Earthly Creatures: voice and language

The distinguished novelist Stevie Davies has just published her latest work called Early Creatures, described as a riveting, epic historical novel set in 1940’s Germany. Here she listens to the lost voices of the period.

‘Language thinks for me,’ wrote the Jewish humanist Victor Klemperer in his brave and brilliant The Language of the Third Reich (1947). It ‘dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being, the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it … words can be like tiny doses of arsenic’. Swallow enough of the propaganda-infected discourse of Nazism and your tongue becomes toxic, a bearer of poison. ‘How effortlessly people with harmless average dispositions adapt to their environment … clichés do indeed soon take hold of us’. In a terror-state, mass-suggestion breeds toadies and sycophants.

In history as in literature, we yearn to hear people’s voices. A novelist is a listener. And an English novelist must seek equivalents for what she hears spoken in German. With the all-male potentates of the Third Reich, from Hitler to Goebbels, Goering to Himmler, there is plenty to go on. Here they strut on film across the public stage to the lectern, flailing their arms, punching the air, shrieking nto microphones. The radio-waves reverberate with elite brayings. The worst of the worst, I’ve found, is Roland Freisler, President of the People’s Court, filmed at the show-trials of the conspirators who failed to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. ‘You dirty old man,’ he barks at defendant Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, whom he shortly intends to hang (slowly), ‘what are you doing fiddling with your trousers?’ The language of the big beasts is replete with invective, insult, commands, threats, tirades. Watch the trial excerpts on film and see how long it takes you to hit the mute button.

Resistance

‘Their voices, my God, their voices!’ wrote the German dissident Theodor Haecker in his journal for April 1940. ‘I am overwhelmed by all that they betray. Their deadness … The stinking corpse of a vox humana.’ In Chapter 13 of Earthly Creatures, the radio is on in schoolteacher Magdalena Arber’s East Prussian lodgings. Magda has already come some way towards political resistance:

Dr Goebbels was attacking Magdalena’s new radio, lashing it with his fury, but the radio was fighting back. The crackling effect was reinforced by blizzards of interference, for it was one of the cheap models labelled Goebbels’ Snout. The best you could say for this flimsy fabrication of Bakelite, cardboard, and cloth was that it made a noise. The vulpine face and rigid gestures of the Imperial Propaganda Minister were all visible to your mind’s eye. The wagging forefinger, the pumping arm, the rancorous stare.

But where are the women’s voices? We can ask all we like. Women in the German Reich were generally as important as they were ‘racially pure’ and fertile. In a brilliantly acid satirical book by the dissident Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education under the Nazis (1938), the author quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘the one absolute aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.’ And what a mother! The National Socialist mother, as a female regional leader writes in The Female Educator (1937), must practise ‘weapon-bearing motherliness’. What will shoot out from between your legs will be baby soldiers for the Fatherland, living weapons.

Ecstatic

On extant newsreels we behold the ecstatic female faces at Party rallies, heiling Hitler and weeping with helpless passion, as if they’d all pile into bed with him without a moment’s hesitation. And they would. As witness the sexually explicit love-letters women sent to the Führer, offering him their services and their wombs. As witness the Lebensborn foundation where (if you were blonde enough and pedigreed Jew-free) you got the chance to be fucked by a splendid young SS-man contributing his pure sperm to the Thousand Year Reich.

What a gift to the novelist letters, diaries, memoirs and – especially – verbatim interviews are. Shortly after the War, Jewish refugee Louis Hagen returned to Germany to look up folk he’d known earlier. These interviews, taken down verbatim, were published in 1951 as Follow My Leader and republished in 2011 as Ein Volk, Ein Reich. When I met Hildegard Trutz (nee Koch), I knew I had the model for the Nazi ladies of my fictional East Prussian village of Alt Schönbek. The provincial life Magdalena encounters when she goes east as a teacher is old-fashioned, hospitable, kind – except when it isn’t. The Struppat women, Edith and Dagmar, represent diehard female Nazism. The novel’s satire skewers them. I heard them speak loud and clear through Louis Hagen’s transcripts.

Here is Mrs Trutz bragging to Hagen:

I was pointed out as a perfect example of the Nordic woman, for besides my long legs and my long trunk, I had the broad hips and pelvis built for childbearing which are essential for producing a large family … Like Father I could never stick Jews. Long before our classes in race theory, I thought they were simply disgusting. They are so fat, they all have flat feet and they can never look you straight in the eye.

Hildegard records relief at the death of her pious Christian mother, ‘mad about the Bible and all that sort of thing … She was simply a burden on the community.’ She describes her virtuous coupling at a Lebensborn home with an ash-blond soldier to produce a purebred baby boy: ‘I suckled him for the first fortnight and then he was removed.’

Insanity

No novelist can hope to improve on the insanity of real life – but I did my best. Who needs parody when language speaks for itself? In writing Earthly Creatures, I felt confident to elaborate on the linguistic riches bequeathed by the interviewees. Edith Struppat is ‘a human loud hailer’.

Big and buxom, square-jawed and humourless, Mrs Struppat was relentless in the marching of her feet and the marching of her mouth.

Mother of seven and grandmother of thirteen, Mrs Struppat describes the family ceremony of dedication to the Führer of the latest Aryan babe, carried not in a cradle but on:

a bona fide Teutonic shield made of cardboard, such as the Knights of old used to dedicate their infants … My daughter knitted a version of the Teutonic Knights’ helmet, with crocheted wings coming out, and the baby was wearing this helmet on his head, can you imagine? So sweet … Obviously a new-born baby could not be expected to wear a tin replica. Not good for his head. Of course you have not had babies, Miss Arber, so you may not have heard of the fontanelles? …

Quite right, Mrs Struppat: Magda has no intention of serving as a broodmare. I learned much from Hagen’s verbatim testimonies. For the novelist, it’s very much the throwaway remark, the blurt, the jabbering of commonplaces, that make a reader feel: Oh yes, I recognize that, I know her. Mrs Struppat and her snooping daughter Dagmar lack something that might have tempered their madness: humour. We, eighty years later, laugh aloud, and in that laughter we disown their folly, delusion, evil, fear and vanity. And yet … I found that, in satirizing these manic figures, sympathy might justly creep in. Dagmar for instance:

The poor girl had been fed from the cradle on a diet of drivel. She was suckled on Edith Struppat’s tainted milk. The Band of German Maidens. The wireless. The newsreels. Her teachers. Festivals. And it had all fermented in the vat of her body until puberty unleashed it.

Contradictions

In interviews conducted by Alison Owings in Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (1993), we hear the voices of Nazi woman recorded decades after the War, interpret their stammerings and withholdings, note their inner contradictions and lies or, on the other hand, reflect the trauma they underwent.

Listen in to Mrs Ellen Frey (178) who’d adored Hitler, marched with the Band of German Maidens, believed official dogma and had a whale of a time. Mrs Frey acknowledges that despite all,

I am, if I am honest, in my inner being not against this Hitler … I must say, I’ve never been to Dachau. I should go sometime, I always say no, I don’t want to see it and so on. And because I hear from good friends, from earlier, who say everything in Dachau is … Well, one must not say what they all say …’

Thank you, Mrs Frey, for your incoherent syntax: If I am honest, I should, I don’t want to, one must not say. We should be grateful for Mrs Frey’s non sequiturs, her evasive swerves and swallowings, flashes of ecstatic memory, doors opening onto long vistas of past pride and present shame. Likewise Mrs Anna Rigl who performs the characteristic ploy of hoisting herself with her own petard, bleating that ‘If they [the Nazis] didn’t like the Jews, they should just lock them up, but not gas them.’ Just ‘take their jewelry and possessions and so on’, that would have been so much better. Even more than the diaries and memoirs I studied for Earthly Creatures, interviews echoed the living voice, its dissimulations, its simultaneous expression and repression of an everlasting turmoil of emotion.

Our language, as Haecker wrote, ‘betrays’ us. And what counts as language anyway? When Magdalena reaches Alt Schönbek and meets the mute disabled twin, Flora Daschke, threatened with liquidation as an Untermensch, she writes home to her father and aunt:

I’m learning to get the gist of what Flora is telling me. Well, I think I am. And she’s lovely! And I love her! … There are many languages, Dad, aren’t there? You’ve taught me that. The body speaks. It has its truth. The face speaks. The tilt of the head. The hands. They all have a language. And so I have the sense that Flora is speaking to me and wants me to understand, and that it is my job to decrypt what she is saying, by listening with the whole of me. Does that make sense?

Stevie Davies’ novel Earthly Creatures is published by Honno. It is available from all good bookshops.