I have kept asking myself since then what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and how the threads run. What, for instance, links my visit to Reinsburgstrasse with the fact that in the years immediately after the war it contained a camp for so-called displaced persons, a place which was raided on March 20, 1946, by about a hundred and eighty Stuttgart police officers, in the course of which, although the raid discovered nothing but a black market trade in a few hen’s eggs, several shots were fired and one of the camp inmates, who had only just been reunited with his wife and two children, lost his life.
Why can I not get such episodes out of my mind? Why, when I take the S-Bahn toward Stuttgart city center, do I think every time we reach Feuersee Station that the fires are still blazing above us, and since the terrors of the last war years, even though we have rebuilt our surroundings so wonderfully well, we have been living in a kind of underground zone? Why did it seem to the traveler on a winter night, coming from Möhringen and getting his first sight from the back of a taxi of the new administrative complex of the firm of Daimler, that the network of lights glittering in the darkness was like a constellation of stars spreading all over the world, so that these Stuttgart stars are visible not only in the cities of Europe, the boulevards of Beverly Hills and Buenos Aires, but wherever columns of trucks with their cargos of refugees move along the dusty roads, obviously never stopping, in the zones of devastation that are always spreading somewhere, in the Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea, or Afghanistan?
And how far is it from the point where we find ourselves today back to the late eighteenth century, when the hope that mankind could improve and learn was inscribed in handsomely formed letters in our philosophical firmament? At the time Stuttgart, nestling amid vineyards and overgrown slopes, was a little place of some twenty thousand souls, some of whom, as I once read, lived on the top floors of the towers of the collegiate church. One of the sons of the country, Friedrich Hölderlin, proudly addresses this small, still sleepy little Stuttgart where cattle were driven into the marketplace early in the morning to drink from the black marble fountains, as the princess of his native land, and asks her, as if he already guessed at the coming dark turn that history and his own life would take: receive me kindly, stranger that I am. Gradually an epoch of violence then unfolds, and with it comes personal misfortune. The giant strides of the Revolution, writes Hölderlin, present a monstrous spectacle. The French forces invade Germany. The Sambre-Maas army moves toward Frankfurt, where after heavy bombardment the utmost confusion reigns. With the Gontard household, Hölderlin has fled that city for Kassel by way of Fulda.[11] On his return he is increasingly torn between his wishful imaginings and the real impossibility of his love, which transgresses against the class system. Yes, he sits for days on end with Susette in the garden cabinet or the arbor, but he feels the humiliating aspect of his position all the more oppressive. So he must leave again. He has gone on so many walking tours in his life of barely thirty years, in the Rhone mountains, the Harz, to the Knochenberg, to Halle and Leipzig, and now, after the Frankfurt fiasco, back to Nürtingen and Stuttgart.
Soon afterward he sets off again to Hauptwil in Switzerland, accompanied by friends through the wintry Schönbuch to Tübingen, then alone up the rugged mountain and down the other side, on the lonely road to Sigmaringen. It is twelve hours’ walk from there to the lake. A quiet journey across the water. The next year, after a brief stay with his family, he is on the road again through Colmar, Isenheim, Belfort, Besançon, and Lyon, going west and southwest, passing through the lowlands of the upper Loire in mid-January, crossing the dreaded heights of the Auvergne deep as they are in snow, going through storms and wilderness until he finally reaches Bordeaux. You will be happy here, Consul Meyer tells him on his arrival, but six months later, exhausted, distressed, eyes flickering, and dressed like a beggar he is back in Stuttgart. Receive me kindly, stranger that I am. What exactly happened to him? Was it that he missed his love, could he not overcome his social disadvantage, had he after all seen too far ahead in his misfortune? Did he know that the fatherland would turn away from his vision of peace and beauty, that soon those like him would be watched and locked up, and there would be no place for him but the tower? A quoi bon la littérature?
Perhaps only to help us to remember, and teach us to understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic, for instance the connection between the former princely residence of Stuttgart, later an industrial city, and the French town of Tulle, which is built on seven hills—Elle a des prétentions, cette ville, a lady living there wrote to me some time ago, That town has grand ideas of itself—between Stuttgart, then, and Tulle in the Corrèze region through which Hölderlin passed on his way to Bordeaux, and where on June 9, 1944, exactly three weeks after I first saw the light of day in the Seefeld house in Wertach, and almost exactly a hundred and one years after Hölderlin’s death, the entire male population of the town was driven together in the grounds of an armaments factory by the SS Das Reich division, intent on retribution. Ninety-nine of them, men of all ages, were hanged from the lampposts and balconies of the Souilhac quarter in the course of that dark day, which still overshadows the memories of the town of Tulle. The rest were deported to forced-labor camps and extermination camps, to Natzweiler, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, where many were worked to death in the stone quarries.
So what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet in these lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship. A place that is at the service of such a task is therefore very appropriate in Stuttgart, and I wish it and the city that harbors it well for the future.
Acceptance Speech to the Collegium of the German Academy
Born as I was in the Allgäu in 1944, I did not for some time perceive or understand any of the destruction that was present at the beginning of my life. Now and then, as a child, I heard adults speak of a coup, but I had no idea what a coup was. The first glimmerings of our terrible past came to me, I believe, one night at the end of the 1940s when the sawmill in the Plätt burned down, and everyone ran out of the houses on the edge of town to stare at the sheaf of flames flaring high into the black night. Later, at school, more was made of the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon than of what then lay only fifteen years in the past. Even at university I learned almost nothing of recent German history. German studies in those years were a branch of scholarship stricken with almost premeditated blindness, and as Hebel would have said, rode a pale horse. For a whole winter semester we spent a proseminar stirring The Golden Pot, without once discussing the relation in which that strange story stands to the time immediately preceding its composition, to the fields of corpses outside Dresden and the hunger and epidemic disease in the city on the Elbe at that period.[12] Only when I went to Switzerland in 1965, and a year later to England, did ideas of my native country begin to form from a distance in my head, and these ideas, in the thirty years and more that I have now lived abroad, have grown and multiplied. To me, the whole Republic has something curiously unreal about it, rather like a never-ending déjà vu. Only a guest in England, I still hover between feelings of familiarity and dislocation there too. Once I dreamed, and like Hebel I had my dream in Paris, that I was unmasked as a traitor to my country and a fraud. Not least because of such misgivings, my admission to the Academy is very welcome, and an unhoped-for form of justification.
11
The famous poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) grew up in Nörtingen near Stuttgart. He had an unhappy love affair with the wife of his employer, the banker J. F. Gontard, in whose house he was a tutor. Around 1802 he showed the first signs of psychological distrubance, and spent most of the rest of his life suffering from mental illness. Much of his poetry celebrates the ideals of ancient Greece.