"The Jew's Beech" by Droste Hulshoff

 First published in German in 1842, this novella includes lots of Gothic elements such as poretending thunderstorms and corpses discovered in forests ... and two men who look very much alike. Friedrich Mergel is the clever peasant son of a mother who was physically abused by her husband; he has a short temper and ideas 'above his station in life'. He is best friends with his lookalike Johannes Niemand, a rather dim peasant whose name means Johnny Nobody. 

It's basically a prototype murder mystery. At the core of the story are Friedrich's Uncle Simon, a dodgy dealer for whom Friedrich works, and a team of crooks who are illegally cutting down trees, repeatedly pursued by foresters. One of these foresters is found dead after having had an argument with Friedrich; the lad is suspected but there is no proof one way or another. Four years later, Aaron the Jew, to whom Friedrich owes money, is found dead. Friedrich runs off - with Johannes - and disappears and is consequently again suspected of the crime but later exonerated after another man who later commits suicide confesses to killing a Jew named Aaron. Then, twenty-eight years later ...

The biggest difference from today's whodunnit tropes is this statement just over half-way through the book: "For the sake of those readers who are perhaps eager to learn the outcome of this affair, I must mention that it was never cleared up." (p 59) It seems that Anthony Trollope (as I have observed in reviews of his books The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, and Barchester Towers) was not the only author who enjoyed the self-spoiler. In this case, Hulshoff excuses herself: "It would be unfair to leave the reader's curiosity unsatisfied in a tale of fiction, but all this really happened - I cannot subtract or add anything." (pp 59 - 60)

The story has the folklore quality of a Grimms' fairy tale and the rustic setting of a pre-industrial Germany in which the countryfolk are utterly unromantic and mostly, it seems, petty thieves. There was a whiff of Silas Marner in the relationship between the party-loving peasants and the paternalistic squire. It was a delightful glimpse into a vanished world.

Selected quotes: 

(page numbers refer to the paperback edition translated by Lionel and Doris Thomas and published by Alma Classics in 2024)

• "A house which, boasting a chimney and window panes rather larger than usual, testified to the pretensions of its builder, while its dilapidated state indicated the miserable circumstances of the present owner." (p 15)
• "an eerie fellow in whom pompous reserve often alternated with a candour just as affected." (p 25)
• "When children are small, they trample on our laps - when they are big, on our hearts!" (p 54)
• "As soon as anybody had a few shillings to spare, he wanted to have a wife as well who would help him eat well today and starve tomorrow." (p 64)
• "As she let everything given to her go to rack and ruin, the village people had soon tired of helping her, for it is natural to man to abandon those who are actually the most helpless." (p 87)
• "The fields were bare, the leaves began to fall, and many a consumptive felt the shears of fate at his life thread." (p 94)

April 2024; 99 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Wall Jumper" by Peter Schneider

 The 'Wall' is the Berlin Wall which divided the German city from 1961 to 1989. The narrator lives in West Berlin (when it was "a half-city, a walled-on enclave set within a surly, repressive state"; Introduction) but frequently visits East Berlin where he visits relatives, goes to bars and collects stories of those who 'jump' the wall. There are some remarkable stories, including three teenagers who live close enough to the early wall to leap from the roof of their apartment block onto the wall; they make use of this facility to go to movies in the west, returning each night, only being caught after western journalists record their adventures. Another wall jumper goes from west to east. 

The main thrust of the book is to explore how growing up under two different systems, the capitalist West Berlin and the communist East Germany, affects the characters of the inhabitants.

The Introduction (by novelist Ian McEwan) calls this book a novel although there is little novel-type structure (it is difficult to discern a plot and the character of the protagonist does not seem to be affected in the way that the hero of a novel normally is). It is more like reportage, although the narrator is anonymous and one presumes that the other characters are pseudonymous, perhaps even fictional.

It's a very short book (120 pages in the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition) and I read it quite quickly. It fascinated me but it didn't always hold my interest which may have been due to the lack of a normal novelistic structure.

It is an interesting insight into the thoughts and feelings of people growing up in East Germany. For example, one character makes the point that it is wrong of the West German leader to lecture the East German leader about remembering the Nazi massacre of the Jews, since during the Second World War the West German leader had fought in the Wehrmacht and the East German leader had formed part of the resistance, spending ten years in Nazi jails.

In the Introduction, Ian McEwan makes the following points:

• The people living in West Berlin "tended to be the more adventurous spirits ... leaving behind them the prosperity and stifling conformity - as they saw it - of other German cities ... [for] cheap, shabby, once grand apartments. Those high ceilings echoed to the sound of radical political talk and avant garde jazz sweetened by the reek of cannabis. It was the presence of the Wall ... that made West Berlin both edgier and yet intellectually more vital than other cities in the West." 
• "Their stories are unfolded artfully, in a Scherezade-like manner, as bar-room anecdotes, cleverly overlapping throughout"

Selected quotes:

• "The difference between German and Latin American cooking becomes trivial when you see the garbage cans." (Ch 1)
• "A joke is always an epitaph for a feeling that has died." (Ch 1)
• "Smoke rises among exotic trees, light glows behind windows, human silhouettes become visible." (Ch 1)
• "Even more telling are the colors: pale gray, olive gray, wine gray, dove gray." (Ch 2) NB: My copy was an English translation published by a British publisher ... yet it uses American spellings! Why?
• "I leave the lines for name a title blank." (Ch 2) The narrator is anonymous throughout.
• "The Russian formula for concrete: a third cement, a third sand, a third microphone." (Ch 2)
• "If a human right is trampled anywhere in the world, she seems to come out of it with bruises of her own." (Ch 2)
• "What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I've been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state? Where does a state end and a self begin?" (Ch 3) This last sentence is repeated near the end of the book.
• "The street looks scoured." (Ch 3) 
• "Lena's stories seemed to me the product of a wishing so strong that the conditional past became the past pure and simple; they were not lies." (Ch 3)
• "The use of the subjunctive, even where grammatically appropriate, was artificial, showed lack of feeling and directness." (Ch 3)
• "I am entering a state where even things that will happen anyway require authorization." (Ch 4)
• "Pommerer, an intellectual under socialism, has about as much contact with the workers as I do in the West. He gets to know them when a water main bursts, a facade is restored, or a chair stands vacant at a barroom table." (Ch 4)

June 2022; 120 pages

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The train was on time" by Heinrich Boll

A very short novel set in the Second World War. A German soldier boards a train taking him to the Eastern Front. He becomes convinced that he is going to die soon. The train is carrying him towards his fate. Will he escape it?

I think that this is a novel written on two levels. One is the level of myth. It follows a classic mythic structure sometimes called the Hero's Journey (other books in this blog that also have mythic structures include Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt). In this structure, identified by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and followed consciously by George Lucas when writing the first Star Wars film, the Hero first receives a call which he refuses, he then embarks on a journey, entering a new world, he encounters Guides or Companions who help him find the way, he has opportunities to leave his quest which he may or may not take (these can be seen as trials), and near the climax he descends into the cave. In the case of Boll's book:

• He is an Outsider:
• Andreas is a very strange soldier like Boll (who was a pacifist conscripted into the Nazi army) . Andreas’s best friend, Paul, is a chaplain, and Andreas prays a lot (including praying for Jews). Symbolically, Andreas has forgotten to bring his rifle, which he has left propped up in Paul’s room. 
• At the start of the journey he has the opportunity to Refuse the Call: 
• “‘Get on?’ asked the soldier, amazed. ‘Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert.”
• He is on a journey. 
• Once he boards the train (presumably a metaphor, given that it travels on an undeviating track and you can’t get off until it stops) he realises: “the terrible thing is that I’m going to die … soon!” This word ‘soon’ (“Soon I’m going to die, that’s a certainty that lies between one year and one second”) triggers a process of searching his mind for what bits of the future he can visualise and which bits are a blur, he starts to narrow down the place (and therefore the day and time, he’s on a train whose timetable equates place and time) he believes he is going to die. 
• He has two Companions, one of whom has a Map. 
• Andreas meets two other soldiers on the train: a blonde boy and an unshaven sergeant on leave (who, significantly, lends Andreas a map which he uses to help him pinpoint his place of death). These are his Companions on the train. He is the Outsider, brought into contact with the world: “‘That’s right, mate,’ said the blond fellow. ‘Forget your troubles and join the game.’” They persuade him to play cards (another symbol: card games are governed by the random shuffle but once they are started the outcome of the game is largely fixed).
• These companions offer him a number of opportunities to escape his destiny; he Refuses the first chances but eventually he is persuaded to take the last.
• “I could get out here, go off someplace, any place, on and on, till they caught me and put me up against a wall, and I wouldn’t die between Lvov and Cernauti, I would be shot in some little village in Saxony or die like a dog in a concentration camp. But I’m standing here by the window and I feel as if I were made of lead. I can’t move, I feel paralyzed, this train is part of me and I’m part of the train, this train that has to carry me to my appointed end, and the strange part about it is that I have absolutely no desire to get out here.”
• There are trains going the other way which he has an opportunity to board: “From Lvov we take the civilian express, the courier train, the one that goes direct from Warsaw to Bucharest. It’s a terrific train, I always take it, all you need is to get your pass stamped, and we’ll see to that,’ he guffawed, ‘we’ll see to that, but I’m not letting on how!’”
• Towards the end he is taken by his Companions to a restaurant and then a brothel. I suggest that the brothel is the Descent into the Cave. It is this that gives him the chance to escape his destiny.

But the book also works on a thoroughly mundane level. It is a tale of a German soldier travelling on a troop train to the front. Every detail is kept deliberately mundane (eg “Wherever there are soldiers there’s dirt.”) in order to provide the myth with verisimilitude.

This foreknowledge of death, being supernatural, is asserted: It is also asserted: “To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given.” but the author has to work hard to make the reader believe it and therefore, just as in Kafka, he surrounds the foreknowledge with details that are thoroughly mundane (and at the same time symbolic): “Somewhere in the distance searchlights were raking the sky, like long spectral fingers parting the blue cloak of the night ... those silent, uncannily long, spectral fingers of the searchlights, still groping across the sky. It seemed as if the faces belonging to those fingers must be grinning, eerily grinning, cynically grinning like the faces of usurers and swindlers. ‘We’ll get you,’ said the thin-lipped, gaping mouths belonging to those fingers. ‘We’ll get you, we’ll grope all night long.’ Maybe they were looking for a bedbug, a tiny bug in the cloak of the night, those fingers, and they would find the bug.” 

The prose is everyday and unsensational with a great deal of repetition, not always exact repetition.

Great lines:

• “Those halting, colourless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death”
• “Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death. ... This Soon is like a thunderclap. This little word is like the spark that sets off the thunderstorm, and suddenly, for the thousandth part of a second, the whole world is bright beneath this word.”
• “What a pretty girl, he thought: everyone will think she’s ugly, and she’s pretty, she’s beautiful ...”
• “Everything bad comes from those resounding voices; those resounding voices started the war, and those resounding voices regulate the worst war of all, the war at railway stations.”
• “How terrible, to have to eat just before one’s death. Soon I’m going to die, yet I still have to eat.”
• “It was terrible to look into the drab houses where the slaves were getting ready to march off to their factories. House after house, house after house, and everywhere lived people who suffered, who laughed, people who ate and drank and begat new human beings, people who tomorrow might be dead; the place was teeming with human life.”
• “What a laborious, frightful business it was, this killing time, over and over again that little second hand racing invisibly beyond the horizon,"
• "the silence of those who said nothing, nothing at all, was terrible. It was the silence of those who knew they were all done for.”
• “vast gloomy estates where brooding women dreamed of adultery since they had begun to find their blubber-necked husbands repulsive”
• “Splendid and gloomy and without lightness, those cities, with bloody pasts and untamed back streets, silent and untamed.”
• “Many people are like that, an object suddenly becomes valuable to them because someone else would like to have it.”
• “pale, sad eyes the colour of sand dark with rain; unhappy eyes, much that was animal in them and all that was human,”
• “‘We live on hope,’ Paul had once said. As if one were to say: ‘We live on credit.’ We have no security … nothing”
• “Every turn of the wheels tears a piece off my life,”
• “Corpses are heavy … I’m telling you, the bodies of dead men weigh a ton. Corpses are heavier than the whole world”
• “How crazy for the sun to shine like that, Andreas thought, and a dreadful nausea lay like poison in his blood.”
• “It’s a terrible thing to maltreat a person because that person seems ugly to you. There are no ugly people.”
• “Twelve hours before my death I have to find out that life is beautiful, and it’s too late. I’ve been ungrateful, I’ve denied the existence of human happiness.”
• “It’s always a good idea to start with yes. You can always say no later. If you say no right off, your chances of doing business are nil.”
• “every death in war is a murder for which someone is responsible.”
• “When they have a hangover, all they ever want is sausage.”

Beautifully written, carefully structured and thought-provoking.

November 2019; 108 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso

The eponymous hero sells his shadow to a 'man in grey' (because "the devil isn't as black as he's painted") in return for a purse of never-ending gold. But he is shunned by everyone (except his faithful servant) as soon as they espy his lack of shadow. The devil then offers to sell the shadow back to Peter in return for his soul.

An adult fable written by a man who fled revolutionary France for Berlin, joined the Prussian army, fought against France, later returned to France but for the rest of his was always a German in France or a Frenchman in Germany.

One nice touch: it is purportedly written by Peter to "my dear Chamisso", the author.

Naive. July 2012; 124 pages

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann

This delightful novelette ('Der Tod in Venedig') records how an elderly novelist on holiday in plague-stricken Venice falls in  love with a beautiful Polish boy.

The story is full of signs and portents. On the boat to Venice the hero, von Aschenbach, meets a group of young men of whom one is elderly bewigged, dressed and cosmeticised to look young, the result being a travesty. This is what Aschenbach will become by the end of his homosexual paedophilic obsession. He is also rowed to his hotel by an unlicensed gondolier in a black coffin-like gondola; this boatman reminds us of Charon the ferryman of the Styx. There are also many references to classical myth:

• Helios the sun god (who is also Apollo)
• Narcissus the beautiful youth who fell in love with his reflection
• Hyacinth the beautiful boy-lover of Apollo who was killed by the west wind
• Ganymede, the beautiful boy who was carried by an eagle to Olympus and made to serve Zeus as cup-bearer
• Of course Apollo himself was a beautiful youth

In some ways the book contrasts the Apollo who is the god of intellect, moderation, reason, light and music with Dionysus the god of ecstasy, passion and drunkenness. Aschenbach starts as a man whose writing is severely intellectual and ends as a creature wholly enslaved to passion. But to see it as a battle between two gods is perhaps naive. Music and poetry are strict and intellectual art forms and people often see this as Apollo-like; however they also have their passionate sides and Apollo is also the god of the the ecstatic prophecies of Delphi. He is clearly linked to passionate love of both men and women. I think that Mann was playing with the duality of Apollo within Aschenbach. In another contradiction Apollo, who is father of Aesculapius the god of medicine and who is himself associated with healing is also the god who shot deadly plague arrows into the Greek camp at Troy.

Finally Mann plays with the concepts of Beauty as discussed between the old ugly Socrates and the beautiful youth Phaedrus in the Phaedrus by Plato. In this book Socrates contrasts 'being in your right mind' with the madness that comes with following an erotic desire for beauty. This is clearly the situation for Aschenbach. When a soul, says Socrates, looks upon a beautiful boy it experiences the utmost joy; when separated from the boy, it feels intense pain and longing. This is the allegory of the chariot; we are pulled by passionate horses, we need to rein them in.


When Aschenbach discovers that there is cholera in Venice he decides not to tell the boy's family in case they leave. This is clearly a moral lapse for which he will be punished. (It is also one of the few points at which the film differs from the novella.)


The boy Tadzio becomes aware of Aschenbach's obsessive interest and starts to play up to it, smiling at the old man and making eye contact. At the end of the book, after his family have decided to flee Venice, Tadzio walks into the sea and beckons to Aschenbach.


A wondrous story crammed with many, many layers of meaning in 71 short pages.


It was also a brilliant film starring Dirk Bogarde as the writer.

August 2010; 71 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God