August 2022 in Books: What I'm Reading

It's a colossus and I'm still running back and forth between its legs like a Brutus (to attempt a poor Shakespeare allusion). But gradually I'm tackling the audiobook recording of Robert A. Caro's memoir of Lyndon B. Johnson during his vice presidency under John F. Kennedy: The Passage of Power.

If it were a Columbo television crime show episode, I'd say at once that Johnson was the mastermind who organized Kennedy's assassination. Jealousy, enmity, rivalry, and humiliation teem in the pages.

It's hard to regard Kennedy's presidency as a saintly Camelot, or to consider even Robert F. Kennedy as a kindly figure, if one reads about the dynamics behind the scenes. That said, no individual actions of the Kennedys stick in my memory as criminal; the Kennedys generally just seem sort of mean. (Well, all right, I think the patriarch was genuinely a 'piece of work.') Johnson himself, however, practically built his career on electoral fraud and political crimes.

"Photo portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson
as U.S. Senator for Texas
and Majority Leader"
(1950s)
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

So it does feel as if one scratched the surface of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and found it — and by extension the entire presidency and democratic system — to be made not so much of stone, as of paper-mâché formed to look like stone.

And of course the other paradox: despite the emotional and moral hollowness that marked parts of their political lives, Kennedy, Johnson, and others, achieved genuine, lasting good. — And before Kennedy's political career, [as mentioned in a past blog post] his rescue of his fellow sailors in a torpedo boat in World War II really is the stuff of superheroes, and makes for a thrilling adventure in Caro's prose.

It's also astonishing how many significant historical details are no longer known, now that the former President and Vice-President have died.

The most significant detail, perhaps:

Did Kennedy offer the vice presidency to Johnson assuming, after their fierce primary battle and mutual hatred, that Johnson would reject the offer? Or was it in fact a purposeful, strategic move to enable Kennedy to win more votes than Richard Nixon's Republicans in the South?

***

New cover of Touch the Dragon
From the Turnstone Press

Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon (1994) was given to me by my paternal grandfather when I was a teenager.

The author went to Thailand on a student exchange when she was seventeen years old. It was the 1980s. She was a Canadian who didn't know much of the language, but she is taught partly by immersion and partly in a school.

In brilliant prose, Connelly describes daily life from the glamourous to the not-so-glamourous. She writes frankly of the mental discomfort of adjusting to what feels like a diametrically opposed new reality, and dishes about the dissolution of her relationship with a boyfriend back in Canada.

It's affectionately, immersively written. Connelly's sarcastic, worldly-wise voice as an author recalling her younger self is pitch-perfect — but I think that one or two snap judgments that seem insensitive, like calling music at a festival 'horrific,' could also have been edited away without weakening the book.

***

Otto Hahn's autobiography, Mein Leben, is not a famous book. But from reading it I have been converted from someone who knows that he was a famous German scientist, to an admirer of him personally.

He is generously precise about his life, starting in a lower-middle-class family in Frankfurt am Main, through his university years and his escapades e.g. in duelling fraternities, and his various youthful loves and losses.... And that's as far as I've gotten. His life certainly did not end in the early 1900s, and later chapters will likely detail his attitudes toward the two World Wars, and the Cold War.

Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer has come out in theaters, tracing the role and reaction of a different scientist to knowledge pursued for the sake of military applications. It would be interesting to compare the different works.

The Bach Motet: Jesu, meine Freude

A colleague sent me a new recording of a Bach motet. Aside from the anti-coronavirus masks worn by all the singers, as they stand and perform in a church in Prague for the Spring Festival, on May 18th this year; and aside from the quality of the singing of music, which had been unknown to me before; what struck me was the lyrics.

J.S.Bach - Motet: Jesu, meine Freude BWV 227 - Collegium 1704
[YouTube: Bachology,
May 22, 2020]

While Baroque-era Christianity had its fanatic aspects, and the wars of religion were terrible, I find hymns like the ones that were incorporated in the motet touching and sympathetic. They attempt to come to terms with the worst of humanity and the best of existence, all in one. To me they seem like an example of the massive efforts that men made in the 17th century, perhaps more than we do today.

Written by Johann Franck, the hymns in the motet were written in the middle of the 1600s. They are simple in construction: an aab ccb dee rhyme scheme, for example, mostly emphasized in trochees.

I tend to like the first two or three lines of each hymn best. For example, at the beginning of the motet:

Jesu, meine Freude,
Meines Herzens Weide,

The 'pasture of the heart' is tranquil and idyllic, insofar as it makes me think of a landscape painting with a grazing cow shaded by tall, old-growth trees. Why the thought of a cow should feel poetic, rather than reminiscent of milk and steak, I don't know.

Unter deinem Schirmen
Bin ich vor den Stürmen
Aller Feinde frei.

is also pleasant. (To translate roughly: 'Beneath your shelters, I am free of the storming of all foes.' The Bachology YouTube video presents a more elegant translation: "Beneath your protection/I am free from the attacks/of all my enemies.")

July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next

Quick, illogical assumptions motivate me to state that I have not been terribly keen on any books that were published in July or are to be published in August.

Instead I have finished older books. Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai, Humboldt's travels in Russia, winding up in a border station to China, then returning past German settlements founded by Catherine the Great, past Astrakhan, and through the Caspian Sea, braving an outbreak of anthrax and innumerable mosquitoes, were picturesquely set forth in later travelogues by Gustav Rose (a science professor who was a fellow traveller) and in Humboldt's letters.

The letters are not saintly, in my view. Humboldt writes to Count von Cancrin, the Russian government minister who granted his journey, in tones at times confident and friendly, at other times servile and toadying. His views in these letters are much more blissful than his views in letters to his brother and friends. His euphoria about Russian military victories against the Ottoman Empire also seems a little bloodthirsty now. I did roll my eyes a little at Humboldt's worries that he might be nominated for a prestigious position back in Berlin, which two hundred years later I'd characterize as a 'First World Problem.' Also, it's easier to sympathize with the mosquito problem, than with his boredom at being greeted by lengthy dinners and eager delegations wherever he goes.

Астрахань Городская клиническая больница №2 имени братьев Губиных (1838)
via Wikimedia Commons

AT ANY RATE, journeying and surveying the natural world through Siberia and back, experiencing a lifelong dream, Alexander von Humboldt was an emissary of the Russian government. Not only was it paying him a fabulous sum and gratifying a wish; it was also organizing transport with a lavish hand — teams of horses that were frequently changed out, etc., and military escorts, transported him over thousands of miles with an ease uncharacteristic of the times — and shelter.

Grimm Fairy Tales: The Star Talers

"Illustration of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Star Money'" (1862)
by Ludwig Richter (1803-1884)
via Wikimedia Commons

GROWING UP amongst the dark firs and bristling blackberry bushes, fragrant lilacs and apple trees, and the distant rushing of the wind in the hill where my family lived in Canada, I became immersed in the world of Grimm fairy tales. I would sit in the attic, where my siblings and I slept like contented nestlings as the nightlight shone from underneath the window, and imagine a fairy tale in old Europe with the help of Ludwig Richter's illustrations (frogs, ancient leafy trees, wells and courts and birds whose species were unfamiliar beyond the Atlantic) from the early 1860s. We had an expurgated edition that did not have all of the tales and was in modern High German, no regional German dialects as far as I recall.

I read, for example, The Star Money, "Die Sterntaler." It is as brief and as simply-cut as its heroine's shirt, because the Grimm brother who wrote it down was sketching a mere memory of the tale's plot.

It presents a main character and nameless wayfarers: a parentless figure who wanders through the world, who sees the woes of fellow-travellers and has the means to 'fix' them — so she does.

***

Es war einmal ein armes, kleines Mädchen, dem war Vater und Mutter gestorben, es hatte kein Haus mehr in dem es wohnen, und kein Bett mehr, in dem es schlafen konnte, und nichts mehr auf der Welt, als die Kleider, die es auf dem Leib trug, und ein Stückchen Brod in der Hand, das ihm ein Mitleidiger geschenkt hatte; es war aber gar fromm und gut. Da ging es hinaus, und unterwegs begegnete ihm ein armer Mann, der bat es so sehr um etwas zu essen, da gab es ihm das Stück Brod; dann ging es weiter, da kam ein Kind, und sagte: „es friert mich so an meinem Kopf, schenk mir doch etwas, das ich darum binde,“ da thät es seine Mütze ab und gab sie dem Kind. Und als es noch ein bischen gegangen war, da kam wieder ein Kind, und hatte kein Leibchen an, da gab es ihm seins; und noch weiter, da bat eins um ein Röcklein, das gab es auch von sich hin, endlich kam es in Wald, und es war schon dunkel geworden, da kam noch eins und bat um ein Hemdlein, und das fromme Mädchen dachte: es ist dunkele Nacht, da kannst du wohl dein Hemd weggeben, und gab es hin. Da fielen auf einmal die Sterne vom Himmel und waren lauter harte, blanke Thaler, und ob es gleich sein Hemdlein weggegeben, hatte es doch eins an, aber vom allerfeinsten Linnen, da sammelte es sich die Thaler hinein und ward reich für sein Lebtag.

THE FAIRY TALE is read as an allegory about the Christian's notion of charitable deeds.*

* See "Allegorie" in the Wikipedia article here.

It is a tale that, to my leftist mind, epitomizes the absurdity of the world before modern social security, where a girl could be abandoned by society and yet be forced by her conscience to rectify the world's inequality out of her slender means.

To the proto-feminist part of my mind, it is impressive that the tale's reward for kindness is financial independence at nobody else's expense rather than, let's say, a husband.

But I have to add: from a non-cynical, religious standpoint, the insistence that a kind gesture to meet the needs of others is never in vain and never unappreciated by God is touching, although it is implausible and difficult to realize.

*

There was once a poor, little girl. Her father and mother had died, she had no house left to live in, no bed to sleep in, and nothing in the world other than the clothes she wore on her body and a piece of bread in her hand, which a pitying person had given her. But she was pious and good. She went away then, and along the way she met a poor man who begged so much for something to eat that she gave him the piece of bread. Then she went further, and a child came, and it said, "I am so cold where my head is, please give me something that I can bind around it." So she took off her cap and gave it to the child. And when she had gone a little further, a child came again and had no jacket, so she gave it hers; and still further, a child begged for a frock and she also gave it hers. Finally she reached a forest, and it had already become dark. Another child came and begged her for a shirt, and the pious girl thought: 'It is dark night, so you may as well give your shirt,' and so she gave it. All at once the stars fell from the sky and were many hard, shining coins. And although she had given away her shirt, she had one on after all but this time it was made of the finest linen. So she gathered all of her coins into it and was wealthy for the rest of her life.
(Free translation, based in part on Margaret Hunt's version.)

"Das arme Mädchen (1812)" [Wikisource - in German]
"Grimm's Household Tales, Volume 2/The Star Money" [Wikisource]
"Die Sterntaler" [Wikipedia - in German]
"Star Money" [Wikipedia]

Joseph Roth and Poland After World War I

"Boot und Transportfuhrwerk im winterlichen Galizien" (1914-1918)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

IN THE MID-1920s, in a Europe that was as battered as ever by the First World War, Joseph Roth (who later wrote The Radetzky March) was earning his bread as a foreign correspondent for German newspapers. One such periodical was the Frankfurter Zeitung, mouthpiece for leftist circles in the Weimar Republic that was later shut down by the Nazis, only to resurrect itself after the Second World War as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Roth himself was far to the left, inclined to socialism, and he took the pen name 'Red Joseph' for the purposes of his political journalism. Also, his views and position in Weimar Germany were determined by other elements: he was a Jewish native of Galicia, now Poland, who had served (after years of reluctance) in the imperial army on the German side, and who indulged in an odd allegiance to the abolished monarchy, which he celebrated in part of his work.

His newspaper assignment was to travel in Poland, in Ukraine, and in a Russia that had been living under a Leninist system since 1917. (Later he would travel to Albania, Yugoslavia, the Saar region of Germany that had rejoined the country by referendum, Poland, and Italy.) Vladimir Lenin himself had just died in 1924. And Joseph Roth's perspective was, of course, directed by his life experiences. He had no prejudices against the coexistence of the plethora of European minorities. These were intended, per the ideals of the League of Nations, to form their own states by virtue of the ideal of self-determination, but they lived too intertwined with each other for it to be simple to draw a border map humanely. In that respect there is no warning in his writings of the German nationalism that already existed at the time, and certainly not of the Nazism. His stance toward the Russian government was staunchly optimistic, at first, and he was looking forward to seeing Leninist solutions to widespread problems of undereducation, poverty, sickness, and lack of dignity for the poor in a classist society. He also tinges his reporting with his strong adherence to religion.

He took a long time to send dispatches back, because he kept gathering more and more material before he put his pen to paper. I believe that one can easily notice from the quality and nature of his writing when the well of inspiration was overflowing and when it ran almost dry.* He also had a magisterial way of writing — he never mentions specific interviewees or quotes anybody, it seems; everything is noted from an infinite upwelling of knowledge, except where it throws a tangent into his intermittent analysis. In the course of his travels, he was assailed not by his surprisingly complacent interlocutors (they did not seem to be holding onto the grievances of the war, although it was uncanny for him to revisit some places where he had once been the invader), but by pests like bedbugs. Aside from physical afflictions like these, there is a peculiar untouchability in his reporter's persona, as if he were a sleepwalker through Galicia and the Soviet Union.

But he ended his travels by thinking that his socialist ideas were not being realized in every respect, and his optimism crashes every now and then in the reports. He also found, everywhere, the detritus of the war.

***

Excerpts from his reporting in Poland:

"Lemberg, die Stadt."

Es ist eine große Vermessenheit, Städte beschreiben zu wollen. [. . .] Städte verbergen viel und offenbaren viel, jede ist eine Einheit, jede eine Vielheit, jede hat mehr Zeit, als ein Berichterstatter, als ein Mensch, als eine Gruppe, als eine Nation.

and

Nationale und sprachliche Einheitlichkeit kann eine Stärke sein, nationale und sprachliche Vielfältigkeit ist es immer.

(November 22, 1924)

***

"Die Krüppel."

In Lemberg wurde der berühmte polnische Invalide begraben, über dessen demonstrativen, heroischen Selbstmord alle Zeitungen der Welt berichtet hatten. Dieser Invalide sprach in einer Versammlung seiner Kameraden über die gemeinsame Not, schloß mit einem Hochruf auf die polnische Republik und schoß sich eine Kugel durch den Kopf.

*

Wir haben Massengräber gesehen, verschimmelte Hände, ragend aus zugeschütteten Gruben, Oberschenkel an Drahtverhauen und abgetrennte Schädeldecken neben Latrinen. Wer aber weiß, wie Ruinen aussehen, die sich bewegen[. . .]? Wer hat schon gehende Krankenhäuser gesehen, eine Völkerwanderung der Stümpfe, eine Prozession der Überreste?

So war dieser Leichenzug.

"Karl I. in Galizien während der Gegenoffensive, die von Mitte Juli 1917 bis Anfang August andauerte. Hier trifft er am 22. Juli in Busk ein. Gemeinsam mit dem Generalobersten Böhm Ermolli schreitet Karl das Ehrenspalier ab"
(~ King Karl I in Galicia during the counteroffensive, which lasted from mid-July 1917 to the beginning of August. Here he arrives on July 22nd in Busk. With Colonel-General Böhm Ermolli, he paces down the honour guard.)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

*

[. . .] und über dem Leichenzug, knapp vor dem Knaben im weißen Hemd, der das mattschimmernde Metallkreuz trug, segelte eine dunkelblaue Wolke, zackig, wuchtig und schwer, und streckte vorne einen Zipfel aus, wie einen zerfetzten Zeigefinger, um den Krüppeln den Weg nach dem Friedhof zu weisen.

(November 23, 1924)

***

St. Zitakapelle in Dobrowlany, Galizien (1917)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Translations (amateurish, with help from Google Translate):
Lemberg [Lviv], the City
It is a great presumptuousness to want to portray a city. [. . .] Cities reveal much and conceal much, each is a unity, each is a plurality, each has more time than a reporter, than a human being, than a group, than a nation.
National and linguistic unity may be a strength; national and linguistic diversity is always one.

The Cripples
In Lemberg was buried the famous Polish invalid of whose demonstrative and heroic suicide all the newspapers in the world had reported. This invalid spoke in an assembly of his comrades about their common need, ended with a paean to the Polish republic, and shot a bullet through his brain.
We have seen mass graves, moldy hands, stretching out of filled-in pits, thighs on wire barriers and severed skulls beside latrines. But who knows what ruins look like that move? Who has seen walking hospitals before, a mass migration of stumps, a parade of remains?
This funeral procession was that.
And above the funeral procession, barely in advance of the lad in a white shirt who bore the dimly shining metal cross, sailed a dark blue cloud, ragged, massive and heavy, and stretched in front of itself a tip like a torn forefinger, to point the cripples along the way to the cemetery.

***

Sources:
Reisen in die Ukraine und nach Russland, by Joseph Roth. Jan Bürger, ed. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - English)
Frankfurter Zeitung (Wikipedia - English)
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - German)

* After rereading Jan Bürger's afterword in the edition that I have, it strikes me that perhaps I am misinterpreting. Roth apparently rarely thought he was out of material or inspiration:

"1926 gestand er den Redakteuren der Frankfurter Zeitung fast zwei Monate nach Ankunft in der Sowjetunion, dass er bis dahin noch gar nichts habe schreiben können. Dies habe mit der Überfülle und Intensität der neuen Eindrücke zu tun."

A Toast To Winter: Part I, Matthias Claudius

The days have become so short now, and as grey as if dredged up from the seabed on a hazy northern morning, and at -6°C so cold by the measure of early German winters, that one solution to the chill fog that invades the mind too might seem to be to dive into summer literature. But instead I will try the cure by 'hair of the dog,' and mention books and poems and plays that celebrate, or at least describe, winter.

FIRST, a poem. Matthias Claudius is a German poet whose subjects take him through the everyday of a time span that seems broader, because I think it is still so relatable, than the swathe of the 18th and 19th century (1740 to 1815) that he personally knew. Transformed into songs, like Der Mond ist aufgegangen and, in the realm of the classics, 'Death and the Maiden,' his verse made him familiar even in my Canadian-German household in the 1990s.

To illustrate the poem I have chosen here, a figure of Winter would be far more appropriate, gnarled and foreboding or gleefully hard as described. But instead I have chosen some rather more tame and cheerful pictures by Ludwig Richter.

***


Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen

Der Winter ist ein rechter Mann,
    Kernfest und auf die Dauer;
Sein Fleisch fühlt sich wie Eisen an,
    Und scheut nicht süß noch sauer.
War je ein Mann gesund, ist er's;
    Er krankt und kränkelt nimmer,
Weiß nichts von Nachtschweiß noch Vapeurs,
    Und schläft im kalten Zimmer.
Er zieht sein Hemd im Freien an,
    Und läßt's vorher nicht wärmen;
Und spottet über Fluß im Zahn
    Und Kolik in Gedärmen.
Aus Blumen und aus Vogelsang
    Weiß er sich nichts zu machen,
Haßt warmen Drang und warmen Klang
    Und alle warme Sachen.
Doch wenn die Füchse bellen sehr,
    Wenn's Holz im Ofen knittert,
Und um den Ofen Knecht und Herr
    Die Hände reibt und zittert;
Wenn Stein und Bein vor Frost zerbricht
    Und Teich' und Seen krachen;
Das klingt ihm gut, das haßt er nicht,
    Denn will er sich tot lachen. –
Sein Schloß von Eis liegt ganz hinaus
    Beim Nordpol an dem Strande;
Doch hat er auch ein Sommerhaus
    Im lieben Schweizerlande.
Da ist er denn bald dort bald hier,
    Gut Regiment zu führen.
Und wenn er durchzieht, stehen wir
    Und sehn ihn an und frieren.

*

A spur-of-the-moment translation by me. (The last verse is pure guesswork.)

A Song
to be sung behind the stove

Winter is an honest man,
Sound as a nut and long enduring;
His flesh feels firm as iron
And fears not sweet nor sour.

If ever a man was well, he is;
He falls sick or sickens never,
Night sweats or vapors knows he not,
And sleeps in a chilly chamber.

He pulls his shirt on in the open
And lets it not be warmed before;
And jeers at seepages of teeth
And colic of the bowels.

For flowers and the song of birds
He has no use whatever,
Hates warm throngs and hates warm tones
And hates warm things altogether.

Yet when the foxes bark in force,
The logs in the stove are crackling
And around the stove the man and master
Rub their hands and shiver;

When stone and bone crack in the frost
And ponds and lakes do shatter;
It pleases his ear, he hates it not,
For he wants to die of laughing.

His ice palace lies far away
At the North Pole near the shore;
And yet he has a summer house
In dear old Switzerland.

There he is — now there, now here —
To mount his regime well.
And when he passes through, we stand
And look at him and freeze.

***

Sources:
Wikipedia: "Matthias Claudius" (English language)
Spiegel Online: Project Gutenberg: "Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote - Kapitel 164" (German language)

The poem was written in 1782 — "Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen" (September 18, 2013) on the blog "Gedichtauswahl begründet"

Illustration of Der alte Turmhahn by Eduard Mörike
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1855
Via Wikimedia Commons

Auszug der Sennen
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1827
Oil on canvas
Via Wikimedia Commons

Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote
Lead pencil sketch by Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), Winter landscape with snowman and sleigh
via Wikimedia Commons

To the Now-Arrived, Cold Wintertide

A poem by Johannes Rist (with translations interlarded):

Auf die nunmehr angekommene kalte Winterszeit

Der Winter hat sich angefangen,
Der Schnee bedeckt das ganze Land,
Der Sommer ist hinweggegangen,
Der Wald hat sich in Reif verwandt.

Winter has itself begun, the snow bedecks the land entire; the summer has traversed away, the woods turned over into rime.

Die Wiesen sind von Frost versehret
Die Felder glänzen wie Metall,
Die Blumen sind in Eis verkehret,
Die Flüsse stehn wie harter Stahl.

The pastures are by frost consumed, the fields are glistening as if metal; the flow'rs into ice apostate, the rivers stand like hardy

The Fox and the Geese

Fox once came upon a meadow where a herd of lovely fat geese was sitting. He laughed and said, "I have come at the right time. You are sitting together so nicely that I can eat you up one after the other." The geese quacked with affright, leapt to their feet, and began to wail and plead piteously for their lives. Fox, however, refused to listen to them and said, "There will be no mercy here! You must die." At last one of them took heart and said, "If we poor geese are to lose our lives in the flower of youth, grant us one favour and allow us a prayer, so that we do not die with our sins upon us; and afterwards we will even set ourselves in a row so that you may always choose the plumpest." — "Very well," said Fox, "that is fair and it is a pious request. Pray; I will wait that long." So the first started a pretty long prayer, always "Gah, gah," and because she refused to stop, the second did not wait for her turn, but also started: "Gah, gah!" The third and fourth followed her example, and soon they were all quacking together. (And when they have prayed themselves out, this tale shall be told further; but they are still perpetually praying on.)

Original text: "Der Fuchs und die Gänse," Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Bayreuth: Gondrom Verlag, 1982)

THE END

The Term of Life

"Three studies of a donkey" by Gerard ter Borch the Elder (ca. 1612)
Watercolour and ink on paper?, in Museum het Rembrandthuis (Amsterdam)
From Wikimedia Commons

"Die Lebenszeit" from the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm:

***

Sunday: The Parable of the Rings

The central message of Lessing's Nathan der Weise is embodied by the famous Parable, which Nathan recounts to Saladin, who has asked him which is the true religion. In summary:

A man of the east possesses an opal ring whose quality it is to make the bearer agreeable to God and to man. This ring is passed down to his most dearly beloved son, independent of order of birth, etc., and so on down the generations. Eventually there is a father who loves all three of his sons equally, and has promised his ring to all three of them. So he asks an artist to make two identical rings. Then, when he is on his deathbed, he gives each of them a ring and a blessing, and then dies. Afterward his sons squabble over who received the true ring, but it is never discovered.

But this tale is not without holes in its logic. In some indignation, Saladin asks Nathan whether this is the answer to his question, and Nathan humbly replies, "Shall I ask forgiveness if I do not trust myself to choose among the rings, which our Father made in the intention that they bear no difference?" Saladin counters that the religions are different, so much so that even the food and drink diverge. But, says Nathan, the origins of these religions are the same, and these religions are histories that all describe the same thing. He then explains why he chooses to be Jewish if other religions are equally valid. The traditions of Judaism have been transmitted to him by his parents, and is it not natural that we would prefer, and trust in, a history that has been recounted to us by persons who have proven over and over again that they love us, and that they would not lie to us?

Another flaw is that all three of the sons are behaving quite disagreeably, which should not be the case if one of them had the ring. And this apparent plot-hole is addressed in the second part of the parable:

The brothers take their complaints to a judge. He asks if two of the brothers love the third more. They evidently do not, and the judge, waxing wroth, says that they only love themselves, and that none of the rings is the right one. This one ring has presumably been lost, and three replacements made. Even if the ring hadn't been lost, the father would not have wanted one of the sons to be favoured at the expense of the other two, or to endure the tyranny of the one ring any longer. So the judge, in a fine oration, exhorts the sons to find the true ring by practicing its virtues:

Es strebe von euch jeder um die Wette,
Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring' an Tag
Zu legen! komme dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut,
Mit herzlicher Verträglichkeit, mit Wohltun,
Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott
Zu Hilf'! Und wenn sich dann der Steine Kräfte
Bei euern Kindes-Kindern äussern:
So lad ich über tausend Jahre
Sie wiederum vor diesen Stuhl. Da wird
Ein weisrer Mann auf diesem Stuhle sitzen
Als ich; und sprechen.

In other words, "Let each of you contend to show the power of the stone in his ring! Come to the aid of this power with a mild spirit, with hearty concord, with beneficence, with the most profound submission to God. And if, then, the powers of the stones should become apparent in your children's children, I invite you again before this chair in a thousand years' time. Then a wiser man than I shall sit in this chair, and speak."

So, I suppose I should be commenting on this, but I prefer to leave the parable as is, and let the reader make up his own mind about it. I will only say that religious strife, in my view, has much more to do with the pursuit of power than with the pursuit of truth.

* * *

Tale in the Decameron (First Day, Novel III):
English, Italian

Nathan der Weise

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
First Published: 1779

On the train, as I was travelling around southern Germany this past week, I read Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), a play that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in 1778. From what I've heard, it's famous here, whereas it has never crossed my path in English books or articles. It is a true Enlightenment work, as a strong spirit of tolerance animates the whole, and a true 18th-century work, as the dramatist attempts to depict the most refined and exalted sentiments. To the extent that these sentiments are pure, unmixed, and histrionic, they are not true to life nor have ever been, and what has borne the vicissitudes of time and taste much better is the tolerance, as the question of peaceful coexistence among religions is as perplexing today as ever.

The hero of the story is Nathan, a wealthy Jewish merchant who lives in Jerusalem in the time of Saladin. He returns from a long journey to find that his home was on fire, but a Knight Templar had rescued his daughter. So he endeavours to make the acquaintance of the knight, and wants to present him with any assistance in his power. At first the knight is scornful, but then he is conquered by the magnanimity of Nathan, and agrees to become friends. Curd von Stauffen, for that is the rescuer's name, is then strangely attracted by the daughter whom he saved, and wants to marry her. One obstacle is that the daughter, with her finer instincts, is aware that she is not in love with the Templar. Another is that the two are brother and sister; Nathan suspects this and therefore holds back the parties who are eager to see them married, among them his daughter's maid, who believes that her mistress has no hope of heaven if she does not become a Christian. This plot element is disturbing, as (evidently) who knows what might have happened, but I think that Lessing weaves it in as part of the theme of a universal brotherhood and sisterhood.

There are many lesser threads to the narrative, for instance Saladin's debts as well as the friendship of Nathan and a dervish turned Saladin's treasurer, but the warp and woof of the plot are the way that prejudices are formed and disproven once the characters communicate and interact with one another. Representatives of each religion, Christianity and Judaism and Islam, evince generosity and forgiveness and loyalty, and the sole villain of the tale is the Patriarch, who is a hidebound hypocrite. Also, I am not sure why – though one explanation is that people at that time, socially as well as singly, took a very conscious aesthetic pleasure in fine morality, as they might in a fine painting or an exquisite dessert – but the characters in 18th-century moral tales (e.g. Samuel Richardson's Pamela) indulge in a great deal of public and mutual praise, and Nathan der Weise is no exception.

In my view, the play is weakened by central contradictions. For instance, Nathan is intended to be quiet, modest, and simple, but Lessing wants to display his character; so in a sense Nathan is the opposite of quiet, modest, and simple, as he must bare his every thought and feeling in the overstrained idiom of the stage. Also, he is intended to be a real character, founded on Moses Mendelssohn, and still the world of characters in which he is placed is composed of the artificial (and irritating) stock characters of 18th-century fiction and drama. The plot itself is not so original or restrained, either, given, for instance, the long-lost family device. But this device fits, again, into the theme of brotherhood; also, I surmise that mysterious parentage busied the minds of Lessing's contemporaries for a good reason, as people slept around secretly a great deal in those days, so myriad illegitimate children lived without knowing their parents or siblings.

* * *

Apart from the Parable of the Ring (which I wish to write about on Sunday), two passages struck me pleasantly in the play:

Templar: "Let time in its course, / And not curiosity, make our acquaintance."*
"Laßt die Zeit allmählich, / Und nicht die Neugier, unsre Kundschaft machen." (Act II, Sc. vii)

Sittah: "Every detail, too much / Despised, avenges herself, Brother."
"Jede Kleinigkeit, zu sehr / Verschmäht, die rächt sich, Bruder." (Act III, Sc. iv)


Nathan der Weise, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970


Nathan the Wise (Text in middling English translation)
Nathan der Weise (Text in original German)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Brief biography, overview of works, links)

*Approximate translations mine.