Title A literary occupation: responses of German writers in service in occupied Europe Author(s) O'Keeffe, William John Publication date 2012-05 Original citation O'Keeffe, W. J., 2012. A literary occupation: responses of German writers in service in occupied Europe. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Rights © 2012, William J. O'Keeffe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/820 from Downloaded on 2014-03-27T11:53:44Z A Literary Occupation Responses of German writers in service in occupied Europe Author William John O’Keeffe, B.A., M.Litt. in submission to the National University of Ireland, Cork for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 Department of German Head of department: Dr. Manfred Schewe Supervisor: Dr. habil. Gert Hofmann 1 Table of Contents page: Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 1.1. A civil literature in an uncivil time 6 1.2. A Franco-Hellenic axis 8 1.3. Literary Conscripts 11 1.4. The literary-critical focus: the aesthetic 16 1.5. A reappraisal of critical reception 22 1.6. The German philhellenic Paradigm 27 1.7. Prevailing literary form 31 1.8. The Kriegstagebuch: mastery and criticism 36 1.9. Prefatory note on published editions and source texts 38 1.10. Methodology of selection, access and approach to the texts 39 2. Occupation literature: form and content 2.1. Measures, motives, myth, realities 42 2.2. France: cultural patronage and the centrality of Paris 48 2.3. Greece: cultural custodianship 59 3. Literature on two fronts 3.1. Involuntary tourism 67 3.2. The Francophile‟s dilemma 73 3.3. Culture shock: the East 78 3.4. Applied fictive form 84 4. Aesthetic dissidence: Erhard Göpel and Erhart Kästner 4.1. Sub-texts in Erhard Göpel‟s Die Normandie and Die Bretagne 95 4.2. The freedom of the aesthete 104 4.3. Griechenland/Kreta: the repossession of classical Greece 108 4.4. The aesthetic of light; correspondences: Kästner‟s Greece, Felix Hartlaub‟s Paris 110 4.5. The aesthetic of stone: Kästner‟s appeal for moderation 116 4.6. Mentioning the war: elision through classical transfiguration 118 4.7. Formal measures v. free form: the redundancy of revision 125 2 4.8. From Hauptmann to Heidegger: the philosophical ground 131 5. Felix Hartlaub: Paris underground 5.1. Formative influences on Weltanschauung 139 5.2. The migrant flâneur 145 5.3 Idle pursuit? The validity of a flâneur literature in wartime 149 5.4. The writing persona 154 5.5. Doppelgänger and double alienation: Hartlaub and “Er” 157 5.6. Phenomenology and animation 5.6.1. Sea and skyline: elemental transmutation 160 5.6.2. The body municipal 162 5.6.3. People watching: anthropometric ironies 165 5.7. Erzählte Zeit. Hartlaub‟s relegation of chronological time 173 5.8. Paris: the aesthetic of occupation 178 5.9. Subtexts of subversion 181 5.10. Hartlaub: colour as agent 5.10.1. Colour as mood: the coded spectrum 186 5.10.2. Colour as re-animation 187 5.10.3. Colour as isolation: studies in grey 189 5.10.4. Colour as myopia: the use of etiolation 191 5.11. The centrality of the Paris sketches; critical reception 193 5.12. Lacunae in the Hartlaub oeuvre; resistance speculation; death of a 203 flâneur 6. Conclusion 6.1. The fortunes of war 214 6.2. The modes of literary response: an evaluation. 218 Appendix: The Hartlaub Paris MS: commentary 227 Bibliography 241 3 Declaration This thesis as submitted is entirely the work of the author, and has not otherwise been submitted at University College Cork or elsewhere for the award of a degree. ________________ William J. O‟Keeffe 4 Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the unfailing encouragement, enlightening guidance and kindly supervision offered always by Dr Gert Hofmann. This work is dedicated to Dr Gisela Holfter, who first entertained its proposal, and for whose loyal and considerate support the author is ever grateful. 5 1. Introduction 1.1. A civil literature in an uncivil time Pax in Bello, the superscript Erhart Kästner applied to the unfinished and in his lifetime unpublished third book of his wartime trilogy on Greece and its islands,1 summed up in epigram the paradox of the serving soldier of the forces of occupation, seconded from military to literary duties, and attempting to write a civil literature in times and conditions which seemed to prohibit such. It is here proposed to examine the objectivity of book-length responses in prose, including multiple-authored collections, from persons in the service of the German occupying forces in the Europe of 1940-1944. The book-length criterion here extends from a two-quire, 32 page booklet (Erhard Göpel‟s Die Bretagne), through essay collections, travelogues, the novella, and the novel. Only the war-diary is excluded, on the grounds of its subjective form, but more so on the grounds that the most revealing of the war diaries are post-war redactions, simply because of the risk to personal safety there had been in writing un-coded text.2 The exceptional case of Ernst Jünger is considered here later (vide infra 1.8). The claims of the literature of the invaders on the sympathy of non-partisan readers are subject to a moral forfeit, now as then, though it should be noted that a French language translation of Ernst Jünger‟s Gärten und Straßen was a publishing success in 1942. Where the fact of occupation is elided through war-evading, war transfiguring or war-transcending prose, the common charges of „calligraphy‟ and of aesthetic escapism must be answered. A countervailing argument is here advanced, that this „literature of occupation‟ on account of its contemporary authenticity, its offering of an unsentimental aesthetic within the pervasiveness of war, and on account of innovation in literary form found within it, is the immediate, as distinct from the later, retrospective, literary Bewältigung of the wartime experience. The slight in number and among themselves disparate exemplars of this contemporary literature stand in quantitative contrast to the surge of German language 1 Cf. Erhart Kästner: Griechische Inseln (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975). 2 Cf. Marianne Feuersenger (1982): Mein Kriegstagebuch. Führerhauptquartier und Berliner Wirklichkeit; also Peter Hartl (1994): Ursula von Kardorff: Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942 bis 1945; also Hans Dieter Schäfer: Das gespaltene Bewußtsein. Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1981, 1984), p. 45. 6 literary output on the war in the two decades following 1945: over three hundred works to 1960,3 and of literary merit, works, “die eine gewisse literarische Qualität aufweisen und in anerkannten oder jedenfalls nicht einschlägig militaristischen Verlagen veröffentlicht wurden”, at least a hundred novels or comprehensive stories to 1965, according to one determination.4 The few contemporary works considered here are therefore by virtue of their relative rarity, published and unpublished, additionally important. The subject works are also historically important for being records written without the modification of moral, philosophical or factual hindsight, and for their being grounded still, perforce, in political concepts of a Europe deriving from the treaty of Versailles rather than the treaty of Rome. The stereotype of an allegorically encoded non National Socialist literature is disputed by Schäfer‟s Das gespaltene Bewußtsein (1981), which title points to the many manifest contradictions between National Socialist ideology and actual praxis in the field of cultural consumption in the broadest sense, from literature to foreign-branded consumer goods.5 In that context, many of the works studied here would not be remarkable. They were commissioned as Gebrauchsliteratur, functional writing, a form which covered also war reportage, travel writing and the diary and the essay, and which was dominant in the 1930s and into the war years.6 This ascendancy of functional literature, which established itself after 1930 and had its origin in a reaction to the social shocks of the Weimar era, was not supplanted until the advent of the sixties.7 The functional aim of this literature during the war years was primarily the Belehrung der Truppe, the instruction of the troops; its political purpose was the affirmation of an occupation policy of Korrektheit. This was self-serving, in France for reasons of promoting efficient economic cooperation, and in Greece, at least initially, for the propaganda value of demonstrating a See Jürgen Egyptien / Raffaele Louis: “100 Kriegsromane und -Erzählungen des Zeitraums 1945 bis 1965”, in: Treibhaus. Jahrbuch für die Literatur der fünfziger Jahre, 3. 2007, p. 211, note 1. 4 Ibid., p. 211. 5 See Schäfer: Das gespaltene Bewußtsein, pp. 7-68, 146-208; p. 35: “Es war ein Irrtum, die nichtnationalsozialistische Erzählprosa als Literatur der verdeckten Schreibweise zu interpretieren.” p. 146: “Das Dritte Reich ist von einem tiefen Gegensatz zwischen nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und Praxis gekennzeichnet.” 6 Ibid., pp. 44, 79. 7 Ibid., pp. 41, 89. 7 conscientious cultural custodianship of the antique. In the East, where no armistice was signed, where cities were fought over and the occupation policy was harsh, and where in consequence the social background was displaced, paradoxically it was there that notable examples of the social and non- functional genres of the novel and novella were written (vide infra 3.4). As Schäfer has pointed out, the world-shattering chaos of the war surpassed that of the economic crisis of the thirties and left most of the writers remaining in Germany unable any longer to combine empirical and allegorical elements into radical forms of reality interpretation, of Wirklichheitsdeutung. The relatively widespread (in Germany) modernism of the thirties had lost its basis.8 The experimentation with forms by such as Benn, Jünger, Langgässer, Nossack and of the here considered Felix Hartlaub was an undercurrent, not mainstream.9 The published works examined here were functional in being informative and/or diverting for their temporarily expatriate readers.