Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (2 page)

In ‘The Singing Bone’, one of the Brothers’ lesser-known, albeit most telling tales, a wandering shepherd-cum-minstrel stumbles on a little white bone, out of which he carves a mouthpiece for his horn. But the bone has its own agenda:

   Oh, dear little shepherd boy,

   The bone you blow on knows no joy,

   My brother slay me.

   Beneath the bridge he laid me

   All for the wild boar’s hide

   To make the king’s daughter his bride.

No mere accommodating object, this, no mouthpiece for an idle ditty – the bone cannot help but echo the smothered cries of the misdeed. The shepherd’s breath, like an archaeologist’s glue,
re-
members the dismembered. (In ‘The Onion’, an anti-
Märchen
included here, the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, best known for his visual collages, reconstitutes another kind of re-membering.)

The Grimms, it turns out, albeit unbeknownst to them, had a prehistoric prototype. In 2009 archaeologists from the University of Tübingen digging in the Hohle Fels Cave, in south-west Germany, not far from Ulm, reported their discovery of a 35,000-year-old, 8.5-inch-long, five-holed flute carved out of the hollow bone of a griffon vulture.
⁴
It is only fitting that a bone flute, a singing bone of the sort immortalized by the Grimms, should have been discovered, not in a riverbed in broad daylight, but in the dark pit of a cave where it was surely played by its maker to tame the restless spirits and still the fears of night.

This anthology gathers German imaginative texts from a span of several centuries and from various literary movements born of crisis and doubt. The German Romantics (Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Josef von Eichendorff, Heinrich von Kleist, Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine et al.) formulated an imaginative reaffirmation of German identity in response to the trauma of the Napoleonic occupation of German lands. Expressionists like Georg Heym, Georg Kaiser and Alfred Lichtenstein and Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters functioned as a visionary avant-garde responding to the economic and cultural collapse leading up to and in the wake of the First World War. Schwitters’ visual and verbal collages constitute a realistic portrayal of a broken world. Post-Second-World-War lyrical realists, like Wolfgang Borchert, embodied a poetic attempt to re-member, to put the shattered fragments of the German identity back together and start over again after the cataclysm of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The collection also includes unclassifiable tales and texts, like those of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, that fit the tenets of no movements. The narratives gathered here have been variously referred to by those inclined to categorize as allegories, fairy tales, tales of the fantastic, parables, fables, prose poems and grotesques. I prefer to think of them as enigmatic
tales. The common thread that runs throughout is a feverish intensity and a predilection for the stuff of dreams.

Styles and tactics vary. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and von Eichendorff’s ‘The Marble Statue’ are prime examples of a hallucinatory literature of heightened consciousness and extreme states of mind. Hoffmann employs an ecstatic prose, a hybrid blend of half-science, mystical leanings, strained sobriety and barely controlled madness. (Freud, who attempted to elucidate the mysteries of ‘The Sandman’ in his essay ‘On the Uncanny’ [‘Über das Unheimliche’], elsewhere, in a letter to Martha Bernays, dubbed the story ‘mad, fantastic stuff’.) Tieck pits a traditional Teutonic fascination with mountains and forests against the sentimental lure of
Heimat
(homeland). Von Eichendorff ultimately resorts to religion to rein in and wrap up the chthonic anarchy of his hero’s restless imaginings. And in a transcendent and totally original work like ‘St Cecilia or the Power of Music’, Heinrich von Kleist, the most and least Romantic of the lot, employs the astute tactical manoeuvring of a soldier and the sometimes dispassionate, sometimes plodding prose of a Prussian civil servant to render the ineffable. (A century later we will find a kindred tendency in Kafka.)

In ‘Peter Schlemiel’, Adelbert von Chamisso, a French émigré who discovered his literary voice in German, adds a twist of Gallic whimsy to the German
Märchen
, toying with its constraints, freeing it up with the wilful possibilities of unfettered metaphor. When asked which book by another author he would most like to claim as his own, the great twentieth-century Italian fabulist Italo Calvino cited Chamisso’s small masterpiece. This eerie black comic tale of the hapless Schlemiel, who foolishly bartered his shadow for worldly stature and wealth, influenced the diverse likes of Hans Christian Andersen, who borrowed the premise for a story of his own, ‘The Shadow’; Karl Marx, who alludes to it in his famous essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’; Jacques Offenbach, who includes a likewise shadow-less character of the same name in his opera
Les contes d’Hoffmann
; J. M. Barrie, whose play
Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up
, begins, as you
may recall, with Peter in search of his lost shadow; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who makes mention of it in his
Philosophical Investigations
. Having borrowed the Yiddish word
schlemiel
, a hopeless bungler liable to trip on his own shadow, from his Jewish friends in Berlin, with whom he identified as fellow outsiders, Chamisso returned the favour by introducing the term into the German language.

Among those with whom the homeless Frenchman crossed paths at the literary salon of Rahel Varnhagen, the converted Jewish muse of the Romantics, was Heinrich Heine. Heine paid tribute to Chamisso in
The Harz Journey
, where he noted his delight at discovering in the guest book of an inn at which he stopped ‘the much-cherished name of Adelbert von Chamisso, the biographer of the immortal Schlemiel’.

The last Romantic and the first modernist, Heine, himself a Jewish convert to Christianity, had a field day with idealized German Romantic notions, singing odes to nature, and laughing all the while. In his description of the life of miners in ‘Descent into the Mines’, Heine sounds the depths of German
Märchen
and myth with a folklorist’s eye, a poet’s insight and a satirist’s wit, in the process pressing the limits of German locution. The witty, vitriolic Austrian critic Karl Kraus went so far as to accuse him of having ‘un-corseted the German language and enabled every Tom, Dick and Harry to fondle its breasts’.
⁵

While reviling Heine, Kraus revered his fellow Viennese, Peter Altenberg, for cultivating the hybrid poetic-prose form Heine had launched. All three were consummate stylists, linked by their love and mastery of the German language, but also, incidentally, by their alienated stance as converted Jews straining for acceptance in a largely hostile society.

Jewish authors of the German language comprise an important literary strain in the early twentieth century, particularly in the literature of angst and enigma. In grotesques like ‘The Magic Egg’ and ‘A New Kind of Plaything’, Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender), a philosopher by training and temperament, manages to lace Kant’s pure reason with the absurdist logic of Chelm, the legendary Jewish village of fools. The irreverent satires of Kurt Tucholsky and Egon Erwin Kisch, likewise included
in this anthology, combine an in-your-face Jewish chutzpah with an unflinching German political idealism.

Scholars have traced Kafka’s inspiration back to the dark parables of the Hasidic Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and other Jewish mystics, the influence of which cannot be denied. Kafka’s tales are indeed firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, reaching all the way back to the biblical Book of Jonah, the nightmare of a man literally engulfed and spat back out by the physical manifestation of his angst. But it would be a foolish error to try to extract Kafka’s writings from the language and literary tradition in which they were written. As Tucholsky detected in a glowing review of ‘In the Penal Colony’,
⁶
Kafka had a more than passing affinity with Kleist. ‘It is not true, as people maintain, that dreams are dreamy,’ Tucholsky wrote. ‘So mercilessly hard, so gruesomely objective and crystal clear is this dream of Franz Kafka’s [ … ] Since [Kleist’s novella]
Michael Kohlhaas
no German story has been written that with such conscious force appears to stifle every semblance of sympathy and yet is so infused with the spirit of its author.’ In a letter to his sometime fiancée Felice, Kafka confirmed Tucholsky’s prognosis, referring to Kleist as one of his ‘true blood relations’.
⁷
Fellow misfits – Kleist scorned by the Prussian aristocratic lineage out of which he sprang, Kafka spurned by the assimilated Jewish provincial middle class that spawned him – both writers harvested their traumas, and managed in the merciless prose of the military tactician and the office bureaucrat, respectively, to capture and depict the incomprehensible.

A streak of melancholy and depression bordering on madness unquestionably runs through the authors and tales in this book. Hoffmann’s hero Nathaniel toys with and ultimately succumbs to it, leaping to his death. Tieck’s protagonist, the young hunter, likewise loses his mind. Von Eichendorff’s young nobleman battles it out with his demiurges that almost get the better of him. Painstakingly depicting the contours and constraints of a hopeless world, a world from which he feels excluded, Kleist’s last period on the long sentence of his short life is a bullet through the head. The great Austrian modernist master Robert
Musil’s tale ‘The Blackbird’ is a vivid account either of the inexplicable, the precise charting of an alternate universe, a parallel irreality, or of a descent into madness, which may very well be one and the same. Fellow
flâneurs-
raconteurs, the Austrian Peter Altenberg and Swiss Robert Walser, spent spells of time in insane asylums, Walser ultimately withdrawing to one, where he wiled away the last twenty years of his life. Georg Heym dramatized schizophrenia, a condition with which fellow Berliner Unica Zürn battled for much of her life, and to which she ultimately succumbed with a fateful leap. Kurt Tucholsky and Paul Celan were suicides, Ingeborg Bachmann a casualty of depression, alcohol and pills. And yet it would be ill advised to label their work the literature of lunatics.

Tucholsky and Celan surely had extenuating historical circumstances for their depression and their decision to end their lives. Society itself had gone mad. The collapse of social democracy and the seemingly unstoppable rise of Adolf Hitler drove Tucholsky first into exile and finally to his wits’ end. Born in the Bukovina, at the time the easternmost German-speaking outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in the Ukraine, poet Paul Celan saw his world collapse and lost his family and almost everything dear to him in the Holocaust – everything, that is, except for the German language. Though his was a death by drowning – he leapt into the Seine – one might well take the metaphoric liberty of suggesting that he strangled on the same syllables he had braided into verse.

It is precisely the uncanny ability of the authors in this book to hold on to lucidity, sometimes at considerable cost, often with an unsettling humour, and to share their flashes of insight into the dark recesses of the human condition, that makes their work worth reading.

Peter Wortsman

Berlin, January 2010–New York, June 2011

1
.    ‘Franz Kafka, the Vulture’, in
Selected Non-Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges
, edited by Elliot Weinberger (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999).

2
.    The German term
Dichter
applies, strictly speaking, not only to poets but also encompasses authors of prose of acknowledged literary merit.

3
.   
Café Klößchen,
38
Grotesken
, edited and with an afterword by Joachim Schreck (Berlin, DDR: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 1980).

4
.    ‘Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music’, Science Section,
The New York Times
, 24 June 2009.

5
.    ‘Heine und die Folgen’ (Heine and the Consequences), Karl Kraus, in
Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie
(Vienna and Leipzig: Verlag Die Fackel, 1922).

6
.    ‘In der Strafkolonie’, a review by Peter Panter (aka Kurt Tucholsky),
Die Weldbühne
, 3 June 1920.

7
.    In a letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, Kafka designated Grillparzer, Dostoyevsky, Kleist and Flaubert as ‘my true blood-relations’. Franz Kafka,
Letters to Felice
(New York: Schocken Books, 1967).

1812

The Brothers Grimm

Once upon a time a great lamentation arose in a certain land because of a wild boar that tore up the fields of the farmers, killed their livestock and ripped open people’s bodies with its tusks. The king offered a rich reward to anyone who could rid the land of this calamity, but the beast was so big and strong that nobody dared to approach the forest in which it dwelt. Finally the king let it be known that whosoever captured or killed the wild boar would have the hand of his only daughter in marriage.

Now in this land there lived two brothers, sons of a poor man, who came to the king and were willing to take on this hazardous undertaking. The older brother, who was crafty and shrewd, offered his help out of pride; the younger brother, who was innocent and simple, did so out of the goodness of his heart.

The king said: ‘So that you are all the more certain to find the beast, you will enter the forest from opposite sides.’ The older one entered from where the sun sets and the younger one from where it rises.

And after the younger brother had been walking a short while, a little man came up to him, holding a black spear in his hand, and said: ‘This spear I give you because your heart is pure and good; with it you may confidently set upon the wild boar, it will do you no harm.’ He thanked the little man, hoisted the spear onto his shoulder and continued fearlessly on his way. It wasn’t long before he spotted the beast, which came charging at him. He held out the spear, and in the creature’s rage it clove its heart in two. Then he lifted the monster onto his shoulder and carried it homewards, wanting to bring it to the king.