"Leporella" by Stefan Zweig. 1929

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

German Literature Month V has only a few days left.  I have greatly enjoyed participating in this wonderful event. I commend and thank the hosts for their hard work.  There are lots of wonderful edifying posts by event participants.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

I am debating with Ambrosia as  whether or not we will host a party this year.  

Works I Have So Far Read for G L V

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser. a serious work of art

7. The Hotel Years Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Hoffman, a brilliant collection of feuilletons translated and introduced by Michael Hoffman

8.  "The Dandelioln" by Wolfgang Borchert. 

9.   "The Foundling" by Heinrich Von Kleist

10.  "A Conversation Concerning Legs" by Alfred Lichenstein 

11.  A Homage to Paul Celan

12.  "The Criminal" by Veza Canetti 

13.  Rebellion by Joseph Roth. Between the wars

14.  The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch - an amazing work of art

15.  The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.  Sex and the City redone in the Weimer Republic  

16.  Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada.  A panoramic view of the Weimer Republic 

17.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

18.  Fear by Stefan Zweig

19.  "Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig.

20.  "Oh Happy Eyes" by Ingeborg Bachman - no post

21.  Joseph Roth. Three Short stories published in Vienna Tales no post

Today is the last day of German Literature Month V.  The event really motivated me to read some great literature.  I will do a close out post probably tommorow but I offer my great gratitude to the Hosts for their hard work and support.  Without this event I might never have read Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Gregor Von Rizzori, Herman Broch, Irmgard Bachman, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Heinrich Von Kleist or Gunter Grass.  

Stefan Zweig is one of my favorite authors.  Sometimes he may be melodramatic but he can tell a great story and has tremendous cultural depth.  He is entertaining, not for nothing was he once the most translated German language writer.

"Leporella" is a dramatic gripping story with no redeeming characters.  The center piece of the story is a mentally challenged woman who works as helper in the house of a Baron.  The Baron married his wife for her money, once married he resumed the ways of a dissolute playboy bachelor.  He was so uninterested in his wife the marriage was never consummated.  The wife is bitter over how she is treated, she tries to get back at her husband by withholding money from him but he gets around this.  One day one of his temporary loves, a young opera student refers to the helper as his "Leporella", a reference to a lover of Don Giovanni in the Mozart Opera and soon he starts to call her that.  She falls in love with the Baron when he gives her a trivial gift and even begins to procure girls for him.  I found that aspect of the story especially fascinating.  It was as if Leporella was vicariously having sex with the Baron.  She is presented as completely without sexual qualities, fit just to work.  Needless to say this does not work out well!

I don't want to spoil the fun of the plot other than to say there are several fascinating turns of events.  This is a look at a bitter world.  I greatlye givex  enjoyed this story.  As far as I know non German speakers cannot read it outside of The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig published by Pushkin Press.

Mel ü

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig. 1925. A reread from German Literature IV, November 2014)

Mendel, real or not, I deeply regret your passing and your fate.  Ambrosia Boussweau 

"Over everything else, understandably, the crematoria smoke still hung its tragic pall. The unparalleled magnitude of that catastrophe seemed to demand silence before its enormity, both from Jews and Gentiles."  Simon Schama

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

German Literature Month V has only about a week left.  I have greatly enjoyed participating in this wonderful event. I commend and thank the hosts for their hard work.  There are lots of wonderful edifying posts by event participants.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

I am debating with myself whether or not we will host a party this year.  

Works I Have So Far Read for G L V

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser. a serious work of art

7. The Hotel Years Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Hoffman, a brilliant collection of feuilletons translated and introduced by Michael Hoffman

8.  "The Dandelioln" by Wolfgang Borchert. 

9.   "The Foundling" by Heinrich Von Kleist

10.  "A Conversation Concerning Legs" by Alfred Lichenstein 

11.  A Homage to Paul Celan

12.  "The Criminal" by Veza Canetti 

13.  Rebellion by Joseph Roth. Between the wars

14.  The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch - an amazing work of art

15.  The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.  Sex and the City redone in the Weimer Republic  

16.  Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada.  A panoramic view of the Weimer Republic 

17.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

18.  Fear by Stefan Zweig

Last year during German Literature Month IV I expressed my great love for a short story by Stefan Zweig, "Mendel the Bibliophile".  I wanted to reread it this month but I was somehow afraid it would not live up to my expectations.  I was so delighted to find I liked it even more this time.  I will just more or less for myself talk about some of the things that struck me on the second reading.

In the last twelve months I have read a good bit of Yiddish literature, holocaust works, and nonfiction on the issues between the so called European Jew and the Yiddish Jew.  I know this is a sensitive topic subject to uninformed misunderstandings but this conflict is very important in understanding much of the history and literature of Germany and the so called Mittleeuropa region.  Stefan Zweig epitomized the fully assimilated European Jew, deeply urbane, highly cultured and very affluent from old family money.  People of this background were a embarrassed by the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia.  I see now that one of the things "Mendel the Bibliophile" is about is this conflict.  The European Jew knows his real roots are with the Yiddish Jews but he is a bit embarrassed to admit this.  I also now understand why Mendel rocked back and forth as he read and why he read with such deep focus.  These are habits instilled in him from ancient traditions of study of the Torah.  The Yiddish culture was deeply into the reading life as were European Jews.  Joseph Roth has said the Prussian hatred of the Jews, he was writing from before the Holocaust begun, was a war on the book,on those who cherish reading and learning.

The narrator of the story has returned to the Gluck Cafe, from which Mendel dealt in books for thirty years.   His memory was amazing, ask him on any obscure work and he could tell you not just what it contained and when it was published, he could tell you how much it was worth and he could get you a copy.  He had contacts all over the book loving  world.  

World War One started but Mendel gave it little mind other than noticing some waiters were drafted to fight and that Herr Gluck's son was killed while serving in the  army.

Mendel maintained a vast correspondence.  He noticed his issues of a famous French journal devoted to rare books stopped coming eight months ago so he wrote to the office in Paris to inquire.  All out going mail was censored and two policemen had him brought in for questioning, asking him why he was corresponding with an enemy country?  Mendel is completely baffled, his work and the books transcend petty politics.  At first the police are planning to release him, then they found out he had as a child in the company of his family moved from Russia to Austria without official permission.  The officials are outraged to discover Mendel never bothered to apply for Austrian citizenship.  He is sent to a concentration camp as an enemy alien and kept there for two years until he was released when the war was over.  He returns to the cafe to find it has new owners who want to turn the coffee house into a sophisticated cafe.  Mendel in his thread  bare clothes, with his long beard and his custom of staying in the cafe 12 to 16 hours a day while buying only the two cups of coffee he could afford is not what the new owner wants.  Compressing a lot, he throws Mendel out one day accusing him of stealing a bread roll and tells him never to return.

The narrator has returned years later.  No one but an old lady who was a rest room attendant remembers Mendel.  She tells the man that Mendel's spirit was destroyed by what he saw in the concentration camp, by the agony of two years away from his reading and his work.  The close of the story is heart breaking.

Now on this reading I see the deep cultural clash in the story, the depiction of the base ignorance of the Prussian junker class and their servants, and a dark look at the future of all European Jews.

The only way I know that those who do not read German can read this amazing story is in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig published by Pushkin Press.

To any who would suggest, as big name critics and historians  such as   Hannah Arendt have, that Zweig never faced the fate of European Jews I would say you are just wrong.  Yes he fled Europe and could not face the world he thought was coming but it was not because he did not care but because he cared so much the pain killed him.  

I will be readi it  in 2016.  I found I recalled much of the story, but not all as I reread it.  

It is so interesting how being an illegal immigrant made the authorities fear Mendel.  

Mel ü

 

Fear by Stefan Zweig (1925, forthcoming in the Pushkin Press edition of The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig, trans. by Anthea Bell)

"Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa masterpiece, token La Bohème Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look at us: the Revolution. Of course there is no Revolution, not even in the Kinos, no German October , not under this “Republic.” The Revolution died—though Leni was only a young girl and not political—with Rosa Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over these Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Luxemburg. . . . AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN . These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people. . . ." Gravity's Rainbow

There are  many references   to Berlin in Gravity's Rainbow.  Why does this matter? Well it interests me so I decided to add some quotes to my posts for GL V.

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

I am estatic to once again be able to Participate in German Literature Month, elegantly and lovingly hosted by Lizzi's Literary Live and Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. This is my fourth year as a participant.   On the host blogs you will find the particularities of the event but the basic idea is to read literature first written in German (translated or not) and share your thoughts.  I began accumulating works for the event soon after the event ended last year and I began reading for it in mid-September.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

Works Read for G L V So Far

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser. a serious work of art

7. The Hotel Years Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Hoffman, a brilliant collection of feuilletons translated and introduced by Michael Hoffman

8.  "The Dandelioln" by Wolfgang Borchert. 

9.   "The Foundling" by Heinrich Von Kleist

10.  "A Conversation Concerning Legs" by Alfred Lichenstein 

11.  A Homage to Paul Celan

12.  "The Criminal" by Veza Canetti 

13.  Rebellion by Joseph Roth. Between the wars

14.  The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch - an amazing work of art

15.  The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.  Sex and the City redone in the Weimer Republic  

16.  Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada.  A panoramic view of the Weimer Republic 

17.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

Pushkin Press has been very instrumental in publishing the work of Stefan Zweig in translation.  I salute them for this but I wish so much they would include in their collections date first published information. I really don't think, for example, that readers of his novella, Fear, should have to use Google to find first publication data.

Stefan Zweig was during his lifetime one of the best selling authors in the world and certainly the most translated from German.  His 1925 novella Fear showed me why he was so popular.  The narrative was so well done that I for sure felt the fear of the woman narrating the story.  The central character is a married woman with a young son and daughter, her husband is a prosperous attorney.  She lives a very comfortable worry free life.  Being carried away one day by a lust for some excitement she starts an affair with a young handsome piano teacher.  She is a very orderly woman has befits an upper class Viennese house wife and her liver becomes part of her well ordered routine, just as Sunday's are spent with her in laws, one afternoon a week is spent with her lover.  Then something terrible and terrifying happens, a woman confronts her an accuses her of stealing her man. She demands money to keep silent about the affair. The blackmailers demands more and more, threatening to go to her husband.  On one horrifying day the blackmailer shows up at her house, leaving with Frieda's wedding ring, telling her she will give her the pawn ticket.  Things get very scary and exciting now.  Frieda confronts her lover, who she has stopped seeing, and accuses him of being in conspiracy with the blackmailer.  He tells her she is crazy.  

I don't want to tell more of the exciting fear inducing plot.  The ending was interesting and kind of fun.  I  was surprised but not shocked by the denouement of the blackmail plot but I did enjoy the close.

Fear is dramatic, some would say melodramatic.  It is very  insightful portrait of an adulterous woman. I enjoyed reading it.  The description of the marriage and the woman's relationship to her children is superb. 

There are five novellas in the collection, I have now read four of them.  I will save the last one for another time.

Mel ü

Paul Celan. A Poem and a Short Story by Germany's Greatest Post W W II Poet

"Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books—that is, the Bible—of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity."  Joseph Roth, 1933"

I am estatic to once again be able to Participate in German Literature Month, elegantly and lovingly hosted by Lizzi's Literary Live and Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. This is my fourth year as a participant.   On the host blogs you will find the particularities of the event but the basic idea is to read literature first written in German (translated or not) and share your thoughts.  I began accumulating works for the event soon after the event ended last year and I began reading for it in mid-September.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

Works Read for G L V So Far

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser.  

7.  Hotel Days Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Roth 

8.  "The Dandelion" by Wolfgang Borchert

9.  "The Foundling" by Heinrich. Von Kleist 

10.  "A Conversation About Legs" by Alfred Lichtenstein 

My Jewish Learning has a very good bio on Paul Celan

A Brilliant Interview with Pierre Joris on translating the poetry of Paul Celan

"Death Fugue"

By Paul Celan

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents
he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden
hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are
flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a
grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at
sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents
he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the breezes
there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you
others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his
eyes are blue
jab deper you lot with your spades you others play
on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at at noon in the morning we drink you
at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master
from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then
as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one
lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink
and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in
the air
He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is
a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith


Translated by Michael Hamburger 

Paul Celan

Margarete is a reference to Goethe's Faust.  The poem takes place in a Nazi death camp. 

Celan is considered the greatest poet of the Holocaust.

A very interesting work, more a prose poem than a story, is included in an anthology I highly recommend, Tales of the German Imagination From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachman (Celan had a long lasting relationship with Bachman), "Shadowlight", first published in 1949.  I do not see it as subject to analysis but it will make you think deeply if you let it.  The shadow of the war and the Holocaust hangs over this as it does all of Celan's work.  

"All talk of justice is for naught so long as the biggest warship hasn’t been torpedoed by the forehead of a drowned man."

Paul Celan

1920–1970

Ed

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, Romania, to a German-speaking Jewish family. His surname was later spelled Ancel, and he eventually adopted the anagram Celan as his pen name. In 1938 Celan went to Paris to study medicine, but returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. During the war Celan worked in a forced labor camp for 18 months; his parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp. His father most likely died of typhus and his mother was shot after being unable to work. After escaping the labor camp, Celan lived in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris. Celan was familiar with at least six languages, and fluent in Russian, French, and Romanian. In Paris, he taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure and earned a significant portion of his income as a translator, translating a wide range of work, from Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Charles Baudelaire. His own work as been translated into English numerous times and by several noted poets and translators including Michael Hamburger, Rosmarie Waldrop, Heather McHugh, John Felstiner, and Pierre Joris.

Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. His first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns, was published in Vienna in 1948; his second collection, Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedaechtnis, 1952), brought him critical acclaim. Katherine Washburn, his translator, noted in her introduction to Last Poems (1986): “The title of this book [Poppy and Memory] pointed with a fine vividness to the central predicament of Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel, heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”  From The Poetry Foundation 

I hope to read as much as I can of the poetry of Celan.  

I hope those familiar with Celan will share their experience with us.
Mel ü

Alfred Lichtenstein A Poem and a Short Story by A German Soldier Shot In the Head at Soome, France, 1915

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

I am estatic to once again be able to Participate in German Literature Month, elegantly and lovingly hosted by Lizzi's Literary Live and Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. This is my fourth year as a participant.   On the host blogs you will find the particularities of the event but the basic idea is to read literature first written in German (translated or not) and share your thoughts.  I began accumulating works for the event soon after the event ended last year and I began reading for it in mid-September.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

Works Read for G L V So Far

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser.  

7.  Hotel Days Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Roth 

Leaving for the Front

By Alfred Lichtenstein (trans, unknown, permission granted to republish for educational purposes)

Before I die, I must just find this rhyme.
Be quiet, my friends, and do not waste any time.

We’re marching off in company with death.
I only wish my girl would hold her breath.

There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m glad to leave,
Now mother’s crying too, there’s no reprieve.

And now look how the sun’s begun to set.
A nice mass-grave is all that I shall get.

Once more the good old sunset‘s glowing red.
In thirteen days I’ll probably be dead.

June 1914

Lichtenstein died 7 weeks later on August 14th shot in the head at the Battle of Somme in France. I imagined Lichtenstein and Saki, also killed in France, facing each other from the trenches staring across no man's land.  

"A Conversation Concerning Legs", first published posthumously in 1915, is included in an excellent anthology I have talked about earlier this year and during GL IV November 2014, Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachman edited and introduced by Peter Wortsman.  Wortsman leans toward surrealistic works.

In the story two men are in a public park, one is remarking on the fact that his other man, a stranger to him, has no legs.  Amputees were very common in this era due to the war, disabled veterans seen as kind of a symbol of waste by the survivors and as a cause of lingering hatred.  The legalese man a professor of philosophy and ethics, he carries his legs around with him in a bag. Here is his account of how he lost his legs, given to a woman who tells him that his condition repulses her

"‘One leg came loose at the upset of first occupying my professorial chair; I lost the other while otherwise preoccupied with the formulation of that salient aesthetic principle that led to a fundamental shift in our discipline.’ To which the lady said: ‘Which principle is that?’ I said: ‘The principle that it’s only the structure of the soul and the spirit that matters. If the soul and the spirit are noble, the body will be beautiful in the eyes of the beholder, however humpbacked and deformed it actually is.’

In response the woman hikes up her dress and shows off her legs!

Bio data From Tales of the German Imagination.

The life of Alfred Lichtenstein (1889–1914) lasted all of twenty-five years, cut short by a hostile bullet in the trenches of Vermandovillers on the Somme in the early days of the First World War. Born in Berlin, he studied law, later switching to theatre, before being drafted. One of the lightning rods of the German avant-garde, he published dark poems and eccentric stories in the leading Expressionist journals, Der Sturm , Simplicissimus and Die Aktion

Mel ü