I have a love/ hate affair with writing. Except when it's hate/ hate.

[tree_and_leaf]

I have also been re-reading Hermann Kant's Die Aula, a heavily autobiographical story about an East German journalist who is looking back on the three years he spent after the war preparing for university, thanks to a new programme for bright proletarians who had to leave school without qualifications - and trying (a) to work out why the most talented and enthusiastic member of the class is now running a pub in Hamburg, and (b) to avoid confronting the fact that he betrayed his best friend out of jealousy, in a way we only discover towards the end of the book.

Which makes it sound very gloomy, but it's actually extremely funny, and written in a witty and allusive style. It's about how the past shapes us, but also about how we remember the past - and how we write stories about it. So the first sentence is still curiously recognisable to anyone who's trying to get words down on paper:

There's this man, he sits over a typewriter, smokes too much, blows dust off the keys, bites into an apple and thinks of Schiller,* stares at the empty paper and then at the clock, scrapes away at the sticky lower-case a until it's clean again, has yet another cigarette on the go, and he calls all that work.

He's lying in wait for a thought.†

(Da sitzt einer über seiner Schreibmaschine, raucht zuviel, bläst Staub von den Tasten, beißt in einen Apfel und denkt an Schiller dabei, starrt auf das leere Papier und dann auf die Uhr, kratzt an dem verklebten kleinen a herum, bis es wieder sauber ist, und nennt das alles Arbeit.

Er lauert auf einen Gedanken.)

*Schiller used to leave apples in his desk and not find them until someone else noticed the rotting smell...

† Perhaps unsurprisingly, no sooner has our hero found the thought, than he gets a telegram inviting him to give a speech celebrating the educational programme, now to be abolished, which he will spend the reset of the book trying to write. He never does get to give it.

Comments

[mk-tortie.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds like a book I should read once I actually have some free time! Thanks for the heads up :)

[tree_and_leaf]

I probably ought to warn you that Kant is very pro-DDR (which is not normally something I go for) - though I think he actually reveals more of what was wrong with the system than he thinks he is. It's a good book, anyway - evocative, funny,† and very informative.

† The hero would like to relate an edifying anecdote about how he was turned on to books during his time as a POW, but unfortunately the book that turned him on was "Gone With The Wind" and a crush on Scarlett O'Hara....

[mk-tortie.livejournal.com]

Pro-DDR is not a problem - in fact I went to a really interesting lecture at the HU about DDR literature in the 1940s and 50s from some of the very hardline writers and the creation of 'communist fathers' and a communist history for East Germany through literature.

I think he actually reveals more of what was wrong with the system than he thinks he is.

It's amazing how often East German authors (and film directors) seem to do this - I think actually even the most committed communists amongst them recognised that the system was not perfect and some changes/reforms needed to happen, it's just that they were not intending to work against socialism, but rather improve it for everyone.

Anyway... I'll stop regurgitating bits of my dissertation now! Sorry! I'm definitely going to go and see if the book is in the King's library, anyway, it sounds pretty good.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, that's about the size of it with Kant, I think (he's certainly critical of some of the things that happened in the early period, and with the exception of Our Hero's first boss, who is a bad lot, virtually all the characters who end up in the West (being miserable, of course) are sympathetic and their reasons for going were related to bad things which had happened to them in the DDR.

Did you ever read Ole Bienenkopp?

I'm definitely going to go and see if the book is in the King's library, anyway, it sounds pretty good.

Yay! I'd be surprised if it isn't - it used to be on quite a lot of undergraduate reading lists, and it was quite popular in West Germany, too (it's still in print).

[caulkhead.livejournal.com]

I missed the Hermann first time round, and got very confused...

This is so very familiar. And explains why my keyboard at work is so pristine.

[tree_and_leaf]

I've been trying to imagine "Die Aula" as written by I Kant, and... er, can't.

The fascinating thing about Die Aula is that it's so precisely observed that there are bits that you immediately recognise in a basically very alien setting.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I really like the sound of that book. Is there an English translation? Or would I have to wrestle with the original German? (I did A level, but my German is now very rusty. THough better reading than speaking)

[tree_and_leaf]

Not that I've been able to track down, alas (it was translated into a number of languages, but English doesn't seem to have been one of them). The German's fairly easy, though - no Thomas Mann-esque Page Long Sentences Of Doom. It's a really good book, and worth wrestling with German for (though of course that doesn't exactly make it relaxing reading...)

The story involves China, albeit rather tangentially (and in a way that can't really be explained without spoiling the plot).

Every now and then I contemplate writing fanfic on Aula..