My translation of the Austrian writer Erich Hackl’s ‘Die Hochzeit in Auschwitz’ – ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ was published by Serpent’s Tail in spring 2009. Some time before that I had been contacted by the German department of the German School in Richmond to ask whether I would be willing to introduce Erich Hackl and his work, as a text by him had been chosen for the school’s annual translation competition. As a translator into English I’m always willing to do whatever I can for the books and authors I’ve worked on and so I immediately agreed to speak at the prize-giving. Erich Hackl is a radical left-wing author and my talk, given below, was intended to do justice to him as a committed writer. I think I succeeded in that, at any rate the attaché from the German Embassy who was present demonstratively didn’t shake my hand afterwards. But that was a small pleasure which hardly made up for the fact that ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ got very few reviews (although they were extremely positive) and not many readers. A literary translator into English has to get used to indifference to literature from other languages, but the reception or non-reception given ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ has probably been the greatest disappointment of my career. It’s obvious from the text of my talk that I admire Hackl’s work. Aside from that, however, I was convinced that the book had the potential to attract attention and find readers to a greater degree than most translations. Hackl is something of a best-seller in German, his books are widely reviewed and his approach to combining oral testimony and fictional reconstruction is appreciated as a distinctive element in contemporary German-language writing. The title and ostensible subject alone seemed likely to guarantee interest in a British literary market place always eager for new insights into Nazism. I say, ostensible subject, because although the ‘incident’ of the wedding is indeed at the heart of the book, its subject is equally the aftermath of heroic acts (heroic acts by an imperfect hero). And that aftermath is a story of political disillusionment, of the failure of the Left to find an alternative to the apparent certainties of the anti-Fascist struggle. Perhaps the telling of the story and the shades of grey were too complicated for readers looking for simple depictions of good and evil, black and white. Perhaps it fell between stools: too much documentary and too much fiction. Or something like that.
Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen, Students of the German School!
In 1963 Edward Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ was published. It’s both a key historical study and a work of considerable literary distinction. It proved extremely influential even though the thesis of the book as stated in the dry-sounding title is a dubious one. The subject are the struggles by working people for better conditions, to protect their livelihoods in a situation of social upheaval – the industrial revolution – in the face of governments which supported the propertied. And above all it’s a study of the struggle to find means of expression, of communication, without which the solidarity necessary to political action – to form trades unions, political parties – is impossible.
There’s a much quoted sentence in the Preface to ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ which helps explain why the book continues to have an influence and to be read – and not only by professional historians:
Thompson writes:
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott (Southcott was a millenarian preacher), from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Thompson, in other words, does not see the rebellious artisans of the period as victims of industrialisation, of modernisation, of political repression, but as themselves actors in history, in their own history.
Thompson’s ‘Making’ was the work of an undogmatic Marxist who had broken with the Communist Party after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. The book was central to the development of what became known as ‘history from below’, and which was to have a powerful impact on the way historical research was done over the next couple of decades: In the History Workshop movement, for example, which brought together professional and non-professional historians. (Edward Thompson himself, incidentally never held a university post.)
One of the tools of ‘history from below’ was Oral History: The systematic recording and compilation of the testimonies of still-living witnesses to more recent historical events and processes. The testimonies of workers, of the inhabitants of the different quarters of towns and cities and of the countryside. Their words, collectively and individually, were accorded a weight and significance which had previously only been granted those who held or had held power in the conventional sense. It’s difficult to grasp now how important that was. Today a multiplicity of media outlets appear to allow unlimited expression of opinion. That freedom, however, is illusory, if it does not have the potential to produce or reinforce durable forms of collective expression and action.
In the German-speaking lands ‘history from below’, the recording and publishing of testimonies, was less the work of historians in the strict sense, than of writers. (German academic historians were, in any case, for a long time very resistant to such approaches.) This was in part likewise a response to, an engagement with the radicalising 1960’s. It was also eased by a greater formal openness of writing in German than in the English-speaking world. German literature has been more elastic, displays, for example, a greater variety of short forms.
At the same time, however, as writers explored the possibilities of incorporating documentary material, whether printed, written or spoken, in their texts, they were also aware of the limits of such material, of the limits of its use. So on the one hand there’s the awareness of the ‘slipperiness’, the ambiguity, the contradictoriness of the materials assembled and, on the other, that awareness is inseparable from the form found to convey and accommodate it. One solution may be to aim for a multiple perspective, for a polyphony of voices, in which the author, the shaper of the material refuses to try to answer every question, smooth out contradictions. Particularly when oral testimony is used, a representation, a way of telling has to be found which, as Erich Hackl has noted in an interview is “not abstract, not assertive, not vague.” And, with a degree of modesty he adds: “But how I find it, that unfortunately I can’t say. Not even whether I will find it.” I suspect the latter part of that statement is more true than the first.
In interviews Erich Hackl has several times talked of ‘stories’ he has been told or has come across, which he would like to write about but has not, or not yet, been able to find a way, a way of telling that could satisfactorily bear or carry them. That is to say: He is intensely aware of the requirement of literary form, of appropriate language as he is of the stories, of the experiences which have imposed themselves on him. Stories which he encounters through his concern with the working class movement in Austria and with the lives of the resisters under Fascism of whatever kind, both before and after 1945. His concern also, as a Hispanicist, in particular with movements of resistance and opposition in Spain and Latin America. Sometimes in his books he is able to link the two, as in the case of Rudi Friemel. A working class militant in Favoriten in Vienna, Friemel volunteers with the International Brigades in Spain, falls in love with the daughter of a Spanish Anarchist, a story which then leads to that ‘Wedding in Auschwitz’ which is the title of one of his books and which has just been published in English; or as in ‘Als ob ein Engel’ – As if an Angel – in which left-wing Jews escape the Anschluss to begin new lives in Argentina. Later, in the 1970’s, during the regime of the generals, Gisela Tenenbaum, the daughter of a couple of that generation, joins a left-wing underground organisation, The Monteneros. She is captured and presumably tortured and killed, but her body has never been found, she is one of the thousands of ‘disappeared’.
Extraordinary stories, of course, but they are not presented as tragic accounts of those who died too soon, of losers or victims. Like Thompson, Hackl wants to restore the dignity of the resisters. That dignity which oppressors tried to deny, whether in the public hanging of Rudi Friemel on the Auschwitz Apellplatz or in the dreadful uncertainty to which the family of Gisela Tenenbaum is condemned, not knowing how or even when their daughter died and still hoping against hope that one day she will return.
The context of the stories, however, is even wider than that. Somewhere Erich Hackl remarks that at the time, that is, in the 1970’s, one did not and could not know that the bloody repression of the Left in Latin America and elsewhere was the brutal initial stage of the world-wide imposition of what would come to be known as neo-liberalism.
But perhaps it is easier to talk about politics than to grasp Erich Hackl as a writer. One way of thinking about him, about his work, is to see his style, approach, emerging out of a tension: On the one hand there’s the chronicler – a chronicler like Johann Peter Hebel who wrote brief stories for the almanachs read by the common people, as they used to be called. Concise, humorous, informative, without condescension. A part of a famous story by Hebel, ‘Unexpected Reunion’, is adapted in Hackl’s ‘Sara and Simon’. But then there’s the evident influence of writer who, while as insistent on details as Hebel, returns repeatedly to the theme of individuals or of a love overwhelmed by historical reality. ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ even appears in its title to evoke Heinrich von Kleist’s story ‘The Betrothal in Santo Domingo’. In Kleist’s story it is the brief flowering of love between a white officer and mulatto girl during a slave revolt which cannot come to any kind of happy ending.
Whether influenced by Hebel and Kleist or others, however, there’s a reserved timelessness about Hackl’s writing. In a poem dedicated to him by the Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’bal, the latter writes, “The voice of books does not age”. With a little bit of license I think we can apply that to Erich Hackl’s own books and writing. He has found for himself a style which is not only respectful of his subjects and their words, but also of the literary traditions his work draws on and in which his readers can situate themselves. It is not simply a matter of some kind of accessibility, but of a form of democratic conversation between past and present, between generations and across borders and oceans. It is that quality, too, which makes Erich Hackl a very special writer in German today.
Thank you.
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