Spotlight on … Walter Abish How German Is It (1980)

‘Literary trickster, Walter Abish, was a late bloomer. His first novel, Duel Site (1970), did not appear until Abish was turning forty. His second novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), cemented his reputation. Each chapter of that book played pseudo-alliterative rules: the first chapter began with each word beginning with the letter a, the second would add the letter b, the third c and so on, until chapter 27 when a letter was taken away until chapter 52. A brief flurry of publishing through the 1970s was followed with relative silence through to the present day. So far Abish has only published three novels, three collections of short stories, one book of poetry and one autobiography.

‘How German Is It is perhaps his most celebrated novel, and certainly his most complex. It is a novel that probes Germany’s recent past through the brothers Ulrich and Helmuth Hargenau, whose father defected against Hitler in the last days of the Second World War and was killed by firing squad. As the title infers, Abish is interested in the question of how uniquely German the Holocaust was, and how its people could have committed such an act. But this is not a novel wholly interested in Germany’s past – it is interested in its present, with the rise of a terrorist group, whose activities mirror the Red Army Faction.

‘As in Abish’s former works, How German Is It is enamoured with verbal tomfoolery, of which the cumulative effect is to constantly wrong-foot the reader, making us as wary of modern German as both Abish and his characters seem to be. Ulrich Hargenau, the novels ‘hero’, is a successful writer, estranged from his wife, Paula, a female terrorist, whom he saved from prison by testifying against the other members of her group. Ulrich, returned to Brumholdstein (named after Ernst Brumhold, a Heidegger-type philosopher), begins to suffer occasional death threats and attempts are made on his life. His brother, Helmuth, a successful architect who designed the police station in Brumholdstein (only to see it blown up by the terrorist group operating in the area), begins to suffer from similar concerns. The Hargenau’s – a very Americanised family – represent modern Germany, in a very old German town. Brumholdstein was the site of a notorious gas chamber and concentration camp, now buried beneath the modern facade.

‘About half way through this novel teacher Anna Heller is discussing with her primary school students the concept of familiarity. What is familiar? What qualities is it that makes something familiar? This is a question Abish’s novel returns to frequently, with the word ‘familiar’ a recurring motif. In the end it seems that nothing is what it seems and that the familiar can pave over deep secrets – just as the paving stones outside the familiar bakery conceal a mass grave – and just as the familiarity of marriage can hide seething resentments.

‘“Sunday: This is the introduction to the German Sontag. This is an introduction to the German tranquillity and decorum. People out for a stroll, affably greeting their neighbours. Guten Morgen. Guten Tag. Schönes Wetter, nicht wahr? Ja, hervorragend. A day of pleasant exchanges. A day of picnics, leisurely meals, newspapers on the sofa. Franz sitting in their small garden, reading his Sunday paper, his back to the noisy neighbours next door, his back to the familiar scene of the neighbours playing cards, his back deliberately turned to their Sunday.”

‘Only those who have embraced knowledge of Germany’s past and reached some form of reconciliation with it – as Franz the waiter, who is building a scale model of the concentration camp has – can see the hypocrisy under the surface of the familiar. Their only reaction is to turn their back on it. Only the present will not let them.

‘Ulrich, the subject of death threats, is shot in the arm, but has the mayor of Brumholdstein tell him to “forget it.” The mayor also panics that there will be bad publicity for his town when news of the bodies breaks, and wishes he could simply forget they were there. Towards the end of the novel Ulrich is witness to the terrorists biggest act to date – the blowing up of a bridge (the second bridge blowing in the Penguin Classics so far, and I’m only eight books in!) that connects the mainland with the island town of Gänzlich (or the two faces of Germany, the modern mainland and the remote islands that still cling to a past, wary of strangers, united against them. This act forces Ulrich to face up to his responsibility and to himself, and leads to the devastatingly satirical end.

‘For Abish, How German Is It is a novel that questions the very identity of a nation in transition, trying to face up to its troubled past. As Abish writes of the naming of the town:

‘“Without access to the intricacy, the nuances, the shades of meaning in our language, the visitor’s ability to understand and appreciate the complexities of our customs or the manifestations of our creative impulse will be severely limited…. In adopting the name of Brumhold we have also, in all seriousness, embraced his lifelong claim to the questions: What is being? What is thinking?”

‘The answers Abish finds to these questions are not always satisfactory, if only because Abish himself was uncertain of them. In 2004 he published Double Vision: A Self Portrait which speaks of his time in Germany following the publication of How German Is It. He asks himself, “At what stage in the reconstruction of Germany, at what point in this tremendous effort will the turbulent past fade, enabling the visitor to Germany to once again view the society with that credulous gaze of a nineteenth-century traveller?” If Abish, with the novelists gaze, cannot reconcile the two faces of twentieth century Germany, what hope has the country of rebuilding the familiar? More recent novelists have turned their attention to this question with equally unsure conclusions: Christa Wolf with Das Bleibt (1990) Rachel Seiffert in The Dark Room (2001), or Bernhard Schlink with The Reader (1995). But then questions of how to comprehend the atrocities of the Third Reich will trouble novelists for eternity. To this conundrum Abish adds much with his cinematic prose, prefigured by the quote from Jean-Luc Godard that opens his book: “What is really at stake is one’s image of oneself.” The very image of a nation is at the heart of this work.’ — Blogging the Classics

_____
Further

Podcast: Walter Abish on NPR’s Bookworm
Sentimental Re-Education
Notes on Proceduralism, Part 1 – Walter Abish
ANALYSIS How German Is It
‘The Second Leg’, by Walter Abish
Walter Abish @ goodreads
Arrests in Poland
Death in Iran
POST SCRIPT UM: AN INTERVIEW WITH WALTER ABISH
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE FAMILIAR
99: The New Meaning by Walter Abish
Alphabetical Africa (Opening)
Walter Abish’s “How German Is It”: Representing the Postmodern
Abish’s Africa
Familiarity and Forgetfulness in Walter Abish’s Fiction
Constraints, Concealment, and Buried Texts: Reading Walter Abish with Georges Perec and the Oulipo
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL?
In So Many Words (Walter Abish’s In the Future Perfect)
Walter Abish: Plotting a ‘Terrorism’ of Postmodernist Fiction
Alphabetical Africa’s Relationship Between Language and Meaning
Buy ‘How German Is It’

____
Quotes

______
Interview
from Tablet

Most of your writing, while profoundly autobiographical in some sense, is not autobiography at all. In fact, your best-known work—How German Is It—is famous for being non-autobiographical: You’d never been to Germany before you wrote it. Why write a self-portrait now?

I began writing it in 1980 during a two-month stay at Yaddo. I had just finished How German Is It and didn’t as yet have another project. I decided to write an autobiographical piece, a self-portrait, but I decided to put it aside. At the initial stage, I think I published short snippets, a mention of China, of my family, maybe Uncle Phoebus. They were little vignettes: the Chinese policemen kicking the dead child back and forth, and my feelings about that and my response. I wanted to deal with the personal and I wasn’t quite sure how to. I wasn’t quite prepared to. And so I worked at it for some time and again put it aside.

In the 90’s I decided finally it was time to pick up the manuscript. By this time I had settled on a structure. I had also spent six months in Berlin. The German Jews who play an important role in the writer-to-be section serve as an ideal counterweight to present-day Germany.

At one point in the book, during your first trip to Germany, you’re taking photographs—

You’ll notice that I haven’t included any of my family. I felt that the photos would mislead. I wanted to leave it to the imagination. Incidentally, when How German Is It appeared in Germany the reviewers, not knowing how to react, did what people would do elsewhere. They read me instead. They explained me. No problem there: Vienna, fled the Nazis, they’ve got the whole story—why read the book? And there’s a review in the Houston Chronicle, some professor at the University of St. Thomas, and he writes that I end up in America and that’s a happy ending. People really bring their own history to it. Many books do not invite that.

To people who say to you: you’ve been doing all this stuff—these formal experiments—and here you are writing a very direct book. There’s a sense of that in some of the critics—and John Updike does that in The New Yorker—that you had been cheating them previously and that now you were delivering the goods.

I didn’t get the sense that he was implying that.

Obviously he’s been an admirer—a somewhat unlikely admirer—of yours all along. What I mean is that certainly American readers, gorged on memoirs that are very different from yours, recognize that the methods you’re employing in Double Vision are direct in their own way. They’re vignettes you carved out from hundreds of pages more.

I deleted a number of characters and their history, because it would prove difficult for a reader to absorb so many details. I couldn’t have written Double Vision earlier, in 1980 for instance, because I didn’t possess the insight into what I now describe. And I think if you were to rephrase the question—

Go right ahead.

And link it to How German Is It, it becomes more pertinent. Let me give you a brief account. I left Israel in 1956 for England, where I wrote my first play. I was influenced by Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. My verse drama was set in China, 1949. All the characters are Chinese. The action takes place in a monastery overlooking the Yangtze, which at that time of year has flooded the village at the foot of the monastery. The principal characters, in addition to the monks who remain undecided on how to respond to Mao’s conquest of China, are three individuals fleeing from Shanghai. One is a bar girl, one is a con man, and a prostitute. I’m sorry, a poet.

I always mix them up, too.

Though I was unaware of it, I’m already at this early stage toying with the familiar and defamiliarization. I’ve never lived in a Chinese village—I may have visited one. I’ve never been to a Chinese Buddhist temple—all this is foreign to me. My next play, The Burning of the Misfit Child, an unfinished play, is set in the Midwest in a town in which everyone is in one way or another connected to the mental institution, the town’s largest employer. People fear it, they fear ending up there. What they most fear are the mentally ill, the unstable, the misfits. It’s my first impression of America.

In the seventies I went to see a film, Ich liebe dich, ich töte dich (“I love you, I kill you”) by Uwe Brandner, an interesting writer living in Munich. A very fascinating, complex, homoerotic film that influenced me to write “The English Garden.” When that story was singled out in The New Yorker and The New York Times, I wrote “The Idea of Switzerland,” which in turn led to How German Is It, in which many of the elements that are important to me are at play.

Since How German Is It came out there have been a number of historical revelations that I want to ask you about. At the time, some Heidegger societies objected to your portrayal of the philosopher Brumhold, whom they nonetheless recognized as the embodiment of their man. How have you felt about the things that have come out about Heidegger?

Delighted. I retain a love-hate relationship to Heidegger. It’s difficult to dismiss the questions he ponders: What is being? What is language? His relationship to Hannah Arendt is revealing. His relationship to Ernst Jünger and to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is even more so. He was, I think, politically a naïf; it was Ernst Jünger who influenced Heidegger politically. Jünger was aware of the mass extermination of the Jews. He writes about it in his wartime journals. Though he fails to mention that his farm, to which he retreats at the end of the war, is only a short distance from Bergen-Belsen. In 1942 and ’43 Jünger reads Josephus and Jeremiah contemplating the fate of the Jews, as if it is somehow disembodied. After the war, though he continues to keep a journal, he never mentions the word Jew again. They have literally ceased to exist for him. He stated something to the effect that the Germans who lived abroad—clearly, by that, including the Jews—should not be the ones to judge Germany’s wartime conduct. That should be left to people who experienced the war from within Germany. Heidegger clearly took Jünger’s injunction to heart.

This is a hard question to ask, but in what sense do you think of the book as a direct, Proustian evocation of this lost world—or found world, however you want to look at it—in terms of your parents? It’s not something people would expect from you.

Well, in the book I refer to Proust. I compare Walter Moses, one of what I call my German fathers in Tel Aviv, to Baron de Charlus. I write of my determination to have Proust as my influence. I think I am being consistent. I can distinguish between a rich literary past and nostalgia. I’m not trying to recapture the past. I’m called experimental. The word carries less and less weight. I see everything I’ve written as somehow connected. I once wrote a paper on the familiar and everyday life and literature. I had certain ideas that proved erroneous. I believed that the familiar was something to be mapped. It’s nothing of the kind. We familiarize the world unless that instinctive need to familiarize is blocked, stunted. I don’t know if that sheds any light on Double Vision.

There were a few things that really struck me about the Mayan scribes, whose complicity in the sacrificial violence that defined their society you describe at the end of your book. One was that you wanted to ensure your book couldn’t be read as a kind of Goldhagen-like criticism of Germans, although people seem to be doing this anyway. Why did you feel this was necessary? I mean, this is a funny question since it’s already happened: Updike responded so personally, started talking about the German line in his family, like you had somehow accused him of participating in some way.

Or of my animus to Germany. Animus to me serves as an energizer—it is not the generator. Why did I introduce the Mayan scribes? Now that scholars have deciphered the script, what scholars took to be tranquil religious communities turn out to have been warring states. The scribes were privileged members of the royalty whose task was to enhance the stature of their king. They created a kind of usable history. They didn’t oppose bloodletting or sacrifice.

Like Jünger?

It was their society, their culture. Look, I feel people are manipulatable and I’m intrigued by how societies devise rules and develop a logic that drives and charges their society. So it seemed appropriate here, to focus on the role of the writer. Furthermore, during the Mayans’ decline, the scribes remained consistent, falsifying history. The scribe’s dilemma must have been, how to oppose, and what risks could he take without having his fingers chopped off? I can identify with them.

___
Book

Walter Abish How German Is It
New Directions

‘The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish’s novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Würtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, “How German am l?”––as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula’s, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father’s selfless heroism. Through Ulrich––privileged, upper class––we confront the incongruities of the new democratic Germany, in particular the flourishing community of Brumholdstein, named after the country’s greatest thinker, Brumhold, and built on the former site of a concentration camp. Paula’s participation in the destruction of a police station; the State’s cynical response to crush the terrorists; two attempts on Ulrich’s life; the discovery in Brumholdstein of a mass grave of death camp inmates––all these, with subtle irony, are presented as pieces of a puzzle spelling out the turmoil of a society’s endeavor to avoid the implications of its menacing heritage.’ — ND

______
Excerpt

*

p.s. RIP Sean DeLear, Holger Czukay ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! No, thank you! Yesterday was a long one, and I came home too brain dead to approach SCAB with the proper joy, but I will preserve my brain today and dive in later! I can not wait! Lazy days are nice. I already miss them, ha ha. Yesterday was all about sound work. Yesterday we spent all day organizing the files, which we have to do before getting into detail work. The only really productive thing we did was replace two stand-in explosion sounds with the real ones. We have to submit the film to Sundance tomorrow, and those were the two things we absolutely had to improve, and which are the only things we have time to fix before submitting the version with ‘rough’ sound to the festival. How was your today? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. No, I haven’t heard the Bug vs. Earth album. Curious combo. I don’t like Earth at all, which is obviously my problem. They’re Gisele’s favorite band, but I find them to be a snooze for some reason. But, yeah, I’ll check that album. Good, I look forward to your writings on Ghost. Everyone, Go here and read Steve’s thoughts on the band Ghost. To quote Steve, ‘although it gets way more general into my thoughts on Christianity and the way it’s been weaponized against LGBT people.’ ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, right! Thanks for the Anger interview! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks for speaking to the unknowable one. Definitely getting all the advice, opinions, expertise on your YnY venture is an excellent, wise idea. ** Shane Christmass, Hey, man! Nice to see you! Oh, of course using encryption in my GIFs is a heavenly idea, but I’m an ignoramus and klutz when it comes to actually making GIFs. I’ve only made one, and it took forever, and it sucks. But please do it. So I can squint and luxuriate. ** Misanthrope, Thanks for the big up and words to our mysterious guest-host. Oh, Hornet, right, not a Lantern at all, sorry, my space out. I saw that ‘Green Lantern’ blockbuster, I think. Yeah, I vaguely think it wasn’t so hot. Thats interesting about the Americans in the US Open. Gosh, I would addict myself if I wasn’t elsewhere all the time du jour. ** Okay, quiet, well, … The other day I remembered the novel featured today for some forgotten reason. And I remembered that, one, it’s very good, and, two, that it was kind of the big ‘it’ novel in the early 80s amongst my crowd and how it seems like no one ever talk about it anymore, a fact which intrigued me, so I thought I’d bring it up and see if it toots any horns. See you tomorrow.