Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (49 page)

Civil servant, composer, conductor, theatre director and music critic of note, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, aka
E. T. A. Hoffmann
(1776–1822), born in Königsberg, Prussia, changed his middle name to Amadeus in homage to Mozart, whose music he revered. But it was with his wild, whimsical tales, sometimes penned at lightning speed, that he made his living and his mark. A thin little man with deep-set eyes, sharp features and porcupine-like hair, as if he were a character of his own creation, with temperament enough for multiple personalities, his face appears to have been as mobile and versatile as his pen, even after his body succumbed to the paralysis of syphilis.

‘In the Penal Colony’ (‘In der Strafkolonie’), by Franz Kafka, was originally written in 1914 and was published in 1919 as the fourth of a series of Drugulin Editions of short works issued by the Verlag Kurt Wolff. In response to his publisher Kurt Wolff’s shock and concern about the violence of the tale, Kafka replied in a letter dated 10 November
1916: ‘Your objections to the distressing aspects accord completely with my own opinion, though I feel that way about almost everything I have written so far … by way of clarifying the latest story, however, let me merely add that it is not alone in being distressing, but that our times in general, and my own time in particular, have been and continue to be equally distressing.’ Among the contemporary critical responses, only one, by Kurt Tucholsky, sounded its murky depths, declaring it to be ‘a work of art so great that it defies all labels [ … ] The book may not even be of our time,’ whereupon Tucholsky adds with an implied wink: ‘It is completely harmless. As harmless as Kleist.’

The adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ says it all. Notwithstanding his relatively small body of published work, comprising three novels, one of which was left unfinished, stories and short prose fragments,
Franz Kafka
(1883–1924) entered the collective unconscious as few other writers have. Born in Prague into an assimilated Jewish family, he was a lawyer by trade, engaged in investigating the personal injury claims of industrial workers for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, who carved out precious time at night to write. Ironically, a diagnosis of tuberculosis proved both a ticket to freedom, permitting him to quit his job and devote himself entirely to writing, and a death sentence. Posterity must be eternally grateful to his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who ignored his request to burn everything.

‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (‘Die Insel der Tausendjährigen Menschen’), by Georg Kaiser, was written in 1943.

Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser, aka
Georg Kaiser
(1878–1945), was born in Magdeburg and made his name in Berlin as one of the most performed playwrights of the Weimar Republic. Best known for the Expressionist style of his early plays, his style influenced Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. In later plays, Kaiser shifted to a more naturalist manner characterized as
Neue Sachlichkeit
(new sobriety). He also collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on several one-act operas. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Kaiser fled to Switzerland, where he continued to write until his death in 1945.

‘The Tattooed Portrait’ (‘Das Tätowierte Porträt’), by Egon Erwin Kisch, was originally part of a memoir written in German, but contracted for publication in 1936 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in New York, under the English title
Crawling in an Inky River
. Knopf subsequently
reneged on the contract when the changing political climate in the US made the publication of a book by an exiled German writer of leftist leanings inadvisable. Redubbed
Sensation Fair
, the book was brought out by Modern Age Books in New York in 1941. The original German version subsequently appeared in 1942 under the title
Marktplatz der Sensationen
, published by the German exile press El Libro Libre, in Mexico City, and was reissued in 1967 by the Aufbau Verlag in Berlin. The German story ran again in the anthology
Café Klöβchen, 38 Grotesken
, edited by Joachim Schreck, published by the Eulenspiegel Verlag in Berlin in 1980.

Known as ‘Der Rasende Reporter’ (the reporter on the run),
Egon Erwin Kisch
(1885–1948) was a prolific journalist of decidedly literary inclinations. Born in Prague, of Jewish parentage, he lived through the First World War, in which he was wounded, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the proclamation of the Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Third Reich, the Second World War, exile and extensive travel, all of which he documented in countless accounts written for newspapers and thereafter compiled in some thirty-five books. ‘There is nothing more sensational in this world,’ wrote Kisch, summing up his credo, ‘than the time in which we live.’

‘A Raw Recruit’ (‘Gestellung’), by Klabund, was written in 1915, and published in
Der Kunterbuntergang des Abendlandes
(
The Higgledy-Piggledy Path of Western Civilization
), 1922.

Poet, songwriter, satirist, novelist and playwright,
Klabund
, aka Alfred Henschke (1890–1928), was born in Krossen, and grew up in Frankfurt (Oder), the hometown of Heinrich von Kleist. A student of philosophy, philology and drama, he derived his pen-name from a combination of
Klabautermann
(a mischievous imp in North German folklore) and
Vagabund
(vagabond). Weakened lungs from tuberculosis made him unfit for military service. Though, like many of his young patriotic contemporaries, he initially welcomed the First World War, he soon changed his tune, and was charged with treason following his publication of a letter calling for the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The irreverence of his cabaret ditties made him a counter-cultural favourite of the Weimar Republic and a bête noire of the Nazis.

‘St Cecilia or the Power of Music’ (‘Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik’), by Heinrich von Kleist, first ran in several consecutive issues of Kleist’s own newspaper the
Berliner Abendblätter
(
Berlin Evening News
) before it folded.

Heinrich von Kleist
(1777–1811), born in Frankfurt (Oder), in Prussia, was an aristocrat by birth, a rebel by inclination, a Romantic by temperament and one of German literature’s greatest stylists. His plays are now considered classics, and his chiselled prose was a model for the likes of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. A reluctant soldier turned reticent bureaucrat, he tried and failed, first as a magazine editor, then as a newspaper publisher. ‘I do not wish to be happy,’ Kleist wrote in a letter to his half-sister Ulrike, ‘I want to plummet the lowest level of hell.’ He succeeded in his dubious wish. His writing brought him meagre renown. First hailed, then scorned by his contemporaries, Kleist put the final period on the sentence of his short life with a bullet through the head.

‘Conversation’, by Jürg Laederach, was originally published in the author’s collection
Laederachs 69 Arten den Blues zu spielen
(
Laederach’s 69 Ways to Play the Blues
), 1984.

Jürg Laederach
(1945– ) was born in Basel, Switzerland. His numerous publications include novels, short story collections, plays and translations.

‘A Conversation Concerning Legs’ (‘Gespräch über Beine’), by Alfred Lichtenstein, originally appeared in the journal
Aktion
in 1915 and was posthumously published in the author’s book
Geschichten
(1919).

The life of
Alfred Lichtenstein
(1889–1914) lasted all of twenty-five years, cut short by a hostile bullet in the trenches of Vermandovillers on the Somme in the early days of the First World War. Born in Berlin, he studied law, later switching to theatre, before being drafted. One of the lightning rods of the German avant-garde, he published dark poems and eccentric stories in the leading Expressionist journals,
Der Sturm
,
Simplicissimus
and
Die Aktion
. His alter ego, Kuno Kohn, summed up the author’s credo in the story ‘Café Klößchen’: ‘The only solace is to be sad. If sadness slips into despair, better to be grotesque. Live on for a laugh. And try to find a modicum of relief in the fact that existence is little more than a string of brutal, shabby pranks.’

‘The Blackbird’ (‘Die Amsel’), by Robert Musil, originally appeared in the volume
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
(
Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten
), published in 1935 in Zurich, where the author and his wife lived in exile from their native Austria, soon to be annexed by the Third Reich. A compilation of reflections and tales he disparagingly referred to as his ‘little stop-gap book’, it was issued to help keep his head above water while he laboured on his never-to-be-completed
magnum opus,
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(
The Man Without Qualities
).

The son of an academic engineer,
Robert Musil
(1880–1942) was born in the Austrian provincial capital of Klagenfurt, schooled at a military academy, and trained as a mathematician, behavioural psychologist, engineer and philosopher. He digested and channelled these diverse disciplines into his incomparably well-crafted fiction, essays and plays. While his first book,
Die Verwirrungen des Zögling Törless
(
Young Törless
), was a critical and commercial success, subsequent work, fiction and plays earned him respectable reviews, and the prestigious Kleist Prize, but hardly enough money to scrape by. He wrote occasional theatre criticism to try to make ends meet, though the ends never met.

‘The Magic Egg’ (‘Das Wunder-Ei’), by Mynona, was written in 1916 and first collected in
Schwarz-Weiss-Rot. Grotesken
(1919). ‘A New Kind of Plaything’ (‘Neues Kinderspielzeug’) was first collected in
Rosa die Schöne Schutzmannsfrau und Andere Grotesken
(
Rosa, The Constable’s Comely Wife, and other Grotesques
) (1913).

Mynona
, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Intellektuelle Biographie
[
Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography
],
Kant für Kinder
[
Kant for Children
] and his magnum opus, a study of Schopenhauer, titled
Schöpferische Indifferenz
[
Creative Indifference
]) and a literary absurdist by night who took the pen-name Mynona (
Anonym
, the German word for anonymous, spelt backwards) to publish black-humoured tales he called
Grotesken
, or grotesques. Born in the Prussian province of Posen, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Poznan, in Poland, the son of a Jewish physician, Salomo Friedlaender flitted between various activities, including insurance underwriting and the study of medicine, before settling on philosophy as his primary pursuit. Moving to Berlin, he soon found an outlet for his whimsical side, writing and delivering his grotesques at various Expressionist-inspired and Dadaist-leaning cafés. The grotesques were collected during his lifetime in some twenty books. In 1933 he and his wife emigrated to Paris, where he managed to elude the Gestapo – his wife was not so lucky – and where he died in poor health and dire poverty in 1946.

‘The Seamstress’ (‘Die Näherin’), by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of his early stories, was first published in 1894.

Born in Prague, Bohemia, then an eastern dominion of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, aka
Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926), is best known for his poetic works, notably his cycles, the prose poems
Duineser Elegien
(
Duino Elegies
) and verse series
Sonette an Orpheus
(
Sonnets to Orpheus
). But his fiction, notably his semi-autobiographical novel
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge
(
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
), a modernist masterpiece that paved the way for the likes of Robert Musil, is no less remarkable in form and content. The inspiration for the novel was the time Rilke spent in Paris as the secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin, whom he revered. Rodin later fired Rilke for taking the liberty of engaging in personal exchanges with Rodin’s correspondents. A lifelong nomad, Rilke roamed around Europe and spent a formative time at the Château de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, in Switzerland, where he completed the aforementioned poetic cycles.

‘The Onion’ (‘Die Zwiebel’), by Kurt Schwitters, was first published in the German literary review
Der Sturm
in 1919. An anti-
Märchen
conceived as a textual collage of assorted shreds of advertisements, truisms and diatribes, it portrays the artist as sacrificial lamb who gets his own in the end by reassembling his severed parts.

Born in Hanover, painter, sculptor, designer, composer and poet
Kurt Schwitters
(1887–1948) was best known for his collages in image, word and tone. A true ‘realist’ of the twentieth century, he presented the fragmented reality of culture’s collapse. Condemned by the Nazis as an
entarteter
(degenerate) artist, Schwitters fled first to Norway and then to England, where he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and earned a meagre living through portrait-painting. ‘I sympathize with nonsense,’ he once said. Or as he put it in a letter: ‘We play till death takes us away.’

‘Rune Mountain’ (‘Der Runenberg’), by Ludwig Tieck, first appeared in the
Taschenbuch für Kunst und Laune
(
Pocket Compendium for Art and Spirit
), 1804, and was, thereafter, included in the volume
Phantasus
(1812), a collection of Tieck’s fantastic tales.

Born in Berlin, the poet, translator, critic, editor and author of novellas Johann Ludwig Tieck, aka
Ludwig Tieck
(1773–1853), was one of the leading proponents of German Romanticism. In addition to his own compositions, he is known for his translation of Cervantes’
Don Quixote
, as well as plays by William Shakespeare for an edition begun by August Wilhelm von Schlegel that subsequently became a
standard of German literature. He also edited a posthumous edition of the work of Heinrich von Kleist.