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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Another book finished! Two in a busy month - how? My third Tuesday_Thursday class: German women's film and literature. It's a relief to have a course where I can read narrative works again. Linguistic articles can be interesting in their own way, but I've missed *stories*.
At the same time, there was a point earlier this week where secondhand_stress made the content too harrowing to actually enjoy the reading process. But still, I appreciated the writer's straightforward yet thoughtful retelling of the last days of the war (World War 2, the European point). She was a journalist, about thirty at the time of writing, who published this anonymously. Wikipedia gave a name, but it could be only speculation. And I feel a little uncomfortable "outing" her, even if she's dead, if she didn't want to be named. The English translator is Philip Boehm.
The book ended in a bittersweet way: relative safety and a potential new job, but worry that another authoritarian (Soviet) government would limit the freedom to write; a renewed sense of self for the narrator, but also abandonment by someone she used to love.
Specifically - **spoilers, plus content warning for sexual assault, etc.** - she and her fiancé don't just find that they've grown apart after being separated for months, but he also objects when she refers to being raped by Russian soldiers in a casual, sometimes joking way. Not because this is "morbid," as someone might say today, but because it seems brazen to him, sexually shameless. As if shame would make anything better!
This attitude is possibly also found in another woman, a doctor, who tells the narrator not to talk of such things. I say possibly, because that's her answer to the question of whether many women were coming to her asking for abortions. So maybe it was more that abortion was illegal and this doctor didn't want to admit to anything.
But the book is about more than surviving sexual violence, though survival in general is a large theme (of bombs and guns, things shattering and falling, invasion, hunger, despair).
I found it interesting how guilt never loomed large in her thoughts, though she felt "slimy" at one point for using deception to get back a radio that her neighbour stole, and emotionally exhausted after finally enjoying sex with the one man (among the several Russians who came to her apartment) who never really forced her to. Maybe "survivor's guilt" has become too much of a psychological catchphrase that people (i.e., me) forget that not everyone reacts exactly that way. For instance, she reacted with a shocked numbness and disgust - but no personal sense of guilt - when hearing of her own side's atrocities...but "side" could be misleading. She wasn't a fan of Hitler, but never risked her neck to be publicly against him, either.
Languages. That's a theme too. She'd traveled, knew a bit of Russian, which helped her out in some cases. But to go back, at one point she's asked to translate for a Soviet soldier who describes German ones killing children, and she's shaken. Then, when the war is over, after hearing on the radio about mass murders in the eastern concentration camps (she knew Jewish people in particular were being persecuted, but not the scale), she turns off the radio afterwards when Beethoven starts playing - can't stand to hear that right then. ...Is it significant that he was German? Or just the idea that the music sounded too happy or calm? Not all of Ludwig B. is stormy and dramatic.
Anyway, I'm not saying she needed to feel personal guilt. Or that she seemed to be evading her own complicity like Leni Riefenstahl did (first thing we looked at in this class was part of a documentary about her - the section about her film Olympia). But it was refreshing to see things from a different perspective than I might have, especially since I relate to the woman in a lot of other ways - we're both a bit more introverted than extroverted, like to talk but would rather write sometimes, and are about the same age...perhaps even look(ed) similar, since she mentions hair colour. (I am limited in my language by the fact that there's no simultaneously-past-and-present verb in English, at least not in a main verb position. Anyway.)
Two quotations from nearer the beginning of the book:
About a dead radio - "Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can't plug them in somewhere. [...] At the moment we're marching backwards in time." (5)
About talking to a colleague/friend on a phone that's unexpectedly working - "Gisela told me she's exactly as old as her father was when he fell at Verdun in the First World War almost to the day. She never saw her father. Now she says that she can't stop thinking about him; she talks with him in spirit, as if her time were coming, as if she was going to meet him soon. We never spoke about such things before; we would have been embarrassed to bare our hearts like that." (24-25)
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