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.

Der Verlorene—Text und Kommentar

by Hans Ulrich-Treichel, Commentary by Jürgen Krätzer, (1998, commentary 2005), published by Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. 175 pages.

6 October 2007; pp. 1-129

In German, “Der Verlorene” basically means, “the lost person,” but there’s some subtlety in the title that’s hard to describe in English. “Verloren,” related to the English word “forlorn,” is simply an adjective: lost. In German, it’s possible to take an adjective like this and turn it into a noun. Usually this is done when the noun itself is clear. If you’re talking about two men, one short and one tall, you can say “Der Große,” and it’s clear you’re referring to “Der große Mann,” or “the tall man.” But In the title of Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel, it’s almost as if the noun itself is what’s missing. Something or someone is lost, so very lost that it can’t even be given an true identity. All we know about it is that it’s really and truly gone.
The literal answer to the question of who or what has been lost: a child, Arnold, the infant child of a German couple at the end of World War II. In a moment of panic, when Arnold’s mother thought she was going to be accosted and killed by Russian soldiers, she gave the infant Arnold to a passing woman. As it turned out, she was neither accosted nor killed; she and her husband made it safely to the West of Germany and managed to start a new life, but they never recovered their son, and never recovered from the pain of losing him so suddenly and so pointlessly.
The story is narrated by Arnold’s younger brother, born after the war, who’s lived out the early years of his life in Arnold’s shadow, never quite understanding what happened to Arnold, but always burdened with a sense of shame that pervaded his household. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that not only is Arnold lost, but also the younger brother has lost something. He’s never experienced a moment of kindness from his father. He’s never experienced a loving embrace from his mother. Most of all, without understanding what really happened to Arnold, he’s never been able to understand who his parents are and who he is.
Treichel has mastered the sort of humor that characterizes a lot of my favorite German fiction, where the joke is rooted in the way a child’s mind tries to come to terms with all the metaphors, euphemisms and half-truths that characterize adult speech. As the plot rolls on and the parents try everything they can to try and find their lost child, the narrator grapples with a sense of jealousy that defies logic but nevertheless makes a lot of sense: he’s jealous of how easy Arnold has things, how he has two parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to find him, and yet never has to suffer the father’s coldness, the mother’s tragic mood swings, the anxiety of having one’s life invaded and eclipsed by an older brother who’s been elevated to a sort of mythic perfection by the fact of his perpetual absence.
The best parts of the story are the characterization of the father, who seems in some ways to be the most lost of all the figures in the book; the story of the kindly policeman Herr Rudolf, who stands as a perfect counterpart to the cold, remote father figure; and the strange monologue of the hearse driver who enters the story midway through and plays the same role as the gravediggers in “Hamlet,” reminding us that death is unrelenting and ever-present, unglamorous, not glorious, redemptive, nor particularly tragic—and that in our struggle to deny it, we ultimately turn ourselves into the basest of comedians.