Category: German Literature

Malina – Ingeborg Bachmann

It’s always hard to write about a book which you finish with a feeling that you have not understood anything. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s one and only novel Malina is not only awesome and exhilarating, but also pretty hard to make sense of. Taking as its subject the disintegration of a certain female artist’s mind, I spent most of the novel trying to determine what was real and what was not. I have now finished the novel and I am none the wiser. I have tried looking at the secondary criticism and am even less wise than before. It appears the main topic for the critics to discuss is whether half the characters even exist outside of the heroine’s head. You see what kind of fish we are dealing with here.

Malina is a weird book. It is probably the story of a woman whose attention is divided between two men, a Hungarian named Ivan and the eponymous Malina. My edition’s back cover calls it “part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study”. Just that alone ought to grab our attention – we are not dealing with a novel that fits into the standard genres we might be used to. The narrator spends the first half of the book mostly with Ivan, then she has a breakdown and spends most of the second half of the book with Malina. Or we might say, in his power. One of Bachmann’s most famous utterances is that “fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman”.

Fascism, fascism, fascism. Can we ever escape it, except by retreating cowardly into a past where it hasn’t been born yet? In Malina it lurks throughout the first act, only coming out into the open in the second. Malina is post-war German literature, but relatively subtle in its treatments of the past when compared to authors like Günter Grass. In fact, it reminded me a little bit of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters. I later discovered that Bachmann had been a kind of mentor to Bernhard. He, in turn, had given her some of his distinctly offensive praise: “I loved Bachmann a great deal. She was a very intelligent woman. A strange combination, no? Most women are stupid but bearable, possibly even agreeable; intelligent too, but rarely.”

But we must get to the novel, there’s no hiding from it. What there is, is hiding from is our narrator’s past. “I don’t want to talk, it all upsets me, in my remembering.” From the moment Malina begins our narrator is three things – creative, intelligent, and mentally unwell. Unlike with Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, which Malina has plenty in common with, here we don’t even start with a narrator we can trust. The opening section gives us “the cast” and descriptions of the narrator, Malina, and Ivan. But already we get a nudge that identity is a bit more complicated (a mess) than what we can easily write down. In the case of our narrator, “Official Austrian I.D. Eyes—br., Hair—blond; born in Klagenfurt”, is really not enough for us to go on.  We then hear that “the experts” have deemed her “still functional”, which the rest of our novel will test our credulity of.

And so, and so. The first section of the novel is entitled “Happy with Ivan”, which I believe to be a joke. For our narrator, Ivan appears a kind of saviour: “Against the decay and order, against life and against death, against accident, constant threats from the radio, the newspaper headlines all spreading the plague, against perfidy seeping down from upstairs or up from downstairs,”, she has Ivan. Ivan “is beginning to cure me”. But does Ivan care about our narrator? “How sad I am, and why doesn’t Ivan do anything about it?” Probably not. We are treated over the course of the novel to examples of “sentences”, shared between the two characters, as if they are reading off limited scripts. But our narrator notes that “we don’t have a single sentence about feelings.”

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

The narrator’s mood swings between joy and terrible sadness, from paragraphed section to paragraphed section. At one point she gets excited about “infecting” the world with positive feelings – it always comes back to disease – but soon she is depressed again. Such mood swings do not make for fun reading. Nor does the disorientation that comes from these and other abrupt changes. The first time the narrator meets Ivan’s two young children, she is cold to them and they to her. The second time we hear that they meet, the situation is much changed, and they are more talkative. What are we missing? We ask in vain for some signposting, some sense even of time. It is not forthcoming.   

Malina is made up of short sections, often only a page or two long. Dialogue is hard to differentiate. Sometimes we get phone calls, which are jumbled up and with the ends of sentences missing. Our narrator spends a lot of time waiting for Ivan, and less time with him. In the first section, we have a fairy tale, we have snippets of stories or else reworkings of them, we have letters written and unwritten, we have an interview. All of this is inventive, and every new approach throws new light on the problem we are facing in Malina, of making sense of things and working out what’s what.

After a trip out of Vienna to see friends the narrator collapses, and the first section ends. Malina’s second part is one of the most horrific sequences I have ever read. In it, our narrator falls into her own mind, and we with her. Where the first part of the book kept her past hidden, with only the odd veiled references (she was put up against a wall and almost shot as a child), the second part introduces “my father”. A family, the thing we had missed before. But this is not her real family, or at least not necessarily so. The second part is a nightmarish hellscape of torture scenes and mental anguish, interspersed with dialogue (now clearly signposted, as in a play), between the narrator and Malina. The closest thing I imagine it compares to is being waterboarded. We go under the water and feel like we are drowning, and then our head is dragged out again for a brief gasp of air, only for the cycle to repeat.

Gas chambers, barbed wire, Siberian prison camps, incest, murder, child rape. I, not one for squeamishness, thought that this is one of the few books that could have done with a content warning. The narrator possibly has a real sister, Eleonore. She has possibly betrayed her father. She has possibly been raped by her father. She dies repeatedly, horribly. In the nightmares a constant feeling is one of exposure – she is filmed without her consent, or forced to stand on stage, or forced to strip naked. Her powerlessness is the overwhelming impression. At the same time, her powerlessness is also reflected in Malina’s growing influence over her “waking” life. These dialogue sections, which feel just as unhelpful as the dream sequences (Malina: What happened to her? Me: She died in a foreign land”), convey a transferring of agency. “Leave it to me”, Malina says. And what he means is – control over her whole life.

In the third section, we might think that things are back to normal. At least the dream sequences have ended. But my initial impression of the narrator, who says of herself that she’s always in a “state of disintegration or recomposition”, is that she has been lobotomised. Something is missing. Even less than before do we have a grasp on what time it is. She is interested in mailmen (as a concept). Her relationship with Ivan begins to crumble, and the snatches of phone conversations become still less informative. The narrator notices that signs of Ivan’s presence in her life are also disappearing, such as the pack of cigarettes he would leave on the table. Everything is falling apart; only Malina remains.

In “the theatre of my thoughts”, which may or may not be the outside world, the narrator tries to live. At a restaurant with Malina, she is decapitated. Malina goes from a slightly concerning controlling presence to an outright evil one when he begins urging the narrator to murder Ivan. “Kill him! Kill him!” But is this real? (“But am I really saying something?”). It is impossible to say. As the narrator’s mind continues its final losses of everything that allowed it to make sense of things, we are treated to no additional clarity.

And yet, the lack of clarity is itself a reality. If we say that the narrator simply went mad, then where does that leave Malina, who early on we learn “was destined to be my doom?” Madness can be aided and abetted by dark agents, and perhaps Malina’s suggestion that our narrator murders Ivan is not a figment of her imagination, but in fact him pushing her further and further into passivity and his control. All through the novel, our narrator is a passive being. She is desperate to control Ivan, but she has no power over him. Her dream sequences, like Kafka’s, show her being submissive to an entirely dominant father. The final sections have Malina be ascendent. Violence is a thread running through the novel. Whether it is the slap given to her as a schoolgirl by a boy as a prank, her father’s dream violence, to Malina’s real violence, our narrator is the victim of physical force.

Malina might be read as an attempt, a doomed one, to break out of this domination by others. And it is an attempt made using language. The fairy tale we are treated to early on in Malina is one of woman’s emancipation. Our narrator, who is an author like Bachmann, also reads in a way that leads her to a kind of freedom, or hope of it. She twice quotes Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “He who has a Why to live for will bear almost any How”. The constructed-ness of Malina itself is a kind of scattergun attempt at finding a way of self-expression that works. We have letters, we have telephone calls, we have dialogues.

But with each of these, we have difficulties. The phone calls don’t go anywhere. The letters, whose recipients (yet again) may not actually exist, are not posted. Perhaps most intriguing is an interview with a journalist, where the narrator begins to express her thoughts on language.

“I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it, all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt”.

This is an important statement. Germanists will be thinking about Arendt and Adorno and Celan and all the other thinkers and artists who struggled with what to do with German after the Second World War and who made similar pronouncements. And yet, “(signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)”. There is no engagement, the man shuts her down. The truth, which is a victim’s and a woman’s truth, has no place here. As is the case elsewhere in the novel, our narrator (ironically, good at writing), cannot express herself externally because the men do not allow her to.

Austria during the sixties was a bit of a mess with regards to its Nazi past. Bernhard’s Woodcutters deals with it obliquely, and Elfriede Jelinek’s horrid (but also impressive) Wonderful, Wonderful Times does so a little more directly. The interview is one example of an unwillingness to think about the past among certain members of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Another example comes at the end of the first part where the narrator goes on holiday to the Tyrol with some friends, where we have some Bernhard-esque social satire (albeit less funny). Here we have no “discussions,” “talking,” or “get-togethers,” but conversation, a dying species of weightless speaking at cross purposes, which permits proper digestion and maintains the good spirits of all.” Language itself, as in a Chekhov story, is manipulated by the controllers of discourse into being a tool for preventing discourse, leaving our narrator poised for her breakdown.

Malina is one of those novels that rewards reading carefully. It also frustrates, with its lack of clarity. Does Ivan exist, does Malina exist, or are they merely alter egos, facets of the narrator’s imagination let loose upon the world? We have to wean ourselves off the plot to enjoy the book. Instead, carried by Bachmann’s command of language, we need to focus on the ideas here instead. Why is it that our narrator cannot speak? Why are her relationships with the outside world always characterised by domination and submission?

Once we start asking these questions, the novel provides plenty of answers. It is the tortured and at times torturous account of the breakdown of a psyche, but that breakdown is not without its external factors. To go away thinking that this is just another novel about a psychotic woman is offensive and misses the point. This woman is trapped within a world that destroys her ability to speak and define herself and deprives her of any kind of authentic expression except her writing. Given all of that, how could she do anything other than go insane?

I really enjoyed Malina’s intelligence and inventiveness. It is not an easy book to read, and I can’t pretend I liked getting to the end not knowing what I had just read. But at the same time, here is a book that still has mysteries to unravel, and that demands I one day return to it. That can only be a good thing.

Realism at Work: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann was born in 1875. Buddenbrooks, his seven-hundred-page-plus multigenerational epic depicting the decline of a merchant family in his native Lubeck, was published in 1900. Even to write such a book at that age would be a titanic achievement, but to make it good – that is something truly special. Indeed, when Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 it was Buddenbrooks, not his Magic Mountain of 1924, that was singled out by the committee as the main driving force behind their decision. I was not expecting to enjoy Buddenbrooks as much as I did, even though it had received some extremely enthusiastic praise from one of my old teachers at Cambridge. But, thanks to John E. Woods’ fantastic translation (Mann has long suffered in the English-speaking world thanks to H. T. Lowe-Porter’s somewhat dreadful efforts), I was truly able to get into Mann’s world.

Buddenbrooks is the work of a young man. There is a certain comparative lack of wisdom in it and a certain lack of sympathy, both of which mean that in the end I still find myself preferring Fontane to Mann. But Mann makes up for this by the sheer force of his intelligence. You can tell how hard he studied to write this book. When I was in Lubeck some years ago I visited the Mann Museum there, located in what we now think of as the Buddenbrooks’ house, and there was an entire room devoted to Mann’s planning for the work – pages and pages of notes, piles and piles of books. What Mann had not the experience to know, he used his mind to acquire. It’s amazing that he did as well as he did.

This piece is broken up into two halves – the first deals with the way the novel is built. What I found interesting is just the way that Mann writes with such a deliberate realism. Just as Mann studied hard to write this work, so too can any perspective writer study Buddenbrooks and discover somewhat exposed in it the wheels and cogs that any successful realist novel must have. The second part then details a few things of the plot. Buddenbrooks is a huge novel, and there is too much to say for any self-respecting blogger not to become boring. I will focus on my favourite bits, things and people that are worth thinking about.

Structure – How To Write A Realist Novel

The point of the realist novel is to be realistic, defined as containing as much of outward reality as possible. The contortions of modernist writing may better reflect our perception of the world and our own minds, but we turn to realism when we want what we think the world is actually like. But how do we build this world? It’s quite easy really – one can basically work from a recipe as if the completed novel is a dish we are trying to prepare. What is the world made up of? We have what people wear (such as Madame Buddenbrook’s gold bracelet), we have food, we have buildings (the various Buddenbrook houses), we have people. People, of course, have personalities, but they have appearances too, which are just as important, and indeed can compensate for a personality if we write them sufficiently well.

All of these things together create a picture of the world. Mann’s story, which runs from 1835ish to about 1880, uses these things – clothes, cultural markers (what’s on in the theatre) – to tell us where we are in time. In addition, Mann uses various historical markers, dropped in here and there. Buddenbrooks is definitely a book that is improved by knowing a bit about Germany’s 19th-century history – whether it is the debates over Lubeck joining the German customs union, or the Revolutions of 1848, or the Wars of Unification – it’s useful to know how to place the story within German history. Especially because one thing that it might be trying to say is that Germany’s ascendency as a great power is matched by the decline of one of its great families.

Realism is a fundamentally conservative mode of writing. That is because it is constantly setting the bounds of its own topics. All of the things I’ve mentioned – what people wear, what they eat, what they talk about, where they go – establish a sense of society. And any good realist novel is engaged in a critique of society while demonstrating its pervasive influence. Characters talk about what they are supposed to, and anyone who goes against this ends up being excluded, or mocked. In Buddenbrooks Christian Buddenbrook, who has spent much of his youth in South America, is such a figure. Another is Hugo Weinschenk, a husband of one of the Buddenbrooks, who comes from a lower class. Society in the realist novel is fundamentally class-based, and these novels tend to show the difficulties that any cross-class communication comes up against. (In Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, the lovely but lower-class Lene cannot spell correctly). In Buddenbrooks, silence or censure is the fate met by characters who speak out of line:

“It’s best not to say such things out loud,” she thought, fixing her eyes firmly in the distance in order not to meet his gaze.

Unable to articulate their problems without being cast out, people discover they have nowhere to turn. Wherever they go, society demands conformity – religion, education, business, even a beach holiday (all described in Buddenbrooks) all act to crush resistance on the part of would-be freethinkers. Revolts are rare, despair more common. It’s no surprise that many of the greatest realist novels of the 19th century which attack society end with suicide or resignation on the part of the rebels.

But though these novels are conservative, in that they never advocate for revolution, they are rarely reactionary. Instead, they work upon their readers, making them ask questions, see society’s victims as society’s victims, and in doing so they cause people to reflect upon the structures around them. Progress comes slowly, but it comes.

In Buddenbrooks Mann shows the way that society exerts a crushing influence upon its members. Thomas Buddenbrook, once he has become head of the family, is so obsessed with trying to conform that he makes the life of his son Hanno a misery, even once he starts to question the foundations of the society that he is trying to fit into. Thomas’s sister Toni is ostracized after her two marriages – both undertaken not for love, but to help the family business, because she has internalised a sense of duty – end in divorce. Thomas prevents his brother from marrying his lover because it would bring shame to the family name. Altogether, the novel shows that even the victims of society end up being its willing executioners. Nobody is safe, and nobody is entirely guiltless.

Describing the world is not enough. We must also make use of symbolic objects, and here Mann’s youth is obvious. He has studied well. From Vronsky in Anna Karenina he takes the excellent symbol of teeth to show inner decay. From Fontane he understands the importance of houses as reflections of the soul. I particularly liked the way that the original Buddenbrooks house ends up decaying, so that although the façade is alright, the inner garden and courtyard is an overgrown mess. The family itself has undergone a similar decline, sustained by Thomas’s youthful vigour, while all around him everyone else begins to fail and falter.

In addition to symbols, Mann understands that the best way of creating memorable characters in a book with a great many characters – and in Buddenbrooks there are a lot – is the use of repeated phrases and ideas. Toothache is one, as is Toni’s upper lip. There is Klothilde, who is always eating but never seems to stop being scrawny, and Bendix Grünlich, with his “golden muttonchop” facial hair.

All this is good. All this makes his characters seem real, seem placed within a meaningful (because we can find symbolic significance within it) world, and seem to have genuine conflicts (individual versus society). One can study the book and go away and write a realist novel, easy as that.

Thomas Buddenbrook

I have written before about my own family, in round about terms. Novels of decline are dear to my heart – Roth’s Radetzky March, the Patrick Melrose novels, and so on. I exist at the tail end of a saga of decline, and I am sure that, were it not for the evils of modern medicine, I would quietly have gone to an early grave at the age of twenty-two, dying of consumption. Instead, I am alive, and straining under various pressures to be a certain kind of person, the one who will “restore the family fortunes” and its social standing. These pressures may be in my mind, but just as with realist novels, real life tends to convey society’s influence in ways that are not entirely obvious – through what is said and what is worn, through who is welcome to break bread at our table and who not, and so on.

Thomas Buddenbrook comes to head the family at a young age after the unexpected death of his father. He achieves early success. He quotes Heine and has a feel for culture that was lacking in his ancestors, who looked upon the arts with amusement or contempt. But this feel for culture sows the seeds for his downfall. For what Tom has, that his ancestors did not, is a certain interiority. He feels. And what does he feel? At first he feels ambition, he consciously chooses the role of the upper-middle-class business, which fits him like a glove. He succeeds in local politics, in business: “Didn’t you know that one can be a great man in a small town? … That takes a little imagination, I’ll grant, a little idealism – and that’s what you lacked, whatever you may have believed about yourself.”

Convinced of his own potential greatness, he lives to “keep up appearances”. He abandons his true love, as does Tony, and makes a marriage that brings the family a lot of money in her dowry (and Mann never shies away from showing figures, because they prove the thoroughness of his research). He goes about his business, he grows older, and at some point he realises that something is going wrong: “all the while he was wrestling in vain to find comfort in order and routine, because, to his despair, he found himself forever falling behind his own active imagination”. A true bourgeois, he tries to order his life to avoid any introspection. But it fails.

“A man who stands firmly in his profession, unshaken by doubts, knows only one thing, understands only one thing, values only one thing – his profession.”

Yes, this is the problem. A profession is not a life. It may be “pleasant to remember your forefathers when you know that you are of one mind with them and are sure that you have always acted as they would have had you act”, but when that is not the case…  Tom displaces his own anxieties onto his son, Hanno, demanding that he be “a genuine Buddenbrook”, whatever that means. He does what he can. But ultimately everything falls apart.

What is extraordinary is the fragility of the (19th-century) bourgeois family. We rest our hopes upon one or two males, and if they fail – then all the rest collapses. The women are simply chattel for improving the family name. Buddenbrooks is not a story of continual decline. Instead, it is a decline that is punctuated by great moments of hope. But in a sense, from the moment Hanno Buddenbrook is born – a sickly, unhealthy child who likes music more than making money – we know that the family is doomed, however hard Thomas works. No amount of religious faith, no dominus providebit (God will provide) above the door, can compensate for the wrong child being born at the wrong time. And therein lies the tragedy.

All of us in Thomas’s position are faced with pressure to lead a certain life, and often with competing pressures. Is one to make money or to be oneself? Our parents may want one thing and our schooling demand something completely different. In such situations, the sensible thing may be to compromise, but I am too young to know. At the end of On Tangled Paths Baron Botho, having broken off his relationship to the poor Lene to marry the rich and silly Käthe, tells a friend in a similar situation that he must “beware of this middle course, beware of half-measures.” Either he must submit to his society in full, or take his love away – to America, perhaps. But to go for the middle course is only to destroy yourself: “Many things are permissible, but not what does violence to the soul or entangles the heart, even if it’s only your own.”

Conclusion

I am not in danger of being anything other than a disappointment for choosing the wrong girl (or boy) to marry. But disappointment need not come from others and nor is a marriage the only thing worth judging. I know how well I have internalised my own idea of society, and how it watches over me, whip in hand, every day of my life. I must make money, I must follow my heart, I must heed the calling of my soul – and yet how few hours there are in the day! We are doomed to despair, whichever route we take. Thomas’s Uncle Gotthold marries his childhood sweetheart and is disinherited. His three daughters have no money to marry, and end up growing to be old and lonely spinsters. Thomas himself makes the “right decision”, and his earthly reward is a terrible punishment.

The world is made up of so many tangled paths along which we stumble blindly. It is better to have no internality, to believe confidently in the world as it stands as any good Hanseatic merchant or office-bound lawyer does. But like Mann, I am cursed with a voice and a questioning gaze. He made something of his, even if he did not lead the family business to great glory. I can only hope that I will do the same. Though I am still young, and there is much stumbling for me left to do…

Anyway, Buddenbrooks is a complex, fascinating, at times touching portrayal of the declining fortunes of a family of Lubeck-based merchants. Although there is a certain coolness to it that means I ultimately prefer the Fontane of Effi Briest, there’s no denying Mann’s phenomenal talents. He provides a guidebook on how to write a great realist novel, and that’s incredibly inspiring. The fact that I did not even attempt to analyse it properly is more a reflection of its quality, than anything else. There is too much to say. The conflict between duty and the heart is already enough to show the depth of the book’s treatment of its various themes. For English readers, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Woods translation. It’s very readable. And that’s good, because this is a book that needs to be read.

A Few Thoughts on Kleist’s Style

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most extraordinary German writers of an age when German writing was already shaping world literature. However, it took a long time for the world to get used to him. Goethe famously snubbed him, and Kleist’s biography tends to be haunted by its ending – he died in a suicide pact at age 34. Before that death, however, he managed to produce a small body of work – his complete works, including letters, fits snuggle into a single two-thousand-page volume – which time has only elevated in stature.

For Kleist did not fit in within his world. Stefan Zweig, the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer, wrote a book entitled Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, which suggests something of his character and his kindred spirits. Kleist’s writing, which I have long struggled to get into, has at last opened itself up to me. I have conquered his dreadfully long and torturous German sentences for the first time, and now I am able to see for myself what the fuss is all about.

Heinrich von Kleist

Kleist wrote dramas, and he wrote short stories, and he wrote a couple of interesting philosophical essays and journalistic pieces too. This post will focus on the short stories. At Cambridge I read Penthesilea, his tragedy involving Achilles and the eponymous Amazonian queen, but I could not understand it. Last month I read The Broken Jug and The Schroffenstein Family, both of which are early dramas which had moments of cleverness but were nevertheless a little contrived. I will read his more mature dramas, including Penthesilea again, in due course. But it is his short stories – eight of them, all written near the end of his life, that have motivated me to write today. For they are really something special.

In addition to his suicide pact, everyone likes to mention that poor Kleist had a rather significant mental breakdown in 1801. This is what scholars like to term the “Kant Crisis”. Kleist had been reading the aforementioned German philosopher and had accidentally broken down the foundations of his own world. It happens. Kleist learned from Kant that we are unable to penetrate through our sensory perception of the world to things as they really are. As he explained it to a friend, it’s as though everyone is wearing tinted glasses – our world is distorted, but we cannot know how, and we cannot know what the real world is actually like. Objective truth becomes impossible; at least Kleist saw it that way. Connections to others are fleeting, trust is impossible. Our world is only misunderstanding heaped upon misunderstanding. All this broke Kleist the man but it made Kleist the writer.

Style

Deceitful Reportage in Michael Kohlhaas

So what is this writer? Awful, is one way of describing him. His stories are made up of long, winding sentences, that occasionally bring German grammar up to its limits. These long sentences fit into paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. This does not make for easy reading. The two previous times I read Kleist’s prose, at school and then at my first year at university, I was crushed by it. The language was too complex, the syntax and lexis arcane. I had a feeling that I’d like Kleist, but I couldn’t reach him. Perhaps if he’d been born fifty years later, I thought, he’d have learned how to use speech marks and add a new paragraph here and there, as so often do his translators.

And yet these sentences and these paragraphs serve a purpose. “Michael Kohlhaas”, the longest novella, has the subtitle “from an old chronicle”. It tries, consciously, to be a kind of reportage. Kohlhaas, a real figure from the age of Luther, is blown up by Kleist into a titanic figure. A horse dealer who is wronged by an aristocrat, Kohlhaas burns the man’s castle to the ground and goes around pillaging half of Germany, just to get a kind of justice. Kleist pretends that the work is history, referring to “the chronicles whose comparison allows us to write this tale”. But the tale has little to do with the historical Kohlhaas, and Kleist’s approach seems designed more to derail our idea of history as something clear-cut and definite. The narrator informs us at one point that the sources disagree, and decides that he cannot really say what happened. At another point he mentions an emotion in Kohlhaas’s heart but refuses to say what it is. We are left with an allegedly objective document that falls apart.

Then there is the narrator himself. A man who refers to “the poor Kohlhaas” and only a moment later heaps insults upon him, the narrator provides no ballast. Though occasionally he appears to see into Kohlhaas’s heart, just as often he makes us see only a gesture, or a facial expression. As with some of my favourite books – Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Conrad’s Nostromo – Kleist presents us with a mysterious central character who we look upon, but rarely into.

The story further displays a defiance of objective truth by being filled with rumours – where is Kohlhaas and his band of rebels? – and mistakes. The justice system, supposedly on Kohlhaas’s side, and supposedly designed to help us reach Truth, proves hopelessly corrupt due to the influence of the aristocrats (mockery is made of the justice system in The Broken Jug as well). We repeatedly get the impression that around Kohlhaas are forces that he cannot understand and cannot predict, whether they are the scheming aristocrats or bandits using his name to further their own ends. In this, Kohlhaas becomes a kind of microcosm of humankind’s place in a not-fully-knowable universe, and a surprisingly modern work.

God and Perspective in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, “The Foundling”, and “The Earthquake in Chile”

“Michael Kohlhaas” uses a documentary style that ultimately undermines itself. Elsewhere, Kleist explores the importance of perspective in questions of truth. “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, is a shorter story that is quite enigmatic. Four brothers arrive in Aachen with the intention of destroying some religious images – the time is at the height of Protestant fervour. They gather together a band of men and head to their target church, but during the mass, instead of giving the signal to attack, the brothers are overcome by the power of music. They begin to pray, and pray, and pray. They are brought to a madhouse, and there they stay, living out a long and somewhat strange life. The music that they heard was played by a nun that was apparently sick, but had miraculously recovered in time to perform. However, it later transpires that she was sick after all, and that her replacement’s identity is unknown.

What exactly has happened? We encounter much of the story through the eyes of the brothers’ mother, who travels six years later to Aachen in search of them. From one of the band of rabble-rousers she learns one version of the story, from the abbess another – and from other inhabitants of the town, still more versions. Nothing is clear, from who played the music to what happened to the brothers. We encounter a truth that has been shattered beyond repair, something Kleist makes clear by using numbers. We cannot reach the truth of a story where there were both definitely three hundred and one hundred rebels at the ready – we can only select a version that makes most sense to us.

And what does it mean that the brothers were converted? Is it an act of God? Perhaps, but we cannot be sure. They are catatonic, capable only of repetitious prayer. Although they appear to be happy, this is not the sign of a benevolent God – certainly not the kind of God that most of us look for. The boys’ mother is converted to Catholicism at the story’s end, but it’s a conversion that seems slightly absurd to us – we cannot understand her. We know what she experienced, of course, because we read about it – but we do not know how she interpreted it or how it touched her core.

God lies at the heart of Kleist’s most exciting works. Does he exist, and what is he like if he does exist? Kleist’s style reflects a refusal, a brutal refusal, to answer these questions. In “Saint Cecilia” we see an apparent act of God, but one that only makes God seem stranger than what we’ve been led to expect – it disorientates us. In “The Foundling”, another extraordinary story, a merchant takes in an orphan after his son dies and raises him as his own. And in return for all this unconditional, Christian kindness, he is treated with an almost satanic cruelty. It does not make sense. It challenges that Christian-moral firmament upon which our worldview rested in Kleist’s day, and still mostly rests in our own day. The tragic conclusion of “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place in and outside a church, but it is brutally violent and fit only for an old-testament God in one of His worst moods.

Conclusion

Any good story has an element of ambiguity, but Kleist’s ambiguity seeps through to his very formal approach to problems. We see events and characters from multiple angles, in a style that appears to be factual, but all this does not take us any closer to resolving our issues. On the contrary, it makes them even more acute. We have a God who seems to exist, but rather than providing a bedrock upon which to build a certain surety, Kleist uses his God to make us even more confused about what we think of as truth.

I admit that the style is frustratingly dense at times, and the sentences need attacking with a hacksaw, but if one can get over these hurdles, they will find in Kleist a writer who is very much worth reading. He is a figure who is disquieting in the extreme and strikingly contemporary. More posts on him to follow.