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The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany'

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The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany' H-German Buse on Gorra, 'The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany' Review published on Sunday, January 1, 2006 Michael Gorra. The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvii + 211 pp. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-11765-2. Reviewed by Dieter K. Buse (Department of History, Laurentian University)Published on H- German (January, 2006) Travel Writing on Postwar Germany Ulrich Giersch's book, Walking Through Time in Weimar: A Criss-Cross Guide to Cultural History, Weaving Between Goethe's Home and Buchenwald (1999) set Goethe's idyllic house, garden, and literary works against the horrors of the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp. Ralph Giordano, the moralist and philosopher who had previously taken Germans to task for not addressing their past, authored Deutschlandreise: Aufzeichnung aus einer schwierigen Heimat (1998). He too noted the Weimar and Buchenwald contrast as he wandered throughout his country revealing warts and novelties. He acknowledged the difficulties of selection as he criss-crossed the past and the present of his homeland trying to find out what Germans thought. Interwoven with his findings were allusions to earlier literary works, including other travel accounts. He concluded that in 1996 his country was a very different place than during the first half of the twentieth century. Gone were the militarists, the loud antisemites, the horrid jurists, the révanchists, and the profiteers from Rhine and Ruhr whom Kurt Tucholsky satirized so well. Giordano closed by citing Tucholsky on the necessity for "the quiet love of our Heimat" adding a definitive "Ja!" The French travel writer Patrick Démerin in Voyage en Allemagne (1988) wrote just before the Berlin Wall opened. In Bremen he was surprised to find six hundred different German wines for sale in the Ratskeller. He observed that a student drinking and dancing session resembled an American college event because of the music and "absence totale d'aggressivité" (p. 288). He noted Bremen's radical university and left-wing image of the 1970s. By contrast, in the 1987 elections, three right-wing parties offered slogans such as "Germans vote German" over which someone had scrawled: "this is Bremen, not Munich! Here we do not want the politics of a petty people who are mountain savages from the edge of the Alps" (p. 293). He concluded "J'ai trouvé peu trace de nationalisme dans mon voyage" (p. 416). Instead, people were attached to their region and Heimat, but also to Europe, and had taken up the task of the responsible citizenship that Giordano had advocated, including preventing the horrors their country had once inflicted. Much earlier the Israeli writer Amos Elon inIn einem heimgesuchten Land. Berichte aus beiden Deutschland (1965) retold what he had encountered as a journalist traveling Germany's major cities. The rebuilt land evinced newness but many of the old traits and attitudes remained. He found a "peculiar land: on the one hand one finds old Nazis, who teach as professors at nearly every university; on the other hand there is no other European country in which academics with openness and cool relaxedness try to demonstrate the national insanity of the past for the criminality which it was" (p. 60). Twenty years later in a postscript to a reprinted edition, he admitted that, like most Jews going to Germany, he sought ghosts and had brought some along with him. Further, he had far overestimated the right-wing nationalists and underestimated the building of new mentalities. With Citation: H-Net Reviews. Buse on Gorra, 'The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44469/buse-gorra-bells-their-silence-travels-through-germany Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German the Bundesrepublik, he concluded, Germany had made a "break" with its previous history. None of the travelogues cited above are mentioned in the book under review. Numerous people from many countries have written reflective and informed travelogues on post-World War II Germany. The occasional Russian, some French, many Germans, and a few Anglo-Americans have shared their experiences and reflections. The usual travel writing mimicking the path an author has followed while selectively reporting encounters with people and places in Germany exists, even if in Michael Gorra's view no Anglo-American has written in the style of a Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson. Opening his book with a discussion of the fog which a solitary figure high on a hilltop surveys in a Casper David Friedrich painting, Gorra asserts "this curious fact: nobody in the Anglo-American world writes travel books about contemporary Germany" (p. xiii). He acknowledges Jane Kramer's and others' reportage. He applauds Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts but "Fermor found no companions: my shelves stayed empty when I went looking for some Teutonic equivalent of Mary McCarthy's Venice Observed or V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness" (p. 35). Gorra's way of looking is odd and selective, and gives no answer as to why Anglo-American travel writers might be more pertinent than others. Early in this book the author admits "there were some books that I would have liked to have read, if only my German were good enough" (p. 36). He notes that Heinrich Heine's Harz Journey is available in English, but neither his letters nor Theodor Fontane's Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg are. Yet, Gorra asserts that Heine's Harz is "one of the most engaging books in all German literature" (p. 124). He acknowledges going to Germany with little understanding of the language: "I had learned some German by then, enough at least to buy groceries, to make reservations, and to chat with the patient and well-disposed" (p. xv). Later he reveals more about his understanding of the language and the limits of translation: "I can't make it through anything more than the simpler of the children's books" in German but adds "however did Sebastian Faulks's First World War novel, Birdsong, get to be called Gesang vom grossen Feuer, song of the great fire? That's a book I know well, but seeing it in translation gives me a flicker of uncertainty: is it still the same story?" (p. 108). Instead of finding out, he buys books in German to give other people because "I struggle my way through a dust jacket and hope that back home I'll be able to find a translation of Adalbert Stifter. And yet I know that my sense of these writers will remain at best an approximation, while the real thing is kept behind closed doors" (p. 109). This is the substance of the author's own admission regarding the field of literature, the area on which he is supposed to have expertise. So why should he be a source for understanding present-day German culture, its sociology, its history, its outlook and especially the people with whom he cannot converse? Travel writers offer observations. When in Berlin Gorra comments about the city: "It's got too many parks and rivers, most of its buildings are low, and even before the bombing of the Second World War its urban fabric wasn't especially tight, not compared to Paris, say or even to London" (p. 133). One may wonder what "tight urban fabric" means, or its validity if the claim is understood, but he continues "So one spring afternoon I came up into the air at Sophie-Charlotte Platz, wondering who she'd been" (p. 133). Thereafter he wanders the area: "bought a roll at an organic bakery, drank a bottle of water, got bored. Nothing about the area looked promising, it was too far from our hotel and too drab, a neighborhood of one-man shops, in which all custom is local. There wasn't even a Turkish fruit stand" (pp. 133-34). Looking for the exotic--his simple Turkish version of it actually exists in the very blocks he wandered--Gorra encounters the Hohenzollern palace. This structure he finds "unexpectedly attractive" but "not nearly so grand as the ones that many lesser princes had built for Citation: H-Net Reviews. Buse on Gorra, 'The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44469/buse-gorra-bells-their-silence-travels-through-germany Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German themselves; Prussian thrift" (p. 134). Offering a stereotype instead of telling the reader that the elegant palace is two blocks long is an odd observation. But not as odd as saying "I had been there a few months before, wandering through a series of china-encrusted state rooms and then out into its compact park--nothing I needed to see again" (p. 134). Much of the west wing of that palace contains the superb displays of Berlin's pre-history museum, which is worth several visits--unlike the "china- encrusted state rooms." Secondly, the "compact" park is actually about two kilometers in length and nearly one in breadth with lakes, many trees and walkways in addition to a formal garden with fountains. Odd too that the "nothing" he needed to see again seems to include one of the world's great Egyptian collections, including the Nefertiti bust (since moved), across the street near the fine Berggruen collection of Picassos, Matisses and Klees. Regarding geographic information, in Gorra's description the suburb of Dahlem is moved to "the far west" from the southwest of Berlin.
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