LETTER FROM GERMANY
383
or a snakeskin with a kind of still-life art that excludes man and all
mankind's moral problems. For all his knowledge and understanding of
the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Friedrich Georg Juenger thus
limits his use of their stylistic innovations to a kind of visionary en–
riching of the descriptive lyricism of some nineteenth-century German
"art for art's sake" hymnic poets or prose-writers, such as Conrad
Ferdinand Meyer or Adalbert Stifter. Hans Egon Holthusen, the most
interesting among the new Rilke disciples, has chosen to follow the
tradition of the
Duino Elegies
and of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
rather
than, as most other Rilke imitators, the easier tradition of the
Bueh
der Bilder,-
in some of his more recent work, however, Holthusen seems
unfortunately to be imitating
T.
S. Eliot, whom Germany is just discov–
ering, in a rather crude and superficial manner. Most of the German
poets who do not follow Romantic models or George and Rilke have
been attempting, in one way or another, to revive the Expressionism
of the years that followed the first World War. Some of these poets,
generally Communists, follow the example of Brecht; others are satirists,
in the general tradition of Joachim Ringelnatz or of Erich Kaestner,
who continues to publish the same kind of bitterly witty verse as he did
twenty years ago; others flounder in a curiously vague attempt to revive
some of the more "dada" aspects of expressionism and manage, at best,
to produce weak imitations of the nonsense poetry of Christian Mor–
genstern.
The most widely read novels of the last few years have generally
been translations or the works of German exiles, such as Thomas Mann,
Theodor Plievier or Alfred Doeblin, who had been forbidden in the
Third Reich. Wilder's
The Ides of March
has contributed very much to
the prestige of American literature in the eyes of those intellectuals who
are too traditionalist to be swept off their feet by Thomas Wolfe.
Gone
with the Wind
has created a demand, among the wives of businessmen
who are prospering in the West-German reconstruction boom, for the
kind of long and lush novel that can be discussed at length at a
"Kaffeeklatsch." Three German novelists who are not yet widely known
outside of Germany have, however, inspired some serious discussion in
literary circles: Elisabeth Langgasser, Hermann Kasack and
Ernst
Juenger.
Hermann Kasack's
Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (The City Beyond
the River)
is easily the most distinguished German novel of recent
years. A Kafka-like allegory about a man who arrives in a strange city
to assume the duties of its official historian, the novel describes how
this hero slowly becomes aware that he is the only living man in a kind
