The bloodstained downfall of ‘ Bildung’ has been given us in cruel miniature. Böll’s most ambitious investigation of the Nazi infection in the German body politic was the novel Billiards at 9.30 ( Billard um halbzehn, 1959), which spans the period from the end of the 19th century to 1958. Three generations of an architect family have been involved with a Benedictine monastery: the grandfather built it; the father blew it up in the Second World War, nominally for military reasons, but in fact because he knew it to be corrupted by Nazism; the son is rebuilding it, unaware who was responsible for its destruction.
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Round this theme is woven a picture of a society in which former criminals, their victims, and their opponents mingle on equal or unequal, but usually unjust, terms. During the Adenauer years, Böll, also a Catholic Rhinelander, seems to have seen himself as the moral conscience of a Church compromised by its wartime record and by its association with wealth and power in the new and predominantly Catholic Germany. But in his later work the sense of a historically defi ned Germany measured by an external standard of justice faded, the targets of his critiques became more secular, and his position became more simply that of socialist opposition to the Christian Democrat Party (e.g. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum [ Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum], 1974). Böll remained interested in modernist techniques such as multiple, undefi ned, or unreliable narrative viewpoints, but the clunking symbolism and schematic morality already apparent in Billiards at 9.30 became more pronounced and his original fi erce identifi cation with a unique moment in the national life was ature er lost.
Günter Grass (born 1927) followed a course rather like Böll’s, German Lit
though Böll got his Nobel Prize in 1972, while Grass, more of an enfant terrible, had to wait until 1999. Grass is a poet, dramatist, graphic artist, and prolifi c novelist, but he will be remembered above all for one book. The Tin Drum ( Die Blechtrommel, 1959) is the life story of Oskar Matzerath, who begins, like Grass, on the interface between the German and Polish communities in Danzig, who decides at the age of three to stop growing, who drifts, lecherous and seemingly invulnerable, though armed only with his tin drum and a voice that can break glass when he sings, through the absurdist horrors of the Third Reich, and who is fi nally incarcerated in a lunatic asylum in the Federal Republic where he composes his memoirs. The novel stands out from everything else written, by Grass or others, about the Nazi period for the amoral exuberance of its narration. Oskar is, at most, passingly puzzled by the eagerness of these adults to destroy each other and the nice things he enjoys. The amorality is 152
Traumas and memories (1914– )
19. The Tin Drum: Günter Grass (left), with David Bennent (as Oskar Matzerath, with drum) and Volker Schlöndorff (director), during the fi lming in Danzig (Gdansk), 1979
essential, for it refl ects that of the acts and actors that are being described. So too is the exuberance, for against all the evil and death, from which the book refuses to avert its gaze, it asserts the value of life and pleasure – the untiring verbal inventiveness, some of it encouraged by Döblin’s example, is a sustained act of resistance. But the crucial device that makes The Tin Drum into an exceptionally powerful analysis of how the German catastrophe happened is its parodistic relation to the German literary tradition – specifi cally to the tradition since the last comparable catastrophe, the Thirty Years War. Grass goes back to the early sections of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus to fi nd a narrative standpoint from which he can encompass a political development that ends in Nazism and a literary development that ends in Oskar Matzerath. Oskar learns to read from Goethe’s novel of personal maturing, Wilhelm Meister, regarded since the Second Empire as the fountainhead of ‘ Bildung’, and from a life of Rasputin. That 153
Goethe and Rasputin could also, grotesquely, go hand in hand in German 20th-century history is shown by a novel in which every convention of ‘ Bildung’ is overturned, starting with the idea of personal growth, and the course of events seems to be determined not by Nature or Spirit but by a homicidal maniac. In Grass’s later works – even the next two books in what the English scholar John Reddick has called his ‘Danzig trilogy’ – the inventiveness became arch or stilted and the themes lost urgency as they became politically correct (e.g. The Flounder [ Der Butt], 1977). The Wall made not only the GDR but the Federal Republic too a more introverted place and, responding to the need to defend public life from the left-wing Fascism of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and perhaps inspired by the example of Thomas Mann, Grass became a reliable and important campaigner for the Social Democrat Party as he became a less penetrating analyst of his world.
Because much of the writing of Arno Schmidt (1914–79) was ature er done in the 1950s, and from 1958 he led the life of a (married and atheist) hermit in rural lower Saxony, he was insulated from these local diffi culties and maintained, partly thanks to his enormous German Lit
erudition, a broader view of German nationhood. The Heart of Stone ( Das steinerne Herz, 1956) balanced an unfl attering picture of both the modern zones with a sub-plot dependent on the earlier trauma from which the contemporary division of Germany derived: the absorption of the independent principalities, in this case the Kingdom of Hanover, into Bismarck’s Empire. In The Republic of Scholars ( Die Gelehrtenrepublik, 1957), Schmidt wrote a science-fi ction parable of the Cold War, that other and larger-scale determinant of German identities, set in a post-World War Three era, when German is a dead language. Schmidt’s eccentricities of style, spelling, and punctuation were part of his deliberate detachment from his contemporaries and should not be dismissed simply as pastiche of Joyce – though his magnum opus, Bottom’s Dream ( Zettel’s Traum, 1970), 1,300 multi-columned A3
pages weighing over a stone, owed much to Finnegan’s Wake.
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Uwe Johnson (1934–84) chose a different way to preserve his independence and his ability to write, moving from East to West Germany in 1959, spending much of the 1960s abroad, and settling in England in 1974. He developed a narrative method without a privileged narrator of any kind, piecing together fragments of discourse in a montage which eventually made extensive use of newspaper material: there is no single truth about the lives of his characters or about their relation to the major public events which intimately affect them. Speculations about Jakob ( Mutmaßungen über Jakob, 1959) treats the murky circumstances surrounding the death of a man who is a ‘stranger in the West, but no longer at home in the East’ at the time of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis, while The Third Book about Achim ( Das dritte Buch über Achim, 1961) asks whether a Tr
personality is continuous across the divide between the Nazi years aumas and memories (1914– )
and the GDR and fi nds no answer. The possibility of socialism with a human face, already an issue in Speculations about Jakob, is a central theme in the four volumes of Anniversaries ( Jahrestage, 1971–83), which take up some of the same characters and follow every day of their lives throughout the year 1967–8, cross-cutting the German past, the American present, and the crushing of the Prague Spring. In comparison with these powerful books, the experiments in narrative indeterminacy of Christa Wolf (born 1929), who stayed in the GDR, joining the party hierarchy and literary bureaucracy, seem relatively colourless.
The Quest for Christa T. ( Nachdenken über Christa T, 1968) shows little awareness of the social constituents of personality, despite spanning the same period as The Third Book about Achim.
Her autobiographical Patterns of Childhood ( Kindheitsmuster, 1976), however, impressively presents both the illusions of a Nazi childhood and the traumatic effect of the transition to the later standpoint from which she tries to write.
Since 1945 the challenge facing Germans writing about Germans has been to transform trauma into memory and to understand 155
the present by mourning the past, to show what it is to be German by telling stories broad and deep enough to contain the indescribable. After 1961 that challenge be
came even more diffi cult, and only those whose narrative could rise to include the global power relationships which were imposing on Germany an economic, social, and cultural schizophrenia had any chance of success. Only a resolutely international or historical perspective could resist the hypnotic attraction of the great lie on which German division was based: that the Democratic Republic was a nation freely working to realize socialism, when it was actually, as the Wall proclaimed, an old-fashioned bureaucratic dictatorship maintained by the military force of a foreign power. Such a perspective was easier to attain in philosophy than in literature.
Heidegger and Jünger in their later, and unrepentant, work perhaps achieved it, if for quite the wrong reasons. Adorno paid a cruel penalty for his continued adherence to ‘ Bildung’ when he was pilloried by students as a reactionary and, probably as ature er a result, died of a heart attack in 1969; but the tradition of the
‘Frankfurt School’ was carried on and decisively broadened by his pupil Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Habermas sought a German Lit
synthesis of German philosophy with the American and British traditions (rejected by Adorno) in a theory of evolving democratic argument: in democracies Enlightenment was embodied in institutions ( The Theory of Communicative Action [ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns], 1981). He thereby both related the constitutional order of the Federal Republic to that of other Western nations and marked it off critically from the German past. His fear that, none the less, the government of Helmut Kohl was encouraging a nationalist form of West German patriotism which would efface the difference between the Federal Republic and earlier German states was expressed in 1986–7 in his criticisms of revisionist historians of the Jewish genocide (the
‘battle of the historians’, or ‘ Historikerstreit’). Arguably, however, Kohl was consciously concerned only that Germany should also mourn its 11 million casualties of the Second World War: a true 156
assessment of the Third Reich was possible only if its full cost was recognized.
That goal came signifi cantly nearer in 1989 with Russia’s withdrawal of military cover from Eastern Europe and the collapse of its puppet regimes. In East Germany the last survival from the era of bureaucratic absolutism came to an inglorious end, and with it 30 years of false consciousness for the whole nation. Those, like Christa Wolf, who had already once rebuilt their lives on those hollow foundations could not be expected to reconstruct themselves after a second trauma. But for established Western writers and younger writers from the East a new degree of honesty became possible. After an angry critique of Kohl’s handling of reunifi cation that was more a political intervention Tr
than a novel ( Too far afi eld [ Ein weites Feld], 1996), Grass aumas and memories (1914– )
returned to something like his old form with Crabwalk ( Im Krebsgang, 2002), centred on the fl ight of East Prussians from the advancing Russian armies in 1945 and the torpedoing of a refugee ship with the loss of 9,000 lives. His admission of service in the Waffen-SS in his autobiography of 2006 also showed that his portrait of Oskar Matzerath was closer to reality than anyone had been prepared to allow when The Tin Drum was fi rst published. In 2005 the prizewinning poet Durs Grünbein (born 1962) attempted to address the most notorious of all Allied war crimes, the fi re-bombing of Dresden, from the point of view of a native of the city, taking into account Dresden’s political and cultural history, its associations with the Nazis and its dismal reconstruction in the GDR: incongruities of tone were essential to the poem but brought it a mixed reception ( Porcelain. Poem on the death of my city [ Porzellan. Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt]). Germany’s inability to mourn the terrible bombing campaign against its cities had been the subject of a controversial study by W. G. (‘Max’) Sebald (1944–2001), On the Natural History of Destruction (literally: Literature and the War in the Air
[ Luftkrieg und Literatur], 1999), itself a sign that the taboo was 157
being broken. Sebald’s novels, the most striking event in German literature of the 1990s, are both single-minded and endlessly varied in their concentration on the process of remembering past violence, the process by which, as we are told in The Emigrants ( Die Ausgewanderten, 1992), a dead body, snowed up on the mountainside, will eventually, after many years, emerge at the foot of a glacier. Like Uwe Johnson, Sebald, long a professor at the University of East Anglia, had to settle outside Germany in order to give his memory the freedom and scope necessary for his literary project. The lives and deaths that his stories retrieve from the ice ramify round the world. Though the German catastrophe is usually their overt or covert point of reference, they involve highly detailed presentations of many seemingly unrelated topics and locales: Istanbul and North America, the architecture of railway stations, the history of the silk industry, and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. Germany appears to be quite tangential to The Rings of Saturn. An English Pilgrimage ature er ( Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995), which is concerned (as the title indicates) with the patterns made by the debris left over from another world-historical implosion, that of German Lit
the British Empire. By his deliberate ambiguity of genre – are we reading fi ction, autobiography, history, or documentary?; are the blurred photographs scattered through the narrative authentic or staged, relevant or irrelevant? – Sebald replicates both the layers of forgetting that have to be excavated to get at the past and the variety, always eluding unity, in what we are trying to recover.
The books have a unity, however, and it lies in something wholly German: their cultivation of exquisitely calm, statuesque, and elaborate sentences which, apart from little, scarcely noticeable, 20th-century spoilers, could have been written by Goethe. It is these which tell us that this view of our present condition, global though it is in its reach, is achieved from a historically and culturally particular standpoint – a tragic standpoint because it is German and because in no other language would it have been necessary or possible to write Sebald’s greatest single sentence, a ten-page account of the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, in 158
his last novel, Austerlitz (2001). Sebald’s work is a clear sign that since the turning point ( Wende) of 1989–90, German literature has resumed its original post-war search for a national historical identity, a search that is important to all of us, not just because every nation has similarly to fi nd its place in an ever more integrated world system, but because the German example makes it peculiarly clear that what matters in the end is not identity, national or personal, but the pursuit of justice.
Traumas and memories (1914– )
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Further reading
The following list details some of the best writing in English on the topics touched on here and also serves as an acknowledgement of some of this book’s main sources.
German history
Hagen Schulze, Germany: A New History, tr. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Harvard University Press, 1998). Excellent concise introduction with useful material on cultural history.
Eda Sagarra , A Social History of Germany 1648–1914 (Methuen, 1977). Comprehensive synthesis that keeps the implications for literature always in view.
W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge University Press, 1965). Foundational study, still unsurpassed.
Histories of German literature
The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2000).
Full, reliable, up-to-date, traditional literary history with extensive bibliographies.
A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery, and others (Harvard University Press, 2006). 188 individual essays, interrelated but avoiding a single narrative.
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Philosophy and German Literature,1700–1990, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Authoritative treatment of this crucial aspect.
The Oxford Companion to German Literature, ed. Henry Garland and Mary Garl
and, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1997). Dictionary format, with over 6,000 entries.
Collections of essays
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Bowes & Bowes, 1952, and numerous subsequent editions). Studies of Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke, and others – a starting point for much post-war literary criticism.
Michael Hamburger, Reason and Energy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). Valuable introductory essays on poets by a poet.
The eight volumes in the series German Men of Letters, ed. Alex Natan and Brian Keith-Smith (Oswald Wolff, 1961– ) contain many useful introductory essays on nearly 100 writers.
Further re
Period studies
ading
W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806
(Cambridge University Press, 1962). Consciously modelled on Raymond Williams.
T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832
(Croom Helm, 1980; Oxford University Press, 1986). Stylish and scholarly literary criticism, though unsympathetic to Hölderlin.
J. P. Stern, Reinterpretations: Seven Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Thames & Hudson, 1964). Searching studies of prose writers.
Ronald Gray, The German Tradition in Literature 1871–1945
(Cambridge University Press, 1965, 1977). Wide-ranging and controversial.
J. P. Stern, The Dear Purchase: A Theme in German Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2006). Intellectual analysis of most major 20th-century fi gures.
Individual writers
John Williams, The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 2001).
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Nicholas Boyle, Goethe. The Poet and the Age (Oxford University Press, 1991, 2000). Two volumes. A third is in preparation.
German Literature Page 17