Our philosopher, p.1
Our Philosopher, page 1
GERT HOFMANN (1931–1993) was born in Limbach, Saxony. For two decades, he taught German literature at universities across Europe, Britain, and the United States, composing radio plays in his spare time. In 1979, he turned his hand to fiction. In the years that remained to him, he wrote thirteen novels and short-story collections, including The Parable of the Blind, The Film Explainer, and Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl. He was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Alfred Döblin Prize.
ERIC MACE-TESSLER has lived in Germany and Switzerland for three decades. He taught literature until his recent retirement.
MICHAEL HOFMANN, the son of Gert Hofmann, is a German-born, British-educated poet, critic, and translator. His most recent books are One Lark, One Horse (poems) and Messing About in Boats (essays). For New York Review Books he has translated several works, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and edited an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends.
OUR PHILOSOPHER
GERT HOFMANN
Translated from the German by
ERIC MACE-TESSLER
Introduction by
MICHAEL HOFMANN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1986 by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München
Translation © 2020, 2023 by Eric Mace-Tessler
Introduction copyright © 2023 by Michael Hofmann
All rights reserved.
Originally published in the German language as Veilchenfeld.
This translation was originally published in the United Kingdom by CB Editions in 2020. It appears here in a slightly revised form.
First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2023.
Cover image: Otto Dix, Portrait of Dr. Fritz Perls, 1966; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph © akg-images
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hofmann, Gert, author. | Mace-Tessler, Eric, translator. | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25, writer of introduction.
Title: Our philosopher / by Gert Hofmann; translated by Eric Mace-Tessler; introduction by Michael Hofmann.
Other titles: Veilchenfeld. English
Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2023] | Series: New York Review Books classics |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023004647 (print) | LCCN 2023004648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681377582 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681377599 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PT2668.O376 V4513 2023 (print) | LCC PT2668.O376 (ebook) | DDC 833/.914—dc23/eng/20230206
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004647
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004648
ISBN 978-1-68137-759-9
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
OUR PHILOSOPHER
A Note on the Text
INTRODUCTION
WHEN I think of the lugubrious, pessimistic, and altogether funny-fantastical oeuvre of my father, Gert Hofmann, I think of Kleist’s observation that an arch remains standing because its stones all want to fall at the same time. Hofmann was an acclaimed master of that spectral form, the radio play. Most of his life, he worked as a German Lektor at universities in England, Scotland, the United States, and Slovenia. With a certain amount of pride, he raised a family. He came to fiction late, when they were mostly gone. His first novel, Die Fistelstimme (The Falsetto), was published in 1980, when he was almost fifty. He was conscious of having to make up for lost time. His contemporaries were famous and successful (some; others, of course, were obscure in their own kitchens). He had little in common with younger writers. And so, in the 1980s and 1990s he wrote and published a dozen or so books of fiction at the rate of one a year. The completed manuscript of Die kleine Stechardin (translated into English as Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl) was on his desk when he died on July 1, 1993, thirty years ago and far too young. In his eulogy, Michael Krüger, the last of his several German publishers, spoke of “this friendly, driven man.” Actes Sud, his French publisher, lamented “the premature disappearance of a visionary and cosmopolitan writer.”
Within that Kleistian arch, Our Philosopher (Notre Philosophe in French, a title he greatly liked; Veilchenfeld in the original, and in Ian McEwan’s stunning reference to the book in his own novel Lessons, and then in a later article) occupies something like the capstone. In terms both of the years of his accelerated and abbreviated career, and of its place among his books, it comes squarely in the middle: published in 1986, and the sixth or seventh of his major publications. Halfway. Nel mezzo.
Further, for reasons both accidental and deliberate, my father’s writing evolved (in my sense of them) from “grammar-books” to “word- or phrasebooks.” The early novels and stories got him a rather undesirable reputation as a difficult writer, a virtuoso, one for the few. He operated with layerings of reported speech and reported writing, so that a sentence might end—if it ever chose to, and remember, German, so verbs at the end—with “he said, he thought, he wrote.” There is still some of that Russian doll protocoling in Our Philosopher, but it is already making way as a technique for an altogether more casual, informal, unexplained collage of speech, in which the figures are made up of words, rather as the figures in Philip Guston paintings are made up of bandages. In fact, the spoken words have more reality than the speakers. Think radio plays with children’s angelic voices. Eccentric interrogations. Think innocents without innocence, truth from the lips of babes and sucklings. The piercing treble. Think Weltmaschine (the title of a story he published in the same year as Our Philosopher), which grinds passing small. Think of Veilchenfeld, with his bandaged head, and holes left for the eyes, the mouth. The nose—good question.
Our Philosopher has a further kind of centrality in that my father wrote his books on one of two subjects: artists and childhood, the childhood very often based on his own, raised by his mother and grandfather in the small town of Limbach-Oberfrohna in provincial Saxony, as may be read in Our Conquest or The Film Explainer. Our Philosopher combines elements of both. There is the artist, which Veilchenfeld certainly is, with philosophy seeping into ancillaries of painting and music: the bookshelves, the string quartet, the piano, the sketchbooks. Even that provocatively unidentifiable notion, “our philosopher,” suffers further diffusion. “Our philosopher”—how can anyone possibly tell: a pipe, a way of scratching his chin or staring into space? As though it had been “our baker” or “our newsagent” or even “our neighbor.” The phrase is in fact an oxymoron: Precise and then uncertain. Possessive and then elusive. A hand clutching at a cloud. Or punching it. One way of reading the book is to see it as the “we” expelling the philosopher from their midst. His identification and then expulsion. Call it intellectual cleansing. His extrusion.
And then there are the children. Hans, our boy narrator, precocious and still in single figures, and his even younger sister, Gretel. Of course. We are in a German fairy tale of sorts. The children are the book’s true philosophers, always questing for the last word, never without a question or an objection on their lips.
And me? my sister asks.
You can’t either.
Our Philosopher straddles—or yokes—the two subjects. It is part family drama (as Luck would be, later), part Künstlerroman. Or part “chronicle of a death foretold” (my father admired the novella by Gabriel García Márquez; it may even have served him as a model here), and part Entwicklungsroman. This last of course in the bleakest and most ironical way possible. I’m not being fanciful or sentimental when I think perhaps Hans, having effectively killed him (spoiler alert—not much), will one day become Veilchenfeld. Out of guilt, but also—different sense—from conviction. He will come to understand that a life without annotated books, a piano, a sketchbook, is not really worth living. Maybe.
There is some limited interaction. Veilchenfeld spends an evening with Hans’s family; Hans’s father, the peg-leg veteran doctor, with his phantom pains, periodically sees to Veilchenfeld’s heart (“which is no longer beating correctly”), and his head; Hans goes to him for drawing lessons; he sees and acknowledges him in public from time to time; he accedes, probably not understanding what he is doing, to his last request; he hangs around dangerously as Veilchenfeld’s body is picked up by the undertakers—the scene with which the book begins and ends. In some ways, this isn’t much; the two cogs are only intermittently touching. They are more like parts of separate stories. As I say, my father’s two subjects. In other ways, though, it feels like a lot, and not really necessary at that, given that their one constant connection is Hans’s lifelong curiosity about Veilchenfeld, which we take as a given, to the extent that his father early on warns him about it: “I really would prefer that you didn’t think about him so much, says Father.” The whole book thinks periodically about all sorts of other things (it is a distractable sort of book)—perhaps it even tries not to think about Veilchenfeld too much—but it does keep returning to him.
It does so in a macabre suburban setting. A secretly barbarous setting. Some conflation here of ba nality and monstrosity. An infernal machine and an “our town” that is so characterful as to be anonymous. Or so bursting with anonymity as to be characterful. One that prides itself on being, of all things, heart-shaped. A foldaway set of houses, tenements, streets and parks, official buildings, and happy happy shrubs: the lilac in which Veilchenfeld is given to lurking, the widowed beanpoles he perambulates around, already under unspoken house arrest or “protective custody,” an elderberry, an apple tree. (Perhaps one remembers Brecht’s lines about a conversation about trees being tantamount to a crime because it includes silence on so many other atrocities?) Further afield, a brick factory, a quarry, a lake, just the place for Sunday strolls. The central figure, with his consummate harmlessness and his almost comically useless occupation, and the contrast between him and the healthy—although, in point of fact, diseased and disfigured—world around him, which is nothing if not useful in its productions: bricks and stones, whips and jam, an extensive administrative machinery and numerous finely calibrated, though in the end perfectly interchangeable, hostelries. It all feels as miniaturized, as clarified, as a fairground, a puppet show, a board game. The Austrian critic and Germanist Walter Grünzweig has written of the Realitätsverlust—the loss both of realism and of reality—that, he argues, constitutes the most characteristic quality of my father’s writing.
Here are some words that do not appear in Our Philosopher: Jew, Nazi, Brownshirt, Blackshirt, Hitler, Nuremberg, Kristallnacht, victim, pogrom; nor, for that matter, minority, immigrant, race, persecution, lynching, Lives Matter, ethnic cleansing (I could go on). The reason they are not there is not because they have been suppressed but because they are presumed. They are all over—or all under—the book. In the invisible underpinnings of its events and scenes, its queasy mix of poverty, sickness, banality, jollity, hatred, and violence. Why say what the reader knows already? Why not just supply the soundtrack—or speech ribbons—for the invisible and superior film in the reader’s head? Where everything plays anyway: Schauplatz Menschenkopf, as my father said. Scene of the action, the human head.
I have forgotten how unconventional, how radical, how strange my father’s books can be. They are like novels turned inside out, or on their heads, the inverse of novels. No plot, no character, no description, no action. No style. The point is not character revealing itself in action. The doctor and his wife, the father and mother, are they “good,” are they sympathetic? His professional attention (of little objective value), her Veilchenfeld-induced colics. Redemptive? Or hypocritical? Even Hans, so compelled by Veilchenfeld, the one truly noteworthy presence in so much child-ordinariness; is his interest entirely benevolent? I think so, but would find it hard to prove in my father’s almost post-psychological telling. It is strange to see any references to the “real” world. Only very occasionally. “The Condor Legion pilots.” “The 18th of September, a Monday, around ten.” (Which would put us, impossibly, in 1939, and after the invasion of Poland. But it only goes to show my father never cared about these things and will not have looked it up.) A smattering of places in and around Limbach. Helenenstrasse. Am hohen Hain. Bits of realia, not too much.
Senseless German reviewers complained that there was no proper philosophy, nothing plausible and detailed attached to Veilchenfeld, not understanding that it’s not that sort of book, not understanding that it’s not a documentary novel, that, as I remarked earlier, the real philosophers in it are Hans and Gretel with their incessant questions. (Isn’t that what philosophers do? Ask questions?) The action seems to take place in a puppet theater, and to involve principally the misunderstandings and evasions and attempted obfuscations of speech. What a poor device the question is, and yet we have nothing better. It’s the dialogue here that is load-bearing, the back and forth of the scenes, the macabrely echoing exchanges. Once I have people talking to each other, I’m away, my father would say. Besides, what’s wrong with this as philosophy, a jazzy comic nihilism: “Instead, Herr Veilchenfeld cites or makes up the sentence about how life comes from the abyss and drags on for a while, and then retreats back into the abyss without trace or consequence.”
A note on Eric Mace-Tessler’s translation. He wrote to me many years ago, out of the blue, to discover whether I had an interest in translating Our Philosopher myself. I did not. I was happy to have translated my father’s last three books. Other books had been translated by others before me—by Edna McCown, by the late Christopher Middleton. But Mr. Mace-Tessler had always wanted to work on Veilchenfeld, and he completed his translation, as we say in the profession, or better, in the calling, on spec. He did it for the noblest of reasons: that it might exist in English. He mulled over his translation for years, and reading it now, I can say that it is as careful and devoted a version as may be done. It was first published in London in 2020 by Charles Boyle in his CB Editions, which is how Ian McEwan came upon it, and now here it is in your hands, the reader’s or purchaser’s, or perhaps just the person’s thinking about it.
—MICHAEL HOFMANN
March 2023
OUR PHILOSOPHER
OUR PHILOSOPHER has died suddenly. Our hearse collected him. The hearse drivers—no one knows who had them come—drove up to his place Monday morning on rubber wheels, silently, and they sprang from their box. We saw it ourselves.
We’re leaning against Höhler’s garden fence and aren’t making ourselves dirty. The hearse drivers pull the coffin meant for Herr Veilchenfeld out of their large-wheeled, solemn and rickety hearse with a remarkable scraping noise that carries the length of Heidenstrasse, and disappear, after having tapped in passing on the feather-tufted neck of their little horse. Surely they don’t want to go and get Herr Veilchenfeld? Yes, they are getting Herr Veilchenfeld! Only yesterday, around eight in the evening in middling weather, I saw him in his back garden, pale but standing amidst the lilac bushes. He was behind, not in front of, his garden wall, but we could see through the cracks. For, although it was known in our town that after his release Herr Veilchenfeld had moved out to us, and now lived in Heidenstrasse without connections (Mother), in the house with the bay window, he was more and more seldom to be seen in the last days.
Does he really still live here? we ask Father.
Yes, says Father, he is upstairs.
And what does he do?
He sits at his table.
And why doesn’t he come down?
•
Because I feel more secure amongst my books than amongst my fellow countrymen, Herr Veilchenfeld always said to Mother across the narrow bit of garden, which he retraced with short steps time and again, and, under the brim of his black hat, he smiled at her out on the street.
•
If he had at least moved into a house with a larger garden, Mother said to Father. At the edge of town there are some. One’s even empty up in Birkengasse. There he could have had his exercise without anyone seeing him. While here, where he lives now . . . It’s always just the same six or seven paces he can walk here. He’ll really go crazy, constantly walking around in circles.
And how was he supposed to know that one day he would not dare leave his garden when he wanted to have some exercise? Father asked her. Though he knew our philosopher well from his visits, Father also hadn’t known at that time about leaving the garden.
Yes, said Mother, for a philosopher, he has changed a lot. Unfortunately, he’s completely run down now, outwardly, and his nerves as well.
For it was not only when he did go into town sometimes, to buy bread perhaps, that Herr Veilchenfeld pulled his hat far down over his face and turned up his coat collar, so that at least he couldn’t be recognised from a distance. He didn’t even willingly go to our shops. And if he did go into a shop and the shop wasn’t empty, he placed himself in a corner and let everyone go before him, even us. And he preferred to be looked after by Frau Bichler, even if she did ruin him financially (Mother) and often let him down. But if we did see him some time walking down the street, along the kerb as if it were a tightrope, he greeted us of course, but as if under torture, and he said every time: Please, don’t tell anyone that you’ve seen me. The less said about me, the better. Or: I am only an apparition. Poof, I will vanish immediately! Or simply: Forget about me.
