Two Writers

There's an interesting article in this week's Nation about the German writer Hans Fallada.

"Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country's history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. "Hans" recalls the Grimms' Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and "Falada" is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress's treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada the man avoided the fate of Falada the horse. "I do not like grand gestures," he said, "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way." He made this excuse, rather grand itself, in 1938, after accepting edits of his latest novel, Iron Gustav. The book was part of a Nazi film project, and Joseph Goebbels wielded the blue pencil. Iron Gustav tells the story of a coachman whose authoritarian parenting ruins most of his children but who becomes a national hero after he refuses to relinquish his horse and carriage for an automotive taxi. Taking up his editor's suggestions, Fallada extended his narrative's endpoint from 1928 to 1933, twisted Gustav's one decent son into becoming a Nazi storm trooper and made the other, criminal son a member of the Communist Party."

Fallada, born in 1893, is quick to use the rise of the Nazis for his own professional promotion, even though he " hated the strutting arrogance of the Third Reich." All the while he complains about how his work is being butchered and misused; and yet he never does anything about it, but complain. He remains, in his way, the consummate Romantic writer, all ego and contradiction, even as he - a common peril for Romantics - becomes more hustler than writer.

Two generations later, born in 1944 of all years, we have W.G. Sebald. I've been reading Cynthia Ozick lately, and I'm finding it interesting comparing the two writers, and their relative feelings towards the opportunities of history:

"So, in language sublime, Sebald is haunted by Jewish ghosts - Europe's phantoms: the absent Jews, the deported, the gassed, the suffering, the hidden, the fled. There is a not-to-be-overlooked irony (a fossilized irony, my professor-critic might call it) in Sebald's having been awarded the Berlin Literature Prize - Berlin, the native city of Gershom (né Gerhardt) Scholem, who wrote definitively about the one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the Vaterland itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated - until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured."

More on this tomorrow.