All for Nothing – Walter Kempowski (German)

Kempowski is able to bring to life an episode in history, and he does so by giving us the feelings of the people involved. These people are Germans in East Prussia at the end of WWII. As disaster approaches – Russian troops are pressing close to the border – they face the loss of everything, including, quite possibly, their lives. Still, they’re absorbed in everyday issues. They’re not totally oblivious to the dangers – they make plans to evacuate – but these plans keep being relegated to the back burner. This human tendency for avoidance may account for why so many German Jews didn’t flee the country; we hold on to the mundane because the alternative is so foreign to us. We hold on until it’s too late, as it is for the characters in this novel. Heil Hitler. Kempowski chooses to tell this story in a quiet, precise, matter-of-fact prose. His restraint is especially admirable since, as a boy, he lived through events similar to the ones he writes about. In All for Nothing (great title, because it states a fact) the issues are not black and white. Yes, war is monstrous, we already know that. But who are the monsters? Not Katherina, not Auntie, not Peter, not Vladimir. Not even the local SS official, the diligent Nazi Drygalski. He and others act badly (either in petty ways or in brutal ones), but they act in accordance to their beliefs and the necessities pressing upon them. And not all Germans agreed with the beliefs espoused by Der Fuhrer, nor did they all see him as a great man; but all were fearful of expressing any opposition. Heil Hitler. The novel weakened a bit, for me, when the exodus begins, and this is because the calm, everyday quality I admired is replaced by a more dramatic tone. Which was unavoidable – the exodus was filled with chaos and suffering and death. But we begin to see things from the point-of-view of twelve-year-old Paul, and I found him to be the least convincing of the main characters. There is one black presence, and the way he’s presented illustrates Kempowski’s approach. Interspersed throughout the novel are two words, often used when people meet. They’re to be found in the body of this review.

Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

I was acquainted with Martha Gellhorn from reading Ernest Hemingway’s letters (she was his third wife). I got this book because I wanted her take on their relationship, so I skipped the first forty-three pages to the section where EH appears. My intention was to read about him and her, then stop. But I didn’t stop; I continued on to the end of this 508 page book (and then turned back to the beginning). If a letter collection depends on the amount of revealing of a personality it offers, this one ranks among the best. You don’t have to like or approve of the person – often I didn’t like or approve of Martha – you just need to be interested, to feel you’ve reached a degree of intimacy. And when you do, the disapproval tends to soften. After all, life is tough for everybody, we all have our faults, and we sometimes act badly. By the halfway point, I didn’t believe that Martha was a malicious or destructive person. She, like so many writers, was unhappy much of her life. As for her marriage to Hemingway, it was a mistake on both sides. She would marry again, with similar disastrous results. She just couldn’t live with a man. She liked men, but at an emotional distance. Her “great love” was Laurence Rockefeller, but that relationship lasted for decades because she saw him only a few times a year. Also, she was nearly sixty years old when they met, so sex wasn’t a big issue. Martha had a problem with sex. She “didn’t like sex at all,” “the bed part didn’t come off,” she was “the worst bed partner in five continents.” These quotes are examples of her blunt honesty (though she could be self-deceptive). What was most interesting to me were her views on old age. The years she found to be especially difficult were when her looks began to go. But she achieved (to her surprise) a degree of happiness in her seventies, mainly because she gave up her unfulfilled aspirations and accepted what she did have. This period of contentment ended when illness and infirmities began to ravage her; she wound up taking her life at age eighty-nine. Not least among the virtues of these letters is how good a writer Martha Gellhorn was. After finishing the book I was prompted to get a novel of hers. To a large degree it was because I didn’t want us to part ways. 

The Weather in Africa –Martha Gellhorn

Weather is made up of three short novels. I read the first one – On the Mountain – but won’t be reading the others. Gellhorn didn’t show me any talent for writing fiction. Though her prose is readable, the characters are shallow, even on the trite side, and the plot plods along. Maybe her reporting as a war correspondent is good, but I’m not interested in that type of thing. Since she was close to novelists, she may have felt compelled to try her hand at it. But, in her letters, she often complained that these attempts were both grueling and futile. She felt better about Weather. It may have been better, but it isn’t very good. One of the things I noted in those letters was that she was perceptive about the work of other writers; she recognized quality – and the lack of it. I think, all along, she knew her fiction wasn’t of much worth and she was happier when she abandoned all efforts at it. I got this book because I wanted to feel close to her, but I found no trace of the vivid and vital person that I thought I knew.