And Never Said a Word

And Never Said a Word is an early novel by Heinrich Böll published in 1953. It was translated quickly into English in 1955 (as Acquainted with the Night), but the translation quoted here is by Leila Vennewitz from 1978. Böll’s focus is post-war poverty, seen through the lens of a married couple, Fred and Käte Bogner, who narrate their story in alternate chapters.  Its title comes from a folk song (Never Said a Mumbling Word) which Käte listens to at one point, about Jesus’ stoicism on the cross (“His blood came trickling down, / And He never said a mumbling word”) used to highlight her own patient and uncomplaining nature given the difficulties she faces in her life. She lives in a single room with her two children in fear on her landlady and neighbours:

“The children playing in the corridor: they are so used to being quiet that now they don’t even make a noise when it is permitted.”

On the other hand, her neighbours, the Hopfs, make love loudly through the wall, and her landlady, Mrs Franke, smothers them with the vinegary smell of her preserving. Mrs Franke is what might be described as a ‘pillar of the community’, on numerous committees and boards (including the Housing Commission), and receiving Holy Communion every morning:

“I shrink from partaking the Body of Christ, the consumption of which seems to make Mrs Franke more alarming every day.”

Here Böll introduces one of the key concerns of the novel, the contrast between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, which often has a religious dimension. When Käte finally goes to confession she tells the priest:

“…about my hatred for the priests who live in big houses and have faces like advertisements for face cream.”

He tells her he cannot absolve her – “how can you harbour so much hatred” – yet later, realising her poverty, changes his mind.

As the novel opens, Käte and Fred are living separately, Fred no longer being able to bear staying in the one room and having left after an incident where he struck their children. Their poverty is highlighted in the way Böll opens both the first (Fred) and second (Käte) chapters by immediately referring to money: Fred going to the bank to cash his paycheck; Käte counting the money Fred has sent her. Fred has a job at a telephone exchange, but also tutors for extra money. Despite this, he spends the first chapter looking to borrow money so that he and Käte can spend the night together in a hotel. In the evenings he drinks and plays pinball. Fred is a weak man who still loves his wife but is unable to live with her. Käte, meanwhile, faces the burden of raising their children alone (and fears she might be pregnant again). The constant challenge of poverty is portrayed in her fight to keep her environment clean:

“Then I start my battle, my battle against dirt. Where I derive the hope of ever subduing it, I don’t know.”

The novel takes place over a single day (and night) yet such is Böll’s deftness with the double narrative that we feel we have come to know the characters thoroughly. Their marriage has reached a crisis point where Fred must either come home or separate from his wife.

The novel is also notable for its use of motifs or repeated moments, for example the café which they visit separately and which, on both occasions, suggests kindness remains in the world. This might be contrasted with their visits to churches which are less welcoming. There is also a convention of pharmacists (or druggists as they are called in this translation) in town and the novel is scattered with slogans such as “You can trust your druggist!” providing a modern alternative to the processions of priests and bishops. Most successfully, Böll has Fred see the other members of his family at points as a spectator:

“And in these children of mine, slowly marching along and solemnly carrying their candles across my minute field of vision – in them I saw what I thought I knew but only knew now: that we are poor.”

Towards the novel’s end he sees his wife in the same way, “my wife, who I had embraced innumerable times without recognising her.” It is this sighting that influences his final decision.

And Never Said a Word is probably among Böll’s lesser novels, but it is still a striking portrait of poverty which presents its characters with empathy and compassion.

Our Conquest

Gert Hofmann’s novel Our Conquest remains some of the earliest of his work we have in English, originally published in 1984 and translated by Christopher Middleton in 1991. Its focus is one we see in much of his work, a child’s perspective of war. The novel begins on the day of a town’s long-awaited ‘conquest’:

“One day our little town came to be conquered, or, as mother says, rolled up, from north to south, cut off from all surrounding towns and villages…”

The novel is narrated in the first-person plural, giving the impression of brothers, or at least siblings – the mother, too, refers to ‘them’. But later, when a suit is tried on, there is no description of it being tried on twice (or of two suits) suggesting a deliberate choice of the author to narrate in this particular way, perhaps simply to generalise the experience, or to add the air of superiority that is implied at times – especially with regard to their less fortunate friend Edgar whose mother and father are dead and who is “staying in our garden shed for the time being as our lodger.” (The narrator’s father is only ‘missing’, a distinction that is frequently mentioned). Edgar’s inferiority originates in the fact his father worked in the narrator’s father’s factory – making leather whips. This inferiority is demonstrated when Edgar waits in the shed while the narrator is fed bread and bacon fat by his mother. However, Edgar is perhaps older as when the boys decide they want to leave the house on the day of ‘our occupation’, the mother remarks to him:

“…at least I know that you’ll take care and that I can depend on you. You won’t let anything happen to them will you, you’ll bring them home safe and sound again?”

Yet when they are alone, Edgar is not cowed by the narrator and, in fact, wields power over them with his knowledge of the death of a Czech worker at their father’s factory. Rather than blackmail them for food, he makes them hurt themselves with a knife he has found:

“And we – we’ve taken a deep breath – take a firmer hold on the knife and, with a determined lunge, stab it into our thigh to punish ourselves. Oh the pain! And oh the blood! And among the old scars, the many fresh wounds.”

These wounds are mentioned throughout the novel – for example, when trying on the suit – and suggest a guilt which the narrator needs to be reminded of through pain. In the meantime, the boys are asked by the mother to go to the slaughterhouse as she has heard there is Butterschmalz (buttermilk) – a rumour which turns out to be unfounded, if, indeed, the mother believed it. At the slaughterhouse the boys are caught and questioned. The reader may have a suspicion that there is something in the slaughterhouse the director doesn’t want the boys to see:

“…only a few ghostly objects lying around on the flagstones in the darkness which we take to be bodies (of animals) that have been forgotten about or overlooked.”

The conversation in the slaughterhouse is the first of many, but these lengthy dialogues are presented without speech marks in long paragraphs accompanied by the thoughts of the narrator. In this way the novel, though taking place as the boys wander the town and interact with others, feels almost internal, a working out of the new world of ‘our conquest’. As well as the slaughterhouse, they visit a neighbour whose husband has recently died (it is here they acquire the suit) and a theatre. Throughout the question is not just what will life be like now? but will life be worth living? (answered in the negative by Herr Schellenbaum who has poisoned himself and his wife). The narrator provides an innocent (though even that is questioned) lens through which to view this moment of transformation.

Our Conquest is not Hofmann’s easiest novel. Its prose is intense, even smothering, in keeping with the fear and anxiety of the town. The unusual narration further disorientates the reader. And yet you are drawn into its world not only physically but mentally, inhabiting the same space (perhaps the ‘we’ is narrator and reader). It is a reminder of what a remarkable writer Hofmann is.

Woman in the Pillory

The work of Brigitte Reimann, an East German writer who published for twenty years between 1953 and her early death in 1973, was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until the translation of Siblings in 2023 by Lucy Jones. Now Jones has translated an earlier novel, Woman in the Pillory, also for Penguin Classics. Whereas Siblings was drawn from Reimann’s own life to some extent, Woman in the Pillory is set during the Second World War when she was a child. It tells the story of a young German woman, Kathrin, who falls in love with a Russian POW, Alexei, who has been assigned to work on her farm while her husband, Heinrich, is fighting. Though its central message might be characterised as ‘people are people wherever they come from’, most of the novel’s German characters are quite unsympathetic while Alexei is something of a paragon in his patience and virtue.

Heinrich’s sister, Frieda, lives with the couple, and is devoted to her brother (one reason why she isn’t married). In many ways she takes his place in his absence as she adopts a dominant role even while living in Kathrin’s house. A sense of Kathrin’s place in the family is suggested when Heinrich returns home on leave:

“Kathrin sat perched between the brother and sister, crushed by their warm, bulky flesh, their loud remarks and ripostes, and her husband’s raucous laughter.”

While Heinrich is not cruel to Katherin, his attraction to her was influenced by the farm that she had inherited. It is the difficulties the two women have coping with all the work of the farm which leads Heinrich to propose that they be allocated the help of a Russian POW. “Russians,” he tells Kathrin, “are different from us, only half-human, get it?” Her disillusionment with her husband is partly the result of the glee with which he relates stories of killing Russians, including women and children. Kathrin is fearful of Alexei at first:

“She thought he was sure to have been the kind who raped women, killed children and sniped at German soldiers.”

When he helps her carry water into the house and she thanks him, however, she sees a change in his expression: “the apathy and stoicism vanished for his face. He smiled.” For the first time she speaks up for him, suggesting to Frieda that “the man should get a decent meal if he’s supposed to work.” One of the novel’s most interesting aspects is Kathrin’s gradual assertion of her right (as the owner of the farm) to take charge and make decisions. This begins long before she and Alexei are lovers, originating is a sense of shared humanity. Her relationship with Alexei develops into a friendship and she is genuinely horrified when Frieda asks her “is there something going on between you and him?” She is, however, insistent that Alexei is just as human as they are:

“Alexei is good and helpful You can’t lock him in the barn like an animal… He’s a person, just like us.”

Reimann skilfully creates the oppressive atmosphere of the German countryside at this time, where most think like Frieda rather than Kathrin. At times she uses a communal voice such as the “village womenfolk”:

“The Martens had taken on a new farmhand, a POW…so why was Kathrin wearing a new skirt? Why did she have on that colourful pullover?”

Particular individuals stand out as well, such as Anders, a neighbouring farmer, angry that his own daughter is sleeping with SS officers (for moral rather than political reasons) who hints to Heinrich about a potential relationship between Kathrin and Alexei. Or Horst Lange, the overseer, “a striking, youthful figure, always in jackboots and brown trousers,” who takes an interest in every rumour. Ony Trude, a neighbour, offers Kathrin and support:

“I’ve seen nothing and I know nothing, Kathrin. And if I had – child, do you think I would talk about it?”

Woman in the Pillory is a less successful novel than Siblings because ultimately there is less complexity. However, Kathrin is a strong central character, her love for Alexei made more credible by her need to assert her independence from Frieda and her disgust at her husband’s actions in the war. The novel is as much about her personal development as it is about her love, though this has the unfortunate effect of making Alexei’s character rather less convincing. Luckily this does not apply to Heinrich and Frieda who, despite their narrow-minded beliefs, are never simply pantomime villains.  It is a short novel with a compelling story and increasingly tense atmosphere that you may wish to read in one sitting.

Imagine Breaking Everything

Coming-of-age novels in which the central character escapes from poverty, or some other form of challenging background, often present a sense of doubleness, where the protagonist feels as if they are more than one person. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is a recent example, but we see it as far back as Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song where the protagonist Chris talks specifically about there being ‘two Chrisses’. Melissa, in Columbian author Lina Munar Gueravara’s debut novel Imagine Breaking Everything (translated by Ellen Jones), has a similar feeling after returning to her old neighbourhood to visit the mother she hasn’t seen for months, hoping that she can go back to being “Melissa from La Alborada, from Ofelia, the real Melissa…

“Because that was the real Melissa, right? The one who fell silent in history lessons and couldn’t handle the infinite answers in calculus, who played basketball like a regular student and was going to graduate, that was the real Melissa. It had to be, because it couldn’t be the other one, the one who had punched Pilar Villareal in the face.”

Melissa’s journey through her old neighbourhood reacquaints her with the past she is hoping to escape, but the first indication that she had not yet accomplished this occurs as the novel opens and we learn that she is in danger of not graduating after smashing a printer which the school insists she must pay for first. This propensity for violence originates with a violent father but when her mother eventually leaves him to stay with her brother (who is now Melissa’s Aunt Anahi) she quickly abandons her daughter. When her mother appears unannounced, as the novel opens, to pick her up, she is unable to have the honest conversation with her she would like:

“Questions that all boiled down to just one: are you all right without me? The question scared me because I didn’t know how to say yes without her thinking I didn’t still miss her. Even more scary was the answer she might give.”

As she returns to the place where she used to live (“Everything looked familiar, even the few things that were new”) she worries that the new Melissa will be replaced by the old Melissa:

“Yeah, I was a different person… but I was scared of forgetting that.”

Melissa has reasons to regret her past as we discover when she is attacked on her first day back. She suspects the Martinez brothers, children when she left, taking revenge as she killed their cat (not entirely deliberately but by putting laxatives in its food). Later she will attempt to apologise to Pilar Villareal, a girl she bullied relentlessly (including smashing a model she brought into school, an early example of breaking everything), another encounter that will end in violence when Pilar refuses to accept her apology and retaliates with a few home truths about Melissa’s mother. Melissa carries the marks of this violence throughout the novel, and at one point, despairing at the difficulty of changing, compares it to her mother’s tattoo:

“It doesn’t matter what clothes we wear, how much make-up we put on, underneath it all she’s got her Tweety and I’ve got my bruise, it doesn’t matter what we do, our mistakes are branded on our skin, forever, so we won’t forget we’re the same people as before, the same people we always were, because people  don’t change, they just lie.”

Her mother, Melissa fears, cannot change. One incident she recalls is when she broke her thumb punching a door (another example of breaking everything) and her mother does not come to collect her from the hospital until the next day. But she also has the example of her Aunt Anahi who has transitioned, and encourages her to control her temper by counting to seven – even the role models in her life seem like polar opposites. Her mother’s behaviour is compared not to Judas but to Peter as, according to Melissa’s friend Zapata:

“Denying someone like that is betrayal, how could it not be? Peter was even worse than Judas because he was Jesus’s best mate, and he didn’t deny him just once or twice, he denied him three times.”

Melissa will come to remember Zapata’s words as she struggles to see a future with her mother.

Imagine Breaking Everything depicts the struggle to escape your fate engagingly and often humorously. The fact that Melissa is attempting to leave behind her impulse to violence while also coming to terms with her mother’s erratic and unreliable love for her adds a new dimension to this likeable coming-of-age story. Presented to the reader with all her flaws and doubts, Melissa is a character who reaches beyond to page to engage the reader’s hope for her future.

In a Deep Blue Hour

In a Deep Blue Hour, published originally in 2023 and now translated into English by Michael Hofmann, is the latest novel from Swiss writer Peter Stamm. It begins with the narrator, Andrea’s, attempts to make a documentary about the author Richard Wechsler, filming in locations associated with his life. Despite agreeing to the film, Wechsler seems to be determined to give little away:

“He has the annoying quality of not finishing his sentences. You know what he means but he never says it.”

When Tom, Andrea’s partner, asks him a question, his “expression goes rigid, he stares straight into the camera.” There are questions about the possibility of capturing a person on camera at all which will allow Stamm to consider, more widely, whether it is reasonable to think we can understand another person’s life in the course of the novel. In the background, Andrea is drifting away from her partner, an early sign being his decision to be called Thomas:

“Why would somebody who for forty years has gone by Tom suddenly want to be Thomas?”

At the same time, she draws closer to Wechsler (off camera, of course) and even fantasises about a younger version. When the writer does not appear for filming, they begin to explore his past through those that knew him, beginning with an old school friend, now a butcher. From what he tells Andrea she believes she understands Wechsler’s first love, possibly the basis for all the women in his novels (he has never married), elaborating on the butcher’s story:

“And how do I know? The scene appears in one of Wechsler’s books.”

It doesn’t take Andrea long to track down the woman in question, Judith, now a married minister. Stamm intercuts her early interviews, where little is revealed, with scenes of their first night together, presumably described by Andrea (their accuracy further complicated by the fact that Andrea and Judith will become friends). Andrea declares that Judith is Wechsler’s ‘muse’.

At this point, the first part of the novel ends – Wechsler has failed to appear, the documentary is abandoned. When the second part begins, Andrea is no longer a filmmaker, and no longer with Tom; Wechsler is dead. Andrea and Judith meet again at the funeral, and, shortly after, Judith is in contact:

“Because you liked him… And because no-one else knows. About him and me.”

They spend some time in Wechsler’s house together and Judith tells Andrea more about her relationship with him:

“Many years, half a lifetime, in which they continually approached and left one another.”

In the novel’s final part, Andrea has a new job, one she does not find fulfilling. However, thoughts of Wechsler have not left her:

“What am I doing with Judith and Richard? Why don’t they leave me in peace, both in my head and my life?”

As the novel approaches its conclusion, she comes to think of them more than ever.

In a Deep Blue Hour is less striking than many of Stamm’s previous novels. Andrea is a deliberately ordinary narrator (not uncommon in his work) but also one who lives an unremarkable life, only tangentially touched by the lives of Wechsler and Judith. There is certainly a refutation of the idea that influence in a relationship is related to close proximity as both Wechsler and Andrea are influenced by the idea of a person as much as the person. They perhaps also share an inability to sustain a relationship when the other person is physically present. At one point Wechsler says, “You can’t live in both worlds at once [the fictional and the real]” but perhaps he, and Andrea, demonstrate you can.

The Director

Daniel Kehlmann made his name with Measuring the World (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway), a novel set in the first half of the nineteenth century telling of the attempt by German mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and geographer, Alexander von Humbolt, to do exactly that. His last novel, Tyll (translated by Ross Benjamin), is set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years War. It would be fair to say, therefore, that he is something of a master of the historical novel, and in The Director (again translated by Benjamin) he turns to the more recent history of the twentieth century and a period of time that is perhaps inevitable for a German writer, the Nazi regime and the Second World War. Kehlmann overcomes the challenge of having something new to say by focusing on the real-life film director, Georg Wilhelm Pabst.

Pabst makes for an interesting example of how both the film industry and the Nazi dictatorship work. Known as ‘Red Pabst’ he was certainly not a supporter of Hitler, and left Germany for America where we find him at the start of the novel trying to convince the studio to back his film about a ship where the passengers think war has broken out – “You have a small ship with the entire world inside” – but instead they offer him A Modern Hero:

“A wretched script, a paltry budget, and the producer constantly interfering. Can you believe it, he dictated the shots to me!”

Unhappy in America, he recrosses the Atlantic to make a film in France, and, when that falls through, he decides to visit his mother in Austria as she has telegrammed to say she is unwell. While there, Germany invades Austria, war is declared, and the borders are closed. However, Pabst is given the opportunity to make ‘non-political’ films for the Reich, with the alternative implied rather than outlined. When Pabst asks if he will be arrested if he does not go to see the minister as requested:

“Kramer smiled. For a few seconds he didn’t answer, then he clapped his hands and stood up.”

The Minister is more explicit though the tone remains friendly:

“It is what it is, and I say what it is, and all you say here is: I’m sorry! And you say: Now I know better! And: I have recognised my mistakes. And I want to do my part to build a new Germany.”

He takes a phone call during their meeting, however, during which he smashes the phone to pieces on his desk, conveying the potential for violence should Pabst not cooperate. Kehlmann brilliantly conveys the atmosphere of oppression in Nazi Germany (and Austria) in the novel from the moment Pabst arrives in the country. He cleverly focuses on the viewpoint of Pabst’s young son, Jakob, as he watches those trying to escape in the opposite direction being taken off a train:

“More people are getting off the train, many of them crying. A man shakes his fist, shouting something that Jakob can’t make out. Farther back, at the end of the platform, a woman collapses and lies down right there on the concrete.”

Kehlmann also creates some wonderful characters to convey the bullying nature of Nazism, none more so than the caretaker of the castle where Pabst’s mother is staying, Jerzabek, who is also the leader of the local Nazi group. He has, of course, no need to hide his views when he picks the Pabst family up at the station:

“On the way he spoke about the Jews. The Führer was now driving out the vermin, making them crawl away all over the world.”

Technically an employee, his status as a Nazi gives him licence to act as if superior and he moves his family into the part of the castle where Pabst’s mother once stayed. (Kehlmann has this patriotic German ironically unable to speak German clearly such is his dialect). Jerzabek is put in his place by Krämer, but he, too, is someone whose power exceeds his previous status worrying that “once again he had said something that wouldn’t pass muster among educated people, once again the wrong word, the wrong nuance, the wrong allusion.” Here Kehlmann identifies one of the most comedic and terrifying aspects of fascism, and also what makes it attractive for so many.

The novel is more than its setting, however, as it also outlines Pabst’s obsession with filming, particularly when he is working in Prague on his final film during the war which was lost. Anyone interested in the mechanics of filmmaking will find this novel fascinating, but it also touches more generally on artistic obsession where Pabst places the film before all else. The Director is another wonderful novel from Kehlmann who lays bare all Pabst faults but still retains our sympathy, and highlights the horrors of fascism without losing sight of its absurdity.