A Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque -1961- translated from The German by Ralph Manheim - 1964

 

A Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque -1961- translated from The German by Ralph Manheim - 1964

German Literature Month XI

This is my 10th  year participating in German Literature Month.

Through this I have encountered numerous great writers.  One of themes in a Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque is how could the culture that produced great art, literature and lasting philosophical classics have also given rise  to the Holocaust.

During German Literature Month in November of 2013 I posted on All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, his masterful account of trench warfare during World War One.  On the cover of my copy of All Quiet on the Western Front it is said to be greatest war novel of all time. I have not read enough war novels to dispute or verify this claim but I think the foot soldiers in The Iliad would see little has changed in four thousand or so years.  This is a great novel and it well might be the best war novel ever written.  It is told in the first person by a twenty year old German WW I private.  I admit part of the power of the book for me was the way it forced me to see the Germans soldiers in a sympathetic way.  My ancestors fought against the Germans twice in the Twentieth Century.  My uncle, for whom I was named, died at 23 in WWII

Now eight years later I just completed his account of a refugee from concentration camps in German stuck in Lisbon while he tries to secure passage for his wife and himself on a ship bound for America.  It is a nightmarish enviorment in which no one can be trusted.  Their lives depend on securing the required paper work.

This is a powerful work, very profoundly evoking the horrors of the narrator’s situation.  I have been under lock down in Metro Manila since March 15, 2020.  I do not at all suffer materially but at times I find it oppressive.  I think A Night in Lisbon great a work of art as it is, was not a good choice for me.