Across the Border: WG Sebald writes about Peter Handke

In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.

WG Sebald's remarkable essay Across the Border, on Peter Handke's 1986 novel Die Wiederholung, translated by Ralph Manheim in 1989 as Repetition, has been made available in English by Cannon Magazine. You can download it as a PDF. Even better news is that The Last Books press is reissuing the translation later this year alongside Scott Abbott's translation of Handke's book-length poem To Duration, published in the same year.

This is especially gratifying for me as Handke was one of the first writers to reveal the potential for writing beyond the shameful lowlands of contemporary English literature, and Repetition one of the most rapturous reading experiences of my life. A quarter of a century or a day later, I tried to write about this in an essay. 

Reticent artificiality

In another essay, developing his reasons for admiring W. G. Sebald, [James Wood] contrasts him with some of his more popular contemporaries:

What is remarkable about The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn is the reticent artificiality of Sebald's narration, whereby fact is taken from the real world and made fictional. This is the opposite of the trivial "factional" breeziness of writers such as Julian Barnes and Umberto Eco, who take facts and superficially destabilize them within fiction, who make facts quiver a little, but whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact . . . . Facts are a sport for such writers . . . . For Sebald, however, facts are indecipherable, and therefore tragic.

From James Wood's The Broken Estate as reviewed by Gabriel Josipovici.

Books of disquiet

Two references to Thomas Bernhard made last month by two of Britain's most prominent novelists are unremarkable in themselves, yet still surprising. Eleven years ago, when I wrote an introductory essay for Spike Magazine, such references by such people were unthinkable. On Radio 3's Nightwaves, following up his impressive and moving lecture, Will Self acknowledges that WG Sebald has strong affinities with "the lapidary monologuing" of Bernhard, yet also different because he moved to England in the Sixties. "If he had remained at home", Self wonders:

might he not have become – at the very least – a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald’s writing is anecdotal in feel, and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana – Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and model-making enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing.

A modulated solipsism is nice way of putting it: no cure here, only mitigation; palliative care. The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bear witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bear witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention:

Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day – and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response – if not an atonement – for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even – casting the shadow forward – an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one.

The blind eye we turn to the implications of Sebald's novels is emphasised by the disproportionate attention given to his least best novel Austerlitz. Had this been less explicitly about the Holocaust, as the three others are, one wonders if this novel would be regarded so highly. When he turned his attention to the Allied bombing of German cities, reviewers used it as a stick to beat opponents of the invasion of Iraq, to align them with 1930s appeasers. Self says "it is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction", yet not subsuming the live incineration of Iraqi families is precisely what agitates the cognitive dissonance of mainstream gatekeepers like Daniel Johnson. A cachinnating cynicism would be required instead perhaps. Which brings me to the second mention of Bernhard. In Prospect Magazine, the house paper of the English liberal intelligentsia, Martin Amis caused a fuss by dismissing JM Coetzee by claiming "his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure":

Amis: People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones — but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?

Tom Chatfield: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.

Steven Poole was the first to point out that "Amis might have been thinking of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who in my opinion is extremely funny". Are there any other writers in German who don't use paragraph breaks? Perhaps Amis is being funny himself; after all, who ever gets pleasure from paragraph breaks ("Hit return, baby, one more time")?  My own bewilderment at comments like this – another one would be Jonathan Jones' dismissal of Saul Bellow in favour of a much lesser writer – suggest that Will Self is right to raise the biographical influence on Sebald's fiction. I wonder if this could be the reason why Amis' novels leave me cold, books written by a stranger in a strange land. I have to say the same of Will Self's novels and those by almost every other big name in current English fiction, whereas Sebald and Bernhard and so many other European novelists give me the air in which to live and breathe. Perhaps it's something to do with internal and external exile. High modernism in English is peopled by exiles and aliens: Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, DH Lawrence and Woolf in their own ways, while contemporary writers whose novels have moved me also tend not to be inward with the culture in which they live and work: Sebald himself, Hugo Wilcken, Tao Lin, Jonathan Littell, Agota Kristof, JM Coetzee, Aharon Appelfeld. Of course it doesn't hold entirely and, Colin Wilson-like, one can overplay Outsider art, but what it does offer is an initial diagnosis of the long-term malaise in English fiction. Whereas Sebald and Bernhard expose their fellow countrymen to the taint, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan seem happier to criticise the official enemy than the genocide being perpetrated in their name by young Christian white men (it's not just Amis displaying "­narcissism and [an] inability to empathise"). What is to be done? I'm not implying that English fiction needs to address this subject as such but, to quote another writer not of his land, to find words for what would otherwise remain wordless.

A report from the academy: more on Kafka's "porn stash"

Last August, in my response to the reviews of James Hawes' Excavating Kafka, I said that the headline "revelation" that Kafka owned magazines featuring erotic images would not be a surprise to "anyone familiar with his work and with the secondary literature".

Even if you've read only Metamorphosis, the magazine image that Gregor Samsa had framed for display showing "a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished" is enough to suggest a unusually stimulated imagination.

Later in the blog, I wrote that Hawes' book seemed to be relying on a saintly image of Kafka as promoted by Max Brod opposed and revised by Walter Benjamin as early as the 1930s and by Milan Kundera in the 1990s. In the latest print edition of the TLS, Julian Preece confirms this suspicion by using, Kundera apart, the same examples to express surprise at the focus of the book: "Saying that Brod got it wrong is hardly worth another book".

Preece, a professor of German and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, also reveals that the "porn" magazines to which Kafka subscribed "mainly contained literary writing". I seem to have missed this telling fact from all the debate at the time. Nor did I know that Hawes' recommendations for further reading consists of only "seven European male critics". Preece quotes his reasons: "You don't need any more than this, for the brutal fact is that there really is very little else that would be missed", to which Preece responds: "So that's Benjamin, Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari, Canetti and Sebald dealt with". Is it really true that Hawes does not include any of these names? I hold out little hope that my own favourite writers on Kafka are included as Preece says that Hawes' exceptions "seem to be associated with his book".

However, I do know that Hawes rates the biographer Reiner Stach, and that's good to know but, in connection with this, Preece complains that Hawes "rehashes one sexist misnomer: that Felice was just 'a little typist' ... and consequently desperate to bag the successful, good-looking lawyer". As he points out, Felice was "a successful businesswoman with managerial responsibility working for a high-tech company". This is very clear in Stach's The Decisive Years with its revisionary portrait of Felice, her family and, by extension, Kafka himself, so one has to wonder if Preece has quoted Hawes out of context or if Hawes disagrees with Stach's scholarship.

Preece's trenchancy also confirms my hunch that the marketing profile of the book was borne of confidence in the lazy, ignorant and philistine preferences of the British common reader rather than in any conspiracy or incompetence of Kafka scholarship.

One could go through any number of the "K-myths" [as demolished by Hawes] and show how they were cleared up years ago, if indeed they ever really existed.

Preece concludes: "his disregard for readers who know what he is writing about is perplexing".

Blogblog: on litblogs and critblogs

Beginblog
Dan Green proposes a new category of book blogs: critblog. It's a useful distinction because, as his post explains, the proliferation of literary weblogs has been led by "superficial chitchat and literary gossip" rather than critical engagement with the oracle. His post reminds me of the daily shock of trawling through dozens of RSS feeds with only the slightest glimmer of interest. While hoping for reviews, speculation, discussion or just original links, I read instead three dozen reports of the death of a famous young author - as if I or anybody else was unaware of Ed Champion's grim post from several days before.

Developblog
This year I've wondered if the blog form had run its course. Did it reach a peak around 2006 as a friend has suggested to me? But what would reaching a peak mean? Dan laments the growth of blogs that do little "to the development of the litblog as a medium" - indeed, they circumscribe it to a bland daily digest - and reveals his plan to "inaugurate a new project" encompassing "more formally-developed critical essays, specifically essays on contemporary American fiction". I'm sure this is a good direction in which to go (as The Quarterly Conversation has proven). However, we should be clear: this is not blogging; a blog brooks no development. That is, if development is the cultivation of a project moving toward a positive fulfilment.

Digressblog
In 2000, when I began writing on Splinters, the idea was to draw attention to the essays, reviews and interviews on the wider site; an eddy in an otherwise stagnant backwater. It also enabled me to write on literary issues without having to expand an aside into an essay or review. Priority was always given to the longer form. Over the years, as blogging's profile rose, I still took time out to write long about Celan, Roubaud, Blanchot and, later, Sebald and Richard Ford, as well as individual reviews, believing this would rid myself of a certain lack. Perhaps there was a hope that the two would combine to form a distinct voice against the prevailing potatohead culture. If such a hope lived then, it's dead now. If we accept that winning is profile and popularity, the potatoheads have won. See, for example, the Guardian Book Blog's suspiciously minimal blogroll. The literary intellectuals at the newspaper evidently prefer to promote chicklit chat even though it makes Loose Women sound like an Oxford High Table.

Even though?

Anyway, such hope is a mirage looking back into the desert of the past. I have always written for reasons that are clear to me: to understand and unpack why, despite being island-bound and monolingual, I sense such an affinity to writers from the European mainland, and why English commensense realism and the happy freedoms of postmodernism* are irredeemably alien to me. If there are readers out there who recognise this feeling and who might then be saved from the dutiful reading of the latest potatohead favourite in order to find their own way, then my efforts have not been in vain.

*Postmodernism is a misnomer. It is the Victorianism of our age. Postmodernism is to Modernism what Victorianism is to Romanticism: a relapse, a celebration of unwitting failure, a backslide into the snug of timeliness and commerce. Modernism is still to come.

Backtothepointblog
The amusing thing about the rise of the blogging idiots - some in their unstately pleasure-domes, some in their Nick Cohen caravans - is that they herald not the decline in newspaper book coverage and, with it, the associated glorious benefits to all, but its success. Rather than facing up to books as unique interruptions to daily life, newspaper book coverage has corralled literature into the interminable chatter of culture. Blogging follows. However, blogging has the small advantage of being able to make the silence of literature its focus. A literary editor would not sanction such pretentious nonsense, as the absence from newspapers of our best reviewers attests.

Trapblog
But I must have said this all this before. Repetition is a necessity of blogging and I used to be happy with that. Yet now, as the delay in the fulfilment of writing becomes a cage rather than a clearing, another indistinct form becomes more attractive. How many blogs have been written in order to open the way for what blogging has replaced?! The question would then be: can another form maintain this spirit of need and enquiry toward its imaginary completion?

Endblog
Imagine then, a book.

Nearly finished

"I believe the narrative form is very very tired." George Steiner soundbit by The Guardian. "Me pap!" cries a litblogger in response. Such is the future of criticism. Of course, Steiner has been saying such things for many years. Like the Austrian author he introduced to an English-speaking audience in 1975, he's a master of necessary exaggeration. All that's left now is the search for a narrative of exhaustion. Another one.

For help, see this three-part interview with WG Sebald posted at Vertigo: "The art really is in isolating yourself and letting as few things into your head as possible." So then, back to blogging.

"I admired the fog and its affinity to the mountains"

Not the mountains in this case but Ditchling Beacon on the South Downs this afternoon (as taken on my phone camera after I'd cycled up through the fog). The line comes from Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer), a novel from 1847 by Adalbert Stifter - an influence on both Sebald and Bernhard - which Tales from the Reading Room inspired me to read. "It's a coming of age novel in which very little happens," Litlove writes "but its emotional climate is one of achingly suppressed passion." This is a perfect summary of the 380 pages (of 475) I have read so far. "It's extraordinary" she adds. It is that. I wonder how many other novels have such faith in such silence?

Spectral presences

How can a book so absorbed in the minutiae of daily life be so thoroughly imbued by a sense of loss?

Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald asks the question of Jacques Roubaud's novel The Great Fire of London and, in another post, compares the relation of photographs in this book to those used by Sebald in his. It also includes quotations from what looks like a fascinating interview with Sebald:

I have always had at the back of my mind this notion that [dead] people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits. And photographs are for me, as it were, one of the emanations of the dead, especially those older photographs of people no longer with us. Nevertheless, through these pictures, they do have what seems to me some sort of spectral presence.

Going back to Roubaud though: in a post earlier today, I mentioned the occasional value of books of the year lists. Well, it's 18 years since one in the Independent sparked my interest in Roubaud's great work. It's also four years since I posted an essay about the translation. It's good that the word is spreading.

Our desperate friend

The Editor's Corner at The Book Depository makes a good point about the recent survey that found "almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author". No, Mr Ed points out, most of that 10% want to be JK Rowling, which is something else.

Even so, many do still wish to become authors, even if it means working "very hard for very little recognition and for precious little money". Creation is its own reward (apparently). With this fresh in mind, I began to read Enrique Vila-Matas' novel Montano's Malady (I refuse to link to the English edition and its cretinously truncated title). It's about a man who is literature-sick. Every situation in his life is immediately related to a memory of literature. Someone, he decides, looks like Robert Walser, which reminds him of that WG Sebald said Robert Walser looked like his grandfather and died in the same way, walking in the mountains, and so on. (Vila-Matas reminds me, incidentally, of a comic WG Sebald, if you can imagine such a thing). The narrator introduces his son, Montano, whose malady is the inability to write any further. The struggle with literature-sickness and Montano's Malady maintains the book's energy and, as Three Per Cent's review says, is also a sort of manifesto for a renewal of literature against its enemies (aka "Pico's moles").

The great thing about the novel is that it's both very light on the surface yet also profound, moving and inspiring. No way is it "heavy stuff" as one mooing reviewer claimed. It's an ideal, unputdownable, thumping-good-read for that ambitious 10%. They can see their situation portrayed in a novel. Not being able to go on is, after all, a vital part of life.

I'm going to go to the kitchen to have a yogurt; I shall be accompanied by the desperate friend who always goes with me, that friend who is myself and who, so as not to fall into the clutches of cursed despair, writes this diary, this story of a soul trying to save itself by helping the survival of literature, this story of a soul no sooner strong and steady than it succumbs to depression, in order then, laboriously, to get back on its feet, to readjust through work and intelligence, constantly battling with Pico's moles.

Measuring the reviews

More high-profile reviews of Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World are appearing. We got a hint of the approach they might take last year, and I wasn't very happy. Mark Anderson threatens more provocation in The Nation: “Reviewers in Germany and in the United States have welcomed Kehlmann's comic novel as a departure from the lugubrious German bestsellers of the recent past ...” he begins (via Dispatches from Zembla). Mmm... While the welcome is strictly for it being a bestseller, we read it differently. The implication, even if it was never meant in that way, is that comic novels are not written by Germans because they're a lugubrious race. I'm aware that it's more than unlikely that even a smart Germanist like Mark Anderson (himself a translator of a great Austrian comic novel) will promote Gert Hofmann ahead of chat about Günter Grass and the legacy of Hitler and the breath of fresh air Kehlmann apparently represents. So I want to repeat it here: Gert Hofmann is the great comic German novelist of our time. He should at least receive a namecheck in the many reviews of Kehlmann's novel.

Like everyone else, I was interested in reading the famous bestseller. So when I got a copy, I read into it with high expectations. So far, it's entertaining. No doubt about that. However, it's hardly anything to get excited about. Here's a passage from the translation chosen from the page where my bookmark has come to rest:

At the Academy, Humboldt gave lectures on the conductivity of the human nerves. He was standing right there in the drizzle on the trampled grass outside the city when the last section of longitude was measured that connected Paris to the Pole. As it was completed, everyone took off their hats and shook hands: one ten-millionth of the distance, captured in metal, would become the unit of all future linear measurements. People wanted to name it “the meter”. It always filled Humboldt with exultation when something was measured; this time he was drunk with enthusiasm. The excitement stopped him from sleeping for several nights.

Without doubting its adequacy, you can read this sort of thing in any weekend supplement on any number of subjects. It's relaxing, undemanding. This a criticism only if someone wants to call it a great novel or to repeat the much-quoted comparison with Nabokov and Proust. Now that I've read some of the book, this comparison is even more absurd than when it was first trumpeted. Whoever made it doesn't seem to care about providing evidence and the British publishers haven't even revealed who made the comparsion, merely quoting Luke Harding's unattributed quotation. No doubt this is also from where Kate Chisholm got it. Any further comparisons sans evidence will probably rely on the same piece. I predict that if negative responses to the comparison are ever addressed, the complainants will be described as “purists”.

Gert Hofmann on the other hand can be safely compared with many other great writers; though not perhaps Nabokov and Proust. He's as funny as they are, but the sensibility is different. Another random quotation is necessary. Coincidentally, he also wrote a comic novel about an Enlightenment figure, the scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

It was the first time in a long time that Lichtenberg was walking in such close proximity to people. They smelled his sweat. Their eyes and ears boggled, not one of them shrank away from him. Because the Stechardess was now eating and sleeping at his house - not with him, mind! - they had abrogated their greeting. He had to go on greeting them, though. Then he was past them, and they spun round to look at him from behind. He didn't really notice at all, he was lost in thought. Often it would be thinking about some favorite notion of his, for instance: Is the cause of all movement in the world an idea of God's? Lichtenberg nodded and smiled subtly and said: It's possible! And resolved that he would go and sit in the third of his rooms today and look into the matter.

Superficially the two quotations are similar. But notice how Lichtenberg's ebullient character inhabits the third person narration (and those exclamation marks!). The novel doesn't lord it over its characters but takes us into their world; or rather, into the space between their world and ours. Though I haven't read it all, so far Kehlmann merely uses the setting to pursue his purpose (i.e. triumphant storytelling).

For that reason, it's appropriate that the novel is also reviewed by Daniel Johnson, the London print media's resident Germany-basher. He applauds Kehlmann because the novel “deconstructs the fantasy Germany of which many of his thirty-something contemporaries dream, rather than the real, hollowed-out Germany they actually inhabit.” No, I don't know what he means either. Is Britain any less hollowed-out? Johnson's neocon fantasies have been well and truly deconstructed since he championed the “moral bombing” of Iraq four years ago yet he still appears on a regular basis to sneer at those who noticed the emperor's new clothes. Like his father Paul, any red-face isn't from shame.

He goes on: “Like W. G. Sebald, who had to emigrate to England to become a major German writer, Kehlmann had to escape Germany – he lives in Vienna – to anatomise its escapism.”. For what it's worth, Hofmann lived and died in Munich after travelling around a bit. Most Germans seem to travel around a bit; escaping into the world. Often escaping enough to realise that real people live there. Johnson compared Germany's opposition the US invasion to its apparent revisionism over the Allied bombing campaign 60 years earlier, i.e. that it hadn't learned. It's been made clear since then, if it wasn't bleedin' obvious at the time, that it opposed the bombing precisely because it had learned.

Still, Johnson was right to say that it “has been a long time since Germany produced a major novel.” Yet this might be because “major” novels are anachronistic and that the majority of German writers have recognised that. Reviewers looking out for the imperial grandeur of “major” novels might easily miss the great novels of their time because these novels seek to be truthful rather than powerful. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl hasn't even been published in the UK.

"The Fire" that time and this

The publication of the translation of WG Sebald's remarkable essay on the Allied airwar on Germany coincided with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So it was no surprise the reviews were defensive not only of the 60+ year-old Allied campaign but of the one in process. For example Daniel Johnson assured us that while strategy might have been more important than morality in World War II, since then "the overriding aim of American strategic doctrine ... has been to avoid enemy civilian casualties". Which will come as a great relief I'm sure to the relatives of the dead in this city. (I've written more elsewhere about Johnson's shameful review in a long essay on Sebald).

So when I saw that an English edition of Jörg Friedrich's The Fire, subtitled "The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945", was about to be published, a book which Sebald didn't live to read but which brought about the catharsis in German society he had recommended, I thought: uhoh, here we go again! While the reviewer's are likely to be less thirsty for Iraqi blood as they were in 2003, they will no doubt use the incontrovertibility of the one to win back some credence for the other.

However, the first review I've seen is an uncredited one in The Economist, and it avoids the comparison entirely and begins quite magnanimously:

Bombing German cities into a wasteland was terrible: anyone reading Jörg Friedrich's book [...] will be in no doubt of the cultural destruction and human suffering that it caused. For many Germans, the experience of reading the unvarnished awfulness of their own, their parents' or grandparents' wartime experiences was cathartic. The translation will fill a gap in contemporary understanding in the English-speaking world of what happened in the air in the second world war. Mr Friedrich deserves credit for both his diligence and his descriptive powers.

But of course, it can't be left at that. "For all that, the book is flawed" the review says, taking back what it has given. "Many bad things happen in wartime and countries that start wars often experience the worst of them." (I can think of one contemporary example to the contrary). It goes on:

The author's outrage, and the sarcastic and melodramatic prose that this fuels, dims any understanding of the context in which Winston Churchill and his air chiefs decided that the air onslaught on German cities was the best (or least bad) course of action, and stuck to this even when the cost, to both bombers and bombed, became increasingly awful.

While this looks bad for Friedrich, I would ask how much that initial catharsis is dependent on the lack of varnish and excess of tone and outrage? Can one happen without the other?

The review ends with the usual feeble resort: "Mr Friedrich's desire to puncture Anglo-American self-satisfaction comes perilously close to suggesting that the Germans were right to defend Nazism, and the allies were wrong to attack it." But those, like The Economist, whose leader this week exhorts the US administration not to withdraw from its occupation, those who wish to distance themselves from apparent Fascist-appeasing demagogues, might be interested to learn that in his Afterword to the English edition, Jörg Friedrich says he supported the 2003 invasion.

A British Schreibtischtäter

The basic thesis of Daniel Johnson's open letter to Günter Grass is that the latter's silence over his past has emerged as the noise of his opposition to Western imperialism (link via KR blog). "Now that we know how you began your career, with a thorough indoctrination in the Waffen SS" he says "your lifelong loathing of the West takes on a new and sinister significance."

It's a curious loathing. Grass takes part in debate. He puts over his opinion. Sometimes it seems (I don't follow his pronouncements), he challenges governments if he believes they are wrong. Isn't this what the West stands for? Isn't this what participants in a democracy are meant to do? Not according to Johnson:

Like your American counterpart Noam Chomsky, like countless writers and intellectuals of the left from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Harold Pinter, you have worked hard to discredit the political and economic system to which you owed your success: capitalism.

So there we have it. They should all shut up. What's more, the 'success' of Chomsky's theory of generative grammar, Garcia Marquez's fiction and Pinter's plays is down, not to talent and particular application, but to capitalism. Perhaps Johnson means financial success instead. I suspect he does. Yet his article proves that a lack of intellect and talent isn't a drawback.

The logic of Johnson's comment is that anyone who dares to speak out against the actions of the political and economic system to which they "owe their success" is immediately a hypocrite. Curiously, this is the same logic used by Nazis and Stalinists on their own dissidents. Barring the rest of Johnson's 4800-word tirade, this alone is enough evidence to suggest democracy is only a veneer over the distressing logic of capitalism.

Johnson has history as a blowtorch to that the veneer. In April 2003, the TLS published his sickening 4000-word review of three books about the Allied bombing raids on Germany during World War II. I wrote about it soon after in an essay on WG Sebald. At that time, the invasion of Iraq had just taken place. Johnson picked out a certain novelist for contempt then too:

Grass has no doubt that the Allied bombing [of Germany] was a war crime because it lacked military objectives. "The Allies tried to break the resistance of the German people by killing hundreds of thousands, but the resistance grew." Speaking before the collapse of Saddam's regime, he was equally sure that the Iraqis would defend their country "because of the bombing". Grass evidently identifies with "the German people" in their "resistance" to the Allies; as a young soldier, he was after all one of them.

Before anything else, this reveals that Johnson already knew three years before this letter that Grass was Nazi soldier, so why does the particular branch make any difference now? Yes, the Waffen SS had been made up of ideologically driven Nazis, but that late in the war everyone knows that such elitism had long been abandoned. And anyway, isn't Grass saying rather that the bombing put in jeopardy liberation from tyranny by increasing the resistance? His "identification" is more like understanding beyond ideological constraints, an intellectual openness that Johnson, like his father, cannot abide.

An aside: Johnson would no doubt dismiss anything Grass says as suspect. For instance, he doesn't believe that Grass, as he claims, tried to join the U-boat service instead. These recruits, Johnson says, "were also notoriously hard-line Nazis" anyway. This is false. A late friend of mine was drafted into U-boats also as a teenager. He might have gone into the Waffen SS instead. That would have been more fortunate as few submariners survived. But he did survive and soon after the war emigrated to the UK. Later he joined the Civil Service and at retirement received a medal from the government; an achievement he cherished and one hardly likely from a hard-line opponent of the West. All these were actions of someone who wished merely to belong and do good, which he did.

The letter format enables Johnson to tell Grass that "you [as a Nazi soldier] were careless of how many people you killed, for to you they were scarcely human. Your mentality was not unlike that of the Islamist suicide bombers of today". (There's another clue as to Johnson's real concerns). As Grass claims he committed no crimes as a soldier, one wonders what deaths he is talking about. If Grass did take part in lethal actions, it has to be proven, yet Johnson offers no evidence. The whole letter is full of such assumptions and contortions. The giveaway example: as suicide bombers tend to be fanatical converts in small cells rather than teenage boys filling the space left by fallen adults in one of the largests armies the world has ever seen, the more appropriate comparison is with US soldiers in Haditha, Fallujah, et al.

Of course, Grass has been proved right in his prediction of resistance from the Iraqi people, though it is probably down less to Shock & Awe than the subsequent tyrannical occupation. This is what upsets Johnson more than anything, for he has more in common with Grass of old than he can possibly admit. Johnson has (as far as I know) yet to apologise for his outspoken support for an illegal invasion and occupation that has caused the deaths of a quarter of a million people. At least Grass has tried to atone in his writing life. Johnson reckons his silence over an ultimately irrelevant detail still makes him a Schreibtischtäter, a desk-criminal. But one has to recognise what one has done before atonement can take place.

Germane genius

Simon Barnes does that annoying British thing: make engagement with a foreign culture - in this case Germany's (because of the World Cup) - appear to be something one ought to do, like swallowing a tablespoonful of Cod Liver Oil, something to make one a better person in the long run.

I was aware that my ignorance of German literature was almost perfect. I had read the trippy novels of Hermann Hesse, of course, and duly over-rated them as a trippy student. I had read Kafka (well, he wrote in German) at school, and written Kafkaesque school stories.

Nice that he knows Kafka wasn't German. But nor was Hesse. He was Swiss. Oh I know, it's picky, but here's yet another article about German literature by a well-read and well-meaning writer that doesn't mention the three greats of modern German literature (Bernhard, Handke and Gert Hofmann). He doesn't even mention Sebald.

Remembered if outlived

When I read reports that Will Oldham a.k.a Bonnie Prince Billy has a new LP soon called Then the Letting Go I thought: he's so good with titles! It's always a good sign. But it turns out the title also makes up the final words of Emily Dickinson's poem that begins After great pain. Whatever, it's in keeping with a theme I noticed so many years ago when I wrote something to welcome I See a Darkness into the world: he writes songs of the human animal. The LP covers, at least until Joya, tended to feature an animal on the way to becoming human. But then there was last year's slightly disappointing Superwolf collaboration too. This is something to be investigated further. The relation between the formal feeling of being human and the great pain of being animal might be said to be the dynamic behind so much art (that is, art has to outlive the animal yet also seeks to return). Eric Santner certainly seems to think so. His new book On Creaturely Life looks at Rilke, Walter Benjamin and, perhaps most intriguingly, WG Sebald. Santner argues:

Sebald’s entire oeuvre can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors.

This last point is one I tried to make in my own essay on Sebald (now offline) - one that I felt was missing from the reviews of his Airwar book, mainly because many of the reviewers used it for special pleading on behalf of bombing our neighbours in Iraq.

Another diseased spirit

George Walden was a Tory MP and sometime junior minister between 1983 and 1997. He now reviews books on a regular basis in various London publications. In the left-wing New Statesman he patronises and pours scorn on Hans Erich Nossack’s newly-translated memoir of the Allied air raid on Hamburg; a raid that killed in one night almost as many that have been killed in Iraq over the last two years.

While he does acknowledge that Nossack doesn't seek to blame the Allies for the attack, there is, Walden says, a problem of tone. He is deeply suspicious of the romantic lyricism of Nossack’s prose:

Just as the images of the incineration of 3,000 souls in New York's twin towers were too alluring for aesthetes to resist applauding, the firestorm of Hamburg, says Nossack, ‘was almost lovely to look at’. For him, this vision of hell becomes a great, mystic, chaotic thing. Rather as many a Nazi envisaged war, in fact.

He doesn’t reveal the identity of the applauding aesthetes, which might lead us toward a certain conclusion, to which I’ll come.

What he does do is echo WG Sebald’s critique of German writing in response to the airwar. He agrees that it was concerned with forgetting rather than reportage. Such prose is "part of this process of forgetting". Yet Sebald calls Nossack "the sole exception" who was able to "put down .. concrete facts about the progress and repercussions of the gigantic, long-term campaign of destruction."

In Walden’s account, these concrete facts seem to be swamped by self-pity and moral equivocation. Could this be because Sebald had read widely in the subject and could see things that we can’t?

Walden suggests we read Nossack's book in tandem with Diary of a Man in Despair, an evocation of a nation's diseased spirit leading to war - written by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a German who did not equivocate and was consequently shot. Here you get the full moral stench exuded not just by the Fuhrer … but the schoolteachers, shopkeepers, labourers or sub-postmasters who helped give him 88 per cent of the vote. The sweat from their brown-shirted armpits is none the sweeter for coming from humble bodies.

For there is such a thing as the guilt of whole nations.

Walden’s suspicion extends even to suspecting Sebald of equating the airwar’s destruction with "the enormity of Nazi evil itself" and playing down the culpability of ordinary Germans. This seems excessive; a means of avoidance. What’s more, he seems to want to attach guilt to all Germans who need to reveal the enormity of what happened to them. Walden doesn’t even want to learn enough to forget in the first place. Could this disdain be due to more recent events than the Second World War?

For the first six years of Walden’s time as an MP, he was part of a government that supported Saddam’s evil regime in Iraq: the time, it has to be said, he was at his most dangerous and most murderous. I wonder how he feels about being closer to influencing policy against a tyrant than many of the Germans he pours scorn on? I can find only this sickening article in the Telegraph which curiously fails to mention his own complicity in causing the deaths of the "exterminated millions … in the Iran-Iraq war" yet rages against Germany for refusing to join in the latest turkey shoot. For it is clear he applauds the recent, more direct efforts of extermination by ‘the Allies’, but it is probably 'almost too lovely' for him to describe.

For there is such a thing as the guilt of whole governments.

Sadly, diseased spirits like Walden, who do more than equivocate, suffer a different fate to Reck-Malleczewen.