Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature 9783110460933, 9783110457957

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Michal Ben-Horin Musical Biographies

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 20

Michal Ben-Horin

Musical Biographies The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature

ISBN 978-3-11-045795-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046093-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-046046-9 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Still Life with Guitar; dimapf/iStock/Thinkstock Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Irene Kacandes for her sensitive reading of this manuscript and the faith she took in me and my project. I would like to thank the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University for funding the project in its final stages. I would also like to thank the Bar-Ilan University Research Authority for its support. Finally I would like to thank the many friends, colleagues and teachers for listening over the years and with whom I could share, explore and develop the central ideas contained in this book.

Contents Overture. German Catastrophe and the Rebirth of Musical Biography 

Thomas Mann: Dissonance as a Mode of Documentation 15 Musicology as Narration or Mann and the Composers 17 21 Mann Writes on “Wagner’s Reading of Beethoven” Mann Rewrites “Adorno’s Reading of Schoenberg” 25 Word/Music: Speech Disruptions and Atonality 33 Form: The Novel as “Constructive Music” 37

Interlude I. Siegfried: Atonality and Decentralized Narrative 

Günter Grass: Rhythms of a Fictitious Testimony Allegories of Memory: Carnival and Ethics 53 The Aesthetics of Dissonance 59 69 Music as Parody: Jazz and Onion

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Interlude II. Clown: Ironic Tune between Memory and Oblivion 

77

Ingeborg Bachmann: The Resonance of Trauma 83 Story and Score: Bachmann’s Musical Biography 86 Manners of Death: Account of a Never-Ending War 91 94 From the Motet to Atonal Melodrama When Music Interferes with Language 100

Interlude III. Pianist: Austria from a Musician’s Perspective 

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Thomas Bernhard: Writing, Playing, and the Compulsion to Repeat 115 Variations on the Compulsion to Repeat 119 A Composer’s Life Story, the Return of the Repressed 125 Canon, Politics and Counter-Biography 129 Un-Musical Mother Tongue, Jargon and Dissonance 135 Cadence 140

Interlude IV. Composer: Sound Transfiguration after Reunification Coda. The End of Musical Biography?

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143

VIII

Contents

Bibliography Index

169

153

Overture. German Catastrophe and the Rebirth of Musical Biography All forms of music, not just those of expressionism, are realizations of content. In them there survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly […] The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. (Theodor W. Adorno 1985, 42–43)

Telling stories in response to historical disasters is not new. Since Homer, a story is one way of bearing witness to what happened. This act, the telling, stands at the center of my book that explores works by German and Austrian writers who dealt with the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Nazi past. In their work, writers such as Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Günter Grass (1927–2015), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) and Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) struggled to find an appropriate language to testify to the horror and the trauma, to the crimes and the suffering, and to feelings of shame and guilt. For some of them the war broke out when they were children, for others this event was already part of their adulthood. They address the disaster in different ways, which demonstrate a critical struggle on the one hand, and an attempt of coming to terms on the other. These writers’ work reflects a complex of issues that involve ethical and political dilemmas and encompass cultural, psychological, aesthetic and poetic questions. For example, how does one testify to that which cannot be grasped and which rejects or dissolves every act of speech? How can the silenced be heard and where does it survive? Considering the traumatized subject’s inability to speak the horror, like the victim’s inability to bear witness to that which was done to him, we could ask who is speaking in literary texts by Mann, Grass, Bachmann and Bernhard, and who is the traumatized subject? Assuming that someone is speaking, does his speech really reverberate with the trauma? In what sense does it bear witness to oppression, violence, suffering and guilt? How does the text resonate with the disaster in a way that does not ignore or even exclude and erase that which is struggling to be heard? This is where music comes into the story. In studies of the construction of cultural memory about the Nazi period and the Holocaust, musicological discourse has been neglected. Were we to better attend to it, we would have a better understanding of how artists, specifically German creative writers, have struggled with the memory of this past. Attending to musicological discourse in novels involves a new understanding of how “music” is present in “literature.” So,

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as a side effect, my study also attempts to advance the field of word/music analysis. German postwar writers often and in various ways turn to music as a means of coming to terms with the National Socialist past and its attendant horrors. This could seem perverse or paradoxical given that music is considered a nonsemantic art in the sense of not deploying words to communicate, and novels are of course written with words. However, on further consideration of music as theme and structure that generate different signification modes, we realize that it is indeed music in these senses that saturates some of the most renowned German novels of the postwar period. Musical means enable the authors who deploy them to connect to the most unspoken aspects of the Nazi debacle and to portray precisely what has been thought of as the unportrayable. This still begs the question: why music? What is embodied in musical poetics that cannot be found, or is insufficient or forgotten in poetic language? How does music contribute to the literary testimonies of Mann, Grass, Bachmann and Bernhard? In order to address these questions in the context of their novels, the book applies and borrows from different theoretical fields, such as philosophy, musicology and psychoanalysis. I summarize below Friedrich Nietzsche’s insights on music and the tragic myth, Theodor Adorno’s claims about music and the culture industry, and Julia Kristeva’s arguments on music and the psychic mechanism. This theoretical framework serves as the basis for my reading of German and Austrian writers who responded to the disaster of the Second World War. In his essay Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872) Nietzsche refers to the Apollonian and the Dionysian, two contradictory forces that meet without negating each other in the Greek tragedy. This correspondence that retains the differences enables us to create a true knowledge of being. Whereas the Apollonian force is associated with the plastic realm of visual figuration, the Dionysian force, a basic, natural desire or infinite movement embodied in music, is related to the acoustic realm and is central to Nietzsche’s conception of cultural memory. Following Schopenhauer’s notion that music is supreme over other arts, including poetry, since it is the image of the will itself, while the other systems of representation embody the image of the ideas, music, according to Nietzsche, carries powerful documentary potential. Compared to other sign systems that cover and veil the tensions and gaps inherent in being, music is direct and lays bare the contradictions: “Because music is not, as all the others are, a copy of appearances, but a direct copy of the Will itself, so that it represents the metaphysical in relation to all that is physical in the world, the thing-in-itself in relation to all appearances” (1994a, 77 [emphasis in the original]). This claim can be applied to and demon-

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strated by listening to the musical dissonance, a disharmonious sound that bears witness to pain and horror without excluding, neglecting or disguising them with harmonious images. Pointing out the documentary potential of music to express that which escapes the verbal language, we are reminded of the Romantic School’s approach, as in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s essay on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism” (Locke 1917, 97). For Hoffmann, the expressive power of music lies in its ability to “set in motion” the psychic machinery that is blocked to words or concepts. By resonating with anxieties and desires, music succeeds where verbal language fails: it gives voice to emotions and unconscious mechanisms. According to this approach, music makes it possible to express not only what escapes language but also to reverberate with that which can barely be grasped or cognitively contained: “Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and immeasurable […] we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning” (Locke 1917, 98). Hoffmann’s use of figurative language and expressive concepts such as “mighty,” “immeasurable” and “infinite” hints at the experience of the sublime, and attests to the romantic idea of “absolute music.” Accordingly, the documentary potential of music lies in its non-conceptual and non-semantic character. Because music is detached from the affections, feelings and objects of the real world, it shapes a “separate world for itself.” Paradoxically, the ability of music to “express” or “reverberate with,” rather than “represent” in a mimetic way, generates by means of its power to detach and transcend. This dialectical movement embodied in the ability to separate and distance, on the one hand, and to penetrate and provide a deep reflection, on the other, returns in Theodor Adorno’s notion of music as a site of cultural criticism. Adorno’s theoretical essays, especially those that address questions of representation after the catastrophe of the Second World War, seek to expose the oppressive mechanism of the “culture industry” in the late capitalist era. For Adorno, this exposure is inherent in a mimetic mode he defines as the “mimesis of the hardened and alienated,” (Mimesis ans Verhärtete und Entfremdete), (Adorno 2013, 30) and that he associates with autonomous artworks that respond to reality by distancing themselves from it. The resistance to contemporary trends in mass culture is derived and conditioned by this distance. Only by applying this mimetic mode can art offer a way out of the total, oppressive consumption mechanism in which the culture has been entrapped. Compared to other arts, music is most compatible with Adorno’s demand. As a non-conceptu-

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al signification system that is nevertheless “similar to language,” (Adorno 2002, 113) distant and reflective, alien and mimetic, music can better testify to modern society’s distortions by exposing the masking ideology. The resistance to total, oppressive systems derives also from the ambiguous character of music. According to Adorno, music resembles language because it signifies, albeit differently from the signifying language. Intentions are essential to music, but they appear only intermittently, always ambiguously: “music points to the true language as to a language in which the content itself is revealed, but for this it pays the price of unambiguousness, which has gone over to the signifying language” (Adorno 2002, 114). The silenced content can be revealed only by means of a “true language,” alternative to the unambiguous “signifying language.” This argument is already developed in Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of Modern Music, 1949), in which Adorno claims that musical form internalizes repressed content that cannot otherwise be conceptualized or spoken of. Because musical forms offer neither visual nor verbal representations, music functions as an acoustic seismograph that reverberates with reality. Music’s mimetic mode of the “hardened and alienated” thus unveils that which was repressed and “forgotten” by the ideologies of modern societies. Music conveys the horrors masked by conceptual categories and symbolic significations.¹ This oppression and denial are absent from official historiographies and sites of cultural memory. Therefore, Adorno concludes, all forms of music bear more accurate witness to the history of humanity than the documents themselves (Adorno 1975b, 47). In the same essay, however, Adorno emphasizes specific musical styles that better demonstrate his claim. He distinguishes between a manipulative and a deceptive approach that he associates with neo-classical composers such as Igor Stravinsky and jazz musicians, on the one hand, and a resisting approach to oppressive social procedures he ascribes to Arnold Schoenberg and his students of the Second Viennese School, such as Anton Webern and Alban Berg, on the other (1975b, 192–196). According to Adorno, the latter composers’ autonomous work and atonal music suggest a powerful critique of culture by exposing its oppressive mechanisms. For example, their music challenges the conventions of

 Referring to the implications of Adorno’s musical aesthetics that music in its resistance to conceptual determinations induces new modes of thought, scholars often argue about music’s potential for signification. See for example Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Thought (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago Press, , –): “in Adorno as well – although on the one side music’s truth content is that it exemplifies a mode of concept-less cognition – a higher kind of rationality that transcends concepts – it nonetheless mimics the working of concepts and language.”

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tonal harmony through the excessive use of dissonance – the “unstable” interval or chord that extends the limits of traditional composition. Subverting the balance of classical harmonies, modernist composers document the oppressive, distorted relationship between subject and object, man and nature, self and other. In contrast to tonal music, which masks the cracks and distortions, atonal music resists false views that enforce harmonious images on a disharmonic, damaged reality. Referring to Nietzsche’s view of the musical dissonant, Adorno moves to Schoenberg whose atonal compositions and dissonant chords keep reminding the listeners of the alienated relationships of late capitalist societies, which their false consciousness tends to forget: “But not until Schoenberg has music accepted Nietzsche’s challenge […] The origin of atonality as the fulfilled purification of music from all conventions contains by its very nature elements of barbarism […] the dissonant chord, by comparison with consonance, is not only the more differentiated and progressive; but furthermore, it sounds as if it had not been completely subdued by the ordering principle of civilization” (Adorno 1985, 40). It must be said, however, that Adorno’s contextual interpretation of the music of Schoenberg and his students has been strongly criticized since the 1960s.² For example, scholars who employ formalist approaches to music analysis have emphasized the well-structured character of atonal style and point to symmetrical, not asymmetrical, features of atonal compositions. However, the impact and use of critical theory, including the claim that music responds to and expresses historical and cultural processes, has become an integral part of the post-1945 cultural discourse.³ Schoenberg’s progressive creation was demonstrated in the development of styles and techniques such as “musical prose,” “emancipation of the dissonance,” “free atonality,” and “twelve-tone composition” – all discussed in his collected essays, Style and Idea (1975). In his 1933 lecture celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Brahms’s birth, Schoenberg points to a progressive revolution in the realm of music: “This is what musical prose should be – a direct and  For a critical discussion of the dialectic model characterizing Adorno’s music theory, see Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, ), –; Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –; Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg – (New York: Oxford UP, ), –; and Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy and Modernity (New York: Cambridge UP, ), – .  On the formalist approach, see the use of “set theory” in defining atonal music in Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, ). For a contextual reading based on critical theory and aspects of cultural identity, see Reinhold Brinkmann, Arnold Schönberg und der Engel der Geschichte (Vienna: Picus, ), –.

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straightforward presentation of ideas, without mere padding and empty repetitions” (Schoenberg 1975, 414). Although Schoenberg, who coined this term, pointed out that “musical prose” can already be found in Haydn, Mozart, and Mahler (1975, 74–75), the technique reached its peak in his innovative “free atonality” and “twelve-tone music,” that were developed as a part of Schoenberg’s search for new modes of expression to resonate with the “shock consciousness” of the modern subject. For the modern subject flooded with the hectic rhythm of urban life, developments in transportation, rapid technological changes, and the crisis of the First World War, the familiar became unfamiliar. Schoenberg reflects on these socio-cultural processes by estranging the conventional in music. His avoidance of repetition suspends and defers the familiar, while creating a deep impression of instability. For the listener of the musical piece, each move is new and unfamiliar, something that had not been played or heard before, and which the listener cannot repeat from his memory. The unfamiliar is produced by a variety of musical means: first, the intense use of dissonance in a “free atonality” style disrupts stable tonal harmonies; second, the ruptured and asymmetrical forms of “musical prose” reflect music’s reverberation with a fragmented, incomplete everyday language that subverts the totality of Romantic idealism; and third, the negation of repetitive structures or patterns in the “twelve-tone technique” prevents the listener from becoming familiar with the piece. Whereas Adorno interprets these musical means as manifestations of collective processes inherent in late capitalist societies, Julia Kristeva considers them as symptoms of psychic mechanisms. In this sense, Kristeva’s theory, which draws on the Freudian concept of the unconscious,⁴ provides a productive perspective of the manifestations of traumatic experience in musical textures. Her views are highly relevant to our story regarding how German literature responded to the catastrophe of the Second World War. Through a reading of various literary texts, Kristeva is able to trace the moments when the unconscious, which accounts for the subject’s traumatic response, is revealed. This, in her view, happens when the language becomes musical: “Language thus tends to be drawn out of its symbolic function (sign-syntax); and is opened out within a semiotic articulation; with a material support such as the voice, this semiotic network gives ‘music’ to literature” (Kristeva 1986, 113). According to this reading, music constitutes the traces that traumatic impressions leave on literary texts.

 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), .

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What, however, is the significance of all this? And how can we translate these insights into our exploration of German and Austrian post-1945 novels? In her essay Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva defines two modalities of the same signifying process that constitutes language – the “semiotic” and the “symbolic.” Semiotic processes predate the symbolic ones and are instinctual and maternal. They are unregulated but ordered according to biological and social constraints, as well as by drives organized around the mother’s body. Kristeva uses the Platonic concept of “chora” to describe the continuous rhythmic and feminine space shared by mother and child prior to the development of the sign which prepares for the emergence into the symbolic order. However, this is not a linear process. Parallel to the rise of stable meanings bound up with a growing obedience to the laws of language, which are described as paternal, rational, and transcendental, semiotic processes disrupt the symbolic domain of significance. Kristeva associates the dominance of the semiotic order with two different stages: infant life (language of babies) or psychoses. In contrast to the symbolic order that manifests itself in the form of laws and censorships – language (syntax) and the society (taboos), the semiotic returns with the rise of the phantasies. In the semiotic, what was repressed into the unconscious is revealed. A central manifestation of how a “text signifies the unsignifying” when language opens up within semiotic articulation is the “polylogue” – a dense texture of rhythmic flows, alliterations and phonetic successions.⁵ Interfering with the logic and coherence of a logical speech act, the polylogue challenges the notion that signifying systems are somehow closed and impossible to change or reinvent. Yet, as radical as this process may be, the deconstruction of language is always relative, since the text does signify: “No text, no matter how ‘musicalized,’ is devoid of meaning or signification; on the contrary, musicalization pluralizes meanings” (Kristeva 1981, 115). Polylogue textures suggest ambiguities, disorder and non-stabilized meanings and reveal the tensions and contradictions concealed by homogeneous discourse (ideology). Destroying the “symbolic ‘thesis’ by pelting it with music” (1981, 180–181), these textures demonstrate how literature uses music to voice the repressed content of culture, which challenges the official frames of signification and historical representation. In summary, this book intertwines philosophical (Nietzsche), socio-cultural (Adorno) and psychoanalytical (Kristeva) approaches to music in order to better  In defining the polylogue text Kristeva claims: “there is a dialectics between limit and dismembered infinity, between sight and rhythm, between meaning and music, and between bank and stream […] the polylogue-text, which only this dialectics can construct, emphasizes music above all” (Kristeva , ).

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understand why German and Austrian authors shape musical poetics when dealing with the Nazi past and the catastrophe of the Second World War. To be sure, there is a long and rich tradition of looking at the role of music and literature, especially in the German context. What I intend to examine goes beyond merely thinking of music as a frequent topic in literature, but rather, thinking of music as a tool of representation. I look at the way music becomes a medium that powerfully attests to the dilemmas and complexities of handling and processing historical events. I title this study “Musical Biographies” to draw on the long and rich tradition of the German Künstlerroman, a novel about the life of an artist. In deploying a familiar term, however, I also would like to do what the writers themselves have done: to use what we think is known to explore the unknown. In employing and responding to what is already known and has been done by scholars in the field, while further exploring the unknown regarding the use of music in stories about the disaster, my book brings new understandings to the research. Focusing on the thematic aspects of the musical manifestations of the novels, my book corresponds with the work of Steven Paul Scher and Marc A. Weiner. Whereas Scher deals with “verbal music” – the depiction of a fictitious or historical musical piece (1984, 10–13), Weiner, in Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative, explores the integration of musical subtexts that activate socio-political information to create critical reflection in the readers’ mind. Expanding on “verbal music” or the concept of music as an “ideological code,” I show how the use of musical intertexts by the authors reconstructs the historical and political context of the private and the collective life stories. Unlike historiographies or different forms of biography, the “musical biography” reconstructs the historical space via thematic intertextual relations to music. In concentrating on the structural aspect of musical manifestations in the novels, I will elaborate Scher’s two concepts: “word music”, namely tonal imitation, and “music-like structure” – that is an analogy between musical and poetic techniques (1984, 10–13). I introduce the term structural analogies to refer to how the novel’s components such as chapters, paragraphs, and sentences reflect musical forms, such as the four-movement sonata form with its exposition and development sections, the counterpoint texture of the fugue, the figure of leitmotiv that loads repetitive sounds with contents (connotations), or the twelve-tone composition that challenges traditional harmonies. Regarding tonal imitation, I look at a wider textual phenomenon – the “rhythmization of language” generated in repetition of sounds or syllabic arrangements that do not necessarily signify concrete meanings but give voice to that which is non-sense. The repetitive

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patterns (like in the polylogue) reveal the tonal component of the poetic text, which is usually concealed. The “rhythmization of language” finds its counterpart in the “rhythmization of fiction” that Eric Prieto explores in Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. In his book Prieto describes how in their attempt to expand the novel’s expressive capacities, modernist authors sought new models in music, an art that had traditionally seemed remote from the novel’s primarily mimetic vocation. However, he raises questions about the achievement: “as a semantically diffuse art, [music] has been notoriously difficult to defend in ethical terms […] outside of representation, it seems, lies only irresponsibility” (Prieto 2002, 276–277). Drawing on his argument, my book shows how by moving beyond stable meanings produced by the signifying language, music can bear witness to traumatic experiences bound up with historical events. The book demonstrates how the musicalization of fiction developed by modernist writers became a major tool for post-1945 German and Austrian writers, and was inherent in their search for appropriate modes of expression in dealing with the Nazi past. This brings me to the final aspect of the research field. In focusing on the musical trajectory, this book corresponds with a path breaking work on witnessing employing poetic, historical and psychoanalytical perspectives. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub claim: “It is not to return to the purely academic ‘mirrorgames’ between ‘novel’ and ‘life’ and to the traditional, all-too familiar critical accounts of the mutual ‘reflection’ (or ‘representation’) between ‘history’ and ‘text’. It is rather and more challengingly so as to attempt to see in an altogether different and exploratory light – how issues of biography and history are neither simply represented nor simply reflected, but are re-inscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the text” (Felman and Laub 1992, xiii). My book brings a new perspective to these questions by exploring the role of music in texts that seek neither simply to reflect nor represent issues of history and biography. The translation and re-inscription in post-1945 German literature goes beyond the realm of music: “musical biography” reverberates with history by giving voice to that which bypasses verbal signification and is absent from the collective memory. In writing these texts, German and Austrian writers demonstrate the tensions and complexities inherent in any attempt to testify to traumatic experiences and oppressive mechanisms of exclusion and denial. The structure of the book is inspired by its subject matter. Resonating with musical forms, the book comprises an “overture” (introduction), four main “movements” (chapters) separated by “interludes” (digressions) and a “coda” (conclusion). Whereas the main chapters suggest coherent analysis and interpre-

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tation of works by different authors, each interlude presents a “musical character” whose voice responds to and echoes with the questions explored in the previous chapter. This repetition “on a different note” embodies a musical principle (music as the art of tonal repetitions) on the one hand, and a psychic mechanism of response to traumatic experience (such as the “compulsion to repeat” and the “return of the repressed”), on the other. Following the overture that introduces the central motifs used in the following chapters, the first chapter focuses on Thomas Mann’s influential work Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus, 1947). Written between 1943 and 1947 this novel is a key example of the way that music embedded in literature is able to reflect the political conditions that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany. The novel opens with the narrator confessing the need to tell the story of his friend, a modernist composer, who became entangled with the history of Germany. I show how Mann, inspired, among others, by Nietzsche and Adorno, Wagner and Schoenberg, sought to find in music, and musical dissonance in particular, a means to respond to the catastrophe of the Second World War. My reading, however, goes beyond the plot to different textual and contextual aspects in order to explore how the novel’s intertextual relations with music create a powerful mode of poetic testimony. The first interlude pursues the exploration of alternative methods of representation by focusing on the figure of Siegfried in Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome, 1954). Koeppen transforms the celebrated hero of Wagner’s “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) into a lyrical and reflective “anti-hero,” who composes twelve-tone music. The atonal piece reverberates with fractured narratives of guilt and shame. I show how the correspondence between the disharmonious modern music and the decentralized narrative are closely bound up with Koeppen’s search for a new mode of response to the German disaster. Chapter 2 focuses on Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), a fictitious autobiography of a young drummer, Oskar, during the years of the Third Reich. He joins a group for disseminating propaganda during the war, following which he tries to find work as a musician in the postwar Germany of economic growth and prosperity, a life that encourages the repression and denial of the recent calamity. Grass considers the novel as his first literary attempt to confront and process the Nazi past. In so doing, he also addresses Mann’s fictitious biography by presenting his own version of a modernist composer. In contrast to the elitist intellectual composer and his biographer’s learned analysis in Mann’s novel, Grass’s grotesque drummer exemplifies fascism in everyday life in the form of violence and the horrifying exclusion of the other. My reading thus focuses on musical repertoire, acoustic images and sound repetitions in the language

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Grass employs to shape the subversive rhythms of a drummer’s “bottom-up” testimony. The second interlude focuses on the character of the comedian in Heinrich Böll’s novel Ansichten eines Clowns (The Clown, 1963). Böll, who often referred to the paradox of writing in German in the second half of the twentieth century, demonstrates the dilemma faced by postwar writers such as Grass: Besides the insufficiency of words to express traumatic experience, there was also the horror of using the same language the Nazis misused and damaged. I show how Böll chooses to deal with this dilemma by shaping a clown figure who demands a certain mode of listening from his interlocutors. Haunted by the Nazi past, the failed comedian, who obsessively distances himself from the conformist social milieu of West Germany, ends up as a street musician. His viewpoint, however, not only bares the oppressive side of ideologies but also testifies to the danger of narcissistic oblivion of the other. Chapter 3 deals with the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, who found in music a vehicle for extreme modes of documentation. I describe Bachmann’s unfinished project “Todesarten” and focus on her novel Malina (1971) that was planned as a musical overture of the whole project. The novel’s protagonist, a nameless narrator (Ich) who lives in Vienna in the 1960s, portrays the tension between nostalgic yearning for the years before the war and the traumatic experience associated with the Nazi past. Bachmann’s work is a complex attempt to introduce a psychic mechanism that reverberates with the musicalization of fiction and the rhythmization of language. Her language creates an intensive repetition of sounds and semiotic patterns. I show how Bachmann, by constantly referring to the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg, interferes with traditional modes of narration. This inability to tell a coherent story thus translates into and resonates with a distorted memory caused by trauma. The third interlude focuses on the character of a pianist in Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher, 1983). The novel is written as a biography of a piano teacher who failed in her career as a pianist. Teaching at the prestigious conservatory in Vienna, the teacher enforces control and violates her students in a way that reveals the oppressive sides of a civilized, highly cultured society. I show how Jelinek employs music as a tool of cultural criticism that interferes with a pretense of harmony. Interweaving the private and the public, the pianist’s life story becomes a sharp critique of political violence and social aggression against strangers, repressive gender relationships and distorted family connections. Austria and the critique of the homeland are also at the heart of Chapter 4, which deals with the work of Thomas Bernhard. I explore two of his late texts: Beton (Concrete, 1982), which demonstrates a futile attempt to write the biography of the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, whose

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music was banned by the Nazis; and Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall (Extinction, 1986), a novel of resistance and rage that leads to self-devastation. Struggling with guilt about his parents’ engagement with Nazism the novel’s protagonist attempts to compose an “anti-autobiography” that completely erases itself (and his past). I show how Bernhard records in the language of his characters the rhythms of compulsive repetition, thereby revealing what collective memory conceals. His novels are poetic testimonies of the “Austrian dialectics” that blurs the boundaries between admitting collaboration with the Nazi perpetrators and a deep sense of self-victimhood. The fourth interlude focuses on the character of the composer in Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Tristanakkord (Tristan Chord, 2000), a novel that in my view challenges and offers an ironic refutation of musical traditions and aesthetic enterprises since Wagner. Hired to write the biography of a world famous composer who terrorizes him, the narrator ends up writing only one sentence, which reverberates with the sounds of a single dissonant chord. Treichel’s parody of the German Künstlerroman and the Wagnerian dissonant chord goes hand in hand with Mann’s ironic tradition embodied in the much earlier musical biography – the Faustus novel. In this sense, Treichel’s newer musical biography reveals a new level of inquiry that emerges since the reunification of Germany. All the works I examine demonstrate how the intense involvement with music expands the boundaries of the literary text that seeks to respond to the catastrophe of the Second World War. Not only the employment of thematic allusions to musical repertoire, but also the rhythmization of language due to tonal resemblance and repetitions, and the analogy to musical forms, challenge regular processes of signification. The book shows how the representational modes developed by Mann are later radically explored by other authors. Bachmann’s destructive representation of the self culminates in murder amplified by the collapse of language into semiotic streams, non-semantic syllabic fragments and incoherent narrative. In Bernhard’s novel, the hyperbolic language and tonal repetitions that block any attempt to tell a story, re-inscribe the destructive psychic mechanism of compulsive repetition. Grass’s deconstructive poetics is demonstrated by extreme use of grotesque neologisms that erase any possible room for identification. In contrast to his followers, Mann avoided radical deconstructive strategies. In his novel music is echoed and referred to in a way that recalls Nietzsche’s documentary potential: an alternative mode of representation “born from the spirit of music.” This brings us to the coda that recapitulates the conclusions regarding the relationship between historical catastrophe and (the birth and death of) musical biography. By focusing on the role of music in the work of post-1945 German and Austrian writers, this study significantly adds to our understanding of how these

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writers struggled to process and help their readers to process the Nazi past and the disaster of the Second World War.

1 Thomas Mann: Dissonance as a Mode of Documentation I had kept with me both Berlioz’s memoirs and Adorno’s manuscript on Schoenberg. His rigorous manner of veneration, the tragically cerebral relentlessness of his criticism of the contemporary musical situation, was precisely what I needed […] the fundamental motif of my book: the closeness of sterility, the innate despair that prepares the ground for a pact with the devil. (Thomas Mann 1961, 63–64)

Thomas Mann is one of the German creative writers who felt the urge to tell his own story in response to the rise of National Socialism and the catastrophe of the Second World War. The result was Doctor Faustus, a novel Mann wrote between 1943 and 1947, and which belongs to a body of work he created while struggling with fascism from his exile in America.⁶ In exploring the fundamental events of German history until April 1945 as they are intertwined with the biography of a fictitious composer, the novel is a profound attempt to deal poetically with historical events and collective trauma. Doctor Faustus is a musical biography that conveys Mann’s understanding of music as the essence of “Germanness,” a term he uses when referring to the origin of Germany as a modern cultural and political entity. Mann weaves together the political with the aesthetic and the historical with the musical in order to present his poetic testimony. This chapter explores the testimony. I examine Mann’s story of a musician whose self-destruction resonates with the devastation of Germany, by applying twentieth century techniques of composition such as the montage, at the same time that its narrator is grounded in nineteenth-century aesthetics influenced by the humanist tradition. The protagonist also composes avant-garde music of dissonant sounds that interfere with the deceptive wholeness of “harmonious images,” even though his literary motivation reveals melancholy and a deep romantic longing for a lost unity. In my view, this dialectic representation is inherent in Mann’s preoccupation with tradition, as well as his response to the way that fascism has manifested itself in a horrendous history. I will show how Mann writes not only about devastation and destruction, but also about fascination and power, desire and seduction, irony and shame. In this sense the novel reflects also Mann’s identification with the poetic portrait he creates, namely the dilemmas and experiences of a modernist German artist.

 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend, Trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, ).

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Doctor Faustus tells the life story of Adrian Leverkühn through the eyes of Serenus Zeitblom, who calls himself Adrian’s friend, and who writes the story in the period between 1943 and 1945. Facing the imminent disaster of the Second World War, the fictitious writer (and narrator) seeks to combine two narratives: the history of Germany (1002–1945) and the life story of a friend (1885–1940). One ends with the friend’s death in August 1945, the other three months before the end of the war, and both are interwoven with the Faustian folktale.⁷ In contrast to earlier versions of the folktale, Leverkühn (“Faust”) is a musician, having given up his theology studies to become a composer. In searching for a way out of his creative infertility, which symbolically reflects the cultural crisis of the fin de siècle, he accepts the demonic contract, agreeing to sacrifice his life in order to enjoy twenty-four years of musical creativity. The novel ends with a catastrophe that reverberates with the ancient genre of tragedy. Nietzsche described this genre as “born from the spirit of music” when he wrote about Wagner’s operas. Leverkühn is a tragic hero whose death redeems humanity and the Germans in particular. From a theological perspective, his death promises salvation, which is translated into secular aesthetics in the realm of music: the creation that predicts and precedes death also embodies the principle of hope that promises the continuation of cultural life in Germany despite the catastrophe. By incorporating a range of texts from different discourses into Doctor Faustus, such as theology, science, history, psychology, and the arts, including music, Mann argued passionately for implementing the “montage principle” (Mann 1989, 25; Adorno and Mann 2002, 18). The montage is an aesthetic strategy that brings together different materials that were cut from their old contexts. The new context, however, is not a reconstruction of the old. The montage does not provide a coherent image that masks the tear by integrating the pieces into a whole. In order to testify to the tear and the loss of a whole that is no longer possible, the montage lays bare the pieces. Most critics have taken as fact Mann’s claim to have structured the novel in montage. I would argue, however, that it is not only the fragmentation of the montage that serves as a model for Doctor Faustus, but also the encrypted longing for totality as embodied in musical systems associated with Wagner on the

 Brinkemper places Mann’s Faustian model between two contrasting conceptions of German tradition: in the first, Faust is a man of “black magic,” a disputed revolutionary who brings about a reform in religious thought; the second is a classic, idealistic model of Faust, a man of progress, an autonomous individual representative of the bourgeois world; see Peter Brinkemper, Spiegel und Echo. Intermedialität und Musikphilosophie im Doktor Faustus (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), –.

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one hand and Schoenberg on the other, that serves as a deep-rooted source for the novel. To demonstrate this I focus on two hermeneutic discourses that Mann rewrote into his novel, Richard Wagner’s reading of Ludwig van Beethoven and Theodor Adorno’s reading of Arnold Schoenberg.

Musicology as Narration or Mann and the Composers Because of its intensive use of intertextual relations, descriptions of harmonic and melodic patterns, and analogous translations of musical forms into narrative structures, Mann’s work has become central to the field of literary-music study.⁸ Mann’s concern with music, however, did not influence only his literary work. His preoccupation with the biographies of musicians, their repertoire and various aesthetic theories played a role in Mann’s political thought as demonstrated in various essays and public speeches he gave, and was central to his understanding of the cultural conditions that led to the catastrophe of the Second World War. Nevertheless, literature was the medium through which Mann penetratingly explored the relationship between culture and politics. This is also true for Doctor Faustus, which, as we know, alludes to the Faust legend. The myth of Faust can be traced to a historical character named Georg Faust (1480–1540) a teacher of medicine, astrology, and alchemy. According to the folktale that first appeared in the sixteenth century entitled The History of Dr. Johann Fausten, Faust, a student of theology, moved to Krakow, where he began to pursue dark magic. He then fled to Venice and met the devil, Mephistopheles, who was disguised as a dog. Faust’s fascination with dark magic lured him into making a pact with Mephistopheles, who became his servant: for twenty-four years all his wishes would come true, but the price for such wish-fulfillment would be death – yielding his soul to Mephistopheles. In other versions of the story Faust becomes a symbol of revolutionary power and desire that challenges traditional institutions and classical thought, pursuing experience of the new and the unknown and exploring moral and cultural barriers.

 See Elvira Seiwert, Beethoven-Szenerien. Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und Adornos Beethoven-Projekt (Stuttgart: Metzler, ); Volker Scherliess, “Zur Musik im Doktor Faustus,” in “und was werden die Deutschen sagen??” Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus (Lübeck: DrägerDruck, ), –; Walter Windisch-Laube, “Thomas Mann und die Musik,” in Thomas Mann Handbuch (Stuttgart: Kröner, ), –; Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Adorno,” in Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, ), –.

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Mann, however, understands the essence of the Faust tale as essentially musical. In the lecture Deutschland und die Deutschen (Germany and the Germans, 1945) that Mann delivered shortly before the end of the war, he argued that if Faust, the hero of the late medieval myth, represents the “German soul,” he had to be a musician: It is a grave error on the part of legend and story not to connect Faust with music. He should have been musical; he should have been a musician. Music is a demonic realm […] calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich and conjuring, incantatory gestures in magic of numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts, mystical and abstract. If Faust is to be the representative of the German soul, he would have to be musical, for the relation of the German to the world is abstract and mystical, that is, musical. (Mann 1999, 307)

According to Mann, music is the aesthetic embodiment of the “German soul.” In music the abstract and the mystical, reason and counter-reason, rationality and irrationality meet in a way that produces the demonic. Music therefore resonates with the demonic. However, it is one thing to elaborate on views regarding music and its ability to bear witness and to reflect on evil; it is another thing to find specific, concrete musical means and features to manifest the view that musical elements represent the demonic. Furthermore, if we accept the notion that the formation of German identity is reflected in musical discourses of the time, we can explore the analogy between the history of music and the political events that brought about the rise of Nazism as elaborated in the novel.⁹ The novel Doctor Faustus suggests this exploration within which the musical dissonant, parallel to the aesthetic montage, plays a central role. As opposed to the consonant sound, the dissonant sound resists harmonic and melodic solutions. Within cultural discourse this unpleasant sound is perceived as evidence of a refusal to impose harmonious views that enforce order over chaos, wholeness over the partial, universal and conventional generality over the particular. As a deconstructive sound-figure, the dissonance

 See Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” in Music and German National Identity (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, ), –. Scherliess (, ) mentions the names of eighty composers alluded to in the novel, and Tobias Plebuch focuses on the question of evil (das Böse) in analyzing the novel’s depiction of the history of Western music; see “Vom Musikalisch-Bösen. Eine musikgeschichtliche Annäherung an das Diabolische in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” in Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, –  (Bern: Peter Lang, ), –. On the role of Mahler’s music in Leverkühn’s fictitious work, see Ernst Osterkamp, “‘Apocalipsis cum figuris.’ Komposition als Erzählung,” in Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, – (Bern: Peter Lang, ), –.

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suggests an alternative mode of representation of complex historical events and cultural mechanisms. The dissonant sound resonates with the “tear” characterizing the collapse of social relations into violence and terror, and reveals the alienation and oppression concealed by ideologies. The connection between history and biography, and music and political identity in Mann’s work is demonstrated in the way the author relates to the composer Richard Wagner: on the one hand, an affirmation based on appreciation of Wagner’s aesthetics, especially his passionate revolutionary thought that influenced and shaped the innovative aspects of his musical dramas; and, on the other, a sharp critique of Wagner’s perspective on the history of music and the total synthesis that embraces a romantic model of arts and politics. Mann expressed this ambivalence by means of parody and irony as demonstrated for example in his story Tristan (1903). However, despite the parody of romantic aesthetics, the ironic voice of the narrator does not dismiss this fascination with Romanticism. On the contrary, the poetic representation rather reveals a model of the romantic artist, albeit a distorted version, which nevertheless emphasizes the danger that lies within the model itself. Mann’s duality cannot be understood outside the process of self-reflection that involves the author’s criticism of and identification with the composer. This is evidenced by Mann’s need to preserve a tradition he associates with another author: “then these two are we – Goethe and Wagner, Germany is both” (Mann 1978b, 119). Mann placed his own work, the Faustus novel, within the canonical repertoire of Goethe and Wagner, adding another author and another composer to this tradition. However, even though the self-understanding of the novel’s protagonist, Leverkühn, as a modern German composer reflects that of Thomas Mann, the modern German novelist, this is by no means a simple analogy. The resemblance between the author and the fictitious composer reveals identification with the complete model of creation, fascination and self-performance, which is illustrated by Mann referring to his novel Doctor Faustus as “my Parsifal.” In alluding to Wagner’s last musical drama that incorporates aspects of the composer’s biography while shaping a self-myth, Mann is more than hinting at his own fantasies.¹⁰ This resemblance is demonstrated in the depiction of

 Documents from  include Mann’s notes regarding the Faust project, which he returned to in  and started working on in . According to Irmela von der Lühe, Mann’s continuous preoccupation with this topic in his genesis novel, as well as his fascination with Goethe and Wagner, shows that from the project’s first stages his object was the shaping of a self-myth that reached its peak in the Faustus novel. See “‘Es wird mein Parsifal’: Thomas Manns Doktor

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Leverkühn’s parents and hometown which are similar to those of Mann’s: the father, “a man of the best German type” (Mann 1968, 17), is connected to the traditions of the land and the city, while the mother is connected to music and characterized by the “darkness of her coloring, the black hair, the black eyes with their quiet, friendly gaze, which might have made me take her for an Italian” (1968, 25). This German-Italian mix hints at Mann’s mixed origin of southern Portuguese-Creole on his mother’s side and northern Swedish-German on his father’s. The interplay between the biographical and the poetic becomes explicit when Mann uses similar images to describe Lübeck, his own city of birth, in his speech Germany and the Germans, and the fictitious Kaisersaschern, Leverkühn’s and Zeitblom’s “city of youth” (Mann 1968, 38). Thus, on the one hand, Mann mentions in the speech the beautiful city hall his father the senator frequented, which was completed at the beginning of the modern era, and on the other, the spooky, uncanny state of mind, the “hysteria of the dying Middle Ages, something of latent spiritual epidemic,” and a “quality of secret demonism” on the other (1999, 305–306). Similar descriptions appear in the novel’s exposition, such as “a morbid excitement” or “a metaphysical epidemic latent since the last years of the Middle Ages” (1968, 39). Mann blends the lines between history and fiction by interweaving early memories of his birthplace within the fictive biography of Doctor Faustus, and by challenging a constructed autobiography with a novel that testifies to historical events. This is how he recalls Lübeck: “It’s a strange thing to say about a sensible, sober, modern, commercial city, but it was conceivable that a Children’s Crusade might suddenly erupt here, a St. Vitus Dance, an outbreak of religious fanaticism coupled with mystic procession of the people, or the like” (1999, 306). These memories reappear in the novel in Zeitblom’s description of Kaisersaschern: This was a practical, rational modern town. Yet, no, it was not modern, it was old; and age is past as presentness, a past merely overlaid with presentness. Rash it may be to say so, but here one could imagine strange things: as for instance a movement for a children’s crusade might break out; a St. Vitus’s dance, some wandering lunatic with communistic visions, preaching a bonfire of the vanities’ miracles of the Cross, fantastic and mystical folk-movements. (Mann 1968, 39)

Faustus zwischen mythischem Erzählen und intellektueller Biographie,” Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, – (Bern: Peter Lang, ), –.

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This merger of old and new, past and present (or presentness), modern nation and medieval state of mind also reflects the interplay between enlightened rationality and dark irrationality, which is “Germanness”; and between “the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts, mystical and abstract,” which is music.

Mann Writes on “Wagner’s Reading of Beethoven” Richard Wagner’s life, essays, and operas inspired Mann at various stages of his own writing (Windisch-Laube 2001, 327–332). In Wagner, Mann found the ultimate “German contribution” to Western art. According to Mann, his musical dramas embodied the new German myth by demonstrating new horizons of expressivity in chromatic moves and intensive use of dissonance which nevertheless finds resolution. Wagner introduced the idea of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) in his essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art-Work of the Future, 1849), where he called for a merger of all the arts as the condition for freedom of the human spirit. He saw the artwork of the future as a model of being in which man overcomes his egocentricity through his fearlessness in facing death. Wagner’s version of the new German myth included catastrophe and redemption; its protagonist, Siegfried, embodies tragedy but also redemption that can be fulfilled only through a deadly desire, an erotic force that defines the gender roles. The redemption of man in Wagner’s work is bound up with a desire to die, a longing to overcome life and enter into the eternal realm. The erotic leap into death that ends with salvation stands at the heart of his musical project, which Wagner understood not merely as a work of art, but as the essence of German being. In his lecture Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners (Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner, 1933), Mann criticized the way Wagner’s musical work was employed by pro-fascist groups in Germany. He insisted that this music should not listened to or read out of its historical context, and that charging the work with actual political values was a misuse and violation of the musical creation: “It is thoroughly inadmissible to ascribe to Wagner’s nationalistic attitudes and speeches the meaning they would have today. That would be to falsify and misuse them, to besmirch their romantic purity” (Mann 1957, 246). At the same time, Mann’s rhetoric conceals a premise that Wagner’s music gave expression to “Ger-

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man” characteristics, and therefore to the “Germanness” that is the cultural identity and national tradition that Mann valued.¹¹ In another lecture dedicated to Wagner, Richard Wagner und der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner and The Ring of the Nibelungs, 1937), Mann distinguished between “soul” and “state,” maintaining that Wagner’s work embodies the German contribution to Western culture and to nineteenth-century monumental art (Mann 1978b, 133–135), making it both fascinating and dangerous because of its blindness to that which is not musical, namely, the historical, the social, and the political. It is the mystical-purely-human (Mythisch-Rein-Menschliche), the unhistorical, timeless poetry (Urpoesie) of nature and the heart. And yet, what Mann regarded as the German traits in Wagner’s music also became part of Mann’s criticism of German intellectuals who were fascinated by total and radical aesthetics. He thought the regression from the social to the aesthetic realm of myth and legend avoided criticism of political tendencies as shown in the rise of Nazism: “in the political domain the legend becomes a lie” (1978c, 141). Mann explores this transformation of the myth in the political domain in Doctor Faustus. Two allusions to Wagner are of particular interest here: first, in Kretzschmar’s musicological lectures and second, in Zeitblom’s description of Leverkühn’s music. In both cases Wagner relates to Ludwig van Beethoven, which reflects his inclination to interpret Beethoven as the culmination of a specifically “German” musical tradition in which Wagner viewed himself as heir and natural successor. Shortly before Leverkühn leaves Kaisersaschern for good he and his friend Zeitblom attend Kretzschmar’s lecture series on the history of Western music. The fictional character of Kretzschmar is based on two historical characters, the musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar (1848–1924) and the philosopher and sociologist of music Theodor Adorno.¹² By incorporating the features of these two

 On the national aspect of Wagner’s music, see Thomas Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera,” in Music and German National Identity (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, ), – . On Mann’s reception of Wagner, see Hans Rudolf Vaget, “National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of ‘German’ Music,” in Music and German National Identity (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, ), –. According to Stefan Würffel, reading Mann’s novel as self-analysis and self-therapy does not call into question its role in his political struggle; however, this claim emphasizes Mann’s blind spot regarding the question of nationalism; see “Vom ‘Lindenbaum’ zu ‘Doktor Fausti Weheklage’. Thomas Mann und die deutsche Krankheit zum Tod,” in Vom Zauberberg zum Doktor Faustus. Thomas-Mann-Studien (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, ), .  See Ursula Brandstätter, Musik im Spiegel der Sprache. Theorie und Analyse des Sprechens über Musik (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), .

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men into the ironic representation of the literary character (Kretzschmar), Mann criticized the way in which they interpret different composers’ works. However, once again, beyond the parodic strategy and the amusing gap between Kretzschmar’s pathos and his disability (stuttering), which disrupts his speech fluency, the novel expresses an affirmative approach to the musical tradition they belong to, including Wagner, who interprets Beethoven. Whereas in Kretzschmar’s first and second lectures on Beethoven, Wagner’s name is explicitly mentioned, the third and fourth lectures implicitly allude to Wagner by referring to his interpretation of Beethoven. This interpretation cannot be separated from the process of identification and self-performance. The way Wagner “interprets” Beethoven is grounded in his narrative on the history of Western music, in which he himself as a composer plays a crucial role. Wagner’s self-understanding as a progressive force of this tradition is demonstrated, for example, in his essay Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, 1851). In this essay Wagner describes the relationship between words and instrumental music in terms of linear progress (in which the two poles constantly approach each other) ending in redemption. According to Wagner, his own music dramas followed Beethoven’s development of a unique word/music correspondence that culminated in the Ninth Symphony. This association between two innovators in the history of music (Beethoven and Wagner) is elaborated in Doctor Faustus, in regard, however, to a third “hero”: a fictitious composer of modern music. Zeitblom interprets Leverkühn’s last musical piece, Doktor Fausti Weheklage (The Lamentation of Doctor Faust), as the negation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In comparing this piece, which demonstrates the climax of Leverkühn’s creativity, and the disaster of the Second World War, Mann calls into question the history of music as Wagner relates it. Various scholars point to similarities between stylistic features used by Mann’s narrator to describe the Lamentation and those emphasized by Wagner in his interpretation of Beethoven as expounded in his essay Beethoven (1870).¹³ Cicora, for instance, maintains that Mann borrowed these features from Wagner but embedded them in opposite contexts, so that Leverkühn’s musical biography, which contradicts Wagner’s narrative on the history of music, demonstrates Mann’s rejection of Wagner’s idealistic scheme. Others mention the technique of “composing with words” attributed to Beethoven and inherited by Wagner and Schoenberg.¹⁴  See Mary Cicora, “Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Wagner: Visual Music in Doctor Faustus,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte  (): –.  See the claim that Mann is Leverkühn’s Beethoven because he “composes with words” (Osterkamp , ). On “composing with words” by Beethoven and Schoenberg, see Hermann

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In contrast to these claims, the death of Leverkühn at the end of the novel conveys an approval of the Wagnerian apocalyptic conception based on the interplay between catastrophe and redemption. I therefore suggest that despite the parody and irony used by the implied author, Doctor Faustus confirms this postRomantic tradition connected to Wagner’s creation and thought, as opposed to later authors, who shaped deconstructed modes of representation. Mann rejects the theological and national aspects of the Wagnerian myth, but constructs another myth. Ultimately, the rejection of Wagner’s aesthetics culminates in the lamentation and identification that resembles Wagner’s thinking about the role the composer plays in history. Finally, the way in which The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus at the end of the novel concludes Leverkühn’s life story and is interwoven with the enduring German legend of Faust, demonstrates my reading of the novel as a musical biography. The chromatic and expressive lamentation affirmatively relates canonical characters such as Goethe, Beethoven, and Wagner to prominent traditions of German culture, yet at the same time creates a distance of negation and refusal. Mann’s disappointment with the humanist promise and the collapse of enlightened traditions reflects this ambivalent representation. His dual, split perspective on Wagner comprises both overwhelming enthusiasm and critique. Mann’s ironic view dissolves his fascination with Wagner’s way of unmasking precisely when he wears a mask: Yes, Wagner is German; he is national, in the most exemplary, perhaps too exemplary way. For besides being an eruptive revelation of the German nature, his work is likewise a dramatic depiction of the same […] Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and selfcritique of the German nature that is possible to conceive. (Mann 1957, 250)

We may conclude that Beethoven and Wagner (and Beethoven in Wagner’s eyes) are central to any of Mann’s plans to construct a truly German narrative. The connection between identity and music, the political and the aesthetic, is demonstrated throughout Mann’s fictional world, as he elaborates and embeds in different contexts, partially ironic or pathetic, partially tragic, the essentials of Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven. Is this Mann’s answer to the ideological abuse and misuse of music in the political realm, including the music of “The Great Germans,” as Beethoven and Wagner were called by the Nazis? Does the novel succeed in challenging and interfering with the stereotypical frames and

Danuser, “Erzählte Musik. Fiktive musikalische Poetik in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus,” in Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, – (Bern: Peter Lang, ), –. On the role of Beethoven as a counter-image to Wagner and Leverkühn, see Seiwert , –.

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constructed myths regarding these composers? Does the novel provide a critical perspective on cultural cults, admiration and fascination that encouraged the creation of a new national myth? We will explore these questions further by focusing on another hermeneutic context: Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg.

Mann Rewrites “Adorno’s Reading of Schoenberg” Describing the genesis of the novel Doctor Faustus, Mann wrote how he planned to use music in shaping a cultural paradigm for fin de siècle conditions. The source of Leverkühn’s portrait had to be Nietzsche’s biography. The “Nietzsche novel,” however, turned out to be a layered musical biography incorporating various musicological discourses, partially as a result of Adorno’s involvement in this poetic project.¹⁵ Mann’s meta-poetic perspective incorporated his reading of Adorno as fundamental to the project when he grasped the similarity between Adorno’s cultural criticism and the novel’s main ideas.¹⁶ A central source for this exploration is Adorno’s interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, as well as his analysis of other composers such as Webern, Stravinsky, and Krenek.¹⁷ It should be stressed that for Adorno the composers’ musical praxis and their way of solving technical problems was socially relevant and proper for application in socio-cultural spheres.¹⁸ Pursuing his arguments from Dialektik der

 Thomas Mann, A Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (New York: Alfred Knopf, ), .  Many scholars have dealt with this mutual relationship. For example, the specific collaboration with regard to the Faustus novel that Mann’s family tried to conceal is described in Dietmar and Ruth Strauß, “Sprache eines unbekannten Sterns. Adorno und die Musik im Doktor Faustus,” Fragment  (): –. According to Strauß, Adorno’s influence on Mann involved not only musical elements, but also the novel’s philosophical premise. On Adorno’s reception by Mann, see also Claudia Albert, “Doktor Faustus: Schwierigkeiten mit dem strengen Satz und Verfehlung des Bösen,” Heinrich Mann Jahrbuch  (), –, and Seiwert , –. For recent works on this topic, see James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, ), –; Hans Rudolf Vaget , –; Justice Kraus, “Expression and Adorno’s Avant-Garde: The Composer in Doktor Faustus,” The German Quarterly  (): – .  Carl Dahlhaus, “Fiktive Zwölftonmusik: Thomas Mann und Theodor W. Adorno,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, ), ; Strauß , .  See Robert Witkin, Theodor W. Adorno on Music (London: Routledge, ), –; DeNora Tia, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), .

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Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947) that Adorno wrote with Horkheimer, in which they showed how by trying to overcome irrationality (fear of nature) the enlightened discourse becomes mythical and irrational, Adorno demonstrates similar dialectics in the field of modern music. His disapproval of the specific musical system, therefore, had to do with what he saw as a repressive social apparatus: Music, in its surrender to historical dialectics, has played its role in this process. Twelvetone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it. The subject dominates music through the rationality of the system, only in order to succumb to the rational system itself. In twelve-tone technique the actual process of composition – the productivity of variation – is returned to the basic realm of musical material. On the whole, the freedom of the composer undergoes the same experience. This technique is realized in its ability to manipulate the material. Thus the technique becomes the designation of the material, establishing itself as alien to the subject and finally subduing the subject by its own force. (Adorno 1985, 67–68)

The central example used here is Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone composition, which according to Adorno annihilated the subject instead of endowing him with voice. In terms of musical analysis Adorno basically meant that Schoenberg’s composition does not leave free space for any “individual choice” since every note is bound up with other notes due to the rigorous combination imposed or enforced by the “system.” From a cultural and political viewpoint, Adorno emphasized the oppression and alienation of the subject in totalitarian systems, in which the logical mechanism collapses into terror and fascination, and the rational, into irrational and myth. By describing the composer as one who attempts to dominate music by rational means, and yet who is dominated and subdued by its rationality, Adorno pointed to the cultural mechanism of the “dialectic of enlightenment” through which the subject becomes a victim of progress, as reflected in civil and technological processes of standardization and regulation. Throughout his reading of Schoenberg’s music Adorno dialectically pointed to what he understood as the composer’s achievements and failures. According to Adorno, in order to critically reflect upon modernist processes of identity and desires that obey and are oppressively captured by the economy of the “culture industry,” the musical piece must be dynamic. This demand seems to be fulfilled in the variation form (“theme and variation”) as Adorno discovered it in Schoenberg’s modernist elaboration of the classical form (1985, 63). However, in the radical development of a twelve-tone composition, the dynamic principle that “set in motion” the critical potential of Schoenberg’s atonal works loses its power and becomes total; at that moment the music becomes static. This is the paradox

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of the variation as a form, because total regulation interferes with its essential development: The sudden transition from musical dynamic to statics […] explains the uniquely determined systematic character which Schoenberg’s compositional technique assumed in its later phase, as a result of the twelve-tone technique. The tool of compositional dynamic – the procedure of variation – becomes absolute […] Everything, yet nothing, is variation. (Adorno 1985, 60–61)

In response to this dialectical mechanism of progress, which culminated in the catastrophe of the Second World War, Adorno pointed to a counter-movement of negation he explored in a much later essay called Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics, 1966). To some extent, the counter-movement is Adorno’s answer to fascism as the political manifestation of the philosophical crises of the twentieth century. What, however, does Adorno mean by counter-movement? For Adorno, the real danger lies in a perception that rejects and abolishes the difference, the “not-identical,” in favor of a homogeneous conceptual system. In contrast to idealistic systems that fixate the object (thing) with the identity of a subject (concept), the counter-movement of negative dialectics reflects the false image of identity processes that enforces homogeneity on differences and thus exposes its violence and arrogance towards any heterogeneity. Adorno’s perception of “negative dialectics” thus suggests a critical perspective on the question of identity as a false, deceptive appearance by producing infinite alternations that subvert the “identical” and the “total” (Adorno 1990, 186). If music reflects on and reverberates with these processes then what musical styles and means could undermine the harmonious pretense of the “beautiful image” and embody the infinite movement that rejects the “identical”? Adorno does not give an unequivocal answer reply to this question. However, as hinted earlier, his discussion of Schoenberg’s musical dissonances and atonal music in Philosophy of Modern Music offers a partial answer. In this essay Adorno not only criticized Schoenberg for a progressive innovation that culminated in regression (his twelve-tone composition), but also praised his atonal music for offering an appropriate mode – negative and therefore critical – of representing distorted social relationships in the late capitalist era: The actual revolutionary moment for him is the change in function of musical expression. Passions are no longer simulated, but rather genuine emotions of unconscious – of shock, of trauma – are registered without disguise through the medium of music […] Schoenberg’s formal innovations were closely related to the change in the content of expression. These innovations serve the breakthrough of the reality of this content. The first atonal works are case studies in the sense of psychoanalytical dream case studies. (Adorno 1985, 39)

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In the protocol character of atonal music generated through intensive use of dissonance, Adorno saw unique documentary potential. Furthermore, because Schoenberg’s atonal work demonstrates the “emancipation of the dissonance” and refuses any synthesis or harmonic resolution, it does not mask and disguise moments of alienation.¹⁹ By unmasking and revealing that which is stored in the unconscious, atonal music, a “seismograph” of the modern subject, works through the mechanisms of repression and denial (Adorno 1975b, 47). Schoenberg’s tense relationship with Adorno is revealed in letters Schoenberg wrote to his friends shortly before he died. A central cause of this tension was the publication of Philosophy of Modern Music, to which Schoenberg responded sarcastically: “Modern music has a philosophy – it were enough, had it have a philosopher.” Referring to Adorno he wrote to his friend: “He attacks me […] but I could never stand this man […] and now I know why, then obviously he never liked my music” (Stuckenschmidt 1974, 462). In another letter, Schoenberg wrote that Adorno used pseudo-philosophical jargon in order to cover up his way of non-thinking: “He knows, of course, all about twelve-tone music, however, he has no idea about the creative process” (Schoenberg 1964, 449). The resentment between the composer and his critic is demonstrated also in the dialogue between Mann and Schoenberg that began in a protest sent to the Saturday Review in October 1948. Schoenberg accused Mann of describing his innovative system in his novel without mentioning his name (Schoenberg 1964, 449). Later in a letter to Josef Rufer, Schoenberg also explained his concern that the way his musical system was depicted and interwoven in the plot would lead historians to do him an injustice. The fight ended with Schoenberg responding to Mann’s offer to add an appendix naming Schoenberg as the inventor, the “originator,” of the musical system alluded to in the novel and giving the readers its context.²⁰ Mann learned about Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique also from Adorno’s interpretations, when reading Philosophy of Modern Music at the time of writing Doctor Faustus. The specific collaboration between the author and the musicol-

 On the “emancipation of the dissonance” in Schoenberg’s thought and music see Carl Dahlhaus, “Emancipation of the Dissonance,” in Schoenberg and the New Music (New York: Cambridge UP, ), –. On Adorno’s analysis of Schoenberg’s conception of the dissonance see also: Beatrice Hanssen, “Dissonance and Aesthetic Totality: Adorno Reads Schoenberg,” in Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, ), –.  See Thomas Mann, Briefe – und Nachlese (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, ), – ; Arnold Schoenberg, Ausgewählte Briefe (Mainz: B. Schott, ), –; Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Briefwechsel – (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp ), –.

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ogist regarding the novel is demonstrated in Mann’s letter from 31 December 1945: “What I need is a few characteristic perceived accuracies,” Mann writes to Adorno, and asks: “What musical features would create the illusion of a covenant with the devil?” (Adorno and Mann 2002, 21–22). Adorno replied to Mann with the musical compositions based on the twelve-tone-technique that he composed for the novel’s protagonist, who conducts a pact with the devil. Adorno’s music thus became a source for Mann’s “verbal music” as reflected in Zeitblom’s descriptions of Leverkühn’s musical pieces.²¹ Allusions to the innovative compositional technique first appear and are widely discussed in Chapter 22 of Doctor Faustus: “This musical system invented by a schoolmaster should integrate the archaic with the revolutionary,” Leverkühn explains to Zeitblom, and the latter answers: “Your notion of the archaic-revolutionary schoolmaster […] had something very German about it” (Mann 1997, 202–203). He then criticizes the system’s implementation: “That is what I would call a strict style.” And, in light of Adorno’s argument: “the immutable playback of such a row of intervals, no matter how varied in texture and rhythm, surely that would inevitably result in an awful impoverishment and stagnation of music” (1997, 206). The discussion introduces a dialectical relationship between free and bound, independent and dependent, subjectivity and objectivity that cannot be reduced to the musical context only. They hint at and predict political events: the rise of fascism and the disaster of the Second World War. Zeitblom’s interweaving between Leverkühn and Germany, between the private story and the collective history, is reflected in the analogy between the musical and the political system. At a certain point in the conversation Zeitblom challenges Leverkühn as he points to a restorative element inherent in the latter’s image of utopia and analogically compares this with returning to a previous form of variation (Mann 1997, 206). Associating the musical system with a political system, a utopia (or dystopia) is exemplified in Leverkühn’s claim that the dualism, “the Janus face to both past and future,” reflects cultural processes that are simultaneously progressive and regressive (1997, 207). In this respect the first detailed allusion to Schoenberg’s system in the novel already includes Mann’s poetic interpretation of Adorno: the claim about Schoenberg’s integration of old with new, followed by a criticism of the total, absolute variation form, is placed within a new context of the novel. This allusion demonstrates not only a poetic exploration of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” but also reflects Mann’s perception of Adorno’s cultural criticism and interpretation of

 See Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel – (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp ), – .

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Schoenberg.²² The concrete musical system that embodied for Adorno the mechanism he earlier recognized in the Dialectic of Enlightenment becomes a model for Leverkühn’s musical work. The oppressive regularization of the revolutionary and the total rationalization of the irrational generated through the demonic contract, demonstrate the German sin that is the cause and reason for the disaster. Mann, who claimed that there were not two Germanys – bad and good – but rather one German nation that embodied for him the good that had succumbed and become evil (Mann 1978c, 141; Mann 1989, 83), employed the innovative musical system in order to represent the German “good” that failed. This failure is manifested in Leverkühn’s life and musical creation. In his death following ten years of illness (an allusion to Nietzsche’s illness) and in his last two pieces, Apocalipsis cum figuris and The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, Zeitblom finds the traces of distortion that demonstrate the cultural and collective dehumanization process that the Germans experienced under the Nazi regime. Leverkühn’s last musical piece is based on drafts Adorno prepared for Mann, such as the violin concerto, chamber music for strings, brass and piano, a string quartet and a symphonic cantata.²³ Scholars differ about Adorno’s sources.²⁴ However, they all agree that the novel’s description of the Lamentation resonates with Adorno’s dialectic perception. The lack of “free” tones on the one hand, and the radical use of innovative expressional means on the other, characterize Leverkühn’s fictional music: This gigantic lament […] is, properly speaking, undynamic, lacking development and without drama […] the same identity that reigns between the crystal chorus of angels and the howls of hell in the Apocalypse and that has now become all-embracing, has become a for-

 In referring to Schoenberg’s theoretical works, Kraus claims that the theory of expression formulated in Doktor Faustus has more in common with Schoenberg’s ideas than with Adorno’s; see Justice Kraus, “Expression and Adorno’s Avant-Garde: The Composer in Doctor Faustus,” The German Quarterly  (): –. On a different note, Goehr shows how “Schoenberg’s own model of listening or reception is conservative both in aesthetic terms and as a model for the philosophy of history – specifically regarding the relation of ‘new music’ to ‘the tradition.’ He denies what in his compositions Adorno sees to be their new or radical potential.” See Lydia Goehr, “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, ), .  Mann asked Adorno to write the drafts for Leverkühn’s last pieces; see Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel – (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp ), –.  Strauß (, –) identifies it with music by Berg, Webern, and Krenek; Dahlhaus (, ) points to Stravinsky; Evans (, ) maintains that Mann was influenced by Adorno’s criticism of Webern, especially concerning his application and development of the twelve-tone technique.

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mal arrangement of ultimate rigor that knows nothing that is unthematic, in which the ordering of material is total, and within which the idea of a fugue, for instance, becomes meaningless, precisely because free notes no longer exist […] nevertheless it serves as a higher purpose, for […] as a result of the absoluteness of the form, music is liberated as language. (Mann 1997, 511–512)

Leverkühn’s demon enforces rigorous discipline upon that which should have escaped from order (harmonic regularity), tradition (tonal), and form (the fugue). The Lamentation demonstrates an avant-garde that had lost its independence and had become a dangerous, dogmatic system. In the novel the following oppositions, which are also used by Adorno in Philosophy of Modern Music, manifest the critique of fascism: archaic/revolutionary, barbaric/aesthetic, static/dynamic, bound/free. Drawing inspiration from the way Adorno interpreted Schoenberg’s music, Mann dressed up the creative revolutionary in a Mephistopheles gown. The musical breakthrough that had reached new heights of expression and documentation degenerates, revealing a horrible digression with no emancipatory potential, but only a non-social, anti-bourgeois destructive force. This digression characterizes Germany’s path in history, one that according to the narrator connects between the aesthetic and the political. In telling the story of his friend, the narrator emphasizes the correspondence between the technique of a musical composition and that of a political system, which Leverkühn conceives to emerge from the same origin – a German desire, both neurotic and demonic, which is “the very definition of Germanness” (Mann 1997, 326). However, reverberating with Mann’s own idea of the “Faustian musician” as a representative of the German soul, it seems that the very intention of deconstructing and interfering with the ideological misuse of music by Beethoven and Wagner ended up in creating another myth – this time the myth of Schoenberg. Mann’s novel does not release twelve-tone composition from its “demons,” the stabilized significations, but rather charges it with dense symbolism, fixed identity and ideology. Schoenberg, Adorno, and Mann all dealt with two fundamental terms in the German aesthetic discourse: “image” (Bild) and “play” (Spiel). Like Benjamin, Adorno approved the fragmentary structure of artwork as an allegorical representation that does not enforce a coherent, harmonic image on historical events.²⁵ The closed, complete artwork that neglects horror and pain ceases to

 See Lyotard’s claim following his allusion to Mann’s Doctor Faustus: “Adorno comes around, finally, to Benjaminian writing […] a writing of the ruins, micrologies, graffiti [which]

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account for the human. Only the torn artwork that interferes with the coherent image manifests and embodies a critical content (Adorno 1985, 124–125). Beethoven’s late compositions as well as Schoenberg’s atonal music provided Adorno with the fragmentary structure that contrasts with the total artwork and harmonic image: “Schoenberg’s attitude towards play was just as polemical as his attitude towards illusion […] with the negation of illusion and play music tends towards the direction of knowledge” (Adorno 1985, 41).²⁶ Mann alludes to Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg regarding the illusion, the play and the image in the conversation between Leverkühn and the demon in Chapter 25 of the novel. Addressing the modernist composer, the devil who defines trends in the history of music speaks in “Adornian language” about the moment when aesthetics can no longer play with figures and images: The prohibitive difficulties of the work lie deep in the work itself. The historical movement of the musical material has turned against the self-contained work. It shrinks in time, it scorns extension in time, which is the dimensions of a musical work, and lets it stand empty […] work, time, and pretence, they are one, and together they fall victim to critique. It no longer tolerates pretence and play, the fiction, the self-glorification of form, which censors the passions and human suffering, divides out parts, translates into pictures. Only the non-fictional is still permissible, the unplayed, the undisguised and untransfigured expression of suffering in its actual moment. Its impotence and extremity are so ingrained that no seeming play with them is any longer allowed. (Mann 1997, 234)

In order to bear witness to suffering that is otherwise censured, masked and concealed by ideology, the musical piece must not disguise and transfigure. However, the absolute negation of the play also has a price, that of emptiness. Unlike the dialectics of the “hardened and the alienated” the extreme critique totally empties the work of its content. In voicing these concepts Mann reconstructs an aesthetic discourse within which the political is revealed. The crisis in the field of music which is reflected in the lack of appropriate means of expression, the need for new modes of representation that better testify to modern existence without digressing within harmonic myths, and ultimately the criticism of the deceitful character of the bourgeois artwork – all become part of Mann’s narrative regarding the emergence of fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. preserves the forgotten that one has tried to forget by killing it.” Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews” (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, ), .  Regarding Adorno’s questionable analysis of Beethoven, see Rosen’s claim that Adorno imposed the fragmentary conception on Beethoven’s late musical pieces; Charles Rosen, “Should We Adore Adorno?” The New York Review of Books,  October . See also Carl Dahlhaus “Zu Adornos Beethoven-Kritik,” in Adorno und die Musik (Graz: Institut für Wertungsforschung, ), –.

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From the musical discourses that Mann unfolds by alluding to different composers, I now turn to explore the novel’s musical language.

Word/Music: Speech Disruptions and Atonality Mann’s musical biography comprises moments in which language itself becomes music. This happens, for example, in the lecture series delivered by Kretzschmar, a music and organ teacher, in the city hall of Kaisersaschern. The musicalization of language is produced through repetitive patterns that block the fluency of the semantic order, on the one hand, while emphasizing the musical potential of the verbal sign (word), on the other.²⁷ The repetitions result from Kretzschmar’s stuttering as his speech irregularities turn into a parody, especially in his lecture on Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111. Among other pieces, Mann studied this sonata with the help of Adorno, who played it for him. A paraphrase of Adorno’s musical analysis was even incorporated into Kretzschmar’s role.²⁸ Interestingly, Mann gave the interpretive authority to a character who suffers from speech distortions (a stutter). In the text this interference in the fluidity of speech relates to acoustic images such as those connected with locomotives or fire engines. The narrator’s description evokes a comic effect that undermines Kretzschmar’s pathos, and in the dialogue between the lecturer and his audience, the latter has to complete the words of the former. This dialogue reaches its parodic climax in the third lecture when the speaker cannot pronounce the concluding word of his argument: But piano lessons should not be – at least not essentially, not first and last – instruction in some special skill, but instruction in … “Music!” a voice in the tiny audience cried, for the speaker could not manage the final word, which he had used so frequently till now, and was still stuck mumbling its initial consonant. (Mann 1997, 69)

 Ursula Brandstätter, Musik im Spiegel der Sprache. Theorie und Analyse des Sprechens über Musik (Stuttgart: Metzler, ) discusses abolishing the connotative level of language, thereby turning it into a tonal rhythmic succession as in music. Thus, instead of tones placed at fixed pitches, Mann inserts nonsense syllables that lack semantic and informative content. Brandstätter also shows that the affinity of this poetics to music is based on semantic oppositions and contradictions that subvert the logic of language. At that juncture “language meets music” (, –).  On October , , Adorno played two Beethoven sonatas at Mann’s home. The next day Mann sent him a letter asking for an interpretation and analysis of the pieces. On October , Adorno sent Mann the subject analysis of the aria from Beethoven’s Sonata Op. . See Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel – (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), .

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The verbal hindrance appears as the absence of a word, the signifier. Such interference becomes an integral component of the poetic language, a gap in the semiotic succession demonstrated by a break in the line. The word “music” leaves an empty space, a void that is filled by another voice coming from the amused audience. Other examples of linguistic irregularities appear when Kretzschmar analyzes the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111. This description of the “Arietta” is based on the score sketch Adorno sent Mann after he played the sonata for him and demonstrated the motif’s development. Kretzschmar becomes a parodic image of Adorno in Mann’s translation of the musical rhythmic patterns into verbal patterns. These patterns also reveal the Jewish origin of Adorno’s father’s name (Wiesengrund), leaving open the question of whether Mann reminds Adorno of something he had preferred to conceal: Just three notes, an eighth, a sixteenth, and a dotted quarter that can only be scanned as something like: “sky of blue” or “love’s pain” or “fare-thee-well” or “come a day” or “meadow-land.” (Mann 1997, 56) [drei Töne nur, eine Achtel-, eine Sechzehntel- und eine punktierte Viertelnote, nicht anders skandiert als etwa: “Him-melsblau” oder: “Lie-besleid” oder “Leb’-mir wohl” oder: “Dermaleinst” oder: “Wie-sengrund.” (Mann 1980, 72)]

An elaboration of various verbal phenomena follows, but in order to understand what Kretzschmar tells his audience, one must be familiar with the musical piece he is referring to. When he composed this sonata, Beethoven was almost completely deaf. The piece is famous for its originality and innovation with respect to classical conventions, and provides technical challenges for performers: first, the sonata’s dissonant sounds and extreme harmonic moves anticipate the atonality of modern music; second, the two-movement sonata interferes with the canonical sonata form based on four movements; and third, the constant repetition challenges the form of developing variations by giving the impression of monotonous steps. The break from classical conventions of harmony, melody and rhythm as demonstrated by Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111 resonates with the break of semantic fluency in Kretzschmar’s language: Dim-dada! Do listen, how here – the melody is dragged down by the centrifugal weight of chords! It becomes static, monotonous – twice D, three times D, one after the other – the chords do it – dim-dada! (Mann 1997, 56) [Dim-dada! Bitte zu hören, wie hier – die Melodie vom Fugengewicht – der Akkorde überwogen wird! Sie wird statisch, sie wird monoton – zweimal d, dreimal d hintereinander – die Akkorde machen es – Dim-dada! (Mann 1980, 72–73)]

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The textual segment in the novel following the sonata description by Kretzschmar includes suspension, augmentation, and fragmentation of syntactic structures, use of repetitive words, emphasis on sound successions and phonetic combinations. Mann interferes with the semantic values on the one hand and emphasizes the “semiotic” non-semantic patterns on the other, in order to demonstrate musical, expressive modes of speech. This happens, again in a parodic way, when Zeitblom explains how Kretzschmar’s voice imitates the sound he plays on the piano: “With his lips he imitated what the hands played. Tumtum, tum-tum tum-tr-r!” (1997, 55), [Mit dem Munde ahmte er nach, was die Hände spielten. Bum, bum – Wum, wum – Schrum, schrum” (1980, 72)]. Later Zeitblom explains how Kretzschmar’s voice imitates a rhythmic pattern when playing “all these stupendous transformations for us with hardworking hands, singing along very fiercely”: “Dimdada,” and shouting loudly over it all. “Chains of trills!” he yelled. “Fioriture and cadenzas! Do you hear convention abandoned? Here – language – is – no longer – purged of flourishes – rather flourishes – of the appearance – of their subjective – self-composure – the appearance – of art is thrown off – for ultimately – art always throws off – the appearances of art. (Mann 1997, 56) [“Dimdada”, und laut hineinredete: “Die Trillerketten!” schrie er. Die Fiorituren und Kadenzen! Hören Sie die stehengelassene Konventionen? Da – wird – die Sprache – nicht mehr von der Floskel – gereinigt, sondern die Floskel – vom Schein – ihrer subjektiven – Beherrschtheit – der Schein – der Kunst wird abgeworfen – zuletzt – wirf immer die Kunst – den Schein der Kunst ab. (Mann 1980, 72)]

The compositional subversion of classical musical conventions reverberates with the novel’s subversive language that unmasks, “throws off,” the appearance and pretense (total image) enforced on a contradicting, torn reality. According to this reading, modernist atonality which is predicted by Beethoven’s use of the dissonant in his sonata Op. 111 is transformed by Mann into speech disruption and incoherent narrative. This interference with “classical traditions” of music and literature, and the retreat from the familiar in favor of the unfamiliar is part of Mann’s poetic documentation of the disaster. Moreover, the rhythmization of the novel’s language encourages the analogy between the genius composer whose music demonstrates “convention abandoned” and the speaker whose stuttering demonstrates a destabilization of the speech convention. The tear heard both in the musical piece and the speech act resonates with the boundary crossing that challenges the listener’s (both of the musical sonata and the musicologist’s lecture) expectations. The analogy between the “dissonant moments” of the musical piece and the speech act is based on a dominant deformation of a central capability that turns into disability – speaking in the lecturer’s case vs. hearing in the composer’s.

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The stutter thus challenges normative speech as much as the harmonic tensions in Beethoven’s late sonata challenged the laws of classical music. The proximity of the passages (the verbal disruptions and the analysis of Beethoven’s piece) creates a correlation that finds its meaning in the unique context of Mann’s musical biography, and demonstrates his reading of Adorno’s cultural discourse.²⁹ However, the irony regarding Adorno as reflected in the parodic portrait of Kretzschmar interferes with the myth of Beethoven as an uncompromised composer who heroically faced his tragic fate. The myth upholds the romantic conception of the genius who only by transgressing the normative order can reach the “truth” and create an insightful view of reality. This analogy shows Mann’s ambivalence, his fascination with, as opposed to criticism of cultural myths, and classical and romantic traditions. The ambivalence is reflected also in the way the novel fails to demonstrate a poetics of stuttering that radically subverts or even particularly challenges official systems of signification.³⁰ No matter how transgressive this subversion of language and classical narrative is, or how convincingly the parody and ironic views are incorporated into the novel, in the end Mann presents a coherent worldview regarding of the political and his place as a writer facing the catastrophe. Mann created moments of estrangement in the language of his novel by rhythmization and musicalization of words in a way that interferes with conventional syntax. This mode of representation is later radically developed by other authors who, partly in response to Mann, shaped deconstructive musical biographies. Mann, in contrast, avoided deconstruction; his poetic language does not cross the boundary into music, just as his novel is neither a sonata nor twelvetone music. The novel rather points to new potential for representation arising from the spirit of music. Despite the creation and shape of unique verbal textures that are incorporated with rhythmic and tonal successions as “dissonant prose,” Mann ultimately gives way to coherent explanation and strict plot structure. After all, Kretzschmar’s language conceals an encrypted interpreter who rejects radical subversion or any denial of logical, discursive means.

 On Kretzschmar’s ideas on Beethoven as part of his philosophy of music and Adorno’s aesthetics of music, see Seiwert , –.  On this poetics see, for example, Deleuze who distinguishes between a stutter in language (langue), which subverts the writing system and effects a state of “strangeness” and foreignness in language, and a stutter in speech (parole) that is simply a characteristic of a literary character; Gilles Deleuze, Kritik und Klinik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), .

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Form: The Novel as “Constructive Music” In his comments on the novel Mann claimed: “I felt clearly that my book itself would have to become the thing it dealt with: namely, a constructive music” (Mann 1961, 45). The term “constructive” resonates with the cultural-political discourse in Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and a revolutionary concept of art that called for new modes of expression and representation. Mann’s claim for this correspondence between his literary innovations and the innovations of modern music, and the analogy between narrative and musical composition is repeated in the narrator’s words. For example, at the beginning of the novel Zeitblom hints at a possible similarity between Leverkühn’s symphony and the life story he tells: “Adrian himself would surely never – in, let us say, a symphony – have announced such a theme so prematurely, would at most have let it insinuate itself from afar in some subtly concealed and almost impalpable fashion” (Mann 1997, 7), and later in quoting Leverkühn: “‘I did not wish to write a sonata,’ Adrian said to me, ‘but a novel.’ This tendency toward musical “prose” reaches its height in the String Quartet, perhaps Leverkühn’s most esoteric work” (1997, 478). Leverkühn’s last musical work provides another example: “movements, grand variations, which correspond to textual units of chapters in a book” (Mann 1997, 467). The biography as a symphony, the novel as a sonata, musical movements as textual units – these correspondences demonstrate the narrator’s attempt to create a form analogy between the friend’s biography and his musical work, and between the collective history of people and the history of musical creation. The question of form analogy is also conveyed in the research field: Some scholars question whether the structure of Doctor Faustus can be compared with musical concepts such as sonata form, twelve-tone composition (Dahlhaus 1982, 40–41; Wehrmann 1988, 120–122), or the Wagnerian leitmotif (Scherliess, 1997, 116). Other scholars reject this approach and point to a metaphoric use of musical terms (Windisch-Laube 2001, 332), arguing that attempting to interpret the novel as a musical composition is highly questionable (Robertson 1993, 134; Osterkamp 2001, 325). However, I wish to argue that rather than finding the answer to this question (which musical form serves as a model for the novel and whether the novel really conveys this), the crucial point is how does Mann’s claim for a form analogy reflect his quest for alternative modes of documentation? And to what extent can this specific form (constructive music) better respond to the historical disaster and reverberate with the trauma of the Second World War?

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In order to explore this relationship between the musical form and the narrative, we need to look at the poetic moments when discussions on the form of art and aesthetics become political. Dichotomies such as symmetry/asymmetry, whole/part, and closure/openness emerge in the novel through the repetitive use of images such as “appearance” and “magic square.” The “magic square” is a painting of arithmetical layers based on 16 values (4 lines and 4 rows) that yield the sum of 34 and demonstrate total symmetry. This form is first mentioned in Albrecht Dürer’s wooden engraving Melancholia I that hangs in Leverkühn’s room in Halle. This arithmetic configuration, which predicts the hubris of modernity and the ability of enlightened man to control and regulate, to explain and to create order in nature, is translated into musical terminology, the innovative musical system that helped Leverkühn out of his crisis. Zeitblom is fascinated by symmetrical form. He relates the symmetry to other characteristics of magic and mystery that reflect the critical thought of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” this time as demonstrated by and transformed into the realm of music. The “magic square” appears to be a musical form that prohibits and restricts the tones that are not motifs, so that “free notes would no longer exist” (Mann 1997, 511). By alluding to Adorno’s thought when discussing the issue of form in this passage of “verbal music,” Mann reminds his readers of twentieth century aesthetic and political discourses in which symmetrical form embodies the ultimate threat to human values and freedom of thought. The symmetry is associated with determination and the fixation of power systems that annihilate the individual and erase the differences characterizing the human. This very feature, however, is the source of Zeitblom’s fascination, and Mann’s too, despite his ironic tone. According to Zeitblom, the regression of the rational into the irrational, and the transgression of pure logical forms into mystery and metaphysics embody the “secret of identity” (Mann 1997, 502) – that is Germanness, which is musical. The encrypted identity becomes the key to understanding German history up to the catastrophe of the Second World War, and reverberates with Mann’s words on Wagner on the one hand, and the musician as the representative of the German soul, on the other. This mechanism of strictness and totality embodied in the form characterizes Leverkühn’s musical compositions: “but there is not a note in these searing, susurrate tones of the spheres and angels that did not appear with strictest correspondence in the laughter of hell” (Mann 1997, 398). In the conversation between Mephistopheles and Leverkühn mentioned earlier, they both refer to aspects of form. The unity produced by the total form is deceptive. The harmonic image cannot bear witness to a breached historical reality. Hence Mephistopheles describes the approaching dead-end of the history of music, which reflects the urge of composers such as Schoenberg and other members of the Second Vi-

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ennese School to depart from harmonic views and traditional means of expression that can no longer truthfully respond to the state of the modern subject: For four hundred years all great music found contentment in pretending such unity was achieved without a breach, took pleasure in conventional universal legitimation, which it endeavors to confuse with its own concerns. My friend it will work no more […] the subordination of expression to all-reconciling generality is the innermost principle of the musical illusion. And that is over. The claim to presume the general as harmonically contained within the particular is a self-contradiction. (Mann 1997, 257)

But not only is Adorno recalled here. The critique of the musical form including the ornament and convention, abstract generality, illusion and appearance echoes Nietzsche’s cultural conception of dissonance as the only appropriate mode of documentation and response to being. Musical dissonance (vs. consonance), like the allegory (vs. symbol), opposes the coherent frame that covers up contradictory desires, suffering and horror. In applying musical structures to the poetic frame of the novel, Mann reveals the contradictions that are concealed by coherent frames of narration. It seems, however, that ultimately Mann preferred traditional to revolutionary, innovative frames. In speaking about a “constructive music” and the “montage principle,” he expressed his wish for an experimental poetics “born from the spirit of music.” Yet Doctor Faustus insists on something that music never had: it explains and justifies, defines and gives names. The symbolic embodiment of a “German composer” who produces a unity and a center reappears beyond the identity breaches and the narrative ruptures, just as the coherent frame of the novel finally contradicts the fragmentary character of the montage. This is true also for Mann’s intended use of modernist musical means such as the “emancipation of the dissonance” in “free atonality” and “twelve-tone composition.” Whereas Schoenberg’s music displays these means to undermine traditional structures based on repetitions of melodic and harmonic patterns, Mann’s poetics retains repetitive themes (motives) as the basis for constructed symbolic forms. Thus Zeitblom, the narrator, defines and gives “names” to Leverkühn’s desires in the same way that he interprets his musical pieces, forging the desires in stable symbolic manifestations. Even the irony that Mann expresses through the voice of an implied author does not entirely interfere with the authority of the narrator. The ambivalence that characterizes Mann’s concern with tradition is brilliantly performed in the novel. The musical biography that attempts to document German history by exploring the life and creation of a German musician ends with a performance in which Leverkühn performs his last composed piece based on his life story interwoven with the legend of Faust. One of the central

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features of the piece is an expressive echo effect, an extreme fugal texture based on innovative style, theme and variations, and an infernal quality of rhythmic displacements and basso-continuo. Leverkühn cannot finish the performance and collapses on the piano. A dissonant sound is heard when the pianist and composer falls with his arms outstretched on the keyboard. As if alluding to the crucifixion of Christ this gesture echoes the redemptive image of a martyr who sacrifices himself to rescue others. A few lines later in the narrator’s concluding words this motif of redemption is applied to devastated Germany as Zeitblom emphasizes the relation between the private and the public, the personal and the national: “When, out of uttermost hopelessness – a miracle beyond the power of belief – will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: ‘God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!’” (Mann 1968, 490). To conclude, Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus is a story told by Zeitblom, based on two premises: the parallel narratives of the private and the public, and the profound capacity of music to convey and respond to historical events. Mann learned the documentary potential of music from Nietzsche, which is then explored in the novel in depictions of works such as Leverkühn’s last two compositions (“verbal music”), rhythmization of language (“word/music”) and the claim for a “constructive music” (form analogy). Mann’s narrator reflects on political processes and interprets historical events as they are interwoven within musical creation by emphasizing the relationship between logical form and chaotic power, bondage and freedom, dehumanization and humanism, barbarism and pure aesthetics. In contrast, however, to Adorno’s claim that “negative aesthetics” is the only creation still possible after 1945, Mann’s poetic personas, Zeitblom and Leverkühn, reach a different conclusion. Despite the deconstructive model of a modernist composer who breaks the rules of classical composition in order to compose, and despite the way in which the revolutionary composition reverberates with the innovative technique of montage that challenges the concept of a traditional, stable narrative, Mann’s narration offers a coherent perspective on the Third Reich as a last stage in a national German narrative.³¹ Doctor Faustus in-

 For a critical survey of the debate regarding Doctor Faustus and Mann’s construction of German culture, see John Fetzer, Changing Perceptions of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: Criticism – (Columbia, SC: Camden House, ). According to Gerhard Kaiser, “und sogar eine alberne Ordnung ist immer noch besser als gar keine”: Erzählstrategien in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), –, Mann shaped a modernist Faustian character by alluding to German national composers such as Wagner and Pfitzner. See also Weiner (, )

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troduces a subject who is anxious to transgress limitations, transcend boundaries and overcome creative restrictions, but his hubris brings upon him the ultimate punishment – a sacrificial act that reverberates with theological images. In recounting his own version of the Faustian folktale and of Germany, of music and Germanness, Mann favored reconstruction over deconstruction by integrating the intertexts into a synthetic unity and coherent narrative, rather than leaving the materials unmasked, fragments torn from their contexts. In Mann’s musical biography the protagonist, the hero of a modern tragedy, preserves the tradition that was doomed to decline and disappear after the German defeat in the Second World War. The novel demonstrates the dominant role of aesthetic discourse in German history and attempts to represent its dialectics, but its peculiarity lies in inquiring into the correspondence between the aesthetic and the political. By incorporating extra-literary discourse, the novel reflects on the failure of culture and its manifestations in the aesthetic realm to protect and maintain human values. In this respect we may recall Mann’s claim that the retreat of intellectuals into the aesthetic realm enabled the rise of fascist politics in the public sphere.³² Mann associated this retreat with current trends in modern music that became unintelligible and remote from the centers of social activity. The novel thus questions how exactly the cultural developments, as they are depicted in the life story of Adrian Leverkühn, encouraged the political disaster of the Third Reich.³³ However, was not Mann himself a victim of his own interpretation of German history? Was he not fascinated by the historical determinism he read into his poetic version of it? Is not the whole story he tells about Germany an embodiment of the progressive ideological approach (historicism)? And if so, is it not just another story of Germany,³⁴ and perhaps not the one that makes the most sense to us today? Subsequent chapters explore these questions by focusing on Mann’s followers in the field of German and Austrian literature.

on the modernist strategies used by Mann to shape a critical perspective that exposes the political aspects of the reception and the emergence of collective images.  See Weiner , ; Hannelore Mundt, Doktor Faustus und die Folgen. Kunstkritik als Gesellschaftskritik im deutschen Roman seit  (Bonn: Bouvier, ).  See Martin Swales, “Zwischen Ontologie und Geschichte. Musik in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” in Resonanzen (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), –.  See Vaget , –; Eberhard Lämmert, “Doktor Faustus – Eine Allegorie der deutschen Geschichte,” in Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, – (Bern: Peter Lang, ), –.

Interlude I. Siegfried: Atonality and Decentralized Narrative The novel Death in Rome, the last volume of Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar trilogy, is an example of a deconstructive musical biography. Following Thomas Mann, who admitted his intention when claiming that Doctor Faustus has to be a “constructive music” (Mann 1961, 45), Koeppen’s mode of narration draws inspiration also from modernist music, which lacks a tonal center. However, unlike the unity that Mann finally produces, despite his intention to create a disintegrated narration (montage technique), Koeppen’s novel suggests fragments of perspectives that are never fully integrated into a whole. The break from classic conventions of harmony is conveyed in Koeppen’s use of different, to some extent contradictory perspectives that resist synthesis. Atonality functions not only in the form of “verbal music,” but also as a model of deconstructive narration. The subversion of traditional Western tonality is reflected in the subversion of the classical narrative form. Destabilized tonality is reflected in a decentralized narrative. The novel alludes to the music of the Second Viennese School, particularly, as we saw earlier, the way it was used by Mann in his profound poetic attempt to bear witness to the catastrophe of the Second World War. Working with similar materials, Koeppen’s novel sheds new light on how creative writers responded to the disaster. His use of the musical medium resembles and differs from Mann’s. Death in Rome alludes not only to Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice which relates to another composer, Gustav Mahler, but also challenges Mann’s conceptions of the political and the aesthetic as they are depicted in Doctor Faustus. In telling his story about Germany and the Nazi past, Koeppen explores the relationships between music and history, and literature and identity that cannot, however, be discussed under a single term, such as “Germanness,” if, indeed, by any explanatory mode whatsoever. In this sense, Koeppen challenges not only an integrated explanation, but also calls into question the application of a logical mechanism that gives reasons for and defines the causes of the disaster. Koeppen’s 1954 novel is set in the 1950s in Rome, a modern city and a site of defeat recovering from the disaster of the war, a crossroads and a meeting point of two father/son pairs in which the latter are rebelling against the former. One son is Adolf, coming to Rome to become a priest; his father is a Nazi who escaped the Nuremberg Trials. The other is Siegfried, whose name alludes to Wagner’s protagonist, the hero of the new German myth. Siegfried’s father has been “cleansed” and purified from his Nazi past. During the time spent in an American prison camp, Siegfried came across the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and drawing inspiration from them, after the war becomes a

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composer of modern music. He inherits and continues a musical tradition that was excluded and banned during the Third Reich as “degenerate music” (entartete Musik) and regarded as dangerous. Siegfried tries to resist and reject various “father figures” he associates with Nazism, including his teachers, his uncle, and his biological father. His fascination with the music of the Second Viennese School demonstrates his resistance to the generation that refuses to acknowledge the crimes of the Germans and either mystifies and celebrates or represses its past.³⁵ The two father/son pairs meet at a concert hall where Siegfried’s twelve-tone symphony is being played. The plot is directed towards this encounter which ends in death. As in Mann’s abovementioned novella, the death is no secret; the reader expects it from the beginning of the story. Only the timing and the description of how the death takes place are still missing. The allusions to the atonal modernist music serve Koeppen not only in terms of content, but also in terms of narrative form. Throughout the narration the reader learns about musical structures and other musical components such as timbre, rhythm, harmonic and melodic patterns. However, in addition to information about the musical components, including the “emancipation of the dissonance,” Koeppen describes the reception of the music by following the listening experiences of different characters. The listeners of the modernist symphony perceive the musical piece in contradictory ways that cannot be integrated into a single, whole meaning. Instead of the great totality of Wagner’s operas, including “Siegfried” of Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), which was created to deepen the bonds and unity inherent in the national community, Siegfried of Koeppen’s Death in Rome creates a music that loosens and interferes with the official national bonds. In contrast to emotions of association and iden-

 In discussing Koeppen’s work, Hans-Ulrich Treichel defines various forms of historical understanding in postwar West Germany. “Successful memory” (Gelungene Erinnerung) characterizes communities that have freed themselves from responsibility for Nazi crimes and continue to admire past traditions despite the crisis of the Second World War: “Dieses Erinnern ist ein Erinnern, das die Kontinuität der Barbarei und Geschichtslüge produziert. Die historische Vergewisserung, die sich selbst nicht problematisch ist, ist die einer fatalen Tradition;” see HansUlrich Treichel, Über die Schrift hinaus. Essays zur Literatur (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, a), . In the novel this is the case with Siegfried’s parents. Martin Huber points to the complexity of Siegfried’s alternative: his dodecaphonic music is supposed to offer a new way of dealing with the past by internalizing it, taking it into account, and going beyond it; see Martin Huber, Text und Musik: Musikalische Zeichen im narrativen und ideologischen Funktionszusammenhang ausgewählter Erzähltexte des . Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), . Siegfried, however, who is so aware of the ideological abuse of music in the Third Reich, cannot offer a productive solution beyond melancholy and a resort to flight.

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tification with the new German myth, his twelve-tone symphony evokes feelings of dissolution and disassociation. The unease and disassociation that characterize those who listen to the dissonant sounds played in the music hall in Rome are transformed into a disintegrated, decentralized narrative. Furthermore, the contradictory interpretations of the musical piece demonstrate the inability to create a coherent view of the musical event. This limitation in the musical realm can also be translated into limitation in the historical realm. By reflecting the historical (catastrophe) in the musical (the twelve-tone symphony), Koeppen calls into question the official means of documentation and representation. Similar to the listeners of the twelve-tone symphony the novel’s readers are missing an explanation and coherent interpretation. Instead of collecting and analyzing data which contribute to a better, clearer understanding of the event, the reader is repeatedly confronted with partial information and shifting perspectives that reverberate with social distortion and aggressive, violent exclusion of the other. Koeppen’s poetic testimony does not provide his reader with a logical mechanism of cause and effect, of origin and result. Rather, the novel draws inspiration from dissonant musical pieces that expose the horror of modern alienation, by revealing the ruptures, which are no longer concealed in the soothing totality of symbols and in the disguise of modern myths. The contradictory perspectives characterize not only the literary depiction of the twelve-tone music played in the novel, but also the conclusions scholars have arrived at regarding this depiction. Claudia Albert, for example, claims that the opposing views and interpretations of the musical piece are evidence of the uniqueness and achievement of a poetic representation free from moral categories.³⁶ Friedhelm Marks points to the affinity between the novel’s polyphonic structure and the symphonic form, while resisting any attempt to overcome the contradiction inherent in Koeppen’s strategy of musical representation.³⁷ In contrast, Irmgard Scheitler claims that the musical piece is a clear metaphor of the revolt against the Nazi past.³⁸ In her view, Koeppen interweaves the characters’ different perceptions regarding this past into a literary

 See Claudia Albert, “Doktor Faustus: Schwierigkeiten mit dem strengen Satz und Verfehlung des Bösen,” in Heinrich Mann Jahrbuch  (): .  Friedhelm Marks, “Polyphonie. Musik und Romanform bei Wolfgang Koeppen,” in Wolfgang Koeppen – Mein Ziel war die Ziellosigkeit (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, ),  and .  Irmgard Scheitler, “Musik als Thema und Struktur in deutscher Gegenwartsprosa,” in Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte  (): . See also Carl Dahlhaus, “Die abwesende Symphonie. Zu Wolfgang Koeppens Tod in Rom,” in Beziehungszauber. Musik in der modernen Dichtung (Munich: Carl Hanser, ).

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montage. This poetic texture emphasizes what is absent from the musical piece rather than what it includes, and takes on an almost allegorical quality.³⁹ The music is thus not only a metaphor for intergenerational rebellion. Rather, its contradictions and heterogeneity subvert any harmonious, sentimental conception of the past, such as those characterizing memory sites of postwar Germany that neglect and avoid historical responsibility.⁴⁰ Throughout the novel, the various impressions of the twelve-tone symphony follow one another: Siegfried’s lover hears how the music “cries;” she recognizes the anxiety and fear in it and connects it with negative images such as “fear of death” (Todesangst), “dance of death” (Totentanz), and “spread of plague” (Pestprozession), (Koeppen 1992, 154). Adolf’s father is bored by the music. Expecting the famous march melodies he used to hear at Nazi ceremonies, he is annoyed and upset by the unfamiliar, “boring” music. He feels hungry and thirsty but is paralyzed and unable to leave the hall (1992, 155). Siegfried’s parents are shaken by the symphony, finding it strange and so very different from the music they love by composers such as Beethoven and Wagner (1992, 155). Instead of a melodic theme, coherent harmony, and sublime tones expressing ideal values, they hear jazz rhythms, a jungle of degenerate tumult and disharmony, “a nigger kraal full of lust stripped bare” (1992, 156). Siegfried’s brother also fails to find the comforting, sublime tones of Beethoven and Wagner and thinks this music might be dangerous, a demonstration of contradictory and dissonant ways of thinking. Finally, the symphony tortures Adolf, the other son. He doesn’t like the music, perhaps because it reminds him of his childhood and the music he heard before it was banned. However, the symphony also embodies what he has been searching for but has been unable to find: “There was also the memory of a time before guilt in these sounds, of a paradisal peace and beauty, of sadness at the entry of death into the world” (Koeppen 1992, 157). This nostalgic “return” to a mythological world preceding the catastrophe is possible only from a theological perspective, which Adolf develops when becoming a priest, despite his skepticism. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his impressions of Siegfried’s symphony include ambiguous images of hope and melancholy. Like Mann’s narrator, Zeit-

 Benjamin discusses the concept of allegory: “Jede Person, jedes Ding, jedes Verhältnis kann ein beliebiges anderes bedeuten;” see Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp), .  See Helmut Lachenmann on Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, which lacks resolution, as well as his discussion of how new music responds to being, without hiding behind exotic masks or melancholic lament; Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existenzielle Erfahrung. Schriften –  (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf u. Härtel, ),  and  respectively.

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blom, who hears and recognizes in Leverkühn’s last piece the “Lied an die Trauer” (“Ode to Sorrow”), an inversion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Adolf understands too that Siegfried did not compose a celebrating “Lied an die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), but rather a constant longing that attests to a deep loss (1992, 157). Compared with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony based on a classical tonality, meaning that harmonic tensions (as in dissonant intervals or chords) are resolved (consonant intervals) and listeners’ expectations for a familiar sound order are entirely fulfilled (actually the “Ode” passage is a triumphant redemption conveyed through resolution of harmonic tensions), Siegfried’s twelve-tone symphony evokes an opposite reaction in the audience: rather than contentment and satisfaction following an ecstatic moment, the atonal piece evokes feelings of doubt and discomfort. The depiction and representation of such feelings are part of Koeppen’s poetics of memory, which can be explained, for example, by the term “negative prayer.” Following Adorno’s conception of a “negative aesthetic,” Lyotard speaks of the impossibility of traditional prayer in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the familiar and conventional are transformed into a total mechanism of oppression, restriction and violent exclusion, only the unfamiliar can challenge cultural amnesia and “political oblivion”: Nono “after” Mahler, Beckett “after” Brecht, Rothko and Newman “after” Matisse […] they are enough and have been enough to bear negative witness to the fact that both the “prayer” and the history of the prayer are impossible, and that to bear witness to this impossibility remains possible. (Lyotard 1997, 47–48)

In light of this claim, similar to the negative aesthetic atonal music bears witness to the impossibility of tonal music. The disharmony produced by dissonant sounds that reject a solution bears witness to a harmony and synthesis that can no longer survive. Returning to the novel, avoiding a one-dimensional definition and a familiar, expected interpretation, Siegfried’s disharmonious music embodies an infinite movement that escapes any synthesis of time and space. By interfering with traditional listening and signification systems, as demonstrated, for example, by the listener’s inability to repeat or sing this music, this piece testifies to the disaster. In addition to modern music associated with the Schoenberg School, Koeppen describes two musical traditions as archetypes of two very different worlds that are associated with oppressive mechanisms: The German Lied and AfricanAmerican music. Despite the fact that these sounds are played in distinct spaces and halls, Koeppen compares them through the gestures of the characters. For

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instance, standing at his window, Siegfried hears a Schubert song performed by a women’s choir.⁴¹ He tries to block the sounds, but in vain. The sudden presence of this German music threatens his daily existence and his attempt to forget and recover from the German past in multicultural Rome. Moreover, the women’s choir revives the German myth and gives vocal, phonetic expression to the silent image: “There stands a linden tree by the fountain at the gate,” singing it in the middle of Rome, singing the song in the middle of the night, where there was no rustling of lindens and no tree grew for miles. But down there by the fountain they kept the faith, kept faith with their faith, they had their linden tree […] and what could I do but shut the windows and wooden shutters. (Koeppen 1992, 82)

Adolf’s father also hears the song and, in contrast to Siegfried, is filled with excitement and rushes to meet the singers and converse with them about the glories of Germany and his longing for his homeland: He was glad. Judejahn had followed the song, the German song, and the once-mighty man listened in reverence to the song of the German women. Their singing was Germany, was the motherland, it was “By the Fountain at the Gate,” it was the German linden tree, it was everything one lived and fought and died for. (Koeppen 1992, 83)

In another room Siegfried’s mother, who still mourns Hitler’s death and the defeat of the German Reich, listens to a “nigger song” – a hybrid combining elements of American folkdance and Italian folksong – sung by Italian kitchen helpers (1992, 28). She also stands at the window, trying in vain to avoid and block the sunlight, the fragrances and voices of the vibrant city, unable to understand the song with its strange rhythms, and feeling paralyzed by the foreignness: In the yard, the kitchen boys and kitchen maids were singing nigger songs whose meaning she didn’t understand and whose rhythm troubled her […] the nigger songs were louder; the nigger songs were wilder, the nigger songs got into the room, they advanced into the corner which Eva occupied. (Koeppen 1992, 127)

 Schubert’s “Lindenbaum” came to express longing for homeland and even death, a myth of self-sacrifice. Quoting from Mann’s Der Zauberberg, Stefan Bodo Würffel demonstrates the use of this song as an intertextual code activating an aesthetic tradition centered on Wagner’s musical dramas as an explanation for the crisis of the First World War; see Stefan Bodo Würffel, “Vom ‘Lindenbaum’ zu ‘Doktor Fausti Weheklage’: Thomas Mann und die deutsche Krankheit zum Tod,” in Vom Zauberberg zum Doktor Faustus. Thomas-Mann-Studien (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, ), –.

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A few paragraphs later, Siegfried tells a friend of a dream he had that seems to express a fantasy and a wish: the gods are playing a jazz quartet on top of Capitol Hill and dancing the boogie-woogie, with Pan playing the saxophone and Orpheus singing to a banjo. Once again jungle images appear, recalling the Nazi designation of such music as degenerate in contrast to the music of the “Great Germans” (Große Deutsche) Beethoven and Wagner.⁴² Siegfried thus attempts to avoid the German music in the same way that his mother tries to avoid the African-American rhythms; the German music prevents the son from putting the Nazi past behind him, and the hybrid rhythms confront the mother with new traditions she refuses to acknowledge. The two are connected by a consciousness of the present that Koeppen embodies in Rome, free from gods, no longer a holy empire, but rather a multicultural city of foreigners and strangers, filled with a chaotic mix of languages and ruptures of traditions. Koeppen tells his reader a different, deconstructive story. He returns to Rome, a city that for years had been a site of cultural significance and pilgrimage, through the “back door,” showing its stinky Tiber water, poor beggars dragging themselves along the dirty streets, dark rooms, bars, and hotels where people can hide their fears and anxieties. According to Marks, this is the heterogeneous counter-image based on new multicultural relations that Koeppen shapes against the cultural chauvinism of the fathers’ generation.⁴³ I, however, believe that the unique elaboration of listening as a representational strategy also reflects the place where the events occur. Therefore, it is not the city’s ontology, but rather the way in which it embodies its visitors’ consciousness and perceptions (as demonstrated in listening to the atonal music) that plays a central role in this novel. The novel’s documentary potential lies precisely here: in the contradictory ruptures that bear witness to the impossibility of a complete synthesis by evoking a false pretense of harmony. Rome is thus revealed as a site of multiple experiences: some people come to the city looking for a glorious past, others seek to find compromise and peace in religion; some enjoy its aesthetic artworks, and others find their home in its multicultural environment. Koeppen shapes Rome, the city associated with the core of Western tradition

 The Nazis’ rejection of jazz and African-American music as the embodiment of a hybrid, dangerous culture threatening the German nation is discussed, for example, in Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, ), –. On the myth of the Great Germans such as Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Beethoven and Wagner and its implications for the Third Reich see Huber , –.  Friedhelm Marks, “Polyphonie. Musik und Romanform bei Wolfgang Koeppen,” in Wolfgang Koeppen – Mein Ziel war die Ziellosigkeit. Eds. Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Michael Gratz (Humburg: Rotbuch Verlag, ), .

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(cultural and religious), as a poetic seismograph that embodies the characters’ failure to confront and come to terms with the past. Rome thus becomes another station in Siegfried’s compulsive flight from his parents and the Nazi past, a place where this past returns yet again as repressed content that refuses to become passé. Death in Rome alludes to works by Thomas Mann but, unlike Mann, Koeppen seems to challenge the bond between twelve-tone composition and fascist ideologies instead of charging it with a stable identity. His novel focuses on the effect music has on its listeners rather than on musical components and textures. Both novels present biographies of modern composers and translate the discomfort caused by the musical dissonance into a mode of poetic testimony. However, in contrast to Leverkühn, Siegfried is not seeking a musical revolution. Rather, he recognizes in this music that which he will never be able to compose and the home he will never have. He drifts to Rome, a modern city empty of gods, visions, and promises. Moreover, Koeppen exposes bare human desires, while Leverkühn is bound up with a transcendental demonic pact. He struggles with his demons and symbolically sacrifices his life in order to maintain a humanistic worldview. Mann’s tragic hero reflects a longing for an ethics that distinguishes between good and evil. As opposed to Doctor Faustus, the demise that ends Koeppen’s Death in Rome does not point to any act of reconciliation or metaphysical redemption, not even in a future or utopian world. The dead body of Adolf’s father lies bare on the floor, empty of meaning and symbolic gestures, indifferent to the people around it. The narrator reports in a bored voice on the death that soon will be forgotten, disappearing into the chaos and urban noise of Rome.

2 Günter Grass: Rhythms of a Fictitious Testimony Like anyone born in the mid-1920s, Günter Grass was old enough to have played some role in what happened, to have belonged to a Nazi youth group and been influenced by its ideology, yet young enough not to have been seriously implicated in the Nazi extermination machine. For years it seemed that “he never needed, unlike so many other Germans just a few years older, to hide, explain away, or falsify what he did as a young man” (Pierce 2001, 1). This view was challenged when Grass’s autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), came out in August 2006. In Germany it caused a public sensation. It seemed that Grass expected this by giving an interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) a week earlier.⁴⁴ In the book Grass admitted to having served in the Waffen-SS during the final months of the war. For sixty years he had kept silent about this biographical tidbit, hidden it from the public – his biographers, critics, and readers. The autobiography evoked an immediate response as demonstrated, among other media, in Der Spiegel. ⁴⁵ Other writers, friends, and colleagues responded mainly with sympathy and understanding. Christa Wolf called for a reasonable, moderate discussion of biographies instead of a hysterical and emotional controversy.⁴⁶ John Irving considered it a “failure” in Grass, who had refused for so long to talk about his experience as a soldier, but praised him as a writer and intellectual.⁴⁷ Other professional readers, among them historians, responded with disappointment and anger. For some of them Grass had spoiled the critical potential and the political dignity of the public sphere.⁴⁸ Some of the reactions arose from his self-assigned role as the “conscience of the nation,” a symbol of morality and a political writer who was not afraid of self-criticism and self-reflection. For many readers Grass was a voice that had called to pursue

 Günter Grass, “Warum ich nach sechzig Jahren mein Schweigen breche,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,  August : –.  Special Issue on Günter Grass’s autobiography, in Der Spiegel,  August .  Christa Wolf, “Ich habe Respekt vor Günter Grass,” Süddeutsche Zeitung / Aug. : .  John Irving, “A Soldier Once,” in The New York Times Book Review,  July :  and .  See for example Joachim Fest, “Moral versteht sich von selbst,” in Der Spiegel,  August : .

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the struggle against repression, denial, and forgetting the past. For these and other reasons, his belated revelation seemed to many like a betrayal.⁴⁹ My study, however, does not deal with how Grass’s work was received. In this chapter I intend to show how Grass’s early novel, The Tin Drum, is actually dealing with these questions by demonstrating a profound and uncompromising engagement with German suffering, shame and guilt. Among post-1945 musical biographies explored in this book, Grass’s novel thus plays a central role. Following Nietzsche, Grass, like Mann, uses musical dissonance to shape a unique mode of documentation. He too tells the life story of a musician as reflected in and interwoven with the events of German history. However, unlike Mann, Grass does not associate the dissonance with modern music, such as twelve-tone composition. In The Tin Drum the dissonance is revealed firstly as a rhythmic pattern inherent in the poetic language that challenges standard syntax and balanced speech structures, and secondly as disturbing sound images that interfere with traditional aesthetic conventions and the canonical repertoire. The refusal to offer a “soothing” musical solution to the tense, unpleasant chords reverberates with depictions of unbearable glass-breaking singing or the explosive, disturbing rhythms of the drum. I would argue that these “distortions” amplify the novel’s decentralized narrative and open up a space through which repressed, silenced contents of the culture are revealed. Grass develops various deconstructing techniques that work against and interfere with the hegemonic narrative. Here too, it is not the modern atonal music that evokes ambivalent contradictory listening experiences as demonstrated in Koeppen’s Death in Rome, but rather a dense montage of popular musical citations of different styles that subverts the narrative center. In light of Bakhtin’s remarks on the carnival and the carnivalesque, I will show how Grass’s employment of these “musical ruptures” parodically undermines canonic traditions, including Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Parody and the grotesque characterize Grass’s way of challenging the collective memory in order to bear alternative witness to the disaster. I explore below how by playing the uncompromising, disturbing sounds of counter-memory, The Tin Drum, a grotesque musical biography, reveals what is missing from official sites of remembrance.

 In Israel there were critics who maintained that Grass’s revelation was marginal in contrast to the power of his fiction (Shahar and Ben-Horin, ), but others, especially historians (Margalit,  December ) and literary critics (Golan, ), strongly criticized him and accused him of anti-Semitism.

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Allegories of Memory: Carnival and Ethics The novel The Tin Drum Günter Grass’s first epic work, inaugurates the Danziger Trilogie (The Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1963) which also includes Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse, 1961) and Hundejahre (Dog Years, 1963). Here as in his later works, Grass deals intensively with Nazism, the Second World War and its implications for the present, Germany’s responsibility for Nazi crimes, and questions of German guilt and suffering.⁵⁰ Together with other writers of his generation, Grass contributed to the creation of a new cultural and political identity in Germany.⁵¹ He gave explicit expression to his political thought while involved in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in West Germany.⁵² Around the time of German reunification (1989/90), Grass criticized the “annexation” of East Germany by the West. In his famous lecture “Schreiben nach Auschwitz” (“Writing After Auschwitz,” 1990), he described his position using the image of a scar engraved onto the German body, a mark that can no longer be removed: We cannot pass over Auschwitz. However much we want to, we must not commit such a violent act, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is a permanent brand on our history and – as a gain! – makes possible a perspective that could mean: now we know ourselves. (Grass 1997c, 256 [translation mine])

 In light of claims about the new paradigm in post- German literature, Katharina Hall, focusing on representations of German suffering during the war, offers a re-reading of this trilogy within a broader frame, including two later novels, örtlich betäubt () and Im Krebsgang (); see Katharina Hall, Günter Grass’s Danzig Quintet: Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from Die Blechtrommel to Im Krebsgang (New York: Peter Lang, ). On Grass’s dealing with German suffering and guilt in a wider context, namely the new cultural trends in post- Germany, see Aleida Assmann, “The Incompatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,” in German Life and Letters  (): –.  On the relationship between post-reunification literature in Germany and the political discourse, see: Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, ). On the various controversies that these writers were involved in see Eshel , –; on the Wolf controversy (/) and the claim that East German intellectuals failed in a second Historikerstreit, see Huyssen , –.  In  Grass assisted Willi Brandt, head of the SPD in West Germany. Later he participated in the election campaigns of , , and  and became a member of the SPD in . In February  he resigned from the party because of disagreement about immigration policy. Grass documented his political experience in his diaries Essays und Reden II, –; see also his fictional Mein Jahrhundert (). On his political engagement and relationship with Brandt, see for example, Harro Zimmermann, Günter Grass unter den Deutschen (Göttingen: Steidl, ), –.

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According to Grass, reunification meant a cure and a healing of the open wound – the memory of Auschwitz – and would bring Germany and the Germans a new agenda according to which Auschwitz could become “history,” namely a past that is passé. His attack on Adorno’s earlier claim of the impossibility of “poetry” after Auschwitz can be read in this light, confirming at the same time the strong influence the philosopher and musicologist had on him.⁵³ This can be seen in his criticism of progress and modernity that in many ways echoes the Frankfurt School’s criticism of culture as well as Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Grass uses his own metaphor – that of the snail: “Progress is a snail,” he said in a speech delivered in 1982 in Rome; “At that time many wished – and so did I – that there could be jumping snails. Today I know […] that the snail is too quick for us” (Grass 1985, 140). Grass’s experience with “time and its contrary curse” led him to create a unique poetics that embodies historical consciousness and resists the “passage of time” (verstreichende Zeit), seeing Auschwitz as the determining event for Germany’s self-understanding. Germans must bear witness to a past that must be recalled and remembered, like a scar. In the Rome speech titled “The Destruction of Mankind has Begun,” Grass repeatedly referred to the “writer” as obliged to write against the passing of time: “As a contemporary, I have written against the passage of time. The past made me throw it in the path of the present to make the present stumble. The future could only be understood on the basis of past made present” (Grass 1985, 140). The past must become an obstacle to the present; the future is possible only when it is generated from a “present past.” The dialectical relationship between past and present as the condition for a political literature and ethical self-understanding can also be found in his speech accepting the Danish Sonning Prize in 1996. In this speech Grass speaks about a whole generation who survived the war and felt guilty for that and about himself as a writer who is responsible for the memory of the dead. As someone who witnessed the devastation and crimes, he knows all too well that no amusing present could ever erase the horrific past. Therefore, he is not free to choose

 As discussed earlier, Adorno claimed the impossibility of an art or poetry that denied the facts of the disaster by continuing traditional liberal, rational modes of representation; see Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Prismen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), . See also Kiedaisch, Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (Stuttgart: Reclam, ) on his influence on German writers such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Günter Grass, Stefan Heim, Peter Weiss, and Heinrich Böll.

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his literary materials. Too many dead are watching him in his writing (Grass 1997d, 446–447).⁵⁴ In 1999, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Grass connected the poetics of resistance, the author’s mission, and the act of “reading aloud”: the author who reads his literature aloud demands of his audience a certain attention that both estranges and suspends the process of comprehension, and is required in order to resist the ongoing flow of passing time. In a later speech given in Vilnius in 2000 Grass claimed how in the history of German collective memory different kinds of suffering associated with different ethnicities failed to coexist and therefore German suffering had been deferred and repressed in light of the suffering of others such as the Jews and gypsies.⁵⁵ According to Aleida Assmann, Grass gets to the heart of the psycho-logic of the German memory problem: the urge to deny one victim’s suffering (Jews or gypsies) in order to give space for another (Germans). Exploring Grass’s pronouncement in light of his literary work, Assmann calls not only for the integration of different sufferings in the national memory, but also for a correlation, as Grass’s work suggests, between social (personal) and national (collective) memory: “Recognition of the family memory of suffering must not lead to ignoring the national memory of guilt, but the national memory of guilt cannot be a barrier closing off the stories of experienced suffering” (Assmann 2006, 199). As I will show, Grass’s musical biography profoundly interweaves the private and the public and offers alternatives to the ways in which the Second World War and the Nazi past, the destruction and suffering are recalled, retold and shaped within German memory. Concerning Grass’s concept of history, Neuhaus argues that The Tin Drum does not demonstrate an overcoming or a working through of past experience, but rather that past experience should remain acute, like an “open wound,” hence present.⁵⁶ What poetics, however, can reverberate with this wound? How can it avoid the confirmation of deceptive hegemonic rituals, symbolic fascination, and national mystification? And finally, how can literature enforce ethical responsibility for a past that must not be lost to history? A partial answer is found in the dialogical poetics that paradoxically inherits the tradition of the medieval carnival.

 Quoted in Volker Neuhaus, Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit. Zu Leben und Werk von Günter Grass (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, ), .  Quoted in Aleida Assmann , –.  Neuhaus Volker, Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit. Zu Leben und Werk von Günter Grass (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, ), .

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In his “Discourse in the Novel” (1988), Mikhail Bakhtin develops the concept of dialogue to demonstrate literary representation of social and cultural relationships. According to Bakhtin, the novel was historically created through the translation of carnivalesque structures into the realm of literature. In this transformative process the social role turns into a “voice” of a “dialogical texture.”⁵⁷ The novel is therefore a poetic embodiment of a historical event – the medieval carnival. Bakhtin speaks about the relationships between the voices: During the days of the carnival social roles are reversed and traditional power relationships are suspended. In the novel this cultural subversion is conveyed in parody, which turns a serious gesture or situation into ridicule and comic content. The destabilization of social hierarchy is reflected in the undermining of traditional narrative centers. This happens also because of simultaneous representation of different contradictory voices within the novel’s dialogical texture. Bakhtin uses the musical term “polyphony,” which means a texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody (voices). Explaining how the dialogical character of the polyphonic novel interferes with the absolute status of a homogeneous language and subverts signification centers that represent stable ideological worldviews, Bakhtin refers to the musical “orchestration of themes into a heterogeneous voice texture” (1988, 263). The musical terminology reveals the subversive character of the dialogical texture: By creating dissonant tones within the homogeneous, monolithic sound, the carnivalesque strategy interferes with the hegemonic narrative that excludes alternative stories. Literature thus borrows a musical means (polyphony) to shape a subversive poetics that reflects upon social realms, exposing what has been repressed, rejected, or removed from the official sites of culture (Bakhtin 1988, 366). This subversive poetics is illustrated in Grass’s The Tin Drum, which like Thomas Mann’s musical biography, sought to offer alternative modes of response to the catastrophe of the Second World War. Like Mann, Grass looked to music to develop a unique mode of narration and documentation, but in Grass’s case the music involves a broader understanding of art on the one hand and “noises” (Geräusche) on the other. Throughout this carnivalesque texture he tried to create an alternative ethics. In his autobiography Grass writes that music had been pivotal to him since his youth and especially in the first postwar years. Critics have also pointed out that music plays a dominant role in his work. Stahlbaum, who examines the existential role of art in the Danzig Trilogy, includes in the “artist” category not only musicians (a drummer, a trumpeter, a flu-

 See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –.

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tist), but also clowns, dancers, painters, sculptors, marionettes, and poets.⁵⁸ Mundt, who explores the paradigms of art criticism as social criticism in postwar novels, focuses on analogies between the historical character of the Führer and the artist – a drummer or dancer.⁵⁹ In defining different art figurations (Kunstfiguren) in Grass’s literature, Durzak connects playing the drum and documenting or narrating the past.⁶⁰ Auffenberg, who identifies the drum rhythms with a narrative principle, emphasizes the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of the music/literature relationship.⁶¹ Roehm, likewise, emphasizes the musical aspects in Grass’s novel Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986) by using terms such as “polyphony,” “counterpoint,” and “improvisation.” Neuhaus describes Oskar’s music as a symbolic “pre-form” (Vorform) of the completed novel.⁶² Moser points to the parallel between the way Oskar plays the drum and how he tells his story.⁶³ Another version of the narration/drumming relationship is found in Frizen, who uses integrated terms such as “Erzählmusik” and “erzählendes Musizieren,” while alluding to the musical theories of Nietzsche, Wagner, and Adorno.⁶⁴ Finally, Arker provides an explicit connection between the psychic mechanism of recollection and the drum by arguing that the act of playing creates memory.⁶⁵ In my context, The Tin Drum is a musical autobiography. On the most obvious level, it covers critical events in the life of a musician between 1899 and 1952. Oskar, an adult in the body of a hunchbacked child, describes his childhood and youth in Danzig in the years preceding the rise of Nazism: his involvement in a German propaganda theater during the Second World War; his musical activities during the years of the Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder), a term used to describe the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany after the war; and the events prior to his arrest for murder and his hospi-

 Klaus Stallbaum, Kunst und Künstlerexistenz im Frühwerk von Günter Grass (Cologne: Lingen, ), –.  Hannelore Mundt, Doktor Faustus und die Folgen. Kunstkritik als Gesellschaftskritik im deutschen Roman seit  (Bonn: Bouvier, ), – and –.  Manfred Durzak, Der deutsche Roman der Gegenwart. Entwicklungsvoraussetzungen und Tendenzen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, ), .  Christian Auffenberg, Vom Erzählen des Erzählens bei Günter Grass. Studien zur immanenten Poetik der Romane Die Blechtrommel und Die Rättin (Münster: LIT, ), –.  Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), .  Sabine Moser, Günter Grass. Romane und Erzählungen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, ), .  Werner Frizen, “‘Blechmusik’: Oskar Matzeraths Erzählkunst,” in Études Germaniques  (): .  Dieter Arker, Nichts ist vorbei, alles kommt wieder. Untersuchungen zu Günter Grass’ Blechtrommel (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, ), .

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talization. Oskar plays his drum and writes this story from 1952 to 1954 while in hospital. The act of drumming, however, is not simply a metaphor for the process of storytelling. The drum’s rhythms trigger the act of narration and are integral to the novel’s poetic language; indeed, the drum becomes a tool of recall, carrying voices and transferring memories: “If I didn’t have my drum, which, when handled adroitly and patiently, remembers all the incidentals that I need to get the essential down on paper, and if I didn’t have the permission of the management to drum on it three or four hours a day, I’d be a poor bastard with nothing to say for my grandparents” (Grass 1965, 19). As if to draw our attention to the role of music, Grass creates other characters associated with music. His mother listens to popular arias from sentimental operettas such as Johann Strauss’s Zigeunerbaron (1885) and Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), and her piano repertoire includes Beethoven sonatas. Meyn, a member of the SS, struggles to play the trumpet for chorales on Christmas Eve, and Greff, a petit-bourgeois store owner, sings with his boys a variety of “morning songs, evening songs, hiking songs, soldier’s songs, harvest songs, hymns to the Virgin, and folk songs native and foreign” (Grass 1965, 280). In pointing to the role of musical folklore, marches, and military songs for Nazi youth groups, Grass alludes to songs such as “ännchen von Tharau,” “Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht,” Volk’s “Wir lieben die Stürme,” and Flex’s soldier songs – all popular and part of the Hitler Youth repertoire.⁶⁶ Musical quotation becomes an integral part of the narration. This incorporation is deployed to demonstrate a gap between the historical pathos and the satirical representation. Didactic songs and hymns performed in kindergarten are followed by patriotic popular songs played during the war, such as “Englandlied” and “Lili Marleen.” The montage of musical allusions also includes such titles as “Der rote Sarafan,” “Schwarze Augen,” “Hast du dort droben viel Englein bei dir,” “Es steht ein Soldat am Wolgastrand,” “Regentropfen,” “Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt,” “Jesus, dir leb’ ich, Jesus, dir sterb’ ich,” “O Maria hilf,” “Der Mai ist gekommen,” and “Heimat deine Sterne.” This dense display of different styles in the text blurs the lines between tragic and comic, serious and humoristic, high and low and creates a parodic effect that is inherent in Grass’s cultural criticism. The parody becomes grotesque when the propaganda group that Oskar is a member of arrives at the border in Normandy border and witnesses a machine-gun massacre of five nuns, which is depicted as a surrealist drama, including stage directions, to the tune of the “The Great Pretender,” the 1956 hit by the Platters in America. The firing of the machine gun corresponds to

 Volker Neuhaus, endnotes to Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (Göttingen: Steidl, ), .

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the slow gramophone music and the acoustic images become the foreground, while the killing is relegated to the background: The rat-tat-tat of the machine gun punctuates the slow mournful music. Roswitha holds her ears. Felix stands on his head. In the background five nuns with umbrellas are seen flying heavenward. The record sticks in its groove and repeats. (Grass 1965, 330 [emphasis in the original])

The significance of the anachronism of a 1950s hit incorporated into an event that takes place during the 1940s becomes clear later in the novel: the “pretender” proves to be an allegory for postwar West Germans, for whom appearance and pretending are the values of a society that has turned loss, mourning, and suffering into a cliché. As I show below, Grass’s poetic use of musical dissonance is a central device in challenging this pretending. Oskar, his poetic drummer, celebrates and develops the art of dissonance; his music becomes a mode of resistance against the manipulative power of political illusions and socio-cultural appearances.

The Aesthetics of Dissonance Like Thomas Mann, Grass draws inspiration from Nietzsche’s conception of dissonance as a documentary tool and a mode of response that does not neglect the horrors. However, unlike Mann, Grass does not associate musical dissonance with atonal music. Rather, he shapes the dissonance as distortions of traditions – linguistic, aesthetic and cultural. These distortions are conveyed in destabilized syntax and neologism that suspend stable meanings, in unbalanced acoustic and visual images as well as in the parody of canonical repertoire. The distortions and interferences open up a poetic site where repressed, silenced contents of the culture are revealed. The dissonance “remembers” in that it calls attention to the process of exclusion and denial, reminding of what happened before it was covered and disguised, just like asymmetrical form. Discussing the necessary correlation between asymmetrical forms and memory processes in his book Symmetry, Causality, Mind, Leyton claims that “asymmetry is the memory that processes leave on objects [whereas] symmetry is the absence of process-memory” (1992, 7). Grass obviously was unaware of Leyton’s conception when writing The Tin Drum. However, Leyton’s claim helps us to see how Grass explores symmetry, asymmetry and memory and how he uses that exploration to criticize German culture.

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We begin with the correspondence between acoustic and visual images – the dissonant, out-of-tune sounds and asymmetrical forms inherent in the depiction of Greff, who hangs himself on the “drumming machine” (Trommelmaschine). As a devoted Boy Scout leader Greff knows many folksongs by heart and likes to sing them at local public events. His scouts later become members of the Nazi Jungvolk and Hitler Youth. However, he is also an inventor of “music machines,” and when Oskar turns eighteen Greff builds him a drumming machine out of a set of scales used for weighing potatoes. A few days later Oskar finds Greff’s dead body hanging from the machine: one scale holds a potato sack and the other the dead body, demonstrating the absolute symmetry of “a wellbalanced death” (ausgewogener Tod), (Grass 1965, 412). Greff has committed suicide after being suspected of two civil and public law “sins”: cheating in business and homoerotic relations. When the dead body is released from the machine, the sound mechanism is activated: And yet, perhaps because my drum accounted in good part for the form Greff imprinted upon his death, I occasionally manage to drum a pretty faithful tone-poem of Greff’s death. When friends of Bruno, my keeper, ask me what my piece is called, I tell them the title is ‘165 lbs’. (Grass 1965, 305)

From Oskar’s point of view, Greff’s death is an aesthetic event that is embodied and conveyed through a musical piece called “165 lbs” (Fünfundsiebenzig Kilo). His interpretation of this musical composition demonstrates its documentary potential: The “drum piece” (Trommelstück) transforms the violence and self-destruction into sounds played by an orchestra that is out of tune. These dissonant sounds are produced when the dead body is released from the drum machine. At this moment the aesthetic symmetry of the “well-balanced death” is distorted and turns into asymmetry, which reveals the horror, oppression and dismay otherwise disguised and concealed by symmetry. Released from the machine that is intended for weighing and measuring, the ordering and balancing of Greff’s corpse testifies to the random regulative violence of power systems. These systems are inhuman because they exclude and erase that which does not measure or weigh according to normative categories, homogeneous standards or ideals. Alluding to the tortured body on the script machine from Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie,” Greff’s aesthetic death on the sound machine scorns the obsessive regularity, discipline, and bureaucracy of officialdom. Oscar’s language recalls and bears witness to this horror by translating the rhythm created by the killing machine into writing – one instance of what I am referring to as “musical biography.” The monotony of repetitive sounds produced

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by the scales is suddenly interrupted in a way that unmasks the denied, oppressive violence. The interruption is heard from Oskar’s tin drum through which he composes his life story. The witnessing gaze becomes music that is transformed into a distorted, destabilized narration as demonstrated by the suspension or acceleration of the poetic language. In this sense, Oskar’s art of narration interferes with the monotonic regulation and oppressive spectatorship, the seemingly harmonious order and balance that were among the sources of the war crimes. Another example of allegorical distortion shaped by dissonance and asymmetry is the interference with “symmetrical rhythms” played on Nazi parade platforms. The intense appearance of symmetric images occurs in the plot shortly before Oskar’s father joins the Nazi party. Oskar describes how he used to march with his father at the Sunday Nazi parades. There he meets Mr. Bebra – a gnome, according to Oscar’s mother – who predicts the upcoming events when the Nazis will take over: “They will organize torchlight parades. They will build rostrums and fill them, and down from the rostrums they will preach our destruction […] Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it” (Grass 1965, 107). These events culminated in speeches delivered from the central platform. “What is a rostrum?” Oskar asks, and immediately answers: “Regardless of whom it is built for, a rostrum must be symmetrical. And that rostrum on our Maiwiese was indeed striking in its symmetry” (1965, 110). Oskar informs his readers that the main characteristic of a parade platform is its symmetry. Oskar, however, admits to being suspicious of the symmetrical stage. It becomes a synecdoche for the oppressive and harsh ideology of the current political system, and he explains how in the summer of 1935 symmetry was the cause of his rebellious act: hiding under the platform and drumming subversive rhythms. What constitutes subversion in this context? By drumming out a triple rhythm against the double rhythm of the march, Oskar interferes with and destabilizes the “rectilinear march music” (gradliniger Marschmusik), (Grass 1965, 113). Drumming the “Blue Danube” and then the Charleston, Oskar turns the stadium into a dance hall, and “Gone were law and order” (1965, 114). Amusingly, Grass uses Strauss’s romantic waltz music as a subversive tool that interferes with order. Until November 1938 Oskar pursued his subversive performance lying under symmetrical platforms, turning speakers into stutterers and marches into waltzes and foxtrots (1965, 115). To distort and interfere with the straight, symmetrical lines of the Nazi platforms is to act in a politically subversive manner. Indeed, not only in this scene, but in a larger sense in the novel as a whole symmetry is transformed into asymmetry. This pattern is revealed at various textual levels: in the plot (the chaos on the parade platforms); in visual (the ruined

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drum) or acoustic images (one of Oskar’s skills is singing in a way that breaks glass, or playing the drumming machine as demonstrated above); and in verbal manifestations (undermined semantic values and unstable syntax, such as in children’s rhyme-songs like “Glas Glas Gläschen,” in nonsense and neologism like “Oskarism,” among others). Grass himself referred to the inhuman aspect of symmetry in an interview: I (have) always looked to express this asymmetry and the tension it evokes. I find symmetry inhuman, and it is not accidental that all the totalitarian ideologies are expressed via symmetrical architecture. The Tin Drum, the tribune chapter, includes in general an attack against the symmetry. (Quoted in Arker 1989, 445 [translation mine])

The association of symmetrical form with totalitarian regimes is reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s cultural criticism from Dialectic of Enlightenment – reflecting the attempt to regulate violently anything abnormal that escapes and fails to “fit in.” In this sense Oskar’s playing is political in that it places the “abnormal” on the Nazi podium, where it performs. His hidden rhythms played under the parade platforms interfere with the official rhythm played loudly on the platforms until the symmetricality and regularity of the latter are destroyed. In this respect symmetry means manipulative pretense, which Oskar’s transgressing narration challenges. Indeed, when describing the act of playing, a subversive moment occurs also in the poetic language, which is suddenly inflated with repetitions. The hidden drum rhythms arising from the “abyss” interfere with the monotonous rhythm of the marchers. Allegorically, this rhythm resonates with what was expelled and excluded from postwar German memory. The infinite movement of this disturbing rhythm distorts the pretense and artificial harmony of a society that refuses to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the crimes it witnessed. The aesthetics of dissonance is manifested in other visual images as well. For instance, past events leave traces on the “disabled instrument” (invalides Instrument), or “exhausted drum” (erschöpfte Trommel), as its color-faded, scratched, resonating body is described as a “wreck” (Wrack). Later, however, Oskar destroys or “kills” his drum in order to replace it with a new one. When he confesses his “crime,” the new tin drum – made of a raw material still clear of scratches like a face empty of wrinkles – becomes a metaphor for “conscience” (Gewissen). Grass’s language leads us to associate what happened to his drum to collective processes of neglect and denial: It was not until the middle of December that the accusations of the serrated red and white conscience round my neck began to carry less conviction: The lacquer cracked and peeled; the tin grew thin and fragile. Condemned to look at this death agony, I was eager, as one

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always is in such cases, to shorten the sufferings of the moribund, to hasten the end. (Grass 1965, 259)

Oskar begins to collect drums in fear that one day they will disappear from the world. Therefore, he does not throw the old one away, but rather keeps it in the cellar. Violation, horror, and guilt are engraved in the scarred tin, silently waiting. The damaged instrument is isolated, concealed in the cellar. Oskar hopes to receive – perhaps for Christmas – “a new and guiltless drum” (Grass 1965, 259). There is also an attempt to repair the drum, which fails, and leads to a profound depiction of a historical clash at the Polish post office between Polish partisans and Nazi collaborators. In August 1939 Oskar forces his mother’s lover (possibly his father) to return with him to the post office, which is already under attack, in order to repair the drum. Shortly thereafter SS men break into the building and arrest the defenders, who are later murdered, and deliver Oskar, who is in the throes of a nervous breakdown, to a mental hospital. He receives the treatment his drum did not, and tells his story while in the hospital. Attempts to isolate or cure the “abnormal” (hiding the drum in the cellar or getting it repaired in the post office on one hand, and Oskar’s hospitalization, on the other), convey a poetic analogy between the damaged drum and Oskar’s disability (his deformed body and mental breakdown). They reveal, however, also a historical analogy between the imprisonment and hospitalization of the disabled during the Third Reich and the immediate postwar efforts at renovation and repair that were bound up with postwar ideologies of Zero Hour (Stunde Null), a term indicating the end of the war, and de-Nazification. Throughout the novel Grass describes these hasty processes of rehabilitation and normalization in postwar West German society that also point to the denial conveyed in the official narrative and collective memory. Grass’s dissonant poetics interferes with these cultural processes not only through the depiction of subversive drum rhythms but also in shaping the image of “glass-breaking singing” (Glas Zersingen). The sound of exploding glass is a central acoustic image associated with the transgressive movement from symmetrical to asymmetrical – a dissonance with no resolution. For instance, in Dr. Holtz’s clinic, Oskar explodes jars and test-tubes containing embryos and other specimens. The liquid spreads over the floor leaving distorted spots and stains and dead organs that only minutes earlier had been preserved in formaldehyde, objects of observation and scientific research. To take this interpretation further, Oskar acts against that which scientists and scholars do: They regulate and categorize, observe, analyze and diagnose various objects, while keeping them isolated behind glass in laboratories, archives, hospitals or museums. The glass-breaking singing is therefore a disso-

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nant sound that destroys the barrier enforced upon distorted forms of life. Like the drum rhythms that transgress the down/up boundaries in the “platform scene,” Oskar’s singing transgresses the boundaries between inside and outside, present and absent. Similar to the destabilizing drumming this singing becomes a subversive tool that reveals deformed biological specimens, previously concealed, imprisoned or hospitalized, blocked or expelled from the public realm. In this sense as well, then, this musical biography once again raises to the surface what had been marginalized and excluded. Oskar describes his “musical talent” as follows: I had the gift of shattering glass with my singing: my screams demolished vases, my singing made windowpanes crumple and drafts prevail; like a chaste and therefore merciless diamond, my voice cut through the doors of glass cabinets and, without losing its innocence, proceeded inside to wreak havoc on harmonious, graceful liqueur glasses, bestowed by loving hands and covered with a light film of dust. (Grass 1965, 64) [Ich war in die Lage, Glas zu zersingen; mein Schrei tötete Blumenvasen; mein Gesang ließ Fensterscheiben ins Knie brechen und Zugluft regieren; meine Stimme schnitt gleich einem keuschen und deshalbunerbittlichen Diamanten Vitrinen auf und verging sich im Inneren der Vitrinen, ohne dabei die Unschuld zu verlieren, an harmonischen, edel gewachsenen, von lieber Hand geschenkten, leicht verstauben Likörgläsern. (Grass 1997a, 75)]

His vocal acrobatics are demonstrated through a rich vocabulary connected to musical terminology that refers to tone, color and pitch – “singen,” “schreien,” “Fernwirkender Gesang,” “schreiend zu singen,” “zersingen,” “reich ausgerüsteter Ton,” “lautloser Ton.” These are first discovered when Oskar fears losing his drum: The ability to drum the necessary distance between grownups and myself developed shortly after my fall, almost simultaneously with the emergence of a voice that enabled me to sing in so high-pitched and sustained a vibrato, to sing-scream so piercingly that no one dared to take away the drum that was destroying his eardrums; for when the drum was taken away from me, I screamed, and when I screamed, valuable articles burst into bits. (Grass 1965, 64) [Die Fähigkeit, mittels einer Kinderblechtrommel zwischen mir und den Erwachsenen eine notwendige Distanz ertrommeln zu können, zeitigte sich kurz nach dem Sturz von der Kellertreppe fast gleichzeitig mit dem Lautwerden einer Stimme, die es mir ermöglichte, in derart hoher Lage anhaltend und vibrierend zu singen, zu schreien oder schreiend zu singen, daß niemand es wagte, mir meine Trommel, die ihm die Ohren welk werden ließ, wegzunehmen; denn wenn mir die Trommel genommen wurde, schrie ich, und wenn ich schrie, zersprang Kostbarstes (Grass 1997a, 75)]

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Where Oskar’s drumming fails, his singing succeeds. In the daytime he drums out counter-rhythms below symmetrical platforms and shatters harmonious liqueur glasses; at night he seduces people to steal by sing-breaking store-windows. His destructive work – “zerstörerisches Werk” – in terms of both artwork and a “job” thus reveals various strategies of subversion and interference with civil law, the political order, and cultural and linguistic conventions. According to Lehmann, this technique or performing skill cannot be regarded as musical aesthetics.⁶⁷ This may be true. However, in the context of a musical biography, where different textual layers allude to and convey vocal figures, sounds and rhythms such as in the musicalization of language and form analogies, Oskar’s gift may indeed be interpreted as musical. In this sense, Grass’s disturbing sounds are not only acoustic images, but must also be considered as part of the musical language that challenges formal linguistic structures. The sounds of glass breaking, other noises, screams, and a variety of off-key tunes are thus reflected in the novel’s language in the form of repetitions that highlight phonetic components over semantic content, revealing subverted meanings. An example is the description of the missionary women reciting a phrase from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13: 13): “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.”⁶⁸ While listening to the recitation, Oskar’s associative stream transforms into wordplay that interferes with stable significations: Faith healer, Old Faithful, faithful hope, hope chest, Cape of Good Hope, hopeless love, Love’s Labor’s Lost, six love. An entire credulous nation believed, there’s faith for you, in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the gasman. I believe – such is my faith – that it smells of walnuts and almonds. But it smelled of gas. Soon, so they said, ‘twill be the first Sunday of Advent. And the first, second, third, and fourth Sundays of Advent were turned on like gas cocks, to produce a credible smell of walnuts and almonds, so

 Jürgen Lehmann, “Fragment als Form der Überschreitung. Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel u. Michail Bachtins Theorie des Romans,” in Konflikt – Grenze – Dialog: Kulturkontrastive und interdisziplinäre Textzugänge (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), .  The role of musical elements in this biblical chapter has been discussed by several scholars. See Neuhaus (, ) and Stahlbaum (, ), who compare it to a poem by Paul Celan; on formal analogies see Patrick O’Neill, “Musical Form and the Pauline Message in a Key Chapter of Grass’s Blechtrommel,” in Seminar  (): ; Dieter Stolz, Vom privaten Motivkomplex zum poetischen Weltentwurf: Konstanten und Entwicklungen im literarischen Werk von Günter Grass – (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), –. The chapter’s musical potential is also demonstrated by the way it was composed; see Wolfgang Hufschmidts’s Ricercar: Theme und fünf Kontrapunkten in sechs Teilen und  Abschnitten nach dem Kapitel “Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe” aus dem Roman “Die Blechtrommel” von Günter Grass, für Sprecher und Altflöte (Dortmund: Verlag pläne, ).

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that all those who liked to crack nuts could take comfort and believe: He’s coming, He’s coming. Who is coming? The Christ child, the Savior? (Grass 1965, 203)

What does all this mean? Can any meaning be derived from this text? Like a juggler Oskar plays with words and creates an associative, unstable syntax based on contiguity and displacement.⁶⁹ The eloquence of the formal language is disturbed by the incorporation of repetitive patterns, catalogs of adjectives, successions of words lacking subject or verb and ruptures of canonical repertoire. For example, an allusion to the New Testament follows an allusion to Tchaikovsky’s romantic Nutcracker, traditionally played at Christmas. This proximity generates a “nonsense montage” that, however, conveys an alternative logic based on sound correlations: The analogy between Weihnachtsmann and Gasmann that is created by the sound similarity hints at a correspondence between the extermination of the European Jews and a theological perception of the Jew as the other, a homo sacer. The Christian child is none other than the divine Gasman who carries the gas meter while calling: “I am the Savior of this world, without me you can’t cook” (Grass 1965, 203). The estrangement caused by the tension between the pathos and the religious language on the one hand and the trivial, everyday language on the other consists of a central subversive strategy. Oskar’s version of the Christian promise culminates in catastrophe – that of the Second World War. This semiotic paraphrase ends with variations on “hope,” “beginning,” and “end,” that also alludes to the musical form of “theme and variation”: They began to hope that soon it would be over, so they might begin afresh or continue, hoping after or even during the finale that the end would soon be over. The end of what? They still did not know. They only hoped that it would soon be over, over tomorrow, but not today; for what were they to do if the end came so suddenly? And then when the end came, they quickly turned it into a hopeful beginning; for in our country the end is always the beginning and there is hope in every, even the most final, end (Grass 1965, 204). [Hofften sie schon, daß bald Schluß sei, damit sie neu anfangen konnten oder fortfahren, nach der Schlußmusik oder schon während der Schlußmusik hoffend, daß bald Schluß sei mit dem Schluß. Hofften nur, daß bald Schluß, schon morgen Schluß, heute hoffentlich noch nicht Schluß; denn was sollten sie anfangen mit dem plötzliches Schluß. Und als

 This is part of a dominant narratological strategy of revealing the gap between the narrator’s explanations and the reader’s knowledge. Oskar’s viewpoint concerns himself and the drum above all, even when he describes his father as being attracted to the fire (of the pogroms of November , , known as the Night of Broken Glass) in order to warm himself, and the SS men who play in the toy store (having violated both the place and its owner, who commits suicide; Grass a, –).

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dann Schluß war, machten sie schnell einen hoffnungsvollen Anfang daraus; denn hierzulande ist Schluß immer Anfang und Hoffnung in jedem, auch im entgültigsten Schluß. (Grass 1997a, 263)]

The sustained word repetition shows how they have become a cliché. The cyclical narrative ends where it began: the Zero Hour is reactionary and not revolutionary, concealing and denying rather than revealing and working through the traumatic experience. This irony is also reflected in the repetitive pattern “I know not” (Ich weiß nicht), which estranges the concept of belief and demonstrates the manipulative power of religious institutions: the quotation from First Corinthians is fractured and torn apart by being integrated with nonsense images. So the promise of “faith, hope and love” given to the people of Corinth by Paul, becomes “priceless (unbelievably cheap) sausages” (ungeheuer preiswerte Würste) given to the masses by the contemporary cultural heroes. These are priests, or butchers, who fill books with script and the stomach with meat, as both the spirit and the physical body are driven, and nourished, by the same symmetrical, monotonous rhythms.⁷⁰ In Oskar’s distorted language that comes out of a deformed body, the missionary evocation becomes a “polylogue promise” unmasking and exposing ideological components. Like the counterrhythms of the drum, the narrator’s semiotic rhythms interfere with the balanced syntax of a standard language and hermetic ideology – producing dissonant sounds that remind the reader of that which is excluded. Repetition that emphasizes the tonal elements is also found in the allusion to a children’s rhyme that recurs in part throughout the novel and appears in complete form only at the very end.⁷¹ “The Black Witch” (“Schwarze Köchin”) demonstrates the psychic compulsion to repeat as embodied in musical means. This nursery rhyme that haunts Oskar combines images of fear and anxiety with tonal and rhythmic patterns: Always somewhere behind me, the black witch. Now ahead of me, too, facing me, Black.

 Regarding the Metzger image, see also a possible connection with Grass’s later criticism of Adorno’s refusal of political engagement. As early as  Grass published a poem called “Adornos Zunge” in the journal Akzente attacking Adorno for his “schöne Zunge,” namely a language, discourse, and utopian perception that avoided political praxis and engagement. Grass attacked what he saw as a passive, conservative standpoint hiding behind beautiful words – the tongue image – instead of fighting the violence and social aggression – the butcher, who cuts off the tongue (Zimmermann , ).  Grass incorporated psychoanalytic terminology in the narrative, but, according to Masson (, –), in order to undermine it and call it into question.

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Black words, black coat, black money. But if children sing, they sing no longer: Where’s the Witch, black as pitch? Here’s the black, wicked Witch. Ha! ha! ha! (Grass 1965, 589) [Schwarz war die Köchin hinter mir immer schon. Daß sie mir nun auch entgegenkommt, schwarz. Wort, Mantel wenden ließ, schwarz. Mit schwarzer Währung zahlt, schwarz. Während die Kinder, wenn singen, nicht mehr singen: Ist die Schwarze Köchin da? Ja – Ja – Ja! (Grass 1997a, 779)]

This rhyme functions as a musical leitmotif – that is, a musical pattern (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic) originally developed in Wagner’s musical dramas to signify particular dramatic-poetic content (a character, an idea, an emotion). In the literary realm the leitmotif employs textual (a character, a gesture, a visual or acoustic image) or contextual (conceptual or emotional, such as love or fear) repetition.⁷² Using this nursery rhyme based on musical alliteration and rhythm throughout the novel, Grass repeatedly displays and “plays” the prime fear that was repressed and denied through cultural processes. The traumatic experience reverberates with tonal repetitions, which suspend and undermine the classical conventions of the novel. Through these textual ruptures the mythical horror returns, and is embodied in different characters such as the policemen, neighboring children (playing violent games), canonical heroes and cultural monuments (Goethe and Wagner), as well as in sounds and noises produced by the train, the tram, or the escalator on which Oskar is finally caught after he runs away and is taken back to the hospital. The tense, explosive movement that undermines stable cultural and linguistic conventions thus becomes an inherent component of Oskar’s carnivalesque poetics that transforms the musical dissonance into a mode of resistance. Grass’s fictional biography plays dissonant sounds in order to interfere with the oppressive mechanism of culture and society. Parody provides him with another such tool.

 See Calvin Brown, “Theoretische Grundlagen zum Studium der Wechselverhältnisse zwischen Literatur und Musik,” in Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, ), .

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Music as Parody: Jazz and Onion The poetics of resistance shaped by the subversion of hegemonic culture’s codes and symbols, as well as parodies of myths and traditions, can also be seen in the drummer image.⁷³ The drum has played a pivotal role in two different cultural and political traditions associated with progress that turns into destructive power: first, the narrative of Enlightenment within which the drum symbolized a tool of transmitting reason to undeveloped cultures; and second, as an instrument used for marches and demonstrations of power, in which the drum became an attribute of an avant-garde militarism and a symbol of totalitarian movements such as fascism. Moreover, the literary representation of the drummer refers to a specific historical context. In the 1920s those who opposed Hitler called him a “political drummer” (politischer Trommler) because of his involvement in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Later, he made this term integral to his propaganda rhetoric.⁷⁴ Grass plays with this reference by drawing an analogy between Oskar and the historical character of Hitler, the neighborhood drummer who kills, distracts, and tells the story of petit-bourgeois citizens turning into a violent, aggressively manipulated mob.⁷⁵ And yet the character of Oskar is not reduced to a Hitler caricature or an allegory of Nazi Germany. Grass emphasizes the tensions and contradictions within Oskar, who is simultaneously a double and a counter-figure. He uses vocabulary and rhetoric that were part of Nazi propaganda,⁷⁶ yet through parodic and deconstructive strategies he also criticizes this oppressive ideology.

 Two approaches have been taken in examining parody in this novel: The first is Zeitgeschichte, according to which the characters are paranoid incarnations of Nazis and petit-bourgeois citizens; see Hanspeter Brode, Die Zeitgeschichte im Erzählenden Werk von Günter Grass (Frankfurt a. M.: Herbert Lang, ), –; Jost Hermand, “Das Unpositive der kleinen Leute. Zum angeblich skandalösen ‘Animalismus’ in Grassens Die Blechtrommel,” in Günter Grass: Ästhetik des Engagements (New York: Peter Lang, ), –; and Rainer Scherf, Das Herz der Blechtrommel und andere Aufsätze zum Werk von Günter Grass (Marburg: Tectum, ), –. The second is Kulturgeschichte, according to which Oskar is a parody of the artist figure of German Romanticism; see Stallbaum ; Neuhaus ; Mason , ; Arker , –; and Mundt , –.  Hanspeter Brode, Die Zeitgeschichte im Erzählenden Werk von Günter Grass (Frankfurt a. M.: Herbert Lang, ), .  On this analogy see Mason , –, Brode , –, and Mundt , .  Werner Frizen, “‘Blechmusik’: Oskar Matzeraths Erzählkunst,” in Études Germaniques  (): .

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The political and cultural criticism is also applied to enlightened authority as embodied by the figure of Goethe: If for a time I inclined more toward Rasputin and feared Goethe’s intolerance, it was because of a faint suspicion that if you, Oskar, had lived and drummed at his time, Goethe would have thought you unnatural, would have condemned you as an incarnation of anti-nature, that while feeding his own precious nature […] on honeybuns, he would have taken notice of you, poor devil, only to hit you over the head with Faust or a big heavy volume of his Theory of Colors. (Grass 1965, 91 [emphasis in the original])

So Oskar’s drumming is not part of the black pedagogy and programmatic regulations, but a chaotic, anarchic art. Unlike the representational dichotomy in the anti-fascist literature of Brecht or the fascist literature of Böhme, Grass subverts and transgresses the stable image of the drum as a cultural code.⁷⁷ His Faustian drummer rejects fixed identities, so he joins a propaganda group and at the same time interrupts public Nazi assemblies, choosing neither a socio-political nor an aesthetic alternative.⁷⁸ Grass is also parodying the Künstlerroman here to show resistance.⁷⁹ Derived from the Bildungsroman, this genre focuses on an artist who struggles to become an accepted member of society. The Tin Drum depicts the life of an “artist,” a drummer, but in contrast to the educational process demonstrated in the classic model, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Grass’s protagonist is far from educated, and he definitely fails to become an accepted member of society. Oskar’s teacher is Mr. Bebra, the Mephistopheles-like clown who encourages him to sign a contract with the future leader of Germany – Der Führer. Grass’s protagonist, however, chooses a parodic form of cooperation, beginning with interrupting Nazi rallies and later joining a propaganda group whose commander is a friend of Goebbels. The musical pieces played by Oskar are also different from the classical model: among other things they include popular hits, children’s songs, dance music, and jazz. His singing, too, contrasts radically with the reader’s conventional ideas of the art of singing, combining screams and shrieks. Furthermore, his

 Hanspeter Brode , , .  Hermand claims that this is the real scandal of the novel, in that it fails to offer a political solution leading to a better world, leaving the reader in the darkness of absurdity and anomaly; see Jost Hermand, “Das Unpositive der kleinen Leute. Zum angeblich skandalösen ‘Animalismus’ in Grassens Die Blechtrommel,” in Günter Grass: Ästhetik des Engagements (New York: Peter Lang, ), .  Neuhaus mentions three genres that Grass alludes to: Pikaroroman, Bildungsroman, and Künstlerroman; see Volker Neuhaus , –.

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singing has an explosive potential that is actualized through the bourgeois milieu, breaking its harmonious façade. The character of Faust is at the center of intertextual relations between The Tin Drum and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Both novels attempt to portray a private life story as an allegory of Germany’s cultural history in the twentieth century. In Mann’s case the humanist who makes a pact with the devil in order to fulfill his desire for infinite knowledge becomes a composer of innovative music that reflects the horror of the times. In contrast, Grass’s Oskar is a clown or fool in the guise of a drummer, who literally does not grow up, and then refuses to die even at the end of the text, returning in a later novel.⁸⁰ Identifying this as the ultimate reason for his decision to write The Tin Drum,⁸¹ Grass protests Mann’s poetic choices by offering another version of the story and by refusing to participate in the mystification and demonization of Nazism. He resists the use of “fate” as a determinist explanation and legitimization for Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, according to which a transcendent force took control of the Germans and forced upon them the Nazi ideology. Grass thus sought to interfere with the mystical idea of the Third Reich that was part of the ritual and fascination of the cultural and political phenomenon of Nazism. He refused to depict a pact between a genius musician and a transcendent demonic force, documenting instead the everyday layers of life of the petit bourgeoisie: a bored family man who joins the Nazi party (Matzerath), a grocer who strives for acknowledgment and admiration through fascist rituals and self-sacrifice (Greff), and a drunken trumpeter who vents his own penchant for violence and aggression among SS members (Meyn). We have seen that a central means of subversion is parody, within which music and musical tradition can play a decisive role. Similar to Thomas Mann, Grass alludes to two composers, Beethoven and Wagner, who were regarded as representatives of the great canon of German music, and in so doing while depicting the years of the Third Reich, he hints at their reception in Germany at that time.⁸² For instance, during a performance of Wagner’s opera Der Flie-

 Grass’s The Rat () introduces Oskar’s perspective interwoven with four others. Aspects of the drummer also appeared in his novella Cat and Maus ().  Hannelore Mundt, Doktor Faustus und die Folgen. Kunstkritik als Gesellschaftskritik im deutschen Roman seit  (Bonn: Bouvier, ), .  Evidence of these composers’ reception in the Musikpolitik of the Third Reich is found in the radio broadcasts initiated by Goebbels in . The two first projects included renditions of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a lecture series on Wagner’s music, culminating in a broadcast of The Ring of the Nibelung; see Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, ), –.

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gende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1843) with Oskar and his family in the audience, Oskar, failing to understand the dramatic conventions, tries to rescue the singer and causes a fire in the forest where the opera is taking place. The forest, called Zupput, is part of a capitalist empire that includes an amusement park, a casino, restaurants, and cinemas – a grotesque allegory for Bayreuth, the site most intimately connected with Wagner’s musical dramas. The Tin Drum includes yet another parody of Wagner related to his last opera, Parsifal (1882), which creates a new German myth by interweaving theological and national concepts based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval saga. In an autobiographical essay Wagner wrote how meaningful Good Friday was to him and called it the trigger for the work that later developed into Parsifal. ⁸³ He viewed this day as the pinnacle of miracle and redemption when the protagonist, a double for Jesus Christ, is healed of his deadly wounds: “Miracle of supreme salvation! / Our Redeemer redeemed!” (Höchsten Heiles Wunder! / Erlösung dem Erlöser), (Wagner 1999, 61). In contrast, Grass incorporated this day as a parodic event. After failing to persuade a Christ statue to play his drum, Oskar finally realizes that the horrible figure is void of miracles and promises neither revelation nor redemption. Good Friday recalls the crucifixion of Christ, but in Grass’s version it ends in mere childish revenge: Today is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday, then Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and then it will be all up with that character who can’t even drum, who won’t even give me the pleasure of a little broken glass, who resembles me but is false. He will go down into the grave while I shall keep on drumming and drumming, but never again experience any desire for a miracle. (Grass 1965, 145–146)

The holy day becomes a hyper-realistic, ridiculous struggle between those who stay home and clean their rugs (Catholics) and those who go for drives in the country (Protestants). Unlike Wagner’s fictional world, Grass’s offers his protagonists no redemption; it is empty of reconciliation, magic, or even particular interest, and it lacks resolution.⁸⁴ In “evoking” Beethoven, Grass takes up the Ninth Symphony as did Thomas Mann. In The Tin Drum, however, Beethoven’s work serves as the musical background to a parodic occurrence with an allegorical meaning. In a club called the Onion Cellar, Oskar is listening to the confession of Frau Pioch, who tells him about her lover and their (sexual) relationship. The confession alternates be-

 Peter Wapnewski, Der Traurige Gott. Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, ), –.  On Grass’s use of Wagnerian intertexts see also Cicora , –.

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tween the love story and the physical state of Frau Pioch’s foot. Her injured foot stands for the intimacy between the lovers, whereas its healing marks their parting: They were doing the Ninth Symphony. When the chorus started up I removed the shoe from my right foot and held the foot out in front of him. He stepped on it with might and main, but I didn’t do anything to interfere with the concert. Seven weeks later Willy left me again. We had two more brief reprieves; twice more I held out my toe, first the left one, then the right one. Today both my toes are maimed […] two nailless victims of our love. (Grass 1965, 527)

In the story of Frau Pioch, concepts such as love, loss, and even victimhood contradict the conventional cognitive schemas. The lost toenail followed by the decline of the love and the distancing lover contradicts the semantic values of Beethoven’s celebrated “Ode to Joy” – so well known it has become a cultural code for humanism and freedom. Moreover, Frau Pioch suggests that her lover join her and have “a good cry” at the Onion Cellar. By refusing to join her, the lover, a “poor soul,” who “must suffer without the consolation of tears!” (Grass 1965, 527), foregoes the opportunity to work through his suffering and come to terms with the haunting past. This ironic tone that Grass introduces behind his characters’ backs (Frau Pioch in this case) creates a parodic effect that subverts and undermines the therapeutic discourse of post-1945 Germany. Earlier in the plot, Oskar recounts how much his mother loved Beethoven’s slow movements and how she had “learned to play two or three of them even more slowly than indicated” (Grass 1965, 115). His laconic report hints at the empty therapeutic role of the playing, a deceptive image of art, illustrating a critique of normative bourgeois expectations and traditions. Furthermore, Oskar tells how Beethoven’s picture over the piano was replaced by the picture of Hitler when his father joined the Nazi Party. Pseudo-mythical features are employed to depict a struggle between the two titans: The picture of the gloomy Beethoven, a present from Greff, was removed from its nail over the piano, and Hitler’s equally gloomy countenance was hung up on the same nail. Matzerath, who didn’t care for serious music, wanted to banish the nearly deaf musician entirely. But Mama […] insisted that if Beethoven were not over the sofa, he would have to be over the sideboard. So began the most sinister of all confrontations: Hitler and the genius, face to face and eye to eye. Neither of them was very happy about it. (Grass 1965, 115–116)

The struggle between the two characters, the mother and Matzerath, exposes oppositions that are structured as similarities. In counterpoising the musical genius against the political dictator, Grass points to the cultural codes associated with Nazi ideology. Encouraging and nurturing the worship of Beethoven, a cultural

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hero analogous to Hitler, demonstrates the misuse of the Beethoven myth by Nazi propaganda that was affirmed by musicologists, pedagogues, and historians.⁸⁵ Grass simultaneously constructs and deconstructs these contexts as a mode of critique. But what exactly happens in the Onion Cellar? Grass shapes this Jazz club as a symbolic site of false mourning during rapid recovery from the war through the Economic Miracle. Like the Zero Hour, both are terms generated by the postwar political agenda that ignored the preceding years, as if this “new beginning” had no history. In the 1960s, sociological and psychoanalytic researchers of postwar German society tended to explain the Germans’ “Inability to Mourn,” that is, their inability to deal with the Nazi crimes, as a collective repression of the trauma of the Second World War.⁸⁶ Grass’s novel seems to predict this diagnosis by depicting a ridiculous situation of collective crying. In the Onion Cellar a jazz trio – a flute, guitar/banjo, and drum – plays every night.⁸⁷ The owner hires Oskar and his two friends to play musical interludes because after the “crying ritual” the audience needs a change of mood when leaving the club to make room for others. This depiction of “onion consumers” is a parody of the so-called therapeutic discourse that promised to heal the horrors of the twentieth century – “which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century” (Grass 1965, 525). Indeed, the Onion Cellar’s owner offers his visitors an elitist ritual of collective crying, so that the club becomes a topographic metaphor for the psychoanalytic process, delving into the unconscious in order to cure the troubled psyche. It is not surprising, therefore, that only wealthy people can afford this treatment to free them from a bad conscience and a sense of responsibility for the past: It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh’s Onion Cellar where the host […] induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice – what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. (Grass 1965, 525)

 As early as the s, Rosenberg prepared the ground for the politicization of Beethoven’s music by comparing its “fixed and clear tonality” with what he called the “musical anarchy” developed by composers of the Weimar Republic (Levi , ). This formed the basis for comparing Beethoven – particularly the “Beethoven myth” – with Hitler, while elevating such elements as heroic musical style, a powerful and creative personality, and uncompromising readiness for self-sacrifice in the name of sublime ideals.  See Margarete Mitscherlich, Erinnerungsarbeit: Zur Psychoanalyse der Unfähigkeit zu trauern (Frankfurt a. M.: Gutenberg, ).  This may hint at the jazz band Grass was part of. On his band’s performances in the Czikos Club in Düsseldorf, see Neuhaus , .

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The business becomes a great success as the drum performs its therapeutic function. In fact the drum’s effect on the people is so strong that it eventually replaces the onions. Later, Oskar even abandons the jazz rhythms in favor of drumming himself back to childhood: “I drummed my way back. I drummed up the world as a three-year old sees it” (1965, 533). Under the influence of this special “musical style” his listeners begin to behave like children – even infants – wetting their pants and uttering pre-verbal sounds. Ultimately Oskar becomes a famous drum virtuoso and travels throughout Germany. His audiences consist of older Germans who experienced the war, and have subsequently forgotten their childhood. He becomes the shaman of a society without history that needs a cure for oblivion by founding a ritual – “Oskarism” – of deceptive remembrance. This nostalgic ritualization of childhood excludes the possibility of adopting a reflective view of the years of the Third Reich, thus preventing a genuine dealing with the catastrophe of the Second World War. We therefore need to distinguish between two images: the “false” rhythm that is used in deceptive therapeutic work, and the subversive counter-rhythm, a dissonance that exposes the manipulative and deceptive power of the ritual. This exposure is integral to Grass’s poetics, which attempts to break through illusions, and to ritualize and mythologize the past. The novel reverberates with sounds that Grass collects into a parodic texture of musical allusions torn out of context, a heterogeneous montage of noises from the routine of everyday life – sounds of cooking, dance steps, nursery rhymes and popular songs. Grass introduces the ambiguity and complexity that is inherent in any attempt to represent and respond to the past. In offering a parody of psychoanalytical methods and false therapeutic discourses, he calls for the critical work of memory, which he places in the hands of Oskar, a distorted body that has been expelled from society. In the asymmetrical playing, unbalanced rhythms, and noises that are reflected in unstable prose, Oskar keeps telling his audience the story it might wish to forget. In this sense, rather than a story of the Third Reich and war crimes, The Tin Drum tells of postwar West Germany. This story is embodied in the rhythms of a musical biography, in the dissonances of a narrating voice free of justification that continually seeks to interfere with the German Zero Hour. Like Thomas Mann, Grass sought to create a new poetics that blurred the boundaries between literature, music, and history as an alternative to the official methods of examining and representing the past. In both cases, the musical pieces of a modernist musician and a drummer – protagonists of two musical biographies who wander between center and periphery, and between hegemonic and marginal creation – have documentary potential. Leverkühn, who longs for

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alternative spaces far from the institutional centers, is abandoned by his friend, but his death becomes a symbol, predicting the future of a whole society. Oskar too, albeit differently, wanders through alienated areas. He displays a deformed body that goes in and out of mental hospitals, is expelled from school, is bullied by his peers, and is rejected by his stepmother and the woman he desires. Despite this he becomes a cultural hero, a shaman of musical rituals who seduces his audiences by his drum rhythms, and yet at the same time reflects and exposes the perverseness of society. Like Mann’s protagonist, Grass’s drummer composes his own life story, but instead of a symphonic cantata alluding to Schoenberg’s innovative composition, Oskar finds satisfaction in sentimental and popular songs. Both these fictional autobiographies deal with moral questions of crime and guilt. Leverkühn admits to being a murderer before he falls unconscious on the piano, and Oskar maintains that “drumming his way back” would clear his conscience. Like Leverkühn, whose collapsing on the keyboard alludes to the crucified body of Christ, Oskar wonders whether he is the new Christ. However, whereas Mann creates a new version of a tragic myth, coloring the horrors with romantic and expressive colors, in Grass’s novel the horror is stark. Through the use of parodic strategies, the pathos turns into a macabre joke, combining the comic and the disgusting, the ugly and the terrifying. The tragic myth is released from its traditional context, becoming simply another fragment of Oskar’s carnival. In contrast to the modernist composer who Mann created as an allegory for the German downfall and who inherits a German musical repertoire that still contains a small promise of hope, Grass’s Faustian seducer has nothing to offer but the storytelling-drumming of tin music, promising neither reconciliation nor metaphysical consolation. In the fictional world of The Tin Drum, life does not emerge from the spirit of music. This is a world where the Apollonian element returns as the prototype of the uncanny. Perhaps this is why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – which according to Nietzsche demonstrates the emancipatory potential of art and which Mann tried to rescue from the hands of a society that did not deserve it – returns in Grass’s novel only as a parodic shadow. Grass creates the effect of estrangement and uncertainty by tearing musical quotations from their organic context, and thus interfering with collective rituals and processes of fascination and mystification, denial and oblivion. This musical biography ends with the haunting tones of a nursery rhyme. These dissonant sounds that reverberate with traumatic experience and horror, like the other disturbing rhythms played on Oskar’s drum, could still hint, even if only for a while, at the possibility of alternative – musical – poetics after 1945.

Interlude II. Clown: Ironic Tune between Memory and Oblivion Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown offers a different tune for dealing with the disaster of the Second World War and its aftermath in postwar West Germany. In this musical biography that presents a structured narrative which however does not erase the traces of destruction – political and territorial, social and mental – irony plays a central role. Böll, one of the prominent postwar German writers, was among those writers who actually participated in the Second World War, and who later documented their experience in their work. Immediately after the war Böll returned to Cologne where he began writing stories, novels, and radio plays, as well as essays expressing his disapproval of the politics of Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democratic Party (CDU).⁸⁸ Böll became a member of Group 47, a literary group that promoted a political agenda aimed at a new beginning: Zero Hour. This approach paradoxically enabled the authors to avoid dealing immediately with the implications of the Third Reich. However, like Günter Grass and a few other members of Group 47, such as Ilse Aichinger, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Paul Celan,⁸⁹ Böll called into question this political agenda and set about shaping an alternative poetics of memory. He presented his poetic approach in the Frankfurter Vorlesungen, where he talked about the paradox of writing in German in the second half of the twentieth century: Our literature has no places. The enormous, often exhausting effort of postwar literature consisted of finding places and neighborhoods again. One has not yet understood what it meant in the year 1945 to write only half a page of German prose. (Böll 1985, 53 [translation mine])

 On Böll’s political essays, see F. Lawrence Glatz, Heinrich Böll als Moralist. Die Funktion von Verbrechen und Gewalt in seinen Prosawerken (New York: Peter Lang, ), –. In the early s Böll was involved in a journal based on Christian-socialist principles, which tried to offer an alternative both for the capitalism of West Germany and the Communism of East Germany. Böll’s novel Ansichten eines Clowns poetically demonstrates this intention; see Michael Butler, “Ansichten eines Clowns: The Fool and the Labyrinth,” in The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Böll (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, ), .  See Klaus Briegleb, “Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan. Ihr (Nicht‐)Ort in der Gruppe  (–/),” in Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan: poetische Korrespondenzen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), –.

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In these lectures Böll speaks about the trauma of the war that generates silent witnesses. This muteness is conveyed through the paradox of language; German, the author’s mother tongue, has been violently abused by the Nazis. Böll, however, uses this language to write about violence and exclusion, suffering and loss. In other essays as well, Böll describes the total destruction, ruined neighborhoods and damaged communities caused by starvation, sickness and expulsion. Conquered, bombed and burned out, these devastated cities arouse in him feelings of horror and humiliation, guilt and shame. How can one write under these historical conditions? What poetics would be able to express the traumatic experience without either repressing and denying the disaster on one hand, or masking it with ideologies of a “new beginning,” on the other? As I show below, Böll’s answer to these questions lies in a musical poetics derived from his “aesthetics of the human” (Ästhetik des Humanen), an aesthetics that does not neglect human elementary needs such as “dwelling, neighbourhoods and homeland, money and love, religion and meals.” Rather, Böll’s “aesthetics of the human” exposes how those were misused to manipulate the subject by means of covert terror and false ideologies. Conveyed in different literary characters, such as the protagonist of The Clown, who sings ironic tunes and seeks to re-experience past events through listening to musical pieces, music illuminates this destruction of human values. The clown’s perspective sets in motion a polyphonic movement of construction and de-construction. This juxtaposed movement interferes with the celebratory concept of urban reconstruction associated with the post-war agenda of a Zero Hour and the Economic Miracle. In contrast to the homogeneous master narrative, Böll’s story demonstrates a different story, thereby working against denial and consignment to oblivion by a society that refuses to deal with its recent past.⁹⁰ The Clown tells the story of Hans Schnier, the son of an established bourgeois family in Bonn, who decides to become a clown in revolt against his parents. Schnier’s father has enjoyed the benefits of the economic growth of postwar Germany, and is presented as an opportunist in close contact with the Conservative Party. Schnier’s mother, too, is characterized by a shrewd ability to adjust to new realities: during the Third Reich she sent her children to youth movements and hosted Nazi ideologues in her home, whereas after the war she became the president of a pacifist-humanitarian organization.

 Böll discusses this in different contexts, such as the documentation of German crimes and representations of the catastrophe of the Second World War. His moral position becomes increasingly one of shaping an anti-opportunist social model as an alternative to the trend of rehabilitation during the Economic Miracle. For a general summary of these approaches see Glatz, Heinrich Böll als Moralist (New York: Peter Lang, ), –.

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After repeated failures as a professional clown, Schnier locks himself in his apartment and phones some members of his family and various acquaintances. While money is the explicit reason for these calls, the implicit one is Schnier’s compulsion to confront the representatives and reminders of his past experience. He thus enters into a series of confrontations: with his parents, who sent their daughter to die in the war; with his brother, who converted to Catholicism; with his lover, who left him to marry a Catholic; and with his childhood friends and acquaintances. By placing himself “outside” the society’s institutional framework and challenging familial and religious taboos, Schnier seems to suggest a counter-memory to the collective trends of negation and denial characterizing West German society. Böll’s clown is not a musician. However, he does listen to music and demonstrates how musical poetics integrates the polyphonic, therefore “musical,” tradition of the medieval carnival. For example, transgressive voices that challenge the authoritative voice of the sovereign shape cultural and political criticism. The clown’s subterranean tune thus interferes with the hierarchy of power systems (state, religion and the family) by blurring the lines between high and low, sublime and inferior, respectful and despised. In this sense, the novel’s vocalization suggests strategies of protest and exposure on the one hand, and reverberation with traumatic experience, on the other. Alongside the polyphonic texture, music reveals in the novel through the activation of musical intertexts and a dense textures of acoustic images, as in the synesthetic descriptions of the clown’s phone calls. Most of Schnier’s calls begin with depictions of voices and various sounds that stimulate the narrator’s olfactory sense. Schnier seems to hear the smells or to smell the voices of his interlocutors. For example, after calling his brother, a theology student living in a dormitory, Schnier tells the reader: “I was disappointed. I had been expecting a gentle nun’s voice, smelling of weak coffee and dry cake, instead: a croaking old man, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and cabbage, so penetratingly that I began to cough.” (Böll 1967, 61) The voice on the other side protests against the wealth and the corruption of the church, and demands that Schnier admit to being an unbeliever. However, Böll does not stop there. His ironic use of sensory images radicalizes the act of exposure: I am very sensitive to smells, and the intensely strong smell of cabbage had mobilized my vegetative nervous system […] The cabbage smell was something I remembered from boarding school. A padre there had once explained to us that cabbage was supposed to suppress sensuality. I find the idea of suppressing mine or anyone else’s sensuality disgusting. (Böll 1967, 64)

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As this excerpt shows, pungent smells and repulsive sights are transmitted to the reader through the dissonant sounds the narrator hears on the phone. They evoke physiological sensations such as nausea and disgust, the symptoms of a sickness associated with a society that is immersed in the process of denial and repression. The transgressive deformation of the senses (audible-olfactory) thus unmasks another crime – neglecting the Nazi past by means of routines of violence, greed and hypocrisy. In a different “recorded” call to the Kinkel family, where “it smelled of beef broth, as if they had cooked a whole ox” (Böll 1967, 84), Schnier complains of being forced into situations he cannot bear. For this he blames his sensory mechanism: “I always find it embarrassing when my eyes or ears witness something not meant for my eyes or ears, and the mystical gift of being able to detect smells through the telephone is far from being a pleasure, it is a burden” (1967, 84). Schnier’s exceptional sensory ability strengthens his position as a ‘reluctant witness’. Yet in speaking about the burden of witnessing, his irony operates on two levels: first, the grotesque exposure of the characters, and second, the estrangement connected to the act of testimony. From the clown’s perspective, he himself becomes a victim, a witness to public and private failures to confront the Nazi past. By transmitting the voices of his interlocutors to the reader, Schnier’s recorded testimony not only documents his acquaintances’ blindness to the disaster that is facilitated by everyday routine or ideology (the legacy of state politics, the capitalist market, religion or the bourgeois family), but also reflects the refusal to bear witness and testify to past experience. In this sense as well, the novel’s criticism is directed not only against the people surrounding Schnier who “enjoy” conscious oblivion, but also against the clown himself who is trapped in narcissistic processes of self-pity (consciousness of victimhood) and compulsive self-destruction. The novel includes two main musical intertexts: In the first, the clown identifies negatively with acts of singing and playing; for him the performance of music is another form of protest. By introducing a Latin psalm he criticizes the Catholic Church, suggesting hypocrisy or forms of renunciation. The novel ends with Schnier satirically singing “Poor Pope John.” However, the whole scene also emphasizes his obsessiveness, for in fact, the reason for his choosing to sing in the train station is the anticipated arrival of his ex-lover: As I began to sing I felt almost myself again: mater amabilis – mater admirabilis – I intoned the ora pro nobis on the guitar. I liked the idea. With the guitar in my hand, with the open hand lying beside me, with my true face, I would wait for the train from Rome. (Böll 1967, 233 [emphasis in the original])

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Schnier’s total identification with the melancholic-ironic clown occurs just after his lover left him. With her he still was a part, albeit a tentative part, of the community and the social sphere. By abandoning him she brought about the complete retreat of his poetic persona outside the symbolic order, a process that set in motion the destructive compulsion to repeat. As we will see in Bachmann’s novel as well, the musical event reverberates with the breakdown of the subject, its collapse and giving in to traumatic impressions: Looking at the mirror before going down the street with his guitar, Schnier sees “the face of a suicide […] a face of a corpse” (Böll 1967, 224). Böll refers also to a piano piece by Frederik Chopin, the Mazurka in B Major Op. 7. In the first instance the piece is connected to a crucial event: returning from his first night with his lover, Schnier hears his brother playing this mazurka. The piano sounds are connected to early sexual experiences and foreshadow his decision to transform protest into a way of life. His protest is musical. The clown humming ironic tunes demonstrates Schnier’s way of dealing with the German past. And yet this musical strategy reveals also danger demonstrated by another reference to the mazurka when Schnier tries to reconstruct the crucial moment from the past. He phones a friend and asks her to play the mazurka for him. The sounds are heard over the telephone line, a technological transfer that functions as a bridge to the past. In requesting the musical replay, Schnier seeks to motivate the meditative potential of music by reconstructing a singular event from the past: She played extremely well, the tone was superb, but while she played I began to cry from sheer wretchedness. I should not have attempted to repeat that moment; when I came home from being with Marie and Leo was playing the mazurka in the music room. You can’t repeat moments or communicate them […] It is bad enough to talk about such moments, to try and repeat them is suicide. It was a kind of suicide I was committing when I listened on the phone now to Monika playing the mazurka. (Böll 1967, 203)

When listening to the piano playing Schnier recognizes how the “second time” can never be the first. Horrified by this revelation, he associates this failure to “repeat” with death. For him, understanding that the past is always already passé means “committing suicide.” Metaphorically Schnier demonstrates the limits of a work of memory, which fails to distinguish between the working through of past events from compulsive repetition of them. Haunted by his own traumatic experience Schnier refuses to acknowledge what the replayed mazurka demonstrates: the necessary caesura separating past and present. But if music fails to recreate past moments, what exactly does it document? As a non-semantic flow that reverberates with the psychic mechanism, music implies that it is impossible to return to the trauma, and furthermore demon-

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strates the danger of any desire and attempt of returning to the traumatic moment, which may lead to the reappearance of explosive violence. The novel reveals this aggression through the figure of a clown, an eccentric who is caught up in processes of self-destruction. Schnier’s attempts to recall could provide alternative ways of dealing with the past that challenge the collective tendency to renunciation and repression. His viewpoint, however, reveals another kind of consigning to oblivion. Obsessed with his own crisis, the way Schnier adopts a consciousness of victimhood, calls into question his commitment to interfering with the master narrative and critically engaging in the public sphere. By illustrating these tensions inherent in every work of memory, Böll’s novel also illuminates his response to Adorno: In this town Theodor W. Adorno spoke his great words: after Auschwitz one can no longer write poetry. I modify these words: after Auschwitz one can no longer breathe, eat, live, read – the one who took the first breath, who smoked only one cigarette, has decided to survive, to read, to write, to eat, to love. I am speaking to you as a survivor, I who required more familiar lands, terrains […] since the human, the social, the community, so I believe, is not possible without a homeland. (Böll 1985, 40 [translation mine])

For Böll, writing in German after the Second World War represented both a moral and an existential decision to carry on living. A human way of living, however, requires a place and a territory. Böll shapes this space within the polyphonic realm of a musical biography. Based on a construction that never forgets moments of destruction, his novel is an ironic tune of exposure and uncompromised confrontation. This tune is a tool of protest and criticism. Like Grass, Böll deals with Nazi crimes and their legacy in the present from a carnivalesque perspective. His protagonist, who sings satirical psalms, listens to romantic mazurkas and radically responses to sounds, wears a clown’s mask in order to unmask socio-cultural, collective and private, processes that led to the emergence of Nazism and to postwar obliteration of the Nazi crimes.

3 Ingeborg Bachmann: The Resonance of Trauma And always when I speak about music, I realize that music was my first, childish expression, and today for me it is still the highest form of expression that humanity has found […] one in which people achieved what words and images could not have achieved. Music helps me by showing me the absolute, which I cannot find in language and also not in literature. (Ingeborg Bachmann 2004a, 71–70; 1983, 85 [translation mine])

Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the leading Austrian poets of the second half of the twentieth century, writes in several essays about her need for new modes of expression to testify to traumatic experience. As far back as the concluding remarks of her 1949 dissertation on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, she discovers alternative ways of dealing with the horrors of the modern subject in Goya’s painting “Chronos Devouring One of his Children” and Baudelaire’s poem “The Abyss.” In Bachmann’s view these works revealed man’s anxiety (Angst) facing the loss, alienation and void (das nichtende Nichts) inherent in the human condition.⁹¹ However, alongside a preoccupation with art and poetry, she never ceased to explore music, which showed her an absolute dimension beyond literature and language itself, in which the human could again be found.⁹² This exploration also emerges in Bachmann’s essay on the opera singer Maria Callas, where she explicitly connected between the “art” (Kunst) and the “human” (Mensch).⁹³ For Bachmann, Callas’s operatic performance sets in motion a trans-historical movement to a centuries-old place.⁹⁴ Born from the spirit of music, this movement – an embodiment of a unique cultural memory – calls for an engagement in the experience of the other. This way of engaging in and “listening” to the

 Ingeborg Bachmann, Die kritische Aufnahme der Existenzialphilosophie Martin Heideggers (Munich: Piper, ), .  Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews (Munich: Piper, ), .  “[S]ie war immer die Kunst, ach die Kunst, und sie war immer ein Mensch;” see the essay “Hommage à Maria Callas,” in Essays, Reden, Vermischte Schriften, Anhang. Werke in vier Bänden (Munich: Piper, d), –. In an interview Bachmann pointed to this allusion from Büchner’s Danton’s Tod, as part of her dialogue with Paul Celan; see Bachmann , , and Dagmar Kann-Coomann, “Undine verläßt den Meridian, Ingeborg Bachmann gegenüber Paul Celans Büchnerpreisrede,” in Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan: Poetische Korrespondenzen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), –.  See Ingeborg Bachmann, “Hommage à Maria Callas,” in Essays, Reden, Vermischte Schriften, Anhang. Werke in vier Bänden (Munich: Piper, d), .

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stranger has become rare in the history of atrocities and violence, with alienation generating a humanity that has turned against itself. Referring to both the sound connected to Callas’s singing and the images reflected in her gestures, Bachmann attributed great significance to the ways in which the acoustic component interfered with the visual and the conceptual. In her essays “Was ich in Rom sah und hörte” (“What I Saw and Heard in Rome”) and “Die blinden Passagiere” (“The Blind Passengers”), she hinted at how the ear resists the authority of the gaze.⁹⁵ Through these texts Bachmann explored the non-figurative potential of music to reverberate with that which is suppressed by the visual signs. Music provided her with an alternative mode of expression that was not constricted by the tyranny of an image or nullified by a preconceived concept. Bachmann’s exploration corresponds with that of Theodor Adorno, whose theoretical texts on the potential of music to resist oppressive ideologies she was familiar with. Like Adorno, Bachmann engaged in experimenting with music in general and with musical dissonance in particular, in order to resonate with that which had been silenced. And as in Adorno’s case, this act of resonance is connected to a utopian moment. She explains in an interview: I don’t believe in this materialism, in this consumer society, in this capitalism, in this monstrosity that is taking place here […] I really do believe in something and I call it “A Day Will Come.” And one day it will come. Well, probably it won’t come, because it’s been destroyed for us so many times; for thousands of years it’s been destroyed. It won’t come, but I believe in it nonetheless. For if I weren’t able to believe in it, then I couldn’t write any more. (Bachmann 1983, 45 [translation mine])

Bachmann connects between the ability to write and her faith in a better future, which she reframes as “a day will come.” The open horizon of a utopian world embodied in this “day figure” does not, however, forget past experience that is crucial to her work of memory. As in the essay on Maria Callas, Bachmann calls for a trans-historical mode that recalls the past in a present related to a possible, better, future. Here as well the means of constellating and transfiguring the past day with a “day [that] will come” within the present moment depends on the redemptive power of music. But where exactly is this day that Bachmann writes about? What past is conveyed through her story, and what promises a utopian future?

 See also her speech “Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar” in Ingeborg Bachmann, Essays, Reden, Vermischte Schriften, Anhang. Werke in vier Bänden (Munich: Piper,  f), –, –, and –, respectively.

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In a speech delivered in 1964 on being awarded the Georg Büchner Prize,⁹⁶ Bachmann tells the story of a “no-place” (kein Ort) that has become a field of war and violence, illness and horror. The speech unfolds successive episodes about postwar Berlin that demonstrate the symptoms of past trauma. The city’s pathology is revealed to the reader through the eyes and voice of a stranger who walks around the city and relates what he sees. His language does not conceal the horror; on the contrary, based on distorted optical (visual) and sonic (audial) images the narrator’s language interferes with a harmonic conception and exposes the illness. While looking for a specific mode of testimony as an alternative to the “reporting” that she identifies with official discourses, Bachmann hints at Büchner’s protagonist Lenz, whose startling desire generates a deformed viewpoint. In her view, such a perspective created by one who walks on his head is necessary to testify to the place that hundreds of reports fail to mention.⁹⁷ Inspired by the eighteenth-century German author Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Büchner’s novella begins with a walk through the mountains and a protagonist who “felt no fatigue, but at times he was irritated that he could not walk on his head […] he felt an urge, he searched for something, as though for lost dreams, but he found nothing” (Büchner 1986, 139). Lenz, who desires to “walk on his head,” wishes to impose on reality the syntax of dreams, based on condensation and displacement that disrupts categories of time and space. He seeks rest and hopes to find a cure at a pastor’s home. However, it is precisely his restlessness that makes him so human. In a world that masks its illness behind “healthy ideologies,” the insane is sane. Lenz’s humanity is thus engraved in his insanity and in his wish to inversely perceive reality as a camera obscura. His upside-down perspective turns the familiar into the unfamiliar, and requires unique attention that transcends false cures offered by the master narratives. What Lenz offers the readers is neither a cure nor the root of the illness, the source (which can never be found or reached) that explains the sickness, but rather the reverberation with and recording of its symptoms. In so doing he challenges the logic and principles of historical representation. In the same speech, Bachmann alludes to another Büchner Prize speech, “Der Meridian” (“The Meridian”, 1960) by Paul Celan, whom she met in 1948

 Ingeborg Bachmann, “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” in Essays, Reden, Vermischte Schriften, Anhang. Werke in vier Bänden (Munich: Piper, c), –.  “Diese Einstellung kann jemand nötigen, auf dem Kopf zu gehen, damit von dem Ort, von dem sich leicht hunderterlei berichten ließe, dem aber schwer beizukommen ist, Kunde gegeben werde” (Bachmann c, ).

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in Vienna and with whom she corresponded until 1962.⁹⁸ “The Meridian” demonstrates Celan’s need for a new poetics he calls “Breathturn” (Atemwende) that does not disguise a traumatic experience. Throughout this speech the documentary potential of Büchner’s “inverted figure” (Lenz) is reflected in Celan’s “turn figure.” Drawing inspiration and yet simultaneously breaking away from authors such as Büchner or Celan, Bachmann developed her own perspective to resonate with trauma, in which the figure of the musical dissonant played a central role.

Story and Score: Bachmann’s Musical Biography On several occasions when discussing her writing, Bachmann talked about music, mentioning names of musicians or musical pieces, musical forms, and their sign systems (scores) and tonal and rhythmic possibilities. She was also inspired by her acquaintanceship with the composer Hans Werner Henze, of whom she said: “I first understood music in a real sense through him” (Bachmann 2004a, 71 [translation mine]). This encounter, at the annual gathering of Group 47, was the beginning of a long-term friendship and collaboration that reflected Bachmann’s self-understanding as a writer: The beginning of writing is connected for me with composing since I first started to compose […] Music was for me the greatest thing, it always remained the greatest […] it was a mutual fascination and attraction; it really was a case of a composer and an author coming together. (Bachmann 2004a, 37 [translation mine])

The dialogue between the poet Bachmann and the composer Henze generated not only an extensive correspondence,⁹⁹ but also various works by Bachmann: the ballet Monolog des Fürsten Myschkin (A Monologue of Prince Myshkin, 1952), the radio-play Zikaden (The Cicadas, 1955), Nachtstücke und Arien (Serenades and Arias, 1957), Chorfantasie (Choral Fantasy, 1964), and two operas, Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1960) and Der junge Lord (The Young Lord, 1965). Not only did Henze set Bachmann’s texts to music, but Bachmann also pitched them to the musical horizons of Henze’s work. For instance,

 On the relationship and the literary dialogue between Bachmann and Celan, see Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann. Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, ), –. See also Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Herzzeit. Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ).  See Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze, Briefe einer Freundschaft (Munich: Piper, b).

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in commenting on the libretto she wrote for The Young Lord, she mentioned various difficulties in the mutual work, such as creating a polyphonic texture within the verbal language.¹⁰⁰ Through her collaboration with Henze Bachmann enriched her musical knowledge, which she considered as a professional advantage: “Of course I can do what other writers cannot: read scores” (Bachmann 2004a, 71). She once described how music helped her writing by enabling her to imagine something that is beyond music,¹⁰¹ for example, when music is connected with mythical or cultural memory. In The Cicadas, a radio-play she wrote to Henze’s music, dissonant sounds embody the act of recalling as well as conveying the duality of remembrance: on the one hand, a physiological act of being aware of a past event, and on the other, a figure of poetic memory. The Cicadas tells the story of ancient creatures whose devotion to singing destroyed their humanity. The tragic fate of the cicadas is conveyed to the listeners through dissonant music that compels them to remember the loss of the human: “Don’t strive to forget! Remember! And the parched song of your desires will turn into flesh. There’s certain music we’ve heard somewhere before fading in the air. I know it, and you know it too” (Bachmann 1999a, 197). Here music evokes knowledge of a loss that connects to past experience. In this play acoustic figures such as “faded music” (verklingelte Musik) and “resounding voices” (erklingende Stimme) recur as part of Bachmann’s search for a lost human essence, and point to the possibilities and limits of the dialogue between literature and music.¹⁰² Such romantic longing for reconciliation between man and nature, which is also embodied in the union between music and literature, appears in Bachmann’s essay “Musik und Dichtung” (“Music and Poetry,” 1959). This essay is a response to Adorno’s claim regarding the similarity between music and language.¹⁰³ Even if this longing has lost its relevance in a post- and hyper-capitalist era, the central role of music in Bachmann’s work cannot be seen as redundant.¹⁰⁴ Bachmann’s musical poetics is hinted at in another of her essays,  Ingeborg Bachmann, “Notizen zum Libretto,” in Gedichte, Hörspiele, Libretti, Übersetzungen. Werke in vier Bänden (Munich: Piper, e), .  Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews (Munich: Piper, ), .  See the text on the opera singer Maria Callas in Bachmann d, –.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Fragment über Musik und Sprache,” in Musikalische Schriften I–III. Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), .  On the irrelevance see Spiesecke , ; and compare with Eva Lindemann, Über die Grenze. Zur späten Prosa Ingeborg Bachmanns (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, ), –.

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“Die wunderliche Musik” (“The Marvelous Music,” 1956), which merges various genres, and attributes deformed images and destructive allusions to the world of music: “Modern music becomes old when people get used to it. The music which nobody can get used to will be forgotten. Only music that is created for masses will be remembered” (Bachmann 1978b, 52 [translation mine]). This claim demonstrates the following paradox: Musical pieces are remembered and will survive oblivion only when they affect and move the masses. However, in order to become old, to be a part of a tradition, music must be communicative and take the risk of becoming something that audiences become used to. What about modern music that renounces repetition so that the listeners cannot become used to? Is this not the case of atonal music, like Schoenberg’s “musical prose” (musikalische Prosa), that lacks communicative, discursive potential, and hence is forgotten and lost as time passes? Yet it is only such dissonant music that documents and bears authentic witness to the deconstruction of the modern subject. This music testifies to the alienation of modernity by expressing the distortion between man and nature, and between man and her fellowman (other). Remarkably, in an interview Bachmann gave shortly before her death, she called into question the potential affinity of music and literature: “There is no musical lyric, there is no musical prose. Music is something quite different” (Bachmann 2004a, 74–75). And yet, as various scholars have pointed out, the role of music in Bachmann’s poetics cannot be dismissed. For example, Corina Caduff distinguishes two musical figures, “hope” and “memory,” that play different poetic roles in Bachmann’s work;¹⁰⁵ and Katja Wistoff-Schmidt connects the musical character of Bachmann’s literature with the compositional principle.¹⁰⁶ In contrast, Hartmut Spiesecke claims that Bachmann’s work calls into question the use of music in the literary medium.¹⁰⁷ According to Spiesecke, in Bachmann’s later work, she no longer sought to redeem language through the power of music, the result being that the musical element of her writing lies in a poetic texture of quotations and intertextual relationships that is not necessarily that of music. Bachmann thought differently of those relationships:

 Corina Caduff, “dadim dadam” – Figuren der Musik in der Literatur Ingeborg Bachmanns (Cologne: Böhlau, ).  Katja Wistoff-Schmidt, Dichtung und Musik bei Ingeborg Bachmann und Hans Werner Henze (Munich: Iudicium, ), .  Hartmut Spiesecke, Ein Wohlklang schmilzt das Eis. Ingeborg Bachmanns musikalische Poetik (Berlin: Norman Klaunig, ), –.

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Here and there I recall a line I’ve already heard, an expression, and when I like something, when I think it has to be “saved,” I use or modify it, giving it new significance. So if you like, it’s a kind of working relationship that has existed in music forever. (Bachmann 1983, 60)

As this excerpt shows, for Bachmann, intertextuality in literature is the ability to preserve and reopen an event from the past in the present. Intertextuality offers her a specific relationship to past events that she regards as musical (has always existed in music), a relationship that refuses to let the past disappear. The past never becomes passé.¹⁰⁸ This strategy offers a “working through” of trauma and loss that rejects “acting out” and denial. However, it is not the whole context of the remembered object that reappears, but rather its remnants embodied in the literary allusion that is now partially reconstructed within new contexts. The dismantled parts do not gain a new totality. Giving the “line” heard in the past a new significance by relocating its parts in the present implies saving this expression from being forgotten and fading into oblivion. Musicologists and literary scholars discuss the novel Malina, in which music provides Bachmann not only with a mode of reverberating with the unconscious, the nonrepresentational generated in traumatic experience, but also plays a conscious role of remembering. Karen Achberger examines how intertextual patterns relating to composers such as Beethoven and Schoenberg split the fictitious world into two semantic poles, harmony and (patriarchal) tradition versus disharmony and innovation, which connects to nostalgia versus trauma.¹⁰⁹ In response, Susanne Greuner emphasizes the mimetic and thematic aspects in the novel’s affinity with music and analyses its polyphonic structure.¹¹⁰ David Dollenmayer claims that the allusions to Schoenberg are central to the conflict between “feeling” and “art” that are reflected in the novel.¹¹¹ Different aspects of the musical medium in Bachmann’s late prose are also discussed by Eva Lindemann, who explores the allusion to Beethoven, the micro-structure of developing

 See also Henze’s conception of the quotation, namely, quoting the “old” by placing it within a new context is the real essence of dialogue and the process of communication and understanding; Hans Werner Henze, Musik und Politik. Schriften und Gespräche – (Munich: dtv, ), .  Karen Achberger, “Der Fall Schönberg. Musik und Mythos in Malina,” in Ingeborg Bachmann (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, ), .  Susanne Greuner, Schmerzton. Musik in der Schreibweise von Ingeborg Bachmann und Anne Duden (Hamburg: Argument, ), –, –.  David Dollenmayer, “Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in Bachmann’s Malina,” in Modern Austrian Literature  (): .

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variations, and the macro-structure of fugue and sonata form in Malina. ¹¹² All these authors stress the clear relationship between music and literature in Bachmann’s work in general, and in Malina in particular. Taking these approaches into account, I claim that Bachmann’s intertextual relationships are part of her exploration of the music-literature connection. This exploration is of existential value to her as a writer and a person, which is demonstrated in the way she talks about these two arts, and the way she shapes them as a documentary mode of response to collective and private experiences. A 1971 interview demonstrates the profound role of sound images in Bachmann’s constructed biography: There was a specific moment that destroyed my childhood: The march of Hitler’s troops into Klagenfurt. It was so horrible that on that day my memory begins […] but this monstrous brutality, this roaring, singing, and marching – the emergence of my fear of death. A whole army entered into our tranquil, peaceful Kärnten. (Bachmann 1983, 111)

Here, her “screen memory” to use the Freudian term (since several documents indicate that Bachmann was not in the town the day the soldiers marched into Klagenfurt), becomes an integral part of Bachmann’s identity. In retrospect, the young girl’s first encounter with the Nazi troops is reconstructed as a traumatic event through the sounds of “roaring, singing, and marching.” These horrific voices first awakened in the witness (Bachmann as a girl) a “fear of death,” (Todesangst) which would shape the adult author’s consciousness of this haunting feeling. Bachmann describes a primary scene of anxiety signifying the moment of destruction and the experience of a “ruined childhood.” This biographical (if albeit imagined) experience is transformed into Bachmann’s 1971 novel Malina. The traumatic event is embodied in an “I” character, who is also the narrator. The personal aspects of Bachmann’s novel are revealed as she concludes in her interview: “I would call it an autobiography only when one can see in it a mental process of the self, not however a narration of life-stories, personal stories and similar embarrassments” (Bachmann 1983, 73, 88).¹¹³

 Eva Lindemann, Über die Grenze. Zur späten Prosa Ingeborg Bachmanns (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, ), .  Like the writer, critics and scholars point to the novel’s autobiographic potential, comparing it, for example, with fictitious autobiography; see Jost Schneider, Die Kompositionsmethode Ingeborg Bachmanns. Erzählstil und Engagement in “Das dreißigste Jahr,” Malina und “Simultan” (Bielefeld: Äisthesis, ), . The novel was read in relation to the generation complex and representation of Nazism; see Holger Gehle, NS-Zeit und literarische Gegenwart bei Ingeborg Bachmann (Wiesbaden: DUV, ), – and was read not only as an “imagined autobiography,” but also as an “Autobiographie des Imaginären,” demonstrating the genealogy of the self

Manners of Death: Account of a Never-Ending War

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She rejected a voyeuristic reading of her work, insisting that neither gossip nor rumors about her life and relationships with colleagues, friends and lovers should shape the interpretation of Malina, but rather a careful reading that follows the condensation of private incidents into a fragmented, uncompleted life story, and the destructive identity process at the center of the work. Bachmann translates the horrific sounds from her constructed biography into a multilayered musical texture dominated by dissonances that already set the tone in the novel’s prologue. In light of this, I will show how Malina, a deconstructive musical biography, challenges rational, coherent traditions of representation that deny the disaster. Accordingly, Malina demonstrates an attempt to create a musical-poetic language that reflects the limitations of accessing memory and extracting testimony. The novel’s experimental language touches on psychological and sociological systems of repression and denial, and of censure and taboo. This language operates through trauma when questioning the limits of the verbal and conceptual in order to respond to the nonrepresentational. But what and how exactly does this poetics “remember”? Where does its recalling potential lie?

Manners of Death: Account of a Never-Ending War Born in Klagenfurt, a city on the border of Slovenia, Bachmann never ceased writing about her ambivalent relationship to her Austrian homeland. As a product of a turbulent period in Austrian history that included depression, Austrofascism, National Socialism, defeat and occupation, economic recovery, and political restoration, her literary work became a medium of dealing with this historical experience. A critical discussion of Austrian writers that focuses on the problem of representing the past in general and the Nazi past in particularly cannot avoid the controversy regarding the status of Austrian versus German literature, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, Klaus Zeyringer distinguishes reactionary-ideological from critical approaches and suggests studying this Austrian literature as an analytic realm of text-context relations, in this case, a field that is examined in cultural studies, social history, and sociology of art.¹¹⁴ Schmidt-Dengler adopts a similar approach by rejecting “naïve patriotism” on the part of Austrian writers on the question of literature as an imagined construction, being reborn as a literary voice; see Sigrid Weigel, Bilder des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Dülmen-Hiddingsel: tende, ), .  Klaus Zeyringer, Österreichische Literatur –: Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarken (Innsbruck: Haymon, ), –.

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and identity.¹¹⁵ Michael Lützeler also resists distinguishing Austrian, Swiss and German literatures on the basis of nationality,¹¹⁶ an issue that became critical after the Second World War. Nevertheless, a central question addressed in more than a few literary works by Austrian writers concerns the role that Austria played in the politics of the Third Reich: was it a victim of the Nazi conqueror after its annexation (Anschluss) to the German Reich in 1938, or an active collaborator and loyal ally of the National-Socialists? This is also the case in Bachmann’s work. Dealing with the Austrian homeland following the Second World War is central in her poems and prose. For example, her literary project Todesarten-Projekt (Manners of Death) demonstrates the reworking of images associated with death in order to expose aggression and violence in collective and private circles. Even though this project was never completed, the hundreds of drafts Bachmann left show her unique way of dealing with the cultural and psychological aspects of destruction and illness in a specific historical context. Shortly after the appearance of Malina, Bachmann stated in an interview that this was the overture of the planned project, of which a thousand pages had already been completed.¹¹⁷ She first referred to the title of the project when reading from a literary fragment that was later entitled Das Buch Franza (Franza’s Book). Introducing her work she said: Ways of dying [manners of death] also include crimes. This is a book about a crime. I’ve often wondered, and perhaps it has passed through your minds as well, just where the virus of crime escaped to – it cannot have simply disappeared from our world twenty years ago just because murder is no longer praised, desired, decorated with medals, and promoted […] For today it is infinitely more difficult to commit crimes, and thus these crimes are so subtle that we can hardly perceive or comprehend them, though all around us, in our neighborhoods, they are committed daily. (Bachmann 1999b, 3–4)

For Bachmann, literature testifies to cryptic crimes by giving voice to that which is covered and masked. Bachmann’s alternative mode of documentation undermines oppressive systems by decoding unnoticed violence and latent murder. Her literary work thus bears witness not only to the silent perpetrators, but also to the mute victims who have been silenced. The external settings are Vien-

 Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Bruchlinien. Vorlesungen zur österreichischen Literatur  bis  (Salzburg: Residenz, ), .  Paul Michael Lützeler, “Die österreichische Gegenwartsliteratur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Deutschsprachigkeit und nationaler Autonomie,” in Für und wider eine österreichische Literatur (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, ), .  Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews (Munich: Piper, ), .

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na, Galicia, and Carinthia; the real settings, however, “laboriously concealed by the external are elsewhere – at times within the thinking that leads to a crime, and at times in that which leads to dying.” She explains: “For it is this interior in which all dramas take place, in the power of a dimension in which we, or imagined characters, can grasp the nature of pain and suffering” (Bachmann 1999b, 4). Bachmann’s literary imagination conveys this concealed interior. Her work demonstrates a sharp poetic unconscious that reveals what is hidden and screened in reality. In the next section I will show how she shapes this “poetic unconscious” by incorporating into her work the documentary potential of musical dissonance as expounded by Friedrich Nietzsche. The Franza’s Book was never completed and was published as a fragment. In 1967 Bachmann started to work on the above-mentioned novel Malina, which was published four years later. Simultaneously she worked on prose texts that appeared in her second short-story collection, Simultan (1972). Despite the textual separation and differences between these works, they resemble each other structurally, and deal with various “manners of death.”¹¹⁸ Surprisingly, up to the mid-1990s there was very little discussion of the works in their historical context or their implications for the problem of representing the past in post-1945 German literature in general.¹¹⁹ Exploring the reception of Bachmann’s work, Sara Lennox claims that by the end of the 1980s some uncertainty had become apparent in approaches to Bachmann’s writing, deriving from a more general confusion about what was then regarded as a feminist perspective. In Germany and Austria, even those who had previously identified as feminists, now pursued other aspects of Bachmann’s works without considering gender as a central component of their analysis. In contrast, particularly in Britain and North America, scholars responded to the critiques of early 1980s feminism to advance a more differentiated, historically and culturally specific notion of femininity and gender in Bachmann’s works in general, and Malina in particular.¹²⁰ Let us turn to Malina. ¹²¹ In providing a powerful testimony to the disaster, this novel demands its readers recall that 1945 is not merely a historical date

 In  a critical edition was published suggesting that all these texts be read as part of an uncompleted literary project.  See Sigrid Weigel, Bilder des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Beiträge zur Gegenwartsliteratur (Dülmen-Hiddingsel: tende, ), .  Sara Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters. Feminism, History and Ingeborg Bachmann (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, ), .  Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, Trans. Philip Boehm (New York, London: Holmes & Meier, ).

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that can be consigned to the past. The main character, a feminine “I,” cannot speak, and obsessively writes and later destroys uncompleted letters. She moves in and out of lecture halls, hotel rooms, and cafés filled with hypocrisy and pretense, before disappearing behind the walls of her home, “from which nothing can ever be heard again” (Bachman 1990, 225). This “I” lives in 1960s Vienna, surrounded by people who suppress fascism, past and present, and remain silent about the violent persecution and ethnic and gender oppression of the other. The “I” retreats from a society that is hostage to a never-ending war, leaving behind a poetic testimony of a damaged life marked by oblivion and compulsive repetition. A central mode of this testimony is the musical dissonance introduced by the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg, and used by Bachmann to expose what is covered and hushed up, repressed and denied. In Malina this dissonance resonates with phrases of atonal melodrama, fragmented musical pieces, broken dialogues, and truncated phone calls. A white-faced clown produces Schoenberg’s disharmonic Sprechgesang instead of singing a harmonious aria, thereby demonstrating a destructive poetics doomed to compulsive repetition and revealing an eternal pendulum-swing between moments of nostalgia and utopia.¹²² By incorporating a penetrating atonal subtext to tell the life story of “I,” this biographical account becomes a seismograph of horror resonating with symptoms of illness and damaged existence that transgresses the lines of national identity: “Fascism is the first element in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I tried to say, here in this society there is always war” (Bachmann 1983, 144).

From the Motet to Atonal Melodrama Malina consists of a prologue and three chapters. The first chapter tells of the “I” living with her lover, Ivan, believing to find in him a cure for her pain; the second consists of a series of nightmares about different ways of dying interwoven with dialogues with a symbolic father and a murderous perpetrator (Täterfigur); and the third presents a dialogue between the “I” character and Malina – her double, her master, and her therapist – who draws out that which resists conceptualization. Malina demands that the “I” speak her unconscious thoughts, fears,

 I have discussed this at length elsewhere; see Michal Ben-Horin, “Memory Metonymies: Music and Photography in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron,” in German Life and Letters . (April ): –. In an interview Bachmann mentioned the term “Todesarten” as a title for her uncompleted literary cycle, in which the novel Malina was intended to be the overture (Bachmann , ).

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and desires, so the result being that the dialogues become a struggle for language and memory. Later, Malina replaces the “I” as the storyteller and documenting subject. The novel explicitly deals with problems of memory. Already in the prologue the “I” refers to this difficulty when repeating the mantra: “I must talk. I will talk. There’s nothing more to disturb my reminiscing” (Bachmann 1990, 9). In an attempt to give voice to traumatic impressions that have been blocked, Bachmann lets her “talk” through the use of musical structures and thematic intertextuality: where language reaches its limits and memory fails, music appears. For example, images associated with Mozart’s music render modes of narration and memory obsolete. The main character compares Mozart’s motet Exultate, Jubilate (1773) with a wonderful book she is unable to complete. The repeated first lines of the motet point to the character’s failure to write the book her lover Ivan wants her to write.¹²³ Should this book appear, “people will read with laughter after just one page, they will leap for joy, they will be comforted” (Bachmann 1990, 31). This unwritten “beautiful book” (schönes Buch) on the legendary origins of Klagenfurt embodies a harmonious narrative of redemption in a “promised land.” The narrator identifies with the legend’s mythological heroine, a princess whose life is in danger. A stranger comes to save her from her enemies. He sings and mourns for her, but only she can hear his voice, which is described as neither singing nor even talking: “Deep into the night she thought she heard a voice, which did not speak but sang, it whispered and lulled, but then it stopped addressing strangers and sang only for her in a language which enthralled her, although she could not understand a word” (Bachmann 1990, 37). This hybrid voice between singing and speaking would later be connected with the protagonist of Schoenberg’s melodrama, whose disharmonic tones reveal what harmonious melody conceals – an existence voided of redemption. In Malina’s fictitious world, in which the catastrophe of the twentieth century is reflected in the experience of the mourning stranger, redemption is impossible. Drowned in the river and reborn as a bodiless, absent victim who “did not speak but sang” this character hints at Paul Celan, who committed suicide in the Seine River.¹²⁴ The harmonious singing (bel canto) can no longer be

 The early stages of the development of the motet in Western music were characterized by a polyphonic texture. Mozart’s K.  for soprano and orchestra is close to the Italian tradition of the Baroque solo motet. It was written in Italy in  for the castrato Rauzzini, so that its genesis reveals yet another dimension of split identity for the “I.”  Weigel has explored Bachmann’s allusions to the poet Paul Celan (, –; , –). In her view, in contrast to other writers who obsessively fill the space left by the dead

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heard. As humanity has become a victim of enlightenment, rationalism and technological progress (Bachmann refers to the nuclear catastrophe), Exultate, Jubilate can only be heard within an imagined world – the narrator’s fantasies about a utopian place free of the distortions and threats of modern society: A day will come, when our houses will fall, all cars will have become scrap metal, we will be freed from all airplanes and rockets, renounce the invention of the wheel and the ability to split the atom, the fresh wind will come down from the blue hills and our breast will expand. (Bachmann 1990, 90)

This utopian picture – “a day will come” – is revealed through several fragments that culminate in redemption. The sounds of the repetitive phrase (a day will come) recall the rhythm of a sacred ritual that engages in everyday life and opens a space of redemption, a Promised Land. In repeating the redemptive promise like a prayer the narrator hints at her secret desire, a concealed message that cannot yet be applied and fulfilled: All water will run dry in the deserts, once again we will be able to enter the wilderness and witness revelation […] from the nocturnal forest of our thoughts we will return to the primeval forest, we will cease thinking and suffering, it shall be redemption. (Bachmann 1990, 90)

“I” has a dream about a better future that highlights the horror in a present haunted by a disastrous past. She cannot write the “beautiful book” about her glorious fantasy just as she cannot listen to Mozart (Bachmann 1990, 11). The impossible tonal melody of the classical piece, the musical cantabile which the “I” can no longer listen to, will be replaced by the dissonant sounds of modern music.¹²⁵ The semantic dichotomy in the fictitious world thus points to the confrontation of traditions – classical and modern, harmonic and disharmonic. Within the urban, technological world of Malina the tones of the First Viennese School are replaced by the tones of the Second Viennese School. This difference, however, is also narratological, as it gives way to an alternative mode of repre-

with Jewish characters, thereby paradoxically confirming the official sites of memory, Bachmann implicitly recalls the absent poet through intertextual allusions to his work.  Dollenmayer points to a possible similarity between Pierrot, in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, and the narrator in Malina, namely unstable identity, see David Dollenmayer, “Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in Bachmann’s Malina,” in Modern Austrian Literature  (): . See also Joachim Eberhardt, “Es gibt für mich keine Zitate”: Intertextualität im dichterischen Werk Ingeborg Bachmanns (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ),  on the affinity between Schoenberg’s melodrama and Mozart’s motet with regard to the performer.

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sentation that documents the memory disturbances of “I.” Schoenberg’s atonal piece reverberates with the unconscious psychic mechanisms of a subject who has failed to work through past experience. Pierrot lunaire, composed by Schoenberg in 1912, was written for flute and piccolo, clarinet, violin and viola, cello, piano, and speaker (Sprechstimme). The melodrama cycle consists of twenty-one songs in three different parts, based on Albert Giraud’s poems, which were translated into German in 1892 by Otto Erich Hartleben. Giraud’s Pierrot embodies an ironic remark on the comic-melancholic character of French pantomime plays, representing various stereotypes of the artist at the fin de siècle, such as narcissistic dandyism, manifested by flamboyant clothing and makeup ecstasy, as well as fantasy and paranoia, and the self-understanding of martyrdom. Schoenberg’s melodrama is known for its experimental structure, demonstrating the composer’s attempt to free himself from traditional tonality and conventional forms in order to better express the existence and experience of the modern subject. A central example is the Sprechgesang, a hybrid vocal mode between singing and speaking.¹²⁶ In the score, Schoenberg added concrete instructions for the performer, who is expected to produce melody by estranging the very essence of singing: The melody given in the Sprechstimme by means of notes is not intended for singing. The task of the performer is to transform it into a speech-melody, taking into account the given pitch. This is achieved by: (I) Maintaining the rhythm as accurately as if one were singing; (II) Becoming acutely aware of the difference between singing tone and speaking tone […] However, the performer must be very careful not to adopt a singsong speech pattern. That is not intended at all. Nor should one strive for realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speaking and speaking that contributes to a musical form should become quite obvious. But it must never be reminiscent of singing. (Schoenberg 1996, 12a)

This innovative compositional technique does not relinquish the semantic value of the text in favor of the sounds of melody. What it does is to replace the aesthetics of singing (bel canto) with the aesthetics of speech that is closer to everyday language. This technique can be seen as a criticism of the abstractness of classical music that fails to respond to a concrete reality.¹²⁷ Not only the musical  Schoenberg was not the first to compose using Sprechgesang. An initial attempt at rhythmic and tonal stabilization of the words can be seen in Engelbert Humperdinck’s piece Königskinder (); however, it was perceived as a Wagnerian variant and soon integrated into an opera; see Rudolf Stephan, “Sprechgesang,” in Die MGG. Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel: Bärenreiter, ), .  Gabriele Beinhorn, Das Groteske in der Musik. Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot lunaire (Pfaffenweiler: Centarus-Verlag, ), .

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style is criticized here, however, as shown by the grotesque role of Pierrot. Schoenberg directs his music towards the prosaic dimensions of everyday life in search of alternative means of expressing the modern subject. In alluding to Pierrot lunaire and introducing this musical piece as a dominant subtext in the novel, Bachmann thus recalls and even replays Schoenberg, not by using everyday language to overcome the limits of music, but rather by using music to push language beyond its restricted possibilities. The novel incorporates both the text and the melody from the last song in Pierrot lunaire, “O alter Duft” (“O ancient scent”), which shows a situation of reconciliation as the protagonist dreamily contemplates the “beloved” world, forgetting his recent fears and anxiety. The nostalgic closure ignores the aggressive, violent images present in the earlier songs, and, in contrast to the otherwise entirely atonal cycle, it begins in the tonality of E major, thus expressing harmony and reconciliation with the world. However, this soon proves deceptive: the harmonic pretense is refuted by the dissonance of the final tones, E and F, heard simultaneously from the singer and the piano.¹²⁸ The unfulfilled, refuted promise of a “beloved world” is central to Schoenberg’s piece, and Bachmann reflects this musical subtext in the life experience of her protagonist, a character who tries to be cured of a “dark story” (dunkle Geschichte) by melancholic yearning and nostalgic longing for a legendary epoch. Her memory, however, betrays her. The first phrase of Schoenberg’s “O ancient scent” (bars 1–3) is initially quoted with its melodic/rhythmic score in relation to the appearance of Malina. However, when Pierrot speaks of “legendary times,” the “I” character cannot remember anything of them: “and I can’t remember anything more from far-off days” (Bachmann 1990, 4). Throughout the novel this musical allusion recurs in connection with lost origins that cannot be traced. The allusion hints at a paradisiac dimension that was ruined during the Second World War: “having falling among humans for the very first time,” “the first recognition of pain” (1990, 10). This recognition of loss related to feelings of guilt and identifying with victims. The arousal of a ‘fear of death’ also resonates with Bachmann constructed memory demonstrated in her 1971 interview. In the novel the war is experienced as a crisis that damaged the narrator’s memory mechanism: “There is a disturbance in my memory, I shatter against every memory. Back then in the ruins there was no hope at all” (Bachmann

 Beinhorn points to other subversions of harmonic pretense, such as the piccolo part in relation to the piano part, the orchestration of the tutti, and the use of anachronistic forms like the choral movement in the piano part (, ). Such elements demonstrate Schoenberg’s ironic-satiric attitude toward the cultural aestheticism he partially identified with the fin de siècle bourgeois.

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1990, 172). This recollection signifies two different phases that cannot become one: “the time when I had everything […],” and the time when “everything became injured, abused and finally destroyed” (1990, 204). Like the space where the narrator’s house was before the war, she now walks by it “as if nothing had ever been there, or almost nothing – well, there was something there once, a scent from long ago; I can’t sense it anymore” (1990, 14 [emphasis mine]). Throughout the novel other fragments of Schoenberg’s text are connected to Malina, as when the “I,” awaking from a nightmare, calls him: “Talk to me about the new record, did you bring it with you, O ancient scent!” (Bachmann 1990, 128 [emphasis mine]). Close to the end of the novel the “I” stands next to the piano, recalling what Malina first played for her “back then […] before we really began talking to one another” (1990, 212). She tries in vain to imitate the playing. We learn how the first meeting between the “I” and Malina was musical and took place in a pure semiotic phase soon to become symbolic. However, the attempted reconstruction of the pre-symbolic moment becomes destructive: Malina, who “actually plays and half speaks and half sings and is audible only to me,” pushes the “I” aside and takes her place at the piano (1990, 212). The violent act is revealed through Schoenberg’s musical mode – the Sprechgesang. Similar to the piano scene in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus predicting the end of the novel, this performance too signals the novel’s ending.¹²⁹ By omitting two lines of the poem, Malina’s rendition (he plays and half speaks and half sings) causes the tonal and atonal parts to confront each other, thereby creating an asymmetrical form that emphasizes the tension originally existing in Schoenberg’s piece. Patching the lines together in this way causes a rhythmic change and an asymmetrical structure that documents the act of exclusion.¹³⁰ In creating this score montage Bachmann echoes Schoenberg’s attempt to undermine the harmonic pretense. Pierrot’s dissonant voice appears time and again in the novel as a present/ absent musical subtext, preventing the “I” from remembering anything from the past before the war. This is how the text documents the epistemological and mental break: Not only that the “I” cannot recall this past, she also fails to construct a nostalgic view of it, because recalling the harmonic, legendary times – “O ancient scent from far off days” (“O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit”) – indicates that the damaged, deformed being has faded into oblivion. As in Schoenberg’s

 Karen Achberger, “Der Fall Schönberg. Musik und Mythos in Malina,” in Ingeborg Bachmann (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, ), –.  Michael Leyton, Symmetry, Causality, Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –.

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atonal melodrama, a rescue in the form of redemption, or at least reconciliation, is absent from the novel, which ends with silent murder: No alarm, no sirens. No one comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can ever be heard again. It was murder. (Bachmann 1990, 225)

When Music Interferes with Language The affinity of Bachmann’s text with music is multidimensional. In exploring her use of musical intertexts (such as the names of composers and musical pieces), I have focused on her systematic allusions to Mozart’s Exultate, Jubilate (1773) and to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) as two semantic spaces in her fictional world. Other allusions from the classical repertoire include Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Chopin’s etudes, Verdi’s Requiem, and Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The novel also refers to different musical styles, including Austrian Lieder and French chansons. ¹³¹ Another dimension draws an analogy between narrative and musical forms such as polyphony and theme and variations, as well as phonetic components (onomatopoeia) and repetition of prosodic patterns (“dadim-dadam”) that generate, for example, the texture of polylogue. These play a central role in Bachmann’s novel, for example in the dialogues with Ivan, with the father figure, and with Malina. In all three dialogues the ecstatic and anxious musical responses of the “I” are expressions of extreme subjectivity. Despite the fragmented dialogue with Ivan, the “I” believes she can find her way back to conventional language through their relationship: “for he has come to make consonants consonant once again and comprehensible, to unlock vowels to their full resounding, to let words come over my lips once more” (Bachmann 1990, 15). However, the failure of the relationship repeatedly forces her to confront the limits of language, and this confrontation is far more radical when music becomes the expressive medium for extreme states of subjectivity.

 I have dealt elsewhere with the role of musical interexts in shaping poetic memory in Malina; see Ben-Horin “Memory Metonymies”, in German Life and Letters . (April ): – . For further discussion see also Spiesecke, Ein Wohlklang schmilzt das Eis. Ingeborg Bachmanns musikalische Poetik (Berlin: Norman Klaunig, ), –; David Dollenmayer, “Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in Bachmann’s Malina,” in Modern Austrian Literature  (): –, and Corina Caduff , –.

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For instance, when listening to a French chanson on the car radio while driving on the streets of Vienna, the “I” sings in a voice that only she can hear (Bachmann 1990, 58). A close reading of the text implies that the failure of communication between the pair is the responsibility of both individuals; it is not just Ivan who cannot hear, but also the “I” who refuses to speak: Auprès de ma blonde I’m You’re what? I’m What? I’m happy Qu’il fait bon Did you say something? I didn’t say anything Fait bon, fait bon I’ll tell you later What do you want later? I’ll never tell you Qu’il fait bon (Bachmann 1990, 34)

Combining German and French, this absurd dialogue is structured as a musical composition. The contiguous voices of Ivan and the “I” are heard simultaneously, as the fragmented musical phrases of the chanson are interwoven with the incomplete questions and answers of both passengers. The words of the chanson echo the broken, incomplete dialogue with Ivan that demonstrates an ongoing delay and deferral. The “I” promises to tell Ivan “later.” But the feelings of happiness remain concealed. Soon enough the “later” turns into “never.” The played chanson, not the “I,” speaks as a voice of the other, a second voice that hovers around the unspeakable and echoes the unsayable: So tell me It’s too loud, I can’t talk any louder What do you want to say? I can’t say it any louder Qu’il fait bon dormir Go on, tell me, you have to tell me today Qu’il fait bon, fait bon That I have risen Since I’ve survived the winter Since I’m so happy Since I already see the Stadtpark Fait bon, fait bon Since Ivan has arisen

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Since Ivan and I Qu’il fait bon dormir! (Bachmann 1990, 35)

As the lover in the popular chanson who finds consolation going to sleep alongside her beloved, the “I” seems to find consolation with Ivan. Love becomes a source of happiness which, however, is haunted and shadowed by feelings of shame and guilt. The inability to “say it louder” plays a double role here: Her unsuccessful attempt to overcome the sound of the radio (too loud) reveals the psychological blocks and mental hindering. The same failure of conceptualization that is conveyed through the inability to force words on mental and emotional mechanisms is revealed in the reverberation with traumatic experience. We see how music echoes the concealed material and gives voice to what can neither be stated nor conceptualized. More crucially, however, it is precisely the deferral of definite meaning that becomes apparent in the above extract. Instead of signifying an identifiable “thing,” the “I” produces a fragmentary mode of metonymic allusion. The repetitive sounds of the French lyrics that hint at a positive plurality of meanings, demonstrate the way in which the unconscious of the poetic subject resonates in Bachmann’s literary language. A rich arsenal of vocal images associated with speaking, singing, and playing is emphasized in the novel by conflicting images of muteness, silence, and the absence of voice. Thus the “I” often admits to losing her voice and being forced into silence. The fear of death paralyses her and her father forbids her both to speak and to sing by threatening to tear her tongue from her mouth (Bachmann 1990, 184–185). The threat is woven into the narrative via the repetition of the phonetic pattern “dadim-dadam,” which first appears in the novel’s prologue and refers to an early memory of watching a film adaptation of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hofmann. However, the original music that the narrator first heard in a dark cinema in Vienna can now no longer be heard: Since then I have often heard the music again, improvised, varied, but never played the same way or so correctly; once more from an adjacent room, where it was hacked to pieces during a discussion between several voices about the collapse of the monarchy, the future of socialism, and where someone began shouting because someone else said something about existentialism and structuralism, and by listening carefully I managed to make out another beat, but by then the music had already perished in the shouting, and I was beside myself because I didn’t want to hear anything else. (Bachmann 1990, 11)

All that is left are fragments of the complete work, weak remnants expressed in variations or improvisations of the original phrase. The “I” listens to these remnants and realizes that she will never hear the original musical version again. The source is lost. Music, not the political discussion of the monarchy and so-

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cialism, expresses a “notion of resistance.” Precisely these resisting musical echoes that later reappear as a repetitive phonetic pattern, provide the narrator with an alternative voice to her father’s prohibitions. In her dreams the “I” disobeys her father by dancing and reciting variations of the semiotic pattern: “I actually am dancing, di-dam di-dam” (Bachmann 1990, 147), [Ich tanze wirklich, didam dadam (Bachmann 1980, 235)]. Later, however, when she wants to shout at him, she cannot find her voice. Transformed into the monstrous figure of an alligator in the narrator’s eyes, the father locks his daughter in a windowless room and takes away the key in a symbolic act of castration: “he takes away my key on top of everything else, it’s my only key! I’m speechless” (Bachmann 1990, 148). This horrific phantasy demonstrates the destructive act of brutal authority to which the “I” responds by investing her language with music. The “I” speaks-sings a dense texture of phonetic successions that points to a radical collapse of signification.¹³² By doing so she actually withdraws from the symbolic to the semiotic, from metaphor to metonymy. At the crucial moment of identifying the murderous father with the lover, the semiotic interferes with the symbolic, thereby subverting the syntactical logic that produces fixed meaning. This polylogue texture of the novel gives voice to the latent resistance that drives the narrator in this instance. Onomatopoetic imitations of the alligator alternate with both rhythmic patterns and fragments of the lost melody: My beloved father, you have broken my heart. Crackcrack broken dam-di-dam my broken my father crack crack rrrack dadidam Ivan, I want Ivan, I mean Ivan, I love Ivan, my beloved father. My father says: take this woman away! (Bachmann 1990, 148) [Mein geliebter Vater, du hast mir das Herz gebrochen. Krakkrak gebrochen damdidam meines gebrochen mein Vater krak krak rrrrak dadidam Ivan, ich will Ivan, ich meine Ivan, ich liebe Ivan, mein geliebter Vater. Mein Vater sagt: Schafft dieses Weib fort! (Bachmann 1980, 236)]

This transposition of fragmented, disharmonious sounds into language is the polylogue expression of the failed relationship between father and daughter and of the failure of reconciliation. The blending of word and sound in a syntactically divergent sentence becomes part of a metonymic mode of representation that refers to an earlier experience without giving it a name, but rather by touch-

 On the psychotic discourse creating heterogeneous signification based on rhythms and intonations as a support for the subject when the signification system collapses, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), , . Two central manifestations of linguistic heterogeneity are musicality and nonsense.

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ing on contiguous associations. Similar to the intertextuality that Bachmann defines as “musical,” the polylogue pays particular attention to the acoustic remnants of an infinite “whole” without, however, transforming this whole into a closed, finite totality.¹³³ I claim that Bachmann uses polylogue precisely to refute the possibility of reconstructing a master narrative of the past that excludes and silences different, marginal, narratives. When semiotic patters take over the symbolic logic such a master narrative cannot be told. Another strategy that Bachmann employs is the formation of musical texture through polyphony. Once again we recall Bakhtin, who discusses the metaphoric use of this musical term with reference to the novel’s dialogic structures, namely a simultaneous representation of various voices that annuls hierarchical organization.¹³⁴ By crafting a polyphonic texture, Bachmann, like Grass before her, adds another musical layer to her writing. In the novel the narrator conducts a continuous dialogue with Malina on existential questions such as death and survival, sanity and insanity, memory and oblivion. Malina assumes the role of therapist, demanding answers and compelling the “I” to articulate repressed experiences. Failing to fulfill Malina’s demands, the “I” falls asleep and awakens from her nightmares only when the process assumes a physically violent dimension. At this point, the language of the “I” incorporates musical terminology: But then I am slapped to my senses, I know where I am once again. Me: (accelerando) I’m not falling asleep on you. Malina: Where was it? On the way to Stockerau? Me: (crescendo) Stop it, it was some place on the way to Stockerau, don’t hit me, please don’t hit me, just before Korneuburg, but stop asking me. I was the one who was crushed, not you! (Bachmann 1990, 191)

The musical instructions that accompany the act of speaking document the psychic state of the “I”; they convey an impression of her desires and fears and anticipate the dialogue’s destructive turn. At times, the musical terminology contradicts what is said, thus exposing the limits of language. For instance, the answer to Malina’s question (what the narrator is going to do) is accompanied by musical terms indicating growing tonal strength (“forte, forte, fortissimo”), but the only word that comes out is “Nothing” (“Nichts”), (Bachmann 1990, 210). Thus not the word with its semantic value, but rather its musical sound gives true wit-

 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), .  See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –.

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ness to the critical situation of the “I.” When verbal discourse is defeated and when language reaches the limits of expression, the music begins. In other words, this passage demonstrates a polyphonic texture of overlapping internal and external voices. As in the case of the French chanson, music takes over at the moment when the discursive elements collapse and words fail to express the subject’s needs.¹³⁵ Moreover, just before the dialogue ceases, the “I” gives up her attempts to narrate the story of her fragmentary past and delivers these fragments to Malina. The attempt to open up a new path to the past by means of a musical break, to penetrate the “screen memories” – those nostalgic pictures that protect the subject from confronting the painful impressions – in order to free the repressed experience, ultimately fails: Me: (dolente) Don’t leave me! (cantabile assai) You – leaving me! (senza pedale) I wanted to tell you, but I won’t do it. (mesto) You alone are disturbing me in my remembering. (tempo giusto) Go ahead and take over all the stories which make up history. Take them all away from me. (Bachmann 1990, 221)

This turn of events at the end of the narrative seems to suggest the impossibility of healing the traumatized subject through accessing, however fragmentarily, the troublesome past. Bachmann’s musical biography thus exposes the splintered, distorted memory of a neurotic subject who, haunted by past experience, cannot be healed or redeemed. From this perspective the novel does not make a case for the therapeutic potential of alternative discourses, but rather presents us with an alternative mode of documenting the past, one that repeatedly exposes the limits of linguistic representation. As we saw, Bachmann explores the question of the Third Reich within the Austrian context. The musical subtext in Malina reflects the narrator’s and the autobiographical subject’s attempt to overcome the traumatizing experience of the Anschluss and the war by recalling earlier times. The use of musical phrases and allusions demonstrates acts of playing and listening, and through the musi-

 Different scholars deal with the musical terminology that Bachmann incorporates in this polyphonic texture; see Weigel , ; Greuner , . Thus for example Caduff (,) highlights its necessity through the analogy with a play’s instructions, while according to Eberhardt (, ) the musical terms function as instructions for reading and interpreting (e. g., as a Nachschrift), not as instruction for the characters or “musicians” (e. g., as a Vorschrift). This claim does not explain, however, the unique texture of the text. Furthermore, the disagreement regarding the voice (performative or interpretive) does not blur the fact that music needs music as a means of expression. The evidence, as much as the conversation between the characters or their voices themselves, reaches its peak when it departs from the formal conventions of dialogue.

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cal phrases and word rhythms the “I” tries to return to an ideal, nostalgic past, one that is associated with the Habsburg Monarchy: “You glorious country of mine, my Ungarland” (Bachmann 1990, 128). Old Austria reappears as a lost childhood fantasy. This paradox of longing for a lost, pure origin connected with Klagenfurt and yet understanding that ultimately there is no way back, is repeated in variations throughout Bachmann’s oeuvre. For example, in the novella “Drei Wege zum See” (“Three Paths to the Lake”) in the story collection Simultan, the main character is a successful news photographer who travels throughout the world documenting disasters and crises.¹³⁶ The story begins with Elisabeth arriving at her father’s house, but as in Malina, her attempt at reconciliation between the two fails. The three paths to the lake are the main metaphor for a locked, sealed past time. Elisabeth tries time and again to find the paths she knew by heart as a child, but, incapable of finding them, she gives up. When she arrives at the beach by bus, accompanied by her father, she discovers that “this lake is no longer the lake that belonged to us; the water tastes different and swimming in it is different” (Bachmann 1988a, 150). Not only the place, but also the language is locked for Elisabeth. When swimming together in the lake, she wants to tell her father how much she loves him, yet the only words that come out of her mouth are in English and are perceived as ‘empty signifiers’ by her father, who cannot understand any language but German (1988a, 149). The loss of language is experienced also by her father, who mourns the occupation of Austria by the Germans. The story distinguishes the Austrian dialect of German and uses cultural and linguistic features to create political opposition between Austria and Germany. Thus Elisabeth’s father claims that German is an “unbeautiful language” (unschöne Sprache). This description embodies the difference, and the metaphysics of Nazism that enabled it to become a “perpetrators’ language” (Tätersprache).¹³⁷ Bachmann’s use of the Austrian dialect is evidence of her own “blind spot.” Her idealization of the Habsburg monarchy as an alternative to Nazi Germany and the confrontation of the German and Austrian past are reflected in the ambiguous relations to the mother tongue. These topics are explored also in other stories. Bachmann’s female narrators simultaneously alienate and long for their mother tongue, which also embodies a fear and worship of the Name-of-the-Father. Their language therefore reveals the differences and gaps in the German as part of dealing with Austria’s Nazi past and its legacy in the present.

 Ingeborg Bachmann, “Drei Wege zum See,” in Simultan (Munich: dtv, a), –.  Bettina Bannasch, Von vorletzten Dingen. Schreiben nach Malina: Ingeborg Bachmanns Simultan-Erzählungen (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), .

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Despite acknowledgment of the sealed, locked past, Bachmann’s work thus demonstrates an attempt to maintain cultural and political traditions through a musical poetics. The tragic fate of her characters results from the utopian perspective associated with the constructs of the mythological homeland. What they long for cannot be fulfilled. However, the texts are different from each other in their reflection on historical events. In contrast to “Three Paths to the Lake,” the novel Malina poetically demonstrates Bachmann’s irony and sociocultural criticism. For example, Malina demands that the “I” avoid self-pity as well as pity for the other: What good would it have done you then if someone in Timbuktu or in Adelaide had cried about a child in Klagenfurt who had been covered with rubble, who had lain down on the ground in front of the lake promenade underneath the trees during an attack of low-flying aircraft, and who then had to see dead and wounded around her for the first time? So don’t cry over others, they have enough to do saving their skin or getting through the few hours which remain before they’re murdered. They don’t need tears “Made in Austria.” (Bachmann 1990, 326)

From this perspective, mourning and pity are products of the consumer industry characterizing late-capitalist society. The words “made in Austria” present not only a criticism of the false, deceptive processes of mourning, but also a metapoetic criticism of trends in Austrian literature, particularly with regard to a national literature seeking to define an Austrian essence, hence collapsing into reactionary ideology.¹³⁸ In the next chapter we will see how Thomas Bernhard’s protagonist, while writing his own life story, emphasizes and pushes this critical approach ad absurdum. Bernhard provides us with a musical biography based on Murau’s autobiography – or rather his “anti-autobiography.” His protagonist criticizes the concept of homeland put forward by Maria, a poet who embodies Ingeborg Bachmann.¹³⁹ This conflict between the characters concerns the limits

 See Klaus Zeyringer, Österreichische Literatur –: Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarken (Innsbruck: Haymon, ), –.  W. G. Sebald examines the use and function of the term Heimat in Austrian literature, discussing for example the work of Jean Améry, a writer who becomes an intertext in Bachmann’s novella; see W. G. Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat (Salzburg: Residenz, ), –. According to Sebald, in contrast to Améry, who rejects the concept of homeland and becomes heimatlos in response to the catastrophe of the Second World War, Bachmann seeks to present and recall the homeland by means of nostalgic and utopian longing. On the utopian aspect in Bachmann’s thought and writing see also Sara Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann, –.

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of historical representation, namely the moment and conditions under which historical consciousness loses its critical power and becomes a mode of sinking into oblivion. In Murau’s response we can find Bernhard’s critique of the utopian of homeland in Bachmann’s oeuvre.¹⁴⁰ Murau, who left Austria and lives in Italy, is contrasted with Maria, who wishes to go back to Vienna. However, even Bernhard would have to admit that Bachmann’s work inspired his own criticism of the homeland. As we shall see below the two authors have more in common than at first appears. Both draw inspiration from the Second Viennese School, and have little confidence in therapeutic discourse. As Bachmann’s novel demonstrates, in playing the role of a therapist and forcing his patient to articulate trauma with words, Malina aggressively abolishes the subject. Bachmann uses Schoenberg’s musical avant-garde that conveys the shocking experience of the modern subject through atonality and Sprechgesang, to resonate with the trauma of her protagonist generated in the crisis of the Second World War. Her protagonist seeks a cure in music but remains trapped within the oppressive mechanism of language. The dissonant language of repeated rhythmic patterns, non-semantic successions, pseudo-polyphonic textures, and quotations of atonal music – all point to the music that appears on the threshold of language, music that interferes with conceptual and narrative conventions, and therefore reverberates with the traumatic impressions of the poetic subject. To conclude, Bachmann draws on psychoanalytic terminology to deal with the problem of memory and narration, documentation and storytelling, and the images she invokes are poetically elaborated in connection with music. In fact, the musical dissonance appears as an alternative to the therapeutic process of regularizing and healing the subject. The dissonance, however, does not offer recovery, but rather a medium through which the illness is resonated and therefore poetically documented. For this reason the failure of the haunted, distorted “I” to remember and to recover from its illness points to a work of memory that is far from being utopian. On the contrary, Bachmann reveals the danger of an obsessive preoccupation with the past. Yet at the same time her musical biography attempts to document that which was forgotten by Austria’s master narrative and the official story of its past. In doing so, Bachmann’s work thus confronts the amnesia, the “memory twilights” of the post-fascist and post-capitalist culture within which she lived.

 See Joachim Hoell’s Mythenreiche Vorstellungswelt und ererbter Alptraum: Ingeborg Bachmann und Thomas Bernhard (Berlin: VanBremen, ), , on the two writers’ different conceptions of homeland, Bernhard’s nightmare vs. Bachmann’s utopian monarchy.

Interlude III. Pianist: Austria from a Musician’s Perspective Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian author and playwright, could be the subject of a fascinating musical biography. The daughter of a Catholic mother and a father of Jewish descent, she received a classical education, including ballet and piano lessons at the Vienna Conservatory. At the age of eighteen she began her studies in theater, art history, and languages at the University of Vienna, and six years later graduated in music studies. Influenced by the “Wiener Gruppe,” Jelinek developed an experimental poetics that crosses the lines between literature and music. This approach is demonstrated in her preoccupation with the life stories of musicians and the incorporation of musicological discourses into her literary work. This is also clear in her innovative language in which tonal repetitions and rhythmic patterns become central principles of storytelling.¹⁴¹ In her speech on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, Jelinek described how language haunts her. Her way of speaking about this uncanny language is musical; she listens to the music of language that conceals and reveals the horrors of existence. Jelinek uses this music to develop a critical conversation about the country that denied, repressed, and “forgot” its Nazi past. Her work is devoted to exposing an oppressive mechanism that did not disappear from Austria after the Second World War, but continued latently in state structures, a market economy, and the private sphere of the bourgeois family. Jelinek’s view of music is political. She seeks modes of expression and conversation that escape the hegemonic discourse and fixed linguistic frames bound up with oppressive hierarchal relationships. In order to subvert such power relationships, she develops a musical poetics that demands a unique mode of reading based on the ability to listen. Her readers are required to listen to a language comprises of alliterations, rhythmic patterns, and wordplay that drive alternative structures of significance. For example, her speech on the occasion of being awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize in 1986: Entitled “In den Waldheimen und auf den Heidern,” this speech plays with the names of Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s president between 1986 and 1992, whose Nazi past emerged during his presidency, and Jörg Heider, the leader of the Austrian right-wing party (FPÖ), as if these names were landmarks or landscapes in a beloved, pastoral homeland. In the

 On Jelink’s prose see Uda Schestag, Sprachspiel als Lebensform: Strukturuntersuchungen zur Erzählenden Prosa Elfriede Jelineks (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, ).

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course of her speech Jelinek draws an analogy between the late 1930s in Austria, when the Anschluss took place, and the 1950s, focusing on the exclusionary policy against intellectuals, including oppression and expulsion.¹⁴² In 2000, after Heider’s symbolic resignation from the FPÖ leadership opened the way for the establishment of a conservative right-wing coalition, Jelinek refused to allow her plays to be performed in Austria. In the essay “Meine Art des Protests” (“My Way of Protesting”) she argued that performing her plays on the public stage meant collaboration with hegemonic institutions, and approval of unacceptable reactionary policies.¹⁴³ She continued to write, however, and in the summer of the same year published three monologues alluding to German composers such as Beethoven, Schumann, and Schubert under the title Das Lebewohl (The Departure). The protagonist in the first recites a “Heider monologue,” a polyphonic montage that incorporates sentences from Heider’s resignation speech and quotations from Aeschylus’s ancient tragedy Oresteia. The second monologue, “Das Schweigen,” (“Silence”) describes an author’s attempt to write about her favorite composer, Robert Schumann, and the third, “Der Tod und das Mädchen II,” (“Death and the Maiden”) alludes to a musical quartet by Franz Schubert, but here the woman awakening from her eternal sleep is a metaphor for Austria, and the description of the awakening prince, the redeemer, hints at Heider.¹⁴⁴ In these monologues, Jelinek employs silence in the face of political slogans exploited in the public sphere. The absent speech of a non-semantic music is used against clichés circulated and manipulated for use in collective rituals celebrating heroic myths and patriotic readiness for self-sacrifice. For example, the second monologue points to music as an alternative to pompous speech, thereby suggesting ways of escaping from empty public discourses. Schumann appears as a cultural code for a musical repertoire that becomes yet another product of the Viennese culture market. As a result, Jelinek chooses silence for her poetic persona, who is silent about Schumann. Various ways of silence thus become a strategy of resistance. By keeping silent the literary figure conceals this musical repertoire that is inaccessible to the late-capitalist market, governed as it is by an oppressive economy, and succeeds in escaping from the deceptive forces of the culture industry. However, the language of Jelinek’s poetic persona is also revelatory, which is expressed in its musicality: a musical texture of displacements and dissonances,

 Elfriede Jelinek, “In den Waldheimen und auf den Heidern,” in Der Streit  (): .  Elfriede Jelinek, “Meine Art des Protests,” in Der Standard,  February : .  Elfriede Jelinek, Das Lebewohl: Drei kleine Dramen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, ).

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contradictions and tensions hint at things without naming them and without forcing them into fixed categories and charged semantic frames. Precisely where the protagonist lapses into silence, Jelinek’s musical language speaks. The way Jelinek writes about Schumann alludes to Thomas Bernhard’s novella Concrete, discussed below. Like Bernhard’s protagonist, who travels from Austria to Palma in order to begin writing his biography of Felix Mendelssohn, Jelinek’s considers a vacation in Palma to put an end to the unproductiveness and infertility that haunt her in Austria. As in Bernhard’s novella, there is also a demonic sister, a metaphor for Vienna, the city of culture and musical tradition that failed to protect its citizens from the horrors and crimes of Nazism. Jelinek’s semiotic writing about Schumann thus offers an alternative mode of expression. She subverts narrative conventions and standard syntax in a way that points to true listening, and to conversation that avoids the oppression and identity-fixation inherent in hegemonic discourses. In writing about Schumann Jelinek illustrates the paradox of documenting the past. Ultimately, her protagonist has nothing to say about Schumann. Furthermore, the cyclical syntax and repetitive tonal patterns indicate the compulsive rhythm of an obsessive subject who forgets Schumann, just as Bernhard’s narrator forgets Mendelssohn. The biographical subject – Schumann or Mendelssohn – remains inaccessible to and concealed from the reader. However, it is precisely this act of concealment that reveals the repressed content of culture, giving poetic voice and testifying to cultural processes of repression and denial. Jelinek’s play Clara S.: Musikalische Tragödie (Clara S.: A Musical Tragedy, 1981) may be read in this light as a musical biography integral to a tradition that can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche.¹⁴⁵ The implications of this cultural tradition can be seen in the writings of the writers this book discusses. Jelinek tells the story of Clara, the wife of Robert Schumann, the renowned German composer of the Romantic era. But it is the other story that Jelinek relates, that of a woman who is a talented pianist and composer in her own right but who must sacrifice her career to the social commitments of being a wife and mother. Jelinek interweaves two narratives by locating the historical character in a modernist time and place: late capitalist and neo-fascist twentieth-century Austria. Bound by normative codes imposed on her by society, Clara does not create, but rather encourages her husband to complete his symphony before is admitted to the mental hospital in Steinhoff. Playing by the rules of the culture industry, the modernist Clara plans to market the symphony to the masses.

 Elfriede Jelinek, Clara S.: Musikalische Tragödie, in Theaterstücke (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, ), –.

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In The Piano Teacher, Jelinek reveals a disturbing criticism of power systems, political illusions and myths of consumption, and the culture industry. This novel, too, demonstrates a poetics that resonates with voices from what has been oppressed and excluded. Montages of contradictory speeches, clichés, and quotations confront the reader with the use and misuse of language. As in earlier works, Jelinek’s cultural criticism exposes modes of exploitation, abuse, and violation based on gender, socio-economic, and ethnic differences.¹⁴⁶ She opens up a critical perspective on Nazism by pointing to current implications of latent fascism and late capitalism, and of reification and economic manipulations. The abused body is that of the other, and its violation is illustrated in the language that subverts hegemonic and patriarchal structures. The novel tells the story of Erika Kohut, a former promising pianist and now a 36-year-old piano teacher who still lives with her mother. This intimate, private story also becomes an allegory for collective neurosis – how Austrian society regulates personal desires and demands their sacrifice in the name of bourgeois decency.¹⁴⁷ Erika’s mother insists on discipline, infinite devotion, and obedience from her daughter; she has to be a “woman” and behave according to traditional norms. Erika’s refusal to identify with this model by becoming a career pianist fails. Instead she becomes a teacher in the Vienna Conservatory, but there too she transgresses. She finds momentary satisfaction in voyeurism and pornographic movies and, haunted by her voyeuristic urge, she turns from the center to the periphery, from the prestigious conservatory to dark parks and cheap sex stores. Erika’s actions can also be seen as a movement from the hegemonic centers of canonical heritage to the margins of culture, from the temple of classical music to the periphery of sub-cultures. On her daily way home from work she visits peep shows frequented by people speaking foreign languages. In a tiny, smelly room she watches women expose their bodies to the gaze of random spectators, and later she lurks in dark parks, looking for couples making love: She avoids the paths taken by other wanderers. She seeks the spots where other wanderers take their pleasures – always in twosomes. After all, she’s done nothing wrong, nothing

 See Elizabeth Wright, “Eine Ästhetik des Ekels. Elfriede Jelineks Roman Die Klavierspielerin,” in Elfriede Jelinek (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, ), –. Karl Ivan Solibakke, “Musical Discourse in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin,” in Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity (NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, ), – shows how “Gender as a coding process corresponds to the subversive aspects of Erika Kohut’s musical endeavors,” arguing that “performing art and deconstructing womanhood are central to the novel’s intention” ().  Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, Trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ).

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that would make others shrink away from her. Using the binoculars, she scours the area for couples, from whom others shrink. She cannot investigate the ground under her shoes; she switches into blind. She relies entirely on her ears – a professional habit. (Jelinek 1988, 141)

Jelinek ironically incorporates phrases from “Der Wegweiser” (“The GuidePost”), from the well-known song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter Journey) by Franz Schubert and Wilhelm Müller. This parodic description of a woman who obtains satisfaction through voyeurism conveys once again, this time in a grotesque way, the mechanism of concealment and revelation. Erika’s secret journeys that later develop into a sadomasochistic relationship with her lover are now connected to the journeys of the lonely lover from Schubert’s song. Behind the repertoire of German Idealism lies oppressive authority. Violence emerges where oppression rules. In order to break out of the restrictions and gain the pleasure that is denied her, Erika must first watch other couples who take their pleasure, and later force her aggressive drives on the other (student, lover, partner or mother). As we see, restrictions are explored through the notion of German Idealism, perhaps the most celebrated example of cultural sublimation, turning material into spirit and mind, real into ideal, and body into poetry. By incorporating the language of the Romantic wanderer, Jelinek subverts and unmasks pure Romanticism. An ideal love for a woman, which reverberates with a sad longing for a yet unexplored homeland, as demonstrated in Schubert’s nineteenth-century cycle, becomes in Jelinek’s post-1945 novel a bare sexual act that takes place in the Viennese peripheries dominated by vulgar consumption and an economy of instant gratification. The illusions of German Idealism collapse in the face of exposed bodies and flesh. Bourgeois institutions are seen through their back door, the area in which the pianist wanders in search of the lost homeland: “At last: the homeland of the pipers. The sight is so close that Erika doesn’t need her binoculars” (Jelinek 1988, 141). The piano teacher pursues her deconstructive work of subverting the myths of classical composers and cultural heroes, undermining images of beauty and harmony by sarcastically stressing “defects,” such as Schumann’s ugliness, Beethoven’s deafness, and Schubert’s alcoholism. Jelinek gives the Viennese musical myth a grotesque interpretation that exposes the fear and anxiety behind the normative disguise and the decent dignified appearance of the bourgeois audience. This novel also develops a different musical subtext of the revolutionary Second Viennese School. In contrast to other students who are exposed to a range of piano pieces but end up playing “just” Beethoven or Schubert sonatas, Erika’s lover, Klehmer, is “allowed” to play Schoenberg. Playing pieces by the modernist

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composer who “emancipated dissonance” and challenged the conventions of traditional harmony, resonates with the revolt against social taboos and oppressive authorities. In her relationship with Klehmer, Erika explores the limits of sociocultural norms; Viennese audiences are disturbed by Schoenberg’s music. They prefer to listen to the classical repertoire, from Mozart to Wagner, which embodies the romantic Weltschmerz, the nostalgic worldview of the Welt des Gesterns: A member of the Philharmonic audience reads the program notes and is prompted to tell someone else how profoundly his innermost being throbs with the pain of this music. He’s read all about it. Beethoven’s pain, Mozart’s pain, Schumann’s pain, Bruckner’s pain, Wagner’s pain. These pains are now his sole property, and he himself is the owner of the Pöschel Shoe Factory or Klotzer Construction Material Wholesalers. Beethoven manipulates the levers of fear and these owners make their workers jump fearfully. (Jelinek 1988, 19–20)

The pianist’s thoughts point to the illness of a decadent society that denies and suppresses one part of its past – Nazism, while celebrating another – the classical traditions and heritage. This society is proud of human values such as freedom, equality, and brotherhood in the concert halls and at the same time is blind to the foreigner and the stranger. The pianist turns the musical realm into a field of cultural conflict and struggle from which she draws power and authority. The novel demonstrates how her sovereignty results from sadomasochistic practices of oppression and humiliation that she enforces not only on the other, but also on herself. Erika, the “slave of music,” manipulates her students and dictates to them. She uses violence against the other and against her own body, cutting her limbs with a razor and her shoulder with a kitchen knife. She lets her mother bite her and demands that her lover physically hurt her. She is imprisoned in a compulsive mechanism that characterizes many of Jelinek’s characters – a writer who refuses to free her poetic persona from self-destruction. In resisting and negating any possible resolution, these characters, subjects of oppression and bodies of false consciousness, are doomed to endless wandering, to infinite deconstructive journeys – a live testimony to distorted place and damaged existence.

4 Thomas Bernhard: Writing, Playing, and the Compulsion to Repeat Childhood is always another piece of music, although not classical. For example: in 1944 in Traunstein I had a long walk to school […] and every time I passed by her home, a woman jumped out and yelled: “I’m still going to send your grandfather to Dachau.” In 1945 it was another story and another piece of music, twelve-tone perhaps. My brother’s friend, who was seven at the time – I was fourteen – picked up a rocket-propelled grenade and was torn to bits. (Thomas Bernhard 1993, 9 [translation mine])

The work of Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian playwright, essayist, and novelist, is an ongoing conversation with the past. However, Bernhard regards the past that goes back to his childhood and apprenticeship during the years of the Third Reich as inaccessible, sealed. How does Bernhard respond to blocked past experience? And to what extent can his story transcend national narratives? Raised in Austria and Bavaria in the 1930s, Bernhard experienced the growing power of the Nazi Party. He was sent to schools that enforced Nazi ideology and he joined the “Jungfolk.” After the war he returned to Salzburg to work as an apprentice in a grocery. He also took singing lessons with Maria Keldorfer and studied musical aesthetics with Theodor Werner. Complications arising from tuberculosis ended his musical career. Bernhard introduces autobiographical segments in his literary work, as well as fragments of life stories that reveal distortion and loss. In certain texts Bernhard employs images of muteness to express the limitation of language as a mode of expression now charged with the horrific experience of the Second World War. The catastrophe that rational processes fail to explain brought about the collapse of traditional systems of perception. In Bernhard’s poetics this failure is manifested in concepts that are devoid of content and appear as “non-concepts,” an empty embodiment of “concept-less-ness” (Begriffslosigkeit), as shown in his monologue “Drei Tage” (“Three Days”).¹⁴⁸ Produced in 1970 this cinematic portrait gives a poetic account of Bernhard’s struggle to resonate with and recall what is no longer present: It is always the conversation with my brother that never happened, the conversation with my mother that never happened. It is the conversation with my father that also never happened. It is the conversation with the past that never happened, the past that never hap-

 Thomas Bernhard, “Drei Tage,” in Thomas Bernhard: Ein Lesebuch (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), –.

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pened and that never will happen. It is the conversation containing large pronouncements that never happened. It is the talking with nature that doesn’t exist, conversing with concepts that are not concepts and that can never be concepts. Conversing with the conceptlessness, the slow-wittedness. It is conversing with material that is constantly incomplete. Conversing with subject matter that does not respond. (Bernhard 1993, 18 [emphasis in the original; translation mine])

Bernhard’s conversation with the past that cannot be reached is reflected in a work that draws inspiration from music. On the boundaries between literature and music Bernhard seeks other ways of reverberating with nonexistent nature, “concepts that are not concepts,” and “subject matter that does not respond.” His musical biography is thus a poetic document that reaches out to those non-representational moments, and remembers through the use of musical intertexts, acoustic images, and alliterations. The discussion of the role of music in Bernhard’s poetics revolves around two central approaches. The first, which prevailed until the 1990s, focuses on the thematic issues shaped by Bernhard’s metaphorical use of musical terminology. Jurgensen uses terms such as “aria,” “polyphony,” “contrapuntal,” and “orchestration,” but avoids a full complete interpretation of the text, on the one hand, and generalizes in analyzing structural analogies, on the other.¹⁴⁹ Fraund discovers the Wagnerian leitmotif and Webern’s dodecaphonic music at the narrative level, but his arguments are completely based on general analogies between narrative structure and musical form.¹⁵⁰ Reiter, too, points to a thematic development in Bernhard’s prose similar to that of the development of a musical motif.¹⁵¹ However, by focusing on the musical motif she does not relate to the sound component in Bernhard’s language that is crucial to understanding how the poetic text conveys a psychic mechanism, such as the compulsion to repeat.

 Manfred Jurgensen, “Die Sprachpartituren des Thomas Bernhard,” in Bernhard: Annäherungen (Bern: Francke Verlag, ), , –.  Thomas Fraund, Bewegung – Korrektur – Utopie: Studien zum Verhältnis von Melancholie und Ästhetik im Erzählwerk Thomas Bernhards (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), –.  Andrea Reiter, “Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Musical Prose,’” in Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the s (New York: Berg, ), –, –. For a critical perspective regarding this approach, see Christian Klug, Thomas Bernhards Theaterstücke (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), ; Andreas Herzog, “Thomas Bernhards Poetik der prosaischen Musik,” in Zeitschrift für Germanistik  (): ; Kuhn, Ein philosophisch-musikalisch geschulter Sänger: Musikästhetische Überlegungen zur Prosa Thomas Bernhards (Königshausen u. Neumann, ), ; Hermann Helms-Derfert, Die Last der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur Prosa von Thomas Bernhard (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, ), , and Scheitler, “Musik als Thema und Struktur in deutscher Gegenwartsprosa,” in Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte  (): .

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The second approach concentrates on form rather than content in assessing the significance of Bernhard’s work. Here too, we find a wide range of perspectives and disagreements. Scheitler points to the central role of the formal as opposed to the semantic elements, and claims that Bernhard’s prose does not reflect external reality.¹⁵² Helms-Derfert assumes that an interpretation based on the formal components of the literary text neglects the affinity between form and content in Bernhard’s work. Rather, Helms-Derfert shows how the formal deconstruction – through either fragmentary writing in his early work or “musical writing” in his later work – functions as a thematic-structural element.¹⁵³ An insightful approach is suggested by Damerau who argues that the musicality embodied in Bernhard’s language, especially its rhythmical intensity, calls into question the possibility of conceptualizing the world of objects.¹⁵⁴ My analysis follows this direction. I claim, however, that music in Bernhard’s work does not substitute for or invalidate the thematic content, but rather makes this content “speak” differently, namely, musically. By referring to two of his late musical biographies: Concrete (1982) and Extinction (1986) I hope to show how fully aware Bernhard is of the danger of pure tonal successions that do not “speak,” and apparently cannot support ethical thought, action or responsibility for the past. The influence of music is clearly evident in Bernhard’s work, as was his fascination with musicians. Thus, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is the subject of Concrete; J. S. Bach is a subtext in Der Untergeher (The Drowned, 1983); the novel Korrektur (Correction, 1975) refers to composers such as Handel, Purcell, Mozart, Schoenberg, and Webern; Mozart’s Haffner Symphony (No. 35) plays a central role in Wittgensteins Neffe (Wittgenstein’s Nephew, 1982); Beethoven’s Storm Sonata (No. 17) and Bach’s Kunst der Fuge (Art of the Fugue) are discussed in Alte Meister (The Old Masters, 1985); Beethoven’s Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, his Fifth Symphony, and Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) and the opera The Magic Flute are heard in his plays Vor dem Ruhestand (Eve

 Scheitler , –. Skepticism and disbelief in language that failed to give accurate expression and bear true witness to being have already become part of modern thought. See for example the fictitious letter of Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon that demonstrates the perilous state of language decades earlier; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” in “Lieber Lord Chandos”: Antworten auf einen Brief (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, ), –.  Helms-Derfert, Die Last der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur Prosa von Thomas Bernhard (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, ), –.  Burghard Damerau, Selbstbehauptungen und Grenzen zu Thomas Bernhard (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), –.

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of Retirement, 1979) and Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman, 1972). Bernhard’s autobiographical essays refer also to music’s existential value for him.¹⁵⁵ In addition, many of his interviews indicate a poetic conception based on musical elements.¹⁵⁶ For instance, in an interview with Jean-Louis Rambures, Bernhard said: I would say it’s a matter of rhythm and has a lot to do with music. Yes, a person can understand what I write only if he or she realizes to begin with that the musical component is most important and that what I say is of secondary significance. (Rambures 1992, 112 [translation mine]) [Ich würde sagen, es ist eine Frage des Rhythmus und hat viel mit Musik zu tun. Ja, was ich schreibe, kann man nur verstehen, wenn man sich klarmacht, daß zuallererst die musikalische Komponente zählt und daß erst an zweite Stelle das kommt, was ich erzähle]

Here Bernhard plays with homophones: “zählen,” which has a double meaning – to count something and to be valuable – and “erzählen,” which means to tell a story. In this way, Bernhard stresses the semiotic principle of his work: Counting the beat (rhythm) and reverberating with things he speaks about is his way of overcoming fixed signification systems and interfering with stable conceptual frameworks. Moreover, the sound heard in phonetic alternations and repetitive patterns embodies the psychic process of compulsive repetition through which the traumatic past, repressed and unspeakable, can release its strong grip. Let us examine how Bernhard incorporates musical images and concepts into his description of events in the years of 1944 and 1945. Beginning with the following claim: “Childhood is always another piece of music, though not classical,” he then focuses on two disconnected recollections, such as the violent outburst of a woman he hears on his way to school: “I’m still going to send your grandfather to Dachau,” or the torn body of his brother’s dead friend, who “picked up a rocket-propelled grenade and was torn to bits.” For Bernhard these two fragmented, disconnected events are connected through music. The memory is transformed into a story which is a musical piece, though “not classical.” The sound of the death signifier “Dachau” activates the image of the Third Reich, just as the image of a vandalized body activates the dissonant, non-coherent sound of “another piece of music, twelve-tone perhaps” (Bernhard 1993, 11).

 See especially Der Keller () and Die Kälte (). On the role of music in Bernhard’s autobiography, see also Reiter , –, and Kuhn, , –.  See for example Krista Fleischmann, Thomas Bernhard – Eine Begegnung: Gespräche mit Krista Fleischmann (Vienna: Edition S, ), –, –, and –.

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We see how a singular event of exclusion and violence is engraved in the remembering subject by associating this event with particular sounds and acoustic images. Music thus becomes a medium of memory through which the subject re-experiences the horrific past in the present. Similar to the writers we examined in the previous chapters, here as well the musical components interfere with a coherent master narrative.¹⁵⁷ In searching for an alternative mode of representation to those provided by the hegemonic institutions, Bernhard’s work demonstrates split recollections and torn experiences, “a whole series of those stories,” (Bernhard 1993, 10), with an affinity to the musical medium. As we shall see, the affinity of Bernhard’s work to music is strongly based on thematic and sound repetitions. In fact, the reader is exposed to repetition at various textual levels – repetitive words, utterances, acts, physical states, and plot elements.¹⁵⁸ Several scholars of Bernhard’s literature have dealt with this phenomenon. The weakness of some of this work, however, is that the discussion of the repetition in the literary structure fails to analyze how it shapes or undermines specific meanings. For example, Mariacher claims that the repetition in variation is an organizing principle of narrator consciousness searching for the death trigger, and discusses the shaping of musical associations due to the repetition principle as a paradigm of modern existence.¹⁵⁹ My reading of Bernhard’s work emphasizes the relation between repetitive patterns of music, poetic language and psychic mechanisms. I will argue that the musical repetitions engraved in Bernhard’s poetics expose that which collective memory conceals.

Variations on the Compulsion to Repeat Rudolf, the narrator of Concrete, locks himself into his house in Peiskam after illness has forced him to leave Vienna. He blames his sister for preventing  See Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, ), , on the vitality of memory and its decisive role in the discourse of history – but distorted through transformation, repression, and denial. On “effective history” see also Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), –.  For a survey see Hans Höller “Rekonstruktion des Romans im Spektrum der Zeitungsrezensionen,” in Antiautobiografie: Zu Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), –, and Klug (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), .  Barbara Mariacher, “Umspringbilder.” Erzählen – Beobachten – Erinnern: Überlegungen zur späten Prosa Thomas Bernhards (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), ; or Scheitler , , .

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him from completing – or even starting a biography of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, which subsequently, however, emerges as an attempt to justify his own inability to write. Even though the sister despises Rudolf’s musicological scholarship, she is devoted to helping him overcome his lung disease. On her advice he travels to Palma to write and maybe to convalesce, but there he recalls an earlier visit and a meeting with Anna Hardtl, a German woman whose husband fell to his death from the balcony of their hotel room.¹⁶⁰ He had listened to Anna’s story and accompanied her to the graveyard; this time he returns to the graveyard, and to his horror finds Anna’s grave next to her husband’s. This discovery evokes in him feelings of guilt and an inaccessible void. The novel begins and ends with Rudolf – a “writing character” – but what he does is actually the opposite: non-writing. His text is defined by what it lacks: a non-text that turns against itself, a biography that refuses to be written. Rudolf is unable to complete the biography of Mendelssohn; instead, he writes another biography that is conveyed through the activation of repetitive musical intertexts (theme), tonal successions (sound) and pseudo-polyphonic textures (form). A central mode of repetition is return as a movement both in time (successive repetition) and space (going back to a place or a territory). This return is always bound up with failure, embodied in the character of Rudolf. For example, his preoccupation with the biography of Mendelssohn stands in the way of reconstructing his own past musical experience. What we see is him sitting at his desk, organizing his books in an attempt to start writing, reading his notes, looking for the elusive sentence, the appropriate word, the correct context, and repeating this whole process time and time again. This inability to “act” is also clear in Rudolf’s relationship with his sister who makes decisions not only for herself, but for her brother as well. She represents a “healthy” existence, as opposed to Rudolf who suffers from lung disease and is characterized by a dim awareness of reality and by anxiety that paralyses him. Rudolf’s “un-writing” constantly vacillates between the “too early” and the “too late” – the timelessness of trauma: Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost. My work of Mendelssohn Bartholdy is of course a literary work, I told myself, not a musical one, yet at the same time it’s a mu-

 Among the biographical parallels to Bernhard himself are music lessons in Vienna, the Morbus Boeck disease as a complication of tuberculosis, and frequent travel to Spain, Portugal, and Palma; see Manfred Mittermayer, Thomas Bernhard (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), , and the encounter with Gabrielle, a young widow from Bavaria whose husband was killed by falling off the hotel balcony, as described in Krista Fleischmann, Thomas Bernhard – Eine Begegnung: Gespräche mit Krista Fleischmann (Vienna: Edition S, , –.

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sical work through and through. We allow ourselves to be captivated by a subject, and we remain captivated for years, even for decades, and it can happen that we let ourselves be crushed by it. (Bernhard 1984, 151 [emphasis in the original])

Rudolf speaks about his work on Mendelssohn in a way that reveals the time structure of trauma. Following Freud, according to Lyotard, a traumatic event is engraved in the subject’s psyche twice: the first time always occurs “too early,” when the subject is unprepared and unprotected, whereas the second time the traumatic impression occurs “too late,” since the real event has already been experienced. How, then, can we respond to the event without imposing concepts on it that reduce, exclude, and eliminate its contents? Lyotard’s answer draws on music, the non-semantic and non-conceptual art that responds to the psychic mechanism of trauma by offering an alternative mode of representation and documentation.¹⁶¹ Bernhard’s novel attempts to demonstrate this. For instance, the first sentence in Rudolf’s “musical work,” the Mendelssohn biography, is always written “too early” or “too late” and therefore is lost, leaving the work unfinished. However, in this respect, Bernhard’s musical biography Concrete bears witness to that which avoids completeness. The art of repetition generates a fictitious autobiography that tells the story of writing difficulties, insanity, and illness. Bernhard, however, rejects the possibility of therapeutic cure.¹⁶² He neither seeks a remedy for his characters or his readers; rather, he tries to recall that which has been forgotten and repressed, enabling it to reappear as an infinite musical movement beyond fixed conceptual systems, a preconscious existence that is always simultaneously not-in-time. Let us see how Bernhard documents this psychic mechanism in the language of repetition: I’ll calm down and begin to work, I told myself. Again and again I said to myself, I’ll calm down and begin to work. But after I had said this about a hundred times and could no longer stop saying it I gave up. My attempt had failed (Bernhard 1984, 6).

 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews” (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.  On the limits of a psychoanalytical interpretation of Bernhard’s work, see Hans Höller and Matthias Part Auslöschung als Antiautobiographie: Perspektiven der Forschung, in Antiautobiografie: Zu Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), . Their claim, however, does not negate the fruitfulness of psychoanalysis as a perceptual and conceptual source for understanding and thinking about Bernhard’s writing.

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Like the narrator of Bachmann’s novel Malina, who cannot write the “beautiful book,” Bernhard’s narrator cannot complete the book on Mendelssohn. In both cases the difficulty of writing and telling a story demonstrates the failure to recall and remember. Like Bachmann’s anonymous “I,” Rudolf is haunted by the past, imprisoned in the rhythm of compulsive repetition. He is thus afraid that his sister’s return will put an end to his attempt to write. This anxiety is illustrated by the repetitive use of the words “return,” “once again,” and “once more.” More specifically, two themes are interwoven in Rudolf’s consciousness – the figures of the sister and the composer – in a way that hints at the texture of a musical fugue.¹⁶³ In contrast to music, however, this is not a simultaneous movement, but rather a narrative strategy that evokes the impression of simultaneous movement. The impression is created both by Rudolf’s claim that he thinks and listens simultaneously and by the paragraph’s cyclical form, consisting of two sentences: one beginning with the thought about the biography’s first sentence and ending with listening for the sister’s anticipated return, and the other beginning with listening and ending with the thought: I spent about two hours thinking about the first sentence of my Mendelssohn study and at the same time listening for my sister’s return, which would put an end to my study before it was even started. However, since I listened for her return with ever increasing intentness, reflecting that, if she did return, she would inevitably ruin my work, while at the same time thinking about the wording of my first sentence, I must finally have nodded off. (Bernhard 1984, 5)

Bernhard requires from his reader a complicated comprehension that includes both reading and listening.¹⁶⁴ The reader is invited to listen to the syntactical

 The fugue is a musical form based on imitation. Prevalent in medieval polyphony, this form reached its peak in Bach’s instrumental fugues and Handel’s fugal choruses. Many scholars refer to the fugue in relation to Bernhard’s work but disagree about the structural application. See for example the controversy regarding the prolog of The Drowned in Andrea Reiter, “Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Musical Prose,’” in Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the s (New York: Berg, ), –; Michael P. Olson “Thomas Bernhard, Glenn Gould, and the Art of the Fugue: Contrapuntal variations in Der Untergeher,” in Modern Austrian Literature  (): –; Lutz Köpnick, “Zur Gewalt der Musik bei Bernhard,” in Sprachkunst: Beitrag zur Literaturwissenschaft  (): ; and Barbara Mariacher, Umspringbilder. Erzählen – Beobachten – Erinnern: Überlegungen zur späten Prosa Thomas Bernhards (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), –. For a general critical perspective see Gudrun Kuhn Ein philosophisch-musikalisch geschulter Sänger: Musikästhetische Überlegungen zur Prosa Thomas Bernhards (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann ), –.  A reflection on this process is found in listener characters such as in The Old Masters (). Addressing his student, the protagonist highlights these qualities by ironically using

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structure, the tonal combinations, and the rhythm of the ordered words in a way that does not annul the previous moment, which is added to the present and the following moments of the reading process, thereby creating the text’s polyphonic texture.¹⁶⁵ This simultaneous listening and reading draw attention to the verbal repetition that reverberates with the psychic mechanism of repression. The sound repetition demonstrates a language of displacement spoken by a person who writes by not writing the story of Germany and Austria. Just before leaving for Palma, sitting in his chair as a metaphor for his chains – his illness, his haunted identity, his distorted homeland – Rudolf repeats verbs such as “leave” (verlassen), “go” (weggehen). He mentions the fact that he talks to himself as if he were a separate, distanced body that needs to be talked to. This reflection embodies the schizophrenic state that appears later in Rudolf’s language disturbances, when the associative flow of foreign words, mixed people and place names culminates in Rudolf’s “claim of being insane.”¹⁶⁶ Moving from a neurotic to a psychotic state, his insanity is illustrated by his language, in which standardized syntax is interfered with and semiotic features are emphasized over semantic content: As I sat there I thought first about Taormina and the Timeo, with Christina and her Fiat, then about Palma and the Meliá, with the Cañellas, their three-story palace and their Mercedes […] The Meliá or the Timeo, Christina or the Cañellas, the Fiat or the Mercedes, I speculated unable to stop myself, as I sat in the iron chair, drawing refreshment from these ridiculous speculations – the Meliá with all the hundreds and thousands of yachts outside the window, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Palma – the Timeo with its bougainvillea flowering at the window – the Meliá and the incredible sea breeze – the ancient bathroom at the Timeo – Christina or the Cañellas – the bougainvillaeas or the sea breeze – the Cathedral or the Greek Theatre, I thought, sitting in the iron chair, the Mallorcans or the Sicilians – Etna or Pollensa – Ramon Llull and Ruben Dario or Pirandello. (Bernhard 1984, 63–64)

the megaphone metaphor as an acoustic filter connecting listener and speaker: “Wir brauchen Zuhörer und ein Sprachrohr, sagte er”; Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), . On this point see also Mariacher , –.  On the polyphonic reading experience, especially the wandering viewpoint (wandernde Blickpunkt), see Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, ), .  See Deleuze on the psychic structure manifested in a unique language; Gilles Deleuze, Kritik und Klinik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), –, and Lacan on aphasia as metonymy; Jacques Lacan, “Metapher und Metonymie,” in Die Psychosen. Das Seminar Buch III (Weinheim und Berlin: Quadriga, ), –.

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[Und abwechselnd dachte ich, auf dem eisernen Sessel sitzend, an Taormina und das Timeo mit Christina und ihrem Fiat, und an Palma und das Meliá und die Cañellas mit ihrem dreistöckigen Palast und ihrem Mercedes […] das Meliá oder das Timeo, die Christina oder die Cañellas, der Fiat oder der Mercedes, hatte ich die ganze Zeit auf dem eisernen Sessel denken und spekulieren müssen […] der unglaubliche Meereswind am Meliá, das uralte Badezimmer im Timeo, Christina oder die Cañellas, die Bougainvilleen oder der Meereswind, die Kathedrale oder das griechische Theater, dachte ich auf dem eisernen Sessel, die Mallorquiner oder die Sizilianer, der Atena oder Pollensa, der Ramón Llull und der Ruben Darío, oder der Pirandello. (Bernhard 1988a, 89–90)]

This is Rudolf’s polylogue, a lonely man sitting in Austria, hoping and wishing for the “other” place to complete the unfinished biography. The polylogical moment demonstrates the blurred boundary between monologue and dialogue where fantasy interferes with reality and tonal similarities subvert the semantic values of language. The metonymic, associative structure of semiotic displacement and semantic distortion becomes the counter-language of Bernhard’s musical biography. Not surprisingly, Rudolf’s trip to Palma also ends in failure. Due to his compulsion to repeat, he is driven into an encounter that activates cultural codes of foreignness, exclusion, and death. At the end of the novel, where the narrator tells the story of Anna Hardtl, a final repetition appears – a variation on death, now connected with the word “concrete,” which is also the title of the novel, namely her husband’s death on the concrete floor, the concrete gravestone in the graveyard, and the concrete that covers Hardtl’s body. Rudolf’s hometown, Peiskam, an Austrian ghost, is reflected in Palma as the identity from which he flees but which keeps haunting him even in this tourist city. Rudolf retreats to his hotel room, falls into nightmarish sleep, and returns to the point of departure: a biography that resists being written. The compulsion to repeat is engraved in the poetic personas.¹⁶⁷

 Mahler-Bungers points out that the mechanism of compulsive repetition is found in the deconstruction of life stories through the writing process; see Annegret Mahler-Bungers, “Die Antiautobiographie. Thomas Bernhard als ‘Antiautobiograph?’” in Über sich selber reden. Zur Psychoanalyse autobiographischen Schreibens (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, ), . However, this interpretation avoids any textual analysis of the deconstructive principle and reduces it simply to “style.”

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A Composer’s Life Story, the Return of the Repressed The fictional world of Concrete comprises a dense net of memories: childhood during the Second World War, a love of music and the narrator’s first musical attempts, descriptions of Salzburg and Vienna, illness, and a preoccupation with the character of the Jewish composer whose music was forbidden during the Third Reich in Germany and Austria. What is the reason for Rudolf’s obsession with this German composer of Jewish descent? What does the activation of intertextual relations between Bernhard’s prose and nineteenth-century music reveal? The intertextual journey begins in Vienna, where Rudolf first heard Mendelssohn’s uncompleted piece Die wandernden Komödianten (The Wandering Players). For Rudolf, Vienna, a city that was left in the hands of reactionary National Socialists and Catholics, embodies decadence and erasure of musical traditions, which he tries to resuscitate through documenting the life and analyzing the music of different composers, especially those composers whose work was prohibited during the Nazi era. Whereas the musical canon of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner was manipulatively integrated and ideologically misused, for instance in the musical programs of the Hitler Youth,¹⁶⁸ works by composers of Jewish descent, such as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Arnold Schoenberg, were banned. Mendelssohn’s name was erased from music catalogs after 1934 and the editor of the journal Die Musik found “Aryan” alternatives such as Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949), Julius Weismann (1879–1950), and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny (1903–1969). The atonal music of the Second Viennese School was also perceived as subversive “Jewish music” that threatened national “German music” and was therefore excluded from performance repertoires and published catalogs. Nazi propaganda typically claimed the existence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that threatened cultural and national values. The Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (Lexicon of Jews in the Music) noted, “The twelve-tone system in music is equivalent to Jewish levelling down in all matters of life […] This represents the complete destruction of the natural order of notes in the tonal principle of our classical music” (quoted in Levi 1994, 103).

 The final concert of the SS youth orchestra was devoted to works by all of these composers, while the increase in the number of musical events dedicated to “German music” by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Reger, Schumann, Wagner, and Bruckner continued into the first months after the German defeat; see Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, ), –, –.

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Nor could “Jewish music” be performed in Vienna. In Concrete Rudolf attempts to “correct” this historical distortion by writing the Mendelssohn biography. He remembers the Nazi prohibition engraved in Austria’s cultural fate, which he sees reappearing in the form of opportunism and radical conservatism, and which he desperately confronts. Not surprisingly, intertextual patterns such as Wagner’s musical dramas, which are admired by Rudolf’s sister, are mirrored in and opposed to Rudolf’s interest in Mendelssohn’s music. As we shall see, the evocation of Wagner in Concrete relates to a wider concept of cultural criticism originating in music, including language and the use of jargon. In his 1850 essay “Judentum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”), Wagner infamously argued that Jews were incapable of creating art or music: Our whole European art and civilization, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other; but at most the homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch – not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings. (Wagner 2001b, 7)

According to Wagner the Jews, lacking a homeland and being foreign to the history, culture, and language of the German people, could speak (after-speak) and create (after-patch) only in their own jargon, Yiddish, which hurts the ears: “The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew’s production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle” (Wagner 2001b, 7). Wagner loathed what he saw as a deformed, dissonant sound with neither resolution nor redemption from its threatening instability, just like its creator, the rootless, homeless Jew. Wagner claimed to have heard such sounds in the synagogues of Leipzig, his hometown: Who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled with the absurd, at hearing that sense-and-sound-confounding gurgle, yodel and cackle, which no intentional caricature can make more repugnant than is offered here in full, in naïve seriousness? (Wagner 2001b, 10)

In contrast to the great German composers from Bach to Beethoven, Wagner associated Mendelssohn with unreliability and artificiality that reverberate with his Jewish descent: a musician who in contrast to “our true music-heroes […] reduces these achievements to vague, fantastic shadow-forms” (Wagner 2001b, 12). For Wagner, the Jewish musician is a fraud. The Jew demonstrates a rendered, false version of the great music, an empty imitation of form without content that distorts the origin with dissonant sounds: “Judaic works of music often produce on us the impression as though a poem of Goethe’s, for instance, were

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being rendered in the Jewish jargon” (Wagner 2001b, 11). Bernhard’s novel reflects on Wagner’s outrageous criticism of Mendelssohn, a converted, “disguised” Jew, for mimicry and lack of originality. Whereas Wagner distinguishes and invents the difference in order to exclude Mendelssohn from the German canon, Bernhard, in contrast, invents the resemblance as his narrator identifies with Mendelssohn. At the beginning of Concrete Rudolf admits to the reader that Mendelssohn is his favorite composer, and the similarities between the two soon become apparent: a man who was banned after his death, the other who feels banned from his own life; a forbidden musical work and an absent musicological text; the foreignness attributed to one as a Jew, imagined by the other as an outsider whom some consider to be sick, even mad. Rudolf’s sister teases him, “how can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven! […] you only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew” (Bernhard 1988a, 23–24 [emphasis in the original]). She points to the ethnic features of Mendelssohn’s identity and elaborates this in stating her musical preferences. She thus dismisses Mendelssohn but worships the composers of the First Viennese School as well as Wagner, whose anti-Semitic views associating Jewishness with illness were not alien to the collective imagination of the German-speaking world from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Third Reich.¹⁶⁹ Rudolf’s over-identification with the “excluded” composer is conveyed through acoustic images. Time and again the narrator of Concrete associates his voice with negative images. He hates his voice – “I’d hated my own voice for years” – and thus parallels Mendelssohn, whose music resonates with “jargon,” producing sounds like a “creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle.” I claim, therefore, that Bernhard “heard” the dissonant sounds defined by Wagner and turned them into a mode of narration, so that Concrete can be seen as an ironic response to Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.” Whereas for Wagner the hybrid language of “jargon” is unmusical, Bernhard inflates his own prose with music, which distorts the coherence of language and threatens the official narrative. Rudolf’s identification with Mendelssohn sheds light on Bernhard’s own identity processes. In his autobiographical essays, Bernhard wrote how as a child in Traunstein he felt like a foreigner.¹⁷⁰ Like Rudolf, he was fascinated

 On the connection between Jewishness and musical aesthetics, see Weiner , –. On the exclusion and banning of “Jewish music” during the Third Reich, see Levi , –.  See Thomas Bernhard, Ein Kind (Salzburg: Residenz, ), ; Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung (Munich: dtv, ), , respectively.

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with “outsider” characters who were “victims of the society.”¹⁷¹ Alongside Mendelssohn or Wagner who become sources of over- and counter-identification for Rudolf, and for Bernhard, the composers of the Second Viennese School play a role too. The subversive musical techniques of the Viennese Avant-garde are translated into Bernhard’s transgressive poetics. For instance, whereas Schoenberg’s “musical prose” incorporates linguistic qualities into his music, Bernhard’s “prosaic music” translates musical qualities into literature.¹⁷² Concrete thus demonstrates Schoenberg’s demand for the “emancipation of the dissonance” by turning the novel against itself, rejecting the story, and becoming a text that refuses to be written as a coherent narrative. Undermining the tonal center of traditional harmony in modern music is analogous to undermining the plot coherence in Bernhard’s writing. Bernhard’s “jargon” challenges the language of the canon that silences the voice of the victim; his is a counter-movement that reflects the desire to destroy his-story, and is thus a key to his self-concept: “I am a story destroyer” (Ich bin ein Geschichtenzerstörer), (Bernhard 1993, 13). This destruction, however, does not imply annihilation. Bernhard creates a “distorted story” by resisting the logic of a hegemonic narrative. Music is his way of creating distorted stories that give voice to that which has been silenced. In other words, emphasizing the musical elements in the language of prose has the effect of undermining plot coherence and interfering with the narrative. The aim, however, is not to erase the story, but rather to develop an alternative mode of writing through which the non-representable can be represented. The new storyteller, “the story-destroyer,” creates a new way of writing that undermines the conventions of traditional prose just as atonal music evokes impressions of disorientation in contrast to tonal music, which evokes impressions of orientation and stability. Bernhard’s novel, therefore, demonstrates a monotonous plot consisting of infinitely repeated variations. The text offers no exit from the hermetic cycle in which the narrator is captured, haunted by the ghosts of dead musicians, except for Hardtl’s story near the end, before returning to the point of departure. This repetition is continued almost ad absurdum and complicates the reading process.¹⁷³ However, it is precisely this strategy that forces the reader into a crit-

 Thomas Bernhard, Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung (Munich: dtv, ), –.  In comparing Bernhard’s literary strategy and Schoenberg’s development of musical ideas, Herzog proposes the term “prosaic music” as a response to “musical prose”; see Andreas Herzog, “Thomas Bernhards Poetik der prosaischen Musik,” in Zeitschrift für Germanistik  (): .  On this issue see Friedlander’s discussion of the pathology of obsessive memory as well as the role of the historian, who is required to explain and at the same time avoid a naïve positivism

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ical reading that recalls what society attempts to forget. In conclusion, the musical elements of Concrete that are embodied in thematic and sound repetitions, as well as in the texture of simultaneously listening and reading, participate in the shaping of a mode of documentation in which non-writing – and forgetting – are merely apparent. At stake here is not the repression of the event, but rather testifying to the repression mechanism of a collective unconscious. This is where the affinity of literature to music challenges hegemonic “sites of memory” and offers an alternative to the oblivion embodied in the empty page of Mendelssohn’s biography and the concrete that covers the dead.

Canon, Politics and Counter-Biography The protagonist of Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction, Franz Josef Murau, receives a telegram about his family’s death in a car crash, and the first part of the book consists of his memories while looking at family photographs and talking with his Italian student, Gambetti. The second part focuses on Murau’s journey to Wolfsegg, his parents’ estate, where the funeral takes place. In contrast to Concrete, here the childhood experience is directly connected to the years of the Third Reich: Murau’s father was a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party and his mother supported the Nazi ideologues. Now, with their death, Murau wishes to cut himself off from this tradition and heritage, and therefore attempts to write an anti-autobiography titled “Extinction.” At the end of the novel, the reader learns that Murau gave his family estate to the Jewish community in Vienna, and his death shortly thereafter can be read as suicide. In pointing to the acoustic similarity between the signifier “Auschwitz” and the novel’s title, “Auslöschung,” Heidelberger-Leonard perceives a lack of sensitivity regarding the Jewish situation, which is further demonstrated by the representation of Jewish characters in the novel. She maintains that Bernhard kills the dead a second time.¹⁷⁴ I, however, believe that fully conscious of the affinity of the literary and the acoustic elements, Bernhard created a reflective text that deals with the problem of language in a historical context. His attitude towards German is transgressive in a way that reveals its horrific distortions. This language that was associated with abuse and carnage is the protagonist’s and the author’s mother tongue. In light of this, the tonal resemblance between Auschthat would create a closed historical narrative; Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana UP, ), –, .  See Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, “Auschwitz als Pflichtfach für Schriftsteller,” in Antiautobiografie: Zu Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), .

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witz and Auslöschung, the historical and the fictional, demonstrates a documentational mode that exposes hidden structures of meaning excluded and repressed by certain political signification processes. Murau’s longing is paradoxical: he wishes to erase his past by rewriting it, but this attempt soon fails and the process already depicted in Concrete continues. Rudolf’s symptomatic behavior is reflected in Murau’s compulsion to repeat. Like Rudolf, Murau deals with traditions of writing and reading, composing and listening. He knows that the past is forever blocked and cannot be repaired in the present. Nevertheless, he is obsessed with an ambivalent, contradictory movement of erasure and creation, deconstruction and reconstruction. In an interview Bernhard described the typical Austrian contradiction: On the first floor violins are playing while on the second floor the gas taps are being opened.¹⁷⁵ Bernhard examines this macabre combination as a cultural/political phenomenon in his play Eve of Retirement which has three characters: Rudolf, head of the Supreme Court who will soon be retiring and who was an SS officer during the Second World War in command of a concentration camp in Poland, and his two sisters, Vera, who admires him, and Clara, who struggles with him.¹⁷⁶ Music heard on-stage functions as an intertextual signifier of cultural traditions, triggering memories and shaping two opposing narratives of past experience. Vera and Rudolf tell the affirmative story of Austria’s “good years,” dwelling nostalgically on cultural and musical traditions that were destroyed by the Allies. Here the music evokes bourgeois spaces where educated children play the violin, cello, and piano. Vera wishes to revive these traditions once again in postwar Germany,¹⁷⁷ and plays a piano arrangement of Mozart’s A Little Night Music, among others. When she mentions how “a culture-folk creates music by itself” (Bernhard 1998, 96), Bernhard points to the reinterpretation inherent in the Nazi music-politics. Her sister Clara tells a contrasting story and tries to interfere with this aestheticizing of the political, exposing the pretense, deception, and vi-

 See Jean-Louis Rambures, “Alle Menschen sind Monster, sobald sie ihren Panzer lüften,” in Von einer Katastrophe in die andere. Dreizehn Gespräche mit Thomas Bernhard (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, ), .  The premiere in  in Stuttgart created a scandal associated with Hans Karl Filbinger, a candidate of the German conservative party. On the play’s reception see Jeanette R. Malkin, “Thomas Bernhard’s Resentment and the Politics of Memory,” in Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, ), –.  “Wir werden wieder Musik machen / du wirst Violine spielen ich Klavier / Beethoven Mozart Chopin”; Thomas Bernhard, Vor dem Ruhestand (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), .

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olence embodied in her family’s musical heritage, and accusing them for misusing the art (Bernhard 1998, 43). The third act of the play sheds further light on the convergence of music and Nazism as a political phenomenon. On his birthday Rudolf secretly celebrates his Nazi self-concept as the whole family pages through a photo album to the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Here Bernhard combines a musical event with evidence of death and extinction in a series of photographs: the concentration camp Rudolf commanded, a meeting with Himmler, a concert where an SS officer’s daughter played, a visit to Auschwitz, the killing of Jews in the gas chambers – all become part of Rudolf’s sense of his Nazi legacy. The recollections and memories evoked by the photographs are contrasted with the counter-narrative of Clara, who is confined to a wheelchair and must stay in the room and bear it all, unable to escape the family’s origins and celebration of its inheritance. A similar desire to annul his origins characterizes Murau. Extinction reconstructs the ambiguity of music as non-semantic art by showing how easily it can be manipulated and misused on the one hand, while on the other demonstrating how it can function as a means of criticism. An example of this duality can be found in the activation of musical intertexts such as allusions to the classical repertoire of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert. Haydn’s music (including the melody of the Austrian national anthem) incorporates a symmetrical rhythmicmelodic structure, balanced and stable like the bourgeois enterprise of producing an autonomous, educated subject. On arriving at his late parents’ estate, Murau hears the local orchestra playing Haydn, and he immediately recalls the music that was played in the village when he was a child. His nostalgic descriptions reveal his affection for the classical repertoire he grew up with. Throughout the novel, however, playing Haydn is connected with the Nazis, first as a hypothetical scenario, and second in the funeral march as the family, village people, representatives of the Catholic Church, Nazi officers, and party members join in procession to the sounds of the music played by local musicians: The village band played the Haydn piece again, better than before, I thought, and the cortege moved even more slowly toward the cemetery than it had previously moved toward the church. I have always hated processions and parades, especially accompanied by music. All the world’s disasters have been inaugurated by processions and parades, I thought. I was revolted by the thought that not far behind me were former Gauleiters of the Upper Danube and the Lower Danube, the very people who had desecrated the Children’s Villa and permanently ruined it for me. Behind them were the veterans of the League of Comrades, some of them on crutches – men who had fought for their abominable Nazi ideals and been awarded the Blood Order for doing so. (Bernhard 1995, 321)

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In one breath Murau mentions the funeral march and the childhood villa, which was used as a hideout for Nazi officers after the war. The memory reveals not only the musical tradition and legacy of Wolfsegg, but also the Nazi chronicle, starting in the years of the Third Reich, continuing after the Second World War, and ending in the funeral. One specific example of the violence embodied in this tradition is the story of Schermeir, who was deported to a concentration camp after his neighbor betrayed him (Bernhard 1995, 208). Murau sees the injustice clearly: the forgotten victim, a miner who was never “excused” for being oppressed and violently excluded, in contrast to the perpetrator, a rural governor who now enjoys a good pension as a civil servant. Listening to the orchestra playing Haydn, Murau thinks about the country that provided the murderer with a wealthy life while simultaneously neglecting and forgetting his victim (1995, 209). He reflects on the collective processes of extinction and repression characterizing Austrian society, and in response, attempts to write his anti-autobiography to tell the story of the victims. But is this possible? Do the methods of forgetting used by Murau escape the repression mechanism of Austrian society? And finally, is it not he, the Austrian, who becomes the ultimate victim? Bernhard explores these tensions and complexities by translating the violence of the represented world into the language of representation. This is manifested, for example, in the aggressive language with which Murau describes events in order to erase them, introducing and presenting the traditional musical canon only to undermine and refute its components. This canon was manipulatively abused in the formation of a deceptive political myth and still continues to contribute to collective processes of negating the past. Bernhard seeks music that apparently alienates the historical in order to avoid the fetishism and totality of master narratives. The cultural canon is discussed in a conversation between Murau and Gambetti, who espouses anarchy in contrast to reactionary and opportunist politics. The discussion aims at exposing these deceptive tendencies of Austrian culture and society under the influence of the Catholic Church as diagnosed by Murau: The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. (Bernhard 1995, 73)

Behind Murau’s back, Bernhard converses with the classical repertoire. He illustrates classical music’s dual, ambiguous face, encouraging ignorance and a

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weak historical consciousness on the one hand, and enabling a critical representation of social conditions on the other. This socio-cultural reception of the musical canon plays a central role in the novel’s critical inquiry. Murau despises the way people consume and listen to music in Austria, as his mother did, so he tries to subvert that sovereignty by undermining the mother tongue, German, metaphorically cutting it off from its origins. Not only the formation and reception of a musical canon, but also that of a literary canon is called into question. For example, the allusion to Goethe reveals the deception inherent in bourgeois literary consumption. Goethe’s work contributed to the foundation of an official, standardized language, the language of the German nation, a basis for its establishment as a “nation of culture.” Like Grass, Bernhard employs a critical perspective inspired by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment while turning Goethe into an object of parody: “The prince of poets – what a ridiculous notion! Yet how utterly German!” (Bernhard 1995, 291). Murau repetitively employs parody to shock or surprise his audience (here his student) and thus to compel critical rethinking of the canon and its reception. However, the bourgeois order is only one of Murau’s objects of criticism, as demonstrated by his sharp, violent language:¹⁷⁸ Goethe is the philosophical pied piper, the German for all seasons, I told him. The Germans take their Goethe like medicine, believing in its efficacy, its health-giving properties. Goethe is nothing other than Germany’s foremost intellectual quack, I told Gambetti, her first intellectual homeopath. The Germans swallow their Goethe, as it were, and are healthy. (Bernhard 1995, 290)

In criticizing postwar German and Austrian society Bernhard hints at how the literary canon can function as an alibi: on the one hand is the idea that Nazism was an accident in the history of Germany and that by going back to Goethe the nation can be healed from its “dark times”; on the other is the victimization of the Austrians who suffered under the Nazis.¹⁷⁹ Murau develops this simultaneous affirmation and refutation of the canon by pointing to writers such as Hölderlin,  Adrian Stevens employs Bakhtin’s carnival theory in defining Murau’s subversion of the bourgeois order; see Adrian Steven, “Schimpfen als künstlerischer Selbstentwurf: Karneval und Hermeneutik in Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung,” in Thomas Bernhard: Beiträge zur Fiktion der Postmoderne (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), –. According to Stevens, this comical taboo-breaking aims at emancipation from cultural traditions, but he does not discuss the cultural-historical context of this process.  Hoell argues that in contrast to Germany, Austria was not punished after the Second World War, which enabled the cultural and socio-economic development that shaped a new historical Austrian consciousness; see Joachim Hoell, Mythenreiche Vorstellungswelt und ererbter Albtraum: Ingeborg Bachmann und Thomas Bernhard (Berlin: VanBremen, ), –.

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Musil, and Kleist as opposites of Goethe: “Hölderlin is the great lyricist, Musil the great prose writer, and Kleist the great dramatist. Goethe fails on all three counts” (Bernhard 1995, 291). Franz Kafka and a fictitious female poet called Maria, who shared some biographical details with Ingeborg Bachmann,¹⁸⁰ also provide an alternative to the ultimate hero of the German canon. For instance, there is an allusion to Bachmann’s poem “Böhmen liegt am Meer,” (“Bohemia Lies by the Sea”) which is Murau’s favorite poem. Maria’s poems are a source of inspiration for Murau, also a poet, who reads his poems to her, before destroying them. She, however, also does not escape his critical tongue. Murau ironically points to her nostalgic conception of Heimat, alluding to Bachmann’s images of a utopian homeland: “the word home, coming from her lips, sounded as grotesque as it would coming from mine, though I never used the word, which I find too emetic, whereas Maria used it nonstop, saying that home was the most seductive word” (1995, 117 [emphasis in the original]). Murau’s quest for a poetics of resistance is translated into visions of political action, and he imagines the revolution led by Gambetti, which will explode the world (Bernhard 1995, 543). This revolutionary potential, however, is actually Murau’s projection of the destructive passion that has developed in him in the face of latent fascism and cultural decadence. Murau’s desire to eliminate these distortions and enable the emergence of a new, critical society is embodied by the “lesson” he prepares for an Austria that has not yet been punished for its historical crimes. Similar to the depicted relationship between Bebra and Oskar in Grass’s The Tin Drum, the mentor/student relationship as portrayed here includes parody, negation and deconstruction, all directed at the apprenticeship novel (Bildungsroman).¹⁸¹ The parody genre appears again in the subversion of the literary canon – not in the poetic illustration of the pedagogical and educational process, but rather in the pessimism and skepticism embodied in the rhetoric of cursing and exaggerating. The mentor’s projection onto the student also reveals the weakness of the former to realize the desired change in the world.  Like the poetic persona Maria, Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, also Robert Musil’s birthplace, and traveled between Vienna, Germany, and Paris until she found her home in Rome. For an analysis of the intertextual relations to the poem “Böhmen liegt am Meer,” see Joachim Hoell, Der “literarische Realitätenvermittler.” Die “Liegenschaften” in Thomas Bernhards Roman Auslöschung (Berlin: VanBremen, ), –.  See Hermann Korte, “Dramaturgie der ‘Übertreibungskunst’: Thomas Bernhards Roman Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall,” in Thomas Bernhard (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, ), ; and Wilhelm Voßkamp, “Auslöschung. Zur Selbstreflexion des Bildungsromans im . Jahrhundert bei Thomas Bernhard,” in Literatur und Demokratie. Festschrift für Hartmut Steinecke zum . Geburtstag (Göttingen: Erich Schmidt, ), –, respectively.

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What remains is the planned anti-autobiography. Nevertheless, this weakness becomes powerful. As the demand for a revolutionary praxis declines, anarchism as a critical method of thinking, speaking, and writing increases. This is the language used in representing the musical and literary canons; the language of resistance becomes an alternative to the misused language of clichés and manipulative pretense. In exploring the German canon with his tense, contradictory language, the narrator – a fictional author of a musical anti-Austrian novel – attempts to interfere with the forgetfulness of collective memory.¹⁸²

Un-Musical Mother Tongue, Jargon and Dissonance Linguistic self-reflection clearly plays a central role in Bernhard’s poetics. We have already discussed some aspects of this phenomenon in examining intertextual relations, which illustrate both the misuse of language in political discourses of the Third Reich, and its part in the collective process of denial and repression. As we saw in Concrete, a dominant element of Bernhard’s language is the way he borrows and translates musical elements, incorporating acoustic images and a range of voices, organized hierarchically in a way that creates meaning. His protagonist/narrators are aware of their voice and reflect on it. As noted above, Rudolf describes his voice as hoarse, the voice of a “Geschichtenzerstörer,” analogous to an atonal, disharmonic texture. Murau points to the shrieking, unpleasant voices of Wolfsegg that correlate with and supplement the false tones played in Austrian music halls. Shrieking voices are attributed not only to Murau’s mother, who is metonymically associated with the Austrian homeland, but also to his sisters and the servants, who have lost their unique voices through adjustment to the standard and their appropriation by the mother, and to Spedollini, the mother’s lover. Bernhard develops the aesthetics of hoarseness by establishing a hierarchy of differences in the novel’s semantic space. In order to explain this I turn once again to Adorno’s discussion of musical dissonance. In Philosophy of Modern Music he distinguishes between chaotic and systematic disharmonies, specifically between “cacophony” as a casual, unpleasant texture of tones and “dissonance” as a tenseness seeking resolution (1975b, 40). Adorno would argue that tonality is not only anachronistic and has ceased to reflect social and technical progress, but is also false and deceptive. Hence, consonant harmony is cacoph-

 Helms-Derfert, Die Last der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur Prosa von Thomas Bernhard (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, ), .

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onous, not the dissonant chord. In light of this, it would seem that Bernhard attempts to offer an alternative to deceptive modes of representing the past and the formation of false memories, by reorganizing “unpleasant” sound images to reverberate with poetic documentation. In the fictitious world of Extinction cacophonous shrieking is a sign of standard fluency and of reactionary conformity, whereas dissonance represents the critical process of resistance. Similarly, Murau draws attention to the falsified rendition of Bruckner’s piece played by the Austrian orchestra in postwar Linz and thus reveals another level of meaning. The music of Bruckner, whom Hitler wanted to turn into the Reich’s national composer, is conducted by Ougen Jochum, who during the Third Reich was active in Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna.¹⁸³ These two names that connect to the music-politics of the Third Reich are a part of the heritage Murau’s parents participated in.¹⁸⁴ The parents embody the decadence and pretense of a society that fills the concert halls and opera houses, and consumes music without critically accounting for the conditions of its creation and reception: And then, because they have to make use of their theater subscription, they go to Linz and see some dire comedy, without feeling in the least ashamed of themselves. And they go to those ridiculous concerts at the Bruckner House, where innumerable wrong notes are played at maximum volume. These people […] haven’t just taken out subscriptions for the theater and concerts: they live their whole lives on a subscription basis. (Bernhard 1995, 29)

Murau’s parents manifest the lack of critical awareness that determines their bureaucratic visits to cultural events. Their shrieking and hoarse voices, those voices heard in Wolfsegg, are metaphorically associated with blind obedience and hypocrisy. They reflect the grating sounds Murau ascribes to his mother’s language, German, which contrasts with the negative musical language of Murau, the language of resistance in Adorno’s sense. According to Murau, the German

 Hitler wanted to found a center of Austrian music in Linz, Bruckner’s and his hometown, following the model of Bayreuth. The first stage of this project was the foundation of the Linz Bruckner Orchestra, which played Bruckner concerts during the season; see Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, ), .  How should Bruckner’s music be played and Wagner’s operas be heard after the Nazi era? These questions are not intended to negate performance of the music, but rather call for more critical modes of reception; consider, for example, Theodor Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ) and Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existenzielle Erfahrung. Schriften – (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf u. Härtel, ), .

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falsifies meanings and fails to represent reality either adequately or appropriately: German is essentially an ugly language, which not only grinds all thought into the ground, as I have already said, but actually falsifies everything with its ponderousness. It’s quite incapable of expressing a simple truth as such. By its very nature it falsifies everything. It’s a crude language, devoid of musicality, and if it weren’t my mother tongue, I wouldn’t speak it […] German, in spite of being my mother tongue, always sounds alien and ghastly! To a musical and mathematical person like you or me, Gambetti, the German language is excruciating […] the German language is completely antimusical. (Bernhard 1995, 119 [emphasis in the original])

Here the term “antimusical” refers to a language that lies and falsifies. The unpleasant sounds are a metaphoric attribute of the standardized language of the cultural canon in its reception and consumption – the language of historical oblivion. From this point Murau develops his notion of a weak historical consciousness by using the counter-concept: “musicality.” What might be seen as a parody on Wagner’s “unmusical Jews” becomes a tool of criticism that emerges from reflection on language and its musical spirit. Thus Murau’s “jargon,” the language of resistance that undermines and challenges the standard hegemonic language, is musical. This language consists of rhythmic and tonal repetitions, and carnivalistic manifestations such as curses, wordplay, and illogic. As a contrast to the cacophonous German of the Wolfsegg tenants – the shrieking, anti-musical mother tongue that becomes metonymic for cultural decadence and repression in postwar Austrian society – Bernhard places Murau’s dissonant, disturbing German, which returns to its musical origins, to its Dionysian elements, a source of deconstruction, an infinite movement and displacement. Even the rhythmic texture subverts conventional syntax. This shows Bernhard’s attempt to replace cacophony with dissonance, to recall musicality back into the script, into the language he uses in order to write the musical biography. As in Concrete, in Extinction location plays a pivotal role in the movement of negation. Bernhard uses the metaphorical rhythm of life and heartbeats to illustrate the opposition between Rome and Wolfsegg, between Italian exile and the Austrian homeland.¹⁸⁵ At its core is the illness of a sick body that fled from Wolf-

 On the novel’s topographical and geographical schema, see Hans Höller “Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung als Comédie humaine der österreichischen Geschichte,” in Thomas Bernhard: Beiträge zur Fiktion der Postmoderne (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), –; Steffen Vogt, “Trauer und Identität. Erinnerung bei Thomas Bernhard und Peter Weiss,” in Thomas Bernhard: Traditionen und Trabanten (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann ), –, and Mariacher , –.

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segg in order to be reborn, unlike a whole society that is captured in decadent pretense and violent oblivion. Like Rudolf, whose trip to Palma fails to free him from his ghosts, Murau also fails to deal with his origins by moving to Rome; his language, however, which seems marked by destruction and failure, internalizes the “Roman Rhythm” (römischer Rhythmus) of a critical thinking that exposes the distortion (Bernhard 1995, 534). Like Rudolf, Murau translates the rhythmic disturbances into a language that testifies to an event that always occurs either “too early” or “too late.” The subject can never meet this event, but rather tells of its yawning emptiness: In the Children’s Villa I looked for my childhood, but naturally I did not find it. I went into all the rooms in search of my childhood, but of course it was not there […] We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void (gähnende Leere). We go into the house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious gaping void, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into this gaping void. Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a gaping void […] the Children’s Villa is the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood but the whole of your past is a gaping void. (Bernhard 1995, 301–302 [emphasis in the original])

These sentences are part of a monologue based on two motifs that embody the time and the place, the “children’s villa”, and the “gaping void.” Murau’s attempt to “revisit” and reconstruct his childhood experience finds only emptiness and has to admit failure, reaching a dead-end illustrated by cyclical verbalization. The past cannot be explored or re-experienced. In this monologue the repetition of “I thought” (Ich dachte) suspends concrete information, and these gaps produce a unique rhythm within which the question of memory is examined and explored. Recalling the past is by no means an answer to a weak historical consciousness; however, the emphasis on tonal patterns through verbal repetitions such as “gähnende Leere” or variations on the verb “hineingehen” (go into) reveal a hidden significance. These repetitions momentarily suspend the passing time through infinite movement that, however, refuses to mark or define that which has been excluded from language. In this sense, Bernhard’s poetics may challenge historiography on the one hand and collective processes of denial on the other. Moments of suspension within infinite movement appear also in the context of careful observing and listening, as Murau says at the end of the novel when he mentions the art of the insignificant:

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On the way from the Children’s Villa to the office, for instance, I observed precisely how the clouds behind the villa had taken on the shape of a dragon with a wide-open mouth. Even in memory such triviality can remain clear, so that we can sometimes picture precisely the movement of the cloud formations even weeks, months or years later […] what we witnessed years ago can still be seen and heard precisely, if we can master the mechanism that makes this possible […] I believe I have developed this natural mechanism into an art, which I practice every day and intend to perfect. (Bernhard 1995, 310–311)

By focusing on the marginalia, the small details, and the parts instead of the whole, the static becomes dynamic.¹⁸⁶ This perception sets remembrance in motion. In this sense Murau’s art resists and alienates symbolic acts of commemoration, such as monuments and tombstones. The infinite movement hints at a poetics of memory that avoids fixing or categorizing past events. In focusing on the parts instead of the whole, on the gaps, the void, and the absence instead of the presence, on the changeable instead of the stable, this poetics hints at negative realms of memory within which a true remembrance and attention to the past may emerge. Murau’s anti-autobiography illustrates an attempt to rewrite the complexity of origins as a dual, polyphonic, movement of reconstruction and extinction. This fails, of course, but despite the narrator’s death, his uncompleted script remains, reflecting and testifying to the amnesia of modern society. In this sense, Extinction also fails to offer a solution or redemption for the victims through programmatic grief-work, which after all is no more than another means of regulation and exclusion.¹⁸⁷ The monumental “sites of memory” are nothing but the emptiness and void revealed to Murau in his search for his lost childhood. Bernhard does not kill the dead again. On the contrary, his work becomes a poetic medium within which exclusionary methods are explored critically and subverted by strategies of deconstruction, exaggeration, and parody. His work documents the mechanism of memory and in so doing exposes that which has been repressed by it. Focusing on the marginal and the partial, the dynamic,

 On this process see also Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the “optical unconscious” (das optische Unbewusste), namely a method of photographic augmentation that undermines the static and stable fixing of a visual image; “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), – .  I agree with Buzer regarding the stereotypical representation used ad absurdum, a reflection of Murau’s strategy of exaggeration, which operates and is reflected in both stories, the “bad” – the story of the German Nazi – and the “good” – the Jewish victim; see Günter Butzer, Fehlende Trauer: Verfahren epischen Erinnerns in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Munich: Fink, ), .

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changeable, and infinitely unstable is Bernhard’s answer to a politics and a place for which denial and extinction became a way of life.

Cadence Fascinated by music, Bernhard explores its possibilities through a critical inquiry into Austria and its Nazi past. Music also fascinates his literary characters – Rudolf, who wishes to write a biography of Mendelssohn, and Murau, who hears the sounds of Haydn while in Wolfsegg. This is also true for the narrator of The Drowned, who listens to Bach. The novel begins with news of a double death – Glenn Gould, the celebrated Canadian pianist who died a natural death, and Wertheimer, who committed suicide. Arriving at Wertheimer’s house, the narrator discovers that he had destroyed all his notes – parts of an autobiography he intended to write. As in the case of Murau and Rudolf, the planned autobiography was never completed, either refusing to be written or intentionally destroyed, thereby reflecting the compulsive self-destruction of their creators. All three protagonists, however, leave another story behind, a musical biography that challenges the traditional conventions of the cultural canon. The Drowned ends with the sound of an infinitely repeating phonograph record, Glenn Gould performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As the narrator finally learns from a witness, just before his death Wertheimer, too, had played the Goldberg Variations – performing the piece live as a counterpoint to the recorded version. However, in contrast to Gould’s perfect execution, Wertheimer, the Jewish pianist, chose to tamper with the melodies and interfere with the traditional rendition of the music. He distorted the melodies of the great German master whose music was played and abused by the Nazis. The Austrian-Jew’s “wrong,” inaccurate playing resonates with the unbalanced language, the offkey “jargon,” the dissonance of his literary Austrian “doubles” – Rudolf and Murau – demonstrating the only appropriate way of responding and bearing witness to disaster. Scholars have drawn different conclusions regarding Bernhard’s way of dealing with and representing the past. One approach, psychoanalytical in nature, views his work as a therapeutic model based on working through of grief and attempting to come to terms with the past.¹⁸⁸ A different approach views Bern-

 See Korte, “Dramaturgie der ‘Übertreibungskunst’: Thomas Bernhards Roman Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall,” in Thomas Bernhard (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, ), –, Silke Schlicht-

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hard’s literature as an attempt to document the failure and impossibility of representing the non-representable.¹⁸⁹ As demonstrated above, my view is that Bernhard’s texts do not constitute a therapeutic means of dealing with the past, but rather reveal that the affinity between text and music facilitates a unique mode of response to the catastrophe of the Second World War. This affinity is created by intertextual relations that activate historical contexts within which the cultural and musical canon was received and consumed. The relation to music is also manifested in the hierarchical organization of acoustic images: at the structural-linguistic level, emphasizing rhythmic and phonetic repetitions, and on the formal level, alluding to analogies between a pseudo-simultaneous narrative and a musical polyphonic texture. Both Concrete and Extinction portray the psychic mechanism of compulsive repetition that is engraved in the narrator’s language. This is not a language of repression; rather it evokes critical reflection on the cultural legacies in Austria that are associated with the mechanism of collective repression. In this light we may view the subversion of the canon – musical and literary. We also see in the novels an explanation of the central role of dissonance that interferes with hegemonic traditions. Rudolf fails to write the musical biography of Mendelssohn just as Murau fails to write the anti-autobiography of Wolfsegg, and like Rudolf, Murau admits his defeat, acknowledging the impossibility of meeting the “things that do not respond.” However, both embody a poetic persona, a subject that is compelled to search for the “gaping void” and the “material that always remains incomplete,” escaping all methods of totalizing, regulating, and organizing. Bernhard’s poetics challenges historical representation; it does not seek to describe what occurred, but rather reflects on the impossibility of “meeting” the event. His poetics evokes a consciousness of a lack and muteness that does not represent, but rather hints at the conditions of a negative – and therefore authentic – remembrance.

mann, Das Erzählprinzip Auslöschung. Zum Umgang mit Geschichte in Thomas Bernhards Roman Auslöschung Ein Zerfall (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ), –.  Günter Butzer Fehlende Trauer: Verfahren epischen Erinnerns in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Munich: Fink, ), –, argues that Bernhard’s novel demonstrates the “paradox of commemoration.” This is a general trend in German literature from the s to the s, according to which neither adequate documentation of the past nor healing is possible, but can only end in disaster and failure. Steffen Vogt, “Trauer und Identität. Erinnerung bei Thomas Bernhard und Peter Weiss,” in Thomas Bernhard: Traditionen und Trabanten (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann ), –, is more ambivalent, maintaining that the death concluding the end of Extinction demonstrates the failed attempt to shape an alternative identity, and that the fictional autobiographical writing is evidence of incomplete mourning.

Interlude IV. Composer: Sound Transfiguration after Reunification After German reunification (1989/90) one might have expected to discern new trends in the way German literature was dealing with the catastrophe of the Second World War. As we have seen in several pre-reunification novels, the “enemy” is associated with National Socialism and is transformed into either demonic figures (Mann, Grass) or family members and “doubles” (Bachmann, Bernhard). In contrast, the new novels direct their criticism to other nationalities and countries that participated in the Second World War and were identified as enemies of the Germans, such as Russia (communism) and the United States (capitalism). Hand in hand with this trend is the increasingly sympathetic depiction of protagonists who collaborated with Nazism, expounding their weakness and failure of judgment rather than viewing their violent acts as intentional and consciously part of the political and socio-cultural context – a poetic strategy more likely to evoke the reader’s understanding of and sympathy for, and even identification with, these characters. Moreover, many writers of the post-war generation in Germany wrote fictional biographies of characters who were either children during the Third-Reich years, or were born after the war, adding new layers to critical accounts of the representation of Germany’s past. Hans Ulrich-Treichel is a case in point. His literary work demonstrates particular life stories, interweaving fiction and documentary, personal and collective, in order to explore the complications of the German catastrophe. He too refers to musicological traditions and sound figurations that reverberate with earlier attempts of German and Austrian writers to deal with the question of representing the past. Like those writers, Treichel seeks in music alternative means of challenging conventional modes of testimony. Such is the musical biography The Tristan Chord, a novel that views aesthetic and cultural legacies with intimacy and humor, obsession and self-reflection. The novel probes the limits of historical and political discourses in reunified Germany by subverting cultural and musical traditions. Borrowing from and elaborating on the Romantic irony, Treichel exposes clichés in the history of music by alluding to composers we have already encountered in the literary works above, such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Brahms. Here as well, the obvious affinity of literature with music also sheds light on other fields, such as historiography and biography: Ironically, Treichel’s narrator claims that he is not in-

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terested in the question of memory, but rather the question of oblivion. However, precisely this claim regarding the exploration of cultural oblivion hints at a very striking memory poetics. The Tristan Chord tells the story of Georg, a young poet, who, after realizing that far too many scholars have been occupied with the question of memory, plans to write a breakthrough doctoral dissertation on the question of oblivion in German literature. However, instead of pursuing his research, Georg becomes an assistant to a well-known German composer, Bergmann, who intends to write his own autobiography. Treichel portrays an eccentric composer who embodies the Mephistopheles element, the demonic double of Faust – a founding myth in the traditions of German Enlightenment and Romanticism. Bergmann asks his assistant to edit his memoirs and later to write the text for a new composition. Surprisingly, Georg discovers that despite his celebrated image as one of Germany’s most important composers, Bergmann cannot play more than one chord: It was not a simple chord, but still intelligible, and its sound was so sorrowfully longing and unresolved that Georg was immediately convinced that it had to be the Tristan Chord. The Tristan Chord was the only chord Georg knew by name, and so whenever he heard Wagner or something like Wagner with a sorrowfully longing and somehow unresolved chord, he rushed to say: “the Tristan Chord.” (Treichel 2000a, 79 [translation mine])

The Tristan Chord – perhaps the most famous chord in the history of modern music, which inaugurates Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde – as a subject of musicological discourse and theory had already become inherent in a specific political culture.¹⁹⁰ This chord consists of four pitches – f, b, d, g – that appear in the first bars of the opera and occur simultaneously in the second act. Despite the chord’s dense texture, the resolution of the dissonance is delayed throughout the opera and arrives fully only in the third act. Its dissonant sounds results from the chromatic tonal texture and its function within the complete harmonic movement. This expanded dissonance also became a source for the atonal music developed by Schoenberg in the twentieth century and anticipated the move from the classical harmonic tradition based on tonal hierarchy to a new conception of a music that demonstrates the “emancipation of the dissonance.”

 On the political aspects of Wagner’s musical dramas, see for example Mary A. Cicora Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner’s MusicDramas (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), –; Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera,” in Music and German National Identity (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, ), –, and Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s Ring (Aldershot: Ashgate, ).

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The Tristan Chord is heard in the dramatic moments of the opera and anticipates the tragic end of the forbidden love between the mythological knight and the princess. Because of the long-delayed resolution of the dissonance, this chord evokes in the listener feelings of tension and uncertainty, anticipation and mystery. Reverberating with an erotic riddle, the Tristan Chord embodies a promise of and a longing for the redemptive power of love, if not in life, then in death: “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word,” wrote Wagner in an 1849 letter to August Roeckel, the founder of Volksblätter; “fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness, and this fear is generated only when love itself is already beginning to wane” (Wagner 1988, 306). Wagner eroticizes the struggling with the fear-of-death. His ideal world transgresses the lines between love and death, courage and sacrifice. This transgression became central for the Wagnerian enterprise that combined political and aesthetic visions in the ideological construction of the new German myth. The Gesamtkunstwerk – a “total artwork” written for the people and by the people (das Volk) – was intended to offer a model of national community, and to be an inspiration for composers and politicians, intellectuals and writers. This total artwork also became an object of critical inquiry, as we have seen in the famous case of Nietzsche and in the body of literary work explored in this book. Treichel incorporates these musicological subtexts generated in the Wagnerian discourse and the counter-discourse in his own musical biography. His poetic strategy is irony: For example, whenever Georg, Treichel’s narrator, hears a Wagnerian or semi-Wagnerian chord, filled with sadness and longing, he calls it the Tristan Chord. This musical fixation makes a great impression on the female of German-literature students, and Georg exploits this romantic Wagnerian image very successfully in his sexual life until the day he meets a female musicology student. The dinner he prepares for her is, of course, accompanied by music, the first course being served to the jazz sounds of Miles Davis and the main course to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. With the last course Georg tries to move beyond sighing “der Tristankkord”: When he – they had already arrived at dessert – repeated the words “Tristan Chord” and wanted to rest his hand on hers, she drew back her hand and said forcefully: “Oh no you don’t!” She then departed rather quickly and never called him again. That evening the Tristan Chord had gotten stuck in his throat and he had resolved to do more research and learn the exact places in the opera where the chord appears. (Treichel 2000a, 80 [translation mine])

Treichel’s protagonist believes that the reason for his humiliation is his insufficient musical education, and decides to strengthen his knowledge of Wagner’s

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musical dramas. He studies the controversy between two musicologists and learns from John Stewart’s “The Tristan Chord: Identity and Origin” that the Tristan Chord is not as clear or comprehensible as he had first thought and becomes more intelligible only from knowledge of Wagner’s predecessors – Purcell, Bach, Scarlatti, and Beethoven. Instead of pursuing this approach, Georg concludes that his dinner guest might have stayed longer had he only called it the “TC,” as the experts did. The novel The Tristan Chord is a parody on processes of interpretation and reception of musical drama. In Wagner’s artwork the chord embodies the lovers’ longing for unification, which is fulfilled at the moment of death. The sounds resonate with a riddle that can be neither solved nor deciphered, a motif that can be traced only within the framework of a specific musical hermeneutics. Georg overlooks this hermeneutic option, and mistakenly translates the dissonance into his personal attempts at love. The Tristan Chord thus becomes an empty gesture, a decoration for a pathetic lover and a failed seduction. Moreover, this is not the end of the story. The autobiography of Bergmann, the celebrated German composer, is never completed. Instead of creating and writing, he becomes a tyrannical figure who oppresses his assistant and sees his creativity ebbing away. The chord appears as a symptom of decadence, infertility, and symbolic castration. Georg then relinquishes his poetic creation, the composer ceases writing his autobiography, and his symphony consists of one chord only, which Georg says sounds “as if rising from the abyss and is followed by nothing. Only silence” (Treichel 2000a, 237 [translation mine]). The dissonant sounds apparently resonate with the depth of being, but now that depth is silent. Not a voice or a sound follows. With this dissonant chord we arrive back at Thomas Mann’s musical biography, Doctor Faustus. We could say that Leverkühn’s project is equivalent to the Gesamtkunstwerk in that private and national life stories are interwoven, but the difference is clear: whereas Wagner’s music was created for the Wilhelminian period, Mann’s protagonist completes his work with the rise of Nazism. The rise and fall of Leverkühn embodies the political culmination of the Tristan Chord. The composer dies not only as a hero, but also as a musical martyr. His physical and mental collapse represents the collapse of a worldview – a heroic attempt to continue the tradition of culture, humanism, and Bildung beyond its classical forms and historical limitations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this attempt had already manifested itself in different ideological forms, among them the aesthetic ideology of Expressionism. The musical avant-garde of the Second Viennese School with its deconstruction of hierarchical tonal system (atonality and emancipation of the dissonance), presented a revolutionary leftist

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and anti-fascist agenda, but its methods resembled the politics of rightwing nationalism. Mann was aware of these similarities. His poetic dissonance, which alludes to the Tristan Chord inherent in German Romanticism, thus indicates not only an insightful and productive avant-garde, but also a musical development that anticipated the violent and ecstatic forms of modernist art. In this sense Leverkühn, the protagonist who fails to escape the dissonance, becomes its victim. This is not the case with the musicology student in Treichel’s post-reunification musical biography. On a different stage and demonstrating new attempts at dealing with the German past – beyond the pathos of Wagnerian myths and Romantic traditions – the female musicology student protests and refuses to play the role assigned her by her male “lover.”

Coda. The End of Musical Biography? For someone born outside of Germany, and for whom the history of National Socialism and the Second World War was inaccessible, and if related, reported or discussed, was still unperceivable, I sought various routes for exploring this horrific past. Historiography was one of the sources, literature another; however I always felt that something was missing. Furthermore, there was the issue of traumatic experience and the way in which people speak that which escapes or resists language. My search led me to music and to the works of those writers who made use of music in their exploration of the Nazi past. I was moved by their literature and by the alternative modes of expression and response they offered. My inquiry into these works let me ask more questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification affect our perception and how does this affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise, and what do we do with irony? How do refutation and subversion of, and interference with official narratives contribute to our understanding of this past? What do these musical biographies actually reveal? This brings me back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay on the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. Exploring the possibilities of the Dionysian force, as reflected in musical dissonance, to shape unique modes of documentation, Nietzsche’s essay became a model for writers of German and Austrian literature in the twentieth century. As we have seen, Thomas Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and Hans-Ulrich Treichel all responded in their work to Nietzsche’s speculative account of music. Mann’s Doctor Faustus thus seeks to discern the signs of the German catastrophe in the history of music and the symbolic life story of a modernist musician. His employment of a musical intertext, sound correlations and formal analogies plays a central role in his pivotal biography. Mann used Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique as a model for his protagonist’s innovative compositional style. This style, which characterizes Leverkühn’s late musical pieces, embodies an element of menace and barbarism that was repressed in the cultural process and returns as a violent explosion. Doctor Faustus also hints at Mann’s political views. Despite the fact that he refused to return to Germany after the Second World War, Mann submitted his novel instead: his poetic delegate takes upon himself the German guilt and suffering and thus bequeaths the Germans a promise of cure.

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Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen also explores the relationship between discourses of modern music and the cultural representation of the Nazi past. In employing a new language that draws inspiration from atonality and musical dissonance, and that combines different perspectives to interfere with a stable, coherent narrative, Koeppen deepens the sense of horror and estrangement, while at the same time rejecting any attempt to come to terms with the past. Günter Grass produced his own version of a musical biography in The Tin Drum. In shaping a carnivalesque worldview by pushing musical imagery to absurd lengths, and in combining different styles, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to jazz rhythms and American pop hits, Grass challenged hegemonic discourses on mourning and suffering, guilt, and trauma. His narrator, as opposed to Mann’s, does not interpret harmonic movements in Beethoven’s most celebrated piece, but rather interferes with the symmetrical march rhythms played on solemn symbolic occasions. Grass’s protagonist, a clown or fool figure seemingly originating from a grotesque carnival, lives in postwar West Germany and playfully shifts between resistance and affirmation, protest and conformity. His incongruous movement exposes that which was silenced and dismissed by the new political agenda. In pointing to the power of deceptive appearances, such as the Economic Miracle and Zero Hour, this musical biography bears witness to the repressed contents of the culture. Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown points to the complexity of writing in German after 1945. His musical biography is an ironic tune of exposure and confrontation. Like Grass, Böll deals with Nazi crimes and their legacy in the present from a carnivalesque perspective; and like Grass’s protagonist, Böll’s draws inspiration from the model of the clown and uses musical references and acoustic images to effect a critical perspective on forgetful, deceptive existence. Böll’s clown, however, reveals another kind of consigning to oblivion in which he himself participates: Obsessed with his own crisis, the narcissistic way in which Schnier adopts a consciousness of victimhood, calls into question his commitment to interfering with the official narrative and of critically engaging in the public sphere. Some years later, Ingeborg Bachmann places the clown figure in a new context. In the novel Malina, her clown speaks-sings in dissonant tones from Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal melodrama, and replaces the tonal sounds of Mozart’s motet. His grotesque voice resonates with the catastrophic encounter between a feminine “I,” its masculine counterpart, and the missing yet desired stranger (Jewish, Hungarian, or Slavic). Through the language of the “I,” its speech disturbances and non-semantic successions, Bachmann exposes a psychic mechanism that admits to a failure in remembering. And yet, her work of memory cannot escape the ethical “danger” that is inscribed in a vague and unproductive

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narrative, so that in this respect she risks being inaccessible to readers. In dealing with the Nazi past and the question of responsibility, her musical biography also reflects on the question of victimhood by blurring the distinction between murderers and victims, external and internal enemies. Ultimately, this is where the novel’s power lies; a literary work that questions the limits of representation and documentation. This is true also of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, which provides a critique of socio-political violence and aggression, and oppressive gender relationships through the subversive use of musical discourses. Jelinek refuses to free her poetic persona from self-destruction. In resisting any possible resolution, her Viennese pianist, the object of oppression and false consciousness, is doomed to infinite deconstructive journeys – a live testimony to distorted place and damaged existence. Similar strategies are demonstrated in the writing of Thomas Bernhard, whose literary characters manifest the unproductive mechanism of the compulsion to repeat. Bernhard elaborates the Nazi-related aspect of German and Austrian identity through various connections to music: incorporating acoustic images of strangeness, such as the jargon that reverberates with a foreign language and reflects a displacement of one who is an ultimate “outsider,” or the dissonant voices of his characters; the translation into musical forms such as polyphony, theme and variations, and “free atonality” that interfere with plot coherence; the creation of sound repetitions that suspend signification processes; and finally the subversive use of highly charged ideological intertexts – all of which shape a neurotic character, who is imprisoned in a process of self-destruction. Bernhard’s musical biographies do not describe “what occurred,” but rather resonate with historical exclusion. Through patterns of repetition, similarity, and difference, they document the repressive mechanism of a society that denies its role in and responsibility for a horrific past. The book focuses mainly on literature published between 1945 and 1989. After the reunification of Germany, German-language literature began to manifest new tendencies in dealing with the past, for example as external “national” entities such as Russia, Britain, and America also step into the role of the perpetrator; or when the representations of Nazi collaborators begin to emphasize human features. Furthermore, some authors chose to reconstruct an authentic childhood from an adult character’s viewpoint in order to avoid criticism. This is true of Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995), which from a teenager’s perspective tells the story of an illiterate woman who was forced to serve in an administrative post in a Nazi work-camp in order to save her life. A similar perspective is suggested in Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain, 1998), which provoked widespread public debate in the

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late 1990s, and even Grass, in one of his last novels Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), returns to the story of the “German disaster.” Despite the apparent differences between postwar literature to 1989, and post-1990 literature, music continues to play a significant role in the critical exploration of historical events, and the ramifications of the Nazi past. In his debut novel Vom Wasser (Water, 1995), for example, John von Düffel incorporates acoustic images of serial music in order to present distorted life stories that reverberate with trauma; in his novel The Tristan Chord, discussed above, Treichel offers an ironic refutation of musical traditions since Wagner; and even Winfried Georg Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) demonstrates the use of sound figures to shape poetic modes of testimony that challenge the conventions of documentation and historical representation. This however requires a separate discussion. Is this the end of the musical biography? As this book shows, not quite. The sincere refutation by post-reunification authors such as Treichel or Sebald draws on aesthetic traditions exposed and described throughout the book: German and Austrian writers, who have turned to music and its profound figuration – the musical dissonance – in order to develop new modes of narration and response to the catastrophe of the Second World War. These writers have created musical biographies that can process extinction and denial in a way that words conventionally cannot. As we saw, however, translated into the realm of literature, the non-semantic elements and repetitive rhythms that interfere with verbal, conceptual determinations also reveal the compulsive, “neurotic” aspects of this work of memory. Coming to the end of this book thus raises new questions. The haunting music of these poetic testimonies does not let us put the matter to rest. This, however, is exactly where their power lies. Reading these musical biographies is troubling since they “fail” to come to terms with the past. Rather, they keep playing for us the fragile notes of memory, narration and response to horrific, traumatic history. In this respect, the work presented here calls into question not only the official narratives that deny and neglect personal stories, but also challenges writers’ and readers’ most intimate perspectives on an inaccessible past.

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Index absolute music 3 acting out 89 Adorno, Theodor W. 1 – 7, 10, 15 – 17, 22, 25 – 34, 36, 38 – 40, 47, 54, 57, 62, 67, 82, 84, 87, 133, 135 f. – aesthetics of music 5, 36 – critical theory 5 – culture industry 2 f., 26, 110 – 112 – Dialectic of Enlightenment 26, 29 f., 38, 54, 62, 133 – Frankfurt School 54 – mimesis of the hardened and alienated 3 – negative aesthetic 40, 47 – Negative Dialectics 27 – Philosophy of Modern Music 4, 27 f., 31, 135 Aichinger, Ilse 77 allegory 39, 46, 59, 69, 71 f., 76, 112 alliteration 7, 68, 109, 116 anti-autobiography 12, 107, 129, 132, 135, 139, 141 articulation 6 f. asymmetry 5 f., 38, 59 – 63, 75, 99 atonality 4 – 6, 10 f., 26 – 28, 32 – 35, 43 f., 46 f., 49, 52, 59, 88, 94, 97, 98 f., 100, 108, 125, 128, 144, 146, 150 f. Auschwitz 53 f., 82, 119, 129, 131 Austria 1 f., 7 – 9, 11 f., 41, 83, 91 – 93, 100, 105 – 112, 115, 123 – 126, 129, 130, 132 – 137, 140 f., 143, 149, 150 f. Bach, Johann Sebastian – Art of Fugue 117 – Goldberg Variations 140 Bachmann, Ingeborg 1 f., 11 f., 77, 81, 83 – 96, 98 – 108, 122, 133 f., 143, 149 f. – Böhmen liegt am Meer 134 – Die wunderliche Musik 88 – Malina 11, 89 – 96, 98 – 100, 104 – 108, 122, 151 – Musik und Dichtung 87 – Simultan 90, 93, 106 – The Cicadas 86 f. – Todesarten 11, 92, 94

Bakhtin, Mikhail 52, 56, 104, 133 – dialogical 55 f., 104 Baudelaire, Charles 83 Beethoven, Ludwig van 3, 17, 21 – 24, 31, 33 – 36, 46 f., 49, 58, 71 – 74, 76, 89, 100, 110, 113 f., 117, 125 – 127, 130 f., 143, 146, 150 – Fifth Symphony 3, 117, 131 – Ninth Symphony 23, 47, 71 – 73, 76, 100, 150 – Sonata Op. 111 33 – 35 – Storm Sonata 117 Benjamin, Walter 31, 46, 139 Berg, Alban 4, 30, 43 Berlioz, Hector 15 Bernhard, Thomas 1 f., 11 f., 107 f., 111, 115 – 125, 127 – 141, 143, 151 – Concrete 11, 111, 117, 119, 121, 124 – 130, 135, 137, 141 – Eve of Retirement 117, 130 – Extinction 12, 117, 129, 131, 136 f., 139, 141 – The Drowned 117, 122, 140 – Three Days 115 biography 1, 8 – 12, 15, 19 f., 23, 25, 33, 36 f., 39, 41, 43, 52, 55 f., 60, 64 f., 68, 75 – 77, 82, 86, 90 f., 105, 107 – 109, 111, 116, 120 – 122, 124, 126, 129, 137, 140 – 141, 143, 145 – 147, 149 – 152 Böll, Heinrich 11, 54, 77 – 82, 109, 149 f. – The Clown 11, 77 – 82, 150 Brahms, Johannes 5, 143 Brecht, Berthold 47, 70 Bruckner, Anton 114, 125, 136 Büchner, Georg 83, 85 f. Callas, Maria 83 f., 87 capitalism 3, 5 f., 27, 72, 77, 80, 84, 87, 107 f., 110 – 112, 143 carnival 52 f., 55 f., 68, 76, 79, 82, 133, 137, 150 catastrophe 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 – 17, 21, 24, 27, 36, 38, 42, 45 f., 56, 66, 75, 78, 95 f., 107, 115, 141, 143, 149, 152

170

Index

Catholic Church 80, 131 f. Celan, Paul 65, 77, 83, 85 f., 95 – Meridian 83, 85 f. Chopin, Frederic 81, 100, 130 – études 100 – Mazurka in B Major 81 collective memory 9, 12, 52, 55, 63, 119, 135 communism 77, 143 compulsion to repeat 10, 67, 81, 116, 119, 124, 130, 151 constructive music 37, 39 f., 43 Dahlhaus, Carl 25, 28, 30, 32, 37, 45 degenerate music 44 Deleuze, Gilles 36, 124 disharmony 46 f., 90 dissonance 5 f., 15, 18, 21, 27 f., 39, 44, 59, 61 – 63, 75, 98, 114, 137, 140 f., 144 – 147 – dissonant chord 5, 12, 136, 146 – musical dissonance 3, 10, 50, 52, 59, 68, 84, 93 f., 108, 135, 149 f., 152 documentation 11, 31, 35, 38 f., 45, 52, 56, 78, 92, 108, 121, 129 f., 136, 141, 149, 151 f. dodecaphonic music 44, 116 Düffel, John von 152 Dürer, Albrecht 38 Economic Miracle 57, 74, 78, 150 emotions 3, 27, 44 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 54 expressionism 1 false consciousness 5, 114, 151 Faust 16 – 19, 24 f., 31, 39 – 41, 70 f., 76, 144 First Viennese School 96, 127 Freud, Sigmund 121 German reunification 53, 143 Germanness 15, 20 f., 31, 38, 41, 43 Germany 10 – 12, 15 f., 18 f., 21, 29 – 31, 39 – 41, 43 f., 46, 48, 51, 53 f., 57, 69 – 71, 73, 75, 77 f., 93, 106, 123, 125, 130, 133 f., 143 f., 149 – 151 Giraud, Albert 97

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 19, 24, 68, 70, 126, 133 f. – Wilhelm Meister 70 Gould, Glenn 122, 140 Goya, Francisco 83 Grass, Günter 1 f., 10 – 12, 51 – 77, 82, 104, 133 f., 142 f., 149 f., 152 – Cat and Mouse 53 – Crabwalk 152 – Danish Sonning Prize 54 – Dog Years 53 – Peeling the Onion 51 – The Destruction of Mankind has Begun 54 – The Tin Drum 10, 52 f., 55, 57 – 59, 62, 70 – 72, 75 f., 134, 150 Great Germans 24, 49 Group 47 77, 86 harmony 5, 11, 34, 43, 46 f., 49, 62, 89, 98, 113 f., 128, 135 Hartleben, Otto Erich 97 Haydn, Joseph 6, 125, 131 f., 140 Heim, Stefan 54 Henze, Hans Werner 86 – 89 hermeneutic 17, 25, 144, 146 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang 54, 77 Hoffmann, E. T. A 3 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 117 Hölderlin, Friedrich 133 f. Holocaust 1 homeland 11, 48, 78, 82, 91 f., 106 – 109, 113, 123, 126, 134 f., 137 Homer 1 Humperdinck, Engelbert 97 idealism 6, 113 ideology 4, 7, 31 f., 51, 61, 67, 69, 71, 73, 80, 107, 115, 146 instrumental music 3, 23 jargon 28, 126 – 128, 137, 140, 151 Jazz 4, 46, 49, 69 f., 74 f., 145, 150 Jelinek, Elfriede 11, 109 – 114, 149, 151 – Clara S. 111 – Das Lebewohl 110 – The Piano Teacher 11, 112, 151 Johnson, Uwe 77

Index

Kafka, Franz 60, 134 Kaisersaschern 20, 22, 33 Kleist, Heinrich von 134 Koeppen, Wolfgang 10, 43 – 50, 52, 149 f. – Death in Rome 10, 43, 50, 52, 150 Krenek, Ernst 25, 30 Kretzschmar, Hermann 22 f., 32 – 36 Kristeva, Julia 2, 6 f., 103 f. – chora 7 – polylogue 7, 9, 67, 100, 103 f., 124 – Revolution in Poetic Language 7 – semiotic 6 f., 11 f., 34 f., 66 f., 99, 103 f., 111, 118, 123 f. – symbolic 4, 6 f., 39, 50, 55, 57, 74, 81, 94, 99, 103 f., 110, 139, 146, 149 f. Künstlerroman 8, 12, 70 Lacan, Jacques 123 Lied 47, 58, 100 Lyotard, Jean-François

31 f., 47, 121

Mahler, Gustav 6, 18, 43, 47 Mann, Thomas 1 f., 10, 12, 15 – 25, 28 – 41, 43 – 46, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 71 f., 75 f., 99, 143, 146 f., 149 f. – Death in Venice 43 – Doctor Faustus 10, 15 – 20, 22 – 25, 28 – 31, 37, 39 f., 43, 50, 52, 71, 99, 146, 149 – Germany and the Germans 18, 20 – Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner 21 – Tristan 19 – Richard Wagner and the Ring of the Nibelungs 22 Matisse, Henri 47 melancholy 15, 44, 46 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix 11, 111, 117, 120 – 122, 125 – 129, 140 f., 143 – Die wandernden Komödianten 125 Mephistopheles 17, 25, 31, 38, 70, 144 montage 15 f., 18, 39 f., 43, 46, 52, 58, 66, 75, 99, 110, 112 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 6, 95 f., 100, 114, 117, 125, 127, 130 – 132, 150 – A Little Night Music 117, 130 – Exultate, Jubilate 95 f., 100 – Haffner Symphony 117

171

– The Magic Flute 100, 117 musical intertexts 8, 79 f., 100, 116, 120, 131 musical prose 5 f., 88, 116, 122, 128 musicalization 7, 9, 11, 33, 36, 65 Musil, Robert 134 myth 2, 17 – 22, 24 – 26, 31 f., 36, 43, 45, 46, 48 f., 72 – 76, 87, 89, 95, 99, 107 f., 110, 112 f., 113, 132 f., 144 f., 147 narcissistic 11, 80, 97, 150 Nazism 1 f., 8 – 13, 18, 22, 30, 43 – 46, 49 – 51, 53, 55, 57 f., 60 – 63, 69 – 71, 73 f., 78, 80, 82, 90 – 92, 106, 109, 111 f., 114 f., 125 f., 129 – 133, 136, 139 f., 143, 146, 149 – 152 neurotic 31, 105, 123, 151 Newman, Barnett 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16, 25, 30, 39 f., 52, 57, 59, 76, 93, 111, 119, 145, 149 – Apollonian 2, 76 – Dionysian 2, 137, 149 – The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 2, 149 non-semantic 3, 12, 35, 81, 108, 110, 121, 131, 150, 152 parody 12, 19, 24, 33, 36, 52, 56, 58 f., 68 – 74, 133 f., 137, 139, 146 Pfitzner, Hans 40, 125 Platonic 7 polyphony 45, 49, 56 f., 78 f., 82, 87, 89, 95, 100, 104 f., 108, 110, 116, 120, 122 f., 139, 141, 151 pretense 11, 27, 35, 49, 62, 94, 98 f., 130, 135 f., 138 Promised Land 95 f. psychic mechanisms 2, 6, 10 – 12, 57, 81, 97, 116, 119, 121, 123, 141, 150 psychoanalysis 2, 7, 9, 27, 67, 74 f., 108, 121, 124, 140 psychoses 7 representation 2 f., 7 – 10, 12, 15, 19, 23 f., 31 f., 36 f., 45, 47, 49, 53 f., 56, 58, 69 f., 78, 85, 89 – 91, 96, 103 – 105, 108, 116,

172

Index

119, 121, 129, 132 f., 139, 141, 143, 150 – 152 repression 10, 28, 52, 74, 80, 82, 91, 111, 119, 123, 129, 132, 135, 137, 141 return of the repressed 10, 125, 127 rhythmization of language 8 f., 11 f., 40 romanticism 3, 19, 69, 113, 144, 147 Rothko, Mark 47 Rufer, Josef 28 Scher, Steven Paul 8 Schlink, Bernhard 151 Schoenberg, Arnold 4 – 6, 10 f., 15, 17, 23, 25 – 32, 39, 43, 46 f., 76, 88 f., 94 – 100, 108, 113 f., 117, 125, 128, 144, 149 f. – emancipation of the dissonance 5, 28, 39, 44, 128, 144, 146 – free atonality 5 f., 39, 151 – Pierrot lunaire 89, 96 – 98, 100 – Sprechgesang 94, 97, 99, 108 – Style and Idea 5 – twelve-tone composition 5, 8, 26 f., 31, 37, 39, 50, 52 – twelve-tone technique 6, 25 – 30, 149 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2 Schubert, Franz 48 f., 110, 113, 131 f. – Linden Tree 21, 48 – Winter Journey 113 Schumann, Robert 49, 110 f., 113 f., 125 Sebald, Winfried Georg 107, 152 Second Viennese School 4, 38, 43 f., 96, 108, 113, 125, 128, 145 Second World War 1 – 3, 6, 8, 10, 12 f., 15 – 17, 23, 27, 29, 37 f., 41, 43 f., 53, 55 – 57, 66, 71, 74 f., 77 f., 82, 92, 98, 107 – 109, 115, 125, 130, 132 f., 141, 143, 149, 152 Shakespeare, William 23 shock 6, 27, 108, 133 Stravinsky, Igor 4, 25, 30 sublime 3, 46, 74, 79 symptoms 6, 80, 85, 94 synthesis 19, 28, 43, 47, 49 taboos 7, 79, 114 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 66 testimony 9 – 11, 15, 45, 50 f., 80, 85, 91, 93 f., 114, 143, 151 f.

theme and variation 26, 40, 66, 100, 151 Third Reich 10, 40 f., 44, 49, 63, 71, 75, 77 f., 92, 105, 115, 118, 125, 127, 129, 132, 135 f., 143 totality 3 f., 10, 16, 19, 21 f., 26 – 32, 35, 38, 44 f., 47, 62, 69, 78, 81, 89, 104, 132, 141, 145 tragedy 2, 16, 21, 41, 110 f., 149 transcendental 7, 50, 71 trauma 1, 6, 9 – 11, 15, 27, 37, 67 f., 74, 76, 78 f., 81 – 83, 85 f., 89 – 91, 94 f., 102, 105, 108, 118, 120 f., 149 f., 152 Treichel, Hans-Ulrich 12, 44, 143 – 149, 152 – Tristan Chord 12, 143 – 147, 152 twelve-tone symphony 44 – 47 unconscious 3, 6 f., 27 f., 74, 76, 89, 93 f., 97, 102, 129, 139 unsayable 101 verbal music 8, 29, 38, 40, 43 victim 1, 12, 26, 32, 41, 55, 73, 80, 82, 92, 95 f., 128, 132 f., 139, 147, 150 f. Wagner, Richard 10, 12, 16 f., 19, 21 – 24, 31, 37 f., 40, 43 f., 46, 48 f., 57, 68, 71 f., 97, 100, 114, 116, 125 – 128, 136 f., 143 – 147, 152 – Artwork of the Future 21 – Flying Dutchman 72 – Judaism in Music 126 f. – leitmotif 37, 68, 116 – Master-Singers of Nuremberg 21, 145 – Opera and Drama 23 – Parsifal 19, 72 – Ring of the Nibelungs 22, 44, 71 – Total Work of Art 10, 21, 32, 145 – Tristan and Isolde 100, 144 f. Walser, Martin 151 Weber, Carl Maria von 58 Webern, Anton 4, 25, 30, 116 f. Weiss, Peter 54, 77, 137, 141 Weltschmerz 114 Western tonality 43 witness 1, 3 f., 9, 18, 32, 38, 43, 47, 49, 52, 54, 58, 60 – 62, 78, 80, 88, 90, 92, 96, 104, 117, 121, 139 f., 150

Index

Wolf, Christa 51, 53 working through 55, 67, 81, 89, 140

Zero Hour

63, 67, 74 f., 77 f., 150

173