German Literature Archives - Page 9 of 12

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.

Georg Trakl and the Poetry of Spiritual Twilight (Translations)

I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.

Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.

Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.

The Poems

Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.

Song of a Captive Blackbird (DE)
 
Dark breath in green twigs.
Blue blossoms float around the face
Of the lonely one, his golden step
Dying under the olive tree.
The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings.
So quietly bleeds out humility,
Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn.
The mercy of shining arms
Embraces a breaking heart.

A painting showing a night time landscape. Munch's early and middle work reflects a similar sensibility to that of Trakl. — This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.

 Spiritual Twilight (DE)

 Silence encounters at the forest’s hem
 Its dark quarry.
 On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
  
 The blackbird’s cries are stilled,
 And the soft flutes of autumn
 Go silent in their pipes.
  
 On a black cloud
 You sail, drunk on the poppy,
 The ponds of the night,
  
 The stars in the heavens.
 The sister’s lunar voice is always calling
 Through the spirit’s night.

The Sun (DE)

Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill.
The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – 
All are beautiful.
  
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond.
Under the round heavens
The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
  
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain.
When the day silently ends,
A good and an evil is prepared.
  
When the world becomes night,
The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes;
The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.

The Sun, also by Munch, shows a sun. — The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.

In Spring (DE)
Softly sank from dark steps the snow;
In the shadow of the tree
The lovers raise their rosy lids.
  
Star and night always follow
The dark calls of the mariners;
And the oars beat softly in time.
  
Soon on the ruined wall blooms
The violet;
The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.

Autumn Homecoming (DE)

Remembrance, a buried hope,
Preserves this brown wood frame,
Where dahlias hang above -
An ever stiller homecoming;
The ruined garden, the dark reflection
Of childhood years,
So that from blue lids the tears plunge
Unstoppably.
Now swim the glassy minutes
Of gloom
Over and into the night.

Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence

Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.

Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.

The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.

Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy

Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike Dostoevsky, in its way.

As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And that is where the challenge lies.

The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride, and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of me.”

I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.

What did you think?

Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable / No Way Back

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

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

Houses and Juxtapositions

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

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

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

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

Holk and the Crisis of Masculinity

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

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

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

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

Speech, Style, and Structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

I enjoyed it a lot.

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