About People: Julie Zeh

“When did everything go so totally haywire?”

Julie Zeh’s About People is a remarkable novel set during the Pandemic. Thanks to comments here, I know that like-minded readers are somewhat jaded with “Pandemic novels.” Lisa, in particular, noted that some Pandemic novel plot threads are thin. And that brings me to About People, a novel that easily makes my best-of-year list.

About People is set in the Pandemic, but it addresses moral questions concerning beliefs, fanaticism, humanity and compassion. The book opens in 2020 with ad agency employee, 36-year-old Dora in Bracken which is located in Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. Dora moved from Berlin to rural Bracken with her dog, leaving a tepid relationship with a long-term boyfriend, Robert, behind.

Dora still wasn’t even sure she wanted to move to the countryside. All she knew was that she needed that house. Urgently. Even it it was just an idea. A mental survival technique. A hypothetical emergency exit from her own life.

Dora’s relationship with Robert, who works at an online magazine was initially good, and she “can’t remember when it all started” to go wrong. After 2015, Dora notes Robert’s friends “started snapping at one another,” over political and social issues. “Friends began sorting into new constellations. You’d meet up with some friends, but not with others. You’d unfriend certain people on Facebook, unfollow them on Instagram and Twitter and replace them with new connections.” Real differences emerged when Robert began a “climate-defender phase,” and he started to get upset with Dora’s “tiniest recycling mistakes, as if improper sorting were a criminal act.” At first, Dora admired Robert’s commitment, but his commitment slid into superiority as he begins lecturing Dora with statistics. “The world they had previously shared morphed into a suffocating corset of rigid rules,” and distance grows between them.

He saw Dora as an agent for throwaway society, consumer culture run amok, wasting energy, piling the garbage dumps ever higher.

It’s not that Dora disagreed with recycling; she didn’t need “convincing,” But it was his arrogance, his tone and “the rhetoric that paralyzed her.”

There’s a great section on the “energy” needed to produce a cotton tote vs a plastic bag, and at one point, Dora’s brain runs with the calculations as to whether or not she’s “done something to save the environment.” Dora and Robert had many scenes about recycling, but after Covid arrived, Robert discovered his true calling.

Fueled by fanaticism, Robert becomes a Covid “expert.”, and following lockdown, Dora’s life with Robert becomes suffocating. He rides around town on his bike saying he’s gathering info for his articles, but when they are at home together, they get on each other’s nerves. She takes her dog for walks in order to escape his criticism, but then:

Robert informed her that he would no longer tolerate her walks. He spoke slowly and clearly as if Dora were somehow cognitively impaired.

In the months prior to lockdown in Germany, Dora quietly made forays into the countryside looking for the perfect property. The ‘perfect’ property is an old run-down house in Bracken on one acre. It seemed like “the next logical step of her adventurous life journey.” Bracken is in the district of Prignitz, and her father, Jojo, an eminent neurologist asks Dora “what do you plan to do out there among all the right wing nutjobs.?” She thinks he’s exaggerating. But the “so-called Clash of Civilizations really does exist. But it’s not between East and West. It’s between Berlin and Bracken. Between metropolis and province, center and perimeter, city and outskirts.”

Bracken is small:

The technical term is linear settlement, which means it’s your typical East German one-horse town. At its center lies a church overlooking the village square. There’s a bus stop, a firehouse, a mailbox, 284 inhabitant. 285 with Dora.

Dora meets her neighbour, Goth, a lanky anti-social man who says he’s the “village Nazi.” Dora thinks he’s joking, but then when some of Goth’s pals arrive and they all start singing Nazi songs, she understands that Goth was stating the truth.

Adjusting to living next door to a Nazi is one issue, but Dora is a city dweller who must adjust to country life. She’s ill-prepared for shopping which she learns must be planned with “military precision,” and shocked to find out that her neighbours vote for AfD. As she becomes more involved with her community, she realises that as a Berliner, she did not understand the issues faced by those in rural communities:

Every minute the bus doesn’t come is a minute gained for the right wing populists. The people in power can’t even get local public transit up and running, and now they want to abolish diesel?! That’s how anger turns into rage. And rage turns into hate.

Working in the ad industry, Dora is perfectly placed to understand how product branding is geared towards consumers who wish to wear their beliefs like medals of honour. I’m thinking of Guy de Bord here in the Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” T shirts, flags and window signs which signal our beliefs. Dora, however, is an independent thinker; she refuses to be swayed by political rhetoric:

Dora doesn’t like absolute truths or any supposed authority that relies on them. There’s something bristly deep within her, something that always wants to resist. She has no desire to fight to prove she’s right, and refuses to take part in any kind of groupthink.

About People is a amazing novel. Dora is in a relationship that is wrecked by her partner’s application of his intensified beliefs, and she moves to an area where voters don’t share her views. Dora is horrified by the idea that she has a Nazi for a neighbour, but stuck out in the country, Goth shows her some prickly kindness and Dora, once over her horror and fear, struggles to see his humanity. About People is a subversive novel as it tackles topical issues while establishing compassion for a Nazi. Dora wonders “who’s more carbon neutral, an activist crisscrossing Europe to attend rallies, or a stubborn grandma who doesn’t bother with recycling but has never set foot on a plane?” And that’s a question I’ve chewed over too.

Review copy. Translated by Alta L. Price

The Assistant: Robert Walser (1907)

Robert Walser’s The Assistant is a delight. It’s a story of the resilience of youth, a longing for family, and the complexities of the employer/employee relationship. When the novel opens, Joseph, an impoverished young man, arrives at the Evening Star, a country villa owned by an inventor, a man named Tobler. Joseph, who has had a spotty employment history, is to be Tobler’s new clerk, and the previous clerk, Wirsich, who appears later in the novel, left under a cloud of disgrace. Joseph suffers from poverty. His clothes are shabby and threadbare, and he arrives hungry. Joseph, desperately grateful for the job, carries a chip on his shoulder and is well-aware of his lowly station and his dependency on his employer’s grace.

At first the situation looks promising. Joseph is given a pleasant room, and he eats with the family. The food is good, the coffee excellent and the job is not too demanding. Joseph is quick to sense the moments when Frau Tobler patronizes him, but gradually he finds himself attracted to her.

Tobler was at one time, a “low-level employee, an assistant engineer in a large machine factory.” He received a large inheritance and decided to buy a splendid lakeside villa at Bärenswil, and here he launched himself as an inventor. So far there’s the Marksman’s Vending Machine (it dispenses bullets), the Advertising Clock, and an Invalid Chair. While Tobler pours money into these inventions, no one seems interested. Things at the villa begin to unravel quickly after Joseph’s arrival. There’s no mention of Joseph’s wages and while Tobler gives his clerk a little pocket money now and again, a salary does not appear.

There’s a phase of debt and decline in which the debtor (Tobler) dives into a spending frenzy, and in this case, while the local merchants grumble, they still provide services and goods on ‘the tab.’ At this point the local tradesmen are not aware of the dire nature of the Tobler finances.

The Tobler house was still releasing the odors of the most fragrant cleanliness and respectability into its beautiful surroundings.

Joseph, at first prickly and unsure of himself, feels that his life is tied up with the fortunes of the Toblers. He becomes adept at avoiding creditors and skilled at letters which promise future payment. The bank presses for its money, and Tobler builds an underground fairy grotto and throws a party.

Frau Tobler becomes increasingly depressed, and life at the villa is in freefall. The Toblers’ youngest child becomes the vessel for her mother’s frustration, and only Joseph takes Frau Tobler and the sadistic maid to task over their treatment of the child.

At one point Joseph meets his predecessor, and this section of the novel illustrates Joseph’s humanity, kindness and optimism. But there’s a sadness too–Joseph has no family and longs for one. His only correspondent is his former landlady.

The human magic that resided in a home like this–how dolefully enchanted Joseph had always been when he saw it reflected in some window that had been left standing open, making it visible down where he was standing on the cold street all alone, tossed from one place to another, without a home.

The Assistant makes my best-of-year list. My copy includes a splendid afterword by the translator Susan Bernofsky

The German Refugees: Goethe (1794)

“Nothing sharpens a person’s eye as much as being restricted.”

Goethe’s The German Refugees concerns a group of people who have fled from the French army and retreated to an estate on the “right side of the Rhine.” The group is led by the widowed Baroness von C. She is accompanied by her daughter, Fraulein Luise whose fiancé is with the allied army. Also in the party is the Baroness’s son, Friedrich, his tutor and cousin Karl.

Once they arrive, old friends who live in the area come to visit. There’s Herr von S., a petty councillor. His wife is a dear childhood friend of the Baroness, so there’s a cherished reunion in these troubled times when seeing old friends is both a delight and a relief.

There’s that old saying: never discuss politics or religion at dinner, but revolution and revolutionary ideas are in the air. Karl and Herr von S. have political opinions that are diametrically opposed. Karl is in favour of “imminent reforms” while Herr von S. supports the “old system.” A debate which focuses on the German Jacobins in Mainz rages between these two men. The argument becomes heated with Karl wishing “the French army all success” and that the French, if they succeed in Mainz will “regard and treat them [the Jacobins] as their own, not sacrifice or leave them to their fate, but heap honors, wealth and trust on them.” Karl, a man with poor self-control, ends his speech with “he hoped the guillotine would reap a fine harvest in Germany as well.” Herr von S. is so offended he leaves with his wife in tow.

Political opinions have trumped nationality, and the friends who drew together in the face of war, feud over opposing ideas. The Baroness is upset when her friend departs, but admonishes the rest of the company to “return to our former mode of behaviour,” and amuse each other with conversation. Members of the company take turns to tell stories. Some of the stories are little more than anecdotes while others are substantial. The priest tells an excellent story of a singer who has many lovers but one true friend. That friend, a businessman, eventually asks to become the singer’s lover.

She gave into his wishes, but reluctantly and against her better judgment. “I fear,” she said, “that by yielding thus I lose the most valuable thing in the world: a friend.”

The priest tells another great story. This time it’s about a sea merchant who, deciding that he’s missing out on life, marries at the age of 50. At first, he’s happy to stay home with his beautiful young wife, but then after some time passes, he longs to return to the sea. He knows if he leaves his young wife alone, he is asking for trouble. He leaves and tells her that if “you can no longer do without the company of a man, no longer deny yourself the pleasures of love,” then she should pick carefully. And as soon as the merchant leaves, all the young men in the town lose no time at all. They start parading, back and forth, under the young wife’s window.

The priest really pays his way with these stories, and of course they have a moral. There’s another about a young man named Ferdinand whose covetous habits lead to trouble. Those seven deadly sins….

The introduction states that Goethe “hated politics” and goes into some depth about his political beliefs. Translated by Mike Mitchell .

The Bachelors: Adalbert Stifter (1850)

Adalbert Stifter’s The Bachelors, a beautiful story of regret and time, begins with a group of young men “frolicking and cavorting” in the countryside. It’s a gorgeous day; a “dazzling landscape spread out all around them,” and the young men revel in the joy of youth, health and possibilities for the future. One of them insists he will never marry, and another agrees. The author steps in here with an observation about the future and time:

We must remark at this point what a puzzling, indescribable, mysterious and fascinating thing the future is, before it becomes our present–and when it has, how quickly it rushes by, slipping through our fingers –and how then delineated it lies there as the past, spent and insubstantial.

One of the young men is Victor, Both of his parents are dead, but per his father’s will, he was raised in the countryside by a woman who is now elderly. Over the years, she has received a small amount of money for Victor’s care, and she’s managed to save some for his future. There’s a job arranged for Victor, but before he takes up that post, he is to visit his uncle who lives on a remote island. Victor is depressed at the thought of leaving and states that “all the enjoyment’s gone” from his life. While one of the story’s themes is regret, there’s also the idea of living in the present. His foster mother gives him some advice:

I’ll soon be seventy years old and still haven’t said that the enjoyment’s gone has gone out of my life because everything, everything should give you pleasure, for the world is so beautiful and grows even more beautiful the longer you live.

Victor undertakes the long journey to his uncle on foot, and an old dog, who was his companion at home, joins him. Victor has already gone too far to return the dog, and so he takes this faithful canine along with him. His destination is his uncle’s island home, a former monastery, called The Hermitage and when, after a long journey, he gets as far as he can on foot, he finds a man with a boat, and asks him to row him to the island. It’s at this point that Victor learns, or at least begins to learn, exactly how isolated and hostile his uncle is.

The Hermitage is like a veritable fortress–as if his uncle lives under siege. There are grilles on all the windows, locks on all the doors and the building is surrounded by a high wall. Victor’s uncle tells him to drown the dog, which Victor of course refuses to do. This is the beginning of a very strange relationship, with Victor’s taciturn uncle locking Victor in at night and his uncle, apparently so paranoid about safety, that he disappears into what seems to be cupboards (they are actually doors leading to another section of the house). It’s a bizarre situation, and the atmosphere in the house is depressing. All around Victor is decay, with his uncle, spewing bitterness and hostility. In order to escape this oppressive life, Victor explores the island and discovers its many beautiful nooks and crannies. All this time, the uncle observes his nephew, looking for signs of his brother’s character. At last, he too gives Victor some advice:

Life is immeasurable only when you are still young. You always think there’s so much ahead of you and that you’ve only gone a short way. And so you postpone things, put this and that to one side to be taken up later. But when you do take it up it’s too late and you realize you’re old. That’s why life seems a vast expanse when viewed from the beginning but scarcely a stone’s throw when at the end you look back over your shoulder.

Living in the present is a pertinent issue– this is especially true now perhaps more than ever. I see people in restaurants on their phones instead of engaging with others. I see children watching children play on Youtube in videos that fabricate reality. I see people who spend more time on social media than they invest in their own families. It’s all rather sad.

The Class: Hermann Ungar

I’m blasting off German Literature Month XIII with Hermann Ungar’s The Class (1927). The protagonist of the novel, Josef Blau, a schoolteacher, is permanently scarred by his impoverished past. Unfortunately for Josef, who works in a school for the “well-to-do,” he is consumed with a sense of inferiority, a terror of his students and sheer horror at the idea that the pupils will mock him:

Nothing Josef Blau felt, was more suspicious to well-to-do people than poverty. Even their compassion had a level of arrogance.

All the boys wear these sailor-suit type uniforms, and in one case, the uniform is idiotically infantile as the lad already sports chest hair which sprouts out. There’s one exception to the uniform; the boy’s father is poor, a law clerk, and his son’s clothes are old and worn. Blau is terrified that the pupils will compare him to this poor student. At one point, Blau asks the boy which career he wishes to pursue after he leaves school, and to Blau’s great shame, the boy replies that he wants to be a teacher. Of course, Blau, who is paranoid and neurotic, takes this comment personally–that “Josef Blau’s profession was a profession for poor people”

Blau agonizes that the boys will feel sorry for him and try to share their food. He’s certain they will look at his nails and see that they are not manicured. He worries that his pupils will follow him home and see the poor area he lives in. He won’t turn his back on the students as he’s convinced they are making fun of him. It’s not easy being Blau, and then another more popular teacher starts working at the school.

The boys were well-fed and well-dressed. He was aware of the freedom of movement and self-confidence a well-to-do background gave a person, if they enjoyed it from birth, and that it could not be replaced by education, not even by the acquisition of culture and wisdom. He was afraid this was where the first chink in his armour might appear. He could feel the boys’ eyes scrutinizing his movements and his clothes.

So that’s Blau’s professional life, so now for the personal. Blau lives with Selma–a young woman who is pregnant. Also sharing the dingy apartment is Selma’s mother, Matilda–a woman who struggles into her corset whenever her late husband’s cousin, Bobek visits. Bobek leers at Matilda, but his real object is Blau, and he persuades Blau to sign a bill of exchange. Blau agrees to sign even though he is no position to risk the potential financial loss.

Blau also believes that his fate, which is entwined with the lives of others and society’s sometimes unknown mores, merely waits for a mis-step, a wrong word, so there’s forever a Sword of Damocles hovering over Blau’s head:

If everything had been decided in advance, then one could have been free of care. If there were a fate, an unavoidable predetermined fate to which one was subject, then one would have only to do or say what was already decided, and one would have done it without a care in the world. But there was no unavoidable, predetermined step or word awaiting. It was not the case that one could take this step alone, say that word alone, and with every word, with every step fulfill the fate that followed from them. One chose the step and the word from among many. One overstepped a harsh, unknown law, to which one was subject, and stumbled into one’s fate.

Blau in one sense reminds me of the sort of paranoid neuroticism in Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky sometimes adds long character studies or asides which provide some relief. There is no such relief in Blau’s self-gnawing self-cannibalism. Here we are in Blau’s head–subject to his paranoia, his anguish, his self-loathing, and it’s not a pleasant place.

Translated by Mike Mitchell

Head Count: Ingrid Noll

“I didn’t yet know at that time that Cora regarded men as just some kind of mouse that you played with for a while, the way a kitten does, before satisfying your hunger.”

November 2022 and it’s German Literature Month XII. Here’s my first (possibly only) pick: Ingrid Noll’s Head Count–a title that has a double meaning. At the heart of the novel is the relationship between Cora and Maya who meet at school when Maya is 16. Maya has an unpleasant home life; her delinquent father absconded to pursue the life of an artist, leaving Maya’s mother in the lurch with two children to support. Maya’s mother, lacking compassion, is a nurse who works in “the most unsuitable job possible for her.” There’s never enough money and they live in poverty. Maya is not popular at school; in fact, she’s subjected to cruel teasing, but Maya’s life changes when Cora (Cornelia) appears in her class. Cora seeks out Maya and they become firm friends.

Cora’s family is well off, and her home life is everything Maya could dream off. At first it would seem that the two girls are very different from each other but the underlying commonality is delinquent behavior.

Cora wants to be an artist:

Cora revealed a slight tendency towards revolting subjects. In an attempt to impress her, I confessed my kleptomania. She was thrilled to hear it.

Soon Cora and Maya are inseparable and together their delinquency escalates from shoplifting lipstick to more more expensive items. Maya’s brother, Carlo, develops a crush on Cora, and much to Maya’s distress, Cora doesn’t seem to discourage Carlo. The book follows Cora and Maya’s exploits as they become young women. Before long there’s a whiff of the Parker-Hulme case to Cora and Maya’s relationship, and more than one man meets a grisly end.

Noll’s female characters make short work of men who drift into their lives. Cora finds herself a rich sugar daddy and marries him while Maya falls pregnant and marries a dull lump of a man who has no idea what he’s dealing with. Maya’s delinquent father drifts in and out of her life and he’s sometimes used as a tool to weigh Maya down. This is the third Ingrid Noll book I’ve read, and sadly most of the titles from this author don’t make it to translation. Of the three books, this was my least favourite.

Translated by Ian Mitchell

Confession of a Murderer: Joseph Roth

“But, my friends, let me digress for a moment, and forgive me for keeping you here: I wish today that we were still the old grains of dust! Our lives were ordered not by laws but by whims.”

My final entry for German Literature Month is Joseph Roth’s Confession of a Murderer. The tale of tangled identity, jealousy and class envy is told by an observer narrator–a man who has no connection to the story, but he has the ability to listen. The narrator lives in Paris opposite a Russian restaurant called Tari-Bari. It’s an odd sort of place, and since this is post Russian Revolution, the place is full of Russian emigrants. The narrator notes that in the restaurant, “time played no part.”

A tin clock hung on the wall. Sometimes it stopped, sometimes it was wrong; its purpose seemed to be not to tell the time, but to ridicule it. No one looked at the clock. Most of the guests in this restaurant were Russian emigrants. And even those amongst them who, in their own country, might have had a sense of punctuality and exactitude, seemed now, in a foreign land, either to have lost it or to be ashamed of displaying it. Yes, it was as though those emigrants were consciously demonstrating against the calculating, the all-calculating and so very calculated, deliberations of the European West.

Complementing the idea that a sense of time doesn’t play much of a role at the restaurant, patrons have an “alcoholic breakfast,” and even though the place closes, patrons remain inside; some even sleep there. But the timelessness that pervades the restaurant goes beyond the sleeping and drinking past regular hours. For these people, in many ways, time stands still. Their lives in Russia have been interrupted. Some emigres managed to adapt to their new lives while, for others, they are frozen in time.

Of all the patrons in the restaurant, the narrator is drawn, not in a pleasant way, to one particular man. He smiles at the narrator and is nice enough, but it’s an odd smile which “disturbed” the narrator. One day, this man, Golubchik, relates his story to the entire restaurant. He’s sometimes addressed as “our murderer” and freely admits that he was once a police spy. But if he was a member of the secret police, why is he tolerated? So Golubchik tells his story; he was the bastard son of Prince Krapotkin and a married peasant woman. He grows up knowing that he’s different (he thinks that means ‘special’) and fanned by the notion that he’s the son of a prince, he decides to seek out his father in order to claim his, as he sees it, birth right. On the way to Odessa to see his father, he has a fateful meeting with a mysterious character, a well-dressed Hungarian named Lakatos. Lakatos befriends Golubchik and after a huge meal and a lot of alcohol, Golubchik tells his story to his new friend. Lakatos encourages Golubchik to confront the prince.

Lakatos, complete with a limp, is a devilish figure who leads the clueless Golubchik to his moral doom, “straight to hell.” Soon embroiled in the labyrinthine layers of murky state bureaucracy, Golubchik finds himself a member of the Ochrana. While Golubchik’s life becomes arguably more interesting, it also grows more confusing–especially when he’s sent to Paris and is assigned to spy on a dressmaker and his models. Here, Golobchik runs into his arch enemy. … Well at least the man he thinks is his arch enemy, Prince Krapotkin’s son–his legitimate son.

This is a tale of tangled identity: Golubchik is a peasant yet longs to be a prince and claim his so-called birth-right. As a spy, opportunities arise for Golubchik to use his power to usurp Prince Kraptokin’s son, but he’s bucking the rigidity of the class system. There’s a comic element here to be found in Golubchik’s fate. Here’s a man who is a spy and yet in some ways he’s completely clueless.

Lakatos also appears in The Leviathan.
Translated by Desmond I Vesey

The Vaccination: Frank Wedekind

The Vaccination from German author Frank Wedekind is another entry for German Literature Month. Wedekind wrote the Lulu plays which became the basis for the silent film Pandora’s Box starring the intriguing actress, Louise Brooks. The Vaccination, rather like The Seducer, isn’t at all as the title implies. The Vaccination (Die Schutzimpfung), a tale of infidelity, jealousy and deceit, told in retrospect, concerns an affair between the narrator and a married woman named Fanny. There’s the impression that Fanny has strayed before as she’s rather practiced at deceiving her husband.

“You have nothing to fear, darling,” Fanny said to me one lovely evening, when her husband had just come home, “since husbands, by and large, are jealous only so long as they have no reason to be. As soon as there is really a reason for them to be jealous, it’s as if they were stricken with terminal blindness.”

The narrator isn’t as comfortable with this arrangement as Fanny and he’s sure the husband, who sends odd looks his way, “must have noticed something.” Fanny reassures her lover that her husband suspects nothing, explaining the bold “method” she has “devised” which, she insists works, “inoculating him once and for all against any jealousy” and suspicion. She describes how she constantly tells her husband she is “really taken” with the narrator and if she doesn’t “break her vows” of marriage it’s because of the narrator and for “him alone that I have been so unshakably faithful to you.” Fanny swears this sort of talk acts as a vaccination against her husband’s jealousy. The narrator isn’t convinced, but then one day Fanny unexpectedly shows up at his lodgings. There they are, in his small room, both starkers, whopping it up in bed when guess who else pops up unannounced? … Yes the cuckolded husband. So will Fanny’s method of vaccination work?

This tale has an unexpected, delightfully venomous twist in a careful-what you-wish-for sort of way. What a mind Frank Wedekind must have had.

Juan LePuen

The Pharmacist: Ingrid Noll

“Margot was dressed in nothing but a black suspender belt and red boots, and she had perched her purple knickers coquettishly on her head.”

Pharmacist Hella Moorman is stuck in bed at the Heidelberg Hospital for Women. With nothing to do and bored to tears, Hella begins to tell her life story to her roommate, a very dull looking “ageing spinster.” It seems harmless to confess all, and the roommate, Rosemarie Hirte, following a hysterectomy and a cancer diagnosis, seems half asleep most of the time anyway. To Hella, telling all is “a kind of therapy.” Hella admits that in her past she “kept falling for men who were having an even harder time of it than I was.” That is a long way of saying they were LOSERS. Hella, who comes from a good family, has a pattern of trying to salvage hopeless men. By the time she’s an adult, she’s been accused of murder (nothing can be proved) and has had a string of awful men in her life. But she’s intelligent and becomes a pharmacist.

Enter Levin, a much younger man who says he’s studying to be a dentist. Within a short period of time, Levin has moved in, and good at spending Hella’s money, he persuades her to buy a flashy red convertible. There’s the impression that Hella is not very attractive; she’s the one who has to initiate sex with Levin. He doesn’t seem that interested, and he’s much more interested in the sports car. Hella admits the car has its uses: “it was fun roaring around with someone in a perpetual state of euphoria.”

Over time, Hella learns that Levin is to inherit his grandfather, Herman’s, impressive mansion and ALL of his money. Too bad the old chap won’t be reasonable and die. In the meantime, Levin, who can’t wait for his inheritance begins to siphon off valuables from his grandfather’s house. Levin employs a vastly unsuitable young woman named Margot to care for his grandfather. Margot looks as though she belongs on a stripper pole rather than behind a wheelchair.

Margot was no thrifty housekeeper but a thoroughly incompetent slut.

As Rosemarie listens to this sordid tale from her hospital bed, she occasionally jumps in with snarky, tart comments. At one point she interrupts Hella:

“Were you really so stupid as to actually marry that waster?” demanded Frau Hirte. “If so, then please skip the wedding, if you don’t mind, and go straight on to the successful divorce proceedings.”

Rosemarie doesn’t seem in the least concerned to hear that Levin was fascinated by Hella’s secret stash of poisons passed on from her creepy Nazi grandfather.

Hella’s tale is tinged with ‘if onlys.’ If only Levin will marry her … If only she can have a child … If only Margot would leave …

Here’s Hella’s wedding day with Margot stealing the show:

I looked so pretty, or at least so I imagined; my costume suited me perfectly and my father had put around my neck, with his own fair hand, the six rows of polished pearls and garnets which had belonged to his grandmother and which I had had my eye on for a long time. But then it all started to go wrong. I caught sight of Margot and was horrified. Was this the mangy cat who had, after a fashion, taken care of Herman Graber’s household? Before me stood a young woman in a black dress, the top half transparent and, at the back, plunging all the way down to the start of the valley between her buttocks; totally out of place, and no doubt paid for out of my money. And confronted with this package of aggressive, low-class sex, many of the men were asking eagerly, ‘who’s that, then?‘

Things become even more complicated when Margot’s husband, Dieter, Levin’s best friend and former partner-in-crime, shows up. Yes Hella’s life would be perfect … if only Margot would disappear. And then there’s the decision about which man of three (yes, three no less) she should choose. As Hella’s sordid tale continues, and becomes darker, we only have her version of events. She positions herself as an innocent bystander surrounded by users and yet is Hella the sort to be a victim? Is Hella a reliable narrator? This novel, with its dark transgressive humour, follows Hella’s lifestory as told to Rosemarie Hirte. Rosemarie, by the way, has a sordid tale of her own in Hell Hath No Fury.

Goodwill, dependability, loyalty and morality don’t stand a chance when sex is involved.

This was a great pick for German Literature Month.

The Seducer: Frank Wedekind

After reading Frank Wedekind’s short story, The Seducer, I looked up the meaning of the word ‘seduce.’ “A person who entices another into sexual activity. A person who entices another to do or believe something inadvisable or foolhardy.” Initially I was not sure that either definition quite fits Wedekind’s story, but perhaps it’s a matter of who is being seduced. … The story, set in the 19th century, begins like this:

“It is entirely easy to win the favor of every girl, without exception. But it isn’t always easy. The important thing is to set about it in the right way.”

The rest of the gentlemen of the circle of close friends listened in eager anticipation.

So we have several men gathered while one explains how to win “the favor” of a woman. Thanks to the title, naturally, I decided that the narrator is talking about sexual favors. The narrator goes on to explain how he visited his Aunt Matilda and there met Melanie who has just returned from Brussels. The narrator is clearly sexually attracted to Melanie and that notes that “her hips and most of all the shape of her corset struck me for their magnificent curves.” But while the narrator is impressed by Melanie, the feeling isn’t mutual.

She cast sharp glances at me that made me feel as if I were being peppered with small-caliber shot.

Later the narrator and Melanie go for a walk in the garden. It’s dark and there’s a little bit of seduction going on with Melanie as she “leaned her upper body” over her male companion. The narrator leaves only to return a few days later. At this meeting, with the aunt conveniently asleep, the narrator and Melanie are in the house with Melanie sprawling all over the chaise longue, and she’s so hot, she has to undo the two top clasps of her thin dress so she can “breathe better.” The narrator feels no small frustration during his talk with Melanie as he is only given “a wordless, superior smile.”

The courtship, for that is what it is, continues with the narrator almost driven crazy by Melanie’s behavior. On one hand she’s cold and yet during each of their meetings there are rather unsubtle sexual maneuvers from Melanie. This short story only runs to a few pages, so I won’t go into it any further. For this reader, the story is, given the narrator is lecturing men on the subject of how to win an uninterested woman, ironic. There’s a seducer in this story alright–it’s just not the narrator.

Original title: Der Verfüher.

Translator:Juan LePuen