Translated by Mike Mitchell
Well, I certainly exercised my muscles reading this one! My biceps have been toned by a 1004 page chunkster, published by Allen Lane, though for those who prefer e-books, it is also available from Frisch & Co.
The Tower is an elaborate and intricate novel, requiring serious attention. It doesn’t read quickly and is as good a work out for the brain as for the biceps. I suspect it will spawn many a Ph. D. I took six weeks to read it (with interruptions – I found I needed some light relief now and again) but I can’t think of a more appropriate book to review on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
Tellkamp’s novel charts the last five year’s of the GDR, mainly through the experience of the Hoffmann family: Richard, the father, Christian, the son, and Meno, Christian’s uncle. It starts in the run-up to Richard’s 50th birthday gathering, a set-piece which Germanists will recognise is a nod to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Further nods are evident in the long, complex sentences (which the translator Mike Mitchell has chosen to preserve) and the echo of the novel’s subtitle. Tellkamp’s scope is grander than Mann’s though. This is not only a family going to ruin, but a whole society, and that without an iota of Ostalgie.
Not that Tellkamp blasts with both barrels blazing. His is an intellectual dismantling of the state. Richard is a surgeon; Meno a literary editor; Christian is at the start a high school pupil, wishing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They have as comfortable an existence as possible in the GDR. They live in the Tower – a district, on the heights of Dresden, a kind of intellectual space, cushioned in some respects from the crass realities of life in the GDR. This allows them to enjoy their social gatherings, their musical recitals, and the relative freedom to make the state the butt of their jokes.
Their ‘freedom’ is but an illusion. The state is everywhere and chinks in personal armour ruthlessly exploited. Richard has sired a second family and the Stasi uses that to exert pressure on him to become an informer. His refusal has repercussions on the whole family but most particularly on Christian, a Tonio Kröger figure (more allusions to Mann), who pays the price of his father’s missteps and his own youthful naivety. His story, which contains elements of the author’s own, is of a person who must be crushed. Extended army service, it transpires, is an excellent vehicle for such uncompromising outcomes.
Of the three, Meno fairs best. A zoologist by training, he now works as an editor for a prestigious publisher. While there is no doubting his love of literature, and his recognition of literary talent, he is not the man to disregard state policy and he continues to censor the works of those he publishes. Nor will he defend the talented female author, Judith Schevola, even when she is threatened with expulsion from the Writer’s Union and the loss of her livelihood.
The scientist in him makes Meno a keen observer, and parts of the novel take the form of his personal diary and notebooks. I’ll be honest here. I dreaded those italicised sections. So much detail equalled too much detail for me. Although I resisted the urge to skim, these sections often felt like a call to admire the author’s descriptive prowess. Instead they killed the pace ….
That’s not to say that there isn’t some skillful writing to be enjoyed and admired. The stealing of the trees for the hospital’s inter-departmental Christmas tree contest is priceless; the visit to the Leipzig Book Fair illuminating. (Actually, a Meno entry, so they are not all tedious). Christian’s experiences are harrowing, as the state reduces him to the no-one indicated by his nickname, Nemo. For those who love nothing better than layer upon layer of literary intertextuality, Tellkamp offers many, many more than I could register.
Behind it all, however, is life as it was lived in the GDR. The mundanity, the shortages, the farce, the corruption, the fear of the hidden informer. Lives made and broken at the whim of a faceless state. It is only in the final 50 pages, or as holes in Iron Curtain appear in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that dissenting voices find the courage for public protest. The army is deployed to control the masses. This state is not about to surrender.
But then, all at once …
The clocks struck, struck 9 November, ‘Germany, our Fatherland’, their chimes knocking on the Brandenburg Gate:
The rest they say is history.
Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) 
Sounds like a book that with some editing could have been even better.
Editing would have certainly made it more dramatic, and, interestingly, the German audio book restricts itself to Christian’s thread. That will do it!
The (to-me) wearisome descriptive passages are obviously missing from the TV series, which I saw earlier in the year. I recommend that. Have bought myself the DVD and look forward to rewatching.
But I’m not sure the novel needs to be editted ..I know, after all I’ve said. The problem, I suspect, is with my limited knowledge and patience. This work is too finely crafted for anything to be other than significant. It’s just that some of that significance was lost on me.
Given that the fall of the Berlin wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union were momentous events of our times, it’s amazing that I’ve read so few books about them. Despite its faults, this book sounds like a good read.
This book does sound fascinating though the length is daunting. I just finished a fascinating novel by Han Keilson, Life Goes On, 265 pages, 1934 about the life of a small town German shop keeper in the years between the wars.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this – I hadn’t heard of it. I’d quite like to read it but would need to find a substantial gap in my reading schedule!
I just finished a non-fiction account of the collapse of the Wall, and it has made me realize that I should read some more books set in that general time period. This might be a book to put on my reading list, although I agree with some other comments… the length seems a little daunting. (I don’t say this very often, but maybe I’ll look for the DVD instead.)
Excellent review of this remarkable novel with so many layers. It can be read also as a roman à clef. Many of the characters are based on real and sometimes rather famous personalities (Franz Fuhmann, Stefan Heym, Dieter Noll, Hermann Kant, Hans Modrow, Manfred von Ardenne, Jurgen Kuczynski)
Before I forget it: there is a connection between The Tower and Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane. The inventor Manfred von Ardenne (in The Tower he is called Baron Arbogast) was the grandson of Elisabeth von Ardenne (1853-1952), the historical Effi Briest.
There’s another connection with Effi Briest. The translator of the Tower, Mike Mitchell, has a new translation of Fontane’s novel, coming out next spring … I feel a 6th or is it 7th re-read coming on ….
Reading different reviews of The Tower, I still cannot form some basic idea about this book. It looks like an extensive social commentary in which not much happens, but a lot of things are discussed. To tell the truth, not my favourite kind of German novel, as I was immensely bored by Man without Qualities. I like more experimental stuff, like The Death of Virgil by Broch. And I am definitely looking forward to the publication of Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. It will be a living monument to the superhuman endeavour of the translator, as we’re talking a sort of German Finnegans Wake.