Manja: The Story of Five Children
by Anna Gmeyner
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©2015. - Volledige herziene vertaling van: Manja : ein Roman um fünf Kinder. - Amsterdam : Querido, 1938. - Oorspronkelijk verschenen onder het pseudoniem Anna Reiner. - Amsterdam : Querido, 1938. 2015-30-21Tags
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Ich muss gestehen, ich hatte leichte Zweifel als ich mit diesem umfangreichen Hörbuch begann. 873 Minuten - und das zu einem solch ernsten Thema. Ist das auszuhalten? Nein, zumindest nicht immer. Doch dies hängt nicht mit der Länge der Lesung oder des Inhalts an sich zusammen, sondern mit der unbeschreiblich eindringlichen Sprache Anna Gmeyners, die kongenial von Iris Berben umgesetzt wurde. Immer wieder musste ich innehalten, um das Gehörte erst einmal zu verdauen.
Fünf Kinderschicksale in der Zeit von 1920 bis 1934 werden geschildert, jedes so individuell wie Menschen nun mal sind. Manja, das 'Ergebnis' einer spontanen Liebesnacht, voller Lebendigkeit und Liebe dem Leben gegenüber, lebt in einer verarmten jüdischen show more Einwandererfamilie. Und dann die vier Jungen, deren Familien einen Querschnitt durch die gesamte Gesellschaft bilden: die politisch engagierte Arbeiterschaft, das großbürgerliche, reiche Judentum, die liberalen konfessionslosen Intellektuellen und die faschistischen Kleinbürger. Gemein ist ihnen, dass sie Manja lieben, egal wer aus welcher Familie kommt. Es ist eine schöne, wenn auch von Geldsorgen geprägte Kindheit die da erzählt wird. Doch das Unheil des III. Reiches rückt näher und macht auch vor der Freundschaft dieser Fünf nicht halt. Denn Manja und Harry, einer der vier Jungs, sind nicht rasserein...
Gmeyners Sprache ist voller Poesie und doch so genau, dass man das Schrecken und Grauen dieser Zeit förmlich mit den Händen greifen kann. Iris Berben setzt dies in einer fantastischen Art und Weise um. Rauh und hart klingt ihre Stimme, wenn der faschistische Familienvater seinen Sohn zusammenbrüllt, weich und sanft wenn Manja sich um ihre schwache Mutter kümmert. Einfach brilliant! show less
Fünf Kinderschicksale in der Zeit von 1920 bis 1934 werden geschildert, jedes so individuell wie Menschen nun mal sind. Manja, das 'Ergebnis' einer spontanen Liebesnacht, voller Lebendigkeit und Liebe dem Leben gegenüber, lebt in einer verarmten jüdischen show more Einwandererfamilie. Und dann die vier Jungen, deren Familien einen Querschnitt durch die gesamte Gesellschaft bilden: die politisch engagierte Arbeiterschaft, das großbürgerliche, reiche Judentum, die liberalen konfessionslosen Intellektuellen und die faschistischen Kleinbürger. Gemein ist ihnen, dass sie Manja lieben, egal wer aus welcher Familie kommt. Es ist eine schöne, wenn auch von Geldsorgen geprägte Kindheit die da erzählt wird. Doch das Unheil des III. Reiches rückt näher und macht auch vor der Freundschaft dieser Fünf nicht halt. Denn Manja und Harry, einer der vier Jungs, sind nicht rasserein...
Gmeyners Sprache ist voller Poesie und doch so genau, dass man das Schrecken und Grauen dieser Zeit förmlich mit den Händen greifen kann. Iris Berben setzt dies in einer fantastischen Art und Weise um. Rauh und hart klingt ihre Stimme, wenn der faschistische Familienvater seinen Sohn zusammenbrüllt, weich und sanft wenn Manja sich um ihre schwache Mutter kümmert. Einfach brilliant! show less
In a coinage which has achieved fame in the annals of internet film criticism, Onion AV columnist Nathan Rabin discussed "a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl": "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Well, not solely in the minds of film writer-directors. We bookish folk must admit that Manic Pixie Dream Girls enjoy a parallel history in written fiction, from Leslie Burke in Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia to (it could be argued) Henry James's Daisy Miller. In both Paterson and James, as in MPDG films, the narrative focus is on the show more effects of these unorthodox, energetic girls on the male narrators, rather than on the inner lives of the girls themselves. In both cases, the girls cause the males to question their preconceived notions. And in both cases, of course, the girls must die, never to lose their effervescent, youthful energy; never to become mature women; never to threaten the fetishized memories kept inviolate by the men they leave behind.
Anna Gmeyner's 1938 novel Manja is a lesser-known example of the MPDG genre, and it really goes for broke. Rather than merely allowing its vibrant, imaginative young heroine to transform the emotional world of one mopey young man, it has her do it for four of them simultaneously: Karl, the son of Communist activists; Heini, child of educated leftists; Franz, son of a stupid, cruel thug who rises in the ranks of Nazi officialdom, and Harry, the half-Jewish child of a banker whose power is on the wane. The five children form the kind of predictably unpredictable band beloved of childhood fiction (the smart one! the cowardly one!), and yet I must say that Gmeyner pulls off their interactions with a certain amount of subtlety and interest. This interest dwells, not so much in the development of the individual characters, who are fairly transparent "types," but in their interactions and the ways in which the rise of Fascist power affects the group dynamic. In the interactions of Karl and Franz, for example, one can trace the similarities in the militarism of both boys' upbringing, despite their positions on different sides of the political spectrum. When the children play Indians, Harry is cast as the noble chieftan, husband of the princess, while Karl and Franz take the roles of her bloodthirsty kidnappers:
Besides the debate here between the Fascist idea that the few people worthy of goods in the first place should stockpile any leftovers, and the Communist notion that everyone should share equally, there is also an uncomfortable undercurrent in this discussion about sharing Manja's body. Predictably enough for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl narrative, it is Manja whose imagination and forceful personality holds the little group together—but the boys' gradual realization, as they begin to hit adolescence, that their society views girls as objects to be possessed by one male only, begins to undermine their solidarity. And Manja isn't just a girl: she's a poor Polish Jew, and she's growing up in a society that is tightening like a noose around people in all three of those categories. The boys around her are all torn between the desire to protect her against the threats of the outside world; the desire to maintain the status quo (the children make a heartbreakingly naive pledge that they will never allow their relationships to change); the desire to reject her as her friendship becomes a social liability; and the desire to triumph over the other boys and "win" her for his own.
These dynamics are honestly interesting, and I think Gmeyner does a good job with them. So too, she evokes with complexity certain of the children's parents—in particular, I was impressed with the character arc of Harry's father Max Hartung, an anti-semitic Jew who neglects his own son while fawning over the more Aryan-looking child fathered on his wife by one of Max's political rivals. Gmeyner often makes Hartung extremely unlikeable, yet never abandons the attempt to depict his thought processes with compassion. And I admit to seeing myself in the person of the intelligent, leftist but largely impotent-feeling Ernst Heidemann, father of Heini, who finds himself facing the horror of explaining to his son why their country is controlled by murderous bigots who reject the principles of equal human rights embraced by the Heidemann family.
Manja also asks some interesting questions about destiny and character-formation. It opens, unconventionally, with the scenes in which each of the five children are conceived. From this opening extends a preoccupation with the extent to which our origins dictate our fates: certainly an understandable question for an Austrian writing in 1938. Franz, for example, is growing up in a cruel household devoid of love, a reality reflected in his conception by rape. His parents are callous social climbers and bigots; does this necessarily mean Franz will be, as well? His struggle to break free of his father's cruelty, not to repeat it, is a difficult one: he sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Similarly, Manja is conceived under circumstances of unlikely but genuine human connection which is nevertheless unable to avert death: this seems an extremely accurate harbinger of her life to come. Dr. Heidemann, making the rounds of the maternity ward at night, "had a strange thought":
Pressing questions at a time when concepts of inborn racial purity or contamination were gaining ever more ominous prominence in Germany. And indeed, one of the most interesting things about Manja, the primary reason I would recommend it to others, is that, like Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, this is a novel written in the midst of the events it describes. Gmeyner gives us no easy answers at the end of the novel because the future of Germany and Europe were still very much unclear in 1938, and looked very dark for people of Gmeyner's humanist, liberal bent.
So Manja is a relatively thoughtful, anthropologically interesting example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl genre, and one I'm glad I read. I have to say, though, that many of the aspects of this genre that reliably grate on me, are also present here. Gmeyner does attempt some depiction of Manja's inner life, but sheer numbers are against her: with four boys to depict and only one girl, Manja's subjectivity perhaps inevitably gets overshadowed by those of her male friends. She becomes an object, either for protection or rejection, especially once outside pressures are threatening her as a Jew. Indeed, once a certain key scene of victimization passes, we hear almost nothing from Manja herself before the end of the book, instead watching as the parents and male children react to what they believe happened to her. To some extent this could be read as a comment on how abuse and violation silence and alienate their victims, but for me it isn't totally effective. The narrative structure seems to reinforce the idea that Manja is more important as an idea than as a person—an idea totally supported by the final scenes.
I mean, don't get me wrong: I shed tears at the end of this book, just like I always cry at the end of Harold & Maude, just like I remember bawling after finishing Bridge to Terabithia as a kid. The MPDG formula is a compelling one: if it weren't, it would hardly be so enduring. There is something satisfying about watching the male recipient of the sacrificed Manic Pixie's joie de vivre walk away from that cliff or that hospital room, a sadder but a wiser, more hopeful man. And yet the formula is compelling at the expense of female subjectivity, of female complexity, of female maturity: an exchange I tire of making again and again and again. show less
Anna Gmeyner's 1938 novel Manja is a lesser-known example of the MPDG genre, and it really goes for broke. Rather than merely allowing its vibrant, imaginative young heroine to transform the emotional world of one mopey young man, it has her do it for four of them simultaneously: Karl, the son of Communist activists; Heini, child of educated leftists; Franz, son of a stupid, cruel thug who rises in the ranks of Nazi officialdom, and Harry, the half-Jewish child of a banker whose power is on the wane. The five children form the kind of predictably unpredictable band beloved of childhood fiction (the smart one! the cowardly one!), and yet I must say that Gmeyner pulls off their interactions with a certain amount of subtlety and interest. This interest dwells, not so much in the development of the individual characters, who are fairly transparent "types," but in their interactions and the ways in which the rise of Fascist power affects the group dynamic. In the interactions of Karl and Franz, for example, one can trace the similarities in the militarism of both boys' upbringing, despite their positions on different sides of the political spectrum. When the children play Indians, Harry is cast as the noble chieftan, husband of the princess, while Karl and Franz take the roles of her bloodthirsty kidnappers:
Then the robbers seized the cheiftan's sleeping wife and dragged her through the jungle to their camp. With war-like yells she was bound to the stake. She endured this without complaint, but waited for death with bowed head while the villains discussed cannibalism.
"I'll eat her legs," said Karli, noisily sharpening the knife on a stone.
"They're for me," replied Franz.
"She's got two," said his fellow-cannibal placatingly.
"What's left over will be pickled and put in the larder," persisted Franz the robber.
"Red Indian larders?" jeered Karl, forgetting his part.
"I like the little toes best." The cannibal conversation started up again.
"Me too," replied Karl.
"I'll eat both, though," shouted Franz. "They're sweet as sugar."
"One each," bellowed Karl, adding a sentiment rare among cannibals, "Equal Rights for All."
Besides the debate here between the Fascist idea that the few people worthy of goods in the first place should stockpile any leftovers, and the Communist notion that everyone should share equally, there is also an uncomfortable undercurrent in this discussion about sharing Manja's body. Predictably enough for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl narrative, it is Manja whose imagination and forceful personality holds the little group together—but the boys' gradual realization, as they begin to hit adolescence, that their society views girls as objects to be possessed by one male only, begins to undermine their solidarity. And Manja isn't just a girl: she's a poor Polish Jew, and she's growing up in a society that is tightening like a noose around people in all three of those categories. The boys around her are all torn between the desire to protect her against the threats of the outside world; the desire to maintain the status quo (the children make a heartbreakingly naive pledge that they will never allow their relationships to change); the desire to reject her as her friendship becomes a social liability; and the desire to triumph over the other boys and "win" her for his own.
These dynamics are honestly interesting, and I think Gmeyner does a good job with them. So too, she evokes with complexity certain of the children's parents—in particular, I was impressed with the character arc of Harry's father Max Hartung, an anti-semitic Jew who neglects his own son while fawning over the more Aryan-looking child fathered on his wife by one of Max's political rivals. Gmeyner often makes Hartung extremely unlikeable, yet never abandons the attempt to depict his thought processes with compassion. And I admit to seeing myself in the person of the intelligent, leftist but largely impotent-feeling Ernst Heidemann, father of Heini, who finds himself facing the horror of explaining to his son why their country is controlled by murderous bigots who reject the principles of equal human rights embraced by the Heidemann family.
Manja also asks some interesting questions about destiny and character-formation. It opens, unconventionally, with the scenes in which each of the five children are conceived. From this opening extends a preoccupation with the extent to which our origins dictate our fates: certainly an understandable question for an Austrian writing in 1938. Franz, for example, is growing up in a cruel household devoid of love, a reality reflected in his conception by rape. His parents are callous social climbers and bigots; does this necessarily mean Franz will be, as well? His struggle to break free of his father's cruelty, not to repeat it, is a difficult one: he sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Similarly, Manja is conceived under circumstances of unlikely but genuine human connection which is nevertheless unable to avert death: this seems an extremely accurate harbinger of her life to come. Dr. Heidemann, making the rounds of the maternity ward at night, "had a strange thought":
Supposing that their destinies had been packed away somewhere in the basket, like the red water bottles at their feet? And that one of them could be taken out and another put in its place. All had pink faces with sparse and mostly dark hair which would fall out later, and then more would grow, fair curls or smooth black hair. How much of what they were going to be was already in them? How much of what they would experience later was born with them?
Pressing questions at a time when concepts of inborn racial purity or contamination were gaining ever more ominous prominence in Germany. And indeed, one of the most interesting things about Manja, the primary reason I would recommend it to others, is that, like Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, this is a novel written in the midst of the events it describes. Gmeyner gives us no easy answers at the end of the novel because the future of Germany and Europe were still very much unclear in 1938, and looked very dark for people of Gmeyner's humanist, liberal bent.
So Manja is a relatively thoughtful, anthropologically interesting example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl genre, and one I'm glad I read. I have to say, though, that many of the aspects of this genre that reliably grate on me, are also present here. Gmeyner does attempt some depiction of Manja's inner life, but sheer numbers are against her: with four boys to depict and only one girl, Manja's subjectivity perhaps inevitably gets overshadowed by those of her male friends. She becomes an object, either for protection or rejection, especially once outside pressures are threatening her as a Jew. Indeed, once a certain key scene of victimization passes, we hear almost nothing from Manja herself before the end of the book, instead watching as the parents and male children react to what they believe happened to her. To some extent this could be read as a comment on how abuse and violation silence and alienate their victims, but for me it isn't totally effective. The narrative structure seems to reinforce the idea that Manja is more important as an idea than as a person—an idea totally supported by the final scenes.
I mean, don't get me wrong: I shed tears at the end of this book, just like I always cry at the end of Harold & Maude, just like I remember bawling after finishing Bridge to Terabithia as a kid. The MPDG formula is a compelling one: if it weren't, it would hardly be so enduring. There is something satisfying about watching the male recipient of the sacrificed Manic Pixie's joie de vivre walk away from that cliff or that hospital room, a sadder but a wiser, more hopeful man. And yet the formula is compelling at the expense of female subjectivity, of female complexity, of female maturity: an exchange I tire of making again and again and again. show less
The story could be set in any times and in many places.
Five children are conceived on the same night, born within days of each other at the same hospital. Their backgrounds are very different, but there are links between their families and they form friendships. It is only with the passage of time that they realise what their parents have always known; that the world will look at them and treat them differently.
This particular story resonates, speaks so profoundly; and that comes from its setting and from its author.
Those five children were born in Germany in 1920. The war was over, there were hopes for a new Germany, but the stringent conditions of Treaty of Versailles that had been signed the previous year would be a heavy burden. The show more country struggled, but in time a charismatic leader emerged, at the head of a new party offering a path to national pride and a brighter future. His name was Adolf Hitler.
This book, published in 1938, follows the lives of those five children until 1933, when they are twelve years-old. By then the Nazi party was in power, Hitler was Germany’s Chancellor, and the Reichstag Fire Decree had become law, stripping many German citizens of their civil liberties.
Many, fearing for their own futures, fearing that their government would go even further, sought exile abroad.
Anna Gmeyner, Austrian-Jewish by birth, was one of those exiles, and she wrote this book in London. She knew of course that she was writing of a terrible time, but she could not know – though she might suspect – how very, very terrible things would become, for the families of those five children, and for so many other families in Germany and across Europe.
Her book offers a clear, vivid and detailed view of the lives of five disparate families. Each scene is painted clearly and starkly, and, though the narrative those scenes must carry is complex, the author’s clear-sightedness and the skills she deployed to bring each scene to life, meant that I always understood what was significant.
And, though this is always a very human story, social changes are so clearly illuminated. The earlier chapters show the consequences of the War and the Peace, on those who fought and lost, and on those who lived through it. The latter chapters show how that leads to the rise of the Nazi party, and to the appalling shift in society that followed.
Manja, who gives this story its title, is the only girl of the five children, the daughter of a Polish immigrant whose life was thrown off course when her lover killed himself, and who would always struggle with what she had to do to survive and to be a mother to her children.
The four boys have very different backgrounds. Heini is a son of a doctor, who has fine ideals and will always stand by his principles; Franz is the son of a man who will become a Nazi; Karl is the son of a Marxist factory worker; and Harry is the son of a rich industrialist who believes his philanthropy may protect him from his part Jewish heritage. It won’t.
It would be fair to say that their four families represent different sides of society, but the reality of each character and situation, and the naturalness of the links between the different families are such that it never feels didactic.
.... Heini’s father, was the doctor, who cared for both Manja’s and Harry’s mothers after they gave birth; Franz’s father was employed – and dismissed – by Harry’s father; and he endowed Heini’s father’s hospital. And then there were families who lived in the same building; there were children who met at school ....
It feels real, and it feels right that these families stand for so many others.
The children meet each Wednesday and Saturday – at the wall – which is all that remains of a house that once stood above a river. It is there that Manja shows the boys the constellation of Cassiopeia – five stars that they see as symbolic of the ties of friendship between them. As they grow they will come to understand the differences between their families and the tension that brings, but none of that will stop them from being friends.
As the story advances though the changes wrought by the Nazi party have dreadful repercussions for so many. It is terrifyingly, heart-breakingly real.
Manja is vulnerable, the result of her sex, her race, her family situation. I feared for her as I saw the chain of events that led to an and that was both inevitable and tragic.
That, and the whole story was profoundly moving; and the knowledge of what was still to come when this story ended made it still more so.
The author’s first hand experience of Germany during the time she writes about makes her story so vivid, and that she left the country before she began to write leaves me in no doubt that it is honest and authentic.
She told her story so well, using all the skills she must have learned as a dramatist to bring her five families and that Germany that they lived in to life, and in engaging and involving her readers.
I hope – and I have to believe – that she did what she set out to do.
And I am grateful that her book has a place in the Persephone Books list. show less
Five children are conceived on the same night, born within days of each other at the same hospital. Their backgrounds are very different, but there are links between their families and they form friendships. It is only with the passage of time that they realise what their parents have always known; that the world will look at them and treat them differently.
This particular story resonates, speaks so profoundly; and that comes from its setting and from its author.
Those five children were born in Germany in 1920. The war was over, there were hopes for a new Germany, but the stringent conditions of Treaty of Versailles that had been signed the previous year would be a heavy burden. The show more country struggled, but in time a charismatic leader emerged, at the head of a new party offering a path to national pride and a brighter future. His name was Adolf Hitler.
This book, published in 1938, follows the lives of those five children until 1933, when they are twelve years-old. By then the Nazi party was in power, Hitler was Germany’s Chancellor, and the Reichstag Fire Decree had become law, stripping many German citizens of their civil liberties.
Many, fearing for their own futures, fearing that their government would go even further, sought exile abroad.
Anna Gmeyner, Austrian-Jewish by birth, was one of those exiles, and she wrote this book in London. She knew of course that she was writing of a terrible time, but she could not know – though she might suspect – how very, very terrible things would become, for the families of those five children, and for so many other families in Germany and across Europe.
Her book offers a clear, vivid and detailed view of the lives of five disparate families. Each scene is painted clearly and starkly, and, though the narrative those scenes must carry is complex, the author’s clear-sightedness and the skills she deployed to bring each scene to life, meant that I always understood what was significant.
And, though this is always a very human story, social changes are so clearly illuminated. The earlier chapters show the consequences of the War and the Peace, on those who fought and lost, and on those who lived through it. The latter chapters show how that leads to the rise of the Nazi party, and to the appalling shift in society that followed.
Manja, who gives this story its title, is the only girl of the five children, the daughter of a Polish immigrant whose life was thrown off course when her lover killed himself, and who would always struggle with what she had to do to survive and to be a mother to her children.
The four boys have very different backgrounds. Heini is a son of a doctor, who has fine ideals and will always stand by his principles; Franz is the son of a man who will become a Nazi; Karl is the son of a Marxist factory worker; and Harry is the son of a rich industrialist who believes his philanthropy may protect him from his part Jewish heritage. It won’t.
It would be fair to say that their four families represent different sides of society, but the reality of each character and situation, and the naturalness of the links between the different families are such that it never feels didactic.
.... Heini’s father, was the doctor, who cared for both Manja’s and Harry’s mothers after they gave birth; Franz’s father was employed – and dismissed – by Harry’s father; and he endowed Heini’s father’s hospital. And then there were families who lived in the same building; there were children who met at school ....
It feels real, and it feels right that these families stand for so many others.
The children meet each Wednesday and Saturday – at the wall – which is all that remains of a house that once stood above a river. It is there that Manja shows the boys the constellation of Cassiopeia – five stars that they see as symbolic of the ties of friendship between them. As they grow they will come to understand the differences between their families and the tension that brings, but none of that will stop them from being friends.
As the story advances though the changes wrought by the Nazi party have dreadful repercussions for so many. It is terrifyingly, heart-breakingly real.
Manja is vulnerable, the result of her sex, her race, her family situation. I feared for her as I saw the chain of events that led to an and that was both inevitable and tragic.
That, and the whole story was profoundly moving; and the knowledge of what was still to come when this story ended made it still more so.
The author’s first hand experience of Germany during the time she writes about makes her story so vivid, and that she left the country before she began to write leaves me in no doubt that it is honest and authentic.
She told her story so well, using all the skills she must have learned as a dramatist to bring her five families and that Germany that they lived in to life, and in engaging and involving her readers.
I hope – and I have to believe – that she did what she set out to do.
And I am grateful that her book has a place in the Persephone Books list. show less
Manja is the story of five children written from their conception to their twelfth year. Gmeyner writes about friendship, school , secret hideouts and wonderful games. What makes this novel different from the typical childhood saga is that the time is the early 1930's and the setting is fascist Germany.
The story begins at conception. If children are born innocent, their life paths are set by their parents. Heini is the loved child of parents who adore each other. Dr. Ernst and Hanna Heidemann raise their son in an atmosphere of idealism and service. Franz's father is a brutal, not too bright clerk who blames his constant job losses on outside forces like Jews and Communists. He enjoys beating his wife and Franz is conceived because of show more spousal rape. Franz's home is a shrine to Nazi principles. Little Harry's parents are a half-Jewish industrialist and a stunningly beautiful mentally weak mother. The night he is conceived his father makes love to a shell of a woman . She is the Aryan trophy wife who does not hate her husband, but cannot love him. Harry is a disappointment to his father; he looks Jewish and is a runt, unlike his blond younger brother. Karl's father is a card-carrying Communist who loses his job because he actively fights worker injustice and his mother is a laundress who nurtures anyone who needs care. Like his parents, if Karl sees something he thinks is unjust in the schoolyard he opposes it; he is usually in trouble. Finally, there is Manja. She, unlike the boys, does not reflect her home background. Conceived as a result of a single encounter between a young Jewish woman and a Jewish musican who commits suicide immediately afterwards, she is raised in a single parent home. When her mother's desperate marriage ends, the woman becomes a cleaner and takes men to her bed in order to make ends meet because of uncontrollable inflation. She becomes a drunk and Manja, by the age of twelve, is running the house.
These children could be stereotypes and symbols for 1930's Germany: the Nazi, the Communist, the Idealist; the Corrupt Industrialist, the Jew. But Gmeyner does something wonderful. Despite what is going on in the home and the streets, she gives these children a childhood where they escape into each others' company and can ignore the rising hate. They have a secret place, a walled area by the river where they meet twice a week, play fantasy games, have picnics, argue about their parents' beliefs without really understanding what they are. These children are innocent and still see things in black and white. They are friends who love each other and if two are Jewish it does not matter.
It is when the adult world smashes into their world that they have to give up their innocence. It begins to happen in school. Franz and Harry join the Hitler Youth. Franz loves the parades and games, while Harry who does not look three-quarters Aryan becomes the butt of jokes and is miserable. Franz is drawn into a circle of popular bullies and starts to act like them. Heini is suspended for writing an essay criticizing war and the need for Germany to revenge the Treaty of Versailles. Karl is beaten up because of his father's trade-union activism and the teachers look the other way. Manja is segregated to the Jewish bench and when she defends another Jewish girl against a blatant lie she is punished.
Adult behavior spoils the childen's world, but not their bond. Franz wants to run away with Manja to save her from what he is told is coming. But in a careless moment he causes the crisis with a lie he does not understand and the world of childhood ends abruptly.
Written in 1939, this is a powerful book. The four boys, jolted into adulthood too soon, are very real. Only Manja herself is unreal, too good and too mature for her twelve years. This, however, is not really a flaw. She is the ideal who is sacrificed in a society gone mad. She will, however, be a part of these children as long as they are allowed to live. In the novel, Manja likens these friendships to the constellation Cassiopeia. "One, two, three, four, five!" her voice climbed up a scale of triumph."My star is the one in the middle. Heini, Karl, Manja, Harry, Franz. It's recorded in heaven." The constellation becomes their symbol. Even if it disappears from sight, it is there and always will be. show less
The story begins at conception. If children are born innocent, their life paths are set by their parents. Heini is the loved child of parents who adore each other. Dr. Ernst and Hanna Heidemann raise their son in an atmosphere of idealism and service. Franz's father is a brutal, not too bright clerk who blames his constant job losses on outside forces like Jews and Communists. He enjoys beating his wife and Franz is conceived because of show more spousal rape. Franz's home is a shrine to Nazi principles. Little Harry's parents are a half-Jewish industrialist and a stunningly beautiful mentally weak mother. The night he is conceived his father makes love to a shell of a woman . She is the Aryan trophy wife who does not hate her husband, but cannot love him. Harry is a disappointment to his father; he looks Jewish and is a runt, unlike his blond younger brother. Karl's father is a card-carrying Communist who loses his job because he actively fights worker injustice and his mother is a laundress who nurtures anyone who needs care. Like his parents, if Karl sees something he thinks is unjust in the schoolyard he opposes it; he is usually in trouble. Finally, there is Manja. She, unlike the boys, does not reflect her home background. Conceived as a result of a single encounter between a young Jewish woman and a Jewish musican who commits suicide immediately afterwards, she is raised in a single parent home. When her mother's desperate marriage ends, the woman becomes a cleaner and takes men to her bed in order to make ends meet because of uncontrollable inflation. She becomes a drunk and Manja, by the age of twelve, is running the house.
These children could be stereotypes and symbols for 1930's Germany: the Nazi, the Communist, the Idealist; the Corrupt Industrialist, the Jew. But Gmeyner does something wonderful. Despite what is going on in the home and the streets, she gives these children a childhood where they escape into each others' company and can ignore the rising hate. They have a secret place, a walled area by the river where they meet twice a week, play fantasy games, have picnics, argue about their parents' beliefs without really understanding what they are. These children are innocent and still see things in black and white. They are friends who love each other and if two are Jewish it does not matter.
It is when the adult world smashes into their world that they have to give up their innocence. It begins to happen in school. Franz and Harry join the Hitler Youth. Franz loves the parades and games, while Harry who does not look three-quarters Aryan becomes the butt of jokes and is miserable. Franz is drawn into a circle of popular bullies and starts to act like them. Heini is suspended for writing an essay criticizing war and the need for Germany to revenge the Treaty of Versailles. Karl is beaten up because of his father's trade-union activism and the teachers look the other way. Manja is segregated to the Jewish bench and when she defends another Jewish girl against a blatant lie she is punished.
Adult behavior spoils the childen's world, but not their bond. Franz wants to run away with Manja to save her from what he is told is coming. But in a careless moment he causes the crisis with a lie he does not understand and the world of childhood ends abruptly.
Written in 1939, this is a powerful book. The four boys, jolted into adulthood too soon, are very real. Only Manja herself is unreal, too good and too mature for her twelve years. This, however, is not really a flaw. She is the ideal who is sacrificed in a society gone mad. She will, however, be a part of these children as long as they are allowed to live. In the novel, Manja likens these friendships to the constellation Cassiopeia. "One, two, three, four, five!" her voice climbed up a scale of triumph."My star is the one in the middle. Heini, Karl, Manja, Harry, Franz. It's recorded in heaven." The constellation becomes their symbol. Even if it disappears from sight, it is there and always will be. show less
Anna Gmeyner the author of Manja began writing her novel in 1938 while living among a community of European exiles in Belsize Park in London. She had come as a refugee to London in 1935. According to Eva Ibbotson, Anna Gmeyner’s daughter, in her preface to the 2003 Persephone edition Manja was inspired by a one paragraph newspaper report about the fate of a twelve year old girl in a German town.
The novel with its somewhat controversial beginning was well received at the time it first appeared written under a pseudonym. However I think that reading it now – knowing what we do about what happened in Europe in the years after Anna Gmeyner was writing lends it a greater poignancy.
“….Her story is one of heart-breaking poignancy; and show more although it is individualised with a truly imaginative vitality, we are convinced that her fate is only too typical of what is happening to hundreds of children in these outrageous times” ( 22nd September 1939 Manchester Guardian)
The novel takes place in a German town between the years of 1920 and 1933. In 1920 Germany was a broken country – struggling to recover from the four years of World War I. Manja is a novel about five children, Manja a young Jewish girl from Poland, and the four boys who are her friends. The novel opens with the stories of the conceptions of each of these five children. The families from which these boys come each represent the different political strands that existed in Germany at this time. One is a son of an idealist doctor, one the son of a Nazi, another of a Marxist, while the fourth is the son of a rich industrialist who believes his money may protect him from his part Jewish heritage. It is Manja who unites these boys – and this story is in part the story of their parents and of Germany in the years that lead to the raise of Nazism – but it is also the story of this friendship set against a terrifying backdrop. Manja shows the boys the constellation of Cassiopeia – five stars – which becomes the symbol of the friendship between the children. It is inevitable that their friendship is tested – that the evil that surrounds them at the end of 1933 intrudes – and the reader fears for Manja.
“I know what you mean,” he cried eagerly. “A long time ago at school there was a beetle in the yard, on its back. I turned it over so it could crawl, but there were some boys who kept on turning it back to make it wriggle. Those kind of people are different,”
“But there are so many of those kind of people.”
“Yes, aren’t there? There are suddenly so many,” he agreed. “But Manja if we and everyone like us are cowards, then all the beetles in the world will have to stay on their backs,”
Manja said nothing but pressed his hand. “You’ve turned over a beetle,” she said presently, “it’s crawling again.”
Somehow though, the story is never depressing, gently brutal perhaps – and very powerful. The children meet each Wednesday and Saturday – at the wall – which is all that remains of a house that once stood above a river. In the waste ground of these ruins the children are, for a time, able to enjoy the innocence of childhood. They are growing up however, and the times are changing. I hesitate to say too much that could result in spoilers as I know there are other Persephone readers out there who may be intending to read this one soon. Gmeyner captures the changing times, the fear and hate that pitches neighbour against neighbour with what feels like bone chilling authenticity. Suffice to say I will continue to think about Manja and her fate for a long time. show less
The novel with its somewhat controversial beginning was well received at the time it first appeared written under a pseudonym. However I think that reading it now – knowing what we do about what happened in Europe in the years after Anna Gmeyner was writing lends it a greater poignancy.
“….Her story is one of heart-breaking poignancy; and show more although it is individualised with a truly imaginative vitality, we are convinced that her fate is only too typical of what is happening to hundreds of children in these outrageous times” ( 22nd September 1939 Manchester Guardian)
The novel takes place in a German town between the years of 1920 and 1933. In 1920 Germany was a broken country – struggling to recover from the four years of World War I. Manja is a novel about five children, Manja a young Jewish girl from Poland, and the four boys who are her friends. The novel opens with the stories of the conceptions of each of these five children. The families from which these boys come each represent the different political strands that existed in Germany at this time. One is a son of an idealist doctor, one the son of a Nazi, another of a Marxist, while the fourth is the son of a rich industrialist who believes his money may protect him from his part Jewish heritage. It is Manja who unites these boys – and this story is in part the story of their parents and of Germany in the years that lead to the raise of Nazism – but it is also the story of this friendship set against a terrifying backdrop. Manja shows the boys the constellation of Cassiopeia – five stars – which becomes the symbol of the friendship between the children. It is inevitable that their friendship is tested – that the evil that surrounds them at the end of 1933 intrudes – and the reader fears for Manja.
“I know what you mean,” he cried eagerly. “A long time ago at school there was a beetle in the yard, on its back. I turned it over so it could crawl, but there were some boys who kept on turning it back to make it wriggle. Those kind of people are different,”
“But there are so many of those kind of people.”
“Yes, aren’t there? There are suddenly so many,” he agreed. “But Manja if we and everyone like us are cowards, then all the beetles in the world will have to stay on their backs,”
Manja said nothing but pressed his hand. “You’ve turned over a beetle,” she said presently, “it’s crawling again.”
Somehow though, the story is never depressing, gently brutal perhaps – and very powerful. The children meet each Wednesday and Saturday – at the wall – which is all that remains of a house that once stood above a river. In the waste ground of these ruins the children are, for a time, able to enjoy the innocence of childhood. They are growing up however, and the times are changing. I hesitate to say too much that could result in spoilers as I know there are other Persephone readers out there who may be intending to read this one soon. Gmeyner captures the changing times, the fear and hate that pitches neighbour against neighbour with what feels like bone chilling authenticity. Suffice to say I will continue to think about Manja and her fate for a long time. show less
This unusual and cinematic book opens with five scenes describing the conception of four boys and a girl in Germany on one night in May 1920. We then see, in harrowing detail, what happens to the children over the next thirteen years, as their friendship is broken apart by the different political views of their parents. A new translation by Kate Phillips.
Anna Gmeyner wrote "Five Destinies" in 1939 under the name Anna Reiner after she had fled Germany for England.
The story follows 5 children, all born in Germany in 1920 , Franz, Harry, Karl, Heini,and Manja, who through circumstance become friends, despite the different backgrounds of their parents.
As they enter their teenage years the political situation is causing much fear and uncertainty. As a young Jew, Manja is attacked and ridiculed and her young friends are distressed that they are unable to protect her.
The tragedy which follows propels the young boys from their childhood and into the realisation that to remain friends they must part.
A powerful and tender story of the effect of Nazi Germany on its young.
The story follows 5 children, all born in Germany in 1920 , Franz, Harry, Karl, Heini,and Manja, who through circumstance become friends, despite the different backgrounds of their parents.
As they enter their teenage years the political situation is causing much fear and uncertainty. As a young Jew, Manja is attacked and ridiculed and her young friends are distressed that they are unable to protect her.
The tragedy which follows propels the young boys from their childhood and into the realisation that to remain friends they must part.
A powerful and tender story of the effect of Nazi Germany on its young.
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- Alternate titles
- Manja: The Story of Five Children
- Original publication date
- 1938 (German) (German); 1939 (English) (English)
- First words
- For a moment Cassiopeia, with her five sparkling stars was seen above the church tower, then she disappeared behind black scurrying clouds.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Stillness wrapped up the birch tree with its torn handkerchief and the children sitting close together on the wall, without grief and unseparated, as on a reef against which the flood of events impotently dashed itself, and was silent. Nothing had happened.
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- German
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- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 830 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures German literature and literatures of related languages
- LCC
- PT2613 .M45 — Language and Literature German, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures German literature Individual authors or works 1860/70-1960
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