Hermann Hesse -- STEPPENWOLF

Hermann Hesse's fame has lasted, though he is surely not quite as highly regarded as he once was.  My three dollar mass-market paperback copy of Steppenwolf, for instance, asks and answers a question about his once massive popularity: "Why has one European writer, Hermann Hesse, captured the imagination and loyalty of a whole generation of Americans? Because he is a vital spiritual force . . ." Of course, maybe the "whole generation" phrase hints that even the writer of the book's copy (I should note that my edition is from some forty years after the original German publication) knew that Hesse's fame would not stay quite so immense forever. Nowadays he is regarded as a J.D. Salinger for a deeper crowd, the discontented adolescent who sees phoniness everywhere but, instead of whining humorously, turns to the things of the spirit. 

Steppenwolf is maybe his best known novel, though at this point in time, it's hard to know if that's just well-known because so many people like the songs "Magic Carpet Ride" and "Born to be Wild," songs by the band Steppenwolf, both still mainstays of classic rock radio (and the latter, I just learned, the source of the phrase "heavy metal"). Those song titles, incidentally, seem perfectly in line with the Hesse's fascinations with man's complicated inner nature and with the wisdom of the East. What is fascinating is that Hesse's novel, growing out of his own history in early twentieth century Germany, should have so much resonance the mid-century American generation. Steppenwolf was, I read, Timothy Leary's favorite, and one guesses that Timothy Leary was popular among many who were reading Hesse in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Peter Handke--The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Peter Handke is an Austrian modernist writer, primarily known as a playwright and the author of several novels. His name came to my knowledge after reading an interview with Don DeLillo (whose Libra I just finished). The book is actually mentioned by his anonymous questioner, who puts it in a short list of "slim but seminal European works of fiction" that also includes books by Albert Camus and Max Frisch. At about 130 pages, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) is indeed pretty slim, and I have to take my source at his word that it is a seminal text. The book is not an enjoyable read in any usual way. It is not full of poetic language or a gripping plot or beautiful description or inspirational themes. I read it rather as a case study in the style and the concerns of modernism.

Heinrich Böll: AND NEVER SAID A WORD

I keep finding myself picking up these Heinrich Böll novels. This latest one, titled And Never Said a Word, was a real let-down, yet I know that I'm still going to move on to the next one. This makes me aware of the value of Böll, which lies somewhere beyond the actual qualities of his writing or his ability to come up with plots and characters. What comes through all his books, a deep moral concern and a deep moral seriousness which it gives him the ability to infuse significance into the smalles of activities, from drinking coffee to interacting with neighbors. Even when, as I suspect would happen to anyone reading this book, one gets terribly bored, one admires the man who produced it.

Max Weber: THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

Max Weber's great essay of 1904 has suffered from its own success. It does have a catchy title. People throw around the phrase "the Protestant ethic" constantly. It is written with an appealing (though for some, off-putting) combination of simplicity and grandiosity. And, I think, people just like they idea they think the work represents, the basic version of which is familiar to everyone. It is usually put rather crudely: Protestantism somehow led to capitalism. For many it explains how we good Protestants became good capitalists. So it provides an explanation of how, in general, we've gotten just so darn good. But this version, an optimistic description of the progress that led inevitably to our own time, misses a large part of the value of this book.

Heinrich Böll: THE LOST HONOUR OF KATHARINA BLUM

The Lost Honor is a very short novel, maybe not quite long enough to truly be a novel. At a little over a hundred rather sparsely filled pages, it meets the old Edgar Allan Poe requirement for a short story that it be able to be absorbed in a single sitting. Against Poe's recommendations, though, it doesn't aim at a single effect. Instead confronts the big ideas that motivate much of Heinrich Böll's work. In this book, as in The Clown and Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Böll sneers at the veneer of public respectability that hides immorality, shows the ways that people can use their power to manipulate others, and also betrays a general cynicism about the officialdom of postwar German society.

Steven Ozment: THE REFORMATION IN THE CITIES

In this book, Steven Ozment has attempted a new look at the history of the very earliest phase of the Reformation, running from 1517, the date of Luther's famed 95 theses, up to about 1520-21, when reforms started to be instituted in the German towns. His concern is to find out the why Luther's ideas were so appealing to city dwellers of Germany, and his answer is that it appealed for positive worldly and "urban" reasons. In doing this, Ozment paints a particular picture of Protestantism, making it free of its later religious excesses, its Calvinist strictness, its occasional Messianism, its later concrete forms with their organized rituals too reminiscent of Catholicism. He is sometimes overly eager to separate this undeveloped, early phase from the later developments within the churches.

Heinrich Böll: THE CLOWN

I confess that I didn't pick up The Clown for any literary reason at all. I was interested in this book entirely because the book promised to be about a mime. It was only after that I learned anything about Heinrich Böll. The essentials on Böll are that he is a German novelist, Nobel Prize 1972, grew up in a respectable Catholic pacifist family in World War II. From this book, it seems that he has inherited his parents' distaste for war, though they also seem to have turned him against certain aspects of Catholicism and respectability.

The Clown, in spite of its title, is a rather dreary book, punctuated only rarely by moments of comedy, which sometimes come simply from the dreariness reaching such heights as to be comical.