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.

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     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. 

Zweig’s Obsessive Protagonists

 

 

     Apart from folk stories, most ancient and medieval narratives concerned gods or aristocrats undergoing major upheavals.  Novel writers found drama then in bourgeois and sometimes even proletarian milieux.  By the time of Chekhov overt drama came to seem unnecessary.  Character could be revealed by the smallest of events, a vague impression, a velleity, a trivial accident.  With the insights of Freud the significance of matters of apparently little consequence emerged, justifying attention to details that could sometimes generate major crises.

     Stefan Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s, corresponding with him and visiting for decades.  In a letter of October 21, 1932, Zweig wrote: “Everything that I write bears your influence and perhaps you can tell that the strength to tell the truth, possibly the essential element in my work, is due to you.  You have provided a model for an entire generation.” [1]  Zweig’s stories depict more or less ordinary protagonists, driven by one stimulus or another into odd and extreme cathexes, producing overmastering obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come to dominate their lives.

     In the world of Stefan Zweig’s stories, a façade of stable respectability (not unlike that that marked most of Freud’s patients) masks turbulent emotions, usually erotic, that prove uncontrollable and ultimately ruinous.  The psychoanalytic influence is evident, but in no formulaic application but rather in the general sense of a more or less calm-looking ego fronting, as long as possible, for a cyclonic id.  In one novelle after another the reader finds minds in extremis, helpless to manage obsession.  Whether the psychological structure mirrors the apparent cultured bourgeois satisfaction of the Vienna of the author’s youth thrown into the madness of Nazism or not is debatable, but the parallel seems apt.

     In Zweig’s “Chess Story” (“Schachnovelle”) the political analogy is explicit as the protagonist is forced into a kind of madness by Nazi persecution.   To escape the irrational lunacy of a criminal government, he mentally retreats to the ordered if competitive world of the chess, a realm entirely abstract and idealized, empty equally of virtue and wickedness.  The ego is entirely overpowered by his absorption in this world of the mind, producing a total breakdown.

     In “The Man who Ran Amok” (“Amoklaufer”) a doctor already strained by long service in a tropical colony hesitates to perform an illegal abortion for a respectable lady who consults him.  When she then dies after resorting to a back-alley practitioner, he is overcome with regret and himself commits suicide.  Doubtless his reaction would have been milder had his sensitive nerves not been affected by long colonial service, but he is also aware that his initial rejection of her request was in part due to his resentment of her position among the elite.  Thus it is his own inhumanity rather than her suffering that disturbs him.  The use of the Malay term amok highlights the fact that the cultivated European is every bit as capable of mad behavior as the Asian tribesman.

     In both these stories there is a narrative frame; the story is told to another character as though to hear it directly from the mouth of the neurotic would be too agonizing.  The frame stories insulate the reader from too hot a point of passion, placing the reader at a safe remove from the mental maelstrom of the protagonists.

     “The Burning Secret” (“Brennendes Geheimnis”) has a simple third person omniscient narrator.  The main character is a baron identified as a “ladykiller” (“Frauenjäger”) who pursues liaisons as a sort of sport.  Cynically cultivating a relationship with the son of a lady in whom he is interested, he offends the child who, realizing he is simply being used, resolves to frustrate the would-be lover.  Here the main character experiences only frustration from his compulsive and selfish romancing.  Though powered by the dynamo of erotic desire, the baron’s game is in fact altogether ego-centered.  Such men as he “are always burdened with passion, but not that of a lover, rather that of a player, cold, calculating, and dangerous.” [2]  With his thoughtless attempt to use the child Edgar, the baron condemns his own project.  If he cannot bear to be alone [3], it is perhaps because he feels so strongly the ugliness of his own soul.

    “Angst” (“Fear” or “Anxiety), the single word that best defines the Zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century, is the title of a Novelle with a typical bourgeoise as protagonist.  She resembles a case study by Freud with her comfortable, respectable home and social standing.  Yet her sexual desire leads her to an affair that she might have initially considered a mere peccadillo but which comes to occupy her constantly, bringing ceaseless anxiety.  A surprise twist in the end produces what might seem even more surprising: a somewhat optimistic ending. 

 

She distinctly recognized the boy’s voice and felt surprised how much it was like his father’s.  A gentle smile came to her lips and rested there quietly.  With eyes closed she lay that she might all the more deeply enjoy the thought of what her life was and her happiness as well.  There remained a bit of pain within but it was a promising one, glowing and yet mild, just as wounds burn before they scar over for good. 

 

     The first-person narrator of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (“Brief einer Unbekannten”) has dedicated her entire life since the age of thirteen to her passion for a writer, though he is never really aware of her existence.  She says “I will tell you my whole life, that truly began only on the day that I came to know you.” [5]  She even bears him a child that dies as she does as well, without his ever recognizing her.  She describes her passion as dominating her entirely, “hopeless, servile, submissive,” and as “slavish, dog-like, and devoted.” [6]  Clearly she suffers from what an observer would call an obsessive, abnormal fixation, yet to her it is altogether inevitable and even the writer, for whom she has not existed until she had died, seems in the end to accept the love-offering. 

 

He could feel a death and an immortal love.  Something broke internally in his soul and he thought of that invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate like music in the distance. [7]

 

     In each of these stories someone is driven by overpowering emotion to a desperate state of mind.  In most cases the impetus is sexual, though the chess player responding to unjust imprisonment is an exception. [8]  For Zweig civilization and rationality are shallow and deceptive and the ego is in the last analysis impotent, unable to control the passions.  In the past Zweig was once very highly thought of, particularly toward the end of his lifetime (though a rediscovery has occurred in recent years on a small scale), but he has always had his critics.  A reviewer finds him “fake” and “stiltedly extreme,” a “schematic grand guignol.”  The author himself admits to a “preference . . . for intense, intemperate characters.” [9]  Perhaps the reader must have at least glimpsed a life out of control to realize that the irrational is as central to our minds’ operation as what we generally consider to be logic, and for the most part more so.  Zweig’s artful prose describes the psychic disorder that can an any moment overcome even those who seem the most sensible and proper among us.  The author’s suicide during World War II suggests that the danger of such mental storms does not belong to fiction alone.

 

 

1.  “In Alles was ich schreibe ist von Ihnen beeindruckt und vielleicht spȗren Sie, dass der Mut zur Wahrhaftigkeit, der möglicherweise das Wesentliche meiner Bücher ist, von  Ihnen stammt: Sie haben ein ganzen Generation ein Vorbild gegeben.”

2.  “Sie sind immer geladen mit Leidenschaft, aber nicht der des Liebenden, sondern der des Spielers, der kalten, berechnenden und gefährlichen.”

3.  “Although he was not lacking in inner resources, he had an entirely sociable nature, and his nature was entirely sociable for which he was well-liked and his inability to be alone was well-known.”  (“Er war, obwohl innerer Befähigung nicht entbehrend, eine durchaus gesellschaftliche Natur, als solche beliebt, in allen Kreisen gern gesehen und sich seiner Unfähigkeit zur Einsamkeit voll bewußt.”)

4.  “Deutlich erkannte sie die Stimme des Knaben und spürte erstaunt zum erstenmal, wie sehr sie der seines Vaters glich. Leise flog ein Lächeln auf ihre Lippen und rastete dort still. Mit geschlossenen Augen lag sie, um all dies tiefer zu genießen, was ihr Leben war und nun auch ihr Glück. Innen tat noch leise etwas weh, aber es war ein verheißender Schmerz, glühend und doch lind, so wie Wunden brennen, ehe sie für immer vernarben wollen.”

 5.  “Mein ganzes Leben will ich Dir verraten, dies Leben, das wahrhaft erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich kannte.”

 6.  “Hoffnungslos, so dienend, so unterwürfig,” and “sklavisch, so hündisch, so hingebungsvoll geliebt.”

 7.  “Er spürte einen Tod und spürte unsterbliche Liebe: innen brach etwas auf in seiner Seele, und er dachte an die Unsichtbare körperlos und leidenschaftlich wie an eine ferne Musik.”

8.  The doctor in “The Man who Ran Amok” originally acts out of pride, but many readers, especially those inclined toward Freud, will see eros in the immediate background.

9.  Michael Hofmann “Vermicular Dither,” London Review of Books XXXII:2  (28 January, 2010).