October - December 2014: Postwar Germany (from 1945)

With apologies for the late appearance of this thread.



German literature includes works written in German, composed of books written by Germans, German-speaking Swiss writers and Austrians. Most is written in “high German,” but there are also works written in local dialects like Bayerisch.

Since 1945, seven authors writing in German have won the Nobel Prize for Literature; Herman Hesse, Nelly Sachs, Heinrich Böll, Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller.

German literature has been used as a means to examine that country’s troubled past and to work towards reestablishing a national identity, as well as a new German literature and history, separate from its Nazi past. In 1949, the part of Germany that would become West Germany, the aftermath of WWII became known as Zero Hour (Stunde Null), a clean sweep that would leave the Nazi past behind. There was also a leaning toward the west, with Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre becoming important literary influences. It is often heavy on symbolism, as in The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass or Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. Wolfgang Borchert’s play, The Man Outside, concerns men returning from the war, and themes of alienation and self-pity, as well as a feeling of having carried the brunt of the war’s devastation. Other early postwar works that examines similar themes are Beyond Defeat by Hans Werner Richter and The Cherries of Freedom by Alfred Andersch. Other important authors of the years immediately following WWII are Friedrich Dürrenmatt , Heinrich Böll and Bertolt Brecht.

An excellent introduction to German literature can be found here:

http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/05/Music__Literature/02__Literat...

Reserved for the rest of the intro.

And a few suggestions of current authors writing in German:

Bernhard Schlink, who is known for his novel The Reader, although there are several more of his titles available in English.

W.G. Sebald, before his death, was considered a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His most well-known novel, Austerlitz, contains a sentence that is nine pages long. Many of his books deal with memory and forgetting the past.

Birgit Vanderbeke’s novel, The Mussel Feast, was recently short-listed for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and is the story of a family waiting for the father to return home. In this brief book, the tension slowly increases as more and more is made clear.

And for pure enjoyment, Atlas of Remote Islands is a collection of maps of remote islands with intriguing descriptions. Judith Schalansky developed a passion for places she had no expectation of ever visiting as a child in the DDR.

Crime novels (Krimis) are very popular among German readers. Here is a short list of current authors with books translated into English:

Ingrid Noll writes dark novels that are characterized as thrillers. Hell Hath No Fury deals with a woman’s obsession with a man and is told from a claustrophobic first person perspective.

Three Bags Full by Leonie Schwann has the clever conceit of being a mystery in which the sleuth is a sheep who is trying to discover who killed her flock’s shepherd.

The Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel is set in a small, rural Bavarian village in the 1950s, and is based on actual events.

Thank you for setting this up, Kay. I've been looking through my library for books that would fit this read, and I'm happy to say I've found quite a few, although I will want to explore new authors that you recommend too. The books already on my TBR are:

City of Angels: or the Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf -- a recent LT recommendation
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky -- a recent LT recommendation
Two or Three Years Later by Ror Wolf - from my Open Letter subscription
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and Doctor Faustus (a reread) by Thomas Mann
Soul of Wood by Jakov Lind
Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
The Canvas by Benjamin Stein -- from my Open Letter subscription

I'm going to add a link of the group page later this morning.

I always liked Alfred Doblin. His most famous work is Berlin Alexanderplatz but A people betrayed-published 1949 and Karl and Rosa--published 1950 are my two favorites. All of them are set between the wars and give a good picture of the constant political disruption and the squalor and despair going on in the country that eventually led to Hitler's rise to power. Doblin's books were among those that the nazi's burned. There is also Arno Schmidt's Nobodaddy's children which includes Scenes from the life of a faun and Brand's Heath. He was a seriously talented writer IMO.

Writing about WWII--Gert Ledig and Willi Heinrich are the best. Ledig's The Stalin front was translated by Gert Hofmann's son Michael. It is a gruesome often black humored look at the brutality of war. Ledig lost a few body parts in Russia.

Grete Weil's Last trolley from Beethoven Straat--great book.

I'd also recommend Hans Fallada, Siegfied Lenz, the above mentioned Gert Hofmann, the already mentioned W. G. Sebald, and the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. And there is the Austrian Thomas Bernhard.

My favorite German contemporary author is Juli Zeh. I really, really like her Eagles and Angels--it reminds me in style and tone of the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato. Her In free fall is really good too.

Thanks, Kay. I'll read two or three books, including The Mussel Feast, which I already own, and possibly Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky and The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck.

One book I would recommend highly is Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck.

The Goethe-Institut has a great web site featuring contemporary German authors whose work has been translated into other languages, including the German literature in English translation section.

ETA: I almost forgot that a LT friend of mine gave me a copy of The Hunger Angel earlier this month, so I'll definitely read it this coming quarter.

My plan is to read De Duivelsbijbel by Richard Dübell. Richard Dübell was born in 1962 in Landshut, which was part of West Germany after the war.

I wonder if you can see a clear distinction in themes/moods in books written by authors who grew up in West Germany as compared to East Germany. I remember when we had a quarterly read about Eastern Europe that I read 3 authors from 3 different countries but found all their books to be rather bleak and dark-ish in themes. I wonder if you'd see the same thing with East German authors, and if West German authors are lighter in tone.

>5 lriley: I can second the recommendations of Berlin Alexanderplatz (and will look for the other Doblins) and Hans Fallada. All very bleak, though.

>6 kidzdoc: I thought Alina Bronsky was Russian.

>8 rebeccanyc: According to Wikipedia, Alina Bronsky was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia, but she spent her childhood in the German towns of Marburg and Darmstadt, and she currently lives in Berlin. That Wikipedia page mentions that she is a German writer, and the Goethe-Institut link I posted includes her in the list of German authors whose books have been translated into English. Broken Glass Park was originally written in German, and was translated into English by Tim Mohr for Europa Editions.

>9 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I was going by her name, but that makes sense.

As a sort of warm-up for this thread, before plunging in and trying to fill some of the gaps in my reading of post-war authors, I've picked up Erich Kästner's Fabian: die Geschichte eines Moralisten (1931 - the title in English is "Going to the dogs"), which has been sitting on my shelves for ages. The subject-matter is quite a revelation if you're only used to Kästner as a children's writer — late-20s Berlin every bit as sleazy as in Isherwood or Döblin (partner-swap clubs, lesbian bars, male brothels, etc., etc.). But the moral message is exactly the same as in Emil und die Detektive, Der 35. Mai and all the rest. Really quite disorientating...

A few more names to add to the already long list above:
Ingeborg Bachman - most prominent female member of the post-war group that included Böll, Andersch, Grass and the rest. Malina is a sort of feminist counterpoise to the Tin Drum.
Uwe Timm - famous for Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, a satirical account of how the German economy got going again after the war.
Martin Walser - slightly more obscure south-German member of the post-war generation, who didn't write his "my childhood in the Third Reich book, Ein springender Brunnen, until very late in life.

I wanted to start out with something quite new to me, so I picked up Birgit Vanderbeke's 1990 novella, Das Muschelessen (The Mussel Feast), which I'd never heard of until I saw it mentioned a couple of times above. Since it ties in with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed like an appropriate choice for the 3rd of October (Germany's national unity day).

It's a very short book — you can easily read it in two or three hours — but quite absorbing. It's written in a sort of Thomas Bernhard looping narrative style, with long run-on sentences and characters who don't have names, but are just identified by their relationship to the narrator ("mein Vater", "meine Mutter", "mein Bruder"). If you could imagine Thomas Bernhard as a teenage girl born in the fifties (scary thought!), this is how he might write. It's a pretty angry book too: probably only "mildly irritated" by Bernhard's demanding standards, but measured on any normal scale there's a serious quantity of anger built in to the narrator's slow dissection of what's wrong with the family she lives in.

Given the time and the place, it's fairly clear that we are supposed to read it more broadly than as a simple attack on selfish and abusive fathers/husbands. It's very hard to find stories that can survive the weight of a load of political symbolism shovelled on top of them without either the story or the politics seeming crude and bolted-on, but Vanderbeke handles it very subtly and leaves us to do most of the work. We have to draw our own parallels to what was going on in Germany at the end of the eighties without any direct help from the author, and we're free to ignore the symbolism altogether if we want to.

Very nicely done. And more than a slight echo of one or two German fathers I've met...

I can't believe we already in October! I am planning to start with a re-read of The Clown, by Heinrich BOll (last read in College, so probably 35 years ago, I loved it then.)
>11 thorold: The Kastner sounds super-intriguing. I will have to look for it.

>11 thorold: >13 banjo123: I have the Kastner too; it's been on the TBR for several years.

>13 banjo123:,>14 rebeccanyc:
The Kästner doesn't count as Post-War, of course, but go for it. It's quite something...

I've just started Matthias Politycki's Weiberroman, which was apparently a big cult success when it came out in 1997, but obviously passed me by. Looks quite fun so far: parkas, Pink Floyd, and lots of footnotes.

Weiberroman: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (1997: no English translation yet) by Matthias Politycki (1955- )


Still trying to look for German authors who are new to me, I followed a chain of recommendations on LibraryThing and came up with Birgit Vanderbeke's contemporary, Matthias Politycki, who is by all accounts (at least, as far as Wikipedia and his own website can be trusted...) a well-established writer with a bit of a reputation for stirring things up and experimenting with form and style. And a big fan of Nabokov, Sterne and Diderot. Who could resist that combination? So far, the only one of his prose works to be translated into English is Jenseitsnovelle (Next world novella, 2009).

Weiberroman is a very postmodern, 1990s sort of book. The basic premise is that Gregor Schattschneider has disappeared in mysterious circumstances from the Bavarian island of Frauenchiemsee, leaving behind him the manuscript of his vast and unfinished novel-about-women, Weiberroman, in which he appears as the serially-love-lorn anti-hero. Gregor's friend, the literary scholar Eckhardt (who also appears as a character in the novel), has collated a portion of the thousands of un-ordered manuscript fragments and edited them for publication, and has annotated them with copious quantities of pedantic footnotes, before also disappearing in mysterious circumstances and leaving Politycki to complete the work of preparing the text for publication.

Except that practically all of these "facts" about the genesis of the text are put into question during the course of the book, with Gregor at one point hinting that it is he himself who is writing both text and footnotes, and at another accusing Eckhardt of being the author of the text, and so on. Politycki makes sure that we know we are not allowed to believe in either the stability of the text, or its authority, and that we entirely forget that the whole thing was dreamed up by Politycki! At times it feels like Kater Murr, Tristram Shandy and Pale fire all rolled into one, and it definitely has one of the funniest bibliographies I've seen.

The novel itself is in three sections, corresponding to three of the great loves of Gregor's life (we are told that there are further unpublished fragments dealing with at least two more women). The first part, "Kristina", takes place in the early seventies, when Gregor is a teenager in a sleepy small town in Westphalia. "Tania" is set during Gregor's student days in Vienna at the end of the seventies, and "Katharina" in Stuttgart in the late eighties. Gregor appears as something like the stock heterosexual man of romantic comedy, forever falling in love with women, but totally unable to put himself in their place and work out what they might be thinking. Or to explain to them what he himself feels. The women are also, at least at first glance, stock figures: unattainable princess, dumb-blonde Playboy-model, and immaculate flight-attendant. But the narrator helps us to see beyond Gregor's tunnel vision, and we realise that the women are actually much more human and interesting than that. Which is just as well, because Gregor on his own would be a bit of a pain. Fortunately, there's plenty of comedy, both in the narrator's ability to distance himself from and laugh at Gregor-the-protagonist and in the constant sparring between the narrator and the editor, who clearly has no understanding of the concept of fiction, and constantly feels obliged to leap in with a footnote and contradict what Gregor is telling us.

Apart from the ostensible subject of the incomprehensibility of women, there's a lot more going on. One element is Politycki's mock-serious aim of establishing the cultural heritage of the "Generation of 78" — which is of course really just a way to poke fun at the self-importance of all the people who have made careers out of their activities as student rebels in 68. There are hundreds of references to contemporary events in the text (as Eckhardt can't resist pointing out, almost all of them incorrect), from Baader-Meinhoff to the fall of the Berlin wall, but the running joke is that despite being an intellectual and the protagonist of a Bildungsroman, Gregor isn't in the least interested in politics (or indeed in anything much else, apart from women, word-games, and beer). As we are reminded in the first part, he belongs to the generation that all wore parkas, blue-jeans and air-force boots to express their contempt for uniforms.

This is a very unGerman book in many ways: it's poking fun at seriousness of all kinds, culture, history, the academic establishment, Swabians, expensive cars, and above all at Schwärmerei. But it does have one very German attribute, which is sort of endearing (and which the author is aware of: he has Eckhardt mention it in his editorial postscript). It is one of the most over-engineered comic novels I've ever read. I think I might have been put off by this in the early chapters if I hadn't been drawn in by the nostalgic appeal of his description of German provincial life in the seventies, as seen by teenagers. Being of a similar age and having spent a lot of holidays with my teenage German cousins, it's all extremely recognisable!

...I had time to read another short book over the weekend:

Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970: The goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick) by Peter Handke (1942- )



To judge from the accounts of his biography on Wikipedia, the Austrian writer Peter Handke seems to be an absolute textbook case of "the generation that took itself too seriously". He has followed the time-honoured career path for Great Writers, starting out as an enfant terrible in the sixties, disrupting literary conferences with radical questions, then graduating to hanging out with actresses, rock musicians and film-makers, and achieving full Embarrassing Political Pariah status by the 1990s. His oration at Slobodan Milosevic's funeral has probably saved him from the inconvenience of a trip to Stockholm. In fact, he fits so completely into the mould that it was rather a surprise to discover that I hadn't read any of his books.

Joking apart, what struck me from a quick glance at Handke's c.v. is the odd way his background mirrors that of his Austrian near-contemporary Thomas Bernhard. They both grew up in border areas (one in the north-west corner of Austria, the other in the south) and spent part of their childhoods in Germany, they were both illegitimate children with fathers who disappeared over the horizon and mothers who subsequently married someone else. But rather different writers. Apparently they didn't get on with each other, but I don't suppose many people did get on with Bernhard.

The novella Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter seems to be the most famous of Handke's early works, and it is one of those great titles that sticks in your mind whether or not you've actually read it. A bit like The loneliness of the long-distance runner and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum: titles that seem to be micro-stories in their own right. But it's also probably the main reason why I hadn't read anything by Handke. On the strength of this one title, I had him mentally filed away as someone who writes about football, a subject I generally find even less interesting than the frustrated desires of heterosexual men (for which, see the previous post in this thread!).

It turns out that this is actually an elegant little philosophical investigation into the problem of language and meaning, with echoes of classic existentialist texts like L'étranger. The central character, Bloch, experiences a kind of disconnection in which the relationship of objects to words, of words to abstract meanings, of events and statements to each other, are all destabilised and put into question. Football does come into the story at a couple of points, most crucially in the closing scene, but it isn't really a football story. There's a lot of insistence on the detail of ordinary things: what the world looks like when you're a little bit disconnected from it, and Handke maintains a very flat, undemonstrative style, in which apparently minor things, like a coin falling out of a pocket, are treated with as much weight as extreme acts of violence. I think I would find this pretentious in a longer book, but in a short novella like this I found it an interestingly different way of looking at things. It obviously wasn't Handke's main aim to create a historical snapshot of life in a small community in southern Austria at the end of the sixties, but reading the book 45 years on, the degree of observation of everyday things that comes out of the peculiar narrative style is also very interesting from that point of view.

#18--Bernhard's works sometimes can be entertaining in a ferociously sarcastic/comical way. I think Jelinek is a bit closer to him. She's got a bit of venom too. I'd want to space out my forays into their works--even if I liked them more than I do to at the least every 6 months. I'm pretty sure though that after reading Jelinek 3 times that enough is enough. And it's not necessary for everybody that they'd actually have to like the writer in person to like their work. I've read Handke only twice--but I never detected anything like I'd find in Bernhard. Comparatively speaking I don't know how Handke could ever rate a Nobel and Bernhard not--though that prize is littered with a lot of lesser thans. My favorite work of Bernhard's is The voice imitator--about 100 one page length collection of fictional vignettes--maybe the closest thing to it that I've read is Louis Paul Boon's Minuet--(hate to bring a Belgian into this and if he were still alive and reading this he'd probably hate that I did it too). Boon I don't believe had anywhere near the people hating skills of either Bernhard or Jelinek. Handke strikes me more as a social climber--which IMO can be a lot worse.

>18 lriley:
I read Bernhard's four autobiographical novellas and Der Untergeher a couple of years ago, and was very impressed. He does things with the German language I didn't know were possible. And he can be savagely funny, I agree. Sometimes there are passages on topics that no normal person could find funny that you just have to laugh at, from the sheer exuberance of his negativity (the twenty-page celebration of suicide that opens Die Ursache, for instance). The voice imitator is on my list...

I assume that he missed out on the Nobel by not living long enough.

Any suggestions for what to read first from Jelinek?

I too read a book by Handke over the weekend.

Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke



Peter Handke is now more famous, or notorious, for his very vocal support for Slobodan Milosevic, but when he wrote this book in 1972, at the age of 30, that was all in the future. Without telling too much of the "plot," this novel follows the unnamed narrator, who is also an Austrian who turns 30 in the course of the story, as he either seeks his ex-wife or flees he (she may be murderous), traveling across the United States from Providence to New York to Philadelphia and then to Tucson, the Pacific Northwest, and finally Los Angeles. So this book is many things: a road trip, a not very suspenseful suspense story, and a European 'perspective on the late 60s US (some of which, even when expressed by American characters, seems a tad stereotypical). But what it is primarily is a largely claustrophobic look inside the mind of the very self-obsessed narrator, who itemizes his every thought and feeling, paying little attention to the people with whom he interacts. And maybe, just maybe, he is a little psychologically disturbed (I mean beyond this self-obsession). Just to give the flavor of some of his endless musings:

"As I sat motionless, something began to move back and forth in my head in a rhythm resembling that of my wanderings about New York that day. Once it stopped, then for a long time it ran straight ahead, then it zigzagged, then it circled awhile and subsided. It was neither an image nor a sound, only a rhythm that now or then pretended to be one or the other. It was only then that I saw inside me the city that up until then I had almost overlooked." p. 36

Literary, artistic, film, 60s rock, and other popular culture references abound in this book: in the beginning the narrator is reading The Great Gatsby and feels that Gatsby is enabling him to transform himself. He also reads a German book, Green Heinrich, which tells the tale of a German boy/young man living in the country in earlier times, including his romantic difficulties and physical conflicts. In the course of the novel, he attends various films, from Tarzan to Young Lincoln and in the end even meets director John Ford (who, in contrast to the narrator, expressly advocates engagement with other human beings). (Handke wrote scripts for films as well as novels.)

As the book progresses, the reader gets a hint of unpleasant aspects of the narrator's childhood that could have contributed to his lack of interest in the other people in the novel. To some extent, the narrator is self-aware. He knows, for example, that he doesn't really experience a new experience, but "checks it off."

I didn't warm to this novel as I was reading it. I found the narrator almost insufferable, his travels only mildly interesting, his interactions with other people odd (one wonders why they put up with him). And yet . . . a day after I finished it, I find I'm still thinking about it. Short novel, long aftereffect?

#19--The three I've read of Jelinek's are Women as lovers, The piano teacher, and Lust. They are all pretty unrelentingly negative--can be quite funny in spots though--depending of course on one's sense of humor. She seems to disdain Austrians maybe even moreso than Bernhard. She definitely has some bones to pick with the male of the species--who are pretty much characterized as selfish, egotistical, gluttonous, lust driven buffoons without exception. Self important authority figures--moms and dads, priests and politicians, bosses of any and all stripes take a real whacking as well. What she thinks personally on these issues I can't tell you (most people are at least a lot of the time complicated and at least a little bit hypocritical in one way or another) but if her books are anything to go by the people (especially the men) at least in her region of the world could just as easily be living in the stone age.

IMO you should give her at least one try--she is a talented writer.

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
(Shortlist, 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize)



I don't know what would have happened if we'd been able to eat at six o'clock as usual. It's astonishing how people react when the routine is disturbed, a tiny delay to the normal schedule and at once everything is different.

This novella, which was originally published in 1990 and not translated into English until last year, is set in a home in West Berlin prior to the country's reunification. An unnamed woman and her teenaged son and daughter have prepared a feast of moules-frites (mussels with chips) for the head of the household, who promises to bring good news of a promotion to the top level of the company he works for. He does not appear at six o'clock, which is surprising given his usual promptness and rigidity, and instead of eating the sumptuous meal the three of them wait anxiously for his arrival. As time passes and as they become inebriated with drink they speak openly and critically about him, and slowly, in the manner of peeling away the layers of an onion, the man's tyrannical and monstrous behavior towards each of them is revealed.

This story of a dysfunctional family is enriched with symbolism, presumably of German society in the 1980s, which includes the gruesome description of the death throes of the mussels as they are boiled alive, and their increasingly distasteful appearance as they sit, uneaten, for hours afterward. The Mussel Feast is a striking and powerful work, and one which undoubtedly would reveal more on subsequent readings.

Die Klavierspielerin (1983: The piano teacher) by Elfriede Jelinek (1946- )



As has already been said a few times above, Elfriede Jelinek is a distinguished Austrian writer, of roughly the same generation as Handke and Bernhard. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004. Like Bernhard — and like the title character of this novel — she was initially trained as a musician, and she is well-known for her work in the theatre as well as for her novels. Her first big success was Die Liebhaberinnen (Women as lovers) in 1975.

Die Klavierspielerin appeared in 1983 and was made into a film wih Isabelle Huppert in the title role in 2001. Possibly because of the success of the film, it seems to be Jelinek's best-known work among English-speaking readers. The central character is a woman in her mid-thirties trapped in a closed, possessive relationship with her elderly mother and a sterile career teaching students the mechanical process of interpreting music according to a set of predefined rules. If she were English, she would be a character in a wistfully ironic novel by Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor. However, she doesn't have that luxury, but instead tries to break out by realising her violent and transgressive sexual fantasies, with disastrous results.

The novel is a savage, disturbing, but often also very funny satire that tries to dismantle our ideological assumptions about family relationships, love, sex, high culture and outdoor sport. Jelinek writes from a decidedly Marxist-feminist point of view, in which everything turns out to be ultimately about money, power and violence. But this isn't a dour political tract. Jelinek keeps us on our toes by constantly shifting the narrator's tone and style around, until we have no idea from where we are looking at Erika. Sometimes the language is mildly ironic, sometimes it's lyrical, sometimes analytically bureaucratic. But whenever you think you know where you are, that's when the narrator will swing round and hit you with something that looks unbelievably crude, shocking, and out-of-context, but is also undeniably completely true. She pulls the rug out from under us by telling us about things that we know (but don't want to acknowledge) would happen in that situation in real life, but which seem completely out of place in a novel. Definitely not an easy or a comfortable read, but a very rewarding one.

As several German friends have mentioned it to me recently, I've started to read Er ist wieder da (Look who's back) by Timur Vermes. Transgressive in very different ways from Jelinek...

Er ist wieder da (Look who's back, 2012) by Timur Vermes (1967- )



Timur Vermes grew up in southern Germany and has worked as a journalist and ghostwriter. Er ist wieder da is his first novel, and has been a huge bestseller in Germany. It has already been translated into many other languages (27, according to Wikipedia), and a film is due to be released next year.

The premise of the novel is that Adolf Hitler unaccountably finds himself alive and well and in the Berlin of 2011. His uniform smells of petrol, he has a headache, and the last thing he can remember is sitting on a couch in the bunker with Eva. Obviously there must be a reason why he's there: it doesn't take him long to work out that the German nation is in a mess and needs a strong and capable leader to bring it back onto the right path. And he soon finds the way to get his message out to the German people when he gets a place on TV as a Hitler-impersonator (what else?) on a satirical comedy show.

The real strength of the book is the daring idea of using Hitler as first-person narrator. Vermes very effectively captures the characteristic style of Hitler's rhetoric - easy to imitate for a sentence or two, but it's quite an achievement to do it for a whole book without becoming repetitive. I didn't detect any obvious wrong notes: Vermes has clearly done his research quite thoroughly. (The third variation on "Seit 5:45 Uhr wird jetzt zurückgeschossen!" was probably one too many, however...)

Hitler always remains in character, taking himself entirely seriously, continuing to believe in his deluded ideas, and never doubting for a second that he has always done the right thing. Vermes has to make sure that the reader is aware of the enormity of the moral split that is going on here: Hitler presents himself as the war veteran, the simple man of the people, the war leader carrying the responsibilities for his people, and the cuddly Onkel Wolf who liked to joke around with his secretaries and eat cream cakes, but we're not allowed to forget what else he presided over. Sometimes this shift works and sometimes it doesn't. Ultimately, of course, the contradiction can't be resolved. In the one scene where someone confronts him with the direct consequences of his policies ("You murdered my grandmother's family"), Vermes rather faintheartedly doesn't pursue the point, but allows him to brush it away by turning on the charm.

The idea of making Hitler into a comedian is also clever: Vermes is making the (perhaps not entirely original) point that we live in a world where you get more attention as a clown than you do as a politician, and reinforcing it with the paradox that in modern Germany, dressing up as Hitler would give you the freedom to say things that would otherwise be totally unacceptable. It's also interesting how Vermes cleverly manages the humour: Hitler, even though he's a professional comedian, never says anything that's obviously calculated to be funny, but as narrator he is aware that his comments (which are often extremely funny because of the context) make people laugh, and this doesn't bother him. If people are laughing at what he says, it means that they are listening to him. It's noticeable that Vermes doesn't give Hitler a new political programme for the 21st century. He's against a lot of the things he sees around him, but we're never told what he's for, other than restoring Germany's borders to what they were.

Some of the other jokes in the book are a bit more obvious: there's a certain amount of rather predictable Rip-van-Winkle stuff about Hitler discovering the oddities of the modern world, and there are a lot of in-jokes about German newspapers, politicians, and TV shows (some of which I certainly missed). Not everything was at the same high level of comedy as Hitler's wildly inappropriate speeches, but I did laugh a great deal at this book. I didn't feel very comfortable about finding it so funny, though!

It's notable that reviews of this book outside Germany tend to be rather lukewarm. I suspect that it loses a lot of its transgressive effect in translation (in Germany, it's still problematic to talk about Hitler in any context other than a strictly didactic one; English readers probably think about Mel Brooks or the Monty Python Minehead by-election sketch). Moreover, even a very good translation probably wouldn't capture the dangerous and disturbing resonance that the Hitler rhetorical style has in German.

I hadn't heard of Er ist weider da. I'll have to look for it. I've noticed a significant opening of people's willingness to be open about the past now that so very few people who lived through it are alive. Not a right-wing Stoiber-style speech on the unfairness of ethnic Germans losing their properties in Poland and the Czech Republic after the war, but a genuine openness to discuss the legacies of the war.

>26 RidgewayGirl:
He's very rude about the CSU and the Oktoberfest - maybe Hugendubel have banned it : -)

Well, now I have to find a copy! But I'll have to wait until Monday as tomorrow is a holiday.

I've started a thread asking for everyone's ideas on how to structure next year's theme reads. Please visit http://www.librarything.com/topic/182450 and make suggestions!

Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963) by Christa Wolf (1929-2011)



Up to now in this thread I've been making an effort to read books by authors who are new to me. Wolf is an author I already know fairly well, but this particular book has been sitting on my TBR shelf for quite some time.

Christa Wolf was one of the most important writers — possibly the most distinguished — of the German Democratic Republic (DDR, East Germany). Although she often criticised the way it was run and got into many conflicts with the authorities, she seems to have believed firmly in the idea of a socialist state in Germany, and she was one of those who spoke out publicly against the absorption of the DDR into the Federal Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Der geteilte Himmel is a very early work — only her second novel to be published, in 1963 — and is set in an industrial city in East Germany in the period immediately before the building of the Berlin Wall. Superficially, it could be read as a simple propaganda story: a young woman's loyalty to the Workers' and Peasants' State helps her overcome the temptation to follow her bourgeois fiancé into the West. But of course, it's a lot more complicated and rewarding than that. Wolf draws on her experience of a period she and her husband spent working in a railway carriage works to show us what the socialist state looks like in practice for industrial workers, students and academics, and explains how the realities of personal ambition, bullying, weakness — and above all, the dangerously recent legacy of the Nazi period — make it difficult to achieve its ideals.

With hindsight, it's easy to see what's missing from the picture: her version of the DDR may have its fair share of pollution, inefficiencies, pettiness, and incompetence, but its policemen confine their efforts to directing traffic, there don't appear to be any prisons or censorship, and the existence of the Stasi is only very indirectly hinted at. When things go wrong, they are resolved by workers' meetings and self-criticism, not by the forcible intervention of state agencies. And of course we wouldn't really expect anything else. Not only would it have been difficult and dangerous to speak out about state terror, but it would probably also have been redundant: none of her readers in East or West would have been under any illusions in that respect. Certainly not in 1963.

The question she is trying to answer is not why around 20% of the population of the DDR chose to leave before the 13th of August 1961, but rather why 80% chose to stay. And she wants us to see that it's a complicated question that goes beyond simplistic ideas about native soil, economics, or abstract loyalty to a political ideal. Her central character, Rita, is someone who was born outside the DDR and fled there at the end of the war (like Wolf herself); she lives in an unattractive industrial city where she has no family ties, and she's not a fanatical communist. She is well aware of the problems in the running of the factory where she works and the institute where she studies; she sees good people being frustrated in their ambitions and bad ones profiting. Moreover, she feels for a long time that her love for Manfred is the most important thing that's ever happened to her. But nonetheless, she feels a loyalty to the common project of building a better world that she shares with her co-workers and fellow students, and she sees how she is losing Manfred to his all-consuming hatred for his fellow-travelling ex-Nazi father and his scheming bourgeois mother. In the end, it is the loyalty to her friends that wins, as we know from the start of the book, but it's not an easy decision. And it's probably no coincidence that she takes that decision on the Sunday before the Wall went up...

I'd like to join this theme-read with Siegfried Lenz (The German Lesson), Günter Grass (The Tin Drum) and Heinrich Böll (undecided which one to choose yet).
I want to add some other German, Swiss and Austrian books I read over the past few years. Most were worth the read but I highly recommend the Lewinsky-books.

FRANCK Julia. Die Mittagsfrau (DE, 2007)
KEHLMANN Daniel. Die Vermessung der Welt (DE, 2005)
RUGE Eugen. In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (DE, 2011)
SCHLINK Bernhard. Das Wochenende (DE, 2008)

GSTREIN Norbert. Einer (AU, 1989)
SCHNEIDER Robert. Schlafes Bruder (AU, 1992)

LEWINKSY Charles. Johannistag (CH, 2000)
LEWINSKY Charles. Melnitz (CH, 2006)
LEWINSKY Charles. Gerron (CH, 2011)

>31 Trifolia:
Great! German Lesson plus Tin drum is probably as near as you can get to a two-book crash-course in post-war German literature. I've read each of them several times, but I'm not sure if I'd want to read them back to back. You'll probably need something from Böll's lighter side to recover, like Irisches Tagebuch.

I've been thinking of reading either Rummelplatz or In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts as a follow-up to the Christa Wolf. But I've got a business trip to Berlin coming up: maybe I'll come back with something altogether different.

I hadn't realised that Charles Lewinsky is Swiss - he seems to be much better known in Dutch than in German (if LT is anything to go by, which it usually isn't on that sort of point).

Thanks for mentioning Die Vermessung der Welt - I hadn't thought about it, because it's set in the 18th century, but it is an excellent read, and it ties in - in an oblique sort of way - with what RidgewayGirl was saying about a change in attitudes to the past. Being prepared to poke a certain amount of respectable fun at the "good" bits of German history probably means that you're getting past the point where everything you write about the past has to involve breast-beating about the Third Reich (cf. Das Parfum).

>30 thorold: I am always out of synch with the quarterly threads in Reading Globally. I read my first Christa Wolf this summer, not knowing if I would have time during the actual post WWII quarter. I was really taken with her writing. It was her last book and made me wonder a lot about her. The question your review addresses about why people would choose to stay is one she was still addressing in 2010, long after the fall of the wall, which was 25 years ago. Wolf's books are somewhat hard to find in English, but your review makes me want to start at the beginning and work my way through.

As noted above, I am usually reading just ahead or more often somewhat behind with the quarterly read in Reading Globally. This quarter's theme has induced me to read three books so far this year that fit in this quarter, but none were actually read in this quarter. Following thorold's review of Divided Heaven in 30 above, I thought it might be interesting to add a Wolf book from the end of her life. I first put this in the Club Read group back in August. Christa Wolf won the 2010 Thomas Mann award for her body of work.



City of Angels or, the Overcoat of Dr Freud by Christa Wolf, translated from the German by Damion Searls
first published in 2010 as Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud

Who would you be if your country disappeared? What would happen to your identity? The nameless narrator of City of Angels is faced with just such questions. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1992, not that long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, she made her own small but defiant gesture of solidarity with her country of East Germany, wondering "... whether it was really worth it to travel to the United States with the still-valid passport of a no-longer extant country". The immigration officer asked "Are you sure this country still exists?" "Yes, I am" she replied.

This is a complex novel, told in layers like an archeological exploration of the narrator's life, shifting back and forth in time as all recollection does. The narration is done in the present tense about that era twenty odd years ago. The trip to Los Angeles was at the invitation of The Center, an organization which brought small groups of intellectuals and artists from outside the US together for several months at a time, supporting them while they pursued their individual projects. The narrator's project was to uncover yet another identity, that of a German woman who had fled to the US before WWII. This woman had written a series of letters over more than thirty years, from 1945-1979, to a woman in East Germany who had bequeathed them in turn to the narrator. The letters were signed only "L". There were no envelopes, only the date and Los Angeles, for sender and recipient were careful not to incriminate each other in the paranoid world of the GDR.

During the narrator's time in Los Angeles, the former East Germany was going through turmoil as police and party records were opened, informers were identified and files were made public. Families and friendships fell apart. Getting the news from Germany each day was troubling, but then one day the narrator's own name appeared in news reports. Can you forget things you did long ago that have unintended consequences? This question came to haunt her. Trying to unravel the chain of events took the narrator further back in time. Distance is required and is obtained for this painful process by shifting from "I" to "you" in the narration, separating the self into now and then. "When I woke up I remembered our drives in the country, when you held the road atlas on your knees and looked for the country you could find refuge in, and you never found it..." She recalled an even earlier time as a small child, fleeing for the West with her family, away from the advancing Russians, and not making it across the river that would become the boundary. In such ways are our fates decided.

Emigrés and exiles, past and present, fill her life on the far edge of the American continent, an odd place from which to reflect back, yet one filled with the ghosts of earlier voices of dissent: Brecht, Garbo, Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and others. Reflections on the US and its citizens echo the puzzled reactions so many have in discussions with Americans. She is struck by "This bottomless need Americans have for safety, certainty, security"; the morning ritual of "How are you today?" where the expected answer is a variant of "Fine", because nobody really wants to know, nothing is expected - it's just "elevator syndrome"; the inability to say "communist" like any other word. She came to dread the questions that assumed she would not go back home, had been lucky to escape, as if one's country could be shrugged off like its out of date clothes.

City of Angels or, the Overcoat of Dr Freud is an autobiographical novel digging as far into the soul as possible without quite reaching ...the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. Eventually Wolf comes to the conclusion "I want to live in a world where there are still secrets". In the end would it be too painful to find out who we really are?

>34 SassyLassy: Sassy, that's been on my TBR since you originally reviewed it and I hope to read it later this quarter.

I've started a NEW THREAD to gather your ideas for what our theme reads should be next year. Please put your thinking caps on and come on over.

# 32 Thorold, yes, a crash-course was what I intended. I remember Böll, Grass and Lenz from school and I was surprised to read somewhere that in 2014, they're still considered to be the three masters of German literature. So, it's high time I actually read their books.
I'm looking forward to reading Ruge's next book (Cabo de Gata), but I don't think I'll manage to squeeze it in this challenge in time.

I've been thinking about your comments on a change in attitudes to the past. I don't know enough of German literature to really say anything meaningful, but I've wondered if the translation of German literature is representative of German literature itself. Do we get a good overview of German literature or do we only see a small selection that is influenced by what non-German speakers expect from German literature with topics like the Third Reich or die Wende?

>34 SassyLassy:
That's another one I still want to read...
Interesting: your review made me think of The ministry of pain, which is about a group of expatriate ex-Yugoslavians coming to terms with the disappearance of the country they grew up in. Off-topic for this thread, and Ugrešić is a rather different sort of writer from Wolf.

>37 Trifolia:
Yes, German writers who don't write about the Third Reich and/or the Berlin Wall probably come into the same category as black US writers who don't write about racism and the legacy of slavery. They obviously must exist, but they may well have a hard job persuading publishers to take them seriously, and they risk being beaten about the head with the collected works of Theodore Adorno if they are published...

I came back from Berlin with a stack of books, and started reading Rummelplatz on the plane. Very impressed so far. (Less impressed with my own planning, since I inadvertently managed to time my trip so that I just missed the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, but got the full benefit of the train strike...)

I have been slow to read anything for this group! But I did read this article in the NYT about the Berlin wall.

>34 SassyLassy:
Christa Wolf speaking at the demonstration on 4 November 1989: http://youtu.be/SSk-ytE9c20

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann
Originally published 1954.



This is Mann's last novel, left unfinished at his death. (More on that later.) Both comic (in a way I haven't seen in his other novels) and serious, this tells the tale of Felix Krull in his own voice, for he is the narrator, at times delightful, at times borderline insufferable. Starting with his childhood, with a godfather who liked to dress him up in various costumes, Felix delighted in trying on different personalities and generally deceiving people (for example, pretending to be sick to avoid school and really getting into the part). His father was the proprietor of a company that made very inferior champagne and, despite the fact that the company was on shaky financial ground, his parents frequently threw wild, drunken parties; that is, until the day when the creditors came to take away all their furniture and their house and the father killed himself.

Thus starts a new life for Felix, his mother, and his sister, one of poverty. His godfather comes to the rescue with plans for each of them; Felix is to go work in a hotel in Paris but first he must find a way to avoid his required military service. This is the first time the reader sees Felix's persistence and dedication, as well as his imagination. Before he ultimately fools the military recruiters, he spends evenings wandering through the streets of the better part of Frankfurt, learning all the details of the highest quality of jewelry, clothes, food, and much more. And then off to Paris he goes, with a border stop where at customs the jewelry case of a lady standing in front of him somehow winds up in his suitcase. He starts out as an elevator operator, but is so charming that he soon is promoted to a waiter. Various romantic and criminal activities take place in the course of this sojourn at the hotel, and the reader sees how Felix throws himself into not just into doing his job and getting ahead but also has a secret stash of money and elegant clothing that he keeps in a rented apartment (the hotel workers live in dorms within the hotel) so that he can go out with a completely different persona on his days off.

It is while Felix is out in these upper class surroundings that he finds the opportunity to masquerade as the Marquis de Venosta, leave his job, and go on an around-the-world tour that the Marquis's parents are forcing the real Marquis to go on so he will forget the dance hall woman he is love with. The first stop in the Marquis's travels is Lisbon, from where he will take a ship to South America; on the train, Felix, traveling as the Marquis, meets a professor who introduces him first to natural history, evolution, and the geological history of the planet and then to his utterly charming wife and daughter. Complications develop.

So this is the plot. Clearly, Mann is exploring issues of identity, deception, and class; he also has Felix obsessed with the idea of "doubles" -- early on, a sister and brother, later the Portuguese wife and daughter, and of course himself and the Marquis. How this would have evolved if Mann had finished the book is an open question. Felix loves life and has a high self-regard not just for his vaunted good looks but also for his ability to conquer all obstacles and adapt to any situation. He is by and large a fun character.

It is clear from the book that Mann intended it to be much longer, for Felix refers to other people he pretended to be, but the book never extends past Lisbon and his role as the Marquis. And, delightful as much of this book is, it is too long in spots; I like to think that if Mann had lived he would not just have extended Felix's tale but would also have returned to edit some of the places where the narrative drags.

As a note on the translation, I found several peculiarities. While early on the translator refers to the Gare du Nord in Paris as "North Station" and translates a French person's name as "Bob," he also leaves paragraphs in French (and one in Italian) (obviously where Mann wrote in those languages instead of German) without a footnoted translation. I can read French (and can guess at Italian), but how could the translator and the publisher have assumed that all readers can?

Rummelplatz (no translation yet; written 1960-1965, first published in full 2007) by Werner Bräunig (1934-1976)

 

Continuing the East German theme, this is another book I hadn't heard of until I started reading up on Christa Wolf in connection with Der geteilte Himmel.

Werner Bräunig came from a working-class background in Chemnitz (Saxony, East Germany). As a teenager he was involved in the black market and seems to have spent some time in juvenile detention, later he worked in various industrial jobs, including a period working in a papermill and another (briefly) in the uranium mines of the Wismut AG, as well as a spell in prison for smuggling. After his release from prison he became respectable, joined communist youth groups, and took up journalism. This brought him into a young writers' group at the mine and eventually a university place in 1958. This brought him a teaching job and a strong reputation as an up-and-coming writer.

He became an alcoholic after the political row over Rummelplatz and died at the very young age of 42. Although his c.v. makes him sound like a classic con-man, he was clearly a talented writer and seems to have been a convinced socialist and party member, who believed in the ideal of a socialist state but was critical of the way it was put into practice.

Rummelplatz was Bräunig's only novel, intended as the first part of a trilogy charting the early history of the DDR. It opens with the declaration of the East German state in October 1949 and ends with the failed popular rising of 17 June 1953. He advertised quite widely that he was working on this project, and published several excerpts in magazines up to 1965, when he suddenly found himself the object of an organised campaign of criticism by everyone from Walter Ulbricht to people who claimed to have been his colleagues in the mine. It doesn't seem to be clear whether the criticism was really directed at his book (which hardly anyone had actually read in manuscript), or whether he was just a convenient scapegoat for Ulbricht's plan to introduce more restrictive cultural policies. The book was attacked on the grounds of political deviation and moral degeneracy, but it seems likely that its setting in the Wismut mines — owned and run as a "war-reparation" operation by the Soviet Union and supplying 60% of its uranium — would also have been highly embarrassing to the DDR leadership. Other writers, including Christa Wolf (who was a candidate for the Central Committee at the time) spoke up in his defence, but to no effect. After the campaign against it, it was clear that no-one was ever going to publish it, and Bräunig took to hack-work and the bottle. A censored excerpt appeared in an anthology in 1981, but the novel was only published in full in 2007, 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The novel follows the experiences of a loosely-connected group of young characters, most of them industrial workers, and uses the detailed description of their ordinary working lives to illustrate what is going on in the DDR. Most of the book takes place in and around the Wismut uranium mines. This extremely vivid realism ("merciless realism" as Wolf calls it) is the key thing that makes this book stand out. There aren't many novels that describe work convincingly from the worker's point of view, and Rummelplatz is definitely up there with the best of them. I think this is the only novel I've read about miners that focusses on what they do and why, rather than on the conditions they do it in. That's not to say that the book is all in realist mode: there are also quite a number of passages where characters go off into Tolstoy-style reflections on the big historical picture, and in the later parts also some passages in a more modernist stream-of-consciousness style that feels a bit like Berlin, Alexanderplatz. Although this is intended as a political novel, it's on the human level that it's most powerful and most engaging. The use of voices, technical vocabulary, dialect, and sheer everyday detail is brilliant.

A Rummelplatz is a fairground, but the literal translation would be something like "place of disorder" — Bräunig uses it as an image in both senses. Bräunig's idea seems to be to show us the DDR growing up in the chaotic situation of the immediate post-war period, with all the human, political and economic challenges thrown up by trying to establish socialism in a state damaged by the experience of the Third Reich, defeated in war, and artificially split along borders that left widely-disparate amounts of resources in East and West (the East starts out with a quarter of the engineering industry, but only about 1% of the coal and steel production, for example). The theoretical notions of Marx are hard to apply in this messy situation where socialists who spent much of the last fifteen years in jail or in exile find themselves having to work with former Nazis; there are still close family and business ties between East and West that have to be disentangled, and there is a porous border that becomes increasingly attractive as the economic situation worsens. He cleverly shows us how the system discourages risk-taking and responsibility at low levels, and how this leads both to inefficient use of scarce resources and to the increasingly paranoid security state. It's not an entirely unbiased account: there is a strong element of caricature in the way the West German characters are portrayed, he's silent about things like the Russians' confiscation of everything that wasn't bolted down (and many things that were, right down to railway tracks) as war reparations, and he's careful not to discuss any individual East German leaders. The description of the 17th of June also diverges quite a bit from the accounts you see in West German sources (especially Bräunig's suggestion that Nazi activists played a leading role). All the same, he's very frank about things like the brutal behaviour of the police and Stasi. And he makes it clear where the uranium the miners dig up is going, and what it's intended to be used for. It's not hard to imagine why the book was suppressed. Even in Britain, it wouldn't have been possible for someone working in the nuclear industry to publish a book about uranium mining: he'd have had the Official Secrets Act waved in front of his face before he even got the typewriter out.

Lost masterpiece? Possibly. It's a bit patchy, and obviously Bräunig never had the heart to polish the manuscript into a definitive form, but it's certainly a very impressive book, and a unique document of a period that isn't very well known. It's not hard to imagine that, with a few of the rough edges taken off it, the trilogy would have been a masterpiece if it had ever been completed. And who knows: if the DDR had been the sort of state where people who wrote like that were encouraged, it might still have been with us today.

Edit: I originally wrote this before reading Angela Drescher's very interesting historical note in the back of the 2007 edition; I found that I'd got one or two things backwards, so I needed to revise it a bit

Edit 2: It didn't strike me before, but that author photo I grabbed from Wikipedia must be a very early example of the mirror-selfie. The decadent capitalist iPhone has clearly been airbrushed out of his hand...

Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra
Finished reading: 9 November 2014



In 1983, Christa Wolf published the novel Kassandra, which is often described as her most important novel. Publication of Kassandra, was preceded by a lecture series about the creation process and her ideas about the novel during the Summer term at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. These lectures are collected and published in the volume: Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra.

Since 1959, Fisher Verlag, later Suhrkamp, has organized the lecture series, known as the Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. With an interruption between 1968 and 1979, each term, namely twice per year, during the Winter term and the Summer term, a literary author is invited as a guest lecturer. Christa Wolf presented a series of lectures as guest lecturer at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main during the Summer term of 1982. This was still quite remarkable at that time, because Christa Wolf was a prominent author from the German Democratic Republic (DDR).

Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra is a collection of four essays that were read as lectures. The first two lectures describe how Christa Wolf discovered her theme. As she had missed her flight to Greece, for a holiday, she started reading the The Oresteia by Aeschylus. They are the hum-drum report of her travel to Greece, a recording of her thoughts on the reading of The Oresteia interspersed by many, noisy interruptions around her, as observed during her travel. The third lecture is written as a diary recording the interaction between her life and the conception of the novel. In it, the author explores ideas about the role of women in society and literature, particularly the figure of Cassandra. The fourth lecture is a letter, in which she investigates the historical reality of Medea, and the history of writing by female authors. The novel Kassandra is announced as the fifth lecture, but published in a separate volume.

Presumably, the lectures or essays in this volume, were read in several sessions; or, the text of the lectures must have been condensed and re-written for publication. It seems the first two lectures are too long and boring, while they present the reader with very little, or relevant material. The final two lectures are quite difficult and very dense. They require knowledge of The Oresteia, Greek history and Greek mythology.

Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra can be read separately from the novel. In that case, it could serve as an introduction exploring the mythical figure of Cassandra. The lectures offer a feminist interpretation of the Trojan War, from a Marxist perpective. The lectures are also interesting to readers interested in mythology.

Please come on over to the thread for theme read ideas for 2015. There are some great ideas already there, but we could use as many as possible before I start a voting thread next week sometime.

Der Hund. Der Tunnel. Die Panne. Erzählungen
Finished reading: 9 November 2014

English:

Der Hund. Der Tunnel. Die Panne. Erzählungen is a thin volume, Werkausgabe, Band 21, in the 30-vols. collected works of the Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In it three short stories are collected: Der Hund (Engl. "The Dog"), Der Tunnel (Engl. The Tunnel") and Die Panne (Engl. "The Breakdown"). The three stories are each written in a surrealist style.

Der Hund (Engl. "The Dog") was first published in 1952. It is a rather haunting story about a rich man, who chooses to live in poverty, separated from his wife, but accompanied b his daughter. Every day, he performs on the streets to read from the Bible. Not only does he attract an audience of listeners every day, and the attantion of the narrator, more sinister is that a large, grisly dog latches on to him, following him everywhere and into his home. One day, the dog attacks and kills the man. Then, the dog latches onto the daughter, following her around the streets. It would be quite appropriate to include this story in an anthology for horror stories (I do not know whether that has ever been considered.)

Der Tunnel (Engl. The Tunnel") is a very short story, indeed, which was also first published in 1952. Anyone may have given some thought to the idea, that each time a train rides into a tunnel, it might just as well never come out. We all know and expect to emerge out and into the light at the end of the tunnel, but what if the tunnel would just run on deeper and deeper into the darkness. Der Tunnel (Engl. The Tunnel") is a surrealist story of just that happening. It is a quite exhilarating, but very short story.

Die Panne (Engl. "The Breakdown"). It is the longest story and was published in English as A Dangerous Game in the UK, and Traps in the United States. It is a very interesting, surrealist story, first published in 1956. A sales representative, Alfredo Traps, is stranded in a village after his car has broken down. Rather than staying at a hotel, he accepts the invitation of a local person, to stay the night and join him for dinner with his friends. The friends are a group of retired judges and lawyers. They get together and while enjoying an excellent dinner, they play a game to plead the case of one of them. Traps gets involved and his words and stories are weighed and judged, until gradually, Traps feels cornered and starts believing in his own culpability.

The Dog, The Tunnel & Traps are three very well-written, somewhat sinister, surrealist stories. They are not very long, but excellent reading.



Other books I have read by Friedrich Dürrenmatt:
Theater. Essays, Gedichte und Reden

A short one from my TBR pile:

Wittgensteins Neffe (Wittgenstein's nephew, 1982) by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)

 

The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has already been mentioned a few times in this thread. Unlike most of the writers we've discussed, his work often focusses on philosophical and aesthetic questions, and he's not really concerned in the first place with history or politics (although he often gives political and social institutions a bashing in passing). He caught TB as a young man, frustrating his hopes of becoming a singer, and illness and mortality are frequent themes in his work. Bernhard claims in his memoirs that his greatest influence in life was his grandfather, the novelist and anarchist Johannes Freumbichler, who taught him from an early age to question all authority, a principle Bernhard seems to have stuck to pretty consistently, keeping him in constant and sometimes hilarious conflict with the conservative Austrian establishment. His final, celebrated, act of subversion was a provision in his will that there should be no new publications of his books or performances of his plays in Austria (needless to say, he made no effort to emigrate during his lifetime: provoking his compatriots was obviously too much fun).

Wittgensteins Neffe was written directly after Bernhard's five short volumes of memoirs about his childhood and youth, and is in a similar format, somewhere between fiction and autobiography in tone (160 pages without any chapter or paragraph breaks). It deals with his friendship with the Viennese eccentric and music-lover, Paul Wittgenstein (1907-1979 — technically, a second cousin of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, not a nephew), whom he met through a mutual friend in 1967. Not long afterwards, as he describes in the opening pages of the book, Bernhard and Wittgenstein coincidentally both found themselves in the same hospital complex on the outskirts of Vienna, Bernhard in a ward for patients with lung disease, and Wittgenstein, who suffered from bouts of mental illness throughout his life, in the psychiatric section. Naturally, it takes Bernhard 20 or 30 pages to discuss his feelings about the possibility of meeting his friend in the hospital, and about half a page to describe what happens when they actually do meet, but in the process we learn a lot about friendship, mortality, the incompetence of the medical profession, etc. A running theme is the interchangeability of the two men's illnesses and the way Bernhard sees his own mortality reflected in Wittgenstein's obvious decline in his later years, which leads him to spend less time with his friend than he feels he ought to have.

It might not sound like a very cheerful book, but there is always an (intentional) element of caustic humour in Bernhard's writing, especially when he is at his blackest. We have to laugh at his excess, at ourselves for finding it funny, and of course at the targets of his rage, all the doctors, nurses, actors, cultural bureaucrats, government ministers and other exponents of Stumpfsinnigkeit (dullwittedness) who happen to walk into the line of fire. We also get plenty of Wittgenstein anecdotes, which were obviously prime fodder for Vienna gossip at the time (Bernhard apologises for retailing these, but does it anyway). And a couple of accounts of Bernhard behaving badly at awards ceremonies, which is always fun.

Of course, the real reason to read this book is Bernhard's inimitable style, which works more like music than any other prose you're likely to have come across (although Beckett does something a little bit similar). Words and phrases are combined in sentences, then repeated over and over again with transpositions, inversions, variations that create meaning not by a series of logical steps, but by gradual accretion of similar but subtly different assertions coming at you from different directions. You have to give the text as much attention as you would give a Bach keyboard piece, but over the stretch of 100 pages or so you can do that, and it's very rewarding.

>44 edwinbcn:
I picked that up in a charity shop a little while ago, but put it back on the shelf because it looked a bit too intimidating. Sounds as though you had the same experience!

>46 edwinbcn:
That's odd - I have what should be the volume that comes after that in the same series (matching cover art), with Grieche sucht Griechin and two other stories, but it's also labelled as Volume 21. There must have been more than one set of collected works.

You are really reading up a storm, thorold!

>49 rebeccanyc:
Don't worry, I'll get distracted by something else before long...
Just at the moment there are a lot of hotels and airports in my life, which helps make time for reading. And German literature is an area where I've always got a long list of things I haven't got around to yet. With the impetus of this thread I'm discovering even more, and the backlog is increasing.

>42 rebeccanyc:
I read Felix Krull in my teens, but I don't remember anything about it, really. I think I just took it as a straightforward picaresque novel: it never occurred to me at the time that it had been published in 1954 not 1754, and that that should make a difference to the way you read a book!

Wittgenstein's Nephew sounds very interesting; I'll add it to my wish list.

I read The Passport by Herta Müller earlier this month. I found it to be a painful, choppy and inscrutable slog, even though it was barely over 100 pages long. That's about all I can say about it.

>48 thorold:

I think "intimidating" is a word you could use to describe Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra, but my dislike is largely generated by the style of writing. Much of it is deliberatedly made to be difficult, by using a confusing style, a free flow of thought and associations, without explanation. The first two lectures are really not much more than trash. A thought I did not include in the review, but that occurred to me while reading was: "What an agony it must have been to sit through these lectures. If I had been in the audience as a students, it would have bored me to death."

I have already suggested that the way the essays are published in Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra and the way they were read may have not been the same.

I various places, the lectures by Christa Wolf are described as an exiting event. This sentiment is so at odds with the contect and the nature of the material, that I assume the excitement originates in her phsical presence as a representative of the DDR to give this lecture series in the German Federal Republic.

Finally, as Leszek Kolakowski contends in Is God Happy?, a collection of essays which I have been reading since February this year, and hope to finish before the end of December, we are now so far removed from the reality in 1982, that it is hard for contemporary readers to understand the impact of the differences between the ideological backgrounds between the two Germany's. Kolakowski suggests that, especially students of contemporary literature and history should once again study Marxism, as a thorough knowledge of Marxism is needed to make sense of much of the history, literature and literary criticism of the 1960s through 1980s.

The same holds for the discourse on Feminism, which plays an important part in Wolf's conception of the novel Kassandra.

Still, I did get a lot from reading Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra, particularly in terms of the mythical background and the development of the character of Cassandra.

>48 thorold:

I had never read any fiction by Dürrenmatt before, and what I liked most about it is the close association of the work with similar surrealist novels by the Dutch author Simon Vestdijk. I had always wondered where the roots of Vestdijk's surrealism came from, and have never found anything so similar, that was written at about the same time.

Mein Verschwinden in Providence. Erzählungen
Finished reading: 10 November 2014

English:

Mein Verschwinden in Providence. Erzählungen (Engl. My Disappearance in Providence & Other Stories) is a collection of nine short stories by Alfred Andersch, published in 1971. All stories were written between the Spring of 1968 and the Spring of 1971. The stories are published in the order in which they were written, which hinders the reader to construe a meaning or signficance of the stories.

Some of the stories contain autobiographical elements. Alfred Andersch, who was born 100 years ago, in 1914, was drawn into the army during the Second World War. A decade before the war, he had been imprisoned in a concentration camp for his sympathies with Communism.

Three of the stories, "Brüder", "Festschrift für Captain Fleischer" and "Die Inseln unter dem Winde" deal with the Second World War. In each of these stories there is a character by the name of Franz Kien, who seems to be an alter ego of Alfred Andersch. "Brüder" is about two brothers who are musing about being drawn into the army. "Festschrift für Captain Fleischer" deals with a group of German Prisoners of War in an intern camp in the United States and the process of de-Nazification, as they need to come to terms with their new status and the fact that Germany has lost the war. The story deals with interesting aspects about the soldiers capacity to remain sane, absorb the many impressions of their new environment (the story is set in the United States), and matters of honour and respect, shown by a Jewish officer. "Die Inseln unter dem Winde" deals with a foreign visitor to Germany, who is shown around by Franz Kien. The story describes how Kien at first suspects, and gradually realizes that the foreign visitor sympathizes with the ascending Nazi powers. The story is set in the final years before the war.

Some stories seem to deal with developments in Germany after the war, and the changes in people's ideas and attitudes towards Americans. Thus, in the story "Tochter" some of the characters German is studded with English expressions, and other English language influences, even to the extent that they cause mistakes to be made in German grammar. Other stories are clearly set during the students protests and "second" rise of communism in Germany during the 1960s. The title story "Mein Verschwinden in Providence" consists of a series of 110 vignettes which represent suggested chapters or scenes for a novel to be written.

It seems the "war stories" are the strongest felt stories. They are apparently most close to the core themes of Alfred Andersch. Most other stories are only somewhat interesting, as they trace contemporary developments in Germany, but there is no clear thematic development. The repeated appearance of the character Franz Kien, suggests that the stories describe a personal development, but other stories seem unrelated.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Alfred Andersch emerged as one of the most important post-war authors, but in recent years, doubt has been cast on his sincerety, and the truthfulness of his autobiographical writing related to the war experience. However, it seems many German authors seem tainted by this type of behavior. It will probably take another generation to re-evaluate this "menschliches-alzu-menschliches" behavior of denial are distortion. Once all biographical facts have been explored and studied, it will most likely be possible in the future to appreciate parts of these writers oevre as opposed to insisting on 100% ideological purity. Surely, a large part of the work must be original and sincere. It would really be throwing the baby out with the bath water, to fully discard an author such as Alfred Andersch.

Alfred Andersch was born in 1914 and died in 1980.



Other books I have read by Alfred Andersch:
Die Kirschen der Freiheit
Wanderungen im Norden
"... einmal wirklich leben". Ein Tagebuch in Briefen an Hedwig Andersch, 1943 bis 1975

In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge



This novel started slowly for me, but gradually it lured me in and by the end I could hardly put it down. It tells the tale of four generations of a family in East Germany (the GDR) over 50 years from 1952 to 2001, but it does so by jumping back and forth in time, with different chapters set at different times and with each chapter told from the point of view of different characters.

The oldest members of the family are Charlotte and Wilhelm, who grew up in the pre-World War II era, who were involved in some way in Communist politics, and who fled?/were sent? to Mexico for a time. Charlotte is the mother of Kurt and his missing brother Werner. Kurt was in the Soviet Union for a time and was imprisoned in the Gulag in the Urals; when his sentence was changed to exile there, he met and married Irina, and eventually they were able to return to the GDR. Years later, they brought Irina's mother back from Slava in the Urals to live with them. Their son is Alexander/Sasha, who grows up, is drafted, marries, has a son of his own, Markus, but has trouble settling down or figuring out what he wants from life. Through these characters, the reader sees many of the changes taking place in the GDR, from Charlotte, who was raised by her mother to take the water off the stove just before the kettle started to whistle to save gas to Markus who smokes pot and takes Ecstasy.

The story starts in 2001, as Sasha, who has just learned he has inoperable cancer, goes to help take care of his now widowed father, Kurt, who has some kind of dementia. Then it switches to 1952, and Charlotte's perspective on her and Wilhelm's time in in Mexico, and then to the first of many chapters that take place on October 1, 1989, just before the fall of the Wall, when Wilhelm's 90th birthday is being celebrated. Over the course of the book, the reader sees this event from the point of view of many of the characters. Another recurring time is 2001 (just after the attacks on the World Trade Center), when Kurt travels to Mexico to retrace some of his grandmother's and Wilhelm's history and to find himself; all these chapters are told from Kurt's perspective.

There are many fascinating vignettes in this novel; perhaps my favorite was the story of how Irina got the apricots for the stuffing for her 1976 Christmas goose through a lengthy series of black market trades. Much of what happens in this novel is domestic rather than political; in fact, there is a focus on cooking and recipes at times, as well as on aging and challenging family relationships, and buried (or not so buried) resentments and hostilities. Nothing very dramatic happens. Eventually some secrets are revealed and some mysteries solved, but much remains opaque at the end, like real life. The reader becomes wrapped up in the story of this family and their times.

As a note, I found this book on display in one of my favorite bookstores (which is scheduled to close at the end of the year) and would probably have passed it over except for this theme read. I'm glad I found it.

Something completely different from what I've been reading for this thread so far, a novel that doesn't have anything partcular to do with recent German history or even anything particularly "German" about it apart from the language and setting:

Adler und Engel (2001: Eagles and angels) by Juli Zeh (1974 - )

 

This was recommended by lriley in one of the earlier posts in this thread. Juli Zeh, who grew up in Bonn and is the daughter of a senior civil servant, is a lawyer by training (amongst other things, she has been an intern at the UN and holds a doctorate in international law). Adler und Engel was her first novel, and she's had a string of other successes and literary prizes since then. She's also been a frequent commenter on German political questions in the press, most recently over the NSA scandal.

Adler und Engel is in the form of a 21st century noir thriller with a background of drug-dealing and Balkan atrocities, the sort of book where everyone is so busy snorting coke that they have no time to drink whisky or cross their legs elegantly, and where you know from the start that all the good guys are going to turn out to be bad (but probably not vice-versa). Not really the sort of thing I enjoy, and I didn't, but it was sufficiently compelling and well-written to make me stick it out to the bitter end. And it is fairly bitter. Zeh slowly but surely takes away all the usual motivating forces that drive literary narrative: the main characters have no remaining interest in money, career, sex, or even normal human affection; good and evil are too murky for anyone to be motivated by them any more; even the ostensible death-wish of Max, the POV character, is not really credible, and all we are left with is the destructive, self-consuming force of narrative closure. As usual in such cases, the back-story is rather complex and largely hidden, but Zeh is much more interested in the process by which the characters create a narrative from the events than in the events themselves, and a lot is only very broadly sketched in. The real focus is on the interaction between Max the storyteller and Clara the listener, which becomes more warped and twisted in every chapter. Deeply strange, but interesting.

>34 SassyLassy:
In the last couple of weeks, I've also read Stadt der Engel oder The overcoat of Dr Freud, which I found very rewarding, though I don't have a lot to add to what SassyLassy already said about it. Literature is so often about the importance of keeping memories alive: it's interesting to see a novel that investigates whether there might be a case to be made for the necessity of forgetting as well.

>56 rebeccanyc:
This is on my TBR pile now as well, but - partly in view of the discussion going on in another thread about the proportion of books by female authors we read - I've now started another novel by a female author previously unknown to me, Apostoloff by Sibylle Lewitscharoff. Interestingly odd so far...

TWO MORE DAYS TO VOTE for next year's theme reads.

On Sunday morning, I'll close voting and post the results.

The voting thread is here.

The results are IN!!!

Go to this post in the voting thread to see them and to volunteer for leading a theme read.

Apostoloff (2009) by Sibylle Lewitscharoff (1954 - )

 

This is another novel that mixes fiction with elements of autobiography and travel writing, as Wolf does in Stadt der Engel, but it's in a much lighter vein. Like the narrator of Apostoloff, Sibylle Lewitscharoff had a German mother and a Bulgarian father and grew up in the suburbs of Stuttgart. She now lives in Berlin and has published several other novels besides Apostoloff, most recently the crime story Killmousky.

The basic premise of Apostoloff is that Tabakoff, a wealthy member of the Bulgarian diaspora in Stuttgart, has paid for the remains of several of his compatriots who left Bulgaria shortly after the war — including the narrator's father — to be re-interred in Sofia. The narrator and her sister go along, more out of curiosity and for the sake of the free trip to Bulgaria than out of family piety, and arrange to take a tour around the country afterwards, with Rumen Apostoloff, a godson and former neighbour of their Bulgarian grandfather, acting as their driver and guide.

The novel, mostly in the form of the narrator's reflections from the back seat of Rumen's modest Daihatsu as they drive around the country, starts out with the narrator very bitter and sarcastic towards everything, in particular her father (whom she hasn't forgiven for killing himself when she was a little girl) and Bulgaria (which gets hammered three ways, as an ally of Hitler under Boris III, as a Stalinist dictatorship, and as a crumbling, mafia-infested and ugly post-communist state). We leap backwards and forwards alarmingly between Bulgaria now and Degerloch in the sixties as she constantly finds new things to make fun of, but it's not the universal and sustained anger of a Bernhard or a Jelinek: as the book progresses, the narrator gradually starts to thaw out. She is struck by the atmosphere of an icon-filled chapel, she has fond memories of her Swabian grandmother, she recalls her affection for Tabakoff's late wife, and she reflects with some respect and pride on her eccentric Bulgarian grandfather, a Tolstoyan idealist who wanted to make common cause between philatelists, rabbit-breeders and Esperantists. (Apostoloff has invested considerable time in the rather futile project of translating the grandfather's papers into German.) In the end, she even manages to establish a sort of rapport with her father's troublesome ghost.

This is a very funny book in parts, especially when it's talking about Bulgarian architecture or the great Bulgarian-Swabian funeral cortège, but perhaps not one that you would want to recommend to anyone with a deep patriotic love of Bulgaria.

...and since it was a cold, foggy Sunday, I had time for another short one from the TBR pile:

Das dreißigste Jahr (The thirtieth year, 1961) by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)

 

Bachmann was another Austrian — she grew up in the small town of Klagenfurt, the subject of the first story in this collection — and one of the major literary figures of the fifties and sixties. She's probably best-known as a lyric poet, but she also published a number of important prose works, including the novel Malina and this short story collection. She worked for Austrian Radio for some years, and her credits include a number of radio plays (and several episodes of a popular serial of the time). Her work tends to be in a very modernist style, exploring the world indirectly through the consciousness of her characters, in contrast to the realist "Trümmerliteratur" (rubble-literature) that was dominant in German at the time.

Thanks in part to her high-profile love affairs with a string of important intellectuals and her untimely death, she has acquired a posthumous cult status rather like that of Sylvia Plath.

Das dreißigste Jahr is a collection of seven short prose pieces all written in the late 1950s. There are two "key themes" that run through all the pieces, in various ways: the unequal relations between men and women, and the moral problem of living in a post-war world. As you would expect (in hindsight) there's a strong feminist sensibility everywhere, but oddly enough Bachmann chose to write four of the seven from an explicitly masculine point of view, and one from a point of view that does not bring the narrator's gender into play. Only "Undine goes" and "A step to Gomorrah" have explicitly feminine narrative viewpoints.

All the pieces seem to deal with people who are facing a crucial choice in their lives, but who ultimately don't quite have the courage to take it.

The title story is a miniature version of the classic German form, the Bildungsroman, describing a year in the life of a young man who suddenly realises that he's going to be thirty, and that all the endless possibilities there used to be in his life are condensing into the choices he has already made. It's the most ambitious in the collection in terms of form, switching between third and first person, prose and poetry, bringing in a character "Moll" who turns out to be a composite of all the hero's mediocre friends, and generally hitting us with the full armoury of modernist writing. And it works.

But I think the pieces that will stick in my mind most are the shorter opening and closing stories. The first is a beautiful, but jagged and painful, account of how the terrible experience of war has made it impossible to reconnect with memories of childhood and the comfortable isolation of small-town life; the last is Undine's delightfully lyrical, angry, sad and ultimately affectionate farewell rant directed at humans in general and men named Hans in particular. Definitely something you should have on hand for the Hans in your life...

(Apologies for reproducing the rather unfortunate Picabia cover art. It might be relevant to note that Bachmann had a big fight with Piper, the publishers of all her earlier works, and moved to another publisher in 1967. Possibly the designer of this edition was getting a bit of posthumous revenge...)

A great find, and wonderful review of Rummelplatz by Werner Bräunig. As you indicated in your review of November 14, the book had appeared as early as 2007. I suppose it is either a matter of Zeitgeist or a matter of direct influence that your review was followed by a review of the same book in De Volkskrant of December 6:

Review of Rummelplatz in de Volkskrant, d.d. 6 Dec

One of the things I miss most about Holland, and Amsterdam in particular is the high level of cultural sophistication, which means that both in arts & letters one is almost always first served in the most current trends, and both bookstores and newspaper editors have a good nose for what is important.

You seem to have that type of antenna as well, as shown by your early, and timely review of Rummelplatz. Then, again, it is possible that Jan Luijten in de Volkskrant of December 6 was inspired by your review.

>63 edwinbcn:
Luijten: Van deze indrukwekkende roman is nu een zeer lezenswaardige vertaling verschenen.

I suspect that the timing of the review has more to do with the appearance of the Dutch translation than with my mentioning the book here! But it's true that critics and publishers in the Netherlands are usually far more quickly aware of what's happening in neighbouring cultures than their British and American counterparts are.

The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns) by Heinrich Böll was written in 1963.

I first read this many years ago when I was in college. I loved it then, and kept my copy. The translation is by Leila Vennewitz. I may need a new copy—the glue in the binding is disintegrating, and my copy comes with marginal notes from a previous owner. I love Boll’s writing. It’s very accessible, funny and insightful

This book received quite a bit of negative reaction when it was first published, because it was perceived as anti-Catholic, and anti-CDU. Böll was actually himself Catholic, but was anti-authoritarian and had liberal views on religious and social matters.

Böll typically writes about eccentric individuals battling against a rigid social structure. In this novel, we have a stream of consciousness narrative from Hans Schneier. Hans is from a wealthy Bonn family (the brown coal Schneirs) but feels that he never got much advantage from his family wealth. Part of the book deals with political/economic corruption and how his parents managed to be successful before, during, and after Nazi rule.

Hans has been traveling as a clown (really a kind of mime-performer, an artist, it seems) and has been pretty successful at it. However, as the book begins, his life has disintegrated because the woman, Marie, who he regarded as a wife (although he never actually married her) has left him for another man. Reading between the lines, Marie made a good decision, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Hans, who is quite a mess and seems incapable of managing without her.

Nice review of Ansichten eines Clowns (Engl. The Clown, which I hope to read next year (won't be able to squeeze it in this year). I read my first book by Heinrich Böll in 1991, but those were interviews (Weil die Stadt so fremd geworden ist ... Gespräche), and I found the book so boring that it completely put me off Böll. However, two years ago, I bought three novels, including The Clown. In the intervening years I had bought a few other books by Böll, one of which I read earlier this month, but have not yet had time to review: Das Brot der frühen Jahre (Engl. The Bread of Those Early Years).

As non-English Nobel Prize Winners won't kick in till the third quarter, I will keep posting German post-war Literature here, for a while.

Yes, (re-)reading some Böll was one of the things I was planning for this thread, but I seem to have got distracted by the DDR. It might still happen, because I will have the chance to raid my mother's library over the Christmas holidays, and she has quite a lot of Böll, Lenz, Grass, etc. on her shelves.

I'm still working my way through Ruge's Fading light, but finding it very depressing, so I keep getting distracted by other things.

>66 edwinbcn: and >67 thorold: I am impressed with you both for figuring out how to put an umlat on the "o" in Boll!

I wish that I could read in German! I took German in college, and we read several of Boll's short stories, which I really liked. The one I remember best was "Kinder Sind Auch Zivilitsen." For years I meant to practice reading German, but I eventually gave it up, and unfortunately, sold my German books. But I think I will look for an English translation next year.

>68 banjo123:
Nothing clever about typing Umlauts! If you use them regularly, you remember how to do it: there are different tricks for every type of computer and operating system. And usually three or four different ways. On a Mac, you can type ALT+u followed by a vowel, for instance. Oddly enough the easiest are smartphones and tablets: they all seem to follow the principle that if you keep your finger on a letter key, the accented versions of that letter pop up. And if all else fails, in a place like LT, you can type in an "html entity" (e.g. ö translates to ö).

Nothing very clever about reading books in other languages, either (admittedly, growing up in a bilingual family helps a bit!): once you've got to grips with the basics of a language, you just have to go for it and try to use it. Start with something achievable (e.g. children's books, popular fiction, something you've already read in translation), and don't let yourself be put off if you don't understand every word. An e-reader with a built-in dictionary is a help at the beginning. But the main thing is to keep on trying and never accept that you can't do it. Remember, the people who speak most languages in this world are taxi drivers and waiters. If they can do it...

ü

It works!

Thanks for the umlaut instruction. I actually ended up with ø at first, but now I think I have it. ö.

p.s. taxi drivers and waiters can do lots of things I can not. (example carrying piles of dishes on their arms without dropping, and changing lanes very fast on the freeway. ) :D

I have a semi-professional interest in German-language literature, so I read a lot of it and I've been following this discussion with interest.

Lately I've been trying to extend my knowledge of contemporary writers--the ones that haven't yet made it into university reading lists and which, in general, I didn't have easy access to while still living in the US. I'm happy to see both well-known and lesser-known but rising authors in the discussion here, as well as a number of books that have been on my "to read" radar. I've been delinquent about commenting in a timely fashion to the reviews here, so I'll restrict myself to saying "thanks" for the moment and commenting on a couple of the recurring themes. I'll remark on several of the books I've read during this quarter in another post.

Do German writers mostly feel compelled to write about "German" topics (i.e. WWII and/or East Germany), particularly if they want to be taken seriously as major writers? I'm not sure...there's definitely some truth to it, but not maybe as much as one would conclude looking at the authors typically translated into English. And I think some of it is not so much pressure to "work through the past", but to define themselves as distinctly German authors in a book market that is full of translations from English. There are two genres where this is particularly visible: historical fiction and mystery/thrillers, both of which tend to be very rooted in local culture and experience. And German authors seem to be well represented here, in contrast to, say, contemporary fantasy/SF, where one would be hard pressed to find anything decent other than maybe Walter Moers and possibly Andreas Eschbach. There's another category of writers that typically looks at topics other than German history: immigrant/multicultural literature (many, but not all, of either Russian or Turkish background). Authors like Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Alina Bronsky, Sascha Stanisic, Rafik Schami. They, of course, face other pressures--Feridun Zaimoglu has notably challenged the expectation that authors with multicultural background can only write about immigrant issues.
And most importantly, the younger generation of writers seems to gradually be starting to feel more free to choose whatever topic they want rather than always digging around in the past. Offhand, Karen Duve is one; Julie Zeh is another.

I don't recall seeing it mentioned here, but the website New Books in German (http://www.new-books-in-german.com) is good for getting a sense of recent and notable German fiction. Not everything is available in English, as one aim of the website is to spread the word about recent books that would be of interest to English-language publishers, but I think they do keep a list of recent translations.

On the topic of trying to improve reading ability in German: I agree, it takes a long time to read with anything like the fluency possible in one's native language. The key is to choose books that are interesting, not too difficult (I don't recommend Günter Grass for beginners!). It helps to read for enjoyment and not worry about missing a few details here and there. Slang isn't so good, and a conventional writing style is easier to follow than something experimental. Shorter texts are good because they move faster. I read a fair amount of Böll and Brecht when I was starting out. And Hesse, because I was an angsty teenager. Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker was also among some of my earlier readings, if I recall. Wolfgang Borchert might also be worth a try.

My reading from this quarter seems to be a random cross-section of some of the slightly dustier corners of German literature: a postmodern dystopia, a Biblical satire, a historical novel about the days immediately following the end of WWII, a story of frustration and middle age in the German province, and a folkloric narrative about the Armenian genocidewritten by a Holocaust survivor.

Die Beschattung (Shadowlife) by Martin Grzimek
The cover blurb compares this novel to Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This is justified, I think, as the story has something of both: a future society where mass entertainment and government control have limited individuality and created a yearning for authentic experience. Like both novels, it suggests that pleasure, not paranoia, will be our undoing. And like both novels, there is, behind the dystopia, a belief in deeper values like beauty and poetry and morality and truth.

The novel starts out as series of letters by a young man written to his girlfriend, who has disappeared. He is employed by a government agency which is in control of the country's entire literary production. With the comforts of the modern age, society evidently has few problems, but its citizens have an insatiable appetite for new experiences--the more authentic, the better. Felix's job is to interview citizens old enough to still have had interesting experiences and record their stories. These oral recollections are sent to a computer, which processes them and makes books out of them, guaranteed to be completely true and authentic.
But something goes wrong with one of the interviews, and Felix ends up enacting a complex sort of fraud which puts him in great danger.
And then, the perspective changes, questioning the reliability of everything Felix has recounted. Is he, in fact, part of a plot to destroy the system? Or is he delusional, making everything up out of a desire to be an author himself, to create, to enact a story?

This is not a challenging or provocative work the way Brave New World must have been in its day. It is, in some ways, less about criticising society than the literary establishment, and it reflects in true postmodern fashion on themes of authorship and authenticity and creativity: can any story be "real" or "true"? Can we even write anything new that isn't merely a recombination of elements that have already been used countless times? What about the passivity of us as readers as consumers?

A beautifully written and engaging novel. While not edgy, the final chapter does, nevertheless, leave the reader with a chill with regard to the consequences of what it would mean for to government to have total surveillance and total control over the media. Recommended.

>72 spiphany: That's an interesting question, about "German" topics. I just started reading the Reader and was really wondering about that.

I've just got back from a short trip to Munich with a another stack of German novels. It turns out that Hugendubel have free Wi-Fi, so I was able to consult this thread for inspiration as I stood in front of the books, with predictable consequences.
Somehow, I don't think I'm going to get through all of them (plus the books I'm reading at the moment) before the end of December!

That Hugendubel is a dangerous place. Even the English-language sections are well stocked. I'm not allowing myself in until I finish er ist wieder da, however.

On the S-Bahn coming in from the airport on Wednesday morning, I overheard part of a conversation a few rows down the carriage: a young man was encouraging his friends to read Böll's Irisches Tagebuch, which was described as "geil" and "cool". Possibly that reflects a shortage of adjectives in modern Germany, but at least it shows that people are still reading the "great writers" of the fifties and sixties...

>77 thorold: Geil!

Noah: Roman einer Konjunktur by Hugo Loetscher
Originally published in 1967; there's an English translation by Samuel P. Willcocks published by Seagull books in 2012.

Loetscher is a Swiss author who typically writes with an eye on the ironies and absurdities of contemporary society and human behavior in general. I'd previously read a collection by him (Der Buckel) which has some brilliantly memorable moments. Noah, which is an earlier work, didn't impress me quite as much in terms of its execution, but it is nevertheless an effective and trenchant satire of the post-war economic boom in Europe.

He sets the story in pre-Diluge Mesopotamia as Noah is beginning to build his Ark and imagines step by step the vast economic and social consequences that would follow from such a vast construction project.
Identical planned communities arise from the need to provide housing and shops for the workers near the construction site. The local hills become deforested, leading to environmental concerns. Because so many people have become prosperous (the money flowing primarily from Noah's enormous but gradually dwindling herds of sheep), the arts flourish and change rapidly. In order to collect the animals that are to be included in the Ark, Noah must first engage the scientists to make a taxonomy of all existing species; to prevent the list from becoming too unwieldy, certain selections are made (a situation that recalls the woodworm's story in Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). And as the Ark fills with animals, other problems arise: how to feed and muck out the vast numbers of creatures, how to prevent them from causing trouble, how to prevent the neighbors from becoming upset because of the terrible smell issuing from the Ark. The Ark becomes a tourist attraction, but Noah is, unfortunately, not clever enough to charge admittance to the world's first zoo. He is reaching the end of his abilities--and his money is running out.
Here the book ends, with the comment that "only a Flood could save Noah now."

Cleverly imagined, and the pace at which one development logically and seemingly inevitably follows the next is tremendous. It is easy to see how one person's project takes on a life of its own and soon changes are underway that are far out of his control and headed for disaster. The novel is fairly short, and written without chapter or section divisions; this is a bit confusing when the story abruptly jumps from one topic to something else, but it fits with the way society itself is irresistably pressing forward.

The story convinces, and it surely continues to be relevant today. But for some reason it felt slightly dated to me, perhaps because the satirical effect depends on the readers living in a time where there is a huge sense of optimism about the rapid economic growth, and today, I think, we have become somewhat more sobered in this regard.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

In the Reader, 15 year old Michael Berg, begins a relationship with an older woman, Hanna. Later, as a young law student, he discovers Hanna on trial for her past as a concentration camp guard. Michael struggles with his feelings about Hanna, and with his feelings about Germany’s Nazi past. He blames his father, a distant parent, for being complicit in the Third Reich, even though this is not logical.

Michael struggles with the intersection between justice and personal relationships. Neither justice, nor personal relationships satisfy.

One issue in The Reader is the issue of sexual abuse, with a teen age boy as the victim to an older woman. I wasn’t sure that I was satisfied with how the book dealt with this issue. Michael doesn’t see himself as a victim, which is probably realistic. As the book unfolds, it appeared clear to me, that this abuse had a profound, and negative, effect on Michael’s life. I kind of wanted the author to hammer this home, however he never did. Perhaps that was better.

Bernard Schlink also writes mysteries, and his writing style reflects that. It drew me right in, and kept me turning pages. The translation is by Carol Brown Janeway and it felt seamless.

Confirming spiphany's point about how outsiders are more likely to pay attention to writers dealing with characteristically "German" subject-matter, this is a book I knew nothing about, but which caught my eye in a secondhand bookshop precisely because it's about the workers' rising of 17 June 1953 which I'd read about in Rummelplatz.

5 Tage im Juni (5 days in June, 1974) by Stefan Heym (1913-2001)

 

Stefan Heym (real name Helmut Flieg) grew up in a Jewish family in Chemnitz, and was involved in left-wing politics from his schooldays to the end of his life (he was elected to the Bundestag as an independent socialist member for a Berlin district at the age of 81!). From the rise of Hitler until the rise of McCarthy he lived in exile in the United States. He became a US citizen, and built up a career there as a novelist and journalist. His books from this period, and indeed many of his later works, were written in English and translated into German by the author. He served in the US forces in the Second World War (in a propaganda unit).

Heym came back to live in East Germany in 1953: although he was initially welcomed there, as a returning socialist exile and literary lion, he fell foul of the régime after the tightening of cultural policies in 1965 and for some years his books could not be published in the DDR. Several, including this one, were first-published in the West. In the eighties, Heym was active in the protest movement seeking reform in the DDR. Most of his work deals in one way or another with contemporary political events.

5 Tage im Juni is a novel that does exactly what it says on the tin: it describes the events of the five days up to and including the 17th of June 1953 in Berlin, taking Martin Witte, the president of the official communist trade union in the (fictitious) engineering works of the VEB Merkur, as central character.

The background, broadly-speaking, is that the government of the DDR had tried to tackle the economic problems of the early fifties by a combination of austerity measures and severe repression of what was seen as subversion or economic sabotage. The effect was disastrous: production fell, illegal emigration to the West rose alarmingly, and the prison population was growing out of control. In the early summer of 1953, the Central Committee was forced to admit that mistakes had been made, and many of the unpopular measures (especially those affecting farmers and small businesses) were rolled back. However, the requirement that the production norms for industrial workers be raised by 10% was kept.

Witte, although a loyal party functionary, is a conscientious man, and feels compelled to tell his superiors in the party that the workers will not stand for the 10% increase. They are already at their limits, and their wages barely cover their living expenses. Enforcing the increase will certainly lead to trouble. This message goes against the strong convention that only good news can be passed up the hierarchy, and gets him into trouble with the local committee. Meanwhile, nefarious agents of western powers (with a strong hint at neo-Nazi connections) are inciting the workers to strike.

We follow Witte and some of the people connected with him more or less hour-by-hour through the five days — Heym is obviously drawing on the American documentary/journalistic style of the time, with short chapters all headed with a date and time, interspersed with excerpts from actual documents (news reports, speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.). The writing itself looks relatively unadventurous — nothing like Bräunig's hardcore realism — Heym wants us to focus on the content, not the style. There are a few short passages of Alexanderplatz-style modernism given to one of the characters, the stripper Gudrun-alias-Goodie, but they seem to be there more to create variety of texture than anything else. This is a book that you read for its insights into how ordinary people get involved in political action, and how the political process can break down under the influence of inertia, cowardice and authoritarianism, not for its literary flourishes.

>80 banjo123: banjo123: One thing I've always found interesting about Schlink's novel is the way the English title inevitably puts a different emphasis on the story than the German. "Der Vorleser" clearly refers to Michael, whereas "The Reader" is ambiguous and could suggest Hanna instead.

>81 thorold: thorold: funny you should mention Stefan Heym, he's next up on my list of books read this quarter, also.

Schwarzenberg by Stefan Heym
I picked this up without knowing much about the author except that he had written a novel on the Wandering Jew and had lived in the United States and wrote in both English and German. I hadn't been aware of his politics, which as it turned out meant that I was expecting this novel to develop somewhat differently than it did.

Schwarzenberg is the name of a district in the Erzgebirge of Saxony on the Czech border which was left unoccupied by either American or Soviet forces for several weeks after the end of World War II. Anti-fascist (read: left-wing communist and socialist) groups in the region removed the local Nazi government and formed a provisional government to keep order, distribute food, prevent plundering, etc.

Heym explores the immense utopian potential of such a situation. In his novel, the American occupation troops receive an unclear order; unsure whether to proceed to the eastern or western border of the district, they flip a coin. And thus it is chance--or providence--that makes possible the events that follow. With the old order gone and the new one absent (nobody knows for how long), the citizens see a rare opportunity to create a new state, a Free Republic of Schwarzenberg, founded by the people themselves and based on democratic principles. They are aware that their republic's existence is precarious, that it will probably exist for a few weeks or months at most, and yet the power of the dream is indeniable: for Germans to rule themselves, to create their own government after the horrors of a regime that seriously challenged the ability to trust either a powerful government or the people who willingly participated in it.

The novel follows the members of the small group dedicated to this new government as they struggle to restore order to the post-war chaos. They must deal with a band of soldiers stealing food and causing trouble, with the everyday problems of telephone, train, and postal service. And soon they find themselves entering negotiations with both the American and Soviet occupying forces. It starts with the need to decide what to do with the Russian forced laborers for whom they can spare neither food nor shelter, and whom they eventually pack into train cars and send across the border to the Soviets. This compromise--how many of the people in that train car face execution after their return?--is the first blot on the idealism of the new state.

And soon, instead of a struggle for sovereignty or finding their own path, Schwarzenberg turns into the site of a political and ideological struggle--the Cold War, it seems, has already begun. The Americans seems amused by this postage-stamp-sized republic which they inadvertantly created and prefer to observe it as a laboratory of democratic processes rather than provide concrete assistance or even formally acknowledge Schwarzenberg as a state, which would give it more negotiating power. The Soviets, on the other hand, give lip service to the idea of Schwarzenberg as an independent state, but use it for their own ends, essentially crushing it through brute force. This is all the more tragic because the members of Schwarzenberg's anti-fascist provisional government are, from the beginning, more oriented towards the Soviets as allies, and they never consider anything other than a communism-inspired government for their republic.

And this is the point where Heym's own background begins to show and where I began to become slightly disappointed with the novel, which was published in 1984 (significantly, not in East Germany, where Heym had emigrated and was politically active, but in Munich). In some ways, the novel says more about the time in which Heym was writing and about his personal disappointment with the communist regime in East Germany than the time the story is set in. I suppose all historical fiction is really a lens for the dreams and concerns of the present, but I think I was really hoping to read a different story, one which excavated a more positive, subversive version of "what might have been" that would have allowed the individuals in the story a bit more agency (I suppose I was thinking of alternate histories such as The Invention of Curried Sausage or Goodbye Lenin, which, although problematic in some ways, are, I think, useful ways of reclaiming a less-than-positive past). Then again, I may be revealing my own American bias here which favors narratives of the independant underdog fighting to succeed against all odds.

>82 spiphany: Great minds think alike, obviously :-)

I wanted to move on to something a bit lighter, but I'm not sure if I actually did:

Der Hals der Giraffe: Bildungsroman (The Giraffe's neck, 2011) by Judith Schalansky (1980- )

 

Judith Schalansky studied art history and taught typography before she became a novelist, and her books are elegant design objects, even in paperback. RidgewayGirl and Rebecca mention her Atlas of unknown islands earlier in this thread; Der Hals der Giraffe is also beautifully designed and laid out, and is illustrated with carefully picked engravings that might (or might not) have come from old biology textbooks.

The book is a Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the neue Bundesländer: an account of the schoolmistress-as-sociopath, set in a dying school in a small town in rural Pomerania, the top right-hand corner of the former DDR (Schalansky grew up in Greifswald, which is about as far as you can go to the north-east without being in Poland or getting your feet wet). Like her Scottish colleague, the biology teacher Inge Lohmark initially strikes us as an heroic figure, valiantly standing up for her values in a world where that is no longer appreciated, but we soon get the message that she isn't necessarily the ideal role-model of a teacher. By the end of the book, Schalansky has shown us what a monster Lohmark really is, but has done it in such a cunning and witty way that we still, in an odd way, seem to be on her side, despite everything.

Lohmark is middle-aged and in a job that will inevitably disappear in three or four years when the last child has left the school, her daughter has been away on a gap year in California for 15 years, and her marriage amounts to little more than sharing a house. But the main part of her problem seems to be the collapse of the DDR and the disappearance of the value-system she grew up in and which gave her a role and a structure to her life. She clearly isn't a socialist, and she doesn't want the old days back, but she feels adrift. The only solid thing she has to cling onto is her scientific education, with at its core Darwin's elegant and simple theory of evolution by natural selection. With that, she can arm herself against the annoyances of life in the new Germany and face the daily battle at the chalkface. Unfortunately, it turns out that rejecting all thoughts of tender emotions and orienting your life around the principle of the survival of the fittest is not a very good idea, particularly if you are (a) a dinosaur and (b) well beyond reproductive age. And even more dangerous if your headmaster is scheming to make the school "fit for the future". By the end of the book, she seems to be so far off the rails that she is teaching her class about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This is certainly a cruel novel: every bit as bitter and satirical as Muriel Spark's. But it's a delight to read. Schalansky moves smoothly backwards and forwards between the outer world of what Lohmark does and says and the inner world in which she aligns her experiences with the great truths of biology.

Without any particular plan, I seem to have read two successive books both told from the point of view of appallingly bad mothers and written by women who belong to a much younger generation than their central character: I followed my lessons with Frau Lohmark with a taste of

Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche (The hottest dishes of the Tartar cuisine, 2012) by Alina Bronsky (1978- )

 

This is Alina Bronsky's second novel, following the very successful Scherbenpark. The narrator is Rosalinda, a Russian lady who has become a grandmother very much against her wishes. Once she has seen her new granddaughter, Animat, she becomes possessed with the determination to do everything in her power to help the child (and keep control of her), to the detriment of her daughter Sulfia if necessary. Rosa is used to getting what she wants: armed with the strong conviction that she is always right, she deploys all the techniques at her disposal in the course of her campaign: bribery, physical coercion, deception, blackmail, psychological warfare, the giving and withdrawing of sexual favours, a fraudulent claim to knowing the secrets of Tartar folklore, even prayer (although she is cautious with this last: she's learnt that God has a tendency to overdo things). The unfortunate Sulfia is pushed into three marriages, with increasingly disastrous results, but Rosa does manage to get the family out of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia into Germany. And eventually, despite her own best efforts to mess things up, many things do work out for the best, although not at all in the way she intended.

This is a bit of a one-joke book: much of the point relies on Rosa's conviction that she is always acting for the best, whilst inadvertently allowing the reader to see the damage she is doing by constantly seeking to retain control of her daughter's and granddaughter's life. And that can get a bit wearing after a while. But it's also clearly a book about emigration, and about how people who live in hard times have to develop sharp elbows, and how much of a luxury it is to be able to retain liberal moral values. Rosa — like Frau Brücker in Die Entdeckung der Currywurst — is someone who has simply decided that in the present circumstances, the rules don't apply to her. Unlike Frau Brücker, she has innocent victims around her who get hurt, however. They are both caricatures, of course, but the point of caricatures is that they have recognisable characteristics. There's a lot in both of them that reminds me of people I've met: relatives who lived through the last war, people who have emigrated from countries in a chaotic state.

BTW: just to be clear, this isn't a book about cooking. The title is yet another fraudulent stratagem out of Rosa's arsenal. She's been brought up in the monoculture of Stalin's Soviet Union, and knows next to nothing about the culture of her Tartar ancestors. But she discovers later in life that there's a market for ethnic folklore...

I feel I may be hogging this thread a bit too much, but I'm trying to clear at least some of my Munich book-haul off the TBR shelf before the Christmas holidays. And anyway, you can never have too much Thomas Bernhard. Or can you?

Goethe schtirbt (2010: No English yet, but my guess at a title is Goethe Dhies) by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)



These four short pieces (only adding up to a hundred pages in all), dating from the early 80s, finally appeared in book form 20 years after Bernhard's death. They fit together very nicely to make up a kind of composite picture of the Bernhardian thought-world.

The title piece is a slightly whimsical fantasy in which the dying Goethe tries to arrange a meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the only man whose thinking seems to be worthy to be put side by side with his own. (When you find yourself describing a piece about the deathbed of Germany's greatest poet as "in lighter mode", you know it's got to be Bernhard...) There's a certain amount of comic business involving Goethe's court of poets and secretaries, and some reflections on the very Bernhardian theme of the paradoxically deadening power of great genius. Great fun.

(The full text of the piece "Goethe Schtirbt" as it originally appeared in Zeit in 1982 is available here: http://www.zeit.de/1982/12/goethe-schtirbt )

The two central pieces, "Montaigne" and "Wiedersehen" are about relatives — parents, especially — about whom Bernhard's feelings are much the same as those expressed in Philip Larkin's most famous lines — although he probably wouldn't agree with the bit about "they may not mean to". "Wiedersehen" is an especially fine example of the Bernhard riff at its most exuberant, where he manages to keep going for page after page on the subject of the garish red woollen walking socks worn by his parents on their senseless mountaineering trips and the garish green ones worn by his friend's parents on theirs. And a beautifully deflating joke in the last line.

Then, in the last ten pages, he hits us with "In Flammen aufgegangen", a travel report in which he comes to the conclusion that the whole world (with the possible exception of Rotterdam) is unbearable to live in, and imagines Austria as a smoking pile of ashes with only a few barely recognisable Catholic and National Socialist residues in it...

>84 thorold: thorold: Have you read Scherbenpark? I was impressed with Bronsky's creation of a distinctive narrative voice there; she does this in Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche also, but I found it not quite as successful. Like you, I found the protagonist rather tedious after a while. Not so much because she's a caricature, but because she's a thoroughly unsympathetic character who doesn't seem to ever really develop or change in the course of the novel. I was reminded of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day in the way the author uses a first-person narrator but nevertheless lets us see the holes and weak spots in the narrator's view of the world. But Ishiguro's butler senses that something is missing, whereas Rosa is too self-satisfied (or too determined to not let herself be hurt, using her meddling as a shield for her own vulnerability) to ever really reach this insight. I found it uncomfortable, but maybe it's supposed to be...

>85 thorold: thorold: Rotterdam? Really? What are its mitigating qualities in his opinion? I wouldn't have thought Bernhard likely to approve of any city in Europe or North America.
Re: the heroization of Goethe, actually de-mythifying him seems to be "in" right now. What was the recent film? "Fack ju Göhte"? and there have been at least a couple of novels, i.e. Ortheil's Faustinas Küsse and Löhr's Das Erlkönig-Manöver which definitely focus on the lighter, more human side of the literary giant. Maybe the Germans are finally starting to take themselves slightly less seriously ;)

>86 spiphany:
No, I haven't read Scherbenpark yet, but I probably will, now. Bronsky is clearly a good writer, even if she is a bit of a fraud and is milking the Russian stuff for more than it's worth.

There was some Bernhard connection with Rotterdam, improbably enough. If I remember it right, his mother was sent off to have her illegitimate child in a convent near Heerlen, and I think they then lived together in Rotterdam for a while before she brought him back to Bavaria. It's all in Ein Kind.

>85 thorold: I feel I may be hogging this thread a bit too much

Quite the contrary, I was already going to write how much I have been enjoying your reviews -- and feeling guilty that I haven't been doing more reading for this theme. I hope to read at least one more book for it before the end of the year.

>85 thorold: Not at all. I've made note of several titles to pick up once I finish er ist wieder da.

>85 thorold:, >88 rebeccanyc:, >89 RidgewayGirl:
As should be obvious, I've been enjoying myself with this theme. Having grown up with one foot in German culture, but never actually lived in Germany, I always feel a bit embarrassed about how narrow my knowledge of German literature is. It's great to have a bit of a push to go out and discover writers who are new to me. It really struck me when I was in Hugendubel last week how much difference it makes being in the physical presence of a large number of German books. Even if I can order up almost anything I want from online booksellers or as e-books these days, it can be a very frustrating experience when you just don't know what's out there.

I've still got a couple more "experiments" to try: I started Heimsuchung yesterday, and I also want to read at least one LGBT novel before the end of the quarter, so I've got a novel by Alain Claude Sulzer lined up that I found via http://www.new-books-in-german.com (thanks for the link, spiphany!). After that, as I said, I'm hoping to raid my mother's shelves for some re-reads of old favourites.

>85 thorold: Like others, I've really been enjoying your contributions to the thread, so please, don't stop!

This one was recommended in >6 kidzdoc: above, and it also came up several times for me in LT recommendations for other books I was reading:

Heimsuchung (Visitation, 2008) by Jenny Erpenbeck (1967- )

 

Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin and comes from a family of intellectuals (her father is a physicist, philosopher and expert on competence; her grandparents were left-wing writers who spent the Nazi years in exile in the USSR). Before she became a novelist, she already had a successful career as a director of operas.

Germany has some of the strictest planning laws in the world, but they seem to have a remarkable blind-spot when it comes to lakes. Every German lake with any pretensions to being scenic has its shores lined with hotels, villas and dachas, all surrounded by high mesh fences and dense evergreen hedges to ensure that no unauthorised person can catch a glimpse of the water. When you spend your holidays there, all you ever see of the lake (unless you get on a boat or climb a nearby mountain) are the fifty metres or so of shore that belong to the place where you are staying.

Heimsuchung is set on a short stretch of the shore of the Scharmützelsee, which lies roughly halfway between Berlin and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. It is a prime example of such a lake: promoted as a beauty-spot by Theodor Fontane(*), who gave it the romantic name "Märkisches Meer", it has been a popular get-away spot for prosperous Berliners since the mid-19th century. One of the most famous to have a house there was the boxer Max Schmeling, who is mentioned a few times in the book. After a prelude in the last ice age, we follow the history of the plot of land in a series of scenes that take us through about a hundred and fifty years up to the present day. We see a successful architect with Nazi connections building a summer-house there; we see Jews being dispossessed of their plot and exiled or murdered; a Red Army major commandeers the place for a couple of days in 1945; we see the architect fleeing the communists and the summer-house being allocated to a clan of writers with a more-than-superficial resemblance to the Erpenbecks; we see the granddaughter of the family enmeshed in legal disputes over the land after the fall of the DDR. "German history 1870 to the present day" in a holiday cottage. What could be more convenient?

It may sound a bit corny when you condense it like that, and it is occasionally a touch too obvious, but on the whole, I thought it worked very well. The writing is pleasantly lyrical, but not intrusive in its style. You can see Erpenbeck's opera background working in the very tight, symmetrical construction of the scenes. Everything is carefully thought out and fits together exactly as it should, there are lots of repeated motifs - phrases, bits of stage business, props keep reappearing from scene to scene; the entrances of the symbolic, non-speaking gardener-character cover the set changes and time-shifts; there are even a couple of scenes that are structured as classic da capo arias ("ABA") and one where two sets of characters in different places and times are on-stage together (that last was probably a mistake: in an opera you can have two things going on at once, but on the printed page it doesn't really make sense). Even the set has a theatrical feeling to it: the action is confined to a very small number of locations within the plot of land, and almost all the indoor scenes take place in a pair of upstairs rooms with a climbable balcony, connected by an ingenious hidden cupboard for eavesdropping purposes. Perfect for Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro!

(*) Author of a series of popular walking guides to Brandenburg, sometimes known as "the Märkisch A. Wainwright".

Grenzgang by Stephan Thome
This was shortlisted for the Deutscher Buchpreis several years ago and it caught my interest because of its focus on regional customs. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I feel like one trend among German authors is writing novels with a strong local flavor, in part because it may (or may not) allow them to avoid problems of national identity and the German past.

In this case, the novel features a tradition known as "Grenzgang" ("walking the border"), originally a physical and symbolic act of marking off the town boundaries to prevent land from being stolen by neighboring townships, but now transmuted into a festival that takes place every seven years and involves ritualized ceremonies and (predictably) the consumption of lots and lots of beer. As such, it is also a time when things happen, when couples get together or break apart, when children come of age and adults do things that propriety would usually hinder them from doing.

Although we do experience bits and pieces of the festival in the novel, it's not directly described in detail, and the book doesn't feature a panorama of colorful characters as one might expect from the starting premise. Instead, the Grenzgang serves as more of a backdrop and organizing principle for the novel. It centers on just two characters, both approaching middle age, both more-or-less outsiders in the community, both struggling to cope with a sense of failure and emptiness (i.e., "Grenzgänger" in a sense; the book certainly draws on this meaning).

The story jumps back and forth between the present Grenzgang and the last one seven years before; thus we witness both the moments that their lives fell apart in the past (when Thomas returns to Bergenstadt after a failed university career; when Kerstin discovers that her marriage is over and her husband is being unfaithful), and how they have adapted and gone on with their lives after these disappointments. We see a kiss seven years ago and how they now, almost reluctantly and in spite of themselves, find themselves being drawn together--not out of love or passion, but because of the need for comfort and companionship.

This is the sort of plot that I tend to find dreadfully boring if not done well (stories of middle-class discontent don't particularly speak to me: there's enough banality in real life, I don't need to read about it). However, Thome's novel captured me with its beautiful writing and craftsmanship. There's an almost old-fashioned feel about it--in the sense that it focuses on storytelling and characterization; it takes its time and lets us get inside the characters' heads, is sympathetic towards them without hiding their faults and weaknesses. It's rich language, meant to be savored. What convinced me, ultimately, to pick up this novel was listening to Thome read an excerpt (you can find it here: http://www.literaturport.de/index.php?id=28). Not only does he read his own writing well (not all authors can), but hearing it really brings it to life: his gift for vivid, striking phrasing and imagery and dialogue that captures the tension between the characters, the way in which they constantly--and to some degree consciously--take part in a complex, wordless game of approaching and retreating, provoking reactions and judging the response of their conversation partner.

This was a first novel, but an incredibly mature one, both in its understanding of the human psyche, its mixture of sympathy, irony, and humor which manages to avoid being sentimental, and for its execution. The temporal jumps, a structure that can easily become distracting and make for frustrating reading, become an essential compositional element of the novel, for in Bergenstadt, as one of the characters observes, life seems to happen in bursts every seven years during the Grenzgang. And these bursts, these snapshots, mean that the characters always have one eye to the past, and we, the readers, are invited to compare past and present, the disintegration of a marriage, a life, and the building of a new one, the maturation of a child, loss, hope.

Thome's second novel, Fliehkräfte was also a Buchpreis nominee; I enjoyed Grenzgang enough that I will probably hunt down this one as well.

Grenzgang sounds worth seeking out. I've put it on my list of books to look for at the Hugendubel. Would you consider posting your review on the book's page?

>94 RidgewayGirl: Yep, I could do that I suppose. I've been waiting a bit with posting reviews on the book pages because I've been hoping to get around to writing reviews in German, both to encourage more German-language reviews on LT, because it seems appropriate for books that haven't been translated, and as a sort of personal challenge--I work mostly in English, so I don't get much of a chance to write in German nowadays. But knowing me, and my very sporadic review-writing, and the fact that it takes me longer to write in German...maybe I'd better just go with the English one that's already writen.

You're in Munich? Maybe we can meet up sometime. Heck, I could probably lend you Grenzgang when it comes down to it...

Aus den Fugen (2012) by Alain Claude Sulzer (1953- )

The Swiss writer and translator Alain Claude Sulzer (who writes in German, in spite of his Alsatian-sounding name) comes from Basel, and has also lived in Berlin. He has won the usual clutch of literary awards. His earlier novel A perfect waiter has already been translated into English, and a translation of this book is said to be coming.

Aus den Fugen is a novel that brings together the musical and psychological meanings of "fugue". (A "Fuge" in German is also a joint between bricks, tiles, etc., so the title could be translated "Out of the cracks" as well.) We follow half a dozen characters through an evening in Berlin. The celebrated pianist Marek Olsberg is giving a recital at the Philharmonie, when the course of his life suddenly changes, a couple of bars before the end of the Hammerklavier sonata. The unexpected ending of the concert has important consequences for everyone in the book.

I found this a mildly engaging, thoughtful and reasonably entertaining novel. Nice, but nothing really special. Several of the main characters are gay men, but it's not really an LGBT novel - it belongs to the generation of books where that can be merely an incidental detail.

Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1955) by Heinrich Böll

As so often with Böll, this charming short novel about a day in the life of a washing-machine repair technician turns out to pack an unexpected punch. It's all about how the demands of survival in difficult times distort moral values. Walter has forgotten how to be a real human being in the state of permanent hunger he found himself in as a teenager in the postwar years, and has thrown all his energy into a job he’s good at, but which means nothing to him. It's only his encounter with Hedwig, a young woman he has been asked to collect from the station, that makes him realise that there is more to life than bread. Böll creates a very vivid picture of Germany in the early fifties and of what it's like to be young and hungry. As usual he’s a little too enthusiastic with the symbolism - colours in this case - but this is really a very enjoyable little book, still well worth reading sixty years on.

...and another classic from the fifties:

Ehen in Philippsburg (Marriages in Philippsburg, 1957) by Martin Walser (1927- )

Walser grew up in the picturesque Lake Constance village of Wasserburg (if you've seen Heimat 2, it's the place the cellist comes from). In the post-war years he worked in broadcasting in Stuttgart. He made his literary debut at a Gruppe 47 meeting in 1953 and has been one of the big names in German literature ever since. In 1998 he aroused controversy with a speech questioning the value of public remembrance of the Holocaust.

Ehen in Philippsburg was Walser's first novel. It takes a satirical look at bourgeois life in a fictional West German city (probably based largely on Stuttgart) at the height of the Wirtschaftswunder. Whilst poor people are still scraping a living recycling materials they collect on bomb sites, the professional classes are carving out careers in culture, media and politics. Interior decoration, money, PR, fast cars, adultery, a dedication to personal advancement, and a complete disregard for anyone else are the keys to this Balzacian world. Each of the four sections of the book takes a different central character and involves a gruesome - but offstage - tragedy for an unimportant person. Philippsburg society goes on regardless.

Although it's clearly very much a fifties novel, in all its cocktail-cabinet radiogramness (and plenty of overlap with British and U.S. writing of the time, as well as with Balzac), there's a lot here that is particularly German, and at least some of it is still very telling. And occasionally very funny indeed, in a black sort of way.

By a nice bit of serendipity I picked up just the right thing for this time of year, a lightish historical novel set during the twelve days of Christmas:

Krieg der Sänger (2012) by Robert Löhr (1973- )

Löhr, mentioned in >86 spiphany: above, has written a string of historical novels dealing with iconic moments of German history. He also runs a puppet theatre, apparently.

The Sängerkrieg (war of the singers) was an imaginary contest between the greatest medieval poets in German, described in a 13th century manuscript and supposed to have taken place in the Wartburg under the patronage of Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia. It caught the attention of 19th century romantics and nationalists, as a representation of cultural and political unity, the birth of the German language, the coming together of Christian and pre-Christian ideas, etc. Everyone from Novalis to ETA Hoffman had a go at it, and it gave Wagner the plot of Tannhäuser.

Löhr takes this sublime moment when Walter von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach were pitting their poetical and performance skills against the (mythical) Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and imagines how it might really have worked out if such a bunch of great creative egos had been invited to a house-party at an isolated castle in the middle of winter. Especially when all of them were also trained fighting men, and had been involved both personally and through their patrons in the civil wars of the time.

The result is a lively, swashbuckling adventure, something between Ivanhoe and a murder mystery story. High culture is there of course, but it's on the margins: the real story is all about greed, envy, lust and political advantage. To add to the fun, we also get a frame narrative involving a later guest at the Wartburg, Martin Luther, a pot of ink, and you-know-who. Very entertaining!

Offside by Gisela Elsner, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
first published as Abseits in 1982

In ice hockey, an offside occurs when the puck crosses into the defensive zone of the opposing team before the attacker's skates have crossed the blue line that demarcates that zone. When this happens, the puck is returned to the neutral zone for a face-off.

Gisela Elsner may have known nothing of this, but offside is an apt title for her novel. Lilo Besslein, the main protagonist, is constantly getting ahead of herself in her skirmishes with her parents, her husband, and even her lover. Each time this happens, she must go back for a new face-off.

Lilo lived in the post war planned suburb of Lerchenau. By the 1980s, the time frame of this novel, the suburb had become reasonably desirable, while still maintaining the sterility of 1960s housing estates. She lived there in a seventy square metre apartment with her husband Ernst, a man married to convention, but too tight fisted to achieve even acceptable standards of dress and decor in an appealing way, something which Lilo would not forgive.

The reader first meets Lilo and Ernst on the day their first child is born. The new parents somehow feel defeated by this event. Nothing works out. Once discharged from the maternity hospital with her antidepressants, Lilo begins a slide that will take her into multiple addictions.

There is nothing happy in this novel, yet Elsner somehow manages a savage humour when writing of suburban despair and tedium; a degree of levity that sustains the reader for awhile. Ultimately though, this was like a cross between darkest Doris Lessing and a John Cassavettes film. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie with its interminable rides comes to mind. One of Lilo's displacement escapes was putting on her eye makeup. Even as a teenager who loved the stuff, I don't think I've ever read one and a half continuous pages describing this process. Lilo however repeats the ritual again and again in preparation for her next offside, for Lilo can never play the game in a relatively straightforward manner, the way everyone else in her suburb did.

When the novel reached its inevitable expected climax, I felt a huge sense of relief to have actually finished the book. At the same time, I felt shortchanged, for Elsner is an excellent writer. I would have been thrilled to discover her had the material been different.

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Here is a link to more information on Gisela Elsner

http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing/langua...

I've enjoyed reading everyone's reviews, and it now seems clear I won't be reading any more for this theme read this year. But I have several postwar German books on my TBR and hope to get to them in 2015, now that they're on my radar.

Das Glück in glücksfernen Zeiten
Finished reading: 11 November 2014



Das Glück in glücksfernen Zeiten would translate as "Happiness at Unhappy Times". It is the title of a German novel that gives an intense impression of the 1990s, although its main theme is of all times. The main character in the novel, Gerhard Warlich, is a philosopher, that is to say a professional philosopher, with a PhD degree in the subject. However, this qualification does not immunize nor make him more perceptive about the condition of his own soul. After a period of unemployment, Warlich, found a job as a manager in a laundry firm, a type of employment clearly far from what he would have expected. In his day dreams he hold on to his secret ambition to set up a school, and he even undertakes steps to realize that ambition. Unaware of his profound unhappiness, unable to see even the beginning of his deep depression, he breaks together as the blackest melancholia bursts through.

Does life have a purpose? What is the fulfillment of life? Perhaps the 1990s brought this issue to the face of more university graduates than ever before, although daily toil without perspective or fulfillment of dreams must have been the fate of countless working people before. The novel does not offer any solutions to this dilemma.

Das Gefängnis der Wünsche
Finished reading: 12 November 2014



Das Gefängnis der Wünsche (English: "The Prison of Desires") is a experimental novel by the Swiss author Christoph Geiser. While the heart may be the seat of love, desire, or lust originates in the mind. The novel is difficult to read, as it consists of a kind of stream-of-conscious thought. As the connection between love, lust and prison first brings Marquis De Sade to mind, he is one of the minds being read, the other is Goethe. Diffucult to read, and hard to follow.



Other books I have read by Christoph Geiser:
Zimmer mit Frühstück
Wüstenfahrt

Der fremde Freund
Finished reading: 15 November 2014

In English:

In the love affair between Claudia, divorced, and Henry, a married father of two children, who lives separated, passion seems to be missing. Although in the German language, "the strange friend" can only refer to Henry, who remains a stranger, perhaps, the "odd" friend is Claudia, who is unable to develop a normal, enduring relationship with Henry, as she was unable with her husband, from whom she divorced. Although readers may be tempted to find the reasons for her loneliness in her life in the German Democratic Republic, the true causes are found in her past.

Der fremde Freund, in English The Distant Lover, is a beautifully written novella, about the inability to come closer.

Das Brot der frühen Jahre
Finished reading: 19 November 2014

In English:

Das Brot der frühen Jahre is an uneventful novella that portrays the hardship of life in post-war Germany, as a constant struggle for food, even the meagre portion of everyday bread. This struggle is described with a certain nostalgia, as it seems to be the only legitimate connection to the past. The novella describes a day in the life of the unnamed main character. On this day, he must arrange to meet Hedwig Muller, a young woman he has known since his early days from his hometown. She forms another legitimate connection to the past. The arrival of Hedwig in his life, marks a turning point of which the earliest moments are indicated in this short novel. The young man awakens to the sense that he must take responsibility and care for another person, no longer hoard money and only live to secure his basic needs, but spend money, for her, on her, even waste money, perhaps.

Das Brot der frühen Jahre, in English The Bread of Those Early Years, is a hopeful novella, about new life, emerging from the darkness.



Other books I have read by Heinrich Böll :
Weil die Stadt so fremd geworden ist ... Gespräche

Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus
Finished reading: 21 November 2014



To readers who have no experience with the absurdities of living in the former German Democratic Republic, Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus may appear to be a work of satire. It is, and is meant to be, notwithstanding the fact that the absurdity of life in the DDR was sadly very, very real. And while many of the main characters escapades, his reasonings and actions are fictional, and while not actually real, they most certainly seem to belong to the stock of likely, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but very, very plausible actions and ways of thinking that belonged to that historic period. Therefore, future readers can read this short novel both as a satire and a source of understanding life in the then-German Democratic Republic (DDR).

Part of the satirical aspect of Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus lies in the dramatic irony, that the reader already knows that the whole plot, as built up from 1981 to 1988 (- 1989) is obsolete in view of historic reality, as it would unfold after the summer of 1989. In 1981, the main character decides that he intends to travel to Italy, a country outside the so-called "East Block', beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. His journey is inspired by Johann Gottfried Seume's Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that there is no way Paul Gompitz can do this legally, i.e. with permission from the authorities, and therefore he decides to undertake his journey by illegal means, which, in practical terms meant that he had "to escape" from the GDR. The novel minutely describes the planning, preparation and execution of Gompitz's plan. Part of the sublime absurdity of the novel lies in the fact that Gompitz sincerely intends to voluntarily return to the GDR after his journey, a contingency the authorities barely know how to handle.

The novel can also be read as an absurd adventure, and may be of particular interest to people who like reading about sailing.

Nachgetragene Liebe
Finished reading: 23 November 2014



Nachgetragene Liebe beschreibt the youth, aged six to 11 of author Peter Härtling in Olomouc in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic. Härtling, born in 1933, grew up during the Second World War. The theme of the novel is the expression of "belated" love for the father.

Some biographical facts are known about the author and the author's family, and seem to correspond with elements in the novel. However, the novel must surely have significance beyond the autobiographical basis of Peter Härtling.

Perhaps part of the "belatedness" of the love for the father, as expressed in Nachgetragene Liebe is the tabu that must have surrounded the topic, directly after the War and many years that followed. The father figure in the novel is a barrister and continued working in that position during the war, which would make him an accomplice in the eyes of many. The novel describes how, at the beginning of the war, the family moved from Hartmannsdorf near Chemnitz, in Sachsen, in eastern Germany to then Olmütz in Mähren. The novel suggests that the parents moved to Olomouc in search of "a quiet corner" in the German Reich, and there are many suggestions that the father and mother were benign to the local populace.

Prior to 1939, Olomouc was a Czech city. Bohemia and Moravia were annexed by Nazi Germany. In the night of 15 / 16. March 1939, the synagogue was burnt down and 800 Jews were arrested and deported to the extermination camp Dachau, a fate shared by 3,489 Jewish people from Olomouc throught the Second World War period.

Olomouc is a very beautiful city, essentially quite on a par with Prague. Nachgetragene Liebe is a very nostalgic novel that does not deal with any of the suffering during or after the war. Instead, it presents an idealized view of life in the city through the eyes of a young boy. The focus of the novel are the boys memories of his father.

These were six books I read in German in November, but at the time had no time to review.

Thanks for posting the reviews now!

>109 banjo123:
Seconded! They all sound interesting, especially Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus, which I'm obviously going to have to read now...

>110 thorold:

I am sure you will love it. You've read and reviewed a couple of DDR-novels here before, and Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus is just a very short novel that typifies that period: sadly as it was at the time, hilarious to look back on through this short novel, particularly with dramatic irony in retrospect. Of course, only if you do not need to look up who Egon Krenz is.

>111 edwinbcn:
Yes, very nice! I read it on my Kobo in two evenings. No great problem remembering who Krenz was, but I've never sailed on the Baltic, so I did end up spending quite some time looking at the charts for Rügen to make sense of the route. I loved the scene with the three naked Stasi men on the FKK beach.