Gerd Gaiser

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Gerd Gaiser (15 September 1908 – 9 June 1976) was a German writer. His most important works are the expressionist war novel The Falling Leaf (1953) and The Final Ball published five years later.

Biography

Gerd Gaiser was born in Oberriexingen, the son of a Swabian Protestant minister. Gaiser initially attended the Protestant monastery schools in Schöntal and Urach after passing his state examination — together with Albrecht Goes. After graduating, he studied painting and art history in Stuttgart, Königsberg and Dresden. In 1933 he joined the National Socialist Teachers League. On October 19, 1937, he applied for membership in the NSDAP and was admitted retroactively to May 1 of the same year. In 1934, he received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen with a thesis on Renaissance and early Baroque sculpture in New Castile. He worked in the school service as an art teacher and wrote for the journals Das Innere Reich and Das Reich.[1]

In 1941, his book of poems Rider in the Sky was published.[lower-alpha 1] That same year, he was drafted into the air force of the Wehrmacht as a reserve lieutenant and served in Jagdgeschwader 27. A year later, he transferred to Jagdgeschwader 1 and later to the Jagdgeschwader 11. In 1943, a second volume, Song from the East, was to be published. On July 1, 1943, his promotion to First Lieutenant of the Reserve reached him and he transferred to the staff of Fighter Wing Romania as Third General Staff Officer. In 1944, he transferred to the Air Fleet of Upper Italy in the same position and saw the end of the conflict there as a prisoner of war.

In the post-war period Gaiser worked as a painter, from 1947 again as a teacher and from 1962 until his retirement in 1973 as a professor of art education at the Reutlingen College of Education.

In 1959, Gaiser married the painter Irene Widmann (1919–2011).

Honors

He was awarded the Fontane Prize in 1951, the Prize for Literature from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1955, and the Wilhelm Raabe Prize in 1956 and 1960. Gerd Gaiser was elected to the prestigious Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1956. He received the Immermann Prize in 1959.

Writings

Gaiser's Rider in the Sky stylistically echoed the Kleist enthusiasm of German modernism. "Gaiser's work," one critic stated, "clearly influenced by the experiences of his formative years in the ‘bündische Jugend’, reflects the post-war revival of interest in the work of Nietzsche, Moeller van den Bruck and the historical pessimism of Oswald Spengler; to this is added an Existentialist criticism of the age, strongly influenced by Heidegger."[2]

In his first novel A Voice Rises, Gaiser's skill in writing atmospheric moods is evident. Gaiser sets forth the perplexity of a German veteran who returns from a prisoner-of-war camp. A Voice Rises was published alongside other post-war novels on similar theme, such as Plievier's Stalingrad and Argonaut Journey in the Mark, by Elisabeth Langgässer.

Perhaps his strongest work appeared in 1953, the war book The Falling Leaf, in which he depicts the air war in kaleidoscopic fashion, with numerous cuts and shifting focus, depicting one week in the life of German aviators during the conflict. Based on his experiences as a pilot in Norway, The Falling Leaf was described by Hans Egon Holthusen as the best German novel to emerge from the Second World War. Gaiser was a representative of modern literature, who made use of symbolist as well as expressionist stylistic devices. "He moulds his topical material into poetic shape by skilful, stylized use of interior monologue and impressionism until it has transcended rapportage and become poetry."[3]

His following novel, The Ship in the Mountain, was praised by Friedrich Sieburg. The main character of the novel, the historian Hagmann, is a Jünger style anarch who sardonically comments on the village community of an imaginary town in South Germany, which pursues profit motives and thus stands for the greedy society of the economic miracle era.

However, the polarization and unambiguity, which were the hallmarks of the war novel, lead in Gaiser's two contemporary novels to the simplicity of the characters, who can only justify their action by being such. Wolfgang Grözinger said that the "focus of his work is not in the contemporary novel, but in a new experience of nature, into which historical space and fate break in again and again."[4] In his best-selling novel The Final Ball, the character Soldner, a returnee and high school teacher, can be recognized in his criticism of civilization as a revenant of the historian from The Ship in the Mountain.

Literary scholar Manfred Durzak made it clear that the novel was a "formally skilful epic mosaic of thirty short memoir monologues" that was "superior, from the point of view of technical bravura, to Böll's similarly structured novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine." Indeed, Gaiser's merits are undeniable, but Ursula Knapp highlights the shortcoming of Gaiser's large-scale prose: "In The Final Ball, too, two positions [are] antithetically opposed. Instead of a 'multiplicity of ways of looking at things' [...] only one evaluation of events comes into consideration anymore, namely that of the positive figures."[5] Knapp further suggests that the unambiguity offered by Gaiser can also be read as bindingness and the critique of civilization as a call for self-sufficiency.

The idiosyncratic choice of names for his characters is striking. On the appearance of Am Pass Nascondo in 1960, Der Spiegel stated: "As in all his books, Gaiser again excels as an oddball with names: His characters are called 'Rezabell', 'Gepa', 'Guscha' or 'Flux' and live in 'Puntmischur', 'Calvagora', 'Targmüns' or 'Vioms'". Der Spiegel located Gaiser in Jünger's school of writing. Stronger than a mythological or symbolic reference, as in Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs — despite demonstrable borrowings — is probably the creation of a surrealist interstice. In part, the fanciful names recall the youth movement and its initiation, including the assignment of a Scout's totem. Gaiser replied to Horst Bienek during the workshop discussions: "Naming is an apparently ancient way of coping. Man, in the second chapter of Genesis, takes possession of a world by giving out names."[6]

After the war, Gaiser had success as a writer and also enjoyed the esteem of conservative literary critics such as Holthusen and Sieburg. Like Gaiser, these authors lost influence as Group 47 gained in importance. Leading literary critics from this group, including Walter Jens[7] and Marcel Reich-Ranicki,[lower-alpha 2] openly opposed the possible establishment of Gaiser as a figurehead of postwar German literature and instead specifically promoted Heinrich Böll, whom they considered the more politically and literarily suitable author for this role.[lower-alpha 3] Gaiser's stories could be found in numerous anthologies and school reading books until the 1970s, and books by him were still regularly published in paperback editions until 1990. Since then he has fallen into relative oblivion.

Works

  • Reiter am Himmel (1941; poetry)
  • Zwischenland (1949; collection of short stories)
  • Eine Stimme hebt an (1950; novel)
  • Die sterbende Jagd (1953; novel)
  • Das Schiff im Berg (1955; novel)
  • Einmal und oft (1956; collection of short stories)
  • Gianna aus dem Schatten (1957; novella)
  • Aniela (1958; tale)
  • Schlußball (1958; novel)
  • Gib acht in Domokosch (1959; collection of short stories)
  • Revanche (1959; collection of short stories)
  • Sizilianische Notizen (1959)
  • Am Pass Nascondo (1960; collection of short stories)
  • Klassiker der modernen Malerei (1962; part of the series The Little Art Book)
  • Tempel Siziliens (1963; with Konrad Helbig)
  • Gazelle, grün. Erzählungen und Aufzeichnungen (1965)
  • Der Mensch, den ich erlegt hatte (1965; collection of short stories)
  • Merkwürdiges Hammelessen (1971; collection of short stories)
  • Der Motorradunfall (1972; collection of short stories)
  • Ortskunde (1977)

Translated into English

Bibliography

  • Siegfried Dangelmayr and Hannelore Quenel, "Gerd-Gaiser-Bibliographie. Mit Anmerkungen von Norbert Feinäugle," In: Gerd Gaiser zum Gedenken. Reutlingen: Padagogische Hochschule (1983), pp. 1–35.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ In the Soviet Occupation Zone, Rider in the Sky was placed on the list of literature to be discarded.
  2. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki's verdict is typical of Gaiser's changing fortunes as a writer. In 1963, in Der Fall Gerd Gaiser (The Case of Gerd Gaiser), he attested, despite all the criticism, that "in [...] fragments, especially in some episodes of the dying hunt, as well as in a number of smaller stories [... ] he is able to achieve an extraordinary intensity of representation."[8] In 2008, he declared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung: "After 42 years, I, for one, will not read these mostly rather awful books by Gaiser again." In 2010, he wrote in the same newspaper that "[...] this Gaiser [was] a National Socialist," and spoke of "his[s] unfortunately not entirely untalented book[s]."
  3. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki openly stated: "We who contributed to Böll's fame saw no other way out. There was no other way. The conservative critics wanted to make Gerd Gaiser the figurehead of literature. The anti-Semitic, ex-Nazi writer. We could not allow that. We agreed on Böll as the opposing candidate. There were others who were better. But they were not suitable."[9]
  4. ↑ Published in the United States as The Last Squadron (1956).
  5. ↑ Published in England as The Last Dance of the Season (1960).

Citations

  1. ↑ Klee, Ernst (2007). Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, p. 172.
  2. ↑ Bullivant, Keith (1987). Realism Today: Aspects of the Contemporary West German Novel. Leamington Spa: Oswald Wolff Books, p. 20.
  3. ↑ Bennett, E. K.; Waidson, H. M. (1970). A History of the German Novelle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 297.
  4. ↑ Grözinger, Wolfgang (2004). "Gerd Gaiser: Das Schiff im Berg, Dezember 1955." In: Panorama des internationalen Gegenwartsromans: Gesammelte Hochland-Kritiken 1952-1965. Schöningh, p. 142.
  5. ↑ Knapp, Ursula (2002). Der Roman der fünfziger Jahrezur Entwicklung der Romanästhetik in Westdeutschland. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, p. 44.
  6. ↑ Bienek, Horst (1962). Werkstattgespräche mit Schriftstellern. München: Carl Hanser, p. 214.
  7. ↑ Jens, Walter (25. November 1960). "Gegen die Überschätzung Gerd Gaisers," Die Zeit. Retrieved 15 January 2016. Reprinted in Hans Mayer, ed., Deutsche Literaturkritik, 4: Vom Dritten Reich bis zur Gegenwart (1933–1968). Frankfurt am Main: Ausg. Fischer-Taschenbuchverlag (1978), pp. 604–11.
  8. ↑ Reich-Ranicki, Marcel (1963). ""Der Fall Gerd Gaiser. In: Der Monat, No. 180, pp. 68–84.
  9. ↑ Wackwitz, Stephan (May 29, 2010). "Nachdenken über MRR," Taz. Retrieved 3 June 2010. See also Becker, Rolf; Hellmuth Karasek (2. Januar 1989). "Ich habe manipuliert, selbstverständlich! Kritiker Marcel Reich-Ranicki über seine Rolle im Literaturbetrieb und seinen Abgang von der „FAZ“," Der Spiegel, pp. 140–46.

References

Bausinger, Hermann (1983). "Gerd Gaisers Heimkehr ins Zeitlose – eine Skizze zur Nachkriegsliteratur," Schwäbische Heimat, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 34–37.
Bienek, Horst (1976). Werkstattgespräche mit Schriftstellern. München: Ausg. dtv, pp. 256–72.
Bronsen, David (1965). "Unterdrückung des Pathos in Gerd Gaisers Die Sterbende Jagd," The German Quarterly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3, pp. 310–17.
Buesch, Thomas A. (1972). "The Poetic Language of Gerd Gaiser," The German Quarterly, Vol. XLV, No. 1, pp. 57–69.
Bullivant, Keith (1980). Between Chaos and Order, the Work of Gerd Gaiser. Stuttgart: Heinz.
Gaiser, Gerd (1967). "The Present Quandary of German Novelists." In: Robert R. Heitner, ed., The Contemporary Novel in German: A Symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Göbel, Karl (1961). "Das Bild unserer Gesellschaft in Romanen von Gerd Gaiser und Heinrich Böll," Die Pädagogische Provinz, Vol. XV, pp. 370–76.
Grimm, Reinhold (2001). "Gerd Gaisers „Reiter am Himmel“ – Bemerkungen zu seinem Roman „Die sterbende Jagd“." In: Ursula Heukenkamp, ed., Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1961). Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 21–33.
Hohoff, Curt (1962). Gerd Gaiser, Werk und Gestalt. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Holthusen, Hans Egon (1976). "Scripta Manent," Ensemble. Internationales Jahrbuch für Literatur, No. 7, pp. 182–86.
Hilton, Ian (1966). "Gerd Gaiser." In: Brian Keith-Smith, ed., German Men of Letters. Vol. 4, Essays on Contemporary German Literature. London: Oswald Wolff.
Hilton, Ian (1970). "The Narrative Architecture of Gerd Gaiser's Novel Schlußball." In: Ralph Willis Baldner, ed., Proceedings: Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, Vol. XXI, pp. 79–84.
Hilton, Ian (1980). "Mythic Consciousness in Gerd Gaiser's Die sterbende Jagd." In: Derek Attwood, Alan Best, Rex Last, eds., For Lionel Thomas: A Collection of Essays Presented in His Memory. Department of German: University of Hull.
Hülse, Erich (1965). "Gerd Gaiser: Schlussball." In: Rolf Geissler, ed., Moglichkeiten des modernen deutschen Romans. Frankfurt: Moritz Diesterweg, pp. 161–90.
Keller, Otto (1965). Gerd Gaiser: Am Paß Nascondo. Munich: Oldenbourg.
Margetts, John (1985). "Gerd Gaiser's Schlußball: A Reappraisal (In memory of Erika Wirtz)," Oxford German Studies, Vol. XVI, pp. 122–49.
Nonnenmann, Klaus (1963). Schriftsteller der Gegenwart. Olten: Walter-Verlag.
Peitsch, Helmut (1995). "Towards a History of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung": East and West German War Novels of the 1950s," Monatshefte, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 3, pp. 287–308.
Schaufelberger, Anna-Regula (1974). Das Zwischenland der Existenz bei Gerd Gaiser. Bonn: Bouvier.
Thomas, R. Hinton; Wilfried van der Will (1968). The German Novel and the Affluent Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Vögtlin, Bernhard Karl (2004). Gerd Gaiser: Ein Dichter in seiner Zeit. Marburg: Tectum.

External links

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