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Germany

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers

London: Macmillan, 1937

The Fox of Maulen by Hans Helmut Kirst (1968)

Hans Helmut Kirst
Hans Helmut Kirst, around 1970.

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular German-language authors were experiencing a resurgence: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Junger — even the old stager Erich Maria Remarque — were all active and writing books which are still remembered and probably still read now.

But one author outsold them all during this time. Hans Helmut Kirst had his books regularly in the German best-seller lists, with sales of his forty-eight titles usually hitting around half a million copies each in the domestic market and with over twelve million copies in total worldwide. Yet today Kirst is largely forgotten.

Kirst’s output of fiction was prodigious but he was driven. He was also scriptwriter for eight films produced for the German market (six of which were from his own books); a documentary film-maker; and, on at least one occasion, an actor in a tv series. One of his books was made into a (not very good) big-budget film: The Night of the Generals starred Peter O’Toole, fresh from his success in Lawrence of Arabia. (The script had many notable contributors, including Gore Vidal, Paul Dehn and Joseph Kessel; O’Toole was apparently reluctant to take the part but felt an obligation to the producer Sam Spiegel, because of Lawrence).

kirst - 4 gunner asch books
Hans Helmut Kirst’s Gunner Asch novels in UK Fontana paperback editions.

Despite all this work, if he is remembered at all, Kirst‘s name is usually linked with his creation, Gunner Asch. In a series of four books, the adventures of the titular hero picked up on the literary exploration of the absurdity of military life that has accompanied conflict, from Alphonse de Vigny in the Bourbon restoration through good soldier Schweik’s adventures in the Great War to Hawkeye and Trapper in M*A*S*H.

His books (twenty-four of which were translated into English) fall into four broad categories. First, there are the humorously cynical army novels (like the 08/15 series about the misadventures of Gunner Asch), written from 1955 onwards. Then the historical thrillers, usually based in a military context (Night of the Generals, which appeared in 1963; Officer Factory, also 1963; The 20th of July, 1966; Night of the Long Knives, 1976) which are more serious explorations of the brutalising effects of military life. Then come the later novels, set in contemporary Germany and often crime-based in some way to reveal the seamy side of the post-war German ‘economic miracle’ (Undercover Man, 1970; A Time for Scandal, 1973; A Time for Truth, 1974; A Time for Payment, 1976). Finally, the outliers: the apocalyptic No One Will Escape, 1959 — like Shute’s On the Beach but grimmer; and The Fox of Maulen (published in the U.S. as The Wolves), 1968 – a bit like Fallada’s Alone in Berlin but a little less bleak.

Cover of the UK edition of The Fox of Maulen

This last title is undeservedly forgotten not least because it can stand as an archetype for Kirst’s “anti-war” books. It also has a timelessness as a fable of the corrupting effects of power.

The story revolves around what happens in the (fictitious) village of Maulen in the (real) region of Pomerania between 1932 and 1945. It follows the rise, fall and collapse of the local Nazi party seen through the eyes of one man, Alfons Materna, who is a shrewd, self-reliant and independent local farmer.

The plot is simple, although there are numerous characters. Written in four parts, the story follows the path of Materna’s political awakening. The first two parts deal with his transition from disinterested hostility to active opposition to the bumptious and malign leaders of the local Nazi party. Then through the third section, the period of the Nazi’s grip on the village, Materna has to wriggle ethically to survive. In the final section, the collapse of the village’s existence is traced as Russian tanks roll across the Pomeranian farmlands.

Materna is intrinsically hostile – but initially passively so – to the discipline that the local Nazis want to impose on the villagers and merely wants to get on with his life without interference – and (initially) without interfering in the lives of anyone else. Since the death of his wife, Materna has been used to being left alone to live his life, unmoved by the swirls of political argument, local or national.

His passivity disappears when his younger son is killed in a bungled weapons practice run by the local SA. Seeking some adventure as an alternative to their dull rural existence, both of Materna’s sons had joined the local party for the opportunities it offered for supposed comradeship, possible whoring, and certain excessive drinking. Then, when the effects of the Nazi’s racially-inspired policies begin to encroach upon the farm that Materna’s forefathers have owned for generations, his world is threatened and he feels forced to act.

Spurred by personal dislike of the strutting local Nazi leaders, Materna moves from passivity to individuals to outright opposition to the Nazi party in the village – brought about mostly by a mix of his grief, an innate contrariness to authority, and a streak of basic decency. His weapon (initially) is not sustained political argument (for he has no articulated opposition to what is going on) or even overt violence but barbed flattery, pricking the pomposity and incompetence of the local Nazi functionaries.

Later, as Materna’s contempt for the individual members of the local party grows, he increases the tempo of his campaign and progresses to using ridicule, blackmail and jealousy. Based on marital discord and prompted by unfounded rumour, he tries to wreck the relationships inside the structure of the SA. The story is told to show how Materna (always with his own interests at the forefront) brings down the ambitions of individuals with less guile, cunning or foresight. Materna is no saint. He is both greedy and generous, hard and sentimental, morally upright and debased at the same time.

At first, Materna’s low-key rebellion is purely a matter of self-interest. His farm workers – who often came from those parts of society that the Nazis wanted to eliminate – are crucially important to his business. But as they become demonised and persecuted, he begins to feel a sense of identification with the injustice, and organises a sort of underground railway foe the persecuted, which gradually comes to dominate his life. He reluctantly helps more and more people, often ones previously unknown to him, to escape to less dangerous places (in the mid-1930s even Poland seemed safer than turbulent Germany).

This underground railway becomes a business in itself and towards the middle of the book Materna has to realise that it is now longer possible to run it safely, together with the farm. And so he bargains with the local SA chief to authorize the travel of two “undesirables”: one of his trusted workers – a Jew – who will take charge of the other end of the railway; and a disabled woman he has come to love, whose life would be threatened were she to stay.

Although Materna could have left with the departing group, he chooses to stay to fulfil the economic terms of the bargain. He also explains that he wants to stay “to see what happens and have some fun,” a desire he explains is activated by both personal animosities and by a growing dislike of what is happening to his (specifically) local world.

Of course, as the book draws to a close Materna cannot escape his fate any more than can the other villagers of Maulen. Kirst’s ingenious ending is in keeping with the moral ambiguity of his characters.

But there is a deeper – and troubling — aspect to the book beyond the explication of the moral ambiguities and compromises in the story. The novel deals with moral choices, ethical dilemmas and personal deceits. A book about moral dilemmas cannot be judged without examining the moral record of the author himself. Here the evidence is not clear cut.

Kirst was born and grew up in the district of Masuren, a backwater of the then-German region of Pomerania. He joined the German Army in 1933, at the age of 19 and in the pit of the Great Depression. He became a member of the Nazi Party soon after. So, while it can be assumed that he bases the characters in his book on real-life acquaintances, it’s clear that Kirst was not describing his own experiences.

By the middle of the war, Kirst had risen from the ranks to the level of lieutenant in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Although he never saw front-line action, he was appointed as the political instruction officer for his unit — entrusted with explaining, justifying and proselytising for Nazism and its policies.

After the war, Kirst claimed that he had confused the party of National Socialism with the country of Germany, and that he had been unaware that “one was in a club of murderers”. But can that really be so, given his record and position? Who can say from this distance whether Kirst repented and purged his guilt through writing or whether he just sublimated his experiences? Certainly, he went through a process of formal ‘de-Nazification’. Unlike others – Gunter Grass for instance — he never sought to conceal his past. But since Kirst never let a good idea have only one outing he employs the basic idea of subversion from The Fox of Maulen again in his later novel Party Games (1980), although this time with less poignancy and broader humour. The question then arises “Is the repetition evidence not of repentance but just commercial exploitation of experience?”

Kirst’s books were often criticised for subordinating the horror of events in Germany during the reign of the Nazis to a sequence of humorous incidents at a local level, which consequently glossed over the wider social and historical context. Some critics saw this as partly an act of self-exculpation. Kirst was writing — and his books were published — at a time when the problem of the recent past and the taint that had on the New Germany were matters of constant public discussion.

In one way or another, all of Kirst’s books deal with the effects on individuals as they shift from being members of a turbulent civil society prior to the rise of Hitler to followers of (or resisters against) doctrinaire Nazism and finally survivors or victims of the de-Nazification process .

Cover of The Wolves, the US edition of The Fox of Maulen

Coincidentally — deliberately? ironically? – The Fox of Maulen was first published in Germany as Die Wolfe (the US edition carries the original title, The Wolves) in 1967, a year after Kurt Kiessinger became Chancellor of West Germany. Kiessinger was the first prominent former member of the Nazi party to achieve a high office in the West German government, having been a lawyer in the Kammergericht, the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, between 1935 and 1940, and having joined the Nazis in 1933).

Regardless of the motive, by reducing the focus to the local and personal, Kirst was able to show the impact of huge events on the individual lives of those who were “ordinary” – often resentful of the hand life had dealt them, not usually particularly active politically, not especially well-educated and not influential. He could take characters who, despite their handicaps of class or status or lack of wealth, saw opportunities to achieve their ambitions when their society developed in a different political direction. His stories thus became fables of lasting relevance, illuminating with mordant humour the havoc created by flawed characters placed by chance in positions to become agents of influence. His novels entertain and instruct (for those who are alert to the parallels). Change the names and the contexts and the basic stories in many of Kirst’s novels (and especially The Fox) can be applied to many other political events of the years of this century – never mind the events of 70 years ago. This, to me, is the mark of a novel of lasting value.

The Fox of Maulen is both the high water mark of Kirst’s writing and the high water mark of his examination of the morality of resisting or rejecting — making accommodations to survive in a world where moral choices cannot be resolved into simply black or white.

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

The Fox of Maulen, by Hans Helmut Kirst
London: William Collins, 1968

Life or Theater? An Autobiographical Play by Charlotte Salomon (1943/1981)

Charlotte Salomon’s “autobiographical play” Life or Theater? is often described as a work of Holocaust art. It’s true that Salomon created it while living as a Jewish German refugee in the south of France and that she was arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and murdered there on 10 October 1943. And the repression of the Jews by the Nazis is a backdrop whose shadows grow longer as the story reaches its climax.

But Life or Theater? is first and foremost a story of private tragedies, tragedies whose full details have only gradually come to light over the course of decades.

Beween July 1940 and February 1943, Salomon, daughter of a wealthy Berlin surgeon, Dr. Albert Salomon, told a story in nearly 1,300 paintings on 10×13-inch sheets of paper with a narrative of 32,000 words of dialogue and description inscribed on their backs. From these, she selected 769, which she entrusted to her French doctor in Villefranche, with instructions for him to pass them on to Ottilie Moore, the German-American millionaire in whose villa Salomon and her grandparents were living. A few months later, she and her husband were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed, probably on the day of their arrival.

Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France, 1939 or 1940.
Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France 1939 or 1940.

By the time of her arrest, Salomon’s grandfather was dead. She had killed him, preparing an omelette laced with the poison veronal. As Toni Bentley wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article, “Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal.”

Life or Theater? itself is entirely personal, despite its historical context. Every character is someone from Salomon’s life. Its dramas are family dramas, its emotions individual and specific to her. And it is a work of self exploration, though the explorer admits her expedition is incomplete. As she wrote in a preface to what she described as “Ein Singespiel” — a libretto, if you will:

Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole, so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.

The suicide of Charlotte Knare.

The story opens in darkness. The first painting shows a Berlin street at night, what appears to be a bridge, and a sequence of figures — a woman at first but growing less distinct — leading to the darkness at the lower lefthand corner. “One November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ home and threw herself into the water,” the text tells us. Knarre is the name she gives her mother’s family, the Grünwalds; Charlotte Knarre is the aunt for whom she is named, the aunt whose suicide four years before Salomon’s birth proved only the first in a series of deaths that shaped her life.

In the next scene, Dr. Albert Kann, a young military doctor, courts and marries Franziska Knarre. Charlotte is born in 1917, but her mother suffers from depression and, within six panels afterwards, is shown taking an overdose of opium. Though she is found before it can take effect, she then jumps to her death while recouperating at her parents’ apartment. In reality, nine years passed between Charlotte’s birth and her mother’s suicide.

charlotte waits for her mother to come at night
Charlotte waits for her mother to come at night.

Charlotte struggles to understand her mother’s death. She leaves a letter on her mother’s gravestone: “Dear Mommy, please write to me.” She sits up nights expecting her mother to visit, like an angel.

Her life improves somewhat with the arrival of a governess, but then, in 1930, Dr. Kann meets and marries Paulinka (Paulina Lindberg in real life), an aspiring singer. For much of the next few years and several hundred pages, the focus shifts from Charlotte to Paulinka — her increasing popularity as a singer, the obsession of an older man, a theater director, for her and then Paulinka’s own obsession with a poet and mystic named Amadeus Daberlohn (“penniless Mozart”).

For Charlotte, Paulinka is a figure of fascination for her beauty, talent, and glamorous lifestyle — and a source of intense jealousy, first as a competitor for her father’s affection and then as Charlotte herself becomes obsessed with Daberlohn. At the same time, Charlotte learns from her grandmother that she has experienced even more tragedies that the suicide of their two daughters. Her brother and sister also took their lives; her husband has had affairs, stays with her only for the sake of appearances.

Der Sturmer announcement of boycott of Jews
Der Sturmer announcement of the boycott of Jews.

History begins to intrude upon this private story at the start of Act Two: “The swastika — a symbol of bright hope!” reads the text over a picture of brownshirts marching down a street, featuring the date “30.I.1933.” By the next panel, however, Der Sturmer announces the boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Kann is dismissed from his university post.

Two panels of Daberlohn's monologues.
Two panels of Daberlohn’s monologues.

But the greater shadow that descends over Charlotte’s world is that of Amadeus Daberlohn. Page after page after page appears with a series of his head and lines of dialogue –or rather, monologue. At one point, there are fifteen straight pages of his head and his talk; at another, nearly a dozen of Daberlohn shown reclining, the images and words growing more rushed and indistinct. One has to wonder whose madness is being depicted: Daberlohn’s or Charlotte’s?

Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.
Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.

Charlotte and Daberlohn meet away from the Kann’s home. He encourages her affection: “You are so beautiful. When you smile, your hands smile too.” The two are shown kissing. Embracing on a park bench. Arm-in-arm on the street.

And the focus shifts again, from Charlotte and Daberlohn to Daberlohn himself. To his attempt to create a masterpiece, an adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve into a contemporary setting. He superimposes this story onto his own relationship with Charlotte. Then he turns his back on her and his “masterpiece” becomes a version of the Resurrection blended with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. “My hopes, therefore, life with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path,” he writes. Daberlohn’s “masterpiece” seems more than a little creepy as portrayed by Charlotte, still clearly infatuated with the man at a distance of some years.

Suddenly, it is 1938, and the public and private tragedies converge and accelerate. The assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan incites the destruction of Jewish shops and properties in Kristallnacht. Dr. Kann is sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Paulinka manages to get him released and they leave Germany for the Netherlands.

After Grandmother Knarre's suicide attempt.
After Grandmother Knarre’s suicide attempt.

Charlotte joins her grandparents in France. There, her grandmother attempts to hang herself. In the aftermath, her grandfather reveals more dark family secrets. The grandmother makes another attempt, throwing herself out a window like her daughter had. And succeeding like her daughter had.

Charlotte talks with her grandfather
Charlotte talks with her grandfather.

Yet, somehow, Charlotte manages to find hope. She draws energy from the warmth and beauty of southern France. “You know, Grandpa,” she says, “I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again.” To which he replies, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!”

“She had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths,” Charlotte writes of her work over the year following her grandmother’s suicide. “And from that came: Life or Theater?”

This ending omits the poisoned omelette. And none of the words in Salomon’s text touch on the question that naturally arises when one learns of it: what was Salomon’s real motivation for killing her grandfather? It is hard not to look for answers in the pictures, however. Is there another untold story, a story about abuse, lurking in the many dark pages of Life or Theater?, written beneath the pages and pages of talking heads and feverish monologues, in the frenzied speed that seems to have driven Salomon’s brush throughout so much of this project?

The last panel of Life or Theater?
The last panel of Life or Theater?

The last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on the beach, looking out over the blue Mediterranean as she paints or sketches. On her back are painted the words Leben Oder Theater. When I first read the book, I assumed the question was being posed as a choice between Life (as in real life) and Theater (as in Art). But now I wonder if Salomon intended it to be read differently: as a choice between Life (her own desire to draw inspiration from the beauty around her, to put the world together again) and Theater, as in the Greek tragedy, the family drama that the women in her family seemed to feel condemned to sacrifice themselves to.

Life or Theater? has appeared several times in English, each time with more material as new papers and paintings are discovered. The best and most comprehensive was the 2017 edition from the Overlook Press. Unfortunately, this edition is already out of print and hard to find. Taschen’s edition from the same year is still available, though it’s slightly abridged. Previous versions appeared in 1963, with a foreword by the theologian Paul Tillich, and in 1981 following the exhibition of 250 paintings at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam.

In all cases, the book is presented as an art book — large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel. Indeed, many of its images will seem familiar to today’s readers, much more accustomed to the presentation of graphic novels.

Take this image from early in the book, showing Charlotte’s mother and father at the hotel when they spend their wedding night. Three wordless panels as they progress up the staircase, into the room, and into the bed.

The wedding night of Charlotte's parents.
The wedding night of Charlotte’s parents.

In 1943, this would have seemed novel, more like three shots from a film than any painting. But we can easily picture similar images from a book by Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown or Jimmy Corrigan. And I do hope that one day some editor will have the courage to package the book in this way. Not only because it seems truer to the spirit of the book, but also because its readership will remain limited as long as reading it means holding a great ten-pound lump in the lap for hours at a time.

Life or Theater? is one of the most intense and moving works of autofiction I’ve ever read, and I highly encourage others to discover it, even in ten-pound lump form.

Life or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon
New York: Overlook Press, 2017

No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar) (1934)

Title page of No Right to Live and Esther Grenen (Maria Lazar)

Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing firm. A man bumps into him, then disappears into the crowd. When von Ufermann reaches his gate, he finds his ticket, his passport, his wallet are gone.

At that point, most people would contact the police, try to arrange for replacements, contact the bank in Frankfurt. But von Ufermann surrenders to fate. “Oh, well! I don’t suppose old Hebenwerth would have given in anyway!” he shrugs, and hails a cab to take him back into the city. The theft has presented him with an opportunity to step away from the pressures of money, work, family, social status, the chaotic German economy. A hiatus, a moment of suspension:

Ufermann was almost ashamed of himself, but he could not help it. He was actually delighted at not having flown to Frankfurt. Slowly he paced a few steps. Now he had plenty of time at his disposal, the whole morning belonged to him and not to the business. No matter how many people rang him at the office, sorry he wasn’t there, he was away. No need to inquire about Irmgard’s health or dictate any letters, nor would he see the gloomy face of old Boss, who knew everything, who knew things that only a confidential clerk could know and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. No need to consider when and where to tell Gierke to pick him up. He was simply going for a walk, just like anybody else. The sun shone, it was actually bright and warm.

And then the plane von Ufermann was supposed to be on crashes.

In No Right to Live, the novelist offers her protagonist a chance to escape from his life. A bit like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Ernst von Ufermann gets a chance to see what the world looks like without him. For his widow and business partner, the cloud has a silver lining: a life insurance policy worth millions of marks, enough to bail out the firm and leave the grieving wife even wealthier than before.

With only the spare change in his pockets, however, von Ufermann soon finds himself grappling with the practical matter of survival. His mistress, a small-time actress, put him up for a night or two, then introduces him to a petty criminal who arranges for von Ufermann to travel to Vienna, complete with a borrowed passport and a new identity of Edgar von Schmitt, to deliver a mysterious packet to contacts there.

In Vienna, “Herr von Schmitt” finds he’s moved from relying on the goodwill of crooks to navigating the complex loyalties of a group of young National Socialist fanatics:

“Death to the Jews.” He was no Jew, he wasn’t even interested, he had never bothered about such things. Death! An ugly word. Death. Perhaps it really did mean something to him. In the street they were now singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. Did that concern him? Death, death.

He also realizes that every day he continues to allow the lie of Ernst von Ufermann’s death to play out he implicates himself ever more deeply in a case of insurance fraud. What he’d imagined at first as a momentary break from the demands of his life proves to be a descent into an ever more powerful vortex of chaos. And when he does eventually manages to make his way back to Berlin, he learns that, unlike George Bailey, everyone seems quite a bit happier without him.

His only respite are the moments when he can become completely anonymous:

Who was the man in the leather jacket leaning against the dirty corridor-window with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Did no one know him? No, no one knew him. He gazed out at the black fields, the black woods flying past in the white and wintry air. The roofs of humble cottages stood out black and the pine-trees, stark and bare, were black too. The sound of voices came from the compartment. They scarcely noticed when he left the hot, stifling atmosphere in which they sat. They showed no surprise at his not taking off his shoes at night or propping himself up against his neighbour and snoring with half open mouth as they did. They never thought of saying “sorry” or “excuse me.” It was more by luck than anything else that they did not drop their greasy sandwich-paper on his lap. No, no one knew him.

No Right to Live illustrates the problem with the fantasy of escaping from a life you find unbearable. First, there’s no guarantee that the new life you devise is any better than the first one. And second, if you do then try to step back into the life you left behind, it’s like trying to eat off a plate that’s been shattered and pieced back together. These stories never end well.

Wishart ad for No Right to Live
Wishart advertisement for No Right to Live

When it was published by Wishart in England in 1934, No Right to Live was almost guaranteed to be forgotten. Wishart’s ad claimed the book had been banned by the Nazis, but in reality, the German and Austrian publishers knew well enough not to bother even trying to get it passed the Party censors. Even Wishart was concerned not to aggravate the German authorities and their sympathizers in England by pressing the book’s anti-Nazi content too far and chose not only to delete certain passages from Gwenda David’s translations but to insert a few things of their own.

Even without comparing No Right to Live with its original German text, it’s not hard to see that something was lost, if not in translation, then at least in publication. There are several points at which the narrative jerks forward somewhat unexpectedly, almost as if pages are missing. It’s not surprising, then, that there were almost no reviews of No Right to Live in the English press.

By the time No Right to Live appeared, its author had herself escaped from her old life and taken on an assumed name. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1895, Maria Lazar grew up among the elite of Austrian culture alongside Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig. Oskar Kokoschka painted her posed with a parrot in his 1916 Dame mit Papagei. Thomas Mann dismissed her first novel Die Vergiftung (The Poisoning) for its Penetranter Weibsgeruch (“penetrating woman smell”).

In 1923, Lazar married a Swedish journalist, Friedrich Strindberg, which gave her Swedish citizenship and the means to later flee her native country safely. The couple separated and in 1933, living in Berlin and uncomfortable with the prospect of living under Hitler’s regime, she accepted an invitation from the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis to spend the summer at her home on the island of Thurø, where they were soon joined by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. Lazar never returned to Austria.

She adopted the pseudonym of Esther Grenen, which she thought sounded more Nordic, and Lazar and her daughter Judith later moved to Stockholm in 1939. She died there in 1948, having committed suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer.

German and Dutch editions of No Right to Live: Leben Verboten and Leven Verboden
German and Dutch editions: Leben Verboten! from Das Vergessene Buch and Leven Verboden! from Van Maaskunt Haun

The original German text of the novel did not appear until 2020. A young Austrian and fan of neglected books, Albert C. Eibl, had published Lazar’s first and last novels, Die Vergiftung and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut (The Natives of Maria Blood) through his one-man publishing house Das Vergessene Buch (The Forgotten Book). He was able to obtain Lazar’s typescript from the estate of Lazar’s daughter Judith and published the book, accompanied by a commentary by Prof. Johann Sonnleitner of the University of Vienna, in March 2020.

Leben Verboten! has been a commercial and critical success in Austria and Germany. Austrian TV channel Ö1 selected it as their book of the month for July 2020, writing that,

It is amazing with what clairvoyance and sharpness Maria Lazar describes the rise of National Socialism at the beginning of the thirties. The novel moves on rapidly, sometimes even has comical sides and is still oppressive in the description of the inhuman, ideologically cruel underpinned plans of National Socialism. One follows this — officially dead — Ernst von Ufermann through the days and weeks, as the political climate heats up threateningly. The book, which is a crime story, a psychological study and a political thriller at the same time, plays with the literary means of confusion, double life and more or less big rip-offs and impresses with quick scene changes and striking dialogues across all levels.

According to WorldCat.org, there are just nine copies of No Right to Live available in libraries worldwide. I obtained a PDF of the book courtesy of Meta Gemert, a Dutch writer, translator, and publisher, who will be releasing a Dutch edition, Leven Verboden! based on the original German manuscript from her Van Maaskant Haun Publishers in October 2021. Meta tells me that she’s trying to convince NYRB Classics to contract a new English translation of Leben Verboten!. If she does, it would follow the path of Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, which was a best-seller when it was reissued in Germany, in Dutch by Van Maaskant Haun as De Effingers in March 2020, and is rumored to be slated for publication by NYRB Classics in 2023. In the meantime, however, if you’re interested in reading No Right to Live in PDF, despite its shortcomings, drop me an email at [email protected].

No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar)
London: Wishart & Co., 1934

The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre (1948)

Cover of The House Without a Roof by Joel Sayre

“Before the all-out bombings of Berlin began in November 1943, there were six houses on the Hofmann’s street,” Joel Sayre writes. “Now, in July 1945, there were, by official reckoning, one and a half, of which the house that Lilo lived in was reckoned as one.” Though it looked like an intact house from the street, its roof had been destroyed by an RAF incendiary bomb in early 1944 and the attic floor served in place — except when it rained hard or long.

The House Without a Roof is a story of how ordinary people survive under desperate conditions. But unlike other books about the early years of Germany’s recovery from the war, such as James Stern’s The Hidden Damage (1947) and The Smoking Mountain (1951), this book is as much about survival under the Nazis as it is about survival after their downfall.

That the Hofmanns made it through the rise of the Nazis and the war with their home and selves relatively intact was due to a combination of luck and wit. Hedi, the wife, was the daughter of a Jewish soldier killed on the Western Front in World War One, which made her, under the Nuremberg Laws, a Mischling — half Jew, half Aryan, and thus prohibited from numerous rights. Neither Hedi nor Fritz supported Hitler’s policies, but they soon found it necessary to avoid being singled out for retribution.

In turn, Lilo, their daughter, learned to blend in. One day, Lilo came home, upset that the grace she’d become used to saying at lunch had changed. Instead of the traditional,

Come, Lord Jesus,
Be our guest,
Let these gifts
To us be blessed.

The pupils were instructed to say,

Fold your hands
And bow your head,
To Adolph Hitler pray;
For he gives our daily bread,
And all our wants he doth allay.

Lilo asks to be moved to a different school, but Hedi knows that under the Nazi’s scheme for standardizing the Nazification of German institutions , the Gleichschaltung, every kindergartener would now be saying this prayer. So, Lilo simply has to accept and go along. “Remember that it’s very, very dangerous to say that you don’t like Hitler, so you mustn’t ever tell our secret to anybody, ever, ever.” Just keep reminding yourself, Hedi tells her daughter, “Das Wunder ist ein Schwindel” (This miracle is a fraud).

Luck often brings the Hofmanns under its umbrella. One of tenants in their apartment house is a sculptor whose heroic busts are favorites among the Nazi elite and the other residents enjoy the protection accorded him. One day, a nurse in a neighboring apartment takes Lilo to visit the hospital where she works, where she meets Frau Ley, wife of Reichsleiter Robert Ley, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party. The Reichsleiter arrives, clearly drunk, and becomes enraged when he spots a crucifix on the wall. He rips it down and begins smashing the fixtures. Lilo is quietly escorted out and told the matter is not to be spoken of.

Berlin in early 1946
Berlin in early 1946.

Their greatest ordeal, however, comes when Fritz Hofmann, a strong, tall, and Nordically handsome man with a university degree, is invited to become a member of the SS, the most elite — and most extreme — element of Nazi Party. The idea sickens Fritz, but he recognizes this is an offer he cannot refuse. After considering the limited options before him, Fritz and Hedi — with the help of a friendly doctor — contrive a solution: Fritz will go mad. He benefits from having seen how his own father behaved (and was treated) when he went insane years before.

In the longest section of the book, Sayre recounts the extraordinary lengths and intricate maneuvers involved in convincing the doctors and SS officers that Fritz is, indeed, insane while avoiding becoming a victim of the state’s mental health system. The key to Fritz’s performance is his taking a pro-Nazi position more extreme and passionate than even the most fervent follower. He takes to drawing his visions of the ultimate triumph of the cause:

His masterpiece was an SS Armageddon on top of a mountain in the Urals, under a lowering sky. The central figures were Himmler — winged, of course — and Jesus Christ shaking hands…. About the two central figures stood a hierarchy of Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Sepp Dietrich, the Waffen-SS general, the smiling Standartenführer who had offered Hofmann the commission, and many others. Here and there, a wounded SS angel heiled Himmler and Jesus from the ground.

One comes away in awe of Fritz Hofmann’s ingenuity and stamina.

The Hofmanns also survived the almost constant Allied bombing that Berlin endured from 1943 on. Lacking a robust and deeply-buried subway system like London and Moscow, Berlin had few good options for sheltering its residents. The choices were hunkering down in a trench or huddling in a crowded basement with neighbors. The government began providing free postcards for contacting friends and relatives:

We are living
We have had deaths
We have been [half]/[considerably]/[totally] bombed out

These statements were thought to be sufficient to cover all situations.

The House Without a Roof is a remarkably light and sane account of a dark and crazy time, which is a tribute to the character of both the Hofmanns and Joel Sayre. Though none of his work is in print today, Sayre was considered one of the very best of The New Yorker’s exceptional team of reporters. As editor William Shawn later wrote of Sayre, “he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” My copy of The House Without a Roof came from the collection of James and Tania Stern and bears the following inscription from Joel Sayre:

To Jimmy Stern and his delightful missus whose first name, heard in a moment of booze, unfortunately escapes me. In sincere admiration.

The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre
New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948

The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw (1959)

Covers of The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

The Hiding Place opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work.

“The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.”

Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in The Hiding Place, Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany.

This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead, it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completely soundproofed.

As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end.

Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist.

Covers of The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly:

After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about?

Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him to do.”

Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight.

Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. The Hiding Place manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction.

Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard in the US television production of The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”

Robert Shaw 1958

The Hiding Place was Robert Shaw’s first novel. And though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, The Sun Doctor (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. The Flag, is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s The Spire. The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. A Card from Morocco (1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, are long out of print.

The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw
London: Chatto & Windus, 1959

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp (1970)

Cover of Kuno, the son in Renate Rasp’s novel, A Family Failure, wishes he could be as lucky as Gregor Samsa. When Gregor was transformed into a monstrous cockroach, at least his family had the decency to reject him. Kuno’s family — specifically his stepfather (who prefers to be referred to as “Uncle Felix”) — wants to keep him AND turn him into a monster. It is Uncle’s plan to transform Kuno into a tree.

“Needless to say everyone can choose the way he wants to live. Man is born free,” Uncle tells Kuno. At that moment, Kuno was free to learn how to grasp things with tongs because Uncle Felix has cut his hands off. This is in preparation for his arms being shaped into branches.

This distresses Kuno’s mother, who invited Mr. Pettkola, the artificial limb manufacturer’s agent, to the house to discuss providing Kuno with artificial hands. But Kuno is too smart to let his mother off that easily. Better that she continue to watch “the sight of my tongs, the swellings of my stumps.”

Uncle Felix’s plan is meticulous, full of intermediate steps, requiring years to be carried out. “We’ll have to change your diet. No meat, no sausages, no butter. Your mother knows it. Only vegetable fats, a lot of vegetables and water, above all water, more and more water.” Uncle knows just how to manipulate the boy’s emotions: “If this littel sacrifice is too much for you say so at once, then I’ll know where I stand, and we can spare ourselves a lot of trouble before we even start.” Becoming a tree is a matter of family pride. Uncle Felix certainly isn’t undertaking all this trouble for himself. This is a joint endeavor. “You do understand,” he tells Kuno, “that there must be no disagreements between us all, not now.”

One day, Uncle rousts Kuno early. Standing him in the kitchen, he carefully wraps the boy’s legs in wire to hold them together. He wraps bandages over the eyes until no light penetrates. “Six months from now, and you’ll be able to stand the sun without any bandages. Hours of it. You won’t be able to see any more.” He fills the boy’s ears with wax. Kuno is ready to begin practicing being a tree.

As grim as the slow, calculating mutilation of Kuno is to read, one cannot help be aware that, writing in the late 1960s, as a prosperous West Germany was leaving its Nazi past behind, Renate Rasp’s story was not realism but satire of the most savage order. The older generation destroying its young by forcing them into an absurdly unnatural mold. The mother as representative of the accommodators: “She wants to exonerate uncle. He has done what he could, like a father.” If there has been a failure, it is Kuno’s, in failing to shape himself to Uncle’s ideals. These were painful themes from the country’s recent past.

The German title of A Family Failure was Ein ungeratener Sohn, which roughly translates to “An unruly son.” At no point in this book does anyone — not neighbors, not passing acquaintances, not men from the shops — question what Uncle is doing. True, his methods might be a little severe, but then it’s clear that Kuno is not always trying his hardest.

The satire of A Family Failure/Ein ungeratener Sohn may have been too much at the time for readers to take, but the book remains just as neglected in Germany as with English readers. It begs to be rediscovered, for it’s one of the most powerful and unforgettable parables of the dangers of an older generation taking too much control in shaping the destiny of a younger one.

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp, translated from the German by Eva Figes
New York: The Orion Press, 1970

The Smoking Mountain, by Kay Boyle (1951; 1963)

Cover of 1963 edition of The Smoking Mountain
In 1948, the American writer Kay Boyle left France, where she had spent most of the previous 25 years to live in Germany. Germany was then an occupied country, split between the Soviets, French, British, and Americans into four zones of military administration. Whether she was making amends for sitting out France’s own time of occupation in the safety of America, or spurred by the call of The New Yorker editor Harold Ross for “fiction from Germany,” or just interested in a unique place in time, Boyle was to find in the experience the inspiration to write the dozen stories and articles collected in The Smoking Mountain.

Boyle took her title from a passage by the German novelist and anti-Nazi journalist, Theodor Plievier: “…the people ceased to exist as a people and became nothing but fuel for the monstrous, smoking mountain, the individual became nothing but wood, peat, fuel oil, and finally a black flake spewed up out of the flames.” The Germany she witnessed was barely beginning to recover. Most city centers were still fields of rubble. Gaunt men, women, and children still tramped along the roads, either fleeing from the Soviet zone or trying to return to homes and families they left during the war. As William Shirer wrote in his foreword to the 1963 edition of The Smoking Mountain, the Germany of 1948 “is not a pretty place for human beings, either the conquered or the conquerors. The cities are largely a mass of ruins, the rubble piled high wherever you look. The Germans, who have lost another great war they expected to win, are understandably still in a daze.”

Frankfurt, 1947
Frankfurt, 1947

Many of the men, former soldiers often returning from POW camps outside Germany seemed more like ghosts than living beings. One of Boyle’s Americans describes an itinerant ex-POW digging up potatoes for a few pfennig as “a figure so eloquent in its suffering, so dramatically conceived, that it might have been a portrait done in sombre oils, the dark, despairing eyes, not of a living man but of an El Greco head, following him now from where the canvas was placed upon a museum’s shadowy wall.” Another finds it difficult to enjoy the folk dances being performed for a party of American occupation VIPs when he notices how close they are to starvation:

It seemed to him that the threads of their necks must snap in two, unable to bear the weight of the fleshless skulls they carried, and that their bones would pierce the carnival lace and tinsel of their disguise, and expose them for the skeletons they were. He could hear the girl’s hand striking the tambourine with which she danced, and he could not bring himself to turn his head and see again the bony stalks of her white arms lifted, like the arms of those who have already perished reaching from the grave. And the young man, in his matador’s suit and his cracked, black, patent-leather pumps, danced his desperate, intricate steps before her, his legs as brittle and thin as sticks of kindling in his cotton stockings, the brass coins jingling with avarice on his tricorner hat. And no one else looked at them, it seemed to Rod Murray; no one else dared watch them as they danced away across the parquet floor.

Frankfurt American Post Exchange, mid-1950s

In glaring contrast is the wealth and health of the Americans and their Post Exchanges, clubs, cocktail parties, and commissaries:

But once you stepped from the German city street, and into the Commissary, here, for better or worse, was the look of home. Metal push-wagons waited in a double row in the overheated entranceway, as they waited in the chain stores of any Stateside city you might name. Mrs. Furley showed her identification to the German girl seated at the desk, and picked up a meat number, and then she moved on with the others, as she had day after day of the year that had just elapsed—moved on with the young women in their saddleback shoes and bobby socks, pushing her wagon as they pushed theirs before them, moved into the thick of it with the matrons, the teen-age girls, the displaced grandmothers, some of them newly come from the States, who clung to the handles of their vehicles as if to the last remaining vestiges of a civilization they had always known….

On the shelves which lined and bisected the vast low hall were stacked the familiar cans and bottles—the names of Campbell, and Heinz, and Van Camp, and Fould, and Kellogg, to reassure the exiled, and beans and pancakes illustrated in color so that the fears of the lost and the bewildered might be allayed.

For some Americans, however, life on post in Germany was better than life back home. In “Home,” a black G.I. befriends a skinny Germany boy he spots shivering in the rain, takes him into the Post Exchange, and buys him a new set of clothes, including a warm coat and sturdy shoes. When the German clerk checking him out chastises the G.I. for spoiling the boy, he replies, “Well, at home … at home, ma’am, I never had much occasion to do for other people, so I was glad to have had this opportunity offered me,”

The best piece, however, is the introduction—at over seventy pages by far the longest in the book. In large part, it reprints Boyle’s account for The New Yorker of the trial of Heinrich Baab, a thuggish low-ranking member of the S.S. known as “The Terror of the Frankfurt Jews.” Unlike the Nuremberg Trials and other tribunals conducted by the Occupation forces, Baab’s trial took place in a German court, with German judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense attorney. And unlike most of the victims of the high-ranking Nazis tried in Nuremberg, many of Baab’s victims sat in court and watched their former persecutor as he sat in the dock. “If they were not actually the murdered,” Boyle writes, “they were those whose annihilation had been attempted, or they were of the flesh and blood of those who had died.”

As Boyle describes him, Baab seems more intent on snacking than on the proceedings:

He had a pallid, bloated face, this forty-one year-old Frankfurt citizen, and he wore a khaki shirt, the collar of which seemed tight around his fleshy neck. His broad rayon tie, which had apparently been striped in yellow and brown in its time, was now faded, and his heavy head, with the front half of the skull naked of hair, hung sideways. For, despite the fact that he was on trial for the murder of fifty-six other Frankfurt citizens, he was concerned with some kind of tidbit, some kind of nut, which his fingers kept shelling out of sight below the panels of the dock. With his head inclined at this angle, the polished area of his broad, flat skull was mercilessly exposed, and his blunt-fingered heavy hand could be seen only at those moments when he contrived to slip a nut into his mouth. As he prepared the next morsel of food for consumption, his sagging jowls went surreptitiously into motion, and his glance moved carefully around the courtroom as he chewed.

In Baab’s trial, Boyle saw “the pattern for a revolution which has not taken place, the outline for action which might spring not from an outraged national honor, but from the outrage of a deeper, wider honor.” At the time when The Smoking Mountain was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1951, her assessment was that Germany was still holding back from this revolution, not yet ready to “be brought to accept a national responsibility?” By the time the book was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963, Shirer considered that Boyle’s Germany “is a Germany which no longer exists. The rubble has long since been cleared, the cities and factories rebuilt, the Germans become prosperous and independent and confident…” In reality, though, the wounds of war do not heal just from having the rubble cleared and shiny new buildings erected in its place. One thing I’ve come to appreciate from living in Europe for many years is that the experience of war, defeat, and occupation makes it much harder to look at the world in black and white terms like “good” and “bad”: survival usually involves more subtle nuances of grey. For anyone who’s forgotten that, Kay Boyle’s The Smoking Mountain offers an effective reminder.

The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Germany During the Occupation, by Kay Boyle
New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963

The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt (1968)

Cover of 1968 Quadrangle Books edition of 'The Third Reich of Dreams'
Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front under Hitler, once said, “The only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps.” In The Third Reich of Dreams, Charlotte Beradt proves that Ley underestimated the power of his own regime over the people’s unconscious.

Working quietly and covertly, through an understandably informal network of acquaintances, journalist Charlotte Beradt began collecting accounts of dreams involving the Nazis soon after Hitler assumed power as Reich Chancellor in January 1933. Unable to work due to her association with the Communist Party, Beradt took numerous precautions to prevent the disclosure of her project, smuggling out bits and pieces of her notes in letters to friends and hiding them in her apartment. By the time she and her second husband, the lawyer and novelist Martin Beradt, fled Germany in 1939, she had recorded over 300 such accounts.

She collected and analyzed roughly fifty of these in the short book, Das Dritte Reich des Traums over twenty-five years later, in 1966. Translated into English, it was published, with an afterword by psychologist and concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim, as The Third Reich of Dreams by Quadrangle Books in 1968. As Bettelheim writes, “This is not just a volume of dreams but one of cautionary tales. They warn us about how strong are the tendencies of the unconscious, when we are torn by anxieties, to believe in the omnipotent external power. It is this, our anxiety, on which the success of all totalitarian systems is built.”

Beradt was, of course, familiar with the works of Franz Kafka, and more than a few of the dreams she recounts are Kafka-esque nightmares:

In place of the street signs which had been abolished, posters had been set up on every corner, proclaiming in white letters on a black background the twenty words people were not allowed to say. The first was “Lord”–to be on the safe side I must have dreamt it in English. I don’t recall the following words and possibly didn’t even dream them, but the last one was “I.”

As in many of Kafka’s stories, Nazi power was perceived by Beradt’s dreamers as blind, irrational, omnipotent, and omnipresent. One doctor told her that he dreamed he was reading in his apartment when the walls around him suddenly disappeared. Suddenly, from the street outside, a loudspeaker boomed, “According to the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls….”

Other dreams evoke memories of Orwell’s 1984. Beradt tells of the dream of a man who had spoken with his brother on the telephone earlier that day. Having taken the precaution to praise Hitler in his conversation, he later let slip the remark that “Nothing gives me pleasure anymore.” Later, he told Beradt, he dreamt:

In the middle of the night the telephone rang. A dull voice said merely, “This is the Monitoring Office.” I knew immediately that my crime lay in what I had said about not finding pleasure in anything, and I found myself arguing my case, begging and pleading that this one time I be forgiven–please just don’t report anything this one time, don’t pass it on, please just forget it. The voice remained absolutely silent and then hung up without a word, leaving me in agonizing uncertainty.

The man recalled inventing numerous bureaucratic entities in his dreams, including the “Training Center for the Wall-Installation of Listening Devices,” and regulations such one “Prohibiting Residual Bourgeois Tendencies Among Municipal Employees.” As with the citizens of Orwell’s Airstrip One, Beradt’s dreamers lived “from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overhead, and, except in darkness, every move scrutinized.”

In one dream Beradt collected, a woman saw Hitler being pulled from the Reichstag by airplane with a lasso, taken out over the North Sea, and dropped into the water. But among Beradt’s dreams, acts of resistance in dreams were exceptionally rare. Instead, the power of the regime to erase the sense of self was pervasive. One young woman recalled seeing banners with the slogan, “Public Interest Comes Before Self-Interest” fluttering in endless repetition along a street.

As Bettelheim writes, “Under a system of terror we must purge even our unconscious mind of any desire to fight back, or any belief that such rebellion can succeed, because therein alone lies safety.” In its most extreme form, the power of the Nazi regime over the unconscious prohibited any form of realism. One man told Beradt, “I dreamt that I no longer dream about anything but rectangles, triangles, and octagons….”

By far, the dreams themselves are the most interesting parts of The Third Reich of Dreams. I found much of Beradt’s commentary awkwardly written, and it would have been fascinating to learn more about her process of collecting the accounts and getting them out of Nazi Germany successfully. However, though long out of print, it remains an eloquent testimony to the psychological power of a totalitarian state. As theologian Paul Tillich wrote, reflecting on how slowly he came to realize the impact of Hitler’s control over the German people, “In my conscious time I felt that we could escape the worst, but my subconscious knew better.”

The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt, translated from the German by Adriane Gottwald
Chicago, Illinois: Quadrangle Books, 1968

The Department Store, by Margarete Böhme (1912)

Interior of Warenhaus Wertheim, Berlin 1910
Interior of Warenhaus Wertheim, Berlin 1910
The Department Store: A Novel of Today was German novelist Margarete Böhme’s magnum opus, five hundred pages long and stocked with nearly as many characters as flowed through the doors of the great Berlin store, Müllenmeister’s Emporium, around which the story centers. Böhme is remembered today for her novel, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (The Diary of a Lost Girl) (1905), which purported to be the authentic journal of a young woman forced by circumstances into prostitution. A huge best-seller in its time, it was twice filmed, the second version (1929) directed by G. W. Pabst and starring the iconic American silent film actress, Louise Brooks.

Reviewing the novel in The Bookman, Frederick Taber Cooper found it hard to believe that, “with such a thoroughly virile grasp of the theme, and strong, bold, unflinching portrayal of its dramatic elements,” the book could have been written by a woman:

It contains the life history of a dozen families, in all the various social strata of the Prussian capital, a sweeping and comprehensive bird’s-eye view of German manners and customs, in the social world and half-world alike….

You are not merely made to see the surge and rush of bargain day, the disciplined army of clerks working, like the separate cogs and wheels in some monster machine, driven at full pressure, the eager crowds, pushing, jostling, laughing, frowning, catching the contagion of the hour, yielding to the shopping craze — you not only see all this, but you become actually part of it; you feel yourself caught and drawn along, gasping and breathless, in the very thick of the press, you almost start to take out your own pocket-book and buy recklessly of things that you in no wise want!

The Department Store, an electronic copy of which can be found on the Internet Archive (link), is something of the flip side of Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) (1883), in which the great Paris department store, modeled on Le Bon Marché, is portrayed as a symbol of the abundance and extravagance of the Industrial Age at its height, and in which the owner/entrepeneur is won over by the beauty and virtue of one of his shopgirls.

While Böhme’s emporium overflows with just as many goods as Zola’s, its celebration of capitalism is undermined by a sense of corruption and shoddiness. The store’s furniture shines as brilliantly as those in the most exclusive shops, but its manufacture and materials are cheap and unreliable. The underpaid salesgirls spend ten or twelve hours a day standing behind their counters, while shop chiefs keep the stock boys and warehousemen scurrying back and forth without relief. And the shopgirl with whom the young heir to the store falls in love proves craven and unfaithful. While not quite a radical novel, it’s not too many steps from the kind of stories of worker exploitation and organized labor that were just beginning to appear.

The Department Store was one of the very first books reviewed by the young Cicely Fairfield under her new pen name of Rebecca West, in The Freewoman. West made her opinion of department stores plain from the start: “A great department store is an offensive thing, because it pretends that trade is carried on in a dignified manner. The strong towers and wide façades of these immense shops make believe that Commerce has become a god, for whom it is meet to build a temple: whereas, in its present-day development, it is a vampire, to be buried at the cross-roads, with a stake through its heart.”

Margarete Böhme
Margarete Böhme
Unlike The Ladies’ Paradise, which she called “a miracle of sensuous perception,” Böhme’s won West’s respect as “the brooding of a masterful intellect over a social phenomenon.” Where Zola’s heroine is near saintliness in her virtue, Böhme’s leading female character, Agnes Matrei, is “the woman who is the kind of flower that grows in that hot-house: hardly a woman, rather some phantom formed from the unwholesome mist that rises from the marsh by moonlight.” In West’s estimation, the novel was “an absorbingly interesting book.”

Not everyone had such a high opinion of The Department Store, though. Borrowing his metaphor from the book’s subject, The New York Times’ reviewer dismissed it by writing that “In a shop one can get pretty nearly everything under the same roof and carry on a successful business; but the same tactics do not good in writing a novel.”

Having taken up writing as a way to make a living after she divorced her husband in 1900, Margarete Böhme went on to publish a total of forty novels over the space of the next twenty-some years. By the time of her death, however, none of her books were in print, her most famous novel, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, having been banned from republication by the Nazi Party for its disreputable portrait of German womanhood. It was resurrected a few years ago in both German and English editions featuring stills from Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl.

The Department Store, by Margarete Böhme, translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne
New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1912

Walter Mehring

At the moment, Walter Mehring’s poems, essays and novels are out of print in both German and English. Mehring’s The Lost Library:The Autobiography of a Culture is, like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a paean to the humanist culture of Central Europe before the rise of Hitler.

Walter Mehring

You can read a short bio at Wikipedia and an obituary from the New York Times.

A number of Mehring’s poems were set to music. You can listen to several on YouTube: “Charité”, performed by Wacholder, and “American Riesenspielzeug”, sung by Joseline Gassen.

Young Woman of 1914, by Arnold Zweig

Cover of first US edition of 'Young Woman of 1914'Young Woman of 1914 (1931) is the first in narrative order and the second in order of publication of Arnold Zweig’s tetralogy of the First World War (the others are The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), Education before Verdun (1935) and The Crowning of a King (1937)). Calling this a tetralogy, however, should not imply that there are such strong links among the books that they need to be read in sequence or even in totality. Aside from the character of the writer and draftee Werner Bertin–a major character in this novel and a supporting one in the others–and a few other minor characters and events, the common bond among the books is one of context, not content.

The young woman of the title is Leonore Wahl, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker in Berlin, university student and eager follower of the intellectual radicals of her time. She meets and has an affair with Werner Bertin, a rising young writer of a more modest family. I hesitate to say that she falls in love with Bertin, because although the two develop a relationship that continues when Bertin is enlisted into the German Army Services Corps and shipped off to a series of postings, Zweig makes it clear that neither is quite ready to put head over heart.

Until Leonore finds that she is pregnant, that is–or at least, until she deals with this fact. If Young Woman of 1914 is remembered at all today, it is as one of the earliest and frankest accounts of abortion. Given her youth, her situation as a single woman, and her awareness of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of her feelings for Bertin, she decides to have an abortion. Although illegal at the time, safe but surreptitious abortions could be found if one had sufficient funds and guile. With the help of her brother, Leonore locates a doctor who performs the procedure:

Leonore, outstretched on the examination chair, uttered no more than a sharp gasping moan as she clutched its metal edges. On each side of her a Sister held down her arms and shoulders with dragoon-like fists. The violence of the onslaught almost deprived her of consciousness. Her heart seemed to change into an organ sensitive to pain, and she felt as though it were splitting within her breast; an engulfing surge of torment swept over her forehead and temples.

“Poor creatures, they always had to pay the bill,” the doctor muses.

This excerpt gives a sense of the ham-fistedness of Zweig’s style–or at least of Eric Sutton’s translation–that turns the experience of reading his novels into something akin to hiking through thick underbrush. It’s unfortunate, as the basic story here is actually quite modern. When Bertin meets Leonore again, he does feel and express some remorse, but mostly to be seen to care. In truth, what she’s gone through is alien and a little distasteful to him.

Having seen a little of combat and a great deal of the drudgery and boredom of army life, though, Bertin has a much greater appreciation for the comfort of a loving relationship, and Leonore herself seems prepared at last to find refuge in the tenderness they feel for each other. They decide to marry, if only to postpone Bertin’s quick return to the front. And as she sees him off at the train station, she thinks, “It was none other than love that had come upon her–love that suffers, schemes, creates: just love.”

I have mixed feelings about this book. It’s full of fine moments, such as a walk Bertin takes through the streets of a Bosnian town while serving on the Balkan front, where Zweig captures the flow of life that goes on despite the big-H history happening all around it. And in the relationship of Leonore and Bertin, he does a good job of conveying the awkwardness of lovers who need to establish an intellectual equality before confronting their real feelings for each other. On the other hand, what would have been a little masterpiece if pared down a to around 150 pages takes Zweig over 380 pages to tell. And this is one of Arnold Zweig’s shortest books! It’s no surprise to discover that he went on to become a key literary figure in East Germany. There is a certain Marx-like windbagishness in his writing. Stefan Zweig–no relation–would have dealt with this in a novella.

Young Woman of 1914, by Arnold Zweig, translated by Eric Sutton
London: Martin Secker, 1932

Theodor Fontane

One of the more noteworthy recent reissues in the wonderful New York Review Books Classics series is Theodor Fontane’s 1891 novel, Irretrievable. Fontane is considered by many of those familiar with his work as “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,” in the words of Gordon A. Craig, yet there are few of the truly major European writers of the nineteenth century–aside perhaps of Benito Pérez Galdós–who have suffered greater neglect among English-reading audiences.

Theodor FontaneIn part he suffers a common fate with other German novelists. His works, as much as those of his contemporaries such as Adalbert Stifter and Theodor Storm, have a tendency to pop up in English translations, usually from academic presses, and then vanish out of print just as quickly.

The loss is ours. German writers get a bum rap, a reputation for ponderousness than is only partly deserved–and wholly undeserved in Fontane’s case. “There is also in Fontane,” writes Phillip Lopate in his Afterword to Irretrievable (Unwiederbringlich), “a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life that steadfastly avoids the demonic and apocalyptic….” Perhaps this is due to the fact that Fontane came to fiction very late: his first novel was published when he was sixty years old. Throughout his work, you find a sense of perspective, humor, and tolerance very few writers possess before middle age.

The other thing most English readers encountering Fontane’s work for the first time note is how modern his themes are. The problems of marriage–particularly from the wife’s perspective–are one of his most frequent topics, as are its most common responses: divorce, adultery, and simple unhappiness. Take, for example, Lopate’s setting on the story in Irretrievable:

Irretrievable is the story of a marriage that has worn thin. The partners have been together for some twenty-three years, are raising two teenage children, and for the most part have enjoyed a happy marriage. Still, they have reached a point where they no longer are
charmed but are irritated by the limitations each sees in the other.

His women are fully-drawn individuals capable of living outside their husbands’ shadows, and his men–like most of us still–are more often well-intentioned but clueless than autocratic and evil. In fact, Lopate suggests the lack of a radical sense of evil might be one of the reasons Fontane’s work has had a hard time winning popular and critical readers in English.

Fortunately, though, there’s never been a better time to discover Fontane in English. In large part this is thanks to Antony Wood, whose small press, Angel Classics has reissued four of his novels–including an alternate translation of Unwiederbringlich, No Way Back, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

In addition to No Way Back/Irretrievable, Fontane books currently available in English translation include On Tangled Paths, translated by by Peter James Bowman. The tale of a romance between a cavalry officer and a seamstress. The officer intends for the relationship to be something of a place-holder until a wealthier and more socially acceptable wife can be found, but then the situation gets more complicated when they end up falling in love.

This novel is also available in not one but two alternate translations: Trials and Tribulations, translated by Katharine Royce, from Mondial Books, and in a volume from Continuum’s fine “The German Library” series, Delusions, Confusions, paired with another novella, “The Poggenpuhl Family.” Finally, there is Cecile, translated by Stanley Radcliffe, also from Angel Classics–also a story of adultery–in this case, initiated by the woman.

However, at least as many other English translations of Fontane’s works have disappeared within a few years of appearing in print:

• Effi Briest

This is easily Fontane’s best-known work, often compared to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary for its depiction of adultery. Thomas Mann once wrote that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them. Although Angel Classics’ website shows their edition, also translated by Rorrison and Chambers, as being in print, Amazon shows that both theirs (issued as a Penguin Classic in the US in 2001) and the 1976 Douglas Parmee translation (also a Penguin Classic) as out of print.

• Before the Storm, translated by R. J. Hollingdale

This was Fontane’s first major work, about the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the Prussian gentry and peasants. It was issued as an Oxford World Classic in paperback in 1985, but used copies now go for $25 and up. It’s compared by some to War and Peace, but aside from sharing a historical period, the two books have little in common. Although both novels portray wars from the viewpoints of the people they crash over like tsunamis, there is very little drama and quite a lot of conversation in Fontane’s book. It does cause one to wonder, though, what Fontane might have produced if he’d tackled this subject when he was twenty or thirty years younger.

• Under the Pear Tree

Although a minor work, Under the Pear Tree is the closest Fontane ever came to a novel of incident (if not action). Hradschek, a village innkeeper, murders a man who comes to collect a gambling debt … only to wind up dead himself soon after.

• The Stechlin, translated by William Zwiebel

“At the end an old man dies and two young people get married—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages” was Fontane’s own summation of this book. The Stechlin was Fontane’s last major work. It’s been called, “probably the finest chronicle of the life style of the German upper classes in the late nineteenth century.” Camden House published William L. Zwiebel’s first-ever translation into English in 1995.

Douglas Parmée’s introductory essay to Irretrievable is now available on the NYRB webpage for the book, along with Lopate’s Afterword. The New Yorker also published a long essay, “Heroine Addict,” by Daniel Mendelsohn, in its 7 March 2011 issue.