Erwin Strittmatter (1912–1994)

Erwin Strittmatter, author of the most popular East German novel, Ole Bienkopp, found his way into literature from a rural working-class background. In his early life he worked (among other things) as a baker, chauffeur, groom, and rabbit breeder. His autobiographical “nightingale stories” explore this colourful background and the way it made him into a writer. They’ve been published in various different combinations: this collection brings together three of them.

“Zirkus Wind” looks — from the perspective of a small boy determined to escape from a village community into a more exciting life— at the career of someone who is trying to do the opposite, the circus performer Wind who wants to settle down to ordinary domesticity with a farm-girl, but can’t help breaking out into show-business again. In “Sulamith Mingedö” the young narrator has already taken a tentative step into creative writing when he sees the fascinating circus child Sulamith humiliated in the village school. In the longest piece, “Tina Babe”, the narrator is a young man sent to Thuringia in the 1930s to work for two “artistic ladies” who are setting up an angora rabbit farm. We watch his efforts to educate himself on the quiet, to escape the clutches of his husband-hunting co-worker, and to get close to his employers’ sophisticated friend Miss Babe, a Published Novelist. Of course it all goes wrong and gets tied up with the political background of those days.

Lovely warm, atmospheric writing laced with irony and a certain amount of gentle mockery of his younger self, a convincing description of the way some people just can’t help becoming writers, even in the most unfavourable circumstances.… (more)

Egymondatos összefoglalás: Stanislaus Büdner pék és hipnotizőr kalandjai a XX. század első felének Németországában, Hasek modorában. Ezzel a könyvvel kapcsolatban az volt számomra a kérdés, hogy fogja a maga humoros-ironikus-anekdotikus modorában bemutatni a hitlerizációt és a második világháborút. Nos, tulajdonképpen sehogy: ahogy Strittmatter elérkezik ezekhez az eseményekhez, a regény derűsen kesernyés hangütése átúszik valami finom melankóliába, és ami azt illeti, szerintem ez a legjobb, amit az író tehetett ebben a helyzetben. Szóval ez tetszik. Ami már kevésbé tetszik, a könyv mellékes üzenete: hogy a fasizmus kizárólag azoknak a bűne, akik tulajdonnal rendelkeztek. A kocsmárosoké, gyáriparosoké, pékmestereké, és persze az arisztokratáké. A nincstelenek meg (a pékinasok, munkások és béresek) csak úgy bele lettek taszigálva ebbe a kozmikus marhaságba, félrevezették vagy egyenesen erőszakkal kényszerítették őket. De mivel ez egy NDK-s könyv az ötvenes évekből, ezen annyira nem lepődtem meg.

Ami meg legkevésbé tetszett, az maga a főszereplő, Büdner. Egész egyszerűen túlságosan se hús, se hal figura ahhoz, hogy egy nagyívű mesét köré lehessen építeni. Nyoma sincs benne Svejk karizmatikusan kolosszális hülyeségének, vagy Yossarian elhivatott individualizmusának. Tulajdonképpen csak a naivitását lehetne kiemelni, mint jellemző tulajdonságát – még paranormális képességei is csak úgy lifegnek rajta, mint valami félig lerágott köröm, amire Strittmatter időnként emlékeztet ugyan minket, de egyébként nem akar túlságosan kezdeni vele semmit. És az is zavart szegénykémben, hogy akárhány nővel akadt össze a könyv lapjain, azokról kiderült hogy kurvák/fasiszták/egyéb, mindenesetre kivétel nélkül kibabráltak Büdnerrel. Nekem meg az a filozófiám, hogy aki csak ilyen nőkkel találkozik, az először is nézzen magába, mert valószínűleg ott lel rá a probléma megoldására.

No, azért nem bántam meg, hogy időt szántam rá. A csodatévő összességében szórakoztató, helyenként tanulságos könyv, ha nem is írta be magát aranybetűkkel a mentális emlékkönyvembe.… (more)

Ole Bienkopp is said to have been the most-read contemporary novel in the DDR. It's a rural tragi-comedy, set in an East German village in the 1950s, the story of the stubborn small farmer Ole Hansen — called "Bienkopp" (bee-head) because of an incident in his first occupation as an itinerant bee-keeper — who persuades some of his neighbours to pool their land and organise themselves into a collective farm, at a time when the Party was still officially putting all its faith in the individual peasant. His difficulties with the local authorities are exacerbated by opposition from the remaining pre-war landowners in the village, in particular the sawmiller Ramsch, and by the bourgeois aspirations of Ole's wife Annegret, who seems to have an undue fascination with Ramsch's riding boots and duelling scars (to be fair, the author is even more obsessed with these stigmata of social privilege than Annegret is, never missing a chance to mention them).

In Part II of the book, which reads more like a sequel than part of the same novel, we're five or six years further on, collective farms (LPGs in East German jargon) have become the official norm, and Ole is chairman of the flourishing LPG "A blossoming field". But he still has any number of enemies in the village, numerous spinsters and widows are in pursuit of him, the Party is setting targets that take no account of sustainability or the availability of fodder and machinery, and every man in the collective is in love with the new poultry-girl, pigtailed Märtke.

This is propaganda, and quite heavy-handed in places — I was amused to see that a previous owner of my copy had pencilled in an index to the many useful bits of agricultural advice on the flyleaf — we are meant to see that collectivisation is good, private profit is bad, priests are hypocrites, and people who chew gum, use English expressions, or run away to the West invariably come to a bad end. But Strittmatter also wants us to see that management is about more than just meeting targets, that it's bad to follow orders that don't make sense to you, and even worse to pass them on down the line without question. Lazy and self-serving administrators get as hard a time here as capitalist profiteers.

And it's not hard to see why it was such a successful novel in its time: it is full of lively, colourful characters, humorous incidents and informed, down-to-earth views of village life, and it's written in an engaging (but not at all naive) rustic style, with strings of short, punchy sentences, lots of repetition and alliteration giving a ballad or folk-tale feel. Everything is shouting out that this is a book about people "like us". Strittmatter was clearly very good at what he did, and he obviously knew exactly how far he could tease the authorities without actually getting into trouble. Which would have been quite a bit further when this was published in 1963 than it was a couple of years later, after Walter Ulbricht's savage attack on Werner Bräunig and the associated clampdown on the creative freedom of writers.

Very readable and amusing, despite the complete disappearance of the world it's set in, and probably still deserves a place on lists of great agricultural novels.… (more)