Caporetto: Das Hemingway-Komplott by Horst Kleinert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caporetto: Das Hemingway-Komplott by Horst Kleinert Lesley Pleasant Caporetto: Das Hemingway-Komplott. By Horst Kleinert. Thurm Verlag, 2020, 208 pp. Paperback €12,80. Horst Kleinert’s curious German novel Caporetto: Das Hemingway-Komplott [Caporetto: The Hemingway Conspiracy] has two imperatives for its protagonist, Frank, and for the reader: “Lies es.”/“Read it” (the “it” being A Farewell to Arms) and “Seien Sie nicht zu mutig”/“Don’t be too courageous”; that is, extremism will kill you. One might be tempted to add a third: Avoid Death in the Afternoon. In Kleinert’s text, Hemingway’s reading of passages from his bullfighting disquisition alienates guests at the Ocean Inn in Miami Beach. Later, the book is unexpectedly wielded as a deadly weapon by Paula, Frank’s wife, ultimately resulting in her own death. Caporetto’s appendix contains for the Hemingway scholar a fourth suggestion: Go to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and research whether Hemingway appeared at the 1 September 1931 Berlin premiere of the Carl [End Page 117] Zuckmayer stage adaptation of A Farewell to Arms. Kleinert explains that the different sources1 he has consulted do not agree on whether or not Hemingway attended. For those who believe he did, there is disagreement about when and on how (badly) he behaved. It is Hemingway’s planned appearance at the premiere in Berlin that forms the basis of the Caporetto conspiracy of the book. Part mystery, part thriller, part romantic melodrama, the novel is a timely reminder of how political extremism on the right and the left thrive in unsettled times. Reminiscent of a cop show serial and of cartoon fights, it is a condemnation of contemporary America in the guise of an historical novel with “recurring guest” appearances by a caricatured Ernest Hemingway, the “good” American who fought against the Fascists, appreciated Europe, and bemoaned the loss of natural habitats. It also marks the end of the (West) Berliner belief in a Hemingway-type American savior, the loud, uncouth, gun-toting, raisin-bombing dependable friend. Fired and humiliated because he can’t back up his first front-page story that claims that a run-of-the-mill drug-related murder is actually politically driven, Frank is determined to prove it. By uncovering the ultra-right secret organization Thor, Frank will rehabilitate his credibility as a journalist; in following the story to Thor, he happens to uncover the Caporetto plot. Saving Hemingway is a lucky byproduct. A caricatured Papa Hemingway serves to tie the novel together, which spans from August 1931–June 1934 and involves stints in Berlin, Paris, Florida, and former “German” East Africa. After warning Hemingway in Paris about a plot to kill him at the Berlin premiere of the stage play of A Farewell to Arms, Frank accompanies him reluctantly to Berlin (regaled throughout the drive with grand statements about big game hunting, deep sea fishing, bullfighting, and war tales). Frank saves Hemingway from an assassination attempt by insisting that he sit out the second act at the theatre bar. A grateful Hemingway pens a three-page letter, that Frank believes reads like one of Hemingway’s stories. In portraying Frank as the hero who risked all to save American values as embodied by and given voice by Hemingway, the letter convinces the ambassador to grant Frank and his wife, the good Germans, if you will, permission to become American citizens. The plot is high on convolution and rich with cameos of famous Germans, including Max Schmeling against whom Hemingway shows “good form” in a fictional boxing match; Fritz Kortner who recites the Ring Parable from Lessing’s Nathan the Wise; Marlene Dietrich who claims that The Sun Also Rises [End Page 118] was “nicht schlecht”/“not bad,” and Richard Tauber who sings an aria from Turandot at the Six-Day Race in the Sportpalast. The narrative also has Frank encounter two apparent femme fatales, who are actually nothing of the sort, embroiled, respectively, in an extreme leftwing and rightwing group (both equally “menschenverachtend”/“inhumane”), and both of whom support and help Frank uncover and fight the group Thor, to tragic ends. Although Paula is upset when she reads a New York Times...