Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)
Authors: Unknown
Selected, Translated and Edited by Peter Wortsman
PENGUIN BOOKS
Introduction:
‘
Making Bones Sing’
TALES OF THE GERMAN IMAGINATION
The Singing Bone
The Brothers Grimm
Hansel and Gretel
The Brothers Grimm
The Children of Hameln
The Brothers Grimm
St Cecilia or the Power of Music
Heinrich von Kleist
Peter Schlemiel
Adelbert von Chamisso
The Marble Statue
Josef von Eichendorff
Descent into the Mines
Heinrich Heine
The Magic Egg
Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender)
A New Kind of Plaything
Mynona (aka Salomo Friedlaender)
The Seamstress
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Island of Eternal Life
Georg Kaiser
In the Penal Colony
Franz Kafka
A Conversation Concerning Legs
Alfred Lichtenstein
A Raw Recruit
Klabund (aka Alfred Henschke)
The Time Saver
Ignaz Wrobel (aka Kurt Tucholsky)
The Tattooed Portrait
Egon Erwin Kisch
The Experiment or the Victory of the Children
Unica Zürn
The Dandelion
Wolfgang Borchert
The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran
Ingeborg Bachmann
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
PETER WORTSMAN
’s translations from the German include
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
, by Robert Musil (now in its third edition);
Peter Schlemiel
, by Adelbert von Chamisso;
Telegrams of the Soul
:
Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
;
Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
;
Travel Pictures
, by Heinrich Heine; and the forthcoming
Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm
. He is the author of a book of short fiction,
A Modern Way to Die
; an artists’ book,
it-t=i
(comprising his poetry and etchings by artist Harold Wortsman); stage plays,
The Tattooed Man Tells All
and
Burning Words
; and a travelogue/memoir,
Ghost Dance in Berlin (A Rhapsody in Gray)
. Recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and the Geertje Potash-Suhr Prosapreis of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, as well as fellowships from the Thomas J. Watson and Fulbright Foundations, he was a Holtzbrinck Fellow in 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin, where he completed work on this book. His translation of
Flypaper
, by Robert Musil, is published in Penguin Mini Modern Classics.
To Richard Sieburth, il miglior fabbro
‘Making Bones Sing’
‘Perhaps there are also different ways of writing, but I only know this one; at night, when fear keeps me from sleeping, I only know this one [ …]’ So Franz Kafka confided to his friend Max Brod in a letter of 1922. Or as Jorge Luis Borges aptly observed: ‘Kafka could only dream nightmares, which he knew that reality endlessly supplies.’
1
Fear has indeed proven rich fodder for fantasy in the German storytelling tradition, at least as far back as the Romantics. The very notion of angst has been absorbed into the English language by its German name, as if we English speakers conceded the terrifying as Teutonic turf. Fearless in their readiness to face fear head-on, certain
Dichter
2
mined their nightmares for precious literary ore. But if the resulting narratives succeeded in transcending the German particular and managed to tap the collective unconscious, appealing to readers across the divides of language, temperament, time and space, something more than just morbidity must be at play. Contrary to the cliché, the darkest German literary confections are such a pleasure to read because they are also spiked with humour – therein lies their enduring appeal, eliciting laughter when you least expect it and in the most unlikely places.
Perusing the offerings at a bookstore in East Berlin a few years before the Wall came down, I was amazed at the apparent profusion of literature and the crowd of would-be book buyers. Not just the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and V. I. Lenin, as I’d naively expected. Books were clearly still a prized commodity in the German Democratic Republic. Word
spread far in advance of the appearance of new editions, and because of the price of paper and limited print runs, books sold like hot cakes, often disappearing as quickly as they hit the shelves. It was here in East Berlin that I first happened upon a copy of
Café Klößchen,
38
Grotesken
,
3
a book rife with gallows humour from a host of irreverent German authors of the twenties and thirties I’d never heard of, Klabund, Lichtenstein, Mynona, Kisch, et al. – one of the sources of the stories in this volume.
And, much to my surprise, the GDR even countenanced Kafka. I was flabbergasted to spot his name out of the corner of my eye on the spine of a book. But the irony was too good, too Kafkaesque to be true: for the title I had at first squint read as
Sämtliche Schriften
(
Complete Writings
) turned out on closer examination to be
Amtliche Schriften
(
Administrative Writings
), a compendium, not of his elusive parables, but of the official reports and letters he drafted on the job for the insurance company, the bureaucratic taskmaster to which he sacrificed his daylight hours and which he cursed in his diaries and letters to friends at night.
‘Yes,’ an unsmiling, bespectacled clerk said, ‘other works by the author have been published.’
‘Can I buy them?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she regretted to inform me, ‘they are out of print.’
An absurd situation straight out of
The Trial
! Kafka himself would have got a kick out of it. I remembered what my late beloved Aunt Steffi, a native of Vienna, once said of a Kafka reading she’d attended in her youth.
‘What was he like?!’ I pressed her.
She paused. A rationalist to the bone, Steffi had to admit that she did not know what to make of the gawky man and his strange stories. ‘But one thing I do remember,’ she said, ‘he could hardly keep from laughing.’
By a fortuitous conjoining of literary taste, popular Zeitgeist and publishing fashion in the wake of the Second World War, and thanks to the tireless machinations of his friend and impassioned posthumous promoter, Max Brod, Kafka’s dark premonitions
broke through the bulwarks of culture, language, time and place to make the author a catchword, a one-man symbol of our angst-ridden age, a secular saint of the twentieth century. In 1984, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris presented an unprecedented exhibition, titled ‘Le Siècle de Kafka’ (Kafka’s Century). It was perhaps the first time that a major public exhibition space devoted to the visual and plastic arts launched a show ostensibly revolving around the work of a literary artist. Kafka served as a curatorial clothes-line on which to hang a diverse body of artworks and artefacts, including sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Germaine Richier, a wrapped-up armless torso by Christo, drawings by Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Max Ernst and Henri Michaux, photos of a haunted Prague, doodles by Kafka himself and a sentimental novel by a certain Dr Josef Goebbels, better known for his rants and ravings. The conceptual clothes-peg that held the exhibition together was the metamorphosis of the proper noun Kafka into the adjective Kafkaesque.
In our justifiable adulation of the writings of the visionary German-speaking Jewish scribe from Prague we tend to overlook the fact that he was not spontaneously spawned, Athena-like, from the cranium of German letters. Kafka had his precursors among the German Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins, writers of talent, imagination and stylistic daring scribbling away in Berne, Berlin, Vienna and the far corners of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And if Kafka’s dark fantasies resonated with readers in the English-speaking world, it is not only because they spoke to the existential angst of the moment. The path had already been paved by Carroll and Wilde, Kipling, Wells and Orwell – an author whose name inspired an almost synonymous adjective, Orwellian. The American imagination, meanwhile, had already been primed by home-grown fabulists, Irving, Hawthorne and Poe, whose inspiration had been stoked by Hoffmann, von Eichendorff and Tieck (translations of whose works were serialized in
Blackwood’s
magazine, a well-respected review in its day).
Darkness is not, of course, a German prerogative. But the German imagination set an early standard, poignantly and precisely
sounding the sinister in the flights of fancy of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the tales collected and retold by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Anyone who in childhood has ever read, or rather been read, a Grimms’
Märchen
will for ever remember the effect: that terror combined with the immediate recognition that such tales tap otherwise unutterable truths. (Until the end of his short life, Kafka still savoured
Märchen
, unquestionably a major influence on the form and content of his own enigmatic short prose.) The standard English translation of the German word
Märchen
as fairy tale sugarcoats the raw German grit with hovering fairies and flickering lights, replacing the cunning, cannibalistic witch of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ with the cute and kindly Tinkerbell, tapping, but ultimately quelling, fledgling fears. Disney added another layer of prettification, safely encapsulating the malevolent in a shell of nicety. But German
Märchen
aren’t nice. Rather than cocoon the virgin consciousness, they blurt out the unspeakable, and so, from early on, vaccinate with the ring of truth. (‘A New Kind of Plaything’ by Mynona and ‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ by Unica Zürn, two of the twentieth-century German fables included in this volume, are directly rooted in and toy with the Grimms’ aesthetic. And Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ taps the same source.)
