In his 1998 ‘Peace Prize Speech’, Martin Walser complained that authors today are judged primarily for their public statements whilst their literary works are disregarded. This may indeed be especially true for Walser himself, who has the dubious honour of having had two media debates in unified Germany named after him: the ‘Walser–Bubis debate’, or ‘first Walser debate’, which followed his polemic on the way National Socialism is remembered in the same speech, and the ‘second Walser debate’ concerning his novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) regarding the question of anti-Semitism in this book. His 1998 novel Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) is closely linked to the first debate: the author’s speech can be read as his response to the reception of his autobiographical novel about a childhood and youth during the Nazi period. Literary works, therefore, do form a part of the discussions about the author, but in his opinion reviewers and commentators put contemporary social and political concerns ‘before aesthetics’ and thus neglect the specific quality of literature. Walser’s critique of memory in the Peace Prize Speech runs parallel to this distinction: the ‘spirit of the time’ demands political correctness and creates a hegemonic discourse about the past, which in Walser’s view is opposed to personal and literary memory but also to what he terms German ‘normality’. In this way aesthetics and politics are uncomfortably intermingled in Walser’s controversial speech. The author’s insistence, however, that works of art should be viewed on their own terms is of course one with which literary scholars tend to agree. Questions of aesthetic autonomy are especially pertinent and sensitive when a fictional text depicts a politically contested past. The following analysis asks, then, what the specific qualities of Walser’s literary form of memory are and whether his aesthetic approach is indeed free from memory politics.

Authorial commentary – presenting the past

One of the distinctive features of Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen is the voice of an authorial narrator offering meta-fictional commentary in three short chapters, each entitled ‘Past as present’, at the beginning of each of the three parts of the novel. The narrator describes an aesthetics of presenting the past to which the whole novel corresponds. The past is literally intended to appear as present, as direct experience, unfiltered through later knowledge or judgement. The narrator coins the phrase ‘disinterested interest’ (‘interesseloses Interesse’), which is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics, often summarised as ‘disinterested pleasure’. The notion of a detached aesthetic perception is applied to the writer’s relationship to the past. This idealist concept of the reception of art, however, cannot easily be transferred to the reconstruction of history with its various political and moral implications and the conflicting interests arising from them. Walser’s narrator, too, knows that it can only be the ‘aim of wishful thinking’ (283) to be able to recreate the past – that is, in the case of Ein springender Brunnen, the experiences of a five- to eighteen-year-old in the years 1932 to 1945 – as present. Yet the narrator maintains that there is a difference between his own approach and other versions of a shared memory of the past. For the latter he uses the metaphors of the museum and play-acting to characterise, first, the fossilising and thus distorting nature of public memory (9), the museum being one of its institutions, and second, the way in which the past is all too often modified to fit present-day requirements (282).