The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, by Werner Sollors

Abstract

The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, by Werner Sollors. Harvard University Press, 2014. 400 pages. The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, the title of Werner Sollors's distinguished volume devoted to the immediate post-world war period in Germany--that is, the last five years of the decade--manages to be both vague and lurid. Its strangeness, moreover, is linked to the fact that for all the focus the author brings to the years of the American occupation of Germany, the title itself is borrowed from a French Catholic novel by the eminent right-wing polemicist and sometime celebrant of radical anti-Semitism, Georges Bernanos. The novel, published in 1926, is Sous le soleil de Satan (whose second section is titled "La Tentation du desespoir"), and it periodically resurfaces in Sollors's book as if to say that German history at its most tragic was in fact written within the medium of French literature, specifically by way of its obsession with Bernanos's novel. A first example is Wintergewitter (Winter Thunderstorm), the little-known novel by Kurt Ihlenfeld of a mass escape of German refugees from Silesia, fleeing the advancing Soviet army after the war. At a key juncture, the novel's protagonist waxes lyrical on his desire to meet Abbe Donissan, the fictive country priest whose encounter, under "Satan's sun," with evil in Bernanos's "La Tentation du desespoir" had "entered him more deeply than many a real person whose path he crossed every day" (130). That the Catholic, sometime royalist Bernanos of 1926, that is, should resurface in a novel of World War II as a guide to the dilemmas of democratizing a defeated Germany after the war and do so to the point of gracing Werner Sollors's book with its title is anomalous indeed. Or take the more familiar, politically reprehensible--and intellectually renowned--figure of Carl Schmitt, the theorist of the "state of exception" and "crown jurist" of the Third Reich, whose "denazification" after the war offers the substance of a gripping chapter in Sollors's volume. It begins with an epigraph quoted from a Schmitt diary entry of July 1930 that reads as follows: "Apathetic, depressions, listless and indifferent, just lying around, a feeling of decline and destruction. There is only one who can wake me up and strike me: Bernanos, and even he only with Under Satan's Sun" (153). Once again, and in a way that seems to orient a central chapter, the displacement in space (from Germany to Bernanos's northern France) but also in time (from pre- to post-Hitlerian) is striking. That temporal displacement opens up the interesting question of what precisely Bernanos was imagining in the postwar period on which Sollors concentrates. The answer is intriguing. The French author's final work, The Dialogues of the Carmelites, which may be more familiar to the reader as the libretto of Poulenc's opera of the same name, stages the martyrdom--at the guillotine--of a group of Carmelites in 1794. The episode had been interpreted in 1931 by Gertrud von le Fort, Bernanos's German source, as the final sequence of the French Revolution, but more intriguingly still, in an intuition that harmonizes enigmatically with the resonance established by Sollors between the prewar Bernanos text of his title and the postwar world which is the subject of his book, as the embodiment of a very contemporary "fear of dissolution of a moribund age (pre-Hitlerian Germany)" that she would proceed (in The Song at the Scaffold) to transpose retroactively into the French eighteenth century once she had happened upon the episode of the martyred Carmelites while browsing in the archives of the Munich University Library (44-45). The source of Bernanos's drama of religious martyrdom at the hands of an apparatus of state terrorism, the Revolution, that is, was rife with an anticipation of the tragedy that would befall the Jews, the catastrophe whose afterlife is at the core of Sollors's oddly vague subtitle, Tales of the 1940s. …