by W. G. Sebald
The reconstruction that Kluge was thus able to make of the disaster, in far more detail than the summary of it given here, can be likened to the revelation of the rational structure of something experienced by millions of human beings as an irrational blow of fate. It almost seems as if Kluge were responding to the question put by the allegorical figure of Death in Nossack’s Interview mit dem Tode (“Interview with Death”) to his interlocutor: “If you like, you can see how I go about my business. There’s no secret to it. The fact that there is no secret is the point. Do you understand me?”63 Death, introduced to us in this text as a suave entrepreneur, explains to his listener, with the same ironic patience as is evident in Brigadier Anderson’s attitude, that fundamentally everything is just a question of organization, and organization manifested not merely in the collective catastrophe but in all areas of daily life, so that to find out its secret all you need to do is visit a tax office or some similar civil service department. In Kluge’s work, this very link between the vast extent of the destruction “produced” by human beings and the realities we experience daily is the point upon which the author’s didactic intention turns. Kluge reminds us all the time, and in every nuance of his complex linguistic montages, that merely maintaining a critical dialectic between past and present can lead to a learning process which is not fated in advance to come to a “mortal conclusion.” The texts with which Kluge seeks to promote this aim correspond, as Andrew Bowie has pointed out, neither to the pattern of retrospective historiography nor to the fictional story, nor do they try to offer a philosophy of history.64 Instead, they are a form of reflection on all these methods of ours for understanding the world. Kluge’s art, to use the term in another way here, consists in using details to illustrate the main current of the dismal course so far taken by history. For instance, there is his mention of the fallen trees in the Halberstadt town park, “where silk-moth caterpillars had lived when they were planted in the eighteenth century,” and the following passage: “(Number 9 Domgang) In the windows stood a selection of tin soldiers, which had fallen over immediately after the raid, the rest of them being packed away in boxes stored in cupboards, 12,400 men in all, Ney’s Third Corps as they desperately advanced through the Russian winter toward the eastern stragglers of the Grande Armée. They were put out on display once a year, during Advent. Only Herr Gramert himself could arrange his troop of soldiers in their correct order. In his terrified flight, leaving his beloved soldiers, he has been struck on the head by a burning beam, and can form no further plans. The apartment at Number 9 Domgang, with all its marks of Gramert’s personal style, lies quiet and intact for another two hours, except that it grows hotter and hotter during the afternoon. Around five o’clock it catches fire and so do the tin soldiers, who melt into lumps of metal in their boxes.”65
A briefer didactic fable than this could hardly be written. Kluge’s way of providing his documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it transfers what he quotes into the context of our own present. Kluge “does not allow the data to stand merely as an account of a past catastrophe,” writes Andrew Bowie; “the most unmediated document … loses its unmediated character via the processes of reflection the text sets up. History is no longer the past but also the present in which the reader must act.”66 The information that Kluge’s style thus imparts to readers about the concrete circumstances of their present existence, and possible prospects for the future, marks him out as an author who, on the perimeter of a civilization to all appearances intent on its own end, is working to revive the collective memory of his contemporaries who “with the obviously inborn desire for narrative, [have] lost the psychological power to remember even within the destroyed city itself.”67 It seems likely that only his preoccupation with this didactic business enables him to resist the temptation to offer an interpretation of recent historical events purely in terms of natural history, just as elements of the science fiction genre in which readers know all along what the end will be appear again and again in his work. Instead, he interprets history in a way rather like, for instance, Stanislaw Lem’s: as the catastrophic consequence of an anthropogenesis based from the first on evolutionary mistakes, a consequence that has long been foreshadowed by the complex physiology of human beings, the development of their hypertrophied minds, and their technological methods of production.
* A film by the director Gustav Ucicky, starring actors Paula Wessely, Peter Peterson, and Attila Hörbiger. The film was called Heimkehr (Homecoming).
Constructs of Mourning
GÜNTER GRASS AND WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER
I. THE INABILITY TO MOURN:
DEFICIENCIES IN POSTWAR LITERATURE
And if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a man may carry his owne pyre.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, HYDRIOTAPHIA. URNE-BURIAL; OR, A BRIEF DISCOURSE OF THE SEPULCHRALL URNES LATELY FOUND IN NORFOLK (LONDON, 1658)
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s theory of “the inability to mourn,” first formulated in 1967, has since proved—although statistically this can hardly be verified—to be one of the clearest explanations given for the mental disposition of postwar society in West Germany.1 The absence of “reactions of mourning after a national catastrophe of vast extent,” the “striking paralysis of feeling which was the response to the mountains of corpses in the concentration camps, the disappearance of the German armies into imprisonment, the news of the murder of millions of Jews, Poles and Russians, and political opponents from the ranks of the German people themselves,” left negative impressions on the internal life of the new society, with consequences that can be properly understood only now, seen in the more distant retrospect of, say, the films of Fassbinder and Kluge.
The Mitscherlichs’ theory of the distorted mental attitude of Federal German society as it took shape finds support not least—although they do not mention this—in the fact that attempts were actually made to organize collective mourning. The inept institutions of National Remembrance Day and German Unity Day, when during the Cold War years people were supposed to put candles in their windows for their brothers and sisters in the East, were ill-judged acknowledgments that there had been no natural reactions of mourning, so that the state had, as it were, to create them by decree. The imposition of mourning on a state that could no longer afford to indulge in a national day of celebration was the first sign that the Germans had managed to avoid a phase of collective melancholy (whose objective correlate would have wrecked the Morgenthau Plan), instead bringing their psychological energies to bear on “resisting the experience of a melancholy impoverishment of the self.”2
The Mitscherlichs showed that “the moral duty of mourning for the victims of our ideological aims … for the time being could be only a superficial intellectual phenomenon,” since in the circumstances the emotional collapse that psychologists might have expected had been displaced by mechanisms and strategies “very close to the protective biological strategy for survival, if not actually analogous to it.”3 While there was any perceptible questioning from outside of the nation’s right to exist, and while the population’s concrete needs stood in the way of preoccupation with their own guilt, then mourning and melancholy—both of which can be allowed expression only against a reasonably secure social background—were suppressed. That is why Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich themselves do not set out to accuse the nation of psychologically inadequate reactions in the years directly after the end of the war because of the absence of mourning. What they do consider a problem is the fact that “even later there was no proper mourning for our fellow human beings, killed in such great numbers by our own deeds.” That deficiency is perhaps most obvious in the literature written some ten or twelve years after currency reform, which shows hardly any insight into ideas of collective guilt and the need to describe the wrong that had been done. In many novels of the 1950s, for instance, egocentric sentimentality and criticisms of the new society which fall rather short of the mark are a substitu
te for the study of what happened to others among us. It is probably therefore fair to say that the authors of the 1950s, predestined to be the conscience of the new society, were as deaf to conscience as that new society itself.
Nossack: An Exception
Among the few postwar writers who felt scruples about what had happened, and tried to articulate them in a form still relevant today, is Hans Erich Nossack. In his notes made at the time, he says a great deal about the responsibility of the survivors for their younger brothers, the shame of not being among the victims, sleepless nights, the necessity of thinking things out to the end, and failure as the proper way for us to die.4 Nossack tried to understand the various categories of mourning through the example of Greek tragedy, and he realized that in a society which is too deeply afraid of feeling guilt to look back, if it is to conserve what vital energies it has left, anyone who mentions “what lies behind us” is likely to be condemned by the general public.5 Earlier than most others, Nossack understood where the difficulty of postwar writing chiefly lay: in the fact that memory was shameful and that anyone who did remember would, like Hamlet, be admonished by the new men in power.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.6
These rather diplomatic words from the queen, who feels both concern for her son and the fear of discovery, are followed by the new king’s more explicit warning that to continue mourning is “impious stubbornness,” from which we may conclude that in a political community which bears a heavy burden of guilt, wishing to remember the victims that preceded its establishment is the same thing as expressing doubts of the legitimacy of the new order, which must ignore the past and identify with the victors.
Wishful Thinking
While Nossack was trying to maintain a position of profound skepticism like Hamlet’s against the consensus of society at large, most of the outstanding writers of the new Federal Republic (for instance Richter, Andersch, and Böll) were already busy propagating the myth of the good German who had no choice but to let everything wash over him and bear it. At the heart of the apologia thus circulated was the fiction of a difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration, one that was in some way important.
As a result, in most literary works of the 1950s, which are quite often decked out with a love story in which a good German man meets a Polish or Jewish girl, the incriminating past is “reappraised” sentimentally rather than emotionally, and simultaneously the author extensively and successfully avoids—as the Mitscherlichs note in the case history appended to their essay—saying any more about the victims of the Fascist system.7 If in individual psychological cases this course of action serves “to keep signs of affection that are in short suppy anyway within the pattern of family roles,” then in literature it maintains traditional narrative forms, which could not convey an authentic attempt to mourn by identifying with the real victims.8
The Mitscherlichs rightly complain that we, the readers, who would have liked to know more about the conflicts of the survivors and be given a more honest account of them, must put up with poorly drawn figments of wishful thinking that personify innocence, characters who can bear life among their opportunistic countrymen only as isolated individuals retreating, with resignation, into a private existence without any obligations, even though we know that such noble heroes do not usually exist.9 “The gulf between literature and politics in our country is as wide as ever,” so the Mitscherlichs summed it up in the middle of the 1960s, “and so far none of our writers seems to have succeeded in influencing the political awareness and social culture of the Federal Republic one iota with his works.”10
The Mitscherlichs’ diagnosis of the inherent inadequacies of German postwar literature, which at this time was undoubtedly correct, does not register the fact that since the beginning of the 1960s, and at least since the appearance of Hochhuth’s in many respects devastating play Der Stellvertreter (“The Deputy”), several authors had begun auditing the balance sheet of German guilt.
We may account for the delay before they did so not least by remembering that the real dimensions of the genocide perpetrated by their nation were only just beginning to dawn upon men of letters unused to factual research, and the legal reconstruction of the circumstances of that mass crime had itself been delayed. The minds of authors who would be important in the further development of West German literature began to be politicized to the same extent as the legal procedures culminating in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt shed light on the functionalism of a “pedantically controlled apparatus of human destruction.”11 Die Ermittlung (“The Investigation”), by Peter Weiss, whose road to Damascus the Frankfurt trial was, is one indication of that fact, and so are the Frankfurter Vorlesungen (“Frankfurt Lectures”) given in the mid-1960s by Heinrich Böll. These last mentioned say more about Germany and the Germans, and say it more cogently, than anything in Böll’s previous literary works.
Here for the first time Böll speaks, with his by now characteristic honesty and immediacy, of the lengthy emergence of recognition and emancipation in a country where “too many murderers [go about] freely and boldly,” people “of whom it can never be proved that they are guilty of murder.” And he continues: “Guilt, remorse, penance, insight, have not become social and certainly not political categories.”12 However, he does not say that literature itself fended off possible insights longer than was good for it, and that the political and social immobility and provincialism that the Mitscherlichs connect directly with the “doggedly maintained resistance to memories”13 had its counterpart in literary immobility and provincialism.
Just as the nation as a whole concentrated all its energy and its entrepreneurial spirit “on restoring what had been destroyed, extending and modernizing our industrial potential all the way to kitchen fittings,” so the literature of the fifties, in a kind of parallel process, was notable less for a desire to investigate the truth than for a certain resentment of the miracles achieved in the economy; a situation diagnosed by the Mitscherlichs as “political apathy with, simultaneously, a high degree of emotional stimulation in the field of consumption.”14
Deliberately taking sides against political apathy instead of merely deploring the lack of foundation for this parallel to Father Malachy’s Miracle* was to a great extent the task of West German literati in the sixties. It provided them with their true éducation sentimentale as independent writers. These years of apprenticeship then found political expression in the commitment of many authors to political parties in the 1969 election.
This political commitment openly faced the question of the authenticity of democracy in Germany, where, as Böll has often reminded us, too swift and enthusiastic a readiness for reform aroused doubts of its real political substance. The commitment of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass in the 1969 election was determined not least by the suspicion that their West German fellow countrymen would have been satisfied with a Christian Democratic Unity Party continuing into the future, from which they concluded that it was crucially important to the further development of democracy in Germany for the Social Democrats to come to power.