Erwin Strittmatter

[Eric]

Erwin Strittmatter - SS scribe and GDR hero

I cannot disguise my Schadenfreude at the fact that the great GDR author Erwin Strittmatter (1912-1994) has been exposed as a former SS scribe.

The words "Nazi" and "fascist" are often misused nowadays, in an attempt to blacken the name of anyone you don't like. But in the case of someone who, when already over the age of thirty, was writing down details of which partisans the SS shot dead in Slovenia and Greece, I don't think the word is used wrongly. Not least as the author in question then became a much loved GDR writer of many books. He wasn't directly responsible for the executions, but he didn't like to mention them to anyone in the GDR, despite the fact he had Stasi contacts there. A real turncoat.

When Wessie G?nter Grass disguised the fact that he was in the SS as a teenager, there was a helluva rumpus. Was this Ossie more guilty?

The Wikipedia shows that he wrote loads of books, but conveniently forgot to mention his past in any of them:


Ochsenkutscher (1950)
Eine Mauer f?llt (1953)
Katzgraben (1953)
Tinko (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinko) (1954)
Paul und die Dame Daniel (1956)
Katzgraben – Szenen aus dem Bauernleben Mit einem Nachspiel (1958)
Der Wundert?ter (1957, 1973, 1980)
Die Holl?nderbraut (1959)
Pony Pedro (1959)
Ole Bienkopp (1963)
Schulzenhofer Kramkalender (1. Auflage erschien im Aufbau-Verlag 1967)
Die Holl?nderbraut – Schauspiel in f?nf Akten (1967)
Ein Dienstag im Dezember (1969)
3/4hundert Kleingeschichten (1971)
Die blaue Nachtigall (oder Der Anfang von etwas) (1976)
Ein Dienstag im September (16 Romane im Stenogramm, 1977)
Sulamith Minged?, der Doktor und die Laus (1977)
Meine Freundin Tina Babe (1977)
Die Nachtigall-Geschichten (1972, 1977, 1985)
Die alte Hofpumpe (1979)
Selbstermunterungen (1981)
Wahre Geschichten aller Ard(t) (1982)
Der Laden (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Laden) (1983, 1987, 1993)
Ponyweihnacht (1984)
Gr?ner Juni (1986)
Lebenszeit (1987)
Die Lage in den L?ften (1990)
Der Weihnachtsmann in der Lumpenkiste (2003)
Flikka (ca. 1982)
Wie ich meinen Gro?vater kennenlernte
Vor der Verwandlung (Erwin & Eva Strittmatter, 1995)
Geschichten ohne Heimat (2002)
Wie der Regen mit dem See redet (2002)
Kalender ohne Anfang und Ende – Notizen aus Piestany (Hrsg. Eva Strittmatter, 2003)
Lebenszeit – Ein Brevier (Ausgew?hlt von Helga Pankoke, mit 85 Privatfotos)
Todesangst – Eine Nacht (Ausgew?hlt von Helga Pankoke, 2005)
There's a museum, there a school named after him. There's a Strittmatter society, a prize is named after him. He's regarded as a great writer of rural novels and plays. But given his "forgotten" background, isn't his image being manipulated?

See: Nationalsozialismus: War auch Erwin Strittmatter in der SS? - Nachrichten Kultur - WELT ONLINE (http://www.welt.de/kultur/article2084243/War_auch_Erwin_Strittmatter_in_der_SS.html)

[Mirabell]

A real turncoat.

but a good writer.

[Eric]

Mirabell, your cryptic answers and poems never explain anything. How is he a good writer? Which are his best works? Was his prowess as a writer relative to the state in which he lived which was glad to have anyone that wrote for it voluntarily? Or is he revered in Western Germany as well?

I am trying to demonstrate something totally different here. That the GDR, itself a repressive state, hid the fact that one of their top writers was earlier in the SS. When that happened to Grass, he got a lot of criticism. But the locals of the towns where Strittmatter lived, and which he described, i.e. Spremberg and Bohsdorf, don't want to let go of their hero. They are still trying to support him in rather the same way that some people in Serbia have blind faith in the healer and are prepared to riot on his behalf, although he is likely to have given the order to massacre some 8,000 people. The head of the Strittmatter Society is on the defensive: "We're not going to let them take Erwin Strittmatter away from us!" is his cry.

As someone with Russian background, Mirabell, you should be more sensitive to the subtleties of all this than merely to mutter that he may have been a turncoat (and maybe a minor war criminal) but as he was a good writer, well, that's alright then. My point is that this is typical for the whole mentality of the GDR. Whereas Hamsun's sins came out in the wash shortly after WWII, the devious people of the GDR deliberately concealed Strittmatter's background (as it was impossible to imagine that the Stasi didn't know where he was coming from).

[Mirabell]

I was just trying to steer it back to books because I decided to talk about books forthwith.

Der Laden is, as far as I see, a very well written book, that has, I admit, bored me too much even from looking at the subject matter/length. I haven't even touched two of the three volumes sitting on my shelves. And I haven't read any of the older books. I should, shouldn't I? Or maybe finish Der Laden first. Being boring does not make him a bad writer, though. I totally dig great stylists. GDR had a lot of them.

[Stewart]

I was trying to steer it back to books.
This section need not be about books, seeing as it's for "introducing and discussing authors and their lives, their influences, philosophies, and motivations."

[Mirabell]

This section need not be about books, seeing as it's for "introducing and discussing authors and their lives, their influences, philosophies, and motivations."

I know. It was a personal decision. I would rather talk about books then give Eric a canvas on which he can project his political fantasies, he manages fine by himself. He just likes to feel righteous sometimes, I feel, and he doesn't engage with others' positions, and, honestly, once you use words like "devious" a political discussion is -or should be- over.

I didn't want to abandon this thread though, hence the steering.

Btw., as a final remark Eric, you are missing a crucial point in your rant.
But I do have to say, it's kinda admirable the way you persist in talking about things you don't have a clue about, such as writers you haven't read (a highlight) and historical situations you haven't comprehended.

Yr approach to -at least- German history is funny, like a botanist whose only tool is a two-handed axe. there's something to be said for that, sure.

But thinking about the GDR....you would have fit right in there, not the ideology, just the mentality, relentlessly attacking biermann kunert et al. with half true, half concocted accusations, spun just the right way, implied just the right things, god, you would've been a smash with them. You're so GDR.

[Eric]

The grim Gombrowicz avatar is a kind of reflection of some of my key tenets.

I have not read one book by Strittmatter; but I don't think Mirabell has, either.

All literature is written in a national context. When, as a Brit, you read authors from your own culture, you know where the author is coming from. Without having attended even one lecture on English Literature, you already know (assuming a bit of education) in which context Austen, Dickens, the Bront?s, Zadie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Martin Amis, Thomas Hardy, and U.S. imports including Eliot and James, plus Jonathan Coe, A. S. Byatt, Geoffrey Chaucer, etc., were or are writing.

Sadly, when Brits read "Continental" literature, there is much less awareness of the political, social, geographical context in which an author wrote. So if you just see a name, you initially have no idea who and what the author was. He or she was just "the greatest German / Portuguese / Danish / Croatian author".

Erwin Strittmatter is the result of the tragic 20th century history of Europe. He worked for the Nazis, how voluntarily is unknown, and ended up writing what are, in effect Blut und Boden novels for a nasty little state where they shot you if you tried to sneak out.

My discussion is therefore very much political. After having immersed myself in the literature of a country that had real bad luck during the 20th century, i.e. Estonia, it is impossible for me to merely imagine that books are written in a social and political vacuum. Even Beatrice Potter wrote her children's stories in a historical and class context. But this context must be much wider than the Marxist one with its base and superstructure and a kind of paranoid view of the bourgeousie always writing propaganda to subvert the masses, while socialist authors were the bee's knees.

I do not rant about the GDR. I read and consult books and the internet and draw my own conclusions. I have already mentioned the Emmerich book. This book may not be perfect. But when you hear that iconic GDR author Strittmatter has been exposed as having concealed his past, the first thing to do is to use such at book as a touchstone. Who saw the exposure coming?

Please write thoughtful criticism, using standard English, so that we can all discuss at an equal level, because obviously a German who does not have English as his mother-tongue, with his semi-Russian background, may feel himself at a language disadvantage, as I would be if I tried to write German.

Mirabell: the slightly unidiomatic nature of your English is nothing to be ashamed about, but you have to start discussing, stop posing. We can cope with the mistakes. We can't all be native-speakers of English. (Saliothomas tries his best not to be, but isn't entirely convincing.)

I cannot engage in others' positions if people spend their time playing a grand game of subterfuge instead of actually telling the rest of us what their own positions are. But do, by all means, abandon this thread if you feel that Nazi Witold is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. (Nazi? OK, no one would be so crass as to call me that. But Witold is an avatar I'm proud of.)

P.S. The two-handed axe (which we, in idiomatic English, used to call a "felling axe" in the Scouts) was used to good effect during the Russian occupation of Estonia to hack to pieces books deemed unsuitable by the Soviet authorities. This piece of philistine cultural murder was done in the foyer of the National Library, according to Jaan Kross.

[Mirabell]

The grim Gombrowicz avatar is a kind of reflection of some of my key tenets.

I have not read one book by Strittmatter; but I don't think Mirabell has, either.

All literature is written in a national context. When, as a Brit, you read authors from your own culture, you know where the author is coming from. Without having attended even one lecture on English Literature, you already know (assuming a bit of education) in which context Austen, Dickens, the Bront?s, Zadie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Martin Amis, Thomas Hardy, and U.S. imports including Eliot and James, plus Jonathan Coe, A. S. Byatt, Geoffrey Chaucer, etc., were or are writing.

Sadly, when Brits read "Continental" literature, there is much less awareness of the political, social, geographical context in which an author wrote. So if you just see a name, you initially have no idea who and what the author was. He or she was just "the greatest German / Portuguese / Danish / Croatian author".

Erwin Strittmatter is the result of the tragic 20th century history of Europe. He worked for the Nazis, how voluntarily is unknown, and ended up writing what are, in effect Blut und Boden novels for a nasty little state where they shot you if you tried to sneak out.

My discussion is therefore very much political. After having immersed myself in the literature of a country that had real bad luck during the 20th century, i.e. Estonia, it is impossible for me to merely imagine that books are written in a social and political vacuum. Even Beatrice Potter wrote her children's stories in a historical and class context. But this context must be much wider than the Marxist one with its base and superstructure and a kind of paranoid view of the bourgeousie always writing propaganda to subvert the masses, while socialist authors were the bee's knees.

I do not rant about the GDR. I read and consult books and the internet and draw my own conclusions. I have already mentioned the Emmerich book. This book may not be perfect. But when you hear that iconic GDR author Strittmatter has been exposed as having concealed his past, the first thing to do is to use such at book as a touchstone. Who saw the exposure coming?

Please write thoughtful criticism, using standard English, so that we can all discuss at an equal level, because obviously a German who does not have English as his mother-tongue, with his semi-Russian background, may feel himself at a language disadvantage, as I would be if I tried to write German.

Mirabell: the slightly unidiomatic nature of your English is nothing to be ashamed about, but you have to start discussing, stop posing. We can cope with the mistakes. We can't all be native-speakers of English. (Saliothomas tries his best not to be, but isn't entirely convincing.)

I cannot engage in others' positions if people spend their time playing a grand game of subterfuge instead of actually telling the rest of us what their own positions are. But do, by all means, abandon this thread if you feel that Nazi Witold is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. (Nazi? OK, no one would be so crass as to call me that. But Witold is an avatar I'm proud of.)

P.S. The two-handed axe (which we, in idiomatic English, used to call a "felling axe" in the Scouts) was used to good effect during the Russian occupation of Estonia to hack to pieces books deemed unsuitable by the Soviet authorities. This piece of philistine cultural murder was done in the foyer of the National Library, according to Jaan Kross.

MHm. I see I said it well @ #6

Thank you for proving my point.

[nnyhav]

Nevahoyduvim. Thanks for the update.

Though I see that FAZ headlined the story "Finally, one from the East!" Most reader comments seem to be of the "So what?" variety. Certainly the case internationally, e.g. very little (couple short stories) in English translation (unlike Grass, see below). But the Wessie/Ossie morality play has overtones of the North/South division more familiar to us USians.

Current LRB has Jacqueline Rose on Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/rose01_.html), (trans by Michael Henry Heim), dealing with another scribe of literary note, Paul de Man (who Schlink portrays somewhat villianously):

What, then, does it take to redeem a guilty past? Is confession enough? Does it ever come in time? The fury that has greeted G?nter Grass’s confession about his wartime past suggests that something more than an appeal to honesty, making a clean breast, is involved. The language and position of de Man’s accusers, as Werner Hamacher observes in his article ‘Journal Politics’, ‘are those of the police who have seen a spectacular case slip out of their hands’. Grass’s moral authority was seen to collapse under pressure of his membership as a youth of the Waffen SS, an affiliation he had chosen to conceal. Behind the accusations there seems to be an unspoken assumption that anyone who has erred in this way should have no trouble at all in admitting it to her or himself. But if the crime is monstrous, then surely its passage into knowledge and then language will be hard and slow. At moments it has felt as if the real crime of both Grass and de Man might be the crime of revealing that there are things so appalling to us in retrospect that our only way of dealing with them is to close down part of our minds – to not want to know. There is a contradiction here which increases in direct proportion to the certainty with which the condemnation is expressed: of course we would have acted differently, i.e. better (perish any other thought); but had we failed – although this is almost unthinkable – we would have been only too happy to recognise what we did and admit it to the whole world.

One point elided from this is that Grass, posing as the conscience of a nation speaking truth to power, had called upon his political opponents to make a clean breast of their past, and so was exposed as a hypocrite. But all of the supposed monstrousness is in guilt by association, facilitating or abetting rather than commission. I agree with the article's assessment that de Man's theorizing deconstruction was in no way an attempt at exculpation for prior sin nor ideologically motivated (what leads up to the extract is worthy of consideration). Strittmatter, as a state-approved author, was differently positioned than either. (But easy migration between supposed poles of ideology has some relevance to all.)

Another point of reference, the opening line of a novel I just started reading: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I'll wager that line is way more recognized than its author.

[nnyhav]

So I should have said "exposed to the charge of hypocrisy", but that's a little too weak where the other is too strong. Complicity is complex. I had hoped that the LRB link's bit about de Man's uncle would make that clearer.

I should also have included the Faulkner observation: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." (ntm the last word in the last post should have been 'book' not 'author' for full relevance)

[Eric]

Nnyhav's long quote in #9 is interesting.

I rather like the FAZ comment: "At last, an Ossie!" I sympathise. Usually I side with the Ossies against the rather cocky Wessies, but I see the Wessie point. The Ossie collaborators have been good at covering their tracks.

I can't get worked up about Grass, but Strittmatter is a different matter (pun?).

While Grass (born 1927) was perhaps stupid not to let it slip out earlier, he was only a teenage volunteer, sweet seventeen, when he joined the SS. Many people do stupid things in their teens. My own uncle volunteered for the Ostfront as a teen - and suffered for the rest of his life for it (five years in gaol plus exile).

On the other hand, Strittmatter (born 1912) was a man in his early 30s, in a battalion where they shot partisans. He did some of the paperwork, and probably never shot anyone. But he wasn't a blue-eyed young boy. And he went on to become the conscience of a horrible, repressive r?gime, writing all his rural romanticism in a country full of spies, pollution, corruption, ideological brainwashing, and so on. So Strittmatter truly jumped from the frying pan into the fire. But he too is a victim.

It is a little too easy for people in Western Europe to switch off their imagination when it comes to collaboration with evil r?gimes. Here, I'm looking at the obverse of the coin in the case of Strittmatter. If you can't escape physically, and your standard of living, e.g. access to better goods and accommodation, depends on collaboration, you may be tempted to join the overlords. Not a noble thing to do, but human. Write a few anti-Nazi novels and you're in the clear with the r?gime.

In the West, no one gets cosied up to by MI5 or MI6, told they will be able to get coffee or whisky or a flat more easily if they hang around in pubs and listen to people, and report back. Those people who join the secret services in the West will often have an ideological motivation, as most ordinary jobs pay well enough to live a reasonable life. In the former Soviet bloc, it was a balancing act, also involving your direct standard of living.

But indeed. The past isn't dead. It tends to wake up at inconvenient moments.