Stephan Hermlin by Gudrun Brüne (1985) [1]
"Where one asks, others will know no answer, and
where answers are given, questions will be waiting."
Stephan Hermlin was born (as Rudolf Leder) into a bourgeois Jewish family in Chemnitz, in 1915. Aged sixteen, he joined the Socialist Student Association as well as the Young Communist League (KJVD). Unfortunately, Germany was probably not the best place to be at that time for a Jewish Marxist and so, in 1936, Hermlin fled abroad; drifting round Egypt, Palestine, England and Spain, before settling in France.
Quickly establishing contact with literary circles in Paris, Hermlin also became involved with an underground German-language radio station.
During the occupation - and after a period of internment - Hermlin lends support to the Resistance and goes on the lam, before escaping to Switzerland in 1943 with the help of the (exiled) German Communist Party.
Whilst living in Switzerland, he publishes his first work; a volume of ballads influenced by his experiences in France. Considering the nature of these experiences, one might have expected that Hermlin's Zwölf Balleden to possess a hard militant-ideological edge, but, as one commentator
points out, these carefully crafted poetic pieces reveal "a high degree
of artistic sensibility and familiarity with European literary
traditions from the Middle Ages into Modernity" [2].
Hermlin's goal was not to turn poetry into a form of political
propaganda but "'to harmonize once and for all that which cannot be
fully grasped, that which is perennially eclipsed, that which can only
be intimated through music and poetry, the dream, the quiet, the
incoming tides of silence, in short everything that makes up the world
of lyrics, with the world of the visible.'" [3]
As well as establishing his own name as a poet and writer of essays and short stories, Hermlin also enjoys success as a literary translator. I discuss my favourite piece of his from this period in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here.
Post-War, Hermlin returns to Germany and gets a job as a broadcaster at a radio station in Frankfurt. In 1947 he decides to move to East Berlin in the Soviet-controlled zone (which will eventually become the GDR), where he becomes an active supporter of the new regime. In an obituary for Hermlin, Philip Brady writes:
"His move to East Germany was more than a matter of ideology. He
returned in many essays and interviews to the question of Heimat
(fatherland) and to his own powerfully emotional conviction that the GDR
was his only conceivable home." [4]
In 1972, Hermlin is presented with the Heinrich Heine Award by the East German Ministry of Culture, for his services to literature (and the state). In 1979, he publishes what is to become his most popular work, Abendlicht (1979) "in which
fact and fiction, reality and dream, politics and Romantic gesture,
combine in a story that shifts between autobiography [...] and the narrative of a distanced,
anonymous observer" [5].
In 1995, two years before his death - and six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - Hermlin gives an interview to Die Zeit in which he finally responds to the perceived failings of communist intellectuals such as himself and friends including Jean-Paul Sartre.
Perhaps, looking back, Hermlin - like many other writers - was naive to think he could combine his sophisticated artistic sensibility with the political brutalism of Stalinism. Of course it's important to remember the historical context, but, even so ... Having said that, to dismiss his life and work as nothing more than an overly-aestheticised revolutionary fantasy is, I think, a bit harsh.
Defending Hermlin from what might be perceived as unfair criticism [6],
Síomón Solomon - translator of Hermlin's 1970 radio play Scardanelli - suggests that perhaps his personal failings and
political shortcomings might themselves be regarded as "inextricably
bound up" [7] with his life as a writer.
Notes
[1] This portrait by Gudrun Brüne can be found in Für Stephan Hermlin zum 13. April 1985, (Reclam, 1985).
Dates and details in the post are mostly based upon Síomón Solomon's Biographical Chronology in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. xxvii-xxix, and Philip Brady's, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, in the Independent (11 April 1997): click here.
[2] Axel Fair-Schulz, 'The Impact of Swiss Exile on an East German Critical Marxist', Vol. 43, No. 3, of the Swiss American Historical Society Review (Nov 2007), p. 31.
[3] Ibid. Fair-Schulz is quoting Hermlin writing in 'Von der Musik Shelleys', in Das Goldene Tor, (Feb. 1947), pp. 108-109.
[4] Philip Brady, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, Independent (11 April 1997).
[5] Ibid.
[6] This criticism includes the work of the investigative journalist Karl Corino, who - whilst looking for possible Stasi connections - discovered that Hermlin had reimagined the facts
of his own life in order to further his own status as a heroic figure. See Corino's book on this matter entitled Aussen Marmor, innen Gips: Die Legenden des Stephan
Hermlin (Econ, 1996).
[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 43 in the 'Translator's Introduction', p. 20.
