Now it surely looks as if my book will get started together with him [Diederichs]. At least my original publisher van Oorschot wants to see it in German bookstores by November 1st… I’m going to cut a few hundred pages, paste over a few flecks of midnight oil, and slip in a few sheets of blotting paper. Geert v. O. and I had much fun discussing all this.
When Diederichs finishes reading the manuscript at the end of June, 1953, in his own interest he urges the timely setting-up of a licensing contract. Thelen is of the opinion that in the meantime Diederichs has come to regard the book as economically successful. On August 8, 1953, Thelen reports to his friend and literary colleague Kurt Lehmann:
Diederichs is on board. We drank a toast to our adventure at the Black Hog Inn in Düsseldorf.
With this gesture, the cooperation of the Dutch and German publishers was a fait accompli. The contract itself was very likely unprecedented, since van Oorschot would be producing in his own country a work in a foreign language. The Island of Second Sight appeared in November, 1953 in an original German-language edition in Amsterdam’s van Oorschot Publishers, and simultaneously as a licensed edition in Düsseldorf/Cologne with Diederichs as the publisher. The scene had been set for a successful marketing campaign. Van Oorschot would distribute the thousand-page book in the Netherlands, and Diederichs in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
The literary climate in Germany during the first half of the 1950s was determined largely by a literary association called Group 47. Beginning in 1947, the group, which was led by Hans Werner Richter, had convened once or twice a year at various locations to debate literature. At these sessions, young writers read aloud from their works in progress, and following the readings, the attending writers and critics would begin debating the quality of the texts they had heard. The writers who passed muster would enjoy considerable career privileges on the German literary scene, especially among publishers and the media. If today we look at the list of writers who read at Group 47 sessions, we find the names of the most significant post-war German authors, including Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gabriele Wohmann, Peter Härtling, Peter Handke, and Martin Walser, to name just a few.
Thelen, too, gave a reading in front of Group 47, at their meeting in the Bebenhausen Abbey in Swabia in the fall of 1953. The invitation was arranged by the Dutch writer Adriaan Morriën, who, along with van Oorschot, accompanied Thelen. His performance was a remarkable failure. A few colleagues applauded his reading, but Richter, the Group’s chief spokesman in all likelihood tore Thelen’s text apart. What they had heard, Richter apparently said, would have to be radically revised, since in its present form it could not be published. Thelen later recalled that Richter’s critique culminated in the use of the term Emigrantendeutsch (“an emigrant’s German”). Thelen felt insulted, and in the coming years, he forfeited the support of this influential group, which meant that he would lack the backing that would help him succeed in Germany’s literary world.
Hans Werner Richter’s reaction to Thelen’s Island manuscript reading was, from his own point of view, understandable. Following the war, the young German generation of writers wished to separate itself from the “blood-and-soil” Nazi literary scene as well as from the narrative experiments of the pre-war writers. Their desire was, in theory, to make a wholly new start, “lean and simple, eschewing all tradition, out of fear of yesterday’s soulless language.” Their intention was, in Richter’s words, to carve “a clear-cut through the thicket of our language.” The ambition of Group 47 was to manage as closely as possible this self-imposed set of rules, so anyone who wrote like Thelen could expect to be branded as “behind the times.” Thelen’s baroque style, his enormous vocabulary, and his linguistic virtuosity must have struck these post-war “clear-cut” writers as a relic of times long past. They might have accepted raindrops, but there came a downpour.
Thus Thelen found himself mildly repulsed by what was known as the business of literature. He continued living in foreign lands, published his writings only sporadically, and refrained from making public statements about social or political topics. Meanwhile, a writer named Günter Grass — twenty-four years Thelen’s junior — had much better luck with a novel that was also baroque in style and similarly virtuosic. In 1958, he was awarded Group 47 main award for a chapter from his Tin Drum, which launched him to a remarkably successful career that culminated in 1999 with the Nobel Prize. We can thus suppose that Thelen’s Island was simply published five years too early. Perhaps Thelen wrote just the right book, but at the wrong time. Considered in retrospect, it is nonetheless regrettable that Hans Werner Richter and his Group 47 retreated all too hurriedly, instead of letting Thelen’s downpour refresh them as thoroughly as it should have.
But more broadly, the intellectual climate of the era was also hardly propitious for Thelen’s book. His resolutely anti-clerical attitude and his extremely sharp, aggressive attacks against Nazi foes, while tolerated, were not exactly welcome among average citizens and social circles in the Federal Republic. Still, the legal steps against the book were taken on other grounds.
On April 14, 1954, the publisher Peter Diederichs submitted a multi-page statement to the Düsseldorf Police Department explaining why Thelen’s book had appeared in his publishing company. What brought about this police action was an accusation against Thelen’s work by a man from Hinterzarten in the Black Forest who called the Island “pure pornography” and labeled its author a “high-society Bolshevist.” The police department eventually dropped the case, but not before it had caused Thelen and his German publisher a great deal of anxiety.
The prudish gentleman from South Germany was not alone in his opinions. While the great majority of reviewers were unfazed by the book’s erotic passages — which Thelen himself referred to as his “whore stories”—still, now and again, readers reacted with moral indignation. For example, a review of the Island in the April 23, 1954 Weltwoche carried the title “A Book for Frivolous Minds.” The author offered this explanation: “The book very often reminded me of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” tryptich by Hieronymus Bosch — not the side panels of that painting, but the central scene showing vaguely perverse activities, created by a patently infantile imagination and clearly absurd.”
The guardians of literature, with Hans Werner Richter in the forefront, had thus stated their case, and the guardians of morality had come forth with their objections. Still, none of this could prevent Thelen’s book from a broadly positive reception and sales figures that satisfied the publishers. In the Netherlands, Van Oorschot even had to bring out a reprint, and by 1967, Diederichs had published eight editions totaling 47,000 copies. This kind of success, at least, was something the Group 47 was unable to prevent.