Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann
German Fiction
Original title -Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens
Translator – Lelia Vennewitz
Source – Personal copy
For my second book for German Lit Month, I moved off the Guide Crime novel and picked a book I had decided on earlier this year. Joe at Rough Ghost had put up a picture on social media of a book by Fühmann, but I’m not sure if it was this one or another. U had read The jew car by him a couple of years ago and hadn’t known he had some other books coming out years earlier, so I found a cheap copy of this book which is on a subject that he talked and wrote about a lot in his later life, and that is Germany’s past he hAD BEEN IN THE nazi party during the wart but lived in East Germany after the war and was a staunch socialist. This book, written later in his writing life, is part memoir, part travelogue. It follows a three-year period he spent in Budapest in 1972.
October I9
Budapest: perhaps even more mini-skirts than in Berlin, in any case shorter ones, sometimes ending above the top of the stocking, usually cheap materials with an inverted pleat back and front and the skimpiest ones covering the ungainliest thighs
The intersection outside the Astoria is a No Stopping zone, a taxi stops, the customer has trouble with his money, the driver explains, the customer searches, cars block the inter-section, the cars blow their horns, the cars make a racket, the customer negotiates, the driver shows the figure on his fingers, the cars are now jammed up beyond the intersec-tion, the customer doesn’t understand, the cars roar, the driver of the car behind the taxi jumps out, cursing as he thumps the rear end of the taxi, the driver waves him off, the curser flings up his arms, and the cars way at the back reverse or turn and look for another route.
I liked this observation about skirts very of its time !
Fühmann finds himself in Budapest as a 50-year-old on a trip to a writer’s conference.(I’m always amazed how much more in Eastern European states’ Literature is taken) We see him talking with his fellow writers and his own poetic piece a few times in the book as he wanders around Budapest, talking about the city but also looking back at his own past and those war and post-war years. As the ghost of the Warsaw apcts invasion of Budapest some fouyr years before this book a book that start like a travelogue about the place thew writers become a darker book a writer thinking about his writing and also the past isn ever good as he wanders dark street drinks with his fellow writers. Talking about their works and place, it is a world caught in Amber.
Among pillars, in niches, under arcades: four pools, three large, one smaller, one shell-shaped, one shaped like a stadium, the water rising in temperature from the smallest to the largest pool each time by four degrees, from twenty-eight to forty degrees Centigrade, and on the water in the circle of the talking heads, bibs floating like lotus blossoms
Thirteen Leopold Blooms: what a metamorphosis
In the sauna: the old men have left, and now above the common people an athlete sits on the arm of a chair, wringing himself out. Doggedly, as stubbornly solemn as an athlete who has come in eleventh at the regional champion-ship, he squeezes the water out of his tissues, pore by pore, and every time he lifts his elbow he ripples the muscles of his arm, and no one pays any attention, wise nation! For fifteen minutes he works the section between collarbone and the top of his left breast, I might have been curious to see whether he kept up this pace, but the heat drives me out
Had pick this bit with its nod to Joyce
This is one of those lost gems that maybe would be great reissued a man wandering post-68 Budapest, a writer remembering his past draft into war by the Nazis and then those post-war socialist years, a time when the world he knew seemed perfect. But as he wanders around Budapest, you can see how that changes, and he talks to other writers. This has a bit of everything in his poetry, fiction, travelogue, and memoir. In the days when reading of a place was how to feel it before the age of celeb travels, he makes us feel the town, the Acacia trees, and the writers he meets. The city itself wound but still getting by. I hope it gets a new publication. My book is over thirty years old. I know Seagull Books has brought a few of his other books out. Described as one of the most sensitive books in East Germany. It captures those two extreme views of German life from the mid-thirties to when the book was written in 1972. Have you a favourite East german writer ?
This sounds a wonderful read, one well worth looking out for as I love reading about travel in the 1960s. Much has changed since then. Many thanks for the review.
Interesting what you say about how literature is taken so much more seriously in Europe. For the 1970s Club I read a book called Tamara by Geoffrey Dutton, who had been to the USSR and part of the main premise of the book is how seriously the Soviets took literature especially poetry.
Of course we can all go on about how the Soviets constrained it with their rules and censorship — but at the end of the day books and reading were considered important not only by the rulers but also by the people, and from what I could see even in a brief holiday there in 2012, that attitude still prevails. Because as Australians we were considered ‘exotic’ we often got into conversations even using just my limited Russian and their limited English, and I only had to mention that we were there to visit Tolstoy’s grave or Chekhov’s or Dostoyevsky’s house and they would be delighted. They would ask me if I had read such-and-such and so on. You could not have the same ad-hoc conversation in London and find that everyone you spoke to would know who you were talking about if you mentioned Virginia Woolf or Bertrand Russell or even Dickens. If they know Austen it’s because they’ve seen the film, not because they’ve read the book.
It’s the same here in Australia, I think. We have stood by and let a shallow version of American culture take over instead of celebrating our own.
Sounds good, another one to try at some point 🙂
This sounds excellent. I’m going to look for it. Thanks for the review.
Thank you so much for reviewing this. I just finished it, based on your review, and it is one of the five best books I read this year. So much to ponder; it took me quite a bit longer than I expected for a 250 page book. I had to stop and think about so many of his aphorisms and observations.
I also enjoyed the subtle building up of reflections on seemingly abstract and random topics (shame, nationality, change, myth) that finally culminate in his self-examination of what he might have done in his Nazi youth if he had been assigned to work at Auschwitz. He is brutally honest about how he might have behaved just as others in that environment behaved.
And yet there was so much else to think about in his thoughts on language, translation, reflection, how we perceive the world… Really a wonderful book.
Yes a book that feels like it should be better known as it is beautifully written and also has so many little threads in it