Secret Shares: Joseph Conrad's Cultural Reception in Germany by Anthony Fothergill (review)

Abstract

YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 203 exposure to vice, 'with all her baits and seeming pleasures', 'the fugitive and cloistered' reader would merely preserve 'a blank virtue, not a pure'. Books offer a unique way of enhancing our historical understanding, allowing us knowledge of a timewhen we were not as we are now. Colebrook's ambitious volume not only makes a compelling case for the relevance ofMilton studies today, examining points of intersection between Milton's commitment to rationalist vitalism and some of the dominant preoccupations of contempo rary theory and criticism, but at the same time prompts challenging questions about the ethics of reading, explores important issues pertinent to modern subjectivity and historicism, and ultimately revitalizes some of the fundamental questions about themeaning of life itself. Durham University Mandy Green SecretSharers: Joseph Conrad's CulturalReception inGermany.By Anthony Fothergill. Cultural History and Literary Imagination, 4.Oxford and Berlin: Peter Lang. 2006. 274 pp. isbn: 978-3-03910-271-6, us-isbn: 978-0-8204-7200-3. 'Conrad's Cultural Reception inGermany' may seem tohave all the resonance of 'The humour of the swiss', but thisbook isoriginal, erudite, resourceful,wide-ranging, and absorbing. Fothergill cites theusual suspects in thefield ofCultural Studies ? Benjamin, Bourdieu, Gademar, et al. ? but he eschews jargon and splendidly shows that 'new models forunderstanding cultural historical reception are provided byGerman readers' encounters with Conrad' (p. 21).The seven chapters explore thevarieties of reception thatConrad's works enjoyed from the 1920s onwards into post-Second World War Germany. Chapter 1carefullypoints out that 'the collected fictionalworks of Conrad' became 'the largestand most longstanding foreign language enterprise in thepublish ing history of S. Fischer Verlag' and 'indeed in modern Germany' (p. 28). Fischer's journalNeue Rundschauwas broadly social democratic and cosmopolitan, publishing the cream of contemporary German and foreign writing, includingThomas Mann, Robert Musil, Brecht, Dos Passos, Gide, Kafka, Rilke, Shaw, and Tolstoy. Conrad benefited from theFischer 'label', and the journal was instrumental in the dissemination of his influence,publishing reviews of the editions, essays on his work, serialized versions of his shorter fiction, and extracts from his letters. Chapter 2 dwells on the 'elective affinities' between Conrad and Thomas Mann, and Fothergill persuasively argues that the latter's engagement with Conrad was instrumental inMann's rejection of his pre-war, anti-democratic, anti-'Western' stance and his movement to 'a consciously democratic, pro Republican position' (pp. 90-1). In his third chapter, 'JosephConrad in theThird Reich', Fothergill charts the significance of Conrad's works for a range of 'secret sharers', such as Gerhard Nebel, Gottfried Benn, Max Beckman, and Maryla Mazurkiewicz Reifenberg, who camouflaged their critique of a brutal, repres sive system when they concentrated on Conrad's attention to 'the nature of political authority, loyalties to (possibly failing) ideals', and 'thenecessity to strive 204 Reviews for the expression of truths beyond comfortable illusions' (p. 104). Chapter 4 focuses on a lecture delivered on 21November 1936 by the editor of a pro-Nazi monthly, Dr. Wilhelm Stapel, who called Conrad a 'Jew'.This malignant error gave rare opportunity for a rear-guard response byHerman Stresau, who wrote the first major German monograph on Conrad, Joseph Conrad: Der Tracker des Westens (1937). As Fothergill movingly demonstrates, Stresau's tragic insight that such figures as Jim, Heyst, and Marlow are types of 'der unbehauste Mensch' ? the unhoused, unaccommodated man ? spoke powerfully to 'those who [. . .] in active or passive opposition to theNazis, feltno longer at home in their homeland' (p. 155). Fothergill's fifthchapter, 'Conrad on theU-Boat: Lothar-Gunther Buchheim and the Imagination under Fire', tells a most extraordinary story.During his researches Fothergill met Buchheim, who had begun to read Conrad, a blacklisted author, in 1940 at the instigation of Peter Suhrkamp of Fischer Verlag. Buchheim was renowned forhis documentary works and forhis 'faction' (asused byFothergill) Das Boot (1973), which drewclosely upon hisdiaryreports of day to day experiences aboard U-96 as a young war correspondent and war artist during the batde for theNorth Adantic (1941-2). Remarkably, during an appalling, protracted storm, the captain, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, astonished Buchheim by reading aloud Conrad's 'perfect description!' in The Mirror of theSea of how 'the Westerly Wind [. . .] is often like a...