George Hunka - Notes and comment

The world of yesterday

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind, even experiencing each on a different side — the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenceless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism, with its deliberate programme of inhuman dogma. It was for our generation, after hundreds of years, to see again wars without actual declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass theft and the bombing of defenceless cities, bestiality unknown for the last fifty generations, and it is to be hoped that future generations will not see them again. Yet paradoxically, at the same time as our world was turning the moral clock back a thousand years, I have also seen mankind achieve unheard-of feats in the spheres of technology and the intellect, instantly outdoing everything previously achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the air with the aeroplane, words travelling all over the world at the moment when they are spoken, the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the defeat of even the most insidious diseases. Almost daily, things still impossible yesterday have become possible. Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress. (xiv; emphasis mine — GH)

Wallets out

It is a rare day that I can solicit donations to organizations in both Vienna and Philadelphia, and this is the day.

Tomorrow, March 13, radio klassik Stephansdom will be holding its second fundraising drive of the year — and this month the theme is spring, the season. The Vienna-based station is going all out tomorrow with special offers and programming (Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring will be shoehorned in there, I’m sure), along with a chance for you to call in to your favorite hosts, not to mention a report from Christoph Wellner and the ongoing success of the campaign. I’ve written about radio klassik Stephansdom before, so I hope you’ll step up and donate here. (Though if you don’t subscribe to international calling or don’t know German, you may want to forego the call-in.)

Closer to home, the Pen & Pencil Club of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s oldest private press associations, has launched a GoFundMe page to cover a few pressing bills. In addition to this, the Club is seeking new members, and don’t let the fact that you don’t live in Philadelphia deter you — you’ll always be welcome when you drop by the city for a few days and want to enjoy a comfortable, gregarious drink with the gentlepeople of the press. You can donate here and learn more about the club here. I’ve written briefly about the Club before too.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

In a passage that I quoted yesterday from his book Germania, Simon Winder mentions Gustav Mahler’s song “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (1901-1902), based on the poem by Friedrich Rückert. He called it “the greatest” of 19th century German songs, “a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances.” He is off by a year or two, but let’s be open-minded. It won’t hurt.

It would be chary of me not to post it here today, so control (highly) your circumstances and enjoy this 1989 performance of the song by Jessye Norman, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. The original poem and a translation follows the video.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
Friedrich Rückert

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!
Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.
Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

I am lost to the world
English translation by Richard Stokes

I am lost to the world
With which I used to waste much time;
It has for so long known nothing of me,
It may well believe that I am dead.
Nor am I at all concerned
If it should think that I am dead.
Nor can I deny it,
For truly I am dead to the world.
I am dead to the world’s tumult
And rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love, in my song!

Translation © Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)

Solitary tourism, in Vienna and elsewhere

From Simon Winder’s delightful 2010 book Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History:

Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century — a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. …

The poetry on this subject stretches out to the most hazy, distant horizon and fed a century of German songs, culminating perhaps in the greatest of them all: Mahler’s setting of a Rückert poem, “I have lost track of the world with which I used to waste much time,” a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances. The idea, whether in Goethe, Mörike, Rückert or Heine, is to be alone, in a wood, on a mountain, in some overpoweringly verdant garden, or just inside one’s head, almost always as a moment’s pause before plunging back into a world of love and normal human decisions. This tic is of course a bit unpolitical and some writers have seen it as passive in a way that implies a German malleability and failure to engage with disastrous implications for the future. But equally it is an anti-political, fiercely private stance, with a built-in resistance to fanaticism or mass manipulation. It seems hard on Schubert’s songs for them to be viewed as early danger signs of a failure to stand up to Nazism.

Women and the Russo-Ukrainian War

A week ago, just a few days before the third anniversary of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, St. Martin’s Press published Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, a collection of writings by the late Victoria Amelina. The book recounts Amelina’s attempts to document the war in Ukraine, attempts which were tragically cut short when she died, the victim of a Russian cruise missile, in a Donetsk restaurant in 2023. In a recent essay for the Guardian, her friend Charlotte Higgins called it “a precious, powerful work of literature: a steady beam of light born amid darkness and violence,” and in her introduction to the book Margaret Atwood describes the text as “intensely modern. It reminds us of — for instance — the Pessoa of The Book of Disquiet and the Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape. Incompleteness draws us in: we long to supply what is missing.”

A few days after Amelina was killed in 2023, I memorialized her on July 5 of that year with a post to this blog; that post appears below.

When the time comes for the histories of the Russo-Ukrainian War to be written, historians will find a great many of the first-person accounts of the war to have been composed by women. The prose generated by these writers reveals a tough-as-nails approach to the violence of the war; perhaps the first drafts of these accounts can be found today on Twitter, on feeds by the likes of Olesya Khromeychuk and Dr. Olha Poliukhovych. Both of these women are academics, but both provide meditations on the war that reach deep into personal experience — both their own and ours, if we read deeply enough. (I also note that the best reporting to come out of Kyiv during the early days of the war was from the BBC’s Lyse Doucet.)

The courage of these women is beyond dispute. Over the weekend Victoria Amelina, a writer who abandoned her interest in fiction at the start of the war to document war crimes and the lives of children in the war, was killed by the Russians in a Kramatorsk missile attack on a restaurant, dying in Dnipro. She is far from the only artist to be killed in the conflict. It is only fitting that you take ten minutes to read her essay “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened,” an undated meditation published by Arrowsmith Press. She writes:

We still need to talk about the past. A lot. We can help each other mourn our dead, as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht helped me and millions of others around the world, regardless of nationality.

How can I return the favor? As a citizen of Lviv, I want to accept responsibility for the city’s past — with all its stories, beautiful and ugly, with all its guilt. As a writer what I can do is to listen to the silences rising from the city’s ground, and do my best to translate them into a tongue the living understand.

To honor her memory and return the favor Amelina bestowed on us, we should listen to those silences too.