‘DAS BROT,’ THREE POST-WWII GERMAN VOICES: WOLFGANG BORCHERT – LUISE RINSER – HEINRICH B?LL
Guy Christopher Carter
Historical Theologian | Worker in Refugee Resettlement #WomanLifeFreedom
Achtung!? Stream of consciousness memoire up ahead. To avoid, take detour by scrolling down to arrow.
I grew up in a wonderful time and place, after three great wars in which my grandfather, uncle, father and cousins were nearly killed by whiz-bangs and other flying enemy ordnance, trench war diseases, tropical diseases, kamikazes and the Korean winter.?? I was born during the last one and over a decade before the next one, with no war damage to be seen in my country, no rationing and no scars of war on the faces and limbs of people I knew.? Those scars were all due to being kicked by cows, thrown off horses or involved in car accidents long before the invention and widespread distribution and installation of automobile seat belts, and much later shoulder harnesses.? There was a Cold War in Europe and Asia and, one even heard rumors of it in Latin America of which my corner of the world was actually a part, though under US occupation.? It was the 1950s and ‘60s, and in our small town, settled by those Mexicans and Germans whom the Comanche permitted to be there, before the Gringos came, German and Spanish and even Latin were taught in the junior high school and high school.? Spanish, of course, being on the ascendant, as it still is, about to make of the USA the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by the year 2050.? ??Que viva la Raza mestiza y America Unida!? My grandfather and father, WWI and WWII Veterans respectively, and both of them Eng-Span bilingual could see this coming and assumed I would have the common sense to take Spanish in school.?
But, unbeknownst and even incomprehensible to them, my mind processed information differently from theirs, with fascination rather than contempt for all things German, especially since I noticed German still being spoken in the small shops and stores where I lived. Where I lived was an unplanned German settlement going back to the 1840s where, it was said, that those Germans who had arrived at the Port of Galveston on a late voyage from Hamburg or Rotterdam late in the year and were simply too exhausted to go on another fourteen miles north, to a German settlement run by a lunatic Hessian prince and, anyway, that they had never seen Spanish moss hanging on trees before and it reminded them of Sauerkraut and that they were ravenously hungry.? So, the story goes, they stayed.? They got along very well with the Mexicans and combined both their music and their cuisine to good effect andgthey intermarried a lot.? Those ‘Texas-Germans’ had a saying, “Dem Ersten, der Tod.? Dem Zweiten, die Not.? Dem Dritten, das Brot” (‘To the first one [to arrive] death.? To the second one poverty. To the third one, bread’).? As in a great many large US cities, there had been at one time a daily German newspaper in our little town and a German Lyc?um, no less. ?In a fit of WWI-hysteria, ignorance and stupidity presaging that of the Republican dominated Texas Legislature today, these institutions were shut down in 1917 and “the speaking of any Germanic language” forbidden, English being of course one of those.? But, though German culture took a hit In that way American GIs from our town had a habit of marrying pretty German girls while stationed there and bringing them back home.? In any case, the teaching of German, along with the teaching of Spanish, continued whether they liked it up in Austin or not.
Post WWII-Germany was a divided country, half of the Germans our friends and half of them supposed to be our enemies because of the Russians, who definitely were our enemies, and still are.? Because I liked the sound of the language and because all three of my German teachers were really good at what they did (and because I quickly developed a crush on the last one, Fr?ulein K), I became a budding German scholar, though having but a splash of German ancestry.?
What did those German teachers teach us Gringo and Tejano kids there in South Texas, land of prickly pear cactus and mesquite trees and armadillos, but also of pecan groves, cool flowing rivers and Bluebonnets in the spring?? ?Yes, I had Spanish-speaking classmates in all my German classes, something I thought and still think was so incredibly cool—tri-lingualism the world never knew about.? “So, Fulgencia, why are you taking German when you could be acing it Spanish?”? “Because the Gringo Spanish teacher doesn’t know Spanish, and I am bored out of my gourd.”? Good reasons!? Well, here’s what they taught us beyond basic conversation, grammar and diction (at which all three German teachers were merciless sticklers, and at which the Spanish-speakers were better than the Gringo Anglophones).? They taught us poems, proverbs and great literature, treasures I keep with me to this day.?
Frau J, in the seventh grade, with no textbook except the one in her head and on the blackboard (yes, black board), taught us German proverbs, such as Alle Anfang ist schwer (‘Every beginning is hard’) and, Ein geschenktes Gaul guckt man nicht im Maul (‘You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’).? If you learned enough of these, you could do very well at German Bingo, which Frau J had invented, as far as we knew, and win Mexican pecan pralines some Fridays and caramels on others.? She, our first and most venerable German teacher, thought we ought to know how to read printed Gothic typeface (Fraktur) with the complete German alphabet, “in case you want read anything before Hitler,” she said, and I certainly did.?
My next two German teachers, Herr W (8th & 9th grade) and Fr?ulein K (grades 10-12), invited us to concentrate on literature printed in our anthologies in Latin type. Herr W preferred 19th Century authors such as Ludwig Thoma[1] and Theodor Fontane [2] (which would not pass the Texas censors today, at least not his Effie Briest). ?Herr W also taught those of us who wanted to learn Sütterlin cursive script.? Only two of us made a pact to hand in all of our written assignments in Sütterlin, my unforgettable Tejana classmate, the aforenamed Fulgencia, and I.? Fulgencia always impersonating a male Pachuca with her jeans, white T-shirt and ducktail hairdo, was better at German than I at that stage.? I have since imagined her as breaking free from South Texas to join the firm of Baader & Meinhoff [3] GmbH-VEB and the Red Army Faction in Germany on the way becoming a fiery revolucionaria somewhere south of the border with Ché Guevarra and his successors.?
With Fr?ulein K we found ourselves in the 1930s and ‘40s, Post-WWI and Post-WWII German Expressionism in literature and art, and what German artists and authors had to express in those periods was not light fare.? This in a way matched the Saturday afternoon offerings at the local cinema where the manager him- or herself was also attempting to escape South Texas boredom by screening films such as The Miracle Worker,[4] The Sundowners[5] and that great compliment to the Eichmann trials and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, the Swedish documentary film by Erwin Leiser, Mein Kampf (1959/1960),[6] a surprise hit all across the US in the early ‘60s.? The authors assigned to us, her advanced Gymnasiasten as Fr?ulein K called us, were set to reading short stories and chapter excerpts From Thomas Mann,[7] e.g., “Das Wunderkind” (‘The Prodigy’) which I found devilishly hard to translate. ?Mann can hardly be called a minimalist author.?? The Nazis would have been happier had he been a lot more minimal, but unfortunately for them he kept on writing, and even broadcasting, from Princeton, New Jersey.? But Fr?ulein K saved him for later on.?? There were other German Post-WWII fiction authors, of course, one of whom shall remain nameless except in the footnotes.[8] ?
She started La Pachuca and me, and the others in our advanced class, on authors who really were minimalist, as in writing in short sentences or sentence fragments sometimes with very short words, which you don’t always get in German.? This made them both enjoyable to read and easy to translate.? Ah, but had they only given us Hemmingway to read in American Literature class!? There was too much sex in his writing, in all of it, so all we got from Mrs. T was Hawthorne and his Scarlet Letter (!).? ?
These are the three Post-War German authors to whom I would like to introduce you now, at long last.
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Wolfgang Borchert[9]
Fr?ulein K started us out on this very young author whose looks and hairstyle, longer than the Beatles but not quite as long as the Stones, I tried to affect until the high school principal threatened to send me either home or to Mr. Hager’s barber shop.? ?Borchert is sometimes inaccurately described as ‘a nihilist.’? Where do people get these ideas?? The poor fellow found meaning in everything beautiful, in beautiful Geraniums, for instance, in their little window boxes still to be seen adorning many German houses and apartments.? But, in the beautiful and in the joyful, he also found sadness, as in his second-best known story and title of a collection of short stories, Die traurigen Geranien (‘The Sad Geraniums’).? Well, it was World War II and Germany was fighting a barbaric and suicidal war under the command of a complete lunatic tyrant—Who wouldn’t be sad, even if you were just a flower?? But his best known story, at least to all non-native speakers learning German, was and is, Das Brot (‘The Bread,’ or really ‘The Loaf of Bread’), and we all remember the first two sentences, really a sentence fragment and then a complete but very short sentence:
Das Brot.
Das Brot lag auf dem Tisch.
‘The bread.
‘The bread lay on the table.’
On whose table did the bread lay??? It lay on the table of an elderly couple who were starving.? They were part of the great Post-War German and for that matter the great Pan-European mass of orphaned parents in a society structured along almost Japanese or Chinese lines, with children obligated to at least be present for their parents.? But now, in the period of the Allied Air War, 1940-45, and the period after the collapse of the Third Reich and before the introduction of the West Mark in West Germany in 1948, many of the adult and adolescent children were either absent, in POW or other internment camps, vaporized or buried beneath the rubble of the bombing on the home front or the shelling on the battle field, or they had fled to Canada, to the USA or Central or South America, Australia or just anywhere to get away from the land of their birth which had become the land of their nightmares.? But in the story, here the couple sit, alone, perhaps with a dimly burning electrical bulb for light, perhaps with some Ersatz coffee or an onion soup made from a single onion with greens harvested daily.?? Here they sit, and for what?? Borchert wrote this before War’s end and for his trouble was arrested for ‘defeatism’ and sent to the Eastern Front which he miraculously survived, but he did not survive the damage to his body and his psyche for long.
Luise Rinser[10]
Luise Rinser had a phenomenal literary career to match her phenomenal personality, including warmth and empathy which comes through in her memorable Die Rote Katze (‘The Red Cat’), a story about the necessary withdrawal of empathy.? Though she used other writing styles, Die Rote Katze was de facto minimalist.? It is the story of a child’s memory of an unforgettably terrible day.
It is of course about a cat of reddish color, not really a normal color for a cat.? The cat is a female cat, for Tom cats are not called Katze but rather Kater.? Our poor lady cat, who lost her home like everybody else thanks to the American 8th Air Force and British Bomber Command, makes her entrance on a pile of rubble, the target for cruel boys who throw brick shards and pebbles at her, but she is quick and fleet of foot.?
At the same time and nearby, there is a human mother with her three children who is having her own struggle for survival.? Turning her hand to this and that, also working as a Trummelfrau, working on a war damage cleanup team that is salvaging as much brick and stone as possible, she scrapes together barely enough to feed her own family.? And then her kids make a mistake.? The see the red cat being persecuted by the local child-sadists. The two little ones demand that their elder sibling, the narrator, intervene.? The animal torturers being driven off, the red cat herself immediately attaches herself to her rescuers, following them home, purring all the way.? Their mother is aghast in a way the children, the little ones at least, cannot understand.? She insists that the cat be sent away, shewing it herself, but the children prevail.? “How can we feed it?”? the mother asks, “How much can a cat eat?” the children respond.? Before week’s end, they find out.? The feline insinuates itself into the family eats a little of everything, and a little of everything adds up to a lot.? The mother is concerned, truly worried.?
Finally one morning a crisis point is reached.? The mother has managed to buy a little real coffee on the black market, which she has put on to boil, having pre-lactated her cup.? When the coffee is ready, she goes to pour it, but the milk is gone.? The cat has found it and stolen it, and fury ensues.?? In tears the mother orders her eldest to get rid of the cat, so that it will never come back.? He understands.? He picks up the cat who instinctively cuddles, and the little ones follow him out into the frozen ice-encased urban horror-scape.? He tells them to go back.? The little ones will not.? Holding the cat by its hind quarters, he discovers how hard it is to kill, to beat the life out of a living being.? Eventually it succumbs, perhaps, at least no longer crying, thrown into an ice hole in a bombed-out ruin.? He lies awake all night listening to them sobbing into their pillows.
I have never experienced such want, and I hope you have not either, but I did meet people in Germany who had had exactly that experience during the hard decade after Germany’s ‘Hour Zero.’? I remember one woman who proudly showed me her housekeeping book from the introduction of the D-Mark in 1948 to that particular day when I was having coffee in her home in 1990.? She and her husband were among the Silesian refugees from what was Germany on their wedding day but Poland when they left for the West.? Like that little family with the red cat, they had had a crisis of the heart because of the privation of that time.? The housing they were allocated in Hameln was really too small to accommodate the married couple, now with their first child on the way, plus her mother-in-law, so relatives now in Mannheim had offered to take her in.? “I was really close with her, please understand.? But we did not have a telephone and she began writing to us every single day.? Of course, I had to reply, but I tallied it up and realized that I would not be able to make ends meet with what my husband brought home if I were posting a letter everyday, so here is what I did.? I began waiting a day, then two, then three, then finally a week before I wrote back, because I knew that when she received a letter from me, she would write back instantly.? It broke my heart, but we had to do many things like that just to live.”? ‘Many things like that . ?. ?. ?.‘?? Perhaps I thought of that red cat and that bleak time I had read about so many years earlier as I heard her tell her story.? It is a story I have never been able to forget.? Thank you, Luise Rinser.
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Heinrich B?ll[11]
I was told recently that, of the post-War German authors, almost no one reads Heinrich B?ll in Germany anymore.? This cannot be because he became frozen in time.? On the contrary, B?ll, though a devout Catholic and Christian Democrat, engaged with issues in the West German society where he saw the fear of a national security state taking the place of human community, and the despair of a self-satisfied materialism replacing the hope against hope that made it possible for his generation to live through the twelve-year hell of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich.? His readership and his political party, as well as the Catholic hierarchy of which he could be critical and was were shocked to find that this safe and, they thought, irrelevant Catholic writer, could see through the hypocrisy of an always freshly scrubbed West Germany and that, he was even in favor of having public conversations with very leftist students, even those in the Red Army Faction such as the Baader-Meinhoff gang.? He was interested in what people, especially young people, had to say, and in how they said it.? That was one black mark against him, enough to drive him off the road of popularity, no matter what the Nobel Committee had to say when they awarded him the prize for literature.? ?His response to their sub-Catholic fury was a novel., also made into a film, Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharine Blum (‘The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum’).?
I like reading B?ll for much the same reasons I enjoy Greene or Bernanos.? These authors make faith credible in a very realistic, harsh and even hopeless context.? For B?ll, that context included his military service on the Eastern Front and his return to an almost completely destroyed Cologne after imprisonment as a POW.?
For B?ll, very much like the Catholic Graham Greene, ethical choices are clear, but the people who have to make those choices and live with them are complicated and damaged in many ways, worn down also by the strain and drudgery of just managing to muddle through life as it has become.?
In Bōll’s Kerzen für Maria (‘Candles for Mary’), my favorite of his short stories, a married couple come into a valuable supply of paraffin, suitable for making church votive candles if not the beeswax candles for Catholic church altars.? The husband is on a business trip which, in and of itself, is hard to organize because it must all be accomplished without the motorcar.? In the very cheap pension he stays in, there is a young couple, not married and surreptitiously cohabiting, getting off to a very bad start in life.?
Already here we are in B?ll country, the landscape of Catholic Germany in which people do, and in fact did, know their prayers, church teaching and, at least through the catechism and the sensory pastiche of church art, architecture and liturgy, the Bible.? It was a world in which people had a moral compass they identified with religious faith.? His stories are replete with allusions based on this presumed knowledge, if not actual piety.? Nowadays, this knowledge, even on the part of agnostics or ‘convinced atheists’ on which a priest or pastor at the graveside could depend to make at least something said or prayed connect with at least something in the hearers, was and is now practically gone.? ‘God-talk’ has evaporated, partly due to the Church’s own fault, B?ll would say today without being asked his opinion by any bishop, and especially the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne.?
Without judging them, without saying anything to the young man whom he considers responsible to care for the corporeal and spiritual welfare of his beloved, our merchant, thinking of his own beloved waiting at home for him after his long journey, of the holiness of that bond, takes this matter up with a higher power with the Virgin herself, and lights a candle for the couple from his stock.? End of story—a light shining in the darkness.
?Guy Christopher Carter, 24.x.2023
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[8] Günter Grass could be included in this line-up, but I refuse to do so, and for two reasons.? First, I consider him to have been dishonest about his Waffen-SS past, which as a conscript no one would have judged him for had he not tried to hide it.? Second, in his dotage he hatched what unfortunately became a temporarily popular albeit phenomenally crack-brained idea, namely, his ‘two-state solution’ to the question of German unity, something he is probably still advocating in GDR-purgatory.? If you must, see his? Deutscher Lastenausgleich.? Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot.? Reden und Gespr?che—und—Schreiben nach Auschwitz ( Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand , 1990) | Two States—One Nation? ?(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990.? At any rate, we knew of but did not read Grass in Fr?ulein K’s class, though he had made the cover of TIME and NEWSWEEK, noticed by Fulgencia, who read everything, and who did mention once that she thought it was “far out” that ‘Grass’ was actually the author’s name.? The only thing Grass has in common with my favorite German author, Heinrich B?ll, is that they were both Nobel literature laureates, B?ll in 1972 and Grass, inexplicably, in 1999.