In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Rediscovering the "Other Germany":A New Edition of the Works of Stefan Andres
  • John Klapper
Stefan Andres: Werke in Einzelausgaben. Ed. Christopher Andres, Michael Braun, Georg Guntermann, Birgit Lermen, Erwin Rotermund:
Die Sintflut: Roman. Ed. John Klapper. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. 950 pp. €49 (Hardback). ISBN 978-3-8353-0207-5.
Gäste im Paradies: Moselländische Novellen. Ed. Hans Wagener. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. 346 pp. €28 (Hardback). ISBN 978-3-8353-0251-8.
Terrassen im Licht: Italienische Erzählungen. Ed. Dieter Richter. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. 322 pp. €28 (Hardback). ISBN 978-3-8353-0427-7.
Wir sind Utopia: Prosa aus den Jahren 1933-1945. Ed. Erwin Rotermund, Heidrun Ehrke-Rotermund, in collaboration with von Thomas Hilsheimer. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. 316 pp. €28 (Hardback). ISBN 978-3-8353-0586-1.

Stefan Andres (1906-1970) was born the son of a miller in the Mosel region of Germany and, following an aborted attempt to join the Catholic priesthood, studied German, art history, and philosophy in Cologne, Jena, and Berlin. Despite early successes with strongly autobiographical novels and the award of an Abraham Lincoln scholarship, which enabled him to spend time writing in the south of Italy, he found it difficult to establish himself in Nazi Germany. Following the loss of his position with the Cologne radio station in 1935 owing to his inability to produce the required certificate of racial purity for his "half Jewish" wife Dorothee, he spent the subsequent two years in a state of constant fear of arrest. The famous novella El Greco malt den Großinquisitor, with its study of responses to tyranny, was published in 1936, and in 1937 the family finally managed to secure permission to leave Germany for the isolated southern Italian coastal town of Positano, which was to become the family refuge until 1950. Despite enormous physical hardship and the tragic death of a young daughter through illness, the period of "voluntary semi exile" (Wagener 227) and quasi-"inner emigration" proved to be highly productive and decisive for the writer's development. In the middle of work on his large-scale allegorical reckoning with the Third Reich, Die Sintflut, Andres produced his second "master novella," Wir sind Utopia, as well as numerous short prose works, many [End Page 379] of them historical texts with veiled oppositional content, which were published in newspapers in Nazi Germany.

Back in Germany after the war (he was able to regain residence only in 1950), Andres began a highly fruitful collaboration with Klaus Piper in Munich. The Piper Verlag published the considerable oeuvre that had developed in Italy and a period of bestseller status ensued, during which the writer was awarded numerous literary prizes and became a major public figure, delivering speeches on a wide range of social and political topics and energetically touring the country to give readings from his works. Andres became a particularly committed opponent of West Germany's so-called "Schmutz- und Schundgesetz." He was an early advocate of German reunification and a vociferous and active member of the antinuclear movement. However, the delayed return to Germany after the war had created in him an abiding sense of being an outsider in West Germany - a fate he shared with more typically exiled writers - and he saw himself as "ein kläglicher Prophet in seinem Fisch" ("Manchmal im Traum" 31-32). Disillusioned as well by the apparent failure of the new Germany to learn from the mistakes of the past, evidenced most notably in the blind pursuit of material values in the society of the economic miracle and the acceptance of nuclear weapons on German soil, Andres turned his back on Germany in 1961 and returned to his spiritual home in Rome. In his final decade his work became increasingly imbued with philosophical and biblical themes, while at the same time his readership diminished as his essentially conservative style was seen to be out of step with the increasing experimental literature of the era.

Andres is thus not an easy figure to categorize. Though he was consistently opposed to the Nazi regime, much of his early work was nevertheless praised by Nazi commentators for its alleged ties to the German soil, while...

pdf

Share