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Redeeming history in the story: Narrative strategies in the novels of Anna Seghers and Nadine Gordimer

Prigan, Carol Ludtke, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1991

Copyright ©1991 Iqr Prigan, Carol Ludtke. All rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106

REDEEMING HISTORY IN THE STORY: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN THE NOVELS OF ANNA SEGHERS AND NADINE GORDIMER

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Carol Ludtke Prigan, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1991

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Helen Fehervary Dagmar Lorenz Advisor Michael Jones Department of German Copyright by Carol Ludtke Prigan 1991 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Professor Helen Fehervary for her assistance and encour­ agement throughout this project. Thanks go also to the other members of my committee, Professors Dagmar Lorenz and Michael Jones. Part of the research and writing of this dissertation was made possible by a Fulbright Grant to Ber­ lin, formerly the German Democratic Republic. I would like to express my thanks to the staff at the Anna-Seghers-Archiv in Berlin for all their help as well. Sincere thanks to my husband, Scott, for enduring the transformation of ideas into a written form with me and for all your encouragement and support.

XI VITA

June 25, 1959 Born - Mt. Clemens, Michigan 1981 B.A., Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan 1985 M.A., University of Wiscon­ sin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1982-83, 1984-85 Graduate Teaching Assistant Department of German University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1985-89, 1990-91 Graduate Associate, Depart­ ment of German, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATION Translation of Burkhardt Lindner. "The Passaaen-Werk and the Berliner Kindheit; The Archaeology of the Recent Past." Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, New German Criticrue 39 (1986) ; 21-46.

FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: German Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German Literature Literary Theory and Criticism Narrative Literature Contemporary South African Literature

111 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii VITA ...... iii

CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION...... 1 II. THE ANTI-FASCIST NARRATIVE IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE ...... 19 Anna Seghers...... 20 Nadine Gordimer ...... 42 III. ANNA SEGHERS' EXILE NOVELS DAS SIEBTE KREUZ AND TRANSIT: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES FOR THE FUTURE 67 Das siebte K r e u z ...... 69 T r a n s i t ...... 97 IV. HISTORY IN THE MAKING: NADINE GORDIMER'S NOVELS BURGER'S DAUGHTER AND A SPORT OF NATURE . . . 130

Burger's Daughter ...... 133 A Sport of N a t u r e ...... 161

CONCLUSION...... „. . 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 197

IV CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Although Anna Seghers and Nadine Gordimer, to my knowl­ edge, never met personally, nor read each other's novels and stories, there exists an uncanny affinity between these two authors' works that also extends into their individual biographies. Partly due to their family situations and partly due to the historical situations which influenced their lives and their writing, Seghers and Gordimer share a view of the world that is decidedly anti-fascist, and born of a European middle-class, Jewish background. This they share with an important literary critic of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin, whose thoughts on the creative process and storytelling inform my reading of Seghers' and

Gordimer's novels. In order to place Seghers' and Gor­ dimer 's novels in a storytelling context later on, it is first necessary to explore how these authors' lives and their respective places in literary history have affected their writing. If their experiences found their way into the works, as I contend, then biography becomes an integral part of understanding their novels. Beyond that is the question of how Seghers and Gordimer responded to the events of their day and how their theoretical positions found

1 2 expression in the novels. How then these two authors have brought their view of the world around them into the literary work is of central importance. The concrete method will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but the theoretical paradigm of storytelling as Benjamin expressed it in the 1930s is important here. Storytelling in the context of fascism in Europe or South Africa has a common thread running through it: the redemption of the past in the act of remembrance toward hope for the future. Storytelling is the means by which Seghers and Gordimer remember the past in a concept of the future as either an escape from the chaos of the present or in order to present an alternative to the present. The messianic element in Benjamin's essay "Der Erzahler” as well in his other works can be seen here also. Benjamin's combination of Jewish messianism with historical materialism provides the link between two authors whose experiences were dif­ ferent, yet whose narratives express a similar world view. Stories are the medium through which Seghers and Gordimer tell of their times and the history which informs them.

Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of Seghers', brought the ideas of Jewish messianism into his understanding of storytelling in his 1936 essay "Der Erzahler." In this essay, he examined the decline of the ability to relate stories in post-World War I contemporary industrial society.

Benjamin gives us a view of the storyteller and what charac­ 3 terizes him/her in his essay. Benjamin viewed the storytel­ ler as an essential member of society who creates stories for an audience, not a lonely figure who writes books in a room separated from the world as the novelist does. Ben­ jamin's storyteller is imbued with the ideas of Jewish mes­ sianism upon which he drew throughout his life in his writ­ ings. Exiled from Nazi Germany like Seghers, Benjamin turned to the power of memory and remembrance to disrupt the continuum of the present with a brief vision of the future. The storyteller takes on this function in his/her stories. Storytelling in the traditional sense depends on the spoken word as its medium, not the written work, to convey ideas and experience. The role of memory is all-important, for it is memory that the storyteller employs:

Die Erinnerung stiftet die Kette der Tradition, welche das Geschehene von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht weiter- leitet. Sie ist das Musische der Epik im weiteren Sinne. Sie umgreift die musischen Sonderarten des Epischen. Unter diesen ist an erster Stelle diejenige, welche der Erzahler verkorpert.1

Stories are passed from generation to generation because someone remembers the event(s) or experienced them him- /herself. Thus, the storyteller creates from experience fErfahrung) as well: "Der Erzahler nimmt, was er erzàhlt.

^Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzahler," Gesammelte Schriften. vol. II, ed. Tiedemann & Schweppenhàuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 453. 4 aus der Erfahmng, aus der elgenen oder berichteten. ”2 Ben­ jamin sets up a dichotomy here between the storyteller and the novelist, or romancier as Benjamin prefers to call the novelist. The romancier does not create from experience as Erfahruna as the storyteller does, but from experience as Erlebnis.

Benjamin differentiates between these two terms by characterizing Erfahruna as experience which is part of tradition or history whereas Erlebnis is a short-term expe­ rience of the present. Benjamin explains this in another essay of this period, "über einige Motive bei Baudelaire":

In der Tat ist die Erfahrung eine Sache der Tradition, im kollektiven wie im privaten Leben. Sie bildet sich weniger aus einzelnen in der Erinnerung streng fixierten Gegebenheiten denn aus gehàuften, oft nicht bewufiten Daten, die im Gedachtnis zusammenflieBen.^

In contrast to the nature of Erfahruna. Erlebnis is a shock which can trigger the remembrance of past events and experi­ ences. In the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin uses Proust's terms mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire to demonstrate that the modern novelist uses a conscious expe­ rience of the moment, Erlebnis fmémoire volontaire) to create a literary work. In other words, the modern writer

^Benjamin, 443. ^Walter Benjamin, "Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Gesammelte Schriften. vol. 1.2, ed. Tiedemann & Schwep­ penhàuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 608. consciously uses his/her immediate experience exclusively instead of reaching far back into memory for those experi­ ences which seem lost and forgotten. According to Benjamin, in some cases, it is the shock of the present experience which causes the retreat into memory and forces the storyteller to deal with past experience, as was the case with Proust. The journey into the past by means of remembering is how the storyteller lives for the present and looks to the future. The story has no ending, but rather points to future stories. The listener/reader wants to know how the story will continue: "In der Tat gibt es keine Erzahlung, an der die Frage: wie ging es welter? ihr Recht verl6re."4 The story does not end when the storyteller finishes as the novel does, but can continue as long as the ability to translate experience (Erfahruna^ into words exists. Ben­ jamin views this expression of experience as a craft in itself:

Ja, man kann welter gehen und sich fragen, ob die Beziehung, die der Erzahler zu seinem Stoff hat, dem Menschenleben, nicht selbst eine handwerkliche Beziehung 1st? O b seine Aufgabe nicht eben darin be- steht, den Rohstoff der Erfahrungen— fremder und eigener— auf eine solide, nûtzliche und einmalige Art zu bearbeiten?5

4Benjamin, "Der Erzahler," 455. ^Benjamin, "Der Erzahler," 464. 6

The storyteller's relationship to the material is that of a craftsman who takes the raw material of experience and crafts it into a form consisting of words— a story: she "spins a tale." Benjamin directed his analysis here to a pre-industrial age when workers did not experience aliena­ tion from the product of their labor and people gathered together to hear stories in communities. For Benjamin then, the storyteller represents the last vestige of the ability to use experience in its immediacy to tell others of the past while creating hope for the future. Benjamin's storyteller is also the one who bursts the continuum of history with remembrance in the redemption of the past for the future. Just as the Jew bears witness to God's promised reconciliation with his people, the storytel­ ler uses remembrance to recall the utopian vision of the future in the past. Benjamin's concept of storytelling emphasizes the messianic moment that comes at the juncture of the past and the future:

The utopian content of the past becomes the material basis for a vision of the future of mankind, the dim recollection of the golden age before the Fall. The messianic concept is thus intimately connected to the idea of a return to an original state which lies both in the past and the future. Karl Kraus' motto "Origin is the Goal" cited by Benjamin among others, captures this idea most succinctly.®

®Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Mes­ sianism," New German Critique 34 (1985): 84. Benjamin's storyteller is at once the embodiment of the utopian content of the past and the communicator of it. By creating from accumulated experience, the storyteller reclaims the past and realizes its idyllic quality. As such, storytelling is at once a restorative and utopian act. Benjamin saw his role as the critic in a similar manner in the process of redeeming these moments of utopia in literary works from the past for his present. Both Seghers and Benjamin saw the storyteller's func­ tion as one of recollecting and relating experience for a community. Seghers saw the artist unconsciously storing up experience which he/she one day would consciously turn into the work of art by means of memory. Much like Benjamin, Seghers was concerned that storytelling might give way to novel writing, a practice detached from experience (Erfahrung^. She offered this advice in the 1932 piece "Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt":

Meistens erzàhlt man deutlicher als man schreibt. Knûpft man im Erzahlen an Gesehenes und Gehortes an, wahrend man schreibend leicht an Geschriebenes anknùpft, statt an die sichtbare Wirklichkeit. Deshalb ist es gut, was man schreiben will, zuerst einem imaginâren Zuhorer zu erzahlen.?

?Anna Seghers, "Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt," über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. vol. II, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1971), 12. 8

The importance of the imagined listener for Seghers leads us back to Benjamin and his insistence on the oral tradition as the basis for true storytelling. Benjamin regarded the creative process as one which is coupled with tradition and a sense of time which is not transitory. The story will live on, long after the storyteller dies. However, it is the storyteller's experience reaching into the past that is essential for the story to continue. Time in this sense is no longer represented as a linear concept where events follow one another in a sequential pro­ gression. Time is collapsed: past, present, and future are mixed and the story represents this in one of its most com­ mon forms, the fairy tale. The fairy tale is significant for Benjamin: "Das Marchen, das noch heute der erste Rat- geber der Kinder ist, weil es einst der erste der Menschheit gewesen ist, lebt insgeheim in der Erzahlung fort. Der erste wahre Erzahler ist und bleibt der von M a r c h e n . "8 The storyteller is the one who "dem Horer Rat weiB.The fairy tale has been giving instruction and advice to listeners (and its readers in more recent history) for many years. The fairy tale lives on in the story. Benjamin's works encompassed literary- and historical- critical essays as well as radio plays and book reviews. He reviewed one of Seghers' exile novels, the 1937 work Die

^Benjamin, "Der Erzahler," 457. ^Benjamin, "Der Erzahler," 442. 9

Rettung. and in the review he termed her a true storyteller, not a novelist, as he explained the difference in "Der Erzahler." Regarding Seghers, he wrote:

Sie erzàhlt mit Pausen wie einer, der auf die berufenen Horer im Stillen wartet und, um Zeit zu gewinnen, manchmal innehalt. 'Je spater auf den Abend, desto schoner die Gaste.' Diese Spannung durchzieht das Buch. Es ist weit entfernt von der Promptheit der Reportage, die nicht viel nachfragt, an wen sie eigent- lich wendet. Es ist ebenso weit entfernt vom Roman, der im Grunde nur an den Leser denkt. Die Stimme der Erzahlerin hat nicht abgedankt. Viele Geschichten sind in das Buch eingesprengt, welche darin auf den Horer warten.iO

For Benjamin, Seghers exemplified his concept of the storyteller. Her novels are narrated, not merely written, with the listener-reader in mind. The immediacy funmittelbarkeiti Seghers referred to in her letters to Lukacs corresponds to Benjamin's use of Erlebnis as opposed to Erfahrung. The shock of the present (e.g. an experience such as exile) causes the author to process the information or experience by going deep into memory in order to give form to that initial experience. In doing this, the writer makes connections between this experience and the continuum of history, and points to the future. Nadine Gordimer too is a storyteller in Benjamin's sense. She creates from her experience as well as others'

^Owalter Benjamin, "Eine Chronik der deutschen Arbeitslosen," Gesammelte Schriften. vol. Ill, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), 533. 10 to tell a story about life in South Africa and all its con­ comitant problems. Benjamin's vision of the storyteller harkens back to a "simpler" time, but Gordimer is one of those authors who continue the tradition even though she writes down her stories. She has, however, liberated her stories from strict European conventions of form by drawing on her experience as an African, living among people whose traditions of storytelling predate their written expression. This can be seen as Gordimer's way of helping to create an inclusive culture in South Africa, but it is also her expe­ rience of South Africa embedded in a narrative strategy. Benjamin's storyteller is the one who presents a vision of the future, seen from the present, but taken from the past. Stephen Clingman notes that Gordimer's novels are not just realistic novels, but that "each of them ends with a vision, and it might properly be called an historical vision."11 The "historical vision" contains a vision of the future, not just the past as one usually thinks when con­ fronted with the term "history." The word "story" in his­ tory is a story of the past, seen from the present, and looking toward the future. This is crucial in South Africa, because no one can pretend to understand what the present is or what the future may hold without first understanding the past. Gordimer's vision of the future is firmly grounded in

llstephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer; History from the Inside (Hemel Hempstead, Herts.; Allen & Unwin, 1986), 13. 11 her knowledge and understanding of the past, and she creates narrative strategies which demonstrate her vision of his­ tory. Much in the same way as that of Seghers, Gordimer's creative process involves an understanding of history based on experience. As Gordimer narrates her story from experi­ ence, the characters are also telling their stories from their created experiences. Gordimer never explicitly uses such terminology as Seghers did with her three-level theory of the creative process which will be discussed later, but much of what she does say about writing in South Africa can be compared to Seghers' position. The writer's necessity to create from one's experience in order to depict society in its fullest can be either Gordimer's or Seghers' mandate. Both have considered their position in society as authors crucial in that they are able to help people understand where that society is headed. The message Seghers and Gor­ dimer present is about experience, theirs and others', and the "advice" they give is contained in the narrative in its use of memory to point to the future. For both Seghers and Gordimer, the narrative has a redemptive moment, one which differs significantly from a Christian concept of redemption. This redemptive moment is grounded in the Exodus story of deliverance and waiting for reconciliation with God. In the Talmudic tradition, the presence of Jews in the world and their witness to their 12 experience is seen as testimony to God's presence in the world. The redemption of the Israelites from the house of bondage in Egypt is the testimony to the world as well as to Israel and Egypt of God's caring and loving nature. The Jew who then repeats this story bears witness to God's love for the Jewish people. There are several key thoughts here, and among them is the concept of witness to an era. The storyteller keeps a memory alive by relating experiences and thereby testifies "... against the truth-claims of stories told by others— be they those of the Egyptian or of the Nazi."12 The same could be said of those who tell of apart­ heid South Africa. This involves a use of memory that is both a reclaiming of the past and at the same time a hope for future reconciliation. The storyteller is the one who makes God's promised redemption of humankind present in the narrative every time he/she tells a story. The Exodus paradigm appears in Seghers' and Gordimer's works as a story told of people and events in history with the use of memory. Seghers, in exile from Germany, tells of working-class Germans who have not succumbed to the Nazis' lies. Gordimer's novels present a view of blacks in apart­ heid South Africa and the whites who sympathize with their plight. The protagonists of all four novels under con­ sideration here live in the present and move into the future

12Michael Goldberg, Theoloov and Narrative; A Critical Introduction (Nashville; Abingdon, 1982), 133. 13 because they are remembering subjects who all bear witness in their very being to their ability to adapt and survive. Not only do they employ memory in their coping processes, but the authors do so as well in their telling of the stories.

The question of how a writer tells stories at a partic­ ular time in history is central to this study. . Although much has been written about Seghers and her years in exile, most critics fail to discuss her importance for narrative literature in the twentieth century. Similarly, Gordimer's position as a storyteller in South African literature has yet to be explored. This study will be comparative, citing similarities and differences in Gordimer's and Seghers' works as well as pointing out their uniqueness in their respective contexts. In addition to essays, letters and interviews, Seghers' Das siebte Kreuz (1942) and Transit

(1944), as well as Gordimer's Burger's Daughter (1979) and A Sport of Nature (1987) will serve as the subjects for this analysis. All four of these novels best exemplify each author's commitment to the expression of the experience of a time in a work of fiction and their hope for the future embodied in it. How they achieve this is a major part of the storytelling process. Each author's position on the practice of creating a narrative deserves attention in order to understand how Seghers and Gordimer see themselves as writers in their own 14 historical situation. It was important for Seghers to insist on anti-fascist literature based on human experience as opposed to a realist formula. The question of the validity of whites writing about South African experience is important to Gordimer. In order to fully comprehend these points, one must consider each author*s position on the practice of creating a narrative as well as their place in literary history. We can then move on to a consideration of how Seghers and Gordimer put their views into practice. The realism Seghers and Gordimer are often cited for allows for other strategies in the construction of the nar­ rative. Just as Seghers^ anti-fascist literature exhibits modernist modes of narration such as inner monologue and free-indirect speech while portraying a very "real" situa­ tion, Gordimer's novels are indebted to the modernist narra­ tive as well. Among the most obvious examples of this are Georg Heisler's thought patterns in Das siebte Kreuz and Rosa Burger's continuous inner dialogue with an absent part­ ner in Burger's Daughter. There are many voices present in these novels, each telling their own stories, and among them is also the narrator's voice. Additionally, both authors employ such strategies as montage and flashbacks in the con­ struction of their novels, reflecting the discontinuous nature of experience in the modern world. For both Seghers and Gordimer, history not only informs their works topically, but also factors in the creation of 15 the work. The authors' reactions to a specific historical event often find their way into the works, but also the event itself can act as a catalyst for writing. This is evident in Seghers' writing of Transit for example. She wrote from her own experiences following the Nazi army's occupation of France and used that event as a subject in and of itself as well. The events surrounding the 1976 Soweto uprising called into question the white person's role in the anti-apartheid movement, and Gordimer's writing of Burger's Daughter was a response to the situation as well as an exam­ ple of the historical event she used for the problematic which stands at the center of the novel. Each work provides the connection between the writers' experiences and the creation of their narratives. That Seghers' idea of an anti-fascist novel is inextricably bound up with storytelling is evident in her two most famous exile novels. In Das siebte Kreuz. individuals tell of Georg

Heisler's escape and how it affects them, and the narrator of Transit tells of his search for identity in a crisis.

The act of narration or telling a story has therapeutic value for the characters, especially in the case of Transit. but also for the author. It is at this point that the per­ sonal story becomes a political act. The stories become the weapons against the forgetting of experiences. The story of Georg Heisler's escape includes a multitude of other people's stories and bears witness to many lives. People 16 who help Georg escape the Nazis comprise Seghers' projection of what a Volksfront or popular front in Germany might be like. Her creation of such a popular front in the late 1930s underscores a deep desire for such a movement within Germany to fight the National Socialist government. The hope for change contained in the novel continues in Seghers' next work. Transit. Despite the increased urgency of escape from the Nazis, the narrator of Transit decides in the end that his role in the anti-fascist struggle is not to run away, but to remain in France to do whatever he can. His private story is not only a search for identity, but also becomes a political act as he testifies to his reasons for staying and the struggle to leave that many of the German exiles encountered. Storytelling plays a major role in Gordimer's novels as well. In Burger's Daughter. Rosa Burger tells her story in her inner monologues which she addresses in turn to one of three people. Rosa's identity is caught up in her father's role in the South African Communist Party and hence her telling of her story is a search for her identity based on her experiences, not his. The narration of the novel brings

Rosa back home to South Africa after searching in Europe for her place in the world to reclaim her position in the anti­ apartheid movement, this time on her own terms, yet with the full awareness of being Burger's daughter. Rosa gains 17 strength from the past as she reminisces to carry on for the future. While Rosa tells much of her own story, a narrator takes over for Hillela in A Soort of Nature. We may ques­ tion this narrator's reliability at times, but our knowledge of Hillela is enhanced by the narrator's inside position which goes beyond the reports and books cited for informa­ tion about her. Hillela's story is intertwined with his­ torical events in southern Africa, but even as she seems to stand apart from those times, her story is definitely a part of history. The author projects Hillela into an indistinct future when a post-apartheid South African state is created while always reminding us of her past and how she got there. We come to realize in the course of this story that Hillela is the sport of nature, the freak occurrence of which the title speaks. She is the new white person who can exist in a multi-racial Africa. Perhaps the difficulty in knowing Hillela's identity is due to the indistinct nature of South Africa's future. Gordimer moves beyond Burger's Daughter, however, in that she creates a narrative of the multiracial society in South Africa prefigured in the United Democratic Front, a multiracial anti-apartheid movement which gained strength in the 1980s. Hillela's personal story becomes a political statement: a white woman marries a black man, has a child by him, sees him killed, then later marries the black man who, as chair of the Organization for African 18 Unity, oversees the creation of a new South Africa. A Sport of Nature is Gordimer's (the white author's) picture of the beginning of a South African state beyond apartheid. For both Seghers and Gordimer, the narration of their novels recalls the author's processing of the past in the present while envisioning a future. What makes their stories interesting is how they create narratives to bear witness to an era and thereby give hope for the future. Seghers and Gordimer do not always resolve the conflicts of their times presented in their works, nor do they always present a unified narrative voice, complete with answers to the problems presented in the works. Instead, they draw upon the various stories from their own experiences to create new stories to show the problematic present and a hope for the future. The conflicts which arise in Gor­ dimer 's and Seghers' narratives depict the dilemma of the white, middle-class writer working in an increasingly com­ plex, decentered narrative world. In this sense, Seghers and Gordimer are realists. Their stories are the attempt to create a totality of experience in order to give our lives "coherence and continuity over time."13 Otherwise we are left with "the experience of nothingness" in a fragmented world.14

llcoldberg, 32. 14coldberg. CHAPTER II

THE ANTI-FASCIST NARRATIVE IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

Anna Seghers and Nadine Gordimer's narratives are as similar as their lives are dissimilar. Seghers' life was disrupted by the experiences of war and exile; her works reflect the discontinuity of her development as a writer as a result of these experiences. Gordimer's life is still in progress and her development as a writer has been con­ tinuous. Indeed, the most striking difference between these two authors is their experience of fascism in their lives. Seghers, a Jew and a communist, was a victim of German fas­ cism, and her writing and her concept of the creative process were profoundly influenced by that experience. Con- trarily, Gordimer is not a victim of fascism in apartheid South Africa because she is white. Her life has not been disrupted by overt discrimination or exile. This difference also affects how we view these two author's lives. It is difficult to see Seghers' life and works in one continuous, linear fashion. It is most convenient to group her novels and stories together according to the period or place in her life in which they were written, be it exile or post-war East Germany, rather than see them as one complete body of work. However, Gordimer's development as a writer has

19 20 progressed steadily along with her experiences as a South African. Interestingly though, Seghers' and Gordimer's nar­ ratives do not display this difference. There is no single line in the narratives that progresses in a linear manner. Instead, we encounter many voices blended together to tell a story. Both Seghers' and Gordimer's concept of creating a nar­ rative is based upon the retrieval and use of experience from memory, much like Benjamin's concept of storytelling. While this will be demonstrated later on with the novels themselves, it is important to first examine Seghers' and Gordimer's theoretical concept of literature in their own contexts, bearing in mind the authors' differences and similarities. Seghers advanced her ideas of literature as a response to the question of how to write anti-fascist liter­ ature in exile. Gordimer formulated her position while struggling with being a white, anti-apartheid writer in South Africa. Despite the differences in time and place, Seghers and Gordimer both responded to the challenges of their times with a concept of literature that draws upon the tradition of storytelling in the transformation of experi­ ence into a narrative.

A. Anna Seghers Anna Seghers' first conclusive formulation of her ideas of the creative process came in two letters written in 1938 21 and 1939 from exile in Paris to Georg Lukacs who was exiled in Moscow. Seghers wrote her letters as a response to Lukacs' defense of a particular idea of Gestaltunq or portrayal in literary realism and to give her assessment of the creative process. Coming at the end of the express­ ionism debate in which Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch notably differed with Lukàcs, Seghers' own response to Lukacs serves today as an explanation of her ideas of what anti-fascist literature should be and an indicator of how she herself created her stories. Seghers was well-known in the exile community for her novels, stories, essays, and speeches to international writers' congresses. Her letters to Lukacs round out her activity in the early years of exile in Paris before she moved on to Mexico. For Seghers, the realism debate was a problem of exile as well as a literary problem. In her letters to Lukacs, Seghers wanted to pose questions and raise points she felt Lukacs had ignored in his essays on realism which she had read in Das Wort and Internationale Literatur. Seghers' ideas as expressed in these letters addressed the problem of realism as a mode of anti-fascist literature. Seghers main­ tained that a writer who creates from the particular materiality of his/her experience will create a work of realism, whereas Lukàcs relied on a particular idea of realism which should serve as the prototype for the work of literature. 22 In exile, Seghers was concerned that writers should create works that would present the reality of fascism and exile and yet be true to the writer's experience and commit­ ment. While Lukàcs promoted a work of art aimed toward pre­ senting a construct of totality, Seghers insisted on the importance of subjective experience for literature. The artist had to rely on his/her experience from which he/she would draw the elements of the work. In this sense, Seghers could accept expressionism contrary to Lukàcs because art­ ists were giving necessary form to their experiences of that time. Expressionism was not an anomaly or a precursor of fascism in this respect, as Lukàcs had argued, but rather an indicator of what Seghers referred to as a "Krisenzeit" or time of crisis. Expressionism was a part of a historical process which encompassed exile and contained a redemptive moment, as yet unrealized. Life in this transition phase was fragmented, and fascism separated people from each other (as in exile) and from the realization of their goals, but Seghers believed it to be only a period in the historical process. Lukàcs did not entirely disagree with Seghers' idea of the creative process but rather with the products of a process that did not adhere to his concept of realism.

Lukàcs had already defined realism in his 1938 essay "Es geht um den Realismus" as follows: 23

Wenn die Literatur tatsachlich eine besondere Form der Wiederspiegelung der objektiven Wirklichkeit ist, so kommt es fûr sie sehr darauf an, diese Wirklichkeit so zu erfassen, wie sie tatsachlich beschaffen ist, und sich nicht darauf zu beschranken, das wiederzugeben, was und wie es unmittelbar erscheint. Strebt der Schriftsteller nach einer solchen Erfassung und Dar- stellung der Wirklichkeit, wie sie tatsachlich bes­ chaffen ist, das heifit, ist er wirklich ein Realist, so spielt das Problem der objektiven Totalitat der Wirk­ lichkeit eine entscheidende Rolle. . . .1

While Seghers could defend expressionism, Lukacs focussed on the results of experimental forms and found them to be lack­ ing an inherent critique of the capitalist world. The work of literature should be, according to Lukàcs, an objective portrayal of the totality of capitalist society instead of simply reflecting its s y m p t o m s . 2 In contrast to Seghers, Lukacs' form of anti-fascism was to use the traditions of the Enlightenment and humanism against the heritage of fascism of which, according to Lukacs, expressionism was a precursor. Lukacs' realism depended on an Aristotelian concept of art as a closed work. This included a tradition stretching from the Greeks to the classcism of Goethe and Schiller (to an extent), through the great nineteeth-century realists such as Balzac to Thomas Mann. Lukàcs' idea of realism was the cultural heritage he desired to have included in the canon of socialist litera-

iGeorg Lukàcs, "Es geht um den Realismus," Die Express- ionismusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realis- muskonzeption. ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), 198. ^Lukàcs, "Es geht um den Realismus," 207. 24 ture, and Balzac perhaps exemplified best Lukàcs' concept of a great realist author. Although Balzac was a royalist, he portrayed his political enemies objectively in his works, thereby creating a totality representing society in and of itself. Lukàcs adopted Engels' analysis of Balzac:

. . . the question is still that of the 'triumph of realism', which Engels, in his analysis of Balzac, identified so acutely as the triumph of realistic portrayal, of the correct and profound reflection of reality which rose above Balzac's own individual and class prejudices.3

For Lukàcs, the idea of Gestaltunq or portrayal was particu­ larly important. Literary works which merely described events, such as the reportage technique used in Neue Sachlichkeit. reproduced repressive structures of capitalist society and provided no critique of them.^ The true realist, on the other hand, presented a totality in his work, one which reflected the world objectively and there­ fore gave a complete picture of capitalist society, with all

its inherent contradictions, instead of a one-sided view.

3oeorg Lukàcs, "Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decay," Essavs on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 138. This article first appeared in Internationale Literatur 7 (1938): 103-43. 4Russell Berman, "Lukàcs' Critique of Bredel and Ottwalt: A Political Account of an Aesthetic Debate of 1931-32," New German Critique 10 (1977). 25

Seghers raised the point in her letters that, in times of crisis, the author creates from the reality of his/her experiences and thus presents a view of the reality he/she lives in.5 Lukàcs contrasted such attempts to represent reality with the pursuit of objective truth in his reply to

Seghers of 28 July 1938:

Auch bei diesen [ehrlichen Schriftstellern] handelt es sich darum, ob der Schriftsteller aus dem Erlebnisstoff dieses objektiv Wesentliche herausholt, ob er seinen Charakter als Spiegel der Welt im bewuBten Schaf- fensprozefi verstarkt und vollendet oder ob er nach "artistischen" Mitteln sucht, mit deren Hilfe er die unzusammenhàngenden Splitterchen zu einer künstlichen Scheineinheit verbinden kann. Subjektiv kann dies letzte mit der groBten Begabung, mit der groBten hingebungsvollsten Ehrlichkeit geschehen,— objektiv wird dabei doch bloB ein Scherbenberg interessanter Einzelfalle entstehen.6

Lukàcs used terms here that underlay his sympathies for realism in the tradition of nineteenth-century bourgeois authors: the realist work of literature maintains an objec­ tive point of view whereas other forms are subjective in their point of view; this subjectivity gets in the way of portraying an objective reality and can only result in a conglomeration of incongruous splinters of reality, art­ istically constructed, but ultimately lacking.

5Anna Seghers, Letter of 28 June 1938, "Briefwechsel zwischen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukàcs," Die Express- ionismusdebatte. 269.

^Georg Lukàcs, Letter of 28 July 1938,"Briefwechsel zwischen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukàcs," 280-81. 26 Seghers' response to Lukacs' insistence on an objective totality was grounded in historical events which Lukacs never fully acknowledged or considered. Seghers related writers' inability to construct works portraying an objec­ tive reality to her generation's experiences of World War I and the changes in society following the war. For Seghers, there was no totality to portray, rather the writer was con­ fronted with a fragmented world in transition. Seghers stated in her second letter:

Was hatten wir denn fur "Spiegel" im Krieg und kurz nach dém Krieg, als wir aufwuchsen? Sie spiegelten entweder eine vergangene Welt fremder Grunderlebnisse, denen wir damais unter der Wucht unsrer eignen nicht gerecht werden konnten, oder sie spiegelten die Gesellschaft verzerrt, als Vexierspiegel. (Ich nehme das Wort auf, obwohl die Kunst ja nicht "spiegelt".) Wir hatten keinen deutschen Barbusse, keinen deutschen Romain Rolland. Wir kônnen uns heute ungefâhr erklàren, warum nicht. Uns waren aber Splitterchen, die irgendeinen Bruchteil unsrer eignen Welt aufrichtig spiegelten, lieber als aile Scheinspiegel.^

Much like Benjamin, Seghers saw the inability to construct a totality in literature dependent upon the experiences of war in a modern age. It became even more a necessity for Seghers that authors not deny the existence of this time of crisis, but create from their experiences to present reality as they know it rather than some notion of reality.

^Seghers, Letter of February 1939, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukàcs," 288. 27 Seghers explained her concept of the creative process in her first letter of 28 July 1938. She relied heavily here on her interpretation of Tolstoy's three-level theory of the artistic process which he had described in his diaries. Lukacs had also turned to Tolstoy as an example of a great realist, but Seghers' use of Tolstoy's theory dif­ fered from Lukacs' appropriation of the same author as an example in that she adapted his ideas concerning the crea­ tive process rather than used his works as demonstrative for her own literary production. Seghers would return to Tol­ stoy and his works in her essays and letters many times in the years to come, but for now she was most concerned with how the author created the work ofliterature, and Tolstoy's ideas helped her formulate her own concept. Seghers reduced the three-level theory to two levels in her first letter to Lukacs. On the first level, an experi­ ence is taken up, almost unconsciously, then returns on a second level in the work of art:

Auf der ersten Stufe nimmt der Künstler die Realitat scheinbar unbewuBt und unmittelbar auf, er nimmt sie ganz neu auf, als ob noch niemand vor ihm dasselbe gesehen hàtte, das langst BewuBte wird wieder unbewuBt; auf der zweiten Stufe aber handelt es sich darum, dieses UnbewuBte wieder bewuBt zu machen.®

®Seghers, Letter of 28 June 1938, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs," 266. 28

Seghers emphasized the importance of immediacy in this process. The author should translate experiences gathered into a literary work but only after they have become a part of unconscious, stored-up memories. Like her contemporary Bertolt Brecht, Seghers did not consider the realistic con­ tent of a work as an end in itself, but the method by which it is expressed was important also. Like Brecht too, Seghers was a creative writer and therefore more concerned with method unlike Lukacs who, as a philosopher, took a more content-based approach to literature. However, Seghers also emphasized the literary work's basis in reality; "Das Hafigebende ist die Richtung auf die Realitat . . . . The presentation of reality remained an important point in Seghers' letters despite her antipathy to Lukacs' prescrip­ tive realism. Futhermore, because reality was in the process of development, it was not a closed totality. Seghers feared that writers would blindly adopt realism as a method and hence abandon the immediacy of experience for a set of rules and examples. Seghers insisted on this first level because of its value for the political struggle. Frank Trommler writes: "In der Unmittelbarkeit des Erlebens sah sie die Wahrheit des politischen Kampfes bezeugt; sie dûrfe nicht durch eine vorgegebene Konzeption von Realitat und Realismus

^Seghers, Letter of 28 June 1938, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs," 271. 29 verschûttet werden."10 The concept of reality could not be the same for every writer because each had his/her own expe­ rience of it from which to create the work of literature. Every writer was, then, in Seghers' opinion, moving toward the most complete representation of reality as he/she knew it, and this would necessarily change as one moved through history.H This view allowed Seghers a more sympathetic assessment of expressionism because writers were doing their best to express reality as they experienced it in their works. To further illustrate her point, Seghers named authors from other times who were also not realists in Lukacs' sense, but nevertheless took up their experiences directly in their works. The examples Seghers gave in her letters to Lukacs are indicative of the difference of opinion between the two. While Lukàcs held up authors such as Goethe, Balzac, Romain Rolland, and Thomas Mann as great realists, Seghers turned to Kleist, Holderlin, Lenz, and Günderode as examples of a generation of authors whose lives were broken by the effects

lOprank Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland; Ein historischer überblick (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1976), 658. llcf. Kurt Batt, "Erlebnis des Umbruchs und harmonische Gestalt. Der Dialog zwischen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs," Dialog und Kontroverse mit Georg Lukacs. ed. Werner Mittenzwei (Leipzig: Reclam, 1975), 212, 217; and, Eugenie Jax-Laufen, "Die 1iteraturtheoretische Position der Anna Seghers wàhrend der Exilzeit 1933-45," Staatspriifung Lehramt (Aachen, 1975), 32. 30 of the world in which they lived and of which they wrote. Seghers contrasted their fate with Goethe's fame:

Subjektiv aber war dieses [Goethes] Werk erkauft durch eine starke Anlehnung seines Schopfers an die be- stehende Gesellschaft, eine Auflehnung hàtte vermutlich dieses Werk gefàhrdet. Eine groBe Abneigung hatte Goethe gegen jede Art Auflosung— die Disharmonie der Schriftstellergeneration, deren Krankheit ihm fol- gerichtig dûnkte (. . .).12

Seghers drew the parallel between that generation of authors of Goethe's time and the avant-garde or modernist writers Lukacs so disliked to make a subtle political point. Just as Goethe brought his works into line with the political powers of his time so as not to cause any disharmony in his world, she implied, so too did Lukacs promote a form of lit­ erature that served to perpetuate a bourgeois tradition. In Seghers' opinion, Lukacs ignored the experienced present

(exile) and its effect on writers just as he ignored that generation of authors around Goethe. Seghers, a winner of the 1928 Kleist prize herself, believed that Kleist and

Holderlin could serve as examples as well as Goethe, and by ignoring them, Lukàcs was ignoring an entire tradition of German literature reaching into the present, a tradition whose authors experienced a broken, fragmented world and used that experience in their writing.

l^Seghers, Letter of 28 June 1938, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukàcs," 265. 31 Seghers' concept of realism was, in essence, based on experience and how it is used to create the work of literature. Although she never differentiated between Erfahrung and Erlebnis when speaking or writing about expe­ rience, her idea of the creative process involving experi­ ence is most closely related to Benjamin's distinction between the two terms. In a later address, Seghers returned to a discussion of Tolstoy's theory, expanding on it from her letters to Lukacs;

Auf der ersten Stufe wirkt die Umwelt, die Wirklichkeit unmittelbar und sozusagen naiv auf den Künstler; . . . sie reizt ihn . . . zur Gestaltung oder Darstellung. Dann kommt die zweite Stufe, die Stufe des Nachdenkens, des BewuBtwerdens. Er denkt über diese zuerst nur unmittelbar wirkende Darstellung. . . . Aber . . . der wirklich groBe Künstler erreicht die dritte Stufe, auf der ihm das BewuBtgewordene wieder unbewuBt wird und auf der er so sicher geht, . . . daB er darin umgeht wie ein Tànzer, der mühselig seine Tanzschritte eingeübt hat, aber dann tanzt . . . .13

According to Seghers, the artist not only takes up reality unconsciously, an experience then causes the artist to create the work. This is Benjamin's concept of Erlebnis. This experience leads to the second level where the artist considers how to best express him-/herself. It is a time of contemplation and bringing the stored-up experience, Erfahrung. into active use. Often this process is facili-

i^Anna Seghers, "Der Schriftsteller und die geistige Gegenwart," über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. vol. I, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1971), 71. tated, especially in times of crisis, by a kind of "Schockwirkuna."14 This is the shock of the present which can be the impetus to work through recalled past experience and give it an artistic form. But there is a third level to the process also. The material made conscious on the second level becomes, in effect, second nature to the artist and he/she becomes as one with the material in the process of creating as on that first level. Seghers used an appropriate analogy when she gave the example of the dancer in her speech. A dancer pos­ sesses the talent to move his/her body according to the moods, situations, or feelings he/she wishes to express. But in order to arrive at that point, the dancer must prac­ tice the steps which express the feelings until they are second nature and the movements actually are the feelings. The author, like the dancer, is inextricably a part of the work he/she creates, as Seghers pointed out to Lukacs in one of her letters; "Im Kunstwerk steckt das Verhaltnis des

Kûnstlers zu seinem Stoff."15 The artist is a "Produkt seiner Zeit, aber auch ein schopferisches Subjekt,who 14seghers, Letter of 28 June 1938, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukàcs," 268. Also, Heinz Neugebauer states: "Anna Seghers hat nicht die Gesamtheit aller Erscheinungen im Sinn, sondern Ereignisse, die den Künstler stark beeindrucken, ja schockieren." Anna Seghers; Leben und Werk (Berlin; Volk und Wissen, 1978), 67-68. ISseghers, Letter of February 1939, "Briefwechsel zwis­ chen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs," 289.

l^Christa Wolf, "Glauben an Irdisches," Lesen und Schreiben (Darmstadt; Luchterhand, 1972), 92-93. 33 cannot be a passive observer of some objective reality. The artist does not live separate and distinct from some other self, the self which lives and participates in history. Benjamin's storyteller is also a part of the society for which he/she creates stories. His romancier. on the other hand, sits alone in a room, detached from the audience for which the novel is intended. Seghers first used Tolstoy's theory to come to terms with the creative process she herself practiced and also in response to the question of how to write as an anti-fascist author. There could be no strict paradigm to follow if the anti-fascist author truly desired to write to change the status quo of exile and fascism. These were not new-founded convictions on Seghers' part, rather they reached back to the late 1920s and early 1930s when she had begun to write. For Seghers, to write anti-fascist literature involved a political commitment to affect change through writing.

If one were to reduce Seghers' objections to Lukacs' concept of realism to one particular point, then certainly it would be the importance she bestowed on the individual writer's ability to use his/her surroundings and experience to create a work of literature. For Seghers, the subject (i.e. the author) is the filter through which reality passes. What made Lukacs' concept of realism difficult for Seghers to understand was its denial of the author's sub­ jectivity in the work. Seghers argued consistently in favor 34 of a realism that does not deny the author's important role in creating the work of literature. For Seghers, writing anti-fascist literature meant writing from her experiences and commitment to Germany beyond fascism. One thing great artists of the past could not pass on to future writers was the influence of the contemporary situation, which, if the writer was absorbing reality, he/she would use in determin­ ing both content and form of the work. The social con­ structs in which the author lived thus would become a part of the work also. These experiences as translated into the work would give us a view of reality then. In Seghers' opinion, no socially responsible author could ignore his/her experiences for they were the basis of a work of realism. The shock of exile caused Seghers to write from her memory of past experiences of Germany. In Das siebte Kreuz. she turned to her remembrances of Mainz and the Rhine-Main area where she grew up and attended school. Her memories of the places she came to know as a child were the basis for her story. The history of this area was woven into the story as a reminder that circumstances did change, but there was still something inside people that has not been touched by the Nazis. But even before exile, Seghers had dealt with the con­

cept of experience as it relates to artistic expression. In her 1924 doctoral dissertation "Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts," Seghers considered how Rembrandt depicted Jews 35 in various stages of his career. In her explication of Rem­ brandt's development from portraying assimilated, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal to orthodox east-European Jews and the symbols of Judaism, we can see the beginnings of Seghers' appropriation of Tolstoy's three-step theory of the creative process. Her contention was that Rembrandt was profoundly influenced by the milieu in which he lived and his daily experiences with Jews. However, Rembrandt did not simply depict Jews in his paintings, but rather transformed the images according to his idea of Judaism which was characteristic for his time.l?

The reality of seventeenth-century Holland played an impor­ tant role here. Rembrandt's choice of subject depended on his contacts with Jews, and not an abstract idea, as Seghers explained:

Das Judentum hat nicht, wie wohl bei den meisten seiner Zeitgenossen, Gelehrten oder Künstlern, fur ihn seine Bedeutung durch die Hirkung eines bestimmten, seiner religiosen oder kulturellen Lage entsprungenen Gedankenganges, sondern es hat fur den Künstler einen nur fur ihn, Rembrandt, charakteristischen Eigenwert, den er zuerst in der Realitat entdeckt, und zwar in einer fur die Blicke seiner meisten Zeitgenossen eindruckslosen und verschlossenen Umwelt.^8

What set Rembrandt apart from his contemporaries, according to Seghers, was his ability to transform the situations he l^Netty Reiling (Anna Seghers), Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts (Leipzig: Reclâm, 1983), 31. ISseghers, Jude und Judentum. 55. 36 experienced into a work of art. While his ideas of Judaism were a function of his times and generally a historical view of Judaism, Rembrandt's portrayal of Jews was based on his contacts with them. Seghers' view of Rembrandt's paintings was informed by his times as well. The way in which she dealt with this topic would resurface in her later works, be they critical essays or stories. Seghers explored how Rem­ brandt turned his experience into a work of art by uncover­ ing Rembrandt's past experience and relating it to his art­ istic representation of it. In doing so, Seghers was able to draw conclusions about Rembrandt's relationship to his subject and shed light on the historical situation influenc­ ing the art of his times. Seghers turned from the study of art history to writing stories for publication in the late 1920s. She joined the German Communist Party in 1928 when she was already well- known for her novella "Der Aufstand der Fischer von St. Bar­ bara." Seghers became involved in the Party's writers' organization, the Bund proletarisch-revolutionarer Schrift­

steller (BPRS), which promoted proletarian writers through workshops, courses, and publications. Proletarian litera­ ture, or workers' literature, was to be literature written by workers for workers as part of the revolutionary movement in Germany. Seghers' involvement in the BPRS included teaching workers how to write as well as writing articles 37 for the BPRS publication Die Linkskurve on practical issues of writing. One of Seghers' articles was the fictionalized discus­ sion between herself and a would-be proletarian writer "Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt" (1932). Seghers emphasized the necessity for the writer not only to depict what he/she sees, but to go beyond that and explore the situation as if the writer had experienced it also. Accord­ ing to Seghers, the writer cannot expect to compose an interesting account of a May 1 demonstration in Shanghai if he/she is watching from a distance instead of getting involved in the demonstration and registering people's reac­ tions as well as what one sees. Seghers was making a plea here for direct political action on the one hand, but also for the writer's creative process. If a writer desires to get the best possible written version of the event, he/she must be willing to at least record others' if not his/her own experiences of the event. Unlike the bourgeois novelist, the (proletarian) writer must write from the work­ ing class' experiences. Although Seghers' early works were informed by politi­ cal events, they also contained a subjectivity which was criticized by other members of the BPRS. One such critic,

Otto Biha, credited Seghers for her talent in an article but felt that her writing exhibited "idealistische Zùge und 38 kleinbürgerliche Verworrenheiten.The subjectivity cited by Seghers' critics was related to her concept of the crea­ tive process and the importance of experience for the work.

She defended her stories in her "Selbstanzeige” from 1931 where she stated: "Wenn man schreibt, mufi man so schreiben, daB man hinter der Verzweiflung die Moglichkeit und hinter dem Untergang den Ausweg spurt."20 The argument here is not so much about revolutionary content, but how it is expressed. Seghers hoped her readers would understand the conflicts and the hope for the future she presented through the characters' experiences and not because she depicted the conflicts resolved. This dispute was also a part of her letters to Lukacs. Seghers insisted on portraying the process, not a closed totality as Lukacs promoted in his method of realism. In exile from Nazi Germany, Seghers was one of the first to give her support to the Volksfront movement. The Volksfront was established by the exile community to bring anti-fascists of all political backgrounds together to pre­ sent a unified opposition to Hitler and the Nazis to Germany and the world. Among its goals was also the intent to help those artists and intellectuals separated in exile from their audience to overcome the isolation and to perform,

l^As quoted in Kurt Batt, Anna Seahers (Leipzig: Reclam, 1973), 63. 20seghers, "Selbstanzeige," über Kunst und Wirklich­ keit. vol. II, 11. 39 write, and give lectures for the rest of the exile com­ munity. Behind the idea of the Volksfront was the hope that the exile experience would not mean the end of a progressive German culture. But because the Volksfront movement embraced anti-fascists of various political leanings, it was a movement that should bring together more "traditional" or conservative artists and writers with communist and socialist artists. There should be enough room for bourgeois authors such as Thomas Mann as well as communists such as Anna Seghers in the Volksfront. Seghers supported the movement not only because it was anti-fascist, but because it represented to her what should happen in Germany to overthrow the Nazis. Even after the Volksfront was in decline and the differences on how to write anti-fascist literature revealed in the expressionism debate had divided writers, Seghers turned to the Volksfront as a paradigm for her novel Das siebte Kreuz. In the novel, she presented characters with different political views unified in their desire to help one man escape from the Nazis. These people are all anti-fascists in that they act out of an understanding that they cannot allow the Nazis to destroy their lives totally. There is a commitment deep inside these people that causes them to help Georg Heisler. For Seghers, anti-fascist was not just a title one could attach to a person, but instead would reflect the essential difference between committed anti-fascists and 40 hangers-on. Seghers stated in 1938: "Wir sind nicht anders durch das Vorsetzen der Silbe 'anti', sondern indem wir von Grund auf anders sind."21 Clearly, for Seghers, this meant being a communist, but others would be anti-fascist even if their political affiliations were different than hers. Her comments here were directed at those authors who felt a label would make them (and their works) into anti-fascists and thereby gain the recognition and support of the exile community. Seghers viewed anti-fascism as a commitment which would then inform her works. For Seghers, the per­ sonal experience of exile from Nazi Germany was also a political experience which then found expression in her writing, as in her use of the Volksfront concept in Das siebte Kreuz. The Volksfront carried in it the hope for a different Germany in the future. Seghers did not enter the realism debate when it began in 1936. She chose instead to concentrate on her writing

and published three novels and a story within the first five years of exile. Seghers' exile novels and stories provide us with examples of the process of which she wrote in her letters to Lukàcs. Through her works, she spoke of the hope she had for the future, as yet unrealized. Her exile novels are open-ended, not closed totalities, so that we may wonder how the story will continue, much like the stories Ben­ jamin's storyteller told. In this way, the author produces 21seghers, "Und jetzt muB man arbeiten," über Kunst und Wirklichkeit. vol. I, 68. 41 works which exemplify the social-historical processes. The past is important for the future as well as the present. However, Lukacs' realism stands outside of history, opting for the ”... passive reflection of historical ideologies. . . . There is no mediation of the social relations by the forces of production of which literary techniques are a part. Form is merely an expression of objective content.”22 In contrast, Seghers' novels contain a redemptive moment, one which contains hope for the future in the subjective experience contained in the narrative. Seghers' writing was based on a concept of experience closely tied to history. In her letters to Lukacs, she drew upon examples from past movements in art history and literary history and connected them to the current situation of exile to substantiate her arguments. These past experi­ ences of disruption and change should enlighten Seghers' contemporaries so that they might see the parallels between the past and the present of exile. Seghers' concentration on history is also evident in her description of the crea­ tive process. This is a process that takes place over time, not a static method. It follows that Seghers' writing would then change over time as her experiences changed and came to be used in the work of literature. Lukacs' realism would

Z^Eugene Lunn, "Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler; A Comparison of Brecht and Lukacs, New German Criticme 3 (1974): 29. 42 remain the same exercise of objective portrayal of reality, regardless of immediate experiences. While Seghers was a storyteller in Benjamin's sense, Lukacs' realist was a novelist as Benjamin defined the romancier; detached from society and writing according to a method. Seghers relied on a creative process that did not deny the author's experience or the experience of his/her times. Lukacs, as Eugene Lunn explains, "... separated literary dialectics from political praxis and fell back upon a 'copy' theory of artistic representation which essentially denied the novelist the productive power of conscious­ ness. "23 Seghers' concept of realism caused her to object to Lukacs' prescriptive theory. In her stories and novels, Seghers used the creative process of which she spoke in her letters to Lukacs to create anti-fascist literature. She viewed her role in exile as a storyteller who could best tell the stories of fascism and exile from a sense of com­ mitment and a historical perspective. Seghers' novels and stories contain a subjectivity based upon that commitment and realized in their redemptive moment. Through her stories and the use of narrative strategies, Seghers bears witness to the era she experienced and passes on a hope for the future to her readers.

B. Nadine Gordimer

23Lunn, 28. 43

Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs, South

Africa, approximately 30 miles from Johannesburg. 24 she spent her childhood years in this mining town of 20,000 people where her father owned a jewelry shop. Her mother was British, her father Lithuanian, and both were Jewish. In contrast to Seghers, Gordimer had little formal education while growing up. She attended a Catholic school until age 11 when her mother took her out of school because of a sup­ posed heart condition which later turned out to have been misdiagnosed. Gordimer had already begun to write at the age of 9, and had her first story published six years later in the Johannesburg weekly Forum. An imaginative and preco­ cious child, Gordimer invented stories for her mother's friends' entertainment while she was held out of school. Her first volume of stories. Face to Face, was published in 1949. Since then, Gordimer has published ten novels and numerous short stories as well as essays and non-fiction on life in South Africa and on the African continent. Gordimer briefly attended classes at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1945 and mixed with blacks for the first time on a basis other than as master to 24The biographical information related here is taken primarily from an interview with Jannika Hurwitt in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Sixth Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York; Viking, 1984), 239-79. Further references will be given in the text. Additional informa­ tion can be found in Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Hemel Hempstead, Herts.: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Robert F. Haugh, Nadine Gordimer (New York: Twayne, 1974); and Judie Newman, Nadine Gordimer (London: Routledge, 1988). 44 servant, as was the case in her home town. Apartheid as law did not yet exist, and blacks sat in the same lectures and seminars as whites at several universities in South Africa. There was great interest in leftist movements and the Com­ munist Party around this time, especially among students. But Gordimer did not engage in any political activity as yet, preferring instead to concentrate on her writing. She saw relationships between blacks and whites on an individual and personal level, not as a political situation that needed to be addressed or even changed:

My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn't see that it was pretty meaningless until much later. (Interview with Hurwitt, 250)

It would be several years before Gordimer developed what might be called a political conciousness. In the late 1940s and early 1950s though, she, like many of her white con­ temporaries, experienced the steady economic growth and relative stability of post-war South Africa without giving much thought to the blacks who helped achieve that

prosperity but did not share in it. She married, had a child, and continued to write her stories. The only ripple in the smooth surface of these years was the ascendancy of 45 the Nationalist Party in 1948 to become the majority party in the government with the right to rule the land. The segregation of blacks and so called "coloreds” from whites which had been practiced for years was put into law and became what we know today as apartheid. South Africa had its beginnings as first a Dutch, and later a British colony. Gordimer's first awareness of being a colonial came not in a political context in South Africa, but on her first trip out of the country to England. She explained the insight she gained on this trip in an inter­ view:

. . .[I]t brought an understanding of what I was, and helped me to shed the last vestiges of colonialism. I didn't know 1 was a colonial, but then I had to realize that I was. Even though my mother was only six when she came to South Africa from England, she still would talk about people "going home." But after my first trip out, I realized that "home" was certainly and exclusively— Africa. It could never be anywhere else. (Interview with Hurwitt, 244)

Although Gordimer's early works show great sensitivity towards the South African system and its anomalies, it was not until her 1966 novel The Late Bourgeois World that Gor­ dimer 's development into what can be termed an anti­ apartheid writer was realized. In this novel, Gordimer began to develop what she termed "narrative muscle" (Inter­ view with Hurwitt, 256), that is, politics began to inform her work not only topically but also as a question of form 46 and intent. Her novels convey an explicit political message only in the sense that they convey how people are affected by politics. It is above all Gordimer's acute sensitivity to behavior in the South African apartheid state that is most evident in her writing. When she shed the last vestiges of colonial nature, she took on the responsibility of writing about South Africa as a South African, and that also meant shedding the naivete of a white who felt just being civil to blacks was enough to change the effects of racial segregation. Gordimer belongs to a group of writers whose literary careers began in those post-war years with the beginning of the Nationalist Party government and apartheid. With the codification of apartheid in South Africa came also the severing of political, cultural, and moral ties with Europe, "... and from being the dubious colonial children of a far-off motherland, white South Africans graduated to uneasy possession of their own, less and less transigent internal

colony."25 As the color bar was set into law as apartheid,

white South Africans set out to chart their course increasingly alone on the African continent. Gordimer recognized this development first upon leaving South Africa: the colonial sheds her colonialism as she finds what she is

not in it.

25j. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Let­ ters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 11. 47 Gordimer explained her own development as a writer in relation to the apartheid system in an early essay "A Bolter and an Invincible Summer" (1963). In this essay, she stressed her relatively unpolitical awakening to a political situation, much like her year at the University of the

Witwatersrand;

So it was that I didn't wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my con­ temporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparent esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the 'problems' of my county did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that set me falling, falling through the surface of 'the South African way of life.'26

An important turning point in Gordimer's own assessment of her literary career was the shooting of black demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1961 by white police officers. While this was an important event in her political awakening, she wants no one to obscure the importance to her of the craft of her writing, and at the same time, not to deny the conclusions of her artistic inquiry. Some critics might find it diffi­ cult to allow Gordimer this non-political stance here, pointing instead to her works and their political subject matter as evidence that she could only write as she does 26Nadine Gordimer, "A Bolter and an Invincible Summer," The Essential Gesture: Writing. Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 26. Further references to this volume will be given in the text with the book title and page number. 48 because of her views on South Africa. Gordimer would insist though that it was the nature of literature and the creative process which forced her to depict South African life in a politically charged manner. The rise of the Republic of South Africa and its sever­ ing of ties to Great Britain put whites in South Africa in a position to view themselves as Africans, albeit Africans of European descent. But being born in South Africa and having lived there all one's life does not necessarily make one an African. The mentality of the colonialist dies hard, and to commit oneself to the future in South Africa means moving beyond colonialism and white supremacy. Gordimer put this point in perspective when she stated in an interview;

I feel myself committed to an indigenous culture here. I think it hasn't happened yet but it's something that one hopes will be allowed to happen— that there will be whites who will prove themselves acceptable in terms of our past to build a common cultural future with blacks. So from that point of view I see myself— yes— as an African, a white African.27

Gordimer has repeatedly stated her view of what it means to be African in terms of an inclusive, indigenous culture. She clearly does not see herself as a European, despite her European roots. But as a white who identifies herself as an African and is committed to a common culture with blacks,

27«Nadine Gordimer: An Interview," Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, ed. M. J. Daymond, et al. (Pietermaritzburg: U Natal P, 1984), 33. 49

Gordimer is doubly marginalized. She belongs to a minority within a minority. As a white, Gordimer belongs to the minority that controls the government and enjoys the privileges which accompany white rule. But she also belongs to a minority of whites within the minority who are opposed to that system of oppression and wish to link up with the majority somehow. How to do this is the question that has become more difficult to answer over the y e a r s . 28 it is also one Gordimer has explored extensively in her fiction. Being a writer in South Africa has been complicated by the censorship laws, in particular the Internal Securities Act and the Publications Act, which were designed to hamper or stop the publication or uttering of thoughts and ideas the minority government deems politically incorrect. The Internal Securities Act is concerned with what politically undesirable people say whereas the Publications Act has more impact on the written word. The implications of such laws are far-reaching. Not only do authors face censorship and banning, but publishers are also wary of printing materials which may be banned in the future (and would thus incur a financial l o s s ) . 29 The banning of printed material is not restricted to books published in South Africa, but applies equally to English-language literature imported to South

Africa. 28gee also Stephen Clingman, "Introduction," The Essen­ tial Gesture. 5-6.

29m . J. Daymond, et al., "Introduction," Momentum. xv. 50 Gordimer has spoken out many times against the censors. She is quite correct to point out the political reason for censorship and banning of South Africans' writing in her essay "Censored, Banned, Gagged" despite what the white officials maintain: "... all those books by South African writers which have been banned, have been banned for a political reason: non-conformity with the picture of South African life as prescribed and proscribed by apartheid" (The Essential Gesture. 58). Censorship and banning are a means by which the minority government has been able to control the dissemination of information and opinions within the

country. And, although a specific banning is in reference to the perceived political message of a piece of writing, often the writer cannot get future works published, thus creating a void where that person could have otherwise been present to reflect and comment on life in South Africa as he or she sees it. The result is a distortion of the literary

and journalistic response to apartheid in favor of the ruling white minority.

This situation, in turn, creates some difficulty when South Africans attempt to "boast of a 'literature' while, by decree, in their own country, it consists of some of the books written by its black and white, Afrikaans- and

English-speaking writers," as Gordimer put it in "Censored, Banned, Gagged" (The Essential Gesture. 67). The prolifera­ tion of the censorship laws serves only to perpetuate the 51 claims of those literary scholars who view South African literature in terms of language affiliation (English or Afrikaans) rather than as a national literature belonging to the African continent and including writings in other lan­ guages besides those of the colonizers. The censors, in the attempt to promote one "truth" in their doings, relegate South African letters to the status of a perpetual colonial endeavor. Gordimer has also been banned: her novel Burger^s Daughter was not allowed to be sold in bookstores in South Africa for a few weeks when it first appeared in 1979. The book was again available to the public after an appeal by the Publications Board Director himself, as she chronicled in her book What Happened to Burger^s Daughter. Gordimer believes that the true artist cannot be touched by the censor. In "A Writer's Freedom" she stated: "You can burn the books, but the integrity of creative artist is not incarnate on paper any more than on canvas— it survives so long as the artist himself cannot be persuaded, cajoled or frightened into betraying it" fThe Essential Gesture. 106). In this same essay she quotes Brecht's poem "Die Bücherver- brennung" as an example of what book burning (or censorship, banning) can mean to the writer. She applies Brecht's view of the Nazis' book burnings to the contemporary situation in South Africa. If a book is not deemed unworthy of pub­ lication by the censors, is the author not doing his/her 52 job? Gordimer's response to this is that the books may be burned, but the integrity of the artist survives as long as he/she continues to write regardless of the outcome.

Censorship in South Africa serves to maintain a racist regime and will continue to do so as long as apartheid remains in force. As I write this in 1991, the slow disman­ tling of apartheid has only just begun. Because of South Africa's colonial past, European literary traditions have exerted a great deal of influence on white South African writers especially. Gordimer can be placed within the context of a "liberal" tradition stemming from these colonial beginnings. South African literature has existed only since the late nineteenth century and is most commonly seen to appear with Olive Schreiner's novel The Storv of an African Farm in 1883. Until that point, what was written in South Africa was primarily intended for consumption "back home," in England and in the Netherlands. As colonial literature, its purpose was to justify the colonialists' presence in Africa as well as to provide amus­ ing anecdotes about the indigenous people and their curious ways. Schreiner's novel marks the beginning of white writers born, raised, and living in South Africa writing about the country and their experience for a South African audience. 53

Paul Rich defines this early era of South African lit­ erature as "liberal realism."30 Authors belonging to this early period of South African literature still followed the lead taken by English literature. Victorian realism celebrated the individual's autonomy to shape and control his existence. Translated into the colonial situation, realism celebrated the white man's eüsility to control the African— man or terrain. The urbanization and industri­ alization which took place in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century shook the bourgeois underpin­ nings of realism. The modernist trends in literature chal­ lenged realism, and as Rich puts it: "... modernism exemplified a moral doubt in the realist imperial v i s i o n . "31 While white writers still hung on to liberal realism, mod­ ernism offered an escape for those few writers who wished to break out of colonial society. The place of liberal realism in South African litera­ ture came increasingly into question during the early years of apartheid. Rich summarizes the situation:

In the field of fiction, especially, the fundamental tenets of literary realism were found to be ultimately irreconcilable to the liberal world view, certainly as far as an expanding and progressive literature was con­ cerned. By the early 1960s, it may be said that English writers were confronted with an ideological dilemma. On the one hand they could move beyond "lib- 30paul Rich, "Liberal Realism in South African Fiction 1948-1966," English in Africa 12.1 (1985): 47-81. 3lRich, 52. 54

eral realism” which had been tentatively experimented with over the previous decades . . . and grope towards a "socialist realism" .... Alternatively, they could abandon realism altogether and search towards a post­ modernist literary mode of the kind that eventually emerged in the 1970s. . . . The point is that these later developments in the 1960s and 1970s were a direct result of what may be termed South African liberal realism in the immediate post-war era.32

What Rich termed liberal realism underwent a change in order that writers could respond to the changing reality of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Rich, two strains of writing emerged: pastoral naturalism and urban modernism. One was based on a rural South African identity (pastoral naturalism) and the other on the South African city (urban modernism).

The pastoral has a long-standing tradition in South African literature. Generally, novels and stories in the pastoral vein recreate the South African "garden-farm as a bastion of trusted feudal values or cradle of a transindividual familial/tribal form of consciousness.”33 The pastoral grants reassurance to white settlers by pro­ jecting a vision of the past (safety), especially in times when the whites' future looks uncertain. The pastoral celebrates white labor in rural retreat and therefore can

satisfy the critics of colonialism who see the colonizer as a lazy person escaping the rigors of labor back home. What

32Rich, 47-48.

33coetzee, 4. 55 we have then, is a lopsided picture of South African life as the black man fades into the background. Coetzee explains this phenomenon further:

. . . [T]he black man becomes a shadowy presence flit­ ting across the stage now and then to hold a horse or serve a meal. In more ways than one the logic of the pastoral mode itself thus makes the incorporation of the black man— that is, of the black serf, man, woman, or child— into the larger picture embarrassing and dif­ ficult. 34

Pastoral naturalism then, according to Rich, is a continua­ tion of the pastoral tradition, but not an idealized pastoral vision of the past. Rather, it is the harsh realities of rural South African existence, both for whites and blacks, that informs the pastoral of the post-war years. Alan Baton's 1948 novel Cry. The Beloved Countrv portrays the city as an evil place where the idealistic (black) rural pastor confronts the decay and corruption of modern life. For the pastor Kumalo, the only way to save his son and sister from the city is to bring them back to the land where life is difficult, yet richly rewarding. For Baton, the individual's choice is to avoid the source of evil and to retreat to the countryside. Here, the pastoral triumphs although the characters are not white colonialists.

Coetzee takes a much more negative stance towards the pastoral, seeing it as a literary form which continues to

34coetzee, 5. 56 celebrate white dominance over the African countryside. He views the pastoral as a kind of wish fulfillment for the (predominantly Afrikaner) farmers who have lost much of the land they once claimed their own in South Africa to the growth of towns and cities and industrialization. The fail­ ure, then, of the liberal-individualist tradition out of which the pastoral comes is not to have persuaded the "new landless white proletariat that its future was linked to that of a growing black proletariat."35 Urban modernism, on the other hand, divorced itself from the African landscape and countryside and presented its characters in the milieu of the city. According to Rich, urban modernists were concerned with pursuing the pos­ sibilities for individual freedom within the framework of the city.36 No longer concerned with retrieving the colonial past from the countryside, the urban modernist viewed the city as the locus of South African experience. Here, too, blacks cannot fade into the background as in the pastoral. Rich places Gordimer early in her career at the forefront of urban modernism because of the topics she chose for her works and the milieu in which she presented them. The logical development of liberal realism in the late 1950s and early 1960s can be seen in those writers who explored "the moral choices available to individuals in a situation

35coetzee, 6. 36Rich, 67. 57 of evolving interracial relations."3? Gordimer's early stories and novels typify this. Her approach to interracial relations was on an individual basis both in her life and in her stories. In these years, the cities saw enormous growth, partic­ ularly in the black population which moved to the townships surrounding the cities to work. In the years leading up to Sharpeville, it was possible for urban modernism to explore such choices that the city offered, but in the years after Sharpeville and the banning of the African National Congress and many other anti-apartheid organizations, and in the wake of growing political repression and censorship, urban mod­ ernism failed to relate the political implications of the forces at work in society. Some authors took up a more politicized realism, in some cases a "socialist realism" of a kind as a response to the changing political climate and in hope of depicting the apartheid state and its horrors more clearly.38

My intent here is not to give a complete history of

English-language South African literature, but to make an important point: that despite being native to South Africa, many writers continued to look to England and Europe for ideas and influences. The years surrounding the consolida­ tion of power by the Nationalist Party in 1948 witnessed a

37Rich, 70. 38Rich. 58 shift toward other literary forms in an attempt to better express the South African experience. Rich's categories, in a way, express the author's place of reference in South Africa (urban or rural), and to a lesser extent, the subject matter of his or her works. Gordimer's place in South African literature certainly can be compartmentalized by placing her under a rubric such as urban modernism, but ultimately, one must view her literary works in respect to their ability to depict South African experience, urban or otherwise. The challenge then, considering Rich's classifications, would be to determine whether Gordimer is a realist (and which kind) or a modernist. Indeed, many critics have attempted to classify Gordimer in various ways, but as we have already seen, the choices generally stem from a liberal tradition in literature. Stephen Clingman chose to base his classification of Gordimer's works on her perspective rather than a literary genre or movement. Unfortunately, Cling- man's conclusions are hardly new:

. . . [T]he perspective she characteristically employs in her work is social and historical in nature. The key to this perspective is that social and private life are seen as integrally related; the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs gave it its classic definition in his exposition of what he called 'true great realism.' For Lukacs, . . . private life had to be seen as a social and historical construct only. As restated in his definition of 'critical realism,' seen from this per­ spective the 'ontological being' of characters 'cannot be distinguished from their social and historical 59 environment.• This seems a fair encapsulation of most of Gordimer's writing.^9

I do not wish to take issue with Clingman's interpretation of Lukacs, but rather his application of Lukacs' form of realism to Gordimer's works. Clingman plants Gordimer squarely in socialist realism without actually employing the term, instead opting for the less ideology-charged term "critical realism." While Gordimer's novels depict the individual's rootedness in social and historical constructs, they also seek to disrupt those constructs by expressing the individual's experience as a subversion of the social con­ struct. In Burger's Daughter. Rosa Burger's inner dialog with her father, for example, is not only a representation of her relationship with him, but also an exploration and subversion of what that relationship has meant for her within the narrative. "History from the inside" (Clingman's phrase for Gordimer's writing) is not just a view of history from a privileged position (â la Lukàcs) inside her charac­ ters, but rather a personal history, a subjectivity evident in her novels. Other critics too, such as Michael Wade in his book on

Gordimer, point to her realistic portrayal of South African

life and its multiracial experience. 40 in contrast, Judie

39ciingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer. 8. 40Michael Wade, Nadine Gordimer (London & Ibadan: Evans Brothers Ltd., 1978), 4. 60 Newman sees Gordimer's works imploding the construct of literary realism as a step toward creating a truly South African literature. Newman draws an appropriate parallel between the "... representations of realism and the imposition of colonial structures” on Africa.41 The ques­ tion writers in South Africa must always confront is one of tradition. "Realism" or "modernism" are forms which say as much about the work of literature as they do about the author's relationship to his or her subject in that they are forms imported from the colonizer. In this respect, realism continues to be little more than a useful tool of the colonizer. Conversely, Gordimer, by her own admission, became committed to an inclusive, indigenous culture in South Africa and hence a different form of literature beyond the realism of the colonizer. In this respect, her works cannot be classified conclusively as either "modernist" or

"realist" according to European constructs. The problem of colonialism does not disappear, but the means by which colonialism is subtly evoked through literature have less and less a voice in Gordimer's works. The political situation in South Africa forced her to reevaluate how she would tell the story of life there. The result has been novels and stories that reflect Gordimer's commitment to South Africa beyond the colonial legacy and apartheid, as Judie Newman points out:

4iNewman, 55. 61

As a white writer, Gordimer's fictional enterprise involves a refusal to exercise white proxy in the arts, but rather to seek out narrative forms which combine European and indigenous forms and are attentive to the majority voice in South Africa. As a result her work is both politically committed and formally innovative, involving subject matter of intense contemporary inter­ est, to which Gordimer has responded with a multi­ plicity of narrative strategies.*2

In her writing, Gordimer moves away from European literary traditions and blends her narratives with indigenous forms, with stories in the oral tradition of storytelling. This, in turn, leaves the hegemony of European literary forms behind as she progresses towards the indigenous, inclusive culture she often speaks of. This is not to say that her works are not indebted to those European forms, but rather that the intent is not to recreate the colonial enterprise in fiction.

One might ask at this juncture why Gordimer should even be allowed to contribute to an indigenous South African cul­ ture. She is, after all, a member of the minority that upholds and enforces the apartheid laws. What right does she have to speak for blacks, for people whose culture she does not directly share? Hers is a precarious position: to be a white person against white supremacy in South Africa writing about that country for a world-wide audience. The reaction to Gordimer's writing and her impact in world lit-

^^Newman, 13. 62 erature has not always been kind, as Albert Gérard relates in his introduction to Enalish-Lancmaae Writing in Sub- Saharan Africa;

Recalling the atrocities that have taken place in the R.S.A., it is not difficult to understand and even sympathize with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's denunciation of the Paton-Gordimer brand of liberalism, "the white lib­ eral's dream of a day when Black and White can love one another without going through the agony of violent reckoning. Liberalism has always been sugary ideology of imperialism, it fosters the illusion in the exploited of the possibilities of peaceful settlement and painless escape from imperialist violence which anyway is not called violence but law and order."*3

As a white, anti-apartheid writer in South Africa, Gordimer opens herself up to criticism of this nature. The next cru­ cial question is then, how can a white tell the "real" story of apartheid when she is not a party to the atrocities suf­ fered by the majority population. This became a critical point in discussions about South African literature in the 1970s.

The rise of the Black Consciousness movement and the Soweto uprising in 1976 brought the whole issue of who writes what for whom (and for what reason) to the forefront. Gordimer did not remain quiet during this period, and it was in her essay "Relevance and Commitment" (1979) that she addressed the white artist's position in South African

43Albert Gérard, "Introduction," European-Lancmaae Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, vol. I (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadô, 1986), 55. 63 society. She recognized the difference between blacks' and whites' experiences and called on whites to scrap their ver­ sion of a white-based culture in their works:

Exploitation, which the blacks experience as their reality, is something the white artist repudiates, refuses to be the agent of. It is outside himself; he experiences it through a moral attitude or a rational empathy. The black creation of a new selfhood is based on a reality he, as a white cannot claim and that could not serve him if he did since it is not of his order of experience. If he is to find his true consciousness, egress in his work the realities of his place and time, if he is to reach the stage where commitment rises within him to a new set of values based on those realities, he has to admit openly the order of his experience as a white as differing completely from the order of black experience. (The Essential Gesture. 139)

I believe it is important here to note the extent to which Gordimer went to point out the fundamental differences between blacks' and whites' experiences without denying a white writer's commitment to a new South Africa. Gordimer believes that this is the way, by opening oneself up to the differences, that the white artist can "reconnect his art through his life to the total reality of the disintegrating present. . ." (The Essential Gesture. 139). By doing this, in turn, by rethinking his/her convictions, the white art­ ist's work can be seen as relevant by an indigenous culture and as incorporating commonly created realities and cultural entities. Indeed, an important concept for Gordimer is that of writing from experience. She has repeated her conviction 64 often that a writer must create from experience in order to depict reality best. That experience is transformed in the work and becomes a narrative. This is the writer's task, as Gordimer stated in her 1984 essay "The Essential Gesture":

The transformation of experience remains the writer's basic essential gesture; the lifting out of a limited catego^ something that reveals its full meaning and significance only when the writer's imagination has expanded it. This has never been more evident than in the context of extreme experiences of sustained per­ sonal horror that are central to the period of twentieth-century writers. fThe Essential Gesture. 298)

Extreme experiences can be said to lead to great literature. The shock of the present, be it war, political upheaval, or personal tragedy, causes the writer to transform experience into a literary work. Often that experience remains buried or not fully realized until the writer takes hold of it and expands it.

Stephen Clingman's position is that Gordimer's novels contain a "history from the inside." He concludes that Gor­ dimer 's position is not only a privileged one in that she is a participant in the processes she depicts, but also con­ fined by the "inside" position: "For Gordimer is caught up in the midst of the processes she is attempting to depict.

At the same time as she engages with history she is moulded by the patterns and forces she must try to assess."44 while

Clingman sees this position as confining, I would argue that 44ciingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer. 2. 65

Gordimer'S novels and stories are enriched and complicated by her implication in them. The narrative not only reveals the author's approach to the topic, but also the author's experience in regard to the topic. In Gordimer's case, apartheid is the continual topic. Her voice is part of the writer's essential gesture. For Gordimer, a commitment to writing anti-apartheid literature arose from her involvement with the consciousness of her era. We cannot deduce Gordimer's selection of a topic from that anti-apartheid stance. Instead, her commit­ ment results from writing (and all that involves) about

South Africa, and not an ideology. In this respect, Gor­ dimer has attempted to write novels and stories using her experience of South Africa to present a view of the world as she sees it. Gordimer's position in world literature is, by now, secure. Her novels and stories are widely read, and her essays appear in newspapers and magazines in Europe and the United States. Hers is often considered the foremost voice among anti-apartheid writers today. Gordimer is quite aware of the difficulties associated with that position; to be anti-apartheid and white in South Africa opens one up to criticism from all sides. But Gor­ dimer is firm in her commitment to telling the stories she observes in South Africa, as she states in "Selecting My Stories": 66

. . . [T]here are some stories I have gone on writing, again and again, all my life, not so much because the themes are obsessional but because I found other ways to take hold of them; because I hoped to make the revelation of new perceptions through the different techniques these demanded. I felt for the touch that would release the spring that shuts off appearance from reality. (The Essential Gesture. 112)

Gordimer is indeed the storyteller who may tell the same stories over and over, but searches for the best way each time to relate the stories that will go beyond appearance in order to grasp the reality of the experience. Much in the same way that Seghers' exile novels give us a picture of the horrors of fascism as well as the hope for what might come in post-fascist Germany, Gordimer's novels reveal apartheid South Africa to us as well as a vision of what the future might bring for her country. Gordimer's vision may be called "liberal" by some critics, but in any case, it is a vision filled with hope. Her novels, too, contain a redemp­ tive moment in that hope for the future. It is, after all, her stories which exemplify her commitment to a different kind of South African "realism." CHAPTER III

ANNA SEGHERS' EXILE NOVELS DAS SIEBTE KREUZ AND TRANSIT; NARRATIVE STRATEGIES FOR THE FUTURE

In a letter dated 23 September 1938 Anna Seghers states:

Ich werde elnen klelnen Roman beenden, etwa 200 bis 300 Seiten, nach einer Begebenheit, die sich vor kurzem in Deutschland zutrug. Eine Fabel also, die Gelegenheit gibt, durch die Schicksale eines einzelnen Mannes sehr viele Schichten des faschistischen Deutschlands kennen- zulernen.1

The novel she refers to here is Das siebte Kreuz which she finished writing in 1940 and was first published in 1942. Probably her most famous exile work, Das siebte Kreuz tells about everyday life under National Socialist rule in Germany and an escape which captures the attention of many people and touches several lives deeply, ^eghers tells a story about a people and a country she loves and what has happened to them from her position in exile in Paris, and at the same time she presents a message about the future of these people. Seghers' novel is an example of how one author relates in her works historically relevant experiences such

^Anna Seghers, "Bemerkungen zum 'Siebten Kreuz,'" über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. vol. II, ed. Sigrid Bock (Ber­ lin; Akademie, 1971), 16.

67 68 as those of exile and Nazi Germany. In doing so, Seghers strives for a "BewuBtbarmachung der Wirklichkeit” as she put it in her essay "Aufgabe der Kunst."2 This holds true for her subsequent novel Transit as well. These two exile novels exemplify Seghers* concept of creating a narrative, of telling a story of everyday life and personal engagement under Nazi rule. It is my contention that two levels of experience are related in both novels: Anna Seghers * personal exile expe­ rience and the characters* experiences. These experiences are all central to the act of storytelling in that the author*s experience of writing in exile is analogous to the process which her characters go through: remembering leads to some kind of action. In order to demonstrate this, I want to look first at Das siebte Kreuz and Seghers* portrayal of Georg Heisler*s escape and the Volksfront in Germany as conceived from exile. I hope to show how Seghers constructed her narrative in order to create a totality of experience thereby giving the reader a picture of Germany at the time and envisioning hope in it for the future. In Transit Seghers took a slightly different approach and focussed on one person, the first-person narrator, to carry the story. Here, the narrator*s personal story becomes pub­ lic in the course of his telling it. It is the act of

2Seghers, "Aufgabe der Kunst," über Kunstwerk und Wirk­ lichkeit. vol. I, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1971), 197. 69 storytelling itself that gives him strength and an understanding of his situation. Seghers gives us a view of an individual fate within the historical process and how that individual finds his way in a world fraught with dangers. From Das siebte Kreuz in which one man's story touches so many other lives, to Transit, whose narrator must tell his story to fight the mind-numbing anonymity of 1940's bureaucratic Marseilles, Seghers used her experience to create narratives of hope.

A. Das siebte Kreuz While Anna Seghers lived in Paris during the first half of her exile from Germany, she often wrote novels and stories dealing with the situation back home. Das siebte Kreuz was written during the late 1930s before the outbreak of World War II. Seghers recalled in later interviews how she managed to get the manuscript of the novel out of France before the Nazis marched into Paris. According to her, one manuscript was sent to a friend in New York, another to a friend in France from whom she never heard again, and the third manuscript was destroyed before fleeing Paris. As it turned out, Seghers was indulging her love to tell stories and creating some publicity for the book as well:

In Wahrheit hatte sie drei Exemplare in die Staaten geschickt. Am 9. Mai 1940 schreibt sie aus Frankreich an Wieland Herzfelde von zwei Exemplaren bei Franz Carl 70

Weiskopf in New York und einem dritten bei Berthold Viertel in Hollywood; ein weiteres konne sie ihm schicken. Es gab damais also mindestens vier Exemplare, und die wuBte es genau.3

Sending copies of the manuscript to friends in the United States proved to be a strategic move for Seghers because it was through this that she landed a contract with Little, Brown Company publishers to bring out an English translation of the novel. The Seventh Cross appeared in 1942 in

American bookstores and soon became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a bestseller. A Hollywood movie was made of it starring Spencer Tracy, a serialized version appeared in the periodicals "The Worker" and "Daily Worker," and a comic strip also related the escape of Georg Heisler from the con­ centration camp Westhofen.4 Das siebte Kreuz was reviewed favorably at that time in the US, British, and German-American press. Anna Seghers and Das siebte Kreuz captured the attention of many people who had no idea what was really happening in Nazi Germany. Alexander Stephan concludes that the novel's popularity and success was not based on its correspondence with events in

^Hermann Kurzke, "Anna Seghers im Exil: Ihr Briefwech- sel mit Wieland Herzfelde," Frankfurter Allaemeine Zeituna. 10 May 1986: n.p. The letter in gestion to Wieland Herzfelde can be found in Gewohnliches und aefahrliches Leben: Ein Briefwechsel aus der Zeit des Exils 1939-1946 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986), 41-43. ^The comic strip and the serialized version of the novel are part of the collection at the Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Berlin. 71 the concentration camp Osthofen (which served as the prototype for Westhofen in the novel),

. . . but rather because Anna Seghers, through the sub­ jective medium of literature, transforms authentic material into a story that not only paints an exact picture of Germany in the mid-1930s, but also takes a stand on the human condition of our time. Or stated differently, by choosing the form of a novel, Anna Seghers lifts the camp theme above the daily routine of eyewitness accounts, such as those by Beimler, Bredel, Langhoff, Wittfogel, Gerhart Seger, and Paul Massing.®

The success of Das siebte Kreuz was and is due in part to the fact that it is a novel, a fictionalized account of events surrounding an escaped concentration camp prisoner. Seghers relied heavily on eye-witness accounts from other refugees, escapees from concentration camps, and information from the German Communist Party's underground network for her novel as she stated in interviews and letters, and as Stephan also describes in his article on Osthofen.® Seghers then took this information and used it to create her novel, thereby telling a story which one could argue is fiction and therefore not real. But Seghers did create a very real pic- ®Alexander Stephan, "Concentration Camps in Exile Lit­ erature: The Case of Osthofen," trans. Leslie Shouse-Luxem, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 5 (1988): 114. ®Most notably in an interview with Christa Wolf, über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. vol. II, 40: "Vielerlei Umstànde, Begebenheiten sind mir immer von Emigranten, und darunter waren auch Flüchtlinge aus Lagern, genau erzahlt worden, genau beschrieben worden auf meine Bitte." Also material from Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Berlin: "Selbstaussagen von Anna Seghers zum Roman 'Das siebte Kreuz,'" and Stephan, "Osthofen," 113-14. 72 ture of the situation in Germany by using others' and her experiences in the novel. In doing that, Das siebte Kreuz became more accessible, more understandable to its readers, wherever they have been or may be in the world, than the first-person accounts of terror in Nazi Germany and escapes from it. Seghers' concept of the process of creating a narrative which I have discussed elsewhere is important for her crea­ tion of this novel, but it is also evident within the novel as the process which the characters go through to be able to tell their own individual stories. Remembering and experi­ ence (Erfahrung and Erlebnis) play an important role in con­ structing an image of the individual and collective charac­ ters. The individual stories reaching back into the past, and in some cases into the future, complicate the novel in a way that does not allow the reader to read it solely for the story of Georg Heisler's escape. Seghers employed narrative strategies such as inner monologue, free-indirect speech ferlebte Rede), and third-person narration to evoke a com­ monality among characters. We learn of their thoughts and concerns which all somehow center around Heisler's escape and the reactions to it. Seghers constantly shifted the point of view in the novel and employed montage construction to show us, the readers, what several characters do and think at any given moment in the course of the novel. Seghers would use this same method in constructing her later 73 novel Die Toten bleiben iuna to much less satisfactory results than in Das siebte Kreuz. In the later novel, the various scenes are never fully integrated into the story line to give the reader a sense of continuity. Here, in Das siebte Kreuz. she pulls the reader into the story and keeps one wondering how it will all turn out just as the charac­ ters themselves wonder what will happen to them. There are essentially three types of remembering and experience in the novel: that of the concentration camp prisoners who reflect on Heisler's escape and its con­ sequences; that of the other characters (such as Franz, Georg, and Fiedler) who are forced by this escape to go back into their memories, which in turn tells a story; and, that of Anna Seghers' exile experience as reflected in the novel. These three kinds of experience serve then to create a dis­ continuity in the time line of the novel which is a reflec­ tion of the storytelling process and the attempt to create a totality of experience within a time frame, here of one week. The story of Georg Heisler's escape is told primarily by an omniscient narrator who also assumes the perspective of various characters throughout the novel. Seghers opened the novel though with the recollection of the escape as if the narrator were one of whose left behind in the concentra­ tion camp by using first-person narration. The collective "wir" of the Westhofen concentration camp prisoners tells us 74 about what has happened in the camp since the successful escape of Georg Heisler. We, the readers, are told of the seven crosses torn down because one escaped prisoner could not be found for whom one of the crosses was intended. We know the outcome of the novel before the action begins.

What is left for us to discover is how it all happened. The greater portion of the novel is devoted to telling how Georg manages to escape being captured by the Nazis. When the novel opens in the future, the question is no longer whether he escaped but rather "wo mag er jetzt sein?"^ The prisoners' collective voice appears three more times in the course of the novel: twice in the middle and at the end. Their collective story serves as a reference

point or frame story from which the novel progresses (or regresses depending on how one wants to see it) and lend a

7Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Darmstadt: Luchter­ hand, 1975), 8. All further references to this work will be given in the text with 7K and page number. Eva Andreassen and Frank Wagner both assume that there is but one omnis­ cient narrator in the novel who takes on the identities of the various characters throughout the novel, including the prisoners' in the beginning, middle, and end sections. The author's standpoint is hence clear by her choice of the prisoners for the first and last sections, that is, by lift­ ing up their voice from the other, Seghers declares her partiality to their plight. Andreassen, "Faschismus als ideologisches Angriffsziel und als dichterischer Gegenstand. Anna Seghers im Exil— ihr Leben und ihr Schaffen unter be- sonderer Berücksichtigung der Romane Der Kopflohn und Das siebte Kreuz." Diss., University Oslo, 1988, 151. Wagner, . . . der Kurs auf die Realitât (Berlin: Akademie, 1978), 115, 128. I would object to a total collapse of the prisoners' voice with that of the general narrator. I would again emphasize the framework nature of these sections as adding a point of reference for the novel and as giving the prisoners a voice not generally heard. 75 certain authenticity to what is told by the use of a first- person voice or direct quotes. But the prisoners do not know the entire story, and thus another narrator takes on the main body of the novel. The prisoners' experience as told in the novel emphasizes a different life under Nazi rule. Although the scenes are brief, when considered in connection with the scenes in the concentration camp con­ cerning the SS- and SA-officers, they present a picture of the suffering and brutality which took place there. The prisoners give the reader information about the situation in the prison camp and the status of the anti­ fascist movement in Germany as well. This is particularly evident in the reaction to the capture of Wallau, one of the most revered of the escapees. This is lifted out of the time line of the main text by the introductory remark: "Spater erzahlte einer von diesem Morgen: ..." (7K, 115). For the prisoner who tells this story, even though it appears in the middle of the novel, it is a remembrance of Wallau's capture and being brought back to the camp as well as a lament for the murder and destruction of a political movement in Germany. The stories of their experiences that these people have to tell are in danger of not being told because the movement has essentially been destroyed by the Nazis:

Die ganze Generation hatte man ausgerottet. . . . Was beinahe nie in der Geschichte geschehen war, aber schon 76

einmal in unserem Volk, das Furchtbarste, was einem Volk ûberhaupt geschehen kann, das sollte jetzt uns geschehen: ein Niemandsland sollte gelegt werden zwis- chen die Generationen, durch das die alten Erfahrungen nicht mehr dringen konnten. . . . Wenn aber niemand die Fahne mehr abnehmen will, weil er ihre Bedeutung gar nicht kennt? (7K, 116)

In light of the political situation in Germany, Georg's escape takes on great meaning for the concentration camp prisoners. By escaping, Georg will live to be able to relate his experiences and those of others in Nazi Germany to those who know little about what is happening there, whereas the remaining prisoners can only put their faith in his ability to do just that. The final five paragraphs of the novel take us back to the camp, and once again, the perspective is that of the collective "wir." As in the beginning, we are transported into the future. The voice that speaks here is speaking after all the events in the novel have taken place including

the opening scene. Once again, though, the emphasis is on remembering: remembering how one felt, thought, and responded to one another on the day it became evident that Georg Heisler had indeed escaped. From this remembrance comes a projection for the future in the last line of the novel: "Wir fühlten allé, wie tief und furchtbar die

auBeren Machte in den Menschen hineingreifen konnen, bis in sein Innerstes, aber wir fühlten auch, daB es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar" (7K, 288). 77 This statement has implications not only for the prisoners in their immediate struggle against the Nazis, but also for the other characters in the novel. They are all tied together in this final statement which contains a hope for the future, a hope that maintains there will always be some people who do not allow such powers as the Nazis to change what is inside of them, their convictions. This in turn expresses the hope that the power the Nazis seem to have cannot last after their (anticipated) fall because the impetus for change lies within the person where it cannot be destroyed. The final lines of the novel affirm what has been implied throughout, that is, that although National Socialism has "invaded" much of everyday life, there is still something inside people that causes them to help Georg Heisler in his escape no matter what the consequences may be. For some it is clearly a political commitment, for others it is simply what one must do for a friend or a per­ son in need. The characters who help Georg escape have their own stories to tell. These stories are made up of remembrances of earlier events concerning their relationships with Georg and their lives before the Nazis came to power. These remembrances help the characters work through their past experiences and come to terms with the present in order to move on into the future. This is also true of Georg's flashbacks into the past. All these recollections are 78 touched off by Georg's escape from Westhofen. The first to be affected by the news of this event is Franz Marnet, a former friend of Georg's. When Franz hears of the escape of seven prisoners from Westhofen, he almost immediately thinks of his old friend Georg Heisler and that his escape touches him, Franz, as well:

Da fiel ihm ein, was ihn daran besonders betraf: Georg . . . Was fur ein Unsinn, dachte er fast sofort, bei einer solchen Nachricht an Georg zu denken. Georg war vielleicht nicht mehr dort. Oder, was ebenso moglich war, er war tot. Aber in seine eigene Stimme mischte sich Georgs Stimme, von fern und spottisch: Franz, wenn was passiert in Westhofen, dann bin ich nicht tot. (7K, 15)

Franz does not know for sure if Georg was among those seven who escaped, but a voice from his past, Georg's voice, tells him his suspicions are true. The thought of Georg's escape nags Franz to the point where he cannot sleep that night and begins to remember how he came to know Georg and what their relationship was (7K, 46ff.).

For Franz, the time he spent with Georg was difficult if not in the end painful, and for a long time the remember­ ing itself hurt so much that he could not bear to recall his relationship with Georg. But now the question arises inside of him: ". . . ja, war er denn eigentlich sein Freund? GewiB, sogar mein bester, mein einziger, dachte Franz 79 plôtzllch. Er war ganz verstôrt durch diese Einsicht" (7K, 46). Thoughts that were too difficult to think before sud­ denly become easier to deal with. The shift from free- indirect speech to inner monologue underscores the realiza­ tion to which Franz comes. His character can say "I" and speak for himself instead of being subsumed under the nar­ rator's voice. Franz's recollections of Georg tell the story of how Georg became involved in the left-wing worker's movement in the 1920s which was the justification for his eventual arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis. Franz must somehow come to terms with the fact that it was Georg who was arrested and not Franz, although his own involvement with the movement seemed more serious to him than Georg's. Franz is forced by Georg's escape to ask himself what it was that changed him if he changed at all. Franz spends the rest of the novel making attempts to help Georg or establish contact with him. His first thought is to talk to Elli, Georg's wife and Franz's girlfriend before Georg took her away from him. Franz asks her about

Georg's old friends, and from that information, tries to talk to Paul Rôder (7K, 213). This is the closest he comes to actually making contact with Georg since he had been staying with the Roders. Liesel Rôder, suspecting Franz is

an informant, says nothing to him about this and Franz walks away alone and discouraged that he cannot help Georg. Indeed, Franz is associated more often with matters of 80 everyday life or "das gewohnliche Leben" than the worker's movement to which he once belonged. But Franz is able to recover something from his past toward the end of the novel. His attempts to help Georg having failed, he retreats to the family circle (7K,

275ff.), but only finally after he meets again and recog­ nizes a comrade from old times, Lotte. She tells him of her life since they last saw one another and warns him at the same time:

"Man kommt sich manchmal allein vor. Dann denkt man: Ihr andern habt allés vergessen. . . . Du auch Franz. Hast du vielleicht nicht Herbert vergessen? Meinst du vielleicht, ich hab das deinem Gesicht nicht angesehen? Wenn du sogar den Herbert vergessen hast, wie viele hast du dann noch vergessen? Und wenn du schon vergiBt.— Damit rechnen die ..." Mit der Schulter deutete sie nach dem Nachbartisch, der von SA besetzt war und ihrem Anhang. (7K, 279)

Just like the camp prisoners, Lotte recognizes also quite well that the immediate danger is one of forgetting one's convictions and one's friends. Franz takes Lotte's message to heart and reassociates himself with the movement by bringing Lotte to his family's Sunday gathering. Therefore Franz reconciles his desire for an ordinary life with the need to remember where his convictions lie, and he can

finally move beyond his memories of Georg and the past. Franz's experiences are paradigmatic for the novel in gen­ eral . 81

Georg, too, recalls his past to be able to deal with his present situation. Throughout this seven-day escape he calls forth from memory the voice of Wallau, his fellow prisoner and escapee, to give him advice as to how he should proceed. These remembrances of Wallau and his voice telling Georg what he should do at that moment keep Georg from let­ ting his fear overcome him. From the beginning, Wallau is with him:

Es pfiff von der Liebacher Au her. Es pfiff zurück, so erschreckend nah, daB Georg in die Erde biB. Krabbel! hatte ihm Wallau geraten, der ja den Krieg erlebt hatte und die Ruhrkàmpfe und die Kampfe in Mitteldeutschland und ûberhaupt ailes, was zu erleben war. DaB du immer weiterkrabbelst, Georg. Nur nicht glaubst, daB du ent- deckt bist. Viele sind erst dadurch entdeckt worden, daB sie sich eingebildet haben, sie waren's schon, und dann irgendeinen Unsinn machten. (7K, 24)

Wallau speaks to Georg through Georg's memory, and with this advice he is able to continue with his escape and avoid cap­ ture. Georg calls upon Wallau's voice from the past many times throughout the novel. The narrative in these cases is always a mix of Georg's thoughts with Wallau speaking directly to Georg within the context of a memory of their time together in the concentration camp. An image of Wallau is constructed in these sequences into which Wallau fits easily when his character finally does appear in the novel. We learn much about Wallau through other characters' thoughts and memories of him and 82 few details from Wallau himself except during his interroga­ tion upon his capture. While Wallau tells his captors nothing, he does talk to himself throughout the questioning and recalls the life he had which is now finished because he knows there will be no other release from this prison. His silence is an indication of his imminent death. In his remembrance, a personal history is recounted as well as a collective history of various events in Germany during his lifetime.

Fiedler, the middleman who helps to get Georg out of the country, recalls his personal experiences of an earlier life of involvement which function in the novel in much the same way as Wallau's. They tell of the movement going underground when the Nazis came to power. For Fiedler too, this past has the power to help him in the present: "Dieses alte, gemeinsame Leben war aber von solcher Art, blofi ein Hauch davon genügte, urn einen ganz zu verjüngen, bloB eine Erinnerung" (7K, 251). The memory of his earlier life serves to awaken a feeling in Fiedler of belonging and having a purpose in life. He goes on to help Georg and to renew his commitment. For Wallau though, the memories are detached from his present situation. He sees no way out of this prison, and therefore he speaks to himself of a person he considers dead: "Es gab einmal einen Mann, der Ernst

Wallau hieB. Dieser Mann ist tot" (7K, 130). Besides having the function of not giving the Nazis any information 83 whatsoever, Wallau's silence and inner monologue act as a distancing mechanism. He no longer has anything to do with the world as it has become. Anna Seghers' presentation of these characters as remembering subjects points to the last sentence of the novel: "Wir fühlten allé, wie tief und furchtbar die aufieren Machte in den Menschen hineingreifen konnen, bis in sein Innerstes, aber wir fühlten auch, daB es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar" (7K, 288). There is something inside of these people, something of which they are presently unaware, but are able to regain as they recall their past. Kurt Batt understands this process to be a kind of testing which the characters experience when Georg escapes:

Die Flucht eines KZ-Haftlings ist die Prüfsituâtion, der die Figuren verschiedener politischer Richtungen und sozialer Schichten aussetzt, um in Erfahrung zu bringen, welche seelisch-geistigen Eigenschaften der Menschen für den Nazismus unerreichbar bleiben und wie sie geweckt werden konnen.®

Batt places more weight on the actual escape and its con­ sequences for the various characters than the process they go through in reference to the escape. What Batt fails to discuss is that the act of remembering can be seen as a

political action in itself and that the testing of the ®Kurt Batt, "Anna Seghers," Deutsche Literatur im Exil 1933-1945. vol. II, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenaum, 1974), 322. 84 characters' strengths relies heavily on how well they can remember the past and act accordingly. The various historical aspects on both the personal and collective levels as represented by the multitude of charac­ ters create a totality of experience within the novel. The Rhine-Main area is the locus of the action which, throughout history, is comprised of experiences of war and occupation by foreign armies. Although time changes, people and their experiences retain a certain constancy. Christa Wolf, in her essay "Glauben an Irdisches," collapses Seghers' experi­ ence with that of her characters' in time as well as space much in the same way Seghers actually does in Das siebte Kreuz;

Die Raume, in denen man wirklich lebt, werden dur- chscheinend für andere Raume; auch die Zeit ist nicht fest; indem sie die Tiefe der Vergangenheit erhalt, gewinnt sie Perspektive für die Zukunft. Der Mann, der da durch die Stadte und Dorfer lauft, die die Erzahlerin so gut kennt, daB sie aus der Erinnerung aufstehn laBt, Stein um Stein: Dieser Mann, wieder einer von denen, die vor ihren Verfolgern fliehen, bewegt sich vor einem Zeithintergrund der Geschichte dieses Landes.9

Within the area described in the novel, time does not remain in the strict boundaries of the present experience of Georg's escape. The various characters and their remembered past experiences aid in achieving this. Seghers also

^Christa Wolf, "Glauben an Irdisches," Lesen und Schreiben (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1972), 94-95. 85 relates the history of the Rhine-Main area to us to put the scene into perspective. In the course of two to three pages she describes the events leading up to the present of the novel. The times may change, but there is also a constancy of experience: "Jedes Jahr geschah etwas Neues in diesem

Land und jedes Jahr dasselbe: daB die Âpfel reiften und der Wein bei einer sanften vernebelten Sonne und die Mühen und Sorgen der Menschen" (7K, 10). The collective "Volk" to which Anna Seghers feels bound is depicted in the fullness of its experience: past, present and future. Christa Wolf notes in the quote above that the storyteller Anna Seghers created the setting for her novel from her memory of past experience. Her exile experience is reflected in the novel as well; perhaps not so explicitly as in the description of cities and the countryside, but it is nevertheless there in the presentation of history as well as in the characters' personal circumstances. The writing of the novel was, in effect, Seghers' own working through the past to understand the present and look to the future. Through her characters she questioned what the Nazis were doing to her people. This appears not only in description (e.g. Mettenheimer's fear after being questioned, Sauer's feigned ignorance during Paul's visit so as not to endanger himself, Fritz Helwig's confused state of mind concerning his jacket) but also in indirect questioning through the characters about what has happened in Germany. 86 Georg witnesses a military parade in Frankfurt where the observers are enthusiastically cheering on the Nazi soldiers as they march by. Georg questions this odd mixture of remembering and forgetting which the people exhibit:

Was für ein Zauber ist das, zu gleichen Teilen gemischt aus uralter Erinnerung und vollkommenem Vergessen? Man konnte glauben, der letzte Krieg, in den dieses Volk geführt wurde, sei das glücklichste Unternehmen gewesen und hatte nur Freude gebracht und Wohlstand. Frauen und Madchen lacheln, als batten sie unverwundbare Sohne und Liebste. (7K, 163)

By using the technique of free-indirect speech, Seghers attributed this question not only to Georg (who is implied by the "man") but also to the narrator. The remembering sanctioned by Nazi ideology is a selective remembering and is, at the same time, a forgetting as well. In contrast, Seghers' characters use their memory in its fullness. Those who do not are likely to forget and suffer whatever con­ sequences may result. Remembering and active use of memory

are evident not only in this novel, but also in Seghers' essays. History must be recognized and remembered for society to be able to continue in the historical process. For example, her essay "Glauben an Irdisches" discusses post-war Germany and Europe with a keen eye focussed on the 87 past and what has taken place. From that past she looked to the future and what might happen in Europe.10 The shock of exile and of being a foreigner isolated in another country also surfaces in Das siebte Kreuz in an indirect manner. Unlike in Transit. Seghers' own experi­ ences are still cloaked in the guise of experiences not related to exile specifically. Nevertheless, if one looks at Georg's escape, one finds several examples of experiences parallel to the exile experience. Seghers linked her character Georg (who remarks at one point: "So allein wie ich, ist man nirgends" 7K, 158) to people who can and do help him. He must learn to rely on Paul, Fiedler, and the KreB' to help him leave the country, and to help him over­ come his fear. Much in the same way, the exiled writer had to depend on friends and acquaintances to help him/her cross the border into other European countries to escape imprison­ ment by the Nazis. Georg also has to wait, and waiting turns into frustra­ tion and leads to anxiety about his future. Even the time a vending machine takes to produce a cup of coffee is unnerv­ ing: "Mit qualender Langsamkeit drehte sich das belegte Brot der offnung zu. Harten müssen, bis sich die Tasse unter dem dûnnen Fadlein Kaffee fiillte, für die, die warten

konnen" (7K, 151). Georg cannot stay where he is and eat a

^^Anna Seghers, "Glauben an Irdisches," über Kunst und Wirklichkeit. vol. Ill, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1971), 46-51. 88 leisurely meal like others; he must flee. In exile, the waiting leads to frustration as well. At first, the exiled waited to return to Germany. Then later, they waited to receive permission to leave one country of exile to travel to another. Waiting does not necessarily cultivate patience in a person. It can be a numbing and frustrating experi­ ence, as it was for Georg. This is especially evident when he is at the KreB' waiting for papers and money that will allow him to leave the country;

Wenn man zum Warten verurteilt ist, zu einem echten Warten auf Leben und Tod, von dem man im voraus nicht wissen kann, wie es ausgeht und wie lange es dauert, Stunden oder Tage, dann ergreift man gegen die Zeit die seltsamsten MaBnahmen. Man versucht die Minuten abzufangen und zunichte zu machen. Man errichtet gegen die Zeit eine Art von Deich, man versucht noch immer den Deich zu stopfen, auch wenn die Zeit schon darüber fallt. (7K, 270)

Time slows for the person waiting until it appears to be a heavy burden. The time of waiting has little to do with the historical time represented and experienced in the novel.

Waiting suspends the person in time, and the fight against that is characterized by remembering for some. When forced into waiting in exile, as Seghers was, remembrance of the past and of her native country is an exercise in fighting against the anesthetizing time of waiting. llBernd Leistner maintains that waiting becomes the "Prüfstein des Menschlichen ûberhaupt." "Warten und Wartenkonnen. Beobachtungen zu einem Leitmotiv im Werk von Anna Seghers," Zeitschrift für Germanistik (1988): 393. 89 Remembrance and waiting, past, present, and future events merge in Das siebte Kreuz and result in a discontin­ uity in the novel's time line. The basic framework upon which the novel is built is Georg's escape. Within this story, several other stories are told creating a montage effect of related experiences. Each chapter represents one day of the week from the time of Georg's escape from Westhofen to the time he boards the barge which will take him out of Germany. Within each chapter there are simultaneous scenes instead of a linear movement of time. Kurt Batt credits Seghers with maintaining a strict plot line and at the same time creating the effect of simultaneity;

Die straff geführte Handlung, die auch der auBeren Spannungsmomente nicht entbehrt, wird gestützt durch ein meisterlich gehandhabtes Simultaneitatsprinzip, das den Eindruck der Gleichzeitigkeit, ofter durch knappe szenische Einsprengsel, sichern hilft. Infolge des haufigen Schauplatzwechsels, der Unterbrechung, der jàhen Auf- und Abblenden, entsteht der ofter bemerkte Charakter des filmischen (. . .), trotzdem aber erreicht Anna Seghers eine Lockerheit des Erzahlens, die den Eindruck erweckt, als flosse der epische Strom absichtlos d a h i n . ^ 2

The montage effect interrupts the escape story; however, the multitude of simultaneous experiences could obscure this story were they not all interrelated stories. The montage effect is complicated even further by the introduction of

IZsatt, 326-27. 90 past experience in the form of memories into the present. This disrupts the story taking place in the present and at the same time brings more meaning to it. The reader faces then a story made up of many varying experiences told by several characters as well as a narrator who has knowledge of all events relating to the characters and the historical situation. The concept of a Volksfront or popular front within Germany comes to mind here. Although Seghers never explicitly stated her intention with this novel (other than it should depict many different types of people living under Fascism in Germany), she did communicate the response to the novel in a conversation with Christa Wolf:

Man hat mir gesagt, zum Teil hat dieser Erfolg in den USA auch darauf beruht, weil viele Menschen zum ersten Mai stutzig wurden; sie haben zum erstenmal verstanden, daB Hitler, bevor er sich auf fremde Volker gestürzt hat, den besten seines eigenen Volkes kaputtgemacht hat.13

Indeed this very message appears in the novel, in particular when the prisoners reflect upon the worker's movement and what has become of it. Several critics have taken the statement above as Seghers' intention and called the novel

13Anna Seghers, "Christa Wolf spricht mit Anna Seghers," über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. vol. II, 40. 91 an appeal for the Volksfront cause.14 Lutz Winckler states: "Das Bündnis der Heifer hat Volksfrontcharakter,"I® and thus maintains that the sheer diversity of characters involved in Georg's escape prove that Seghers tried to recreate the Volksfront in Germany on a small but effective scale. This opinion assumes that Seghers' novel presents a representa­ tive view of Germany in the 1930s, and on many levels, it does. Eva Andreassen warns, however, against an uncritical assumption of the verity of Seghers' novel:

Fragwürdig und wenig wirklichkeitsgemüB scheint auch die groBe Bereitschaft der Bevolkerung, sich für den Flûchtling einzusetzen. Trotz des groBen Risikos entscheiden sich— mit wenigen Ausnahmen (. . .)— alle für den Flûchtling und nehmen damit den Kampf gegen den faschistischen Staat auf. Wenn man diese Befunde, wie auch das groBe MaB an Hoffnung, das der Roman atmet, in Betracht zieht, dürfte es berechtigt sein, den Roman eher als eine gestaltete Utopie zu betrachten, weniger als ein wahrhaftiges Abbild Hitler-Deutschlands im Sinne einer mechanischen Widerspiegelung.l®

Andreassen's interpretation of this point rests on the assumption that other critics view the "reality" of the

14cf. Kurt Batt's article on Seghers as well as his book (Frankfurt a.M.: Roderberg, 1973). Manon Maren- Grisebach also takes up this interpretation in her article "Anna Seghers' Roman 'Das siebte Kreuz,'" Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert. vol. I, ed. Manfred Brauneck (Bamberg: Buchners, 1976), 283-98.

l^Lutz Winckler, "'Bei der Zerstorung des Faschismus mitschreiben.' Anna Seghers' Romane Das siebte Kreuz und Die Toten bleiben luna." Antifaschistische Literatur. vol. 3, ed. Lutz Winckler (Konigstein/Ts.: Scriptor, 1979), 179. l^Andreassen, 200. 92 novel as corresponding to the reality of Nazi Germany, when in fact, Seghers' novel is a realistic story about a fic­ tional character who escapes from a concentration camp. But there is more to the novel than a straight-forward appeal for the Volksfront. By the time it was finished. World War II had already begun, and the idea of a Volksfront in exile had all but dissolved. The novel can be seen more as a memento of the anti-fascist movement in Germany than of directly expressing Seghers' opinion of what that movement should do to overcome Nazism. It is precisely in this sense that the novel has its importance as a story. It is not bound to that specific time (1940); its ability to continue as a meaningful story rests in its timeless message of hope in the face of adversity which lies in the levels of remem­ bering and experience in Das siebte Kreuz. It is apparent in Das siebte Kreuz that fascism in the form of National Socialism has invaded all aspects of life in Germany to the extent that individuals question their every move lest it be interpreted as an action of opposition to the Nazi state. Andreassen believes Seghers actually minimizes the effect of Nazi power in everyday life by pre­ senting the concentration camp as the sole place of terror and violence: "Der Faschismus verliert damit sein drohendes Gesicht, und er wird durchaus als friedlich und ein natürlicher Bestandteil des Alltagslebens hingenommen."!?

Andreassen, 154. 93 But is this really so? Seghers showed how terror of the Nazis permeated all levels of society so that it is ingrained in everyone. This is most evident in the novel, for example, when Hettenheimer is called in for questioning and he anticipates what could happen to him although he has no knowledge of doing anything wrong (7K, 63). Even a fam­ ily conversation is guarded when one of its members is an SA-officer, as is the case at the Marnet family Sunday gathering toward the end of the novel (7K, 275ff.). It is interesting that in this particular instance the only person who carries on the conversation about the Jewish family that chose to leave Germany is the Catholic nun. She appears unafraid of any imagined consequences for her opinions on the subject. This particular Marnet aunt has not internalized the fear but is steadfast in her religious faith. Time and time again in the novel, those who have faith in a different kind of future act in ways that can be characterized as daring in light of a situation where it seems that everyone is suspect.

Just as the beginning is told from the perspective of a person or persons from inside a prison who can only follow the story from a distance, Seghers sat in cafés in Paris and wrote this novel from a distance. From her memory she created characters and portrayed the area of Germany she perhaps knew best: the Rhine-Main area. By doing this, she fulfilled her need to tell about her people and country, and 94 she remained tied to the people. Seghers viewed her posi­ tion as a writer in exile to be advantageous because she could describe the people in her homeland much more power­ fully and exactly than those writers remaining in the country.Her distance allowed her to view Germany with a certain objectivity, but at the same time, caused her to reach into her memory to bring to her novel the experience fErfahrung) it needs to make it a story. Seghers' use of memory acted much like Georg's, that is, it became part of the technique of survival in exile as well as a literary tool. Like Proust, who, when smelling the madelaine baking, went back into his mémoire involontaire, his stored up expe­ rience, Seghers retold the history of her native country as if she just took a bite of Streuselkuchen and was reminded of the thousands of years of history which came before the Nazis and to which she was bound.

This is not the same history, the same "Volk" the Nazis celebrate, and Seghers makes this clear in the essay "Volk und Schriftsteller" (1942):

Weil 'Volk' nicht nur Natur ist, nicht Blut und Boden, wirkt es auf den Schriftsteller nicht als ein Natur- phanomen, sondern als ein gesellschaftliches. . . . Daraus erklart sich, warum der Schriftsteller gar nicht durch Blut, Erdgebundenheit, ja in manchen Fallen nicht einmal durch die Muttersprache mit dem Volk verwandt sein muB, dessen Schriftsteller er ist. Seine Ver- bundenheit ist weniger naturhaft, weniger einfach als

l®Seghers, "Volk und Schriftsteller," über Kunst und Wirklichkeit. vol. I, 196. 95 die Nazis uns glauben machen, trotzden ist sie tiefer.19

Her connection to the people lies in her knowledge and understanding of the social-historical process, and not some mystical concept of "Erdgebundenheit." With this knowledge of the historical process, Seghers was able to create an image of the contemporary situation and point toward a future in her story. In Das siebte Kreuz. the future is not a totally bleak one, rather hope is conveyed. Throughout the novel, past and present are mixed, thereby giving the present action a historical basis. For everything the reader is told about the present situation, there is a past event which sheds light on the present. Frank Wagner goes so far as to claim a programmatic reason for this mixing of the present with the past: "Die erzàhlerische Energie sucht . . . in allererster Linie nach dem, was an wirklicher Oder potentieller Widerstandskraft in die Romangegenwart hineinreicht oder was bei den Henkern und Haschern ihre Hitlergefolgschaft erklart."20 According to

Wagner, the novel is a search for that portion of Germans who have not succumbed to Nazi ideology. This generally fits with a post-war hope that the people were not totally taken over by the Nazis. I think Seghers may have had that in mind when writing the novel, but she goes beyond such a ISseghers, 193.

20wagner, 164-65. 96 simplification of the story. Seghers' history is not con­ fined to the Weimar Republic years, but rather reaches back to the times of the Romans who were the first to invade the land. Her point in making reference to various times in history is to show that this too is important for the people. To put emphasis on the past as a source of hope for the future is not to deny the positive moments in the present.

Georg's successful escape is also a great producer of hope among those characters who have been affected by Georg's flight in some way: "Die erfolgreiche Flucht steht sym- bolisch fur die Moglichkeit, die Terrorherrschaft durch- zubrechen.Although it can be said that Georg's escape is a symbol for those who hope for a quick end to the Nazi state terror, it is also the collective of characters and their experiences which together provide us with a great deal of the hope for the future. Each character has a story to tell and does so by remembering how he or she got to the present in order to posit a place in the future for him-

/herself. This process of remembering which leads to action was Seghers' method of creating her narrative. The storyteller (here Seghers) can only tell a story by using experience which consists of a lifetime of experience and reflects the historical situation. The process of writing the novel is one of reaching back into memory and creating

2iAndreassen, 165. 97 from the unconscious experience which lies there. As if to mirror this process, Seghers created characters who do much the same thing— they reach into their past experience to tell their own individual stories which then comprise the novel. Das siebte Kreuz also contains a redemptive moment. It is only through the actions of characters based on their interpretations of their past that they are able to save Georg Heisler. Seghers thus could point out in the end what she has demonstrated throughout the novel: "... daB es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar" (7K, 288). That something is a belief or hope that the individual cannot be corrupted by a fascist state.

B. Transit

Das siebte Kreuz deals extensively with the collective memories of characters who are involved in some way with Georg Heisler's escape. The novel would not be nearly as exciting or interesting if it focussed solely on Georg. Seghers' emphasis changed though in her next novel. Transit, from the collective to an individual's crisis. Storytelling remains at the center of the novel, but now it is one per­ son's story we read instead of many. The actual telling of the story takes on great significance as well. The narrator of Transit uses his recounting of experiences as a way to solidify his concept of his identity. The storytelling act has two functions then: to relate experiences, and to serve 98 as a vehicle for realizing one's identity in the midst of these experiences. In much the same way as in Das siebte Kreuz. Seghers' own experiences in exile are part of the novel and the act of storytelling was a way for her to main­ tain and even recover a sense of identity at a time when identity was easily blurred by bureaucratic measures. Transit is Seghers' only work whose subject is explicitly that of exile from Nazi Germany. As such it has often been singled out from her works as a fluke or aberration. We shall see that Transit has much in common with at least one other exile novel, namely Das siebte Kreuz. and that it is also unlike that novel in that this is where the personal becomes public through the act of storytelling. It is common knowledge that Seghers wrote Transit while being in the same situation as her characters in the novel, that is, awaiting her passage to Mexico in and around Mar­ seilles. Seghers wrote in a letter in 1960: "Das Buch ist in Marseilles entstanden, in den erwahnten Cafés, wahrscheinlich sogar, wenn ich zu lange warten muBte, in Wartezimmern auf Konsulaten, dann auf Schiffen, auch inter- niert auf Inseln, in Ellis Island in USA, der SchluB in

Mexiko."22 And in a letter to Klaus Müller-Salget concern­

ing her writing of the novel she stated:

Eine der wenigen Arbeiten, die ich an Ort und Stelle der Handlung zu schreiben begann. . . . Ich habe damais 22Anna Seghers, Briefe an Leser (Berlin: Aufbau, 1970), 43-44. 99 drauflos geschrleben ohne über die jeweilige Situation nachzudenken. Ich glaube aber, ich habe einigermaSen herausgebracht, wie es damais in Marseilles a u s s a h . 2 3

Seghers too, was pressed by the need to leave France. As a communist and a Jew, she would have been handed over to the Nazis by the French eventually, and her husband was already interned in a camp in the south of France. Seghers remained in Paris after the Nazis occupied the city and half of

France for a time, and then after a while in hiding, she and her two children crossed the demarcation line and made their way to the south of France. Marseilles was the largest French port city and the seat of consulates of many non-European governments. It was the perfect place for refugees looking for a way out of France and Europe to congregate and pursue all the documen­ tation required to leave the country. Seghers was no dif­ ferent from many of the other Germans congregating in Mar­ seilles in 1940.

Seghers certainly absorbed many of the stories and rumors circulating in Marseilles, and some perhaps found their way into Transit. One story in particular that she used as the catalyst for the narrator's actions in Mar­ seilles is that of the writer who committed suicide in a Paris hotel when the Nazis took over the city. In the novel

23Anna Seghers, Letter to Klaus Müller-Salget, Anna- Seghers-Archiv, Berlin. 100 his name is Weidel; in real life, it was Ernst Weifi, as

Seghers admitted in a 1968 letter:

Nach meiner Rückkehr nach Paris— ich konnte mich nicht mehr langer auf dem Lande halten, Paris war von den Deutschen besetzt— ging ich in das Hotel, um mich nach ihm [Ernst WeiB] zu erkundigen, denn ich hatte irgend eine Ahnung, daB dieser Mann schwer diese schlechte Zeit aushielt. Die Wirtin gab mir unklaren und sonder- baren Bescheid. Nachdem hat sich herausgestellt was ich in "Transit" geschrieben habe: "Er hat sich das Leben genommen in der Rue de Vaugirard beim Einmarsch der Deutschen in P a r i s . "24

The case of Ernst WeiB is interesting in itself, but the point I would like to emphasize is that Seghers used her own experiences in shaping the novel's story. But while many of her own experiences can be distilled from Transit. it is not a strictly autobiographical novel. Seghers neither appears in the novel, nor did she record her own experiences exactly as they occurred.

Seghers problematized the topics of exile and flight with the issue of storytelling. Ernst WeiB (Weidel) did not live to tell any more stories, but the need to tell of one's experiences continues. Seghers' novel Transit may not appear much different from a Feuchtwanger novel that deals with the topic of exile, but the problematization of the narrative puts it (Transit) in line with Seghers' reflec-

24Anna Seghers, Letter to Peter Schmidt, 19 June 1968, Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Berlin. See also Ernst Schuhmacher, "Mit Anna Seghers in Cecilienhof," Sinn und Form 35.6 (1983): 1154-60. 101 tions on the process of creating a literary work. While writing about seemingly straight-forward characters, Seghers complicated the novel by raising up the motivations and reasons for telling this story in the first place and making the narration a focus of the reader's attention along with the plot. The ability to express oneself and one's experi­ ences verbally as the narrator does stands in contrast to the dead author Weidel who did not even finish writing his story. The questions of identity and purpose in life are tied to the ability to relate historically relevant experiences— for the narrator in particular, but also for Anna Seghers. Transit was widely acclaimed upon its publication in 1944 for being an accurate if not stylized account of the situation in Marseilles at the time of the Nazis' advance

across E u r o p e . 25 The post-war reception took on a different tone though. The case of Transit can be seen as a classic pairing of realism vs. existentialism within literary- critical debates, and as an example of the use of a novel to fight the cold war. "Bis etwa 1968 ist 'Transit' von der DDR-Literaturwissenschaft gemaB dem bis dahin geltenden Realismusverstandnis als Sonderfall im Werk von Anna Seghers

25gee Paul Meyer's review of Transit; "Zu Anna Seghers' neuem Roman," Freies Deutschland 3.8 (July 1944): 29. 102 betrachtet worden . . . ,«26 according to Hanna Hebbeln. While GDR critics would only mention Transit in passing when discussing Seghers' work, other critics, particularly those in the Federal Republic, hailed the novel as "unpolitisch" and "kein politischer Tendenzroman"27 and therefore it could be accepted outside the GDR. Transit's appearance in the Federal Republic in 1964 (a Swiss publisher had come out with a limited German edition in 1948) was unlike Das siebte Kreuz. whose publication two

years earlier in 1962 was protested by those who felt Seghers had no business publishing her works in the west. The conflict rested on whether or not Transit should be read as a documentary novel into which history is transposed or if it might be seen as a symbol for modern life and its

a n o m a l i e s . 28 The second of these two general interpreta­ tions lays emphasis on the novel's timeless quality, that

is, the bureaucratic hassles and the identity crisis are indicative of modern life and therefore applicable to every­ one. The opposite claim is of course that the novel pre­ sents a realistic picture of a historical time. The exist­

ential questions are not raised in such an interpretation. 28Ranna Hebbeln, "Realhistorie und ihre literarische Verarbeitung in Anna Seghers' Exilroman 'Transit,'” Diss., n.p., 1978, 13. 2?dpa Buchbrief/Kultur, Rev. of Transit. by Anna Seghers, Hamburg, 21 May 1964; Jeahoth Chardrahoth, «Emigranten-Schicksale,« Rev. of Transit. by Anna Seghers, n.p. Tel-Aviv, 30 June 1964. 28Hebbeln, 5. 103 Central to the interpretations focussing on the exist­ ential qualities of the novel is the comparison with Kafka, and in particular with his unfinished novel Der ProzeB. The descriptive "Kafkaesque" and statements like the following appear in reviews: "Die Wirkung des Bûches ist alpdruck- artig und erinnert gelegentlich an Kafka."29 Even Sigrid Bock in a later essay, "Anna Seghers liest Kafka," draws this same conclusion. 30 But there is a difference between calling a novel "Kafkaesque" and pointing to the affinities between Kafka and Seghers. In Bock's article, she maintains that Kafka was always important for Seghers as a writer who struggled with the creation of his works from experience.

The tendency to dismiss a work as "Kafkaesque" reveals the interpreter's unwillingness to delve deeper as to why there is this uncanny affinity between the two authors. I do not wish to go into a detailed examination of the parallels between Seghers' and Kafka's works, but I do think it neces­ sary to point out that Transit, despite whatever connections there may be between the two authors, is not an exception in the body of Seghers' work. Seghers' novel may be her most immediate expression of an existential state, but it is still her story of a man's attempt to relate experiences in the hope of changing his life. Seghers' decision to make

29curt Rosenberg, "Anna Seghers und ihr Werk," Geist und Zeit 5 (1960): 140. SOgigrid Bock, "Anna Seghers liest Kafka," Weimarer Beitraoe 30.6 (1984): 900-15. 104 him a storyteller underscores her desire to tell about the fates of people waiting for redemption and a new life. The narrator of Transit could be just about anyone— within certain limits. He is one among many Germans caught in the Nazi-occupied part of France looking for a way to get to "free" France. His plans are hazy, he relies heavily on friends (the Binnets) to help him, and he is a worker. We learn everything we know about the narrator from his own story. We are as his listeners in the pizzeria under the spell of his story because, as he states: "Ich mochte gern einmal allés erzàhlen, von Anfang an bis zu End e . " ^ ! We want to hear it too. The narrator pleads for our patience as if to promise more exciting events in his story later on (T, 9). But his desire is clearly to tell us everything in order, from beginning to end. Within the first few pages the listener/reader is brought close to the narrator and becomes involved in his story. The narrator tells us of events that have already taken place but for him there has been no closure, no point at which he can say that part of his life is over. Later in the novel we meet the legionnaire who tells the narrator his story in an attempt to bring his years in the French Foreign Legion to an end. The narrator realizes what is taking place during this man's story: "Ich wuBte, daB er erst

^^Anna Seghers, Transit (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1978), 6. All further references to this work will be given in the text with T and page number. 105 jetzt, in dieser Minute, an diesem Tisch, sein vergangenes Leben abschloB. Denn abgeschlossen ist, was erzahlt wird. Erst dann hat er diese Wûste £ùr immer durchguert, wenn er seine Fahrt erzahlt hat" (T, 143). The act of telling one's story has a greater significance than one might presume. In addition to relating events, occurrences, and ideas, the narrator is bringing to a close a section of his life as we listen:

Die inneren Gründe sind ihm wichtig. Sie mit ihm gemeinsam zu erschliefien, sind wir aufgefordert. Erst solches Erinnern, Durcharbeiten, Wiederholen schlieBt ab. Das aber heiBt hier, sich das Erlebte erzahlend bewuBt machen und die gewonnenen Erfahrungen weiteraeben.^2

We are invited along on this journey of discovery and revelation, and we continue (reading, listening) because we want to know what happens. We have a stake in this story too. Only through our listening and remembering will we be able to keep these experiences alive. Even though our nar­ rator feels the need to move beyond these experiences, they also need to be told so that no one forgets the refugees' plight. The novel is comprised of the narrator's story and the act of telling it as well. The narrator begins by telling of the "Montreal," the ship that supposedly sank somewhere between Dakar and Martinique. He addresses his neighbor at 32wagner, 214. 106 the table in the pizzeria and invites him/her to drink a glass of rosé with him and he begins his story. Except for occasional interruptions when he addresses his neighbor directly, the narrator spends his time telling about his life, how he came to Marseilles, and the doctor and Marie. Not until the final two pages do we return to the present. The narrator's story consists of a flashback instigated in part by his short trip to Marseilles from the peach farm where he now works. As he sits in the pizzeria, he begins to expect to see Marie come through the door at any moment. His story is the answer to why this will not happen and how he has come to be where he now is. The novel is told in first-person narration using primarily the simple past tense. By shifting between the now of the pizzeria and the past, Seghers mixes the two and forces the reader to also work through the experiences. The reader becomes involved in this story a l s o . 33

The narrator's recollections are spurred on in part by the author Weidel's unfinished manuscript. When the nar­ rator stumbles upon it in the suitcase he recovers from

Weidel's landlady he begins to read as he never read before: "So hatte ich nur als Kind gelesen, nein, zugehort" (T, 18). Weidel's manuscript enthralls him like the fairy tales his mother once read to him. He becomes absorbed by the story

33see also F. C. Weiskopf, Unter fremden Himmeln: Ein AbriB der deutschen Literatur im Exil 1933-1947 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1981), 136. 107 until it suddenly stops after approximately 300 pages. His disappointment is real:

Ich erfuhr den Ausgang nie. Die Deutschen waren nach Paris gekommen, der Mann hatte allés zusammengepackt, seine paar Klamotten, sein Schreibpapier. Und mich vor dem letzten fast leeren Bogen allein gelassen. Mich überfiel von neuem die grenzenlose Trauer, die todliche Langeweile. Warum hat er sich das Leben genommen? Er hàtte mich nicht allein lassen dûrfen. Er hatte seine Geschichte zu Ende schreiben sollen. (T, 19)

Weidel's absence, punctuated by the unfinished manuscript, is of consequence for the narrator throughout the novel. The effect though that this unfinished story has on the nar­ rator is quite profound. He wants to read the end of the manuscript so much so that he plays over and over in his mind "what if?" What if he had been Weidel's friend? Could he have stopped him from committing suicide? Of course these questions remain unanswered. Instead, the narrator assumes Weidel's identity upon reaching Marseilles in order to obtain the documentation that allows him to stay to prepare his departure. Or at least that is what we think he is doing. The narrator is actually doing what Weidel could not or did not want to do; namely, tell a story to its end. The implications of telling one's own story are that it can either remain in the private sphere and not be shared with others (like Weidel's unfinished manuscript that has only one reader) or it can enter the public sphere and be 108 shared with many. The narrator does not write down his story, but rather sits in a pizzeria and tells it to the first best person who will listen. One could go so far to say that his story itself has little to do with literature and more to do with living. But where does the author and her novel fit in? Seghers' novel has everything to do with living and experiences, and the telling/writing of the story does not merely reflect reality, but it is also "eine Form der historischen Selbstverwirklichung, . . . die die Massen ergreifen kann."34 The narrator in Transit is not an exemplary person but through his telling of his story, his experiences take on exemplary nature. He may be just one of thousands searching for a place to be; he is also one who found a place, and in doing so he legitimates his actions within the course of the story. In the process of relating his experiences he is able to find the reasons why he remained in France.

Along with uncovering these reasons, the narrator also relives the search for his identity. We never learn the narrator's real name at any point in the novel. He obtains documents that bear the name Seidler in order to enter and be registered in Marseilles. Once it becomes clear he can-

S^Gertraud Gutzmann, "Schriftsteller und Literatur; Ihre gesellschaftliche Funktion im Werk von Anna Seghers, 1935-1947," Diss. U of Massachusetts, 1980, 74. 109 not remain there without some proof that he is waiting for a visa, transit, or any of the other papers needed to leave the country, he uses the knowledge that Weidel has a Mexican visa waiting for him and becomes Weidel for the purpose of getting the visa. Eventually, after he relinquishes the idea of leaving France to be with Marie, the narrator departs Marseilles for the farm where he becomes undistinguishable from the natives and, in fact, is one of them when Georg Binnet says to him: "Du gehorst zu uns. Was uns geschieht, geschieht dir" (T, 185). The narrator has made this country his home and these people his people:

Wenn die Nazis uns auch noch hier überfalien, dann war­ den sie mich vielleicht mit den Sohnen der Familie Zwangsarbeit machen lassen oder irgendwohin deportieren. Was sie trifft, wird auch mich treffen. Die Nazis warden mich keinesfalls mehr als ihren Landsmann erkennen. Ich will jetzt Gutes und Boses hier mit meinen Leuten teilen . . . . (T, 186)

Transit is sometimes viewed as a novel of an identity crisis. The narrator's preference for using assumed names and an assumed past as he tries to figure out what to do with himself in Marseilles speak to such an interpretation. The act of narration is how he reconstitutes his identity, but his identity is no longer German, but French. In my

opinion, the search for identity exists in the story as a process of self-realization, not as a crisis. The narrator longs for a purpose in life as he expresses to his friend 110

Heinz who is a veteran of the Spanish Civil war among other battles (T, 99-100). The narrator feels empty, but through his story he fills his life again with all the experiences and recalls his commitment to his French friends to help protect their country. Just as the narrator of Transit feels the need to tell his story from beginning to end, Seghers is there as well, closing a chapter of her life. Transit is far from autobiography though. Seghers neither tells us about her own personal experiences of waiting in consulates or for a ship from her perspective, nor assumes the narrator's per­ spective in the novel. Her role is similar to that of an orchestrator of events (as also in Das siebte Kreuz) who nevertheless calls upon her own experiences to inform the novel and to be able to create it. In much the same way as her narrator, telling this story (i.e. writing the novel) has therapeutic value also:

Das Schreiben diente Anna Seghers moglicherweise dazu, Erlebtes zu bewàltigen. Der Satz in "Transit": "Denn abgeschlossen ist, was erzahlt wird: ist durchaus als "programmâtischer Satz" [Kurt Batt] zu verstehen. Christa Wolf schluBfolgert: "Und wenn gilt; 'was erzahlbar geworden ist, ist überwunden', so gilt auch: was überwunden werden muB, soil erzahlt werden." Anna Seghers selbst überwindet die erlebte Transitatmo- sphere, indem sie davon erzahlt.35

35Hebbeln, 91. Ill

The time Seghers spent waiting for visas, transit permis­ sion, permission to leave France, and a ship that would take her and her family to Mexico as well as the journey was spent in part writing this novel. In Transit, we are con­ sistently confronted with the tension between arriving and leaving, old and new, and waiting and acting. Seghers' intimate knowledge of this tension is evident. She and her family had no idea what would await them in "the new world." They were leaving behind the familiar and embracing the unknown. Probably the largest single reason why one cannot equate Seghers with her narrator is that he remains in France while she embarked on the journey to Mexico. Seghers undoubtedly used the writing of the novel as her narrator does the telling of his story: to move on to new experi­ ences while reflecting on the past. Seghers exacerbated the difference between the present in Marseilles and the future in another land to the extent that one can speak of the difference between the here and now and the afterlife. When Marie, Weidel's estranged wife and now widow, waits for her visa de sortie and is prepared to leave Marseilles, she tells the narrator of her own ques

tions:

"Ich frage mich immer: Wie mag es dort drüben sein? Wird es so sein wie hier? Wird es anders sein? . . . Dort drüben. Wenn ailes vorbei ist. Wird wirklich endlich Friede sein, wie mein Freund glaubt? Gibt es dort drüben ein Wiedersehen? Und wenn es ein Wieder- 112

sehen gibt— werden wir, die sich wiedersehen, so ver- wandelt sein, daB es gar keinem Wiedersehen gleich- kommt, sondern dem, was man hier auf Erden immer umsonst gewùnscht hat: einen neuen Anfang." (T, 165)

Clearly Marie is talking not only of a journey to a foreign country, but also of the possibility of a life after death. Leaving behind the known world and venturing off to the unknown is analogous to dying and being reborn to a new life. Marie may be uncertain as to how she could answer her own questions, but she is still eager to find out what it is like "dort drüben." The narrator though is not prepared to venture an answer: "Ich weiB hier ziemlich Bescheid nach- gerade. Ich kenne mich ganz gut aus in den irdischen Verhàltnissen. Obwohl sie ziemlich verworren sind. Hier hab ich ganz gute Beziehungen. Da drüben kenne ich mich gar nicht aus" (T, 166). The narrator has also interpreted Marie's questions to be about the afterlife and he calmly tells her he knows nothing of it, all his information deals with this place and the present. We can read his answer to her two ways though. In his

denial of knowing what it is like over there, the narrator is being quite truthful. He does not know how it will be in another country, far from Europe. When Marie explains her­ self further (to correct his understanding of her ques­

tions) , the narrator replies that he does not know for sure, but the new country will probably be much like the one they 113 come from. The narrator's thoughts and subsequent actions are rooted in Marseilles and France. He does not consider what may be for him "dort drüben" because he has no inten­ tions of finding out. His future is in this place. The narrator is the main character in the novel and it is through his perspective that we come to know the other characters. He tells us his thoughts and impressions of the doctor, Marie, and Weidel, but we only learn their stories when they tell them to the narrator. The notable exception here is Weidel. His story is pieced together as we move through the novel and the narrator learns about Weidel from other people. These personal stories (especially the nar­ rator's) make up a brief history of the exiled from Nazi Germany. History in all its fullness is reflected in the land and the city. Personal histories and individual fates lie in the forefront and are the key to the future. Being able to realize the future comes with the telling of stories. The narrator begins his story with a look into the immediate past. He tells how he landed in a French work camp for foreigners and escaped when the Germans marched in. His reason for being in France was another escape: "Ich selbst war im Jahre 1937 aus einem deutschen KZ getürmt. War bei Nacht über den Rhein geschwommen" (T, 7). This is

no Georg Heisler though. We learn in the course of the novel that he has had no real political convictions and that 114 his imprisonment in the concentration camp was more a result of adolescent behavior than his political commitment. The narrator depicts his life in a self-effacing manner as if to say that he is merely an ordinary guy in an unordinary situation. This situation effects him in such a way that it leaves him longing for something that would differentiate between him and the Nazis, as he recalls his thoughts on the way to his friends, the Binnets:

Ich gramte mich, daB all der Unfug aus meinem Volk gekommen war, das Unglùck über die anderen Volker. Denn daB sie sprachen wie ich, daB sie pfiffen wie ich, daran war kein Zweifel. Als ich nach Clichy hinauf- ging, wo Binnets wohnten, meine alten Freunde, da fragte ich mich ob Binnets wohl vernùnftig seien, um zu begreifen, daB ich zwar ein Mensch dieses Volkes sei, doch immer noch ich. (T, 10)

The Binnets turn out to be understanding people and recog­ nize the difference between the narrator and the Nazis. They take him in as one of their own and he helps out one of the daughters with her work by carrying packages of laundry for her. The narrator feels at home and, at the same time, a desire to move on with his life. This desire is charac­ terized by his overwhelming boredom. The question of identity is raised already at this point in the story. The narrator is German but he cannot identify with the picture of Germans that the Nazis present. 115 Weidel's unfinished manuscript opens up for him a different perspective of what it means to be German:

Und wie ich Zeile um Zeile las, da spûrte ich auch, daB das meine Sprache war, meine Muttersprache, und sie ging mir ein wie die Milch dem Saugling. Sie knarrte und knirschte nicht wie die Sprache, die aus den Kehlen der Nazis kam, in morderischen Befehlen, in widerwartigen Gehorsamsbeteuerungen, in ekligen Prahlereien, sie war ernst und still. Mir war es, als sei ich wieder allein mit den Meinen. Ich stieB auf Worte, die meine arme Mutter gebraucht hat, um mich zu besanftigen, wenn ich wùtend und grausam war, auf Worte, mit denen sie mich ermahnt hatte, wenn ich gelogen oder gerauft hatte. (T, 18)

The narrator's connection to his past is through language and a written story, albeit an unfinished one. He deals with his prospects for the future by telling his own story. The connection between the future and the past is that of language and storytelling. The narrator takes charge of his life when he moves beyond the story written by another. Suddenly the written word is not so enticing:

Lesen? Das hatte ich einmal getan an einem àhnlichen leeren Abend. Nie wieder! Ich spûrte den alten Unwillen meiner Knabenzeit gegen Bûcher, die Scham vor bloB erfundenem, gar nicht gûltigem Leben. Wenn etwas erfunden werden muBte, wenn dieses zusammengeschusterte Leben gar zu dûrftig war, dann wollte ich selbst der Erfinder sein, doch nicht auf Papier. (T, 72)

It is important to keep in mind that the narrator is reflecting on his situation at this point in time. His 116 aversion to the written story is real, but it is his present desire to "tell it all" to someone. The person he wants to describe to his partner is his own creation by means of the act of storytelling. He has moved beyond the need to identify himself with the dead Weidel and all the implica­ tions that has. At this point in the story he is relating though, the narrator has not fully recognized this. His dislike of books is the indicator of a desire to do some­ thing with his life. In his view his fate is still linked with the aura of moving beyond the boundaries of Europe and the life he knows. If there is one character in the novel who seems to always know what he wants and what he is going to do, it is the doctor whom the narrator finds to tend to the child of Binnet's girlfriend. By coincidence (?), this doctor is Marie's friend for whom she left her husband. The narrator has noticed Marie in the cafés about town but he has no idea of the connection between the two or that Marie is Weidel's widow. The doctor is first and foremost a member of the healing profession. He desires to leave because he wants to heal the sick in Mexico. He mentions nothing of the neces­ sity to leave for any other reason until shortly before his first, unsuccessful departure. He too fears the Nazis. The narrator characterizes the doctor early on quite accurately though: "Dieser Mann ist Arzt mit Leib und Seele. Er kann den Menschen helfen" (T, 56). The doctor has little qualms 117 about leaving Marie behind when he has the chance to sail before her papers are in order. When he is turned back from the ship, he is angry and disappointed. The people in the hospital in Caxaca need him, but, as he says: "Lage das Krankenhaus am Belsunce, dann brauchte ich nicht ûber die Ozean" (T, 56). The doctor is sure of himself and where he is going. The narrator views him as a dedicated, yet unwaivering man.

The doctor and the narrator form two sides of a tri­ angle. The third side is Marie who is living with the doc­ tor and planning to go to Mexico with him. Marie has an almost ethereal presence throughout most of the novel because of her endless search among the refugees for her husband, Weidel. The narrator first notices her slipping in and out of the cafés, expectantly searching for someone. Marie is characterized by this search.

She tells her story later in the novel, after the nar­ rator has gotten to know her through the doctor. Her acquaintance with Weidel and her marriage to him appear to be a coincidence or, more realistically, Marie's ticket away from home (T, 111). Marie's association with the doctor has some of the same elements of coincidence and longing for a way out of her situation. The doctor wins her over in the

course of their flight from Paris in a moment of fear:

Und ich, ich versprach ihm weiter zu folgen bis ans Ende der Welt. Das Ende erschien mir nah, die Strecke 118 kurz, das Versprechen leicht. Wir kamen aber über die Loire, wir kamen hier an. Da war auf einmal der Zufall ein Schicksalsschlag, ich war allein mit dem Mann, der mich gefunden hatte, statt mit dem Mann, den ich gesucht hatte, .... (T, 151)

Marie is still searching for Weidel, who, despite the nar­ rator's eventual admission that Weidel is dead, lives on for Marie. It was easy for her to embrace the doctor and his plans when it seemed they would not be realized. But now Marie spends her days and nights incessantly searching for the man she left behind. The basis for the story here is that of Andromague, the woman who continues to look for a dead man despite having two men who love her and compete for her attentions. 36 The narrator's fixation with the business of procuring a visa and all the related documents becomes a fascination with winning over Marie and taking her away with him. After all, he would be travelling under the name Weidel— Marie would be the natural companion. In telling this story, the nar­ rator's depiction of his fascination with this dream becomes his justification for remaining in Marseilles for so long.

The paradox is, of course, that to stay (and persuade Marie to love him) he must prove he is going to leave (and take her away from the doctor). Interwoven with this complicated state of affairs is the "uraltes Hafengeschwatz" that every­ one seems to get caught up in.

36seghers, Briefe an Leser. 44-45. 119 The narrator mistakenly sees the doctor as his major rival because he is most concerned with what happens in the present. The doctor never fully recognizes the narrator as anything but a friend trying to help Marie leave Marseilles because his attention is on the future in Mexico. And Marie is always looking for the past. She cannot separate herself from the idea that Weidel exists somewhere, as she tells the narrator when he begins to get hopeful that she wants him, not the doctor;

"Wir wollen einander doch nichts vormachen. Du weiBt, wer uns trennt. Wir wollen einander doch nicht belûgen, in der letzten Minute, du und ich." Ich legte mein Gesicht auf ihr Haar, ich fühlte wie lebend ich Lebender war und wie tot der Tote. (T, 178)

Weidel and the past remain for Marie the most important parts of her life. She may be sailing on to a new world, but it is with the thought that Weidel is already there waiting for her. The narrator understands now that his efforts to have Marie's visas and transit permission approved have fueled her belief that Weidel is alive. Only through him could she obtain her papers. The power this dead man has over the narrator's life lasts only as long as he continues to assume Weidel's identity at the consulates and the police station. Marie and the doctor are not the only people the nar­ rator encounters who are waiting to leave France. The story 120 of Marseilles in 1940 is told also by virtue of the nar­ rator's contact with several characters in the consulates and the cafés. The personal stories together give us the wider story of World War II Europe and escape. The people may be different, but their reasons for leaving are similar: to avoid being handed over by the French to the Nazis and ending in a concentration camp somewhere. All these people are so caught up in the bureaucratic requirements of their transit that they forget the everyday goings-on in the world around them. One day, the narrator chooses to enter a certain café to escape the usual gossip and rumors among the refugees:

Es gibt in den Brûleurs des Loups manchmal echte Fran- zosen. Sie sprechen statt von Visen von verniinftigen Schiebungen. Ich horte sogar ein gewisses Boot nach Oran erwahnen. Wahrend im Mont Vertoux die Besucher alle Umstande der Passage breittraten, verhandelten diese Leute hier über alle Umstande der Kupfer- drahtladung. (T, 81)

The "Mont Vertoux" is the café where the refugees most often congregate to discuss the latest information about ships and passages. The narrator generally does not enter into these discussions but observes them with detached curiosity. He never really seems to belong to their world, preferring

instead to seek out signs of everyday life among the French. What he tells us of these people informs us of the situation beyond the port of Marseilles. Spain, now under 121 Franco, routinely denies people transit visas if they sup­ ported, in one way or another, the republicans in the civil war. The United States grants visas, transit or otherwise, to those who can show they are not communist sympathizers. The narrator, in his search for all the proper papers, also must prove that he (actually Weidel) did not write left- leaning newspaper articles during the Spanish civil war. He denies he ever did, which is true, all the while coming to understand what sorts of things Weidel really did write. In the end, he gets permission to travel to Mexico via the United States. The next stop is the nearest café where he meets again another man who just received his transit from the United States.

The "Mittransitàr" (we never learn his name either) tells the narrator his story too. His bureaucratic night­ mares did not end with the reception of a US transit visa. His Polish citizenship is no longer valid as he explains:

Stellte sich also heraus, daB mein Heimatort, den ich nie mehr wiedergesehen habe, sich stark vergroBert hat, so daB er nach zwanzig Jahren doch eine eigene Gemeinde bildete, und zwar noch im Staate Litauen. Mir nützen also die polnischen Ausweise nichts mehr, ich brauche die Anerkennung der Litauer. Das ganze Gebiet ist auBerdem langst von den Deutschen besetzt. (T, 138)

It seems futile for the "Mittransitàr" to continue with this paper chase. He is tired of it all and has decided to return home. The narrator reacts to this news by asking his 122 conversation partner if he knows what awaits him at home (i.e. the Germans, and this man is a Jew). He replies with the story of the dead man who waits in eternity to find out if he made it into heaven or if he will go to hell. His present state is hell, and hell is a useless, stupid waiting for nothing. At least in going home he is taking some kind of action to change his life, for better or worse. The events in the world outside the realm of visas and Marseilles is told through the various characters with whom the narrator comes in contact. It seems that what news­ papers people do have are not being read. Their knowledge of world events reaches only so far as these events affect their lives. By setting up the story in this way, Seghers achieved a symbiosis between the refugees' world and the world around them. The only time the events in Germany or Spain seem to matter is when they affect the refugees' status and they must obtain this visa instead of that one.

Their actions are performed in a vacuum. Most of the refugees have little awareness of the life around them. The narrator stands in neither the refugees' world nor the ordinary life of his French friends firmly until he makes a commitment to one or the other. The doctor recognizes this and calls the narrator's life "zweigleisig" (T, 101). The narrator vacillates between the cafés where refugees wait and the home of his friend, Georg Binnet. He has been envious of Binnet since his arrival in Marseilles. 123

When the narrator arrives and expects to be welcomed. Bin- net 's African friend, Claudine, informs him that Georg is working the late shift. She herself had just come from work too. The narrator leaves, disappointed, and says to himself and his listener/reader: "Es gab also doch noch Henschen, die ein gewohnliches Leben führten" (T, 30). His visits to Binnet's apartment bring out feelings of happiness and sad­ ness. He enjoys seeing the boy and discussing current events with Georg, and Claudine saves portions of their food for him when he comes by for a visit. He feels he does not belong in such a life though: "Ich fühlte, wie mich das gewohnliche Leben von alien Seiten umspannte, doch gleich- zeitig fühlte ich auch, daB es fùr mich unerreichbar gewor- den war" (T, 43). The narrator has difficulty seeing his life as part of the ordinary life of the Binnets because he is too busy waiting for something to happen that would tell him where he belongs. His initial intent to remain in the south of France gets lost in a whirlwind of visas and feelings for a woman who would never be his alone. Instead of the constant worry of what tomorrow might bring, we have the opposite in the Binnets. Claudine is wiser than the narrator assumes when she responds to his question about what will become of her when Georg leaves her (the narrator also assumes this is inevitable): "Sie erwiderte spottisch: 'Ich bin froh, daB ich etwas zu Mittàg habe. . . . Ich habe meinen Sohn'" (T, 124 121). The narrator is jealous of the home Georg has built for himself with Claudine and cannot imagine it will last because everything seems transitory to him. But the Binnets exemplify the fact that life goes on despite fears and anxiety. And as Frank Wagner puts it: "Die Kraft des überdauens findet sich in diesem 'gewohnlichen Leben,' daraus wird die Veranderung kommen."37 The change in the narrator does come as evidenced by his story. He decides to stay in France knowing that he can work and live there. The realization he comes to about his life in Marseilles appears at the very end of the novel: "Ich werde eher des Wartens mûde als sie des Suchens nach dem unauffindbaren Toten" (T, 187). Marie's search for Weidel will never end, but the narrator has long since become tired of waiting and is ready to move on with his life. The narrator's decision to stay in Europe should not be considered a regression into his former life. If anything, this man has cast aside the drifter he once was and made a commitment to a people and a land. Remaining in France takes on a new meaning and a new goal: "Aufbruch in neue soziale Beziehungen, in eine neue Selbstbestimmung, in die

Erneuerung der alten W e l t . "38 The narrator no longer needs to travel to a new world for a new beginning. He can direct his energies toward renewing the old world instead. Seghers

3?wagner, 247. 38wagner, 250. 125 presents the political vision of genuine resistance by means of a personal story and in this way the narrator is politicized. He does not join a political party or volunteer immediately for the resistance movement, but he recognizes his affiliation with and commitment to the people and preserving a certain way of life that allows him to be free. Seghers presents us with a narrator who must tell about his life in order to understand the hope for the future embodied in the people and the land. This is no "Blut und Boden" mythology though. These people are real; Seghers does not mystify their lives. They are subjects acting in accordance with the natural course of history, and now the narrator belongs to these people. The importance of storytelling is a major concept of Transit. Our view of Marseilles and Europe in 1940 is shaped by the consciousness of a narrator who feels com­ pelled to tell us everything from beginning to end. The act of telling his experiences and those of others creates a broad picture of the historical situation but also gives the narrator the strength to continue. The search for identity the narrator pursues is finished with the story he tells. He has found where he belongs.

Transit would seem then to be a fairly straight-forward

novel if it were not for the probiematization of the act of storytelling which is interwoven with the narrator's story. Weidel's unfinished manuscript leaves the narrator 126 unsatisfied precisely because he wants to know how the story ends. This in turn reflects his general impatience with his own life; he too wants to know how things will turn out. The narrator's desire to tell everything from beginning to end is a function of his dissatisfaction. We also can hear Seghers' voice behind that program­ matic sentence: "Denn abgeschlossen ist, was erzahlt wird." Seghers' own experiences from which she created this novel were of an uncertain nature also. Waiting in cafés and in

consulates she turned to writing to fill the hours and to get through difficult times, as she stated in a letter:

Ich glaube, wir kamen nachher in Situationen, die ebenso schlimm, wenn auch ganz anders waren. Ich habe sie vielleicht deshalb besonders gut überstanden, weil ich andauernd an diesem "Transit" schrieb. Einige Mitreisende fragten mich verwundert, ob ich denn immer noch schreiben k a n n . 3 9

We sense that she too did not like the fact that Weidel's manuscript was unfinished, that his story was lost to the world. With her novel, Seghers also closed a period in her life and took up new tasks in her second adopted country,

Mexico. If Weidel is a ghost that is with the narrator through much of the novel, the concept of his unfinished work haunts the narrator and his creator, Seghers, as well. The act of storytelling has its therapeutic value, but it is also a political act. Although Weidel left his last 39seghers, Letter to Müller-Salget. 127 story unfinished, he was neverthless someone who, by means of his career as a writer, did something for his people and his country as we learn from a musician friend when he ans­ wers a question from the narrator:

"Um was soil denn der gekâmpft haben?" ”Um jeden Satz, um jedes Wort seiner Muttersprache, damit seine kleinen, manchmal ein wenig verrùckten Ges- chichten so fein wurden und so einfach, daB jedes sich an ihnen freuen konnte, ein Kind und ein ausgewachsener Mann. HeiBt das nicht auch, etwas fur sein Volk tun?" (T, 184)

Storytelling so that all can understand and gain perspective on the historical events is a key concept in Seghers' crea­ tive process. The stories we read in Transit, although they are filtered through the narrator's perspective, give us a picture of the forces of history and personal fates. Relat­ ing to Seghers' views of literature, Andreassen speaks to the responsibility of the author to her readers in this con­ text:

Der Schriftsteller dürfe nicht den Leser allein und unwissend wie zuvor lassen, durch die Kunst konne der Leser sich Klarheit über seine Situation und die historisch-gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhange verschaf- fen, und daraus Mut und Rat fur die Zukunft schopfen.^O

The narrator in Transit tells his story in order to gain perspective himself, and to show another person (his

40Andreassen, 74. 128 listener) that he was able to come to an understanding of his own purpose in life and gather courage for the future. Weidel did not entirely fail his responsibility to his reader by not finishing the manuscript. Weidel's manuscript exercises influence on the narrator. Because the narrator is unsatisfied and wants to hear/read an ending, he creates his own story and thereby also gathers strength for the future by reflecting on his past. From his story, we, the readers of Transit, learn about an individual fate in the historical process. The personal story becomes public in the telling and communicates to us hope for the future that, despite the chaos, there is still the land and the people and a desire for à decent life to continue. While Transit deals extensively with personal fate within the wider historical context, in Das siebte Kreuz the action moves from the political to the personal level. However, both novels exemplify Seghers' concept of creating a narrative. Storytelling plays an important role in both novels, whether it be an individual recollecting and telling his personal story or the omniscient narrator commanding the remembrance from her characters through which we come to understand their actions.

Although Das siebte Kreuz emphasizes the many stories of the collective characters as they are linked to one man, the novel's affinity to Transit lies in its narration. The characters of Das siebte Kreuz and the narrator of Transit 129 all turn to their past and their memory to tell their stories and to gain hope for the future. This mirrors Seghers' own process of creating from her stored-up memories or even her memory of most recent experiences to write her novels. The experience of exile served as the catalyst for the writing of both these novels. Seghers wanted to create narratives that would make people aware of what Nazi Germany had become and what was happening to some of Germany's best people. At the heart of Seghers' anti-fascist narratives lies the act of storytelling. And at the heart of storytelling lies the experiences of the author and the people she tells about. By recollecting these experiences, Seghers expressed the courage and hope to overcome the pre­ sent and move into the future without forgetting the past. In Das siebte Kreuz. it is a hope for opposition to the Nazis within Germany. In Transit, the hope is for a renewal of the people and lands touched by the Nazis. The impor­ tance of storytelling in these two novels cannot be over­ looked; indeed storytelling is the key to Seghers' anti­ fascist narratives. CHAPTER IV HISTORY IN THE MAKING: NADINE GORDIMER'S NOVELS BURGER'S DAUGHTER AND A SPORT OF NATURE

Nadine Gordimer, writing some forty years after fascism and Nazi rule in Germany, addressed the problem of a writer's responsibility in and to society in her 1984 essay "The Essential Gesture." She concluded the essay with the following words:

The writer is eternally in search of entelechy in his relation to his society. Everywhere in the world, he needs to be left alone and at the same time to have a vital connection with others; needs artistic freedom and knows it cannot exist without its wider context; feels the two presences within— creative self­ absorption and conscionable awareness— and must resolve whether these are locked in death-struggle, or are really foetuses in a twinship of fecundity. Will the world let him, and will he know how to be the ideal of the writer as a social being, Walter Benjamin's story­ teller, the one 'who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story'?!

Benjamin's storyteller is one who not only creates stories for society, but in and of it as well. That is also the writer's challenge in South Africa today as Gordimer sees

^Nadine Gordimer, "The Essential Gesture," The Essen­ tial Gesture: Writing. Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 299-300. 130 131 it, just as it was for Seghers in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Because Gordimer*s "work is written from a given social situation in a particular historical moment"2 she has the capability to be the kind of storyteller Benjamin described. The expression of a social situation in a given historical moment calls for the gathering of experiences into a narrative. In South Africa, Gordimer deals with the responsibility of being a writer, a white writer, by creat­ ing narratives that convey the experiences of living in a country in upheaval. Gordimer creates remembering subjects for characters as a way to recall the past in order to work through the present and move on to the future. It is my contention that Gordimer*s strength as a storyteller is most evident in two of her novels. Burger*s Daughter (1979) and A Sport of Nature (1987). In both novels, she tells the story of the problematic position of whites in the struggle to end apartheid. Gordimer posits

the solution to this problem clearly in a vision of the future based upon the experiences her characters have. For Rosa Burger in Burger's Daughter, the future is undefined,

but it is certain she will spend it in opposition to the apartheid government by the end of the novel. Gordimer focusses here on the relationship between past, present, and

2Stephen Clingman, "Writing in a Fractured Society: The Case of Nadine Gordimer," Literature and Societv in South Africa, eds. Landeg White & Tim Couzens (New York: Longman, 1984), 162. 132 future both thematically and in the narrative itself. Rosa must come to terms with the past (her father's activism on the part of blacks as a communist and the apartheid system) in order to find a place for herself in South Africa. She and the narrator do this by telling her story. Rosa recreates her life for herself while the narrator helps by creating a framework for her story. Rosa reclaims her life in the process of doing so and can therefore give of herself to others in the anti-apartheid struggle at the end of the novel. The case of A Soort of Nature is different, however, because we must ask ourselves throughout who really tells

Hillela's story. The narrator of the novel relies heavily on other people's remembrances of Hillela as well as his/her own knowledge to piece together her past because, as we find out, her future is secure. In much the same way as in Burger's Daughter though, Gordimer raises the issue of the past by thematizing its recovery in the act of narration. Hillela is called upon to relate events at times, but generally it is the third-person, omniscient narrator who is left to uncover how Hillela got where she is at the end of the novel. Although both novels seem to progress through time in a linear fashion, the narrators often forge on ahead only to have to retrace their steps and fill in the gaps in the stories. In this way, Gordimer links the past to the future 133 through the present in her narratives. Burger's Daughter and A Sport of Nature represent Gordimer's ability to relate historically relevant experiences in and of South Africa and its people in the latter half of the twentieth century. That she creates from her own experiences goes without saying. That is her responsibility as a writer living as a social being in South Africa today.

A. Burger' Daughter For many critics, and Gordimer herself. Burger's Daughter marked a turning point in her work towards more

"revolutionary" or radical subjects. Published in 1979, Burger's Daughter ends with the eruption of the Soweto uprising in 1976. The novel can be read simply as Gor­ dimer 's response to the rising Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and the question of the position of whites in the struggle against apartheid. In order to do this, Gor­ dimer had to retrace the steps of the small contingency of whites who belonged to the Communist Party in South Africa (and its hangers-on) to portray the reasons why whites became involved at all in the struggle. The immediate impact of the novel in South Africa was its banning upon publication. Sheila Roberts relates the

decision in her article on the novel:

Burger's Daughter . . . was initially banned in 1979 because the Publications Committee found that the book 134 was used "as a 'pad' to launch a blistering and full- scale attack upon the Republic of South Africa; its Government's racial policies; white privilege; processes of the law and forces for the preservation of law and order." The ban was lifted later that year, following an appeal by the director of the Publications Control Board himself.3

Clearly those in power felt threatened as they were the target of Gordimer's novel. The system set up by the South African government to review "questionable" literature con­ trols only that which has already been published and brought to the Publications Control Board's attention. The banning of Burger's Daughter created such an outcry from literary figures and organizations around the world that "the embar­ rassment it caused the director of the Publications Control Board caused him to appoint immediately a special committee of literary experts to report on Burger's Daughter."* The result was that the ban on the novel was lifted with the committee handling the appeal noting that the original com­ mittee was incompetent and biased. One of the interesting aspects of this chain of events in the life of Burger's Daughter is the response which the banning elicited from abroad. Gordimer had already found a public outside South Africa. Her novels have been published in Great Britain and the United States, and she was well

^Sheila Roberts, "South African Censorship and the Case of Burger's Daughter." World Literature Written in English 20.1 (1981): 43. ^Roberts, 46-47. 135 known to readers of The Atlantic and The New Yorker (among other publications) for her stories. This popularity per­ haps created an unwillingness on the part of the Pub­ lications Control Board to continue the ban on Burger's Daughter. as Sheila Roberts states:

But in this demonstration of fairmindedness or liber­ ality on the part of the director of publications there could be an element of bribery. By offering special treatment to writers who have influence abroad, is he hoping to buy a reduction of criticism from them against his committee? In any case, if he spares these well-known writers from banning, their books do not achieve the same publicity at home and abroad as they would otherwise do.5

Roberts raises an important issue which points to the irony inherent in the banning and censorship process. For those authors who are lucky enough to have achieved a following outside South Africa in the US or England, the banning of a work actually brings them more publicity and the government more criticism. Other authors who are not so popular and whose works are banned or censored often fade into obscurity. To her credit, Gordimer did not ask for an appeal or participate in any way in the proceedings. To do so would have given the appearance of compliance with a

system based on inequality. Burger's Daughter, despite banning, probably did gain a substantial readership in South Africa and abroad because of the controversy surrounding it.

^Roberts, 47. 136 although that is not always true of a banned literary work. However, what the government sought to ban became the vehicle for many readers' understanding of conditions in South Africa as presented by one particular author. Gordimer's novel centers on one character, Rosa Burger, but the history of the white-dominated South African left unfolds within Rosa's story. Host critics acknowledge that the Soweto revolt in 1976 and the Black Consciousness move­ ment provided Gordimer with the historical moment to which her novel leads, but M. J. Daymond sees the events around Soweto as what Gordimer felt "... was the necessary manifestation that South African history had entered a new phase. . . ."6 Although Rosa Burger is affected by these events, history is not just part of her story, but a major factor in the writing of it. Gordimer responds to the Black Consciousness movement which sees no role for whites in the struggle against minority rule in South Africa by giving Rosa a place in the anti-apartheid movement, as we shall see later. The forces of history affect Rosa's life in its most personal aspects and in her relationships with others. Within Gordimer's telling of the story of whites in the South African left is Rosa's story about where she fits in.

®M. J. Daymond, "Burger's Daughter; A Novel's Reliance on History," Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, eds. M. J. Daymond, et al. (Pietermaritzburg: U Natal P, 1984), 160-61. 137 Rosa's telling of her story to be able to go on in the struggle is analogous to Gordimer's writing of the novel to explore where whites fit into the anti-apartheid movement. Gordimer's novel may rely on history to inform it, but it is also the relationship of the past to the present and the future that is most clearly at the forefront of the novel. It is evident in the narrative and also problematized thematically in the novel. I would like to first explore this relationship as it is presented in Burger's Daughter before turning to the narrative. Rosa Burger grows up in a household where the emphasis is not on what has happened, or even what is happening now, but what will happen. Her parents, and especially her father, Lionel Burger, live for the Future. For them, "The Future is coming."? As the colonial powers in Africa fall one by one, the white-ruled apartheid government of South

Africa is considered the next to go. The only present that

counts is the one in which the struggle is carried out in order to bring about the future. Lionel Burger was a major force in the liberation move­ ment, one of the few whites to remain in the leadership of the South African Communist Party after its banning in the early 1960s. Rosa tells us all about her father's involve­

ment and the ideological struggles within the party. She

?Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter (New York: Viking Penguin, 1980), 112. All further references to this work will be given in the text with BD and page number. 138 recalls these things from years of living with him and the lessons she has been taught. While talking with Clare Ter- blanche, another daughter of parents working for the Future, Rosa recalls one of the lessons she learned about what is to come:

The future he was living for until the day he died can be achieved only by black people with the involvement of the small group of white revolutionaries who have solved the contradiction between black consciousness and class consciousness, and qualify to make uncondi­ tional common cause with the struggle for full libera­ tion, e.g., a national and social revolution. (BD, 126)

Clare Terblanche has just attempted to enlist Rosa's help for the struggle by asking her for the key to the photocopy room in the building in which Rosa works so that Clare can make copies of an illegal pamphlet. Rosa's refusal to help her stems not so much from her denial of the future but rather of her desire to live in the present at that moment. Her only act of defiance is to live her own life, a com­ pletely different one from her parents' lives. The future is the achievement of the liberation of the black people from apartheid, a future she has understandably little desire to live for when friends and family are arrested, jailed, and die for it. Rosa's break with her father first comes in her refusal to live only for the future as he did.

This refusal to live for the future does not lead to Rosa's embrace of the past and all its traditions though. 139 She understands the contradiction between the future her parents lived for and the past they inherited. For her, it is contained in her name. Named partly for Rosa Luxemburg and partly for her Afrikaans grandmother Marie Burger, Rosa recognizes the conflict inherent in being a white South African growing up in a family dedicated to the cause of black liberation:

. . . [T]he name I have always been known by as well as the disguised first half of my given name does seem to signify my parents' desire if not open intention. . . . But my double given name contained also the claim of MARIE BURGER and her descendants to that order of life, secure in the sanctions of family, church, law— and all these contained in the ultimate sanction of colour, that was maintained without question on the domain, dorp and farm, where she lay. (BD, 72-73)

Rosemarie Burger, called Rosa by her parents, senses the continuity in which the majority of whites move through life in South Africa. They are inextricably bound up with their colonial past and the claim they have on the land because of it. Rosa's Aunt Velma and Uncle Coen live in the security of inherited land and the sanction of church and law. The present is the same as the past in this respect, and they look forward to a future that they can predict based on what they know of the present. The changes that occur in South Africa bewilder Aunt Velma and Uncle Coen, but little has changed in their lives nevertheless (BD, 351-52). That Rosa feels secure with these people seems almost like heresy. 140

But we are reminded that this too is her heritage and some­ thing with which she must come to terms. As a white, she must look to a colonial past to find her roots in Africa. Her double name forces her to consider both the past as represented by Marie Burger and future as represented by the ideas put forth by Rosa Luxemburg. The continuity of the past is perhaps no where so pre­ sent as in Europe. Rosa travels to France and visits her father's first wife Katya, and in her attempt to free her­ self from her father, Rosa embraces Katya, the woman of his past. The continuity is found everywhere: in the landscape, people, and situations around her. Katya takes Rosa to the olive grove that was Renoir's garden and the trees' age causes Katya to observe the following:

If you live in Europe . . . things change (. . .) but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away. If I'd stayed . . . at home, how will they fit in, white people? Their continuity stems from colonial experience, the white one. When they lose power it'll be cut. Just like that! (BD, 249)

Europe (here France) affords Katya the security of a past that no longer needs to be defended as the whites' past in South Africa does. She can be whoever she pleases, safe in the knowledge that "nobody expects you to be more than you are" (BD, 250). 141 This continuity is even evident in art in Europe; it "offers a timeless substitute for reality."® Rosa listens to her lover, Bernard Chabalier, explain Bonnard's two paintings of women at different times: "No past, no future" (BD, 287). The woman in an 1894 painting is the same as the one in the 1945 painting. The forces of history do not effect them just as Katya lives in a world that will always be the same for her. Rosa lives there too for a while ". . . in a similar invented paradise, a world of sensual pleasures, divorced from historical events, a world in which she is a timeless image."® In France she is momentarily

free from her inherited double identity. The future is not the outcome of a struggle (those wars were already fought) nor is the past one that must be clung to as a heritage wor­ thy of its status. Rosa is eventually confronted with the past, her past in particular, in the form of Zwelinzima whom she knows as Baasie, the black child who lived with her family when she was a child. Baasie (Afrikaans for "little boss") is no more as his name indicates. Zwelinzima challenges Rosa's assertions of a shared past (and ostensibly a shared future). Thus Rosa is forced to come to terms with the past in order to find her way in the world.

®Judie Newman, Nadine Gordimer (London: Routledge: 1988), 81. ®Newman. 142 Gordimer too used the shock of the present reality in South Africa to deal with the past and the future, according to Stephen Clingman:

In Burger's Daughter it is in a moment of extreme solitude and extreme oppression, in the world of 1976, that Gordimer turns to the South African radical tradi­ tion in order to assess the appropriate and inevitable form of a revolutionary inheritance in a post-Soweto reality, turning also to the past to negotiate the demands made in the present by a revolutionary future.10

The process Gordimer used is contained in the narrative of the novel. In telling her story, Rosa Burger confronts the past, and in particular her father, in order to meet "the demands made in the present by a revolutionary future." Both Rosa and the narrator are concerned with how she should live in a South African society sinking further into chaos, and to understand this, they must understand her past and how she can live for a future. Rosa goes back into her memory and tells about her life to three specific people (and us, the readers) while the narrator gives us the details and the outline of Rosa's life, in some cases what Rosa experiences and what she does not tell us herself. It is in the narrative that the relationship between past, pre­

sent, and future becomes clear.

lOciingman, 172. 143 In each of the three sections of the novel Rosa tells her story to an absent partner. Within each section Rosa's remembrances are of that time or an earlier period, but never from a point in time beyond the confines of the sec­ tion's timeline. The narrator sets up a scene and then Rosa's voice interrupts to comment or remember what happened then or earlier. Often she is reconstructing her childhood and the images she took in from her memories. Rosa's position as a storyteller is complicated from the beginning when she states: "If you knew I was talking to you I wouldn't be able to talk" (BD, 17). Rosa addresses this remark to Conrad, the man she lives with briefly after her father's death. Ironically, he draws much information out of Rosa about her life and her family in conversations recorded by the narrator. But Rosa's true thoughts are addressed to him in this section when he is not physically present. The absent audience makes it easier for her to express herself and perhaps to be even more honest than if she were speaking only to herself. Rosa is quite aware of what she is doing: "One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to some­ one" (BD, 16). Rosa, as the remembering subject in the novel, needs to reflect on the times of her life as if she were speaking to another person. In this way, these remem­ brances function dialectically within the text as a whole. What we learn from the narrator (an event, a conversation) 144 causes Rosa to remember related events or to uncover thoughts long buried under other thoughts. This happens in each of the three sections: first, Rosa talks to Conrad, remembering her childhood and her parents after her father's death; in the second part, Rosa speaks to Katya, sorting out her reasons for leaving South Africa; and in the third sec­ tion, Rosa comes home and finally addresses her father, resolving many of her doubts about what it means to live in

South Africa.Additionally, "The personal memories and flashbacks span also the historical and political changes of those years."12 Rosa's personal story is tied up with that of modern South African history. She must tell her story in order to come to terms with her heritage.

Rosa's first absent partner, Conrad, seems to miss the point about Rosa's past. He is interested in all the details of a life committed to the struggle for black liber­ ation with what seems to be a desire for a vicarious thrill. Conrad draws recollections out of Rosa about her family by asking her what they did when, why they did it, and where was Rosa in all of it. After Rosa's father dies in prison, she lives with Conrad in his abandoned garden cottage which will be destroyed for a new freeway. In the cozy atmosphere of the secluded cottage, Conrad tries to draw her out by

lloaymond, 172. 12nargot Heinemann, "Burger's Daughter: The Synthesis of Revelation," The Uses of Fiction, eds. Douglas Jefferson & Graham Martin (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1982), 185. 145 posing provoking questions. Nevertheless, we have the feel­ ing that what Rosa says in her monologues tells us much more about her life and her relationship to her family than she tells Conrad directly. Conrad does not seem to understand her inability to pick apart the man who was her father and her relationship to her family in these conversations they have. Rosa lashes back at him in her monologues, trying to explain her inner conflict:

. . . [D]idn't you understand, everything that child, that girl did was out of what is between daughter and mother, daughter and brother, daughter and father. When I was passive, in that cottage, if you had known— I was struggling with a monstrous resentment against the claim— not of the Communist Party!— of blood, shared genes, the semen from which I had issued and the body in which I had grown. (BD, 62)

What Conrad never quite grasped, and what Rosa recounts for him in her story is that her identity as a child, girl, and young woman is that of her family's. She is, above all, her father's daughter. Burger's daughter. His death then would be the release from this bond: "And now he is dead! Dead! I prowled around that abandoned garden . . . and I knew I must have wished him to die; that to exult and sorrow were the same thing for me" (BD, 63). Always her father's daughter, Rosa struggles with the reality that she will never be free of his legacy as long as she lives in South Africa. 146 Conrad thinks he gets the whole story from Rosa in the cottage, but looking back on those conversations, Rosa says quite clearly: "Still more to it than you knew" (BD, 63). Conrad proclaims her free and Rosa wonders what that really means for her. She leaves the cottage (later she cannot even pick out the spot from the freeway), and leaves Conrad and his questions behind her. What Conrad does understand is the shared destiny that Rosa has with her father, that is, that she will go to prison someday. But Conrad lives for himself and he will never really understand what consequences that bond between father and daughter has. Rosa can explain to him all she wants, but really what she is doing is remembering her life to understand where she will go next. Her desire to break her ties to South Africa leads her to Brandt Vermeulen, a distant relation, who helps her get a passport, something normally denied her as Burger's daughter. Rosa leaves South Africa for Europe because, as she tells Brandt, "I want to know somewhere else" (BD, 185). Rosa leaves South Africa not only to "know somewhere else" but to know herself apart from her heritage there. Strangely enough, she travels to Katya, a woman linked with her father years ago. Katya left South Africa years before and created a new life for herself in the south of France. Rosa receives a condolence letter from her after her father, Lionel, dies; Rosa informed her half-brother in Tanzania who told his 147 mother, Katya, of Lionel Burger's death. Something in Katya's own past draws Rosa to France. Katya had left Lionel and embraced the continuity of Europe instead of the Future in South Africa. Rosa searches for a reason why she chose to come to Katya, and in one of her monologues she states: "I wanted to defect from him” (BD, 264). Katya managed to "defect” from Lionel, to leave behind the allegiences. How was Rosa to do that? She comes to Katya and listens to her tell stories of her time with Lionel in the Communist Party, working for the Future. Rosa listens to these stories and then, in her mind, addresses Katya, trying to understand what happened long ago. Katya was never a very good revolutionary and was dis­ ciplined for her "bourgeois tendencies” on occasion. She tells her story from her perspective, but Rosa wants to know: "What did he say?” (BD, 262, 263), meaning her father. Rosa listens and then assumes her father's perspec­ tive:

I see it all the way he did; smiling and looking on, charmed by you although you've grown fat and the liveliness Katya must have had has coarsened into clownishness and the power of attraction sometimes deteriorates into what I don't want to watch— a desire to please— just to please, without remembering how, any more. (BD, 264)

In this passage, Rosa collapses the past of the story with the present she observes. Rosa understands much more about 148

Katya and her past than she thought she would. If for one moment, she catches a glimpse of why she came to Katya, she lets it go in order to live for the present, there in France. Rosa understands that Katya could not remain with Lionel because "... what else is there for a woman who won't live for the Future?” (BD, 264). Rosa too has rejected the Future, if only for a while. She is released from her past and can enter into an image depicted in the room Katya made ready for her that is far from her image in South Africa as Burger's daughter. Rosa did not seek out Katya to learn more about her father, but to get away from him and to be someone other than Burger's daughter. In the process of moving away from her father, Rosa walks (or dances) into the arms of her French lover, Bernard Chabalier. Rosa's monologues become shorter, and the nar­ rator takes over more often and for longer periods. Rosa moves into the image of Katya, the eternal mistress living out her life among friends after the lover has gone. Rosa tells us how she is different now too: "Bernard Chabalier's

mistress isn't Lionel Burger's daughter; she's certainly not accountable to the Future . . ." (BD, 304). As long as Rosa is Bernard's mistress she is someone else, divorced from the past (her father) and the future (in South Africa) despite any plans Bernard has about her work with anti-apartheid organizations in France. 149 Rosa lives in the here and now with all its sensual pleasures, but she still sees the toll time takes on Katya and the town's other aging mistresses like the woman she finds wandering confused in the street one day. The future in the affair is indeterminate, but the aging process con­ tinues . After the summer in France, Rosa leaves Katya for London where Bernard will supposedly meet her. In London, Rosa is confronted with the past once again, and she leaves Bernard and Katya behind to embrace the future in South Africa. She finds out that: "No one can defect" (BD, 332), not even Burger's daughter. In the final section of the novel, Rosa returns to South Africa and is now ready to address her father. Unlike Conrad or Katya, Lionel is not present and cannot hear Rosa tell her experiences. This does not deter her from speaking though. Rosa recalls her telephone conversation with her childhood companion Zwelinzima in London to try to find the reason why she returned. Lionel is the one who would understand this squabble between his children, one white, one black, about who can best bring about the Future. Rosa cannot escape her heritage in the timeless quality of Europe. She returns to the realization of who she is: "I am what I always was" (BD, 349). In France, Rosa is like the Bonnard paintings which depict a woman who never changes despite history. Once disrupted in her reverie by a phone 150 call, Rosa remembers who she is and returns to South Africa to assume her future there. The confrontation with Zwelinzima brings back the memory of a shared childhood (Zwelinzima lived with the Burgers as a child), and when Rosa tries to reestablish the bond she remembers they had, Zwelinzima jerks her into the present. This is not her present with Bernard, but the one she has suppressed, the present of the struggle between blacks and whites in South Africa. Stephen Clingman views this development in terms of the Black Consciousness move­ ment:

Black Consciousness forces a white reassessment but also provokes a new dedication; absorbing the impact of all that her encounter with Zwelinzima signifies, the revolt of Rosa's body presages the revolution of her identity once again. The direct challenge that Zwelin­ zima has levelled determines Rosa to return to South Africa to renew the social commitment her father left off.13

Rosa's initial response to Zwelinzima's anger is a purging of her body, a physical response. In vomiting, she also purges herself of the identity she assumed as Bernard's mistress and recalls her identity as Burger's daughter. Part three of the novel opens with Rosa's account of the confrontation. Is this justification for her words to

l^stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 184- 85. 151 Zwelinzima? Perhaps, but it is also an apology to her father, a coming home to him and an idea of the future. Rosa has recalled her past, defected it, and returned home, both physically and in her narrative.

Rosa is not left to defend a dead ideology passed on to her by her father. Just as Rosa revolted against her father, the children of Soweto rise up and revolt against their elders who had looked to the white anti-apartheid organization for leadership. The children are now taking to the streets to object to an inferior education. It is their turn to carry on the legacy of the struggle, as Rosa explains to her father: "Our children and our children's children. The sins of the fathers; at last, the children avenge on the fathers the sins of the fathers. Their chil­ dren and children's children; that was the Future, father, in hands not foreseen" (BD, 348). The children are taking over for the parents now: "In a way Lionel couldn't have

foreseen, the children are radicalizing the parents; yet such unforeseeable transformations are the essence of his v i s i o n . "14 Rosa lives in a world where the children are the

ones who continue and renew the struggle.

Rosa carries on in her father's name by helping to heal black children in a hospital in Johannesburg, not by organizing and working as her father did. The times have changed. These children are being shot at and beaten in

14Heinemann, 195-96. 152 detention by white police officers for their defiance of white rule. Rosa realizes she cannot be on the front line with the black children as her father was in the Communist Party, but she can work for the future in her own way. Her confrontation with Zwelinzima in the present causes her to again contemplate the past in a different light to understand what her place in the future might be. Rosa's telling of her story is at once a search for her identity as Burger's daughter and the way she constitutes her identity as Rosa. As she tells us, her childhood was spent unassumingly absorbing the ideology of the Future. In recalling that, she is able to understand what the assump­ tions were. How Rosa deals with her past is to first flee it to suspend herself in time, and then to seek it out again at home. Rosa's story fits into the novel in a montage of people, places, and events. She comments on what has hap­ pened in the immediate past as well as what occurred when

she was a child. Rosa's act of storytelling enables her to

redeem that part of her heritage in order to go forward with her life. The third-person, omniscient narrator tells us what Rosa does not as well as what she could not know. The narrator anchors Rosa's story in the flow of time leaving Rosa to freely move among events. Her version of her story is embedded in the larger context of history. The narrator opens and closes the novel and remains aware of all events concerning Rosa as well as history in 153 general in between. Gordimer's narrator shifts easily from one perspective to another, as Margot Heinemann observes:

The narrative method is flexible, centered in Rosa's own observation, but shifting easily to other minds, to the impersonal reports of 'surveillance,' to the hostile record of the political police— in the main quite unobtrusively. One notices these changes only when a particular contrast in angle of vision is impor­ tant to the story. Crucial moments are often represented not in narrative form but as scenes, in highly articulate conversation and discussion among the characters.

In addition to such scenes where characters' speech is recorded verbatim without commentary, other key moments in the novel occur from the narrator's perspective as well. The narrator assumes the voices of other figures in the novel such as Lionel's biographer who questions Rosa. The biographer appears in the context of the narration, that is, not as a person posing questions directly, but as the nar­ rator assuming the biographer's consciousness as evidenced by the use of free-indirect speech. The narrator is asking questions of Rosa and giving her answers with the full knowledge of what the questions and answers are. The nar­ rator/biographer prods Rosa at one point: "... surely, that can be remembered and recounted?" (BD, 90). Rosa is asked to remember events from her father's life on one level and also to remember her life on another. For as much as

i^Heinemann, 185. 154 the biographer is interested in Rosa's father, the narrator also has a stake in the remembered events. They comprise the framework of the novel. Some of the narrator's assumed points of view serve only to give us information but not to see the characters' processing of information. Such is the case in those sec­ tions which have the flavor of an official report. The nar­ rator comments on information contained in the reports too, thereby making us aware of the source of information:

She was known to have driven to town on these dates and to those destinations by the surveillance to whom all her movements had been and were known, from the day a fourteen-year-old girl, the arteries of her groin pain­ fully charged with menstrual blood, stood with a hot- water bottle and an eiderdown outside the prison. (BD, 173)

We take into account what surveillance could have known and did know about Rosa. "Surveillance was not sure" if Rosa contacted others about her departure (BD, 190). The Minis­ try of the Interior was convinced she had orders to contact

Frelimo in order to set up bases in Mozambique from which the opposition would infiltrate South Africa (BD, 176-77). The narrator gives all this information, knowing all the time what Rosa's motivations are for her departure from

South Africa. The narrator bridges the gap between the public Rosa, Burger's daughter, and the private Rosa. Eventually Rosa 155 moves to fill in this gap herself. In the meantime, the narrator sets the scene for her reminiscences and allows others to tell their stories too. In conversation we hear Conrad, Katya, and Bernard all speak of their lives and their personal histories. Rosa's reluctance to speak to Conrad in person underscores her need to tell her story alone. The narrator is left the task of pulling together the parts so that they may speak to us, the readers, as a complete story. What we do not have in Burger's Daughter is a conclusive end to Rosa's story. The forces of history bring Rosa back to where she started in South Africa, but we do not know what ultimately becomes of her. One thing we do know for sure is that Rosa's life begins with the first Afrikaner Nationalist government taking power in May 1948 (BD, 94). Gordimer, through her narrator and Rosa, ties Rosa to historical events which defined her family's life through the use of documented history. The detentions and imprisonments occur at stages in Rosa's life which correspond to the strikes and uprisings that are a part of South African history. As a fourteen- year-old girl she waited in front of a prison to give her mother a hot water bottle and an eiderdown after the deten­ tions following Sharpeville. Rosa's first love as a teenager was not a boy she met at school, but Noel De Witt, another one of the faithful imprisoned whom she visited to pass information under the guise of being his fiancée. Even 156 Rosa's own detention occurs in conjunction with a historical event, the 1976 students' protest in Soweto and the sub­ sequent detentions, arrests, and tannings. The narrator tells us that Rosa was among those taken:

A few white people were detained, arrested, house- arrested or banned on 19th October 1977, and in the weeks following. The Burger girl was one. She was taken away by three policemen who were waiting at her flat when she returned from work on an afternoon in November. (BD, 353)

The public history to which Rosa's life is tied underscores the life she remembers, the one of her parents' activism and the effect it had on her growing up. Rosa never completely sheds her ties to South Africa and the narrator helps us see that. Rosa and the narrator also recall the history of the South African Communist Party to which her father belonged. The use of an actual historical figure by Gordimer as the prototype for Lionel Burger underlies this recounting of history. Lionel Burger was really Bram Fischer, a leading

Afrikaans lawyer and communist whose life Gordimer researched and presented in Burger's Daughter. Clingman relates the importance of this point for the novel:

. . . [I]n so far as Burger is based on Fischer, Gor­ dimer has extended her usual practice of close observa­ tion in the present, into historical research of the past. Not only has she made direct use of basic 157 political and historical texts (. . .) but she also undertook interviews with people connected with Fischer and his times. So the figure of Burger acts as a bridge in the novel between fact and fiction, and past and present, as the methods of the novelist and a more orthodox historian c o i n c i d e . 16

The important point here is not just that Gordimer researched Fischer for her novel, but that history provided her a basis for her story, just as Rosa's dates give her a framework within which she acts and remembers. Gordimer's observations of the past found their way into the novel through her narrator and Rosa; Rosa acts in the present on what she remembers from the past in the hope that the future will be a better one. Gordimer also acted in the present by writing a novel in which she calls on the past to inform the future. To further strengthen this aspect of the novel, Gor­ dimer also used documentation in the composition of Burger's Daughter. The most obvious examples are Lionel's speech from the dock after his trial which was based on Fischer's speech (BD, 24f.) and the Soweto Students' Representative Council's (SSRC) pamphlet which she inserted into the text word for word. Thus we have a text comprised of fictional characters, historical events, and quotes from documents.

Gordimer skillfully pulled these seemingly disparate pieces of the story together into a whole.

l^ciingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer. 172. 158 The effect of the use of documentation in the novel goes beyond a masterful combination of history and fiction though:

She includes a pamphlet issued by the Soweto Students' Representative Council in June 1977 which, when Burger's Daughter was published, had for some time been bannned for possession as well as for publication. The organisation which had issued it had also been banned since 19 October 1977. In the fiction, this is the date on which Rosa is detained. Thus Gordimer's act of illegality underlines the link between her fiction and the history which gave it birth.

The significance of Gordimer's use of a historical event in her novel is heightened by the insertion of a banned text into the novel. Rosa's detention is subtly linked to Gor­ dimer 's own act and the students' revolt. The events Gor­ dimer experienced find their way into the novel as a part of the storytelling process. By printing words silenced by the government, Gordimer gave a voice to those whose story touched hers. Their story (the uprising) is a part of her story (Burger's Daughter^; it is part of her experience. The use of quotes in the novel underscores Gordimer's use of her experiences to create the novel. Gordimer's novel charts the course of a white revolu­ tionary's lifelong work to free blacks from apartheid. Part of Rosa's difficulty in assuming her identity as Burger's

i^Daymond, 161. Rosa is actually detained in November (BD, 353). 159 daughter is that the rules of the game have been changing. As a white in South Africa, she could no longer assume her help in the struggle was wanted or needed as the Black Con­ sciousness movement gained popularity. Rosa encounters a proponent of the ideas of Black Consciousness a year after her father dies at a gathering in Soweto to which she is invited by her friend Marisa. Duma Dhladhla, a young black man, makes it quite clear what he thinks of whites in the anti-apartheid movement as well as blacks who look to whites for leadership:

— Whites, whatever you are, it doesn't matter. It's no difference. You can tell them— Afrikaners, liberals. Communists. We don't accept anything from anybody. We take. D'you understand? We take for ourselves. There are no more old men like that one, that old father— a slave who enjoys the privileges of the master without rights. It's finished.— (BD, 157)

Gordimer's own struggle with the question of where do whites fit in finds something of an answer in her novel. The Black Consciousness movement challenged the notion that whites can lead the blacks to liberation in South Africa or even work toward that end alongside blacks. Rosa's dilemma is clear then: how can she continue in her father's footsteps when his kind no longer fits in. If Rosa left South Africa because she felt she could not assume the same role her father had in the struggle, she returned because she felt there was something for her to do. She uses her talents as 160 a physiotherapist and goes to work in a hospital serving blacks. Rosa reclaims her life and past experiences in the act of storytelling. Eventually, after the shock of a phone call in the middle of the night, she is able to return to South Africa and accept the responsibility of being a member of a minority within a minority, part of the few whites who do not accept the white government's oppression of the majority population. Rosa's life comes full circle in the novel. We see her in the beginning waiting outside the prison where her mother is being detained. At the end of the novel she is the one inside the prison. This progres­ sion from outside to inside is mirrored in the narrative as well.18 We know Rosa from the impersonal reports of sur­ veillance and her inner voice with which she tells her story. In the beginning she asks: "When they saw me out­ side the prison, what did they see?" (BD, 13). We know what the other people saw, but we are also privy to Rosa's view. We follow Rosa inside then: to her story and eventually into prison. And what of the Future? Rosa returns to South Africa after searching the past in order to deal with the present. That she comes back to Lionel, quite literally in the sense that she speaks to him in the final section, resolves the question of how the past can be instrumental in living in

ISsee also Newman, 75-76. 161 the present with an eye to the future. Clingman relates this to Gordimer's writing of the novel as well:

The novel has looked to the past in order to find the only source of inspiration that could be adequate to its present. There are many places it might have looked, but that it found it in Lionel Burger's heritage confirms that Burger's Daughter is, despite its ideological qualifications, truly, as Gordimer has said, her most radical novel yet. Fusing the needs of the present with the traditions of the past there is a strong revolutionary alignment in the novel.

The issue is not that Lionel Burger was a Communist and Gor­ dimer sees South Africa's future bound up with that ideol­ ogy, but rather that the past and the present are brought together in order to envision a future, whatever it may be. That is the novel's revolutionary quality. We may not know what will become of Rosa in the future, but there is hope expressed in her story. Rosa does not abandon her memory of her father but tries to use it to understand her place in South Africa. She ends up in prison, like her father at the end of his life, because that is the response of the government to a woman who carries on the legacy of her past.

B. A Sport of Nature What then do we make of a woman so unconcerned with her past as she seems to be of her future? The main character of Gordimer's 1987 novel A Snort of Nature. Hillela, appears

i^Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer. 185. 162 to be a person outside of history until we probe deeper into the novel. As Gordimer presents her, the future is resolved for Hillela. At the end of A Sport of Nature she stands triumphant on the platform at the celebration of the newly created country which replaces the Republic of South Africa. The struggle is over; there is no prison term for Hillela at the end of this novel. Rosa tells her story and rediscovers the legacy of her father in order to go on living in South Africa, but Hillela seems to float through time, hardly touched by the forces that help shape Rosa. But just as Rosa searches her memory for her past, Hillela's past must be uncovered to understand how she arrived at her place on that platform. The past figures predominantly in this novel of the future, as we shall see. Gordimer leaves Rosa at the prison gates for the times demand a new kind of white person in South Africa. The question is whether Hillela fits the bill.

The appearance of A Snort of Nature in 1987 marked Gor­ dimer 's move away from dealing with the question of where whites fit in the anti-apartheid movement to what kind of white would be a part of a new South Africa. The response to the novel varied. Most reviewers either liked A Sport of Nature or hated it,20 depending on the reviewer's own per-

20see for example Susan Greenstein, "Laws of Skin and Hair," The Women's Review of Books 5.2 (November 1987); 1, 3-4; and Jennifer Kraus, "Activism 101," The New Republic 18 May 1987: 33-36. 163 sonal stance toward the idea of a woman revolutionary who seems not to have earned her stripes, so to speak. What many critics failed to see in the novel is a Rosa Burger, a woman willing to spend time in jail for her beliefs. Hillela avoids the dilemma of being a white person in a black liberation movement in that Gordimer gave her no sense of color-consciousness such as her previous heroines had. In her essay on Gordimer's colonial heroines, Robin Visel touches on this point:

Gordimer's idealization of Hillela stems from her own apparent need to free her central character from the white colonial dilemmas that trapped her previous heroines between two worlds: alienated from white society and unable to participate fully in black society. . . . In A Sport of Nature. Gordimer unconvincingly allows Hillela a short cut to blackness. Relying on instinct, attraction, pluck and luck, she bypasses history and politics to emerge triumphant in her African robes and headdress at the birth of the new nation.21

Visel's assessment is that Gordimer allowed her character no awareness of history or skin color in order for Hillela to magically overcome the difficulties that a character like Rosa Burger encountered. While it would appear that Hillela is not conscious of what is happening around her, the nar­ rator consistently brings Hillela into focus through the use of history and memories. Because Hillela does not tell her

2lRobin Visel, "Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer's Colonial Heroines," Ariel 19.4 (1988): 40. 164 story like Rosa Burger, we, the readers, are forced to grap­ ple with the image of her identity based on what the nar­ rator tells us. We are asked also to make that leap into the future with Hillela, but we only get there through the past, that is, by listening to Hillela's story. The narrator of A Sport of Nature is the constructor of Hillela's life for the novel's readers. In this respect, the narrator acts as a biographer, piecing together bits of information gathered from books and interviews. The nar­ rator looks back on Hillela's life; she is viewed almost exclusively from this outside perspective. But we get a glimpse of what goes on inside Hillela too in sections aside from the main body of the text printed in italics and in the narrator's use of free-indirect speech. From the beginning when we meet Hillela as a school girl, the narrator slips behind her character and we have the feeling that Hillela is there, telling her story in part. Thus we read in the account of her school years in Salisbury: "But she was the only Hillela among Susans and Clares and Fionas. What sort of name was that? Didn't know, couldn't tell them."22 Already we meet a girl who has little concept of who she is in respect to her name. The narrator skillfully blends Hillela's conscious reply into the narrative flow of the novel. We read Hillela's voice as

22Nadine Gordimer, A Soort of Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 3. All further references to this work will be given in the text with SN and page number. 165 part of the greater biography of her. So too is the case with other characters such as Hillela's aunt Pauline or cousin Sasha. The result of all this is a nar­ rator/biographer who is close to all the characters and events in the story beyond knowing all they do. The nar­ rator knows their thoughts and motivations as well. The narrator comments extensively from a position in the future back on the events which shape Hillela's life. When she is seventeen, Hillela is caught in an incestuous affair with her cousin Sasha by his parents, Pauline and Joe, with whom Hillela has lived since she was kicked out of a Rhodesian boarding school for associating with a "colored" boy. The narrator, considering what Hillela goes through in her life, in particular the killing of her first husband, Whaila Kgomani, comments on that time:

It is unlikely that Hillela will have remembered at any time the exaggerated emotions and highly-coloured scroll of unrolled life that absorbed her totally when she was seventeen. It was the torn streamers that were to come back to her: killing is killing, violence is pain and death. (SN, 74-75)

Despite the ensuing bedlam caused by Hillela and Sasha's transgression, the narrator tells us that what Hillela remembers from this time are words spoken by Joe in a con­ versation following the incident with Sasha concerning the anti-apartheid movement's endorsement of "controlled 166 violence" as a tactic. This is what she recalls because of its importance to her situation later in life when Whaila is killed in their kitchen in Ghana by the South African secret police and she is left alone to deal with the tragedy of his death. The narrator links events at different times with one another always from a perspective sometime after all the events in the novel have taken place. The narrator, true to the notion of a biographer's task, also tells us Hillela's story by mixing in reports from others as well as omniscient narration. Often we read what other people remember about Hillela or conversely, what other people may have known, according to the narrator's speculation. Regarding Hillela's teenage years and her relationship with Sasha we read: "Perhaps Handy knew about Sasha ..." (SN, 35), Handy being Hillela's best friend. We first discover what Hillela and Sasha's relationship really is later on in the novel despite the narrator's hints and clues. To recount Hillela's time on the beach in Dar es Salaam the narrator turns to another woman who helped her: "Christa Zeederburg, urged to reminisce at the end of her life, never forgot the safety-pin. — Just an ordinary safety-pin, the kind you buy on a card, for babies' nappies. That's all she had, then!— " (SN, 133). The safety-pin seems like a strange reminder of a woman, but it was what Christa saw and focussed on when she first met Hillela. 167 Hillela appeared helpless as a baby to her and, at the same time, admirable because of all she achieves by the end of the novel. The narrator goes back in time and reminisces with the various characters in order to present Hillela's story from as many perspectives as possible, but the narrator does not know everything or chooses not to tell all. Although con­ versations are reproduced and various intrigues are recounted, Hillela's story is curiously marked by the absence of knowledge about certain times in her life. These lacunae are pointed out to us along the way by the narrator. Not only are they lacunae in the narrative, but apparently also in Hillela's memory of her past. The nar­ rator indicates this in reference to the period of time after she leaves Pauline's and Joe's house at age seventeen until she turns up on the east African beach almost two years later:

This is not a period well-documented in anyone's memory, even, it seems, Hillela's own. For others, one passes into a half-presence (alive somewhere in the city, or the world) because of lack of objective evi­ dence and information; for oneself, the lack of docu­ mentation is deliberate. And if, later, no-one is sure you are really the same person, what— that is certain to be relevant— is there to document? Everyone is familiar with memories others claim to have about oneself that have nothing to do with oneself. (SN, 103-4) 168 Hillela speaks here, justifying her selective memory. The narrator continues by comparing Hillela's life with all the gaps in her story to famous people such as Christ or Shakespeare whose stories also contain lacunae. As if to justify then Hillela's and the narrator's lack of informa­ tion, the narrator states: "It is not difficult for a girl of seventeen (out of sight of the witness of family and friends) to be absent from the focuses of a woman's own mnemonic attention in later life: to be abandoned, to dis­

appear" (SN, 104). These gaps in knowledge are not the sole possessions of a narrator who appears to have a firm grasp on everything to do with Hillela. They apparently exist in Hillela's memory too. It is interesting to note that, after such a confession of Hillela's purposeful forgetting, the narrator recreates that period in Hillela's life. We get as conclusive a pic­ ture of Hillela as is possible even if she chose to forget certain times in her life. Although some critics maintain that the narrative is never conclusive about Hillela throughout the novel, I would hold that the narrator does reconstruct Hillela's life using memory: the various characters' reminiscences, Hillela's memory (despite the lacunae), historical documentation (a "collective memory" of sorts), and the narrator's omniscience. The picture is by no means complete and the narrator makes a point of that, but meant to be a story of an exemplary woman and her role 169 in the future. That the narrator/biographer does not know everything is not necessarily disturbing, rather that the narrator admits it causes us to question who really tells

Hillela's s t o r y . 23

Hillela's forgetting of her past is picked up by the narrator and used to recall Hillela's past and tell as much of her story as possible. Hillela sheds certain events like her school name, Kim, in the beginning. A statement such as "She was, perhaps, happy; she would not remember" (SN, 114) does not refute whether she was happy at that time but sets up the parallel between how she was and what she has become. Because Hillela has forgotten much (the narrator seems to know what she will have forgotten), she moves through life making up her story as she goes. As Kim disappears and Hil­ lela emerges, she casts off one identity for another, a talent we witness often in the course of the novel. The narrator perseveres in obtaining the "true" story of Hillela perhaps no where so obviously as in the discovery of the beginning of her relationship with Whaila, the first man she would marry. The narrator first tells us what the official document, the Who's Who of twentieth-century black political figures, says about Whaila and his wife. In con-

23see Barbara Temple-Thurston, "The White Artist as A Sport of Nature." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 15.1 (1991): 176; and, regarding the distance Gordimer places between herself and Hillela by means of the narrator, Richard Peck, "What's a Poor White to Do? White South African Options in 'A Sport of Nature,'" Ariel 19.4 (1988): 88. 170 sidering the absence of real information (the line in the curriculum vitae does not say who she was or whether his wife was black or white), the narrator looks to Hillela for a statement: "I was very young, working at an embassy in Accra when I met Whaila at a reception given by the late Kwame Nkrumah” (SN, 177). The narrator's response, "Well, it's not impossible" (SN, 177), does not confirm what Hil­ lela says but also does not deny iti Unsatisfied, the nar­ rator goes further and relates a conversation with Madame Sadat in which Hillela says: "You always remember the beginning, not the end. Fortunately. It was in Accra, a man passed me in the street and then turned around— Whaila: we recognized each other" (SN, 178). The narrator then tells how Hillela stopped in at the exiled organization's (ANC's) office and Whaila comes in. How did she know he was there? Apparently not from passing in the street: "... she must have known without knowing" (SN, 179). Whatever version of this encounter Hillela gives, it is the nar­ rator's account that stands as the authoritative one. It was not obtained by interviewing, but by being there as an omniscient narrator, aware of all of Hillela's actions. The narrator portrays Hillela as a person who changes her story to fit the situation. Her version of her life begins with Whaila, her memory of her existence prior to that is buried, only to arise at particular points in the novel. One of those memories is of her family, Pauline, 171 Joe, and Sasha, which comes to her when she discusses white people's role in black liberation in South Africa: "There are people who have given up being white. . . . And there are others . . . another kind. I knew them, I was in a fam­ ily . . . they wanted to but they didn't seem to know how?" (SN, 193). Hillela does not refer to them as her family; she distances herself from her past because she knows now how to give up being white. She does not remember her fam­ ily because they belong to some great pre-history from which she has distanced herself by means of forgetting. Even Whaila is aware of the distance she has put between herself and the past embodied in her family (SN, 215). The narrator is the one who constantly relates events in her family's life to Hillela's, bridging the gap of forgotten memories. Hillela is often quite honest about her feelings and perceptions of herself even if she plays with the facts. On the beach in Tanzania, she is quite adamant about her ability to understand what happens around her and the impor­ tance of experience. Arnold, one of the exiled asks her one day as they swim: "Isn't there anything you know without experiencing it for yourself?" (SN, 142). Hillela con­ templates his question for a moment and then answers:

— No. Not really. No.— . . . — How can anyone know what hasn't happened to them? People like you, who've been in prison . . . and once or twice others. I'd heard talking, back there. You can describe what it was like, but I . . . I never, I don't really believe 172 it's all it's like . . . You are all different, all of you . . . from the speeches. Where I lived— at home, when I was still in what was my home— everything was read out from newspapers, ever^hing was discussed, I went to a court once and there was another kind of talk, another way of words dealing with things that had happened . . . somewhere else, to somebody else . . . I couldn't know. I can only know what happens to me. (SN, 143)

Back home, in what was her home, Hillela heard all kinds of talk, but witnessed little action that made much of a dif­ ference in anyone's life. Questions of race and privilege were discussed but rarely was there an experience other than that of the privilege of being white. As Hillela moves through life she accumulates experiences from and of which she can speak. She does not pretend to know everything, and her unassuming nature is unnerving to some people. The nar­ rator often copies this mind-set in telling Hillela's story. The events or experiences the narrator has no direct knowl­ edge of are often swept aside with a "perhaps" or "it was said." To know for Hillela means to have experienced directly and the experience in which she gains the most knowledge is her marriage to Whaila Kgomani. If we consider history to be accumulated experience, this is the point when Hillela enters history through the fullness of her experi­ ence, when she no longer considers herself a part of the privileged white household in which she grew up. As Hillela moves through her life after Whaila, she discovers a world of knowledge contained in books. While 173 living in the United States and giving lectures about Africa and South African refugees, she must supplant her experience as a refugee with statistics and documentation: "She had to go back to libraries (. . .) to find the supplement she had always said she could not trust: what she had not experi­ enced for herself. It was necessary, for the practice of exaction" (SN, 249). Statistics are needed to convince those who cannot (for whatever reason) experience something themselves such as being a refugee from South Africa. Ultimately, it is the personal experience which tri­ umphs when statistics fail to impress. At a Senate hearing on aid to refugees, Hillela's documentation is flawless, but the Senators remain skeptical. Only when she passes around a picture of her child (hers and Whaila's) and explains the situation do they understand. Her child is well cared-for and healthy, but if she were in Africa as a refugee there, "... her life would depend on a handout of soup powder, the installation of a well to give her clean water, and a clinic to immunise her against disease" (SN, 253). One can read about things in books, but authentic experience is where the true stories come from, the kind that make an impact, as Hillela knows. And the narrator often tells us (mockingly?): "Trust her!"

For Hillela to know something, it must be an experience of her body. Her point of reference is in fact her body; she records her life in her memory according to events she 174 experiences first-hand. Reading books is fine, but that is past experience, something someone has recorded for others to read about. Hillela is more concerned with what happens now. After Whaila's death, she travels to Eastern Europe, and in a conversation with Karel, a veteran of wars and revolutions, she tells him what the difference was between herself and Whaila as she sees it: "For me, everything hap­ pens for the first time, for him everything grew out of what had already happened. I just think about how to manage; the way people do it, wherever you find yourself" (SN, 232). Hillela is adaptable, a survivor because she deals with how to manage and get on with her life, and this has been her focus all the while. Her relationship with Whaila opens up the possibility of considering the past and reminiscing as she does here. The immediacy of experience and its impor­ tance for her is not diminished; another dimension is added to her life, that of a shared past with Whaila and all its unrealized possibilities. It is Hillela's cousin Sasha who relates her need to experience things first-hand to her body in a letter he writes her from prison: "You were always in the opposite state. You received everything through your skin, understood everything that way" (SN, 330). Hillela is a sexual being. Making her way in the world, she understands those experiences best which she receives through her skin. Her awareness of her body is not unnatural coming from a 175 woman who lived in a state unnaturally preoccupied with bodies, skin color, hair, and "relative thickness and thin­ ness of lips" (SN, 185). Accordingly, Judie Newman explains Hillela's apparent promiscuity in a different light: "Only sexual love remains as a touchstone of integrity, whether personal or political. In South Africa the laws that govern African lives are based on the body (. . .) and therefore have to be fought through the body."24 Hillela's early years were spent in a home where revolution was the subject of conversation. Her own experience of revolution later on is when she marries a black man and has a daughter. On a personal level, Hillela makes the revolution happen in this relationship. She gets beyond the barriers set up by laws of skin and hair by refusing to acknowledge categories of people, but at the same time, it is her compulsion to dif­ ference that causes her to continue her search for the "rainbow family" she had with Whaila. This "rainbow family" is part of her vision of utopia. The body is the locus of this experience and memories are tied to the experiences of skin and hair. The relationship of the past to the present and ultimately to the future is grounded in Hillela's experi­ ences. The novel's progression through time is based on remembrance of the past (the narrator's, Hillela's, other

characters'). The narrator often moves quickly through a

24Newman, 99-100. 176 broad range of events taking place over a period of time only to go back to pick up the details. Often the narrator presents various views of Hillela and her experiences and documentât ion about her only to retrace these steps through time and give a more knowledgeable account of what has hap­ pened. Throughout the novel, Hillela's past is brought into focus in line with her presence on that platform in Cape Town at the end. Hillela herself may not show great inter­ est in where she comes from, but that is an integral part of her story which the narrator does not ignore. Hillela's early history is comprised of being shuffled from one boarding school to another and from one aunt to another after her mother leaves her and her father for a Portuguese fado singer in Mozambique. Hillela seems quite equal to the challenge of adapting to her surroundings and fitting in, and the aunts (Olga and Pauline) seem to be good substitute mothers. Olga makes sure her family celebrates the traditional Jewish holidays to make Hillela feel at home, and Pauline includes her in every level of family life. But when the teenage Hillela and her friend Handy decide to hitchhike from Johannesburg to the beach in Durban one day without telling anyone, Pauline decides she needs to do some mothering to find out what Hillela thinks. Pauline shows her some trinkets and photos her sister Ruthie (Hil­ lela's mother) left behind. Her motive is to reach this girl who seems to have no sense of morality or anchoring in 177 a shared past: "Pauline had decided what was needed was to fill up the vacuum of the past so that the young life could take root in the grit of the present" (SN, 48). Hillela finds a picture of her mother among the things and after looking at it, offers the photo to Pauline. This photo, like her mother's drafts of mildly pornographic letters to her Portuguese lover she discovers are rejected and thrown away, a part of the past Hillela has no desire to carry with her in the present. The narrator does not drop Hillela's connection to her past though. Her identity as Ruthie's daughter is cited by Pauline after Hillela leaves South

Africa: "Attached herself to some man— that's what it was all about. He was the one who had to go" (SN, 128). Pauline sees Hillela's fate tied to a man like her sister was to her Portuguese singer. For Pauline, history repeats itself. We are reminded throughout the novel though that Hil­ lela's past did not begin and end with her mother's defec­ tion from the family. Hillela's Jewish heritage remains with her everywhere she goes: in her name and in her iden­ tification with the cause of black liberation in South Africa. The relevance of black people's exile from South Africa to the fate of Jews in Europe is made quite compell-

ingly in the novel. When Pauline agrees to house a black family for a night on their way out of South Africa just 178 ahead of the police, the narrator makes the connection between Jews and blacks in Pauline's thoughts:

The spectacle of the woman with her open-mouthed sleep­ ing baby on her back, trooping into the kitchen, the two other children dressed for the journey to exile in white knee-socks, as if for the only occasions the young woman had to go by, roused in Pauline some sort of atavistic consciousness of like journeys she herself with her children could have been propelled on— the panic of pogroms, the screech of cattle trains leaving a last station, the crawl of the homeless along the roads of war. (SN, 79-80)

Black activists forced into exile for their attempts to overthrow the racist government of South Africa bring to mind the history of the Jews who fled Germany or were killed at the command of a fascist government. Gordimer, through her narrator, brings together two racist regimes and the oppression of Jews and blacks in different times and places in this one image of a family preparing to leave their home. In a horrifying way, the past is ever present, despite the shift to another continent. Pauline is the subject of this remembrance, but Hillela is also confronted with the history of Jews in her life. Hillela's Jewish heritage is evident first of all in her name. We are reminded often of the fact that she was "... named in honour of her Zionist great-grandfather . . ." (SN, 26). Sasha is aware of the history their great­ grandfather brought with him to South Africa and the burden 179 that places on them as heirs. This heritage is that of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, as we read in one of Sasha's letters:

There has been madness since the beginning, in the whites. Our great-grandfather Hillel was in it from the moment he came up from the steerage deck in Cape Town harbour with his cardboard suitcase, landing any­ where to get away from the Little Father's quotas and the cossacks' pogroms. It's in the blood you and I share. Since the beginning. Whites couldn't have done what they've done, otherwise. (SN, 336)

Sasha sees the pogroms as an excuse to turn another group into the oppressed. Their great-grandfather was free to beat blacks when he stepped off that ship because he was no longer the one being beaten. Such psychology is not a part of Hillela's awareness. Sasha is driven by his guilt for being white, but Hillela does not categorize people in such terms, and she does not feel the white liberal guilt as Pauline or Sasha do. Instead she sees the connection between the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust and the blacks in South Africa, but not until she is confronted with the evidence of the Holocaust after Whaila's murder. Hillela travels to an Eastern European country after Whaila's death where she is an acceptable guest being the widow of a slain ANC leader. An older "revolutionary," Karel, befriends her, and one day at his house, she discov­ ers something she does not recognize among his memorabilia. Karel must explain it to her: 180

Don't you see? The label is still there. Like a can of beans. It's Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in their death chambers. It was issued with— what'd you call it— rations to the camp commandants.— . . . I was with the Russians who went in when Berlin fell. Host of Hitler's men had fled but we opened doors and found some. One had this can on his desk. . . . A sample. Something to (. . .) play with, while talking on the phone. (SN, 236)

Karel keeps the can among the pictures of friends and family to remind him of the way the gas was used for killing "as some ordinary . . . commodity" (SN, 236). Hillela's response to this is to cry, and Karel knows she is not crying only for all the families and children killed in the Holocaust, but for her Whaila, killed by white South African secret p o l i c e . 25 whaila's death is just one among many blacks who die fighting the South African government. Here too, the narrator goes one step further and associates the deaths of Jews and blacks only to conclude: "The necessity to deal in death, no way out of it, meeting death with death, not flowers and memorials, was just coming to the people among whom she had grown up" (SN, 237). In the struggle people will die, and in South Africa, whites will die as well as blacks. The tragedy of thousands upon thou­ sands of deaths in the name of an idea of racial superiority

is present to Hillela in the death of her husband. She

25see also Peck, 87. He maintains that Hillela is crying for herself. 181 knows that "... killing is killing, violence is pain and death," no matter if it happens on a kitchen floor or in a gas chamber. Although Hillela rewrites her story for a while to include a Portuguese father, she never totally leaves her Jewish heritage behind. She is always Hillela, namesake of her great-grandfather and Rabbi Hillel even if she is Kim to her schoolmates at the boarding school and later Chiemeka to the outside world when she is Reuel's wife. Whaila's death though marks a point of reference for Hillela around which her life afterwards revolves. For those who knew her before Whaila and did not see her until she was the wife of a prom­ inent African leader there is a lacuna of the sort explana­ tions cannot erase. The narrator tells us; "They did not understand that even if she had not been hit, the little beach girl was buried" (SN, 225). Even her old friend and lover Arnold grieved for the old Hillela (SN, 226). Hil­ lela's reason for living had become Whaila and the family they would make together, the "rainbow family." Now she makes a place for herself in the movement that can possibly help that come about, even without Whaila, if on a different scale. Hillela uses her abilities to adapt and survive to move on (the image of the wandering Jew comes to mind). She casts aside the girl she was and steps forward with the con­ fidence of a woman who has experienced the closeness of death. 182 Even in exile Hillela continues to live in the here and now, but she is reminded often of the past in her memories of Whaila and her vision of the "rainbow family." But the here and now is also the history happening around her, and even if she seems impervious to the changes going on in the world as a child and teenager, the narrator links Hillela's life with events outside her immediate experience in the course of the novel. In fact, Hillela's life spans that of the Nationalist government and its apartheid regime and beyond, into the future.26 But the most striking parallel between Hillela and the world around her is in the narrator's habit of link­ ing Hillela's experiences with those of other people. Her body, her point of reference for all she experiences, is the vehicle for our recognition of what happens in the world by means of this narrative strategy. After she leaves Pauline and Joe, she becomes pregnant at age 19. The narrator des­ cribes her experience thusly: "While electric currents were passing through the reproductive organs of others, Hillela had an abortion" (SN, 118-19). What Hillela experiences is inside her body while the torture is outside her experience. In a similar manner, the narrator ties together the birth of her daughter, Nomzamo, to the celebration in the streets outside in Ghana. We are reminded by this contrast of inside and outside of the narrator's approach to Hillela;

26cf. Temple-Thurston, 178. 183 first telling us what appearances are and then what she experiences inside her. In this way, Hillela is tied to history even though she claims she knows only that which she experiences.

In the later chapters of the novel, we learn of Hil­ lela's family's fate in the form of letters her cousin Sasha writes her from his jail cell. She never receives them to read what has become of Sasha, Pauline, and Joe, but they serve to inform us of what changes have occurred in the anti-apartheid movement and what contrast there is between their lives. For Sasha, these letters are an attempt to explain what happened long ago and what is happening to him now. They are, in part, confessional in nature, but they also reveal the deep commitment Sasha has for the anti­ apartheid cause. His writing of these letters is his way of understanding where that commitment came from and how he will continue with his life if he receives a long jail sentence.

In an earlier note to his mother (written in anger and frustration), Sasha expresses a concept of utopia and its necessity in order to continue with the struggle:

Without utopia— the idea of utopia— there's a failure of the imagination— and that's a failure to know how to go on living. It will take another kind of being to stay on, here. A new white person. Not us. The chance is a wild chance— like falling in love. (SN, 194) . 184

All of Pauline's and Joe's work, like Rosa Burger's and other whites' activities in the anti-apartheid movement seems futile to Sasha if they cannot envision a fundamen­ tally different South Africa with a different kind of white person, one who is not dependent on the colonial past for a position in Africa, but one who is part of Africa in the present and future. Sasha recognizes Hillela as this new kind of white per­ son. If anything, Hillela succeeds in changing the course of her life and her future by not recreating the past in her family. She is quite pleased with herself:

Satisfaction sank deep as the cool moisture that existed under the parched sand: not to have reproduced herself, not to have produced a third generation of the mother who danced away into the dark of a nightclub, the child before whom certain advantages lay like the shadow of a palm tree, the aunts who offered what they had to offer. (SN, 202)

Hillela's hope for the future is in her family. First it is with Whaila and the child Nomo, later it is with the "rain­ bow family" of a multi-racial African society. Because she did not reproduce herself, she can cut the ties to her past. Her life can begin with Whaila. The irony is that Hillela cannot keep her little rainbow family together: Whaila is killed, and Nomo becomes a model who lives in Europe instead of Africa. Indeed, Nomo has a decidedly European identity. 185 while Hillela remains tied to the African continent and her search for the "rainbow family." The connection between the novel's title and its main character becomes clearer at this point. We first encounter a girl unconcerned with events around her, going with the flow, so to speak. The quote which precedes the beginning of the novel, a definition of lusus naturae. sport of nature, would seem to apply here. Hillela is one who "exhibits abnormal variation or a departure from the parent stock or type. . ." (SN). She seems unaffected by her Aunt Olga's wealth and likewise her Aunt Pauline's activism. She is unconcerned about her affair with Sasha, even upon discovery. In short, Hillela's reactions to people and events strike us as unnatural, but it is her ability to adapt to situations and her inability to categorize people that carries her on in life and makes her a new kind of white person. Hillela may travel to Europe and the US, become engaged to a wealthy white man, and have all the com­ forts she could wish for, but she still returns to Africa to stand alongside another black man on that platform in Cape Town.

Hillela's story is an expression of hope that there are "sports of nature" out there somewhere among the whites of South Africa. Hillela has the innate qualities to be a new kind of white person which are brought out in her relation­ ship with Whaila. Whaila reminds her of her heritage as a 186 South African white: "You were born in sin, my love, the sins of your white people" (SN, 216). And as she climbs out of her bath (the baptismal water!), the narrator proclaims:

"But saved. She knows how to look after herself. She climbed out of the bath and he wrapped her in a towel tenderly, as if she had just been baptised" (SN, 216). Hil­ lela is born again in her marriage to Whaila; her future is secure.

Hillela's ability to adapt and her refusal to see dif­ ferences in people because of their skin color are her major character traits. Indeed, she delights in this compulsion to difference. Barbara Temple-Thurston demonstrates how

Gordimer turned around the concept of color-consciousness in the novel:

Gordimer's borrowing of this term from South African writer Sarah Gertrude Millin is deliberately ironic. Preaching racial purity in the early 1900s, Millin asserted that those who deny having "colour conscious­ ness are, biologically speaking, sports." . . . Hil­ lela's color consciousness, however, delights in dif­ ference and combines with her sensual nature to brand her a "sport of nature." Ironically, then, Gordimer inverts the negative value to become a desirable value, for Hillela is the only White in the novel who can adapt, mutate so to speak, and therefore find a place in Africa.27

To provide a contrast to Hillela, Gordimer gives us a pic­

ture of the white liberals, Pauline and Joe. They leave

2 7Temple-Thurston, 181. 187 South Africa when they no longer can understand why blacks refuse their help. Their color-consciousness is obvious and they have never overcome the differences in peoples' skin colors. Hillela always had a disregard for such differences and she moves on in life taking this sense with her wherever she goes.

Hillela's guest for the "rainbow family" is ultimately outside her body. With Whaila's deaths she leaves behind her own "rainbow family" and works for the realization of a greater multi-racial family in Africa. She rejects Brad, her American fiancé, because the relationship strikes her as being too much like incest. Brad is, in other words, too much like Sasha, another white man. The difference she experienced in her relationship with Whaila cannot be found in a marriage with Brad. Also, Hillela would receive US citizenship and a place in the present if she stayed with him: "Once married to a bona fide citizen of a country already existing and not still to be won back, there is full citizenship of the present"! (SN, 270). Hillela has been living for the future though, and not for settling down in the present. Then there is Reuel, the African leader in exile, fighting to regain control of his country after a military coup supported by the former colonial power. Hillela's attraction to him is based in part on her perception of his ability to help make the "rainbow family" happen. Hillela 188 is there with him as he fights for his country, an uncommon sight in the refugee camps and militaary outposts. When they finally marry, Reuel renames her by giving her an African name: Chiemeka Hillela. It means the same as his name, but in a different language: "'God has done very well'" (SN, 314). 'Hillela' becomes a name of intimacy which the two use between them, but to the outside world she is an African in name as well. Hillela steps into her role as the President's wife with all the assuredness of someone who has practiced for the role. The narrator is unclear about much that happens in her life now, but knows what Hillela has brought with her from her past to be able to fulfill her new calling. Again, she adapts to her surroundings, accepting her husband's other wives and children by allowing them to live in and visit Government House. She creates the semblance of the "rainbow family" although it is not (SN, 322). From her time as the nanny to a French diplomat's children (and his mistress) she brings a sense of protocol and decorum befit­ ting the wife of a head of state. She slips on the dress sense she learned from her shopping trips with Olga instead of running around Government House in jeans and sandals (SN, 319). And from her past too comes perhaps the impetus for activism learned from Pauline and Joe, yet aware that the rules have changed and their roles have been long since revised. Despite Hillela's persistence in casting off her 189 past, part of her ability to adapt to new situations lies in recalling stored-up memories of ways to survive. The past is with her in another way too. In her hus­ band's, the President's, new country there are vestiges of the past as the narrator points out to us. Reuel allows the Lebanese shopkeepers to remain, and there are still enemies of the state who need to be imprisoned. The narrator links this post-colonial country with the practices of former colonial powers: "Of course there is a prison where indi­ viduals designated Enemies of The People are held. As a prisoner in another country once wrote, there surely have to be such places? The rendezvous just and unjust keep, in turn. Every power has to put away what threatens it?" (SN, 344). What is so unusual about a government that expels a foreign journalist for an unfavorable story? The narrator makes the point that some things never change because one wants to protect what one has achieved whether one is the President of an independent black state or white Nation­ alists in apartheid South Africa. The image here is rather pessimistic. Whaila's country

(South Africa) will hardly become Hillela's utopia because there will still be prisons and white industrialists will still make a profit despite a change in leadership.28 But the pessimism of the last pages of the novel is not the note it ends on. The conclusion of the novel, when Hillela

28peck, 90. 190 mounts the platform a watches the ceremony proclaiming a new South Africa, is a vision of the future of a South Africa without apartheid. We can read Judie Newman's following statement as an answer to that pessimism: "If the futuristic conclusion to the novel appears somewhat Utopian, it is possible that this is deliberate strategy on Gor­ dimer 's part— to compose an ending to encourage just such an ending to the present Republic of South Africa."29 In New­ man's view, A Sport of Nature is to be understood as a work containing the impetus for change in South Africa. In my opinion, the ending, as a projection of the future, is a product of the desire for a multi-racial South Africa as well. It is not by chance that Hillela stands on that plat­ form. She embodies that new white person that Sasha spoke of and that presumably will be able to stand next to repre­ sentatives of a majority-ruled South African government. There will be the white bankers and businessmen there, ready to sell T-shirts and soda, but this is not their celebration because the struggle was not theirs. Hillela is a member of the minority of whites who are able to take part in the celebration because she has been a part of the struggle evi­ denced by Whaila's blood on the kitchen floor. Just as in Burger's Daughter though, Gordimer is not telling us what to do next in A Snort of Nature. Her vision of the future as expressed in the novel is not conclusive

29Newman, 95-96. 191 just as Rosa's future is not. Susan Greenstein concludes her review of A Sport of Nature: "She has written a novel grounded in the particularities of the present which tells us what one road to the future might look like."30 How does Gordimer get on this road to the future though? These "par­ ticularities of the present" are grounded in the past as well. By creating a narrative in which the past is recalled, the present flows into the future or a hope for it. Hillela may well realize by the end of the novel that there is no way to move on into the future without dealing with the past. For Hillela, it is a question of identity and her ability to adapt. The past is carried into the

future as a reminder (her name and her heritage) and a tool (her diplomatic skills, dress sense). On a larger scale, the same can be said for institutions like prisons and secret police which survive revolutions. The narrative of

the novel links the past to the future by means of remem­ brances in the present. Hillela's story is told as one great remembrance in order to discover how she moves through her life. The narrator must sift through the lacunae and the misleading statements in order to bring Hillela to the future. In the end, her life as a "sport of nature" is redeemed by this act of narration. Hillela emerges as the new white person worthy of the celebration.

30Greenstein, 4. 192 Gordimer took Hillela past the ending of Burger's Daughter and Rosa's imprisonment for two reasons. First, Hillela is a very different person than Rosa. This is even underscored when Rosa appears in A Sport of Nature as a girl consulting Joe, a lawyer, about her parents' defense (SN, 23). She is younger than Hillela, but more composed, like an adult. She listens to Joe attentively and concentrates on what he has to say. One concludes that this is certainly one of the faithful just from the way Pauline treats her honored guest by serving her a snack. Secondly, Rosa tells her story from her perspective in Burger's Daughter, but Hillela hardly ever speaks directly in the narrative of A Sport of Nature. When she does, it is an assertion of her person as a being in history (e.g. SN, 129). She does not explain her actions to the reader, nor reflect on the past as Rosa does with first-person narra­ tion. The key difference between the two narratives is con­ tained in a reflection by the narrator at the end of A Sport of Nature. In Burger's Daughter. Rosa believes that one is always addressing someone, but here we are told different;

If it is true that the voice of a life is always addressing someone— for the religiously devout it is a god, for the politically devout it is the human mass— there is a stage in middle life, if that life is fully engaged with the world and the present, when there is no space or need for reflection. The past is not a haunting, but was a preparation, put into use. (SN, 354) 193

It can be said that Lionel haunts Rosa until she can finally lay his ghost to rest upon her return to South Africa. She addresses Lionel, but then the narrator takes over and tells us what happens to Rosa. She then moves into the fullness of the present as she works with the black children and goes to prison. Hillela has reached the stage in her life where Whaila no longer haunts her. She has gotten beyond Rosa; Hillela's story has a future where Rosa's has only a hope for one. The difference in time between these two novels is just eight years, but in those eight years we have witnessed the escalation of violence and resistance to the minority government in South Africa. We move from the late 1970s when Black Consciousness challenged whites' role in the anti-apartheid struggle to the late 1980s when the hope for a multi-racial solution to the problem of minority government captured the attention of many as demonstrated in the popularity of the United Democratic Front in South Africa. Gordimer's novels grew out of such situations as her response to the pressing questions of her day. The nar­ rative strategies Gordimer employs point to the importance of history, both personal and political. Experience is the material of which these stories are made, and through them, Gordimer gives us a glimpse of what future experiences may be in South Africa. CONCLUSION

Although they were created more than forty years apart and on different continents. Das siebte Kreuz. Transit. Burger's Daughter, and A Sport of Nature have authors in common who express their responsibility in society as storytellers in the creation of their narratives. Nadine Gordimer and Anna Seghers both created narratives for a com­ munity to explain and to give direction. They recalled the history of their people and their countries in order to pre­ sent possibilities for the future. Seghers' and Gordimer's narratives reflect this process both structurally and thematically. We are challenged to consider the past and its impact on the present and the future in the course of their narratives. The tradition of storytelling demands that the teller create from experience; Seghers and Gordimer have not shirked that responsibility either. As in the case of Ben­ jamin's storyteller, we may well ask at the end of any of these novels: "Wie mag es weitergehen?" The art of Gor- dimer's and Seghers' storytelling lies in the redemptive quality of the narrative in which hope for the future is conveyed.

194 195 Seghers as well as Gordimer did not allow her work to be subservient to a particular movement or type of litera­ ture. Seghers reacted strongly against a kind of enforced socialist realism that prescribed and proscribed how a literary work was to be written. Much in the same way, Gor­ dimer stressed the artists' freedom from self-censorship to be able to create a relevant work based on his/her experi­ ence. For Seghers and Gordimer, it is important that the writer be committed to the story he/she tells. In Gor­ dimer 's opinion, that commitment arises when the author does not censor him-/herself in writing about South Africa. Seghers' commitment had its political as well as literary side. Being anti-fascist was not simply being against some­ thing, rather it meant seeing the possibilities for the future based on a commitment. This in turn had ramifica­ tions for literature. As Gordimer put it, no writer of any worth can defend fascism (The Essential Gesture. 291).

Like the characters they created, Seghers and Gordimer are present in their works as remembering subjects, follow­ ing their convictions and creating from experience. Ben­ jamin's concept of the storyteller and its roots in Jewish messianic thought help to clarify just what kind of sub­ jectivity is needed to create stories which present an alternative to the here and now or a way out of the chaos in the present. The storyteller can only function as a part of society, sharing her stories with anyone who will listen. 196 Seghers and Gordimer have not abandoned that responsibility as writers in the twentieth century. Indeed, the need for Gordimer's and Seghers' stories becomes apparent in times of crisis such as those of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. Their novels contain a vision of the future which is grounded in a view of history that is not pessimistic, but filled with hope. Benjamin's crisis of storytelling is averted in these two authors' works. The reality they depict is that of the contemporary world as seen through memory. The message in the novels is one of hope for that world. BIBLIOGRAPHY

I . Primary Literature A. Anna Seghers 1. Novels Das siebte Kreuz. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1975. Transit. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1978. 2. Essays, Letters, Interviews "Brief an Peter Engel." WeiB-Blatter. Diskussionsforum und Mitteilunasoraan fur die am Werk von Ernst WeiB inter- essierten 1 (April 1973): 1. Briefe an Leser. Berlin: Aufbau, 1970. "Ein Briefwechsel zwischen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs." Schmitt, Die Expressionismusdebatte 264-301. "Gesprach mit Anna Seghers." Sinn und Form 38.2 (1986): 268-73. "Gesprach mit Anna Seghers." Weimarer Beitrage 16.11 (1970): 10-13. Gesprache. With Gunther Caspar. Berlin: Aufbau, 1980. Gewohnliches und aefahrliches Leben: Ein Briefwechsel aus der Zeit des Exils 1939-1946. With Wieland Herzfelde. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986. Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts. Leipzig: Reclam, 1983. (Doktorarbeit, Heidelberg, 1924.) Letter to Hans Peter Schmidt. 19 June 1968. ts. Folio 107. Anna-Seghers-Archiv. Berlin. "Letter to Hermann Kesten." Deutsche Literatur im Exil: Briefe europaischer AUtoren 1933-1949. Ed. Hermann Kesten. Vienna: Verlag Kurt Desch, 1964. 48-49.

197 198

Letter to Klaus Müller-Salget. 17 January 1974. Anna- Seghers-Archiv. Berlin. über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit. 4 vols. Ed. Sigrid Bock. Berlin: Akademie, 1971-79. "Vorwort zu der tschechischen Ausgabe von Transit (1950).” ts. Folio 530. Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Berlin. B. Nadine Gordimer 1. Novels Burger's Daughter. New York: Viking Penguin, 1980. A Sport of Nature. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988. 2. Essays, Interviews "English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa." Aspects of South African Literature. Ed. Christopher Heywood. London: Heinemann, 1976. 99-120. The Essential Gesture: Writing. Politics and Places. Ed. & Intro. Stephen Clingman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. "An Interview." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. M.J. Daymond & Margaret Lenta, eds. Pietermaritzburg, S.A.: U of Natal P, 1984. 32-34. Interview. With Jannika Hurwitt. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Sixth Series. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1984. 239-79.

II. Secondary Literature A. Anna Seghers 1. General Albrecht, Friedrich. "Zwischen den Grenzpfahlen der Wirk­ lichkeit: Zur Todesproblematik bei Anna Seghers." Weimarer Beitràge 36.1 (1990): 118-39. Auwera, Berold van der. "Das politisch-1iterarische Credo der Anna Seghers." Text und Kritik 38 (1973): 8-12. Batt, Kurt. "Anna Seghers." Deutsche Literatur im Exil 1933-45. Vol. 2. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenaum, 1974. 310-38. 199

Anna Seghers: Versuch über Entwickluna und Werk. Frankfurt a.M.; Rôderberg, 1973. "Auswahlbibliographie zu Anna Seghers 1924-1972." Text und Kritik 38 (1973): 31-45. "Erlebnis des Umbruchs und harmonische Gestalt. Der Dialog zwischen Anna Seghers und Georg Lukacs." Dialog und Kontroverse mit Georg Lukacs. Der Methodenstreit deutscher sozialistischer Schriftsteller. Ed. Werner Mittenzwei. Leipzig: Reclam, 1975. 204-248. "Staatsklassikerin Anna Seghers." Deutsche Studien 14 (1976): 69-76. . "Unmittelbarkeit und Praxis: Zur asthetischen Posi­ tion von Anna Seghers." Positionen: Beitràge zur marxistischen Literaturtheorie in der DDR. Ed. Werner Mittenzwei. Leipzig: Reclam, 1969. 134-78, 623-28. . "Vertreterin der Gegenaufklarung." Neue Deutsche Hefte 155 (1977): 655-58. "Zum Tode von Anna Seghers am 1. Juni (1983)." Neue Deutsche Hefte 30.3 (1983): 664-67. Batt, Kurt, ed. über Anna Seghers: Ein Almanach zum 75. Geburtstag. Berlin: Aufbau, 1975. Bruhns, Helgard. "Zwischen Realismus und Idéologie: Zum Roman der Anna Seghers." Text und Kritik 38 (1973): 13-19. Bunten, Kathleen Anne. "Isolation and Solidarity in the Early Works of Anna Seghers." DAI 39 (1978): 905A. Ohio State University. Cernyak, Susan E. "Anna Seghers: Between Judaism and Com­ munism." Spalek, 278-85.

Diersen, Inge, et al. Lexikon sozialistischer deutscher Literatur von den Anfanoen bis 1945. Gravenhage: Eversdi]ck-boek en druk, 1973. Eichmann-Leutenegger, Beatrice. "Anna Seghers: '. . . das mogliche Diesseits des Jenseits. . . .'" Frau und Mut­ ter 11 November 1984: n.p. Franz, Marie. Die Darstellung von Faschismus und Antifas- chismus in den Romanen von Anna Seghers 1933-1949. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1987. 200

Gutzmann, Gertraud E. G. "Schriftsteller und Literatur: Ihre gesellschaftliche Funktion im Werk von Anna Seghers, 1935-1947." Diss. U of Massachusetts, 1980. Haas, Erika. Idéologie und Mvthos: Studien zur Erzàhlstruktur und Sprache im Werk von Anna Seghers. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1975. Heist, Walter, ed. Anna Seghers aus Mainz. Mainz: Krach, 1973.

Horning, Use. "Aus dem Briefwechsel der Autorin." Weimarer Beitràge 16.11 (1970): 13-17. "In Memoriam Anna Seghers." Sinn und Form 35.6 (1983): 1154-70. Jax-Laufen, Eugenie. "Die 1iteraturtheoretische Position der Anna Seghers wahrend der Exilzeit 1933-1945." Staatsprûfung (Lehramt). Aachen, 1975. Kessler, Peter. "Anna Seghers und der Realismus L. N. Tol- stojs und F. M. Dostoevskjis." Weimarer Beitràge 16.11 (1970): 18-61. Kessler, Peter, and Irene Wegner. "Ethos und epische Welt: Anna Seghers." Schriftsteller und literarisches Erbe: Zum Traditionsverhàltnis sozialistischer Autoren. Ed. Hans Richter. Berlin: Aufbau, 1976. 284-355. Kurzke, Hermann, "Anna Seghers im Exil: Ihr Briefwechsel mit Wieland Herzfelde." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10 May 1986: n.p. Leistner, Bernd. "Warten und Wartenkonnen. Beobachtungen zu einem Leitmotiv im Werk von Anna Seghers." Zeitschrift fur Germanistik 4 (1980): 389-97. Mytze, Andreas W. "Von der negativen Faszination: Das westdeutsche Seghers-Bild." Text und Kritik 38 (1973): 20-30. Neugebauer, Heinz. Anna Seghers: Leben und Werk. Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1978. Petersen, Jan. "Anna Seghers: Gestalterin unserer Zeit." Die Weltbühne ns 2.4 (1947): 159-63. . "Anna Seghers: Gestalterin unserer Zeit." Die Weltbühne ns 2.5 (1947): 211-14. 201

Richter, Hans. "Der Kafka der Seghers." Sinn und Form 35 (1983): 1171-79. Rilla, Paul. "Die Erzahlerin Anna Seghers." Die Dichter des sozialistischen Humanismus. Portràts. Ernst Tol­ ler. Friedrich Wolf. Bertolt Brecht. Johannes R. Bec- her. Anna Seghers. Louis Fùrnbera. Ed. Helmut Kaiser. Munich: Dobbeck, 1960. 80-96. Rittinghaus, Johanna. Anna Seahers. Leben und Werk. Leip­ zig: Verlag fur Buch und Bibliothekswesen, 1954. Roggausch, Werner. Das Exilwerk von Anna Seahers 1933-39: Volksfront und antifaschistische Literatur. Munich: Minerva, 1979. Roos, Peter, and Friederike J. Hassauer-Roos, eds. Anna Seahers: Materialienbuch. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977. Rosenberg, Curt. "Anna Seghers und ihr Werk." Geist und Zeit 5 (1960): 134-55. Rühle, Jürgen. "Gefahrten am Kreuzweg." Literatur und Revolution. Ed. Jürgen Rühle. Cologne, Berlin: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1960. 243-55. Sauer, Klaus. Anna Seahers. Autorenbücher 9. Heinz Ludwig Arnold & Ernst-Peter Wieckenberg, eds. Munich: Beck, Edition Text & Kritik, 1978. Stephan, Alexander. "Arme Seghers." Basis 8 (1978): 227- 29.

"'Ich habe das Gefühl, ich bin in die Eiszeit geraten . . .* Zur Rückkehr von Anna Seghers aus dem Exil." Germanic Review 67.3 (Summer 1987): 143-52. "Künstlerische Anschauung und politischer Auftrag." Zeitkritische Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts: Die Gesellschaft in der Kritik der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Hans Wagener. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975. Wolf, Christa. "Glauben an Irdisches." Lesen und Schreiben: Aufsatze und Prosastücke. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1972. 83-111. 2. On Specific Works a. Das siebte Kreuz 202

A. A. "Der Film 'Das siebte Kreuz.'" Freies Deutschland 4.5 (1944/45): 28. Andreassen, Eva A. "Faschismus als ideologisches Angriffsziel und als dichterischer Gegenstand. Anna Seghers im Exil— ihr Leben und ihr Schaffen unter be- sonderer Berûcksichtigung der Romane Der Kopflohn und Das siebte Kreuz." Diss. University of Oslo, 1988. Becher, Hubert. "Ein falsches Kreuz," Wort und Wahrheit 3.10 (1948): 776-77. Beicken, Peter. "Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz (1942)." Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Paul Michael Lùtzeler. Konigstein/Ts.: Athenaum, 1983. 255-72. Brandt, Sabine. "Vor der Abdankung." Rev. of Das siebte Kreuz. by Anna Seghers. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 28 November 1962: n.p. C. "Ein Sieg deutscher Kunst." Rev. of Das siebte Kreuz. by Anna Seghers. Internationale Literatur 13.10 (1943): 2-3. Cowley, Malcolm. "The Soldier and the Saint." Rev. of The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers. The New Republic 28 September 1942: 385-86. "Der Erfolg von Anna Seghers' 'Das siebte Kreuz.'" Freies Deutschland 1.12 (1941/42): 39. Diersen, Inge. "Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz." Weimarer Beitràge IS.xii (1972): 96-120. Frey, Peter. "Auf der Suche nach einem Nazi-KZ in Rheinhes- sen." Neue Deutsche Literatur 28.11 (1980): 92-102. Greenberg, Clement. Rev. of The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers. The Nation 17 October 1942: 388-90. J. W. "Hitler-Deutschland, wie's wirklich ist— Anna Seghers' 'Das siebte Kreuz.'" Einheit (1943): 9. Kaufmann, Harald. "Anatomie einer Flucht: 'Das siebte Kreuz' von Anna Seghers in einem westdeutschen Verlag." Neue Zeit (Graz) 22 February 1964: n.p.

Maren-Grisebach, Manon. "Anna Seghers' Roman 'Das siebte Kreuz.'" Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert. Vol. 1. Ed. Manfred Brauneck. Bamberg: Buchners, 1976. 283-98. 203

Mayer, Paul. Rev. of Das siebte Kreuz. by Anna Seghers. Freies Deutschland 2.1 (1942/43): 16. Motyljowa, Tamara. "Unangreifbar und unverletzbar: Bemerkungen zu Anna Seghers' Roman Das siebte Kreuz.” Trans. Klaus Ziermann. Weimarer Beitràge 17.9 (1971): 153-68.

Palitzsch, Peter. "Ein notwendiger amerikanischer Film." Die Weltbühne ns 9 (1954): 1614-16. Prescott, Orville. Rev. of The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers. New York Times 23 September 1942: n. p. "Prisoner Escaping: The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers." The Times Literary Supplement 20 Feb. 1943: 89. Roha. "Anna Seghers' Roman 'Das siebte Kreuz.'" Inter­ nationale Literatur 13.9 (1943): 78-79. Sillen, Samuel. "The Seven Who Fled." Rev. of The Seventh Cross. by Anna Seghers. New Masses 29 September 1942: 22-23.

Stephan, Alexander. "Concentration Camps in Exile Litera­ ture: The Case of Osthofen." Trans. Leslie Shouse- Luxem. Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 5_(1988): 109- 20. "Ein Exilroman als Bestseller: Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross in den USA." Exilforschuna: Ein Inter­ nationales Jahrbuch 3 (1985): 238-59. Stuart, John. Rev. of The Seventh Cross and Interview with Anna Seghers. New Masses 16 February 1943: 22-23. Straub, Martin. "Heislers Weg in das 'gewohnliche Leben': Zur Wirklichkeitsaufnahme in Anna Seghers' Zeitge- schichtsroman Das siebte Kreuz." Helmut Brandt & Nodar Kakabadse, eds. Erzahlte Welt: Studien zur Epik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Aufbau, 1978. 210-33. Winckler, Lutz. "'Bei der Zerstorung des Faschismus mitschreiben'. Anna Seghers' Romane Das siebte Kreuz und Die Toten bleiben iuna." Antifaschistische Litera­ tur. Ed. Lutz Winckler. Konigstein/Ts.: Scriptor, 1979. b. Transit 204 Berendson, Walter A. "Henschenware.” Allgemeine Wochen- zeitung der Juden in Deutschland 4.13 (1949/50): 7. Bilke, Jorg B. "Sturz aus der Geschichte? Anna Seghers' Roman 'Transit.'" Die deutsche Exilliteratur 1933- 1945. Ed. Manfred Durzak. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973. 312-25.

Boll, Heinrich. "Gefahr unter falschen Brûdern. Heinrich Boll über Anna Seghers: Transit." Der Spiegel 18.16 (1964): 114-15. Brandt, Sabine. "Anna Seghers— Glanz und Elend: Der Roman 'Transit' und die 'Erzàhlungen.'" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25 April 1964: Literaturblatt. dpa Buchbrief/Kultur. "Anna Seghers: Transit." Rev. 21 May 1964. ts. Folio 135. Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Berlin. Gutzman, Gertraud. "Bei Gelegenheit der Transit-Lektüre: Die Erzahlkonzeption der Anna Seghers." Faschis- muskritik und DeutschlandbiId. Christian Fritsch & Lutz Winckler, eds. Berlin: Argument, 1981. 178-91. Hans, Jan. "'Der Krise ins Auge sehen . . ': Annaherung an 'Transit.'" Anna Seghers; Text & Kritik. Munich: Edition Text & Kritik, 1982. 27-42. Hebbeln, Hanna. "Realhistorie und ihre 1iterarische Verar- beitung in Anna Seghers' Exilroman 'Transit.'" Diss. n.p., 1978.

Mayer, Paul. Rev. of Transit. by Anna Seghers. Freies Deutschland 3.8 (1943/44): 29. Müller-Salget, Klaus. "Totenreich und lebendiges Leben: Zur Darstellung des Exils in Anna Seghers' Roman Transit." Wirkendes Wort 27 (1977): 32-44. Schüler, Gerhard. "'Transit': Zu Anna Seghers' Roman." Gottinger Tageblatt 3 May 1964: n.p. Sellenthin, H. G. "Vom Elend des Exils: Anna Seghers' Flüchtlingsroman 'Transit' erscheint im Westen." Telegraph am Sonntag (Berlin) 29 December 1963: n.p. Szépe, Helena. "The Problem of Identity in Anna Seghers' Transit." Orbis Litterarum 27 (1972): 145-52. "Transit Visa. By Anna Seghers." The Times Literary Sup­ plement 19 January 1946: n.p.. 205

Wagner, Frank. "Transit-Lektùre im Jahre 1969.” Weimarer Beitràge 15 (1969); 149-67. Walter, Hans-Albert. "Zeitgeschichte, Psychologie des Exils und Mythos in Anna Seghers' Roman Transit. Anmerkungen zu Interpretationsproblemen bei der deutschen Exilliteratur." Ruth Dinesen, et al., eds. Deutschsprachiaes Exil in Danemark nach 1933. Zu Meth- oden und Einzeleraebnissen. Copenhagen, Munich: Fink, 1986.

Wolf, Christa. "Transit: Ortschaften." Sinn und Form 38.2 (1986): 258-67. W. T. "Mit groBartiger Schlichtheit." Rev. of Transit, by Anna Seghers. Westdeutsche Allgemeine (Essen) 18 July 1964: n.p. B. Nadine Gordimer 1. General Boyers, Robert, et al. "A Conversation with Nadine Gor­ dimer." Salamagundi 62 (1984): 3-31. Boyle, JoAnne Woodyard. "The International Novel: Aspects of Its Development in the Twentieth Century with Empha­ sis on the Work of Nadine Gordimer and V.S. Naipaul." DAI 45 (1984): 524A. University of Pittsburgh. Clingman, Stephan. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. Hemel Hempstead, Herts.: Allen and Unwin, 1986.

"Writing in a Fractured Society: THe Case of Nadine Gordimer." White & Couzens 161-74. Cooke, John L. "African Landscapes: The World of Nadine Gordimer." World Literature Today 52 (1978): 533-38. "Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bib­ liography 36 (1979): 81-84.

. "The Novels of Nadine Gordimer." DAI 37 (1977): 4346A. Northwestern University. . "Out of the Garden: Nadine Gordimer's Novels." Design and Intent in African Literature. David F. Dor­ sey, Phanuel A. Egejuru, & Stephan H. Arnold, eds. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1982. 17-27. 206

Driver, Dorothy. "Nadine Gordimer: The Politicisation of Women." English in Africa 10.2 (1983): 29-54. Gerver, Elisabeth. "Women Revolutionaries in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing." World Literature Written in English 17 (1978): 38-50.

Gorman, G. E. "The M o d e m South African Novel in English: A Selective Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses." Research in African Literatures 10 (1979); 383-93. Green, Robert J. "Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism." Bulletin of Bibliograohv 42.1 (1985): 5-11. "Nadine Gordimer: 'The Politics of Race.'" World Literature Written in English 16 (1977): 256-62. Haugh, Robert F. Nadine Gordimer. New York: Twayne, 1974. Heywood, Christopher. Nadine Gordimer. Windsor, Eng.: Pro­ file Books, 1983. Lazarus, Neil. "Modernism and Modernity: T. W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature." Cultural Critioue 5 (1986-87): 131-55. -Laredo, Ursula. "African Mosaic: The Novels of Nadine Gor­ dimer." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 8.1 (1973): 42-53.

Lomberg, Alan. "Writing in the Truth: The Romantic Realism of Nadine Gordimer" English in Africa 3.i (1976): 1- 12. Newman, Judie. Nadine Gordimer. London: Routledge, 1988.

Roberts, Sheila. "Nadine Gordimer's 'Family of Women.'" Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts. Humanities and Social Sciences (Natal, S.A.) 60 (1983): 45-57. Smyer, Richard I. "Africa in the Fiction of Nadine Gor­ dimer." Ariel: A Review of International English Lit­ erature 16.2 (1985): 15-29.

"Risk, Frontier, and Interregnum in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer." The Journal of Commonwealth Litera­ ture 20.1 (1985): 68-80.

Special Issue on Nadine Gordimer. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 19.4 (1988). 207

Visel, Robin. "Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer's Colonial Heroines." Ariel 19.4 (1988): 33-42. Wade, Michael. Nadine Gordimer. London & Ibadan: Evans Brothers Ltd., 1978. 2. On Specific Works a. Burger's Daughter

Boyers, Robert. "Public and Private: On Burger's Daughter." Salamagundi 62 (1984): 62-92. Daymond, M. J. "Burger's Daughter: A Novel's Reliance on History." Daymond, Momentum 159-70.

Greenstein, Susan M. "Miranda's Story: Nadine Gordimer and the Literature of Empire." Novel: a Forum on Fiction 18.3 (1985); 227-42. Heinemann, Margot. "Burger's Daughter: The Synthesis of Revelation." The Uses of Fiction: Essavs on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle. Douglas Jef­ ferson & Graham Martin, eds. Milton Keynes, England: Open UP, 1982. Newman, Judie. "Prospero's Complex: Race and Sex in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 20.1 (1985): 81-99. Roberts, Sheila. "South African Censorship and the Case of Burger's Daughter." World Literature Written in English 20.1 (1981): 41-48. Smith, Rowland. "Allan Quatermain to Rosa Burger: Violence in South African Fiction." World Literature Written in English 22.2 (1983): 171-82. b. A Sport of Nature

Greenstein, Susan. "Laws of Skin and Hair." Rev. of A Sport of Nature, by Nadine Gordimer. The Women's Review of Books 5.2 (November 1987): 1, 3-4. Howard, Maureen. "The Rise of Hillela, The Fall of South Africa." Rev. of A Sport of Nature, by Nadine Gor­ dimer. New York Times Book Review 3 May 1987: 1, 20, 22. Horstmann, Ulrich. "Hingabe mit Haut und Haaren: Nadine Gordimer's Roman 'Ein Spiel der Natur' und ihre Essays 208 ZU Politik und Literatur." Die Zeit 46 (13 Nov. 1987): 26. Kraus, Jennifer. "Activism 101." Rev. of A Sport of Nature, by Nadine Gordimer. The New Republic 18 May 1987: 33-36. Peck, Richard. "What's a Poor White to Do? White South African Options in 'A Sport of Nature.'" Ariel 19.4 (1988): 75-93. Tempie-Thurston, Barbara. "The White Artist as A Sport of Nature." Studies in Twentieth Centurv Literature 15.1 (1991): 175-84. Thurman, Judith. Rev. of A Sport of Nature, by Nadine Gor­ dimer. The New Yorker 29 June 1987: 87-90.

III. Literary Theory and Criticism Adorno, Theodor W. Àsthetische Theorie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Arato, Andrew, Eike Gebhardt, & Paul Piccone. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1982. Bahr, Erhard. "Georg Lukacs's 'Goetheanism': Its Relevance for his Literary Theory." Georg Lukàcs: Theory. Cul­ ture. and Politics. Ed. & intro. Judith Marcus & Zontan Tarr. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989. 89-95. Barnouw, Dagmar. "Exil als allegorie: Walter Benjamin und die Autoritàt des Kritikers." Exilforschuna 3 (1985): 197-241.

Bathrick, David, et al., eds. Critical Theory and Modern­ ity. Spec. Issue of New German Critique 26 (1982): 3- 228. . Modernism. Spec. Issue of New German Critique 22 (1981): 3-188. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols.. Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann Schweppenhauser, eds. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972-89. Berman, Russell. "Lukacs' Critigue of Bredel and Ottwalt: A Political Account of an Aesthetic Debate of 1931-32." New German Critique 10 (1977): 155-78. 209 Brooks, Peter. "The Taie vs. The Novel." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 21.2 & 3 (1988): 285-92. Burger, Peter, ed. Seminar: Literatur und Kunstsozioloaie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Pre­ senting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Prin­ ceton UP, 1978. Durzak, Manfred. "Der moderne Roman: Bemerkungen zu Georg Lukacs' Theorie des Romans." Basis 1 (1970): 26-48.

Fehér, Ferenc. "Is the Novel Problematic? A Contribution to the Theory of the Novel." Trans. Anne-Marie Dibon. Telos 15 (1973): 47-74. Gerulaitis, Renate, ed. Oakland Symposium on Socialist Realism. Rochester, MI: Oakland U, 1975. Goldberg, Michael. Theolocrv and Narrative: A Critical Introduction. Nashville: Abingdon, 1982. Habermas, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwolf Vorlesunaen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Horkheimer, Max, & Theordor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklàrung. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1969. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism. Mass Culture. Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Centurv Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.

Lowy, Michael. "Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe (1900-1933). Trans. Renée B. Larrier. New German Critigue 20 (1980): 105-15. Lukacs, Georg. "Es geht um den Realismus." Schmitt, Die Expressionismusdebatte 192-230.

Essavs on Realism. Ed. Rodney Livingston. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. . Theorie des Romans: Ein aeschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der aroBen Epik. Neuwied & Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971. 210

Lunn, Eugene. "Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler; A Comparison of Brecht and Lukàcs." New German Critique 3 (1974): 12-44. Mayer, Hans, ed. Deutsche Literaturkritik der Geaenwart: Vorkriea. zweiter Weltkriea und zweite Nachkrieaszeit (1933-1968). Stuttgart: Goverts, 1971. Mittenzwei, Werner, "Der Streit zwischen nichtaristotelis- cher und aristotelischer Kunstauffassung. Die Brecht- Lukâcs Debatte." Dialog und Kontroverse mit Geora Lukàcs: Der Methodenstreit deutscher sozialistischer Schriftsteller. Ed. Werner Mittenzwei. Leipzig: Reclam, 1975. 153-203. Rabinbach, Anson. "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism." New German Critique 34 (1985): 78-124. Schmitt, Hans-Jùrgen, ed. Die Expressionismusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeotion. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976. Der Streit mit Geora Lukàcs. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. Schmitt, Hans-Jürgen, & Godehard Schramm, eds. Sozialistis- che Realismuskonzeotionen: Dokumente zum I. Allunions- konqreB der Sowietschriftsteller. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. Thüsen, Joachim von der. "Der Begriff des Erzahlens und die Form des Romans." DAI 32 (1972): 5754A. Stanford University. Weimar, Klaus. Anatomie marxistischer Literaturtheorien. Bern: Francke, 1977. Witte, Bernd. "Benjamin and Lukàcs. Historical Notes on the Relationship Between Their Political and Aesthetic Theories." New German Critique 5 (1975): 3-26. Wohlfarth, Irving, ed. Second Special Issue on Walter Ben­ jamin. New German Critique 39 (1986): 3-232.

IV. Literature and the Historical Context A. Contemporary South Africa 211

Adey, Alberk David. "South African English Literature, 1945 to 1975: A Vision of the Customary." DAI 42 (1982): 3996A-3997A. University of South Africa. Brink, André. "Writing Against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa." World Literature Today 58.2 (1984): 189-94. Brutus, Dennis. "English and the Dynamics of South African Creative Writing." English Literature; Opening Up the Canon. Leslie A. Fiedler & Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. 1-14. Coetzee, A. J., Tim Couzens, and Stephen Gray. "South African Literature After World War II." Gérard 173-250. Coetzee, J. M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Daymond, M. J., J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta, eds. Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Pietermaritzburg: U Natal P, 1984. Gérard, Albert S., ed. Eurooean-Language Writing in Sub- Saharan Africa. 2 vols. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadô, 1986. Heywood, Christopher. Aspects of South African Literature. London: Heinemann; New York: Africana Publishing, 1976. Kunene, Daniel P. "Ideas Under Arrest: Censorship in South Africa." Research in African Literatures 12.4 (1981): 421-39. Lazarus, Neil. "Modernism and Modernity: T.W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature." Cultural Critigue 5 (1986): 131-55. Leach, Graham. South Africa: No Easv Path to Peace. London: Methuen, 1987. Malan, Charles. "1981: Literature and Context in South Africa." South African Literature 1981 (1983): 9-20.

Mermelstein, David, ed. The Anti-Apartheid Reader: The Struggle Against White Racist Rule in South Africa. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Moyana, T. T. "Problems of a Creative Writer in South Africa." Heywood 85-98. 212

Nkosi, Lewis. "South Africa: Black Consciousness." Gérard 454-50. Parker, Kenneth, ed. The South African Novel in English: Essavs in Criticism and Society. New York: Africana, 1978. Povey, John. "South African Writing: Critical approaches." Into the 80's: The Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of African Studies. Vol. 2. Donald I. Ray, et al., eds. Van­ couver: Tantalus Research Ltd., 1981. Rich, Paul. "Liberal Realism in South African Fiction 1948- 1966." English in Africa 12.1 (1985): 47-81. . "Romance and Development of the South African Novel." White & Couzens 120-37. White, Landeg, and Tim Couzens, eds. Literature and Societv in South Africa. New York: Longman, 1984.

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