A Manifesto For Germany's 'New Right'?: Martin Walser,The Past, Transcendence, Aesthetics, and Ein Springender Brunnen

Abstract

Martin Walser’s speech on receipt of the 1998 ‘Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels’ unleashed a fierce controversy. The author’s attack on the ‘institutionalisation’ of Holocaust remembrance as ‘Drohroutine’, ‘Moralkeule’ and ‘Einschüchterungsmittel’ attracted criticism from almost all quarters. Yet the quarrel extended beyond Walser’s perhaps unfortunate choice of vocabulary and may be seen as a continuation of the ‘Historikerstreit’ and the ‘Literaturstreit’, that is, as a struggle between left and right to redefine the public sphere. An examination of the novel for which Walser received his prize, Ein springender Brunnen, confirms this and reveals Walser’s indebtedness to the political philosophy of the emerging intellectual New Right. Quite apart from the implicit relativisation enacted by the ‘bracketing-out’ of National Socialism in its (semi-autobiographical) recreation of its protagonist’s childhood between 1933 and 1945, the novel pits transcendence against immanence, metaphysics against politics, and ‘organic’ community against rootlessness. Poetry, the imagination and mysticism offer resistance to National Socialism, which appears as a product of modernity rather than as a reaction to it. Johann and the German cultural heritage are, it would seem, as much victims of the philistine cruelty of National Socialist reality as the Jews who appear intermittently, yet apparently arbitrarily, throughout the novel.