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"Origin, resume - all nonsense! We all come from some small town Jüterbog or Königsberg and in some Black Forest we will all end" (Gottfried Benn) Therefore just a stenogram: Thomas Huebner, born in Germany, studied Economics, Political Science, Sociology, German literature, European Law. Consulting firm in Bulgaria. Lived in Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Indonesia and Jordan. Now residing in Prishtina/Kosovo. Interested in books and all other aspects of human culture. Traveler. Main feature: intellectual curiosity

History of the Great Game of Chess

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As an avid reader and also chess player, I think it is fairly obvious that I am also a reader (and collector) of chess literature. Although a lot of the chess books I am reading are way too technical to review them here, I will make an exception today. The book I am reviewing is dealing with a certain aspect of the history of chess that might be interesting for a wider audience.

Nansen Arie, the author of История на великата шахматна игра (History of the Great Game of Chess), is a dilettante – and I mean this expression not in an offensive sense. Arie has so far no record as a chess historian, nor is he a strong player. The author is a cardiologist and a lover of the game of chess since his childhood. Another history of chess I hear a few readers sigh…but this book is different and the subtitle explains us why: the contribution of the Jews to chess (приносът на шахматисти евреи) is the author’s topic.

Since the beginning of modern tournament chess in 1851 and until today, a big percentage of the leading players – including the world champions Steinitz, Lasker, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Spassky, Fischer (who developed mysteriously into an extreme anti-semite), Khalifman, Kasparov but also leading masters like Zukertort, Tarrasch, Charousek, Rubinstein, Bernstein, Nimzovich, Tartakower, Reti, Flohr, Fine, Reshevsky, Szabo, Lilienthal, Najdorf, Boleslavski, Averbach, Geller, Taimanov, Stein, Korchnoi, Speelman, Gelfand, Judit Polgar, Radjabov and many others were or are Jews or of Jewish origin.

Dr. Arie starts his work with an introduction that gives a short overview and that also mentions anti-semitism in chess: the influential chess writer Franz Gutmayer published a number of popular pamphlets in the early 20th century that denounced the playing style of Jewish players as decadent and “sick” – contrary to the “healthy” (Aryan) attacking style of Gutmayer’s disciples. And the world champion Alexander Alekhine published during WWII a series of articles called “„Jüdisches und arisches Schach” (Jewish and Aryan chess) in which he was attacking players like Lasker (whom he publicly admired on many occasions before) in a way that is not worthy of a chess genius. (After the war Alekhine disputed the authorship of these articles.)

In the first chapter, the author gives an overview regarding the main chess events before the establishment of a regular world championship, highlighting the successes of Jewish players and providing very brief biographical notes on them. The second part covers the World Championship matches, the third the Chess Olympiads. Part four covers chess in the USSR, part five the big international tournaments, part six the matches USSR vs. “Rest of the World”, part seven (somehow inconsistently) the “traditional” chess tournaments (like Hastings). A short chapter on Bulgaria would have been interesting and reasonable (the author is Bulgarian and writes primarily for a Bulgarian audience).

Dr. Arie has written a work with the love and industriousness of the amateur. Who wants to learn about the remarkable success of Jewish chess players has in this work all necessary information.

However, I have to admit that this work left me disappointed for various reasons.

The book contains no games at all. A book that wants to explore the successes of Jewish chess players should at least give some remarkable examples of their play and do some effort to explain, why there was such an explosion of Jewish players from 1850 until today, and what the social, historical or psychological reasons behind this development were. Dr. Arie is making no serious attempt to explain this rise of the Jewish element in chess.

A second big disappointment is the lack of a literature list. The author doesn’t mention any sources although it is obvious that he is heavily indebted to the literature on the history of chess. There is no mentioning of Moritz Steinschneider’s classical study “Schach bei den Juden” (1873), no mentioning of Emanuel Lasker’s writings on philosophy or the Jewish question, no mentioning of the Makkabi chess clubs in many countries. Edward Winter’s article “Chess and Jews” on chesshistory.org is also not mentioned, dito Felix Berkovich’s and Nathan Divinsky’s “Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps“, or Meir and Harold Ribalow’s “The Great Jewish Chess Champions“. There is even no mentioning of the sources of the photos in the book. I don’t know if this is the author’s or the publisher’s fault, but it is a lack of diligence and respect for the intellectual efforts of others when these sources are generally repressed and omitted.

This work is written in Bulgarian, but it makes an effort to re-translate many names or expressions into the latin script. Unfortunately the person who did this (very probably not the author) seems to have been not at all familiar with the history of chess. This results in very frequent and rather annoying mistakes like “The Rating of Chess Player” instead of “The Rating of Chessplayers” (title of Prof. Elo’s famous book), “Café de la Regens” instead of “Café de la Regence” , “Ignatz fon Kolish” instead of “Ignaz von Kolisch”, “Vilhelm Cohn” instead of “Wilhelm Cohn”, “Iohann Loewenthal” instead of “Johann Löwenthal”, “Rudolf Spielman” instead of “Rudolf Spielmann”, and so on and on. There is hardly any page in the book without such unnecessary mistakes.

Although I am very sympathetic towards the work of any dilettante (being one myself), I wish this book on an interesting topic would have been written and edited in a better and more diligent way.

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Нансен Арие (Nansen Arie): История на великата шахматна игра (History of the Great Game of Chess), Сиела (Siela), Sofia 2014

 

Moritz Steinschneider: Schach bei den Juden, Julius Springer, Berlin 1873

Franz Gutmayer: Der Weg zur Meisterschaft, Veit, Leipzig 1913

Emanuel Lasker: Kampf, Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2001 (reprint; originally published in 1906)

Emanuel Lasker: Jude – wohin?, in: Aufbau, New York 01. January 1939

Emanuel Lasker: The Community of the Future, M.J. Bernin, New York 1940

Alexander Aljechin: Jüdisches und arisches Schach, in: Pariser Zeitung, 18.-23. March 1941

Arpad Elo: The Rating of Chessplayers, Arco, New York 1978

Harold U. Ribalow / Meir Z. Ribalow: The Great Jewish Chess Champions, Hippocrene Books, New York 1987

Felix Berkovich / Nathan Divinsky: Jewish Chess masters on Stamps, McFarland & Co., Jefferson 2000

Edmund Bruns: Das Schachspiel als Phänomen der Kulturgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, LIT, Münster 2003

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 


From Bulgaria with Love

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German Literary Spaces (Nемски литературни простори) is a new collection of essays by the Bulgarian poet, essayist, aphorist, and translator Venzeslav Konstantinov.

Konstantinov is one of those very important mediators between different countries, languages, cultures that make literature or other works from the cultural sphere accessible to us and whose work is so important and frequently underestimated. As for Bulgaria, a considerable part of the classical and modern literature in German language was translated and edited by Konstantinov and his translations are accompanied by essays that help the reader to understand the context of the work and the writer. Konstantinov is a particularly gifted translator of poetry. The “Bulgarian” poetry of Erich Kästner for example is so close to the original that it sounds as if Kästner has written the poems himself in Bulgarian.

A collection of twenty of Konstantinov’s essays on German literature is now published in the new book announced here. Each chapter is devoted to the work of one author, and the range of writers covers the period from the 18th century (the first essay in the book is devoted to Goethe) until today (an essay on Martin Walser concludes the book). All essays are comparatively short (five to ten pages), only the one on Elias Canetti (“From Rustschuk with Love”) is longer. And all of them make the reader curious to discover the work of the writer that Konstantinov is describing in the respective essay.

Konstantinov proves not only to be a congenial translator, but also a successful ‘literature seducer’, someone who knows how to wake up the wish in the reader to discover new literary horizons.

With two small critical remarks I want to conclude this review. First, it would have been great to make it clear that the essays are not dealing with the 20 most important German authors (there is for example no essay on Kafka, and an essay on Katja Mann instead of Thomas or Heinrich Mann). The essays reflect Konstantinov’s interests, and that’s absolutely fine. But they are not (and not meant to be) a systematic introduction to German literature. That’s in no way meant as a criticism of the author, but a short remark in this sense would be useful to readers that are not so familiar with German literature.

Additionally it would have been nice to mention if the essays were written for this book or if it is a collection of previously published articles. Nothing wrong with collecting previously published essays, it is even a commendable deed from the publishing house Iztok-Zapad (East-West) in Sofia. But as a reader I just want to know what exactly I am reading.

These remarks diminish in no way the excellent work by Venzeslav Konstantinov and his publisher. This collection of essays is worth reading and deserves a translation, and of course many Bulgarian readers.

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Venzeslav Konstantinov: Nemski literaturni prostori (German literary spaces), Iztok-Zapad, Sofia 2014

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A Belated Echo

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Josef Burg, born 1912 in Wyschnyzja, a small town in the Bukovina, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now belonging to the Ukraine, reached an almost biblical age. He died 2009 at the age of 97 years in the nearby town of Tschernowzy (Czernowitz).

Czernowitz, his home for most of his life, once housed a vibrant German-speaking Jewish community. Czernowitz not only had one of the best universities in Austria-Hungary and an excellent German theater, it had also dozens of newspapers and literary journals. It was, according to the poet Paul Celan who was born there, a place where people and books lived. It is therefore not surprising that Czernowitz was also the home of important German poets like Celan himself, Rose Ausländer, Immanuel Weissglas, Alfred Gong, and several others.

Josef Burg was one of the last of this generation of authors. But contrary to the above mentioned poets, Burg wrote mainly prose – and he wrote exclusively in Yiddish, not German. Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern European Jews is derived from Medieval German (Mittelhochdeutsch) but has absorbed many Hebrew, Slav, and recently English words. By the educated Western European but also by most Zionist Jews, Yiddish was considered as ‘jargon’, a ‘wrong’ German, a dialect of the uneducated and backward people from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. But this point of view doesn’t do justice to this language – it is rich, colorful, even juicy, and it has produced many eminent writers and an extremely interesting literature. Josef Burg was one of the last authors to write in this language.

In one of his short stories A loschn beazmoj (A language of its own), Burg is describing the surprising reactions of his environment towards Yiddish: as a student in Vienna just before the Anschluss in 1938, he is witnessing how a Jewish student from the East is earning verbal abuse and even open hatred from his Jewish colleagues from Vienna – just because he is addressing them in his native language (which for sure all of his colleagues at least understood).

A short time later the narrator is congratulated by his professor for his excellent German. When the professor asks the foreign student what his native language is, he answers: “Yiddish, Herr Professor!”. The professor, probably a conservative Austrian aristocrat reacts not like the student expects:

I remark that he wants to say something. Maybe the hackneyed “Yiddish is spoilt German”. But he looks at me vividly. Warmth and a certain hesitation are in his gaze. And he says something unexpected. Simple, pure and full of expression: “Yiddish, young friend, is a language of its own.”

(Ich bamerk, as er grejt sich epess sogn. Efscher doss ojssgedroschene “Jidisch is a fardorbn dajtsch!”. Nor er kukt af mir zudringlich. Sein blik is erwoss farzojgn un warem. Un er tut umgericht a sog. Poscher, rejn un saftik: – Jidisch, junger frajnt, is a loschn beazmoj!)

The stories in Josef Burg’s collection of stories A farschpertikter echo (A belated echo) are grouped in three thematic chapters. One is consisting of childhood memories from his poor shtetl and its lumberjacks and rafters. The second deals with the life of the survivors and their attempts to find back to some kind of normality, which for most of them is impossible (Burg for example was the only surviving family member – he lost 50 relatives in the holocaust). And the third is focusing on the time of the persecution.

All of these stories leave a strong impression on the reader. That is partly because of the backdrop of these stories: the genocide. But it is also because of the art of Josef Burg. He leaves everything superficial out and is concentrating on the essential: the fate of the people he is describing, their hopes and fears, their rare joys and frequent sorrows.

In jene teg (In those days) is a good example. On five pages only, Burg is describing the fate of a man he knew in Vienna in 1938. The crippled Galician Jew is like the narrator a regular guest in the Cafe Central, a popular meeting point of intellectuals, writers and artists. The man with the hunchback is one of these luftmentschn that are such a familiar view in many Yiddish stories: someone with an unidentifiable profession (this one seems to be a photographer and a poet, but it is doubtful how he can survive from this almost non-existing income), origin and future, living on the edge of destitution.

The friendly and very modest behavior of this Quasimodo make the narrator curious and he is finally befriending this man. But he is too shy and modest to recite his own poems, as much as the narrator insists. After the Anschluss and the introduction of the “racial” laws in Austria, the Cafe Central has closed its doors for the Jews and on a last occasion before the narrator leaves Austria (he is a foreigner and therefore lucky to find a way out of the mousetrap which Vienna has become for local Jews), he is meeting his friend a last time and his friend is finally giving him a notebook with his poems:

“You wanted my poems? Here you are…Maybe they prove to be useful for you…for sure not for me anymore.”

(“ir hot gewolt majne lider?…Ot hot ir sej…Efscher wet ir sej kenen ojssnuzn…Ich – schojn sicher nit.”)

Some years later, the narrator learns about the fate of his friend from another emigrant: the poet was hiding in a chest, but found while sleeping by the SS. They buried him alive. The manuscript with the poems is handed over to a Jewish publisher in Prague who is later also to become a victim of the Nazis. The notebook is lost without a trace.

“Maybe one day you will remember me!”

(“Efscher wet ir amol mich dermonen!”)

Josef Burg remembered him. And we need to be grateful for this work of a great writer.

 

BurgCover2jpg

Josef Burg: A фаршпэтиктэр эхо: дэрцейлунген, новелес, фарцейхенунген, Sovetskij pisatel, Moscow 1990

Josef Burg:  A farschpetikter echo / Ein verspätetes Echo, P. Kirchheim, München 1999

Translations from Yiddish to English in this blog by Thomas Hübner

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 


The Sea and Poison

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On 5 May, 1945, during the last months of WWII – the war in Europe was just coming to an end – an American B-29 airplane went down over Fukuoka, Japan. The highest ranking surviving soldier was brought to Tokyo for further interrogation. The other eight survivors were brought to the Department of Anatomy of the University of Fukuoka. There they were subjected to medical “experiments” that were carried out without anesthetics by Unit 731 under its commander General Shiro Ishii and with the support of several doctors and nurses from Fukuoka Hospital.

The so-called “experiments” for which Unit 731 was notorious were so gruesome that they can be only compared with those of Dr. Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. A biography of Ishii mentions an example of the “scientific” experiments of Unit 731:

“To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.” (Byrd, Gregory Dean: General Ishii Shiro)

In the case of the American soldiers, the vivisections meant that inner organs were consecutively extracted in order to see how long the soldiers would survive. It was murder with a so-called “scientific” alibi and under the cruelest conditions you can possibly imagine (no use of anesthetics, as already mentioned!). All prisoners died after unimaginable suffering.

Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo was one of the first authors to shed a light on Japan’s moral guilt for the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers, but also by respectable medical doctors, nurses and scientists. His novel The Sea and Poison is based on the Fukuoka crime.

The narrator of the novel that is set in Japan in the 1950s, is a man with a lung disease (just like Endo himself who suffered from tuberculosis and who had a part of his lung removed). He is treated successfully by a Dr. Suguro, an unfriendly and uncommunicative man with a swollen face that looks somehow creepy. But he is obviously a good professional in his field. The narrator investigates out of curiosity about Dr. Suguro and meets someone who knows the past of this strange person.

Dr. Suguro was during the war part of the team of doctors and nurses that carried out the vivisections in Fukuoka. During that time Suguro was a young practitioner at a hospital. One of the first surgeries after he starts his duties in Fukuoka Hospital and in which he participates, is the lung operation of an old woman, a welfare patient. The operation is not necessary from a medical point of view and it will end with the death of the woman, but since she is “only” a welfare patient and will probably die anyway from her disease, the responsible doctor is not hesitating to use her (without her knowledge or even consent) for this human experiment in the name of a very doubtful “scientific progress”,

Suguro finally gives in to participate in this surgery which is supposed to bring at least some more scientific results and might help to find a better treatment for similar cases in the future. Suguro is shocked and devastated by what he sees and he shows compassion to the woman before the surgery. Sometimes he is giving her extra food when nobody watches. But he, the young practitioner doesn’t stand up to the driving force behind this completely useless and lethal surgery: Dr. Toda, the main surgeon, wants to make a career for himself and for this he needs to have under all circumstances a big number of surgeries performed. That in many cases these surgeries will end necessarily with the death of the patient, is not a matter of concern to Dr. Toda. Welfare patients seem to be not fully human to him, interesting only as human “material” and as long as it is in the name of “science” (i.e. his personal ambition), anything is in the right order for him.

Toda is in many ways the complete opposite of Suguro. He is talkative, over-ambitious, and he enjoys exercising power, a fact that results also in a constant bickering directed at Suguro, who has moral scruples and choose this profession obviously out of the real wish to help people, not to make a career at all costs. But Suguro is weak and he collapses morally. Japan, like Germany, was not a society where subordinates were used to doubt or even to stand up to their superiors or any higher authority when receiving orders that were ethically doubtful or inhumane.

A minor figure but nevertheless an important character in the book is the nurse Ueda with a rather unhappy personal history. She is more passive and chose this profession neither out of enthusiasm nor out of the wish to make a career. But her unhappy private life and frustrated pre-disposition together with her experience in Manchuria have taught her to follow orders and how to deal with “inferior” people and races. She is participating in the operation without enthusiasm but also without sign or even thought of rebellion against this unnecessary and lethal surgery.

When the surviving American soldiers are brought to the hospital, it is again Toda who takes the initiative. The post of the deacon of the faculty is vacant and the spectacular vivisections will be the perfect opportunity for him to bring himself in position for this important job. None of the doctors and nurses who participate in the vivisections because Toda puts some pressure on them rejects this request and so these “scientifically” disguised crimes take place under the hands of doctors whose profession it should be to protect and save lives.

I don’t think that Endo wanted to write a kind of documentary novel that was meant to expose the terrible crimes of a part of the Japanese doctors and medical staff during WWII, and I also don’t think that Endo should be blamed for not writing in very much detail about the sufferings of the American soldiers, or for changing some details in his novels compared to the reality, such as the use of anesthetics (which were not used during the real vivisections of the soldiers). It’s a novel after all and any author is entitled to change or adapt certain details when it suits him – otherwise he should write a report, not a novel.

We can assume that Endo’s readers in Japan were (just like the author himself) aware of the details of this case, which were reported in length by all Japanese newspapers during the trial of 1948 against some doctors and medical staff. We can only guess why he introduced the use of anesthetics contrary to the real story. It might be simply for the pragmatic reason not to shock the readers more than necessary, it might be a concession to the publisher, it might be even considered as an act of compassion toward the victims of this crime. And that he doesn’t describe the graphic details of the vivisections has also to be seen in the framework of the artistic tradition of Japan.

It is a constitutional moment of many Japanese novels and movies to make extensive use of the ellipsis as a narrative device (think of Kurosawa’s or Ozu’s movies). It’s more important to see that there are doctors and nurses that have a profession that is aiming to heal people – and they come together to commit a number of sadistic murders. As for the sufferings of the victims, it is left to the readers’ imagination. No need to describe something that would have more similarity with a splatter movie than with the situation in any normal hospital in the world.

It has to be mentioned that Endo was a catholic author. He lived several years in France and was familiar with the work of authors like Bernanos or Mauriac. Additionally he was suffering from tuberculosis and had to undergo surgery to remove one of his lobes. So we can suggest that he had a lot of his own experiences with doctors and hospitals flow into this novel, as well as his views on the freedom of will and personal ethical responsibility for one’s actions.

In my opinion, the three main characters in the book are based on typical representatives for different approaches of people working in hospitals or in the medical profession in general. There are the ones that choose this profession out of the genuine wish to help other people and to render a valuable service to mankind (like Suguro). For others (like Ueda) it is just a profession like any other. And for a number of people (like Dr. Toda) it is an instrument to display power, a vehicle for their personal ambition, a place where they can use any means that suits the only aim that matters: to rise in the hierarchy, to gain more recognition, prestige, money, and power for themselves.

The main question for Endo seems to be: where are the ethical limits for the work of a doctor or medical professional? The surgery that the welfare patient has to suffer is completely useless, will not help her, cure her disease or make her life more comfortable. In the contrary it will kill her. But since she is a welfare patient, she seems to be the suitable ‘material’ to gain at least some (very doubtful) additional knowledge that might help to cure similar diseases in the future more efficiently. (At least this is the alibi that the doctors make up for themselves.) It is clear that already this case shows a complete lack of humanity from the side of the doctors and is against all ethical principles of medicine. And it is also obvious that doctors or nurses that are already so morally compromised to perform such surgeries will not protest against any order to undertake vivisections on prisoners that have absolutely no medical justification and are simply a cruel form of murder.

For me this is clearly a book about the importance to act according to ethical principles under all conditions. Just as the way to Auschwitz started when people were not protesting against the boycott of the shop of their Jewish neighbor, the way to the ‘medical’ experiments of a Dr. Dr. Mengele started when people were not protesting against the declaration of certain people as being ‘lebensunwert’ (not worth living).

Considering today’s discussions about reproduction medicine or euthanasia in many countries, or the participation of medics in the torturing of prisoners in Guantanamo or elsewhere, the question of individual ethical responsibility of doctors is as acute as ever. Therefore Endo’s disturbing but important novel, as depressing as the story is, has lost nothing of its urgency and strength.

Postscriptum:

The real doctors and nurses that participated in the Fukuoka vivisections were sentenced to death or very long prison sentences in 1948.

General MacArthur, the military commander of Japan commuted all death sentences and reduced the prison sentences considerably.

In 1958 all Fukuoka killers were free again. Most of them held later high positions in medicine, science, and the pharmaceutical industry in Japan.

Emperor Hirohito, who created Unit 731 and who was fully aware of the biological warfare and human experiments and who encouraged the deeds of this Unit, never saw a court.

General Ishii – still today considered a hero by many Japanese – received immunity for his crimes in return for delivering the results of his “scientific research” to the Americans(!).

Results of the biological human experiments of Unit 731 were used in the US and the Soviet Union for their respective military Biological Warfare programmes.

The Japanese Supreme Court confirmed in 2007 that victims of Unit 731 or their family members are not entitled to any financial compensation.

the-sea-and-poison

Shusaku Endo: The Sea and Poison, transl. Michael Gallagher, Tuttle Publishing, Rutland Tokyo 1991

On the Fukuoka case:

Marc Landas: The Fallen. A True Story of American POWs and Japanese Wartime Atrocities, Hoboken, John Wiley 2004

On Unit 731:

Peter Williams, David Wallace: Unit 731 – Japans Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London 1988

Sheldon H.Harris: Factories of Death. Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-up. Routledge, New York 2002

Toshiyuki Tanaka, Yukiko Tanaka: Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Westview Press Inc. 1998

On similar cases in Nazi Germany:

Alexander Mitscherlich / Fred Mielke (eds.): Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit (‘Medicine without Humanity’), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009

Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer (‘Auschwitz, NS Medicine and its Victims’), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2012

Robert J. Lifton: The Nazi Doctors, Macmillan, London 2000

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


The Village of the German

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Rachel and Malrich Schiller, the sons of a German father and an Algerian mother, are two brothers that are so different that it is hard to imagine that they come from the same family.

The two immigrant boys, growing up in France without their parents who stay in their home village in Algeria, are agewise just a few years apart but take a path in life that is completely different from each other.

There is Rachel, the older one, who is very serious about his education and studies and who embarks on a successful professional career that enables him to lead the life of a well-to-do middle class French citizen. His French wife makes the picture of a successful assimilation complete, even when the mother-in-law of Rachel, a sympathizer of the racist Front National that seems to become the dominant political party in France, doesn’t really accept this Arab – and even worse: German! –  husband of her daughter as a member of the family.

And there is Malrich, who came a few years later to France and who grew up in not so favorable conditions. His world is the banlieue, the soulless ring of suburbs that seem to be designed for the immigrants and socially weaker classes. A world without much chances for a regular job, but a world with criminal gangs and a growing number of violent incidents on the streets. (Mathieu Kassovitz’ movie La Haine comes to mind.) Malrich may be a bigmouth sometimes, but he is a genuinely sympathetic young man who sees very clearly what is going on around him. Especially the growing presence of the “bearded” in the banlieue, and the failure of the state authorities to deal with them, is noted very clearly by Malrich.

Malrich finally drops out of school most of the time  and is hanging out with other young lads from his neighborhood who share the feeling of belonging to a lost generation without perspective and without future. His meetings with his older brother who reminds him of the importance of being disciplined and of the necessity to finish his education are a nuisance, and the rare visits of his mother are a sad and mostly speechless encounter every time. Malrich and his mother literally have no common language anymore. His Berber mother doesn’t speak French and Malrich has forgotten almost all his childhood Arabic.

One day, the brothers receive devastating news from their home village. There has been an attack by terrorists – probably in one way or the other under the involvement of the Algerian State Security – on their village, and their parents are among the many victims of this gruesome act.

For Rachel it becomes soon an obsession to find out more about this attack and the reason why it happened. There are many unresolved questions for Rachel, one of them is the German origin of his father, who was a respected person and hero of the Algerian independence fight against the French, since he trained Algerian military that was fighting the French forces. After the independence, their father settled in a remote village, married a local woman and later sent his two sons to France. But who his father, a somewhat detached figure, really was, where he came from and what he did before coming to Algeria, Rachel and Malrich have no idea.

For Rachel this quest for the truth is getting more and more obsessive, an obsession that destroys in the end everything in his well-organized life. But it is surprisingly Malrich who finally visits the “village of the German” (the original title of the book) and learns to accept the terrible truth about his father.

This novel is a very touching reflection on guilt and personal responsibility. The Algerian author Boualem Sansal is advocating personal freedom in a world that is threatened by inhumane ideologies. An Unfinished Business (in the US published as The German Mujahid) is an admirable book with characters that no reader will easily forget. Despite it’s rather depressing subject, Sansal leaves the reader with a sign of hope: Malrich has grown up fast as a result of the circumstances, and it is a good guess that he will be able to come to terms with the haunting past and with the future as well.

an-unfinished-business1

Boualem Sansal: An Unfinished Business, transl. Frank Wynne, Bloomsbury, 2012

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


Holy War – Holy Profit

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The attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi in September 2013, the recent kidnapping of a large number of girls in Nigeria by the terror group Boko Haram, the mysterious assault on the In Amenas oil field in the Algerian Sahara, the destruction of the ancient culture of Timbuktu, or the disastrous bomb explosion just a few days ago in Mogadischu: terror business in Africa is booming. And to speak of business in this context seems to be completely justified, after you have read the new book of the journalist Marc Engelhardt “Heiliger Krieg – Heiliger Profit” (Holy War, Holy Profit).

Engelhardt is embarking on a journey that leads the reader from Somalia to Sudan, Tchad, Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, and the Central African Republic. In all these countries armed groups are active that spread terror and destruction over this huge and strategically important region. The Sahara desert is not only having vast oil and gas resources, but also huge deposits of gold, diamonds, and uranium. These resources are particularly interesting for the big strategic players in the region: the US, France, and since a couple of years also China.

It is remarkable that the groups described by Engelhardt are so small and mobile. That al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine, Mujao, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) by Joseph Kony, or the Somali al-Shabaab militia are able to control huge territories with such a small number of fighters (the biggest of these groups have still not more than estimated 5000 “soldiers”) seems to be surprising at first sight. But the almost complete absence of a functioning state in their operating zone, together with the notorious extreme brutality of these groups – together with their ability to find and exploit very efficiently sources of funding such as piracy, kidnapping, contract killing, cigarette, charcoal or sugar smuggling, drug trafficking, human trafficking, or extortion make their success much less surprising.

All groups mentioned by Engelhardt use a very strong religious rhetoric and propaganda, some “Islamic”, some “Christian”. They say that they aim at a true caliphate, for the reign of “true” Islam – or of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, like the ultra-brutal LKA.

But let us not be deceived here, says Engelhardt. This is almost exclusively rhetoric, and it is to a certain degree useful for these groups (the “Islamistic” groups receive at least partly logistic support and training by al-Qaeda). But their almost exclusive aim is to collect money and more money. And they do it exclusively with means that are strongly opposed to the principles of those religions they pretend to promote.

Beside a detailed description of the historic and political background of the terror organizations, a big part of Engelhardt’s book is dealing with the business activities of these groups. In Somalia for example, it is beside the recently decreasing piracy industry, the smuggling of charcoal for the export markets and of sugar for the local market, that provides a nice profit to the gangster-terrorists. But even these enormous profits or the big money that is made from cigarette smuggling through the Sahara desert, are dwarfed against the exorbitant profits from cocaine smuggling. The drug for the European market (the demand is growing strongly) is arriving in Central Africa on board of old airplanes run by a dubious airline, which is locally known as “Air Cocaine”. The value of the cargo of one such flight might easily be at 7-800 million Euros – the last published state budget of Somalia was at about 150 million Euro. It is obvious that these profits (the smugglers receive usually about 10% of the value of the cargo) are extremely attractive to the criminal gangs that operate in the vast Sahara desert.

It is worth noting that beside the external powers already mentioned above, also Algeria is one of the key players in the dealing with this new terrorist challenge. Before 9/11, the Algerian regime was an outcast for most countries of the world, including the US administration. This changed dramatically in 2002, when the Bush administration was looking for new allies in the global fight against terror. Suddenly, the former outcast became a close friend, especially since also the Algerian junta showed a big interest in better relations with the US. The terror of an allegedly Islamistic group in Algeria was getting worse and worse. For the Algerian government this terror came just at the right moment – and strangely enough almost all terror attacks happened in the stronghold areas of the Algerian Islamists, a fact that was remarked by several analysts from the very beginning. Why should the Islamists bomb their own supporters? Engelhardt, like most experts in the region, assumes and provides a lot of evidence for it, that these so-called Islamistic groups were indeed part of the Algerian State Security Service. Also some other strange coincidences during several kidnappings of tourists, or the recent oilfield attack are only explicable by – at least – a kind of collusion between those groups who commit these terror acts and the Algerian State Security. A strong reason for that may be to keep the potential threat from revolting Tuareg tribes at bay.

Also the role of France in these conflicts is highlighted. France considers this region of former colonies still as a kind of natural influence zone, and the big hunger for uranium seems to be an additional strong motivation for the present President to break his previous promise to stop interfering militarily in the region. Additionally, many French companies (like Total) have huge business interests in the region, and as a result of this melange, France is very much willing to support even doubtful regimes with a devastating human rights record, as long as they guarantee that French business interests will not be touched.

What can be done against the rather depressing rise of gangster-terrorism in the region? Many experts, especially in the US, seem to think that this is a primarily military challenge. More efficient use of military technology, more drone killings in order to eliminate the truly “bad guys”, seems to be the main concept even of the administration of Nobel Peace Prize Winner President Obama.

But it is obvious that the military option is not sufficient to eradicate the terror in Africa. As long as the conditions are like they are now in this part of the world, even a massive unleashing of deadly weapons on terrorists (and very frequently innocent bystanders) will not decrease the problem. There will be always a fresh supply of fighters that have nothing to lose (or that are forced to be part of these groups, like the countless children soldiers), as long as there are not fundamental changes happening in these countries.

Engelhardt (and with him the reviewer) believes that a successful fight against terrorism in Africa needs mainly two things: economic development and institution building in these countries, in order to create stronger states, and also a drying-up of the economic sources of income of the terrorists (such as an efficient disruption of their money transfer systems).

News on this topic are regularly published on Engelhardt’s website: http://marcengelhardt.wordpress.com/

A translation of this very instructive book into English is highly recommended.

Engelhardt

Marc Engelhardt: Heiliger Krieg – Heiliger Profit, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2014

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


Utopia, resurrected

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Alexandria, the second biggest Egyptian city, has been for most of its history a truly cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. From the time of its foundation by Alexander the Great until the Suez crisis Alexandria housed not only a big Greek community, but also people from all possible different ethnic, national and religious background. When you would walk on the streets of Alexandria one hundred years ago, you would probably hear people on the streets talking to each other in about a dozen different languages.

Alexandria was not paradise, but it was a place where during most of its history, its inhabitants – no matter what their origin was – had learned to get along with each other. (For those who are interested in the history of Alexandria and the other multi-ethnic cities of the Mediterranean Beirut, Smyrna and Saloniki, I would like to recommend a book by the British historian Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, London 2010)

It is therefore easy to understand that Alexandria was and still is a place that inspired the imagination of many writers. The Greek poet Constantin Cavafy spent most of his rather uneventful life in this city and created his poetry here. E.M. Forster devoted two of his works to the city (Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon). His friend Lawrence Durrell used Alexandria as a backdrop of his Alexandria Quartet, a series of four novels. Also several Egyptian (Arabic) authors have made Alexandria the location of some of their most important works, e.g. Naguib Mahfouz’ novel Miramar.

And there is of course a rich autobiographic literature and memoirs of people who have lived in Alexandria, such as the beautiful Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman, or George Moustaki’s Les Filles de la mémoire (Moustaki’s father owned an antiquarian bookstore in Alexandria).

The collection of short stories Farewell to Alexandria, by Harry E. Tzalas fits into this context. Tzalas, born and educated in Alexandria, emigrated to Brazil in 1956 before settling in Greece where he became the founder and president of the Hellenic Institute for Ancient and Medieval Alexandrian Studies in Athens, a position that brought him frequently back to the city of his youth.

The eleven short stories, written between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, explore the Alexandria of the late 1930s, through WWII, the 1952 revolution and the Suez crisis that ended with the almost complete dispersal of the non-Arabic population of Alexandria.

The characters in Tzala’s stories are taken mainly from his childhood and youth. They come from different social milieus and different religions and are described with great warmth, sensitivity and perception.

There is for example Antoun, a poor Lebanese shoemaker, a simple but good man. One day, a relative of Antoun dies in Beirut, and the hero of the story inherits a modest amount of money. Now the quiet life of work and weekend fishing excursions of Antoun comes to a halt for some time. Should he start his own business now that he has the opportunity and the funds to do so? Should he invest the money somewhere else? What to do with this sudden modest wealth? Antoun doesn’t sleep well for a while until he comes to the probably wise decision to spend the money for the fulfillment of a long existing secret wish: he always wanted a watch! Once he makes up his mind, he goes ahead without further hesitation – he buys watches for all family members and a little radio. And leads his life from that moment on just as if nothing has happened. Not a very exciting or wealthy life, but probably a quite happy one. At least he rose to the status of a watch owner, and that’s probably as far as the ambition of Antoun would lead him. The story ends with a short afterword:

The years passed. I left Alexandria. Osta Antoun died. I got the news when I met an old acquaintance who used to go fishing with us on Sundays. “Antoun passed on,” he said. “May God have mercy on his soul. He was a good man. It was his heart, you know. He was buried holding his watch tightly in his hands.”

Many of the characters in Tzalas’ stories are waiting for something to happen, like the Armenian family in The little Armenian girl that is waiting for the ship to bring them home. But frequently, the expected is not happening, or when it comes finally, something important has changed in the meantime. Life is taking its own course and we are usually not the masters of our destinies.

Some of the stories are particularly moving because they show the fate of families that are stranded in a hostile surrounding during WWII. The front line was not very far away from Alexandria, and the authorities (and some neighbors) were not particularly friendly to the number of Italian or German families that resided in Alexandria. That some of them showed open support and sympathy with the enemy didn’t exactly help to make their lives easier. Frau Grete and Sidi Bishr, October 1942 deals with this aspect, but the stories are never dry history lessons. They always put the spot light on some very interesting and credible characters.

Tzalas’ book breathes a certain melancholy. Because it describes a lost Utopia. But it is thanks to stories like the one’s that Tzalas is telling us, that this Utopia is kept alive at least in our memories:

Alexandria is resurrected for all those who called her Utopia, who have loved her and lost her; the Alexandria of children and poets. (from: Alexandria ad Aegyptum)

The book is illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, an Armenian-Egyptian artist. The illustrations are very evocative and add to the charm of this beautiful collection of stories.

Tzalas

Harry E. Tzalas: Farewell to Alexandria, transl. Susan E. Mantouvalou, illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 2004

Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London, John Murray, 2010) 

E.M. Forster: Alexandria: A History and Guide / Pharos and Pharillon, Andre Deutsch, 2004

Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet, Faber and Faber 2012

C P Cavafy: Complete Poems, transl. Daniel Mendelsohn, Harper Press, 2013

Georges Moustaki: Les Filles de la mémoire, Editions Calmann-Levy, 1989

Andre Aciman: Out of Egypt: a memoir, I B Tauris, 2006 

Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar, transl. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 1998

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


The Making of a Bestseller

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Hegemann

16-year old Mifti, the hero of the novel “Axolotl Roadkill” by Helene Hegemann, is a kind of female Holden Caulfield transferred in time and space to the early 21st century techno clubs of Berlin.

The book was a minor sensation when it came out in Germany in 2010, and the 17-old wunderkind author became the darling of a certain part of the literary feuilleton and media.

I read the book soon after it was published in Germany and was taken aback. What was hyped by some reviewers as the work of a new literary genius turned out to be 200-odd pages of revolting and not very well written fuck-and-vomit prose, mixed with half-digested (and quarter-understood) theory jargon, and the usual name-, label- and location-dropping that is supposed to excite a certain category of Berlin hipsters, but that is simply a sign for an inflated ego of the “author” (Regarding the “authorship” of this book see below). Rarely in my life was I bored more as when I was forcing myself through this book.

It turned out that a very big part of this so-called novel was plagiarized (without mentioning sources) from a variety of books and other texts. Only in later editions, the publisher mentioned all(?) sources. But “theft remains theft”, as the author Helmut Krausser remarked in this context, and to argue that everybody is doing it nowadays shows only a lack of reflection and hints at lustful self-deception.

A well-connected father (Herr Hegemann is a famous dramaturg in Berlin) who can pull a few strings in the publishing and media scene, a publishing house (Ullstein) that was a bit too eager to produce a new literary wunderkind, reviewers that in all seriousness praised the “authenticity” of the plagiarized novel and that are obviously blind when the author fulfills their two main quality criteria (“young and female”), and a girl that knew how to put together a novel mainly with the copy-and-paste function of her laptop – these are the ingredients of this case, the initial big success and the scandal that was following.

What Hegemann and her supporters seem not to understand until today is that there is a difference between intertextuality and plagiarism. That she (and even a reviewer in the “Guardian”) claims until today that she “took” just a few lines from other authors is appalling. I remember that in an article of the Frankfurter Allgemeine it was proved in detail that a very big part of the book is a mechanical copy of texts written by people other than Fräulein H.

Sorry when I sound a bit misogynic this time. But I found it extremely annoying that this rag of a book took so much attention from other much more worthy works of contemporary literature (also by female authors).

“Axolotl Roadkill” is interesting as a media phenomenon but not as a novel. Zero out of five stars. ‘Nuff said.

 

Helene Hegemann: Axolotl Roadkill, transl. by Katy Derbyshire, Constable & Robinson 2012

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


The Simple Art of Poetry

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I admit it: I have a preference for poems written in a simple, almost sparse language. And that say many things with comparatively few words.

Günter Eich’s Inventur (Inventory) was one of the first examples of this kind of poetry I came across when I was very young.

Inventur


Dies ist meine Mütze,
dies ist mein Mantel,
hier mein Rasierzeug
im Beutel aus Leinen. 

Konservenbüchse:
Mein Teller, mein Becher,
ich hab in das Weißblech
den Namen geritzt. 

Geritzt hier mit diesem
kostbaren Nagel,
den vor begehrlichen
Augen ich berge. 

Im Brotbeutel sind
ein Paar wollene Socken
und einiges, was ich
niemand verrate, 

so dient es als Kissen
nachts meinem Kopf.
Die Pappe hier liegt
zwischen mir und der Erde.

Die Bleistiftmine
lieb ich am meisten:
Tags schreibt sie mir Verse,
die nachts ich erdacht. 

Dies ist mein Notizbuch,
dies meine Zeltbahn,
dies ist mein Handtuch,
dies ist mein Zwirn. 

 

Inventory
 
This is my cap,  
this is my overcoat,  
here is my shave kit  
in its linen pouch.  

Some field rations:  
my dish, my tumbler,  
here in the tin-plate  
I’ve scratched my name.   

Scratched it here with this  
precious nail  
I keep concealed  
from coveting eyes.   

In the bread bag I have  
a pair of wool socks  
and a few things that I  
discuss with no one,  

and these form a pillow  
for my head at night.  
Some cardboard lies  
between me and the ground.   

The pencil’s the thing  
I love the most:  
By day it writes verses  
I make up at night.   

This is my notebook,  
this my rain gear,  
this is my towel,  
this is my twine. 

(Translated by Joshua Mehigan)

Later I discovered many other interesting and beautiful examples of this genre. There are of course too many to quote them all, so I will just present a very few examples here:

Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise. 

(Theodore Huebner Roethke – a distant relative)

Another one:

Was ich habe, will ich nicht verlieren, aber
wo ich bin, will ich nicht bleiben, aber
die ich liebe, will ich nicht verlassen, aber
die ich kenne, will ich nicht mehr sehen, aber
wo ich lebe, da will ich nicht sterben, aber
wo ich sterbe, da will ich nicht hin:
Bleiben will ich, wo ich nie gewesen bin.

 
What I have, I don’t want to lose, but
where I am, I don’t want to stay, but
the one I love, I don’t want to leave, but
the ones I know, I don’t want to see again, but
where I live, I don’t want to die, but
where I’ll die, I don’t want to go:
I want to stay where I have never been. 

(Thomas Brasch, translated by Thomas Hübner) 

The following poem is already a kind of modern classic:

Was es ist
 
 Es ist Unsinn
sagt die Vernunft
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
Es ist Unglück
sagt die Berechnung
Es ist nichts als Schmerz
sagt die Angst
Es ist aussichtslos
sagt die Einsicht
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
Es ist lächerlich
sagt der Stolz
Es ist leichtsinnig
sagt die Vorsicht
Es ist unmöglich
sagt die Erfahrung
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
What it is
 
It is nonsense
says reason
It is what it is
says love
 
It is misfortune
says calculation
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It is hopeless
says insight
It is what it is
says love
 
It is laughable
says pride
It is frivolous
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love 

(Erich Fried, translated by Gwilym Williams) 

 And here is a quite famous example:

This is Just to Say
 
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
 
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
 
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold  

(William Carlos Williams) 

The shortest possible form of a poem is of course the haiku. Therefore here some examples from the great master of the haiku genre, Matsuo Basho:

Waking in the night;
The lamp is low,
The oil freezing.
 –
 It has rained enough
To turn the stubble on the field
Black.
–
 Winter rain
Falls on the cow-shed
A cock crows.
–
 The leeks
Newly washed white,-
How cold it is!
–
 The sea darkens;
The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.
–
Ill on a journey;
My dreams wander
Over a withered moor. 

(translated by Robert Hass)

These are examples by well-known or even famous authors. But frequently lesser-known (but equally gifted) poets produce works that deserve to be noted, read, distributed and recommended. And I don’t want to conclude this short choice of poems without giving the floor to a poet that is probably unknown to most of you. I discovered this author only recently, after a close friend presented me a copy of his newest collection of poetry. I am talking about the Bulgarian poet Vladislav Hristov (born 1976), and his book Fi (Фи). (Thank you, Eli! And thank you, Vladislav Hristov, for the dedication in my copy!).

Hristov is undoubtedly one of the best haiku poets of our times: 

изгонената котка
само тя
видя звездопада
 
cat shooed away
only she saw
the meteor shower 

(Translated by Maya Lyubenova)

Also in his new collection the tone is laconic, sparse, but always evocative:

дясната ръка
държи книгата
лявата
ръката на любимия
всяка нова страница
е раздяла
 
the right hand
holds the book
the left
the hand of the beloved
each new page
is shared
–
снимането на ангел
е много лесно:
просто кажи обичам те
преди да натиснеш копчето
 
photographing an angel
is very simple:
just say I love you
before you press the button
–
сънувах тарковски
седнал на пода
в детската ви стая
андрюша какво правиш тук
той мълчи
вцепених се от ужас:
ами ако ме попита
същото
 
I dreamt Tarkovsky
sat on the floor
in your children’s room
andryusha what are you doing here
he was silent
frozen in horror:
what if you asked me
the same 

(Translations by Thomas Hübner)

Vladislav Hristov is an extraordinarily versatile and talented poet/photographer/artist. He writes also interesting short prose, and it would be nice to see more of his works translated and published in other languages.

Ergo Books, his Bulgarian publisher, is to be congratulated for the efforts they are undertaking to promote contemporary Bulgarian poetry. Beside from Vladislav Hristov, they publish also the poetry of Jana Punkina, Miroslav Hristov, Jordanka Beleva, Dimana Ivanova, Palmi Ranchev, Maria Vasileva, Margarit Zhekov, Kamen Kostov, and Ivaylo Ivanov, amongst others.

Fi

 Vladislav Hristov: Fi, Ergo Books, Sofia 2013 (in Bulgarian language)

 

Günter Eich: Abgelegene Gehöfte. Schauer, Frankfurt am Main, 1948 (transl.: Poetry, Apr2009, Vol. 194, Issue 1, p37)

Theodore Roethke: Open House. Knopf, New York, 1941

Thomas Brasch: Die nennen das Schrei. Gesammelte Gedichte. Suhrkamp, Berlin, 2013

Erich Fried: Es ist was es ist. Wagenbach, Berlin 1983 (transl.: http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.com/2009/06/coming-soon-erich-fried.html)

William Carlos Williams: The Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909-1939. New Directions, New York, 1991

Matsuo Basho: Poems, e-book 2004 (http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/matsuo_basho_2004_9.pdf)

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

“I would prefer not to”

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“That Herman Melville has gone ‘clean daft’, is very much to be feared; certainly, he has given us a very mad book…The sooner this author is put in ward the better. If trusted with himself, at all events give him no further trust in pen and ink, till the present fit has worn off. He will grievously hurt himself else – or his very amiable publishers.”

This grotesque reaction of a reviewer of a new work of Herman Melville, the author of  “Bartleby the Scrivener”, shows that something went indeed wrong with Melville. But he didn’t go mad – he did something even more unforgivable: he disappointed the expectations of his readers!

After his adventurous youth as a sailor and living on Pacific islands with cannibals, he became famous with adventure novels like Typee and Omoo. But instead of staying in this line of work and becoming a bestselling author, he delivered Moby Dick, an already very difficult to swallow piece of literature, too dark and too philosophical for the biggest part of the 19th century audience. And as if this was not already enough, he came up finally with one of the strangest literary heroes of all times: Bartleby.

What hasn’t been written about this story! Especially since the 1920s, when psychoanalysis and the publication of Franz Kafka’s (and Robert Walser’s with its countless office clerks) works lead to a Melville renaissance,

Melville’s oeuvre and especially Bartleby has been interpreted again and again – Bartleby, the psycho-pathological case study; Bartleby as a criticism of Thoreau’s flight from civilization; Bartleby as a self-portrait of Melville (who had to work as a customs officer after the publication of this story due to his falling out with the reading public of his time); Bartleby as a parable concerning the life of the artist in a world dominated by business interests (the story takes place mainly at Wall Street); Bartleby as a predecessor of Camus and existentialist philosophy; Bartleby as a modern Hiob or even Jesus (the story is full of biblical references). – And this is just a small choice of possible interpretations!

But this is not my main point here – Bartleby is one of the few cases in literature that is open to such a big variety of possible interpretations. So read it – in case you haven’t done it so far. Or re-read it again: it is just 60 pages, and at least for me one of the most unforgettable literary works ever.

Do not expect a longer review here:  “I would rather prefer not to”, as Bartleby used to say…Just read it!

Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener, Hesperus Press (and many other editions)

bartleby

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.