The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Both Böll and Grass saw themselves as moral guardians in postwar Germany.9 Both were involved politically with the peace movement, but the shine was rather taken off Grass’s role when it was revealed in 2006 that he had himself been a member of the Waffen-SS.10 Not everyone accepted that it was simply a case of a misguided teenager “doing his duty.”

  Among his critics was the third of the triumvirate, Martin Walser (b. 1927), who was himself in the Wehrmacht and may have joined the Nazi Party during the war. Walser was a much wittier writer than the other two, with a caustic turn of phrase, but not so well known outside Germany. His dominant theme to begin with was the effects of the rat-race on middle-class employees (Halbzeit [Halftime; 1960] and Der Einhorn [The Unicorn; 1966]), though later and more interestingly he explored the psychological consequences of living in a divided country (as in his novella Dorle und Wolf, translated as No Man’s Land; 1987). Walser didn’t want to look back, not in public: the present-day problems of Germany were too pressing. His most well-known work in the English-speaking world is Ein fliehendes Pferd (Runaway Horse; 1978).11

  MOURNING BECOMES OEDIPUS

  Böll and Grass in particular, then, had at last begun to come to grips with the Third Reich, stimulating an appetite that would finally germinate in the 1960s and 1970s. But their collective achievement went wider than that. In the words of Keith Bullivant, “Gone at last was the ultimate concern with a transcendental world, gone the allegorical, mystical treatment of the great questions of life without real regard for those of the day.”12

  By this time, however, none of them were young men and so they did not involve themselves with the student radicalism of the 1960s to anything like the same extent as, say, Max Frisch, Peter Schneider, and Peter Weiss. This younger generation was also much affected by the (Baader-Meinhof) terrorism of the early 1970s, mainly for the way in which it provoked (and therefore revealed) the still-authoritarian instincts of the government agencies. Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Frisch’s Stiller (1964) in particular explore the authoritarian ground before the internalization of democratic values around 1968 referred to in the previous chapter. This culminated in the late 1970s in what became known as the “German autumn,” when the chief prosecutor, a high-ranking banker, and the head of the Federation of German Industry were all assassinated. The gap between the writers and the government widened in times of terrorism. Writers accused the state of restricting civic rights, and politicians repeated their claim that the writers were offering “mental support to anarchism.”

  But not all German literature can be snugly fitted into this pattern of “coming to terms with the past.” The critics Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Walter Jens both drew attention to the greater readiness, from about 1970 on, of German writers to be more aware politically—in the broadest sense (civil rights, U.S. nuclear missiles on German soil, secularization), important aspects of this “new realism” being an emphasis on language (Sprachrealismus), documentary narrative (concrete realism), and the emergence of the women’s movement in Germany, as elsewhere. Probably the most significant names here were Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) and Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), both Austrian and both Catholic. In Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Player; 1983), and in particular Lust (1989), Jelinek exposed the allegedly modern worlds of film and media where women are still treated in the same old way, as often as not as sex objects.13 Jelinek’s style is deliberately deadpan in order to confront the reader, especially the male reader, with how pornography strikes women.14

  The Vaterromane, or “father novels,” which faced the burden of the parental Nazi past in a kind of collective Oedipal revolt, formed a distinct subgenre of German literature in the late 1970s. The (delayed) timing of these works rather reinforces the Mitscherliches’ conclusions.15

  THE ALLIANCE OF WRITERS AND READERS IN THE GDR

  To the east was another Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republick (DDR) or German Democratic Republic (GDR), which underwent its own trajectory in which religious instruction was abolished in schools, censorship was imposed and relaxed, imposed and relaxed, limiting subject matter and creating eventually an implicit alliance of readers and writers who learned to create and assimilate a series of codes, allegories, and subtexts that, up to a point, the authorities would accept. As a result the GDR became known as “Leserland,” the Land of Readers.16 There was an initial optimism, with authors such as Anna Seghers presenting the brand-new socialist state as a viable alternative to the Third Reich, even daring to compare it with Goethe’s and Schiller’s Weimar.17 This didn’t last. From the late 1950s on, in such works as Bruno Apitz’s best seller about Buchenwald, Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked amidst Wolves; 1958), Hermann Kant’s Die Aula (The Lecture Hall; 1965), Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W.; 1972), and in several titles by Christa Wolf, in particular Kassandra (1983), writers considered what was being lost, aesthetically, because so much of the communist state was centralized. Here, as later, artistic license was allowed where direct criticism was not.18

  It was to be expected that women writers would shine in East Germany because it was (officially, at any rate) committed to the equality of the sexes, backed up by laws governing such things as maternity leave and day care. But that overlooks the fact that East Germany occupied much of the territory of what had been Prussia, where most men were conservative traditionalists. This made conflict over sex roles more in-grained there than anywhere else. And it was these factors, or some of them, which conspired to produce Christa Wolf, a writer who, perhaps, could not have existed anywhere else. Her Nachdenken über Christa T. (Reflections on Christa T.; 1968), is the pivotal work, a spare narrative in which the eponymous Christa T. goes in pursuit of a form of Bildung, a fuller realization of her self than is allowed by the drab confines of the communist world she inhabits, and where the terminal illness of her close friend became a metaphor for the GDR.19 Most controversial of all was Was bleibt (What Remains), a book that Wolf wrote in 1979, but that was not released until 1990. It gives a semifictional account of her surveillance by the Stasi and her adjustment to that life. However, because the text was only released after the Wende (the “turn” or reunification of Germany), Wolf was attacked for not being brave enough to “go public” from within the GDR.20

  A number of books, as Martin Swales has pointed out, specifically addressed the psychological and cultural differences between East and West Germany; among them are Uwe Johnson’s Zwei Ansichten (Two Views; 1965), Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper; 1982), and Thorsten Becker’s Die Bürgschaft (The Pledge; 1985).21 Johnson, who settled in England, showed in his books how there can be no simple, single truth about character, an argument (or message) with more resonance in Germany than elsewhere.

  One of the biggest cultural differences between East and West, as will already be clear, was freedom of expression, a matter on which the GDR shot itself in the foot in 1976 when it stripped Wolf Biermann of his citizenship, “because he told too many uncomfortable truths.” Biermann told these truths in poems and songs, and he and the other Liedermacher, or Song Makers, were an important dimension in politicizing young people on both sides of the Wall in the late 1970s and 1980s. Biermann’s expulsion provoked a wave of immigration of literary figures to the West and was followed by the passing of the “Lex Heym,” a law criminalizing any material that “might” damage the state—this was after Stefan Heym had released his novel Collin in the West in 1979, in which he attacked the corruption of Stalinism in the 1950s.22 Others kept up the pressure. In books such as Peter Handke’s Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (The Hour of True Feeling; 1975), Christoph Meckel’s Suchbild: Über meinen Vater (Picture Puzzle: About My Father; 1980), and Volker Braun’s Hinze-Kunze-Roman (Every Tom, Dick, and Harry Novel; 1985), the dominant theme was the links between political restrictions and a deadened psychology.

  That makes it seem as though criticism of East Germany from within was—if not widespread—at
least active. This did not stop Günter Kunert from arguing that the GDR would have collapsed much earlier if so many writers had not constantly legitimized it, and Peter Schneider agreed. After 1989, incredible as it may seem now, more than one East German writer went on record as regretting the demise of “a utopian alternative” to the federal/capitalist state. No less telling was Christa Wolf’s argument, in an interview she gave in 1990, that “the great ideologies had not only become more and more dubious, but also less important, no longer offering a guide as to moral values or behaviour.”23 Such views were mocked mercilessly by Enzensberger for their anguish over lost “fundamental experiences” and “slow-moving Sundays.”24

  THE DIMENSIONS OF GERMAN SUFFERING

  Once again we should remind ourselves not to shoehorn postwar German writing into one or two simple patterns (“We didn’t just have autumn and winter,” said the East German actress Corinna Harfouch, “we had spring and summer too”).25 Here we must mention a breed of angry writers, people such as the Austrians Thomas Bernhard, Felix Mitterer, and Gerhard Roth, and the Swiss Peter Bichsel. Bernhard died in 1989, just as unification occurred, but not before he (and others like him) had published a raft of books denouncing his country as “a vile place,” a cold and isolated “sump of immorality” that had never addressed its past. His titles reflect his verdict—Der Keller: eine Entziehung (The Cellar: A Withdrawal; 1979); Die Kälte: eine Isolation (The Coldness: An Isolation; 1981); and Auslöschung: ein Zerfall (Extinction: A Degeneration; 1986).26

  Toward the end of the century, three authors emerged who paralleled Böll, Grass, and Walser. Bernhard Schlink’s best-known book is Der Vorleser (The Reader; 1995), set in the 1950s and telling the story of a young teenager, later a law student, who has an affair with Hanna, an older woman who is an uneducated tram conductor. Only after we are well into the book do we discover that Hanna has a secret past as a guard in a concentration camp. By the time of the revelation, we have responded to her as a sympathetic character, but Schlink’s underlying point is that Hanna admits her guilt and that in Germany, in the immediate postwar years, it was easier for those guilty of lesser crimes to concede their culpability than it was for those responsible for much greater wrongdoing. For Schlink, distinguishing between the greater and lesser evils is an important element in overcoming the past. In its way, this brings the Mitscherlich argument full circle, that the greater the crimes a war criminal has committed, the more likely he or she is to be mired in psychic immobilism. The character of Hanna, based in part on a real woman, was deconstructed by Tom Bower in the London Sunday Times, showing how such a figure—unable to read and write—could not have existed in the Third Reich.27

  W. G. Sebald, in Austerlitz (2001), his last and best-known book, tells the story of a child evacuated from Prague to Wales in 1939 who goes in search of his past. This journey, which at one stage includes a single sentence ten pages long, describing a visit to the concentration camps, what is left of them, brings him face to face, in a calm tongue reminiscent of Goethe, with German suffering, a theme Sebold returned to in Luftkrieg und Literatur (translated as On the Natural History of Destruction; 1999), where he gives a vivid description of the firestorm unleashed by the Allies over Hamburg in 1943. This theme was explored even more starkly in Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire; 2002), six hundred pages about the imbalance in the number of dead in the bombing raids. In particular, 80,000 died in two night raids on Hamburg and Dresden, more deaths from bombing than in the entire United Kingdom during the whole war. Overall, 600,000 Germans died from the bombing, more than ten times the British deaths. Friedrich was not trying to excuse the Nazis, nor being “dangerously soft”—he had, in 1984, in Die kalte Amnestie (Cold Amnesty), cataloged how the West German establishment “remained infected” by Nazism in the years after the war. But he did draw attention to the fact that the Allied mass killing brought no military gain.28

  In the same year, Günter Grass published Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). This again dealt with memory and the question of German suffering through the sinking of the passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff, torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in January 1945, with the loss of 9,000 passengers. This made it the largest-ever maritime disaster, with losses six times those of the Titanic.29

  As Steve Crawshaw has said, these authors are not attempting to “air-brush” unpleasant facts out of the picture: German suffering and Jewish suffering are not equal. “They are, however, both real…Germany is sometimes seen as unchanging. In reality, it is a nation of crabwalkers—moving, more rapidly than Germany itself sometimes seems to notice, towards the future and towards the creation of a Germany that we have not seen before.”30

  Volker Weidermann, editor of the arts and literature section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, has become something of an authority on recent literary history in Germany. In 2008 he published Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher (The Book of Burnt Books), an account of the auto da fé on May 10, 1933, when, prompted by students, the Nazis burned the works of ninety-four German and thirty-seven foreign writers. Weidermann tracked down the surviving German authors to rescue several from oblivion. Two years earlier, he had published Lichtjahre (Light Years), in which he identified the latest raft of German writers worth reading, among them Ingo Schulze, 33 Augenblicke des Glücks (33 Moments of Happiness; 1995), Thomas Brussig, Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us; 1995), and Thomas Meinecke, whose work tries to bridge pop culture and high seriousness.

  Weidermann also devotes space to Walter Kempowski, who was born in Rostock, arrested in 1948 for smuggling documents to the West that showed the Russians were breaking strategic agreements with the Americans, and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor. Released after eight years, Kempowski, whose novels were popular in the 1970s, set about chronicling Germany’s twentieth-century tragedy via stories of ordinary people, amassing an archive of 8,000 diaries and 300,000 photographs. He also wrote a series of novels going back in German history, the account of which was for him far from heroic. Perhaps because of this, recognition was slow in coming but, at his death in 2007, his reputation was rising.31

  POETRY, SILENCE, AND INTIMACY AFTER AUSCHWITZ

  In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously announced that to write poetry after Auschwitz “is barbaric,” but in one sense in Germany there was more of a need for poetry after the war than ever before. The nature of guilt, of grief, of shame, is a private as well as a public matter, and their expression in intimate terms has been as much a feature of postwar German poetry as has anger at what was done in Germany’s name.

  Early on, Wolfgang Weyrauch identified a need for what he called Kahlschlag, a “clearing of the terrain,” a purging of the language, disposal of the “rubble” of the past and a need to invent a language cleansed and freshened but at the same time worthy. This is the context for the first truly successful German poem realized after Auschwitz, Günter Eich’s strikingly simple “Inventur” (Inventory; 1948), notable for its “bald stock-taking of existence” in which deliberately flat language is used as a form of cleanliness, discarding the traditions of meter, rhythm, and metaphor, poetry without the furniture of poetry.32

  In the 1950s Gottfried Benn’s Statische Gedichte (Static Poems) became known to the public. He had continued to write in secret, although forbidden from doing so by the Nazis, and the collection had circulated privately. In one of the best, called “Farewell,” Benn conceded that, early in the 1930s, he had betrayed “my word, my light from heaven” and that redemption was impossible: “There are only two things: emptiness and the constructed self.” As Nicholas Boyle sums it up, “If the self has become pure construction, not made out of interactions with its past experiences or with a given world, there is no place for poetry as it had been practised in Germany from Goethe to Lasker-Schüler.”33 In his 1951 essay Probleme der Lyrik (The Problems of Poetry), Benn outlined his view that art obeys its own rules and that poetry in particular should aim for intimacy and privacy so as to remain beyond the reach of po
litics; poetry, he said, is a closed world with its own rules, and in remaining so, it becomes redemptive.34 This hermeticism proved influential for writers such as Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Rose Ausländer.35

  Celan’s best-known work, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), was written in the year war ended, when the full extent of the Holocaust was becoming known. The poem, which begins “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” (“Black milk of daybreak”) and climaxes with the terrible phrase “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (“Death is a master from Germany”), is a commemoration of the death-camps, its title reflecting (and anticipating) the dangerous ambiguity that would come to afflict memory of the crime: a fugue is a piece of music, a work of art, but also a flight, an avoidance, a psychological illness, and (it can be) an escape.36 Celan’s style gradually became terser—he called this “straightening,” Engführung. Later still, he argued that true poetry reflects a natural “tendency towards silence,” and this too may be understood as poetry after Auschwitz. Celan, who was Jewish, committed suicide in 1970.