The Critical Reception of Hemingway’s Works in Germany Since 1920

In my previous post, I examined the French reactions to Hemingway’s works between the two World Wars. This was easy—Hemingway spent many years living in France, writing great novels, and finding the joie de vivre within both the French and American Literary communities in Paris.

What did the Germans think of Hemingway’s literature? Were they open to literature from other countries? Especially Americans?

The second essay in Hemingway in Europe examines “The Critical Reception of Hemingway’s Works in Germany since 1920” through the lens of Helmut Papajewski.

After the military collapse of Germany in 1918, the country’s literary output was divided into two movements. The first was the conservative, nationalistic movement which believed that Germany’s failure in the First World War was in part due to a lack of emphasis on national themes in literature. The writers of this period endeavored to strengthen the sense of historical, popular, and racial tradition.

The opposite movement thought that the German tragedy was the result of a lack of understanding of other peoples and tried to broaden the reading public’s knowledge of foreign literature. “They saw literature as the expression of the social development of other countries” (Papajewski, 73). Enter the Western nations who had an indirect contact with their political ways of life, namely the United States.

When modern American literature became known in Germany in the middle twenties (this essay was written in 1965, twenty years after the end of World War II), their hopes were pinned on the new writing which introduced Ernest Hemingway in literary periodicals such as Der Querschnitt. Many of Hemingway’s short poems which had not yet appeared in America could be found in Germany. The Sun Also Rises was published in 1928 by Rowohlt in Berlin.

Of course, the reception to his works was mixed. Those critics who were very conservative in their attitude, together with strictly Catholic values, rejected Hemingway in no uncertain fashion. His characters in The Sun Also Rises lived amoral, useless lives according to these critics.

Most of the larger public, however, readily accepted his works, especially A Farewell to Arms after the First World War. The Gral, a publication of strict denominational principles, made a distinction between the artistic and the ethical elements of Hemingway’s writing. In large part, this distinction recognized Hemingway’s remarkable narrative technique.

The “Lost Generation”, but not the first “Lost Generation”!

I find it fascinating that this generation, between 1920 and 1930, was interested in the affinity between Hemingway’s characters and their own generation. Imagine being able to relate to American and German generations through literature, knowing what we know now about what lay ahead in the horrors of World War II.

This generation was particularly interested in the concept of a “lost generation”, a notion introduced by the American critic Clifton Fadiman in the Nation (3). Fadiman emphasized that the problem of the “lost generation” was not new in literary history; these same frustrations can be found in Goethe’s  Werther, Turgeniev’s Fathers and Sons, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. What a great reminder! I would love to explore this more in Fadiman’s article, but, sadly, it is no longer available. I will have to examine these themes in revisiting Werther and Dorian Gray! Good project. Papajewski reminds his readers that the validity of the strange parallels between the characters of the “lost generation” of Goethe, Turgeniev, and Wilde verses Hemingway’s characters were abandoned with the events of 1933 and the abrupt change in the literary scene.

When Hemingway came on the scene, the German intellectuals had a disregard for personal values. Looking at Russia, individual values seemed threatened because of her authoritarian regime. Likewise, in America, individual values were threatened through “publicity”. Hemingway was not regarded so much as an American as he was an “artist”. His critics heralded him as “the champion of the protesting individual”. His realism and contempt for the bombastic pointed to a new, humanistically oriented literature (76).

After 1933, however, two events made Hemingway’s work impossible to exert an international influence.

The first was the beginning of the Second World War. English and American authors were not altogether forbidden in Germany but moder authors, in general, were regarded as suspect: “The Nazis favoured all those authors who were critical towards their own countries or towards the countries of the Allies”(76). For example, Eric Linklater’s book, Juan in America, achieved literary renown in Germany.

The second event was the closing of Rowohlt publishing house which had hitherto published Hemingway’s works. Unfortunately for Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls was in the process of being published in Germany in 1940. At this time the United States had not yet declared war on Germany. Hemingway’s own participation in the Spanish War and the treatment of it caused the publishing of his work to be halted. Hemingway would have to use the Fischer Verlag publishing house to release the first German edition of For Whom. This publication catapulted Hemingway’s literary fame among young people in Germany. Up until 1949, only a limited number of texts could be acquired, making it even more sought after!

Post World War II Hemingway in Germany

After 1949, when the general stabilization of Germany industry had put the printing industry back on its feet, practically all of Hemingway’s works were made available to the reading public in Germany. The introduction of pocket books brought his works within the reach of ever-widening circles of readers, specifically the religious and the literary-scholar.

Papajewski poses the question of why Hemingway found great success with such violent novels in a country that had just suffered from much violence during the previous twelve years of its history. In trying to solve this enigma, Papejewski refers to the German writer Friedrich Sieburg for answers. Sieburg states that “The impact of the defeat of Germany in the First World War had resulted in a ‘glorification of violence to an almost mythological significance’”(78). After the Second World War, when this type of violence had been discredited, it was replaced with a literary treatment of violence in a form entirely different from that of crude nationalism.

From Papajewski’s viewpoint, Germans were drawn to the “great passivity of Hemingway’s characters”(79). This is evident in their way of speaking and being driven to impulses of action when there was not rational explanation; there was much boredom and banality. Hemingway’s conception of his protagonists or “heroes” in his novels and short-stories were considered as artificial heroes of Nazi times. “Wherever love manages to penetrate isolation as in Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls it is, after a period of beautiful fulfillment, doomed to destruction”(80). Thomas Mann, one of the great intellectual writers in Germany, commented very favorably to Hemingway’s works for this reason.

Hemingway’s Heroic Code

In his determination to survive morally, Hemingway’s “heroes” had to regulate their own behavior by a code: that life, basically disturbed as it is by many traumatic experiences, would be altogether impossible if it could not at least be made tolerable by a certain dignity which only a code of living could provide (81). In other words, life in a chaotic time can be tolerable when living within a circle of similarly minded fellow-beings. Hemingway illustrated this code in his bullfighter stories which were very successful in Germany. Bullfighting, according to Papajewski is “the extreme form of the heroic code”(81). This most dangerous form sport demands the strongest will to survival.

Another example of Hemingway using the survival code in his stories drew a large section of younger German readers. The catch-word of these readers was “the skeptical generation”—a term coined after 1945 referring to the skepticism of the war generation with regard to former cultural values. As Hemingway simplified his characters, he also gave them a new depth of survival through the repetition of traumatic experiences. We find in The Old Man and the Sea, the simplification of the main characters, Santiago and Manolin, who spend every day in a routine of preparing the fishing boat, eating, and talking about trivialities such as baseball and Joe DiMaggio. The Germans refer to this repetition of daily life as “Nullpunktexistenz”, or “life at zero”. This is typically a response to the impact of great catastrophes on the mind. “These ‘natural shocks’ diverted man’s consciousness from his own overcomplex and artificial world and led him to a true understanding of his own existence”(82). Psychologists today refer to this diversion as “Dissociation” or daydreaming, especially in cases of PTSD.

Posterity of Hemingway in Germany

Hemingway’s life and death were of great interest to readers in Germany. After his death, the Berlin paper, Der Morgan, says “We too mourn over the death of Ernest Hemingway. And that does not mean this paper only but the whole Eastern zone of Germany”(90). The Old Man and the Sea was considered and praised as the last important work of Hemingway and a great literary achievement—a work of “Greek simplicity and greatness”.

“In both parts of Germany, the interest in the life of Hemingway was thus revived by his death, which was felt to be quite in accordance with his life legend”(Papajewski, 91).

Work Cited

Roger Asselineau. The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe.  New York: University Press, 1965.