Category: German Literature

Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow

The dislike I have for Thomas Mann’s writing can be summarised as the sneaking suspicion that he does not have a soul. I do not doubt Mann’s intelligence, for how else could anyone write such long sentences on such fascinating topics, ranging from fascism to the conflicted identities of so many bourgeois artists, running around them so that they are illuminated from every possible angle? Yet every time Mann just leaves me cold. I have a certain dislike for the way that his stories always seem to be about educated rich German men, usually on holiday, musing about the same things over and over again. Only exams, and the sheer richness of his writing, makes me get anything out of him. He is the last writer who I would ever read for pleasure. In short: “how clever he is”, says the head; “how cold he is”, says the heart.

Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung and frühes Leid) and Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), as the first paragraph perhaps indicates, have not changed my opinion of Mann much. The first story is the description of a party held during the dark days of the Weimar Republic, while the second describes a middle-class holiday gone badly wrong. Both works, published in 1926 and 1930 respectively, are linked, I think, by a certain trepidation about the future. Mann was in his fifties and he had seen his country destroyed in a World War, and in the peace that followed for Europe he saw only its fragility and the growing resentment of individuals, the sort that led eventually to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

“Disorder and Early Sorrow” takes us into the home of a family of what in German are called Bildungsbürger, or the educated middle class. As opposed to the standard bourgeois these people were well educated, but they were economically weak. The family here consists of a mother, a father – Professor Cornelius, two older children – Ingrid and Bert, and two younger children – Lorchen and Beißer (Ellie and Snapper in one English translation). In addition to these are various servants, of whom Xaver is the most important.

The story is about a party that the two older children are throwing. Over and above the difficult financial situation the family finds itself in, unable to repair their nice house or feed themselves properly – at one point they decide they need “a cake, or something cakish” – the problem facing Cornelius, who is the central figure here, is that of dealing with a changing world. Traditional barriers are falling all around him. Not only is language collapsing – as in the cake anecdote – so too are class barriers. Xaver and Bert look so much the same that Cornelius can’t tell them apart when he looks out of the window. For Cornelius, who is a history professor, it is difficult to keep track, so he retreats into his studies – of the beginnings of national debt in Spain and England. 

For the young ones, this breakdown of barriers is only a good thing. They are politically engaged, and make use of all the newest technology, such as telephones. At one point one of their hobbies is described – they go onto a tram and pretend to be other people, speaking in funny accents as if they have only just arrived in Berlin. Cornelius also acts, once the party gets underway, saying hello to his children’s guests, but his acting is far more awkward and nervous. He belongs to a generation where “good breeding” and “gallantry” are the key virtues. When the guests speak to him, they are terribly polite, but as soon as he turns away they speak naturally again.

Cornelius is gripped with a “Father’s pessimism”. His eldest children have already broken free, but the younger two may yet have their innocence saved. There are a number of touching moments in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”, and all of them are between Cornelius and his two youngest children. They play a game with a pillow, and it is Cornelius’s fatherly love for them that most successfully humanises him: “Tenderness floods Dr Cornelius’ heart as if it were wine”.

But even in this love there is something fragile. Lorchen, the girl and his favourite, suffers the “sorrow” of the title when she is rejected by one of the boys at the party who decides he wants to dance with someone his own age, instead of a toddler. She ends up crying tremendously, so that the boy in question eventually comes to wish her a good night. When she falls asleep afterwards, Cornelius reckons that she will forget everything by the next day. But one day Lorchen – whose name recalls the Lorelei myth that inspired so many German Romantic ballads – will grow up, and Cornelius will have to let her go just as he has his other children.

The story is filled with little details but one thing that stood out was the use of space in it. It’s quite a claustrophobic tale, with almost all the action taking place on one floor of Cornelius’s house. In this it reflects the cramping of his own power in the world as the Weimar economy falls apart and the politics of consensus that educated men such as himself had dominated falls apart with it. I almost enjoyed reading it. Perhaps if I had read it in English I would have. As it stands, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

Mario and the Magician

“Mario and the Magician” is another one of those fun little beach-tales that Mann was so fond of – think “Death in Venice”. An unnamed family goes on holiday to Mussolini’s Italy only to find to their horror that the country is filled with fascists! This “tragic travel experience” is written like a chapter in a travel book, which is an interesting approach for Mann to take. The style tries to contain excessive outbursts of emotion, but the topic is inherently emotional, because the family had a dreadful time. In some way, this tension reflects the tension in European life at the time between resentment and apparent peace.

Anyway, the story is rather unsubtle. Mann really didn’t like fascism, which we can certainly forgive him for. The story was written before Hitler was a major force in Germany, and so we can call Mann prescient enough for noticing that fascism is bad. Considering he is an artist, it’s something of an achievement for him not to be drawn into it as so many were at the time, including Rilke, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats. But then again, I’ll just put that down to Mann not having a soul. Fascism manages to find so many supporters because it appears to offer salvation for the soul, and only the intellect can stand against that.

Before we meet the magician of the title, the main event is a trip to the beach. The beach is a rather unnatural place – we are supposed to relax here. Yet the beach instead is “lacking in innocence and aimlessness”. The children aren’t just children, but “patriotic children”, waving flags and being used by their parents as a pretext for nationalist fights with foreign tourists. At one point the narrator lets one of his children run around naked, only to be punished with a fine for it for offending public decency and “national dignity”.

The main event of this story, though, is the trip they take to watch a magician, Cipolla. Cipolla is a fascist demagogue. There is nothing more to it. He stands on stage and manipulates people, and the crowd cheers him for it. His volunteers are made to do embarrassing things, surrendering their will to him in the process. The narrator cannot make sense of it, calling him “the most effective hypnotist I have ever seen”. There is no rational explanation for why people seem to lose their self-control, but it happens anyway. Cipolla, this angry, ugly, monster of a man who is filled with resentment (vaguely related to women) is able to control everyone through the force of his voice and personality. However strange it seems to Mann, the approach worked in much of Europe then, and still works in parts of the world now.

As for Mario, I can’t tell you about his role in the story without spoiling its ending. He is a waiter who serves the children in one of the cafes they visit. But he also takes part in Cipolla’s performance.

“Mario and the Magician” appealed to me less than “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Its lack of subtlety is not the main problem – after all, the fact that fascism is awful is something that needs to be made clear. I disliked the language of it – I read as much in English as I did in German – but most of all I disliked its message. Not the one that says fascism is bad, but the one that seems to propose a solution. I do not know what the answer is to fascism or radicalization, and perhaps there is nobody who truly does, but the one that Mann seems to put forward here is not one I can support at all. It is, to be frank, politically naïve. But then, perhaps, in 1930 we still had a right to be politically naïve. In a few more years we would lose that right forever.

Conclusion

Mann oh man, I wish I could like Thomas Mann. But I just find him too intellectual. It’s not that intellectuality is a problem per se, but rather that when intellectuality is there without a corresponding warmth of feeling it’s really hard to be excited while you are reading. Dostoevsky’s characters may be in some sense representatives of certain views or systems of thought, but they always feel like passionate people, motivated by ideas, rather than ideas who have been poured into people. Mann liked Dostoevsky – I haven’t read his thoughts on the Russian, but I’d be interested to know what they were.

I am going to read more Mann one day. Like Robert Musil, whose “Three Women” I enjoyed intellectually, there’s definitely something to enjoy in these two stories. But at the end of each you are – or at least I was – always left feeling that there is something missing, and that’s a great shame. Because Mann definitely knew how to write.

Honour in Decline: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March is a story of decline. On one level, it describes the rotting of an Empire, Austria-Hungary; on another, it is a much more personal story, telling the tale of three generations of the Trotta family, a family whose own rise and decline are both the result of their country’s decay, and in a way partly responsible for it. In dealing with the fortunes of a family, it is in some way comparable to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but The Radetzky March is a much tighter book, thanks to its focus on only three characters – grandfather Joseph Trotta, father Franz Trotta, and son Carl Joseph Trotta. As men, they are the administrators and soldiers of the great empire. As a result, their fates are inevitably bound with its own.

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, is the one constant of The Radetzky March. He lived to be 86 and ruled for almost 68 years.

There is a lot to like about the novel. For me, above and beyond Roth’s talent for description and portraiture, what I loved most about The Radetzky March was its description of family and the shifting of the generations. My great grandfather became the world leader in his field and a household name; my grandfather became a famous and influential politician. But my father and his brother, the heirs, both found it difficult to live up to the expectations of the past and in some sense their lives can be read as an attempt to cope. It is now my turn, like Carl Joseph under the gaze of his grandfather’s painted eyes, to face the pressure to be someone I may not be.

The Radetzky March is not a source of guidance on this topic, but it is a picture of a world that is now lost, and we would do well to sift through the ashes in search of what might be worth holding on to.

The Birth of a Dynasty – The Opening of The Radetzky March

The first chapter of The Radetzky March is enough to decide whether the novel is for you. Detailing the life of grandfather Trotta, it works perfectly as a short story. We meet him in the army at the Battle of Solferino of 1859, where he saves the life of the young Austrian Kaiser, Franz Joseph. Joseph Trotta, who is the son of simple Slovene peasants, is ennobled for his deed. No longer is he a Slovene, now he is an Austrian – “a new dynasty began with him”. He receives a promotion, becoming a captain, and now is not merely Trotta, but “Trotta von Sipolje”. We might expect him to be happy, but instead the honour is more of a curse than a blessing. We feel his pain as his identity becomes uncertain, fragmented. “He felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life”.

But he cannot return to the past either. When he meets his father again the conversation is stilted, awkward. The only thing for him is to try to become the aristocrat he supposedly is. Grandfather Trotta marries “his colonel’s not-quite-young well-off niece” – a lovely description conveying all the delicacy of aristocratic reasoning – and raises his only son with military constriction. “Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest.” The son is not damaged by the life of discipline. These were different times, when individuality was less important than service. But things will change.

In the end, the father dies soon after the son comes of age. “Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring – and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.” The rest of The Radetzky March concerns the wheat – his son and grandson, and their fates.

Fathers and Sons

Time changes. The father Franz Trotta grows up and now raises his own only son, Carl Joseph. He raises him in just the same way as his own father did. In these early chapters the only thing Carl Joseph seems to say to Franz (who is almost always referred to by his role, district captain) is “Yessir, Papa”, which indicates the degree of independence of thought the young lad has. There is no intimacy between them. They write each other letters, just as the grandfather wrote his own father letters, out of a kind of obligation and without any heart in them. When, later in the book, there are moments that put father and son together, they are unable to speak to each other.

Always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!”

Honour, of a sort

It is honour, that mysterious network of social rules and regulations, that binds both mouths shut. Honour is not all bad – it was, after all, a great source of dignity, and it bound together members of the upper classes with its common behavioural language. Nevertheless, honour places all of the characters of The Radetzky March in chains, whether they notice them or not. We see this most tragically with a young man, Max Demant, who Carl Joseph befriends early in his military career. He is in many ways a double of Carl Joseph – he, too, finds himself in a social position unthinkable to his ancestors. Demant is a Jew – his grandfather was a tavern keeper, his father a postal official. He is no soldier, no cavalryman, and his wife doesn’t love him. As he puts it, his is “a life with snags”.

One evening Demant departs a theatre performance early, leaving his wife alone. Trotta offers to escort her back, but they are seen by the other officers. The next time they are all together, the other officers drink heavily, leading one of them ultimately to start yelling “Yid, Yid, Yid!” Demant has no choice but to challenge the speaker to a duel. No choice? Demant knows that he has a choice – he knows there are ways to disappear, for example to flee to America. But he is unable to make that decision. “A contemptible, shameful, stupid, powerful iron-clad law was fettering him, sending him fettered to a stupid death.” In spite of honour’s stupidity, if he wants to remain a part of the community, he has no choice but to submit to it.

The ordinary citizens, who live outside the officers’ world, see things as perhaps they really are. “The officers went about like incomprehensible worshippers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals.” We do not even see the duel, we only hear its result as Trotta does – second hand. Just as did Effi Briest, The Radetzky March makes duelling into something pointless, depriving it of its romance. Roth skilfully weaves both hope and despair into the final hours before the fight, and even with that the final result still surprised and shocked me. Honour, Roth shows, is something insidious as well as something obvious. It can lead to duels and avoidable deaths, but it can also be responsible for a coldness between family, where really there should be warmth.

Decay

Is honour the source of the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy? I don’t think that Roth suggests that here. Things are more complicated than that. After the duel, Carl Joseph is forced from his prestigious cavalry regiment into the infantry and posted to the Austro-Hungarian border with Russia. I loved the description of the nature there, of how the Austro-Hungarians “sacrificed” gravel year by year in trying to force the swampland into roads and solid ground. Here Carl Joseph meets a Polish Count, Chojnicki, whose pessimism about the Empire’s prospects is unconcealed. Chojnicki, however, sees a solution to the decline, and that solution is violence. He is a dark prophet of reaction. In killing its rebellious elements, there’s a chance the Empire may yet survive.

Back in Moravia, the district captain also witnesses changes as The Radetzky March progresses:

“At first he had merely belittled the nations that demanded autonomy and the “working people” who demanded “more rights.” But gradually he was getting to hate them – the carpenters, the arsonists, the electioneers.”

He does not think that the Empire is ending, but he knows that it has enemies. His transition, as the novel goes on, from benign governance to hatred, is perhaps a better starting point for thinking about the Empire’s decline. Like many others, he is unable to understand why Hapsburg subjects would have any loyalty to anyone other than the Empire and Emperor. His closemindedness, which has made him an excellent bureaucrat, leaves him unable to read his times.

Chojnicki is the borderland society’s leader, and Carl Joseph visits him regularly. With nothing else to do, and grieving for his friend, Carl Joseph takes up drinking. And now the Empire’s decay is coupled with his physical decay.

Demonstrations for universal suffrage in Prague, 1905. Of course, one could just shoot the lot of them. But that tends to have unforeseen consequences.

Blood

We have a chance to see Chojnicki’s theories in action. Carl Joseph is tasked with putting down some striking workers, with violence if necessary. He does not question his orders. “It had not yet occurred to the lieutenant that the workers were poor wretches who could be right.” Carl Joseph’s mind, like his father’s, has been conditioned to serve without questioning. But shooting civilians, even unruly ones, is far less noble than the fate he had once believed would be his. As he prepares to give the order to fire, he tries to imagine what his grandfather would have done. But he cannot. He is living in an unheroic age, and he no help comes to him. Instead,

he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.

The incident needs to be hushed up. People have died. But for Trotta the memory of that day remains with him as a time when he was powerful. It is a dangerous memory. As Carl Joseph’s decline continues, he gets drawn into gambling debts as a co-signatory to friends, and when the original debtors are unable to pay for various reasons, the creditor, Kaputrak, comes to Carl Joseph instead. Carl Joseph feels powerless before the man, even though he is an officer and the other a mere civilian. Unable to control himself, he grabs his sabre and forces the other out of the room with it, nearly stabbing him in the process. But there is a witness, and all Carl Joseph achieves is a little more time before he has to pay. Without war to give an outlet to his trained violence, Carl Joseph ultimately turns it against others.

The Little Things

What makes The Radetzky March so good is its subtlety. Little things, little ironies, pile up throughout the novel. Towards the end, there are more and more images of clocks and watches, pointing to the limited time left for Austria-Hungary. Then there is the use of music. The “Radetzky March” was a kind of unofficial anthem for the Empire, a tune the boy Carl Joseph used to hear each Sunday, is replaced by the “Internationale” as the workers begin fighting for their own corner, instead of blindly submitting. And then we have the use of portraits. Carl Joseph is haunted by the image of his grandfather, hanging in his father’s house. It represents his obligations to live up to the family name, and he comes back to it again and again.

But there are also portraits of the Emperor too. Early in The Radetzky March Carl Joseph removes one such portrait from a brothel, ashamed to see it there. By the end of the novel, however, the portraits, which once hung all over the Empire, have disappeared, stowed away now that other causes have grown in popularity. The situation with the portraits, as with the Trottas themselves, represents the state of the Empire. When they are taken down, the end is not far off.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed The Radetzky March. It is an extremely rich book, filled with irony and thoughtfulness. Roth treats Austria-Hungary neither as an ideal world, nor as a complete disaster. Within the all-encompassing idea of honour, he finds both good and bad. When he writes that, “all in all, Lieutenant Trotta’s experiences amounted to very little”, there is more than a hint of sympathy in the condemnation. Carl Joseph has been brought up rigidly, in a rigid world, and when he is forced to face things he hasn’t been prepared for he (understandably) falls apart into drinking and violence. If the Empire had not been heading for collapse, perhaps all would have been alright. He would have found a place in the world for himself. But history did not give him that choice.

Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March.

In some way The Radetzky March contains a lot of what makes Tolstoy so good. Roth describes a wide range of characters from various social strata, giving the impression that he understands the entire world. In The Radetzky March even the Emperor himself is a character, which was pretty cool (Tolstoy does the same in Hadji Murat). But Roth is not quite as good as Tolstoy at making characters, and this is especially obvious with the female characters. For the most part they were boring seductresses, serving to demonstrate the Empire’s moral decline. Of course, given the story is mostly about officers, there’s little space for women to have a big role. All the same, I’d have liked to see a bit more variety. Tolstoy, for all his views on women, was definitely a lot better at writing them.

The Radetzky March is a great book in spite of both the women and Roth’s occasionally confusing chronological signposting of events (Roth doesn’t always link the chapters very clearly). It is an insider’s account of the decline of an empire, and a timeless story of the way the generations can fail to connect with one another.

For more about the tension between honour and practice, Effi Briest is worth reading. To look at another world that has faded away, read my review of Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement. For more Roth, I’ve written about Job: The Story of a Simple Man, here.

Diving into the Past: Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse

I visited Lübeck in July 2015, a few months after Günter Grass had passed away. I was there to visit Thomas Mann’s museum as part of a trip that also took me to Husum, Theodor Storm’s hometown, but since Grass had his own museum and I had time, I decided to drop in. Walking around inside, unable to understand the German on the walls, I did at least manage to enjoy Grass’s drawings and countless photos of undersea wreckage. I gathered that this was something to do with his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, and bought a copy of it as a trophy and memento. Unlike my unread copy of The Tin Drum, I’ve actually dragged myself through Im Krebsgang twice, and will probably read it a third time. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s easier to write on what you know, and I’ve exams to prepare for.

I cheated with Cat and Mouse because I read it in translation. However, I now think this was a good decision. I was able, for the first time, to meet Grass without my faulty German acting as an untrustworthy intermediary. Grass is often considered the most important German-language writer since the Second World War, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Cat and Mouse is a short novel about the past, about Germany’s horrific past, and individual lives within it. It takes us into wartime Danzig and follows a single figure, Joachim Mahlke, through the eyes of a friend. From the warplanes above on the first page the atmosphere is ominous. All the more so because for most of the book we don’t know why we need to hear this story. But as readers, we suspect the narrator has something bothering him, something only half-acknowledged.

Grass's illustration for the first edition of Cat and Mouse, showing a cat wearing an Iron Cross medal
Grass, who was also a talented artist, did the covers for all of his books. The Cat here, with its wonky eyes and Iron Cross, is a little unnerving.

Childhood in a Time of War

Cat and Mouse begins in Danzig a short while into the Second World War – the novel is technically second in a loosely connected trilogy of works by Grass, after The Tin Drum and before Dog Years, but it can certainly be read separately from them. Our main characters are schoolchildren, rather than adults, which gives us a different perspective on the War from what’s typical. Yes, there are planes overhead, but the War’s impact on the children is indirect at best, at least at first. The children compare notes on various warships from rival powers, and they dive in a sunken Polish minesweeper to dig up trinkets.

Real violence seems far away. The opening scene describes a successful attempt by the narrator, who is suffering from toothache, to get a cat to pounce on Mahlke’s oversized Adam’s Apple, which the narrator calls Mahlke’s “mouse”. Beneath the planes, toothache and pranks are the order of the day. The principal of their school is “high party official”, but for the kids he is first and foremost a principal. The magic of childhood is not destroyed by the War so much as slightly distorted. Words like “up to” when describing time hint at later difficulties, while the knowledge of warfare is perhaps disturbing, but at least early on in Cat and Mouse we are given the impression that all is well in their world.

Two Worlds

But there are two worlds at play here, not one. Cat and Mouse as a title reflects a division between two antagonistic beings, one stronger than the other. In practice, this refers to German society at the time, and Mahlke himself. Mahlke is an oddball. He is a Catholic, like the narrator, but his Catholicism is distorted by a strange worship of the Virgin Mary beyond what is acceptable. He doesn’t fit in with his peers either. When the boys go out to the minesweeper, most of them sit on the deck and sunbathe, while Mahlke usually exception dives down alone in search of treasure.

This underwater world is Mahlke’s world. His “light-blue eyes… filled with curiosity only under water”, and Mahlke builds himself a base in part of the boat where water has not reached. Nobody else has ever reached his hideout, which requires lung capacity beyond their own. Like Mahlke’s mind – Cat and Mouse has very little direct or reported speech – the hideout remains hidden from us. In it he stores the trinkets he finds, such as a small Polish virgin and a gramophone. It is a strange hobby, Mahlke’s “fanaticism” for diving, but it provides him with “a goal in life” completely disconnected from matters above water, from the War. For even Mahlke’s perception of the world is strange – we learn that “Great events were shaking the world just then, but Mahlke’s time reckoning was Before learning to swim and After learning to swim”. 

War and the classroom

War does eventually break into the classroom, but slowly. A teacher is arrested and students are questioned. Then there is a lieutenant who returns and gives a talk, describing his experience in the air force cheerily as “some merry-go-round” and “pretty much the same as in the old days when we played handball in our good old recreation yard”. But of course, such a speech has been doctored for the schoolchildren, and only briefly do other emotions and darker thoughts break through the humour and lightness, such as when the speaker mentions “some that couldn’t take it”. And when the speech is finished, the narrator informs us casually that “he had graduated from our school in ’33 and was shot down over the Ruhr in ‘43”. The children do not notice what we, who are older and wiser, know to look out for.

Mahkle’s Other Goal

Another time a lieutenant commander comes and Mahlke, for reasons unknown, steals his medal and stows it away in his hideout while the man is supervising their gym class. Guilt then gets the better of him and he confesses the theft to the principal. He is then summarily expelled and sent to a different school. There, Mahlke develops a plan to recover his honour – he plans to come back to his initial school to give a speech, and the only way to do that is through fighting. He joins the army and disappears. The narrator is a little way behind, picking up scraps of information about his friend but little concrete information.

When they meet again, Mahlke is already a hero, but the two of them are unable to connect. Their language fails them. The narrator keeps repeating himself. And Mahlke isn’t given permission to speak at the school either – rules are rules, the principal reminds him. Mahlke, who was no patriot, learns that it was all for nothing.

Form and Structure

Cat and Mouse is interesting at least as much because of its form and structure as because of its story. From the very first words, “…and one day”, we are thrust in media res into the story, and this leaves us with more questions than answers. We do not learn, at least at first, why the narrator is writing, except obliquely, when he says he “ha[s] to write.” And he is speaking just as much as he is writing. Cat and Mouse is an oral story, which raises questions, later answered, about who is listening. When we write, we can be writing for ourselves, but when we speak, we demand something more – judgement, or perhaps support.

Cat and Mouse follows Mahlke and not the narrator. All the same, the narrator, who consciously hides himself, is just as much of an enigma as his quarry. Each chapter seems like a fragment of some longer dialogue, wrenched out of thin air, and many begin with questions, or ellipses to indicate this fragmentation. There are also, occasionally, moments where the long paragraphs split up into short, single-sentence paragraphs, such as:

“What’s the matter with him?” / “I say he’s got a tic.” / “Maybe it’s got something to do with his father’s death”.

These moments, where other characters seem to speak together, remind me of a Greek chorus. Everyone is trying to understand Mahlke, but nobody can. Cat and Mouse’s fragmentary search through the past is partially a quest to reconstruct him from the boy whose legend as “The Great Mahlke”, the amazing diver, has displaced the underlying reality. But there’s much more going on here than that.

An old photo showing the Danzig waterfront around 1900
Danzig, modern day Gdansk in Poland, was once quite the beauty. Grass grew up here, and the city is the setting for his “Danzig trilogy”, consisting of The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years.

Literature after Auschwitz – Cat and Mouse and Memory

Cat and Mouse is, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, an attempt to reformulate and re-evaluate the past so as to come to terms with it. The narrator is cagey because he feels he has a hand in Mahlke’s ultimate fate, a hand he’s unwilling to acknowledge. The odd comment, like when he says “I alone could be termed his friend”, speaks to a kind of guilt. As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes ever so slightly more open, describing “this gloomy conscience of mine” and mentioning his conversations are with a “Franciscan Father Alban” without getting to the point of ever saying what exactly hangs over him until the very end.

In truth, the narrator is obsessed by Mahlke, because he is unable to escape his guilt – but nor can he face it directly. At the very end of the novel, in the climax scene, Cat and Mouse briefly shifts into the third person – “Pilenz shouted: “Come up!””. The narrator – whose name is Pilenz – is even ready to use linguistic trickery to distance himself from his actions.

Theodor Adorno, one of the major German critical theorists of the 20th century, wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric”. Paul Celan, a German-language poet, revised that by suggesting that poetry written after Auschwitz can only be worthwhile if it is about Auschwitz, directly or indirectly. Both of these thoughts reflect a central preoccupation in German-language literature after 1945 – that of guilt, and how to deal with it in writing. Günter Grass, in his autobiographies, confessed to being an enthusiastic member of the SS, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of thinking about Cat and Mouse. Rather we should read Cat and Mouse in light of Celan’s comment. It is a book that is deliberately reflective, looking back into the past from an unspecified point in the future, and not trying to find answers so much as to atone.

It is not an easy process. The fragmentary nature of the book, as I suggested above, makes it feel like it is compiled from a much greater source. And while on a literal level, this source is the narrator’s chats with the priest, on another level Cat and Mouse records just an individual instance of a general project, that of the German people’s coming to terms with their complicity in violence and horror during the Second World War and Nazi Era more broadly. Cat and Mouse is a book of obfuscations, feints and trickery, but this is not because of the narrator’s bad conscience so much as the challenge of actually truly coming to admit responsibility when every part of you begs you to go on hiding from it.

Pilenz, the Narrator of Cat and Mouse

But questions remain, and Pilenz, the narrator of Cat and Mouse, is at their centre. I’ve avoided using his name just as he avoids it. He only tells us it halfway through the novel. Just as he consciously hides his guilt so too does he consciously hide himself: “I’m not going to speak of myself, my story is about Mahlke”. But sentences like this only further draw our attention to him.

I don’t feel I have all the answers here, or at least an interpretation I can give to what I’ve read that makes sense, but I’ll do my best. Here are the basic facts: Pilenz lives with his mother. His father is away fighting, and an older brother too. The brother, who was the favourite child, dies, and at home he daily bears witness to his mother’s infidelity. It is not a happy life. Other examples, such as a sexually abusive priest from his youth, come up in passing.

I think Pilenz is consumed by guilt, both for his responsibility in Mahlke’s fate, and for his own life’s course. He mentions travelling to Nazareth and Ukraine in search of a way to live. “I should be able to believe, to believe something, no matter what, perhaps even to believe in the resurrection of the flesh” – these are his hopes, but not the reality. After the War, after the destruction, Pilenz has no spiritual centre. He is lost and cannot find himself. In telling Mahlke’s story he is not trying to tell his own so much as save it, to give himself a chance to find the meaning he longs for. We can only guess as to whether he succeeds.

Conclusion

“Who will supply me with a good ending?” Pilenz asks in the final chapter. Reading Cat and Mouse it is obvious that there cannot be a happy ending here. The very absence of a happy ending is the motor that keeps Pilenz talking and us reading. We want to understand what ending we will get, and what Pilenz’s role in it is.

This blurry but nonetheless embarrassing photo of me is the only one I have from my time in the Grass museum.

I think I probably liked Cat and Mouse. It is short and focused, and I found its structure interesting and ideas worth thinking about. I enjoyed the connection between diving into the underwater world of Mahlke’s minesweeper and the Pilenz’s “diving” into the past to try to reconstruct their friendship. Overall, I can readily recommend the book to people who think it all sounds interesting. But I can’t say I enjoyed it on a human level. The characters weren’t endearing, and the message of guilt and atonement felt rather too closely bound with its era to be engaging on a personal, rather than intellectual level. But that’s just me.