Marcel Beyer

Eight essays on literature, language, art, Europe and life from one of Germany's most revered living writers.

After a visit to Putin's old postbox, the reader is taken to Dresden and Brixton, Gdańsk and Minsk, diverted to birds, bees, stray cats and pet dogs, confronted with Stasi and KGB, Proust and Jah Shaka, puzzled by overcoats and anoraks, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, and lost (then found) in service stations and memorial centres. Throughout, Marcel Beyer forges unexpected links and makes show more unpredictable leaps.

"I work from the margins, partly very literally as I build my sentences, for instance when I start with the name of a colour rather than a noun, to explore how the sentence might be steered from there to a subject. In my reading, I am drawn to the outliers or, as malicious claims would have it, to the obscure. Central books: that is, those everyone can agree on, have never much interested me. I am rarely tempted to explore the centre of my world in writing, and even if I did want to encroach upon a centre, I would have to choose a path from the outside. But outside, too, one advances to the heart of things."

Inspired by the great W. G. Sebald, Beyer's playful literary investigations wend through the high points and horrors of Europe's artistic history, towards a profoundly personal conclusion. show less

I read Marcel Beyer's Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes in the U.S.) in the original German, and so missed much subtlety of language and theme. The plot is fairly straightforward, relayed by turns through two narrators: Karnau, a police sound engineer, and Helga, the 6-year-old daughter of a Nazi official. Most of the story takes place in early 1944, and it was a surprise when a late section shifted to a contemporary setting, 1992 or so. Karnau's interest in sound, specifically the human voice and show more what it reveals about humanity at large, as well as the individuals speaking or listening, intertwine with the issues raised by war generally, and the Nazi hold on culture in particular. It is these aspects of the book which I'm certain are fragmented for me: not only the literary qualities of language, but also the thoughtful consideration of sound, language, power, psychology which make up a great deal of the book.

It's very disappointing that not until the afterword is the identity of Helga's father revealed, the Nazi official for whom Karnau works and consequently develops an important relationship with his six children, Helga especially. Disappointing because Beyer appears to take great pains not to specify who it is, referring to him only as Father (when Helga narrates) or the father of the six children (when Karnau does), and in fact referring obliquely to even Hitler as the Patient, and only later as der Führer, presumably because that reference would triangulate on the identity of the official. In the end, Beyer makes the link only tentatively: identifying the source of the epigraph as a diary entry from a well-known Nazi leader, and leaving it to the reader to draw the connection between that leader (and that diary entry) to the story just told. And disappointing, ultimately because the marketing for the book trumpets the identity everywhere, and immediately, such that I knew the entire time I was reading, despite all of Beyer's care that I not know. Did the marketing idiots read the book? Do they care about the work at all? Was it simply beyond them to find a way to sell a book without stamping it as an exposé of Hitler or his inside circle (it's not)?

The tentative and perhaps fragmented sense of the novel I get from my imperfect German adds an interesting element to the story, and what I gather to be the main themes, though. Karnau reflects on the ghostly nature of voices, spoken or replayed on records or in one's head. His thoughts are confident but not dogmatic, it seems to me, and at odds with his socially awkward presence when speaking with others in the book. And while that's always true for any book I read, given what I understand and what I recall of it later, the fragmentation due to reading in the German underscores that for me. In a real sense, it added to the experience, more than detracted as I might have expected.

It would be interesting to re-read in translation, though. I wonder how much of what for me was tentative, is dictated by my mastery of German versus by the prose. Several sections in which Karnau's sound experiments are contrasted with those by Nazi doctors were clear enough, though I'm uncertain as to whether the Nazi experiments were torture, or autopsy. In several cases I wasn't sure if the patient was Hitler, or some other anonymous personage.

And I know I missed a great deal of Karnau's project, the specifics of his curiosity for capturing the human voice in all manner of circumstances: on the front, in death, speaking at table. Most memorable is Karnau's lecture at a conference, the ideas of what can be changed in a person's thinking, and what not, and how much is revealed through that person's use of language, and a classic tension is made of the fact that Gestapo operations officers in the audience pounce on the practical implications of Karnau's ideas in a way he apparently was deaf to, or willingly set aside, until forced to confront them.

The comparison of the Nazification of the Alsace region, and later in the Sudetenland, to use of language among German citizens was, however, pretty strong even to me.

Overall Beyer's story is unsentimental, though that is difficult to pull off given the tragedy of the time and the central roles of children and a family. show less

This is about a phenomenon that Anglo-American readers may not know: the silence of German grandparents about the events of the Second World War. In the ethos of this novel, entire family histories have evaporated, leaving the children and grandchildren at a loss when they look back into their family's history. Beyer makes that absence into the object of a kind of cross between minimalist fiction and Robbe-Grillet. I wasn't persuaded by the construction of the novel: I can see the choices show more Beyer makes, his efforts to fill in scenes he has incompletely imagined, his attempts to fill out scenes that are too brief... it is just not sufficiently skillful for the purpose, which I take to be the slow and layered conjuring of uncertainties and partial insights, each one revealing further uncertainties and absences. It would have been a better novel without the sequences that seem to come from detective novels... the very sequences whose potential open-endedness was demonstrated so long ago by Robbe-Grillet. show less

A disturbing book set during WW2. A sound engineer is obsessed with recording all human sounds, not just the normal voices, but a person sleeping, even a soldier's death rattle at the front. He comes into contact with a large family, that of Goebbels's. The book goes right up to the last days in the bunker, even including Hitler as a patient in hospital eating only chocolates. Hermann, the engineer, and helga, the eldest of the siblings, are the book's two narrators telling us about the show more events leading up to and the last days in the bunker.
I suppose, an obvious comparison would be Perfume, another book about obsession, though of scent. I had a similar feeling of discomfort, yet grim fascination with the subject. Hermannfeels he was pushing the boundaries to get to the ultimate truth of human sounds, but his subjects sometimes paid the ultimate price. show less