Martin Walser and the Presence of the German past

Abstract

One of the ghosts hanging over Martin Walser's controversial 1998 speech in acceptance of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was that of his novel Ein springender Brunnen, published that year. The Frankfurt speech and the novel shared parallel concerns about the past and its role in the present; but as radically different kinds of speech acts, the two works elicited largely different reactions. Whereas the novel met with widespread praise as a major work of contemporary German literature, the speech proved extremely controversial, leading to denunciations of Walser as a cryptofascist rechtsextremistischer Intellektueller.1 Although such reactions were probably unfounded, they reflected difficulties in the speech that set it apart in a negative way from the novel, showing it to be an unsuccessful attempt at shedding light on discussions of the German past. In what follows, I explore some of the historical and political implications of the novel and the speech and the problematic interconnections between the two. In Ein springender Brunnen Walser addressed himself autobiographically to the problem of German history during the Third Reich. Ein springender Brunnen tells the story of Johann, a Catholic boy who, like Walser, was born in 1927 in a small town on Lake Constance. Like Walser's own father, Johann's father is a failure in business, but he exercises a powerful aesthetic influence over his son prior to his premature death in the mid-1930s. Like Walser, the fictional Johann volunteers for the German army at the end of WWII. Explaining in a 1998 Spiegel article why he joined the Wehrmacht, the real-life Walser asserts ich die Leute damals, die sich gedruckt haben, verachtet habe, and he admits that even young men who volunteered for the Flak were considered cowards; the fictional Johann, one of whose friends joins the Flak, thinks: Warum denn das? Zur Flak meldeten sich Feiglinge, Druckeberger. Wer sich zur Flak meldete, gestand dadurch, dass er an die Front wollte [...].2 Both Walser and his fictional character Johann are briefly taken prisoner by the Americans at the end of the war; like Walser, Johann then returns to his home town to finish his high school education. Both Walser and his protagonist are readers and admirers of Friedrich Nietzsche. Each of the novel's three main sections begins with a programmatic-philosophical chapter entitled als Gegenwart. The first section deals with Johann at age five, shortly before the Nazi rise to power; the second section covers Johann's life as an eleven-year old boy entering puberty and receiving his first communion in 1938, one year before the outbreak of WWII; and in the novel's final section Johann is a seventeen or eighteen-year old soldier in late 1944 and 1945, shortly before and shortly after the end of the war. In the three programmatic chapters, an unidentified narrator-- presumably Johann at an older age looking back on his previous life-wrestles with the problem of gaining access to the past. Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man meter der, dem es passierte (9), declares the narrator in the second sentence of the novel, suggesting that, if this is an older Johann speaking, there is an unbridgeable gap between present-time narrator and past-time story. Toward the beginning of the first chapter, he asserts, Die eigene Vergangenheit ist begehbar (9), and yet the novel is nothing if not a walk through one man's past. From the very onset, the narrator suggests that the project of the novel is impossibly quixotic. The novel's very existence, however, contradicts his claims. What people may think of as the objectively true past, the narrator claims, is in fact a construction which they have created for their own purposes in the present. Every past, inasmuch as it is told in the present, is therefore at least partly a fiction. Geschichte as history is always also Geschichte as story. In the final chapter, the narrator goes so far as to insist that Die Vergangenheit als solche gibt es nicht (281). …