Schlump

by Hans Herbert Grimm

  Today, this exuberant leaflet can be found on a desk on the second floor of the house with a crack in the wall. Here was Hans Herbert Grimm’s study. The desk is still by the window with a view of the Thuringian countryside. Beside the leaflet are manuscripts, diaries and letters. At the top of the pile is a letter written by Grimm on 3 March 1929 to his lifelong friend Alfred. By now Schlump had been in bookshops for a few months, but had sold only 5,500 copies. The author’s mood alternates between disenchantment and hope, tending more towards the former. For only a few weeks beforehand, a book had appeared on the market that attracted everyone’s attention, a book that Ullstein-Verlag was doing its utmost to turn into the biggest literary success in the Weimar Republic, a book that was selling 10,000 copies per day, a book that also had as its subject the Great War: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

  Remarque’s novel was talked about with enthusiasm, but also angrily denounced by war veterans and ‘Stahlhelm’ activists. And this was just the beginning of the triumphant and unparalleled success it would achieve both in Germany and across the globe. It soon became the German anti-war novel par excellence, stirring discussion about the whole intellectual and moral foundation of the new German republic. A documentary work, a quintessential work in clear language and with a clear message. A book that would dominate the market and debate for a long time to come. Grimm no doubt suspected this and hoped for a different outcome. He wrote to Alfred about Remarque’s novel and about another book that appeared at the same time on a similar subject, Ludwig Renn’s War: ‘Once you get beyond the sensation of the material, neither of these works is in competition with Schlump, in my opinion. For now, the need for realistic depictions of the central event in our entire generation’s lives swamps any artistic aspirations as far as this material is concerned. I personally think that the time is ripe for Schlump, but I know it’s going to take longer than my patience would like.’

  The ‘sensation of the material’ endured, however. There was still much to tell of the story of the Great War. The majority of war-related books that appeared at the beginning of the 1920s were heroic accounts of the fighting, – heroic, clinical accounts of the deeds of German soldiers in the field, beginning with Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel in 1920.

  Many others followed. The shock of defeat was still fresh; readers and no doubt authors, too, needed to make sense of the heavy losses, the pain and the deprivations of the four-year conflict. It is not until the second half of the 1920s that we see the first proper literary engagement with World War I: the questions of everyday life during the war, heroism and futility. Arnold Zweig began this process with his 1927 novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa. After this came Ludwig Renn’s War in 1928, Oskar Wöhrle’s Querschläger. Das Bumserbuch. Aufzeichnungen eines Kanoniers (Ricochets. The Gunner’s Book. The Account of an Artilleryman), Alexander Moritz Frey’s Die Pflasterkästen (The Stretcher-Bearers), Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (Army Report) (all 1929), and Adrienne Thomas’s 1930 Katrin Becomes a Soldier. Most of these novels were documentary in character; their portrayal of the war and military action was stripped bare, unadorned and unheroic. This style came as a shock to the reader and was a provocation to many who wished to preserve the heroic memory of their own deeds or those of fallen relatives.

  When, just a few years later, the books of so-called un-German authors started to be burned, it is not surprising that most of these anti-war novels were at the top of the list for the bonfire. Schlump burned along with them, the book whose authorship was known to practically nobody, and which had not received the attention from an anti-war readership that it deserved. It had come to the attention of the National Socialist students, however, who hadn’t forgotten just how explosive in nature these pages were.

  Schlump is different from all the other war books of its time. It is a fairy tale with an emphasis on the truth, a sort of docu-fable. A book in which the hero goes through hell, almost losing his belief in the goodness of the world along the way, but then returns at the end to a sort of idyll. Schlump’s heroism is a heroism of resistance to hostility, misanthropy and disillusionment. He is an illusionist. He has experienced the worst a human being can experience here on earth, but he wants to go on living, wants to walk tall again in the world, and for that he needs a belief in humanity. Without that, we can infer from the book, there can be no Schlump, no Schlump alive in this world.

  What kind of a young man is Schlump, the optimist who sets out into the world by going to war? A fairy-tale hero, somewhere between Tom Thumb, the Valiant Little Tailor and Hans in Luck. A boy who is saddled with the daft nickname given to him by a policeman; he’s known as Schlump his entire life.

  He goes to war with all the hopes and dreams harboured by his comrades before him. Only all his dreams actually come true. Having arrived in France, he’s put in charge of a small commune at the age of only seventeen, the girls fall in love with him, and he tries to administer justice in his little world. He does administer justice. No prison in Loffrande? Never mind, the ruler of the commune will organise one at the other end of the town. What is going on here? What are we to make of this ridiculous, implausible idyll in the middle of the war? Or is it reality?

  It is a stage, an initial stage on Schlump’s journey through the world. At this point the war is still just a rattling of the window panes, a distant thunder of cannon. As everyone here knows, only fools end up in the trenches. And Schlump is certainly no fool; perhaps just a little over-optimistic, a little naïve, a little too philanthropic. It is odd that in this wartime world there appears to be no place for chauvinism and nationalistic hatred. And when later, as a recruit moving around France, Schlump is surprised by the hostile looks from the French standing at the roadside, he thinks, Oh, I see; they don’t know me here yet.

  It is easy to underestimate this novel; indeed the reader is even invited to do this. Schlump progresses through the war as if in a dream, floating from girl to girl and from adventure to adventure. When he finally arrives at the Front – the real war – he is treated by his superiors like a sack of peas. Then the war explodes before his very eyes. The description and depiction of sheer horror runs to no more than a few pages, but they are all the more devastating for that, branding themselves more deeply and intensely on the memory when juxtaposed against the idyllic background of the wandering tailor. The limbs of the two British soldiers flying above the heads of the Germans. The brain on top of the skull, served up as if in a restaurant. The German soldier calling out for his mother and stuck in the barbed wire, who Schlump can only rescue dead. The trumpeter with a death wish. The flare exploding in the belly of the British soldier – the gory version of a cancelled pregnancy and birth, or a child of the war: death. And then that completely surreal scene illustrating the utter madness of war: Michael in combat with the British soldier. Holding the Tommy tight to his chest, Michael grabs a grenade from his belt, stuffs it between himself and the Brit, pulls out the pin, and the two of them, still firmly entwined, are blown to bits together. A brutal love scene, a rape that ends in death. ‘Michel’s head rolls where they’ve just been fighting, ending the right way up. Eyes wide open, it looks over at Schlump, appearing as if it is trying to smile.’

  What about Schlump? Does he remain cheerful, unaffected, an eternal Schlump in Luck? It seems as if he’s wearing an impregnable coat against the war, as if he’s protected by an invisible skin. Only twice do we see holes appear in this skin. The first occasion, shortly after Michel’s dance of death, is when he briefly becomes enraged by the appetising smell of frying coming from the officers’ tents: ‘Schlump talked himself deeper and deeper into this bitterness; all of a sudden he saw everything with new eyes. He worked himself up and felt unhappy for the first time in his life. It was as if he’d awoken from a deep sleep; for the first time in his life he was thinking seriously about himself and the world.’

  Seeing everything with new eyes. It is the eyes of the reader through which Schlump momenta
rily looks on from the sidelines. A reality shock for the novel’s hero. For Schlump, the episode seems to have no significant effect. For the reader, however, it is a decisive moment in which our suspicions are confirmed that this is no fairy tale, but a report from a world totally out of joint. Immediately afterwards, Schlump shows his vulnerability a second time in another brief outburst of awareness: ‘For a moment he lost his golden childish innocence. But it didn’t last long.’

  Schlump is an anti-coming-of-age novel from a world in freefall. Everything collapses; one man walks on. Like an astronaut in zero gravity. Brief moments of lucidity are dwarfed into irrelevance by the dreamlike life surrounding everything. It truly is madness. What is reality? In all seriousness, is it when an innocent young pregnant girl crosses a market square only to be blown to bits by a bomb? And when a Joan of Arc figure calls out to our hero on the opening page of the novel, chooses him and then regularly encounters him in endlessly different guises, wrapping him in a protective cloak – is that unreality? Is that the fairy tale? The docu-fable Schlump repeatedly challenges the reader to establish what is fable and what documentary. The rule here is that the unlikely is always the documentary part, the part that depicts so-called reality.

  Following the scene in the market square where the girl is blown sky high, Schlump lays a curse on the world: ‘This entire war is nothing but the cruellest, vilest slaughter, and if mankind can put up with such an atrocity for years, or stand by and look on, well, it deserves nothing but contempt. But he who fashioned mankind, he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself, for his creation is an utter disgrace!’ Schlump voices his outrage in the presence of a newly arrived character, a messenger from the world of reality, who in a nutshell outlines the value of the war, using his historical analysis to dismiss the human sacrifice as irrelevant and statistically insignificant. The philosopher Gack, with his rational yet utopian visions of a peacefully united Europe after the war, is mad. A crazed man. Not someone the future will listen to.

  Then the war is over – over and lost. Everything has disintegrated, producing the craziest, worst outcome, and yet the Schlump idyll remains as unaffected as before. ‘He was filled with a wonderful sense of bliss, delightfully certain that everything would turn out all right in the end.’ This wonderful certainty is the thing that even Schlump’s author cannot comprehend. He attributes it to his hero because that is the magical power of the author, because he knows that without this belief there cannot be an optimist like Schlump in this world. Belief, belief, belief. Despite all probability. Despite everything that has happened during the war years. When Schlump returns to Germany, he is amazed that ‘everything was still running so smoothly’. His surprise is short-lived. More than anything over these years he has learned how to be amazed. The world has not changed and will not change. The crucial thing is to survive.

  This Schlumpian sunny optimism is the triumph of a resounding ‘nevertheless’. The sunniness of the will, in defiance of a mighty darkness. Even reading Schlump today, we find this darkness present everywhere. It is a book balancing on the edge of the abyss. Down below, where the hero refuses to look, darkness, despair and oblivion lie in wait.

  We are back in the room in Altenburg, at the desk with the diaries and letters. Letters from the field, too, from France, where not only Schlump but his creator, Hans Herbert Grimm, experienced the war. Grimm wrote countless letters from the Front. To his mother, and especially to his friend Alfred, his soulmate, with whom he enjoyed a literary, philosophical and intellectual friendship. Both men experienced the war similarly, as an inner phenomenon. In March 1918, Grimm wrote to his friend from Maubeuge:

  Dear Alfred,

  Where are you? Outside the weir is rushing. Will we ever succeed in escaping from the yoke of human beings? We’re suffering at the hands of people, irrespective of who these are. Human beings are tormenting us. Where are you now? I’m worried about you.

  What else is there to say? I’m no longer alone. What happened to those secret evenings when a thousand little nothings came to life? In which direction are we going?

  Yours,

  Hans

  There are many other letters here. A good number of these speak of solitude and the desire for solitude, of perseverance, and of admiration for France and the French. When God created the French, he drank a bottle of Burgundy beforehand, Grimm writes to his mother. And ‘The French boys are the smartest of all. They stand in the middle of the street and laugh at everyone.’

  We can hear Schlump in this voice, Schlump’s wisdom and Schlump’s desperation. Just laugh at everyone, everyone and everything, the entire ridiculous world. ‘The enthusiasm of desperation’ is how Schlump describes it, and at another point surprise is expressed at ‘the peculiar war . . . going on here’. Peculiar war – drôle de guerre, as the French themselves would call the coming conflict against Germany, those quiet months following the declaration of war in autumn 1939, when these countries were at war again, but a war without hostilities. A peculiar war. What war isn’t peculiar?

  Hans Herbert Grimm returned from the Front to begin his middle-class existence. He married Elisabeth, with whom he had a son, Frank, got his PhD, became an English, French and Spanish teacher, and wrote in his spare time. A short story, ‘Schlafittelchen’, appeared in Vivos Voco, the journal published by Herman Hesse. And then came Schlump with Kurt Wolff, the publisher of Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, René Schickele, Georg Trakl and many others.

  Schlump never became a great success. Remarque’s novel dominated discussion and the market. And when the fuss had died down, Schlump had almost been forgotten. The book was translated, appearing in both Britain and America. The English novelist J. B. Priestley wrote in The Times that it was ‘the best of German war books so far (excluding Grischa)’. But major success was elusive. And as the author didn’t want to lose his anonymity, there was little he could do about it.

  He remained a teacher. In Germany the National Socialists came to power, Schlump was burned and banned, and at home Hans Herbert Grimm bricked up his book in the wall. He was afraid, afraid of being discovered, afraid of imprisonment and persecution. His wife advised him to flee; she said she was prepared for it, and also prepared to give piano lessons to feed the family. But he wanted to stay. Wanted to stay in his beloved Altenburg and keep teaching for as long as possible. He joined the NSDAP so he could live in safety. According to his pupils, he taught tolerance in his lessons – so far as this was possible – recommending books written by banned authors whose works had been burned, and getting the girls he taught to read them. He hated being photographed. But in the few pictures that do exist from the time, he looks terribly happy amongst his pupils, with a round face, round glasses and thin hair.

  Then he had to go to war again, working as an interpreter on the Western Front. During his second war he kept a sort of diary for his son, later having it bound in red linen. Here it is before me on the desk, a pressed clover leaf on the first page, followed by the dedication ‘To my son, not actually for reading – for that would be asking too much – but as a crazy souvenir from my second time at war. 1942.’ This is how it begins:

  Dear Frank,

  If one wishes to live life sincerely and gracefully – surely the most useful form of this great art – one must be generous, letting others express their opinions first, listening to them and not contradicting until the following day, and only if one is sure that they no longer know their own minds. If they do still know their own minds, then one must leave them to it, and yet do what one must according to one’s convictions.

  For it is impossible that two people can agree completely (and profoundly) on everything . . . Ultimately we are all alone, enclosed in a fixed shell with no exits. And each of us leads his life more or less inertly, more or less conscious and awake. This is a salutary realisation that makes life easier and spares one failure. Which is why it’s in equal measures cheerful, colourful, wonderful and thrilling. One must never let oneself be troubled
by this pleasure in colourfulness and incomprehensible beauty, which is offered up at every turn. Rather one must be grateful for it anywhere and at any time, sure in the knowledge that it is the inexhaustible outpouring of a secret harmony flowing through everything. And one must connect with this secret reality, the harmony of the universe, which one finds in the smallest and largest things. Then it flows into you, fills you, flows through you, shines from within you, finding you secret allies who will strengthen your soul with their power and make you lissom and flexible when life is tempestuous, felling and splitting mighty boughs.

  The letter to his son goes on like this for many pages, on thin paper and in black type.

  When the war was over, Grimm returned home to Altenburg. A new political system was established. On account of his NSDAP membership, he was prevented from resuming his career as a teacher, in spite of the fact that his former pupils were willing to vouch for him. It didn’t even help that he finally revealed himself to be the author of the anti-war novel Schlump, and that his claim received official confirmation. This document is on the coffee table too, the letterhead reading ‘Mayor of Altenburg’. Below this: ‘I confirm that Herr Grimm, the schoolmaster resident at Braugartenweg 9, Altenburg, is the author of the well-known anti-war novel Schlump, published by Kurt-Wolff-Verlag in Munich. This novel also fell victim to the Nazi auto-da-fé in 1933. Knittel. Head of the Cultural Department.’ The head of the district authority, too, penned an official letter in which, besides highlighting the ‘anti-fascist and anti-militaristic leaning’ of Schlump, he wrote, ‘Moreover, I know from my daughter – a pupil of Dr Grimm – that he made no secret of his anti-fascist stance at school. In my opinion Dr Grimm cannot be regarded as a Nazi.’