Wellen

by Eduard von Keyserling (1911) Published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. 173 pages.

My favorite passage of the book is the one where Lolo, a young woman who has discovered that her fiancé, Hilmar, doesn’t love her anymore, steps out into the Baltic sea one night and nearly drowns. At the beginning of the passage, we’re told that Lolo wants to make a sacrifice, and she sacrifices herself to the waves. There’s a religious connotation to the word “sacrifice” here (in German, Opfer)—but if the waves hold a religious function in this book, it’s as the centerpiece of a religion of default. The book centers not around a pilgrimage, but rather a rather routine summer vacation to the Baltic Sea, in which a passel of well-to-do folk visit, or perhaps invade, the world of taciturn Baltic fishermen. The goal of the vacation is a secular one of relaxation. People are gathering energy for the future. Generälin von Palikow is getting her family ready for her granddaughter Lolo’s wedding. The painter Hans Grill is taking a moment to relax and paint the waves before taking a new phase in his career—he’s not sure what he plans, but he wants to make his art more marketable, more commercially successful. In the meantime, he’s happy to spend some loose time with his new bride, Doralice, enjoying the treasure of freedom
Hans had devoted his life to freedom. At every turn he extols freedom. He seems to be in the process of developing an informal artistic treatise on the virtues of freedom, an ongoing discourse that serves as a compliment to his paintings. It was with his fiery talk of freedom that he seduced the beautiful Doralice away from her decrepit husband, count Köhne-Jasky. And now that Doralice is his, he bores her with the incessant talk of freedom. And as readers, we get the sense that Hans himself isn’t anywhere near ready for the actual challenges of being free. He desperately needs his wife Doralice. Now that he has her, he wants to settle down, to construct a nice, quiet, suburban life around her. And he’s afraid of her because he senses that she’s the one who’s actually free; he’s the philosopher of freedom. As an artist in pre-WWI Germany, he has an accepted role of being a little bit eccentric, a little bit visionary, a little bit crazed. But its his wife, with her beauty that distorts society by drawing all men toward her, who actually has the gift of freedom, the gift of always choosing a new path. Doralice has already broken out of one marriage, and now she’s approached by Hilmar, the young soldier, and she has the chance to break out of another one, and after that . . . who knows what suitor will come next?
Hans says that he now has only two subjects for his paintings, his wife Doralice and the waves. If the eccentric Hans plays the role of a shaman in this secular society, then he has defined a spirituality based on two idols, one a subject and the other a background. The subject is highly concentrated—a single life, a single life story, a point of focus, a concentration point for attention, an attainable object of conquest, infinitely desirable. The background is diffuse, eternal, indifferent to human struggle.
Like Count Köhne-Jasky, like Hans Grill, like Hilmar, Lolo is also infatuated by Doralice. And when the crowd of those who adores the subject becomes too much, she plunges herself into the background, goes into the water on a cold night and swims out as far as she humanly can, in a moment of unreasoning thought where free-will doesn’t seem to play a role. She’s abandoning human society because human society is unfair, because it arranges itself into games of favor and feverish devotion and there’s no reward for those like Lolo who are left out.
And after Lolo is recued and her family leaves the Baltic in high dudgeon, Generälin von Palikow, outraged, scolds Doralice for having gone too far. It’s okay to break society’s rules. Society’s rules are stupid. Doralice was right in escaping her first marriage, but she can’t go on infinitely breaking out of marriage after marriage after marriage. It’s a surprising moment. Up until this point, von Palikow had seemed to represent the most conservative element character in the book. It’s surprising to learn that her vision of life is much more subtle and wise, that she’s capable of stepping back from society and forming a vision that seems bold and pragmatic, a vision that society itself is something wavelike, that troughs of convention and restriction must be followed by peaks of rebellion, and that these peaks of rebellion themselves must come to an end.
After Palikow’s family leaves the beach and summer wanes, Doralice and her husband Hans are stuck together, and Doralice has little to do but wait for the moment when Hans will forgive her. Life seems limited to her now, broken. One day it seems he’s on the verge of giving her the resolution she craves. And then he goes out to sea in a shabby boat helmed by a drunken sailor, and the two get swallowed by the waves, and Doralice is abandoned with her poor conscience. As the book ends, we see that she’s taken up a strange, platonic relationship with a hunchback, Knospelius, who haunts the beach. Her days of romantic adventure seem to be behind her. The subject fades into the background.