I hear events at tumblr are responsible for both the return of old friends and a whole bunch of new ones arriving at Dreamwidth. Hello and welcome, to go all David Frost on you.

This noon, I managed to finish my Yuletide story, which is far later than I usually do, but then my November was very crowded indeed, and December won’t be much better till Christmas. Now on to some fannish content. Read, in recent weeks:

Evelyn Juers: House of Exile.. The author in her afterword calls it „a collective biography set in an age of fragmention and flux“; I’d say she crosses the line to fictionalization and novel writing, which isn’t meant as a criticicism (I liked the book!), just as an observation. (Basically: when you describe some of your characters crying or tell me what they’re feeling when they’re alone and there isn’t a surviving diary entry, either, it’s a novel.) The two most prominent characters, thus singled out in the subtitle, are Heinrich Mann and his second wife, Nelly Kröger, with co-starring roles to brother Thomas, Brecht, Willy Münzenberg, Heinrich and Thomas ill-fated sisters Carla and Lula, the younger Manns, Jacob Wassermann, and a great many of others from the Weimar literature who is who; Virginia Woolf (plus husband and relations, plus Vita Sackville-West) makes for an odd exception in this mostly German-language-writers scene, not least because she’s not in contact with any of the others, though the author imagines her in the same café as Heinrich in late 20s Berlin during a touristy trip at one point. It might be to establish a greater European context, or it might be simply because the author likes Virginia Woolf, but either way, the gracefulful, elegant prose and the tender melancholy exuding this book very much fits with her presence.

It starts with a meeting between Heinrich, Nelly and Brecht, then Heinrich near the end of his life, lost in Los Angeles after Nelly’s death, then flashes back to his childhood which means the author covers all those decades of the Empire along with the Weimar Republic before getting to the exile years. Or maybe „covers“ is the wrong word – more like skips, like a stone thrown at a lake, skipping from wave to wave to wave. Weaving in and out of different eras of everyone’s lives. Early on, when we get to the childhood of the Mann siblings, the narrator observers regarding their mother Julia, who was half Brazilian, half German, that she passed on the habit of longing for something elusive - Sehnsucht - to her children, in her case for her lost Brazilian childhood. And you could say that for a great many of the characters, though once Germany goes to hell that longing takes on far more tragic connotations. (Not that the story was tragedy-free before – poor Carla! -, but the brighter colours were more dominant.)

The narrative voice makes no judgment, but the montages and juxtapositions do; I mean, when you go from Heinrich despite financial difficulties giving it all for the anti fascist struggle to Thomas being pleased of being recognized as the new Goethe moving into his latest villa, the comment makes itself. Our author is pretty adroit and showcasing Thomas‘ pomposity and egocentricity via his own diary entries (and the pettiness – case in point: in the 1940s, Thomas the nobel prize winner was without a doubt the best known German writer in the world, while no one outside the circle of exiles in the US even knew Heinrich existed, so you’d think his competitive spirit was at last satisfied, but no, a single article in one of the exile magazines praising Heinrich is enough to get him jealously brooding again), but she also leaves no doubt at Thomas‘ genius. And she restrains from quoting Brecht’s most lethal zingers. I mean: „Brecht was angry with Mann for withdrawing his signature“ (from a shared letter of German writers re: plans for a democratic post war Germany which differentiates between Hitler and the German nation) is putting it mildly; what Brecht actually said (unquoted by her, but preserved in his diaries) was: „The only thing that makes me distrustful of the Germans right now is that they used to read Thomas Mann’s novels without 20 SS divisions forcing them to.“

(Christopher Hampton in his play Tales from Hollywood uses that line when dealing with the same historical scene. Brecht on TM is generally vicious fun, as in: „Whenever I meet Thomas Mann I get the impression of 3000 years looking down on me.“ As for Thomas Mann, his famous quote about Brecht was „the monster has talent, das Ungeheuer hat Talent“, which, also true, on both counts.)

Juers doesn’t just use the better known sources but the more obscure ones, like the FBI files on the various German exiles (priceless gem: Marta Feuchtwanger and Helene Weigel used to mock and frustrate the FBI agents by reading Polish cookbook recipes to each other on the phone, never mind that neither of them actually spoke Polish, for they knew, of course, that they were listened to; it took the FBI eons to catch on), and Nelly’s desperate letters to her few friends in the last years of her life. Given that displaced refugees and their lack of knowing what, if any hope they have for a future either in the new or in the old country are hardly a thing of the past makes the book additionally poignant, even if you’re not into German literature. Besides, I feel the characters come across vividly even if you don’t know who they are beforehand.

Nitpicks: there are some mistakes an editor should have caught, both really minor ones in the context they’re in (no, Charlotte von Stein wasn’t the one to inspire Werther, which was published years before Goethe met her; that was Charlotte Buff; however, the context is the perversity of the concentration camp of Buchenwald being built while one of the trees on the ground is left intact because supposedly Goethe had sat under it, which inspired one of the exile writers to a highly memorable scathing article), and more annoying ones (no, Brecht wasn’t working on The Three Penny Opera with Margarethe Steffin in 1932; it premiered in 1928, the co-worker/mistress you’re thinking of was Elisabeth Hauptmann. The play in 1932 with Steffin was Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe). But these don’t detract from what I found to be a beautifully written book which both moved and delighted me. I’ll leave you with a passage from the opening Brecht & Heinrich & Nelly scene:

Approaching from a distance, hand in hand like lovers, the tall blonde and the old gentleman both called out to him – Brecht! He turned towards them and waved. The Californian sun glinted from his glasses like the sword of Zorro. It was early morning. Heat and the scent of jasmine hung loosely all about the market place. Sunlight played upon the unreal splendour of the fruit and vegetables. Not quite real. Some people claimed the produce in this country lacked character, it always looked much more promising, bigger, brighter, than it tasted. Especially apples. (…) On this day in the summer of 1944, just before the German generals‘ attempt on Hitler’s life, the news had spread like wildfire through the community of European exiles in Los Angeles that a farmer from the north was selling berries on the market. (…)Striding across the plaza (…), Brecht gave them each, Heinrich and Nelly, a translucent gem to taste. – One for Adam and one for Eve, he chuckled. The proof of the pudding. And crushing a berry against his own palate like an oyster, announced triumphantly that it was delicious, the real thing, not a hybrid, and that he was no gooseberry fool.