Alfred Andersch ‘revisited’: Werkbiographische Studien im Zeichen der Sebald-Debatte (review)

This book should be of interest even to those readers not yet familiar with the Sebald / Andersch controversy, which began in 1993 with W. G. Sebald’s essay “Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Alfred Andersch. Das Verschwinden in der Vorsehung.” The issue has simmered—some would say festered—from that time on. Further discoveries of documentation from Andersch’s past in 2008 by Jörg Döring and Rolf Seubert reintensified the debate and led to the conference held in the Literaturhaus, Frankfurt, on the 19^th of November 2010, from which the materials here were derived. The conference must have channeled currents of quite high tension to judge by the productive power that expanded the papers presented. Seubert’s contribution, questioning Andersch’s record as a prisoner in Dachau, has grown to one hundred pages.

In 1993, Sebald had not yet risen to his greatest prominence; Andersch died in 1980, survived by a respectable but by no means overwhelming literary reputation. The position taken in “Between the devil and the deep blue sea” focused primarily on Andersch’s first significant publication, Die Kirschen der Freiheit, a slim volume describing the author’s experiences of isolation, most vividly as a former Communist in the Third Reich. The material of the book is therefore autobiographical, and its subtitle “Ein Bericht” also suggests that it will describe actual experiences rather than explore its theme through fiction. On the other hand, the text insists that it will tell an entirely subjective, elusive truth only reached by reflection on the language in which personal reality can be constructed. It is rich in literary devices and literary consciousness of its theme. Sebald, however, found it mendacious to a degree that in his view left it no value of any kind and tainted all Andersch’s subsequent work, including his novels.

The controversy has persisted and even gained in importance because works of art create their creators as well as the other way round. It is, as the Bible tells us, by their fruits that we know our trees, and yet we are also curious about the dark depths to which they send their roots. The suspicions that produce animosity and alienate one generation of Germans from another, which seem to have motivated Sebald, appeared also in the shock that greeted revelations of Günter Grass’s youthful errors. But there is a difference that makes Sebald’s vituperation harder to grasp. Grass’s literary work addresses the nation through an epic conception of the novel. His protagonists may be antiheroes in one sense, but they are also heroic in that they embody some essence of their nation. Andersch embodies only so much of Germany in his work as he experienced there as the site of his isolation. Perhaps nothing excites an attack as provocatively as the vulnerability of someone who does not belong.

There is much discussion in Alfred Andersch ‘revisited’ about an autobiographical pact that authors make with their readers which obligates them to respect the trust that they receive by reporting with factual accuracy. But Die Kirschen der Freiheit promises, quite explicitly, only a very restricted and subjective report. Its first lines demonstrate the speaker’s sense of a right he reserves to deal casually with facts that lie outside his personal sense of time and place. Harkening back to childhood memories of the Räterepublik in his native Munich, he says he doesn’t remember when it occurred, he thinks perhaps it was spring, which he notes he could easily check, but instead he offers a brief inner exchange on the way he understands the differences between knowing, thinking, and believing. The text later inserts reflections on what the author has just written as he sits composing the work, a device much loved by Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales Andersch knew well. The narrative closes on the Italian front...