Writers and Cities (part two): Kempowski and Klemperer

In the article Writers and Cities (part one) I mentioned among others Walter Kempowski in connection with Rostock (http://www.rostock.de) and Viktor Klemperer in connection with Dresden (http://www.dresden.de http://www.dresden-online.de).

Both writers lived through the Third Reich in their home cities, Kempowski as the son of a ship owner in the Baltic port of Rostock, and Klemperer as a Jew married to a German in Dresden. Both experienced the destruction of their home cities during Allied bombing, both kept diaries, collected examples of contemporary language and recorded even the tiniest details of everyday life. Both have had their books made into films for television, which is not surprising, for they are both able to convey the atmosphere of their time very clearly and without for a moment pointing a moralising finger. And talking about moralising, I don't know about you, but as an observer of Germany I was heartily glad when in October 1998 Martin Walser raised the question as to how much longer Germans were to have the "moral cudgel", as he called it, of the Holocaust held over them every time they wrote or spoke about their past. The late twentieth-century obsession with making individuals or whole nations feel guilty about some aspect of their past for which they were not responsible seems to be merely another way of making it easier to manipulate people or states for sometimes quite questionable ends. Not only that, but it also brings into disrepute those with an honest claim to recompense and makes perfectly normal, balanced discourse about the past almost impossible. What Martin Walser started was a healthy discussion, albeit often over-heated, and since then a much more matter-of-fact tone has taken over.

I was, however, surprised to find on Walter Kempowski's homepage (http://www.kempowski.de/ ) a description (since,I think, removed) of Deutsche Chronik thus: Das eigentliche Thema des Romans ist die Konfrontation des Privaten mit dem Politischen, die Frage nach dem Verhalten des deutschen Bürgertums in Deutschlands dunkelsten Zeitläuften. Hinter all den Sonderlichkeiten, den Sprüchen und Harmlosigkeiten bürgerlicher Existenz scheint das Versagen einer ganzen sozialen Schicht auf. (The actual subject of the novel is the confrontation between the private and the political spheres of life, the question of how the German middle class behaved during Germany's darkest days. Behind all the odd habits, the little sayings and the artlessness of bourgeois existence is revealed the failure of an entire social class) And there was I, obviously guilty of the same middle-class artlessness, simply enjoying what I took to be delightful reminiscences of family life not unlike our own in England. Was I supposed to be seeing dark guilt in that charming, though at times sad, chronicle of a family living through some really dreadful experiences? Isn't the author allowed to have simply enjoyed writing about his family history? Is it really necessary for him to justify having been born into a family which happened to be German and happened to live during the last stages of the Imperial German Empire, the First World War, the Allied Occupation, the Weimar Republic, the Second World War, the second Allied Occupation and the division of Germany into East and West? And what is meant by "the failure of an entire social class"? "Failure" and "entire" both smack of prejudice. The description above probably postdates the writing of the family chronicles by a long time. I would be interested to know why it features on Kempowski's website at all. Or is it that a German writer has to feel guilty about creating a "really good read" and so hints at a much deeper meaning which apparently only the "discerning" reader can discover? Certainly Kempowski was occasionally given a hard time by critics who thought the last thing a novel should be was entertaining, and Kempowski entertains, in the best sense of the word, brilliantly, as sales figures for his books prove. His still most popular work is Tadellöser und Wolff, published in 1971, and made into a superb television series by one of Germany's most impressive directors, Eberhard Fechner, in 1975. It was even shown on one of the British television channels with sub-titles, if I remember correctly. But, so far as I know, the book remains unavailable in English.

How lucky the British are to be able still to publish novels which entertain without being hard work for the reader or, for that matter, in the least bit trivial, and autobiographical works without, as yet, having to pay lip-service to political correctness (I am thinking here for example of Penelope Lively). Even the British Empire is now receiving a more balanced treatment by historians, as for example in Niall Ferguson's book Empire (2003) (also a television series on Channel Four). It is also interesting to note that the new Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol is managing to exist despite being refused money from the politically correct Lottery Fund.

All that said, I do hope a competent and sensitive translator will be found to give us an English version of Kempowski's Tadellöser und Wolff (1971). Kempowski wrote it in the language of his remembered youth and the family conversations are full of the sort of quirky expressions that close-knit families often develop, a miniature language understood only by the initiated, interspersed with allusions and humorous wordplay. Maybe younger generations are so dominated by what they pick up from films and television that they don't develop private family languages any more. We did, and I remember the first time I read Tadellöser und Wolff being fascinated to discover that the Kempowskis spoke in their own language just like we used to, a mini-dialect, as it were, funny and cosy and irreverent. The title of the book Tadellöser und Wolff, for instance, was Herr Kempowski's favourite way of expressing approval, a mixture of the adjective tadellos (faultless) and Loeser und Wolff, the name of the firm where he bought his cigars. The firm had its own building on the corner of Potsdamerstraße and Schöneberger Ufer - you can occasionally catch a glimpse of it in films of old Berlin - a fine seven-storey house built in the late twenties. Frau Kempowski comments gently on all and sundry with the words Wie isses nun zu fassen? or Wie isses nun bloß möglich? (roughly equivalent to Would you believe it?) and Zu und zu schön! (too, too lovely!). Talk is laced with self-fabricated Latinisms reminiscent of schooldays - immerhinque (even so), with nautical terms -Volle Kraft voraus! (full steam ahead! - when turning on the taps on the washbasin), with Low German dialect - Na denn giv mi ma mine Tasch. Is dat noog? (Well then give me my wallet. Is that enough? - Grandfather handing out pocket money) and with snatches of hymns, rhymes and advertising jingles, depending on the context. The real sense of the Kempowski family conversation is almost impossible to translate adequately, and this is doubtless is true of all such homemade languages. After all, their purpose is the sharing of common humour and the expression of affection without the embarrassment of becoming too emotional, while at the same time excluding strangers from the conversation.

During the Second World War our parents did not discuss their fears in front of us children. Serious talk about the War took place when we were in bed. The family conversation contained just such often-repeated sayings and humorous asides as did that of the Kempowski family; the worse things got, the more the humour took over, the more the old jokes were repeated. It was comforting and I have always been grateful to the parents for sparing us their real anxieties. We sensed an atmosphere, we heard enemy aircraft at night, we puzzled over the disturbed behaviour of evacuee children in school, but we felt our world was intact. None of us could have altered the course of the War, any more than we can stop our present-day government from taking military action in various parts of the world, once it has been voted into office with a huge majority. The time for preventing wars lies far back before the misguided generation of voters even started school. I prefer to think that it was the same for the Kempowskis, and I suspect that, far from being selfish and insensitive to the real goings-on under Nazi rule, the adults were doing no more than our parents did, namely keeping a stiff upper lip in front of their three children and carrying on as best they could. And before anyone sneers, as is fashionable in this politically correct age, at the "stiff upper lip", it might be worth considering how well people in the compensation-and-counselling culture of today would cope with a similarly extreme situation.

In this context it is worth mentioning Sebastian Haffner's posthumous autobiographical Geschichte eines Deutschen (2002). This fascinating account of youth during the rise of Hitler was written in 1939 but never published until Haffner's son discovered the text after his father's death in 1999. Haffner was not Jewish but chose to leave Germany because he disliked and despised what was going on there at the time. He made a very successful career as a journalist and historian of his time, and later returned to live in Berlin. If you are thinking of acquiring this latest publication be sure to get hold of the edition containing the whole account. Parts of the book were assumed to be irrevocably lost at the time of the first printing but then, and that is an exciting story in itself, turned up unexpectedly and were incorporated into a second edition. The first version of the book, translated from Haffner's English manuscript version back into German by his son Oliver Pretzel, was published by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt in 2000. It caused a major stir in historical circles as doubt was cast on its having genuinely been written in 1939. The insights it contained, even without the particularly illuminating chapter about the Nazi training camp for law students, threw new and uncomfortable light on the history of the 30s in Germany. In England the first version of the book appeared in May 2002 (Weidenfeld and Nicholson), and the full version is due out in May 2003. It is heftily and misleadingly titled Defying Hitler, presumably with an eye to popular readership, which is a shame, because those with a reasonable knowledge of that period may well be put off at the prospect of "yet another going-over" of the Nazi years. However, no-one should miss it. The description of the brain-washing effect of Nazi methods is compelling.

Walter Kempowski evidently benefited from secure family life just as Haffner did and just as we did. His parents were conservative in their views and critical of the National Socialist regime, but careful not to endanger their children. Frau Kempowski had connections with the Bekennende Kirche, the German Protestant Church in opposition to the "official", but Nazi-conformist, Protestant Church. She was anything but cowardly, according to her son. Not only did she brave the bombs and enemy aircraft guns to watch out for fire-bombs at the top of their house during the fierce raids on Rostock in April 1942, she also sheltered a Jewish woman in their cellar, and later braved the Gestapo to free her Danish son-in-law, who had been arrested on suspicion of being a spy. Her husband, a veteran of the First World War, had been called up and fell in the last months of the war. Her two sons were sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal in 1948 to 25 years imprisonment on the spurious charge of espionage for the West, while she herself received a 10-year sentence for not reporting their supposed "activities". In 1954 she was released and moved to Hamburg to get help from relatives. In March 1956 Walter Kempowski was released and joined his mother in Hamburg. His brother Robert was released in September 1957.

Around Tadellöser und Wolff, the first part of his family chronicle, Kempowski built the other eight volumes that make up Die Deutsche Chronik, the final volume of which was published in 1984 under the title Herzlich Willkommen about his return to the West and the difficulties of starting a new life and career. The earliest period, that of his parents and grandparents during the Empire and up to the end of the First World War, Aus großer Zeit was published in 1978. The entire Chronik is a remarkable and very readable account, a family history not of famous people but of very average Germans. Every tiniest detail is recorded, the houses, the interiors, the furnishings, what one wore, what was talked about, each family member's little habits and sayings, popular songs of the period, the food and food shortages, rationing, the ships that sailed for the family firm, their loss at sea, the bombing, the arrival of the Russians and then the arrest of both sons and of Frau Kempowski. The two boys were imprisoned in Bautzen, one of the most feared East German prisons in the old city of Bautzen in Saxony. There is a website with an English version giving the history of this huge prison, part of which is still in use as such http://www.stsg.de/main/bautzen/ausstellung/ausstellung/index_en.php. Bautzen itself (http://www.bautzen.de/), by the way, is the capital of the Oberlausitz, a district in the south of Saxony inhabited not only by Germans but also by Sorbs, a West Slav tribe who came to the region over a thousand years ago and who still speak their own language, which is not unlike Czech.

One of the characteristics often shown by people who have at some time in their lives lost their homelands is a tendency to want to recreate the past by collecting anything and everything that in some way reminds them of what they once had. In Kempowski's case this tendency started with writing a diary, then books, then with collecting oral and written evidence of other people's experiences. He set up an archive in his own home and out of this grew the monumental work Das Echolot. Ein kollektives Tagebuch (The Echo-sounder. A Collective Diary) the first part of which appeared in 1993. Some of the archive, including manuscripts and objects mentioned in the novels, has since re-unification been transferred to the Kempowski Archive in his home city of Rostock, one of the historic Hanseatic ports on the Baltic coast. (http://www.uni-rostock.de/fakult/philfak/fbg/kempowsk/archiv.htm) One of Kempowski's later works, Der rote Hahn (2001), is a collage containing eye-witness accounts of the Allied bombing of Dresden 13th-14th February 1945, one of the last dreadful cases of fire-bombing which killed well over 35000 people, many of them refugees from the Eastern Front crammed together in the centre of the city whose defending guns had been moved eastwards. The Deutsches Historisches Museum website contains three eye-witness accounts by way of an introduction to this painful story. http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/wk2/kriegsverlauf/dresden/index.html The Roter Hahn of Kempowski's title refers to the red cock or rooster which is the symbol of a burning building, as in the expression jemandem den roten Hahn aufs Dach setzen (to set fire to someone's house).

Like Kempowski, Viktor Klemperer, from 1920 until his suspension in 1935 Professor of Romance Languages at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, recorded the minute details of daily life, the people with whom he had dealings, the increasing difficulty in obtaining the mundane necessities such as food and clothing, the radio broadcasts and the rumours, the sudden disappearance of acquaintances, his own health problems, his own reactions to everything as it occurred, his experiences at work in the factory and on the street. The same claustrophobic atmosphere - Klemperer as a Jew in the hostile environment of Hitler's Reich, and Kempowski as a suspected capitalist spy in Soviet-occupied and then Communist East Germany. Drawing on the diaries he had kept since the age of sixteen, Klemperer wrote Curriculum Vitae 1881-1918, (published 1989) and then continued to keep diaries from 1918 until 1959, the year before he died, but, unlike Kempowski, he saw comparatively few of his writings published in his own lifetime. The fact that he was actually able to save most of his manuscripts through all the years of persecution and destruction is remarkable. After his death his diaries remained untouched for a number of years in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden until their eventual publication after the end of the Communist regime in East Germany in 1989. Like Kempowski, Klemperer came from a respectable middle-class family proud of its German nationality. He became a Protestant in 1912 and, like Kempowsk's father, served as a volunteer in the First World War.

When the first translated volume of Klemperer's diaries Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. Tagebücher 1933 - 1945 (I Will Bear Witness: The Diaries of Viktor Klemperer 1933-4 1and 1942-45, translated by Martin Chalmers), appeared in Britain in two volumes in 1998 and 2001, the historian Niall Ferguson (the same historian mentioned earlier as the author of the book and Channel Four series entitled Empire) wrote in his review in The Sunday Telegraph: It is not the horror of the Holocaust we see here, but the subtle, barely discernible corruption of daily life, as the regime's cocktail of economic recovery, coercion and propaganda poisons the minds and perverts the conduct of ordinary Germans. Here we see how the path to Auschwitz was paved not so much with indifference as with indoctrination. The other two volumes span the period from the First World War to Hitler's rise to power, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1918 - 1932, and the post-war years in East Germany, So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen. Tagebücher 1945 - 1959.

So far it seems that only the diaries from the Hitler years have been considered worth translating into English, presumably with the American market in mind. The over-used word Holocaust springs to mind again. Yet readers who hoped to find in Klemperer a Zionist will have been disappointed. He was, as he said himself, first and foremost a German, and the indignation he felt at the Nazi injustices sprang precisely from his loyalty to the German nation. He had encountered the Zionist movement before the First World War in Prague and thought of it as something peculiar to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He disliked the extremist language of Zionism and suspected that its separatist tendency had probably influenced Hitler's thinking. Certainly Klemperer saw in the language of Zionism and Nazism many common characteristics, such as the over-use of words like "historisch" and "Volk". In the chapter entitled "Zion" in LTI - Notizbuch eines Philologen Klemperer quotes extensively the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of the Zionist movement. Klemperer clearly felt that Herzl's fanaticism was alien to the German cultural tradition in which he himself had grown up. It will be a great pity if Klemperer's other autobiographical writings are withheld from English-speaking readers simply because he does not match their supposed expectations of a German Jew in the Hitler years. Like the Kempowskis, he lived through a great many changes of regime in Germany and his writings are a very useful antidote to the distortions of school history curricula that see Germany still only as a military state.

In 1947 Klemperer published LTI - Notizbuch eines Philologen (LTI, that is, Lingua Tertii Imperii or The Language of the Third Reich), a sharply critical account of the corruption of language under the effect of National Socialist propaganda. …der Nazismus glitt in Fleisch und Blut der Menge über durch die Einzelworte, die Redewendungen, die Satzformen, die er ihr in millionenfachen Wiederholungen aufzwang und die mechanisch und unbewusst übernommen wurden…Aber Sprache dichtet und denkt nicht nur für mich, sie lenkt auch mein Gefühl, sie steuert mein ganzes seelisches Wesen, je selbstverständlicher, je unbewusster ich mich ihr überlasse. Und wenn nun die gebildete Sprache aus giftigen Elementen gebildet oder zur Trägerin von Giftstoffen gemacht worden ist? Worte können sein wie winzige Arsendosen: sie werden unbemerkt verschluckt, sie scheinen keine Wirkung zu tun, und nach einiger Zeit ist die Giftwirkung doch da. (…Nazism was slowly absorbed into the flesh and blood of the masses through individual words, phrases and sentence formations, which were forced upon them in millionfold repetition and mechanically and unconsciously adopted….But language does not just write and think for me, it also directs my feelings, it controls my entire spiritual being, the more naturally, the more unconsciously I let it take over. And what happens when educated language is made up of poisonous elements or becomes the carrier of poisonous substances? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, they appear to cause no effect, and yet in time the poisonous effect is there after all).

Klemperer kept notes continuously and despite the considerable danger of their being discovered during one of the frequent sudden searches that were part of the harassment suffered by Jews in their homes and later in the Judenhäuser ("Jews' houses", selected buildings where the Jewish population were forced to live crowded together in limited shared space). He observed how the "Language of the Third Reich" was passed on, often unwittingly, even by its opponents. Nazism, he said, invented or transformed language so that even its most bitter enemies were compelled to use and therefore spread its expressions in order to combat them at all. Once in common use, words spread through thoughtless conversation, and he quotes the word charakterlich as in the phrase used in school reports under the Nazi regime, charakterlich gut, meaning not so much "of good character" as "having a good Nazi attitude" and therefore a vital comment for a pupil's successful career. In the National Socialist education system everything depended on showing the right attitude, namely that of a true Nazi, which was counted as vastly more important than any ability or skill, let alone knowledge. Der Nazipädagogik kam alles so ausschließlich auf die Gesinnung, auf den unverfälschten Nazismus ihrer Schüler an, dass die Gesinnung in allem und jedem an entscheidend erster Stelle vor jeder Befähigung und Geschicklichkeit, vor allen Kenntnissen geschätzt wurde.

At times, and he was writing during the Soviet occupation of East Germany having just in 1945 joined the Communist Party, he shows a, to the present-day reader, touchingly naïve faith in Communism. One of his chief concerns is what he calls the "mechanisation" of language, particularly when referring to human beings. He cites the frequent use of technical terms to refer to human activities, the crassest example in his opinion being the word Gleichschaltung which, in reference to machinery, means sychronisation, but as used by the National Socialists meant enforcing political conformity such as the subsuming of all teachers, lawyers, tax inspectors an so on under a single National Socialist (and thus centrally controllable) organisation. Klemperer deplores this treatment of individual human beings as if they were units in a machine, automatons: Das eindeutige Mechanisieren der Person selber bleibt der LTI vorbehalten. Ihre charakteristische, wahrscheinlich auch frühzeitigste Schöpfung auf diesem Felde heißt "gleichschalten". Man sieht und hört den Druckknopf, der Menschen, nicht Institutionen, nicht unpersönliche Behörden, in gleichförmige automatische Haltung und Bewegung versetzt: Lehrer verschiedener Anstalten, Gruppen verschiedener Angestellter des Justiz-, des Steuerdienstes, Mitglieder des Stahlhelms und der SA usw. usw. werden beinahe in infinitum Gleichgeschaltet. In this context Klemperer contrasts Bolshevism with Nazism, and one assumes that at the time of writing he knew about Stalin's forced collectivisation of Russian agriculture and the massive terror campaign against Stalin's opponents during the thirties. Bolshevism, he says, pursued technical progress in order to create a more humane way of living for the people, in order to provide them with an opportunity to enjoy greater intellectual benefits under improved physical conditions and less burdensome work. The quantity of new technical expressions in use indicated, he thought, exactly the opposite of what was going on in Nazi Germany: sie weist auf das Mittel hin, mit dem der Kampf um die Befreiung des Geistes geführt wird, während ich im Deutschen aus den Übergriffen des Technischen zwangsläufig auf die Versklavung des Geistes schließe. (it points to the means by which a struggle is taking place to free the spirit, while the encroachment of technical terminology in the German language to me inevitably means the enslaving of the spirit). To present-day readers it may seem that the "mechanisation of language" with its implied contempt for individual human beings is still very much with us, and that Klemperer was closer to the truth than he realised in noticing the influence of America on Europe. Nazi propaganda, he maintained, was heavily indebted in its style to the sensationalist presentation and loud headlines of the North American press, while Communism showed great admiration for the industrial and technical developments in the United States. Had he been able to see into the future, Klemperer might have written an addendum to include the word "globalisation".

In his diary entries from February, March, April and May 1945 Viktor Klemperer tells how he and his wife lived through the bombing of Dresden which saved Klemperer just in the nick of time from being transported off to Auschwitz. He had actually been given the disturbing task of distributing to his Jewish acquaintances the written orders to assemble at the station, all the time carrying his own notice to depart. He and his wife managed to leave Dresden amid the chaos following the raids and there followed a trek from one place to another, staying briefly with various friends, always afraid of being recognised and endangering their hosts, until they finally reached Bavaria, where they lay low and waited for the capitulation and the arrival of the Americans. Eventually they returned to Dresden. Klemperer was not only reinstated in his professorship but suddenly found himself endowed with all manner of privileges by virtue of his race. Professorships at the universities of Greifswald, Halle and Berlin (Humboldt-Universität) followed, and in 1956 he was awarded the Vaterländischer Verdienstorden der DDR in Silber (the Order of Merit in Silver of the German Democratic Republik). He was one of many German intellectuals to see in the East German state a chance to do things better, to improve on the past, like Bertolt Brecht and his wife the actress Helene Weigel, like Ernst Bloch, Stefan Heym, Heiner Müller, Anna Seghers, Sarah Kirsch, John Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde, Robert Havemann, Christa Wolf and many others who lived under the new regime in hope and often in despair, but unwilling to abandon the state which they saw as the only opportunity to prevent a return to National Socialism.

In 1999 the German public television channel ARD broadcast a serialisation in twelve episodes of Klemperer's diaries covering the years 1933-45 under the title Klemperer - ein Leben in Deutschland. As the introduction stated, the series was frei nach Motiven der Tagebücher Viktor Klemperers (loosely based on the diaries of Viktor Klemperer). It was intended for a wide audience in main viewing time and as such was a very worthwhile production, managing on the whole to avoid most of the worst of the "Jews-under-Hitler" clichés. But it bears no comparison with Eberhard Fechner's superb two television series from1975 and 1979 based on Walter Kempowski's Tadellöser und Wolff and Ein Kapitel für sich.