by Hans Keilson
And so, occasionally interrupted by the demands of school and my work as a musician, I started to tell the story of myself and of my parents in the small-town capital of the district of Mark Brandenburg, and later in Berlin—the story of an independent small businessman and his economic downfall, set in the political, social, and economic upheaval of the years after the First World War, the period of the Weimar Republic, the hyperinflation, and the rise of National Socialism. It was a piece of self-analysis within the narrow range of my understanding and abilities, and a description of broader developments insofar as I could grasp them. But it was only one part of my self-portrait. I wrote the other part, about being young and Jewish in the Germany of that time, only later, in the Netherlands, as the novel The Death of the Adversary, which appeared in Germany in 1959. In the United States it was one of Time magazine’s Best Books of the Year for 1962.
So, in 1933, my book was published. I was able to attend a reception at the villa in the Grunewald—I gave “Tutti” a big bouquet of flowers and shook “Samy’s” hand; “We’ll bring out one of your books.” Aside from that, I stood lost in a crowd of people, most of whom I did not know. A slim, wiry man stalked confidently around the room—it was Leonhard Frank—and there was Hermann Sinsheimer, who wanted to serialize my novel in the Berliner Tageblatt (before changing his mind). I met Richard Huelsenbeck there as well: the cofounder of Dadaism, later a psychiatric colleague of mine. The press had published a book of his at the same time as mine.
I stuck close to Joachim Maass and Karl Jakob Hirsch (author of Kaiserwetter), whom I’d already spoken to by chance on the way there, and to Kurt Heuser, whom I knew through Stefan Grossmann and his daughter, Maya, a schoolmate (and more to me than that). My book was banned in 1934—the last debut by a Jewish writer from the old S. Fischer Verlag. That same year, I passed my medical exams and was likewise banned from practicing medicine.
I switched over to the other career I had studied for: that of a gymnastics, sports, and swimming instructor state-certified by the Prussian College for Physical Education in Spandau. From that point on I taught at the Landschulheim Caputh, various schools for the Jewish community in Berlin, and the Theodor Herzl School. There, on the Kaiserdamm, I ran on burning hot asphalt in the “Potsdam-Berlin” five-hundred-meter relay race for the Jewish sports club Bar Kochba. In October 1936, my future wife, Gertrud Manz, and I left Germany; the Nuremberg Laws had put us at risk.
Since then I have lived in Holland, where I survived the war and persecution in hiding, working as a doctor (under a fake name) for the Vrije Groepen Amsterdam resistance group. Life did indeed go on, but I was far removed from literature, although I did publish in a few Dutch-language anthologies under the pseudonym Benjamin Cooper, and also started pouring out German-language poems, some of which, to my great surprise, the Dutch literary journal De Gemeenschap [The Community] published under the fake name “Alexander Keiland.” I sent them to Peter Huchel after the war, and he published the poem “To the Tune of an Old Nigun” in Sinn und Form. I wrote the short novel Comedy in a Minor Key while I was still living in hiding, and Querido, the German-language émigré press in Holland, published it in 1947. It was practically impossible to import the press’s products into Germany, due to currency problems.
It was thanks to the poems published in De Gemeenschap that my parents were allowed to come to the Netherlands from Germany after Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) in Berlin. My father, as a decorated soldier who had fought on the front lines in World War I, appeared with my mother on a special exchange list in 1943, but no such exchange took place. The lives of both my parents were ended in Birkenau.
After the war, until 1970, I worked with other survivors for Le Ezrat Ha’Jeled (To Help the Children), an organization for Jewish war orphans. I passed my medical exams again, in the Netherlands, as a neurologist and psychoanalyst. In the summer of 1967, I joined the staff of the Amsterdam University child psychology clinic. There, with the support of the clinical psychologist Herman R. Sarphatie and later the mathematician Arnold Goedhart, I began the studies that would eventually become my dissertation in 1979. In 1934, in Berlin, I had been told that if I received my Ph.D. in medicine I would have had to renounce my citizenship, so I decided not to; forty-five years later, I finished what I had started. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and the Interior supported my work, which was published as a monograph in the Enke Verlag’s series “Psychiatry Forum” in Stuttgart, in 1979. I spent eleven years sitting at a desk, working on it, which must be why I eventually gave it such a long title: Sequential Traumatization in Children: A Descriptive-Clinical and Quantitative-Statistical Follow-up Investigation of the Fate of Jewish War Orphans in the Netherlands. In publishing this book, I finally said the kaddish—the prayer for the dead—that I had been unable to say for so long.
In addition to Sinn und Form, I also published poems in Castrum Peregrini, Neue Rundschau, and Die Zeit, contributed to anthologies, and published academic work in both German and Dutch—not much, all things considered. I wrote countless reports and case studies, though, in the language of my profession, to convince judges and other authorities of the suffering that had befallen the children and adults I treated or studied during the dark years. This is the work that fundamentally shaped my personal relationship to literature.
When I arrived in Holland in 1936, I saw my novel in the public library. Had it hurried on ahead of me, or dragged me along after it? Its title, Life Goes On: was it a challenge, a premonition, an incantation conjuring up the future, or just an ironic bon mot? In May 1983, I gave a speech in Osnabrück as the PEN Center’s representative for German-language authors in exile, at the opening for the “Week of Burned Books.” Written on the wall behind me were all the names of the authors forced into exile. Many of these authors were no longer alive. My name was there too; coincidentally, I was standing directly under it when I gave my speech. I had never been particularly convinced that I belonged on such a list, but I realized on that occasion that it was not just illustrious men and women who had fled the country: the lesser-known authors, the young beginners, left Germany too. Their only fame is to have had their books burned or banned, along with those by Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and so many others.
Since the war, I have twice been back to visit Bad Freienwalde (now in East Germany) and revisit my memories. It is human nature to forget, and to be forgotten. It is this fact that legitimates days of commemoration.
Literature is the memory of humanity. Anyone who writes remembers, and anyone who reads takes part in those experiences.
Books can be reprinted. The fact is, there are archival copies of books.
Not of people.
HANS KEILSON
Bussum, the Netherlands, spring 1984
Also by Hans Keilson
Comedy in a Minor Key
The Death of the Adversary
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1933, 2005 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
Translation copyright © 2012 by Damion Searls
All rights reserved
Originally published in 1933 by S. Fischer Verlag, Germany, as Das Leben geht weiter
Revised German edition published in 2005 by S. Fischer Verlag, Germany
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keilson, Hans, 1909–2011
[Leben geht weiter. English]
Life goes on / Hans Keilson; translated from the German by Damion Searls. —1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-19195-5 (alk. paper)
1. Keilson, Hans, 1909–2011—Fiction. 2. Germany—History—1918–1933—Fiction. I. Searls, Damion. II. Title.
PT2621.E24 L413 2012
833'.912—dc23<
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2012012326
www.fsgbooks.com
e-ISBN: 9781429947763