Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) Read online

  TALES OF THE GERMAN IMAGINATION FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM TO INGEBORG BACHMANN

  Selected, Translated and Edited by Peter Wortsman

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction: ‘Making Bones Sing’

  TALES OF THE GERMAN IMAGINATION

  Part One

  The Singing Bone The Brothers Grimm

  Hansel and Gretel The Brothers Grimm

  The Children of Hameln The Brothers Grimm

  The Sandman E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Rune Mountain Ludwig Tieck

  St Cecilia or the Power of Music Heinrich von Kleist

  Peter Schlemiel Adelbert von Chamisso

  The Marble Statue Josef von Eichendorff

  Descent into the Mines Heinrich Heine

  Part Two

  My Gmunden Peter Altenberg

  The Magic Egg Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender)

  A New Kind of Plaything Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender)

  The Seamstress Rainer Maria Rilke

  The Island of Eternal Life Georg Kaiser

  In the Penal Colony Franz Kafka

  The Kiss Robert Walser

  The Blackbird Robert Musil

  The Lunatic Georg Heym

  A Conversation Concerning Legs Alfred Lichtenstein

  The Onion Kurt Schwitters

  A Raw Recruit Klabund (aka Alfred Henschke)

  The Time Saver Ignaz Wrobel (aka Kurt Tucholsky)

  The Tattooed Portrait Egon Erwin Kisch

  Part Three

  The Experiment or the Victory of the Children Unica Zürn

  The Dandelion Wolfgang Borchert

  Shadowlight Paul Celan

  The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran Ingeborg Bachmann

  Conversation Jürg Laederach

  The Tales and their Authors

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  TALES OF THE GERMAN IMAGINATION FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM TO INGEBORG BACHMANN

  PETER WORTSMAN’s translations from the German include Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil (now in its third edition); Peter Schlemiel, by Adelbert von Chamisso; Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg; Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist; Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine; and the forthcoming Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm. He is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die; an artists’ book, it-t=i (comprising his poetry and etchings by artist Harold Wortsman); stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words; and a travelogue/memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin (A Rhapsody in Gray). Recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and the Geertje Potash-Suhr Prosapreis of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, as well as fellowships from the Thomas J. Watson and Fulbright Foundations, he was a Holtzbrinck Fellow in 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin, where he completed work on this book. His translation of Flypaper, by Robert Musil, is published in Penguin Mini Modern Classics.

  To Richard Sieburth, il miglior fabbro

  Introduction

  ‘Making Bones Sing’

  ‘Perhaps there are also different ways of writing, but I only know this one; at night, when fear keeps me from sleeping, I only know this one [ …]’ So Franz Kafka confided to his friend Max Brod in a letter of 1922. Or as Jorge Luis Borges aptly observed: ‘Kafka could only dream nightmares, which he knew that reality endlessly supplies.’1

  Fear has indeed proven rich fodder for fantasy in the German storytelling tradition, at least as far back as the Romantics. The very notion of angst has been absorbed into the English language by its German name, as if we English speakers conceded the terrifying as Teutonic turf. Fearless in their readiness to face fear head-on, certain Dichter2 mined their nightmares for precious literary ore. But if the resulting narratives succeeded in transcending the German particular and managed to tap the collective unconscious, appealing to readers across the divides of language, temperament, time and space, something more than just morbidity must be at play. Contrary to the cliché, the darkest German literary confections are such a pleasure to read because they are also spiked with humour – therein lies their enduring appeal, eliciting laughter when you least expect it and in the most unlikely places.

  Perusing the offerings at a bookstore in East Berlin a few years before the Wall came down, I was amazed at the apparent profusion of literature and the crowd of would-be book buyers. Not just the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and V. I. Lenin, as I’d naively expected. Books were clearly still a prized commodity in the German Democratic Republic. Word spread far in advance of the appearance of new editions, and because of the price of paper and limited print runs, books sold like hot cakes, often disappearing as quickly as they hit the shelves. It was here in East Berlin that I first happened upon a copy of Café Klößchen, 38 Grotesken,3 a book rife with gallows humour from a host of irreverent German authors of the twenties and thirties I’d never heard of, Klabund, Lichtenstein, Mynona, Kisch, et al. – one of the sources of the stories in this volume.

  And, much to my surprise, the GDR even countenanced Kafka. I was flabbergasted to spot his name out of the corner of my eye on the spine of a book. But the irony was too good, too Kafkaesque to be true: for the title I had at first squint read as Sämtliche Schriften (Complete Writings) turned out on closer examination to be Amtliche Schriften (Administrative Writings), a compendium, not of his elusive parables, but of the official reports and letters he drafted on the job for the insurance company, the bureaucratic taskmaster to which he sacrificed his daylight hours and which he cursed in his diaries and letters to friends at night.

  ‘Yes,’ an unsmiling, bespectacled clerk said, ‘other works by the author have been published.’

  ‘Can I buy them?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she regretted to inform me, ‘they are out of print.’

  An absurd situation straight out of The Trial! Kafka himself would have got a kick out of it. I remembered what my late beloved Aunt Steffi, a native of Vienna, once said of a Kafka reading she’d attended in her youth.

  ‘What was he like?!’ I pressed her.

  She paused. A rationalist to the bone, Steffi had to admit that she did not know what to make of the gawky man and his strange stories. ‘But one thing I do remember,’ she said, ‘he could hardly keep from laughing.’

  By a fortuitous conjoining of literary taste, popular Zeitgeist and publishing fashion in the wake of the Second World War, and thanks to the tireless machinations of his friend and impassioned posthumous promoter, Max Brod, Kafka’s dark premonitions broke through the bulwarks of culture, language, time and place to make the author a catchword, a one-man symbol of our angst-ridden age, a secular saint of the twentieth century. In 1984, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris presented an unprecedented exhibition, titled ‘Le Siècle de Kafka’ (Kafka’s Century). It was perhaps the first time that a major public exhibition space devoted to the visual and plastic arts launched a show ostensibly revolving around the work of a literary artist. Kafka served as a curatorial clothes-line on which to hang a diverse body of artworks and artefacts, including sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Germaine Richier, a wrapped-up armless torso by Christo, drawings by Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Max Ernst and Henri Michaux, photos of a haunted Prague, doodles by Kafka himself and a sentimental novel by a certain Dr Josef Goebbels, better known for his rants and ravings. The conceptual clothes-peg that held the exhibition together was the metamorphosis of the proper no
un Kafka into the adjective Kafkaesque.

  In our justifiable adulation of the writings of the visionary German-speaking Jewish scribe from Prague we tend to overlook the fact that he was not spontaneously spawned, Athena-like, from the cranium of German letters. Kafka had his precursors among the German Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins, writers of talent, imagination and stylistic daring scribbling away in Berne, Berlin, Vienna and the far corners of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And if Kafka’s dark fantasies resonated with readers in the English-speaking world, it is not only because they spoke to the existential angst of the moment. The path had already been paved by Carroll and Wilde, Kipling, Wells and Orwell – an author whose name inspired an almost synonymous adjective, Orwellian. The American imagination, meanwhile, had already been primed by home-grown fabulists, Irving, Hawthorne and Poe, whose inspiration had been stoked by Hoffmann, von Eichendorff and Tieck (translations of whose works were serialized in Blackwood’s magazine, a well-respected review in its day).

  Darkness is not, of course, a German prerogative. But the German imagination set an early standard, poignantly and precisely sounding the sinister in the flights of fancy of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the tales collected and retold by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Anyone who in childhood has ever read, or rather been read, a Grimms’ Märchen will for ever remember the effect: that terror combined with the immediate recognition that such tales tap otherwise unutterable truths. (Until the end of his short life, Kafka still savoured Märchen, unquestionably a major influence on the form and content of his own enigmatic short prose.) The standard English translation of the German word Märchen as fairy tale sugarcoats the raw German grit with hovering fairies and flickering lights, replacing the cunning, cannibalistic witch of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ with the cute and kindly Tinkerbell, tapping, but ultimately quelling, fledgling fears. Disney added another layer of prettification, safely encapsulating the malevolent in a shell of nicety. But German Märchen aren’t nice. Rather than cocoon the virgin consciousness, they blurt out the unspeakable, and so, from early on, vaccinate with the ring of truth. (‘A New Kind of Plaything’ by Mynona and ‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ by Unica Zürn, two of the twentieth-century German fables included in this volume, are directly rooted in and toy with the Grimms’ aesthetic. And Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ taps the same source.)

  In ‘The Singing Bone’, one of the Brothers’ lesser-known, albeit most telling tales, a wandering shepherd-cum-minstrel stumbles on a little white bone, out of which he carves a mouthpiece for his horn. But the bone has its own agenda:

  Oh, dear little shepherd boy,

  The bone you blow on knows no joy,

  My brother slay me.

  Beneath the bridge he laid me

  All for the wild boar’s hide

  To make the king’s daughter his bride.

  No mere accommodating object, this, no mouthpiece for an idle ditty – the bone cannot help but echo the smothered cries of the misdeed. The shepherd’s breath, like an archaeologist’s glue, re-members the dismembered. (In ‘The Onion’, an anti-Märchen included here, the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, best known for his visual collages, reconstitutes another kind of re-membering.)

  The Grimms, it turns out, albeit unbeknownst to them, had a prehistoric prototype. In 2009 archaeologists from the University of Tübingen digging in the Hohle Fels Cave, in south-west Germany, not far from Ulm, reported their discovery of a 35,000-year-old, 8.5-inch-long, five-holed flute carved out of the hollow bone of a griffon vulture.4 It is only fitting that a bone flute, a singing bone of the sort immortalized by the Grimms, should have been discovered, not in a riverbed in broad daylight, but in the dark pit of a cave where it was surely played by its maker to tame the restless spirits and still the fears of night.

  This anthology gathers German imaginative texts from a span of several centuries and from various literary movements born of crisis and doubt. The German Romantics (Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Josef von Eichendorff, Heinrich von Kleist, Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine et al.) formulated an imaginative reaffirmation of German identity in response to the trauma of the Napoleonic occupation of German lands. Expressionists like Georg Heym, Georg Kaiser and Alfred Lichtenstein and Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters functioned as a visionary avant-garde responding to the economic and cultural collapse leading up to and in the wake of the First World War. Schwitters’ visual and verbal collages constitute a realistic portrayal of a broken world. Post-Second-World-War lyrical realists, like Wolfgang Borchert, embodied a poetic attempt to re-member, to put the shattered fragments of the German identity back together and start over again after the cataclysm of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The collection also includes unclassifiable tales and texts, like those of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, that fit the tenets of no movements. The narratives gathered here have been variously referred to by those inclined to categorize as allegories, fairy tales, tales of the fantastic, parables, fables, prose poems and grotesques. I prefer to think of them as enigmatic tales. The common thread that runs throughout is a feverish intensity and a predilection for the stuff of dreams.

  Styles and tactics vary. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and von Eichendorff’s ‘The Marble Statue’ are prime examples of a hallucinatory literature of heightened consciousness and extreme states of mind. Hoffmann employs an ecstatic prose, a hybrid blend of half-science, mystical leanings, strained sobriety and barely controlled madness. (Freud, who attempted to elucidate the mysteries of ‘The Sandman’ in his essay ‘On the Uncanny’ [‘Über das Unheimliche’], elsewhere, in a letter to Martha Bernays, dubbed the story ‘mad, fantastic stuff’.) Tieck pits a traditional Teutonic fascination with mountains and forests against the sentimental lure of Heimat (homeland). Von Eichendorff ultimately resorts to religion to rein in and wrap up the chthonic anarchy of his hero’s restless imaginings. And in a transcendent and totally original work like ‘St Cecilia or the Power of Music’, Heinrich von Kleist, the most and least Romantic of the lot, employs the astute tactical manoeuvring of a soldier and the sometimes dispassionate, sometimes plodding prose of a Prussian civil servant to render the ineffable. (A century later we will find a kindred tendency in Kafka.)

  In ‘Peter Schlemiel’, Adelbert von Chamisso, a French émigré who discovered his literary voice in German, adds a twist of Gallic whimsy to the German Märchen, toying with its constraints, freeing it up with the wilful possibilities of unfettered metaphor. When asked which book by another author he would most like to claim as his own, the great twentieth-century Italian fabulist Italo Calvino cited Chamisso’s small masterpiece. This eerie black comic tale of the hapless Schlemiel, who foolishly bartered his shadow for worldly stature and wealth, influenced the diverse likes of Hans Christian Andersen, who borrowed the premise for a story of his own, ‘The Shadow’; Karl Marx, who alludes to it in his famous essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’; Jacques Offenbach, who includes a likewise shadow-less character of the same name in his opera Les contes d’Hoffmann; J. M. Barrie, whose play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, begins, as you may recall, with Peter in search of his lost shadow; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who makes mention of it in his Philosophical Investigations. Having borrowed the Yiddish word schlemiel, a hopeless bungler liable to trip on his own shadow, from his Jewish friends in Berlin, with whom he identified as fellow outsiders, Chamisso returned the favour by introducing the term into the German language.

  Among those with whom the homeless Frenchman crossed paths at the literary salon of Rahel Varnhagen, the converted Jewish muse of the Romantics, was Heinrich Heine. Heine paid tribute to Chamisso in The Harz Journey, where he noted his delight at discovering in the guest book of an inn at which he stopped ‘the much-cherished name of Adelbert von Chamisso, the biographer of the immortal Schlemiel’.

  The last Romantic a
nd the first modernist, Heine, himself a Jewish convert to Christianity, had a field day with idealized German Romantic notions, singing odes to nature, and laughing all the while. In his description of the life of miners in ‘Descent into the Mines’, Heine sounds the depths of German Märchen and myth with a folklorist’s eye, a poet’s insight and a satirist’s wit, in the process pressing the limits of German locution. The witty, vitriolic Austrian critic Karl Kraus went so far as to accuse him of having ‘un-corseted the German language and enabled every Tom, Dick and Harry to fondle its breasts’.5

  While reviling Heine, Kraus revered his fellow Viennese, Peter Altenberg, for cultivating the hybrid poetic-prose form Heine had launched. All three were consummate stylists, linked by their love and mastery of the German language, but also, incidentally, by their alienated stance as converted Jews straining for acceptance in a largely hostile society.

  Jewish authors of the German language comprise an important literary strain in the early twentieth century, particularly in the literature of angst and enigma. In grotesques like ‘The Magic Egg’ and ‘A New Kind of Plaything’, Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender), a philosopher by training and temperament, manages to lace Kant’s pure reason with the absurdist logic of Chelm, the legendary Jewish village of fools. The irreverent satires of Kurt Tucholsky and Egon Erwin Kisch, likewise included in this anthology, combine an in-your-face Jewish chutzpah with an unflinching German political idealism.

  Scholars have traced Kafka’s inspiration back to the dark parables of the Hasidic Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and other Jewish mystics, the influence of which cannot be denied. Kafka’s tales are indeed firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, reaching all the way back to the biblical Book of Jonah, the nightmare of a man literally engulfed and spat back out by the physical manifestation of his angst. But it would be a foolish error to try to extract Kafka’s writings from the language and literary tradition in which they were written. As Tucholsky detected in a glowing review of ‘In the Penal Colony’,6 Kafka had a more than passing affinity with Kleist. ‘It is not true, as people maintain, that dreams are dreamy,’ Tucholsky wrote. ‘So mercilessly hard, so gruesomely objective and crystal clear is this dream of Franz Kafka’s [ … ] Since [Kleist’s novella] Michael Kohlhaas no German story has been written that with such conscious force appears to stifle every semblance of sympathy and yet is so infused with the spirit of its author.’ In a letter to his sometime fiancée Felice, Kafka confirmed Tucholsky’s prognosis, referring to Kleist as one of his ‘true blood relations’.7 Fellow misfits – Kleist scorned by the Prussian aristocratic lineage out of which he sprang, Kafka spurned by the assimilated Jewish provincial middle class that spawned him – both writers harvested their traumas, and managed in the merciless prose of the military tactician and the office bureaucrat, respectively, to capture and depict the incomprehensible.