Castle Gripsholm

by Kurt Tucholsky

  KURT TUCHOLSKY (1890–1935) was born in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family. He received a law degree from the University of Jena in 1915 and was conscripted to fight in World War I not long after. A notably poor soldier, his aphorism likening soldiers to murderers became a pacifist rallying cry. Tucholsky began his journalism career while still a student, and he found success writing in a range of forms, including the feuilleton, criticism, satire, poetry, and lyrics for cabarets. Under both his name and various pseudonyms, his work frequently appeared in the leftist intellectual organ Die Weltbühne (the World Stage), to which he would contribute on and off for the rest of his life. Tucholsky’s collected writings amount to thousands of pages and include a play, Christopher Columbus (1932); an illustrated book, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (1929); and two works of fiction, Rheinsberg (1912) and Castle Gripsholm (1931). He was married twice, to Else Weil from 1920 to 1924 and to Mary Gerold in 1924. In 1933, his last piece for Die Weltbühne appeared in January; by August his German citizenship had been annulled and his books burned en masse. The Nazis had denounced him as “one of the most wicked of literary pornographers.” He divorced Mary to distance her from Nazi persecution and lived in exile in Sweden on short-term visas under threat of deportation, where he died from an overdose of sleeping pills. There are two annual literary awards given in his name: the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize and Germany’s Kurt Tucholsky Prize.

  MICHAEL HOFMANN is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. Among his translations are works by Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; Herta Müller; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. A recipient of both the PEN Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, Hofmann’s Selected Poems was published in 2009 and One Lark, One Horse in 2019. In addition to Castle Gripsholm, which was the first book he translated, New York Review Books publishes his selection from the work of Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends, and his translations of Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage, Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front, and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida.

  CASTLE GRIPSHOLM

  KURT TUCHOLSKY

  Translated from the German and with an introduction by

  MICHAEL HOFMANN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1931 by Ernst Rowohlt Verlag KG a.A., Berlin; copyright © 1946

  by Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg and Stuttgart; copyright © 1961 by Rowohlt Verlag, GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg

  Translation and introduction copyright © 1985 by Michael Hofmann

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Nils Dardel, Waterfalls, 1921

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Originally published in German as Schloss Gripsholm.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tucholsky, Kurt, 1890–1935, author. | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25– translator.

  Title: Castle Gripsholm / by Kurt Tucholsky ; translated by Michael Hofmann.

  Other titles: Schloss Gripsholm. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2019] | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018035291| ISBN 9781681373348 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681373355 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PT2642.U4 S313 2019 | DDC 833/.912—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035291

  ISBN 978-1-68137-335-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  CASTLE GRIPSHOLM

  INTRODUCTION

  For twenty-five years, from 1907 to 1932, Kurt Tucholsky wrote polemical articles, feuilletons, theatre- and book-reviews, travel sketches, poems and cabaret songs. Then, for the last three years of his life, he was an ex-writer who expressed himself in his diaries and letters, but no longer in print. This deathly silence was part of his complete repudiation of Germany after the Nazi take-over. To have gone on writing – to have inveighed impotently against the coming to pass of what he had worked all his life to prevent – would have been to concede a defeat too bitter to contemplate. Erich Kästner described Tucholsky as ‘a short, fat Berliner who tried, with his typewriter to avert the coming catastrophe.’ The means proved insufficient.

  •

  Kurt Tucholsky was born in Berlin in 1890, the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman. Some of his childhood was spent on the blustery Baltic coast, for which he developed a lasting affection, and in whose landscape, people and language (all of them ‘platt’, ‘low’ or ‘flat’) Castle Gripsholm is a declaration of faith. In 1907, while still a law-student, he published Rheinsberg: A Picture Book for Lovers, a holiday story, a brief escape from the city into nature and love, a bitter-sweet not-quite-idyll of the sort he later developed in Castle Gripsholm. He took a doctorate in law – many of his fiercest attacks were reserved for the Weimar legal system, with its class justice and vicious political bias – and after the War, where he fought on the Eastern Front, he resumed his career as a writer and journalist.

  Working mostly for the weekly, Die Schaubühne, later Die Weltbühne, he soon found himself contributing under four pseudonyms as well as – decreasingly – under his own name. (A first selection of his pieces was accordingly called Mit 5 PS, 5 HP.) This ‘blithe schizophrenia’ is an extraordinary procedure that illuminates his nature as a man and a writer: firstly, it had a strongly practical side:

  ‘it was useful to have a fivefold existence – because who in Germany will credit a political writer with humour? a satirist with seriousness? a whimsical fellow with knowledge of the penal code or a chronicler of cities with comic verse? A sense of humour loses you credence.’

  Then, it was playful: the deployment of his five ‘homunculi’ as ‘the five fingers of one hand’ – although they had a fair degree of independence from one another, and sometimes fell out and conducted arguments among themselves! Lastly, it provided cover for Tucholsky himself, who, as he says near the beginning of Castle Gripsholm, disliked divulgence and confession in literature, and – appearances often to the contrary – kept his personal sphere intact. In the same way as his use of pseudonyms, Tucholsky’s work combines practical value, discretion and playfulness.

  In 1923, during the worst of the inflation, he gave up the profession of writing for a year and went to work in a bank. His experience of office life produced probably his best-known creation, Herr Wendriner, a version of the ‘common man’ of the 1920s: a Berlin Jew, a self-seeking survivor figure, rascally businessman and the hero of many sketches and monologues. The year after, he returned to writing, but left Germany for Paris, ‘to take a rest from’ his fatherland and gain a little distance from developments there: governmental weakness and deceit, militarism and exploitation, partisan justice, right wing paramilitary groups and political assassinations. From then on, he was only in Germany on occasional visits. Based mostly in Paris, he wrote and travelled.

  In 1929 he moved to Sweden and in that year one of his most celebrated volumes, the satirically entitled Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, appeared, his texts to photos and montages by John Heartfield. Its tone is perhaps more despairingly aggressive than that of earlier writings, but the range remains typical: there is a long and closely argued attack on German just
ice; the caption ‘Member of the Reichstag’ over the picture of a cockatoo; some glorious monologues – a midwife enraged at being compared to a corkscrew; a circular proposing the leasing of civil servants to private groups, to provide official dignity and a few ‘star turns’; ironic praise (from a rabid nationalist speaker) for the German army in the War, its ‘painless style of close combat’ and ‘humane barrages’. There is a grisly picture of two duellists after a ‘Studentenmensur’, their faces streaming blood from what would turn into the ‘scars of honour’ they had received from one another. Above it is a poem entitled, with appalling accuracy, ‘German judges of 1940’.

  Tucholsky had always looked to the future, but what he saw there now made him incline to resignation and despair. His considerable popularity was not matched by any degree of actual political effectiveness: he doubted whether his work had got rid of a single official, or just one of those wicked, tortured and torturing ‘Anstaltsweiber’ (‘institution-women’ – like Frau Adriani) whom he particularly loathed. ‘Are the sadists going? Are the bureaucrats being thrown out? It makes me depressed.’ His writing now condensed itself into ‘Schnipsel’, ‘snippets’, that were either aggressive or troubled and pessimistic in character, though, somehow, they hadn’t lost their wit:

  ‘Germany is an anatomical curiosity: it writes with its left hand, but acts with its right.’

  Another ‘Schnipsel’ describes man as ‘a vertebrate with an immortal soul, and also a fatherland to make sure he doesn’t get above himself’. Tucholsky’s did, certainly. Just before Christmas in 1935, ill and unproductive and alone, ‘broken by his fatherland’, he took an overdose of morphia. He was buried in the churchyard at Mariefred, which he had described in Castle Gripsholm. ‘If I had to die now,’ he wrote, just before the event, ‘I would say, “Was that all?” And: “I didn’t really understand it.” And: “It was a bit noisy.” ’

  •

  Castle Gripsholm was published in 1931. It is Tucholsky’s only novel, his longest single piece of work of any kind. As a critic, he had a very high regard for the form, and so, despite his modesty in not claiming the tag for himself, tribute should be paid to the skill of this one (which has sold three-quarters of a million copies). More than anything else, it is a beautifully plausible version of what it pretends to be: ‘a summer story’ – the plainest and clearest and liveliest of first-person writing – full of fresh air, sunshine, trees, companionableness and friendly bickering – sweet oblivion. But, in the light of its author’s other preoccupations, commitments and achievements, and of the date itself – two years later he would be stripped of his citizenship and his books would be burned – can this withdrawal, this holiday, this compliance with his ‘publisher’s’ wishes, can it be real?

  It is real, though the reality is wishful. That the sales of his books really did matter more than what he was trying to achieve in writing them. That it would be possible to turn away from politics, and to forget what was happening, in some serene privacy. That the struggle in Germany and for Germany could take place on some manageably small and symbolic level, like the struggle for Ada. That his privacy would indeed be serene . . . Castle Gripsholm is a book by a man who was never a father himself, and in whose life there were many women, but no one durable and fulfilling relationship. Tucholsky was not a visitor to the area of Mariefred and Gripsholm, he was living there, and he would die there and be buried there. The train that leaves Berlin at the beginning was one he had been on seven years before; a return to Germany and a resumption of his work there must have seemed at best problematic, and, more likely, out of the question. There is real sadness, and a real sense of farewell and ending in the last pages. No wonder perhaps that he leaves us with a drinking toast that is more an agnostic prayer in deadly times, out of sight of Sweden, and with his beloved German coastline never to re-appear.

  In keeping with the ‘blithe schizophrenia’ with which he managed his four pseudonyms, Tucholsky’s personal circumstances have been muted, dissembled and changed in a brave and resourceful way. Nothing could be further removed from the spirit of this book than self-pity, resignation and gloom. It has serious depths, but they have been concealed where it is most difficult and distinguished to conceal them: on the surface. The subjects of Tucholsky’s publicistic writings – love and friendship, creativity and language, freedom and authority, nationalities, justice and modern life – appear everywhere: in conversations and casual reflections. Only in the astonishing, black reverie on gladiators and ancient Rome with its meditation and how a society keeps its members quiet by offering them violent spectacles, is there anything like a formal digression.

  As well as finding the tone of Castle Gripsholm extraordinarily free and fresh, the reader may see a surprising modernity in the externals of a book written over fifty years ago. This comes in part from the abundance in it of those institutions that have more and more given texture to modern life: the office and the holiday, the customs and frontiers, the shop-window, the museum, the landlady and the boss. (The book is dedicated to a car licence-plate number.) In Stockholm, Tucholsky comments on the oppressiveness of modern cities, ‘the occidental uniform, with American trimmings’. This awareness has something to do, I think, with Tucholsky’s loneliness: a man with a home and loved ones would perhaps be more protected from the dominance of such neutral institutions, less painfully aware of their awful pervasiveness.

  Tucholsky’s loneliness can be indirectly – and surprisingly – laid at the door of Frau Adriani, one of his ‘Anstaltsweiber’, from a long string of authoritarian female figures in his work. The first of these occurred in 1914, in an article on the actress Rosa Bertens, playing a role from Strindberg:

  ‘She sat in an upholstered chair, gripping both the arm-rests. Was she still in command? She had been in command for fifteen, twenty years, maybe longer, and they had been bitter years . . . This was her kingdom, and the view of the distant horizon was obstructed. She ruled here, ruled by all available means . . . There was the family table with the cosy lamp. A flight in the sunshine? You try flying when the lead weights of women drag you to the ground. Down! Down! Down! . . .’

  What shows in these lines is of course not misogyny, but hatred of a home presided over by a dominant mother-figure, such as he himself had grown up in from the age of fifteen, when his father had died. As much as Rosa Bertens, the above portrait, as he told his second wife, was of his mother. So also is that of Frau Adriani, and it is she – with her taunts of ‘Why don’t you get married?’ – who is at the root of the instability and impermanence of his marriages and other relationships. Tucholsky was far too good a student of Freud (who, with Strindberg and Hamsun, was one of his gods; he kept a photograph of him in his study) not to be aware of the implications of a poor relationship with his mother. By chance, this aspect too now looks modern: very few adjustments have to be made when one reads about the Princess and her ‘Peter’. There is in their relationship hope and affection and sex and companionship, but nothing necessarily, unconditionally, formally binding. Will and inclination hold them together. They are not an entity, but two individuals, equal and independent, now adult, now childish, sometimes worried but never solemn. Their future (together) is uncertain. All the more reason, then, for them to make the most of their five weeks together, to talk and act and enjoy.

  •

  The particular difficulty in translating Castle Gripsholm has to do with what is perhaps Tucholsky’s greatest gift as a writer: his ear for speech. In a word itself untranslatable, he calls himself ‘ein Ohrenmensch’, literally ‘an ear-person’. It is the North German dialect, the ‘Plattdeutsch’ in the book that is the problem. Thomas Mann’s translator, H. T. Lowe-Porter says frankly that ‘dialect cannot be translated, it can only be got round by a sort of trickery which is usually unconvincing’. I have used little trickery. It seems to me that Tucholsky’s Platt is so integral to the book, so firmly and repeatedly and deliberately described and celebrated that to search for a �
�corresponding’ dialect in English (then constantly referred to as ‘Platt’) would be mistaken. The very specificity of it would make it distracting, paradoxical, absurd. Tucholsky himself, in a review of a translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, protested at having Mellors speaking in a ‘Bavarian mountain dialect’ that was quite incompatible with his explicit vocabulary. Similarly, what English dialect has recourse to French, to an antique genitive, or to some of Tucholsky’s more carefully ‘planted’ idioms? I decided to aim for an understanding of the meaning of the German – difficult enough for a Saxon like myself, and someone whose sympathies tend to be with the taciturn Arnold anyway! – and to catch the Princess by the spirit, pace and tone of her speech, its qualities of parody and irreverence. I think it is still possible to ‘hear’ the book, even if not with its original genial locality. For help in understanding individual phrases, I owe thanks to my family, and rather more to Ebba Beer, Kay Hoff and Hans Werner Richter, who have the good fortune to be ‘Plattdeutsch’. I am conscious of having rather dwelt in my Introduction on the darker hinterland of the book, but I am confident that its sunniness needs no introducing – only the reader’s appreciation, and a little awe.

  Michael Hofmann

  April 1985

  London

  CASTLE GRIPSHOLM

  Or we can blow our trumpets

  And go blaring through the land;

  But we’d rather walk in days of spring,

  When primrose blossoms and thrushes sing,

  Quietly thinking beside the stream.

  THEODOR STORM

  Chapter One

  1

  Ernst Rowohlt Publishers

  Berlin W50