Cross Fire
From SARAH GAINHAM
BONN
ANYONE who takes up a position between the lines in a war gets shot at; even a cold war. This is the unenviable position of a young German writer, Uwe Johnson, aged twenty- seven, who can perhaps be compared with John Osborne in England. He has had two novels published by Suhrkamp Verlag, who are also Bert Brecht's publishers. On the publication of the first, Mutmassungen ueber Jakob ('Conjectures about Jacob'), Johnson left his home in East Germany and moved to West .Berlin. He dis- claims refugee status and says himself that he is just a man who moved his domicile from one part of his homeland to another. Jakob made an instant impression as a serious and talented attempt to portray life in East Germany—as it is. His next book, Das dritte Buch ueber Achim —'The Third Book about Achim'---confirmed hrs reputation. The fact that both his books so far analysed life under Communism gave the politico-literary world of West Germany the notion that Johnson was a warrior in the inner- German cold war. His wide acclamation and large sales were taken as tacit proof of the sup- eriority of West German society and of Johnson's recognition of it.
But this is not Johnson's own idea. He is, and wants to be, between the fronts; critical of Western society as well as Eastern. His public affirmation of this attitude has caused a literary a'andal in West Germany which, though it owes something to the genius for real (as distinct from PR) publicity of his Italian publisher, Feltrinelli, is also a sign of the bitterness of the cold war im Germany and the insidious fashion by which artists are inveigled into taking part in it—as much by the pressure of events, perhaps, as by design.
On the occasion of the appearance of Jakob in Italian, Feltrinelli held a round-table in Milan on the subject of modern German literature— Which in Italy, as in London, means largely Brecht. The main lecture was given by Hermann Kesten, a German writer and journalist living in Rome, who attacked Brecht as a 'servant of dictatorship.' Johnson replied with a defence of Brecht, saying among other things that Galileo Was an historical play and not a comment on Brecht's own life; that Brecht went to East Berlin after the war because nobody else wanted him and because he was given a theatre of his own there and a budget. He disclaimed any didactic, intention in his own novels; he wished only to tell a story and to leave the drawing of con- clusions to his readers. Commenting on the division of his country, he attributed it rather to the victorious allies than to Germans of any colour, and made it clear that he did not whole- heartedly approve of West Germany any more than of the Communist part. The two States were equally satellites of the great powers. The East Germans are not inhuman; they had found themselves in an emergency and acted to pre- vent further loss of valuable personnel through the stream of refugees (a dialectical error which implicitly adopts the Communist view of the Wall, for the logical answer to the stream of refugees would have been to imprave their living conditions so that they would not wish to leave). And of the East-West division of Germany, Johnson said that Germans should not cut them- selves off emotionally from each other; the much-prized 'illusion' of reunification essentially demanded the preservation of common under- standing. All this, in spontaneous discussion and not from manuscript.
Some of his words, twisted and out of con- text, were reported in Die Welt by Kesten under the title 'Conjectures about Uwe Johnson'; Johnson as well as Brecht, he conjectured, was a servant of dictatorship. The article was couched in a sub-hysterical cold-war style reminiscent of McCarthy days. Almost at once the episode became an affair of State. Heinrich von Brentano gave a press conference in Berlin (where he had just viewed the infamous Wall—a ritual viewing of the Wall now being a pilgrimage which almost every well-known personality in West Germany feels bound to undertake) and permitted him- self to say in effect that if Johnson felt himself at odds with the Federal Republic then he ought fo be ashamed to take its money. Kesten is just another journalist; but von Brentano is the leader of the parliamentary party of the CDU and until a few weeks ago was Foreign Minister. His tone, too, was strident and near-hysterical. I had the impression that his irri- tation was caused not so much by what had been said in Milan as by a deep unease in the speaker himself. The controversy is not really about Uwe Johnson; it is about Berlin, and new plans for Berlin. For both von Brentano and Mende of the FDP made statements on Berlin's future in the recent Bundestag debate which—though they do not seem to have been widely noted abroad—were not in tune with official policy as laid down by Chancellor Adenauer.
What Uwe Johnson thinks of the Wall is of minor interest—that he said it when he did, and abroad, is what caused the fuss. In Berlin von Brentano expressed once again opinions contrary to the official line. and his remarks were not mentioned in West Germany's most respected pro-Adenauer paper. He is alarmed because the outlines of a Western plan for Berlin are slowly emerging from mists of secrecy; and they bear an unpleasant resemblance to the 'free and demilitarised city of West Berlin' of the Com- munists. The only conceivable way Berlin could be partially detached from the Federal Republic is with workable international control of the air corridors and surface routes; but President Kennedy's kite had hardly been flown on this subject before it was condemned in the strongest terms by both Khrushchev and Ulbricht. A few days later the Russian ambassador in Washing- ton said that international control of traffic to Berlin could not be taken seriously, and that 'a privileged position' for the Federal Republic in Berlin was out of the question. So the Russians have already leapfrogged over President Ken- nedy's last proposal to a new position, where they take West Berlin's detachment from West Germany for granted.
Previous page
