The German Genius

Soviet submarine in January 1945, with the loss of 9,000 passengers. This made it the largest-ever maritime disaster, with losses six times those of the Titanic . 29
    As Steve Crawshaw has said, these authors are not attempting to “air-brush” unpleasant facts out of the picture: German suffering and Jewish suffering are not equal. “They are, however, both real…Germany is sometimes seen as unchanging. In reality, it is a nation of crabwalkers—moving, more rapidly than Germany itself sometimes seems to notice, towards the future and towards the creation of a Germany that we have not seen before.” 30
    Volker Weidermann, editor of the arts and literature section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , has become something of an authority on recent literary history in Germany. In 2008 he published Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher ( The Book of Burnt Books ), an account of the auto da fé on May 10, 1933, when, prompted by students, the Nazis burned the works of ninety-four German and thirty-seven foreign writers. Weidermann tracked down the surviving German authors to rescue several from oblivion. Two years earlier, he had published Lichtjahre ( Light Years ), in which he identified the latest raft of German writers worth reading, among them Ingo Schulze, 33 Augenblicke des Glücks ( 33 Moments of Happiness ; 1995), Thomas Brussig, Helden wie wir ( Heroes Like Us ; 1995), and Thomas Meinecke, whose work tries to bridge pop culture and high seriousness.
    Weidermann also devotes space to Walter Kempowski, who was born in Rostock, arrested in 1948 for smuggling documents to the West that showed the Russians were breaking strategic agreements with the Americans, and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor. Released after eight years, Kempowski, whose novels were popular in the 1970s, set about chronicling Germany’s twentieth-century tragedy via stories of ordinary people, amassing an archive of 8,000 diaries and 300,000 photographs. He also wrote a series of novels going back in German history, the account of which was for him far from heroic. Perhaps because of this, recognition was slow in coming but, at his death in 2007, his reputation was rising. 31
    P OETRY , S ILENCE, AND I NTIMACY A FTER A USCHWITZ
     
    In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously announced that to write poetry after Auschwitz “is barbaric,” but in one sense in Germany there was more of a need for poetry after the war than ever before. The nature of guilt, of grief, of shame, is a private as well as a public matter, and their expression in intimate terms has been as much a feature of postwar German poetry as has anger at what was done in Germany’s name.
    Early on, Wolfgang Weyrauch identified a need for what he called Kahlschlag , a “clearing of the terrain,” a purging of the language, disposal of the “rubble” of the past and a need to invent a language cleansed and freshened but at the same time worthy. This is the context for the first truly successful German poem realized after Auschwitz, Günter Eich’s strikingly simple “Inventur” (Inventory; 1948), notable for its “bald stock-taking of existence” in which deliberately flat language is used as a form of cleanliness, discarding the traditions of meter, rhythm, and metaphor, poetry without the furniture of poetry. 32
    In the 1950s Gottfried Benn’s Statische Gedichte ( Static Poems ) became known to the public. He had continued to write in secret, although forbidden from doing so by the Nazis, and the collection had circulated privately. In one of the best, called “Farewell,” Benn conceded that, early in the 1930s, he had betrayed “my word, my light from heaven” and that redemption was impossible: “There are only two things: emptiness and the constructed self.” As Nicholas Boyle sums it up, “If the self has become pure construction, not made out of interactions with its past experiences or with a given world, there is no place for poetry as it had been practised in Germany from Goethe to Lasker-Schüler.” 33 In his 1951 essay Probleme der Lyrik ( The Problems of Poetry ), Benn outlined his view that art obeys its own rules and that poetry in particular should aim for intimacy and privacy so as to remain beyond the reach of politics; poetry, he said, is a closed world with its own rules, and in remaining so, it becomes redemptive. 34 This hermeticism proved influential for writers such as Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Rose Ausländer.