I am not even going to attempt to explain my silence throughout much of this year, but as the leaves fall, and the grey sets in, and it is almost done, I return here only to make note of two extraordinary political events of the last days:
It was election day in the US last Tuesday, 5th November 2024. Donald J. Trump was not only the 45th President of the United States, he is now also the President-elect, that is, will be the 47th President of the United States. Unbelievable but true. As I write, each day brings new appointments to his White House or cabinet – most of them stranger than the one that came before. And then there is Elon Musk! At the same time, I sense an organisation, a plan, that was not discernible the first time round. That is not necessarily good news.
The next day, 6th November 2024, this news hardly digested, the Bundeskanzler der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Olaf Scholz, decides to sack his finance minister, Christian Lindner, in effect leading to the impending dissolution of the coalition. Lots of stuff in between, but as it stands now, Germany is effectively without a functioning government and new elections will be held on 23rd February 2025.
This at a time when wars still rage in the Ukraine and the Middle East, and insecurities predominate in almost all of the western liberal democracies being reflected in many of the electoral outcomes. Things bode not well into the foreseeable future.
In his afterword, Daniel Kehlmann, describes the sheer visceral horror of reading this slight memoir of fragments of a childhood culminating in an actual horror; of confusion, betrayal and a young girl’s fight for survival – from the creeping Nazi terror of Berlin, to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. And having survived, reflections on the just that: the burden of being an Überlebende. It didn’t have to be, but Cordelia Edvardson had a life; a long, productive life – in Sweden, in Israel as the Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet, as a mother. I hope she also found some happiness and peace of mind.
I did not know Cordelia Edvardson (1929-2012), and her Wikipedia entry is brief and the accuracy of which I can not vouch for. (The German entry is longer but also confusing. At the Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, a Swedish site, is a good biographical overview.) But her mother is Elisabeth Langgässer, a writer of some renown in the post-war years who has mostly disappeared from literary discourse in Germany – for good reason, Kehlmann says; has not dated well, he says; Catholic mystic, he says. Her name is only known to me through acquaintances that live in a street with her name in the Rhineland. I must say, after reading her daughter’s book and Kehlmann’s remarks I feel absolutely no inclination to pursue her any further. Only to wonder why there are streets, schools and literary awards in her honor.
Daniel Kehlmann makes the case for Edvardson’s book being one of the rare and most powerful first hand accounts of the industrial killing machine of the Holocaust, and one wonders why after its original publication in 1984 it did not find its place in the culture of remembrance. Or why it does not seem to have been translated into English (?). One wonders whether her familial situation, as a precursor to the events she describes or in the aftermath, was not just a little too complicated; whether she was just not Jewish enough; or was it that a mother’s betrayal, or at least her egocentricity, was not just too contrary to the maternal norms?
Above I referred to this book as a memoir, the publisher’s call it a Roman, that is, a literary novel; this something Kehlmann also wonders at. Edvardson does write in the third person, a narrative device most associated with fiction, but one could imagine she did so to create some distance from people and events and the emotions they gave rise to and that she had learnt to live with, but which no doubt loomed large still in her inner consciousness, ever threatening to overwhelm. In other words, there is no reason to doubt that das Mädchen in the telling is Cordelia Edvardson.
“Once bitten … twice shy” so it is said in English ; in German the expression is: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”- literally, a child once burnt will tend to shy away from fire. But this child, das Mädchen, seeks it out – Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer. The imagery is devastating. The flames may no longer burn but the damage caused is never extinguished, nor is the urge, the necessity, to return to the source of her suffering. As if willing the flames to consume her as they did so many others.
An extraordinary account that, however horrendous the content, deserves much wider recognition.
One hundred years ago, in 1923, Germany was grappling with the instability of the new constitutional republic patched together out of the ashes of a world war and the accompanying chorus of public unrest and grievances – real and imagined; the economy was wracked by reparation payments and hyperinflation; French troops occupied the Rhineland and now the Ruhr valley and a fledgling radical nationalist party in Bavaria (with enough thugs in its midst and an Austrian with a talent for oratory – if you want to call it that – now at its helm) was stirring up resentment and planning (not very well!) a putsch of sorts. Ten years later the events described in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel “The Oppermans” that I write about below are realized – the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 ended in the triumph of the Nazis rise to supremacy and the beginning of some of the darkest days of history.
I knew who Lion Feuchtwanger was. I knew him to be one of the German (and Jewish) literati to get out just in the nick of time. I knew him to be one of those intellectuals to have found safe haven first in the south of France and then in the US; in his case amongst an exile community in Pacific Palisades that included Thomas Mann and Adorno. And that his home, the “Villa Aurora”, exists still – now as an artists residence and a place of cultural exchange and learning.
And, until now, I had not read him at all. But, encouraged by a piece written by Joshua Cohen in the NYT last year, that is, in fact, his introduction to a new publication (for which he is apparently responsible for) of the English translation of The Oppermanns, not long ago I sought out and read the most recent German edition entitled Die Geschwister Oppermann. The Geschwister being all the siblings of a privileged and successful German-Jewish family in Berlin: Gustav, a writer of the literary establishment and bon vivant, and the main protagonist from whom the narrative springs, Martin, who runs the family furniture business, Edgar, a brilliant doctor, and Klara, married to a Polish Jew with American passport and the best connections in industry and finance.
pub. Aufbau Taschenbuch 2008pub. McNally Editions 2022German and U.S. publications
As literature in the highest sense of the word, one should not attempt to feign too high a regard. There are portions that have been written very carelessly indeed, without an editorial eye and committed revision – inconsistencies, repetitions, messy dialogue abound. Short sentences are fine, but only up to a point. And when one too often wonders whether that sentence – or something not dissimilar – has not previously been read – and it has? That Feuchtwanger was operating in screen-writing mode (as suggested by Cohen and elsewhere) is a good explanation for the often disjointed form; one which may very well work in drafting, with a camera at the fore, a curt: cut to … and a continuity ‘girl’ at one’s beck and call. It may also account for what I thought the exaggerated, often repetitive, descriptive passages. Though I did wonder, also, whether here was not a style characteristic of a lot of German writers of this generation who, unlike Thomas Mann and few others, didn’t have the luxury of working alone for literary publication, but had to also shuffle between theater, film, journalism, perhaps, academia.
And that is where one gets to why this book is special, and its shortcomings so easily forgiven. Feuchtwanger is not a stylist, absolutely no Th. Mann, but style here is not the point. Literary inadequacies in form are hardly to be wondered at considering the circumstances and urgency under which this novel came to be. Writing, as Cohen says, in “real time”, Feuchtwanger’s novel is the only work that I have read that so portrays – in narrative form, and as it happens – the end game in the Nazis diabolical rise to power, and being played out against the backdrop of an already fractured German society – many elements of which were willing or passive participants.
And I mean the collapse of an entire society – its laws, its norms, its moral fabric. Only in retrospect may one presume that here was a disintegration just waiting to happen. From its beginnings in late 1932 as Gustav celebrates his 50th birthday at his Grunewald villa with family and friends, the novel is bound to the chronology of events leading to the Machtergreifung in January 1933 and what happened next – in Berlin (knowing well enough the particular topography in western Berlin that the novel traverses, added an extra impetus to my reading and its reception), in the provinces, in and out of exile. That that city which has so flourished in these last decades as I write, just as it had so embraced modernity and all its hallmarks of tolerance and indulgence a century ago whilst chaos reigned on the streets and in all the institutions of the young Weimar Republic, could have degenerated so swiftly is a potent reminder of, not just the inherent fragility of almost all social structures, but also the prejudices they conceal and opportunism they encourage.
A tragic tale, a cautionary tale for the ages. Irrespective of its deficits, The Oppermans is an important and immensely disturbing book that should be read for its exposition of the lies told – and those we tell ourselves still – and where they ultimately lead.
on January 20th 1942, at a lakeside villa on the outskirts of Berlin, the fate of millions of European Jews was sealed.
Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, where the Wannsee Conference was held – now a memorial and museum.
I recall vividly reading about the Wannseekonferenz for the first time, and how shocked I was at the cold-blooded, bureaucratic precision in which the gathered elite from the SS and political apparatus made specific the plan to annihilate the Jewish people – the so-called “Final Solution”. My initial horror was later reinforced by other accounts and documentaries, and I especially remember the British film, Conspiracy, in which Kenneth Branagh gives a brilliant and chilling portrayal of Reinhard Heydrich.
Now eighty years after the event, the German public television channel ZDF remembers that meeting, and its consequences, with a new TV film titled simply Die Wannseekonferenz. The link is to the ZDF internet site where it is already available for viewing, and it will be televised next week here in Germany. It is not as yet subtitled nor is there an English synchronization – hopefully we will be spared the latter. There is also a documentary piece, and a number of resources, unfortunately also only in German.
The internet site of the “Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz” (the memorial that has evolved right there at the scene of one of the most grotesque of crimes) is, however, excellent and does have an English presence. Of especial interest is the infamous protocol; the only documentation of the event, and upon which all secondary material is based. Following, is an informative – and captioned – video; just one of many excellent resources featured on the site.
The protocol of the meeting held on 20th January 1942.
