Daniel Kehlmann – My Own RE:public

Once bitten…

“Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer” by Cordelia Edvardson, 2023.

Übersetzt aus dem Schwedischen von Ursel Allenstein, Hanser Verlag.

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.

Fakery is afoot

Zadie Smith’s latest work of big F fiction is anything but fraudulent but (The) Fraud is writ large on its cover and permeates the narrative – bold faced is the text even when writ small.

To my mind, a veritable romp of a read, but not one to be deconstructed to an allegoric tale of he who was once (and god forbid not future) American president as some – particularly on the other side of the Atlantic – would have it. I mean to say, contemporary comparisons and reflections are always warranted but, loathe as I am to repeat myself, Trump is far less of an aberration than many would have it – rather just the latest in a line of crooks and con-artists – yes, frauds! – who have, and in various incarnations and with various degrees of success, elbowed their way to center stage for times long and short. (Granted, an encore performance there did not have to be!)

The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, and she does it with aplomb, perhaps not with the absolute Leichtigkeit that she brings when her subjects occupy a space she so totally gets – the northern London suburbs, for example, and characters pulled from that landscape spreading their wings near and far. Here is a writer exploring what is, for her, new (literary) terrain. But I think she succeeds in constructing a 19th century tale that does not feel so distant in time nor in space, rather, has the immediacy of now; certainly, her main protagonist, Eliza Touchet, and those who rotate about her, and whether they be in London or the Home Counties, don’t present as somehow being stuck in a Dickens or Thackeray door-stopper but, instead, read as having the potential to be time-shifters in a Netflix show-stopper. (By the way, these two aforesaid gents I mention not by chance, but because they and others and most especially Eliza’s cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, are of the cultural and social milieu from which the narrative springs. As a reviewer said, do keep Google at the ready, behind the Fiction are various degrees of Fact. There they are: those F words again!) The success of the novel may also have something to do with style; the post-modern realism in which Zadie Smith writes fits with the uglier, even brutal, side of the burgeoning global world and the intertwined strands leading from Andrew Bogle to the slave plantations of Jamaica and from The (Tichborne) Claimant to the still colony of Australia where England could still banish its unwanted or troublesome and make capital in the process. Suggesting that almost two centuries on, the ghosts of colonialism still haunt the global ambitions of both the once oppressed and the oppressors.

And F can stand for more than (just) Fraud. Recently, I read Daniel Kehlmann’s novel ‘F’ (Rowohlt, 2014), and I see now that, presumably on the back of his previous successes (especially this one) in the international market, it was indeed translated (Vintage, 2015). In any obvious way Kehlmann’s work, set in a contemporary German-speaking space somewhere (if specified, I seem to have missed it), would not necessarily have too much in common with Zadie Smith’s historical novel.

But then there are these damnable F words that call out to me to consider. And it is Fortunate for this comparison some words map quite nicely from German to English, and interconnected F words are prevalent in both languages. The now universality of Fake, for instance; after all just a shade of Fraud (or, is it, Freud?), or the other way around. And Fame and Fortune: Fortune-telling (show me the Future) and changing Family Fortunes for a Father and a Fraternity of three, each with a life defined by Finance and (non-) Fidelity, (not so) Fine Art and Forgery, Food and (feigned) Faith, This, again, is a novel about deception, the power of suggestion and, yes, Fälschung – about Fakery (or something more carnal) being afoot and other forms of Foolery.

And Fate. Towards the end of the novel, the mostly absent Father – he by whom the die was cast, Iacta alea est, and who casts his shadow from the first pages – says:

“Fatum” […].”Das grosse F. Aber der Zufall is mächtig, und plötzlich bekommt man ein Schicksal, das nie für einen bestimmt war. Irgendein Zufallsschicksal […”

“Fate” […] “The big F. But chance is a powerful thing, and suddenly you find yourself living a destiny that was never meant for you. Some random fate […]”
F by Daniel Kehlmann; my own translation

An imperfect book, but an interesting (and often funny) novel in which Kehlmann uses his narrative talents to philosophize on the blurring of lines between that which is true and that which is imagined and that which is just plain false. At the time of publication almost a decade ago, I am not sure that the range of possibilities for bad players to prey upon a digitalized, connected world were fully understood, nor the repercussions; ‘fakery’ mostly remained still in the realm of the classical and obvious forms of deception – human beings telling human lies in very human ways; even a charlatan or trickster of whatever persuasion, peddling whatever their wares is but a sophisticated version of this. Now, a new breed of ‘mover’ – regionally or globally – is sowing seeds of discontent – or just after the next quick buck; harnessing digital technologies to open up new fields of activity beyond the obvious – and anybody can just as easily be the next perpetrator as the next victim.

And F is for Fiction. Two really good works of fiction, from two terrific writers. I think I am correct in saying they are friends.

Rushdie in Frankfurt

Some would say about time, others better late than never. On Sunday October 22 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, Salman Rushdie was rewarded for a profound and courageous literary life – rather, LIFE without need of a conditional. And awarded with the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. And, he was there – so very ALIVE with sparkling intelligence and infectious good humor (granted, das große deutsche Publikum in the pews didn’t always get it! but what the … I did!). And, with humanity, and a gift for finding the right words to articulate the misplacement and perversion of humanity and how it may be retrieved in a fractious world. Only weeks after the terror attack against Israel and the repercussions in Gaza, such a clear voice is most sorely needed

Here now is Rushdie’s marvelous acceptance, audio is available elsewhere on the site, and embedded below in PDF format all the speeches, including the laudatio by Daniel Kehlmann.

Salman Rushdie 2023 Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels Download

Thirty years of heresy, persecution, hunger, pestilence ….

Oh, and war!…Just a few of the words that come to mind of a much darker time four hundred odd years ago (1618-1648) that puts this year of ours into perspective. One could add: torture, execution, butchery, disease…You surely get the picture.

The prankster Till Eulenspiegel, depicted with *owl* and *mirror* (title page of the Strasbourg edition of 1515)

Well I do…having finished reading Daniel Kehlmann’s latest work, Tyll, (mentioned here upon its recent publication in English, though I read in German so I can not speak on the translation) which powerfully describes the devastation visited upon a continent and its peoples – brutalised as they were through all the above said … I can’t think that it would have occurred to Kehlmann just how prescient his novel would be. Not in that the grotesqueness of a pre-modern era (and the literary form chosen) is so relatable, rather that the grotesqueness told as it is with a picaresque slant and the mocking gaze of Tyll Eulenspiegel reflected through a contemporary lens portends of the potential consequences of social disharmony.

A folk’s jester goes to war

“Tyll” by Daniel Kehlmann, original pub. Rowohlt, Germany, 2017

Coming to my notice via The New York Times is publication of the English translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. Only a couple of years old in original, I seem to recall it as being well received, and ‘Daniel’ is a bit of a “Publikum” darling anyway – hence the familiarity of a first name being enough to identify him by many literary minded sorts in Germany. My interest piqued, I have just visited the local library and duly got myself a copy; begging the question exactly where to fit it into my reading agenda!

Coincidently some of my favourite UK podcasts have recently lured Kehlmann into their studios for interesting chats that further whet my appetite. Firstly, the Arts & Ideas podcast available directly from BBC Radio 3 or at Apple Podcasts, and then there is the Times Literary Supplement Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast also at Apple.

For a little more context and historical background, here are the Wikipedia entries for the Thirty Years’ War and Till Eulenspiegel. I’m very much looking forward to the read.