German Life and Letten 47:3 July 1994 0016-8777

‘EIN HOFFNUNGSLOSER MORALIST’: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMANN

MICHAEL BUTLER

The sudden death on 1 July 1993 of Gert Hofmann at the early age of sixty-two has deprived contemporary German literature of a distinctive and fascinating voice. Yet despite numerous prestigious awards, including the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis ( 1979), the Alfred-Diiblin-Preis ( 1982), the ‘Hor- spielpreis der Kriegsblinden’ ( 1983) and, posthumously, the ‘Literaturpreis der Landeshauptstadt Miinchen’ ( 1993), Gert Hofmann remained through- out his career ‘ein Auknseiter und Einzelginger, ohne Clique und ohne Gruppe, ein Solitlr in der Literatur’.’ Indeed, it is probably true to say that his books have still not got beyond the paradox of being the ‘bekannt- esten unter den literarischen Geheimtips’ which they were declared to be in 1986.2 Despite the consistently positive reception of his work in the German feuilletons, extended critical attention has been lacking and even the useful compilation of reviews of his work, Auskunftfiir Lam, published by Luchterhand in 1987, is long out of print.

The reasons for this curiously intermittent interest are difficult to fathom, but they may well have to do with Hofmann’s initial concentration in the 1960s and 1970s on the unfashionable genre of the ‘Horspiel’. Moreover, his peripatetic life-style - for many years he worked abroad as a Germanist at, among others, the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Yale and Ljubljana - kept him at the periphery of the German literary scene. He was thus spared the critical mania for instant pigeon-holing, but at the cost of wider public re~ognition.~

Gert Hofmann had written some thirty radio plays before he published his first major piece of fiction, the ‘Novelle’ Die Denuwiution (1979). Since that date a steady stream of stories and novels have appeared which constitute one of the major achievements in German literature of the last twenty years. This extraordinary productivity includes the novels Die Fistel- stimme ( 1980), Au J dem Tim ( 1982), Unsere Eroberung ( 1984), Unsere Vergfllieh-

’ Sigrid IdfYler, ‘Hofmanns Venthngen’ in Hans Christian Kosler (ed.), AuknnJjGr LSN, Darm- rtadt and Ncuwied 1987, p. 40. a R u l Michael Litzeler, ‘Der vento&ne Sohn. Ein Werkportrit’ in AU&UJIIJ& Lm, p. 51. CE Hwpeter B d e ’ a m m e n t on Hofinann in h i review of Dn Turn: ‘Ein literarischer Gcheimtip Tur Insider, dem grolkn Publikum ehcr unkknnt’ , A w h J f i L s c r , p. 145. ’ Michael SchefRcr haa recently pointed to Cert Hofmann aa one of the important writers ignored by Frank Schirrmacher, literary editor of the Frdcfurtn Al lgm’w Zitmy, in the latter’s 1989 pdemic against the ‘unoriginality’ of contemporary West German literature. Sn his essay, ‘Jcnscits w n Tradition und Experiment. Zu Textm Martin G n i m e h und Gert Hofmannr’, Text + Kntik, 113 uanuary 1992: ‘Vom gcgenwirtigen Zurtand der deutschcn Literatur’), 33-51. The controversy initiated by Schirrmacher ir documented in: Franz Joscf Gru ct al. (eds.), Dab& Li*r&~ 1989. Jahnnibblick, Stuttgart 1990. pp. 260-317.

Q B.dl BLrtrcU Lld 1991. PVMirbcd by Blvhcll Publhbcn. 108 Mey Rod. O d d OX4 1JF. UK and 238 hlrin Streel. C.mbrid#e, MA mlu. USA.

376 THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMANN

keit (1987), Vor &r R e g w e i t (1988), Dcr Kinocrziihfer (1990) and Dar Cliick (1992). To this imposing list must be added Cespriich ubcr Balzacs Pfcrd. Vier Novelh (1981), the substantial ‘Eniihlungen’, Dcr Blindcnrturz (1985) and V k l c h j Z d (1986), as well as a representative collection of stories dating from 1985-1990, Tolsbis Kopf (1991). Shortly before he died, Hofmann was able to finish the manuscript of a novel, Die kleine Ste~hardin.~

In his speech accepting the ‘HBrspielpreis der Kriegsblinden’, Gert Hof- mann declared:

Der Schauplatz meiner Werke, ob man sie nun liest oder hort, ist und bleibt der Menschenkopf, der, da es ein moderner Kopf ist, ein uniibenichtlicher und heikler, von allen Sciten bedriingter, von Druck, f i r m und Gestank unablksig iiberfluteter, mit sich selbst und den anderen tiidlich entzweiter Kopf ist .

This unremitting insistence on the individual and on the social context of his writing, that is, the quarrel with the self and with its environment, represents the key to Hofmann’s position as a moralist. At the same time he is clearly aware that amidst the cacaphony of contemporary life the small, quiet voice of the writer is frequently drowned, his words obscured and trivialised by the verbiage with which the individual is constantly bombarded. Perhaps for this reason, he remarked in the same speech: ‘Ich bin ein Moralist, wenn auch ein hoffnungsloser’ (p. 34). In a typically wry paradox Hofmann sets the perceived hopelessness of his position against the firmness of its assertion. Not surprisingly, therefore, two types of characters dominate his narrative world: the frequently anonymous representatives of a smugly conventional society and those who are presented as failures, eccentrics, inadequate dreamers or desperate artists. In the latter category, for example, can be found the eponymous hero of Gespriich ubcr Balzacs Pfcrd, whose last-ditch attempt to redeem his dire financial position in the theatre fails in a confrontation with the real life drama of the Parisian sewers; or, in a bleak reversal of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the poet Lenz who returns home to seek a single word of recognition from his father only to be promptly banished from the paternal hearth as an incurable embarrassment (‘Die Ruckkehr des verlorenen Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz nach Riga’); or Pieter Bruegel in Der Blittdensturz whose professionally ruthless desire to create a final masterpiece ironically blinds the artist to the human needs of the blind beggars he temporarily employs as hapless models. Hofmann chooses such historical figures not in any sense to illumi- nate their biographical problems - invention is freely intermingled with

‘ Published in Spring 1994, the novel was fint Suialiscd in the FrmCrcfLrtn A11gmeim Zeitung in 38 instalments between 24 October and 6 November 1993. It would be pleasant to think that this waa Schimcher’s way of apologising fix journalistic hubris. 5‘H6rspiel und Literatur’, reprinted in A u r b 1 ~ 5 r Lug, pp. 3&35, here p. 33. Q B d B * d n n Lcd 1991.

THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMANN 377

historical fact - but as resonant vehicles to explore contemporary, personal tensions of repression and lovelessness.6

The ‘Enahlungen’ gathered in Tolstois Kopf are no exception. They illus- trate vividly Hofmann’s skill in setting up an ironic tension between his characters’ individual stones and the language in which they are couched. The method reveals patterns of persecution and personal dislocation which the banality .of their lives initially obscures. Most are related from a first- person perspective and those which are not proceed from a distinctly subjective consciousness. They vary considerably in subject matter, but all reveal a concern with defective relationships. In the opening story, ‘Motte’, for example, the narrator takes refuge in the first person plural as he relates how on the eve of the Second World War the village butcher fights to prevent his retarded daughter being sent to an asylum. The narratorial mask of conventional wisdom is dismantled step by step to reveal a repressed malevolence which leads directly to tragedy, a shocking outcome swiftly forgotten as the approaching universal bloodbath conveniently blots out the community’s particular guilt. ‘Empfindungen auf dem Lande’ similarly stresses the conjunction between private attitudes and political conse- quences. Here the subject is the hostility of inbred country communities towards bewildered ‘asylum seekers’. Hofmann allows the parallel between yesterday’s Jews and today’s undesirable aliens to hover unspoken between the lines. The mental structures of xenophobia remain the same.

The most powerful story in the collection, ‘Die Weltmaschine’, describes the absurd passion of a small farmer who suddenly decides to construct a machine from scrap metal which would not just imitate the world but actually replace it. As the man’s family and farm disintegrate around him, his obsession challenges the notion of reality held by his increasingly uneasy neighbours. The machine’s magnificent uselessness proves too much for their circumscribed imaginations, and they burn down the barn in which it is housed with the farmer locked inside. The murderous nature of collective prejudice is caught with laconic irony: the self-righteous arsonists cannot hear the farmer’s screams ‘weil unser Hen so pocht’.’ The title story, ‘Tolstois Kopf, which concludes the collection, acts as an appropriate coda to such dark themes. Tolstoy’s ineffectual and embittered son, the spitting image of his father apart from a cranium several sizes too small, is con- demned to earn a living in American vaudeville by imitating his detested father. The grandeur of the latter’s humanitarian dreams is reduced to the sordid unpleasantness of a provincial sideshow.

The power of Hofmann’s best fiction is rooted precisely in the exploration of familial structures in such accurately observed provincial settings. Though too discreet a writer to pursue overt autobiography, Hofmann returns again and again to the topography’of the small town of Limbach in Saxony where

See his conversation with Achirn Roscher, ‘Nach Lcbensrnaterial graben’, n e ~ ~ h c h l i h h r r , 40 (1992), 33-42, here p. 38. ’ ToLrloir Kopf, Munich, Vienna 1991, p. 133.

@ Jhil Bkekwcll Ltd 199).

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he was born in 1931. Not surprisingly, given his generation, his attention in such works as Unsere Erobmng and Vcifchenfild, for example, is focussed on the memories of childhood in an adult world characteriscd by deceit, suppressed fear and moral cowardice. Hdmann’s idiosyncratic method is the structuring of these stories from the narrative viewpoint of children. This is not a sentimental procedure, but a technique which depends for its impact on a delicate irony: in returning to his childhood, the author ostensibly assumes the identity and feelings of his younger self while at the same time retaining a control which drives an essentially moral purpose. The device of a haive’ narrator works because it allows questions to be asked and reactions to be recorded that the adults would have promptly disguised if they had scented the danger of exposure. As Hofmann himself put it in an interview:

Ich sehe ein Kind nicht als ein ‘Medium’, sondern F i f e auf seine Sicht zuriick, weil ein Kind das Leben bcsonders intensiv, erschreckt, entlarvend, zweckfrei wahmimmt, sozusagen ohne Hintergedanken, und den Blick der Routine noch nicht kennt.B

Thus the two Imbach brothers in Unsere Erobmng, sent on a trivial errand by their mother, embark in fact on an odyssey of unpleasant discovery. As they wander through an eery, ruined landscape - the date is 8 May 1945 and the town is momentarily cut off from history - the boys encounter mysterious and shifty adults who provoke in their childish imaginations vague and incomprehensible horrors. At the same time, the children’s internalisation of their parents’ corrupt values is indicated by their petty maltreatment of their companion, ‘unser Edgar’, an older simpleton taken in, but abused by, the well-to-do Imbach family. I t is the archetypal outsider, Edgar - a distant cousin of Grass’s Joachim Mahlke - who functions as the unwelcome moral conscience of the family by remembering ugly details of the immediate past, in particular, the murder of a Czech ‘Zwangsarbeiter’ in the family factory by the boys’ Nazi father.

The nature of communal guilt is the theme, too, of Viilchenfeld. A Jewish professor, Bernhard Israel Veilchenfeld, dismissed from his university post in Leipzig, appears one day in the obscure backwater of Limbach where he hopes to fade into a n ~ n y m i t y . ~ Through the children’s insouciant eaves- dropping and artless questioning of their parents the community’s isolation and persecution of Veilchenfeld is revealed in all its labyrinthine cruelty.

’Nach Lebensmaterial graben’, p. 37. The word Jew, in fact, is never mentioned in the t a t , and Veilchenfeld’s full name is not given

until the tinal confrontation with the town authmitia who formally strip him of his citizenship (V&hm~Jd, Darmstadt 1988 = Sammlung Luchterhand edition, p. 141). Indeed, Veilchenfeld appears to be a convert to the Lutheran Church, for among the papers he always caniies with him is his ‘Konfinrutionuchein’ (p. 14). That persecution haa taught him a bitter lesson about the treacherous nature of ‘assimilation’ is clear from the reaaon he gives for not leaving his lodgings: ‘Weil ich mich unter meincn Buchern aichertr Ghlc a h unter meinen Landsleuten.’ (p. 8) Q Bail BlwtVcU Ltd 1994.

THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMA” 3 79

The power of the story lies in the delineation of escalating victimisation from its onset in neighbourly irritation, through juvenile loutishness to the full-scale brutality of the town’s civic representatives. But most telling of all is the falsity of familial routine in a morally corrupt world. This is neatly caught in an early bedtime exchange between the mother and her children in which the euphemism ‘verlegt’ is employed to cover the deadly reality awaiting Veilchenfeld:

Und wann wird er vcrlcgt, frage ich und ziehe mich so langsam wic

Die Mutter sagt: Nun bald. Und warum wird er verlegt? Wegcn dem, was er denkt. Und was denkt er, fragt meine kleine Schwcstcr, die Herrn Veilchenfeld

Doch das kann ihr die Mutter auch nicht sagen, sic steckt j a nicht in

Und wir, h g t meine Schwnta, wie denken wir? So wie ale. Also werden wir auch nicht verlegt? Nein, sagt die Mutter, und nun in die Wannc. (p. 15)

miiglich aus.

nicht traut.

seinen Gedanken. Er denkt eben anders, sagt sic.

Significantly, the children’s father, a doctor, falls into the same moral quagmire. For despite his initial hospitality - as conventionally due from one professional man to another - and his awareness of his duty as a doctor, he ultimately shows no more courage than his fellow citizens in resisting the herd-like pressure to conform. After Veilchenfeld is openly beaten up by Nazi thugs, his son records his father’s words:

Aber vicllcicht ware es angesichta dusen, was auf Veilchenfeld zukommt, gar nicht das schlechteste, wenn er sich umbdchte, sagt der Vater, der in vielen Dingen robuster als die Mutter denkt und diese Gedanken auch ausspricht. (P. 77)

These two episodes, given the flashback technique - the story begins and ends with the hearse bearing Veilchenfeld’s corpse away - do not so much foreshadow as illuminate the professor’s eventual suicide. They are paradigmatic for the guilt of the whole community: the ‘banality’ of betrayal is highlighted in the structures of language itself.

Set in the opening years of the Nazi dictatorship, V&hy%ld is a damning portrayal of what Max Frisch once called ‘die ldeinen und scheinbar noch harmlosen Ansitze, die.ersten Risse in der Mauer, das bedenkenlose Mitma- chertum.”O And as in Andorra, to which those remarks referred, the moral cowardice strikes at the heart of the one institution which should protect

lo Quoted in: Ernst Wendt and Walter Schmitz (cds.), Ma*riolh LY Max FtircA~ ‘ A h a ’ , Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 77.

0 Bail B*EhrcU Ltd 1W.

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the weak and the young: the family. In this particular way the community is generally undermined, its values distorted and an inhuman ideology allowed to take mot.

A further illustration of this infernal dialectic can be seen in the novel, Dn Kinoerzihler. Here, in his most overtly autobiographical text, Hofmann recalls his childhood memories of his grandfather, Limbach’s ‘Kinoenahler’, that is, the man who with his narrative skills and adept piano-playing filled out the silent films for the delectation of the cinema-going public. The story centres on the gradual collapse of the grandfather’s world brought about by the arrival of the ‘talkies’. The wit and humour of this story are principally located in the ambivalent portrayal of the author’s grandfather. The nar- rator’s sympathy with the old man’s eccentricities is countered by the realism of his mother and grandmother, neither of whom take the ‘Kinoerzahler’ and his artistic pretensions seriously, especially at a time when the superfluity of his ‘profession’ is as plain as ‘ein drittes Nasenloch‘.” The fascination of Dcr KinoerzW lies in its gentle exploration of an individual gifted with imagination, if not much creative talent, within a community which has little time for either. This private story is set contrapuntally against the momentous events of the Nazi period as filtered through the narrow minds of the inhabitants of Limbach. Hitler’s acts of aggression, for example, flit past with an ironic inconsequentiality, neatly caught in such regurgitated propaganda clichis as ‘vor der Heimkehr des Sudetenlands’ (p. 233) and ‘als wir zuriickschlugen’ (p. 283). The moral thrust of the grandson’s memories, however, becomes plain when the Nazi movement restores a vestigial (and fleeting) dignity to the redundant ‘KinoerzZhler’. Thus the latter stands as a painful reminder of how easily the resentful ‘Kleinbiirger’ fell for the grandiose lies of another failed and unwanted artist. The child’s empathy with his muddled grandfather, who at a crucial moment prefers his ideal world of the silent cinema to the meretricious glory of a Nazi Party rally, is sealed in the final pages when the narrator emerges into the narrative present to indicate that he is in the process of reenacting his grandfather’s fate: the womenfolk in his own family react to his desire to shape past experience into a coherent whole, ‘damit es ein biBchen Bestand hat’ with the same touch of mocking realism to which the grandfather had been subjected:

Aber es ist wie mit allen meinen ‘Erfindungen’ (meine Frau) und den anderen ‘Unvergfnglichkeiten’ (meine ironische jiingste Tochter Susi): Lustlosigkeit, Einfdlslosigkeit, die Depression der Sommermonate, Herbstmonate, Win- termonate, die in siidliche Richtung hoffnungslos verstopften Autobahnen, die cine rasche Flucht unmiiglich machen, dam Kopheh, Atemnot.. . . (p. 302)

Ikr Kiawr&&r, Munich 1993 (DTV edition), p. 68. Q Bril B L c M t ud 1W.

THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMAh” 381

For Hofmann, memory is clearly the defining act of the moralist, and these words indicate the extent of the difficulties he faces. Nevertheless, the chilly stasis they conjure up remains a momentary, if unnerving, one. Such sentiments, however bleak, mark a sober recognition that progress, however slight, can be made; that although art may have shrunk ‘vom Bildhaueratel- ier zur Prothesenwerkstatt’, it is still needed in our damaged world ‘damit wir weiterkriechen k6nnen’ (p. 294).

Gert Hofmann’s critique of the nuclear family is continued in the ironically titled novel, Dar Click, in which the familiar narrative technique of childlike vision penetrating the carapace of adult mendacity is once again employed. In this novel it is the father who is the failure, his small son the indulgent observer. The text concentrates on a single day in the life of a disintegrating family: the father, a would-be writer who clutches a framed postcard from Thomas Mann as sole proof of his literary credentials, must quit the marital home before his wife’s new lover arrives to take his place. His six-year-old daughter is to stay in the new m6nage, the ten-year-old son will accompany his father into ‘exile’. The events are recollected by the son who for the purpose has retreated to his earlier self in order to capture the immediacy of what he calls the ‘letzten Tag meiner Kindheity.l2 Faced with his father’s increasingly pathetic vacillations and his mother’s cold decisiveness, the boy makes no attempt at objectivity. With the melancholy precocity of a child older than its years, he defends his father’s dreams and attacks his mother’s loss of patience after seventeen years of drudgery. The necessary balance is provided by the narrator’s irritating younger sister, whose inno- cence is still intact and who can therefore ask the simple, essential questions.

The pattern of this last day of a failed marriage frequently resembles a curious parody of Candiak, with the self-deceiving, ‘unworldly’ father flanked by two miniature companions who possess radically different perspectives on events. What unites them, however, is their common detestation of the romantic interloper, the rebarbatively named Herr Herkenrath. Though the children are not prepared or able to see through their father’s hollow pretensions, their uncluttered gaze immediately recognises Herkenrath’s dubious promise when he arrives in the final pages of the text. The cause of the mother’s faintly comic rejuvenation is seen as the embodiment of what the father had feared, but remained a victim of, all his life: petit- bourgois boredom, love reduced to a briefcase and a pair of carefully polished shoes. The novel ends with father and son leaving home in a furniture van to an uncertain future. The image is a deeply ambivalent one, for the narrator admits in his final words that neither he nor his father really knew much about each other. For the son the journey offers a possible escape from betrayal and disappointment; for the self-pitying father the

‘* Dor C&k, Munich, Vienna 1992, p. 151. Hofmann admitted that he wrote this ‘traurige Ehcgach- ichte’ in order to get it out of his syatern: ‘P ist die Cerchichte meiner Eltem.’ ‘Nach Lebcnrmatcrid graben’, p. 42.

Q Btlil B*clncll Ltd 1994.

382 THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT H O F M A ”

broken family represents the ultimate comment on personal inadequacy and a life of ‘mauvaise foi’.

In such delicate excavations of memory, Gert Hofmann’s claim to be ‘ein Moralist, wenn auch ein hoffnungsloser’ can be seen to be a highly pro- ductive paradox. To a critic who remarked on the total absence of happiness in his books, Hofmann replied:

Das Thema Gluck hatte seine gro& Zeit im 18. Jahrhundert. Aus der Zeit stammt auch die amerikanische Verfassung, in der das Gliick verankert worden ist, und was ist daraus geworden? Ich zcige Mcnschen in Konflikten und in extremen Situationen, hier hat das GIG& keinen Plau. Da geht es nicht urns Giiicklichsein, sondern urns l?turleben.ls

In such a context, the recovery of even fragments of lost or suppressed identity point to a belief in the possibility of alternative modes of living, however vague their contours remain in the work itself.

Astonishingly enough, however, it was precisely to the theme of happiness that Hofmann turned in what was to be his last book, Die kleine Stechardin. Superficially, the novel’s protagonist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, can be seen as an emblematic figure in Hofmann’s fiction: the troubled artist/ intellectual, the eccentric who affords moments of comic relief to his society, the dreamer who lives as grandly within his head as he wanders clumsily through life. As with other stories featuring historical personalities, Die kleine Skchardin is not concerned with scholarly reconstruction of the past, though Hofmann’s attention to detail certainly betrays the scholar. Instead Hofmann is intent on exploring his own imagination, discovering through the process of writing the richness of possibility: how things could have been, not how things actually were. Thus in place of a full-scale biographical account of this fascinating and profoundly complex exemplar of the German Enlightenment, he chooses a single, significant episode in Lichtenberg’s life: his brief love affair with a thirteen-year-old flower-girl, Maria Dorothea Stechard, whom he took into his house in 1777 - to the titillation of the respectable gossips of Gottingen - and where they lived happily together until her tragically early death in 1782. In a prefatory note, the reader is warned that the truth of the matter will not be found in ‘facts’:

Dabei ist gerade das Erstunkene und Erlogene, die Ratlosigkeit, der ganze, wie mal einer schrieb, ‘menschheitliche gram’, vom Himmel her gesehen, das Wahrhaftigste an dem kleinen Mann. Bei uns ist er geworden, nicht wie er war, sondern wie er auch hiitte sein LOnnen.‘*

Indeed, the point is amplified in the opening words of the novel: ‘Einmal, vor vielen, vielen Jahren. . .’ The fairy-tale tone, the sense of sheer delight

Hans Christian Koller, ‘Aur den Fenrtrm noch einmal daa Abmdland bcgrijfkn. E n Gcsprich mit Gert Hofinann’ in A u r h f l f * . Lmr, pp. 41-50, h m p. 50. ” DU Unm Stechardin, MunichNienno 1994, p. 5. @8.lil BLELrrll Lld 1994.

THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF GERT HOFMANN 383

in story-telling, is continued by the typical narrative device of a young, enthralled ‘listener’ prodding the narrator’s tale forward with breathless questions. In fact, what Hofmann has produced is a modem variation of the legend of Beauty and the Beast. The ‘ugliness’ of his beast is of two kinds: a biographically correct physikl deformity (Lichtenberg was of diminutive stature and had a hunchback) and an emotional impoverishment which owes more to Hofmann’s imaginative puqiose in the text. Hofmann’s Lichtenberg has all the intellectual brilliance of the historical model - the text is studded with references to his popular lectures at the University of Glittingen, his experimental work on electricity, his wide correspondence with the leading scientists of late eighteeenth-century Europe and quotations from his famous ‘Sudelbii~her”~- but the dominant feature of his life at this crucial moment is not academic success, but the painful banality of sexual frustration. The text’s sustained and highly successful joke is centred on the juxtaposition of emotional aridity and the excitement of empirical discovery at one of the rich moments in the history of science.

The slow ripening of love between the child/woman Dorothea and the professor twenty-two years her senior is conveyed with a delicacy of touch which adds something quite new to Hofmann’s range. The anonymous questioner of the opening pages is replaced by the ‘kleine Stechardin3 own naive queries as she begins to sense a world far beyond her humble origins. Lichtenberg’s decision to teach her to read and write, though initially a sly strategem for seduction, charts the growth of a mutual affection which transcends disparities of social and intellectual status, Hofmann’s restrained, paratactic prose conveys the hesitant movement in both man and girl from sexual timidity to sensual liberation with an unparalleled sensitivity. The consummation of this unlikely union, which his prurient colleagues can only observe from a distance, but not comprehend, takes place amidst Lichtenberg’s most valuable possessions: his books and his unrivalled collec- tion of scientific instruments, the symbols of his vast intellectual ambition. What in less assured hands might have dissolved into arch sentimentality, here articulates a moral vision: the release of love humanises Lichtenberg’s obsessive desire for knowledge. Indeed, love does more: it triumphs over deformity itself. The hunchback that had contributed so much to Lichten- berg’s sense of social indequacy and driven him to excesses of compensatory intellectual endeavour, simply disappears in Dorothea’s embrace:

Du wirst mir nicht glauben, sagte er, aber mir ist, als hatte ich gar keinen Buckel mehr! Was f ir einen Buckel, fragte sic? (p. 169)

In stark contrast to Hofmann’s fiction hitherto, Dic kleinc Skchardin is a remarkably serene work of art. And its serenity is tempered but not under-

” As the ‘Sudelblcher’ contain some 6000 aphorisms, I shall leave i t to Lichtenberg specialists to check the authenticity of Hofmann’r quotations.

&a Buil Eklrmll Ud 199).

384 THE NARRATIVE WORLD OF CERT HOFMANN

mined by the painful concluding pages which relate Lichtenberg’s desolation over Dorothea’s untimely death, followed by his collapse into melancholy and the old refuge of hypochondria. The opening rhythms of the fairy-tale thus broaden into an elegiac parable on the transience of human happiness. At the same time, the story presents the latter as an achievable and convincing reality, however short-lived. Indeed, despite the disintegration of Lichtenberg’s temporary idyll, the novel ends on a distinctly and (for Hofmann) uniquely positive note: a brief, humorous coda points not to the past, but to the future, to continuity in the shape of marriage and children, that is, to another story and another ‘Lichtenberg’. The final words of the text, suspended in the space of their own paragraph - ‘Und dann?’ - take on an unexpected poignancy from the fact that they were the last Hofmann was to write. These two simple syllables, the motor of all story-telling, function as a provocative leitmotif in the text; it is perhaps not too fanciful to read them as Hofmann’s invitation to his readers to continue, on their own account, the humane project of his fiction: the recovery of memory and the emancipation of the imagination.

In an ironic coincidence, Gen Hofmann died from a stroke on the 251st anniversary of Lichtenberg’s birth. His last work of fiction underlines more clearly than any other his attachment - strained but never broken - to the battered values of the Enlightenment. Indeed, Die kl& Stcchtardin appears to restore to his self-proclaimed status as a moralist precisely that dimension of hope which he had once so firmly denied. Where the earlier work could bc said to analyse and diagnose with unflinching honesty the sickness of a society suffering fiom various forms of moral amnesia and spiritual deadness, Die k k n e Skhardin offers a witty, warm and refreshing antidote.