A major writer and polemicist in the revival of post-war German literature, the novelist and playwright Martin Walser died on July 28, in Überlingen, near Lake Constance; he was 96 years old.
Alongside Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, both Nobel laureates, he has made the history of Germany and the aftermath of Nazism the center of a particularly rich body of work. We owe him some 25 novels, collections of short stories (including Histoires pour mentir), essays, and around fifteen plays.
Son of an innkeeper, born in 1927 in Wasserburg, on Lake Constance, Walser was enlisted in the Wehrmacht in 1944. On his return, he studied Literature and then became a radio man, during which time he joined the avant-garde of Groupe 47. He then began writing a Diary, Living and Writing, the first volume of which was published in 2007. .
His first novel, Quadrille à Philippsbourg, published in 1957, was a great success, crowned by the Hermann-Hesse prize. Five years later, he caused a stir with his play Chêne et Angora Rabbits, a semi-tragic, semi-grotesque chronicle of a political deportee who became a mystical madman in 1945, delirious with his Nazi imprecations. The work will be represented in 1968 at the TNP de Chaillot with Jacques Dufilho. Three years earlier, The Drum by Günter Grass had already awakened the buried demons of Third Reich Germany.
Then comes his trilogy, around the character of Anselm Kristlein, composed by Half-time, The Unicorn, and The Fall (1973), where he takes a sarcastic look at society, while criticizing “the arbitrariness of conformity”. , through insignificant or indefinable protagonists. In Austria, Thomas Bernhard will do the same, with more humor.
Meanwhile, Walser publishes the autobiographical I don’t smell good, the story of a writer in his forties, out of inspiration, who finds salvation in political commitment to the left.
Tirelessly, this troublemaker, winner of the prestigious Büchner Prize in 1981, will resume his favorite themes: betrayal, guilt, lies. We find them in La Maison des cygnes (1980), the story of a broker struggling to emerge from adolescence, and later in Dorn or the Museum of Childhood, a dark epic in the history of Germany, through the character of a lawyer. A novel that opens with the destruction of Dresden by Allied aircraft and ends on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 2007, he declared to the Revue des Deux Mondes: “My novels are responses to the world, that is to say, to my experience of it (…) For me, writing means saying something about a way more beautiful than it actually is. The starting point is almost always a painful experience, so that one makes the world bearable only through writing. Already, he was described as a “ferocious magician” and “apocalyptic judge of a bourgeois society sated to the point of disgust.”
A violent controversy had agitated Germany in 1998, following his speech receiving the Peace Prize from booksellers, in Frankfurt, for Une source vive, where he looks back on his childhood. Walser claimed there the right for Germany to assume itself as an “adult and uninhibited nation”, believing that the trauma of Auschwitz had been exploited. He spoke out against the “constant reminder of fault”, seen as a “moral club”, claiming to want to “look away from the recurring representation of our shame. He had received the support of Günter Grass.
Four years later, in Death of a Critic, he violently attacked Germany’s most famous literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Jewish survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, which sparked a new scandal and had earned him the charge of anti-Semitism. These critics accused him of having become a nationalist conservative.
Until the end, Martin Walser did not stop taking a public position, attracting new enmities. In April 2022, he co-signed an open letter addressed to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in which he opposed the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine. It was a few days after the massacres of civilians in Boutcha. His work has been translated into French by Gallimard and Robert Laffont editions.
