An Ordinary Youth

Only recently (with All or Nothing in 2015) has German author Walter Kempowski had some success in English, despite earlier translations of Days of Greatness and Dog Days. Now, following the translation of Homeland in 2018, we have one of his earliest works, Tadellöser & Wolff, translated by Michael Lipkin as An Ordinary Youth on the basis its original title (which plays on a cigar brand and the German word ‘tadellos’ meaning flawless) “would have been as opaque to the German reader of 1971 as it is to an English language reader today.” The novel (for it is certainly not structured as an autobiography) is based on Kempowski’s experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. He was born in 1929 and therefore was a young child when Hitler came to power but was sixteen by the end of the war; in other words, his youth was entirely coloured by the rise of the Nazis, the war, and Germany’s defeat.

Walter is the youngest child in the family, with an older brother, Robert, and a sister, Ulla. They live in the town of Rostock and, as the novel opens, have just moved into a new home. The impression we are given is of a family who live a comfortable life: Ulla takes riding lessons; she and Robert join the yacht club. As he will do throughout, Kempowski only refers to the Nazification of Germany tangentially, through the perception of a child, ending the first chapter with a description of the family being photographed, “even father, in his SA uniform.” When he goes with friends to a café after the cinema a sign declares:

“JEWS NOT WELCOME”

On Wednesday and Sunday evenings there are Hitler Youth meetings. That Walter does not fit in (a theme that will run through the novel) can be seen when he goes to his first camp:

“Everyone had kitbags except for me. Instead I had a shapeless hiking rucksack from my parents’ honeymoon trip to Tegernsee in 1920.”

When war begins, the general belief is that it will not last long. His friend, Ute’s, family decide to move to Berlin for a few months “until everything calmed down, as they’d be out of range.” Faith in Hitler is high, with Walter’s father declaring “he has a good head on his shoulders.” Walter’s only complaint is that he cannot get Polish toy soldiers, and so makes do with French and British instead. As time goes on, however, Rostock is subjected to air raids and the family have to shelter in the cellar. In the morning, they exit to:

“…the sound of brickwork crumbling, balconies collapsing, and men’s shouts in the distance.”

Walter, meanwhile, is more concerned with which cinemas may have been destroyed. As well as film, he also loves jazz (used by both Wolfgang Koeppen and Josef Skvorecky as a sign of resistance). His father, meanwhile, is posted in Gartz on the Polish border:

“As the local commandant, he had to allocate prisoners of war to the surrounding estates.”

Walter is rarely doing well in school, and his standing in the Hitler Youth is such that eventually he is sent to the ‘remedial’ section. One issue is his hair, which he has grown long:

“Your hair was supposed to reach over your chin when you combed it forward: that was the right length.”

At the war’s end he is a courier, carrying letters or goods in person as the postal service has collapsed. When he is in Berlin collecting medicine for a dentist, he hears a new sound:

“At first I thought it was a storm, then that someone on the street was throwing boards on a pile. But I soon realised it was artillery.”

The Russians are on the outskirts of the city. When he goes to the station, he finds that all trains have been cancelled.

The appearance of Russian troops marks the end of the novel – it might even be said to end on something of a cliff-hanger – but events post-war are a different story. The novel is written in an unusual style: short sections – exactly like memories – interspersed with snippets of verse, song, advertising slogans (many of which are sourced in the Lipkin’s notes). This creates a pervading sense of irony (as with the title), a light-heartedness among the gloom, as well as reminding us of Walter’s age. With its child’s eye view, An Ordinary Youth is a particularly affecting picture of life in Nazi Germany, an eerie mix of the ordinary aspects of growing up and the violence of extremism and war.

Once a Jailbird

Hans Fallada’s 1934 novel Once a Jailbird (translated into English by Eric Sutton the same year, and revised in 2012 by Nicholas Jacobs, Gardis Cramer von Laue and Linden Lawson) originated (as anyone who knows anything about Fallada’s life will know) from the author’s own experience of prison. His first jail sentence – like his protagonist, Willi Kufult, for embezzlement – came in 1924, with others to follow. The novel, however, is more concerned with the experience of prisoners once they are released, Fallada describing his intention in a letter to his publisher “to show how the current criminal justice system and modern society as a whole force anyone who has broken the law only once into a life of crime.”

As the novel opens, Kufult is coming to the end of a five-year sentence and displays the cunning of a hardened criminal, blackmailing the nets instructor (making nets is one way prisoners can make some money) when he overhears a conversation with another prisoner. But this is simply the persona Kufult has had to develop to survive:

“Back in his cell, Willi Kufult collapsed. That was what always happened. When he was with other people he prattled on and threw his weight about and posed as the old experienced lag who could never be fooled; but alone with himself, he was very much alone, and grew timid and despondent.”

This will be a reoccurring problem for Kufult, who is caught between the difficulties of going straight, and the fact that, while he can at times outwit others, he lacks the nastiness required to be a successful criminal. This deep-rooted decency also leads to petty arguments as he expects to be treated fairly at all times – arguments that do not always go in his favour. Days before his release, he hopes for help from his wealthy brother-in-law, help that never arrives. While Bruhn, who is also about to be released, has a job lined up in a timber works, Kufult initially intends to leave for Hamburg, sensing that in the same town as the prison, he will always be a criminal. As he tells the governor:

“I would prefer… to go to a place where I wasn’t known.”

It is the governor who suggests he goes to work at ‘the Home of Peace’, a charitable organisation which employs ex-convicts, as a typist. Once he gets there, however, he discovers that the work is hard and the pay is poor. As one of the other ‘employees’ puts it:

“They’re robbers in this place… They live on our blood. That’s why the grafters have set up this show here, and called it a charity, just to sponge of our work.”

Later, Kufult takes the chance to leave with some of the others when he discovers that the company is negotiating a large contract, and he undercuts it. Despite clearly showing considerable business acumen, his status as an ex-convict complicates everything. A similar pattern follows with other jobs, for example when he is canvassing for a newspaper – his ability to do the job counts for little when his past is discovered. Even when innocent, Kufult acts guiltily – when a magistrate asks him why he “behaved just like a hardened criminal” when questioned by the police, he replies:

“Herr Specht treated me just as a police officer does treat a real criminal.”

As in many of his novels, Fallada manages the rhythm of hope and despondency with skill. Money is a constant concern for Kufult and he finds himself with only a few marks and no income at points, but at others is able to earn well. Friendships with ex-convicts come and go – some can be trusted, others not at all. There is even a love story of a kind. Intriguingly, in the final chapter, Fallada turns to Kufult’s childhood when he was unfairly treated by a pastor he is lodging with. The same sense of grievance has haunted him throughout the novel’s pages. His father tells him:

“You must learn that you can do as much damage by doing what’s foolish as by doing what’s wrong.”

This is a lesson Kufult never quite seems to learn.

Once a Jailbird, now almost a hundred years old, is sadly just as relevant now, demonstrating that imprisonment makes every future more difficult except a life of crime, and that prisoners can become institutionalised to the point that the feel prison is the best place for them. In Fallada’s own words:

“It doesn’t really matter what Kufalt does; whatever happens he’s caught fast in a trap and he cannot struggle free.”

Balzac’s Horse

Gert Hofmann’s Balzac’s Horse and Other Stories was originally published in 1981 as Gespräch über Balzacs Pferd: Vier Novellen (A Conversation About Balzac’s Horse: Four Novellas) appearing in English in 1989 with the addition of five shorter stories, largely translated by Christopher Middleton, but with two stories translated by Michael Hofmann. While the extra stories are welcome, they do alter the unity of the original volume in which all four novellas focus on writers of various types: Balzac, Casanova, Robert Walser and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. In each of them, Hofmann uses dialogue (sometimes one-sided) to explore the character of the writer and the nature of art.

This is obviously made explicit in the title of ‘A Conversation About Balzac’s Horse’ in which the ageing author is pictured in an empty theatre waiting for the curtain to rise on a new play he has written in discussion with a Mr Brissot, inspector of the cloacas (sewers) of Paris. He is planning his next work in which he intends to bring “the cloacas of Paris onto the stage” and is quizzing Brissot regarding the setting. Balzac’s certainty in his craft diminishes as the conversation progresses. Initially he tells Brissot that he is neither nervous nor excited as “everything has been planned to perfection” though this is put in doubt as he frequently asks Brissot if he can see or hear anything below. He also discourses on the difficulties of writing for the theatre, having to please the actors and director, claiming to have rewritten the final act seventy-two times. The turning point occurs as he declines a visit to the cloacas at the best time (according to Brissot) – midnight – as that is when he writes, only to learn of other famous, indeed titled, visitors. Hofmann gradually turns the conversation from being largely provided by Balzac until Brissot is the main contributor, describing the ‘entertainment’ these visitors experience. Then more Brissot describes, the less confident Balzac becomes:

“The spectators I’ve invited…the ladies with the bouquets, the director’s friends, the critics stuffed with food! they’re not coming, they’re not coming!”

At the heart of the story is the question: what is art? and this is also examined in ‘Casanova and the Extra’. Late in Casanova’s life, he finds himself reduced to a genteel poverty, often living in his carriage and with few possessions:

“His only belongings at that time: two coats, the better of which he is wearing… In addition, some linen, much mended, not that one would see, five books, three attacking Voltaire, three snuffboxes, the aforementioned cane, a chain with a watch…”

In the early part of the story Hofmann establishes Casanova’s separation, and then he engineers an “uncanny encounter” with his mother – uncanny because he believes his mother to be dead (a “conversation, which did perhaps occur, or could have occurred…”). His mother challenges him as to what he has achieved with his life, Casanova at first claiming that he is a poet, and then:

“At least, I live poetically.”

In keeping with the supernatural atmosphere of the encounter, his mother refers to his actions as if she had been there, observing. Casanova is made to face his own essential selfishness – the ending demonstrating that he has not, perhaps cannot, change.

In a similar vein to the previous two stories, ‘The Resignation of the Writer Robert Walser from the Literary Society’ is also about failure and mortality. In the story, Walser has been invited to speak at a Literary Society in Bern and is spending the time before the event with the Society’s chairman, Gissenger. Again, the story takes place late in Walser’s life when he has all but stopped writing and can no longer get published. Gissenger is a businessman with his own worries who grows increasingly resentful of Walser and is embarrassed to be seen with him:

“I am forced to the conclusion… that R. W. has no narrative gift, and is quite incapable of amusing or distracting me.”

As with the previous stories, Walser is faced with someone who causes him to doubt his art. In the final novella, Lenz, the least well-known of the characters, returns home after many years away having become estranged from his father. The story mainly consists of Lenz pleading with his father to support him, but the other side of the conversation is silence.

While the other stories collected here are also very fine, particularly ‘Tolstoy’s Head’ in which Tolstoy’s son fonds employment in American impersonating his father, the four novellas are excellent both in their insight into the psychology of the artist and in their dialectic form. Out of print like most (but not all) of Hofmann’s work, it is a collection well worth seeking out.

Siblings

East German writer Brigitte Reimann’s 1963 novel Siblings (originally Die Geschwister) is the first of her fiction to be translated into English (two volumes of her diaries are available, also translated by Lucy Jones). Siblings was written shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall and examines the tensions within one particular family regarding whether East or West promises the more hopeful future. The novel is written from the point of view of Elisabeth, who still believes in the socialism offered in the GDR, despite the fact that one brother, Konrad, has already fled to the West. It is when she discovers that her other brother, Uri, is also considering leaving that she must decide whether or not she has the right to stop him.

Reimann emphasises the unusual closeness of Elisabeth and Uri from the start of the novel. As a child she boasts about him to her schoolfriends (“We love each other”) and her descriptions of him are more befitting of a lover than a brother:

“…his forceful chin, the wide, flat, black arch of his brow and his hazelnut eyes, flecked with darker, rust-coloured spots…”

At a later point she refers to him walking around the house in pyjama bottoms, “his naked, brown torso was gleaming.” The news he is leaving is devastating for her both ideologically and personally:

“It can’t be true – my brother and I can’t have grown this far apart. I won’t be his accomplice.”

She regards Konrad’s departure as a betrayal, accusing him of hating the GDR (which he calls ‘the Zone’) “blindly and stupidly, the way a fundamentalist hates,” reacting with an anger she cannot conceal:

“The red heat filled my mouth again and crashed against my eardrums.”

Their parents play little part in this having already been put in the past by their children:

“It was your generation’s fault. You voted for Hitler. You’re to blame.”

(Even when her father points out that he did not support the Nazis he is accused of not doing enough to stop them). It’s an important reminder of the conditions in which East Germany was created and why for many young people, like Elisabeth, socialism was the future. The society in which she lives cannot not simply be retroactively divided into those who were Party functionaries and those who opposed and suffered. Her idealism shines through in her life as a factory worker and painter, which must echo Reimann’s own experience at a coal mine where she also led a group of writing workers (the dust is likely to have contributed to her early death from cancer). Elisabeth defends her brigade leader (“he knows more about painting from the Italian school than I do”) and the exhibition the workers hold in the face of Konrad’s cynicism. She does not censor herself, criticising the painting of her superior, Heiners, even though she knows he is on very good terms with the party secretary – even going as far as to tell him:

“Your class has outgrown you… How can you talk about grassroots when you’re looking at things from the Party secretary’s car?”

When Uri complains that a classmate with low grades has a better job than him because he’s a Party member, she defends the decision by pointing out the work Party members undertake while studying: “the functions, the meetings, the hundreds of urgent assignments that people like us didn’t bother with.” Yet, at the same time, she is aware of the system’s flaws:

“If one of our welders wanted to solder a single link in a chain – a procedure that didn’t even take fifteen minutes – he had to chase up a dozen forms and two dozen signatures.”

In the novel, Elisabeth’s ideological and emotional life become entangled – her belief in the GDR’s future is also an assumption of a future which includes her brother. The very closeness of their relationship, which sees Uri confiding his plans for escape to her, is also the reason she wants him to stay. But her belief in her country is not simply a dogmatic repetition of what she has been taught. As Lucy Jones points out:

“Her voice is really modern and bold, her excitement is infectious so that what stays with you is not so much her obsession with the particular idea of socialism, but her passionate, youthful belief in what the future should look like.”

It is this voice, alongside the emotional turmoil of fearing she will lose someone she loves, that gives the novel it’s power. Sixty years on, it is a novel that deserves to be read.

Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl

In the Afterward to his translation of his father’s novel, Michael Hofmann makes the claim that Hofmann senior had two main subjects: art and childhood, and that his later novels (of which Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl is an example) touched, to some extent, on both. Its title character, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, is not a work of fiction, but a German physicist of the eighteenth century. Although a scientist, his fame perhaps mainly rests on his writing. Known as a satirist, he also kept ‘scrap’ books of quotations, sketches, reflections and so on, some of which were published after his death giving him a reputation as an aphorist. (Hofmann also reveals that many of these aphorisms are featured in the novel, though not all of them are genuine). The ‘little flower girl’, too, was a real person, Maria Stechard, whom Lichtenberg met when she was a child of thirteen. She soon moved in with him, and it is this relationship which lies at the centre of the novel.

Lichtenberg is already a focus of curiosity in Gottenberg as he was born with a hunchback:

“Stop, little chappie, they cried, and reached out their hands towards his hunchback.”

Hofmann returns to his treatment repeatedly – people turning round to look at him after they pass, discussing whether his hump is getting bigger or smaller – but the writer’s aim is not simply to elicit sympathy for his character. He is portrayed as vain, particularly in the way he dresses, and he is always on the look-out for attractive women:

“It lifted up the women’s skirts, that was the best thing about the wind. Lichtenberg went out onto the street to keek under a skirt or two. To see the odd ankle and calf, and maybe even a knee.”

When Lichtenberg first sees Maria she is selling flowers and he is immediately besotted:

“She is thirteen, and, I have to say, beautiful. I have never seen such a picture of beauty and gentleness.”

Certainly, his affection for her is genuine, but it is also physical. How should the reader fell about this? Maria’s age has led to comparisons with Lolita, though this rather ignores the very different settings and intentions, but one similarity is the way in which the style to some extent neutralises the predatory nature of the relationship. There is a lightness and liveliness to the narrative which we instinctively associate with Lichtenberg’s character. We see it in colloquial language such as ‘chappie’ and ‘keek’, but also in the short linking paragraphs (“And then?”) and the often exclamatory dialogue. When Maria moves in, this is at first relayed by the choral (and prurient) voice of the town:

“Lucky so and so! It must be the hunchback that does it! But what will he do with that little slip of a thing?”

Far from presenting Maria as a woman, or even an adolescent, Hofmann is clear she is a child:

“The child thanked him for her food and drink, and then she ran off into her room.”

Even when he first sees her naked, Hofmann is at pains to point out her physical immaturity:

“Her breasts were hardly worth mentioning. They hadn’t yet begun.”

The development of their relationship into a sexual one, however, is a slow process – it is a few weeks before “When they happened to touch now she didn’t straightaway shrink back.” In some ways, Lichtenberg is as innocent as she is:

“He had never yet undressed a girl, he needed to learn how it was done.”

These different versions of innocence bring them together. Lichtenberg is also careful to keep his home life separate from his professional life. Always aware of his deformity, he can be jealous, and Maria remains hidden for others in the early part of their relationship. While he thinks of traveling together (“We’ll go out into the world, she’d be happy with that.”) it never happens, in part because he has all the happiness he needs at home. The novel covers only their relationship – it is not a biography of Lichtenberg. Its tone both manages to suggest a lightness in which all such relationships need not be taken too seriously, while at the same time insisting on the depth of feeling involved. It is an unusual book but one which it is difficult not to be moved by.

Billiards at Half Past Nine

Billiards at Half Past Nine is Heinrich Boll’s sixth novel, originally published in 1959 ten years after his first, The Train Was on Time, and available in a 1961 translation by Patrick Bowles. As with much of Boll’s work, it centres on post-war Germany’s relationship to its past, here personified in three generations of the Faehmel family, Heinrich (on whose eightieth birthday the novel is set), his son, Robert, and his grandson, Joseph. All three are architects, and one building in particular is central to the novel’s schematic, the Abbey of St Anthony, which is built by Heinrich, demolished in the war by Robert, and redesigned by Joseph.

The novel is told from a variety of viewpoints – for example, it begins from the point of view of Robert’s secretary, Leonora, who is surprised by his rudeness when she interrupts his daily game of billiards at the Hotel Prinz Heinrich between nine-thirty and eleven, the mystery of which is later touched upon by his father, Heinrich:

“What’s he up to, what does he do, my son, the only one I have left, Leonora?”

In the next chapter, we find Robert in the Prinz Albert where the staff have clear instructions he is not to be interrupted, instructions which are challenged by the arrival of Nettlinger, an acquaintance from Robert’s school days. This chapter is told from the point of view of Jochen, a desk clerk at the hotel, who recognises Robert’s goodness despite his unusual behaviour:

“He’s one of the few people for whom I’d stick my hand in the fire anytime, anytime, d’you understand, this old hand here, corrupt and crabbed with rheumatism.”

This physical representation of age gives some indication of the way in which the past is constantly invading the present for the novel’s characters, often as unwelcome as Nettlinger is in the Prinz Albert. The losses of the past are often to the forefront of their minds: when Heinrich refers to Robert as “the only one I have left” it is because his other children are dead, two in childhood, and Otto, killed in the war. Robert reflects on the loss of his friend Schrella, constantly bullied by Nettlinger and others:

“On the way home they fell on Schrella, dragged him into doorways, beat him up between dustbins and abandoned prams, pushed him down steps into dark cellars, in one of which he had lain a long while with his arm broken…”

He remembers a baseball game in 1935 where he hits the ball so well it is never found, but Schrella is tormented by the other team’s players with the connivance of Nettlinger – it perhaps sticks in Robert’s mind because he knows Nettlinger is desperate to win but still places bullying Schrella above that. Nettlinger, of course, is already part of the Nazi movement – and still an important man after the war, an injustice that torments Boll in so many of his novels. Schrella, meanwhile, has to leave Germany and live in exile. He returns towards the end of the novel, welcomed by Nettlinger – for him it is better if the past is forgotten.

Boll divides his cast using an unusual, quasi-religious symbolism. Schrella describes himself as a ‘lamb’ and tells Robert, “…we’ve sworn never to taste of the Buffalo Sacrament.” This is a little disconcerting at first as it seems to be entirely of Boll’s invention. In the course of the novel, the Buffalo Sacrament is associated with Hindenburg and German imperialism, as well as a Nazi marching song. ‘Lamb’ already has connotations of pacifism and sacrifice – though that one of this group, Ferdi, is executed for attempting to assassinate a leading Nazi suggests it is anti-war rather than non-violent. Robert resists in his own way, becoming a demolitions expert in the army – the very opposite of his father – intent on destroying German buildings to remove them from the line of fire. This culminates in the destruction of the Abbey which he knows is unnecessary, as do the Allies when he is captured days later as the war ends:

“Why did you blow the Abbey sky-high when it so obviously had no tactical or strategic importance whatsoever?”

It does not seem to be a question of his relationship with his father, but a protest at the capitulation of German institutions. Both Robert and Heinrich are invited to the consecration of the new Abbey, and both say they will go while knowing they will not – an illustration of the necessity of pretending the past is forgotten. Robert feels he cannot go as he is not reconciled to “the powers guilty of Ferdi’s death” and Heinrich because he is not

“…reconciled to my son Otto who was my son no longer, only my son’s husk, and I can’t celebrate my reconciliation to a building even if I did build it myself.”

Billiards at Half Past Nine is a complex novel – Boll himself apparently later thought it too schematic in its construction – but it is also very moving in places. It demonstrates the difficult choices faced when a country succumbs to dictatorship and the tensions which remain in the aftermath. Rebuilding alone, it suggests, is not enough.

Getting Dark

How real are other people? This seems to be the question Peter Stamm is asking in his latest collection of short stories, Getting Dark, translated once again by Michael Hofmann. In these twelve stories, characters are attracted to people who don’t exist, to different version of themselves, and even begin to fade from existence entirely.

Perhaps the most obvious example is ‘Supermoon’ where the narrator doesn’t seem to be so much leaving her job as fading away completely. “I’m sure they didn’t mean any harm by it, they were in the elevator, chatting, and they just didn’t notice me,” it begins innocently enough, but soon the narrator will struggle to get anyone to notice them – colleagues, a young man on the tube, even their partner, Hedwig. Initially the narrator can make themselves heard by repetition, speaking a little louder, but soon even that doesn’t seem to work; they stop receiving emails, their colleagues go out to lunch without them, they find their home empty. Their insubstantiality begins to have a physical effect as they struggle to unlock their own door:

“I’m tired, but have a great feeling of lightness, weightlessness.”

In summary it sounds less subtle than it is, but the questions it raises are probed in more straightforward scenarios in stories such as ‘Sabrina 2019’. Here a young woman is asked to model for a statue. Once the statue is put on show, she becomes attached to it, visiting it every day at the gallery. It is bought by a wealthy art collector, Robert, who has (according to the gallerist) “an amazing house”:

“It was strange, but suddenly Sabina envied her silvery double the chance to live in a beautiful house, remote from the unpleasantness of daily life…”

The reality of the statue becomes more attractive to Sabrina than her own reality, and she becomes obsessed with visiting Robert.

The idea of a different life waiting for you can also be seen in ‘Nathigal’, where David sits in a café with a squirrel mask and unloaded pistol in his bag, watching the bank across the street. He tells himself he is planning to rob it, but it soon becomes clear he is far from a hardened criminal, and by the story’s end it is difficult to differentiate reality from daydream, though the causes of David’s unhappiness are clearer. Other characters use fantasy to escape their mundane lives. In ‘The Most Beautiful Dress’, the women working for a design company creating information boards for an archaeological dig become infatuated with the chief archaeologist, Felix:

“He was the George Clooney of dendrochronology, said Nicole, our boss, after their first meeting.”

In ‘Dietrich’s Knee’ a man finds a flirtatious email to his wife from the titular knee. Not wanting her to know he has read it or discover he has deleted it, he sends it again from a different email address which he then uses to correspond with her as ‘Dietrich’. As with many of the stories, the ending is not quite what you would expect.

Interactions with a different version, or at least a different perspective, of reality also occur in ‘Cold Reading’ and ‘First Snow’. In the former, a woman on holiday encounters a medium as she tries to escape a sudden rain shower. Although she is sceptical of all she is told, she is still changed:

“Still, I felt as content as if at the end of a good book or a film I’d enjoyed.”

In the latter, a man heading for a skiing holiday with his family is distracted by work and left at a service station by his wife. When she doesn’t return, he sets off on foot:

“My irritation with Franziska was long since gone, and I took a quite delight in the beauty of the snow-covered hills.”

He eventually comes across a school, and a teacher takes him in, treating him like child and asking him to draw a picture for his wife. As strange as this encounter is, it ultimately makes for a very moving story.

The first story, ‘Marcia from Vermont’, also set in winter, was originally published separately. It brilliantly captures the different versions of reality which exist within memories. The narrator is invited to an artists’ retreat in the USA, a country he visited as a young man. As memories resurface of that earlier visit, he discovers that the retreat is funded by the family of a woman he met at that time, Marcia, with whom he had a relationship that also involved another couple. While there, he also encounters different versions of that period – a story written by the other man, photographs taken by the Marica – which make him reconsider his own memories.

All the stories in Getting Dark probe our relationship with reality in Stamm’s usual provocative manner, but all grounded in ordinary life. For some reason UK publishers only seem interested in his novels, but his short fiction deserves an audience just as much.

Lilly and Her Slave

Lilly and Her Slave is a collection of short stories by Hans Fallada “based on the manuscripts found in the evaluation reports of forensic psychiatrist Ernst Zeimke” and now translated by Alexandra Roesch. In some cases, the stories were known from previously discovered manuscripts, though two here represent revised versions, and a further two are entirely new. Despite this, there is a certain amount of thematic unity to the collections as in most of them the central character is a woman, and the subject is love.

‘The Machinery of Love’ is the longest of the stories at over a hundred pages. The narrator, Marie, tells us that she is “someone who has decided to write in the following pages about her marital and extramarital experiences with various men.” Her attitude is undramatic – she has no intention of leaving her husband as “such a goodbye would require a very firm belief in life,” and this is a faith she no longer has. In fact, she goes on to describe her initial aversion to love as being rooted in the experience of her older sister, Violet, who is raped one night on her way home, and immediately breaks off her engagement, telling no-one what has happened. Eventually she confesses to Marie but forbids her to tell anyone else. Violet never recovers, and Marie tells us that for many years:

“…I felt a loathing and disgust for love… to me this word was intertwined with the idea of a cruel soulless machine that has us all at its mercy.”

It is for this reason that she marries “a good, faithful companion” rather than allowing love to decide her choice. She tells of “three incidences of infidelity” as if to prove that no-one is immune, but writing from a point in her life when:

“I am tired of the deceptions and the detours; I no longer want to be fooled by the machinery of love.”

Our relationship to love is a question Fallada returns to again and again in these stories. ‘Lilly and Her Slave’ also features a female character who wishes to control, love, but here she uses it like a weapon. Spoilt as a child, “she often sat dreaming, imagining herself beautiful, passionate, idolised by all men.” Her dream comes true, but Lilly has an uneasy relationship with her own passion:

“She felt the urge to put her arm around his neck, to kiss him back, to respond to the advances of this strange young man. But it passed, she was overcome with anger…”

This is an example of how Fallada’s characters can verge on caricature, and then complexity will be revealed. This story has two scenes one feels only he could write – when Lilly convinces (well, blackmails) her cousin to allow her to meet his ‘girlfriend’, who turns out to be a prostitute, and the final scene when Lilly wins the love of an older man but can only use that love cruelly against him (more cruelly than you can probably imagine).

Conversely, in ‘The Great Love’ we see a love which lasts through years of difficulties, but this does not necessarily make for a more optimistic story. Thilde and Fritz meet when they are young:

“This was the love she had read about, the great love, and it could never end.”

As time passes, however, Fritz becomes less certain. “Do you really know me?” he asks Thilde. They do marry, but it is not idyllic: “He is strict. He can be mean.” He is an atheist, and they are further divided when she baptises their first child against his wishes. She fears he has another woman; that he cares more for his friend than for her; that he is less and less present in her life. Yet, all this time, she insists she loves him, even as their relationship looks beyond saving. Here, too, love seems dangerous, a delusion that excuses cruelty.

The remaining stories are shorter. ‘Pogg, the Coward’ is also on the theme of love as Pogg, who has lived his life fortuitously, and always to his own benefit, eventually succumbs to a love for which he gives up everything. The final story, ‘Who Can Be the Judge?’, gives us the best clue to Fallada’s writing as he compares the law, “a purely fictitious world, a world of fixed norms” to the real world:

“It is an unreal world, a world that has nothing, nothing in common with life.”

In Fallada’s fiction we find the real world, one where characters are not judged but simply portrayed; for, as he says:

“…no judge can be just, and no judgement can be final.”

This is his great strength as a writer, and one that shines through in these stories.

Women in a River Landscape

Heinrich Boll completed Women in a River Landscape shortly before his death in 1985, with an English translation by David McClintock appearing in 1988. Whether he knew it would be his final novel or not, there is a directness about it, largely created by the absence of a mediating narrator, which suggests the urgency of its message. Boll describes it as ‘a novel in dialogues and soliloquies’ and, on the page, it appears very like a drama script, though there is little in the way of action, and the dialogue is not naturalistic. Its focus, as with so much of Boll’s work, is the corruption of post-war Germany, and the continuing power and influence of individuals and institutions that have escaped justice or, at the very least, shame.

These hidden pasts are evident throughout the novel. In the opening conversation between Wuber and his wife Erika, she refers back to the days when he and his circle of friends were coming into power:

“I saw you drive out to dump the Klossow documents in the lake.”

This disposal takes pace at the behest of Chundt, a powerbroker who continues to appoint ministers (“Chundt always frightened me with his boundless ambition to control heaven and earth”), and also to remove them when they are no longer of any use:

“Plukanski couldn’t be supported any longer: an old wartime story has just emerged.”

These secrets are used within the ‘gang’ to ensure obedience; Chundt threatens Blaukramer:

“And you’d better keep quiet: I now have a few photos in my dossier… The photos show you ordering the men to fire on the poor swine who were trying to escape from a concentration camp…””

Erika has kept these secrets, but other wives have found this harder. Blaukramer’s wife, Elisabeth’s, refusal to keep quiet has led to her incarceration in an institution, “where all the discarded wives live – in a high-class prison”:

“They go there to have their – what’s the expression? – to have their memories corrected.”

Plottinger’s wife, on the other hand, drowned herself in the Rhine – a river that is used throughout as a symbol of all that is hidden away:

“To think of all the different objects that jostle one another down there in the green slime: SS skull and crossbones, and swords with black, white and red tassels…”

The river landscape is also a reminder of the past: the owner of a dilapidated building on the bank refuses to sell as his father was killed in a concentration camp, leaving it instead as a “monument to shame”.

The story itself has a few key points: Erika overhearing the “voice that used to make us all tremble” in her home when the ‘gang’ are meeting, the voice, we assume, of some Nazi with a new identity, the same voice Elisabeth claimed to have heard before being put away. This prompts her to refuse to go to a public event where she is expected with her husband, and also causes some soul-searching on his part. Later it will be Erika who finds that Elisabeth has hanged herself; Plukanski, too, dies from the shock of his dismissal (and a girl dies from an attempted abortion – Chundt is the father – as if to demonstrate how cheap life is to the group). Characters talk of escape – to Cuba, to Chile – particularly the younger generation. Both Church and culture are seen as corrupt – the Church as useful “window-dressing”.  Someone is dismantling the grand pianos of bankers, following the example of Karl, who kept only the castors which he is now using to make a buggy for his son. It is a novel, then, in which symbolism runs deep, and the country is fixed with an accusatory eye. Politicians are blamed (“politics is a dirty business”) but Boll is well aware of the power behind the politicians:

“We politicians collaborate in producing all the shit, and then clearing it all away, so that they can do the dusting without getting any dirt on themselves.”

The fixation with the Church and aristocracy may seem a little dated at times, but we might just as easily recognise the behaviour of contemporary politicians and powerbrokers – Plukanski, for example, has been used because “there wasn’t the slightest trace of spiritual dimension in his make-up.”

Women in a River Landscape is an appropriately elegiac novel, as ageing characters discuss their pasts, their hunger and desperation, and the compromises they have made. Despite Boll’s anger and condemnation, his approach is nuanced, his characters both created by and reacting to circumstances. It is not his easiest, or best, novel, but it has the hypnotic power of a confession.

The Assistant

The Assistant was one of four novels that Robert Walser wrote in the early 1900s, between The Tanners (1906) and Jakob von Gunten (1909). (The fourth, now lost, was a second novel also called The Assistant – “fantastical,” according to translator Susan Bernosky, “where the others are psychological and domestic.”) It is at least partly drawn from life as in 1903 Walser worked as secretary to an inventor in Wadenswil near Zurich – the names of the inventor’s four children remain unchanged in the novel, though the inventor himself undergoes a minor transformation from Carl Dubler to Carl Tobler. The novel opens with the arrival of Tobler’s new assistant, Joseph Marti, sent to the inventor’s villa by an employment agency. (Later we will meet the previous assistant, Wirsich, whose cyclical behaviour of drunkenness and remorse has eventually led to his dismissal). Joseph could not be more pleased with his position, which is in contrast to the poverty he has previously known:

“He took second helpings of each dish on the table. It’s true, he had arrived here from the lower depths of society, from the shadowy, barren, still crannies of the metropolis. It had been months now since he had eaten as well.”

The conversational “it’s true” is typical of Walser’s style, as the narrative flits in and out of Joseph’s point of view both indirectly and directly, with Joseph’s speech frequently accompanied by his thoughts. He is throughout a sympathetic character: lacking in confidence (“Will I be good enough?” he wonders) and perhaps too aware of his flaws (“I have always had trouble comprehending new and unfamiliar things”). The position as assistant is a new start for him, as we can see when he writes to his to his previous landlady:

“Do you still remember how often you had to shake me out of my dull, hermit-like existence and all my wicked habits?”

The letter itself suggests Joseph’s loneliness, and the reason he enjoys feeling part of Tobler’s family, lodging, as he is, in Tobler’s house. Thus he develops a relationship not only with Tobler but with the rest of his family, a relationship which changes when Tobler is away:

“The entire house was a different one when the master was absent. Frau Tobler, too, seemed to be a quite different woman, and as for the children – particularly the two boys – their relief at the absence strict father was visible at quite some distance.”

Joseph regards himself as a part of the Tobler household, particularly when it comes to his sympathy for the youngest daughter, Silvi, a “beaten down, slovenly little creature” with whom he can, perhaps, identify, who is regularly punished for wetting the bed:

“As an employee of the Tobler household, I am obligated to put in a word for Silvi, for Silvi too is a member of this household whose interests I am supposed to represent.”

Though generally meek, Joseph can at times stand up to others, telling Tobler, for example, when he is reprimanded for being a little late that “a few minutes one way or another made little difference.” Despite his love of his position, he seems untroubled by Tobler’s furious response, and he generally retains a calm demeanour in the face of emotion:

“This remark was smashing success! For one thing, Joseph was treated to the sight of a livid face…”

Tobler’s anger, we suspect, partly originates in the fact he has invested money he has inherited into developing his inventions and has yet to see any reward. Much is expected of the Advertising Clock – a clock on which adverts can be displayed. Joseph describes the clock in less business-like terms:

“It’s like as small or large child this clock… like a headstrong child that requires constant self-sacrificing, care and doesn’t even thank one for watching over it. And is this enterprise flourishing, is the child growing? Little progress can be seen.”

In fact, the Tobler household is running out of money, and Joseph’s job becomes increasingly focused on keeping creditors at bay as Tobler tries to raise further money from various sources. This creates some tension in the narrative both for Tobler, threatened with the failure of his enterprise, and Joseph, who may lose his job, but it will not be a surprise to learn Walser is not plot-driven and has plenty of time for detours, including a spell in prison for Joseph as a result of failing to present himself for military service which enters the story rather unannounced. The meandering tale feels like a commentary on Tobler’s capitalist dream: Walser gives us a glimpse into the early days of entrepreneurs, but through the eyes of a man who offers a very different perspective. Far from being driven by future plans, Joseph tends to take each day as it comes. Though lonely, he cares for others – even offering his predecessor, Wirsich, money when he falls on hard times. Joseph is a gentle character who at times seems not of this world, and certainly at odds with the cut-throat world of business. Yet, by the end, we might think he is all the better for it.