German Joys

The Machine is the Message

In the middle of a fascinating article on how the Internet shreds attention spans and may leave heavy users unable to read books, Nicholas Carr relates an interesting anecdote about Nietzsche:

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Starve the Authors!

Germany produces a lot of fiction.  Among the few fine books, there are desultorily exercises in taboo-violation (g), meandering works of "self-reflection" (g) by aging baby boomers, evocations (g) of the shallow, materialistic youth of today that are as listless and dull as their subjects.

In other words, lots of it is crap. Why is this?  Maxim Biller blamed cowardice and insularity a few years ago (g) in Die Zeit.  Now comes an amusing polemic by Oliver Jungen, in the FAZ, which points a finger (g) at the German literature industry itself. Germany offers its authors a spectacular smorgasbord of prizes, including the "Büchner-, Kleist-, Breitbach-, Heine-  Goethe-..., Johann-Peter-Hebel-, Peter-Huchel-, Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz-, Wilhelm-Raabe-, Hermann-Lenz-, Friedrich-Hölderlin-, Friedrich-Hebbel-, Mörike-, Nicolas-Born-, Heinrich-Böll-, Georg-K.-Glaser-, Carl-von-Ossietzky-, Heimito-von-Doderer-, Hilde-Domin-, Georg-Kaiser-, Hugo-Ball-, Wolfgang-Koeppen-, Adelbert-von-Chamisso-, Walter-Kempowski-, Nelly-Sachs-, Uwe-Johnson- or the Jean-Paul-Prize." 

There seem to be more prizes than authors in Germany, Jungen sneers.  One sponsporing organ alone, the German Literature Fund, gives away a million Euros a year.  And the prizes are just the tip of the subvention iceberg.  He calls the premise behind this extravagant sponsorship "condescending": it is the notion that "Literature is seen as a basket case.  We're just trying to sweeten the last days of the old doddering aunt."  But instead of bringing forth great books, it's (predictably) created indecisive musings, impressionism and self-indulgence.  Citing Alfred Doeblin, Jungen yearns for the passionate, engaged author, who rebels against all authority, including prize juries.  The ones who write despite it all, because they must.  Jungen admonishes us, (half?) ironically: "Harm the writers! Starve them! Enrage them!" 

German Joys Review: Fleisch is Mein Gemuese

Fleisch ist mein Gemüse ("Meat is my Vegetable"), the first book by Heinz Strunk*, is subtitled "A Rural Coming-of-Age -- with Music". It is indeed a sort of searingly honest, frightening, often howlingly funny Bildungsroman. Strunk opens the story with his late adolescence. Not the scholarly type, he's in his late teens, with no prospects for college, no girlfriend, and no money. He's still living with his mother in a settlement of "dwarf-houses" in the nondescript Hamburg suburb of Harburg, the kind of place in which the opening of a new McDonald's in the mid-1970s is still considered a high point of local history.

He lives with his single mother, who bore him as the result of a fleeting relationship, never married, and is beset by increasingly severe mental problems. Strunk's not free of those himself: he barely lasts a month in his mandatory military service before being discharged on the unsettling grounds of "endogenous depression."  Have I left anything out?  Oh, right -- the acne.  Not just the ordinary acne vulgaris that comes and goes, but the most severe form -- acne conglobata ("characterized by numerous large lesions, which are sometimes [gulp] interconnected").  It can last into the early 30s. 

Not the most promising start in life.  But Heinz does have one thing going for him -- music.  Social isolation = practice time, and by his early 20s, Heinz has learned to play several instruments, some of them well.  In the American version of this story, perhaps, the precious gift of music redeems young Heinz, bringing him fabulous wealth and drawing women to him like moths to a suppurating candle.  But let's return to the German version.  Heinz gets a few gigs with a dance band called Holunder, run primarily by more or less drink-addled misfits.  Word spreads that Heinz can play the saxophone (or "snot-can", in gig-speak) pretty well, and is eventually approached by one of Northwest Germany's premier live-entertainment ensembles, Tiffanys.  Not "the Tiffanys," mind you -- just Tiffanys.  Bandleader Gundolf Beckmann, affectionately known as Gurki (roughly, "cucumber-boy") because of his tall, bent form, started Tiffanys some time ago to supplement his music-shop income.  He needs new band members to replace the previous crew, whom he alienated.  Also along for the ride are bandmates Norbert and Jens, a proper young civil servant, one of whose anti-vegetable sayings provides the title of the book (another is "Man is by nature not an eater of side dishes.").  At his first gig, Heinz actually finds that he's a damn fine saxophone player, and the band quickly accepts him.

Together, Tiffanys travel throughout the backwaters of northern Germany, playing until 3 or 4 in the morning in places with names like Mooreschwerde and Klein Eilstorf.  They play weddings, youth festivals, company functions, and Schuetzenfesten, a peculiar German tradition in which members of neighborhood "shooting societies" get together at a big party and drink themselves into a blind stupor.  In fact, just as book critics like to say cities are "characters" in a novel, you might say alcohol, in its many forms, is a character in Fleisch.  Public festivals and parties in Germany invariably involve consumption of mass quantities of alcohol, often as a result of lock-step drinking rituals that generally appear weirdly joyless to outsiders.

By the time 2 o'clock rolls around at a Tiffanys gig, the guests are glassy-eyed, bathrooms are unusable (but, at 2 a.m., are needed more than ever), and unfocussed hostility -- sometimes directed at the band -- is in the air.  Tiffanys, however, can save the day by playing "On the North Sea Coast" by Klaus and Klaus, an unspectacular piece of German prole-pop that seems to have a magical mesmerizing power wherever Tiffanys go.  Strunk's judgments on German Schlager are merciless and amusing.  Germany's fascination with John Denver's "Country Roads" leaves Strunk cold, but the "totally depraved" songs of Roland Kaiser earn high marks.  The introduction of cheap synthesizers in the late 1980s, Strunk reports, increased the quality of German dance-party bands by providing a regular beat for the first time.

After the concert comes payday, which generally involves endlessly petty dickering over the precise number of tunes played and breaks taken.  And then the wild sex with groupies.  Actually, no, no wild sex.  Women seem rather uninterested in generally unattractive, badly-paid members of a party band who wear pink tuxedos during their gigs.  Instead of orgies, Tiffanys get to enjoy, again and again, the exhausting ritual of stuffing heavy instrument cases back into whatever cheap car serves as the band's transport.  Fleisch, although rather unstructured, has supremely comical moments.  Strunk's key strength as a writer is characterization.  The indefatigable and always-polite Gurki evokes a mixture of admiration and contempt from his band (the mixture's about 10/90, respectively) as he trots out one of his tried-and-true peppy sayings, including -- in English -- "Swing time is good time, good time is better time!"   

However, like much German humor (you could also say Central European humor) the deadpan irony stands cheek-by-jowl with bleak moments.  Strunk presents himself as the butt of a series of cruel cosmic jokes.  The driving force of the book comes from the fact that Strunk knows this, and spends most of the book cringing at what fate will throw his way next.  Strunk's judgments of others are often lacerating, but just when you want to protest his lack of charity, he swings the spotlight around to his own utter schlubbiness.  Young Heinz indulges in frenetic onanism, drinks way too much, and develops a fateful fascination with coin-operated gambling machines.  The Merkur Disc 2 -- whose intricacies are described in loving detail -- guzzles lots of his meager income.  Precisely because Heinz shows us his vulnerabilities and shortcomings, we find ourselves hoping he will finally develop some self-respect and establish himself in life.  Which he eventually does, after a fashion.

Whether as a tour d'horizon of a side of moist, clammy side German life that most of us will (thankfully) never experience or as a unsentimental but very mildly life-affirming memoir of a young man repeatedly rescued from the abyss by music, Fleisch ist mein Gemuese is a rewarding read.

* Strunk has, of course, gone on to become a German celebrity and political candidate for the political organization Die Partei, a shadowy outfit with murky ties to the German satirical monthly Titanic.

Prizes as Hysterical Love-Making

Jonathan Littell on winning (g, my translation) the 2006 Prix Goncourt for his novel Les Bienveillantes:

You received the Prix Goncourt.

Unfortunately.  I did everything I could to prevent that.

But you did not accept it.

I didn't want it.

Why not? Why reject a prize that so many of your colleagues yearn for?

I don't think prizes have anything to do with literature.  They have to do with marketing, not literature.  I don't like that.

But it's a prestigious prize, well-endowed.  You could live well in Barcelona with that money.

I came to Barcelona before the prize.  The money is nice, but I don't like the competition, all this crap.  People who are interested in that care more about their social status than art.

Robert Musil, on prize ceremonies in general:

We have a history of great men, and we regard it as an institution that belongs to us, just like prisons or the army; having it means we have to have people to put into it.  And so, with a certain automatism inherent in such social needs, we always pick the next in line and shower him with the honors ripe to be handed out.  But this veneration is not quite sincere; at its base lies the gaping, generally accepted conviction that there is really not a single person who deserves it, and it is hard to tell whether the mouth opens to acclaim someone or to yawn.  To call a man a genius nowadays, with the unspoken gloss that there is really no longer any such thing, smacks of some cult of the dead, something like hysterical love making a great to-do for no other reason than that there is no real feeling present.

The Man without Qualities, Vol I, p. 322 (Wilkins / Pike translation).

Another Book Bites the Dust

Yet another German book has been withdrawn from the market after someone portrayed (or perhaps allegedly portrayed) in it threatened to sue.  In this case, the book is Havemann, a family chronicle by Florian Havemann.  The publisher signed an agreement to withdraw the book, and has asked booksellers to send back unsold copies.

In addition to the legal questions all this raises, what about the environmental ones?  The book was almost 1,000 pages long, after all.  What happens to all that paper?

The Dangerously Non-Dangerous Book for Boys

In 2006, a British father and son wrote The Dangerous Book for Boys.  It's supposed to evoke those long-past days when, instead of vegetating for hours in front of glimmering consoles, young boys dreamed of adventure, played outside, and sometimes got hurt.  It had information on Antarctic explorers, famous historical battles, building catapults, tying knots, navigating in the woods.  Plus anecdotes about bone-crushing sports and their heroes.  And some sections on history and honor and loyalty and other old-fashioned virtues. It sounds like a kind of updated Boy Scout manual.  I should note that I haven't read the book.  As will shortly become clear, this post isn't really about the book's contents.

The book was a success in Britain, and soon an American version came out.  Some changes were made -- mainly removing Britain-specific themes like rugby, and adding in more references to American history. 

Now, the German version is here (G).  But wait -- we wouldn't want to make Germany a dangerous place, would we?  No, we wouldn't.  So the entire chapter on historical battles has been removed, as has the "Brief History of Artillery."  The Ten Commandments has been replaced by -- wait for it -- an essay on international human rights.  Any mention of rabbit hunting is also gone.  The first reviewer (G) on the Amazon.de page is disgusted: "[T]he English version was so successful because, among other reasons, it addressed subjects that run contrary to the gobbeldygook of 'peace education', and which boys would actually find interesting, at least in secret."

I'm with him.  These changes do at least two impermissible things.  First of all, they alter the contents of the book.  This is the capital crime, the cardinal sin, of the translator's art. It would be equivalent to me translating a German novel and substituting all the sex scenes with uplifting homilies to chastity, because I personally believed that people like the ones portrayed in the novel shouldn't be having sex.  Second, the 'opinion elite' sense of privilege seems to have struck again.  The changes were not made because the original references would not be understood in Germany (which would be a legitimate reason, given authorial consent), but simply to 'disappear' aspects of the book which might make the average German literary professional uneasy.  The chapter on human rights is especially ludicrous.  What, a reasonable 12-year-old boy might ask, is so bloody dangerous about human rights?

These changes reflect almost unimaginable self-aggrandizement, I would say.  Whatever German literary professional made these changes expressed the unmistakable belief that his values and his sensibilities are more legitimate than those of his audience.  The fact that many people may have bought this book precisely because it's the kind of book that might have information about battles seems to be irrelevant.  The changes also reflect a fundamental distrust of the public -- boys are being denied information about battles presumably because they might end up wanting to fight them.  I rather doubt that would happen, but who am I to question the immortal wisdom of a German editor?

I don't want to be too hasty assigning blame here.  I don't know whether the translator himself was responsible for any or all of these changes.  And if the authors approved them or instigated them, then I suppose we've just got to grit our teeth and accept it.  I have send off an email to the authors to see whether they know of these changes. I'll let you know what I find out.

UPDATE: I got a nice response from one of the authors of the book.  He said that he understood there would be some changes to the book to make it more suitable for a German audience, but that he was not aware of the extent of the changes and did not approve them.  He said he would be complaining to the publishers. 

I should note that negotiating translation rights is a complex business.  It's always good to keep in mind that authors may have less control over translations than the lay public might think.

Pearl-Diving Still Legal

In Germany, most of the articles in the Feuilleton (arts & culture) sections of major newspapers are not posted on the newspapers' websites, for reasons I've never really understood.  This means if you want to read reviews of books and movies from major German newspapers online, you're pretty much out of luck.

That's why the website Perlentaucher (G) ("pearl-diver") is so useful -- it collects and indexes short summaries of the major-paper book reviews, so you can get an idea what the papers are saying about various new books and films.  Call it a culture aggregator.  Perlentaucher then sells its abstracts to online book-sellers such as buecher.de.  Two major German newspapers sued Perlentaucher a few years ago, claiming that the website was appropriating their intellectual property without compensation.  Perlentaucher, for its part, claimed it had a right to quote and summarize already-printed material, and then do what it wished with the end result. 

Perlentaucher won about a year ago in the District Court of Frankfurt, and the newspapers appealed.  Now, early today, the higher court (the Frankfurt Regional Court) has also announced a verdict for Perlentaucher (G).  The newspapers are going to appeal, so the story is -- ludicrously enough -- not yet over.  Yet the interim judgment would seem to reassure bloggers that they can quote or summarize printed matter without fearing a lawsuit.

I heard an interview with DeutschlandRadio Kultur this morning with the editor of the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Rundschau.  Her newspaper's actually grateful for the extra publicity Perlentaucher brings to its culture pages, so it's not a part of the lawsuit.  She noted that most of the people who write for the Feuilleton are freelancers who maintain some rights to their work, so the legal situation's a bit more complex.

However, the moderator asked her a good question: why don't the newspapers and perlentaucher get together and simply arrange some sort of equitable agreement about the rights to use the abstracts?  Aren't the newspapers behaving here like the music industry -- desperately fighting a futile rear-guard action to stop a new medium, instead of thinking of innovative ways to profit from it?  The Rundschau woman was sympathetic to this argument, but noted that relations between the print and the internet camps are apparently so rocky now that there's no chance of a settlement.  (You'd be amazed how much doesn't get done in Germany because people in key positions decide they can't stand each other, but that's another story).

So the legal battle goes on.  But in the meantime, Perlentaucher will keep finding those pearls for us.  I wish them the best of luck in their continuing legal odyssey...

English-Language Reviews of German Books

I just stumbled upon this part of the book-review website Complete Review, which features a considerable number of English-language reviews of contemporary literature and poetry in German that has yet to be translated into English.  A labor of love.

Hölderlin in English by David Constantine

Hölderlin, done into English by the poet David Constantine (G):

'Another day'

[orig. Wohl geh ich täglich...]

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere

Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

Sublime.  More here.

"Esra": Forbidden Forever

I'm a bit late in getting around to this, but the German Federal Constitutional Court has issued a decision confirming (G) a lower court's ban on German novelist Maxim Biller's novel "Esra." The book revolves around the relationship of two figures named Esra and Adam, a first-person narrator, and was closely modeled on Biller's personal life. The problem, from the perspective of German law, was that Biller inserted a very big clef into this roman a clef -- his novel-girlfriend was identified as the winner of a German film prize, and her mother as the winner of an alternative Nobel Prize -- which was also true of his real life girlfriend. 

"Esra" and her mother sued, and won.  The high court's 5-3 majority (decision (G); summary in press-release format (G)) held that because Biller described personal crises the ex-girlfriend faced and "intimate sexual practices," the novel intruded into the "private sphere" of the real-life person on which the character of Esra was based. So, unless you already have a copy of this novel, you won't be getting to read it anytime soon. The court also noted that Biller mentioned facts that would have made the woman easily recognizable to a wide pool of persons. In fact, working from the facts mentioned in the court's opinion, you can find out her name in about 30 seconds of Internet research. (A useful reminder that most lawsuits are filed for symbolic reasons, not to achieve a practical goal...)

Courtesy Among Communists

I've dipped into the German manners guide from 1982.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a book for the ages.  On the inside of the dust cover, the publisher proudly asserts that the first edition ridiculed many fusty old traditions into impotence.  The second one sailed into the "taboo" area by suggesting ways for unmarried people to show attraction for one another. The third and fourth editions (the one I have) positively "affirm" this state of affairs.

There is nothing this book does not tell you how to do, except perhaps invade Poland [disgusting! cheap! -- ed.]  You'll learn how to use a fish-knife, smoke a cigar, help a lady sit at the table (hint: never shove the chair into the backs of her knees!), when to make an ironic comment to a conversation partner (never against those who are too dull to defend themselves in kind), how to drive, how to dance, how to begin and end your letters, how to watch television, how to travel, when to call people (never during the evening news!). The advice is generally damned good, and delivered with panache.

If you need proof of the authors' broad-mindedness, consider that they tell you not only how to greet a university president (Eueure Magnifizenz) or dean (Euere Spectabilitaet), but also a Communist:

For and Against the address "Comrade"

There is basically no objection to the address "comrade," when, for example, a former Social Democrat or Communist meets another former Social Democrat or Communist. After all, the Social Democrat or Communist intends to show the other a token of friendship: he wishes to refer to common interests or memories, and does so in the expectation that the other person will take pleasure in the reference to the things that connect them.

In the post-war era, there have been many discussions of the pros and cons of this address among Communists and Social Democrats. The exchange of opinions between old and young comrades has not quieted to this day.  This is understandable, since for many, the word "comrade" is tainted by associations with "Volks-comrade" or "party comrade," just as others entertain the suspicion (greatly overgeneralized, to be sure), that by using the address "comrade" outside of certain closed circles, one is possibly attempting to identify oneself with comrades of all nations, who are trying to spark a global revolution.

Umgangsformen Heute, pp. 117-18. The discussion continues for five more paragraphs. Complicated country, Germany.

Viennese Tiredness

Ah, the famous 'Viennese Tiredness' (Wiener Muedigkeit).  A description of it, from a fine essay about Robert Musil by Roger Kimball which appeared a decade or so ago in The New Criterion:

[F]in-de-siècle Vienna . . . was an atmosphere in which, as the historian Carl Schorske put it, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was … both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefühlskultur [sentimental culture].” As Schorske went on to note, this revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—Hermann Broch called it a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life tout court. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,” he continued.

The threat of the political mass movements lent new intensity to this already present trend by weakening the traditional liberal confidence in its own legacy of rationality, moral law, and progress. Art became transformed from an ornament to an essence, from an expression of value to a source of value.

Of course, these transformations were a catalyst for disaster. The resources of civilization—epitomized by the faith in rationality, moral law, and progress that Schorske mentions—were hollowed out from within; weightless, they soon lost the capacity to resist the barbarism of feeling—aesthetic, sexual, social, political feeling—that rushed in everywhere that a spiritual vacancy was felt. It was, as the Marxists used to say, “no accident” that Nazism and other extreme movements got their start in this narcotic environment.

Pithy Forewords, Volume I

Hans Peter Duerr (G) wrote a five-volume work in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s that criticizes the German sociologist Norbert Elias' conception of the 'civilizing process'.  Here is an excerpt from the foreword to Volume I (my translation):

In the ten years in which I worked (not exclusively) on this book, many scholars assisted me with information.  I can thank them only summarily here. However, only a few members of this group are ethnologists from German-speaking countries who, in general, were not ready to answer questions I posed in letters as soon as they had become members of Salary Group C3 or higher.

 

Memo to Self: Read Jonathan Franzens "Discomfort Zone"

From an interview with American writer Jonathan Franzen, a former German-literature major: "One of the essays in your memoir, 'The Discomfort Zone,' connects your love of German lit with your own sexual awakening."

Insult A Nation's Literature, Win its Prize

One good reason to learn German is to read the many books that have been translated into German, but not into English. While American publishing houses release fewer and fewer works translated from other languages into English, translation from various languages into German continues apace. The Czech Library, 33 volumes of Czech literature translated into German, was recently completed (G). It's a successor to the Polish library, a large translation project headed by the Polish-German translator Karl Dedecius. It's subsidies that make this possible, although nobody is getting rich from it. Many translators into German work for a pittance, or for free. But work they do.

The German sinologist, poet, and translator Wolfgang Kubin is the latest to be recognized. Today, he was awarded the Chinese State Prize (G) in Beijing for his many translations of works of Chinese literature into German. Which is pretty stunning. Although Kubin is fascinated by Chinese literature and culture in general, he recently declared in an interview that most contemporary Chinese literature is "crap," because its authors never address controversial themes. Kubin's view is that a modern society "needs critics, because without critics it is doomed to death." He calls many contemporary Chinese authors "cowards." In the link just above, he notes that many Chinese authors come to Germany for literary "vacations" and are content to be thought of as dissidents. But when they go back to China, they collaborate with the authorities. They permit portions of their works to be censored so that their books can appear in their native countries. Powerful politicians and writers in China, he says, "somehow, for various reasons, actually completely work together, and I don't really have a complete picture of how that operates."

Nevertheless, he won the prize, awarded directly by the Chinese government. Perhaps it's a sign of tolerance, he says, but he's not completely sure...

Moments in Gummy Bear History

...courtesy of Hans Traxler's 1992 book "The Life and Times of Gummy Bears," one of the few German comic books to have been translated into English. I have the German version, but I'll translate the captions into English.

"Ivan the Terrible went mad when he realized that he could not impress gummy bears with his tried-and-true torture methods."

"Through contact with humans, gummy bears began to develop all the afflictions of civilized life." (overweight, fear of flying, tennis elbow, weltschmerz)

Maxim Biller on Sighing in Hindi

For a while, I've been working on a translation of Maxim Biller's sulfurous 2000 essay "Cowardly the Land; Feckless the Literature" (G).  It's a sparkling cavalcade of well-focussed hatred directed at deserving victims.

One of his stories, "The Mahogany Elephant," has just been translated into English and published in the New Yorker.  Turns out some of his stories have been published in the New Yorker in English.  Here's an excerpt from an online-only interview with him:

Are there American writers you have drawn inspiration from? Jewish-American ones?

When I was twenty, I discovered the books of Malamud, Heller, Bellow, Roth. They taught me to be free to write about my own—the Jewish—people, just as Chekhov, Camus, and Fitzgerald wrote about their people. My biggest hero was always Mordecai Richler. I loved him, because he was comic, tragic, and never pseudo-intellectual. He understood that literature is about telling a story, not showing off your vocabulary. I met him once. We went on tour through Germany—he was reading in English, I was explaining in German who he was, and at night we had a whiskey and smiled at each other and didn’t talk much. I’m sad that he is no longer alive and can’t write more of his wonderful novels.

Are there themes in your writing that seem to you to be typically German, and that American readers might be unfamiliar with?

I hope not. I think that literature—if you succeed at it—is universal. It is always this thing with love and war and parents who lied to you, and, of course, there must be some suspense and a lot of invisible poetry, and then it doesn’t matter whether the characters sigh in German or in Hindi.

German Joys Review: America Right or Wrong

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts on American parochialism. Anatol Lieven, a Cambridge-educated historian and foreign-affairs expert, has a few, too, as he shows in his 2004 book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. (ARW) Lieven's target is not so much America's the insularity itself; he knows there are good excuses for it. His point is that this insularity is dangerous in a country that throws its weight around as much as the U.S. does.

Lieven begins ARW with a 1989 conversation he had with a U.S. diplomat then stationed in Pakistan. Lieven had recently ventured into the countryside to speak to the Afghan warlords the U.S was funding. He found they were "a serious threat to peace and progress in Afghanistan [and] pathologically anti-Western." Lieven and a colleague asked the diplomat whether he agreed with the U.S. government's policy of funding these men.

The diplomat responded that with a long, indignant speech: he was sure the Afghan resistance was going to build a "successful free market democracy." "This diatribe," writes Lieven, "reflected a messianism rooted in the American creed but was accompanied by a total ignorance of Afghan history, society, tradition, or reality in general." As early as page 3, we see, Lieven is not going to pull any punches. In his view, a similar worldview has driven American policy ever since, and helped determined the United States' response to September 11:

This book seeks to help explain why a country which after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had the chance to create a concert of all the world's major States -- including Muslim ones -- against Islamist revolutionary terrorism chose instead to pursue policies which divided the West, further alienated the Muslim world and exposed America itself to greatly increased danger.

Lieven underpins this bracing critique of American nationalism and insularity with formidable research and anecdotes from his years as a reporter. He also builds a convincing case that defects in American public discourse contributed directly to the foreign-policy blunders that have dominated recent headlines.

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts on American parochialism. Anatol Lieven, a Cambridge-educated historian and foreign-affairs expert, has a few, too, as he shows in his 2004 book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. (ARW) Lieven's target is not so much America's the insularity itself; he knows there are good excuses for it. His point is that this insularity is dangerous in a country that throws its weight around as much as the U.S. does.

Lieven begins ARW with a 1989 conversation he had with a U.S. diplomat then stationed in Pakistan. Lieven had recently ventured into the countryside to speak to the Afghan warlords the U.S was funding. He found they were "a serious threat to peace and progress in Afghanistan [and] pathologically anti-Western." Lieven and a colleague asked the diplomat whether he agreed with the U.S. government's policy of funding these men.

The diplomat responded that with a long, indignant speech: he was sure the Afghan resistance was going to build a "successful free market democracy." "This diatribe," writes Lieven, "reflected a messianism rooted in the American creed but was accompanied by a total ignorance of Afghan history, society, tradition, or reality in general." As early as page 3, we see, Lieven is not going to pull any punches. In his view, a similar worldview has driven American policy ever since, and helped determined the United States' response to September 11:

This book seeks to help explain why a country which after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had the chance to create a concert of all the world's major States -- including Muslim ones -- against Islamist revolutionary terrorism chose instead to pursue policies which divided the West, further alienated the Muslim world and exposed America itself to greatly increased danger.

Lieven underpins this bracing critique of American nationalism and insularity with formidable research and anecdotes from his years as a reporter. He also builds a convincing case that defects in American public discourse contributed directly to the foreign-policy blunders that have dominated recent headlines.

German Joys Review: Sociology in Ethics

Those who are interested in how modern thinkers address contemporary moral dilemmas will be interested in Marcos Breuer's Soziologie in der Ethik: Handlungtheoretische Fundamente der Moralphilosophie (Sociology in Ethics: Behavioral-theory Fundaments of Moral Philosophy). In this dissertation, Breuer analyzes the work of John Mackie, Peter Singer, and John Rawls.

Breuer's theme is the Menschenbild (roughly, image of human nature) in each philosophers' thought. To make meaningful generalizations about human conduct, you must have an idea of how humans think and act. What motivates human conduct? How much altruism can we expect people to display? How far will they go to realize their interests? Philosophers -- especially moral philosophers -- obviously have to assume answers to these questions. However, they rarely make these assumptions explicit, even though they form the building blocks of later analysis.

Breuer "reverse-engineers" each philosopher's basic assumptions about human nature by analyzing their philosophical systems. To structure his inquiry, Breuer develops a five-point analytical framework:

1. Motivation structure: What sort of preferences do people have; and how do they decide when the preferences conflict?
2. Altruism: What kind of altruism motivates humans?
3. Moral Dispositions: What kind of basic moral dispositions control behavior?
4. Interaction: What is their model of interaction between people?
5. Rationality: What sort of rationality do they posit?

Kurt Vonnegut on Love & Books

Kurt Vonnegut's death is news in Germany, which makes sense, since 'Slaughterhouse Five' (Schlachthof Fuenf) was popular here. To mark the occasion, an excerpt from an interview he gave to the Paris Review in 1977:

VONNEGUT
...I'm on the New York State Council on the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That's where the writers are most likely to be.

INTERVIEWER
You believe that?

VONNEGUT
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

INTERVIEWER
Let's talk about the women in your books.

Non-Bear Shaped Gummi Bears

Sex toys have been a topic on this blog before, albeit in the context of taxation. Now they're back: a trip to the store turns into a journey of erotic self-discovery when Harald Martenstein discovers (G) that his local department store now sells sex toys.

Special Offer

Harald Martenstein discovers an “erotic goods” section in the department store

I’m not really a lady. That’s why I rarely visit the ladies’ underwear department in the Karstadt department store. However, it came to pass one day that I got lost. I wanted to go to the CD section. Do not buy the so-called new Beatles CD Love, by the way, it’s horrible. I didn’t find the CD-section. Instead, I was suddenly standing before a gigantic, knobby dildo. The term dildo denotes a stylized recreation of the male reproductive organ. It is designed for leisure pursuits. There are ones with and without motors, just like with boats and two-wheelers. I explain the word because once, when I was a young man, I had to admit at a party that I didn’t know the word, and that was embarrassing. I actually thought “dildo” was that large, extinct Australian bird. It also wouldn’t be such a bad name, when you come to think of it. Dildo DiCaprio. Dildo Jetengine. Suddenly it came to be that if Ildikó von Kürthy tried to pep up a Franz Kafka novel with sex scenes, you would have something that would be about as patchy as the Love CD.

German Joys Review: Die Neuen Spiesser

The 'New Squares', Christian Rickens calls them in his new book, Die Neuen Spiesser: Von der Fatalen Sehnsucht nach einer überholten Gesellschaft ("The New Squares: On the Fatal Yearning for an Outdated Society"). It's a provocative title, Spiesser (roughly, "square") is a mildly pejorative term.

The New Squares range from the Federal Constitutional Court Judge Udo di Fabio, whose recent book Kultur der Freiheit ("Culture of Freedom") warns us that the collapse of common sense puts the "west in danger"; to Paul Nolte (G), historian at the Freie Universität Berlin, who denounces a new permanent underclass of alienated, tattoed Gameboy addicts cut loose from stabilizing bourgeois values; to Eva Herman, a peppy TV celebrity whose new book Das Eva-Prinzip: Fuer eine neue Weiblichkeit ("The Eva Principle: For a New Femininity" (G)) calls on German women to admit that the attempt to combine children and career cannot succeed, and return to the comforts of hearth and home. This is a pretty European brand of conservatism; fond of talk about ancient customs and traditional values, and skeptical of the free market. You could call the New Squares throne-and-altar conservatives adrift in a throneless cosmopolis.

Now comes Christian Rickens, an editor at Manager Magazine (G), to give them the back of his hand in this crisply-written, entertaining polemic. The tone throughout is lightly ironic, although not flippant. Rickens doesn't intend to confront right-wing doom-mongering with its left-wing Doppelgaenger. In fact, he mocks doom-mongering. Issue by issue, he sets out the New Squares' claims and demonstrates, by a bit of research and clear thinking, that the problems they describe are nowhere near as grim as they'd have us believe, and that their proposed solutions are generally unworkable.

Rickens acknowledges differences in temperament and intellectual caliber among the New Squares -- some are university professors, others tabloid columnists. However, Rickens identifies two typical thought-mistakes (Denkfehler) common to them all. The first is a weakness for spongy pseudo-scientific phrase-mongering: stuff like "the erosion of our cultural substance," or the "declining sense of togetherness and being bound together by fate" (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). The New Squares, he comments, seem to be reading "too much Nietzsche and too little Popper." Many of their arguments are, therefore, unfalsifiable -- dinner-table banter wrapped up in pretty rhetorical ribbons. How are we supposed to tell whether a nation's "cultural substance" is disappearing?

The second error is the conservative tic of confusing social change with collapse or decay. What Fritz Stern wrote of an earlier crop of German cultural conservatives still holds true: "[O]ften they mistook change for decline, and, consistent with their conception of history, attributed the decline to a moral failing." German society is changing, argues Rickens, but many of the problems bemoaned by the New Squares are much more manageable than they let on, and some of them aren't problems at all.

Does Germany Have an Asshole Problem?

One thing I kind of miss about American universities is the fact that professors say "fuck," "shit," and "asshole" all the time, and nobody cares. Sometimes they even put naughty words in the titles of the books they write, as with Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, published by the Princeton University Press.

In this video, Stanford management professor Robert Sutton explains his new book, The No-Asshole Rule, which details the harm assholes do to corporate work environments. His book has been translated into German, with the title Der Arschloch-Faktor. In fact, the book came out in German translation before it was even published in its original language.

Does this mean that some editor in a German publishing house looked over new lists of English books and said: "Mein Gott! This book must be translated into German immediately! Germany is full of assholes!" I don't see Germany as particularly asshole-rich, in fact, most Germans have far better manners than I do. I have heard, however, that German publishing houses are full of assholes...

Heinrich Böll: CIA Operative?

I subscribe to the newsletter sent out by www.german-foreign-policy.com, a spunky website which provides an independent, not to say critical take on German foreign policy. It has an English-language component as well.

Their latest headline is on the German writer Heinrich Böll. A new documentary on ARTE claims he accepted money from, and reported to, the CIA, although it's not clear how extensive his knowledge of this fact was:

The German writer Heinrich Boell had worked for several front organizations of the US secret service. This is alleged in a TV documentation of the French-German television channel ARTE, which was introduced to the press in Berlin. "We all worked for the CIA", admitted the former business administrator of the base of cultural operations in Cologne, that enlisted Boell's services for CIA actions all over Europe. But this background was unknown. It was believed that the Ford Foundation (USA) was doing the financing. Also Boell's colleague, Guenter Grass, who was interviewed in the film, considers improbable that Boell was deliberately engaged in CIA activity. As proven by documents in the film, the CIA paid Boell's travel expenses. It also subsidized appearances in the international cultural scene of various other writers. Boell "was a diamond in the CIA's collection", says the author of the film in a discussion with german-foreign-policy.com.

A reconstruction of the relationship to the CIA, that the future Nobel laureate and eponym of the Green Party's foundation, can be traced back to the beginning of the 50s. At that time, the little known Boell was invited to West Berlin for readings where he became involved with the milieu of the (West) "German front organizations (...) in the Battle of the Cultures". They are said to have been directed by the CIA.

...

It was further reported, that these contacts congealed into Boell's becoming a regular member of a CIA front organization. Their couriers contacted intellectuals in Poland, the Soviet Union and in the GDR and supplied them with material from the west. This is how dissidents were recruited and presented to the international public during Boell's subsequent trips to the eastern bloc countries. Boell is said to have made reports about his trips, that landed on the desk of the CIA's base of cultural operations in Cologne - in the publishing house of the former Kiepenheuer and Witsch, a reputable address for German and international literature.

German Joys Review: In Europa

  In Europa (G) took 6 years to finish, and is over 900 pages long. Its author, Dutch journalist Geert Mak, calls it "a journey through the 20th century." Mak divides the century into time-segments as short as two years (1939-41) and as long as fourteen (1956-1980), and a chapter is devoted to each. The occasion for the book was an assignment from Mak's newspaper, the Dutch NRC Handelsblad. In 1999, as the millennium drew to a close, the paper sent Mak off to travel through Europe and write a weekly column taking the continent's pulse at points large and small. He visits places in Europe that played a role in whatever era he is researching -- Paris for the early years of the century, Stalingrad for the early 40s, Berlin for the late 80s, Spain for the mid-70s, etc.

The book is much more than a stitched-together collection of newspaper columns. Mak relied on several sources of information: his own immediate impressions (he rented a mobile home for some parts of the journey, but went by train, bus, and steamer for others); visits to the same places earlier in his journalistic career; interviews with locals and with people who played a part in the events he describes, and a bibliography comprising 18 pages and four languages (Dutch, German, English and French).

It's hard to do justice to the kaleidoscopic richness of the result. You watch Serbian television propaganda in Novi Sad in 1993; drink with cheerful peasants in a small Hungarian village in 1999 (the "last year that trash was collected by a horse-driven carriage"); hear the first-person accounts of a Polish government minister, Portuguese coup plotter, Dutch prime minister, and a founder of the European Union; visit an East German factory coming to grips with competition for the first time; sail across the Black Sea on a Ukrainian steamer; drink ouzo on a Greek island with men who resisted Italian and German occupation; watch a group of mentally retarded Germans riding a train through booming post-Wall Berlin; hear a Romanian professor describe the downfall of the Ceausescus; visit a pair of Ukrainian peasants who stayed on their farmstead even after Chernobyl melted down next to it; hear an afternoon of Poland's populist, anti-Semitic Catholic right-wing Radio Maryja; listen to bemused Dutchmen describe Hungarian refugees who arrived all over Western Europe following the 1956 uprising; hear the complaints of unemployed Frenchmen living a vagabond existence in campgrounds on the fringes of provincial towns; and share Mak's dismay at the nationalistic blather of Basque separatists.

Polish Books II: The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz

A few notes about another Polish book I read recently. The book was rather good, so the post is rather long.

Miłosz, a Polish poet and 1980 Nobel laureate in literature, was born in Lithuania, in 1911 (Lithuania was then a part of Russia, after 1918 a part of Poland). By the time the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Miłosz was a promising avant-garde poet. He stayed in Poland during the war, working in the “cultural wing” of the underground. Poles have a long history of preserving local culture as a means of resisting an equally long history of foreign domination. Spiritual resistance to Nazi rule was just as important as the practical sort – poets risked their lives to publish in underground newspapers, theatres staged secret plays, there was even an underground university.

Miłosz watched as the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was crushed after a few weeks and the Nazis razed Warsaw in retribution. Only after the destruction of Warsaw did the Red Army, which was encamped nearby, "liberate" the smoldering ruin. This culpable delay, which Poles attribute to Stalin’s calculation, was only the most recent reason for Poles to view the advancing Russians with apprehension. At war's end, some Poles hoped that the West might be able to cajole Poland from of Moscow's orbit, but these hopes were gradually dashed; by the early 1950s, it was clear Poland would become a Soviet satellite.

In the uncertain post-war years, Miłosz cooperated with the new Polish government. When he began writing The Captive Mind in 1951, Miłosz was cultural attaché to the Polish Embassy in Paris. Poland’s new commissars had hoped to burnish the new government’s image by detailing a worldly young poet to captivate Paris' intellectual circles, but things didn't go according to plan. As Moscow’s interference became clearer, Miłosz rebelled. As he writes, his rejection of Stalinism proceeded "not from the functioning of the reasoning mind" – which reminded him of the ease and fame awaiting politically-reliable artists – but from the "revolt of the stomach," the feeling that he would soon no longer be able to carry out "the writer's essential task – to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole." Miłosz applied for political asylum in Paris in 1951 and lived there until 1960, when he took up a professorship in Slavic Languages at Berkeley.

The Captive Mind is part Miłosz' justification of these decisions and part intellectual biography; but primarily it is an account of the ideological temptation of Communism. He describes the book as a "battlefield[] in which I have given shape to my combats with the doctrine I have rejected." The book may be a battlefield, but it is no demonizing polemic; Miłosz had met too many brilliant, idealistic Communists to permit that. Out of respect for them, Miłosz promises, when discussing Marxism, to "give the enemy his arms" and even to "copy the way of reasoning" when necessary, before attacking it.

Anti-Communists hailed the book as a lucid attack of enforced ideological conformity, but Miłosz kept his distance from all political camps, wary of being instrumentalized. Years later, he wrote that his failure to unreservedly join the anti-Communist cause led "[t]hose few people who were against current political fashions and saw me as a valuable ally [to make] dour faces, because the world is divided into two blocs, and if you are in one you must beat the hell out of the other." Instead, after writing The Captive Mind, Miłosz withdrew from direct political disputation.

Miłosz is a poet, not a lawyer. Rather than stitching together a precise, linear argument, the book strolls leisurely here and there in Miłosz fashion, favoring the reader with asides on the countryside around Vilnius, 19th-century French colonial officials, and the appeal (for one growing used to the gray uniformity of Socialist-bloc architecture) of Western cities, in which the "exciting and invigorating power of … participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues."

American Writer's Nazi Epic Enchants France

Signandsight features an English translation of a piece in a German newspaper about Jonathan Littell, a 38-year-old American writer whose 900-page novel "The Well-Meaning Ones", written in French, is reputed to be a favorite for the Prix Goncourt. According to this piece in the Independent,

Les Bienveillantes (The Well-Meaning Ones)...is the first-person story of an SS mass murderer who recalls, without emotion, his activities in Nazi execution squads and death camps. The novel, written in a four-month frenzy after five years of research, has been compared by French critics to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Stendhal.

Littell himself has an intercontinental past; he "lives in Barcelona with his Belgian wife and two children" and "is Jewish-American but he was brought up and educated partly in France. His father, Robert Littell, is an espionage writer and former journalist who exiled himself in France in the 1970s." According to this article in 20Minutes (F), Littell worked through most of the 1990s for humanitarian organizations in war zones such as Bosnia and Chechnya.

He applied twice for French citizenship, because his American passport limited his effectiveness as a relief worker, his citizenship rendered things -- to quote the article directly: "'touchy' (délicat)." He was turned down for French citizenship because he had not spent sufficient time in France. He says he sketched the outline of the novel in English because he could do so more "rapidly and precisely," but wrote the novel in French, because his own literary tradition is "more French than Anglo-Saxon."

Here, the complete review, a literary blog, handicaps the fast-approaching French literary prize season. Littell's novel currently tops the French best-seller list and is a contender for the Prix Goncourt. (If you'd like to bet on who will win the Nobel Prize in literature, you can do so here). His response to the French prize season: "That just brings stress. What I ask is simply that people leave me alone."

P.S. The writer for The Independent couldn't resist a dig at contempoary French novels: "Most contemporary French novels are thin volumes of 300 pages or fewer. They are often taken up with the author's childhood, literary struggles or random musings."

Snail-Friendly Formerly Socialist Indian Chiefs

First there was Karl May, the odd 19th-century German novelist who brought 'the Western' to Germany. Even though he'd never been to the United States, May's amazingly vivid descriptions of the rugged landscape of the West, and the ruggeder men who tamed it, were popular with German children. All Germans, and I mean all, can recite volumes about the loyal Indian scout "Winnetou", and the various palefaces who explored the West with him, including "Old Surehand" and "Old Shatterhand." The books remain in print to this day. In fact, Karl May has sold more books than any other German-language author.

Then there were American Westerns. Then came West German Westerns, which were successful. Then came Westerns...from the East! East Germany, that is. East Germany's historical role was the Potemkin country, the dolled-up store-display Communist dictatorship that showed the rest of the world that anything the West could do, the Soviet bloc could do just as well. (At least one Soviet-bloc country that is, which was relatively highly-developed and helped by massive infusions of Soviet economic aid). There were East German car brands, medical congresses, detective shows, management consultants, and even dance crazes (the Lipsi: "a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing").

So there had to be socialist Westerns, and there were. In these Westerns, the Indians were wise, peaceable beings who didn't even have a word for "property," and the cowboys, except for a few noble exceptions, were sadistic liars or unwitting tools of the capitalist robber barons. The Indian chief was usually played by the muscular Gojko Mitic (l), the son of a Serbian peasant family who became a (socialist) world-wide star in such movies as Chingachgook the Great Snake and The Son of the Great Bear.* Although Mitic could speak fluent German, his dialogue was always dubbed, in order "not to discriminate against the Indians." (G).

Guenter Grass: Two Defenses, One Attack

John Irving defense Guenter Grass "as a writer and a moral compass" here:

The man (and the writer) is a model of soul-searching and national conscience. People are saying he deliberately withheld this information until after he won the Nobel prize for literature, because he would never have won the prize if it were known he'd been in the SS...

The fulminating in the German media has been obnoxious. Grass is a daring writer, and he has always been a daring man. Was he not putting himself at risk - first at 15, then at 17? And now, once again, at age 79? And, once again, the cowardly small dogs are snapping at his heels.

Peter Gay joins in:

I think that whatever Mr. Grass has said in election campaigns (usually as a loyal Social Democratic speaker) or in his powerful novels, all essentially on the present or the recent past, retains its value.

... Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr. Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor. (The overused phrase “seizure of power” badly distorts what happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Führer’s accession. A coup d’ état would have been bad enough; that Hitler’s appointment was perfectly legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked, reasonably enough, “What else could he have done during that time in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus?” And answers his own question: “Nothing.”

Grass' confession seems to have been met with rather more patience and understanding from English-speakers -- especially his writer colleagues -- than in Germany. One of the reasons must be that these writers know Grass primarily, or only, from his novels and from meetings with him.

They also probably know little about many of Grass' innumerable moral and political judgment calls (for Grass, the two virtually always go together) that don't have to do with World War II. Take it away, Christopher Hitchens:

When German reunification finally occurred after 1989, [Grass] referred to it with scorn as an Anschluss whereby the West had annexed the former "German Democratic Republic." When challenged on the absurdity of this, he wielded the truncheon of moral blackmail and said that, after Auschwitz, his critics had no right to speak about history. At a discussion in a Berlin theater at about that time, I heard him defend these propositions and felt that I was listening to a near-perfect example of bogus pseudo-intellectuality. By this stage, he had already become something of a specialist in half-baked moral equivalences. At the PEN conference in New York in the mid-1980s, for example, he had sonorously announced that conditions in the South Bronx put the United States on a par with the Soviet Union … I didn't like being lectured by a second-rater then and I like it no better when I discover I was being admonished by a member, however junior or conscripted, of Heinrich Himmler's corps d'elite.

Believe what you will about Hitchens, he knows how to end a polemic. With a truncheon:

"Let those who want to judge, pass judgment," Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.

I Wiki'ed Dedecius

When I picked up a book of German translations of poems by Wislawa Szymborska, I noticed that the man who translated them into German (and wrote a nice foreword) was named Karl Dedecius. Hmm, interesting name.

Then, while leafing through Hans Magnus Enszensberger's Museum der Moderne Poesie, Enszensberger's famous collection of lyric poems from 100 poets from all over the world, I noticed that the aforementioned Dedecius had translated almost all the Polish poems in that volume.

I looked Dedecius up in German Wikipedia, and found out that he is a prominent Polish-German translator, and in fact founded the German Poland Institute. He started translating Polish and Russian literature in his spare time, while he was an employee of the Allianz insurance company.

I liked the Wikipedia entry so much I decided to translate it into English; you can see the result here. My favorite part:

[Dedecius] was severely wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad and became a prisoner of war. During his time as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, he taught himself Russian. Quote: „I lay in my sick-bed, and the nurses brought me books by Lermontov, for instance. For one year, I learned the Cyrillic Alphabet and Russian by reading Lermontov and Pushkin. Eventually, the guards asked me to write love-letters for them, because I wrote like Pushkin"

Polish Books I: 'Return from the Stars' by Stanislaw Lem

On my trip to Poland, I took along three books by Polish writers: Return from the Stars by Stanislaw Lem, Collected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. My European friends taught me this habit; it disrupts your ordinary reading patterns to stimulating effect. I've finished the books, and now post a few thoughts.

First to Lem, a visionary Polish science fiction writer (here's a clever website site about him). His 1961 novel Solaris was made into a movie in 1972 by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and in 2002 by the American Steven Soderbergh. Judging by this interview (G), Lem disliked both films, most other humans, J.K. Rowling, and all other science fiction writers except for Philip K. Dick.

Return from the Stars was written in 1961, but translated into Western languages only in the mid-1970s, when Lem's fame began crossing borders. I read it in a German translation from 1976; its German title is Transfer. As the book opens, we meet Hal Bregg, an astronaut who's just returned from a research expedition to the nearby star Fomalhaut and environs. The journey lasted 127 earth-years, but only ten years aboard the ship thanks to relativistic time-dilation. When Bregg returned, the government (we're never told which one) sent him to ADAPT, a training center, which is supposed to help returning spacemen adjust to a deeply-altered earth. The course has the sugary, airbrushed feel of indoctrination, so Bregg breaks it off after a short while. After all, he survived the howling, radioactive wasteland of Fomalhaut; how much of a challenge could Brave New Earth be?

The Real Loser from the World Cup

The World Cup came to Germany, and it all went off peacefully and everyone made pots of money. Except, that is, for one branch. Can you guess what it it might be? Think, reader, think! Ask yourself:

(1) What activity are Germans likely to be distracted from during a huge soccer tournament?

(2) What are foreign tourists very unlikely to buy in Germany?

German Joys Book Review: La Mythologie Scientifique du Communisme

Lucian Boia, a Romanian historian and historiographer who specializes in the history of the imagination, originally wrote La Mythologie Scientifique du Communisme ("The Scientific Mythology of Communism") in 1993.  The French publisher Les Belles Lettres republished it in 1999; here's the book's website. As no translator is credited, it appears Boia wrote the book in French.

Boia's subject is the role of science in Communist mythology. It was a relationship of mutual influence: Communism trumpeted its inherent superiority to "idealistic" or "bourgeois" Western thinking by stressing its roots in the objective, materialist scientific laws of social organization discovered by Marx and Engels. Once established, Communism, in turn, attempted to use scientific achievement, like sporting prowess, to demonstrate the inherent superiority of Communist society to the decadent West.

The problem, though, was that Communist thinkers and apparatchiks were driven by two foolish ideas. The first was that scientific procedures such as the scientific method and peer review were tainted by their bourgeois origins. The second, related mistake, was imagining that many limits on progress imposed by human nature, the natural environment, or even the laws of physics were artifacts of the ideology of capitalism and could be transcended with enough Stakhanovite effort.

Write a Novel, Acquire an Amanuensis

Alright, just a cheap excuse to use the word amanuensis. And it's not really lyrical amateur translation, either, but it's close. From the Wikipedia entry about the Hungarian poet and novelist György Faludy, this short excerpt, which is not only wildly juicy but also written in fabulously non-standard English:

Faludy's second wife, Zsuzsa, died in the 60's. In 1963 Eric Johnson (26), a US ballet dancer and later a renowned poet in contemporary Latin poetry, read [Faludy's] novel My Happy Days in Hell, which captivated him, and he decided to seek Faludy in Hungary. He started to learn Hungarian and found Faludy three years later in Malta. He became his secretary, driver, translator, co-author and partner for the next 36 years. In 2002, Faludy married a 26 years old photo model, Fanny Kovács. Johnson left for Kathmandu, Nepal, and died there in February 2004, at the age of 67. Faludy has since published collective poems with his wife.

Sign and Sight Rounds up Reactions to the 'Handke Affair'

Sign and sight has a useful round-up of reactions to the aborted attempt to award the Heinrich-Heine Prize to Austrian writer Peter Handke.

After Handke's pro-Serbian political opinions made the award controversial, he decided to declined the prize in advance. Some of the reactions are illuminating, some of them delightfully pompous (see Botho Strauss), and Elfriede Jelinek's utterly opaque:

The Frankfurter Rundschau prints a text written "Because of the circumstances" for Peter Handke by fellow Austrian writer and former Heinrich-Heiner Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek on her homepage. "The poet has to say what he has to say, because it's necessary for him to say it. But it's not that he has to say what is necessary, because that would mean he had nothing more to say, that he only had to get done what needed doing. And that's not enough."

I think that says all that's necessary. Don't you?

Handke Withdraws

The City of Duesseldorf put together an independent jury of politicians and professors to decide whom should receive the Heinrich-Heine Prize, awarded since 1972 to commemorate one of the city's most famous sons. The jury picked Peter Handke, an Austrian writer, praising his ability to confound public expectations in search of an "open truth."  After a weeks-long dispute, Handke yesterday announced (G) that he would turn down the prize, probably ending a literary dispute that's been filling Germany's culture pages for weeks.

Like every Austrian writer, Handke hates Austria, but that's not what made him controversial. His first major work, "Insulting the Audience," was a 1966 "play" in which four nameless characters insult the public for a couple of hours ("You subhumans! You war criminals!") before wishing the audience good night and leaving. But even that didn't make Handke controversial.

What made him controversial is his stance toward Slobodan Milosevic. Handke, whose mother is Slovenian, visited that delightful country in the early 1990s. He continued through other parts of the former Yugoslavia, and developed a fondness for the people who lived there, especially ordinary Serbs. Throughout the 1990s, he wrote essays and commentaries that were seen as pro-Serbian. When Milosevic was put on trial for war crimes, Handke visited him in the Hague, confessed feeling a certain "closeness" to him, and attacked the war crimes tribunal as an instance of "illegitimate," victor's justice. He attended Milosevic's funeral early this year.

I have read several of Handke's works, including the eerie "Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" and some of his poems, but I've never read anything he's written about Serbia. Handke claims he never downplayed Serbian atrocities, but only wanted to present a counterweight to the self-righteous demonization of Serbia in the European press. He also pointed out that Serbians in various parts of the former Yugoslavia had suffered atrocities at the hands of Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian groups, a fact which he claims was grossly under-reported.  His critics accuse him of presenting a grossly misleading portrait of the situation by avoiding atrocities and relying on a sentimentalized portrait of Serbians as a nation of anarchic, peace-loving misfits.

Germany's literary intelligentsia knew a fabulous scandal when they saw it. The independent jury nominated Handke in mid-May, while the prize itself could only be finally awarded after approval by the city council on June 22nd. This left a month for all of Germany's intelligentsia to moisten the pencil-tip and get to work. Journalist Caroline Emcke here (G) says here that Handke's simpering denials of evil political intent can't concea