The Poet Speaks

Whenever Lutosławski speaks about his music, he exhibits a Freudian ambivalence of the variety that expresses one idea while being at pains to hide a conflicting one. As Freud explains, an ambivalent attitude involves the desire to perform an act that the subject considers consciously to be taboo while feels unconsciously to be enjoyable. In Lutosławski's case, he refuses to acknowledge any extra-musical content to his music, as if to do so would break the taboo of the absolute. Yet, his words about music belie an unconscious acknowledgement of its power of expression, drama and even narrative. As I have discussed elsewhere, this ambivalence is particularly evident in Tadeusz Kaczyński's published conversations with Lutosławski, especially in an outburst of dismay concerning Kaczyński's interpretation of the Cello Concerto.

Later in the same interview, Lutosławski maintains that he views ‘any discourse about the so-called content of a composition with some scepticism’, because to him ‘this content is absent’. Still, in an interview with Irina Nikolska, Lutosławski admits that the term ‘form’ is inadequate to describe his music because it lacks the ‘dramatic and literary implications’ that the Polish word akcja (action) or the English word ‘dramaturgy’ include. While at pains in his interview with Kaczyński to deny music's content, Lutosławski nevertheless lets slip that there are dramatic and literary implications in his music during his interview with Nikolska.

This ambivalence about music's content is also manifest in Kaczyński's interview with Lutosławski concerning the String Quartet of 1964. The composer affirms that his quartet had special significance in his oeuvre, although his reasoning relates to the impossibly fraught concept of the purely musical. Lutosławski mentions the two-movement form (‘the first one less important than the second’), the episodic opening, and the ‘advanced aleatory’, among other technical features, as important practices that he developed again in the Second Symphony and the Cello Concerto.

The central concern of the present chapter is with the question of why H. G. Adler's literary works failed to find a wider reading public during his own lifetime. My main focus is on the corpus of letters between Adler and Heinrich Böll which are held, respectively, in the German Literary Archive in Marbach, and the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne. Some of this correspondence has only come to light recently, during the process of review and re-archiving of material which survived the physical collapse of the latter institution in 2009. Following the suggestion of Adler's biographer, I also draw on Adler's correspondence with potential publishers. This material constitutes an interesting case study which offers complementary insights into the West German “literary field” of the 1950s and the two authors' interactions with it. I begin by tracing Böll's early career and in so doing refute the claims made by W. G. Sebald with respect to the later Nobel laureate's novel, Der Engel schwieg. This serves me to point up the insights that a consideration of the publication history of creative work can offer in the wider narrative of literary-historical trends and text reception, and, as a point particularly germane to the present chapter, how a writer's correspondence can be utilized in this regard as an invaluable storehouse of empirical material.

Adler and Sebald are two Einzelgänger of literature (as Michael Krüger's postscript to this volume suggests) but they both were also enmeshed in a rich network of literary relationships. Not only do they share certain literary affinities, above all with Kafka, but as writers who also are participating in the contested terrain of postwar German literature and cultural discourse, their relationship to each other is also part of a complex field of literary interrelations. To analyze these interrelations is to view the links between Adler and Sebald as part of a network of intellectual relationships that constituted the field of discourse in postwar Germany. This network was largely conditioned by the questions of what it meant to write in German after Nazism and, especially, what purpose literature might serve after Auschwitz. In drawing out the importance of Adler's and Sebald's literary networks in these heated debates, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's theories of the literary field, looking at the ways in which both writers attempt to accrue cultural capital by building literary networks among their contemporaries and positioning themselves against writers of an older generation. I demonstrate that the shared intertextual networks that link Adler and Sebald are part of a larger map of intergenerational power struggles in the fields of German literature, Germanistik and Holocaust testimony.

Introduction

In the “Guardian Profile” which appeared in September 2001 in anticipation of the UK launch of Anthea Bell's translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001), interviewer Maya Jaggi describes how Sebald “loathes the term ‘Holocaust literature.’” While the assertion no doubt owes something to Adorno's famous dictum, Sebald is quoted as stating, “It's a dreadful idea that you can have a sub-genre and make a speciality out of it; it's grotesque.” Attempts at “recreations” are described as “an obscenity”—according to Jaggi, Sebald commends Lanzmann's Shoah but condemns Schindler's List—and he asserts: “I don't think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It's like the head of the Medusa: you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it you'd be petrified.” Turning to his own practice (referring to Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants, 1996), but also by implication to the recently published Austerlitz), Sebald claims that “I was trying to write the lives of some people who'd survived—the ‘lucky ones.’ If they were so fraught, you can extrapolate. But I didn't see it; I only know things indirectly.”

Introduction

In her recent book on The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch revisits and expands her concept of “postmemory” to emphasize both its processual nature and the position of the viewer. In considering the transmission of traumatic experiences beyond those experienced during the Holocaust, Hirsch opens up her discussion to allow for transnational as well as intermedial comparisons. In addition to authors, Hirsch looks at visual artists whose works can be situated within “a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge.” One of these artists is Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, whose work Hirsch characterizes as follows:

This description calls to mind both how W. G. Sebald works with images in his literary texts and what effect this method has on his narrators, characters, and, by extension, on us, his readers: by manipulating the surface of images, for example by photocopying photographs to obscure details and increase blurriness, Sebald invests the images with a new imaginative potential. Not only images invade, inhabit, and haunt both Sebald and his works, but texts enter into this process as well, such as the works of H. G. Adler.