Martin Walser (1927–2023)

There is a lot of artistic endeavor in this novel. The protagonist is Augustus Baum, a theatre producer in his mid-fifties, who is hospitalized after a stroke. He blacked out in the theatre while rehearsing Chekhov's "The Seagull". He tries to continue working on the play from his hospital bed. His assistant, Lydia, who is also his former lover, visits him daily to report from the theatre and receive his instructions. Baum has also started a relationship with Ute, the young night nurse, who show more falls in love with him although she knows that he is a charmer. And then there is also his wife, a neurologist working in the same hospital, who provides him with his personal breakfast everyday, as she has done for the 29 years of their marriage.
This complicated love story mirrors the one in Chekhov's play, and there are a lot of references to it. They are explained every time, so it is easy to understand the references, although I think it might be more interesting if the reader has actual knowledge of the play.
The artistic endeavor, though, is that the novel itself is almost like a play. The whole story takes place in Baum's hospital room, and is almost exclusively told in direct speech (without inverted commas/quotation marks!). There are only a few lines by a very neutral narrator, and two long letters by an old friend of Baum, who himself is entangled in a ménage à trois with his wife and his gay lover.
Like this, the hospital room becomes a stage, and Baum wants his fellow human beings to play the roles he has assigned to them. When this doesn't work, he feels like a victim, seduced by the evil, evil women and their genitalia.
While I appreciate the idea of writing a novel that is like a play, even like a studio play set in one room with a very limited cast of characters, I fail to see the point in this. I just don't think that the world needs another novel about the sex fantasies of an aging man who feels attacked by women wearing jeans or white blouses, or even just existing. His wife tells him that he uses women like power plugs, taking their energy, and his excuse is that Goethe and Brecht did the same. The power plug is just one of many sexual references, some a bit metaphorical, some very explicit.
So what? Why should this novel even be relevant?
There are so many sexist aspects in this and when I googled it, I was surprised to find almost no negative reviews. The book was published four years before #metoo - but in the meantime, the author has published another book about yet another old man torn between two women and being helpless and despaired because they are too cruel to let him keep both of them. The poor man.
No, thanks. No more Martin Walser for me. show less

One of the most frequently-heard pieces of advice to new writers is that you shouldn't let yourself get drawn into replying to criticisms of your work. This probably applies a fortiori when you've been in the business for the best part of half a century and the critic who's provoked your anger is the most famous arbiter of literary taste in the country. And even more so when your reply takes the form of a savage novel-length personal attack. But Walser was obviously in a William Tell mood in show more 2002, and must have seen himself as the only person in a position to bring the tyrant down...

The target of his wrath was Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013), the most feared and celebrated German literary critic of modern times, well-known to the public as the host of the long-running TV show Literarisches Quartett, on which many distinguished authors saw their work mercilessly torn to shreds. By the time Tod eines Kritikers appeared, Reich-Ranicki and Walser had been skirmishing in public for longer than most viewers of the show had been alive. And it sounded as though they could happily go on doing so for as long as they both survived, like an old married couple.

Something obviously pushed Walser over the edge, though, and he produced this satirical roman-à-clef in which novelist Hans Lach finds himself accused of the murder of the tyrannical TV pundit André Ehrl-König (an obvious allusion to the sinister child-stealing figure in Goethe's poem). Lach's latest novel has just been scathingly dismissed on Ehrl-König's show - in an attack that has Reich-Ranicki's footprints all over it - and he has been heard threatening Ehrl-König at the after-show party. But Lach's neighbour, the historian Michael Landolf, doesn't believe he's capable of violent murder, and sets out to prove his innocence, in a quest that requires him to interview half of literary Munich.

There are a few good jokes, and some satisfyingly postmodern plot twists, and the central point about the relationship between the writer, the expert and the ordinary reader is worth making, but probably not at such length or with so much anger. As Walser lets Landolf discover, the reason Ehrl-König/Reich-Ranicki is so easy to parody is that he is a performer who has learnt to exaggerate his own character traits for the purposes of television. And, as we all know from current politics, people who use that strategy only get stronger when you try to make fun of them.

Walser has got into trouble about supposed antisemitism in his books on several occasions before, and that happened with this book as well. He obviously knew it would: in the book itself, he has journalists absurdly argue that Lach's crime is exacerbated by the fact that he has killed a Jewish critic, even though he didn't actually know that Ehrl-König was of Jewish descent. In real life, critics pointed to the echo of Hitler in Lach's threat "Ab heute nacht Null Uhr wird zurückgeschlagen" and to elements of negative Jewish stereotypes in the portrayal of Ehrl-König. It's probably impossible to say whether Walser is indulging his (supposed) prejudices or simply trolling the press here, particularly when you reflect on how Reich-Ranicki exploited the same kind of Jewish stereotypes to his advantage in his own TV persona. Probably best to leave this one to the German press to argue about. However, what is clear is that there's a lot too much lecherous-old-male fantasising about sex in the book, and that rapidly gets tedious. Female characters are either permanently offstage (like Lach's wife) or they are there to be the object of one or other male character's lust. Yawn! show less

Ehen in Philippsburg was Walser's first novel. It takes a satirical look at bourgeois life in a fictional West German city (probably based largely on Stuttgart) at the height of the Wirtschaftswunder. Whilst poor people are still scraping a living recycling materials they collect on bomb sites, the professional classes are carving out careers in culture, media and politics. Interior decoration, money, PR, fast cars, adultery, a dedication to personal advancement, and a complete disregard for show more anyone else are the keys to this Balzacian world. Each of the four sections of the book takes a different central character and involves a gruesome - but offstage - tragedy for an unimportant person. Philippsburg society goes on regardless.

Although it's clearly very much a fifties novel, in all its cocktail-cabinet radiogramness (and plenty of overlap with British and U.S. writing of the time, as well as with Balzac), there's a lot here that is particularly German, and at least some of it is still very telling. And occasionally very funny indeed, in a black sort of way. show less

Alfred Dorn, the central figure of this book — obviously meant as Walser's big post-Wende novel of German history — is born in Dresden in 1929, grows up there, emigrates to West Berlin in 1953, and eventually becomes a civil servant in the Hessian culture ministry.

Whilst he goes through the motions of a respectable career, Alfred's whole life is in reality blighted by an obsessive need to recapture physical evidence and memories of the childhood he was cut off from by the bombing raid show more of 13 February 1945, which he and his parents survived by the merest accident. Alfred is stuck in a destructively close relationship with his mother (he's caring for her in his student room whilst trying to get through his final law exams), and he never comes to terms with key parts of adult life: he's repelled equally by manifestations of sexuality and by political or religious engagement. His low self-esteem also makes it difficult for him to trust other people and form proper friendships, and he spends most of his free time in correspondence with old ladies who might be able to remember some detail of life in Dresden before 1945.

Alfred's failure in life is also reflected in the way he is never allowed to deviate from a career path in law and public administration that he doesn't seem to have any real interest in or aptitude for, whilst his (presumed) talents as a musician and a caricaturist are constantly hinted at but never developed. At one point he does have a project for a historical novel (set, inevitably, in the 18th century Saxon court) under way, but this turns out to be a sterile exercise as well.

There's a lot of very interesting stuff in this book, close observation of how German society worked in the 50s and 60s and what mattered to people (the endless wars Alfred gets into with his Berlin landladies, for instance), as well as insights into the limitations of legal and civil-service ways of seeing the world. Alfred works for a while in an office processing compensation claims from victims of Nazi terror: there's plenty of irony in the way he has to keep requesting documentary evidence from people whose pasts have been erased even more thoroughly than his own. And it also gives a close view of the day to day realities of the way the German-German border messed up the lives of families separated by it, the bureaucratic nightmares of applying for travel permits or sending letters and parcels under constantly changing rules. Although I don't think Walser quite manages to convey the element of fear that went along with all that inconvenience.

This isn't the Tin Drum of the Berlin Wall. Awful though he is, Grass obviously likes Oskar Matzerath and finds him funny, and we can't help liking him too. But Walser clearly got exasperated by Alfred Dorn long before the end of the book, and he can't help making the reader feel the same way. Alfred is not funny, there's no way we can laugh at him except nastily. And 500 pages of someone like that is more than anyone can reasonably be expected to take... show less