348
PARTISAN REVIEW
dialects , and the tragic aftermath of WorId War II . However, what
is so frustrating about
After the Fires
is that at the end of its four hun–
dred pages we are left with no better understanding of the deep–
seated reasons behind the turns that German literature has taken. It
would seem that Demetz's crucial error in trying to formulate a con–
sistent theory to account for the breadth and turmoil unique to Ger–
man writing lies mostly in his reluctance to ask the simplest of ques–
tions: Why?
The book's most interesting chapter by far is that on the
literature of the Holocaust . Here Demetz not only offers compelling
insights into the complexity of taking any kind of academic stance
. towards such suffering; he also illuminates the central problem the
survivors had to ask themselves about the choices open to them in
reconstructing their literature and the very language with which it
was written :
We asked ourselves whether it would not be nobler to be inar–
ticulate in another language rather than articulate in Ger–
man - whether we should escape into and adopt Czech, Polish,
Yiddish, or Hebrew, or go on, against all reason , to cultivate
German in a secret act of basic resistance , believing that we were
the true speakers, as long as we were able to speak at all, and that
the killers were infecting, misusing, raping a pure idiom.
As Demetz points out, there were almost as many different answers
to the problem as there were writers. However, what is important is
the dilemma itself and the pressure it brought to bear on anyone
writing in German, for, as the author subtly observes: "If it is difficult
to form an English sentence about what happened, it is still more dif–
ficult in German."
Such acute thinking is precisely what is lacking in the rest of his
book. Although Demetz's catalogues of the important and influential
texts of the last three decades would be useful to any student or
bookstore browser, he relies too much on simple plot summaries
rather than close readings. Chapters devoted to single authors such
as Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, GiinterGrass, and Peter Handke
fare a little better, but even here he fails to penetrate to the deeper
cultural complexities that make a Swiss writer Swiss, or what an
Austrian's relation might be to the empire's long history. Instead,
Demetz chooses to devote separate chapters to cultural background
while elsewhere mixing writers from the four countries under the
general headings of poetry, drama, and fiction.
