Friday, August 11, 2006

The Homecoming

Aptly enough, on my plane ride back to Hong Kong I finished reading Bernhard Schlink's new book "Die Heimkehr" or "The Homecoming". Best known as the author of the best-selling "Der Vorleser" or "The Reader" (which caused quite a literary sensation upon its publication in 1997 and is now read by everyone in Germany from Abitur-students to housewives), Schlink is trained in law and is a professor of Rechtsphilosophie (Philosophy of Justice) at the Humboldt in Berlin, but started his literary career writing crime thrillers. "Der Vorleser" caused a sensation because of the juicy/graphic descriptions of a relationship between a 15 year old boy and a 30 something year old woman, but the most controversial aspect of the novel was the revelation of the woman's role in an act of Nazi atrocity, pitting the law-student protagonist's abstractly idealistic notions of justice against his conflicting emotions for his former lover. By the end I was so caught up in the story that I ended up bawling at the conclusion, yet beyond its emotional factor, the success of The Reader was due to its brave voicing of his '68 generation's ambiguous feelings towards their fatherland's horrific past.

I remember reading Der Vorleser for the first time in English (unfortunately it garnered the attention it did from Oprah's book club) and flipped through the book in two hours in a Borders. I wasn't impressed by the flat prose and the unlikely plotline. So when I found out we were reading it in the original for my German 4 class senior year of high school, I was less than thrilled. However, I quickly realized that the English translation had lost much of the simple elegance and turns of phrases present in the original. The prose was chillingly direct, stalkingly beautiful, complex and succinct. I became so emotionally caught up in the story that I ended up bawling at the conclusion, and now it's one of my favorite books hands down, in any language.

Of course, one of the critiques often heard about Der Vorleser was that it beautified or excused Nazi actions since the novel's ostensible representative of Nazi power was crafted with such compassion. How dare he give an ex-Nazi protagonist a complexly human facet--with the ability to love and the propensity to hurt? But by no means does Schlink excuse the actions of his fathers. In fact, quite the opposite: he simply wanted to capture the crisis of conscience that confronted so many in his generation, the students of '68 who clamored for a more honest discourse about Nazi horrors and the complications throbbing in WWII's aftermath. Yes, our grandfathers were Nazis, and yes they are to blame--but how much of their actions came of their own volition? or were they simply caught up in the banality of horror, as Arendt said?

Schlink's protagonists stand at the crossroads of Germany's national history and private sorrow. Like characters in a Greek tragedy, they pick their lot according to the bad hand Fate dealt them--a function of being an unwitting subject in the problematic history of their Fatherland. Die Heimkehr deals with especially problematic fields in the history and philosophy of law and transfers them into the realm of suspenseful fiction. Schlink uses Homer's Odyssey as a leitmotif to weave together Germany's most significant recent historical events (Nazism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, problems of Reunification) with the protagonist's search for the mysterious figure who left behind a trail of written tracts that theorize justice not according to any conventionally moral standards, but rather to a perversion of the "golden rule" (do unto others what you would others do unto you) called the "iron rule" that essentially justifies any act of evil because it preempts an expected act of evil from the opponent. "Das Buch ist böse", says one disgusted protagonist of these tracts [the book is evil]. How much more complicated then, when this starry-eyed Odysseus discovers the sins and secrets of his father--and realizes that the notions of justice that he holds true to his heart run contrary to those of the man whose blood courses in his veins?

This journey takes him through tests and trials to the heart of a philosophical darkness wherein life begins to imitate art - most unsettling is how Schlink charts the way this "iron rule" easily metamorphoses from disturbing abstraction into harrowing reality. The climax purposely alludes (I think) to Holocaust accounts, a la Wiesel or Levi. The specific moment where the protagonist understands the banal notions that propagated such extreme evils illustrates how innocent millions were taken to the slaughter based on seemingly intellectual, justified grounds in the Third Reich. Die Heimkehr is a tour de force of penetrating philosophical inquiry bound up in a suspenseful story of love relationships.

What does this actually have to do with my own Heimkehr? Well, reading the book certainly made me hunger for more Schlink, or at least for people with whom I could discuss him and such themes. After coming back this time to Hong Kong, I realized with alarmingly apocalyptic clarity that this is not the place where I can be at home spiritually. It's an uncomfortable part of growing up when you realize the home that you loved so much growing up cannot remain your home forever. I know it's quite coarse for me to dismiss the entire population of such a cosmopolitan city and say no one here cares about history, philosophy, literature, art, music, etc. etc...but there are certain objective standards that betray the geist of the city, such as quality of bookstores, cultural monuments, average person's value/worth judgments. In any case, it's good to be home, but just like Odysseus or Schlink's protagonist, I will be off again pretty soon after my homecoming. And just like them, I vow never to rest until I've found a spiritual resting place.

p.s. some of you may know I write a weekly column in the English section of a daily newspaper in HK, Ming Pao Daily. I've been writing for almost a year now, but starting in September they'll be making some changes to the page and will be discontinuing my column. Auf wiedersehn to that, I guess...but I've been grateful for the opportunity to chronicle such an eventful year--I doubt I would've had the discipline to write so much had I not had deadlines to meet. But my energies will be directed other forms of writing!

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Goodbye to Berlin

In German, the phrase for “to say farewell” translates literally to “to take farewell.” I find this somehow more poetic than the English phrase because it signifies a palpable loss or taking away from the thing or person at hand.

Today is my last day in Berlin. More than six months ago, in anticipation of my time in the same city, I’d read Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs, “Goodbye to Berlin.” These loosely connected narratives incisively and empathetically capture portraits of the characters he met while working as an English teacher in 1930s Berlin. His sketches convey the chaos and confusion of the bustling, volatile Weimar Republic, parting decadently as it was poised on the brink of a fascist takeover. One of the most famous lines from this work is as follows: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” The influence of the booming film industry and fascination with a new visual culture is manifested in these words. For Isherwood, Berlin was a heady confluence of the rush of people, cabarets and cabs. He simply allowed the onrush of images to seep into his mind and eagerly recorded these fleeting impressions with words, mixing in snatches of his own subconscious.

I recently visited the Bauhaus Archive and saw a small display of pioneer photographer and artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s photogramms, a form of sans-camera photography that consisted of light-sensitive paper being exposed to objects, culminating in dynamic and interesting light patterns. Not knowing that photographs could be created without cameras before, I immediately became fascinated with the intense subjectivity of these photographs. When Moholy-Nagy did use a camera, he would allow Berlin street scenes to turn out unfocussed and blurry, as if providing a companion illustration to Isherwood’s contemporaneous observations of the exciting and bewildering city.

I have certainly taken a fair amount of pictures with my camera while living here for the past six months, but my most precious images of Berlin have been pressed into my mind, like an invisible photogram. The past week has been a rush of “Goodbye to Berlin” activities and at first I tried to snap pictures at every turn, but quickly realized the futility of the activity.
I will remember walking from the TV Tower at three in the morning along Alte Jakobstrasse, the street I took every morning on my bike to go to the Berlinische Galerie, and noticing for the first time that further up the street ran the diagonal seam of bricks demarcating the former location of the Berlin Wall. I’ll remember the train running over Hallesches Ufer with two swans drifting under the bridge at the exact same moment, then turning the corner and seeing the sun come up over my street at five in the morning.

Isherwood and Moholy-Nagy both knew that the only constant in the clash of urbanity and art is fleeting instability. No images or words can pin down the essence of a heavy glance, a brief flash, a silent moment in conversation. Years from now, my pictures of Berlin will evoke fond memories for me, but they are only shadows of the pictures and sights captured in my imagination and memory.