Page-Turners & Anti-Politics

PLAN D

by Simon Urban

Random House, 551 pp., €11.99 (German Price), March 2013, 978 3 442 74442 8

Much has happened in the three months it's taken me to get sucked in & through Simon Urban's breakthrough novel. Katy Derbyshire's English translation of the book was published last month by Harvill Secker, priced £15. Around the same time, over the first weekend in June, Hessen's police force, working under orders from Hessen's CDU Minister of the Interior, brushed off a well-organised, 10,000 strong Blockupy demo in Frankfurt, against the European Central Bank. The kettling tactics used to crush a protest overwhelmingly non-violent in its motivation were upsettingly similar to tactics used by the Metropolitan Police to suppress student and anti-cuts demos in London over the last two years. The Frankfurt law-enforcement officers didn't even have to use their water cannons. Managed-democracy's most expensive hardware has its greatest effect simply by standing there, martially: its bad PR for a state to allow sufficient uncontrolled dissent to get itself into a position where it actually has to make use of it. Two weeks after no one outside of the left was saying anything about violations in Frankfurt – where does the democratic masses' disinterest in freedom of assembly & of collective action spring from? – the German government's Human Rights Spokesman, the Free Democrat's Markus Löning started feigning panic about Turkey:

“It makes me really worried when I see the water-cannons and other big machinery being deployed.” ⁱ

Why Gysi didn’t sue Simon Urban

Back in August 2011, the Hamburg based Simon Urban released Plan D, his first novel. The reaction of the German Feuilleton – something like a Grand Central Committee of Literary Taste, housing inside the press – was so unanimously, screamingly positive, that you might suspect its unanimity had been argued through in advance; that tactics were at play. The novel is itself set in 2011, in an East Germany to which reunification has never happened. In Urban’s alternative future the collapse of the iron curtain was followed, in 1992 already, by Die Wiederbelebung – The Resucitation – of the old East Germany, which has slugged on, stubbornly & monotonously socialist, with as much restriction on emigration – i.e. almost total – as there was in the GDR up til 1989. This author combines this gimmick with a whodunnit, airport thriller genre – the victim found hanging right at the start; both shoes tied together being the boasty stamp of a Stasi ritual revenge murder – to milk every West German sterotype about the old East for all it is worth. And these stereotype’s are worth more than a bit. Hard on the heels of the Holocaust industry, an ‘Ost’-algia industry – complete with torchlit tours through the old Stasi interrogation cells – has followed. I had to wait til February of this year for the paperback to gorge myself on those sterotypes; and now I’m glad I waited. 

Cut.ting Edge Event: a jewel of a meritocracy, or of a mediocracy? Part 1.

     Cut.ting Edge – Austrian, German and Swiss writing in translation – was published online last Saturday night, and before you read any half-baked reviews of it, you should read the magazine itself. Five Dials, another magazine for new translations from the German speaking world was released in January. Alongside the work of thirteen other translators, an essay and two poems of mine are published in Cut.ting Edge; the work in Five Dials is, on the face of it, excellence – and much more important, an enjoyable read. So the only political correct and marketing correct answer to my rhetorical opener would be: of course these magazines should be seen as jewels of a meritocracy. A real no-brainer. Oder?

A violent-peace: the IBA opens in Wilhelmsburg

How many officers would you deploy, if you were in charge of policing an event where between 300 and 1000 demonstrators were expected, who, according to the police's own statement, can be categorised as ''middle-class'' ⁱ, i.e. harmless ? One hundred, perhaps? - remember, you're putting in the officers in full riot gear, helmets, body armour, metre long truncheons. That must be enough, that would give you a ratio of one well-armed, potential combatant to, at the most, every lot of ten do-gooders. The head of the Hamburg police service, under the direction of Michael Neumann, Minister for Interior Affairs and Sport, decided to deploy six hundred and fifty police officers at the official opening of the IBA  – the city's proudest piece of gentrification – in Wilhelmsburg on Saturday evening. The presence of these six-and-a-half centurias on that one day has cost the city an estimated €100 000 ⁱⁱ. A spokeswoman for Hamburg police was unwilling to confirm this estimate, but also refused to present their version of the costs, even though the arithmetic involved is simple.

Hamburg-Klopstock calling Goethe! Come in Goethe!

“If the Duke continues to drink himself to the point of illness then he will succumb to that illness, and will not live long, instead of, as he claims, strengthening his body with the drink ... The Duchess may continue to suppress her current discomfort, due to her very manly way of thinking. But this discomfort will turn into sorrow. And will she be able to suppress that? Luise's [the Duchess's] sorrow! Goethe! -- ... ”

So wrote Hamburg poet Friedrich Klopstock to Goethe in Weimar in 1777. At that time, Klopstock was still seen as the fatherly head of all German language writers. Like Günter Grass today, he had many detractors who enjoyed the sport of mocking him, and yet nevertheless enjoyed a huge status. Goethe, 28 and already a famous writer, was making news with his rugby-player-after-five-pints sort of behaviour together with his patron & close friend the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. They slashed around themselves show-offishly on the market place with big whips, jumped on their horses, and rode through the villages playing sadistic practical jokes on the locals, knowing these people had no means of redress against such actions. Klopstock gets to hear of this in Hamburg and is incensed, it undermines his ideal of the poet as someone who rises on the sublime above all such iniquities. He also feels responsible, seeing Goethe as a promising but errant relative of the family of poets which he presides over. And so the letter continues:

“Goethe! -- no, do not drape yourself in that glory, you do not love her as I do .... Up to know the Germans have been right to complain about their rulers, because these rulers haven't wanted anything to do with you scholars (=writers). Your friendship with the Duke takes him straight away out of that category. But if you continue to dance with the Duke to this old tune, there's no limit to the excuses the other rulers would have to make in their defence, [for not being interested in writers], if it actually one day will have happened, that thing which I fear most?”

Klopstock asks Goethe to show the letter to the Duke too. Whether Goethe did this or not we don't know, but we do know that he only answered two months later, in a tone of clear refusal: “Do spare us such letters in the future”, adding casually that he'd have no time at all for himself if he responded to all such letters and warnings.

Klopstock didn't like this not very veiled insult at all: “And as you even threw my letter into that category of 'such letters' or 'such warnings' – you express yourself as strongly as that ­-- my letter, containing the proof of my gift of friendship, then I declare you not worthy of that gift I gave you.” ⁱ The break between the two of them was final.

Goethe treated many people badly; and his response to Klopstock shows him as a careerist, understanding art as a career-ladder and the necessity of shoving people off the top of that ladder, to make way for himself. Or, as Yeats puts it in his poem, The Fisherman: “The beating down of the wise / And great art beaten down.” If you translated Klopstock's name literally into English you would get Knock-stick. Knocking his stick at Goethe didn't help Klopstock.

For those of you out there who want to get more into the Klopstock feeling, come along to the annual Hamburg "Poetry Slam in a Church" event, to be staged  in what's known as the Klopstock-Kirche - the Christianskirche in Altona - where you can even see Klopstock's tomb. My Writer's Room colleague Hartmut Pospiech is hosting the evening (around the 3rd weekend in June.) My biggest question is whether Hartmut will allow sexually explicit or explicitly political poetry in the church - and how the vicar will respond. The fact that this is my biggest question seems proof of an infantile part of my mind, concerned with scandal & smut, a quality of mind that Goethe hung onto for a long long time, well into his late thirties.

i For the original German version of the quotes from the letters from Klopstock & Goethe, and for the historical background to the above post, please see: Friedenthal, Richard. Goethe. Sein Leben und seine Zeit. Piper, 1996, Munich. p.190 – 191.