The Politics of Writing and Being Written: A Study of Walter Abish's "How German Is It"

Abstract

The central consciousness and authority of How German Is It is an apparently omniscient narrator determined to prove, through construction of a plexus of parallels and analogies, that Nazism and its related tendencies constitute, not a kind of historical aberration but, instead, essence of Germanness. This largely comic deconstruction of fiction of contemporary German innocence is followed, however, by attempted imposition of a new fiction; a fiction about Germany's sole appropriation of a particular kind of evil, which is perhaps essence of evil itself. And yet while narrator is busy linking a stereotypical German concern with and even passion for symmetry, perfection and absolute to practices of Nazism, simultaneously narrative is making use of comic structures and patterns which, in Rene Girard's words, deny sovereignty of individual more radically than either god or destiny.' The narrator's construction-presented as a largely unmediated revelationof this German malevolence is perhaps best exemplified by digressive and insidious introduction to, and eventual narrative use made of, philosopher Brumhold. An interest in Brumhold is first expressed at beginning of fifth chapter of section entitled 'The Idea of Switzerland'. An earnest-faced young woman,2 an American student of Brumhold, moves into a flat at Wurtenburg above another occupied by Ulrich Hargenau, a successful novelist and failed terrorist from an aristocratic German family; a kind of modem man without qualities whose father, a Second World War general in Wehrmacht, once wrote an anti-Semitic German history and was eventually executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. This establishment of connecting parallels between everyday lives of ordinary Germans, or Germans might be considered as exemplary representatives of Bundesrepublik, and certain German political, cultural and social ideas, as well as historical periods and events, is one of narrative's primary means of investigation, argument, and establishment of authority. Ulrich Hargenau lives in Wurtenburg, a city closely connected with and still largely resonant of, narrator points out, the world of Albrecht Durer (18). Taking off from Durer, who could easily become visitor's point of reference or perhaps even guide (19) (the German word for 'guide', a word which recurs in narrative with motif-like regularity, is 'fuhrer'), narrative winds its