Paul Reitter in TLS

Can a bad economy make for great poetry? Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought so. Indeed, he saw his own gift for lyrical writing and reflection as being, in a way, a consequence of the stock market crash of 1873. This self-understanding starts with the fact that Hofmannsthal was conceived at the very moment of the bust. His father, a banker, got word of it soon after arriving in Naples for his honeymoon. Cutting his trip short, he hurried back to Vienna, where he was able to confirm that the family fortune, which stemmed from his silk-trading, noble “von”-earning, devoutly Jewish grandfather, had evaporated. But even harder hit, Hofmannsthal believed, was his mother. She already suffered from weak nerves; according to him, the cause was the tumultuous context of her own birth: the revolutions of 1848. When financial worries came, she dealt with them poorly. In Hofmannsthal’s view his mother’s stress imprinted itself on him in the womb. Its mark was the special sensitivity of the poet.

SPIEGEL

Austrian director Michael Haneke discusses his shocking new film, “The White Ribbon,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, his penchant for gloomy stories that unnerve his viewers and his unsettling view of humanity.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Haneke, you won the Palme d’Or in Cannes this year for your shocking film “The White Ribbon.” Now Germany is even sending you, as an Austrian, to represent it in Hollywood at the Oscars. Let’s hope the Oscar jury won’t have to go into therapy after all that bleakness.

Haneke: Bleakness?! My film contains a beautiful love story, which isn’t bleak, and there are moments of tenderness. But I am stereotyped for portraying only our dark sides. I believe that I love people, but even the most likeable people don’t come with a guarantee that they’ll always remain likeable. Each of us is capable of anything. It just takes being in the right situation.

SPIEGEL: “The White Ribbon” portrays a German village in 1913 and 1914, shortly before the beginning of World War I, in which mysterious acts of violence occur. The human relationships in the village are deeply troubled. There are no heroes, and there is no salvation. Do you really have such a negative view of humanity?

Haneke: My view of humanity isn’t negative. But the world in which we live is dominated by disorders. I believe that the purpose of drama is to illustrate conflicts and it’s something I take seriously. …

An excerpt:

Everything I have I carry with me.
Or: everything that’s mine I carry on me.

I carried everything I had. It wasn’t actually mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or somebody else’s. The pigskin suitcase was a gramophone box. The dust coat was from my father. The town coat with the velvet neckband from my grandfather. The breeches from my Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees from our neighbour, Herr Carp. The green gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret silk scarf and the toilet bag were mine, gifts from recent Christmases.

The war was still on in January 1945. Shocked that, in the depths of winter, I was to be taken who-knows-where by the Russians, everyone wanted to give me something that would be useful, maybe, even if it didn’t help. Because nothing on earth could help. It was irrevocable: I was on the Russians’ list, so everyone gave me something – and drew their own conclusions as they did. I took the things and, at the age of seventeen, drew my own conclusion: the timing was right for going away. I could have done without the list being the reason, but if things didn’t turn out too badly, it would even be good for me. I wanted away from this thimble of a town, where all the stones had eyes. I wasn’t so much afraid as secretly impatient. And I had a bad conscience because the list that caused my relatives such anguish was, for me, tolerable. They feared that in another country something might happen to me. I wanted to go to a place that did not know me.

Something had already happened to me. Something forbidden. It was strange, dirty, shameless, and beautiful. It happened in the park with all the alders, away at the back, beyond the short-grass hills. On the way home, I went to the centre of the park, into the round pavilion where, on public holidays, the orchestras would play. I remained seated for a while. The light pierced the finely-carved wood. I could see the fear of the empty circles, squares, and quadrilaterals – white tendrils with claws linking them. It was the pattern of my aberration, and the pattern of the horror in the face of my mother. In this pavilion I swore to myself: I’m never coming back to this park. …

Simon Callow welcomes an incomparable portrait of an awesome writer

In terms of what we know about them, the contrast between our two greatest men of letters, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, could scarcely be sharper. Of Shakespeare, we know next to nothing; of Dickens we know next to everything. Dickens might well have wished it otherwise: speaking of his great predecessor, he wrote to a correspondent: “It is a great comfort, to my way of thinking, that so little is known about the poet. It is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should come out.”

The mystery of Charles Dickens is quite as profound as that of William Shakespeare, but it is essentially the mystery of art itself and of its roots in the deepest layers of experience and personality. Of the writer’s external life, there is almost an embarrassment of riches. It was a life lived at full tilt. There are times in Michael Slater’s indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject’s expenditure of energy. It’s like being sprayed by the ocean. Even Dickens was astonished at it: “How strange it is,” he said, “to be never at rest!”

John Eliot Gardiner conducts the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. This performance was filmed at the Palau de la Musica Catalana, Barcelona in Dec. 1991.

An extract from The Passport by Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, translated by Martin Chalmers and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail.

Around the war memorial are roses. They form a thicket. So overgrown that they suffocate the grass. Their blooms are white, rolled tight like paper. They rustle. Dawn is breaking. Soon it will be day.

Every morning, as he cycles alone along the road to the mill, Windisch counts the day. In front of the war memorial he counts the years. By the first poplar tree beyond it, where he always hits the same pot hole, he counts the days. And in the evening, when Windisch locks up the mill, he counts the years and the days once again.

He can see the small white roses, the war memorial and the poplar tree from far away. And when it is foggy, the white of the roses and the white of the stone is close in front of him as he rises. Windisch rides on. Windisch’s face is damp, and he rides till he’s there. Twice the thorns on the rose thicket were bare and the weeds underneath were rusty. Twice the poplar was so bare that its wood almost split. Twice there was snow on the paths.

By Jeremy Treglown
Between 1913 and 1915, three part-autobiographical novels were published in London which would eventually be translated all over the world. In each, a clever, emotionally turbulent boy grows up, struggles with his family background and his sexuality, is attracted by the idea of being an artist and sets out into adult life. The writers had very different receptions but by the 1920s all were famous and, as late as 1940, Orwell, in “Inside the Whale”, named them together as among the lasting modern authors. They were D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and W. Somerset Maugham and the novels which, sooner or later, attracted so much attention were Sons and Lovers, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Of Human Bondage.

To say that Maugham is the odd man out may seem to play down the others’ oddity, but he is. Born in 1874, he was the eldest of the three and had already made a considerable name as a writer with the Zolaesque Liza of Lambeth (1897), based on his experiences as a medical student, and with some plays, four of which were running simultaneously in the West End in 1907. As far as the life of a modern artist was concerned, he knew it at first hand, having lived in Paris and become friendly there with a young painter, Gerald Kelly, who worked as an assistant to Rodin and knew Monet, Degas and Cézanne. Kelly, Maugham and one of the first of Maugham’s many unreliable, exploitative young lovers, Harry Philips, ate regularly at Le Chat Blanc, where they were part of a group that included Rodin, Clive Bell and the Irish painter Roderic O’Conor. When Philip Carey, the central character in Of Human Bondage, rejects art for medicine, he is not only making a symbolic statement which – like his subsequently opting for marriage rather than travel – separates him from Paul Morel and Stephen Dedalus, he is also reflecting his author’s experience.

Biographically, there are other important differences. Alone among the three novelists, Maugham took part in the First World War: with skill and sangfroid both as a medical orderly and, later, though not without some failures, as a senior intelligence agent. (The preface to his collection of innovative, influential spy stories, Ashenden, confesses, “In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success”.) He was also the only one of them who lived to be an old man. But while Joyce and Lawrence saw their reputations grow steadily, if never enough to satisfy them, Maugham’s celebrity – he was probably the richest writer in the world, his story “Rain” alone making more than a million dollars mainly from screen and stage adaptations – shrank before his reptilian eyes. …

In the twenty years since the fall of communism, literature has been lifting the fog that had settled over the historical expanses of eastern central Europe. After 1989, uncensored editions of many contemporary classics became available, and numerous authors were discovered for the first time in the West. Meanwhile, a younger generation of writers, their imaginations liberated by events, were quick to respond to the new appetite for understanding the communist past. Katharina Raabe, editor for eastern European literature at Suhrkamp Verlag, surveys some of the most important of these authors and describes German publishers’ role in bringing them to western readers.
More than twenty years ago, “it seemed to the western mind that through the Manichaean division into East and West a whole section of Europe had been swallowed up by the fog”, as the Serbo-Hungarian Jewish writer Danilo Kis put it.[1] Today the fog has lifted. But the landscapes that were once veiled have in some cases altered to the point of being unrecognizable. Kis’ gloomy prediction that this part of Europe would be lost forever has come true in a different way from anything Kis could have thought possible: the Iron Curtain has gone. But could Kis have imagined that whilst for the “Eastern Bloc” the separation was largely peaceful, his own Yugoslavia would sink into bloody wars, ethnic expulsions and massacres?

Today the map of eastern Europe is made up of smaller units, and the boundaries are more numerous. It still seems incredible that the European Union now includes the former Baltic Soviet republics as well as the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, alongside Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. To speak of eastern and western Europe seems a political anachronism. And yet this “eastern Europe” obstinately lingers in the consciousness. …