Antiguas literaturas germánicas

Given the ingenuity and thoroughness of Northern European philologists, it seems odd that anyone might consider a Spanish study of ancient Germanic texts to be a relevant groundswell of information – but then again not every book is authored by this Argentine. The imagination and style necessary for great fiction comprise the acme of literary artistic talent. So it is a great pleasure when such a mind does us the favor of expressing his or her views on the content and history of texts often reserved for more obscure interpreters. If you are familiar with Borges’s oeuvre, you are aware that his learning is not only breathtaking, it is systematic, a fortress built on a million precisely positioned bricks that render the whole formidable, impenetrable and, with the exception of this poet, unparalleled in the history of modern letters. To create a story, or poem, or essay, one of these bricks is taken and examined as closely as one can without letting it slip into the woeful chasm of triviality. This one brick then reminds its builder of other bricks, some of which may sit next to the one he is examining, others of which might be located on the farthest end of his battlements. But only one base is required to build his structures, one beach-found pebble, one flickering amidst the “heaventree of stars” (a metaphor proposed in this novel) to re-imagine an entire realm of gods, of giants, of dwarfs, and their interaction with us mere humans. And the brick for this book is a runic drawing of something that terrified generations of coastal dwellers, a Viking longship.

We begin with ancient Britain and conclude with ancient Germany, but in between we find the richest of all long-gone Germanic traditions: the Scandinavian. Students of that beautiful incantation, Old Norse, will not only be quick to point out that modern Icelandic is this tongue’s direct and close descendant, they will also invoke the primacy of this tradition as the most remarkable in Europe at the time. Now, as much as I am captivated by Norse mythology and most things Nordic, we must be fair in stating that Greek and Latin mythology, reinforced by the Christian credos that were spreading at the time of the composition of some of these epics, were primary sources for their structure, and to a lesser degree, their content. This notwithstanding, Borges reiterates one facet of this literary development that makes it unique:

In Iceland, the new Christian faith was not hostile to the old. In contrast to what occurred in Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, and Denmark, conversions here were bloodless. Those Norwegians who had settled in Iceland displayed the religious indifference of aristocrats; their descendants looked back upon the pagan faith with nostalgia, just like other old things lost over time. What happened to Germanic mythology was exactly what had happened earlier to the myths of the Greeks: no one believed in them anymore, but a firm knowledge of their stories was indispensable for learned persons.

There are other reasons for the survival of Norse traditions that in some countries have now been transformed into modern paganism, and no reason is more significant than the gods’ mortality. You will have heard about Ragnarök (Götterdämmerung in the Wagnerian cycle), which is traditionally rendered as “twilight of the Gods,” a German mistranslation akin to what Herder did with ellerkonge. Scholars of Scandinavian languages will tell you, however, that it really means the “fate of those who reign,” which could be gods, or lords, or run-of-the-Althing despots. It is this eschatological feature that separates the Norse tradition from the Greek and Latin, and makes it more palatable to the martyrdom of Christianity in which a God, only one in this case, knows his end in his beginning.

That Antiguas literaturas germánicas is primarily designed as a survey for Spanish speakers of a hitherto little-researched field for Latin Americans is a correct supposition. But Borges could not possibly have written something simply for pragmatic purposes.  We must consider, therefore, the investigation’s poetic value, and most relevant to his works are the kennings, the famed Scandinavian metaphors with which Borges is more than a little enamored, and which he lists with relish in the middle of his work. Among many others, he includes: “the battle ice,” “the wrath stick,” “the helmets’ fire,” “the helmets’ rodent,” “the blood branch,” “the wolf of wounds” (for “sword”); “the whale roof,” “the swan land,” “the waves’ path,” “the Viking field,” “the gulls’ meadow,” “the whale path,” “the islands’ chain” (for “sea”); and “the ravens’ delight,” “the raven beak’s reddener,” “the eagle gladdener,” “the helmet tree,” “the sword tree,” and “the swords’ dyer” (for “warrior”). Here was an endless font of poetry for a bilingual English-Spanish speaker who many feel wrote with a surfeit of adjectives placed before nouns.  Borges, his vision fading, slowly became so taken by these sagas that he began to believe they had all actually happened. He even confessed in an interview that, while he might not be a Christian in the strict sense of the word, he “believed in the Norse gods,” a response that did not surprise the interviewer and should not surprise us. The advent of Christianity did change something in the tone of these sagas. As Borges laments:

The saga, like all novelistic works, is nourished on the richness and complexity of its characters. The new faith resulted in banning this disinterested contemplation and shoved it out in favor of a dualistic world of virtues and vices, of punishments for some and rewards for others …. From these awful syntactical equivalences …. it should be noted that the movement from a ‘storm of arrows’ [for ‘battle’] to a ‘firebrand of a storm of arrows’ comprises the degeneration of the poetry of Iceland.

Thus the violent and mystic images of the Vikings, above all for kinship and military terms, were replaced by the black-and-white simplicity of good versus evil. But much more than that, a whole world was submerged beneath frozen waters for the good of mankind, which had the remarkable foresight not to forget about it. Perhaps, for this reason, you will be stunned at the coherence of such an endeavor, of the revivification of the invaders, their hymns and dirges, their macabre prophecies and sayings. And in the end, through several centuries of asides and esoteric learning, we picture quite clearly Bede, Snorri Sturluson, and Otfried of Weissenburg under one bright Northern sky. That is, a “cloud house and the sister of the moon.”

Das Parfum

Many years ago an acquaintance with a cultivated taste for strong drinks recommended that I read this famous work, particularly effective, he insisted, after several of those concoctions. He also hyped the book as "mind-blowing" (likely betraying one of his own habits), but we are drifting far from our cove. In point of fact, Das Parfum had long been known to me; yet I had never bothered to move past my standard bookstore leaf-through because the story smacked far too much of that frightful misnomer called magical realism. You will hear about it if you are ever unfortunate enough to attend one of those catchy courses on world literature invariably taught by some hipster mediocrity who loves talking up colonialism, relativism, and other impish idolatries, and if you go in for that sort of stuff, there's little that can be done to help you. To be frank, there is nothing magical or real about these works. They are fairy tales, true enough; but instead of revelling in the childish wonder that allows a fairy tale to operate at once as entertainment and allegory, magical realism quickly devolves into socio-political twaddle. It becomes the triumph of native lore over the cold, hard statistics being compiled by the cold, hard conquerors, often understood, in turn, as the New World in its nativeness and the Old World in its demands. Thankfully, our story unfolds exclusively in Old Europe, if demanding enough to remind us why so many of its inhabitants once sought out another realm.

Our senses will revolve around a small, crooked, and ostensibly effete Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a frog in both name and appearance. Grenouille is introduced as are many an anti-hero: by the plight of his orphanhood, the hopelessness of his indigence, and his wretched physical condition of his mortal shape. After harrowing, wicked experiences as a parentless urchin who could barely fend for himself, he labors as a tanner for Grimal (a French homophone for "grey evil"), a man known for working children to death – the newly industrial eighteenth century boasted an unkindness all its own – and he survives simply because we will him to do so. We, his readers, know that he cannot die before he has accomplished what God – a term that when mentioned to him much later on provokes "such a blank look that one would think he had heard the word for the first time" – has determined he must do. He must live on because he has a gift that might seem, in that age antecedent to proper sewer systems and hygiene, particularly overwhelming: an unrivaled sense of smell. And soon he masters "all the odors of Paris," which like any city of that period greatly resembled a cistern of unending filth.   

Grenouille goes along with his plight for the lack of any better options, his indifference to his physical well-being making him almost the ideal galley slave. Soon, however, he learns of another career path, and its discovery is precipitated by fate one festive night:

He was just about to leave the boring fireworks performance to head home along the Galerie du Louvre when the wind brought something to him, something tiny and hardly noticeable, a crumb, an atom of a scent, no, something smaller still: the notion or hint of a scent rather than an actual smell, and yet at the same time it was most certainly the hint of something that he had never smelled before .... For the first time it was not only his greedy character revived by some insult that hurt, but also, as it were, his heart. It seemed strange to him that this scent could be the key to the ordering of all other scents – and if you didn't understand this point, you could not say you understood anything about scents. And he, Grenouille, would have wasted his life if he did not manage to possess it. 

Where that scent leads Grenouille is hardly a secret; but what he does when he finds it, foreshadowing the hideous rituals of the novel's last act, need not be revealed on these pages. The faintest whiff and the slightest possible distinction between odors are as clear to Grenouille as a species of bird to the ornithologist or a book in an endless library to the omnilegent. Since Grenouille is creative, self-serving, and wicked in his devotion to his pursuits, he dreams of what all evil genius dreams: neverending, globe-spanning fame. To attain such an end he secures, with repeated displays of his unearthly talents, an apprenticeship with one of Paris's erstwhile great parfumiers, a bloated bourgeois pig called Baldini. Baldini eases slowly into his Salieri role – one more than suspects that the Italian surnames bespeak a fearful symmetry – with Grenouille's unstoppable genius becoming more a source of income than of envy, and soon Baldini is again the most renowned parfumier in all of Paris. But Grenouille's fame will be different than all other glories ever achieved:

He knew now that he had the power to do more. He knew that he could improve that scent. He knew he would able to create a scent that was not only human but superhuman, the scent of an angel, so indescribably good and life-affirming that he who smelled it became bewitched, and simply had to love him, Grenouille, the bearer of that scent, with all his heart.

The comparison to Mozart ends there, thanks in no small part to Grenouille's self-assessment as, well, "completely and utterly evil" (subsequent events do not in the least deter us from this initial evaluation). It would be enough for a good man with Grenouille's abilities to make the most sensational jasmine, honeysuckle, and lilac perfumes the world could ever know. If money or comfort motivated our crooked friend, that would indeed apply – but some devils have little interest in the currencies of men.

Das Parfum is, very much to Süskind's credit, not the kind of novel ordinarily subsumed by my shelves. Its themes, while not quite commercial, are familiar in that way that pastiches of ideas and galleries of oft-used secondary characters for a few brief, ignorant moments seem fresh (this is a book that could not possibly be filmed, and yet it has been). Apart from our olfactory freak, no one is really accorded much originality, even if their stereotypes are parodic and therefore mostly efficacious. Nevertheless, the work's style and self-confidence remain mystifyingly engrossing, perhaps because as foul as Grenouille is, his passion is to an art to which we, shallow beasts, will always be subject. There are numerous unsettling passages, including the sacrifice of animals (why modern letters is so focused on these slaughters is still a puzzle; perhaps because we are to be tacitly equated to such beasts), but most of the cruelty is implied, most of the mayhem offstage, and most of our worries unfounded. Yet in one startling passage towards the culmination of our plot, not our story, something occurs that we somehow sense will not. Moreover, we expect something else to occur – something much more in line with the typical topicality of the magical realism charlatans – and are relieved when it does not take place. And in the end, what does take place? Is the description of that public square as real as it seems to old Grenouille? As real, I suppose, as those Parisian catacombs. 

Shroud

He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a frenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner.

Our beliefs assume curious shapes as dusk descends; what we have loved becomes either more enchanting or more alien; what we have feared glows with illuminant strength; and what we have known sinks into a morass of ruinous doubt. It is not our faith weakening as the light, but our gradual glimpse of the obverse of that old coin we had been carrying so confidently in our pockets. And even if the two-headed coin of conjurors and charlatans, one face will necessarily be darker, the duplicate or understudy. A small hint at the structure of this novel.

Our novel is cloven into three, perhaps because only three characters have any bearing on its outcome. The first and most rotund is a tall, lecherous, one-eyed beast of an academic with the unripe name of Axel Vander. The name, as any speaker of Dutch will tell you, seems to indicate a nobiliary particle with a syncopation of its final and most important component – a fact that Vander duly notes, then, like most everything else, brushes to the side to deal with more pressing problems. The most pressing at hand may come in the form of Catherine Cleave, dite Cass, our second character, apparently Irish, and as young, feminine, and thin as the aging Vander is bulgingly male. She enters our landscape as the novel opens in his own thoughts; she has discovered his secrets and intends, like any unsteady extortionist, to meet her victim in person. He travels, sweating, cursing, knocking a bad leg to the metronome of his cane, to Italy from California, land of the gold rush, of lawlessness and, towards the end of the twentieth century – a century that he knows almost in its entirety – a cultural vacuum where a learned man can hide in peace. More specifically, he will meander to Turin, where he initially plans, like any practiced murderer, to cast Cass Cleave from this famous tower and be done with her.

What our plot entails cannot and should not be elaborated upon in these pages; the pleasure of reading Banville hardly extends into the superficial realm of artifice. His repeated triumphs are the victories of style that frame details so minute as to seem both obvious and radiant. Vander dreams he will rot in a "cavernous hospital in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting"; America to him "seemed like a nonce-word, or an unsolvable anagram, with too many vowels in it"; when asked for a glass of water, a ubiquitous waiter in the Antwerp hotel where Cass and Axel's paths finally cross, "nodded, or perhaps it was a little bow that he made, briefly letting his eyelids fall as he did so, and murmured something, and padded off into the shadows" (I had initially read the passage as "paddled," which would have been even more magnificent). What can be said is that both Axel and Cass – who almost devolve into a rather fitting anagram – are subject to acute hallucinations that could easily be diagnosed by people who enjoy easy diagnoses and easy living. Such an approach will not, however, get us very far. Vander has something wicked on his conscience; it could very well be the fate of his late wife, Magda, appearing most frequently as a stuffed corpse; or a numinous link to Cass's father who revels in the mendacity of the professional actor; or even something increasingly distant for the contemporary reader – the bottomless perdition of the last European War. Contracts were drawn up, mostly with the Devil or his minions, and persons otherwise unconsulted in battle strategies or occupation policies suddenly tended to chirp from the obscurest branches. Vander recalls one of his Belgian compatriots in this vein:

Although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbor to the east.

Vander will gain the by-lines he so craves, and only at the cost of a few scruples; Hendriks gets his comeuppance a few years after the war as one of the swinging sacks of Jack Ketch. Whether Vander sees this fate as justice depends in no small part to what he thinks of destiny, whether what we do and those who fall as our victims could play any role in our own condemnation – and perhaps enough has been said on the matter.

There is a topical undercurrent to Shroud that may rile those who believe in art as an island replete with apolitical fauna and flora. At worst, the implications come off as a thin crutch, no more supportive than Vander's own Faustian staff; at best, the historical context infuses the tale with much-needed logic and causality. And yet, there are many unlikelihoods. That long and horrific night when an anonymous letter, in a Satanic reversal of a Biblical passage, saves Vander from certain destruction; the random appearances of a secondary character of impossible age best accounted for as "an off-duty clown"; the syndrome (perhaps lifted from this novel) that causes Cass to smell almonds and then slowly unfurl the foolscap of her very troubled mind; the whole conceit of Lady Laura, whose life is an amalgamation of so many woeful habits that it would seem well-nigh impossible for her to exist for the years and the circumstances provided (although her nasty form of retribution is spot-on); yet the most unlikely of all the scenarios involves Cass herself. That Kristina Kovacs, a former flame now dying as slowly as Vander's memories, would be interested in one last carnal exploration in which she might recall the Sapphic nights of her enlightened youth is perfectly plausible; that Vander himself could see anything in his blackmailer except insanity may suggest what state his mind and soul currently inhabit. Yet through this long and lusty poem, one face stands out as true and enduring, the "raptor's profile of a desert monarch," a thin and eternally pensive physician who comes to Vander's aid then hovers in his vicinity. Perhaps he is convincing because his secret is unambiguously clear; perhaps his utter indifference and opposition to Vander can be taken as a symbol of what Vander has long since avoided. And we haven't even mentioned who gets to play the Harlequin.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

A wise old Greek once said that we gaze upon what we find most repulsive because we have an inner need to learn – a statement of particular truth if we assume the human soul to be deathless. Our souls may indeed glean some reflection of light and hope from behind the cloudy sunsets that all Romantics adore; but what really propels us forth in a life that ultimately promises infirmity and decrepitude is the chance for redemption, for the restoration of all the days and nights lost to work, to illness, to bickering or internecine. In their stead we wish ourselves the chance to fill our past with the glory of living – the greatest work of art we could ever achieve. Even when the best and most breathtaking of young life has passed us by and we begin the turn through a second existence of increasing responsibility, pensiveness, and loss, we are reminded of why we were once young: never having been young means never having been immortal. Youth serves its placeholder when it extends its gaze past its greedy hands and gains a premonition of what is to come. That is why when the young perish they remain young forever both in our memory and in their own, but they will not have lived or loved as completely as those who survive to grayness. So although dying young for a starlet may lead to greater posthumous worship it is not to be desired on any soul however deserving it may be of adulation. Which brings us to one of the most famous unfinished novels of all time.

The plot involves a certain simplicity enriched only by the sensations and motives of true art. Our title character is a young man betrothed as a child by his dying father to another orphan-in-waiting, Rosa. Drood is well-spoken and temperamental like many who have had to justify their suffering, and in that way he resembles his uncle and guardian, John Jasper. Jasper is only a few years older than Drood and the cathedral choirmaster in Cloisterham, the smallish town in which our events accumulate. His position remains one of respect and clout, and his truck with all the local authorities grants him the sheen of blamelessness. Yet even a cursory glance at this "dark man" injects distrust in his vanity as if he were an alembic of maledictions:

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whisker. He looks older than he is, as dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are good, his manner is a little sombre. His room is a little sombre, and may have had some influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in shadow. Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or the bookshelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself (There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously – one might almost say, revengefully – like the original).

We all know the type of girl depicted in such vulgarity, but our conclusions should caption the beholder not the beheld. If a cheeky, frisky young thing is your idea of a beautiful painting – or at least something worth looking at day in and day out – then the satisfaction of some primal needs will be your recurring priority. Jasper does little to conceal his fondness for Rosa, and given her attractiveness, the general dearth of eligible women in the vicinity, as well as the mild discrepancy in age (Rosa is but eighteen as the novel opens), such lust is hardly extraordinary. Jasper, Rosa, and Drood comprise the three points of an unlikely love triangle swept aside by the other characters: Sapsea, the pompous future mayor; Crisparkle, the minor canon; the Landless twins, Helena and Neville, born in Sri Lanka but of mystical origin much like certain characters in this novel; Grewgious, "the Angular man" and Rosa's benefactor who claims if forced to write a play or be decapitated, he would surely lose his head; Bazzard, his shadowy valet and closet playwright; Miss Twinkleton, the headmistress of Rosa's boarding school; and Durdles, stonemason and local drunk who also hears and knows more than most everyone else in Cloisterham. Even with this extensive cast and conversation, we never lose the thread of an argument, such as the one that Neville and Edwin have shortly before the latter's disappearance on Christmas Eve – and I will end our summary right about there.

Critics have spared no effort in decoding the novel, apparently only half-written, and arrived at the conclusion that the psyche of the criminal trumps the detective story that encases it; were it so, however, one would have serious doubts as to the validity of the whole enterprise. There is surely one overwhelming suspect and motive for the crime, but the motive vanishes once a shocking announcement (to the characters but not to the reader) dissolves a bond that many had held for eternal. The most glaring mistake of critics, and one rather endemic to academe, is to prod a hot poker among the ashes of notes that Dickens left for the continuation of the novel as well as letters dispatched to relatives and friends and try to reassemble his original intentions. There is a reason why Durdles, who is consistently inebriated yet just as consistently alert, hears a scream in or near the cemetery he patrols almost a year before Drood vanishes, and why certain characters tend to slip offstage when others appear. In fact, it is Durdles who seems to know or suspect much more than he could effectively impart:

Durdles is asleep at once, and in his sleep he dreams a dream. It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in its course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light – really changed, much as he had dreamed – and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

You might do well to consider this dream, and you might do better to omit for a moment the two characters it mentions. It is this passage that illuminates all of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in such a manner as to leave the careful reader only one decision as to the identity of the person behind our protagonist's disappearance. There is also that odd sailor, or maybe two, that drifts into Cloisterham for no apparent reason other than to visit old Crisparkle. And sailors, as we know, often detect danger from very far off.  

Denkwürdigkeiten eines Antisemiten

This novel's title was chosen, one may suppose, for its shock marketing value, a gimmick that has repeatedly forced reviewers to justify its inclusion to unknowing readers ("It's ironic"; "Of course, this is the opposite of the truth"; "This is not the memoir of an old Nazi," etcetera). Our climate of political correctness values non-offensiveness over precision – which is another way of saying if you don't really think we were all created equal you had better try and pretend – and we are now unable to criticize anyone with any regularity except white Christian men, that universally acknowledged most fortunate of demographic segments. The matter is ridiculous and exploitable, although quite natural in our development as we globalize, level out, and forget that inequalities can promote cooperation as much as envy. An admirable principle that flickers throughout the life of Arnulf, our narrator.

The novel itself is broken into five easy pieces, all of which can and should stand alone. Apart, they incorporate the changing perspective of one man; together they ache for company and commitment, both of which they do not deserve. Arnulf, who resembles our author in many ways, will begin and end his story with Russian words, perhaps because he secretly believes Russia and Marxism to be the downfall of his childhood home and memories (even the second chapter, Youth, echoes this Russian author's early work). While the final chapter, Pravda, needs little introduction or translation, the first word and chapter, Skuchno, can suggest both boredom and yearning – that is to say, a feeling of not being where one would like to be. From the very beginning, then, Arnulf, who does not give us his first name until the fourth chapter, Troth, feels horribly out of place:

We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American ... but we lack the political insight for that. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better.

Like von Rezzori, Arnulf is of Italian stock but born in Bukowina as the Great War destroys old Austria, an empire that claims to be an heir to Charlemagne. These fantastic circumstances not only make Arnulf a redoubtable polyglot, they also strip him to a certain extent of what all of us need at one point or another, a sense of home. Such moments are easier to abide when one has been raised in a multilingual and multicultural setting, and when travel and movement are as commonplace and tried as one's morning ablutions, the obvious parallel being those with no homeland in particular. Two such nations wandered about Europe in larger numbers up through the 1930s, the Roma people and, of course, the sons and daughters of Abraham. 

Sooner or later – be in a neighbor, a love interest, a rival, or an employer – Arnulf will discover the rich Jewish life that varnished Europe until the evil of the Second World War. He will belittle it, despise it, and enjoy it; but most of all he will quote his own relatives' hatred rather than come up with reasons of his own to feel animosity to these outsiders:

The specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt – doomed from the start – to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of the Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves – that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. 

A casual reader may protest the irony of the title, but those who actually finish the novel will be handed a plausible explanation for its use. As layer upon layer is peeled off Arnulf's fantastically rich life, we come to see the designation as that of an opponent in the literal sense of the word. Arnulf's clean-cut Anglo looks, mastery of several languages, sophistication, and inherent restraint allow him to pass for a citizen of any European country ("the biography of a model White European"), including a Jew. As it were, a shallow mind might think Arnulf's cosmopolitan meanderings mimic all too closely the stereotypical restlessness of the constantly displaced Hebrew, making the novel an exercise in self-loathing, but again this approach should be discouraged. We never get anything about his survival of the war because his life was in no danger, nor did he take an active role in combating the forces that wasted a generation. He existed as he always had – for himself and his artistic whims.   

I have said little of the plot because the plot, like the dull and darned topicality it wends itself around, is a flimsy clothesline for Arnulf's artistic observations. His peripatetic antics will not strike anyone as particular original or even wise, but their context, and the cultures negotiated for them to take place as they did, are quite remarkable and, with the possible exception of this writer's work, unparalleled in German letters. We can appreciate the novel for exactly these details. A Romantic encounter unfolds as, "behind us the city pinned lights all over itself," while another tryst is stymied as "all the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles." Arnulf has many things on his mind as a young man, and they usually devolve into some need for female attention. As such, the Jews we encounter are purposive in their roles: a prodigy pianist; a lonely thirty-something shop owner; a family of innkeepers and a curious Ladino-speaking guest (another tip of the hat to Canetti); a drunkard with a lame hip resulting from unhappy love and her aforementioned addiction; and then Arnulf's second wife, who hates him for one thing above all:

Already the previous, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people's memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him; for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife .... his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended ... He could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail ("Even at the expense of vividness?" he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered like a fanatic, "Yes!  Yes!  Yes!").

Then again, maybe the best method to breathe eternal life into old stories is to make them your own. Even if many of the stories belonged to members of a decimated people who have since forsaken Europe and its hidden hates? Yes, yes, yes, indeed.