After reading Der Gott jenes Sommers (2018) by Ralf Rothmann I was somewhat perplexed by the title (in English: "The God of that Summer"). For God is nowhere to be found in the novel, unless it is a vengeful God who revels in the carnage His creation inflicts on the world. The novel covers the last few months of the Third Reich in the countryside outside the northern German city of Kiel. Der Gott jenes Sommers is something of a sequel to Rothmann's bestselling 2015 novel Im Frühling sterben(English edition: To Die in Spring). In fact, the protagonist of that earlier novel - the apprentice dairy farm laborer seventeen year-old Walter Urban - makes an appearance here in Der Gott jenes Sommers. Im Frühling sterben dealt with the last spasms of combat on the Eastern Front while this most recent novel is about the Home Front.
The action in Der Gott jenes Sommers is seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Luisa Norff, a bookish, precocious girl who, up to this point has mostly been spared the horrors of war. Luisa and her family have been been evacuated from Kiel to a dairy farm controlled by her much older brother-in-law - a high-ranking SS officer. Life is good on the farm - plenty of fresh milk and butter - and the fleets of British bombers just pass overhead en route to better targets. Luisa is joined by her older sister Billie - a sexually adventurous teenager - and her older half-sister Gudrun, the wife of the SS officer. As the story progresses, the war begins to close in on the family. From a distance, Luisa can see the flames at night from the firebombing of Kiel. Refugees from the city and rural eastern Germany are given sanctuary at the farm, while POWs and detainees perform slave labor nearby. Unfortunately, the novel sometimes devolves into familiar clichés: innocence - the young Luisa ("unser Schutzengel, wenn auch ohne Heiligenschein") confronts the evil SS man. In the time span of just three months Luisa experiences the whole range of human fate: kindness and cruelty, new life and suicide, love and rape, life-threatening illness (typhus) and loss of family. All before her thirteenth birthday.
In the novel, Rothmann intersperses chapters with a fictional chronicle - written in baroque German - from the Thirty Years War. These include terrible scenes of rape and pillage along side the story of the writer Bredelin von Merxheim and his companion Bubenleb who attempt to build and float a chapel across a lake in an effort to bring hope to the survivors. The chapel sinks to the bottom of the lake before reaching shore. It is from this story that we have the novel's title: "...und mag der Gott dieses Sommers unsere Nähe auch verschmähen - kann er sich denn weiter entfernen, als der Gedanke, der ihm gilt? What is Rothmann's purpose for including this Binnenerzählung from the Thirty Years War? That war is a permanent state? That God abandons man in his time of anguish? The novel ends at a chapel. Luisa enters the cloister of the Camelite nuns through a door inscribed with the words of Horace: Non omnis moriar (I shall not wholly die) and tells the mother superior she wants to become a nun, for "Ich hab alles erlebt."(I have experienced everything). This brings us back to the opening of the novel; Rothmann quotes some verse from the the Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius (2 October 1616 – 16 July 1664). The lines are from Gryphius' poem Grabschrift Marianae Gryphiae ("Epithaph of Marianna Gryphius"). If nothing else, I am grateful to Ralf Rothmann for reminding us of this incredibly moving poem - a eulogy for Gryphius' niece, who died one day after her birth while her parents were fleeing a besieged town in the Thirty Years War. The poem is worth quoting in full:
Grabschrift Marianae Gryphiae
Geboren in der Flucht, umringt mit Schwert und Brand,
Schier in dem Rauch erstickt, der Mutter herbes Pfand,
Des Vatern höchste Furcht, die an das Licht gedrungen,
Als die ergrimmte Glut mein Vaterland verschlungen:
Ich habe diese Welt beschaut und bald gesegnet,
Weil mir auf Einen Tag all' Angst der Welt begegnet;
Wo ihr die Tage zählt, so bin ich jung verschwunden,
Sehr alt, wofern ihr schätzt, was ich für Angst empfunden.(Born in flight, ringed with sword and fire,
smothered in smoke, my mother’s bitter hostage,
my father’s greatest fear, pulled into the light
as the angry flames swallowed my native land:
I looked at this world and left it quickly,
for in one day all the world’s anguish met me;
if you count the days, I vanished young--
very old, if you count what I knew of anguish.)
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