Dialog International

(Inter)National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month - the one time of year when Americans are encouraged to read poetry. So the blogs are filled with poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, and many other favorites.  The celebration is not just limited to American poets, but so far German poets have been left out of the festivities.

So my contribution to National Poetry Month is a poem by Gertrud Kolmar.  Gertrud Kolmar is practically unknown in America. In fact, there is no English Wikipedia entry for her (yet -  it is on my to-do list). She led a rather solitary life in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and avoided the tumultuous Weimar literary scene.  But even so she found some grateful readers for her poetry - including her cousin, Walter Benjamin.  Gertrud Kolmar was Jewish, but, for some reason she and her father did not flee Germany in 1938 with the rest of her family. Instead, they were moved into a Judenhaus in Berlin, and then Gertrud was forced into slave labor in a munitions plant.  She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.  She left behind about 100 poems of striking beauty and intensity.  Her poems about animals display the precision of a Marianne Moore, but also have the visionary power of Emily Dickinson (with whom she shares a birthday - December 10).  In the postwar epoch, Kolmar has been narrowly categorized as a Jewish poet, or worse - a Jewish poetess.  In fact, she is one of the greatest lyric poets and deserves the widest exposure.

I made an attempt to translate one of Gertrud Kolmar's poems - Die Dichterin - but could not match the  translation by  Henry A. Smith.  So the translation is Smith's:

Die Dichterin

Du hältst mich in den Händen ganz und gar.
Mein Herz wie eines kleinen Vogels schlägt
In deiner Faust. Der du dies liest, gib acht;
Denn sieh, du blätterst einen Menschen um.
Doch ist es dir aus Pappe nur gemacht,

Aus Druckpapier und Leim, so bleibt es stumm
Und trifft dich nicht mit seinem großen Blick,
Der aus den schwarzen Zeichen suchend schaut,
Und ist ein Ding und hat sein Dinggeschick.

Und ward verschleiert doch gleich einer Braut,
Und ward geschmückt, daß du es lieben magst,
Und bittet schüchtern, daß du deinen Sinn
Aus Gleichmut und Gewöhnung einmal jagst,

Und bebt und weiß und flüstert vor sich hin:
"Dies wird nicht sein." Und nickt dir lächelnd zu.
Wer sollte hoffen, wenn nicht eine Frau?
Ihr ganzes Treiben ist ein einzig: "Du..."

Mit schwarzen Blumen, mit gemalter Brau,
Mit Silberketten, Seiden, blaubesternt.
Sie wußte manches Schönere als Kind
Und hat das schöne andre Wort verlernt. -

Der Mann ist soviel klüger, als wir sind.
In seinen Reden unterhält er sich
Mit Tod und Frühling, Eisenwerk und Zeit;
Ich sage:"Du..." und immer:"Du und ich."

Und dieses Buch ist eines Mädchens Kleid,
Das reich und rot sein mag und ärmlich fahl,
Und immer unter liebem Finger nur
Zerknittern dulden will, Befleckung, Mal.

So steh ich, weisend, was mir widerfuhr;
Denn harte Lauge hat es wohl gebleicht,
Doch keine hat es gänzlich ausgespült.
So ruf ich dich. Mein Ruf ist dünn und leicht.
Du hörst, was spricht.

Vernimmst du auch, was fühlt?

 

The Woman Poet

You hold me now completely in your hands.

My heart beats like a frightened little bird's
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink,

Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb,
And cannot touch you (though the gaze be great
That seeks you from the printed marks inside),
And is an object with an object's fate.

And yet it has been veiled like a bride,
Adorned with gems, made ready to be loved,
Who asks you bashfully to change your mind,
To wake yourself, and feel, and to be moved.

But still she trembles, whispering to the wind:
"This shall not be." And smiles as if she knew.
Yet she must hope. A woman always tries,
Her very life is but a single "You . . ."

With her black flowers and her painted eyes,
With silver chains and silks of spangled blue.
She knew more beauty when a child and free,
But now forgets the better words she knew.

A man is so much cleverer than we,
Conversing with himself of truth and lie,
Of death and spring and iron-work and time.
But I say "you" and always "you and I."

This book is but a girl's dress in rhyme,
Which can be rich and red, or poor and pale,
Which may be wrinkled, but with gentle hands,
And only may be torn by loving nails.

So then, to tell my story, here I stand.
The dress's tint, though bleached in bitter lye,
Has not all washed away. It still is real.
I call then with a thin, ethereal cry.

You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?

- Gertrud Kolmar (translated by Henry A. Smith)

German Fiction Should Get Real

Richard Kämmerlings in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung looks at the scandal at the French Bank Societe Generale involving a rogue trader and complains that contemporary German fiction doesn't depict the realities of modern life: it is too focused on the private sphere:

"As a reader, you start to starve, after eating from only one food group. What's missing is the stuff that forms our lives beyond the private sphere: the economy, technology, medicine, the military, even media. It’s easy to explain why this is happening. But it’s harder to explain why no one reacts. These days, a writer generally has absolutely no idea about these highly sophisticated systems, with their inherent logic and terminology."

Kämmerlings points to the American writer Tom Wolfe and his book of social satire The Bonfires of the Vanities which captured the essence of the Wall Street trading floor as an example for German writers. But maybe German writers should look to revive the Zeitroman, which flourished in the Weimar Republic.  Back then writers such as Herman Kesten and Erich Kästner wrote novels about book publishers, newsrooms, and advertising agencies. Martin Kessel captured the human comedy of big city office politics in Herrn Brechers Fiasco , a novel which could have served as a model for today's popular TV show The Office. Writers such as Ernst von Salomon wrote about life in the military, while Arbeiterlitatur  - fiction about the factory floor written by echt proletarians such as Willi Bredel and Kurt Held - was very popular. 

Of course, in the 1920s and 1930s there were no "writing programs" for fledgling novelists at German universities.  Writers were forced to make a living in the workplace to subsidize their writing, and literature profited from this closeness to and knowledge of everyday experience.

German Literature Quiz

Dispatches from Zembla asks if you can identify 10 passages from great works of German literature in English translation (actually Germanic literature, since it includes Austrian authors and one Czech).  It is, of course more challenging to recognize the excerpts in translation, but I am pleased to announce that I was able to get 5 out of 10 right off the bat: two from Thomas Mann, one from Goethe (Die Leiden des jungen Werther), the anti-Märchen from Büchner's Woyzeck, and - most proud of this one - the opening paragraph of Rilke's exquisite but obscure novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.  I'm pretty certain I would have recognized the Kafka passage if had been in the original German, since Kafka's style is unmistakeable.  How did you do on the quiz?

I was linked to the quiz from the blog Three Percent at the University of Rochester, a blog devoted to international literature in translation.  Why Three Percent?  The blog editors explain:

Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. That is why we have chosen the name Three Percent for this site. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%. While that figure obviously represents more books than any one person could read in a year, it’s hardly an impressive number.

An even greater shame is that only a fraction of the titles that do make their way into English are covered by the mainstream media. So despite the quality of these books, most translations go virtually unnoticed and never find their audience.

We have been blessed with some wonderful translators and translations of German literature: Michael Hamburger's translations of Paul Celan, John Wood's extraordinary translations of Thomas Mann, Michael Hoffmann's brilliant work on Wolfgang Koeppen - rescuing the the great novelist from obscurity in America, and Eric Bentley's groundbreaking introduction of Bertolt Brecht to American audiences.  And so many of out greatest poets - Robert Lowell, Robert Haas, Galway Kinnell - just to name a few - have provided rich translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. But the editors of Three Percent are correct: how much contemporary German writing gets translated, and of that, how much is ever reviewed?  One gratifying exception was the New York Times Book Review Section, which last week reviewed two German novels in translation: Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier (who is Swiss).

I myself am reading a novel in translation currently: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. You can read an interview with Bolaño's translator - Natasha Wimmer - here.

A Reappraisal of Heinrich Böll

  Heinrich Böll died in 1985 at the age of 67, and his literary reputation quickly began to fade. Throughout the 1970's Böll was the "Good German" - the moral mouthpiece of post-war Germany, a mantle now assumed by Guenter Grass. But already in the 1970's Böll began to irritate the political and cultural establishment by speaking out against the "anti-terror hysteria" that swept West Germany in the wake of the German Autumn. By the time of his death, he was seen by many as a kind-hearted, but hopelessly naive, Gutmensch (closest English equivalent is do-gooder) whose novels and stories reflected their time and had more historical, rather than literary, value.

Checking on Amazon I was saddened to find that only a collection of his stories and the novel The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns -1963) are still in print in English translation. You can't find Group Portrait with Lady (Gruppenbild mit Dame -1971) , the novel which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Now there is a chance that Böll's reputation will be restored with a new 25 volume collected works ( Kölner Ausgabe). Literary historians, critics and the reading public will have the opportunity to reevaluate Heinrich Böll, and, with luck, some of his works may be retranslated and reissued in the US. Already the new collection has sparked renewed interest in Böll's last novel, completed only weeks before his death, which was dismissed by the critics at the time: Frauen vor Flußlandschaft (Women in a River Landscape), which I don't believe was ever translated into English. The critic Walter van Rossum, writing in Freitag, sees a forgotten masterpiece:

In jedem Kapitel präsentiert Böll ein neues Tableau mit Bonner Herrschaften: Ministrable und Minister gar, Veranstalter des Wirtschaftswunders, Täter und Opfer in wechselnder Konstellation - sämtlich vereint in einem Geschäftsgang, den man Politik nennen könnte, genauso gut könnte man von einer Dauerintrige mit mobilen Seilschaften sprechen. Man wird übrigens bis zum Ende nicht genau erfahren, worum sich die Intrigen spinnen. Man hat sogar den Eindruck, die Spinner selbst hätten den Überblick verloren. Und es ist großartig, wie Heinrich Böll es schafft, niemals zum Kern von irgendetwas vorzustoßen. Aus dem einfachen Grund: Es gibt keinen. Böll erzählt nicht die Geschichte einer Verschwörung, um sie am Ende aufzudecken. Er erzählt von der Verschwörung als Lebensform der Macht.

Böll was not writing a roman à clef about political corruption in Bonn. The Catholic Böll rather saw a perversion of the moral universe in the abuse of power by politicians. In his words he wanted to portray
Bonn als Ort der Zerstörung des Christlichen (Bonn as the place where Christian beliefs are destroyed). In this case Frauen vor Flußlandschaft sounds like a worthy successor to Wolfgang Koeppen's postwar masterpiece about Bonn Das Treibhaus (The Hothouse). Van Rossum suspects that Böll's final novel was dismissed by the literary establishment because it exposed some very uncomfortable truths about German society, which the establishment critics (especially the "Pope" of German literary criticism, Marcel Reich-Ranicki) were unable - or unwilling - to face.

Sie (die Literaturkritik) hat einem literarischen Meisterwerk die Kunstleistung abgesprochen, um die Wahrheiten dieses Buches nicht ertragen, nicht tragen zu müssen.

Marsden Hartley and the Volk

Maine has been the home of some of America's greatest painters such as Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and - my personal favorite - John Marin. But these artists were not from Maine; as we say here: they were from away. In his watercolors Marin captured the beauty and violence of Maine's rocky seacost, but he was a New Yorker, dividing his time between Manhattan and Maine. Marsden Hartley is the one great American modernist we in Maine can call our own. Hartley (1877-1943) was born in the central Maine city of Lewiston, and he died in Ellsworth, Maine.  He aspired to become known as "the painter from Maine" and sought to capitalize on the Maine brand as a popular tourist destination. His work is today seen in the context of the American Regionalist movement in painting, which celebrated the diverse landscapes and people across the country.  Hartley desired to see his name attached to Maine just as Georgia O'Keefe's name is connected to New Mexico, Thomas Hart Benton's with Indiana and Missouri and Grant Wood's with Iowa. But Hartley was much more complex than the folksy, backwoods persona he sought to cultivate.  And, in fact, the greatest influences on his art came not from his fellow American regionalist painters but from Germany.  This is what the art historian Donna Cassidy explores in her very interesting book: Marsden Hartley: Race, Region and Nation.

 

The Last Gasp of Günter Grass

Here is a sad coda for a brilliant literary career in decline: the Associated Press reports:

Nobel laureate Guenter Grass has filed a lawsuit against the publisher of his biography for claiming that he voluntarily joined the Nazis' murderous Waffen-SS unit during World War II, his lawyer said Friday.

Attorney Paul Hertin said he filed a request for an injunction against Random House — which owns the biography's publisher Goldmann Verlag — earlier this week at a regional court in Berlin. It contained an affidavit by the 80-year-old writer in which he contends he was drafted to the SS and did not join the service voluntarily, Hertin said.

The unfortunate lawsuit calls attention once again to writer's decades-long unconscionable silence concerning his role in the SS as he was serving as the self-proclaimed moral scold of postwar Germany. Grass' literary legacy is now undergoing a critical reassessment, and the results are not positive for the 80-year old writer.

When I first read Die Blechtrommel as a college student it was an exhilerating experience.  Grass' Danzig was an epic creation that could stand along side Joyce's Dublin and García Márquez's Macondo as a masterpiece of literary imagination.  The imaginative power was sustained through Hundejahre and Katz und Maus. But then Grass appears to have read too many of the critical reviews of his work, and he began to see himself as the mouthpiece for social justice, which could only be achieved through the programs of the SPD.  His work became tendentious, self-righteous - a platform for making a political statement.

I met Günter Grass once - at a Goethe Institue event in Boston where he read excerpts from his novel Der Butt. In his comments after the reading, Grass made condescending comments about America (he obviously made the US book tour only at the insistance of his publisher) and mocked the earnest questions from some of the students in the audience.  It was then that I began a serious reappraisal, and I was not shocked when I learned last year about his SS secret.

I now feel that Wolfgang Koeppen's postwar trilogy is a greater literary achievement than Grass' entire oeuvre. And the reputation of Walter Kempowski - a writer Grass dismissed while he was alive - will only grow over time.  Kempowski made it his life's work to uncover the truth in history - to make the past vivid and chronicle the present- while Grass' primary objective - we now know - is concealment.

Peter Viertel is Dead

The New York Times reports the death of the German-American memoirist Peter Viertel at the age of 86. On this occasion it is worth remembering his mother - Salka Viertel - whose contribution to German literature, film and music has never been acknowledged.  Through her generosity and courage, Salka helped so many writers, composers, and film directors survive a difficult exile in America. The list of those she personally helped include the greatest names of the 20th century German and Austrian culture: Brecht, Mann (Heinrich and Thomas), Eisler, Alfred Döblin, Schoenberg and so many more.  Peter grew up in Santa Monica with these luminaries at the dinner table.  And that is what launched his later career.

Read my review of Salka Viertel's autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers.

Walter Kempowski is Dead

f The premier chronicler of postwar German identity - Walter Kempowski - died of cancer today at the age of 78.  The tributes are pouring in, but for most of his amazingly productive career Kempowski was ignored or scorned by the German media and the literary establishment: Kempowski was considered too reactionary, ignorant of modern literary techniques. But it turned out that Kempowski was most innovative of postwar German writers. His monumental Echolat is a collage of documents and thousands of actual first-hand accounts of World War II - the war from the bottom up - a much greater achievement even than Ken Burns' documentary series The War, currently running on public television in the US. Kempowski is unknown in the US.

The Bremen writer Hella Streicher recalls attending a reading by Kempowski that was attended almost exclusively by elderly people. For his work spoke to them about their lives - they recognized themselves in his words, and they knew he valued and honored their life experiences.

"Zur Heiterkeit findet ein Mensch zurück, wenn man sich mit ihm beschäftigt. So muss es auch mit den Deutschen gehen: ihnen zuhören und ausreden lassen. Dafür bin ich da." (A person can recover his joy when someone cares about him. That's also the way it is with the Germans: listen to them and let them say their piece. That's why I'm here.")

Hella's essay - Kempowski's Power(pdf)- is worth reading. Also worth reading is the last extensive interview with Walter Kempowski available in English. Then there is this bit at the end of the interview, when Kempowski is asked about his own impending death:

How do you want to die?

"Like Fontane. He said to his daughter over dinner: "I'll just be in the next room." When she looked in a quarter of an hour later, he lay there dead on the bed. But I doubt I'll be let off that easily."

His reference to Theodor Fontane is actually quite useful.  Kempowski - like Fontane - was a melancholy chronicler of a vanished era.  His work ensures that we will never forget.

Art and "entartete Kultur"

Gerhard Richter recently unveiled his new spectacular abstract stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral. Richter explained the concept behind his creation:

72 shades of color, each appearing 72 time per level, “out of which the computer uses a random number generator to determine the color arrangement for one half of the cathedral window; the other half is a reflection of the first."

A complete view of the windows can be found here. The windows have been described as a "Symphony of Light" and have been praised lavishly by critics around the world.

The only dissonant note came from Cologne's Cardinal Meisner, who was so angered by the windows that he said "they belonged in a mosque".  Evidently consigning something to a mosque is a terrible insult.  But the good cardinal was just getting started. A couple of days later Meisner gave a sermon at the opening of a museum where he uttered these words - perhaps with Richter and his windows in mind:

Vergessen wir nicht, dass es einen unaufgebbaren Zusammenhang zwischen Kultur und Kult gibt. Dort, wo die Kultur vom Kultus, von der Gottesverehrung abgekoppelt wird, erstarrt der Kult im Ritualismus und die Kultur entartet. Sie verliert ihre Mitte.  ("When culture becomes disconnected from religion, from the worship of God, religion becomes ritualism and the culture becomes degenerate." )

The word "entartet" (degenerate) carries a specific historical meaning in German, for that is how the Nazi's described modern art - especially German expressionism. The 1937 Nazi art exhibit - Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) was a sensation, and meant that most of the great German painters could no longer work in Germany (This was a great bonanza for America, for we ended up with many of the paintings and artists ). Meisner may not have been intentionally referring to  Nazi art-appreciation, but he is prone to using inflammatory language, and this comes just a week after Eva Herman's disgraceful performance. Also, one has to question Meisner's appreciation for any art since at least 1800, when artists no longer saw their primary role as "worshipping God". It is perhaps not a coincidence that 1800 is also approximately the point in history when official Roman Catholic theology stopped developing. I like what one of Meisner's strongest critics - theologian Hans Küng had to say about the affair:

"All true art is about the meaning of life, but you can't ban artists from portraying chaos, ugliness and evil," said Kueng, who lives in Tuebingen, Germany.

Bamboozled?

Philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on the success of German academicians at American universities:

Here there's a lot of mudslinging in universities. In England and the USA, people have a different way of approaching questions, particularly with me, because my style of thinking is rather Anglo-Saxon. Many German colleagues have it easier in America because there people think, oh, that's some German profundity that's so profound that it can't be understood anyway.

Could that explain the phenomenal career of Henry Kissinger?

By the way, these are dark days for the German University system. In the recent Shanghai ranking of the top 500 universities in the world, the top Germany univesity - LMU Muenchen - placed only at number 53. The nuber one university in the world?  Harvard, which just announced its endowment increased to $33 billion.  The rich get richer....