viernes, 12 de noviembre de 2010

MARTIN WALSER: "UN CABALLO EN FUGA"

Martin Walser

Escritor alemán, Martin Walser forma parte del movimiento literario del Grupo 47, en el que se potencia el compromiso social de los autores.

Ha obtenido premios como el Gerhart Hauptmann y el Georg Büchner a toda su carrera, reconociendo su posición como uno de los principales autores contemporáneos en alemán.

Martin Walser (born 24 March 1927 in Wasserburg am Bodensee, on Lake Constance) is a German writer. He became famous for describing the conflicts his anti-heroes have in his novels and stories. In 1998 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt. He is the father of a daughter born in 1961, the writer-and-painter Alissa Walser.

Walser's parents were coal merchants, and they also kept an inn next to the train station in Wasserburg. He described the environment in which he grew up in his novel Ein springender Brunnen (English: A Gushing Fountain). From 1938 to 1943 he was a pupil at the secondary school in Lindau and served in an anti-aircraft unit. According to documents released in June 2007, he became a member of the Nazi party on 20 April 1944,[1] though Walser denied that he knowingly entered the party, a claim disputed by historian Juliane Wetzel.[2][3] By the end of the Second World War, he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht. After the war he returned to his studies and completed his Abitur in 1946. He then studied literature, history, and philosophy at the University of Regensburg and the University of Tübingen. He received his doctorate in literature in 1951 for a thesis on Franz Kafka, written under the supervision of Friedrich Beißner.

While studying, Walser worked as a reporter for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk radio station, and wrote his first radio plays. In 1950, he married Katharina "Käthe" Neuner-Jehle. His four daughters from this marriage—Franziska Walser, Alissa Walser, Johanna Walser, and Theresia Walser—are all professional writers. Johanna has occasionally published in collaboration with her father.

Beginning in 1953 Walser was regularly invited to conferences of the Gruppe 47 (Group 47), which awarded him a prize him for his story Templones Ende (English: Templone's End) in 1955. His first novel Ehen in Philippsburg (English: Marriages in Philippsburg) was published in 1957 and was a huge success. Since then Walser has been working as a freelance author. His most important work is Ein fliehendes Pferd (English: A Runaway Horse), published 1978, which was both a commercial and critical success.

In 2004 Walser left his long-time publisher Suhrkamp Verlag for Rowohlt Verlag after the death of Suhrkamp director Siegfried Unseld. An unusual clause in his contract with Suhrkamp Verlag made it possible for Walser take publishing rights over all of his works with him. According to Walser, a decisive factor in instigating the switch was the lack of active support by his publisher during the controversy over his novel "Tod eines Kritikers" (English: Death of Critic).

Walser is a member of Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin, Sächsische Akademie der Künste (Saxon Academy of Arts), Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Poetry) in Darmstadt, and member of the German P.E.N

From Left to Right

Walser has also been known for his political activity. In 1964, he attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which was considered an important moment in the development of West German political consciousness regarding the recent German past. He was involved in protests against the Vietnam War. During the late 1960s, Walser, like many leftist German intellectuals including Günter Grass, supported Willy Brandt for the election to the office of chancellor of West Germany. In the 1960s and 1970s Walser moved further to the left and was considered a sympathizer of the West German Communist Party. He was friends with leading German Marxists such as Robert Steigerwald and even visited Moscow during this time. By the 1980s, Walser began shifting back to the political right, though he denied any substantive change of attitude. In 1988 he gave a series of lectures entitled "Speeches About One's Own Country," in which he made clear that he considered German division to be a painful gap which he could not accept. This topic was also the topic of his story "Dorle und Wolf".
[edit] Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

In 1998, Walser was granted the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. His acceptance speech, given in the former Church of St. Paul (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt on 11 October 1998, invoked issues of historical memory and political engagement in contemporary German politics and unleashed a controversy that roiled German intellectual circles. In 2007 the German political magazine Cicero placed Walser second on its list of the 500 most important German intellectuals, just behind Pope Benedict XVI and ahead of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass.
[edit] Frankfurt Speech and the Walser-Bubis Debate

In Frankfurt, Walser made his acceptance speech with the title
Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede (Experiences when writing the regular soapbox-speech):

Everybody knows our historical burden, the never ending shame, not a day on which the shame is not presented to us. [...] But when every day in the media this past is presented to me, I notice, that something inside me is opposing this permanent show of out shame. Instead of being grateful for the continuous show of our shame, I start looking away. I would like to understand, why in this decennium the past is shown like never before. When I notice, that something within me is opposing it, I try to hear the motives of this reproach of our shame, and I am almost glad, when I think I can discover, that more often not the remembrance, the not-allowed-to-forget is the motive, but the exploitation [Instrumentalisierung] of our shame for current goals. Always for the right purpose, for sure. But yet the exploitation. [...] Auschwitz is not suitable for becoming a routine-of-threat, an always available intimidation or a moral club [Moralkeule] or also just an obligation. What is produced by ritualisation, has the quality of a lip service [...]. The debate about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin will show, in posterity, what people do who feel responsible for the conscience of others. Turning the centre of the capitol into concrete with a nightmare [Alptraum], the size of a football pitch. Turning shame into monument.

At first the speech did not cause a great stir. Indeed, the audience present in Church of St. Paul received the speech with applause, though Walser's critic Ignatz Bubis did not applaud, as confirmed by television footage of the event.[5] Some days after the event, and again on 9 November 1998, the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews, Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused Walser of "intellectual arson" (geistige Brandstiftung) and claimed that Walser's speech was both "trying to block out history or, respectively, to eliminate the remembrance" and pleading "for a culture of looking away and thinking away".[6] Then the controversy started. As described by Karsten Luttmer:[7] Walser replied by accusing Bubis to have stepped out of dialog between people. Walser and Bubis met on 14 December at the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to discuss the heated controversy and to bring the discussion to a close. They were joined by Frank Schirrmacher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Salomon Korn of the Central Council of Jew in Germany. Afterward, Bubis withdrew his claim that Walser had been intentionally incendiary, but Walser maintained that there was no misinterpretation by his opponents.

The Novel: Runaway Horses

Schoolteacher Helmut Halm is vacationing with his wife, Sabina, as they have for the past eleven summers, in a little town by the water on the German side of Lake Constance. Sunburn, a fondness for food and alcohol, and a lack of exercise do not flatter his forty-six-year-old body or hers. The reader first meets them in a sidewalk cafe watching the passersby, whose appearance puts him to shame: He has not even managed a decent tan, and sunburn has brought out every wrinkle and blemish in his wife’s puffed-up skin. Just as he decides to return to their lonely rented room, a trim, muscular, handsome, bronzed young fellow comes up beside them, accompanied by an equally stunning woman, both stylishly casual in blue jeans. Helmut, with distaste, imagines the man to be one of his former students, but the latter introduces himself, however improbably, as Klaus Buch, Helmut’s long-forgotten boyhood companion. Klaus, though Helmut’s age, appears a generation younger, thanks to a regimen of jogging, sailboating, health foods, mineral water, and abstinence from drink and tobacco. He and his strikingly lovely younger wife, Helene, obviously revel in their appearance, even as they excite Helmut’s envy. Klaus professes great joy at this chance encounter and insists on renewing their friendship, despite reluctance on Helmut’s part. In front of both wives, Klaus spins endless tales about their often embarrassingly sexual boyhood adventures. Helmut professes, not very convincingly, to remember virtually none of the details, and he even denies the basic truth of some of the incidents.

Klaus asks that Helmut and Sabina lead a hike into the nearby mountains, but he sneers at the height that they finally attain: a mere hill. He laughs uproariously and mocks Helmut’s inability to keep to the route, a failure scarcely diminished by a sudden downpour. At the summit, they dine at a restaurant, but Klaus objects to the poor quality of the food. During their descent, passing through a village, they come upon a runaway horse, with two men chasing it helplessly. Klaus, approaching it in a wide arc, daringly grabs its mane and mounts it. It races off anew but soon is seen returning, Klaus still astride. He claims to identify with runaway horses and maintains that the owner erred in approaching it head-on: “You must never stand in the path of a runaway horse. It must have the feeling that its path remains unobstructed. Besides: You can’t reason with a runaway horse.”

Klaus is the hero of the excursion. He even appears to be no longer pathologically afraid of the cold, wet nose of Helmut’s gentle old spaniel, Otto, which formerly made him scream at its friendly touch—odd behavior in so virile a man.

More meetings ensue, during the course of which not only does Sabina flirt mildly with Klaus, but also Helmut, who has for some months forsworn sexual contact with his wife, begins secretly to covet Helene. They go sailing on the lake, which, for the Halms, is an unexpected delight. This experience sets the stage for the book’s melodramatic climax. The two men, this time alone, set out for a second sail. The weather deteriorates; a vicious storm arises. Klaus, becoming somewhat crazed, refuses to turn back, almost determined to head for the storm’s eye. The canvas tilts so close to the water as would seem inevitably to capsize the vessel. Only by leaning far out in the opposite direction do they avoid disaster. The logical Helmut demands that they head for shore. Klaus at least agrees to face the wind, thus momentarily righting the boat. He calls Helmut a coward but screams at him to seize the tiller and hold it tight between his legs. Helmut obeys clumsily, causing the boat to change direction. Klaus retakes control and recklessly allows the craft to heel over again. Waves break over the sides. Then, Helmut kicks the tiller out of his friend’s hand; the boat, again heading into the wind, rights itself, but Klaus is knocked into the water and disappears. Eventually, Helmut manages to beach the craft, but Klaus is lost.

The next day, there is still no sign of Klaus. Three people are reported drowned during the storm. Helmut, curiously, proposes to Sabina that they go jogging in the forest. They will walk into town, purchase some running shoes, shorts, shirts, and two bicycles. As they prepare to exercise after their return, they find Helene at the door. She enters, begins to drink, smoke, and eat some rich homemade cake. She is no longer stylishly garbed. This is not the Helene they have known. Her arrival initiates a confession. Tearfully, she claims that Klaus was not at all the successful environmental journalist that he seemed. Often he suffered from writer’s block, staring for hours at the blank page in his typewriter. He fought with his editors and publishers,and his career was about finished. He really worried that she (his second wife) no longer loved him. She could not communicate with him. Jealous of her early musical promise, he forced her to abandon a career as a pianist. Far from a success, he had sunk so far as to look upon Helmut as his only means of salvation.

They answer a knock at the door, and there stands Klaus, the survivor, come to take his wife home. Still drinking and smoking, Helene greets him, somewhat ambiguously says, “Let’s go, genius, onward and upward,” and leaves with him.

Helmut and Sabina now decide that they do not really want to go jogging. In fact, they will even leave the just-purchased bicycles with their landlord. If they ever return to the lakeshore another year, they can retrieve them. Instead, they will pack and head for some other town. The story ends aboard a train, where they find a compartment to themselves; Helmut looks upon his wife with rekindled desire.

The Characters

Since Runaway Horse is actually a novella, hardly more than a hundred pages, there is little space for character description and development. Only Helmut and Klaus receive full treatment. The introspective Helmut is given to hiding his real persona, uncertain of his calling as a teacher and troubled by memories, most of which he would willingly forget (and often does). He prefers the confines of his rented room to the world outside. (He actually enjoys its barred windows and misses them when he returns home.) Depicted as a man of reason, he is nevertheless patently neurotic and even irrational in his unease at Klaus’s probing into their boyhood past. His uncertainties extend to his own self-image. He is gradually, if unwillingly, growing apart from his wife, unable to communicate sexually and torn by a sense of inadequacy. Not until the story’s end does he succeed in achieving some satisfaction from his life and in reestablishing a sexual bond with his wife.

Klaus at first seems to be a successful and well-adjusted writer of health and environmental books, lean and tanned of body, admired by women, and in appearance twenty years younger than his boyhood friend. Yet he is far from this ideal. His wife accuses him of morbid jealousy, of being so insecure as to believe that the equally insecure Helmut can effect his salvation. If Helmut is the man of reason, then Klaus is the man of instinct, the runaway horse of the book’s title and, as the storm incident bears out, an irrational force with which no one can reason.

Sabina and Helene, characters merely sketched, are more normal, foils for their respective husbands. Helene, though younger than Klaus, actually shelters and mothers him. She is unhappy, repressed but resigned, another survivor like her husband. Sabina is scarcely more than a good German hausfrau.

Still, Martin Walser is too professional to create cardboard stereotypes. Helmut is no unblemished hero who, unaware of his own basic strengths, miraculously saves both vessel and madman from his folly, finally solving his physical and psychological problems. In truth, he is mainly to blame for Klaus’s being swept overboard and is experiencing well-deserved pangs of guilt over his friend’s apparent death. Nor does Klaus end as a mere shell of the man he once was; only the disaffected wife offers a litany of his supposed shortcomings. It takes quite a man to survive a plunge into a storm-tossed lake. He returns, doubtless demythologized, as one critic has put it, and doubtless chastened, but hardly conquered.

Themes and Meanings

The story can be read literally for what it purports to tell: the tale of two middle-aged men suffering from change of life, the one (Klaus) gladly reliving his past because it represents happier times, and the other (Helmut) reluctant to recall painful childhood memories and equally reluctant to cope with his present inadequacies as a teacher and a husband. The storm incident will allow Helmut to realize his positive qualities, see the shortcomings of his envied friend, and finally, purging himself of his frustrations and uncertainties, achieve a measure of happiness.

Others eschew such a simplistic explication. They know that Walser is a Socialist sympathetic with East German Communism, an author who refuses to accept the benefits of the vaunted Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that turned West Germany, a nation virtually destroyed in World War II, into a world leader in industry, admired for its high standard of living and its freedom from unemployment and inflation. Instead, like several other postwar German writers, he sees West Germany as a nation of soulless capitalists and disaffected losers. The characters in this novella are comparable to Xaver Zurn, the frustrated chauffeur of Seelenarbeit (1979; The Inner Man, 1984) or the protagonist of Die Gallistl’sche Krankheit (1972; Gallistl’s ailment), who suffers from a mysterious malady characterized by unhappiness about himself, his family, and Germany in general. He blames his country for his symptoms, which are relieved only when he turns Socialist. Thus interpreted, Helmut’s story illustrates the folly of refusing to acknowledge Germany’s past. Helmut and Klaus both, along with their wives, are also guilty of selfishly living for themselves alone, heedless of the truth that salvation must lie in social commitment.

Finally, what of the curious name Buch (German for “book”)? Some scholars would see it as a symbol for the book of German history in which Helmut must read the nation’s truth. This might appear to be a farfetched interpretation if it were not for the fact that, although Helmut’s last name is almost never mentioned, Klaus is called “Klaus Buch” constantly, almost obsessively, often several times per page. Walser would seem to be laying special emphasis on the importance of this surname.

Critical Context

Runaway Horse afforded Walser his first commercial success; it was a runaway best-seller. It continued the critical acclaim of his earlier novels, plays, and essays. With the death of Heinrich Boll, Martin Walser has become one of the two most prominent German novelists; like Gunter Grass, Walser is eminent in several genres. No modern German writer is better at probing the inner recesses of characters beset by frustration and failure, and Walser accomplishes this without the exaggeration of Grass or the social preachments and frequent humorlessness of so many East German writers. Walser can be quite amusing. Not every critic has recognized the fine sense of humor that prevents tendentiousness and leavens almost all of his books, not least among them Runaway Horse. He can laugh at his protagonists, making the reader laugh with him and possibly at him. If his beliefs and biases inevitably color his fiction, whatever message he sends must be discovered. Rarely does he slip into applying obvious labels. Walser remains a thoroughly satisfying master artist.

Bibliography

Clark, Jonathan Philip. “A Subjective Confrontation with the German Past in Martin Walser’s Ein fliehendes Pferd,” in Martin Walser: International Perspectives, 1987. Edited by Jurgen E. Schlunk and Armand E. Singer.
Pickar, Gertrud B. “Narrative Perspective in the Novels of Martin Walser,” in The German Quarterly. XLIV (1971), pp. 48-57.
Sinka, Margit M. “The Flight Motif in Martin Walser’s Ein fliehandes Pferd,” in Monatshefte. LXXIV (Spring, 1982), pp. 47-58.
Thomas, Noel L. “Martin Walser Rides Again: Ein fliehendes Pferd,” in Modern Languages. LX (1979), pp. 168-171.
Waine, Anthony Edward. Martin Walser, 1980.

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