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

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

Regarding geographic information, in Gorra's description the suburb of Dahlem is moved to "the far west" from the southwest of Berlin. Hamburgers may be surprised that their city "lies eighty miles up the Elbe" (p. 42) instead of fifty. He comments on the German language, unable to imagine aspects of it being spoken softly (p. xv). With regard to German beds he finds that they do not allow for cuddling. In this he may be right about the old ones, but can he really conclude that sleeping arrangements "prevent any meeting in the chilly middle ground" (p. 33)? As a foreigner Gorra is sometimes fearful of being attacked as an outsider. Some of this fear is primarily indicative of news reports from when he traveled, namely in the late 1990s. Some of it reflects his account of his preparations for the stay, namely reading a few books on "national character" and seeking other travelers' accounts. For some of his friends Germany is "creepy," and he suggests those who are Jewish are right to stay away (p. 100). In his view once "past the idea of Oktoberfest, the words 'enjoy' and 'Germany' don't, for an American, seem to belong together" (p. xiv). As he offers his views of German history and coming to terms with it, Gorra is open with his biases. For instance, he asserts that Essen "should have been ... bombed flat" but then draws back, reflecting on what he has written, yet affirms that "sometimes one should say it" (p. 73). He fulfills this prescription, sadly--despite his many quotations from W. G. Sebald's insights about bombing and morality.

The book's eight chapters review the author's wanderings around some galleries, museums, cafes and tourist sites. He stays in the country's north central areas, exploring parts of six of the sixteen states. He uses almost exclusively Weimar, Hamburg, Berlin, and Lübeck to try to develop themes relating to earlier travel writers. Employing Weimar as a cultural capital, he mentions its many English visitors, such as Thackeray and George Eliot. Then he sets up a dichotomy of Goethe, who advocated travel for education, versus Stendal, who sought pure pleasure. But Gorra mainly contrasts Weimar with Buchenwald, as others have. He quotes many authors such as James Young, Lawrence Langer, and W. H. Auden, then recounts his own feelings. For instance he quotes Young on Fritz Cremer's Buchenwald monument, though leaving the sculptor unidentified while comparing it unfavorably to the Iwo Jima memorial. Hamburg is mostly employed to illustrate aspects of thevie quotidienne (money handling, men's supposed introductory bows, beds) as he experienced it, interspersed again with quotations, for example, from Mark Twain, John Murray, and James Fenton's "German Requiem,"' about destruction and space. Here he raises the question of seeing--as a camera or with the mental eye of what he read in preparation for his stay. He repeats that he learned some German history but "I found nothing that might help me understand, how I, as a traveler and a temporary resident, might deal with that history itself" (p. 37). As in that sentence the first person is ever present as is the Nazi period, "that neutron star into whose bitter gravity all German history seems to fall" (p. 39). He reveals his own outlook by stating that "in remembering my own childhood" before

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. 3 H-German knowing about Auschwitz he had been socialized to think of the country "as something like the Black Death" (p. 40). Everywhere he looks for metaphors and metonymy and he finds that "Germany's most easily discernible distinguishing features assume the shape not of architecture or cuisine or manners but of history. The metonymy with which it is still most surely identified is that of the Third Reich" (p. 41). Though coming early in the book and frequently repeated, that thesis receives few nuanced contours, or as he says, can one write about Germany "without worrying away at The German Problem" (p. 42)? His worrying is the main substance of the book, including that nothing in Germany seems to add up, everything is a combination of extremes, and the peculiarities of its history are confusing. He seems especially bothered when he posits that the past may not be monolithic. "But it is also frightening and for some of us it is perhaps unbearable," he writes, "for it entails as well the belief that the past is or rather was contingent, that it wasn't all inevitable" (p. 51). For instance, regarding a plaque about the wartime removal of Jews in Hamburg, he asks how much should a traveler let such horror weigh on him, and, as expected, answers that "it is, in fact, a part of the great defining peculiarity of Germany's history, one of the most powerful of all the metonymies through which we distinguish it from other lands" (p. 85). Since he has written nothing on German history, one does wonder who the "we" is that he employs numerous times as though he represents some school of thought. Instead of illustrating he goes back to his other topic, the limits and possibilities of travel writing as a genre.

One chapter introduces his wife, his traveling companion, through whom he sees most German art and architecture. He joins her for quick trips to the Harz, Hildesheim, Münster, Magdeburg, Hanover, and many places with Romanesque churches. He takes the opportunity to encounter a bit of the regional Germany of earlier eras but he cannot escape manifestations of the Holocaust. The non- Jewish victims of the era, whether Communist resisters, conservative plotters, Russian prisoners of war, Polish slave laborers, or Sinti and Roma are so lightly noticed, as to have disappeared. The physical descriptions of cities are interspersed with references to other travel accounts, all English ones, and some comments on his inability to come to terms with a very selected German past. In sum, the book is more about the limited topics on which Gorra has read than about what Germany is at present. Mostly it offers the ruminations of an American with a narrowly defined linguistic ability. When in Hamburg, where he lives while his wife is on sabbatical, one would expect him to do as the Teutons do, namely to read Die Zeit or Der Spiegel. Instead his coffee accompaniment is the Herald- Tribune. The book reveals much about being a certain kind of American intellectual, with narrow training; he admits to having studied only English literature and "only in English" before his German stays (p. xiv). Repeatedly, he acknowledges that he cannot quite accept the idea that Germany is more than "a place where evil has happened" (p. 105). As a series of reflective pieces for magazines such as Threepenny Review, American Scholar, and Harvard Review, where much of the book previously appeared, this type of informal writing with grandiose claims and titillation about the Nazi era may work, but for a study published by an academic press it lacks a researched base and seems like a dinner-party soliloquy.

Another chapter travels mostly through the writings of Daniel Goldhagen, Walter Benjamin (the obligatory nod toward Arcades), and W. G. Sebald before his actual exploration of Hauptstadt Berlin. Gorra admits his reading did not prepare him for the "enthralling streets" (p. 144). So he eats out: "I found myself distracted by the full room of expensive, skinny people, out for a night of urban pleasure unmixed with angst--historical angst anyway. Germans enjoying themselves overtagliatelle al salmone and a glass of Pinot Grigio--a frightening idea, perhaps, but I was used to it by now" (p. 144).

Then he marches off into Fontane, comparing what that writer witnessed a century previously at the same spots. Again he fears "that only a part of that [Nazi] past will get dealt with" (p. 155). Again he cannot see beyond facades and Cold War clichés in eastern Berlin: "Through a colonnade came the loud shouts of a school playground, but most of the people out walking were old, and one could also trace the neighborhood's character--as well as the nature of East German health care--in the stores that sold walkers, crutches, and canes" (p. 158). Odd that so many countries, including the United States, had a higher infant mortality rate than the GDR.

Much learning, sometimes tending toward name-dropping, is shown about literary topics. Some are only tangentially related to the subject. Despite the allusions, the book is easy to read, indeed it is presented in fine, if casual, post-modernist style. Given all the personal interjections and attitudes, though, one might hypothesize: how would a biased person from the bombed cities of Vietnam or Iraq with limited knowledge of English see Washington, and would that person repeatedly assert that it is a place where evil has been organized? Or if a German with little English came to the United States and wrote mostly about Indian removal, slavery, and illegal bombing of much of southeast Asia as sins that the present generation should acknowledge in its daily existence, would such a study not be seen as anti-Americanism? Ironically, when the American travel writer Charles Brace went all over Germany to find out about daily life there during the 1850s he encountered questions about the horrid mistreatment of the native Americans and a pastor scolded him: "'God will hold your Fatherland accountable!'" Brace admitted that his "blood tingled to my cheeks with shame" when Prussian "tyranny" was shown to be much milder than American slavery.[1]

Yet, in the end Gorra, despite all his prejudices and limited historical and sociological understanding, seems to hint that some elements of the new Germany captivated him. He admits to being comfortable in the elegance of Hamburg, as a New Englander liking its haughty formality. He seems to identify with the fallen church bells in Lübeck, which figure in his title and in the last chapter. He uses the city and Thomas Mann's writings to chronicle some of the city's merchants' lives, as well as his own. The bells make him think that perhaps some grieving has taken place, though he has difficulty in deciding what it means.

It is difficult to review this book and not to make normative comments. Instead, I suggest that Gorra is simply wrong on so many aspects of the contemporary Germany many others have analyzed, described, and experienced that most informed readers will toss the book aside as arrogant or misinformed. This reaction would be unfortunate insofar as he does pose again the questions of how people should live in the aftermath of genocide and whether ethical behavior in the present can trump imperial and racial actions. The book will perhaps serve later as a historical document that inadequately addresses those difficult issues and especially not the manner in which they have been struggled with in central Europe during the last decades. To return to the surface level at which Gorra mostly operates: one major example of his wrong-headed and wrong-heartedness is his claim that "It's not just the weather that makes it unlikely the bestseller list will ever feature a volume called A Year in Schleswig-Holstein or Under the Nordrhein-Westfälische Sun" (p. 86). Given that the word play is on Peter Mayle's book about Provence and that of Frances Mayes about Tuscany, does the assertion not overlook that Provence and Tuscany only found favor with tourists and artists slowly in the nineteenth century? Further, for five months every year the hiking trails in Provence are closed due to heat and fire danger--while the windswept mini-hills of the delightful and varied countryside of Schleswig-Holstein remain cool though sometimes very wet, but not more than another place

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. 5 H-German glowingly mentioned by Gorra, the English Lake District. Schleswig-Holstein, in the quantity and quality of accessible terrain, palaces, archeological sites and the joys ofWattlaufen , can compare with any place and given changing tastes and global warming may become a new tourist mecca. Perhaps the tradesmen would not be quite so unreliable and the food choices more limited than in Provence or Tuscany, but the beer is always much better in northern Germany and no one prevents visitors or locals from importing Gigondas or Chianti wines. But perhaps Gorra is suggesting that evil did not take place in Europe's south? If that is the point then the local history of Mérindol or Cabrière d'Avignon might be instructive. In such villages the Catholics massacred nearly every Protestant. Did the French slave trade not operate from Marseilles? Was Tuscany not fascist under Mussolini and did no persons from there help to bomb and gas Ethiopians? Anyone with a bit of imagination could do a year or more in Schleswig-Holstein, or find more than sunshine in the Roman ruins of Xanten, the Eifel, and Trier, or examine the Romanesque churches of Cologne or the castles of the Eifel (especially if they had Peter Mayle's funds). Ironically, a travel writer who is not cited by Gorra and who wrote what for its day nearly achieved bestseller status was Johann Georg Kohl,Die Marschen und Inseln der Herzogthümer Schleswig und Holstein (1846; reprint 1973). Gorra might want to consult him as a model since Kohl thinks externals such as wooden shoes illustrate the honesty of people in northwest Germany compared to the criminals on sandals and stockings in Greece and Spain.

Gorra's comment on Schleswig-Holstein merely serves to focus on all he missed in the country with more world heritage sites than any other. Perhaps that resulted from his German travels to mainly a few cities, guided through old English books, though he missed travelers who explored the social realm such as Henry Mayhew's writings about Saxony. However, he must be recognized for trying to grapple with the German past even when he shows little understanding, as opposed to some empathy, for the role of that past in its present. Too often he makes offhand comments without evidence. For example regarding the university system he offers that "everybody agrees [it] is broken," though it still produces Nobel Prize winners, and its graduates are hired in North America (p. 86). He finds the citizenship laws "retrograde" yet overlooks that they were changed in 1999 (p. 93). His assertions about "one of Germany's principal present-day ills, the growth in xenophobia" in the late 1990s should surely be tempered by comparisons from the twenty-first century with the Bush/Blair/Berlusconi countries (p. 77).

Gorra writes: "It is a dangerous business, to read hearts and minds from the look of a street, but that is a chance that any travel writer must take" (p. 158). It is dangerous indeed, but the chance need not be taken at all: one can try to get out of one's own national skin, learn some languages, and talk to people to find out what is in their hearts and minds, one can read polls and compare results on similar questions in diverse lands, and one might even look at the contents of a country's civic education and international actions.

Note

[1]. Charles Brace, Home-Life in Germany (New York: Scribner, 1853), pp. 309, 272.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=11342

Citation: Dieter K. Buse. Review of Gorra, Michael,The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through

Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January,URL: 2006. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11342

Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].