Poets and Patriots

Today I'm moving on from novellas to poetry, with a couple of short works I randomly threw together.  Of course, as is often the case, if you look hard enough, you can find connections anywhere - and today I didn't have to look very hard at all...  Fasten your seat-belts; today sees us crossing the Rhine (in style, of course!).

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First up today is Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, a late-18th-century pastoral story of a rural romance.  Hermann, an innkeeper's son, is out one day offering supplies to refugees fleeing from the French troops who have pushed the Germans back over the Rhine.  Suddenly he sees a beautiful, gentle maiden who is taking care of a woman and her child - and, well, you can guess the rest...  After a brief trip home, Hermann returns with a couple of friends, determined to find out more about the lovely Dorothea and, if possible, to bring her home as his wife.

While I originally had my doubts, Hermann und Dorothea is actually poetry, written in unrhyming hexameters.  I only found this out after the event though - you see, my Kindle version didn't keep the original lines, leaving me thinking that it was stilted prose with capital letters in funny places :(

There is a rather political background to this work.  The setting is a time when there was no German nation, just an abstract dream of uniting hundreds of independent fiefdoms which shared a (fairly) common language and heritage.  Goethe is setting up his two characters as examples of Germanic ideals, prime caring Teutonic citizens who work hard for the common good.

To be honest though, this was not my kind of story.  I found it simple and uninspiring, and the resolution was never in doubt.  I really didn't like the writing much either - its focus on dialogue over description was disappointing.  I hate to say it, but this might be another Goethe nominee for a Golden Turkey (the second nomination in a row!).  For one of the undisputed greats of world literature, Goethe really doesn't have a very high strike-rate around these parts ;)

*****
Moving on fifty years or so (it's lucky that the bus has time travel as a standard feature...), we're crossing the Rhine once more - in the same direction, but with very different feelings.  The German poet Heinrich Heine spent most of his later life in self-imposed exile in Paris, reluctant to expose himself to danger from the ever-present Prussian censors.  Like any good German though, he did get homesick, and the result of one of his rare journeys home resulted in the poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter's Tale).

The poem, preceded by a prose introduction, is the story of Heine's journey (as shown on the map) across the border, up through the Rhine country and Westphalia, to his family home in Hamburg.  As he presses further into his home country, he describes the landscape, the people and the institutions with quick wit and poetic licence - and his opinions are rarely favourable.  He comes to bury the Prussians, not to praise them...

Things have changed since the writing of Hermann und Dorothea, and not for the better.  German unification is only a matter of decades away, but it will be achieved under the jackboot (and I use the word deliberately) of the powerful state of Prussia.  The creation of a major German-speaking state is to be achieved not by a coming together of minds, but by one state gobbling up dozens of others and becoming a major player in European politics.  When English speakers today think of typical negative German stereotypes, it's often the legacies of the Prussians that we have in mind.

Heine despises the Prussian authoritarianism and misses no opportunity to mock its people and institutions:

"Noch immer das hölzern pedantische Volk,
Noch immer ein Rechter Winkel
In jeder Bewegung, und im Gesicht
Der eingefrorene Dünkel" (Caput III)

"They're still the same wooden, pedantic folk,
And still with ninety degrees
In every movement, and in their face
Darkness in a deep freeze" *

* Translated very loosely to keep the rhyme ;)

As a native of Hamburg says, after the fire that destroyed much of the city, the other German states were quick to offer aid:

"Man schickte uns Kleider und Betten genug,
Auch Brot und Fleisch und Suppen!
Der König von Preußen wollte sogar
Uns schicken seine Truppen." (Caput XXI)

"They sent us all clothes and bedding enough,
With bread and meat and soups!
The King of Prussia even desired
To send us all his troops."

It may sound at times as if the poet hates his home country, but that is not the case.  In fact he's very patriotic - he just has a different idea of what this means to the people who are in charge...

I did enjoy Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, but it wasn't the beautiful poetry I had been expecting.  It seems more like comedy at times, a little slapstick and verging on limerick-style in places.  In his introduction, Heine says that in getting the book past the censor, some of the bite has had to be extracted, and that there is, perhaps, too much humour. I would certainly agree that the satire is a lot tamer than it might have been.

Despite that though, it does make for good reading, and it's probably a good one for anyone wanting to try something in German.  The short sections, and the straight-forward verse, make it a fairly simple read, even if you're a little short on confidence.  All in all, Heine's poem is entertaining stuff - and certainly not what I was expecting...

There's this bloke...

There's this bloke, you may have heard of him, German writer, goes by the name of Goethe - yep, that's the man.  Anyway, this is about a few of his writing things, you know, books, I mean.  He's not a bad writer, you know...

Immense understatement aside, basically Goethe is to German literature what Shakespeare is to English literature, and nobody with more than a passing interest in reading German can really avoid picking up one of his works before long.  Last year, I read Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, a rollicking, emotion-charged epistolary novel, and this year I have added to that with a bit more prose (I'm leaving Faust, his most famous work, until I'm a bit more confident in my German - like never...), so here are a few brief, confused thoughts on some of his works.

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Earlier this year, I spent a good two weeks tussling with a monster of a book, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship), the first Bildungsroman and an absolute classic of German literature.  Wilhelm Meister, the son of a middle-class trader, is earmarked to step into his father's shoes; however, he has a passion for the theatre - and women -, and this leads him to decide to break out on his own and follow his passion(s).  A naive, young man, Wilhelm makes a multitude of mistakes during his travels, but the sum of his experiences will make him into the successful man he is to later become.

In this (rather thick) book, Goethe is asking us to be patient towards the young, putting forward an idea of youth as a time for experimentation, a chance to follow your dreams (which was not as self-evident then as it can be now).  It's all very interesting, but it did drag a little, and there are times when you wish that Wilhelm would hurry up and reach maturity a little faster...  In short, it's not one for the casual reader, unless that casual reader is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature (which you may well be - I know my readers are extremely erudite).  Werther, while rather melodramatic and over-the-top at times, would be a much better introduction to the great man's work for most of us.

*****

Not all of Goethe's prose is lengthy though, and our next example is fairly brief.  Novelle is a, well, novella, written according to what Goethe decided novellas should be (and when Goethe decided something, there were usually people with chisels and stone tablets on hand).  In this short piece of fiction, a single event is described, a noblewoman's ride out into the countryside of her domain and the effects of a fire which breaks out in a nearby town.  When things go wrong, the writer shows us two ways of dealing with the same problem, allegories for dealing with issues in real life.

While not wanting to disagree with Herr Goethe though (sorry, Herr von Goethe), I was less than impressed with this brief story.  It's the sort of work which is better appreciated by literary theorists than readers, twenty or thirty pages of pretty words and little action which stops very abruptly (and I did check to make sure my e-version was complete...).  Having said that, it is short though, so you won't have to devote a lot of time to finding out for yourself :)

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Luckily, my final choice for today was far more satisfying than Novelle - when I actually managed to find the whole text.  Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, which could possibly be translated as Entertainments of German Emigrés, is an intriguing work, consisting of seven stories of varying length contained and augmented by a frame narrative, the start of which takes up a good chunk of the book.  A family of nobles is displaced by the advances of the invading French troops, and, after a political quarrel upsets the peace in their temporary home, they all decide to ignore the events of the outside world and get along in harmony by telling each other interesting stories (the Unterhaltungen of the title).

Some of the stories are very brief, just a page or two, while others are regular short-story length, and most of them are retellings of traditional stories, specially treated by Goethe for this collection.  There is a moral element to the collection as most of the stories turn on the behaviour of the main protagonist, a bad decision or a moral weakness leading to an interesting twist in the tale.  The exception among the seven, however, is the final tale, Das Märchen (The Fairytale), which is a wild, radically-imaginative story which screams 'allegory' at a hundred paces and seems almost out of place amongst its more sedate counterparts.  In fact, it is often removed from this collection and published together with Novelle (which it effortlessly overshadows) in a single book.  The Will-o'-the-Wisps, the kings, the giant, the snake, the ferryman, the hero...  yes, they are (intentionally) allegorical, but I won't tell you what it's all about - that's what the internet's for :)

And what was that about the whole text, I hear you cry in chorus?  Well, as I started my e-text, it quickly dawned upon me that there was something funny about what I was reading, as if it was built upon a premise I was unaware of.  A quick check on German Wikipedia confirmed that my version (and, as it later transpired, virtually every other e-version floating around) was a drastically-reduced effort, containing only three stories - and none of the frame story...  So, after quickly rejecting the option of giving up (it's all for you, dear reader!), I managed to somehow find a complete online text, and with a bit of copy and paste, alter format, convert to PDF, upload to Kindle thingamajiggery, I was able to enjoy the whole text.  Brilliant :)  And, what's better, it was well worth it ;)

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So, to summarise today's lecture:

  Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - Interesting, but long, and not one for the novice.

  Novelle - A bit over my head and not my favourite bit of G-Lit (to put it mildly).

  Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten - Very entertaining, and difficult to source electronically (even in German!).

That's all for today, but never fear: there'll be more German-language delights very soon :)

Review Post 3 - Of Novels and Telenovelas

OK, no more poetry - I promise...

On finishing The Iliad, I decided (naturally enough) that it was time to read something a little lighter, so my eyes landed on one of the Roddy Doyle books sprawled across one of my long-suffering bookshelves (note to self - operation Bookshelf Overhaul is long overdue!). Most people will have heard of or read (or, more likely, seen) Doyle's The Commitments, the first of the Barrytown trilogy (also the setting for Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha), and The Van is the third of these novels. Set in Dublin in the wondrous year of 1990, amidst the backdrop of the Republic of Ireland's first trip to the World Cup (something more important than non-football followers could ever imagine), The Van takes Jimmy Rabbitte snr. as its main protagonist, following his experiences from unemployment to setting up a mobile fish and chip shop, the van of the title, with his best friend, Bimbo.

It's written in Doyle's usual funny, yet profound, style, giving us an insight into the day of a man who, undereducated and unemployed, has been left to make his own way through the week, drifting from the local golf course to the park, with the occasional pint or two in the evening when he can afford it. The reader can really empathise with Jimmy and his struggle to adapt to time spent alone after an adult life of work (although I, for one, would be quite happy with a bit more spare time), and his attempts to make himself useful to his family are faintly noble.

Doyle also uses the book to muse on adult male relationships, taking the long-term friendship of Jimmy and Bimbo and subjecting it to the pressure-cooker environment (or should that be deep-frier environment?) of their fledgling business. As the money comes in, emotions start to fray: the role reversal whereby the usually dominant Jimmy becomes Bimbo's side-kick, and then employee, places a great strain on their friendship until the tension becomes too much for other people to bear. Now, how do you resolve something like that...

While the gradual breakdown of a lifelong friendship and the nostalgic joy of reliving the halcyon days of Italia '90 made this a pleasure to read, the enjoyment of this novel was tainted at times by the handling of the role of women. Jimmy and his friends have a voyeuristic tendency, and women (and some girls on the cusp of attaining womanhood) are used mainly as objects to be ogled - and later pursued. I'm not doubting the reality of what Doyle has written; it's easy to believe that someone of a certain age, in a time and setting far from today's, would act as Jimmy would and not really think anything of it. It just made me feel a little uncomfortable (and I have seen a couple of reviewers who have agreed with me). That may well have been the point, but this book could well have done with a little more female perspective. Where I felt sorry for Jimmy towards the start of the book, by the end I was a little ambivalent towards him and his greasy endeavours. Which is a shame.

*****

One author who never finds me ambivalent is Thomas Hardy, whose works I started reading again last year (and will continue to enjoy in 2010). After the rolling farmlands of Far from the Madding Crowd and the ominous heaths of The Return of the Native, this time it is the woody glades of Wessex which take centre stage in his novel The Woodlanders.

Grace Melbury, educated beyond her station by her ambitious father, returns to the sylvan Wessex village of Little Hintock unable to fulfil the family promise of a marriage to Giles Winterbourne. Instead, she succumbs to the advances of a local doctor, an outsider from a higher social background, but with lower morals. I think we can all see that there won't be many happily ever afters here...

It's a lovely little read, if not a patch on his major works, and, as always, you can almost imagine yourself transported to the leafy glades by Hardy's measured prose (even if he never uses a couple of short words where a complicated - and occasionally invented - Greek-based word will do). The book abounds with love triangles and unrequited passions, and the moral seems to be to choose wisely before rushing into wedlock, especially if you're marrying above/below your station. Hardy also reflects on the unfairness of the law, particularly as regards the differing ease with which men and women were able to obtain divorces in olden days (I wonder if he'd be happier now...). Something to reflect on when remembering your wedding vows.

*****

Where Hardy is restraint and pastoral calm, my most recent book is passion and despair, usually in equal and mixed up proportions. Just as you may have heard that some bloke called Shakespeare is a fairly famous writer of English, you've probably come across the name Goethe in the context of German literature. As an avid reader, and a modern languages graduate, I am a little ashamed to say that I had never read anything by the great man - until now, that is.

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) is an epistolary (or letter form) novel, in which the Werther of the title, a young, romantic German, pours out the contents of his overflowing heart to his friend Wilhelm. Escaping city life for nature, Werther settles in a small town where he meets the angelic Lotte - and promptly falls head-over-heels in love. Sadly, despite their mutual understanding and attraction, their relationship can only be platonic as Lotte is promised to another man. So begins Werther's slow spiral into depression, madness and suicide...

This novel is one of the most famous Sturm und Drang works, and it is certainly stormy. On reading the first part of the novel, I was blown away by the intensity of the writing and the openness of emotion which Goethe breathed into his literary alter-ego. Werther is actually a mixture of the young Goethe's own obsession with a young woman called Lotte and the fate of a friend who ended his life at an early age. Although embarrassed by this early work later in life (he was only 25 when he wrote this - bloody geniuses...), it was an instant Europe-wide hit and found many admirers and Werther copycats. Of course, the church was not so happy with Goethe as some of those copycats went a little too far; in fact, the work was seen as an apology for those committing suicide.

A word of warning for anyone wanting to read this book in German; written in 1774, you may be a little surprised by what you see on the page. The original text varies ever so slightly from modern German, with several common and consistent spelling conventions different from today's, slight grammatical variations and a few vocabulary peculiarities. In fairness though, once you have waded through a few pages (removing redundant 'h's and swapping a few vowels around), it is surprisingly easy to read, provided you have a fairly high standard of German (and a high tolerance for chest beating, hair pulling and teeth gnashing).
Is it any good? Definitely. The prose is breath-takingly vivid at times, and Goethe drags the reader along as Werther swings between the highs of his halcyon days in Lotte's company to the lows of his attempts to come to terms with the impossibility of his desires. While the cynic in me did at times long to give him a slap and say "get over it, you cretin", it was a small voice at the back of my head and was usually drowned out by the passion Werther poured into his outbursts of grief and declarations of love.

Ready for Faust? I might give it a few months...

*****

From the sublime to the ridiculous we go as I explain what that i-Pod is doing amongst the books in my post photo. Well, having eventually succumbed to the temptation of upgrading my trusty, battered old i-Pod Mini to a sleek new Classic before Christmas, and having finally got around to upgrading my internet connection to Broadband, I am now able to download video podcasts (and able to time that process with a watch rather than a calendar). Which brings me to Alisa - Folge deinem Herzen (Alisa - Follow your Heart), a telenovela which has been running on the German channel ZDF since March last year.

Now, you may not think of me as the type of person to be obsessed with kitschy telly programmes (and you'd be right - I'm far too intellectual for all that. No, really...), but watching rubbish is a great way to practice languages. I think I got more from watching a couple of years of the soap opera Unter Uns than from three years of German at university. As a language teacher myself, I encourage students to watch programmes like Neighbours and Home and Away as they model the kind of language people use every day - and there's a limit to how much news the average language student really wants to watch.

Anyway, Alisa runs for about 40 minutes every day, Monday to Friday, and follows the trials and tribulations of Alisa Lenz, who has come back to live with her adopted parents in the small town of Schönroda after a failed business (and relationship) in Berlin. The angelic-looking Alisa, played by Teresa Scholze (who, were she British, would be a certainty to be playing Cinderella in pantomime next Christmas), stumbles across Christian, a sensitive, good-looking man (I don't know the actor's name, but I bet he's played Prince Charming a few times in his career) who happens to be the son and heir of the powerful local Castellhof family. Can you see where this is going yet?

In her first week in Schönroda, Alisa manages to seriously annoy Christian's uncle (who is then revealed to be the one interviewing her for her new job), save Christian's sister from drowning and get on the wrong side of Christian's fiancee, Ellen (who, conveniently, is as dark and brooding as Alisa is blonde and bubbly; good witch - evil witch, anyone?). Throw in a stereotypically over-exuberant Italian woman who, despite speaking perfect German, has a huge accent and starts every sentence with an Italian word, a mean supervisor who has been instructed to get rid of Alisa at all costs and a family doctor who appears to be keeping a dark secret about one of the Castellhofs, and you have the set-up for the rest of the show. Oh, did I mention that Alisa accidentally saw Ellen in flagrante with Christian's Uncle Oskar in his office on her first day of work? Now if this series does not end in a wedding, I'll eat my i-Pod.


While it's depressing how low your standards sink when you're looking for free programmes in a foreign language, I must confess that it's all good entertainment. Yes, the dialogue is stilted, the characters are caricatures, and everyone has more secrets than I could hope to accumulate in a lifetime. Still, it's a pleasant way to while away an idle hour, and we can't be reading Goethe all the time now, can we?

Oh, alright, I admit it: I'm addicted...