Walter Abish was born in Austria, but spent his childhood in Shanghai, where his family were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1949 the whole family moved to Israel and he reloacted the United States in 1957, becoming an American citizen in 1960.
Abish is not a prolific writer. He has only published three novels, three collections of short stories, one book of poetry and one autobiography. His novel ‘How German Is It’ is his most famous work although when he wrote it in 1979 he had never actually set foot to Germany!
I first read this about 20 years ago and I’ve read it again after it occurred to me that it is a book that helps to define ‘hauntology’, currently something of a buzz word when discussing folk music, contemporary cinema and fiction. For Abish’s novel is strongly focused on the spectres of the past and in particular how this has an impact on national identity.
It is a book about remembering and forgetting.
Abish examines how far it is appropriate to set the past aside when the memories are so horrific. In Germany, most would prefer to be selective about its history, celebrating cultural achievements like the architectural glory of Gothic and Baroque churches or the sublime music of Bach rather than dwelling on the squalid barbarism of the Nazi regime.
Abish is quite experimental in style. He uses a lot of repetition as if to burn his themes in the reader’s mind and often gives only fragments of conversations to force us to imagine the rest. There is no real plot as he is more interested in character studies than any strongly defined storyline.
The main two characters are brothers who are doing very nicely thank you in the ‘new’ Germany. The fact that their father was executed in 1944 for plotting against the Third Reich is something that generates more embarrassment than pride. They are contrasting personalities , Ulrich Hargenau is a novelist full of self doubts and frustrations; his brother Helmuth is an egocentric architect whose lifestyle reflects his main interests of status and women.
The main events take place in new town of Brunholdstein which was built on the foundations of a concentration camp. The town is symbolic of the “new democratic Germany” with the average age of the population being just 29. The town is variously described as “opulent”, “antiseptic”, “over-priced” and “flourishing”. It represents a forward looking country that is full of efficiency and opportunity; “where people were no longer measured by class, upbringing, loyalties, but by their achievements as human beings”.
The town was formerly know as Durst , a town with “no official history” although people are well aware that thousands were transported there during WWII.
One key character in the novel who is not inclined to let bygones be bygones is Franz who in his spare time is building a matchstick model of the camp of Durst. Abish doesn’t beat about the bush in showing us what this pastime represents for he is essentially remembering what others are conveniently choosing to forget.: “What he was doing was to evoke in the people he knew a sense of uncertainty, a sense of doubt, a sense of dismay, a sense of disgust”.
To try to efface the memory of the past, Brumholdstein is named after a well respected (but largely unread) philosopher. Ernst Brumhold a fictional creation but one most scholarly Germans would recognise as Martin Heidegger. The irony here is deliberate. The real life Heidegger’s weighty reflections on being and time were undermined by the fact that he was a supporter of National Socialism and by the fact that he once wrote “The German people must choose its future, and this future is bound to the Fuhrer”.
For me, Abish is saying that you have to confront the truth of the past before you can move forward with dignity. The out of sight but out of mind approach is shown to be fatally flawed. This is evident in Brumholdstein when , while fixing a broken sewage pipe, the pavement collapses to reveal a mass grave and as Abish notes near the end of the novel : “Sooner or later, every German, young or old, male or female, will come across some description in a book, or newspaper, or magazine of those grim events in the concentration camps, and not necessarily the remote ones in Poland but camps in the heart of Germany”.
