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Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder die Hälfte des Lebens

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German

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

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37 people want to read

About the author

Franz Fühmann

109 books8 followers
Franz Fühmann (15 January 1922 – 8 July 1984) was a German writer who lived and worked in East Germany. He wrote in a variety of formats, including short stories, essays, screenplays and children's books.
Notable awards
Heinrich Mann Prize 1956
National Prize of East Germany 1957 and 1974
Deutscher Kritikerpreis 1977
Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 1982

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Profile Image for Caroline.
906 reviews304 followers
December 17, 2024
1971 or 72. After a disppointing visit to a Budapest antiquarian bookstore by the author, a middle-aged man from East Germany, he passes a market:

Against mountains of grayish-yellow, bottle-shaped pears and oversize ruby-red apples, a basket of fresh figs: delicate pink, delicate gray, delicate brown, delicate purple; milky drops on the stalks (that is how, according to Ferenc's description, I imagine the poetry of Szabó Lõrinc)

One day my obituary will contain the words: He carted around a lot of books and fruit


Fühmann visits Budapest (a favorite city of his; he is translating Hungarian poets) and ponders conundrums and his life with the spare time he suddenly has. He has been invited to spend several days in Budapest, and merely to read from his work one evening without any other requirements. This journal records those days, his meetings and conversations with friends, his random observations of people and landscape, but mostly it is a meandering meditation on topics that bubble up from his translation work and his life. The aspect of his own life that generates the most reflection is his journey from Fascist youth and soldier in Hitler's Germany to socialist writer in East Germany.

Interwoven through the events of the day are sentences and paragraphs on a topic. Shame one day, One and the Other another. Nationality, identity, and language, Hungarian literature (e.g. Radnoti) and language in particular. Myth vs. fairytale. Taboos. 'What am I to do? What can I do?'

What is change? he asks. Who are we before, during and after we 'change.' And intermittent glimpses beneath the surface of the sentences is the topic that he is circling: Nazism and Auschwitz. Most of the topics don't mention his Fascist youth directly, the comments deal with abstractions. But they are flowing toward a examination of his soul.

But there is absolutely no sense in the very natural question: So why didn't you break with the Nazis, why didn't you defect? why didn't you resist, and so on? Yet this is the very question that is always being asked, especially by young people. They have the right to this question, of course, only that they demand from each single impact the immediate and direct effect of the sum of the impacts which finally brings about the break. To be sure, the last drop that finally causes the glass to overflow is also just a drop like the preceding ones, but it happens to be the last one, and many others had to precede it, and each one was necessary and often drops fell into the glass that were bigger than that last one, and when they fell their sole effect was one of preparation, of indispensible preparation for that one last drop....

Do what you like, you can't get away from Auschwitz.


Fühmann spent his years in uniform far from these atrocities; he never killed a man. But he is unflinching in exploring what he might have done if he had been assigned to staff Auschwitz, with his young attitudes and the war mentality of a Fascist soldier. He refuses to say "Not me--never me!" He is brutally honest about how one acts in an environment of unified inhumanity. These few pages make up a small part of the book, but are crucial to pulling together all of the meditations on the topics I've mentioned above.

I could add quotes from almost every page, but of course they rarely work extracted from a book in the same way they affect the reader in the flow of the page. Nevertheless, a couple taken from the reflections pages; there are many wonderful ones about about Budapest and his daily life as well:

We have brcome used to associating the idea of fatalism with that of pessimism, but in fact there is also a thoroughly optimistic form of fatalistic thinking. Brecht's words that Socialism is as good or as bad as we make it is a warning against precisely this fatal belief in automation....


It is very odd, but we have got into the habit of accepting a necessary atttribute of a given entity as reason to exclude it instead off learning to see its positive aspects. Thus we have sought, for instance, to reduce abstract art ad absurdum by--and this can be done--laboriously proving that it is not concrete, instead of exploring its possibilities as a transitional phase...


What was it that so fascinated me on first reading Lukács? ...least of all what was Lukács [as an individual author]...It was my first experience of the Other in intellectual terms, my first encounter with Marxism...That someone (or rather: that a method) should see relationships, lines, processes, inherent laws, where we were accustomed only to barren dates, dates in the framework of dates...all this was quite simply a revelation, and what took my breath away was the emergence of my own fate as I suddenly grasped from books: tua res agitur [per Google translate: your agitated soul]...In war literature, for example, the irresistible fascination of the crudest depictions of battles and atrocities that was my experience, how could it possibly turn up in literary history...

and this upheaval was suddenly invaded by the reports about Nuremberg and Auschwitz...

I knew nothing of Auschwitz, knew nothing about Auschwitz...


Far away on the horizon, beyond the river, where the river meets the sky, a paler wisp--what is it? Mist rising from the water; mist sinking from the sky? Danube and sky are a delicate gray-blue, they would be indistinguishable were they not separated by the minuteness of that whiter wisp. But what is that wisp? Is it a row of hills, a river bank, is it a wisp or is it transition itself, the physical manifestation of an idea?

This In-between between Danube and Sky is indescribable, like one of those translations into the void which Mallarmé tried to put into words...Could language express it, just this, this transition, but precisely it? Perhaps; a labor of days, and what would be gained? Much: an insight into what language can do.


I love books like this, collections of reflections and experiences and observations that provoke one's own reflections. If you have any to recommend, please add a comment!

Highly recommended. Out of print, but some available via used bookstoes online.

I discovered this via Stu Allen's blog Winstonsdad; he is the source of many books I would never have heard of but were very much worth reading. Thanks Stu!
Profile Image for Jill.
479 reviews253 followers
March 17, 2022
Partway through this travelogue of Budapest, our narrator (and I think this is non-fiction, so I'll also tentatively say "the author" proper) reflects on the nature of human change. Our narrator was a drafted Nazi who has since become an anti-fascist. What happened, right, is the question, and part of the reflection pushes up against it:
But there is absolutely no sense in the very natural question: So why didn't you break with the Nazis, why didn't you defect, why didn't you resist, and so on? Yet this is the very question that is always being asked, especially by young people. They have a right to this question, of course, only that they demand from each single impact the immediate and direct effect of the sum of impacts which finally brings about the break. To be sure, the last drop that causes the glass to overflow is also just a drop like the preceding ones, but it happens to be the last one, and many others had to precede it, and each one was necessary, and often drops fell into the glass that were bigger than that last one, and when they fell their sole effect was one of preparation, of indispensable preparation for that one last drop


And this was written in 1973.

--

Twenty-two Days is one of the most accurate depictions I've encountered of what an actual travel journal looks like. It starts out with descriptions of people and events and landmarks; meditations on a new city and culture. Particular enchantments and surprises. Anecdotes. And by the end of the trip, your brain has been swirled into such a complex new stew that you could be writing this anywhere, Budapest is the entire point but is also entirely incidental, the world is in the confines of your heart and mind. And so you write about the topics that bubble up, that perhaps you wanted to ignore or didn't have the space to consider properly, and your thoughts on those topics take up pages, scrawled over hours in a cafe, and you could be anywhere. That's traveling, man (or at least I guess that's how I travel). I've never read something that hits it better.

The magic of this book, though, is that it captures the beginning of the trip and the end with equal beauty, intensity, and depth -- from the heart-pulled first encounters with the street outside your hotel to your heart pulling out of its socket with your trying to understand it. Budapest is captured and honoured and catalytic; a character in its own right but also a backdrop for a twisted and important soliloquy on what it is to progress, change, be human, believe in what is right, and understand wholeness.

I highlight that it was written in the 70s because it comes off so modern, in many ways -- the conversation around moral conviction/purity is a deeply contemporary one. I was startled to see the passage I quoted above because come on -- it reads like it's commenting directly on how a lot of far-leftist rhetoric is playing out these days, particularly on forums like TikTok and Twitter. That is, it isn't to say a comment is irrelevant, but that your particular comment to someone is not (necessarily -- unless it's that last drop) going to change the world or even that person: it doesn't happen that way. Humans don't work that way. We are each a collection of more than what an external narrative would want us to be. The divides we're seeing, politically and in deeper ways than that, are in many ways a response to just this way of trying to get a point across (and to our deeply FUCKED algorithms, and to propaganda, and and and, but y'know. still.).

Anyway. This was quite beautiful, very skillful, and I think both timely and important. Worth trying to get your hands on -- just don't go in wanting to rip everything apart. Though I think that's probably good advice, period.
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