Campo Santo by W.G. Sebald

Author:W.G. Sebald
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Essays, Literary Collections, Travel, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9780307433039
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Character of Hermann Ott

For this very reason the story of Hermann Ott that forms the backbone of the Diary, and is used by the author to offer the reader’s receptive imagination many consoling ideas, will not ultimately stand up to critical examination. Unlike the documentary passages about the exodus of the Jews and the electoral campaign, the writer’s own family life, and the essaylike digressions, it is pure invention although everything else relates to it. This fact, of course, is initially disguised by the repeated suggestion that we really have here an incident from the life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki which cannot at present be made public.

Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt, by trade a teacher and a skeptic, has been teaching at the Rosenbaum private school since state schools were closed to the Jewish children of Danzig, and still buys his lettuce from Jewish tradesmen even when the market women call him names for it. This Hermann Ott is a retrospective figure created by the author’s wishful thinking; structurally no different, if of far less fateful import, than the angelic young Father Riccardo Fontano in Hochhuth’s The Deputy who provides evidence that good still exists even in the face of mass annihilation.

In order to leave Hermann Ott’s German identity in no doubt, Grass gives us his literary alter ego’s Aryan family tree of all the way back to Groningen in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century. The implication here, as in everything we learn about Hermann Ott, is that there really were Germans of a better kind, a thesis that stakes its claim to a high degree of probability through the combination of fiction with the documentary material. Whether the good and innocent Germans leading their quiet, heroic lives in the country’s postwar literature really existed in the way suggested to the reader probably matters less, objectively speaking, than the obvious fact that, as we can read in Böll, they confined their effective activities to saying a Good Friday prayer which “even includes the unbelieving Jews.”22

German literature of the postwar period sought its moral salvation in these fictional figures, of whom Günter Grass’s Doubt is certainly one of the most honorable, and, thus preoccupied, failed to understand the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives of those who let themselves be integrated into the system without questioning it.

The invented figure of the teacher Doubt, enabling Grass to develop his snail-theme of melancholy, thus functions as an alibi to counter the programmatic intention of mourning, and the real aspects of the story of the Danzig Jews once again fail to get their due, despite the aid of Erwin Lichtenstein. One of the passages in the Diary where an appearance of truth is created by the confrontation of historical reality and retrospective fiction is a passage about the transports taking those Jewish children who were able to leave Danzig to England. Faced with his own children’s questions:

“Did they have to go to school, too?”

“Did they all learn English quick?”

“And what about their

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