Gert Hofmann, Before the Rainy Season, Trans. by Edna McCown (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991)«Gert Hofmann's latest novel could be titled "Twenty Years of Solitude." Before the Rainy Season, in Edna McCown's readable translation, is about an old German soldier living on the edge of the Bolivian rain forest. Mr. Hofmann, who was born in 1932, is one of those German writers who wear the weight of history on their shoulders. Most of the time, it doesn't keep him from dancing. His novels and stories refine ugly episodes of recent history into lucid parables. Here he examines the psychic process known as dissociation, the ability to seal off compartments in the mind. Psychiatrists say it is what makes survival possible for victims of child abuse and also for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. But lying to oneself is hard work. At the age of 54, the old soldier is so exhausted by the effort of denying his ugly past that, when a young visitor from Germany arrives to tell him it's safe to go home again, he doesn't have the energy to pack. Instead, he delivers his life story to this young man, in a long, convoluted monologue in which the need to confess and the need to conceal alternately propel and delay the inevitable conclusion of an artfully paced narrative.
Heinrich von Hartung, the old soldier, did something unspeakable on the Russian front during World War II. In 1948 he came to Bolivia and bought an estate in the remote province where several other "kindred spirits" from the Third Reich have also found refuge. (Mr. Hofmann coyly avoids the term "Nazi" throughout.) Here the exiled German proceeds to re-create his homeland, a mixture of lower-middle-class Gemutlichkeit and concentration camp discipline: rose gardens, bird sanctuaries, barbed wire and guard towers. Even those little iron dwarfs, Gartenzwerge, that epitomize house-proud German kitsch are re-created in flesh and blood; "garden dwarves" are what the nasty old coot, a racist to the end, calls the Aymara peasants who work for him.
In Bolivia, Hartung marries into the local elite and brings over his family from Germany -- his father, a general who remains a rather nebulous figure, and a brother who is 20 years younger than Hartung. This brother is the most original figure in the book. Unlike Peter Schneider, whose unsettling novel "Vati" ("Dad") stuck close to the known facts of Josef Mengele's life, Mr. Hofmann plays fast and loose with history. What he does, in effect, is to put Klaus Barbie and Che Guevara into the same family. The old soldier's younger brother, raised in Bolivia, joins a group of revolutionaries while still in his teens. He helps them kidnap a local politician. The rest of his companions are caught and executed. He goes to prison for most of his adult life. It's his escape in November 1968 (a year after the historical death of Che), and his murder in front of his brother, that set the older man to talking at last.
From Kafka Mr. Hofmann has learned how to fix on a single detail and backlight it so that it casts mythic shadows. The scene in which the brother is arrested, with his childhood toys in a corner, is a powerful allusion to the hundreds of Latin American teen-agers who have paid for their idealism with their lives in recent decades. ("A child's room deserted in haste, there are several others like it in this country.") The passage is all the more moving for being told in the cold, sarcastic voice of the older brother.
The two brothers, born a generation apart, are both historically plausible but also -- another device Mr. Hofmann has learned from Kafka and from fairy tales -- two halves of a dissociated psyche. When they start to swap clothes, it's a sign that defenses are crumbling. As individuals, the older one is all denial, refusing to admit either past crimes or current ones -- such as his exploitation of dirt-poor peasants; the younger brother is all pity and guilt and ineffectiveness. "Basically I'm good for only one thing: to take the blame," he says in summing up his life. In the realistic-mythic connection between the brothers, Mr. Hofmann has again recast history as disturbing parable. The notion of one generation growing up to assume the blame for another's unacknowledged crimes has relevance well beyond German history.
Mr. Hofmann is less adroit with the Latin American setting. On the allegorical level, Hartung's rundown hacienda in the jungle is a correlative of the old man's moral decay, a Bolivia of the mind. On the travelogue level, Mr. Hofmann is glad to remind his readers how foreign and how poor Bolivia is. But his tone is so unrelievedly grim (although picturesque) that it irritates, like those third world documentaries on German television in which the locals are laughing and mugging for the camera while an earnest voice-over tells you how wretched they are. Mr. Hofmann doesn't even give his Bolivians a chance to mug for the camera.
On the other hand, he can be very funny about Germans. The generation gap between the old soldier, obsessed with historical crimes, and the young visitor from a 1960's Germany, who is obsessed with his sex life, is telling and comic. This naive visitor has unwittingly found the perfect gift for a mass murderer in hiding: an electric bread knife made by -- who else? -- the munitions maker Krupp. The old soldier reminisces about the names of mopping-up actions on the Russian front: "Hedgerose," "Chopped Meat," "Sausage Broth." An American reader still gagging on Pentagon euphemisms used during the Persian Gulf war is grateful for this direct black humor and the solid legacy of second-generation guilt that inspired it.
A STABBING
The fight took place here, says Uncle... My brother appeared from behind this mulberry tree... Billig, he thought, would soon appear. When he did appear my brother hit him in the mouth. He came from over there, says Uncle, he wanted to put the handcuffs on him, he was taken totally unawares by the blow... Billig followed my brother with his one eye... Billig had just stabbed him again, in the thigh, I think, but my brother... stood here, says Uncle, and screamed in Spanish: "In a few years, if you're not dead, you'll be sitting in a gutter begging for a few coins, totally blind." ...At that, Billig stabs him again, of course, we stand there looking on... Then my brother hits him again. "Ow," Billig screams, "ow!" And takes out an even longer blade and stabs my brother through his other hand. . . . My people took off their hats and... formed a line for him to pass through. Billig, he says, before stabbing him for the last time, genuflects with the knife. Only twenty-four hours have passed, but they're already saying that my brother looked over at me beseechingly before that stabbing, and that I refused to help him, but that's not true. Not once in his life did my brother look at me beseechingly, that's why I could never have "refused" him anything, says Uncle.» - Suzanne Ruta
«Born in 1931, Gert Hofmann belonged to a generation of postwar German writers who grew up during the Nazi period and, because of their age, were spared direct participation in the war at the fronts or in the concentration camps. Yet as children, Hofmann and his contemporaries were inadvertently witnesses to various horrors, from denunciations, murder, and suicides to ostracism and persecution that affected mostly Jews but also members of their own families. As with Christa Wolf's 1976 novel Kindheitsmuster, a major part of Hofmann's literary work was focused intensely on buried childhood memories of life in the family and in his hometown between the late 1930s and 1945. Many of his novels not only dwell upon dramatic events dating to these years but also reflect on the very process of unearthing and reassessing the bits and pieces of memories. In his work the author reveals the cognitive, psychological, and aesthetic problems associated with the endeavor to retrieve the past.
Hofmann started in the 1960s as an author of radio dramas and as a playwright for television, but his indisputable literary breakthrough came in 1979 with the publication of the novella Die Denunziation (The Denunciation). Die Denunziation marked the beginning of his serious interest in the subject of the Holocaust and the German Nazi past. Hofmann surprised the public with the originality of his selection of historical themes as well as with the rich palette of narrative techniques and strategies. Characteristic of Hofmann's prose are the peculiar restlessness and unreliability of the narrative voice. The narrator switches perspectives, cruises freely between past and present, and often shades into an unidentifiable presence as if to underscore the idea that the "truth" about the past has become practically inaccessible.
Most of Hofmann's works touching upon themes of persecution, racism, and murder during the Nazi period are set in the microworld of a sleepy provincial town in Germany. Often the author uses his own birthplace in Saxony, Limbach, as the background for the historical events. With almost ethnographic accuracy Hofmann describes the life of the family—with its predictable dynamics, power plays, and idiosyncracies—set within a small network of friends, neighbors, and relatives. Yet at the same time, he transforms the family into the stage where private attitudes, petty habits, and routine behavior resound with the big moral dilemmas of the time and can be fatally related to ruptures and tragedies of historic proportions. In Die Denunziation, for example, it is the Hecht family that disintegrates in the most dramatic way after an anonymous betrayer reports the half-Jewish tailor L. Silberstein to the authorities. After Silberstein is rounded up in 1944, his wife commits suicide, and thereupon the mother of the Hecht family drowns herself, the father is sent to the retreating Eastern Front, where he is killed, and the twin brothers, Karl and Wilhelm Hecht, are separated for life at age 14.
In other short novels, such as Unsere Eroberung (1984; Our Conquest) and Veilchenfeld (1986), the narrator's voice assumes the identity and naive directness of children who have inadvertently become witnesses to historical tragedies. Sent on an errand on 8 May 1945, two brothers from Unsere Eroberung run into various adults whom the children suspect of participation in unimaginable horrors. It is again a child, their cousin Edgar, who unearths the nasty truth, namely that a Czech slave laborer has been murdered in the family factory. In the novel Velichenfeld the complex conjunction between the quiet and unremarkable everyday life of the small community of Limbach and the cruel political persecution of its only Jewish member, Professor Veilchenfeld, in the course of 1938 is seen again through the eyes of a child.
The theme of the Nazi past is handled with subtlety and humor in Hofmann's most overtly autobiographical text, Der Kinoerzähler (1990; The Film Explainer"). Once again, the book presents a meticulous study of one community's petty quarrels surrounding the "Aryanization" of a Jewish-owned cinema, and it goes on to reveal the subtle mechanisms leading to collaboration in the horrors of Nazism.
Hofmann's approach to the Holocaust and the Nazi past lacks the self-righteous pathos of other contemporaries who became known as the creators of the so-called Väterliteratur. While these authors have explored the past of their authoritarian parents only to assess the psychological injuries that were sustained, Hofmann is interested in the broader impact of the atrocities of the Holocaust, on Germans and Jews as well. In his works he manages to maintain a masterful balance between realistic autobiographical details and a modernist sense of rupture, incompleteness, and the impossibility of a consistent account of the experience. At the same time, his novels avoid the traps of sentimentality and philo-Semitism and offer no ready condemnations or absolutions.» - Mila Ganeva
