Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)
I.
One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.
(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)
Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime.
But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused.
II.
I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].
In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3].
Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:
"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4]
Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...
"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5]
Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so.
Notes
[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.
[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979).
Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically:
"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]
One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
/ The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf
[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.
[4] Ibid., p. 86.
[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.
For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here.
