H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (November, 2003)

FORUM: REV: Denham on Nossak, _Der Untergang_ and Rehn, _Nichts in sicht_

Nossack, Hans Erich. _Der Untergang_. (1948) Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1976.
Rehn, Jens. _Nichts in sicht_. (1954) Frankfurt am Main: Schoeffling & Co.,
2003.

Reviewed for H-German by Scott Denham <mailto:scdenham@davidson.edu>,
Department of German and Russian, Davidson College.

I. Context

As I write the first lines of this review essay I am sitting in the car
waiting to pick up kids from school, laptop on my knees, under tall
sycamores just across the park from the main city cemetery in the city of
Wuerzburg (where I am spending two years directing Davidson College's German
study abroad program). On my left across the street is the
Siebold-Gymnasium, formerly Kaiserliches, then after 1918 Staatliches
Realgymnasium. One of the teachers there, Theo Memmel, resigned his teaching
post to became the Nazi mayor of Wuerzburg in 1933, which he remained until
1945 (Rockenmaier, 244). Just behind me at one end of this section of the
beautiful Ringpark is the war memorial, built in 1932 to honor the several
hundred Wuerzburg soldiers killed in World War I. It had a shockingly
fascist aesthetic already then, with massive Breker-like figures carrying a
dead comrade, all Stahlhelme, trench coats, grim faces, all from the light
grey limestone that lies under this part of Franconia. Plaques of names
stand behind them, each with a year chiselled in it. Seven comparatively
reserved crosses stand to the sides with dates 1939 to 1945 plus two plaques
put up by a _Vertriebenenverband_ and the local sport club commemorating the
loss of life and _Heimat_, these all added later. A couple hundred meters
across the park from the school is, before the gates of the cemetery, the
memorial to those killed in the bombing of the city on March 16th, 1945. It
is dark stone with a sculpture of a family lying dead on the ground
surrounded by dark stone crosses. The style is Ernst Barlach. Every time
I've been by this memorial there have been fresh flowers. Some 4000 people
were killed in the bombing of Wuerzburg, which was one of the last big raids
of the war.  3000 of those dead are buried in a mass grave here. Each March
16th the bells in the city toll between 9:20 and 9:40pm to mark the bombing
(Domarus, 166).

There is no marker or memorial, but on April 26th, 1942, along the street
between the war memorial and the bombing memorial--at the time the
Hindenburg-Ring, now the Friedrich-Ebert-Ring--a photo was taken of a large
group of Jews from Wuerzburg and surrounding towns who were forced to march
to the trains that carried them to the East. Most of these 842 people
deported on that day were killed in Belzec and Sobibor (Rockenmaier, 150,
153). Readers of this discussion list probably know this photograph from the
Wuerzburg _Main-Post_ Archive: a long line of people in winter coats
carrying bags and suitcases, moving from back left to front right across the
picture, trees in the background on the right, police standing on the
sidewalk to the left. It has been reproduced often. On June 17th, 1943, the
last 57 Jews from Wuerzburg and the region were sent away. The train went
directly to Auschwitz. Some 1200 Jews from Wuerzburg were deported and
killed. A room in the town hall houses a permanent exhibit about the
destruction of Wuerzburg. There used to be a small plaque marking the place
of the city synagogue in the Domerschulstrasse, but a new building is going
up on the vacant lot where the synagogue once stood and the plaque is gone
now.

History is thick in this town. The connections between, for example, the WWI
dead, the Nazi schoolteacher turned mayor, the deported and murdered Jews,
and the destruction of Wuerzburg, are easy to make, as I just have, but, as
we know, difficult to explain and more difficult to understand, in one's
head and in one's heart. I drive past the war memorial, the school, the
bombing memorial and then down the Friedrich-Ebert-Ring every day. On some
days, like today, this is a very strange experience.

II. Why now

Thanks to a new generation of historians and to a new generation of curious
readers, and to publishers who have reissued long-forgotten documentary
histories and fiction, we now have a lot of material to help us confront
these inevitable connections more thoughtfully and responsibly. Given the
numerous reviews already of Grass's novel and of Friedrich's history, I have
decided to discuss below two lesser-known, but re-issued books of
literature, first Hans Erich Nossak's _Der Untergang_ (1948) and then Jens
Rehn's _Nichts in sicht_ (1954). Both have become modestly successful again
following W.G. Sebald's claims that German writers didn't do a very good job
of representing the bombings and Joerg Friedrich's bestseller _Der Brand_.
Not quite a flood, but certainly a table-top full of new titles greet one in
any good bookstore in Germany these days: Joerg Friedrich's _Der Brand_,
Grass's _Im Krebsgang_, Sebald, Nossack, and Rehn; but also now big picture
books like Christoph Kucklick's _Feuersturm_ and Friedrich's newest book
_Brandstaetten_ (both recently reviewed by Ralf Blank on the H-Soz-Kult
list), as well as Lothar Kettenacker's fine collection of essays and
newspaper reviews on Friedrich's _Der Brand_ and a _Spiegel_ collection,
journalistic but very interesting, edited by Stephan Burgdorff and Christian
Habbe. Kettenacker's book is especially useful and should be on any reading
list designed to explore the discussion at hand. Friedrich's newest book has
already provoked a new wave of reviews.

III. Hans Erich Nossack's _Der Untergang_

The memoir-like essay is referred to by Nossack as both a "story"
["Erzaehlung"] and a "testimonial" ["Bekenntnis"] and by critics variously
as a memoir, essay, report ["Bericht"], "a mixture of the fictional and the
documentary" (Weiss), and story; it has appeared in four editions in
Germany:

"Der Untergang," in _Interview mit dem Tode_ (Hamburg: Wolfgang Krueger
Verlag, 1948).

_Der Untergang_ (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1961).

"Der Untergang," in _Interview mit dem Tode_ (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,
1963).

_Der Untergang_, illus. with photographs by Erich Andres (Hamburg: Ernst
Kabel Verlag, 1981).

Total print run of the various editions seems to be in the 75,000 range
(Czerwionka, 282).

The publication history of _Der Untergang_ through 1981 shows two sides of
the kind of reporting on German victimization present in postwar Germany:
first a kind of high-brow, bourgeois (Nossack: "buergerlich") view as
present in places like the staid and sometimes provocative conservative
journal _Merkur_ and the Langen-Mueller Verlag on the one (right) hand and
in Heinrich Boell and the Gruppe 47 on the other (left). In this case, it is
the highbrow publisher Suhrkamp that legitimizes the presentation of German
victimization, mainly by reissuing the piece in 1961.[1] Second, there is a
low-brow, _kleinbuergerlich_ outlet, on the one hand as a kind of local
history, as was the case all across Germany in hundreds of small, local
memorial publications for victims of allied bombing (see Friedrich), and on
the other as what Nossack called disdainfully "Bahnhofsliteratur," the kind
of books (often militaria) sold at train station kiosks, sensational,
"Landserhefte," possibly pornographic or right-wing: cheap. The 1981 edition
by the Ernst Kabel Verlag seems more the latter to me. Erich Andres was a
photographer for the Wehrmacht, went on after the war to work as a
commercial photographer, and apparently took these photos of his hometown
during a leave from his job as photographer in a _Wehrmacht
Propagandakompanie_. From what I can find, he shot the Hamburg photos
illicitly and hid them until after the war. This seems plausible. It appears
as if the local Hamburg publisher Ernst Kabel Verlag saw the serendipitous
similarity in the two native Hamburgers' work -- Andres's documentary
photographs and Nossack's documentary report on the bombing of Hamburg --
and moved to produce the synthetic portrait of Hamburg's demise in July
1943. Despite the whiff of _Bahnhofsliteratur_ surrounding the Ernst Kabel
Verlag edition, it is a compelling book. Nossack's text is given real power
through Andres's photos, and vice-versa. None of the previous editions of
_Der Untergang_ had any illustrations at all. I know that one U.S. press is
currently considering an English edition of Nossack's memoir, possibly with
photographs.

Critics cite _Der Untergang_ unanimously as the Nossack title that made him
famous (Haase, Weiss, Vollmann, for example) and alongside a few other
titles ("Unmoegliche Beweisaufnahme," in _Spirale_ [1956],
_Bereitschaftsdienst_ [1973]), it served and serves as the identificatory
text for Nossack, whom critics name nearly always alongside Camus and
Cortazar outside Germany, and in the same breath as the other "internal
immigrants" in the German context: Ernst Juenger, Elisabeth Langgaesser,
Marie Louise Kaschnitz, Walther von Molo, Frank Thiess, Peter Bamm, and Hans
Carossa, among other authors of those books "your grandmother read"
(Vollmann) in the fifties and sixties. In this list, too, belongs Jens Rehn,
but more on him below. Nossack is a realist of the occasionally magical
sort, a minimalist, a nihilist. He's a serious, unfunny, solid, obvious
character. He claimed to hate publicity and success, but at the same time
(as his correspondence shows), he carefully furthered his literary success
and sought every opportunity for public exposure and publication. In fact,
he claimed repeatedly that the Hamburg bombing was the critical moment for
him, his new beginning (at 42 years old), his awakening as an author. He
said on several occasions that all his earlier works had been lost in the
fires. Yet several new studies show that this was not the case. Rather,
Nossack had lost only his diaries; all but two of his plays, most of his
poems, and much of his correspondence was saved, either in the fireproof
safe in his Hamburg office or with friends in other places. Nossack actually
tried hard to use the pre-war material (mostly dramas) through the early
fifties, but by about 1952 had found that his post-_Untergang_ prose writing
was being received better than his pre-war plays, two of which flopped in
Wiesbaden in the early 1950s (see Dammann and Czerwionka).  Still, he
continued to claim that the bombing was his new beginning and it has become
just that in his own literary biography and for the popular imagination.
Most surveys claim that Nossack was a communist (yes, but he was also in the
right-wing paramilitary Freikorps for a year as a student in Jena); that he
was censored by the Nazis (he wasn't; on the contrary, in 1942 he asked for
and received permission from the NS state to publish); that the Hamburg
bombing was his literary and personal "Zero Hour" (literary, not: he sought
for the next seven years to publish and have produced his pre-war plays;
personal, yes in some ways, but he didn't seem to realize this until a
decade or more after the fact, when he began making the point in
interviews). Nossack sought in right and left-wing political circles for
ways to reject his bourgeois-mercantile upbringing as a young man (as did
millions of others at the time). As an adult he "escaped" into the family
coffee firm as a way of avoiding contact with the Nazi state (he had been in
the KPD, after all). After the war he remained an outsider. He referred to
himself once as "the best-camouflaged author in Germany." He won prestigious
writing prizes and awards and has been the subject of a dozen dissertations.
He wrote and published prodigiously: a handful of novels, several
collections of stories, collections of speeches and essays, lots of
occasional prose in journals and papers, interviews, letters, diaries. With
the exception of a few recent volumes and papers interested in a critical
revision of Nossack's self-portrait, there has not been any very good work
on Nossack in the last decade. He is not on German departmental reading
lists. He seems a period piece, an acquired taste for contemporary readers
(along the lines of Ernst Juenger), and is of interest now only because he
is a good example of early attempts to describe and digest the trauma of the
war.

Nossack is back on the front burner now for two reasons: first, he had his
hundredth birthday in 2001, and German papers and cultural institutions are
notoriously active about such anniversarial events. A dozen or so major
newspaper articles marked his centenary. Even more important, though, is the
debate about Germans-as-victims, opened most prominently by W.G. Sebald in
his essay "Luftkrieg und Literatur," given as the Zurich Poetics Lectures in
1997 and published as _Luftkrieg und Literatur_ in 1999 (_On the Natural
History of Destruction_, Random House, 2003). Here Sebald accused German
literature of not adequately portraying German victimization, and especially
of repressing the trauma of the destruction of German cities through the
bombings. German authors had abdicated some kind of responsibility to their
own German victims, he argued. One of the few exceptions, for Sebald and
others -- in the hasty search for Germans who had treated _German_ rather
than _Jewish_ or other victims in their fiction -- was Hans Erich Nossack in
his piece _Der Untergang_. So all of a sudden everyone (or the few hundreds
or so who cared) went to the library and read Nossack's _Untergang_, having
never heard of it before Sebald. (Sebald actually got hold of Nossack,
Hermann Kasack, and Alexander Kluge, two others who pondered impact of total
war on Germans, much earlier. See his scholarly essay in _Orbis Litterarum_
from 1982.) With perfect timing, then, came Guenter Grass's wonderful new
novella _Im Krebsgang_ (2002) (_Crabwalk_ [2003]), which situated the
world's worst maritime disaster in the complicated context of Germans as
victims, Germans in war, Germans making memories, and Germans trying to
figure out how and what to think about the grim images of innocent women and
children dying at the hands of the allies. Nossack's _Untergang_ is named in
several reviews of Grass's book.

I find much in Nossack's other works to be dated, heavy-handed, tendentious,
and very serious. He was influenced by Kafka, surrealists, expressionist
themes; he sometimes reminds me of Schopenhauer. _Der Untergang_ represents
the experience, or better, the state of *destruction* well, and without the
irrational abstraction or psychologization (Hofsommer) of Kasack's _Die
Stadt hinter dem Strom_ (1947) or the social commentary of Boell's _Der
Engel schwieg_ (written 1949-50; published posthumously 1992). Nossack's
slight "report" should be read by more than just the readers of the H-German
discussion, now that we're concerned again (in the context of the Iraq war)
with the nature of air war and what bombs do to cities and people.

Schreibverbot?

Several critics mention that Nossack was prohibited from writing ("unter
Schreibverbot") under the Nazis.[2] Yet I find no evidence for this. The
National Socialist _Reichsschrifttumskammer_ (Reich Chamber of Writers), a
wing of the _Reichskulturkammer_, required that all published authors be
members of the party "writers guild." Nossack, through a chance encounter
with Hermann Kasack, editor at the Suhrkamp Verlag, sought to publish a book
of poems with Suhrkamp. In order to do this, he had to seek permission from
the state by way of an application for membership in the
_Reichsschrifttumskammer_, which he did (Dammann, 227ff.). Until this point,
in October 1942, Nossack had published nothing, nor tried to, though he was
already a prolific writer -- poetry, plays, and diaries. He was not
prohibited from writing, nor from publishing under the Nazi state. On the
contrary, the _Reichsschrifttumskammer_ gave Nossack explicit permission to
publish by way of an "exemption from necessary membership" in the chamber
since his planned publication was "only occasional and of modest size"
(228). So, from what we know from the archives, Nossack was not of interest
for the Nazi state, which didn't even know he was writing until this request
(which was granted) of 1942. While most biographical accounts of Nossack
mention prominently his membership in the communist party for a few years in
the mid-1920s and again from 1930 to 1933, almost none mention his
membership in a right-wing Freikorps unit and in a conservative university
fraternity in the early 1920s (see Dammann and Nossack, "Jahrgang,"136).

IV. Jens Rehn's _Nichts in sicht_

Reading this war book, originally published in 1954 and just republished,
can add to and complicate our knowledge of how German literature represented
the experience of the war. Although World War Two is hardly present in the
story and shows up only as a kind on contextual frame for the minimal plot,
the book has been (and will continue to be) read as a German war story. The
novella is a period piece, a wonderful existentialist exercise, with clear,
precise, and direct language that reminds me of Camus or Raymond Carver or
of film noir or Hemingway. The story is basic: two men stuck on a life raft
in the Atlantic. Both die, first one, then the other, over the course of a
few days. My ideas about the book here are not so very different from those
of most of the German reviewers, though in the current context of renewed
interest in the literary and historical representation of German suffering
in WWII, this book has a newly-inspired relevance. Clearly the publisher
seeks to market the novella in the context of this renewed interest, which
is why I think it is relevant to discuss Rehn's book here.

The story opens with the basic dramatic scene: flat ocean, burning sun,
drifting life raft, two men, the "one-armed man" and "the other man," never
named, sitting opposite each other on a rubber life raft in the middle of
the Atlantic. The narrator uses declarative sentences, brief, direct. One
man watches the horizon without pause; one sleeps. All is past tense,
heterodiegetic, third-person presentation; uncomplicated. Later the narrator
focuses more on the characters' psyches, including retrospective memory
flashbacks and hallucinations, including stories of women, which is a common
and complicating factor for both characters, but for now, things are distant
and factual. On the horizon there was "nothing in sight." The title phrase
comes back as a kind of refrain throughout the book at regular intervals
after its invocation at the end of the first paragraph. (This technique
reminds war novel readers of Vonnegut's "So it goes" in _Slaughterhouse 5_.)
Following the first refrain, the reader gets a factual description of the
progress of how a shot-up arm, wounded and rotting, gets amputated. The
description is clinical, impersonal, almost like an encyclopedia entry.
Although, contrary to what some readers say, there is a kind of
light-hearted irony here already in the first pages. Gallows humor is of
course characteristic of the war novel genre, and Rehn has a nice touch with
it. The arm, tossed overboard, "lies by now some 2300 meters down, that is
if no fish has eaten it." Otherwise there is only smoking, eating bits of
chocolate, and nipping at the remaining whisky ration, the only liquid on
board, terse conversations about the hopeless situation, and lots of private
thinking and remembering.

We learn about the characters gradually, but in such a way that underlines
the irrelevance of their own individuality: "When a rubber raft is drifting
alone in the mid-Atlantic it is irrelevant if it's drifting there in war or
peace. It is also unimportant what the nationalities of the two men are when
they are drifting alone in the mid-Atlantic and will die of thirst if no one
finds them in time. The sun is uninterested in the fact that the one-armed
man is an American and the other man is a German, or in the fact that they
are squatting in a rubber raft in the middle of the Atlantic in 1943" (9).

Much of the narration concerns itself with the details of the physical state
of the two men. The one-armed American airman dies of a massive infection at
the end of the second of the five chapters. The other man, the German
submarine officer, of dehydration at the end of the book. The actual
relationship between the two is minimal, since the one-armed man dies early
on, but the psychological relationship between them that exists in the mind
of the other man is important and dominates the story, beginning with the
other man's debate with himself about whether and when to throw the dead man
overboard, and ending with the one-armed man's continued presence in the
story through hallucinations in the mind of the other man. Even early on
they converse about the hopelessness of human relationships: the narrator
tells us that the German's fiancée was killed in a riding accident. (So it
goes.)  And the American's girlfriend learns that he was lost over the
Atlantic, drinks herself into oblivion to escape her sorrow, and ends up in
the hospital with a leg amputated after a drunken car wreck. (So it goes.)
Thus we gain insight into men's concerns -- basic ones, to be sure: women,
food, drink -- and rescue. But from the outset all their needs are shown to
be without meaning beyond physical survival. They die and that's that. (So
it goes.) Of interest later in the book are several hallucinations the other
man has, mainly involving imagined conversations with the dead one-armed
man, who for a day at least, floated along behind the raft inspiring all
sorts of desperate thoughts. But then Rehn's narrator inserts one of the
encyclopaedia entries: "Hallucinations are caused by, among other things,
fever and extreme exhaustion. They are perceptions without a corresponding
external stimulus, that is, perceptions of actual situations transformed by
illness. [. . .]"

Of special interest in the context of the current interest in German
literary and historiographical representations of Germans as victims in war
are a few scenes of submarine attacks on allied shipping convoys and the
retaliatory depth-charge and bomb attacks on the German submarines. The
results are deadly for all and seem to serve no real connection to Rehn's
presentation of the other man's psyche. The war is a simple fact,
unavoidable, present, like nature. "We shouldn't have attacked. Then you
could have continued sailing. -- When and if. -- Result 50 men gone to hell.
In two days it will be 51 counting me" (15).  "The steamer was in the
crosshairs and began to sink aft after the first hit. The next torpedo hit
between the bridge and the stack. The ship broke up and sank quickly. Many
people, very many people swam in the water. That was not good to see. The
seas were very rough. The people would not be able to hold out in the water
for long" (92).

This was Rehn's first work and aroused great interest in 1954. It won a
literary prize and caught the attention of Gottfried Benn, Siegfried Lenz,
and Martin Walser, who all wrote positively about Rehn's novel. The reissue
of the book has also inspired several brief positive notes in the press,
always in the context of the current wave of treatments of Germans as
victims of WWII. (For excerpts of the reviews, see the Schoeffling Verlag
webpage for the book: <http://www.schoeffling.de/content/buecher/232.html>.)

V. Taboo?

Sebald might be right that there is no great German novel about the bombing.
But there was never a taboo about speaking or writing about the bombings.
There are, as Sebald himself mentions, hundreds of local histories of the
experience of cities and towns during the war, as well as, inevitably, the
photos -- before and after -- of the church or town hall. Nossack and Rehn
show how the war as treated both as experience and topos soon after the war.
Another war experience book that needs to be named in the context of
Wuerzburg is Leonard Frank's _Die Juenger Jesu_, a portrait of Wuerzburg in
rubble and a sketch of moral possibilities for Germans and some Jews after
the war. This novel, first published in 1949 and long out of print in the
West (Aufbau Verlag had it in print for a while in the late 1950s), has also
been reissued recently, by a local Wuerzburg publisher.

As many reviewers have noted, there is no taboo about discussing or
portraying German victimhood, one needs only pay close attention and listen
well.

I believe the press and publishers have pushed the discussion we are having
now for a couple of reasons beyond simply selling newspapers and books:
first, because, in fact, there are some good new books out: Grass's
especially. And second, because of the Germans' increasingly relevant role
in international geopolitics. Having Germans see themselves as victims, or
at least be reminded of their possible partial status as war victims -- as
complicated and fraught with problems as this may be -- allows them to be
better pacifists on the world stage, or to understand why their Green
foreign minister should be taken seriously. In Wuerzburg, the bombings are
nearly unavoidable. What is easy to miss here is the former Jewish life of
the city. There is in this town what some have called "the presence of the
absence" of Jews. The discussion of the Germans as victims, of the allied
bombings of Germans and their cities, of the memorialization of these
victims, is a necessary and useful one. But in this town I see an encrusted
history of a cult of German victimhood and not much else.

WORKS CITED

Blank, Ralf. Review of Joerg Friedrich, _Brandstaetten_.  17 October 2003.
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/type=rezbuecher&id=3483.

_____. Review of Christoph Kucklick,_Feuersturm_. 13 October 2003.
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Dammann, Guenter. "Neue Funde zur fruehen Biographie Hans Erich Nossacks."
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_____. _Brandstaetten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs. Munich: Propylaeen,
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_____. "Beyond Slaughter: Memories of '45: The bombing of Baghdad cannot be
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Furlong, Ray. "Horrific Fire-bombing Images Published." BBC News, UK
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_____."Der Untergang," in _Interview mit dem Tode_. Hamburg: Wolfgang
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_____. _Der Untergang_. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1961.

_____. "Der Untergang," in _Interview mit dem Tode_. Frankfurt a. M.:
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_____. _Der Untergang_. Illus. with photographs by Erich Andres. Hamburg:
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_____. _On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred
Andersch, Jean Amery, and Peter Weiss_. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York:
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_____. "Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte: Versuch ueber die
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NOTES

(1). It would be worth investigating how this came about, who made the
decision to issue _Der Untergang_ as a separate book, whether the
early-1960s wave of Germans-as-perpetrators media (Eichmann trial, various
"Auschwitz trials" of former concentration camps guards; Mitscherlich,
Grass, et al.) sparked some desire on the part of Suhrkamp or Nossack to
offer _Der Untergang_ as a kind of counterweight: Germans-as-victims vs.
Germans-as-perpetrators. The correspondence between Nossack and his
publisher (Unseld) and editor (Kasack) that might shed light on this
question seems to be at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, though
I've not checked it there.

(2) Among others: Inge Stephan: "In his postwar writings, Nossack achieved a
belated literary breakthrough denied him during the Third Reich, when he had
been banned from writing" (172). Joseph Kraus: "Im Jahre 1933 haette
Nossacks erstes Manuskript veroeffentlicht werden sollen; nun musste er froh
sein, mit einem Schreibverbot davonzukommen" (8). Jacket text from Der
Untergang, Ernst Kabel Verlag: "Hans Erich Nossack, Jahrgang 1901, konnte
durch die Umstaende der Zeit, in die er hineinwuchs, als Schriftsteller erst
nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in der Oeffentlichkeit hervortreten."  Schroeder:
"Nossack erhielt Schreibverbot" (32).

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