I know it’s not fair to sing the praises of a new book non-German speakers won’t yet have access to. Helga Schubert‘s Vom Aufstehen (On Getting up) has been consuming my thoughts, eliciting memories that I had not held in consciousness for maybe half a century. We can share, though, the general considerations of what makes some books resonate, while others don’t.

The collection of stories tells the story of the author’s life in Germany after the war. Schubert was born in 1940, shortly before her father was killed in action, in his 20s. Her mother, herself probably traumatized by all that war, flight, poverty and widowhood imposed, was not the ideal mother, distant and punitive in alternation. A childhood was spent moving, from town to town, school to school, until they settled in Berlin, eventually imprisoned in its Eastern part behind the wall. The author was a practicing psychotherapist for many years before her writing career took off, despite GDR restrictions.

I grew up in West Germany, a decade or so later, but many of the details the author describes rang absolutely true for my own childhood, the constant geographic displacement included, as well as the reliably offered baked treats from grandparents in times when sweet stuff was still rare. She had me with the sentence: “I saw too many tears as a child.” The crying adults were really a hallmark of post-war childhood, decades before the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was conceived, much less popularized. As was the unwillingness or inability to explain the cause for the emotional distress and/or emotional distance, a silence that left children forever searching in themselves for possible transgressions.

I dissolved when I read her repeated assertions: “Alles gut.”(All good.) It was an eternal mantra in my own life, uttered by comforting adults, probably in the hopes that if said out loud often enough, it would come true. As a stand-in for “calm down,” “don’t worry,” ” all is well,” “nothing to be done,” or “not your problem,” it was the underlying melody I had hummed to me when faced with misery or fear, my own and others’.

Reading about something that you are quite familiar with can resonate in one of two ways – if it’s depicted badly you feel particular scorn, if it is represented well your brain and heart react with waves of recognition, you are moved as a reader, and quite literally transported back as an experiencer. It is a different feeling or cognition from when you read – equally important – about things/places/times that you know nothing about but are now invited and exposed to, learning along the way.

It is all the more effective if the language contains no pathos, no flowery formulations, but consists instead of Sachlichkeit, a kind of dispassionate objectivity, or, as someone said when Schubert received last year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the highest literary honors for works written in German, when the writing is done with gentle insistence. Getting up is not just the theme of this story collection, the willingness to leave the realms of sleep to face the difficulties of the day. It is also an attitude towards life in general, quietly described, to get back on your feet when you’ve been thrown down, loss after loss or deprivation, for many of the post-war generation.

— Alles gut. —

And speaking of language and resonance – the other stimulating thing I read this week might be of interest to you as well, and is certainly accessible in English. Francine Prose has another thought-provoking essay on the difference between men and women writers, their language, their acceptance into the canon of literature, their (dis)proportional selection for awards, and the gendered differences among their readers. How can you not delve into Scent of a woman’s Ink – Are women writers really inferior? with urgent prayers that she comes down on the right answer after such a nasty title? (Spoiler alert, she does. See below.)

“In the end, of course, it’s pointless to characterize, categorize, and value writing according to its author’s gender, or to claim that women writers fixate on everything that irritates gynophobes about our sex. The best writing has as little to do with gender as it does with nationality or with the circumscriptions of time…… there is no male or female language, only the truthful or fake, the precise or vague, the inspired or the pedestrian…..The only distinction that will matter will be between good and bad writing.“

Now, that resonates!

As does this quintessential German symphony by Schumann.

Photographs are from the German state Mecklenburg-Pommern some 15 years ago, where Schubert lives in an artist colony close to Schwerin.