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Overview
[1944 Diary] is a deeply personal account, made even more remarkable that it was written during World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust . . . A moving and fascinating read." —Library Journal
In 2010, FSG published two novels by the German- Jewish writer Hans Keilson: Comedy in a Minor Key—written in 1944 while Keilson was in hiding in the Netherlands, first published in German in 1947, and never before in English—and The Death of the Adversary, begun in 1944 and published in 1959, also in German. With their Chekhovian sympathy for perpetrators and bystanders as well as for victims and resisters, Keilson’s novels were, as Francine Prose said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, “masterpieces” by “a genius” on her list of “the world’s very greatest writers.” Keilson was one hundred years old, alive and well and able to enjoy his belated fame.
1944 Diary, rediscovered among Keilson’s papers shortly after his death, covers nine months he spent in hiding in Delft with members of a Dutch resistance group, having an affair with a younger Jewish woman in hiding a few blocks away and striving to make a moral and artistic life for himself as the war and the Holocaust raged around him. For readers familiar with Keilson’s novels as well as those new to his work, this diary is an incomparable spiritual X-ray of the mind and heart behind the art: a record of survival and creativity in what Keilson called “the most critical year of my life.”
Offering further insight into Keilson are the sonnets he wrote for his lover, Hanna Sanders, which appear in translation at the back of this volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374713898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Hans Keilson is the author of Life Goes On, Comedy in a Minor Key, and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. He died in 2011 at the age of 101.
Damion Searls is the author of three books and has translated thirty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch. He rediscovered the work of Hans Keilson; his 2010 translation of Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key, published to international acclaim when Keilson was 100, was a New York Times Notable Book and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. He died in 2011 at the age of 101.
Damion Searls is an American writer and translator. He grew up in New York and studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in translating literary works from Western European languages such as German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch. Among the authors he has translated are Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, and Nescio.
Read an Excerpt
1944 Diary
By Hans Keilson, Damion Searls
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am MainAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71389-8
CHAPTER 1
PEOPLE
JOHANNES GERRIT VAN DER LINDEN: Hans Keilson's false identity.
GERTRUD MANZ (1901–69): Keilson's wife, although technically they are not yet married in 1944; living in Naarden.
DADAUT: Keilson's pet name for Gertrud.
BARBARA (b. 1941): Keilson and Gertrud's child.
HANNA SANDERS (1921–2008): Keilson's lover, in hiding with the Bakkers.
LEO RIENTSMA (1899–1985) and SUUS (SUZANNA) RIENTSMA, née Warsen (1898–1972): The Dutch couple whose house at Wallerstraat 3 Keilson is living in.
LIESKE or LIES (b. 1933) and HANNIE or HANNA (b. 1935): The Rientsma daughters.
ARIE BAKKER (1914–92) and EVY BAKKER, née Beer (1910–81): Two of the Rientsmas' fellow resistance members, whose house at Tak van Poortvlietstraat 20 contains a workshop where documents are forged, including Hans Keilson's passport. Hanna Sanders is in hiding there.
EMMA BEER, née Longo (1882–1960): Evy Bakker's Italian mother, a poetry aficionado.
ROSALINA "CORRIE" GROENTEMAN, née Speijer (1902–87): The other Jew in hiding at the Rientsmas' for an extended period, officially their maid. Her children Esther (b. 1923) and Abraham or Bram (b. 1924) are rounded up in Amsterdam in 1942 and killed at Auschwitz; her younger daughter, Sonja (b. 1938), survives.
CORA and JAN VAN DER LEK: The Rientsmas' neighbors at Wallerstraat 5, with attics connecting through a secret door. Jan is a colleague of Leo Rienstma's at the yeast factory. He plays the flute, she the piano. Their son is also named Bram, like Corrie Groenteman's.
The VAN OYENS: Friends of the van der Leks, living on the upper floor of Wallerstraat 5 after being evacuated from The Hague. Keilson hears their daughter, Hanneke, playing the piano.
JOOP ANDRIESSE: Jewish member of the resistance staying briefly with the Rientsmas; Keilson attends his wedding to Sofie "Fiet" Hes.
EVERT: Probably Andriesse, whose fake ID bears the name Evert Jonker.
CAS EMMER (1909–2005): Keilson's oldest Dutch friend and his personal physician for decades after the war. Together with Keilson, Emmer formed a kind of reading group with figures including Jan Thomassen, Rudi Buys, and the poet Jef Last.
JAN THOMASSEN (1908–51): Friend of Keilson's and Emmer's. He worked as Prince Bernhard's personal secretary after the war, and his brother Wim Thomassen was mayor of Rotterdam from 1965 to 1974.
RUDI: W. R. van Brakell Buys (1905–78), Anglicist, philosopher, and rector of a theosophical school in Naarden after 1938.
EVERWIJN VERSCHUYL (1903–97): Surgeon in Delft and mentor for Keilson; he lets Keilson assist him as a doctor.
CORRIE HARTONG (1906–91): A famous Dutch dancer and choreographer, mentioned several times in the diary, with her name spelled in different ways.
Other people mentioned only once are identified in the footnotes; names not annotated are of people who remain unidentified.
CHAPTER 2Diary
Conscience — or conflict? What are the motives driving me: self-justification or reflection? Defense or acknowledgment. Guilt or atonement, crime or punishment. Both. I have reached the point where I can drop my disguise. Finally. I am grateful to — yes, to whom? The first time I kept a kind of personal diary was as a boy, before my bar mitzvah. It was on my father's letterhead with his business and bank account information on the sheets of paper. The entries recorded my religious feelings. Later, when I began to write, I burned it. I thought it was unnecessary, my writing seemed to be "confession" and record enough.
Last summer, when my tooth bled for eight hours until I fainted, I understood Hebbel's diary. I understood for the first time (!) that writing does not make a diary unnecessary — it requires a diary, presupposes it. The issue is an art that comes only from "life" — a courage to strive for truth. Nothing else. "Art is autonomous," as Corrie Hartoog said? More on that later.
The burning desire to keep a diary came over me at home, with Gertrud and the child.
Friday, March 3rd, '44. German soldiers sitting in the streetcar when I got on. A scene I know all too well! But something struck me about these soldiers. Strangely chiseled faces — made me think of Austria at first, Styria or Carinthia. They weren't Prussians, that was obvious. Suddenly they started talking: a Slavic language. I took a closer look and saw a round patch pinned on their left arms with the inscription: Idel-Ural, and below it: Tatar Legion. Russians! In German uniforms! The most biting comedy I have ever seen, there on my way to The Hague. Either Russian prisoners, or deserters, stuck into German uniforms to defend Europe ... against whom? The twilight of power politics.
Slavically chiseled faces. Some peasants, some middle class. One of them stood up to give his seat to a lady and squeezed in with his comrades on the opposite bench even though there was only room for two. They talked with each other not in the clipped, staccato, insolent melody that the Germans have decided to adopt, but gently, warm and human like boys — comradely, brotherly even. The way Tolstoy's Russians must talk to each other, and only they can. They'll get their heads chopped off if the English or Americans catch them, because they're traitors, or poor devils who couldn't stand prisoner's food any longer and moved up to soldier's rations. They'll hang them — and maybe that's what they deserve. But these are people, human faces, not hardened brutes. Russians in German uniforms with swastikas.
I remember the Russian prisoners from the last war. They stood behind my father and me in synagogue. I slid down the bench toward them and peeked in their prayer books. They were Russians but they understood Hebrew, they were praying in Hebrew. So then they weren't foreigners? Yes, yes they were, and to me the combination of Russian and Hebrew became the epitome of foreignness.
Sunday, 5th. No fear. No more fear of looking at myself in the mirror. No more whitewashing. I'm saying what I say to myself in secret. The blank sheet of paper's power to inhibit the writing and thinking process has been overcome. I will write down my thoughts and experiences. My conscience is not turned off, but it is no longer afraid of expressing itself. Ethical conflict? Infidelity. Or truth even in going astray, no metaphysical pretenses? I haven't played the role that my "profession" should have made me play vis-à-vis Hanna. I didn't present myself as superior. The bliss of being subordinate. Finally, for once, the grace of inferiority. And no secrecy.
I can't tell Gertrud anything. "Please, no problems, not now," she said last time. This determines my attitude. My poems will tell her the whole story someday. What sustains me is a land I have longed to live in but have never known. No poetic circumlocutions, my dear Hans: longed to live and write in. I have never felt it inside me so deeply, so ardently. Does a daemon have me in its grip? But I crouch down only so that I can pull him into this circle of mine on the other side — to subdue him, to create. Things change. I will come out of this time a different person. Ecstasy! How I long for it — a longing left over from last summer when I fainted — maybe so that it will guide my choice.
It's not just being everything to someone, to Hanna, I'm sure she has her problems with me anyway. It was our almost total lack of a past when we came together, although everyone has a past with other people. She is a mirror to me like no one has ever been before. I will take care it doesn't get cracked, doesn't cloud over.
Monday. 3/6. Feel a stronger need to write this diary. What is love? More than just a local itch and then scratching it. Had I forgotten this most basic rule of love, that God is in the lover? Not only in the beloved. I couldn't stand it anymore, being the "beloved," being worshipped. It flattered my vanity too much. I was afraid it was all just vanity. Someone, a girl, in love but she can't be yet, she doesn't know love. Until I decided to dare to take the step I had already taken in my imagination. If only I didn't feel like I was destroying what I had previously built up in her. A premonition that could only be grasped or formulated mystically, = fear. But I took the step, against my vanity, and then I wasn't in the superior position after all. The nights we spent together. She came to me as a girl, and remained one. Her nature made sure of that. I let go of my fear of the consequences, my fear of surprises. My conscience built up crime and punishment where they never actually, causally existed. Complete abandon, the stammering, the whispering, as a sign of a breath that is all a person has left.
Never before has anyone lain in my arms like that. Was I ever that close to God, ever, as I was then, in that total surrender? The girl's complete loss of self. The safety and security of the nothingness she came to me with. Knowing that there was at the same time something to protect her. Trusting me not to deceive her. She feels the conflict and is very gentle, restrained. The poems I wrote for her are the toll I paid. What was it Achterberg said when Tammenons Bakker asked aren't you sorry? But I've written five poems! Moral insanity? Well, so far I've written nine. Conscience does function as more than just a mechanism for regret and guilty feelings, after all.
Read Martin Buber. The Struggle for Israel. His speech to the Christian missionaries to the Jews is magnificent: Jewish Foci. A true critique of Christianity. I've seen a lot of perfect examples myself, visiting pastors. His essay on Mombert is masterful too. And that he spoke up in the Zionist Congress. — When I read the speech, I had the feeling that here was someone speaking who knew he wasn't being heard. It sounds uncertain, he bases his argument on his own life, bears witness — A tragic constellation. He must have felt this uncertainty himself, his not entirely equal position. You can sense it: only the ethos or insight of an unpolitical person can drive one to politics. But it isn't an equal position, there are too many money changers. With slicker hands.
Kafka, the bleak light of his burning despair. His artistic skill often conceals it. But his wound is deeper than Kierkegaard's. I understand him more than I used to. Why didn't I buy his books before? Something my father said, when I wanted to go to the theater to see Kortner as Shylock: "There'll be time for that later." I've been living for years in that "later." Waiting. That's why my "here and now" is often so hopeless.
Hanna wrote that she feels like love wears a person out. Poor thing, she doesn't see that when something is lost, something new comes into being. She sees only the wearing down, not the filling up. Lack of concentration. A girl with the uncertainty of an intellectual who has felt the ground pulled out from under his feet. Or is it something else. She refuses to say the word, so as to avoid conflict. She holds back. I know I'll lose you, she wrote. A despair that isn't clear yet. But I'm losing too. Which one of us is losing more? The one who's playing for higher stakes. Only who's that? For all my deep and genuine respect for her, I definitely feel like I'm the one playing for higher stakes. But is that just the whispering of the devil?
Read a lot of Baudelaire. Amazing poems. The introduction by Gautier, with the apology for decadence, is even more amazing. Baudelaire, as a son of the church, believed in Hell and damnation. Was attracted and repelled by it at the same time. Great courage. Goethe would have shied away, preferring to stick to the middle. What amazes me is the absence of any messianic pathos as he sanctifies "evil" with his poems. His clear-sighted look at the brokenness, the damned state of human existence, all the while without a "will to heal." His ahistorical perspective is almost inhuman in its humanity.
Being content in an unredeemed state! That is probably the final consequence of Christianity, which defines its redemption historically, referring to a specific moment in time — but which also gives daily proof of daily unredemption. Actually, Baudelaire is the final consequence of Christianity.
The conversation with Corrie Hartoog was about my not letting a poem, for example a Baudelaire poem, be what it is — instead I want to know more. A kind of curiosity drives me to take in the whole background behind a poem; this background is sealed inside Baudelaire himself. The more I immerse myself in his work, his character, his life, the more capacious my experience of the poem becomes. The immediate experience Baudelaire must have had when he wrote the poem is communicated to me. Only when art emerges from a person's life does it matter to me; the so-called autonomous laws of art, understood as formal problems, are important only as a result of that. C.H. denied this and wanted to present it as a scientific, unartistic viewpoint of mine. It seemed like everything she said was about trying to hold my scientific attitude against me. Meanwhile I had already explicitly said the same thing about her, in a letter. Still, she's wrong. Even a poem can only be understood starting out from the person writing it. There's no other way. Not as the expression of a mood, of feelings, but as the expression of an encounter: a way of being and conducting oneself, an experience of life. That is exactly what Rilke meant when he described poems as experiences. Experiences embody ways of being, which we have to reveal completely in order to grasp a given experience as the expression of lived life. Is that unartistic? Just because it is also intellectual? It is thought and lived. Thought of as a living thing, lived as something thought.
The idea of mercy, as Christianity understands it, displaces all action onto God. The person merely waits. Of course that's true. But at the same time the human being is a partner in the conversation, someone who can start or stop on their own. In any case, someone in whom God's creative intentions have power too. More power than original sin has.
Corri Hartog talked about the person being an "instrument." I said a person was more than just that. My response was clumsy and labored, as I so often am. Something about her irritated me. In the good sense — not annoyed me, but in the sense that I was engaged by more than what she was saying. From what depths was she speaking, actually? I haven't yet plumbed her depths.
Maybe the human being is redeemed after all, "after all"— not by Christ — but in his own spirit, in the creative element he feels working within him. A breath of air from another world, when he surpasses his own limits and becomes one with his transcendence, for a few seconds, in a moment made holy. But he is damned in the world, in doing what must be done. It would be a terrible break, a battle never to be ended, traceable back to the inner battle of God within himself.
Sickness — is that the ultimate cause of creative madness?
Monday. Evening.
Talked to Hanna. "After all, I don't have any right to you," she said. And yet such closeness while we talked, full of deep understanding. "Do you only do things for pedagogical reasons?" she said. I tried to explain my motives. And in doing so laid out part of my conflict. She listened happily. I was shocked to realize how deeply I was drawn to her. "Affinity" I called it — kindred spirits. A girl you are talking to has a gaze rising up out of mysterious depths, looking into a mysterious distance. Thinking it over, seeking. This look made a different face shine through her features.
Letter from Gertrud. Very sad, she's not well. I understand her deeply. She is alone, I start to cry when I think about her. It is she who is suffering from my conflict. I am anything but kind to her. I hate myself, hate my resentment. And, even more, my earlier fear that kept me from seeing the truth. We don't go together. We are completely different types, despite our deep affinities. I'm still shuddering, she is not calm and self-possessed enough. Nervous. And doesn't understand men. Too primitive. So I have nothing but criticisms? No, no, when I reread "The Dreamer" I know that I wrote that poem at my limits.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 1944 Diary by Hans Keilson, Damion Searls. Copyright © 2014 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Introduction,
People,
Diary,
Sonnets,
Afterword,
Notes,
Also by Hans Keilson,
A Note About the Author and Translator,
Copyright,