Category: German Literature

A Midlife Crisis Novel – Martin Walser’s Runaway Horse / Ein Fliehendes Pferd

Based on the way I was taught German, it was hard to avoid the manifestly silly impression that Germany is made up entirely of old people and people “with a migration background”. This novella, Runaway Horse (Ein Fliehendes Pferd), by the German author Martin Walser, does admittedly deal with the first of these groups, so at least my knowledge of Germany’s aging society was not entirely wasted. As societies everywhere are aging, I suppose we simply have to get used to the increasing ubiquity of the midlife crisis novel. This one, from 1978, considers the effects of meeting someone whose life choices are completely different to our own not quite too late for us to turn things around if we decided theirs were actually better.

The novella follows closely a schoolteacher, Helmut Halm, and his wife Sabine as they enjoy a holiday on Lake Constance. There, an old schoolfellow of Helmut, Klaus Buch, likewise on holiday with his own much younger wife Helene, encounters them one day. This sets the stage for a clash of values, because the two couples, in particular the two male figures, have very different ideas of life. Both, however, are middle aged and having to consider the shapes of their lives, both what has passed and what is to come.

The Halms are bourgeois. Helmut has brought a five-volume set of Kierkegaard’s diaries with him on holiday, and he and his wife can think of nothing better to do of an evening than drink wine and smoke. He is detached from the world, “his dream became to be unreachable”. There’s a sense that he enjoys the irony of the difference between his inner world, which filters the novella’s action, and the perception of him that others have. The Halms as a pair do not represent passivity so much as a resignation from the ambition of trying to sit at the centre of the world. Gladly on the margins, they enjoy what life has to offer them – good food, good wines, predictable holidays (they have been visiting Lake Constance for eleven years), and the life of the mind.

Klaus Buch and his wife are the opposite. Successful writers, they seem all action and good health. They avoid sugar, only drink water, and are always out running. They embody that German passion for aktiv holidays and the great outdoors. Several of the book’s set pieces take place on the boat that Klaus sails, or else in nature. If the Halms have given up on participation in life in their middle age, Klaus Buch resolutely refuses the same course. He memorably describes having “had to part with [his first wife] because he did not want, like a plant, to keep growing in a pot that was too small for him.” His new wife Helene, eighteen years younger, serves to keep him younger.

Seeing Helmut and Sabine at a café, Klaus and Helene decide to join them (and ruin their holiday). Helmut remembers next to nothing about the past, which in Klaus Buch’s telling becomes “more alive than the present”, and where Helmut was a considerably more impressive a figure than he has now become. (“Klaus Buch said… how happy he was to see that Helmut was no petit bourgeois. / Helmut thought: if there is anything I am, it’s a petit bourgeois”) Thus begins a story of incredible awkwardness, of sailing trips, hikes, and dinners, as Klaus Buch explains who Helmut was and how amazing he was, and Helmut is forced to keep up a kind of mute pretence that it was indeed so.

One of the elements of ein Fliehendes Pferd’s formal mastery is that this is all that the story works with, this opposition of worldviews and two couples. There literally are only these four characters with speaking roles – Helmut and Sabine, Klaus and Helene. Yet the whole thing becomes rich through an intensity of language created out of its apparent simplicity. The word “adventure” is repeated like a mark of shame for Helmut, whose life lacks so much of it. Likewise, the mineral water that the Buchs drink versus the wines of the Halms are obvious symbols of their two attitudes to life. “You don’t like me anymore, eh?” Klaus says to his wife so many times that eventually it becomes more performance than affection, and then there are the references to “flight” or “trotting” that mark Helmut’s own thoughts, as the fleeing horse of the title.

By being so normal in content – a fairly standard lakeside holiday – the text elevates what it does say into something almost mythical. Everything becomes intense and symbolic. The German here relies heavily on reported speech, which is its own grammatical construction in the language, requiring no “he said” or similar verbs to keep us aware that we are deep within someone else’s words (and world). Like in Thomas Bernhard, we are immersed in another’s world for pages at a time, but unlike in Bernhard, (with the possible exception of Correction), we are shifting from consciousness to consciousness as they battle. First Klaus Buch will speak for pages, with us trapped in his vision, then Helmut will go home with Sabine, and spend a few pages musing in his own mind. Finally, near the novella’s end we get to see a little of Helene’s thoughts too.

The ruination of the Halm’s holiday is less significant than the shaking of their world, once Klaus and his wife step onto the scene. With their enthusiasm, zest, pep, or however you want to call it, the Buchs are dangerous. Klaus talks a lot about sex – Helmut and his wife don’t even do it anymore. (“How often do you bang your wife, eh?” Being one of the more crass things Klaus says when he and Helmut are alone.) At first Helmut is just grumpy, but gradually he realises there is real danger here. He quite likes Helene, whose breasts he keeps stealing furtive glances at, just as he realises Sabine quite likes Klaus. There’s no risk that either of the Buchs is interested in an affair, but there is a risk that just by being there they reveal the weaknesses of the Halms’ lives. Beauty and energy always have their attractions.

For me they certainly do. At first, it was hard not to prefer Klaus, with all that inner drive. Perhaps he will get Helmut out running and ditching the fags and booze, I thought. Sure, Klaus is annoying, but he’s not wrong to be living life the way he was. (Just as Helmut wasn’t wrong either, just less exciting to read about). When Klaus quite literally leaps onto a wild horse dangerously attempting to flee a field, it’s an obvious representation of him saving the moping Helmut. Why seem and be passive, I thought, as Helmut does, when you can be?

It may be true that Klaus undermines himself by seeming something of a parasite. He claims he needs Helene to remain physically young, just as he eventually admits he needs Helmut to remain mentally young. However, ultimately, when he and Helmut go on a sailing trip alone and the weather becomes stormy, the overall impression is that Klaus is a heroic, Nietzschean (a name mentioned in the text) figure, while Helmut is a coward who wants to go home. As the weather worsens, Klaus “laughed and danced towards the mast”, truly Dionysiac. Then, moments later, the waves catch him and he is lost overboard, leaving Helmut to make his way back to shore however he can. So much for the other’s worldview, eh, triumphantly though it is lived even at the end.

The final chapter of the novella provides the necessary correction to our idea of Klaus. Helene joins Helmut and Sabine the next day and she decides to drink as much wine as she can with the other woman. Now, for the first time, the dominant consciousness of the novella is not Klaus or Helmut’s, but rather Helene’s, as she presents the private version of her husband. In this portrayal, Klaus is obsessed with his writing while utterly unsuccessful at it, controlling towards his wife (he practically tries to turn her into his daughter and literary inheritor), and a total “fantasist.” While readers go through ein Fliehendes Pferd thinking that it is Helmut who loves the distance between his inner world and appearance, ultimately Klaus seems the one who lives this disjuncture. Until they saw Helmut and Sabine, Helene says, Klaus talked about his idea of living far more than actually living it.

While all this is going on, Helmut himself is wracked with guilt over Klaus’s death, even though he bears no responsibility for it. He doesn’t drink with the women, and before Helene had turned up he had actually gone with Sabine to get activewear so they can change their lives. In other words, taken as a clash of ideologies, it appears that Klaus, dying, had won.

But then he actually turns up, having miraculously survived the storm at sea in something like a tragicomic moment of brilliance, and drags away Helene back into the hell of her life with him. Sabine and Helmut throw off their sports clothes and light up new cigarettes. It’s a very strange ending, insofar as it leaves us right back where we began. This connects the story to the novella’s epigraph from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where Kierkegaard, behind one of his typical masks, asks whether we could write a story between clashing worldviews where an “event” is not used to provide the grounds for the victory of one or the other of them. Because the story ends up right back at the beginning, with the Halms and the Buchs separated, and neither pairing having changed their views, we can say that Walser has delivered just that.

The problem is that nobody likes reading a story only to get back to the beginning. Even if the externals are the same as before, many cyclical stories imply a kind of internal revaluation of things. But here we have two worldviews that clash, are bruised, but then reconfirmed on each side. There’s not really a sense that anyone has learned anything. The novella has this obsessive normality to it – you can sit on a bench at a national park, like I did yesterday in my part of Germany, and imagine the whole thing playing out among the middle aged couples you see walking past with their dogs – and then at the last moment Walser delivers Klaus incredibly from the jaws of death. It’s quite silly.

The idea of stasis or stagnation is one that I think does make for interesting literature, and the topic of how our decisions shape our lives, including from middle age onwards, can never not be important to people who have to deal with questions like that during their own time on earth far more than they have to consider, for example, how they would react if they woke up one morning and discovered they were a bug. But I find Walser’s treatment of his topic here, his sudden renunciation of the exploration of the ideas, a little sad in the end. To go back entirely to where we began as perfectly as Ein Fliehendes Pferd does, (whose last words are the novella’s first words), at least when trying to tell this story, all seems to say the story was not worth telling to begin with.

It’s a sharp contrast with the obvious mastery of the nuts and bolts of writing which Walser displays, from his careful use of symbols to his powerful portrayals of contrasting consciousnesses in the narration, and does leave a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. I am glad it was only a novella.  

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

Writing Catastrophe – Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

More and more we will have to ask ourselves how we might respond to natural disasters in our stories, the kind of stories they might lead us to write. What is the significance of a catastrophe? This is almost a literary question, insofar as it concerns the interplay of meanings and appearances. Man in the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, provides an example of how we might begin approaching the topic. Ostensibly the record of a widower’s isolation in a Swiss valley cut off by bad weather, it is really a short but intense look at humanity’s attempts to live inside a world where their power and lives are limited.

A recent widower, Herr Geiser finds himself stuck in his house in a valley in Ticino as bad weather cuts off the town from the outside world. Soon even the power goes and he has to stick to matches and canned goods. He entertains himself by building things out of crisp bread and reading. His mind is not that of a young man, however, and he has to take notes by hand to remember what he reads. A little later, he decides instead to use scissors to cut out sections from books and stick them to the wall. Next, he makes an attempt to flee on foot to a neighbouring valley, but returns home. His note-mania continues as his mind declines, with whole diagrams plastered onto the walls, and shortly thereafter the story ends.

Narration

One of the first things I noticed about the novella, which I read in the original German, is the strange narratorial voice. Readers are not close to Herr Geiser at all: to give two examples, we do not learn his first name, and through impersonal and passive constructions (“es” (it), “man” (one)) or phrases like “it is not thinkable” Man in the Holocene builds up a feeling of being almost a work of science or technology, rather than a story. It is as if we are observing some creature at the zoo, except that here the creature is an old man, shuffling about. As a result, we come to see Herr Geiser not as an individual so much as a representative of Man in general (to refer back to the novella’s title) just as the creatures we see at the zoo are supposed to embody their whole species.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, let alone as automata – I certainly do not, at any rate. But Man in the Holocene does much to force us down this route through its most distinctive formal trait – the cuttings that Herr Geiser sticks to the wall.

Cuttings

These are a fascinating novelistic technique and worth dwelling on. When I say cutouts, I mean just that – real cutouts are plastered across the text. They are drawn primarily from history books and encyclopaedias, with a little of the Bible thrown in for good measure, and all are presented in their original formatting. (I never want to read Fraktur, the “German” typeface, ever again, no matter how beautiful it is to look at when you do not actually need to make sense of it.)

Herr Geiser is a man of facts, unlike his wife, who was a reader of fiction. Man in the Holocene presents Herr Geiser attempting to make sense of the world via these facts. When he reads, he reads to expand his knowledge, hence the note-taking which expands into making cuttings. This process of gaining knowledge for the process of understanding, even control over his environment, makes Herr Geiser again rather representative of humanity’s recent Enlightenment destiny as a whole. Furthermore, this entire process of meaning-making is noted explicitly in one extract as something distinctively human – in other words, Herr Geiser’s actions make him more human, even though I said above it had the opposite effect.

One reason for this is because there is more to texts than the motivation behind covering the wall with them – there is also what they say. Generally speaking, like a text by W.G. Sebald, we have a sense as we read Man in the Holocene of accumulating catastrophe. As we learn about Ticino, we read about the countless catastrophes befalling its people, through rock slides and floods and war. Mostly, these are natural catastrophes, which highlight humankind’s powerlessness in the face of nature. We also learn about flora and fauna native to the world, and as Herr Geiser explores his interest in geology we learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric times. 

A sense of scale is one thing that rather makes us seem like animals. Because we are a speck in comparison with geologic time, the significance of our significances seems like nothing of the sort. “Man appears in the Holocene” is a more accurate translation of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän – in other words, we were nothing but ashes in all the years before then, and perhaps just as fated to short lifetimes as the dinosaurs. Indeed, reading about the Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular, it’s hard to avoid making the comparison in our heads that we too are an apex predator, yet just as fragile when we consider the power of nature. Another theme of the cuttings is that we shape nature to live in it, but little good does it do for us when faced with entire valleys slipping away.

This is not the main thing, however. Herr Geiser also cuts out diagrams of dinosaurs, but the final diagram in the book is that of a human being. This kind of echoing reduces us, in spite of our investigating the world, into a creature to be investigated and no different from the dinosaurs on the pages before. Our meaning-making, in particular via religion, is also challenged through the primacy the text places upon scientific work. The Bible might demonstrate humanity’s development, but not if the sections extracted (Noah’s Ark, Creation) are contradicted by the other extracts. Instead, this makes human reasoning look further flawed.

It does not help either that by the end of the book Herr Geiser has essentially lost his mind – there’s an obvious narrative irony in the way that all these attempts to understand the world and the catastrophes befalling it bring Herr Geiser no closer to escaping or mastering them. Note-taking does not make the world take note. This is most explicit, and quite funny, in one of the novella’s central sections, where Herr Geiser endeavours, in vain, to remove a salamander that has ended up in his bathroom. After a few pages of struggling, suddenly readers instead read several extracts about the biology of salamanders – the implication seems to be that Herr Geiser believes that by understanding them a little better, he might be considered the real victor in their duel. It is, of course, not so.

In short, these cuttings are an ambiguous contribution to the novella’s network of meanings. On the one hand, they celebrate humanity as this meaning-deriving creature, driven by knowledge. On the other, they show its animal heritance, frailty and smallness. Generally speaking, they also do something else important – they force readers to put the extracts in relation to the rest of the text and interpret them for ourselves, thus increasing our participation beyond passive reading. We can even say that we join Herr Geiser even if we do not get close to him as a human – we become representatives of the “human being” too.

A Social Animal

Herr Geiser’s wife Elsbeth has died, I presume, shortly before the novella begins. The idea of human beings as social animals is one which I realise is also an important part of how the story builds its network of ideas. Herr Geiser is alone, with only his cat for company. He does visit a local inn at one point, but is largely asocial, before becoming actively antisocial as the novella draws to a close. He reads, but his reading seems pointless, especially when he finds he forgets it all. At the same time, he’s actually dependent on others, though he does not acknowledge it – to give an example, a neighbour brings him soup, without which I doubt he would be able to feed himself.

Frisch’s ideas of gender are a smidgen dated, I have noticed, but the function of Elsbeth’s memory within the text, I think, is to demonstrate how incomplete Herr Geiser’s life is when he is alone. His wife, who we learn reads fiction, symbolises an emotional interaction with the world just as Herr Geiser, through his encyclopaedia mania, symbolises a technological engagement with the world.

Neither, on its own, is sufficient for a fully human life. Man in the Holocene demonstrates how poor Herr Geiser’s single life is by showing how, alone, he declines. (Dementia develops faster in people with less regular social interaction). This is a further irony, because this decline as a human being, into a kind of animal or child, comes even as Herr Geiser continues his knowledge-obsession. The more notes he takes, the less sense he himself makes or can make as a human being.

Through the cutouts which praise human subjugation of the natural world, and the very fact of the town’s existence – “the Federal and local government do everything to ensure the valley does not go extinct” – we have a sense that even though human endeavour seems ultimately insignificant on a geological timescale, it is still better to try to work collaboratively to build human habitable worlds, than just to retreat into ourselves as Herr Geiser does. In this sense, the text is not entirely nihilistic.

As a Novella

With that said, it is hard not to read Man in the Holocene as an overall depressing, nihilistic work. It is a work where we humans simply do not matter. The cutouts, and the descriptions of nature, paint us as utterly insignificant and totally vulnerable to disasters. “Only man knows catastrophes, and only if he survives them; nature knows no such thing.” The relentless repetition of geologic facts emphasises the shortness of our lives, even the lives of homo sapiens as a whole.

We do not even need the cutouts, however. Man in the Holocene is a novella, and it shares many of the central ideas that form has gathered around itself during its storied history within German-language literature, such as madness in the protagonist. In terms of humanity’s smallness, however, another novella trope is important – a serious interest in time and its movements. In Frisch’s story, this comes across in the idea of cyclicity. Throughout the novella we get a sense of the valley as functional unit, with the post bus with its hooting in particular coming to be the obvious symbol for this. But at the novella’s end, all of these things are described in a long panoramic section without Herr Geiser being mentioned once. In other words, we loop back to the story’s beginning, and find that nothing has changed once we remove its central character. We do not need geologic time – even in the short timeframe of the novella we see how easily we are wiped away and replaced without a change to the world’s essence.

In the Context of Frisch’s other works

Man in the Holocene is my third Frisch, after Homo Faber and Montauk. While it shares themes of aging with the latter, in its concern with humanity’s development the more obvious point of comparison is with the former novel. I remember Homo Faber as being critical of humanity’s technological development through the figure of its narrator, who was obsessed with his electric razor, but ultimately struggled to experience emotions, leading to a kind of ruinous personal life. Like Herr Geiser, Walter Faber in his novel tries to understand his world through statistics and facts, but unlike Herr Geiser Faber finds strange coincidences and love forcing him out of his comfortable worldview.

Where Homo Faber was ultimately a cautiously optimistic work, describing a kind of way out of an entirely mechanistic worldview through emotional engagement, Man in the Holocene is no such thing. This is not merely because Herr Geiser’s mental decline is permanent. Rather, what is important here is that it simply does not matter. Humans may change the world however they will, but in the end it will all be washed away by floods, or crushed under heavy stones.

The world has existed since so long ago that we cannot even conceive it, and it will continue long after we have all gone extinct. The result is that nothing matters, even the attempt to write about it or gain knowledge about it, even the attempt to write blog posts about it. Because Elsbeth is dead, there’s no way out for Herr Geisler. Instead, there’s just a nature that is beautiful, but completely indifferent to him and all of us.

Depressing or not, I found it very interesting that the work demonstrated one way we might approach writing about things like climate change. A way that is probably morally irresponsible, but still valid – to write about life in this geological timeframe, showing how meaningless human endeavour is. This is the voice of a climate pessimist, or even a sceptic. The climate is changing extremely fast, geologically speaking and compared to historical changes to the climate, but the effects are felt the same way they are described here in Frisch’s work – as something huge, unstoppable, and utterly indifferent to us. A few weeks ago we had wildfires in California, last year my family’s house in Switzerland was itself flooded and the village cut off from the outside world. At least in the latter case we had insurance.  

When we think of nature, once we stop thinking about it in a Romantic manner – as a source of sublime beauty – we get to this sense that it is indifferent and cruel. (Of course, this is part of what the Romantics meant by sublime, but there is a slightly different emphasis). Clearly we must go a little bit further still, to find some way of writing about catastrophes and human insignificance which does not rule out human agency to make some small positive contribution against them. Without hope and ensuring action against these great impersonal forces and the human forces behind them, Frisch’s book, and humanity as a whole, may find themselves ashes, not some great interplanetary species.