Master of German prose

Started by Jaakko Keskinen, November 06, 2018, 09:02:20 AM

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Jaakko Keskinen

I have often heard (and read) the accusation that while German literature is full of great poetry and dramas, prose hasn't had a single one truly great master, comparable to Hugo or Proust in France, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in Russia or countless candidates from English language. Do you agree or disagree with it? What would be your potential candidates for one(s) who have mastered it?

Mine would be probably Thomas Mann and Ludwig Tieck. Goethe's prose style is rather dry in a bad way at times which wouldn't make me consider him as a candidate. Kafka I have not read yet (his works count as German literature, right?). Hesse is ok, I guess but I wouldn't put him as high as Mann or Tieck.

Mann's writing style reminds me of Dostoyevsky in some ways yet it has much originality in it. He may not be the most quotable writer but that's part of what makes him great - don't get me wrong, I love quotes but a change once in a while is refreshing and on the other hand quotes often throw ideas at reader but he uses ideas in a more subtle and ambiguous way, he doesn't outright say things are like that or that. This leaves more things for the reader to decide him/herself.

Tieck may be considered an odd choice by some but I really like his novellas and other stories. The Old man of the Mountain is a masterpiece.

"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Kafka certainly. Robert Musil (of Man without Qualities fame) certainly makes my list. Rilke, on the basis of his one novel (Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).

I prefer Hesse to Mann, but both are contenders. How about ETA Hoffmann? his influence on subsequent writers was huge.

There are a number of oddball candidates who stand out for distinctive style &/or subject matter, such as the Austrian Thomas Bernhard and the Swiss Robert Walser.

Some of the best stylists in German were actually philosophers (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche).
formerly VELIMIR (before that, Spitvalve)

"Who knows not strict counterpoint, lives and dies an ignoramus" - CPE Bach

Cato

Ludwig Tieck easily hovers at least around the top, not just for style, but also for content!  Der blonde Eckbert is one of the greatest stories in any language.

Thomas Mann, a qualified yes, especially for Der Zauberberg and Doctor Faustus.  It is a qualified yes, because every time I peruse the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers I wonder how much per word he was paid! 

Ironic phrasing is one thing, ouroborotic periphrasis  ???  is another!

I will offer more later!
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Florestan

Hesse is a better stylist than Mann imho --- and more romantic, too. :) They are both giants of German-language literature.

Other good candidates otomh: NovalisEichendorff, Theodor Storm, Paul Heyse, Joseph Roth (Austrian).

Luther, perhaps?
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

ritter

Hermann Broch definitely deserves mention here, I'd say.

mc ukrneal

Never read any of these in the original, but I never connected with Mann. Kafka was pretty awesome. And I always enjoyed ETA Hoffman. I also agree that many philosophers were quite good writers. Though, they did have a tendency to go on a bit. A bit.
Be kind to your fellow posters!!

pjme

#6
Thomas Mann's "Lotte in Weimar" is such great, elegant, poetical, sad novel. The portrayal of Goethe is masterly..

Siegfried Lenz (1926 - 2014) is definitely worth mentioning. I recently read (translated - my German is shaky) "Deutschstunde" (1960) OCLC 887072907 (English: The German Lesson, trans. E. Kaiser and E. Wilkins, 1968). A subtle yet strong novel about "the merits of duty"....
"The story of a young boy and his friendship with Nansen, an artist whose paintings were condemned as 'degenerate art' and shares many features with the painter Emil Nolde, it unfolds as a series of reflections as the narrator tackles an essay entitled 'Duty as Joy' which he has to write as a punishment. Its apparent simplicity covers a wide range of moral and ethical issues explored elsewhere in Lenz's work as he endeavoured to 'take preventative actions against any danger of a recurrence' of the Hitler era, as he declared in his acceptance in 2000 of the Goethe Prize, awarded to him on the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth."
Source:https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2014/10/a-german-lesson-for-europe.html

Ken B

Well, I haven't read any of those mention per in German. In English Mann comes across as a master of prose: detached, ironic, clear. My goal in learning German is to DinV in German; I am not there yet.


Biffo

Thomas Mann thought Nietzsche was the greatest writer of German prose

JBS

Quote from: Ken B on November 06, 2018, 01:23:38 PM
Well, I haven't read any of those mention per in German. In English Mann comes across as a master of prose: detached, ironic, clear. My goal in learning German is to DinV in German; I am not there yet.

Was meinen Sie? DinV kenne ich nicht im Englisch oder Deutsch.

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

Ken B

#10
Quote from: JBS on November 06, 2018, 03:46:20 PM
Was meinen Sie? DinV kenne ich nicht im Englisch oder Deutsch.
Der Tod in Venedig, genau genommen.

JBS

Quote from: Ken B on November 06, 2018, 04:16:54 PM
Tod in Venedig, genau genommen.

Ach, es is klar. Sie wollen TiV auf Deutsch lesen.
Aber sagen Sie
Quoteis to DinV in German
Sterben Sie in Venedig! ?
Hoffentlich nicht so!


Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

Ken B

Quote from: JBS on November 06, 2018, 04:22:52 PM
Ach, es is klar. Sie wollen TiV auf Deutsch lesen.
Aber sagen SieSterben Sie in Venedig! ?
Hoffentlich nicht so!
Alles, was ich muss tun, ist nicht am Venedig gehen! 

Mandryka

Has anyone here managed to read The Death of Virgil? Or indeed any other Hermann Broch.

I've enjoyed some Mann, and I've enjoyed some Kafka. But the German prose write I've enjoyed the most is Alfred Dönlin's  Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

mc ukrneal

Be kind to your fellow posters!!

Ken B

Quote from: mc ukrneal on November 06, 2018, 10:50:06 PM
Perhaps this will be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_German_Novels_of_the_Twentieth_Century

I am surprised to find that without ever having much interest in German literature of the 20th century, I have read 7 of the top 10! Of course that's because it's filled with Kafka and Mann. I did really like The Radetzky March.

ritter

#16
Quote from: Mandryka on November 06, 2018, 08:39:06 PM
Has anyone here managed to read The Death of Virgil? Or indeed any other Hermann Broch.
...
I've read two (Pasenow oder die Romantik and Esch oder die Anarchie) of the three volumes of The Sleepwalkers , as well as one of the fragmentary versions (Demeter) of Bergroman. I found all of these extraordinary in every sense. Beautifully written, and really insightful. First-rate novels, IMHO.

I've also read some of Broch's essays, e.g. his text on Joyce for a university course many, many years ago. But that is too far back for me to currently give an opinion.

I started The Death of Virgil three time IIRC, but never made it past the first 50 pages or so. Seine Zeit wird kommen, I suppose (and hope)  ;).

Biffo

Quote from: Mandryka on November 06, 2018, 08:39:06 PM
Has anyone here managed to read The Death of Virgil? Or indeed any other Hermann Broch.

I've enjoyed some Mann, and I've enjoyed some Kafka. But the German prose write I've enjoyed the most is Alfred Dönlin's  Berlin Alexanderplatz.

No and No - got about one-third the way through The Death of Virgil. Only managed one-quarter of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Read quite a lot of Mann (in English)

Florestan

Quote from: Ken B on November 06, 2018, 11:55:18 PM
I did really like The Radetzky March.

Joseph Roth is a great writer indeed. Do try the sequel to TRM, Der Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb).
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Cato

Quote from: Florestan on November 07, 2018, 03:01:03 AM
Joseph Roth is a great writer indeed. Do try the sequel to TRM, Der Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb).

From an essay by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street journal:

Quote

The best novels, with only a small number of notable exceptions—"Don Quixote," "In Search of Lost Time," "Ulysses"—have been family novels. "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," "The Brothers Karamazov," "My Antonia," "The Brothers Ashkenazi," "Buddenbrooks," "Joseph and His Brothers," family novels all, provide a deeper pleasure than does most other fiction. Family, as William Shakespeare (author of "King Lear," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth") would have been the first to tell you, is the great literary subject. In this pantheon of great family novels, though it is not so well known as those I've just mentioned, is "The Radetzky March" (1932), a novel written in German by Joseph Roth (1894-1939), a Galician Jew on whose tombstone in France are engraved the words "Ecrivain Autrichien," Austrian Writer.

Michael Hofmann, Joseph Roth's best translator and most perceptive critic, has called "The Radetzky March" "a work that seems to be done in oils." That interesting remark suggests both the splendor of Roth's novel and its feeling of permanence as a work of literature built to last. The reason is to be found not only in Roth's literary craftsmanship, which is consummate, or in the fascination exerted by his characters, which are without exception artfully drawn, but in the grandeur of the novel's theme. That theme is the gradual fall and ultimate demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

"The Radetzky March" takes its title from Johann Strauss Sr.'s famous musical composition, which Roth called "the Marseillaise of conservatism." The novel is the chronicle of three male generations of the Trottas, a Slovenian peasant family that is ennobled when at the battle of Solferino, in 1859, its first-generation figure, the young lieutenant Trotta, is wounded, almost by accident, by a bullet intended for Emperor Franz Joseph. The emperor would eventually reign over the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 68 years, from 1848 to his death in 1916.


Roth's novel is a valediction for the political configuration of an empire that he, a far from uncritical intellectual, came more and more to admire, toward the end of his life calling himself a monarchist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, extending from the border of Russia to those of Serbia, Italy, Germany, Romania and the Adriatic Sea, was an astonishing multinational state, a confederation comprising Bohemians, Poles, Moravians, Slavians, Croatians, Transylvanians and others. Within the Dual Monarchy, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was also called, a true spirit of internationalism reigned: Within it one passed borders without passports, did business without tariff or taxation. Under this arrangement the Emperor Franz Joseph was like unto a god. Simple people kept his photograph on their walls next to that of Jesus Christ.

In "The Radetzky March" the collapse of the Empire is reflected in the fate and changed character of the Von Trottas over three generations: from that of the rugged military virtues of "the hero of Solferino," as the textbooks call the first Trotta, to the rigidity of his bureaucratic son (a district commissioner in Moravia), to the aimlessness of the grandson, Carl Joseph, who will die a senseless death in World War I. It is called World War, Roth remarked, because it changed "the whole world." That war, along with the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles, put paid to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A grand theme can emerge in fiction only if joined to the richness of the highest art. This Roth supplies in abundance. His artistic power extends from commanding sweeping narrative to filling in arresting detail. The most minor character is often sprung to life with a single such detail, like one Captain Lorenz, who "was the father of three children, and the husband of a disappointed wife." The Polish Count Chojnicki is "forty years old but of no discernible age."

Roth captures friendships begun late in life, sexual infatuations contracted early in life. At one point midway in his novel, he writes: "So curious, changeable, and knotted is the human soul." He unknots it throughout the pages of "The Radetzky March," convincingly setting out the thoughts of characters of great intellectual penetration as well as those, like the last of the Von Trottas, "not overly endowed with imagination." Roth's range of characters is dazzling. An entire chapter in "The Radetzky March" is given over to the thoughts of Emperor Franz Joseph, alone in his bed chamber, sensing the end of his empire. Then there are the Jews of the provincial town of Jagers on the Russian border, who by some freak of nature had red hair. "Their beards were like conflagrations."


In a life of only 44 years, Joseph Roth wrote 15 novels and a vast quantity of superior journalism. A spendthrift with heavy expenses—his wife, thought to be schizophrenic and later to be murdered under Hitler's euthanasia program, spent much of her adult life in insane asylums—he worked under the lash of financial pressure all his days. Nothing he wrote was negligible, trivial. But only in "The Radetzky March" did all his impressive powers come fully into play. In that novel he left the most convincing quotidian account we have of life under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, established his literary heritage, and left succeeding generations an imperishable masterpiece.

—Mr. Epstein is author of the forthcoming "The Ideal of Culture and Other Essays" (Axios Press) and "Charm: The Elusive Enchantment" (Taylor Trade), both to be published in 2018.


"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)