Forced Emigration

Without a Country     Ayşe Kulin     (2016)

Translated from the Turkish by Kenneth Dakan     (2018)

In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, German universities, funded by the government there, were highly esteemed. American students trekked off to Germany to pursue graduate degrees in both the humanities and the sciences. German research publications influenced scholars around the world. However, when Nazi oppression of Jews stepped up in the 1930s, many of the faculty in German universities and medical schools—Jews and those critical of the Nazi regime—were forced to emigrate. Although I knew these historical facts, until I read Without a Country, I had no idea that dozens of German scholars took positions in Turkey, which was building up its educational system in the years just prior to World War II.

In Without a Country, Ayşe Kulin tells the story of one German Jewish scholar and his family who leave everything behind in Frankfurt so that he can take a position in Istanbul in 1933. According to an author’s note, an actual German pathologist inspired the fictional character of Gerhard Schliemann, who lands a job in Turkey and negotiates with the Turkish government to find job placements in Istanbul and Ankara for many other German academics and physicians. Schliemann’s descendants grow up in Turkey and navigate the paths of nationality and religion in varied ways. The Schliemann family and their friends evolve not only as German/Turkish/American but also as Jewish/Muslim/Christian, some practicing, most not.

That’s the basic premise of this intriguing family saga that provides, in three sections, scenes from the 1930s/1940s, the 1960s, and then the present day. Most of the action is set against the magnificent scenery of Turkey, especially the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul, city of ancient churches, mosques, and palaces. Political movements and political unrest play out in the background; I fact-checked a few of the historical references and found them to be accurate. In a sense, novelist Kulin is telling the story of modern Turkey through her fiction.

In the first section of the book readers get brief scenes depicting significant incidents in the lives of the Schliemann family. The details of their escape from Nazi Germany to a welcoming Turkey are absorbing, and the individual characters come to life. Even in the second section, Gerhard and his wife, Elsa, remain in the story as their children and grandchildren take center stage. I was disappointed, however, in the final section of the book, which shifts from third-person narration to first-person, with the narrator being Esra, the great-granddaughter of Gerhard and Elsa. The multi-generational family chronicle is diluted as readers hear little or nothing of the fates of beloved characters from previous decades. The novel would have been much stronger if the contemporary section had been expanded considerably.

Still, I recommend Without a Country for its depiction of people in a multicultural society in an area of the world that has seen much discord. As Gerhard was “without a country” when he left Germany in the 1930s, so his great-granddaughter Esra will be “without a country” if she leaves Turkey in the present day. Kulin has a keen awareness of the sacrifices, compromises, and heroism of families caught in the tumult of history.

Guest Review: Cloaks and Daggers

Hunting Eichmann:  How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi     Neal Bascomb     (2009)

Today, as a bonus Tuesday post, another guest review by ethicist and philosopher Paul R. Schwankl!

Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) managed the Third Reich’s plans to exterminate Jews. For fifteen years after World War II, he was the most notorious alleged war criminal still at large. In 1960, a team from the Israeli security services smuggled him from Argentina to Israel to be tried for crimes against humanity. These are the bare facts of the case.

As someone who was trained in moral philosophy, I’m interested in analyses of the evil in this man. But I also love cloak-and-dagger stories, so I’m grateful to Neal Bascomb for his magisterial book Hunting Eichmann, based on an immense number of interviews and memoirs, detailing the lucky breaks and good choices that allowed Eichmann to hide—and allowed the Israelis to capture him.

At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies didn’t at first realize how important Eichmann was to the Holocaust. He didn’t run individual death camps; he was the distant overseer who made sure that Jews got to them. Significantly, he hated being photographed. After the war, he got swept up along with millions of other German soldiers and put into a crowded and understaffed prison camp, where he passed as a low-level officer. He easily escaped and worked as a rural laborer in northern Germany. But by 1950 his adversaries had figured out his role in Hitler’s Final Solution, so he made his way to the seaport of Genoa, staying with pro-fascists along his route, including Catholic priests and monks who felt that as long as Eichmann was against communism it didn’t matter how many Jews he had killed. Eichmann sailed to South America and had no trouble entering fascist-friendly Argentina, getting a job, and, in 1952, bringing his wife and three sons over to join him. It seemed that Adolph Eichmann, now named Ricardo Klement, had won.

But a remarkable happenstance, combined with one of Eichmann’s few mistakes, started to unravel his cover. Eichmann allowed his sons to use the surname of their birth; they claimed that their father was dead and that Ricardo Klement was their uncle. In 1956, the eldest son, Klaus, starting dating a German Argentinian, Sylvia Hermann. When Klaus visited her German-speaking home, he assumed that it was safe to brag to Sylvia’s blind father, Lothar Hermann, that his dad had been big in the Wehrmacht. Klaus did not know that Lothar was half Jewish and had gone blind from beatings by the Gestapo. Eventually, Lothar and Sylvia got in touch with Israelis who were still pursuing war criminals. Lothar and Sylvia also, with much difficulty, found out where the Eichmann family lived. In a highlight of the book, Sylvia risked her life by calling on the family and coming face to face with Adolf Eichmann (Ricardo Klement) himself.

From there Israeli operatives largely took over the hunt, first undertaking a positive identification, which was hampered by a lack of photographs. The capture of Eichmann and his transportation to Israel took three years of work. It was an amazing accomplishment by the Israelis, though the details were long kept secret. Argentina complained that the Israeli captors had violated Argentine sovereignty, which Israel admitted they had done. Israel asserted that it was standing for a righteous world in which criminals like Eichmann must not go free. The Jewish state ultimately patched things up with the post-Peronist Argentine government.

In reading Bascomb’s account, I was impressed with the expertise of the career spies and agents who captured Eichmann, but the amateurs and part-timers also did some truly amazing things. For example, one Israeli started wooing a former mistress of Eichmann in Vienna. After several excruciating dates, the Israeli persuaded her to open her photo album, which contained one of the rare pictures of Eichmann. He got the Vienna police to seize the album on the pretext that the woman was hiding stolen ration tickets in it.

 Many war criminals have come and gone since Eichmann’s day, and it is still possible to bring them to trial; an ex-Nazi in his nineties was sentenced just recently. I would like to think that the Israelis’ success with Eichmann helped, by laying an effective foundation separate from the Allies’ work at Nuremberg. Eichmann was hanged and cremated and his ashes scattered at sea; he remains the only person to whom Israeli courts have applied the death penalty. In the United States today, we can all use a reminder that law can indeed rule.

Moral Quandaries in Berlin, Part 2

Here in Berlin     Cristina García     (2017)

The cover of Here in Berlin tells us that this is “a novel,” but upon opening it you’ll be excused if you mistake it for a collection of short stories. Either way, Cristina García has produced a striking picture of contemporary Berlin by presenting pieces of historical Berlin.

The construct is this:  a Visitor, never named, interviews Berliners, many of them aged residents of a nursing home, and records their stories in their own words. The Visitor also sets down a few third-person accounts of Berliners. In addition, the Visitor records some interviews with Cubans, both in Berlin and in Cuba, as she explores the connections between East Germany and Fidel Castro’s Cuba as those connections existed from the end of World War II until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. It had never occurred to me before, but now it’s obvious that there would have been movement of people between these two centers of Communist power in the twentieth century. Students would have traveled from Cuba to study in Berlin, for instance, and transatlantic business would have been conducted.

How did the (fictional) Visitor secure her (fictional) interviews? “The Visitor struggled with balancing what she found with what eluded her. On fortuitous days, stories dropped like gifts out of the windless skies, typically prompted by loneliness, or happenstance. Other stories—the forgotten, interstitial ones she’d come to Berlin to collect—she coaxed from the grist of history. Why was apocalypse so compelling? What did war keep offering that ensured its survival?” (109)

Oh, the stories that emerge! The primary revelations concern the Nazi era and the period of the late 1940s, when Berlin was an apocalyptic landscape of destruction and starvation. Nonagenarians reveal to the Visitor long-hidden secrets of their precarious survival, and slightly younger Berliners recount grim childhoods, when World War II was grinding to a horrific conclusion, with Hitler’s troops fighting to the bitter end and the Russians storming Berlin. The voices are so authentic that you may start to think of the book as documentary rather than fictional.

War crimes are prominent in the stories, as ordinary Germans explain how they were sucked into the Nazi machine. Toward the middle of the book, a former Luftwaffe pilot laments, “We grew old, very old, before our time. Sometimes I think it’s better to remember nothing at all. Memories are selective. We pick and choose what we need to believe, what we require to survive.” (122) The specter of collusion in war atrocities hangs over almost all the speakers. An amnesiac photojournalist explains: “Dear Visitor, the ghosts in Berlin aren’t confined to cemeteries. Listen. Don’t you hear their whisperings? Feel their tugs on your sleeves? Their stories lie beneath the stories that nobody want to talk about. They haunt the present like palimpsests, shaping it with their hungers.” (96)

Over it all, the Visitor tries to pinpoint her reasons for conducting the interviews in the first place. She finds linkages between some of the characters, making Berlin sometimes seem like a small town where everyone knows everyone else. For instance, an ophthalmologist whom the Visitor interviews has a couple of the other story tellers as patients. A Cuban who moved to Berlin and became a geology professor reports his long-ago affair with a crippled German ballerina whom the Visitor also interviews. To fully appreciate Here in Berlin, it helps if you can read German, or at least are willing to Google the meanings that you can’t get from context. Sure, most readers will know that “danke” is “thanks,” but I’m guessing that fewer will recognize “Ku’damm” as the shorthand for “Kurfürstendamm,” the broad avenue of shops in Berlin. A few misspellings in the German are unfortunate editing errors. The bits of Spanish that dot the text are less problematic.

The memories of war cannot be erased by time, it seems, or even by the deaths of the participants. In the gleaming new Berlin, a city of lovely lakes and rivers, heinous acts linger: “Most of the city’s new architecture—dazzling, sleek—has sprung up along these riverbanks. Berlin longs to define itself by the future, yet it remains a hostage to its past.” (88)

For a different take on Germany in the years right after World War II, see my review of The Women in the Castle, a novel by Jessica Shattuck. And for another collection of linked short stories, try Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout.

Moral Quandaries in Berlin, Part I

Go, Went, Gone     Jenny Erpenbeck     (in German, 2015)

Translated by Sarah Bernofsky     (in English, 2017)

Richard is retiring from his position as a classics professor in Berlin. In his university office, he packs up books, clears out drawers, sorts stacks of papers. His next steps are somewhat unclear, both to him and to us as readers. Maybe he’ll write some journal articles. Maybe he’ll kick back and take his boat out on the lake on which his suburban house is situated. Richard is a widower with no children, no close family, and an ex-mistress who is no longer part of his life; he does have a good circle of friends.

By chance, Richard walks by some refugees who are protesting the poor living conditions in a ramshackle tent village in a city park. In Germany, the refugee crisis is not abstract but obvious from makeshift camps and from daily news reports. Ever the academic, Richard wonders about the backgrounds of the refugees flooding his country. He decides to do some background reading, particularly on conflict in African nations, and he draws up a list of questions to ask individual refugees from Africa. It’s unclear what the end product of this “research” will be. Will he produce some written piece? If so, will he come down as pro-refugee or anti-refugee?  Without much trouble, Richard gains access to a group of African refugees housed in an abandoned building near his home, and he starts working through his question list. (I’ll pass over the potential ethical issue of failing to seek permission for doing research on human subjects!)

Go, Went, Gone holds many layers of meaning, and as a reader you can unpeel as many of these as you want. For instance, as Richard gets more and more involved with the refugees, he’s reminded of lines in classical literature that speak to moral quandaries. He’s trying to figure out how Germans should respond to the situation, all the while Erpenbeck reminds us, by brief references to online forums, of a thriving racist element in German society.

The novel is set in the present day, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has left residual tensions between West and East, between capitalism and communism. Richard lived for decades under an oppressive regime in East Berlin, so he’s receiving a pension that’s significantly less than that of his counterparts who worked in West Berlin. Still, in some ways he’s a beneficiary of the removal of the Wall:  “Who deserves credit for the fact that even the less affluent among their circle [in the former East Berlin] now have dishwashers in their kitchens, wine bottles on their shelves, and double-glazed windows? But if this prosperity couldn’t be attributed to their own personal merit, then by the same token the refugees weren’t to blame for their reduced circumstances. Things might have turned out the other way around. For a moment, this thought opens its jaws wide, displaying its frightening teeth.” (95)

As Richard’s views on the refugees are slowly, slowly developing, small incidents take on larger meaning. Here it’s windblown dust on leaves: “The Sirocco . . . came from Africa and across the Alps, sometimes even bringing a bit of desert sand along with it. And indeed, on the leaves of the grapevines you could see the fine, ruddy dust that had made its way from Africa. Richard had run his finger across one of the leaves and observed how this small gesture produced a sudden shift in his perspective and sense of scale. Now, too, he is experiencing such a moment; he is reminded that one person’s vantage point is just as valid as another’s, and in seeing, there is no right, no wrong.” (55) Bodies of water take on a liminal quality, marking some critical transition. Richard thinks often about the lake in his backyard, which holds the body, never found, of a man who presumably drowned a couple of months before the novel begins. This sad fact reminds Richard of the thousands of refugees who’ve drowned in dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean.

Novelist Erpenbeck could easily have slid into didacticism or preachiness, but she doesn’t. She juxtaposes the quotidian activities of Richard’s life (making toast, taking his car in for service) with his increasing existential concerns about the direction of his life and the direction of the world around him. She presents the refugees mostly as benign figures, victims of civil wars or sectarian repression in their native countries, but not every refugee is honest or honorable.

Sarah Berofsky’s translation of this novel is exceptionally good, especially considering the difficulties of dealing with characters who are presented as speaking in many different languages. Richard himself speaks German, English, Russian, and Italian, in addition to his fluency in ancient Greek and Latin. He communicates with the refugees mostly in English and Italian—many of them crossed the Mediterranean and landed first in Italy. They work hard to learn the language of each country they arrive in, with the hope of remaining. The “go, went, gone” of the title refers to their language learning, since the conjugation of the German verb for “to go” (gehen, ging, gegangen) is important to eventual fluency. The title also refers to the constant “going” of the refugees, their peregrinations from one European nation to another, from one government office to another, from one squalid camp to another, in hopes of finding asylum and work.

Very few books written in other languages get translated into English. I try to report on a few of them on this blog, to reveal non-Anglophone patterns of thought. Go, Went, Gone is a brilliant and profound novel that you should not miss.

Watch for my upcoming review of Here in Berlin by Cristina García, under the heading "Moral Quandaries in Berlin, Part 2."

A Martin Luther Biography

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet     Lyndal Roper     (2017)

Caution: Heavy lifting required! This academic biography is crammed full of data and has 88 pages of footnotes.

Historians have traditionally set the date for the launch of the Protestant Reformation in Europe as October 31, 1517, when the monk-professor Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted his “95 Theses” on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

Lyndal Roper’s biography of Martin Luther appears in time for the 500th anniversary of this event, in 2017. It’s unclear if Luther actually nailed a piece of paper to that church door, but he certainly sent his document, challenging certain practices of the Catholic Church, to his local bishop and to the powerful archbishop of Mainz. Luther’s “95 Theses” were statements intended to provoke debate in the university town of Wittenberg. Instead, they became early shots in theological and physical wars that went on for centuries.

The “95 Theses” mainly critiqued the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences, by which people could purchase time out of Purgatory (punishment after death) for their souls or the souls of loved ones. But the seeds of other complaints about the Catholic Church were present in the arguments of the “95 Theses.” Over subsequent years, especially during the 1520s and 1530s, Luther further developed his positions against the Church’s monopoly in granting forgiveness of sins. He also attacked monasticism, pilgrimages, papal authority, the Catholic sacraments, scholastic philosophy, the celibacy of priests, and the cult of the saints, especially the role of the Virgin Mary as an intercessor with Christ in heaven. Luther departed from the medieval tradition of meditative, mystical faith to pursue a bold approach toward God. He shocked his contemporaries, both Catholic and reformist, with his frank views on sexuality, arguing that the pleasures of the flesh should be enjoyed (within certain limits) because all human actions are inherently sinful anyway.

In the early years of his theological campaign, Luther fully expected to be burned at the stake. He actually welcomed this grisly prospect, but as his support grew and martyrdom became less of a possibility, he became more haughty. He insisted that he alone could point out the true path to reforming the Catholic Church. I find this attitude contradictory, since Luther preached “the priesthood of all believers,” arguing that Christians could and should read the Bible for themselves. In another contradiction, he affixed his own interpretations to the beginning of each book in his monumental German translation of the Bible, although he repeatedly claimed that the Bible was simple to interpret.

Luther was a tech-savvy guy, taking full advantage of the new technology of printing to spread his voluminous writings across Germany and beyond. Consciously or not, he also exploited the nascent capitalism in the many German principalities of the sixteenth century by attacking the Catholic Church for its financial dealings and accrual of wealth. At least partially for this reason, he gained the protection of three successive Electors (princes) of his native Saxony, a large area in the east of Germany. Luther sided with the German princes against the farmers who rose up in protest over economic conditions in the Peasants’ War of 1524-25. He directed his followers to submit to the civil authorities who were placed over them by God. As Roper puts it, he created the “theological underpinnings of the accommodation many Lutherans would reach centuries later with the Nazi regime.” (311)

That brings us to Luther’s anti-Semitism, which was venomous. Luther believed that Christians were the “chosen people” of God and that Jews should no longer make that claim for themselves. With vile slanders and calls for destruction of Jewish properties, he went far beyond the standard anti-Semitic attacks of medieval theologians and poets.

Without passing judgement, Roper shows her readers repeatedly that Luther was an arrogant and unpleasant man who used the most foul scatological and sexual expletives and analogies in attacking his theological enemies. We’re not talking about an occasional outburst but rather Luther’s standard mode of operation, documented in thousands of his letters, sermons, pamphlets, and treatises. He did have some stalwart friends, like the mild-mannered Philipp Melanchthon, but he made lots of enemies. That’s how Luther rolled. Because Luther would never budge in his theological views, he refused to compromise or collaborate with most other Reformation theologians. This stance caused splits within the reformist camp and led to the multiplicity of Protestant denominations that still persist.

Still, Roper argues in her conclusion that Luther’s very intransigence and courage were necessary characteristics for someone taking on the enormously powerful Catholic Church. Luther was also extremely hard working and talented as a linguist. Intellectually, Luther was always able to “cut to the heart of an issue.” (411).

In tackling her subject, Roper wisely sets limits: “This book is not a general history of the Reformation, or even of the Reformation in Wittenberg; still less can it provide an overall interpretation of what became Lutheranism.” (xxviii) Instead, she says, “I want to understand Luther himself. . . . I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body.” (xxvii) Although I accept that Roper is concentrating on the mind of Luther, I was disappointed that Luther’s hymnody merits only one paragraph (403) and that his wife, the ex-nun Katharina von Bora, and his six children receive only passing mentions. A chronological chart would also have been helpful. In addition, I found Roper’s concluding sections on the influence of Luther particularly weak. These are small complaints about an excellent book.

Roper’s biography of Luther is overwhelming in its detail but fascinating for an ex-Lutheran like me. I kept plowing through it, seeing slices of my own twentieth-century religious training, even in some of the sixteenth-century anti-Catholic cartoons that Roper reproduces. In my Lutheran confirmation class, the seamier side of Luther’s polemical writing was, obviously, never presented. But every year on October 31 we celebrated Reformation Day, singing Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Luther went to war with the Catholic Church, and he saw God as the fortress that protected him in the battle.

After World War II

The Women in the Castle     Jessica Shattuck     (2017)

I had sworn off reading more novels set in World War II, because there are enough global injustices in the current news. But I decided that I’d try The Women in the Castle, because it’s set primarily right after World War II. I knew by page 10 that I was in the hands of an capable writer and that I’d stick with this novel. I read it in one day, gritting my teeth through the flashbacks to horrific scenes from the war.

In the spring of 1945, as the Nazi war machine collapses, millions of people are on the move across the European continent: prisoners of war being released, Russian soldiers running amok, civilian refugees returning to ruined villages or settling in crowded camps for displaced persons. They walk unfathomable distances in all weather, beset by injuries, diseases, assaults, and starvation.

Among the roaming throngs are surviving members of the German Resistance movement. These are the men and women within Germany who did not accept Hitler’s vision for their country and who tried, numerous times but unsuccessfully, to assassinate the Führer. Jessica Shattuck tells the stories of three fictional “widows of the Resistance” as they scrape together the fragments of their lives.

Inside Germany, Marianne von Lingenfels and her three children take shelter in a crumbling ancestral castle of Marianne’s late husband, who was part of an assassination plot that led to gruesome execution for him and his fellow plotters. Marianne has made a vow to look after the families of her husband’s compatriots. She’s able to locate the widows Benita and Ania and their children and bring them to the castle, where they all lead a hardscrabble life.

This is the basis of the surface narrative in The Women in the Castle, and that narrative is full of secrets and mysteries, betrayals and senseless deaths, but also great love and kindness. The characters of the three women are distinct and deeply drawn as the plot moves back and forth in time.

The underlying story is more complex. Shattuck considers what it was like in the late 1930s to be pulled into the fascist maelstrom in Germany through something seemingly benign like the Landjahr Lager, a Nazi agricultural training and service program. She looks at how women survived World War II, particularly women in cities, where there was no access to food once all the shops had been bombed. She asks what political resistance really entailed on an individual level, in battle or in a concentration camp. She posits what it may have been like after the war for German resisters to live next door to returning Nazi soldiers—or worse, members of the SS. She explores the reactions of ordinary Germans to the incessant Nazi propaganda that covered up war atrocities. Here is a description of Ania, one of the widows in the novel:  “She knew of the horrors and she didn’t. She half knew—but there is no word for that. She knew it the way you know something is happening far way in a distant land, something you have no control over: earthquake refugees living in squalid conditions or victims in a foreign war.” (259)

I lived in Munich in 1973, one generation after the end of World War II. By then Munich had been rebuilt from rubble and was an immaculate, prosperous city with all the cultural amenities. But reminders of the war were all around in the form of the maimed bodies of many middle-aged and elderly men. No one ever talked about what had happened to the city or its inhabitants during the war. This silence of avoidance is exactly what Shattuck portrays in The Women in the Castle. With her powerful novel, I think that Shattuck is warning us that we must confront the hard truths of the past, lest we, too, be drawn into the xenophobia and bellicosity of a dictator.