Dialog International

Erich Kästner in the Third Reich

As a follow-up to my previous post about writers who remained in Germany during the NS-period where I mentioned Erich Kästner in passing, Der Spiegel published a short piece that puts Kästner's particular situation in more complete context.   Erich Kästner despised the Nazis, and, for the the most part, the animosity was mutual. Kästner was perhaps the only author of note who was brave enough to attend the Nazi book-burning orgy in Berlin on May 10, 1933. He watched as the fanatical students consigned his own books to the bonfire, shouting "»Gegen Dekadenz und moralischen Verfall« ("Down with decadence and moral decay!")  A woman spotted him in the crowd and shouted "»Dort steht ja der Kästner!« ("Kästner is standing right over there!«)  so he was lucky to make it out from the horrible event unharmed.  What followed were twelve miserable years: his books were banned - except for the beloved children's book Emil und die Detektive. He was arrested several times and interrogated by the Gestapo.  Yet he stayed in Germany - unlike so many other talented writers.  He was the first to admit that he wasn't a hero - he never participated in any underground resistance activity: 

»Ich bin ein Deutscher aus Dresden in Sachsen.
Mich läßt die Heimat nicht fort.
Ich bin wie ein Baum, der, in Deutschland gewachsen,
wenn's sein muß, in Deutschland verdorrt.«

("I am a German from Dresden in Saxony.  My homeland will not let me go. I'm like a tree that grew in Germany - and, if it comes to that, will wither away in Germany.")

Erich Kästner somehow survived through the Nazi dictatorship.  After the war, his career once again took off.  Looking back on the dreadful period he wrote:

»Die Ereignisse von 1933 bis 1945 hätten spätestens 1928 bekämpft werden müssen. Später war es zu spät. Man darf nicht warten, bis der Freiheitskampf Landesverrat genannt wird. Man muß den rollenden Schneeball zertreten. Die Lawine hält keiner mehr auf. Sie ruht erst, wenn sie alles unter sich begraben hat … Drohende Diktaturen lassen sich nur bekämpfen, ehe sie die Macht übernommen haben"

("The events from 1933 to 1945 should have been stopped in 1928 at the latest. After that it was too late.  You can't wait until the struggle for freedom is labeled as treason. You need to squash the rolling snowball. No one can stop the ensuing avalanche after that.  It ends only after everything is ruined. ... Threatening dictatorships can only be stopped before they have taken power.")

In 1930, Thomas Mann gave his famous speech in Berlin - "Appell an die Venunft" ("Appeal to Reason") before a large audience that included Nazi thugs and the writer Ernst Jünger.  No doubt Jünger was amused.  He knew the Republic - which he hated- was finished.

That same year Erich Kästner published my favorite novel of the Weimar Republic - Fabian: Geschichte eines Moralisten.  Towards the end of the novel the protagonist Fabian thinks:

"Vernunft kann man nur einer beschränkten Zahl von Menschen beibringen, und die sind schon vernünftig."

(You can only bring a limited number of people to Reason, and they are already reasonable.)

Salka Viertel and Greta Garbo: A Love Story

165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica is a modest, unassuming bungalow with a view of the Pacific Ocean, far from the mansions of Beverly Hills and the glamour of Hollywood.  But in the 1930s this house became a sanctuary for artists, writers, composers, film makers - the cultural elite of Europe who managed to escape the horrors of Hitler's Germany. The house was owned by Salka Viertel, a Polish-born Jewish actress and screenwriter who with little fanfare managed to create a European-style salon on the California coast.  The Catalan writer Núra Añó was kind enough to send me her book El Salon de los artistas exiliados en California (also in English: The Salon of Exiled Artists in California), based on years of research on Salka Viertel, her family and friends, and the emigré community in Pacific Palisades.  This community has always fascinated me ever since I discovered a copy of Salka Viertel's memoir The Kindness of Strangers (1969) in a Maine library.  I also discovered Salka Viertel again in Christopher Isherwood's Diaries: he was a close friend of Salka and her husband, the Austrian writer and director Bertold Viertel.  Even though Salka Viertel was such a pivotal figure in the exile community very little has been written about her, so Núra Añó's book is a corrective, and she fills in many of the gaps of The Kindness of Strangers. 

The names of Weimar luminaries who frequented Salka Viertel's salon are far too many to list here.  She had a talent for making visitors feel at ease, they could speak German and enjoy German meals and Apfelstrudel, all prepared by Salka herself.  Writers who couldn't stand one another back in Berlin - such as Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann - would often encounter each other at 165 Mabery Road.  And it wasn't only German speakers who would meet there:  Hollywood royalty - both actors and directors  - were frequent guests.  Charlie Chaplin could often be found there and became a close friend with the hostess.  It is amazing that Salka was able to put on these lavish parties while earning very little as a screenwriter and all the while raising three sons on her own - her husband was rarely around. 

The heart of Núra Añó's book her research into the relationship between Salka Viertel and Greta Garbo.  By the time the two of them met at one of Salka's parties in 1930 Greta Garbo was already an international film sensation - adored by millions of fans for her great beauty and acting talent.  Something immediately clicked between the two of them.  Garbo was an intensely private - even introverted  - woman, but she could let her guard down with Salka.  During Hollywood's glory years in the 1930s and 40s sexuality was quite fluid - even though this was kept from the tabloids and gossip columns.  Many of the great stars were lesbian or bi-sexual: besides Garbo there was her erstwhile rival Marlene Dietrich as well as Tallulah Bankhead, Louise Brooks and many others.  Salka Viertel herself had affairs with both men and women.  But her relationship with "G.G." was more than just a fling - they remained close and, to a large extent, dependent on each other for the rest of their lives.  For Salka Viertel's career as a screenwriter her devotion to Garbo was both a blessing and a curse. Núra Añó lists the numerous treatments and screenplays she wrote for Garbo, but most of them were rejected or never made it into production.  Garbo herself was quite fickle when it came to screen roles, and her studio and agents were very protective of her persona as a sex goddess.

As an American, it is infuriating to read how Salka Viertel's story ends.  After the war, Salka was accused of having communist sympathies since she had helped so many European exiles, regardless of their political views. But inevitably there were some people deemed "undesirable"  - such as Hanns Eisler - by the House of Un-American Activities.  Salka was blacklisted and unable to get screenwriting work in Hollywood.  Of course, she was not alone:  America had provided sanctuary to so many Europeans of great talent, and now was turning against them.  Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin and many, many others realized that America had changed and it was time to return to Europe.  Salka was extremely proud that she had become an American citizen, but now she was nearly destitute - unable to earn a living.  She left 165 Mabery Road behind and fled to Switzerland, where she could be closer to her sons and grandchildren.  In Kloster she was able to find a measure of peace and could write her memoir.  And occasionally her great love - G.G. - would come to visit. 

See also some related posts:

Review: Salka Viertel's "Kindness of Strangers"

Christopher Isherwood on Thomas Mann

Review: Pazifik Exil by Michael Lentz

Review: Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud

 

Thomas Mann's American Democracy Lecture Tour

I've been reading Thomas Mann's War by Tobias Boes, most of which deals with Mann's 16 years in America.  Mann was an instant celebrity when he arrived in New York on the Queen Mary in February 1938, thanks in part to the brilliant marketing of his American publisher Alfred Knopf.  But there was also tremendous curiosity in America about the developments in Hitler's Germany and Mann presented himself to Americans as Hitler's nemesis. He quickly was able to capitalize on his celebrity by engaging in a cross-country lecture tour of more than 30 cities, including Lewiston, Maine.  At each stop he delivered his lecture "The Coming Victory of Democracy" (originally  his 1937 essay "Vom kommenden Sieg der Demokratie" most likely translated for American audiences by his daughter  Erika). Thousands of Americans flocked to these lectures, and Mann received an honorarium of $1,000 per speech ( a considerable sum in 1938, surpassed on by speeches of H.G.Wells).  As Tobias Boes points out, Americans attended the events not so much to be lectured on the virtues of Democracy, but "by the promise of celebrity and by Mann's biography as an antifascist émigré, which lent his pronouncements a kind of authenticity that was clearly an attraction in its own right."

It is impossible to overestimate the popularity of Thomas Mann in America in the years leading up to America's entry into the war.  Thirteen year-old Susan Sontag decided she would devote her life to literature and intellectual pursuits after becoming enthralled with The Magic Mountain - an unlikely bestselling novel in the US that would be found on many "middlebrow" bookshelves.  Sontag wrote:

"Of course, Mann, unlike the other exiles, was also a public presence. To have been as officially honored in America as Thomas Mann was in the late nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties was probably more improbable than to have been the most famous writer in the world. A guest at the White House, introduced by the Vice-President when he gave a speech at the Library of Congress, for years indefatigable on the lecture circuit, Mann had the stature of an oracle in Roosevelt’s bien-pensant America, proclaiming the absolute evil of Hitler’s Germany and the coming victory of the democracies. Emigration had not dampened his taste, or his talent, for being a representative figure. If there was such a thing as a good Germany, it was now to be found in this country (proof of America’s goodness), embodied in his person; if there was a Great Writer, not at all an American notion of what a writer is, it was he."

`I downloaded the text of The Coming Victory of Democracy to get a sense for what Americans were experiencing and also to compare it to Mann's last gasp attempt to preserve democracy in Germany - his 1930 Appell an die Vernuft speech which was disrupted by Hitler's goon squad. Appeal to Reason could have been subtitled:  "The Coming Victory of Fascism in Germany."

What I admire about The Coming Victory of Democracy is that Mann doesn't presume to lecture to Americans about the virtues of democracy; after all, America is one of the oldest and most successful democracies.  Rather, speaking from experience, Mann emphasizes the fragility of democracy, that it must continually be nourished not only intellectually -with Vernunft - but with passion.

"America needs no instruction in the things that concern democracy. But instruction is one thing — and another is memory, reflection, re-examination, the recall to consciousness of a spiritual and moral possession of which it would be dangerous to feel too secure and too confident. No worth-while possession can be neglected. Even physical things die off, disappear, are lost, if they are not cared for, if they do not feel the eye and hand of the owner and are lost to sight because their possession is taken for granted. Throughout the world it has become precarious to take democracy for granted — even in America… Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem. America is aware that the time has come for democracy to take stock of itself, for recollection and restatement and conscious consideration, in a word, for its renewal in thought and feeling."

It is a lesson we are in dire need of today as we watch democracy slip away in Trump's America.  We need another Democracy lecture tour, but who would deliver the lecture?  Who  today has the stature of a Thomas Mann?  And would any Americans bother to attend?

Richard Wagner's Das Judenthum in der Musik.

I am a great admirer of the late Amos Elon's history of German anti-Semitism The Pity of it All (2002). One of the most important documents prior to 1933 is Richard Wagner's 1850 essay The Jews in Music, in which he trashes the music of Felix Mendelssohn and the poetry of Heinrich Heine.  I've found Das Judenthm in der Musik virtually unreadable, but I returned to it after reading an excerpt of Norman Lebrecht's new book Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947.  Lebrecht points out that at his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn had rock star status in Germany:

"His death, at thirty-eight years old, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. Thousands escort his coffin to the railway station and more follow the procession through the streets of Berlin, singing hymns that Mendelssohn composed. Crowned heads send condolences. Queen Victoria is “horrified, astounded and distressed.” Musicians are dumbstruck. To Joachim, “it seemed as if the world had ceased.” Robert Schumann regards him as “the highest authority” in German music. His death briefly halts Germany’s ascent as a musical power. It is a fermata in the history of Western music, an end point."

Shortly after this, Richard Wagner felt compelled (out of jealousy?) to purge German music (and indeed, all German arts) from Jewish influence:

"In exile, [Wagner] writes an article for a small magazine, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, under the pseudonym “K. Freigedank” (the freethinker). Titled “Jewishness in Music,” it attacks Felix Mendelssohn as a “foreign element” that must be expunged from German music. There is, writes Wagner, “an unconscious feeling which proclaims itself among the people as a rooted dislike of the Jewish nature . . . We always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them . . . involuntary repellence.”

The Jew, says Wagner, “speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation but he speaks it always as an alien.” Mendelssohn “showed us that a Jew can possess a wealth of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture, the most exalted and gentle sense of honour, without ever being able to arouse in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect that we expect from music.” If Mendelssohn, the most gifted of Jews, was no more than a pale imitator, it stands to reason—to Wagner’s reason—that no Jew can ever create an original work."

As Amos Elon points out, Wagner's loathing of Jews didn't stop Jews from flocking to Wagner's operas.  Nor did it prevent the composer from accepting funding for his concert hall in Bayreuth from the Jewish mathematician and art patron Alfred Pringsheim.  Pringsheim's daughter Katia later married Thomas Mann - who was forced to flee Germany with his Jewish wife and his "halb-jüdische" children.

Did Sex Bring Down the Weimar Republic?

I recently learned that the well-known Berlin nightclub KitKat is closing:

"The KitKat, where guests often wear revealing outfits, is known for pushing boundaries with its debauched fetish parties.Launched in 1994, the KitKat's name is inspired by the Berliner nightclub featured in the musical Cabaret. It was set in Berlin in the early 1930s, against the backdrop of the uprising of the Nazis, at a burlesque venue called the "Kit Kat Club"."

Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret dealt with the collapse of the Weimar Republic.  The centerpiece of the movie is the Kit Kat Club - emblematic of the free-ranging sexuality of Berlin in final years of the Republic.  Laurie Marhoefer, a professor at the University of Washington, has studied sexuality in the Weimar Republic.  In the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute she writes: 

"The cabaret in the film, the Kit Kat Club, is home to gender-bending and sexual transgression — heterosexual transgression, often. Joel Grey’s character, the Master of Ceremonies, presides over the Kit Kat Club. He cross-dresses and sings about the pleasures of three-way relationships. To American critics in 1972 the Master of Ceremonies was, as Terri Gordon writes, an embodiment of “the decadence and decline of an increasingly corrupt society” or, perhaps, a Hitler-figure, “luring the audience into blind complacency.” That is, critics linked his sexual and gender rule-breaking to fascism, which makes sense — the film’s plot makes the same link."

This is the "Kit Kat Club theory" of the Weimar Republic's collapse:  the "moral nihilism" of the liberal democracy led inexorably to immoral fascism.  In the final scene of Cabaret the Kit Kat Club clientele is comprised of swastika-bearing SA men.  This theory was advanced by several postwar historians, including Gerhard Ritter:

"Ritter’s idea was that the Weimar Republic’s relative toleration of sexual diversity amounted to moral nihilism, a revolt against moral authority that opened the door for even more immorality, namely, fas-cism. In his view, fascism represented a rejection of Christian moral values, such as the condemnation of murder. Moreover, fascism’s rejection of the Christian injunction against taking human life and its rejection of Christian sexual morals were of a piece."

In Erich Kästner's Weimar Zeitroman - Fabian (1931) - the moralist protagonist Fabian complains about the immorality that surrounds him:

"Dort drüben, an dem Platz, ist ein Cafe, in dem Chinesen mit Berliner Huren zusammensitzen, nur Chinesen.  Da vorn ist ein Lokal, wo parfümierte homosexuelle Burschen mit eleganten Schauspielern und smarten Engländern tanzen und ihre Fertigkeiten und den Preis bekannt geben, und zum Schluss bezahlt das Ganze eine Blondgefärbte Greisin, die dafür mitkommen darf. [...] Im Osten residiert das Verbrechen, im Zentrum die Gaunerei, im Norden das Elend, im Westen die Unzucht, und in allen Himmelsrichtungen wohnt der Untergang."

The moralist Fabian cannot survive long in this sea of depravity. 

Of course Erich Kästner was no Nazi; Goebbels had Fabian tossed into the bonfire as "smut".  And there were many factors other than sex that brought down the Weimar Republic.  Still, the backlash against the "loose morals" of the young democracy undoubtedly played a role, and deserves more historical analysis.

Peter Handke und kein Ende

No sooner did the Nobel Committee in Stockholm award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk than the vilification engine kicked in.  Almost immediately Handke was called "The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists" in a New York Times Op/Ed piece.  There was universal outrage in Western media that once again the Nobel Committee had made a disastrous decision - this time awarding the prize to a writer who eulogized Slobodan Milosevic.  Handke, das Monster wrote Andreas Rosenfelder in Die Welt.  Missing, of course, from all this outraged commentary was any discussion of his work.  My own opinion is that yes, the Committee has made a number of bad choices, but Handke is more deserving of the prize than many other recent recipients - as fellow Austrian and prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek openly admitted.  Yes, Peter Handke has made indefensible statements.  He is fond of hurling insults at detractors and admirers alike - but then again, so was another giant of Austrian literature: Thomas Bernhard.  Handke certainly sounds like a very disagreeable character.  But if we are forced the honor only agreeable writers there would not be much to admire in German language literature.  After all, Rilke was a jerk (number 3 on the list of Ten Greatest German Poets). Handke has made some unfortunate choices, as did that earlier admirer of the Nazis Gottfried Benn (number 8 on the list) and Bertold Brecht (number 9)  wrote hymns to Stalin. No doubt Günter Grass would have been eviscerated in the press had he revealed his stint in the Waffen SS before he won the Nobel Prize in 1999. 

Handke has written many works (too many?) and I have only read a few of these.  But I recall being astonished when I read his first play Kaspar as a young student.  Here was truly "the shock of the new" in drama - Handke had surpassed the Theater of the Absurd.  In this play Handke takes the Austrian preoccupation with the Limitations of Language (Wittgenstein and the von Hofmannsthal of the Chandos Brief) to its logical conclusion. For the character Kaspar Hauser language is not a liberating force, but rather a form of torture ("Sprachfolter") that imposes a rigid conformity on the mind. Handke has been called a monster for his profanity-laced insults against his detractors and against the press in general.  But he launched his career with a virtuoso insulting of the theater audience in Publikumsbeschimpfung  ("Ihr seid profilierte Darsteller, ihr Maulaffenfeilhalter.{...} ihr Nimande, ihr Dingsda!")  And those insults pale beside his self-critique in Selbstbezichtigung:

"Ich bin nicht, was ich gewesen bin. Ich bin nicht gewesen, wie ich hätte sein sollen.  Ich bin nicht geworden, was ich hätte werden sollen.  Ich habe nicht gehalten, was ich hätte halten sollen."_

One work that made a huge impression on me and which I've had to re-read was Handke's  heart-breaking 1972 short book Wunschloses Unglück (Eng. version "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams") - an examination of his mother's life written shortly after her suicide.  Handke describes a talented young woman who was thwarted because of her gender and her poverty from realizing her modest dreams:

"Als Frau in diese Umstände geboren zu werden, ist von vornherein schon tödlich gewesen. Man kann es aber auch beruhigend nennen: jedenfalls keine Zukunftsangst. Die Wahrsagerinnen auf den Kirchtagen lasen nur den Burschen ernsthaft aus den Händen; bei den Frauen war diese Zukunft ohnehin nichts als ein Witz.“

Her attempts to find what might come close to some semblance of happiness fail. Eventually the cold, gray clouds of depression close in her and she ends her life at age 51.  One is reminded hat the alternate word in German for suicide (Selbstmord) is Freitod  - which almost connotes a breaking free.  And the narrator (Handke) is proud that she made the decision to take her own life:

"DAS WAR ES. DAS WAR ES. DAS WAR ES. SEHR GUT. SEHR GUT.  Und während des ganzen Fluges war ich außer mir vor Stolz, daß sie Selbstmord begangen hatte."

But with the last sentence the narrator acknowledges that his words failed to capture the essence of his mother and her journey:

"Später werde ich über das alles Genaueres schreiben. "

Peter Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize for LITERATURE - not the Peace Prize or a prize for his political commentary.  The tragic outcome of this hysterical condemnation of the Nobel Committee's choice is that people will choose not to read an important - and highly innovative - writer whose works belong in the canon of modern world literature. 

Als Frau in diese Umstände geboren zu werden, ist von vornherein schon tödlich gewesen. Man kann es aber auch beruhigend nennen: jedenfalls keine Zukunftsangst. Die Wahrsagerinnen auf den Kirchtagen lasen nur den Burschen ernsthaft aus den Händen; bei den Frauen war diese Zukunft ohnehin nichts als ein Witz.“

German Leitkultur and Literature

For years I've been hearing German politicians talking about the national Leitkultur ("guiding culture"), but I never got a clear understanding about what exactly Leitkultur is.  Now, thanks to a comprehensive paper put forward by the right-wing AfD party in Thuringia (H/T nobody), I now know what Leitkultur is.  Basically, Leitkultur is a defensive posture in response to the influx of foreigners into the Fatherland:

Von Beginn an stand die Debatte um die Leitkultur im Zusammenhang mit der

Masseneinwanderung aus außereuropäischen, insbesondere muslimischen Kulturen.

Der Zustrom von Fremden, die mit der europäischen und deutschen Lebensweise

nicht vertraut sind und diese in Teilen sogar geringachten und zurückweisen, warf

die Frage auf, worauf für ein auskömmliches Zusammenleben in Freiheit nicht

verzichtet werden kann. Leitend war dabei die Überzeugung, dass Relativismus und Multik

ulturalismus keine angemessene Antwort auf diese Frage sein können.

Die Politik des  Relativismus und des Multikulturalismus  führe letztlich zu

einem unverbundenen Nebeneinander von Parallelgesellschaften, denen es

an gemeinsamen Bezugspunkten für das allgemeine Zusammenleben mangelt. Die

Fragmentierung der Gesellschaft führe zur Erosion des Rechts, zur Verschärfung sozialer

Konflikte und zum Anstieg von Gewalt. Um diesen negativen Entwicklungen zu begegnen

sei es notwendig, sich der Gehalte des verbindlichen Konsenses zu vergewissern, der die

Grundlage gesamtgesellschaftlichen Zusammenlebens darstellt.

Literature, of course, is a major component of the German Leitkultur.  The great German poets and novelists provide are a cohesive force - binding the Volk to it common German heritage.  The authors of the paper do not hesitate to list those authors that are essential to any concept of German Leitkultur:

Exemplarisch seien genannt: Das Bauhaus, Benedikt X („Wir sind Papst“), der Deutsche

Idealismus, unsere Dichter und Denker (wie z.B. Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Fontane),

Leaving aside for a moment the universalist Schiller ("alle Menschen werden Brüder") and the anglophile Fontane, Heine and Goethe may not be the ideal representatives of the ethno-nationalist identity politics promoted by the authors. Heine spent most of his creative life in self-imposed exile in France.  His native Germany was for him “the land of bigots,” where patriotism consisted of “hatred of the French, hatred of civilization, and hatred of liberalism,” and where “servility was in the German soul.” France, on the other hand, was “not only the wittiest of nations, but also the most compassionate."

As for Goethe, I have to ask whether the authors of the Leitkultur paper have actually read much of his work.  If they had, they would have known that Goethe had a life-long fascination with the Koran, which he knew as well as the Bible and considered it just as important. One of Goethe's most beautiful Sturm und Drang poems is Mohomets Gesang (1772)  ("Song for Mohammed") in which meaning of the prophet Mohammed  is put into the metaphor of the stream, starting from the smallest beginning and growing to be an immense spiritual power, expanding, unfolding, and gloriously ending in the ocean, the symbol for divinity. He especially describes the religious genius in carrying the other people with him like the stream does with small brooks and rivers.

Kommt ihr alle! –
Und nun schwillt er
Herrlicher; ein ganz Geschlechte
Trägt den Fürsten hoch empor!
Und im rollenden Triumphe
Gibt er Ländern Namen, Städte
Werden unter seinem Fuß.

Unaufhaltsam rauscht er weiter,
Läßt der Türme Flammengipfel,
Marmorhäuser, eine Schöpfung
Seiner Fülle, hinter sich.

And did the AfD authors ever read Goethe's late poem/prose cycle - West-östlicher Divan - , his homage to the great Persian poet Hafiz?  The work contains some of Goethe's most famous poems, such as Selige Sehnsucht.  His goal was a reconciliation - or even a fusion - of the Occident with the Orient, of Christianity with Islam:

              „Wer sich selbst und andere kennt /

                Wird auch hier erkennen /

                Orient und Okzident/

                Sind nicht mehr zu trennen.“ 

Sounds pretty Multi-Kulti to me!

 

Why Paul Celan was rejected for the Nobel Prize

Only one German lyric poet - Nelly Sachs - has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Nelly Sachs was the co-recipient of the coveted prize in 1966 along with the Hebrew author Shmuel Yosef Agnon.  Why Nelly Sachs and not the far greater poet Paul Celan?  We now have some insight in the decision since the Swedish Academy has opened some of its archives dating back 50 years.  Nelly Sachs was considered for the prize together with the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. Other names also under consideration were Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene and W.H. Auden. But Sachs had the inside track.  The poet had fled to Sweden to flee the Nazis and was well-established in the Swedish literary scene:

Drei Jahre zuvor war Nelly Sachs erstmals für den Preis vorgeschlagen worden. Drei Jahre sind eine kurze Wartezeit. Der Däne Johannes V. Jensen beispielsweise wurde achtzehnmal vorgeschlagen, ehe sich die Akademie 1944 seiner erbarmte. Sachs genoss aber Heimvorteil. 1940 vor den Nazis nach Schweden geflohen, war sie schwedische Staatsbürgerin und in der Szene vernetzt. In der Akademie sassen die Freunde Ekelöf und Lindegren, die sie ins Schwedische übersetzt hatten und die ihrerseits von Sachs übersetzt wurden, sowie drei weitere Autoren, deren Werke sie in früheren Jahren ins Deutsche übertragen hatte. Für Befangenheit hatten die achtzehn Akademiker damals kein Sensorium. 1976 zeichneten sie sogar die beiden Akademie-Kollegen Eyvind Johnson und Harry Martinson mit dem Preis der Preise aus – eine Affäre, die zwei Jahre später mit Martinsons Suizid endete.

Still, it was felt by the Committee that Sachs's oeuvre was not strong enough to stand on its own, and she was paired with the Israeli writer.  There were voices in support of Paul Celan, but they fell on deaf ears.  In fact, the Committee decided - and here's where it gets grotesque - that Celan's poetry was not up to snuff:

Doch das Komitee urteilte: "Dem Teilungsvorschlag zufolge sollen zwei jeweils für sich bedeutende Werke der deutschen Lyrik ausgezeichnet werden. Im Bezug auf Celan war das Komitee jedoch nicht davon zu überzeugen, dass seine Arbeiten einen solchen Rang verdienen." Zwei Jahre zuvor hatte es im selben Kreis geheißen, Paul Celan könne keinen Anspruch auf eine "hohe internationale Auszeichnung"

Paul Celan is now celebrated as one of the greatest - and influential - poets of the 20th Century.  What is tragic is that the international recognition that is gained through the Nobel Prize might have prevented - or delayed- the poet's suicide.  Instead, he was tormented to the end by baseless plagiarism charges by the widow of the poet Yvan Goll. 

On the other hand, Paul Celan is in excellent company with great poets and writers who were passed over by the Nobel Prize Committee, including Tolstoy, Proust , James Joyce, Auden, John Updike, Robert Frost  - not to mention Celan's friend and lover Ingeborg Bachmann.

Heidegger's One Good Deed

Recently I wrote a review of Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Cafe about the circle of writers and thinkers who gave rise to Existentialism.  A central figure in the book was, of course, Martin Heidegger, whose 1928 Sein und Zeit is considered the first major work of existentialist philosophy. In her book, Bakewell describes Heidegger's deplorable treatment of his Jewish mentor (Husserl), colleagues and students following the 1933 Nazi seizure of power.  After Germany's defeat and even after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the world Heidegger refused to answer for his unforgivable behavior.  He always maintained that he was "misunderstood."

"He did not let his resentments put him off his work, which continued to lead him down the mountain pathways of his thoughts in his late years.  He spent as much time as possible at Todtnauberg, receiving visits from pilgrims and sometimes from more critical visitors.  One such encounter was with the Jewish post and concentration camp survivor Paul Celan, who gave a reading in Freiburg in July 1967 while on temporary release from a psychiatric clinic.  The venue was the same auditorium where Heidegger had given his Nazi rectorial address.

Heidegger, who admired Celan's work, tried to make him feel welcome in Freiburg. He even asked a book-dealer friend to go around all the bookshops in the city making sure they put Celan titles in their windows so the poet would see them as he walked through town. This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice."

Concerning the meeting itself between the poet and the philosopher, Celan memorialized his visit with a poem: Todtnauberg.  The poem - like many of Celan's poems - is difficult to interpret, but I believe there are clues here that indicate that the poet left Freiburg as frustrated with Heidegger as many of the other visitors.  What started out as hope for hearing a "thinker's word to come in the heart" ("einer Hoffnung , heute, auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen") ends with something "crude" ("Krudes"), the hike in the mountain seems to have been abruptly interrupted {"die halb-beschrittenen Knüppelpfade im Hochmoor"). 

Evidently Heidegger's kind deed did not go far enough:  he was incapable of uttering that "coming" heartfelt word that Celan was longing to hear.

 

TODTNAUBERG

Arnika, Augentrost, der
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwürfel drauf,

in der
Hütte,

die in das Buch
— wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen? —
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

Krudes, später, im Fahren,
deutlich,

der uns fährt, der Mensch,
der’s mit anhört,

die halb-
beschrittenen Knüppel-
pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,
viel.

 

The Cult of Hölderlin in the Third Reich

One of the interesting things I learned from reading Nicholas Steingardt's The German War (see my review) is that the Nazis created a cult of the nineteenth century Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (number 2 on my list of the 10 greatest German poets).  This evolved throughout the Third Reich but reached a climax in 1943 with a celebrations throughout Germany commemorating the 100th anniversary of the poet's death.  How this rather obscure, emotionally hypersensitive German poet who had only contempt for his fellow German "philistines" became transformed into a spiritual Führer of the German Volk - the "purest of pure" the "most German" of all German poets - is a fascinating story.  What interests me here is that the peak of the Hölderlin cult coincided with the realization among most Germans that the war effort was lost. Steingardt writes:

"Listening to Hyperion's Song of Fate (DV note: from Hölderlin 's 1797 novel Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland ) provided a glimpse into the abyss, a retreat into reverie, a safe haven into which readers could surrender - momentarily - and marshal their own inner, moral reserves.  Hiding the war behind a veil of lyrical abstractions this literary canon helped 'apolitical Germans' to reinvent themselves, unwillingly to be preached to by the Nazi hacks, but at the same time blocking out the possibility that the war would confront them with immediate moral and political choices. Instead, they ransacked their cultural heritage to help bear its burdens."

So, while Schiller and Kleist were the poets of German military success in the early days of the war, Hölderlin was the poet of German military defeat.  Still, the Nazis kept positioning the Third Reich as the fulfillment of Hölderlin's vision.  Here is the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg writing in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte:

Es war die Tragik Hölderlins, dass er sich aus der Gemeinschaft der Menschen lösen musste, ohne dass ihm die Gestaltung der kommenden Gemeinschaft beschieden war. Er blieb ein Einsamer, ein Unverstandener seiner Zeit, der aber die Zukunft als Gewissheit in sich trug. Er wollte eine Wiedererlebung, kein neues Griechenland, aber er fand im Griechentum die nordisch-heidische Lebenshaltung wieder,  die in dem Deutschland seiner Zeit verkümmert war, aus der jedoch allein die kommende Gemeinschaft wachsen kann... Und der Kampf um die Gestaltund des Reiches aber is das Ringen um die gleiche Tat, die Hölderlin nicht tun konnte, weil die Zeit noch nich erfüllt war.  

But while the Nazis were promoting Hölderlin  as a spiritual forerunner of a national-socialist Volksgemeinschaft, the poet also served as inspiration for those who would try to sabotage the Nazi regime.  Steingardt writes about how Sophie Scholl, the leader of the White Rose student opposition group, revered Hölderlin.  Likewise Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler, saw in  Hölderlin the prophet of a "secret Germany" which had been perverted by Hitler and the Nazis.

With the collapse of the Reich, the cult of Hölderlin  lost its appeal, especially to the troops returning from the front.  Günter Eich expressed his disgust in his famous 1946 poem Latrine:

 Irr mir im Ohre schallen
Verse von Hölderlin.
In schneeiger Reinheit spiegeln
Wolken sich im Urin.

(Mad in my hearing echo verses of Hölderlin  in snowy pureness clouds are reflected in pools of urine.)

Here is a recording of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger reading Hölderlin's poem Der Ister.