The Island of Second Sight
Page 122
Thelen, too, gave a reading in front of Group 47, at their meeting in the Bebenhausen Abbey in Swabia in the fall of 1953. The invitation was arranged by the Dutch writer Adriaan Morriën, who, along with van Oorschot, accompanied Thelen. His performance was a remarkable failure. A few colleagues applauded his reading, but Richter, the Group’s chief spokesman in all likelihood tore Thelen’s text apart. What they had heard, Richter apparently said, would have to be radically revised, since in its present form it could not be published. Thelen later recalled that Richter’s critique culminated in the use of the term Emigrantendeutsch (“an emigrant’s German”). Thelen felt insulted, and in the coming years, he forfeited the support of this influential group, which meant that he would lack the backing that would help him succeed in Germany’s literary world.
Hans Werner Richter’s reaction to Thelen’s Island manuscript reading was, from his own point of view, understandable. Following the war, the young German generation of writers wished to separate itself from the “blood-and-soil” Nazi literary scene as well as from the narrative experiments of the pre-war writers. Their desire was, in theory, to make a wholly new start, “lean and simple, eschewing all tradition, out of fear of yesterday’s soulless language.” Their intention was, in Richter’s words, to carve “a clear-cut through the thicket of our language.” The ambition of Group 47 was to manage as closely as possible this self-imposed set of rules, so anyone who wrote like Thelen could expect to be branded as “behind the times.” Thelen’s baroque style, his enormous vocabulary, and his linguistic virtuosity must have struck these post-war “clear-cut” writers as a relic of times long past. They might have accepted raindrops, but there came a downpour.
Thus Thelen found himself mildly repulsed by what was known as the business of literature. He continued living in foreign lands, published his writings only sporadically, and refrained from making public statements about social or political topics. Meanwhile, a writer named Günter Grass—twenty-four years Thelen’s junior—had much better luck with a novel that was also baroque in style and similarly virtuosic. In 1958, he was awarded Group 47 main award for a chapter from his Tin Drum, which launched him to a remarkably successful career that culminated in 1999 with the Nobel Prize. We can thus suppose that Thelen’s Island was simply published five years too early. Perhaps Thelen wrote just the right book, but at the wrong time. Considered in retrospect, it is nonetheless regrettable that Hans Werner Richter and his Group 47 retreated all too hurriedly, instead of letting Thelen’s downpour refresh them as thoroughly as it should have.
But more broadly, the intellectual climate of the era was also hardly propitious for Thelen’s book. His resolutely anti-clerical attitude and his extremely sharp, aggressive attacks against Nazi foes, while tolerated, were not exactly welcome among average citizens and social circles in the Federal Republic. Still, the legal steps against the book were taken on other grounds.
“A book for frivolous minds”
On April 14, 1954, the publisher Peter Diederichs submitted a multi-page statement to the Düsseldorf Police Department explaining why Thelen’s book had appeared in his publishing company. What brought about this police action was an accusation against Thelen’s work by a man from Hinterzarten in the Black Forest who called the Island “pure pornography” and labeled its author a “high-society Bolshevist.” The police department eventually dropped the case, but not before it had caused Thelen and his German publisher a great deal of anxiety.
The prudish gentleman from South Germany was not alone in his opinions. While the great majority of reviewers were unfazed by the book’s erotic passages—which Thelen himself referred to as his “whore stories”—still, now and again, readers reacted with moral indignation. For example, a review of the Island in the April 23, 1954 Weltwoche carried the title “A Book for Frivolous Minds.” The author offered this explanation: “The book very often reminded me of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” tryptich by Hieronymus Bosch—not the side panels of that painting, but the central scene showing vaguely perverse activities, created by a patently infantile imagination and clearly absurd.”
The guardians of literature, with Hans Werner Richter in the forefront, had thus stated their case, and the guardians of morality had come forth with their objections. Still, none of this could prevent Thelen’s book from a broadly positive reception and sales figures that satisfied the publishers. In the Netherlands, Van Oorschot even had to bring out a reprint, and by 1967, Diederichs had published eight editions totaling 47,000 copies. This kind of success, at least, was something the Group 47 was unable to prevent.
The book went out of print in hardcover in 1967, so it seemed like a minor re-discovery at the end of the 1970s when Düsseldorf’s Claassen Publishers took over the rights to Thelen’s works. Thelen’s return to visibility was welcomed in the press, but as far as sales of his three works were concerned, readers showed a preference for the Island of Second Sight, a successful book that remained a clear favorite.
Nevertheless, a single book seldom assures a breakthrough for its author, at least not during the writer’s lifetime. To remain visible, Thelen needed to continue writing, publishing, and making himself heard in the public sphere, rather than pulling back from the marketplace of the publishing industry. Yet to anyone who confronted him with demands of this kind, he responded with a complete lack of understanding. Thelen believed that he was responsible for his literature—not its marketing.
After 1953, Thelen published only a single work comparable in size and quality with The Island of Second Sight. This was Der schwarze Herr Bahssetup (Black Mister Bahssetup), a book of recollections set in the Netherlands. Unlike the plot of the Island, which stretches out over a period of several years, the action of this book is limited to just a few days, and is quickly summarized: The writer Vigoleis, acting as an interpreter and general-purpose advisor, accompanies a visiting Brazilian legal scholar around Amsterdam and The Hague, and their experiences give rise to numerous digressions.
In the eyes of the critics, Bahssetup was not a success. Thelen’s readers had expected a continuation of the Island, with its abundance of characters and stories, but the new work was an almost bottomless collection of stray thoughts and ruminations. In his review in Die Zeit for December 27, 1956, Rolf Schroers asked, “What’s up with Vigoleis?” Schroers complained about the lack of a discernable plot in the book, and declared that the 700-page work ought to have been cut by 500 pages.
Such criticism affected Thelen deeply. The sensitive writer immediately retreated into his shell, and published very little from then on, save a few sporadic items in private and vanity presses.
With his later works, Thelen was unable to match the success of his Island. Critics gave attention to his “round” anniversaries, but otherwise, the world heard very little from the author of one of the great books of the century. Other writers were more visible on the literary scene—particularly those who remained in the spotlight by commenting on political and social topics, and those who used popular media to promote these opinions. Thelen’s appearances took place on a much smaller stage. He lived his life in private, occasionally telling his stories to invited visitors—journalists for the most part—and writing letters.
These letters weren’t mere ephemera—especially not the ones that Thelen referred to as his “storytelling” letters. Using his grand gift for narration, in these letters he performs at his very best. Even in those that deal exclusively with everyday subjects, Thelen’s talent bursts forth. If there exists a genre in which he achieves the quality of his Island of Second Sight, it is here in these letters.
Quite apart from their literary value, the letters offer a special perspective on the author’s biography. Among other things, they reveal why Thelen refused to return to Germany after World War II. Very early on, at the beginning of the 1930s, Thelen became aware of the danger represented by the Nazis. And when on Mallorca he faced attempts by the Hitler regime to co-opt him, he resisted wi
th a vehemence that was almost suicidal. Reading his letters and his Island, we can conclude that his political and humanistic inclinations were more important to him than his own life. After 1945, this meant that Thelen could not tolerate German politicians or office-holders who during the Nazi period had not, unlike himself, pointedly kept their distance from the regime. That is why he took up residence across the border in Switzerland, taking care of houses owned by a Mexican friend in Ascona and Blonay, and writing letters. In 1973 he and Beatrice rented an apartment in Lausanne-Vennes, on the shore of Lac Leman.
In 1984, Johannes Rau, the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, bestowed on Thelen the title of University Professor. And in 1985, German President Richard von Weizsäcker presented him with the Federal Cross of Merit. It was probably a combination of financial need (the Thelens were dealing with costly medical bills) and these gestures of restitution offered to him by high-ranking German politicians that persuaded Vigoleis and Beatrice in October, 1986, to move to the Lower Rhenish town of Dülken, very close to Thelen’s hometown. Thelen lived in Dülken another two and a half years, and he died on April 9, 1989, perhaps still trusting that he might outlive his reputation as the great unknown figure of German literature.
End of Journey
Even at his death, the great narrator Thelen offered us one final story. In keeping with his own wishes, his body was cremated and the urn was deposited in the waves of the North Sea. The nautical undertaker formulated an official, detailed record of the procedure, indicating the exact time of day and the precise geographical coordinates of the burial at sea, and ended with the boat’s return to home port. The final sentence of the report: “End of Journey.”
What a grandiose end to a life that was a single journey—a journey that often took the form of escapes from threatening conditions in Europe, or from the couple’s own living situations. But it was also a journey to places, people, and events that Thelen transformed into literature like no other writer, and that, so many years later, he viewed through a pair of custom-prescribed glasses. Sometimes while writing, he put these glasses aside and, figuratively, picked up a magnifying glass. In this way, the events of the past became larger and clearer. Suddenly he could see more than what he experienced years before. What came forth was what he called his “applied recollections,” and what the world now calls a literary work of the century.
Jürgen Pütz
Cologne, July 2003
Translated by Donald O. White
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