Reviews

• Extremely Relevant

  The master journalist H.L. Mencken once wrote, "If you are against labor racketeers, then you are against the working man. If you are against demagogues, then you are against democracy. If you are against Christianity, then you are against God. If you are against trying a can of Old Dr. Quack's Cancer Salve, then you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die. This novel is 23 years old; the Second World War ended over 59 years ago, yet the plot is still relevant today. It will be a long time before Germany as a nation, and the Germans as a people will be live apart from the legacy of Nazism and the atrocities and destruction that was wrought during those few years. While the descendents of the victims will continue to usurp the role of the victim, the descendents of the perpetrators will inherit guilt for the crimes, and then there are those who are not sure how they fit into this scheme from a historical perspective. The naïve, the disgruntled, the apathetic, and the nazis-new and old-exist side by side, this is the crux of "How German is it." The setting of this story is a town that was once the site of a concentration camp. For posterity the camp has been leveled and a modern town has been built and named after Germany's most celebrated contemporary philosopher. The story surrounds a writer who is the son of a former high ranking German military officer executed for his role in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. While not a military story, this novel weaves through the daily activities of this man and the constantly reminders of the events past due to relationships both professional and personal, and a small band of terrorists, a very interesting plot. Although written in 1980, terrorism is explored as a form of expression for the disgruntled. The author does a good job to explain how a government can tweak the circumstances and the fears surrounding terrorism to gain more power, allocate more funding, and remove personal freedoms. The characters are well developed in this very important novel for it covers events that are beginning to find there way into American society. Terrorism was a novelty in the United States in 1980 whereas it was already a common place event in the rest of the world. This novel will make you think about your lifestyle relative to the rest of the world. Very cleverly written.

• Exquisitely German

  Just happened to read this at the precise point in which to maximize its enjoyment. I've studied just enough deutsch to get the German asides, and having recently moved to Berlin I laughed out loud in agreement with Abish's insights i.e., the German inclination to combine what is essentially perfection with what is menacing. Also, I read this in the final vomitous days of Trump's bid for the US presidency, in a state of global apocalyptic hysteria.

• This darkly brilliant and funny novel is an exploration of Germany’s past

  This darkly brilliant and funny novel is an exploration of Germany’s past. The protagonist, Urich Hargenau is returning home after a period of exile in Paris. His brother is a bourgeois architect in Germany, and his wife Paula remains a member of the Bader-Meinhof type terrorist group he once operated in. Abish manages to navigate the difficult waters of remembrance and judgment in this astonishingly funny excavation of German schuld. We learn of the town of Bumholdstein, named after Germany’s greatest thinker Brumhold (thinly veiled reference to Heidegger), which has been erected on top of a former concentration camp. This marking, like so many others in this text, serve as metonymic reminders of collective complicity, and of the deeply sedimented structure of violence. Although Abish does not always keep the postmodern elements of the plot entirely together, this novel never fails to fascinate.

• Outside looking in

  This is a story about a German family in the 1970s, and backwards to Nazi times. Father was a Stauffenberg co-conspirator and was executed in 1944. Main protagonist is one of his sons, Ulrich, who got entangled with a Baader Meinhof- like terror group. His opposite is his brother Helmuth, a successful architect, opportunist, and womanizer. Part of the plot is the absence of a mother. Both brothers compensate with plenty of women. Walter Abish was born in Austria in 1931. His family fled from the Nazi take-over and lived for a while in Shanghai (which was a haven for Jewish refugees). Then Abish moved to Israel and later to the US, becoming an American citizen and writer. This is the first book by him that I have read. He is said to be an experimental writer, but that hardly applies to this book, which is a fairly straightforward story. It is unusual for a non-German to write a long novel set almost entirely in Germany (some small pieces in France and Switzerland). The book is somewhere to be found in the neighborhood of Heinrich Boell and Bernhard Schlink, if you need a mental map, but unfortunately there are too many slips and flaws to make it entirely comfortable. Unfortunately the errors are tendentious, which dims my enjoyment. The novel of 1980 probes the surface and underlying texture of Germany through Ulrich's eyes, which causes a major credibility problem for the narration, as Ulrich's problems can't possibly be those that are ascribed to him. Ulrich comes to his home town (Abish takes some liberties with German geography) in 1977 after living half a year in France. We look at things with the permanent question: how German is this? Is it suspicious? Will it give reason to fear it? Is it as normal as it pretends? Ulrich is a man in his 30s who returns after just half a year absence in France, no further. His observations, however, sound as those of the 50 y old author might have sounded on a first visit ever. The discrepancy is so stark that I have to conclude that the voice which we `hear' is not meant to be taken for the hero's, but we are to think of the real author. This is maybe also expressed in the title of part 1: The edge of forgetfulness. That is an appropriate title for a person like Abish, but not for Ulrich. The perspective of the book gives me an odd feeling. I find myself protesting against the mistrust, and then I remember that I shared some of that myself, formerly. This attitude seems strange to me now and I can hardly remember it. Nowadays I have a genuine impression of normality. Was it really different 30 years ago? It may have been. The distance to war time was only 30 years; many people must still have been `under cover'. More of the old spirit must still have been around. An always hot subject is the comparison of the Red Army Faction individuals with Nazis: were these two groups people of one kind or is this comparison scandalously off base? Abish has it the other way anyway: he compares the terrorists to the anti-Hitler conspirators. I find that equally scandalous. He sees the `Einzieh' Group (his Baader Meinhof equivalent) more as romantic agitators than as criminals with a political background. Apart from such odd evaluations, Abish upsets me more than once with odd observations or claims. The Germany that he describes for 1977 has often more similarity with a British propaganda film about Germany at war than with the reality that I remember. I wonder what his primary source of information is for such nonsense as on page 26, where people put on their Lederhosen for a summer outing, and where you hear the `old tunes' on the radio, which keeps the glorious past from being effaced. What crap. More examples: there is a former concentration camp site, on which a new city has been built and which has been given a new name (which name is, incidentally, after a Heidegger type of man), while memory of the camp is not maintained, and no book, nor archive exists about it. Honestly, that is such nonsense. I would really be surprised if any such case can be shown to have happened. The reality of post war Germany was miles away from this. Page 190 even seems to insinuate that there was a substantial position of Holocaust denial in Germany of the 1970s. Not so. More: a mass circulation magazine is called `Treue'. While a work of fiction can of course invent any name for a fictional magazine, there is something like truth or untruth even in fiction. Truth is that a mass circulation magazine in Germany in the 1970s would never have been called Treue (=fidelity or loyalty). There was just no market for that kind of spirit. Mass circulation products were called Stern or Bunte or Quick or Bild, or something in that vein. In a larger context: the story is set in Bavaria among nouveau riches and intellectuals. The author claims that the Prussian traditions of honor and obedience have been abandoned. But Bavaria was never a part of Prussia, and the integration of Bavaria in a German Empire under Prussian leadership lasted less than a half century. The author got his historical perspectives blurred! This is not one of the best books that I have read lately, but it is definitely one of the most stimulating, insofar as it asks me to disagree on nearly every single page.

• Great book

  A must read

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