The reason for the murder of memory lies in the fear that Orpheus’ love for Eurydice might, as Nossack puts it in another passage, turn to a passion for the goddess of death; it knows nothing of the positive potential of melancholy.47 But if it is true that “the step from mourning to being comforted is not the greatest step but the smallest,” then the proof is in that passage of Nossack’s account where he remembers the truly infernal death of a group of people who burned in a bombproof shelter because the doors had jammed and coal stored in the rooms next to it caught fire.48 “They had all fled from the hot walls to the middle of the cellar. They were found there crowded together, bloated with the heat.”49 The laconic comment reminds us of the Homeric lines about the fate of the hanged maids: “So the women’s heads were trapped in a line, / nooses yanking their necks up, one by one / so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death … / they kicked up heels for a little — not for long.”50 The comfort of language evoking pity takes the reader, in Nossack’s text, in very concrete terms straight from the horror of that coal cellar into the following passage about the convent garden. “We had heard the Brandenburg concertos there in April. And a blind woman singer performed; she sang: Die schwere Leidenszeit beginnt nun abermals—‘The Time of Suffering Now Begins Once More.’ Simple and self-assured, she leaned against the harpsichord, and her unseeing eyes looked past those trivialities for which we already feared, past them and perhaps to the place where we now stood, with nothing but a sea of stones around us.”51 Here again, of course, we have a construction — a metaphysical construction — placed on the meaning. But the way in which Nossack puts his hope in the will to tell the truth, and helps to overcome the tension between two poles by his unemotive style, may justify such a conjecture.
Comparison of Kasack’s novel with Nossack’s factual account also shows that an attempt to write a literary account of collective catastrophes inevitably, if it is to claim validity, breaks out of the novel form that owes its allegiance to bourgeois concepts. At the time when these works were produced the implications for the technique of writing could not yet be foreseen, but they became increasingly clear as West German literature absorbed the debacle of recent history. Consequently, Alexander Kluge’s highly complex and at first sight heterogeneous book Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 (“New Stories. Nos. 1–18”), published in 1977, resists the temptation to integrate that is perpetuated in traditional literary forms by presenting the preliminary collection and organization of textual and pictorial material, both historical and fictional, straight from the author’s notebooks, less to make any claim for the work than as an example of his literary method. If this procedure undermines the traditional idea of a creative writer bringing order to the discrepancies in the wide field of reality by arranging them in his own version, that does not invalidate his subjective involvement and commitment, the point of departure of all imaginative effort. Indeed, the second of the “new stories,” describing the air raid of April 8, 1945, on Halberstadt, is a model in this respect, showing how personal involvement in collective experience, a crucial feature of Nossack’s writing too, can be made at least a heuristically meaningful concept through analytic historical investigations, relating it to immediately preceding events and later developments, to the present, and to possible future perspectives. Kluge, who grew up in Halberstadt, was thirteen years old at the time of the air raid. “When a high-explosive bomb drops you notice it,” he says in his introduction to the stories, adding, “On April 8, 1945, something of that kind fell ten metres away from me.”52 Nowhere else in the text does the author refer directly to himself. The tone of his account of the destruction of his native town is one of research into the past; the traumatically shocking experiences to which those affected reacted with complex processes of amnesiac suppression are brought into a present reality shaped by that buried history. In precisely the opposite way from Nossack’s, Kluge’s retrospective presentation of what happened follows not what the author saw with his own eyes, or what he may still remember of it, but events peripheral to his own existence past and present. For the aim of the text as a whole, as we shall see, depends on the fact that experience in any real sense was actually impossible in view of the overwhelming speed and totality of the destruction; it could be acquired only indirectly, by learning about it later.