HEINRICH BOLL ON WORK, FAITH, GERMANY: An Interview
dramatic recovery of self is, in each story, a picture of willingness to live in the world from which he had initially broken in despair. We come upon Tom More five years later: "Hoeing collards...
...Was Adenauer particularly materialistic...
...Oh, not from personal vanity...
...This demurrer, however, should not minimize the significant contribution which Percy's insights made with regard to the way of selfhood...
...I don't even think he was...
...You have in France the expression "a man of letters...
...But when, for example, I hear that the Cardinal of Santiago participated in a Te Deum for the Chile putsch, I find that unbearable...
...For authors of an earlier generation, Ernst Jtinger or Friedrich Sieburg, there was always some way of finding in the depths of their libraries the forbidden authors...
...Have you, yoursell,/ elt guilty...
...But, even there, I'm afraid our Catholic renascence is limited to literature...
...We are citizens of the German Federal Republic like everyone else...
...Walker Percy is a Catholic who specifically asserts his belief in the Christian understanding of man and salvation...
...In fact, my problem is not religious, but political...
...It's a negative definition...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MICHAEL PAUL NOVAK MORNING IN SITGES I sit on the balcony to watch The stir of a maid's broom, This hiss of a gardener's hose, And I want to shout so quietly-Slow down, for the moment fit Our stereotype of the Spanish, Become a little lazy, Make your broom glide without dust, Your hose arch in the air Like a slender rainbow...
...Two total inflations one after another is enough to traumatize...
...Let me explain...
...Thomas Mann...
...Percy's "caricatures" are large and very entertaining, but above all they are concerned to communicate a most serious message...
...To discover its conscience, one would need a computer as big as Cologne...
...That's the background from which I come: one that had practically not changed since Bismarck's kulturkampJ...
...Today, I have liberated myself...
...Q.--Throughout your whole work, in all your characters, culpability returns as a leitmotif...
...We often were even unaware of their names...
...In this immense indifference to private property, there was a nihilistic component which only needed to be mobilized...
...Just once, however, I came near the truth...
...This is the impression that his writing may give that there are two categories of human beings: those who are "dead" and others who have gone the route of Tom More and are, perhaps, "alive...
...The teap of faith, Kierkegaard warned, must be continually re-made...
...The hardest thing for a German is to accept himself as such...
...But perhaps one must be a German to understand the resistance of the intellectuals in the Federal Republic to the Christian Democrats in general and to Adenauer in particular...
...The Vicar-General of the Diocese of Cologne has just reminded me of this by sending me a bill for my "Church tax...
...I didn't, I haven't refused the Nobel prize...
...It was during a train journey, I was returning from the East, on leave...
...By dint of interiorization, we ended by giving up any capacity for political, social, or economic analysis...
...A.--"The successor of Jean-Paul Sartre...
...Germany has 62,000,000 inhabitants...
...Whatever have been our past mistakes, we have never been spoiled...
...Simply because I am German...
...Kafka, I discovered in 1946...
...I myself also had to make an effort to rid myself of this German distemper...
...Where Were You, Adam...
...381] "All any man needs is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty...
...If we have no specifically Catholic literature (except by converts like Gertrud yon Le Fort) it is doubtless because, until 1945, the Catholic milieu was a major obstacle to any literary vocation...
...There are certain things the French can permit themselves because they are a trifle spoiled...
...A.--What is a committed writer...
...That is to say: if it is already not easy for a German to be an intellectual, it is twice as uncomfortable for him also to be a Catholic...
...It is there that the real reason for our maniacal attachment to property must be looked for...
...So that's how I have become baptized for a second time...
...the fear of those who know how things can change from one day to another...
...He also specifically acknowledges that he sees his mission as a writer as that of conveying the Christian truth to an age for which the traditional words have worn so smooth that they no longer take effect...
...Perhaps his overly schematized presentation is necessary in order that a blind age may get the point...
...The Two Sacraments...
...We can't...
...A.~A Catholic writer...
...But from this to call me the conscience of a nation...
...Q.--Did this traumatization play any part in your literary commitment...
...You know there are two definitions of the Church: on the one hand, the institution (which I detest because of its tie-up with the bourgeoisie) and, on the other hand, the Mystical Body...
...But neither is he for that reason innocent...
...Commonweal: 237 What, on the other hand, I find unforgivable, is the policy of the Christian Democrats for twenty years to feed this ambiant (surrounding) materialism and Adenauer's role in:this...
...But I had no idea that this was genocide...
...You have even been called "the conscience oJ the nation...
...Used with permission...
...Wherever we traveled, as prisoners, in France, in Belgium, the inhabitants spat in our faces, threw stones at us...
...You must think back to what the situation of Germany was at that time: in a metropolis like Cologne, every inhabitant had become in fact a robber, in order to avoid dying of hunger or cold...
...If I appear to be a moralist, it is completely unconsciously...
...Believe me, what characterizes our postwar literary generation is the very simple fact that we intellectuals refuse to see ourselves as marked men...
...A.--That may have played a part...
...In its rhetoric and its formality, the French language constitutes a prop to thought...
...On the eve of giving up the international presidency of P.E.N...
...I cannot, in fact, tell you how much longer I will remain a Catholic...
...Simply because we were Germans...
...in favor of Soviet intellectuals), Heinrich Btill personifies a new conception of the committed writer who is "Made in Germany...
...Perhaps it is because the Nazi terror has traumatized me so I instinctively avoid any description of violent scenes...
...Apparently Albert Speer himself was completely unaware of this...
...Until I933, the question of my nationality had never bothered me...
...That is why Adenauer was able to contribute to spreading materialism like a contagious sickness...
...One caveat may be appropriate with regard to Percy's work...
...Explicit god-consciousness is not a necessary characteristic of recovered selfhood as Percy portrays it, but it is clear that, in his view, the god-relationship has been restored...
...In the middle of the night our train stopped in a small unknown German railroad station...
...It was hallucinating...
...10 May 1974:236 Q.--Many o~ your compatriots pretend they didn't know what really went on during the Third Reich...
...I don't much care for that qualification, which sounds as though one were carrying a flag...
...Match my stillness up here, Move with ease to these rhythms Of the year away As we all drop like feathers Through the sunny afternoon To the good night...
...382] In these words and others like them, Percy is saying that there is a way to selfhood, the way of the quest which makes possible the final fulfillment...
...Neither innocent, nor guilty, that's what we all are...
...It annihilated all our connections with tradition or with the natural and social environment...
...But this is a fact, and will doubtless always remain inexplicable...
...It may seem crazy...
...Today, reinforcing Jean-Paul Sartre in the international positions he takes (and with his recent intervention This interview by Jean-Louis de Rambures first appeared in the French daily, le Monde on December 13, 1973...
...You forget one thing...
...Q.--rl/ one can believe Ernst Jiinger, by rejecting in, teriority, this new literature thereby lost some part of its soul...
...Children of the Dead...
...A.--It was a necessary evolution...
...Did you, Heinrich B611, know...
...That's a problem my wife and I often discuss...
...Between 1945 and 1947 I published, I think, sixty stories in ten different magazines...
...That is the way I commit myself...
...The Grimace...
...When we commit ourselves, there is always an underlying hidden fear...
...the little railroad station was Buchenwald...
...During the Third Reich, being against the regime, I did not feel myself concerned by the obligation imposed upon us to feel we were German...
...Why then have I not left the bosom of the Church...
...If Hitler was able to impose himself, it was owing to our habit of conceiving of history as an ineluctable fatality...
...Whenever this canary utters his plaintive-humorous-hopeful cry again, there will certainly be those who are intent to listen...
...I have a horror of didactic literature...
...in order to devote himself once more entirely to his writing, Heinrich B/311 discussed this new conception with Jean-Louis de Rambures...
...A.--What a horrible definition, so characteristic of German idealism...
...We come upon Tom More five years later: "Hoeing collards in my kitchen garden . . . . After hoeing a row: sit in the sunny corner, stretch out my legs and look at my boots...
...Perhaps, quite simply, because Catholicism was the major influence of my childhood...
...It had to start again from zero...
...This description of the way to faith has obvious significance for an age described by Bonhoeffer as one in which it is not possible for man to be religious any more...
...He quotes with approval Flannery O'Connor's reply to a question as to why she created such bizarre characters: "For the near-blind you have to draw very large simple caricatures...
...Alas, we haven't come to the end of our capacity for interiorization...
...On the contrary, I am more delighted with every day that passes to have received it...
...Our irrational fear of Communism--oh, note well, not of Communism as a political system or a spiritual force, but only of Communism as an eventual menace to private property--this is the fear of a people that has always been poor throughout its history...
...A.--Let us understand one another...
...The militant consequences of the Reformation are, anyway, now beginning to fade...
...Group Portrait with Lady) is located in a very circumscribed area around Cologne...
...Q.--ln any case, you are a moralist...
...But that has only a purely sociological interest...
...This is an advantage of which we make use every time we consider it necessary...
...In Germany, where Catholics and Protestants are about equal in numbers, everyone resents his religion as a fate...
...Materially speaking, I am made of Catholic stuff, like the potatoes that grow around Cologne...
...Obsessed by a single theme, the German problem, he is the first writer from his country since Thomas Mann in 1929 to have received one year ago, the highest international literary distinction--the Nobel prize...
...But besides his fundamental dislike for human beings, he had also a bourgeois (in the bad sense of the word) mistrust of everything even faintly spiritual, critical, or merely intellectual...
...Herman Hesse, Erich Kastner vaguely reminded me of something...
...Our new literature has dismissed what hitherto had been considered the very essence of Germany--interiority...
...This explosion of collective hate was an unforgettable lesson: because Germany was despised, I suddenly became aware that for nothing on earth would I have refused to be a part of it...
...Essentially it is the game with forms, with personages, with situations, that pleases me in writing...
...Here again France, a lay, perhaps even an atheist, country, but with a Catholic background, has an advantage over us...
...A.--I don't believe that an individual can be guilty just because he is born in one place rather than another...
...I only knew Buddenbrooks, and that by chance...
...I much prefer that...
...It was only later, after the war, that I brought the two facts together...
...It was in 1945, while I was a prisoner, that a relationship, which I would say was quasi-metaphysical, was born in me vis-~-vis this people, which had been, as it were, foreign to me until then...
...Now that it possesses for the first time, it intends to profit from its goods without being bothered...
...i II HEINRICH BOLL ON WORK, FAITH, GERMANY AN INTERVIEW The new conception of the committed writer who is "Made in Germany' Heinrich B611's career is, in its way, a German literary miracle...
...I do not consider myself the least bit as a moralist, but as a player...
...I refuse to play the game of eternally justifying the first by invoking the second...
...You must realize that my grandmother, and even my mother, would have made three signs of the cross over themselves at the very idea of having a novel of Zola's in their library...
...But for myself I am sure that the Germans (insofar as one can generalize) suffer from a fundamental trauma in the face of life...
...Not to see that Nazism was a terrorist r6gime, one would have had to be blind...
...The translation is by Anne Fremantle...
...A French intellectual who commits himself has a long humanist tradition to lean upon...
...Q.---Do you still regard yourseIJ as a Catholic...
...His action stemmed from a whole spiritual national tradition...
...What, on the other hand, I did not know was the systematic and bureaucratic elimination of millions of human beings, as practiced by the Third Reich...
...Because I was Catholic, I suffered, even with my very first novel, terrible tensions and difficulties with the hierarchy (I never let myself be scared by those idiots) and also with my family, which often thought my attitude incomprehensible...
...Your de Gaulle is no comparison...
...After 1945 this made us miss, I am quite sure, one of the greatest chances our history offered us...
...Percy's chief mission in his writings is to do a little ass-kicking or, as he says, to provide "vicarious catastrophe" so that his reader may be enabled to acknowledge his castaway condition sufficiently to embark upon a search of his own...
...In short, then, in an extraordinary spirit of rediscovered liberty, Germany took up writing again...
...In his epilogue to The Moviegoer he remarks that the time is late, that it is no longer possible to be edifying in the same way in which Kierkegaard was, unless "ass-kicking" can be considered edifying...
...That stems, above all, from the tabula rasa created by the Third Reich...
...We German writers, we have every time to explore the territory before we set foot on it...
...We have something to say, and the chance to be heard...
...Should he not make it clear, as did Kierkegaard, that one does not leave one stage behind and move, once and for all, from essential non-selfhood to essential selfhood...
...No wonder that, to begin, with, I envied the freedom of expression of your P6guy or Bernanos...
...lOMay 1974:238...
...A.~Fiscally, yes...
...Q.~What surprising words in the mouth oJ a Catholic author...
...We have nothing of the sort...
...Q.--The sociologist Alexander Mitscherlich considers that the Germans threw themselves desperately into the "economic miracle" to escape the unbearable idea ol their culpability...
...But my beliefs (let's say I still believe in many things) are no one's business but my own...
...Suddenly, I saw an immense flock of shaved creatures invading the platform...
...We threw them bread and cigarettes out of the carriage windows...
...A few raised .their emaciated arms toward us travelers...
...That's the rub...
...It is a very human attitude...
...By a wholly Germanic dialectic, it was by discovering what a malediction the fact of being German constitutes that I first became aware of belonging to this people...
...Yet, he is the most translated (into more than 20 languages), the most widely read, in the West as in the East (his USSR sales exceed a million) of any contemporary German...
...A novelist whose entire work (his chief novels are: Bogner, Go Home...
...I challenge you to define such a creature...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
