The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

For those who like your etymologies straight and simple, consider an interpretation of the heroine's name from this famous novella.  Katharina is a Teutonic form of a Greek name widely understood to mean pure (catharsis is often cited as a related term), while Blum is almost a German flower, just like virág is a Hungarian flower and the original surname of this great epic's protagonist.  And our heroine is indeed a pure flower, a lonely bead of buds lying in a corner of a small, semi–urbanized apartment whose market value she could not possibly afford.  She works as a housekeeper for two well–off  couples, has her own car, and generally leads the plain but unencumbered life of the average or slightly above–average German.  She is young and lean, shy and sexually prudish, sensitive and attractive, educated and cultured if skeptically religious, and, most of all, hard–working and lonely.  She also has two "life–endangering qualities": loyalty and pride.  In other words, she is a perfect metaphor for postwar Germany itself.  

 

Now one may ask oneself, as so many Germans did in the 1970s when even the closest adviser to the West German Chancellor turned out to be a spy, how did someone like Katharina Blum ever come into such plebeian ease?  Consider her demographic: "those pretty young brown–haired things, thin, between 5'4" and 5'6" in height and 24 and 27 in age; here at the Carnival you'll see hundreds of thousands of them walking about. "  She is at once beautiful and common, but in the way a solitary rose is beautiful and common.  That is because we cannot have a heroine to embody Germany that looks or acts or talks like no one else.  She must be representative, typical, forgettable; otherwise she would not be a nation but an artist.  However you choose to examine the matter, Katharina is so symbolic that she acquires her own personality.  Now and then, she is portrayed by our omniscient narrator as fickle and moody; she looks after her gravely ill mother with an indifferent air, but waits to weep in private upon her death; she does not allow some of the older men in her life, usually patrons of a club where she tends bar and serves drinks, to do more to her than drive her home, although they certainly try to do more; and we are informed early on that she was once married.   To a parasitical drunk no less, who was one of the first persons to libel her once news of her crime is made public.

 

That crime of hers.  What Katharina is ultimately accused of having done is hardly surprising given the circumstances.  But the bitter irony is that her reputation is already tarnished even before she decides to act.  And here, I must say, the reader more familiar with the political events of 1970s Germany will grasp nuances that elude those who think that the RAF only stands for Britain's air squadrons.  That Katharina is vilified for cavorting with and bedding a known criminal, a whim made even more reprehensible by the fact that her nickname is "the nun," should tell you a great deal about what Böll thought of the establishment in his homeland.  A curious notion, that.  Having been born in the mid–1970s I have always cultivated an image of 1960s and 1970s Germany, a period of remarkable economic and cultural resurgence known in German as "The Miracle," as one of the paradises I can only visit in dreams and magnificent works of art.  Böll, however, doesn't quite see things that way.  His vision of Germany is strewn with remarks about its hypocrisy and yellow journalistic tendencies sprung from an overattentiveness to scandal that is both typically German and a reaction to the unending international scrutiny of German ethics in the twentieth century.  Katharina, like Germany, is isolated and assailed on all sides.  Her family is retconned into a band of profligate leftists and every trace of humanity and decency is erased from her record.   In the end, we are duly aware of whose honor has been violated and we smile.  We smile because we know that Katharina, despite her flaws, will flourish and rise to the heights she deserves.          

Gone Are the Days of Plenty

The title of this film is a little misleading, since the lessons that the protagonists wish to impart to the bloated segments of society are secondary to their own lives and choices.  You may wonder what disempowered college–age idealists can possibly do apart from protesting, dope smoking and ratcheting up petty crime statistics.  The German title, however, gives us more information: it may be translated, like when it appears in the opening scene on a sort of dunning letter, as “your days of plenty are numbered.”  Literally, it could be "the years of plenty are gone,” or, as fett (akin to American use of "phat") means both "luxurious" and "cool" or "awesome," "the cool years are gone.”  This adage applies both to the young, weak and resentful students and the middle–aged moneyed elite they seek to overthrow.  And if you are familiar with tales of juvenile discontent, you may correctly assume that our film will begin with a crime.     

 

A crime, it should be said, that is more overshow than throw.  A luxurious villa full of the finest  technology and kitschy objets d’art (much more of a rarity in Germany than in the United States) is subjected to chaotic justice.  Jan (Daniel Brühl), one of the perpetrators, outlines the scheme he carries out in greater Berlin with his undernourished roommate Peter (Stipe Erceg): nothing is stolen, furniture and possessions are rearranged, and a note is left in plain view for the returning nabobs. The note is often signed, “The Educators” (spelled with a radicalizing “k” in the English release), with the aim of having these posh Philistines “feel less safe in their high security neighborhoods.”  Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) then asks Jan, with whom she has been spending an inordinate amount of time of late, why he and Peter don’t simply steal everything and give it to the poor.  Jan astutely counters that while these rich folk (a list of yacht club members is used as a basis for attack) expect burglars, since they themselves rob society’s coffers to meet their own exorbitant whims, they do not expect righteousness.  Few things could be more frightening than having someone come into your house, play with your possessions, then inform you in writing that you simply have too much money.  Will they come around and put an end to their excessive habits, or will they resent society even more?  But our Educators are not concerned with that type of result; they want to instill the fear of a higher authority in the hearts of their victims, and with that fear a realization that the world, and the people who run this world, are unfair.        

Jule has her own problems.  A year ago she rammed her uninsured Golf into a high–end Mercedes driven by an equally high–end business executive.  Yes, the accident was both her fault and not subject to payment by her insurance company, so she legally had no claim to make when ordered to pay back the full ticket price of the totaled car.  After one year, we are informed, she has worked off almost one–eighteenth of the sum, and her job as a waitress will neither improve that percentage nor allow her to pay her rent on time.  Facing eviction, she turns to Jan for inspiration.  He tells her quite politely that although the accident was her fault, there is nothing worse than destroying the life of a young woman so that one privileged German can drive a car worth the average annual income of thirty Serbs.  She nods her head and sees his point, but what are they to do, disenfranchised and disaffected as they are?  One solution presents itself immediately, and things move quickly towards Jule’s integration.

Exactly halfway through the film, there is a predictable change of perspective.  Up to this point we have been able to side with the 'truth of youth,' of the fundamental principles of equality and fairness which all young people should espouse and with which the majority of older citizens should try to reacquaint themselves.  While broadly drawn, the characters are likeable and their cause tenable.  But those darling Educators become hostages to the plan of another party when they attempt to retrieve a conspicuous item they left behind at the house of one of those yacht club members.  This shift is necessary dramatically, for otherwise our parable of moral damnation would get a wee bit tedious.  Consequences for these actions, however harmless in essence, are as inevitable as the taxes that Jan, a consummate anti–institutionalist, laments.  The nature of man, we are told, is to be better than others.  We are also told that it’s not he who invented the gun who is guilty, but he who pulls the trigger.  The war of truisms begins, but for some magical reason it seems real.  It seems real because both sides are right and wrong, both sides are looking out for their interests and understand a part of human nature that cannot be denied.  Yet only one side is moral.  And moral doesn’t only mean saying and doing the right things, it means grasping the basic principles of human interaction and seeking fairness and equality of opportunity.  When one of their victims laughs off his guilt by saying he was not born in southeast Asia and is therefore not responsible for those who were, the rebuttals he receives make him think.  He thinks of another time.  His own youth, especially the wildness of 1968, flashes before his beady little eyes and, with that youth, the sweetness of invincibility and righteousness.  Back then he was not a top executive but a teacher, poor but happy, and totally in love with his young wife.  And those fabulous days, his best days, are all gone.     

The Incarcerated World

A translation of a review by Heinrich Böll of this modern Russian opus.  The original was entitled Die verhaftete Welt, and first appeared in May 1969 in this newspaper.  Before this time, Solzhenitsyn was not as widely known as he would become a few years later when Soviet authorities forced him to turn down the Nobel prize then booted him out of the country altogether (he would return in 1993 and recently celebrated his 89th birthday back at home*).  To the best of my knowledge, this essay has never been translated into English.

1. Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle has enormous breadth, numerous moments of tension, and several dimensions: a prose dimension, a humanistic-historical dimension, a political-historical dimension, and a societal dimension.  It is vaulted from many sides, a cathedral among novels, with carefully measured calculations that hold solid.  That it also contains suspense in the traditional understanding of the word does not involve novelistic means but precisely those calculations or statics which every reader fears may not maintain the breadth and tension of its other parts.  Here tension and suspense become architectonic concepts.  That it covers historical information as well only confirms the novel as a sort of construction material with little time before it is put to use.  

The plot begins with a telephone conversation between Volodin, a state councillor of second rank who wants to warn a friend of his, a professor, about foreign contacts.  This initial break into the consciousness of a gifted diplomat, whose career has been completely secured with all the attendant privileges, is only the entry into the cathedral.  The conversation takes place around Christmas 1949; the novel ends exactly two days later with a description of the prison transport through Moscow.  In a delivery van with the inscription “мясо - Viande - Fleisch – Meat,” prisoners are taken away from the first circle of hell without knowing in what circle they’ll end up.  The correspondent from the French newspaper Libération, on the way to a hockey match in Dinamo stadium, reads the inscription on the delivery van, pulls out his notebook, and writes down with his ballpoint in Bordeaux-red: “Again and again in the streets of Moscow one sees delivery vans with foodstuffs, extremely clean and unobjectionable in terms of sanitation.  Provisions in the capital can only be described as marvelous.”

2. The novel comprises 87 chapters, 670 pages in order to survey its dramatis personae, and is difficult even after the second reading.  It would be easier if the publisher resolved to include a detailed list of all the characters, with age, gender, function, job, and political position provided.  This last point because there are so many transitions and ensnarements between the prisoners as well as between the non-prisoners (we’ll talk about the concepts of free and unfree a bit later on).  They are all incarcerated, not of course in the technical prison sense; their incarceration has many causes, most of which would hardly be intelligible to the West.  The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s novels were banned from publication in the West may be understood both literally and figuratively as this sort of incarceration.  That he became – and this alone could be a reason for the Soviet government to join the Berne Convention – the victim of every condition so protected by the Convention may be seen as an ironic component in the game of mutual “freedom of publication.”

It is this incarceration which has made Russians into the nation on earth least enthusiastic about emigration.  And here I designate all the characters of the novel, prisoners and non-prisoners, as politically incarcerated in the Soviet Union.  I should add the following so as to eliminate any type of misunderstanding or malevolent falsification: I don’t mean incarceration by the police, I mean the type of incarceration one imposes upon oneself.  Let semanticians do their research on the novel and discover the true meanings behind “self-incarceration” and “decarceration,” “carceration” and “incarceration.”  In my understanding, James Joyce was, essentially to the end of his life, incarcerated both by Ireland and Catholicism.

3. The collective slap in the face for the West’s stupidity at the end of this book may be related to the fact that Western observers keep seeing signs here and there, even occasionally leading to recognition, a key of decryption with which these signs could be interpreted, but which they never get a hold of.  Perhaps because this key changes daily, hourly, weekly and may be subject to an enormous amount of coincidence in this mammoth empire.  Even I did not get a hold of this key; I’m short of breath, East Europe takes its time and breathes in very deeply.  This key is not only based on passion, occasionally addicted to passion, it is impassioned in the true sense of the word and not just because of the revolution, and not just because of Stalinism.

Against the multifaceted breadth buttressed by the aforementioned statics of The First Circle, not only do some highly recommended Western novels become decorative ancillary chapels, but the results of decades of literature remain constructs outside this cathedral as auxiliary or, at best, elegant residences.  Of course, the horrible dialectics in the face of such a work are thanks to the fact that it sums up and illuminates an unbelievable mass of suffering and history.  The form, the expression, the style in which Solzhenitsyn writes his prose and keeps it in order is remarkable.  This order allows one to see a composition carrying every last freedom, which indicates that we have a master at work, as well as a mathematician, someone to whom the formulas of science are not foreign.  Here prose becomes a formula, spiritual and epic lucidity, and they meet in a parable in the mathematical and physical sense of the word.

4. If I avoid the word metaphysics, it is only because I do not have a name for this kind of metaphysics. In any case, order is neither given nor pushed forward, but order is created nonetheless.  It is integrated in the mathematical and physical sense and it may well be that from here a new materialist metaphysics arises, as many physicists have suspected it would.  As Western authors have laid aside the dogma of secrecy, so does Solzhenitsyn not quite reject the future, but instead no longer includes it as an ideal goal comparable to the heaven of the metaphysics passed down to us.  He sums up the present, and one should not forget that this is the present of 1949, four years before Stalin’s death, and that this book was written from 1955 to 1964.  In the Soviet Union of 1969, being incarcerated is something different than what it was in 1949. 

Thankfully, Solzhenitsyn avoids giving all this a meaning, and elects simply to note, register, and develop his text from elements familiar to him, from experiences.  And since he has no need to polemicize the order he gives or pushes forth, he achieves a sobriety and dryness which are superior to both optimism-riddled socialist realism and the intentions of the nouveau roman.  This is not only because he experienced firsthand what his colleagues in the West did not: Stalinism.  It is also because the West has lost its sense of hidden suffering, which now causes the most outrage as a component of sexual lust as yet undetected or unacknowledged.  I ascribe to Solzhenitsyn’s work the quality of revelation, an unpathetic revelation, and not just regarding the book’s historical content, Stalinism, but also regarding the history of humanity’s suffering.  In this respect, Stalinism here is only an “occasion,” sufficiently frightening, but “only an occasion” nevertheless.

The prisoners in The First Circle, incarcerated in the camp of Mavrino near Moscow, are responsible for various tasks, all of which have the purpose of refining and further developing surveillance methods, and therefore of hauling in additional prisoners.  They are permanently entrapped, but as prisoners and researchers they are free, while their wardens are also free and still a permanent source of fear to the prisoners.  They could always be incarcerated and perhaps taken to another circle of hell.  It is in no way certain whether landing in the seventh circle of hell would be a lucky move or a fate worse than death.  In the course of further developing the phonoscope, which would enable the identification of a person by his voice recorded on tape, five taped voices are handed over to the prisoners so they can compare them to the voice of Volodin, whose voice was just recorded.  His voice is found to be one of the five.  The sole triumph of these prisoners is that they were able to rule out three of the five suspects, with their consolation being that only two of the five, including Volodin, will be incarcerated.  When he’s brought into Lubyanka prison as described in detail in the penultimate chapter, we see the subjection of a state councillor of second rank, a man who already has a plane ticket to Paris in his pocket, to pedantic, protracted, and absurdly unclear initial humiliations – all of which vividly remind the reader of the incarceration in the first circle of hell of the prisoners already well-known to him.                     

Certainly it’s no coincidence that this first circle of hell turns out to be a laboratory.  A well-functioning, well-equipped laboratory.  I imagine that astrophysicists, astromedics, astrotechnicians, and all their assistants are under strict surveillance and constant monitoring by various secret police forces, possibly even subject for months on end to severe enclosure.  Given the fact that we are dealing here not only with chemical, physical, and technical laboratories, but also with national economic and, most of all, recruiting laboratories in which new methods of manipulation are being concocted, and old methods are being analyzed and developed further, and given the other fact that even the dreams of those working in the innermost circle of these heavens probably have to be monitored as well so that they don’t spill the beans, so to speak, and one sees how quickly Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle is de-Stalinized.  Here captivity and freedom, intuition and ingenuousness on the part of both the prisoners and the free, of the manipulated and the manipulators, are all rather relative.  I don’t know the proportion of wardens and free persons in a space research center; in the “first circle of heaven,” I think the proportions and conditions differ only slightly from those in The First Circle.  There are enough secret worlds, as well as worlds of hidden suffering whose revelation would not only involve sexual suffering.  In this respect I look at The First Circle as both bound to the historical material and a revelation that goes beyond it.

Perhaps the key to understanding the Soviet Union is the difference between being incarcerated in terms of your soul and in terms of the law.  However much the matter is debated and however much such a judgment does not correspond to the Russian frame of mind, the Soviet Union is still run by Russians and by Russia.  That does not need to mean what it keeps threatening to become: imperialistic, nationalistic, and under Stalin once again Tsarist.  Only when reading Solzhenitsyn did I first realize the significance of the changes towards more openness by Khrushchev in 1956.  Among other things was the allowance for Solzhenitsyn to be released from captivity, and for him to write and have his works published.  That he still writes but may no longer be published, that he lives in the Soviet Union but is incarcerated, although he has not been taken into custody, can only mean one thing.  It means that the jury’s still out as to whether the Soviet government will ever understand what politicians all over the world never quite understand: that an author is already incarcerated in his own language.  That Solzhenitsyn as a person and author, as an author born in 1918 and not at all determined by the history of the Soviet Union, is neither typical nor symbolic; that he is real and present for the Soviet Union.  If he weren’t denounced and branded a heretic, the Soviet Union could actually be proud of him.  Ultimately, he doesn’t go any further than Khrushchev did in his famous speech; Solzhenitsyn only took the word de-Stalinization literally and fashioned it into something more.  He is incarcerated in the Soviet Union just like one of the “heroes” of his book, the prisoner Rubin, who remains beholden to socialism as much as he does to the Soviet Union.  Rubin is in no way unnationalistic but is also not cosmopolitan and, as a Marxist who sees right through his own prisoner-incarceration quandary, is far superior to his wardens.  And I have long since assumed that all those people who are accused of draggling their own nests are usually those who strive to keep them clean.

Solzhenitsyn’s book comes from afar, it is vaulted high into the heavens, and it is also a revelation for the more or less helplessly operating parts of Western literature.  It stems from the great Russian tradition, it has bypassed, overcome and renewed socialist realism, and in the temerity of its construction, which is also secured by its statics, it is also topical: it has Tolstoy’s breath and the spirit of Dostoevsky, and it unites these two as antagonistic minds in the nineteenth century up to contemporary literary criticism, and, without a doubt, it is Solzhenitsyn.  Moving past Sartre and Camus, he completes the age-old debate of “free” and “captive,” but not prettily, not philosophically, but with material that is unassisted, unadulterated and unemphatic.  Take the meeting between the apparently all-powerful minister Abakumov and the prisoner Bobynin: the trembling minister who knows all too well how many circles hell has, and the poised Bobynin, who has already endured many a circle of hell.

In such scenes of which there is no paucity, the unity of reality and symbol is neither invented nor found, it is derived from the material at hand like the result of a solved mathematical formula.  It would be useless to enumerate additional examples.  Were I a painter or a graphic artist, I would try to depict The First Circle visually within a system of order yet to be invented which may have the form of a giant rosette.  I can only imagine the possibility of, at one glance, making literature illuminated and visible, and not with the claim of total understanding so typical of literary criticism, but as an aid to understanding.  This prose does not, in any case, flow with great placidity; it is not a current, but a lake made of many sources, both big and small.  I know I am providing simile after simile: a cathedral, a lake, a rosette, yet this but attests to the book’s many dimensions.

There are very few novelistic elements in this novel: on page 9 Volodin places a phone call; on page 232, the specialists in Mavrino are given the assignment of identifying his voice and they ask for additional material as a basis of comparison, which leads to more phone tapping; on page 588 Volodin’s voice is partially identified; at the end of the novel he is incarcerated.  The book is most novelistic about half the way through: the material which the prisoners request so as to conduct a voice comparison is taken on the occasion of a dinner party in the classic opulent bourgeois style, as held by state prosecutor Makarygin.  It is at this gathering that a few, but only a few, of the novel’s many threads come together.  Volodin is Makarygin’s son-in-law; his wife Dotnara (called Dotti, a Western abbreviation that cannot fail to remind us of the habits of the noble class depicted in Tolstoy’s work) is completely preoccupied with problems that are in no way the problems of a classless society: servants and adultery.  Meanwhile Volodin in his apartment gradually moves from being one of the oblivious and privileged to someone who has more of a clue.  And it is precisely this phone call with his wife, which “is recorded in a particular central news office” that is recorded on tape, and comes “on the heels of the decision by Rubin earlier that afternoon to have all the suspects’ long-distance calls monitored without exception.”  And the prisoner does not only invade the life of the state councillor.  Some other absurd “coincidences” occur here at the dinner party at Makarygin’s: Klara, Makarygin’s unwed daughter, a warden at the Mavrino camp with the rank of lieutenant, falls in love with the prisoner Rostislav (and he with her!).  She is the first person to pick up the receiver and cannot guess that in that same camp, just a few hours later, this telephone conversation will lead to the incarceration of her brother-in-law.  Thus in two chapters the threads come together and then just as quickly come undone.  Apart from that, the banter at the Makarygin party is very witty and spirited, it is the entertainment of the oblivious, the talk of the privileged, of dignitaries: “It would never have occurred to any of the people here that in this polished black receiver, in this unobtrusive conversation, there lurked a secret decay which knew how to find each of us, even in the bone of a dead horse.”                

Only in these two chapters right in the middle of the novel, no coincidence for such a mathematician, is tribute paid to the format of the classical novel and only here are the threads of fate “hemmed together.”  All other destinies, and they are numerous, are only documented: Spiridon, Sologdin, Simotschka, and Myschin, Stalin and the prisoner Dryssin, who is deprived from receiving letters from his wife, and may only read them in the office of major Myschin:

    No, read it here.  I can’t let you take letters like that with you into the common rooms. 
    What type of impression of life outside of prison would that give the prisoners?  Read!

And so Dryssin reads, among other things: “Dear Vanya, you’re hurt that I write so rarely, but I come home late from work and go almost daily into the forest to look for firewood.  And then later in the evening, I’m so tired that I practically keel over.  This is not a life but forced labor.  If I could only sleep in on Friday, but I’ve got to drag myself to the demonstrations.”  A completely demoralized Dryssin is then ordered to write a letter to his wife: “optimistic, cheerful, prop yourself up.”  And then: “Write a response.  An optimistic and hopeful response.  I’ll allow you to write more than four pages.  You wrote once that she should trust in God.  Then better to stay with God than ....”

The prisoner Dryssin, whose fate is chronicled in a few pages, has no novelistic function.  He is only one of millions and he is obliged to trumpet optimism and cheerfulness from his prison.  Ths insane absurdity of the incarceration of prisoners already documented in magnificent personal detail in the books of Lydia Chukovskaia (The deserted house) and Evgenia Ginzburg (Journey into the whirlwind) is now deepened, widened and, to a certain degree, de–individualized by Solzhenitsyn, who has up to now no peer in terms of expression.

5. Apart from everything else it may be, our century is the century of camps, of prisoners.  And to all those who were never captives, may you boast or be ashamed of the good fortune or chance of being spared the experience of our century, and you can take that for whatever it’s worth.  For those who survived, and that is all of us, those of us reading and writing – indeed, everyone – there is only the possibility of acknowledging our captivity, whether or not one experienced something like that.  Whoever did experience it knows how relative luxury is: amidst the wasteland of a hundred-thousand-man camp a bit of soap and a saucer of water are real luxury, because they are luxury at hand. And five twelfths of a cigarette when a whole one costs one hundred and twenty marks and fifty marks represents your entire fortune, that is truly, not only symbolically so much more pleasure than that of the zillionaire who loses a hundred thousand in an evening and thinks nothing of it because he doesn’t feel it.  But the person who pays fifty marks for five twelfths of a cigarette knows all the while that he could pay his rent with that money.  The stupidity of the West’s luxury-driven society and its victims, the criminals who wish to take part in it, consists of thinking of luxury as something absolute.  In this century you simply have to know that, in order to evaluate and enjoy luxury, having a can of preserves and an empty bottle really means life or death for a prisoner.  This secret philosophy of prisoners (which has a lot of theology in it) glides invisibly and yet perceptibly throughout The First Circle.

Yet another philosophy is even more perceptible: that of love, prudishness, and marriage.  “Yes, yes, to love!”  whispers the young prisoner Rostislav.  “To love!  But not the story of love, not the theory of love, but girls!”  And later: “But what have they taken from us?  Tell me now!  The right of assembly?  The right to sign for state loans?  The only way that beast wanted to hurt us was by taking us away from women!  And that’s what it did.  For more than twenty-five years.  The swine!   Does anyone know what a woman means to a prisoner?”

And who knows what it means to the women of these prisoners to have this freedom handed to them and, in most cases, not to know what to do with it.  Who can guess the meaning of freedom for someone sentenced to at least twenty-five years of imprisonment?  Here there arises that disdained something which may possibly have not arisen in the event of the freedom of both members of a couple: there arises from captivity the concept, much reviled in the West, of faithfulness.  The tortures of sex and the sex of tortures extant in Western literature are also an expression of an unacknowledged captivity and an absurdly interpreted freedom.

That these features – the tortures of sex and the sex of tortures – are completely uninteresting not only to Soviet censorship, but also to the enlightened, the aware Soviet citizens, to the non-oblivious, is one of the signs that is hard to decipher.  It would probably have been interesting to the bloated, jaded class of privileged and oblivious persons in the Soviet Union, for whom servants are a veritable topic of conversation.  For an entire chapter (chapter 39), the female state security lieutenant Klara Petrovna Makarygin, daughter of a state prosecutor, and the prisoner Rostislav talk about Soviet society in the laboratory in Mavrino.  They talk about methods of falsifying documents and about privileges.  And here it is the prisoner Rostislav who plants the seed of wondrous corruption.  And what does the prisoner whisper to the highly privileged daughter from the class of the classless bourgeoisie?

What was the revolution aimed at, anyway?  It was aimed at the privileged!  What did not sit well with the citizens of Russia?  Privileges!  Some only had work clothes, others wore sables; some walked, others rode in carriages; some had to heed the whistle of factory sirens, other gorged themselves rotten in restaurants.  Isn't that right? 

“Of course,” said the good and enamored daughter of the state prosecutor, who that same evening would take part in an opulent party at the apartment of her pushy bourgeois mother.  There would be crystal and silver, exquisite foods and wine, spirited conversations and even loaned-out servants.  And she would pick up the receiver and the conversation with her brother-in-law Volodin would begin to be taped that very night in the same laboratory where she fell in love with the prisoner Rostislav Vadimovich Doronin, and it would serve to expose her brother-in-law.  “That’s right,” says Rostislav, “but why don’t people renounce all privileges instead of trying to obtain them?”  Thus the wondrous corruption of the female lieutenant continues.                

6. All these quotes and allusions may give you the impression that we are dealing with many novels and many romances all united into one novel.  It is rather difficult to restrict oneself to citations when you want to quote most of the 670 pages the novel contains.  The book does not possess that infamously epic flow: it keeps stumbling, starting over, stumbling again; it has whole chapters of bitter soliloquies and paraphrases on the inspections by human rights commissions that are led astray, thoroughly and completely astray.  Or the wives’ horrible half-hour visits which are allowed to many prisoners once a year.  The stumbling is the stumbling of deep breathing, of lengthiness, not a shortness of breath, which may arouse the appetite of the Western European novel.  It is this pacing which reminds one of Tolstoy, and it is this sarcasm and subtlety of psychological perception that remind one of Dostoevsky.  And yet all the while it is Solzhenitsyn, undeniably, because one knows more from him. 

There are also specialists in the Mavrino camp who refuse to develop surveillance methods or who cleverly sabotage this development, since only they, the lone specialists incarcerated for this purpose, know or could know how these methods might be developed.  These seem to me to be the true socialist scientists.  In addition, the female employees, all the state security lieutenants, young women most of whom were born after Lenin’s death in 1924, appear to be most unreliable.  But many a prisoner turns out to be someone you can count on.  That we can see this makes the material, despite the staggering amount of pain and suffering, almost optimistic.  Pensions are still being paid nowadays to the victims of Stalinism.  And what does Solzhenitsyn’s horrible crime consist of?  Naturally, there cannot be so much absurdity in a state founded and operated on Marxist principles.  But can this acknowledgment of Stalinism-driven mass incarceration possibly find closure in the long run with pensions still being meted out to its victims? 

One hundred years after Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, we now have this book, unfortunately only in the West, for whom it was not written.  It was written for the liberation of socialism.  We have no reason, not the slightest reason, to revel in The First Circle as a portrait of Stalinist misdeeds, absurdities, and entrapments.  But we do have a reason to ask ourselves whether a Western author could manage, in our complicated entanglement, such a depiction of the world of the oblivious and the world of those suffering in secret. 

*Note: Solzhenitsyn passed away on August 3, 2008, four months shy of his 90th birthday.

Antares

In case we were not clear on the matter, the closing credits of this film feature a constellation that contains this eponymous star, one of the brightest in the firmament we call the visible universe.   One may suspect that the name was chosen to show the interconnectedness of the lives of the film's three young couples, one of whom is no longer a couple, in a building complex in the greater Vienna area.  With such a premise one may also suspect that Antares will inevitably devolve into what is lovingly termed hyperlink cinema, in which an unfathomable amount of coincidence (to the point, in many cases, of lottery–like odds) brings together the whole ensemble cast in a most execrable miniature of globalization.  That this plot–avoiding technique has become a cliché of modern filmmaking is bad enough; worse still is the supposition that many takes on the same happenings may teach us about the complications of perspective and, ultimately (here we feel the director tensing and getting giddy), relativity.   It is one thing to offer several views of the same events or issues; it is quite another to assume that because different people see different things, these events and issues are imbued with greater significance and profundity.     

 

Despite my antipathy to coincidence, overlaps of fate do occur, and the chances of their happening are increased exponentially by physical nearness.  A cause–and–effect chain stretching across continents is not only ridiculous, it essentially confirms the possibility that everything is so closely related that the slightest gesture may bring down a mountain (there is a theory, a wildly inventive theory for this type of outlook), which might make you think twice before you drop that banana peel in the middle of the road. Nevertheless, director and writer Götz Spielmann gets this one right: if you're going to have an overlap, make everyone bump around the same concrete prism.  So we meet three couples who are more or less neighbors, each of whom gets its own vignette: Eva (Petra Morzé) and her lover Tomasz (Andreas Patton); Marco (Dennis Cubic) and his girlfriend Sonja (Susanne Wuest); and Marco's lover Nicole (Martina Zinner) and her highly abusive and estranged partner Alex (Andreas Kiendl). Marco and Sonja live together in the complex, while Eva resides nearby with her melomane husband and their teenage daughter.  Nicole also lives in an adjacent building with her young son, which renders Marco's midnight dog–walking expeditions all the more efficient. 

 

The movie does the right thing by getting the least explicable (and perhaps most absurd) of the three vignettes out of the way first, more than suggesting how alienated the characters feel.  Eva seems to sleepwalk through her domestic tasks and local hospital shifts as a nurse, although we are never told how and why she takes up with the equally married Tomasz.  Their lovemaking, if one could call it that, is peppered with the usual hijinks that emotionally unattached people are supposed to do in bed.  The problem is that Eva is becoming increasingly fond of Tomasz while all he wants to do is take rather compromising pictures, and their practically anonymous and often wordless encounters recall another recent film with a similar story line.  But the downright weirdest element is the person whom Eva and Tomasz run into after carelessly deciding to be seen together in public, and how Eva subsequently addresses that situation.

 

The two other vignettes are more tightly intertwined, with another extrarelational affair as the fulcrum.  In the second part, Sonja, who does curious things to magazines in her job as a supermarket cashier, pretends to be pregnant to fend off the pleas of her family−obsessed Croatian boyfriend Marco.  What she doesn't know is that Marco may want to have a baby with her, but he has other urges that require attention elsewhere.  Perhaps then we shouldn't be surprised that Marco's favorite Croatian song, as he summarizes the lyrics for her, relates the story of a man who leaves his wife, becomes rich, loses everything, and then wants to come back and see her one last time.  There are some obvious turns and twists, such as when Sonja pretends to be asleep and then emerges, fully dressed, to follow Marco to his lover’s apartment.  It is also the only movie I have ever seen in which a toy giraffe is used as a hostage. 

 

The third movement chronicles the daily activities of a horrible excuse for a human being who doubles as the bellicose ex–husband of Marco's lover Nicole.  You will be happy to know that certain things one might expect in a lesser movie do not take place here, except for one critical coincidence towards the end that is a function of fate and comeuppance working in tandem.  A pale blue metaphorically reminiscent of infirmity or depression coats every scene, and Spielmann is not averse to headless shots exploring otherwise neglected parts of his characters.  Numerous moments that have no effect on plot events reveal flaws and strengths that can only result from close observation and a love for the vicissitudes of humankind.  If you are not interested in detail, this will not be enjoyable.  But if you find the smallest of facial ticks or half–swallowed sentences to be sources of insight, Antares, in its restrained eccentricities, may show you something new.

Christoph Eschenbach

A translation of an interview with Christoph Eschenbach, one of the world's most renowned conductors who will be stepping down as head of the Philadelphia Orchestra after this season.   You can read the original here.

With the Orchestre de Paris and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Christoph Eschenbach heads up two of the most well–respected musical entities in the world.  And both have been recent recording partners with him on the independent Finnish label Ondine.  The conductor spoke with Jörg Hillebrand about his orchestras, his records, and his preference for contemporary music.

A small portrait of Richard Wagner painted by Pierre Auguste Renoir in Palermo in 1882 hangs in the Musée D’Orsay.  In it we see the composer mild in his old age, his face without any sharp edges, with slightly blurry contours.  If this view of Wagner could be translated into music, the result might be exactly what one would get to hear at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Ring Cycle” taken over from Zurich.  The Orchestre de Paris, which so rarely does opera and is unaccustomed to such long stretches of playing, sat in its pit relaxed and in deep concentration.  There was no visible strain.  At times, true enough, the mammoth score was transformed into sound, in any case without that assiduous overexplictness in the leitmotivs that one has come to experience in most productions.  The orchestra sound became ever louder, ever brighter; in the fortissimo, almost garish.  In the pianissimo, on the other hand, it became mysteriously shaded.  The sound had little depth, almost no weight, coming off all the more thick on the surface as a result.  Chamber music refinement over long stretches.  One word comes to mind: de–Germanization.

At the music stand is Christoph Eschenbach.  His upper arms are still close to his body, his forearms still flapping nervously, his wrists still turning in that incomparable way.  Outwardly, he hardly seems changed at all, even when you stand right in front of him.  His long, bald head is ageless; his body’s stature as small as a boy’s.  He resides on marvelous Marceau avenue, that leads south from the Arc de Triomphe to the Seine, on the top floor of a building constructed in 1914.  Breathtaking art nouveau marks the furnishings of the maisonette–apartment, with wrought–iron lattices on the surrounding gallery and a gold–colored fireplace.   This all contrasts the modern art on the walls.  

Jörg Hillebrand: Mr. Eschenbach, the last time we met for an interview it was also about Wagner, more specifically about your debut with Parsifal at the 2000 Bayreuth festival.  Why didn’t you return the year after that to the “Green Hill”?

Christoph Eschenbach: I couldn’t fulfill the second year of the contract because I had a back problem (attested to by a doctor), lower spine pain that made itself known rather severely when I conducted sitting down.  And in Bayreuth you’ve got to sit when you conduct.  Otherwise the brass section in the deepest part of the pit won’t be able to see you.  My turning it down was in no way connected to the affair in 2000 which ended with Hans Sotin’s departure.  I wasn’t mad at anybody.  Wolfgang Wagner behaved himself superbly in this whole matter.  He stood by me and advised me as to how we should proceed together.  My hat goes off to him!

JH: Well then, as a sort of compensation, your first “Ring.”  What, in your opinion, is the message of the tetralogy?   

CE: It’s about the state of the world and the state of the gods.  Both situations are morose.  It’s about corruption, broken contracts, oaths, perjury, and swindles and deception.  It’s also about “dope,” about drugs.  In short, it’s about everything that’s ghastly these days.  But nevertheless, at the end, there’s a glimmer of hope.

JH: Do you have any role models among the Wagner conductors of the past?

CE: I got to see quite a bit, even in Bayreuth.  As a student, I spent many summers in the orchestra pit, even sitting in the middle of the score and observing the conductors from the front.   I got to see Knappertsbusch, Böhm, Cluytens, the young Maazel and the young Sawallisch.  But for the “Ring,” I emphatically wiped everything that was there out of my head.  The only thing remaining was the score.  And all of a sudden it wasn’t that hard to learn the piece or to find a personal approach to it.  I didn’t even listen to any records, because I really wanted to tackle it from a new angle.  If  you can mention anything akin to a role model, it would be von Karajan’s “Ring,” which lacks Knappertbusch’s weightiness and blackness and offers a very large array of colors.      

JH: Is it hard to play Wagner with French musicians?

CE: No, not at all.  They were completely prepared beforehand.  Many of them came with scores to the first auditions.  And from the first reading to the last “Twilight of the Gods,” not one musician called in sick.  I’m very proud of my orchestra.  The musicians are completely impassioned by this work, and they’ve told and shown me that in many different ways.  It’s really something that, even still before the last performance, a bass group is sitting and practicing in the pit one hour before the show, or that an English horn player is warming up an hour and a half before we start.

JH: You’ve been conducting the Paris orchestra for about six years now.  Our reviewer Manuel Brug once classified it as notoriously second–rate.

CE: That’s not true.

JH: How would you categorize the orchestra qualitatively and with respect to its repertoire in the French music scene?

CE: In France, it’s quite obviously the best.  And I’ve really diversified the program as far as the repertoire is concerned.  Incidentally, my predecessors (for example, Barenboim) also did that, but I introduced even more Neue Musik.  And right at the beginning, I invited Marc–André Dalbavie to be the composer–in–residence.  We’ve performed world premieres by Dusapin, Manoury, Matalon and other French composers, as well as pieces by contemporaries from other nations.  For example with Truls Mørk, we just put on the world premiere of a cello concert by Matthias Pintscher.  It was a stupendous piece, very broad and long, almost like a cello symphony.

JH: Marc–André Dalbavie was the composer–in–residence for the lengthy period of four years.  What do you like about his music in particular?

CE: The spaciousness.  At first he composed more spectral pieces in which orchestra groups were divided up in the audience or on different tiers.  And in the pieces that were no longer spectral, he managed nevertheless to bring in this feeling of space, either in some form of  “Color” or “Ciaccona.”  I’m fascinated by it.  I’m fascinated by the space around music in general.  How space sounds.  I don’t mean the concert hall, but the space in and of itself, the amplitude of musical declaration.

JH: Let’s jump over the big pond to America, but let’s stay with Neue Musik.  As principal conductor in Houston, you rendered outstanding services to your American contemporaries, as well as allocated numerous composition contracts.  And in your opening concert as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, you’ve already gotten the ball rolling with the world premiere of Gerald Levinson’s “Avatar.”  What role does contemporary American music play in your programs?

CE: A large one, although I try to avoid what principal conductors of other American orchestras do, i.e., concentrate exclusively on American music.  Because to me American music is not that terribly interesting.  The regression in style and the desire to make yourself loved by the public are traits I can’t stand.  Many composers that were once good now unfortunately tend to do this.  But there are today still a few good ones, for example Peter Lieberson.  Augusta Read Thomas is particularly good and I’ve already given her many contracts.  One time in Hamburg I worked her into the program with Mozart’s Requiem.  I started by breaking off in the middle of the ninth bar of “Lacrimosa” and went right into a similarly set up choral work by Augusta.  It was an enormous success.  In Philadelphia, on the other hand, it was far from an enormous success.  Here you can see that the audience’s taste is heading in the wrong direction.  But I’m slowly getting my audience in Philadelphia also used to composers like Rihm and Pintscher.

JH: You’ve been letting composers introduce their works to the Philadelphia public.  Has that helped in their understanding or enjoyment of the works?

CE: Yes, very much so.  Just the fact that I say three words then call the composer up on stage has a certain show effect.  I remember Oliver Knussen asking beforehand: “What am I supposed to say?  It’s all spelled out in the program.”  I said: “You don’t need to say a word about the piece.  You can talk about your grandmother.”  Which is exactly what he ended up doing.  All that needs to be proven is that the composer is alive, that he’s a human being and not some sort of monster.   That breaks the ice.  After that, the audience experiences the piece in a different way than they would have otherwise.  

JH: Last year the Philadelphia Orchestra signed a three–year contract with Ondine, which provides for the orchestra to produce the master recordings itself and let the record label see to the rest.  What’s the explanation, in your opinion, for this unconventional setup?

CE: First and foremost, the orchestra wants to keep the recordings in its possession.  You don’t shell out an enormous sum in advance only to let the record label take over everything.  The orchestra is highly involved in the licensing.  And should it come to pass that the project’s not working out, someone else could be called in or they could do the whole thing themselves.

JH: On the occasion of your first recording together, our reviewer Attila Csampai wrote that the spirit of Eugene Ormandy still marks the orchestra’s character and that you felt seemingly at home in that tradition.  Do you?

CE: I don’t feel at home in any tradition, but I select traditions in order to analyze them better.

JH: Does Ormandy’s ghost still haunt Philadelphia?

CE: No, that’s only in people’s imagination.  If there are any ghosts, there’s Stokowski’s.  Stokowski experimented a lot with the orchestra.  He introduced “free bowing.”  That’s when string players don’t carry out a simultaneous bow change and can use more than one bow stroke per tone, which yields a bigger sound.  That’s what Ormandy took over.  Of course, he definitely left his mark in his forty–four years of conducting the orchestra.   But come on: these are new musicians.  Maybe three of them played under Ormandy.  
 
JH: Your first recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Ondine was also your first production on SACD.  Do you see in this medium the future of classical recording albums?

CE: Yes, of course.  I think that in a year’s time, there’ll hardly be any recordings that don’t use this system.

JH: What advantages does multi–channel technology give classical music recordings?

CE: It brings the concert hall into your home.  Even into the homes of older people who no longer go to concerts.

JH: The Philadelphia Orchestra has a relatively new concert hall, the Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2001.  After your opening concert there in 2003, Wolfgang Sandner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported room acoustic problems, particularly regarding the balance between soli and tutti, as well as between the strings and wind instruments.  Have these problems since been dealt with?

CE: The sound in Verizon Hall was very dry and tight at first.  It had to be opened up somehow.  It was discovered that certain mistakes had been committed during construction and that the rules of acoustics had not been observed.  We worked on it a lot together with architect Russell Johnson and his team.  Now the hall sounds very good, actually.  

JH: The next work appearing in Ondine is Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which is truly an often–played piece.  The Philadelphia Orchestra alone has recorded it seven times in its history.  What did you do in order to bring out something new?

CE: I didn’t bother too much about tradition.

JH: So again no listening to records?    

CE: No, although I worked in the famous “Philadelphia sound,” which is very good for Tchaikovsky and can be summoned with almost no legerdemain.
                
JH: What else is going to be put out?

CE: We’d like to record some Mahler because the orchestra hasn’t done that in a while.  Ormandy only performed three or four symphonies, Riccardo Muti just one, while Sawallisch didn’t do any.  Now the time has come and the orchestra plays Mahler outstandingly well.  Then we’ll probably continue with some more Tchaikovsky.

JH: Cyclically, thus including the three early symphonies?

CE: That’s my goal because I love them so much.  I can’t say, however, anything more precise about it.  Since the orchestra owns the recordings, it’s very closely linked to the process of the recordings’ coming into being.  We have an “artistic committee” and a “media committee” that both have a say in the matter.

JH: The Orchestre de Paris is also still recording on Ondine.  Four symphonies by Albert Roussel have been announced.  Please introduce this composer to your fellow countrymen.

CE: Albert Roussel is a very underrated composer who speaks in his own language.  The second symphony, for example, is very exciting.  It sounds like music to a Hitchcock film.

JH: Where would Roussel be categorized in the French music tradition?

CE: He’d be somewhat all over the map.  There are, naturally, certain late impressionist aspects, but also some very dramatic eccentricities that really constitute a symphonic cosmos.

JH: In July you’ll be playing with the orchestra of the Schleswig–Holstein festival on double duty as both conductor and pianist for a Mozart piano concert.  And together with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is the first half of his “Seasons,” your first solo recording in thirty years.  Are you finally returning to the piano?

CE: That’s not what this means.  I might end up mulling over whether I should record the remaining “Seasons” or perhaps other Tchaikovsky pieces.  I might.

JH: What as a pianist have you learned from conducting?

CE: What I used to want to do, i.e. play oboe, cello or trumpet on the piano, I manage to do when I’m on top of my game.

JH: The last time we met, you were Principal Conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra, but living in a hotel in Hamburg with a home in Houston still.  Where is your home now?

CE: In Philadelphia.

JH: And where is your homeland?

CE: Inside of me.   A homeland is no place for me.