Search This Blog


Planetary Motions, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton.


A categorized index of all work that has appeared on this site is available by looking under the current month in the Blog Archive section and selecting Index.


This site is listed in BlogCatalog and

Literature Blogs
Literature blog








Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 59 [Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike] (March 2025)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi


    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)