Germanicisms and "Books For Snobs"
I don't recall how Alexander Wolff's Endpapers had made its way into my Reading List. But there it was, and since I needed to start a new book I thought it might as well be this one. The book's premise sounded very good: here was an author writing about his grandfather and father, both of whom had led interesting lives.
Kurt Wolff, the grandfather, had founded two very influential publishing houses, one in Germany (which he lost to the Weimar crisis and the Nazis) and one in the US (which he basically also lost, albeit "only" to his supposed business partners). He escapes the Nazis early, lived in France and then found his way to the US before moving back to Europe two decades later.
Niko Wolff, the father, had fought World War 2 on the German side and had ended up in the US only after the war. There are a lot of details how the tale unfolded this way; but you can imagine that this very fact made for an interesting family dynamic.
The background of it all is, you guessed it, money, namely the enormous privilege of being a part of the Merck family (you can either read the book or look this up). It was that privilege that saved Kurt's life when he tried to escape France (without connections he would have never managed to get the critical visa to enter the US), and it was that privilege that at more or less any point of the way helped the family lead a life that an ordinary family simply might not have had. The privilege is acknowledged, yet the acknowledgment feels perfunctory throughout the book.
I suppose this is not only because privilege is difficult to truly face. It's also because there are so many other interest aspects of that particular family: there were Jewish members, there were people who joined the SS, there were children born out Kurt being a relentless womanizer, etc.
As a family history, it's a gripping tale, even though I didn't read it for that. I read it to see the author trying to come to terms with the German side of his family, and it underdelivered on that part. Even though the author managed to spend a year in Berlin, he never managed to pierce beneath the surface or, crucially, come to a deeper understanding of Germany's attempts to deal with its past.
I've noticed this before when, for example, Americans who try to argue their way around the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers in the American South take Germany as an example of how to do these things properly. Even as there are many laudable things going on in Germany, the situation actually is a lot more complex and certainly a lot less ideal that those people can see with their rose-tinted glasses.
The Germany that emerges from such narratives is one of an enlightened country that has done wonders to atone for its past. The idea that that atonement might in fact contain larger elements of being performative completely escapes most Americans.
This is not to say that the Germans of today are like the Germans of the 1940's (when most of them were Nazis) or 1950's (when they all pretended nothing had ever happened) or 1960's (when their children started demanding answers) or 1970's (when the Holocaust finally made its way into the German consciousness). But comparisons with other countries are mostly useless when they're based on naive idealizations, because they don't allow you to go deeper. You end up staying at the surface level that Alexander Wolff stays at where you either visit the site of some atrocity, or you meet up with your idealistic friends who harbour three refugees from the Middle East. That the bulk of contemporary Germany exists in between these poles completely escapes him.
Even if you don't enjoy listening to heavy metal, you're probably aware of its visuals. The above is an example from my Bandcamp library (if you're curious, here's the direct link -- it's a Polish band). Heavy-metal visuals typically include some very exaggerated (and frankly mostly cartoonish) pictures plus a strange name. More often than not, the strange name will include characters that do not exist in your standard English-language alphabet.
The most commonly used characters are umlauts. This is probably what you had in mind as well.
Brief interlude: Mgła isn't an artificial word. It's just Polish. Apparently, you can form words by using consonants next to each other without throwing in a vowel. And the "ł" is a Polish character, which is not to be confused with "l" -- even as, of course, lazy English speakers usually just write "l".
Anyway, many heavy-metal bands use umlauts, whether they're real or not. Keith Kahn-Harris just wrote a whole article about just that: Taking The Heavy Metal Umlaut Seriously (Or, Why Motörhead Are Azerbaijani). It's a hugely enjoyable and interesting read that includes observations such as the following:
The aesthetic delights of reading a language you do not understand have always been underestimated.
I don't know if you see it that way. For sure I know it's true for me. Languages that I cannot read and that use a different script always look very intriguing to me. As Kahn-Harris argues, it's exactly this idea that has heavy-metal bands add umlauts (I'm obviously simplifying the longer argument here), leading to such beautiful outcomes as this one:
"The name of the Finnish children’s metal band Moottörin Jyrinä is Finnish, but the umlaut on the first word (which means ‘engine’) is not required in the language whereas the one in the second word is."
How about that?! (or in heavy-metal-eese: Höw aboüt that?)
Kahn-Harris is very realistic about his endeavour:
"While it would be unreasonable to expect metal bands to have detailed knowledge of multilingual diacritics, the heavy metal umlaut is inevitably Anglocentric; encoding an English-speaker’s set of associations. However much metal today is heavily globalised, with thriving scenes not just outside the English-speaking world, but outside the ‘west’ as well, the heavy metal umlaut remains as foundational as its English-speaking acts do."
There's a lot of content in that one paragraph.
Obviously, I can't look at umlauts like the rest of us, given I'm not objective. My first name features an umlaut, which has been a huge source of frustration for me ever since I moved to the US (ironically, in Germany, people would constantly misspell my last name): most English speakers assume that you can just write "Jorg" instead of "Jörg". There's np difference anyway, right? Well, there actually is! It's not a heavy-metal umlaut! It's a different sound, a different character.
It hurts me a little every time someone sends me an email and omits it -- and mostly, it's people from the English speaking world. OK, I get it, you don't have umlauts. But how or why you wouldn't make more of an effort to spell someone's name right escapes me (even if you just copy and paste it from an earlier email someone sent you).
I finally started reading Matthew Witkovsky's Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945. On page 15, I found these words that stopped me in my track. In May 1928, a German museum curator would describe the world of the photobook that we have arrived at: "books for snobs". Photobooks are mostly sold to collectors and photographers, and they can only be found in a few specialty shops all over the world and at photobook fairs (that often are part of art fairs).
I just spoke with the founders of 10x10, and this topic came up. I'm still working on the transcript; I expect the interview to be published on my site in three or four weeks. This is a discussion that we need to get into: how can we expand the audience for our books?
With that question I'm going to conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg