Ante- and Postdiluvian Reflections of an “Inner Emigrant”: Stefan Andres’s Trilogy Die Sintflut (1949–1959/2007)

Und manchmal – nicht im Traum! – in fremdem Land, Wohin ich selber mich aus dir verbannt, Sitz, Deutschland, ich mit deinem Feind zu Tisch, Ein kläglicher Prophet in seinem Fisch, Gerettet – und zugleich von Scham verschlungen. Da denk ich wohl: mich hat ein Traum bezwungen; Und möcht erwachen von der Wirklichkeit, Deutschland, zu dir, wie dich mein Traum gefreit.

(“Manchmal im Traum” 42)

Through this lament for the idea of the “other Germany” written on 9 May 1945, the day of Germany’s capitulation, the writer Stefan Andres (1906–1970) identifies himself with his fellow Germans, in particular those “inner emigrant” writers, artists, and journalists who had remained in Nazi Germany but had not collaborated with the regime and had endeavoured, each in their own way, to maintain their artistic and moral integrity. Andres had had to flee Germany in 1937 because of his “half-Jewish” wife and spent thirteen years in “selbst-gewähltem Halbexil” (Wagener 227) in the south of Italy. Cut off from events in Nazi Germany and deprived almost completely of intellectual exchange in the fishing village of Positano on the Gulf of Salerno, he increasingly saw himself as a Jonah-like prophet and devoted several years of his exile to creating the two-thousand-page trilogy Die Sintflut (1949, 1951, 1959), intended to be a comprehensive mythological and allegorical reckoning with the Third Reich.

Following publication of the first two novels – Das Tier aus der Tiefe (1949) and Die Arche (1951) – and before the troublesome third, Der graue Regenbogen (1959), had even been completed, Andres began to rework his magnum opus with a view to producing a substantially shorter single-volume version. Between 1955 and 1969, he devoted considerable time to editing copies of the published novels (“Das Tier aus der Tiefe” “Die Arche,” and “Der graue Regenbogen,” the Roman versions), a process continued by his widow, Dorothee, in the early 1970s. However, the revised version was finally to see the light of day only in 2007, as part of a new collected works edition (Die Sintflut).²

Drawing on the Andres Nachlass held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach including the numerous edited manuscripts of the original Sintflut and the extensive correspondence between Andres and the Piper Verlag, on the previously inaccessible “Roman version” of the revised Sintflut, and on material from the Andres Archive in Schweich, this article first examines Andres’s status as an “inner emigrant,” reviews the genesis and reception of the original trilogy, and summarizes the complex abridgement process. It then suggests possible readings of the (new) Sintflut, evaluating its significance in the context of Andres’s writing as a whole.

In the wake of the “great controversy,” the postwar debate between Thomas Mann and Walter von Molo and Frank Thiess over the term “innere Emigration” (see Grosser), and of Mann’s blanket rejection of all books published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 (“Ein Geruch von Blut und Schande haftet ihnen an; sie sollten alle eingestampft werden”; Mann 732), literary scholars have adopted a number of distinct approaches to the phenomenon. The first critical wave was characterized by apologist discussions (e.g Koenigswald; Paetel) – supplemented more recently by a polemical evaluation (Denk) – but also by blanket condemnations (e.g. Schonauer). In the 1970s, an attempt was made to broaden the term “inner emigration”: on the one hand, less importance was attributed to perceived political differences between writers, and there was a move towards acceptance of a “gleitende Skala [...] vom aktiven Widerstand bis zur passiven Verweigerung” (Grimm 48); on the other, some critics pointed to the ambivalent character of certain Christian conservative authors’ work that, it was alleged, could be interpreted as being supportive of National Socialist thinking (e.g. Loewy; Schnell). Recent years have seen a refinement of these literary critical approaches as scholars have sought to avoid ideological prejudgment of the literary “inner emigrants” who published work in Nazi Germany and to reevaluate texts written between 1933 and 1945 by examining the actual conditions under which they were produced (Denkler; Kroll; Rüther; Schmollinger...