Adding to the Weimar Bookshelf
HANSER, RICHARD
Adding to the Weimar Bookshelf A Princess in Berlin By Arthur R.G. Solmssen Little, Brown. 374pp. $12.95 Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students...
...Period pictures by artists like Pechstein, Beckmann and Kollwitz introduce different sections...
...Through a wartime contact with a well-born if impoverished German officer, the American is admitted to Berlin's upper crust...
...At the time of Hitler's beerhall putsch in Munich, our hero is in Berlin...
...It begins with an epigraph taken from Heine's Nachtge-danken that is not translated...
...Who is that...
...To offer yet another book on this well-explored subject would seem to require a degree of literary self-confidence bordering on chutzpah...
...The going here can be fairly heavy...
...As for nonfiction, even a skimpy bibliography would run to a good dozen pages...
...Solmssen' sA Princess in Berlin does focus on the sinister events of 1922-23 in Germany, through the eyes of a young American art student...
...A servant girl drowns herself because inflation has wiped out her dowry, leaving her without hope of marriage or a future...
...A dispute arises at a swank restaurant over the bill for a small wedding party...
...Alfred DSb-lin'sBerlin, Alexanderplatz...
...by Hans Fallada...
...Solmssen, in addition, overworks a ploy he uses to deliberately leave us dangling at the end of one paragraph while he darts off in quite another direction in the next...
...One wonders, finally, about the handling of the German quotations that are strewn in profusion throughout the novel...
...No mean achievement...
...The theme has, manifestly, been given unstinting attention in all possible variations year after year...
...Cuno's government fell...
...But some telling scenes and characters effectively generate the atmosphere of the time: part extremely hectic, part morbidly apathetic, and shot through with a feeling of uneasiness and dread...
...Nevertheless, Arthur R.G...
...The bill comes to 790,650,000,000marks...
...Gustav Stressmann, who had just formed a coalition when Dr...
...What is the reader who doesn't know German to make of this...
...Solmssen has successfully immersed himself in its milieu...
...He learns what is happening only when somebody tells him, often somebody who wasn't there either...
...A Princess in Berlin is, besides, an unusually handsome piece of bookmaking...
...Much of the book is written in dialogue, or what is offered as dialogue although it is often exposition set inside quotation marks...
...He is almost never there...
...At a raffish party, for instance, a young man wearing a leather jacket and turtleneck is sitting on a table playing a guitar and singing tart songs of his own composition...
...By fashioning this broad spectrum for his protagonist, Solmssen allows himself ample leeway for ranging at will over the social landscape of pre-Hitler Germany...
...Neither are most of the passages used later, several of them quite long...
...Still, there is much here to attract and hold those who have an interest in the seemingly inexhaustible subject of Weimar...
...Solmssen is especially good on the impact of the inflation, which seems more nightmarish and unreal the more one reads about it...
...It is finally settled in uninflated American money?for $31.63...
...A Grosz caricature enlivens the title page...
...Remarque's Three Comrades...
...Being an emergent artist, he gravitates to the squalid precincts of Berlin's bohemia, too...
...asks our young American, and he gets a predictable answer: "I think his name is Brecht...
...Success by Lionel Feuchtwanger...
...He hears about it at third hand, drastically diminishing the drama of the event for the reader...
...Taken all in all, despite my criticisms, this is a novel that can be placed on the ever-expanding Weimar shelf, side by side with the other titles I mentioned at the outset...
...Little Man, What Now...
...12.95 Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler," "Putsch...
...The young American also becomes involved—peripherally and rather implausibly—in the assassination of Rath-enau, the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic who was gunned down by Freikorps fanatics because he was Jewish and liberal...
...The method is to mingle fact and fiction in a manner increasingly in vogue, so that personalities like Herman Goering and Walther Rathenau figure in the story alongside the characters invented by the author...
...How Hitler Made Revolution " Let's see now: We have had Isher-wood's Berlin Stories, followed by / Am a Camera and then Cabaret both on stage and screen...
...This may be some sort of experiment on the author's part to apply the film techniques of cross-cutting and quick-cutting to prose, but it doesn't work...
...The type is attractive, the margins large, and everything possible has been done to give the book a distinctive look especially appropriate to its theme...
...Isn't it considered bad manners to speak a foreign language in the presence of persons who do not understand it...
...Of course it is...
...On the cover is a painting by Klimt...
...Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg—and these are only some of the fictional treatments of the Weimar period that come readily to mind, listed in no particular order...
...A good deal of place- and name-dropping results, not all of it absolutely necessary...
...And the grip of the novel is frequently slackened by the protagonist's distance from the events being described...
...The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes...
...This historic crime becomes a major element in Solmssen's plot: Fact and fiction together are designed to create a sense of the greater horrors to come...
...the new Chancellor, Dr...
...This approach has its problematical aspects and sometimes leads to faintly comical contrivances...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 22
