Book Review - On Writing and Politics 1967-1983 by Gunter Grass

 On Writing and Politics by Gunter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim, introduction by Salman Rushdie

London: Secker & Warburg, 1985 (first published in German 1984)        ISBN 0436187736

Those few who may read my blog regularly will know that I've been on a bit of a Gunter Grass kick this year, having read The Rat and Peeling the Onion, and recalling my reading earlier of both The Tin Drum and The Flounder. Grass's individuality cannot be doubted, and in On Writing and Politics we can see, in snippets, how his individual take on writing developed. 

The items in this book are a combination of written pieces and addresses, and/ always circle back to the obsessions that Grass maintained all his life - trying to understand the German story of World War Two, progressing his view of democratic socialism via incremental parliamentary reform, and bemoaning the rupture of Germany and particularly Danzig, after the War.

As Salman Rushdie points out in his introduction, Grass, despite still living in Germany, was actually a refugee emigrant, constantly returning to his native home in his books, as he describes in the essay describing how he came to write The Tin Drum.

He writes about his literary inspiration Alfred Doblin in more than one of the pieces in this book, showing how he predicted the future, and how his writing is much more than Berlin Alexanderplatz. His piece on Kafka explains how he was the writer that first understood that bureaucracy is the new totalitarianism, and how no truly great writer can be claimed by any ideology.

He writes about Heine's grappling with anti-semitism in writing The Rabbi of Bacharach, in an essay dealing with how German youth had to face the guilt of the nation for the war. The political pieces in the book have much to do with the failure of revolution, of how the East and West were moving towards the same big-government capitalism, and how the hope for justice for the people lay in parliamentary socialism.

On Writing and Politics is a useful little insight in the mind of one of the great writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

I have included below my notes on each piece in the book (when I read a book of essays I like to take a little note on each piece as I read them).

Introduction by Salman Rushdie

Grass as emigrant and refugee, returning to his homeland in books, elaborating on the stupidities of German and World politics.

Doblin, my teacher [1967]

Essay on the debt owed by Grass to Alfred Doblin, an expose mostly about Wallenstein - avoids Berlin Alexanderplatz. Doblin's ability to be many things at once, to live with his contradictions - split personality of doctor and writer. Plea for people to engage with his complete oeuvre. "I can hope at the most, ten years after my teacher's death, to help arouse your curiosity, to tempt you, to help him find readers. He will upset you; he will trouble your dreams; he will make you gulp; you won't like the taste of him; you'll find him indigestible and he won't agree with you. He will change his reader. Anyone who is satisfied with himself should steer clear of Doblin."

Tin Drum [1974]

Brief description of writing Tin Drum, description of living in Paris, early poem about Oskar as Stylite, trip to Poland for research, writing in furnace room - first three drafts stoked the furnace. "But by then I was already famous and didn't have to stoke the furnace any more while writing. Since then I've found it harder to write."

Kafka [1978]

Description of Kafka as the master of understanding how bureaucracy is the new totalitarianism. How great writers can't be suborned into supporting an ideology. How the Czech Prague Spring was crushed.

Racing with the Utopias [1978]

Grass describes his tour of Asia and Africa while reading Doblin's Mountains, Oceans, and Giants, a post-apocalyptic novel. He shows how we are heading into that future owing to overpopulation, despoilation of the environment and repressive government, of whatever type. He focusses on repression of writers by governments, and oppression of the poor by those higher - the eta of Japan and the slums of Bombay.

What shall we tell our children? [1979]

Grass approaches the problem of war guilt by discussing Heine's story The Rabbi of Bacharach. Heine never finished it, despite a lifetime of tinkering with it, and predicting repression of the Jews would move from religion to state. Grass attempted to write a conclusion that jumped time from the 1800s to the 1930s, but couldn't make it work - hte then goes on to discuss The Diary of a Snail, which juxtaposes the destruction of the Jews in Danzig alongside 1960s German politics. He muses on what he would have done in Nazi Germany if he was slightly older, on the TV series The Holocaust, and on what he should tell his children.

Literature and Revolution or the Rhapsodist's Snorting Hobbyhorse [1969]

(Address to Belgrade writer's conference) Bemoaning the tendency of writers to jump on revolutionary bandwagons, to little effect - a defence of Social Democracy and a reminder that workers are mostly not interested in writers. "Only too often the heralds of revolution have become uncritical apologists for revolutionary terror."

Erfurt 1970 and 1891 [address 1970]

Talking about the meeting of West and East German leaders in Erfurt, and reflecting back to 1891 creation of SDP policy in that town. The gap between the theory of revolution and the practical effort to make worker's lives better, and how the two can't be reconciled. The stigmatization of revisionists, when to be one is actually a good thing - the fact that East and West will never re-unite while one side is revolutionary and the other revisionist.

Writers and Trade Unions [address 1970]

Short piece on whether writers can and should become part of a union - will they strike? will they work to a pay scale? what benefit do they bring to a union? Copyright law the only law that complies with the constitutional injunction ' property confers an obligation' - goes back to the community after a certain time - should other property be treated similarly?

A Warning against the force of habit [address 1972]

Address in Athens. Force of social democracy. The similarity between East and West - coup in Greece vs. repression in Czechoslovakia. Western private capitalism and Eastern state capitalism - treating peoples as parts of a security bloc rather than countries and nationalities. Working toward democracy.

The Artist's freedom of opinion in our society [address 1973]

Address to European representatives. Reminder that freedom of opinion also means allowing opposing voices. Writers aren't necessarily different to anyone else in allowing freedom of expression (viz. Futurists, Communist Writer's Unions). East and West both repress opinion (Czech and Greece). Europeans need to do something about it.

The destruction of mankind has begun [address 1982]

Pointing out that man is destroying the planet and wondering if there is any point to continuing to write, as writers only do it for posterity and immortality.

On the right to resist [address Jan 30, 1983]

50th anniversary of Hitler's ascension. What lessons can be learned - he gained power because people wanted it, and those that didn't weren't prepared to resist. Contrast to 1983 with extraordinary police powers and decisions to host nuclear weapons on German soil, Grass issues a call for peaceful resistance.

Superpower Backyards [newspaper article 1982]

Description of a visit to Nicaragua, just after the Sandanista's takeover. Comparison of that to Solidarity - repressions by USA and USSR - Pope condemning in Nicaragua what he supports in Poland. Germany unwilling for help.

 

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Rat by Gunter Grass

 The Rat by Gunter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim

London: Secker & Warburg, 1987 (first published in German in 1986)    ISBN 0436187728

It's been a very long time since I've read any of Gunter Grass's fiction - in fact it might even be about thirty years ago that I read in quick succession The Flounder and The Tin Drum, in that order. Having recently read the first volume of his memoirs, Peeling the Onion, I was motivated to pick up something else of his, and The Rat was to hand...

I must admit it took me some time to get in to this book - is it a dystopian novel about the end of the world? Is it a sci-fi fantasy of genetic mutation gone wrong? Is it an homage to the fairy tales of the German forest? Is it the rebirth of The Flounder and Oskar Matzerath? The answer is yes to all, with the landscape of Baltic Prussia and Danzig once again taking centre stage throughout the book.

The Rat is a vehicle for Grass to comment on environmental degradation, the arms race, the destruction of history and tradition in the chase for capitalist success and, as in many of his novels, a mourning for the loss of what once was - a Kashubian way of life that he knew as a child.

The book flits between multiple realities - the here-and-now, where Grass gets a pet rat for Christmas, and listens to the Third Programme on the radio while writing The Rat. He writes about Damroka, his beloved, who is on a ship running a scientific programme to measure jellyfish numbers in the Baltic: the ship is crewed with all the women Grass has been involved with romantically. He writes also about Oskar Matzerath, who is now a successful video producer - Grass discusses with him the production of a video about the death of the forests, and of the fraudster Malskat, while also reporting on his visit to Poland for his Grandmother's 107th birthday.

There are also the "other" realities... one where famous fairy tale characters try and take over the German government to stop the destruction of the environment, only to be destroyed by a combination of capital, military force and organised religion, and the other, where rats have organised the mutually assured destruction of the human race by atomic warfare, so they rule the world. There is a brief interregnum by human-rat hybrids (Manippels) that escaped from a laboratory, but the book ends with Grass, trapped in a spacecraft orbiting the human-less earth, being unable to decide if he was being dreamed by his interlocutor (the "she-rat"), or whether he was dreaming her. 

Depending on which reality we the reader are inhabiting at the time, the women on the ship might be speaking to The Flounder and trying to find the sunken city of Vineta, where women rule, and Oskar's shrivelled corpse is worshipped by the new rat society, that begins to develop in disturbingly similar ways to the human society it replaced.

Once the reader has oriented themselves to this book, it is a rollicking read, full of false bombast, and continually deflating the importance of all around us, poking the bear in a particularly Grassian way. Written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is perhaps a little dated in it's references, but none the worse for that. A good book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass

 Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim

London: Harvill Secker, 2007 (first German edition 2006)      ISBN 9781846550621

I tend as a rule not to read biographies of authors, unless the life of the author is the mainspring of their work. Gunter Grass is an exemplar of that, mining his life to create amazing fiction over the years. I first encountered Grass in The Flounder rather than The Tin Drum, and I must say I found the latter not as powerful as the former, despite the fame it brought to the author. Be that as it may, I've been aware of this memoir since the controversy caused by it's publication, and thought it might give me some insight into Grass' works.

The controversy of course was the revelation that Grass - who famously has built his literary career on destroying the legacy of Nazi Germany - not only volunteered for the Wehrmacht, but was enlisted in the Waffen SS. Peeling the Onion deals with that and so much more as Grass reflects on his early life, up until his first marriage.

The book is a 400 page reflection on what Grass did do, what he didn't do, and how memory makes itself, sometimes out of nothing, sometimes with something small that gains a significance beyond it's worth, and sometimes eliding major events. The title of the book describes Grass' approach to writing his life: peeling the onion back layer by layer, investigating each skin to see what it can tell him about himself.

He spends much of the first half of the book investigating the question of what he actually did feel about the Nazis, and why in fact he volunteered for the army, much against his parent's wishes. He certainly never thought that the Nazi's were evil, he believed that Germany was fighting for it's existence, and in fact refused initially to believe the evidence of the Holocaust when a POW (as did most of his fellow prisoners).

His old self questions his young self about why he didn't  protest, why did he follow the progress of the German Army and Navy on maps, why did he acquiesce to it all, and why did he volunteer to fight? As with many things in life, the answers are complex - youth desires to be a hero, youth wants away from parents, youth wants away from the boredom of the Luftwaffe Flak unit he was dragooned into. Age describes the folly of his choice, and shows via others that acquiescence to evil is not obligatory. His description of a fellow recruit who refused to bear arms ("wedontdothat") is a picture of what he could have done if he had the wisdom of age when he was a youth.

By the time he joined his unit, an SS Panzer Division , the final collapse of Germany was underway, and he spent his time fleeing from Russians, until he was wounded by shell splinters and was sent to hospital in Marienbad, where he was at war's end, and from where he became a POW.

His descriptions of his time in the various POW camps describe the hunger, which gave his attendance at a cooking class given by another POW who was a chef an added glamour. This is one skin of the onion that Grass remembers distinctly - a room full of hungry men preparing imaginary dishes... dishes that he went on to cook himself once he was settled and had the means to purchase ingredients. He also writes about the time he spend in a camp sheltering in a foxhole with a very catholic young soldier named Joseph....who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI? Maybe... and that's one of the tropes of this book, can we trust what our memory tells us, and can we trust what Grass is telling us? He never resolves this point, which weaves it's way through this book as a ghostly echo of the life Grass may have led if he hadn't abandoned his faith.

After his release, and having located his parents and sister in Dusseldorf, he headed there to pick up the pieces of his life. He never questioned his family about the traumas they suffered as Danzig was overrun, but he knew that what happened there to them changed them for ever. Grass describes how he was determined to become a sculptor and began an apprenticeship as a stone mason, where he helped rebuild Dusseldorf. Eventually he was accepted into art school, and began his new life as an artist.

He goes on to describe how it was his poetry that first garnered attention, after having been taken up by Group 47. By this time he was married to his first wife, and he had attended a fateful dinner party where the son of the host marched around banging on a tin drum. This unleashed his mind to produce his most famous novel, and made him a writer of renown.

Peeling the Onion tells us a lot about Grass the person - selfish, observant, obsessed with art and history, and from a young age understanding where he wanted to go, if not how to get there. It's a great piece of writing, a wonderful meditation on what memory is and how it can flatter to deceive, and how hard it is to arrive at any sort of "truth" about a life lived, especially in the tumultuous European 20th century.

A great book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Clown by Heinrich Boll

 The Clown by Heinrich Boll, translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz

London: Calder and Boyars, 1972 (originally published in English 1965, original publication in German, under the title Ansichten Eines Clowns in 1963)        ISBN 0714501689

I have reviewed Boll's Billiards at Half Past Nine previously, and found it an interesting and at times strange book. The Clown has had a similar effect on me. Although this book is less overtly about World War II than Billiards at Half Past Nine, it is still the over-arching shadow that hangs over everything that happens, which was the state of affairs in Germany in the Sixties. Those that can adapt themselves do, and we see those people doing as well in democratic Germany as they did in Nazi Germany, while the small acts of heroism that took place during the war are forgotten, along with everything else.

But the The Clown is not really about the war. It is a story of the developing society of Germany after the war, and the interactions between rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, particularly the machinations of Catholic society, and the hypocrisy that lay at the heart of much of what they did in Germany at that time.

The plot revolves around Hans Schnier, son of a wealthy industrialist (mainly involved in coal mining, but with a finger in many pies). He eschews family, seduces Marie, the daughter of a local storekeeper, and runs away with her. Marie is Catholic, Hans a Protestant. Hans has developed a moderately successful career as a clown, but as the novel opens he is returning to his apartment in Bonn in the knowledge that his career is in tatters, and that Marie has left him for Zupfner, a Catholic, and part of the Catholic discussion group that Marie was a part of before she and Hans eloped.

Hans wanders around his apartment with a sore knee, a bottle of cognac and some cigarettes, he is down to his last Mark, and sets out to ring relatives friends and enemies in search of money, Marie's location, and revenge. Through the phone calls he makes, and the flashbacks that intersperse them, Hans takes us through not only his and Marie's history, but lays open the clubbishness, snobbishness and sense of superiority that was part of Catholic society and politics at that time.

Hans's devotion to Marie was absolute - he fails to understand why the outward forms of devotion, such as a marriage certificate or wedding in church are important, and how they could change how people feel. Boll, through Hans, has much to say about the institution of marriage and was ahead of his time to see it as bondage for a woman. His Catholic philosophizers are all men, and the women involved are seen only as followers. Hans is bereft without Marie - to him, even though they weren't married, her leaving him to marry Zupfner is adulterous, and Hans thinks marriage and Church teachings destroy more lives than they save.

The Clown is a also a story about theory versus real life. The Catholics theorize about things, discuss things interminably, while Hans is busy living. He balks at being labelled one way or another, and yet everywhere he goes and everything he sees is trying to put him in a box, to label him, to see if he is acceptable or not according to doctrine. Hans rejects that utterly. When his father comes to visit him, we learn that his father too may have felt that way, but has been ground down by expectations and his wife to do what was expected. Hans muses on his father's heroism in standing up to Nazi thugs in the final days of the War, and realizes that he is loved by him, even as his father leaves without offering him any money, as Hans won't work for it in any way.

Perhaps that is the main theme of The Clown: the danger of dogma. The death of Hans's sister Henrietta in the last days of the war, after her parents allowed her to join a Flak regiment to save the "sacred" soil of Germany from the "Jewish Yankees" broke Hans, and the failure of German society to move on (replacing Nazi dogma for democratic dogma, replacing racism with performative non-racist activities for consumption by everyone except Germans) disgust him. His decision to paint his face and show no emotion as he performs his transgressive skits is his way of coping with the trauma of the War, and the hypocrisy of 1960s German politics and culture.

This is a good novel, but it is a novel of its place and time, and it has dated a little. Sectarianism, as described in The Clown, no longer exists in the same way. Yet some of the things Boll writes about Catholics still hold - their sense of different-ness, a kind of pity for those who are not of the One True Church, and yet also a kind of persecution complex when discussing their faith. No group of believers finds it easy to dissect the more illogical and strange aspects of their belief, so I was surprised to learn that Boll was actually a committed Catholic. I imagine this book caused him some trouble when he went to church after it was published.

This book, while it covers the life-time of Hans, spans only one night in time, and finishes with Hans accepting his lack of money and of Marie, painting up and going out to busk. His life has collapsed, as Germany collapsed, and we the reader cannot be sure if he can rebuild it. 

Heinrich Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 for his body of work. He is an important figure in post-war German fiction, and The Clown is worth reading not only as an insight into his writing, but also as an insight into a re-building Germany.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Boll

 Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Boll, Translated from the German by Patrick Bowles

London: John Calder (A Jupiter Book), 1965 (First publication in English 1961, First published 1959)

Many years ago, probably because he was a Nobel Prize winner and I was a priggish young man, I attempted to read Heinrich Boll's  Group Portrait with Lady several times, but never got beyond the first chapter. I found it very hard to concentrate on the writing: I seem to recall it being very dense and wordy, with nothing for the reader to "hang their hat" on. Reading Billiards at Half Past Nine was a pleasure, although the writing I think is similar. Perhaps I have matured....

Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass are, in English-language circles, probably the two best known writers to come out of post-war Germany: part of Group 47, Boll and Grass have focussed much of their writing on the effects of the war on Germany, trying to deal with the horror, and the lasting guilt, shame and anger that came from that catastrophe.

Billiards at Half Past Nine is the story of the Faehmel family - Heinrich, his son Robert, and Robert's son Joseph. All are architects, and they have been scarred by both the First and Second World Wars in many ways. Heinrich is a man who created himself from nothing, with a keen sense of where he wanted to go, who he wanted to marry, and how he wanted his career to progress. He wins the commission to build St. Anthony's Abbey, which sets him on the road to success, and he marries Johanna, a solicitor's daughter. Unfortunately for them, they lose two of their children to disease. Johanna in particular is disgusted by the militarism of Germany, and is horrified that her young son dies with the name Hindenburg on his lips. Boll sees both the Kaiser and Hindenburg as the progenitors of the Nazi horror. In the book he talks of those who have taken the "Buffalo Sacrament" as opposed to those who are "Lambs". One of their other sons, Otto, becomes a Nazi ("having tasted of the Buffalo Sacrament"), a shell of the boy they knew, and is killed on the Russian Front. Boll has Heinrich muse on how one can be less connected to a blood relative than to another person, in his case to his son's wife Edith.

Robert, Heinrich's son, begins his story at school, where his friend Schrella is bullied by most of the rest of the class, including Nettlinger, and the teacher known as "Old Wobbly". These last two become Nazi functionaries, and after another student, Ferdi, attempts to assassinate Wobbly and is captured, all those implicated in the attempt are punished. Ferdi is executed, Schrella's father disappears, Schrella and Robert (who both helped Ferdi), are tortured and flee the country, and the boy who passed notes to Robert's family about his fate is also done away with. This is the pivotal moment in Robert's life. After Johanna pulls in a favour from Nettlinger, and Robert comes back home (Schrella does not), he is drafted into the pioneer corps, where he becomes an expert in demolition. And demolish he does, as much as he can, in a kind of revenge against society and what it had done to his friends and himself. This becomes worse after his wife Edith (Schrella's sister) is killed in an air raid. In a final act of hatred against everything, he blows up St. Anthony's Abbey in the final days of the War. This is his great secret that he keeps with him, as he continues on in his very structured life as a Quantity Surveyor and Engineer, sticking to a strict regimen that includes playing billiards with one of the hotel-workers at the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning.

The novel is built around the voices of Heinrich, Robert, Joseph, and Johanna, with interspersions from Leonore (secretary to Robert), Joschen (Concierge at the Prince Heinrich), and Hugo (the hotel boy that Robert plays billiards with). Much of the action is rendered as flashbacks, and in fact the novel takes place over the space of a couple of days, climaxing in Heinrich's eightieth birthday. Heinrich, in his old age, has come to accept that his life in many ways has been a sham, and when his wife comes out of the asylum she has been living in since the death of Otto with the intent to assassinate Old Wobbly, he concurs with the (failed) attempt. We learn that Joseph's girlfriend Marianne, witnessed her father, a Nazi functionary, commit suicide and saw her mother hang her younger brother before she was saved from a similar fate. Joseph has been working on the commission to rebuild the Abbey, where he discovers Robert's secret, which drives Joseph to abandon his career. Heinrich too has put the pieces together, fully understanding what it was that drove Robert to commit such a deed.

Boll shows us, with the continued success of Nettlinger and Wobbly, that while the Nazi regime has fallen, those in power are to a great extent still in power. While they may no longer have you killed for the "smallest gesture", they still drink champagne and smoke Cuban cigars. Boll has little time for the politics of post-war Germany, portraying both sides as equally corrupt. Robert's attempts to destroy the old order by literally destroying buildings is doomed to fail, and he ends the novel on a more positive note, adopting the hotel boy Hugo as his son.

The attentive reader can gain much information about the state-of-mind in post-war Germany from this novel. It is a well-written, closely intertwined set of stories about the rise and fall of Germany in the twentieth century, through the lens of one family. Certainly a good piece of literature.

A postscript on the edition I was reading - Jupiter Books, an imprint of John Calder was "introduced to bring the best of twentieth-century literature, authors and titles of world reputation, to a larger reading public at prices only slightly higher than those of mass-market paperbacks." With it's severe and sparse design, I wasn't completely surprised to see that the book was actually printed by the Karl Marx Werk at Possneck in what was then East Germany. I'm not sure if this accounts for the occasional misprint that I found in my book, but it is interesting to see the authors on the Jupiter list - Beckett, Ionesco, Duras, Borges amongst others. A forgotten piece of publishing history?

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, translated by Hilda Rosner

New York: New Directions, 1951        ISBN 0811202925  (Ninth Printing)

Many years ago I read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, and while I don't remember much about the book as a whole, I do remember the ending very clearly, as a  summing up of the mystical aspects of what was then, to me, a very strange book. I didn't know what to make of it then, and I must re-read it. I have found reading Siddhartha a similar experience: it was not what I expected, and I'm not sure what to make of this very German, and yet Indian, of books.

Siddhartha is a story of a man striving for enlightenment, and determined to achieve it on his own terms. For Siddhartha, that means experiencing not only the life of an ascetic, but also that of a rich man: to drink fully of all ways of living and thinking, before trying to make sense of life. Hesse's grandfather was immersed in Indian culture during his time as a missionary, and no doubt Hermann imbibed a lot of what he shows in this book about Buddhism and Hindu spirituality through his family connections.

To this knowledge he has added his German romantic idealism - Siddhartha is not content to follow another's teachings, even those of the Gotama himself, but he must forge his own path. He must discard his own pride and personality as well, which, he realises as time goes on, he has indulged not only when he was a rich and powerful man, but also when he was an ascetic.

It takes not a holy man, or a clever man, or a smart man, to assist Siddhartha on his journey: it is a simple ferryman, uneducated and yet enlightened, who helps Siddhartha discover that the key to it all is to understand that everything is in everything - all flows together to the same end, like the river he spends years ferrying people over.

By the end of his life he has accepted that there are no breaks or differences between earth, animals or people - that we are all one, forever. That is our victory, to understand that we are connected to everything.

This short book, written much like a fairy tale, tries to lead the reader to the same place that Siddhartha reaches, or at least show one pathway to that goal. It is a simple but wise book, and I recommend it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Not I by Joachim Fest

 Not I : Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, edited by Herbert A. Arnold

New York: Other Press, 2013 (original German publication 2006)   ISBN 9781590516102

This book was an unexpected pleasure. Picked up on a bargain table at one of my favourite bookshops, I bought it having read a few of Fest's histories of Nazi Germany over the years and thought it looked like it might be an interesting book to read. It certainly is that.

Much of this memoir is taken up with the story of Fest's father, Johannes, and how he reacts to and deals with the Nazi takeover and life after 1933. Johannes was a member of the Zentrum Party, which was the party of the Catholics in the Weimar Republic. He was also a committed Catholic and Republican. He was one of the minority who saw through Hitler from the first, and stuck to his principles. Doing this meant he lost his job as a principal of a school in Berlin, and was not allowed to hold down any other job. He was regularly harassed by the Gestapo, and shunned by most of his neighbours, as well as his former work colleagues.

While the Fest's upper middle-class life was slowly falling apart, Joachim and his siblings were slowly brought to understand how one operates in a tyranny - trust no-one, be very careful what you say, and who you say it to. Joachim and his brothers are no longer welcome at their Berlin Gymnasium, and are sent to a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg just before the war breaks out. While their family moved from having an entire floor of an apartment building, with a maid, to sharing bedrooms and wearing patched clothes, Fest writes of a basically happy childhood - children everywhere make the best of what they've got, and often don't realise how bad things really are, even though young Joachim has an idea of what is happening. While he is learning how to navigate being anti-Nazi in a Nazi world, he is also learning what he can of German music and literature, with the help of many of his father's friends.

Quite a few of those friends were Jewish, and Joachim learns much from Dr. Meyer, a widower who becomes increasingly depressed as time goes on. Johannes is very clear-eyed about the danger to his Jewish friends and constantly urges them to leave Germany. Only a few do so, and the rest are lost to history, swallowed in the Holocaust.

Fest moves from school to a Flak unit, then the Labour Corps, and finally into the fighting around Remagen, where he is captured by the Americans and spends a few years in camps, from which he unsuccessfully tries to escape. Eventually he is freed, and reaches Berlin again, and those of his family that remain (his elder brother died on the Eastern Front and his Uncle and Aunt were killed by Russian troops). The final, shorter part of the memoir relates his move into journalism and finally to writing about the Third Reich, which he initially looked down on as a subject, thinking that he'd much rather write about his true interest of the Italian Renaissance.

This memoir, while describing what happened to Fest, is also a memoir of his developing mind, and of the difficulties of the times in which he grew up. As the son of a member of the educated middle-class, Fest was exposed at an early age to the greats of German literature and art, and much of this book is taken up with his discovery of, and reaction to, Mozart, Beethoven Schubert, Rilke, Goethe and other staples of the German canon. After the war, while incarcerated, he is exposed to American literature and begins to see that his cultural education was blinkered by his upbringing much more than he thought.

Fest's life, and more particularly his father's life, is evidence of the price that must be paid to be true to principles, and how most are unable or unwilling to pay that price and don't understand those that do. On several occasions Johannes could have retrieved his old life back, but didn't. He fought for what was right in his own way, but it brought him nothing but trouble and pain. He came back from Koningsberg and Russian captivity after the war a changed man. Fest too came back a different man from the war. However, their principles had not changed. They had resisted Nazism as best they could.

Not I describes very well how life is lived under totalitarianism. Fest is amazed at the freedom and casualness shown by his American captors, which helps him to realize just how much life is circumscribed when living under a totalitarian system, where you cannot say what you think or do what you want to do. Fest writes a little of how this came about - that the Germans are a law-abiding people rather than a people concerned with justice, and that National Socialism attracted opportunists - people hopped on the bandwagon when it was good for them to do so, and hopped off again when it wasn't - which is Fest's theory for why, after the war, no-one was a Nazi, or had ever been.

This book has also been treated well by the people that turned it into something I could read - translated well, the text is very readable (in fact gripping in many places) and contains plenty of footnotes to explain Fest's cultural references. Being published in the US also means that the paper and binding are to a much higher standard than the usual British and Australian rubbish we get Down Under - made to last, rather than to make money.

This was a book that I was going to read and pass on, but it's now a keeper. If you are interested in German history, it's one to read.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger, translated from the German by Stuart Hood

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 (Auf den Marmorklippen first published in 1939)


Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel is a World War One classic, and is a book that has cast its spell over many young men since it was fist written. Its combination of lyrical writing and vague philosophy, along with thrilling accounts of combat, made this very German book a bestseller, and one still worth reading today. Junger never reached those heights again with his written work, but On the Marble Cliffs is well worth reading, and a fascinating insight into a part of the German psyche during the Nazi era.

Although Junger denied that this story was an allegory describing the rise of the Nazis, it is obvious that the political situation in Germany during the 1930s informs this tale. Set in a fictional location in a time out of history (cars and cans of beer co-exist with halberds and suits of armour), On the Marble Cliffs tells - through the eyes of a retired soldier cum botanist - the tale of the demise of The Marina, a peaceful country of agriculture, which is stormed and ransacked by the minions of the Head Ranger, the ruler of the Forest Lands that lie beyond the pastoral lands of The Campagna.

The narrator sets the scene of an idyllic life classifying plant specimens (Junger himself was an avid amateur botanist, and On the Marble Cliffs abounds with descriptions of plants) with allusions to a previous life of battle, and describes how the agents of the Head Ranger slowly bring crime, death and chaos into the land of The Campagna, and then The Marina.

Junger's description of the slow creep of nihilism into the life of The Marina is where one can more closely call this work a parable of the growth of Nazism. The people of the Marina refuse to contemplate that change is possible, and fail to see that the change in their habits has been brought about by them being tempted to sink as low as the Forest people. Junger places the narrator and Brother Otho (the term brother here is used in its real meaning, and also in the sense that the narrator and Otho  were similar to monks in their outlook on life) as above the general fray of human existence, their minds being on a higher plane. Junger's aristocratic outlook on life comes through in how he portrays most of the characters in the book - while cutting through sloganeering, the narrator does believe in a natural hierarchy of people, with the Forest people at the bottom, the herders of The Campagna having a type of rustic nobility, and the most enlightened being the poets and priests of The Marina.

Junger's style and thought is clear on every page of On the Marble Cliffs: his limpid prose creates a dreamlike quality to the story, which only adds to the horror of the final battle and destruction of The Marina. Junger's philosophy is also threaded through the text: a nineteenth-century Germanic outlook of romantic angst, where feelings matter, but are almost indescribable, and where human worth and value is only seen at the ultimate when put to the test in battle, and if you are on the losing side, you either die with honour, or retreat and leave the victor to his spoils.

While On the Marble Cliffs certainly makes some sort of political point, its ethereal quality dulls its polemic nature, and gives the whole book a sense of unreality that disengages the reader from the action. In many ways it reads like a fairy tale, and perhaps that is exactly what it is.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The man without qualities by Robert Musil

The man without qualities by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

(A sort of introduction, Pseudoreality prevails, Into the Millennium)

Translated from the German by Sophie Pike, Editorial Consultant Burton Pike

London: Picador, 1997             ISBN 9780330349420


Ah, the unfinished novel - of the millions that have languished in bottom drawers around the World, only a few are lucky enough to be published, and only a very few come to be considered towering classics of literature. The man without qualities is one of those classics, a massive intellectually sprawling novel (in truth three novels) following the Austrian man Ulrich through his experiences during his time as secretary to the Parallel Campaign, formed to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Emperor's reign.

Ulrich is the vehicle of the story, and he is an interesting man, a man of his time, and "the man without qualities". He has no need to make a living or a name for himself, and while being surrounded by what would be called today the "chattering classes", sees himself as above the fray of the intrigues and arguments of the campaign, full of wisecracks and theories about modern life, but never getting personally involved.

Through Ulrich we meet an array of other characters - the Count, who is in charge of the Campaign, an old-school aristocrat who is bemused by the new ideas that are swirling around him, Diotima, Ulrich's cousin, who holds the meetings of the Committee at her house and is determined to create a lasting legacy from this moment, Tuzzi her husband, and Ulrich's friends Walter and Clarisse.

Then there is Moosebrugger, the sex murderer. Through these characters we gain an insight into the decadence, lack of direction and vacuousness of an Empire and an era that is about to fall. As the old certainties crumble, what is to replace them? This is at the heart of Musil's project, and as all the characters work toward that answer, nothing seems to hold firm. Diotima, the paragon of beauty and social correctness, falls for the German industrialist and thinker Arnheim, and is torn in two by her forbidden love for him and her need to be seen as a pillar of society. She becomes close to Ulrich for a while as she can confide in him. While Ulrich is always ready to give advice, it is never clear whether he believes such advice to be correct, or whether any path he suggests one should follow is in fact the "right" one. The question of what is "right" or "wrong", or "good" or "evil" is returned to again and again by nearly all the characters in the book. Moosebrugger is the catalyst for this philosophizing early on in the book. Several of the characters, Diotima and Clarisse, think that to hang Moosebrugger is evil, and that what he did was a natural outcome of his poor situation in society and lack of a decent upbringing. Musil shows us that in fact Moosebrugger is deranged, but not so deranged that he doesn't take advantage of feelings such as those of Diotima's and Clarisse's to advance his cause.

The intrigues develop apace - Diotima seeks to justify her inability to leave her husband by developing her concept of a higher love, General Stumm enters the fray to ensure the military has its point of view expressed in the Campaign and promptly becomes lost in philosophy, Ulrich begins and ends an affair with what is by now his usual prevarication and generalisations about feelings rather than looking at his own individual wants and needs.

Clarisse meanwhile, starts to fall apart. The contradictions in thinking in this modern age start to fracture her delicate personality, and when confronted with the realities of the inmates of the prison for the insane, her grand schemes for the rehabilitation of criminals such as Moosebrugger collapses.

The beginning of the third book, Into the Millennium, takes us to Ulrich's hometown to which he has returned on his father's death. There he meets Agathe, his sister. They have spent most of their childhood apart, and this sudden reconnexion is dramatic for both of them. Agathe is a person who, much like Ulrich, has slipped through life without creating many ripples, but unlike Ulrich she doesn't intellectualize feelings: she relates personally to situations and people, and still has a sense of good and bad. She collides head-on with Ulrich, and this collision leads not only to an almost incestuous relationship, but leads Ulrich to begin to open his mind to the idea that the old religions may have hit on some core truths on how to live life.

Agathe flees her husband and goes with Ulrich to Vienna, where they once again enter the busy-ness and intrigue of the Campaign, and the book then ends halfway through a pivotal moment in the Committee's activities.

There is so much in this book it's hard to know where to begin and end, and better minds than mine have drawn out the themes that abound in the novel/s. The loss of the old certainties in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries left a void in values and even morals, which The man without qualities probes into, showing that, without some sort of guiding light, society can quickly go haywire. The "old school" characters in the book bemoan the rise of democracy, nationalism and other "modern" characteristics, but realise there is little they can do to force a return to the old realities. The self-consciously "modern" characters flail about in their search for something concrete on which to build their lives: Diotima for example moves from being at the pinnacle of the social tree, to exploring the idea of chaste love between two equals, on to developing sexology to a higher plane, without finding the roots that she longs to feel under her feet.

In the figure of the Count we see the leader who leads from behind, often finding that doing nothing is the best course of action at any particular moment. General Stumm is often pictured throughout the book as a figure of fun, especially when involved with Ulrich, but he keeps plugging away, and where the book finishes we begin to see him position the Army well in the grab for prestige that the Campaign has unleashed.

The question of what one is to do with one's life is the central theme of the book: Ulrich has all the answers but doesn't believe any of them, Arnheim can talk with the best of the theorists but is a businessman at heart, Diotima loses herself in the latest fad, and Clarisse is driven mad by the choices open to her. In this way, although the book was written in the earlier years of the Twentieth Century, it feels very modern in subject matter: what should we believe? is it even valid to believe anything? is there such a thing as good and evil? There is much discussion and exposition in The man without qualities, but no answer.

At over a thousand pages, it might seem that this book about nothing much (and yet everything) would be a colossal bore, and yet it is not so. Yes, there are passages within the work that take some getting through and are quite dense, but those moments are relieved by others of high farce, romance, comedy and drama. While no-one "does" anything of note, and nothing is decided, there is a lot of action in the book.

There is little doubt in my mind that this book is a classic of Twentieth Century literature. It took me a long time to read, but the book stayed with me the whole time: Ulrich in particular - "the man without qualities" - struck me as a perfect example of the modern man, and all that is wrong and right with him.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted reader, or for someone who is not prepared to work at a book, but if you don't mind digging in and going the extra mile, the rewards can be worth it.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell