Leonhard Frank’s novel Links wo das Herz ist was such a thinly veiled autobiography, it was practically see through. In it he describes how, as a Leonhard Frank’s novel Links wo das Herz ist was such a thinly veiled autobiography, it was practically see through. In it he describes how, as a German exile working in Hollywood, he befriended his colleague across the hall at work, Thomas Mann, whose brother Heinrich once presented him with one of Germany’s most important annual literary awards more than 25 years earlier. Frank and Mann became friends, often visited and dined with each other as they both read novels they were working to each other. Frank enjoyed Mann’s Doktor Faustus while Mann was apparently enchanted with Frank’s Mathilde. But while Mann’s went on to be considered a classic by many, Frank’s has been out-of-print for decades and can only be found through diligent effort in a few used German-language book stores. In his novel Frank laments, although he was one of his era’s most popular writers, by having his work banned, Hitler won. It’s true this is not a great novel. But is it worthy of seeking out? I’m not sure.
I’m interested in Frank precisely because he is relatively forgotten and I make an effort to find and read his books. So I’m perplexed a bit by this one. Frank was always a phrenetic writer, often in a Waugh-ish, A Hand Full of Dust-ish kind of way. (Indeed, I suspect Frank read it because during his time in Hollywood, he actually wrote about the mortician Waugh based a similar character in the novel The Loved One on.) One gets a sense that Mann had a great impact on Frank as he wrote this book. Mann chose Goethe to try to explain the inside of the German soul before and during World War II. Frank chose to write a love story mostly about a Swiss girl’s world, one that is rarely touched by the grit and grime of reality. Nor does it really need to be. World War II is a supporting character in this love story.
As a child living in the Swiss countryside, Mathilde’s world is so idyllic, she seems to have trouble separating it from the fairy tales that fill her imagination. Intrusions of reality enter the book randomly like insignificant meteors dropping to earth, disintegrating into forgetfulness before their impact registers. Even her best friend’s unwed, teenage pregnancy and her own wedding at age seventeen. She had two suitors and was married the wrong one for seven years, but she felt like she was living back in one of her fairy tales when the right one, an Englishman, Weston, educated in Switzerland, came back—her Prince Charming—from a self-imposed exile halfway around the world to marry her. They knew they would marry before they had even corresponded with each other. When the world outside of hers was collapsing in 1933, she had never been happier in her mostly happy life. Even the occasional news from over the border can’t intrude on her raising a daughter and Weston writing his history of the British Empire. And as the pressures of reality—but not war itself—take their toll as guesses about Weston’s fate as a flyer in British missions around Europe, she is weighed down by the uncertainty of whether he is alive or not. The end of the novel, though not predictable, is not at all unexpected.
Frank wrote this novel after escaping a prisoner camp in northern, occupied France and making his way on land to Portugal, boat to New York and train to Los Angeles. And he fell in love with a woman much younger than him in the U.S. One reads the strong influence of Mann’s allegories, an older man’s giddy love, and his penchant for recycling themes. With respect to the latter, his actual escape with three others from a prisoner camp was followed by a twenty day bike journey south through Vichy France and to freedom was recycled from Links wo das Herz ist. One gets a sense he started out writing a love story and then added the war experiences either when he got stuck or to make it more marketable.
I can’t think of any love stories that I've read outside of Wodehouse novels and short stories. Certainly not in German. So the story did not captivate me as much as I hoped it might. But waiting for occasional gems of phrasing was worth the reading journey. And the concept of the plot was better than its execution....more
This volume compiles all the short stories Leonhard Frank published in his lifetime, ranging from 1912 to 1961, in chronological order. Reading the fiThis volume compiles all the short stories Leonhard Frank published in his lifetime, ranging from 1912 to 1961, in chronological order. Reading the first half of this collection felt like watching an athlete practicing for competition; Frank seemed to be exercising to explore his craft. These episodic stories had inconclusive endings, experimentations with descriptive writing, and tinkering with styles of dialogue. This writer was unsure of himself. But in the second half, the stories flow, each has a point. Like all good short stories, they quickly establish their tight universes.
His confident maturity shows itself in Die Schicksalsbrücke (The Bridge of Fate), a short Bildung novella of sorts. A seventeen year old girl whose wealthy widower father hires a matron to prepare her for the obligations she will be expected to assume. When her father has business problems, she wishes for his failure so that they can fire the matron and she can once again be close to him and shed the pretension of life awaiting her. But as she approaches her eighteenth birthday, his business worries are over, he becomes engaged and has decided on the groom of the arranged marriage of his daughter. When she tells him that she has secretly been taking acting lessons, has been offered a job in a theater in another city, and tells him she has no intention of getting married off into polite society, he tells her he will no longer support her. On the train journey to her new life, she meets an older American businessman whose attentions are ambiguous. He is either a kindly father figure or an old pervert. As she crosses the symbolic bridge to her future, we are left speculate whether she will become an independent actress or face a crueler, unknown fate.
The most moving story, Atmen (Breathing), is barely a fictionalization of the most painful event of his life, the sudden death of his young wife in 1923 after she had a stroke on a street car. For whatever reason, this paragraph captured me; it demonstrates his growing maturity as a writer (please forgive the inadequate translation):
Er war vierzig. Die Stirn war über den Brauen weit vorgebaut. Diese Höcker waren in den Jahren schwerer Schreibtischarbeit immer größer geworden. Die Stirn beherrschte das schmale Gesicht, und ihr Fanatismus kehrte wieder im dünnen, festen Mund. Nur die Augen verrieten seine Empfindsamkeit. Das Haar war ergraut. Sein sportlich durchtrainierter, schlanker Körper erlaubte ihm, in zehn Sekunden vier Stockwerke hinaufzuspringen und vor der Tür so ruhig zu atmen wie unten.
(He was forty. The forehead was built up far beyond the brows. These bumps grew ever larger through hard toiling at his desk. The forehead ruled the narrow face and its fanaticism returned back again in its thin, tight mouth. Only the eyes betrayed his sensitivity. The hair had grayed. His athletic, thoroughly trained body allowed him to spring up four stories to the door that he could breath as calmly as he did at the bottom of the steps.)
The only thing more tragic than the death of a young child is, as Frank makes clear, the death of a young spouse.
The highlights of the collection are Frank’s collection of post-WWII stories. A group of Berliners who live in an open basement try to survive together. One, an artist, drawn to a pile of rubble by the activity of many rats who had conquered the rubble of the city, uncovers a dead woman still sitting in her chair. He spends days painting her as his fellow dwellers leave him to his artistic inspiration. It is a scene eerily reminiscent of one in Zola’s The Masterpiece.
In another story that begins in 1944, a Gestapo informer identifies a neighbor who made anti-Nazi statements in private, watches as he is dragged out of bed and witnesses his death by beating. Fast forward two years. His widow is now living with a returned veteran, who spends his days looking for the informer who has disappeared. She won’t marry her new love until he takes revenge and kills her first husband’s murderer, a scene that he incorporated into his brilliant novel Die Jünger Jesu. He eventually finds the informer as the conclusion leads to an oddly happy ending.
But it’s not all dark. Another story focuses on a small family in bombed out Berlin living in a garden shed. The father is arrested for taking boards from a public area and sentenced to three months in jail. During that time his son becomes ill as his mother and her son’s employers work together to bring him back to health. When the father is released, his optimism is unbowed. As he finds the board he was charged with stealing lying where he left them, he asks the police if he can take them. They answer that he has done his time and have no problem with him taking them home to build an addition to his shed. Frank concludes that people like him will rebuild Germany.
A wonderful collection that confirms, as the editor writes, that “Frank is without a doubt one of the most significant German writers in the first half of the 20th century, and at least in the interwar years, was one of the most successful authors of his time, comparable with Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, or Hans Fallada.”...more
Set in 1927, five middle-aged men from Würzburg, Germany, friends since childhood, meet in a park overlooking the city. Commiserating about their liveSet in 1927, five middle-aged men from Würzburg, Germany, friends since childhood, meet in a park overlooking the city. Commiserating about their lives after the inflation, from which their fortunes have never recovered, they decide to form a singing quartet, with one of them, who lost his bar, serving as impresario and manager. As they prepare and publicize their first concert, Leonhard Frank tells a story in which the reader sort of hovers above the lives of their friends, families and neighbors to provide snapshots of hard lives in a small city (it occurs to me that this story may have been an inspiration for the film The Full Monty).
We meet a sixteen year old girl who is torn between two suitors. Who will she choose? A murder briefly upends a number of people's lives. Will it be resolved? An 83 year old women returns to the city after spending 26 years in Ohio with her second husband because she wants to die where she was born. How will she adjust? These and many more characters all share a time when hardships have peaked and life finally takes a turn for the better. The dreams and fortunes of the quartet tie them loosely together and mirror a shaky rebirth that Germany experienced in the late 1920. Sadly, since these events take place before the Great Depression changed the world forever, we readers are the only ones who know their happiness will be short-lived.
This was an enjoyable book, perhaps a minor classic; a fitting addition to the inter-war Neue Sachlichkeit genre, but mostly unknown today....more
More than ten years before Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), there was Der Mensch ist Gut (Man is Good). Leonhard Frank quicklyMore than ten years before Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), there was Der Mensch ist Gut (Man is Good). Leonhard Frank quickly wrote this book while he was in self-imposed pacifism-motivated exile in Switzerland during World War I. His novella was torched with as much hate-filled gusto during the Nazi book burning rallies as was Remarque’s classic. Frank also had to flee a certain fate in the German concentration camps in 1933. But unlike Remarque, Zweig or the Mann brothers, he joined the vast majority of authors who became relatively anonymous after they were banned during the Third Reich only to become part of the post-World War II amnesia that infested too many parts of German culture.
Published in 1917, Der Mensch ist Gut is a series of interwoven stories of people in Berlin who have learned about the deaths of their loved ones in World War I. A waiter loses his only son; a son for whom he sacrificed and gave everything he could. As he realizes how complicit he was in his son’s death—by giving his son a toy gun in his youth and teaching him about value of duty to the Kaiser—he runs through town shouting “Peace!” and others join him until a large crowd builds in a city square. A widow learns her husband was shot in the head; better than to be shot in the stomach followed by a long, painful death she reasons in silence. She wonders if her unborn child will care when he or she learns that he was an insurance salesman. And then she goes for a walk. A mother whose worries about her son finally become true realizes her husband will always be blind to the propaganda about the need to protect the fatherland. After wandering the streets, she comes face-to-face with a waiter and the insurances agent’s wife. They all understand what brought them together as soon as they look each other in the eyes.
Unfortunately, the latter chapters lose much of the emotion built up in the first half of the book. One gets the sense that Frank felt rushed to get something out as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the book was quite a sensation. At the height of German reactionary violence in 1920, he returned to Germany to receive the Kleist Preis, awarded annually to a work or body of work of German literary significance, from Heinrich Mann. Copies of his book were reprinted by the thousands by the British to give to German prisoners of war in World War II. But today it is largely forgotten.
Although it has not been published for years in Germany, thanks to the University of Michigan Library digital collections (http://www.lib.mich.edu) and support by the Hathi Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org), Der Mensch ist Gut is still available in print. This service should be celebrated, explored, and used by readers everywhere....more
It really is odd how the human brain works. Today while doing yard work, I was beginning to write a review in my head of a book I'm reading now and waIt really is odd how the human brain works. Today while doing yard work, I was beginning to write a review in my head of a book I'm reading now and was trying to figure out the right English translation of "verkannt" which can be "misunderstood" or "unrecognized." And then it dawned on me, Frank's alter ego Michael Vierkant, the last name I always thought of as "four corners" or "square" is actually a play on the word "verkannt." Frank never got the credit he deserved, as is explained below. Now back to my reading.
Original Review
Links wo das Herz ist (Left, Where the Heart Is) is Leonhard Frank’s autobiographical “novel,” told in third person through the story of his alter ego, Michael Vierkant, a character reprised from his first novel Die Räuberbande. By the early 1930s, Frank was among the best-selling authors in Germany and respected by his peers for his stories of how average people struggled against larger social forces. His pacifism made him beloved by his readers and hated by the political right.
To me the most interesting part of the “novel” begins shortly after the Nazis assumed power in 1933. Frank was among the elite in German literature, as well-known as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. He was a friend of Joseph Roth who, in the novel, informs Michael about his immediate plan to leave Germany for self-imposed exile in Paris over their last lunch together in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, Michael decides to go into an exile that took him from Zürich to England and, by the late 1930s to Paris, only to find himself interred in Brittany by the French government after Nazi Germany’s invasion in May 1940. By chance, Michael is able to escape the camp with two others only to find himself on the coast of the English Channel with no way to get across. They decide the only option left to them is to make their way to free France and Marseille.
The journey itself is worthy of a Hollywood film. They stay on the back roads, sleep in barns (using the manuscript of a novel sewn into the lining of his coat as a pillow) where scared but sympathetic farmers give them food and travel advice. They encounter Germans along way and bluff themselves through, eventually getting hold of bicycles to speed their way south until after more than three weeks, they reach Marseille. With the help of the American Emergency Rescue Committee (mostly for the benefit of scientists, artists and writers), he makes his way to Lisbon and gets passage on ship to New York. He arrives in New York with the clothes on his back, his manuscript, and thirteen dollars. The committee gets him a train ticket to Hollywood—on the way he notices how the same town seems to have been reproduced a few hundred times—and a studio writing job paying $100 a month.
Michael’s time in Hollywood is filled with despair and guilt. He never adjusts to the success-driven culture or, for that matter, the boring weather. His job is a token exercise in which no one takes him seriously and reports of war in Europe have him questioning his fortune for having escaped. His office is across from Heinrich Mann. He becomes friends with Thomas Mann and they often dine together reading excerpts of their writings. Mann reads from drafts of Dr. Faustus while he admires Michael’s readings from Deutsche Novelle and Matilde. He describes the death of a fellow émigré whose wife asks him to wait when the embalmer arrives—who was the basis of Evelyn Waugh’s character in The Loved One (and played by Rod Steiger in the underappreciated film classic of the same name)—only to be devastated when they both realize the body looks more alive in death than in life. It is a metaphor to him about the shallowness of Hollywood.
Michael leaves Hollywood for New York after the war, where is was monitored by the FBI for being "violently pacifist" in his beliefs. It was there that he wrote Die Jünger Jesu, mets a new love, another German émigré, before returning to Europe with her in 1950, whereafter they were married. After travelling from Le Havre and arriving in a bombed out Aachen in the middle of the night, he goes into town to a bookshop the next day he realizes that his books have disappeared. After a 17 year absence, he has been forgotten. He realizes that “German readers under 40 knew nothing about him. Hitler triumphed over Michael” („Die deutschen Leser bis zu vierzig Jahren kannten nichts von ihm. Über Michael hatte Hitler gesiegt.“). This observation alone gives this book a special place in my library.
Frank eventually made his way back to his hometown in Würzburg and decided to settle in Munich where he renewed his friendships with writers like Erich Kästner. He was still recognized and celebrated in East Germany, but the reactionary forces that strongly influenced life in West Germany under Adenauer kept his critical writings from reaching larger audiences. He died in Munich in 1961 never having regained the literary stature he had achieved from 1914-1933. Whatever exists of his legacy today is due in large part to the efforts of his widow....more
Leonhard Frank's first novel caused a literary sensation in Germany when it was published in 1914, receiving the Theodor-Fontane-Preis for excellence Leonhard Frank's first novel caused a literary sensation in Germany when it was published in 1914, receiving the Theodor-Fontane-Preis for excellence in literature and art. This semi-autobiographical novel, set in the late 19th Century in Frank's hometown of Würzburg in lower Franconia, follows a gang of boys who meet in a secret cave set in a hillside under the castle overlooking the city. The boys adopt names of characters in Karl May novels, although they think of the May's stories about the American West as fact, not fiction.
They meet in the cave in the late-evening, early morning hours, sneaking out of their homes. Sometimes they engage in pranks, sometimes they do good deeds. But most of their lives are filled with scenes of drab, cruel every day experiences. As they get older, each finds out that they have little hope of ever getting out of their town. One becomes a priest and Michael, Frank's alter ego, impresses one of his teachers to eventually land in an art school in Munich. But his small town upbringing doesn't prepare him for the competitive jealousies of the big city. His talent eventually brings him to a villa on the shores of the Mediterranean, but a matter of saving his honor shows that he can't escape his provincial past.
The conclusion of the novel occurs years later when the boys, as adults, turn out to be just like their fathers. In this rather dark coming of age novel, Frank established his reputation as one of Germany's most important early 20th Century writers. The success of the novel allowed him to go into self-imposed exile in Switzerland when World War I began to become one of the leading pacifists of his age....more
Leonhard Frank begins Die Jünger Jesu (The Disciples of Jesus) with what many considered to be the end of their world:
„Würzburg am Main, die Stadt des
Leonhard Frank begins Die Jünger Jesu (The Disciples of Jesus) with what many considered to be the end of their world:
„Würzburg am Main, die Stadt des Weines und der Fische, der Kirchen, gotisch und barock, wo jedes zweite Haus ein unersetzliches Kunstdenkmal war, wurde nach dreizehnhundertjährigem Bestehen in fünfundzwanzig Minuten durch Brandbomben zerstört. Den folgenden Morgen floß der Main, in dem sich die schönste Stadt des Landes gespiegelt hatte, langsam und gelassen durch Schutt und Asche, hinaus in die Zeit.“
(“Würzburg on the Main [pronounced mine], the city of wine and fish, of churches, gothic and baroque, where every other house was an irreplaceable artistic monument, was destroyed, after 1,300 years of existence, by firebombs in 25 minutes. The next morning the Main flowed, where once the most beautiful city of the country had once been reflected, through rubble and ash, out into time.”)
Set immediately in the aftermath of World War II, this story is about rebirth—sometimes with roots of injustice, sometimes with the vitality and optimism of a new spring, but never simple or predictable.
Die Jünger Jesu are a group of eleven boys who meet late at night in the bombed out cellar of a church—a reprise of sorts of Die Räuberbande, Frank’s first novel. The boys become a secret conscience of the city. They act as Robin Hoods, “taking from the rich, who have everything, and giving to the poor, who have nothing.” They store their pilfered bounty in a secret warehouse under the church and distribute it anonymously with notes attached that the gifts were left by the disciples. They take note of people of need and act on their dreams of building a new Germany built on Christian socialism.
An incredibly diverse cast of characters includes Johanna, a young girl who leaves her Nazi father and lives in one of the many tool sheds that dot the vineyards surrounding the city. She meets and falls in love with an American soldier, becomes pregnant, and is left behind when his tour of duty is up. Her Jewish friend Ruth returns to the city in rags after being sent to Auschwitz only to be spared as she is forced to suffer in a Warsaw brothel run by the SS. She is intent on getting her revenge on the politician responsible for her family being murdered in Auschwitz. Many of the leading city officials have reassumed, with the complicity of the American military administrators, the same positions in the new government. Unknown to the Americans—or perhaps it was—they run a secret organization that continues to terrorize their victims and opponents.
The disciples represent the hope of a new, better Germany. Their deeds and struggles against reactionary forces form a rich, unpredictable story that is among Frank’s best. Frank wrote this book in the late 1940s while he was still exiled in New York City and had not yet returned to Germany. Many of the themes, especially the rehabilitation of former Nazis at the expense of reformers, were extracted from newspaper reports and conversations with soldiers and reporters who had returned from Germany. Despite not being present at the scene, his story is a remarkably accurate, condensed portrayal about the inconsistencies, dreams and frustrations of post-World War II Germany. Because of this story, he was not welcomed warmly by his hometown of Würzburg when he returned to visit in 1950. Time has led to a reassessment, acceptance, and celebration of this visionary tale by the city's descendants. Sadly, rehabilitation of his writing and reputation has not been as forthcoming from a larger German audience....more
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