North and South

An insightful passage from an early chapter of Professor Dr. Susanne Popp's wonderful new biography of the German composer Max Reger:

Ganz von Riemann auf die deutsche Tradition eingeschworen, lehnte er das Fremde und Andersartige — in seinen Augen die Trivialität und Melodiösität „zweifelhaften Charakters" — der als apostrophierten Oper ab und prognostizierte ihr ein baldiges Verschwinden. Wie eingeschränkt „deutsch" sein Verständnis war, zeigt ein Vergleich mit dem gleichzeitigen Urteil von Jean Sibelius, das Toni Mäkelä überliefert: „Cavalleria rusticana ist auch sehr stark national, und viele Passagen kann nur ein Sizilianer verstehen. Wie Du weißt, hat das Naive eine wichtige Funktion in ihrer Musik. Wir Nordländer neigen mehr zum ,Kontemplativen'. Aber wenn wir es schaffen, unser Philosophieren loszuwerden, können auch wir Begabungen produzieren."

Boye

The third volume of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with a tribute to the narrator's parents, who have succeeded in fleeing to Sweden. The tribute is also one of mourning for his mother - though still alive, she is ill and has withdrawn into a silence from which she cannot be recalled.

Imperceptibly, the image of the mother merges with the image and memory of another female character, that of her friend and colleague, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye, who like other women in the novel is referred to solely by her last name. Boye's suicide, and her own rationale and explanation for it, form the subject of the early part of volume 3.

The novel's sharp focus on the life and work of Boye and the acute attention the narrator devotes to her indicate that for Weiss this author and poet had a more personal significance for Weiss than was the case with Brecht, for example. One wonders if Weiss had met Boye in Sweden - after all, in 1938 his family took up residence in Alingsås, West Gotland, where Boye herself moved in the following year in order to be close to Anita Nathorst. A meeting does not seem improbable.

Some of Weiss's account of Boye's life and of her final months appears to be drawn at least in part from the biography by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet, 1950)- yet there are also some details that may derive from actual contacts with the poet. In particular, Weiss is at pains to analyse Karin Boye's existential, political, artistic, sexual and personal situation in 1941, describing it through the words of the psychoanalytically-trained doctor Max Hodann. Hodann says that in her moment of surrender to Goering at a mass rally in 1932, Boye had made it impossible for her to forgive herself or receive forgiveness, and had consciously and unconsciously abandoned hope. Her novel Kallocain (1940), which depicts the merciless and inhuman conflict in a world that is divided into two opposing blocks, is the testament not only to her own despair but to the despair of a generation. Hodann sees a continuation of Boye's fatal inner and outer dilemma in the inability of the radical German youth of the 1930s and 40s to avoid either a collapse into Nazism or an embrace of Stalinist Communism:

Ich gab Boyes Schilderung wieder, wie sie sich hatte betören lassen dem Mann mit dem bleichen Hysterikergesicht auf der Tribüne in der überfüllten Sporthalle, und wie sie zu spät erst das Ruchlose seiner Reden begriffen habe. Viele von uns, sagte Hodann, immer noch, und oft grade, wenn es um Entscheidendes gehe, wie Kinder, wir ließen uns beherrschen von Hoffnungen, deren Ursprung eingebettet sei in der Erinnrung an das Ertasten der Mutterbrust, im Aufgehn in einer Harmonie, die es für uns nicht mehr gebe. Auch Boye müsse, wie wir alle, nach der Mutter, dem Vater in sich gesucht, und diese, in wachsendem Maß, und durch andre Gestalten ersetzt haben... Ich möchte behaupten, sagte er, daß unsre Generation mehr gezeichnet ist von dem Unheil, das die Sowjetunion ergriff, als von den Verheerungen durch den Faschismus, denn an dem Arbeiterstaat hingen wir mit unserm ganzen kindlichen Glauben, während uns von Anfang an bekannt war, was in Deutschland aufkam.

I'll return to this subject in another post.

The Pact and the Poet

I've found the remaining part of volume 2 of Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance something of a mixed bag, as it deliberately avoids settling down into one main stream of narrative. The sections on Engelbrekt seem a little contrived, as though the author were spinning material to fill out space, especially when one learns that Brecht himself has lost track of the project and the narrator is left alone with his research on the subject. Of more interest are the extensive deliberations on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is now providing all sorts of headaches for the various radicals, including Rosner, who continues to try to find some justification for the nefarious agreement, engaging in a Kafkaesque series of arguments in which the Pact becomes the basis for an "understanding" between the working classes of Germany and Russia. Weiss makes it perfectly clear that he regards the situation as patently absurd, and the characters of the novel appear trapped and helpless in the face of a historical conundrum that goes against all they have worked and fought for.

Brecht's preparations to leave for Finland, and the dismantling, disposal and transporting of his vast private library of world literature (the authors and titles are listed over several pages, take up most of the narrative. There is a nice concluding scene in which Brecht leans out as the Swedish secret police depart after searching the contents of the library for "subversive" literature. "You've forgotten the thrillers!" he shouts to them, and then throws his copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, etc. out of the window down to the garden below.

Shadows of Recession

The latest issue of Hiidenkivi, the cultural magazine published in Helsinki by SKS, the Finnish Literature Society, is focused on the theme of "The Long Shadows of Recession", with a look in words and pictures at three periods of economic crisis in Finland: the early 1930s, the early 1990s and the late 2000s. Articles examine social attitudes to unemployment and poverty through the decades, and there's also a survey of Depression and wartime cookbooks, and a sobering photograph of a Helsinki leipäjono (literally "breadline") or soup kitchen in 2006. Jouni Jäppinen contributes an interesting study of the tiny Baltic-Karelian island of  Tytärsaari, whose Finnish inhabitants traded with local Estonians from the 14th century onwards until the Second  World War, when the island was lost to the USSR (it's still in Leningrad Oblast). And Taru Kolehmainen ponders the history of the Finnish Literature Society's language committee, which was founded in 1928 and modelled to some extent on Germany's Der Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein, which in the Nazi period attempted to rid the German language of foreign - particularly French - loanwords. It's somewhat eerie and even rather disturbing to note some details of the Sprachverein's experiments, such as its aspiration to replace the names of the months of the year with "Germanic" equivalents like Herbstmond (September) and Julmond (December) - for some of these creations seem to have been borrowed from equivalent formations in Finnish (syyskuu, joulukuu). In Finland, the struggle was against Swedish influence, however, and probably represented a natural historical development more or less untainted by ideology.

Meet the Germans - 3

At the now-ended Helsinki Book Fair the German translator Stefan Moster asked how large a share of the Finnish translation market (foreign books available in Finnish) is taken up by books that were translated from German in the twentieth century, writes Hannu Marttila. Apparently, the right answer is around five percent - not the twenty-five plus that Hannu Marttila admits he (wrongly) guessed. It's English that makes most of the running - a point also made by Finnish academic Lea Laitinen this month in an interview with Hiidenkivi's Pirjo Hiidenmaa on the subject of the future of the Finnish language.

Meet the Germans
Meet the Germans - 2

Meet the Germans - 2

An editorial in Books from Finland notes that Finland is to be the "theme country" at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2014.

...a troupe of Finnish writers will go to Germany to meet not just publishers at the Fair in October but the general public and new readers (as well as old, in many cases, as a fair number of Finnish books have been translated into German during the past few years) at readings and lectures: they and their books will get plenty of international attention all year, as literary publicity at Frankfurt is centred round the chosen country.

Another group of Finnish writers will visit Germany next year (2010) as part of a Festival of Finnish Literature organized by Germany's Literaturhaus network in 2010, preparations for which have already begun (see in this blog Meet the Germans).

Finland and Germany (both East and West) have long had close cultural relations, and during the 1930s Finnish authors like Olavi Paavolainen spent a good deal of time in the country - without, however, succumbing to the national mystique.

As we've already observed, Iceland (also a country with long-standing links to Germany) will be Frankfurt's Guest of Honour in 2011.

Two strands in Nordic literature

Still following the thread that was prompted by the discussion of Greenlandic literature, and particularly by the examples and reflections contained in Karen Langgård's essay, I wonder whether the questions connected with the aspiration towards nationhood may not lie at the centre of the debate on Nordic literature itself.

The uncertainty about national role and identity has had a twofold effect on Nordic consciousness and culture. On the one hand, it has led to a preoccupation among Nordic authors and thinkers with issues of identity, society and community, sometimes expressed in religious terms, but more rooted in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and nineteenth century German sociology. On the other hand, much as in Russia, it has often inspired a reaction against those essentially collectivist concerns, leading to the birth of a kind of ethical universalism that derives from the ideals of the German enlightenment, in particular those expressed in the philosophy of Kant.

Just as the Russian classic authors - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev - go beyond the limitations of the social and historical confusion of their age to create an essentially moral universe in which time and matter play a secondary though none the less vivid role, so the work of the great names of Nordic literature - Kierkegaard, Claussen, Blixen, Ibsen, Strindberg - inhabits a realm in which the ethical and existential concerns of the individual are transformed into a portrayal of all human life, perceived in the eye of the absolute. Perhaps this is the other side of the "religious" coin.

The two strands, the social-communal and the universal, are still present in Nordic literature today, although - just as in Russia during the twentieth century - the former has gained the upper hand. When an author like Pia Tafdrup describes herself not as a Danish poet, but a poet who happens to write in Danish, she is to some extent allying herself with the Nordic universalist tradition, though also with literary universalism everywhere, and with writers who fought the collectivist tyranny (the examples of Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and Brodsky come to mind). And those Nordic authors who continue to seek their subjects and inspiration in the analysis of social and political issues are harking back to the uncertain murk of Herder, Hegel and nineteenth century nationalism, with its twentieth century consequences.

This is probably a gross oversimplification, but I think it's one that might be worth further inquiry.

Meet the Germans

Meet the Germans is a website run by the Goethe Institute, and it seeks to explore "what is typical of Germany and German society." One of its blogs is dedicated to the subject of German-Finnish interaction, and in an extensive series of posts the Finland-based authors Thomas Lang and Ariane Grundies reflect on life in Finland as it's experienced by Germans. Judging from recent posts, much of the reflection concerns the topic of saunas, but there are also some insights into the difficulty of pinning down and classifying the Finnish national character:

Ich habe sehr unterschiedliche Dinge gehört: Der Finne sei so und er sei so und anders sei er auch. Er sei Heavy Metal, er sei Natur, er sei Technik, er sei Mökki ohne Strom und Wasser, er sei Mökki mit Wasser, aber ohne Strom, er sei überhaupt kein Mökki, er sei finnisches Design und ein bisschen unpraktisch, er sei zuverlässig, aber dabei ziemlich unzuverlässig und äußerst gesprächig, aber ganz schön still, er sei mehr Schwede, mehr Russland, er sei vor allem er selbst, unpolitisch politisch, stolz und selbstbewusst, doch voller Minderwertigkeitskomplexe, hilfsbereit und offen, er sei sehr schräg, aber ziemlich geradeheraus.

Interestingly, perhaps, the post notes that the Finns tend to describe themselves in terms of the usual clichés, while the Germans contradict them.