Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

“HANS OFF!”, AND OTHER NONSENSE

I will make this comment brief, because it’s more in the nature of a reflection than a full-blown essay.

I am writing this after having watched both the two semi-finals and the final in FIFA’s World Cup. Germany defeated Brazil 7-1 in a game that was fast and humiliating for Brazil. The Netherlands and Argentina drew nil-all in a boring contest that was decided in a penalty shoot-out, which Argentina won. So Germany and Argentina faced off in the final. Mercifully, Germany won by the match's one goal near the end of extended play, so we were spared another penalty shoot-out. I felt very sorry for the great Argentinian striker Messi, who did his darndest. But the outcome makes no difference to my viewpoint.

I am not a great sports fan and never have been.

Even though I went to an all-male secondary school where rugby was the unofficial religion, and being a sportsman was the only way one could become a prefect, I managed to avoid completely ever taking part in any organised sport whatsoever. One day a year, the whole school had to participate in a “marathon”. My participation consisted of running for a couple of hundred yards and then walking the rest of the course in a leisurely fashion, coming back into the school gates (with about a quarter of the student body, I might add) an hour or so after the real runners had returned. My own extra-curricular activities at school consisted of acting and debating, and I was rewarded in my last year by getting the leading role in the school play.

I will be clearly understood here. I am not anti-sport. If people enjoy it, good for them. Nor am I allergic to exercise. I like taking long walks and, when I have the chance, I love bush tramping. But when, some years back, I realized that not only had I never played rugby, but that in my whole life I had never even watched a game of rugby in its entirety, I consciously decided to keep it that way.

Soccer, on the other hand, is a different matter. At least one of my sons was, and still occasionally is, a pretty good soccer player (or as we non-rugby people like to say, footballer). Some of my daughters played the game at junior level. And though I don’t go out of my way to watch soccer matches, I can be persuaded to go and watch a match if it’s likely to be a pleasant social occasion. And I always try to watch the World Cup final.

But there is the national chauvinist aspect in international sports contests, and this is my real theme for today’s sermon. I’ve said I’m not anti-sport, but I really am anti the nationalistic nonsense that goes with it, the assumption that sport is somehow tied to the destiny of a nation, or that in its international guise it is anything other than a business.

Let me give you a really crass example. In FIFA’s World Cup, Brazil and Germany have in recent years been the most conspicuous champions (Brazil seven times in the finals and five times the winner; Germany seven times in the finals and four times the winner). Italy is also one of the champions (four times winner, but two of those wins were way back in the 1930s). England and France languish some way down the list of the twelve nations that have made it into World Cup finals. France has twice been in the finals, but has only once won. England has only once been in the finals, and that was also the one and only time England won, nearly fifty years ago now, in 1966.

But how poisonous that national feeling becomes when it is related to sport. It really is a substitute for warfare.

Item – the English, who generally perform very badly at the World Cup (and whose club teams at home are largely made up of lavishly-paid Spaniards and Frenchmen and even Germans), have to have somebody to cheer for in the World Cup final, but this also means they have to have somebody to hate. So they have decided their sworn enemy is Germany and almost any other nation that meets Germany in a final will be the nation English football fans will cheer for.

My wife and I happened to be in London twelve years ago, at the time Germany and Brazil were the World Cup finalists. The tabloid newspapers were filled with anti-German bilge, including one which had a big front-page picture of the desired cup itself with the headline “Hans Off!” 
Such witticism. 
The afternoon of the match, my wife and I had been doing something totally non-sporty. We’d been at a matinee performance of a Shakespeare play (in fact a delightfully blood-thirsty condensation of the little-performed Henry VI plays). We came out into the pale London light to find the streets filled with Cockneys cheering and yipping and waving Brazilian colours because “their” team had won the World Cup. Cars drove up and down hooting their horns and waving Brazilian flags. It wasn’t as if English football fans have a particular love for Brazilians – it was just that any foreign team (except probably the French and Argentinians) could be the ersatz “English” team so long as it defeated the Germans.

I fail to see how this promotes international goodwill.

Of course, there are sports fans who can see through the nationalistic puffery and can admire sporting skill for its own sake.

My favourite moment of the three 2014 World Cup matches that I watched? It was during that dire semi-final when the German team methodically humiliated the Brazilian team. Before the match was over, there were close-ups of Brazilian fans staring in stunned astonishment or weeping in anguish. Many Brazilian fans left the stadium long before the match was over, knowing that their team had no hope of recovering.

But, to my delight, there were also shots of Brazilian fans applauding the German players for the sheer skill with which they scored their last two goals.

 I do wish all sports fans were like those ones.

Something New

“THE EMPEROR WALTZ” by Philip Hensher (4^th Estate / Harper-Collins, $NZ44:99)

In 1914-15, the pioneer American film director D.W.Griffith made a film, The Birth of a Nation, which presented a contentious view of American history. It showed the South in the American Civil War being defeated by a rapacious North, it presented blacks as sub-human and it glorified the Ku Klux Klan in a manner that is widely believed to have revived that defunct terror group. Of course the film was controversial. Many cities banned it. Many local censorship boards demanded cuts. Race riots were feared.

In response, Griffith pleaded that people were being “intolerant” of his film, and wrote a pamphlet about the evils of censorship. He also, in the following year, 1916-17, made his epic film Intolerance, which told, intercut, four parallel stories supposed to represent intolerance through the ages – a story set in modern times, one set in ancient Babylon, one set at the time of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, and one concerning the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. In each case, according to Griffith, “love” was being thwarted by mass prejudice and intolerance. The film was subtitled Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages.

Now why on earth am I giving you this well-known film history lesson when I am supposed to be reviewing the Englishman Philip Hensher’s 613-page-long new novel The Emperor Waltz?

Quite simply because, once I cottoned on to the novel’s overall structure, I thought that Hensher was doing a Griffith, and I feared that the novel would be a polemical piece of special pleading.

Philip Hensher is an out and open gay, most of whose novels have dealt with explicitly gay themes (although the best of them that I have read – King of the Badgers – was more focused on the issue of public surveillance and the “watched society”). The Emperor Waltz tells a number of different stories, set in different eras. In the 1970s, a youngish man called Duncan, having inherited money off his unpleasant father, decides to set up of bookshop catering to gay tastes in a working class district of London. The locals are hostile. Sometimes bricks come smashing through the bookshop’s window. Later, police harass the owners of the bookshop by sending in plainclothes men to smell out smut and bring a prosecution for selling pornography. Meanwhile, in a story set in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, a young artist called Christian Vogt becomes part of the radical Bauhaus art movement.

“Aha!” I thought smugly to myself, “soon we’re going to have Nazi stormtroopers marching into the novel and bashing up homosexuals.” I was assuming that Hensher was going to run his parallel stories as case studies in hostility towards gays, perhaps with the implicit message that anyone now who is uneasy about aspects of modern gay culture must be a closet Nazi.

But, dear reader, I underestimated Hensher. The fact is, his novel is far more subtle than this, and while there is the odd spot of polemic it is not always a work of preachiness.

Being a Germanophile, (as he has made clear in a number of his Guardian columns), Hensher must be aware of how ambiguous the relationship of Nazism to homosexuality was (given the huge homo-erotic appeal of Brownshirt units and the proclivities of some Nazi leaders, despite official persecution of homosexuals). There are a few passing references to homosexual characters in the Weimar sections of novel, and some indications of closeted homosexuals hiding who they really are, but the main characters being persecuted by German reaction are the avant-garde artists, whose chief representative in the novel is heterosexual. Hensher is not only enjoying himself with a critique of Bauhaus art (there are long sections contrasting the artists Paul Klee and Johannes Itten), but he is also suggesting that any radical and world-changing view will at first meet hostility. Bauhaus art then, gay liberation now (or at least in the 1970s and 1980s).

The modern and the 1920s sections take up most of the novel, but there are other historical stories told. Exactly halfway through the novel, one self-contained 40-page section concerns early Christians being persecuted in the reign of the emperor Diocletian. A pagan merchant’s daughter (later martyred and known as St. Perpetua) has the following conversation with her Christian slave:

 “ ‘I have talked much about my religion’, the slave said.

‘Oh, I won’t tell anyone’, the merchant’s daughter said. ‘But is it a secret sort of religion? In caves, in the desert, sacrificing babies to the gods, and it is death to speak of the mysteries?’

‘My religion is not like that,’ the slave said. ‘One day it will live openly and everyone will see everything about it. It is not a religion made for darkness.’

‘Why do you not live it openly now?’ the merchant’s daughter said, but the slave had nothing but a gesture of the hands in response to that. ‘I can see, you would be killed if you did. But you don’t seem to mind being killed in the name of your religion…’ ” (p.318)

I think Hensher’s parallel here is fairly obvious. Early Christianity, like Bauhaus art and gay liberation, was once a movement of the powerless that upset established power structures and provoked a hostile reaction. The Christian slave’s words that her movement will ‘one day … live openly and everyone will see everything about it. It is not … made for darkness’ could really be the epigraph to the whole novel.

At this point we could, of course, ask some hard questions about whether early Christianity, Bauhaus art and modern gay-dom are really comparable. To some extent, Hensher’s structural parallels force the issue.

There are also two sections whose place in the novel is a little murky.

Thirty pages (given the heading “Next Year”) are a scene of obnoxious young middle-class teenagers taking drugs and watching their father’s stash of pornography when they are supposed to be looking after a younger child. I’m not sure what Hensher’s purpose is in including this, except perhaps to show the iniquities of apparently respectable middle-class heterosexual families. Or to show all the wrong ways in which teenagers might be introduced to homosexuality, as they snigger over anal sex.

Far more intriguing – and the part of the novel I found most engaging – is the forty-page section headed “Last Month”. Unlike the rest of the novel, it is told in the first person by a character identified (on p.376) as “Phil”, so it appears to be direct autobiography on Philip Hensher’s part. Phil lies in a hospital bed. He is there for a minor operation. He has to co-exist with people he does not really like (including especially one disgusting and malodorous tramp), but he uses his skills in reading character to get onside with the supervising nurse and thus to get himself moved to a bed with a window view. As I took in this minutely observed episode, I couldn’t help thinking how well it read as an autonomous short story. Where it fits thematically into the rest of the novel I can only guess. Is Hensher’s point that human survival often has to mean peaceful co-existence with people we can’t stand? Or that the skills that go into reading character accurately can also be used to manipulate others?

Having noted these other sections, however, it remains true that the novel’s major preoccupations are with 1920s Germany and with modern homosexuals.

Hensher never falls into the trap of presenting his gay characters as uniformly likeable people. There are some who are satirised or presented in negative terms. One gay character talks arrant nonsense such as “Promiscuity is a radical critique of heteronormative structures that keep everyone in this society in place”. (pp.437-438). As a mature gay man, Hensher adopts a coolly ironical attitude towards this character, perhaps a bit like a feminist who knows that the rhetoric has changed and who now regards with some embarrassment the days of bra-burning. In the Weimar sections, a homosexual couple who talk of “having sodomy” in the interests of “hygiene” are essentially ridiculed. Hensher seems especially hostile to those who attempt to link gayness with left-wing political causes. Again in the Weimar section, leftist people who talk bloody revolution are really depicted as being on the same wavelength as thuggish beer-swilling Brownshirts. In the “modern” section, one tiresome gay politico, who wants to use the gay bookshop for meetings discussing Trotsky, is finally kicked out by other gay men who see him as a dishonest and irritating irrelevance (pp.482-485).

Hensher is on record complaining about left-wing parties which pander to working class prejudices against gays. He is also on record as noting how much more welcoming the English Conservative Party has been to gays than the Labour Party has been, and how large a fan base Margaret Thatcher had among gay men. This brings me very much to the conclusion that, while I heard one radio reviewer laud this novel for being about the power of “outsiders”, it is really showing outsiders craving to be insiders – wielding power and fully accepted by society at large. The trajectory of the “modern” sections of the story is towards a character’s belief (pp.508-509) that the gay bookshop has become redundant because the type of wares it sells are now sold openly in mainstream bookshops anyway.

Why the novel is called The Emperor Waltz is another of those things that readers will have to puzzle out. Strauss’s stately and melodious old dance tune is referenced in most of the novel’s different sections (apart, obviously, from the one set in early Christian days). It is one of the novel’s many verbal links: a rather artificial way of binding diverse materials together – like having persecuted Christians in one section and then calling the main character of another section “Christian”. Hensher equates the tune with happiness, but perhaps also with the inevitable march of history and change. And any number of other things.

How do I personally rate this novel? There are spots of badly self-expository dialogue, as when Duncan spills out hatred for his dying father as he neatly explains how his father mistreated his sister:

“I remember. Even in the 1950s, you didn’t just throw small children into the deep end of swimming pools and wait to see if they drowned or not…. Every week… making her walk all the way back to school in the dark of January to make her find a pencil case she had dropped. Do you know, you’ve never once given me any help or advice – you’ve never done anything for me, except once. Mummy made you explain to me how to shave. You couldn’t get out of that. That was it. I’m glad you’re dying.” (pp.110-111) Etc. Etc.

The episodes where a team of enthusiasts set up the gay bookshop, and later where a party is being held to raise funds to fight the police prosecution, have the naïve jolly-hockey-sticks tone of old tales about a bunch of kids putting on a show in the local barn. To give a literary comparison, they reminded me of nothing so much as the assembling of the Dinky-Doo concert party in J.B.Priestley’s The Good Companions. Such enthusiasm. Such simple-mindedness.

On the other hand, the novel is packed densely with interesting detail and is the product of an erudite man who does not want to inhabit a ghetto. While you are reading it, it engages attention. But the artificiality of its central conceit means that the effect quickly wears off.

Pedantic footnotes: As one might expect from this author, there are a number of in-jokes in The Emperor Waltz, and many points at which cultural references are left unexplained so that the literati can have the pleasure of picking them up for themselves. Some historical characters have major roles (such as Paul Klee and Saint Perpetua). Others drop fleetingly into the narrative (such as the novelist Angus Wilson being all campy at the gay bookshop’s fund-raising party). Then there is the totally fictitious character who is dying of AIDS, but who is so in the closet that he pretends he is dying of a “rare Chinese bone disease”. Those in the know will recognise here a reference to a well-known travel writer. A number of times, there are references to meat-eating characters enjoying the “inner organs” of animals, which can only be an echo of a famous passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses.  And when, late in the novel, somebody writes of an aeronautical engineer called Norway, we are not told that this was the chap who wrote a string of pop novels under the pseudonym Nevil Shute. And so on and so on.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “BEFORE THE STORM” (“VOR DEM STURM”) by Theodor Fontane (first published in 1878; R.J.Hollingdale’s English translation first published in Oxford World Classics 1985)

Some time ago on this blog, I wrote of Theodore Fontane’s German masterpiece of conciseness and elliptical construction Effi Briest (look it up on the index at right). I noted that reading that masterpiece had led me to read the one other novel by Fontane (1819-1898) that is readily available in English, Before the Storm. Given that Before the Storm is an historical novel, set among the Prussian gentry over a few months in the winter of 1812-1813, and given that it concerns the German national uprising against Napoleon, I half-expected something like a German equivalent of War and Peace: an epic of the Napoleonic Wars as seen from a German perspective. Alas, I found Before the Storm to be no such thing. Instead, I found it to be a rambling, descriptive work, which took a long time to get nowhere, and I dismissed it as one of the most boring books I had ever read.

One day, I said, I would explain why I came to that conclusion.

So here I am doing so.

Let it be noted that for most of its length, Before the Storm has no “plot” as such. It is a series of sketches, vignettes, anecdotes and descriptions in which, presumably, Fontane is attempting to build up a panoramic portrait of Prussian society on the eve of its national revolt. For what it’s worth, the wisp of “plot” concerns the two young adult children of the widowed Prussian squire Berndt von Vitzewitz – Lewin and Renate. They seem, by love and mutual affection, destined to marry the two children of Privy Councillor von Ladalinski, a Pole who had become a Protestant and embraced Prussia as his homeland. But Kathinka Ladalinski, whom Lewin loves, eventually runs away with the Polish Count Jarosh Brinski, and re-embraces the Catholic faith. Lewin von Vitzewitz is heartbroken, but consoles himself by marrying Marie, a village girl, orphan daughter of a travelling showman. The novel seems to intend this to represent the rejuvenation of aristocratic blood by the blood of the people. Meanwhile Renate von Vitzewitz remains in love with Tubal Ladalinski, but Tubal dies heroically after being wounded in the national uprising, and Renate lives out the rest of her life as a sort of Protestant nun.

As I say, this “plot” is no more than the thread on which to hang various observations. For most of the novel, “nothing happens” in the sense of a story moving forward. Instead, we have a series of self-contained scenes and descriptions, often more in the form of separable essays than of narrative. Such scenes are mainly set either on the von Vitzewitzes’ East Prussian estate Hohen-Vietz, near the River Oder, or in Berlin. Thus, to illuminate various sides of Prussian life we are introduced to:

* A “Hernhutter” Protestant “Aunt” Schorlemmer, who rages against the slackness of the official Lutheran church.

* A grotesque dwarf-woman Hoppenmarieken, receiver of stolen goods and spy, who redeems herself in the last few pages by helping to rescue Lewin from a French prison. I assume she is intended to illustrate the nationalist worth of even the lowliest Prussian.

* The estate’s antiquarian clergyman Seidentopf, who is more interested in archaeology and various racial theories about the origins of Prussians than he is in preaching.

* There is also the complete Francophile Countess Amalie, Berndt von Vitzewitz’s sister, who adores French culture at the expense of German culture. That she dies in the last pages, around the time of the nationalist revolt, may be intended as some sort of symbol of the end of that sort of French-dominated “Enlightenment” ethos, and the birth of a new unified German spirit.

There are a host of other minor characters, but the only one who lodges in my mind is the rough-and-ready old “General” Bamme who takes over a local command in the final section. Fontane does, however, in “long shot” as it were, introduce some real historical personages. For example, in Berlin, Lewin attends a lecture by the German nationalist philosopher Fichte, and poets of the period are quoted at length.

Prussia in 1812 was still officially allied with Napoleon. Many soldiers and patriots were unhappy with this. Many Prussians fought for the French in the Grande Armee, but some had taken service with the Russians against the French. As the novel trundles along, there is much discussion and much agonizing about whether people should join a revolt against the French (who are at this stage straggling back from their catastrophic defeat in Russia). But, being good Prussians, nobody does anything until the King of Prussia issues a proclamation saying they can. In a 680-page novel (in the Oxford World Classics edition I read), the revolt itself takes up at most 60 pages near the end, and for some reason Fontane decides to focus on an entirely fictitious event – the attack by Prussian militia and volunteers upon a French garrison in the East Prussian town of Frankfurt. (Germany has more than one Frankfurt, remember.) It has been claimed that Fontane’s real theme is not the patriotic Prussian uprising against the French, but the repercussions of Prussia’s initial defeat by the French in 1806. It has further been claimed that his central idea is the tension between patriotism and duty to authority.

Even if this is so, however, it does not compensate for the novel’s lack of real dramatisation.

It is hard to believe that this novel, Fontane’s first, was written by the same man who, 16 years later, was to write Effi Briest (his 14^th novel). If he was later to become a master of compression and understated irony, he is here still the journalist and regional historian, striving to cram all his research into his novel. I detect a distant echo of the type of thing Sir Walter Scott was attempting to do, especially in his earlier Waverley novels, half a century before Fontane – an attempt to give a portrait of a whole society at an historical moment, introducing some factual characters and some historical events. Unfortunately, Before the Storm is almost as stylistically stiff and theatrical as Sir Walter Scott is. This is not the German War and Peace (history dramatised). It is the German The Antiquary (history annotated).

There are long and verbose discussions, not only of the proposed military action, but also of German poetry and Prussian law and the archaeological origins of Prussia. Numerous folk-tales are introduced, which seem to be the fruit of Fontane’s having recently written travel books about Brandenburg. Too often, rather than dramatising events, Fontane has people reporting them in conversation, telling rather than showing. The upheavals of the Napoleonic wars are conveyed by what characters say about them. Thus we hear older soldiers (some of whom fought for the French and some for the allies) discussing the Peninsular War in Spain. The Battle of Borodino and later the French retreat from Russia are talked about only. But so (in a letter) is a fire on the Hohen-Veitz estate and much of the skirmishing as Cossacks chase the French across parts of Brandenburg – events that would have impinged directly on the novel’s main characters. I was strongly reminded of a very boring old Hollywood film (Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of The Buccaneer), which chitter-chatters at length about conflict, but then after the long build-up disposes of its (supposedly) climactic battle in a handful of long shots. Fontane’s deliberate ellipses and evasion of some key action in Effi Briest are the work of a master ironist. In Before the Storm they seem the work of an incompetent and lead to bathetic anti-climax.

Such few pleasures as this novel affords, then, are the pleasures of the history textbook or antiquarian document, not of the novel.

Be it noted that with 200 years of hindsight, there is something disturbing about the novel’s Prussian-Germanic patriotism. Fontane himself (a Prussian with French Protestant forebears) is an urbane and civilised European gentleman. He shows – honestly enough, I suppose – that Prussian opinion in 1812-13 ran the whole gamut from loyal servants and admirers of the French to ardent Teutonists. He sometimes says admiring words about French soldiership and paints an amiable portrait of Lewin’s Gascon gaoler late in the novel. There is a tender scene (at Countess Amalie’s) in which it is admitted that Corneille is as stirring as German romantic poetry.

Even so, implicit in the whole structure of the novel is the idea of all levels of society (from king to dwarfish receiver of stolen goods) joining in a “holy” national crusade. Much of it sounds perilously like later Blut-und-Boden fantasies – the mystical union of Germans to German soil, and the type of racial “national community” that Adolf craved. As a research scientist, one of my sons once ran a Max Planck laboratory in Leipzig, not too far from the great German national monument commemorating the “Battle of the Nations” victory over Napoleon. Occasionally, he said, small groups of extreme right-wing German nationalists, rightly regarded with contempt by most modern Germans, would still demonstrate there – neo-Nazis, skinheads etc. Of course it is not Fontane’s fault, and his novel has to be read in its historical context, but the ideology of Before the Storm does lead directly to such scenes.

Some interesting sidelights of the novel:

As “allies”, the Russians are treated in a friendly enough fashion by Fontane, although there is much muttering about how “unreliable” they are when joint operations are planned.

The official Lutheran church is not satirised by Fontane, but is presented as the Anglican Church often was in contemporaneous English novels – that is, as a comfy institution, which few people take too seriously, its pastors being mainly careerists. Therefore, in Before the Storm, strong Protestant opinion is represented by “Herrnhutters”, Calvinists and various evangelicals, most of whom really do satirise official Lutheranism.

Particularly disturbing and distasteful is the novel’s attitude towards the Poles. We are quite a few miles away from later “biological” German racism, which saw Poles and other Slavs as inherently “inferior”. The Ladalinskis are clearly worthy enough to marry Prussian gentry and serve the Prussian government; but Kathinka’s return to the Catholic Church and to Polish patriotism is treated with scorn late in the novel. I detect here something akin to the English Establishment’s attitude towards the Irish – they are acceptable so long as they are a subject people and adopt our ways. Paddy is a fine fellow when he is willing to serve in the British Army; but he is a nuisance who deserves to be ridiculed when he starts talking about independence.  Likewise, according to this novel, Poles are fine people who are civilised only so long as they adopt Prussian ways and serve Prussia.

One final thought: how aware was Fontane himself of how pusillanimous the Prussian patriotic uprising at last seems in this novel? No matter how much it is dollied up in chatter, in the end all we see is the kicking of a demoralised French army that had already been defeated in Russia anyway.

I have just spent far too long trashing a novel, which you were probably never going to read in the first place. Apart from detecting future sinister trends in German nationalism – for which Fontane was not responsible – why have I raged on at such length? Because I know that, later, the author was capable of much, much better.

The key to my appreciation of Before the Storm is therefore intense disappointment.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

UNLAID GHOSTS

I have never pretended to be an expert on things German. I cannot speak German, apart from understanding a few scattered phrases thanks to long ago doing two papers in German as part of an undergraduate degree. I visited Germany in childhood as part of a general European tour, spending a few weeks with my parents and elder siblings, travelling south from Hamburg down through Hanover and the Rhineland to Austria. But that was so long ago that I can hardly reconstruct memories of the trip – and they would be childish impressions anyway. Most of what I know of the country comes from reading books and seeing movies.

So it would be pretentious and silly of me to make sweeping statements about Germany based on a recent three-night stay in Hamburg with friends, who were also generous hosts. But I did have some of my preconceptions overturned in that very short time.

In the first place, I was surprised by the beauty of Hamburg itself. For some reason I

imagined it as a dingy industrial seaport, smoky, dirty and noisy. Doubtless there are parts of Hamburg that are like that, as there are in any modern city. But my chief discovery was of how green, clean and open the city was. Maybe I was influenced by the very salubrious suburb where my friends live. But riding by rail from suburb to central city, we were passing well-appointed garden allotments, tidy blocks of flats and much greenery. The impression was reinforced by going to the top of the tall former water tower (now an observatory) in the city’s major park and getting a panoramic view in all directions across the great North German Plain – flat as a pancake and green in all directions. To the west, there was a little bump of a hill, which seemed to be the highest natural feature for many hundreds of square miles. But my host pointed out that it was not a natural feature at all. It consisted of thousands of square metres of rubble that had been hauled away from the city after the Second World War, when Hamburg was repeatedly bombed, and piled in one place as the foundation for an artificial hill.

The old quarter of the city, with its preserved shopping arcade from the nineteenth century and its old Rathaus and other historic buildings around the artificial lakes on the River Alster, reinforces this impression of a city made for civilised living rather than for pounding machinery. So do the new building projects near the port, with gleaming modern architecture replacing antique berths for smoky ships. Walking through the working-class area of St Pauli, I saw the odd specimen of spray-painted graffiti; but I was amazed at how neat, tidy and generally un-graffiti-bombed it was (unlike working class areas in other European cities). My host told me that its apartments are permanently rent-controlled by a Social Democrat local authority, so that it has not been taken over by the middle class and “gentrified”, as inner-city working class areas in so many cities have

been. It was only after leaving Hamburg that I discovered it was named Europe’s “Green Capital” in 2011.

On top of this, there was the feast of high culture to which our hosts treated us or directed us. An excellent production of Borodin’s Prince Igor at the Staatsoper. A performance, in the preserved nineteenth century concert hall, of orchestral works by Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach and of Robert Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony under the baton of Christian Zacharias. Not to mention a visit to C.P.E.Bach’s grave in the crypt of the great Lutheran Michelskirche (St Michael’s church) and an admiring look at a monument to Brahms (Hamburg-born even if he made his musical career in other parts of the German-speaking world).

I appreciate that by this stage I am sounding like a gushy tourist brochure. I do apologise for this, but Hamburg was really an enjoyable experience and it was good to find a city quite unlike by imaginings.

But you are an habitual reader of this blog and you know that I wouldn’t write about

some place I had visited without attaching a moral of some sort, and here it comes – complete with a reminder that I disclaim any profound knowledge of Germany.

The point is, you cannot be even in this lovely city of Hamburg without being reminded of the negative side of German history.

We walk through the beautiful square in front of the Wilhelmine Rathaus, with half an eye on the kayaking regatta going on, on the Alster lake. And we pass the monolithic First World War memorial.  It says “Forty thousand sons of this city gave their lives for you, 1914-1918”. A reasonable sentiment for a war memorial. But a modern plaque at the base of the monument designates it a “Memorial to the Fallen in both World Wars” and tells us this sad story – when the memorial was raised in the 1920s, one side has a relief designed by Ernst Barlach,

showing a grieving mother embracing her son. When the Nazis came to power, they saw this image as too “pacifistic”, so they erased it and replaced it with a patriotic German eagle. The grieving mother and son have now been restored. Clearly, war memorials can be used by those who wish to glorify war as much as those who wish to lament.

We pass over to the other side of the square. Again, there is a sad reminder of something. A not-quite-representational modern statue of Heinrich Heine, Germany’s greatest poet of the 19^th century, stands there. (Heine’s mortal remains lie in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, where we had visited them a few weeks earlier). Again, a modern plaque tells us that an older statue of Heine was raised here in 1926, but it was torn down by the Nazis and Heine’s books were among those that were burnt. This was because of the embarrassing fact that

Germany’s greatest 19^th century poet was Jewish.

On the same day, leaving the square, we go to what remains of the once great Lutheran church of St Nicholas, larger than most cathedrals. It was bombed to smithereens by the RAF in the Second World War, so that all that remains is the spire, and parts of one of the old entrances. Next to these fragments, there has been planted a “peace garden”. The great church was built in the nineteenth century in the “Gothic revival” style that was popularised in England, and was in fact designed by a team of English architects. So British planes destroyed a British work of art – which is not the greatest tragedy of a war that destroyed far greater things than that, but which is horribly ironic anyway.

Perhaps you can see by now what I (protesting the brevity of my visit; admitting my

lack of knowledge of Germany) am driving at.

Over seventy years after the Second World War, Germany is still haunted by the wrong sort of history.

I do not know how young Germans, who had no part in the sins of their grandparents, think about this. But I do know that when my wife asked conversationally whether it was yet safe to joke about the war, our host gave us a polite “Not really”. In fact, as he and I had been ambling around the city’s great park on a fine Sunday morning, he had been answering my own inane questions of how the Germans saw the past. He opined that even now, for Germans, most of the twentieth century is seen as a great and horrible tragedy, leading to the destruction of what Germany at her best could have been. There is an awareness that aspects of German history, which could be seen as quite innocent if they were parts of another nation’s history, can now be seen only as precursors to something indefensible. In other words, regardless of the guilt of specific individuals, there is still the residue of a national guilt. It doesn’t mean that Germans wake up stressed with guilt every morning, but it does mean that jangling in the background somewhere there is the sense that something is not right with the nation’s history.

And that is as far as I want to push this reflection before I start getting sententious and claiming to greater knowledge of the subject than I possess.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE” by Anthony Doerr (4^th Estate / Harper-Collins, $NZ34:99

I approach reviewing this new American novel, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, with some trepidation. Merely by describing it, I may easily give the impression that it is a poetic masterpiece, and I certainly do not think that. It is an intelligent novel at the upper end of the pop novel market, and very enjoyable as such. But it is no masterpiece, and it does occasionally strain at symbolism in ways that become quite arch. Also, I hesitate to give away too much of the novel’s plot. All the Light We Cannot See is, after all, a new novel. While I might be happy to give synopses of novels that have been around for some time, I think it is unmannerly of reviewers to spike all the surprises that a new novel tries to hold in store for readers, and especially new novels, like this one, that have complex surprise-filled and sometimes suspense-filled plots.

Why should a reviewer damage one of the chief skills of a writer, which is to keep readers engaged with a good yarn?

So having virtuously begged off ruining your enjoyment of the novel, I assure you that all I give here is the set-up.

All the Light We Cannot See is told throughout its 530-odd pages in the present tense. This, I suspect, is because its two leading characters are children who grow into adolescence. The present tense preserves the youthful immediacy of their experiences as the story jumps backwards and forwards in time.

In France in the 1930s, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the young daughter of a functionary at the Museum of Natural History in Paris – the man in charge of security and locking things up. Marie-Laure has acquired from her father a deep interest in the natural world, and especially in plants and sea-creatures. But in early childhood she is stricken with blindness. Patiently, her father Daniel LeBlanc teaches her how to find her own way in the world when she is without sight, and coaches her in Braille so that she can enjoy the novels of Jules Verne. When war comes, and when Paris is threatened with bombing, Daniel helps to crate up the treasures of the museum and have them scattered to safer places. Then he flees from the invading Nazis, taking Marie-Laure to the walled Breton city of Saint-Malo where his uncle Etienne lives. From the novel’s opening pages we know that something catastrophic will happen here, as the novel’s prologue takes place during the 1944 bombing of Saint-Malo, which reduced most of that historic city to rubble.

Meanwhile in Germany, told in chapters that run parallel with those about Marie-Laure, there is the growing-up of the equally likeable kid Werner Pfennig. He and his sister Jutta are orphans. They grow up in an orphanage in a working class town. Werner’s apparent destiny would be to live and die as a coal-miner, the way his father did. The orphanage is run by a kindly French woman, so little Werner has no animosity towards the French. However, this being the 1930s, he inevitably becomes part of the Hitler Youth. He is as gentle a soul as Marie-Laure is. Like Jutta, he deplores the bullying and thuggery that is encouraged in both the Hitler Youth and, later, the army. But, to escape the dead-end life his working-class background would otherwise deliver him, he is willing to allow his one great talent to be exploited by the army. Werner happens to be a genius with wireless telegraphy. Not only can he fix effortlessly any damaged radio that is brought to him, but he can also understand the technique of triangulating radio signals so that he can pinpoint the origin of any broadcast. He finds himself used by German forces to track down any radios operated by partisans or resistance forces in countries the Nazis have occupied.

Anthony Doerr captures something of the enforced enthusiasm – almost suppressed hysteria – of the Hitler Youth and other organizations for Nazi youth in passages such as this:

“It seems to Werner as if all the boys around him are intoxicated. As if, at every meal, the cadets fill their tin cups not with the cold mineralized water of Schulpforta but with the spirit that leaves them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying forever drunk on rigor and exercise and gleaming boot leather. The eyes of the most bullheaded boys radiate a shining determination: every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness...” (pp.262-263)

He also suggests a theme of how Werner’s essential good nature has been corrupted by his love of technology, in passages such as this, where Werner is helping in the business of tracking down, and killing, members of national resistance movements:

“Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some stinking frozen trench, full of lice, the way the old instructors at Schulpforta fought in the first wear. This is cleaner, more mechanical, a war waged through the air, invisibly, and the front lines are anywhere. Isn’t there a kind of ravishing delight in the chase of it?” (pp.344-345)

The very structure of the novel tells us that somehow the lives of the blind teenaged French girl and the callow teenaged German soldier will intertwine. Yet, despite its time-and-place-specific plot, despite details on German army life and life in occupied France, this is less an historical novel than a symbolic novel. The characters often appear to float in an ether of the author’s own devising. By having children or adolescents as his focus, Anthony Doerr creates a certain historical decontextualization. These characters are only minimally aware of politics or the social structure of their countries. So the setting is sometimes almost surreal, as the characters strain against the novel’s heavily-layered symbolism.

Werner is addicted to radio, remember, and therefore perceives much of the world through the sense of sound, just as the blind Marie-Laure does. Werner and Marie-Laure are both, in effect, orphans and ruled by the strange noises of their world. Am I straining my interpretation to see Anthony Doerr as attempting to re-create the particular ethos, world-picture or mind-map of the world before television, in which radio was the everyday, household miracle and events were easily perceived in terms of voices, sound-effects and music? Of course there is a sinister side to this phenomenon. One of the epigraphs to the novel is a quotation from Josef Goebbels saying “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.” Sweet airs and voices are corrupted, just as Werner is corrupted by technology.

The novel is at its most lyrical when it conveys how the blind Marie-Laure experiences the world:

“Colour – that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has colour. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano cords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light.” (pp.44-45)

Much later, this lyricism is pushed to extremes when the action has moved to Saint-Malo:

 “To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hear the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean seething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears the cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green waters of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who live their whole lives and never once see a photon from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.” (pp.390-391)

Now unless the author intends us to believe that Marie-Laure is endowed with supernatural powers, there is no way that this passage can be read literally. Marie-Laure, no matter how much blindness may have rendered her hearing more acute, could not possibly hear the great majority of these things. This passage (and many others like it in All the Light We Cannot See) serves a double purpose. First, it allows the author to paint a description, very lyrically, of Saint-Malo and its environs. Secondly, it rhapsodises over the faculty of hearing and its possibilities.

Without destroying the novel’s development for you, I should add that there is a third leading character in this novel, introduced a little later than the other two. This is the Nazi officer Reinhold von Rumpel, who is in search of a particular treasure in ways that make his path cross those of Marie-Laure and Werner. Without going into the particulars of the case, I see symbolism sustaining this part of the novel, too. Von Rumpel’s obsession with something beautiful that will give him power is like a parody of the Nazi’s mythologisation of their own conquests and the racial mysticism that cloaked brute force.

I think I have given you the flavour of the novel in these comments, which scrupulously avoid “spoilers”. I regret that there is a German character called “Frederick” when Anthony Doerr could just as easily have called him “Friedrich”, in line with the other authentically German names in the book. I think Marie-Laure’s reading of Jules Verne comes close to being a cliché concerning the way thoughtful French kids spend their time, but at least it ties in with the girl’s curiosity about the natural world. For all its lyricism, however, I enjoyed reading this book as a good story, even if its main characters do have to bear such a heavy freight of conscious symbolism.

Typically annoying footnote: Oh Dear. I know I’m a pedant, but I can’t help noticing these things, and when I read a novel with an historical setting, I’m afraid I’m always on the lookout for anachronisms. And I found at least one in All the Light We Cannot See. In 1940, according to the novel, a radio ham boasts of all the stations he has been able to hear from France and he says “I got Pakistan once” (p.135). This is very clever of him, given that the nation of Pakistan did not exist until 1947.