Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Doktor Faustus
Buddenbrooks
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Joseph Roth, Radetzky March
Lutz Seiler, Star 111
Clemens Meyer, While We Were Dreaming
Christa Wolf, City of Angels
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
Life of Galileo
The Good Person of Szechuan
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance vol I and II
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
Transit
Heinrich Böll, The Train Was on Time
A buncha short stories
Herta Müller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
The Appointment
Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers
Thomas Bernhard, The Old Masters
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Austerlitz
Silent Catastophes
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
...probably some others I'm forgetting over the last few years (I think none of these are more than five years old, and most are from the last year or two when "read modern German-language literature" became a project)
I didn't like The Tin Drum. As with many books I don't like while I'm reading, I played some metafictional games: perhaps Oskar is actually normal sized? Perhaps he's such an unreliable narrator that none of it happened? But I settled down into the idea that it's just a novel with a magical realist premise and an insufferable protagonist. I'm legitimately unsure whether this is intentional, and will need to peruse the secondary literature.
The most flattering reading I can give: Oskar is the average German citizen. He's perfectly aware of what the Nazis are for and do, he's heard of the concentration camps but knows not to ask any follow-up questions. He will support the army if it gets him out of Danzig for awhile, he's fine to go lay on the beach each weekend. Leaving Danzig at the end of the war doesn't bother he because he has a place to go, he's glad to accept the German economic miracle in the West despite not doing anything to deserve it. He is passive in the face of history, contains no outrage over anything but his romantic misadventures, and stumbles into a happy ending he does not in any way deserve.
*****
I've been reading in German and Austrian literature for a few years now. It is dispiriting and compelling at the same time. There are so few of these books that I really love--at a pinch, only Anniversaries--the widened circle including The Rings of Saturn, The Aesthetics of Resistance, City of Angels and Mother Courage. But Mann and Musil and Grass all left me cold. I could appreciate but not love Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that's mostly Günter Lamprecht's fault, and that Fassbinder could make his miniseries after the war. But most of it is formal and correct and perhaps a little lifeless, like you're looking for a heart that simply isn't there.
And yet, I keep on, and will continue. One is inclined to ask: why?
*****
Spanish language literature will explain things to you, if it does nothing else. The most apolitical or right-wing writers must acknowledge colonialism, and capitalism; political instability and the tricky interrelations of Europe and native cultures. (You might have the politics of Octavio Paz, you're still going to hate Europe a little.) Spain gets off no easier than the Americas, wrestling centrally and constantly with what it means to have experienced fascism for such a long time and then tried (and failed) to forget it.
Japan has a central organizing myth in Godzilla and the million things that refract from it: a retelling of the trauma of how WWII ended for Japan, the primal fears that it raised. (I am quite sympathetic to the alternate view that Godzilla is an attempt to overlook Japan's actual role in the much longer war and their various atrocities and focus only on the tiny sliver of that experience that makes them the victims, but this counterreading is very much in the text already--Godzilla attacks Japan for a reason.) The forced modernization and economic miracle that faded; one can pretty simply hop from the Meiji Restoration to the post-1970 economic boom and find all the parallels one might want. And all throughout it people are writing all sides of it.
Germany... does not do any of this. There is the Exilliteratur, but none of those people really know what happened in Germany because they mostly weren't there. The people who were there remain largely silent. Upon the division of the country, the GDR has its own set of problems, and the West now needs to be integrated into western Europe and so the pesky question of what exactly someone did in the war needed to be forgotten. Then there's the economic boom which... how to say this charitably... convinced a number of people in the West that there was some sort of inherent German business genius as opposed to boring structural economic reasons for such advancement so quickly. Moral accounting was then unneeded, God had signalled his approval of the hardworking German people. And when moral accounting is not needed, very few people will be interested in doing it.
There's political violence and an attempt to refocus the issue of Nazism in the 70s, but it mostly fails. The Die Wende, reunification, and yet another economic boom: the people are finally ready to look somewhat honestly at what they did. As with all such historical reminiscences, it helps a lot that many of the most responsible people were already dead in the mid-90s. But Die Wende is also a time of human economic, artistic, and personal flourishing, so attention is at best divided. (I don't mean to downplay it: the circumstances of division were traumatic, and reunification really was a time of new and exciting possibilities for almost everyone.)
The end result is that you can read and read looking for an accounting, a serious moral reckoning, and find nothing. The Exilliteratur will tell you that everyone in Germany knew and understood the bargain, and were more or less happy to go along with it as long as it was providing dividends. The retrospective work will tell you that, too: one assumes this is part of Günter Grass' motive in The Tin Drum. But to write of this at all suggests that you have misgivings, and most people kept their own counsel.
*****
So you go into reading a literature hoping--expecting, more like--to find some revelations and instead find none. A curious silence or an omission. Why did we begin this project in the first place?
Well, you know why you didn't see anything, you've read Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and know all about Metaphysical Ketman, the idea that you can keep some secret interior personal space your own. When faced with horrors, you can comply or say and do the things you need to do to keep yourself safe and your life normal. But as Milosz will tell you--or Christa Wolf, who was an informer for the Stasi for a couple of years and just forgot about it--maintaining a double life is psychologically stressful and most people just can't do it for any length of time. The division will collapse and the outer person--the one who complies--takes over. How can you write honestly about what you experienced when your entire continued existence requires you to lie to yourself about what you knew, what you did and didn't do?
And me, looking for clarity where there could never be any.
*****
But those of us in the US live here, now, with the reality of our own horrors. One might have been able to look away in previous decades because the horrors mostly occurred in places far away from us. Now they are home and visible and difficult to ignore. But the example of Germany can and should show us that people will find a way to ignore what is happening so long as it doesn't disturb them and their lives.
You know very well what will happen if you sit to the side and hope for the best, and don't pretend that you do not. The point is not to interpret what will happen, but to change it.
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