A worthy winner of the 2018 Hans Fallada Prize, which recognizes works of contemporary German literature tackling recent sociopolitical issues, Paula appears in English in an outstandingly sharp translation by Katy Derbyshire. Already one of the foremost translators working from German, Derbyshire recently embarked on a new venture: V&Q Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to translations of “remarkable writing from Germany.” With Paula among its first titles, the bar has already been set incredibly high, which bodes well for readers of translated literature fascinated by the subtleties of language and the boundless ways it can be used to communicate.
Paula is, in essence, all about language—its power, its nuances, and what we are faced with in its absence. In her translator’s note, Derbyshire mentions the difficulties presented by the opening lines of the book: “a sentence and a half that took over a year to translate.” The key to these lines—and to Paula as a whole—is schweigen, which Derbyshire elegantly renders into English as “deliberately remaining silent.” Hoffmann’s entire memoir is built on this particular way of withholding language that can only be described in the very same words it refuses to yield. Paula is a deep and affecting exploration of a mystery posed early on by the author: “how words can be forged out of what has been silenced.”
The ever-present silence emanates from Paula, Hoffmann’s maternal grandmother. Born in 1915, Paula grew up with her brother Karl and two sisters, Theresia and Marie, in a rural Swabian village that “had ceased to exist” in the eighteenth century but managed to claw its way back to life enough for Paula to spend a relatively happy childhood there. Her grandmother’s story, our narrator tells us, can be condensed into five words: “He died, in the war.” The “he” is ostensibly Paula’s brother, Karl, but as we later find out it may also refer to one of the two other young men she lost during the Second World War. One was certainly her fiancé; the other, who died earlier, had perhaps been engaged to her.
Whichever loss it was, whatever grief occurred, a trauma that the young Paula experienced causes her in later years to descend into an unbreakable silence that encompasses the death of her firstborn child, the identity of her daughter’s father, and all the stories she could possibly tell about her life. The result of this oppressive silence is a spell of alcoholism, an obsession with prayer, and a total dependence on the daughter with whom she cannot properly communicate. When Paula becomes a grandmother, she smothers her daughter’s daughter—in whom she seems to recognize something of herself—with a lethal combination of protective love and silence. Gradually, her silence extends to these later generations, until all three women are emotionally shattered by their inability to speak of certain topics.
Although Paula contains elements of fiction, the narrator is clearly Hoffmann herself, which assures the novel’s categorization as autofiction. The genre is sometimes criticized for its awkward position, landing somewhere between fiction and memoir in a way that can leave readers feeling a little uncomfortable. What in the narrative is fiction, and what is fact? In autofiction, we often simply have to accept not knowing. Hoffmann the narrator acknowledges potential critics early on, announcing that “I am an unreliable narrator . . . you can rely on me to make up everything I no longer know, everything I’ve never known, everything I have to know.” It’s a clear stance that in Paula is buttressed by the use of qualifications such as “probably” or “might have been,” and Hoffmann’s frequent discussion of fiction’s capabilities. “Fiction is the only way to close the gaps between image and image, fragment and fragment,” she writes, and this is exactly what she does in Paula—imagine what might occupy the blank spaces in the story of her grandmother’s life.
Paula is presented as a series of vignettes arranged in a loose chronological order, beginning with the narrator’s childhood memories but constantly looping back to her present-day writing process and occasionally making forays into her grandmother’s past. Throughout her life, Paula refused to speak about the moments that had come to define her, withholding critical information about their paternal lineage from her daughter and granddaughter. What appears at first to be the narrator’s attempt to uncover the secret of her grandfather’s identity quickly runs out of road and instead becomes a painful meditation on her relationship with her grandmother. From viewing her as a protector—the only person who climbs into bed with her when she suffers nightmares as a child—our narrator grows to resent, even hate, her grandmother during her teenage years. She feels smothered by Paula’s religion, her tendency to enter her room without knocking, the way she seems to watch her every move. Torn between feelings of love and hatred, and haunted by her failure to understand her grandmother’s abiding silence (Paula, we are told early on, died in 1997 at the age of eighty-two, taking her untold story with her), the narrator attempts to reckon with this incredibly complex, fraught relationship through her writing.
The fragmented structure of Paula produces an effect akin to rifling through a box of photographs—an action often taken by the narrator as she searches for the key to her grandmother’s past. Photos, she concludes, are nothing but concrete proof of existence in a particular moment; they show only what has been captured without telling any stories or offering conclusions. There is, however, something compelling about the visual medium that Hoffmann seems to be trying to emulate in writing. Though brief, the narrator’s descriptions of her childhood town, the farmhouse where she and her family once lived, the rural surroundings of her grandmother’s youth, and even the mountain resort where Paula holidays each year with her sister Marie, are all utterly exquisite. They capture the essence of a place in a few well-chosen images: “Wanted” posters of RAF terrorists tacked to the door of the town hall, the patterns in a pile of folded aprons, the view framed by a single window at dawn. Such small but salient details form a cumulative collection of images that in turn creates an almost cinematic sense of place.
Evocative though these descriptions may be—particularly when contrasting the “vastness” of a landscape with the small, unchanging, and suffocating components of a family home—Hoffmann really excels in crafting emotional atmosphere. The deliberate silence produced by Paula and “carried down generations” by her daughter and granddaughter, as if it were an inherited disease, is tangible, so thickly cloying that at times it becomes almost unbearable. A terrible, heavy silence surrounds family mealtimes and evenings spent in front of the television, both of which are captured with such authenticity that readers will shudder. One of the most memorable passages involves the narrator and her mother sitting at the dining room table, their conversation interrupted by Paula’s untimely—and unwanted—entrance, which rapidly leads to a painfully awkward not-quite-argument. There is an aspect of delicious horror to scenes like this one; our narrator’s emotions are pitched so perfectly that it is impossible not to feel what she feels.
Even when silence is not specifically her subject, Hoffmann homes in on details that serve to underline the contrast between what is revealed and what is withheld. A mysterious bandage on Paula’s leg hides an unexplained injury, while her concealed hand moves constantly and compulsively inside the apron pocket where she keeps her rosary. One day, in a more potent image, the narrator watches from a hiding place as her grandmother drives a spade into compact, winter-hardened earth. Seemingly a simple domestic scene, it illustrates Paula’s acceptance of manual labour, a remnant—just like her cooking and proclivity for making preserves—of a humble childhood. But on a more metaphorical level (and one that instantly recalls Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”), it puts Paula and her granddaughter in almost identical positions: the one struggles with a spade, the other with a pen.
It is a testament to Derbyshire’s extraordinary skill that all the tension Hoffmann creates is so impeccably transported. Each word, it seems, has been precisely chosen both for its individual meaning and sense of rhythm. The result is a melodious, effortlessly flowing translation which, like the original, manages to convey a lifetime of emotions in just a few words.
Even in this seamless English version, Paula retains some distinctly German elements, skillfully managed by Derbyshire with a decision to retain the excerpts of Swabian dialect from the original text. For our narrator, the Swabian spoken by Paula is “a language in which I was never really at home even though I moved around in it, in which I never felt safe because I couldn’t write it, because it differed from what I thought was beautiful when I read it, when I heard it.” As someone who now conducts her life in Austrian German, I could understand the scattered words of Swabian only when reading them aloud, turning shapes on a page into spoken forms that suddenly contained meaning. Inserting this unfamiliar language literally and effectively captures Hoffmann’s struggle to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant.
Although Paula was herself silent—opposed to records played too loudly, to unnecessary conversation, and to the asking of “too many questions”—both narrator and reader come to a small but shattering realization: maybe she was unnerved by silence. Maybe, in her self-imposed emotional exile, she was deeply, unutterably lonely. There are hints that this insight has come too late—the book, we know, was written many years after Paula’s death, and the narrator refers repeatedly to how she understands things now in a way she didn’t at the time. As this idea forms, Paula—who has mostly seemed an oppressive, forbidding, emotionally icy figure, the mainstay of a claustrophobic childhood—is occasionally glimpsed as frighteningly frail. Drawing from this, as well as from the differing yet linked experiences of her family’s three female generations, Hoffmann eventually begins questioning the place that women are granted in society and what effect such unspoken social rules might have had on Paula. “Perhaps the options were whore or wife, goddess or witch,” she muses. But note that this is only a “perhaps”: nothing, after all, can ever be certain in this book.
Paula, which plays with concepts of identity, language, and fiction in a thoughtful yet accessible way, crosses the bounds between fiction and fact and enters into a discussion of what memories ultimately mean to us. As a result, this slender book is perhaps an example of autofiction in its purest form. Towards the end, we find the narrator “asking myself if I’m allowed to write this story the way I’m writing it”; surely any reader would answer that yes, she is. Always upfront about the fact that her narrator’s memories cannot be the objective truth, and that her grandmother’s past has been constructed from the scant evidence of faded photographs, Hoffmann poses a series of unanswerable questions about identities. “What makes a person?” she asks, “And how can a woman add up . . .?” This concern with what makes us into the people we become is particularly fascinating in the case of a woman like Paula, who lived through one of the most intense and lasting periods of silencing Europe has ever known.
With its shattered form and elusive genre, Paula proves slippery. Its characters are hard to pin down, and its events are relayed to us by a narrator who freely and frequently admits she is unreliable. Yet even as it is by turns chilling, frustrating, and utterly heartrending, it is a book that is both absorbing to read and an important demonstration of language’s power to create, shape, and even take away. “There is no language for nothingness,” writes Hoffmann. But maybe, with this translation of Paula, she and Derbyshire have offered us one.
