Dialog International

Review: Ilse Aichinger's Die größere Hoffnung

Ilse Aichinger's Die größere Hoffnung is included in Sueddeutsche Zeitung's series of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.  The book (the title in English is literally "The Greater Hope") was published in Vienna in 1948.  An English translation - Herod's Children - was released in 1963 to mixed reviews.  Like all great Austrian writers, Aichinger plays with language - in a sense, the novel is about the language of tyranny and horror- so it is nearly impossible to translate.

Aichinger somehow managed to survive in Vienna during the war as a Mischling - or half-Jew.  So Die größere Hoffnung is in part her attempt to come to terms with that terrible personal experience.  What distinguishes this novel from other works of fiction on the Holocaust is the narrative perspective - the point of view is that of a child - and the poetic style.  Aichinger uses expressionistic techniques, fairy tales, Kafka-like parables, and myths to tell the story.  In fact, I did keep thinking of Kafka while reading Die größere Hoffnung. In a sense, Aichinger writes about the world that Kafka anticipated in his work; her novel is a completion (Vollendung) of his vision.

The main character is 11-year old Ellen who in the first chaper is visiting the consulate in the middle of the night to obtain a visa to join her mother in America.  But Ellen has no sponsor and the consul tricks her into believing that only she can grant herself a visa. For the most part, the adults in Die größere Hoffnung only wish to bring harm to or trick the children at the center of the story.  The first chapter bears the title Die grosse Hoffnung / The Great Hope, and the novel shows how time and again Ellen's hopes - and those of the other children - are dashed: there is no escape from their fate. And yet, the children never lose hope. They make plans and envision happier futures for themselves to the end. 

Rejected by the other (Aryan) children because of her Mischling status, Ellen joins a group of Jewish children who have been driven from from every public playground and park and are forced to play in a graveyard. Aichinger doesn't use the word Jew; instead these are the children "with the wrong grandparents".  Because they have four "wrong grandparents", they are forced to wear the star.  The other children view Ellen with suspicion since she does not have a star, having only two "wrong grandparents".  But Ellen longs to wear the star as well so she can be accepted by the others. Much of the novel is about how the children seek to understand the meaning of the star. They reenact the Nativity over and over, believing that the Star of Bethlehem represents the true meaning of the star. Adults are drawn into the Nativity play, but they are only there to keep the children preoccupied until they can be rounded up by "die geheime Polizei" - the secret police.  And so the children learn the truth about the star, although Ellen, at the very end of Die größere Hoffnung as she is torn apart by a grenade, comes to find yet another, more hopeful meaning in the morning star she sees rising above the bridge of hope.

At the center of Die größere Hoffnung is the chapter entitled "Death of the Grandmother".  Ellen's mother has left for America, so she lives with her "wrong" - that is Jewish - grandmother.  The grandmother wishes to die rather than be arrested and deported and so enlists Ellen's aid in committing suicide.  In actual life, Ilse Aichinger's grandmother was arrested and deported to the death camp during the final days of the war. She watched from a bridge as her grandmother was transported away.

Aichinger wrote: "Man überlebt nicht alles, was man überlebt." (You don't survive everything that you survive) 

She was asked about this in a 1996 interview in Die Zeit: 

Zeit: Was haben Sie nicht überlebt? ILSE AICHINGER: Den Anblick meiner Großmutter im Viehwagen auf der Schwedenbrücke in Wien. Und die Leute um mich herum, die mit einem gewissen Vergnügen zugesehen haben. (Zeit: What didn't you survive? Ilse Aichinger: The sight of my grandmother in the cattle truck on the Sweden Bridge in Vienna. And the people standing around me who watched with a certain amount of satisfaction.)

Ilse Aichinger has written stories, essays, plays and poetry.  Die größere Hoffnung remains her only novel.

Review: Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau

Stettin, 1945. In a bombed-out apartment, an eight-year old boy secretly watches as his mother is repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers.  She then takes the boy by the hand as they make their way onto a packed train headed in the direction of Berlin. When the train makes a stop, the mother hands the boy the suitcase and tells him to wait for her on the platform while she uses the restroom. The mother never returns.

This is how Julia Franck begins her terrific novel Die Mittagsfrau ("The Noonday Witch").

Why did the mother abandon her young son?  The rest of the novel takes us back to Helene's (the young mother) early childhood in Bautzen and follows her through a tragic love affair in Berlin and the unhappy marriage that brought her to Stettin.  The novel is a psychological portrait of a young woman, but at the same time psychogramm of German history.  Helene is a half-Jew, and her personal history is inextricably bound together with that of her country.  In the end, the reader achieves some measure of understanding for Helene's unforgivable act. 

I found the early childhood scenes in Bautzen - the period just before the Great War -  especially effective.  Helene's mother Selma grieved for her four stillborn sons; she was incapable of feeling love for her two daughters.  Helene and her older sister compensate for this absence of love through an incestous relationship with each other.  When in 1914  their beloved father leaves to fight in the war, Selma is driven over the edge into madness and the young girls are left to their own devices to survive. Selma's mental illness casts a shadow on both girls: Martha succumbs to addiction and Helene retreats into silence and passivity.

Die Mittagsfrau won the 2007 German Book Prize and the English translation (by Anthea Bell with the unfortunate Harlquin-romance-like title The Dark Side of the Heart) has been released in the UK (not yet in the US).

The Mittagsfrau is a figure from old east German folklore.  She appears during the midday heat to peasants at harvest and steals their children along with their sanity. 

Dann bist du verwunschen, du armer Schneck,
                Denk doch einmal!
Herz weg, Verstand weg, Erinnerung weg,
                Alles aufs mal.
(Carl Spitteler, Die Mittagsfrau)

(Then you are cursed, poor wretch. Just think! You'll lose your heart, your head, your memory. All at once.)

According to the legend, the witch-like powers of the Mittagsfrau diminish if you engage her in a short conversation.  Helene loses her ability to communicate and therefore falls victim to the darkness of the Noonday Witch.  Fortunately for us, the readers, Julia Franck is able to give voice to Helene and to a terrible epoch in history.  This novel has the ring of truth. 

Wetlands Bombs in America

No accounting for taste.  Charlotte Roche novel Feuchtgebiete about a teenage girl's obsession with her bodily secretions was a blockbuster publishing sensation in Germany, but has failed to catch fire in the US since it's release in April (Wetlands, translated by Tim Mohr).  Checking this week, the book had an Amazon sales-ranking of 11,661.

What happened?  Are American's too prudish for Roche's frank discussion of the female body?  Not at all.  The book is simply poorly written (accurately translated by Mr. Mohr) and very unsexy.  The New York Times greeted the US launch with these comments:

"Part of the controversy over “Wetlands” has been whether it is pornography or literature. That sexually explicit writing can be serious seems long settled. There are really no taboo topics — good writing trumps such complaints. The problem is that “Wetlands” has all the nuance of Mad Magazine and less wit. Its descriptions are banal and repetitive, its vocabulary painfully limited. Helen is meant to be a complicated character, but she is merely inconsistent. She spreads her effluvia about like confetti but worries that someone might see her chewing her fingernails — “that belongs behind closed doors.” She likes to “break into the public pool and go drunken skinny-­dipping after a night out clubbing” but is embarrassed about being naked in the operating room. She is fascinated by anal sex, her wound and its discharge, yet mortified if she passes gas in a public toilet. All of this is supposed to be brave and disturbing, but “Wetlands” is simply and willfully aggressive. Helen’s a mess, and not a very interesting one. "

The Los Angeles Times is a bit kinder in its assessment - the reviewer attempts to find a transcendent story behind the graphic scenes: 

In drips and oozes, her real story emerges. She is the completely neglected child of two repressed and depressed people. She doesn't know what her father does for work. She has memories she does not trust and a recurring vision of an event that could not have occurred. Or did it? No one in her family communicates -- even when they visit. It soon becomes apparent that Helen is so desperately into her bodily functions and pleasures because no one else -- not a lover and definitely not her mother or father -- is actually interested in her.

Trouble is, most readers as well quickly lose interest in Helen and her stunts.  There are some cultural events that can cut across borders and languages and find audiences in Europe and the US.  The film The Lives of Others is an example, as well as Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Amazon sales rank 700), even though I am not a fan of the latter. But Wetlands is not such a phenomenon.  I find it amusing that Amazon informs me that "buyers of Wetlands also purchased The Kindly Ones (by Jonathan Littell)" which was a publishing sensation in France but bombed in the US.

If you don't want to read Wetlands - and I don't recommend it - you can watch ihis rather good interview wifh Charlotte Roche in English (appropriate words bleeped out).

Review: Anna Seghers' Das Ende

The recent deportation of John Demjanjuk, aka "Ivan the Terrible", to Germany where he will stand trial for war crimes once again raises the issue of the "willing executioners" of the Third Reich. Who were these low-level operatives that killed and tortured on command? Why did they do it?  Two weeks ago Der Spiegel caused an international firestorm of controversy with a cover article on non-German, European collaboration in the Holocaust (Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers).  The article was the source of a diplomatic row with Poland, a nation that refuses to practice Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

It is not likely that the aging and ailing Demjanjuk will provide any testimony that would give us insight into his actions over 64 years ago. But I thought about Ivan Demjanjuk when I recently read Anna Seghers' 1946 novella Das Ende (The End), for the story is told primarily from the perspective of a death camp guard very much like Demjanjuk. 

We first encountered the character Zillich in Seghers' bestselling novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross - 1942).  Zillich is a SA-Mann who had distinguished himself with special brutality and is selected to help run the Osthofen concentration camp.  In the novel, Zillich fails to capture the escaped protagonist Heisler, but Seghers was evidently not finished with him.  Das Ende describes what happens to Zillich after Germany's defeat. 

At the beginning of Das Ende, Zillich has made his way back to the American zone in southern Germany to his family in a rural village.  There he keeps a low profile, and hopes that no one will recognize him or turn him in for his actions as sub-commandant at a concentration camp in the east.  His luck runs out when a railroad worker, who had been a prisoner at the camp, recognizes him. Zillich flees and, under an assumed name, tries to find sanctuary at work camps in the region.  We follow the tormented Zillich through the ruined landscape as he attempts to escape his past.  At no point does he express any remorse or guilt for what he had done at the camps.  Still, the camps haunt his dreams:

Der Schlaf brachte ihm aber keine tiefere Ruhe, sondern Unrast und Beklemmung. Er spürte traumlos oder in einem uferlosen, gestaltlosen Traum die Drohung in allen Fasern; er spürte den Tod allgegenwärtig, allmächtig und allwissend zugleich, als ob er ihm folge und als ob er ihn verfolge. Er riss ihn am Haar, der Tod, er brannte ihn im Herzen, er kitzelte ihn an den Fersen, er surrte in dem dünnen Gemurmel im Rücken. Zillich wollte rasen vor Wut, der Störung ein Ende machen. Er brüllte: Ruhe! Er befahl: Raus! und: Wird's bald! und: Marsch, marsch! (Sleep did not bring him any deeper peace, but rather restlessness and a feeling of oppression. In a dreamless state, or in a formless, unending dream he could feel the threat in every fiber of his being, he could sense death, all powerful, ever present, and all knowing, as if it were following him and as if he were pursuing it. Death was grabbing his hair, burning in his heart, licking at his heels, humming softly at his back.  Zillich wanted to explode in rage to put an end to the torment. He shouted out: Quiet! He ordered: Get out! and Do it now! and March, march!)

We learn about Zillich's past as a bully, how he was despised by others in the village and feared by his own wife and son.  But the Nazis valued these qualities, and for the first time in his life Zillich achieved some measure of recognition.  His willingness to "do the dirty work" - even if it involved murder and torture - eventually earns him the promotion at the camp.  But his victims can never forget him.  At every turn Zillich confronts a strange Männlein dressed in a suit with a flower in his lapel.  The Männlein, who may or may not be a Jew, seems to know Zillich's past. Zillich, in the end, realizes there is only one escape route.

Segher's (uncharacteristically) brings in one important personal detail to Das Ende: Zillich ended his Nazi career at the concentration camp in Piaski, where Anna Seghers' mother was relocated and perished.

In my opinion, Seghers' novella is superior to Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (The Reader), which has won many awards and was made into a Hollywood feature film (as was The Seventh Cross).  Compared to Zillich, Hanna Schmitz, the illiterate former SS guard at Auschwitz in Der Vorleser, is unconvincing.  What little I know about Ivan Demjanjuk, I believe him to be more like Anna Seghers' fictional creation.

Walter Kempowski, CIA Spy?

Walter Kempowski has had a strange afterlife thus far.  First he "tweets" (zwitschert) from the grave. Now his American friend, a professor of German in Utah, has revealed new information about Kempowski's involvement with the CIC - the US intelligence precursor to the CIA - in the immediate postwar years.

Professor Alan Keele discussed his findings in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

"Andererseits geht aus den Akten hervor, dass Kempowski sich damals viel öfter mit CIC-Leuten getroffen hat, als er in den Romanen behauptet. Dort ist nur von einem Treffen die Rede.

FAZ: Erfüllt das den Tatbestand der Spionage?

Ich würde sagen: ja. Kempowski hat den CIC damals in Wiesbaden von sich aus öfters aufgesucht und seine Dienste angeboten." (AK: The files show that Kempowski met more often with the CIC people than he maintained in his novels.  There he only mentions one meeting. FAZ: Does this rise to level of being an actual spy?  AK: I would say yes.  Kempowskis sought contact with the CIC in Wiesbaden on his own initiative and offered his services).

Why did did the young Kempowski want to spy for the CIA?  According to Professor Keele, it had nothing to do with Kempowski's ideological aversion to communism.  Rather, the young man simply was looking to "spy his way into a job in the Nirvana of an American supermarket" (sich einen Job im „Schlaraffenland“ des amerikanischen Supermarkts erspionieren.)

Whether Kempowski was really a CIA spy or not is irrelevant: the authorities in the Soviet zone thought he had performed an act of espionage.  He was arrested when he returned to Rostock and sentenced to 24 years in the prison at Bautzen.  He served eight years of the sentence, and when he got out he started writing about his his experience.  Maybe if he had been a successful spy he never would have become a writer, and that would have been a loss for postwar German literature.

Review: Burned Child Seeks the Fire by Cordelia Edvardson

After reading Elisabeth Langgässer's poetry and reviewing her 1946 novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel (The Indelible Seal), I became interested in the fate of her daughter. Cordelia survived as a young girl the camps at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and was brought to Sweden after the war. In 1984 she wrote a memoir in Swedish; it later appeared in German as Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer, and in English translation by Joel Agee.

It is a short book - I read it in one sitting - but very powerful and disturbing. The book is dedicated to her mother Elisabeth Langgässer, and the mother-daughter relationship is at center of the story.  Cordelia writes about herself in the third person: she is "the girl".  "The girl had of course always known that something was wrong with her." is the opening sentence. From earliest childhood she is aware that there is something different, shameful about her, She develops a talent for detaching herself from what is happening to her.  This detachment is most likely what allowed her to survive later on.

Outwardly, of course, Cordelia is just like all the other children.  She embraces her mother's religion - Roman Catholicism - and is a good Christian girl. But she can sense that she is an outsider, and she is not accepted by the others.  So, it was no surprise at all to the girl when, in 1943, she and her mother were summoned to the Gestapo headquarters and she was informed that as a Volljüdin (a full Jewess) she would have to leave her family (Elisabeth Langgässer was "half Jewish" an married to an Aryan, and thus was not deported).

At the camp, the girl is stripped of all possessions. Somehow a photograph of her mother remained with her.

Sometimes she asked herself vaguely who had sent her out to serve here in the realm of the dead - but basically she knew.  It was really so obvious. 

In her novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel Langgässer creates an artful, elaborate (over 600 pages) story of individual salvation through God's grace in a world of destruction and evil.  But Cordelia dispatches that notion in just a few sentences:

In (the girl's) smile all memories are collected, the present and the past, all tenderness, all sorrow and longing.  Her smile is without guile or deception, for it does not deny her bitterness and anger at a world without mercy. At a world in which we are executioners to ourselves as well as to others...

What the girl experiences at Auschwitz is hell.  We know the stories from Primo Levi and others.  Cordelia Edvardson writes about it with her cool, sparing prose which makes it almost bearable to read.  Only once does the writing become emotionally charged as she writes about watching young mothers who - although given the chance to live at the Selektion - calmly accompany their children into the gas chambers. 

Safe in Sweden, the girl hears from her mother.  She wants to know the details of the death camp so she can include them in her new novel (most likely Märkische Argonautenfahrt - Langgässer's last work).

The daughter answered, describing her memories as well as she could.  Later, when she read the mother's novel, she did not recognize them.  It was both too much and too little.  Ther was talk about fire, and no mention of ashes.  How could it have been otherwise?  It was written by one of the living.

Cordelia Edvardson received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 1986 for the German version of Burned Child Seeks the Fire.

Walter Kempowski Lives! .... on Twitter

Walter Kempowski was one of my favorite postwar writers and the literary scene in Germany has not been the same since he died in October 2007.  So imagine my joy when I began to receive "tweets" from Walter Kempowski.  Evidently, everybody now has a Twitter account - even the dead.  It is a bit surprising, since while he lived among us Kempowski was not known for embracing modern technology.  But I'm happy to say that the old man is as grumpy and acerbic as ever. Death hasn't mellowed him in the least. 

Here are a couple of my favorite Kempowski tweets:

Diese elende Twitter-Scheiße! Nur Idioten! Schluß jetzt! Tür zuschlagen und immer schön mit dem Wind pinkeln! (This miserable Twitter shit! Nothing but idiots! Stop it right now! Slam the door shut and never pee into the wind!)

Man darf ja heute nicht seine Meinung sagen in Deutschland. Versuchen Sie das doch mal! Ein Schritt vom Wege, und Sie sind erledigt. (You are no longer permitted to express your opinion in Germany. Just try to do it! One step off the path and you're done for.)

Das Einzige, was mich am Tod wirklich traurig macht, ist, dass man als Toter keine Musik mehr hören kann. (The only thing that really makes me sad about death is that one can no longer listen to music.)

I'm glad that I can stay in touch with Walter Kempowski on Twitter, but this platform limits you to 145 characters per message - or per tweet.  Hopefully, he'll move to another. more expansive medium - such as a blog!.  So that we can get the "full Kempowski".

Review: Elisabeth Langgässer's Das unauslöschliche Siegel

In a post on Inner Emigration I wrote about some German writers who continued to publish in Germany during the Third Reich.  There were, of course, a number of writers who were forbidden to publish, but who continued to write and keep their production hidden away in desk drawers (Schubladenliteratur).  The Catholic writer Elisabeth Langgässer had a Schreibvebot imposed on her as early as 1935 since she was a "Half-Jew"; only her marriage to the "Full Aryan" philosopher Wilhelm Hoffmann kept her from deportation to a death camp after 1942 (her daughter, Codelia, a child from an earlier marriage, was, however, deported to Auschwitz).

Langgässer began work on her masterpiece, Das unauslöschliche Siegel (The Indelible Seal), in 1936, but was not be published until 1946.  It was quickly seen as one of the most important novels to appear in postwar Germany, and was praised by Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann, among others.  The book is Langgässer's reckoning with Germany's descent into darkness, but it is hardly a work of historical fiction.  Rather it is a strange variation of the Baroque Welttheater, where humans are incidental players in a grand struggle between God and Satan. The core plots take place between 1914 and 1927 in the a village in the Rhineland and in France, but the book ends with an Epilogue 1943, a one-act play that brings the action forward to the present. Langgässer disrupts the narrative with seemingly unrelated scenes, dialogues, letters - for example, Bernadette of Lourdes makes an appearance - interjections that contribute little to the plot line but serve to round out the "theology" of the novel.

Review: Die Quandts by Rüdiger Jungbluth

Members of Germany's wealthiest family dynasty - the Quandt family - appear each year on Forbe's list of billionaires, but most Americans have no idea who they are and how they amassed their fortune.  For decades, the Quandts have successfully kept a very low profile, even within Germany.  Last year the veil of secrecy was pierced to some extent when Quandt heiress Susanne Kletten became the victim of a sensational sex-blackmail scheme.

As a banker, I had some knowledge of the Quandt empire and used to call on Quandt-controlled companies such as BMW, Altana and Byk Gulden.  In New York City I got to know the husband of Colleen-Bettina Quandt (who converted to Judaism and made a name for herself as a jewelry designer), but I still had only a hazy notion of the source of the Quandt fortune.

The journalist Rüdiger Jungbluth has done a fantastic job of piecing together the incredible story of the Quandts in his unauthorized history of the family.  Jungbluth writes with an engaging style and has the talent to make even the most complex stock transactions understandable and even entertaining.  I couldn't put this book down. 

The key figure in the Quandt family saga (and the book) is Günther Quandt, who brought the family into prominence by becoming a major supplier of uniforms to the German army in WWI.  In the hyper-inflation and economic chaos of the Weimar Republc Quandt successfuly executed a hostile takeover of the battery group Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG (AFA) and took control over the munitions group Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabrik (DWM) just as Germany began to rearm itself.  Despite his fabulous financial success in the 1920s, Günther Quandt was no fan of the Republic and joined a "study group" that explored ways to bring Italian fascism to Germany.  In 1933 he joined a group of major industrialists in a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler. (I never understood why industrialists such as Peter Kloeckner, Friedrich Flick and Otto Wolff - along with Günther Quandt - were so hostile to the very Republic that enabled them to amass such vast fortunes).

Review: Anna Seghers' DIe Entscheidung

I have always been interested in postwar German fiction that deals with the American occupation, so I was eager to read Anna Seghers' 1959 novel Die Entscheidung (The Decision). But I have to admit it was a bit of a slog to make it through all 600 pages of Seghers experiment in Stalinist socialist realism. Disappointing, really, since Seghers is a fantastic story-teller as we know from her anti-fascist exile novels Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross - made into a Hollywood feature film) and Transit (Transit Visa).

Christa Wolf recalled a meeting a meeting in the early days of the GDR between Anna Seghers and Walter Ulbricht - the Secretary of the ruling SED party - when Ulbricht challenged the Genosse Schriftsteller (comrade writers) to write socialist masterpieces about collective farms, socialist industrialization and even a "socialist Faust". I don't believe that Seghers ever attempted a "socialist Faust", but with Die Enstsheidung she rose to the challenge of depicting socialist industrialization and in the process wrote the first major novel about a divided Germany. 

Die Entscheidung takes place in the early days of the GDR and the BRD.  Germany is split into the American-dominated west and the socialist SBZ (Soviet Occupied Zone) and the division is much more than an arbitrary line on a map: Seghers sees it as an existential divide, much like her friend Christa Wolf did a few years  later in her classic GDR novel Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven).  But in Die Entscheidung the borders are still quite porous; characters move relentlessly between east and west and make conscious decisions whether to remain in the east and build a new socialist reality or flee to west where the Marshall Plan is beginning to provide real material wealth at the dawn of the Wirtschaftswunder.