Things, in Germany, are less than swell. The year is 1988, and although the past few decades have witnessed an extended period of economic revival, reconstruction, and political reorientation, a disturbing malaise has begun to settle in. A yuppified monoculture is creeping over the land, with the hollowed-out remains of industrial infrastructure ripe for repurposing. There’s an abandoned shipyard that might profitably be converted into “a cultural centre, with cabaret venues, self-help courses and hobby studios and rock concerts on summer evenings.” There are nascent environmental concerns — a cruise ship glides by, while below, “in the water, the fish struggled to breathe.”
On top of that, the whole culture seems shot through with streaks of decay. Yes, the famous skylines might seem miraculously restored, but peer closer and you’ll find that everything in Germany, from the bottom up, is cheap, tacky, and dispiriting, a flimsy facsimile “abysmally rebuilt by business-orientated German idiots.” Overpopulation is suddenly on everyone’s mind, and a glut of Turkish and North African immigration has been met with a rising tide of xenophobia and nationalist sentiments that occasionally crests into violence — rocks are launched through cafe windows, scattering the patrons and denting the giant silver samovars inside. If the end of history seems to have arrived, no one’s prepared for it.
As far as mise en scène goes, it all seems an unlikely choice for Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), the German writer known among Anglophones primarily for his final novel, All for Nothing, which appeared in English in 2017. Set during the final months of World War II and taking place largely within the confines of the Georgenhof Estate, an aging manorial property through which shuffles a parade of the dispossessed — displaced Germans and Jewish refugees and retreating troops — All for Nothing describes the fall of a nation through the lens of a great funneling. The ancestral home of the Georgenhofs is something like an open city, its once rigid borders eroded by the exigencies of collapse. Old-fashioned in its approach to realism yet with a shrewdly decentered narrative presence that seems to flit like a will-o’-the-wisp from character to character, All for Nothing manages to combine the gauzy neutrality of Theodor Fontane with the ludic élan of Günter Grass.
Marrow and Bone, Kempowski’s latest work to be translated into English, reads like a wry bookend to All for Nothing, a sly illumination and inversion of the themes and techniques employed in the latter work. Ostensibly, Marrow and Bone is structured as a road narrative, with the protagonist, Jonathan Fabrizius, assigned the task of traveling through East Prussia to write an article about his experiences there. Jonathan is 43-years old, of average height and build, studiously cultured, if in an aimless sort of way. Orphaned by the war, he is, in many ways, little more than a grossly distended child (no surprise, then, that his prized possession should be a painting by Fernando Botero) and seems an extrapolation, or shadowing forth, of Peter, the young boy at the center All for Nothing who finds himself similarly abandoned at war’s close. His girlfriend, Ulla, nearing 30, is a whirling cloud of bohemian energies; her clothes are charmingly eclectic, she works as a gallery assistant, and is planning an exhibit on the art of cruelty.
It’s a profoundly de-energized life that Jonathan leads, sapped of direction, drive, and any semblance of meaning. Not particularly inclined to self-reflection, he’s stirred out of these doldrums only by the trip through East Prussia, where he was born, as it turns out, in February of 1945, “in an icy wind and sharp, freezing rain on the trek away from the Eastern Front.” His mother had died giving birth to him; his father was atomized on the Vistula Spit. If the prospect of return troubles him, it’s almost precisely because it might turn out to be an entirely empty gesture.
Marrow and Bone isn’t so much a specimen of Trümmerliteratur — a sort of German neorealism that sprang up in the immediate postwar years and centered around returning soldiers — as it is a sterling inversion of the genre. After all, it’s not the City as Ruin that Jonathan finds himself confronted with, but rather the gaudy reconstructions that shot up like rancorous weeds following the war. It’s not the failure of the ideals of Country and Glory that he reckons with, but the embrace of the empty ideologies of luxury and leisure that typifiy postwar capitalism. It’s not the guilt of survival that nags at him, but rather the anxieties attendant to being burdened with sorrows that you can’t truly lay claim to. Because, when you get down to it, Jonathan wasn’t really marked by the war; the horrors surrounding his birth aren’t memories, since he wasn’t precisely conscious at the time. Instead, they’re available to him only as generalities.
There’s a cheapening effect to all of this, with Jonathan frequently playing his tragedies for pity. They become an excuse for bathos, a leaven for extravagant yet empty emotional displays. Roused to rhapsody by an exhibit in a “flotsam museum,” he falls back on an old trick: “He felt rather like a piece of flotsam himself, he said, and played the suffering card to his advantage: father killed on the Vistula Spit, mother breathed her last when he was born. Trek, icy wind, etc.” The past reveals itself as a mirage, a compendium of barely remembered scenes, so simplistic in their lineaments and so detached from any greater context that pinching them produces little more than a sere droplet of guilt — like squeezing water from a stone.
This cheapness even extends, cleverly, to the structure of the book. The full, classically novelistic scenes, done up with a Tolstoyan gravitas, that made up All for Nothing have been reduced to snapshots. The final chapters of All for Nothing, which depict a retreating army and caravans of refugees trundling through the wintry countryside, have become, in Marrow and Bone, little more than glimpses, hazy, half-silvered memories that Jonathan turns over in his mind from time to time. In the sense that foreground has become background, that subject has become trope, Kempowski seems to be enacting a generational struggle on the level of representation. At the heart of Marrow and Bone lies a familiar question: How can a nation go about reckoning with its past when the narratives of suffering and guilt have lost their immanence?
Given the book’s concern with confronting the past and its situation in East Prussia, it’s not surprising that the shadow of Günter Grass should hang over it. At one point, Jonathan wonders about the location of “the Polish Post Office in which the brave Polish soldiers had died,” calling to mind a famous chapter in The Tin Drum, and later the narration makes the connection explicit: “Extraordinary to think that Günter Grass roamed this city on his scooter as a young boy in shorts.” Overall, Marrow and Bone is a more churlish work than All for Nothing; it’s slippery, parochial, and oddly involuted, satirical one moment and sentimental the next, and with its insistence on drawing out the specter of Grass it can feel, at times, like metacommentary. When Kempowski has a character point out the precise name of a motorized scooter, he’s laughing not simply at the character, but at himself as well, at the fact that this, now, should pass as realism.
More significantly, the Grass-ish motifs that run through the text mount a critique of the toylike strain in postwar German fiction. It’s a phenomenon present in the work of Heinrich Böll — whose eponymous entertainer in The Clownforces himself, in the book’s first sentence, “not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of [him] in five years of traveling back and forth” without cease — and of course in The Tin Drum, in the character of Albrech Greff, a greengrocer accused of fudging his scales who commits suicide by hanging himself from an elaborately counterweighted scale. At heart a parody of the blinkered German industriousness that rebuilt the nation after the war — in turn a strange inversion of Benjamin’s angel of history, now swept unceasingly forward without ever having to look back — this tendency toward elaborate, clockwork preciousness is complicated in Kempowski’s work.
Late in the book, Jonathan considers “how, at the site of a plane crash, photo-journalists always managed to find a doll with its arms torn off to splash across the front page,” discerning that “the dolls were a way of skipping sublimely over the ghastliness.” It’s here that we begin to really understand Kempowski’s indictment of the toylike. While, at its best, it served as a condemnation of historical blindness and denial, it could also be devastatingly dismissive, its entertainment value overshadowing any critical intent — we have only to think of Grass’s description, in a chapter about the defense of the Polish Post Office, of the dying post office workers as “perforated and roughly opened.” In Kempowski, the toy metaphor has been exhausted, reduced to something mass-produced and commercialized — a sublime avoidance of the actual.
So then: How should one go about confronting the past? And how — if that’s the course of action we’ve decided on — can one do it sincerely, whole-heartedly, and committedly? There isn’t, as it turns out, a whole lot one can actively do to court a self-reckoning. Survival, in Kempowski, is always a touch miraculous. It’s why All for Nothing ends with a sudden switching of places that ultimately saves the life of Peter, and it’s why the description of Isestrasse that opens Marrow and Bone is quick to note that “Isestrasse would not have been left standing after the war if the bomb aimers of the Allied air forces had pressed their release buttons a hundredth of a second earlier or later.” This sense of having threaded the needle of a cataclysm pervades Kempowski’s work, and points to a certain baseline mysticism present in his writings — if survival is fundamentally fortuitous, so, too, is the return of the past.
When, deep into his road trip, Jonathan visits the church in East Prussia where his mother died and was buried, we’re treated to a quietly lyrical passage that reads like something out of Fontane:
“He stared at a spot on the wall and knew: that’s where she lies. He was neither sad nor happy; he wasn’t even surprised that he was standing here, in a graveyard; he was neither cold nor warm; there was a little sunshine, a little wind. He could have walked on, but instead he stood staring and listening as if mesmerized. He saw the humus-rich soil, the tendrils of ivy, a bumblebee flying back and forth; there were sparrows, an aeroplane, the voices of the others.”
The jumpiness of the book’s prose, its almost flippant legerity, here eases into something slow and contemplative, arpeggiated even. The passivity of the descriptiveness (Jonathan stands, and stares, and sees; his physical and emotional states are defined by what they aren’t; the sunshine, the wind, the sparrows and aeroplane and voices are simply present) is almost hypnotic. We have a sense of the world revealing itself, or laying itself bare.
What the book’s final pages reveal is that the degradations of late 20th-century space — the gaudily rebuilt cathedrals, the repurposed warehouses, the cookie-cutter coffee shops — aren’t simply aimless caviling. In fact, the book seems to suggest, place might be one of the most potent vehicles of reckoning. Visiting the stretch of coastline where his father died, Jonathan is overcome by a sense of connection with the past and its deep layeredness. Unbeknownst to him, the ghost of his father emerges from the landscape, swirling up out of the mud and reconstituting himself from the cloud of atoms he has evidently been. It’s a touch of playfully cryptic spiritualism in a book generally denuded of whimsy, though its latent suggestions seem to be clear: that the past is, in many ways, a material constellation; that there is an individual responsibility to seek it out; and that the dead, even the unknown dead, the forgotten or the never-met, don’t truly desert us.
[Published by New York Review Books on March 24, 2020, 208 pages, $16.95 paperback]