German Literature Archives - Page 10 of 13

Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable / No Way Back

Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable, also translated as No Way Back (German: Unwiederbringlich), is a carefully constructed social drama in the same vein as his Effi Briest, which I’ve written about here. Fontane, who is little known outside of his native Germany, belongs to the same group of masterful European realists as Flaubert and Turgenev. And like Turgenev, his novels are usually pleasantly short. Irretrievable focuses on the collapse and apparent reconciliation between a married couple. Count Holk and his dully religious wife Christine have, after many years of marriage, drifted apart. When Holk meets an exciting and flirtatious young lady, Ebba von Rosenberg, during his work at court, far away from home, he begins to doubt his marriage.

Is it too late to change, and is it right to?

Houses and Juxtapositions

I’ve noticed that all of Fontane’s novel begin with descriptions of houses. Though it’s a practice any modern editor would undoubtedly murder him for, nonetheless it serves its purpose. One thing I really like about Fontane is his use of natural objects as symbols. By natural, I mean the sort of things that in our own, non-fictional, minds can be seen with hindsight as symbols of this or that. A house reflects its owners, and in the Holks’ case, the castle already hints at various disunities in their world. For though Irretrievable takes place in Schleswig and Denmark during the time when they were both still under one ruler, the house has “a Mediterranean feel”. It is out of place by the beach on the Baltic coast.

The Baltic coastline of Irretrievable is peaceful and ultimately boring for Holk. Instead, he heads into the city of Copenhagen, where excitement can be found – but also the seeds of tragedy. John Samuel CC BY-SA

It is also not where Countess Christine wants to live. The castle was built by Holk recently, as an alternative to the traditional seat of his family, which lies inland. She and he have lived in both buildings, and she prefers the original. For her, it is associated with the happier days of her marriage. So, immediately, we have one spouse who has moved forward, and another who is looking back. This kind of division runs through Irretrievable and will be one source of its ultimate tragedy.

Indeed, the danger of irretrievable lies in the sharpness of its divisions. There are two houses. There is the sea and the land. Holk and Christine live in the countryside, but Holk works at the Court in Copenhagen, which Christine considers a hive of immorality. The countryfolk are pious and intelligent, while the inhabitants of the city are playful and mysterious. For Holk, once he decides to move away from Christine, there can be no gradualism, and no clear compromise. It is either one extreme, or the other. And although he thinks otherwise, he is not suited for either option.

Holk and the Crisis of Masculinity

Holk is an insecure man. Early on the narrator informs us that he finds Christine too perfect, while she herself wishes he were more so. “He would be the ideal husband, if only he had some ideals”, she says. Without ideals he thinks only of the present, while she thinks both of the past – in her mourning both of a deceased child and of the old house – and of the future – in considering where the two living children will go to school to finish their education. And so Holk falls into flirtation, an action marked by its disregard of past affections and future consequences. He flirts both with the daughter of his landlady, Brigitte Hansen, and with Ebba von Rosenberg, the companion of the Danish princess whom he serves.

For Holk, life with Christine at their castle by the sea is dreadfully dull, and flirtation is exciting. He imagines that he is moving beyond the strict social constraints of that pious coastal life, but he doesn’t realise that flirting just brings him into another set of social codes, of whose very existence he is blissfully unaware. He thinks that Ebba is interested in him, and indeed their affection is consummated over the course of a single hour, but when he’s next seen by the Princess she shuns him for breaking the rules of Copenhagen society. While Holk thinks that he must propose to Ebba, he doesn’t realise that she considers her brief romance with him to be a simple game, and she rejects him harshly.

Interior 1899 Vilhelm Hammershoi 1864-1916 Presented in memory of Leonard Borwick by his friends through the Art Fund 1926 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04106 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported). Photo @ Tate

Holk is guilty of a traditionally masculine overconfidence. He lacks the emotional intelligence to notice the social constraints he has flouted until it is too late. In the same way, when he first meets Ebba, he tries to impress her with his knowledge of genealogy, trying to guess her origins. But in spite of his impressive memory, she reveals that she is the granddaughter of a court Jew, which shames him and reveals his racial prejudices also. Holk, having rejected one world, finds himself failing to enter the new one too. He doesn’t notice the rules until it’s too late. At the end of the book he returns painfully to Christine to beg forgiveness; meanwhile, Ebba has made a fantastic marriage to an extremely rich Englishman. She, at least, understood how to play the game.

Speech, Style, and Structure

Fontane is a master of dialogue. It sounds realistic and advances the plot, which I suppose is all we can ask for, given the novel’s ambitions. But in Irretrievable dialogue isn’t the only way that the plot is advanced, however, and there are a number of cool little tactics I think are worth dwelling on. One of these is connected to the novel’s setting. Much of the novel’s action takes place in Denmark proper, where Holk works at court. News comes predominantly from letters, whether from his wife, his brother-in-law, or someone else. That means that news is delayed, but it also means that news is open to interpretation. Holk constantly misreads letters, assuming a different tone than is actually there. This is in part because he wants to justify his infidelity to himself. The reader, because the narration follows Holk closely, is consequently led along with his delusions.

Fontane thus gives us a narrative that seems at first flat, by which I mean there are few key moments of change – rather we just witness the gradual moral decline of Holk. But because he isn’t aware of this, Fontane makes the reader responsible for finding significance in his actions and inactions. For example, there is the way that he first promises Christine he will be home for Christmas… and then by new year he is still in Denmark. The narrative rarely draws attention to this, but so the reader must pay attention to connect the dots.

Paying attention also reveals a certain degree of irony in the narration, of the sort that Holk himself seems incapable of picking up on. “Christine was unable to write because she was ill. It couldn’t be said that this information made much impression on him.”, is one example. Uncertainty is carefully maintained all through the story, providing an implicit contrast to Holk’s self-assurance in his interpretation of events. One such example lies at the end of the book, warning of the final tragedy of it all – “Holk’s dream was fulfilled, or seemed about to be fulfilled”. This use of “seemed” repeats at key moments throughout. In Irretrievable Fontane artfully uses a seemingly straightforward narrative only to reveal its – and Holk’s – ultimate illusory control over events. It’s quite clever, really.

The Title – the Shades of Meaning of Irretrievable / No Way Back

Irretrievable takes place in 1859-1861, towards the end of Danish control of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Politics and history are not of prime importance, but they already add a shade of meaning to the title of Irretrievable. Readers familiar with German history know what none of the characters can yet know – that the uneasy presence in Denmark of two duchies containing a sizeable ethnic German population will not last more than a few years after the novel ends. Holk, as an ethnic German serving an aging Princess in the Danish court, has an uncertain future even before his infidelity is considered. What Irretrievable becomes, then, is also a record of a dying place, culture, and identity.

Irretrievable refers, more obviously however, to the state of Christine and Holk’s marriage. Their relationship goes from tranquil distance at the beginning to – ultimately – Christine’s suicide under the waves. Yet this suicide comes only pages after a renewal of their marriage vows, after Holk’s return following their separation. There are few signs that there really was no way back. So the title, although it speaks to the inevitability of the plot, doesn’t speak to the reality of the situation. Rather, it reflects a single character’s view on things – Christine’s. It is she who cannot move on from first the loss of her child, and then Holk’s infidelity. The simplicity of the title conceals the ultimate fragility of the viewpoint it expresses.

Theodor Fontane himself lost a child, so had plenty of reasons to feel Christine’s position. Nonetheless, he knew that staying in the past could only lead to further tragedy.

The idea of irretrievability also has some relevance to Holk’s age. In the novel he is not old, but at about forty, he is also not young either. His dalliance with Ebba reflects ultimately how out of touch he is as to his true identity as an aging family man. He can try to flirt and flout convention, but in the end, he does not belong to that world anymore, and his failure is inevitable.

Conclusion

There’s no way back to the youth we’ve lost, just as there’s no way to remove the fact of death’s loss from out hearts. But we can move on and try again to find life and love beyond them. Holk returns to Christine after his infidelity and they even renew their marriage vows. She, however, is unable to move on. Being locked in the past only leads to an ever-greater dislocation from the present, and one that proves ultimately fatal for her. Fontane wrote Irretrievable in the aftermath of the death of one of his own children, and it’s easy to see how its theme could be dear to him. For although on one level this is simply a book about an adulterous adventure gone wrong, at a deeper level it is about whether we choose to live in the past or try to find life in the present.

I enjoyed it a lot.

For more Fontane, here’s my review of Effi Briest.

Theodor Storm’s Poetry of Love and Death (Translations)

I really like Theodor Storm as a poet because he seems to me to be incredibly conventional. There is almost nothing special about either the form or the content of Storm’s poetry, but these little pieces are (forgive the translations if they don’t convey this) perfectly crafted all the same. There is no danger of ambition getting in the way of the message. While it is true that Storm wrote longer poems that I haven’t translated here, even those are all limited in formal and thematic scope. It seems he understood his talents and never thought it was worth the danger of trying to move beyond them, something he did in the formal experimentation of his novellas.

Storm was born in 1817 in Husum, a small town in the duchy of Schleswig, at that time ruled by the Danish crown, even though it contained a sizeable German population. He studied law further south, wrote poems and novellas (I’ve written on Aquis Submersus here, and Immensee here), and returned to Husum after it had come under Prussian rule following a brief war with Denmark. There is a political slant to his work at times, but this doesn’t come across in the selection I’ve translated. I don’t feel the patriotism translates well without notes and I’m not sure it’d be enjoyable with them either.

Storm died at the age of 70 from cancer, shortly after completing “The Rider on the White Horse”, perhaps his greatest novella.

The Poems

I’ve translated several of Storm’s poems. His topics within them range from life and love to death and decay. My only regret with them is that I haven’t yet translated his more nature-based poems. I find them particularly beautiful. But that means I’m harder on myself – I want to do them justice. Since I myself grew up by a grey and northern coastline, I’m especially fond of Storm’s poetry dealing with his homeland.

But anyway, here are the poems. Following them will be a few comments.

 Beginning of the End
 
 It's just a point, not even pain -
 It's just a feeling you perceive -
 And yet it hangs around your thoughts,
 And yet it makes it hard to breathe.
  
 And when you try to tell your friends,
 You find you cannot find the words. 
 You tell yourself: "this is no end."
 And yet there's no peace from its birth.
  
 And now the world becomes so strange, 
 And quietly your hopes depart,
 Until you see at last - at last! -
 That death's dark arrow's found your heart.

 

 Insomnia
  
 I woke from dreams in worried fright -
 Why is the lark's song out in the night?
  
 The day's gone by, the morning's still far,
 Down onto my pillow there shines a star.
  
 Yet on and on there floats the lark's song -
 O voice of day, what has gone wrong?

 
 
 Early Morning

 Above the roof the sun's gold shines,
 And cocks begin to crow the time;
 The one crows here, the other there,
 Their call rings out from everywhere.
 Now in the distance dies the cry -
 There's nothing more to fill the sky.
 Oh brave old cocks, sing on your song!
 They are still sleeping, sleeping on.

 
 
 A Whisper
  
 It is a whisper in the night,
 And yet it set my peace to flight.
 I feel it's there, it wants to say
 Some thing but cannot find the way.
  
 Is it love's words, their secrets thrown
 Into the wind, blown far from home?
 Or is it pain from future days
 That hopes to help me change my ways?

A photo of Husum, showing the water and a few of the waterfront houses, which are much the same as they were during Storm's time. — Husum, Storm’s birthplace and home for much of his life. It’s a lovely little town and the Storm Museum there is worth visiting if you’re ever in the area. Photo by Bernd Untiedt (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 
 "One body and one soul..."

 One body and one soul, as once we were,
 - Seen thus, how great your death to me appears.
 As you, alone, within the grave decay,
 So too feel I, myself, decay up here.

 
 "A man held once..."

 A man held once by loving arms,
 Need never ask in life for alms.
 If he must die far off, alone, 
 Still yet he'll feel those blessed hours,
 When her mouth loved with all its powers,
 And now in death she'll stay his own.

 
 Consolation
 Whatever happens, come what may!
 If you still live I'll love this day. 

 The feeling goes, the world to roam -
 Wherever you are, that's my home.

 I see your lovely face before me,
 And know the future cannot hurt me.

Closing Remarks

If I had to write about these in an essay, I’d find more to say than I will say now. But essays are always unnatural; they just get in the way of enjoying the simplicity of the poetry. Storm’s poetry is often about love, about the changes in love brought by death and separation. In this he seems quite similar to another major German poet of the same period, Eduard Mörike. But Storm’s poetry, at least here, also has a much greater sense of apprehension and anxiety about it. Death is always just around the corner, and however beautiful the natural world is there’s also a sense that Storm is not always certain that he can correctly interpret the world’s symbols. The gap between perception and his understanding seems to torment him, as in “Insomnia” and “A Whisper” – both end in questions.

I hope you enjoyed my translations. If you have any comments, why not leave a comment? If you want more German poetry, I have a piece on Hugo von Hofmannsthal here.

Thomas Mann’s Gladius Dei and the Challenge of Modern Art

I confess I’ve never really gotten the hype with Thomas Mann. Or rather, the moment I start reading him I’m usually left either disappointed or confused. I blame his reputation. German students like me flock to read him but soon find they spend more time in the dictionary than the stories themselves. Death in Venice is a particular pain to understand the language of, and that’s not even half the battle of making sense of that tale. Nonetheless, once I read it in English (the poor Cambridge academics who supervise me are doubtless shaking their heads in disappointment) I found it rather enjoyable, and intellectually challenging too. Nevertheless, due to the arcane rules of Cambridge examinations I can’t talk about Death in Venice next year, though Mann himself remains on the syllabus. Looking for alternatives, I turned to “Gladius Dei”, hoping it would have something interesting to say.

“Gladius Dei” – I was attracted by the title, meaning “the sword of God” – is not nearly as action-packed as its title suggests. And nor is it as focused on the past as the Latin hints at either. Instead, it shows the clash between modern art and the sensibility that drove it with the older ideas that once justified artistic creation but which, in 1902 (the time of the novella’s composition), had very much fallen out of fashion. It is the tale of one man, Hieronymus, and his struggle against modernism as a whole.

Translations are from David Luke’s Death in Venice and Other Stories.

Introduction: Munich, the Fallen City

“Munich was resplendent.” “Gladius Dei” begins with a description of Munich, and Munich in some way is the main character of the novella. The German Jugendstil, their Art Nouveau, was at the height of its popularity in the city at the time the novella was written. From the very first paragraph, listing “festive squares” and “colonnades” and “fountains” we are immersed into this world of art. We meet the people, particularly women, who live in the city – as types, rather than as people. They are all relaxed and indolent. There is no rush about them.

Then we are taken into “the elaborate beauty-emporium of Herr M. Blüthenzweig”, where artistic reproductions and books are all on display, ranging in topic from the very modern to the classical. And here there is the first sense that art and its creation are not done in isolation, but influenced by consumers and their tastes – “among all this the portraits of artists, musicians, philosophers, actors and writers are displayed to gratify the inquisitive public’s taste for personal details.”

Next, we meet the key reproduction, which forms the focal point of the novella – but we don’t learn what it is in the novella’s first part. Instead, we are introduced to it through (literal) framing – “there is a large picture which particularly attracts the crowd: an excellent sepia photograph in a massive old-gold frame”. The frame is significant – its age contrasts with the contents, which are “sensational” and highly modern, promoted by “quaintly printed placards” and “this year’s great international exhibition”. Ironically, like the citizens of the novella, we are shown modern art by means of its popular reputation rather than its particular contents.

The narrative then moves back onto the street from its focus, completing the framing of the central picture. The final paragraph discusses the popularity of the art while returning to the novella’s opening words. “That it should continue so to thrive is a matter of general and reverent concern; on all sides diligent work and propaganda are devoted to its service; everywhere there is a pious cult of line, of ornament, of form, of the sense, of beauty… Munich is resplendent.” Though “Gladius Dei” ends its first part with the same words that begun it, here the tone is changed. From the purely celebratory beginning, now there is something seedy about the art – hinted at by words like “propaganda” and “cult”. It is this tension and seediness that the centre of Mann’s tale hinges upon.

Hieronymus and the Madonna

With the second section of “Gladius Dei” we are introduced to Hieronymus, whose name, reminding me of the artist Bosch, immediately conjures up images of the past. Against the brightness of resplendent Munich we are told that “when one looked at him, a shadow seemed to pass across the sun or a memory of dark hours across the soul”. He is inscrutable, but we are told he resembles a portrait in Florence of a monk who also raged against the world. In this way, Mann connects the present anger of Hieronymus with a historical precedent, that of the priest, Girolamo Savonarola. The two of them also share the same name.

A painting of Girolamo Savonarola, a priest who shares many characteristics with Hieronymus in Gladius Dei — Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican priest who shares a passionate hatred of modernity with Hieronymus, alongside some physical features too.

Hieronymus first goes to a church on the Ludwigstrasse to pray, and then he comes across the art house of Blüthenzweig. Going inside, he sees the reproduction first mentioned in part 1 of “Gladius Dei”:

“It was a Madonna, painted in a wholly modern and entirely unconventional manner. The sacred figure was ravishingly feminine, naked and beautiful. Her great sultry eyes were rimmed with shadow, and her lips were half parted in a strange and delicate smile. Her slender figures were grouped rather nervously and convulsively round the waist of the Child, a nude boy of aristocratic, almost archaic slimness, who was playing with her breast and simultaneously casting a knowing sidelong glance at the spectator.”

This is sacrilege. A holy image turned lustful – “ravishing”, “sultry”, and the “knowing sidelong glance” all suggest that the glorification inherent in such a choice of subject has taken a back seat. Hieronymus overhears two young men discussing the painting, neither of whom respects its religious subject matter. “She does make one a bit doubtful about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception” one says. But they inform the reader that the painting has been bought by the Pinakothek Gallery and that its artist is being feted around the city. Their language is almost comically cultural, as if – to use the modern phrase – they are a bunch of posers. I would be surprised if this was not exactly what Mann has in mind. Hieronymus, meanwhile, finishes looking at the painting, and leaves, ending part 2.

Part 3 is only a page long, but it describes Hieronymus’ struggles to rid himself of the image of the sexualised Madonna. At last, however, “on the third night” he receives what he perceives to be a command from God, and decides that he must go and protest the display of such a work of art. And now the story approaches its climax.

Action and Inaction – the Bloodless Climax of Gladius Dei

Part 4 begins as Hieronymus heads onto the street, filled with righteous rage. “It is God’s will”, he thinks to himself, echoing the cries of “Deus Vult” that launched the first crusades. Outside the weather has begun to worsen, and a storm appears to be approaching. He reaches Blüthenzweig’s shop and goes inside, seeing evidence all around him for the spiritual decay of humankind. For example, there is a “gentleman in a yellow suit with a black goatee” who has a “bleating laugh” – both the laugh and the goatee suggest something animalistic about him. Coming across Blüthenzweig as he’s finalizing a transaction Hieronymus hears him call it “most attractive and seductive”.

Blüthenzweig is a capitalist, an art dealer with little appreciation for art itself. That is Hieronymus’ interpretation anyway, as he claims the dealer despises him “because I am not able to buy anything from you.” Meanwhile, Hieronymus is entirely concerned with the non-monetary value that art has. Is it good for the spirit, or not? In the case of the Madonna, he sees it as actively pernicious – “vice itself.” Blüthenzweig rejects this immediately – “The picture is a work of art… and as such it must be judged by the appropriate standards”. The painting has been bought by the gallery and is universally acclaimed. Both Blüthenzweig and Hieronymus have their own idea of what the “appropriate standards” are, but Blüthenzweig’s idea is marked by a focus on the external – acclaim – while Hieronymus’ is internal – “the spiritual enrichment of mankind”.

Hieronymus does not let Blüthenzweig convince him. He cries of hell, of the torments of purgatory. Beauty is a lie used by the representatives of Jugendstil to avoid considering the health of the soul. Instead, art ought to be “the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss”. It must be about compassion, not beauty. Hieronymus demands that Blüthenzweig burns the reproduction, which naturally he does not have any interest in doing. He calls in Krauthuber, one of his workers, to throw Hieronymus out of the shop. Krauthuber is “a son of the people, malt-nourished, herculean and awe-inspiring” and with “heroic arms.” He represents, it seems to me, a sidestepping of the Christian view of art that Hieronymus represents towards the Classical, where art, especially if one takes Nietzsche’s view, was all about advancing the spirit and glorifying it.

Just not in the Christian sense of the spirit or glorification. Alone on the street, Hieronymus falls into madness, surrounded by the markers of a depraved age – “carnival costumes”, “naked statues”, and “the busts of women”. He sees them all piled into a pyramid and set to flames. It is here, as the novella ends, that he quotes Savonarola, who had had a similar vision of God’s vengeance, “Gladius Dei super terram… Cito et velociter” – “behold there is the sword of God above the Earth, fast and swift”. He has achieved nothing for his madness, but perhaps Hieronymus succeeded in saving his soul. Who can say?

Theories of Art and the Modernism of “Gladius Dei”

By the time that Mann is writing “Gladius Dei” Hieronymus’ view of art was well out of date. Even in the 19^th century, art had already become popular, its form and content determined by market forces – think of Dickens in England during that time, or Dumas in France. That’s not to say that lofty goals had departed from artistic endeavours, but rather that they were often secondary to the need to feed oneself and one’s family, especially as artistic production became democratised and a new generation of writers and artists who were not aristocratic in background came to prominence.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to see where Mann sits in all this. Though in “Gladius Dei” he shows the vapid banality of Blüthenzweig and his customers, Hieronymus is a ridiculous figure too. The contrast between the violence of the novella’s title and the ultimate lack of action and change seems to mock Hieronymus’ hopes to change society’s relation to art for the better. Likely, Mann sits somewhere in the middle – he respects Hieronymus’ love for the spiritual mission for art, while acknowledging the historical forces that make this view secondary, and indeed challenging to hold. The old values, in a world where “God is dead”, simply aren’t reliable anymore.

It’s also worth considering how the form of “Gladius Dei” reflects modernism in its composition. For one, there’s Mann’s ambivalence towards all of his characters, so that it’s not clear who is worth supporting, if anybody. Then there is also the satirical use of religion (just like the Madonna itself) and its language when Hieronymus thinks God is commanding him to defeat Blüthenzweig and the reproduction. It’s clear that Mann doesn’t think Hieronymus is really hearing God or want the reader to think so either. The inconclusiveness of the novella’s conclusion is also, in its own way, modernistic. We are given no guidance – it’s not even clear if we should pity Hieronymus. All, I think, that is clear is that the Jugendstil movement and the Christian artistic sensibility of Hieronymus are both inadequate in Mann’s view. But what is good art – Mann’s ideas on that are impossible to work out.

A photo of Thomas Mann in 1905 — Thomas Mann in 1905, three years after “Gladius Dei” was completed. I’m not sure how far I approve of the coldness of his writings. Intellectualism alone is not what I’m after as a reader.

Conclusion

Personally, I’m closer to Hieronymus than Mann is. Not in the sense that I think literature and art should be about fulfilling a Christian message, but rather that I do think there should be a strong message in them about the value of humanity. A literature must be affirmative, glorifying our lives and life itself in all their complexity, whether good or bad. This is the secret to Tolstoy’s greatness. Mann doesn’t care enough about people for that. In this, he reminds me a little bit of Isaac Babel, another writer who is much more intellectual than emotional. It can make stories that are thought provoking, but terribly cold…

I thought “Gladius Dei” was ok. I mean, it’ll be easy to write about it next year once I’m back at Cambridge. But the measure of a book’s value isn’t how easily I’ll be able to ram it into an essay. I’ll keep reading Mann, but I hope one day I’ll understand where he keeps his heart locked away. Irony just doesn’t cut it for me – our own world is too ironic, too dispassionate, already. The solution to an ironic and dead world isn’t acceptance, but a conscious search for meaning and value, like Kazantzakis managed in Report to Greco. But perhaps I’m asking too much.

If you’ve read “Gladius Dei” and have an opinion on it, why not drop by the comments and let me know what you thought?