image: Isolde Ohlbaum |
This lecture starts with Lenz telling about his first attempts of writing poetry when he was young, what he calls introvert poetry, poems about wineleaves that conform his withdrawn nature to the outside world. He says he has no plan, neither in life nor in writing, the only thing he regards as his guidance is some kind of feeling to give him some kind of sense of direction.
Early influences are Grillparzer, Schnitzler & Lasker-Schüler. it is notable that Lenz buys his books in special offer, has not much money. Important is here as well that young lenz grows up in the Germany of 1930s and is drawn to literature that cannot be described as, say, vital, and he is regarded by others as negative and morbid, contaminated by impressionism; a student of art history and working on his phd which he never finished. He has difficulties with academic writing and rather would prefer to write stories.
He is surprised himself how relatively unperturbed he is by those external judgements about his introvert nature and the advice to stop writing because of his lack of success; protesting loudly against being overlooked wouldn't look good and if you don't say anything you'll be regarded as a fatalist which in his view isn't so bad. He was sensing that it all doesn't matter anyway as a war will come. Lenz' relative astuteness and shrewdness is testified by legal advice he gave the family of his half-jewish wife whom he got to know in 1937.
In 1936 he started to write what would become Das stille Haus in which he writes about his own childhood and youth, but if it has happened in 1890.
In 1939 he reads proust in the Benjamin/Hessel translation, an experience that showed him that this is how life can be when it is worth living and Proust has discovered it. The literary path that lead him to Proust were Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Herman Bang, Jacobsen and Eduard von Keyserling.
During the war Lenz served as a simple soldier and at the end of it he was briefly detained as a prisoner of war in the USA until 1946, during all this time continuing to write Das stille Haus, inventing a life worth living, for Lenz that would mean Vienna and the upperclass, rich people and servants, without caricaturing rich people, no judgement; additionally writing a story about Mörike, and all this to escape horridness of war. Only once he writes up what a leading officer says about his youth and uses this later in Neue Zeit. All his later writing comes from memory, he says he has no clue how memory works, it cannot be described. Sometimes, he says, it feels like you can walk through a mirror to distant days.
With respect to the question: whether use the first or third person singular, Lenz says he chose the third person in his character Eugen Rapp, because it leads to more distance than just using 'I', so he can put everything (his experiences, notes from his diary) into Eugen Rapp, telling himself: this is not you, it's Eugen.
He starts writing Verlassene Zimmer in 1964 which would be the beginning of his autobiographical nine part chronicle:
1966 Verlassene Zimmer
1968 Andere Tage
1975 Neue Zeit
1978 Tagebuch vom Überleben und Lebe
1983 Ein Fremdling
1986 Der Wanderer
1988 Seltsamer Abschied
1992 Herbslicht
1997 Freunde
The first one, Verlassene Zimmer, starts with the world of his grandparents and he wants to have a change in perspective which is why the story is told by his grandfather, then grandmother, then sister, then mother and so on until slowly Eugen Rapp makes his appearance.
After Neue Zeit Rapp initially wanted to stop with his chronicle as it would be in the middle of Nazitime and he felt too close to those experience, stating how closer you are to an experience, the more difficult it is to narrate it. The chronicle should do two things, show the times in which he lived, dating from pre 1900 until the 1990s and at the same time lead beyond that, into a sphere that is the realm of the imagination, there are no laws in art. According to him, everyone is right who says something about literature because one cannot regard literature independently of one's personality.
Another relatively important Lenz book is Der innere Bezirk (1980) in which he writes about a woman which he saw in front of himself without ever having met her, Margot von Sy, a very sensitive person who recovers from a suicide attempt. In Margot Lenz shows the many concerns and threats that people were afflicted with during the rule of nationalsocialism. Margot is a person who has created distance to her environment and would not be able to survive without this distance. Due to her compassion she is aware of people using her, hence distance is needed. This in a way is a prime conflict of Lenz, the creation of distance out of a need for survival, yet at the same time his awareness that one can only know one's own nature in the company of others. When he writes, he says, he sometimes feels as if a a wall has come down and one's own fears have become images in which he can walk around and meet himself.
He says he would not be able to supply a coherent image of himself as a the poet. When he wrote his story about Mörike (Erinnerung an Eduard 1981) he says that a friend has a different perspective than a researcher.
With respect to Horace and his ars poetica he wonders how one should write today: he rejects the suggestion to write 'wordly' as he never got around in the world, although, he states, he was pushed around between Leningrad and San Francisco. People complain he flees into nature and he says to himself this is no surprise. Of course, he could write about environmental damage, but Horace doesn't say a writer should uncover the problems of society, in Horace there are just hints towards norms. What are the actions, the deeds of a writer, if not helping to sort out social problems, and Lenz says his writing won't help trade unions, but, he says it might lead to a lighter mood (Lichtstimmung), about cornflowers in fields, that this is important to him, nature has an immaterial reward, and how to go about writing this: by way of immersion, to immerse yourself into everything that exists until you forget yourself and you become grass and thistles and bring this into your words. You will get a meditative text, if a couple of people like it then this is enough for him. It won't be many he says and his imaginative or meditative view is different compared to a more worldly or dynamic approach, but, he states, one cannot demand everything.