The Tower, by Uwe Tellkamp, may appear to be a monolithic, singularly heroic literary act by a surgeon and survivor of the indignities of the German Democratic Republic. This man, who lived to tell the tale, so to speak, penned an epic about a bourgeois family which has retreated into a kind of inner emigration in the crumbling but stately villas of the posh Weißer Hirsch neighborhood in Dresden. But The Tower is much more complex than that, and intellectually rich. The story, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, focuses on three men of various ages and various levels of complicity with the putrefying system of 1980s GDR, and it is now (finally!) available in print in English translation.
Who are these three men? Christian is a pimply and ambitious young student who dreams of following his father, Richard, into the field of medicine; he ultimately signs up for three years of military service in the hopes of securing a spot as a medical student. His efforts to mimic Party loyalty are largely successful until his collapse as a soldier. His father Richard’s 50th birthday party opens the novel and initially Richard appears equally eloquent and morally blameless. However, numerous affairs and a secret second family make him a pawn in the hands of the Stasi. Finally, Meno, Christian’s maternal uncle—something of a mentor to the teenage boy, and a former botanist—works as an editor at one of the GDR’s few high-quality imprints that frequently ran short on paper, rounding out the trio of protagonists.
Tellkamp’s multi-faceted book not only documents the slow demise of this once-illustrious family, it records the state of affairs in a country that no longer exists—a “lost” country—without slipping into misplaced nostalgia. In part, this is accomplished by emphasizing the brutality of army life and the willingness to repress the mounting protests in 1989. Christian is no longer able to maintain his façade of party allegiance after his unit is ordered to attack a group of demonstrators that October, which includes his mother. Those well-versed in GDR cultural history may be able to read The Tower as a roman à clef—the Old Man of the Mountain strongly resembles Franz Führmann—but special cultural or historical knowledge is not required to appreciate the impressive and occasionally surreal collage of scenes and character studies from a country that is not mourned but most certainly vanished.
One reason for The Tower’s length (unusual even by German standards) is Tellkamp’s tendency to describe these scenes in minute detail, using nebulously lyrical, almost flowery language. The novel spans seven years, but like Proust’s Recherche, devotes long stretches to single anecdotes. Michael Mitchell does a masterful job of translating Tellkamp’s prose in a nuanced and balanced manner without sacrificing reading fluidity. His sensitive rendering also makes it possible to follow Tellkamp’s stylistic shift from a kind of bourgeois realism à la Thomas Mann in the first half of the novel (“The Pedagogical Province”) to echoes of so-called socialist realism in the second (“Gravity”).
Under this socialist-realist sensibility falls the short Chapter 53 (page 750), devoted to the mechanics and aesthetics of the laundry wringer:
The ironing-woman, full-bosomed with piggy eyes and reddish down on the backs of her fingers and her upper lip, brusquely instructed them in how to operate the machine, after she’d checked their time in a notebook and ticked them off with a sharp pencil stroke […] Anne nodded, pressed a second button and now it sounded as if someone—or something—were being tortured, torment and pain were flying over the solid beechwood, worn by decades of use, of the wringer, shuttling to and fro, the boulders in the box thundering and rattling, a convulsive tremor from the transmission belts running over driving wheels on the side of the machine, obeying the blind, unfeeling voltage commands of a motor. For a moment there was nothing to do.
On the other hand, one of Meno’s diary entries, reminiscing of better times, falls distinctly into a bourgeois realist camp:
It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating the Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions—Classics!
Although Uwe Tellkamp became a household name in Germany after The Tower was awarded the German Book Prize in 2008, it was not at all assured that his thousand-page epic would ever be translated into English. The vagaries of the Anglophone publishing industry were such that all the major publishers took a glance and then decided it probably would not be worth it. Only after the up-and-coming eBook publisher Frisch & Co. had received Mitchell’s translation did Penguin purchase the rights to a print edition. The likely and deserved success of The Tower in English should serve as a lesson for publishers hesitant to commission translations of long and complex novels. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is a remarkable remembrance of a country lost to history—a great Christmas gift or a tome to tide you over through a long winter.
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Bradley Schmidt is a translator of contemporary German poetry and prose, an adjunct instructor at Leipzig University, and an Assistant Editor at Asymptote.
Image via Suhrkamp
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