Monatshefte | 2021
Karl Wolfskehl: A Poet in Exile. By Voit Friedrich. Lyttelton: Cold Hub, 2019. 231 pages + 33 b/w images. NZ$40.00.
Abstract
these latter frameworks are indeed discussed by the author, but this is one of a number of respects in which the book seems to obscure its subject matter by an excess of theory. The central chapters of the book deal with a succession of authors and texts. The selection is far from obvious. No Walter Flex, no Arnold Zweig, but (departing from Germany) Henri Barbusse’s Le feu, and (departing from World War I itself) Christian Kracht’s recent novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008), which deals with a fantastical war that has never ended. In between we have chapters on the more familiar ground of Ernst Jünger (In Stahlgewittern, Sturm), Erich Maria Remarque (Im Westen nichts Neues, Der Weg zurück), and Werner Beumelburg (Die Gruppe Bösemüller). The chapters are all densely argued and thoroughly researched, so that, despite the very particular theoretical perspective the author has created, his interpretations will be required reading for all students of the material. Rather than go into the discussions of specific works, I want to skip to the concluding chapter, which finally speaks to the first part of the book’s title, for it becomes clear here that, despite all the references to Rosa and Virilio, the project’s true spiritus rector has all along been Karl Heinz Bohrer. In a long footnote to his essay on the “absolute present,” Bohrer blithely dismisses all 20th-century literature with socio-historical emphasis as lacking a “contemplative structure” and hence as belonging merely to the “higher journalism.” (His acclaimed models of a truly aesthetic literature are Woolf, Beckett, and Kafka. “Zeit und Imagination. Das absolute Präsens der Literatur,” in Bohrer, Das absolute Präsens. Die Semantik ästhetischer Zeit, Frankfurt 1994: 158.) Significantly, among the novels that are found wanting is Im Westen nichts Neues. Waßmer’s final chapter reverts to Bohrer’s basic distinction, and in his concluding pages he runs through the texts he has discussed, asking in turn whether they succeed in meeting the criteria of a truly aesthetic status. Unsurprisingly, the answer for most of the novels is negative. Again unsurprisingly, the exception is Jünger, who is stated to have achieved a genuine “Ästhetik der Beschleunigung”; it was of course primarily Bohrer who discovered Jünger the aesthete of war in his Die Ästhetik des Schreckens (Munich, 1978). The result is a book that may be of great interest to readers concerned with aesthetic theory, but is perhaps of less interest to those who are concerned with the war itself. One is left instead with the impression of war narratives being subjected to a test that the authors would probably have rejected as irrelevant to their intentions. Bohrer’s essays frequently read like extended applications of Schiller’s principle that the true measure of aesthetic quality is that the form must “crush” (vertilgen) the subject matter. To think, as Waßmer does, that this principle, expounded in Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in 1795, could still have had validity for authors who had survived the horrors of the Western front and felt the need to tell their story seems (and with all due respect to the eminent Mr. Bohrer) something of a stretch.