Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Conservative dystopian futures

    Some time ago on Twitter, another translator shared her dislike of conservative dystopian future fiction. I’d never thought to divide that particular genre into liberal and conservative subcategories, but it’s an interesting exercise. I suppose the former is driven by fear of oppression and/or a backlash against progress (see The Handmaid’s Tale) and the latter by a belief in the futility of utopian projects and the irrepressibility of certain inconvenient elements of human nature (see Love in the Ruins). 1984 and Brave New World defy easy categorization, although BNW has some notably “conservative” elements, exemplified by the sad fate of John the Savage.

    Around the same time I ordered a book by Herbert Rosendorfer because one of my regular clients was described as writing in a similar style to his. So it seemed like a good idea to study one of his novels in German and English. I found these two at Abebooks for a total of $6:

    Letters Back to Ancient China turned out to be conservative dystopian future fiction with a twist, namely that the dystopian future is the author’s present.

    The narrator is a time traveler from 10-century China who finds himself in Munich ca. 1983. He tells the story in letters to his friend who stayed behind. For the most part, he is unimpressed. With a clear Confucian eye he diagnosis our modern society as a pointless project oriented towards its own destruction.

    That a European author would choose a Chinese traditionalist as the character who sits in judgement on the modern West is not as strange as it might seem. Conservatives of a certain stripe love Chinese tradition, or at least their conception of it. I used to be in touch, via Facebook, with a Christian writer, conservative in the broad (non-GOP) sense, who posted a lot about Confucius and admired Chinese culture generally. “Ah well,” he would say when despairing of the way our culture was headed, “There will always be a China.” A freethinking American friend of mine who happened to have Chinese in-laws became his Facebook “friend” but couldn’t stomach his uncritical Sinophilia; there were periodic verbal fireworks and, ultimately, an unfriending. I think of this incident fondly as the only time I’ve seen a social-media relationship break down over Confucius.

    Anyway, if unlike the translator mentioned above you do like conservative dystopian future fiction, this is a good one to check out. The English translation by Mike Mitchell, published by Dedalus Europe in 1997, is faithful and reads well.

    PS – I no longer use Facebook. How about we all leave and let the behemoth starve to death? It would be a well-deserved fate.

  • Medieval love poetry: sexier than you might think

    Richard Wagner mined most of his opera plots from medieval sources. Here’s an intro to Tannhäuser:

    Legend has it that back in 1207 or so, Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia invited the most accomplished minstrels in the land to battle it out at the Wartburg castle in Eisenach. In German they call this the Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg and the proper name for a medieval German minstrel is a Minnesänger. Here’s the original group photo, with Hermann and his wife Sophie above, and the Minnesänger below:

    http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0434

    If you’re familiar with Wagner’s Tannhäuser, you know that the title character gets invited to this party and scandalizes everyone by expressing incorrect opinions about love. But Tannhäuser wasn’t actually invited — he belonged to a younger generation with a different party scene. In the original story, the offense was caused by Heinrich von Ofterdingen praising Leopold of Austria over Landgrave Hermann.

    Now, if you were invited to show off your poetic talents at a castle, what would you say to your host, who took the time to organize this event and spent untold amounts on extra firewood, beer, small animals, and larger animals to stuff the small animals into? “Leopold of Austria really puts you to shame”? Of course not! You have better manners than Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

    But manners aside, you’re probably not very interested in whether Hermann or Leopold was doing a better job of ruling a chunk of central Europe. So Wagner made a smart move here: he had the singers fight over love rather than politics.

    He did this by combining the Sängerkrieg legend with that of Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser was a real person; between 1245 and 1265, he wrote a number of bawdy lyric poems with a light, ironic perspective. A “penitential song” is also attributed to him, and the Manesse manuscript (a famous repository of medieval German poetry and source of the group photo above) shows him wearing the garb of the Teutonic Order:

    Tannhäuser in the Codex Manesse (http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0523)

    These real-life elements laid the groundwork for the Tannhäuser legend: the poet finds his way into Venus’ mountain lair, where endless sensual delights await. Eventually, jaded by hedonism, he repents but the Pope denies him absolution. Tannhäuser despairs of forgiveness and returns to the infamous love den, there to await God’s final judgement on the Last Day.

    In the late-medieval/early modern ballads, that’s it for him. In the opera, he is saved by the prayers of Elisabeth, a character inspired by Landgrave Hermann’s daughter-in-law St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

    Wagner took a dualistic approach to this tale. In his version of the Wartburg poetry slam, the good poets advocate a purely spiritual love and Tannhäuser, the debauched poet, is the only one among them who does not regard sexual intercourse with prudish horror. This take has a few problems. For one thing, it creates a simplistic plot with little real human interest.

    Wagner’s perspective was basically post-Christian, so he found it easy to imagine the medieval mind as committed to unbearably sharp distinctions with no grey areas, venial sins, or Purgatory. But a Christian society understands that only a tiny spiritual elite will throw themselves into thorny bushes to banish lustful thoughts, or refuse to participate in any conversation that does not revolve around The Divine Bridegroom. The rest muddle through ambiguously, hoping that the elite will do some of the heavy lifting for them.

    Medieval sources reflect this ambiguity. The epic Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach has a moral structure under which real people could live; Wagner’s Parsifal does not. Tannhäuser suffers from the same difficulty.

    As Sir Denis Forman, once deputy chairman of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, put it, “Wagner was not a believer and wrongly thought that the spirituality which had inspired Bach’s B Minor Mass, the painting of the Florentines and Dante’s Inferno could be used by any good pro as a mechanism to wheel out a holy plot. Which it can’t, because when false piety is rumbled there is nothing left but kitsch. That is why the pilgrims trudging to and from Rome are cardboard figures, why Elisabeth is no more than a nutcase, why the Minnesängers are a comical band of prefects at a pious public school and why Tannhäuser himself is a ludicrous figure.” (And Sir Denis was a Wagner fan.)

    A ludicrous figure

    Another problem is Wagner’s portrayal of medieval love poetry. In the opera’s second act, the poets are asked to define the nature of love, whereupon they sing solemnly of unsullied fountains and cold stars whose purity they would defend with their last drop of blood. Even before Tannhäuser admits to having dwelt in the Venusberg, the other poets threaten him with swords just for mentioning “soft flesh” and “enjoyment in happy desire.” Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

    Many people still have this idea of medieval courtly love — that you were supposed to honor your beloved so much you wouldn’t dream of touching her. But we really get this idea from Wagner and other dreamy Romantics like Hoffmann and Novalis. Although the Minnesänger discouraged casual hookups, the love they encouraged did also aim at physical consummation.

    A handful of examples: Tristan and Isolde engage in flagrant acts of adultery, and author Gottfried von Strassburg treats it as an exemplary relationship with an aura of divinity. Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote dawn songs in which illicit lovers end up so tangled that “it would exhaust a painter’s talent to represent them”.  Walther von der Vogelweide’s references to sex are often coy – “a little bird will keep our secret”; “let us break these flowers together” – but he’s also happy to inform us about the time he spied on a young lady stepping out of her bath. The humor in one of his poems hinges on a woman’s failure to understand what a love affair entails. In response to the man’s explanation that, “You should give a man your body in exchange for his. Lady, if you want mine, I’ll give it away for such a beautiful woman.” She responds, “I can’t think of anyone whose body I would want to take – that sounds like it would hurt him.” Mm.

    They did like songs about worshiping unattainable ladies from afar, but they weren’t recommending it as an ideal — they were just seizing the chance to write mopey rhymes.

    Minnesang was a morally dubious art form by strict Christian standards. Although individual churchmen sometimes acted as patrons for them, the Church generally disapproved of wandering entertainers. The music pretty much died at Landgrave Hermann’s court after his pious successors Ludwig IV and St. Elizabeth took over. They took a dim view of courtly love poetry with its potential to incite lust and its emphasis on ephemeral worldly things.

    So the idea that Tannhäuser could scandalize a group of Minnesänger by praising carnal love is pretty silly. Far from being a guardian of moral purity, your average Minnesänger was probably hoping that when the time came he’d just scrape into Purgatory.

    Tannhäuser has its good points. The hysterical chastity is tiresome and it’s a travesty of medieval culture; but of course what draws audiences to it is the music, not the medievalism, and on that point I really can’t complain.

    The Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, as imagined by Moritz von Schwind

  • I am certified!

    In September I went to Madison, Wisconsin to take the ATA (American Translators Association) certification exam. There were about 20 of us taking it at one of the university facilities. Many language pairs were represented. Spanish and French were the most common. I may have been the only person there doing German-English.

    Until recently, ATA exams were purely paper-and-book affairs. This was one of the new computer exams, so we each brought our own laptop and had to write our translation in Wordpad (because it has fewer special features than Word).

    Preparation and anxiety levels varied quite a bit among the test takers. One gentleman arrived early and wheeled in a big suitcase filled with every conceivable reference book. These he proceeded to arrange in careful piles before the test. My immediate neighbor, on the other hand, strolled in about 10 minutes before start time with nothing but his laptop and two pocket dictionaries. He sat back looking cool while others were doing pranayama, praying to St. Jerome, making deer-in-headlights faces, etc. I bet he either passed with flying colors or failed miserably.

    There were three vigilant proctors. Their job is to meander around the room making sure no one is using unauthorized websites or engaging in any other translation-related mischief.

    We received a paper packet with three passages, from which we selected two for translation. My choices were a formal magazine article, a scientific passage, and a chatty, informal magazine article. At first I decided to avoid that last one because the informality seemed to entail a risk of too many judgment calls with which the graders could potentially disagree. But after completing the first passage, I realized I was not in the mood to tackle a highly specific piece with unfamiliar technical terminology. Are they going to call time while I’m noodling around Wikipedia trying to figure out the difference between various kinds of thingamajigs, I thought? So I went for the chatty piece and of course I drove home wondering whether the graders would disagree with my decisions. Too free? Not free enough? My husband took me out for a drink.

    A thingamajig

    Finally, last Saturday a big envelope came from the ATA with my certificate and a letter of congratulations. I am now allowed to style myself “ATA certified from German into English.” In order to maintain the certificate, I have to earn a certain number of continuing education points every few years.

    So what’s the point of being a certified translator? Obviously, certification by a professional body indicates to potential clients that you are not a charlatan.

    And for some jobs, such as translation of birth/death/marriage certificates for official purposes, the organization requesting the documents will only accept the work of a certified translator. Years ago when I was emigrating to Canada I had to pay a certified German-English translator for an English version of my German police record even though I could have translated it myself. (NB: it was clean. I once got done for jaywalking in Munich but that wasn’t even on there.)

    Another consideration is that as machine translation expands and work for human translators contracts, it might be increasingly advantageous to have special credentials.

    So, although certification is not necessary for a good career in translation, it’s nice to have. And now I have it! I’m number 520122. Hooray.

     

     

  • Monks + cheese

    An update on the curious case of mendicant friars and the moral dangers of collecting cheese (see this previous post): here is a story that appears in Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland (History of public morality in Germany):

    http://</a

    Basically, a friar goes round the farms begging for cheese and eggs, and at one house the farmer’s wife tells him her daughter Grete is in bed with a thorn in her foot. So he offers to go up and do something about it. Mother agrees, then hears Grete screaming and shouts “Let him do it, daughter, it’ll help!” But after he leaves she realizes he wasn’t taking out the thorn but doing something unmentionable to poor Gretl. So she (Mom) goes out with a wheel of cheese and a club. When she sees the friar she hides the club behind her back and shouts, “Come get another piece of cheese!” He doesn’t fall for her trick, but he does decide to keep his distance from then on. A cautionary tale for all.

  • Reformation Flame War

    In honor of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, here is my heavily redacted version of a Reformation-era dialogue by Hans Sachs, namely

    A dialogue on the hypocrisy of the religious and their vows, through which, despising the blood of Christ, they presume to become holy.

    in which Hans the cobbler and Peter the baker amuse themselves by trolling an unsuspecting Franciscan friar who just wants some candles. These dialogue pamphlets dramatizing theological disputes were very popular in the 16th century. Here the Franciscan friar attempts to defend traditional Catholic religious orders against Protestant objections. Like most Reformation dialogues, this one contains lengthy passages where the speakers just sling competing Bible verses at each other. I’ve cut most of that out and kept the fun stuff. Although this is a loose translation, it’s still fairly accurate. Enjoy!

    Monk[1]: Peace be with you, dear brethren! Of your charity please give me some alms for the poor barefoot Franciscans, we need candles for singing and reading.

    Peter: I don’t give to strong beggars like you and begging is forbidden. In Deut. XV God says, “There shall be no beggars among you.” I give candles to my poor neighbors who use them for WORKING. Get a job!

    Monk: Ah, you must be Lutheran.

    Peter: Nope, Evangelical.[2]

    Monk: Then yeesh, do what the Gospel tells you and give to anyone who asks of you. Matthew V, Luke VI, and so on…

    Hans: He just roasted you with Bible verses, Peter.

    Peter: OK fine, I got roasted. Here brother Heinrich, behold this penny which I will give you for the Lord’s sake and which you can exchange for whatever candle suits your fancy.

    Monk: Oh, God protect me, I’m not allowed to take money! My order forbids it.

    Hans: Who set that order up?

    Monk: Our holy father Francis.

    Hans: Oh, so Francis is your father? Well GUESS WHAT – Christ says in Matthew XXIII to call no man “father,” for you have but one father who is in heaven!

    Monk: Arrgh, we know that. But he taught us the way a good father teaches his children.

    Hans: Then I guess he’s your master and you can’t call any man “master” either, according to Christ in that same chapter, and Christ says again in John’s Gospel that he is the way the truth and the life, which isn’t really relevant but I feel like I need more Bible verses to back up my argument.

    Monk: But Francis didn’t just make things up himself, he took them from the Holy Gospel.

    Hans: Where in the Gospel does it say you can’t touch money? I can give you the opposite example. Remember when Christ told Peter to catch a fish and open it up and there was a coin inside? That was amazing.

    Monk: But he also said not to build up treasure on earth, and you cannot serve God and mammon, and Luke XII, and then there’s the camel and the eye of the needle, and sell all you have and give it to the poor…there you have it.

    Hans: You talk the talk, Mr. No-Shoes, but do you walk the walk?

    Monk: Um, yes? We don’t take any money, which means we don’t have any. Not even a little.

    Hans: But outside your cloister walls you have plenty of friends taking and spending money for you…princes who build your snazzy monasteries and pay thousands of ducats for you to buy a cardinal’s hat. Don’t think we haven’t noticed. If that’s not called “building up treasure on earth”, I don’t know what is.

    Peter: It’s called playing your greed under your little hat.

    Monk: OK what the – look, fine, we have people who look after the money for us. But we don’t pay any attention to money. We focus on our religious duties.

    [extended conversation about money, including the accusation that money donated to religious orders is ultimately being stolen from The Working Man]

    Hans: …and you’re no use to God or man.

    Monk: It might make sense to say that if we didn’t spend LITERALLY ALL OUR TIME SERVING GOD!!!

    Hans: You’re good at going to church, not so great at doing actual works of mercy.

    Monk: Come to our monastery tomorrow at noon! You’ll see a whole pile of poor people getting fed.

    Peter: Yeah, you give them the food you don’t want, like soup and peas, then you sit in your own refectory eating delicious fish soup and vegetables with no sense of shame!

    [boring section cut]

    Monk: Well God bless you, young men, but I have to move on now to someone who might actually give us something.

    Hans: Wait, wait Brother Heinrich! One more thing.

    Monk: WHAT

    Hans: Do you keep your vow of chastity?

    Monk: Yes, why not? If we didn’t know how to keep that vow, we wouldn’t make it.

    Peter: The farmer’s daughters really get a taste of your chastity when you’re out collecting cheese.[3]

    Monk: Show me where it says that in our rule!

    Peter: I don’t mean just you guys…it’s all the mendicants who are out there collecting cheese.

    Monk: Don’t judge the whole crop by a few weeds.

    Hans: My concern is that if you don’t do things the natural way, you’ll end up getting into the freaky stuff….

    Monk: That’s why we discipline our flesh. Our whole rule is designed to curb the desires of the flesh. Not just by fasting, but other kinds of discipline too.

    Peter: Tell us about it…

    Monk: Happy to! We don’t wear any linen underwear, but we do wear rope belts, we go barefoot in open shoes[4], we don’t wear any hair on our heads, we go our entire lives without taking a bath – seriously, until we die – we don’t sleep on feathers, we never take our clothes off, we eat meat at not quite half our meals, we don’t eat off of tin[5], we have to be quiet A LOT, we have to stand and kneel in the choir for an hour or five every day, and pray in the middle of the night.

    Peter: Oh yeah? Well the guys and I work really hard every day for crappy food and then we get to bed late, and in the morning the kids are already up yapping by matins…I think my rule is harder than yours.

    [interminable argument cut]

    Peter: Look Brother Heinrich, I have two candles for you. But don’t use them to read Scotus or Bonaventure. Read the Bible and eventually God will enlighten you. And don’t be offended by the way we jumped down your throat and harangued you for an hour when you could have been out collecting more candles.

    Monk: It’s OK, dear brethren. God be with you.

    Peter: AMEN.

    Epilogue: Peter and Hans were saved by faith alone and went to Heaven even though they were jerks. Their many descendants refuse to go to bed when somebody is wrong on the Internet.

    Brother Heinrich asked the prior if he could be put on cheese collecting duty next time. He is still in Purgatory.

    [1] Actually a friar.

    [2] The idea here is probably not that Peter disapproves of Luther, but that “Evangelical” is a better term with more legitimacy, since it basically means “a follower of the Gospel” (as opposed to a follower of one specific guy).

    [3] “keß” in my edition, “kes” in another one. I think that must be cheese… Collecting cheese was apparently such an occasion of sin that Sachs wrote a jaunty little couplet about it: “Mein keuschheit ich frei halten tet / wenn ich nicht kās zuo samlen het” (“I’d keep my chastity with ease / if I didn’t go out collecting cheese”). For more on cheese and chastity, see here.

    [4] So…not actually barefoot?

    [5] “essen aus kainem zin”?

  • Heine heads for the hills

    Here is my translation of the poem that opens Heinrich Heine’s delightful travel narrative Die Harzreise (1826). This poem is all about how it feels to leave the city of Göttingen — famous, he tells us, for its sausages and its university — to walk in nature among simple mountain folk.

    Schwarze Röcke, seidne Strümpfe,

    Weiße, höfliche Manschetten,

    Sanfte Reden, Embrassieren –

    Ach, wenn sie nur Herzen hätten!

    		 Black their skirts and silken stockings,

    White their cuffs, so fine and neat,

    Tender speeches, sweet embraces –

    Would that hearts within them beat!
    Herzen in der Brust, und Liebe,

    Warme Liebe in dem Herzen –

    Ach, mich tötet ihr Gesinge

    Von erlognen Liebesschmerzen.

    		 Had they hearts in loving bosoms,

    Love aglow within their hearts –

    How I tire of their crooning,

    Spare me their deceitful arts.
    Auf die Berge will ich steigen,

    Wo die frommen Hütten stehen,

    Wo die Brust sich frei erschließet,

    Und die freien Lüfte wehen.

    		 To the mountains I’ll away now,

    There are wholesome cabins found,

    There the breast can swell unfettered,

    And the wind blow freely round.
    Auf die Berge will ich steigen,

    Wo die dunkeln Tannen ragen,

    Bäche rauschen, Vögel singen,

    Und die stolzen Wolken jagen.

    		 To the mountains I’ll away now,

    There the dark pines loom on high,

    Brooks are rushing, birds are singing,

    Clouds go speeding boldly by.
    Lebet wohl, ihr glatten Säle!

    Glatte Herren! Glatte Frauen!

    Auf die Berge will ich steigen,

    Lachend auf euch niederschauen.

    		 So farewell, ye shallow halls!

    Shallow ladies, shallow men!

    To the mountains I’ll away and

    Laugh as I look down again.

    I care a lot about meter, and in German each of the lines ends in an unstressed syllable, so my first draft preserved that. However, those kinds of rhymes (feminine rhymes: Manschetten/hätten, Herzen/Schmerzen) occur more easily in German because if you pool all the infinitives and verbs conjugated for 1st and 3rd person plural, as well as a large percentage of plural nouns, you have a ton of words ending in unstressed “-en”. Feminine rhymes in English (mountain/fountain, passion/fashion) tend to require more rumination. They also risk sounding too cute.

    After getting a first draft down, I considered that this is supposed to be a poem you dash off as you pack your things. You leave it on your desk for your poseur university friends to find, and maybe they’ll tell those girls you met the other night that you are so over them.

    So I reworked it with easy one-syllable (or masculine) rhymes, the kind that would occur to you easily as you put on your hiking boots. This means the meter is a little different from the original, but I’m happy with the result.

    I was particularly happy with “shallow halls,” which sounds like a contemptuous play on “hallowed halls;” initially I had tried “glib” because of its closeness to “glatt.”

    My in-house critic pointed out that it might not be OK to rhyme “again” with “men” in old-timey poetry. He may be right! But for the moment I’m declaring this one done. By the way, I didn’t consult any existing English versions for this and I still haven’t, so any similarities to other translations are purely coincidental.

  • If this translation is wrong, I don’t want to be right

    Recently, while slumming it at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service, I ran across two texts that were strange in the same way.

    The first was a German text: “Hallo meine hübsche Dame, wie machst du diesen schönen Morgen?”, which was already translated as “Good morning my pretty lady, how are you doing this fine morning?” (checking existing translations into English is my job at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service).

    And….yeah….that is what it says. Except that it doesn’t, because that’s not how you ask someone how they are doing in German. “Wie machst du” is a literal translation of the English “How are you doing?” Also, you don’t call a Dame “du”. So as a German sentence, this thing was a mess. But my job was to approve the English translation and, yes, the English translation made perfect sense in English, although it did fail to reflect the fact that the German didn’t make sense in German because it was too English, so perhaps in that sense it was not a good translation, and it should have read, “Hello my pretty lady, how goes it to You this fine morning?” Anyway, I approved it, but I would have liked to know who put this through and why. If they were back-translating to check that their German sentence was correct, they got the wrong impression.

    A few weeks later it happened again, at length and in French. This time it was advertising copy about a winter vest. The French side was essentially a literal translation of English, only sometimes it was worse than literal. For example:

    “Ce veste volonté toujours tirer par.” (“This vest will always pull through.”)

    The “worse than literal” part here is that “will” is “volonté,” which is the noun “will,” as in “Thy will be done.” The slightly less bad but still really bad thing about this sentence is that “tirer” means “pull” and “par” means “through” but if you know anything about languages, you know that kind of translation is not going to work. And keep in mind, this was a job where the source text was French, so what I was supposed to do was evaluate the English target text.

    And the English side was perfect. That’s actually a little weird because the TM software used by the Extremely Cheap Translation Service is programmed to translate normal French into English, so it seems like this bizarre Franglais should have resulted in something confusing. It could be that it came out weird and the first human editor (there are always two human editors) guessed the client’s intentions and rewrote it.

    This time I flagged it – it was long and seemed to have a more serious destiny than that little German sentence – and wrote a note about how the target text was fine but source text was nonsense. Incidentally, that’s about all the attention you can expect from your editors at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service.

    ETA: Just to be clear, the ECTS didn’t do anything wrong here. Their clients were just being weird.

  • Marion Dönhoff and Bismarck’s daughter-in-law at the end of the world

    Refugees fleeing East Prussia

    In January 1945, East Prussian Countess Marion Dönhoff jumped on her horse and headed west, away from the Russian army. Seven weeks later she and the horse arrived safely in Hamburg, where she settled and built a long career in journalism. She recounted the journey in her book Namen, die keiner mehr nennt. Ostpreußen – Menschen und Geschichte (1962).

    One memorable incident was her encounter with Sibylle von Bismarck-Schönhausen, which I have translated here:

    We had been traveling about 14 days when we arrived one evening in Varzin, a large estate in the Rummelsburg district, which Chancellor Bismarck had acquired with his endowment after 1866: large, magnificent woods, and a farm run in exemplary fashion.

    The Nogat and the Weichsel lay behind us and I had thought this would be a place where we could rest a while. To finally arrive – what a relief it would be. We rode through the park gate and up the sloping path to the manor house. Up there, in front of the main gate, stood a wagon and two large rubber-tired carts, piled high with boxes. Others have already stopped by, I thought: hopefully there’s still room inside. But to my great surprise I learned that it was not the luggage of East-Prussian refugees; it was the Bismarck archive awaiting evacuation. Even here the decamping was underway. And I had believed that things were calm beyond the Weichsel.

    At that time the Chancellor’s daughter-in-law was still alive – a small, slender, highly amusing and very old lady, who in her youth had been the cause of many a furrowed brow: she had hunted on horseback, smoked cigars and distinguished herself through joking and witty repartee.

    And indeed she remained immensely compelling, so compelling that I could not decide – although it seemed imperative – whether to leave the next day. In the end we stayed two days. Two memorable days. Outside the refugees trekked slowly through the country, and as the last ones passed by, locals joined the train and became refugees themselves. Here, too, they had reached the turning point. The wagon we had seen had already driven away without the old Countess, who could not be convinced to leave Varzin. All our warnings and remonstrances were no use. She was quite sure she would not survive the Russian invasion. Nor did she wish to survive it, and she had had a grave dug in the park accordingly (on the assumption that nobody would have time to do so later on).

    She wanted to stay in Varzin and enjoy her home to the last. And this she did with grandezza. Around her everything was as it always had been. The old servant, who did not wish to leave either, served at table. One superb red wine followed another – vintages that were the stuff of a connoisseur’s dreams. Not one word was spoken about what was happening outside or what was to come. She told lively, nuanced stories of the old days, her father-in-law, the imperial court, and the time her husband Bill Bismarck had spent as governor of East Prussia.

    When I finally said farewell and we rode away, I paused halfway to the garden gate to look back once more. She was standing, lost in thought, in the doorway and giving a last wave with a little handkerchief. I think she was even smiling…though I couldn’t quite tell.

    The manor house at Varzin

  • Emma vs. Effi

    Last month I read Madame Bovary for the first time. Afterwards I decided to re-read Effi Briest, having read it about 20 years ago at St. Andrews. I used to think of Effi Briest as “the German Madame Bovary” just because it was a realist novel about an adulterous wife, but really they’re quite different. One could write about the differences (in tone, characterization, focus, moral/social concerns) at great length but since this is just a blog, here’s a fun chart full of spoilers:

      Emma Bovary Effi Briest
    Family background Only daughter of widowed farmer Only daughter of amusing couple from the minor nobility
    Husband Feckless doctor Extremely correct Prussian Baron
    Pet Dog (runs away) Dog (faithful)
    Children One daughter, Berthe One daughter, Annie
    Reasons for adultery Contempt for wimpy/embarrassing husband, desire for thrilling love affairs, voluptuous nature, probably reads too many novels. Would like to be good but has a weak, overly agreeable character. Judgment impaired by fear that her house is haunted. Needs a chaperon.
    Lover(s) Callous playboy (landed gentry) followed by earnest youth (lawyer) Callous playboy (military officer) with unpleasant wife
    Husband’s reaction Self pity (and she’s already dead by the time he finds out) Successfully avenges honor, divorces her, keeps child, continues living correctly. Lets her have dog.
    Cause of death: Suicide (arsenic) Stress, and looking at the stars in cold, damp air
    Raciness Pretty high for a nineteenth-century novel; obscenity trial led (as always) to increased sales So low it’s hard to tell how far this affair actually went. Reading between the lines required.

    Penguin has an excellent English translation of Effi Briest by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

  • “Five Germanys”

    Recent events have inspired me to re-read Fritz Stern‘s book Five Germanys I have known (grammar nerds will note that it is “Germanys,” not “Germanies,” because the usual plural spelling rules don’t apply to proper names), specifically the middle section about nurturing, preserving, and defending liberal democracy.

    Reading this book ten years ago, I skimmed that part thinking, “Yeah, mm-hmm, whatever.” But it all seems terribly relevant now. Take his comments on the student revolts of ’68, when he was teaching at Columbia University:

    I was angry at the jubilant desecration of the university, and afraid that we were betraying our patrimony. […] I was afraid of the radical youths who were intoxicated by their own rhetoric, enthralled by the initial successes of violence, and convinced of their historic role as iconoclasts. […] Their disruptions were not cost-free: I feared a massive backlash, a reaction by conservative yahoos who would feel justified in their paranoid hatred of liberal (and expensive) institutions.

    How relevant.

    Then there was a rising desire on the right for repressive law and order, along with a “professed faith in the virtues of hard work and economic individualism, and contempt for the welfare state that ‘coddled’ the weak…a new version of Social Darwinism, bloody-minded if economically effective.” And there were advocates of la politique du pire — “that delusionary policy that holds that the worse things go, the better for radicals. I have often fought with these self-righteous ‘wreckers,’ who seldom realize how bad and irredeemable things can get.”

    Ditto.

    Having fled Nazi Germany for an America that was — on the whole and despite its economic woes — confident, well-meaning and optimistic, with a president who insisted the only thing to fear was Fear itself, Stern was wary of radicals on the left and right. Like G. K. Chesterton, he understood that it was worthwhile, and an adventure, to keep your horse running straight when it is tempted to veer onto the paths that lead to insane extremes.

    He gave an interview to Greenpeace magazine in January 2016, a few months before his death at age 90. The interview seems to be available only in German, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating an excerpt here:

    Historian Fritz Stern: “We are facing an era of fear.”

    GP: Is Europe moving too far to the right?

    FS: I fear it is. I believe we are facing an era of fear, widespread fear — the fear that can be exploited by the right. And you can already see in the example of Poland how fragile freedom is. It is shocking how quickly an authoritarian system is being built up in Poland. […] And as an American citizen I am also deeply concerned.

    GP: About what comes after Barack Obama?

    FS: Precisely. On the whole I’m an admirer of Obama and it was a great achievement on the part of this country to have elected him twice. But the current situation is so serious, so destructive, so dysfunctional, that it can only make you worry.

    GP: You mean Donald Trump?

    FS: Trump is the best example of the dumbing-down of the country and the appalling role of money. An absolutely amoral guy who flaunts his money and ignorance. I arrived in this country when Franklin Roosevelt was president. That someone like Trump, who is a nobody apart from money and monstrous ambition and ugliness – that he would not only put himself forward but would even be accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply beyond comprehension. 

    GP: What has changed in American society?

    FS: I’ve already spoken of dumbing-down. That is due in large part to the media and to the fact that there are fewer and fewer objective journalists. Most people can choose the ones who preach what they want to hear. […] A certain kind of new religiosity, which has very little to do with true religiosity, is also on the rise. I believe we are facing a new illiberal age. And for someone who dedicated his life to a certain liberalism, those are sad tidings. It’s a decline.

    RIP Prof. Stern. If there’s anything I can do to keep that horse on the trail, I’ll do it.