Tag: germany

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

I thought I would give myself the challenge of this 700pg nineteenth century novel. Well, challenge failed. I got about 250pgs in before I decided to bail. There was just way too much undirected babbling about some seriously bullsh*t theories and I just couldn’t handle it. This sort of thing is fun at a party when you are drunk and you are doing the babbling but listening to someone else: no thank you.

I’m disappointed, because I enjoyed his other book, BUDDENBROOKS. It was his first, and seethes with the kind of rage at the bourgeois you only have when you are extremely bourgeois. I read it by the pool in Jordan, and maybe that was what I needed for this book too – long uninterrupted stretches of time where I could get into whatever nonsense everyone wants to talk about ‘art’ or whatever. But I didn’t have that kind of time.

One thing I did enjoy was being reminded of the horrors of TB. It takes place in a TB sanitorium, when they had no treatment other than ‘better air’. I just want to say how EXTREMELY PRO-VAX I am.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

I am amazed I never heard of this book before, and had to randomly come across it in a secondhand book store. It’s a the real diaries of a woman in Berlin over three months in 1945, as the Russians invaded. AS Byatt called ‘one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept’ and she is not wrong.

The first few weeks are spent in the basement, as Berlin is pounded with artillery, and they are cut off from water, from electricity and from news. And then the Russians arrive. I’m sorry to say she gets raped multiple times. Here she is waking up one morning:

“I felt rested and refreshed after five hours of deep sleep. A little hungover, but nothing more. I’d made it through another night.”

This was how bad it was; that just being alive was an achievement. She speaks a little Russian so manages to identify the highest-ranking Russian she can, in the hopes this will ringfence her from the others. The guy she finds is not nearly so bad as some. He does not ‘force’ her physically, and he apologizes, as he has not ‘had a woman’ in so long. She is so touched to be spoken to gently that she bursts into tears in his lap.

One thing I found interesting was that the experience of rape was so widespread, that the women all talked to each other very openly about it. She said it helped a lot, that it was a common experience and there was no shame. But get this: when he fiance comes home, she lets him read his diary and he is SO DISGUSTED BY HER RESILIENCE in the face of the sex violence that HE LEAVES HER. I mean: I can’t.

And this despite these sort of heart-breaking sections:

“I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.”

Apparently there was a very bad reaction when it was published, as ‘people’ (men) thought it besmirched the honour of German women. So she insisted it not be published again till after her death, and never with her name. Her name came out eventually, and guess what: she lived till she was ninety, in 2001. She made it.

JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz

Okay this one killed me. It was just so incredibly charming. It is the real letters of a young German who visited England in 1782. And et me tell you, he is LOVING it. Sample this from the day of his arrival:

“How different did I find these living hedges, the green of them and of the trees – this whole paradisical region – from ours and all others I have seen! How incomparable the roads! How firm the pathway beneath me!”

It rejoices in chapter headings like “Richmond: A Perfect Town.” He finds the street lighting amazing; though apparently this wasn’t just him – a German prince who was there shortly before found it so unusual that he assumed they had illuminated the town just for him.

Weirdly I just read another book by a young man who went on a long walk – Laurie Lee’s WHEN I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING, and it has just the same vibe. While I was impressed that Laurie Lee could relax just by looking at the view (no podcast, nothing), I was even more impressed by Moritz who relaxes by reading Milton. What could make you chill out like PARADISE LOST?

It was a deeply charming window into 18th century London. For example, apparently it took so long to get from the mouth of the Thames to London that most travellers got off at the coast and took a carriage. The river was so busy that you always knew where it was because of the forest of masts.

But to be honest the appeal was not so much the historic fact, as it was the joy and enthusiasm of this young man, dead these two hundred years.

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

This is the second time I have started this book, and the second time I have not finished it. Weirdly, both times I have got something out of it. It is a quite famous self-help book, and I think is the basis for some somewhat culty organizations. I don’t hold this against it, indeed I would query how good your self-help book is if no one can get a good cult out of it.

In the Introduction, Tolle tells us how he was suicidal one night, and thought he just couldn’t stand himself anymore. Then he wondered who was this ‘he’ who was experiencing himself. He had a sort of major insight, where he was able to see that his thoughts and feelings were not his inherent self. He then went to sleep, and woke up in such a state of bliss that he spent the next three months on park benches.

It sounds kind of crazy, but the point is very much the basic point of mindfulness – that we don’t have to identify ourselves with our thoughts. He goes on to build out this idea at some length, and I particularly liked some of his ideas – that you really, really, don’t need to think about your past. That it’s largely irrelevant. Also that you can decide not to create more pain for yourself. That you don’t have to accept anything as a ‘problem.’

He then gets a bit loopy, one-ness, Spirit, etc, and that’s where he keeps losing me, though one of these days I will get through it.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann

I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go.  I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes.  The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann.  Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow).  He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE.  You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no.  As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.”  However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence.   My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”

I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs.  Poor guy.  He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe.  At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull.  Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc.  Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring.  But in any case, I had to quit.  One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today.  I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care. 

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann

This major German classic was the first novel of Thomas Mann (at just 26!) Like many first books it is based on his own life, and let me tell you, he is coming out with all sorts, working through the issues, and etc. It covers three generations of a family, who start off as wealthy merchants and end up SPOILER ALERT kind of poor and certainly bitter.

It is an incredible feat of creation, with an extraordinary number of characters, swiftly created. Try this old lady, who only appears for a half page:

. . . a little wrinkled creature, rich in the grace of God and knitting patterns, who lived in the Holy Ghost Hospital and was named Himmelsburger. She was the last of her name – “the last Himmelsburger,” she called herself humbly, and ran her knitting-needle under her cap to scratch her head

Sometimes it does get a bit carried away, with one long section being a single day in the life of one small boy who has not done his homework. I learn from Wikipedia that this has sometimes been translated as a separate work, and Mann considered it as such. Am not too clear why then it was in this work, as it was exceedingly random, but there you go.

Sometimes though I found all that detail quite charming, as a window into nineteenth century German life. Try this, where they go to a restaurant. First of all, bizarrely, the group orders ‘one beer and six milks,’ but then the waiter asks the obvious question: “sweet milk, buttermilk, sour milk, or clotted milk?” Disgusting and fascinating.

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

Here is a book about how bad things can get.  It’s the dairies of a man who signed up on the the day the first world war began, and, incredibly, made it all the way through to 1918.  The Somme, Ypres, Cambrai: he saw them all. 

The book was published in 1919, and it shows.  Most of the other books of this period were written at a remove of at least a decade or so, but in this one there has been no time to make sense of the war, or to do anything but just tell us what happened.  It is in parts boring, as war is boring, and in other parts horrifying.  As far as I can tell, no one whom he personally knew with whom he began the war ended it alive with him. 

It is deeply revolting.  Here he is on a patch of land that has been fought over repeatedly:

In among the living defenders lay the dead.  When we dug foxholes, we realized that there were stacked in layers.  One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under the showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place.  And now it was our turn. 

He is on the German side, and is, as ever, extraordinarily depressing to see how very similar their war was from their alleged ‘enemies’ on the other side.  He is even reading TRISTAM SHANDY in the trenches.  Towards the end, though, his war does differ from that of English accounts I have read, because he is of course, losing, and he knows it.  They start to run out of food; they are no longer sleeping in trenches, but in craters; and still he goes on. 

With every attack, the enemy came onward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.

He is clearly losing it.

A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

It is in this context that he goes into his last battle.  His company takes a direct hit, and twenty some young men are killed right next to him.  Then he goes on for hours, fighting, sobbing, singing.  At one point he takes off his coat, and keeps shouting  “Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat” which had the “fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”  He cannot remember large stretches of this last battle.  At one point he stops to shoot an Englishman, who reaches into his pocket and instead of bringing out a pistol brings out a picture of family.  Junger lets him live.  He kills plenty of others though, including one very young man:

 I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams

And all this while HE KNOWS THEY CANNOT WIN.  Guys, I would have deserted long before, and I am not even ashamed to say it.  Honour, like courage, are concepts generally deployed by rich people to get you to do what they want.  I can’t think of almost anything for which I would die.

THE INVENTION OF NATURE by Andrea Wulf

In this book a man with a large unearned income has a great time and inspires lots of others to do the same.

Alexander von Humboldt was so famous that at his centennial in 1869 there were huge parades for him across cities in Europe and America.  He has more things named after him than anyone else who has ever lived (rivers, plants, geographical features, a part of the moon).  And yet, today, it is a bit: Humboldt Who?

Humboldt did not identify or discover anything in particular.  What he is famous for is his worldview.  He put forward the idea, revolutionary at the time, that nature was fragile, heavily interconnected, and at great risk from human intervention.  It’s an insight that was so influential that today it sounds obvious. 

It was not an easy road for Humboldt.  Okay, I lie, it was a pretty easy road.  He had a wealthy mother, so the second she died he stopped pretending to study medicine and was off to South America with his boyfriend (or as he liked to call him, his botanist).  He went there allegedly to discover the tributaries of the great Orinioco river, which surprised the locals, who knew them well and to his disappointment could describe them in detail.  While there he studied everything from the colour of the sky to the nature of the soil, and came to a forest of conclusions, almost all of which are correct: he invented isotherms, he identified deforestation, he called it on tectonic plates; he even flagged the dangers of ‘great masses of steam and gas’ coming from cities.  He categorically condemned slavery and the idea of racial inequality in terms that are almost shockingly modern.

After covering Humboldt’s long and cushy life, the book goes on to cover all the many other naturalists who were inspired by him, including Darwin, Thoreau, and Marsh.  Probably not coincidentally, these guys also had a ton of unearned income.  They also had disapproving parents, who either died or got worn down by their sons’ enthusiasm.  And there is a LOT of enthusiasm.  Here’s Darwin to his father:

I am at present red-hot with Spiders!  

Humboldt got so excited that when he ran out of paper he would just scratch away at his desk rather than stop writing, and he did begin to worry he was losing his mind.  Muir, meanwhile, is reported by a guest to have run out of his cabin when the earth started to shake shouting happily: “A noble Earthquake!!!”   He was apparently excited to study it.  But one does wonder on his methods, as he later wrote to Emerson that “he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and they had replied ‘it’s all love’.”

Marsh was probably my favourite, partly because he was one of the only ones who had to find a way to fit his passion in around actually having to work for money.  As he put it, earnestly, in a letter, explaining the kind of job he was after:

small duties and large pay . . .

I mean aren’t we all.  Eventually he gets a job as an ambassador, which gives him lots of time to consider irrigation around the Nile, but still he complained:

I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for

Oh sweetheart.

I have been strangely educated on many topics by this book. That there were 15,000 ships a day entering London in 1802; that the state of Nevada was nearly called Humboldt; etc.  But I think what I mostly take from it is the fact that you can for sure live your best life.  Now, I am rather jealous that probably no one can ever be as true polymath, as Humboldt was, as there is now just too much to know.  And of course, the money thing is a problem. But I am inspired by the joy these guys took in what they were doing, how they poured all their lives into having a wonderful time. 

As John Muir put it:

I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me-ee-ey

And who cares what anyone else thought.