The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg

by Paul West

The man who tried and failed to assassinate Adolph Hitler is reborn from historical obscurity into a novel that details his brazen but ill-fated attempt to kill the Fuhrer with a bomb that he delivered personally

Genres: Historical Fiction, Novels, Fiction, Germany, War

366 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Among the very few “good Nazis” recorded in history, alongside Oskar Schindler and . . . Oskar Schindler, Count Von Stauffenberg (whose bomb plot almost killed Hitler in 1944) is often overlooked despite the internal conflict his failed scheme created among the high-ranking maniacs, whose Führer fanaticism had by this point become so ingrained that had the Nazis prevailed, Hitler’s systematic erasure of all human feeling in favour of psychopathic butchery would now be the norm for every babe born in the land, IST ZAT CLEAR??? Despite Stauffenberg’s motives for the bomb plot—whether from Christian compassion or differing ideologies—any attempt to whack The Devil Himself should earn him a permanent slot in our memories. Paul West’s novel is a first-person beyond-the-grave retelling of the Count’s story, rendered in lilting and poetic prose, not always nuanced to the 1940s German ear, but an elegant enough approximation. Not quite as evocative of evil as a doorstop like The Kindly Ones, West’s book shrouds its inevitable horrors in detached and ice-cool descriptions, no less effective for their matter-of-factness. Slow pacing in the first half is remedied when the bomb erupts and Hitler, for want of a better phrase, “does a mental.” Top-rank historical writing from this prodigious talent.

[Liam Ostermann]

I didn't finish this novel though not because it is badly written, Paul West could write but I am not convinced he is actually a good writer. He attracted enormous praise in his lifetime (1930-2015) but he seems to have vanished rapidly into that black hole of forgotten authors that consumes even the most dazzling talents. Looking over his novels in the first quarter of the 21st century there is something terribly dated about so many of them. The Women of Whitechapel with its 'conspiracy' theory and royal cover up just seems old hat while 'Place in Flowers' simply embarrasses with its attempt to speak for the Hopi indians of the south west USA via a new creation myth.

But I didn't abandon this novel because of Mr. West's prose but because of its subject, Claus von Stauffenberg. West does not adopt a hagiographic approach but Stauffenberg's very real feet of clay are elided when they are not avoided. The only person who came close to assassinating Hitler when it mattered was Johann Georg Eisner and he would never have been welcomed in Stauffenberg's circles because:

1. his was an ordinary working man
2. he attempted to assassinate Hitler and other high ranking Nazis in November 1939 when Staffenberg his pals were still enthusiastically riding Hitler's coattails

the 'sacred Germany' that Stauffenberg and other dreamed of had no room for the Georg Eisner's of this world - well except as workers who made sure that men Stauffenberg could continue living in their castles and running things. Stauffenberg was a grotesque elitist who, thanks to his good looks, was a favorite of that very bogus blow hard Stefan George and thus, despite his negligible intellectual accomplishments and abilities, believed he was part of an aristocratic elite that should rule Germany. Perhaps the same elite that handed Germany over to Hitler in the first place.

Stauffenberg was an elitist who if he despised Hitler for as long as this novel suggests was because he was as socially unacceptable as men like Eisner and he didn't have any real problem with following and working within the Nazi as long as the war was going well. It was surety of defeat that drove men like Stauffenberg to contemplate assassination - but boy did they spend a lot of time contemplating as well as trying to involve the allies in their plots. Having abdicated their will to Hitler and found they had made a pact with the devil they kept trying to foist their free will onto the allies. But it wasn't the allies responsibility to provide encouragement or confer blessings on the German conspirators and the allies had very good reasons to 'be wary of Greeks bearing gifts' (see the 1939 Velno incident for context).

At the heart of West's portrait of Stauffenberg is the now completely discredited notion that atrocities were committed by Himmler's SS and that the army had nothing to do with them, the 'Mythos der sauberen Wehrmacht' (the myth of the clean Wehrmacht) This threadbare fiction had a remarkably resilient life throughout the post war years but was finally demolished in popular culture in 1995 the touring Wehrmacht Exhibition designed Haanes Heer and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. But it was always more of a political fig leaf than a view supported by evidence. Stauffenberg, like all German officers knew what German victory cost the people of Poland and elsewhere. It was only once Germany was no longer winning that his moral qualms emerged.

I couldn't continue reading a novel with Stauffenberg as a hero. The novel's linguistic brio does not make up for a dated premise. I believe Paul West's obscurity will be permanent.

I have given it one star just to remind that I have reviewed this novel but I can't really rate this book because I can't recommend it.

[Heronimo Gieronymus]

On the 20th of July, 1944, a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, planned and carried out for the most part by Nazi officers, came very close to achieving its first and primary aim. It was not the first attempt. Some of the plotters had been in on previous efforts, or the stirrings of them. The man who actually deposited the bomb intended to remove Hitler from power and from among the living—in addition to killing all others present at a meeting at Rastenburg, location of the “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s East Prussian HQ—was the subsequently-venerated career soldier and cosmopolitan aristocrat Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a man known additionally as something of a dashing character, even if he had lost an eye, one hand entirely, and two fingers from the opposite one whilst serving with the Afrika Korps in Tunisia. Late in his extraordinary 1980 historical novel THE VERY RICH HOURS OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG, the great Paul West presents to us the deceased count musing from the beyond, considering bored or preoccupied students of history (witting or unwitting), who return to the sites of previous infamies with at best an only very cursory grasps of events heinous or inspiring that transpired (or may have transpired) there. We are in the old Bendlerstrasse courtyard, location of Stauffenberg’s ignominious, expedient execution, not twelve hours after his bomb had underperformed. “The zero hour was blurred, and all we had were names.” A good many students of history not worthy of any special distinction will at least know of the existence of Claus von Stauffenberg. After all, there is the small matter of Tom Cruise having played him in a movie. That movie, should you have forgotten, was 2008’s VALKYRIE. I have not forgotten it, although it were in a sense as though I had might as well have done. I saw the film with a friend, he a visiting English professor from Ottawa I had not seen in some considerable time. I remember the whole experience being intense and powerful, retaining yet a strong sense of my having been impressed by Christopher McQuarrie’s extremely sophisticated screenplay etc. The issue here is that I was at the time both manic and deep into alcoholic delirium, right on the brink of total psychic collapse. If I still believe the film to have gotten deep into my bones, I cannot meaningfully address any of its particulars in their material miscellany. (The title of the film, one ought to note, is taken from the secret operation that was not merely a plan to assassinate Hitler but in fact a comprehensive one for coup d’état and usurpation of power.) You may or may not have any familiarity with the writer Paul West, who has over the course of the past seven months plus become one of my favourite novelists of all time, this the seventh of his novels I've read over that relatively short stretch. If you do know of Paul West, you will most likely not be surprised that his von Stauffenberg novel is anything but dry historiography or glorified bookkeeping. This is, after all, a man who once wrote an essay entitled “In Defence of Purple Prose,” a literary polemic of sorts arguing for a maximally expressive approach to craft such that the reader may “be awakened by something intolerably vivid.” Of the seven West novels I have consumed (in the utmost state of excitation!) thus far, THE INCREDIBLY RICH HOURS OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG is the third of what we would not be able to help but call the historical novels. These novels have a number of characteristics in common, and it seems sound to touch on some of the key points of overlap. In his “Preliminary” for the novel currently under consideration, West makes some pointed statements about intention, methodology, and byproducts thereof. Naturally, the novel began with copious research, the man himself driven by his métier in a state of high excitement. “Soon I was devouring books about the bomb plot against Hitler, some grand, some shoddy, many of them giving details the others omitted, and almost all of them contradicting one another until I felt that some of what I was reading was fiction already and that a fictional attempt of my own—say an historical impersonation—might go.” A similar consideration of the flexibility both of history itself and the historical record can be found in the preamble to West’s later novel THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER, in which the author will again argue that it is his privilege to allow his imagination some leeway insofar as there is already a great deal of evidence of that sort of thing going on in the various contradictory texts, whether direct reportage or works of historical exegesis, such that the bad faith would ultimately have to belong to those writers who would seek to sublimate the imagination’s impostures. In the preamble to WHITECHAPEL, West also affirms that the research lead to intense stimulation and growing obsession, such that the passion driving the enterprise must find expression in the realization of the literary project (purple prose et al.), just as here, in the STAUFFENBERG “Preliminary,” he reports having arrived at the discovery that “the historical novel—no matter how ventriloquially transfigured—is a taxing, intoxicating obligation.” That West writes from a place of “intoxication” is testified to by a literary performance insistent on pulling out all the stops, giving everything to the language and the transfiguring vision. It is powerful stuff, positively symphonic. The entire novel is narrated by Stauffenberg from the beyond the grave, the voice both effectively ventriloquized and bequeathed the expansive perspective of the abstracted postmortem, a conceit perhaps somewhat evocative of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD. In laying the ground for THE WOMEN OF WHTECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER, West tells us that within the novel “British speakers and musers get British spelling, but the American narrator otherwise writes in American English, except for certain moments of intense locutional empathy.” In THE VERY RICH HOURS OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG, the primarily German cast of characters tend toward the utilization of British word-choice and locutional mode, though again, West being a writer born in England who subsequently wrote and taught in North America, the spelling and grammar default to the American rules and regulations concerning lexicography. Having survived his execution, Hitler will claim he knew immediately the bomb that exploded in his vicinity had to have been British in origin because of the kind of light it gave off, our ventriloquized Stauffenberg agreeing that Hitler was more or less correct, this minor bit of business signifying curiously within the context of this particular novel with its particular brand of stylized prosody. The narrative begins in Tunisia, Stauffenberg ruminating on the folly of Hitler’s war-of-many-front, this one all but a foregone conclusion. He writes to his “sage, attuned, and wistful” wife Nina, for whom he pines. He tends toward effortless loquacity, casual profundity, and the philosophical outlook generally. “Yet, I thought, with all this to see, with an incessant oasis for either eye, I am brutally lonely; I did not know that life is mainly empty spaces, or that our lives in that respect are like the universe itself.” Comparing the desert to snowy Russia: “the sound seemed unable to lose itself and hugged you as you moved about.” Additionally: “I was glad to be in a place where the sun had not vanished into some abyss above you, but plastered you non-stop, made metal impossible to touch, perspiration blind you by day, and sudden chills wake you at night.” Certain landscapes produce distinct mental atmospherics just as the logic of combat becomes contingent upon them. “Desert warfare you can learn about, especially on the spot; but something subtractive in the atmosphere denudes you daily of what you think you have acquired. No doubt the famous Colonel Lawrence had written about this, in a book I never read. I knew only that in the desert you were always present at the hypothesis of your own absence, and your actually being there made hardly the slightest difference.” Stauffenberg may have brought along Leibniz to read in his longueurs, and he may be a man of culture and education, but we quickly come to understand him as a stranger in a strange land, though we also quickly come to understand that in a world on fire all the lands have become variously strange, our officer-aristocrat equally out of place in all of them, not perhaps fully in living possession of the sober oversight he will gain only in death. What he does know are moments, and that you must “savor them, drain them, cram them—for all you are worth.” It is this in a core sense that separates him from jackals, the gangsters, and the National Socialist cultists. It is also the precept that provides the novel its name (in addition to the influence of another “book of hours,” THE VERY RICH HOURS OF THE DUC DU BERRY). Stauffenberg will suffer his war injuries, his vehicle strafed by aerial barrage, and end up in Carthage, hospitalized, nearly dead and almost certain to be "totally blind even if I survived.” He meditates on his idyllic upbringing, a mother who loved Goethe and Shakespeare, “quite often answering someone’s questions as if she were speaking from within a play or a poem, and making an illustrious line (or even a speech) do duty for her in the world of everyday.” There are his high-achieving noble-of-spirit older brothers Berthold and Alexander, twins. “My adolescence, all classics and poetry, had been safe from the midnight knock and a visit from two robots in outdated raingear.” This is clearly nobility as something far removed from mere considerations of class, and it is married to a more-than-a-little-Christian mindfulness of a lost condition of blessedness. Following the hospitalization and recovery, Stauffenberg’s narrative doubles back to before Africa and to the dawning of an increasingly intense process of demystification. The count has grown up with romantic notions of military valour, and had even felt a certain esteem for Hitler once upon a time. Disaffection becomes impossible to deflect, as evidence of intensifying savagery cannot be ignored, a crucial occurrence involving the Polish campaign and two innocent women executed in cold blood at Wielun, southwest of Lodz. Stauffenberg begins to refer to Hitler as S’gruber—a diminution of Schicklgruber, real surname of the failed Austrian painter and “wallpaper hanger” leading Germany and Europe into the depths of irredeemable indignity—and to hate him with all of his being. “I knew something was racing through Europe like a virus, and every ten minutes I caught sight of it in the corner of my mind’s eye, pulsing and swelling, venting slime and splitting down the middle.” There are, increasingly, fellow travellers, all of them ultimately conspirators and answerable as such, not the least of whom are brother Berthold and maternal uncle Nux. The conspirators rally around the legacy of poet Stefan George, whom Claus had visited when the man lay on his deathbed and whom the Nazis had been unable to satisfactorily co-opt. A collection of verse in the possession of each will become the de facto secret handshake of these insurrectionists, members of the “old team” with a “a deed of blood” their shared destiny. Stauffenberg will face his destiny, the bomb will go off in the Wolf’s Lair all-too ineffectively, the coup will fail, and Hitler will for a time live. Though the erstwhile count's final hours will be rich indeed they will be horribly tough on the nerves, and tough shot in that courtyard he will still have over 120 pages left to narrate, the events those that directly follow his demise. Here matters grow more horrific, more intense. The vileness and calumny are not things at which we would likely desire to look, even were we safely dead, yet we understand that look we must. Family members are rounded up, fatuous show trials are put on, men and women are executed by monsters who relish in making a puerile joke of their malefic predations. We witness a curious array of doubles, much of this business a hybrid affair evoking both the comedies of Shakespeare and those two Italian poets in hell. Beck, would-be head of the the seized state, is counterpointed with Fromm, responsible for the spate of executions on the night of the 20th, these occurring directly after Beck dies of two not-altogether-voluntary self-inflected gunshot wounds. The odious Fromm himself is ultimately executed, offering up his hapless “Long live the Führer” in his final moments. There is the doubling of Tresckow and Schlabrendorff, beginning with a lengthy colloquy re: to suicide or not to suicide. Tresckow blows himself to bits with a grenade. Schlabrendorff will be imprisoned, subject to hideous tortures and abuses but also impossible twists of fate, such that he will not only live but return to the ruins and haunt them as a living person. We will ultimately bear witness to survivors who live not spitefully but nonetheless ‘in spite of.’ Another duo or doublet bears mentioning here, “Two Wolves," Freisler and Hitler, Machiavellian jurist-adjutant and demonic despot. They will have their equivalents in yet another, significantly later Paul West historical conjuring, 2001’s A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER, a novel about the English Gunpowder Plot in which Edward Coke and the Machiavellian Robert Cecil, “militant Saxons,” vanquish “the Jesuit treason” by way of show trials, torture, and ritual executions, all of it so much political theatre, all of it profoundly craven and thoroughly wretched. There is a curiosity to which I would like to draw attention, wondering if others have noticed it. In both THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL and A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER there appear two variations on a single aphorism, written thusly in the earlier novel: “you’ll eat a peck of muck afore you die.” What can be redeemed here of this life that would have us eat muck in prelude to death, especially should we deign to renounce the tyrants and ogres? We have Stauffenberg, a man of culture, a dandy and equestrian. In counterpoint we have S’gruber, a man known to fly into such insane frothing rages he would literally chew the carpets and who also happened to believe horses “Emblems of the decadent landed upper class!” What is it that Stauffenberg demonstrates for us or indeed gives us? The question is of course one best limited to Paul West’s Stauffenberg, otherwise there is no end to the possible answers. The answer is in the hours and their richness, a richness that arrives in the rendering, the expression, even if the moral calculus Stauffenberg might employ to establish the worthiness of his actions must prove irresolvable. Hours inhabited and reinhabited, expanded beyond recourse to quotidian horizons. In the novel of hours there is the affirmation, and in the affirmation there is all.

[J. Dolan]

This is that rarest of books in which you'd be hard-pressed to find a single instance of triteness. Every simile, metaphor, description, and thought is as painstakingly crafted and original as it is true. The result is a book committed to fact and detail, yes, but even more to painting a fresh and emotionally evocative picture of the events behind those facts.
This in turn helps lift setting, character, story, et al. to another level, producing that impact only high art can. The Very Rich Hours is one of the more powerful books you'll ever read. In addition to the dramatic feel of its stately Homer-esque lyricism, it gets ambitiously up-close and personal, taking you boldly inside the head of everyone from the tragic hero von Stauffenberg to the madman Adolf Hitler.
As a writer myself, I'd give my right hand to see the world as the incredible Mr. West does-- and perhaps the whole arm for the fearlessness he exhibits in putting his eccentric vision to paper.

[Noel]

Paul West should be a Nobel Laureate in literature...

[Ann]

So far I'm immensely enjoying West's poetic prose.

[Scott]

This book was written as if the author had replaced every perfectly good word with inappropriately absurd ones he looked up in a thesaurus. Getting through this was a chore.

[Michael Greening]

One of my favorite authors, West here penned what I consider to be his finest and most original novel.

[Michael]

Riveting, fictionalized meditation on July 20 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, and its aftermath. I first heard of this book in J.M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, wherein the titular academic is set to deliver a lecture on evil, informed in large part by her strong reaction to this book, particularly West's unflinching imagining of the punishments meted out to the plotters--as Coetzee writes: "That is what Paul West, novelist, had written about, page after page after page, leaving nothing out; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands....Can anyone, she asks in her lecture, wander as deep as Paul West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed? " Wonderful writing throughout, West I mean, though Coetzee's no slouch.

[Xtoph]

Chronology of the Stauffenberg assassination, including the previous history and the following events to the end of the war, detailing the fate of the sympathizers. From Stauffenberg's first-person perspective, for the most part necessarily "from the realm of the dead". This vulgar evil, which appears so down-to-earth and neutral throughout the book, illustrates how it was possible to brutalize all of Germany. Sometimes I found myself almost skipping carelessly over the hideous, because the brutal and vile appeared so succinctly and matter-of-fact in side sentences. This is an important novel that describes the protagonist not as a hero, but rather as trapped in the norms and delusions of German nationalism and puts in in a place where mythos is met by sober reality.

[Judy]

The fictionalized account of a real event and real people: the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 and the fates of the conspirators (the Valkyrie plot). It took me a while to get used to West's unusual, postmodernist style, but by the second half I was better able to understand the characters and enjoy the plot. Definitely not a beach read, but I would recommend this for a good intellectual workout.