Summer Book Supplement
Through German Eyes
During the past two years the Spectator has published articles On contemporary English literature by a Frenchman, an American and an Irishman. In the following article Dr. H. E. Holthusen expresses a German point of view. Hans Egon Holthusen, like so many German authors, is a son of the manse and was born in Schleswig Holstein in 1913. After passing through the Gymnasium at Hildesheim he studied Germanistics and in 1937 graduated with a thesis on Rilke's sonnets at Munich, where, until the outbreak of war, he lectured to foreign students. He served as a private on most fronts, and wrote a book on the Russian campaign which was banned by Goebbels. In April, 1945, he took part in the abortive rising of the Munich students. Since 1945 he has made his mark as one of the foremost critics and lyrical poets of post-war Germany.
THE English novel has always been a favourite with the general reader in Germany. It is adsnired and esteemed for that very quality which is so often wanting in German authors, and the absence of which is the despair of their publishers—namely, the fusion of genuine fiction with solid literary achievement. Interest in the English novel has scarcely weakened since the days of Sir Walter Scott. Even during the ominous twelve years of Nazism, with its attempt to seclude Germany from the rest of the world within a malign provincialism, the demand for English translations increased rather than slackened. Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Charles Morgan belong to the standard authors of the intellectual middle plass. Writers of Cronin's or Warwick Deeping's stamp, when their best-seller season has waned, will find their final resting-place in the ublic libraries. Whenever an author ends in the lending libraries, t is a sure sign that all discussion concerning him has petered out. is work will flourish henceforth in the fullness of silence, in a phere of timelessness not subject to historic change. For there is recurring demand among a highly imaginative reading public for , e Arabian Nights type of book, a perennial hunger for gripping nd moving fiction. I must distinguish this need from interest in the Ontemporary world, which may develop into a compelling desire o study our present literary situation. What is considered by the ' highbrows " as an intellectual event (eM Ereignis), and is discussed n the newspapers and magazines and on the wireless, is not as a rule dentical with the interests of the general reader. Between literature s reading material and literature as an intellectual Ereignis, runs n imperceptible, scarcely definable line of demarcation which is, in time, crossed by the majority of novelists. Twenty years ago D. H. Lawrence was an intellectual event in Germany—today, reading material. Joseph Conrad and Aldous Huxley have met the same fate, despite new translations of their works.
But there are certainly authors whose works are widely circulated and eagerly devoured by the reading public, at the same time as they are the subject of the " highbrows' " heated discussions. These writers are reading material and intellectual Ereignis conjointly. The best-known contemporary example is probably the convert, Graham Greene, who has become what one might call " popular " in Germany through his film, The Third Man. The appearance of translations of The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter was greeted by a storm of enthusiasm. The wide-spread German, as well as European taste for the leit-motiv of despair, the present pessimistic-existentialist interpretation of the world, found fullest; satisfaction in these books. One was enchanted by the author's achievement in the way of theme and form. One esteemed his psychological intuition and his splendid adaptation of the " thriller" technique. Though he was called an English Bernanos, there were certain avant-garde circles of North German Protestanism which discerned an outspoken puritanical and Protestant temper behind the Catholic formulary. But when the publishing house of RowOhlt issued the earlier works of the novelist in rapid succession, sceptical voices began to be heard. They doubted the intellectual homo- geneity of his work. They asked: Did Greene really succeed in fusing his desire for artistic veracity with his gloWing avowal of Catholicism ? Is not the fascination of unmitigated evil in Brighton Rock so strong that the author loses his grip of the subject ? Does not the three-page confession, introduced as it is shortly before the pitiless climax, have the effect of a Catholic label, which, belatedly pasted on, does not prove adhesive ? A somewhat similar circum- stance presents itself in The Heart of the Matter. Here one is aware of a Sartrean experience of loathsomeness, and of a loveless, weary, indecisive struggle between two women. The conflict drives the pious Catholic into self-destruction--carried out with criminal refinement—shortly after he had partaken of the Holy Sacrament. The artist Greene does not heed the Catholic Greene, and the Catholic waylays, as it were, the artist and hinders him. In addition to Greene, Evelyn Waugh has also in recent years caused lively discussion, although his fame is hardly that of the author of The Power and the Glory. Whereas Brideshead Revisited was thought to be an elevated society novel with a Catholic character, The Loved One (published in Germany under the title Tod in Hollywood) has drawn the attention of the literary gourmets. One senses in this work the long English tradition of satire from Swift to the contemporary Huxley, and is enchanted by that typical English mixture of a sense of humour and macabre bitterness. The so-to-speak tactical agnostiscism, with all its startling similarity to nihilism, can be interpreted as the reverse side of the casting mould of a Christian consciousness. It no longer explains ; rather, it allows the reader to draw his own conclusions, after he has, by means of satire, as it were, been completely worn down. The same question arises as with Greene, however, whether the author does not feel the pull of perversion and despair more strongly than that of the truth, and one wonders what he would do if he were deprived of his completely godless and mindless world.
The Christian-minded (and in particular the Catholic) literature of contemporary England so dominates, the German perspective that one almost gets the impression that England is a Catholic land. That longing for a religious formula, superior to pagan ideologies and phantasms, also governs the lively discussion of T. S. Eliot and his works. His fame has spread rapidly since the end of the war, and his influence on the poetry of the younger generation becomes more noticeable from year to year. When ,the first copies of the Four Quartets were received in Germany in 1946, all the conditions for a favourable acceptance of a new Christian message were present. One had seen complete political and military nihilism in the chaos of a national collapse. One had reached and passed the point of absolute zero, and longed for a post-nihilistic formula which would meet the difficulty of the situation. Something in the order of a " theological emigration of the German intelligentsia "—as a malicious critic once expressed it—was in the air. It was in this intellectual atmosphere that Eliot became known in wider circles. He announced the retraction of the apostasies of the modern mind from Nietzsche to Rilke and Valery and the return to the truth and faith of our fathers. It was not, however, a retreat to ideas long since outworn ; it was .rather a progression through the hopeless anarchy of an ailing and confused late culture to the timeless validit) of myth and religion, to the grandes clartes premieres. It was, therefore, the author of the Four Quartets and the pla4 who set the German mind thinking and who was received with such enthusiasm when he visited Germany in the autumn of 1949: He was interpreted essentially weltanschaulich, as a sort of opponent of Rilke and a prophet of a resuscitated Christianity ; Eliot the -radical avant-gardiste and the language-innovator was not considered. Gull the noted Bonn professor, Ernst Robert Curtius, who had translated The Waste Land in 1927 and had written an essay on Eliot—without then beefing with much response—was an exception. In 1949 lie wrote a new article on the poet in which he laid main emphasis oft the earlier work from Prttf rock to The Waste Land, and somewhil maliciously disparaged the author of the Four Quartets, dismissit him into the realm of religious speculation. For Curtius the fascina' tion of his youthful experience of the earlier Eliot was so strot that it prevented him from comprehending the thematical unity an, continuity of the poet's work, and hindered him from perceivit that the Christian Eliot is as much present in The Waste Land at the nihilist in the Four Quartets.
The poets of the '30s, Spender, Isherwood and MacNeice, are known through individual works. But only Auden may be described as a literary Ereignis. His achievement in creating a lyrical language for the fullest expression of the contemporary world of science, .11 political eruption, of terror and of psycho-analysis is seen as a model by several German poets of the younger generation. For they too are seeking that poetical language which may serve as the " objective correlative" of our historical situation. The model of the English poets cannot, of course, be directly imitated. The German endeavour is conditioned by the word and culture pattern peculiar to the development of language and civilisation in Germany. In the case of Auden there are also various possibilities of interpreta- tion. There is, on the one hand, the opinion of the old expressionist Gottfried Benn. His introduction to the German translation of Tar Age of Anxiety interprets the work entirely in terms of his owl fanciful and ecstatic nihilism, thereby failing to perceive the out- spoken religious climax. There are, on the other hand, modern 1 critics who are particularly interested in this climax. They sea Auden's development from Freud through Marx to Christ as a pro• gressive conquest of ideological biases and a way into the future.
The generation of English poets which followed Auden and his friends is as yet not too well known in Germany, although some attention has been paid to Gascoyne and several poems of Dylan Thomas have been translated. The fame of Sidney Keyes awl ' 'Richard Hillary has also reached Germany and has awakened in several writers of the same age a kind of brotherly sympathy. Foi
the moving figure of the young poet with his untimely death on th field of action, surrounded, as it were, by an almost mythic splendour—a figure only too familiar on the German side during th First World War—did not make its tragic appearance for us in th Second World War.
As to dramatic literature, the plays of such experienced play' wrights as Priestley and Noel Coward are box-office hits in Germany. G. B. Shaw demonstrated in memorial performances that at lease an earthly immortality is his. But the significant Ereignisse of the German stage are the plays of Eliot and Fry. Critical opinion concerning Eliot the dramatist is exceedingly varied. One admires the sharp, piercing intelligence with which the dramatist demo' lishes a mass of modern illusions concerning the nature of man, He penetrates to the quick of our consciousness in fronting tl chaos of modern society, not with psychological or sociologic
categories, but with moral argument. Yet one is irritated by th
didactic element in, his scenic argumentation and by the lack of genuine dramatic dynamism. Fry's plays, however, realise wit more success Eliot's demand for a new verse-drama. The first pla of his acted in Munich, The Lady's Not for Burning, made hi famous overnight , in Germany. Enraptured, the public yield to the flood of imagery, and were enchanted by the magic must of an infinite erotic pantomime that reminded them vividly o Shakespeare's comedies. An old England appeared to come to life which had not as yet experienced the contemporary austerity
the emotions: And involuntarily one asks: Which is the true and better England, that of The Cocktail Party or that of Jenne Jourdemayne ? 1 believe we need the one as well as the other: the austere, sober and suffering morality of T. S. Eliot and the bitter-sweet enthusiasm of Christopher Fry, infatuated with the world and bubbling over with poetical images.
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