More on the subject of college…My son’s imminent departure is bringing it all back home, and I find myself thinking a lot about those years. Here’s a story that began when I was a senior, but whose ending is still unfolding.
By the beginning of my final year as undergraduate, I had decided not only to major in art history, but to apply to graduate school as well. My advisor encouraged me to take German; it was essential for graduate study in my field and I might as well get an early start. I knew she had only my welfare in mind, but she had obviously not considered that for a Jew of the post-Holocaust generation, such a suggestion had troubling implications.
The fact was, I had no desire to study German. No, that was an understatement; I bitterly resented the idea and it was only after I had been completely convinced that the attainment of an advanced art history degree could not be accomplished without it that I relented.
My first German teacher was not the blond, blue-eyed Aryan I had dreaded. Instead, he was olive skinned and dark haired, with bright, black eyes and terrifyingly white teeth. Interspersed with his dutiful presentation of the complicated declensions and unwieldy compound nouns, he told witty tales about Teutonic life, culture, and art. He lovingly evoked the coffee houses of Vienna with their sinful Sachertorte and Kaffee mit Schlagsahne; the Weinstube and the Oktoberfeste, famous for their heady, German brews. The class was delighted with his fanciful excursions; he was adored by everyone. Everyone, that is, except me. Four mornings a week, I sat at the back of the classroom nursing my sullen silence. I didn’t want to hear about German culture; too many of my relatives had perished as a result of that culture gone berserk and I could not take pleasure in any his anecdotes. I felt like I knew too much already, and my knowledge both embittered me and prevented me from wanting to know anything more.
One day, the professor asked if he could see me alone for a few minutes. I lowered my eyes, refusing to meet his, and waited until we were the only two left in the room.
“It seems to me that you’re unhappy in my class,” he said pleasantly. “Is there something I can do to help?” I finally looked at him then, his open, friendly face, filled with such unmistakable good will. Without any warning, I burst into tears. It all came spilling out: how repelled I was by Germans and all things German, how I didn’t want to be in the course at all. “I can see that you’re very upset,” he said when I had finished. “But I think you’re making a mistake by condemning a whole culture because of one black period in history.” He tried to tell me about the other Germany, the one of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, but I wouldn’t or couldn’t hear. I passed through the rest cherishing my isolation. I didn’t even mind the low grade I received, so noticeable amid my bevy of A’s. On the contrary, I was perversely proud of it, my own private badge of honor.
By the time the next semester rolled around, I knew I was ready for a change. I had resigned myself to finishing out the year, but I switched to another section, where the teacher was not herself a German. With her muted tweeds and soft cashmeres, the woman evoked a member of the English gentry, and I took this to be an enormous improvement. But there was another reason I began to feel better about my German classes, and this had to do with their content as well as their formal presentation. Like it or not, I had actually been learning something all those months, and was now ready, with the rest of the class, to start tackling a German of greater complexity than “Ich bin eine Studentin.” We had started reading Goethe’s Faust and although I wouldn’t admit it out loud, I actually found myself falling under its spell. When Gretchen learns that Faust has abandoned her, she sings a lament whose refrain chilled me in its poignancy: “Meine Ruh ist hin/Mein Herz ist schwer/Ich finde si nimmer/Und nimmermehr.” I was not the first to discover that this was great poetry – simple, clear, and absolutely heartbreaking – but the discovery was nevertheless important to me and the way I felt about German as a whole: if poetry I could love was written in the language, then the language itself must contain poetry within it. I might be resistant to finding it, but for the first time, I could see that it was there.
The following fall, my first semester as a graduate student, found me enrolled in yet another German course; this one was designed to help students from a number of different departments pass the language examination required by the university for the master’s degree. Here, no one sang praises of German culture. The members of the class wanted to pass the written examination and they wanted to pass it soon. I spent the next two months furiously translating articles on medieval churches and Romantic painting; when I wasn’t doing that, I was creating stacks upon stacks of index cards on which were printed the various nouns, verbs, and adjectives I needed to expand my vocabulary. The effort paid off: I passed the exam on the first try, and if I wanted, I would never have to read, hear, or think of another German word in my life.
For about a year, that is exactly what happened. I never gave German, or my unhappy relationship to it, another thought. And that probably would have remained the state of my interest in it, had not fate intervened in a most curious, but, as I have come to believe, meaningful way. One day, I found myself browsing in the kind of long-since-outdated bookshop that specialized in large tables of remaindered books. A muted rose cover on which was inset the black-and-white photograph of an intense-looking young woman caught my eye. The book turned out to contain in both German and English, the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar, a German Jewish poet who had perished, in her prime, at Auschwitz. The volume was priced at 59 cents; even back then it was less than the price of a subway token. I bought the book and found myself hypnotized immediately. Kolmar’s work was like nothing I had ever read; even in translation, I knew I had encountered a rare spirit. The German originals were printed on the facing pages, and so eager was I to devour these remarkable poems, that without a second’s hesitation, I began reading them. And where I found my German rusty, unequal to the task of deciphering this strange and marvelous uttering, I went back to the dictionaries and grammar books I swore I would never open again. Nothing less than the true coin of the original would do; the translations seemed pale counterfeits which no longer satisfied. While a stanza like the one that follows is compelling, even in English, it doesn’t possess the haunted urgency of the original:
My cave house is black as ink;
There I lie on dried leaf mats,
And on udders swelled with drink
Heavy hang a child, bat.
Outside in the moonwood howls
A witch and frights the unicorn.
On her head a rams wool cowl
Covers golden curving horns.
Auf verdorrien schwarzen Kräutern
Lieg ich stumm in Höhlenhaus;
Schwer an trankgeschwelten Eutern
Hängen Kind und Fledermaus
Da im Mondforst Auerhähne,
Eine Hexe bellend neckt
Die mit fahler Widdermähne,
Goldne Kringelhörner deckt.
German’s capacity for compound nouns creates wildly expressive possibilities: trankgeschwelten is literally a swollen, heavy word; Kringelhörner evoked a singularly magical image which “curving horns” can only approximate. And Auerhähne has an onomatopoetic moan that English doesn’t capture. Even the title of the poem, “Troglodytin” in German tells the reader immediately that the speaker is female, while the neutered English troglodyte is mute on the subject.
I felt that to understand Kolmar and her powerful transcendent verse had made it necessary, even imperative, that I understand German as well. And here I was presented with a moral dilemma of a complexity I could not have imagined two years earlier. Yes, Kolmar wrote in that hated tongue, German; she was after all, a German citizen her entire life. But she was also a Jew. If I refused to read German out of some stubborn desire to resurrect my family or maintain my integrity, my entire rationale quickly broke down when it came to her work. For if I turned my back on German – the language in which her poetry had budded and blossomed – then I was in effect turning my back on her. And to do that would be to consign her to precisely the kind of oblivion that the Nazis had intended. In one sense, of course, they succeeded: the woman Gertrud Kolmar was murdered in a concentration camp. But by reading Kolmar—and more to the point, reading her in German—perhaps I could succeed in giving her back, not her life, at least her resonant voice.
My exploration of Jewish writers who wrote in German went further; a friend with whom I discussed the subject recommended Paul Celan. Unlike Kolmar, Celan, a Romanian Jew, survived the Holocaust. His parents, however, did not, and the longing and sorrow engendered by their loss permeates his poetry:
Runder Stern, du schlingst die golden Schleife.
Meine Mutter Herz ward wund Blei
Eichne Tür wer how dich aus den Angeln?
Mein Sanfte Mutter kann nicht kommen.
I noticed, in my dual language edition, that the translation of the last line read: “My gentle mother cannot return.” I looked back at the German original and puzzled over it for a while. Kommen didn’t mean return, not exactly. The dictionary offered me several possibilities for the word “return” but none of them was kommen. I knew what the translator had meant in choosing that word, but it seemed to me the translator might be wrong. Kommen or “come” was far more suggestive, far more ambiguous than “return,” for it implied that not only would the poet’s mother never literally return, but that her death, brought about in such a hideous way, made even the recalling of her painful and problematic. “My gentle mother cannot come,” he tells us, as if to say, “Even the memory of her refused to coalesce easily in the imagination.” If I hadn’t studied German, such subtleties would have been lost on me, but because I did, I was able to reach back across the time and distance, and for a brief and incandescent moment, gain a clearer sense of what Paul Celan might have meant.
It has been decades since I sat in my first German class and in that time, I have undergone a complete about-face as far as my feelings about the language are concerned, and yet the basis for those feelings has essentially remained the same. At one time, I believed that if I were to have any integrity as a Jew, I would have to hold myself aloof from Germany and all things German. I can see now how fundamentally naïve such a position was, for it didn’t take into account the terrible complexity of history and of culture. Kolmar and Celan have helped teach me that. Unthinkable as it would have seemed to me, I have developed a real love for this dolorous and beautiful language and for the incredible depth of feeling it permits and articulates. And like most loves, it is at least in part based on recognition, on that wonderful moment of gazing into the eyes of the beloved and seeing some apparition of oneself contained within.
