J.P. Hebel

 

When I was a kid, my folks – like W.G.Sebald’s grandfather – bought a “farmer’s almanac”. Or was it a purchase? Surely in the grocery store or the gas station it was thrown before the cashier and rung up with the soda pop, the ten gallons of gas, and the candy bar,, but I remember the almanac as an almost natural product that appeared on our low table in the living room, like fallen leaves appeared on the lawn  or dirt clods – the latter always good for a satisfying throw at a tree trunk, where it would leave behind a spot of clay – could be found in vacant lots.

I know this about Sebald’s dad because, in his essay on J.P. Hebel, Sebald mentions the Kemton Almanac. Since Hebel is the master almanac writer – comparable to Benjamin Franklin in America – this is as good a way as any to introduce Hebel to an anglophone audience. For German audiences, Hebel has been sat on by the 20^th century greats – Benjamin (whose essay on Hebel is only five pages long in the Collected Writings), Heidegger (whose lecture on Hebel is compared, by Sebald, to other readings popular in the Nazi era, with their seriously distorting version of the Kalendergeschichten, or the Treasury of the Rheinland’s Household Friend, and Sebald himself, in the essay included in A place in the Country. For a writer  of such supreme surface simplicity to  survive this weight, there must be something elastic in the prose. Benjamin’s interpretation of the way Hebel wove space into time with a chronicler’s sense of montage has been taken up by all his modern commentators.

 Reinhard Kosseleck, in his essay Anachronism and Antiquity, analyzed how Albrecht Altdorfer, a sixteenth century painter, collaged together different temporal elements in his painting of the Alexanderschlacht. For instance, although the battle is depicted at its height, the count of the dead on the banners held by figures in the scene tell us how many were killed by the end of the battle. The battlefield is an exemplary instance of the event that is shot through with a certain hollowness, a lack of a center, at least in the experience of those who participate – see Fabrice at Waterloo in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. The where of the battle comes, in a sense, after the battle is over.

There are philosophers who claim that all events are like battles.

And this sense – transmuted from the unheimlich to the heimlich – is Hebel’s specialty.

Sebald gently chides Benjamin for trying to make Hebel a friend of sorts of the left – a fellow traveller of the ideals of the French revolution.  Sebald, writing in the neo-liberal eighties and nineties, sees Hebel, instead, as a friend of good governance, under the guidance of expert physiocrats guided by good kings. To make this case, Sebald isolates Hebel from such characters as Georg Foster, a circumnavigator of the globe and friend of the Revolution who Hebel surely read; and more, Sebald erases the whole background of ancien regime violence, as though the violence of the French revolution erupted on a peaceful Europe rather than one that had experienced two world wars between colonial powers (the war of Spanish succession and the seven years warp  and the rise of a militarized Prussia in wars that pitted Prussia against Austria and Russia. In the Seven Years war alone, about 700,000 people died. Hebel, in his most famous story, The Unexpected Reunion,  the body of a miner who was buried in an accident is dug up in the mines at Falun, and his now ancient fiancé sees his body, which gives Hebel the opportunity to create a virtuoso chronology that gives us an idea of history as a kind of geology:

“In the meantime the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake, the Seven Years War came and went, the Emperor Francis I died, the Jesuits were dissolved, Poland was partitioned, the Empress Maria Theresa died, and Sturensee was executed, and America became independent, and the combined French and Spanish force failed to take Gibralter. The Turks cooped up General Stein in the Vetrane Cave in Hungary and Emperor Joseph died too. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, the French Revolution came and the long war began, and the Emperor Leopold II too was buried. Napoleon defeated Prussia, the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and reaped. The millers ground the corn, the blacksmiths hammered, and the miners dug for seams of metal in their workplace under the ground.”

Left out of this list were many things known to Hebel: the acceleration of the slave trade and the profits of the slavery that flowed to the great colonial powers, and the battle for the control of India between the English and the French. Sebald’s Hebel has read Simon Schama and is a friend of Malesherbes, but the real Hebel was much more oblique.

I am less concerned, though, with Hebel’s attitude towards the revolution than I am with the cross between a certain popularizing of enlightenment and the revival of a popular vernacular that found expression in collections of nursery and household tales. To me, this crossroads is epitomized by Charles Perrault, who on the one hand, famously, took the folktale out of the woods and into the boudoir (like La Fontaine), and on the other hand, authored an endless polemical treatise against the ancients and for the moderns.

Hebel speaks in a language, as a “friend of the house”, that would be familiar to the informants of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm – in particular, the daughter of an exiled Huguenot, from whom many of the most famous tales came. Hebel’s, too, are household tales. The news from the enlightenment, in his prose, takes on the air of a folktale. This is a crossed place, seemingly impossible if we hold enlightenment on the one hand to be the opposite of superstition on the other.

In 1703, Charles Perrault’s niece, Mademoisselle L’Heretier, published a book in London entitled La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux, which contained a tale, Ricdin-Ricdon. R-R was a kind of demon or gnome, who offers to spin straw into gold for a girl whose mother had promised the king that she had that exact ability. This tale is better known from the Grimm brothers version, where Ricdin-Ricdon becomes Rumpelstiltskin.  Jack Zipes in his The Fairy Tale as Myth/the Myth as Fairy Tale devotes some space to the “spinning tales”, following his notion that spinning as a home industry suffered a sea change in the 18^th century, from a place of honor to a sort of semi-comic activity performed by ugly old maids.

Hebel makes an extraordinary transposition from the spinning tale to Copernican cosmology in some of his calendar stories explaining to the small town and rural audience the findings of a science that is now, in 1808, more than two hundred years old. In his general remarks about the structure of the universe, Hebel intends to explain that the world is round, and that the sun does not move around the earth.

“Secondly, the earth turns itself around in 24 hours. In fact, imagine if from one point of the globe through its center to another opposed point a long spindle or axle was pulled. These two points we will name the poles. Thus around this axle the earth turns in 24 hours, not after the sun but against the sun, and if a long endless red thread came out, I will say, on the 21^st of March from the sun and reached the earth, and at number it was knotted about a cherry tree or around a crucifix in a field, the globe would have pulled this thread all the way around itself in 24 hours, and so for each day.”

Imagine Rumpelstiltskin as a cosmological god, instead of an earth spirit. Although that crucifix… I’m assuming it is a tombstone. A symbol of death and resurrection, renewed in the Copernican order, and published in a Calendar. Hebel, whose writing is so Heimlich, always lands us in these unheimliche places.

The Clock Repairman's gesture

 
In his essay, A kaddish for Austria: On Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald zeroes in on a bit of personal trivia (one of those bits that operate as signatures of some nameless process) that he gets from Roth’s biographer:

“Bronsen reported that Roth collected clocks randomly; and that fooling with clocks in his final years grew into a mania. What fascinated Roth with clocks was condensed into his last piece of published prose in the first weekend of April, 1939  in the Pariser Tageszeitung.”
The essay – one of those feuilleton of which Roth was one of the great masters – was entitled “At the clock repairs shop.” Sebald takes the piece as revelatory of something essential in Roth’s conception of the artist – or storyteller:

„Thus he sat, like the clock repairman, with a magnifying glass stuck in place before his eye, and looed into the broken wonderwork of wheels and gears, “as if he gazed through a blackframed hole into a distant past”. The clock repairman’s hope, like that of the writer, ist that by a small turn of the wrist [durch einen winzigen Eingriff] he can bring everything back to the beginning to restart it all in its correctly intended order.”

That’s a powerfully nostalgic and hopelessly anachronistic image of the power of the writer. Especially given the historical circumstances in Paris at the time, the Paris in which Roth was drinking himself to death, sensing the mass death to come. Our own sense of the mass death to come has now been sucked into the mass media and banalized as a zombie apocalypse, which is also, in its way, something Roth foresaw – or rather saw about his own time. In an essay that Michael Hoffman has not, I believe, englished, “Self-critique”, from 1929, Roth described his realism as the realism of the irrealism of his time – a time in which the self has hollowed itself out. The artistic response to this, Roth wrote, was to bring the reader face to face with that most difficult of all things to represent: boredom. The essay begins on a typically hard to measure sentence: “It is in some ways painful to deal with an extraordinarily good writer, such as myself, without severity and blame.” Roth goes on to say that his book, Right and Left, has hardly any beginning, really no end, has no characters and no psychology. It is not that he feels that there are no books with beginnings, ends, characters and psychology – the 19^th century epic novel up to Proust has them – but Roth believes that this is no longer possible in the world in which he and the reader exist. The substance of the reader’s grandparents is of a different type from the substance-lessness of his contemporaries.

„But I have attempted – on the contrary – to produce in my reader a certain feeling of boredom, which is a necessary consequence of linguistic precision and the effort to portray the hollowness of the present not convexly, not to present the insubstantability of our contemporaries as “tragic” or “daemonic” but instead to precisely mirror the hopelessness of this world.”

One could say that Roth is enjoying a little too much his stay at the Hotel Grand Abyss. He was a man who knew Europe’s hotels, eventually making his circuit of the sleaziest among them. Still, there is something in the connection between boredom and Roth’s sense of the impending pogram. Perhaps the boredom is the necessary preface. It is a boredom that emerges from the planned system of excitement, which had its model, in the twenties, in the hypermodernity of Berlin. And which is now our wonderful world.

Or so says one mood. Another mood is: fuck that. Expropriate that boredom. Use it against the military-industrial perpetual entertainment complex. Stand up.