The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen’s Essays: On Gender, Nazi Germany, and Colonial Desire by Marianne T. Stecher (review)

No one will be accusing Marianne Stecher of cowardice anytime soon. Imagine bringing up sex, religion, and politics at your family reunion. Assessing Karen Blixen’s position on feminism, Nazism, and colonialism is the scholarly equivalent of poking a stick in a nest of fire ants. These are obviously topics in which many people are deeply invested, and Karen Blixen’s international fame ensures attention.

Stecher has been quite clever in the approach she has taken. Her book analyzes three of Blixen’s major essays, “En Baaltale med 14 Aars Forsinkelse” (Oration at a Bonfire 14 Years Late), “Breve fra et Land i Krig” (Letters from a Land at War), and “Sorte og hvide i Afrika” (Blacks and Whites in Africa). All of these texts have been under-examined, especially by English-language scholars, since the last two had not been translated to English. Stecher’s book includes as an appendix a translation of “Sorte og hvide i Afrika,” executed by Tiina Nunnally, whose translation skills are renowned. That alone is a great service to Blixen scholarship in general. Since all of Stecher’s Danish quotations are translated into English, she makes a good deal of material available, which was not accessible before, to an English-speaking audience. In these three essays, Karen Blixen expresses her views on these highly controversial topics, but since we are dealing with Blixen, the reader still needs to beware. Blixen serves up irony with a lavish hand, and part of Stecher’s task is to contextualize the remarks and help assess what is part of a performance, and what we might actually take away from these pieces.

Although no one could hope to settle the debates about Blixen relating to these three hot-button issues, Stecher comes the closest to doing just that in her chapter on Nazi Germany. Apparently there have been some dark insinuations about Blixen’s views on Nazism, in part because she does not take the Nazi regime strongly enough to task in her essay “Breve fra et Land i Krig,” written as a foreign correspondent in Berlin just before the Nazis occupied Denmark. Stecher locates statements about the Nazis in Blixen’s correspondence that are fairly unambiguous, such as this remark to her aunt in 1938 when she was considering staying in Germany for some months:

Men nogen virkelig Sympathi for, eller Kontakt med, det tredie Rige, kan jeg aldrig faa, tror jeg, hvor stor min beundring for dem end maaske kan blive, for jeg kan ikke rigtig gribes af, ikke engang rigtig holde ud, hvad der, som efter min Mening dette nye tyske Væsen, er udelukkende emotionelt.”

(p. 102)

But I believe I could never have any real sympathy for, or contact with, the Third Reich, no matter how great my admiration for them perhaps might become, for I am not really taken with, I cannot really even tolerate, that which in my opinion is exclusively emotional in the new German spirit.

(p. 101)

She was encouraged to provide a “neutral” view of the Third Reich by the newspapers that sent her to Berlin, and although she does not entirely achieve that, it still accounts for the relatively mild tone of the essay, which has bothered some readers.

The Bonfire Oration, a radio talk from 1953, is not my personal favorite among Blixen’s texts, and I think there are limits to the extent it may be used to explain or illuminate Blixen’s earlier work. Nonetheless, some of its irritatingly conventional remarks, such as “Mandens Tyngdepunkt, hans Væsens Gehalt, ligger i, hvad han i Livet udfører of udretter, Kvinden i, hvad hun er” (p. 55) [“A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in life; the woman’s in what she is” (p. 55)], crave critical commentary. Stecher accurately...