The Dead Girls’ Class Trip (Selected Stories) by Anna Seghers
Part Two, as continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/21/the-dead-girls-class-trip-selected-stories-by-anna-seghers/
Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
New York Review Books 2021
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
nullimmortalis August 7, 2021 at 11:26 am
THE DEAD GIRLS’ CLASS TRIP
“…she would remember, as clearly as I do now, the little velvet ribbon in her hair and the white-walled inn and the sunny garden by the Rhine and the boys arriving just as the girls were leaving.”
Memory as palimpsest for memory, this is a German girl’s proto-Proustian memory of a class trip whereby the various girls, who are now engagingly described in their future lives with the men they married or didn’t marry, were taken from the sunny garden just as the boys, their would-be sweethearts, arrived in the river-boat.
Idyllic, with seesaws, tugged braids and a teacher with a huge crucifix in her cleavage and a duck-walk. But the ‘would-be’ palimpsest — of two future world wars, and the Nazi regime, and these once bosom friends falling out over fealty to the swastika et al — somehow grants them this book’s poignancy of life eternally. For example, the ‘narrator’, I infer, avoids her own death by the now constructive dream co-vividness of cacti and mountains elsewhere, a place where she would have ended up in older age. This genuine masterpiece should be required reading for all would-be inhabitant dreamers of the eternities future-projected by such literature — somehow miraculously creating our personal eternities for real by transcending the lethal fate of the planet where we once lived.
The End
Pages 182 – 187
“Does he actually have the same glass sphere as his neighbor?”
What glass sphere? Or have I missed something?
I am captured, if not captivated, by these first few pages of a novelette. As two men, working on the assumed German railway, seek rope to tie down their jolted cargo. One such worker Volpert has an instinct that the man Zillich, with tipped forward ears, who offers to sell them rope was part of the SS cruelties to those in the (erstwhile, now Soviet rescued?) concentration camp….
In fact, that instinct is more a detailed narrative of such cruelties. As if reliving, by dint of this book’s already established power of retrocausality, reliving something he never lived?
Pages 187-188
“The earth had healed from the conflagration, now it was only the smoke from the small fires in the potato fields…”
An ironic thought, that ending of the Second World War, with what new war we have imposed on the world, today of all days. Reading this book by chance concurrently with this Sørensen one…
I am just concentrating today on these two pages, as we are now tellingly following the path of Zillich himself, from the point of view of his wife,and his return to work on the farm following his period wearing “the brown shirt, the tall boots, and the leather belt…”
Pages 188 – 197
“You can’t kill Satan.”
Death is never punishment for Anyone,
Whatever it is they’ve done?
Zillich flees Volpert’s recognition of him, whereby the former once strung up Jews, taken them down and strung them up again, with ropes no doubt relatives of the rope that Volpert wanted! And justice like the ‘daft woman’ here who still salutes and calls out ‘Heil Hitler’ because she thinks she ought to, one almost feels sorry for Zillich as he searches for work during his anonymous or pseudonymous journey and later talks to someone called Nobody, if not Anyone. Yet, we know like “Himmler, Ley, Göring” et al, he now needs to be strung up, too. Ley-lines of indelible, death-proof history, I guess.
Pages 197 – 206
“Everything’s a matter of fate, Peter Nobody, whose name was suddenly Friday, had said.”
Names changed, co-opted or pre-empted, including that of Zillich with his guilt or inner voice, his need to forget through hard graft, still tested or tempted, his intrinsic control of sand quarry workers or dust cloud city, individual and general attempts at building back better, his wayward attendance at church sermons, worried that his own dreams might give him away… trying to help others, too, when they are similarly beset of being one of the guilty ones. Is God’s redemption enough, we ask ourselves? Canwe feel sympathy for men like Zillich? Indeed, can… should we feel sympathy for ourselves?
Pages 206 – 211
“The dead never come back.”
…says someone here.
Why do I feel guilty at empathising with the poignancy of Zillich’s fate, where everyone may recognise him as a war criminal on the run. Perhaps the poignancy derives from the fact that he pins back his ears with adhesive tape? A giveaway, if ever there was one!
Literature makes one think outside the box, outside the disguise of what one is made to do and what one does because of what one is. And the guilt remains, as one learns of the mass graves and the people who never return to their loved ones. Yet this book’s context so far seems to make them live again. Zillich’s story is part of that pattern, that gestalt. Without this story about him the dead would have surely died forever. They live again here to avenge themselves or just to live? Or even to redeem him?
Pages 211 – 218
A river “glittering cunningly”, invisible bonds tying some men together in inscrutable fellowship, but not others, and no refuge for Zillich, no escape from his Fuhrer paranoia, as he arrives at a new building site, befriended by two others, but why thus befriended, why the plan of the scaffolding for him to stand on? Hard for him to hide in the hills above the city or in the colour of the river’s riparian ribbon, or even in the brushstrokes of a painting… but death now presents no fear by his hiding within the words of this story and this book saying that there is no such fear?
“they’ll hand you a rope”
Pages 218 – 224
“Gossips always believed gossips.”
“Why do people like this go on living? He longed for music, for marching boots, for commands instead of these gray hours that dribbled away between one’s fingers; he longed for harsh resistance that reared up until you stomped on it with your feet and that struck out in all directions, even while screaming and whimpering and dripping with blood, instead of yielding meekly like grass under the rake.”
Zillich’s instinctive, if self-resisted, thoughts — and I hope I am forgiven for quoting the whole of this seminal passage, as it seems symptomatic of our times today, as exacerbated by on-line polarisations. Meanwhile, Volpert still searches for him, and Zillich, still incognito, forebodingly meets another incognito guard from the concentration camp where they both once worked….
The net closes in.
Pages 224 – 231
“Before the idea could even take form, the girl, maybe alerted by his look, raced ahead of him through the forest…”
An unspeakable, unspoken idea. And this unique study in justified as well as unjustified paranoia gathers pace ironically on the slow moving ferry, perhaps implying ominous eschatologies afoot, a new Zeno’s Paradox?
Even Zillich’s instinctively attempted return home has turned him away again. As if birth ever rejects us ab initio to a new master called death … and we try to resist time’s passing, a passing (in more ways than one) that brings such a transference about?
Pages 231 – 236 (The End)
“At odds with the world, they squeezed together in sleep like children.”
…like we all do, our guilty secrets hidden within our heads waiting to be peeled back… by Friday, or simply by Nobody. Leaving people happier behind us — but they in turn pick up sad-felt secrets within themselves, and so we are already gone even before we have gone, like our local rivers of time still flowing…
MAIL TO THE PROMISED LAND
“…as if the exchange of letters could outwit even death itself.”
The literary apotheosis of poignancy.
Distilled into as well as spread from within this whole book (so far) with its endless life, its endless death as cure or curing. The story of a Jewish family decimated by a pogrom before the First World War, their later journeys of life to live, their interactions, their loves and antipathies, their arrival in Paris, the synagogue they then attended and its characteristics, a boy’s bar mitzvah, the First World War itself, how they are scarred, how they got married, how old men, in turn, yearned to travel to the hot Land as Promised by History. And how letters (mail as well as the letters of the words used) can prolong hope and existence, through the Hitler years, with letters pre-written en masse and later sent in a serial real-time way of perseverance so as to crystallise life as a cryology, especially in that hot eastern land. Above all the eyes opened by words as well as cured by surgeons. And a tally of men’s beards all growing as a single cluster…
I shall try to trick into perpetuation my own life by the ever-present pre-written — but as yet unmailed — intention to at least try and wed this story to ‘Five Letters From An Eastern Empire’ by Alasdair Gray as reviewed by me HERE during a now seemingly ‘long ago’ real-time.
“His son’s renown had become inconceivable to his father, not as if it were already gone but as if it hadn’t yet begun.”
THE INNOCENT ONES
A thoughtfully provocative fable whereby a delegation of officers is interrogating war criminals following the Hitler war, even Hitler in disguise himself.
Reminds me of how the politician in all of us can wriggle out of anything! Even death?
THE SHIP OF THE ARGONAUTS
“And more powerful than men or gods, and above them both, far above them all was fate.”
A telling, beautifully written vision of Jason, with the Golden Fleece over his shoulders, as he returns and wanders the land where nobody recognises him, a catalyst distributor of good and bad, with such incidents involving people pretty and ugly described here and reminding me obliquely but effectively of Zillich wandering the land of ‘The End, and the effects upon Germany and environs of Hitler’s War, and upon our times today. One particular striking vision of many ships hung in the trees of the forest including the one that fatefully crushes Jason … as a symbolic sacrifice in redemption of Zillich?
Fateful, if not, in tune with this whole book, fatal?
His time may have been “infinite” but did he in fact carry the ‘plagues he saw us dying of’?
“It wasn’t fate or destiny. It was all a matter of chance.”
THE GUIDE
“If there is not going to be any future, then the past will all have been in vain.”
…that statement, as issued to us from the 1960s when it was written, is very telling for our own modes of thought today, as if we have now reached, in reality, this story’s famous “in vain” recitative of an opening paragraph. Or at least it ought to be famous.
The story tells of a Zeno’s Paradox of a journey…”The journey went quickly according to the car clock, though not if measured by the distance that still lay ahead of them.” Three male Italian geologists in a historic moment I do not understand of Italy warring into Ethiopia in an ‘unfathomable in-between world’, where they seek, inter alia, ‘gold sand’, valuable sand to be panned, led by a guide who is a beautiful boy whom at least one of them yearns for at least affectionately… a now seeming endless journey, a journey taunted-up by the guiding boy, across ravines and mountains worthy of an Algernon Blackwood story. A boy said to have ‘no concept of time.’ Resonating preternaturally with my concurrent by-chance if not by-fate researches into what I have called Gluey Zenoism in other books of rarefied fiction as a battle not against time but death, as this whole book indeed seems to have been. A book that has fixed Anna Seghers centrally into my gestalt, a gestalt still hopefully panning out…
The End of The Guide is open-ended. And I can’t help but think of, not the end, but the beginning of my own story ‘Brief Visit…’ (1995) recently re-published in ‘The Big Book of Modern Fantasy’; its beginning being a single sentence, an endless sentence of life: “‘Which way in?’ asked the guide.”
the end