Glossen

Ein Vergleich von Lutz Seilers Kruso und Ulrich Plenzdorfs
Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

von Karin Schestokat

 

Plenzdorfs kurzer Roman Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.[1] war ein großer Erfolg beim Lesepublikum sowohl in der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik als auch in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, als er Anfang der 70er Jahre erschien. Seine Popularität hielt über die Jahre an, so dass der Roman zur Schullektüre wurde, den heutige Schüler und Schülerinnen immer noch lesen. Er ist Ausdruck eines Zeit- und damit auch Lebensgefühls, das aber im Endeffekt nicht gelebt werden konnte. Zu fragen ist also, warum nicht? Lutz Seilers Roman Kruso[2] war ein literarischer Erfolg, für den der Autor im Jahre 2014 den Deutschen Buchpreis und hohes Lob von der Kritik erhielt. Auch dieser Roman lässt die Leser und Leserinnen an einem Lebensgefühl teilhaben, das ebenfalls ein Ende erreichte, vielleicht weil der Staat, in dem Edgar Wibeau nicht überleben konnte, nun selbst der Vergangenheit angehört. Trotzdem gibt es aber motivische Ähnlichkeiten zwischen diesen auf den ersten Blick doch recht unterschiedlich anmutenden Werken. Mit dem Aufdecken dieser beschäftigt sich der folgende Artikel.

Vorangestellt sind Zusammenfassungen der Rezeption sowie die Handlungen und Hauptthemen der Werke, was dann zu der Darstellung der Verbindungen führt, wie ich sie sehe. Diese beiden Texte wurden in einem Zeitraum von 40 Jahren veröffentlicht, und ich denke, dass ein Lesen von Plenzdorfs Roman im Vergleich zu Seilers’ neue Möglichkeiten der Interpretation des Romans Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. zulassen kann. Die Autoren dieser beiden Werke entwickelten ihre Hauptcharaktere vor dem Hintergrund der sich ändernden Gesellschaft in der DDR, die als Staat seit Oktober 1990 aufgehört hat zu existieren.

In meiner Analyse möchte ich mit Plenzdorfs Text beginnen. Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. wurde 1972 zuerst in verkürzter Form in der ostdeutschen Zeitschrift Sinn und Form veröffentlicht und ein Jahr später in verlängerter Prosaform vom Hinstorff Verlag herausgegeben und erschien schließlich 1973 sowohl in der damaligen DDR als auch in der damaligen BRD. Plenzdorfs kurzer Roman ist von der literarischen Presse und Literaturkritikern hoch gelobt und seine Sonderstellung anerkannt worden. So können wir in einem literarischen Blog vom 8. August 2007, in welchem dem Tod des Autors gedacht wurde, zum Beispiel lesen, dass

Plenzdorf, der als Schriftsteller in der DDR gewirkt hat, […] die Möglichkeit [nutzt], dass es damals auch Zeiten gab, in denen man sich als Künstler selbst in der DDR die Freiheit nehmen durfte, das System zu kritisieren. Die sozialistischen Grundfesten sind im Werk allgegenwärtig, werden jedoch in der Person von Edgar scharf kritisiert. Der junge Mann findet seinen Platz in der Gesellschaft nicht, weil er anders ist, weil er seine Kreativität ausleben will und mit seiner abweichenden Lebenshaltung aneckt.[3]

Uwe Wittstock schreibt in seiner Rezension, veröffentlicht am 09.08.2007 im Kulturteil der digitalen Ausgabe der Welt, dass „… Plenzdorf das Lebensgefühl der ostdeutschen Jugend [traf]”, dass der Roman „… die realsozialistische Variante der ewig gleichen, ewig wahren Geschichte eines idealistischen Jugendlichen [ist], der aufbegehrt gegen die engherzige, staubtrockene Welt der Erwachsenen.“ Und weiter heißt es, dass …

der Roman … ein Meisterwerk der Stimmimitation [ist]: Auf den Spuren von Mark Twains „Huck Finn“ und Salingers „Fänger im Roggen“ traf Plenzdorf einen schnoddrigen Ton, in dem sich Jugendliche in Ost und West wiedererkennen konnten. Dass es ihm dazu aber noch gelang, den verlogenen Polit-Jargon der DDR-Zeitungen, die hilflosen Plattitüden der Erwachsenen und nicht zuletzt das glühende, bedrängende Deutsch aus Goethes „Werther“ – den Plenzdorfs Held als einen Seelenverwandten betrachtet – in dem schmalen Roman unterzubringen, macht daraus ein frühes Glanzstück postmoderner Literatur, entstanden zu einer Zeit, in der in Deutschland noch kaum jemand den Begriff buchstabieren konnte.[4]

Und in einer Rezension im Focus Online vom 9. August 2007 kann man lesen, dass Plenzdorfs Roman zu Recht als ein „Stück DDR-Weltliteratur“ [gilt], wie die Berliner Akademie der Künste in einem Nachruf schrieb. Weiter heißt es dort, dass dieses Theaterstück in der Sprache der DDR-Jugend nachempfundenen Ausdrucksweise geschrieben worden sei und dass es zu einem Sensationserfolg wurde, als es 1972 in Halle uraufgeführt wurde. Erst später wurde es zu einem Roman umgearbeitet. Plenzdorf meinte, er habe sein bekanntestes Werk nur deshalb zu einem Buch gemacht, weil es in der DDR als Film nicht durchsetzbar gewesen wäre. Und so wurde es später in Westdeutschland verfilmt.[5]

Als Plenzdorf 2007 im Alter von 72 Jahren verstarb, hat der damalige Bundespräsident Horst Köhler ihn als einen wichtigen und einflussreichen Autor gewürdigt. Er schrieb in einem Brief an die Witwe, dass „[Plenzdorf] mit seiner sensiblen Beobachtungsgabe und seinem feinen Gespür für sprachliche Nuancen [es] verstand, das Lebensgefühl insbesondere junger Menschen authentisch zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Das hat ihm in Ost und West viel Bewunderung und ein treues Publikum eingebracht.“[6] Und Georg Jäger zitiert Stephan Hermlin, dem zufolge das Werk „authentisch die Gedanken, die Gefühle der DDR-Arbeiterjugend formuliert…“ Jäger führt auch die Laudatio bei der Verleihung des Heinrich-Mann-Preises an Plenzdorf (1973) an, die Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. „ein Gleichnis jugendlichen Denkens und Empfindens in unserer Zeit und in unserem Land“ nennt. Des Weiteren findet sich bei Jäger eine Zusammenfassung der Rezeptionen des Werkes in der DDR und in der BRD, sowohl des Textes als auch der Theateraufführungen und Verfilmungen des Romans.[7]

Edgar Wibeau in Plenzdorfs Roman Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., eigentlich ein Musterschüler, der nie aufgemuckt hat, bricht endlich doch aus der engen Beziehung zu seiner Mutter und ihrer gemeinsamen Wohnung aus. Nachdem seine Bewerbung um ein Kunststudium abgelehnt worden ist, zieht er in die Laube der Eltern seines besten Freundes Willi in Berlin. Diese Laube steht noch in einer ehemaligen Schrebergartenkolonie, vormals angelegt für die Arbeiter in den Fabriken Berlins, damit sie sich dort an Wochenenden in frischerer Luft erholen und vielleicht sogar Früchte und Gemüse ernten konnten, um damit ihr geringes Auskommen etwas aufzubessern. Zu dem Zeitpunkt, an dem Edgar in die Laube zieht, auf seine Kolchose, wie er sie etwas ironisch nennt (Leiden, 64, 84), sollen diese mittlerweile heruntergekommenen Gärten und Lauben abgerissen werden. Deshalb nutzt auch niemand außer Edgar mehr dieses Gelände. Zu der Laube gehört ein Abort, und dort findet er ein Buch ohne Einband, dessen erste und letzte Seiten er selbst als Toilettenpapier verwendet hat (Leiden, 36). Ed, der sich normalerweise auf dem Klo Zeit lässt, fängt an zu lesen. Nach seiner anfänglichen Befremdung, die sich auf den literarischen Stil des Buches bezieht, vergleicht er seine eigene Situation mit der des Helden. Bald wird den Lesern und Leserinnen klar, dass Ed eine Kopie von Goethes Briefroman Die Leiden des jungen Werther gefunden hat. Ed braucht eine Weile, bevor ihm klar wird, dass er diesen gewählten, etwas gestelzt anmutenden Ausdrucksstil für seine Zwecke ausbeuten und durch Zitate aus dem Buch seine Ansprechpartner verunsichern kann. Teil des Charmes von Plenzdorfs Werk ist natürlich, dass der Autor seinen unwissenden Helden mit doppeldeutigen Anspielungen gegen Werther ausspielt und gleichzeitig Parallelen zwischen den beiden aufzeigt. Mit diesem Aspekt des Romans hat sich die Sekundärliteratur schon sehr ausgiebig beschäftigt[8] und deshalb möchte ich darauf hier nicht näher eingehen.

Während seiner Zeit in der Laube hält Edgar nur noch zu Willi Kontakt, indem er ihm Tonbandkassetten schickt, die er besprochen hat. Dabei beschreibt er sein Leben und kommentiert das, seiner Meinung nach, irrationale Verhalten Werthers, besonders gegenüber Charlotte. Ed findet eine Parallele zu seinem eigenen Leben, denn er beobachtet eine junge Frau, die im angrenzenden Kindergarten arbeitet. Bald lernt er sie näher kennen und erfährt, dass sie Charlie heißt, und mit einem Dieter verlobt ist, was ihn aber nicht daran hindert, sich ebenfalls in sie zu verlieben.

Anders als Werther ist Ed aber nicht in die Natur entflohen, sondern in die Großstadt Berlin. Sein Vater kommt wohl aus einer aristokratischen Familie und hat das noble Blut der Hugenotten in seinen Adern, aber alles, was Ed von ihm weiß ist, dass er ein oft betrunkener Künstler sein soll, der seine Frau, Eds Mutter, sitzen gelassen hat, als Ed noch sehr jung war. Ed findet aber eine Art Vaterfigur in einem Kollegen auf der Arbeit, nämlich in dem siebzigjährigen Zaremba, den er für seine natürliche Menschlichkeit, seine Weisheit und seine Lebenskraft bewundert. Diese Bewunderung wird sprachlich durch die Verwendung von “old“ ausgedrückt. Personen, die ihm imponieren, wird ein „old“[9] voranstellt, und Personen oder Situationen, die ihm gegen den Strich gehen, beschreibt er als „prachtvoll“[10], während Edgar Figuren, Personen, aber auch Objekte, die ihm irgendwie gleichgültig sind, mit „oll“[11] charakterisiert.

Im Vergleich zu Goethes Werther aber ist Edgar Wibeau ein Anti-Werther: seine „Leistungen“ beginnen erst mit seinem Tod. Doch er ist nicht freiwillig gestorben, hat keinen Selbstmord begangen, vielmehr war sein Tod ein tragischer Unfall. Obwohl Edgar als arbeitsscheu, als nur ein halber Maler– schließlich war er nicht in die Kunstakademie aufgenommen worden und konnte eigentlich nur technisch gut zeichnen – und auch als ein „nut case“ (Leiden 71) beschrieben wird, ist er doch nach eigenem Ermessen ein verkanntes Genie (Leiden 74). Er möchte etwas nach seinen eigenen Entwürfen herstellen, aus seiner eigenen Kraft und unabhängig vom Kollektiv der Arbeiter. Sein Geld verdient Ed mit Anstreicherarbeiten. Er ist also keineswegs wirklich arbeitsscheu. Und er hat auch Ehrgeiz: Um seinen Kumpels bei der Anstreicher Brigade zu beweisen, dass er kein Versager ist, konstruiert er ein „nebelloses Farbsprühgerät“. Doch als er es zum ersten Mal anschließen will, kommt er durch einen Stromschlag ums Leben, weil die elektrischen Leitungen in seiner Laube nicht intakt sind.

Peter Wapnewski meint, das allgemeine menschliche Probleme, wie z. B. verhindertes Glück, unterdrückte, gehemmte Aktivitäten, unerfüllte Wünsche usw. nicht Leiden einer bestimmten Zeit sind, sondern die jedes einzelnen Menschen.[12] Demnach wäre Ed Wibeaus kurzes Leben also nur die Darstellung eines gescheiterten Daseins. Laut Marta Harmat aber sollten wir Edgar nicht als einen widersprüchlichen Helden ansehen, der geboren ist aus kindlichem Denken und der an seiner Zeit versagt, sondern sein Verhalten als logische Konsequenz deuten, die durch den Versuch eines Individuums hervorgerufen wurde, Grenzen zu überschreiten, um in einer Gesellschaft akzeptiert zu werden.[13] Edgar hat sich abgegrenzt. Auf der einen Seite gegenüber seiner Mutter, die für ihren Sohn nur das Beste will, und auf der anderen Seite gegenüber den Erwartungen der DDR Gesellschaft und ihren Bürgern, verkörpert durch Dieter, den angepassten farblosen Verlobten von Charlie. Sein Tod, so Harmat, sei daher als logische Konsequenz zu deuten, sozusagen als endgültiges Grenze-Überschreiten. Erst jenseits der irdischen, gesellschaftlich-politischen Grenzen erreicht er quasi den Höhepunkt seines Bildungsprozesses und wird zu einem einheitlichen Individuum.

Plenzdorf zeigt den Lesern verschiedene Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen bei seinen Untersuchungen von Eds Leben, indem er die Form eines Montageromans benutzt, die es ihm erlaubt, die Aktionen aus verschiedenen Perspektiven darstellen zu können. Die Geschichte beginnt ja mit Edgars Nachruf aus der Zeitung und die Leser erfahren über sein Leben aus der Sicht der Personen, die ihn gekannt haben. Initiiert worden ist die Recherche in Edgars Leben von seinem Vater, der über die Aussagen der Freunde seines Sohnes diesen nach seinem Tod endlich kennenlernen möchte. Er setzt die einzelnen Puzzleteile zusammen und Edgar kommentiert alles aus dem Jenseits, wodurch er den Lesern auch seine eigenen Empfindungen und Auffassungen mitteilt. Er überschreitet damit die Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod. Dabei verwendet er oft Ausdrücke aus dem Berliner Dialekt und eine Art konstruierte Jugendsprache.[14] Wenn man den Roman allerdings aus heutiger Sichtweise liest und dabei die Geschichte der DDR berücksichtigt, könnte man wohl sagen, dass Edgar unter anderen geschichtlichen Umständen durchaus erfolgreich hätte sein können, dass aber die Gesellschaft bzw. die Regierung der damaligen DDR noch nicht bereit war für solch einen individuellen Erfolg. In diesem Sinne kann man Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. als einen gehemmten, verhinderten Entwicklungsroman gelesen.

Kruso ist Lutz Seilers Erstlingsroman. Vor seinem Erscheinen war Seiler schon für seine Kurzgeschichten und vor allem seine Gedichte bekannt geworden. Für den Roman erhielt er im Jahre 2014 den Deutschen Buchpreis und hohes Lob von der Kritik. Lorenz Jäger von der FAZ hat Kruso ein seltsames Buch genannt. Kein anderes solches Werk käme einem auf Anhieb in den Sinn. Weiter sagt er, dass dieses Buch einen aufmerksamen Leser brauche, und dass dies kein „Wende“-Roman sei. Die dramatischen Ereignisse des Sommers und Herbstes 1989 sind nur als Hintergrundgeräusche vernehmbar, die aus einem Radio kommen. Die Sprache sei lyrisch, der Ort der Handlung auf der Insel Hiddensee könnte ein realsozialistisches Hippie-Idyll sein, die Hauptfigur, Kruso, ein Guru des Friedens und Edgar sein Eingeweihter. Edgar Bendler könnte das alter Ego des Autors sein, da sie am selben Tag geboren sind und einen ähnlichen Hintergrund haben.[15] Einige andere Aspekte, Personen und Handlungen finden sogar direkte Pendants in der Realität.[16] So galt die Insel Hiddensee, gelegen neben Rügen in der Ostsee und wie Rügen zu Zeiten der DDR und auch schon in vorherigen Zeiten bevorrechtigtes Ausflugsziel der Privilegierten der jeweiligen Gesellschaft auch als letzter Zufluchtsort der Republikflüchtigen, oder wie es in Kruso heißt: „Wer hier war, hatte das Land verlassen, ohne die Grenze zu überschreiten“ (Kruso, 164-65). Zu DDR-Zeiten galt Hiddensee als Refugium für Andersdenkende, die auf der Insel als Saisonkräfte im Gaststättengewerbe Arbeit fanden. Diesen realen Sachverhalt hat Seiler aufgenommen und seine Figuren in Zum Klausner, einer Gaststätte, die es tatsächlich immer noch gibt und die im nördlichen Teil der Insel, im Dornbusch liegt, versammelt. Wie der ehemalige DDR-Bürger Seiler selbst, der 1988 das erste Mal dort war, sind auch seine Romanfiguren im Sommer auf die Insel gekommen, um hier als Aushilfskräfte, sogenannte Esskaas, zu arbeiten.[17] Hier landet auch sein Held, Edgar Bendler, nachdem er sein Germanistik-Studium in Halle abgebrochen hat. (In Seilers Roman finden die Leser viele literarische Anspielungen und intertextuelle Verbindungen zu anderen Werken nicht nur der deutschen Literatur. Auf einige will ich verweisen. Hier z.B. haben wir die Erwähnung von Halle, Universitätsstadt heute wie auch schon in der ehemaligen DDR, was eindeutig auf Christa Wolfs Roman Der geteilte Himmel verweist. Edgars Freundin G. ist von einer Straßenbahn überfahren worden und als dann auch noch der geliebte Kater Manfred verschwindet, verliert Ed seinen Halt. Und dies fast wortwörtlich, indem er beinahe aus dem Fenster gesprungen wäre und im übertragenen Sinne, indem er verfrüht in den Studentensommer aufbricht. Anstatt aber nach Polen zu fahren, gelangt er über Berlin an die Ostseeküste und nach Hiddensee. Seine Erfahrungen am Bahnhof in Berlin verweisen auf Reiner Kunzes Kurzgeschichte Element aus der Sammlung kurzer Prosastücke mit dem ironischen Titel Die wunderbaren Jahre (1976). Dies ist nur eine der vielen intertextuellen Verweise, von denen der Roman Kruso nur so strotzt.

Auf Hiddensee angekommen, irrt Ed eine Nacht lang herum, übernachtet am Strand, bis er dann an der Ausflugsgaststätte Zum Klausner ankommt und als Tellerwäscher und Zwiebelschneider[18] Anstellung findet. Damit ist er am unteren Ende der Gaststätten-Laufbahn angekommen, aber er beklagt sich nicht, im Gegenteil, für ihn ist es wie ein Initiationsritus, den er durchlaufen muss, um in diese Arche der Gestrandeten aufgenommen zu werden. Und bald lernt er Kruso kennen, der die Gemeinschaft im Klausner und die Gestrandeten auf der Insel zusammenhält. Der Roman enthält immer wieder Beschreibungen von Kruso als Indianer, was u.a. auf Der letzte Mohikaner verweist.[19] Aber auch er hat ein reales Vorbild: nämlich den im Jahr 2000 verstorbenen Aljosche Rompe, der in den achtziger Jahren mit seiner Punkband Feeling B einer der zentralen Helden des DDR-Undergrounds war.[20] Eine andere, offensichtliche Anspielung findet sich natürlich zu Daniel Defoes Held Robinson Crusoe im gleichnamigen Roman, der ebenfalls auf einer Insel gestrandet ist und nur mit der Hilfe seines Freitags überleben kann. Die Beziehung zwischen Ed und Kruso ist ähnlich, allerdings umgekehrt und daher nicht dieselbe. Am Ende seines Aufenthalts aber muss Ed dann erfahren, dass er „nur geträumt, nur der Traum eines anderen gewesen [war]. Ein Freitag wie ihn Crusoe erblickt hatte im Schlaf, in seiner Sehnsucht.“ (Kruso, 425). Bis es aber zu dieser Erkenntnis kommt, durchläuft er alle Rituale, die auch die anderen Gestrandeten über sich ergehen lassen müssen: Die Waschung in den großen Bottichen im Abwasch vom Klausner, die schwarze Suppe, die aus diversen Speiseresten zusammengeköchelt worden ist, und das Trinkgelage am Strand, durch das die Leser wieder oder erstmals mit den alkoholischen Getränken und Mixturen der DDR bekannt gemacht wird. Am Strand wird auch Musik gemacht, auf den verschiedensten Instrumenten, womit Seiler wiederum auf die Band Feeling B verweist, die er in seinem Buch den Song „Mix mir einen Drink, der mich woandershin bringt“ vortragen lässt.

Kruso, oder Alexander Krusowitsch, auch Aljoscha oder zärtlich Losch genannt, ist der Sohn eines russischen Generals und einer Seiltänzerin, die bei einem ihrer Zirkusauftritte für die sowjetischen Truppen tödlich verunglückt ist. Er ist auf Hiddensee aufgewachsen und bleibt dort mit seiner Schwester Sonja zurück, als sein Vater zurück in die Sowjetunion beordert wird. Die Geschwister wachsen bei ihrem Stiefvater auf, einem Strahlenphysiker (die Figur beruht auf dem realexistierenden Stiefvater von Aljoscha, Robert Rompe, der ein berühmter Physiker und Wissenschaftsfunktionär der DDR gewesen ist). Diese Zeit in Krusos Leben scheint auf eine irgendwie doch noch „normale“ Kindheit zu erweisen, bis dann Sonja ihren Bruder in der selbstgebauten Sandburg am Strand zurücklässt, als sie in der Ostsee baden geht. Sie bat ihn, nicht weg zu gehen, sondern auf sie zu warten. Sie kommt aber nie zurück. Kruso wartet eigentlich immer noch. Unklar bleibt, ob Sonja beim Schwimmen ertrunken ist, oder ob sie von den Stasi Wachposten, die auf der Insel allgegenwärtig sind, bei ihrem Fluchtversuch über die Ostsee zur Insel Møn entweder von der Insel Hiddensee aus oder von den Posten auf den Wachbooten erschossen worden ist. Kruso ist durch den Verlust seiner Schwester genauso traumatisiert wie Ed durch den seiner Freundin, und die beiden jungen Männer finden zu einander über die Poesie. Ed zitiert eines Abends im Suff am Strand Gedichte von seinem geliebten Dichter Trakl[21] und Kruso zeigt ihm endlich die Gedichte, die er selbst geschrieben hat und die er einmal in einem Band herausgeben will.

Kruso hält die Inselgemeinschaft zusammen. Im Klausner hat er zwölf „Apostel“ um sich versammelt, alle Aussteiger, die die Gaststätte bewirtschaften als Kellner, Köche und eben Abwäscher, wie Ed einer ist. Alle haben sie von ihrem vorherigen Leben Abschied genommen und versuchen, es nach der Arbeit in wilden Festen und Saufgelagen am Strand zu vergessen. Dabei ignorieren sie auch mehr oder minder Viola, das alte Röhrenradio in der Küche, das sich nicht mehr abschalten lässt und deshalb Tag und Nacht lang den Deutschlandfunk überträgt. Die Bewohner des Klausners könnten folglich über die Geschehnisse in der Welt gut Bescheid wissen, ignorieren die Nachrichten aber weitgehend. Ihre sich langsam ändernde Einstellung zu den Ereignissen der Gegenwart ist im Aufbau des Buches reflektiert. Finden sich am Anfang wenig Daten, so häufen sie sich zum Ende hin, sodass die Leser genau erkennen können, in welchem Monat des Jahres 1989 der Roman spielt. Wenn die meisten Inselbewohner sich am Anfang der Erzählung um die Weltgeschichte einen Dreck kümmern, so nehmen die Gestrandeten auf Hiddensee die Grenzöffnung und die Flucht ihrer Landesgenossen über Ungarn oder Prag schon wahr, und verlassen nach und nach die Insel, bis nur noch Kruso und Ed übrigbleiben.

Bevor der Roman zu Ende geht, wird Ed in eine schwere Auseinandersetzung mit René, der im Klausner für die Ausgabe von Eiscreme verantwortlich ist, verwickelt. Ed wird zusammengeschlagen und muss ins Krankenhaus. Dort wird er von Krusos Stiefvater versorgt, der sein Labor noch hat und ihn röntgen kann, um sicher zu gehen, dass er sich nichts gebrochen hat. Dann verschwindet Kruso für eine Weile, kehrt aber wieder zurück, als Ed sich erholt hat, und die beiden versuchen, den Restaurantbetrieb noch eine Weile länger aufrecht zu erhalten. Dann verschwindet Kruso erneut, doch als er dann wiederkommt, ist er ernstlich krank. Ed versucht, über den Stasiwachmann auf der Insel Hilfe zu mobilisieren. Der kontaktiert Krusos Vater, den General, der seinen Sohn schließlich abholt. Das sowjetische Kriegsschiff verlässt die Gewässer der Ostsee unter 21 Schuss Salut. Allein zurückgelassen, verschließt Ed die Gaststätte, nachdem er den Strom und das Wasser abgestellt hat, und verlässt ebenfalls die Insel.

Eine Art Epilog beschließt den Roman, in dem die Erinnerung an die Toten, eines der Hauptmotive des Romans, in den Vordergrund gerückt wird. Edgar ist bestrebt, Dokumente über die Republikflüchtlinge aufzufinden, die versucht haben, Dänemark bzw. die Insel Møn zu erreichen, die bei klarem Wetter von Hiddensee zu sehen ist. Er verirrt sich in der gigantischen, labyrinthartigen und kafkaesken dänischen Bürokratie und ihren Behausungen. Er findet keine Spur von Krusos Schwester, aber die von einem anderen EssKaa, den er allerdings nie getroffen hat, dessen Platz er aber am Tisch eingenommen und dessen Pullover er getragen hatte. Seiler lässt Edgar Bücher und Statistiken lesen, aus denen hervorgeht, dass es über 5600 Fluchtversuche gab. Edgar liest, dass 913 davon erfolgreich waren, dass es 4522 Festnahmen gab und mindestens 174 Todesopfer seit 1961, angeschwemmt zwischen Fehmarn, Rügen und Dänemark (Kruso, 448).[22] Dieser Epilog, auch wenn er eigentlich weder Krusos noch Edgars Leben einen endgültigen Abschluss gibt, ist als Reportage geschrieben und lässt deshalb auch den Roman realistischer erscheinen.

Zusammenfassend hier nun die verbindenden Elemente der zwei Werke: In den Romanen von Seiler und Plenzdorf spielt ein „Ed“ eine Rolle. Beide sind Aussteiger aus der Gesellschaft der DDR. Auch wenn sie ihrem Staat jeweils zu einer anderen Zeit den Rücken gekehrt haben, setzen sie sich doch noch mit ihm auseinander. Beide ziehen sich zurück, einer auf eine Insel, wo er seinen Kruso in einer Klause kennenlernt, der andere in die „Idylle“ einer Schrebergartensiedlung, wo er seinen Crusoe lesen könnte, wenn er ihn denn noch hätte. Dieser Ed wohnt in einer Laube, was eine Klangassoziation zu Klause und Klausner erlaubt. Beide sind unglücklich verliebt. Der junge Ed in Charlie, und Ed auf der Insel in „C“, die geheimnisvolle junge Frau, die eines nachts bei ihm im Zimmer auftaucht. Sie darf aber nur fünf Nächte bleiben, denn sie ist eine der Gestrandeten, denen Kruso über kurze Zeit Unterschlupf gewährt. Obwohl Ed nach „Cs“ Verschwinden andere junge Frauen in seinem Bett findet, kann er seine Nächte mit ihr nicht vergessen. (C = Charlie = Charlotte)

Beide lesen bzw. rezitieren einen deutschen Dichter, der junge Ed Goethe und Ed auf der Insel Gedichte über Verlust von Trakl. Eine andere metatextliche Verbindung ergibt sich aus der offensichtlichen Spiegelung / Parallele von Ed Wibeau zu Goethes Werther, und in Kruso wird mehrmals auf Robinson Crusoe von Daniel Defoe verwiesen. Und wenn der eine mit einem lauten Knall „über den Jordan“ geht, als er sein selbstgebautes „nebelloses Farbsprühgerät“ zum ersten Mal in Betrieb nehmen will, so wird der andere unter dröhnenden Salutschüssen von seinem „Helden“ verlassen.

Verbindende Themen der zwei Werke sind also der Rückzug aus dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Zeit, Kritik an eben dieser Gesellschaft, Inseln, auf denen kleine isolierte Gruppen von Menschen zusammentreffen und ein dramatisches Ende. Und es werden in beiden Romanen Nachforschungen betrieben. In Kruso ist es am Ende der Ich-Erzähler, der den Verschollenen aus der DDR in Dänemark nachspürt, in Den neuen Leiden des jungen W. ist es der Vater, der seinen Sohn, den er verließ, als der gerade erst fünf Jahre alt war, nun nach seinem Tod kennen lernen möchte. Vom Sprachlichen her lässt sich feststellen, dass es in Kruso Eds irreale und wirklich verwirrende Träume gibt, dass die Gegenwart surreal verfremdet wird und es gibt im Detail beschriebene ekelerregende Säuberungsaktionen im Klausner, zum Beispiel im Kapitel „Der Lurch“ (S. 100-107), wo im Einzelnen beschrieben wird, wie der Abfluss der großen Abwaschbottiche gesäubert und der sich gebildete Pfropfen aus Haaren, Schleim und Essensresten im Garten unterm Gemüsebeet vergraben wird.  In Die neuen Leiden wird die Darstellung des Verhältnisses von Individuum und Gesellschaft in aufmüpfig-kritischen und drastischen Slang- und Fäkalausdrücken und Übertreibungen beschrieben, während Edgar durch inneren Monolog das Geschehen sozusagen aus dem Jenseits kommentiert.

Eine weitere Verbindung ergibt sich aus einem Spiel mit der Sprache, das allerdings mit dem etymologischen Ursprung des Namens der Insel nicht das Geringste zu tun hat.[23] Aber Seiler selbst lässt Kruso sagen: „Das ist Hiddensee, Ed, du verstehst, hidden – versteckt? Die Insel ist das Versteck…“ (Kruso, S. 175) Versucht man, dies weiter auszuarbeiten und spricht dazu noch Deutsch und Englisch, dann lassen sich Verbindungen über das Englische „hidden“ ansprechen. „Versteckt“ ist die Gaststätte Zum Klausner. Sie ist schwerer erreichbar als andere Gaststätten auf der Insel. Sie liegt ganz im Norden der Insel am Rande der Steilküste. Darüber hinaus verstecken sich hier die Aussteiger der DDR.

Aber auch Edgar Wibeau lebt versteckt, in seiner Laube in der Schrebergartensiedlung in Berlin. Er verbirgt sich vor seiner Mutter und seinem früheren Leben. Insofern sind die beiden Werke auch über das Verstecktsein bzw. das Versteckgewähren und ihre verschiedenen Behausungen miteinander verbunden.

Das Sprachspiel aber lässt sich noch etwas weiterführen. „See“, die dritte Silbe von Hiddensee, bezieht sich wohl zuerst einmal auf die die Insel umgebende Ostsee. Nehmen wir aber wiederum das Wortspiel mit dem Englischen auf, so kommt man zu „(to) see“, also „sehen“. Und was sehen die Gestrandeten, die Schiffsbrüchigen, die Pilger vom Klausner aus? Bei ganz klarem Wetter können sie in der Ferne die dänische Insel Møn sehen. Sie ist ca. 50 km entfernt und steht für die unerreichbare Freiheit.

Zusammenfassen lassen sich die Themen der beiden Werke wie folgt: einerseits gibt es den Rückzug aus der Gesellschaft und damit verbunden Kritik an eben dieser Gesellschaft und andererseits die Isolation, aus der dann eine Art Neugeburt entsteht. Beide Romane beschreiben also Entwicklungen, es werden aber keine endgültigen Lösungen angeboten. In Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. finden wir den Versuch einer Neuentwicklung. Ed Wibeau will etwas Anderes als das, was die DDR-Gesellschaft ihm vorschreibt, aber bevor er das verwirklichen kann, kommt er um. Dies könnte dahingehend interpretiert werden, dass die damalige DDR noch nicht bereit war für solche Erneuerungen. Die endgültige Entwicklung des Helden ist also (noch) nicht möglich.

So wie Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. kann auch Kruso als eine Art Entwicklungsroman gelesen werden. Ed Bendler bricht ebenfalls aus dem System des DDR-Staates aus, durchläuft eine Entwicklung innerhalb der Inselgemeinschaft, erlebt dann quasi eine wohl erfolgreiche Wiedergeburt und beginnt nach der Wende ein neues Leben. Seine Zeit in der DDR hat er abgeschlossen zurückgelassen, so wie die Gaststätte Zum Klausner; was die neue Zeit ihm bringen wird, erfahren die Leser allerdings nicht, wenn man von seinen Nachforschungen über die aus der DDR über die Ostsee Geflohenen in Dänemark absieht.

 

Notes

[1] Ulrich Plenzdorf, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., o.O.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976. (Alle Seitenangaben beziehen sich auf diese Ausgabe.)

[2] Lutz Seiler, Kruso, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. (Alle Seitenangaben beziehen sich auf diese Ausgabe.)

[3] http://deutschsprachige-literatur.blogspot.com/2014/02/rezension-die-neuen-leiden-des-jungen-w.html (Web 5. Sept., 2016).

[4] https://beta.welt.de/kultur/article1092978/Autor-der-Neuen-Leiden-des-jungen-W-ist-tot.html?wtrid=crossdevice.welt.desktop.vwo.google-referrer.home-spliturl&betaredirect=true (Web 5. Sept., 2016).

[5] http://www.focus.de/kultur/buecher/ulrich-plenzdorf_aid_69353.html (Web 5. Sept., 2016).

[6] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/die-neuen-leiden-des-jungen-w-ulrich-plenzdorf-ist-tot-a-499068.html (Spiegel.de kultur, Aug. 9, 2007, Web 5. Sept., 2016.)

[7] Georg Jäger, “Ein Werther der DDR: Plenzdorfs Neue Leiden des jungen W. im gespaltenen Deutschland.” In G.J. Die Leiden des alten und neuen Werther (Literatur-Kommentare 21), München: Carl Hanser 1984, S. 45-56, 186-190. (Web Sept 5, 2016).

[8] Beispiele hierfür sind u.a. die folgenden Artikel: Eldi Grubišić Pulišelić, Slavija Kabić, „Ich Idiot wollte immer Sieger sein”. Der Anti-Held Wibeau aus Ulrich Plenzdorfs Erzählung „Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.” Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 16 (2007): 49-75.

[9] An anderer Stelle spricht er von einem bewunderten Musiker, Old Lenz (NL 60), Old Werther (NL 82, 84, 98, 99 et al.), Old Willi und Old Zaremba, was eindeutig Bewunderung ausdrückt.

[10] Edgar beschreibt eine Figur aus einem Film, den er und seine Kumpels in der Ausbildung ansehen sollten: „Er kam in eine prachtvolle Brigade mit einem prachtvollen Brigadier, lernte eine prachtvolle Studentin kennen, deren Eltern waren zwar zuerst dagegen, wurden dann aber noch ganz prachtvoll, als sie sahen, was für ein prachtvoller Junge er doch geworden war … Ich weiß nicht, wer diesen prachtvollen Film gesehen hat, Leute.“ (NL 40-41)

[11] Ein Beispiel betrifft seinen Vorgesetzten: „Trotzdem war das natürlich kein Grund, [dem] olle[n] Flemming die olle Platte auf seinen ollen Zeh zu setzen.“ (NL 14) Er beschreibt, wie er „Charlie auf einen ollen Hocker“ setzt, obwohl er auch „die olle Kerze“ hätte rücken können (NL 54). Oder er sagt, sie renovieren „olle“ Berliner Wohnungen (NL 88).

[12] Peter Wapnewski, Zweihundert Jahre Werthers Leiden oder: Dem war nicht zu helfen. In Plenzdorfs „Neue Leiden des jungen W.“ Materialien, von Peter J. Brenner herausgegeben, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982, S. 327.

[13] Marta Harmat, Goethe und Plenzdorf aus heutiger Sicht. Zur Aktualität des Werther-Textes. Trans: Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften Nr. 14, Dez. 2002 (Web 31. Mai, 2016).

[14] Vergleiche hierzu u.a. den literarischen blog: http://deutschsprachige-literatur.blogspot.com/2014/02/rezension-die-neuen-leiden-des-jungen-w.html (Web 5. Sept., 2016).

[15] Lorenz Jäger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11. Sept. 2014. (Web 5. Sept., 2016).

[16] Interview mit Gerrit Bartels vom 6. Okt. 2014. (Web 13. Sept., 2015).

[17] Interview mit Gerrit Bartels vom 6. Okt. 2014 (Web 13. Sept., 2015).

[18] Dies ist eine Anspielung auf Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Allerdings assoziiert Edgar mit dem Häuten und Schneiden der Zwiebeln nicht mit einer Erforschung seiner Vergangenheit und verschiedenen Aspekten seiner Persönlichkeit. Für ihn ist es einfach ein Teil seines Jobs.

[19] Auch in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert werden Indianer oft als reine, unverdorbene und starke Charaktere beschrieben, die für das Überleben ihres Stammes gegen die vordringenden weißen Siedler kämpfen. Die Romane von Karl May sind nur ein Beispiel hierfür. In gewissem Sinne kämpft auch Kruso in Seilers Roman um einen Ort, in dem das allgegenwärtige, alles durchdringende System der DDR keine Macht hat. Es stellt sich damit auch die Frage, ob Freiheit in der heutigen Zeit noch möglich ist.

[20] Alexander Cammann, Die Zeit 35/2014, 6. Sept 2014 (Web 13. Sept., 2015). Interessant ist vielleicht, dass zwei andere Mitglieder der Band, Paul Landers und Flake Lorenz, heute bei Rammstein mitspielen.

[21] Georg Trakl, 1887-1914, Österreicher, der die Schule verlassen hat und Apotheker geworden ist. Er hat Gedichte über das Schweigen geschrieben und für die Toten, die keine Sprache mehr haben. Er ist an einer Überdosis Kokain im Ersten Weltkrieg verstorben.

[22] Vergleiche hierzu u.a. Christine und Bodo Müller, Über die Ostsee in die Freiheit. Delius, Bielefeld: Klasing Verlag, 2003, S. 52. Zitiert nach Stephanie Hessing, „Mit dem Surfbrett über die Ostsee. Flucht aus der DDR“, http://gefluechtet.de/wp/2015/08/17/mit-dem-surfbrett-ueber-die-ostsee-flucht-aus-der-ddr/ (geflüchtet.de, 17. Aug. 2015, Web. 9. April 2018).

[23] Der Name „Hedinsey“ taucht bereits in der Prosa-Edda und in den Gesta Danorum des Saxo Grammaticus auf und bedeutet so viel wie „Insel des Hedin“. Der legendäre Norwegerkönig Hedin soll hier um eine Frau oder auch nur um Gold gekämpft haben. Unter dänischer Herrschaft war offiziell „Hedins-Oe“ gebräuchlich. Bis 1880 hieß die Insel auch in deutschen Karten noch „Hiddensjö“, 1929 in deutschen Reiseführern noch „Hiddensöe“. Die vollständige Eindeutschung und Umdeutung zu „Hiddensee“ ist also relativ jung.

 

 

Reinhard Andress ist Professor für deutsche Sprache, Kultur und Literatur an der Loyola University-Chicago, USA. Er war u.a. Gastprofessor an der Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. Zu seinen Buchveröffentlichungen gehören: Protokolliteratur in der DDR (2000) und „Der Inselgarten“ – das Exil deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller auf Mallorca, 1931-1936 (2001). Eine Übersetzung aus dem Spanischen ins Deutsche von Benno Weiser Varons Exilroman Yo era europeo als Ich war Europäer (zusammen mit Egon Schwarz) ist 2009 erschienen. Herausgeber von Fred Hellers Das Leben beginnt noch einmal (2016). Zahlreiche weitere Veröffentlichungen zu Exilthemen und Alexander von Humboldt.

Peter Arnds is currently Head of Italian and Director of Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He is a member of PEN International and the Academia Europaea. His latest book is the novel Searching for Alice published with Dalkey Archive Press.

Theo Buck ist freier Literaturwissenschaftler und Publizist. Er war bis zu seiner Emeritierung Lehrstuhlinhaber für Neuere Deutsche Literatur an der Rheinisch-westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen.

Albrecht Classen ist University Distinguished Professor an der University of Arizona, wo er seit mehr als 30 Jahren deutsche Literatur, Sprache und Kultur vor allem des Mittelalters und der Frühneuzeit lehrt. Er hat ca. 100 wissenschaftliche Bücher und ca. 650 Aufsätze verfasst, dazu ca. 2500 Buchbesprechungen. Prof. Classen ist der Herausgeber der Zeitschriften Mediaevistik und Humanities Open Access. Zugleich schreibt er viel eigene Texte, vor allem Gedichte (mittlerweile 9 Bände im Druck) und jüngst auch ein Band mit Satiren (Amerikanische Satiren, 2018). Er ist aktiv an der Zeitschrift Trans-Lit2 beteiligt, veröffentlicht dort regelmäßig Gedichte und Rezensionen. Er erhielt 2004 das Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande.

Helga Druxes is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She authored the monographs The Feminization of Dr. Faustus (Penn State, 1993), Resisting Bodies (Wayne State, 1996) the co-edited volumes Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right Across Europe and the United States(Lexington Books, 2015) and Navid Kermani (Lang Oxford, 2016). Other publications include book chapters and articles on feminist critiques of neo-liberalism, and female labor migrants in global migration documentaries. Her recent article on Anne Weber and Esther Kinsky can be found in Feminist German Studies Nr. 34 (2018).

Gabriele Eckart ist eine deutsche Autorin und “Professor of German and Spanish” an der Southeast Missouri State University.

Ute Jansen-Alonzo grew up in Post-WWII Germany and studied design at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen, Germany, before she came to the United States. She was Design Director for Ebony Magazine for twenty years, where she collaborated with international photographers throughout the fashion world. Her award-winning career in book design started at the University of Chicago Press. For ten years, she had her own studio for conceptualizing special visual projects in Chicago. She also served as guest instructor in the Marketing Department of Columbia College Chicago. She was chosen “Woman of the Year” by Chicago Women in Publishing.

Ernest Kuczyński, geb. 1979, ist Germanist und Deutschlandforscher, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Theorie und Geschichte der Internationalen Beziehungen (Universität Lodz, Polen). Verfasser und (Mit)Herausgeber von Buchpublikationen und wissenschaftlichen Aufsätzen mit folgenden Schwerpunkten: deutsch-polnische Beziehungen nach 1945, Deutschland nach 1945, Opposition in der DDR, Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.  Mitglied des Verbandes polnischer Germanisten. Letzte Veröffentlichungen: „Im Dialog mit der Wirklichkeit. Annäherungen an Leben und Werk von Jürgen Fuchs“ (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2014); „Sagen, was ist! Jürgen Fuchs zwischen Interpretation, Forschung und Kritik“ (Neisse Verlag, Dresden-Breslau 2017)

Frederick A. Lubich, 1951 als Kind mährischer Eltern im schwäbischen Göppingen geboren und aufgewachsen. Autor von über 400 Veröffentlichungen einschlieβlich Fachbüchern zu Thomas Mann, Max Frisch, Paradigmenwechseln der Moderne, sowie literaturwissenschaftlichen Aufsätzen, journalistischen Essays (Argentinisches Tageblatt, New Yorker Aufbau, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung etc), Übersetzer (u.a. von Yoko Onos Rockoper New York Story und deutsch-amerikanischen Drehbüchern), Herausgeber mehrerer Sammelbände und Autor von rund hundert lyrischen Publikationen auf Schallplatte, in Literaturzeitschriften und Lyrik-Anthologien. Lehraufträge an sieben amerikanischen Colleges und Universitäten und Gastvorträge in über 30 Ländern, sowie Features und Interviews in Rundfunk und Fernsehen in Deutschland, Amerika, Finnland, Marokko und Ägypten. Er schreibt in letzter Zeit an einem autobiographischen Text und postet regelmäßig “Recent Posts.”

Hans Mayer wurde 1951 in Göppingen/Baden Württemberg geboren und hat nach dem Studium der Soziologie, Politologie, Volkswirtschaftslehre, des Völkerrechts und der Verwaltungswissenschaften eine Tätigkeit in der Entwicklungspolitischen Zusammenarbeit aufgenommen. Er verbrachte viele Jahre im südlichen Afrika und im arabischen Raum und arbeitete nach dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion für die postkommunistischen Nachfolgestaaten, unter anderem auch in Kasachstan. Nach dem Ende seiner beruflichen Tätigkeit hat er wieder angefangen zu schreiben, verfasst biografische Bücher und Artikel. Derzeit geht er der Geschichte einer deutsch-jüdischen Spirituosenfirma nach. Seine letzte Veröffentlichung: Die Firma Bernheimer und der Göppinger Kraeutergeist “Borato” (Göppingen, 2018).

Sarah McGaughey is Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College. She is a scholar of modernist studies, in particular of the region of German-speaking Central Europe and of the interwar period. She focuses on the Viennese author Hermann Broch and the relationship between literature and architecture as a means of understanding modernism and modernity. She is author of Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch’s “The Sleepwalkers” (Northwestern UP, 2016) and a co-editor of the forthcoming Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch (Camden House, April 2019). She is also currently the interim online editor of Glossen.

Axel Reitel, geboren 1961 in Plauen/Vogtland, Schriftsteller und Journalist. Ging 1982 nach Haft und Freikauf nach Berlin und studierte an der TU Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie. Schreibt Prosa, Lyrik sowie Features, Reportagen und Essays fürs Radio. Mitglied des PEN-Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland. 2016 Verleihung der Solidarność-Dankbarkeitsmedaille durch das Europäische Solidarność-Zentrum in Gdansk.

Geertje Potash-Suhr is an author and scholar based in Chicago, Illinois. Born in Prague, Potash-Suhr studied in Tübingen, Freiburg, Lausanne, and the University of Illinios. She has written many volumes of poems, most recently Immer rein ins Herz mit der Feder (Grupello-Verlag, 2018), and novels, including her autobiographical novel Baby im Dritten Reich (Grupello-Verlag, 2016). Her work on female figures of Heinrich Heine’s poetry, Venus und Loreley was published in 1998, also with Grupello-Verlag. She endowed the Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize, has won numerous prizes herself, and is nominated for the Else-Lasker-Schüler Lyrik Preis (2020).

Anna Rosmus, real-life heroine of the film The Nasty Girl, has dedicated her life to uncovering the Nazi past of her hometown and to combating neo-Nazis. As a freelance writer, she has contributed numerous essays to magazines and newspapers, such as La Pensée et les Hommes, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The New York Times, and The European. Twice, Anna Rosmus was featured in a 60 Minutes profile. To many, she represents the legacy of the Holocaust in memory, education, and action in the continuing struggle against bigotry. The D.C. Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Law Foundation honored her with the Immigrant Achievement Award as a “distinguished Immigrant who through her extraordinary endeavors has made a substantial contribution to the United States of America and is a proud reflection of the values of this nation.”

Karin Schestokat’s research interest focused on German women (minority) writers, and she has published articles on Yoko Tawada, May Ayim, African-Germans in Germany, and also on Monika Maron and Stefanie Zweig. She published a book on German Women in Cameroon: Travelogues from Colonial Times in 2003. For the last 6 years, her work has shifted to language instruction, and she co-authored the textbook Denk Mal for Intermediate German. A third edition of this textbook will be available in Fall 2019. Due to teaching demands and students’ interest, she is currently focusing on how the GDR past is discussed in contemporary German literature.

Achim Viereck, geboren 1951 in Würzburg, studierte Agrarwissenschaft  an der Universität Hohenheim. Auslandsaufenthalte in Asien, Afrika und Südamerika. Arbeitete nach der Promotion in Mexiko in der Agrarforschung. Danach war er mehrere Jahre als Entwicklungshelfer aktiv (Philippinen und Kapverdische Inseln). Seit 1999 im Bundeslandwirtschaftsministerium beschäftigt. Als Landwirtschaftsreferent mehrfache Einsätze in Lateinamerika (Brasilia und Buenos Aires). 2012 lernte er den aus Franken emigrierten Autoren Robert Schopflocher in Argentinien kennen, mit dem ihn bald eine Freundschaft verband. Seit 2016 im Ruhestand und seitdem in der Betreuung von Flüchtlingskindern engagiert. Er lebt mit seiner Frau Corina in Berlin.

Israel Zoberman is the founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Chaverim in Virginia Beach. The son of Polish Holocaust survivors he was born in Chu , Kazakhstan in 1945. He spent his early childhood in Germany’s Wetzlar Displaced Persons Camp, 1947-1949. He grew up in Haifa, Israel. He is Honorary Senior Rabbi Scholar at Eastern Shore Chapel Episcopal Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

von Hans Mayer

 

Am Quai Charles de Gaulle präsentiert sich Sanary-sur-Mer an der kleinen Riviera zwischen Marseille und Toulon im Spätsommer als herausgeputzte Touristenidylle unter blauem Wolkenhimmel. Die  Häuser der Hafenpromenade, die früher den Namen von Victor Hugo trug, erstrahlen im Licht der Nachmittagssonne. In den Cafés unterhalten sich die zahlreichen Gäste, vor ihnen der Apéritiv auf dem Bistrotisch aus Kunststoff und Aluminium. In den kurzen Pausen der Unterhaltung schweifen ihre Blicke von den unter den Fächerpalmen flanierenden Besuchern zu den Segelbooten an der Pier.  Nichts erinnert hier an die Vergangenheit von Sanary.

Wir sitzen auf der Terrasse des Café Le Nautique, wo sich seit den 1920er Jahren im Sommer die Pariser Bohème traf. Sanary war damals ein kleines Fischerdorf mit etwa zweitausend Bewohnern, darunter die ersten französischen Künstler. Bald kamen auch die Deutschen. Der Elsässer René Schickele zog im Herbst 1932 aus gesundheitlichen Gründen nach Sanary. Ihm folgten die Manns, die Feuchtwangers, die Hessels, die Zweigs und viele andere. Die Machtübergabe an Hitler hatte sie zur Emigration gezwungen, nach 1933 wurde Sanary vorübergehend zur Hauptstadt der deutschen Exilliteratur. Die Geschichte ist bekannt oder auch nicht.

Das Café Le Nautique ist von Einheimischen und älteren französischen Touristen bevölkert. Ein großer Zigarrenschrank gegenüber der Bar weist auf eine zahlungskräftige Kundschaft hin. In einer Ecke wird der französisch-türkische Schriftsteller Jean-Michel Thibaux durch eine Metallplakette geehrt. Hier soll er an seinen Romanen gearbeitet haben.  Ein Hinweis auf die nach 1933 im Exil in Sanary lebenden Schriftsteller fehlt.  Der Eigentümer erzählt mir, er wisse, dass hier nach 1940 deutsche Schriftsteller im Exil gelebt hätten. Ein Hinweis, auch in seiner Menü-Karte wäre sicher sinnvoll, meint er auf meine Nachfrage.

Links neben dem Le Nautique das Café La Marine, ebenfalls ein Treffpunkt der Intellektuellen, im Gebäude rechts davon ein Salon de thé. Ganz oben unterm Dach hatte der Arzt und kommunistische Schriftsteller Friedrich Wolf 1938 und 1939 nach seiner Ausreise aus der Sowjetunion und auf dem Weg in den Spanischen Bürgerkrieg für einige Monate ein Studio angemietet. Das Studio hatte auch damals schon eine kleine Terrasse. Sie muss Wolf einen wunderbaren Blick über die Bucht von Sanary geboten haben.

Wir waren schon 2013 einmal kurz in Sanary gewesen.  Am Place Albert Cavet hatten wir damals Gedenktafeln für den Maler Erich Klossowski und die Schriftstellerin Hilde Stieler entdeckt, die beide 1933 aus Paris zugereist waren und bei der Familie Cavet eine möblierte Wohnung in der Villa L’Enclos angemietet hatten. Wir machten uns entschlossen in Richtung Villa auf, ließen uns durch ein kleines Schild „Privé“ nicht abschrecken und öffneten das Gartentor.  Empört fragte uns ein alter Mann, der mit seiner Frau im Rollstuhl den leicht abschüssigen Weg von der Villa herunterkam, was wir hier wollten, das sei privat. Etwas erschrocken über die Reaktion verwiesen wir auf unser Interesse an Klossowski und Stieler und sofort änderte sich der Gesichtsausdruck des alten Herrn, bei dem es sich, wie sich herausstellte, um Louis Cavet handelte. Wir sollten uns die Villa, es handelte sich um ein bescheidenes zweiflügeliges Haus, ruhig aus der Nähe ansehen. Seine Eltern hätten seinerzeit an M. Klossowki und Mme Stieler ein Wohnzimmer, eine Küche, die Terrasse und einen größeren Raum mit Kamin im ersten Stock vermietet. Er selbst habe Deutschunterricht bei Klossowski erhalten. Eines Tages, so erzählte er weiter, sei Thomas Mann den Weg zur Villa hochgekommen. Daran könne er sich noch genau erinnern. Er sei damals ein kleiner Junge gewesen. Louis Cavet ist 2014 verstorben und mit seiner Frau Marcelle auf dem Ancien Cimetière, dem alten Friedhof, an der Avenue Deuxième Spahis in Sanary beigesetzt worden. Wir besuchen sein Grab. Als wir bei unserem diesjährigen Aufenthalt der Villa L‘Enclos erneut einen Besuch abstatten wollen, werden wir von einer Frau mit einem Korb voll frisch geernteter Kräuter aus dem kleinen Paradiesgarten vertrieben. Bevor sie in der auf der anderen Straßenseite liegenden Küche einer Osteria verschwindet, weist sie uns daraufhin, dass das Grundstück und die leerstehende Villa vom französischen Staat wegen ausstehender Steuerzahlungen beschlagnahmt wurde. Der Zutritt sei verboten.

Auf demselben Friedhof wurde auch der Flaneur Franz Hessel unter Anteilnahme zahlreicher Exilierter und der lokalen Bevölkerung Sanarys in einem Massengrab bestattet. Vom französischen Internierungslager in Les Milles geschwächt, war er Anfang 1941 gestorben. Der Schriftsteller Hans Siemson hielt die Grabrede. Nach einem Hinweis auf dem Ancien Cimetière suchen wir vergeblich. Weder gibt es einen Grabstein noch eine Gedenktafel.

Eine Gedenktafel mit 68 Namen von deutschen, österreichischen und einigen staatenlosen Künstlern und Schriftstellern befindet sich heute neben dem Eingang vom Tourismusbüro von Sanary, darauf auch die Namen Klossowski und Stieler. 1987 von offizieller österreichischer und deutscher Seite inauguriert, ist sie einige Jahre später aktualisiert und ergänzt worden. Allerdings listet sie auch Exilierte auf, die gar nicht in Sanary-sur-Mer, sondern an anderen Orten der Côte d’Azur lebten.

Im Tourismus-Büro versuchten wir Erklärung und Aufklärung zu Hessel und zum Schicksal der Wohnung von Klossowski und Stieler zu bekommen. Unseren intensiveren Nachfragen beim Personal begegnete man zunächst mit einer – vergeblichen – Suche im Internet, um uns dann die Fotokopie einer reich bebilderten Broschüre in die Hand zu drücken, die auf eine 2004 von Sanary kuratierte Ausstellung in der Neuen Stadtgalerie von Purkersdorf, der Partnerstadt von Sanary, zurückgeht, in die Hand zu drücken.  Die Broschüre ist in französischer, englischer und deutscher Sprache auch ins Internet eingestellt, würde aber wohl eine Überarbeitung und einen Neudruck verdienen. Auf einem Prospektständer entdeckten wir auch ein kleines Faltblatt „Auf den Spuren  der deutschen und österreichischen Emigranten in Sanary 1933-1945.“ Es zeigt vierzehn Stationen eines Parcours der Exilierten als Orte des Erinnerns. Eigentlich wollten wir eine kompetente literarische Führung durch Sanary buchen. Nach einer knappen Woche mussten wir aber feststellen, dass dies in der Kürze der Zeit nicht möglich sein würde, weil die einzige dafür qualifizierte Dame aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht konnte oder auch nicht wollte. Wir machten uns dann alleine auf den Parcours, der 1999, zum Teil gegen den auch gerichtlichen Widerstand der heutigen Hauseigentümer, eingeweiht worden war.

Die meisten Häuser, in denen die Emigranten/Exilierten einst Unterschlupf fanden, stehen heute noch, verstecken sich aber hinter hohen Pinien, Olivenbäumen und Oleander. Einsichten oder Aussichten gewähren sie nur selten. Anton Räderscheidts Villa Le Patio, im Stil des Bauhauses mit Flachdach errichtet, lässt hinter den Hecken praktisch nichts von sich erkennen. Der Moulin gris der Werfels oder Hessels Fluchtburg Mas de la Carreirado waren schon immer mauerhoch abgeschirmt. Nur die Villa Lazare, in der die Feuchtwangers die erste Zeit verbrachten, warf uns von hoch oben am Steilhang des Boulevard la Plage Beaucours einen freundlichen Blick zu. Ein Reisender in Adidas-Kleidung mit Rucksack und Smartphone hatte sich unterhalb der Villa niedergelassen. Am Strand steht ein Schild, das alle Besucher auffordert, angesichts der Terrorismusgefahr in Frankreich, alles Verdächtige an die Sicherheitsbehörden zu melden. Die Villa selbst muss hinter zementierten Felsen Schutz suchen vor den Stürmen des Mittelmeers, die die Steilküste abtragen.

Das Gedenken an die Emigranten und Exilierten war auch für Frankreich keine einfache Sache, denn das Schicksal der aus Deutschland Vertriebenen und Verfolgten ist unmittelbar verknüpft mit den französischen Internierungslagern, wo einige von ihnen den Tod fanden und andere nach ihrem Weitertransport in den deutschen Vernichtungslagern ermordet wurden.  Erst 2012 wurde in dem ehemaligen Internierungslager Les Milles bei Aix-en-Provence eine Gedenkstätte eröffnet ­– übrigens außerordentlich empfehlenswert. Erinnern und Vergegenwärtigen ist eine schwierige Aufgabe. Was und wie erinnert wird, hat Auswirkungen für den Blick auf die Gegenwart.  Alain Chouraqui, Präsident der Fondation du Camp des Milles, erinnerte daran, dass man sich in Frankreich erst seit den 1980er Jahren mit der Geschichte der Internierungslager und der Deportationen auseinandersetzte. Wir wissen, so sagte er, dass die Opfer wollten, dass man ihre Geschichte nicht vergisst, nicht um ihrer selbst willen, sondern um der Gegenwart und der Zukunft willen.[1]

 

Notes

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/televisions-radio/article/2016/02/02/le-camps-des-milles-l-engrenage-de-la-honte_4857681_1655027.html. Aufgerufen am 5.10.2017.

von Reinhard Andress

Als der österreichische Exilant und weltweit anerkannte Literaturwissenschaftler Egon Schwarz im Februar 2017 verstarb,[1] ging sein Nachlass an das Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach, wobei es bereits auch einen Vorlass gegeben hatte. Eine Kopie des Nachlasses wird ebenfalls von der Olin Library an der Washington University in St. Louis aufbewahrt, wo Schwarz zweiunddreißig Jahre lang als Professor tätig gewesen war.

Es war auch in der Olin Library, wo ich auf unveröffentlichte Texte von Schwarz stieß, die das autobiographische Spektrum seines auch literarischen Schaffens erweitern, so eine erste Version seiner Autobiographie aus den sechziger Jahren als Typoskript mit wenigen Tippfehlern und handschriftlichen Verbesserungen. Die Autobiographie an sich erschien erst 1979 unter dem Titel Keine Zeit für Eichendorff, 2005 in einer Neuauflage als Unfreiwillige Wanderjahre. Im Jahre 2008 wurde sie mit dem renommierten Johann-Friedrich-von-Cotta-Literaturpreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart ausgezeichnet. Übersetzungen ins Englische als Refuge. Chronicle of a Flight from Hitler (2002) und ins Spanische als Años de vagabundo forzado. Huyendo de Hitler a través de tres continentes (2012) liegen ebenfalls vor.

Die erwähnte Typoskriptversion, die anscheinend nie einem Verlag angeboten wurde, unterscheidet sich auf erhebliche Weise von der publizierten Schlussversion, woraus sich so mancher Aufschluss über den autobiographischen Schreibprozess ergibt. So kommt in der Frühversion eine stärkere Betonung des Persönlichen zum Tragen, ebenfalls eine größere Anzahl von Anekdoten und Geschichten, u.a. zu den vielen Begegnungen mit anderen Exilanten, von Alltagsbeschreibungen und sonstigen, eher impressionistischen Momentaufnahmen des Erlebten. Im Vergleich setzt sich die Schlussversion mit größeren Fragen der Willensfreiheit und des Lebenssinns auseinander. Darüber hinaus ergeben sich aus einem Vergleich der beiden Versionen signifikante Verschiebungen des scheinbaren Realitätsgehalts, die den mimetischen Anspruch von Autobiographie zu unterlaufen scheinen.[2] Kann man die Typoskriptversion gewissenmaßen als Vorübung für die Schlussversion sehen, gibt es wiederum weitere selbständige Manuskripte im Nachlass, die in den autobiographischen Schreibprozess eingeordnet werden können, so das Gedicht „Lebe wohl Südamerika” und das Essay „Dank an die Emigration”.

Das Gedicht, ebenfalls ein Typoskript in Reinschrift mit wenigen Tippfehlern, markiert und verarbeitet, wie der Titel andeutet, den Aufbruch Ende der vierziger Jahre von Südamerika in die USA, nachdem Schwarz nach unermüdlichem Bemühen im Ringen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung das Angebot bekam, an Otterbein College Deutsch und Spanisch zu unterrichten und gleichzeitig einem geregelten Studium an der Ohio State University nachzugehen. Es war der lang gehegte Wunsch nach Bildung, die die Grundlage seiner bemerkenswerten Karriere bilden sollte. Die Autobiographie quittiert den widersprüchlichen Moment des Abschieds, als das Flugzeug abhob, mit einem knappen Satz: „Um den inneren Konflikt zu beruhigen, schloss ich die Augen und sagte mir: ‚Du hast dein Leben geändert’.“[3] Die Knappheit des Ausspruchs ist nicht weiter verwunderlich, denn, wie erwähnt, Schwarz hat in seiner Autobiographie seine eigene Person zu Gunsten der Einbettung in größere Geschichtsabläufe zurückgezogen. Doch im Gedicht erfahren wir gewissermaßen als Momentaufnahme von der hohen Emotionalität des Abschieds, vom Schwebezustand zwischen Südamerika, wo er unter widrigen Umständen seine Jugend verbracht hatte, und den Hoffnungen, der Angst vor und der Sehnsucht nach einer fruchtbaren Zukunft, die sich nur vage abzeichnet. In der letzten Strophe spricht Schwarz von den größeren Zusammenhängen in seinem Leben, die noch verarbeitet werden müssen. Das deutet wiederum an, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Biographie fortgesetzt werden wird.

In dem Kontext ist wiederum das Essay „Dank an die Emigration“ zu sehen. In diesem Falle existiert der Text als schwer korrigiertes Typoskript im Nachlass. Anhand einer Zeitangabe im Text lässt er sich auf die frühen sechziger Jahre datieren und kann, wie die erwähnte Erstschrift der Autobiographie, als eine Übung im autobiographischen Schreibprozess eingeordnet werden.  Dieser „Versuch“ im Sinne der Essayform fasst den Lebensweg bis in die genannten Jahre knapp und einprägsam zusammen und erscheint mir auch deswegen lesenswert, weil Schwarz ein Thema schon anspricht, das in der veröffentlichten Autobiographie wiederholt werden sollte und eine zentrale Rolle dort spielt. Gegen Ende der Unfreiwilligen Wanderjahre fasst es Schwarz folgendermaßen zusammen:

Zu verkünden, daß Hitler für mich gut war, wäre eine Verhöhnung der Millionen, die er auf dem Gewissen hat und zu denen ich, in jeder Phase des faschistischen Vernichtungszuges durch die Welt, leicht hätte gehören können. Dennoch ist es eine Tatsache, daß ich durch die explosionsartigen Ausbrüche des Hitlerismus in die freie Luft geschleudert wurde, wo ich einen längeren Atem und einen weiteren Ausblick gewonnen habe, als wenn ich in der heimatlichen Enge geblieben wäre. Manche Menschen werden, wenn sie ihnen widerfährt, von der Durchtrennung der Wurzeln, die sie an ihr Fleckchen Umwelt binden, gefährdet oder gar zerstört. Mir hat sie zunächst auch nicht gerade wohlgetan, aber auf die Dauer hat sie Kräfte befreit, die sonst unerweckt für immer in mir geschlummert hätten. Anders als andere Emigranten, die der Heimat nachtrauern, heiße ich daher die Emigration gut und bekenne mich zu ihr, nicht weil sie mir just passierte und man für gewöhnlich sein Leben billigt, sondern beinah als Prinzip, als einen Prozeß, dem ich meine Befreiung und, so sonderbar das auch anmuten mag, die Gewinnung meines Gleichgewichts zu verdanken glaube.[4]

Welch eine mutig-optimistische Einstellung durchdringt dieses Zitat, das in „Dank an die Emigration“ vorgeprägt wurde!  Letztendlich und trotz allem behauptet sich eine Einstellung, die Schwarz’ Leben so stark prägte und die wir uns für alle Exilanten und Emigranten in unseren wieder einmal so bewegten Zeiten wünschen. Um die Beziehung zum Gedicht herzustellen, im Essay sind es die „Stücke“ seines Lebensschicksals, die er als die Prüfung verwebt, die er so glänzend bestanden hat.[5]

„Lebe wohl Südamerika“

„Dank an die Emigration“

Die Herausgeber weisen auch auf Andress’ Nachruf auf Egon Schwarz aus Glossen 43.

Notes

[1] Vgl. Reinhard Andress, „Erinnerungen an den Exilanten, Literaturwissenschaftler Egon Schwarz (1922-2017)“.  Glossen. German Literature and Culture after 1945 43 (2017): http://blogs.dickinson.edu/glossen/glossen-43-2017-current-issue/5501-2/.

[2] Vgl. meine weiteren Ausführungen dazu in „Unfreiwillige Wanderjahre von Egon Schwarz: die Entwicklung einer Autobiographie von der Früh- zur Schlussversion“.  Zwischenwelt. Literatur / Widerstand / Exil 36/1-2 (Juni 2018). S. 61-67.

[3] Egon Schwarz. Unfreiwillige Wanderjahre. Auf der Flucht vor Hitler durch drei Kontinente. München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2005. S. 196.

[4] Ebenda., S. 233.

[5] Beide Texte gelangen hier mit der freundlichen Genehmigung von Schwarz’ Witwe, Dr. Irène Lindgren, zum ersten Mal zum Druck. In „Lebe wohl Südamerika“ waren nur geringfügige Korrekturen und die Anpassung an die heutige Rechtschreibung notwendig. Für „Dank an die Emigration“ wurde zwecks dieser Publikation eine Reinschrift hergestellt, die die nicht immer leicht lesbaren Korrekturen zu berücksichtigen versucht.

Glossen #44 | Jan 2019

I: Introduction

Sarah McGaughey | Exile and Emigration. An Introduction

II: In Memoriam: Gerald Uhlig-Romero und Egon Schwarz

Hans Mayer | Zum Tod von Gerald Uhlig-Romero
Dem Begründer des Berliner Café Einstein Unter den Linden

Gerald Uhlig-Romero | Endlich – Der Frühling kommt

Reinhard Andress | „Leb wohl Südamerika” und „Dank an die Emigration” –
Texte aus dem Nachlass von Egon Schwarz

III: Essays

Anna Rosmus | From Passau to Broadway

Hans Mayer | Sanary-sur-Mer:
Die vorübergehende Hauptstadt des deutschen Exils 

IV: Prosa, Poesie, Satire

Peter Arnds | The Bard of Glendalough Valley

Albrecht Classen | Heil dir Amerika – du älteste Demokratie der Welt!

Albrecht Classen | Böse Sprache

Ute Jansen-Alonzo | The Amis are Coming. U. S. Occupation on April 1945

Geertje Potash-Suhr | Befehl

Geertje Potash-Suhr | Gretchen am Lenkrad

Axel Reitel | Bericht an eine Jury. Eine Stasi-Satire

Israel Zoberman | At Maidanek

V: Analyse

Karin Schestokat | Ausgestiegen aus der DDR: Ein Vergleich von
Lutz Seilers Kruso und Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

Ernest Kuczyński | Über Grenzen hinweg: Die Wahrnehmung des literarischen Werks
von Jürgen Fuchs außerhalb des deutschsprachigen Raumes

VI: Interview

Helga Druxes | „Plötzlich liegt die Vergangenheit vor uns”:
Interview mit Anne Weber zu ihrem Familienbuch Ahnen 

VII: Rezensionen und Leseerfahrungen

Theo Buck | Hans Joachim Schädlich. Felix und Felka.

Danièle Buck | Collage zu Felix und Felka

Gabriele Eckart | Jochanan Trilse-Finkelstein with Esther Grünwald.
So kam ich unter die Deutschen: Jochanan Trilse-Finkelstein. Die Saga.

Gabriele Eckart | Gisela Holfter and Horst Dickel, eds.
An Irish Sanctuary: German Speaking Refugees in Ireland 1933-1945.

Frederick A. Lubich | Freya und Nadja Klier.
Die Oderberger Straße.

Achim Viereck | Robert Schopflocher.
Eine Kindheit. Erzählungen.

VIII: Autorenbiografien

Part II of IV
Frederick A. Lubich

II: From the Old World to the New World – Flashbacks and Soundtracks

Part II of III

October

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
old age should burn and rave at close of day,
rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Dylan Thomas

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who had to leave this world at the young age of thirty-nine, could only imagine what facing death at a much older age could possibly mean. As much as I agree with his first two lines, I would like to phrase the third line quite differently – as the reader of this text will be able to see further down – by following Bob Dylan’s poetic imaginary. Not only had he borrow his name from Dylan Thomas, he also rewrote the latter’s poem about dying as a kind of counter ode to eternal youth:

“Forever Young”

“May you build a ladder to the stars
and climb on every rung,
may you stay forever young.”
Bob Dylan

But before I get lost in the stars, I need to back up a bit down here on earth. In the beginning of September, it seemed like Mother Nature was raging toward our area in Southern Virginia in the shape of Hurricane Florence. Contrary to her poetic name which is rooted in the Latin word for “florens” meaning flowering, evoking images of a beautiful spring, this Florence threatened to unleash a huge autumn storm with horrendous, destructive force.

I was barely out of the hospital and back home, hardly being able to walk, let alone eat and talk, when the authorities of the city of Norfolk, our current hometown, issued an evacuation order for our area. Since our house is surrounded by more than a dozen of high trees and only a stone’s throw away from the water, we were not only in  danger of being severally flooded by rising tides, but also of being badly hit by falling branches and uprooted trunks. Since we had moved to this area twenty years ago, we had lived through quite a few hurricanes, but none threatened to be as dangerous and devastating as this one. So, for the first time, we decided to leave everything behind and head further inland toward higher ground, all the while imagining a worst case scenario, in which our home would be destroyed beyond repair.

However, Florence changed its course shortly before landfall, our area was spared, and we did not have to leave after all. In hindsight, the forecast of this hurricane struck me as a kind of natural reflection of my own battle with cancer, which wrecked me like a hurricane – to paraphrase one of the signature tunes by the German rock band Scorpions – and left me behind in physical and emotional shambles. But at least, our house remained intact – if only to stand ready for the next round, when another hurricane would hit the ground.

“Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr“ …“ Whoever has no home now, will not build one any more“, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his poem “Herbsttag” or “Autumn Day”. Our house was built in the late sixties of the last century. It is a three-story building with flat roofs, brown cedar shakes on its sidewalls, which are covered in moss and ivy. On the second and third floor, it has large windows so that one gets the impression from the inside, that one is living in a tree house since the dense crowns of several trees are surrounding the building.

Two windows in the house are quite narrow, but they run from the ground floor to the top floor, thereby evoking the look of loopholes in an old medieval fortress. That look is reinforced by one of the balconies resembling a long battlement walkway that used to be part of a fortress and its further fortification. In other words, our house creates the impression of being an architectural hybrid somewhere between a modern “Bauhaus” and a mediaeval “Trutzburg”, a stronghold defying all adversities. I mention all these architectural details, because our house also happens to be, as one can see further on, a telling reflection of its current inhabitants, who were born and raised in quite different worlds.

To top it off, a beautiful spiral staircase connects all three stories of the house and forms its centerpiece, which can also be seen from the outside through the large, top-to-bottom windows on the front of the house. That spiral staircase was probably also the first feature that caught Lynne’s attention who discovered the house soon after we arrived in Norfolk. Being the daughter of an architect, she has always had an interest in interior design. According to the real estate agent who sold us the house, it was featured soon after its completion in the journal Better Homes and Gardens.

Over the years, the building apparently fell somewhat in disrepair, but it was beautifully restores at the end of the nineties by its previous owner. At that time, the housing market was down and we were extremely fortunate to buy it a very affordable price. Here, our daughter grew up before she left home for college almost ten years ago, moved on to Berlin and now spends all her free time traveling the world just like her parents used to do in their younger years.

Following the motto of Better Homes and Gardens, which we casually ignored for the most part of our time living in this house, we have finally begun to make substantial repairs and improvements on our home and garden. Until two years ago, the ground around the house resembled a jungle full of large bushes, wildly growing bamboo, and too many tall trees. But more recently, we had a few bushes and trees removed and then we turned the major part of it into a blossoming garden by planting more and more flowers, various bushes and even some seasonable vegetables.

And more than ever, I spent my time reading and writing in our garden or down on the white sandy shores of the Elizabeth River, whose large delta merges right there with the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. In the distance, one can see huge cargo ships coming up and down the river and if one is lucky enough one can even spot dolphins gliding through the nearby water. And every now and then, a flock of wild geese rises in flying formation into the blue sky. People who have visited us have called our home and garden and the surrounding area a “paradise” – and we happily agree.

In the first weeks after my surgery, as I was slowly shuffling through our house, trying not to fall, I stumbled upon the following phrase by the German language philosopher Martin Heidegger: “Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins” – “Language is the house of being.” This quote goes on in English: “The thinkers and poets are the guardians of this dwelling.” That statement struck me as particularly ironic in my current situation, in which our house literally resonated with my garbled words and sentences, which in the beginning could get quite loud in my growing frustration to get them out. In the meantime, I have learned to lower my voice or shut up altogether. After all, I feel, I am no longer at home in the spoken word. As it were, I am dwelling in my linguistic ruin. So there, Herr Heidegger, you know what I mean! And to top it off, my own demise and final decay might be just a short shot away.

“Sei allem Abschied voraus”, be ahead of all farewell, Rilke wrote in one of his “Sonnets to Orpheus”. Like no other well-known poet of the twentieth century, this German-Bohemian poet from Prague was a life-long wanderer. For him saying farewell to people and places was a perennial experience. Recently, I have been reminded a lot of Rilke’s verse as I enjoy the sunlit mornings in our house and the peacefulness of our garden. But maybe this is, as they say, the quiet before the next storm, the final hurricane that will take me away.

***

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

As even my short-term future appears quite uncertain, my mind is drifting more and more back into the past. Or to put it more precisely, it drifts back into the future. This paradox perspective, so popular in the discourse formation of postmodernity in the mid-eighties of the last century, sounds more and more promising, because it suggests – spes contra spem – the further one wanders back into the past, the  longer the uncertain future will last. In reality, it is of course a foolish escape, a quixotic escapade, but I happily embrace it just like all the Doubting Thomases throughout history who kept telling themselves ad infinitum “I believe it, because it’s absurd” or as the scholiasts of the Middle Ages put it: “Credo, quia absurdum” …

“Last Exit to Brooklyn”, is not only the name of a once quite controversial novel by the American writer Hubert Selby from the year 1964, but also the name of a film by the German film maker Uli Edel with the film score by the British rock musician Mark Knopfler, both from the year 1989. This title also turns out to be a telling description of our last travel destination this past summer shortly before I received the bad news about my necessary operation. Considering the uncertain outcome of my battle with cancer, our long weekend in Brooklyn could also be the last real outing in our long journey through life together.

The mural in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the preceding picture is a memorial to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a native of Brooklyn.  Both of them were two of New York City’s most celebrated artists of the Pop-Art-era and both of them had to die before their time, especially the latter who was only twenty-seven years old at the time of his death. In hindsight, his last paintings with all their skulls and skeletons reveal themselves as ominous premonition of his imminent destiny. Years after their death, the bio-pic Basquiat featured a prominent cast including David Bowie in the role of Andy Warhol. And here I stand in front of the mural, taking a short break from our stroll through Williamsburg, a favorite quarter of young artists – but internally I am already on the run from the growing threat of my deadly tongue.

Looking at that colorful mural, I am reminded of the vibrant graffiti art towards the end of the last century all over New York City, where we lived from 1984 -1992 in Manhattan on the Upper West Side. It was also during that time when Keith Haring was a rising star in the art world, using the billboards of New York’s subway for his remarkable sketches. I remember in particular a drawing with the inscription “Still Alive in ‘85”. I even took a picture of it, which I still have somewhere in the chaos of my countless files and boxes.

Keith Haring’s inscription on his subway graffiti turned out to be the artist’s writing on the wall, because he too was doomed to die soon after, felled by the plague of Aids, which at that time was killing so many young talents in New York’s artistic community, including one of my students at Columbia University. How young they all were. Some had hardly arrived in their adult life and already they had to go.

Ziggy Star Dust Memories: In the spring of 1973, I saw David Bowie in a small music hall in Newcastle, England where I lived at the time. He was in his Ziggy Star Dust phase and I was immediately struck by his colorful persona and flamboyant performance. Of one scene, I have particularly vivid memories. As he was strutting around the stage in his super high platform shoes, he stumbled over the cable of his microphone and went down to the ground but rose again so gracefully that he reminded me of a fallen angel. Right then and there I knew that he would become a sparkling star in the musical universe of our generation.

“Time is waiting in the wings”
David Bowie, “Time”

Like no other rock star, David Bowie saw the world as a stage where he played out his life in various roles turning it into a life-long “Gesamtkunstwerk”, a total work of art.  Lynne and I spent almost the whole afternoon at the exhibition and it turned out to be a veritable “recherche du temps perdu”, a search for things past, whose growing stream of consciousness down memory lane I try to follow in the subsequent passages. After all, the repertoire of favorite songs, which we have cherished throughout our lives, is an inexhaustible reservoir of sentimental memories.

A few months after I had seen Bowie live in England, I moved back to Germany to continue my studies in Heidelberg. The city was not only home to Germany’s oldest university, it was also the favorite haunt of Germany’s most prominent romantic poets. And to this day, this picturesque town is known for its magic powers to make people fall in love. “Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren”, I have lost my heart in Heidelberg, is one of Germany’s best-known popular songs.

That was the town were Lynne and I met in the summer of 1973. From a romantic point of view, she was a dream girl who seemed to walk and talk at times, as if she too was an angel who had fallen out of the sky. But in a more pedestrian reality she was just another American exchange student from San Diego in Southern California. The year before, she had studied French in Geneva, but on a trip to the Black Forest, she fell in love with Southern Germany and so she came back the following year. As it turned out, she too was a great fan of David Bowie. When he was touring Germany, this time in the guise of the White Duke, we made sure to see his concert together.

“Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?
Hello, I love, let me jump into your game”!
….
Do you think you will be the guy
to make the queen of the angels sigh?”
The Doors, “Hello, I Love You”

I still remember very clearly my first impression of her. She came down a sunlit staircase wearing high wooden platform shoes. They were very fashionable at that time which made her long legs look even longer. Another early memory is of her last name on the plate on her door, which intrigued me immediately, because it clearly was not an English name. And so I began to wonder about her family heritage.

“Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen”, Goethe wrote. In other words, what you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it in order to own it. This advice certainly holds true when it comes to Lynne’s relationship with her paternal heritage. Her father’s roots were in the Italian Campagna Romana, right there, were Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein had painted his famous portrait of Goethe in front of his classical panorama. Since her father’s first language was Italian, his first born daughter grew up with a strong Italian identity along with words and phrases of its melodious vocabulary.

In addition, her vivacious temperament and effervescent exuberance also was a clear reflection of her father’s Mediterranean mentality and so it made perfect sense for her, to keep the family name Dell’Acqua for the rest of her life. From the water! What an evocative maiden name, resonating and undulating with the ebb and flow of the waters, as if she were an Undine straight out of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, or an Arcadian nymph, one of Mother Earth’s mythological daughters.

In any case, instead of frolicking in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, my ragazza dell’acqua with her deep roots in the Campagna Romana soon became my Roman Dolce Vita and my Romantic Commedia Dell’Arte. And I with all my German-Bohemian roots, became her poor poet in his Heidelberg attic, wondering about words he had never heard and worlds he had never seen, in other words, day-dreaming his American Dream …

During our heydays in Heidelberg, we loved to re-enact famous paintings from German and European art history, often turning them into a modern day parody. It was our way of “Lebenskunst”, which meant for us not only the art of living but also living art. Here, I am reliving the painting ”Der arme Poet”, The Poor Poet, by the late romantic painter Carl Spitzweg which is one of the most well-known paintings in German art history. The photo includes of course also the obligatory umbrella in the original painting where it is supposed to shelter the poet in the attic from the rain coming through a leak in the roof. I am sure, that umbrella will come in very handy down the road on that latter day, when a final storm will lift the roof and blow the poor poet forever away.

Looking back at this photo of the young poor poet on his unmade bed, I am struck by two additional visual features in the background. One is an image of Jim Morrison, the front man of the Doors, on the inside of the lid of the tape recorder, the other is a poster of Raquel Welch, the screen siren of Hollywood, coming out of the water. Those two were not only the poster boy and poster girl couple of my adolescent phantasies in the late 1960’s, these two young Californians would also remain my lifelong idols and ideals of female beauty and musical genius.

Throughout the years, I visited Morrison’s grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris whenever I could. And as far as Raquel Welch was concerned, not only did she grow up in San Diego to become “Miss San Diego”, she also had that same Latina allure as my Bella Donna Dell’Acqua. And before I knew it, my poor poet woke up one morning from his dream and voilà – que será, será – found himself right there in Southern California.

***

“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Although my American Dream Girl and her Poor Poet from Germany came from quite different worlds, the two of us were on the same wavelength when it came to our passion for rock music. And there is a good reason for its enduring power. Like no other art form, good rock music is raw energy that comes from the gut and from the heart. And my girl from the water sure had a lot of emotional energy that could rise to a level of rushing and gushing enthusiasm. In addition, she loved to dance and she also had a great talent for it, whereas I had the lyrics in my head and the melodies in my heart, but as music sometimes comes and goes, its rhythm did not always make it all the way down to my legs and my toes.

In Heidelberg, our favorite discotheque was the “Whisky a Go Go”, a cosy night club and bouncy dancing hall named after the famous “Whisky A Go Go” on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, which was the home of the world’s largest names in rock music. Here, my California Girl loved to rock and I would roll until we were soaring, body and soul.

However, back down on earth, the two of us were in many ways a study in contrast. Whereas she was very much a child of the New World and its modern times, I was very much a child of the Old World. And in my mind I was often drifting and tripping back into even older days long before our time.

So let’s return one more time and let’s go again east to the land of Bohemia and Moravia, the Slavic homeland of all my ancestors, who were also called German Bohemians, because the king of Bohemia had invited them to farm his land.. On my maternal side, they had emigrated from Germany in the twelfth century during the time of Emperor Barbarossa and the Staufen dynasty of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

Along with them on their long trek eastwards came the Jews, who left their prospering communities along the Rhine and elsewhere behind, fleeing persecution during the times of the crusades. Many of them moved further east to Poland and Lithuania, the Ukraine and Russia, but many of them also settled in Bohemia and Moravia, adding very much to the multi-cultural mix of this multi-lingual area. All the way to World War I, they were proud citizens of the mighty, ever expanding Habsburg Empire, whose territory once incorporated even parts of today’s Romania and Northern Italy.

During the period of European Romanticism, Bohemians became known as itinerant musicians all over Europe, giving rise to the notion of a bohemian lifestyle which culminated during the fin de siècle in its musical representation by Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La Bohème”. To this day, Bohemians of all walks of life have a reputation for being musical and emotional. “Aus Böhmen kommt die Musik,” the music comes from Bohemia, is the title of a well-known German folksong. Indeed, Bohemians love to sing and dance, and if they have lost their ancestral home they are known for being nostalgic and sentimental. My family certainly was, especially when some of them had a bit of a Schwips from their Czech Pilsner Urquell or some other Slovakian Slivovitz.

Given our ancestral histories and our elective affinities, it was no wonder, my ragazza romana and her bohemian inamorato were made for each other like two star- and moonstruck lovers. The following image below is a cut and paste montage from years ago showing both of us in Heidelberg in the mid-seventies, when the city was also affectionately known as Highdelberg in some higher circles. And those angels down there waiting in the wings sure seem to promise some pretty high jinks.

From the looks of this snapshot, the two of us certainly are in high spirits. Maybe we had concocted some bubbly brew. She certainly is her true effervescent self and appears to be quite amused, whereas I seem to be somewhat dazed and confused. Be that as it may, we sure are ready to have some fun, some good old Commedia Dell’Arte, maybe even a dance with the stars like that legendary goddess Astarte, who was known to ride across the nightly sky in ancient Babylon. She certainly was no Maya with seven veils, according to the Chaldeans and their wonderful visions and starry-eyed tales.

So come on, you improvise and I extemporize! You do the flash backs and I do the sound tracks. I’ll play “Il Dottore”, your Nutty Professor, and you play “Ma Bella Donna Dell’Arte”, my Blue Angel, starring in a divine comedy just like the one by Dante Alighieri. Come on, life is a cabaret and the show must go on! Remember, it always takes two to tango! But if you rather rock and roll, then I‘ll ask …

“Scaramouche, will you do the fandango,
thunderbolt and lightning,
very, very frightening …
Galileo, Galileo
… Figaro …
Magnifico!”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”

But forget that Figaro in this scenario! Who needs a Spanish hair cutter when you can have Galileo Galilei, the great Italian star gazer and cosmic trail blazer of the late Renaissance. After all, we’re in the seventies of the twentieth century, the New Age of freedom and excess, of sex and drugs and rock and roll, of youthful rebellion and universal consciousness. In short, we’re in coming  “Age of Aquarius”, whose dawn the musical “Hair” would celebrate with a lunar dance and celestial exuberance: “When the moon is in the seventh house … and love will steer the stars.”

On top of all those stellar constellations, my Madonna Dell’Acqua also had the right name for this new Aquarian Age and all its higher aspirations. Finally, the earth seemed to be aligned with the universe and it was high time to spread our wings, and for our musical to soar with its final hymn: “Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in”!

***

“Angels fight, angels cry,
angels dance and angels die”
The Doors, “We Could Be so Good Together”

In our magic moments, the two of us were a real dream team, a marriage made in heaven, as they used to say in the olden days, but I am afraid I must burst the bubble, because down here on earth the two of us could also be real double trouble. Passion after all is a powerful potion and the wear and tear of our emotions quite often was getting the better of us. Or to say it with Lady Gaga who like Madonna is also a Paisana Romana just like my Bella Donna Dell’Acqua.

“I want your drama … I want your love.
I want your revenge …You and I could write a bad romance!
I want your …oh oh oh … your Rama-Ramama … and Gaga-ooh-la-la.”
Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”

I could not have articulated it any better! By the same token, this aria buffa with its meshuggene coloratura reminds me vice versa of the Yiddish word “Besherte”, a term of endearment for soul mates who were truly destined for each other. The word is rooted in old Anglo-Saxon, when it meant to cut up things and share them with others and it survived in modern high German as “Schere” for scissors and “Bescherung” for sharing gifts at Christmas time. But in German it also gained an additional meaning in the ironic colloquialism ”eine schöne Bescherung”. In this case, it does not translate into “a beautiful present” but it rather means “what a mess.” In other words, it could also characterize the dream team as double trouble full of storm and stress.

Suffice it to say, sometimes we could be both heaven and hell! Or at least some modern version of what the romantic poet William Blake had called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this poetic masterwork, he proclaimed that without opposites there cannot be progress. Generations later, this dialectical world view would influence among others Aldous Huxley’s most famous book The Doors of Perception which in turn became the source of inspiration for the Doors.

From youthful “mess” to old-age “progress”: Looking back at our long journey through life, I am happy to report, that William Blake was right. The two of us weathered all the storms along the road quite well together. And what is left of our darker realities, are all the highlights of our life and our love, of which we sometimes could not get enough. After all, we were not Florian Illies’ “Generation Golf”, we were born to be wild just like John Kay’s “Steppenwolf”. We were flower children of Mother Earth and part of that Woodstock Generation that was raised on Californian reveries and Bohemian rhapsodies, coming out of the waters and out of the woods.

The mountain of the Hohenstaufen rises right behind my hometown of Göppingen in southern Germany and it still has some ruins of the ancestral fortress of Emperor Barbarossa from the twelfth century. At the time this picture was taken, my musical idols were the itinerant gypsies, the Sinti and Roma, who were roaming the hinterlands of the Habsburg Empire all the way from Romania up to Bohemia. My mother still remembered them as they were passing through her little village. However, when I realized that in comparison with their virtuosity I was also a musical good-for-nothing, I left my good old fiddle way behind. And I also knew, that I had all their wandering melodies singing and dancing in my mind.

Following in the footsteps of Eichendorff, the poet, is however quite another story. He is the quintessential representative of German Romanticism, whose lyrical texts have been set to music by various composers numerous times. His poetic themes and sceneries of romantic ruins and moonlit landscapes, of youthful wanderlust, and last but not least, of “Fernweh” and “Heimweh”, those untranslatable yearnings for far-away countries and – vice versa – the longing for returning home again, all these romantic leitmotivs and nostalgic trajectories have become an integral part of Germany’s cultural imaginaries. And as I realized in hindsight, they had also become very much part of my own life-long phantasies.

„Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts”, From the Life of a Good-For-Nothing, that is the title of Eichendorff’s most well-known novella. In it, the author’s young, happy-go-lucky protagonist takes his violin and sets out for Italy, following in turn in the footsteps of Goethe’s classical “Italian Journey”. I must have been about the same age as Eichendorff’s young protagonist, judging by his peach fuzzy face, when I traveled for the first time to Italy, and I even outdid my role model by hitch hiking most of the way. Only, this time it was not by old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages but by modern-day cars with much more horse power. And in the warm summer nights of the south, I would sleep under the stars and dream of what they might have in store for me.

Back home, way back home in my ancestral homeland, Eichendorffs’s family tree had deep roots in the land of Upper Silesia, which was once also part of the Habsburg Empire. His family even had a small summer castle in Sedlnitz, today’s Sedlnice in the Moravian countryside, which was then known as Kuhländchen, where my maternal forebears had lived for centuries as farmers. Eichendorff spent many summers there, and since my mother’s birthplace Partschendorf, today’s Bartošovice, was the neighboring village, she visited Eichendorff’s near-by castle already as a young school girl, which was an experience that turned her into a lifelong admirer of him and his poetry.

As a young man, Eichendorff not only studied in Heidelberg, he too fell in love in this romantic city on the banks of the Neckar, and to top it off, he too had harbored dreams of setting sails for a new life in America. However, for Eichendorff, that dream never became a reality. In addition, his loved one had left him, adding to his emotional misery. His poem “Das zerbrochene Ringlein”, the broken little ring, became one of the most well-known songs of unrequited love in the German lieder cannon. In it the poem’s protagonist says that he will leave home and roam the world as a “Spielmann”, an itinerant minstrel, trying to forget all his sorrows somewhere in a far-away land. The poem begins: “In einem kühlen Grunde”,  in a cool valley …

The beauty of spring and the joys of love have always been a double phantasy since the beginning of poetry. To give just three examples from the canon of German literature. Walther von der Vogelweide, the great traveling troubadour during the time of the courtly love tradition in medieval Germany, describes in his poem “Unter der linden auf der heide” or “Under the linden tree in a meadow”, a young maiden’s fond memories of her secret romantic tryst with her loved one in a bed of broken grass and beautiful flowers.

Following that medieval model, young Goethe wrote his poem “Mailied” or May Song, which became also known as “Maifest” or May Fest, in which the poet wanders through spring meadows together with a young girl he is in love with. The poem is an exemplary song of erotic innocence and poetic experience, that became the lyrical epitome of German “Sturm und Drang“ with all its exuberant reverie.

Eichendorff, a poet of the next generation happily revisited Goethe’s youthful vision and epic enthusiasm. Goethe had found his first true love in Italy and he eternalized their shared  passion in his “Roman Elegies”. Eichendorff’s love poems also focus on the allure of the foreign, most notably in his poem “Schöne Fremde” whose double entendre of “beautiful stranger” and “beauty of foreign lands” is untranslatable, no matter how much poetic license one applies.

“Heimweh” is another one of those poems and it does not translate into homesickness –  which for non-native speakers of English will probably always resonate with words like sea sickness, or any other sickness which causes the sick one to throw up. “Heimweh” on the other hand translates literary into a woeful longing for home. The first line of this poem reads:  “Wer in die Fremde will wandern, der muss mit der Liebsten gehen”, If you want to wander to far-away lands, you have to go with the one you love the most.

Eichendorff probably even channeled Led Zeppelin to make sure I get the message. After all, they were clearly spelling it out what their message was all about, beginning with title of the song:

“Going to California”

“Someone told me there is a girl out there,
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.”

And as it were, with a “whole lotta love” to give and to share. In other words, the

Love

of a true lover,
the love of a caring wife,
and the love of a wonderful mother,
enough to last for much more than one life.

But stubborn as I was in those days and clueless what the future could bring, I left my loved one behind, leaving for America all by myself in August of 1977, probably thinking that absolute independence would be my ultimate heaven. It soon turned out to be another major moment of bad romance on our itinerary. That bad stretch went from August until December. By November, it seemed we had drifted  “worlds apart”, as the rock band Journey put it in their song

“Separate Ways”

“Here we stand worlds apart,
hearts broken in two, two, two,
sleepless nights, losing ground,
I am reaching for you, you, you.”

And with their chorus refrain, that arena band from San Francisco drove their message home like an orchestrated wake-up call …

“Someday love will find you,
break those chains that bind you”

Considering the fact, that I somehow re-enact Eichendorff’s dreams and poetic phantasies, the romantic irony of that last line was not lost on me, as the band Journey seems to sing in their own way about the poet’s broken heart and his little broken ring. In any case, by the end of that year, the two of us were re-united again in New York City, where I picked up my loved one in the John F. Kennedy airport – and then our hearts went overboard! This was not the first time we had come close losing each other, but this time we had found each other for good. However, we never wore wedding bands. We did not even consider them. Maybe deep down we both were afraid we would break them again.

Ithaca is the name of the little town in the foothills of Cornell University in upstate New York, were I continued my studies at that time. In hindsight, the name Ithaca struck me as a good omen, because it reminded me of the Homeric rhapsodies of Odysseus and his epic and erratic “nostos”, his long return home to his beloved Penelope in Ithaka. It is the archaic model of all adventures stories about faraway lands full of heroic bravura and melodramatic nostalgia. Ever since I had devoured Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in the classical German translation by Johann Heinrich Voss during my earlier years in the Gymnasium, I loved his ancient world of travel and adventure.

As it turned out, my Penelope had brought me home to her own country. We just did not know it at that time. So Eichendorff’s poem “Heimweh” actually turned out to be my “Fernweh” for her home in the New World far out West. The following summer, the two of us traveled together across this seemingly endless continent in Greyhound buses all the way to California, where we continued our continuing education – which apparently never seemed to end – in San Francisco and Santa Barbara.

And it certainly was the right time and the right place to be in California. Songs like “California Girls” by the Beach Boys, “Hotel California” by the Eagles, and “Dreamin’ California” by the Mamas and Papas perfectly captured that far out zeitgeist, that vibrant energy and effervescent atmosphere of those years on the West Coast. And with his song “San Francisco”, beginning with the lines “If you are going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”, Scott Mckenzie was the gentle pied piper for all those flower children who flocked to that rainbow city, the last flourishing outpost of artists and bohemians way up there on the Pacific Coast.

Since the Gold Rush in the nineteenth century, the Golden State of California has loomed on the horizon as the New World’s Manifest Destiny, a mythical Promised Land and modern Paradise Regained. As the country was being settled, more and more names for streets, parks, and beaches in California conjured up these paradisiacal phantasies. When the cultural historian Anthony Heilbut wrote his seminal study on the German expatriates from Nazi Germany who had found a refuge in Los Angeles, he called his study “Exiled in Paradise”.

Oh how we enjoyed roaming the Mojave Desert in spring when all its flowers were in bloom. And how we loved spending summers on the remote beaches north of Santa Barbara, wearing nothing more than a few beads and a sunny smile. And when the sun was setting, my  California girl would turn into Carlos Santana’s “Gypsy Queen” in colorful veils and when the moon was rising, I would become her moonstruck man and she would become Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”.

“California Dreaming”, that was the American Dream as “Paradise Now”, just like the American traveling troupe The Living Theatre had called their most popular play. In hindsight, California was our endless summer of love, or to put it somewhat more prosaically, it was the last four years of our carefree, long-lasting youth, before the real world of a professional life finally caught up with us. And so, we hit the road again, leaving the West Coast and heading back to the East Coast.

“Lehr- und Wanderjahre” is what Goethe had called the formative years of learning and wandering of Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist of his classical bildungsroman. In my case, my years of learning and wandering lasted close to thirty years, in which I studied and taught at a dozen universities in Germany, England and America. In other words, the wannabe fiddling gypsy of my youth had become a “gypsy scholar” instead, as this lifestyle is called in the English- speaking world.

Moving from university to university in pursuit of tenure always reminded me of medieval minstrels wandering from castle to castle in pursuit of a permanent ministerial position. Looking back, I could not have fared any better. On the long and winding and sometimes rocky road, where we so often had to decamp, my fair lady turned out to be a real lady tramp. In other words, we truly had become our American Dream, I was her wandering gypsy scholar and she was my wandering gypsy queen.

“On the Road again”, Willie Nelson’s country song became the favorite soundtrack of our meanderings through this world. And Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” was our alternative guide in search for orientation and our final destination. Which of course always begged the question: Is there an ultimate destiny, let alone preordained itinerary, in a world of so much coincidence, permutation and imponderability?!

***

“Fortuna velut luna …” thus begins the “Carmina Burana”, a collection of songs from the High Middle Ages, whose entry line suggests that fate and fortune are as fickle as the moon. This Latin phrase about the moon could have also been the source of inspiration for Giuseppe Verdi’s famous aria “La donna è mobile”, suggesting that woman is fickle. Waxing moon, waning moon, ebb and flow that come and go. So come, my gypsy queen, my queen of hearts, come and be my fortuneteller! Come show me all your lucky cards …

Tell me, tell me, what is written in the stars! What is our fate! My Fair Lady From the Sea, tell me all about that sparkling Pearly Gate! That magical blue lagoon, that dark abyss of Mother Earth, of eternal death and eternal rebirth, mysterious no-man’s land of eternal death and rebirth! That no-man’s land of all mankind, that blossoming meadow of the Blue Flower, that no romantic will ever find. And again she is rolling her dark brown eyes, just as she did when we lost paradise. And while she keeps smiling her beguiling smile, I keep searching for that utopia, that mythic womb and tomb of the Magna Mater.

„Wohin gehen wir? Immer nach Hause”
Novalis

Where are we going? Always direction home! Wrote Novalis, the romantic dreamer of the Blue Flower. My own scholarly journey on the road home came to an end in Norfolk, Virginia at Old Dominion University. As it turned out, the name of the university literally signifies a home coming since the word “dominion” has its root in the Latin word domo, meaning home. Already the wandering students in Eichendorff’s “Taugenichts” novella had come to the realization at the end of the road: “Beatus ille home, qui sedet in sua domo”, happy is the man who resides in his own home. After my long academic itinerary to find the right place and the right university, I could not agree more.

Finally, I had a solid base from which I could talk myself into more and more lecture tours, which over the years took me to over thirty countries all over the world. I figured, if I was no good as a gypsy musician, I could at least could make up for it as a gypsy scholar. Or to put it differently, the fiddler on the roof had become a real luftmensch, frequently flying the friendly skies, a talking head and so-called Turbo Prof who would talk until his last listener’s ears would fall off.

And after everything was said and done, I felt thankful that after all, I had not become a bum, a German “Bummelstudent”, as we used to call perennial students without a home and nowhere to go. But at the bottom of my Bohemian heart, I will always remain a Good-For-Nothing, Eichendorff’s wandering “Taugenichts”. As a matter of fact, in recent years, I have identified more and more with him, so that I even ended up publishing some of my own poetry under his pseudonym.  For example, the following poem of mine together with the painting by John William Waterhouse, the Pre-Raffaelite painter, appeared in Norfolk’s monthly Downtowner last fall under the name F.A. Taugenichts.

The name of this painting is “The Lady of Shalott”, who according Arthurian legend was yearning for the knight Lancelot. Since she is confined to a tower near Camelot, she reminds me of the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel, which in turn was the name I had given Lynne in Heidelberg because of her long hair at that time. In the meantime, her hair is much shorter just like the name Rapunzel, whose abbreviated version is however still my favorite term of endearment for Lynne.

The original version of this picture poem shown above is a postcard and it was part of a project I had called “poetry to go”, because people can buy postcards, give them to friends or send them around the world. I also love to publish these picture poems in newspapers, because many more people can read them for example at the morning breakfast table and have some food for thought on the way, as they get ready for another busy the day.

The above example is just one of several dozens of poetry postcards, which I produced with different texts, themes and images soon after I had had my first battle with tongue cancer. I had them reproduced by the thousands and sold in different stores in and around Norfolk as well as in Germany with all proceeds going to cancer research. Since last winter, the local newspaper Hampton Roads Gazeti is printing my series on the four seasons not only to celebrate them but also to raise cancer awareness. When we started that project, I would have never thought, that I soon would be battling my own cancer again and more than ever.

***

“I have heard the mermaids singing”
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Norfolk is an old harbor town from America’s colonial period here at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in an area which is also known as Hampton Roads, since it combines old towns like Hampton and Norfolk with newer towns like Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. Together, they are forming a larger metropolitan area of a total of seven cities with over one and half million people. In addition to Hampton Roads, the region is also known as Coastal Virginia, but it is probably most naturally described as Tidewater, since the tides of the Atlantic inundate so many of its marshes and wetlands, meandering waterways and major rivers tributaries.

Considering its natural location, this area is also the home of the mermaid, whose colorful statues adorn grace many public places. It wasn’t until we had lived here for some time, that it dawned on me, that my California girl form the water also was one half of a two-part mermaid configuration. In accordance with mythical mermaids, who are half maid and half fish, Lynne was born in the sign of Pisces and I was a born Virgo. If one puts the two zodiac signs together, they form a perfect  mermaid, a true Meerjungfrau, as she is called in German.

In other words, even from an astrological point of view, the two of us are a match made in heaven and – vice versa – down here on earth, Southern Virginia was our natural destination where we finally found our home. ”Virginia is for Lovers”, is the official motto of this state, and who could argue with that. There is an endearing recording by Charles, singing “Carry me back to Ole Virginny”, an old minstrel song from the nineteenth century and the Rolling Stones chimed right in with him in their bluesy country rock song “Sweet Virginia”, in which they even seem to trace our own journey home from the West Coast to Coastal Virginia …

“Thank you for your wine, California …
yes I got the desert in my toe nails
and I hid the speed inside my shoes …
yeah come on down to Sweet Virginia …”

How fitting that this blues ballad about coming home is featured on their double album “Exile On Main Street”. Yeah, it is good to be home at last. Or, as the forefathers of my better half from the Campagna Romana would have put it:  Pisces, Virgo, Virginia – ubi bene ibi patria.

Nomen est omen: According to Lynne’s mother, the first name of her daughter is also associated with water in the mother tongues of her maternal ancestry from Norway and Sweden. I could never verify this. But it certainly was part of her attempt to reclaim her own ancestry and ethnic identity, which she loved to celebrate in the adventure stories and Nordic myth forging of seafaring Vikings. That ended up impressing her younger son, but not her first-born daughter. She always remained her proud patriarchal father’s “numero uno”, his first-born girl from the water.

However, looking at the proliferation of her name here in Tidewater seems to bear out her mother’s claim. More than a dozen lanes and lakes, parkways and waterways are compound names that contain Lynne’s name in various combinations, including “Lynnhaven”, which is of course my favorite variation. And as if to drive home her aquatic identity all around the Tidewater community, my California girl from the water ended mounting the number plate from her father’s car which she inherited after his death onto her own little Honda S 2000 sports car. It reads “Dell H2O”. And she still loves to drive in the fast lane, which sometimes drives me insane.

“Gremium matris terrae”, the Womb of Mother Earth. That is what poetic scholars of matriarchal mythology call the world of water, the aquatic source of all terrestrial life. Coincidentally, the area of Tidewater in Southern Virginia is also one of the most flooded areas on the East Coast, because the global rising of the sea level is compounded here by the local sinking of the mainland. No wonder, mermaids feel at home here. Unlike land-locked humans they go with the flow when it comes to flooding, and since they have fish tails they don’t have to act like a fish out of water.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water”: During the course of our life together, I have come to the realization, when ebb comes to flow, and push comes to shove my better half can become an amazing bridge over troubled water, strong and supportive as if made out of rock and stone. That was especially evident, when she had to take care of most of the preparations for our hurried evacuation during the last hurricane. She rose to the occasion with so much equanimity, almost bordering on serenity, that she reminded me of “La Serenissima”, the superlative with which the Venetians had crowned their regal Renaissance city a long time ago. The last time I saw Venice it was in late fall and the city was flooded again, but I was struck by the casual, easy going attitude with which its citizens took care of what they call “aqua alta”.

“She’s like a Rainbow” has always been one of my favorite songs by the Rolling Stones ever since I heard it in the sixties on the radio. And I was especially taken by the playful piano play. The last couple of weeks, whenever I started to feel down as if I would drown, my girl from the water rose like a rainbow above it. I have never seen her like this before. Probably because I had never been in such dire straits. And just like we were re-enacted art in our younger years, art is now vice versa re-invigorating our older lives, like this mermaid on the following picture.

Every mermaid in Tidewater is painted in different colors and sometimes they also wear different accessories. This particular mermaid comes in rainbow colors, projecting a message of hope that is reinforced by the word “Hope” which she holds in her outstretched hand.  It is also the password to the building, where we hope, the daily six-week radiation treatment will help me in my battle with cancer.

If “Hope” is the last password for all those who have been struck by cancer, then “Hope Against Hope” describes the conflicting absurdity all those must feel, who know that they are terminally ill. It is a morbid desperation, the Romans used to call “spes contra spem”. But I have a better password through this final absurdity I am borrowing it again from Lynne’s Roman ancestry: “Omnia vincit amor”! It opens every door and for mermaids it would be an easy escape right here along the Atlantic Shore with all its harbors, floodgates and waterways. And on top of it, as far as I can see, it sure would be an exciting escapade, riding the waves all the way out to the open sea.

Last Exit Norfolk: “From Here to Eternity.” The most iconic image of the film “From Here to Eternity” by Fred Zinnemann from the year 1953 is certainly the beach scene in Hawaii, in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are lying and embracing each other in the rolling waves of the surf that is rushing and crushing towards the shore. The powerful ebb and flow of the water and the evocative trajectory of the poetic title “From Here to Eternity” in turn are reminiscent of Goethe’s panoramic allegory “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern”, song of the spirits over the waters. Since Fred Zinnemann was an Austrian immigrant to America, he might have been quite familiar with Goethe’s poetry.

Goethe’s poem describes the course of the water from a spring in the mountains all the way down to the sea, and it turns the subsequent natural process of evaporation and eventual return to earth in the form of rain into a philosophical contemplation about the physical-metaphysical nature of the eternal recurrence of the same. The poet concludes his poem with the transcendental equation: „Seele des Menschen, wie gleichst du dem Wasser, Schicksal des Menschen, wie gleichst du dem Wind“. Soul of man, you are like the water, fate of man, you are like wind. I know of no other poem that describes the psychic energy of humanity, its vibrant vitality and its longing for regeneration and lasting immortality more powerfully than this poem.

Click here to re-read Part I

Part III will be linked here as soon as it is published.

 

Part I of IV
Frederick A. Lubich

My Continuing Battle with Tongue Cancer
or
Spring Songs into Autumn Sonatas
For Lynne

Preface

Part I of the following text was originally written towards the end of September 2018 as a response to my friends’ good wishes and further inquiries after my recent tongue cancer surgery. Since my response also contained additional medical and statistical information on oral cancer, including its early symptoms and warning signs, several readers suggested that I make the text available to a larger audience. And so it is reproduced here as part I in a slightly expanded version.

As I was writing my rather grim update and similarly gloomy outlook about life and death, my current misery started to trigger more and more memories of much better times long gone by.

They took me all the way back to Sète, a port and seaside resort on the Mediterranean in Southern France, were I spent some time with friends in the summer of 1971. Sitting on the rocks looking over the blue water, sparkling in the southern sun and watching the rolling waves breaking onto the beach, I started to imagine writing a love story associated with the sea. But I dismissed it immediately as a quixotic phantasy, since I thought such stories must have been already written in countless variations since the time of antiquity.

“One day, love will find you” … Although this is a line by the rock band Journey which would not become an international hit until several years later, my inner voice might have already mumbled it quietly, long before it came rocking and rolling my way from a country far away. At least clairvoyants could see it that way and explain it like some kind of flash forward into the darkness of my future. Anyway, I never forgot that day overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, day-dreaming of my future destiny.

And now, almost half a century later into my life’s journey and after my latest encounter with mortality, I have decided that it is time to write this love story and write it exactly as it was happening to me over the past years and decades, especially since it had become a central part of my own biography. And so I added this story as part II and III to this narrative, interweaving it also time and again with part I. I also added some additional imagery related to its itinerary.

As usual, my mind kept wandering, getting carried away further and further, but hopefully, this sentimental journey of the second and third part can also serve as a counter vision to the first part. Or to put it in Freudian terms, the pleasure principle is by nature always more enjoyable than the death principle. In short, remembering the misery of death will always remind us to celebrate the miracle of life, and above all its quintessence, the magic and mystery of love. Love is life galore, love conquers everything, or as the ancient Romans put it so succinctly: omnia vincit amor!

I: Tongue-Tied and Speechless But Still Alive

September

Dear Friends on both sides of the Atlantic,

I would like to thank all of you who wrote or called during the past weeks after my operation, sending me your prayers and good wishes, offering to help and even bake me some special German cake. Since some of you also had specific questions regarding how I am doing and how we are coping, I decided to answer all of you in somewhat more detail.

It was in May 2018, when I felt the growing pain in my tongue might be more than just another sore from a recent bit into my tongue. However, for two more months, a nurse assured me that it was only an ulcer and a mouth rinse with saltwater and baking soda would take care of it. It wasn’t until July 2018, that a biopsy confirmed that that this was much more than just an ulcer. My operation was scheduled for August 21.

Clearly, my cancer turned out to be a determined head hunter. Apart from some minor skin cancer operations on my chest, all of my six more or less major operations since 2005 were in the area of neck, nose and tongue. One operation cut out tissue affected by follicular lymphoma, another drilled a dime size hole into my nose to eliminate a carcinoma, and of the four tongue surgeries the most recent one was also by far the biggest one, since my inner enemy had quite suddenly returned with an unprecedented ferocity.

In an operation lasting eight hours, the doctors ended up cutting out more than half of my tongue, which was then reconstructed with tissue taken from my leg, leaving a scar from the hip all the way down to the knee. In addition to providing me with a new patch-work tongue, the rest of my lymph nodes around the neck had to be removed too. So my necklace of stitches also looks with a bit of imagination like the traces of a patched-up decapitation. Thus, this covered-up beheading turns out to be quite symbolic, as the survival rate for tongue cancer is only 50-60 %. Statistically speaking, I could have lost my head – along with the rest of my body – quite a long time ago. But how many more times will I be able to beat the odds before I run out of luck?

Lucky me! This time around I had escaped the final cu of the knife, waking up from my surgery tongue-tied and speechless – but still alive.

While my tongue and neck remained swollen from several weeks, the rest of my body has shrunk substantially, as I have lost twenty-five pounds in this last battle round. As far as regular breathing is concerned, I get most of my air through a trach going right into my trachea, and all my so-called food I get exclusively through a gastric tube. The latter could remain in place for several more weeks or months or – if the streak of my bad luck continues – for the rest of my life.

And forget talking: More than four weeks after surgery, my speech is still mostly babble bubble, sounding somewhat like Donald Duck backwards, only much slower. And every now and then, my gibberish is interrupted by a growling sound as if coming from the underground, vaguely reminiscent of the howling of Jim Morrison from the Doors, one of the great musical idols of my youth. In short, calling my linguistic challenges a speech impediment would be quite a compliment. I speak mostly in tongues nobody understands. And while others are straining to read my lips, I am trying to catch my breath, since simply finishing one or two more or less incomprehensible sentences can still be quite an exasperating experience.

Because I often cannot say the simplest words, I have to write them down either on an erasable notebook or on sheets of paper I have been stacking up in ever growing piles over the last couple of years at home and in my office. They are all recycled photocopies of discarded academic articles, former administrative correspondences etc., which keep reminding me one more time of former research activities, other forms of bureaucratic absurdities etc., but those empty back pages always make perfect scratch paper.

As if I saw it coming, this growing tumor appeared to be designed by my destiny’s morbid sense of humor. As I look at all those paper towers, I am reminded of a vivid phantasy from a long time ago, when I was growing up in West Germany. I must have been eleven or twelve years old, when I imagined that I had been given a certain amount of words in my life and after I had used them all up I would have to remain silent forever.

Maybe the song “Silence is Golden” by the Four Seasons also had an influence on my strange flight of fancy – which in reality seems to have landed me half a century later on the other side of the Atlantic in this current tongue-tied mess. I remember hearing “Silence is Golden” in my youth on radio AFN, the American Forces Network, which at that time was entertaining the American troops stationed in Europe with popular music from way back home.

Be that as it may, little did I know at that time, that I would not only end up talking like those American troopers, but also babbling like those Babylonian builders in the fable of that infamous Tower of Babel. And if one wants to add an additional riff to my biblical narrative, one could make the case, that now with my half native and half artificial tongue, I can even up the ante to their Babylonian brinkmanship and garble my German and English all the better into perfect bilingual gibberish.

In other words, forget talking a mile a minute, forget the Eagles’ driving rock song “Life in the Fast Lane”, forget Bob Dylan’s rocking sing-along “Forever Young” or to bring it even closer to home, forget all that late romantic rush of German “Sturm und Drang”.  Instead, keep in mind the coming of death, the final, inescapable exit door, which the Doors had called that ultimate moment, when we no longer can run and hide, because the time has come to “break on through to the other side”. Academic scholars with ambitious publication agendas have always lived with so-called deadlines, but this deadline has no definite date on which both sides, author and publisher can agree upon – this deadline will hit you sooner or later, no matter if your work is done.

As far as my near future is concerned, I will need dental surgery, speech therapy, extensive radiation and maybe additional chemotherapy, to be topped off by treats like having to pay hefty bills, since our insurance company does not cover all the costs of that extensive surgery. And all of that does not guarantee at all, that I will ever be able to eat and talk again half way normally, let alone teach a foreign language with the necessary clarity. Not to mention the penultimate question: Will my inner enemy come back? After all, a successful operation is by no means a guarantee, that the tongue cancer will not return for a final and fatal blow. That happened to someone in our closer circle of acquaintances not so long ago.

Pondering all my woes along with their future scenarios, I feel strongly, I really needed all that oral cancer like a “hole in the head”, as the Jewish American saying goes. And speaking of not being able to speak: After my first major tongue operation in 2005, I regained my speech about one week after my operation. However, for some reason, in my first telephone conversation with my mother in Germany, I sounded much more Yiddish than German. All I had to add was playing a Klezmer lidl on my old high school fiddle, in order to further underscore the riddle of my new pronunciation and linguistic transformation. In my younger years, I had played the violin with youthful determination, although my modest musical talents always kept me well-grounded through all those years. But now, speaking to my mother, her far-away “Buuf”, as she used to call me in my youth, sounded in deed like a fiddler high up on his roof.

Speaking of Yiddish: Years after my first tongue operation, I started to have longer and longer conversations with my good friend and best Yiddish speaking buddy, Rabbi Michael Panitz, and in the course of our rambling discussions we found out that the Yiddish dialect of his Eastern European grandparents shared many similarities with the German Moravian dialect of my own parents and grandparents, who after World War II were expelled from their ancestral home in the Bohemian hinterland of former Czechoslovakia.

In the beginning of this year, having coffee again with Michael at Borjo’s, our favorite local coffee house in the University Village of Old Dominion University, he told me another one of his funny Yiddish proverbs. This time it was about having a “been in hals”. It literally means to have a leg in one’s throat and figuratively speaking it suggests having a thorn in one’s side. This Yiddish kaffeeklatsch took place half a year before I was diagnosed with the latest thorn in my throat. In other words, Michael’s proverb turned out to be quite a telling self-fulfilling prophecy, since now I am trying to talk quite literally with bits and pieces of my leg and my tongue. And while at times this can sound quite funny – for me in the long run it is no fun.

What’s in a word? Given my story, one could add a final irony to my case history. In medical lingo, tongue surgery is called glossectomy after the Greek word “glossa” for tongue and language. Mulling over my calamity, my position as managing editor of “Glossen”, a bi-lingual online journal on transatlantic, German-American cultural relations and political developments after 1945, could also be in imminent jeopardy. Maybe the name glossectomy is doubling as an ominous writing on the wall, spelling out my pending editorial fall? Or maybe, the linguistic coincidence is only meant to be tongue in cheek? Fate’s tickling of my funny bone so to speak?

***

Considering my new condition, with all its known and unknown challenges, Lynne turned out to be once again my greatest fortune in my current misfortune, as she became an inexhaustible source of practical help and emotional support. And on top of it with her, I was also in the good hands of a practicing psychotherapist with a lot of experience in mental health who could share all her professional wealth. But for the time being, forget the Freudian “talking cure”. In the first days after my operation, whenever darkness threatened to come over me, she simply was my daily sunshine, my sunny California girl of our youthful years from way back when. Leonard Cohen described such magic moments of natural healing most evocatively in his haunting “Anthem” from his album The Future: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

In conclusion, I would like to also shine a light on the reality of tongue cancer and have my story serve as a lasting lesson for all of you, including all your friends and all your enemies – should you have some. In my younger years, I smoked like a chimney, often rolling my own cigarettes with Dutch Drum tobacco and of course always without filters. And I was doing it for fifteen years. Whereas lung cancer is quite common as a result of smoking, tongue cancer in comparison is quite rare. Oral cancer accounts for only 3% of all forms of cancers and the percentage for tongue cancer is even lower. And it can have all different types of causes besides smoking.

All the more reason to be aware of the fact, that a persisting pain in the tongue can be so much more than just a lingering canker sore. Early detection and timely intervention are absolutely essential in preventing further if not fatal damage.  After all, who wants to leave before one’s time, especially if you feel you are still in your latter-day prime? Not to mention Bob Dylan’s paean to youth and its endearing belief in its eternal truth.

“Den Fluch in Segen verwandeln”, to turn the curse into a blessing, that is one of my favorite words of wisdom from the German-Jewish-Argentinian writer Robert Schopflocher, whom I met in Buenos Aires at the beginning of this century. Our brief encounter led to a growing friendship via electronic correspondence that lasted for fifteen years until his death.  Inspired by his guiding principle, which for me has turned out to be true on several occasions during the past several years, I am also trying to come to terms with the curse of my cancer.

In other words, I have become quite grateful to my deadly enemy that he has granted me since the time of his first appearance so many more years to live and enjoy life to the fullest. And I hope, I will be able to cherish all those things again, which we usually take so much for granted, and I am sure, I will do it even more consciously. Simple things like being able to eat and speak … enjoy good food and good conversations … the exchange of silly jokes, the sharing of sudden ideas … the joyful interplay of good company and lasting friendships …

Again, my text turned out to be much longer than intended. But since I can’t talk I have to write. So let me write, turning the curse that has been cast upon me into a blessing: May you all be blessed with good health! “Bleibt gesund”, each and every one of you here and on the other side of the Atlantic. And last but not least, I wish you “a gezunt af dein kop”, as the Yiddish greeting goes, which in English means health to your head!

But I would like to expand its blessing for a healthy head, including its mental health, for all of you by wishing you “Gesundheit” for the rest of your body too! Or as the ancient philosophers of Lynne’s Italian ancestors put it so much more eloquently: “mens sana in corpore sano”!

With this in mind, we both wish you all the best,

Lynne and Frederick

Part II – October

Nobelpreis für Wolf Biermann: Eine transatlantische PEN-Initiative
Frederick A. Lubich

Hervorragende Sänger und Seher sind seit biblisch-homerischen Zeiten die Lichtgestalten ihrer Kultur und Geschichte. Sie berichten von ihren Taten, vertonen ihren Zeitgeist und entwerfen auch immer wieder dessen kulturelle Ideale und sozialpolitische Utopien.

Auch die deutsche Kulturgeschichte kann auf eine ehrwürdige Ahnenreihe solcher Sänger und Seher, beziehungsweise Dichter und Denker zurückblicken, angefangen von Walther von der Vogelweide über Heinrich Heine zu Bertolt Brecht und von Friedrich von Schiller und Johann Wolfgang von Goethe über Thomas Mann und Hermann Hesse zu Heinrich Böll und Günter Grass, um mit den letzten vier nur einige der international bekanntesten Repräsentanten der deutschen Moderne zu nennen.

Die Mitglieder des jährlichen Nobelpreis-Komitee haben im Laufe der Jahrzehnte jedoch nicht nur die vier letztgenannten mit dem Nobelpreis für Literatur gewürdigt, sondern in jüngerer Zeit auch deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen wie Elfriede Jelinek und Herta Müller, die in ihren Texten die Erfahrungen der Gegenwart auf vielfache Weise zum Ausdruck gebracht haben.

Sieht man sich heute im deutschsprachigen Kulturkreis um, so gewinnt die Gestalt des Dichters, Liederkomponisten und gesellschaftskritischen Publizisten Wolf Biermann ebenfalls markant prominente Konturen und dies auch aus zusätzlich einzigartigen Gründen. Wie kein anderer deutscher Künstler seiner Zeit repräsentiert und reflektiert er mit seinem Leben und seinem Werk die Zerrissenheit seiner Nation nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ihre politischen Kulturbrüche und ideologischen Widersprüche und nicht zuletzt ihre erfolgreiche Überwindung, die in ihren dramatisch epochalen Dimensionen in der Weltgeschichte sicherlich ihresgleichen sucht.

In anderen Worten, Hegels Weltgeist und seine dialektische Geschichtsphilosophie hätten keinen besseren Fürsprecher und Vorkämpfer finden können. So wie Bob Dylan für seine Generation den Zeitgeist Amerikas artikulierte, so tat es Wolf Biermann nicht nur für sein zerrissenes Vaterland, sondern auch für ein gespaltenes Europa, das Jahrzehnte lang im Kalten Krieg und seiner globalen Ost-West-Konfrontation politisch erstarrt und militärisch weltweit bedrohlich geworden war.

Biermann hat diese zeitgeschichtliche Zerreißprobe auf mehrfache Weise unmittelbar am eigenen Leib erfahren und das von Kindesbeinen an. Geboren als „halb Judenbalg und halb ein Goj“, wie er sich selbst beschreibt, machte er sich als junger, idealistischer Weltverbesserer schon früh auf den Weg nach Ost-Berlin ins vermeintlich bessere Deutschland, um mit seinen Gedichten und Gesängen so poetisch wie provokativ und so wagemutig wie zuversichtlich für eine gerechtere Gesellschaft zu kämpfen. Ein Leben lang war er im besten Sinne des Wortes ein Spielmann, der in schlimmsten Zeiten seine Freiheit und nicht zuletzt sein Leben aufs Spiel setzte, um mit seiner Dichtung die Wahrheit zu verkünden – zumindest so gut, wie er sie unter den gegebenen Umständen zu erkennen und auszudrücken vermochte.

Heinrich Heines literarische Maxime, Poesie und Politik auf progressive Weise zu verbinden und weiter zu verbreiten, kristallisierte sich im Lebenswerk Biermanns auf geradezu geniale Weise. Höhepunkt seiner essaystischen und vor allem poetischen Kreativität, die sich in zahlreichen Gedichtbänden niedergeschlagen hat, ist sicherlich sein Versepos „Deutschland ein Wintermärchen“, das nicht nur eine kongeniale Revision von Heines gleichnamigem „Deutschland ein Wintermärchen“ darstellt, sondern letzteres an lyrischem Witz und ironisch-sarkastischem Scharfsinn auch immer wieder übertrifft. Anders gewendet, Wolf Biermanns poetisch-politisches Werk ist ein integraler Bestandteil der vielberufenen Dialektik der deutsch-jüdischen Aufklärung, die von Immanuel Kant über Gotthold Efraim Lessing und Moses Mendelssohn bis zur Frankfurter Schule Theodor Adornos und Max Horkheimers reicht und noch weit darüber hinaus.

Aus dem Geist dieser fortschrittlichen Aufklärung konnte schließlich aus Heines dunklem, romantischen Wintermärchen ein helles, modernes Sommermärchen werden, welches über den Berliner Mauerfall und ein wiedervereintes Deutschland hinaus auch noch auf ein sich rundum zunehmend demokratisch vereinigendes Europa auszustrahlen vermochte. Im Laufe der Jahre und nicht zuletzt seit der sogenannten bundesweiten Flüchtlingskrise im Jahre 2015 ist Biermann auch zu einer zunehmend transatlantisch und international wichtigen Stimme geworden, der auch Zeitungen wie die New York Times gebührende Resonanz verleiht.

Auf Grund der einmaligen, poetisch-politischen Verdienste Wolf Biermanns habe ich im Frühjahr dieses Jahres dem Vorstand des PEN-Zentrums deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland vorgeschlagen, den Autor für den Nobelpreis für Literatur zu nominieren und sämtliche Mitglieder haben diesen Vorschlag einstimmig unterstützt. Wir hoffen durch kreative PR-Arbeit dieses Projekt erfolgreich voranzubringen und sind für weitere Vorschläge und einschlägige Hinweise sehr dankbar.

English and American Cinematic Depictions of Nazi-era Naval Personnel

by Michael Panitz

INTRODUCTION: SUBVERTING THE FACE, RECOVERING THE FACE

The face is the gateway to the individuality of the Other. The 20^th-century Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, commented on Genesis 1:26, “God said, let us make the human in Our image”, that each human face is distinct from every other, and that this individuality is itself the image of God within humankind. Another 20^th-century philosopher, the French-Jewish Emanuel Levinas, has rooted an entire ethical system in the recognition of the metaphysical significance in the face-to-face encounter of two people.[i]

The recognition of the “face of the Other”, i.e., to acknowledge the three-dimensional humanity of the enemy, is challenged by war. All war is dehumanizing. To overcome deeply-rooted inhibitions about taking the life of a fellow human, military training leads the soldier to depersonalize the act of killing.  He is conditioned to regard his opponent as a “target”; he “eliminates” the target.

With the mobilization of entire societies on wartime footing that characterized the two World Wars of the 20^th century, war has also involved indoctrinating citizens to think of their enemies in impersonal terms. This is most graphically and radically seen in Nazi propaganda films, depicting Jews as rats and vermin. When a society first accepts the depiction of the enemy as vermin, it becomes psychologically possible to use Zyklon-B, originally developed as an insecticide, to perpetrate genocide.[ii]

In democratic societies, as well, the tendency during wartime in the modern era has been to depict the enemy in ways that prepare the audience of those depictions to go into battle and to take lives. In World War II, not only standing armies, but entire nations, stood pitted against each other. The combatant nations conscripted their members on a large-scale. For example, 11 million Americans served in the military during that conflict. Much of the younger cohort of a belligerent nation’s wartime citizenry was likely to be in uniform before the end of the war. Great Britain, with a smaller population and longer span of conflict, called up an even larger percentage to fill its recruitment needs. Moreover, the civilian sector of the society was instrumental in sustaining the morale of the soldier. Civilians corresponded with their relatives and dear ones in uniform. Civilians were called upon “to do their bit”. Many women entered the workforce to fill the places of men in uniform. Men and women, young and old, were exhorted to donate blood and financial assets, to display stoicism in coping with privations and, in England, large-scale homelessness, without losing the political will to carry on the struggle.

Therefore, shaping the mass psychology of the public ultimately had military value. The military encouraged journalists to accompany the troops and write morale-building pieces for civilian consumption, also exercising censorship over words and images that would be transmitted home.[iii]

The technological innovations of modern warfare also contribute to the elimination of the face of the enemy from the consciousness of the soldier. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” is advice from the era of the musket, whose lethal range was measured only in tens of meters. In warfare since the mid- 19^th century, the rifled barrel was lethal at longer range, and the machine gun mechanized killing.

This depersonalization is especially a feature of naval warfare, where the fighting, albeit carried out by the members of each vessel’s crew, was between ship and ship. Second World War undersea warfare was an extreme example of this. Most of the 50 crewmembers of a U-Boat never saw the ship they had torpedoed, let alone its crew. When attacking on the surface, as U-Boats typically did at night, only the gun crew and the watch-standers saw the action. When submerged, only the captain and those few officers he would invite to the periscope could see their enemy. On the other side, the crews of anti-submarine warfare vessels—patrol boats, trawlers, frigates, corvettes, and destroyers—rarely saw the men of the submarines they fought. An oil slick and some floating debris were the visual evidence of the destruction of the enemy vessel, corroborating the acoustical evidence of a vessel breaking up underwater provided by the surface ship’s hydrophones.

The effort to sustain the will to fight the Second World War involved the genres of fiction as well as journalism. American and British filmmakers produced large numbers of war films, celebrating the exploits of fictional heroes defeating the nation’s foes and presenting models for emulation to stimulate the fighting spirit of the populace.

This essay focuses on one aspect of those war stories: It examines American and British cinematic depictions of one group of German fighters, the officers and men of the Kriegsmarine, during and after the Second World War. Are they seen as “faceless” or as individuals? Contemporaneous depictions of them in stock, impersonal terms are ordinary, and are to be explained by the norms of 1940’s wartime film-making. But even during wartime, several outstanding filmmakers, in one case at the cost of public censure, endowed the German foe with redeeming features,. A closer analysis of these artistic efforts is warranted, with the goal of explicating their exceptional status.

After the end of the war, with the Anglo-American public still eager to relive recent victories, there was a continuing market for Second World War stories and films. In the 1950’s, however, such movies began increasingly to explore differences among the enemy Germans, depicting some as non-Nazi German patriots, and others as closet anti-Nazis. This artistic development also calls for elucidation.

Finally, these two eras of war-story telling have left a legacy for more recent cinematic and television productions, and this essay will offer a brief exploration of the continuing effects of that legacy.

Why focus on Kriegsmarine sailors, and not Luftwaffe aviators or Wehrmacht soldiers? In fact, some American-made films have told stories about those branches of warfare, and the emergence of depictions of differences among Wehrmacht personnel corresponds to the phenomenon discussed in this essay, that the focus on German fighters as individuals grew stronger in post-war film-making.[iv] But the Kriegsmarine merits special attention, because within the navy, the 40,000 man submarine force was composed of freiwillge, volunteers. As such, ideologically-driven Nazis were prominent in that sub-community. Hence, cinematic depictions of U-Boat officers as Nazis are unsurprising, but departures from that norm are all the more worthy of elucidation.

I. The Wartime Years: Ordinary and Extraordinary Depictions

To understand the visual cinematic conventions of World War II naval stories, it is reasonable to begin with wartime documentary film footage. The American documentary series Victory at Sea premiered as a television program in the 1952-1953 season, and was released in theaters in 1954, but it consisted of wartime footage.[v] It covered American naval operations against both Japanese and German adversaries. The relevant footage of German ships and personnel consisted of captured German war photo-journalism. This extended both the perspective and the time-span of the series, allowing the documentary to cover the first two years of the Second World War at sea, prior to the entry of the United States into the conflict.

In that footage, Kriegsmarine personnel are depicted without individuality of personality, but only functional differentiation.  Engine stokers, hydroplane operators, torpedo technicians, sonar operators, and officers are all depicted at their battle stations, but no attention is paid to them as individuals.

Understanding why these warriors are depicted without personality thus resolves into two questions: why German wartime journalism chose to do so, and why American editors kept this footage in the final release.

For the Nazi-era German photojournalists, depicting the men as so many cogs in the wheel of the military machine was a positive, not a negative. Nazi ideology hailed the primacy of the state, claiming that the individual found his true nobility not in pursuit of personal goals, but rather in service of Vaterland, Volk and Fuehrer. Nazi ideologues derided the individualism of western society as decadent, and Nazi wartime propaganda predicted the victory of German single-mindedness over the armed forces of their internally-feuding Western enemies.

For the American editors of this captured archival film, the facelessness of the German sailor served as both a sobering reminder and as a validation. On the one hand, Americans acknowledged the efficiency of the German foe, whom they had only defeated after years of maximum effort. On the other hand, seeing the German depicted in depersonalized terms was a confirmation that Americans had fought for a good cause, that of human freedom and individual self-determination.

The archival footage of American sailors also shows them at action stations, but crucially, that is not the only footage of such sailors shown in Victory at Sea. The Americans are also depicted in off-duty moments, enjoying various recreational pastimes. The message is that Americans became warriors of necessity, but remained humans throughout. They never lost their individual faces.

 

Turning from documentary to fiction films released during the war years, it is important to keep in mind the genre conventions and production conditions of those films. In their numerous war movies, both American and British filmmakers dealt with governmental information ministries and conformed to official guidelines. These guidelines were designed to guarantee that the films would be essentially morale-boosting efforts for the nation at war. The German (and Japanese) enemy in such films is typically depicted in typological and stereotypic terms.

One such film was the 1943 Crash Dive, starring two popular leading men of the era, Tyrone Power and Dana Andrews. The plot is conventional: As its tagline advertising breathlessly announced:

Tyrone Power — Leading a reckless crew on the war’s most
daring mission! Battling death in a depth-bombed submarine!
Blasting Nazis on a bold Commando raid! Finding love in
precious, stolen moments! Crashing his way to unforgettable
glory in…Crash Dive!

The film is a propaganda vehicle, extolling all the types of service within the U.S. Navy. Initially, the protagonist, Lt. Stewart, is seen successfully piloting a small, swift patrol boat in action against a German submarine. Against his preferences, he is transferred to duty as the executive officer of a submarine, Corsair. But ultimately, Stewart learns of the importance of all the branches of the navy, and the film closes with a stirring speech in which he eulogizes each of the different types of warships in the U.S. Navy (except for destroyers—likely an oversight. Hollywood was, after all, a province of civilians.)

Crash Dive follows many of the tropes of wartime American films—brothers in arms, who resolve their inter-personal conflict by teaming up for the greater goal; the heroic self-sacrifice of the “one who didn’t make it”, dying so that his comrades might live; the maturation of the protagonist’s initial brashness into more enduring courage. One such trope, in particular, reassured Americans that they were not being hypocritical in maintaining a racially segregated country while fighting a war against Nazi racism. Although the armed forces were segregated, there were African Americans in specific, secondary roles within the services.  These films tend to portray them in a partly-positive, but also partly-condescending, light. The African-American in Crash Dive, Oliver Cromwell Jones, is serving as a steward aboard Corsair. That relatively lowly station was the only one officially open to African Americans in submarine service at the time. When the call is made for volunteers to stage a hazardous commando raid against a German military installation, Jones steps forward unhesitatingly. That is an endorsement of his courage. When asked why he is doing so, he gives a patriotic answer. His character is also given a moment of racially self-conscious levity: seeing his fellow commandos with black paint on their faces to render them inconspicuous at night, he exclaims, “I’m the only born commando here!”[vi]

The German Kriegsmarine officers and sailors in this film, both on the Q-ship that the Corsair sinks and on the base attacked by Corsair’s commando party, are given only two-dimensional portrayals. There is no effort to see them as individuals.

If Crash Dive exemplifies the run-of-the-mill war film, perhaps forgettable today except to film buffs, two other wartime efforts stand out and continue to speak to today’s audiences: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 49^th Parallel and Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.  In each of these, the Germans emerge as fully-realized characters.

In 1941, the recently-reorganized British Ministry of Information extended the scope of its activities to include not only documentaries but also feature films made in support of Great Britain’s war effort. Its first project was to underwrite Powell and Pressburger’s 49^th Parallel.  The title is an oblique reference to the border between Canada and the United States, much of which follows that line of latitude. The story is the saga of six survivors of a German submarine, destroyed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, who attempt to make their way across Canada to gain refuge in the then-neutral United States. (This was before Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack upon U.S. naval forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, propelled the U.S. into the war.) One by one, they die, leaving only Lt. Hirth, the most ardent Nazi in the group. He actually makes it across the border before being sent back on a clever technicality and subdued.

The filmmakers were eager to contribute their talents to the British war effort. Powell resolved to set the film in Canada, with the United States as the intended destination of the determined Nazis, to bring the Americans into the war on the Allied side. In a later interview about the work, he acknowledged, “I hoped it might scare the pants off the Americans.” Pressburger, a Jewish refugee from Hungary who was working as a scriptwriter in London, also characterized his work as a contribution to the British war effort: “Goebbels considered himself an expert on propaganda, but I thought I’d show him a thing or two.”[vii]

Part of the propaganda value of the film was a bit of military disinformation that it promulgated. The film depicts a fully-operational and comprehensive system of Canadian anti-submarine air defenses. This did in fact not exist at the time of the filming, in 1941. In a later interview, Powell acknowledged the factual inaccuracy, and stated that he suggested the existence of such a fully articulated system in the hopes that it would convince German war planners of the futility of continuing their operations in Canadian home waters.

49^th Parallel is noteworthy for its depiction of different personality types among the six U-Boat submariners attempting their escape. While the German protagonist, Leutnant Hirth, is depicted as a rabid Nazi, one of the enlisted men, Vogel, has no ideological ardor. This comes to the fore when the submariners encounter a farming commune of ethnic German Hutterites (a Christian group similar to the Amish). During the time that the submariners spend in the Hutterite community, Hirth attempts to rouse their German racial consciousness, but fails completely. As their leader, Peter, explains, they are motivated by Christian love, not by racial hatred. Vogel, on the other hand, is impressed with their outlook and way of life. A baker by trade, he improves their bakery and delights them by providing them their daily bread, which they acclaim highly, to his great satisfaction. Ultimately, Vogel seeks to defect. He declares to one of the Hutterite women that he is willing to submit to internment as a Prisoner of War, so as to join the commune after the war.

How to account for the sharp difference between Hirth’s and Vogel’s characters, in a British propaganda film? The answer is seen in the fate of Vogel. Sensing Vogel’s ambivalence, Hirth, as his acting superior officer, marches him into the woods, accuses him of treason, pronounces him guilty without even according him the opportunity to speak up in his own defense, and shoots him on the spot.

Powell’s and Pressburger’s message is that there are, indeed, “good Germans”, but that they are not in positions of authority.  Under the right conditions, they would be capable of being influenced by the goodness of the people of the Free World. But they do not control Germany; hardened Nazis do. The only way to reclaim Germany into the fellowship of moral nations is to defeat the Nazi leadership. Victory is a precondition for reformation of character.

 

Like 49^th Parallel, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film, Lifeboat, was occasioned by wartime exigencies. The American Maritime Commission asked Darryl F. Zanuck, head of the Hollywood movie company 20^th Century Fox, to make a film about the U-Boat menace to North Atlantic shipping.  The request was indeed timely. In early 1943, at the time of this request, the U-Boat offensive was still claiming heavy losses of Allied shipping in the North Atlantic.[viii] Hitchcock was not then working directly for Zanuck, but rather for another film mogul, Robert O. Selznick. But Selznick leased Hitchcock’s services to Zanuck and Lifeboat is the result.

Unlike 49^th Parallel, where the characters of Hirth and Vogel represent the extremes, in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the portrayal of character focuses on the ambivalence and the moral ambiguities that are the common human condition.[ix] This, in turn, affected his portrayal of the U-Boat commander in his 1944 film, Lifeboat.

Nine people find themselves aboard one lifeboat. Eight of them are survivors of a torpedoed merchantman, and the ninth is a German, who feigns being a common seaman but who is soon unmasked as the Kapitän of the submarine, which was itself destroyed in the battle. Over the course of the many days in which they are adrift, without fresh water and with dwindling food supplies, their carefully constructed personas are stripped away and the conflicted inner person emerges. Each one has both good and bad sides to his character. The nurse Alice, for example, initially the exemplification of altruism, proves to have been “the other woman”, engaged in an affair with a married man.

The most problematic member of the ensemble (other than a young German sailor pulled aboard at the very end, as a dramatic echo of the main action), is the German Willi. He insists that the others are setting the wrong course, heading away from Bermuda rather than towards it, as is their intention. When challenged as to why he would help them to take him to Bermuda, when he would simply be a prisoner there, he answers, disarmingly, that he is already a prisoner on the lifeboat, and in Bermuda, at least he would be safe from starvation. But he is seen furtively consulting a hidden compass, and it ultimately becomes clear that he is hoping to take the lifeboat to a rendezvous with his submarine tender.

While initially presenting an inoffensive persona, Willi gradually reveals his true colors.  After a storm nearly swamps the lifeboat, Willi takes command. The force of his personality and his physical stamina, coupled with the demoralization and the physical disintegration of the others, allows him to dominate his fellow survivors.

But after he is unmasked as a water hoarder, the fury of the other passengers is such that, led by the nurse Alice (!), they mob him, beat him senseless, and heave him overboard to his death.

Willi is a complex character. On the positive side, he is a cultured man, multi-lingual, knowledgeable of music. A medical doctor before the war, he saves the life of fellow-survivor, Gus Smith, by amputating his gangrenous leg. When rowing the lifeboat, he sings lullabies to the weary passengers. But despite these positives, Willi is ultimately an evil man. He hides his compass from the others and he lies to his fellow passengers about the way to safety, in fact leading them towards capture. He murders Gus, after Gus catches him hoarding water while the others are nearly dying of thirst.

The defining characteristic of Willi is his sense of purpose, in sharp contrast to the fractious internal debates among the other lifeboat passengers, representatives of British and American democracies. Class tensions simmer in the angry relationship of Kovacs, the proletarian from a working class district of Chicago, and Rittenhouse, the fascist-admiring self-made millionaire. The others bicker over who is to take command; Willi simply does so at the opportune moment. He bides his time, plays his cards perfectly, and utilizes the life-threatening danger of a storm to take command just at the moment that the others are too debilitated, emotionally and physically, to challenge him. Only then does he expatiate on the superiority of the German.

Viewed today, it is easy to recognize that Hitchcock intended this film to convey a wartime message: that the Allies needed to unite so as to be able to defeat so well organized an enemy as the totalitarian Nazi society. Filmed in 1943, when the outcome of the war was not yet certain, the characterization of the Nazi as resourceful, cunning, and strong was a call to take seriously the challenge of defeating so able an adversary.

Despite his aims, Hitchcock’s characterization of the German officer Willi as a complex character aroused considerable, even virulent, criticism. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed:

There remains the alarming implication, throughout all the
action of this film, that the most efficient and resourceful
man in this Lifeboat is the Nazi, the man with ‘a plan.’ Nor
is he an altogether repulsive or invidious type. As Walter
Slezak plays him, he is tricky and sometimes brutal, yes,
but he is practical, ingenious and basically courageous in
his lonely resolve. Some of his careful depictions would be
regarded as smart and heroic if they came from an American
in the same spot.

The noted critic and author Dorothy Parker, after whose brash manner the leading character in the film, “Connie Porter” (played by the stage star Talulah Bankhead) was modeled, panned the film with characteristic wit and ruthlessness: She gave it “ten days to get out of town.”[x]

Hitchcock responded to his critics in words that ring true to the reader today. In retrospect, the widespread misinterpretation of his film upon its release is best understood as a reflection of the mass psychology of wartime America. In a 1962 interview with the filmmaker Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained his goal in creating Lifeboat:

We wanted to show that at that moment there were two world forces
confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the
democracies were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were
clearly headed in the same direction. So here was a statement telling
the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather
their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was
precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination.[xi]

With the added perspective of time, it is now clear that Hitchcock was incorporating some positives in his portrayal of Willi so as to portray him as a formidable foe. Defeating him was therefore a greater dramatic achievement.[xii]

Ultimately, Hitchcock passes negative judgment upon the wartime German in general.  In the final scene of the film, another German is pulled to safety by the lifeboat passengers, and he immediately pulls a pistol on them.  After the African American, Joe, disarms him, but the passengers then allow him to remain on board, the German asks if they are going to kill him. Then, Kovacs, the leading male protagonist, muses,

‘Aren’t you going to kill me?’ What do you do with people like that?

In its own historical setting, the question was rhetorical. The 1944 Anglo-American audience was relied upon to answer, “defeat them”. The individuality of the submarine commander did not yet constitute a change of attitude towards Germany; it was still univocally the enemy to be beaten.

II. Sea-Change in the Cinema of the 1950’s

The seeming exceptions to the norm in wartime films of depicting German sailors in two-dimensional ways, therefore, did not constitute a fundamental reevaluation. Individual Germans were good, but not in control; alternately, Germans had some good points of character, but were ultimately still evil.

In the course of the decade following the conclusion of the war, much was to change, first in life, and then in cinematic art. In the post-war era, relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers quickly deteriorated.  On February 9, 1946, Josef Stalin defended a new Soviet Five Year Plan, giving priority to rearmament over consumer needs, on the grounds that peace with the capitalist-imperialist powers was impossible. Later that same month, George F. Kennan, the leading U.S. diplomat in Moscow, wrote his famous “long telegram” alerting the State Department to the ways of the Soviets. In March, Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. The “Cold War” had been declared.[xiii]

The Cold War had a profound effect upon the political development of Germany. At war’s end, the four principal victorious allied countries each administered a part of conquered Germany. With the rupture between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, the United States, Great Britain and France agreed to unite their three sectors. In the new political climate of 1948-1949, The United States and Great Britain gradually developed a willingness for the non-Communist part of Germany to gain independence. This was accomplished by the middle of 1949, with the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Would this new country be allowed to rearm? That depended on how the Western Allies viewed Germans. In July, 1948, after a massive American airlift broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin, Americans began to feel more positively about their former German foe. Characteristic of this change for the better was the statement of the U.S. Air Force pilot delivering the last of the “Candy Bomber” parcels in “Operation Little Vittles”. Lt. Harry Bachus, who had spent nearly half a year during the Second World War as a Prisoner of War on the outskirts of Moosburg, piloted the B-17 airplane that made this final run, coincidentally, over the same German city where he had been interned. His remarks sum up a remarkable transformation, obliquely acknowledging that Germans had been victims, too, and that American generosity could pave the way for a better German future:

We can show the German people, and particularly these
youngsters, who will be the leaders of tomorrow, that the
airplane can be an instrument of mercy and good will as
well as a machine that can destroy mankind.”[xiv]

The question of a rearmed Germany was bound up in the larger issue of the military preparations of Western nations to counter the prospect of Soviet aggression in Western Europe. In the course of the year of the Soviet blockade, 1948-1949 the Western Allies created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.[xv] At first mostly a declaration of principles, NATO became a serious military reality in December, 1950, when the American president, Harry S. Truman, appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO alliance forces.

Who would fill the ranks of soldiers and sailors, defending Western Europe? All the Western Allies were eager to reduce the strain upon their economies of maintaining large standing armies. What of (West) Germany? Should they shoulder their part of the burden, especially as their country was most likely to be the route of an anticipated invasion?

The British and Americans promoted that step; the French were opposed,. After three years of diplomatic wrangling, in August, 1954, The French National Assembly finally rejected a long-standing proposal to create a European army. The Americans threatened “an agonizing reappraisal” of their commitment to defend Europe.

In this atmosphere of crisis, the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, lobbied for the enlargement of NATO to include Germany and Italy. He offered some reassurances to calm French nervousness about a rearmed Germany: Germany would possess no atomic, ballistic, or chemical weapons; there would be no restoration of the German General Staff, and all German forces would be totally integrated under the command and control of the NATO Supreme Commander. Those proposals quickly met with approval by the existing NATO states, and the French, too, yielded. Pierre Mendes-France, the head of the French government, simultaneously removed an obstacle to French-German rapprochement by reaching an agreement with the F.R.G. Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to return the Saar valley to West Germany.[xvi] The German army and navy were reborn in 1955, now in the service of defending western democracy against Communism.

This new political climate acted as a catalyst for artistic reevaluation.  It is possible that, given time, as the passions of the Second World War receded, film makers would have explored the human face of the German enemy because of the dramatic potential of that new approach. But the political realities of the Cold War, including the desire in the USA to see Germany pay towards the cost of defending the West from the Soviet Union, stimulated this change in attitude towards the prospect of a rearmed Germany. That, in turn, showed up even in 1950’s-era films about World War II.

A harbinger of this change is to be seen in one brief moment in the 1953 film The Cruel Sea. That film was based closely upon Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel of that name. The novel, in turn, grew directly out of the author’s wartime experience as a Lieutenant Commander in the British Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, commanding vessels engaged in anti-submarine warfare. Near the end of the film, the British sailors see their first German U-Boat survivors when, having destroyed the submarine, the British rescue the German survivors from the waters of the Atlantic. One officer exclaims to his fellows: They look just like our own! Having spent six years fighting a faceless enemy, suddenly seeing men—and moreover, men in the same half-drowned, diesel oil-smeared condition as the merchant seamen of torpedoed cargo ships whom they have been rescuing from the water—came with revelatory force.

The exploration of the human side of the German Kriegsmarine enemy is given full treatment in three movies that premiered in quick succession in the mid-1950’s: The Sea Chase (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and The Enemy Below (1957).

The first of these stories, The Sea Chase, is intriguing in that the differences between the historical record and the 1948 novel of that name by Andrew Geer, and between the novel and the film, are all worthy of analysis:

 

The history is only partially preserved. The facts as we know them are as follows: The 6100-ton German steamer, Erlangen, built in 1929, and owned by Norddeutscher Lloyd, was in the port of Dunedin, New Zealand, in late August, 1939 under its master, Captain Alfred Grams, with a crew of German officers and Chinese sailors. It left port on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities, Captain Grams having received orders from Berlin to make for a neutral port. The goal was to rescue the ship from being impounded and its German officers from internment as enemy aliens. Erlangen‘s stated sailing plan was to go to Port Kembla on the south- eastern coast of Australia to take on coal. It was known to port authorities that Erlangen had 175 tons of coal in her bunker, insufficient fuel to reach Valparaiso, Chile, the closest neutral port. But Erlangen did not arrive in Port Kembla. Captain Grams had taken her not northwest, to Australia, but south, to the Auckland Islands, to take on food and to cut wood. After the fact, it became clear that he had put into the Auckland Islands’ Carnley Harbor. While hidden there, for over a month, his crew deforested a six-acre region of that island, harvesting wood to burn in his ship’s boilers. The wood of that region was a kind of ironwood, very dense and suitable for use as fuel. On 5 October, 1939, he steamed from his hiding place and arrived in Pierto Mott, Chile, on Nov. 11, 1939, having burned all the harvested wood, as well as the lifeboats and other wooden furnishings on board the ship, and even hoisting sail, all the while successfully eluding British capture. In Chile, he received a friendly welcome from the largely German local population. Grams dismissed the 50 Chinese seamen of the ship’s company, sending them back to Asia, and remained in Chile with 12 German officers, engineers and assistants until mid-1941. Then, German authorities ordered Captain Grams to take Erlangen to the port of Montevideo. His replacement crew was from the German training vessel Priwal. He successfully rounded Cape Horn and entered the Atlantic, but was intercepted by the British naval cruiser HMS Newcastle off the coast of Montevideo on 25 July, 1941, and scuttled his ship to avoid its capture. The Captain and crew were interned for the duration of the war, and freed in 1946.

All this is dramatic enough in its own right, but the 1948 novel changed numerous details, added a love triangle and other conventional plot elements, and supplied characterizations of the captain and key members of his crew, all for the purposes of creating a still-more dramatic tale:

The steamer, renamed Ergenstrasse, was made much older, having been launched in 1896. The ship herself bears the marks of an eventful history—a bloodstain on the floor of the shipmaster’s cabin, where the crew murdered him during the lawless days of the German revolution, October 1918; and a 5-year stint surreptitiously flying the Danish flag, to avoid being given to the French as war spoils. The point of these changes is to make the ship herself partly the heroine of the story. Ergenstrasse emerges as a gallant old lady, listing but full of spirit—in the tradition of sea stories, in which the authors anthropomorphize their vessels.[xvii]

Unlike the historical record, in which Erlangen goes down in the South Atlantic and her captain is arrested, in 1941, in both novel and film, the denouement of the plot is advanced to the end of 1939, and the locale is changed to increase the dramatic effect. Using plywood obtained in Chile, Ehrlich gives Ergenstrasse an altered silhouette and disguises her as a Panamanian freighter. By means of that stratagem, he successfully steams the entire Atlantic from South to North, only to be intercepted off the coast of Norway, on the verge of pulling off a major propaganda coup on behalf of Nazi Germany.

Whatever may have been the character of the real Captain Grams, the novelist gave the fictional captain, Karl Ehrlich, a vivid and unattractive character, essential to the plot of the novel.  Ehrlich is a battle-scarred veteran of the German imperial navy, having commanded a German destroyer squadron at the World War I Battle of Jutland. He is hard-driving, “filled with animal energy”, feared by his men.  He administers harsh discipline, including physical abuse, but—Hitler-like– is capable of inspiring oratory. Ehrlich’s back story is one of frustration. While in command of a naval stores depot in the chaotic days of late 1918, with revolution and mutiny in the air, he had refused a colleague’s undocumented request for supplies. The colleague rose in the navy and had his revenge; Ehrlich fell out of favor and was discharged; hence his unhappy career as a merchant ship captain. His zeal to return and receive a Kriegsmarine command is his main driving force.

He must get back to Germany… The press would praise him…
They would restore him to his commission… Only in Germany
could he hope to regain his lost rank. All other desires, thoughts,
became subservient to this purpose. He would drive his crew,
kill any or all if he must, but he would see success crown his
enterprise.

Ehrlich is a racist. He fully subscribes to Uebermensch ideology. British women are as unappealing as British food, in his opinion. As for Americans, he dismisses them as a “meteor of nations”, flaring brightly but not for long. Asians are untermenschen. When his crew grumbles about his order to ram a canoe and kill the eight Pacific Islanders on board, he asks his men, already suffering from hunger,

…who has so much food that you’d want to share it with a
yellow-skinned degenerate who, for thirty pieces of silver,
would betray us?

He flatters a German woman whom he is seeking to woo by discoursing on the racial superiority of the Germans, which owes as much to German women as to German men:

In all history, Germany’s is the only nation that’s been able to
come through countless bloody wars without losing its virility…
Only the Germans are able to go on and on, losing their finest in
war but rebuilding an ever sturdier race, physically and mentally,
and, in large part, it’s the German woman who’s responsible.

All of these negatives, except for Ehrlich’s hard-driving nature, disappear in the 1955 movie. The captain, played by the redoubtable John Wayne (who does not even attempt a German accent), is portrayed as a decent and principled, if rough-edged, man of the old school.  He is a German patriot, but no Nazi.

This fundamental recasting of Ehrlich’s character is the mainspring for many other changes in the story: The reason for his dismissal from the Kriegsmarine is altered. In the film, it is due to his having expressed anti-Nazi opinions. This necessitates another change: Ehrlich’s reason for wanting to return to Germany is altered to reflect, not personal ambition to serve the Nazi regime, but rather  a commendable quality: solicitude for his German crew.

When, at the climax of the film, his ship is intercepted by a British corvette, Ehrlich again shows his true, and non-Nazi, patriotism. He hoists the old, imperial naval flag instead of the Nazi banner and, under that flag, attempts to ram the Britisher. This is a more heroic action than the final encounter in the novel, where Ehrlich is surprised by Lieutenant Napier, the British officer who has been hunting him around the globe. Napier, not commanding a corvette in the novel’s iteration of the story, is instead the leader of an away team based on a small, although armed, fishing trawler. Finding Ergenstrasse off the coast of Norway, Napier uses a boat to board and commandeer her.

At the end of novel, Napier kills Ehrlich. The British officer had tried to arrest him, but Ehrlich rushed him and struggled, remaining on his feet even after absorbing twelve(!) bullets, until he collapsed—an end corresponding to the “animal energy” of the German captain. In the film, we do not see him die. Perhaps he went down with his ship—appropriate enough for a good captain—but the audience is left with the tantalizing possibility that Ehrlich and his lady love interest have escaped together to neutral Norway. In 1950’s Hollywood, amor vincit omnia (“love conquers all”) was the rule.

Other classic 1950’s movie tropes abound in this film: the rehabilitation of a ne’er do well sailor under the stern but fair guidance of the captain; a love triangle in which the captain and the female passenger on board Ergenstrasse, played by the “bombshell” actress Lana Turner, belatedly express their love for each other, and the reformation of character of the passenger herself, at first a Mata Hari type, using her sexuality for German intelligence purposes, but at the end a woman capable of true love.

A conventional movie of that era, especially a John Wayne movie, typically had an unambiguous villain. With Ehrlich no longer available for that role in the 1955 film, the true villain is the First Officer, Kirchner (who had been the Second Officer in the book). In both novel and movie, Kirchner is guilty of murder, but in the film, his character, already bad, absorbs all the evil in the novel’s depiction of Ehrlich. In the film, Kirchner is the vile Nazi.

In sum, the true Nazi in the film version of The Sea Chase remains the villain, but the film has taken a significant step in rehabilitating the German naval officer as a character type.  Captain Ehrlich represents the finest traditions of the old, pre-Nazi German navy. He is a German whom Cold War America could imagine as being in command a naval vessel in the newly resurrected German navy—and who wouldn’t trust John Wayne?

The next step in the rehabilitation process was to tell the story of a veteran of the imperial navy and the Weimar Reichsmarine who did serve in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine and yet who could be depicted as a man of honor, an enemy deserving of respect.  This was the theme of Powell and Pressburger in their 1956 film, The Battle of the River Plate. That film is a retelling of the first British naval victory of the Second World War, the destruction of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.

The history of the battle, on 13 December, 1939, and the scuttling of his ship by its Captain, Hans Langsdorff, three days later, was widely reported in Great Britain, being the first good news for the British since the start of the war that September. Graf Spee had put to sea shortly before the start of hostilities, and had sunk 50,000 tons of merchant shipping in the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans. The British had sent several groups of warships in pursuit of her, and on 13 December, one such group, consisting of three naval cruisers, found and attacked her.  The battleship was more heavily armed than the cruisers, but the British forces attacked from two directions, forcing Graf Spee to divide her fire.  Even so, Graf Spee’s gunfire damaged all three of the attackers, one of them, Exeter, severely enough to compel her to retire to the Falkland Islands.  But the gunfire from the British ships had done damage too, including one shot from Exeter that destroyed a key component of Graf Spee’s fueling system. Kapitän Langsdorff headed for the port of Montevideo in neutral Uruguay to repair his vessel.  He needed more time than the 72 hours granted, however, and, low on ammunition and believing that a large British force had assembled outside the harbor, he scuttled his vessel at the limit of Uruguayan territorial waters, after first having ferried his crew to safety. He subsequently committed suicide in a Montevideo hotel room, lying on his ship’s battle flag and leaving a note reading, in part,

I can now only prove by my death that the fighting services
of the Third Reich are ready to die for the honour of the flag…

In Nazi footage preserved in Victory at Sea, Langsdorff is seen being honored by Hitler on the eve of his 1939 mission. But subsequent events raised the tantalizing possibility that Langsdorff was not a typical Nazi.  Perhaps he was, rather, an old-school warrior, a man of honor? The circumstances of his death suggested an air of pre-Nazi chivalry attached to the German officer.  His character was further burnished by Langsdorff’s solicitude for the lives of the merchant crews whose ships he had hunted.  He brought all the civilian mariners to safety aboard his ship, before sinking their vessels.

Langsdorff had served with distinction in the Imperial Navy, taking part in the Battle of Jutland. and receiving a decoration for his valor. After the First World War, he served the Weimar Republic’s Reichsmarine. When Hitler had taken power, Langsdorff requested sea duty— was he trying to get away from Berlin so as to be farther from the Nazi leadership? Granted, his suicide note contained a declaration of respect for the Fuehrer.  He himself was beyond the reach of retribution, but was that intended to protect his family? It was at least possible to see in Langsdorff an echo of an admirable, pre-Nazi military ethos that the British, albeit enemies of the Germans, could respect.

The captain of one of his last merchant ship victims, Philip Dove of the Africa Shell, developed a grudging admiration for Kapitän Langsdorff. After his release, Captain Dove authored a memoir of his experience, I was a Graf Spee’s Prisoner (London, 1940). In his memoir, he recounted numerous acts of kindness and courtesy shown to the prisoners by Captain Langsdorff. When captured, Captain Dove was wearing the short pants of a summer uniform. Knowing that Graf Spee was bound for sub-Antarctic waters for a replenishment rendezvous with her supply ship, Altmark, Kapitän Langsdorff had the ship’s tailor make a woolen uniform for him.

In 1954, Powell and Pressburger, who had continued to collaborate since their 49^th Parallel days, were in Argentina attending a film festival. From there, they went to Uruguay to do research for a film on the famous 1939 naval battle, which they judged would make a suitable topic for a commercially successful film. But they were eager to frame the story from a human interest perspective, and when given a copy of Captain Dove’s memoirs, they resolved to use it as the basis for the story. They completed the film in 1955. Dove served as a technical advisor to the film, and another captured merchant ship master, Captain Bernard Lee, played the role of Dove.

Langsdorff’s gentlemanly ways are further highlighted in the film by a contrast with the brutish behavior of other German naval captains. Some of the British prisoners had been held on Altmark and were transferred to Graf Spee during the replenishment. One remarks bitterly on the contrast: now they were being given clean and spacious quarters, but on Altmark they had been confined in a stinking hold. Their conversation is interrupted by a group of German officers and men coming into their room and presenting them with Christmas decorations. Germans and British alike celebrate amiably until the battle alarm sounds and the Germans leave. The lights from the Christmas ornaments allow the British to continue to see even when British gunfire destroys Graf Spee’s lighting system.

By combining the thrill of a naval battle, for which they were allowed to film on actual warships, with the story of growing friendship and respect between Dove and Langsdorff, Powell and Pressurger created a film that succeeded on several levels.  The British movie-going public, coping with lingering post-war austerities and the decline of their overseas Empire in real life,[xviii] was eager to relive the historic victories of their nation during its “finest hour”. The Rank Organization, Powell and Pressburger’s corporate backers, decided to hold back the film’s release for one year so that it could be part of the 1956 Royal Film Performance.  The film opened to critical acclaim and also garnered high box office receipts.

In The Sea Chase, the captain had been cashiered from the German Navy and, while a German patriot, was not serving in a military capacity. In the Battle of the River Plate, the captain was not a submariner, but rather the commander of a battleship. With the U-Boats widely identified in the public consciousness as the main threat to Allied survival, the full transformation in recognizing the human face of the enemy would involve humanizing a German submarine commander. This development took place a year after the release of Powell and Pressburger’s film, in the American movie, The Enemy Below. In that film, the U-Boat captain himself is shown to be a German patriot, weary of war but still willing to defend his country, and decidedly, if carefully, contemptuous of the Nazis.

The Enemy Below was adapted for the screen from a novel by Denys Rainer of the same title. Like Monsarrat, Rayner had spent the war in command of a variety of Royal Navy anti-submarine vessels. Shortly before publishing his novels—The Enemy Below was one of two based on his experiences—Rayner had published Escort, a memoir of his wartime experiences in the Battle of the Atlantic. His first-hand experience is reflected in the details of his novels.[xix]

However, The Enemy Below is a tale of an encounter that seldom happened in actual wartime, the duel of a single submarine with a single anti-submarine surface ship.  More commonly, once sufficient warships became available to the Allies, two or more of the escort ships would cooperate in hunting the submarine, the one using its “Asdic” or Sonar underwater acoustical equipment to help guide the other to the submerged U-Boat. As such, the duel of one vessel against another was an apt subject for dramatic treatment in film.

In keeping with the dramatic device of presenting the encounter as a duel, the film establishes a narrative rhythm, going back and forth between the point of view of the German submarine commander, Peter von Stolberg, and the Allied destroyer escort captain, John Murrell. (The film switches the nationality of the Allied vessel from British to American, doubtless for market-driven reasons.)

The reinterpretation of the U-Boat commander’s image, includes lines given to his adversary, the Allied captain. One of the popular conventions of naval tales is that the captain escapes the loneliness of command in conversations with a trusted confidant, the ship’s surgeon. In The Enemy Below, Captain Murrell’s conversations with the doctor are a vehicle for the exposition of the Captain’s back-story, one of personal grief he holds out of view under the surface of his persona as a competent, unruffled commander. These conversations reveal Murrell’s view of life. In one such conversation, where the captain and the doctor muse about what life will be like after the war, Murrell acknowledges that the ultimate enemy below is not only the enemy below the surface of the waves, but rather the enemy below the fragile crust of civilized behavior. Whereas the doctor looks forward to a return to normalcy, the captain is more pessimistic:

Murrell: Yes, but it won’t be the same as it was. We won’t have that feeling of permanency that we had before. We’ve learned a hard truth.

Doctor: How do you mean?

Murrell: That there’s no end to misery and destruction. You cut the head off the snake; it grows another. Cut that one off; you find another. We can’t kill it as it’s something within ourselves. You can call it the enemy if you want to, but it’s part of us. We’re all men.

The inference of this revelation is that Murrell recognizes, in the universal human propensity for evil, a link between himself and his German foe.  Later in the same scene, he gives explicit expression to that recognition:

Murrell: I’m just doing what I have to do, like that German captain out there. I don’t like the job but maybe he doesn’t, either.[xx]

Naturally, the film’s main work of reinterpreting the image of the German U-Boat commander is not in oblique inferences from the words of the American captain, but in scenes involving the German commander directly. The Enemy Below focuses even more attention on the character of von Stolberg than had been given to Kapitän Langsdorff in The Battle of the River Plate. The screenwriter, William Mayes, endowed his U-Boat commander with a fully three-dimensional personality.

In an early scene, when the film is still establishing the character of each of its protagonists, Von Stolberg barely conceals his scorn when one of his younger officers, Leutnant Kuntz, displays Nazi ideological fervor. Later, alone with his trusted executive officer, Korvettenkapitän Heine Schwaffer, von Stolberg expresses contempt for the overgrown Hitler-Jugend type of zealot sent to his crew. This scene merits close analysis:

(Setting: The command area of the U-Boat)

Von Stolberg (toweling himself off after having been topside in the foul weather): Whose watch is next?

Von Holem (a subordinate officer): Leutnant Kuntz, Herr Kapitän.

Von Stolberg (over intercom): Leutnant Kuntz report forward.

(Von Stolberg looks up and sees a sign posted on an overhead bar. He looks surprised and displeased. The sign reads, “Fuehrer befiehl und wir folgen”—The Fuehrer commands and we follow.” Apparently, it has just been put in place by Kuntz, the ardent Nazi.)

Kuntz: You wanted me Herr Kapitän?

Von Stolberg: Yours is the next watch topside. We have a signal on the FMB. I think it’s a false echo. But to check its reaction you will zigzag twice an hour until daybreak. If it moves in closer, you will awaken me immediately.

Kuntz: Jawohl Herr Kapitän! (salutes)

As von Stolberg walks off, he passes the newly-posted sign.  Von Stolberg’s body language (he is seen from behind) suggests irritation, and he throws his towel over the word Fuehrer, as if to efface it. Then he goes into his cabin and invites his executive officer to join him.

Von Stolberg: Schwaffer!

Schwaffer:  Mm?

Von Stolberg: Come in Heini.  (Schwaffer enters)

Von Stolberg: Ah, that Kuntz annoys me. Remind him that we do not salute at sea.

Schwaffer: He’s new here, Herr Kapitän. He will tire of it.

Von Stolberg: He’s new… like our new Germany: a machine.

Schwaffer (looking a bit uncomfortable): Herr Kapitän, do you think we are wise in risking that image to be a false echo?

Von Stolberg (pouring a drink): Wise? Expedient. Time is important, and we would travel too slowly under water.  In 48 hours we rendezvous with Raider M. We take the captured British code book and we go home with it.  And this is the important thing. Not the code book. But because when we have it, we can go home. (He lifts his glass in a toast) Auf dein Wohl (drains his drink).

Schwaffer (drinking with him): Zum Wohl, Herr Kapitän.

Von Stolberg (making a face) Tastes like oil and bilge and green mold. Sit down Heini. Tastes like a U boat. I’ve been in the U boats too long. There was a time I went to sea with a fresh heart. But that was many years ago. Now I can only thing of going home. (Offers another drink) You want more?

Schwaffer (Covering his glass in a polite gesture of refusal) No more, Herr Kapitän.

Von Stolberg: You think I take too much. Just enough to sleep. I cannot rest without it. I think too much.  (Raises his glass in a toast) Never think, Heini. Be a good warrior, Heini, and never think. You pay a penalty for thinking. You cannot rest. (Drains his glass, puts it down, and takes a framed photograph from his shelf.) I taught these sons of mine to be good warriors. Country, duty, ask no questions. (Shows Heini the photograph.)  One of them is at the bottom of the sea, this one is a cinder in a burned airplane. And I am glad, that is the way for warriors to die, young and with faith. I have lived too long…

We’re friends, Heini?

Schwaffer (looking non-plussed): I’ve been with you since I was a cadet.

Von Stolberg: That’s not what I asked you.

Schwaffer: I do not know. Sometimes I’m afraid of you. Many times I do not understand you. I’m not certain we are friends.

Von Stolberg (animatedly): We are friends. Believe that. We are friends. Because we are friends, I tell you something: (lowers his voice) I’m sick of this war. It’s not a good war. You don’t remember the first one. I was a Faehnrich in the U-boats and, oh, how proud I was! We went out in those little sardine tins, and if we submerged, we couldn’t always be sure we’d come up again. Oh it was a good game we played. The captain would look through his periscope and sight a target , and then he did arithmetic in his head  and said, “Torpedo los”!  And you know something: sometimes the torpedo wouldn’t even leave the tube! And if it did, we were most lucky to hit something. And now, I look in the periscope and it gives me the distance and the speed. I pass this information to the attack table. The machinery turns, the lights flash, and we get the answer. The torpedo runs to its target.  And there’s no human error in this. They’ve taken human error out of war, Heini. They’ve taken the human out of war. (pause)

War was different then. It put iron in the country’s backbone. It gave the brave memory, and even in defeat, it gave them honor. But there is no honor in this war. The memories will be ugly, even if we win.  And if we die, we die without God. Do you know that, Heini?

Schwaffen: (after a beat) I listen to what you say, Herr Kapitän.

Von Stolberg: (lying down on his bunk): It’s a bad war. Its reason is twisted. Its purpose is dark. It’s not for a simple man.

(Von Stolberg closes his eyes. Schwaffen ponders for a moment, then gets up and covers the sleeping captain with his blanket, turns off the light, leaves and closes the curtain behind him.)[xxi]

This scene encapsulates the difference between a wartime depiction of a German Kriegsmarine officer and the new approach of the 1950’s:

• Von Stolberg is war-weary, more excited about going home than about fighting.
• He is disillusioned. It is dangerous to think in these dark times.
• He himself criticizes the “New Germany” in terms that could have been borrowed from Allied discourse: The New Germany is dehumanizing. It is soul-less. It has not given Germans a good cause for which to fight.
• He himself contradicts the assertion of the German army belt buckle, “Gott mit uns”. The so-called New Germany has alienated itself from God. Death is so close; and allegiance to Hitler has put Germany on the course of damnation, dying without God’s consoling presence.

This last point, especially, suggests the American milieu of the 1950’s.  Americans of that decade were a very church-going people. They identified religious loyalty with the cause of freedom.  True, Franklin D. Roosevelt had already identified Religious Freedom as a key component of the American vision, as far back as his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech. But in the 1950’s, American theism took on new connotation, thanks to the Cold War. Following classic Marxist critique of religion, the Soviets proudly proclaimed their atheism. In 1954, acceding to President Eisenhower’s request, the American Congress added the phrase “Under God” to its Pledge of Allegiance. While the American Supreme Court safeguarded the right of American citizens to practice no religion, in the popular eye, to be an American was practically synonymous with being a believer.[xxii]

In the film’s final scene, Von Stolberg’s religiosity again comes to the fore. The German submariners are, at this point, all prisoners on an American vessel, but they are being well treated and have been given fresh clothing. They are standing at attention at the rail of the ship, prepared to perform a burial at sea for their dead Executive Officer, whose shrouded body is lying on a plank. As the men sing the traditional warrior’s bereavement song, “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden”, the Kapitän recites the religious liturgy of committal. Unlike so many films, which curtail the time devoted to religious ceremonial, The Enemy Below presents the full liturgy. Von Stolberg intones the traditional formula for his deceased friend with gravity, infused with sincerity:

(von Stolberg) Nachdem es Gott, dem Allmächtigen, nach seinem unerforschlichen Ratschluss gefallen hat, unser Kameraden Heini Schwaffer für sein Vaterland sterben zu lassen und nach einem Leben voll Treu und Plifchterfüllung in sein himmlisches Vaterhaus aufzunehmen, ist es unsere traurige Pflicht, den geliebten Kameraden hier auf hoher See den Wogen des Meers zu übergeben.

It bears emphasis that the film’s characterization of Kapitän von Stolberg is considerably altered from that in Rayner’s novel. In that earlier iteration of the story, the submarine commander is an aristocratic Prussian Junker. He is disrespectful of Nazis because they are low-born, socio-economically; but he does not express opposition to Nazi ideology. At one point in the shifting game of hunter and hunted, he indulges in ethnic stereotyping, opining that his Germanic thoroughness can be counted on to defeat the intelligent improvisations of his British adversary.

Nowhere are the divergences from novel to film more blatant than in the ending of the story. In the novel, after both dueling captains have succeeded in sinking the other’s warship, they find themselves in the same lifeboat. But the conflict continues. Von Stolberg erroneously thinks that the German surface ship with whom he was about to rendezvous is the closest combatant, and that within a short time, all the British will be prisoners. He addresses the British captain as such. But in this instance, Captain, Murrell has out- thought him. Murrell has correctly inferred what the submarine was up to and has signaled his own command as to the likely coordinates of the German surface vessel. At the moment that von Stolberg claims the British as his prisoners, British vessels are sinking the German raider. While that is happening, over the horizon, the British and German crews fight it out using fists and makeshift clubs until a British vessel comes into view, settling the matter as a victory for the British side.

In the film iteration of the story, the relationship could not be more different. Near the end of the encounter, each of the combatant’s ships is sinking and both crews have abandoned their respective ships. The Americans, already in lifeboats, are rescuing the swimming German submariners, helping them aboard. The only men remaining on board their vessels are the two captains and the badly wounded German Executive Officer, Schwaffer. Von Stolberg pulls Schwaffer to safety, leading him out of the submarine onto its conning tower.

There, for the first time, von Stolberg sees Murrell, standing on the bridge of his own burning and sinking vessel. Each captain has previously been depicted as wondering about the other, trying to get into the other’s mind, and now they belatedly see each other. What emotions will they show? The movie focuses on this first face to face, encounter. Von Stolberg looks at Murrell for a long minute, recognizing that he is facing his dueling opponent, and, with a meaningful expression, he offers him a salute. Morrell returns the salute with great respect. They have truly seen each other’s faces.

The sympathy thus engendered leads Murrell, at great personal risk, to remain on his burning bridge, fetch a rope, and throw it to von Stolberg. The two captains cooperate to save Schwaffer, and then von Stolberg climbs the rope to Murrell’s bridge. Likewise braving danger, since the submarine is rigged to explode momentarily, the Americans guide their lifeboat back to their vessel and rescue all three of the officers.

True to the framing of the combat as a personal duel between the two captains, the final moments of the film, after the conclusion of Schwaffer’s burial at sea, are a time of connection for Murrell and Von Stolberg. Murrell walks up to Von Stolberg, who is standing at the fantail of the ship and looking out at the ocean. He offers him a cigarette, which von Stolberg accepts. Murrell lends von Stolberg his own lit cigarette to use in lighting the one he has proffered. Then they speak:

Von Stolberg:  I should have died many times, Captain, but I continue to survive, somehow. This time it was your fault. (smiling ruefully)

Murrell: I didn’t know. Next time, I won’t throw you the rope.

Von Stolberg hands back the cigarette, and shakes hands with Murrell. “I think you will.”

Both smile faintly and turn to face the foaming wake.[xxiii]

This final note is one of improbable but definite camaraderie—suitable for the America of 1957, ready to embrace the “Good German” as a brother in arms against the Communist menace.

How true to history is this 1950’s presentation of a U-Boat captain? While after the war, surviving German veterans were eager to portray themselves as non-Nazi, that defense rings hollow with respect to captains of U-Boats.

Most of the captains, unlike the cinematic von Stolberg, were young men, perhaps in their late 20’s or early 30’s. Their period of character formation was during the Nazi era, not before. Moreover, the U-Boat arm as a whole expanded rapidly during the war.  Only 57 submarines were in the Kriegsmarine at the start of the war. During the war, many hundreds were built and launched.  There were not enough pre-Nazi Reichsmarine veterans to be more than a small percentage of the 40,000 men of the submarine force.

A measure of the fervor of the U-Boat crews is their condition, and the condition of their vessels, at the end of the war. In his historical memoir, Raynor reported that his command was given charge of two captured U-Boats at the end of the hostilities. The Germans serving aboard had clearly not given up the fight:

The two U-Boats that surrendered in the Portsmouth command
were in excellent condition, outside and within. Morale was
good and their crews waited only for the new boats. They may
have hoped that if the war had gone another six months they
would prove the saviours of the nation. Such hopes of course
were nonsensical. Germany was utterly defeated.[xxiv]

Still more ardent were the two submarine commanders[xxv] who ignored the surrender order and accomplished an arduous trans-Atlantic crossing, much of it underwater, to arrive in a hopefully-friendly right-wing Argentina. The U-530 under Oberleutnant Otto Wermuth arrived in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in July, 1945, and surrendered there. Heinz Schaeffer, commanding the U-977, held out still longer. He only reached Argentina on August 17, 1945, three months after the Nazi Reich had come to an end. In his memoirs, published seven years after the war, Schaeffer (of course) denied having been a Nazi. But he also explained that he took the boat and those of its crew who were willing to accompany him because he was fearful of returning to an Allied-administered, “Morgenthaued” Germany. This is a reference to the propagandist claim of Josef Goebbels about a prominent Jewish member of the Roosevelt administration, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Attempting to sustain the flagging zeal of the German military, Goebbels threatened that if America were allowed to conquer Germany, Morgenthau’s plan would result in the destruction of all German cities, the reduction of Germany to pastureland, and the castrating of German males. For Schaeffer to have believed this fanciful propaganda suggests that he was more ideologically inflamed than he later claimed.[xxvi]

In sum, most of the U-boat captains, post-war revisionism notwithstanding, were likely to have been hard-core Nazis. The film depictions analyzed here are significant, not as illustrations of the history of the Second World War, but rather as  reflections of American and British anxieties and aspirations in the decade that followed.[xxvii]

III. Echoes of Earlier Eras

In the six decades since the release of The Enemy Below, there have been relatively few Anglo-America cinematic depictions of Kriegsmarine personnel. The most important new chapter in the imaginative recreation of the world of the U-Boat was not a British or American production, bur rather the German film, Das Boot.

Two American films are (at least partially) within the scope of this essay. For its 1965 film, Morituri, (also known as The Saboteur: Code Name Morituri) Twentieth Century Fox engaged an Austrian expatriate, Bernhard Wicki, as director. Wicki had been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939 for his membership in an anti-Nazi youth group. After his release, he relocated to neutral Switzerland.

Morituri is reminiscent of The Sea Chase. Like the 1955 film, it featured a patriotic German merchant ship captain, Captain Mueller, portrayed by Yul Brynner, who has suffered career setbacks on account of his forthright anti-Nazism. Again, as in the earlier film, the villain is the first officer, an ardent Nazi . Adding to the dramatic mix is the protagonist of the film, portrayed by Marlon Brando. His character, Robert Crain, is a pacifist German expatriate living in India who is pressured by the British into booking passage on the ship and helping the Allies to capture it. The ship is carrying a cargo of rubber, badly needed by all sides for their war effort. The main dramatic conflict is between Mueller, who would scuttle the ship rather than allow it to fall into Allied hands, and Crain, who plots to prevent the scuttling. At the end of the film, Crain convinces Mueller to allow his damaged ship to be rescued by the Allies.

Evidence of the film’s 1960’s provenance is the role of “Esther”, a German-Jewish woman played by Janet Margolin. Esther is a passenger aboard the merchant ship. When Captain Mueller allows her the use of his cabin, she accuses him of wanting to take advantage of her sexually. She assumes that, as a German, he would share in the racist Antisemitism of the Nazis. He rejects her accusation brusquely, asserting that it ought not be incredible that he regards her as simply a fellow human. Esther’s anger is explained in the course of the film by the revelation of her back-story. She had been sexually abused by the Nazis. As the plot progresses, she is also the object of lecherous affections by several members of the mutinous crew aboard Captain Mueller’s ship. The incipient sexual openness of films, increasing throughout the 1960’s, is reflected here, as is the higher public consciousness of the Holocaust, brought forcibly to the world’s attention in 1961 with the Israeli apprehension and trial of Adoph Eichmann.

Critics hailed the performances of Brando and Brynner, but criticized the pacing and plotting of the story. Ultimately, Morituri has sunk into near-obscurity.

For the purposes of this essay, it is noteworthy that Morituri is evidence that the dramatic device of making the “Good German” the captain, and the true Nazi, his subordinate, a novelty in the 1950’s, had become a trope by the next decade.

In 2000, a French-American consortium developed a story by Jonathan Mostow into a technologically flashy, but conceptually old-fashioned, U-boat movie, U-571. The story is loosely based on several British and American naval exploits in the Battle of the Atlantic, recovering the secret German Enigma encoding machine from U-boats. In the film U-571, the Americans have located a damaged U-boat awaiting a rendezvous with its tender. The Americans quickly re-configure one of their submarines to look like a U-Boat, put out from Norfolk, Virginia, and reach the stricken sub just before its German tender arrives on the scene. An away party of Americans successfully defeats the U-Boat crew and collects the Enigma, but then, the German ship, having arrived, destroys the American submarine.  The few members of the away party are forced to take cover in the U-boat, quickly learn how to operate it, repair its considerable damage, and fend off an attack from a German destroyer. Of course, they do all of that.

One of the characters of U-571, of great importance for the unfolding of the plot, is the commander of the German submarine. He is captured and ferried over to the American submarine, but when the American boat is destroyed, he survives and swims back to U-571. He is brought aboard and masquerades as a common electrician. On board the commandeered submarine, he does his best to subvert the Americans, twice nearly accomplishing the destruction of the boat, before one of the Americans kills him. The commander could have come from Lifeboat. He is able, devious, resourceful, a formidable and implacable foe. The only alternatives are to kill him or be killed by him.

Critics pointed out similarities between U-571 and other submarine films, such as The Cruel Sea and The Crimson Tide. It is, indeed, closely genre-bound. Among the films surveyed in this essay, U-571 is most reminiscent of Crash Dive. As in the 1943 film, the protagonist is an Executive Officer, who learns in the course of the story how to step up to the higher level of command. As in Crash Dive, U-571 contains a poignant scene in which one crewmember sacrifices his life to save all the others. Again, the later film highlights the patriotism of the one African-American serving in the crew. As befits a film made after the Civil Rights movement transformed American consciousness, though, the African American cook in the later film, portrayed by T. C. Carson, refers to his color seriously rather than jokingly. He taunts a captured Nazi submariner: “It’s your first time looking at a black man, ain’t it? Get used to it!”

In addition to the slightly additional prominence given to the African American crew member in U-571, as compared to Crash Dive, another nod to the turn of the century provenance of the film is in the scenes involving the Executive Officer and the Chief Petty Officer. The navy is a strongly hierarchical organization, but American democracy is more egalitarian. In practice, this can lead to an interesting dynamic in the relationship of an officer to a chief petty officer, who is not a commissioned officer but rather a high-ranking enlisted man. The Chief Petty Officer Klough, played by the veteran actor Harvey Keitel, knows both his men and his boats. In a key scene, after Lieutenant Tyler, played by Matthew McConaughey, confesses that he does not know the solution to the existential problem facing the away team in its commandeered U-Boat, Klough gives Tyler a valuable “pep talk”. Finding a private place to talk, he first he asks for, and receives, permission to speak frankly. Then he explains that the persona of confidence is vital in a commander, even if he is internally unsure, because only that persona will keep the crew from disintegrating. Tyler learns the lesson, and his confidence is what allows him to rescue his crew, defeat the German destroyer pursuing them, and fulfill his mission.

Now, the wisdom of a rookie officer taking good advice from a seasoned “non-com” is nothing new, but it was not a feature of the older films surveyed here.  Its appearance in a film of this genre points to the increased individualism in American society after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate.

The film also offers a compliment to the German foe that was not a feature of earlier films. At one point, Tyler orders Klough to take the boat deeper than any American boat had dived. Every submariner knows that with increased depth, the water pressure on the boat’s hull grows exponentially. After a certain point, the hull will fracture and everyone aboard will drown. Klough plainly doubts the wisdom of the order, but he obeys it, and the U-Boat, built to dive deeper than any of the American submarines of that era, survives. Klough offers a positive assessment of German engineering: “Man, those Krauts sure know how to build a boat!”

Critics hailed the film’s strong script and applauded its technical effects. But British critics, and the British public in general, took heated exception to the film’s implicit claim that the capture of the Enigma machine was an American accomplishment.  In historical fact, the British had done so first. HMS Gleaner captured three rotors of an Enigma machine from one of the crewmembers of U-33 off the coast of Scotland in 1940, In May, 1941, HMS Bulldog recovered an entire machine, plus valuable codebooks, from U-110. Later in 1941, the British also captured U-570 and recovered another one of the machines. When the Americans seized an Enigma on board U-505, captured in 1944, the machine was no longer the item of principal military value, but rather its accompanying codebooks. The American film did pay tribute to the British achievement in an end-title, but that was too little and too late to satisfy the critics.[xxviii]

As if this evidence were needed: U-571 serves as an additional cautionary tale that Hollywood and history have a loose friendship. Feature films are a form of commercial entertainment, and are marketed with entertainment values paramount. These films, even those that are historical dramas, are not committed to historical accuracy. They do have some historical value. But often, insights about the people making the films, their perspectives, and the times that shape them, are the most valuable historical lessons to be gleaned from “history-inspired” films. That is, after all, the principal thesis of this essay.

IV. Epilogue: Can an Alien Enemy have a “Human Face”?

The theme of “seeing the face of the enemy” appears in science fiction settings, too. That is of course, a different genre than the war story, but one particular science fiction work for television merits attention here, because it is closely related to one of the films discussed in this essay.

Paul Schneider, author of the screenplay for Balance of Terror, the ninth episode of the first (1966-1967) season of the television series Star Trek, acknowledged that his story was an adaptation of The Enemy Below. As in the original, the conflict of the two armed vessels is presented as a duel between the rival captains, the human Captain James T. Kirk of the United Federation of Planets starship Enterprise and the alien, (unnamed) Romulan Commander of a “Romulan Warbird”. Enterprise plays the role of the American destroyer and the Romulan ship is a reprise of the submarine. That is because the Romulans, a species of comparable intelligence and technology to the Federation of which Earth is a stakeholder, have one noteworthy technological advantage: they can deploy an invisibility cloak.

Much of the plot of The Enemy Below reappears in Balance of Terror. Tracking the Romulan ship, Enterprise initially maintains an unvarying distance, so as to appear as a sensor echo. As in the movie, the stratagem succeeds, enabling Enterprise to land the first damaging blow. The damage done to the Romulan ship by the Federation vessel’s “phaser” bursts mimics depth charge damage to submarine interiors, with falling debris and a severe jostling of the crew. Again, as in the movie, the television program features meaningful dialogue between the Captain and Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy, including one interchange where Kirk muses to McCoy about relinquishing command, and McCoy responds with a philosophical affirmation of the supreme value of each individual:

In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million
earth-type planets—and in all the universe, perhaps three million
million galaxies like this. In all of that, and perhaps more, there’s
only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.

Of course, the 1960’s are reflected in this story, and not only in the beehive hairdos and miniskirt uniforms of the female crewmembers of Enterprise. At one point, the African Lieutenant Uhuru, a communications specialist, takes over as navigator. (This may be the source of the scene in U-571 where the African-American cook takes over handling one of the hydroplanes regulating the depth of the boat.) When she takes her position, next to the helmsman, the Asian Lieutenant Sulu, he gives her a significant look, perhaps expressing the attitude of “let’s see if you can handle this!” In the starship of the future, as envisioned in 1966, the crew is clearly multicultural, but gender stereotyping is only just being transcended. The glass ceiling has been cracked, but not totally broken. Most of the female crewmembers are nurses, assistant technicians and, in one casting that proved embarrassing to later viewers, yeomen hoping inappropriately for an appreciative gaze from their captain.

Each crew has problems of internal dynamics. A human navigator, Stiles, is hostile to the Vulcan executive officer, Spock, because the first glimpse of the Romulan bridge revealed that alien species to resemble Vulcans, and Stiles suspects Spock of harboring secret loyalties for the enemy. Spock ultimately saves Stiles’ life, curing him of bigotry at the same time—an appropriate message for a Civil Rights- era television program.

On the Romulan side, sub-commander Decius is modeled on Kuntz, the zealous Nazi in The Enemy Below. Decius wants to attack the Federation vessel when it is damaged, even though the Romulan vessel is low on power, because of the glory involved in destroying the enemies of the Praetor (presumably, the Romulan head of state). As in the submarine movie, the commander is contemptuous of that mindless zeal. He expresses his attitude in a rebuke to Decius after one damaging attack on their ship:

Decius: Can it be? The Praetor’s finest flagship beaten?

Commander: (bitterly) Perhaps we can yet save your Praetor’s pride for him….

At that point, the Commander employs a stratagem familiar from a host of submarine movies: he ejects debris, including the body of a dead crew member (naturally, a cherished friend) from his vessel, to fool the adversary into thinking that he has been destroyed.

Repeatedly, the two captains try to ascertain each other’s state of mind, and over the course of the battle, they develop a respect for each other’s tactical prowess. Early in the battle, after the Romulan Captain anticipates one of Kirk’s stratagems and alters course, Kirk exclaims: “He must have guessed our move. He did exactly what I would have done. I won’t underestimate him again.” Later, it is the Romulan’s turn to express rueful admiration for Kirk’s tactics, in a close echo of a line of dialogue from The Enemy Below: “He’s a sorcerer, that one! He reads the thoughts in my brain!” And again: “he’s shrewd, this starship commander. He’s trying to make us waste energy. He’s estimated we only have enough…”

The unspoken end of that sentence is “to get home”. As is revealed in several snatches of dialogue with the over-eager Decius, the Romulan captain is modeled on von Stolberg in this way, as well: he is mostly eager to get home. A veteran of long standing and now battle weary, he has no enthusiasm for the bellicose policy of his government, but he is a man of duty and honor, so he fulfills the orders given him.

Balance of Terror departs from its cinematic model in one important way. In the 1957 film, the two captains destroy each other’s ships but then Murrell saves the life of Von Stolberg. In the 1966 television episode, Kirk wins the duel, decisively damaging the Romulan Warbird. Then, with its invisibility cloak disabled, the Romulan vessel becomes susceptible to Enterprise’s sensor scans, and Kirk gains a full view of the Romulan bridge. The Romulan commander is seen from behind, and then turns, dramatically, revealing how badly wounded he is. Kirk sends him a message, telling him to prepare to beam aboard his survivors. The Romulan refuses, but with poignant words:

Romulan commander: No. No, that is not our way. I regret that we meet this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality I could have called you friend.[xxix]

Here, the theme of “seeing the face of the Other” recurs, transposed into an extra- terrestrial setting. A face, in the sense being developed in this essay, is a face, even when it is that of the alien. In the conversation where the two adversaries finally see each other, face to face, the one offers to help a newly-recognized Other, and the other acknowledges that there could have been a relationship between them, but for the exigencies of their historical situation.

 

WORKS IN PRINT CONSULTED

Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. Little, Brown. 2012.

Cherny, Andrei. The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour. G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 2008.

Cook, Don. Forging the Alliance: The Birth of the NATO Treaty and the Dramatic Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy Between 1945 and 1950. Arbor House/ William Morrow, 1989.

Fritz, Stephen G. Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. The University Press of Kentucky, 1995, 1997.

Geers, Andrew. The Sea Chase. Pocket Books, 1948.

Jones, Jeffrey Owen and Peter Meyer. The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance. St. Martin’s Press, 2010.

Okuda Michael, et al. The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future. Pocket Books, 1994.

Raynor, Denys Arthur. Escort. William Kimber, 1955 (1974), reprinted U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1999.

____________.           The Enemy Below. Collins, 1956.

Tombs, Robert. The English and their History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 (pp. 732-733- Enigma decipherment)

– – – – – – –

About the author: Michael Panitz serves as Adjunct Professor at Old Dominion University and Virginia Wesleyan College, both in Norfolk, Virginia, and as Rabbi of Temple Israel of Norfolk, Va.

 

[i] Rabbi Heschel’s insight is in line with, and probably influenced by, the classic Rabbinic statement equating the infinite worth of the human with the infinite diversity among people. “A king of flesh and blood stamps many coins from one die, and they all look alike; whereas the King of Kings of Kings [i.e. God] stamps all people with the stamp of the first human, and each one is unique.” Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.

On the importance of recognizing the face as the starting point for the philosophy of Levinas: Totality and Infinity, p. 84: “This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however. It is an interpretive, phenomenological description of the rise and repetition of the face-to-face encounter, or the intersubjective relation at its precognitive core; viz., being called by another and responding to that other.”

See, further, Bettina Bergo, “Emanuel Levinas”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on-line; revised 2011).

[ii] Even when it was apparent to German Frontsoldaten that they were fighting a losing battle, racist indoctrination continued to sustain their fighting morale. See Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten, p. 188: “Since an army tends to reflect the society from which it sprang, if the men of the Wehrmacht fought steadfastly in support of Hitler and Nazism, something within the Hitler state must have struck a responsive chord.” Hatred of Bolsheviks merged with hatred of Jews to bolster the resiliency of the Wehrmacht fighters whose correspondence Fritz has analyzed: pp. 197-203.

[iii] Photos of dead U.S. Marines, killed while attempting to wade ashore at the lagoon of Tarawa in 1943, caused an adverse public reaction, not only because the number of casualties far exceeded expectations, but also because the dead were seen to have fallen in non-heroic poses. Antony Beevor, The Second World War, p. 464.

[iv] To cite two examples of this development: David Wolper’s 1969 film, The Bridge at Remagen, focuses on the internal struggle within the mind of a Wehrmacht officer torn between dynamiting the sole remaining crossing over the Rhine river, so as to slow the Allied advance into Germany, and allowing the bridge to stand, so as to save his own retreating men. Similarly, the 1977 film, Cross of Iron, directed by Sam Peckinpah, deals with the conflict between a callous lieutenant, freshly arrived at the Eastern Front from Berlin, bent only on winning a prestigious medal and a war-weary Wehrmacht sergeant seeking.to preserve the lives of the men under his command.

[v] Victory at Sea (TV Series 1952–1953) – IMDb (International Movie Database)

www.imdb.com/title/tt0046658

[vi] Turner Classic Movies, Crash Dive (1943) – Overview – TCM.com

www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/71704/Crash-Dive

[vii] BFI ScreenOnline, “British Film in the 1940’s”, “Magyars in Mayfair” and “Emeric Pressburger”, www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1357301. In fact, the film did not succeed in prompting the Americans to join the Allied side, because it first premiered in the USA in March 1942, under the title The Invaders, by which time it was moot, since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had already triggered the American entry into the conflict.

[viii] Only the introduction of small aircraft carriers, whose patrol airplanes could provide anti-submarine protection for the entire course of the Atlantic crossing, allowed the Allies to defeat the U-Boat strategy. Pitched battles of Allied anti-submarine forces against “Wolfpacks” of U-Boats in May, 1943, turned the tide of battle. Soon after that decisive encounter, Grossadmiral Doenitz withdrew most of the U-Boats from the Atlantic theater of operations. Beevor, p. 438.

[ix] Drew Casper, commentary to the DVD release of Lifeboat, 2005.

[x] Dorothy Parker, “A Film that Could Aid German Morale”, Amarillo Globe, January 31, 1944. The Times , Mar. 16, 1944, reiterated the criticism, with typically upper-class British restraint: “When this film was shown in America it met with some criticism on the grounds that the real hero of the lifeboat which pulls away from a merchant ship sunk and shelled by a U-boat is the captain of the U-boat, which is, in its turn, sent to the bottom. …While Mr. Hitchcock does not altogether put his propaganda account right by his final act of violence, the film itself, considered in the abstract terms of the cinema, is an exciting and expert piece of craftsmanship.”

[xi] Hitchcock rebutted the accusations against him promptly: ”Anti-U.S. Charge Denied”, Gloucestershire Echo, March 16, 1944. On his 1962 elaboration of his statement of intent in creating Lifeboat, see Cinephilia and Beyond, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat: An Expertly Composed Allegorical Thriller that deserves more recognition”

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/alfred-hitchcocks-lifeboat

[xii] Hitchcock himself defended the portrayal of the German character on dramatic grounds: “I always respect my villain, build[ing] him into a redoubtable character that will make my hero or thesis more admirable in defeating him or it.”

[xiii] Don Cook, Forging the Alliance, p. 49.

[xiv] Andrei Cherny, The Candy Bombers, p. 543.

[xv] Cook, pp.135-156.

[xvi] Cook, p. 259-260.

[xvii] On the description of ships in terms of different types of women: See the catalogue of the various Royal Navy warships under his command given by D. A. Rayner in the epilogue of his memoirs, Escort, pp. 234-235:

… the ships themselves, each of whom had—or so it appeared
to me—a character as complex and as interesting as that of a
woman. Loch Tulla was a diligent nursemaid… Verbena the
busy housewife. Shikari the rather raffish thoroughbred of whom
my mother would have said, ‘A very nice girl, but (and you knew
the sting was coming) just a little unreliable I always think.’
Warwick the widowed lady who had once been a girl herself.
Highlander the best-loved, in the prime of her life. Lastly
Pevensey Castle. Poor little Pevensey! The girl who had been to
the university; the one who had everything—but had not yet
learned how to live.

[xviii] Robert Tombs. The English and their History, pp. 780-781.

[xix] Rayner published his other novel about naval destroyer duty in the Atlantic, The Crippled Tanker, in 1960. In real life, Rayner’s task force’s destruction of the U-1200 in November, 1944, is the source for many of the tactical details of battle in the novel. Escort, pp. 217-220.

[xx] The Enemy Below, scene 6 in the DVD edition.

[xxi] The Enemy Below, scene 5 in the DVD edition. Fähnrich is a very junior officer, a midshipman or cadet. Von Stolberg eventually voices scorn for what the Nazis have done to “his Germany” directly to Kuntz.  In a later dialogue, while the U-boat is enduring a damaging depth charge attack, von Stolberg polls his officers for their opinion. Only Kuntz wants to surface and surrender; the others vote to endure the attack. Kuntz protests that it would be suicidal, and von Stolberg retorts contemptuously: So you can die for your New Germany!

[xxii] Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer, The Pledge, pp. 140-150.

[xxiii] The Enemy Below, scene 28 in the DVD edition. The casting in the film also supported the political message of 1957, that there are good Germans worthy of being our allies.  The Austrian actor, Curd Jürgens (presented with the Americanized spelling, Curt Jurgens), who portrayed von Stolberg, had been jailed during the Nazi era for his anti-Nazi views. (Schwaffer, incidentally, was portrayed by a Jewish refugee, Theodore Bikel.)

[xxiv] Rayner, Escort, p. 234.

[xxv] Two commanders are documented to have refused to surrender when Grossadmiral Doenitz broadcast a surrender order on May 8, 1945. But there were numerous rumors of post-war Nazi submarine activity in sub-Antarctic waters. It was assumed that the 43 U-Boats unaccounted for at war’s end had been destroyed by mines, but in the first years after 1945, several South American newspapers ran reports of fishing vessels reporting encounters with German submarines.  “The Antarctica Enigma” – bibliotecapleyades.net

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tierra_hueca/esp_tierra_hueca_6c.htm

[xxvi] Schaeffer’s work, U-977 – 66 Tage unter Wasser, remains of interest in circles of military history buffs. See the review of it in U-Boat 977: The U-Boat that Escaped to Argentina – Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1582175.U_Boat_977

[xxvii] One may object to my thesis that Rayner’s book only appeared in 1956, and yet it does not seem to reflect 1950’s realities. I would respond by saying that, despite its publication date, the book reflects the long-standing thinking of the author, crystallized during his war years and unchanged since that time.

[xxviii] “U-571: You give historical films a bad name”, Manchester Guardian, Feb. 25, 2009.  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/25/u-571-reel-history

[xxix] I believe that the viewer is intended to see the Romulan commander’s suicide as an honorable act. This may be connected to screenwriter Schneider’s decision to give this species Roman names such as “Remus” and “Romulus” for the planets of the empire, “Praetor” for the head of state and “Decius” for the sub-commander. In Roman culture, the suicide of one such as Brutus was respected as an exit fit for the honorable. Previous commentary, available on the internet, has covered some of my analysis of Balance of Terror, albeit without focusing on the significance of the moment when the rival commanders finally see each other. See: Star Trek Re-watch: “Balance of Terror” | Tor.com at https://www.tor.com/…/lemgstar-treklemg-re-watch-balance-of-terror. For instance: “This is an incredibly riveting and layered episode, a tense war story pitting two vessels against unknown enemies. There are obvious parallels to naval battles between seafaring ships and submarines…This episode always comes to mind as some of the best that Star Trek, and science fiction television in general, has to offer. Though we are obviously meant to root for the Enterprise, the Romulan commander is very sympathetic. He’s shown as a military man who has grown tired of war and longs to return home…; the worst thing he can imagine is being responsible for reigniting an old conflict with the humans, but he is also sworn to fulfill his mission to test their defenses. He confides in his friend, “Centurion, I find myself wishing for destruction before we can return.” When he gets his wish, and displays true regret for his actions, pretty much everyone feels sorry for him. Under different circumstances, that could have been Kirk and his crew facing defeat. It’s the similarities and differences between Kirk and the Romulan commander that are most interesting. The commander says they are “of a kind”: both of them are smart and committed to their duty, strategically fairly even matched, and neither want this war. It’s their respective cultures that prevent them from meeting as friends…”

by Gabriele Eckart

Nancy Aris. Dattans Erbe.  Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 2016, 315 Seiten, 14.95 Euro

Nancy Aris who works in Dresden in the office of the “Landesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der DDR” has been known for her publications on East Germany’s recent past as, for instance, Zeitenwende 1989: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Aufarbeitung and Das lässt einen nicht mehr los: Opfer politischer Gewalt erinnern sich.  Now, she has published her first novel, Dattan’s Inheritance, that surprisingly has nothing to do with the legacy of the GDR.  It is about a German woman, Anna, who after the end of the Cold War travels to Vladiwostok to research the life of Adolph Dattan, a former bookkeeper from Naumburg who had created a successful trading empire in the Far East of Russia during the second half of the 19^th century and became a well-known supporter of art and science.  Later, during World War I, he had lost both fortune and reputation due to having been falsely accused of being a German spy. He was banished to live deep inside Siberia for five years; after which time, he returned to Germany a broken man; he died in 1924. Anna, who follows the traces of his life, is a historian specializing in Russian history. Following her intuition, she finds more than the few documents that are in Russian archives about Dattan, and desperately attempts to find meaning in the complicated past (“der verkorksten Vergangenheit einen Sinn geben”), as she calls it.

I found the description of the circumstances of Anna’s trip from Germany to the Far East of Russia and her adventures in the post-Soviet city of Vladiwostok even more interesting than her reconstruction of Dattan’s tragic life story. During the three months there, she has to struggle to find a place to live and to fight with a criminal gang of car smugglers and with the inertia of Russian archivists. As she becomes aware of during her stay, Vladiwostok was a multicultural city with a strong German presence before the revolution of 1918.  However, by the 1930s most foreigners had left – a situation that has been reversing since the end of the Cold War, as more and more people from other countries, mainly Asians, have moved into the city, bringing back the international trade and strongly enriching the new multi-cultural life.

Due to her superb Russian language skills, Anna is able to communicate with many Russians whom she meets in the city and also gets a glimpse of the feelings of people in the face of the disappeared Soviet Union.  Many are relieved about the political and social change that has taken place; others feel nostalgia towards their lost communist country and sharply criticize the present predatory capitalism (“Raubtierkapitalismus”). Due to her sensitivity, Anna is able to understand both points of view.

Stylistically, the novel is a treasure. Aris’s language is colorful and refreshing. She uses wordplay and expressions of German vernacular in addition to many instances of code-switching from German to Russian and English. She also embeds literary references, for instance, to books by Mark Twain. With sarcasm, she struggles against German prejudices against Russians: “Did the Russians not always have chickens and goats on their laps?” (“hatten die Russen nicht immer Hühner und Ziegen auf dem Schoß?”) But, the crucial question: “Why were we always so arrogant and consider us better than others?” (“Warum waren wir immer so arrogant und hielten uns für etwas Besseres?”) she cannot answer.  Since she is able to deconstruct her own prejudices during her trip, it seems that traveling is the best way to work against them.  Dattan seems to have understood that as well. “For weeks, he traveled through Russia, from one post office to the next. By sled or carriage, on old trade routes or trapper paths“ (“Wochenlang war er durch Russland gereist, von einer Poststation zur nächsten.  Mit Schlitten oder Kutsche, auf alten Handelsrouten oder Pelzjägerpfaden.”) The map on the wall of his business showed Vladiwostok as the center of the world with Germany somewhere far away in the West.  This shift in perspective, the narrative implies, allowed Dattan to be highly successful in his trading profession, at least until the outbreak of World War I.

An ad in the newspaper at the beginning of the novel triggers Anna’s interest in Dattan.  One of his grandsons was looking for a historian who would travel to the Far East of Russia and find Dattan’s diary – supposedly for a family chronicle; he promised to pay well for it.  Since Anna has been frustrated with her job in Germany and also suffers from wanderlust, she goes for it.  However, Anna finds out in the end of her search that the grandson’s reason for wanting this diary was different from what he had claimed; it rather had to do with family intrigue.  This last part of the novel, I read breathlessly as you would read a detective novel.  I recommend sincerely and without reservation Nancy Aris’s book Dattan’s Erbe that fits well into German-Russian understanding of the past.