{"id":11571,"date":"2014-02-04T10:22:21","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T14:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11571"},"modified":"2014-02-04T10:25:23","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T14:25:23","slug":"alfred-andersch-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/alfred-andersch-100\/","title":{"rendered":"Alfred Andersch @ 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AASansibar\"<\/a>\"AA\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The German novelist Alfred Andersch<\/strong> would be 100 today. The son of a conservative\u00a0East Prussian\u00a0army officer, he was born in\u00a0Munich, Germany and died in Berzona,\u00a0Ticino, Switzerland.\u00a0His school master was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, the father of\u00a0Heinrich Himmler. He wrote about this in\u00a0The Father of a Murderer<\/a><\/i>.\u00a0In 1930, after an apprenticeship as a bookseller, Andersch became a youth leader in the\u00a0Communist Party. As a consequence, he was held for 6 months in the\u00a0Dachau concentration camp<\/a>\u00a0in 1933. He then left the party and entered a depressive phase of “total introversion”. It was during this period that he first became engaged in the arts, adopting the stance that became known as\u00a0innere Emigration<\/i>\u00a0(“internal emigration”) \u2013 despite remaining in Germany, he was spiritually opposed to Hitler’s regime. In 1940, Andersch was conscripted into the\u00a0Wehrmacht, but deserted at the Arno Line in\u00a0Italy\u00a0on 6 June 1944. He was taken to the United States as a\u00a0prisoner of war\u00a0and interned at\u00a0Camp Ruston, Louisiana and other POW camps. After returning to Germany he began an active literary life, was part of Gruppe 47, the important post-war German writer association, \u00a0edited magazines, was active in publishing, & worked for German radio \u2014 where he had an important role in introducing much controversial post-war writing to the public. In 1958 he moved to Switzerland.\u00a0(I have little sympathy for\u00a0\u00a0W.G. Sebald’s “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” which\u00a0accuses Andersch of having presented through literature a version of his life \u2014and of the “internal emigration” more generally\u2014 that made it sound more acceptable to a post-Nazi public.) More bio-details can be found here<\/a> in Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

In this country Andersch never had much of an impact, though I’d recommend \u00a0one of his books in translation, Flight to Afar<\/em><\/a>, which amazon describes (not incorrectly) as follows:<\/p>\n

\n

A boy dreaming of Huckleberry Finn, a mortally ill Pastor, a seaman, a disillusioned Communist, a young Jewish girl running for her life – meet in a half-derelict Baltic fishing village and are drawn into a daring plan of escape from Nazi Germany. At the center of their plan is a small statue in the Pastor’s church, a statue which is to be confiscated because it is politically dangerous, a statue so beautiful and powerful it welds together the stangely assorted band of refugees.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The original title Sansibar oder der letzte Grund<\/em> feels much more enticing \u2014 as it was to me as a teenage when I bought it in March 1965. I don’t remember too much of the book, except for its theme of a very diverse group of people trying to escape Nazi Germany & the (to me at that age) fascinating modernist narrative structure of the book (which today I may call a very readable modernist-lite).<\/p>\n

For those who have german, here<\/a> & here<\/a> are two interesting newspaper articles remembering Andersch on his 100th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The German novelist Alfred Andersch would be 100 today. The son of a conservative\u00a0East Prussian\u00a0army officer, he was born in\u00a0Munich, Germany and died in Berzona,\u00a0Ticino, Switzerland.\u00a0His school master was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, the father...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,55,64],"tags":[1486],"class_list":["post-11571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-history","category-intellectuals","category-literature","tag-alfred-andersch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11576,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11571\/revisions\/11576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}