It’s not exactly a book for contemplative, relaxed hours at the end of the year. Grit Poppe, their youth novel blocked (2009) was awarded, together with her son Niklas, she submitted a documentary that makes horror, her title: The locked away – in the DDR.
The number of relevant institutions alone is disturbing. All the more what happened in them, forced labor and sports, individual arrest, food withdrawal, beatings, humiliation of all kinds. It is shocking what former inmates, mostly highly reflective people, have to say and that is – not even in the book – no reason to the later GDR malice, because church homes were hardly any better than state homes – and the attached examples from the Federal Republic and Switzerland show that even where people were particularly proud of the rule of law, things could be mercilessly injustice. No consolation book.
“Consoling successfully requires a lot of skill” – so in 1848 the consolation expert Otto Rammler. Hanna Engelmeier, who has a PhD in anthropology, now wants less to comfort than to pursue the need for consolation. She does this in a supposedly wandering way. Engelmeier chats intelligently about personal matters, about writing, praying and reading. About gestures, sayings. It gathers things that have something to say as consolation tables, such as Rilke’s letters to a young poet, a file of David Foster Wallace’s great speech to students, This is Water, from 2005. Old photos of Aunt Hety as generators of memory. The author muses most extensively on a remark by Adorno about ice-cream-eating American children, which informs so furiously about Adorno, the Adorno reception, the history of ice-cream that one almost forgets that consolation was one of Adorno’s central concepts, dialectically shifting between existential Need for consolation and refusal of any false consolation that the individual and his current state mean.
Finally in Consolation. Four exercises nor the howling dachshund before the late night purchase. There is consolation at that moment “when the whining and whining and howling stop”. Where reflection can start when reflexes shift into reflections.
It seems wondrousthat not only the distinctive academic, but also the otherwise still reading young people find an astonishing liking in Robert Walser. It is comforting when everything finds new affection that the Walser connoisseur Reto Sorg attests to him: republican-trained jokes, playing with Swiss language shame, ironic use of language gestures, unpretentious punch lines, disrespect for authorities and respect for the simple. He could not necessarily enjoy such affection during his lifetime, and for a long time he usually stood parked in the Käuzewinkel.
A – first – supplement volume to the critical edition gathers the possible reception documents for the work for the years 1898 to 1933. First of all, of course, it does not show the lack of understanding during his lifetime, but who, when, how intensively promoted him. Walter Benjamin, Hesse, Tucholsky, for example, but above all the tireless Ludwig Hardt. The number of his texts only comes close to the anonymous authors. The latter are in turn an indication of a more casual perception. Conclusion: Browsing through the carefully crafted volume is more fun than distilling a strict history of reception from it.
Marmaduke Pickthall – welch Name! -, born in 1875 into an Anglican pastoral household, fascinated by Islam, to which he later converted (his translation of the Koran into English is still relevant today), traveled to the Middle East as a youth in the mid-1890s, which he looked back on in 1917/18 published his travel reports, which have now been translated into German. At the end of the war, which also destroyed the Ottoman Empire, he showed himself to be very critical of British colonial policy and its fatal consequences, conjuring up an Orient that was already largely extinct, as he had experienced it. You get short episodes, mostly centered around people – bigoted pastors, bizarre knights, rascals, thieves, murderers, wise men and corrupt, plus dismembered cows, panting dogs and diabolical horses. All of this is held together by the indispensable travel companion Rashîd, a ransomed soldier and a figure like from 1001 night. Just as some episodes seem to come from oriental fairy tales rather than from the world in which European missionaries like to disturb the coexistence of different religions through arrogance or ignorance. They are often parabolic stories that amusingly introduce rites and rituals, a sense of justice and rules of honor.
At least a sample of the wisdom of one of his counterparts: Since, from his point of view, he stubbornly sticks to a wrong opinion, just this proves “that you were born to occupy a high position in the world”.
The diary that John F. Kennedy wrote on his grand tour through Europe as a youth in 1937, has already been published years ago. Now it has been re-published, supplemented by that of his friend Lem Billing who traveled with him and by other of his trips, especially to Germany in 1939 and 1945, with a detailed afterword and numerous private photos (now with Billings!). It’s worth reading, even if, contrary to what the title suggests, nothing about the diary was “secret”. The journey took them across the continent. Everywhere they met people in high positions, from ambassadors to cardinals, bought plenty of things, especially dachshunds, met friendly maids, often behaved in the hostels in such a way that they were thrown out, liked to look at cathedrals. The two had pretty clear ideas about the respective national mentality, the French were – apart from Paris – a “very primitive nation”. The Italians happy, their places dirty, the German cities neat, but the people too complacent – and mostly quite Nazis. Kennedy found that democracy was a good fit for England and the USA, fascism for Italy and Germany, communism for Russia, that there would probably be no war, and if so, from Russia. On the trips afterwards he saw a little more differentiated …
The locked away. Re-education in the GDR – the fate of children and adolescents. Grit and Niklas Poppe Propyläen 2021, 414 S., 22 €
Consolation. Four exercises Hanna Engelmeier Matthes & Seitz 2021, 198 S., 20 €
Reception documents on the literary work of Robert Walser 1898 – 1933. Hans-Joachim Heerde (Ed.) Stroemfeld Schwabe 2021, 880 p., 128 €
The pigeon on the mosque. On the move in the Orient Marmaduke Pickthall, Alexander Pechmann (Transl. And ed.) Steidl 2021, 239 p., 22 €
John F. Kennedy: The Secret Diary. Europe 1937 Oliver Lubrich (Hrsg.), DvB 2021, 224 S., 22 €
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