A private story

I've now finished the third volume of the German-Swedish author Peter Weiss's long novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, and so have now read all 1787 pages of the 2005 Suhrkamp edition. It's a varied reading experience - something akin to a blend of fiction, documentary report, ideological tract, historical treatise and autobiographical reminiscence - and it's possible to see why if it were to be translated in its entirety, the book would probably have a limited readership, placing its author firmly in the category of a 1000 copy guy. Although the voice of the narrative is not directly Weiss's own, but that of the novel's youthful narrator, it's hard to swallow the illusion that the teenage chronicler and historian would in real life be capable of disgorging this stupendous volume of earnest, didactic oration.

On the other hand, the book does offer some unique insights into the history and psychology of the Germany of the immediate post World War 2 era. The sections in volume 3 that deal with the problem of why a country that was able during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce one of the most highly-evolved aesthetic cultures of Europe, and indeed of the world as a whole, proved at the same time to be an almost total failure in the art of state building and political endeavour, and ended by nearly destroying not only itself but much of the rest of the world as a well. Weiss appears to pin the blame on what he perceives to be an innate Germanic (not only German, for Sweden also comes in for a large dose of criticism) yearning for an ideal realm, a longing unaccompanied by any substantial practical ability that might have brought about its realization. The link between aesthetics and politics which forms the novel's principal thesis is only an abstract one - in practice, the link did not exist, and most of the writers, artists, filmmakers and composers who began by espousing the cause of a New Jerusalem built from Marxist revolutionism ultimately found themselves cast adrift in a murky sea of violence, war, totalitarianism and genocide.

Weiss extends his judgment to condemn not only Germany, but also most of Europe and America. The Soviet Union is seen as a deceptive friend and foe, which during the 1920s and 30s encouraged the aspirations and actions of radical idealists only to betray them, delivering them into the hands of their tormentors and destroyers. The parts of the novel which deal with this - such as the long passages of analysis and recrimination that precede the gory accounts of executions in the Nazi jails - are probably unlike anything else in postwar German literature, possessing the kind of clarity and frankness sought by W.G. Sebald in his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, but not found by him there.

The third volume stands apart from the other two by containing elements of a more conventional narrative kind. The long account of Charlotte Bischoff's voyage from Stockholm to Nazi-occupied Holland aboard a Swedish merchant vessel could be taken from a 1930s spy thriller, while the section describing the executions of German communists (including two of the novel's principal characters) in Plötzensee Prison have a lurid quality that is possibly at odds with the elevated style of much of the rest of the book. In the end, I found that the unyielding nature of the narrative technique, the unbroken yet breathless hammering of the syntax and diction, made it hard to be swept along by the flow of language and rhetoric as the author undoubtedly intended. By the last 100 pages or so there is a definite sense of exhaustion, with the clauses of the long sentences coming in shorter and shorter bursts - one literally feels that the narrator is almost at his last gasp.

Sebald called this a "genuinely catastrophic novel in which, with a shattering sense of system, Peter Weiss wrecked what he knew was the little life remaining to him", and it is hard not to concur with that judgment. For a work which aims to embrace the aspirations and sufferings of an entire generation, with only a few exceptions this is all too clearly a book of individual self-analysis and self-destruction. Perhaps, given the continued silence about the inner, intellectual reasons for the rise of Nazism in pre-war Germany (a silence that persists not only in Germany itself but also in the rest of Europe), there was no other way in which Peter Weiss could write his fascinating, cataclysmic but ultimately private book.

Resisters

In the second volume of Peter Weiss's long novel - I'm now in the section between pp. 553 and 627 - I notice a sudden change in the narrative technique. For one thing, the sense of "paragraph-lessness" is receding. There are more frequent breaks in the blocks of text, and one is now reading what are almost long but clearly demarcated paragraphs. For another, the specific locale - in this case Sweden and Stockholm - is being described and invoked in a much more concrete and realistic manner than was characteristic of the section devoted to Spain (the second half of volume one). One supposes that a reason for this may be that the author has a greater degree of immediate and long-term familiarity with the places he is describing, The need to insert chunks of art history and Greek mythology into the text seems for the present to have lost its urgency, and the story is developing in a manner that is almost that of traditional nineteenth century fiction - one almost could be reading a story or novel by Tolstoy. The characters converse, they eat and drink, they laugh, they are becoming almost human.

The analogy with Tolstoy also comes to mind in the fact that the characters now being developed and described are historical figures. This is a historical novel, after all. Just as in War and Peace Tolstoy introduces military figures and political leaders into the narrative, Weiss now brings in not only Max Hodann, but a number of other real-life people who worked as political activists in the exiled German Communist anti-Nazi resistance movement. We meet Charlotte Bischoff, who having fled the Third Reich is now in Sweden preparing to return to Germany in order to carry out undergound resistance work there. "Lindner" appears to be the German-Czech resistance worker Hertha Lindner, though from a historical point of view it isn't clear that she was in Sweden during 1939. Weiss now also introduces Rosalinde Ossietzky, daughter of the radical German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1889-1938), who in Stockholm tells the narrator and Max Hodann about the torture and murder of her father by the Nazi authorities. She also recalls the actions of some pro-Nazi Norwegian cultural figures, including the novelist Knut Hamsun, who took part in an active campaign to discredit her father and to deny him the award of the Nobel Prize which he received in 1935.

It has to be said that Weiss succeeds in leading these new characters onto the stage quite naturally, without much ideological ballast - they act and talk like real people, and above all one can believe in them. It is only a pity that the author forgot (or perhaps decided not) to include explanatory notes on these figures, who will  probably be unfamiliar to many of his readers, even - or especially - in Germany. There the affinity to Tolstoy breaks down, for Tolstoy's historical characters were all well-known to his readership. However, with the advent of Wikipedia, it's not too hard to keep abreast of the historical and biographical background as one reads - this was hardly the situation of readers of this challenging novel three decades ago.

Although Sweden in 1939 is now a temporary home for many of the political activists being brought to life, most of them are there illegally. Weiss is scathing about the country's Aliens Act of 1938, which in a response to antisemitic protests (among others, by students at Lund and Upsala universities) virtually closed the door to Jewish refugees altogether. As is consistently the case throughout the whole of the Aesthetics, Weiss groups Jewish and Communist refugees together - for him the Holocaust has two elements, a racial one and a political one. Sometimes they overlap, but they are distinct, separate and of equal validity. The reader is left unaided to deal with this debatable historical construct.

Another problem is the account of the international political events of 1939 which led up to the outbreak of war. The account is heavily influenced by Stalinist versions of history, with the Baltic States, for example, being stigmatized as "semi-fascist" and standing in the way of a successful Soviet defence - part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy being cooked up by Great Britain, France and the United States. One feels that, although this Tolstoyan historical digression is put, somewhat unconvincingly, into the mouth of the youthful narrator, who is only in his teens, one can't help feeling that it would have been better if Weiss had left it out, for it leaves an unpleasant taste, even as fiction. The bewilderment of the narrator and his friends as the German-Soviet Credit Agreement of 1939 is signed is well-described, but again there need to be some notes or other signposts for the reader.

I'm now moving on into the closing section of the first part of volume two, in which the narrator visits the island of Lidingö near Stockholm where the Swedish sculptress Ninnan Santesson has put her home at the disposal of the German writer and dramatist Bertolt Brecht and his family. 

Hallgrímur Helgason: The Author of Iceland - 2

(continued)

And now, as an initiated member of the Comintern, he stood on the special platform that had been erected beside the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square for the anniversary of the revolution, within earshot of the Leader himself, the Sun King, the Pharaoh, the Emperor. And I, his comrade, beside him, a 26-year-old kid with a book in the making. What was I? What was I doing there? I was writing The Lights of Peace. And I was acquainting myself with the onward-marching success of communism. It was a big parade. We stood there for three hours, while the Soviet republics marched past one by one, my God there were a lot of them. Whole factories strode past, army divisions, coalmines, collective farms, schools, athletes, children and women. A hundred thousand copies of the super-worker Stakhanov, smiling triumphantly in the face of socialism, the tanned and pockmarked face of socialism, the one with the big moustache that overshadowed all our lives. And everyone was ordered to keep their arms folded on their chest so that no one would go and shoot the fellow. The danger of this might possibly have disturbed the Leader’s concentration as he peered at this endless procession and selected the face of the next person to shoot.

From an ash-grey sky finely-wrought snowflakes descended, fluttering angularly in the calm air like the scraps of paper that Americans pour over their heroes – God was blessing the Revolution – and fighter planes flew overhead in formation, while others flew low over the highest towers of Russian history. All of it a magnificent spectacle, but painfully long-drawn-out. However, we put up with it and stood there for three hours in 5 degrees of frost. People did not walk out of shows that Stalin directed.

‘What must take place is the plain and simple overthrow of the social structure. We must dissolve it in order to be able to attain the dictatorship of the proletariat. Anything else is just rightocracy. The rightocrats are the road-layers of fascism.’

‘But what about democracy? Hasn’t it a…’

‘According to Lenin, in capitalist states the so-called democracy is an empty illusion, a means of oppression. The true democratic republic is the power of the people, the proletariat, a republic is a res publica, and it must be organized by good people. People like Comrade Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Beria…’

We sat on hard bast chairs in the café of Hotel Metropol, trying to slurp away the chill after the march-athon on Red Square. He was teaching me. I drank in every word. We spoke Icelandic even though Kristján’s fiancée, the Swedish Lena, had now joined us. She was pretty but far too guillemot-like for my taste, with a long neck and a beak nose, as thin as a rake. To tell the truth, I could never get rid of the notion that Lena Billén’s body was just too bourgeois. She didn’t even know how to dress in a proletarian manner, with a far-too Parisian hat on her boyish head and long pearl necklaces at her throat, which I knew got on Stjáni’s nerves. One of these days those necklaces would probably strangle her. From time to time I smiled at the Swedish guillemot and looked at the two-year-old girl she held in her arms. A dark-haired moppet, powerfully built. Her name was Nína, and I sometimes suspected that Kristján was her father, but we never discussed it. Another more important matter preoccupied our minds. At the tables around us sat stately party men – with such strangely iron expressions in these imperial surroundings – and silent women who like Lena looked out of the windows, out at the November-grey Pushkin Square, which the first snow of the winter was quickly turning white. Kristján looked quickly around him after he spoke these last words. ‘Stalin, Molotov, Beria.’ Yes, he had spoken them in a positive way, without any mockery. This was his third time in Moscow, and he had now been here for ten months, well-schooled in circumspection. One thoughtless word could wipe out twenty years’ work. I was still trying to get used to this.

‘Kristján, have you any plans for this evening?’ said Lena, in Swedish.

‘Yes, Einar is going to have dinner with us. In our room.’

(to be continued)

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

The Author of Iceland - 1

Ulla-Lena Lundberg: The Marzipan Soldier - 2

[continued]

The milieu in which he is living is familiar. The school is home from home for him, the timetable and food are as they were in the artillery corps. He has always been surrounded by boys. The smells are familiar, nothing repellent, but not enticing either, like the female smells of the cowsheds.

More acrid where men gather. The smell of sweaty feet that is really something, familiar from gym halls and changing rooms. Underarm sweat, too. The smell of dirt that becomes distinct before the Saturday sauna. The smell of urine from the latrine, old tobacco in one's clothes. The smell of rot-gut from the mouths of those who have had a night out and dared to get drunk.

And then the fresh smell of snow in the school yard, the pines, the horse-dung, the fumes from passing lorries, the smell of firewood wherever one turns, smoke from all of Riihimäki's chimneys. Finland at war.

Mealtimes are irregular right from the outset, for Riihimäki receives assiduous attention from the Russian airforce. There are no air-raid shelters under the school, so the recruits are ordered out to the forest when there is an alarm. There they watch the brickwork receive a direct hit, a stack of firewood start to burn and the glassworks sounds like a gigantic breaking of the ice when it is hit. It's like being at the cinema, but in reality. The lads stand and gape as at a giant-sized screen, only throwing themselves to the ground when a flying bomb explodes nearby: Ouch, my ears!

It is undeniably war, but healthy lads with matriculation certificates and artillery corps experience can't be squandered away like cannon fodder. They need to be trained as officers, and so Göran Kummel and those like him selected for NCO training school. School is not something one can escape in this life, even though one thought one was joining the war in order to get the school dust out of one's lungs.

Göran also attracts attention in another way. His handsome artillery corps uniform is the reason why Sunday after Sunday he is detailed to the guard of honour that stands stiffly to attention at the heroes' funerals. One can't help being just a tiny bit flattered at being considered worthy of being displayed on solemn occasions. Washed as he has been taught by Mother, shaven and brushed, dressed in his finery and touchingly young, Göran raises the tone in the church. Still as glass, or almost, he stands with his gaze directed forward, but his features are soft and the lad in uniform as sweet as if he were made of marzipan. He by no means unaware of the fact that Riihimäki's women and girls like to look at him. Furtively or more or less directly, and one doesn't need to be ashamed about that. The guard of honour stands like an emblem of those one is mourning: young, young men with soft features and living blue eyes, fallen for the Fatherland in their first bloom.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

The Marzipan Soldier

Out in the world - 2

Continuing his series of essays on Ulla-Lena Lundberg's Åland trilogy, Hbl's Philip Teir moves on from Leo to consider the second part of the sequence, Stora världen (The Big Wide World), which takes the story into the 20th century. Teir notes that "if Leo was an episodic family 'tall tale' in the best oral tradition, its sequel... is a modern, polyphonic novel with a myriad of versatile intellects."

The book appeared in 1991, the same year that saw the publication of Lars Sund's Colorado Avenue, a family saga about emigration to North America that's also set in the late 1890s and early 1900s (it was also made into a movie by Finnish director Claes Olsson). Teir says that if we include Kjell Westö's Där vi en gång gått (Where Once We Walked), set in the same decades, we end up with a Finland-Swedish trilogy about the years that led to the Finnish civil war of 1918, with a diverse geographical perspective: Ostrobothnia, Åland and Helsinki. Of the three books, Teir characterizes Lundberg's as the most realistic, and analyzes its preoccupation with male identity and the development of social class in Finland -- subjects that Lundberg handles with an absence of any ideological program or political slant.

Besides being a useful introduction to the Lundberg novel, Teir's essay also gives some background on the historical novel genre in Finland and Scandinavia as a whole. One feels that these books would appeal to readers beyond the Nordic countries: not only do they describe a world, but they also place the individual within that world and map out his everyday struggles and aspirations.

Again, one can't help feeling surprise: it's strange that none of these absorbing and well-written narratives has yet appeared in English translation. They do indeed represent the missing middle ground in Nordic fiction that Per Svensson discusses from a Swedish perspective in his Sydsvenskan article.

Out in the world
Philip Teir - a poem
Nordic historical novels
The missing midfield

Nordic historical novels

There aren't that many available in English. Considering the prodigious output of 19th and 20th century Scandinavian historical novelists like Jonas Lie, J.P. Jacobsen, Verner von Heidenstam , Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlöf, Knut Hamsun, Gunnar Gunnarsson, and nearer to our own time Väinö Linna, Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Carsten Jensen, it's surprising that more of their work hasn't been translated.