On one of the last texts by Marie Luise Kaschnitz: Seismographics of our ‘Culture disturbance’

While tidying up recently, I came across a paperback book that had impressed me when I was younger. Its haunting short texts are slivers, like fragments of a consciousness about what moved people and how it did so in the 1970s, when  these texts were written. When I briefly reread individual pages, I was once again and often shaken, as I was in the first reading; I was also trepidatious.
  For me, the most disturbing thing about this reencounter was that in these “recordings” of the everyday by Marie Luise Kaschnitz, the trepidation from today’s perspective stems from the fact that today they seem like forebodings or premonitions of a dam break that was already looming at the time. Today, more than 50 years after the publication of Kaschnitz’s book, this dam break has become a tangible reality in many aspects. At that time, a deserving German writer felt it and translated it into language. And where are such writers today? I don’t want even to talk about certain German and European female politicians here, although the fate of all of us depends more on them than on an imperturbably sensitive modern female writer.

Whether or not

It was the slim little book “Steht noch dahin”, (“Whether or not”) by the German writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901–1974), who was justifiably very well-known in the postwar period, winner of the Büchner Prize in 1955, which was still meaningful at the time. Even then, it was difficult to classify these shorter, highly polished texts, which get under the skin, into one of the standard literary genres. The Swiss literary critic Elsbeth Pulver calls the book a “collection of short prose texts (reflections, short stories, parables, dreams)”. In them, the author’s “I” appears as “an ageing person who […] is incessantly forced by time to pay attention”.
  When reading these texts, we experience a kind of sensitive contemporaneity that does not simply report, but takes set pieces of modern everyday life as an opportunity to look at them and place them in surprising contexts. In Kaschnitz’s work, this is often done in a dreamlike, intuitive way, but then again with wide-awake observation. The text thereby becomes a sensitively guided seismograph of human and fellow human shocks that “the course of time” brings upon us. This is something that has become rare in our current media and our literature, which “goes for” outward appearances and the breaking of breaking taboos. (Are there any taboos left to break?)
  Even the first text, which gave the collection its title, is stirring: “Stands still there”. What “stands there”, i.e., its outcome, is completely open:¹

“Whether we get away without being tortured, whether we die a natural death, whether we don’t starve again, search the rubbish bins for potato peelings, whether we are herded in packs, we have seen it [...].”*

Even the “we” makes us hold our breath. What? Such fates concern the world, but not us! But the turn-of-the-century generation of Marie Luise Kaschnitz saw it; many of her friends experienced it first-hand. One only has to consider the realities of the First World War, the years of crisis (which were also years of hunger), then the National Socialists’ rule with their genocide of the Jewish population, but also the organised persecution and killing of Travellers, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other opponents of the war, socialists, Christians and communists, then the destruction of Germany in the last months of the Second World War. This cruel bombing of Germany’s major cities was no longer in pursuit of any military objectives but reflected solely the targeted terrorisation of the German civilian population, one of the many unpunished war crimes, this time committed by the other side, which allowed itself to be celebrated as the victor.
  But in the 1970s, of course, seeing also meant literally seeing, for everyone, namely through the triumph of television, seeing that the things mentioned were happening again and again – at that time, however, several hundred to a thousand kilometres away from Europe. Were they therefore less painful? This is the writer’s immanent question, which is echoed in the text.

Do we all have to learn the cell-knocking language?

This is how her text continues in the enumeration of what may still threaten us or threaten us again:

“Whether we do not still have to learn the cell-knocking language, to stalk the neighbour, to be stalked by the neighbour, and to weep at the word freedom.”

Here Kaschnitz mentions the secret language practised worldwide by knocking on the walls or the radiators of a cell, depending on the codes of prisoners, many of whom were members of illegal groups or secret organisations. Today we also think of the courageous people who have been languishing in prisons for years for the sole reason that they have brought to light the web of lies, which also exists in the present time, for world-political motives. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others: Now they are treated as traitors to the United States. And now, in Berlin, even a courageous speaker at a demonstration against the war in Ukraine is treated as a criminal. His hint that Russia may have acted in self-defence is described as a whitewash of war crimes, and he will be prosecuted.

“Remains to be seen, all remains to be seen …”

The current exclusion of everything Russian has now reached a level that must be described as pre-racist. Where are the legal and human rights barriers that still hold?
  Here Kaschnitz, more than 50 years ago, proves to be a true seer. She also followed the Auschwitz trials meticulously and was shocked by the excuses of the defendants that they had done nothing but carry out orders from their superiors, as the law required. The fact that laws can also be unlawful, namely against the guideline of human rights given by nature, which are binding for all people, including governments (the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists them), is systematically omitted in this litany of justification.
  Finally, the author also mentions the danger, which many were aware of at the time, of triggering a catastrophic nuclear strike for the entire world, a danger that the circles of our present-day warmongers do not want to perceive. Such a degree of repression, however, is madness.

“Whether we steal away in time to a white bed or perish in a hundred atomic flashes, whether we manage to die with a hope remains to be seen, all remains to be seen.”

Kaschnitz’s short prose poem ends with this unillusioned conclusion. It leaves everything open, even that the foreseen catastrophe could be preventable. Could, if …

The starving children of Biafra

In the 1970s, everyone was talking about an extremely bloody war in Africa. At that time, the Biafra war was described as a civil war but was in fact a proxy war, in this respect comparable with today’s war in Ukraine. Biafra is a region in Nigeria where the Ibo population predominates. It has its own traditions and was majority Christian at the time, while the rest of the country is majority Islamist. But that was not the only reason Biafra Province (like Donbass in Ukraine) made demands for partial autonomy to the central government. They were disregarded and the Ibo ethnic group undertook a successful coup against the authoritarian central government. The former colonial power (Great Britain) subsequently supported the central government. In a long-lasting war, the central government finally succeeded in defeating the breakaway province of Biafra, ousting its leaders and making the autonomists compliant again. This was preceded by almost complete isolation, widespread bombing by British fighter planes, an embargo, and economic sanctions, which drove the province of Biafra into famine, with corresponding victims, especially children. At that time, only Caritas International was able to alleviate the emergency situation to some extent.
  This background appears in an impressive short text in the middle of the book. Its very title is multi-layered, “Enfant inconnu” (Text 28). It alludes to war memorials often found in France, dedicated to the unknown soldiers who died in the war, the “soldats inconnus”. The text describes in sober terms how the Queen of England received a shocking Christmas package from Biafra during the time of the Biafra famine:

“Inside the box was nothing of that sort [of benevolent presents from the grateful English population to their beloved queen, P.K.], but rather the corpse of a little child killed by an aerial bomb, from which the mother had separated to put it under the Queen’s Christmas tree, Happy Christmas and you are to blame.”

In a manner typical for Kaschnitz, she goes on imitating the inner state of a “normal” contemporary at the time, who is primarily interested in the scandalous dimension of the matter, but unfortunately not in its true political dimensions:

“I wonder what will happen to this child’s body, whether they will bury it or bury it in Westminster Abbey, which I think would be pretty […], the Peers with their little crowns, the Archbishop of Canterbury in regalia. The royal children putting their bouquets on the baby coffin, later a tombstone, an Eternal Lamp, about near the poet’s corner, the child of Biafra, l’enfant inconnu.”

Here the poet masterfully plays with the two ways in which great powers deal with unpleasant truths. Either they are swept under the carpet or they are diverted onto the hypocritical track and pretend to be sorry for “it”, thereby serving all the clichés and sentimentalities with which genuine empathy is drowned today.

“That is you, too!”

The 79 other short texts are variations on this theme, each in its own way. Incidents that we “know” from the media or from our everyday lives are examined, not by way of the overall picture but in a partial picture that speaks to us – and then set against a background that is again only hinted at. But these hints always refer back to the central point, the ecce homo (this is man): Dear reader, this is the human being who behaves this way or that way. That is you, too. And what do you think of that? This is the question that every text asks, straightforwardly and unavoidably.
  Therein lies its radicality, which is not aimed at the politics of the day or mere emotions, but at human concerns. Tua res agitur – that is you, too, it is also about you. It takes a lot of nerve to read it; it is not the modern superficial thrill that is addressed, but the nerve of our being: our humanity, sober but serious.
  The last text, by the way, is dedicated to the blackbird’s twittering. It stands for the vitality of all good forces – those of nature, to which the human species still belongs, even if we are too little aware of it. Our innate powers to be genuinely affected become stronger when we rejoice. The fact that we can still do this, as witnessed by the sadly rarer blackbirds that chirp despite everything, as long as there is still some blood within them, it is not completely, but nonetheless predominantly in our hands. Hopefully we will find the way.

* All quotations translated by Current Concerns
¹ Quoted from the edition Suhrkamp Paperback st 57, 1979, ISBN 3-518-06557-2-300, p. 7

Sources:
Kaschnitz, Marie Luise. Steht noch dahin (Whether or not). Suhrkamp Paperback st 57, 1979,
ISBN 3-518-06557-2-300; 1990 edition available in bookshops.
Pulver, Elsbeth. “Marie Luise Kaschnitz”, in: Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Critical Encyclopaedia of Contemporary German Literature), ed. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, vol. 5