Thumb Prints on the Mind
LEONARD, JOHN
Thumb Prints on the Mind A MONOTONOUS LANDSCAPE By Giinter Herburger Translated by Geoffrey Skelton Harcourt, Brace and World 184 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by JOHN LEONARD Author, "The Naked...
...Herburger makes us feel it all, through an extraordinary particular-ization of details: the way people look, talk, act, fail, regret...
...In a moment the little round bubble of air will break free in her stomach and trip merrily upwards?to be expelled soundlessly through her nose...
...and a description as well of the territory Giinter Herburger stakes out in this collection of seven disturbing, often brilliant, stories...
...Maybe I have no spirit...
...So what else is new...
...An adolescent skier is responsible for the death of a companion...
...Such is the head of drama, whom nobody can shoot to the ground...
...Herburger, however, mixes no puppies in his cement...
...One old girl had only just been roused to a state of excitement...
...innocence is clearly the casualty...
...A Monotonous Landscape explores the potential barbarism, the distorted mysticism and the crushing boredom of present-day middle-class provincial Germany...
...He is not a dealer in grotesques...
...In front of the dividing panels were handrails for the mourners...
...That loss of control occurs both in "The Dwelling Place"—a spinster murders the baby she is sitting with, confusing the infant with the Lamb who must be sacrificed because "the chalice stands ready to receive the blood"—and in the title story, where mania is made obvious and, so, can be too easily dismissed...
...I decided that today I would make something happen...
...Not they...
...of a children's tv program, who will subsequently fail to pierce the celluloid curtain between himself and people who need him...
...Moments are frozen for inspection: "The corpses lay in their coffins in a high-ceilinged corridor...
...I am not particularly weak?simply irresolute...
...Everyone grumbles behind her back, but nobody draws the pistol that will shoot her to the ground...
...Or: "I can imagine it better back home in the kitchen—where I beat her bloody, drive matchsticks under her toenails, plane her and peel her, gradually getting her ripe for my great and glorious eruption, the noise of which will bring them all running to my house, their hands still clutching cards, knitting needles, bread-knives, which they will drop, because they cannot believe what I have done...
...Well—by now we are all connoisseurs of the grotesque, are we not...
...With Kings and Kennedys mixed in the cement...
...He is...
...There they meet Corporal Lankes, in charge of building pillboxes to defend the coast against Allied invasion...
...I was surprised to see what naturally earnest expressions dead people wear on their faces, but that is probably because when they are put in the chapel they have already been dead a couple of days...
...He is, with no exceptions, a man in control of his materials, a master of suggestion, a writer content to induce in his readers a moral and intellectual uneasiness...
...The head of drama has thin fair hair, wavy at the sides, a pointed nose, and rings of pale-colored stones on her fingers...
...He has a vision: "When the War is over, the pillboxes will still be there...
...Reviewed by JOHN LEONARD Author, "The Naked Martini," "Wyke Regis," and the forthcoming "Crybaby of the Western World" Remember the scene in The Tin Drum where Bebra's troupe visits the Normandy front...
...I could shock the whole lot rigid at one go...
...And he says to himself: what an artistic void there was between the First and Seventh World Wars...
...Or: "This afternoon my image is flickering in perhaps three million households—that's about seven million people...
...A homosexual, on the edge of desperation, is informed by the objects around him that he is, permanently, a victim...
...I was beginning to get bored, for I hadn't planned to spend the whole of my free day on the funeral...
...The repressed mess of bourgeois libi-dinal instincts is as palatable to us as last night's experimental canape: fondue de cruslaces, or grasshoppers en brochette...
...With a fork she carefully presses the juice from a mound of radish salad, lets it slide over her tongue, opens wide her still maidenly gullet, swallows, and brings the frosted beer glass in a wide curve to her lips...
...Like late model automobiles, we have built-in shock absorbers...
...The reptile seeks to escape: "Pleasantly warm, we could all sit there drinking beer, gazing at Phrosine's bare flesh and telling ourselves nothing was happening...
...Because he resorts to no gimmicks, no black devices, no numbing and inflated metaphors for monstrousness to do his job for him...
...Like Giinter Grass, Herburger is a member of Germany's Group 47...
...That landscape is dotted with chicken grills and watering spas, housing developments and cheese factories, coal ovens, tv studios, cemeteries and churches...
...It does...
...Herburger is at his best when he leaves the mind nibbling at meanings which are as rich as they are elusive...
...And: "Far to the side, beneath the plate-sized light of a wicker lamp, sits the boss, the famous and infamous head of television plays...
...Lankes is an artist: He mixes puppies into every batch of cement...
...On-the-make m.c...
...The corpses all looked old and peaceful...
...Finally, Herburger's landscape extends itself, like plastic...
...A funeral, and the supper afterward, reveals not only a family, but a species of sentimentality in which guilt is worn like a merit badge...
...When a man like me is told categorically what he should do, he does it...
...In the qualm before each sturm und drang, he is there, taking careful notes...
...Self-knowledge arrives in telegrams the recipients refuse to open or to act upon: "I just sit in his office listening to him talk...
...Besides, German philosophers for years have been whittling abstract scrimshaws on the whale-tooth of our Guilt: Man is basically base...
...I wonder if it's got a name...
...At a time when politics issue from rifles with long-range sights, we shouldn't have to remind ourselves that the pillbox may be our only work of art...
...pillboxes stay put just like the Pyramids stayed put...
...They were well and truly dead, and a bit made up...
...His stories leave thumb prints all over the mind...
...Yet they are not very amused...
...Two things remain to be said about this distinguished collection...
...Around her neck flutters a transparent mauve chiffon scarf, which she gathers up occasionally over the curved neckline of her dress...
...Executive in a furniture factory, who will subsequently spray blood through a syringe all over the white tiled walls of a hospital room, parodying the sex act...
...For the most part they are healthy and wealthy enough to worry about amusing themselves on weekends and vacations...
...Insurance salesman, obsessed with all the opportunities he missed because he wasn't a guard at a concentration camp during the War...
...Then he discovers Dora Five, Six, Seven...
...I stayed, of course...
...A theoretical pillbox...
...For a few minutes she thinks of nothing, savoring the overripe Romadour...
...Quick as lightning shirt up, pants down, and show them my bare bottom...
...First, Herburger falters only when he permits himself a "great and glorious eruption"—that is, when he relaxes his grip and releases the psy-chopathology of everyday life into Symbolic Dimensions...
...When she is finished she will pay out of a tiny soft leather purse, then, coming down on the accelerator, drive in second gear to the apartment house in which she has lived for years...
...I ought to terrify them, make them howl...
...She sits alone...
...It is no more specifically German than evil or madness or measles...
...Across it, moving crabwise, scuttle insurance salesmen, public opinion pollsters, veternarians and motorcyclists...
...My boss needs a wastepaper basket that occasionally says yes or no...
...That is after all what Saturdays are for, after a week spent working hard...
...They lay behind glass on sloping ramps so that one could take a proper look at them...
...Is Herburger anything more than another horror-monger...
...he sees my Structural Oblique Formations, and he says to himself, Say, take a look at that, Very very interesting, magic, menacing and yet shot through with spirituality...
...As of course it wasn't...
...Lankes calls it "BARBARIC, MYSTICAL, BORED"?a description, as Bebra says, of the century itself...
...In these works a genius has expressed himself...
...And one fine day one of those archaeologist fellows comes along...
...Reptiles, yes: the reptilian parts of the brain...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
