German Literature Archives - Page 10 of 14

Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Hiob) – A Review

There is something about Bible stories, and all ancient storytelling, that gives them great power. We all have our feelings, our moments of joy and despair, but compared to the era of belief what richness of emotion have we lost! The story of Job contains one example of such richness. Our present sufferings can seem to pale in comparison with those of a man who feels betrayed by his God. For, whatever great and terrible increase in scale of suffering we bear witness to (especially these days…), there appears to have been a concomitant loss in depth of pain. Many Bible stories have been modernised in literature and the arts in general, and perhaps first among these is the Book of Job. This tale of good and evil and the mystery of the divine maintains its strength even now, when faith is little more than a puff of smoke.

A photo of Joseph Roth, author of Job — Joseph Roth is most famous for two works – Job: The Story of a Simple Man, and The Radetzky March. After being so impressed by Job I hope to read the latter as soon as I can.

It’s not hard to see why Joseph Roth, a Jew writing in German, might have found Job’s story close to his heart. Born in 1894 in Brody, on the edge of the multinational Habsburg Empire, his life was one of recurrent tragedy. An absent father, battles with antisemitism in the military, the collapse of his country (which, with all its peoples, allowed many Jews like Roth to feel at home), the madness and incarceration into a mental institute of his wife, his own alcoholism, and finally the rise of Hitler – none of these was a recipe for joy.

But his novel of 1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, to give it its full title, is in its way a joyous tale. For all its monstrous grief and suffering, Roth’s story of Jewish life is filled with a gentle nostalgia and affection for the minor things of life that bring it value. In some way, it’s similar to John Williams’s novel, Stoner, which also takes a life of misfortune and finds the beauty in it. I’d like to share what I loved about Roth’s Job below.

A Jew in Russia

A Simple, Pious, Life

Job begins by introducing us to Mendel Singer, its hero and our modern-day Job. He is “pious, God-fearing and ordinary”, and he works as a teacher. He is humble; his house is small. His faith and trust in God is simple and true. He teaches children because he does not have the knowledge to teach older children the ways of his faith. Mendel Singer lives in the borderlands of the Russian Empire. He lives there with his family – his wife Deborah, his daughter Miriam, and his three sons – Shemariah, Jonas, and Menuchim. The last son was born unlucky, unable to grow normally or talk. His unlucky birth is the first tragedy that is visited upon the home of Mendel Singer.

But really it is hard to say how far this early part of Job is bleak. Instead, for all the poverty the Singer family live in, there is a remarkable dignity to their world, in part thanks to Roth’s careful attention to his characters and his beautiful language. I don’t know how anyone could read something like this without feeling a sense of nostalgia, a feeling that life is being lived:

“He sat down, sang a little song, then the parents and children slurped the hot soup, smiled at the plates and spoke not a word. Warmth rose in the room. It swarmed from the pots, the bowls, the bodies.”

Mendel’s teaching, too, is given the same treatment:

“The bright choir of children’s voices repeated word after word, sentence after sentence, it was as if the Bible were being tolled by many bells.”

Of course, simply writing beautifully is not enough to cancel out grief. But there is no grief here – not in these passages, at any rate. The feeling that we have as we read Job is instead that we are always too late in counting our blessings, in realising what value there is in what we already have. We are drawn into wisdom by witnessing the absence of it. We can only watch, powerlessly, as Job’s family slip towards abyss after abyss.

Grief Begins

The two healthy boys grow up and are conscripted into the Russian army – which meant a lifetime away from home, and an enforced rejection of Jewish strictures like avoiding pork. By using all of her savings Deborah is able to get Shemeriah smuggled out of the country – and this too, meant that the chance of ever seeing his family again is next to zero. And Miriam, the girl, begins to flirt with the Cossacks, with the Russian soldiers in town. Only Menuchim remains at home, and he is speechless and dumb.

A photo showing a traditional Jewish family outside their house. — A Jewish family in a Schtetl in 1903, around the time Job: The Story of a Simple Man begins. Amusingly and sadly, some of the locations in Job are also featured in Isaac Babel’s tales of (among other things) the destruction of Jewish life in Western Russia and Poland, Red Army Cavalry.

Now beautiful descriptions start moving towards describing torment. “Sorrow blew through their hearts like a constant hot and biting wind”. When Shemeriah, now Sam, writes from America, describing its glory and his prosperity, the father’s grief is laid open – his soul cannot leave the world it has always inhabited. “The sons disappeared: Jonas served the Tsar in Pskov and was no longer Jonas. Shemariah bathed on the shores of the ocean and was no longer called Shemariah. Miriam… wanted to go to America too. Only Menuchim remained what he had been since the day of his birth: a cripple. And Mendel Singer himself remained what he had always been: a teacher.”

I liked the way that the story is so simple. Each of the healthy children has an animal associated with them. Miriam, the coquette, is a gazelle; Jonas the strong is a bear; while Shemariah the cunning and thoughtful is a fox. The simplicity of the piled-up misfortunes makes an equally simple plot diagram. The idea is simple, even if the execution makes use of modern ideas and modern problems. Things like interminable Russian bureaucracy mix easily together with brutal and unfortunately timeless antisemitism. For instance, while walking home one night Mendel thinks – so simply, as to be shocking to a sheltered reader like myself – “A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft and beat him to death on the spot – with a stone perhaps”.

A Jew in America

America – the Promised Land?

Mendel Singer, thanks to news and money from Sam and to avoid Miriam’s desire to be with Cossacks, gathers his family for the one-way journey to America. But Menuchim, still underdeveloped, is left behind – the journey would be too much for him. For Deborah in particular this is a moment of crisis. When she went to the rabbi about her deformed son his promise was that he would grow up to be wise and strong, but that for this to come to pass she must not leave him, even if he is a great burden. But still, with no choice, the family leave him entrusted to another family, and depart.

A photo of New York in the 1900s. — New York (pictured) and America more broadly, may have been a land of opportunity, but for Mendel Singer they marked another step towards the loss of his identity, his culture, and his once unshakeable faith in God’s goodness.

In America Mendel Singer finds riches – his son Sam is a clever guy. But he also finds himself and his world further slipping away from the simple, pious, world that he’s truly after. He notices that in America there are no frogs or crickets at night, and the stars above are “miserable” and “mutilated”. He escapes into dreams, hoping that Menuchim will get better. One day he hears from Jonas in the army, and joy returns for a brief moment. And then terrible, dreadful, history shows its hand. War breaks out in Europe.

The book continues its downward descent. “Fear shook him as the wind a weak tree”. Tragedy comes for Mendel Singer, again and again. At first he prays, and then begins to feel that singing psalms is nothing against the might of flames and cannons. It is the first kind of doubt in Job. The sense that God cannot hear you. But things will get worse still. America has yet to join the war.

Rebellion

Mendel talks to the dead. He knows that God has forsaken him. “For me He has no pity. For I’m a dead man and live”. But his passive feeling cannot last. One more tragedy awaits to push him over the edge. The high point of Job is so unbelievably good. Roth takes his source material and makes a real, thundering, blasphemous rebellion out of it. I had to stop reading I was so in awe. Mendel attempts to burn his bible – the one possession still connecting him with his past in Russia. We see, in his mind, the pages burning, but he hesitates. “His heart was angry with God, but in his muscles the fear of God still dwelled”.

Mendel’s neighbours come to try to stop him. They try to speak to him of Job, the story of a man punished by God as a test. Mendel will have none of it. “My presence brings misfortune, and my love draws down the curse as a lone tree in a flat field the lightning”. His final outburst is something awesome:

“The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel. I am not afraid, my friends!”

Mendel’s final rebellion can only come from a position of faith, because only faith disappointed can lower you into such depths. It is beautiful and harrowing in equal measure, but also uncanny. As if, for the modern reader, Mendel is a fool for his belief. But a fool we can’t help but admire, and perhaps, one we wish we could emulate.

Conclusion: A Good Job?

Job: The Story of a Simple Man ultimately does not stray too far from its biblical source. However, I found the modernised ending to be one of the weakest parts of the book. Roth, the translator Ross Benjamin writes in my copy’s afterword, once confessed that he could only have written the ending drunk. That’s the impression I got too. The modern world is well suited for tragedy, but modernising miracles, as Roth attempts to do, can come across as fake and kind of desperate. But that’s not to devalue Job. It is a really good, really enjoyable book. Roth’s language is wonderful, and his feeling for the slow declines of modern life – the loss of identity, of culture, of homeland – is sublime. I thoroughly recommend it, and will definitely be reading some more Roth very soon.

Have you read any Joseph Roth? Leave a comment with your thoughts if you have.

Update: for my review of The Radetzky March, go here.

Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup and Other Stories – a Review

Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup is a collection of short stories written by the German writer during his early career, from 1904-11, and published in English in the book Bright Magic. I read them largely because they all fall within the time period of the German paper I’m taking next year – is there any other reason to read anything? – and because unlike, say, Robert Musil’s stories of this period, the stories collected in The Murder of a Buttercup are rather more straightforward and approachable. They are, that is, stories as well as experiments, however full they are of modernist flourishes. Döblin himself is one of the better-known German modernists, albeit one whose lifetime’s work has been reduced down to a single book – Berlin Alexanderplatz – just as Ivan Goncharov in Russia or William Makepeace Thackery in Britain have been reduced to Oblomov and Vanity Fair for the casual reader.

A photo of Alfred Döblin, the author of The Murder of a Buttercup — Alfred Döblin, a German writer whose work has more or less been reduced down to his novel *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, was born in 1878 and worked as a doctor before becoming a full-time writer. *The Murder of a Buttercup* was his first collection of stories.

Whether or not that seems fair in Döblin’s case I hope to venture an early answer to at the end of this review. Before then I’ll go over a few of the stories themselves, alongside their general themes. For, whether good or not, they are certainly interesting for their modernist impulses. All translations are by Damion Searls.

The Rejection of the World – “The Sailboat Ride”

The first story in The Murder of a Buttercup is the plainly titled “The Sailboat Ride” and it is itself one of the most straightforward tales here. It details a relationship between a Brazilian man, Copetta, and a woman he meets at the beach at Ostend in Belgium. Copetta is, at forty-eight, already conscious of his age. In Paris, before the story begins, he’s spent weeks in hospital, expecting to die only to ultimately recover. Far away from home, he hopes to sample European culture. But his attention is taken by a woman he meets. After seeing her three times in one day he begins to question the assumptions underlying his life. He sends her a note before destroying both his wedding ring and his pictures of his children.

When they meet, they go for a ride into the sea on a sailboat. They are wild and restless in their passion, but in time Copetta’s mood worsens. She tries to comfort him, but without success. At last a wave comes that bears him away. She is found by the authorities, drifting on the sea – Copetta’s suicide was premeditated, and he had already sent them a telegram to warn them. But the story does not end here. Now we follow the woman as she heads to Paris and tries to stave off her grief through sexual liberation. “She denied herself to no one”. But this does not bring her the deep pleasure she is after. A year later she sends a message to Ostend: “To Mr Copetta Ostend Hotel Estrada expect me tomorrow noon. Wire reply requested.”

She returns. Her mother has died in the interim, but the news has no effect on the woman. She is filled with bliss – her madness is complete. She pretends that Copetta is alive and writes him a message, then one morning she steals a rowboat and heads into the sea. There she meets “Copetta” again. From out of the waves “a dark shape” appears. He joins her on the boat, but his body is crusted with shells and ruined. He tries to ward her off with an ambiguous wave of his arm, but she does not retreat. As they are united in intoxication and pleasure, they turn young once more, and in that moment they are both at last swept under the waves.

Meanings and Themes in “The Sailboat Ride”

“The Sailboat Ride” is a good introduction to many of the general themes of The Murder of a Buttercup. First among these is a turning away from the world. In the Modernist period many artists rejected the stodgy social conditions of the environment in which they worked. Emotions and characters that otherwise would not grace the printed page now rose to prominence and without condemnation on the part of their creators. In “The Sailboat Ride” we have Copetta’s infidelity and also the open female sexuality of the woman. Döblin’s narration in The Murder of a Buttercup is at timeshighly sensual, and this story is filled with hip-on-hip contact, mussels, and other overt and covert sexually charged emotions and symbols.

A painting of Nietzsche by Edvard Munch. — Friedrich Nietzsche, destroyer of past values and builder of new ones, is a big influence on modernism in general, and Döblin in particular. It was he who first challenged the foundations of our culture and society, revealing how flimsy these foundations really were. Painting by Munch.

Of course, within the story both man and women are punished for their desires – Copetta’s inability to deal with socially-conditioned guilt no doubt leads to his suicide, while the woman faces condemnation for forgetting her mother and dancing with so many men. But what matters is that that at the story’s conclusion they turn their backs on society and find bliss. The sea, intoxication (a motif that directly speaks to Nietzsche’s Dionysian world in The Birth of Tragedy), allows them to come together at last, at the cost of their demise. And it’s hard to read the final moments as anything other than triumphant.

“Astralia”: Another Retreat from the World

A rejection of the world can come in many forms, and though death and suicide are common in The Murder of a Buttercup there are other retreats here. In Astralia we find a scholar, Adolf Götting, whose escape comes in the form of mysticism. As the fin-de-siècle mood in Europe worsened towards the outbreak of the First World War, and with organised religion dying, many turned to cults and mysticism to try to find a suitable faith.

The scholar of Astralia has his own mystic group, convinced that the Redeemer will soon return. They meet and drink, and drink a lot. When Götting leaves the tavern one evening he has no boots, nor hat nor coat. He thinks he is transformed into some kind of prophet, and the mockery he receives on the street only confirms his delusions. When he returns home, he treats his wife badly for not being part of his group, but when she continues to fuss about his dress and state of dishevelment he eventually breaks down: “Oh, don’t laugh…. Please, please don’t laugh. Oh, I beg you, I’m begging, beg-ging….”. The retreat fails, Götting is left a fool. Society has been too strong for him to escape.

“The Murder of a Buttercup” – Religion and Rationality

There is a tension in The Murder of a Buttercup not only between society and the self, but also between an extreme rationality and irrationality. Both Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Max Weber (in his lecture “Science as Vocation”) warn against adopting a hyper rationalist viewpoint of the sort that was at the time coming into vogue. While on the surface science offers a lot of explanations, Nietzsche saw a wholehearted belief in science as just a continuation of the Christian world view, and as such one ultimately tending towards nihilism and a devaluation of all things. Meanwhile, Weber added that although science answers a lot of questions, nonetheless its answers are very often based on presuppositions (even today), meaning that most “facts” are nonetheless ultimately contingent. Once we start questioning what underpins them we can devalue the world that way too.

What matters, then, is to leave a little bit of irrationality in yourself instead of veering between hyper-rationalism and irrationalism. There are many characters in The Murder of a Buttercup who seem unable to do this. The most memorable on is Michael Fischer, the hero of “The Murder of a Buttercup” itself. This is an extraordinarily strange tale. On a walk in the mountains Fischer, the head of a firm in the city, attacks and dismembers a buttercup that had managed to slow him down. Fischer is a rational man, if cruel. But the murder of a buttercup is all that is necessary to lead him down the road to madness. A few moments after killing the flower he sees himself, committing the act again. A dislocation has taken place between the old Fischer and the new.

As he continues walking, guilt for the “murder” begins to eat away at him, including a fear of social repercussions – “What if someone saw him, one of his business colleagues or a lady?”. Fischer tries to control himself the same way he controls his firm. In his mind he even seems to refer to himself as a “firm”. But he is unable to win out, and images of death and decay, of the “plant corpse”, continue to eat at him. Alongside another emotion – pleasure. A kind of sexual enjoyment was to be had in murdering the plant, a “gentle lasciviousness”.

Once Fischer gets over his guilt he feels “liberated”. But back in the city this guilt returns. He finds himself crediting the buttercup money to try to buy back his peace, he makes offerings to it. He is unable to win out – he ends up crying at all the beauty in the world, beauty that his guilt is ruining. He only moves on when he takes a new buttercup home from the mountains. He lavishes attention on this one out of spite for the old one. “Never had his life passed so cheerfully” we are told. Eventually, he disappears into the forest, “laughing and snorting loudly”. His madness is complete.

Modern Anxieties in The Murder of a Buttercup

Döblin’s Berlin grew extremely rapidly in the final years of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and business underpin Fischer’s power and confidence. But the foundations are flimsy. There is a moment in the story where he thinks “Nobody would make a fool out of him, nobody”. Though he tries to live rationally, he gains more enjoyment from an imaginary war with a buttercup than from his entire business career. His final retreat into the forest, like Copetta and the woman’s in “The Sailboat Ride”, is a firm rejection of society and social constraints. And like theirs, it is marked by a feeling that illicit, sexual pleasures and desires and more valuable than socially constrained ones, even as those same desires have fatal consequences. Fischer’s story is also similar to “Astralia” by means of its preoccupation with religious concerns.

In “Astralia” there was an attempt to replace organised religion with a kind of mystical cult; in “The Murder of a Buttercup”, however, it is the absence of religion that is the focus. Without a god to turn to, the question of how to expiate his guilt torments Fischer incessantly and seems to be a great contributor to his eventual madness. Looking at the story through Nietzsche seems like a good approach. Guilt, of course, is a Christian emotion in Nietzsche’s view. It makes us uncomfortable acting in a way that benefits ourselves by encouraging us to think about others and external, heavenly, judgement. It is thus the hallmark of a slave-morality. Fischer lives in a godless world, but he is still hamstrung by a Christian moral system, leaving him in the double bind of feeling a bad emotion but being unable to deal with it.

He doesn’t know he is free, and that ignorance comes to destroy him.

Conclusions

There are a few other interesting stories here, including “The Wrong Door”, with its amusing play on our ideas of fate, and the coldly rational and brutally misogynistic “Memoirs of a Jaded Man”. But space and attention are at a premium and I had better wrap things up. I liked a lot of the ideas and concerns that Döblin voices in The Murder of a Buttercup. In some sense his stories, with their mix of the supernatural and irrational alongside the rational and concrete, reminded me of Borges’ work. But Borges manages in three or four pages what Döblin needs several more to do, and I’m not sure the latter’s work is better for the extra space.

A painting of Döblin in a jagged, modernist style. — Modern anxieties alone are not enough for good fiction, at least in my book. The stories in *The Murder of a Buttercup* are intellectually interesting, but not always gripping. Portrait of Döblin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

It doesn’t help that his stories are rarely gripping, and there were a few times when I was left confused about what was actually happening. These aren’t instances of modernist flourishes – when Döblin’s language gets weird, it can be fantastic and beautiful – instead, these are times when he could probably simply have done with an editor. In the end, I’m left with mixed feelings. These tales are the work not of a talented author, but of someone who has everything they need to become one given time and the right circumstances. As with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, and Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, I can’t help but feel that the intellectual side of Döblin’s stories overpower their weaker and less gripping plots. And unfortunately, while it makes him easy to write essays about, it doesn’t really make him enjoyable to read.

But I hope his mature work, when I get around to it, will change my mind.

Have you read any Döblin? Does he get better? Leave a comment and let me know.

Fate and Control in Stefan Zweig’s The Fowler Snared (Sommernovellette)

The Fowler Snared is a short story by the German-language writer Stefan Zweig. Though it is short, it nonetheless reflects a lot of the key preoccupations of the German “Novelle” form while putting its own spin on them. There is a tension in this short tale between our desire for power and control, and our ability to achieve that same control. As in a work of tragic drama the characters of The Fowler Snared discover that there are forces – luck, fate, whatever – that act upon them even as they try to give order to their own world.

A photo showing Stefan Zweig, a handsome young man with glasses dressed formally. — Stefan Zweig, Austrian and Jewish German writer. The photo shows him at about the age he was when he wrote *The Fowler Snared*.

Zweig’s story, taking place on the banks of Lake Como in Northern Italy and detailing something akin to a failed romance, is typical of the highly cosmopolitan writer that Zweig was. Indeed, its setting and language reminded me somewhat of the opening of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, another work from a transnational talent. Born in Vienna 1881 to a family of wealthy but nonreligious Jews, Zweig was a pacifist and internationalist. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany Zweig fled first to the UK, then the United States, and finally Brazil. There, overwhelmed by Hitler’s early successes in the Second World War, he and his wife jointly committed suicide in 1942.

The Fowler Snared is from 1906 and contains none of that fear or anxiety about the world that Zweig’s later works, such as The Royal Game/Chess Story/Schachnovelle do, even though the story does acknowledge some of the darker sides of human character. But anyway, to the story.

Introduction: Plot and Form in The Fowler Snared

What’s in a story? I’ve spoken about the Novelle form in my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, and also in my thoughts on Theodor Storm’s “Aquis Submersus”. Generally we have a frame narrative, a small cast of characters, leitmotifs or recurring symbols, and a moment of crisis around the middle or else a twist. The Fowler Snared has all of these. The story begins in Cadenabbia, a place of “white villas” and “dark trees” on the banks of Lake Como. A place that is full of potential romance. But already something is slightly off, because it is August, and the narrator finds his hotel almost empty – those people looking for crowds, for adventure, would have been better off coming in the spring.

But still there are guests. The narrator singles one out, an elderly gentleman, and approaches him in search of a story. “Why, I wondered, did he not go away to some seaside resort?” the narrator asks himself. In approaching him the narrator makes us aware of the artificiality of stories, the way that they often need to be constructed out of forced experience that may often prove unrewarding. The man, however, rewards the narrator’s curiosity with a story just as he had hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Experience and Memory

The old man, who had “never had either a fixed occupation or a fixed place of abode”, is always described in pairs of adjectives to indicate his lack of stable existence. The narrator remarks that with the end of his life his accumulated experiences would be scattered and lost. “I have no interest in memories. Experience is experienced once for all; then it is over and done with” is the man’s reply, but he agrees to tell his story all the same. And here, as we enter the second narrative layer, we first encounter the tension that will be the man’s undoing – the tension between what he says and what, ultimately, he does.

The Old Man’s Story: The Girl

A year ago the old man was staying at the same hotel, and there he came to be aware of certain guests – a family of Germans. He is intrigued by the youngest of them, a plain girl of about sixteen or seventeen. He sits watching her, unable to work out why he finds her interesting. He admits to himself that she is nothing more than a teenager, “gazing dreamily across the lake”. And already there comes a natural impulse for control – he begins to imagine her personality, where he can only see her outward appearance. “She must be dreaming”, he thinks, of romantic tales.

A photo of Lake Como, where A Fowler Snared is set. — A photo of Lake Como, looking lovely. Resorts are always useful in the literature of this period. They let characters relax and forget a little the social rules that would bind them otherwise, thanks to the fact that all acquaintances here are by default fleeting and temporary. Chekhov’s “Lady With a Little Dog” is another classic resort-town romance. Photo by Stan Shebs CC BY-SA

And so he decides to create such a tale for her and be the author of her own story – “I made up my mind to find her a lover”. He writes her a love letter without signing it, leaves it for her to find the next morning. He does not consider the risk – he has a low opinion of women and thinks the girl is much too meek and quiet to tell anybody about the letter. There is certainly a sense that the man is living out a masculine power fantasy by controlling her.

His first letter is a success and he writes another, and another. The “sport” and “game” of his “imaginary passion” brings him an immense pleasure. But it also brings the girl pleasure. She “seemed to dance as she walked”, and her previous plainness disappears now that she pays attention to her appearance. For the moment all is well, “the marionette danced, and I pulled the strings skilfully”. But our control over the world is not so permanent as the old man might have hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Control’s Failure

There are two mistakes, two things that the old man doesn’t anticipate. In his letters, to avoid the possibility that the girl might realise it is him who is writing them, he now suggests that he comes from another resort each morning to look at her. The girl begins to sit watching the steamer. And one morning, a “handsome young fellow arrives”. Their eyes meet, and although they do not know each other they both succumb to the illusion that they were destined to meet. For the old man, this comes as a shock. “He had almost caught up with her, and I was feeling in my alarm that the edifice I had been building was about to be shattered”. At the final moment, however, the girl’s mother arrives and the two are unable to meet. But this has already revealed the fragility of the man’s overall control.

The next morning the second instance of the man’s inability to control fate is revealed. He comes across the girl in “disorder”. “The charming restlessness had been replaced by an incomprehensible misery”. He only understands when he sees that the family’s table is not laid – they have left the resort. She has been unable to meet her imagined lover. Not only that, but the man’s manipulation, which at first had brought her pleasure, is now the cause of her despair. The moral aspect of the story grows harder to avoid.

Two Moments of Conflict

The old man’s story ends. But as the narrator points out, this is not a good story. The novella form itself demands neatness, a tying up that is absent here. “A story needs an ending”, he says. And so he himself takes a more active role again, asking questions and leading the conversation. He says how he imagines the story ends: the old man was incapable of feigning passion like that forever. In the end, the passion became real. He came back to the same place a year later, hoping to find the girl and declare his love.

And here the man interrupts him with a denial that is as good as a confession. A novella often has a moment of crisis as its high point. This crisis, where the old man’s secret is revealed, is two-parted. There is of course the revelation of his secret, but more importantly there is also his failure. The girl is not here. He returned, “wooing fortune’s favour only to find fortune pitiless”. In a sense, the crisis has already taken place before the story begins. And that makes its impact, the sense of the old man’s powerlessness before fate, all the greater. He tried to control the girl, only to find another force, a more powerful force, controlling him. It is a pleasant irony and gives a nice symmetry to the story.

Stories and the Language of Control

I read The Fowler Snared in an English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, and the translation seems to be a fine one. It didn’t get in the way of the story, and most importantly it was clear, letting the uncertainties of Zweig’s own dialogues and descriptions come to the forefront. For after all, alongside the controlling impulse of the man himself towards the girl, the act of speaking and telling a story is also one that involves giving order and control to something that is essentially boundless and untransferable – personal experience.

First, we have story itself. It is created when the narrator approaches the old man at the beginning of The Fowler Snared, then is given an ending when the narrator pressures the old man to explain his return to the resort. Even the old man himself is aware of the ways that stories are constructed. “The old fellows… would rather talk of their successes than of their failures”. He makes us aware of the inevitable gap between what we hear and what could be said. He was comfortable ending the story without acknowledging that although he had successfully manipulated the girl, he had failed to meet her this time. In the same way, it’s hard to avoid considering that the girl herself never gets a chance to speak in The Fowler Snared. Language and form control her throughout. Even the letter itself is language, weaponised as a tool for power.

Stories are a way of controlling the past. The old man, so long as he himself is speaking, is calm. But when the narrator guesses his secret, he is forced to shout over him and deny the truth. Once he has taken control again, to finish the story, he once again tries to control what we as readers learn. He quotes Balzac to describe his predicament, distancing himself by means of literature from his reality. But ultimately we are left with the knowledge that language is a double-edged sword. The very language he uses to avoid his fate is the language that got him into it. The passionate letters lead to his own ruin just as much as they lead to the girl’s.

Conclusion

I really liked The Fowler Snared. Though it is short, I felt that the way it combined its form and content was interesting. As with many novellas it presents the conflict between order and disorder, but here it shows how we humans are responsible for creating both sides of that coin, first building up systems of control, and then watching as they collapse. Really though, I liked it because it was clearly written, short enough to get through in an evening, and will be good for answering essays on. What more could I possibly want?

For more writers of this period, there’s Hofmannsthal, Trakl, and Sandor Marai to consider.