Dialog International

The American Who Saved German Literature

As a student of German Exile Literature, I am enjoying immensely reading Michael Lentz's novel Pazifik Exil (review to follow in due course).  Lentz takes the readers into the minds of Heinrich Mann, Brecht, Feuchtwanger and - most deliciously - Alma (Mahler Gropius) Werfel as they flee Europe and find refuge in America.  In the first chapter, Lentz introduces the American Varian Fry, who arranges a difficult passage by foot over the Pyrenees for Franz & Alma Werfel, Heinrich, Nelly and Golo Mann. One of Varian Fry's volunteers, Dick Ball, actually carries Werfel part of the way on his back.

I'm happy that Michael Lentz reminds us of this remarkable man; Varian Fry displayed the best of the American can-do attitude: he recognized an emergency situation to save the lives of writers, scientists, artists, musicians who faced certain imprisonment or death as Hitler's armies spread across Europe.  Varian Fry founded the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille in 1940 and helped more than 2,000 people escape across the border into neutral Portugal, where many found passage to the United States. Fry's effectiveness was due to his understanding of the bureaucratic mentality: he obtained the necessary documents, letters, stamps, etc for his clients, and when he couldn't get them legally he simply forged them.  The list of those he saved reads like a Who's Who of European arts and letters: Hannah Arendt, Ernst-Josef Aufricht, Georg Bernhard, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Leonhard Frank, Konrad Heiden, Heinz Jolles, Wifredo Lam, Wanda Landowska, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Heinrich Mann, André Masson, Walter Mehring, Otto Meyerhof, Soma Morgenstern, Hertha Pauli, Alfred Polgar, Hans Sahl und Franz Werfel. To be sure, he was not always successful: Walter Benjamin didn't make it across the mountain passage on his first attempt, and committed suicide out of despair. 

"If I have any regret at all about the work we did, it is that it was so slight.  In all we saved some two thousand human beings.  We ought to have saved many times that number.  But we did what we could.  And when we failed, it was all too often because of the incomprehension of the government of the United States.  It was not until 1944 that the President created the War Refugee Board, to do in a big way, and with official backing, what we had tried to do in our little way, against constant official opposition.  But then it was too late" - Varian Fry (quoted from Varian Fry in Marseille). 

See also two related blog posts of mine: Dorothy Thompson: Fearless Friend of Free Germany and Salka Viertel's Kindess of Strangers.

Poetry Month: Elisabeth Langgässer

Keeping with the theme of National Poetry Month, I offer a poem by Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), a Catholic poet and novelist.  I am making my way through her masterpiece, Das unauslöschliche Siegel (The Indelible Seal) and have looked into her biography a bit. The poem Frühling 1946  (Spring 1946) was dedicated to her daughter Cordelia, who, as Langgässer learned in 1946, had miraculously survived Auschwitz. Langgässer herself had been deemed a Mischling - or half-Jew - in the Third Reich, and was therefore prohibited from publishing until after the war.  And so in 1946 Langgässer was reborn as a writer and a mother. In the poem the poet is literally brought back from the realm of death (Reich der Kröte) by the flower Anemone, who is identifed with Nausicaa, the rescuer of Ulysees.  In the final line, Nausicaa is recognized as her child.

Frühling 1946 (für Cordelia)

Holde Anemone,

bist du wieder da

und erscheinst mit heller Krone

mir Geschundenem zum Lohne

wie Nausikaa?

 

Windbewegtes Bücken,

Woge, Schaum und Licht!

Ach, welch sphärisches Entzücken

nahm dem staubgebeugten Rücken

endlich sein Gewicht?

 

Aus dem Reich der Kröte

steige ich empor,

unterm Lid noch Plutons Röte

und des Totenführers Flöte

gräßlich noch im Ohr.

 

Sah in Gorgos Auge

eisenharten Glanz,

ausgesprühte Lügenlauge

hört‘ ich flüstern, daß sie tauge

mich zu töten ganz.

 

Anemone! Küssen

laß mich dein Gesicht:

Ungespiegelt von den Flüssen

Styx und Lethe, ohne Wissen

um das Nein und Nicht.

 

Ohne zu verführen,

lebst und bist du da,

still mein Herz zu rühren,

ohne es zu schüren -

Kind Nausikaa!

The Most Beautiful German Poem

April is National Poetry Month, so, naturally, it is imperative to blog about poetry.  Last year in Slate Ron Rosenbaum made a convincing argument that Keats' Ode to Autumn is the most beautiful poem in the English language. So that got me thinking: what is the most beautiful German poem? The list of candidates is long: Mörike's Auf eine Lampe, or Denk es, O Seele!, Abendlied (Claudius), virtually any poem in Rilke's Neue Gedichte.  Quickly, though, my search focused on Goethe. But here, too, there were many possibilities: Auf den Mond, Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, Wanderers Nachtlied, and a dozen others.  Finally, I made my choice: Auf dem See (1775).  The poem achieves an exquisite harmony of rhythm, sound, and meaning that, for me, in incomparable German poetry. Here is the poem, English translation below the break:

Auf dem See

Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut
Saug ich aus freier Welt:
Wie ist Natur so hold und gut,
Die mich am Busen hält!

Die Welle wieget unsern Kahn
Im Rudertakt hinauf,
Und Berge, wolkig himmelan,
Begegnen unserm Lauf.

Aug, mein Aug, was sinkst du nieder?
Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder?
Weg, du Traum! so gold du bist:
Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.

Auf der Welle blinken
Tausend schwebende Sterne,
Weiche Nebel trinken
Rings die türmende Ferne;

Morgenwind umflügelt
Die beschattete Bucht,
Und im See bespiegelt
Sich die reifende Frucht.

The poet's exuberant response to maternal nature in the first stanza is emphasized by the upbeat "Und" in the first line, before settling into a steady iambic beat. The middle stanza changes abruptly into a more reflective trochaic rhythm, with the double stress in the last line "Hier auch" shaking the poet from his reverie. The final two stanzas maintain the trochaic rhythm, combined with the rhyme scheme of the first section, which, however, is subtly modulated - asymmetry within the symmetry - signifying the progress of the poet's development in the poem.

A boat ride across Lake Zurich becomes a journey of emotional maturation. The infantile ego of the first stanza (an earlier version began "ich saug an meiner Nabelschnur" "I suck from my umbilical cord") rocking within nature's bosom is suddenly disturbed by dreams from the past.  By the last stanza the "I" dissapears, or, rather is contained within the reflexive "sich" of the "ripening fruit".  Nature, as well, becomes diffused from the towering mountains and the sun ("Aug"), to the reflection of a "thousand stars", while the mountains become obscured in the morning mist. By the final stanza the poet has reached the safe habor of the alliterative "beschattete Bucht" putting his infantile dreams behind him. 

Bonus: Listen to Franz Schubert's rendition of Auf dem See. 

Weltliteratur Today

Jonathan Derbyshire has a nice piece in the New Statesman on the growing dominance of anglophone writers in the global literary marketplace. But part of his argument is based on a misreading of Goethe and the concept of Weltliteratur (literally "world literature").

"There is a significant wrinkle in Goethe's theory of Weltliteratur, however [...] And it is that Goethe reserves a special role for one national literature in particular: Germany's. He wrote that it was the "destiny" of the German language to become the "representative of all the citizens of the world". With the centrality of translation to German literary culture, anyone who knew the language well enough wouldn't have to go to the trouble of learning Greek or Latin or Italian; they could read Homer, Virgil or Dante in German translations that were more than a match for the originals. Germany, therefore, was the literary marketplace par excellence. And Weltliteratur, it turned out, wasn't so much a matter of dissolving national boundaries as a matter of a single national literature going global."

Goethe never systematically explained his concept of Weltliteratur, rather, his thoughts on the subject are scattered throughout letters and essays on other topics. But I don't believe he ever thought that the German language and German literature would dominate.  At most, Germany would act as an honest broker of literary influence between other national literatures. In a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée Goethe wrote:

Ich bezwecke ein Höheres, worauf ich vorläufig hindeuten will. Überall hört und liest man von dem Vorschreiten des Menschengeschlechts, von den weiteren Aussichten der Welt- und  Menschenverhältnisse. Wie es auch im Ganzen hiemitbeschaffen sein mag, welches zu untersuchen und näher zu bestimmen nicht meines Amts ist, will ich doch von meiner Seite meine Freunde aufmerksam machen, daß ich überzeugt sei, es  bilde sich eine allgemeine Weltliteratur, worin uns Deutschen eine ehrenvolle Rolle vorbehalten ist.  (I have something higher in mind, which I would like to outline provisionally. Everwhere one hears and reads about the progress of the human race, about the further prospects for the world and human relationships. However that may be on the whole, which it is not my office to investigate and more closely determine, I nevertheless would personally like to make my friends aware that I am convinced a universal world literature is in the process of being constituted in which an honorable role is reserved for us Germans.)

An "honorable role" for Germans is different from the "destiny" for global dominance that Derbyshire asserts. Goethe lamented the fact that, unlike England and France, Germany lacked a cultural center. But Germany's fragmentation contributed to its receptivity to influences from other nations (such as the Shakespeare cult of the late 18th century). So Germany's "honorable role" was to act as a mediator (Vermittler) between cultures with the goal of estabilshing a true Weltliteratur.  In a letter to Thomas Carlyle he wrote: Zu einer solchen Vermittlung und wechselseitigen Anerkennung tragen die Duetschen seit langer Zeit zu. (For a long time Germans have contributed to this mediation and mutual recognition). For Goethe, the translator plays a critical role in establishing a Weltliteratur (eines der wichtigsten und würdigsten Geschäfte in dem allgemeinen Weltverkehr).Luther represents the greatest example, since his translation of the Bible into vernacular German had a profound impact on Germany's linguistic and cultural development. And it is this absence of translation in the English-speaking cultural markets that prevents English-language writing from rising to the niveau of Weltliteratur as envisaged by Goethe. As Derbyshire points out in his article, one third of all fiction published in France is in translation, while in the US it is a mere Three Percent.

Deutsch über alles

The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Germany have finally had enough. Too many folks in Germany simply cannot speak German, and, worse, the German language is under attack from English, Turkish and other languages as German vocabulary is displaced with Fremdwörter. The solution?  Codify German as the official language of Germany in the Basic Law (Grundgesetz):

On Tuesday, delegates to the annual Christian Democrat (CDU) party congress, held this time around in Stuttgart, voted to support a constitutional amendment that would enshrine German in the so-called "Grundgesetz" -- or "Basic Law." German, says Peter Müller, who is governor of the south-western state of Saarland, should be "rightfully preserved" in the constitution.

And the conservative daily Die Welt has endorsed this proposal,  No more "Denglish":

"There's nothing to be said against enshrining such a measure in the constitution because it is a kind of commitment -- also one on the part of those whose mother tongue is German. Our language is somewhat on the defensive. You don't have to be a nationalist or an anti-American to feel that the English advancing into German officialdom is a sign of the neglect of our own language."

In the age of the Internet and globalization it is virtually impossible to legislate linguistic purity.  The French launch initiatives every five years or so to preserve la belle langue and American conservatives keep trying to have English declared the official language of the US even as Spanish takes hold in many states.  Still, there are signs that there is a conscious effort to reverse the Americanization of German, even without a constitutional amendment:

Wie die Kollegen jenseits des Atlantik zu sprechen, gilt zunehmend als out. "Es gibt bei Verantwortungsträgern einen gewissen Überdruss an der Anglisierung", bestätigt Roland Kaehlbrandt, Autor des Buchs "Deutsch für Eliten". Den Grund beschreibt der Sprachkritiker so: "Das Bedürfnis, über die Sprache krampfhaft Internationalität zu vermitteln lässt nach." (To speak like our colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic is more and more considered "out". "In the executive suite there is a certain weariness concerning the anglicizising (of German)" Roland Kaehlbrand confirms - he is the author of the book "German for Elites".  The language critic sees the following reason for this development: "There is no longer the need to frantically convey an international mindset through language.")

So among the business elite, at least, German is enjoying a comeback.

Bonus:  Test your knowledge of German.  It's harder than you think!

Late-Blossoming Genius

Malcolm Gladwell has a terrific piece in the New Yorker Magazine on the relationship between genius and precocity.  We tend to associate, Gladwell writes, creativity - especially artistic creativity with youth.

"Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

Gladwell then goes on to discuss some notable exceptions ("late bloomers") to this rule - most notably the painter Cézanne , who only reached the pinnacle of his art well into his sixties.  Gladwell then posits - unconvincingly, in my opinion - a fundamental difference between youthful artistic genius and that of old age.

For me, the most astonishing example of "late blossoming genius" is the 19th century novelist Theodor Fontane (1819-1898).  Fontane spent the early part of his life as an apothecary in the service of the Prussian army.  He later became a journalist - more of a propagandist, actually - and foreign correspondent.  There is little in his early works of writing to indicate what was to come later.

At the age of 57, Fontane began his career as a novelist, completing 16 novels before his death at the age of 78. He was 73 when he wrote his masterpiece - Effi Briest - which has often been compared to Madame Bovary. My personal favorite - Der Stechlin - about an old Prussian Junker who sees his world vanishing before his eyes  - was written the year of his death.  Fontane's creativity never abated, in fact, it only accelerated has he grew old.  He died at his writing desk.

Fontane's greatness is inextricably linked to his age.  It is impossible to image any of his novels as the works of a young writer.  Thomas Mann recognized this in his essay Der alte Fontane (1910) (The Old Fontane). He will always be remembered as "the old Fontane":

"He was born to be the "old Fontane" and he will live. The first sixty years of his life were, alomost consciously, merely a preparation for the last twenty. His life seems to teach that only being prepared for dying is truly being prepared for living."

The Great Nobel Poetry Bust

The award last week of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and comments made by a member of the Prize committee that Americans are "too ignorant" to produce great literature have only intensified the criticism here of the Nobel committee and its process for selecting winners. A chief - and not unjustified - complaint is that no American poet has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  David Orr writes in the New York Times:

Lost in the usual Nobel drama was a larger, stranger and nearly unexplainable fact: While American fiction and theater can boast of at least a few Nobel winners (nine, to be precise), no American poet has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not one, in more than 100 years.

While some point to TS Eliot as an exception, the fact is that Eliot turned his back on America at a young age and is considered a British poet.

Is it perhaps justified? After all, there are brilliant poets in many languages, and the Nobel can only be awarded to one person a year. The only problem is that the first half of the 20th century is widely considered a golden age of American poetry — a judgment supported not only by critics, but apparently by some Nobel laureates. In 1996, for example, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published a book called “Homage to Robert Frost” that consisted of an essay apiece by Brodsky (Nobel, 1982); the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel, 1995); and the West Indies poet Derek Walcott (Nobel, 1992). Frost himself, of course, never received the prize. Nor, for that matter, did Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore or William Carlos Williams, all of whom were alive when Nobels went to Ernest Hemingway (1954), William Faulkner (1949) and Pearl S. Buck (1938).

Leaving out Frost, Stevens and Pound is indeed a major embarrassment for the Nobel committee. And looking at the second half of the century, the failure to award the prize to Robert Lowell is another black eye to the prestige of the Nobel Prize. Surveying the landscape today, I cannot fault the committee for bypassing American poets.  Orr cites John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, but, as others have pointed out, Ashbery is overrated and certainly does not have the stature of Heaney, whose greatness was acknowledged by the Nobel committee.

I should say that German poetry has also never received much recognition by the Nobel committee.  While the committee has been generous in bestowing the Nobel Prize on German novelists, only one poet - Nelly Sachs - has received the prize (in 1966), and she had to share it with the Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon.  Hermann Hesse received the prize (in 1946) for his novels, rather than for his poems.

My sense is that the Golden Age for poetry in both America and Germany ended some time ago.  The long drought of Nobel Prizes is likely to continue for many years.

50 Near Perfect Books of German Poetry

As a lover of lists, I was intrigued by the list of 100 Near Perfect Books of Poetry compiled by the people at the Lilliput Review.  So I undertook a less ambitious project of listing the 50 Near Perfect Books of  German Poetry, limiting it to 1) books published since 1900, and 2) collections or poem cycles published in the poet's lifetime. The list is arranged by date of publication.

I make no claims of completeness or objectivity: the choices are mine alone. No doubt Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany's Literary Pope, would heap scorn on many of my choices. So be it.

I would like to expand my list to 100 Near Perfect Books and would welcome any comments or suggestions - especially post-1980 book titles.

The term Near Perfect is used, since artistic perfection is considered an unattainable ideal. But I would maintain that Near Perfect does would not apply in all cases, such as the titles by Rilke, Celan and Trakl: they are perfect.

Ernst Jünger and French Masochism

It is a great honor in France to have a book included in
La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.  The elegant, leather-bound books of the greatest works of literature find their way to the bookshelves of every self-respecting member of the Parisian intelligentsia:

“La Bibliothèque de la Pléiad presents reference editions of the great works of Fren and foreign literature and philosophy, printed on Bible paper and bound, with a full leather and gold cover.< Each year between 10 and 12 new titles are added to this elegant, practical and easy to read imprint. The texts are based on original manuscripts, editions and documents. The translations are new or revised."                   

New editions to this glorious library of the classics are always a cause for celebration.  So now we will get to read a Pléiade edition of Ernst Jünger along side works of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Goethe.  And not just any work by Jünger, but his wartime diaries (Tagebücher I bis III "Journaux de guerre") that deal with his experience as an officer of the Wehrmacht during the Nazi occupation of France. To be sure, this was a high-point in Jünger's military career, for the aristocratic officer could indulge in the aesthetic delights of Paris, the wonderful wines and paintings. But unfortunately the writer just did not have the time, between his bottles of Veuve Cliquot and Pommard, to describe the terror of the Nazi occupation, the execution of resistance fighters, the rounding up of Jews, etc. Why would the French celebrate this monument to aesthetic ego?  That is a question that the writer George-Arthur Goldschmidt asks in a polemic in the Frankfurter Rundschau:

Durch eine solche Publikation wird fast absichtlich die deutsche Emigration, der deutsche Widerstand gegen die Hitlerbarbarei, in den Hintergrund verschoben. Das wahre Deutschland sind daher weder Döblin noch Thomas Mann und Walter Benjamin, alles Emigranten, wenn nicht Nestbeschmutzer. So haben sie nicht die leiseste Chance, in die "Pléiade" aufgenommen zu werden, stehen sie doch auf der falschen Seite, auf der des Widerstands, auf der auch de Gaulle stand. ("A publication of this sort seems almost to intentionally push German emigre writers, the German resistance to Hitler's barbarism, into the background. The true Germany is therefore not Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann or Walter Benjamin - all emigrants, if not whistle blowers. As such they haven't the remotest chance of being received into the 'Pleiade', after all they are on the wrong side, that of the resistance, the same side as de Gaulle. Incredible but true, this is a form of justification for the collaboration and a Europe without Jews or communists.")

I've never understood the  attempts to  rehabilitate Ernst Jünger as some sort of secret anti-Nazi resistance author. Jünger's disdain for the Nazi was driven by aesthetics, not ideology.  In fact his 1932 book Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt is the most perfect expression  of the fascist worldview in German. His 1939 novella Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) was read at the time as some kind of anti-Nazi allegory (according to Heinrich Böll, whose opinion I respect greatly).  But it is hard to see it as such, reading it today. The prose of Marmorklippen, like most of Jünger, seems bombastic and overrated - of historical interest, perhaps, but certainly not literary.

In Praise of Bad Translations

The New York Times reviews Adam Thirlwells' book The Delighted States and has this interesting observation concerning translations:

As he swirls together his international troupe of writers, along with a fine prodigality of portraits, anecdotes and quotations, Mr. Thirlwell argues and sometimes goads at a universal mutual connection and influence.

That leads to the question of translation. Though he gives many examples of what is lost, he insists that even a mediocre translation will convey a writer’s essence; his style, in other words. Style, he writes, citing Proust, is a matter of vision, not language.

Is this true? Can a bad or mediocre translation convey a writer's essence? This made me think about the case of H.T. Lowe-Porter (1877-1963), who, under the Knopf contract,  had a monopoly on the English translations for the entire works of Thomas Mann until 1980.  It is now generally acknowledged that Lowe-Porter's Mann translations leave much to be desired; they are mediocre, at best.  And yet, it is her translations that brought Thomas Mann to generations of Brits and Americans, propelling his fame to Nobel Prize stratosphere.  And Lowe-Porter was pretty open about her disdain for precision in translation.  In her notes in the preface to the English version of Buddenbrooks she wrote that her commitment as translator was to "the spirit first and the letter so far as might be".  She found Mann's style to be a bit ponderous for English readers, so she "livened it up" a bit, shortened the sentences - and the readers enthusiastically ate it up.  But in the process she also sanitized Mann's prose, eliminating or changing the sexual allusions (Lowe-Porter found Mann's homosexuality distasteful). Lowe-Porter's "renditions" of Mann, then, fit the puritanical orientation of America, making Thomas Mann perhaps more acceptable to American readers than a precise translation may have done. 

After Lowe-Porter's copyright expired in the 1980s, a flurry of new - more precise - translations emerged. But was something lost here as well?  Mann's influence, in America, at least, has ebbed. Or is it Lowe-Porter that we miss?