German novelists of the Weimar Republic: intersections of literature and politics

German Novelists of the Weimar Republic

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

German Novelists of the Weimar Republic Intersections of Literature and Politics

Edited by

Karl Leydecker

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2006 by the Editor and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

First published 2006 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–288–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German novelists of the Weimar Republic: intersections of literature and politics / edited by Karl Leydecker. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57113-288-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. German fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Authors, German—20th century—Political and social views. 3. Politics and literature—Germany—History—20th century. I. Leydecker, Karl. II. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT772.G396 2006 833⬘.91209—dc22 2006003308 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Karl Leydecker

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1: Heinrich Mann and the Struggle for Democracy Karin V. Gunnemann

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2: Hermann Hesse and the Weimar Republic Paul Bishop

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3: In Defense of Reason and Justice: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Historical Novels of the Weimar Republic Roland Dollinger

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4: The Case of Jakob Wassermann: Social, Legal, and Personal Crises in the Weimar Republic Karl Leydecker

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5: Signs of the Times: Joseph Roth’s Weimar Journalism Helen Chambers

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6: Ernst Jünger, the New Nationalists, and the Memory of the First World War Roger Woods

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7: Innocent Killing: Erich Maria Remarque and the Weimar Anti-War Novels Brian Murdoch

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8: In “A Far-Off Land”: B. Traven Karl S. Guthke

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9: Weimar’s Forgotten Cassandra: The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in the Weimar Republic Fiona Sutton

193

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10: Radical Realism and Historical Fantasy: Alfred Döblin David Midgley

211

11: Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate Second-Rate Writer”? Heather Valencia

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12: Hans Fallada’s Literary Breakthrough: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Kleiner Mann — was nun? Jenny Williams

253

Notes on the Contributors

269

Index

273

Acknowledgments

T

HE EDITOR WISHES TO THANK his former colleagues at the University of Stirling: Malcolm Read, who helped to conceive the volume, was a careful reader of my own and other contributions, and provided the initial impetus for the introduction, and Brian Murdoch, who provided constant support, advice, and encouragement, and also allowed me to benefit from his extensive personal library. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, which funded a research trip to the German Literature Archive at Marbach am Neckar for a separate project, during which time I was able to collect material for my own contributions to this book. I am grateful to Cornelia Pastelak-Price and the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. (www.jeanne-mammen.de) for permission to reproduce Jeanne Mammen’s watercolor Sie repräsentiert (She Represents). At Camden House I would like to thank James Hardin, for his help with the conception and initial planning of the book, Sue Innes for her help with the preparation of the final manuscript, and especially Jim Walker for his exemplary support throughout. Finally I would like to thank my family, Faye and Elanor, for their love, encouragement, and patience during the preparation of this book.

K. L. January 2006

Introduction Karl Leydecker

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s PETER GAY OBSERVED in his classic study of the culture of the Weimar Republic, “For over a century Germans had looked upon politics with a mixture of fascination and aversion.”1 German writers and intellectuals, most notably those on the left of the political spectrum, had long dreamt of having a direct involvement in political events and affairs of the state. In the immediate aftermath of military defeat at the end of the First World War and the collapse of the monarchy, it appeared that those dreams were about to be realized. Indeed, some writers even briefly took political office in the politically turbulent first months of 1919, most notable amongst them the dramatist Ernst Toller, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, and the intellectual Gustav Landauer, who took leading roles in the short-lived Bavarian Republican government, an honor declined by Hermann Hesse, while Ret Marut, who would become better known as the novelist B. Traven, was also highly active in the Munich Republic. Certainly in no previous period of German history did writers and intellectuals engage so directly with political events and social forces and seek so actively to have a direct influence on them as they were to do during the Weimar Republic. Nor was this engagement confined to those on the left. Political and social developments forced even conservative middle-class writers, who generally had a conception of literature as high art that had no business dirtying its hands with politics, and who would therefore have preferred to remain above the fray, to abandon their Olympian detachment and enter the arena to try to shape events. As one commentator has noted, “the novel was the most consistently politically charged genre of the time.”2 This volume focuses on the response of German novelists from across the political spectrum to the political and social events of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, it extends in several cases to cover not just novels but also literary essays and reportage, for several of the prominent novelists of the period, notably Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, Jakob Wassermann, and the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, were prolific observers of the Republic in those mediums. In order to set the scene, this introduction will briefly sketch the political, social, and artistic context, which provides the necessary backdrop for an understanding of the specific political and social engagement of major novelists of the period.

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Political Events of the Weimar Republic In the course of 1918, after the failure of the spring offensive on the western front, the certainty of German military defeat became ever more obvious. The Kaiser left Berlin on 29 October, never to return. On 9 November his abdication was announced and the chancellorship was handed to the Social Democratic leader, Friedrich Ebert, with Philipp Scheidemann proclaiming the birth of the German Republic to cheering crowds gathered outside the Reichstag building. The House of Hohenzollern ceased to rule Germany and the imperial system had come to an end. Two days later the armistice was signed. Behind the imperial system, however, stood a powerful force, namely the army. In August 1916 the Kaiser had appointed Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg Chief of the General Staff, supported by his QuartermasterGeneral, Erich von Ludendorff. Since the civilian political government at that time was virtually without power, this amounted to control of the fate of the nation itself. In effect, the conduct of national affairs had passed from the hands of the government and into the control of the military. The de facto domination of the High Command remained unchecked almost to the end of the war, and left the army with the conviction that it should have more than a passing say in the way that Germany’s future should be shaped. But crucially the military handed over power to a civilian government in October 1918, shortly before the final capitulation, a tactical maneuver that would ensure that it was the civilian authorities, and not the military, to which blame for the defeat would be attached. For most, resignation and disillusionment were the prevailing emotions rather than some urge for constructive political activity. The shock and confusion felt by civilians and soldiers alike at the final military defeat was compounded by this sudden end of monarchist government and the socalled November revolution of 1918, which posed an armed challenge to Ebert’s and the Social Democrats’ claim to be the rightful representatives of the people. Few, apart from a small number of politicians and political activists such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and their Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), had any notion of what might replace the old imperial system. The revolution certainly left its mark in the foundation of the German Communist Party by the Spartacists in January 1919, but at that time it did not have the broad support that would have been required to transform the country into a Soviet state on the Russian model. Many, in fact, could not accept the validity of any form of government other than the authoritarian, paternalistic, and dictatorial monarchy. To many, the transition from loyal and obedient subject to democratic citizen was simply inconceivable. A successful revolution would have required a determined, far-sighted proletarian party able to seize control, dismantle the institutions of bourgeois government, and establish its own apparatus of state control.

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Such ideas were entirely alien to the mass of the populace. Despite the agitation and bloodshed, the people as a whole were barely touched by the revolution, and were not moved to support its aims. Ebert was certainly not a revolutionary — if he had been he would never have been offered the chancellorship. Ebert’s majority socialists (the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and the smaller group of independent socialists (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or USPD, formed in 1917) could not agree on a response to the events of November 1918. Ebert’s program was reformist; the Independents, spurred on by the extreme left-wing Spartacists, had more genuinely revolutionary principles. For seven weeks a coalition strove to find a common policy, receiving its mandate directly from the Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) that had sprung up in the major cities throughout the country. However, the Independents withdrew their support on 27 December, when it had become clear that their major aims of socialization of the state, nationalization of industry, and democratization of the army were not Ebert’s priorities. After the Independents left the coalition, the Spartacists rose in armed rebellion in Berlin on 5 January 1919 and sought to take control of the state by force. When, in the face of this, social democracy, in the person of SPD minister Gustav Noske, called on the army (which had been at pains to keep itself intact in the midst of these political upheavals) to put down the Spartacist rebellion, during which Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by a right-wing military Freikorps unit, the realities of the situation became even plainer. It was a situation that was to recur in Bavaria. The Independent Socialist leader Kurt Eisner had declared a Bavarian Republic on 8 November 1918. Although he was forced to concede defeat to right-wing parties in elections held in January 1919, and was prepared to resign, he was murdered by a nationalist student before he could do so. The reaction against the right that this provoked led to the appointment of the SPD politician Johannes Hoffmann as prime minister of the Bavarian Republic. As they had in Berlin, the Independents rejected the SPD’s political aims as too moderate, and sought to seize power themselves by setting up a more radically left-wing Räterepublik (Soviet-style republic) on 7 April 1919. This new government included such figures as the writers Gustav Landauer and Ernst Toller, whose actions were dictated by a naïve idealism and whose lack of practical political experience became immediately obvious. The Munich revolution was short-lived. Mirroring events in Berlin, the Social Democrat Prime Minister Hoffmann brought in the Freikorps to stamp out the rival government, thus provoking a civil war in which hundreds were killed and imprisoned. As Anton Gill has noted, “even as the plans for the new democracy were being drawn up, the forces of reaction were crystallizing.”3 Loyalty to the army as an agent of the government seemed to be unquestioned. There

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was, it is true, brief popular anti-militaristic enthusiasm in the immediate aftermath of the war, but this had subsided by the end of 1919. The very forces that had been so demoralized at the military defeat and collapse quickly reasserted themselves, leaving Germany effectively under the control of the same elements that had supported and conducted the war. Those who had resisted the war were crushed by continuing military power exercised through the Freikorps. The period of revolutionary activity achieved little that was positive. All that had changed was the set of officials who exercised military and bureaucratic control. The revival of the never-disbanded military machine and the underlying yearning for national unity (which the war had only served to intensify) were welded firmly together by the national reaction to the Treaty of Versailles signed on 28 June 1919. Under the treaty, Germany lost substantial territories in the west in the shape of Alsace-Lorraine, and in the east, where formerly German lands became part of Poland, as well as all its colonies. It was compelled to disarm, and its army was limited to no more than 100,000 men. Finally it was to pay very high war reparations. The conviction in Germany was that the peace terms represented a deliberate policy of humiliation and repression. The loss of colonies and the demands by the Allies that Germany pay reparations became symbols of Allied viciousness and duplicity. The atmosphere in Germany became conducive to the spread of the Dolchstoßlegende (myth of the stab in the back) cultivated by the commanders of the army, which now asserted that it had never been defeated in the field but only sabotaged at home by socialists and Jews. Adding insult to injury was the forced admission, one of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, that Germany had been the aggressor who had caused the war and must bear the guilt for its consequences. The result was that the German people carried into their new republic a sense of resentment not only against France and Britain, but also against the moderate political leaders of the Weimar Republic, who had been forced to sign first the armistice and then the peace treaty. This, of course, strengthened the hand of conservative groups — industrialists, army officers, nationalists of various kinds within Germany. In this can be seen not only one of the reasons for the failure of the republic but also for the stultification of the political education and development of the German people. It is generally recognized that there was a direct link between this perceived betrayal and the turn to Hitler, some twelve years later, as the savior of the nation. For in the minds of many, democracy was from the first identified with humiliation and defeat, an attitude that did little to win support for the Weimar Republic. One of the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles was that the new government was soon also sorely tested economically. Inflation, which had already become an alarming factor by the end of the war, was further exacerbated by the cost of demobilization and reparation payments. Whereas the

INTRODUCTION




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exchange rate at the beginning of 1914 was 4.21 marks to the dollar, by December 1918 the figure was 8.28. By December 1921 a dollar was worth 191 marks. By December 1922 the figure had already reached 7,589 marks, but it was in 1923 that hyperinflation reached truly epic proportions. By August the dollar was worth 4.6 million marks, rising to 25.2 billion by October, and peaking at an unimaginable 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar in December 1923. Shoppers took to the street not with wallets but with wheelbarrows full of money, and prices rose by the minute. As well as ruining the livelihoods and wiping out the savings of many, the inflationary crisis “destroyed the trust and confidence of a whole generation.”4 On the political front the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin of March 1920 collapsed, partly from internal weakness and differences, but also, more encouragingly for the government, because of the loyalty of public servants and a general strike of workers in Berlin. Both seemed to indicate some popular support for the republic. But there was little cause for optimism. Any national consensus that had existed was soon eroded. In the Reichstag elections of 6 June 1920 the government coalition parties the SPD, the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum), and the liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) lost ground to parties both to the political left and political right of them. On the left the Communists and the Independent Socialists (USPD) gained an increased number of seats while on the right the DDP lost much of its support to Gustav Stresemann’s monarchist Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP), which had campaigned under the claim that they were the only party that could resist the threat of tyranny by the left wing. Even more indicative of the swing to right were the successes of the nationalist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) and the Deutsche Volkspartei. Although they remained the largest single party in the Reichstag, the Social Democrats temporarily withdrew from the government and went into opposition. The ensuing frequent changes of administration and varying fortunes of the very high number of political parties and factions demonstrate how little enthusiasm or loyalty these successive administrations enjoyed from the general German public. They also showed that Germany lacked any definable or acceptable political course. The threat of disorder and social upheaval simply caused the middle classes to become increasingly reactionary, to embrace the old authoritarian attitudes and to look to the military as saviors of the national interest. The military in general were still held in high regard. The officer class still commanded respect and was regarded as socially superior, while the military values of loyalty and discipline were preserved by veterans’ organizations such as the Stahlhelm (steel helmet), whose attraction grew for many as the internal fragmentation of the republic continued apace. Meanwhile, powerful industrial concerns resisted government attempts to levy more tax from them. They argued that it was their patriotic duty to

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resist such taxation if the money raised was simply to be used to pay the humiliating and unjust reparations. As inflation raged, these industrialists made huge profits by selling goods abroad for hard foreign currency while paying their workers in worthless Deutschmarks. Inflation was the greatest destabilizing factor, undermining the whole of German society, and it was a blow from which Weimar Germany never recovered, either politically or socially. The middle classes had their savings wiped out and felt themselves let down by the government as their security was shattered when social and economic stability disappeared. This led to widespread disillusionment, not only with the parties but with Weimar democracy as a whole. Those that railed against the Treaty of Versailles attacked the political representatives that had accepted it, the republican government in general, the Allies, the Jews — in fact anything and anyone that might serve as a scapegoat and persuade people of the acceptability of an authoritarian, nationalistic, militant alternative to further national unity and national pride. When, in 1921, Walther Rathenau, Minister of Reconstruction, stated that it was Germany’s duty to follow the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, whatever its injustices, he was accused of betraying the national cause and of doing so because he was a Jew. The hatred generated against Rathenau led to his assassination on 24 June 1922 by two ex-officers from a Freikorps brigade, who were later turned into Nazi heroes for their exemplary “patriotism.” The assassination of Rathenau is the subject matter of Vicki Baum’s novel Feme (1926), discussed by Heather Valencia in this volume, and the lives and motives of these two young men are portrayed in the novel Die Geächteten (The Outlaws, 1930) by Ernst von Salomon. The author was himself implicated in Rathenau’s murder and was sentenced to five years imprisonment in 1922. After his release he became involved in antirepublican activities among farmers in Schleswig-Holstein, activities that are reflected in Hans Fallada’s novel Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Farmers, Functionaries, and Fireworks, 1931), which is discussed in Jenny Williams’s chapter on Fallada in this volume. Salomon depicts events from the end of the war until Rathenau’s assassination. The novel portrays how patriotic and nationalistic organizations were created as a direct consequence of the abortive revolution, and shows the extremes to which the members of such groups were prepared to go in pursuit of their political principles. Nor was Rathenau’s assassination an isolated case. Anton Gill notes that “376 political murders were committed in Germany between 1918 and 1922.”5 At the beginning of 1923 the nationalist camp won further sympathy for their claims of persecution by the French and other allies as the French occupied the key industrial region of the Ruhr, which they justified as a reaction to the failure to maintain reparation payments. The German nationalists used this to stimulate further support for their political views.

INTRODUCTION




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On 8 November that same year, Hitler staged his “Beer-Hall Putsch,” a failed coup attempt in Munich. At his trial, together with nine accomplices including General Ludendorff, Hitler presented himself as the defender of national interests, appealing to all who would help to recapture a lost sense of German unity and restore German honor. The lenient sentences passed on those accused of this crime against the state reflect the political attitude of those who meted out such justice. Hitler, though an Austrian who could have been deported for his act of treason, persuaded the court that he felt himself to be a German, and was therefore sentenced to only five years imprisonment; he was released after only thirteen months. It was obvious that in the civil service and in the judiciary attitudes prevailed that were not those of the Weimar Republic but of Wilhelmine Germany. The political power wielded by the courts in their interpretation of the law might be said to have equaled that of the Reichstag itself. Thus, while left-wing agitators were harshly punished for their activities, peaceful or violent, those responsible for such right-wing acts as the Kapp Putsch or Hitler’s Munich Putsch were treated far more leniently, and sometimes even acquitted.6 The general state of disillusionment with politics which resulted from defeat and the ensuing chaos led to the questioning of moral values. There was the widespread view that western culture was in terminal decline, and was moving towards totalitarianism and technological control, a view that found its echo in the ever-growing popularity of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 2 vols., 1918–22) during the Weimar Republic. Spengler dismissed the attachment to liberal idealism as futile in a world destined to decline, and argued it was useless to attempt to resist inexorable historical change. At the end of 1923 the Dawes Plan was introduced by the United States, which rescheduled reparation payments and so made them more manageable, and inflation was curbed through the introduction of a new temporary unit of currency, the Rentenmark. It is a matter of some irony that when Germany emerged from its bout of hyperinflation it found itself in a healthier economic situation than before, having cleared its debts. The post-inflation period of relative economic stability and growing prosperity from 1924 to 1929 saw rapid industrial growth, not least because of foreign investment, with the emergence of a number of massive industrial concerns that dominated the country’s economy: the chemical company I. G. Farben (founded 1925), Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works, founded 1926 from Stinnes, Thyssen, Otto Wolff and Phoenix A.G.), Siemens in the electrical industry, Hapag and Norddeutsche Lloyd in shipping, and Hugenberg, Mosse, and Ullstein in publishing. The result was that by 1929 Germany had regained its position as the world’s second leading industrial nation, after the United States, a position it had first achieved just prior to the start of the war.

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As national prosperity grew, there was the prospect of stability. Under the able stewardship of Gustav Stresemann, who was foreign minister from 1923 until his death in 1929, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations (1926), the French evacuation of the Ruhr was agreed upon (it was completed in 1930), and the Kellogg-Briand declaration of 1928 condemning war generated an air of optimism and belief in a stable future. But this was to be short lived, and was brought to an end not least by the very cause of its success, namely dependence on foreign, principally American, short-term loans. As politicians recognized, if there were to be a crisis resulting in America requiring the return of its short-term credits, Germany would in effect be bankrupt. Their worst fears were soon to be realized. The Wall Street collapse of October 1929 led soon to the Great Depression that spread throughout Europe, particularly England and Germany. Though this was a worldwide economic phenomenon, it had the most devastating effect on countries that relied heavily on investment from abroad. The more prosperous countries defended their own interests by withdrawing foreign investment and reducing their imports. As a result, Germany was deprived of investment capital and also lost its export markets. Unemployment rose from just over one million in 1929 to over six million by 1932.7 Against this backdrop of economic crisis, anti-democratic sentiments, whether propagated by the left or the right, flourished. In the elections of 14 September 1930 the Communists increased their share of the vote by fifty percent. On the right, Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’ Party) increased its number of seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107. The NSDAP’s new brand of nationalism appeared to offer a sense of direction to a younger generation who felt that they had gained nothing from the experiment in democracy. It also appealed to the disillusioned older generation and the militaristic elements in Germany, stressing the Prussian virtues of national loyalty, discipline, and subordination of the self to the common good. The rising nationalism also fostered a mood of anti-Semitism that had never been far below the surface of the Weimar Republic. The nationalists had stigmatized the Jews as representing an alien and “un-German” liberaldemocratic spirit upon which the disastrous republic had been founded. Now they sought scapegoats for the economic misery that the country was suffering. Political extremists of either color were vying for domination of contemporary youth who, with no political experience and no evidence that the Weimar Republic had any sound future, had little idea to whom to offer their allegiance. Whoever could harness its support would win the day politically. In its 1932 issues, Die neue Rundschau, the liberal democratic journal published by the S. Fischer Verlag, concentrated on the difficulties facing the younger generation. Contributors such as Jakob

INTRODUCTION




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Wassermann, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Peter Suhrkamp were at pains to guide the younger student generation towards the principles of humanism and liberalism, and generate within them a historical awareness that might counteract the irrationalism and emotionalism that would inevitably become self-destructive. However, by this time democracy had already been fatally undermined. In his classic study of the Weimar Republic, the historian Detlev Peukert identified four separate processes that destroyed the Weimar Republic: “chronic economic and social crisis”; the decline of the “popular legitimacy of the Republic”; “the avowed determination of the old antirepublican élites to destroy Weimar’s already battered parliamentary and democratic institutions”; and finally “Hitler’s broad-based totalitarian movement.”8 Between 1930 and 1932 the then Chancellor, Brüning, attempted to steer Germany through the deepening economic crisis without a majority in parliament, repeatedly making use of emergency executive powers. The attempts to deal with the economic crisis by cutting state expenditure alienated the mass of the people even more. Brüning was forced to resign, and there followed a sequence of elections that produced no majority for any one political party or coalition of parties. Germany was effectively governed by ministerial decree even before Hitler came to power. Indeed, parliament “was deliberately sidelined so that presidential rule could be imposed.”9 President Hindenburg initially resisted Hitler’s demand that he be appointed chancellor after the elections of 31 July 1932 in which the NSDAP emerged as the largest party in parliament, though without an overall majority. After subsequent elections on 6 November 1932, Hindenburg was persuaded that Hitler’s support was on the wane, and reluctantly agreed to the suggestion that Hitler could be kept in check as chancellor, a disastrous miscalculation on the part of the old élites, who backed Hitler for tactical reasons. Hitler was duly appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933. Only fourteen years after it started, the Weimar Republic was over, as Hitler immediately set about sidelining the old élites and turning Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship.

Weimar Culture As Anton Gill noted in his lively account of Berlin between the wars, cultural life flourished in Berlin even at the height of the revolutionary upheavals in 1918/19,10 and if the Weimar Republic was characterized by political instability, this went hand in hand with a vibrant cultural life that quickly became the stuff of legend.11 Film, theater, cabaret, dance, art, architecture and design, as well as novel writing, all experienced a creative flowering during the period. Moreover, during the course of the 1920s German culture became more open to influences from other cultures,

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most notably the United States, as financial credits went together with cultural influence, and at the same time German culture was itself wellreceived in the English-speaking world. To take one example, American jazz became hugely popular in Germany, while in the other direction, German Expressionist films were internationally acclaimed and distributed. Novelists who rose to prominence in Germany were also often quickly translated into English and enjoyed a wide readership and considerable prestige in the United States as well as in their own country, notable examples being Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, and Hermann Hesse, though it is true to some extent of nearly all the novelists featured in this volume.12 Expressionism, initially associated primarily with the visual arts and poetry, crystallized as a movement around 1910 and experienced its high point during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.13 It was therefore, along with its close companion Dada, which was particularly in vogue in Berlin, still the dominant artistic mode in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Characteristic of Expressionism is an oscillation between messianic optimism and apocalyptic despair, which was perfectly in tune with the times during the chaotic period of military defeat and the revolutionary events of 1918–19. The greatest Expressionist poetry was written on the eve and in the early years of the war. By the time Kurt Pinthus published his seminal collection of Expressionist poems, which he ambivalently called Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn [or Twilight] of Mankind, 1918), many of the greatest poets, amongst them Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, and Georg Trakl, were dead. Expressionist plays did begin to appear on the eve of the war, notable examples being Reinhard Sorge’s Der Bettler (The Beggar, 1912) and Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (The Son, 1914), which as the name implies focuses on the conflict between the generations in a manner that would become typical of Expressionism. But it was during the early years of the Weimar Republic that Expressionism reached its high point in the theater, with the appearance of now-classic Expressionist plays such as Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (The Transformation, 1919) and Masse Mensch (Masses and Man, 1921), and Georg Kaiser’s so-called Gas-Trilogie (comprising Die Koralle [The Coral, 1917] and Gas I and Gas II [1918 and 1920]). With the first performance of Bertolt Brecht’s early play Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night, first performed in 1922 and published the following year) Expressionism in the theater at least was a movement already in decline, Brecht’s play marking a deliberate challenge to the excessive emotionalism of Expressionism.14 Filmmakers meanwhile adopted the Expressionist style a little later than the other arts. Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) is regarded as the first Expressionism film, and in film the style remained in vogue well into the 1920s, with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) among the masterpieces of German Expressionist film.15

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The growth of the metropolis, the experience of urban life, was a central aspect of Weimar culture. Urbanization had proceeded rapidly in Germany during the industrial revolution that followed German unification in 1871. To take the example of the capital, Berlin: in 1871 its population was 800,000, whereas by 1925, the total population of Greater Berlin had reached four million, making it the second largest city in Europe after London.16 Berlin was also arguably the cultural capital of Europe in the 1920s, and as John Willett has argued, “Weimar culture was a culture of city-dwellers,” so that “during the 1920s the concepts of the Big City, ‘Asphalt Literature’ and so forth dominated all the arts.”17 So pervasive has the image of Berlin in the 1920s become that the Weimar Republic is “associated in many minds above all with 1920s Berlin.”18 Both film, through for example Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, the Symphony of a Big City, 1927), and literature, most famously in the shape of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), but also notably in the work of Gabriele Tergit and Vicki Baum discussed later in this volume, helped to locate Berlin as the apparent epicenter of Weimar culture, though as one scholar has recently argued, the dominance of Berlin should not be overstated, since “the myth of Berlin in the 1920s that lives on so powerfully to this day was largely a creation of the Weimar literary feuilleton.”19 Also part of the myth is the legendary cabaret scene in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.20 Industrialization and urbanization were accompanied by rapid technological advances, including new and rapid modes of transport and communication, such as the motor car, the airplane, the expansion of rail networks, and the telephone. This brought with it a sense of the acceleration of modern life, a feeling that reached its peak during the middle years of the Weimar Republic, as economic growth picked up and the influence of the USA, perceived as the most modern country in the world, reached its peak. Technological advances also had a direct influence on the arts. Alongside film, other media rose to prominence during the period on the back of advances in technology, contributing to a sense of modernity and change. Such new media included radio, which began broadcasting in 1923, and photography, which acquired a new status as an art form.21 Its greatest exponent was John Heartfield (1891–1968), who perfected the technique of photomontage as a means of capturing the vibrancy and complexity of modern life. These developments were part of a growing vogue for documentary approaches throughout the arts, coupled with a noticeable shift towards visual culture during the period. Also important in this regard was the growth in scope and sophistication of the advertising industry, which was transformed by developments in printing and attracted leading artists to the medium.22 In the theater too, new visual techniques and the adoption of montage became central to avant-garde developments in the second half of the 1920s, as films and images projected on stage

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became key components of the new style of epic theater developed by Brecht and Erwin Piscator (1883–1966). This is best exemplified in Piscator’s famous production of Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla, We’re Living, 1927) at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, which has as its subject changes in Weimar politics, society, culture and even technology from 1919 to 1927.23 These developments in theatrical style were part of a larger shift that occurred around the mid-1920s. By 1924–25, as relative political and economic stability returned, the talk was of a new artistic style that set its face against the excesses of Expressionism. This new style became known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety or New Objectivity). A notoriously difficult term to define, the eminent cultural historian Jost Hermand sees it less as an artistic style than as a mode of thinking: “Neue Sachlichkeit is primarily not so much an artistic as an ideological standpoint that seems to reject everything idealistic, noble, and grandiose, including even bourgeois artistic isms themselves, and that, as a world-view, responds specifically to the political, social and economic reality of the newly created Weimar Republic.”24 In architecture and design this new movement saw the elimination of ornamentation and a turn towards self-consciously modern design. Instrumental in this shift was the Bauhaus school of art and design. It was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, and developed its distinctive new style seeking to unite art and technology as early as 1922. In 1925, due to political pressure following a change in the regional government, it moved to a new specially designed home in Dessau. With its stress on functionality, simplicity, and clarity, the Bauhaus style was perfectly in tune with the movement of New Sobriety. In painting too, Expressionism gave way to the more sober, to some eyes cynical, art of Otto Dix (1891–1969) and Georg Grosz (1893–1959), whose most typical work includes satirical and often grotesque portraits of everyday characters.

Weimar Novelists The Weimar Republic was a propitious time for novelists.25 Not only is the novel a form that lends itself well to the exploration of the turbulent political circumstances and rapid social change which characterized the Weimar Republic, but there was a rapidly expanding readership, as literacy improved, leisure time increased, and bookclubs proliferated.26 The result was a large market for both high-brow and more popular novels during the period. New genres became popular, such as the detective story and the “Zeitroman” (novel of the times), while older genres such as the historical novel were revived and given a new relevance for the times, notably by Lion Feuchtwanger, discussed in Rolland Dollinger’s chapter in this volume.27 Also popular were novels set in exotic locations, none more so than

INTRODUCTION




13

the works of the enigmatic B. Traven, whose distinctive contribution to the Weimar literary scene is explored in these pages by Karl S. Guthke. While some older writers, such as Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) and Jakob Wassermann (the latter the subject of a chapter by Leydecker in this volume), who were already popular long before the war, generally stuck to relatively traditional narrative forms, new forms and narrative styles developed. The Expressionist style is perhaps best embodied in the early postwar novels of Hermann Hesse, especially Demian (1919), which, as Paul Bishop shows, was heavily influenced by psychoanalytical theories, while the new technique of montage, which was such a feature of all the arts in the latter years of the Republic, is nowhere better exemplified in novel writing than in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, discussed here by David Midgley. Novelists of the Weimar Republic also had a new subject matter, namely modern warfare, characterized by previously unknown levels of mass slaughter, mechanization, and brutality. Along with painting,28 the novel was the cultural space in which often diametrically opposed views about the nature and meaning of modern warfare in general, and the First World War in particular, clashed. In the present volume Brian Murdoch examines the work of Erich Maria Remarque in the context of the anti-war novels of the political Left, while Roger Woods looks at the war novels of Ernst Jünger and other novelists of the Conservative Revolution. Although the powerful feminist movements that had developed in Germany around 1900 lost some of their momentum during the war and in the 1920s, the Weimar constitution did grant women the right to vote.29 Moreover, women entered the workforce in ever greater numbers during the Weimar Republic, in both the manufacturing and the growing service sector, which no doubt contributed to the perception amongst contemporaries that women’s emancipation if anything was accelerating during the period. Women’s access to education, including higher education, also steadily improved. This was the age of the New Woman, with the new hairstyle of the “Bubikopf” (bobbed haircut) coming to be synonymous with burgeoning female emancipation, including sexual emancipation. Of all the novelists of the Weimar Republic, it was Vicki Baum who best captured this new spirit of possibility for women in a series of popular novels which are explored in this volume by Heather Valencia. In his chapter on Wassermann, Leydecker demonstrates the continuing importance of the theme of marriage and relations between the sexes during the Weimar Republic.30 Each of the chapters discusses a novelist of the Weimar Republic who published at least one work during the period that was not only popular at the time but has also stood the test of time, being read and studied by later generations of readers and critics. Nearly all of these novelists have had their novels frequently reprinted and translated into English and widely

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read on both sides of the Atlantic. Each chapter contains a brief account of the life of the novelist, his or her significant achievements before and after the Weimar Republic where relevant, and the history of their reception, but the principal focus is on the engagement of the novelists with Weimar politics and society, be it in their novels or in essays or other non-fiction such as the feuilleton, a series of subjective impressions that appeared in the section of German newspapers with the same name. In the case of nonfiction, particular attention is paid to this dimension of the Weimar writings of Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, and Jakob Wassermann, while Joseph Roth’s Weimar journalism, a substantial sample of which has recently become available to an English-reading public for the first time, is given special attention in Helen Chambers’s chapter on the novelist.31 At its beginnings the Weimar Republic seemed to hold out the promise that writers could have a direct influence on political and social life. The fact that the National Socialists organized public book burnings on 10 May 1933 in which works by many of the novelists featured in this volume, including Baum, Feuchtwanger, Mann, Remarque, Roth, Traven, and Wassermann, were destroyed, paradoxically illustrates the perceived political and social power of novelists during the period, which the National Socialists moved rapidly to curtail.32 At the same time, the book burnings marked the end of all freedom of expression in Germany and the abrupt termination of one of the most innovative and creative periods of novel writing in the German language.

Notes 1

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Penguin, 1988), 73.

2

Alfred D. White, “Weimar Republic,” in Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed. Matthias Konzett (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 2:989–93; here, 991.

3

Anton Gill, A Dance between Flames: Berlin between the Wars (London: John Murray, 1993), 24.

4

Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 2001), 3. Widdig’s excellent book not only contains a lively account of the experience of hyperinflation, but also a wideranging investigation of the effects of that inflation on the culture of the Weimar Republic.

5 6

Gill, A Dance between Flames, 72.

For an account of literary representations of the legal system in the Weimar Republic, see Klaus Petersen, Literatur und Justiz in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), and Jörg Hammerschmidt, Literarische Justizkritik in der Weimarer Republik: Der Beitrag der Schriftsteller in der Auseinandersetzung mit

INTRODUCTION




15

der Justizwirklichkeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Werkes von Kurt Tucholsky (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2002). 7

On unemployment in the literature of the Weimar Republic, see Thorsten Unger, Diskontinuitäten im Erwerbsleben: Vergleichende Untersuchungen zu Arbeit und Erwerbslosigkeit in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).

8

Detlev J. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (London: Penguin, 1991), 266–67.

9

Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 259.

10

Gill, A Dance between Flames, chap. 2, 21–39.

11

Only a brief outline of the richness of Weimar culture can be given here. Useful further reading on Weimar culture generally includes: Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); John Willett, The New Sobriety, 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); Willett, The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984); Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1978); and Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1994). On Weimar literature more specifically, see Anthony Grenville, Cockpit of Ideologies: The Literature and Political History of the Weimar Republic (Bern, Berlin, New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Keith Bullivant, ed., Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic (Manchester: MUP, 1977); A. F. Bance, ed., Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982); and Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb, eds., German Writers and Politics, 1918–1939 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992). On Weimar art, see Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Scherera, The “Golden” Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic (New Haven and London, Yale UP, 1990).

12

On American influences in Weimar, see Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), part 2, 69–116. 13

On Expressionism, see A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, ed. Neil H. Donahue (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005). 14

On Weimar theater, see John Willett’s definitive study, The Theater of the Weimar Republic (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988). 15

On Weimar film, see Dietrich Scheunemann, ed., Expressionist Film: New Perspectives (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000).

16

Gill, A Dance between Flames, 34.

17

Willett, The Weimar Years, 111.

18

Ibid., 7.

19

Erhard Schütz, “Beyond Glittering Reflections of Asphalt: Changing Images of Berlin in Weimar Literary Journalism,” in Kniesche and Brockmann, Dancing on

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the Volcano, 119–26. Two further chapters of part 3 of that collection of essays focus on Berlin as a case study in Weimar culture; see 127–63. The photojournalistic representation of the Weimar Republic, with a particular focus on Berlin, is the subject of the superbly illustrated The Weimar Republic through the Lens of the Press by Torsten Palmér and Hendrik Neubauer (Cologne: Könemann, 2000). 20

On cabaret, see Alan Lareau, The Wild Stage: Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995).

21

On Weimar photography, see Diethart Kerbs and Walter Uka, eds., Fotografie und Bildpublizistik in der Weimarer Republik (Bönen: Kettler, 2004).

22

Erich Kästner’s novel Fabian (1931), in which the eponymous hero is employed as a copywriter in the advertising industry, is a satirical literary reflection on the advertising industry towards the end of the Weimar Republic.

23

For Piscator’s own account of the production of Hoppla, wir leben! see Erwin Piscator, Das politische Theater (Berlin: A. Schultz, 1929, repr. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), translated as The Political Theatre by Hugh Rorrison (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980).

24

Jost Hermand, “Neue Sachlichkeit: Ideology, Lifestyle, or Artistic Movement?” in Kniesche and Brockmann, Dancing on the Volcano, 57–68; here, 58.

25 The best recent study of the Weimar novel in English is David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). In English, see also Elke Matijevich, The Zeitroman of the Late Weimar Republic (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). There has been considerable critical interest in the Weimar novel by German critics in recent years, with important studies including Erhard Schütz, Romane der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Fink, 1986); Martin Lindner, Leben in der Krise: Zeitromane der Neuen Sachlichkeit und die intellektuelle Mentalität der klassischen Moderne (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Sabina Becker and Christoph Weiß, eds., Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman: Neue Interpretationen zum Roman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1995); Michael Hahn, Scheinblüte, Krisenzeit, Nationalsozialismus: Die Weimarer Republik im Spiegel später Zeitromane (1928–32/33) (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995); and Walter Delabar, Was tun?: Romane am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Opladen/ Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999). 26

On bookclubs, see Urban van Melis, Die Buchgemeinschaften in der Weimarer Republik: Mit einer Fallstudie über die sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbuchgemeinschaft “Der Bücherkreis” (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2002).

27 On the historical novel during the Weimar Republic, see also Bettina Hey’l, Geschichtsdenken und literarische Moderne: Zum historischen Roman in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994). 28 See Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985). 29

On the feminist movements of the period, see Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976). 30

On gender relations in the Weimar novel, see also Hartmut Vollmer, Liebes(ver)lust: Existenzsuche und Beziehungen von Männern und Frauen in deutschsprachigen Romanen der zwanziger Jahre: Erzählte Krisen — Krisen des Erzählens (Oldenburg:

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17

Igel Verlag, 1998). On female creativity in the Weimar Republic, see Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönfeld with Carmel Finnan (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006). On women writers of the Weimar Republic, see Walter Fähnders and Helga Karrenbrock, eds., Autorinnen der Weimarer Republik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2003); specifically on the novel, see Kerstin Barndt, Sentiment und Sachlichkeit: Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003). 31 Austrian novelists have not been included in the volume, with two exceptions: Roth’s journalism and the works of Vicki Baum, who although Austrian by birth, like Roth lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Nor are there chapters on the two giants of German novel writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955), on both of whom there is a mass of critical literature readily available in English as well as German. Moreover, Kafka was in any case a marginal figure during the Weimar Republic and was not widely read until after the Second World War, while Thomas Mann’s major fulllength novel of the Weimar Republic, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) is set before the First World War and is more a diagnosis of the collapse of the old prewar order than a direct engagement with the Weimar Republic. On Mann’s politics during the Weimar Republic, see the opposing views of Keith Bullivant, “Thomas Mann and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” in Bullivant, Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic, 24–38, and Martin Swales, “In Defence of Weimar: Thomas Mann and the Politics of Republicanism,” in Bance, Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics, 1–13. Limitations of space precluded the inclusion of other writers for whom a case could be made, notably Werner Bergengruen, Willi Bredel, Kasimir Edschmid, Marieluise Fleißer, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Anna Seghers. 32

On the book burning, see Ulrich Walberer, ed., 10. Mai 1933: Bücherverbrennung in Deutschland und die Folgen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983). A selected list of banned authors during the period from 1933–45 is given on p. 303.

1: Heinrich Mann and the Struggle for Democracy Karin V. Gunnemann

H

MANN WAS ONE OF THE most outspoken and visible literary figures during the Weimar Republic. Other novelists were more popular in the twenties and early thirties, but none of them dealt with the political, social, and cultural upheavals of the new republic with more energy and courageous vision than he. Well before the First World War Mann had criticized the repressive life under Wilhelm II in both essays and fiction. His work had provoked the authorities to the point where his ninth novel, Die kleine Stadt (The Little Town), was at first denied publication in 1909. Mann had introduced the work as the song of songs of democracy, and it was feared that it might contaminate the public’s faith in the authoritarian national state.1 Mann’s political criticism comes as a surprise if one looks at his background. Born in 1871 into the world of a well-established bourgeois family of merchants and civil servants, his literary beginnings were situated firmly in the fin-de-siècle aestheticism and political conservatism prevalent at that time. But even as a young man he began to develop a keen interest in the intellectual and artistic history of France. He studied the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and he observed how a novelist like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) stressed the importance of the writer as an anatomist and legislator of his time and nation. As early as 1904 Mann defined his role and that of all serious writers as moral and political educators of the people and saw himself specifically as a teacher of democracy for Germany. From then on, the French Revolution (naively stripped of its contradiction between freedom and violence) became for Mann the pivotal event in human history. The supreme task of a German artist-intellectual, a person of Geist (intellect), he argued, was to educate his nation to follow the demands of critical reason for truth and justice, just as the French people had done in the Revolution of 1789. Along with other important writers of the time such as Alfred Döblin and Georg Kaiser, Mann came to understand intellect as irrevocably tied to action, a dissecting and equalizing force working on society whenever power obscured social and political truth, and threatened human justice and freedom.2 Intellect became for Mann the spearhead in Germany’s attempt to establish a democratic government. EINRICH

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Mann considered Germany’s lack of democratic institutions outrageous in light of the historical development of the previous hundred years. If politicians were unwilling to bring about change, social action had to come from artists like him. Throughout his long life (he died in 1950), this mission gave strong urgency of purpose to Mann’s writings, and it created in him a unique willingness for artistic experimentation and compromise. If the primary function of art was the political and social education of the consumer of art, then writing novels using popular slang and cinematic techniques, or writing words for musicals, might be the most effective means for the serious artist, since the younger generation most closely identified with them. Heinrich Mann’s literary output was prodigious: eighteen novels, nine published plays, eleven volumes of short stories, and, most important, over one thousand essays, speeches, and articles. The history of German literature is poor in good essayists, but Heinrich Mann deserves to be remembered as one of them. The essay was the art form best suited to his critical mind and to his sense of mission to provoke change. While only a few of Mann’s novels can be considered literary masterpieces, a number of his skillfully written essays are invaluable contributions to German intellectual and political history. Despite their historical and intrinsic significance, only a few of Mann’s essays have been translated into English. Two of his early important works are “Geist und Tat” (Intellect and Action) and “VoltaireGoethe,” written in 1910. They were published in major Socialist journals and had a significant influence on the expressionists, especially those who called themselves activists. The extensive essay “Zola,” written in 1915 in response to his brother Thomas’s patriotic welcome of the outbreak of the First World War, helped intensify an ongoing nation-wide debate over the difference between German culture and Western civilization. In his essays and speeches from the twenties and thirties Heinrich took a courageous stand against the political power of big business. He fought for a better understanding with France and for the idea of a unified Europe. Most striking and audacious are the pieces in which he attacked the curtailment of civil liberties during the Weimar Republic and the urgent warnings against the rise of National Socialism and its consequences. Heinrich Mann has always stood in the shadow of his more famous brother Thomas, considered by many as the greatest storyteller in German literature.3 Only one of Heinrich’s novels, Der Untertan (1918, The Subject; translated as The Patrioteer, retranslated as The Loyal Subject) came close to the success of his brother’s books. Since the novel was completed in 1914, its conception lies before the time that concerns us here. However, the topic of the book, and the history around its publication, are directly relevant to the problems faced by Germany in the twenties and early thirties. German historians studying what is sometimes called the “authoritarian personality”4 see the Untertan as a prototype for persons

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with fascist tendencies. Historians are also interested in how the novel portrays the political role of the middle class with its antidemocratic nationalism before and after the First World War.5 By close observation of German society under Wilhelm II and acute premonition of its direction, Mann anticipated in this novel several of the basic obstacles Germany faced in its attempt to become a viable democracy during the years of the Weimar Republic. In Der Untertan he dramatized a political system in which indecisive liberal parties helplessly watched the coalition between an aggressive nationalism and monopoly capitalism. Social Democrats had less interest in social reforms than in securing their position in government, and the proletariat was unorganized and open to coercion and corruption. Most important, Mann exposed what he understood to be a uniquely German characteristic, the “Untertanengeist” (spirit of an underling). The underling was the loyal subject who ironically combined a masochistic subservience with a will to wield power over those beneath him. In his late autobiographical memoir, Mann declared power as his most fruitful theme, the topic around which he composed most of his works.6 Through Der Untertan he wanted to warn his readers of the devastating effect of the “Untertanengeist” on the political, social, and cultural life of a nation. Together with the short story “Kobes,” from 1923, this novel is the strongest example of Mann’s belief in the educational role of fiction for public life. Some historians would argue that the mentality of the German “Untertan” survived the First World War and the German Revolution of 1918/19, and was in part the social-psychological basis for Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The protagonist of the novel, Diederich Heßling, the underling, clearly prefigures fascist practices. Mann himself called Der Untertan a “Kampfbuch” (polemical treatise) against Wilhelmine politics.7 As such it provides a thematic, critical background for Mann’s literary engagement in the politics of the Weimar Republic. Mann recognized that the attempt by Wilhelm II to combine a booming, modern, imperialist economy with a backward, restrictive, and authoritarian political system was a ludicrous anachronism. In order to subdue the increasing opposition and socially integrate his subjects, the emperor had built his personality into mythical heroic proportions. He presented this invented self to the public with great histrionics. His dazzling words about Germany’s unique grandeur and expansion through colonies, his boastings about the might with which he was smashing the socialist onslaught, and the hollow threats to his foreign enemies all served to intoxicate his subjects with awe and fantasies of unrealistic goals. The emperor’s grand behavior provoked in his people a desire for imitation. The development of Diederich Heßling’s character is a reversal of the unfolding of an individual described in the German “Bildungsroman.” In this literary genre the protagonist goes through a slow process of inner

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growth. Shaped by various educational factors, he matures into a person whose worth is measured by the degree to which he becomes a useful member of society. In contrast, Heßling starts out in his youth knowing very well that he was destined to work and to lead a practical existence, but through various forces of an authoritarian society acting on him, his identity is first lost and then perversely reshaped. Through his obsession with power, and his identification with the Emperor Wilhelm II, he first becomes a human nothing, ending up as a power-wielding devil. Diederich Heßling’s education into a perfect subject starts at home when he is frightened by threatening fairytales and a terrifying father. In school he faces the imperial authoritarian system for the first time. He starts to understand that the reward for his subjection to the will of the more powerful, in this case his teacher, is the license to exploit those who are weaker than he is. Proud to be beaten by the teacher, he brutally subjects the weakest member of his class, the only Jew, to kneel before a cross he has erected on the desk. The next steps in his education are a dueling student society at Berlin University and his military service. Hessling is delighted that in both institutions “jäh und unabänderlich sank man zur Laus herab, zum Bestandteil, zum Rohstoff, an dem ein unermeßlicher Wille knetete” (precipitously and inevitably one degenerated to the status of an insect, of a part in the machine, of so much raw material to be molded by an omnipotent will).8 After this experience he is ready to meet the highest personification of power, the magnificent emperor himself, who by his sheer appearance in uniform and on horseback subdues a workers’ uprising. Intoxicated, Hessling observes: Auf dem Pferd dort, unter dem Tor der siegreichen Einmärsche und mit Zügen, steinern und blitzend, ritt die Macht! Die Macht, die über uns hingeht und deren Hufe wir küssen! Die über Hunger, Trotz und Hohn hingeht! Gegen die wir nichts können, weil wir alle sie lieben! Die wir im Blut haben, weil wir die Unterwerfung darin haben! (64) [There on horseback rode Power, through the gateway of triumphal entries, with features stony and piercing! The power that transcends us and whose hooves we kiss, the power that is beyond the reach of hunger, spite and mockery! Against which we are impotent, for we all love it! Which we have in our blood, for in our blood is submission!]

Heßling, the monarchist and loyal subject, finds here the reason for his existence. After the personal encounter with the Emperor, he feels ready to imitate the monarch and become a pioneer of the spirit of the times in his native town of Netzig. Mann has Heßling imitate the Emperor in looks as well as in exact speech. By taking the Emperor’s words out of context, he hopes to heighten the reader’s understanding of their preposterous meaning. In order to provide a critique of domestic and foreign policy in prewar

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Germany, Mann portrays Heßling’s goal to become the most powerful person in his hometown as a purpose parallel to the politics of the emperor. Both are establishing their power by combating the interior enemy: Social Democrats and Jews. While the Emperor is desperately trying to acquire colonies, Heßling’s imperialism consists of absorbing all competition into his own factory. As town politician Hessling confronts his liberal citizens with the necessity for more funds for patriotic causes, while the Emperor persuades the nation of a military buildup so that the German navy would equal that of Great Britain. With high emotion inappropriate to the occasion, Heßling addresses the workers in his factory in the exact words from a speech the Emperor had given at a political rally in 1892: “Mein Kurs ist der richtige, ich führe euch herrlichen Tagen entgegen. Diejenigen, welche mir dabei behilflich sein wollen, sind mir von Herzen willkommen; diejenigen jedoch, welche sich mir bei dieser Arbeit entgegenstellen, zerschmettere ich” (106; My course is right, and I am guiding you to glorious times. Those who wish to help me are heartily welcome, but whoever opposes me in this work I will smash). “Zerschmettern” (to smash) was one of the emperor’s favorite terms for threatening Social Democrats and any foreign nation that stood in Germany’s way as it fought for its “Platz an der Sonne” (107; place in the sun). Clearly, Mann could hope that contemporary readers who discovered these familiar terms in the text would newly contemplate their irrationality and sinister showmanship. Later in the novel Mann exposes the corrupt judicial system of the Empire as a theatrical farce. The law courts are exposed as an instrument of arbitrary power. Hessling provokes a Jewish industrialist to commit lèsemajesté in order to prove to the town audience during the trial that Bismarck’s ideas were still valid: “Blut und Eisen bleibt die wirksamste Kur! Macht geht vor Recht!” (319; Blood and iron are still the most effective remedies! Might makes right!). In spite of the lack of evidence, the outcome of the trial is a victory for Heßling. The Jew is convicted because establishing guilt is declared unimportant when weighed against the political sympathies of the listeners. Heßling and his nationalist followers are successful in subduing all opposition in the town. The liberals have sold out over the integrating policy of a strong fleet against Great Britain, the Social Democrats are not interested in social reforms, and the workers are unorganized and equally corrupted by power. In a boastful speech, again using the Emperor’s exact words, Heßling calls Germany the “Schrecken aller Feinde” (terror of all enemies). The army is the pillar of strength with which German colonies will finally be won, and through which the world will understand that Germany is the salt of the earth. The nation has reached the “Höhe germanischer Herrenkultur” (height of Germanic master-culture) and is the envy of all people. In contrast to France, “dem demokratisch verseuchten, daher von Gott verlassenen Reich” (the empire poisoned by democracy and

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therefore abandoned by God), Germans were God’s chosen people and the instrument of His purpose (467–68). At the end of the novel, Heßling senses rumbles from social upheavals to come, but he puts them aside as the horsemen of the apocalypse holding maneuvers for the Day of Judgment (473). The only person in the book who understands the full implications of the kind of power represented by Heßling is old Herr Buck, a hero of the 1848 revolution, once the leader of the liberal bourgeoisie in Netzig but now demoted by Heßling, like everyone else. Buck watches helplessly as evil in public life grows to mythic proportions. The novel ends with Buck’s death. As he lies dying he expresses visions of a brighter, more humane future until the moment he notices Heßling standing in the doorway to his bedroom. Terror-stricken as if he had seen the devil, he falls forward and dies. The type Mann called the “Untertan” has buried all concepts of freedom, justice, truth, and humanity. Indeed, Diederich Heßling, in his attempt to live his life in imitation of the Emperor’s power politics, has lost all humane feelings and proportions, and his leadership acts like poison on the moral awareness of the people in his hometown. Heßling’s disregard for the rights of the working class goes so far that he experiences the shooting dead of a worker as “etwas direkt Großartiges, sozusagen Majestätisches” (144; something really grand, so to speak majestic). Heßling’s intoxication with power allows him to go even beyond the Emperor’s own unfeeling fancies. Toward the end of the novel in a public speech, he sketches out his personal vision for a future state in which racial hygiene would be guaranteed by procedures to prevent imbeciles and perverts from breeding. This is the kind of message of terror old Herr Buck feels he is receiving from Heßling on his deathbed. It is a message by which Mann anticipates Nazi eugenics, including sterilization and euthanasia for those perceived to be valueless. An equally striking premonition of things to come is Mann’s depiction of the devastating power Heßling asserts over the people of Netzig. As he outlines his vision of an inhumane future state, the people hail him with whooping elation and raised patriotic beer glasses. The process of moral desensitization has come a long way. Mann was cautious about later remarks praising his book as an anticipation of National Socialism and its atrocities. He understood himself primarily as a novelist who created his work out of the tension between his desire to diagnose contemporary life and suggest possible alternatives for the future, and his wish to entertain. Mann did not want to be seen, above all, as a critical sociologist or historian, and certainly not as a mere commentator on current affairs. But, independently of these claims, his acute observation and study of political life from the formation of the German Empire in 1871 to the time just before the First World War enabled him to discover some of the dangerous potential that lay in the history of

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Germany’s preoccupation with power. With unique insight Mann recognized that these dangers would go far beyond the time in which he wrote this novel, and would have a devastating effect on the future of his country and its eventual struggle with democracy. The evaluations of the political dimensions of Der Untertan have often obscured the substantial artistic achievement of the novel. The book is not without problems. There are inconsistencies in the plot, and readers may be irritated by the confusing labyrinth of intrigues and the exaggerated descriptions of facts until they realize that Mann uses them as parts of the world he wishes to depict.9 Der Untertan is not a realistic historical novel, even though the story is based on a number of historical events and uses direct quotations from the emperor. Following the model of the French social novelists, Mann’s characters and events are larger than life, and serve the purpose of pointing to their moral qualities. Mann hoped that readers would gain insight into the real world surrounding them by means of both the content and the form of the text, and so be motivated to change that world. Critics of the novel have attached the terms parody and bitter satire to the book, frequently as derogatory evaluation, thereby attempting to obscure its resemblance to the real state of the German Empire. What such criticism overlooks, however, is that Mann believed that German life under Wilhelm II was a parody of the self and of ideas and events. People were living parodies of their ideologies and of reality. Mann explained in his introduction to a new edition of Der Untertan in 1929 that he had observed how “der Typ des kaiserlichen Deutschen” (the type of the German imperialists) lived their lives as parodies of national pride and of a will to power that wants to dominate the world. They also parodied realism because they refused to respect anything that cannons could not destroy, and they despised things invisible that live in the mind.10 The history of the publication of Der Untertan and its reception provide a striking account of German political and intellectual life from just before the First World War to after the Second World War. At the same time, the emotional intensity with which this novel was received is proof of Mann’s success in making literature a means of communicating a political message. Mann had signed a contract for the publication of the novel in weekly installments in Zeit im Bild from 1 January 1914 on, but only after he had agreed to eliminate some of the more incriminating passages concerning the emperor so as not to run into trouble with censorship. Even then, the text caused a storm of disputation. On 1 August 1914, the day of Germany’s declaration of war on Russia and the call for general mobilization, Mann was informed that in the climate of patriotism the publication of further installments was inappropriate. Not until the end of the war could Der Untertan appear in complete form. Then, in 1918, the novel immediately gained overwhelming popularity. Seven editions of 100,000 copies each were printed within six weeks. The responses to Der Untertan

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reflect the wide spectrum of the hardened political and cultural positions in Germany after the war, a spectrum that made the realization of a democratic state during the Weimar Republic so problematic right from the beginning. The critique from the right went so far as to threaten Mann’s life for what some called his unpatriotic and communist smear campaign. His brother derided the book as an irresponsible social satire unrelated to reality. He called the novel sheer nonsense (Unfug), and he added: “. . . . wenn sie einen vornehmeren Namen verdiente, einen vornehmeren als den der internationalen Verleumdung und der nationalen Ehrabschneiderei, so laute er: Ruchloser Ästhetizismus” (. . . . and if it deserved a more noble name, more noble than that of international defamation and national slander, then it would be: ruthless aestheticism).11 On the other hand, the young Activist-Expressionists hailed the novel as a long-overdue injection of political blood into the German people, and there were those who affirmed the book as the valuable account of a gullible people seduced by power.12 Even though the heat of the responses and the number of reviews diminished during the Weimar years, Der Untertan catapulted Mann into the position of a public figure whose writings remained at the center of the intellectual and political debates of the Weimar Republic. Mann played his most public role in the so-called November Revolution, which followed the armistice of 11 November 1918. At the time, in several German cities, Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils) were formed, modeled on the Soviet Workers’ Councils. Unlike their model, however, these councils did not promote radical social change through revolutionary means. Rather, their primary goal was to establish peace between the radical factions and to represent a strong democratic presence in a newly elected social-democratic government. Kurt Hiller, an activist among the expressionists and a great admirer of Heinrich Mann, organized Intellectual Workers in several German cities that were to cooperate with the Councils of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants. In Munich, Mann’s adopted home town, the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner had established such a council, and Mann was asked to become its chairman. In the Politische Räte geistiger Arbeiter (Councils of Intellectual Workers) Mann saw an opportunity for the realization of the idea that was most important to him, the unity of Geist und Tat (intellect and action). Eisner himself combined the qualities Mann thought were necessary for a politically effective artist intellectual. He was a well-educated man though his roots were in the working class. He was a philosopher, educator, writer, politician, and pragmatist, who believed in political change through the power of ideas rather than revolutionary force. Never before in German history had the possibility of an effective involvement of intellectuals in politics looked more hopeful than directly after the First World War. Germany was finally ready to join the rest of the Western world in the pursuit of freedom and justice. Persons of Geist hoped to assist the population in

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sorting out the contradictory political claims made on them. The most important task was the enlightenment of the future voters in order to prevent a relapse into reactionary politics. Mann shared with Eisner the recognition that after Germany’s long experience with power politics, the creation of a democratic system would have to be a slow, dynamic learning process, an approximation of an ideal, the realization of which, most probably, lay beyond their own lifetime. The Councils only survived until May 1919, when “Freikorps” (free corps), rightist military groups, put a bloody end to them. Eisner himself was murdered by a rightist extremist in February 1919. But Mann’s work for the Council in these short months provided for him public visibility through speeches he gave expressing his thoughts about the kind of politics Germany needed. In his second address to the Political Council of Intellectual Workers in December 1918 (one of the few that has been translated into English), he stressed that the revolution was an attempt to introduce Germany to the moral laws of the liberated Western world. Germany’s defeat served as an opportunity to move toward absolute honesty and away from its former position, where might took precedence over right. He emphasized that intellectual boldness in the name of justice was at this point in German history more important than material wellbeing or the socialization of the means of production. As an example, he pointed to Woodrow Wilson, who in 1918 had formulated the famous Fourteen Points that he thought would make the world “safe for democracy.” Ignoring, or at least putting aside, the bitter reality of postwar economic and political chaos, Mann declared that a spiritual revolution had to precede economic transformation. The fate of a nation was more determined by its “way of feeling and thinking” than by economic principles. He called on his fellow intellectual workers to help shape the German people into responsible republicans who, through their insistence on justice, would reconcile Germany with the rest of the world.13 In December 1919, Mann published Macht und Mensch (Power and Humanity), which he called a textbook for the Republic. The volume contains the sum of his political essays from 1910 onward with the addition of one long, new piece called “Kaiserreich und Revolution” (Empire and Revolution). This essay is not only a political complement to his novel Der Untertan, but is also the first essay in which Mann clearly called for a social democracy for Germany and spelled out concrete suggestions for its implementation. He was deeply concerned about the murderous hatred with which the Communists were trying to get a foothold in Germany, thereby radicalizing the attacks from the extreme right. Mann envisaged a new German state in which the social classes moved toward equality guided by reason, individual responsibility, and a shared interest in work and ownership. For the sake of justice and humanity, he wrote, we must socialize. Mann called for economic policies that would accomplish two basic

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changes. One, the proletarians would be raised and gentrified to the point where they ceased to exist as a separate class. Two, the new bourgeoisie would be forced to question its self-hatred and at the same time would be freed from its addiction to being part of a master race. Mann believed that only by abolishing class differences could Germans finally reach an ethic of individual responsibility in politics.14 The utopian goal of a classless bourgeois society may seem to readers of the twenty-first century (as it seemed to many readers of Mann’s own time) as painfully out of touch with reality. By December 1919, all of Germany was in brutal turmoil as assassinations by the right spurred reprisals from the left. Since Bavaria was the most fertile breeding ground for various counterrevolutionary groups, Munich experienced the pendulum of political events with greater violence than any other city in Germany. Mann’s vision of a social republic was based more on his idealistic admiration of the French Revolution and the tradition of 1848 than on a realistic assessment of the social and political struggle of postwar Germany. He lacked insight into the importance of class identification and, in spite of his very justified attacks on the current political situation, he was not sufficiently aware of the entrenched power structures that were not about to give up their grip on the government. He was unaware of the fear of the middle class of descending the social ladder and of the genuine pride others had in belonging to the working class. He underestimated the heightened susceptibility of the middle class to antidemocratic challenges precipitated by economic and sociopsychological factors arising from the war and its aftermath. In spite of increasing counterevidence over the next years, Mann preserved his idealistic view of the final victory of reason in human history. He emphasized that the darker the times, the more important it was to keep the moral assets of humanity alive, a task ascribed to the artist-intellectual above all. True, the content of the Weimar Constitution adopted in August 1919 gave Mann concrete reasons for hope that Germany would finally follow the other European nations in becoming a functioning democratic state. Universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, and the right to free assembly and association were established but, within a few months, the Kapp Putsch (March 1920), an attempted coup d’état, made it clear that the military represented a continuing threat to the new government. The destructive presence of nationalism in politics was fed by the widely held conviction that Germany had never fully been defeated in the First World War, and also by the Versailles Treaty, with its demand for exorbitant punitive reparations. Though the Constitution had provided for comprehensive codes of labor, none of the socialization laws promised during the Revolution were ever passed. The alliance between the aristocracy and industry that had dominated the Empire continued to exist, and Socialists and labor unions watched powerless as multimillionaires formed large cartels across

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borders. To many, it was obvious that French and German business magnates were secretly negotiating the formation of an iron and coal cartel. In a letter to his French friend Félix Bertaux in April, 1923, Mann reported that he was working on a long article for Die neue Rundschau15 in which he was going to expose the disastrous predominance of the economy, above all of industry. In Germany, a helpless socialist party was standing by while industry was destroying all human freedom. It was most urgent that German and French intellectuals fight together against these industrialists who wanted to prevent Europe from uniting (BW, 55–57). On 11 August 1923, Germany celebrated the anniversary of the Weimar Constitution in Dresden. The extent to which Mann was considered a spokesperson for the Weimar Republic is shown by the fact that he was asked to contribute a formal address at this occasion in the Dresden Opera House. The “Dresdner Rede,” as his speech was called, is one of the short masterpieces of Mann’s political writings. Its impact went well beyond Germany.16 That year, the celebration of the Weimar Constitution took place under the burden of the Ruhr Invasion. In January, 1923, France, with one Belgian division, had occupied the Ruhr region in order not only to guarantee the flow of reparations but also to achieve the predominance of French industries in Europe.17 Mann focused his address on two issues, the continuing war-mad nationalism of Germans, now heated by the French occupation, and the danger of the concentration of capital for the welfare of the majority and for a democratic political system. Fearless of the hatred he would cause in some circles, he asked his audience, with high rhetorical skill, whether this day was truly a time for celebration, or not rather a day for alarm. Had the spirit of the Constitution not been to work for peace and social equality? But what was the spirit reigning now other than hatred? Had the form of government not become a republican plutocracy, a dictatorship of the greediest? He conceded that the general reactionary tendencies in Germany were partly the consequence of the continuing oppression by foreign masters and the general spiritual exhaustion that followed war, but he pointed to the blood-gorging profiteers who used the universal exhaustion for their own profit. The Weimar Constitution had been conceived in Weimar, a symbolic place for the renunciation of absolutism and for the desire to live by humane ideas. But now the German people found themselves thrown from a prewar military absolutism into the unlimited power of capitalism, even though it was clear that only as a democracy could the country survive. Nothing was to be expected from the bankrupt Reichstag. In its inertia it resembled a house of ghosts playing a grotesque ghost sonata. The chancellor himself fed the people with empty promises. Mann ended his speech expressing his hope that spiritual leaders, intellectuals like him, could save the Republic by keeping alive those moral values on which the Constitution had been founded. The state and the economy,

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he pointed out, were only useful to the extent that they served humanity. All working people had to unite and follow those leaders who regarded them as moral human beings to whom they felt responsible. Mann assured the laborers that they could count on intellectuals as their best friends.18 Another example of Mann’s passionate commitment to the survival of the Republic, and to the active role of the intellectual in politics, is his open letter to chancellor Gustav Stresemann in October 1923.19 By the fall of 1923, inflation had spiraled out of control. Reparation payments had been well in arrears, and the Allies demanded that they be paid in gold. The resulting adverse balance of payments and flight of capital meant that by October, not millions or billions, but trillions of marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread or mail a letter. There were food riots, and widespread starvation was reported. Early in August of 1923, the Social Democrats had declared the need for a new national coalition to deal with the crisis, and Gustav Stresemann was called upon to form a new cabinet. Though a Vernunftrepublikaner (republican of the mind) rather than a fervent supporter of democracy, Stresemann aligned himself firmly with the defenders of the Weimar system. His brief tenure testifies to the chaotic state of the Republic. He was chancellor for only three months, during which his cabinet fell twice. He foiled an attempt by the army in collaboration with leaders of big business to force him to resign, and he also helped to crush Hitler’s first attempted putsch. Mann wrote his letter on 11 October, five days after Stresemann was again forced to reshuffle his cabinet in order to escape a reactionary takeover. His open letter was published in the Vossische Zeitung, Berlin, and had the title “Diktatur der Vernunft” (Dictatorship of Reason). The address to Stresemann is worth reading today for its masterful craftsmanship and powerful historical message. The piece exemplifies Mann’s keen sense of dramatic wording and effect. In short, decisive, and provocative statements, through repetitions, and forceful summonses, and imperatives, he asked Stresemann to do three things: first, to avoid a dictatorship of power, second, to establish a dictatorship of justice, and third, to adopt a dictatorship of reason. He blamed the timidity of Social Democratic policies for the formation of a poisoning plutocracy of industry that acted as hangman of the state. In terms that in their urgency prefigure warnings he later voiced about the rise of National Socialism, Mann asked the chancellor to get rid of those shabby rogues who were seducing the vulnerable German people with empty promises. He assured Stresemann that it was not too late to work on those issues of justice on which the Constitution had been based: human rights, socialization of industries, redistribution of land, state-controlled capitalism. And he emphasized again that Germany required a social democracy in order to limit the abuse of power by big industry. The disastrous effect of the last four years had shown the

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limitations of a liberal democracy and the need for more governmental control of the economy. Mann’s last demand of Stresemann, the adoption of a dictatorship of reason, sounds bizarre and, as he admitted at the time, surprised even himself. Obviously, Mann could not have had in mind a transfer of political leadership to an intellectual power elite. Rather, the demand for a dictatorship of reason has to be understood as a moral imperative to counter the radicalization of German politics, from the threat of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the left to the growing power of the National Socialist movement on the right. Mann was well aware of the dubious nature of his appeal to the head of the German government, but, as he confirmed to Stresemann, he considered the call to reason and humanity his only right to exist. Intellectual politics was duty to one’s country and to oneself regardless of success. Mann used the peak of the economic debacle in 1923 not only for intensified direct political engagement but also to write three dramatic, innovative novellas. “Kobes” is the finest and most horrendous of these three so-called inflation stories. In its combination of avant-garde technique and stark realism “Kobes” stands out as a striking example of modern story-telling.20 When the piece first appeared in 1925, its message was intensified by a number of illustrations by George Grosz, the most biting political caricaturist of the twenties. Mann believed that in a country in danger of becoming the slave of high capitalism only the most drastic and shocking depiction of this situation could move the modern reader to contemplate the implications. He knew that literature had to compete with the easy thrills of mass entertainment, especially the new media of the cinema, to be effective, and he therefore needed to mix his social-analytical realism with suspense, the grotesque, and the surreal. With bitter irony, Mann himself called “Kobes” a hymn to inflation, a kind of Stinnes glorification in novella form.21 Kobes, the main character, an elusive phantom, is indeed modeled after Hugo Stinnes, who was regarded as the prototype of the predatory capitalist by the leftist press and parties.22 Taking advantage of galloping inflation, Stinnes had amassed a gigantic fortune through the heavy industry of the Ruhr. His industrial empire functioned as a state within the state and wielded powerful reactionary pressure on the politics of the Republic. Mann thought that a tale about a character like Stinnes, who gained fabulous wealth while whole classes of people sank into poverty, lent itself to a fantastic, grotesque narrative. He captured the speed with which fortunes were made in the early twenties, and solid incomes lost, by the rapid motion of the story’s action, incomplete sentences, modern catchwords, and brief stage-direction-like phrases. In a world where hunting after the most lucrative deal was the only reason for being, language had lost its communicative function. In a style similar to that of modern thrillers, he has people meet in movable

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waiting rooms that zoom up and down macabre elevator shafts. Characters chase each other through labyrinthine, elusive spaces to find the phantom, Kobes, who has his office somewhere in the upper regions of the building. The story opens with an allegorical figure named Middle Class, who in his full and ludicrous devotion to the power of Kobes reminds the reader of Diederich Heßling’s destructive worship of the Emperor. In absolute self-denial, the faceless figure has only one ambition: to serve the greatest, to see him, and die. As in George Orwell’s 1984, Kobes advertises himself through a thundering radio voice that fills all spaces. He declares: “Ich habe einfache Gedanken, einfache Ziele. Ich bin nichts Vornehmes, Politik verstehe ich nicht. Rühriger Kaufmann bin ich, Sinnbild der deutschen Demokratie. Mich kann keiner. Ich bin Kobes” (I have simple ideas, simple goals. I am nothing noble. Of politics I understand nothing. I’m a busy businessman, symbol of German democracy. Nobody can touch me. I am Kobes).23 Kobes’ wealth has grown to mythic proportions. It is the new religion after which the whole world lusts. While dramatically describing the sellout of the middle class and the cunning and destructive power of industry, Mann does not spare his own class, the intelligentsia. His attack on contemporary society includes everyone, even if he thereby questions his own legitimacy as a critic. A meek little doctor of philosophy and natural sciences introduces himself as “Sand.” “Nicht Kant. Nur Sand” (182; Not Kant. Only Sand). Insubstantial like sand, he trickles away at the end of the story, but not before he exposes the horrific nature and disastrous effects of Kobes, the god of the economy and the state, on the people. As the self-appointed chief of propaganda and head of a variété, Sand directs a show in which he makes the audience believe it is seeing and hearing Kobes himself speaking. Since the people in the audience have never seen the master in person before, but recognize his voice, they are ready to follow blindly the ideas and orders given by the man on the stage. With awe they hear him demand that they sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole. Eerily anticipating Hitler’s atrocities, the would-be Kobes figure orders the people to check their wives. He declares that only a first-rate certificate of good conduct entitles to procreation. For children with tuberculosis there will be no support. Mesmerized, the crowd listens as Kobes asks them to become like him and work twenty hours a day. As a hard-working person, he boasts, he finds nothing impossible. He is beyond good and evil, and therefore nothing is forbidden to him, not even the raping of his sister. To emphasize the irrationality of evil and the alarming devotion to authority in Germany, Sand-Mann has Kobes entice the crowd to jump into a Moloch, a glowing furnace that appears on stage. Especially the little children are called to sacrifice themselves because Kobes promises that all those who jump into the furnace will be invulnerable and can do whatever they wish. After an initial hesitation by the adults, even mothers send their children to be burnt in reverence to

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Kobes. When Kobes, the furnace master, has had enough human sacrifices, he releases the people with the call to rape their sisters and to fly at each other’s throats. An orgy of plunder, lust, and violence, of murderous stench and screams, ends the evening in utter chaos. Helpless and in sad irony Sand asks the crowd to hand over their reason as a last sacrifice to the god Kobes. Sand’s attempt to expose Kobes’ evil ways in order to wake up and frighten the people has been in vain. At the end of the story, Sand’s enemy, the head of social affairs, consoles the intellectual like a child by telling him that Kobes does not exist as one single human being but that he is a mythical invention who stands for an organization, a mentality. Even if eliminated, his economic interests and methods will survive well beyond his own lifetime. Resigned to the ways of the world, Sand calmly ends his own life. In “Kobes” Mann gave a frightening example and a powerful warning of what he saw as the contemporary mode of life. By showing the dangers that lie in the absence of personal responsibility and in the susceptibility to mass propaganda and self-sacrifice for an irrational evil cause, Mann was anticipating the causes of the rise of fascism as early as 1923. He was skeptical of his success in effectively warning his readers and teaching democratic values, but, he confirmed: “Wäre die Gesellschaft vollkommen und endgültig, so weiß ich nicht, was Literatur sollte” (If society were perfect and final, I don’t know why there should be literature).24 His selfaffirmation as a writer depended on being a critical observer of his time and a relentless voice for truth and justice independent of the question of success. By 1923 the immense obstacles to the creation of a democracy in Germany were obvious. Even the resolution of the currency crisis in November of that year and the Dawes Plan in 1924, which put an extensive credit system in place, were not able to calm the political polarization and unrest. With the influx of foreign, mostly American, capital and the American way of life, German culture was changed almost overnight into a mass culture with large cultural industries. Humanistic education and privilege, up to then associated in German public understanding with the arts, was challenged by the need for a democratization of all culture. The idea of the arts as a means for the education of a mass audience in the twenties is primarily associated with the political theater of Marxist writers like Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, but there were also important left-bourgeois artists, Heinrich Mann included, who took the change in society as a challenge for new artistic experimentation. The basis for Mann’s modernity and therefore part of today’s interest in his works is his ability to shape his often painful observations of Germany’s social and political development into a challenge for his own creativity. For Mann, the role of the modern artist was to tell the historical truth in an artistic medium that could grasp the imagination of the broadest possible readership. Art could only function as

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an agent for social change if it adapted in form and content to the new consumers of art. Intellect, on which art was based, was an enduring moral strength beyond changing social and political fortunes and personal disappointment. To Mann, the failure of democracy and the crisis of high culture were no reasons to give up attempts to salvage the humanizing ideas on which his democratic utopia was based. His most ambitious literary projects in fiction during the Weimar Republic that demonstrate these insights are his social novels, the trilogy Mutter Marie (Mother Mary, 1927), Eugénie oder die Bürgerzeit (The Royal Woman, 1928), and Die große Sache (The Big Deal, 1930). In his search for a creative response to the new mass culture of the twenties, Mann returned to his French models, Balzac and Zola, who had written social novels in the nineteenth century. In a letter to Bertaux he described the direct link that existed between social novels and the growth of democracy. Germany did not have social novels; instead, German authors wrote personal and timeless fiction. Balzac and Zola had depicted the living sociology of their time. Their novels were criticisms of daily life, understandable to everyone. Referring to his own writing projects, he wrote that he hoped to introduce the genre of the social novel into German literature (BW, 87). In the so-called Weimar novels, Mann was determined to expose the moral and political disasters of the Republic and at the same time to make evident the moral imperatives that were essential to a working democracy in the future. In 1926, when he started to write the first of these novels, he described the state of the Republic in devastating terms in another letter to Bertaux. Parliamentary democracy in Germany, he wrote, had taken on unimaginably evil qualities. Not even a dictatorship could be more corrupt, more unjust and lawless, more predatory and murderous than this so-called republic (BW, 127–28). German culture too, had fallen to a miserable level. Young people were absorbed by the pursuit of material goods and sex. In their spare time they visited sports events, read detective stories and illustrated magazines, and luxuriated in sparkling revues and in the new glamour of movie theaters. In light of these pessimistic observations, Mann’s confidence in the future and the strength of his enduring belief in the mission and power of literature to keep humanistic values alive was remarkable. In numerous articles and speeches he discussed the youth of his day and the new role of the contemporary artist in relationship to young readers. In spite of his criticism, Mann was fascinated by the young generation. He admired their enthusiasm and restless energy in their pursuit of personal happiness and in their attempt to succeed in the economically highly insecure environment of the late twenties. To Bertaux he confessed that, in spite of their distracted lives, young people gave him courage when he thought of their future and they provided him with the impetus to improvise in his novels

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(BW, 229). Wrestling to find an adequate literary form for his time, Mann asked himself the question: How would Zola have written if faced by the problems of the Weimar Republic? Mann was convinced that Zola, too, would have made artistic concessions to the time. As always, he would have fought for ideas that were based on his overarching love and compassion for all humanity.25 He came to the conclusion that the social novel was still able to speak to the new public and teach justice and love for humanity. But in order to be effective, the novel had to be adjusted to modern readers and their sensibilities. Mann was fascinated by the reasons for the huge success in Germany of Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) at the end of the twenties. This English author of crime novels proved how important fantasy was for modern fiction. Contemporary readers yearned to be lifted, through surprise and mystery, out of anxious and uncertain lives. This insight informed all of Mann’s Weimar novels: the harder people’s lives, the more their need for the fantastic.26 Mutter Marie, Eugénie oder die Bürgerzeit, and Die große Sache are respectively composed around the moral maxims of “learn to be responsible,” “learn to endure,” and “learn to be joyful.” In order to draw the modern reader into the text and make these imperatives more palpable, Mann experimented with a number of narrative techniques. The speed of modern life, whether in the form of cars or changing relationships, is reflected in the concentration of time in the plot, in the use of hasty, incomplete sentences, at times reduced to mere syllables, in the use of slang and the simplification of characters. The stories are full of grotesque adventures (especially in the depiction of figures dominant in the business world), of surprise, and of fantastic occurrences. In the two novels with contemporary plots, Die große Sache and Mutter Marie, Mann made use of cinematic techniques, remarking in the introduction to Die große Sache that modern society made the similarities with movies visible.27 The young protagonists find themselves constantly mingling their experiences in the real world with those they have seen on the screen. The reality of the one blends with the other for a fleeting, fantastic effect. Mann wanted the reader to notice and be alarmed by the way young people used fantastic scenes from the cinema as solutions to daily problems instead of making reasonable decisions and acting responsibly on urgent moral and social issues in their lives. Mann’s artistic flexibility — to the point of risking devastating criticism from both his fellow writers and some young readers — is admirable. But whether many contemporary readers could identify with the depicted world, or were moved by it to contemplate the humanizing messages for their own lives, is at best questionable. Mutter Marie appeared in three editions before 1930, but the other two novels were less successful. Nevertheless, these novels are well worth reading today as documents of their time.

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The many political essays, speeches, letters, and articles Mann wrote during the latter part of the Weimar Republic are more skillfully crafted from a literary point of view. They include urgent calls for a United States of Europe, attacks on various anti-democratic practices damaging to the struggling Republic, and warnings about the National Socialist movement. From the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Mann had fought for the unpopular goal of an understanding between Germany and France. A lively document of this concern was his long friendship and extensive correspondence with Félix Bertaux, the French scholar of German literature. French intellectuals saw Mann’s “Zola” essay as the welcome testimony of a German who wrote against the general war hysteria in 1914. They admired him as someone who courageously attacked the practices of the Wilhelmine Empire. When anti-French feelings were at their height in 1923 because of the French-Belgian Ruhr occupation, Mann accepted Bertaux’s invitation to take part in the “Entretiens de Pontigny,” a yearly meeting of French writers, diplomats, and scientists. A year earlier Mann had expressed to Bertaux the hope that his works would contribute to their joint cause, the understanding between their two countries. Mir liegt weit mehr daran, zu wirken, als bewundert zu werden, und ich glaube, dass wahre Wirkung heute keine Landesgrenzen mehr kennen darf. Schon längst ist es meine Überzeugung, dass, im Geistigen wie im Materiellen, die Länder Europas, besonders aber Frankreich und Deutschland, sich annähern und ausgleichen müssen, wenn unser Erdtheil lebendig erhalten werden soll. (BW, 37) [To me, being effective is far more important than being admired, and I believe that today, true effectiveness may not stop at any borders. For a long time it has been my conviction that in spiritual as well as in material matters the countries of Europe, but especially France and Germany, have to become closer, and work with each other if our world is to be kept alive.]

Taking on the role of the writer as a pre-diplomat, Mann made personal contact with Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, who tried to found a PanEuropean Union working from Vienna, and with Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak ambassador to Britain and later the Czech foreign minister. In newspaper articles and speeches, Mann stressed that a United States of Europe was the only reasonable solution to the escalating national and international crises of the twenties. He argued that a European alliance was the only safeguard against a most devastating war, a war that would mean the end of civilization. Above all he blamed monopoly capitalism for the increase in general European irrational nationalism. In this he was not alone. When Mann met in June of 1931 with Aristide Briand, formerly the French premier, to discuss Franco-German relations, he found that he

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shared the same view. Briand expressed amazement at the level of political power big business wielded over the state in Germany, a power that had, as Briand put it, its own private army in the form of the National Socialists. It was incomprehensible to Briand that in a time of democratic crises a country fought against democracy. France was willing to discuss the end of all reparation payments, but only under the condition of a promise for peace. Briand suggested Mann should initiate an opinion poll containing the names of all those who were sick of being led from one catastrophe to the next by the convictions of weaklings.28 Mann was also among those intellectuals who forcefully expressed their disgust at the Republic’s antidemocratic practices in controlling freedom of speech and artistic expression. Germany instituted film censorship in 1920, as well as various arbitrary committees supervising radio broadcasting. The government’s threat in 1926 to pass a law protecting youth from publications it judged as “Schmutz und Schund” (filth and rubbish) provoked Mann to some of his sharpest language. In an article entitled “Letzte Warnung” (Last Warning), he tried to capture his readers’ attention by asking the repeated rhetorical question: “Wozu das Gesetz?” (Why do we need this law?). The censorship law, he argued, would be useless in changing the lives of the young, especially those who were poor and disadvantaged. He pointed out that they received a far more drastic education in the vices of life by living in mass housing projects than through reading trashy literature. Mann challenged the government to show young people that life was more than an arena for wild animals by building affordable apartments for the poor and providing them with a more dignified life, instead of writing arbitrary laws.29 Shortly after this protest, the law against certain kinds of literature came into effect anyway, but not before Mann had directly addressed the prosecuting attorney on the matter.30 There was one encouraging event for those concerned about protecting literature and education. In 1926, the more than two-hundred-year-old Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences added a literary section that, surprisingly, enjoyed relative freedom from the interference of the state during its first years. In 1928 Mann delivered a report to the Academy entitled “Dichtkunst und Politik” (Writing and Politics) in which he stressed the definition of the writer as the uncompromising defender of truth and justice.31 He stated that literary persons based their lives on the belief in the perfectibility of humankind, and therefore did not hesitate to express moral outrage at the misuse of power by the state. Mann hoped that through his membership in the Academy he would have influence on the badly needed reform of the public school system. He claimed that equal access to institutions of higher learning and revision of educational materials were to help train the German people in international understanding and democratic values. Together with Alfred Döblin, Mann worked on editing a new German textbook for the Prussian school system, but it was

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never published, even though it was approved by the last socialist minister of education. Mann served as president of the Academy from 1931 to February of 1933, when the Nazis expelled him. Inequalities of the Weimar Republic’s judicial system were another target for Mann and other left-wing intellectuals. One of the obvious reasons for the failure of the Republic was that it had taken over the antiquated imperial judicial system. The dogma of the irremovability of judges had survived, with the result that many judges continued to serve the Republic in spite of their personal resistance to its democratic values. Consequently sentences for politically motivated murders committed by the right were much less severe than those committed by the left. Mann entered the ongoing heated debate in the Reichstag on the abolition of the death penalty in 1926. In speeches and articles he discussed individual cases in which the death penalty had been erroneously applied without either public outcry or official scrutiny of the judges who were responsible. While a democratic system promised equality before the law, in Weimar Germany the poor were continually disenfranchised and killed.32 Beginning in the late twenties, Mann focused his literary efforts on the rise of National Socialism. In spite of repeated threats on his life, he fearlessly warned the German people about Hitler’s rise to power. He took the occasion of a new edition of Der Untertan in 1929 to condemn the docility of the German people in the face of the government’s open boast about a future war. Even in a republic one could be a despicable underling, he argued in the introduction to this new edition. Indeed, the new powers to which the Weimar citizens were subject were more dangerous than those his “Untertan” had faced, because what Mann called their paths of atrocities were more difficult to identify. Consequently, one didn’t need to worship and imitate those in power in order to be an underling — it was sufficient to be passive, to accept them without questioning their authority. By failing to insist on better laws, on social justice, and on justice in general by renouncing personal responsibility, Weimar Germans resembled Diederich Heßling, the “Untertan.”33 A few days before the 1932 election in which the Nazi party more than doubled its vote and membership in parliament, Mann wrote his most urgent and prophetic article entitled “Wir wählen” (We Vote). The party called itself a National Worker’s Party, he wrote, but this was pure fraud. Ever since its foundation the party was neither national nor social but was working for and with the money of a select group of wealthy capitalists. Betrayal and exploitation were its true mission. Hitler, whom Mann called a “bösartiger Trottel”34 (malicious idiot) advocated the breeding of a master race and at the same time was preparing for a vast blood bath. Mann’s keen observation and understanding of the nature of the Nazi threat made him anticipate future atrocities: “Sie werden die Massen vergasen müssen. Wenn das national ist!” (They will have to gas the masses. As if that is love

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for a nation!). Mann ended the article with a plea for the despicable drug of nationalism not to become the cause again for the death of millions of innocent people.35 Félix Bertaux rightly observed Mann’s unique simultaneous abilities as novelist, philosopher, and psychologist (BW, 558). In one of his few articles translated into English,36 Mann claimed that psychological factors were the basis of the economic situation in Germany. According to his thesis, one of Germany’s unique characteristics was its passivity. While other countries also experienced the collapse of their economies, only in Germany did the process achieve its maximum effect on the psyche. Only the Germans did nothing to remedy the economic crisis. In reference to the political situation, Mann posed the rhetorical question of whether the Germans allowed National Socialism to come to power because they were hearing once again the call of the abyss? Usually, people living in a democracy had a healthy instinct for self-preservation. “Aber es muß doch Witterung haben, wie selbst das Tier, wenn die Schlachtbank nahe rückt” (But they must have the capacity that animals have, to smell the slaughterbench as it approaches). The Germans lacked even this fundamental sensitivity for survival.37 Mann was already in exile in France when he gave Bertaux his psychological explanations for the Nazis’ raging hatred and the reasons for their pathological motives, their hysteria, their Freudian complexes. He was convinced that Nazi hatred for the Republic did not have its origins in the Republic’s weaknesses or its unforgivable mistakes. Rather, as creatures stripped of all humanity, the Nazis could not bear the idea that the Weimar Republic meant to make the emotional German people, a people so little open to selfless reason, into a less violent nation (BW, 284). A year earlier, in a discussion of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Mann had offered a similar account of the psychological origins of hatred of the Jews. He argued that anti-Semitism develops from the inferiority complex of a nation, that it serves as distraction from its own inner problems, and that it is practiced most fervently by those who cannot forget the times of national defeat.38 In 1932 a number of intellectuals were convinced that a coalition between the Socialist and Communist Parties offered the last possibility for preventing a Nazi dictatorship. A proclamation to that effect was signed by Heinrich Mann, Käthe Kollwitz, and Albert Einstein, among others. After Hitler’s takeover on 30 January 1933, the same proclamation appeared on advertising pillars all over Berlin. The Völkische Beobachter launched a tirade against Mann, calling him national vermin, and demanding that the disagreeable Literary President should have a bomb put under him.39 The proclamation and the furore it provoked caused Mann’s immediate expulsion from the Academy of the Arts and Sciences and precipitated his secret flight to France six days later, on 21 February 1933.

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Three months earlier, as it became increasingly clear to Mann that the collapse of the Weimar Republic was imminent, he had written one more long essay in which he explored the background to National Socialism and the conditions for its defeat. The title of this daring piece is “Das Bekenntnis zum Übernationalen” (Confession of Supranationalism). It appeared in the last uncensored edition of the important journal Die neue Rundschau in December 1932. Mann argued that ever since the formation of the German Reich in 1871 a divide had existed in Germany between “Wirklichkeit” (reality) and “Gedanke” (mind), which was the cause for authoritarian governments and irrational nationalism. Hitler’s dictatorship was only the natural outcome of a state in which critical minds were feared and excluded from public politics. From the start, the Wilhelmine Empire was an irrational nationalistic nation for which war was the only purpose. The general European devaluation of rationality around 1900 contributed to the development of the German idea of the state based on the instinctual, on dream, love, and war. The First World War was the consequence of these premises and an example of the most grandiose catastrophe of unreason. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, the country cried for revenge and rearmament. Nationalist ideology continued, heated by monopoly capitalism, and finally opened the way to Nazi dictatorship, against which intellect and reason were helpless. At the end of the article Mann predicted with astonishing optimism that the age of irrationalism would come to an end in about 1940. While the Nazis wanted a repetition of a great catastrophe, he believed that reality was working against them, since the world had become too weak for war. A single country in Europe was no longer viable, either economically or politically, and above all not morally. Practical reason demanded that the national state with its irrational exclusiveness and hate make way for a new political reality, a United States of Europe governed by truth, justice, and prosperity for all.40 For the next seven years Mann worked for this cause with great vigor. Just a few months after he settled in Nice, in the fall of 1933, he published the first and one of the most significant anti-fascist works written by a German in exile. Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (Hatred: Contemporary German History) with the dedication “Meinem Vaterland” (To My Fatherland), is a collection of polemical essays that appeared simultaneously in German and French.41 It was widely read, even smuggled into Germany, and praised to the point where someone compared its power to Zola’s “J’accuse.”42 Mann made appeals and gave speeches that were broadcast on short-wave radio into the German interior, in which he urged German workers to unite against Hitler. Hundred of thousands of copies of these addresses were disseminated in the Reich under the guise of advertising brochures. Mann’s political and literary efforts in the few years between 1933 and 1940 (when he had to flee from the Nazis once again to his next refuge,

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the United States), are extraordinary. Not only did he become the representative for Germans in French exile, but he acted as honored mediator among international political groups trying to prevent the Nazis from coming to power in Germany. With his help, the Popular Front movement was created, a movement that succeeded in persuading Stalin to work together with the Social Democrats in this urgent cause. Even with his intense political agenda, Mann continued his long-held practice of writing fiction alongside his political essays. Between 1935 and 1938 he published the two volumes, over 1500 pages in length, of his highly regarded historical novel, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre (Young Henri of Navarre, 1935) and Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre (translated as Henry Quatre, King of France, 1938). Mann had been collecting material on the first Bourbon King (1553–1610) since 1925. To a large extent the work is based on historical facts, but Mann invented additional events and emphasized characteristics of Henri that exemplified those values and human qualities the writer himself had advocated as essential for a politically and humanely constructive society. Mann intended the Henri IV novels as moral parables. They were to give a utopian alternative to German power politics of the past and, more urgently, in the present. Obvious parallels exist between the corrupt and powerful house of Habsburg and the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany. The main spokesman for the Catholic Habsburg rulers of Spain bears unmistakable resemblances to Hitler, who in a raging voice preaches hatred against the moderates and calls for a powerful cleansing of everything foreign. Preparing for an attack on France, he addresses and hypnotizes the masses with promises and threats of “Boden” (soil), “Blut” (blood), and “Gewalt” (force).43 But in contrast to twentiethcentury Germany, sixteenth-century France had a leader in King Henri IV who had the qualities with which to counter and conquer evil, at least temporarily. In the novel, Henri unites intellect and action, reason and kind tolerance, skepticism and enduring belief in his mission, love for humanity and a fighting spirit. He knows that evil will persist in human history, but succeeds in implementing the Edict of Nantes (1598), which grants religious tolerance and more social rights in France, strengthening the country against Habsburg expansionism. Henri is assassinated by a radical Jesuit, but the humanism for which he stands will survive. Mann ended the novel with Henri speaking to Mann’s own generation, struggling three hundred years later. Henri challenges it to continue his work for justice and peace. The world can only be saved by love, he proclaims, but love means to act, to act even more decisively and courageously than he had done. Moral decay encourages a new beginning. By the time Mann had finished the Henri Quatre novels, in 1938, there was no more hope for peace in Germany and in Europe. Intellectual politics, whether during the Empire, the Weimar Republic, or from exile, had not made a noticeable difference to the course of history. Still, Mann’s

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skeptical optimism about the victory of reason remained unbroken. About the Henri Quatre novels he remarked that if a later Germany should one day improve on its past performance, he hoped this literature would show itself to have been the spiritual antecedent.44 Mann’s tireless efforts to change the course of German history and his enduring hope are well summarized in a cautious comment he made in reference to Die kleine Stadt: “Was wir können ist: unser Ideal aufstellen, es so glänzend, rein und unerschütterlich aufstellen, daß die Besseren erschrecken und Sehnsucht bekommen” (All we can do is to establish our ideal, to establish it in such a sparkling, pure, and unshakable way that those with greater understanding take fright and start longing for it).45

Notes 1

Heinrich Mann, 1871–1950: Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1971), 112.

2

Heinrich Mann, “Geist und Tat,” Essays (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1960), 14.

3

The latest striking example of this fact is a recent television movie that was a great success in Germany in 2002. Heinrich Breloer, in his two-part documentary, called Die Manns — Ein Jahrhundertroman, tells the intriguing story of two generations of the infamous Mann family. Thomas Mann and two of his children figure large in the tale, while Heinrich’s life and work play a subordinate role. His sociopolitical passions are downplayed and his politically most engaged time, his exile in France, is left out completely.

4

David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980), 140–41. 5 Reinhard Alter, Die bereinigte Moderne: Heinrich Manns “Untertan” und politische Publizistik in der Kontinuität der deutschen Geschichte zwischen Kaiserreich und Drittem Reich (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1995), 1. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 93. 6

H. Mann, Der Untertan, in Materialien (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 626. All page numbers from the novel given in the text are taken from this edition. 7 Pierre Bertaux, ed., Heinrich Mann — Félix Bertaux: Briefwechsel, 1922–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 95. Subsequent references to this work in the text are given using the abbreviation BW and the page number. 8 9

H. Mann, Der Untertan, 50.

As one critic puts it, “odd juxtapositions, expressions out of place, paradoxes, abrupt transitions and non sequiturs” all serve as an aesthetic corollary of the Emperor’s-Hessling’s irrational, amoral governance. Mark Roche, “Self-Cancellation of Injustice in Heinrich Mann’s ‘Der Untertan,’” Oxford German Studies 17 (1988): 88.

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43

H. Mann, Der Untertan, 617.

11

Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in Politische Reden und Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer — Werkausgabe, 1968), 1:422.

12

Gotthart Wundberg, ed., Heinrich Mann: Texte zu seiner Wirkungsgeschichte in Deutschland (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), 95. 13 H. Mann, “The Meaning and Idea of the Revolution,” in The Weimar Republic Source Book, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994), 38–40. 14

H. Mann, Macht und Mensch: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 206–8.

15

H. Mann, “Europa: Reich über den Reichen,” Die neue Rundschau 34 (Die Freie Bühne 7), July 1923: 577–602.

16

The Boston journal The Living Age published a practically full report of the address in its October, November, December issue of 1923. “In Honor of the Constitution,” Living Age 319 (October 1923): 57–60.

17

Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 607.

18

H. Mann, Diktatur der Vernunft (Berlin: Verlag die Schiede, 1923), 66–75.

19

Ibid., 7–11.

20

Jürgen Haupt, “Die Entwertung des Geldes und der Gefühle: Heinrich Manns ‘Inflationsnovellen’ zur Gesellschaftskrise der zwanziger Jahre,” Heinrich MannJahrbuch 6 (1988): 64. 21

Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, Heinrich Mann, 1871–1950, 212.

22

Henry Ashby Turner, Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963), 69. 23

H. Mann, Ausgewählte Erzählungen (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1964), 179.

24

H. Mann, “Theater der Zeit,” in Sieben Jahre: Chronik der Gedanken und Vorgänge (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolny Verlag, 1929), 267. 25

H. Mann, “Zeit und Kunst,” in Sieben Jahre, 546.

26

H. Mann, “Detective Novels,” in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Source Book, 521.

27

H. Mann, “Mein Roman,” in Das öffentliche Leben (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1932), 331.

28

H. Mann, “Gespräch mit Briand,” in Das öffentliche Leben, 285–91.

29

H. Mann, “Letzte Warnung,” in Sieben Jahre, 296–99.

30

H. Mann, “Herr Staatsanwalt!” in Sieben Jahre, 286–91.

31

H. Mann, “Dichtkunst und Politik,” in Sieben Jahre, 498–516.

32

H. Mann, “Justiz,” in Sieben Jahre, 517–29.

33

H. Mann, Der Untertan, 617–19.

34

Heinrich und Thomas Mann: Ihr Leben und Werk in Text und Bild, Katalog zur ständigen Ausstellung im Buddenbrookhaus (Lübeck: Dräger Druck, 1994), 314.

35

H. Mann, Das öffentliche Leben, 257–62.

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36 H. Mann, “The German Decision,” in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Source Book, 164–66. 37

H. Mann, Das öffentliche Leben, 309.

38

H. Mann, “Gut geartete Menschen,” in Das öffentliche Leben, 312–19.

39

Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 264.

40

Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1983), 14.

41

The term “Haß” referred to the unprecedented hatred with which the Nazis persecuted all who stood for reason and humanity.

42

Hamilton, Brothers Mann, 284.

43

H. Mann, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1952), 399–400. 44 45

Hamilton, Brothers Mann, 285.

H. Mann, Die kleine Stadt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), in Materialien, 469.

2: Hermann Hesse and the Weimar Republic Paul Bishop

A

SHORT POEM ENTITLED “November 1914” presents us with the quietness of a forest, in which mist hangs and leaves fall; a storm then tears through the forest, clearing away the mist and stripping the trees of branches and leaves. The final stanza cries:

Räum auf und brich in Scherben, Was nimmer halten mag, Und reiß aus Nacht und Sterben Empor den lichten Tag!1 [Clear up and break into pieces What can never last, And bring out of night and death The light of day!] Like many poems of the Expressionist period, this text — written by a pacifist — welcomes the outbreak of the First World War as an opportunity to clear away the dead wood of a stagnant society. Although the mood of later poems changed as the war went on, for the most part they retain an element of optimism. “Im Frühling 1915” (In Spring 1915), for example, opens with a vision of Christ, who has come down from his cross to preach the kingdom of love; in the second stanza he wanders across a dark field of blood; in the final stanza, however, new flowers blossom on the meadow, and birdsong fills the air (G, 404). In “Im vierten Kriegsjahr” (In the Fourth Year of War), written in April 1917, the evening is cold and sad, and it is raining; but even if the world is drowning in war and fear, love still burns somewhere (G, 423). Finally, however, in “Herbstabend im fünften Kriegsjahr” (Autumn Evening in the Fifth Year of War), written on 13 August 1918, the mood is as grim as the weather is stormy: Ach was sollen wir Träumer auf Erden? Dichter und Denker sind fremd in der Welt [Alas, what are we dreamers doing on earth? Poets and thinkers are alien to the world]

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Even if the poet is able to reaffirm his confidence in the cold but comforting light of the moon, the conclusion of the poem is despairing: troops of soldiers crawl forward, mines explode, bloodied limbs and soil fly into the air, and the generals urge the limping horse of war on and on, driving the wagon of misfortune deeper into the blood and filth: Ach wir wollen den dummen Glauben begraben, Daß auch Liebe und Geist eine Stätte auf Erden haben! (G, 445) [Alas, we should bury the stupid belief That love and spirit have a place on the earth!] Although the emotional trajectory of these poems follows, in the end, the pattern established by the works of many Expressionist writers, it seems it took five years of war, millions of dead and missing soldiers, and the collapse of the German monarchy and state to make Hermann Hesse renounce his faith in love and spirit. Nevertheless, much of his work, particularly that produced during the period of the Weimar Republic, bears witness to this largely successful attempt to maintain his optimism. In 1912 Hesse had moved to Bern, where he was living when the First World War broke out. During the war, Hesse worked for the German prisoner of war welfare service in the Swiss capital and founded the Bücherei für deutsche Kriegsgefangene (Library for German Prisoners of War), sorting and sending books to the prisoners of war in France. This social and political work was backed up with strong declarations of a pacifist stance, as clearly stated in the article “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” (O Friends, do not speak thus, 1914).2 This short piece, the title of which alludes to Schiller’s great ode “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy), exemplifies the typical subjectivist bent of Hesse’s writing. At the same time, Hesse became aware of the pressing need, not just for grand statements, but for practical action — albeit of a limited kind. In “Den Pazifisten” (To the Pacifists), an article published in the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit on 7 November 1915, Hesse urged his fellow pacifists to become actively involved in the work of helping those in need because of the War.3 An entire sequence of anti-war essays culminated in “Zarathustras Wiederkehr” (Zarathustra’s Return, 1919), as much a response to the revolutionary activities emerging in the post-war period as to the war itself, and a successful attempt to recapture the rhapsody and the rhetoric of Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1882–84). This text, the central work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and a key influence on Hesse, had been used by the Prussian government for political ends, even being distributed to German soldiers in a kitbag-sized edition.4 In the ten short sections of this powerful exercise in rehearsing Zarathustra’s style, Hesse sought to clarify Nietzsche’s message about the

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relationship between morality, art, and life, and to rescue the prophet’s teaching from its contemporary misuse. During the War, Hesse had begun to experience difficulties in his marriage — the first of three — as his wife slowly succumbed to a form of mental illness, and his youngest son fell ill.5 On 8 March 1916 his father, Johannes Hesse (1847–1916), died. As the war worsened, so Hesse found himself close to physical and psychological collapse; in May 1916 he began psychotherapy. The therapist, Josef Bernhard Lang (1883–1945), was a follower of the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961), and acted as an important means of transmission of Jungian thought to Hesse’s writing.6 Within the first month, Hesse attended twelve sessions with Dr. Lang, and between June 1916 and November 1917 he completed a further sixty sessions. During the final months of his therapy in September and October 1917, Hesse began work on his novel Demian, which appeared in 1919, the year he decided to leave his wife and family and moved to Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola, but also the year of the general strike and the Spartacus uprising in Berlin (5–12 January 1919), the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (15 January 1919), and the opening of the National Assembly in Weimar (9 February 1919). As well as a product of his personal engagement with Jungian therapy, Demian is — and was widely read at the time as — a response to the catastrophe of the First World War, out of which the Weimar Republic emerged.7 Just as Peter Camenzind had found a welcome audience among those dissatisfied with the stagnation of Wilhelmine Germany, so Demian spoke to a generation demoralized by the war. Looking back in 1948 in his foreword to the American edition, Thomas Mann wrote that “the electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War” by Demian was “unforgettable”: “With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.”8 A contemporary review in the journal Die Tat of December 1922 confirms Thomas Mann’s memory: the desperate postwar generation, wrote Lulu von Strauß und Torney, found in Hesse’s work a solution to their most urgent concerns: “In dieser inneren Not kam dem einen oder anderen der Demian in die Hände. Er las, und es war ihm, als werde ihm eine Binde vom Auge genommen. Las und fand — sich selber” (In this time of inner need this person or that came across Demian — read it, and it was as if a blindfold were removed from his eyes. Read it and found — himself).9 In Demian, Hesse produced a heady cocktail of personal confession, Jungian analytical ideas, and archetypal imagery. The work is steeped in Gnostic tenets, mediated in part to Hesse by Jungian theory. One cannot deny the appeal of the novel to readers in the early years of the Weimar Republic (not to mention the German reading public of the 1950s and 1960s and the American reading public of

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the 1960s and 1970s); however, it is not clear whether Demian represents a political response or a flight into mysticism (a charge frequently leveled at Jung, the fons et origo of many of the ideas in the book). Originally published using the pseudonym of the narrator figure in the novel,10 Demian relates the story of the psychological development of Emil Sinclair or, in the terms used in the work, how he manages “sich selber zu suchen, in sich fest zu werden, den eigenen Weg vorwärts zu tasten, einerlei wohin er führte” (GW 5:126; to find himself, become solid in himself, feel his way forward along his own path, wherever it leads). Sinclair is encouraged along his path by his older classroom comrade, Max Demian, the church organist Pistorius (based on Hesse’s therapist, Josef Lang), and finally Demian’s mother, referred to as “Frau Eva.” Using Jungian and other techniques to meditate on his dreams, Sinclair draws a picture of a bird emerging from a globe as from a giant egg and flying up to God, to Abraxas (GW 5:91). This deity, Abraxas, derives from ancient Gnostic beliefs, but is also mentioned in a poem by Goethe in the West-östlicher Divan, and symbolizes the coniunctio oppositorum — the union of “das Göttliche und das Teuflische” (the divine and the demonic), of “Wonne und Grauen, Mann und Weib gemischt, Heiligstes und Gräßliches ineinander verflochten, tiefe Schuld durch zarteste Unschuld zuckend” (GW 5:94–95; bliss and horror, man and woman intermixed, what is most sacred and what is most gruesome entwined, deep guilt flashing through the most tender innocence). Where does this leave morality? Like everything else, beyond good and evil: a precarious location. For if, on the one hand, Demian reassures Sinclair that knowing what is “allowed” and what is “forbidden” does not mean that one can commit murder and rape (GW 5:65), Pistorius concedes that there might be circumstances where it is possible to murder someone — just because one finds that person repulsive (GW 5:111). Those who separate themselves from the herd and follow the true path — that is to say, their own, individual true path — are said to bear the mark of Cain, a reference to the Biblical narrative deconstructed by Demian: because he was different from the rest of the people, the story of how he slew Abel was invented to destroy his reputation (GW 5:32). Thus the true inheritors of Paradise are the “Cainites” (GW 5:142–43), also the name of an early Christian heretical sect (GW 5:48), and it is no coincidence that the communist-anarchist journal founded by Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) in 1911 was called Kain.11 Mühsam was, like Hesse, a member of the esoteric community on the Monte Verità,12 whose values Demian embraces as clearly as it rejects those of Wihelmine Germany — that is to say, the Prussian values of the German Reich presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941). Even bearing the mark of Cain cannot prevent one from being killed, however, and in the final chapter war breaks out, clearly identified with the First World War because of the geopolitical circumstances of the conflict

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(GW 5:156). It turns out that Demian has the rank of lieutenant, and there are strong hints in the novel that war will have a beneficial effect: “In der Tiefe war etwas im Werden. Etwas wie eine neue Menschlichkeit” (GW 5:160; cf. 134–35; Deep down something was coming into being. Something like a new humanity). The dream of the Great Mother, Sinclair’s fantasy about Frau Eva in chapter 8, becomes the military reality of war, in which Sinclair is injured, and the novel leaves him in his bandages, still pondering the image of his “Freund und Führer” (friend and guide), Max Demian. The obsession with myth, which Sinclair demonstrates (GW 5:63),13 has reminded some of the way myth was used for dark political ends by such National Socialist apologists as Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), author of Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1928). Correspondingly, at least one critic has gone so far as to accuse Hesse of sympathy with precisely the same proto-fascistic tendencies that, so it is argued, led to National Socialism.14 In Hesse’s defense, it might be argued that he was, at least in part, trying to do what Thomas Mann attempted some two decades later in his Joseph tetralogy, namely, to combine “Mythos plus Psychologie” and “den Mythos den fascistischen [sic] Dunkelmännern aus den Händen zu nehmen und ihn ins Humane ‘umzufunktionieren’” (to take myth out of the hands of the dark men of fascism and “refunctionalize” it into something humane).15 Yet, as Hesse made clear in his letter to Emil Molt of 19 June 1919, at the time he conceived his task as a writer as an apolitical one: “Meine Aufgabe liegt auf der Seite des Geists, nicht der Praxis, also auch nicht der Politik” (My task lies on the side of Geist, not of praxis, and hence also not politics). This relation had, Hesse emphasized, implications for how he executed that task: “Dichterisch äußert sich das Erlebte bei mir in einer Vertiefung der Psychologie, die mir aber zugleich viele neue technische Aufgaben stellt, so daß die literarische Arbeit für mich zu einem schweren Ringen geworden ist” (Briefe 1:403–4; What I experience manifests itself poetically in me by involving me more deeply in psychology, which at the same time presents me with many new technical tasks, so that literary work has become a difficult struggle for me). Hesse discovered just how difficult it had become when writing his next novel, Siddhartha (1922). In Berlin, the November Revolution of 1918 ended with the collapse of the Spartacus uprising (Spartakusaufstand) and the execution of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In Munich in Bavaria, on the other hand, a socialist republic was established by Kurt Eisner (1867–1919) in 1918 and when Eisner was assassinated in February 1919, the Communists proclaimed a Soviet-style republic (Räterepublik). In March 1919, several months before military intervention by forces from Prussia and Württemberg put an end to the Räterepublik, Hesse was invited by Johann Wilhelm Muehlon to take over the presidency of the ruling cabinet. Hesse turned

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down the offer; for one thing, he wrote to Muehlon on 11 March 1919, it was against his nature (Briefe 1:392). No, his task was a different one and involved the founding with the zoologist Richard Woltereck (1877–1944) of a journal called Vivos voco, first published in October 1919. In this journal (whose title called on the living, in memory of the dead, to help create the new postwar culture)16 he indicated the kind of arena where he wished to intervene; introducing “Zarathustras Wiederkehr,” he wrote: “Wir müssen nicht hinten beginnen, bei den Regierungsformen und politischen Methoden, sondern wir müssen vorn anfangen, beim Bau der Persönlichkeit” (GW 10:467; We must not begin at the end, with governmental reform and political methods, but we must begin at the beginning, with the construction of the personality). But Hesse was experiencing difficulty constructing his own personality, as the genesis of Siddhartha reveals.17 He had begun work on the text in December 1919, producing in a burst of creativity the stories published in Klingsors letzter Sommer: Erzählungen (Klingsor’s Last Summer, 1920), and numerous watercolor paintings. As the months passed, however, 1921 turned into a year of crisis, to which some poems such as “Krankheit” (Sickness), “Gebet” (Prayer), and “Media in vita” (In the Midst of Life) bear witness (G, 493–97); Hesse turned again to psychoanalysis, this time consulting Jung himself in Zurich in May 1921. For Hesse psychoanalysis was, as he told Hans Reinhart in May 1921, neither a faith nor a philosophy, but “ein Erlebnis” (Briefe 1:473; an experience). The extent of the success of Hesse’s therapy with Jung can be gauged by the fact he was able to complete work on Siddhartha, a work he saw as both continuing and complementing the themes of Demian.18 The novel appeared in 1922, the same year in which the cultural philosopher Theobald Ziegler (1881–1958) published his study of Buddhism.19 Siddhartha complicates the legend of the Buddha by giving the name of the historical Buddha, Siddhatta Gotama, to its central character, who, however, rejects the Buddha’s teaching. In a moment of “epiphany,” which has been compared to similar moments in modernist novels by, for example, Joyce, Musil, or Proust, Siddhartha gains insight into the importance, not of following the right teaching, but of accumulating the right experience.20 Indeed, there are parallels between this emphasis on “experience” and the significance attached to Erfahrung by Walter Benjamin.21 Despite, or maybe because of, its archaic diction, Siddhartha met with a warm critical response; Hesse reported with satisfaction that, after reading the novel’s conclusion (which he described as “more Taoist than Indian”) at the peace congress of the international women’s league in August 1922, a Hindu professor from Calcutta congratulated him on the depth of his engagement with Eastern thought.22 (In the fifties, the book achieved great popularity in the United States, where Henry Miller described it as superior to the New Testament.)23

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In 1924, Hesse acquired Swiss citizenship and two years later married his second wife, the singer Ruth Wenger (from whom he separated in 1927). In 1926 he was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, but his personal life had turned miserable again, as the collection of poems published in 1928 under the title Krisis (Crisis) indicates. Hesse saw his own writings in confessional terms, as he indicates in his letter to Heinrich Weigand of 14 October 1926, where he also defends the “naïveté” of Eichendorff against the “aesthetic perfection” of Stefan George (Briefe 2:154). Nor was Hesse any longer sure of the efficacy of therapy, as his critique of psychoanalysis in his letter to Theodor Schnittkin of 3 June 1928 suggests. For psychoanalysts, he writes, such figures as Novalis, Hölderlin, Lenau, Beethoven, and Nietzsche would be nothing more than extreme pathological cases; in their eyes, Schiller suffered from repressed patricidal desires, and Goethe from certain complexes (Briefe 2:196). While he was completing work on Siddhartha, Hesse began work on what many regard as his most successful novel, Der Steppenwolf (1927). If Siddhartha was able to see his life’s mission in terms of “die Welt lieben zu können, sie nicht zu verachten” (GW 5:467; being able to love the world, not to despise it), then the central character of Der Steppenwolf begged to differ. This work constituted Hesse’s last major study of that important literary and social figure, “the outsider,” analyzed at length by Colin Wilson.24 (Thomas Mann also took up an outsider’s perspective by sending Hans Castorp into the mountains in Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain, 1924], where he could see society through a clinical prism, in order to elucidate the disease of modernity.) Shortly after the novel in its entirety had appeared, Hesse wrote in a letter that neither its content nor its poetic form had been understood,25 and nearly a decade and a half later he commented in his “Nachwort” (1941) to the novel that it was, of his all works, the one that had been more often and more badly misunderstood than any other.26 What most struck the novel’s early critics, though, was its honesty — “das unbarmherzigste und seelenzerwühlendeste aller Bekenntnisbücher, düsterer und wilder als Rousseaus Confessions” (the most remorseless and most soul-churning of all confessional writings, gloomier and more savage than Rousseau’s Confessions), as Kurt Pinthus put it27— in its depiction of the fifty-year-old Harry Haller (Hesse shared the same initials and age as his main character), the “Steppenwolf” of the title. For Harry Haller, beyond doubt an “outsider,”28 is indeed the Steppenwolf, that is, a mixture of man and wolf, “das in eine ihm fremde und unverständliche Welt verirrte Tier, das seine Heimat, Luft und Nahrung nicht mehr findet” (GW 7:211; an animal gone astray in a world it finds strange and incomprehensible, which can no longer find its home, air, or nourishment). In this formally more complex work — consisting of the Editor’s Preface, the Records of Harry Haller, and the Treatise on the Steppenwolf — Haller learns, thanks to the mysterious Hermine, how to dance, and enters the “magic theater” in

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which his desires are acted out. In some respects, this is very much a novel of the “roaring twenties,” but although the descriptions of the shady world of Maria and Hermine (GW 7:328 and 333) are evocative of the social world of the Weimar Republic, the names of some of the venues locate the novel, if anywhere, in Zurich or Basel. (Haller’s wolf aspect, it has been suggested, “has its analogue in the murders and assassinations in the new Weimar Republic of the early 1920s, a decade pregnant with coming disaster, as Germany marched relentlessly toward fascism.”)29 Nevertheless, the world of smoke-filled cabaret halls, flappers, vamps, and jazz music functions overall as a cultural signifier of modernity (Pablo’s saxophone and the fox-trot “Yearning” have their counterpart in the recording of Sophie Tucker singing “Some of These Days” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausée (Nausea, 1938), another work set in the late twenties or early thirties). As a powerful amalgam of Nietzsche, Novalis, and Jung, the novel is a sustained exercise in social critique, and, in parts, constitutes a savage denunciation of society. A great deal of this critique derives from Hermann Graf Keyserling (1880–1946) and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), particularly the latter’s two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918–22), with which Hesse was temperamentally much in agreement.30 To begin with, Haller inveighs against jazz and against modern culture in general; jazz, we read in the early pages of the novel, is “Untergangsmusik” (music of decline) which, compared with Bach and Mozart, is — like all our art, all our thought, all our would-be culture (Scheinkultur) — no more than a disgraceful deception (Schweinerei; GW 7:219). In a letter to Josef Englert of 1 July 1923 about Handel’s opera Rodelinde, Hesse wrote that, for many years now, every time he heard this kind of music or saw Gothic or Baroque architecture he had the feeling that this represented “eine vergangene, nicht wiederkehrende Formenwelt” (a world of form that has gone and will never return) — “grade dies spricht Spengler ja nun in seinem Werk systematisch aus” (Briefe 2:63; this is precisely what Spengler articulates systematically in his work). Then again, the challenge presented to Harry Haller by Hermine (GW 7:298) is reminiscent of the “decisionism” of such so-called “Conservative Revolutionaries” as Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) and Arnolt Bronnen (1895–1959),31 and one critic has recently identified elements of the thought of Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) in the discourse of Hermine.32 By the same token, there are echoes of Ernst Jünger’s critique of the role of technology in modern social and political economy, as well as of the suspicion of technology expressed by the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).33 In fact, there is a startling similarity between Hesse’s novel and the critique of modernity offered by Heidegger. After all, it was precisely in the twenties that Heidegger presented his analysis of modernity in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), published

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in the very same year as Der Steppenwolf.34 In the contemporary world of the Weimar Republic, no less, Heidegger detected Seinsvergessenheit — the fact that human beings had forgotten the nature of their existence. For human beings, Heidegger argued, are Dasein; that is to say, beings whose existence is structured by temporality (SuZ, §9–§11). We experience this temporal structure of our existence above all through the possibility, or rather the certainty, of death; our Dasein is, in Heidegger’s terms, a Sein zum Tode (SuZ, §46–§53; “being-towards-death”). Acknowledging the fact of death produces in us Sorge (SuZ, §39–§44; care), but our Dasein is also structured by openness, freedom, and the grasping of opportunities, for it can be “projected” or “designed” (entworfen) within the horizon of the possibilities of being (SuZ, §31). Taking a leaf from Kierkegaard’s book, Heidegger argues that the very openness of being can make us anxious, just as Angst is the appropriate response in a world that has become “unhome-like” and “uncanny” (SuZ, §40; unheimlich). If human existence in general is a form of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) into the unknown, then modernity in particular robs us of our consciousness of the temporality of Dasein, as well as its openness, and hence its freedom and individuality. In the modern world, characterized for Heidegger by the use of public transport and by reading the newspaper, the specificity of the (one) individual becomes dissolved into the generality of the (many) others, what Heidegger termed das Man (SuZ, §27). In opposition to this loss of responsibility in a general anonymity, Heidegger urged his readers to become “resolute” or “open” (SuZ, §60; ent-schlossen), and Sein und Zeit constitutes nothing less than a call to authenticity and totality (SuZ, §45; Eigentlichkeit and Ganzheit). Now, in Hesse’s novel the fictional editor publishes the papers left behind by Haller on the grounds that they constitute “ein Dokument der Zeit” (a document of the times) expressing “die Krankheit der Zeit selbst, die Neurose jener Generation, welcher Haller angehört” (GW 7:203; the sickness of the time itself, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs). The glance thrown by Harry Haller at the editor when they attend a lecture given by a famous historian and art critic says it all: “Der Blick des Steppenwolfes durchdrang unsre ganze Zeit, das ganze betriebsame Getue, die ganze Streberei, die ganze Eitelkeit, das ganze oberflächliche Spiel einer eingebildeten, seichten Geistigkeit” (GW 7:189–90; the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch, the whole bustling pretence, the whole superficial game of a conceited, feeble intellectuality). There are allusions to Hesse’s own writings against the First World War — it emerges Harry Haller is “ein Kriegsgegner” (GW 7:265 and 276; an opponent of the war): he elaborates on his anti-war stance in conversation with Hermine (GW 7:304–6) — and there are prescient references to a coming war (GW 7:342 and 350). Later, in the Magic Theater, Harry Haller comes to realize that the capacity for war is in us all (GW 7:390).

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For its part, the Treatise on the Steppenwolf defines the contemporary bourgeoisie in terms of an attempt to ensure preservation and security at the cost of a feeling of “Lebensintensität” (GW 7:235–36; intensity of life). It notes that the Steppenwolf loves, as if he were his own brother, the political criminal, the revolutionary, or the intellectual seducer, but deplores the thief, the burglar, the rapist — and, while in theory having nothing whatever against prostitution, would in reality have been quite unable of taking a prostitute seriously as his equal — in a way that suggests this constitutes a fundamental shortcoming on Harry Haller’s part (GW 7:234). In political terms, bourgeois democracy is said to be born of weakness (GW 7:235), and the bourgeois willingly sacrifices his so-called “personality” (a compromise born of the need to placate both nature and Geist) to the great Moloch, the “state” (GW 7:245). On the path of “Menschwerdung” (becoming truly human), those who count are the great “Unsterblichen” (immortals), who have transcended bourgeois values and have realized “daß das verzweifelte Hängen am Ich, das verzweifelte Nichtsterbenwollen der sicherste Weg zum ewigen Tode ist, während Sterbenkönnen, Hüllenabstreifen, ewige Hingabe des Ichs an die Wandlung zur Unsterblichkeit führt” (GW 7:246; that the desperate clinging to the ego, desperately not wanting to die, is the surest way to eternal death, while being able to die, stripping away one’s exterior, the eternal surrender of the ego brings about the transformation to immortality). Elsewhere in the novel there are frequent allusions to Harry Haller’s fear of death, and how he manages to overcome it (GW 7:318; cf. 339, 348). Indeed, his earlier fear of death (GW 7:318), which determines his relationship to his razor and his decision to commit suicide, becomes transformed into a desire for suffering that will prepare him for, and make him willing to accept, dying (GW 7:339): on the night before the masked ball, Haller senses that his “Angst vor dem Tode” (anxiety about death) is about to become “Hingabe und Erlösung” (GW 7:348; surrender and redemption). Later on, the modern world is summarized by Hermine in terms of eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, playing-cards and radio music, bars, dance-floors, and jazz (GW 7:340–41); but unless, she says, we accept that life is not a heroic poem, we remain no better than a fool or a Don Quixote: “Wer statt Gedudel Musik, statt Vergnügen Freude, statt Geld Seele, statt Betrieb echte Arbeit, statt Spielerei echte Leidenschaft verlangt, für den ist diese hübsche Welt hier keine Heimat . . .” (GW 7:341; Those who want music instead of tootling, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of money, real work instead of bustle, passion instead of fooling around, will find no home in this pretty little world of ours). Indeed, in several places the novel deals with the question of the relationship between high art and popular culture. In short, history amounts to no more than a “swindle,” and to genuine human beings there remains nothing but

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death — death, and eternity (GW 7:342). In the novel, eternity is described as a world outside time, as “das Reich des Echten” (the kingdom of the truth), and as the kingdom of Mozart, the saints, and the other immortals (GW 7:343). It is no coincidence that Hesse’s critique of the lack of authenticity of everyday life is developed from the example of an academic, in this case a professor of oriental studies (GW 7:263). The novel shows Hesse asking himself, through Harry Haller, what the task of the intellectual in the modern world is (GW 7:324–35 and 340). In a long excursus, the relationship between the German spirit on the one hand, and music and matriarchy on the other, is cast in terms of the significance of Logos (GW 7:324–25); subsequently, when he is in bed with Maria, the touch of Eros initiates a flood of images and memories (GW 7:330–31).35 According to Hesse’s “Nachwort,” however, what the critics had overlooked were the positive aspects of the novel. After all, in the text itself the opposition between man and wolf is deconstructed (GW 7:239–40) and, as Hesse himself pointed out, the suffering world of the Steppenwolf stands in contrast to “eine positive, heitere, überpersönliche und überzeitliche Glaubenswelt” (a positive, cheerful, supra-individual and extra-temporal world of faith), the world of such “immortals” as Mozart and Goethe. (Indeed, Hesse emphasized a key episode, where Harry Haller has an imaginary conversation with Goethe, by pre-publishing the passage separately in the Frankfurter Zeitung.)36 In short, then, Hesse emphasized “daß das Buch zwar von Leiden und Nöten berichtet, aber keineswegs das Buch eines Verzweifelten ist, sondern das eines Gläubigen” (that the book tells of suffering and distress, but it is a book not about someone who despairs but about someone who believes).37 Above all, the basis of bourgeois democracy, the conception of the single, unitary self, is rejected by the treatise in favor of the self as something plural, “eine höchst vielfältige Welt, ein kleiner Sternenhimmel, ein Chaos von Formen, von Stufen und Zuständen, von Erbschaften und Möglichkeiten” (GW 7:242; a highly diverse world, a small galaxy, a chaos of forms, levels and conditions, of legacies and possibilities), a view endorsed by Harry Haller (GW 7:315) and confirmed by his experiences in the Magic Theater (GW 7:385). The most significant images in the novel are the nexus play– drama–theater, beginning with the play of a child. By means of his relationship with Maria, Haller believes, he has learned “[s]ich kindlich dem Spiel der Oberfläche anzuvertrauen, flüchtigste Freuden zu suchen, Kind und Tier zu sein in der Unschuld des Geschlechts” (GW 7:348; to entrust himself like a child to the play of surfaces, to seek the most fleeting joys, to be a child and an animal in the innocence of sex) — or, in the Schillerian and Nietzschean terms from which this passage derives, to appreciate the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. This development takes place even before the final, climactic scenes in the Magic Theater — although, as

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Hesse once observed, the Magic Theater “beginnt schon mit dem Auftreten Hermines” (begins the moment that Hermine enters).38 In the Magic Theater itself, Haller finally learns, under the influence of the drugs given to him by Pablo (whose unnaturally large eyes, presumably, indicate his own excessive use of illegal substances),39 to escape the world of reality and discover the self: “Sie wissen ja, wo diese andere Welt verborgen liegt, daß es die Welt Ihrer eigenen Seele ist, die Sie suchen” (GW 7:366; After all, you know where this other world lies hidden, that it is the world of your own psyche you are looking for). This capacity to find a “universe within” demonstrates Hesse’s indebtedness to Romanticism,40 but the Magic Theater can also be read in Jungian terms as the world of “active imagination” (on 19 February 1927 Hesse himself read the chapter about the Magic Theater to the members of Jung’s Psychological Club in Zurich).41 The thirties in Germany saw the rise of the National Socialist Party: within ten years of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 8 November 1923, Hitler gained more and more political influence until, on 30 January 1933, President Hindenburg named him chancellor. Thereafter, Hitler turned Germany into a totalitarian state, the power of the Party reaching into all aspects of economic, political, and cultural life. In 1931, the same year he married his third wife, Ninon Dolbin, Hesse withdrew from the Prussian Academy of Arts. Following its political takeover, Hesse’s publisher, the S. Fischer Verlag, in 1935, was forbidden by the National Socialist government to transfer overseas the publication rights to his works; in the Third Reich itself, his works were suppressed after 1939. Thus Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930) was one of his last works to be published in Germany; this work, like Die Morgenlandfahrt (Journey to the East, 1932), develops further the familiar question of integrating life’s polarities in general, and Eros and Logos in particular, through the development of the two eponymous characters. From 1932 to 1943, Hesse worked on his largest novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943), published in Zurich after Hesse had been unable to find a German publisher.42 As Ronald Gray has pointed out, the novel contains indirect political references;43 for direct comment on events in the Third Reich, however, we must turn to Hesse’s correspondence. Following the collapse of its successor state, Hesse, in a letter to Luise Rinser of 23 April 1946, described the Weimar Republic as “die einzige erfreuliche Frucht des ersten Weltkrieges” (the one single welcome fruit of the First World War), in which, however, the roots of National Socialism were also to be found; Hesse recalled “daß das deutsche Elend ja nicht erst mit Hitler begonnen habe, und daß schon im Sommer 1914 der trunkene Jubel des Volkes über Österreichs gemeines Ultimatum an Serbien eigentlich Manchen hätte aufwecken können” (Briefe 3:341; that the misery of Germany had not begin with Hitler, and that as early as the summer of 1914, the drunken

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jubilation of the people at Austria’s contemptible ultimatum to Serbia should have acted for some as a wake-up call). In his correspondence — such as his letter of late 1933 to Josef Englert — Hesse had some frank comments, too, on the treatment of the Jews (Briefe 2:397). Later, in a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz of January 1955, Hesse elaborated on the links between the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the composition of Das Glasperlenspiel.44 In some respects, Hesse’s engagement with the Weimar Republic, the focus of this volume of essays, is minimal, largely because he was living outside Germany for most of the time. In other respects, however, his influence was massive, because of the immense popularity of his writings. For all that, however, his writing failed to prevent the rise of National Socialism and the outbreak of the Second World War. Writing to Marianne Weber in February 1944, Hesse tried to deal with the question of how German soldiers could burn villages and then go and play Mozart, and he looked back nostalgically on the period of the Weimar Republic as one of hope; then Hitler suddenly created thousands of brown-shirts for whose uniforms the public was willing to pay: “es gab auch Offiziere genug, die nach dem Erschießen von 10 oder 100 Geiseln oder dem Niederbrennen eines Dorfes sich die Hände wuschen, sich hinlegten und noch eine Stunde Rilke oder Goethe lasen” (there were also enough officers who, after shooting dead ten or a hundred hostages or burning down a village, washed their hands, lay down, and read Rilke or Goethe for an hour); but, he added, “mir wäre ein einziger lieber, der keinen Rilke noch Hesse liest, aber seine Soldaten, statt auf Russen und Juden, auf die eigenen Führer zu schießen beibrächte” (Briefe 3:240; I would prefer one officer who reads neither Rilke nor Hesse but instructs his soldiers to shoot, not at Russians and Jews, but at their own leaders). This letter raises the questions of why not one such officer emerged and whether the excessive attention paid to form by such writers as Rilke bears any responsibility for the rise of Fascism, and thus whether their aesthetic is, in fact, a murderous one. Elsewhere, Hesse appears to recognize that an excessive dedication to literature and psychoanalysis might have been the prime cause of his own physical and psychological decline, describing himself to Emil Molt on 26 June 1923 as “ein hoffnungsloser Outsider” (Briefe 2:62; a hopeless outsider). Yet Hesse remains an important writer, because the issues that his works address were not only of great relevance to the Germany of the Weimar Republic, but remain pressing questions over and beyond this original historical context. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, Hesse wrote to Hilde Saenger in 1931 of what he saw as his — and, by extension, our — existential project: “Das Leben ist sinnlos, grausam, dumm und dennoch prachtvoll. . . . Wir müssen die Grausamkeit des Lebens und die Unentrinnbarkeit des Todes erst in uns aufnehmen, nicht durch Jammern, sondern durch Auskosten dieser Verzweiflung” (Briefe 2:304–5; Life is

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senseless, cruel, stupid, and nevertheless magnificent. . . . We must absorb the cruelty of life and the inescapability of death, not by complaining, but by experiencing this despair to the full).

Notes 1

Hermann Hesse, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 395 (henceforth cited as G). Hesse’s other works are cited from the following editions: Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), henceforth cited as GW; and Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Briefe, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973–86), henceforth cited as Briefe. 2 GW 10:411–16. The article was first published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 3 November 1914. 3

See the extract cited in Volker Michels, Paul Rathgeber, and Eugen Würzbach, Hermann Hesse, 1877–1862 [Marbacher Magazin 54/1990] (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), 47.

4

GW 10:466–97. See chap. 5, “Zarathustra in the Trenches,” in Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1992), 128–63; here, 134.

5

The novel Roßhalde (1914) reflects the breakdown of the relationship with Maria (GW 1:5–169).

6

On Hesse and Jung, see Malte Dahrendorf, “Hermann Hesses ‘Demian’ und C. G. Jung,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 8 (1958): 81–97; Johanna Neuer, “Jungian Archetypes in Hermann Hesse’s Demian,” Germanic Review 57 (1982): 9–15; and David G. Richards, The Hero’s Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach to Hesse’s “Demian” and Other Novels (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987). 7

See Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Demian,” vol. 1, Die Entstehungsgeschichte in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten, vol. 2, Die Wirkungssgeschichte in Rezensionen und Aufsätzen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993 and 1997).

8

Thomas Mann, “Introduction” to Demian (New York: Bantam, 1970), ix.

9

Lulu von Strauß und Torney, Review of Demian, Die Tat, Dec. 1922; cited in Hermann Hesse im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik, ed. Adrian Hsia (Bern: Francke, 1975), 182–83.

10

Hesse’s authorship was uncovered by Eduard Korrodi in his article of 24 June 1920 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “Wer ist der Dichter des ‘Demian’?” (Briefe 1:564–66).

11

Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Demian (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 230.

12

See Harald Szeemann et al, Monte Verità — Berg der Wahrheit: Lokale Anthropologie als Beitrag zur Wiederentdeckung einer neuzeitlichen sakralen Topographie (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1980).

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13

See Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Gospel of Demian,” in The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1965), 87–145; and “Der Hunger nach dem Mythos: Zur seelischen Gastronomie der Deutschen in den Zwanziger Jahren,” in Die sogenannten Zwanziger Jahre: First Wisconsin Workshop, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Bad Homburg v.d.H.: Gehlen, 1970), 169–201.

14

Robert C. Conrad, “Socio-Political Aspects of Hesse’s ‘Demian,’ ” in Hermann Hesse: Politische und wirkungsgeschichtliche Aspekte, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger and Albert Reh (Bern: Francke, 1986), 155–65.

15

See Thomas Mann’s letter of 18 February 1941 in his correspondence with the Hungarian classicist and associate of Jung, Karl Kerényi (1897–1973) (Thomas Mann/Karl Kerényi, Gespräch in Briefen [Munich: dtv, 1967], 105).

16 Ralph Freedmann, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis; A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), 205. 17

See Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha.” 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975–76). 18

See Hesse’s letter of 3 February 1923 to Frederik van Eeden (Briefe 2:48).

19

Theobald Ziegler, Der ewige Buddho (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1922).

20

Theodore Ziolkowski, “Siddhartha: The Landscape of the Soul,” in The Novels of Hermann Hesse, 146–77. 21

Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek, 1998), 138; see Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 438–65.

22

Letter to Helene Welti of 29 August 1922 (Briefe 2:28).

23

See his letter to Volker Michels of 24 January 1973, cited in Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” 2:302. 24

Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956; London: Picador, 1978), 74.

25

Letter to Hilde Jung-Neugeboren of July 1927 (cited in Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf” [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972], 122).

26

Cited in Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf,” 159.

27

Kurt Pinthus, “Hermann Hesse: Zum 50. Geburtstag,” in 8 Uhr Abendblatt (Berlin), 2 July 1927 (cited in Friedrich Pfäfflin and Bernhard Zeller, Hermann Hesse, 1877–1977: Stationen seines Lebens, des Werkes und seiner Wirkung [Munich: Kösel, 1977], 229). 28 The term itself is used in the novel (64); in his letter to Emil Molt of 26 June 1923, Hesse did not hesitate to apply the expression to himself (Briefe 2:62). 29

Don Nelson, entry on “Der Steppenwolf,” in Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed. Matthias Konzett, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 1:457.

30

See Hesse’s discriminating but ultimately positive comments on Keyserling and Spengler in his letters to Romain Rolland of 6 April 1923, to Georg Reinhart of 17 April 1923, and to Italo Zaratin of January 1924 (Briefe 2:57; 60; 76); he

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described Der Untergang des Abendlandes as the most significant work to have emerged from Germany in the previous twenty years (letter to Josef Englert of 1 July 1923 [Briefe 2:63]). 31

Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek, 1999), 298–99. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).

32

Eva-Maria Stuckel and Franz Wegener, Interpretationen zu Hermann Hesses “Der Steppenwolf” — Interpretations on Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (Gladbeck: Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2000). 33

Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). 34 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986); In English, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM P, 1962). Henceforth cited as SuZ with section number. 35

This opposition of Eros and Logos is derived, at least in part, from Ludwig Klages Von kosmogonischen Eros (1922; Of Cosmogonic Eros), which Hesse much admired (see his letter to Italo Zaratin of January 1924 [Briefe 2:76]).

36

See “Traum von einer Audienz bei Goethe,” in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 12 September 1926 (Briefe 2:154).

37

“Nachwort,” in Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf,” 159–60.

38

See his letter to Reinhold Geheeb of 13 June 1927 (cited in Kuhn, “Kommentar” to Demian, 296). 39 His reading of Steppenwolf prompted Walter Benjamin to record his experiments with hashish, as well as opium and mescalin (Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute [New York: The Free P, 1977], 126). 40

Compare with Schelling’s description of intellectual intuition in his Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, 1795), letter 8, in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Hermann Krings, Hermann Zeltner (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976–), Reihe 1, Werke, vol. 3, p. 87. 41 See Briefe 2:165. There is also a disguised allusion (GW 7:387) to the German art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933). 42

Ronald Gray, “Hermann Hesse: The Prose and the Politics,” in Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics, ed. Alan Bance (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1982), 14–25; here, 21.

43 44

Such as GW 9:392; see Gray, “Hermann Hesse,” 24.

Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Das Glasperlenspiel,” 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973–74), 1:295–96.

3: In Defense of Reason and Justice: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Historical Novels of the Weimar Republic Roland Dollinger

F

(1884–1958) BELONGS TO a generation of German writers who spent their formative years in the Wilhelmine Empire. These writers began their literary careers shortly before or after the turn of the century, were politicized during or at the end of the First World War, established their reputation as representatives of literary modernism or the avant-garde during the Weimar Republic, and often shared the common experience of exile after the collapse of the first German democracy. Many of Feuchtwanger’s artistic friends and acquaintances belonged to this Frontgeneration, as the historian Detlev Peukert has called this generation of intellectuals born in the late 1870s and 1880s.1 What Feuchtwanger shared with them — despite many cultural and political differences — was his generation’s disdain for the bourgeois value system of their parents, the flight into the practice of aestheticism before the First World War, and the rejection of this often immoral and apolitical stance in favor of artistic endeavors that could no longer afford the aestheticist denial of the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic. Feuchtwanger rebelled against the Jewish and bourgeois world of his parents — the Feuchtwangers were owners of a margarine factory — by first turning away from the orthodox rituals of his religious parents, and then, after the completion of his dissertation, “Heinrich Heines Fragment: Der Rabbi von Bacherach” (1907), preferring a financially insecure career as literary critic and author over a respectable life as an academic.2 Like other young writers at the time who cultivated their social marginalization, Feuchtwanger cherished his distance from both the Jewish world of his parents and his non-Jewish German environment. However, this distance also laid the foundation for his lifelong self-representation as someone who does not belong to any greater collective — other than that group of exemplary human beings who, like Feuchtwanger, would take it upon themselves to enter the realm of spiritual darkness and enlighten it with their rationality. EUCHTWANGER

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Before Feuchtwanger established his fame as a romancier who would modernize the nineteenth-century historical novel by using historical facts as allegorical material for his literary analysis of contemporary issues,3 he made a name for himself in 1908 as an ambitious editor of his own shortlived journal Der Spiegel (The Mirror), and then as critic for Siegfried Jacobsohn’s Schaubühne, a journal for contemporary theater. Shortly before he met his wife Marta, he finished his first novel, Der tönerne Gott (The God Made of Clay, 1910), a romantic-erotic tale still inspired by the fashionable turn-of-the-century aestheticism despite its critique of the artistic Bohème in Munich, and somewhat reminiscent of Heinrich Mann’s celebrated Die Göttinnen (The Goddesses, 1903).4 From 1912 until the beginning of the First World War, Feuchtwanger and his wife traveled through Southern Europe and North Africa, continuing their adventurous, Bohemian lifestyle that ended with Feuchtwanger’s flight from a French-Tunisian prison in 1914. After his return to Munich in the fall of 1914, Feuchtwanger was drafted into the army but was declared unfit for military service, thus avoiding the horrific war experiences that for many writers became the vantage point for their literary works in the 1920s. Several significant changes in Feuchtwanger’s literary development occurred during the First World War. In several of the plays he wrote between 1915 and 1918, Feuchtwanger not only expressed his pacifist convictions and sympathy for the enemy (his adaptation of Aeschylus’s The Persians in 1916; Die Kriegsgefangenen [Prisoners of War, 1919]) but also began to see the war as the catastrophic climax of Western civilization. He tried to correct Western civilization’s inherent flaws by embracing the philosophical wisdom of Asian or Eastern cultures — a topic that not only formed the basis of his plays Vasantasena (1916), Jud Süss (1916), and Warren Hastings (1916)5 but would also inform all of his novels from the Weimar Republic. Although Feuchtwanger continued to write plays until 1923 (and then two more after the Second World War), he realized that a new genre — the historical novel — was more appropriate for the depiction of the conflict between East and West, a conflict that according to Feuchtwanger also manifested itself in the opposition between Handeln and Betrachten (doing and observing). The most significant changes the First World War brought about in Feuchtwanger’s work were the transition from drama to novel, visible in his dramatic novel Thomas Wendt (1920), which deals with the political idealism of a writer during the revolution in Munich at the end of the First World War; his rejection of aestheticism; and his intention to depict the complexity of the postwar reality beyond the confines of the self.6 Besides being remembered as a successful playwright and the innovator of the modern historical novel, Feuchtwanger’s work is often associated with that of other German-Jewish writers, such as Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) or Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), who like Feuchtwanger

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responded to the crisis of self-identity of German Jews.7 Their assimilation into German society in the wake of their complete emancipation in 1871 was threatened by the reemergence of anti-Semitism during and after the war. While Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Arnold Zweig (1887–1968), and Jakob Wassermann looked for manifestations of a true Jewish identity in the idealized world of Eastern European Judaism, Feuchtwanger, as we shall see, hoped to rescue Jewish subjectivity by viewing it as the driving force behind a historical process that would ultimately lead to a synthesis of Western and Eastern values.

Jud Süss and Die häßliche Herzogin If someone were to write a history of mistakes committed by German publishers, its author would certainly have to include a chapter on Feuchtwanger’s first two historical novels, Jud Süss and Die häßliche Herzogin (The Ugly Duchess).8 Dissatisfied with his drama Jud Süss, which he wrote 1916–17, Feuchtwanger returned for his first novel to the same historical subject matter of the rise and downfall of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (1692–1738) in the duchy of Württemberg during the early eighteenth century.9 Although the first German book club, the “Volksverband der Bücherfreunde,” expressed its interest in Feuchtwanger’s novel upon its completion in September 1922, the Jewish theme of the book was deemed too provocative for its publication at a time of rising anti-Semitism. The publisher therefore commissioned Feuchtwanger to write a different novel in the same historical vein and Feuchtwanger immediately began to work on the life of the Tyrolean Duchess Margarete (1318–69). The publication of this literary “by-product” in 1923 was an immediate success, but, unfortunately for Feuchtwanger, by the time he received his first royalties galloping inflation had already devalued the Reichsmark and the literary success of Die häßliche Herzogin did not translate into financial gain for the author. Meanwhile, the publication of Jud Süss depended on another coincidence. Feuchtwanger had been under contract by the Drei Masken Verlag, a publisher specializing in plays, to find Italian and French plays and make them suitable for German theater. When his publisher lost interest in this project and wanted to cancel its contract with Feuchtwanger, they offered to publish Jud Süss (in a small edition of only 6,000 copies) as financial compensation. After the book’s publication in 1925, Feuchtwanger’s first historical novel soon became a literary sensation both in the United States, where it first appeared as Power (1926), and in England, where Jew Süß (1926) was reprinted twenty-three times during the first year. This stunning success of a hitherto unknown German writer in the Anglophone world helped increase the number of copies sold in Germany to approximately 300,000 by the end of the Weimar Republic. Despite the

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timidity of two German publishers, Jud Süss became an international bestseller and established Feuchtwanger’s fame as a novelist.10 Inspired by Manfred Zimmermann’s biography of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (1874),11 Feuchtwanger’s novel remained faithful to the basic facts of the life and death of Süss Oppenheimer (1698–1738), who during the reign of Duke Karl Alexander from 1733 to 1737 became his powerful financier and political advisor. In constant need of money in order to satisfy his insatiable desire for a lavish lifestyle at his court and to pay for the many soldiers who helped him realize his political plans to cancel the rights of the parliament and turn protestant Württemberg into a Catholic state, Karl Alexander became increasingly dependent on his Court Jew’s political shrewdness and his ability to provide the financial means. Süss Oppenheimer’s own extravagances and his disregard for the financial well-being of the Swabian subjects rendered him an easy target for the simmering anti-Semitism that ran deep in all social groups. The duke’s unexpected death at the height of the political crisis over the his planned coup d’état brought the wrath of the populace upon Süss Oppenheimer, who without his protector became the most obvious scapegoat for the Swabians’ pentup rage against the duke’s policies and machinations. Most of the duke’s other advisors remained unmolested, and the spectacle of Süss Oppenheimer’s public hanging in Stuttgart signified the brutal conclusion of this chapter from Württemberg’s local history. According to Feuchtwanger, the significance of his novel lies neither in the representation of the social rise of an eighteenth-century Jew from life in the ghetto to a powerful public position nor in his becoming a scapegoat for the non-Jewish majorities. Numerous other Jewish financiers had suffered a similar fate before him. This story, Feuchtwanger argues, would hardly have raised the interest of his readers (CO, 388–89). Feuchtwanger does not view his novel as a panorama of Jewish life in eighteenth-century Germany, nor does he want to vindicate Süss Oppenheimer, whom previous anti-Semitic renditions such as Wilhelm Hauff’s novella Jud Süß (1827) had vilified, by creating an apologetic depiction of his protagonist. Indeed, Feuchtwanger’s Süss Oppenheimer is everything but a positive image of a Jewish person. For most of the novel he is seen as greedy for power and money, cunning and servile, and with little respect for other people. This negative portrait of an eighteenth-century Jewish financier opened the book to attacks from both German-Jewish and völkisch critics (CO, 388). While anti-Semites saw the novel as further evidence for the allegedly evil, destructive character of the Jews, German-Jewish critics feared that Feuchtwanger unnecessarily provided them with new ammunition. Of course, such criticisms reveal more about the reviewers’ anxieties about the uneasy relationship between Germans and Jews in the first half of the twentieth century than they do about the author’s intentions in the novel. Only a biased reader could ignore the fact that all the character flaws

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that one may attribute to Süss also typify the multitude of German characters in Jud Süss. The scrupulousness with which Süss Oppenheimer and the duke use each other to pursue their own selfish interests binds them together in an uncanny love-hate relationship that both Süss Oppenheimer and Karl Alexander acknowledge (JS, 297). The parrot that Süss Oppenheimer keeps in his villa in Stuttgart is not merely a symbol for his fascination with exotic objects. It also symbolizes the link between the German sovereign and his Jewish subject, a relationship based on mutual imitation and repetition. The Duke, for example, casts his eyes at Magdalen Sybille, the only woman in the novel with genuinely positive feelings for Süss Oppenheimer, only after he discovers “his Jew’s” desire for her. And when Süss Oppenheimer convinces her to become the duke’s courtesan, he uses the young woman to please the duke and obtain more power for himself, power that is modeled after the absolute power of the monarch (JS, 223–29). By executing the Jewish scapegoat who conveniently serves as a screen for the projection of their own negative qualities, the people of Württemberg cleanse the body politic of their own failures. It is a gross misrepresentation of Jud Süss to suggest that certain character traits used by Feuchtwanger to describe the many figures of his novel are specifically Jewish or German attributes — an intentional misreading of the book that became the basis for Veit Harlan’s viciously anti-Semitic film version of 1940. In Feuchtwanger’s opinion, however, the key to understanding Jud Süss is to be found not in Süss Oppenheimer’s morally questionable actions but rather in his development from a man of power to a man of wisdom, in the trajectory of his inner life that clearly sets him apart from the German characters in the novel. He wants the reader to recognize the allegorical significance of this exemplary Jew for all white Western Europeans: they too must embark on a spiritual journey toward the Eastern culture of Asia: they must enter “den Weg über die enge europäische Lehre von der Macht . . . zu der Lehre Asiens vom Nichtwollen und Nichttun” (CO, 390; the path from the narrow European teachings about power . . . to the teaching of Asia about non-desiring and non-doing). In numerous autobiographical sketches, commentaries on his literary works, and essays on the historical significance of Judaism, Feuchtwanger repeatedly refers to the importance of this idea for both his fictional characters and his self-understanding as a German-Jewish intellectual. In his “Versuch einer Selbstbiographie” (Attempt at an Autobiography, 1927) Feuchtwanger even claims that prior to 1927 he had written only one book, which dealt with human beings caught between the dualism of activity and inactivity or “Macht und Erkenntnis” (CO, 363; power and knowledge). For Feuchtwanger, Jud Süss was primarily a novel of ideas, dealing with a number of philosophical oppositions such as vita activa versus vita contemplativa, outer versus inner life, appearance versus essence, power versus wisdom, the pursuit of one’s desires versus the denial of desires, Nietzsche versus Buddha (CO, 390).

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Although Feuchtwanger’s fascination with Eastern cultures and religions was shared by many non-Jewish writers during the first part of the twentieth century, Feuchtwanger’s discursive linkage between the Orient and the historical task of Judaism went beyond such Exoticist tendencies. Since the turn of the century, Wilhelmine culture had displayed a great fascination with the Orient, and Feuchtwanger’s first major dramatic success, Vasantasena (1915), an adaptation of a fifth-century Indian play, capitalized on this attraction. He also positively reviewed Alfred Döblin’s novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (1916), which he praised for its wisdom in promoting non-resistance (CO, 337–40). However, Feuchtwanger’s participation in this fashionable literary topos becomes more complicated through his claim that he chose a Jewish character to undertake this journey to the East because, in his view, Jews are destined to become a sort of avant-garde in this process of bringing Eastern ideas to Europe. Both their geographical origin in a region located between Europe and Asia as well as their historical role as mediators between the two cultural spheres made Jews particularly qualified to exemplify this path to the wisdom of the East. Paul Levesque has recently demonstrated that Feuchtwanger’s notion of the mediating role of Jews must be understood within the context of the long-standing history of a discourse ascribing supposedly Oriental character traits to modern European Jewry.12 While in the nineteenth century antiSemitic writers such as Treitschke, Chamberlain, and Sombart used this type of rhetoric to deprive German Jews of their proper space within German culture by labeling them as non-European, and Western European Jewish writers like Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904) employed a similar strategy to distance themselves from their unrefined, unassimilated Eastern European coreligionists, Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century welcomed the association of Jews with the East.13 The cultural and political purpose of this reinterpretation of the image of the “Oriental Jew” is clear: German-Jewish intellectuals, threatened by rising anti-Semitism in the wake of the First World War and the loss of a Jewish self-identity through assimilation, could redefine themselves in positive terms as major players in the cultural sphere and view themselves “as uniquely qualified to perform tasks of world-historical importance.”14 As Michael Brenner has demonstrated in his book The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, the construction of the “Jew as Oriental” in works by other German-Jewish writers, such as Else Lasker-Schüler’s Hebräische Balladen (Hebrew Ballads, 1913), Arnold Zweig’s Das ostjüdische Antlitz (The Eastern Jewish Countenance, 1919), and Jakob Wassermann’s Der Fall Maurizius (The Maurizius Case, 1928), to mention only a few, served the purpose of creating an ideal, “authentic” counterimage to the highly assimilated Western Jew who had lost his Jewish self-identity15. But whereas these writers sought the authentic Jew either in the Orient or in the Eastern European shtetl, Feuchtwanger rejected this notion of idealizing the East, instead opting for a cultural symbiosis of East and West.

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In order to make Süss Oppenheimer an allegorical figure signifying the development of European man toward the ideal of overcoming one’s worldly ambition and desire, Feuchtwanger could not construe his protagonist simply as a victim of unjust prosecution. His inner transformation had to be seen as the result of his own decision. Two fictional episodes in the novel serve this purpose. First, Feuchtwanger’s main character could have saved himself from being executed by making public the written evidence that he was in fact the illegitimate son of a Christian nobleman — a stunning development in the novel for which Feuchtwanger had no historical evidence. By keeping the secret of his Christian father to himself, Süss Oppenheimer decides to retain his Jewishness and remain the Jewish outsider in a Christian world. Unlike his brother, who converted to Christianity in order to serve as a high-ranking official at the court in Darmstadt, Süss also rejects conversion and chooses to die as a Jew. In his commentary on the novel, Feuchtwanger writes that his protagonist’s repudiation of Christianity should not be equated with his faithfulness to Judaism (CO, 389). Until his incarceration, Süss Oppenheimer in fact shows only disdain for the ritual laws of his religion. But his unwillingness to save his neck by converting to Christianity demonstrates the author’s ideal of self-denial. Süss Oppenheimer must accept his demise happily (CO, 390) and welcome death in order to illustrate Feuchtwanger’s preference for knowledge over power (JS, 387). At the same time, however, and this questions Feuchtwanger’s own interpretation, Süss’s refusal to give in to the hypocritical proselytizing of some Swabian Protestants assures his final victory over his enemies. Feuchtwanger’s ideal of self-denial requires that his protagonist enjoy a masochistic pleasure during his public humiliation but, like other masochistic pleasures, this too guarantees that he remains in control at the moment of his demise. Moreover, Süss Oppenheimer’s path toward enlightenment and the denial of his initial “will to power” required Feuchtwanger to include another purely fictional strand in his historical narrative. The death of Süss Oppenheimer’s daughter Naemi, who escapes from the clutches of the intoxicated and lecherous Duke Karl Alexander by throwing herself from the roof of her house, constitutes the tragic turning point in her father’s metamorphosis. While he first seeks revenge by pushing the Duke toward a confrontation resembling a civil war with the inhabitants of Württemberg, Süss Oppenheimer later recognizes that this course of action was the wrong way to commemorate his daughter. Only after overcoming his Western desire to boost his self-esteem through confrontation with others, and by internalizing the Eastern wisdom that “schlafen ist besser als wachen, tot sein besser als lebendig sein” (JS, 393; sleeping is better than being awake, being dead is better than being alive) is he able to enjoy a visionary community with his daughter (CO, 449). Naemi’s death is the narrative prerequisite for her father’s final acceptance of “Asian” principles.

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She joins other female characters in the modern German novel — for example, the murdered women in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) or Harry Haller’s female counterpart Hermine in Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) — whose deaths serve as the necessary sacrifice for the modern hero’s successful spiritual development. Unlike her father, who chooses death, Naemi is a victim.16 At the end of the novel, shortly before his execution, Süss Oppenheimer’s inner transformation is complete. A mystical union between Süss and Rabbi Gabriel (JS, 462), the cabbalist seeking the presence of God in the natural world, signifies that Süss Oppenheimer’s life of political activism has now been replaced by his knowledge about the vanity of all worldly desires and the futility of selfish individualism. Oppenheimer’s forehead now bears the mark of religious wisdom, the Hebrew letter shin, which is also the physical leitmotif characterizing Rabbi Gabriel. Although Feuchtwanger’s idealization of self-denial and self-dissolution — deeply Romantic notions that became part of twentieth-century German culture via Wagner’s operas and Schopenhauer’s philosophy — may help Süss Oppenheimer find his peace at the moment of death, Feuchtwanger’s message should not be accepted without some reservations. At a time when Thomas Mann published Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), his novel about the transcendence of the life-negating German fascination with death, Feuchtwanger seems to have moved in the opposite direction. If Süss Oppenheimer has become like Rabbi Gabriel, then one cannot speak of a unity reconciling the juxtaposed lives of the Court Jew and the mystic.17 And if Rabbi Gabriel embodies Feuchtwanger’s ideal, then his mysticism prevails at the expense of all social and political activity. Feuchtwanger’s dilemma at the end of Jud Süss expresses a fundamental problem for liberal intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. While supporting the democratic principles of the new republic in Germany after the First World War and hoping for free elections, the end to censorship, and an economic policy that would end the material suffering of the people,18 Feuchtwanger and like-minded liberal writers such as Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) and Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) were caught between the desire to break down the barrier between literature and politics, on the one hand, and the equally strong tendency to defend the “purity” of the cultural sphere on the other hand. Feuchtwanger witnessed the leftist revolution in Munich in 1918–19, the active role that intellectuals such as Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) played in it, and their gradual disillusionment with the practical world of politics. In his play Thomas Wendt (1920), an immediate response to the events in Munich, Feuchtwanger created the character of a writer who initially joins the revolution before coming full circle by abandoning politics completely for the purer world of the spirit. Both Feuchtwanger’s Thomas Wendt and Jud Süss deal with the problem of the intellectual who must negotiate his

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path between assuming power and accepting responsibility for his actions, and defending the realm of knowledge and risking being sidelined by other historical forces. In this light, the character of Jud Süss is perhaps less an allegorical figure for the journey of so-called Western men toward an imagined East than a character symbolizing the insecurity of an intellectual like Feuchtwanger about his proper place within an increasingly classconscious modern German society. While this is true for most liberal writers of the Weimar Republic who refused to put their literary production in the service of party politics, Feuchtwanger’s Jewish background certainly heightened his sense of not belonging. And he continued to pursue this topic in his next novel, Die häßliche Herzogin. Much smaller in scope than Jud Süss, Feuchtwanger’s novel about Duchess Margarete, nicknamed “Maultasch” (HH, 112) because of the ugly shape of her mouth, is both an action-filled political thriller and a psychological portrait of an outsider. Set in Tyrol in the fourteenth century, the novel tells a complex story of intrigue, deception, jealousy, greed, and several murders. Revolving around the competing interests of German dynasties such as the Luxemburgs, Wittelbachs, and Habsburgs, the Pope (who was exiled in Avignon), local feudal lords, and the cities of Tyrol, Feuchtwanger’s narrative about the life and politics of Margarete bears several similarities to Jud Süss. Inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Feuchtwanger began to study after the First World War, this novel deals principally with the sublimation of emotional and sexual satisfaction through political activity. Spurned by all men due to her ugliness, Margarete, whose intellectual capabilities are vastly superior to those of her male allies and enemies, seeks personal fulfillment by becoming an important player on the European political stage. Her first effort to substitute the idealization of a knightly friend for her unfulfilled desires is cut short when he is executed after an unsuccessful coup d’état directed against her first husband. Although Margarete always pursues the interest of Tyrol against the more powerful dynasties, who are intent on absorbing this bridge to Italy into their domains, and implements a progressive, enlightened policy of modernizing her country, her smart leadership never produces the desired result, that is, her recognition by others. The Volk, characterized by Feuchtwanger as superstitious and governed by primitive instincts, attribute her political success to her rival, the beautiful but cunning Agnes von Flavon, one of Feuchtwanger’s invented characters. Consumed by jealousy and hatred, Feuchtwanger’s ugly duchess seeks the death penalty for Agnes against the resistance of the Tyrolean aristocracy and the masses, who worship Agnes’s beauty and charisma. Before Margarete can spare Agnes’s life, Agnes is killed by Konrad von Frauenberger, a cynical nihilist representing the politician without conscience. Earlier in the novel, he had poisoned Margarete’s second husband — with her knowledge, because her husband,

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Ludwig of Bavaria, had an affair with Agnes and deprived Tyrol of muchneeded income — and Konrad also kills Margarete’s son, the only heir, to protect the power interests of his own social group, the gentry. While Margarete buries her son alone, the aristocracy and the populace honor Agnes by flocking together at her burial. Agnes, the beautiful “Other,” has defeated Margarete even in death. At the end of the novel, the reader sympathizes with a broken Margarete, who was unable to realize either her personal desires or her political goals. Abandoned by her former friends, allies, and subjects, who blame her wrongfully for Agnes’s death, she cedes Tyrol to Duke Rudolf of Austria (1339–65), leaving the House of Habsburg to determine its future. Unlike the historical Margarete, who spent the remaining years of her life in Vienna, Feuchtwanger’s protagonist moves to Bavaria, where we see her disillusioned and resigned to a life of solitude on a tiny island. Like Süss, Margarete withdraws from the world of political intrigue by renouncing all claims to power. But Margarete’s passivity at the end of her life, unlike Süss Oppenheimer’s, does not signify Feuchtwanger’s Eastern ideal of self-conscious “non-doing”; it is mere resignation, the result of the many defeats she has suffered at the hands of her opponents.19 His dictum that “der Handelnde niemals Gewissen hat, sondern nur der Betrachtende” (CO, 369; the man of action never has a conscience, only the observing person has one) is a fitting characterization of Margarete’s longtime advisor, Jakob von Schenna, who refuses to be drawn into the political battle between the Duchess and Agnes (HH, 253). Always the intellectual observer, he analyzes the all-too-human motives of the powerful and shares with the old Abbot Johannes von Viktring’s melancholic insight into the transitoriness of happiness and fame (HH, 210). Both Jud Süss and Die häßliche Herzogin take place at a historical time that Feuchtwanger conceives of as a transitional period between the patriarchally structured order of premodern times with an emphasis on lineage and rank on the one side, and the onset of modernity on the other.20 And in both novels the discourse of modernity is intimately linked to the sphere of money and trade, urbanization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and most interestingly, the figure of the Jew, whose status as social outsider allows him to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Margarete represents “modernity”: she opens the gates of Tyrolean cities to Jews, improves the trading conditions, enhances the financial well-being of a rising urban middle-class, but ultimately her project of modernization is doomed to failure because the irrationality of her environment, still anchored in the medieval value-system, proves to be too strong. An outsider herself, she strongly identifies with her own Court Jew, Mendel Hirsch, who helps her modernize the cities. Unlike Süss, however, Mendel Hirsch does not seek entrance into the inner circles of power, but like his latter-day coreligionist he and many other Jews are brutally murdered during a pogrom, the origin

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of which Feuchtwanger unequivocally locates in the material envy of Christian merchants. Through this discourse of modernity, linked to the image of the Jew, Feuchtwanger’s historical novels also reveal their proper cultural and political origin within the context of the Weimar Republic. The demise of the Wilhelmine Empire and its concomitant patriarchal, authoritarian structures and its replacement by a republic, in which capitalist tendencies and culturally modern values were no longer kept in check by feudal interests, were viewed by many opponents of the postwar order on both the political right and left as a “Jewish conspiracy” against the supposedly more traditional “German” forms of life. Although the discursive nexus between modernity and Jews was an invention of the nineteenth century and often embraced by German-Jewish writers such as Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) and Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), it gained new prominence during the Weimar Republic. The murder of Walter Rathenau (1867–1922) — intellectual, director of AEG, and secretary of state — in 1922, whose life Feuchtwanger originally wanted to use as the model for the character of Süss (CO, 511), indicated that Jews as symbols of a capitalist modernity once again became a target of nationalist circles. By portraying Mendel Hirsch as a Jewish financier supporting the modernizing projects of Margarete and by emphasizing his usefulness for the development of her cities, Feuchtwanger emphasizes the historical role of Jews for the rise of a capitalist modernity in German territories and simultaneously blames backward-oriented Germans, assembled in the ultra-conservative “Artusrunde” (HH, 194), for the destruction of historical progress. Not the Jews, but the German opponents of modernity, Feuchtwanger suggests, presented the real danger for the Weimar Republic. His thinly veiled allegorization of the beginnings of the Nazi movement through this group of young, violent champions of knightly culture and enemies of bourgeois capitalism was Feuchtwanger’s first, brief attempt to come to grips with the phenomenon of völkisch nationalism in the 1920s. In his next novel, Erfolg, Feuchtwanger met this challenge head-on, and he no longer felt the need to project his representation of the early 1920s into a distant past.

Erfolg Erfolg (1930)21 is the first of three loosely connected novels — Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns, 1933) and Exil (1940) were written after Hitler’s ascent to power — that Feuchtwanger called “Wartesaal-Trilogie” (Waiting-Room Trilogy).22 In his commentary on Exil, Feuchtwanger explained that the German dictatorship was also made possible by the inexcusable passivity of the opponents of National Socialism, who had waited too long before responding to the brutality of the Nazi regime with their own

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violence.23 While these comments, written two months after the beginning of the Second World War in his French exile, reflect Feuchtwanger’s pugnacious attitude, prompted by the aggression of Nazi Germany, we shall see that in Erfolg he still hoped to defeat völkisch barbarism by means of an appeal to human rationality and the power of literature. When Feuchtwanger began to dictate his novel to his secretary, Lola Sernau, at the end of 1927, two years after he had moved from Munich to Berlin, the Weimar Republic was enjoying relative economic and political stability. The public was not yet concerned with rising unemployment in the wake of the Great Depression and the radicalization of the political parties of both the left and the right that soon would weaken the moderate political center. In May 1928 the National Socialists received less than three percent of the votes to the Reichstag, and Feuchtwanger’s fictional account of the origin of the National Socialist movement in Munich seemed to revolve around an already historical event. This may have led Feuchtwanger to choose a narrative perspective that supposedly looked back at the narrated events from the year 2000.24 When Erfolg was published in 1930, however, the National Socialists’ share of seats in the parliament had increased to 18.3 percent, and most reviewers did not read Erfolg as a historical novel but rather as a political Zeitroman, the first novel by a major Weimar novelist dealing with the origin of National Socialism.25 Depending on the political viewpoint of the reviewer, Erfolg was either praised as a warning against the Nazi movement or lambasted as a book of hatred that — according to a Nazi reviewer — had earned its author his exit visa from Germany.26 More recently, there have also been critical attempts to establish Erfolg as a Schlüsselroman and identify some of the characters of the novel as representations of historical persons:27 the Marxist engineer Pröckl, for example, is said to be Feuchtwanger’s friend Bertolt Brecht, the comedian Balthasar Hierl allegedly shows great resemblance to Karl Valentin, while the writers Matthäi, Pfisterer, and Tüverlin are modeled after the writers Ludwig Thoma, Ludwig Ganghofer, and Feuchtwanger himself.28 While such readings emphasize the resemblance between fictional characters and real persons — Feuchtwanger’s friend Brecht, for example, was offended by the character of Pröckl — they downplay the aesthetic (fictitious) character of Erfolg, that is, Feuchtwanger’s effort to analyze historical events and movements through the perspective of fictional characters who become metonymic figures representing various social groups and their Weltanschauungen during the Weimar Republic (CO, 397). Formally, Erfolg is the most modern of Feuchtwanger’s novels, and is often associated with the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety), a term that Feuchtwanger did not find particularly useful to describe his novels (CO, 436). While Die häßliche Herzogin and Jud Süss often experiment with language reminiscent of Expressionist prose — noteworthy is the

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effort to create an astonishing rhythm by stringing together several verbs or adjectives — such linguistic innovation recedes in favor of a plurality of narrative modes. The insertion of sociological data, historical excursions, and essays on cultural issues into the fictional plot,29 the often rapid change of narrative perspective from an omniscient narrator to first- and thirdperson narration to interior monologue, and the montage-like juxtaposition of several narrative strands that create the impression of simultaneity lend to Erfolg a decisively modern quality. Unlike some other modern writers — in his essay “Die Konstellation der Literatur” (1927) he names Döblin and Brecht as examples (CO, 420) — Feuchtwanger wanted to make sure that an avantgardist experimentation with form did not gain the upper hand and obscure the purpose of prose literature. According to his essay “Der Roman von heute ist international” (Today’s Novel is International, 1932), the novel accomplishes what the different sciences fail to do, that is, unify the fragmented knowledge of one’s era and offer readers a coherent worldview. Like other modern novelists, such as Hermann Broch and Alfred Döblin, Feuchtwanger ascribes to the modern novel the function of creating a totalizing image of reality and thus enabling the reader to construct meaning in a meaningless world (CO, 434).30 And since literary realism was no longer able to adequately reflect the complexity of modern reality and bring about a meaningful, coherent world view, the combination of different narrative modes — documentary, essayistic, and fictional — seemed most promising to Feuchtwanger, as well as to other modern novelists. Although Feuchtwanger’s novel Erfolg deals primarily with the economic, social, cultural, and political developments in Bavaria after the First World War through the representation of a great number of mainly middle-class and aristocratic characters — Feuchtwanger was criticized by leftist reviewers for the conspicuous absence of proletarians and farmers31 — it does not lose sight of the major historical trends in Weimar Germany from 1921 to 1924. Feuchtwanger pays great attention to the galloping inflation of the early 1920s as well as the occupation of the Ruhr valley by the French army. More specifically, the novel focuses on the corrupt judicial system, the influence of powerful economic circles on the political process, and the rural conservatism and cultural backwardness of Bavaria and its inhabitants at a time of rapid industrial development. Erfolg also continues the discussion of a theme in Feuchtwanger’s earlier novels: the dilemma of intellectuals who are caught between political engagement and passivity, a dilemma that reappears in Erfolg as the struggle of the bourgeois writer with the theory and practice of Marxism. Finally, and perhaps most important, Feuchtwanger analyses the rise and (only apparent) fall of the National Socialist movement in Bavaria between 1921 and 1924.32 Exemplary for Feuchtwanger’s exposure of the corrupt judicial system in Bavaria is the story of Martin Krüger, the director of a modern

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Munich art museum (Gemäldegalerie), who is falsely accused of perjury and sentenced to several years in prison. In the wake of the failed leftist revolution after the First World War, conservative and reactionary politicians, driven by personal ambition and ideology, find an easy scapegoat in the intellectual Krüger. His predilection for avantgardist art is offensive to the reactionary cultural politics of the Munich government, which claims to represent the aesthetic taste of the people of Bavaria. Although Feuchtwanger does not introduce the character of Rupert Kutzner and his political movement of the “Wahrhaft Deutschen” (True Germans) — an easily decipherable allusion to Hitler and the National Socialist Party — until the thirteenth chapter of the second book, his analysis of the forced marginalization of Krüger prepares the reader to recognize National Socialism as a reactionary movement rejecting everything that may be associated with anti-German modernity: modern art, international monopoly capitalism, Jews, the Freemasons, and the Jesuits (E, 204–6). Moreover, the True Germans are seen as a hotchpotch of disillusioned, violent war veterans (such as Erich Bornhaak and Dellmaier), petit-bourgeois, authoritarian characters (such as Cajetan Lechner), who sympathize with the National Socialists for non-political, material, and sometimes merely very personal reasons, and adventurous romantics of little intelligence (such as Kutzner’s brother). Feuchtwanger often uses literary satire bordering on caricature to mock the political irrationalism and naïveté of Kutzner and his inner circle. Representing Kutzner as a charlatan for whom the world of politics is merely a stage to act out his petit-bourgeois fantasies of power (Feuchtwanger has him study his lines with a famous actor), one must wonder today whether Feuchtwanger did not underestimate the broad appeal of the National Socialists and the effective means of propaganda they used in order to exploit the political and economic instability of the Weimar Republic for their political purposes. Painting them as dumb irrationalists, Feuchtwanger underestimated their widespread attraction for a populace that became increasingly disillusioned with a democratic parliamentary system that was seen not only as ineffective in dealing with political and economic problems but also as a foreign, western political framework. Feuchtwanger’s representation of the True Germans as a movement of the intellectually challenged fails to see the Nazis’ invocation of reason for the realization of irrational goals. While the True Germans’ rise to power in Erfolg comes to an abrupt end with the failure of KutznerHitler’s beer hall putsch in 1923, Feuchtwanger’s reader of 1928 may have wondered with good reason whether the author of this novel about Bavaria did not underestimate the danger of the National Socialists for the Weimar Republic (CO, 397). Although Feuchtwanger was forced to reevaluate the political effectiveness of the National Socialists after 1933, he continued to view their ideology and politics primarily as a manifestation of petit-bourgeois irrationalism.

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For Feuchtwanger, neither the theory of Marxism nor the Soviet Union is a credible alternative to völkisch ideology. He reassessed this position after his journey to the Soviet Union in 1936/37, when during his French exile he wanted to help build a strong antifascist Volksfront that would include the communists of the Soviet Union.33 In Erfolg, the author Tüverlin expresses the bourgeois rejection of violent mass politics and Feuchtwanger’s belief in the “aristocracy of the spirit,” that is, the cultural power of the (creative) word, when he says: Ein großer Mann, . . . er heißt Karl Marx meinte: die Philosophen haben die Welt erklärt, es kommt darauf an, sie zu ändern. Ich für meine Person glaube, das einzige Mittel, sie zu ändern, ist, sie zu erklären. Erklärt man sie plausibel, so ändert man sie auf stille Art, durch fortwirkende Vernunft. Sie mit Gewalt zu verändern, versuchen nur diejenigen, die sie nicht plausibel erklären können. . . . Ich glaube an gutgeschriebenes Papier mehr als an Maschinengewehre. (E, 785) [A great man, . . . his name is Karl Marx thought: philosophers have explained the world, but it is important to change it. I personally believe that the only way to change it is to explain it. If you explain it in a plausible way, you change it silently through the influence of reason. Only those who are unable to explain it in a plausible way try to change it by means of violence. . . . I believe more in well-written texts than in machine guns.]

For Feuchtwanger, the ever rationalist defender of the enlightened principle of the spirit, theoretical Marxism was too simplistic a model to explain the complexity of modern life sufficiently. The Marxist explanation of Martin Krüger’s fate, for example, would reduce him to a victim of economic relationships and turn him into a modern-day tragic hero. But other factors contributed to Krüger’s death in prison, factors that do not warrant such a conclusion: his poor health, his relationship with a female painter whose painting scandalized the conservative circles in Munich, and other sociological and political coordinates that a Marxist analysis fails to take into account (E, 703). And for Feuchtwanger this constitutes the moment when Marxism’s alleged scientific objectivity becomes a new “mythology” (E, 703). Moreover, Feuchtwanger has the Communist, Pröckl, criticize the dictatorship of the party and the lack of individual liberties as well as material wealth in the Soviet Union, thus indicating his distance from the Communist Party that in Feuchtwanger’s view also shared the National Socialists’ desire for revolution and violent upheaval.34 While Erfolg reveals Feuchtwanger’s rejection of mass politics in favor of his defense of bourgeois individualism, a political stance typical of many liberal intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, Feuchtwanger simultaneously warns his readers of the dangers that powerful economic elites pose for the

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democratic decision-making process and the justice system. Characters such as Baron von Reindl, the director of the Bavarian Motor Works, or Dr. Bichler, the leader of the farmers’ unions, are the secret power brokers not only influencing the outcome of Krüger’s trial but also appointing and dismissing cabinet members as they see fit. Again and again, Feuchtwanger insists on the hegemony of the economic over the political sphere (E, 620; 643; 659; 708), viewing even the National Socialists as a useful tool for the interests of big industry: they keep the working-class parties in check and offer strong national resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr valley, the location of Germany’s heavy industry. The failure of Kutzner’s putsch is primarily the result of the industrialists’ decision to stop financing his movement because the end of the French occupation of the Ruhr valley and German-French rapprochement are in sight (E, 711). Although Feuchtwanger’s interpretation of the Nazi movement as a puppet in the hands of German industry was similar to the Marxist understanding of fascism in the 1930s, he probably provoked the ire of leftist reviewers with his positive representation of another capitalist, the American Potter. Potter’s rational pragmatism, devoid of any ideological bias, coupled with his offer to the Bavarian government to help finance the electrification of Bavaria if Krüger is pardoned, ironically achieves what Krüger’s supporters fail to accomplish. Potter’s dollars prove more effective than the individual efforts of Johanna Krain, his girlfriend, Dr. Geyer, his Jewish lawyer, and Tüverlin’s essay entitled “The Case of Krüger” (E, 175). Even if Potter’s intervention comes too late for Krüger, who perishes before his pardon becomes effective, Feuchtwanger’s positive image of Potter and “America” leave no doubt that he had no interest in demonizing capitalism as the cause of all evil. If economic rationality does not ignore the common good, Feuchtwanger seems to imply, it is able to enhance social progress and bring about a more reasonable society.35 Both the American capitalist Potter and the intellectual Tüverlin participate in the project of enlightened modernity, that is, the creation of a liberal, just, and reasonable society. The fascination with all things American during the Weimar Republic produces in Feuchtwanger’s novel a truly unusual alliance between the pragmatic, common-sense capitalist and the rational intellectual.36 Although Tüverlin’s essay “The Case of Krüger” fails to produce the desired results, namely Krüger’s release from prison, the novel ends on an optimistic note concerning the effectiveness of a politically engaged art. At the end of Erfolg we see Johanna Krain working on a film called “Dr. Martin Krüger,” and Tüverlin on his “Das Buch Bayern: Oder Jahrmarkt der Gerechtigkeit” (E, 798; The Book Bavaria: Or the Fair of Justice). Tüverlin has learned that in addition to the cool skepticism that characterized his earlier essay he must use his outrage at Bavaria’s corrupt judicial system if he wants his book to reawaken a sense of justice in his lethargic readership. His and Johanna’s personal suffering about Krüger’s meaningless death

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now become the principal driving force for his work, which can no longer save Krüger’s life but can strive to keep his memory alive. Literature (and art in general), Feuchtwanger suggests, may not be able to effect immediate political results but brings about changes through its mnemosynic function: by remembering the dead and bearing witness to the origins of social calamities, literature might stimulate the numb emotions of its readers and provoke them into political action. The sense of unease and embarrassing helplessness that Johanna’s film and the screening of “Panzerkreuzer Orlow” (E, 495; Battleship Orlow) are able to elicit among the viewers seem to confirm Feuchtwanger’s unabating faith in the political effectiveness of literary works.

Der jüdische Krieg After the completion of Erfolg, Feuchtwanger returned to the project of writing a historical novel about the Jewish historian Josef Ben Matthias (37 or 38–100 A.D.), a project he had originally begun in 1926 and then set aside in favor of the more urgent task of dealing with the rise of the National Socialists. This new novel about Josef Ben Matthias, who is also known under his Roman name Flavius Josephus, was to appear in two volumes. After the publication of the first volume, Der jüdische Krieg (The Jewish War, 1932), and while Feuchtwanger was visiting the United States, the Nazis looted his house in Berlin and destroyed his manuscript and important material for the second volume. Since it was impossible to reconstruct the original version in his French exile, he decided to widen the scope of the novel and publish it in three parts. Die Söhne (The Sons) came out in 1935 with the exile publishing house Querido in Amsterdam; Der Tag wird kommen first appeared in English (The Day Will Come, 1942)37 before Bermann-Fischer published the first German version in Stockholm in 1945.38 Feuchtwanger’s choice to use the history of the Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation in the second half of the first century A.D. for his novel is interesting. At a time when German Jewry was feeling the increasing pressure of racial anti-Semitism in Germany, Feuchtwanger could easily have taken as his topic the heroic aspects of the Jewish resistance against the Roman empire or focused on one of the Jewish leaders of the rebellion in order to strengthen the political resolve of his beleaguered coreligionists. Instead, Feuchtwanger concentrated on the role of the Jewish historian Joseph, who in his book The Jewish War (completed in the early 80s A.D.) put most of the blame on the various revolutionary factions of the Jewish populace, making their nationalist inspirations responsible for the course of events that led to the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. By doing so, Feuchtwanger perhaps resisted the temptation to identify the

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Romans of the first century A.D. with the Germans of the 1930s, even if the second and third volume of the Joseph trilogy establish some parallels between them. By essentially accepting the historical Flavius Josephus’s (Roman) viewpoint, Feuchtwanger made sure that his readers would focus on the philosophical content of his book and not just on the victimization of the Jews. And by making the traitor Joseph and his development the crucial aspects of his novel, Feuchtwanger’s Brechtian strategy was to strip his protagonist of heroic qualities and thus turn his readers’ attention to the novel’s ideas. The historical Josephus seems to have been a complicated man whose account of the Jewish war against the Romans became — despite its historical unreliability — the primary source of our knowledge about the Jewish war (66–70 A.D.). During the revolt, Josephus was a Jewish leader who in the end surrendered to the Romans. He began his career as the commander of the Jewish revolutionary forces in Galilee who, when the Romans began their campaign, fled with his forces to the fortress of Jotapata. After a siege of seven weeks, the fortress was taken, and Josephus and his soldiers fled to a nearby cave, where his men decided to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans. Josephus, on the other hand, insisted that surrender to the overpowering Roman military was the more rational course of action; nevertheless, he reluctantly agreed to draw lots with the rest to determine who would die first. As luck would have it, Josephus drew last and convinced the only other remaining soldier that they should give themselves up. He was taken to Vespasian; at this meeting he predicted that the general would soon become Roman emperor, a prophecy that after Nero’s death would prove correct. After the destruction of Jerusalem, he lived in Rome where he wrote his account of the war. According to contemporary scholarship, his book sent a twofold message to Jews and other peoples under Roman dominion: it was a strong warning against revolt, and the uprising should be seen as the work of political fanatics and criminals who by no means represented the political opinion of all Jews.39 While Feuchtwanger follows the historian’s account with regard to the main stages of the Jewish revolt from its first acts of resistance to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem to the victory march in Rome, the main theme of the novel is Joseph’s transformation from a staunch Jewish nationalist to a cosmopolitan citizen of the civilized world, transgressing national and ethnic identities.40 Recognizing nationalist politics as destructive and opposed to rationality, Feuchtwanger’s Joseph becomes an early twentieth-century champion of the hybridization of “self” and “other”: “Es kam darauf an, das eigene Gute überfließen zu lassen in die anderen, das fremde Gute einzusaugen in sich selbst” (JK, 268; It was important to let the good in oneself flow into others, the good of others into oneself). Rejecting the racial Blut und Boden nationalism in Germany, Feucht-

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wanger, in his essay “Nationalismus und Judentum” (1933), celebrates the universalistic principles of the Enlightenment. By distancing himself also from political Zionism in Palestine, the “bad” Jewish nationalism he calls a kind of “jüdischer Hitlerei” (CO, 482), Feuchtwanger tries to rescue the spirituality inherent in a positive Jewish nationalism. And this “good” nationalism, he claims, has its origins in the historical catastrophe of the destruction of the Jewish temple. According to Feuchtwanger, the Roman Empire represented a political structure characterized by reason, tolerance, and the absence of nationalism. It was the Jewish nationalists who committed the “original sin” of introducing the civilized world to the irrationality and senselessness of nationalism. But because they had to pay such a heavy price for their insubordination, they learned a historical lesson that other “white” peoples will accept only after the devastating experience of two World Wars (CO, 480–81). The living memory of the Jewish war against the Romans has led Jews to redefine their national identity. Judaism for Feuchtwanger is not based on a common race, geography, or language but, rather, on a common mentality or spiritual attitude that he summarizes by reference to the Kantian moral imperative (CO, 490). And while other nations, too, have made this basic principle an integral part of their reasoning, the Jews alone have absorbed it as part of their “Instinkt” (CO, 492) — a somewhat strange conclusion for this defender of rationality. One can see Feuchtwanger’s struggle to preserve his sense of Jewish self-identity at a time when it was threatened by anti-Semites, a self-identity that is defined by an all-embracing, universal, and spiritual principle that Feuchtwanger sees symbolized by the immaterial, abstract God of the Jews (CO, 493). And this is the moment where a gulf opens up between Feuchtwanger’s idealization of the Roman Empire in his essay and the Roman soldiers as they are represented in his Der jüdische Krieg. The merciless violence and hatred that Roman soldiers display during the destruction of Jerusalem and its residents is to a great extent caused by their inability to tolerate the physical absence of the Jewish God inside the Temple. Their resistance to this spiritual principle is shared by the National Socialists whose materialism also opposes the Jewish “Bekenntnis zum Geistigen” (CO, 494; belief in spirituality). The Jewish historian Joseph represents not only Süss treading his path from power to knowledge — Joseph poignantly summarizes this idea by saying that the kingmaker is more powerful than the king himself (JK, 240) — but also Feuchtwanger’s new ideal of a rational cosmopolitanism. By divorcing his Jewish wife Mara and marrying the Egyptian woman Dorion, he also wants to live his multicultural convictions in his private life. Without ever denying his Judaism, his hybrid existence becomes a provocation for both his Jewish coreligionists, who see in him a traitor, and the Romans, who never fully accept him as one of their own. The price he

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must pay for his lofty ideals is his sense of not belonging, of remaining an outsider. Whereas Süss found his inner peace by returning to Judaism at the end of his life, Joseph continues to suffer from the dilemma of, on the one hand, not being Jewish enough and, on the other, of being too Jewish. Feuchtwanger creates a drastic image of Joseph’s situation as an outsider when Joseph, shortly before the destruction of the Temple, tries to bring about a last-minute truce and is greeted by both Jews and Romans with derisive mockery (JK, 384). He strives to preserve his Jewish identity by overcoming it at the same time — a paradox that could only become lived reality if the other nations of the novel made his cosmopolitan, spiritual principles their own. Joseph’s hope that he could reconcile Jews and Romans through the authority of his writing (JK, 324) turns out to be unrealistic at a time when the military machinery, incited by irrational politics, does not heed the words of peace. When Joseph at the end of Der jüdische Krieg begins to work on his book about the Jewish war, his intention is both to remember its horror and to warn the next generations against the violence inherent in nationalist ideologies (JK, 463). At the end of the trilogy, we see Joseph recognize his failure and return to the side of the Jewish rebels. When the last volume, Der Tag wird kommen, was published in 1942, the Second World War had already claimed millions of lives, the extermination of the Jews was accelerating, and Feuchtwanger was living out his second exile in California. Forced to rethink his earlier conception, Feuchtwanger realized that what was needed was not his rational utopian notion of a cosmopolitan multiculturalism but emotional involvement with the victims of National Socialism. Joseph’s support for Jewish nationalism at the end of his life is also symbolic of Feuchtwanger’s confession that a Jewish selfidentity, when threatened by extermination, cannot be based on universal, rational principles alone.

Notes 1

Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 26–31. To mention a few from this generation: Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) and Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) who both exerted a strong influence on Feuchtwanger’s literary and political development; Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), the famous theater critic who like Feuchtwanger wrote his first reviews for Siegfried Jacobsohn’s Schaubühne; Bruno Frank (1887–1945), Erich Mühsam (1878–1934), Joachim Ringelnatz (1883–1934), Ernst Toller (1893–1939) with whom Feuchtwanger shared his Bohemian life in Munich. Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) and Frank Wedekind (1964–1918) should be mentioned here as significant influences on Feuchtwanger’s career, although they do not belong to the “war generation.” For Feuchtwanger’s biography, see

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Volker Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, ed. Stefan Jaeger (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag, 1984), 21–78. 2

Wulf Köpke’s “Lion Feuchtwanger’s Discovery of Himself in Heinrich Heine,” in The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, ed. Stefan Jaeger (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag, 1984) analyzes Feuchtwanger’s dissertation.

3 In his essay “Vom Sinn und Unsinn des historischen Romans” (On the Meaning and Meaninglessness of the Historical Novel, 1935) Feuchtwanger writes that he uses historical facts as a means of creating distance between himself and the immediacy of the present; historical material becomes “ein Gleichnis” (510; an allegory) for his representation of the “now.” In Lion Feuchtwanger, Centum Opuscula, ed. Wolfgang Berndt (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1956), 508–15. Subsequent references to this collection of essays by Feuchtwanger are cited in the text using the abbreviation CO and the page number. 4

See Wulf Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger (Munich: Beck, 1983), 16–17.

5

Feuchtwanger and Brecht cooperated on the rewriting of Warren Hastings. The new play, Kalkutta, 4. Mai premiered in 1928. The anticapitalist play Die Petroleuminsel was also performed for the first time in 1928. 6

For an excellent analysis of Thomas Wendt, see Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 69–75.

7

For a discussion of the relationship between assimilation and the crisis of Jewish self-identity, see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1999), esp. 1–17. 8

Lion Feuchtwanger, Jud Süss (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000); Lion Feuchtwanger, Die häßliche Herzogin (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002). Subsequent references to these works are cited in the text using the abbreviations JS and HH and the page number.

9

For a brief comparison of Feuchtwanger’s drama and his novel, see David Bathrick, “1925: Jud Süss by Lion Feuchtwanger is published,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 436–37. 10

Frank Dietschreit, Lion Feuchtwanger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 95–109.

11

Manfred Zimmermann, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, ein Finanzmann des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Stück Absolutismus- und Jesuitengeschichte; Nach den Vertheidigungsakten und den Schriften der Zeitgenossen (Stuttgart: Rieger, 1874). 12

Paul Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” German Quarterly 71.2 (Spring 1998): 145–65, esp. 148–56.

13

Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 148–50.

14

Ibid., 154.

15

Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1996). 16

At the beginning of their journey through Europe and North Africa from 1912 to 1914, Marta Feuchtwanger gave birth to a daughter, who died soon afterwards. The loss of a child became a motif in several of his novels (Die Geschwister Oppermann, 1933; Die Jüdin von Toledo, 1955; Jefta und seine Tochter, 1957) but it is too reductive to read its significance for these works only biographically.

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17 The character of Rabbi Gabriel owes his presence in Jud Süss to Feuchtwanger’s desire to present his readers with a positive example of a Jewish mystic, whose mere possibility anti-Semitic stereotypes have stubbornly denied. Just three years before the publication of Jud Süss, Werner Sombart had expounded in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911) that a Jewish mystic in the tradition of Jakob Böhme was unthinkable. Reducing the “Jewish spirit” to an alleged Jewish preoccupation with material and quantifiable phenomena, Sombart saw no room in Jewish life for mysticism. By creating the character of Rabbi Gabriel and emphasizing the spiritual qualities of Süss Oppenheimer, Feuchtwanger — like Martin Buber before him — reserved for German Jews a place at the “metaphysical table” (Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 155). 18 Wilhelm von Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger: Ein deutsches Schriftstellerleben (Königstein: Athenäum, 1984), 157. 19

Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 88.

20

Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 87.

21

Lion Feuchtwanger, Erfolg (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation E and the page number. 22

See Feuchtwanger’s “Nachwort des Autors 1939” (when Feuchtwanger finished writing Exil) in Lion Feuchtwanger, Exil (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 787.

23

Feuchtwanger, “Nachwort” to Exil, 787.

24

Feuchtwanger, “Nachwort” to Exil, 790.

25

Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, 226.

26

Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 109; Dietschreit, Lion Feuchtwanger, 51–52. 27

See Synnöve Clason, Die Welt erklären: Geschichte und Fiktion in Lion Feuchtwangers Roman “Erfolg” (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975), and Egon Brückner and Klaus Modick, Lion Feuchtwangers Roman “Erfolg”: Leistung und Problematik schrifstellerischer Aufklärung in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1978).

28

For a more complete list see Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 106.

29

For example, chapter 4 of the first book is called “Kurzer Rückblick auf die Justiz jener Jahre” (E, 28–29; A Brief Retrospection of The Judicial System during These Years); in the second book, the chapter entitled “Einige historische Daten” (E, 212–18; Some Historical Data) lists various sociological data about the population of the world, Europe, Germany, and Bavaria in order to illustrate the backwardness of this particular German state. 30

Hermann Broch, in his James Joyce und die Gegenwart (new ed.; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), summarizes this idea: “Aber eben diese Totalität ist ja die Aufgabe der Kunst und der Dichtung, sie ist ja die Grundaufgabe schlechthin” (67–68). For a discussion of the notion of totality in modern literature, see Dollinger, “Die Welt als Sprache und der Mythos: Ganzheitsideen in der modernen deutschen Literatur,” in Unus Mundus: Kosmos und Sympathie; Beiträge zum Gedanken der Einheit von Mensch und Kosmos (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 75–92.

FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 31

Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 109.

32

Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, 217.




83

33

For a discussion of Feuchtwanger’s book Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde, a mostly positive representation of Stalin and the achievements of the Soviet Union, see Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 24–27; for the role of German exile writers in the construction of a Volksfront, see Albrecht Betz, Exil und Engagement, in Deutsche Schriftsteller im Frankreich der Dreissiger Jahre (Munich: edition text ⫹ kritik, 1986), esp. 125–34. 34

Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 107.

35

Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 102; Brückner und Modick, Lion Feuchtwangers Roman“Erfolg,” 77. 36 The ugly side of American capitalism became the reason for Feuchtwanger’s book of ballads called PEP: J.L. Wetcheeks amerikanisches Liederbuch (1928). 37

Lion Feuchtwanger, The Day Will Come, vol. 3 of the Josephus trilogy, trans. Caroline Oram (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1942).

38

Dietschreit, Lion Feuchtwanger, 110.

39

Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Roman Domination: The Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple,” in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999), 268.

40

Lion Feuchtwanger, Der jüdische Krieg (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 268. Subsequent references to this collection of essays by Feuchtwanger are cited in the text using the abbreviation JK and the page number. 41

Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 122.

4: The Case of Jakob Wassermann: Social, Legal, and Personal Crises in the Weimar Republic Karl Leydecker

I

1927 JAKOB WASSERMANN (1873–1934), then in his mid-fifties, undertook a triumphant lecture tour of the United States that lasted several months. He was at the height of his powers as a writer, and the tour of the USA confirmed that he had also advanced from being one of the most widely read novelists in Germany in the 1920s to become a “Welt-Star des Romans” (world star of the novel), as his fellow novelist and friend Thomas Mann dubbed him shortly after his death.1 All over America, crowds flocked to hear him speak, to the extent that the police had to be called to restore public order on the occasion of a lecture at Columbia University. Wassermann’s global appeal seems to have been particularly strong to young people, with the effect he had on the younger generation of the 1920s being likened to Hermann Hesse’s significance for the hippy generation of the 1960s.2 Whilst in America, the workaholic Wassermann, who wrote more than a dozen novels as well as dozens of short stories and was also a prolific critic, essayist, and biographer, was working on the novel Der Fall Maurizius (The Maurizius Case) which on its publication the following year would confirm and enhance his reputation and readership both in Germany and abroad. In the final years of his life he went on to write two further novels that together with Der Fall Maurizius form his magnum opus, known as the Andergast trilogy: Etzel Andergast (1931), and his final novel, Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (Joseph Kerkhoven’s Third Existence), which was published posthumously in 1934, shortly after his death of a heart attack on 1 January of that year. N

The Pre-Weimar Years But Wassermann’s reputation as a novelist does not rest solely on these works written at the end of the Weimar Republic and at the end of his life. His literary career spanned nearly forty years. He was born in Fürth in

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Franconia, into a largely assimilated Jewish family that had little social or religious connection to the Jewish community in the town, but the young Wassermann nevertheless suffered discrimination on account of his Jewishness.3 His childhood was not a happy one, particularly following the early death of his mother in 1882 and his father’s subsequent remarriage the following year. The family suffered grinding poverty and Wassermann was harshly treated by his stepmother. Leaving school at sixteen in 1889, he endured dull apprenticeships in his uncle’s business in Vienna, one year’s military service, and several dead-end jobs before he got his big break, being employed in Munich in 1894 by the writer and dramatist Ernst von Wolzogen, who encouraged the young Wassermann’s literary aspirations. In Munich, which was the literary capital of southern Germany at this time, Wassermann began to move in literary circles, meeting such promising young writers as Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In 1896 Wassermann published his first short stories and his first novel, Melusine, and also joined the staff of the legendary satirical magazine Simplicissimus, where he worked for three years before moving to Vienna to take up a post as theater correspondent. In 1901 he married Julie Speyer and lived with her in Vienna until their separation in 1919, at which time Wassermann moved to Altaussee in Steiermark to live with Marta Karlweis, whom he was eventually able to marry in 1926 after the conclusion of extremely acrimonious and protracted divorce proceedings with Julie, an experience which would be reflected in several of the late novels. Wassermann’s second novel Die Juden von Zirndorf (The Jews of Zirndorf, 1897), was his first work to gain critical attention. It also marked his first literary engagement with the fate of Jews in Germany, a topic which would preoccupy him in both his novels and his non-literary writings throughout his career. His next novel, Die Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs (The Story of Young Renate Fuchs, 1901) was the first to be published by Samuel Fischer in Berlin and marked his commercial breakthrough. This popular if ultimately conservative women’s novel about a fallen woman, which ends with the union of the eponymous heroine with Agathon Geyer, who, like many of Wassermann’s characters, reappears from an earlier novel (Die Juden von Zirndorf), marked the beginning of an extremely lucrative relationship for Wassermann and Fischer.4 Wassermann would become one of Fischer’s most commercially successful novelists, with the result that by the time of Wassermann’s death the publishing house had sold almost 1.5 million copies of his novels in Germany alone.5 Wassermann’s most significant prewar novel was Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (Caspar Hauser or the Lethargy of the Heart, 1908), which has remained popular with successive generations of readers, not least because interest in its subject matter was renewed by Werner Herzog’s 1974 film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (English title: The

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Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). In the novel Wassermann retold the story of the famous foundling who was discovered in Nuremberg in 1828. This enigmatic figure, who had apparently been incarcerated and kept isolated from human contact during his childhood and was rumored to be the heir to the throne of Baden, was repeatedly subject to hostility and attack and eventually murdered in 1833. In presenting his story of an innocent outsider and victim of an uncaring world, Wassermann introduced his concept of “the lethargy of the heart” alluded to in the subtitle of the novel, which would remain central in his subsequent oeuvre. Put simply, this concept implies that injustice is less the product of particular political or social structures or circumstances than the result of a series of individual human failings. This idea resurfaces throughout Wassermann’s works, with the result that for all their focus on injustice, most notably in Der Fall Maurizius, his novels are open to the accusation that they shy away from offering a concrete analysis of the specific political and social ills of the day. Moreover, if anything this tendency would, as we shall see, become even more pronounced towards the end of his life, so that, for example, his final novel, written 1932–33, makes no reference at all to the rise of fascism, Hitler’s seizure of power, or the rising tide of anti-Semitism, of which Wassermann was only too acutely and personally aware. The foundation stones for Wassermann’s great popularity during the Weimar Republic were laid with the appearance of two hefty novels immediately before and after the First World War: Das Gänsemännchen (The Goose Man), serialized in the Munich journal Neuer Merkur from April 1914 to March 1915 and published in book form in 1915; and Christian Wahnschaffe, completed during the war in May 1918 but not published until January 1919. The former is a chronicle of the provincial bourgeoisie, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and ending in 1909, safely before the war, and attracted a wide middle-class readership. Its idyllic, resignatory, humanistic ending in the recent past no doubt offered consolation to those grappling with the realities of Germany during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Christian Wahnschaffe, where again no mention is made of the war, is a panoramic novel that rejects prewar capitalist materialism and preaches the virtue of charity, the eponymous hero renouncing his inheritance and throwing in his lot with the poor and the outcast. In its vision of the redemptive “neuer Mensch” (New Man) it is close in spirit to the work of the younger generation of Expressionists, whose works similarly contain a heady cocktail of irrationalism and visions of quasi-religious personal redemption.6 However, in Expressionism that individual redemption has a social dimension only insofar as the redemption of the individual is typically presented as the catalyst for a wider social transformation.7 It was Christian Wahnschaffe that first brought Wassermann to the attention of an American audience, appearing in a popular translation as

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The World’s Illusion in 1920, only a year after its publication in German. Translations of the other major prewar works quickly followed (only Die Juden von Zirndorf had previously appeared in English, in 1918) as did translations of his subsequent novels. Wassermann rapidly reached a wide readership in English on both sides of the Atlantic, and would soon become one of the most widely read German writers in North America in the 1920s.8

Wassermann as German and Jew Wassermann’s best-known publication from the early years of the Weimar Republic was not a novel at all but his autobiography, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (My Life as German and Jew, 1921). It was perhaps Wassermann’s direct engagement with the Jewish question, culminating in this work, that was most responsible for the revival of critical interest in his life and works in the 1980s, when an exhibition and publication in 1984 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death focused almost exclusively on the Jewish dimension.9 Wassermann’s reflections on the position of Jews in Germany in Mein Weg and other writings and speeches are, however, not clear-cut, nor were they uncontroversial, either at the time of writing or in the revival of interest in this aspect of his work in the 1980s and 1990s. Wassermann’s thinking on the issue of Jews and Germans is intimately bound up with his own sense of identity as a person and as a writer. The starting point is his personal experience of being discriminated against throughout his life, which he documents in Mein Weg in some detail. The sense of injustice that this provoked in Wassermann was particularly acute, since, as he recalls in Mein Weg, as a young man he felt he didn’t just “belong” in a profound way to German life and culture, but was “zugeboren,” or born into it.10 Indeed, he regarded his novel Caspar Hauser as the ultimate demonstration of this, describing it as a fundamentally German book that proved that a Jew “durch inneres Sein die Zugehörigkeit erhärten, das Vorurteil der Fremdheit besiegen könne” (WDJ, 82; through inner Being could consolidate the feeling of belonging and overcome the prejudice of being alien), but felt that his achievement had not been properly recognized. Out of this sense of injustice arose what for Wassermann was the key question for the Germans, namely, why did they bite the hand that fed them (WDJ, 90). Wassermann’s entire oeuvre is marked by this paradox of feeling German on the one hand but feeling rejected by Germans on the other. But Wassermann rejected the response of some Jews, namely to repress their Jewishness altogether. As early as 1904, in his essay “Das Los der Juden” (The Fate of the Jews), Wassermann had strong words for those

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Jews who tried to repress their Jewishness, describing them as behaving like runaway slaves, branded on the inside. These he calls “Schwächlinge” (weaklings), “Abfall” (garbage), and “Verräter” (traitors).11 Yet Wassermann is often at pains in his writings to distance himself from and criticize some sections of Jews. One such group comprises those Eastern European Jews who came in large numbers to Western Europe, including Germany, during and after the First World War. In Mein Weg he describes Polish and Galician Jews as being totally alien to him, even “abstoßend” (WDJ, 113; repulsive). In the same paragraph he goes on to distance himself from the Zionists, calling them Jewish Jews, in contrast to himself, a German Jew, whose mission is to be a “Brücke,” a bridge between Jews and Germans (WDJ, 114–15). Closely related to this sense of his own role is Wassermann’s controversial distinction, first made in 1910 in his essay Der Literat oder Mythos und Persönlichkeit (The Literary Figure, or Myth and Personality, 1910), between the creative person (amongst whose number Wassermann would include himself), and what he called the “Literat,” an imitative, epigonic figure.12 The former is characterized as a “Führer” (LM, 512), the latter as a pacifist (LM, 504), a dilettante, godless, a rebel against all order (LM, 539), a life-denier and pessimist (LM, 543). Wassermann concluded the essay by noting that there was an especially high proportion of such “Literaten” amongst Jews, indeed the whole Jewish people were destined to a kind of “Literatenrolle” (LM, 546). It was left to a few élite Jews to transcend this role, to become creators, and these figures were said to have their roots in the Orient: “Der Jude als Europäer, als Kosmopolit ist ein Literat; der Jude als Orientale, nicht im ethnographischen, sondern im mythischen Sinne, mit der verwandelnden Kraft zur Gegenwart, die er besitzen muß, kann Schöpfer sein” (LM, 546–47; The Jew as European, as cosmopolitan is an epigone; the Jew as Oriental, not in an ethnographical, but rather in a mythical sense, with the transformative power in the present, which he must possess, can be a creator). Challenged by the philosopher, theologian, and Judaic scholar Martin Buber (1878–1955) to clarify his remarks, Wassermann went on to reinforce his message in an open letter to Buber entitled “Der Jude als Orientale” (The Jew as Oriental), first published in 1913, in which he did nothing to hide his contempt for sections of the Jewish population, which he referred to as so-called modern Jews, who are said to gnaw at all foundations, because they are themselves without foundation, who are described as slaves to their personality, and offer a spectacle of “beständigen Krampfes, beständiger Gier, beständiger Unruhe” (constant senseless waste of effort, constant greed, constant commotion).13 He returned to the attack on such Jews, whom he regarded as exemplified in the figure of Heinrich Heine, in Mein Weg. He condemns the tendency of the sons of parvenu Jewish families to become artists and intellectuals, seeing this as a symptom of what he sees as the decadence of modern society, “der Krankheit der Epoche überhaupt,

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der Schrumpfung des Herzens und Hypertrophie des Intellekts” (the malaise of the age, the contraction of the heart, and the hypertrophy of the intellect) and for which he holds Jews at least in part responsible (WDJ, 119). Wassermann was also clearly horrified by the prevalence of political radicalism amongst Jews (WDJ, 121–22). Towards the end of Mein Weg, he launches a powerful attack on anti-Semitism in Germany in the early Weimar Republic, observing that the Jew is now regarded as “vogelfrei” or outlawed, if not in legal terms, then certainly in the feeling of the people. Yet in the very next sentence, he goes on to argue that it cannot be denied that the agitators against Jews do have one valid reason, namely the political radicalism of Jews, describing Jews as the Jacobins of the epoch (WDJ, 124). Though he goes on to qualify these remarks, Wassermann’s deeply ambivalent attitude towards Jews and Jewishness is very clear, and indeed leads him into contradiction. Thus he regards himself on the one hand as a German Jew, and at the same time talks of being at some mythical level Oriental rather than European.14 Thus, while Mein Weg is at one level a penetrating account of Wassermann’s own experience of anti-Semitism and an indictment of the treatment of Jews in Weimar Germany, at another level it is a testament to Wassermann’s deep sense of insecurity in the face of rapid political, social, and economic change. This accounts for, though it doesn’t excuse, the rather unguarded language that Wassermann sometimes employs to distance himself from East European Jews and Jewish radicals, which, as critics have pointed out, often does not rise above the clichés of anti-Semitism, and indeed comes too close for comfort to the rhetoric of Nazism. In fact, Birgit Stengel accuses Wassermann of having a totalitarian attitude of mind and of being nothing less than a “Mitläufer” or fellow traveler of Nazism.15

Wassermann and Politics For much of his life, Wassermann shared with many of his middle class contemporaries a disdain for politics. Thus he concluded his essay on Walther Rathenau’s assassination in 1922 by suggesting that only a hurricane, which would destroy good and bad alike, could sweep away the atmosphere of disgust and horror that he ascribed to politics and the politicization of life.16 This disgust with politics was widespread in Germany before and just after the First World War amongst the conservative middle classes, and not least among writers and intellectuals, as Wassermann himself admitted in his essay “Teilnahme des Dichters an der Politik” (The Participation of the Writer in Politics),17 and as the title of his friend Thomas Mann’s essay Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Observations of an Unpolitical Person, 1918) eloquently testifies.18 But by the late 1920s, Wassermann, like Thomas Mann, had changed his attitude to politics. He

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now believed that politics was “der Augenpunkt jedes zu sittlicher Verantwortung bereiten Staatsbürgers” (L, 329; the focus of attention of every citizen ready to accept moral responsibility). Faced with the rising tide of anti-Semitism and fascism, writers like Wassermann and Thomas Mann realized that they could no longer afford the luxury of an Olympian detachment from political events that threatened the very existence of the Weimar Republic. In the same essay Wassermann went on to argue that the novel cannot be anything other than a mirror of the reality of the time, and the very meaning of an age (L, 330). He concluded the essay by arguing that his analysis of the justice system and the relationship of society to the idea of justice in Der Fall Maurizius was “im höheren Sinn auch ein politisches Faktum” (L, 330; in a higher sense also a political fact). But the reference to a higher sense is extremely revealing, suggesting as it does that Wassermann was still uncomfortable with the idea of a direct engagement with politics, and this is reflected even in the later Weimar novels, including Der Fall Maurizius, as we will see below. As Neubauer has rightly observed, Wassermann’s works avoided politically or ideologically explosive issues, attacked no parties or persons, and remained rather vague in their sociopolitical dimensions, which Neubauer identified as the reason for the lack of interest in him by critics in the period after the Second World War.19 But as literary critics have come to focus less exclusively on the relationship of writers to party politics and have widened their interest to encompass the social dimensions of writers and to explore the relationship between literary history and social history, so also Wassermann’s works have a new relevance and interest for the critic and the reader.20 Of particular interest, in addition to his important critique of the justice system in Der Fall Maurizius and elsewhere, is one other subject that was highly politically charged in the Weimar Republic and which Wassermann engaged with repeatedly in his later novels, namely, the question of marriage.

Wassermann and Marriage: From Laudin to Kerkhoven Wassermann’s literary works of the early Weimar years, comprising primarily the four-volume cycle of novels and novellas Der Wendekreis (The Turning Circle, 1920–24), have long been out of print and are almost totally forgotten. Only the final volume, consisting of the novel Faber oder Die verlorenen Jahre (Faber or The Lost Years, 1924) engages directly with life in the postwar period, recounting the story of a soldier returning late from the war. Like many such “Heimkehrer” stories, for which there was a real vogue in the Weimar period, the story focuses on the effect of the long

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separation on relationships between the sexes;21 in this case an initial alienation between Faber and his wife eventually gives way to their reconciliation and return to bourgeois normality. The depiction of marriages in crisis is one of the recurrent subjects of Wassermann’s fiction, even from the pre-Weimar period, as for example in the marriage novel Der Mann von vierzig Jahren (The Forty-Year-Old Man, 1913). But during the Weimar years, Wassermann’s interest in the subject grew even stronger, no doubt partly for biographical reasons, but also because the subject was perceived at the time to be one of the most important social issues of the day, and one of the most hotly debated.22 A major contribution to the debate during the 1920s was Graf Keyserling’s Ehe-Buch (Book of Marriage, 1925), a 500-page tome in which Keyserling published the invited views of twenty-four leading contemporaries, including Wassermann himself and such other worthies as Thomas Mann, C. G. Jung, Alfred Adler, Ricarda Huch, and Leo Baeck.23 For Wassermann, the invitation was particularly timely, since he was just completing a new novel about marriage that appeared almost simultaneously, Laudin und die Seinen (Laudin and his Family, 1925, translated as Wedlock, 1926), and he was able to quote two key passages at length from the novel as part of his contribution to what he, in common with many contemporaries, regarded as an issue “von äußerst dringlicher Beschaffenheit” (L, 96; of an extremely urgent nature) that threatened the roots of “unser aller Existenz” (ibid.; the existence of all of us). Wassermann’s views put him squarely in the camp of moderate conservative reformers, who saw the root of the problem of marriage in contemporary society in the growth of individualism, with individuals no longer accepting the constraints imposed by Church and State on their behavior, a situation that Wassermann calls a “Krankheit” or disease (L, 105–6). As a consequence, a gap was perceived to have opened up between the law on the one hand and the values and behavior of individuals on the other (L, 103; 111). He attacks the fact that the law still insists on regarding women as inferior (L, 108), and implicitly pleads for an easing of restrictions on marriage and divorce (L, 109). In typical fashion Wassermann, quoting from Laudin, counters the argument of ultra-conservatives that any loosening of the marriage bonds would open the way to sexual anarchy by insisting that each individual has one, and only one, ideal soul-mate (L, 111), which would ensure a certain stability of sexual relations, and in this way he protected himself from the accusation that he was a dangerous social reformer who advocated promiscuity. Whilst Wassermann’s views on marriage and divorce reform are not strikingly original, being in the tradition of moderate conservatives stretching back to Max Nordau’s seminal work Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Civilization, 1883), his treatment of marriage in Laudin und die Seinen is a noteworthy literary

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contribution to the debate. Wassermann himself saw it as of great importance, saying that he felt a greater sense of mission (L, 97; “Sendung”) when writing it than ever before, which is no small claim for a writer who, as Marcel Reich-Ranicki observed, was if anything too deeply driven by a sense of mission.24 Moreover, in this novel Wassermann was able to combine the two themes of marriage and justice, which together would go on to dominate his last works.25 Laudin is a middle-aged divorce lawyer, married with two children. Whilst investigating the suicide of a friend’s son, he comes under the spell of a bohemian and demonic actress, Luise Dercum, for whose sake the young man is said to have committed suicide. This triggers a mid-life crisis in Laudin, who feels a sense of ennui, loss of identity, lack of fulfillment in marriage, and disgust with the constant exposure through his job to what is portrayed as the rotten underbelly of a bourgeois society, characterized by lies, deception, cheating, and every kind of immorality. Laudin’s work and home life gradually deteriorate and he eventually sinks to giving money from his clients to Luise. Finally, when Laudin is on the brink of physical intimacy with her, his friend brings him to his senses by revealing his discovery that his son committed suicide because he had contracted syphilis from Luise. The novel ends with a reconciliation between Laudin and his wife, with Laudin resolving to give up his legal practice, sell their villa and retreat to a simpler life in the country, and devote himself to what with the help of his wife he now recognizes as his calling, namely, to work to create the basis for a new legal framework. At the same time he is reconciled with his elder daughter, who with her young friends has founded a society called “The Flame” with the aim not of overthrowing the old (which might smack too much of revolution), but of trying to build something new. The strength of the novel lies less in its unconvincingly conciliatory ending than in its powerful depiction of a series of interlinked crises: the crisis of an individual, specifically a middle-class, middle-aged man; a whole social class, namely the bourgeoisie; a central institution of bourgeois society, marriage; and more generally a crisis of the legal system as a whole. The result is a devastatingly pessimistic diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society and a plea for specific social and legal reform, notably the removal of social restrictions in the choice of marriage partner in order to allow ideally suited couples to be united (LS, 256). Nor does Wassermann shy away from touching on the taboo subject of abortion, and despite his focus on male crisis he does not fail to address the concerns of women. Thus the consequences of Laudin’s vision of the loosening of the marriage bonds and a liberalization of sexuality are forcefully pointed out to him by May Ernevoldt, who notes that abortion, although illegal, is already commonplace in bourgeois marriages, and that this situation would be exacerbated if Laudin’s vision were to be realized, since it would inevitably lead to an increase in the pregnancy rate outside marriage (LS, 258–59).

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Laudin und die Seinen underlines the point that Wassermann was most able to engage with social issues of the day when focusing on the concerns of the individual. Entirely typical also is the way in which Laudin, and with him Wassermann, goes on to move from the analysis of a particular social ill to make a vaguer general plea for what he calls a transformation of the social ideal (LS, 256), which would require a greater stock of something called “Menschenhumus” (LS, 257; human substance). The awkwardness of the word is a clue to the vagueness of the concept, and the suggestion that this substance is something organic is highly revealing of Wassermann’s tendency to move from the specifically social to the vaguely mystical. Marriage crises proliferate in Wassermann’s three later Weimar novels, which comprise the Andergast trilogy. In the first book, Der Fall Maurizius, Etzel Andergast’s father and mother are divorced, Maurizius’s marriage to his wife Elli is also in a state of crisis prior to her murder, and it is even mentioned in passing that the enigmatic central Jewish figure, Gregor Waremme, is divorced from his wife. The first part of the second book, Etzel Andergast, deals with the collapse of Joseph Kerkhoven’s first marriage and with the associated collapse of Marie Bergmann’s marriage, who later becomes Kerkhoven’s second wife. The second part of the novel in turn depicts the marriage of Kerkhoven and Marie in crisis, as she commits adultery with Etzel, and this plot is carried over into Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, which begins with the continuing crisis of the Kerkhoven marriage and successful trial separation, but then shifts in focus to the account of the marriage and divorce of Alexander Herzog, which is a thinly veiled blow-by-blow account of Wassermann’s own marriage and divorce and stretches to hundreds of pages. These depictions of marital difficulties allow Wassermann to amplify his critique in Laudin of marriage and divorce law. In Der Fall Maurizius, the eponymous hero goes so far as to describe a loveless marriage as cursed, and entering into one as a crime, possibly the most serious crime possible.26 But increasingly, these marriage crises become vehicles to convey Wassermann’s ever sharper sense of a wider social, psychological and even metaphysical malaise, which becomes all-pervading by the last novel.27

Critique of the Justice System: Der Fall Maurizius Wassermann had already been preoccupied with the theme of justice in the pre-Weimar years, not least in Caspar Hauser. His critique of the Weimar criminal-justice system reached its height in his novel Der Fall Maurizius. The novel, based on a real-life case, tells the story of Leonhart Maurizius,

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who has been in prison for eighteen years for the murder of his wife. Instrumental in his conviction was the senior public prosecutor, Baron Andergast, who made his reputation through the successful prosecution of the case. The case turned on the evidence of the polish Jew Gregor Waremme. Andergast’s sixteen-year-old son, Etzel, is convinced of Maurizius’s innocence, and eventually gets Waremme, now living in Berlin under the name Warschauer, to confess that he had perjured himself at the trial and that it was Maurizius’s wife’s sister, Anna, with whom Maurizius was having an affair, who had committed the murder. Meanwhile Baron Andergast feels compelled by his son’s actions to reconsider the case himself and eventually visits Maurizius in prison. No longer able to justify the conviction, he chooses to take the coward’s way out, arranging a pardon for Maurizius, rather than see the original judgment overturned on appeal. When Etzel learns of his father’s action, he breaks off all contact with him, and his father suffers a complete breakdown. On his release, Maurizius is unable to adapt to life outside prison and shortly afterwards commits suicide. Baron Andergast represents the Weimar justice system, and in criticizing him Wassermann joins the ranks of novelists who used their works to attack that system during the Weimar Republic.28 Andergast’s moral bankruptcy is doubly emphasized when it is revealed that he himself lied in order to engineer the suicide of his wife’s lover (FM, 430), who was in turn tricked into perjuring himself in order to protect her honor. Andergast’s eventual complete breakdown is a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Weimar justice system, though characteristically Wassermann’s critique is couched in general, almost philosophical terms, and does not, for example, address the specific right-wing bias of judges during the Weimar Republic, a matter which so exercised Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit and Lion Feuchtwanger, to name but three novelists who directly addressed this issue.29 Thus, when Andergast realizes that Maurizius’s conviction is unsafe, he is shaken by the abstract thought that truth might not be absolute, but a product of the passage of time (FM, 418), but, in contrast to Laudin und die Seinen there is little analysis in the novel of the specific weaknesses of the legal system that could lead to miscarriages of justice. Indeed, it can be argued that it is the personal moral weakness of Waremme/Warschauer, allied to Andergast’s rush to prejudge the case, that led to the injustice. In the end it is personal shortcomings as much as social and political conditions that are shown to lead to injustice, and this is emphasized by the fact that Andergast’s shortcomings in his private life are given as much prominence as those in his public role and serve to illuminate it. Wassermann’s target remains the lethargy of the heart that he had identified as the ultimate source of injustice as far back as the Caspar Hauser novel. It is, however, true to say that Der Fall Maurizius is much more concrete when it comes to exposing and condemning the harshness

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of the prison regime to which Maurizius is subjected, including the systematic abuse of prisoners (FM, 452–53).

Conclusion In Etzel Andergast and Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, the second and third novels of the Andergast trilogy, Wassermann became increasingly preoccupied with the themes of decay, disintegration, and death. The growing sense of pessimism and futility that pervades these works went hand in hand with an ever greater fascination with mysticism and irrationalism, with critics seeing in these last works an affinity between Wassermann and Existentialism (Martin Heidegger’s seminal work, Sein und Zeit [Being and Time], appeared in 1927).30 A key late influence on Wassermann was the work of the Swiss philosopher Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930), from whom Wassermann borrowed whole passages for his Kerkhoven novel and whose work provided the philosophical underpinning for Wassermann’s search for metaphysical certainties in an ever more hostile world.31 Wassermann was all too aware of the political realities of the Weimar Republic in its final phase. His exclusion from the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1931 on account of his Jewishness was only the most obvious sign of the worsening political situation in Germany. It was confirmation that his cherished project of the assimilation of the Jews into German culture and society, in which his own self-designated role was to be a bridge between German and Jewish culture, had irretrievably failed. Wassermann’s Weimar novels are symptomatic of the difficulties that many bourgeois writers who had risen to prominence during the Wilhelmine period encountered when trying to come to terms with the new political, and indeed economic, realities of the Weimar period (Wassermann was always short of money and some of his numerous minor works were written in haste with an eye to generating income, not least to allow him to make alimony payments to his ex-wife). There is considerable continuity between the concerns and the form and style of the novels written before the First World War and those written during the Weimar period. It is not by chance that several of the Weimar novels are set either wholly or at least in part before the First World War. Moreover, thanks to the lack of specific focus on the political and to a lesser extent the social realities of the Weimar Republic in the novels from that period, there is a sense in which novels or parts of novels set during the Weimar period could equally well have been set before the war, or indeed appeared before the war. This is true even where he is at his most specific and most successful in his focus on social concerns in the Weimar novels, as for example in his discussion of marriage or the criminal justice system.

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Notes 1

Thomas Mann, in Marta Karlweis, Jakob Wassermann: Bild, Kampf und Werk, mit einem Geleitwort von Thomas Mann (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1935), 7. 2 Gerd-Dieter Stein, “Gesellschaftskritik und Kolportage: Überlegungen zu Strukturen des Trivialen in J. Wassermanns Roman Laudin und die Seinen,” in Literatur und Sprache im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit: Polnisch-österreichisches GermanistenSymposion 1983 in Salzburg, ed. Walter Weiss and Eduard Beutner (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Heinz, 1985), 141–62; here, 142. 3

On this, see Wassermann’s detailed account of his early life in the strongly autobiographical novel that he completed in 1905 but which he was dissuaded from publishing and which appeared only in 1973: Jakob Wassermann, Engelhart oder Die zwei Welten (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1973). On Wassermann’s life see also the account by his second wife, Marta Karlweis, Jakob Wassermann, and more recently Rudolf Koester, Jakob Wassermann (Berlin: Morgenbuch Verlag, 1996). 4

For a discussion of the novel, see Alan Corkhill, “Emancipation and Redemption in Jakob Wassermann’s novel Die Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs,” Seminar 22, no. 4 (1986): 299–310. 5

Martin Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann: Ein Schriftsteller im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 23–24.

6

For a full discussion of these elements in Christian Wahnschaffe, see Klaus Karlstetter, Das Bild des Jugendlichen in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur der Zeit zwischen dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918) und der Diktatur (1933) (Uppsala: Berlings, 1980), 51–96, esp. 53–55 and 95–96. 7

Well-known dramatic examples include Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (1914) and Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (1919).

8

For details of the translations of Wassermann’s works into English and his reception in America in the 1920s, see Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann, 21–25.

9 See the catalogue of the exhibition in Bonn and other cities in 1984, Dierk Rodewald, ed., Jakob Wassermann, 1873–1934: Ein Weg als Deutscher und Jude; Lesebuch zu einer Ausstellung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984); and the collection of Wassermann’s essays and speeches on the Jewish question: Dierk Rodewald, ed., Jakob Wassermann: Deutscher und Jude; Reden und Schriften, 1904–1933 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1984). See also the collection Rudolf Wolff, ed., Jakob Wassermann: Werk und Wirkung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), where five of the six main chapters focus on aspects of Jewishness in Wassermann’s works. The interest in Wassermann and the Jewish question was part of a wider critical interest in Jewish writers of the early twentieth century at the time. See the important collection Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, eds., Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1985). 10

Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin: Dirk Nishen, 1987), 50. Subsequent references are given using the abbreviation WDJ followed by the page number.

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11 Jakob Wassermann, “Das Los der Juden,” in Dierk Rodewald, Jakob Wassermann: Deutscher und Jude; Reden und Schriften, 1904–1933, 17–27; here, 24. 12

Jakob Wassermann, Der Literat oder Mythos und Persönlichkeit (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910), reprinted in Lebensdienst: Gesammelte Studien: Erfahrungen und Reden aus drei Jahrzehnten (Leipzig and Zürich: Grethlein & Co., 1928), 502–49. All references are to the latter edition and are given using the abbreviation LM followed by the page number in the text.

13

Jakob Wassermann, “Der Jude als Orientale,” reprinted in Lebensdienst, 173–77; here, 176. 14 Wassermann’s ambivalent attitude towards Jewishness is most evident in the novels in his depiction of Gregor Waremme in Der Fall Maurizius. On this, see Martina Landscheidt, “Mutmaßungen über Waremme, Annäherung an Warschauer: Zu der jüdischen Doppelfigur Warschauer-Waremme in Jakob Wassermanns Roman Der Fall Maurizius,” in Wolff, Jakob Wassermann: Werk und Wirkung, 14–32. 15 See Birgit Stengel, “Jakob Wassermanns Weg als Deutscher und Jude,” in Kurt Tucholsky und das Judentum, ed. Michael Hepp (Oldenburg: bis Verlag, 1996), 137–50; here, 140, and her earlier essay, Birgit Stengel-Marchand, “Das tragische Paradox der Assimilation — der Fall Wassermann,” Der Deutschunterricht 37 (1985): 38–41. In her book-length study of aspects of Jewishness in Wassermann’s works, Christa Joeris is a generally much more sympathetic in her analysis, but she too draws attention to the way in which his writings sometimes reproduce antisemitic stereotypes: see Christa Joeris, Aspekte des Judentums im Werk Jakob Wassermanns (Aachen: Shaker, 1996), esp. 63–73. 16

Jakob Wassermann, “Zu Walter Rathenaus Tod,” in Lebensdienst, 23–29; here, 29.

17

Jakob Wassermann, “Teilnahme des Dichters an der Politik,” in Lebensdienst, 328–30; here, 328. The date of first publication of the essay could not be determined.

18

Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: Fischer, 1918).

19

“Seine Epik umging politisch oder ideologisch brisante Fragestellungen, attackierte keine Parteien und Personen, sondern blieb in ihrer sozialpolitischen Dimension eher unbestimmt.” Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann, 30.

20

For an account and critique of this shift towards the exploration of the relationship between literary history and social history, see Jörg Schönert, “The Reception of Sociological Theory by West-German Literary Scholarship, 1970–1985,” in New Ways in Germanistik, ed. Richard Sheppard (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1990), and Schönert, “On the Present State of Distress in the Social History of German Literature,” Poetics 14 (1985): 303–19.

21 Well-known examples include Bertolt Brecht’s early play Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night, 1919) and Ernst Toller’s play Der deutsche Hinkemann (1924). 22

For a full account of the debate about marriage around the turn of the century and beyond, see Karl Leydecker, Marriage and Divorce in the Plays of Hermann Sudermann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 55–76.

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23

Graf Hermann Keyserling, Das Ehe-Buch: Eine neue Sinngebung im Zusammenklang der Stimmen führender Zeitgenossen (Celle: Niels Kampmann Verlag, 1925), translated into English as The Book of Marriage: A New Interpretation by TwentyFour Leaders of Contemporary Thought, arranged and edited by Count Hermann Keyserling (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926). Wassermann’s chapter “Bürgerliche Ehe: Offener Brief an den Grafen Keyserling” was reprinted in Jakob Wassermann, Lebensdienst, 96–112. All references are to the latter edition using the abbreviation L and the page number.

24

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Jakob Wassermann, der Bestsellerautor von gestern,” in Nachprüfung: Aufsätze über deutsche Schriftsteller von gestern (erweiterte Neuausgabe) (Munich: dtv, 1984), 47–52.

25

See Stephan Koranyi, “Nachwort,” in Jakob Wassermann, Laudin und die Seinen (Munich: dtv, 1987), 337–44; here, 338. References to the novel are to this edition, using the abbreviation LS and the page number. For a biographical and psychoanalytical approach to the representation of marriage in Wassermann’s later fiction, see Regina Schäfer, Plaidoyer für Ganna: Männer und Frauen in den Romanen Jakob Wassermanns (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). 26 Jakob Wassermann, Der Fall Maurizius (Gütersloh: Mohn Verlag, 1960), 374–75. Subsequent references to the novel are to this edition, using the abbreviation FM and the page number. 27 As Garrin observes, “The marriages which are shown in these volumes as decaying and crumbling are representative of the German middle class” (Stephen H. Garrin, The Concept of Justice in Jakob Wassermann’s Trilogy [Berne, Frankfurt am Main and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1979], 81). 28

On this, see Koester, Jakob Wassermann, 73.

29

See the chapters on Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, and Lion Feuchtwanger in this volume. 30

On this development in Wassermann’s last novels, see the excellent article by Esther Schneider-Handschin, “Aspekte des Wertezerfalls in Jakob Wassermanns ‘Andergast-Trilogie,’” Wirkendes Wort 43 (1993): 81–90. 31

On this see Geraint Vaughan Jones, “Jakob Wassermann’s Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz: Its Philosophy and Structure,” German Life and Letters 3 (1949–50): 169–84, and René Kaech, “Doktor Kerkhovens drei Existenzen: Als Hinweis auf den Schriftsteller Jakob Wassermann,” Schweizer Monatshefte 51 (1971–72): 419–31.

5: Signs of the Times: Joseph Roth’s Weimar Journalism Helen Chambers

T

AUSTRIAN NOVELIST JOSEPH ROTH is best known for Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March, 1932) a wryly nostalgic evocation of the Habsburg Empire in decline, and Hiob (Job, 1930) a novel about the lost world of the eastern European Jews. As a journalist in the 1920s, however, he was one of the most politically astute and socially aware observers of life in Berlin, and indeed elsewhere in Germany, during the Weimar Republic. His observations were published in the German, Viennese, and Prague press in articles and essays whose literary quality and reader appeal made him, at a Mark a line, the highest paid journalist working for the Frankfurter Zeitung. His work appeared unter dem Strich in the so-called “Feuilleton,” the arts section, below the line that marked off news from comment. Committed throughout his life to discovering and communicating underlying truths, as opposed to documentary fact, Roth saw his contributions as more substantial than the ephemeral daily political reports. In a letter to his editor in 1926 he asserted with characteristic rhetorical élan, “Ich bin nicht eine Zugabe, nicht eine Mehlspeise, sondern eine Hauptmahlzeit” (I’m not a garnish, not a dessert, I’m the main course), continuing, “Ich zeichne das Gesicht der Zeit” (I paint the portrait of the age).1 The main reason for his conviction that his articles had a greater impact was their literary quality. In another letter in 1927 he explains that by his writing he is trying to show the Germans that art is no decorative optional extra: it is as crucial to survival in the modern world as machinery, a winter coat, and medication.2 Roth is often referred to as a chronicler of his times, but in the preamble to a series of pieces on the South of France he claims that he cannot deliver reports, rather “Ich kann nur erzählen, was in mir vorging und wie ich es erlebte” (I can only tell what went on within me and how I experienced it)3 — what he is doing, then, is giving aesthetic form to his own feelings. This apparent tension between subjective experience and objective reality lies at the heart of Roth’s non-fiction. He turns a private eye on public life and exposes and analyses the contradictions of the day, in texts that represent human behavior, circumstances, and institutions at a time of social and political turbulence and economic instability. In order to present HE

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the issues of the time with an immediacy that retains his readers’ attention, engaging their minds and hearts, he interrogates his own subjective responses. He aims to translate the political into human and personal terms. The relationship between his articles and the news reports is comparable to that between the novel and historiography, where the novel, as has been argued, provides a more reliable narrative of the past than historical discourse. His process of composition involves reducing and filtering events in order to arrive at a human perspective, which is the level at which the reader can grasp the dynamics of a situation and in so doing gain a better understanding of the bigger picture: Jedes Ereignis von Weltgeschichtsqualität muß ich auf das Persönliche reduzieren, um seine Größe zu fühlen und seine Wirkung abzuschätzen. Gewissermaßen durch den Filtrierapparat “Ego” rinnen lassen und von den Schlacken der Monumentalität befreien. Ich will sie aus dem Politischen ins Menschliche übersetzen. Aus den Bezirken, die über dem Strich liegen, in die Regionen unter dem Strich. (W 1:570) [In order to feel its greatness and weigh up its effect, I have to reduce each world-history-quality occurrence to a personal dimension. To let it run, as it were, through the filtration plant “ego” and purge it of the dross of monumentality. My aim is to translate it from a political idiom into a human one. From the areas above the line, to the regions below it.]

The ironic composite term “world-history-quality” in this programmatic statement from a 1921 article signals Roth’s skepticism about the standard press view of what is of primary importance for an understanding of the contemporary world. Well aware of the major issues of the day, he none the less more often turns his attention to aspects of ordinary, everyday existence and to marginalized groups and individuals in society. These both command his interest and sympathy in themselves and are seen as symptomatic of wider problems. Losers, not winners, and the immediate milieu of city life are frequently the focus of the over 800 articles Roth published in the Berlin press alone between 1920 and 1932.4 More than 1,300 appeared between 1915 and 1939. Joseph Roth’s journalism belongs in a literary tradition that he himself, in an article in defense of the feuilleton against charges that it was not a serious publication, traces back to Herodotus. He also names Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), saying his Reisebriefe (Travel Letters, 1826–29) are both amusing and a great artistic achievement and equating their artistic value with their moral import (W 1:617). A comparative study of the nonfiction of these two humorously melancholic German Jewish writers who, almost a century apart, responded in sensually rich, ironic prose to political persecution in the land of their mother tongue would be a rewarding project.5 Roth’s journalism is also directly descended from a Viennese line that includes Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, and Alfred Polgar. Altenberg’s

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atmospheric prose sketches, which capture everyday phenomena, turning pebbles into crystal (W 1:268) are free of superficial Viennese charm, as are Kraus’s uncompromising polemics on the misuse of language and the false morality of the age. Polgar was literary editor of the pacifist Viennese weekly, Der Friede, where Roth first placed contributions as a young journalist. He followed Polgar to Der Neue Tag, modeling his work on the editor’s carefully crafted ironic miniatures.6 As a genre whose heyday was in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Viennese feuilleton had a mixed pedigree. Then it was the preserve of influential cultural pundits such as Ludwig Speidel, who could make or break a dramatist’s reputation. Defining its generic characteristics, Hubert Lengauer draws attention to the personal perspective, which invests each piece with an individual unifying tone — polemical, melancholic, or whatever. He sees in the articulation of the feuilletonist’s personal point of view as opposed to the official version of the news a political gain post-1848, an assertion of liberalism that affirms confidence in the individual’s judgment and encourages independent thought and feeling.7 The most prestigious daily was the Neue Freie Presse, which published feuilletons on the cultural scene in the Habsburg monarchy, many written by gifted Jewish writers such as Hieronymus Lorm, Daniel Spitzer, and Sigmund Schlesinger. However a literary form that allowed the writer to indulge in subjective, impressionistic ruminations on topics of sometimes questionable significance laid itself open to charges of pandering to the escapism of readers for whom idle curiosity could readily take the place of the desire for intellectual stimulation.8 Roth was well aware of these criticisms, but in his first waged position, with the newly founded, leftof-centre Der Neue Tag from April 1919–20, his articles, for all their buoyant tone, reflect the harsher sides of postwar Vienna, repeatedly addressing the issues of food shortages and uncertainty about identity.9 Many appeared under the rubric “Wiener Symptome” (Viennese Symptoms), suggesting a diagnostic approach to an ailing city, an approach Roth carried over into later pieces where the patient was the Weimar Republic and the diseases incurable. When Der Neue Tag folded, he headed for Berlin to join many other German-speaking intellectuals looking for a living in the capital of the new republic, where press, cultural activity, and the entertainment industry were expanding rapidly. There, with the aid of contacts from Vienna, but largely on his own merit, he established himself on the Frankfurter Zeitung, a leading national daily, as a star journalist amid a galaxy of talent. Among his Berlin contemporaries were Egon Erwin Kisch, Kurt Tucholsky, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Roth’s family background, unlike theirs, was modest and provincial. Born in 1894 in Brody in Galicia, a small town with a large Jewish population (over 70 percent), on the easternmost fringes of what was then the Habsburg Empire, Roth was raised by his protective mother. He never

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knew his father, whose mental illness and early death were topics avoided in the Jewish community. He distinguished himself at school, but his study of German philology at the University of Vienna (1914–16) was interrupted by the First World War. In Vienna he experienced a strongly antiSemitic atmosphere, exacerbated by the influx of eastern Jewish refugees from the Russian campaign. Roth served in the army for two years, returning to Vienna in 1918 to an irrevocably changed world. He had lost his homeland, territory that fell to the victors; the Habsburg Empire, framework of his early existence, was gone, as was its symbolic anchor, Emperor Franz Josef, who had died in 1916. Roth had to earn a living and also create a new identity for himself. Acutely conscious of his situation as a Heimkehrer, a chance survivor of the war, Roth experienced the geographical and political losses of home town and Empire as emotional and cultural traumas. These were to be replicated more brutally with the collapse of the Weimar Republic and his resulting exile from the German state that became the Third Reich in 1933; the annexation of Austria in 1938 only added to his pain. Roth’s journalistic career took him to Berlin in 1920, but also back and forth to Vienna, and to Prague, particularly in the early twenties, and, starting in 1925, on journeys in France, Russia, Albania, and Italy, as well as Germany. From 1923 he was also writing and publishing novels. He emigrated in January 1933, shortly before Hitler became Reichskanzler, living in exile in France, Holland, and Belgium until his premature death in Paris in 1939 from the effects of alcoholism. In the early twenties Roth expressed socialist views and wrote for leftwing publications, such as the Neue Berliner Zeitung-12-Uhr-Blatt, from 1920 to 1926. He also contributed regularly in 1921 and 1922 to the more conservative Berliner Börsen-Courier, but resigned from it because of lack of sympathy with its politics, placing articles instead from mid-1922 to mid-1924 with the SPD party paper Vorwärts. The death in 1925 of social democrat Friedrich Ebert, first president of the Republic, was a severe blow to Roth, and the shift to the right, signaled by his replacement by the nationalist Hindenburg, led Roth to stop contributing to the Berliner Börsen-Courier altogether.10 From the beginning of 1923 he was employed by the liberal, politically independent Frankfurter Zeitung.11 Despite the high pay he could command, he was always short of money and sought multiple outlets for his work. Throughout the Weimar Republic he wrote occasionally for the Prager Tagblatt. In 1929 he signed a lucrative contract with the conservative Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, breaking temporarily with the Frankfurter Zeitung, and from January 1933 he refused to publish further in Germany with the result that subsequent articles appeared in the exile press in Paris, Prague, and Amsterdam. These were largely polemical essays attacking the Third Reich and rallying support for an Austrian monarchist stance, as the only hope of countering the Nazis. Roth’s political

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shift from left to right is technical rather than substantial. He never moved from his conviction of the right of all humanity to freedom and dignity, or from his resistance to the abuse of power and of language as an instrument of power. What changed with events was his perception of the political climate best suited to deliver his ideal of humanity. At the same time he was a career journalist, and his choice of outlets was influenced by pragmatic financial considerations, just as the subjects and style of his articles inevitably took account of the editorial expectations of the organs to which he contributed. Although our main concern here is with Roth’s Weimar journalism and the light it casts on political and social issues of the age, the novels he published in the period should not be passed over in silence. His first novel, Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web), though set in Berlin, was serialized in 1923 in the Wiener Arbeiterzeitung, the official paper of the Austrian Socialist Party. It is a remarkably prescient account of the danger from right-wing conspiracy in postwar Germany. The petit-bourgeois protagonist Theodor Lohse, a “Heimkehrer” (returnee) without qualities, unable to think for himself, humiliated and disorientated by his lack of role in the postwar city, finds a spurious sense of self as spy, manipulator, and murderer in the shady underworld of illegal nationalist activity. Roth communicates the threatening atmosphere of chaotic violence in the Berlin streets and the subaltern mentality that was open to exploitation by power-seeking ideologues. This novel, in which he includes both past and anticipated future political events, concluded publication two days before the HitlerLudendorff attempted putsch in Munich in November 1923. Both figure in the novel, as does the failed bomb attack on the Victory Column outside the Reichstag in 1921.12 Although it has been criticized for stylistic unevenness, switching between an overheated Expressionist mode and the distanced coolness of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity),13 and although no evidence has been found of its influence on the readership of the day — it first appeared in book form in 1967 — as Bronsen observes, Das Spinnennetz represented an important stand by Roth against his literary contemporaries, whom he publicly criticized for remaining indifferent to the alarming political developments of the day (W 1:1068; 2:59–61). While announcing central thematic concerns such as the fruitless search for order and direction in a world without meaning, and the alienation and disorientation of the individual, it equally demonstrates Roth’s finely tuned antennae for the specifics of atmosphere and mentality as reciprocally influential aspects of human existence, intangibles to which he gave tangible form in his writing. The novels that followed, Hotel Savoy (1924), Die Rebellion (1924), Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End, 1927), Zipper und sein Vater (Zipper and His Father, 1928), and Rechts und Links (Right and Left, 1929), all set in the present or recent past, portray protagonists who are engaged in the

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attempt to return to a home that can no longer be found. In his novel Hiob, subtitled, “the story of a simple man,” he changed style and focus. It tells the story of a Russian rabbi leaving his traditional life in eastern Europe and going to New York, in the hope of protecting his children from the temptation to live non-Jewish lives. Mendel Singer leaves a disabled child, Menuchim, behind. After one son and his wife have died and his daughter has succumbed to schizophrenia, he suffers a crisis of faith, but is saved in the end by the miracle of Menuchim’s return as a successful composer. The novel, about the meaning of suffering and the possibility of grace, is a metaphysical meditation in the form of a legend-like narrative.14 This was Roth’s first major success as a novelist and it was followed by a second, Radetzkymarsch (1932) in which he turned not to rural eastern Jewry, but to the historical past of the fading years of the Habsburg Empire, in order to create a counter-world and escape into a prewar existence (B, 218), remote from violent reality. It is a world shot through with weakness, folly, and indecision and on the brink of political disintegration because of emergent nationalisms, but nonetheless one where the notion of multiethnic tolerance is not dead and a benign order is still thinkable. Much of the novel was written at café and hotel tables in Berlin, Frankfurt, Antibes, and Baden-Baden: in Mampes Gute Stube on the Kurfürstendamm, for example, not far from where Robert Musil was simultaneously working on his novel of Habsburg Austria’s decline, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1930–43). Radetzkymarsch was serialized by the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1932, and published later that year. Because of anti-Jewish legislation and Roth’s departure into exile, he never received the royalties. His books were burned in 1933, and all subsequent works, including the sequel, Die Kapuzinergruft (translated as The Emperor’s Tomb, 1938), were published in Holland by Allert de Lang, Querido, or De Gemeenschap. Although his later novels and stories were an escape from the present, his non-fiction up to 1933 and beyond was firmly rooted in it, which is not to say that it was either literarily true or uniformly realistic in style. As to the reception and distribution of his non-fiction writing, most was ephemeral. Roth, for all his desire to effect change, recognized its limited impact: “Im Feuilleton ist es sehr schwer etwas zu verändern” (It is hard to change anything by writing feuilletons), he reflects in 1925 to Bernard von Brentano (B, 68). He was, however, working on a collection of essays, Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews), which appeared in book form in 1927.15 The text is an attempt to combat prejudice about the Jews in Europe. Roth’s preface is a polemical attack on burgeoning anti-Semitism in Germany and metropolitan Austria, designed both to dispel ignorance in the West and to give the eastern Jews a sense of their own worth and of the value of their traditions. In writing it, Roth was returning to a part of his identity as an eastern Jew, on which as a young man he had turned his

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back as he sought, highly successfully, to assimilate into western educated society in Vienna and Berlin. The rise of Nazism prompts him to ask searching questions about the nature and location of civilization and barbarism in Europe. When describing the community of Hassidic Jews, he begins ironically by showing them as if through the eyes of a traveler in exotic parts: “Sie sind für die Westeuropäer ebenso ferne und rätselhaft als etwa die Bewohner des Himalaja, die jetzt in Mode gekommen sind” (W 2:843; To the Western European they are as exotic and remote as, say, the inhabitants of the Himalayan region, who are now so much in fashion), but no one shows any interest in learning about them, because they live in our midst. He goes on to show the everyday life of the community. What is being offered is not a backward-looking Utopia, such as Roth is often seen as creating, not an alternative in place of the uncomfortable or vicious complexity of urban life, but a corrective to prejudiced perceptions. By detailed descriptions of people and customs, insight is being given into the cultural diversity within the homeland, and into the tendency of the natives to look with contempt on their own compatriots if they speak another language or dress differently, like the Hassidic Jews or indeed the Slavs in Galicia. Although Roth was not religious in any orthodox sense, the text focuses on the spiritual leader in the community, the rabbi, and what interests Roth about him is his role in providing social and psychological support. The angle is sociological, showing the rabbi as a focus and a source of identity and meaning in relation to the fundamental experiences of human existence: birth, marriage, sickness, troubles, and death. He is a fixed point of reference, a reliable but threatened source of wisdom. The question as to who will replace the miracle rabbi’s function — where in modern society is a substitute for his counsel and benign authority to be found? — is implicit in Roth’s text (W 2:843–45). In his enlightening accounts of areas that are generally viewed with disdain, Roth is not implying that everything is better there than in so-called Western civilization, but that some things are different, and different does not necessarily mean worse. Corrections to the publisher’s proofs show the care Roth took in making his case. He removed the explicitly subjective frame and tone in chapter 2, “Das jüdische Städtchen” (The Jewish Shtetl). He also cut some of the more sentimental and polemical observations, together with comments that present Jews in terms of current stereotypes.16 Only two volumes of Roth’s nonfiction appeared in Weimar Germany. The other, Panoptikum: Gestalten und Kulissen (Panopticum: Figures and Scenery), was a collection of reprinted articles published in Munich in 1930.17 After his death his nonfiction disappeared from view, to be rediscovered and increasingly republished from 1970 on. Ingrid Sültemeyer’s edition of selected political articles from Der Neue Tag was followed by the reprinting of some 600 articles in Hermann Kesten’s 1975/6 four-volume

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edition of Roth’s works. A further hundred and twenty-seven reappeared in 1984, edited by Klaus Westermann under the title Berliner-Saisonbericht. Of a six-volume edition of Roth’s works published from 1989 through 1991, three volumes comprise journalism, and these, with a supplementary fourth edited by Rainer-Joachim Siegel (1994), make the full range of Roth’s non-fictional output accessible simultaneously for the first time. These four volumes have been attracting increasing scholarly attention as well as feeding more popular markets in the form of geographically focused selections for cultural and historical tourists, armchair and otherwise, in Berlin, Vienna, and the Saarland.18 Michael Bienert’s selection of articles, Joseph Roth in Berlin, has recently appeared in English translation under the title What I saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–33, and thus a substantial sample of Roth’s non-fiction has become available to the Englishreading public for the first time.19 Because the collection was originally designed as a kind of guidebook to Berlin of the twenties, there is a stronger emphasis on the built environment in these pieces than might otherwise have been the case, so that although a number of them will serve as core points of reference, it will be necessary to go beyond them to amplify the picture. Given the volume and range of the texts, all that can be attempted here is to give some sense of the nature of Roth’s literary engagement with his times. The task is problematic, because of the intricate and concentrated form of the genre. Although they are not all of equal artistic quality, each piece has its own structure, strategies, and dramaturgy.20 The analysis of any one cannot readily be generalized or be transferred to another. In the chosen period some 800 works come into question, from which a choice has to be made for sample analysis. Any selection inevitably involves distortion, in a way that is less true of the genre of the novel, where there are fewer works to choose from. Roth’s reportage is by virtue of its inherent characteristics — multiple self-contained small masterpieces — an intractable treasure for literary critics. After a detailed discussion of “Spaziergang” (Going for a Walk) as a piece that epitomizes Roth’s approach to his journalistic writing, we will turn to three key areas of life in Weimar Germany with which he engaged repeatedly: entertainment, politics, and the face of the city, with a final glance forwards to the polemical essays of the post-Weimar period. There is a broadly chronological progression in the groups of articles discussed. Dietmar Goltschnigg, in his illuminating discussion of Roth’s essays, distinguishes three types of journalistic output: the feuilleton, a series of subjective impressions, pictures, and moods; reportage, comprising reports on local, social, law court, war, and travel matters; and the essay, with its greater emphasis on rational, critical discourse.21 These are not watertight categories in Roth’s work, a fact exemplified by Juden auf Wanderschaft, in which all three categories can be found. We will be concerned principally

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with the first two, as Roth turned to the essay mainly in his last years in response to the political situation. Early clues to Roth’s approach to his writing, to a poetics of his reportage, can be found in a birthday wish to Paula Grübel and a tribute to Peter Altenberg. In 1916, having no cash for a gift, Roth wishes his cousin “Drei königliche Dinge: eine Krone, einen Scharlachmantel und ein Szepter. Die goldene Krone der Phantasie, den Scharlachmantel der Einsamkeit und das Szepter der Ironie” (B, 29; Three royal things: a crown, a scarlet cloak, a scepter. The golden crown of imagination, the scarlet cloak of solitariness and the scepter of irony). These royal gifts, attributes setting the owner above and apart from others, are ones that set Roth himself apart, as an artist. The first, imagination, imparts the power to create alternative or supplementary realities to those experienced in the world of everyday existence. There are two main aspects to Roth’s use of imagination in his reportage. The first is to give an impression of truth, irrespective of whether what is written is literally true or not. The underlying truth of a situation is what matters, and the literary imagination can convey this more successfully than a documentary report, sometimes by adjusting the facts, as Heine does (W 1:617), sometimes, as in the case of Döblin in his Polish travelogue, by using exaggeration (W 2:535).22 This is close to Egon Erwin Kisch’s notion of the reporter’s “logical imagination,” as expounded in his programmatic article of 1918.23 It is generally impossible to tell how much of the ostensible truth Roth presents is actually true and how much is adapted or invented. Any reading of Roth’s nonfiction must be alert to this potential unreliability in factual terms. One example will serve as an indication of how he operates. In the ironically titled 1921 feuilleton, “Reise nach Kultur-Wien” (W 1:592; Journey to Vienna, City of Culture) Roth draws on an article about the nefarious activities of the Austrian lawyer Hof- und Gerichtsadvocat Smirsch, which he found in an collected volume of pieces by Walter Rode. He gets the title of the book and the name of the lawyer wrong, writing “Jurisprudenz, Juristen und anderes” for Justiz, Justizleute und Anderes and “Smilasch” for “Smirsch.” These approximations suggest that though the book had only recently appeared, Roth neither had it to hand any longer nor felt the need for accuracy.24 He further expresses the hope that he will meet this symptom of local culture on his visit to Vienna, although Rode’s article makes clear that Smirsch was already dead in 1913. Roth resuscitates Smirsch/Smilasch in order to use his exploitative dishonesty humorously to illustrate a contemporary ill. Roth also employs imagination to shift reality into a surreal dimension. By this technique Roth makes a strongly visual (sometimes aural) appeal to his readers, which challenges their rational responses. It forces them to look for the join, to consider where the real tips over into the imaginary, and in so doing raises their consciousness of the underlying extremity of situations accepted as normal. He uses this imaginative technique to create

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striking images of a topsy-turvy world or of a disorientated consciousness. Like surrealist painting, this literary device challenges accepted views of reality by shifting ordinary objects into unfamiliar relationships. It is a heightened form of the incongruity that is a hallmark of Roth’s style. In a 1920 article on postwar black-marketing, written from the perspective of a wide-eyed bystander, Roth’s account of feverish dealing in large quantities of disparate commodities, from foodstuffs to foreign currencies, culminates in a sensually precise surreal image of chaos: Millionen sprangen mit leichtem Klaps gegen die Zimmerdecke und blieben kleben, wie feuchtgemachte Zigarettenhülsen, von Schulz u. Comp. emporgeschleudert. Sardinenöl ergoß sich über Pferdedecken. Die nicht garantierten Zündhölzer entzündeten sich am Schmirgelpapier. (W 1:299) [Millions leapt upwards and slapped gently against the ceiling, sticking there like moistened cigarette paper, flung aloft by Schulz and Co. Sardine oil poured over the horse blankets. The unguaranteed matches struck themselves on the emery paper.]

This suggests, with concrete immediacy, the precarious value of traded commodities, when millions in banknotes have no more substance than cigarette paper that may yet go up in smoke, and the matches already have, in a kind of mock apocalyptic vision. Imagination, as the golden crown, is the most valuable gift for the literary journalist, but the scarlet mantle of solitariness is a key attribute too. Roth writes from a perspective as observer and commentator, as eyewitness, at times flaneur, detached from the reality through which he moves, isolated in his sharpened consciousness of what he sees, his desire to record and reflect from a distance without participating.25 Third, the scepter, the symbol of the capacity to rule, that is, to control, is the gift of irony. In the preface to a planned collection of articles, Roth describes irony as a form of analysis (W 3:149). It is the tool he uses to take command of his subjects, to probe and expose the contradictions in the world about him. He frequently achieves this by ironic juxtaposition of discrepant phenomena or information or by otherwise drawing attention to mismatches between form and content, between appearance and substance, between intention and result. In a 1922 piece on Altenberg, he notes, “Er wies in eine neue Zeit. In die Zeit der Wortknappheit und der strengen Kürze.” (W 1:769; He pointed the way to a new age. An age of word scarcity and stringent brevity).26 His own work — nonfiction and much of his fiction too — corresponds to this perception of the demands of the times. Roth voices his awareness of the need to find a new and adequate literary language to represent the phenomena of modernity, whose mass aspect and previously

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unencountered ramifications threaten to elude the writer’s grasp (W 2:220, 332; H, 108, 163). His answer to the instability and contradictions of the age, to its accelerated pace and loss of comfortable certainties is to develop a style where pace and impact are achieved by a range of rhetorical strategies whose essence is condensation and distillation, pregnant brevity and formal clarity. The clean lines of his bright, brittle prose style, where color and rhythm appeal directly to the reader, rest on the frequent use of paratactic sentence structure and linguistically concentrated figures of speech based on contrast and contradiction: oxymora, antonyms, synesthesia, antitheses, paradoxes, and sly zeugma are his ironic stock in trade. Anaphora serves to highlight difference as much as similarity. This is poetic prose, a consciously though not preciously literary style, partaking of Impressionism, New Objectivity, and modernism. The 1921 article “Spaziergang” (Going for a Walk) is both programmatic and exemplary with regard to Roth’s approach and his journalistic style (W 1:564–67; H, 23–27). It is about the sense of loss of authenticity in modern city life, and its critical edge, designed for the well-heeled readers of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, is less cutting than its satirical companion piece, “Feuilleton,” published two months later, in defense of the genre (W 1:616–19). The title is deceptively innocuous. It is characteristic of literary reportage to take something familiar and shift it into an unfamiliar light, or alternatively to present something unfamiliar and render it comprehensible by framing it in familiar terms. This twin aspect of moving close-up phenomena away from the reader and bringing remote ones closer is a defining characteristic of a dynamic genre that, in its small compass, seeks to engage the readers’ interest and make them think, by shifting their responses through a succession of perspectives. The dramaturgy of “Spaziergang” involves an initial sentence, the point of departure, that establishes the perspective adopted: the author’s visual perception in the present.27 These are not phenomena that can be wished away or glossed over. The text asserts their presence, but equally their surface quality — what can be seen. Pointing beyond that, there are already two evaluative epithets attached to what is seen, “absurd” and “inconspicuous,” and in the metaphor of the face of the street and the day we see a typical example of anthropomorphism in Roth’s writing. Whereas Altenberg peoples his fragments of everyday life with invented, novelistic characters into whose minds he looks as omniscient author, in order to reveal their interactive, socially conditioned psychological processes,28 Roth here and elsewhere represents contemporary reality in terms of a human being, whose face, as the direct communicative interface with the rest of humanity, holds the key to understanding what lies behind it. The face metaphor recurs in Roth’s reportage in this sense of the exposed, visible surface of the living organism of the times, a readable surface with a range of individual features that needs the observer as writer to decode

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them. It is a sociological project in which Roth is engaged, but also an ontological one. One is reminded of Büchner’s Woyzeck, looking at patterns of toadstools in the grass, and saying “Wer das lesen könnt!” (If one could read that) to communicate the sense of a mysterious unseen, living world beneath the surface, whose superficial signs are just that, clues to a deeper truth about existence, questions about which can be explored with tools that are both scientific and poetic.29 Of the synonyms for face repeatedly employed by Roth in this sense: “Gesicht” (face), “Antlitz” (countenance), “Physiognomie” (physiognomy), the last suggests a process of scientific interpretation of empirical evidence to get at a hidden truth.30 Before he reviews the evidence, Roth alerts the reader to the discrepant but complementary aspects of his project by a shift of register between the matter-of-fact beginning and end of the sentence and the poetic “Antlitz,” a term which, etymologically, has a strong animate resonance. It derives from the Old High German, “antlizzi,” meaning “das Entgegenblickende,” literally, “what looks back at you.” Equally the double collocation “Antlitz der Straße und des Tages,” implies a contradictory thrust: the street and the day are parallel dimensions of existence, place (here in the city) and time (the present), but the more abstract, intangible term “day,” as opposed to the more concrete and contingent “street,” suggests a metaphysical context that points beyond a straightforward journalistic report of external contemporary phenomena. The poetic resonance of “Antlitz” functions too as part of Roth’s program to raise unspectacular and unprepossessing features into prominence and invest them with dignity and value in their own right. Working with humor and irony from his standpoint of superior knowledge, Roth proceeds first to show and reflect on a working horse, a child, and a policeman. They are all ignorant of the truth he knows, deluded in their understanding of freedom, innocence, overarching order, and the purpose of creation. The oxymoron “zweckmäßigen Wirrwarr” (functional chaos) of the misguided adult world is antithetically balanced against the child’s “Trieb zur Nutzlosigkeit” (impulse towards uselessness), which is presented as a Utopian ideal, and one which the pose of the flaneur underwrites.31 The end of Roth’s text, however, self-reflexively undermines this pose of detachment and his plea for a world free of a functional imperative. He has satirized the misuse of nature, its functionalization by modern man for purposes of entertainment and leisure, but his own concluding comment, that all the unpalatable facts he has observed have caused his own walk to be “vollständig verfehlt” (completely futile), implicates Roth in his own target area. The function of the walk for him was to provide relaxation, but this is no longer possible, it seems, for the “Westeuropäer” (W 1:567; western European: H, 26), a category to which Roth indubitably belongs. He is thus both subject and, to a degree, object of his own critical, and disillusioned, gaze.

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His gaze in the first paragraph moves on to a girl in a window, a man picking up cigarette butts, a fat man smoking a cigar, an advertising pillar, a cafe terrace, waiters, and sundry other people and things. In this section the syntax as well as the figurative discourse is the statement. A combination of linguistic strategies serves to erase the distinction between human beings and things. The girl in the first sentence in the series is the grammatical object of a finite verb “[I] see,” and no more than the equivalent of an inanimate object, a part of the wall, with which she is identified by a brutal metonymy. The five pseudo-sentences that follow have no finite verb and are all accusative predicates of the initial subjugating “I see.” Thus the people described are reduced to the level of importance of things (objects), with no scope for agency or self-determination. The final “sentence” is a conjunction-free list of insignificant, marginal people and one thing, unrelated except by the apparently random order in which the seeing eye lights on them. The incongruous insertion of a hotel into this list implies its equivalent value in a series that otherwise consists of people, distinguished only by a detail of external appearance and/or occupation. The reduction of the “bunten Damen” (W 1:564; colorful ladies: H, 24) to a predicative phrase attributed to the cafe terrace, and their metaphorical transformation into flowers to be plucked, is parallel to the reductive transformation of the fat man, by simile, into a grease spot. Both are humorous counterparts to the more muted and subtle reductive transformation of the man collecting scraps of paper and cigarette ends: the description of him as pressed into the shadows of a square with numerous corners suggests that he is virtually indistinguishable from the scraps of discarded rubbish he pursues. It is not possible here, for reasons of space, to do full justice to the linguistic subtlety with which this part of the text, to say nothing of the text as a whole, achieves its effects. This is much more than an evocation of visual impressions, although it is clearly that too, and its strongly visual quality gives it a sense of immediacy that speaks directly to the reader of tangible and tactile reality. The following section reasserts the eyewitness perspective, picking up the idea of the destitute man, a social peer of the earlier cigarette-stub collector. Roth shifts to narrative mode, and this time the grammar accords the marginalized figure, the beggar with the tin trumpet, subject status. Roth plays out a series of small dramas, triggered by tiny chance events — a fly landing, a nail file falling, a ball bouncing.32 He does this, he tells us, in defiance of what the press presents in inflated terms as of primary importance. He does it to bestow dignity on beggars by granting them existence in the narrative as more than just victims. When one of them, the war cripple, manicures his nails with a file that chance has put his way, Roth comments explicitly (and over-hyperbolically) on the symbolic significance of this sight.33 It has radically changed one’s perception of his social class. This sudden, unexpected shift of perception on the basis of a detail of body

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language shows the precariousness of the individual’s position in contemporary society. This was particularly true of the early Weimar years in Berlin, but is not confined to that period. It also draws attention to the construction of identity, perennially central to Roth’s concerns. One aspect of the expression of this concern in his work focuses on body language and gesture as defining constituents. Pursuing the idea of the relative importance of phenomena, Roth’s attention returns to the advertising pillar as a visible and strongly visual sign of the times. The Litfaßsäule had been part of the Berlin cityscape since 1855, but in the twenties it took on new prominence as a mass medium in an age when the media were still heavily text-based. The press was mushrooming, and a hitherto unfamiliar variety of typefaces vied for the reading public’s attention. The German press was able to exploit particularly rich possibilities with the choice of old German fonts as well as the Latin ones current in western Europe and the United States. What concerns Roth is the way that the physical appearance of the text has become the false measure of its importance. He uses the example of a cigarette ad in a font size more appropriate for an ultimatum or a memento mori. Nonessential commercial goods are placed on a level with a crucial political statement affecting the entire population of the state, or a religious utterance affecting the existential conditions of the whole of humanity. This is media hype avant la lettre, by typeface and layout. Roth draws political implications from the cultural phenomenon. For the reader of the signs, with no way of judging the value of the substance, political statements become meaningless, reduced to the level of significance of a commercial advertisement. It is the victory of form over content. Roth encapsulates his sense of the radical distortion of values in two characteristically aphoristic formulations, using polysyllabic oxymoron in the first and monosyllabic antithesis in the second: “Ich sehe die Typographie zur Weltanschauung entwickelt” (I see typography transformed into Weltanschauung) and “Nichts ist, alles heißt” (W 1:565–66; Nothing is, everything claims to be: H, 25). It is clear from comments elsewhere too that Roth had a highly developed visual awareness of the communicative impact — he calls it “expressive potential” of formal aspects of the media (newsprint, pamphlets, posters, and film) and its producers’ powers of emotional manipulation. In a 1925 letter to his editor Benno Reifenberg, he emphasizes the importance of typography and layout (B, 65). A 1922 article, “h-moll Symphonie” (Symphony in B Minor), on the silent movies shows that he has already identified and analyzed the grammar of film, whereby formal patterns of visual stimuli are calculated to elicit predictable audience responses (W 1:915–17). In his 1929 article “Nonpareille aus Amerika” (Nonpareil from America) which takes its ironic title from a small typeface reserved for minor matters, Roth again addresses the press’s power to manipulate reader response by technical means, and he exposes the associated social

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and political mechanisms that conspire to distort human values. The same small typeface in which the public flogging of criminals in the name of the law in Delaware is reported has also been used to list fallen servicemen during the First World War, Roth tells us. His sympathy is with the flogged and fallen, as he seeks to restore the human dignity denied them by the offhand textual communication of their fate. The semiotics of typography are presented as a barometer of humane values. In the 1926 article “Einer liest Zeitung” (Reading a Newspaper), a remarkable self-reflexive text, and a tour de force about reader reception, Roth explicitly raises the issue of reader manipulation by typeface, asking whether the individual is reading the paper or vice versa (W 2:531–32). This is not a literary conceit, but a serious political question. In “Spaziergang,” Roth, as he goes for his walk, sets nature against the value-impoverished leveler typography, and his seeing eye moves on to record how the dazzling sunshine temporarily burns out the spurious claims to attention of the clamorous text. The ensuing reflection on nature, and on the limited possibilities for modern men and women to escape into it beyond the city, works in two main ways: rhetorically and poetically. The problem is presented rhetorically, as nature itself is reduced to a mediated concept in composite expressions such as “Lesebuch-Natur” (W 1:566; picture-book nature: H, 25) and “Naturbegriff” (W 1:566; idea of nature: H, 25), and the way people view it in relation to its usefulness for themselves, is conveyed by lists of purposes for which it is used (lakes for rowing, mountains for walking tours, and so on). Nature is perceived as entries in Baedeker’s Guide, as text and commodity, instead of spontaneously experienced reality. Nature has become heavily implicated in the discourse of socialized existence in a consumer society. Against this rhetoric Roth sets a brief paragraph, introduced by the comment “Aber was ich sehe, kam nicht in den Baedeker” (W 1:566; But what I see hasn’t made it into Baedeker: H, 26), which signals the uniqueness of his immediate, subjective experience in an age of technical reproduction, to borrow Benjamin’s phrase. It sits outside the normative framework symbolized by the guidebook. In a poetic evocation of a chance combination of fleeting sights and sounds, characterized by distance, insubstantiality, and delicate melancholy, Roth tentatively intimates the existence of a metaphysical dimension, with a discreet allusion to the music of the spheres. The horizons opened up by this brief vision of dancing midges, a jasmine twig, and a child’s voice in the distance, are promptly closed off by a bad-tempered aphorism-laden diatribe against the use of nature for recreation, and a satirical representation of city types, deaf to the tiny natural events that really matter. By the end of the article Roth has asserted the primacy of the eye, the gaze, which, for all his pleas against purpose-driven activity, does not simply register but leads to critical reflection. He has presented external

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reality as a text that can be read, and in which the small print merits more attention than the headlines. The tone is of disillusion and disenchantment, but despite this there is evidence of a clear moral purpose and tentative idealism. Through his examination of surface manifestations of modern metropolitan life from an eccentric viewpoint, or, as he would put it, on a diagonal trajectory (W 1:565), he has sought to reveal existing patterns and structures and propose new ones. Above all, he has shown relationships between the significant and insignificant, suggesting a revision of values in a world where established facts and order must be regarded with suspicion if not contempt, and he has given a fugitive glimpse, created a tantalizingly faint echo, of an ideal existence. The article’s last three sentences shift successively through three distinct registers.34 A lyrical voice evoking the unheard sounds of nature is replaced and so silenced by a sardonic, colloquial aphorism, the harsh, knowing voice of the urbanized world. The final voice is prosaic too, its rational discourse and its labored rhythm simultaneously pronouncing on, and ironically embodying, the futility of the writer’s project. By the juxtaposition of clashing discourses Roth urges the reader to distinguish between them, and to reflect on their bearing on contemporary life and attitudes. The impulse behind these clashes is comparable to Heine’s turn from lyrical forms to prose in the face of the political situation from the 1820s, or to Brecht’s preoccupation with the mismatch between traditional poetic diction and life in the Third Reich. A recurrent focus in Weimar reportage is Berlin’s entertainment industry. For Roth it provides multiple points of departure for reflections on urban civilization — often close to barbarism in his view — at a time when mass entertainment increasingly provided temporary escape from the harsh reality of city life. His 1925 piece “Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen” (The Thirteenth Berlin Six-Day Races), about the massive, hectic annual cycling event in the velodrome on the Kaiserdamm, is not really about the riders and races at all, but about the sociological phenomenon and about communicating sights, sounds, and smells with a critical slant. This is barbarism, a temporary loss of humanity. It is a good example of Roth’s concern with atmosphere and his strategies for capturing it (W 2:331–35; H, 161–67). “Bekehrung eines Sünders im Berliner UFA-Palast” (The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace) in the same year, similarly, is not about the entertainment itself — this time film not sport — but about the discrepancy between content and form in a cinema that looks like a mosque, and where the audience inside is dazzled by technology and subjected to mass manipulation, in a travesty of religious practice. Cinema is the new religion, and Roth shows its influence and emptiness simultaneously (W 2:512–14; H, 168–71). Alongside these it is worth reading “Schillerpark” (1921) on popular recreation. This is a small gem, at once playful and melancholy, which uses observations in a public park to combine

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commentary on contemporary socio-economic history and urban geography with a reflection on the history of civilization and man’s place in creation (W 1:662–64; H, 75–77). Roth’s articles on particular political issues are not numerous. Although he was acutely sensitive to the evolving political climate in Germany and increasingly uncomfortable in it (B, 56), the generic characteristics of the feuilleton remained his guide, and so he wrote pieces that had a subjective point of departure and sought out the symptomatic signs in events and locations. “Rundgang um die Siegessäule” (The Tour around the Victory Column, 1921) and “Ein Unpolitischer geht in den Reichstag” (An Apolitical Observer Goes to the Reichstag, 1924) both reflect on the symbolic function of public architecture, on the discrepancy between what it is designed to symbolize and what it means in reality (W 1:502–3; H, 179–81; W 2:191–94; H, 193–98). The first is a mocking, satirical piece about human folly, which prompts serious comment at the end on the dangers of political extremism. The later Reichstag piece is more somber in tone and links ceremonial and architectural forms to mentality formation. Roth asks, “Wie soll hier Menschlichkeit, Verständnis, Wärme entstehen” (W 2:194; How should humanity, understanding, compassion, exist here?) among “Prunk ohne wärme” (W 2:194; the frozen displays of pomp: H, 198). “Gesang mit tödlichem Ausgang” (Singing Comes to a Fatal End) a 1925 article for the left-wing satirical weekly Der Drache, takes the form of a tragicomic narrative. It presents the case of two Berlin workers shot dead in an altercation with a policeman (W 2:327–29).35 They have been singing Heine’s “Lorelei.” For Roth this incident is typical of the endemic nationalist ills of state-countenanced brutality and antiSemitism. He proclaims himself to be “unpolitisch,” which can be taken to mean not participating in party political activities, but his reportage is charged with political insights both in the broadest sense, but also at times in a more specific way. He identified clearly the kind of post-First-WorldWar mentality that was to lead to the end of the democratic state,36 and wrote articles exposing symptoms of rising National Socialism.37 Roth returns repeatedly to the face of the city as an object of his gaze. Commercial buildings and transport are the main focuses, and although critical skepticism about the effects of rapid and major change in the physical environment and the city’s infrastructure is the dominant tenor, his response remains ambivalent, and the assertion that he becomes progressively more pessimistic with time requires qualification.38 Later pieces such as “‘Das steinerne Berlin’” (“Stone Berlin,” 1930) and even “Das ganz große Warenhaus” (The Very Large Department Store, 1929) leave room for a modicum of cautious optimism. The dual response of horror and fascination has been current in literary evocations of the city since the nineteenth century. Roth in his city writing draws on both impulses but goes well beyond them, using the tools of detailed observation and

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rhetoric to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena, and in so doing, as Karl Prümm puts it, he “delivers . . . a theory of the city.”39 By far the most widely discussed article in this context is his 1924 “Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck” (Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction), an ambivalent hymn to technology, whose last-minute shift in tone from elaborate praise for the railway network to anxiety about dehumanization is problematic (W 2:218–21; H, 105–8).40 It is not appropriate here to enter at length into the discussion of an already well-aired subject. Carl Wege’s view that Roth saw the technological constructs not simply as functional but as “bearers of a new metaphysics” is consonant with his use of the term Eidolon (W 2:220; Platonic ideal, H, 108) for the junction, and with indications throughout his writing of his search for and tentative belief in a metaphysical ideal.41 I would only wish to add that Roth’s glowing enthusiasm is based in part on a dialectic between mathematics and sentiment, and the preference for human activity to be controlled by a rational system can be read in political terms as an attack on the irrational appeals to sentiment and emotion on which the growing power of the National Socialists was based. A rational system is being presented as more humane than an irrational one (W 2:220; H, 108). The face of the city is characterized by disorienting contradictions, and Roth’s texts are designed to raise awareness of these and tease out their implications in ways that tap into the reader’s sensual experience and linguistic sensitivity. “Architektur” (1929) highlights the modern practice of changing buildings’ facades, with the result that the eye, trained to distinguish fake from genuine, can no longer do the job in an age of constantly mutating surface appearance that can render cabaret and crematorium indistinguishable (W 3:115–16; H, 115–18). It is a sinister sign of the times that the distinction between death and amusement is no longer clearcut, and the metaphorical comment “Die Fassade der neuen Zeit macht mich unsicher” (W 3:115; The facade of the modern age makes me unsure of myself) shows the direct link between architectural change and the increasingly heteronomous situation of the individual. In the same year Roth’s detailed descriptive analysis of “Das ganz große Warenhaus” (W 3:81–84; H, 119–23), and in particular his reflections on the escalator, expose the discrepancies between appearance and reality, the mismatch between surface and substance. His paradoxical and antonymic style shows up the contradictions and instability of the day, where something or someone can readily become their opposite. Ostensibly about the expansion of opportunities and the realization of potential, about increased freedom and spiritual development, the store is actually about the subjugation of the customer to its systems and structures, and about constraint, reduction, suppression, and deprivation. It creates nonexistent needs, with the kind of false teleology Roth noted in “Spaziergang” in relation to nature. Contrary to appearances the escalator is not

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raising customers to something higher, but reducing them to passivity. It is an assault on the human quality of self-determination, and the attack is reinforced by the power of text to create anxiety and fear of the stairs that people climbed using their own power. These are now labeled dangerous because newly waxed, by the anonymous management. The notion of benefits of scale and size is undermined by an extended zeugma, listing what the store has much more of, ending with “cardboard boxes” to emphasize the emptiness and lack of value of the gain. Roth frequently uses cardboard as a symbol of worthless form without content or substance.42 Here as in “Spaziergang,” we see the rhetorical power of the paradoxical antithesis to demonstrate that what appeared to be arrogance (Hochmut) is actually humbleness (Demut). Roth shows that it is important to keep looking, in order to read the signs correctly, and to recognize that appearances can be deceptive to a radical degree. Thinking the opposite can be a productive, if unedifying route to the truth: Wenn am Anfange das ganz große Warenhaus wie ein Werk des Hochmuts und einer sündhaften menschlichen Herausforderung aussah, so erkennt man mit der Zeit, daß es nur ein ernormes Gehäuse der menschlichen Kleinlichkeit und Bescheidenheit ist; ein riesiges Eingeständnis der irdischen Billigkeit. (W 3:82) [If at first the really big department store looked like a work of overweening pride and of sinful human self-assertion, then with time it becomes apparent that it is just an enormous shell for human pettiness and modestness; a massive admission of earthly cheapness.]

Closely related to these two pieces are his 1922 article “Wolkenkratzer” (W 1:765–67; Skyscrapers: H, 111–14) which, though skeptical of human endeavor, takes a more lyrical and uplifting line, and the review of Werner Hengemann’s Das steinerne Berlin (1930; W 3:228–31; H, 125–28), which brings the contradictions of the time and place into even sharper focus. Roth plays with words and meanings, but it is a serious game, which shows that these are illogical and irrational times. The Berlin selection by Bienert, translated by Hofmann, concludes with “Das Autodafé des Geistes” (The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind), first published in French in Cahiers Juifs in 1933 (W 3:494–503; H, 207–17). This takes us beyond the Weimar Republic and is a clear example of Roth’s shift toward the rational discourse of the essay in the face of growing National Socialist irrationality. In exile he turned to the essay as a form of intellectual resistance.43 It is the form he used too in “Betrachtung an der Klagemauer” (Wailing Wall, 1929) to attack Zionism and in “Dichter im Dritten Reich” (Poets in the Third Reich, 1933) to attack Gottfried Benn for betraying his art and language (W 3:86–89; H, 45–50; W 3:481–87). In a

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plea for others to share his clear-sightedness and willingness to speak out, Roth writes, Das geistige Europa kapituliert. Es kapituliert aus Schwäche, aus Trägheit, aus Gleichgültigkeit, aus Gedankenlosigkeit (es wird Aufgabe der Zukunft sein, die Gründe dieser schändlichen Kapitulation genau zu erforschen). (W 3:494) [The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness. Out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation).] (H, 207)

There is no need to comment on the accuracy of this prediction. Celebrating and reviewing the German Jewish contribution to literature, he further observes, Das unbestreitbare Verdienst der jüdischen Schriftsteller für die deutsche Literatur besteht in der Entdeckung und literarischen Auswertung des Urbanismus. Die Juden haben die Stadtlandschaft und die Seelenlandschaft des Stadtbewohners entdeckt und geschildert. Sie haben die ganze Vielschichtigkeit der städtischen Zivilisation entschleiert. (W 3:501) [The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilisation.] (H, 215)

Although he was writing of numerous others, this contribution was made not least by Roth himself in his nonfiction. It is a massive, multifaceted contribution that merits the close attention of historians, sociologists, and literary and cultural critics of the Weimar Republic. Important as it is for an understanding of Weimar Germany, Roth’s reportage speaks distinctly to later times too. In a recent review, Nadine Gordimer notes of his comments on the exploitation of nature that it is as if he foresaw theme parks.44 His reflections on monuments and public buildings anticipate current debates on Holocaust memorials and parliament buildings, while articles on immigrants, racism, war victims, retail complexes and mass commercialization, traffic, and popular culture remain relevant in the twenty-first century. The crude, homogenized peddling of industrialized amusement he observed in Berlin nightclubs in the 1930s, and saw replicated across Europe has now spread worldwide through TV channels and chains of leisure providers (W 3:211; H, 172). The problems of modernity and, in the mean time, postmodernity, are his specialty. His pieces, by virtue of their linguistic polish and precision, their poetic melody and rhetorical finesse — “unerschöpfliche Fülle in knappster Konzentration” (W 2:327; inexhaustible abundance in highly concentrated form) was

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his artistic ideal — are strong examples of conscious resistance against hypocrisy and the devaluation of language (W 2:327). The style is the message and, as he said of Caruso, an artist is in touch with eternal things (W 1:625). The artist and seer to Roth are one and the same (W 2:325) and he was a seer in both senses: an acute observer for whom vision was both physical and metaphysical, for whom the surface was the gateway to further levels of comprehension and to visions of the future, whose mediation was his personal aesthetic and ethical mission; “Der Rahmen ist der Stil, bin ich” (B, 111; The framework is the style, which is myself).

Notes 1

Joseph Roth, Briefe (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970) 87, Roth’s emphasis. Subsequent references to this volume are cited in the text using the abbreviation B and the page number. In English as Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, translated by Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2003), 15–16. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation H and page number. For the purposes of a close reading of the text, it has not always been possible to work with Hofmann’s translation, which at times, as here, is idiomatic rather than precise, and loses some of the original sense: “I draw the face of the times.” The significance of “face” is addressed in the discussion of “Spaziergang.” Where no page reference for the translation is given, it is my own. 2

“Es ist mein Bemühen, die Deutschen von ihrem Aberglauben zu heilen, die Kunst sei etwas Abseitiges, die Literatur ein Ornament des Lebens, eine Sache der stillen Abende und der Frauen. Die Literatur ist nötig wie eine Maschine, ein Winterrock und eine Medizin.” (Joseph Roth, Perlefter. Fragmente und Feuilletons aus dem Berliner Nachlaß [Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1978], 247). 3 Joseph Roth, Werke, edited by Fritz Hackert and Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989–1991), 3:453. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation W and the volume and page number. 4 See Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger, ed. Michael Bienert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996), 58–59, for details. 5

Irmgard Wirtz, “Zur Poetik von Joseph Roths journalistischem Frühwerk,” Literatur und Kritik 29 (1994): 39–49 considers some of the parallels in particular in relation to the discourse of the city (in Heine’s case, Paris) as a new manifestation of the Zeitgeist (42). See also David Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Munich: DTV, 1981), 87–88. 6

Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 185–207.

7

Hubert Lengauer, “Das Wiener Feuilleton im letzten Viertel des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Lenau-Forum 9/10 (1977/78): 60–77, 69.

8

See Lengauer, “Das Wiener Feuilleton,” 63.

9

Wirtz, Zur Poetik, 44.

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10

His last contribution to the Berliner Börsen-Courier appeared on 15 April 1923 (W 1:986–88), not in August 1922, as Schweikert suggests (Uwe Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’: Politik und Feuilleton beim frühen Joseph Roth [1919–1926],” in Joseph Roth, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold [Munich: Edition Text ⫹ Kritik, 1982], 40–55; here, 47).

11

See Klaus Westermann, Joseph Roth, Journalist: Eine Karriere, 1915–1939 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), 42–45.

12

See Roth’s account of this, W 1:502; H, 179–81.

13

Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 240.

14

A number of Roth’s subsequent works share with Hiob a legendary or fairy-tale tone. This can be seen as a strategy for turning away from the horrors of the present and for dealing in an oblique way with the problem of evil and the search for order in a world where rational moral standards have been abandoned. These include Das falsche Gewicht, Die Geschichte von dem 1002. Nacht, and Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker. 15

Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Die Schmiede, 1927). It has recently appeared in English as The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton, London: Granta, 2001). Individual chapters had appeared as articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926 and 1927.

16

Corrected typescript and proofs held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. 94.114.8. 17

Produced by Knorr & Hirth, who published the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, for whom Roth was working at the time. The reprints are from the Frankfurter Zeitung and other sources.

18

The three Roth works are Michael Bienert, ed., Joseph Roth in Berlin, Helmut Peschina, ed., Joseph Roth — Kaffeehaus — Frühling: Ein Wien-Lesebuch (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), and Ralph Schock, ed., Briefe aus Deutschland (Blieskastel: Gollenstein, 1997).

19

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994), contains translated excerpts from “Der Kulturbolschewismus,” 169–71, and Juden auf Wanderschaft, 263–67. Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby, eds., The Metropolitan Project: Berlin and Vienna, 1880–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, forthcoming) contains translations of “Wenn Berlin Wolkenkratzer bekäme . . . ,” “Das ganz große Warenhaus,” and “Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck.”

20

On the dramaturgy of the texts, see Schock, in Roth, Briefe aus Deutschland, 161.

21

Dietmar Goltschnigg, “Zeit-, Ideologie- und Sprachkritik in Joseph Roths Essayistik,” Literatur und Kritik 25 (1990): 124–36; here, 124–25. 22 See Irmgard Wirtz, Joseph Roths Fiktionen des Faktischen: Das Feuilleton der zwanziger Jahre und “Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht” im historischen Kontext (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996) for a New Historicist discussion of the relationship between fact and fiction in Roth’s feuilleton cycles “Wiener Symptome” and “Berliner Bilderbuch.”

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23 Egon Erwin Kisch, “Wesen des Reporters,” first published in Das Literarische Echo in 1918, repr. in Literarische Reportage, ed. Erhard Schütz (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1979), 42. 24 Roth lived an itinerant existence all his adult life, staying in hotels or with friends. He had no permanent library and kept his belongings in three suitcases, making use of the Preußische Staatsbibliothek when he was in Berlin, so it is not surprising that he did not have Rode’s book to hand. 25

See Thomas Düllo, Zufall und Melancholie: Untersuchungen zur Kontingenzsemantik in Texten von Joseph Roth (Münster: Lit, 1994), chap. 4, esp. 83–88, for a discussion of Roth’s texts in the context of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur, and also Ulrike Steierwald, Leiden an der Geschichte: Zur Geschichtsauffassung der Moderne in den Texten Joseph Roths (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 140.

26

Emphasis J. R.

27

“Was ich sehe, ist der lächerlich unscheinbare Zug im Antlitz der Straße und des Tages” (W 1:564). The published translation here too goes for an idiomatic solution over a more precise rendering (What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality [H, 23].). This is perhaps not surprising, as the intricacy of Roth’s style in his nonfiction is particularly hard to replicate in translation. For the purposes of my analysis the following is closer to the original: “What I see is what is absurdly inconspicuous in the countenance of the street and the day.”

28

As, for example, in Peter Altenberg, “Bei dem Photographen” (At the Photographer’s), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner J. Schweiger (Vienna and Frankfurt am Main: Löcker/S. Fischer, 1987), 1:131–34. 29

Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe (Munich: DTV, 1965), 120.

30

See, for example, W 1:79; H, 90.

31

Hofmann’s translations, “purposeful bustle” and “full of the delights of idleness” (H, 23) miss part of the point.

32

See Düllo, Zufall und Melancholie, 86.

33

“Mit diesem Zufall, der ihm eine Nagelfeile in die Hand gespielt hat, und durch diese geringfügige Handlung des Nagelfeilens hat er symbolisch tausend soziale Stufen übersprungen.” (W 1:565; The coincidence that has left the nail file in his possession and the trifling movement of filing his nails are enough to lift him about a thousand social classes: H, 25).

34

“Er hört nicht den Plätscherklang der Welle und weiß nicht, daß wichtig das Zerplatzen einer Wasserblase ist.” The poetic rhythm and tone of the original are difficult to capture in translation. I suggest: (He neither hears the splashing sound of the wave, nor knows the importance of a bursting bubble). “An dem Tage, an dem die Natur ein Kurort wurde, war’s aus” (The day nature turned into a resort, that was it). “Infolge aller dieser Tatsachen ist mein Spaziergang der eines Griesgrams und vollständig verfehlt” (In consequence of all of these facts, my walk proves to be that of a curmudgeon and utterly futile). W 1:567; translations HC. 35

See Steierwald, Leiden an der Geschichte, 127, on the tragicomic aspect of Roth’s journalism.

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36

See, for example, “Der Mann im Friseurladen” (The Man in the Barbershop), W 1:621–23; H, 131–34 and his reports on the trial of Rathenau’s murderers, W 1:873–88.

37

See, for example, “Das Hakenkreuz auf Rügen” (W 2:214–16; The Swastika on Rügen).

38 Prümm, for example, sees a development from cultural critical reasoning in the twenties to cultural critical despair in the thirties, arguing that in the end Roth is using his own descriptive techniques as an aesthetic weapon to fend off the negative sides of the city (Karl Prümm, “Die Stadt der Reporter und Kinogänger bei Roth, Brentano und Kracauer: Das Berlin der zwanziger Jahre im Feuilleton der Frankfurter Zeitung,” in Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte: Großstadtdarstellungen zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, ed. Klaus R. Scherpe [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988], 80–105; here, 84, 86). 39

Prümm, “Die Stadt der Reporter und Kinogänger,” 82.

40

See, for example, Ilse Planke, “Joseph Roth als Feuilletonist” (diss., FriedrichAlexander Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1967), 165; Prümm, “Die Stadt der Reporter und Kinogänger”; and Carl Wege, “Gleisdreieck, Tank und Motor: Figuren und Denkfiguren aus der Technosphäre der Neuen Sachlichkeit,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 68 (1994): 307–32.

41

Wege, “Gleisdreieck,” 322.

42

The translation transposes the last two items (H, 121).

43

See Goltschnigg, “Zeit-, Ideologie- und Sprachkritik,” 125.

44

Nadine Gordimer, “The Main Course,” review of What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, accessed 7 March 2003 on http://www.threepennyreview.com/ samples/gordimer_sp03.html.

6: Ernst Jünger, the New Nationalists, and the Memory of the First World War Roger Woods

E

RNST JÜNGER IS CHIEFLY KNOWN FOR his writings in the years of the Weimar Republic, when he was one of the leading figures of the Conservative Revolution, the cultural and political movement that served as “intellectual vanguard of the right.”1 Embracing some of the best-known writers, academics, journalists, politicians, and philosophers of the period, the Conservative Revolution produced a flood of radical nationalist writings in the form of war diaries and works of fiction, political journalism, manifestos, and theoretical tracts outlining the development and destiny of political life in Germany and the West. During the Weimar years the Conservative Revolutionaries became the major innovative interpreters of the First World War for the Right, sometimes associating themselves closely with the paramilitary war veterans’ organization, Stahlhelm, and with the NSDAP, which they briefly saw as a revolutionary party that embraced their ideals. Examining the tensions in their portrayal of the war and their political exploitation of the war experience sheds light not just on their personal preoccupations but also on the political culture of the Weimar years. Among the Conservative Revolutionaries it is particularly Ernst Jünger whose work displays these tensions. In the Weimar period Jünger was the most significant representative of that branch of the Conservative Revolution known as new nationalism, which sought to carry forward military values and structures into peacetime society, and which redefined socialism in terms of the community of frontline soldiers. The following analysis concentrates on Jünger’s accounts of the First World War, but, as will become clear, the tensions and contradictions contained in his writing also feature in the work of other new nationalists, so that what emerges is a group identity based in part on a typical patterning of the war experience. Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895, and he enlisted as a volunteer on the first day of the war at the age of nineteen. By the end of the war he had reached the rank of temporary company commander. He was wounded some seven times, and in 1918 he was awarded the pour le

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mérite, the highest military honor of the time. He remained in the Reichswehr until 1923, and during those years he worked on revising infantry training methods. As a young writer he attracted the attention of the reading public with his first account of his war experiences, In Stahlgewittern (Storms of Steel), published in 1920. It was popular in its time, reaching sales of around a quarter of a million by 1945, and he followed up this first work with many more accounts of the war, ranging from war diaries such as Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as Inner Experience, 1922), Das Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125, 1925), Feuer und Blut (Fire and Blood, 1925) and the novel Sturm (Storm, 1923) to the edited collection of essays Krieg und Krieger (War and Warriors, 1930), and essays in political journals and Die Standarte, the supplement to Stahlhelm’s newspaper. This body of work established Jünger as the leading right-wing writer from the generation that had fought in the war and was openly hostile to Weimar democracy. Jünger’s thinking on politics and culture culminated in Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932), seen by his harshest critics as a blueprint for the Nazi state. Although Jünger’s early enthusiasm for the Nazis as comrades in the nationalist struggle against Weimar democracy and the West had turned to hostility in the later years of the Weimar Republic, a fundamental similarity of outlook at the level of political philosophy meant that there was no clear break until shortly before the party came to power. In 1939 Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) appeared, an account of how an ordered society is overrun by the anarchic Mauretanians. With its emphasis on the need for morality and for control of animal instinct, the book was not only an indirect attack on the Nazis but also a move away from Jünger’s original low regard for moral categories in the face of natural self-assertion. Jünger spent most of the Second World War as an officer in occupied Paris. In 1942 he published Gärten und Straßen (Gardens and Streets), an unenthusiastic account of his experiences in the first years of the war. The book was banned in 1943 after he refused to remove a reference to a passage on tyranny that he had quoted from the Bible. During the war Jünger worked on the essay Der Friede (The Peace, 1945), which he regarded as a form of opposition to Hitler’s regime, but after the war the Allies imposed a ban on his publishing anything in Germany, which lasted until 1949. In the years until his death in 1998 Jünger traveled widely and wrote accounts of his experiences, but he mainly made the headlines whenever he was the recipient of a public honor. The decision to award him the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt in 1982 was particularly controversial and revived the debate about his antidemocratic stance in the Weimar Republic. In his later years Jünger’s admirers included Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand, both of whom visited him in his Wilflingen home. The following analysis concentrates on Jünger’s portrayal of the First World War in his war diaries and a novel written in the early years of the

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Weimar Republic. Critics often see in this portrayal a one-dimensional political exploitation of the war, yet Jünger’s war writings and those of the new nationalists as a whole are more complex and ambiguous than most critics have allowed them to be. Although these writings are at their most revealing when treated as a single complex cultural and political phenomenon, there is a tendency for commentators to indulge in a snapshot approach to these sources on the First World War, homing in on individual statements or fragments of text and constructing an account of attitudes towards the war that overlooks the complex dynamics of the sources used. By this method a simplified version of Jünger’s view of the First World War emerges: it has been argued that he sees war as myth and not as the suffering and dying of countless people, and in this he is contrasted with Remarque.2 More generally, it has been suggested that books on the First World War written in the Weimar years fall into one of two categories: they show it either as a heroic event or as senseless torture. In nationalist writings on the war it is said to be a test of manhood and heroism, in pacifist writings, the collapse of humanity.3 The “soldierly nationalism” of the Conservative Revolution has been cited as an example of violent manliness and explained as a reaction against a social modernization that called traditional male roles into question.4 One sociological study claims that In Stahlgewittern celebrates a heroic ideal of soldiers immune to the fear of death and the horror of killing. For Jünger, it is argued, the slaughter and death had not been in vain.5 Jünger’s war, suggests one historian, was idealized and transfigured: in stark contrast to the pacifist interpreters of war, he and his fellow new nationalists sought to blot out the suffering and destruction it caused and to concentrate on its positive aspects.6 This is a convenient categorization — on the new nationalist side, war as an opportunity to show one’s heroism, as a glorious test of courage, and on the pacifist side, war as bringer of pointless death and suffering. The questionable sociological conclusion often drawn from this categorization is that the new nationalists’ positive view of the war could only be maintained because those who promoted it had been officers, and the war experience of officers had been fundamentally different from that of the ordinary enlisted men. Yet this categorization does not take into account the complexity of the productive tensions lying at the heart of much new nationalist writing on the war. The profound unease in new nationalist accounts of the war is not acknowledged.7 Where commentators do deal with interplay of responses, they detect only marginal doubts about the war’s meaning, doubts that the new nationalists have little trouble in brushing aside. But the balance of responses is rather more even than these interpretations allow, and analysis of this more even balance sheds light on the roots of what is undoubtedly correctly seen as a predominantly heroic presentation of the war.

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In Jünger’s work one can trace without difficulty a development, typical of much new nationalist writing, from high expectations of the war to the disillusionment that sets in when he is confronted with its reality. For example, in the opening pages of In Stahlgewittern, Ernst Jünger describes the enthusiasm with which he greeted the news of the outbreak of war: Aufgewachsen im Geiste einer materialistischen Zeit, wob in uns allen die Sehnsucht nach dem Ungewöhnlichen, nach dem großen Erleben. Da hatte uns der Krieg gepackt wie ein Rausch. In einem Regen von Blumen waren wir hinausgezogen in trunkener Morituri-Stimmung. Der Krieg mußte es uns ja bringen, das Große, Starke, Feierliche.8 [We grew up in the spirit of a materialist age, and in all of us there lived a yearning for the unusual, for great adventure. Then the war took hold of us and intoxicated us. We marched off in a shower of flowers, as if drunk, like gladiators about to die. The war just had to provide that great, powerful, solemn experience.]

Yet he writes that after a short period with the regiment he and the other new recruits lose nearly all the illusions with which they had started out: instead of encountering the dangers they had hoped for, they find filth, work, and sleepless nights (St, 6). Jünger rapidly comes to realize that traditional chivalry, glory, and heroism have little place in modern warfare, which is dominated by an impersonal form of battle that consumes men as it does munitions (St, v). At this level we see how the new nationalists encounter one aspect of the “crisis of modernization” in the pre-Weimar period: Jünger is well aware of the pacifist argument that in modern warfare technical progress results in meaningless slaughter and suffering.9 Jünger’s profound disillusionment distances him from those with whom one might have expected him to share a view of the war, and it places him in surprising company. For while this perspective marks his war off from the war as retold in the more rigid form of the military memoir,10 it establishes close links with the anti-war authors of the Weimar years. The possibility of meeting a meaningless death in fact runs both through Jünger’s work and that of anti-war writers such as Erich Maria Remarque, whose Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) first appeared in 1929 and angered so many in the nationalist camp. Remarque emphasizes also that mere chance decides whether one will live or die.11 Similarly, Edlef Köppen’s anti-war novel, Heeresbericht (Military Report, 1930), had senseless death as one of its major themes.12 Put in most general terms, Jünger’s writings convey a sense not only of the war’s meaning but also of its futility, not only a sense of community in war but also a sense of isolation. They portray war not merely as a splendid adventure in which heroic young men can prove themselves but also as a profoundly disturbing event because in war pure chance governs one’s

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fate: a soldier may stay alive by the grace of “kleine Umstände” (little circumstances) or “Zufall” (St, 63, 119; chance), and may die from a wound inflicted by “ein sinnloses Stück Blei” (St, 133; a meaningless fragment of lead). The wounds of a dead soldier are “sinnlos” (meaningless).13 Contemplation of the chaos of war can result in a laming mood of melancholy (St, 67). And the war that had promised to bring the mental relief of total commitment within a community of men could also bring “ein unbeschreibliches Gefühl der Einsamkeit” (indescribable feelings of isolation).14 In Sturm, the novel serialized for the Hannoverscher Kurier in 1923, Jünger describes how, when death hung over the trenches like a storm cloud, each man was on his own; surrounded by howling and crashing, dazzled by flashes of light, he felt nothing within himself but isolation beyond measure (Sturm, 12). The need to make sense of the war is complicated by the fact that Jünger’s writing on the First World War goes through a systematic rejection of all those conventional sources of meaning that the more traditionbound nationalists were intent on upholding during the Weimar years. Death on the massive scale encountered in the First World War is not, for example, rendered meaningful by recalling Germany’s purpose in going to war. This point is partly a political one that emerged after the war — not least because the war had been lost and it was a psychological necessity for Jünger to find its meaning outside the framework of victory. Jünger’s fellow new nationalist writer, Franz Schauwecker, makes the connection between loss of meaning and the lost war when he describes the emotions of the soldiers returning home after the war: he writes that all at once the effect of the enormous demands made upon them erupted. Suddenly everything had been in vain. The world seemed to have no meaning.15 But the feeling that the war had no meaning affected the new nationalists even while it was being fought, and this sense of futility could often outweigh the idea that if Germany achieved its aims, the suffering would be justified. New nationalists actually spent very little time discussing the aims of the war, and Jünger conveys their mood well when he recalls that soldiers greeted such discussions with an ironic smile. Similarly, in a contribution to the new nationalist journal, Deutsches Volkstum, Rudolf Huch is tempted to side with Remarque when he recalls a meeting of 1917 at which politicians told businessmen of the need to secure certain territories without which, comments Huch, the Germans had got on well enough before the war.16 The wish to rescue something from the war without resorting to conventional nationalism is an important distinguishing feature of Jünger’s work and that of his fellow new nationalists. Despite Jünger’s doubts about the meaning of the war, there is a clear tendency for the positive elements to come to the fore. The switch from expectations of the war to disillusionment with its reality is not the last stage in the development of his attitude towards it. He finds other sources

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of meaning in the war: he portrays it as a natural event, as the reenactment of a noble tradition, and as the expression of the inevitable fate of the nation. Historians have sought to explain why this version of the war should emerge. Modris Eksteins sees the tendency of soldiers who wrote about the war to classify what were totally new experiences according to previously existing categories as an “instinctive reaction,”17 whereas George Mosse suggests cause and effect when he examines the role of nature in war books and argues that it helped to mask the reality of war.18 Mosse’s argument is plausible, but one can take it further by demonstrating the masking process at work at the level of texts. Precisely how do alternative views of the war’s meaning develop? And what can a study of the ways in which they emerge tell us? In Sturm Jünger compares war to a storm. War indiscriminately stamps its path through human existence like a tropical hurricane destroying the brilliant flora and fauna. Jünger points out that nature accepts this destruction and merely brings forth new and more beautiful creations, but he asks whether that is any comfort for the individual (Sturm, 61). Splendor may be senselessly shattered in war, yet by his use of natural imagery Jünger establishes the beginnings of a positive interpretation of this destruction. Qualified by the idea that such an impersonal overall view of the war offers little comfort to the individual victim, the natural analogy is offered here only tentatively — a fact that reflects the uncertainty in Jünger’s mind about its worth. Elsewhere Jünger is able to invoke natural imagery with greater strength of purpose in order to counterbalance the notion that chance governs one’s fate in war. Jünger thus describes in In Stahlgewittern the feeling of being confronted with something as inescapable and absolutely inevitable as an eruption of the elements (St, 51–52). This natural image conveys the idea that the war and the soldier’s fate in it are inescapable. What is natural is inevitable, and against a background of “meaninglessness” and “chance” — the vocabulary of the counterimage of war in Jünger’s work — inevitability lends a kind of meaning. Jünger himself makes these associations clear in the preface to a book he edited on prominent individuals in the First World War: for the person who sees nothing accidental in any phenomenon, including war and armies, who sees rather the expression of life in all its might and harshness, but also life’s meaning, which is far removed from any practical considerations — for this person, writes Jünger, even the death of an individual, however cruel and irreparable it may seem if one just thinks of the personality involved, can never be random or meaningless. This perspective, like any that is founded on inevitability, provides a more profound consolation and a greater sense of certainty.19 That Jünger’s use of natural analogy and his recognition of the chaotic element of war are related, more precisely that the former is often

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prompted by the latter, is suggested in Sturm when the central character reflects on his narrow escape from death in the front line: Es schien ihm seltsam, daß er hier saß. Wie wenig hatte daran gefehlt, daß es ihn getroffen hätte. Daß er jetzt mit verkrampften Gliedern am Boden lag wie der Tote, über den er im Graben gestolpert war. Mit großen sinnlosen Wunden im Körper und schmutzigem, von dunkelblauen Pulverkörnern gesprenkeltem Gesicht. . . . Nicht der Tod schreckte ihn, — der war ja bestimmt —, sondern dieses Zufällige, . . . Dieses Gefühl, Werte zu bergen und doch nicht mehr zu sein als eine Ameise, die der achtlose Tritt eines Riesen am Straßenrande zertrat. Wozu, wenn es einen Schöpfer gab, schenkte der dem Menschen diesen Drang, sich in das Wesen einer Welt zu bohren, die er niemals ergründen konnte? War es nicht besser, man lebte wie ein Tier oder wie eine Pflanze im Tal als immer mit dieser furchtbaren Angst unter allem, was man auf der Oberfläche handelte und sprach? (Sturm, 56–57) [It seemed strange to him that he was sitting here. How close he had come to being hit. How easily it could have been him lying on the ground with twisted limbs like the corpse he had stumbled over in the trench. With great meaningless wounds in his body, and his dirty face spotted with dark blue powder grains . . . It was not death that frightened him — that was bound to come sooner or later — but this element of chance, . . . this feeling that he embodied certain values and yet was no more than an ant to be trampled at the roadside by a careless giant. Why, if there was a creator, did he give man this urge to bore deep into a world he could never understand? Was it not better to live like an animal or like a plant in the valley than to be consumed by this terrible anxiety that lurked beneath the surface of everything one did and said?]

The element of chance governing his survival in battle has a disconcerting effect upon Sturm. The wounds that killed the soldier are “meaningless,” for they too were inflicted by mere chance. Sturm distinguishes between the thought of death itself, which is tolerable because ultimately inevitable, and random death in war. The vision of chaos follows directly from this perception and can only burden man with an acute feeling of fear, for it must make him aware of the precariousness of his situation. Just how profound this fear is becomes clear in a later essay by Jünger, in which he reveals the source of his image and records his response: the image of soldiers as ants being trampled by a giant is based on his response to Alfred Kubin’s 1914 picture, Der Krieg (War). Jünger describes how the picture shows an army with flags and lances, like ants scarcely visible on the ground. This army faces a giant figure wielding a weapon that is half club and half butcher’s knife. The figure is more or less normal down to the waist, but it has the feet of an elephant, one of which is raised over the army and about to crash down indiscriminately. Jünger explains that Kubin portrays the two aspects of Mars: as master of the sword and of the

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butcher’s knife, and he concludes that the nightmare wins out; terror and existential dread are dominant.20 In Sturm the intolerable emotion of fear provokes the vision of an alternative mode of existence that provides security by eliminating human consciousness. It is the natural mode of existence. And this is the aspect of man’s existence in war and of war itself that Jünger pushes to the forefront of his accounts. The character Falk elaborates upon the point when he says that sometimes he wishes he were a simple animal or a plant. He hates the thought of any development towards higher sensibilities for this could only serve to increase one’s sense of anguish (Sturm, 82). It is this simple form of animal consciousness that emerges in Jünger’s accounts of war as a sustaining force. In Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis the unwelcome diversification of existence is said to be replaced by just a few basic drives with the advent of war: Wir sind zu verästelt; der Saft steigt nicht mehr in die Spitzen. Nur wenn ein unmittelbarer Impuls uns wie Blitz durchbrennt, werden wir wieder einfach und erfüllt . . . Im Tanze auf schmaler Klinge zwischen Sein und Nichtsein offenbart sich der wahre Mensch, da schmilzt seine Zersplitterung wieder zusammen in wenige Urtriebe von gewaltiger Stärke.21 [We have split into too many branches; the sap no longer climbs to the tips. Only if we are shot through with a direct impulse like a bolt of lightning will we become simple and fulfilled once again. . . . In the dance on the narrow blade between existence and non-existence true man reveals himself, his fragmented being once more fuses into a few basic drives of enormous strength.]

The theme of chance and the use of natural imagery alone do not distinguish Ernst Jünger and his fellow new nationalists from other writers on the war, yet the specific functions of these elements certainly do: when Remarque, for example, states that it is mere chance that decides whether a soldier will live or die, he concludes that this makes the soldier indifferent; Remarque blames the war for destroying a whole generation, including those who escaped the grenades.22 For the new nationalists, however, chance is countered by inevitability, and the main source of this inevitability is to be found in the supposedly natural roots of war. This patterning also occurs in the work of Oswald Spengler, famous for his monumental Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West), which appeared between 1918 and 1922 and which suggested an inevitability about the rise and fall of cultures. Spengler writes that whereas plants have no choice, men and animals do. In times of stress they seek to escape the freedom this gives them and to revert to a rooted, plant-like existence. Spengler connects this with overcoming a sense of self and with the unity that a regiment of soldiers can feel as it advances under fire.23

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Kurt Hesse, a lieutenant in the Reichswehr, quotes Ernst Jünger’s argument that because we are humans the time will always come when we attack each other. Significantly, this point comes after a reflection on the forces in war that the traditional soldierly virtues cannot match. Human action and natural events are ultimately not at odds, says Hesse, and it is from this position that he derives his conviction that the war was a meaningful event: “Nur eine Tatsache von Wert: Daß die Vorgänge, die sich während der viereinhalb Jahre des Krieges abgespielt haben, natürliche gewesen sind” (The only thing that matters is that the events that unfolded during four and a half years of war were natural).24 Jünger states that he took a notebook with him when he went to war, in order to make notes on his daily experiences, and that he knew the things that awaited him would be unique and later irretrievable.25 The intention of recording the unique experience of wartime is echoed in In Stahlgewittern, where it is the “yearning for the unusual” that makes the prospect of war so enticing. Yet it is clear that Jünger’s wish to see his individual experience as necessary and meaningful must lead him away from his declared principles. For necessity and meaning are to be found in the suggestion that one’s actions in war follow an archetypal pattern. Thus he writes in Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart, 1929) that his experiences are typical among his generation; they are a variation that is bound up with the motif of the times, or they are like a species, an odd one maybe, but one that does possess the characteristics of the genus. Jünger concludes that when he considers his life, he is not actually referring just to himself, but to what lies beneath this self, and to what everyone else can identify with precisely because it is in its truest and least random form.26 This mentality suggests why the need to view individual experience as meaningful resulted in the past being incorporated into the present, even though the reality of modern warfare had cast doubt on the appropriateness of traditional images of war, and the links between trench warfare and traditional warfare had been seen to be tenuous. A mood is endowed with greater meaning if it is felt to have been the mood of countless generations of soldiers in the past: “Am Abend saß ich noch lange in jener ahnungsvollen Stimmung, von der die Krieger aller Zeiten zu erzählen wissen” (St, 11; In the evening I sat for a long time in one of those moods suffused with foreboding of which warriors through the ages can tell). Jünger in fact enters a timeless world as a soldier, seeking not the unique but the typical experience, as when he meets up with his comrades for a drinking session after battle. This ritual is described as one of the finest memories of old warriors. The comrades would laugh like lansquenets at the dangers they had survived, take a swig from a full bottle to toast the dangers they had yet to meet, and care nothing if death and the devil themselves were looking on, so long as the wine was good. That was ever the warriors’ way (St, 79). Jünger’s commentary on an evening of

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reunion makes of the event a stylized ritual. His appeal to the tradition of the soldier type, accentuated by the use of a vocabulary more suited to earlier forms of battle (the “lansquenet” was a foot soldier in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), establishes the authoritative framework within which the death of one’s comrades can be seen as meaningful. The impersonal, eternal qualities of the soldier transform the desolation of war and lend meaning to what is elsewhere seen as futile suffering.27 The political response of Jünger and the new nationalists to the war is determined in part by the simple fact that Germany did not emerge as the victor: Kurt Hesse sets out the problem and reveals the mental process by which a solution is reached. In Der Feldherr Psychologos (General Psychologos) he asks whether the fact that the war was lost is sufficient reason to see this episode in the history of the nation as a negative experience. One must try, he argues, to establish what positive aspects of the war remain. After listing just how much Germany did lose in the war, he asks whether there must not be some gain to emerge from a struggle that was kept up with so much spiritual and physical effort. His suggestion of where meaning is to be found helps explain a key feature of new nationalist writings on the war. If the war was lost there must be a new battle cry: “es gilt, geistige Werte zu annektieren!” (we must annex spiritual values).28 In this suggestion we see how failure in the world of actual military power prompted the new nationalists to internalize the war experience: why, for example, Ernst Jünger called his war book of 1922 Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as Inner Experience). In this “inner experience” the best qualities of the soldier — courage, heroism, selflessness — become ends in themselves.29 Franz Schauwecker describes the situation of the Germans in the war and concludes that they were fighting against hopeless odds. In such a situation there is “no point” in fighting on. Yet if fighting on has no point, says Schauwecker, it does have a “meaning.” This meaning resides in the courage and commitment of the soldiers who fight the losing battle.30 Werner Best, who went on to draw up the Boxheim Papers on Nazi plans in the event of a communist revolution, pursues this idea when he explains that new nationalism sees the world as dynamic, consisting of tension, struggle, and turbulence. He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, referring to the world as perpetually creating and destroying itself. And he quotes Ernst Jünger’s dictum from Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: “Nicht wofür wir kämpfen, ist das Wesentliche, sondern wie wir kämpfen” (The crucial thing is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight). Extending the logic of his thinking, Best concludes that the aims of any struggle are ephemeral and ever changing, and for this reason the success or failure of the struggle is not important.31 Opponents of new nationalism argued that there was a causal connection between such thinking and the lost war: in a hostile essay in the liberal journal Das Tagebuch, Karl Tschuppik characterized

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the new nationalist idea of war being beyond the will of man and a primitive force as the philosophy of defeat.32 What is clear is that the new nationalists’ heroic portrayal of war does not directly tackle the insight into its futility: the feeling of one’s own insignificance in war is not conquered by fixing one’s gaze on a higher goal but is suppressed when writers revert to a preconscious, animal existence. The reaction to the problem that the stated aims of the war are insufficient to make sense of death on the huge scale encountered in the First World War is not to find some other, worthier, aim but to suppress the problem and make war an end in itself. The individual’s fate is not rendered meaningful. Rather, the individual is disregarded and the focus switches to the typical or the collective experience. Crucially, the political response to the war was also influenced by the postwar situation of the new nationalists in what they regard as the alien environment of the Weimar Republic. Jünger shows how, as far as the new nationalists are concerned, giving way to their nagging doubts about the meaning of the war would be tantamount to conceding the superiority of the thinking that underpinned the Weimar Republic. He writes that any philosophy that sees the death of millions in war as meaningless must be a philosophy devoid of God, spirit, and heart, and it must also be fundamentally barren. He attributes this philosophy to liberalism in all its forms, and claims that one of the leading politicians of the Weimar Republic, Walther Rathenau, embraces this view of the war.33 Significantly, however, he also acknowledges his own mixed feelings about the war: “wurde unser Herz noch nie von jenem Gefühl der Leere belagert, das uns zur Übergabe auffordert, indem es uns listig zuflüstert, es sei doch irgendwie alles umsonst gewesen?” (were our hearts never besieged by the feeling of emptiness urging us to surrender by insidiously whispering to us that it [sacrifice in war] was somehow really all in vain?)34 The view of war as natural and self-justifying was further developed in the Weimar period in order to cope with what the new nationalists saw as the spread of alien Western values across the German border. Two expressions of these alien values were the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which outlawed war. Thus a key feature of the new nationalist view of the war is the irrelevance of moral categories. A. E. Günther, coeditor of the Conservative Revolutionary journal Deutsches Volkstum, felt uneasy about German propaganda that proclaimed Germany did not start the war. This propaganda presented the German cause not as the inner experience of the nation but as a legal dispute, which, like any other, could be lost by trickery. It was dangerous to concentrate on the morality of self-defense. A nation’s right to exist includes attack, yet, unlike in Mussolini’s Italy, this was not driven home in the German public sphere as the philosophy of the nation. Referring to Germany’s efforts to refute the war-guilt charge, Günther records his amazement at seeing

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German historians and politicians rummaging in piles of documents, seriously engaging in a search for the truth. He cites Thomas Mann’s essay on Frederick the Great, which had set out what was wrong with an approach based on the question of guilt. Mann had argued rather in vitalist terms of the rights of those things that “have become” and the rights of those things that are “just becoming.” This, suggests Günther, is the proper perspective for studying events. Germany’s rights in fact lie beyond all morality.35 The rise of class-based socialism in the postwar period preoccupied Jünger and his fellow new nationalists, and it led them to construct their own “German socialism” on the basis of the shared experience of the war. Frontline socialism rather than class-based socialism is blended with an assertive nationalism to provide the new nationalists’ remedy for the ailments of the Weimar Republic. Kurt Hesse recalls how in war social issues took a back seat, even among the workers. What arose in their place was a consciousness based on national unity.36 The earliest political pronouncements of the new nationalists are not always thought through, however. The new nationalists generally agree that the social issues must be faced, and that decent opportunities must be created for workers. But Franz Schauwecker seems to surprise himself when he concludes that communism alone holds the key to dignity in life.37 He therefore goes on to say that such talk is high treason and out of the question for the present. Moreover, the new nationalists’ politicization of the war relied heavily on selective memory: in order to produce their harmonious vision of a future state they had to suppress their own awareness of how the community of the front could disintegrate along class lines. That Jünger and his circle were engaging in a political exploitation of the First World War was clear in the minds of their readers. In 1930 Walter Benjamin published “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus” (Theories of German Fascism), a review article of Krieg und Krieger, a volume of essays edited by Jünger in the same year.38 Benjamin first registers his surprise that although the contributors to the volume fought in the war, they claim that it is not particularly important in which century one fights, or for what ideas or with what weapons. They almost seem to regard the soldier’s uniform as the highest goal, with the circumstances in which it is worn being of secondary importance. Benjamin explains this attitude as a symptom of youthful excess, culminating in a cult and an apotheosis of war, and an uninhibited transfer of the principle of art for art’s sake to war.39 He quotes the new nationalists’ argument that war is beyond reason and has its own logic that is inhuman, unbounded, and gigantic, like a volcano or eruption. War as the metaphysical abstraction proclaimed by the new nationalists is for Benjamin an attempt to project natural laws onto technology, and he offers a partial interpretation of these attitudes when he sees a link between losing the war and this brand of hysteria that “perverts” it into a victory.40

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Benjamin pleads for rationalism in the face of the new nationalists’ mystification of the war experience: all the light that language and reason can provide must be directed against the irrational memory of a war that was in reality a last chance for nations to settle their relationships with each other. In this early confrontation with new nationalism Benjamin registers its aestheticization of war, and his thoughts on the origins of this aestheticization take his analysis beyond moral indignation and towards an explanation: the new nationalists’ processing of the memory of war is shaped by their need to convert a defeat into a victory. Benjamin also makes the connection with interwar politics when he characterizes the new nationalists’ front-line soldier as the model for fascism. The very popularity of new nationalist writings on the war indicates that tensions and problems existed not just in the minds of a relatively small (but prolific) group of novelists, diarists, and political journalists. As one historian has pointed out, the “urge to find a higher meaning in the war experience” that would make sense of the enormous sacrifices was widespread in the postwar period, particularly among veterans.41 But so too was the unease about this higher meaning. The tendency for the frontline community and the home front to disintegrate into class-based groupings has been well documented by historical research,42 and this tendency found its concrete expression in the emergence of not one but two opposing large-scale veterans’ organizations in the post-war period — Stahlhelm and Reichsbanner.43 The initial upsurge of interest in pacifist ideas in the Weimar Republic, followed by the increasing isolation of the Nie-wieder-Krieg-Bewegung (No-More-Wars Movement) and the remilitarization of public opinion around 1929, suggest that the internal wranglings of the new nationalists contain elements of a microcosm of Weimar political culture, a political culture that was ultimately receptive to the transformation and suppression of the realities of the war experience.44

Notes 1

This is Walter Struve’s assessment of their role in Elites against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973), 227.

2

Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971), 277. 3

See, for example, Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1968), 95. 4

Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 110–11.

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5

Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, London: Cambridge UP, 1984), 72–75.

6 Wolfram Wette, “Ideologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik als Voraussetzungen der Kriegspolitik des Dritten Reiches,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, 10 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 1:48. 7 Thus, when Modris Eksteins comments in general terms on the conservative view of the war as “a necessity, tragic of course, but nonetheless unavoidable,” he does not exploit the interpretative potential of what is, in the case of the Conservative Revolution, a development of the themes of necessity and inevitability (Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age [London, New York: Bantam, 1989], 287). 8 Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Hanover: published privately, 1920), 1. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text as St followed by the page number. 9

Ernst Jünger, “Der Pazifismus,” Die Standarte 11 (15 November 1925): 2. For a discussion of the theory of modernization as applied to the Weimar Republic, see Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 87–190. George Mosse gives a convincing account of the First World War as a “modern war” characterized by “organized mass death” in his Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 3. 10

See Martin Travers, German Novels on the First World War and Their Ideological Implications, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1982). Travers demonstrates that military memoirs presented a paradigmatic view of war. This form survived through the First World War to emerge in the memoirs of Hermann von Stein, for example, who had command of the XIV Reserve Division in a Bavarian Regiment. His is above all an orderly view of war, in which all the events described have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The typical memoir, argues Travers, does not recognize (does not have the categories to recognize) the less paradigmatic features of war — the fortuitous, the random, the anomic, and the personal torments of hunger, fear, and pain (German Novels on the First World War, 23). See also Hans-Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), on senior officers writing military memoirs in order to justify strategic decisions in the war (22).

11

See, for example, Erich Maria Remarque’s account of how the soldiers are made indifferent by the fact that they can do little to avoid being killed: it is chance that kills them or keeps them alive (Im Westen nichts Neues [Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1976], 76).

12 See Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1978), 116. Travers has pointed out that Ludwig Renn’s Krieg (War) stresses the formlessness of war and the soldier’s struggle to survive in an environment governed by the random and fortuitous, by the failure of purpose and the subversion of order (German Novels on the First World War, 68). See also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1975) on the gap between expectations and reality, which became such an important feature of British writing on the First World War (34–35). Fussell also reports on the elaborate rumors that circulated in the war about how the Germans gained information on the position of enemy artillery. These rumors reflected the

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need to make sense of events that would otherwise seem merely accidental or calamitous (121). 13 Ernst Jünger, Sturm (Olten: Oltner Liebhaberdruck, 1963), 56–57. Subsequent references are given in the text as Sturm followed by the page number. 14

Ernst Jünger, Feuer und Blut (Magdeburg: Stahlhelm, 1925), 16–17.

15

Franz Schauwecker, Deutsche allein (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1931), 9.

16

Rudolf Huch, “‘Im Westen nichts Neues,’” Deutsches Volkstum 11, no. 8 (August 1929): 598–603. 17

Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 155.

18

Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 107.

19

Ernst Jünger, ed., Die Unvergessenen (Berlin and Leipzig: Andermann, 1928), 12.

20

Ernst Jünger, “Alfred Kubin,” Neues Forum 154 (October 1966): 629.

21

Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 116.

22

Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues, 5, 76.

23

Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Munich: DTV, 1973), 2:558–59.

24 Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos: Ein Suchen nach dem Führer der deutschen Zukunft (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 139. 25 Quoted in Armin Mohler, ed., Die Schleife: Dokumente zum Weg von Ernst Jünger (Zurich: Arche, 1955), 55. 26

Ernst Jünger, Das abenteuerliche Herz (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1929), 6.

27

Karl Prümm makes a similar point about In Stahlgewittern in his Die Literatur des soldatischen Nationalismus der 20er Jahre (1918–1933), 2 vols. (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), 1:114–15. 28

Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos, 135.

29

Müller also sees a connection between Jünger’s failure to assign a meaning to the war and his raising of soldierly qualities to the status of self-justifying values (246).

30

Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg (Leipzig: Aufmarsch 1926), 132.

31

Werner Best, “Der Krieg und das Recht,” in Krieg und Krieger, ed. Ernst Jünger (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1930), 151–52. Michael Gollbach (Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges, 156) notes a similar process at work in Franz Schauwecker’s Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1930). 32

Karl Tschuppik, “Nicht daran denken, nicht davon sprechen?” Das Tagebuch 12 (September 1931): 1438–43. Tschuppik makes his view of the vitalist interpretation of the war clear when he adds that this idea is part of the megalomania of inferior generals, politicians who are incapable of thought, and their literary followers.

33

See Jünger, “Vom absolut Kühnen,” Standarte 20 (12 August 1926): 462, and “Die totale Mobilmachung,” in Jünger, Krieg und Krieger, 29. 34

Ernst Jünger, “Die Opfer,” Der Vormarsch 6 (November 1927): 114.

35

A. E. Günther, “Die Intelligenz und der Krieg,” in Krieg und Krieger, 91, 96–97.

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36

Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos, 142.

37

Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg, 169.

38

Walter Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” Die Gesellschaft 2 (1930): 32–41, reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:238–50. Subsequent references are to the 1972 edition. 39

Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” 240.

40

Ibid, 242, n. 2.

41

Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 6. The broader significance of the new nationalist device of describing the war in premodern terms is reflected in the style of many monuments that were erected after the First World War and portrayed soldiers armed with swords rather than modern weaponry. Our analysis of the evolution of meaning in new nationalist texts on war supports Mosse’s interpretation of this phenomenon as the result of a confrontation with a new kind of mechanical warfare, which resulted in an “urgent need to mask death” (101). 42

See Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg, 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), esp. 40–57, on the growing militancy of workers during the war, shortages of food resulting in strikes among munitions workers in Berlin, war weariness, and the desire for peace among the workers. Kocka also examines the unequal provision made for officers and men at the front, a phenomenon mirrored at home by the easier life for those who could afford black market prices.

43 44

See Wette, “Ideologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik,” 78–81.

Gollbach points out that from 1929 onwards the market share of nationalist antidemocratic war books was overwhelming and made the proportion of books critical of the war insignificant. Gollbach takes this as an indication of the popularization of antidemocratic and nationalist slogans, ideas, and groups in the process of political polarization at that time (276).

7: Innocent Killing: Erich Maria Remarque and the Weimar Anti-War Novels Brian Murdoch

E

RICH MARIA REMARQUE’S Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), published in both German and English in 1929, is arguably the best-known of all Weimar novels. Certainly it is one of the few German novels of the period to have achieved the status of an international classic, and it remains, further, one of the most read antiwar novels in any language. Assessing the status of Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) specifically as a Weimar novelist, however, is not straightforward. In the simplest of definitions — a writer publishing between the formal declaration of the Weimar Republic in July 1919 and Hitler’s election as chancellor in January 1933 — Remarque is represented by a limited number of novels only. Technically, the first of these is Die Traumbude (A Den of Dreams), which appeared in 1920, but it is a romantic Künstlerroman (artist’s novel) that might equally well have appeared in the late nineteenth century, and was in any case published under the author’s birth-name of Erich (Paul) Remark. It did appear, nevertheless, within the period of the Weimar Republic and in a sense it is of that time in that it represents a form of escapism back to a prewar period in which young aesthetes, artists and musicians, could be concerned about stormy affairs and then find true love at the deathbed of their closest friend. The writing, though, is mannered and dated, and it is no surprise that the work was not highly regarded; the very negative opinion of one critic in particular weighs heavily against it: that of Remarque himself, who dissociated himself from it by adopting for his later works an older version of his family name and taking as a middle name that of his mother. Die Traumbude was only republished in 1998, in a volume that also contains his second novel, Gam (a name), written probably in 1923/24 but not published until it appeared in the retrospective collection of his early work at the end of the twentieth century, and also his third, which did appear during the Weimar Republic, albeit not in book form. Station am Horizont (Horizon Station) appeared as a serial in the magazine Sport im Bild between 1927 and 1928, and although Ullstein did acquire the

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rights, it was never published as a separate novel. A much later novel, Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (Heaven Has No Favorites, 1961), is linked with it. In terms of quality, Remarque’s own judgment on the first and his failure to publish the second are entirely acceptable.1 Very different indeed is the case of the work that establishes Remarque’s importance as a Weimar novelist, Im Westen nichts Neues, which appeared first in serial form in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, and then in a slightly changed book version in January, 1929. The period was one in which a large number of novels concerned with the First World War were published (and not only in Germany), although novels of the war had begun to appear during the war itself and in the years that followed.2 Two years later, in 1931, another work appeared, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back), and it is important (though they are often kept apart) to consider this together with the by then world-famous Im Westen nichts Neues, even if the international fame of the first was never remotely matched by the second.3 The second novel is a continuation of the first: its action begins just after, and indeed refers to, the death of the principal character in the first novel. Both novels are concerned principally with the First World War as the major shared and formative experience of those in the new republic. Der Weg zurück documents the life in the immediate postwar period of a character who might as well be the fallen narrator of the first: their age, experience, background, and homes are the same, and even the names are obliquely linked, Paul Bäumer and Ernst Birkholz.4 By the time Remarque’s next novel, Drei Kameraden (1937; Three Comrades, 1938), appeared, however, the Weimar government was gone, and this work, though in a sense a further sequel, had to be published in Amsterdam. Only two major works, then, appeared as novels during the period, and neither has a contemporary theme. Im Westen nichts Neues is set in the last year of the 1914–18 war, although it looks back to 1916. Der Weg zurück is set in the year following the last month of the war, taking us into the beginnings of the Weimar Republic. Both works are historical novels and are not actual eyewitness reports from the war and immediate postwar period as such, although the first in particular is often taken that way, and works were published at the same time that do present themselves precisely as eyewitness reports. In an absolute sense, both novels, and the first in particular, are against war as such. Two more specific questions may be asked of Remarque’s works as novels of the First World War, however: first, to what extent their presentation of and confrontation with a war that was still very much in the minds of its citizens reflects Weimar views of the war and its ending; and second, whether aspects of the novels can be related to the Weimar Republic itself. Taking Remarque as a Weimar novelist in a somewhat broader sense, later novels of his also have a bearing on the period. Drei Kameraden has to do, to an extent, with the mental and physical displacement of soldiers

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after the war, and even Remarque’s novel of the Second World War, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (1954, translated as A Time to Love [sic] and a Time to Die), albeit set in wartime Nazi Germany, shows parallel attitudes to war as such.5 Later still, Der schwarze Obelisk (1956, The Black Obelisk, 1957), is set in the Weimar Republic, so that it follows Der Weg zurück in historical sequence, although it is inevitably affected by hindsight after another war and the experience of Nazism. The central figure, however, Bodmer, is a close match for Bäumer and Birkholz. Im Westen nichts Neues and Der Weg zurück, though, are Remarque’s major contributions to the Weimar novel as such. The first presents the war through the eyes of a young soldier, Paul Bäumer, who has — under the influence of a crassly nationalistic teacher — joined the army after the start of the war straight from high school, and who recounts his experiences, sometimes as flashbacks, of many aspects of the war, from basic training to coming under fire in the front line. The narrative alternates between scenes of warfare at the front with periods of respite behind the lines, with some French girls, at home on leave, or on one occasion defending a food store. Against these scenes are set others at the front on wiring or sentry duty, under heavy fire in a dugout, and on a reconnaissance patrol (during which Bäumer kills a Frenchman in a panic). He is wounded and experiences a military hospital. Gradually his immediate circle of fellow soldiers, some schoolfriends, others from different walks of life, are all killed, the last of them the older man Katczinsky, Bäumer’s mentor. Bäumer himself, now alone, is killed at the end of the work, just before the end of the war, and the last few lines of the novel are in another voice. Such a bare description of the work conveys little except, perhaps, to indicate that it holds the interest by rapid and varied scene changes. In fact its structure is deceptively simple; because it is so skillfully done, the work had general appeal and thus became extremely popular, but this itself led to critical suspicion, and indeed to its dismissal as serious literature, in spite of the fact that the subject could scarcely be more serious. It is, as indicated, a first-person narrative, a work effectively with only one character, a young soldier. This aspect of the fictionality is maintained carefully; the narrative does not (apart from the final third-party comment) ever come out of character. A young man is caught up in a war for which he can bear no responsibility. Although clearly intelligent, just out of a classical Gymnasium, his experience of life itself is, as he well knows, limited. But he can observe the war and also think about it from a limited perspective. Critics who leveled the charge at Remarque that some of the characters encountered by the reader are less fully drawn than others failed to appreciate the consistent viewpoint.6 Bäumer is naturally more aware of some things and some people than of others; he knows his schoolmates well and he gets to know other immediate comrades, but will do little more than register the presence of “a graybeard,” or of an unpleasant major he meets once only,

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or indeed of an attractive French girl. If the war is to be presented as the experience of a single young man, then that single character must be entirely believable, and the sole grounds for real criticism would be if Bäumer were to be unusual in any way. That he is not permits general identification with him, and indeed multiplication by the kind of numbers history tells us took part in the war at that level. Bäumer thus shows no unrealistic prescience about the postwar years, and indeed, part of the point of the novel is that he cannot really imagine the years after the war, and by the end the war is still going on and he is dead. The final narrator may speculate on Bäumer’s death, but the reader should be aware that it can only be speculation. Within the novel, Bäumer comments on a variety of aspects of the war as he sees them, making clear its brutalizing effect upon a sensitive young man, the consequent devaluation of practically everything in his life before, social or educational, and what war as such actually means. War is to kill or be killed, or — almost worse — to maim or be maimed: “erst das Lazarett zeigt, was Krieg ist” (only the hospital shows you what war really is), says Bäumer, going on to note that there are thousands of hospitals like this one. That realization leads him to a further comment on the way the war has affected him, and the passage is an important one: Ich bin jung, ich bin zwanzig Jahre alt; aber ich kenne vom Leben nichts anderes als die Verzweiflung, den Tod, die Angst und die Verkettung sinnlosester Oberflächlichkeit mit einem Abgrund des Leidens. Ich sehe, dass Völker gegeneinandergetrieben werden und sich schweigend, unwissend, töricht, gehorsam, unschuldig töten. (260) [I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another.] (186)

The reference to innocent killing could refer either to those killing or those being killed. This is the experience of his whole generation, he goes on, and he blames the generation before: what would their fathers do, he asks, if they were to be held to account? No answer is given in the novel, of course, but the thought is significant for the Weimar Republic. The young soldiers in the novel have grown up with killing as their principal occupation and their knowledge of the world is limited to death. In asking what will happen afterwards and what will become of them, Bäumer expresses, though he himself dies, the views of the survivors who were still young at the birth of the Weimar Republic. The despairing tone is historical and acceptable within the context, but it can function as a warning in the contemporary world, and indeed in general terms. Bäumer presents

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the facts of the war to the reader, but he is himself unable to think clearly about many aspects of it, something that becomes clear when he and his fellow soldiers attempt discussions, which end invariably with the circular and ultimately meaningless assertion — it is no more than that — that “Krieg ist Krieg” (war is war). The reader derives from Bäumer’s experiences the universal message that war is a human disaster and that there should be no more war, the pacifist-liberal message that ensures the continuing importance of the work. It is perhaps still necessary to point out, finally, that Bäumer is a character in a novel, and is not Remarque, even if the author’s own experiences contributed to Bäumer, Birkholz, and Bodmer. Indeed, to refer to Im Westen nichts Neues as a first-person novel without further qualification requires expansion to illustrate the skill with which the work is fashioned and the way in which it could be read nevertheless on a universal level, and not just in Weimar Germany. Although Bäumer is an individual, he is also part of a larger force, and the novel contains a series of concentric rings, at the center of which is Bäumer himself. Much of the novel, indeed, is a first-person plural narrative, and most of the chapters begin with the pronoun “wir,” a pronoun that is both ambiguous (since it can be exclusive, “not you,” or embracing, “all of us”) and also variable. It is always entirely clear what is meant, however, and Remarque manipulates its use for effect. When the work begins, the “wir” refers, for example, to the remains of the company that has just returned from the front, but it can also mean — as the broadest of the rings, “we humans” (as opposed to the animals they become). Further, it can mean “we, the Germans” (an idea Remarque even permits the soldiers to play with grammatically at one point), or “we the German army.” It can also refer to ordinary soldiers (on the German or even on both sides). Moving inwards from the company, the first person plural may refer to the entire platoon, or to the subgroups within it, of the former high-school boys, or the wider group of friends including Tjaden and Westhus, who are not from that background, and Katczinsky, who is older. Even closer to the center, “wir” can refer to Bäumer and Katczinsky, two friends once perceived (in an image Remarque was fond of) as two sparks of life on a nocturnal battlefield. In the brief final chapter, Bäumer is alone, now that most of his closest friends, last of all Katczinsky, have fallen, and becomes, as it were, a first person singular, though he is aware that behind his individuality is a separate and independent life force: “dieses, was in mir Ich sagt” (288; my conscious self, 207). But he falls, and now becomes the subject of a third-person narrative in an objective report on his death and the lack of official comment upon it. To the bare facts of his death is added a speculation that can carry none of the direct verisimilitude of the rest of the novel.7 It also takes us back to a prefatory motto before the start of the book, a statement about the novel, fixed in the reality of the present and

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referring to a whole generation of survivors, those still alive and reading the work in the Weimar Republic. Bäumer’s inability, while taking part in the war, to rationalize his thoughts about it is made clear in his view of the enemy. The concept is, in the first instance, an abstract, since the principal enemy faced by the soldiers is death itself. In a different sense, the real enemy of Bäumer and his fellows is their immediate superiors (noncommissioned officers, that is, since he and the reader rarely even see anyone of higher rank).8 The declared enemy is usually invisible; there are references to the guns, but Bäumer himself encounters directly only the single poilu he kills, and later on a group of Russian prisoners of war. The absence from these texts of a picture of the enemy is one of the principal features of the antiwar novel, especially significant in the Weimar context, of course, as an outwardly directed policy message. It is also part of the general antiwar statement in the context of modern warfare, and a feature too of antiwar narrative in other languages.9 The term antiwar, incidentally, is itself slightly ambiguous, and might refer to a standpoint taken against war in general or against seeing any merit in the First World War; the term is not necessarily the same as “pacifist,” though there is often an overlap. Of the enemies actually encountered by Bäumer, only the Frenchman has a name, Gérard Duval, and he is literally thrown together with Bäumer when the latter falls upon him in a shell crater and in panic stabs him. Trapped with the dying man in the shell hole, Bäumer promises all kinds of things, most specifically that there must be no more war; the basic pacifist message is addressed to the reader, and it was of special relevance in the period in which the novel was published. When he returns to his own lines and tells others about the experience, Bäumer is shown a sniper coldbloodedly picking off soldiers from the opposing trenches. In the face of this reality, Bäumer realizes that even though he could not do such a thing, he has to suppress for the moment any questioning of war as such, since that way madness lies. The motif of the sniper does recur after the war, in Der Weg zurück, where the questioning takes on a completely new tone in peacetime, and has even more significance in the Weimar context. On duty guarding some Russian prisoners, Bäumer has more time, since he is behind the lines, and he is able to speculate a little — but not much — more on the nature of war. Again he realizes that it would lead to madness to pursue his ideas while the war is still on (the central figure in Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht [Higher Command, 1930] does indeed suffer a mental breakdown), but Bäumer promise himself that he will retain his thoughts until after the war. The passage merits citing: Ein Befehl hat diese stillen Gestalten zu unsern Feinden gemacht; ein Befehl könnte sie in unsere Freunde verwandeln. An irgendeinem Tisch wird ein Schriftstück von einigen Leuten unterzeichnet, die keiner von

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uns kennt; und jahrelang ist unser höchstes Ziel das, worauf sonst die Verachtung der Welt und ihre höchste Strafe ruht. (193–94) [An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law.] (137)

He realizes that it is not yet the time to think this through, and in the historical context of the book the matter has to be shelved. In the context of the reader in the Weimar Republic, though, it was appropriate that thought should now be given to this faux-naif view of the way in which governments declare war. The question of murder as a crime is also raised within the context of the war in Der Weg zurück. The basic and most immediate form of prose war description is probably the diary: soldiers kept them and many were published, either after the death of the writer in battle (these are the most immediate — that by the nationalist nature poet and novelist Hermann Löns [1866–1914] is an example) or later, in which case they may well have gone through a filtering process by the diarist, as Ernst Jünger commented of his own In Stahlgewittern (1920, Storm of Steel, 1929), perhaps the best known. Hans Carossa’s Rumänisches Tagebuch (1924, A Roumanian Diary, 1929) and Rudolf Binding’s Aus dem Kriege (1925; translated as A Fatalist at War, 1929) are further examples. The diary form could also be entirely fictitious, as in the case of Adrienne Thomas’s Die Katrin wird Soldat (1930, translated as Cathérine Joins Up, also as Katrin Becomes a Soldier, both 1931). Im Westen nichts Neues is not a diary but a fiction, though it strives for the immediacy of the direct narrative, almost as reportage, while avoiding too much detail of time and place and permitting both flashbacks and an arrangement of contrasting scenes.10 In fact the structure of the work is as skilled as the consistency with which the central character is presented. The chapters vary in length considerably, the longest being a central chapter set at the front line and presenting the experience of the horror of war in a way that is sometimes metaphorical (“Die Front ist ein Käfig” [103; The front is a cage, 72]) and sometimes physically, visually, and acoustically descriptive: Die stickige Luft fällt uns . . . noch mehr auf die Nerven. Wir sitzen in unserm Grabe und warten nur darauf, daß wir zugeschüttet werden. Plötzlich heult und blitzt es ungeheuer, der Unterstand kracht in allen Fugen unter einem Treffer . . . Es klirrt metallisch . . . (113) [The stifling air . . . gets on our nerves even more . . . It’s as if we were sitting in our own grave, just waiting for someone to bury us. Suddenly there is a terrible noise and flash of light, and every joint in the dugout creaks under the impact of a direct hit . . . There is a metallic rattling. . . .] (79)

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The description of the dugout as a grave is significant; later on, the men take cover in blown-up graves, where they literally join the exhumed dead. Bäumer comments that even an old man (by which he means someone other than a recruit, and loss of youth is a recurrent theme) might have his hair turned gray by the experience of a bombardment. There is always commentary within the immediacy, but it is subtly done. A good example is in a passage early in the work, when Bäumer visits a dying friend in a field hospital, and states, as it were, to the reader, that this man is twenty and does not want to die, adding that the whole world ought to be led past his bed. This, of course, is just what Remarque does in the novel. Themes once stated are picked up and reiterated, often in more concise form, like themes in a fugue, as the last stages of the war and the real time of the novel from 1917 to 1918 progress. The gradual attrition, Bäumer’s increasing despair at what will come after, and the way he is increasingly forced to confront his own thoughts on the war are examples of this, and Bäumer develops throughout the novel. It needs to be reiterated that the objective final statement in the work is full of irony. Bäumer has in death “einen so gefaßten Ausdruck, als wäre er beinahe zufrieden, daß es so gekommen war” (288; an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way, 207). The subjunctive and the word “beinahe” must not be overlooked, but the reader is aware that the composed look on his face might equally derive from the resigned calm that he has achieved. He does indeed not have to face the miseries faced by all of the characters with some, little, or no success in the sequel; but the reader knows that he did not want to die, since he had established an objective attitude towards himself that depended upon the unquenchable quality of the life force, the “Funke Leben,” as he had referred to himself earlier in a scene with Katczinsky, and which Remarque would use as the title for his concentrationcamp novel of 1952, Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life). The interpretation of what has been referred to simply as the rictus sardonicus11 is as ambiguous as the comment that there was nothing new to report that day: “nichts Neues zu melden,” “nothing new to report,” can mean, of course, that the death of one soldier is not newsworthy, though he has been the subject of an entire novel that is actually called a Bericht, or report. Or it can mean that this pointless death just before the armistice is nothing new on the front.12 For the survivors, of course, the struggle went on. In the short introductory statement that Remarque placed at the very beginning of the book, Im Westen nichts Neues is related to the author’s present and thus to the Weimar Republic, which contained so many of “those who were destroyed by the war even if they escaped its shells.” The novel ends before the Treaty of Versailles and thus focuses entirely upon the war, without reference to its beginning or to its end. The young central figure and his

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immediate associates may be viewed, then, simply as victims of a set of circumstances quite outside their control. The attitude to war as such is clear — that it is unequivocally evil and destructive, physically and psychologically, and the only good thing that came from it was a sense of comradeship, a much-cited comment from the novel, but hardly one that justifies the war, although it has sometimes been taken that way. Nor does the comradeship endure: in this novel it is obliterated by the war itself, as all those close to Bäumer are killed, and in the sequel it soon breaks down. The attitude to the First World War is that it was a hideous waste of life and a betrayal of a whole generation, something that the new Weimar Republic had (now) to put behind itself. There was, however, considerable debate after the war and especially after Versailles as to whether Germany had or had not actually been defeated. After all, the army was still on French soil. In 1919 Hindenburg gave Germany the Dolchstoßlegende, the notion that Germany had been stabbed in the back by revolutionaries at home, ascribing the idea to an (unidentified) British general.13 Remarque permits Bäumer to make it clear that the blockade, lack of supplies, fresh (American) troops, and their own exhaustion had caused the defeat, rather than military inferiority. The later condemnation by the Nazis of Remarque’s supposed defeatism expressed in the work failed to notice that Bäumer says quite unequivocally at the end of the work, though it is slipped into an extended passage of apparent despair: “wir sind nicht geschlagen, denn wir sind als Soldaten besser und erfahrener; wir sind einfach von der vielfachen Übermacht zerdrückt und zurückgeschoben” (280; We haven’t been defeated, because as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we have simply been crushed and pushed back by forces many times superior to ours, 201). That specific message voiced ten years after the war was clearly comforting, even though the end result of being defeated by weight of numbers still constitutes, after all, a defeat. Remarque even allows a nicely ironic comment on the idea of whether or not Germany was defeated in Der Weg zurück, when Birkholz thinks back to the last essay he had written at school in 1916, on the subject of “why Germany was to win the war.” He recalls that it was given a B minus, and thinks to himself that this was a reasonable enough grade in view of what has happened since. It has been noted that “complementary myths” about the war dogged the new republic:14 that the German army had been stabbed in the back by — socialist — political forces at home, rendering defeat inevitable; and that they had not really been defeated by the allies at all. Not only is neither view accurate, but neither need have any real connection with the two prevailing attitudes in the Weimar Republic to the war and to war as such. One was that the First World War was a baptism of fire, from which the nation could emerge tested and strengthened; the other (less comforting and ultimately rejected in political terms) was that it had been such a waste of life that it should not happen again.

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Unlike, for example, Ernst Glaeser in Jahrgang 1902 (Class of 1902, 1928), Remarque does not show us the outbreak of war and the universal eagerness to enlist, and the war is already under way when Bäumer joins, something that distances his generation completely from any guilt. But in any case, the blame for the war as such is laid firmly at the militaristic world of Wilhelmine society, reinforced by those in authority over the young, notably the teachers. Bäumer’s teacher, Kantorek, drives them to enlist, and is satisfyingly paid back by being ridiculed later in the work when he, as an ageing reservist, is drilled by one of his former pupils. However, that ridicule does not cancel out the bitterness of the condemnation of the “thousands of Kantoreks” who drove the young men to their deaths. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the focal point and embodiment of that society, actually appears in the work, seen from a distance inspecting the troops, something that happens in other war novels, but the militarism has been filtered through the authority figures — the teachers, the priests, the politicians — who had been trusted by the young combatants to guide them into life. The condemnation of these figures by the generation (in the words of Remarque’s motto) “who were destroyed by the war,” was made in a number of novels of the period.15 The moral betrayal of a generation, as well as its physical destruction, is the key to most of the Weimar pacifist novels. But there is in neither of Remarque’s war novels any hint of that notion of a stab in the back. The only criticism that Remarque permits Bäumer to make of those in Germany itself is aimed, not at political movements with an interest in beginning, maintaining, or stopping the war, but at profiteers: “Die Fabrikbesitzer in Deutschland sind reiche Leute geworden — uns zerschrinnt die Ruhr die Därme” (274; The factory-owners in Germany have grown rich while dysentery racks our guts, 197). The profiteers are also pilloried in the second novel, notably the unpleasantly arrogant Onkel Karl, who had been a senior quartermaster during the war and had clearly lived very well, continuing to do so afterwards. The death of Bäumer at the end of Im Westen nichts Neues is a deliberate closure. Bäumer dies before the end of the war, just possibly content at not having to face the future (though we have just seen his affirmation of the life force within him). His death may even be viewed as an expiation for the death of Duval, the only named enemy soldier (just as Ernst Graeber — who has killed a German soldier in Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben, also dies at the end of that work). The internationalism of the work is important, and it was indeed appropriate for a Weimar liberal novel to proclaim to the world that the ordinary soldier in the German army was virtually identical to all the other combatants, as a way of diminishing German militarism. Indeed, there were critics abroad who deplored the way in which the enemy was rendered too harmless by the book.16 It has to be recalled, however, that the Weimar anti-war novel was part of an unusually international literature. It did, it is true, take a long time before anthologies of

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war poetry began to include works from all the combatant nations, but in the case of the novel, the way in which the universality of the experience of the trenches overrode other considerations was underscored by the appearance in German translation during the Weimar period of large numbers of war novels from abroad. Equally, not just Remarque’s, but virtually all other contemporary German war novels were (as is evident from the texts referred to here) translated into English, as well as into French and other languages, many of them in 1929. To give just two examples, one from each side, Alexander Moritz Frey’s still unjustly neglected novel Die Pflasterkästen was translated as The Crossbearers, and Evadne Price’s Not so Quiet . . . as Mrs Biest pfeift. Neither was in the forefront of war literature in the period, though they sold relatively well.17 A contemporary German critique of the Weimar war novels referred to the way in which, through them, “die Vergangenheit, drückend und quälend wie ein Alptraum, wird endgültig zu Grabe getragen” (the past, depressing and agonizing as a nightmare, is at last laid to rest).18 This is the essence of Remarque’s and the other antiwar novels for their time; in the context of another war, the term Bewältigung der Vergangenheit would be used, and after the Second World War would be applied by writers to the question of how Germany had come to accept Hitler, but the Weimar Republic needed to cope in the first instance with the nature of the war itself. The antiwar novels, while serving as a reminder of the reasons behind the rootlessness of those now entering maturity in a new society, helped them to get it out of their system. What the pacifist war literature did not do — at least not to any great extent, and certainly not overtly — was to try to justify (or deny) the loss of the war, or to seek to promote a way of avenging the perceived shame of the Treaty of Versailles. Weimar pacifist war literature is a literature of closure, but not of the backward look. Even within the consistent historical context, Bäumer constantly looks forward to the time after the war, even though he cannot conceive of what it will be like. Those who survived the war — as Bäumer should have, and as Ernst Birkholz, the central figure and narrator of Der Weg zurück actually does — view the postwar period without expectations and often without an aim, but they look forward. The rootlessness and aimlessness of the generation of those who went from school into the war is a theme of many of Remarque’s later novels, and the central figure in Der schwarze Obelisk shows the same qualities. But when they do look back they realize that the prewar world is completely gone, and the war itself, once they have come to terms with details, has to be remembered only as a warning that it should not happen again. There was, of course, a different approach, which did look back to a perceived and supposedly reclaimable past glory, and hence concentrated upon the obliteration of what was seen as the shame of Versailles, a treaty that, it was claimed, had imposed unreasonable conditions upon an undefeated army.

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If Im Westen nichts Neues shows us a Weimar writer trying to cope with the facts of the war experience as such, Der Weg zurück shows us the working out of the problems that Bäumer did not survive to face. The second novel is of considerable importance, and it is important, especially in the context of Weimar literature, that it be regarded not so much as a sequel but more as the second part of one work, even if it did not enjoy the international reputation of Im Westen nichts Neues. It picks up on ideas that were deliberately shelved in wartime, and also corrects possible misinterpretations that might have arisen from the first novel. Bäumer dies, but his alter ego Birkholz, very much like him in background, experience, and indeed home address, observes in practice what Bäumer speculated upon at the end of the first novel. It is worth citing Bäumer’s views again. If we had returned in 1916, he says, we should have created a real revolution, but now we are müde, zerfallen, ausgebrannt, wurzellos und ohne Hoffnung. Wir werden uns nicht mehr zurechtfinden können. Man wird uns auch nicht verstehen. [. . .] Wir sind überflüssig für uns selbst, wir werden wachsen, einige werden sich anpassen, andere sich fügen, und viele werden ratlos sein; — die Jahre werden zerrinnen, und schließlich werden wir zugrunde gehen. (286–87) [weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope. No-one will understand us. [. . .] We are superfluous even to ourselves, we shall grow older, a few will adapt, others will make adjustments, and many of us will not know what to do — the years will trickle away, and eventually we shall perish.] (206)

Bäumer comments right away that maybe this is just melancholy, which will vanish; but the words have been spoken. The “wir” in this case refers to Bäumer’s exact contemporaries; those slightly older may have had jobs and families before the war, and those who come after will push them aside, but the various possibilities he gives for a reaction are observed by Birkholz in Der Weg zurück. Remarque’s sequel to Im Westen nichts Neues is in many respects even more of a Bericht, a report on how the road back had to be taken by those destroyed by the war, even though they were not killed. It presents to the reader once again a variety of experiences facing the former soldiers as they return to life in Germany. The novel opens with the last days of the war, the suddenness of the peace, and then with the march home. But Birkholz and his comrades are not the first, and society is already under way again. The question is always whether or not the returning soldiers can cope with the changes (and in some cases the lack of change) in society, and the changes in their own personalities and attitudes. Novels of the war itself, like Im Westen nichts Neues, looked back; the paradox of Der Weg zurück is that, although still a historical novel at the time it

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was written, it shows the ex-soldiers learning that they have to go forward. To summarize the answer very succinctly: the lesson that Birkholz (and the reader) learns is that the way back into life could not involve actually going backward because the war had changed everything. The characters parallel those in the first novel. Birkholz and Bäumer are, as indicated, pretty well the same person, though Birkholz refers to the deaths of Bäumer and the others. Tjaden survives anyway, and the resourceful Katczinsky and the strong Haie Westhus, both killed in the first novel, are merged and replaced by a younger but equally capable and pragmatic ex-soldier, Willy Homeyer. The main characters try initially to take up things where they left off, but they soon realize that they cannot. This can be positive, for example, in the way they now react to their old teachers, who no longer exercise the same authoritarian control over them, and against whom they can now assert themselves. But the much vaunted comradeship of the trenches quickly breaks down, as those with a business sense are already making deals at the end of the war and do well for themselves later. Der Weg zurück demonstrates that having been a good soldier is no guarantee of doing well in postwar society, just as the first novel showed that being good at mathematics at school would not save you from being killed at the front. New social divisions open up, and the political chaos and polarization after the war sets former comrades against one another, until one of Birkholz’s immediate group is shot dead by another when they find themselves on different sides of the barricades. This is the first of several significant shots fired in a novel that is set, ostensibly, in peacetime. The birth of the Weimar Republic comes about under fire as the echoes of the war take a very long time to die away. Some scores concerned with the war itself are settled, but although this can be interpreted on an individual level as a form of closure, it can also serve to indicate how much things have moved away from the war in a very short time. In an echo of the revenge taken on a drill corporal in the first novel, the soldiers beat up a former sergeant, who during the war had caused the death of one of their friends. At first they are reluctant, because the sergeant is now an innkeeper and therefore not really the same person. Only his army trousers indicate that the guilt of the wartime happenings is still there, which provides the impetus to punish him after all; the initial reluctance is as important as the revenge. Various scenes in Im Westen nichts Neues are deliberately picked up. Bäumer had demanded, for example, that all the world be shown a dying man in a field hospital, and had later taken the reader, as it were, on a tour of the military hospital in which he himself was being treated. Birkholz takes the reader to an asylum, where those literally driven mad by the war maintain the delusion that it is still going on, and he observes too the postwar situation of the war-wounded, the real results of the war, as they actually parade past as part of a demonstration. So too, where Bäumer had

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been unable because of the immediate pressure of the war to think through a given theme, these ideas are now worked out through Birkholz in the later novel. After the Duval incident, Bäumer needed to cling to the circular “war is war” argument simply to be able to carry on, and hence was made to watch the sniper at work. With the Russian prisoners, he drew (and then withdrew from the implications of) the parallel between killing in war — unschuldig töten — and murder. In the new novel, one of Birkholz’s friends, Albert Trosske, kills a man he finds with his girlfriend, and at the trial he draws a distinction between this man, whom he hates, and the men he has killed in the war but did not hate. Again the reader is made aware of the inconsistency. Just before the trial, too, Birkholz visits a former sniper and finds him insisting still that the statement “war is war” eradicates any need for reflection at all. For the former sniper, the argument that he was only obeying orders justifies his own pride in his achievements, which he parades much as if it had all been some kind of shooting match (an idea played with in Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902), albeit with live targets. The sniper Birkholz visited is a family man with a small daughter, and he dismisses anyone who thinks differently from himself as a Bolshevik. The small picture of the sniper, Bruno Mückenhaupt, is an indictment of an attitude to the war that was itself a widespread method of coping with the past; but the argument upon which it is based is still a circular one. War is not justified simply by saying that it is what it is. Mückenhaupt’s conscience is clear because it has never troubled him; he could be the sniper from the first novel, and he represented a widespread attitude in the Weimar Republic, an attitude Remarque wanted increasingly to highlight at the time of the second novel. If some of Birkholz’s colleagues do well, others do badly either financially or personally, and some do not survive at all. An older soldier, a countryman, finds that his wife has been (briefly) unfaithful while he was away, and he cannot forgive her in spite of her patent remorse; not only does the relationship effectively break down, but they move away from the country to the town, where they remain unhappy. This is not just a personal tragedy of the war but indicates a larger-scale breakdown in society. Of the others, two commit suicide, unable to cope with the experience of the war. Birkholz’s sensitive friend Ludwig, who was a lieutenant, has contracted syphilis during the war — a fairly obviously symbol that he himself interprets as having the war still in his blood. He cuts his wrists to exorcise this ongoing disease and to get the war out of his system in a literal sense. Another comrade, Georg Rahe, tries to go backward by rejoining the army, since this is all he now knows, and when this does not work, he returns to France to commit suicide by shooting himself. The phenomenon of survivor guilt was not uncommon after the First World War. Birkholz and his closest friends survive, but sometimes only with difficulty. Birkholz himself, for example, after trying to be a teacher, finds that

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he cannot behave toward children as teachers behaved towards him, and he undergoes a kind of breakdown. The gulf that has now opened up between those at home and those who were soldiers and suffered the psychological damage of the war (a gulf already visible in the home scene in Im Westen nichts Neues) is summed up at a dance by a girl he knew before, who tells Birkholz: “Sei doch mal ein bißchen flott!” (208; liven up a bit). Eventually he realizes that he is not just wasting his time with her, but, in his words, that he has been knocking vainly at the doors of his youth. He is still young, but those doors are closed. He bids the girl (but not just the girl) an exaggerated farewell, because he has discovered that ein stiller, schweigender Krieg auch in dieser Landschaft der Erinnerung gewütet hat, und daß es sinnlos von mir wäre, weiter zu suchen. Die Zeit steht dazwischen wie eine breite Kluft, ich kann nicht zurück, es gibt nichts anderes mehr, ich muß vorwärts, marschieren, irgendwohin, denn ich habe noch kein Ziel (209) [a quiet, silent war raged over this landscape of memory as well, and it would be senseless for me to carry on searching. Time is like a broad canyon between then and now, and I can’t go back, so there is nothing but to go forwards, marching, somewhere or other, because I have no fixed goal. . . .]

The passage is one of the most important in the book, a stage in the learning process begun by Bäumer in the earlier novel and relevant to the setting up of the Weimar Republic.19 The new republic had to look forward, but of course, too many elements in it looked backward instead to Versailles. When writers like Remarque looked into the future from the vantage point of 1930, this was already apparent, and they saw how the future would be determined by those who refused to let go of the past. Der Weg zurück is set in the period from the end of 1918 (the war is not yet over in the prologue, though Bäumer, who died in October, is already dead) to 1920. The chronology is quite clear. At the very end of the work it is said of one of the characters that: “Vor einem Jahr noch lag der da . . . mit zwei Kameraden allein in einem Maschinengewehrnest . . . und ein Angriff kam” (348; Only a year ago he was still in the trenches . . . with two others in a machine gun nest . . . under attack). Only the epilogue, the brief Ausgang, is set in the spring of 1920, given that the characters speak of themselves as “kaum erst raus” (364; barely out) of the forces. Through Birkholz’s eyes we see the confused politics at the birth of the Weimar Republic; just like Bäumer in the first novel, Birkholz makes judgments to an extent and lays open questions for the audience. The revolutionary chaos of the soldiers’ councils are shown, principally to demonstrate the breakdown of comradeship and the emergence of social realignments, both on a personal level and in the wider sense.

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Neither Birkholz nor Bäumer provides direct political arguments,20 and indeed their immaturity is part of the point of both novels, though they do mature in the course of the works. Bäumer’s discussions with other soldiers permit Remarque to pose questions for the benefit of the audience, however, so that the reader can provide the answers. Sometimes those answers are clearly directed, at others they are more complex. Similarly, in the second work Birkholz and the audience are party to a discussion between the two former soldiers, Ludwig Breyer, who has brought syphilis back from the war, and Georg Rahe, who will ultimately return to France to commit suicide, both of whom are in the event unable to look forward and are drawn back incessantly to the war. The presentation of their views is of great importance. Rahe comments on the confused politics: “Sieh dir an, wie sie sich bereits gegenseitig in den Haaren liegen, Sozialdemokraten, Unabhängige, Spartakisten, Kommunisten” (230; Look at the way they are already at each other’s throats, Social Democrats, Independents, Spartacists, Communists), but Breyer sees the blame in themselves. Just as Bäumer had commented that the soldiers would have “einen Sturm entfesselt” (let loose a storm), had they been allowed to return in 1916, whereas by 1918 they are now too defeated in themselves, Breyer says of the situation in 1919: Wir haben mit zu wenig Haß Revolution gemacht, und wir wollten gleich von Anfang an gerecht sein, dadurch ist alles lahm geworden. Eine Revolution muß losrasen wie ein Waldbrand, dann kann man später zu säen beginnen; aber wir wollten nichts zerstören und doch erneuern. Wir hatten nicht einmal mehr die Kraft zum Haß, so müde und ausgebrannt waren wir vom Krieg. (230) [Our revolution didn’t have enough hate in it and we wanted to be just from the beginnings, and so it all flopped. A revolution should roar away like a forest fire, and then after that you can start to sow seeds again. Only we didn’t want to destroy anything, just renew. We didn’t even have the strength to hate, because we were so tired, so burnt out by the war.]

In spite of the failure of the revolution, Breyer goes on to say that it is still possible to get things right by hard work, even though he himself cannot go on and commits suicide, as does Rahe later. But Birkholz, the listener (representing the reader), does not, and he carries the message on and transmits it symbolically to Weimar in 1931.21 By then, however, it was historically too late for such a message: indeed, the revolution had not been radical enough and too many earlier elements and attitudes had survived too well. We need cite only the title of a documentary novel by Theodor Plievier in this respect, a novel that appeared just before Hitler took power: Der Kaiser ging, die Generäle blieben (1932; translated as The Kaiser Goes, the Generals Remain, 1933). Remarque himself summed it up once again

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in his later novel about the Weimar Republic, Der schwarze Obelisk: “Die Revolutionäre selbst waren von sich so erschreckt, daß sie sofort die Bonzen und Generäle der alten Regierung zu Hilfe riefen . . . und die deutsche Revolution versank in rotem Plüsch, Gemütlichkeit, Stammtisch und Sehnsucht nach Uniformen und Kommandos” (The revolutionaries frightened themselves so much that they soon called in the bigwigs and generals from the old regime to help them . . . and the German revolution sank into red plush, coziness, the local pub and a longing for uniforms and orders).22 Birkholz survives and goes forward, but without aims or hope. One problem with Der Weg zurück is the question of narrative perspective. Although it is ostensibly a first person narrative once again (using both the singular and the plural forms), Remarque appears to break this perspective in a few cases. The story of the older man whose wife has deceived him, Breyer’s suicide, and finally that of Georg Rahe, all seem to be told from an omniscient point of view, although Bethke is visited by Birkholz and presumably told him his story, and Birkholz falls into a fever after Breyer’s suicide, so that the description forms part of his feverish dreams.23 Rahe’s suicide, though, is different, since he is alone and on the battlefield when he kills himself with the third shot fired in the work. The first kills Max Weil, shot by a former comrade now on a soldiers’ council; with the second Albert Trosske kills his rival in love, provoking the debate about killing. Rahe, though, might almost be viewed as the last casualty of the war, and thus this actual break from the narrative perspective is an effective one, matching, perhaps deliberately, the death of Bäumer, which was also presented with a shift of perspective. It is — apart from an epilogue — the last section in the work. The war is over for Rahe as it was for Bäumer, but now it is also over for Birkholz and the others. Equally significant, however, is the conclusion of Der Weg zurück, and this Epilog (matching a Prolog set before the end of the war) is perhaps the part most closely related to the contemporary Weimar situation, although within the narrative timescale it is still not long after the close of the hostilities, in the spring of 1920. Birkholz and his few remaining immediate friends are out for a walk in the country. He notes that “wir sehen uns nur noch selten” (359; we rarely see each other any more), and indeed there is throughout the work a kind of attrition parallel to that in Im Westen nichts Neues, as even the surviving former comrades-in-arms drift apart. The former soldiers watch a group of young Wandervögel, presumably some of those members of the youth movement taken over after the war by the Freikorps, being drilled as if at the front. When the ex-soldiers object, they are mocked as cowards and Bolsheviks. The prewar Wandervogel and Freideutsche Jugend movements were, in the general chaos, often taken over by different political extremes. By 1926 the Hitler Youth was already in being, but it did not really become prominent until 1933. There were independent right (and left) wing paramilitary youth groups from 1919, however,

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some associated with the Stahlhelm.24 The final prognosis, then, is a gloomy one, clearly visible in 1931, but with its roots clearly there in 1920. From the perspective of 1919, the ex-soldiers could not see the future clearly; they learned only that they must look forward. When they did look forward, however, already in 1920 and certainly in 1931, the future was bleak as the next generation harked back to a war they had not experienced. The publication of Im Westen nichts Neues was a literary event, partly because of the hype with which that publication was surrounded — it appeared first in a magazine, and only after that as a printed book, and was an enormous success from the start. There followed a great furore, which has been well documented.25 Stories began to circulate about the genesis of the work, and indeed about its author, who was praised and attacked in about equal measure. Remarque’s most famous novel led to bitter rejoinders, straightforward parodies, and a number of obvious imitations, as well as polemical writings purporting to offer the truth about the author and his book. Many imitated the style and even the typography and design of the Ullstein cover. Some of the texts involved are worthless, others not without their point.26 When in 1930, too, Lewis Milestone’s American film All Quiet on the Western Front appeared, showings in Germany were famously disrupted by the Nazis.27 A stop was put to all this on May 10 1933 when Remarque’s book was burned on account of its “literarische Verrat am Soldaten des Weltkrieges, für Erziehung des Volkes im Geiste der Wahrhaftigkeit” (literary betrayal of the soldiers of the war, and to educate the people in the spirit of truthfulness).28 Of course, this was in world terms completely ineffective. The banning of Remarque’s novels in the Third Reich, novels that had been translated on publication into many of the major languages, became, in literary terms, a badge of honor. Remarque himself spent the war in exile in the United States, and after the war he lived and wrote there or in Switzerland, where he died in 1970. Im Westen nichts Neues was not the first of the Weimar antiwar novels by any means, and the years from 1927 to 1933 were immensely productive of works of this kind. Remarque’s work is, however, pivotal. He knew and may be presumed to have reacted to earlier texts (indeed he reviewed some); some later works clearly show the influence of his work, and others more or less exactly contemporary with Im Westen nichts Neues demonstrate a noteworthy synchronicity of style and approach. There are also several features common to a great number of Weimar antiwar novels, before and after Remarque’s. In any survey of literature in Weimar Germany, and the war novels in particular, however, it is important to recall that very large numbers of German publications, including novels, diaries, memoirs, and factual works concerned with the war, appeared between the early 1920s and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. In the earliest stage after the war it was largely a literature of justification, which Hans-Harald

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Müller categorizes mainly as militaria, with the fictional treatment of the war from the negative point of view coming in any real degree only after 1927, and then provoking a reaction from the political right.29 Before Remarque, the best-known antiwar novel in Germany and abroad was Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (translated as The Case of Sergeant Grischa, 1927), the only book of his war quartet to be published in the Weimar period. The style of this novel — with an omniscient and philosophical narrator and a focus upon one single incident treated in detail — contrasts with Remarque’s faster-paced and wider-ranging immediacy. It remains — with Zweig’s Erziehung vor Verdun (Education before Verdun, 1935) — a work of major importance, and it has some features in common with Remarque’s work, but in other respects they are not really comparable. Slightly earlier or exactly contemporary works by four other writers are closer, however, all of them, significantly, giving the most attention to the ordinary soldier.30 Georg von der Vring’s Soldat Suhren (Private Suhren, 1928) appeared in 1927 and was reviewed by Remarque. It is also a first-person narrative by a private soldier, but it lacks the pace and variety of Im Westen nichts Neues, and allows the personality of the central character to dominate to too great an extent. As a small example, Suhren cites his own poetry; Bäumer’s poetry exists, but it has been rendered obsolete by the war and remains in a drawer at home, so that the reader does not hear it. Suhren, von der Vring’s eponymous hero, has more in common with the central figure of Remarque’s somewhat dated Traumbude than with Bäumer.31 Far more successful was Ludwig Renn’s Krieg (War, 1929), together with its sequel Nachkrieg (After War, 1930), the works that match Remarque’s perhaps most closely. Renn was the pseudonym of Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golßenau, from an aristocratic family, who had been a lieutenant in the war. The work, however, is direct, in accordance with the neue Sachlichkeit, the new objectivity, and presents the war through the eyes of the fictionalized author-narrator, Ludwig Renn. In Nachkrieg we see the political tensions at the start of the Weimar Republic in an amount of detail which is only sketched in Der Weg zurück. Interestingly, although it is as antiwar as Remarque’s work, it was taken, as Ulrich Broich has made clear, as a glorification of the comradeship and loyalty of the German soldier. Whereas Renn looks at the entire war, another work first published in July, 1929 but written, according to its preface (and perhaps distancing itself deliberately from Remarque, in 1928), Ernst Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie (1929, Four Infantrymen on the Western Front), successfully filmed as Westfront 1918, concentrates (as the film title and subtitle of the book implies), on the last year of the war. Again looking at a group of ordinary soldiers, the antiwar pessimism and resignation to the belligerence of the human condition that is there too in, say, Zweig’s far broader novels, is made very clear here.32 The fourth work, a significant one for the Weimar Republic, is slightly different and has been

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referred to already. Ernst Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902 is a novel of the home front, presenting the war very effectively through the eyes of a schoolboy who grows up during the war. The novel moves from the Schützenfest mentality of the opening through to justification and then to breakdowns in society. More than any other works, perhaps, this text apportions blame, as a former left-wing activist, now a soldier, writes a letter home listing as those who brought the war about the military leaders, the politicians, and the industrialists; at the same time the young narrator is clear on the guilt of the teachers, the clergy, and the press, which he summarizes in a condemnation of the earlier generation. The work uses as a motto the succinct statement in the work itself by another child: “la guerre, ce sont nos parents.”33 As far as later novels are concerned, the style and approach of Im Westen nichts Neues itself was echoed quite specifically by Theodor Plievier in his novel of the German fleet, Des Kaisers Kulis (The Emperor’s Coolies) in 1930; the work shows clearly the exploitation of naval ratings (many of those at the center of the work were merchant seamen drafted into the imperial navy) and again the real conflict is between officers and other ranks. On the face of it less directly influenced by Remarque, but influenced nonetheless, is Adrienne Thomas’s Die Katrin wird Soldat, which is cast as a diary by a girl from Alsace who joins the war as a nurse. The Alsatian setting of the novel makes for an interesting view of the enemy, but the work as a whole bears out Remarque’s belief, shared to some extent by Glaeser in Jahrgang 1902 and certainly by Frey in Die Pflasterkästen, that only the field hospital really shows what war is like. Thomas’s central figure experiences this from behind the lines, and she dies before the war is over, after the man she loves has fallen. The negative-resigned attitude to the war is more in accord here with the attitudes in Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie than with Bäumer, in spite of the latter’s death. The influence of Im Westen nichts Neues was not restricted to German works. The fact that it was widely and immediately translated meant that the technique of offering a worm’s-eye view, essentially, that is, a victim’s view of the war from a single standpoint, even by a woman, was adopted elsewhere. Reference has been made already to Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . , the title of which makes the influence clear.34 There are various features that link the antiwar novels of the late twenties and early thirties. The depiction of war as negative, completely devoid of any heroic aspects at all (heroic, that is, in the sense, of glorifying: those shown do not lack courage, of course) is the principal feature, coupled with the lack of any real Feindbild (image of the enemy) in historical terms. Weapons and death are the enemies, as is the military machine as such, seen at its closest in the conflict between the ordinary soldier and his immediate superiors. A further feature is the generalization of the ordinary soldier and the perceived (sometimes overtly mentioned) interchangeability

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of the British, French, and German frontline soldiers. The comradeship of the war is a corollary of this, but in spite of exaggerated claims for it, it is always the togetherness of the condemned, powerless to influence their own fate. The ordinary soldier was a victim, and this is relevant to the way in which the antiwar novel of the Weimar Republic tried to overcome the past by focusing upon those not responsible for the war. Guilt lay with the generation before, those in authority who abused their responsibility towards the young by promoting or condoning the war. The novels in question are full of such characters, often teachers. Heinrich Böll, after the Second World War, made a similar point in his brilliant short story “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . .” (“Tell them in Spa . . .”), in which the narrator is a severely wounded schoolboy soldier brought back to a temporary field hospital set up in the classical Gymnasium he had left only three months before. Böll uses this to represent in a small space the complete betrayal by an older generation and its values as put across in a school of a youth who could bear no responsibility for the Third Reich. So too, in the Weimar war novel, Bäumer (like Birkholz) goes straight from school to the front when the war is already in progress, and he has no influence upon and indeed little perspective of the war. The same applies with Plievier’s merchant sailors and the private soldiers in Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie and many other works. Glaeser’s central figure in Jahrgang 1902 is a schoolboy throughout, and Adrienne Thomas’s Katrin is not only young but also a woman. Frey’s Die Pflasterkästen is about non-combatant stretcher bearers, under fire but not actually fighting. This distancing of the characters from responsibility culminates in the somewhat unusual brief novel by Ernst Johannsen, Fronterinnerungen eines Pferdes (Frontline Memoirs of a Mare, 1929), a work perhaps understandably, but in fact quite unjustly, neglected. It is not a sentimentalized animal tale, but rather a vehicle for Johannsen to play with the idea of man in war behaving literally bestially. But it uses the fact that thousands of horses were killed in the war (they appear in several novels, not just in Im Westen nichts Neues, though the scene there is a famous one), and Johannsen has a horse — or more properly and quite significantly a mare — as the narrator of his second war presentation. This ploy enables Johannsen to show us the war (albeit realistically) from the point of view of a completely uncomprehending victim, even less able to influence things that the infantrymen.35 War itself is seen as something all too human, however, and it is another feature of these novels that war can be seen as something visited upon the soldiers, either produced at the stroke of a pen (as in Remarque) or more generally an illness, something inside the human body, as in Zweig and Johannsen. Remarque’s novels differ in attitude from some of those discussed: there is a greater pessimism, for example, in Ernst Johannsen, in Adrienne Thomas, and in Edlef Köppen than in either of the two works, in spite of Bäumer’s death. The insistence on the spark of life is a positive note in spite

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of everything. Remarque is — and the point needs to made — also a great writer, his novels showing complexity of structure, skill, and consistency of presentation, as well as presenting ideas for the reader to consider, all within a framework that maintains interest. Remarque tried to come to terms with the war, both as closure for those who had been part of it and to warn the future. The antiwar stance was also a message for the policy-makers of the new republic. Im Westen nichts Neues in particular went, furthermore, beyond the borders of that new republic and into the canon of world literature. Im Westen nichts Neues and its sequel exorcised the war for the generation that survived its shells. The prediction that some would adapt and others go under is worked out in Der Weg zurück. Both works blame fairly and squarely the generation before, and both criticize those who profited from the war; the attitudes of that earlier generation and the profiteers themselves were still to be found in the new republic. There are messages of comfort in the first novel. The war may have slaughtered the innocents (and worse, made them slaughter others), but the German soldiers were not defeated, whatever history actually says. The line taken is somewhat casuistic, but the soldiers are shown as having done their duty. No one deserts, except for one farmer who cracks and returns to Germany — not to Holland — for the harvest. The underlying theme of the universality of the ordinary soldier and the determination that there should never be another war is an appropriate message not only to Weimar, but also from Weimar for the outside world, while the broader message, that war is an evil per se, has maintained the value of Im Westen nichts Neues. That work was a historical novel from the start, and historical novels give different messages to different presents. There will probably be no more wars in the trenches, but the betrayal of one generation by another, the arbitrariness in the way in which wars begin, and the fact that much of the fighting is done by the uncomprehending young — these are lasting themes. If separated from the first novel, Der Weg zurück is more fixed in its own time and less universal than the earlier work. Birkholz, the narrator, may have in him the spark of life, the force that will carry him on, but Remarque allows others to put a more pessimistic view of the Weimar Republic: Breyer’s view that the revolution was not strong enough led (partly) to his own suicide. That he was right was becoming clearer by 1931, but Birkholz carried on (in the figure of Bodmer in Der schwarze Obelisk) through the Weimar Republic, and he lived on precariously under the Nazis and through the war, in the figure of Pohlmann in Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben. It is a double irony that Pohlmann had been a teacher until his dismissal by the Nazis, and that his part was played in the 1958 film by Remarque himself. But however historically fixed the second novel may be, it too has a general application, even if it is only in the confirmation of the old adage that the lesson of history is that men never learn. It has to be borne in mind that the Weimar antiwar novels were part of a literary scene that included also triumphalist-heroic or genuine adventure

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stories about the war, and also works that are not so easily classified. Remarque referred in his review of Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern to its “wohltuender Sachlichkeit” (comforting objectivity; see note 31). Remarque was at pains to indicate (though the comment appeared in the motto only in the English, and not the German printed edition) that war was not an adventure, even if Im Westen nichts Neues has been accused of having passages where the war might be seen that way. The meal cooked by the men when they are guarding a supply store is usually cited, but it is presented as a temporary idyll and Bäumer is wounded almost immediately afterwards. There is nothing of the adventure in Remarque’s novels. In historical terms the antiwar novels failed in their intent just as the Weimar Republic failed, for reasons that many of these writers foresaw. The British satirist Peter Cook once gave a famously ironic credit to “those prewar German cabarets who did so much to combat Hitler and prevent the outbreak of World War Two,” and of course the antiwar novels of the Weimar Republic gave way to the pro-war attitudes of the right after 1933.36 Der Weg zurück ends with Birkholz, left alone, just as Bäumer was, stressing that “das Leben ist mir geblieben. Das ist beinahe eine Aufgabe und ein Weg” (366–67; I still have life. That is almost a task, almost a path). But by then it was already too late, and Kosole, one of his friends, had just commented of the boys playing soldiers: “Ja . . . so geht es wieder los” (364; Yes, that’s the way it starts again).

Notes 1

Erich Maria Remarque, Frühe Romane, ed. Thomas F. Schneider and Tilman Westfalen, vol. 1 of Das unbekannte Werk (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998). Die Traumbude was published in Dresden: Verlag Die Schönheit, 1920 as the fourth in their Bücherei der Schönheit. Oddly enough it was translated at the time into Bulgarian, Latvian, and Russian, as well as Dutch: see Thomas F. Schneider and Donald Weiss, eds., Erich Maria Remarque, Die Traumbude . . . Bibliographie (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1995). Gam survives in a typescript in the Remarque archive in New York, and Station am Horizont appeared in seven episodes between 25 November 1927 and 17 February 1928. All three works were published in 2000 in a Russian translation (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000). See Wilhelm von Sternburg, Als wäre alles das letzte Mal: Erich Maria Remarque; Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998) on the early works. Der Feind presents a final interesting and relevant case: it is not a novel and it was first published in 1993 in German, but not in Remarque’s text, since the stories that make up the volume were published originally in English translation in the USA. Remarque’s original texts were not published in German and are not extant. The stories do, however, complement the narratives of Im Westen nichts Neues and Der Weg zurück. “The Enemy” and other stories, translated by A. W. Wheen, appeared in Collier’s

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between 1930 and 1931; retranslated as Der Feind: Erzählungen by Barbara von Bechtolsheim (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993). 2 For a succinct introduction to the novels of the period, see the introduction by Thomas F. Schneider and Hans Wagener in their important collection Vom Richthofen bis Remarque: Deutschsprachige Prosa zum 1. Weltkrieg (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003). Perhaps the two most useful earlier works are HansHarald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986) and Ann P. Linder, Princes of the Trenches (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996). Further introductions to the novels of the period include J. Knight Bostock, Some WellKnown German War-Novels, 1914–1930 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931); William K. Pfeiler, War and the German Mind (New York: Columbia UP, 1941, repr., New York: AMS, 1966); Wilhelm J. Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany I (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1975); Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkriegs in der Literatur: Zu den Frontromanen der späten Zwanziger Jahre (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1978); Holger Klein, ed., The First World War in Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1978); Charles N. Genno and Heinz Wetzel, eds., The First World War in German Narrative Prose: Essays in Honor of George Wallis Field (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980); Michael P. A. Travers, German Novels of the First World War and Their Ideological Implications, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982); Margrit Stickelberger-Eder, Aufbruch 1914: Kriegsromane der späten Weimarer Republik (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1983); Herbert Bornebusch, Gegen-Erinnerung: Ein formsemantische Analyse des demokratischen Kriegsromans der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985); Thorsten Batz, Allgegenwärtige Fronten — sozialistische und linke Kriegsromane in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997); Horst D. Schlosser, ed., Das deutsche Reich ist eine Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003), the latter with essays on Jünger and Remarque. 3 Texts are cited from the first Ullstein book editions under their Propyläen imprint: Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen, 1929), translated as All Quiet on the Western Front by A. W. Wheen (London: Putnam’s, 1929; the first American edition published by Little, Brown in Boston was expurgated); new translation with the same title by Brian Murdoch (London: Cape, 1994). Der Weg zurück (Berlin: Propyläen, 1931), translated as The Road Back by A. W. Wheen (London: Putnam’s, 1931). Translations of Im Westen nichts Neues are from my published translation; other translations are my own. In references to other war novels, an English translation of the title is given, followed by the year of original publication in German. In general, if an English translation has been published, the year of the first German publication is given, then the English title, in italics, and then the year of publication of the translation. 4

There is an increasingly large number of books on Remarque, of which the following is only a selection (listed alphabetically): Anton Antkowiak, Erich Maria Remarque: Leben und Werke (Berlin: Volk & Wissen, 1965; West Berlin, Das europäische Buch, 1983); Christine Barker and Rex Last, Erich Maria Remarque (London: Wolff, 1979); Franz Baumer, E. M. Remarque (Berlin: Colloquium, 1970); Richard Arthur Firda, Erich Maria Remarque: A Thematic Analysis of His Novels (Bern: Lang, 1988); C. R. Owen, Erich Maria Remarque: A Critical Bio-bibliography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984); Thomas Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque: Ein Chronist des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bramsche: Rasch, 1991); Harley

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U. Taylor, Erich Maria Remarque: A Literary and Film Biography (Bern: Lang, 1989); Tilman Westphalen, ed., Erich Maria Remarque, 1898–1970 (Bramsche: Rasch, 1988). In addition to the biography by von Sternburg noted above, see also Hilton Tims, The Last Romantic: A Life of Erich Maria Remarque (London: Constable and Robinson, 2003). 5

For recent comment on these links, see Hans Wagener, “Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues — Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben: Ein Autor, zwei Weltkriege,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 10 (2000): 31–52.

6

Thus Bostock, German War Novels, 9, commented that “the situations are not worked out in detail, and the characters are mere types.” Possibly pardonable in 1931, views like this persisted for a long time. 7

I have discussed the question of the use of “wir” elsewhere: Brian Murdoch, “Narrative Strategies in Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues,” New German Studies 17 (1992/3): 175–203. See also Sternburg, Biographie, 169–70, and Harald Kloiber, “Struktur, Stil und Motivik in Remarques Im Westen nichts Neues,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 4 (1994): 65–78, esp. 68. 8

Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany I, 26–27, points out that Remarque is positive in both novels about lieutenants, but most of those (few) mentioned have risen through the ranks.

9 See Holger M. Klein, “Grundhaltung und Feindbilder bei Remarque, Céline and Hemingway,” Krieg und Literatur 1 (1989): 7–22. 10

See my paper “Paul Bäumer’s Diary” in Brian Murdoch, Mark Ward, and Maggie Sargeant, eds., Remarque Against War (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies, 1998), 1–23. There is a discussion there of Löns’s diary. On the question of fictive directness, see Ulrich Broich, “‘Hier spricht zum ersten Mal der gemeine Mann’: Die Fiktion vom Kriegserlebnis des einfachen Soldaten in Ludwig Renn, Krieg,” in Schneider and Wagener, Vom Richthofen bis Remarque, 207–16, and Manfred Hettling’s interestingly titled “Arrangierte Authentizität: Philipp Witkop, Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten,” in the same volume, 51–70. Witkop’s collection was first published in 1916 as Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten, then in 1928 with the amended title; it was translated as German Students’ War Letters by A. F. Wedd (London: Methuen, 1929).

11

Richard Arthur Firda, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Twayne, 1993), 51, sees the ending as the expression of a delusive “retarding moment” as in classical tragedy, a pessimistic answer to those who saw the war as a source of patriotic rebirth. This does not take account of the recurrent idea of the spark of life, and (although the book considers Remarque’s other works, in spite of its title), does not draw the connection between Bäumer and Birkholz, falling into the not unusual (but not particularly useful) mode of linking Birkholz and Remarque instead.

12

This takes us back to the title of the work in German. See Uwe Zagratzki, “Remarque und seine britischen Kritiker,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 10 (2000): 9–30, esp. 21–22. All Quiet on the Western Front — the title suggested by Herbert Read — is equally ironic and ambiguous.

13 Walther Tormin “Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Weimarer Republik,” in Die Weimarer Republik, ed. Walther Tormin (Hanover: Literatur und Zeitgeschehen,

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1962, new ed. 1968), 82–135, here, 106. The comment was made before a parliamentary commission. Hindenburg gives an emotionally more highly charged version in his memoirs, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1920), 401–2, claiming that the revolution “reißt [dem deutschen Offizier], wie ein Fremdländer sagt, den verdienten Lorbeer vom Haupte und drückt ihm die Dornenkrone des Martyriums auf die blutende Stirne” (rips — as a foreigner puts it — the well-deserved laurels from the head of the German officer and presses upon his bleeding brow the martyr’s crown of thorns). 14

John Wheeler-Bennett, Knaves, Fools and Heroes in Europe between the Wars (London: Macmillan, 1974), 19. Note the name of the six-volume 1921 series Im Felde unbesiegt! noted by Schneider and Wagener in their introduction to the essay collection Von Richthofen bis Remarque, 15 and note 16.

15

The idea of a “lost generation” was not restricted to Germany: see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). On the betrayal and rootlessness in Im Westen nichts Neues, see Richard Shumaker, “Remarque’s Abyss of Time: Im Westen nichts Neues,” Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries 1,11 (1990–91), 24–36. 16

See Alan Bance, “Im Westen nichts Neues: A Bestseller in Context,” Modern Language Review 72 (1977): 359–73; and Richard Littlejohns, “‘Der Krieg hat uns für alles verdorben’: The Real Theme of Im Westen nichts Neues,” Modern Languages 70 (1989): 89–94. On the internationalism of the work, see Brian Murdoch: “We Germans . . . Remarques englischer Roman All Quiet on the Western Front,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 6 (1996): 11–34.

17

Alexander Moritz Frey, Die Pflasterkästen (1929), reprinted in the Verboten und verbrannt/Exil series (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), published in English as The Crossbearers, no translator given (London: Putnam’s, 1931). Helen Zenna Smith (i.e. Evadne Price), Not so Quiet . . . (London: Newnes, 1930, repr., London: Virago, 1988); trans. into German by Hans Reisiger as Mrs Biest pfeift . . . (Berlin: Fischer, 1930).

18

Werner Mahrholz, Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart (Berlin: Sieben-Stäbe, 1930), 432–33. Mahrholz comments that in reading the Weimar war novels the German readers must not forget that the defeat was simply a result of the allied blockade. He notes too that similar ideas are found in all the many translated foreign war novels that appeared in Germany at the time. Mahrholz (1889–1930) had been cultural and political editor of the Vossische Zeitung from 1925 (hence his acquaintance with Remarque) and his literary history was seen through the press by Max Wieser. 19

Brian Murdoch, “Vorwärts auf dem Weg zurück: Kriegsende und Nachkriegszeit bei Erich Maria Remarque,” Text⫹Kritik 149 (2001): 19–29.

20

This was a criticism leveled at Remarque’s early novels by critics like Antkowiak; see on this Hans-Harald Müller, “Politics and the War Novel,” in German Writers and Politics 1918–39, ed. Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (London: Macmillan, 1992), 103–20. 21

On the revolution, see John Fotheringham, “Looking Back at the Revolution,” in Murdoch, Sargeant, and Ward, Remarque Against War, 98–118; and Anthony Grenville, Cockpit of Ideologies (Bern: Lang, 1995), 80–97. On the theme of the revolutions and their effect on the Weimar Republic, see Benjamin Ziemann, “Die

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Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg in den Milieukulturen der Weimarer Republik,” in Kriegserlebnis und Legendenbildung, ed. Thomas F. Schneider (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1998), 1:249–70. 22 E. M. Remarque, Der schwarze Obelisk (1956), ed. Tilman Westphalen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998), 28–29. We may recall that left-wing critics often reproached Remarque for not being political enough; as an observer, however, the argument is that the returning soldiers were not radical enough. See Theodor Plievier (who also wrote as “Plivier”), Der Kaiser ging, die Generäle blieben, ed. H. H. Müller (1932; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981). 23

See Murdoch, “Vorwärts auf dem Weg zurück” on these points.

24

See Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement, 1900–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 40–45.

25

See Thomas F. Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues: Text, Edition, Entstehung, Distribution und Rezeption (1928–1930) (Habilitationsschrift, University of Osnabrück, 2000) on the textual history. I am grateful to Dr. Schneider for his assistance. On the reception of the work see Hubert Rüter, Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980); Brian Murdoch, Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Glasgow: Glasgow U French and German Publications, 1991, 2nd ed. 1995); as well as Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, and Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (London: Black Swan, 1990), 368–417. Eksteins’s reading of Remarque’s novel is an important one. See further Manfred Kuxdorf, “Mynona versus Remarque, Tucholsky, Mann and Others: Not So Quiet on the Literary Front,” in The First World War in German Narrative Prose: Essays in Honor of George Wallis Field, ed. Charles N. Genno and Heinz Wetzel (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980), 71–92; and Thomas Schneider, “Die Meute hinter Remarque,” Jahrbuch der Literatur der Weimarer Republik 1 (1995): 143–70.

26 I have listed most of the relevant works in my Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Glasgow: U of Glasgow P, 2nd ed. 1995), 11, and in my edition of the text itself (London: Methuen, 1984), 4–6. Titles range from Im Westen wohl was Neues to Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt? and usually they do not repay the effort of finding them. I have discussed one of the more interesting (Vor Troja nichts Neues) in detail in “All Quiet on the Trojan Front: Remarque’s Soldiers and Homer’s Heroes in a Parody of Im Westen nichts Neues,” German Life and Letters 43 (1989): 49–62. 27

There are many studies of the film: see in particular Bärbel Schrader, ed., Der Fall Remarque (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992) and John Whiteclay Chambers, “All Quiet on the Western Front (1930): The Anti-war Film and the Image of the First World War,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14 (1994): 377–411.

28 Ulrich Walberer, ed., 10. Mai 1933. Bücherverbrennung in Deutschland und die Folgen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), 115. 29

See Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller, for the clearest survey: see also the review by Hermann Glaser in Die Zeit, 16 October 1987, 49.

30

It is, of course, impossible to cover here all the anti-war novels of the period between 1929 and 1933, but reference at least must be made to Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (1930; Higher Command, 1931), a work that incorporates contemporary materials and consequently differs in style from many of the others, and Ernst Wiechert’s Jedermann: Geschichte eines Namenlosen (1931), two impressive

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but now little-known novels. Frey’s Pflasterkästen, about non-combatant stretcherbearers, has been referred to already and belongs in the same category. 31 On Zweig’s war novels see Georg Salamon, Arnold Zweig (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 39–74. The two mentioned were translated by Eric Sutton in 1928 and 1936. Georg von der Vring’s Soldat Suhren was translated by Fred Hall in 1929. The Zurich edition (Zsolnay, n.d.) of Soldat Suhren claimed it to be “die Geschichte des unbekannten deutschen Soldaten,” the tale of the unknown German soldier, something of a cliché, but applied famously by Walter von Molo to Remarque’s novel too; the Vienna edition (Strom-Verlag, 1929) called it “der erste deutsche Kriegsroman” (the first German war novel). Remarque reviewed the work fairly positively for Sport im Bild in Berlin in 1928, but noted that the war was rather in the background. See “Fünf Kriegsbücher,” in Das unbekannte Werk, vol. 4, Kurzprosa und Gedichte, ed. Tilman Westphalen and Thomas Schneider (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1998), 312–13. Two of the other works were by Jünger. The editors note on page 526 that Remarque was accused of assembling his own novel from parts of those reviewed. 32

On Renn, see Broich, “Der gemeine Mann.” The two novels were translated by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1929 and 1931. On Johannsen, see Brian Murdoch, “Habent sua fata libelli: Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie and Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 5 (1995): 19–38 and also “Tierische Menschen und menschliche Tiere,” in Schneider and Wagener, Von Richthofen bis Remarque, 249–60. Johannsen’s novel appeared in 1930 in a translation by A. W. Wheen, who had also translated Remarque (and Plievier). It is worth noting that Wheen himself served (in the Australian Forces) from 1915 mainly in the ranks, though he was commissioned in 1918. I am indebted for information on Wheen to his great-nephew, Ian Campbell.

33

Glaeser’s novel Jahrgang 1902 (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1928), was translated in 1929 by Willa and Edwin Muir and is discussed by Thomas Koebner, “Ernst Glaeser: Reaktion der ‘betrogenen’ Generation,” in Zeitkritische Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans Wagener (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), 192–219 and in detail by StickelbergerEder in Aufbruch 1914. For the passage referred to, see the reprint (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1986), 198. Remarque again reviewed the work (this time for the Vossische Zeitung) and stressed its importance (Kurzprosa und Gedichte, 314–15).

34

See Maggie Sargeant, “Roman der deutschen Kriegsflotte oder Roman der geschundenen deutschen Arbeiter,” in Schneider and Wagener, Von Richthofen bis Remarque, 359–74, for a consideration of Des Kaisers Kulis as a war novel and as a Weimar novel. On Thomas, see the paper by Helga Schreckenberger, “Über Erwarten grauenhaft,” in the same collection, 387–98, and also my “Hinter die Kulissen des Krieges sehen: Evadne Price, Adrienne Thomas and E. M. Remarque,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 28 (1992): 56–74.

35

Murdoch, “Tierische Menschen.” Linder, in Princes, discusses the idea of the victim, but (like most critics) does not mention Johannsen’s Fronterinnerungen. See also the interesting contemporary paper by William Rose, “The Spirit of Revolt in German Literature from 1914 to 1930,” in his Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), 245–72.

36

See Herbert Read’s essay “The Failure of the War Books,” in his A Coat of Many Colours (London: Routledge, 1945), 72–76, on Remarque.

8: In “A Far-Off Land”: B. Traven Karl S. Guthke

1.

I

1926 the fledgling Socialist publishing house Büchergilde Gutenberg in Berlin dramatically enlivened the literary scene by bringing out, within a few weeks of each other, two novels, Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship) and Der Wobbly (The Wobbly) — one about the life of an American sailor aboard a dilapidated freighter destined to be scuttled in an insurance fraud scheme, the other about the adventures of an American hobo in the hinterland of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on the Gulf of Mexico. The name of their author, B. Traven, was unknown, except to readers of the Socialist daily Vorwärts, where, since February 1925, three vignettes of Mexican life and history had been published and the first part of Der Wobbly had been serialized that summer as Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cottonpickers). The author didn’t remain unknown for long. Like a bracing breeze from nowhere, the two novels, especially Das Totenschiff, had an immediate and powerful impact far beyond the membership of the trade-union oriented book club that Die Büchergilde served. By the time Traven died in Mexico City in 1969, his books were selling by the millions, in many languages. As early as 1950, American college students could learn intermediate German from a textbook containing parts of Das Totenschiff; from 1971 on, they could study advanced Spanish from a textbook edition of Traven’s Macario, and by the end of the century, at least one of Traven’s stories, “Assembly Line,” first published in the second edition of Der Busch (The Bush) in 1930 as “Der Großindustrielle,” was required reading in some American high schools, as was Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1929) in some German high schools. John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), produced with at least some input from Traven himself, was, and still is, a cult film. In the literary and sociopolitical landscape of Germany, Traven loomed largest after the demise of the Empire and before the Nazis’ rise to absolute power. To be sure, he did not come into full view until the second half of the Weimar Republic. But, in a sense, he was present at its very inception, or its prelude, and actively so. Under the fake-looking name of N THE SPRING OF

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Ret Marut (which he had used from 1907 to 1915 as an actor in various provincial theaters, and since 1912 as the author of short prose fiction printed mostly in newspapers and magazines)1 he had published, and written virtually single-handedly, an anarchist-leftist journal in Munich, beginning in September 1917. Acerbic in its criticism of the social and political life of the waning years of the imperial regime, it was called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brickmaker), obviously with a view to providing building materials for the construction of a postwar, post-dynastic Germany. The time for this renewal arrived even before the capitulation: on 7 November 1918 the Republic was proclaimed in Munich. Marut’s Ziegelbrenner declared its solidarity, seeing nothing less than “die Welt-Revolution” beginning at that very moment. Marut himself played a highly visible role, primarily as censor-in-chief, in the Central Committee of each of the two successive Bavarian Räterepubliken, republics relying for their authority on the councils of workers, soldiers, and farmers that were established at the outbreak of the revolution. When the revolution failed, on 1 May 1919, Marut was arrested in a Munich street and would, he had reason to believe, have been condemned to death by the cigarette-smoking lieutenant who summarily sentenced the prisoners in a court-martial improvised in the Royal Bavarian Residence — if he had not managed to give his captors the slip at the last moment. Wanted for high treason by the Bavarian authorities, Marut went underground, sheltered by friends in various parts of Germany — until, after escaping first to London, where he eked out a precarious existence without papers from August 1923 to April 1924, he turned up in the Tampico region of Tamaulipas in the summer of 1924, working at odd jobs and beginning to write prose works in German under the name of B. Traven, works that clearly continue the critical sociopolitical stance of Ret Marut. By the time the Weimar Republic drew to its close, the inauspicious and highly provincial literary beginnings of Ret Marut had blossomed into the world fame of B. Traven. To hear Die Büchergilde, the publisher’s inhouse journal, tell it in 1931, “vor fünf Jahren war Traven noch ein unbekannter Mann, heute ist er eine Größe in der Weltliteratur” (five years ago, Traven was a nobody, today he is a major player in world literature), with translations into eleven languages published or in preparation.2 And just as Marut was more than a bystander in the unsettled political climate out of which the Weimar Republic grew, so Traven’s work produced during the mid- and late twenties and early thirties — seven novels, a volume of stories and a kind of travelogue raisonné, all except Das Totenschiff about the wilds of Mexico — was intimately and critically connected with the sociopolitical life of the increasingly turbulent Weimar Republic, notably with its left-of-center ideological factions. Less concerned with language in the sense of le mot juste and stylistic artistry than with a stirring story line implying a social message, these books were a rousing appeal to a sense of

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personal responsibility vis-à-vis the rampant “Republikmüdigkeit,” that hedonistic apathy of the only seemingly “golden” twenties. In their refreshingly offhand and down-to-earth manner, they championed the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, and the ignored of early twentieth-century society — proletarians one and all, whether they were stateless sailors or itinerant American laborers in the oil fields near Tampico or, beginning in 1931 with Der Karren (The Carreta), indios enslaved by their colonial Spanish masters. Only now and then was there a touch of sentimentality or a fleeting sense of melancholy or suspicion of hopelessness in an otherwise forthright advocacy of the underprivileged. When the bell tolled for the Weimar Republic, it tolled for Traven. His books were among the first to be burnt by the Nazis in May 1933. The anti-fascist barbs of his novel Regierung (Government, 1931) in particular were indeed hard to miss. But then, right after their seizure of power, which was soon followed by their seizure of Traven’s publishing house, the Nazis had also made an effort to acquire his books, or rather some of them, for sale under the new regime — much to Traven’s disgust, of course; but why had the Nazis been interested? Their inconsistency throws additional light on the nature of the works that had captivated such large audiences (nearly half a million copies of the German originals alone were sold by the spring of 1936).3 For apart from their implied or even overt denunciation of mentalities and conditions repressing the proletariat, anywhere in the world, Traven’s books were a good read, without degenerating into Unterhaltungsliteratur, light reading material. They were teeming with exotic adventures and stirring exploits by a cast of characters rarely if ever encountered in German literature, high modernist or otherwise. Moreover, there was the much-touted mystery about the author, which cannot have been detrimental to the sales either. The more successful the books turned out to be, the more the readers clamored for information about the author, and the more he — or was it she, Traven once suggested in order to throw pursuers off his scent — mystified his identity. In fact, he developed mystification into a cottage industry that grew ever more elaborate and intricate — and obsessive — over the years. Only on his deathbed did he allow his identity with Ret Marut to be made public. Until then he had usually claimed to be an American of Norwegian descent, born in Cook County, Illinois, in 1890, instead of somewhere in (northern) Germany in 1882 (his spoken German places him in the Lübeck region of Holstein). On one occasion he “revealed” that the B. in “B. Traven” did not stand for Bruno; but in any case, in private life he was T(raven) Torsvan or Hal Croves, while the name entered on his birth certificate, if there ever was one, remains unknown to this day, as does his birthplace, parentage, education, and occupation prior to 1907 when “Ret Marut” stepped into the floodlights of the Municipal Theater of Essen.

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The circumstances of the genesis of his works, on the other hand, he eagerly disclosed, sensing the appeal of the offbeat and exotic to German readers for whom the Mexico of bandits, gold-diggers, cotton pickers, ox-drivers, and Indians was a “far-off land.”4 To the editors of Westermanns Monatshefte he wrote on 21 July 1925: Eine andere interessante Geschichte waere, Ihren Lesern mitzuteilen, unter welchen Muehsalen im Dschungel ein Manuskript geschrieben wird, besonders wenn der Schreiber nicht mit jener kostspieligen Ausruestung ausgestattet ist, wie sie reiche amerikanische Universitaeten oder reiche Privatliebhaber in Deutschland zur Verfuegung stellen. Bis zu welch kleinem Umfang eine Tropenausruestung hinuntergespart werden kann infolge Mangel an Mitteln und uebergrosser Abenteuerlust, darf ich nicht einmal Ihnen mitteilen, um nicht fuer einen glatten Luegner gehalten zu werden. [It would make for another interesting story to inform your readers of the hardships one must endure to write a manuscript in the jungle, particularly when the writer does not enjoy the expensive amenities which rich American universities or rich German patrons would supply. Lest I be held for a liar, I cannot tell even you just how much one can skimp when putting a tropical outfit together if one has no means, but more than enough of an adventurous spirit.]5

Writing to his editor at the Büchergilde on 5 August 1925, he reported: Die Novelle “Im tropischen Busch” [later “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch”] wurde gleichfalls und zwar urspruenglich englisch im Dschungel geschrieben. In Ihrer kleinen Zeitschrift schreiben Sie ueber die geistigen Qualen, die ein Schriftsteller zu erleiden hat, um sein Werk zu gebaeren. Zu diesen geistigen Qualen, die unertraeglich sind, kommen hier, bei mir wenigstens, physische Qualen, die ich vielleicht einmal in Ihrer Zeitschrift veroeffentliche. Qualen, die ihre Ursache in dem tropischen Klima und in der tropischen Umgebung finden. Zu arbeiten in diesem Klima, auf den gluehenden Feldern, das macht mir wenig aus. Aber schreiben in diesen Laendern, wenn man nicht in einem modernen Hotel wohnen kann, sondern in Barracken oder Huetten wohnen muss, das ist die Hoelle. Nicht nur das Hirn, nein ebenso sehr die von Mosquitos und anderem Hoellengelichter zerstochenen und blutenden Haende und Beine und Backen rebellieren gegen den Schreiber und gegen das Zusammenhalten des Gedankengefueges und der notwendigen Farbengebilde. [The novella “Im tropischen Busch” [original title of “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch” (The Night Visitor)] was also written in the jungle, and originally in English. In your little magazine you write about the intellectual torments a writer must undergo in order to bring his work into the world. To these intellectual torments, which are unbearable, are added, at least in my case, physical torments which I might one day describe in your

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magazine. Torments caused by the tropical climate and the tropical environment. Working in this climate, in the simmering fields, does not bother me all that much. But writing in such countries, when one cannot stay in a modern hotel, but must live in shanties or huts, that is truly a living hell. Not only the brain, but also the hands and legs and cheeks, bleeding from the bites of mosquitoes and other demons, rebel against the writer and against his ability to control his thoughts and their images.]6

Earlier in this letter he discussed Der Wobbly: Den Roman schrieb ich in einer Indianerhuette im Dschungel, wo ich weder Tisch noch Stuehle hatte und mir ein Bett aus zusammengeknuepften Bindfaden in der Art einer noch nie erlebten Haengematte selbst machen musste. Der naechste Laden, wo ich Papier, Tinte oder Bleistifte kaufen konnte, war fuenfunddreissig Meilen entfernt. Ich hatte gerade sonst nichts anderes zu tun und hatte ein wenig Papier. Es war nicht viel und ich musste es auf beiden Seiten beschreiben mit einem Stueck Bleistift und als das Papier zu Ende war, musste auch der Roman zu Ende sein, obgleich er dann erst anfangen sollte. Ich gab das Manuskript, das ich in der unleserlichen Form niemand haette einsenden koennen und das so niemand gelesen haette, einem Indianer mit, der zur Station ritt, und sandte es nach Amerika zum Abschreiben in der Maschine. [I wrote the novel in an Indian hut in the jungle, where I had neither table nor chair, and I had to make my own bed out of string tied together in the form of a hammock the likes of which has never before been seen. The nearest store where I could buy paper, ink, or pencils, was thirty-five miles away. At the time I had nothing much else to do, and had some paper. It wasn’t much, and I had to write on both sides with a pencil, and when the paper was used up, the novel had to come to a close as well, although it really was just getting started. As I never could have submitted the manuscript to anyone in its illegible state, and as no one would have read it had I done so, I gave it to an Indian, who rode to the station and sent it to America to be typed.]7

The milieu that generated Traven’s fiction is powerfully evoked in the opening paragraph of “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch” (The Night Visitor): Undurchdringlicher Dschungel bedeckt die weiten Ebenen der Flußgebiete des Panuco und des Tamesi. Zwei Bahnlinien nur durchziehen diesen neunzigtausend Quadratkilometer großen Teil der Tierra Caliente. Wo sich Ansiedelungen befinden, haben sie sich dicht und ängstlich an die wenigen Eisenbahnstationen gedrängt. Europäer wohnen hier nur ganz vereinzelt und wie verloren. Die ermüdende Gleichförmigkeit des Dschungels wird von einigen sich langhinstreckenden Höhenzügen unterbrochen, die mit tropischem Urbusch bewachsen sind, der ebenso

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undurchdringlich ist wie der Dschungel, und in dessen Tiefen, wo immer Dämmerung herrscht, alle Mysterien und Grauen der Welt zu lauern scheinen. An einigen günstigen Stellen, wo Wasser ist, sind kleine Indianerdörfer über die Höhen verstreut; Wohnplätze, die schon dort waren, ehe der erste Weiße das Land betrat. Sie liegen fernab der Eisenbahn. Auf Eselskarawanen werden die Waren, die hier gebraucht werden, hauptsächlich Salz, Tabak, billige Baumwollhemden, Zwirnhosen, Musselinkleider, spitze Strohhüte für die Männer und schwarze Baumwolltücher für die Frauen herbeigebracht. Als Tausch werden Hühner, Eier, Eselsfüllen, Ziegen, Papageien und wilde Truthähne gegeben. [Impenetrable jungle covers the broad plains along the Panuco and Tamesi rivers. Just two railway lines cross this ninety-thousand-squarekilometer stretch of the Tierra Caliente. The settlements which do exist have nestled themselves timidly near the few train stations. Europeans live here only very sparsely and virtually lost to each other. The tiring monotony of the jungle is interrupted by a few long ranges of hills covered with tropical bush as impassable as the jungle, and in its depths, which are always enveloped in twilight, all the mysteries and horrors of the world seem to lie in wait. At a few favorable spots where there is water one finds small Indian villages scattered among the hills, settlements which were there before the first white man ever arrived. They lie far from the railway. Mule carts bring what goods they need, mainly salt, tobacco, cheap cotton shirts, work pants, muslin dresses, pointed straw hats for the men and black cotton scarves for the women. In trade they offer chickens, eggs, young donkeys, goats, parrots, and wild turkeys.]8

Mexico, though not the hut in the hinterland of Tampico, remained Traven’s home for the rest of his life. From the late twenties on, he was often to be found in Mexico City; about 1930 he moved to Acapulco, where he managed an orchard; after his marriage to Rosa Elena Luján in 1957, his domicile was in Mexico City, where he eventually acquired a modern three-story house in upscale Calle Río Mississippi. While he frequently traveled up and down his chosen homeland, especially to the state of Chiapas on the border of Guatemala, in search of material for his books, he returned to Germany only once, in 1959, for the premiere of the Totenschiff film starring Horst Buchholz. He had become a stranger in the homeland that he had written about early on; the great mystery man of twentieth-century literature was now the author of “Mexican” novels.

2. Das Totenschiff, arguably his most famous book, was in fact the exception to the rule. Purporting to be the yarn of an American sailor, and no doubt in large parts autobiographical, Traven’s first novel is not set in Mexico,

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unlike the rest of his fiction (with the exception of his final novel, Aslan Norval, of 1960, which is generally considered to be a failure). Chock-full of crassly “realistic” accounts of the colorful if backbreaking daily lives and labors of the lowest of the low in the social world of the merchant marine, Das Totenschiff is also a philosophical reflection on the tyranny of the supposedly enlightened and humane capitalist state bureaucracy. It is a tyranny over those of its subjects who have, for one reason or another, not only been reduced to powerlessness but also deprived of their identity as a result of the loss of their identity papers. Such is the fate of the crew of the Yorikke — a crying shame in social terms, but also the cue for a searching examination of the existential mode of the nonperson in the modern world: must the outsider succumb to sheer nonexistence, or can he learn, contre coeur, to love his condition, to master his life by creating a proud new identity out of this very namelessness, thus finding a fresh life and a new sense of self-worth and even of community with other “nobodies” in the Yorikke’s no-man’s-land of the living dead? Clearly, this theme points back to the social and political conditions of Europe that the author was leaving behind him as he wrote Das Totenschiff. (An English version was begun in Brixton prison, London, where Marut was held 1923–24 for failing to register as a foreigner.) Nonetheless, the anarchist temper of the first novel foreshadows the “Mexican” ones to follow, with the significant difference that Mexico reinforced the transformation, already incipient in Das Totenschiff, of the “individual anarchist” Ret Marut into the “anarcho-syndicalist” Traven, who was more concerned with authentic forms of community life (Indian style) than with the needs and desires of the subjectivist “self” (which had been a keyword for Marut in his Munich days when he had published a homemade journal entitled Der Selbe).9 Das Totenschiff, then, being no longer “German” and not yet “Mexican,” is the product of a transitional phase. The first of the Mexican novels, Der Wobbly (1926), was written too soon after Marut’s arrival (and suggests too much of a transcription of diaries kept in the early months of the author’s life in the New World) to allow his characteristic new theme — the communality of the indios’ lifestyle versus European and American moneygrubbing and selfishness — to come into its own. Instead, one colorful episode loosely follows the other in the life of a happy-go-lucky gringo living a hand-to-mouth life as an itinerant oil driller, unskilled baker, cattle driver, and cotton picker in the “bush” beyond Tampico, enjoying a country where nobody cares or asks about one’s papers or real name. The native population comes into sight only marginally. This changes with Die Brücke im Dschungel (The Bridge in the Jungle, 1929; serialized, in a shorter version, in Vorwärts in 1927) and the two novels to follow: Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1927) and Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1929). In all three, the Indian idyll, austere as it is in its own way, is threatened by the

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presence of Americans who are out to exploit its resources and “civilize” the native population. The American boots worn by a normally barefoot muchacho, causing his death as he slips off the unsafe bridge built by an American oil company, disrupting the tranquil life of the preindustrial community . . . the yen of the “civilized” for money working havoc with the lives of gold diggers from north of the border, though one of them overcomes the curse of lucre by seeing the wisdom of living, for the rest of his life, in the sustaining harmony of a primordial Indian community . . . the destruction of such family based agricultural community life, anchored deep in history though it is, through American greed for the oil beneath the nourishing land — wherever Traven looks, he perceives the clash of cultures, the tragic threat to the native population. Yet, for all his misgivings about the future of the idealized Indian life, he is not without hope (buoyed by his understanding of the social reform policies of the Mexican federal government at the time) for the survival of the Indians’ archaic existence under the onslaught of industrial ruthlessness driven by consumerist demands. Their form of communal living Traven tends to see as a panacea for all the shortcomings of modern industrial civilization. He editorializes in Die Brücke im Dschungel: Der Fluch der Zivilisation und die Ursache, warum die nicht-weißen Völker sich endlich zu rühren beginnen, beruhen darin, daß man die Weltanschauung europäischer und amerikanischer Gerichtsaktuare, Polizeiwachtmeister und Weißwarenhändler der ganzen übrigen Erde als Evangelium aufzwingt, an das alle Menschen zu glauben haben oder ausgerottet werden. [The curse of civilization and the reason nonwhite peoples are finally beginning to rouse themselves, is that people are forcing upon the whole rest of the world the views of European and American court stenographers, police sergeants, and drapers as if it were the word of God, which all men must believe or else be wiped out.]10

Traven’s first book to appear in the 1930s, Der Karren (1931), initiated a coherent series of six novels culminating, in 1940, in Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel (General from the Jungle) and including, midway, the grimmest and (thanks to the film based on Traven’s own script) best-known of the sequence: Die Rebellion der Gehenkten (The Rebellion of the Hanged, 1936). In these volumes, Traven’s confidence that a change for the better lies just ahead for the Indian population seems to be somewhat shaken. For these crassly realistic novels, intended to document present conditions (though the scene is set in the years immediately preceding the national revolution of 1910), focus on the plight of the indios in the backward state of Chiapas, who are brutally worked to death in the monterías, the mahogany-logging camps, or at least in one of them. An appeal

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for reform is implied, of course; and as such, it is not exclusively local or national; for there are not a few hints that what is at stake is the liberation of the oppressed everywhere, including, pointedly, in Germany, whose nazification Traven followed with concern. Yet the Mexican Revolution, which Traven, according to his understanding of the historical event, shows to be growing out of the inhumane conditions that he describes in great and horrid detail, fails in the end.11 But it should be noted that the resignation implied in this ending of the sweeping epic is significantly offset by the idyll of communal life that some of the revolutionaries achieve as they desist from pursuing their uprising further.12 Here, too, then, Traven still clings to his cherished panacea, even in the face of a “realistic” appraisal of the enduring powers of adverse tendencies and circumstances.

3. Among the numerous books published in quick succession from 1926 to 1940, one does not fit the description of Traven’s literary output offered so far. This volume, Der Busch (1928; enlarged from 12 to 20 stories, 1930) is not a novel but a collection of stories about Mexico, frequently reissued in several languages.13 Most of them are familiar to English-speaking readers from The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories, The Night Visitor and Other Stories, and Stories by the Man Nobody Knows.14 Unlike the novels preceding or following, the short fiction of Der Busch for the most part avoids the sometimes ham-fisted sociopolitical editorializing from Traven’s leftist ideological stance. Instead, it is by and large a record of the European refugee’s encounter with the indigenous population, its mores and culture and history, told in an unpretentious, at times rough-and-tumble style, often without subtlety of diction, but full of down-to-earth idiomatic German, sprinkled with the usual anglicisms, not to mention Traven’s familiar irony, sarcastic humor, and outrageously grotesque turns of phrase, which sometimes rub shoulders with bits of Wilhelmine high-school erudition (120, 134, 165). Of course, the novels following Das Totenschiff were set in Mexico as well. But to the extent that they significantly focused on the native population, they fitted the image of the indios into the ideological framework of a somewhat schematic conflict of exploitative Yankee business mentality on the one hand and the native values of deep-rooted communality and respect for individual worth on the other. The six montería novels, too, are clearly driven by Traven’s sociopolitical agenda. It is only in Der Busch, with its more occasional pieces, that the author focuses more on the mind and the realities of the “far-off land” that he — like the protagonist of Marut’s “German Fairy Tale” Khundar — had absconded to. At the same time he is to all appearances still, as he was in Der Wobbly, somewhat personal in an autobiographical way (introducing even a mule named Bala after the mule of his own Chiapas

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diaries [152] and a narrator earning his keep by giving English lessons [157], as Traven did in his early years in Mexico).15 And throughout, the author-narrator is more relaxed in that he wields less fiercely the ideological axe that he felt he had to grind in earlier (and later) works. What takes over now is Traven’s sharp-eyed narrative exuberance. In a series of telling vignettes of the life of the natives, he focuses on his encounter with the (as he often puts it) “pure-blooded” Indian other, “in the bush in Mexico” where, according to the “American Song” that serves as the overture of the volume, he finds himself trapped, for better or for worse. Der Busch, then, is an account of total immersion in the “fremde Land” (183). And yet the narrator (who is often a first-person narrator whom, for all our narratological sophistication that has become de rigueur, we may to some extent identify with Marut-Torsvan-Traven himself) does not “go native.” Far from it: he is critically alert to the strange and sometimes childish ways and values of his new neighbors, but he is no less, and no less critically, aware of his own European or (as he claims) American cultural heritage and perspective. For there are references, throughout these Mexican stories, not only to Mexican pre- and post-Revolutionary history and politics (to Presidents Porfirio Díaz, and Plutarco Elías Calles, for example) but also to American, European, and specifically German conditions, customs, and facts of socio-political life.16 The fact that these short narrative pieces are told from a European perspective is never lost sight of, but neither is awareness that this perspective can be reversed to show European-American-German ways as they are perceived with the eyes of the inhabitants of a far-away country with a very different culture. As a result of this dual perspective, both cultures are critically brought into clear focus, mutually questioning each other with their distinct cultural assumptions. It is this dual perspective, too, that lends Der Busch not only its internal coherence and unity (which give it a place of honor alongside the “novels,” which, for their part, tended to dissolve the overall narrative sweep into incoherence) but also its intense appeal to readers outside Mexico, and in Germany in particular. For it was here, during the Weimar Republic — years of sociopolitical experimentation and an attempted revolution of values and mores — that Traven’s, the exGerman’s, challenge to conventional ways, derived from his refreshing experiences in an alien “Wunderland” (198), could fall on eager ears. What exactly, then, was the critical image of the nonwhite “other” with which the celebrity author from nowhere confronted his German audiences?

4. The world the narrator finds himself in is distinctly that of the indios, in their jungle habitat, with only the very occasional mestizo, “Spaniard,” or American farmer or businessman thrown in. These stand out like a sore thumb,

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reaffirming the predominance of the indigenous population living in the “bush.” One of them is the narrator, Gale, the only white man for many miles around, a long and often impassable way from doctors, railways, roads, or shops. And a “fremdes Land” (183), a strange world it is in the eyes of the narrator. He appreciates far-away Mexico for its lack of streetcars, automobiles, telephones (16), and other sine qua nons of that “andere Welt” (152), America and Europe. But alienation persists: “Man ist ein Fremder, und man befindet sich unter einer fremden Rasse, die anders denkt und anders urteilt” (13; One is a stranger, and one finds oneself among an alien race that thinks and judges differently). When Gale witnesses native dances in the nocturnal jungle, with the shrill and screeching pitch of their music, reminiscent, he thinks, of the war cries of the Aztecs, which sent shudders down the conquistadors’ spine, he feels that “ich in einer andern Welt lebte, daß Jahrhunderte mich von meiner Zeit, Tausende von Meilen mich von meiner Rasse trennten, daß ich auf einem andern Erdball lebte als dem, auf dem ich geboren worden war” (21; that I lived in a different world, that centuries separated me from my time, thousands of miles from my race, that I did not live on the planet I was born on). And, of course, it works the other way around as well: when an indio finds out that the American lives all by himself in the bush, with no woman around to cook frijoles and bake tortillas for him, he “stand einer ihm völlig fremden Welt gegenüber” (86; found himself facing a completely alien world), much as his ancestors did when they first set eyes on a horse brought along by the white men: surely a god to be worshipped and to be offered a tribute of the most beautiful flowers — until he dies of starvation (“Die Geburt eines Gottes” [A New God Was Born]). Understanding across the cultural barriers, this case shows, is virtually impossible (as postmodern discourse theorists will be gratified to observe). The impasse extends in particular to the encounter of emotions. True, the indigenous tribes have largely discarded their traditional costumes and cultural paraphernalia for Western dress, boots, soap, perfumes, even Western dance-hall music, but their minds remain terra incognita: Die wahren Motive einer Handlung zu ergründen, die der Angehörige einer Rasse begeht, die nicht die unserige ist, ist ein törichtes Beginnen. Vielleicht finden wir das Motiv, oder wir mögen glauben, daß wir es gefunden haben, aber wenn wir versuchen, es zu begreifen, es unserer Welt- und Seeleneinstellung nahezubringen, stehen wir ebenso hoffnungslos da — vorausgesetzt, wir sind ehrlich genug, es einzugestehen —, genau so, als wenn wir in Stein eingegrabene Schriftzeichen eines verschollenen Volkes entziffern sollen. Der Angehörige der kaukasischen Rasse wird, wenn als Richter über die Handlung des Angehörigen einer andern Rasse gesetzt, immer ungerecht sein. (54–55) [It is foolish to try to get to the bottom of the true motivations of the action of a member of a race that is not ours. Maybe we discover the

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motivation, or we believe that we have discovered it, but if we try to grasp it, to bring it in line with our worldview and mindset, we don’t stand a chance — presuming we are honest enough to admit it — no more than if we had to decipher the chiseled inscriptions of a lost civilization. The Caucasian, sitting in judgment on the conduct of one of another race, will always be unjust.]

Der Busch is teeming with the cross-cultural misunderstandings, both touching and grim to the point of grotesqueness, that result from attempts to overcome this impasse: Gale lives by himself in his grass-covered cottage, overjoyed to be far from the curses of everyday civilization, but in “Indianertanz im Dschungel” (Indian Dance in the Jungle), his Indian neighbors conclude that a solitary man must ipso facto be unhappy, and so they try to cheer him up . . . in “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung” (The Welfare Institution), a whole village have their teeth pulled because they have paid for the privilege of medical care . . . in “Familienehre” (Family Honor), an Indian family rejoices when a skinny uncle’s dead body swells up in the tropical heat so that the white-tie-suit handed down by an overweight white merchant will actually fit and thus ensure that the funeral service is a huge social success, and so on. A noteworthy feature of the quoted statements about the strangeness of Mexico is the reference to the “race” of the natives as well as that of the newcomers, suggesting that race is at the bottom of the intercultural difference in outlook, behavior, and attitudes. These statements are by no means isolated instances; nor is the insistence that the Indians the gringo encounters are not mestizos but pure-blooded, “Vollblut-Indianer,” even “ungetrübtes indianisches Vollblut” (28, 18). On the face of it, “Rasse” is of course a biological term, as it is also in Traven’s nonfiction book on Mexico, Land des Frühlings (Land of Springtime, 1929).17 But perhaps one should keep the connotations of the Spanish word “raza” in mind here as well, which are in fact rather more cultural than biological. For on occasion Traven seems indeed to at least hint at that dimension, as when he has an uneducated Indian associate technological competence and financial greed with the “white race” (153). This is corroborated by the distinction that is elaborated more than the mere catchword “race” — that is, the distinction between (European-American) “Zivilisation” and natural indigenous Indian ways. This distinction still serves as the overall conceptual framework for the stories, as it did for the novels, but more unobtrusively so, as it is overshadowed by the richness and variety of human experience. Civilization versus Nature is, of course, a time-honored contrast; but Traven in the Busch stories does not merely revive a tired cliché, precisely because he gives the wealth of his observations its due. For one thing, Traven’s Indians are definitely not the “noble savages,” that construct of the European imagination, which to some extent

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owes its existence to the discontent of Europeans with their own mores. True, the Indian tribe that elevates the Spanish horse to the rank of a god is touchingly “gastfreundlich” (hospitable) and full of “Güte und Friedensliebe” (24; kindness and love of peace); another tribe thinks nothing of treating the gringo holed up in his cottage in the wilderness as one of their own, inviting him to their ritual dance. True, also, as early travelogues often pointed out, prudishness is unknown to the natives, and, like animals, they have an uncanny sense of hearing beyond the reach of the white man (“Indianertanz im Dschungel”), to say nothing of their fabulous health and longevity, which offers the narrator a welcome opportunity for time-honored satire on the medical profession (162). Furthermore, there is something appealingly authentic about the unrestrained emotionality of the Indians, exemplified by the uncontrolled shrieks of horror in the face of personal tragedy, like the loss of a child or another loved one: Der Schrei Teofilias kam nicht von dieser Welt, in denen die Gefühle und Empfindungen der kaukasischen Rasse wurzeln. Man falle nicht in den Irrtum, anzunehmen, daß diese Gefühlserregung Teofilias Komödie oder Verstellung war, um vielleicht das Mitleid ihrer Herrin wachzurufen. Dieses Stadium der Zivilisation, wo man mit vorgetäuschten Gefühlen Geschäfte macht, Geldgeschäfte oder Gefühlsgeschäfte, haben die Indianer noch nicht erklommen. Ihre Äußerungen des Schmerzes oder der Freude sind noch echt, wenn sie uns auch manchmal gekünstelt oder übertrieben erscheinen, weil sie in andern Instinkten wurzeln. (80) [Teofilia’s scream did not come from this world, in which the feelings and sensations of the Caucasian race are rooted. One should not make the mistake of presuming that Teofilia’s emotional outbreak was a farce or pretense, designed, perhaps, to arouse sympathy for her. The Indians have not yet reached that stage of civilization where one simulates feelings to conduct business, financial or emotional. Their cries of pain or of joy are still genuine, even if they sometimes strike us as artificial or exaggerated, because they are rooted in different instincts.]

Yes, then, there is a certain naiveté “unspoilt” by “civilization” about some of the indios that come into focus in Der Busch, but clever is the observer who can tell where it shades into deviousness or where an innocent becomes a clever crook. The familiar schematic dichotomy of the perversions of civilization and the innocence of man in the state of nature breaks down time and again. In “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung,” mentioned above, one begins to have one’s doubts about the real motivation for the seemingly naïve communal wish to have one’s perfectly healthy teeth pulled. For the upshot is that, through their later demand to have their teeth put back into their jaws, the natives, threatening an uprising, bamboozle

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the American mining company into granting higher wages, while the matter of the teeth is not brought up again. Naiveté or cunning manipulation of the gringos? Cunning is everywhere in the Mexican bush and its villages, and all too often it is hard to draw the line between criminal fraud and mere deviousness when it comes to outwitting the white man, even one so well-disposed to the Indians as Gale. In “Ein Hundegeschäft” (Selling a Dog), the Indian Ascension, a clever practitioner of double-talk, contrives to buy a puppy from the American newcomer with the American’s own money. This transaction, commercially complicated and logically sophisticated as it is, does, on the part of Ascension, have a sort of innocent joy of virtual trading about it. We find a similar tone in one of the longer stories, “Der aufgefangene Blitz” (When the Priest is Not at Home), which foregrounds Cipriano, a “Vollblut-Indianer” of long-time service as factotum to the mestizo village priest. Given this constellation, it is not hard to guess who gets the better of whom by hoodwinking him. Cipriano’s negligence leads to the partial burning of the church’s statue of the Virgin Mary, but he keeps his mouth shut when the vox populi proclaims that the mishap was a matter of the mother of God sacrificing herself in order to deflect a bolt of lightning from the rest of the church. The priest and the clerical administration profit handsomely from the much-touted “miracle” that so clearly favored them. Needless to say, it is the Indian, Cipriano, the man of indigenous common sense, who emerges as the real hero, fooling the European and mestizo authorities by not confessing his sacrilegious, if accidental, mutilation of “das Allerheiligste,” which represents “Sinn und Inhalt der ganzen Religion” (34; the most holy object, the meaning and content of the entire religion). Die Kirche wurde eine fette Pfründe. Und eine fette Pfründe ist sie heute noch. Es ist menschlich durchaus zu verstehen, daß Cipriano niemals etwas sagte. Denn wie durfte er, der einfache Indianer, der weder lesen noch schreiben konnte, den Bischöfen und anderen großen Herren der Kirche, die hierherkamen, um Messe zu lesen und zu firmen, in das Gesicht hinein sagen, daß hier ein kleiner Irrtum unterlaufen sei. Die Bischöfe würden ihn ausgelacht haben, und sie würden gesagt haben, er sei zu alt geworden und darum schwach im Geist. Und als echter Vollblut-Indianer wußte er wohl zu schweigen, wo es nicht notwendig schien zu reden und wo gar kein Vorteil für irgend jemand darin lag, Dinge zu verwirren, die große geistliche Herren, tausendmal klüger als er, als zu göttlichem Recht bestehend betrachteten. Es war nicht seine Aufgabe, Religionen zu reformieren. Nach guter Indianerlebensauffassung dachte er, daß man die Dinge am besten läßt, wie sie sind, solange sie einem selbst keine Unbequemlichkeiten bereiten. (43)

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[The church became a cash cow. And a cash cow it is to this day. It is quite understandable, in human terms, that Cipriano never said a word. For how could he, a simple Indian who could neither read nor write, tell the bishops and other great men of the Church who came here to celebrate Mass and confirmations, to their faces, that a little error had been made here. The bishops would have laughed at him, and they would have said he was getting old and feeble-minded. And as a genuine fullblooded Indian, he knew to keep quiet when it seemed unnecessary to speak and where there was no advantage in confusing things that the great holy men, a thousand times wiser than he, viewed as an act of God. It was not for him to reform religions. In his fine Indian attitude, he thought things are best left as they are, as long as they don’t cause one any inconvenience.]

Cipriano’s expert deviousness may still be passed off as obliquely ingratiating. But it gets worse. Crooks rule the day in “Der Eselskauf” (Burro Trading), where the unsuspecting newly arrived gringo pays various “owners” several times for the same mule that nobody wants. Theft and armed robbery are the order of the day in the bush. If one needs to organize a wedding on a shoestring, a nearby American farmer will find that two of his cows are missing (54). Worse still, “Der Banditendoktor” (Midnight Call) suggests in its concluding section, where a chief of police reveals his monumental incompetence, that organized banditry is rampant. And it was always so, and in all classes of society. If Porfirio Díaz had shot all bandits, we hear, not a single Mexican would have survived (105), and the exploitation of all classes by industrial concerns from north of the border doesn’t help matters (107). Violence is the law of the land. Weddings are a risk — one may end up with a bullet in the heart, even the bridegroom, or, more rarely, the bride (135). Elections are no safer — stabbing is common at political speech-making (169–70). When Gale, in “Der Banditendoktor,” is called in to save the life of a wounded bandit, he more or less expects it to be good business practice for the bandits to shoot him for his efforts (177): after all, he might talk, and “zwischen einer intelligent geführten Räuberbande und einer gewissen Sorte von Bankgeschäften, wo der Präsident im eleganten Automobil fährt, ist der Unterschied nicht so groß, wie man meint” (178; the difference between an intelligently run gang of robbers and certain transactions of banks whose president rides in an elegant automobile is not as big as one thinks). Brecht would have understood. Actually, shooting, ubiquitous as it is, is a relatively mild form of brutality in the “fremde Welt” (strange world) of the hinterland of Tampico. Take the Indian in “Die Medizin” (Effective Medicine), whose wife has run away and who, prompted by his belief in the superiority of the “weiße Rasse” (153), now expects the gringo to tell him where she is, or else “schlage ich Ihnen den Kopf ab” (154; I’ll chop your head off). “Die Geschichte einer

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Bombe” (The Story of a Bomb) takes the prize in this category. When the Indian Guido Salvatorres discovers his wife has run away and shacked up with another man, he, with routine competence, throws a homemade bomb into his rival’s hut while a party is in progress; none of the survivors, not even his unfaithful wife, will give evidence against him in court; acquitted, he finds himself another wife the next day, only to be blown to bits by a tin-can bomb of similar design in his hut the same evening. It is a macho world. If a woman — a mestiza, significantly, not an Indian — thinks otherwise, she will be taught a lesson. “Die Bändigung” (Submission) is The Taming of the Shrew, Mexican-style. A parrot, a cat, a favorite horse are shot point-blank for what is perceived as disobedience — the bride gets the point and mends her ways in a matter of minutes. Would Don Juvencio really have shot Doña Luisa too, if she had not brought him his coffee as ordered? Of course he would have, he says; for after all, the worst that could have happened to him would have been the death penalty, whereas a good horse is very hard to find (145). Strangely, this matter-offact statement, with its bizarre variation on ordinary logic, is interpreted to be “das innigste Liebesgeständnis, das ein Mann einer Frau nur machen kann” (the most tender confession of love a man can make to a woman, 145). The “fremde Welt” has a psychology all of its own. Human relationships, it must be said, are among the most alienating features of the new life that the narrator finds himself thrown into. As “Die Geschichte einer Bombe,” where wives are changed more quickly and more casually than shirts, or “Familienehre,” where the human loss is so gloriously outweighed by the sartorial gain, or one or the other of the rest of the stories touched upon might already have suggested: for all their passionate nature, human relationships are only skin-deep or seem to be. Wives are chosen according to the value of the gifts to her family that the prospective bridegroom can afford, and if one daughter is too expensive, it is: “Ich kann auch die da nehmen” (I might just as well take that one there), namely the older and less pretty and therefore bargain-priced sister (52). Here is the concluding observation on the Indian in “Die Medizin” who threatened to chop the gringo’s head off if he didn’t reveal the whereabouts of the Indian’s wife who had eloped with another man: the gringo sends him to a village some 600 miles away, confident that he will find a “new woman” en route: Er ist ein starker und gesunder Bursche. Er wird keine fünfzig Meilen gehen und dann irgendeine Arbeit finden. Oder er stiehlt einem Farmer eine Kuh. Inzwischen hat er Tortillas gegessen und Frijoles. Und wenn er Arbeit hat, hängt ihm am nächsten Tage eine neue Mujer ihren Sack mit dem Sonntagskleide, den Strümpfen und den Schuhen in seine Hütte. (156) [He is a strong and healthy fellow. He won’t go fifty miles before he finds some kind of work. Or he’ll steal a farmer’s cow. Meanwhile he will have

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eaten Tortillas and Frijoles. And when he has found work, the next day a new “wife” will hang her bag, packed with her Sunday dress, stockings, and shoes, in his hut.]

To be sure, there is also sympathy with the indios, but while that does not make the motivation for their not always admirable behavior any more intelligible to the western observer, it does make it more plausible by throwing into relief the hardships these people are laboring under. They are oppressed and exploited by both the government and the Church. The agencies of the state are corrupt and incompetent, and it is the destitute Indians who bear the brunt of the pervasive malaise (though there appears to be confidence that the new president, Calles [1924–28], will make a difference [108]). The broadest pageant of corruption on all levels of government and society, including the army, is painted in “Diplomaten” (The Diplomat), a story about a valuable pocket watch stolen at a presidential ball in Chapultepec Castle and retrieved by means of thorough familiarity with the forms and ubiquity of corruption. The overwhelming majority of the population, the hungry and illiterate indios, this story reveals, are exploited by the miniscule ruling class, which in turn is aided and abetted by American industrial and business interests — the classic proletarian-capitalist dichotomy with its inherent social injustice. These conditions, to be sure, are presented as those prevailing under Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown by the 1910 revolution after decades of dictatorship. But there is a reminder elsewhere that the unsuspecting indigenous tribes had been “ausgebeutet” (exploited) even in the days of Córtez (25), and there are precious few indications that life has since changed significantly for the Indian “proletariat” as Traven calls it, his Marut vocabulary still intact (46, 99). (The very first story sets the scene, with somewhat heavy-handed symbolism, when an Indian youngster dies as a result of the imperious ministrations of a would-be medical man who is introduced simply as “ein Spanier” [13].) Indeed, the real revolution of the indigenous population is still to come; but “heute” (today) in the 1920s, the exploitative class structure can already to seen to “wanken” under the “Ansturm” (reel under the attack) of the Indian masses (99). This attack is nothing less than a “heldenhafter Kampf um ihre geistige und wirtschaftliche Befreiung” (46; heroic fight for their intellectual and economic liberation) — and that, in turn, is part of a worldwide awakening of colonized populations ready to throw off the yoke of “Zivilisation” forced on them by white exploiters. As the ghost of the Pakunese prince puts it in “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch”: “Aber können Sie nicht hören, Senjor, wie alle nichtweißen Völker der Erde ihre Glieder regen und strecken, daß man das Knacken der Gelenke über die ganze Welt vernehmen kann?” (201; But, Señor, can’t you hear all nonwhite peoples of the earth move and stretch their limbs so that one can hear the cracking of the joints all over the world?). This, then,

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is the overall sociopolitical and historical situation the indios are trapped in, exploited by foreign business interests and oppressed by the domestic ruling class propped up by corrupt and incompetent government agencies such as the police and the military (see, for example, 183). Is it a wonder that the proletarians, too, in their small-time manner, try to exploit the exploitable — the gringo, for example, to whom they sell a mule they don’t own, whom they threaten with a machete for failing to do the impossible, whom they are likely to shoot even if he heals a wounded bandit, and so on? On the other hand, the natives, while no unadulterated “noble savages,” do have their own set of values with which to challenge the mores of the powerful, be they foreign or domestic. But, of course, they are precisely the ones that are threatened by the power of the local or central government. These values are those of self-effacing family and community life, with its awareness of the worth of individual selves, their feelings, aspirations, and ways of living, even the things of their daily experience. Their chance of surviving in a country increasingly taken over by American-style business and industrialization is slim. Still, in “Der Großindustrielle,” one of the most widely read of the stories under its English title, “Assembly Line,” it is the indigenous values that triumph over the business mentality imported from El Norte. The bast baskets that the indio weaves in his village in the state of Oaxaca are “kleine Kunstwerke” (146; little works of art), “Volkskunst” (147; folk art). Recognizing this, an American entrepreneur offers to buy thousands of them — only to be told, after due consideration, that the more baskets he would buy, the more each would cost. This flies in the face of the basic commercial assumptions of mass production, but the Indian has his reasons. Such a vastly increased manufacturing scale would wreck his family and social life because his immediate and extended family would have to be drawn into the business full-time, which in turn would mean that their cornfields and their cattle would not be attended to. But the more significant reason is cultural in yet a different way: mass production of untold identical items would replace the beauty of objects that are truly one of a kind. “Aber sehen Sie, Senjor, tausend Körbchen kann ich nicht so schön machen wie zwanzig. Die hätten alle ausgesehen eines wie das andere. Das hätte mir nicht gefallen” (151; But, you see, Señor, a thousand little baskets will not turn out as beautiful as twenty. They would all look the same. I wouldn’t have liked that). Not comprehending such lack of greed, the businessman returns to New York; Indian self-sufficiency and wisdom win the day, but will they win the days to come?18 Another oppressive and exploitative power has only been touched upon so far, in “Der aufgefangene Blitz” — institutionalized religion. In this case, too, the indios emerge as superior in more respects than one. The pattern of domination is only a matter of surface conformity, at best.

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The Catholic Church, its functionaries, its teachings, its rituals, and its hierarchy are accepted by the native population; yet in their hearts they know better, and remain “Indian.” No amount of repressive indoctrination, brutal as it can be (and what missionizing is not), will change the overt or instinctive allegiance to the old gods or prevent the appropriation of Catholicism by the Indians for their own purposes in a sort of countercolonization. If a saint who is called upon — and paid — to help find a lost watch doesn’t perform, he will be punished by being dunked and then dumped in a stinking snake-infested well — just like the underperforming peons on any Spanish-run hacienda (“Der ausgewanderte Antonio” [The Kidnapped Saint]). Conversely, if a burglar does not pay the appropriate saint his promised share of the loot, who can expect the burglar not to be caught by the police (“Spießgesellen” [Accomplices])? Believers in Catholic supernaturalism are put in their place by native realism and common sense, as “Der aufgefangene Blitz” shows amusingly: faced with natural facts, such as a bolt of lightning, the narrator comments, an Indian Catholic will always revert to his “pagan” way of thinking, “trotz aller christlichen Erziehung” (36, cp. 38; in spite of all Christian education). In other words, miracles, divine interventions, don’t happen in Mexico (38–40). Church officials who don’t understand such down-to-earth native wisdom end up with a lot of egg on their faces, targets of Traven’s irony. The priest in the tale about the bolt of lightning deflected by the Virgin Mary is proud to have been honored by this “milagro” (miracle) that will bring in so much money from believers in miracles; the priest in the story about the failure of Saint Antonio to find a lost watch will make the most of the miraculous “emigration” of the saint from his church to the bottom of the abandoned well — this clearly supernatural event will cure his parishioners of their “verdammenswerten Unglauben” (77; damnable unbelief). Such deft touches remind the reader: in this Indian world, European religion is but a veneer, which cracks easily. What opens up between the cracks is that history (“prehistory” in Western terms) which nurtures the culture of the indios, no matter how deprived of dignity they may seem at the present time. A bit like Napoleon lecturing his soldiers in front of the towering Egyptian pyramids that thousands of years of history are looking down on them, the narrator of “Nachtbesuch im Busch” reminds us of the six thousand years of “hohe Kultur” (advanced culture) that look down on us in Mexico from its pyramids: Ich war nicht wenig erstaunt, als ich vernahm, daß diese Leute die Vergangenheit ihres Volkes gut kannten. . . . Viele jener Indianer beteten noch ihre alten Götter an, während alle übrigen die Hunderte von Heiligen, die ihnen ganz unbegreiflich erscheinende unbefleckte Empfängnis sowie die ihnen ebenso unverständliche Dreieinigkeit derart mit ihrer

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alten Religion verwirrt hatten, daß sie in ihren Herzen und ihren Vorstellungen die alten Götter hatten, während sie auf den Lippen die Namen der unzähligen Heiligen trugen. (199) [I was not a little astonished to hear that these folks knew the past of their people well. . . . Many of those Indians still prayed to the ancient gods, while all others had confounded the hundreds of saints, the (to them totally incomprehensible) immaculate conception and the equally incomprehensible trinity with their ancient religion so that in their hearts and minds they had the ancient gods, while the names of countless saints were on their lips.]

Faced with dogmatic specifics of Christian theology, Indian religious common sense soundly triumphs over the logical gobbledygook of the Church. Cipriano’s wisely unspoken arguments in “Der aufgefangene Blitz” against the Christian belief in Providence and the Christian God’s double-dealing are highly amusing (35, 40). Christian and Indian religious conceptions meet head-on, however, in an important story not mentioned so far, “Indianerbekehrung” (Conversion of Some Indians). An Indian chief inquires whether the local missionary can offer “bessere Götter” (better gods). The answer, the chief concludes after listening respectfully, is no, and much to the credit of Indian concepts of a worthwhile life it is. The indignities suffered willingly by Jesus don’t make him a role model, let alone an appropriate god, for Indians. How can God the Father, who lets us commit sins and makes us suffer — or even damns us — for them, be a god of love, or an almighty god, for that matter? Such divinities bear no comparison with the sun god of the Indians, who is apotheosized in a passage of radiantly poetic prose in which “Indianerbekehrung” culminates. This “truly great god” of the Indians dies every night in “deep golden beauty,” only to rise again “from the dead” the next morning with equal splendor (193): “Tausche deinen Gott nicht, mein guter Sohn, denn es ist kein größerer Gott als dein Gott (194; don’t give up your god, my dear son, for there is no greater god than your god). So the “Conversion of Some Indians” is in fact non-conversion; if anyone is converted, it is the narrator, who comments in mock-seriousness that good Christians will have to put up with the fact that they won’t meet these wonderful people in paradise at the end of time, since they are beyond “wahres Heil” (true salvation) and will probably not even have much of a chance to do anything about it, given the “raschen Zerfall der katholischen Kirche in Mexico” (194; the rapid decay of the Catholic Church in Mexico). Small wonder that the clerics fear “die alten indianischen Götter” (the old Indian gods) more than Satan (28). These ancient Indian gods, however, are not only the gatekeepers of an Indian heaven; they also inspire a way of life on earth — one that significantly challenges the Western one, both in religious and in social respects.

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For they provide an alternative both to the Catholic Church, sterile in its self-serving ritual, and to the ruthlessly profit-minded capitalist-industrial complex. This is the message (in “Nachtbesuch im Busch”) of the ghost of the pre-conquista Panukese prince buried in a mound near Gale’s hut in the jungle of Tamaulipas. His peace has been disturbed by the gringo who robbed the mummy of the precious gifts it had been interred with: Im Angesicht der Ewigkeit zählt nur die Liebe, die wir gaben, die Liebe, die wir empfingen, und vergolten wird uns nur in dem Maße, als wir liebten. Darum, Freund, geben Sie mir zurück, was Sie mir nahmen, so daß, wenn am Ende meiner langen Wanderung vor dem Tore stehend ich gefragt werde: “Wo sind deine Beglaubigungen?,” ich sagen kann: “Siehe, o mein Schöpfer, hier in meinen Händen halte ich meine Beglaubigungen. Klein sind die Gaben nur und unscheinbar, aber daß ich sie tragen durfte auf meiner Wanderung ist das Zeichen, daß auch ich einst geliebt wurde, und also bin ich nicht ganz ohne Wert.” Die Stimme des Indianers verhauchte in ein Schweigen. (217) [When we face eternity, only love will count, the love we gave, the love we received, and we will be rewarded only to the extent that we loved. Therefore, my friend, return to me what you took away so that when at the end of my pilgrimage I am asked at the gate: “Where are your credentials?” I can say: “Look, o my Creator, I am holding my credentials in my hands. The gifts are small and inconspicuous, but the fact that I was allowed to have them with me on my pilgrimage is an indication that I too was loved once, and so I am not entirely worthless.” The voice of the Indian fell silent.]

It is a silence worth pondering. To be sure, this story — easily the most richly textured, the most topical, and deservedly the most famous of all — concludes by making light of the American’s hallucination of a preColumbian prince: “Nehmen Sie sich ein nettes, nicht zu dreckiges Indianermädel in Ihre Strohbude. Als Köchin. Dann erscheinen Ihnen keine toten Indianer mehr.” (220; Take a nice, not too filthy Indian girl into your straw hut. As a cook. Then no dead Indians will haunt you any longer.) But ghost or no ghost — the depth of the past, of indigenous culture and wisdom, has been opened up in a flash that haunts the reader’s memory. Ridding himself of excess ideological baggage and at the same time controlling his urge to spin yarns of stirring adventures of swashbuckling desperados, Traven, in Der Busch, re-created in telling detail the strange and exciting world of the far-away country with which he had cast his lot. This world is a powerful challenge to the cultural assumptions or givens of the Europe he left behind, the Europe of his readers at the time. And

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readers he had from the first — in fact, an ever swelling stream of them. Not only were the stories of Der Busch among the most widely read of all of Traven’s works, and in several languages at that, they still are (as a glance at Treverton’s bibliography will quickly confirm).19 Looking back on Traven’s entire oeuvre, which is increasingly gaining recognition as a signal contribution to the “serious” literature of the world, one may well wonder whether Traven did not make his most significant and most lasting impact with his short fiction, rather than the full-length novels.

Notes A version of this chapter focused on the epistemology of the “encounter” with the “other” is included in my book Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen: Francke, 2005). 1

Some were collected in Der blaugetupfte Sperling (The Blue-Spotted Sparrow, 1919); the epistolary novella An das Fräulein von S. . . (To Miss von S. . .) came out in 1916 under the pseudonym Richard Maurhut.

2

Quoted from Karl S. Guthke, B. Traven: Biographie eines Rätsels (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1987), 435. Translations are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

3

Ibid.

4

I take this phrase from the concluding sentence of Marut’s tale “Khundar” in Ziegelbrenner, vol. 4, issues 26–34, page 72 (repr., Berlin: Guhl, 1976). For context, see Guthke, B. Traven, 255. 5

Guthke, B. Traven, 347; translation taken from B. Traven: The Life behind the Legends, trans. Robert C. Sprung (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 220.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid., 347 and 221, respectively.

8

Der Busch (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1930), 195; Guthke, B. Traven: The Life behind the Legends, 219–20. 9

On this transformation, see Heidi Zogbaum, B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992), xxi. 10

Die Brücke im Dschungel (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1929), 170; translation taken from Guthke, B. Traven: The Life behind the Legends, 216. 11 For a reading of the series as a statement of Traven’s disappointment with the Revolution and its aftermath, see Zogbaum, A Vision of Mexico, 200–202, 208, 209–11. 12

Zogbaum sees this return of some of the revolutionaries to communal life as a sign of complacency and acquiescence to “the system that they have vowed to destroy” (A Vision of Mexico, 202).

13

Edward N. Treverton, B. Traven: A Bibliography (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow, 1999), 103–12. My references are to the enlarged edition of Der Busch

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(Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1930). Some of the stories of Der Busch had been published previously in periodicals. See the textual apparatus in volume 2 of Traven, Erzählungen, ed. Werner Sellhorn (Zürich: Limmat, 1968). Jörg Thunecke elaborates on Michael Baumann’s discovery that five of the Busch stories (“Die Dynamit-Patrone,” “Der Wachtposten,” “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung,” “Die Geschichte einer Bombe,” and “Familienehre”) had been told in Owen White’s “A Glance at the Mexicans,” The American Mercury, 4:14 (February, 1924): 180–87 (Jörg Thunecke, ed., B. Traven the Writer/Der Schriftsteller B. Traven [Nottingham: Edition Refugium, 2003], 37–45). A detailed comparison of the texts is still outstanding. Thunecke reports few actual contacts. Until an exhaustive comparative study is available, it is, in principle, not impossible that Traven might have heard these anecdotes independently. Further study should reveal what Traven made of what he read (if he read these texts). In the meantime, one might conclude that Traven chose these “anecdotes” because they conveyed reactions to Mexico that he shared in some measure — subject to his own rearticulation of them, or even thematic reorientation, as in “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung” referred to below. In any case, this has nothing to do with the so-called “ErlebnisträgerHypothese” in that it presupposed manuscripts (of novels, at that); see Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 9, part 3, p. 103 (Detroit: Gale Research Comp., 1981). 14

Traven, The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories (New York: Hill, 1975), The Night Visitor and Other Stories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), and Stories by the Man Nobody Knows (Evanston, Illinois: Regency, 1961). The English titles of individual stories cited in what follows are those used in these volumes. However, some Busch stories are not included in them; so their English titles are my own improvisations.

15 Zogbaum, A Vision of Mexico, 21. To be sure, Traven taught an American farmer’s daughter, whereas the narrator in “Der Banditendoktor” teaches bandits eager to rob American residents in their own language. Other possibly autobiographical asides remain tantalizing, as, for example, the confession of the firstperson narrator that from early on he had to be “reisefertig” (ready to travel) at all times (163). (Was his mother a traveling actress, as has been surmised?) — Zogbaum’s book (note 9) contains a chapter on Traven’s “Discovery of the Mexican Indian,” which does not, however, touch upon the points made here. 16 For references to Europe, see 22, 75, 91, 117, 127, 137; to the United States, 23, 68, 100, 163, 165, 197; and to Germany, 137, 147, 214. 17

See Karl S. Guthke, “Rassentheorien von links: Der Fall B. Traven,” in K.S.G., Die Entdeckung des Ich (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), 235–42.

18

Scott Cook, “B. Traven and the Paradox of Artisanal Production in Capitalism: Traven’s Oaxaca Tale in Economic Anthropological Perspective,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, vol. 11, issue 1, 75–111.

19

Treverton, B. Traven, 103–12.

9: Weimar’s Forgotten Cassandra: The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in the Weimar Republic Fiona Sutton

T

HE WRITINGS OF JOURNALIST AND NOVELIST Gabriele Tergit during the Weimar Republic exhibit a powerful urge to chart and evaluate the conflicts arising from shifting social and cultural values and from contemporary economic and political instability. Although Tergit wrote feuilletons (subjective impressions), travel reports, and reviews, her main focus as a journalist during the Weimar Republic was reporting from the law courts at Moabit in Berlin, because she felt they offered her insight into the essence of the age: “Moabit ist seit einigen Jahren Quelle für die Erkenntnis der Zeit” (For some years now, Moabit has been the source for understanding our time).1 It is in these civil and criminal trials that conflicts of shifting social values are thrown into sharp relief, where some resolution must be sought for the aftermath of political turmoil, and where both poverty and the desire to take full advantage of the new opportunities in the Weimar Republic spill over into theft, fraud, and murder. The question of an appropriate response to a crisis-ridden modern age is also at the heart of Tergit’s first novel, Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (Cheesebeer Conquers the Kurfürstendamm, 1931).2

Better Late than Never: Biographical Overview Gabriele Tergit’s success was at its height during the Weimar Republic. In her autobiography, she refers to her time as legal correspondent for the left-liberal newspaper Berliner Tageblatt3 from 1925 until 1933 as her seven years of plenty.4 In the late 1920s, she also began contributing articles to Carl von Ossietzky’s Die Weltbühne. Moreover, Käsebier was well received by critics upon its initial publication and extracts from the novel appeared in the Social Democratic publication Vorwärts (ES, 172). Tergit received enthusiastic letters from readers of the book, although plans for a film version and translations were never realized.5

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Success had come quite late to Tergit, or rather had been postponed as a result of her own feelings of inadequacy. Her first article, “Frauendienstjahr und Berufsbildung” (Women’s Year of Service and Vocational Training, 1915), had appeared in a supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt as early as 1915, when she was twenty-one, under her real name of Elise Hirschmann. By her own account, she was overcome with a sense of her own ignorance on the eve of publication and resolved to further her education by completing her high-school leaving certificate. She went on to university studies in history, philosophy, and sociology, which she completed in 1925 with a doctoral dissertation on Karl Vogt, scientist and liberal member of the short-lived (1848–49) Frankfurt Parliament. During this period, she wrote some feuilletons for the Berliner Tageblatt and began submitting articles on trials from Moabit to the Berliner Börsen Courier in 1923. She adopted the pseudonym Gabriele Tergit to spare the sensibilities of her bourgeois Jewish family, who were reserved about her chosen career. The first name was an old favorite of hers and the surname was an inversion of the syllables in “Gitter” (here: trellis), a word she chose while seated near a garden trellis. Tergit also published as Thomasius, a reference to Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), professor of law at Halle University and an enemy of superstition and prejudice, famed for his vigorous opposition to the persecution and burning of witches.6 However, whereas Thomasius’s work is reputed to have been influential in bringing an end to witch trials in Prussia, Tergit’s articles and her one novel published during the Weimar Republic represent vain calls to reason in the increasingly volatile political and economic atmosphere. Nonetheless, her work represented enough of a threat to the Nazis that they ordered her arrest on 4 March 1933. Remarkably, the intervention of local police deterred the SA and Tergit was able to flee that night to Czechoslovakia, where she wrote for the Prager Tageblatt. In 1934 she joined her husband, the architect Heinz Reifenberg, whom she had married in 1928, and their son Peter in Palestine. Her feuilletons and articles from this period chart the challenges facing the new immigrants from all parts of Europe.7 In 1938, the family moved to London where Tergit took British citizenship; after 1945, she only returned to Germany as a visitor. For twenty-five years Tergit played a pivotal role in supporting other German writers in exile and, as secretary of the branch for German writers in exile of the writers’ association PEN, devoted a huge amount of time to maintaining a network of contacts. In common with many writers who went into exile, Tergit found it difficult to reestablish herself with her audience in her native country once dislocated from the context, material, and readership that had stimulated her writing. None of her subsequent publications found the same resonance as Käsebier, not even her epic second novel, Effingers (The Effingers, 1951), which traces the history of a German family from 1871 to 1945.

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She also published short texts on the cultural history of the bed and of flowers, but these did not have the contemporary relevance of her Weimar writings.8 It was only in the wake of renewed public and academic interest in the Weimar era during the 1970s that Tergit’s work saw a revival in popularity and, although Effingers was reissued, it was Tergit’s Weimar writings that caught the imagination of the critics and the public.9 The elderly Tergit was fêted in mainstream magazines such as Der Stern as the discovery of the year in 1977, and she was flown to Berlin to give readings.10 However, this interest remained largely confined to the daily and weekly press. It is only in recent years that Tergit’s oeuvre has become the subject of academic attention, largely within the context of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) or literary presentations of the city, although Eva-Maria Mockel’s monograph explores power relationships in Tergit’s literary writings.11 Jens Brüning has made a considerable contribution to focusing interest on Tergit’s work through his editions of her journalism, and increasing awareness of the author was also demonstrated by the recent naming of a promenade after Tergit near the new Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Tergit died in London on 25 July 1982, leaving an extensive body of writing housed at the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar and at the German Exiles Archive in Frankfurt am Main. It includes two unpublished novels, sketches of radio plays, a drama, and literary and historical essays.12 Her autobiography, Etwas Seltenes überhaupt: Erinnerungen (Something Rare Indeed: Memoirs, 1983), was published posthumously.

The View from Moabit The reports of the legal proceedings Tergit witnessed in Moabit, of which she wrote, “Res gestae, die Epoche selber, steht täglich vor Gericht” (WS, 138; Res gestae, the age itself, stands daily before the court) are testimony to the extent to which Tergit was enthralled by the insight they offered into contemporary life. Key preoccupations that run through Tergit’s legal reports include the abortion laws, the rise of paramilitarism, the growing power of advertising, fraud, and the legal system itself. Although these concerns may sound somewhat generalized and abstract, it is important to note that Tergit always emphasizes the individual circumstances of witnesses and defendants. With clear empathy and a sharp eye for the humorous and ridiculous, she captures the human emotions and motives, the greed, jealousy, desperation, or vanity displayed by those in the courtroom. Her reports gain immediacy through the dialogue and keen physical descriptions. As Egon Larsen observes, Tergit’s focus brought a breath of fresh air to legal reporting, then dominated by middle-aged men with a legal background who discussed often arcane points of law in jargon.13 The

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contemporary with whom Tergit had most in common was Paul Schlesinger (1878–1928), legal reporter for the Vossische Zeitung from 1921–1928 under the name Sling. It is the combination of astute observation, humanity, and consciousness of the wider context that lends to Tergit’s legal journalism its continuing resonance and interest for the modern reader. Before considering the reports themselves, it is useful give some brief consideration to the legal world of the Weimar Republic. It was beset by many of the fissures and tensions related to the shifting status of age, gender, and social position, which, Detlev Peukert argues, were caused by the rapid pace of modernization in the Weimar Republic.14 The old educated elites of the Wilhelmine Empire had not been dislodged from their positions in the judiciary by the revolution and counterrevolution that marked the early years of the Republic.15 Loyal to Wilhelmine ideals and disturbed by what its members perceived as the disintegration of accepted social values and morality in mass society, the judiciary remained a notorious stronghold of inflexible conservative and anti-Republican views at the very time that the legislature was often seeking to liberalize or to introduce new laws to protect the underprivileged, such as new employment rights. According to Peukert (220–21), this coincided with a shift away from the legal positivism of the Wilhelmine era towards a greater emphasis upon the discretion of individual judges and their assessment of specific cases. Tergit’s comments upon these developments in her articles make it clear what a double-edged sword the reliance on the discretionary powers of the judges could be. Two reports from 1926 illustrate this point and indicate that Tergit was not content with simply recording her observations but sought to influence the public’s opinion of the justice system by means of trenchant commentary. In each case a transvestite is accused of offending public decency and of soliciting on exactly the same street corner in Berlin (WS, 60–62, 65–66). The first case, involving a male transvestite, is dismissed, whereas the female transvestite in the second case is sentenced to three weeks’ imprisonment. Tergit is astonished by the discrepancy in the sentencing and calls for the law to be clarified. In another article about a young woman who has killed her newborn baby, Tergit protests at what she perceives to be an unnecessarily harsh sentence in the light of expert psychiatric testimony of the defendant’s post-natal emotional instability (WS, 126–28). She names the judge, complaining that this is the second recent such case in which he has handed down a severe sentence. On the other hand, the discretionary power of the judges sometimes mitigates the impact of a particular law. Perhaps surprisingly, given the conservative attitudes of the judges, this occurs with respect to the controversial Paragraph 218 of the German penal code, which criminalized abortion and the display and sale of contraceptives. Popular opposition to the

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paragraph brought some minor amendments to the law in 1926, and the pro-choice campaign gathered momentum again with the economic depression in 1931.16 Tergit frequently reports on abortion trials, but she reserves her criticism for the law itself, often praising the judges for what she considers to be their humane administration and interpretation of Paragraph 218. In one case where two short sentences of probation are given, she comments it is “ein Urteil, das gefällt erscheint, mehr um dem Buchstaben des Gesetzes zu genügen, als aus Überzeugung von der Strafbarkeit dieser Handlung” (WS, 117; a judgment that seems to have been passed more to fulfill the letter of the law than from the conviction that this action should be punished). This emerges again in another case of 1931 where a young woman dies from infection at the hands of an untrained backstreet abortionist. Tergit feels that the sentences are fair, turning her criticism on the politicians who have failed to abolish the law (WS, 142). Nonetheless, these cases are exceptions in Tergit’s depiction of the attitudes of male judges towards women. For the most part, she is critical of their conservative and condescending attitude, which is at odds with the increasing emancipation of women in the Weimar Republic. In one trial, female witnesses are asked to explain their feelings about an event rather than to provide an objective description of the facts, and Tergit notes with heavy irony: “‘Gefühl’ und ‘Empfindung,’ das sind die richtigen Frauenvokabeln” (WS, 69; Feeling and sensation — that’s the right kind of vocabulary for women). In an article devoted to women in the courtroom, Tergit asserts that the legal apparatus is populated almost exclusively by male judges and lawyers. The only exceptions are the occasional female lay judge, the odd defense lawyer, officials from the juvenile court support service, and the daily cleaners (WS, 173–75). In addition, Tergit lists the crimes for which women defendants mostly appear in court as abortion, prostitution, procurement, infanticide, theft, and defamation. Significantly, the first four of these crimes are linked to female sexuality and motherhood, which became fiercely contested focal points of anxieties and aspirations about modernization in Weimar public discourse.17 Moreover, they highlight the conflicting values held by the judges and those who appear before them, particularly as the young women often have a very pragmatic attitude towards their sexuality. The largely conservative attitude of the judges in sentencing those who committed these crimes, as evinced in the conviction for the female transvestite described above, gave some legitimacy and force to those who advocated a return to the traditional role of wife and mother. Another key area in which Tergit is highly critical of the use judges make of their discretionary powers is the partisan sentencing for political violence and racially motivated assaults. Such cases constitute a recurrent theme of Tergit’s legal journalism from 1925 onwards, although her anxiety about the

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leniency shown towards right-wing perpetrators of violence becomes more pronounced during the late 1920s and 1930s when political gang warfare and paramilitarism were escalating. Tergit writes a series of three articles on one particularly horrific case in which a gang of around thirty Nazis hunted down, fatally stabbed and then lynched a Communist newspaper vendor, as well as wounding those who tried to intervene. Tergit concludes with the despairing comment: “so zart kann man das Faustrecht, das sich in Deutschland ausbreitet, nicht bekämpfen” (WS, 134; such gentle measures cannot curb the rule of force that is spreading across Germany). In another trial for murder, Tergit is horrified at the broad interpretation of self-defense (WS, 149). Statistical evidence shows that the Weimar judiciary was indeed more lenient in cases of political violence involving radical right-wingers than those involving Communists or Social Democrats, which provided the endorsement and sanction of the law for right-wing paramilitarism.18 Despite this, Tergit still values the ideal of allowing judges discretionary powers to weigh each individual case on its merits, as she laments the introduction of special fast-track trials to deal with the growing political violence under the emergency decrees of 1931. In Tergit’s view, the reduction of violent street crime brought about by the emergency procedures has been bought at the price of the fair administration of justice; she feels this cost could have been avoided if the judges had acted more responsibly at an earlier stage (WS, 180). Despite her experiences, Tergit continues to have faith in the ideal of a neutral, impartial judge. In reporting on these political crimes, Tergit frequently highlights the self-delusional behavior of those involved, arguing that they have forgotten that they are unemployed, salesmen, post office officials or book-keepers and perceive themselves first and foremost as soldiers in the Communist or Nazi cause. She pinpoints their use of military terminology — the language is that of field kitchens, entrenchments, military rank, and fallen comrades and enemies (WS, 130–32, 166–68). This psychosis allows them to absolve their consciences, according to Tergit: for example, one man insists that he did not flee from a crime, but was reassigned to Mecklenburg. Moreover, the delusional heroic self-image of these vigilantes is reinforced by the publicity of a trial. Tergit emphasizes the youth of those involved in these crimes, noting in one instance that they are “alles Milchgesichter” (WS, 130; all baby-faces), who seek direction from leadership figures. She thereby touches on the widely discussed question in Weimar about a generation of youth who had grown up without father figures as a result of the First World War, and who were perceived to be wild and out of control.19 Young men commit political violence, Tergit claims, from an urge to show off and a craving for renown among their peers (WS, 168). One Nazi writes to the Communist press to brag of his crimes whilst another self-proclaimed professional political criminal brings his own entourage to court to provide press reports on his martyrdom. Tergit describes this as “ein besonderer

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Zweig der Reklame” (WS, 57; a specialist branch of advertising), thus pinpointing the insidious interconnection between politics and advertising. Tergit considers this abuse of trial publicity to be so rife that she advocates not prosecuting weak cases, as they merely encourage others (WS, 138). The most carefully orchestrated performance in court is undoubtedly that of Adolf Hitler in January 1932 during a libel suit. Tergit describes how Hitler is granted exceptional treatment by being allowed to enter the court before the press and other onlookers. Tergit is furious as this creates the effect that the cluster of press is forming a guard of honor when Hitler and his entourage pass into the court. She claims the whole trial is staged “als hätte man ein Interesse daran, Hitler als künftigen Monarchen zu zeigen!” (WS, 170; as if they had a stake in presenting Hitler as the future monarch!) and she is suspicious of the motives of the judicial authorities who allow themselves to be manipulated for such an obvious political purpose. The preoccupation in these articles with the growing significance of reputation over reality and the power of appearances in the Weimar Republic is part of a wider concern in Tergit’s journalism about the preference for form over content in modern life. For instance, she reports on a case where the machinery of the law rolls into operation around a phantom incident (WS, 52–53). The accused has been arrested for obstructing police inquiries, but had only asked why the police were questioning him. Throughout the whole trial, no one learns what the original incident is and Tergit wonders if it had even occurred. It is not only the law whose selfsustaining machinery can function without any real cause. In “Kantinen im Monde” (WS, 140–41; Canteens on the Moon), Tergit reports on a fraud trial in which a long chain of construction contracts and subcontracts are agreed on the strength of a rumor that the Berlin transport authorities are planning a subway extension. A whole machinery of business is thus generated around a nonexistent product, which collapses when it emerges that no extension will take place. Tergit’s legal journalism demonstrates an underlying concern with the growing predominance of appearance over content and of self-perpetuating systems in the Weimar Republic. This concern also constitutes the mainspring of Käsebier, as will be discussed below. The author’s anxieties about the failure of the law to regulate and keep pace with rapidly shifting social values and about the rising tide of political violence are also manifested in her first novel. However, within the novel, Tergit connects these developments explicitly with the process of modernization itself.

Käsebier — A Roman-À-Clef? Tergit’s first novel not only shares preoccupations with her journalism: many of the passages are adapted or even taken verbatim from her feuilletons

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or other articles.20 The short chapters in Käsebier are reminiscent of newspaper articles and the punchy headings read like captions or headlines. As in her journalism, Tergit’s extensive use of dialogue in her first novel creates a sense of directness and immediacy for the reader. In addition, the action radiates out from the offices of the fictional Berliner Rundschau newspaper, which is portrayed as one of the main catalysts of modernization. The novel charts the meteoric rise of folksinger Georg Käsebier to national, and even moderate international, stardom and his equally swift return to obscurity. However, the singer himself remains largely in the background and the author concentrates instead upon the extensive merchandising operation surrounding Käsebier in order to highlight the role of the modern mass media in turning popular culture into a commodity. Tergit focuses on the involvement of the professional circles of journalists, lawyers, and architects, together with financiers and speculators, in generating a short-lived economic boom based on Käsebier. Moreover, those who profit most from this boom are connected to the rise of Nazism. Spanning the period from early 1929 to May 1931, the novel charts the transition in the Weimar Republic from relative political and economic stability into its final crisis-ridden phase. In her autobiography, Tergit describes how the precise nature of her subject matter was suggested to her by a conversation she had with Walter Kiaulehn, her friend and colleague at the Berliner Tageblatt. On the day following the publication of an article by Heinrich Mann about the popular entertainer Erich Carow, Kiaulehn informed Tergit that a journalist had already clinched a publishing deal for a book on Carow and was asking for contributions. This example of canny profiteering crystallized ideas that Tergit had been considering for some time: Ich plante schon lange eine Satire auf den “Betrieb,” den ich für den Zerstörer aller echten Werte hielt, um etwas Nichtexistierendes zu schreiben. . . . Aber ich erkannte, daß ein Buch, aus dem man nicht erfährt weswegen telefoniert, telegrafiert, in Autos gerast wird — ein Kafka-Thema —, unmöglich ist. (S, 77–78) [For a long time, I had been planning a satire on “speculation,” which I considered to be responsible for destroying all genuine values, in order to write about something non-existent. . . . But I realized that it’s impossible to write a book in which the reader doesn’t discover why people are telephoning, sending telegraphs, and racing around in cars — it’s really a subject for Kafka.]

As we have seen, these concerns are evident in Tergit’s journalism, particularly in the reports outlined above of a phantom crime and a phantom business deal that trigger a wider machinery into action. Here Tergit links these to modernizing processes that accelerate the pace of life.

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Nonetheless, aware of the connection with Carow, Kiaulehn himself reviewed the novel as a roman-à-clef, a genre in which the characters are thinly disguised replicas of real-life individuals. He drew comparisons between Tergit’s characters and figures in Berlin literary, journalistic, and social circles. Tergit claims in her autobiography that most of the subsequent reviews of the novel revolved around the Käsebier-Carow connection, thereby obscuring the central issues she wished to raise (ES, 80). There are undeniably some superficial parallels between Käsebier and Carow, but Käsebier is not sufficiently developed as a character to warrant being termed a copy of Carow. Virtually no attention is devoted to his personal history, his inner thought processes, or his responses to his fame. In fact, there are only two brief conversations, covering four pages, in which Käsebier speaks at all (K, 171–74). This represents a stark contrast to Lion Feuchtwanger’s portrait of the morose, ambitious, and greedy folksinger Balthasar Hierl in Erfolg (Success, 1931).21 However, despite Tergit’s protests, the roman-à-clef label has remained remarkably tenacious in reviews of the novel since it was reissued in 1977.22 It must be stressed that Tergit uses not only Käsebier, but also the central Berlin street of the title, the Kurfürstendamm, as a vehicle to highlight the impact of modernizing processes and the increasing predominance of form over content in the Weimar Republic. As in her legal journalism, she also links these developments to the growing success of the radical right wing in the final critical phase of the Weimar Republic. The phenomenon to which both Käsebier and the Kurfürstendamm are subject in the novel can be described as the process that sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as “disembedding.”23 According to Giddens, social relations in the premodern world are connected by presence: social interactions occur within a localized context with all parties physically present. The advent of modernity, however, permits social relations to occur between “‘absent’ others” (CM, 18) or people who are not always, and may never have been, physically present in the same place. Moreover, locale or place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric, or structured by distant social influences and economic relations. Giddens terms this process “disembedding” or “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (CM, 21). He proceeds to identify two key types of mechanism that both prompt and depend upon disembedding: symbolic tokens such as money, and expert systems of professional or technical knowledge, such as construction or air travel. Whereas premodern social relations are characterized by presence alone, disembedding mechanisms enable modern social relations to conjoin “instantaneity and deferral, presence and absence” (CM, 25). The following discussion will consider how the novelist traces the impact of such time-space transformations, upon art in relation to Käsebier, and upon locale in relation to the Kurfürstendamm.

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From Käsebier to Mickey Mouse Käsebier’s rise to stardom involves disembedding, as he is separated from his local context and his act is redistributed in various ways across time and space. His initial appeal derives from the genuine, unpretentious nature of his act. He represents an old, authentic Berlin where space is still identified with place and where social relations are still predominantly characterized by presence. The narrator twice mentions the singer’s “Schnauze” (K, 50; literally: snout), emphasizing his rootedness in the city and in a very specific milieu, “Berliner Schnauze” being the term both for the dialect and for the particular kind of assertive attitude and sharp wit associated with Berliners. Käsebier’s popularity amongst his original working-class audience in Hasenheide springs from his expression of concerns specific to their locale, as he adapts songs about the Charleston by substituting lyrics on social security and debt. The playwright Otto Lambeck, whose report for the fictional Berliner Tageszeitung triggers Käsebier’s fame, admires the strong sense of shared values between singer and audience: “Hier, lange vergeblich gesucht, . . . wächst Selbstironie und Galgenhumor und das Glück der Gemeinschaft” (K, 53; The self-irony and gallows humor and community happiness for which I have sought so long in vain are growing here). Yet Lambeck’s report is, paradoxically, the catalyst for the separation of space and place, since it makes Käsebier known beyond his own district to people widely dispersed in time and space. Rich, fashionable Berliners flood the venue in Hasenheide in search of authenticity and a sense of community, thereby unwittingly destroying these very qualities. Transplanted from his locale to the Wintergarten theater, the singer refrains from amending the Charleston song to spare the sensibilities of his new audience, taking out the element of self-mockery that was so important in establishing his popular appeal. Fashionable Berlin soon tires of the novelty and on the opening night of a new theater specifically designed for Käsebier, the narrator comments that there is no contact between singer and audience (K, 257). The contrast with the original scene described by Lambeck could not be greater. Overall, Tergit illustrates how Käsebier’s authenticity is undermined as he is lifted out of those local social relations that originally produced his popularity. Nevertheless, it is the image of Käsebier as a genuine Berliner that is turned into a commodity for the public through the mass media and entertainment industries, which burgeoned during the Weimar Republic. In an echo of the famous themed Haus Vaterland venue, the theater constructed for Käsebier on the Kurfürstendamm recreates the interior of the Hasenheide bar. In a film operetta, he plays the part of an everyday plain-speaking Berliner who gets into all sorts of scrapes at the court of a young Austrian archduke. Records and radio broadcasts serve to bring his voice to the masses, and his image is reproduced in every conceivable manner from

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photographs, portraits, films, and books to the character merchandising of dolls, cigarettes, books, balloons, pens, and shoes, until there is “vom Boden bis zum Himmel nichts als Käsebier” (K, 192; nothing but Käsebier between earth and heaven). The transfer of information via mass media and mass consumerism functions as a disembedding mechanism, tearing Käsebier from a particular place and making him simultaneously accessible to huge numbers of people who may be at a great spatial distance from each other. In her presentation of Käsebier’s career, Tergit identifies a central process involved in the transition from traditional to advanced modern societies. In describing the commodification of popular culture and the cult of celebrity, Tergit pinpoints a key structure of modern life that developed during the Weimar Republic. It was not only the oft-mentioned Erich Carow who enjoyed sudden popularity as a typical Berlin character: the artist Heinrich Zille, whose work focuses on life amongst the urban poor, was also the subject of all manner of marketing ploys. These included the creation of bars with a Zille theme and the manufacture of dolls, balls, cigarettes, and liquor that were sold in the Berlin souvenir shops of the 1920s.24 So we can see that Tergit highlights a widespread and nostalgic fascination with the authentic and with social relations based on place, which had, paradoxically, sprung up in the very city associated with the cutting edge of modernity and which continues as the heritage industry in our own day. Ultimately, Tergit’s novel reveals how the fad for Käsebier, a real singer whose act depended on his presence in a particular locale, is superseded by a craze for Mickey Mouse, a cartoon drawing whose relationship with the audience is determined by absence from the start. Precisely the same set of goods are produced for Mickey Mouse as for Käsebier, illustrating Tergit’s view that the whole process only requires the most spurious rationale to function. There are clear parallels between Tergit’s presentation of the loss of the authentic and Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the destruction of the aura of a work of art in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1938).25 Nonetheless, they link this development to fascism in different ways. Benjamin argues that fascism attempts to reinstate the aura in order to distract the masses from the revolutionary potential offered by technically reproducible art (such as Mickey Mouse). Tergit, on the other hand, links the destruction of the authentic with the preference for style over substance that paves the way for fascism’s success, a point I will return to later.

Constructing the Kurfürstendamm Like Käsebier, the Kurfürstendamm itself undergoes a modernizing process in the novel, whereby place is separated from space and the locale

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is increasingly structured by distant social influences and international economic imperatives. Moreover, like the singer, the physical infrastructure of the street itself is subject to a cycle of boom and bust in construction and redevelopment projects, which radiates out to the rest of the city. This focus on the constantly changing face of the city reflects contemporary developments in Berlin. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin was as much a byword for change, construction, and redevelopment as it has been during the past decade. In particular, transportation links were extended and developed to facilitate and accelerate movement within the city and beyond, while many sites were transformed for mass entertainment and mass consumption. Along with the Potsdamer Platz and the Alexanderplatz, the Kurfürstendamm was one of the sites where this transformation was most prominent and which became for many artists and writers a metaphor for transience, speed, and the ephemeral nature of modern life. For example, in 1929 Joseph Roth perceives the only permanent characteristic of the Kurfürstendamm to be its capacity for constant renewal: “Unwandelbar ist seine Wandelbarkeit. Langmütig ist seine Ungeduld. Beharrlich ist seine Unbeständigkeit” (Its variability is constant. Its impatience is forbearing. Its fickleness is persistent).26 For Franz Hessel, the rapid turnover of shops and cafés in this street “muß ein sozusagen unterirdisches Gesetz der Stadt sein” (must, so to speak, be a subterranean urban law).27 Roth and Hessel both view this constant change as the normal, stable condition of the Kurfürstendamm. The Kurfürstendamm also functions as a metaphor for transience in Käsebier, nowhere more so than in the brevity of the singer’s conquest of this site so confidently proclaimed by the novel’s title. However, unlike Roth and Hessel, Tergit portrays these spatial transformations as more spasmodic and she explicitly connects them to economic demands and to modernizing processes. The physical infrastructure of Berlin is depicted in the novel as an elaborate network that promotes interaction, mobility, and the traffic of goods and ideas. The layout of the street encourages fortuitous encounters, and the Kurfürstendamm constitutes a particularly rich source of such meetings. For instance, the crucial encounter where Frächter draws Lambeck’s attention to Gohlisch’s largely unnoticed article on Käsebier takes place on the Kurfürstendamm. In the cafés and salons, new contacts and business arrangements are fostered, and the first soirée at Margot Weißmann’s home on the Kurfürstendamm generates the deal between banker Richard Muschler and construction magnate Otto Mitte to build a complex of apartments, garages, and shops around a theater for Käsebier on the Kurfürstendamm. The Kurfürstendamm thus operates as the key structural interconnection and location for traffic and exchange within the novel. With the Käsebier boom, the Kurfürstendamm enters a frantic period of reconstruction, with established shops undergoing drastic renovation in an almost compulsive fashion (K, 175). The narrator ascribes an earlier

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spate of redevelopment on the Kurfürstendamm to the spiraling inflation that forced property owners to transform residential homes into new sites of mass consumption and entertainment, including retail outlets for cars, clothes, shoes, and perfume (K, 175). Space is thus given over to commerce and public interaction rather than private use, making it even more dependent upon economic cycles and upon circumstances beyond the locale. In the Käsebier boom, the profit from the space is maximized even during construction by the use of advertising hoardings to conceal the building work, which heightens the impression that the appearance of the street is being continually altered. The feverish enthusiasm for redevelopment even generates a rumor that the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church) is to be demolished together with the houses in nearby streets to make way for hotels and offices, new venues of commercial interaction. The position of the more enduring and prominent landmarks, around which the identity of the Kurfürstendamm has previously accrued, is shown in the novel to have become precarious. The physical infrastructure of the metropolis not only conducts, and promotes the movement of goods, people, and ideas, but is itself in a state of constant flux. As with Käsebier himself, disembedding occurs as a site structured by local relations becomes increasingly phantasmagoric and subject to changing socioeconomic relations beyond the locale. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the impact when the Käsebier bubble bursts and the property market collapses in the spring of 1930 in response to the world economic crisis. This distant event has a devastating effect upon the Kurfürstendamm itself, revealing the flip side of excessive consumption as exhaustion, crisis, and waste. Muschler compares the sight of the abandoned construction projects and the string of for-rent signs on the street to the devastation wrought by cholera, or an abandoned gold-rush town. Significantly, all this energetic construction work does not produce innovative modernist architecture or humane good quality housing, because of the preference for style over substance. Throughout, Muschler focuses on the financial side of the theater project, abnegating all responsibility for the design itself, an attitude encapsulated in his oft-repeated mantra: “Beim Bauen ist der Bau gar nicht so wichtig, die Finanzierung ist alles” (K, 129; In construction, the building itself isn’t that important — the financing is everything). The narrator comments that the Käsebier complex is badly designed, with too much emphasis placed upon the visual impact created by the communal spaces of the building rather than upon its residential function. The other big construction project in the novel, the Hohenschönhausen apartments, also sports a beautiful façade, but it has been built without spaces for children to play, with doors that do not open properly, and poor natural lighting (K, 182). Form is given priority over function, and it is the inhabitants who suffer.

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Similar tendencies emerge in manufacturing. Duchow, a carpenter, complains that customers are no longer interested in the quality of goods if the visual appearance and price are favorable. Max Schulz, who awards the contracts for the theater complex, relates that a local shoemaker has told him that style is more important to his customers than comfort or the health of their feet. Tergit thereby touches on contemporary debates about the threat to German quality work from the modernizing processes of standardized mass consumption.28 Significantly, the preference for form over content not only affects the economic sphere, but, as in Tergit’s legal journalism, is clearly connected with the rise of National Socialism. For instance, Schulz is compelled to award the contract for supplying gas and water to the Käsebier theater to the lowest bidder, although he is unsure about the reliability of the work, and this bidder wears his swastika openly on his lapel. The clearest link in the novel between the emphasis on style over substance and National Socialism is made through the character of Willi Frächter, who, as his name suggests, has found his vocation as an agent or a fixer. A ruthless opportunist who has espoused every popular cause since the First World War, Frächter is the driving force behind the successful ventures in the Käsebier boom, with the notable exception of the theater project. Whether his deals generate films, books, or cigarettes is of no significance to Frächter: they are all goods to be produced and consumed as quickly as possible before the public appetite fades. His final venture in the novel is the rationalization of the Berliner Rundschau, which involves emphasizing style over substance. He shifts the emphasis from the written word to the visual image in the newspaper by introducing large photographs on the front page, together with sections on cosmetics, fashion, and gossip. The editor of the feuilleton at the Berliner Rundschau, Georg Miermann, links the increasing importance of appearance in the Weimar Republic and Frächter’s general mode of operating to the rise of National Socialism. Miermann claims that the NSDAP is a party that has made showmanship its central policy and that epitomizes “die Form als Inhalt” (K, 218; form as content). He also thinks it is pure chance that Frächter, with his confident bluster and hypocrisy, has not yet joined the NSDAP, describing him as “gefährlich. Er unterstützt jede Bewegung, die man hemmen müßte. Er ist für Bluff. Er ist für Trommeln” (K, 215; dangerous. He supports every movement that should be stopped. He’s for bluff. He’s for drums). This echoes Tergit’s description of the “künstlich aufgezogenen Betrieb” (WS, 170; artificially created commotion), the pomp and circumstance designed to create the impression of Hitler as a leader in waiting during his appearance at Moabit. Unlike Walter Benjamin who considers that fascism seeks to uphold the aura of the work of art, Tergit indicates that fascism’s success derives from its ruthless, irresponsible appropriation and exploitation of modernizing developments for personal or political gain.

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The close of the novel is unremittingly bleak and almost apocalyptic. The whole of Berlin is drawn into the collapse of Muschler’s bank, precipitated by the failure of the Käsebier theater project. Frächter’s final undertaking in the novel is to preside over the demolition of the Berliner Rundschau buildings, as his rationalization measures have brought about the newspaper’s demise and left its staff unemployed. For-rent signs, rubble, and unfinished projects have superseded the glamour of the Kurfürstendamm. Cafés and other public spaces have been taken over by the aggressive behavior of those leaving political meetings, and gangs of politicized youths roam the streets spoiling for a fight. It is a stark warning of what was to become an even starker reality.

Conclusion In her autobiography, Tergit writes that in her later years, she was often haunted by the thought of how she sat so close to Hitler during the libel trial in 1932 that she could have easily shot him at point-blank range and thus spared the death and suffering of many millions around the world. This regret over a lost opportunity for action and her sense of survivor’s guilt is a harsh self-judgment that does not do justice to the commitment, engagement, and sense of social responsibility that Tergit displays in her writing. These qualities were responsible for her putting a whole series of highly controversial, uncomfortable issues on the public agenda in the Weimar Republic, including the abortion laws, the impact of the judiciary’s conservative attitude upon proliferating street violence, turning popular culture into a commodity, the influence of advertising and the cult of celebrity, and the question of how to accommodate shifting values in the modern world. With her writing, Tergit sought not only to make these issues known and accessible to a wide readership but also to influence public debate and to warn of their future implications. Moreover, many of these issues are still at the heart of social and political debates in our own time, which lends a continuing resonance to Tergit’s analysis of them. Tergit’s voice was powerful and authoritative enough that the Nazis endeavored to silence it at the first opportunity. As such, her contribution is worthy of continued attention in academic debates about the Weimar Republic.29

Notes 1

Gabriele Tergit, Wer schießt aus Liebe? Gerichtsreportagen, ed. Jens Brüning (Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 1999), 80. Hereafter referred to as WS. 2

Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm: Roman (Berlin: arani, 1997). Originally published by Rowohlt in 1931. Hereafter referred to

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as Käsebier in the text and as K followed by page numbers in parenthetical references. 3

According to Kurt Koszyk, the Berliner Tageblatt, alongside the Frankfurter Zeitung, represented left-wing democratic journalism in the Weimar Republic. See Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Presse, 1914–1945: Geschichte der deutschen Presse; Teil III (Berlin: Colloquium, 1972), 216.

4

Gabriele Tergit, Etwas Seltenes überhaupt: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983). Hereafter referred to as ES. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent biographical details provided about Tergit are taken from this autobiography.

5

Eva-Maria Mockel, Aspekte von Macht und Ohnmacht im literarischen Werk Gabriele Tergits (Aachen: Shaker, 1996), 56–57.

6

Jens Brüning, “Vorwort,” in WS, 5–12; here, 9.

7

Gabriele Tergit, Im Schnellzug nach Haifa, ed. Jens Brüning (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998).

8

Gabriele Tergit, Das Büchlein vom Bett (Munich: Langen-Müller/Herbig, 1954); Gabriele Tergit, Kaiserkron und Päonien rot — Kleine Kulturgeschichte der Blumen (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1958); Gabriele Tergit, Das Tulpenbüchlein (Hanover: Landbuch-Verlag, 1965).

9

I have come across only one review of Käsebier between 1932 and 1977: Peter Zapfel, “Wiedersehen mit Käsebiers Kurfürstendamm,” Die Kultur, April 1955: 10.

10

Nicolaus Neumann, “Comeback der alten Dame,” Der Stern, 24 March 1977, 185–91. 11

See, for example, Fiona Littlejohn, “Mobility in the Metropolis: Responses to the Changing City in Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm and J. B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement,” New Readings 5 (1999): 39–50; Erhard Schütz, Romane der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Fink, 1986); Inge Stephan, “Stadt ohne Mythos: Gabriele Tergits Berlin-Roman Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm,” in Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman: Neue Interpretationen zum Roman der Weimarer Republik, ed. Sabina Becker and Christoph Weiß (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1995), 291–313; Heide Soltau, “Die Anstrengungen des Aufbruchs: Romanautorinnen und ihre Heldinnen in der Weimarer Zeit,” in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Munich: Beck, 1988), 2:220–35.

12

Brüning, “Vorwort,” 10.

13

Egon Larsen, Die Welt der Gabriele Tergit: Aus dem Leben einer ewig jungen Berlinerin (Munich: Frank Auerbach, 1987), 12. 14

Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).

15 For a more detailed discussion of the attitudes of the judiciary during the Weimar Republic see Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 219–22, and V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 76–77, 82, 120. 16 Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 106–12.

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17

Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 101–11; Katharina von Ankum, “Introduction,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 1997), 1–11.

18

“Up to 1921, 13 murder cases involving left-wingers were brought to court which imposed eight death sentences and a total of 176 years’ imprisonment; by contrast some 314 murders committed by right-wingers led to one life sentence and a total of 31 years’ imprisonment. Also in later years, a political murder perpetrated by a Communist earned either a high prison sentence or the death penalty; right-wing Feme murderers, on the other hand, tended to be let off very lightly” (Berghahn, Modern Germany, 76).

19

Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 94–100; Berghahn, Modern Germany, 120.

20

Compare, for example, the flânerie of Otto Lambeck or Lotte Kohler in Käsebier (35–37 and 90–93) with Tergit’s feuilletons “Vorfrühlingsreise nach Berlin” and “Eingewöhnen in Berlin,” in Atem einer anderen Welt: Berliner Reportagen (Air of Another World. Berlin Reports), ed. Jens Brüning (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 17–21. 21

Lion Feuchtwanger, Erfolg: Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz; Roman (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999).

22

See, for example, Margarete Dierks, “Berlin-Romane und Blumen-Kulturgeschichte,” Frankfurter Hefte 36 (1981): 65–68; Horst Hartmann, “Eine goldene Seifenblase platzt,” tat, 17 March 1978, 14; Hedwig Rohde, “Es lag was in der Luft,” Tagesspiegel, 9 September 1977, 4; Schütz, Romane der Weimarer Republik, 155–57.

23

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). References to this work in the text are given using the abbreviation CM and the page number. 24

Matthias Flügge, “Heinrich Zilles grafische Zyklen und sein Werk der zwanziger Jahre,” in Heinrich Zille, 1858–1929, ed. Renate Altner et al. (Berlin: BerlinInformation, 1988), 165–206.

25

Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rudolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1.2:471–508. 26

Joseph Roth, “Der Kurfürstendamm,” in Werke (Cologne and Amsterdam: Kiepenhauer & Witsch and Allert de Lange, 1991), 3:98–100; here, 100. First published 1929.

27

Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin: Beobachtungen im Jahr 1929 (Berlin: Morgen, 1979), 132. First published 1929. 28

Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 84–103.

29

I gratefully acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting the doctoral research upon which this chapter is based.

10: Radical Realism and Historical Fantasy: Alfred Döblin David Midgley

B

EFORE THE PUBLICATION OF Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), the work for which he is most commonly remembered, Alfred Döblin already had an established reputation as a radical literary experimenter. He had been engaging forcefully in the cultural debates of the Berlin avant-garde since around 1910, and the novels he published from 1915 on were uncompromising in their depiction of the materiality of human existence and of the capacity of human beings, individually and collectively, for extreme forms of behavior. Döblin’s historical vision, coupled with his energetic pursuit of innovative narrative techniques, made him an inspirational figure for the rising generation of the 1920s, among them Bertolt Brecht. At the same time, however, Döblin’s epic imagination was also engaging with metaphysical questions — the place of humankind in the cosmos and the intimate connections between human endeavor and the forces of nature — and it might be argued that his later writings bring a consummation of tendencies that can already be detected in his publications of the Weimar period, but toward which the intellectual climate of that time had been inhospitable. His trilogy November 1918 (1939–50) combines a remarkably detailed account of the historical situation from which the Weimar Republic had emerged with a personal quest for religious orientation on the part of the main protagonist. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1941, indeed, Döblin’s writings are generally characterized by a spiritual earnestness, and reflect critically on the implications of his own modernism; however, his last novel, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (Hamlet, or The Long Night Comes to an End, 1956), which contains much anguished reflection on fundamental aspects of human existence, and relations between the sexes in particular, nevertheless retains something of the vibrancy and vigor of his earlier narrative fiction. Alfred Döblin was born in Stettin in 1878. His father abandoned the family in 1888, and his mother moved with the five children to Berlin, where Alfred received most of his education, qualifying as a doctor in 1905. While his own marriage to a fellow medical student, Erna Reiss, was not a happy one, his early experience of family breakdown led him in later

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life to place family commitment above other emotional attachments. After gaining experience in psychiatric hospitals at Regensburg and at Buch, near Berlin, he ran a general practice in Berlin from 1911 to 1914 and again throughout the Weimar period. In the First World War he served as a medical officer in the German army, and in 1918, while serving in Alsace, experienced the dissolution of the imperial regime. While he maintained a critical attitude towards all forms of political organization, he was a committed democrat and republican,1 a lively critic of political and cultural developments in the early 1920s, and a combative member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts from 1928 to 1933, a period when, like other German institutions, it was being undermined by anti-republican machinations.2 The publication of Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929 became the occasion for a fundamental breach with the Communist writers who criticized the work, and Döblin subsequently remained generally wary of Communist-led activities, although, after the Second World War, he found it easier to publish his novels in the GDR than in the West. In 1933 Döblin escaped to Zurich, and subsequently to France, with his family. He took French citizenship in 1936, and two of his four sons fought in the French army against Nazi Germany in 1940. Although the family had been fully integrated into German Protestant society in Berlin, Döblin showed interest in his Jewish roots during the 1920s, publishing an account of his travels in Eastern Europe in 1924; and from 1933 to 1937 he was active in the Jewish territorialist movement, which was seeking possible locations for a Jewish homeland other than Palestine. As a refugee in France in 1940, however, he experienced the need to revise his worldview significantly, and this led to his adoption of the Catholic faith in 1941. Fleeing again, this time to the United States, he was initially given a contract of employment with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, but effectively lived there in total obscurity dependent on state benefits for the next four years. In 1945 he returned to France and served as a cultural officer in the French-occupied zone of Germany, but between then and his death in 1957 he never regained the measure of literary recognition he had enjoyed during the Weimar period. In the period before the First World War, Döblin was closely associated with the avant-garde periodical Der Sturm (The Storm), in which several of his early stories were published. The exhibition of Italian Futurist art that the Sturm circle, led by Herwarth Walden, organized in Berlin in 1912, indirectly prompted Döblin to issue his most important early programmatic statements. He enthusiastically welcomed the dynamism of these paintings — for example those of Umberto Boccioni, who is famous for his attempts to represent the bustling simultaneity of city streets on his canvasses — because he felt that they had broken decisively with the tradition of perspectival depiction and its assumption of a fixed viewpoint. But when he subsequently encountered the novel Mafarka by the leading

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Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he was disappointed, finding it marred by tired metaphors and an outmoded aestheticism and therefore unable to live up to its avant-garde aspirations.3 Döblin concluded his critique of Marinetti in Der Sturm by proclaiming his own “Döblinism” as an alternative to Futurism, and the watchwords of “Sachlichkeit” and “Dinglichkeit” — both referring to the materiality of the empirical world — that he invoked along the way are indicative of the principle he held to in his own early fiction. This amounts to a radical naturalism, to observing the phenomena of the natural world and seeking the words — nouns and verbs above all — that will let objects and events speak for themselves. In the “Berlin Program” he published in Der Sturm in 1913, Döblin enjoined his fellow authors to learn from his own professional discipline, psychiatry, in order to move beyond the rationalized abstract terms that dominated conventional psychological narrative at the time: Man lerne von der Psychiatrie, der einzigen Wissenschaft, die sich mit dem seelischen ganzen Menschen befaßt; sie hat das Naïve der Psychologie längst erkannt, beschränkt sich auf die Notierung der Abläufe, Bewegungen, — mit einem Kopfschütteln, Achselzucken für das Weitere und das “Warum” und “Wie.” Die sprachlichen Formeln dienen nur dem praktischen Verkehr. “Zorn,” “Liebe,” “Verachtung” bezeichnen in die Sinne fallende Erscheinungskomplexe, darüber hinaus geben diese primitiven und abgeschmackten Buchstabenverbindungen nichts. Sie geben ursprünglich sichtbare, hörbare, zum Teil berechenbare Abläufe an, Veränderungen der Aktionsweise und Effekte. Sie können nie und nimmermehr als Mikroskope oder Fernrohre dienen, diese blinden Scheiben; sie können nicht zum Leitfaden einer lebennnachbildenden Handlung werden.4 [We should learn from psychiatry, the only science that concerns itself with the psychic reality of the individual human being in its entirety. It has long since recognized the naivety of psychology, and confines itself to noting processes and developments — with a shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders for everything else and the whys and wherefores. Linguistic formulations serve only the purposes of practical communication. “Anger,” “love,” “contempt” are terms for complex phenomena that our senses register; beyond that, these primitive and worn-out combinations of letters yield nothing. They denote processes, changes in action and effect that were originally visible, audible, and up to a point measurable. These opaque disks can never serve as microscopes or telescopes; they cannot become the guiding thread for any act of representing life.]

What Döblin was advocating in 1913 went further than this insistence on precise observation and notation, however. In order to convey the impression of a world speaking through the text, he wanted to suppress the sense of a narrating presence entirely, to break the “hegemony of the author,” as he put it. The “steinerne Stil” (stony style) he envisaged in his

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“Berlin Program” would only be achieved by merging that narrating identity with the objects to be presented: “ich bin nicht ich, sondern die Straße, die Laternen, dies und dies Ereignis, weiter nichts” (I am not myself, but the street, the lamps, this or that event, nothing more).5 It was a policy that ostensibly modeled itself on scientific observation, but which also left open the way to the speculative investigations into nature philosophy and the relation between self and world that Döblin was to publish alongside his major novels of the 1920s. Döblin began writing prose fiction when he was still at school, and these early texts — the short story “Modern” and the novel Jagende Rosse (Galloping Stallions, 1900) — already show him to be exploring the relationship between cultural constraints and biological impulses on the one hand, and between individual human identity and the broad realm of nature on the other. In his mid-twenties Döblin wrote a second novel, Der schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain), in which an adolescent boy is confronted with the demons within himself — impulses to perform destructive acts, coupled with his awakening fascination for the opposite sex. The narrative style of this work already comes close to the principle of exact psychiatric observation that Döblin later outlined in his “Berlin Program,” with no concession to the conventional expectation of a continuous narrative thread.6 The intensely introverted love-hate relationship that the boy develops with a young woman culminates in extreme possessiveness and self-destruction on his part; he kills her by biting through her carotid artery and throws himself on the funeral pyre on which he burns her body. Der schwarze Vorhang was written 1902–3 and serialized in Der Sturm in 1912–13, but the radically episodic character of the narrative, together with the dark nature of its subject matter, prevented its publication in book form until 1919, when Döblin’s literary reputation was already well established. The close association between vitality and aggression, between sexuality and violence, were to become perennial themes in his works. The short stories published under the title Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup) in 1913, after some of them had previously appeared in Der Sturm, illustrate the young Döblin’s wit and his eye for the revelatory power of grotesque incidents, as well as his preoccupation with the lack of clear boundaries between normal and pathological behavior. The title story, for instance, describes the onset of a condition of compulsive neurosis in a respectable middle-aged businessman, Michael Fischer, who finds himself assaulting a buttercup with his walking-stick. Instead of providing the reader with preconceived explanations for Fischer’s actions, Döblin’s text presents events as if the consequences of those actions are taking the protagonist himself unawares; it is as if his conscious self is totally dissociated from his own motor reflexes. What might appear an utterly trivial incident acquires a deeper comic significance when Fischer tries to regain his self-control in the sort of authoritarian manner we might

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expect him to adopt in the workplace, seeking to show his thoughts “who is boss” and put his own feet “in their place.” Modes of behavior that belong in the sphere of formal social relations become ludicrous when transferred into the domain of his private fantasy: he devises elaborate gestures of remorse towards the plant he has decapitated, and even sets up procedures for paying it compensation. By the end of the story his behavior has become quite manic, and he disappears into the forest in search of further buttercups to murder. A poignant counterpart to the title story is “Die Tänzerin und der Leib” (The Dancer and the Body), in which an accomplished dancer falls into a terminal sickness at the age of 19. What she has achieved by the exercise of discipline and sheer willpower over her body has led to a fatal loss of personal identity and vitality. Fuller accounts of these and other early works by Döblin, supported by a comprehensive bibliography, can be found in Gabriele Sander’s recent book, Alfred Döblin.7 The work that really established Döblin’s reputation, and brought him the Fontane Prize in 1916, was Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (1916; translated as The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun, 1991), the first of his works to be published by the prestigious S. Fischer Verlag. Although the way Döblin deploys Taoist concepts in this novel has been questioned in recent years by Chinese scholars,8 his choice of a quasi-mythical Chinese setting appears to have liberated his imagination to depict the human potential for extremes of behavior, while also providing him with rich opportunities for reflecting issues of power distribution in his own society. Wang-Lun, a fisherman’s son, grows up as a prankster and a thief, but his physical strength and his general demeanor lead others to look to him for leadership. When a friend is killed by an imperial officer, Wang-Lun avenges that death by killing the murderer and then flees with a band of followers to the mountains, where he is initiated into the doctrine of nonviolence by a former Buddhist monk. Oppression by the imperial regime makes it impossible to maintain this nonviolent doctrine in practice, and Wang-Lun eventually dies leading an insurrection, which is defeated amid increasingly brutal atrocities on either side. Published early in 1916,9 the year of the notorious mass offensives at Verdun and on the Somme, the work caught the wartime mood with its themes of power, injustice, the ultimate futility of violent action, and the dialectic relation between force and renunciation. Critics were also favorably impressed by the vividness of Döblin’s descriptive writing and his innovative way of evoking crowd behavior, which have often been interpreted as the fruit of his earlier critique of Marinetti’s Mafarka. The merging of the fate of the individual into that of a mass movement is a feature of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun that anticipates Döblin’s treatment of the relationship between the individual and the modern city in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek’s Struggle with the Steam Turbine, 1918), the second novel Döblin wrote during a particularly

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energetic phase between 1912 and 1915, exemplifies his tendency to swing from one extreme to another between one work and the next. By contrast with the broad historical sweep of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun, it focuses narrowly on the private war of a Berlin industrialist, Franz Wadzek, against his chief competitor (the manufacturer of the steam turbine mentioned in the title) and the power of the monopoly capitalism he represents. Döblin was evidently attracted by the tragicomic potential of Wadzek as a Quixotic figure who subsides into petit-bourgeois obscurity and escapes to America at the end of his struggle; that aspect of the novel — its repudiation of tragic heroism — was one reason why Döblin’s writing appealed to the young Brecht.10 In retrospect it is also possible to recognize Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine as an important experiment on the way to Döblin’s evocation of life in the industrial city in Berlin Alexanderplatz.11 But critics at the time felt, rather, that in this instance Döblin had simply succumbed to his own appetite for grotesque characterization.12 By the end of the First World War, then, Döblin had established himself as an incisive critic of conventional literary writing and a pioneer of innovative narrative techniques, but his standing as a novelist was as yet uncertain. Not until Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (1929; translated as Alexanderplatz, Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, 1931) was he to achieve a major marketing success, and his relations with the S. Fischer Verlag became strained in the meantime. Throughout the Weimar period, however, he made significant contributions to cultural debates, and in particular to discussions of how the function of literature should be conceived in relation to modern thinking about human nature and the world at large. Long before Brecht and Piscator were thinking in terms of “epic theater” as the means of transcending the limitations of conventional drama, Döblin was promoting the idea of “epic” writing as part of his campaign against subjectivism in the novel. In 1919 he crossed swords with his fellow novelist Otto Flake, whose programmatic foreword to his novel Die Stadt des Hirns (The City of the Brain, 1919) spoke of wanting to put the reader into a “philosophical” state. Döblin took this as an opportunity to challenge, once again, the principle of a sovereign authorial intellect, and to insist that epic writing should not be subordinated to an ethical purpose but should communicate in ways that were “sinnlich anschaulich” (immediate to the senses) and affective.13 In the lecture he gave at Berlin University in December 1928, “Der Bau des epischen Werks” (The Structure of the Epic Work), he also emphasized the sense in which nature itself was the great creator of epic works, and spoke of the individuality of the author as one of the “facts” that should be allowed to speak through the text, but not to dominate it.14 Radicalism, for Döblin, really meant going back to basics. What distinguished the epic writer from the novelist as traditionally

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conceived, he argued, was the ability to pass beyond mere mimesis and present fundamental and exemplary aspects of human existence through whatever subject matter was being treated (BeW, 218–19). Sweeping aside all niceties about the formal distinctions between epic, dramatic, lyric, and reflexive writing, he spoke of the epic mode as an infinitely flexible way of writing, capable of integrating all manner of linguistic material to its purposes, and as free as linguistic communication can be to play on the imagination of the reader or listener (BeW, 224–26). As Dietrich Scheunemann and others have shown, Döblin’s emphatic proclamation of these views can be seen as a major contribution to the transformation of the novel in particular, and to the modernist revolution in literary writing in general.15 While his programmatic writings do not, of course, automatically account for the way he wrote in practice, they do help us to recognize clearly some aspects of what he accomplished in his novels of the 1920s. It was with reference to his novel Wallenstein (1920) that Döblin, in his 1928 lecture, chose to illustrate his own experience of the writing process and of the author’s relation to his material. He explained that he saw a role for the author’s conscious intellect in the initial search for likely material on which his imagination could go to work, and in the critical assessment of the text produced; but in the actual creative process there came a moment of crystallization or visionary cohesion that defied explanation (BeW, 230–34). In the case of Wallenstein, that moment had come when, after a period of exploratory reading, a chance incident triggered his vision of the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus, sailing across the Baltic Sea with an immense fleet of ships, to intervene in the Thirty Years’ War — and we can read Döblin’s description of that vision at the start of book 5 of the novel.16 The name of Wallenstein would have been familiar to German readers above all from Schiller’s dramatic trilogy of 1797–99, but what Döblin provides is not the grand tragedy of a historical individual as Schiller had constructed it but an evocation of history as the vast and impersonal experience of human populations. His Wallenstein is an unscrupulous power-monger and profiteer, and while his narrative makes allusion to the religious conflict with which the Thirty Years’ War was associated, it is much more concerned with the sheer cynicism of power politics and economic speculation. There is a contrast at the personal level between the demonic and brutal figure of Wallenstein and the melancholic Emperor Ferdinand II, on whom the narrative increasingly comes to concentrate; but the depiction of each is expressly linked with primal natural forces. Wallenstein is imagined as a reptilian creature emerging from the swamp, and Ferdinand, after gradually abandoning his aspirations to political influence, eventually retreats into a forest and becomes enthralled by a hobgoblin, who murders him. That surreal moment apart, Döblin’s narrative broadly reflects the record of historical events from the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) to the death of Ferdinand (1637), but he dispenses with

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all mention of dates in the text and his evocation of events dwells on the capacity of mankind for collective brutality. When the personal story is complete, on the final page of the text the butchery is set to continue unabated. Wallenstein is generally seen as Döblin’s darkest novel. Frequently the narrative flow is halted by sustained descriptions of carnage, pillage, pestilence, putrefaction, and sadistic acts, such as the graphically detailed account of the burning of a Jewish couple at the stake as a public spectacle (Wa, 439–45). It is particularly from such passages as these in Wallenstein that W. G. Sebald illustrates his case for accusing Döblin of an obsessive fascination with violence and of turning cruelty into an aesthetic experience.17 Sebald’s claim, on the final page of his study, that the aims of such literature are indistinguishable from those of inhumane political ideologies is unsustainable in the light of Döblin’s record as a writer and a person; but he has a serious point when he argues that Döblin’s evocation of such violence in connection with the religious fervor of the seventeenth century confers an apocalyptic atmosphere on the work, which indicates, perhaps, a readiness to understand the mortification of the flesh as preparing the way for spiritual regeneration (Wa, 51, 81, 158). Other commentators have stressed what was instantly apparent to reviewers in 1920: Döblin’s Wallenstein is an indirect way of conveying the sheer awfulness of the war of attrition he had witnessed on the Western Front in the First World War, including the wholesale dislocation of societies that it entailed, and the desperateness of the search for alternative ways of living that it brought in its wake — admittedly perceived as a cycle of violence.18 In the context of Hans Vilmar Geppert’s broad-based study of historical fiction (1976), the aestheticization of horror in Döblin’s Wallenstein appears as an effective means of subverting other ways of looking at history that might seduce us with their aesthetic coherence.19 Having drawn on distant historical experience to conjure up his bleak vision of human existence in Wallenstein, Döblin then let his imagination play on possibilities that lay in the distant future in Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Oceans and Giants, 1924). This work begins with an evocation of the First World War as a distant memory, but the scenario it presents is again clearly inspired by the experience of intensive technological warfare. The colonization of Africa and Asia by the nations of Europe has been taken to its logical conclusion, and the technological expertise of the western world has increasingly been put to work in harnessing natural energy sources. Over a period of centuries, wealth has increased, but so too have social disparities, and as the world’s population becomes concentrated in huge city-states, the technocratic senates that rule over those states become increasingly adept and increasingly ruthless at quelling and diverting social conflict. Eventually, in the twenty-sixth century, the senates in Europe achieve monopoly control over food supplies by secretly developing

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the means to produce synthetic foodstuffs, and popular unrest is diverted into a massive war against Asia — the “Uralic War” — for the control of mineral deposits. There is a backlash against the devastation caused by that war, however, and again the scenario reflects the anti-technological impulses that became strong in Germany around the time of the First World War, and which are very apparent in the works of such Expressionist dramatists as Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller around 1920. In Döblin’s novel, it is in the city-state of Berlin, under the leadership of a figure who carries the name of an ancient Babylonian deity, Marduk, that the campaign to abandon industrialism and return the population to agricultural production gains the upper hand. But what follows is a reversion to the behavior patterns of the Thirty Years’ War, as Döblin had previously depicted them, with warring groups vying for dominance and taking vengeance on each other with sadistic brutality. Once again, Döblin is unflinching in his depiction of the destructive effects of the lust for power combined with sexual aggression.20 It is the way Döblin imagines the path of humanity beyond that phase, however, that gives this work its distinctive character. The scenario he devises surpasses the technological fantasies of Marinetti and the sciencefiction writers of the day in particular ways, and is clearly also designed to counter their affirmative character.21 He envisages London maintaining its capacity for shrewd political management under rapidly changing historical circumstances and becoming the focus for the next technological grand venture, which ends in a cataclysmic confrontation between human willpower and the very forces of nature. It takes the form of a project to harness the heat from Iceland’s volcanoes in order to thaw Greenland’s ice cap and thus to provide further territory for colonial exploitation. The success of this venture results in ecological disaster — not, as we might easily imagine it, in the form of rising sea levels and climatic change, but in the unleashing of primeval creatures from the permafrost, hybrid monsters that endanger all life forms in Europe by triggering the hypertrophied growth of any limb or organ with which they come into contact. Döblin’s imagination, in Berge Meere und Giganten, has gone to work, not only on the known properties of elements and organisms of the natural world and the human potential to exploit them, but also on the mythic potential of the relationship between human inventiveness and the biological sphere of which it is part. He imagines the power-hungry future leaders of Europe responding to this new crisis by turning themselves into massive biological fortifications — the “giants” of the work’s title — by amalgamating their bodies with the natural environment, laying waste the human societies out of which they have emerged in the process, and continuing their power struggles among themselves in their new guise. Not only the name of the anti-technological leader Marduk, but also certain attributes of the “giants” carry echoes of the myths of antiquity, particularly the cult of

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Cybele and the worship of mountains, rocks, water sources, and fire as features of “mother earth.”22 Mythic thinking is also fundamental to the resolution of the conflict between human ambition and the world of nature Döblin describes at the end of the work. In part, the scope for such resolution is kept before the reader’s mind by descriptive passages that evoke a bountiful and ultimately benevolent nature, particularly as suggested by the landscape of southern France. More specifically, Döblin introduces an exotic and stereotypically feminine demigod figure, Venaska, who counters the destructive fury of the giants with her unfailing erotic power. But among the humans who remain, too, the mythic awareness of the experiences they have shared becomes the key to safeguarding a future life against technological folly without lapsing into the illusion of an idyllic harmony with nature. The survivors of the Greenland expedition, led by the Scandinavian engineer, Kylin, who had masterminded the splitting of the Iceland volcanoes, commit themselves to a bond of fellowship in the sign of the sundered mountain and the flame. It is under this sign, symbolizing their determination to preserve the knowledge of the potential for catastrophe and the need for remorse, that they reestablish their communities in a regenerating natural world. They go forward conscious that they themselves are the custodians of the flame of destruction and the spark of life. In 1932, Döblin published a shortened version of this work under the title Giganten (Giants). It is recognized to be an uneven, and perhaps hastily written, attempt to recast the work in a more popular mode, but it also shows how the controversies of the Weimar period had persuaded him that he ought to draw a clear line between himself and the purveyors of cultural pessimism by making his convictions about the future role of technology in society plain. The revised version ends with Kylin’s group restoring industrial culture, but placing it in the service of humanity at large, rather than that of a technocratic elite. It is also clear from his long essay “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters” (The Spirit of the Naturalist Age), which appeared in Die neue Rundschau (The New Review) in 1924, that Döblin positively welcomed the scientific materialism of the modern age, including what he saw as its political manifestation in Soviet Russia, and in that context he firmly endorsed the culture of technology and physicality that was challenging the abstract values of traditional humanism in postwar Germany.23 But at the same time he continued to reach out for a metaphysical worldview that would resolve the tensions between materialistic and spiritualistic conceptions of human existence. It is in his writings on this subject that we find strong affinities with the Romantic nature philosophy of Schelling (1775–1854) and Fechner (1801–87). In Das Ich über der Natur (The I above Nature, 1927) and Unser Dasein (Our Existence, 1933), Döblin makes the case, not just for viewing the universe as coherently ordered, but for conceiving all elements of the natural world as “beseelt” (animate). He

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analyses human individuality into its component parts, and sees it as related through each of these to the “Ur-Ich,” or prime mover, behind the material world, which itself stands in a relationship of mutual dependency with all individual phenomena. Döblin’s arguments on these points are unlikely to appear wholly convincing to either scientists or philosophers, but they represent his personal attempt to resolve the intellectual puzzle about how the human mind could aspire to comprehend the natural world while yet being part of it and subject to the impulses of its own biological nature.24 In Unser Dasein he also sets out his thinking about the “resonance” that may exist between all domains of the natural world, animal, vegetable and mineral;25 and this thinking has been seen to provide an important clue to the organization of the underlying themes in Berlin Alexanderplatz. In 1927, the year he published Das Ich über der Natur, Döblin also published Manas, a verse epic based on Hindu myths and legends. Because it is in verse, and because of its exotic subject matter, it has tended to be viewed as something of an anachronistic extravagance within Döblin’s oeuvre, and within twentieth-century narrative writing generally, although its vivid and incantatory language was hailed at the time by Robert Musil as an extraordinary achievement in a scientific age.26 Döblin himself considered it important enough to make it the starting point for the afterword he wrote for Berlin Alexanderplatz when it was reissued in the GDR in 1955,27 and his reasons for doing so undoubtedly relate to a dimension of Berlin Alexanderplatz that might not be immediately obvious to the uninitiated reader: Manas was again an attempt to evoke elemental aspects of human existence. It tells the story of a prince who enters the kingdom of the dead in order to take upon himself the burden of all the suffering in the world, is destroyed by the experience, and is redeemed by the self-sacrifice of the goddess Savitri, the embodiment of love. The final third of the work depicts the struggle of the revived Manas to achieve true human identity by becoming self-aware. Manas can therefore be seen to mark a step beyond the emphasis on collective action and instinct-driven behavior that had characterized Döblin’s earlier works, and towards the balance he strikes in depicting the relationship between the individual and society in Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. Precisely what prompted Döblin, in his next work, to turn his attention to the Berlin milieu that was so familiar to him is not certain, but the enthusiastic reception accorded to Berlin Alexanderplatz, initially in the form of public readings and extracts published in journals and newspapers in the course of 1928, suggests that it satisfied a demand for a bold literary representation of the contemporary world, and of the ambience of Berlin in particular. As Walter Benjamin emphasized in his review of the work, it spoke through the substance of life in Berlin and it spoke with the vernacular voice of Berlin.28 While the experimental character of the text and the scurrilous nature of its underworld plot was received with some degree of

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irritation and offence by ordinary readers,29 Döblin’s vibrant diction and his abrupt juxtaposition of disparate texts and utterances were recognized as conveying the excitement of life in the city, its opportunities and its dangers. Axel Eggebrecht caught the spirit of that perception nicely when he wrote that Döblin used styles in the way that other people use the tram, letting each one take him just as far as he wanted to travel, then hopping onto another.30 Benjamin in particular took up the points that Döblin had been making in his programmatic texts about the nature of epic writing, related them to his actual practice in Berlin Alexanderplatz, and summed up the difference between this work and the conventional novel in a highly suggestive opening conceit: whereas the novelist took the reader on a journey across an ocean, he wrote, the writer of epic lay on the seashore and gathered together what the ocean yielded up.31 Put simply, Berlin Alexanderplatz tells the story of an unskilled worker, Franz Biberkopf, who has served a term in prison for the unpremeditated killing of his girlfriend, and now confronts the city anew, resolved to lead an honest existence. The preambles to the nine books that make up the work repeatedly allude to Biberkopf’s attempts to “conquer” the city, and to the fact that each attempt to assert himself individually leads to catastrophe. After falling in with a gang of criminals, Biberkopf loses an arm when he is pushed out of a getaway car. After establishing a seemingly stable relationship with a new girlfriend, Mieze, he carelessly boasts about her and shows her off to one of the criminals, Reinhold, who proceeds to abduct and murder her. Biberkopf’s idea of rebuilding his life is shown to be too strongly rooted in old attitudes of mind, including the unqualified trust he places in male companionship — a habit nurtured by his previous wartime experience. While Döblin liked to underline his commitment to his programmatic conception of epic writing by making it sound as if this personal narrative was merely a concession to conventional taste wished on him by his publisher, the manuscript evidence suggests that it was part of his conception of the work all along.32 The parallel between Biberkopf’s story and that of Manas is apparent in the way the old Biberkopf has to be “broken” before a new Biberkopf can emerge; and Döblin evokes that process of destruction and renewal (at a point in the story where Biberkopf is lying in a comatose state in the psychiatric hospital at Buch) by introducing the allegorical figure of Death the Reaper, who first drives away old iniquity in the form of the Whore of Babylon, and then slices away at Biberkopf’s personality so that it can arise anew, as it were, from primal substance. When the book appeared in 1929, it attracted some sharp criticism for focusing on a criminal milieu rather than that of the class-conscious workers of Berlin. Writers within the German Communist Party in particular used this publication as an opportunity to draw a clear distinction between their own ideology and that of the liberal bourgeoisie, which in their view Döblin represented.33 Berlin Alexanderplatz does have a political as well as a moral

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dimension, but a subtler one than these authors were demanding.34 Biberkopf’s personal encounters bring him into contact with both the anarchist left and the völkisch right. There are intermittent reminders of the conditioning experience he has undergone in the First World War — notably at points where his mood is one of masculine self-affirmation, or insecurity, or when he is responding to political taunts from others — and these are marked in the text by motifs from such patriotic hymns as Max Schneckenberger’s “Die Wacht am Rhein” (The Watch on the Rhine, 1840). It is the refrain from that song in particular that is modified on the closing pages of the work to signal the awareness of civic responsibility to which he has now awakened: instead of Schneckenberger’s vow of vigilance on behalf of the Fatherland, we have an articulation of Biberkopf’s new-found critical awareness: “Lieb Vaterland, kannst ruhig sein, ich hab die Augen auf und fall so bald nicht rein.” (Dear Fatherland, rest assured, my eyes are open and I won’t be taken in.)35 Such deployment of allusive material shows clearly what makes Berlin Alexanderplatz different from a conventional social novel of the time, or indeed from the documentary approach to writing that was favored by many young authors in the 1920s. The montage effects that Döblin created, sometimes quite literally by pasting fragments of text into his manuscript, serve two broad functions. One is to make the fate of Biberkopf as an individual seem less important by emphasizing other aspects of the life of the city that are often remote from his personal experience. The episode at the end of book 5 that leads to the loss of his right arm culminates, for example, not with a description of Biberkopf’s personal catastrophe, but with the evocation of a new dawn and the arrival in Berlin of an international celebrity. The other obvious function of the montage elements is to evoke the sense of underlying connections — the “resonances” of which Döblin speaks elsewhere — between Biberkopf’s story and other dimensions of human life and material existence generally. Otto Keller’s detailed study of the thematic links between these montage components has shown that whether they refer to heroes of antiquity, or biblical figures, or contemporary boxing champions, they are largely arranged around such antithetical principles as conquest and sacrifice, chastisement and healing, death and rebirth, decay and regeneration.36 The Alexanderplatz itself, which gives the work its title, is presented at the start of book 5 as a site of demolition and redevelopment, which is precisely what it was at the time the work was written; and when Döblin interpolates passages from the Old Testament Books of Jeremiah and Ecclesiastes, or amended versions of the stories of Job and Isaac, then these elements, too, can be seen to contain subtle allusions to the dialectic play of natural forces in human life, and to the need to surrender self-importance, which is a key part of Biberkopf’s learning experience. Döblin openly acknowledged in 1932 that the German translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1927) had stimulated him to experiment more

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freely,37 and another conceivable influence on his practice in Berlin Alexanderplatz is John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer.38 But the montage technique he displays is recognizable as a radicalization of his own practice in earlier works, and the themes he presents in the work are manifestly his own. Perhaps the most important quality that Berlin Alexanderplatz shares with the works of Joyce and Dos Passos is the way that it focuses attention, not just on the distinctive character of modern city life, but on the ways in which the substance of that life is itself linguistically mediated. Döblin’s text makes this apparent, not only through the montage of official documents, newspaper cuttings, advertising slogans, and snatches of popular song, the sources for which have now been largely identified in the recent annotated edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Werner Stauffacher (1996), but also in those passages that speak as if with an authorial voice. It is notable, for example, that the didactic manner he adopts for his opening presentation of Biberkopf’s story quickly moves into modes of discourse that recognizably belong to quite specific forms of social presentation, such as those of the fairground ballad-monger and the boxing commentator. Fragments of discourse with such specific characteristics do not merely interrupt and interact with the narrative; the act of narration itself moves easily in this work from one manner of speaking to another, and in doing so, draws attention to the implications of adopting one way of talking about an event rather than another. Recent scholarship has therefore moved beyond trying to identify a central meaning in this work, one that might be associated with a particular authorial position, and has sought rather to interpret what is conveyed by the interaction of the diverse elements within the text with each other and with the texts to which they allude.39 It is for such reasons as this that Berlin Alexanderplatz is likely to retain its canonical status, not just as a literary monument of its times, but as a landmark text in the emergence of a self-conscious intertextuality in modernist writing.

Notes 1

Cf. Erich Kleinschmidt, “Döblin-Studien II: ‘Es gibt den eisklaren Tag und unseren Tod in den nächsten 80 Jahren’; Alfred Döblin als politischer Schriftsteller,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 26 (1982): 401–27. 2

See Inge Jens, Dichter zwischen rechts und links (Munich: Piper, 1971). For Döblin’s biography up to 1933, see also Leo Kreutzer, Alfred Döblin: Sein Werk bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970).

3

Alfred Döblin, “Futuristische Worttechnik: Offener Brief an F. T. Marinetti,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1989), 113–19; here, 117.

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4

Döblin, “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 120–23; here, 120–21.

5

Döblin, “An Romanautoren,” 122.

6

In a later programmatic note, Döblin was to insist that a novel was not worth its salt unless it could be cut into sections like an earthworm and go on living. See “Bemerkungen zum Roman” (1917), in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 123–27; here, 126.

7

Gabriele Sander, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 100–131.

8

Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 138, 366–67.

9

1915 is the date shown in the first edition of the work, but publication was delayed by wartime conditions. 10

See Bertolt Brecht, Werke (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau/Suhrkamp, 1994), 26:153; cf. also 167.

11

Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 141–42.

12

See Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, eds., Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Bern: Francke, 1973), 52–61. 13

Döblin, “Reform des Romans,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 137–51; here, 138–40.

14

Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Schriften zu Asthetik, Poetik und Literatur, 215–45; here, 226–28. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation BeW and the page number. ˆ

ˆ

15

See Viktor Zmegac, “Alfred Döblins Poetik des Romans,” in Deutsche Romantheorien, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968), 2:341–64; Dietrich Scheunemann, Romankrise: Die Entwicklung der modernen Romanpoetik in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1978); Judith Ryan, “From Futurism to ‘Döblinism,’” German Quarterly 54 (1981): 415–26; Erich Kleinschmidt, “Döblin-Studien I: Depersonale Poetik; Dispositionen des Erzählens bei Alfred Döblin,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 26 (1982): 383–401.

16

Döblin, Wallenstein (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1965), 489. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation Wa and the page number.

17

Winfried G. Sebald, Der Mythos der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1980), 49–51, 156–60.

18

See Dieter Mayer, Alfred Döblins Wallenstein: Zur Geschichtsauffassung und Struktur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), esp. 94–117 and 146–51; Adalbert Wichert, Alfred Döblins historisches Denken: Zur Poetik des modernen Geschichtsromans (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978); and Klaus R. Scherpe, “‘Ein Kolossalgemälde für Kurzsichtige’: Das Andere der Geschichte in Alfred Döblins Wallenstein,” in Geschichte als Literatur: Formen und Grenzen der Repräsentation von Vergangenheit, ed. Hartmut Eggert et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), 226–41.

19

Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der “andere” historische Roman (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 107–14 and 161 (cited in Sander, Alfred Döblin, 154); cf. also Harro Müller, “‘Die Welt hat einen Hauch von Verwesung’: Anmerkungen zu Döblins historischem Roman Wallenstein,” Merkur 39 (1985): 405–13.

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20

Cf. Klaus Müller-Salget, Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1972), 216–18 and Ardon Denlinger, Alfred Döblins “Berge Meere und Giganten”: Epos und Ideologie (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1977), 38–44 and 55–60.

21 Cf. David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 322–27; see also Peter Sprengel, “Künstliche Welten und Fluten des Lebens oder: Futurismus in Berlin: Paul Scheerbart und Alfred Döblin,” in Faszination des Organischen: Konjunkturen einer Kategorie der Moderne, ed. Hartmut Eggert, Erhard Schütz, Peter Sprengel (Munich: Iudicium, 1995), 73–102. 22

Cf. Denlinger, Alfred Döblins “Berge Meere und Giganten,” 81–93.

23

Döblin, “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 168–90. 24 For a concise summary of this dimension of Döblin’s thinking, with references to further secondary literature, see Sander, Alfred Döblin, 312–26. 25 Alfred Döblin, Unser Dasein (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1964), 168–75. 26

See Schuster and Bode, Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik, 187–92; Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 2:1674–80.

27

Alfred Döblin, “Nachwort,” in Schriften zu Leben und Werk (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1986), 463–65. 28

Walter Benjamin, “Krise des Romans,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:230–36; here, 233; also in Schuster and Bode, Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik, 240–54; Matthias Prangel, ed., Materialien zu Alfred Döblin, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 108–14.

29

See Werner Stauffacher, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Zurich and Düsseldorf: Walter, 1996), 837–75; here, 853–54; cf. Prangel, Materialien, 60–61.

30

Axel Eggebrecht, “Alfred Döblins neuer Roman,” in Die literarische Welt 5 (1929), no. 45:5–6; here, 6; also in Prangel, Materialien, 62–66.

31

Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:230.

32

Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 176; Stauffacher, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” 864–65. 33 34

See Prangel, Materialien, 88–100.

Cf. Klaus Müller-Salget, Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 345–56. See also J. H. Reid, “Berlin Alexanderplatz — a Political Novel,” German Life & Letters 21 (1968): 214–23; Matthias Prangel, “Franz Biberkopf und das Wissen des Wissens: Zum Schluss von Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz unter der Perspektive einer Theorie der Beobachtung der Beobachtung,” in Gabriele Sander, ed., Internationales Alfred Döblin-Kolloquium, 1995 (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Reihe A, 43) (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 169–80; Anke Detken, “Zum Politischen in Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz und Die Ehe — Versuch einer Revision,” in Engagierte Literatur zwischen den Weltkriegen, ed. Stefan Neuhaus et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 69–88.

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227

Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 454.

36

Otto Keller, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 1980); see also David Midgley, “The Dynamics of Consciousness: Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism, ed. David Midgley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993), 95–109. 37 Döblin, “Mein Buch Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Schriften zu Leben und Werk, 215–17; here, 217. See also Breon Mitchell, James Joyce and the German Novel, 1922–1933 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1976). 38 See Joris Duytschaever, “Joyce — Dos Passos — Döblin: Einfluß oder Analogie?” in Prangel, Materialien, 136–49. 39

Cf. Gabriele Sander, Erläuterungen und Dokumente: Alfred Döblin, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 216–20. See in particular Harald Jähner, Erzählter, montierter, soufflierter Text: Zur Konstruktion des Romans “Berlin Alexanderplatz” von Alfred Döblin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984); Klaus R. Scherpe, “Von der erzählten Stadt zur Stadterzählung: Der Großstadtdiskurs in Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. J. Fohrmann and H. Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 418–37 (In English, “The City as Narrator: The Modern Text in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Modernity and the Text, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick [New York: Columbia UP, 1989], 162–79); Midgley, “The Dynamics of Consciousness”; Ernst Ribbat, “Die Wirklichkeit der Zitate: Döblins diskontinuierliche Rede,” in Gabriele Sander, Internationales Alfred Döblin-Kolloquium, 1995, 115–29; Gabriele Sander, “Döblin’s Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf,” in A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, ed. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 141–60.

11: Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate Second-Rate Writer”? Heather Valencia

V

BAUM (1888–1960) WAS AUSTRIAN BY BIRTH and spent her first twenty-eight years in Vienna. She lived in Germany from 1912 until 1932, then in the United States until her death in 1960. Before moving to Germany she had published little apart from some short stories and articles, but during her Weimar period she wrote five volumes of novellas and eleven novels, including her two most successful works. The themes of the major works reflect many contemporary concerns and prevailing literary trends. In order to place Vicki Baum in context, it is helpful to review these aspects of Weimar society. In the early 1920s, the Expressionism of the previous decade began to give way to a more sober view of art and literature, based on the intent to convey an authentic picture of contemporary society. The term Neue Sachlichkeit — the New Objectivity — described this trend. This turning away from the visionary effusions of Expressionism was undoubtedly inspired not only by disillusionment with such idealistic dreams, following the failure of the revolutionary hopes of 1919, but also by the economic and political turmoil of the early years of the Weimar Republic. Moreover, the concept of art as the province of the privileged was being challenged by social and technological developments. Cheaper printing methods and the consequent expansion in books, newspapers, and magazines went hand in hand with a fast-developing mass readership. Since the nineteenth century, literacy had grown dramatically; this, coupled with increased leisure resulting from shorter working hours, created a greater demand for reading material, with middle-class women constituting a substantial proportion of the reading public.1 The idea of a popular literature that would address the concerns of this expanding readership was a key element of the literary New Objectivity. Hermann Kesten expressed this as a program for Weimar literature: ICKI

Die Kunst soll wieder ein Handwerk werden, . . . eine Produktion, die sich wie jede andere an dem Bedarf des Konsumenten regelt; eine Tätigkeit, die der Raschheit und Beweglichkeit unseres Daseins entspricht, deren Ergebnisse sich in der Regel mit dem Tag verbrauchen, für den sie entstanden.2

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[Art should become a craft again, . . . a product that, like any other, suits itself to the needs of the consumers, that reflects the speed and mobility of our existence, and whose products are usually used up on the day for which they came into existence.]3

In the development of mass popular literature and modern marketing methods, the publishing house of Ullstein played a seminal role. Founded in 1848 by Leopold Ullstein as a wholesale newspaper business, the firm later began publishing newspapers, magazines, and cheaply produced books, becoming by the end of the 1920s the largest publishing house in Europe. They serialized and promoted their novels in the many daily and weekly newspapers and magazines that they produced for a wide range of readers. They inaugurated the mass production of widely available inexpensive books, which Reclam, Fischer, and other publishers then copied, marking the beginning of the modern paperback industry in Germany. The family firm had a liberal philosophy, coupled with an advertising strategy based on psychological insight and up-to-date marketing theory — Hermann Ullstein was conversant with the writing of Henry Ford and visited America in order to study marketing techniques. By signing herself exclusively to Ullstein in 1926, Vicki Baum became part of the development of popular mass culture and modern media marketing: she became an Ullstein brand name. From both a literary-critical and sociohistorical standpoint, therefore, the phenomenon of Vicki Baum is a paradigm of significant cultural developments in the Weimar Republic. Born Hedwig Baum on 24 January 1888 in Vienna, to Jewish parents, she grew up in a dysfunctional, though relatively affluent, family, feeling lonely and unloved throughout her childhood. Her father was a selfcentered hypochondriac and bully who scorned literature; in her memoirs Baum calls him her only real enemy.4 Her mother suffered from depressive illness for most of Baum’s childhood, spending a lengthy period in a sanatorium. At her mother’s instigation, Baum left school when she was thirteen to study the harp for six years at the Vienna Conservatory. In 1906 she married Max Prels, a minor writer, for whom she started writing stories and articles that appeared under his name in various journals. They were divorced in 1910. In 1912 Baum was engaged as a harpist in the orchestra of the Hoftheater, Darmstadt, and she married its conductor, Richard Lert, in 1916. Her first novel, Frühe Schatten: Das Ende einer Kindheit (Early Shadows: The End of a Childhood) had been published in 1914,5 and after her marriage she gave up her musical career, devoting herself to writing and her family (she had two sons). Between 1916 and 1926 they lived in Darmstadt, Berlin, Kiel, Hanover, and Mannheim. In 1921 and 1922 Ullstein published two of her early novels, Der Eingang zur Bühne (The Stage-Door) and Die Tänze der Ina Raffay: Ein

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Leben (The Dances of Ina Raffay: A Life).6 At this point Baum, not wishing to be exclusively identified with the populist publisher, placed her next four books, which she considered of greater literary merit, with the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, a publisher of more “serious” literature.7 In 1925 she won a literary prize for her story Der Weg (The Way); since Thomas Mann, whom Baum revered, was the chief judge, she regarded this as a sign of her acceptance in the sphere of “high” literature.8 In 1926, however, the insecurity of her husband’s professional position in Mannheim, coupled with the enticing prospects that Ullstein held out to her, persuaded her to sign a contract with them, and from 1926 until 1931 she worked as an editor and writer for various Ullstein newspapers and journals. Her major novels were published by Ullstein until her departure for America. In 1929 her most famous novel, Menschen im Hotel (translated as Grand Hotel) appeared.9 Gustav Gründgens and Erwin Piscator staged a dramatized version in Berlin in 1930. In the same year an English translation of the play was a Broadway hit; the film version, Grand Hotel, starring John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo, was made in 1931. Vicki Baum visited New York at the invitation of Nelson Doubleday, the novel’s American publisher, after which, fearing future developments in Europe, she migrated with her family to the United States in 1932. Her work was banned by the Nazis, but continued to be published in Europe by Querido, an Amsterdam publisher of exile literature. Baum lived in Hollywood, becoming a US citizen in 1938, and writing a further sixteen novels. After 1941 she wrote almost entirely in English, though the unfinished draft of her posthumously published memoirs, Es war alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen (It Was All Quite Different: Memoirs, 1987) was in German. She died on 29 August 1960. Vicki Baum’s memoirs illuminate her perception of herself as a writer. She made no secret of the fact that she wrote for money, but stressed that her works were always executed with care: “Jedesmal, wenn ich unbedingt Geld verdienen mußte, habe ich Bücher geschrieben, die nicht mehr sein wollten als gut lesbar und unterhaltsam — Entspannungslektüre. Nie aber habe ich dabei geschludert. Ich habe auch diese leichte Lektüre immer so gewissenhaft und sorgfältig wie möglich gearbeitet” (Alles, 463; Whenever I had to earn money, I wrote books that did not aspire to be anything more than very readable and entertaining — leisure reading. But I was never sloppy. Even this light reading I crafted as conscientiously and carefully as I could). Her often-quoted assessment of herself as “a first-rate second-rate writer” is in fact the later English translation of her remarks: “Ich weiß, was ich wert bin; ich bin eine erstklassige Schriftstellerin zweiter Güte.” (Alles, 377; I know what I am worth; I am a first-class writer of the second rank). Baum, who, as seen above, was confident in her own craftsmanship, almost certainly did not intend to convey the rather pejorative

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coloring of the English term “second-rate.” She was simply emphasizing that she did not aspire to the status of great writers like Thomas Mann, ranking herself rather among Weimar writers like Erich Kästner, Hermann Kesten, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Erich Maria Remarque, who might be designated in English as “middlebrow.” Nevertheless, there were several works of which Baum wrote: “Sie waren, wenn man mir die Vokabel verzeihen will, Literatur” (Alles, 325; They were, if you forgive me the expression, literature). She felt that these had not been valued as they deserved, at least partly because of the image created by her association with Ullstein; she described herself as a cat with a tin can tied to its tail because of being eternally labeled as the author of Menschen im Hotel.10 Implicitly therefore she still espoused traditional ideas of “higher” and “lower” literature, and felt a certain sense of injustice at being confined by the critics within the latter category. In order to explore these aspects of Baum’s work, I will discuss three of her major Ullstein novels: Feme (1926, translated as Secret Sentence, 1932),11 stud.chem. Helene Willfüer (1928, translated as Helene, 1932), and Menschen im Hotel, as well as the earlier novel Ulle, der Zwerg (Ulle, the Dwarf, 1924), one of the works that Baum regarded as “literature.” These four novels span the time from the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic to the end of its middle period of relative stability in the later twenties. I will explore the range of themes and the narrative methods in these works and attempt to determine the characteristics that made the Ullstein novels so successful, and that place her within the genre of popular literature. A comparison of these works with Ulle, der Zwerg will reveal whether or not there are intrinsic differences between it and the other works, thus determining whether her definition as a popular writer and exclusion from the canon of “good” literature is justified. Feme, Baum’s only novel with an overtly political theme, was the first novel to be published by Ullstein under the 1926 contract.12 Before appearing in book form it was serialized in the Berliner Illustrierte without the benefit of much advance publicity, and it never achieved the huge success of the other Ullstein novels. The political assassination in the novel is obviously based on the assassination of the German foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, in 1922, and its aftermath. It is one of the very few novels of the period, as Hans-Peter Rüsing points out,13 that dealt with the secret right-wing organizations in the Weimar Republic, such as the Organisation Consul, which was responsible for many political murders, including Rathenau’s. The novel tells the story of Joachim Burthe, a young law student from a patrician family in a state of decline as a result of the political and economic circumstances. Joachim, who is involved with a secret right-wing organization, assassinates the minister whom the group holds responsible for the social malaise of the times. The focus of the novel is Joachim’s fate

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after the murder, his development into what the professor who saves his life calls “ein ganzer Mensch” (F, 265; a complete human being). The tripartite structure emphasizes the stages of this development: the first section, “Tat” (Deed) describes the background to Joachim’s act, and the murder itself. The second and third parts, “Flucht” (Flight) and “Sühne” (Expiation), describe the physical and emotional hardships he suffers during his years as a fugitive, until he achieves inner peace in a small Baltic fishing village, where he lives an exemplary life and dies a hero’s death. The questions to be considered are how Vicki Baum interprets this ambitious and topical political theme, and indeed whether Feme can justifiably be called a political novel. The early Weimar period is authentically portrayed. The figure of the minister himself is closely modeled on Rathenau: like the latter, he is a sensitive, solitary figure who models his ideas on Goethe, writes books of political philosophy, is aware of the danger from the Right, but refuses to have a bodyguard with him on the day of his murder. Even small details, such as the rain on the day of the murder and Burthe’s posing as a telephone engineer, are based on the Rathenau case.14 Baum draws a convincing picture of the decline of the formerly affluent and noble Burthe family, which has been forced to sublet part of its apartment to a working-class family. Their changed circumstances are clearly conveyed through the scene of the family meal, where everything emphasizes the contrast with their former social status: the tarnished silver with the family crest, the patched and darned napkins, and the horrible tinned food that his mother has to prepare on a gas burner in the only room. Baum integrates other common Weimar themes convincingly into the narrative. She illustrates the economic situation by describing the poor health of the Burthes’ tenant, Schliepke, which is due to the low wages and bad working conditions in the gasworks, and shows the dark side of daily life in the militia’s fatal wounding of Schliepke’s brother-in-law during a strike. She contrasts the lives of the workers and the affluent lifestyle of the directors of industry, exemplified by Dr. Thelmann, a company lawyer who prudently puts his money immediately into objects and keeps a mistress. She takes up the motif of industrial unrest again in the second part of the novel, when the fugitive Burthe is working in a coalmine. She graphically describes the exhausting routine of the work, the comradeship between the “Kumpels” (the miners) and the political fervor of the revolutionary Hille, who is later killed in a confrontation with the director. Baum presents Joachim Burthe’s psyche and the circumstances leading up to the murder very convincingly. The sensitive young man is deeply disturbed by the degradation of his family, which they ascribe to the republican regime, represented by the minister. Baum signals Joachim’s despair by various motifs: his lying on an unmade bed without removing his boots

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reflects the disorder in his own life, while his unfocused desire to act is expressed by his vague utterance “Es muß etwas geschehen” (F, 9; something must happen); moreover, the print that hangs on his wall, “The Farewell of Schill’s Officers,” is a transparent symbol of nationalistic heroism.15 Joachim’s frustration is symptomatic of the malaise of the “lost generation,” which Remarque was to depict three years later in Im Westen nichts Neues,16 and which Gregor von Askanius, Joachim’s idol and fellow revolutionary, describes here, albeit from a different political standpoint: “Es ist schade,” sagte Askanius, “daß du nicht an der Front warst. Es ist überhaupt ein Jammer um euch junge Leute, die ihr den Krieg nicht mehr richtig erlebt habt. Vorher, da wart ihr Kinder und wißt nicht mehr viel, wie es war. Dann hat man euch hergeholt mit euren siebzehn Jahren, unterernährt und wacklig, wie ihr wart, und hat euch gedrillt. Vielleicht haben ein paar von euch die Nase in die Etappe gesteckt, das war alles. Dann ist die große Schweinerei gekommen, und jetzt sitzt ihr da und wißt nicht, wohin mit euch und eurer Jugend und eurem Drang, etwas zu tun.” (F, 27–28) [“It’s a shame,” said Askanius, “that you weren’t at the Front. It’s a real pity that you young people didn’t really experience the war. Before it you were children and didn’t really know what it was like. Then you were called up when you were seventeen, undernourished and shaky as you were, and were drilled. A few of you just managed to poke your noses into the trenches, that was all. Then this whole mess started and now you are all sitting there at a loss to know how to cope with your youth and your need to do something.”]

It is very credible that Joachim should be drawn to the older, charismatic, ostensibly daring figure of Askanius.17 In a conversation that leads to Joachim’s decision to assassinate the minister, Baum makes it clear that Askanius is deliberately manipulating the younger man: “Joachim ballte die Fäuste, und wahrscheinlich hatte Askanius die Geschichte zu keinem andern Zweck erzählt, als damit Joachim Burthe die Fäuste ballen sollte” (F, 25–26; Joachim clenched his fists and probably Askanius had told the whole story for the very purpose of making Joachim Burthe clench his fists). Joachim’s confused feelings for a Russian singer, Jelena Maikova, also play a decisive role. His uneasy awareness that her erotic power over him is degrading leads him to attempt to block out his emotions by flight into what Baum defines as “die kindliche Romantik seiner Geheimbündelei” (F, 38; the child-like romanticism of his conspiratorial activities). Jelena’s taunting finally provokes him to action. Since this is a novel of self-discovery and redemption, it is important for Baum to enlist the reader’s empathy with the protagonist; therefore she portrays him, not as a ruthless political killer, but as an understandably deluded young man, which is rather too obviously emphasized in the

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original subtitle, “Bußfahrt einer verirrten Jugend” (Penitential Pilgrimage of Erring Youth).18 She employs various narrative strategies throughout to strengthen the reader’s identification with her hero. From the outset, she establishes a confidential, chatty tone, through which the reader is drawn into a relationship with the author and is predisposed to accept her judgments, which she gives liberally in the form of direct authorial intervention. The most striking example is just before the murder, where, in order to forestall the reader’s rejection of the murderer, she intervenes and instructs the reader how to interpret the character. In a long paragraph she describes him as an ordinary young man who is too much influenced by other people, allowing himself to be dazzled but without yet having the wisdom to judge. She sees him as a young idealist with a misguided sense of honor that forces him to pursue this cause (F, 64). She reinforces this emphasis on his youth frequently throughout the book, referring to him as the young Joachim Burthe or the young man, and attempts to gain her readers’ sympathy for him with her motherly address to the character himself: “Du bist im Grunde ein schwacher . . . durch Träume irregeleiteter Mensch.” (F, 120; Basically you are weak . . . and led astray by your dreams.) He is portrayed as the hunted wolf with whom author, and thus readers too, identify, while the police hunting him down with their dogs are the enemy “other.” The second section graphically describes Joachim’s sufferings during his flight through Germany; he is constantly on the run, using false identities, and suffers from terrible hunger, cold, and sleeplessness, but the comradeship he finds when working in the coal mine is a turning point. We see his gradually awakening love for life and for humanity: he sings for joy even in the cruel conditions of the mine. His political perceptions have changed, and when the activist Hille considers violent revolution to cure the injustice of capitalism, Joachim’s reaction is uncompromising: “Mit Sprengen und Schießen und Gewalt wird nichts besser, glaub mir, damit wird nichts anders, gar nichts, das kann ich dir sagen.” (F, 167; Through explosions and shooting and violence nothing improves, believe me, that changes nothing at all, I can assure you of that.) At this point his view is based on his pragmatic experience of the failure of his action to achieve political change, but a gradually more mystical, redemptive idea emerges. Burthe achieves enlightenment through various spiritual experiences. His stay in a little south German town19 is an epiphany: both the medieval Madonna in the church and the music of Beethoven played by an amateur quartet speak to his soul. His visit to his old home shows him how his act has destroyed his family, but his conviction that there is a purpose in his having been spared to expiate his deed tempers his growing awareness of guilt. His encounter with a religious community of social outcasts reinforces the idea of passive suffering. The climax of these experiences is his period as a gardener in a sanatorium run by the enlightened Professor Lenzberg, who

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gives him the chance to become purified and whole by allowing him to escape, nursing him back to health when he is wounded, and acquainting him with the minister’s humanity and philosophical writings. The latter’s stoical philosophy becomes his murderer’s lodestone from now on. The reader first hears the details of the murder in Joachim’s confession to the professor. Joachim was unable to shoot the minister in the back, but waited until he was face to face with him, thereby forming some kind of relationship between them. After firing the shot, he ran to cradle the dying man’s head on his lap. The minister himself seemed to regard the deed as a release, saying “Danke” (thank you) to his murderer with his dying breath. This act of confession is a further stage in Joachim’s redemption, and also performs the function of emphasizing his innate goodness, preparing the ground for his elevation to almost saintly status in the final section. The third part of the novel completes the redemption of the hero, in a timeless idyll in a North German fishing community. Joachim arrives here after ten years in America and elsewhere. He now fearlessly uses his own name, but the community calls him “Voss” because he takes on responsibility for the farm and fishing boat of a widow whose husband of that name had fallen into the canal while drunk. Joachim takes on this man’s lowly life, redeeming himself through his self-sacrificing labor for the widow and son, and through his renunciation of the young girl with whom he falls passionately in love. Finally, the noble nature of Joachim’s drowning symbolically redeems the previous Voss’s ignoble end. At the end of the novel the estate manager writes to Professor Lenzburg that he considers Joachim Burthe’s debt to society to have been paid in full, both by his life and his death. Despite its absorbing plot, authentic portrayal of early years of the Weimar Republic, and persuasive doctrine of expiation and redemption, the novel leaves certain political and moral issues unresolved. Though the initial portrayal of Joachim’s malaise and his motivation for the political murder is convincing, it does not go beyond the purely psychological. At no point does he seem to have any concept of how the death of the minister will improve the situation in Weimar Germany. The message of the novel is rather ambivalent: on the one hand, it is clear that the action against the minister was to be rejected, both from a political point of view (the point is made that after his death the situation in Germany deteriorates), and from a philosophical one: Joachim, our identification figure, in his enlightened state espouses the philosophy that harm results from violence, and that only passive suffering is a valid stance. Strangely, however, the ethical issue of murder is deliberately played down: the revelation that the minister was grateful to be relieved of his burdensome life turns the murder almost into an act of mercy. As Rüsing rightly points out, Vicki Baum’s project is to concentrate not on the political issue but on the purification and redemption of the hero, and from this perspective the

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murder has a positive purpose, since it leads eventually to the whole, purified human being (NG, 148). Though Feme begins as a novel of the New Objectivity that poses complex moral and political questions, Baum blurs or even bypasses these, conveying a comforting message for the readership. The novel begins in a realistic contemporary setting but floats off into a vague, timeless idyll in a Utopian rural society. This was almost unavoidable for a concrete reason: the date of the murder in the novel can be taken to approximate to the date of Rathenau’s death in 1922, and the date of Joachim’s death can be fairly accurately pinpointed as 1939, since information is given of time elapsed at various stages of the narrative. But Feme was published in 1926. This means that Baum had to imagine a setting of the future. The unreality of this “Germany” of the late thirties without Hitler, the Nuremberg Laws, or the threat of war jars on the postwar reader and contrasts uneasily with the authentic setting of the novel’s beginning. Baum was probably aware of this structural problem and the other shortcomings in the novel, for it is the only one of her major works that she does not mention in her memoirs. Baum did discuss stud. chem. Helene Willfüer20 in her memoirs with her customary honesty, judging it to be a work of uneven quality, which, however, in her opinion captured the sweat, smell, and feeling of the working atmosphere of impecunious students (Alles, 340). In both parts of the judgment she was accurate. The novel follows the career of Helene, a recently orphaned and independent-minded doctoral student in chemistry in a south German university town, who is strongly attracted to her Professor, Valentin Ambrosius.21 He, however, is obsessed by his passion for his wife, a violinist, who rejects him. Helene is loved by a medical student, Fritz Rainer, a sensitive, unhappy young man, who longs to become a musician and feels himself deeply unsuited to medicine. Helene becomes pregnant by Fritz, and after repeated unsuccessful attempts to secure an abortion, she makes a suicide pact with him. At the last moment, Helene’s desire to live overwhelms her and though Fritz dies by his own hand, she escapes. After a spell in a remand prison, and a court hearing, she is released. Meanwhile Professor Ambrosius, whose wife has deserted him for another man, has made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and is left almost blinded. Helene goes to Munich to start her research again. She gives birth to her son, whom she names Valentin, and gains her doctorate. Ambrosius secures a research post for her in a private laboratory in an idyllic country setting belonging to the elderly Professor Köbellin, who is researching an anti-aging drug. Helene and her colleague, a Japanese scientist, make the breakthrough to produce the drug. Helene secures a highly paid and independent position with the company that is licensed to produce the drug, “Vitalin,” commercially. The novel ends with Helene’s chance meeting with Ambrosius when they are both on holiday in the same hotel on the Italian Riviera. Helene decides to try the experiment of life with him.

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It is clear that several of the contemporary issues typical of the New Objectivity are central to the novel: Helene represents the independent New Woman on an equal footing with her male colleagues and determined to succeed despite almost insurmountable obstacles (“sich durchsetzen” [to win through] is a recurring motto of hers). Baum deals with the issue of unmarried motherhood through Helene’s difficult experiences. The antiabortion Paragraph 218 of the penal code was a controversial issue during the Weimar Republic, and the section of the novel depicting Helene’s visits to various types of abortionist is dramatic and convincing. That Helene succeeds in creating the anti-aging medicine is in tune with the optimistic belief in scientific progress, while the frank allusion to sexual issues such as lesbianism, venereal disease, uncontrollable male sexual obsession and frustration, and female sexuality are also in the spirit of Weimar. Some of these aspects of the novel were the focus of Ullstein’s carefully planned advertising campaign for Helene Willfüer. The book was finished two years before its publication in 1928, and Baum suggests that the delay was because the subject matter was considered too daring at first (Alles, 341), but Lynda King convincingly argues that it was a strategy to establish the image of Vicki Baum herself in the eyes of her readers, in line with the Ullstein marketing philosophy (BSD, 82). To this end, articles by Baum appeared in Ullstein publications between 1927 and 1929 on topics like research into rejuvenation, modern young people, and the New Woman, which would establish Baum’s credentials as an expert on these subjects. The topical theme and the novel’s authenticity were stressed in the advertisements for the serialization in the Berliner Illustrierte. In March 1929 the paper also contained an interesting cigarette advertisement showing a beautiful “Helene Willfüer” posing in a laboratory, having ostensibly invented a new “slimming cigarette.” This shows that by 1929 “Helene Willfüer” was a well-known name and the advertisers were exploiting the scientific authenticity that people believed the novel to embody. The main identification figure is Helene: she is hard-working, courageous and true to herself, tough and yet sensitive, full of motherly affection for those who need it, but with a sensual nature. Ambrosius describes her to Yvonne, his wife, as “ein Stück ordentliches Schwarzbrot” (a slice of good brown bread), and this quality of wholesomeness contrasts clearly with the fickle, egotistical, amoral Yvonne. Her two lovers, Ambrosius and Rainer, are clearly delineated as opposites. Ambrosius is large and strong, a scientist and practical man, whereas Rainer is a slight, oversensitive young man, unsuited to the exigencies of a career in medicine. Helene’s feelings for him are essentially motherly, whereas in Ambrosius she seeks the protective love of the father whom she has just lost. The development of these personal relationships is a central thread of the action. The novel opens with an encounter between Helene and

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Ambrosius on a train journey from Frankfurt to Heidelberg, which introduces the two main characters and reveals important features of the background situation: the recent death of Helene’s father, her impecunious state, and her feelings for her professor. The contrasts between the couple are also clearly delineated: their ages, their social positions, wealth, and lifestyles. Particularly significant is the conversation about their viewpoints on life, where Helene’s statement “Ich muß immer etwas haben, auf das ich schnurgerade hinsteuern kann” (I must always have something that I can aim absolutely straight towards) contrasts with his view: “Die Umwege sind es, die das Leben wertvoll machen” (HW, 15; It’s the detours that make life worthwhile). The rest of the novel then follows the detours that both characters take until they find each other. Helene’s detour into a relationship with Fritz Rainer is indirectly caused by Ambrosius: at a musical evening at his house, she realizes that he does not really see her as a desirable woman; at the same time she is seduced by Rainer’s music into imagining that she loves him. The development of the sexual relationship between them, leading to her pregnancy, is due mainly to Helene’s motherly pity for Rainer’s unhappiness. The next significant encounter between Helene and Ambrosius is another train journey. Both have been in Frankfurt as a result of cataclysmic events in their lives: Helene to seek an abortion, Ambrosius to confront his wife and her lover. The traumatized state of both characters leads to a moment of physical closeness, but they revert immediately to their professional relationship; this further retards their final recognition of their true feelings, and both characters embark on the suicide attempts that, for different reasons, do not succeed. It is significant that Helene’s escape is due to a conscious act of will that leads her to rethink her life and accept her baby, whereas Ambrosius, having described in the witness stand the efficient method by which a scientist would commit suicide, bungles his attempt to kill himself with a revolver. From this point on, Helene is in control of her life, while Ambrosius is a broken man. His physical near-blindness is mirrored by his continuing failure to “recognize” her. He becomes, however, the unconscious instrument of their final union by sending her to Professor Köbellin, which will lead to her success and indirectly to his own improved health through the drug “Vitalin.” When they meet in Italy, he truly sees her for the first time as she comes out of the sea — the Venus symbolism is very clear — and they are finally united. The theme of the “Umwege” is taken up again by Ambrosius. After admitting that the detours took him away from where he should really have been going, he sums up the journey by saying “Aber dann, am Ende wird alles gut, wie im Märchen. Und man sieht, daß die Umwege doch zurechtgeführt haben, trotz allem.”22 (HW, 304; But in the end everything has turned out well, like in a fairy tale. And we see that the detours did lead to the right place in spite of everything.)

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As in Feme, the central theme of the novel is a journey of self-discovery. What role do the other themes play and how are they presented and woven into the action? The treatment of the scientific theme is an excellent example of Vicki Baum’s ability to exploit a topic that was in tune with the contemporary mood, both to develop the action and to give her work the topicality and social relevance that was demanded by Ullstein and by the ideas of the New Objectivity. Their common devotion to chemistry unites Helene and Ambrosius from the beginning and differentiates them from their other partners, and it is through chemistry that Helene ultimately finds herself and becomes independent. With the introduction of the youth-elixir “Vitalin,” however, the scientific theme enters the realm of myth and fairy tale.23 Readers see the period of research in Köbellin’s laboratory principally from the perspective of Helene’s little son, and therefore they too have a child’s-eye view of everything that is going on. They hear Helene’s comforting and simplified explanation of her animal experiments — “Die Mäuslein kommen alle in den Mäusehimmel. Die Mäuslein müssen uns helfen, und das tun sie gern” (HW, 263–64; the little mice all go to mouse heaven. The little mice have to help us and they like doing it) and of the “juice” that comes from the glands to make the “medicine.” The reader is thus simultaneously put in the superior position of partnership with the narrator, understanding more than the child and smiling at his innocence, and at the same time to some extent infantilized, in that the simplified explanations give us, like the child, the illusion of understanding a complex process, but with all the awkward moral issues removed. Baum reintroduces an adult perspective in Helene’s interview with the directors of the company that will mass-produce the drug. The description of the drug is peppered with scientific terms that create the impression of authenticity and give the general reader the illusion of participating in a genuine scientific discussion. Finally, Ambrosius’s miraculous recovery through taking “Vitalin” again belongs to the realm of fairy tale, ensuring the happy ending of the novel. Through these strategies Baum has harnessed the complex issues of scientific development to the needs of her novel. On sexual issues, Baum’s stance is ambiguous. She does not condemn premarital sex, but she does not take a decisive stand on the issue of women’s freedom to abort an unplanned pregnancy. In a long passage (HW, 125–26), which Nottelmann has analyzed in detail (SE, 105–7), the author characteristically intervenes, addressing the heroine and in so doing presenting to the reader Helene’s insoluble problem with the pregnancy. This passage reinforces the reader’s sympathy with the character, preempting our possible criticism of her actions. It also indirectly implies support for the legalization of abortion, in that Baum defines Helene’s actions as necessary, but they are only achievable through “schmutzige und drohende Umwege” (HW, 126; dirty and dangerous detours). However, it is

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not clear whether the perspective here is Helene’s or Baum’s, so the message is ambiguous. The negative presentation of the illegal abortionists is clear: they are stereotyped, reprehensible figures. The “good” female doctor does not, though, as one might expect, reject the restrictive law that prevents her from helping Helene. She shows sympathy, but she herself is morally against abortion: “Ich halte es für unmoralisch, sich einer Verantwortung auf diese Weise zu entziehen. . . . Die Härten des Lebens sind es, an denen man wächst und stark wird.” (HW, 136; I regard it as immoral to withdraw from a responsibility in this way. . . . it is the difficulties of life that help one to grow and become strong.) Despite the fact that these words in fact mirror Helene’s own stoical philosophy of life, they do not prevent her from desperately seeking another abortionist, and it is only the police raid on the ex-midwife’s house following the death of her previous client that prevents Helene from going through with the backstreet abortion. It is not until she is in prison after the death of Rainer that Helene experiences a renewed passion for life, which coincides with the first movements of her baby and gives her the strength to start again. After this, the novel unequivocally reinforces the joy of motherhood, even under the almost impossibly difficult circumstances that Helene suffers before finding her secure post with Professor Köbellin. After this turning point, the idyllic relationship between Helene and her little boy reinforces the positive image of motherhood. Other sexual issues are introduced but similarly blurred. For example, the frustrated lesbian Gudula Rapp is treated ambivalently by the author: in one of Baum’s typical addresses to her character (HW, 168) she arouses the reader’s sympathy for this sad, unfulfilled person, who struggles with poverty, loneliness, and an intractable research topic. Her sexual orientation is however here defined by the narrative voice as an “abseitige und kranke Neigung” (a perverse, sick inclination) (HW, 168). She is simply written out of the novel, leaving for Berlin where she will find anonymity. Another problem of sexual morality, the bourgeois norms imposing sexual abstinence on young people, is touched upon. In a short cameo, the student Marx, frustrated by a long engagement without sexual fulfillment, once visits a prostitute and contracts venereal disease. Friedel, his fiancée, learns the truth in a farewell letter written by Helene and forgives him. The problems of Gudula Rapp and Marx are, on the whole, extraneous to the main action and no clear stance is taken on these controversial issues of social morality. Unclear messages are given on two further moral issues. The first is the suicide pact. As was the case in Feme with regard to the ethical issue of murder, so here there is no evidence that either Rainer or Helene has any moral qualms about their planned suicide. Rainer has just learned that his father has terminal cancer; his father charges him with carrying on his

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studies in order to provide for the family, making it clear that he has bravely rejected the temptation to end his own life immediately, for the sake of his family. Rainer is very moved by this, and yet soon afterwards he decides to escape this burden through suicide, adding, presumably, to the anguish of his dying father and family: neither he nor Helene seems aware of any moral dilemma here. Similarly, the only allusion to the unborn child that is being killed is Rainer’s emotional utterance shortly before the suicide attempt: “Es ist ein unbeschreiblich schöner Gedanke, daß du ein Kind in dir trägst” (HW, 173; It is an indescribably beautiful thought that you are carrying a child inside you). Neither these two moral issues, nor any kind of real regret at Rainer’s death, nor doubts of her own actions in the matter seem to enter Helene’s consciousness in the course of the novel; this is inconsistent with the conscientious and upright character Baum portrays. The final debatable issue in the novel is its ending, where the New Woman seems in the end to be just another romantic heroine who happily gives up her hard-won independence for the man she loves. Helene has in fact always been strongly influenced by male figures: her father, Ambrosius, Köbellin, even, for a short time, Rainer. After the turning point in the prison, however, she gradually gains independence, and her great scientific success enables her to be absolutely sovereign over her life, as is demonstrated by her ability to insist on her own terms when negotiating with the directors of the chemical works. Finally, however, she succumbs to the sense of protection that Ambrosius gives her, and to his need for her: “Du mußt alles lassen und bei mir bleiben. Keine Umwege mehr . . . Du wirst mir helfen, man muß mir helfen. . . . Ich habe eine große Arbeit vor. Ich kann sie ohne dich nicht machen.” (HW, 304; You must leave everything and stay with me. No more detours . . . You will help me, I have to be helped. . . . I have a great project before me, I can’t do it without you). Though taken aback initially by this apparent request to be his research assistant, Helene is won over to the “experiment” when she hears from him that his “great project” is not in the field of chemical research but of life.24 As in Feme, Baum attempts to fuse the treatment of serious social issues with the conciliatory ending that her readership expected. In Menschen im Hotel, Baum’s ability to put her finger on the pulse of her readership combines with her literary craftsmanship to produce the most popular of her Ullstein novels.25 The work has a fast-moving plot that encompasses romance, intrigue, and crime, and an episodic structure reminiscent of the techniques of the then burgeoning film industry, which maintains the momentum of the novel and the involvement of the reader. The plot focuses on six main characters, who come together during six days in an elegant hotel in Berlin. This is one of the earliest novels to use a hotel as the impersonal setting in which a group of strangers can encounter each other in life-changing ways.26 Some scenes take place outside in the

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city of Berlin, but the majority of the action is in the hotel, which represents different things for the various people who come into contact with it. Baum evokes the glitter and bustle of the hotel from the point of view of its clients and staff, enabling ordinary readers to enter a world normally closed to them. The omniscient narrator presents the events from the different perspectives of the characters, but in this work the author does not intervene as obtrusively to guide the reader as in earlier novels, allowing the characters to speak for themselves. Apart from the narrator, one of the characters, Dr. Otternschlag, functions as a detached observer of the scene. He is a physically and emotionally damaged First World War veteran who sits in the hotel lobby, viewing the comings and goings with a world-weary cynicism that, in fact, masks his loneliness. The other characters represent various facets of Weimar society.27 Two figures embody the decaying and slightly tawdry glamour associated with Weimar Berlin: Baron von Gaigern, an adventurer and thief, is a dashingly handsome and fascinating figure, attractive to almost everyone he meets, from the page boy in the hotel to the beautiful dancer Grusinskaya, who falls in love with him. A great artist who is past her prime, Grusinskaya is consumed with anguish over the fading of her popularity. Baum depicts her despair, followed by her reawakening hope when she and Gaigern — who has come to her room to steal her world-famous pearls — unexpectedly experience great tenderness together. In contrast to the fading Grusinskaya, the vibrant Flämmchen is an engaging representative of the New Woman: she has to make her own way in life, is honest and realistic, and views her own transactions without illusions: in order to secure a little enjoyment and luxury she has to sell herself to men like the industrialist Preysing. She does this without compromising her own inner standards of decency and honesty, refusing to call him “du” (the familiar form of “you”), or indulge what she considers to be his perverse fantasies, but conscientiously giving him value for money. She and Gaigern are similar types, basically self-reliant and optimistic characters who embrace the modern world (in contrast to Otternschlag, Grusinskaya, and Preysing, for whom the challenges of modernity are essentially negative). Preysing is the director of a small provincial textile business. Pompous and self-important, he is hated by Kringelein, the character with whom the reader most closely empathizes. Preysing is essentially a man out of his depth in the intricacies of modern business, and in the end a pathetic failure; Baum makes us experience his misery by shifting the perspective to him before, during, and after his agonizing business meeting. Baum does intervene to tell us that Preysing is basically “ein anständiger, gutwilliger und unsicherer Mensch” (M, 262; a decent, well-meaning and insecure person), and she shows him to be a victim of the changing times: Preysing’s old-fashioned family firm, representing the solidly bourgeois

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values of the Empire, which made its fortune in articles like tea towels and conventional worsted suits, as well as materials for uniforms during the war, is now being displaced by the demand for modern fashions. The pivotal figure whose fate impinges on all these characters is the provincial clerk Kringelein, who worked in Preysing’s firm for twentyseven years. Dying of cancer, he has realized all his assets in order to come to Berlin to search for real life. Baum carefully constructs this figure and his circumstances for maximum identification on the part of her public, large numbers of whom were provincial white-collar workers and lower middleclass readers. Kringelein is the archetypal little man whose colorless life has been unremitting drudgery, and who is now making an escape from it. This creates reader identification from the start, which is intensified when on several occasions he stands up to Preysing, culminating in an outburst in which he passionately decries the wrongs done to downtrodden employees such as himself by bosses like Preysing. His escape into the luxury and excitement of the hotel and the city of Berlin vicariously satisfies the longings that Ullstein stimulated in its advertising for the novel: “Wunschtraum der meisten Menschen ist es, aus dem eigenen Leben in das eines Reicheren, Höhergestellten zu fliehen” (Most people dream of fleeing from their own life into the life of someone who is richer and higher in society).28 Our knowledge of his impending death, which Baum keeps before our eyes by several episodes of pain and other allusions, ensures our admiration of his spirit and adds poignancy to his frenzied lust for intense experience. Finally, the peak of the reader’s vicarious wish-fulfillment comes at the end of the novel when Kringelein, rather than the dashing Gaigern or the affluent Preysing, is successful in love. When Flämmchen flees to his room after Preysing has murdered Gaigern, Kringelein protects her and she feels for the first time that she is appreciated for herself: “In Kringeleins Worten entdeckte sie sich zum erstenmal . . . wie einen vergrabenen Schatz.” (M, 292; In Kringelein’s words she discovered herself for the first time . . . like a buried treasure.) The main thread of the action is Kringelein’s quest; this has striking similarities with Georg Kaiser’s 1916 play Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight), which is also the story of a “little man” in possession of unexpected riches, on a quest for intense experience. Like Kaiser’s bank clerk, Kringelein samples various new sensations. As Lynda King points out “the plot is so arranged that he comes in contact with the representatives of two sides of Berlin and two views of life in Dr. Otternschlag and Baron Gaigern, and he participates in their versions of life in order to seek fulfillment” (BSD, 162). Otternschlag’s jaded view is that there is no such thing as real life: “Das Eigentliche geschieht immer woanders” (M, 49; Real life always happens somewhere else). In the company of Otternschlag, Kringelein sees the traditional cultural institutions — museums, ballet — but with Gaigern he experiences modern Berlin and feels

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alive for the first time. His transformation is symbolized by his purchase, under Gaigern’s influence, of a new wardrobe of expensive clothes. For Kringelein’s experiences with Gaigern, Baum chooses events that exemplify the spirit of the modern age and would fascinate the broad readership: a ride in a fast car, an airplane flight, a boxing match, the erotically charged atmosphere of the dance. Finally, at a casino, Kringelein wins a large amount of money that boosts his fast disappearing savings, conveniently allowing him to plan to take Flämmchen to Paris at the end of the novel. The new Kringelein who emerges from these experiences is able calmly to take charge of the situation after Preysing’s murder of Gaigern, and to experience with Flämmchen what Gaigern fleetingly had with Grusinskaya: real affection based on tenderness and respect — which for Kringelein is the “real life” he was seeking. The novel has, however, another dimension, which has often been overlooked. Baum gave the first edition of her novel the subtitle “Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen” (a trashy novel with enigmas), and explained in her memoirs that by this label she intended to signal the fact that she had deliberately used the most hackneyed figures and situations, which were supposed to be viewed ironically (Alles, 375) — but, she implies, by means of the irony, some deeper meaning is conveyed.29 If the “heart-warming” aspects of the novel are examined more closely, it becomes clear that the life-changing events in the Grand Hotel are all called into question. Gaigern pays for his great romantic love for Grusinskaya with his life: unable to rob his beloved, he tries to steal the money for his reunion with her in Prague from Preysing, who kills him. Grusinskaya, whose career has taken an upward turn after her night of love with Gaigern, phones him; she imagines she is talking to her beloved, but in fact is speaking passionately to a mute telephone receiver, while his dead body lies in the hotel. Preysing’s visit to the hotel to achieve the merger that would save his business ends with the business in ruins, while he has compromised his own strict moral code and is arrested for murder. The outcome for Flämmchen seems positive, but actually Kringelein’s inevitable death will leave her in virtually the same situation as before. Only Kringelein has experienced a deeper reality at the end of his life, through his love for Flämmchen; but even he is not immune from Baum’s irony. Though he is the main identification figure, Baum distances the reader from him: although we empathize with him, together with the hotel staff we smile at his comic appearance. The reader is amused at the provincial naiveté of his responses to people and events, and even his metamorphosis into a manly hero at the end of the novel can be seen as tinged with satire. Most crucially, at the moment of his long-awaited confrontation with Preysing, his inability to formulate theoretical ideas makes him collapse, as the narrator comments, into a confusion of “Wichtiges und Nebensächliches, Wahrheiten und Phantasien, Erkenntnisse und Bürotratsch” (M, 266;

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relevant and irrelevant matters, truth and fantasy, insights and officegossip). Here Baum avoids developing a trenchant political argument by rendering the speaker ridiculous. The attractions of the affluent, racy lifestyle are often shown, through the perceptions of the characters themselves, to fall short of expectations. Preysing finds the naked Flämmchen somehow not quite the same as in her pinup photo. Kringelein complains to Otternschlag that the modern cocktail bar is not as thrilling as its popular image, familiar to him from films and magazines. Otternschlag takes up the example Kringelein gives, that the bar stools are not as high as he expected, to universalize this principle: “Alles stellt man sich höher vor, bis man’s gesehen hat” (M, 49; One always imagines everything to be higher than it is, until one has seen it). Otternschlag is also an ambiguous figure. Both the too-obvious symbolism of the damaged side of his face and glass eye and the comic rigidity of his repeated ritual of enquiring in vain whether there is post for him detract from his tragic status as a damaged war-victim. On the other hand, it is his nihilistic view of life that brings the novel to a close, as he sits as usual in the lobby of the hotel watching the revolving door of the hotel, and of life, constantly turning. But here too Baum ironically calls his viewpoint into question by commenting that he was looking at the street with his glass eye, unable therefore to see that the sun was shining. In the ending, as throughout the novel, Baum communicates with the reader on several levels and with multiple perspectives. Menschen im Hotel is artistically the most sophisticated of her Ullstein products. In these three novels, we can discern certain common characteristics that justify Baum’s inclusion in the category of popular mass literature. She is a skilful storyteller; her characters are on the whole types, often stereotypes, easily recognizable to the Weimar reader, but with enough individuality to allow reader identification. She treats complex moral and social issues of her time, but tends not to develop their implications fully, sometimes using an avoidance strategy, as with Kringelein’s tirade, or glossing over some of the issues to achieve a harmonious resolution, as in Feme or Helene Willfüer. In order to achieve her aim, Baum often too obviously guides the reader by her authorial comments; Lynda King comments that “telling readers what to think rather than challenging them to think for themselves is a feature identified with . . . popular literature in general” (BSD, 163). The nature of her characters — types of Weimar society — also places Baum in the sphere of the New Objectivity and of the popular literature of the day. Ulle, der Zwerg, which appeared in 1924, forms an interesting contrast to the three later novels.30 Though it shares some of Baum’s later hallmarks, it is strikingly different in many respects. The main character is a dwarf, whose appearance causes shock or distaste among most of his contemporaries. The novel consists of five chapters that represent different

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stages in his life, beginning when he is five years old and ending when he is about to die, in his mid-thirties. Living in a small town, neglected by his depressed, drunken father, and his sluttish mother, the child Ulle is shunned by almost everyone. After his father’s death, his mother sells him to a traveling sideshow, and after years of being exhibited as a freak, he gets a job as a clown in a circus. A writer, Johannes von Struensee, befriends him and uses him as the inspiration for a character in his new play. To great public and critical acclaim, Ulle plays the jester, Biribon, in the production. Through this experience Ulle is lifted out of his loneliness and meets cultivated people who apparently treat him as a friend and equal. His moment of happiness is brief: he becomes vain and affected, a grotesque parody of the theatrical personality, and, without his realizing it, is again the butt of mockery. At the end of the season he is left without a role or any source of income and his new friends drop him. He goes back to his home town, and after a fruitless attempt to gain work in his former circus, he finds a menial job in a cheap sideshow. Promising to return to take up the job, he goes to revisit his old street. His old house is in disrepair and the one person who had befriended him has gone. At the end of the novel, Ulle, whose physical deterioration has been advancing since he began working as an actor, is sitting on the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter like the five-year-old in the opening scene, inwardly reconciled to his swiftapproaching deliverance from the prison of his life. The darkness of the theme is reflected in the book’s motto: “Das Innerste der Welt ist Einsamkeit” (The innermost core of the world is loneliness). Baum conveys the experience of the rejected outsider with great insight.31 Though the overall narrative perspective is that of the omniscient narrator, the main focus of the narration is Ulle’s experience, and his feelings are described in detail. His sensitivity and intelligence intensify his loneliness and frustration, as he can see through the evasive or hypocritical strategies of those around him: when the district nurse encourages him by saying “Waschen mußt du dich. Davon wirst du groß und stark” (You must wash yourself. That will make you big and strong), the child’s inner reaction is “Ihr lacht mich aus . . . Ihr macht einen Affen aus mir” (U, 42; You’re all making fun of me . . . You’re making a fool of me). Baum does not simplify or gloss over the issues of social rejection, but presents them in their complexity: individuals and social institutions are shown, not as inherently malevolent, but as confused, embarrassed, ignorant, prejudiced, or fearful of the opinions of others. One encounter between Ulle and a proto-Nazi group of Wandervögel (a German youth movement) unequivocally points to future developments. The influence of Thomas Mann is very evident, though not to the detriment of the novel, for Mann’s motif of the sensitive social misfit who at once envies and despises the unthinking “blond, blue-eyed” integrated people in society is an appropriate expression of Ulle’s relationship to

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“normal” people. Moreover, this idea of different types in society coincides with Baum’s own underlying belief, exemplified in the figure of Ulle, that our life and fate is somehow predetermined, and that the deciding factor is, as she describes it at the end of her memoirs: “Mut, das Leben zu leben und das Beste daraus zu machen, komme, was da wolle.” (Alles, 473; The courage to live life and make the best of it, whatever happens). Before Ulle meets the writer Johannes Struensee, he learns to accept the loneliness and humiliations of his life with stoical dignity; at the end of the second chapter he has a revelatory experience; after being rendered unconscious by a blow from the head of the sideshow’s giant snake, he has a vision in which all the suffering creatures of the freak show, whispering in a choir, reveal their kinship to him, culminating in Ulle’s question: “Wie ist mein Weg, ihr fremden Geschöpfe, ihr wissenden Stimmen?” (What is my path, you strange creatures, you wise voices?), and their answer “Der Weg ist von Einsamkeit zu Einsamkeit . . . Es gibt keinen anderen Weg” (U, 173; The path is from loneliness to loneliness. There is no other path).32 This experience is, however, immediately followed by his meeting with Struensee and embarking on what can be seen as a detour from his real path. In this section of the novel Baum analyses the fate and suffering of the artist. Struensee is closely modeled on Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach:33 in a long passage he is described as a master of form and language, whose work has a cold logical perfection, which, however, is only achieved through the “glühende Qual des Schaffens” (U, 175–76; the burning torment of creation). Like Aschenbach he has been suffering from a lack of inspiration and his latest play is not advancing. When he wanders into the circus and meets Ulle, a fellow feeling arises between them: the writer also lives with a “gläserne Mauer” (U, 177; glass wall) between himself and the rest of humanity. As Ulle becomes more deeply involved with Struensee and his friends, he is treated as a real human being for the first time; they call him “Herr Moog” instead of his normal stage name, “Kolibri.” A dual perspective is created: the omniscient narrator focuses at length on the inner life of Struensee, on his notes on Ulle/Biribon, and on conversations when Ulle is absent, so that the reader sees that Ulle is deceived. Like Ulle, the artist is trapped in his unchangeable self: he is absolutely unable to form spontaneous relationships without using the other as raw material. When the play is finished therefore, the intimate friendship cools; Struensee has gained what he needed from Ulle, turning him into a fictitious character, which the real Ulle then plays. His entry ticket into what he sees as real relationships is, ironically, through playing the role of the lonely dwarf. When this role is over, he cultivates acceptance by attempting to assume the persona of the actor, which fails miserably, because for his new acquaintances — Struensee’s family and friends and the actors — Ulle also fulfils a need. They need him to be different, a tragic figure whom they can pity and accept, gaining thereby an image of themselves as tolerant, sensitive

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individuals. When he tries to be like them he encounters their ridicule and even hostility; they resent this pastiche of the actor, with his loud clothes and raucous camaraderie, which is a grotesque reflection of themselves. Ulle’s disillusionment begins when his joy at experiencing sexual fulfillment at last is dashed by the realization that he was merely being exploited by the actress to gratify her appetite for new, extreme experiences, and is complete when he cannot recreate the intimate relationship with Struensee. Ulle, der Zwerg is a powerful and uncompromising work of insight and depth, which, apart from some rather too obvious symbolism and an occasional tendency to the melodramatic, does not exhibit the “popular” characteristics of the three novels analyzed above. The cover of the Ullstein edition features a picture of a picturesque gypsy caravan with washing fluttering on the line, and the rubric “Zwischen Löwenmädchen und der Riesenschlange erlebt der Clown Ulle Glanz und Elend eines Wanderdaseins, das von Vicki Baum mit gütiger Zartheit unserem Herzen nahegebracht wird” (Between the lion-woman and the giant snake, the clown Ulle experiences the glory and misery of an itinerant existence, which Vicki Baum, with her gentle tenderness, conveys to our hearts). This attempt to squeeze the novel into the Ullstein mould represents a distortion of its powerful theme and somber atmosphere. Vicki Baum’s assessment of herself is honest and perceptive: she is a first-class writer of popular, well-crafted novels. She mirrors the atmosphere of Weimar society and writes about topics that were of burning contemporary interest at that time. The weaknesses and inconsistencies in her work stem partly from her desire to reconcile serious writing that deals meaningfully with social issues with the harmonious ending and lighter tone that popular literature demands, and partly because the optimistic outcome reflects her own stoical philosophy of life. As she herself believed, her range has been underestimated: Ulle der Zwerg and several other works, such as Zwischenfall in Lehwinckel, 1930 (translated as Results of an Accident, 1931) and Marion Alive, 1942 (Originally published in English; German version: Marion lebt, 1942), qualify, even by traditional German academic criteria, to be considered as serious literature. The works of serious scholarship by King, Nottelmann, and Rüsing indicate that an overdue reevaluation of her contribution to the culture of the Weimar Republic is now under way.

Notes 1

Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), 21. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation BSD and the page number.

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2 Hermann Kesten, preface to Vierundzwanzig neue deutsche Erzähler, ed. Hermann Kesten (Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1929), 7, 9, quoted in BSD, 152. 3

All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

4

Vicki Baum, Es war alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, Munich: Lizenzausgabe des Deutschen Bücherbundes GmbH & Co. mit Genehmigung des Verlages Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 1987), 89. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Alles and the page number.

5

Vicki Baum, Frühe Schatten: Das Ende einer Kindheit (Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1914).

6

Vicki Baum, Der Eingang zur Bühne (Berlin: Ullstein, 1920) and Die Tänze der Ina Raffay: Ein Leben (Berlin: Ullstein, 1921).

7 Vicki Baum, Die anderen Tage (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922); Die Welt ohne Sünde: Der Roman einer Minute (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1923); Ulle, der Zwerg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1924); Der Weg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1925). 8

“Thomas Mann, mein großer Schutzheiliger, hatte mich für würdig befunden! Er persönlich hatte mir die Tore zur Literatur geöffnet! So wenigstens sah ich das damals” (Alles, 337; Thomas Mann, my great guardian angel, had found me worthy! He personally had opened the gates of literature for me. That, at least, is how I saw it at that time).

9

The novel, translated by Basil Creighton, became famous throughout the English-speaking world. Baum, Grand Hotel (London: G. Bles, 1930, and Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1931).

10 It has to be said, however, that neither the works that she placed with the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, because she saw them as being of higher literary value (see note 7), nor the later novel The Mustard Seed (1953), which she published initially under a pseudonym in order to prove herself and rid herself of the Menschen im Hotel label, achieved any great success. 11

The word “Feme” is difficult to translate exactly: it can mean a secret, kangaroo court, or, in its compound form “Fememord,” a political assassination. The associated “ein Verfemter” means an outlawed person. All these aspects of the term are relevant to the novel’s theme. “Secret Sentence” is the title of the English-language editions published by G. Bles, London and Doubleday, New York, both in 1932. 12

Vicki Baum, Feme (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1926). References to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation F and the page number.

13

Hans-Peter Rüsing, Die Nationalistischen Geheimbünde in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003) 11. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation NG and the page number.

14 Martin Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung: Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 33, quoted in NG 273, n. 17. 15 It is a reference to the heroic hussars under Ferdinand von Schill, who took it upon themselves to charge into battle against Napoleon despite the vacillation of

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the Kaiser. Many of them were executed by the French, and many opponents of Weimar saw this historical incident as inspirational. Cf. NG, 140. 16 Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1929). The Propyläen Press belonged to the House of Ullstein. 17

Askanius turns out to be an empty poseur who manages to escape with a few minor charges against him, and eventually makes a fine career in government.

18

The subtitle was not used in any edition of the book.

19

The little town incorporates all the clichés of kitsch romanticism; it is medieval and described as “enchanted” with the perfume of the linden-trees, church bells, the smithy, the potter selling his wares on an old handcart that rattles over the cobblestones, the old woman at the handloom, and various other attributes (F, 174–76). 20

Vicki Baum, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1928). References to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation HW and the page number. 21

The name of the town is not mentioned in the novel, but Baum implies in her memoirs that it is Heidelberg. 22 It is worth noting that whereas he succumbed to the worst of these detours, his attempt to commit suicide, which had grievous consequences for him, Helene drew back from this temptation in time, and also avoided the other path, abortion. 23

Nicole Nottelmann shows that various formulae are used in this novel: those of the fairy tale, the “Entwicklungsroman” (novel of personal development), the romance, the scientific novel, and the crime novel. See Nicole Nottelmann, Strategien des Erfolgs: Narratologische Analysen exemplarischer Romane Vicki Baums (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 89–109. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation SE and the page number.

24 Several contemporary female readers felt that the author had in the end compromised the New Woman for the sake of the romantic happy ending; see, for example, Lucie Becher, in the Sächsische Volkszeitung, 17 February 1929, and Gabriele Reuter in the Vossische Zeitung, 17 March 1929. 25 Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929). The edition used here is published by Fackelverlag, Olten, Stuttgart, Salzburg, 1963. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation M and the page number. For a much more detailed analysis of Menschen im Hotel than is possible here, see BSD, 154–201 and SE, 140–95. 26

Several “hotel” novels predated Menschen im Hotel, notably Arnold Bennett’s Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), and Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy (1924). Vicki Baum used this genre in two other novels, Hotel Shanghai (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1939) and Hotel Berlin ’43 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944). The genre is of course a variant of the many works that use the convention of a group of strangers being thrown together in a particular setting or for a common purpose, such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387), Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (1942), and, more recently, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (2001).

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27 Lynda J. King points out, however, that “the topical theme was not depicted in a manner in any way especially tied to Germany in 1929” (BSD, 159). This universality contributed to the huge international success of Menschen im Hotel. 28

Advertisement for Menschen im Hotel in Vossische Zeitung, 7 April 1929.

29

Nottelmann’s analysis of the novel discusses in detail the ironical implications of the subtitle.

30

The edition used here is published by Ullstein in Berlin, no date. References to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation U and the page number.

31

There is undoubtedly an autobiographical and cathartic element in her portrayal of Ulle: Baum alludes in her memoirs to her constant feeling of being an unloved, isolated, and ugly child, and asserts about the writing of Ulle, der Zwerg: “Wenn ich . . . ein erwachsener Mensch geworden war, so durch dieses Buch.” (Alles, 324; If I . . . had become an adult, it was through this book).

32

The language and surrealism of this episode illustrate most clearly the influence of Expressionism, which is still apparent in this work. 33

Cf. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, 1912.

12: Hans Fallada’s Literary Breakthrough: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Kleiner Mann — was nun? Jenny Williams

S

KRACAUER, IN AN ESSAY IN Die neue Rundschau in June 1931, identified a new type of writer in Germany, one no longer devoted to absolute values, who considered that the role of a writer was to be a social and political commentator.1 The writer Hans Fallada, whose Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben2 (Farmers, Functionaries, and Fireworks) had appeared in March of that year, was just such a writer. Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben was the novel that established the literary reputation of Hans Fallada, the nom de plume adopted by Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947). Thanks to the critical acclaim this work received, Ditzen was in such demand for short stories and reviews of contemporary literature that by September 1931 he was finally in a position to fulfill a lifelong ambition to become a full-time writer. Although not a great commercial success, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben gave Ditzen sufficient financial security to enable him to pay off debts arising from activities that had twice landed him in jail on counts of embezzlement in the 1920s. In terms of style, themes, and characterization, this novel paved the way for Ditzen’s subsequent literary success, notably with Kleiner Mann — was nun? (1932; Little Man — What Now? 1996).3 Günter Caspar, who edited Fallada’s works for the Aufbau publishing house from 1964 to 1998, describes Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben as the best novel written about small-town life in Germany during the Weimar Republic.4 Rudolf Ditzen was thirty-seven years old when Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben was published: he had had to wait a long time for his literary breakthrough.5 Born in Greifswald in 1893, Ditzen, like many of his contemporaries, rebelled against the authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany, personified in his eyes by his father, Wilhelm Ditzen, who pursued a highly successful legal career that culminated in his appointment to the Imperial Supreme Court in 1909. Ditzen’s rebellion initially took the form of excessive smoking and drinking as well as writing Expressionist and mildly erotic poetry. However, following a near-fatal cycling accident in 1909 and a serious bout of typhus in 1910, his thoughts turned increasingly to suicide. IEGFRIED

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He was fortunate to survive a suicide pact in October 1911 that took the form of a duel fought over the honor of a young woman and left his close friend, Hanns Dietrich von Necker, dead. This brought his education to an abrupt end some eighteen months before he was due to finish secondary school and he was admitted to Tannenfeld sanatorium in Thüringen as a patient of Dr. Artur Tecklenburg. On his release in September 1913 he trained as a steward on a nearby estate and spent most of the First World War working in agriculture. The death of his younger brother on the Western Front in August 1918 caused Ditzen to fall ill, and while undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer he became addicted to morphine. While the 1920s saw Ditzen publish two Expressionist novels — Der junge Goedeschal (Young Goedeschal, 1920) and Anton und Gerda (1923)6 — he spent almost four years of the decade either in clinics being treated for alcohol and drug addiction or in prison as a result of criminal activities to feed his addiction. He emerged from Neumünster prison on 10 May 1928, cured of alcoholism and drug addiction, and after a difficult period of unemployment he found work with a local newspaper. In April 1929 he married Anna Issel, who brought stability into his life and provided the support he needed to write. It was Ditzen’s experience in Neumünster that formed the basis of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben. In January 1930 Ernst Rowohlt, who had published Ditzen’s first two novels, offered him a job in his publishing house in Berlin. Rowohlt, who knew of Ditzen’s plans for a new novel, gave him the afternoons free in order to write. One month later Ditzen began Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben; he submitted it in September 1930. Ditzen’s next novel, Kleiner Mann — was nun? turned Hans Fallada into an international best-selling author overnight. Both novels are critical responses to contemporary social and political issues. In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben Ditzen turns the spotlight on the malaise at the heart of the Weimar Republic. In Kleiner Mann — was nun? he depicts the effects of the greatest economic crisis Germany had ever experienced on the lives of ordinary people. Critics claim with some justification that Fallada’s novels are a rich source of information about the attitudes, behavior, and modes of expression of individuals and groups who otherwise escape the attention of historians.7 Ditzen’s success was due largely to the accurate, lively, and sympathetic description of the fate of the “little man,” the petit-bourgeois, in a time of great social upheaval. It was to be his great misfortune that this literary success coincided with the rise of National Socialism, which, once it had seized power, did not countenance criticism. In April 1933 Ditzen was arrested by the SA (storm troopers) and held for 10 days as the result of a malicious denunciation. His realisation that there was no redress for this injustice in the Third Reich precipitated a nervous breakdown, which lasted into the summer and was compounded by the death of one of his twin daughters shortly after her birth in July. In

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October Ditzen moved with his wife, three-year-old son, and surviving baby daughter to a smallholding in the remote hamlet of Carwitz near Feldberg in Mecklenburg, where he hoped to weather the storm of Nazism. While initially very happy and productive in his rural idyll, Ditzen soon discovered that the tentacles of the Nazi party machine reached into every corner of Germany. His next novel, Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt (Once a Jailbird, 1934), which dealt with the rehabilitation of offenders and the problem of recidivism was not well received by the critics. Then Wir hatten mal ein Kind (Once We Had a Child, 1934), which drew inspiration from Wilhelm Raabe and Jean Paul and was a lifelong favourite of the author’s, did not meet with the approval of the authorities on account of its less than exemplary protagonist. Ditzen’s attempt to write a veiled critique of Nazi Germany in Altes Herz geht auf die Reise (Old Heart Goes on a Journey) resulted in his being declared an “unerwünschter Autor” (undesirable author) in 1935, which caused him to have another nervous breakdown. After that he adopted a number of survival strategies: he wrote children’s books, light, ahistorical, entertaining fiction, fictionalized memoirs, and film scripts, as well as translations. The one novel of merit that Ditzen wrote between 1935 and 1945 was Wolf unter Wölfen (Wolf among the Wolves, 1937), which marked a return to the socio-critical approach of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, Kleiner Mann — was nun? and Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt. In it Ditzen describes the effects of the economic crises of the Weimar Republic on the lives of Germans both in the cities and on the land. The Nazi literary authorities read this work as a critique of the Weimar Republic and were therefore willing to tolerate it. Ditzen’s difficulties as an author were compounded by the denunciations that became a regular feature of life in Carwitz. His alcoholism and extra-marital affairs also contributed to the breakdown of his marriage, which ended in divorce in July 1944. A drunken incident in August 1944 resulted in his admission to a psychiatric prison where, as so often before, he found salvation in writing. The result, Der Trinker (1950; The Drinker, 1989), is one of the most harrowing literary depictions of alcoholism in any language. On his release he remarried and took up residence in nearby Feldberg. When the Soviet army arrived there in the spring of 1945, Ditzen was appointed mayor. After suffering a complete nervous breakdown in August, in September he moved with his wife to Berlin. There he was sought out by Johannes R. Becher, who provided food, clothing, and shelter and encouraged Ditzen to write. Becher, whose youthful rebellion had taken a similar course to Ditzen’s before he channelled his energies into left-wing politics, viewed Ditzen as part of the antifascist, democratic cultural movement he was trying to foster in the Soviet sector. Under

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Becher’s patronage Ditzen wrote Der Alpdruck (The Nightmare, 1946), a semi-autobiographical attempt to address the question of German guilt, and Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone Dies Alone, 1947), which portrays the (largely ineffectual) resistance of two “little people” to fascism and is the first anti-fascist novel of the postwar period. Despite Becher’s support, Ditzen was unable to cope with the mountain of personal and artistic problems he faced in postwar East Berlin. He indulged, and sometimes shared, his wife’s addiction to morphine and died, a physical and emotional wreck, on 5 February 1947. As far as Ditzen was concerned, his literary career began with Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben. He rejected his first two novels because “es nicht meine Bücher waren, weil ich sie auf Anregung, auf Befehl fast einer ehrgeizigen Frau geschrieben habe, weil sie mir suggeriert waren, weil ich sie nicht aus meinem inneren Antrieb geschrieben habe” (because they were not my books, because I wrote them at the behest, almost on the instructions of an ambitious woman, because they were suggested to me, because I did not write them from the heart).8 Both these novels have a very strong autobiographical dimension. Der junge Goedeschal is a selfabsorbed and passionate account of male adolescence, conveyed in breathless Expressionist prose; Anton und Gerda, however, while still dealing with an adolescent protagonist, shows glimpses of the mature Ditzen’s narrative style. Indeed, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben marks the culmination of a development from Expressionist experimentalist to critical realist, a development that can be traced through Fallada’s published and unpublished writings from 1920 to 1931.9 Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben depicts small-town life in Germany towards the end of the 1920s and in the process reveals the cancer at the heart of the Weimar Republic. This is a society where everything and everyone has a price; where corruption in the media and the body politic is rife; where naked self-interest is the motivation behind most characters’ actions and self-advancement at the expense of others is their main goal; where ends justify means and the weakest go to the wall. The first German republic is portrayed as being constantly undermined by venality, patronage, and the non-consent of large sections of the population to what they contemptuously call the “Judenrepublik” (Jews’ Republic) or the “rote Republik” (Red Republic). Agents provocateurs are to be found not only on the political Right, where they incite the farmers to violent protest, but also on the political Left, where a policeman, acting on behalf of the regional government, in which the Social Democrats (SPD) have a majority, colludes in the downfall of an SPD mayor who is perceived not to toe the party line. The novel is set in the fictional town of Altholm and owes much to Ditzen’s experiences in Neumünster.10 The plot revolves around a farmers’ demonstration in Altholm und relates the circumstances before, during,

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and after the event. The farmers, who have been adversely affected by the crisis in agriculture, are unable to pay their taxes, and the authorities react by seizing and auctioning their livestock, machinery, and property. The farmers resist the bailiffs by embarking on a campaign of civil disobedience. Right-wing elements, sympathetic to the farmers and/or opposed to the Weimar Republic, plant two bombs aimed at members and employees of the SPD administration. One of the farmers’ leaders, Reimers, is imprisoned in Altholm, and the farmers plan a mass demonstration in the town to celebrate his release. The SPD regional government wants to ban the march, but the SPD mayor of Altholm, who has expended much time and energy on cultivating good relations with the farming community, refuses to implement a ban. The demonstration is infiltrated by a right-wing agitator, who designs and carries a provocative flag that attracts the attention of the police. Because of the incompetence of the police, a melee ensues, resulting in a number of casualties. The reinforcements sent by the regional government move in, disperse the farmers’ gathering, and impound the flag. This incident, which causes strong reactions across the political spectrum in both the town and the surrounding countryside, would probably have had no further serious consequences, had not a mischievous anonymous letter appeared in a local newspaper, purporting to come from a local businessman, in which the fear was expressed that the farming community might initiate a boycott of Altholm. The leadership of the farmers’ movement needs no further encouragement, and a boycott is introduced. In the court case arising from the disturbances during the demonstration, the court finds the Chief of Police objectively in the wrong but subjectively in the right and passes extremely lenient sentences on the leaders of the farmers’ movement. The SPD mayor is forced by his party to resign and is sent to be mayor of another town at some distance from Altholm. As he leaves, the farmers are assembling for a demonstration that will culminate in their flag being returned to them. This demonstration, too, has been banned by the regional government, and the various political factions in Altholm are positioning themselves to exploit the farmers’ demonstration for their own electoral advantage. Stefan Nienhaus ascribes the novel’s lack of commercial success in 1931 to the fact that the novel is based on groups of characters — the farmers, the journalists, the various political parties — and does not have a clearly identifiable hero.11 A possible candidate for the title of hero, the larger-than-life SPD mayor Gareis, who has done much good in Altholm, often stoops to less-than-honest means to achieve his (mostly) laudable ends. He is, for example, responsible for the sacking of Max Tredup, the first in a long line of Fallada’s “little men.” Tredup ekes out a miserable existence selling advertising space in a right-wing newspaper and supplements his wage by addressing envelopes

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or taking photographs in order to feed, clothe, and house himself, his wife, and their two children. A stroke of luck enables him to sell some politically sensitive photographs to Gareis for 1,000 marks, which he then buries in a remote location near the coast. Through no fault of his own, he is arrested and held in prison on suspicion of having planted a bomb and is only released after the intervention of the prison governor. For Tredup the only consolation in a hostile and unpredictable environment is to be found in the bosom of his family. As Liersch observed in his review of the first GDR edition of the novel, the motif of individual happiness in personal relationships as a response to economic and social crises, which became the hallmark of Fallada’s writings in the 1930s, finds its first expression in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben.12 Tredup does fulfill his dream to become a journalist, but his happiness is short-lived, thanks to Gareis’s intervention. When Tredup subsequently goes to retrieve the money he has hidden in order to start a new life for himself and his family in a different place, he is murdered by a mentally deranged, avaricious farmer; the farmer comments that some people have no luck at all (363), which could stand as Tredup’s epitaph. The owners, editors, and journalists of the four newspapers in Altholm are portrayed in an almost entirely negative light. One owner, Gebhardt, who owns one liberal and one right-wing newspaper, is interested only in profit: “Wenn es Geld bringt, darfst du mir and mich verwechseln” (It doesn’t matter how you write, as long as you make a profit), says one of his editors (140). Stuff, editor of the Chronik, writes adverse reports on businesses that refuse to buy advertising space, and pens reviews of films he cannot be bothered to watch. Padberg, the editor of the pro-farmer Nachrichten, not only reports the news but also takes a leading role in making it. The farmers are portrayed as naïve in insisting on nonviolent protest while admitting the agitator and bomber Georg Henning into their ranks. They are also shown to be easily led and politically disorganized. Only two farmers are described in any detail: Banz, a loner who hides explosives in his barn and thinks nothing of murdering Tredup and burying his body, and Reimers, who is identified in Tredup’s photograph as resisting the bailiffs. Reimers refuses to go on the run, is arrested and imprisoned, and is subsequently the focus of the farmers’ demonstration. Fallada shows him to be an astute political thinker as well as a sly old fox who leads the police a merry dance when they come to arrest him. Most contemporary critics viewed Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben in a positive light. Adjectives such as “lebenswahr/lebensnah” (true to life) and “packend/spannend” (gripping) recur in the collection of almost four hundred reviews in the Hans Fallada Archive. The main point of disagreement among the critics lies in their assessment of the narrative perspective in the novel. Max Krell, in his reader’s report on the manuscript, expressed

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the view that despite the narrator’s attempt at objectivity his sympathies lie with the farmers.13 Rowohlt’s pre-launch publicity described Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben as a “portrayal of the farmers’ movement against the state.”14 The choice of title further reinforced the view that the farmers formed the main focus of the novel. Until recently, the received wisdom in Fallada research has been that this title was imposed by the Kölnische Illustrierte, the newspaper that serialized the novel prior to publication. However, Wilkes has convincingly shown this view to be mistaken by referring to Ditzen’s private correspondence, for Ditzen mentions the title Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben in a letter to his sister Elisabeth on 17 July 1930 — almost three months before Rowohlt opened negotiations with the Kölnische Illustrierte.15 The critic Carl Misch, in the influential Vossische Zeitung, concluded that Fallada was on the side of the farmers. Peter Suhrkamp, Felix Riemkasten, and Siegfried Kracauer decided that the narrator had no clear point of view, although Kracauer suspected that he was sympathetic to the farmers. Kurt Tucholsky viewed the novel as a depiction of the failure of German democracy, for which — in Tucholsky’s view — the Social Democrats were to blame. The majority of the right-wing press praised Fallada’s sympathetic portrayal of the farmers and, by implication, his critique of the Weimar Republic. Most left-wing publications criticized the sympathetic portrayal of the farmers and interpreted the novel as an attack on the SPD and the Republic; the Communist Linkskurve even went so far as to title their review “A Fascist Farmers’ Novel.” Heinz Dietrich Kenter, who collaborated with Fallada on a stage version of the novel, wrote in Die Literatur in July 1931 that Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben was primarily about the current state of democracy in Germany. This was the view of Fallada himself, who wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law, Fritz Bechert, on 26 November 1930, that his aim was to evoke the reaction “poor Germany” and not “poor farmers.” In a letter to his mother on 29 March 1931 he rejected the idea that he had written a novel about farmers or that he had adopted an extremely right-wing point of view. The question of narrative perspective has been central to the reception of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben since its first publication. National Socialism regarded the novel as an indictment of the Weimar Republic and, in its portrayal of the farmers’ movement, prophetic of the coming revolution. Reviewers of the 1939 edition, published by Vier Falken Verlag, described the novel as an important historical document from a terrible period in German history that had been successfully overcome. Fallada’s preface to this edition concludes with the sentence: “Wie ein Mahnmal erscheint mir heute dieses Buch, Mahnmal und Warnung: hier sind wir hindurchgegangen — wir dürfen es nie vergessen!” (Nowadays this book seems to me like a memorial, a memorial and a warning: this is what we have been through — we

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must never forget it.)16 This is the kind of ambiguity to which non-Nazi writers who remained in Germany were reduced. Post-1945 this sentence can read as a veiled attack on the Nazi regime; in the context of 1939 it could be read as an endorsement of it. The issue of narrative perspective surfaced in North American Fallada scholarship in 1990, when Shookman accused Fallada not only of being on the side of the farmers but also of being anti-Semitic and trying to undermine the Weimar Republic in his novel.17 These claims have subsequently been refuted by Thomas Bredohl, who draws on Fallada’s correspondence and other published and unpublished writings of the period, Reinhard K. Zachau, who bases his argument on an analysis of the novel itself, and Henry Ashby Turner, who places the novel in its contemporary context and insists on the distinction between literature and history.18 As Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben has not been translated into English, discussion of the novel in the English-speaking world has been restricted to German Studies circles. The differing interpretations of the narrative perspective in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben are due to a large extent to the new style of writing that Ditzen evolved in this novel. After the intensely personal nature of his first two novels, he was determined that “der Autor diesmal im Buch ganz fehlen [sollte]. Mit keinem Wort sollte er andeuten, was er selbst über das Erzählte dachte, das war Sache des Lesers” (the author should be completely absent in this book. In no way should he indicate his views on the story: that should be left to the reader).19 An immediate result of this approach is the preponderance of direct speech: Heidrun Bauer has calculated that direct speech accounts for some two-thirds of the novel.20 It was a major achievement to produce credible dialogue for such a wide range of characters: farmers, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and lawyers. Fallada also succeeds in introducing variation into the speech of individual characters. Gareis speaks differently to his friend Stein than he does to the farmers; the businessmen express themselves differently when sober and when drunk. Furthermore, as Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel has shown, the rhetoric of the politicians in the novel is entirely authentic.21 Fallada later confessed how difficult he found it to construct and sustain the dialogue.22 However, this technique attracted such critical acclaim that he continued to use it in his next two novels, Kleiner Mann — was nun? and Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt. Nils Arnöman has drawn attention to the similarities between Fallada’s narrative style and that of Ernest Hemingway.23 Fallada published an essay on Hemingway in Die Literatur in September 1931, in which he expressed his admiration for a narrative style in which the narrator is almost completely absent, there is no description of the emotional dimension of the story, and the narration is reduced to a minimum. Zachau has remarked that Fallada could be writing about his own style in this essay as well as Hemingway’s.24

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In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben Fallada not only develops a new narrative style but also introduces a theme that will become increasingly important in his fiction: human decency (“Anständigkeit”). In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben the adjective “anständig” (decent) is most frequently used by and in relation to Tredup. Tredup believes that it is decent of Gareis to stand by Frerksen, the Chief of Police, whose incompetence led to the disturbances arising from the farmers’ demonstration. Stuff takes a much more cynical view and, prophetically, warns Tredup not to rely on Gareis. When Stuff, Tredup’s immediate superior, is asked for his opinion of Tredup, Stuff replies that he is quite a decent fellow as long as he has money in his pocket (63). However, when Tredup obtains a considerable sum of money for the photographs he took of the farmers’ civil disobedience, his behavior is anything but decent, for he hides it with the intention of using it at some future date to escape his domestic responsibilities. Gareis innocently tells Elise Tredup about the 1,000 marks her husband has received, which leads to tensions in their relationship. Not only is Tredup’s marriage in difficulties, he is falsely put in prison (where he is terrorized by a mentally deranged prison guard), and as a result his job is under threat. In an attempt to establish a more secure existence, Tredup resorts to political mischiefmaking. He formulates an anonymous letter to the editor of the Chronik newspaper, which precipitates the farmers’ boycott of Altholm — in return Stuff promises to put in a good word for him with the newspaper’s new owner. Then the prospect of 100 marks induces him to obtain, by less than honest means, a letter that can be published as an announcement in the paper, demanding the dismissal of Gareis and Frerksen. Next Tredup joins the SPD, and Gareis promises to help him find employment if he can acquire proof that the official circulation figures for the Chronik are incorrect. This Tredup does by stealing the information from the safe in the editor’s office. He finally blackmails Stuff in order to get the editor’s job. As Tredup becomes more involved in political wheeling and dealing in Altholm, he begins to drink heavily, visits the town’s prostitutes, and even beats his wife. All pretence of decency is gradually abandoned. In a letter to his friend Johannes Kagelmacher on 13 April 1930, Ditzen writes that among the wide range of characters in the novel there are decent people who sometimes do not act in a decent manner and rogues who are sometimes forced to act decently. In the novel the narrator explores the concept of decency in a conversation between Tredup und Fräulein Heinze, an equally poorly paid and exploited employee of the Chronik (193–94). Fräulein Heinze, who is forced by financial necessity to supplement her income towards the end of every month by prostitution, contrasts her behavior, which she still considers decent, with that of Tredup, who with his drinking, whoring, and political skullduggery can no longer be considered decent. She asserts that it is possible to be down on your luck and do things you’re ashamed of and still be a decent human being.

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Finally, Elise accuses Tredup of not being decent: of betraying the farmers by selling his photographs, and of betraying his wife and children by squandering his money on women and drink. His response is to beat her up (226). It is not until Tredup loses his job as editor that he finds his way back into his family; with Elise’s help and support he begins to plan a new life in another town. This potential happy end comes to nothing, for Tredup is murdered before he can retrieve his money. In a passage that anticipates Lämmchen’s conversation with Jachmann towards the end of Kleiner Mann — was nun? as they wait for Pinneberg to return by train from Berlin, Stuff waits with Elise for Tredup to return by train from Stolpe. In both passages the women refer to their absent partners as “Junge” (boy) and contrast their weakness and vulnerability with the strength and success of men like Jachmann and Stuff. Lämmchen rejects Jachmann’s advances and Kleiner Mann — was nun? ends with the Pinnebergs retreating from a hostile and cruel world into their happy family idyll. In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben there is no happy ending. Instead, Stuff invites Elise to move to Stolpe with the children and work as his housekeeper. Geoff Wilkes sees Stuff’s decision to abandon the corruption of political life in Altholm and direct his energies to the private sphere as an indication of Fallada’s interest in personal values as a response to the social and economic crises of the period.25 In a letter to his parents on 2 March 1930, two weeks after he had started work on Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, Ditzen declared that the main difference between this and his previous novels was the complete absence of an autobiographical dimension. While this holds true for the plot and narrative style, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben has one autobiographical dimension that is to be found in all the novels that Fallada wrote during the 1930s: some of the names of characters and places are drawn from the circle of the Ditzens’ family and friends. Frerksen (the Chief of Police) and Blöcker (a journalist) are the names of Ditzen’s brothers-inlaw, Soldin (a policeman), that of a close family friend. Geier (a town councillor) recalls Ditzen’s friend Hans Joachim Geyer.26 The SPD Party Secretary, Nothmann, bears the name of Ditzen’s landlord at the time he was writing Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben. The Tredups, like the Ditzens, live in Calvinstrasse. In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben Fallada also recycles names from previous works, a practice which he would continue throughout his writing career. The name Tredup, for example, appears in both “Die große Liebe” and “Der Apparat der Liebe” (1924/25).27 The subject matter of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben was of burning interest when the pre-launch serialization began in the Kölnische Illustrierte towards the end of November 1930. That year had seen a further erosion of democracy in Germany, when President Hindenburg installed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor in March. Brüning, who found himself at the head of a government that did not command a parliamentary majority,

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relied on emergency decrees to secure the passage of legislation. The election on 14 September 1930 saw the SPD share of the vote decline by 5.3%, a downward trend that was set to continue for the following two and a half years. The NSDAP (National Socialist Party), on the other hand, increased its share of the vote by 15.7%: the farmers’ vote was a significant factor in this increase. The NSDAP had successfully turned the farmers’ grievances, so vividly described in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, to the party’s electoral advantage. With Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben Fallada presented his credentials as a social commentator and established his reputation as a writer who was not afraid to tackle controversial issues. Stylistically, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben marked a new stage in the development of Fallada as a writer. Influenced by authors such as Hemingway and by the New Sobriety movement, Fallada shook off the Expressionist subjectivity of his first two novels and here forged a style that brought him much critical acclaim, a style that he went on to perfect in the best-selling Kleiner Mann — was nun? the following year. The pre-launch serialization of Kleiner Mann — was nun? in the Vossische Zeitung in the spring of 1932 was hailed by the editor as the most successful since Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.28 When the novel appeared in the shops on 18 June, it soon became clear that it was going to be a bestseller. By the end of August, 14,000 copies had been sold, ten newspapers had bought the serialization rights, and seven foreign publishers had acquired the translation rights. By December, sales had reached 40,000 and Kleiner Mann — was nun? had topped the bestseller lists in bookshops all over Germany. Hermann Hesse and Carl Zuckmayer both nominated it their favorite book of the year. The success of Kleiner Mann — was nun? can be attributed to a number of factors.29 The novel’s major themes were ones with which readers in crisis-torn Germany could identify in 1932: the love story of Johannes and Emma (“Lämmchen” or “little lamb”) Pinneberg, their unplanned pregnancy and marriage, their ongoing housing problems, the birth of their first child, the constant threat of unemployment, and the couple’s determination to maintain standards of decency and humanity even in the face of long-term unemployment. In addition to these universal themes, Ditzen’s closely observed descriptions of everyday situations add to the realism of the novel: when Pinneberg and Lämmchen visit a gynaecologist to enquire about contraception — rather belatedly as it turns out — Pinneberg uses the nonexistent and faintly incongruous term “Pessoirs” instead of “Pessare” to refer to pessaries (7); Lämmchen’s first attempts to cook her husband’s dinner end in failure (50–51; 56–57); Herr Lehmann’s secretary enjoys her victory on the telephone over Dr Kussnick’s secretary, whom she clearly regards as her inferior (86–87). Furthermore, the narrator’s attitude to his characters, which is in turn sympathetic, indulgent, and ironic, engages the reader’s interest. The narrator’s

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attitude is most clearly in evidence in the chapter headings, which take the form of a commentary on the narration to come. The heading to the second chapter provides a good example of the narrator’s approach: “Mutter Mörschel — Herr Mörschel — Karl Mörschel. Pinneberg gerät in die Mörschelei” (Mother Mörschel — Mr. Mörschel — Karl Mörschel. Pinneberg enters Mörschelland). This is the chapter where the petty bourgeois Pinneberg meets his proletarian in-laws and is shocked and embarrassed by their working-class habits. By adding the suffix “ei” to the surname, the narrator conjures up fairy-tale and Romantic associations that stand in stark contrast to the reality he is about to describe. Fallada’s use of dialogue to carry the plot, which he first demonstrated in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, is further developed in Kleiner Mann — was nun? The scene depicted in Mandel’s department store, where the salesman Pinneberg attempts to sell an evening suit to a man accompanied by his wife, mother, and sister marks a high point of this stylistic device. After the four characters and Pinneberg have been introduced (95–96), the action is carried entirely by direct speech for thirty-nine exchanges before a short sentence informing the reader of Pinneberg’s thoughts. Another fourteen instances of direct speech follow before a description of the customers’ attitudes marks a return to a more conventional pattern of discourse. A major factor in the success of Kleiner Mann — was nun? was undoubtedly Fallada’s answer to the question “what now?” in the title. In a letter to Herr Benda on 3 November 1932 he wrote: “die Lösung, die Erlösung kann nur im Privaten liegen. Im Falle Pinneberg ist es Lämmchen . . .” (the solution, indeed salvation, can only be found in the private sphere. In Pinneberg’s case, this means Lämmchen . . .). The highly idealized figure of Lämmchen, whom more than one reviewer described as a Madonna, is the real heroine of the novel. It is her patience, diligence, determination, and devotion to her husband and son that keep the Pinneberg family together. Looking back over the writing of this novel, Ditzen wrote: “Vielleicht wollte ich einmal — ganz im Anfang — einen Arbeitslosenroman schreiben, aber dann ist dies Buch ganz allmählich und unmerklich Zeugnis für eine Frau geworden” (Perhaps in the beginning I may have intended to write a novel about the unemployed, but gradually and imperceptibly this book became a testament to a woman).30 The woman in question was Ditzen’s first wife, Anna, to whom he felt a deep debt of gratitude. Indeed the author’s own marriage, the birth of his son, and his personal experience of unemployment played a major role in the genesis of Kleiner Mann — was nun? The happy ending, to which the figure of Lämmchen is crucial, obviously made a major contribution to the popularity of the novel. The importance attached to decency in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben is developed further in Kleiner Mann — was nun? While Tredup gradually abandons decency as he is overwhelmed by forces outside his control, Pinneberg clings to decency as a bulwark against the same forces. Even when

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he is unemployed and living illegally on an allotment on the outskirts of Berlin, Pinneberg does not join the other allotment dwellers on their woodstealing expeditions into the forest. Unlike Tredup, Pinneberg manages to find the answer to “what now?” in the bosom of his family. In his replies to readers’ letters, Ditzen repeatedly emphasized the importance of decency in private and public life: “was wir brauchen und wozu wir kommen werden, das ist — über alle Parteien und Ideen weg — eine Front der ‘Anständigen’ im Lande, eine Front der Menschen, die menschlich denken” (What we need and what we will eventually achieve is — above and beyond all parties and philosophies — a front of “decent people,” a front of human beings who think in a humane way).31 In its celebration of the triumph of decency and the power of human love to overcome the problems facing “little men” in Germany in 1932, Kleiner Mann — was nun? marks a high point in Ditzen’s work.32 After 1932 the value of decency becomes increasingly difficult to uphold, and the private idyll that constitutes the happy ending of Kleiner Mann — was nun? proves increasingly fragile. By 1944, in Der Trinker, there is no decency to be found, and no happy ending either. Despite the success of Kleiner Mann — was nun? Ditzen remained unconvinced of the novel’s literary merit. In a letter to Peter Zingler at Rowohlt on 9 July 1932 he expressed his view that Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben was a much better novel. Writing to his friend Johannes Kagelmacher in October 1932 he described Kleiner Mann — was nun? as “ein schwächeres Buch von mir” (one of my weaker books). In subsequent years he became increasingly irritated by the adulation accorded “den waschlappigen Pinneberg, der nur etwas durch seine Frau ist” (that wimp Pinneberg, who only achieves anything because of his wife).33 Putnams bought the English translation rights to Kleiner Mann — was nun? in 1932, and the novel was published in London in March 1933 to critical acclaim. The prestigious Times Literary Supplement wrote on 11 May 1933 of the author’s “insight and sympathy” that combined to produce a “formidable picture.” The first sign that the success of the novel was set to cross the Atlantic came in April 1933, when the Book of the Month club nominated it as their choice for June. Ditzen’s American publishers, Simon and Schuster, had obtained permission from the author to undertake a number of cuts that they considered necessary to make the novel acceptable to an American readership. The most important effect of these cuts was dramatically to reduce the socio-critical dimension of the novel and, as a consequence, emphasize the love story. In the process they also excised any reference to intimate body parts and functions.34 In this context Zachau has drawn attention to what he perceives as a major difference between American and European cultures: while European culture tends to see the individual primarily as a social being who acts in a specific social and historical context, American culture privileges the great individual who acts and succeeds alone.

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According to Zachau, American readers were particularly attracted to Kleiner Mann — was nun? because the author’s response to the question in the title was not social or political in nature but rather individual and private.35 The American publishers clearly knew their readers well, for the Simon and Schuster translation — which, incidentally, remained the only translation available in North America until the new and complete Libris translation appeared in 1996 — sold some 60,000 copies in the first three weeks and received rave reviews. The New York Times described it as “an important human document,” and critics across the states added their superlatives, often comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front.36 When Universal Studios decided to film the novel, the producer, Carl Laemmle, declared that “the question of WHAT NOW? is the WORLD’S DAILY PROBLEM, a problem that men can only hope to overcome by a courage born of great faith in the hearts of women.”37 It was only after the premiere of the film, starring Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery, on 31 May 1934, when Universal sent Ditzen some still photographs, that the author received an inkling of the fate of his novel in America. Ditzen described the stills as “einfach zum Kotzen” (sickening) and expressed his dismay that there was “nicht ein Bild, das auch nur eine Idee von der sozialen Lage der Arbeitslosen gäbe” (not a single picture that gives any idea of the social situation of unemployed people).38 In the short space of two and a half years, from January 1930 to June 1932, Ditzen went from being a literary unknown earning 250 marks a month as a clerk in a publishing house to a bestselling author whose monthly income averaged more than 1,000 marks. The two novels that appeared in these years secured his literary breakthrough: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben brought his work to the attention of the critics, while Kleiner Mann — was nun? made Hans Fallada a household name.

Notes The author wishes to express her gratitude to Ms. Erika Becker of the Hans Fallada Archive, Carwitz, for her assistance in the preparation of this essay. 1

Siegfried Kracauer, “Über den Schriftsteller,” Die neue Rundschau 42, no. 6 (1931): 860–62.

2

The edition cited in this essay is Hans Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964). All page numbers refer to this edition. 3

Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932); In English, Little Man — What Now? trans. Susan Bennett (London: Libris, 1996).

4

Günter Caspar, “Nachwort” in Hans Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin: Aufbau, 1964), 619–76; here, 675.

5

The following biographical survey is based on Jenny Williams, More Lives Than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada (London: Libris, 1998). See also Werner Liersch,

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Hans Fallada: Sein großes kleines Leben (Hildesheim: Claasen, 1993); Hans Fallada: Sein Leben in Bildern und Briefen, ed. Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich, with a foreword by Uli Ditzen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1997). 6

Hans Fallada, Das Frühwerk (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), 2 vols.; vol. 1, Die Romane.

7

See particularly Henry Ashby Turner, “Fallada for Historians,” German Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2003): 477–92.

8

Hans Fallada, “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde,” in Lieschens Sieg und andere Erzählungen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 189–230; here, 195. 9 Roland Ulrich, “Gefängnis als ästhetischer Erfahrungsraum bei Fallada,” in Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, ed. Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich (Rostock: Hinstorff, 1995), 130–40. 10

For a detailed discussion of the relationship between fact and fiction in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, see Martin Sadek, “Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben: Realität und Roman,” in Hans Fallada: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Rudolf Wolff (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983); Tom Crepon and Marianne Dwars, An der Schwale liegt (kein) Märchen (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1993); Michelle Le Bars, “Die Landvolkbewegung in Schleswig-Holstein: Geschichte und Literatur,” in Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, 67–99.

11

Stefan Nienhaus, “Was heißt und wie wird man ein volkstümlicher Autor? Überlegungen zur Unterhaltungsliteratur in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel Hans Falladas,” Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 4, ed. Patricia Fritsch-Lange and Erika Becker (Neubrandenburg: federchen Verlag, 2003), 155–70. In a letter to his parents on 13 July 1930 Ditzen himself expressed the fear that the novel might have too many characters.

12 Werner Liersch, “Die dritte Dimension: Hans Fallada: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 7 (1965): 167–72. For a detailed discussion of this motif, see also Geoff Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002). 13 Letter from Max Krell to Ernst Rowohlt, 18 July 1930. All the letters cited in this essay are to be found in the Hans Fallada Archive, Carwitz, Mecklenburg. 14

Letter accompanying promotional materials, 12 May 1931. This and the reviews discussed below are all to be found in the Hans Fallada Archive.

15

Geoff Wilkes, “The Title of Hans Fallada’s Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 88 (1997): 97–99. 16

Hans Fallada, Bauern Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin: Vier Falken Verlag, 1939).

17

Ellis Shookman, “Making History in Hans Fallada’s Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben: Schleswig-Holstein, Nazism and the Landvolkbewegung,” German Studies Review 13, no. 3 (1990): 461–80. 18

Thomas Bredohl, “Some Thoughts on the Political Opinions of Hans Fallada: A Response to Ellis Shookman,” German Studies Review 15, no. 3 (1992): 525–45; Reinhard K. Zachau, “Neue Angriffe auf Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben,” in Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 1, ed. Rainer Ortner and Gunnar Müller-Waldeck (Neubrandenburg: federchen Verlag, 1995) 79–94; Henry Ashby Turner, “Fallada for Historians.”

268 19




JENNY WILLIAMS

Hans Fallada, Heute bei uns zu Haus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 23.

20

Heidrun Bauer, “Zur Funktion der Gespräche in den Romanen Hans Falladas,” diss., University of Vienna, 1971.

21

Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel, “Hans Falladas Roman Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben: Zum Genretypus und zum Erzählmodell,” in Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, 45–66. 22

Hans Fallada, “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde,” 208–9.

23

Nils Arnöman, “Die Funktion der Kinder in den Texten Hans Falladas,” in Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, 155–71. 24 Reinhard K. Zachau, “Wohnräume in A Farewell to Arms und Kleiner Mann — was nun?” in Patricia Fritsch-Lange and Erika Becker, Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 4, 57–66; here, 59. 25

Geoff Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947, 36–37.

26

For an account of Geyer’s life and friendship with Ditzen, see Hannes Lamp, Fallada unter Wölfen (Friedland: Verlag Druckerei Steffen, 2002), 18, 22–24, 26–29, 39–42, 116–17. 27

Hans Fallada, “Die große Liebe,” in Das Frühwerk (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), 2 vols., 2: 113–74; Hans Fallada, “Der Apparat der Liebe,” in Das Frühwerk 2:175–280.

28

Letter from Monty Jacobs to Hans Fallada, 24 June 1932.

29

The edition cited in this essay is Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978). All page numbers refer to this edition. For a more detailed discussion of its success, see Jenny Williams, “Some Thoughts on the Success of Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann — was nun?” German Life and Letters 40, no. 4 (1987): 306–18. 30

Letter to Herr Hünich, 17 October 1932.

31

Letter to Dr. Zellner, 27 November 1932.

32

For a detailed discussion of the role of personal values in Fallada’s work, see Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947.

33

Letter to Dr. Gawronski, 6 April 1936.

34

For a more detailed discussion of the American translation, see Jenny Williams, “Hans Fallada in englischer Übersetzung: Zu Problemen der literarischen Übertragung,” in Dokumentation: Referate und Reden gehalten anläßlich der Gründung der Hans-Fallada-Gesellschaft e.V. am 21. Juli 1991 (Feldberg: Fallada-Archiv, 1991), 38–50. 35

Reinhard K. Zachau, “Lämmchen als Vamp: Der Hollywood-Film Little Man, What Now?” in Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 3, ed. Patricia Fritsch and Roland Ulrich (Neubrandenburg: federchen Verlag, 2000), 247–63.

36 For an account of the novel’s reception in the United States, see Thomas Peter, Hans Falladas Romane in den USA, 1930–1990 (Umeå: Umeå University, 2003). 37

Cited in Zachau, “Lämmchen als Vamp,” 254.

38

Letter to Ernst Rowohlt, 27 July 1934.

Contributors PAUL BISHOP is professor of German at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches German language, German literature, and comparative literature. His publications include books and articles on Weimar classicism, analytical psychology, and intellectual history, as well as Jung in Contexts: A Reader (1999) and A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II (2001). HELEN CHAMBERS is professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland GB. She has published widely on nineteenth and early twentiethcentury German and Austrian narrative and reportage, especially on Theodor Fontane, Joseph Roth, and Gabriele Tergit. Her books include The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane (Camden House, 1997) revised and translated as Theodor Fontane im Spiegel der Kritik (Königshausen and Neumann, 2003). She is editor of Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect (Ariadne, 1991). ROLAND DOLLINGER is associate professor of German at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of Totalität und Totalitarismus im Exilwerk Döblins (1994) and co-editor of A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin (2004) and Philosophia Naturalis (1996), in addition to having authored articles on contemporary German literature. He also gives lectures on German-Jewish history and culture for the New York Council of the Humanities. KARIN V. GUNNEMANN is assistant professor of German literature at Agnes Scott College, Georgia. She is the author of Heinrich Mann’s Novels and Essays: The Artist as Political Educator (Camden House, 2002). She is currently doing research on the perceptions of Germany expressed in the works of German exile writers in Hollywood during the 1940s. KARL S. GUTHKE is Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University, Corresponding Fellow of the British Institute of Germanic Studies, and a member of Sidney Sussex and Magdalene Colleges at Cambridge University. His publications include Schillers Dramen (2nd expanded edition, 2005); Trails in No-Man’s Land; Last Words; The Gender of Death; Epitaph Culture in the West (2003; Sprechende Steine, 2006); Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (2005); and Das deutsche Bürgerliche Trauerspiel (6th revised edition, 2006).

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

KARL LEYDECKER is Reader in German and Head of the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England. Until 2005 he was Head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions, and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Stirling in Scotland. In 2001 he spent a semester as visiting professor at the University of California at Davis. His main areas of research and publication include: divorce in German literature from 1780 to 1933; German drama and social history 1890–1933; Expressionism; Ernst Toller; Hermann Sudermann; the history of German-English literary translation. DAVID MIDGLEY is University Reader in German Literature and Culture, and Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. He has published widely on German authors of the period 1890–1945, and his most recent book, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (2000), is a broad-based study of the literature of the Weimar Republic in relation to its social and cultural context. BRIAN MURDOCH is professor of German at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and has published extensively on medieval German and comparative literature. In the modern field he specializes in literature and the world wars and has published articles on a number of the Weimar pacifist writers. On Remarque he has produced in addition to numerous articles a monograph on and an edition and new translation of Im Westen nichts Neues. He has recently completed a full-scale study of Remarque’s novels. FIONA SUTTON works in international relations for the city government of Leeds in the UK, with particular responsibility for managing projects with partner cities in Germany and the USA. Her Ph.D. research at the University of Nottingham, completed in 2002, focused on models of modernity in selected novels of the late Weimar Republic. HEATHER VALENCIA, formerly lecturer in German, is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her main research interests are German Jewish writers and modern Yiddish literature. Her publications include articles on the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever and on Yiddish writers in Weimar Germany and London. She is the author of the book Else Lasker-Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte Freundschaft (1995) and co-author of the book Sprachinseln: Jiddische Publizistik in London, Wilna und Berlin 1880–1930 (1999). Her English translation of Esther Singer Kreitman’s novel Diamonds is to be published in 2006. She is currently working on Yiddish women writers after the Holocaust. JENNY WILLIAMS is associate professor and Head of the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. She has written widely on Hans Fallada and on translation. She published the first biography of Hans Fallada in English, More Lives Than One (1998),

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS




271

which appeared in German in 2002 as Mehr Leben als eins. She also co-edited Die Provinz im Leben und Werk von Hans Fallada (2005). In the field of Translation Studies she co-authored The Map: A Guide to Doing Research in Translation Studies (2002) and has translated The Fishermen Sleep by Sabine Lange (2005). ROGER WOODS is professor of German at the University of Nottingham (UK). His current research interests are the conservative revolution in the Weimar Republic, East German intellectuals before and after unification, and autobiography in twentieth-century Germany. Recent publications include Nation ohne Selbstbewußtsein: Von der Konservativen Revolution zur Neuen Rechten (2001). Professor Woods has just completed a full-length study of the German New Right: The Fractured Mind: The New Right in Germany as Culture and Politics.

Index

abortion, 93, 195–97, 207, 237–41, 251 Adler, Alfred, 92 Adolphus, Gustavus, 217 advertising, 11, 39, 40, 113, 114, 195, 199, 205, 207, 224, 230, 238, 244, 257, 258 Aeschylus, works by: The Persians, 62 Alexander, Duke Karl, 64, 65, 67 Altenberg, Peter, 102–3, 109, 110, 111, 123 Alter, Reinhard, 42 Altner, Renate, 209 America, 8, 76, 85, 88, 97, 114, 173, 179, 216, 230, 231, 236, 266 Ankum, Katharina von, 209 anti-Semitism, 8, 39, 63, 64, 66, 77, 87, 90, 91, 106, 117 Antkowiak, Anton, 164, 166 Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, 3, 26, 155, 157 architecture, 9, 12, 52, 117, 205 army, 2, 3, 4, 23, 30, 37, 62, 73, 104, 131, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 185, 212, 255 Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, 122 Arnöman, Nils, 260, 268 Aschheim, Steven E., 58 assassination, 6, 52, 90, 232, 250 assimilation of Jews, 63, 66, 81, 96 authoritarian personality, 20 avant-garde, 11, 31, 61, 66, 211, 212, 213 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 52 Bachmann, Holger, 15

Baeck, Leo, 92 Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 34 Bance, Alan, 15, 17, 60, 166 Barker, Christine, 164, 167 Barrymore, John, 231 Barrymore, Lionel, 231 Bars, Michelle Le, 267 Bathrick, David, 81, 227 Batz, Thorsten, 164 Bauer, Heidrun, 260, 268 Bauhaus, 12 Baum, Vicki, 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 229–52 Baum, Vicki, works by: Die anderen Tage, 250; Der Eingang zur Bühne, 230, 250; Es war alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen, 231, 232, 237, 238, 245, 248, 250, 252; Feme, 6, 232–37, 240, 242, 243, 246, 250; Frühe Schatten: Das Ende einer Kindheit, 230, 250; Hotel Berlin ’43, 251; Hotel Shanghai, 251; Marion Alive, 249; Menschen im Hotel, 231, 232, 242–46, 250, 251, 252; The Mustard Seed, 250; stud.chem. Helene Willfüer, 232, 237–42, 246, 251; Die Tänze der Ina Raffay: Ein Leben, 230–31, 250; Ulle, der Zwerg, 232, 246–49, 250, 252; Der Weg, 231, 250; Die Welt ohne Sünde, 250; Zwischenfall in Lehwinckel, 249 Baumann, Michael, 191 Baumer, Franz, 164 Baumgartner, Hans Michael, 60 Bauschinger, Sigrid, 59

274




INDEX

Bavaria, 3, 28, 49, 70, 73, 74, 76, 82, 170 Bavarian Republic, 1, 3 Bayerdörfer, Hans-Peter, 97 Becher, Johannes R., 255–56 Becher, Lucie, 251 Bechert, Fritz, 259 Bechtolsheim, Barbara von, 164 Becker, Erika, 266, 267, 268 Becker, Sabina, 16, 208 Beer-Hall Putsch, 7, 30, 56, 74, 105 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 51, 235 Benjamin, Walter, 50, 59, 60, 103, 115, 123, 136–37, 140, 203, 206, 221–22, 226 Benjamin, Walter, works by: “Krise des Romans,” 226; Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 203, 209; “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” 136, 140 Benn, Gottfried, 119 Bennett, Arnold, works by: Grand Babylon Hotel, 251 Bergengruen, Werner, 17 Berghahn, V. R., 208, 209 Berlin, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 30, 39, 47, 49, 72, 77, 86, 95, 101–24, 140, 168, 169, 193–209, 211, 212, 216, 219, 221, 222, 223, 226, 231, 241–44, 254, 255, 256, 262, 265 Berndt, Wolfgang, 81 Bertaux, Félix, 29, 34, 36, 39, 42 Bertaux, Pierre, 42 Best, Werner, 134, 139 Betz, Albrecht, 83 Beutner, Eduard, 97 Bienert, Michael, 108, 119, 121, 122 Binding, Rudolf, works by: Aus dem Kriege, 147 Bismarck, Otto von, 23 Boccioni, Umberto, 212 Bode, Ingrid, 225, 226 Böhme, Jakob, 82 Böll, Heinrich, 161 Böll, Heinrich, works by: “Wanderer kommst du nach Spa . . .,” 161

bookclubs, 12, 16, 63, 169 Börne, Ludwig, 71 Bornebusch, Herbert, 164 Bostock, J. Knight, 164, 165 Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 12, 33, 72, 73, 78, 81, 98, 116, 183, 211, 216, 225 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Trommeln in der Nacht, 10, 98 Bredel, Willi, 17 Bredohl, Thomas, 260, 267 Breloer, Heinrich, 42 Brenner, Michael, 66, 81 Brentano, Bernard von, 106, 124 Briand, Aristide, 36–37, 42 Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 208 Broch, Hermann, 73, 82 Brockmann, Stephen, 15, 16 Broich, Ulrich, 159, 165, 168 Bronnen, Arnolt, 52 Bronsen, David, 105, 121, 122 Brückner, Egon, 82, 83 Brüning, Heinrich, 9, 262 Brüning, Jens, 195, 207, 208, 209 Buber, Martin, 82, 89 Buchholz, Horst, 174 Büchner, Georg, 112, 123 Buck-Morss, Susan, 60 Buddha, 50, 65 Buddhism, 50 Bullivant, Keith, 15, 17 cabaret, 9, 11, 16, 52, 118, 163 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 178, 185 Campbell, Ian, 168 capitalism, 21, 29, 30, 31, 36, 40, 71, 74, 76, 83, 191, 216, 235 Carossa, Hans, works by: Rumänisches Tagebuch, 147 Carow, Erich, 200–201, 203 Caruso, Enrico, 121 Caspar, Günter, 253, 266 Catholic Church, 187–89 censorship, 25, 37, 68 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 66 Chambers, John Whiteclay, 167 Chaucer, Geoffrey, works by: The Canterbury Tales, 251

INDEX Clason, Synnöve, 82 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 83 colonialism, 171, 219 colonies, 4, 21, 23 colonization, 187, 218 commodification, 203 communism, 136 Communist Party, 2, 39, 75, 222 Communists, 5, 8, 27, 49, 75, 156, 198, 209, 212 Conrad, Robert C., 59 Conservative Revolution, 13, 52, 125–40, 271 Cook, Peter, 163 Cook, Scott, 191 Corkhill, Alan, 97 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Count, 36 Crawford, Joan, 231 Creighton, Basil, 250 Crepon, Tom, 267 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 9 Dada, 10 Dahrendorf, Malte, 58 Dawes plan, 7, 33 Delabar, Walter, 16 democracy, 3–9, 19–42, 54, 55, 61, 126, 137, 259, 262 Denlinger, Ardon, 226 design, 9, 12 Detken, Anke, 226 Deveson, Richard, 15 Díaz, Porfirio, 178, 183, 185 dictatorship, 9, 29–31, 34, 39–41, 71, 75, 185 Dierks, Margarete, 209 Dietschreit, Frank, 81, 82, 83 Dimendberg, Edward, 15, 43, 44, 122 Ditzen, Anna, 254, 264 Ditzen, Rudolf. See Fallada, Hans Ditzen, Uli, 267 Dix, Otto, 12, 16 Döblin, Alfred, 19, 37, 68, 73, 80, 109, 211–27 Döblin, Alfred, works by: “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” 216–17, 225; Berge Meere und Giganten, 218–20, 226; Berlin Alexanderplatz, 11, 13,




275

68, 211, 212, 215, 216, 221–24, 226, 227; Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun, 66, 215, 216; Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, 214–15; “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters,” 220, 226; Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende, 211; Das Ich über der Natur, 220–21; Jagende Rosse, 214; Manas, 221, 222; “Modern,” 214; November 1918, 211; “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker,” (“Berlin Program,”) 213–14, 225; Der schwarze Vorhang, 214; “Die Tänzerin und der Leib,” 215; Unser Dasein, 220–21, 226; Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine, 215–16; Wallenstein, 217–18, 225 Dolbin, Ninon, 56 Dolchstoßlegende, 4, 149, 150 Dollinger, Roland, 82, 227 Donahue, Neil H., 15 Dos Passos, John, 224, 227 Dos Passos, John, works by: Manhattan Transfer, 224 Doubleday, Nelson, 231 Dove, Richard, 15, 166 Düllo, Thomas, 123 Duytschaever, Joris, 227 Dwars, Marianne, 267 Eberle, Matthias, 16 Ebert, Friedrich, 2, 3, 104 economic crisis, 8–9, 39, 205, 254 Edict of Nantes, 41 Edschmid, Kasimir, 17 Eeden, Frederik van, 59 Eggebrecht, Axel, 222, 226 Eggert, Hartmut, 225, 226 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 51 Einstein, Albert, 39 Eisner, Kurt, 3, 26, 27, 49 Eksteins, Modris, 130, 138, 139, 167 elections, 3, 5, 8, 9, 38, 68, 141, 183, 263 emancipation of women, 13, 197

276




INDEX

Englert, Josef, 52, 57, 60 epic writing, 12, 211, 216–17, 222 Evans, Richard J., 16 Expressionism, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 26, 45, 46, 72, 87, 105, 219, 229, 252, 253, 254, 256, 263 Fähnders, Walter, 17 Fallada, Hans, 6, 253–68 Fallada, Hans, works by: Der Alpdruck, 256; Altes Herz geht auf die Reise, 255; Anton und Gerda, 254, 256; “Der Apparat der Liebe,” 262, 268; Bauern, Bomben und Bonzen, 6, 253–68; “Die große Liebe,” 262, 268; Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 256; Der junge Goedeschal, 254, 256; Kleiner Mann — was nun?, 253–55, 260, 263–66, 268; Der Trinker, 255, 265; Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt, 255, 260; “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde,” 267, 268; Wir hatten mal ein Kind, 255; Wolf unter Wölfen, 255 fascism, 21, 33, 49, 52, 57, 76, 87, 91, 136, 137, 203, 206, 256 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 220 Ferdinand II, 217 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 12, 14, 61–83, 95, 99, 201, 209, 232 Feuchtwanger, Lion, works by: Erfolg, 71–77, 82, 83, 201, 209; Exil, 71, 82; Die Geschwister Oppermann, 71, 81; Die häßliche Herzogin, 63, 69–71, 72, 81; “Heinrich Heines Fragment: Der Rabbi von Bacherach,” 61; Jefta und seine Tochter, 81; Jud Süss, 62, 63–71, 72, 79–80, 81, 82; Die Jüdin von Toledo, 81; Der jüdische Krieg, 77–80, 83; Kalkutta, 4. Mai, 81; “Die Konstellation der Literatur,” 73; Die Kriegsgefangenen, 62; Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde, 83; “Nationalismus und Judentum,” 79; PEP: J. L. Wetcheeks amerikanisches Liederbuch,

83; Die Petroleuminsel, 81; “Der Roman von heute ist international,” 73; Die Söhne, 77; Der Tag wird kommen, 77, 80; Thomas Wendt, 62, 68, 81; Der tönerne Gott, 62; Vasantasena, 62, 66; “Versuch einer Selbstbiographie,” 65; “Vom Sinn und Unsinn des historischen Romans,” 81; Warren Hastings, 62, 81 Feuchtwanger, Marta, 62, 81 feuilleton, 11, 14, 101–24, 193–99, 206, 209 film, 9–11, 15, 37, 65, 76, 77, 86, 114, 116, 158–59, 162, 165, 167, 169, 174, 176, 193, 202, 203, 206, 231, 242, 246, 255, 258, 266, 268 Finnan, Carmel, 17 Firda, Richard Arthur, 164, 165 First World War, 1, 10, 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 28, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 56, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 73, 74, 87, 89, 90, 96, 104, 115, 117, 125–40, 141–68, 142, 146, 149, 154, 198, 206, 212, 216, 218, 219, 223, 243, 254 Fischer, Samuel, 86 Flake, Otto, 216 Flake, Otto, works by: Die Stadt des Hirns, 216 flaneur, 110, 112, 123 Fleißer, Marieluise, 17 Flügge, Matthias, 209 Fohrmann, J., 227 Ford, Henry, 230 Fotheringham, John, 166 France, 4, 19, 20, 23, 29, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 46, 101, 104, 154, 156, 212, 220 Frank, Bruno, 80 Franzos, Karl Emil, 66 Freedmann, Ralph, 59 Freikorps, 3, 4, 6, 27, 157 French revolution, 19, 28 Freud, Sigmund, 69 Frey, Alexander Moritz, works by: Die Pflasterkästen, 151, 160, 161, 166, 168

INDEX Frisby, David, 122 Fritsch-Lange, Patricia, 267, 268 Fussell, Paul, 138 Ganghofer, Ludwig, 72 Garbo, Greta, 231 Garrin, Stephen H., 99 Gay, Peter, 1, 14 Geheeb, Reinhold, 60 Genno, Charles N., 164, 167 George, Stefan, 51 Geppert, Hans Vilmar, 218, 225 Geyer, Hans Joachim, 262, 268 Giddens, Anthony, 201, 209 Gill, Anton, 3, 6, 9, 14, 15 Gilman, Sander, 81 Glaeser, Ernst, works by: Jahrgang 1902, 150, 154, 160, 161, 168 Glaser, Hermann, 167 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 48, 51, 55, 57, 60, 126, 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: West-östlicher Divan, 48 Gollbach, Michael, 138, 139, 140, 164 Golßenau, Arnold Friedrich Vieth von. See Renn, Ludwig Goltschnigg, Dietmar, 108, 122, 124 Gordimer, Nadine, 120, 124 Gray, Ronald, 56, 60 Great Depression, 8, 72, 197 Greiffenhagen, Martin, 137 Grenville, Anthony, 15, 166 Grimm, Gunter E., 97 Grimm, Reinhold, 59, 225 Gropius, Walter, 12 Grosz, Georg, 12, 16, 31 Grübel, Paula, 109 Gründgens, Gustav, 231 Günther, A. E., 135–36, 139 Guthke, Karl S., 13, 190, 191 Habsburgs, 41, 69, 70, 101, 103, 104, 106 Hackert, Fritz, 121 Hahn, Michael, 16 Hall, Fred, 168 Hamilton, Nigel, 44




277

Hammerschmidt, Jörg, 14 Handel, Georg Frideric, works by: Rodelinde, 52 Harlan, Veit, 65 Hartmann, Horst, 209 Hasenclever, Walter, works by: Der Sohn, 10, 97 Hauff, Wilhelm, works by: Jud Süß, 64 Haupt, Jürgen, 43 Heartfield, John, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 52–53, 60, 96 Heidegger, Martin, works by: Sein und Zeit, 52–53, 60, 96 Heine, Heinrich, 62, 71, 81, 89, 102, 109, 116, 121 Heine, Heinrich, works by: “Lorelei,” 117; Reisebriefe, 102 Held, David, 42 Hemingway, Ernest, 165, 260, 263 Hengemann, Werner, works by: Das steinerne Berlin, 119 Hepp, Michael, 98 Herf, Jeffrey, 60, 138 Hermand, Jost, 12, 15, 16, 59 Herodotus, 102 Herzog, Werner, films by: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, 86 Hesse, Hermann, 1, 10, 13, 45–60, 85, 263 Hesse, Hermann, works by: Demian, 13, 47–50, 58, 59, 60; “Im Frühling 1915,” 45; “Gebet,” 50; Das Glasperlenspiel, 56–57, 60; “Herbstabend im fünften Kriegsjahr,” 45; “Im vierten Kriegsjahr,” 45; Klingsors letzter Sommer, 50; “Krankheit,” 50; Krisis, 51; “Media in vita,” 50; Die Morgenlandfahrt, 56; Narziß und Goldmund, 56; “November 1914,” 45; “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne,” 46; “Den Pazifisten,” 46; Peter Camenzind, 47; Roßhalde, 58; Siddhartha, 49, 50, 51, 59; Der Steppenwolf, 51–56, 59, 60, 68; “Zarathustras Wiederkehr,” 46, 50 Hesse, Johannes, 47

278




INDEX

Hesse, Kurt, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140 Hesse, Kurt, works by: Der Feldherr Psychologos, 134, 139, 140 Hessel, Franz, 204, 209 Hey’l, Bettina, 16 Hiller, Kurt, 26 Hindenburg, Paul von, 2, 9, 56, 104, 149, 166, 262 Hindenburg, Paul von, works by: Aus meinem Leben, 166 Hirschmann, Elise, 194 historical novel, 12, 16, 25, 41, 61–83, 142, 152, 162 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 7, 8, 9, 21, 30, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 56, 57, 71, 74, 79, 87, 104, 105, 126, 141, 151, 156, 157, 163, 199, 206, 207, 237 Hitler Youth, 157 Hoffmann, Johannes, 3 Hofmann, Michael, 119, 121, 122, 123 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 86 Holborn, Hajo, 43 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 51 Holocaust, 120 Hsia, Adrian, 58 Huch, Ricarda, 92 Huch, Rudolf, 129, 139 Huston, John, films by: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 169 Huyssen, Andreas, 227 Ihering, Herbert, 80 Impressionism, 111 inflation, 4–5, 6, 7, 14, 30, 31, 43, 63, 73, 205 Isenberg, Noah, 81 Issel, Anna. See Ditzen, Anna Jaeger, Stefan, 81 Jacobs, Monty, 268 Jacobs, Wilhelm G., 60 Jacobsohn, Siegfried, 62, 80 Jähner, Harald, 227 Jahnn, Hans Henny, 17 Jay, Martin, 15, 43, 44, 122 jazz, 10, 52, 54 Jean Paul, 255

Jens, Inge, 224 Jews, 4, 6, 8, 22, 23, 39, 57, 61–83, 86, 88–90, 94–98, 101–7, 120, 122, 194, 212, 218, 230, 256 Joeris, Christa, 98 Johannsen, Ernst, 161, 168 Johannsen, Ernst, works by: Fronterinnerungen eines Pferdes, 161, 168; Vier von der Infanterie, 159, 160, 161, 168 Jones, Geraint Vaughan, 99 journalism, 14, 15, 17, 101–24, 125, 195–99, 200, 201, 206, 208 Joyce, James, 50, 82, 224, 227 Joyce, James, works by: Ulysses, 223 judicial system, 23, 38, 73, 76, 82 judiciary, 7, 196, 198, 207, 208 Jung, C. G., 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58, 59, 92 Jünger, Ernst, 13, 52, 125–40, 147, 163, 164, 168 Jünger, Ernst, works by: Das abenteuerliche Herz, 133, 139; Der Arbeiter, 126; Auf den Marmorklippen, 126; Feuer und Blut, 126, 139; Der Friede, 126; Gärten und Straßen, 126; In Stahlgewittern, 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 139, 147, 163; Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, 126, 132, 134, 139; Krieg und Krieger, 126, 136, 139; Sturm, 126, 129–32, 139; Das Wäldchen 125, 126 Jung-Neugeboren, Hilde, 59 justice, 7, 19, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 61, 76, 91, 93, 94–96, 99, 196, 198 Kaech, René, 99 Kaes, Anton, 15, 43, 44, 122 Kafka, Franz, 17, 63, 200 Kaiser, Georg, 10, 19, 219, 244 Kaiser, Georg, works by: Gas I, 10; Gas II, 10; Die Koralle, 10; Von morgens bis mitternachts, 244 Kagelmacher, Johannes, 261, 265 Kapp Putsch, 5, 7, 28 Karlstetter, Klaus, 97

INDEX Karlweis, Marta, 86, 97 Karrenbrock, Helga, 17 Kästner, Erich, 17, 232 Kästner, Erich, works by: Fabian, 16 Keller, Otto, 223, 227 Kellogg-Briand declaration, 8, 135 Kenter, Heinz Dietrich, 259 Kerbs, Diethart, 16 Kerényi, Karl, 59 Kesten, Hermann, 107, 229, 232, 250 Keun, Irmgard, 17 Keyserling, Hermann Graf, 52, 59, 92 Keyserling, Hermann Graf, works by: Das Ehe-Buch, 92, 99 Kiaulehn, Walter, 200–201 Kierkegaard, Søren, 53 King, Lynda, 238, 244, 246, 249, 252 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 103, 109, 123 Klages, Ludwig, 52, 60 Klein, Holger, 164, 165 Kleinschmidt, Erich, 224, 225 Kloiber, Harald, 165 Kniesche, Thomas W., 15, 16 Kocka, Jürgen, 140 Koebner, Thomas, 168 Koester, Rudolf, 97, 99 Kollwitz, Käthe, 39 Konzett, Matthias, 14, 59 Köpke, Wulf, 81, 82, 83, 227 Köppen, Edlef, 161 Köppen, Edlef, works by: Heeresbericht, 128, 146, 167 Korrodi, Eduard, 58 Koszyk, Kurt, 208 Kracauer, Siegfried, 103, 124, 253, 259, 266 Kraus, Karl, 102–3 Krell, Max, 258, 267 Kreutzer, Leo, 224 Krings, Hermann, 60 Kubin, Alfred, 131, 139 Kubin, Alfred, picture by: Der Krieg, 131 Kuhn, Heribert, 58, 59, 60 Kuxdorf, Manfred, 167 Laemmle, Carl, 266 Lamb, Stephen, 15, 166




279

Lamp, Hannes, 268 Landauer, Gustav, 1, 3, 68 Landscheidt, Martina, 98 Lang, Fritz, films by: Metropolis, 10, 15 Lang, Josef, 47, 48 Laqueur, Walter, 15 Lareau, Alan, 16 Larsen, Egon, 195, 208 Lasker-Schüler, Else, works by: Hebräische Balladen, 66 Last, Rex, 164 League of Nations, 8 legal system, 14, 93, 95, 195 Lenau, Nikolaus, 51 Lengauer, Hubert, 103, 121 Lert, Richard, 230 Levesque, Paul, 66, 81, 82 Leydecker, Karl, 13, 98 Liebknecht, Karl, 2, 3, 47, 49 Liersch, Werner, 258, 266, 267 Linder, Ann P., 164, 168 Lindner, Martin, 16 Littlejohn, Fiona, 208 Littlejohns, Richard, 166 Löns, Hermann, 147, 165 Lorm, Hieronymous, 103 Ludendorff, Erich von, 2, 7, 105 Luján, Rosa Elena, 174 Luxemburg, Rosa, 2, 3, 47, 49 Mahrholz, Werner, 166 Mann, Heinrich, 1, 14, 19–44, 68, 80, 95, 99, 200 Mann, Heinrich, works by: “Das Bekenntnis zum Übernationalen,” 40; “Dichtkunst und Politik,” 37, 43; “Diktatur der Vernunft,” 30, 43; “Dresdner Rede,” 29; Eugénie oder die Bürgerzeit, 34, 35; “Geist und Tat,” 20, 26, 42; Die Göttinnen, 62; Die große Sache, 34, 35; Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte, 40, 44; Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre, 41–42, 44; “Kaiserreich und Revolution,” 27–28; Die kleine Stadt, 19, 42, 44; “Kobes,” 21, 31–33; “Letzte

280




INDEX

Warnung,” 37, 43; Macht und Mensch, 27–28, 43; Mutter Marie, 34, 35; Der Untertan, 20–26, 27, 38, 42, 43; Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre, 41; “VoltaireGoethe,” 20; “Wir wählen,” 38; “Zola,” 20, 36 Mann, Thomas, 10, 17, 20, 26, 42, 43, 47, 49, 51, 58, 59, 68, 85, 86, 90–91, 92, 97, 136, 231, 232, 247, 248, 250 Mann, Thomas, works by: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 43, 90, 98; Joseph tetralogy, 49; Der Tod in Venedig, 252; Der Zauberberg, 17, 51, 68 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 213, 219, 224 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, works by: Mafarka, 212–13, 215 marriage, 13, 91–94, 96, 98, 99, 107 Marut, Ret. See Traven, B. Marx, Karl, 75 Marxism, 33, 73, 75, 76 Masaryk, Jan, 36 mass media, 200, 202–3 Matijevich, Elke, 16 Matthias, Josef Ben, 77 Matthias, Josef Ben, works by: The Jewish War, 77 Mayer, Dieter, 225 Melis, Urban van, 16 Meskimmon, Marsha, 208 Mexican Revolution, 177 Michels, Volker, 58, 59, 60 Mickey Mouse, 202–3 Midgley, David, 13, 16, 226, 227 Milestone, Lewis, films by: All Quiet on the Western Front, 158 Miller, Henry, 50 Minden, Michael, 15 Misch, Carl, 259 Mitchell, Breon, 227 Mockel, Eva-Maria, 195, 208 modernism, 50, 60, 61, 81, 111, 138, 171, 205, 208, 211, 217, 224

modernity, 11, 15, 17, 33, 51–53, 60, 70–71, 74, 76, 110, 120, 201, 203, 209, 227, 243 modernization, 70, 127, 128, 138, 196–200, 209 Modick, Klaus, 82, 83 Mohler, Arnim, 139 Molo, Walter von, 168 Molt, Emil, 49, 57, 59 Monakow, Constantin von, 96 montage, 11, 13, 73, 223–24, 227 Montgomery, Douglass, 266 Mosse, George, 130, 138, 139, 140 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 52, 55, 57 Muehlon, Johann Wilhelm, 49–50 Mühsam, Erich, 1, 48, 68, 80 Muir, Edwin, 168 Muir, Willa, 168 Müller, Hans-Harald, 138, 139, 159, 164, 166, 167 Müller, Harro, 225, 227 Müller-Salget, Klaus, 226 Müller-Waldeck, Gunnar, 267, 268 Munich, 1, 3, 7, 26, 28, 49, 56, 62, 68, 72, 74, 75, 80, 86, 87, 105, 107, 170, 175, 237 Munich revolution, 3, 26–28, 49, 62, 68, 170 Murdoch, Brian, 13, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 Murnau, F. W., films by: Nosferatu, 10 Musil, Robert, 50, 106, 221, 226 Musil, Robert, works by: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 106 Mussolini, Benito, 135 mysticism, 48, 68, 82, 96 Napoleon, 187, 250 National Socialism, 14, 20, 24, 30, 31, 36–41, 49, 56–57, 71–77, 79, 80, 117, 118, 119, 206, 254, 259 nationalism, 8, 21, 28, 29, 36, 39, 40, 71, 78–80, 125–40 Necker, Hanns Dietrich von, 254 Nelson, Don, 59 Neubauer, Hendrik, 16 Neubauer, Martin, 91, 97, 98

INDEX Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity, New Sobriety), 12, 15, 16, 72, 105, 111, 124, 159, 195, 208, 229, 237, 238, 240, 246, 263 Neuer, Johanna, 58 Neuhaus, Stefan, 226 Neumann, Nicolaus, 208 New Objectivity. See Neue Sachlichkeit New Sobriety. See Neue Sachlichkeit New Woman, 13, 238, 242, 243, 251 Nienhaus, Stefan, 257, 267 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 51, 52, 55, 58, 65, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works by: Also sprach Zarathustra, 46 Nolan, Mary, 209 Nordau, Max, works by: Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 92 Noske, Gustav, 3 Nottelmann, Nicole, 240, 249, 251, 252 Novalis, 51, 52 November revolution, 2–3, 6, 21, 26–28, 43, 49, 74, 155–57, 166, 196 NSDAP (Nazi party), 8, 9, 38, 56, 74, 125, 206, 255, 263 Oram, Caroline, 83 Ortner, Rainer, 267 Orwell, George, works by: 1984, 32 Ossietzky, Carl von, 193 outsider, 14, 51, 57, 59, 67, 69, 70, 80, 87, 175, 247 Owen, C. R., 164 pacifism, 45–46, 62, 89, 103, 127–28, 137, 145, 146, 150–51 Palmér, Torsten, 16 Pannwitz, Rudolf, 57 paramilitarism, 125, 157, 195, 198 Patchett, Ann, works by: Bel Canto, 251 patriotism, 6, 25 peace, 4, 26, 29, 37, 41, 50, 80, 126, 140, 146, 152, 153, 181 penal code, 196, 238




281

Peschina, Helmut, 122 Peter, Thomas, 268 Petersen, Klaus, 14 Peukert, Detlev, 9, 15, 61, 80, 137, 138, 196, 208, 209 Pfäfflin, Friedrich, 59 Pfeiler, William K., 164 photography, 11, 16 Pinthus, Kurt, 10, 51, 59 Piscator, Erwin, 12, 16, 33, 216, 231 Planke, Ilse, 124 Plievier, Theodor, 161, 167 Plievier, Theodor, works by: Der Kaiser ging, die Generäle blieben, 156; Des Kaisers Kulis, 160 pogrom, 70 Popular Front, 41 Polgar, Alfred, 102–3 postmodernity, 120, 124, 179 Prangel, Matthias, 226, 227 Prels, Max, 230 Price, Evadne. See Smith, Helen Zenna Prinzhorn, Hans, 60 proletariat, 21, 28, 31, 73, 171, 185, 186 Proust, Marcel, 50 Prümm, Karl, 118, 124, 139 Prussian Academy of Arts, 37, 38, 39, 51, 56, 96, 212 psychoanalysis, 50–51, 57, 69 Raabe, Wilhelm, 255 radio, 11, 32, 37, 40, 54, 167, 195, 202 Räterepublik, 3, 49, 170 Rathenau, Walther, 6, 71, 90, 98, 124, 135, 232, 233, 237, 250 Rathgeber, Paul, 58 Read, Herbert, 165 rearmament, 40 Reh, Albert, 59 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 93, 99 Reichsbanner, 137 Reid, J. H., 226 Reifenberg, Benno, 114 Reifenberg, Heinz, 194 Reinhart, Georg, 59 Reinhart, Hans, 50

282




INDEX

Reisiger, Hans, 166 Reiss, Erna, 211 Remarque, Erich Maria, 13, 14, 127–29, 132, 138, 141–68, 232, 234 Remarque, Erich Maria, works by: Drei Kameraden, 142; Der Funke Leben, 148; Gam, 141, 163; Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge, 142; Im Westen nichts Neues, 128, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143–68, 234, 251, 263, 266; Der schwarze Obelisk, 143, 151, 157, 162, 167; Station am Horizont, 141, 163; Die Traumbude, 141, 159, 163; Der Weg zurück, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152–58, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167; Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben, 143, 150, 162, 165 Renn, Ludwig, works by: Krieg, 138, 159, 165; Nachkrieg, 159 reparations, 4, 6, 7, 28, 29, 30, 37 Reuter, Gabriele, 251 Ribbat, Ernst, 227 Richards, David G., 58 Riemkasten, Felix, 259 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 57, 86 Ringelnatz, Joachim, 80 Rinser, Luise, 56 roaring twenties, 52 Roche, Mark, 42 Rode, Walter, 109, 123 Rodewald, Dierk, 97, 98 Rohde, Hedwig, 209 Rolland, Romain, 59 Romanticism, 56 Rorrison, Hugh, 16 Rose, William, 168 Rosenberg, Alfred, 49 Rosenberg, Alfred, works by: Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, 49 Roth, Joseph, 1, 14, 17, 101–24, 204 Roth, Joseph, works by: “Architektur,” 118; “Das Autodafé des Geistes,” 119–20; “Bekehrung eines Sünders im Berliner UFA-Palast,” 116; “Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck,”

118, 122; “Betrachtung an der Klagemauer,” 119; “Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen,” 116; “Dichter im Dritten Reich,” 119; “Ein Unpolitischer geht in den Reichstag,” 117; “Einer liest Zeitung,” 115; Das falsche Gewicht, 122; “Feuilleton,” 111; Flucht ohne Ende, 105; “Das ganz große Warenhaus,” 117–19, 122; “Gesang mit tödlichem Ausgang,” 117; Die Geschichte von dem 1002. Nacht, 122; Hiob, 101, 106, 122; “h-moll Symphonie,” 114; Hotel Savoy, 105, 251; Juden auf Wanderschaft, 106–7, 108, 122; Die Kapuzinergruft, 106; “Der Kurfürstendamm,” 209; Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker, 122; “Nonpareille aus Amerika,” 114–15; Panoptikum: Gestalten und Kulissen, 107; Radetzkymarsch, 101, 106; Die Rebellion, 105; Rechts und Links, 105; “Reise nach Kultur-Wien,” 109; “Rundgang um die Siegessäule,” 117; “Schillerpark,” 116–17; “Spaziergang,” 108, 111–16, 118–19, 121; Das Spinnennetz, 105; “Das steinerne Berlin,” 117, 119; “Wolkenkratzer,” 119; Zipper und sein Vater, 105 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, works by: Confessions, 51 Rowohlt, Ernst, 254, 259, 267, 268 Ruhr, 6, 8, 29, 31, 36, 73, 76 Rüsing, Hans-Peter, 232, 236, 249, 250 Russia, 25, 104, 220 Rüter, Hubert, 167 Ruttmann, Walther, films by: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 11 Ryan, Judith, 225 Sabrow, Martin, 250 Sadek, Martin, 267 Saenger, Hilde, 57 Salamon, Georg, 168

INDEX Salomon, Ernst von, 6 Salomon, Ernst von, works by: Die Geächteten, 6 Sander, Gabriele, 215, 225, 226, 227 Sargeant, Maggie, 165, 166, 168 Schäfer, Regina, 99 Schauwecker, Franz, 129, 134, 136, 139, 140 Scheidemann, Philipp, 2 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 60, 220 Scherera, Jürgen, 15 Scherpe, Klaus R., 124, 225, 227 Scheunemann, Dietrich, 15, 217, 225 Schill, Ferdinand von, 234, 250 Schiller, Friedrich, 55, 217 Schiller, Friedrich, works by: “An die Freude,” 46 Schlesinger, Paul, 196 Schlesinger, Sigmund, 103 Schlosser, Horst D., 164 Schmidt-Henkel, Gerhard, 260, 268 Schneckenberger, Max, works by: “Die Wacht am Rhein,” 223 Schneider, Thomas, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 Schneider-Handschin, Esther, 99 Schnittkin, Theodor, 51 Schock, Ralph, 122 Schönert, Jörg, 98 Schönfeld, Christiane, 17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68 Schrader, Bärbel, 15, 167 Schreckenberger, Helga, 168 Schuster, Ingrid, 225, 226 Schütz, Erhard, 15, 16, 123, 208, 209, 226 Schwarz, Wilhelm J., 164, 165 Schweiger, Werner J., 123 Schweikert, Uwe, 122 Schweppenhäuser, Hermann, 59, 209 Sebald, W. G., 218, 225 Second World War, 17, 25, 57, 62, 72, 80, 91, 126, 143, 151, 161, 212 Seghers, Anna, 17 Sellhorn, Werner, 191 Shanks, Hershel, 83 Sheppard, Richard, 98




283

Shookman, Ellis, 260, 267 Shumaker, Richard, 166 Siegel, Rainer-Joachim, 108 Skierka, Volker, 81, 82, 83 Smith, Helen Zenna, 168 Smith, Helen Zenna, works by: Not so Quiet . . ., 151, 160, 166 Social Democrats, 2, 3, 5, 21, 23, 30, 41, 156, 198, 256, 259. See also SPD Soltau, Heidi, 208 Sombart, Werner, 66, 82 Sombart, Werner, works by: Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 82 Sontheimer, Kurt, 137 Sorge, Reinhard, works by: Der Bettler, 10 Soviet Union, 75, 83, 220 Spartacus League, 2, 3 Spartacus uprising, 2, 47, 49 Speidel, Ludwig, 103 Spengler, Oswald, 7, 52, 59, 132 Spengler, Oswald, works by: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 7, 52, 60, 132 Speyer, Julie, 86 SPD (Social Democratic Party), 3, 5, 104, 256, 257, 259, 261, 262, 263 Spitzer, Daniel, 103 Sprengel, Peter, 226 Sprung, Robert C., 190 Stachura, Peter D., 167 Stadler, Ernst, 10 Stahlhelm, 5, 125, 126, 137, 158 Stalin, Josef, 41, 83 Stauffacher, Werner, 224, 226 Steierwald, Ulrike, 123 Stein, Gerd-Dieter, 97 Stein, Hermann von, 138 Stengel, Birgit, 90, 98 Stephan, Inge, 208 Sternburg, Wilhelm von, 82, 83, 163, 165 Stickelberger-Eder, Margrit, 164, 168 Stinnes, Hugo, 7, 31 Strauß und Torney, Lulu von, 47, 58 Stresemann, Gustav, 5, 8, 30–31, 43 Struve, Walter, 137

284




INDEX

Stuckel, Eva-Maria, 60 Sudermann, Hermann, 13, 98 Suhrkamp, Peter, 9, 259 Sullavan, Margaret, 266 Sültemeyer, Ingrid, 107 Sutton, Eric, 168 Swales, Martin, 17 Szeemann, Harald, 58 Taylor, Harley U., 165 technology, 11, 12, 15, 52, 60, 116, 118, 136, 138, 220 Tecklenburg, Artur, 254 Tergit, Gabriele, 1, 11, 14, 95, 99, 193–209 Tergit, Gabriele, works by: Das Büchlein vom Bett, 208; Effingers, 194–95; “Eingewöhnen in Berlin,” 209; Etwas Seltenes überhaupt: Erinnerungen, 195, 201, 208; “Frauendienstjahr und Berufsbildung,” 194; Kaiserkron und Päonien rot, 208; “Kantinen am Mond,” 199; Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, 193, 194, 199–209; Im Schnellzug nach Haifa, 208; Das Tulpenbüchlein, 208; “Vorfrühlingsreise nach Berlin,” 209 Tewarson, Heidi Thomann, 227 theater, 9–12, 15, 16, 33, 43, 51–56, 62, 63, 80, 86, 170, 171, 202, 204–7, 216 Thirty Years’ War, 217–19 Thoma, Ludwig, 72 Thomas, Adrienne, 161 Thomas, Adrienne, works by: Die Katrin wird Soldat, 147, 160, 161 Thomasius, Christian, 194 Thunecke, Jörg, 191 Tiedemann, Rolf (aka Rudolf), 59, 209 Tiedemann-Bartels, Hella, 140 Tims, Hilton, 165 Toller, Ernst, 1, 3, 10, 12, 68, 80, 97, 98, 219 Toller, Ernst, works by: Der deutsche Hinkemann, 98; Hoppla, wir leben!,

12, 16; Masse Mensch, 10; Die Wandlung, 10, 97 Tormin, Walther, 165 Trakl, Georg, 10 Traven, B., (also known as Ret Marut), 1, 13, 14, 169–91 Traven, B., works by: Aslan Norval, 175; “Assembly Line,” 169, 186; “Der aufgefangene Blitz,” 182–83, 186, 187–88; “Der ausgewanderte Antonio,” 187; “Die Bändigung,” 184; “Der Banditendoktor,” 183, 191; Die Baumwollpflücker, 169; Die Brücke im Dschungel, 175, 176, 190; Der Busch, 169, 177–90; “Diplomaten,” 185; “Der Eselskauf,” 183; “Die Familienehre,” 180, 184, 191; “Die Geburt eines Gottes,” 179; Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel, 176; “Die Geschichte einer Bombe,” 183–84, 191; “Der Großindustrielle,” 169, 186; “Ein Hundegeschäft,” 182; “Indianerbekehrung,” 188; “Indianertanz im Dschungel,” 180, 181; Der Karren, 171, 176; Khundar, 177, 190; Land des Frühlings, 180; Macario, 169; “Die Medizin,” 183, 184–85; “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch,” 172, 173, 185, 189; Die Rebellion der Gehenkten, 176; Regierung, 171; Der Schatz der Sierra Madre, 175; “Spießgesellen,” 187; Das Totenschiff, 169, 170, 174–75, 177; Die weiße Rose, 169, 175; Der Wobbly, 169, 173, 175, 177; “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung,” 180, 181–82, 191 Travers, Martin, 138 Travers, Michael P. A., 164 Treaty of Versailles, 4, 6, 28, 135, 148, 149, 151, 155 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 66 Treverton, Edward N., 190, 191 Trommler, Frank, 15 Tschuppik, Karl, 134–35, 139

INDEX Tucholsky, Kurt, 15, 62, 98, 103, 167, 259 Turner, Henry Ashby, 43, 260, 267 Uka, Walter, 16 Ullstein, Hermann, 230 Ullstein, Leopold, 230 Ulrich, Roland, 267, 268 unemployment, 8, 15, 72, 198, 207, 254, 263–66 Unger, Thorsten, 15 United States, 7, 10, 11, 41, 50, 63, 77, 85, 114, 158, 191, 212, 229, 231, 268 United States of Europe, 36, 40 USPD, 3, 5 Valentin, Karl, 72 Vienna, 36, 70, 86, 103, 104, 107, 109, 122, 229, 230 Vogt, Karl, 194 Vollmer, Hartmut, 16 Vring, Georg von der, 159 Vring, Georg von der, works by: Soldat Suhren, 159, 168 Wagener, Hans, 164, 165, 166, 168 Wagner, Richard, 68 Walberer, Ulrich, 17, 167 Walden, Herwarth, 212 Wall Street collapse, 8 Wallace, Edgar, 35 Wandervögel, 157, 247 Ward, Mark, 165, 166 Wassermann, Jakob, 1, 9, 10, 13, 14, 62, 63, 85–99 Wassermann, Jakob, works by: Andergast trilogy, 85, 94, 96, 99; “Bürgerliche Ehe: Offener Brief an den Grafen Keyserling,” 99; Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens, 86, 88, 94, 95; Christian Wahnschaffe, 87, 97; Engelhart oder Die zwei Welten, 97; Etzel Andergast, 85, 94, 96; Faber oder Die verlorenen Jahre, 91–92; Der Fall Maurizius, 66, 85, 87, 91, 94–96, 98, 99; Das




285

Gänsemännchen, 87; Die Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs, 86, 97; Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, 85, 94, 96, 99; “Der Jude als Orientale,” 89, 98; Die Juden von Zirndorf, 86, 88; Laudin und die Seinen, 92–94, 95, 97, 99; Der Literat oder Mythos und Persönlichkeit, 89, 98; “Das Los der Juden,” 88–89, 98; Der Mann von vierzig Jahren, 92; Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, 88–90, 97, 98; Melusine, 86; “Teilnahme des Dichters an der Politik,” 90, 98; Der Wendekreis, 91 Weber, Marianne, 57 Wedekind, Frank, 80 Wege, Carl, 118, 124 Wegener, Franz, 60 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 42 Weigand, Heinrich, 51 Weimar constitution, 13, 28, 29, 30, 43 Weimar culture, 9–12, 14, 15, 16, 209 Weiß, Christoph, 16, 208 Weiss, Donald, 163 Weiss, Walter, 97 Welti, Helene, 59 Wenger, Ruth, 51 Westermann, Klaus, 108, 121, 122 Westfalen, Tilman, 163 Wette, Wolfram, 138, 140 Wetzel, Heinz, 164, 167 Wheeler-Bennett, John, 166 Wheen, A. W., 163, 164, 168 White, Alfred D., 14 White, Iain Boyd, 122 White, Owen, 191 Wichert, Adalbert, 225 Widdig, Bernd, 14 Wiechert, Ernst, works by: Jedermann: Geschichte eines Namenlosen, 167 Wiene, Robert, films by: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 10 Wieser, Max, 166 Wilder, Thornton, works by: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 251

INDEX

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 2, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 48, 150, 205 Wilhelmine Empire, 36, 40, 61, 71, 196 Wilhelmine Germany, 7, 47, 253 Wilkes, Geoff, 259, 262, 267, 268 Willett, John, 11, 15 Williams, Jenny, 6, 266, 268 Wilson, Colin, 51, 59 Wilson, Woodrow, 27 Wirtz, Irmgard, 121, 122 Witkop, Philipp, 165 Wohl, Robert, 166 Wolff, Rudolf, 97, 98, 267 Woltereck, Richard, 50 Wolzogen, Ernst von, 86 Wundberg, Gotthart, 43 Würzbach, Eugen, 58 youth, 8–9, 34–37, 47, 85, 97, 136, 143–48, 155, 157, 160–62, 167, 198, 207, 234–35, 241, 247 Zachau, Reinhard, K., 260, 265–66, 267, 268 Zagratzki, Uwe, 165

Zapfel, Peter, 208 Zaratin, Italo, 59, 60 Zeller, Bernhard, 59 Zeltner, Hermann, 60 Ziegler, Theobald, 50, 59 Ziemann, Benjamin, 166 Zille, Heinrich, 203, 209 Zimmerman, Michael E., 60 Zimmermann, Manfred, 64, 81 Zingler, Peter, 265 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 59 Zionism, 79, 89, 119 Zipes, Jack, 81 Zmegac, Viktor, 225 Zogbaum, Heidi, 190, 191 Zola, Emile, 20, 34–35, 36 Zola, Emile, works by: “J’accuse,” 40 Zuckmayer, Carl, 263 Zweig, Arnold, 63, 66, 80, 159, 161, 168 Zweig, Arnold, works by: Erziehung vor Verdun, 159; Das ostjüdische Antlitz, 66; Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa, 159 Zweig, Stefan, works by: Schachnovelle, 251

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286