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.
* * * *
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.
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