Castle Gripsholm
by Kurt Tucholsky
tr. Michael Hofmann
(New York Review Books Classics, May 2019)
Reviewed by Jan Wilm
Some books, like most summer holidays, feel entirely undeserved and all too brief. Such is the case with the delightful Castle Gripsholm, the only novel by the German writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935). Known chiefly as a journalist, a waspish (and very witty) critic of the burgeoning Nazi regime, Tucholsky—who at one point circulated texts under five pseudonyms to service his productivity—wrote poems, short stories, and this beauty of a novel.
It was first published in 1931 when its author had left Germany for exile in Sweden. Two years later, his books would be devoured by the pogrom fires in the great purge against Jewish intellectuals. Like Walter Benjamin in his Catalan exile, Tucholsky died of a morphine overdose—in Benjamin’s case a suicide, in Tucholsky’s perhaps an accident. Maybe there are no such accidents; Tucholsky had certainly come to an impasse. Unable to publish, in Swedish solitude, Tucholsky felt like a failure. His writing had, to his mind, been unable to quell the uprising of Nazism and would not prevent the coming decline of German civilization.
Reading the endearing Castle Gripsholm with Tucholsky’s end in mind, it might seem like purely escapist fiction. The book is likely the only novel in German that is dedicated to the license plate of a car—that of Tucholsky’s girlfriend at the time. The novel begins with a humorous epistolary exchange between the author and his publisher, who tells Tucholsky he has had enough of political books, and asks if Tucholsky did not have anything, “a short love story” perhaps. Tucholsky did, and what follows is the love story between Lydia and Kurt, two Berliners who leave Germany for a summer holiday in “one of the oldest castles in Sweden: Castle Gripsholm.”
Appropriately, Lydia is called “the Princess” by Kurt, though she just calls him “Peter.” This pseudonymous byplay finds its proper extension in countless skittish squabbles, which suggests that theirs is a young love. Perhaps it is their first holiday together, perhaps their last. It would certainly account for their sense of optimistic anticipation upon departure and for the exuberant humor on their journey, as when Kurt considers his lunch in the train’s dining car: “I looked at the two herrings, the two herrings looked at me, and none of us said anything.” And young love might account for their gazing at the world as through a colorful prism, for the freshness of observation that Tucholsky weaves on every page.
The German term of the time for summer holiday was Sommerfrische, literally summer-freshness, and here such freshness abounds: in the description of the white nights of the Swedish summer when there “was a feeling of rigidity, as if something was building up and nature was holding her breath.” Or in the curt account of the lover’s pastime: “We lay in a meadow, bathing our souls.” And what more could lovers want than this: “Swimming in the lake; lying naked on the shore, in a sheltered spot; soaking up the sun, so that you rolled home at noon, wonderfully dozy, and drunk on the light, the air and the water; quiet; eating; drinking; sleeping; resting—holiday.”
Perhaps because the novel was written after decades of a hectic, deadline-prone journalist’s life, Tucholsky allowed himself all the ease and calm suitable for his languorous subject. It was a lull in his life, and a lull in his oeuvre, beautiful, light-hearted, thoroughly enjoyable, a little gem that relates very little incident without one dull moment. It is his best work. Perhaps so, because he allowed himself to write without being political but without ever being wholly apolitical. The novel’s escapist qualities are not born of an insincere silencing of the political storm gathering across Europe; they are a contrast to the tempest blowing through the novel as a ghostly absence.
As in Robert Musil’s novel The Confessions of Young Törless (1906) or in Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009), Castle Gripsholm draws subtle parallels between the novel and the fascist regimes of the time, expressed in exigent bureaucrats or despotic institutions. The subtlety of these analogies makes them the more powerful and poignant, as one grasps how the signs of the coming catastrophe were overlooked and how they could have been discerned.
Equally touching is Lydia and Kurt’s impulsive care for a sad little girl in a children’s home near Gripsholm. Through their considerate concern for an innocent child, the novel suggests, just as subtly, how far gestures of kindness might have gone had they become political.
The novel comes in Michael Hofmann’s exquisite translation, which emulates all the tenderness, sadness, and irony of the original. Hofmann has been attacked repeatedly for his free translations, as if his critics had forgotten that even the most literal translation must alter the original in the most obvious sense, as does any act of reading. Hofmann once wrote: “I want a translation to provide an experience, and I want, as a translator, to make a difference.” With this translation from 1985, fortunately finally reissued, Hofmann shows that he does make a difference. If only by having brought one of the most cheerful masterpieces of modern German literature to English readers. In doing so, one sees anew the difference that Tucholsky’s writing made, his humor, his integrity, and grace.
Jan Wilm, born in 1983, studied English and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he was awarded a PhD for a study of J. M. Coetzee. He has taught English and American Literature in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and Essen, Germany. He is an author, translator, and literary critic, among others for the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2016, he published The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee. His first novel, Winterjahrbuch, published in Germany in August. Wilm lives in Frankfurt.
Banner credit: Andy Eick, shared under CC BY 2.0 license