The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  These ghostly presences and the unstable functions of memory and time constitute the slight, ghostly framework across which the fictional characters and events of this novel are deployed. However, I have had a photograph of my great-grandmother close by as I wrote this book, and it has been her firm gaze and wry lips that have watched me and reminded me that this story is not hers.

  There are other hauntings. The fictional character of the Social Democrat Wolf Bloch with whom my character Josephina has a son (Wolf Wenczel) in 1880 while on board ship to New Zealand owes much to an historical person called Johannes Wedde (1843–1890), a remote relative whose memorial portrait is included on the Plakat Sozialistengesetz 1890, along with those of Karl Marx and other deceased comrades. Johannes Wedde was a prolific correspondent and writer and now mostly forgotten poet, and it is his lengthy and impassioned paean to the doomed Paris Commune of 1871, ‘Zum Gedächtnis’, that I have appropriated to my character Wolf Bloch, along with a couple of verses from Johannes Wedde’s poem to his wife, ‘An meine Frau’ (Hamburg, 25 October 1883). The Wedde household in Hamburg also included his sister Theodora whose name I have appropriated to Wolf Bloch’s sister in this fiction. She published a memoir of her brother, Johannes Wedde: Gedenkblätter von seiner Schwester, in 1891. The household was well known for its hospitality and as a meeting place for Social Democrats. I like to think the household would have extended its hospitality to my story, and included in that Gastfreundschaft some fragments of historical correspondence involving Friedrich Engels.

  My character Theodora is credited with having written ‘An Appeal to Women’ for the Brisbane-based Social-Democratic Vanguard. The tract was in fact written by the pseudonymous ‘Comrade Mary’, whose name was frequently associated with another Brisbane-based Social Democrat, codename ‘Comrade Eznuk’ – ‘Eznuk’ is ‘Kunze’ spelled backwards, and was the name of the German immigrant Hugo Kunze, like my character Wolf Bloch a refugee from the anti-socialist repressions of Chancellor Bismarck that began in 1878. I thank ‘Comrade Mary’ for providing Theodora Bloch with her Vanguard exhortation.

  I have attributed some anonymous film reviews in the Evening Post from 1920 to my character Greta, the granddaughter of Josephina in my story. I thank the anonymous critic and hope that she or he would have wished Greta well in her career as a journalist.

  A more egregious appropriation is the text, towards the end of this fiction, attributed to my character Freddy Wenczel. This is the ‘New Theory of the Universe’ that was in fact written by my great-grandmother’s youngest child, Frederick Alexander ‘Fritz’ Wedde, the family’s mystery man, who disappeared without trace for many years before emerging in Torreon, Mexico, in 1958, shortly before his death. I have appropriated a fragment of my own life story by relocating my fictional long-lost Freddy to a place where I lived as a child in the 1950s and revisited in 2005, the upper reaches of the Karnifuli River in what is now called Bangladesh. The historical Fritz is said to have built and lived in an observatory tower in Mexico from which he looked at the stars. I like to think that the historical Fritz would have been pleased to see his tract republished, since he ended it with the irresistible hope that ‘it may be of interest sometime in the future’.

  I could not have written this book without the generous support of Creative New Zealand grants. In addition, the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency in 2015/16 allowed me to spend time in the Staatsbibliothek Berlin archives where I was able to read about Johannes Wedde and to access his poems and correspondence, and to understand the situation of Social Democrats through his eyes and those of his sister Theodora. The Residency also allowed me to visit Kiel in the north where my great-grandmother was born. It was through this visit that I understood the odd connection between that family and Kiel’s poet, Klaus Groth, whose poem ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen’ (‘How cosy was the little spot’) became the book’s meme for how memory both works and fails.

  I acknowledge the critical sympathy of my wife Donna Malane, who read this book in instalments and always improved not only the part she had just read but also as a consequence what came next.

  Finally, very grateful thanks to the book’s marvellous editor, Jane Parkin; and to its publisher Fergus Barrowman for his invaluable encouragement.