Following this encounter and an argument with Erika, Oskar starts to question his own love and asks himself whether he was more interested in the upper-class connections than in Erika herself, though this appears not to be the case after the final twist in the story. Oskar, the narrator of his own account he occasionally calls a “novel”, writes, “What was so terribly provocative was our long-humiliated and mutilated sense of ourselves as slaves when we tried, even outwardly, to be the masters of slaves, which we hid within ourselves [p. 30],” and perhaps even more revealingly, “My love must surely smell of coarse bread and a dusty granary, and that’s why it’s so precious to me. My reason tells me to defend the break-up of the manorial lands, but my emotions tell me to cling compulsively to them, as do all my contempraries [p. 30].”
I Loved a German is not so much a nationalist or anti-nationalist novel as a novel about nationalism and our socially ingrained prejudices which are so difficult to shake off even when the world around us has changed dramatically. I would hazard a guess based on my reading of the novel that Tammsaare was an exponent of civic nationalism avant la lettre. His concern was to salvage Estonian culture from the ravages of history and not to defend some mythical “ethnicity”. What is certainly the case is that this is a complex novel that imparts a number of paradoxes concerning both nationalism and more generally the human condition.
Finally a few words about the novel’s structure and style are in order. It is occasionally a discursive novel, though not on a grand scale. There is, for example, an amusing digression into the difference between writing in the evening and writing in the morning. The manuscript story is that Oskar started to write this autobiographical account after nearly all the events had occurred (i.e. before we or he know what happens to Erika after the split, which is revealed in her letter that ends the book). This manuscript is found after he too has disappeared, and it is handed over to Tammsaare who decides to publish it under his own name and writes an introduction, which of course is actually part of the novel. For some this may appear overly elaborate, but this and Oskar’s habit of calling it a novel undermine the text and that must have been intentional. There is something theatrical about the novel, and the conversations with the landlady and with the grandfather, which form the backbone of the novel, could easily be transferred to the stage. The encounters between the lovers are more typical of a realist novel, with detailed descriptions of the weather, the time of day and their walks. The landlady, who the lovers detest because she embarrasses them unrelentingly, is Estonian and proud of it. Tammsaare clearly finds her ridiculous, but she too is not a caricature. There is some humanity underneath her bluster and bullying. The Estonian maid, on the other hand, is a subdued character and treated with contempt by everyone, including Oskar, but it is revealed in the fictional introduction that she is the one person who had the greatest understanding of people and events. This does not become clear to readers until the end when they have the knowledge to make the judgement. Another reason why this is one of those novels that deserve to be read more than once.
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, June 2018
I Loved a German
To The Reader
Some time ago a certain young man vanished – it isn’t known exactly when, why, where or how. He must have been of a fairly ordinary stamp, for otherwise his disappearance would not have gone unnoticed. At least with death, an individual appears more extraordinary when at the funeral mourners remind each other of what a great person he was, even though he was born small and weak, and lived mostly like an insect under the tree-bark. But with a missing man – this missing man, I mean – there wasn’t a single clue as to where to search for him. The people with whom he lived in town supposed that he had temporarily moved to his father’s farm, but there they were convinced that he was still living in town. And when it finally transpired that he was neither in the countryside nor in the town, it was too late to start a search. The police were informed, but they said that it is difficult to search for and find a person if there are no indications of a crime related to his disappearance. In order to assist the investigation, the lady with whom the young man had lodged brought the police a manuscript he’d left behind. But on closer inspection of the manuscript it emerged that it too lacked indications of criminal activity. For even if it were assumed – which is not very likely – that the young man had put an end to his own life or that that the actions or words of a young lady had incited him to do so, that would not have been of the least significance, for that young lady is dead, and the police do not pursue crimes committed by the dead. Moreover, the civilised world has not regarded suicide as a crime for a very long time, but rather as a certain act of personal freedom and independence, and therefore anyone who encourages suicide cannot be prosecuted in law, especially not when the encouragement is an element of a love affair.
To sum up – the manuscript did indicate a particular psychology, but not criminal one such as the police deal with, and therefore it was returned to the landlady. After she’d talked to the man’s relatives, the landlady turned to me because she had heard that I have a keen interest in every kind of psychology, whether criminal or not. As I read the manuscript, I became gripped by various aspects, not least the question of how much the events described correspond to reality. As I continued, this question came into ever sharper focus, especially because in places I found remarks in the margins of the pages, added in pencil and badly erased, such as ”a lie”, “not right”, “fantasy”, “exaggeration”, “quite the opposite” and so on. Likewise the margins of the manuscript were abundantly decorated with question and exclamation marks. Discussing it with the landlady who brought it, I found out that most of the markings were hers, but some were by her assistant. The two of them had read the manuscript several times, both alone and together, and tried to correct it where there was an outright mistake or a misunderstanding. Generally, though, she said, the story corresponded to the truth, and in that sense the present book has a striking authenticity: it could almost be life itself; in other words, it was born to be a story.
As time allowed, I tried for my part to help adjust the manuscript in accordance with the guidance from the landlady and her assistant so that no one should have anything to say against its authenticity. Adjusting it turned out to be very easy, for mostly there was so much contradiction between the landlady’s and her servant’s opinions that finding a golden mean was a mere trifle. If, for example, I asked the landlady, “Was there anything special about Miss Erika the young man seemed to see in her?”, she would reply, “That’s made up! Erika was a perfectly ordinary German girl, a bit naive, a bit wooden and stiff, but of course she wasn’t without a certain attraction as young girls generally have.” The servant answered the same question: “The young miss was much, much nicer than she’s portrayed in this book; the writer couldn’t have had any gift for poetry. I came to love her, and I cried my eyes out when I read here that she had died.” I went on to ask, “Does the letter at the end of the book appear to be genuine?” and the landlady gave this reply: “The letter must be a forgery from beginning to end, or altered in translation, apart from the handbag, because she really did have that with her once” – whereas the servant replied, “The young lady might actually have written a letter like that, only I don’t know anything about the bag and the things that must have been in it.” Finally I was interested to know what they thought of his coloured student’s cap and some other aspects of his life, and I got this answer from the landlady: “I don’t have any opinion on that, because those are mostly my and my husband’s opinions, which the man vanished wrote down.” The servant said, “Well, no, what is there to think! When it came to the colours of his cap – well, he was in a better class and position, wasn’t he? Like some Russian or even a German.” Nearly every question produced the same result. But as to the young lady having pimples on her face and her blonde hair really being a little curly, both were of the same opinion.