Tag: German Literature

Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Reading well, at least as it’s taught at university, is not much different from detective work. From incomplete information, we make deductions and classifications, and test hypotheses against textual evidence. What does this word really mean, what was this character’s real motivation? Often, the “best” works seem to be those revealing the least, having us fumbling the most. Obscurantism occasionally lies very close to greatness.

The German author Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is different because it’s a detective story that we wish were not one. Like many of the great German novellas, into whose tradition it neatly falls, Böll’s work is dominated by an interrogation of what it means to narrate. Katharina Blum meets and falls in love with a criminal, then shoots a journalist. But whose story is this to tell?

This plot, which we learn almost on the first page, is not what keeps us reading. Rather, it is the determination of Katharina’s motive or, more broadly, what’s in her heart. As we read, we encounter different ways of presenting / understanding her that seem to have a claim to be the truth.

Narrative coldness.

What we notice first is this strikingly cold narrative. The narrative voice seems obsessed with distancing itself from any kind of bias or emotional contribution to our experience. “And so, those are the facts”, it declares after an early chapter. At another point, it names all the sources for the novel. Generally, it uses the passive voice and the German indirekte Rede, or reported speech, which in formal use is its own grammatical construction and gives the narrative a kind of serious “report” feel to it. All of this effort to be honest about the work’s narrative, which stretches as far as a sly apology by the narrator every time the strict chronological telling is interrupted, makes us wonder what such approaches conceal.

Yet we can also take the narrator at face value, and trust that they were trying their best to tell the truth. We can do this because we have two actors who are manifestly not doing this – the police, and the journalists. But first, there’s Katharina herself.

Katharina

In his afterword, written ten years later, Heinrich Böll calls Katharina the “embodiment of the economic miracle” that took place in West Germany after the Second World War. She has her own flat, drives a car, and does her own budgeting – sending money to her poorly mother and her incarcerated brother. We read of interest rates and savings accounts. A generation earlier, a novel about a young woman from the countryside going to the city would end up with the woman being exploited, but here, Katharina manages more or less to hold her own life together…

…At least until the novel’s events begin. The novel is set in 1974, just as the economic miracle ended due to the oil price chaos in 1973. And this change of fortunes is mirrored in Katharina’s own life. Things taken for granted turn out to be less stable. The police is one such topic – when Katharina begins to get bullied by the press, her pleading is “can’t the state do something?” Her employment situation, once her name starts going through the gutter, also wobbles. She receives threatening phone calls. All the signs of her freedom start to turn on her.

Katharina lives in a world of change, and while it has benefited her, her focus on her “honour” is precisely an attempt to find something solid that she can keep safe. She is under constant threat throughout her life from men who are trying to proposition her, and so she tries hard to protect herself from this. When we first hear her voice in the narrative, in the context of questioning at the police station, it is in a mode of pedantry: she is insisting that the police use the right language for her experience. “Zärtlichkeit” and “Zudringlichkeit” are both to do with sexual attention, but Katharina insists that she is experiencing the latter word, which is unidirectional, while the police keep mistakenly writing the former and suggesting thereby that Katharina herself reciprocated or encouraged when she did not.

Yet pedantry is one way of creating an oasis of personal agency in a world where you have very little. Like the cold narrative style, it is an attempt to control a message.

The Police

After Katharina Blum takes Ludwig Götten home following a party, she is pounced upon by the police, who have been trailing him. Somehow, however, Ludwig has escaped – and Katharina must know how, even perhaps be an accomplice. The narration puts us in the place of the police, who are trying to get to the bottom of things. Normally, as I noted at the beginning, readers slip quite willingly into the interrogator’s shoes – crime novels are popular for a reason. Here, however, this becomes quite uncomfortable both for the overwhelming power of the police relative to Katharina, and our own complicity in the invasion of her privacy.

Besides comparing ways of telling Katharina’s story, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is, in a more earthy manner, concerned with privacy and our right to it. When the police first raid her flat, they insist on collecting everything with writing on it. Rather than finding a smoking gun, we are forced to see Katharina’s life broken down into components and painstakingly analysed. We go through notebooks, through family photos, through her finances, and even through her car’s odometer reading. We certainly learn, or think we learn, something about her life. But the cost is, naturally, that we begin the process of destroying that life.

The Tabloid

More so than the police, the greatest damage done to Katharina’s honour comes from the tabloid, “NEWSPAPER”. A German reader would recognise Bild, their popular if sensationalist and unreliable tabloid, akin to something like the UK’s Daily Mail. If the police are able to throw her in a cold room and interrogate her, the newspaper’s treatment of her is somehow more deadly and poisonous. No sooner than Katharina is released from her first questioning, we learn that she is being written about in a way that has, at best, only limited intersections with the truth. It is a pattern that’s repeated throughout the articles quoted in the novella.

Her friends, the upper-middle-class Blornas, are misquoted in a way that makes Katharina look bad. At other points, the reporter “improves” quotes out of an apparent duty to “provide simple people with help articulating their thoughts.” The only person who is convinced that the paper got him right is the priest from Katharina’s hometown, who has an obvious agenda (he calls her a communist). When he’s later confronted by Blorna, his source for this association proves to be “his nose.” It turns out he can smell communists. We would sigh, or maybe laugh, if it weren’t part of Katharina’s life being turned upside down by the paper that reports him.

The paper does damage – there’s a reason why Katharina ultimately shoots the man responsible for the stories. Yet part of that damage is buried under plausible deniability. After the story of Katharina first emerges, she starts receiving threatening phone calls, for example from men propositioning her, in yet another invasion of her privacy. Can we blame the newspaper for that? Certainly, but not in a way where the dots could be connected in a court, and by then the damage would be done anyway. That’s the power of institutions when they are not on our side.

But Böll does not leave the matter there – he also wants to connect the paper more directly to death. He does this through Katharina’s ailing mother, who is already in hospital. Here the journalist is denied an interview by the hospital workers, who state that her condition is very fragile, but the journalist is undeterred. Making use of a disguise, he sneaks in and gets his scoop. The cost is Katharina’s mother’s life – she expires soon afterwards. To rub salt into her wounds, in the newspaper report the author claims that it was the shock of Katharina’s misdeeds that prompted her mother’s death!

And so, Katharina is progressively dehumanised, in the sense that she is replaced as a human in the public eye by another – false – human according to the paper’s editorial decisions – a communist, a bad person. Is it not surprising, then, that she turns to violence?

“how violence develops and where it can lead”

The full title of the novel is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead, and it was the second part that was most interesting to me before I had any idea what the book was actually about. One thing we might notice is that the second title reflects the coldness of the general narration – we have a report’s title more than a story. How Katharina becomes dehumanised and miserable enough to shoot a reporter is presented with a focus on the causes rather than on either Katharina’s mental state (which remains mostly hidden) or on any moral judgment of the murder. Murder remains bad, but readers are expected to want to understand how it might come about.

Simply put, it seems to come about from a decline in social trust. We hear a lot about it today in the context of our own political situations and nations’ changing demographic profiles, but Böll depicts the problem long before our own time. Katharina moves to a big city, which is, of course, a good thing and an achievement, and successfully makes a few friends there. Still, at the same time, she’s aware of how the social and technological progress she’s reliant upon for this success can have its negative sides: “I know so many women who are alone, who spend their evenings alone in front of the TV,” she says. Just as her world became bigger, for many people it can become smaller as they close themselves off from the world. (For example, by reading the gutter press without ever having the experiences that might conceivably balance it).

As soon as the paper starts printing rubbish, the trust Katharina feels in society collapses – recall her cry for help to the police to do something about the libel being printed. (The police are leaking information anyway). The institutions she had expected to help her have not complied with her reasonable idea of justice, while the people she had expected to treat her kindly – strangers – are instead contacting her in a way that is threatening. With her name and honour dragged through the mud she is essentially locked out of society, which is a position where violence becomes a plausible-seeming answer to her problems. So that’s one way that violence comes about. Herr Blorna experiences something similar, as his association with Katharina leads to his own career and world collapsing – though in his case it only ends in fisticuffs.  

There’s another instance of violence, too, as we’ve seen – the death of Katharina’s mother. Here, there’s a kind of trust issue at stake. The reporter both ignores the advice of the doctors to leave her alone and adopts a disguise to achieve his goal. In other words, he completely ignores the social rules whose obedience confirms our status as good citizens. The result, Böll chooses to emphasise, is yet more violence.

Conclusion

In theory, newspapers are supposed to tell the truth, just as the police in their investigations are supposed to discover it. In The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, we see a paper that fails to tell the truth and an investigation that mostly probes a private life with little success at its stated goal. Only the novel’s chosen narrative approach, of a bloodless directness that names its sources and tries to be clear about sources of bias, seems to stand against this by telling us what really happened. However, in reality, this only complicates things further. We might notice, for example, how little Katharina herself speaks, even if she gets the last word. Too often she is only being quoted by others or described.

And should we even trust her own words? Aren’t humans often inarticulate about what’s within their hearts? The narrator might try to be neutral, but neutrality is itself a mask that allows biases safe passage. Really, shouldn’t we know who he or she is, so that we can make our own judgements? Or alternatively, shouldn’t we be given sources without mediation or introduction, so that we can assemble the story ourselves? (This is still not neutrality, because the ordering and choice of sources is itself an influence on our perception of them, but it’s closer to neutrality). Ultimately, we might say that if the narrative makes us distrust bad newspaper reporting, its wider message is not consoling about our capacity to locate objectivity.

Someone I went to school with now works at one of those newspapers, and when I asked him at a chance meeting whether that made him complicit in their occasional hateful and socially destructive messaging, his unencouraging answer was that the paper wasn’t left or right-wing, and that if people wanted to read populist rubbish that was their choice and equally their choice as a paper to write in a way that catered to it. He was quite confrontational in manner, obviously in part a response to my tactless question, but also in a way that to me seemed to indicate that even though he presented himself as being above what he wrote, it was beginning to affect his soul. I can’t say I was too happy for his success.

With that said, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum definitely feels like it has no answers to the existence of papers like Bild. It might have been motivated by its author’s rage at the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof group of terrorists in the papers at the time, but the work has very little to say about the people who actually read the papers and how such papers’ influence might be diminished. Instead, it focuses on their effect on an individual. In that, it’s an emotional appeal clad in cold language, rather than a rational argument. Böll himself calls the text a “pamphlet” in the afterword and that’s really what it is –  a short, effective story, told interestingly. But not one with any answers.

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.