Jarmila by Ernst Weiss

Jarmila by Ernst Weiss
Tanslated by Rebecca Morrison and Petra Howard-Wuerz
Afterword by Peter Engel
Pushkin Press

Jarmila is one of those instances when most of what I have to say about a book has already been said. I'll defer to Max at Pechorin's Journal. And now that I look, I also see Guy at His Futile Preoccupations... and Winstonsdad's Blog have also posted on the novella. Read their reviews--they cover the book well.

It's a wonderful little book, reminding me how much I've enjoyed reading Weiss (see these posts for more on Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer and Eyewitness). At its heart lies two different types of love triangles. The first involves a former watchmaker, Jarmila, and Jarmila's husband. The second focuses on the watchmaker, Jarmila's husband, and Jarmila's son. Each case ends in tragedy. I'll compare the symbolism in the novella to the thistle in Tolstoy's Hadji Murad: so obvious, so simple, and so effective. The other thing that stood out for me was the tone, a strange blending of wistfulness and solemnity, as if mourning a past irretrievably lost.

Read the other reviews to go deeper into the plot and symbolism, then pick up the slim book when you have a chance. Highly recommended.


The first chapter is available online in a translation by Sheldon Gilman and Robert Levine.

The Eyewitness by Ernst Weiss

The Eyewitness by Ernst Weiss
Translated by Ella R. W. McKee
Foreword by Rudolph Binion, Postscript by Klaus-Peter Hinze
Houghton Mifflin Company, 206 pages, Hardcover
ISBN: 0-395-25336-5

With the years going by, emptiness is growing around me. I am still living, feeling, having desires and hopes. I do not fear death itself, but I dread the hour, when, out of exhaustion, there is no more hope left within me for anything.

- Ernst Weiss, 1933

The Eyewitness follows the life of an unnamed narrator in Germany from the end of the 1800s to the late 1930s. The narrator, trained to be a doctor, serves in various capacities during World War I and at the close of the war treats patient “A.H.” for hysterical blindness. After the war he closely follows the rise of Hitler and the decline of the German mental state. The narrator’s early life repeats some of the same troubling family dynamics as in Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer. The troubled father-son dynamic he’s employed in both novels I’ve read make me wonder to what extent he’s using that symbolically—his own father died when he was five (or four, depending on which biography you read). While struggling to become a doctor, he emphasizes his passive role in life as an eyewitness, eager to learn while remaining dispassionate. He believes he is an objective viewer of life until a defining moment makes him realize there is evil in the world: “I realized that my former view of the world had been too neat, that I had not seen much because I had not wanted to see it.” The echo of this willful blindness is seen in several characters, particularly his mentor, in addition to the German collective. The outbreak of World War I provides the narrator a chance to examine the role of the individual and the state during this particular crisis.

As time moved on, the whole nation entered into war service, which gradually included everything in its jaws and which never gave up anything. No more great and small; everything was valuable in the mass, valueless singly. Whether an attack was worth a hundred thousand lives or “only” ten thousand was determined by the strategic situation. None of the people who died was asked. All swore an oath because to refuse to swear was suicide. All obeyed. This was their honor. A few technicians conducted the war, technicians who were specialists and who did not trouble themselves as to why it was happening and when or how it would end. There were only strategic, political goals—no moral, religious ends. The nation was God. Everyone was assigned a place—there he had to stay, to work or to shoot or to labor in a factory. Most people were glad, however, that they were not asked. Such passive obedience dulled worries, conscience, fear about life.

The section with the treatment of patient “A.H.” allows the narrator to look at Hitler’s appeal and how best to treat him:

- “Out of a political movement a religion developed.”

- “He was really a man with a quick mentality; he was intelligent, but when he lied, he believed that he was telling the truth. He captured others by means of his idealism; he moved them with his simplicity, and many followed him without question. They did not want to think, to doubt again.”

- “‘Without scruples, brutal’—these words occurred in his case history again and again.”

- “His motto was: God helps those who help themselves. Everything is permitted to the stronger. Even the slightest respect is too much for an opponent.”

- “I had to approach this man not with logical premises but with a tremendous lie in order to conquer him; for he lied, probably not in the single detail with deliberate purpose, but in his being, for he was really one gigantic lie for whom there was no absolute truth but only the truth of his imagination, his striving, his urges.”

With the healing of the patient, the narrator temporarily steps out of his role as an eyewitness and became a participant, complete with corresponding feelings of grandeur. “Everything happened as I wanted. I had played fate—God…”. He reverts back to his observational role at the end of the war, describing what it was like to be carried along by a political movement in general and specifically what it was like to attend a meeting led by “the corporal.” The narrator goes into great detail on Hitler’s early political speeches, including their message (hatred of the Jews unsurprisingly occupies a central role), the techniques used, and the impact they had on the crowds. The narrator’s comment on having helped his patient—“Was he not my production?”—expands the meaning of “my” to include Germany and Europe. The narrator’s story parallels some of German psychiatrist Edmund Forster’s life (see my introduction), including imprisonment and torture. Instead of committing suicide like Forster, though, the narrator eventually finds a purpose in life, although choosing to help the Spanish Loyalist cause in the civil war was akin to suicide. The fascinating part of the second half of the novel is Weiss’ clear analysis of Hitler’s continued rise to power and his horror at watching events unfold: “His hatred was a source of monstrous power.” The earlier sightlessness of the corporal becomes symbolic of his blind hatred and the country’s heedless obedience.

The narrator’s exhortation to himself not to commit suicide also sounds like it could be Weiss’ own determination to live as an eyewitness, which lasted until June 1940 when he took his own life as Paris fell to the Germans.Weiss considered this novel rushed—he wrote it in less than two months in order to enter it in a competition by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom for the best German novel by an exiled writer. While the novel was awaiting judgment he spent six months revising it and sent a letter to the Guild:

”I would like to inform you that in the meantime I have considerably restructured this novel and essentially deepened its artistic message. The first version I sent you was composed in too short a time for it to meet my standards. I believe that half a year’s serious work on The Eyewitness has been successful.”

The revised manuscript has not been found. The debate about Weiss’ access to Hitler’s treatment records has, at times, overshadowed this compelling rough draft of a novel. The narrator’s admonition, and probably Weiss’ as well, about the impossibility of conveying what it is like to fight in war and also encompasses the difficulty in explaining the psychological effects of living in interwar Germany with the rise of Hitler:

What I describe is only the external consequences. The monster, grinding, crushing, consuming, the splendid bestiality, the barbaric happiness and intoxication cannot be described. In a quiet room one cannot write down the words so that someone else alone in another quiet room, his cigar in his mouth, his dog at his feet, can understand this and then know how one feels.

Note: the link to the previous post on the novel again: What, then, wrought that change?

The Eyewitness by Ernst Weiss: what, then, wrought that change?

Several quotes regarding the pivotal moment in Ernst Weiss' The Eyewitness:

The aftermath of the First World War found Adolf Hitler a charismatic political orator spewing rage and hate. The war itself had seen that same Adolph Hitler an innocuous underling in a front-line Bavarian regiment. The turning point came at the close of the war, when Hitler was hospitalized in Pasewalk for mustard gas poisoning. But mustard gas in and of itself does not work such black magic. What, then, wrought that change in Hitler?

…

Enclosed were Toland’s notes on a still-classified 1943 United States naval Intelligence report on a refugee in Iceland: an Austrian psychiatrist named Karl Kroner. Kroner identified Hitler’s Pasewalk doctor as the German psychiatrist Edmund Forster. By Kroner’s account, Forster had diagnosed Hitler’s complaint of October-November 1918 as psychopathic hysteria and had paid the penalty for this diagnosis by a dubious suicide in September 1933. I promptly scoured Forster’s publications for mentions of psychopathic hysteria and spotted one dated 1922: it contained a transparent reference to Hitler in Pasewalk couched in the very language of Weiss’s later chapter on “A.H.” in “P.” Some months later Mona Wollheim, who had typed up the manuscript of Der Augenzeuge [The Eyewitness] for Weiss in Paris in 1939 and whom I contacted in New York, drew my attention to a passage in the second edition of Walter Mehring’s autobiographical Die verlorene Bibliothek. There Mehring related that in the summer of 1933 Hitler’s Pasewalk psychiatrist had brought his case records on Hitler to Paris and divulged them to the collaborators on the German emigrant weekly Das Neue Tage-Buch, among them Ernst Weiss, before returning to Germany to meet his fate. … The “more” that I learned made it clear that the hero of Der Augenzeuge was modeled on Forster point for point in the novelistic sequence, running from the “miracle cure” to the thirteen days of interrogation.

- from the Foreword by Rudolph Binion



Fate decreed that I should play a special role in the life of one of those people who after World War I created such massive changes and immeasurable suffering in Europe. I have often asked myself what drove me in the fall of 1918 to such an intervention—was it lust for knowledge, the chief characteristic of a researcher in medical science, or was it a desire to act as fate, to be omnipotent, like God himself?

- the opening of The Eyewitness



Weiss's last novel, The Eyewitness, written in 1938, describes a young German veteran of World War I, identified as "A.H.," who has been sent to a military hospital because he is suffering from hysterical blindness (now termed conversion disorder). The character is evidently modeled on Adolf Hitler, who was indeed treated for conversion disorder at a military hospital in Pasewalk, but scholars dispute to what extent the account is fictional. The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's Pasewalk medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler. The whereabouts of the file today are unknown, however, and the real Edmund Forster disapproved of hypnosis, the treatment used to cure "A.H." in Weiss's novel.

- from the entry on Ernst Weiss at Wikipedia



I intend to show that Der Augenzeuge is anything but a transcription of the lost "Pasewalk records." Rather, as a literary text using a historical setting for a more or less fictional plot, the novel is an attempt to explain in terms of psychology how a character like Hitler could have developed. "The First World War made Hitler possible," writes Ian Kershaw. Weiss, as physician and novelist, tries to explain Hitler's development from an unknown soldier to the Fuhrer from a contemporary psychological point of view. He draws a picture of the particular circumstances in postwar Germany that traumatized the people and enabled a disturbed character like Hitler--with his irrational ideas and eccentric behavior--to become so successful. While the hospital passage presents an exceptional example of "shell shock," or--as the Germans called it--Kriegsneurose, the further development of the story elaborates a way of psychoanalytically linking the neurosis of an extraordinary individual with the mass psychosis of a whole people after Germany's defeat in World War I.

- from “Hitler's hysteria: war neurosis and mass psychology in Ernst Weiss's Der Augenzeuge" by Norman Achtler

I found The Eyewitness an engaging novel regardless of Weiss' access to or use of the Pasewalk records. I tend to lean toward Norman Achtler’s analysis, although in the end it doesn’t really matter to me beyond the obvious historical interest. The treatment takes up only two pages at the midpoint of the novel. Of more importance is Weiss’ exploration of his countrymen's mindset and why they were willing to be led by such hatred. This is the essential part of the book--Weiss had a firm grasp of what was going on and why it was happening as it unfolded.

The next post will look at the parts of the novel other than patient A.H.’s treatment.

Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss: “Illnesses interested me, the ill did not"

Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss
Translation by Joel Roten­berg
Arch­i­pel­ago Books, 560 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 0980033039 / 978-0980033038

As you can tell from the list of sections in this post the focus of Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer goes well beyond the murder and trial of his wife. After Georg’s conviction for the murder of his wife he is exiled to the penal colony of C. (somewhere in South America). While there he becomes an integral member of a medical team searching for the cause and a cure for yellow fever. Among the many characters we meet are Georg’s misanthropic father, fellow-prisoner March with a tremendous crush on Georg, Georg’s classmate Walter heading the medical team on C., and the young yellow-fever patient Monica with whom Georg falls in love. Yet the account “of such a life”, the task of this particular modern novel, covers so much more than a simple recap would provide.

The novel is a modern horror story, a worthy descendant of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Georg’s mind, fate arranges the circumstances leading to the murder of his wife and makes the outcome preordained. The reader realizes otherwise, of course, and the events continue to unfold in a gruesome manner. To make the novel more intense there are several similar horror tales. Some are subtle, such as the torture the prisoners endure while waiting to board the ship which will take them to the penal colony in addition to the ongoing tension once onboard. While working on yellow fever research Georg watches a horrific event unfold, doing nothing to halt it, the results of which could have been comparable to his wife’s murder. That’s the appeal of the book and the part that makes it horrifying—here is a man, morally detached from humanity, operating in fields with life or death implications for patients and subjects. Georg introduces the book as his study into why he did what he did, noting his unreliability as a narrator.

The section I found most effective in the horror mode was Georg’s father’s expedition to the North Pole (one of the many shadows of Frankenstein). Let’s just say there is a reason a rat is on the cover of the book. Wait, make that more than one reason. I found I couldn’t put the book down during this section. Another reflection of Frankenstein includes the focus of science separated from morality. As mentioned in the introductory post, Georg viewed wealth and knowledge as the only things that could give a person a foothold in the world. Since wealth was denied him while married and inaccessible in prison he focuses solely on knowledge. His clinical approach in the attempt of scientific progress adds to the reader’s revulsion toward Georg as he shows little mercy toward anyone or anything while advancing his cause. Georg's rationalization for his behavior includes his belief that man is an experiment on the part of nature so his actions are a natural continuation of that dynamic. I have seen the book described as an allegory for fascist mentality for just this separation of actions from morality as well as his search for the greater good regardless of cost, which it is, but it is also so much more.

The novel is also a story of redemption—one of the haunting questions is whether or not the reader believes Georg achieved it. His service in finding the source of yellow fever proves to be admirable but there are several moral bumps along the way. The complexity Weiss provides makes any judgment a hazardous guess. Georg pins his redemption on science and what he can achieve, but his methods and actions make his intentions problematic. Early in his narration he reveals the level of his interest in science and mankind which follows for most of the book: “Illnesses interested me, the ill did not.”

The novel is also part love story, although almost all of the relationships are unhealthy. Maybe it would be more correct to say that Weiss highlights the power of love's absence. Georg’s emotional arrestment, fostered in part by his father’s misanthropic behavior, shapes a man unable to connect with anyone else. His descriptions of his relationship with his wife are as horrific as other parts of the novel. A fellow prisoner, March, falls in love with Georg but is crudely and consistently used to Georg’s advantage. The one relationship that could have had redemptive qualities—Georg’s feelings for the yellow fever patient Monica—proves to have its own problems. Georg’s disdain for those with “loving hearts” permeates the novel as he openly shows contempt for those that think they can provide comfort and love. Paradoxically he displays and desires such benefits when he longs to see his brother on the day he boards the Mimosa for the penal colony or when he sees his love for Monica as part of his redemption (and there are more examples). Such is the complex nature of Georg and the novel.

Highly recommended.

Previous post: Unfinished human beings in an unfinished world

Update (30 Jan 2013): Life imitates art in Helen Rittelmeyer's post on The Redemption of Nathan Leopold, Maybe. While there are important differences between Leopold's and Letham's stories, the similarities can be eerie at times.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer: unfinished human beings in an unfinished world

In Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, both Roth and editor/translator Michael Hofmann favorably refer to Ernst Weiss which was enough to send me looking for his novels. Fortunately Archipelago Books released this translation a couple of years ago (translation by Joel Rotenberg) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Most reviews quote the opening line: “How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training, of certain philosophical aspirations, let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife?” Except that isn’t the opening line. The three-page Foreword provides a glimpse inside Georg Letham’s psyche and hints at how to read the rest of the novel. These are the true opening lines:

Whether we appear as defendant or as witness, we unfinished human beings are not spared the trials of this even more unfinished world. Cruelty and futility are what we meet with, and during our brief existence we see them ad nauseam. No one can avoid this first philosophy. Constant hardship for the individual who battles in vain in the grim war of all against all, in this best-ordered of all possible worlds, pain, affliction of mind, inconceivable physical suffering, together with an idiotic waste of the energy and means given by nature. Who could make sense of it?

Georg Letham gives it a try. The Foreword paints a depressing world full of hardship and pain. Since we can’t make sense of the world, we seek pleasure, although that pleasure is only a temporary delirium that requires greater amounts to produce the same effect. Nature produces disorder, both in the world around us and within us. “Beauty, peace, harmony—all this, too, is no more than a delirium. Only wealth and knowledge give the individual a bit of a foothold.” Sounds like an uplifting book to read, doesn’t it?

Georg tips his hand in this opening section: “Yes, to give an account of such a life—not just some of it, but all of it—this might be a task for the modern novel.” The murder of his wife and his trial comprise the first section of the novel. The remaining sections follows Georg’s attempt to make sense of what happened. His greatest concern resides in a failure to be understood but along the way another fear surfaces—not understanding himself. There are many journeys in Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer but Georg’s attempt at redemption, his journey to cure a sickly and cruel human heart, turns out to be an underlying theme. Below are my notes for the sections of the novel—I’m only going to comment on a few of them in subsequent posts but I found these abbreviated headings helpful.

I will hold up a mirror to myself. With a steady hand. With the exacting eye of a scientist. Without mercy toward myself, just as I showed none toward others. What is man, that he shows mercy toward his own kind?

This is the best I can do. Perhaps someone else will be able to create a realistic novel out of my report on these “experiments on living souls.”

Sections
One: Crime and trial
Two: Boarding the Mimosa
Three: Father’s arctic expedition
Four: March and the voyage to C.
Five: Monica, Walter, experiments
Six: Experiments, recovery, death
Seven: Birth, redemption (?), breakthrough