Novelists From Germany

"The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counter-frost, fear."

"A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence."

"What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. These were his victims."

"He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans."

"Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally."

"Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings."

"Constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current."

"What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?"

"The river ... glittered now here, now there, moving ever closer, as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis-d'or over the water. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini, a shimmering flood of pure gold."

"He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!"

"Even knowing that to possess that scent he must pay the terrible price of losing it again, the very possession and the loss seemed to him more desirable than a prosaic renunciation of both. For he had renounced things all his life. But never once had he possessed and lost."

"Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...Once you've smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody else's."

"So spoke Grenouille the Great and, while the peasantry of scent danced and celebrated beneath him, he glided with wide-stretched wings down from his golden clouds, across the nocturnal fields of his soul, and home to his heart."

"No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating—and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the world outside."

"People could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath."

"He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice."

"His thesis was that life could develop only at a certain distance from the earth, since the earth itself constantly emits a corrupting gas, a so-called fluidum letale, which lames vital energies and sooner or later utterly extinguishes them."

"He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors."

"Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again."

"She was one of those languid women made of dark honey, smooth and sweet and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes—and all the while remain as still as the center of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract to themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women."

"Their compacted human effluvium had oppressed him like air heavy with an imminent thunderstorm. Until now he had thought that it was the world in general he had wanted to squirm away from. But it was not the world, it was the people in it."

"Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it."

"He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel's scent."

"God stank. God was a poor little stinker."

"The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour."

"Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!"

"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."

"The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter."

"He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush with your own hand disgusts you."

"It had all been in vain. The prayers in churches and in mosques-all in vain. The invocations, the appeals to long-forgotten, long-ignored gods-in vain. And their final resistance with knives and teeth-in vain. Cowardice had also been in vain. Hiding, waiting-everything in vain. In vain, too, the promises, the hopes, the unexpected generosity of strangers. Whether their fathers had started plowing only yesterday or their forefathers two thousand years ago-it was all in vain. Men who looked death in the eye as they did life, coldly without blinking, and wore lions' claws made of iron on their belts, their courage was in vain; and in vain did the lion keep his vigil before the palace in the capital city. The conquerors rode astride his back and tore at his mane, yelling and hooting. Everything that had existed before had become incomprehensible. The totality of life and living, because it was suddenly all in vain. The simple yesterday and the day before yesterday that were clear to everyone, and the two thousand years that some men could look back on, the incredible, hazy yet real life, one's own existence from time immemorial-the one as much in vain as the other. If there is not going to be any future, then the past will all have been in vain. (beginning of "The Guide")"

"A miracle that he was even speaking, and then to say what he had said. Usually you hear only about the things that excited people, never about what silenced them. (from "Tales of Artemis")"

"He stopped before a shopwindow, and we recognized his face. On the left side of his forehead, just below the hairline, he had an incredible scar. He stood there, with this hole in his temple, in the middle of the colorful Parisian winter-evening throngs, like one risen from the dead, like the captain of a ship of the dead. Such people wear their own legend like a heraldic crest wherever they go. And whenever we see such people, their external appearance reminds us of this legend. (from "Meeting Again")"

"It happened the first week of April, I think. (beginning of "The Lord's Prayer")"

"One morning in September 1940, when the largest swastika flag in all of the countries occupied by Germany was flying over the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and the lines outside the shops were as long as the streets themselves, a certain Luise Meunier, the wife of a lathe operator and mother of three children, heard that one could buy eggs at a shop in the 14th arrondissement. (beginning of "Shelter")"

"What normally is spread over the span of a lifetime, over a number of years, an exertion of all of one's powers to the breaking point, the relaxing and yielding and painful straining again-all this took place in his mind in the space of an hour-while minutes changed. (Chapter V, p262)"

"If there remained in him only the strength for one tiny movement in the direction of freedom, no matter how senseless and useless the movement, he would still want to make it. (chapter III p173)"

"Seghers is one of those rare twentieth-century German writers who had a need and a use for the short-story form throughout the entire span of her career. The genre enabled her to react relatively quickly to shifting situations. The stories in this collection span a period of just over thirty years-covering the Weimar Republic after the onset of inflation, the Great Depression, the Nazis' seizure of power, Seghers's escape to France, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and her emigration to Mexico, and extending on into the postwar period, the Cold War, the emergence of two German states, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which exposed the crimes of Stalinism. There is no other writer working in the German language over that long span of time whose stories and novellas have such stylistic diversity and such a wide range of approaches and aims. Seghers wanted to describe the world in order to change it. In this sense, each specific time finds its embodiment in one of her stories."

"And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel quite miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country-how could it possibly harm such a big country? (chapter 8 p178)"

"I felt anxious, the way you do when a dream seems too real and at the same time something intangible, imperceptible, tells you that whatever makes you feel happy or sad can never be reality. (chapter 7 p156)"

"[He] got up out of bed and stuck his head out of his little window as far as he could. It was utterly quiet. But for the first time this quiet failed to give him a sense of peace-the world wasn't quiet, it was speechless. Involuntarily he pulled his hands out of the moonlight which, like no other light, has the faculty of clinging to every surface and penetrating every crevice. (chapter I p60)"

""With me it's something else," he said. "I'm Jewish. For me the magnanimity of the German people was never even a consideration." (Chapter 4 p98)"

"The Spaniards waiting there gathered around us, watching our reunion and smiling with the indomitable hearts of passionate people not yet hardened by war, detention camps, or the horror of thousands of deaths. (chapter 6 p127)"

"The whole town was a tortuous net in which he was already caught. He would have to slip through the meshes. (chapter III p173)"

"They're saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn't releasing any information. It may just be a rumor. But when you compare it to the fate of other ships and their cargoes of refugees which were hounded over all the oceans and never allowed to dock, which were left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers' documents had expired a couple of days before, then what happened to the Montreal seems like a natural death for a ship in wartime. That is, if it isn't all just a rumor. And provided the ship, in the meantime, hasn't been captured or ordered back to Dakar. In that case the passengers would now be sweltering in a camp at the edge of the Sahara. Or maybe they're already happily on the other side of the ocean. Probably you find all of this pretty unimportant? You're bored?-I am too. May I invite you to join me at my table? Unfortunately I don't have enough money for a regular supper. But how about a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza? Come, sit with me. Would you like to watch them bake the pizza on the open fire? Then sit next to me. Or would you prefer the view of the Old Harbor? Then you'd better sit across from me. You can see the sun go down behind Fort St. Nicolas. That certainly won't be boring. (beginning of chapter 1)"

"We have a bunch of women there who are really something. Especially two of them. There’s one of them wears her breasts like I would wear the Iron Cross."

"If there is a God, He’s a sadist. That’s my firm conviction."

"To my mind there is nothing more contemptible than snatching the laurels that properly belong to a man who fell on the field of battle."

"Technology can be expected to solve all problems which can be mastered by technical means, but we must expect nothing from it which lies beyond technical possibilities."

"In every healthy economy the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed. Since technology presupposes destruction, since its development depends upon destruction, it cannot be fitted into any healthy economic system; one cannot look at it from an economic point of view. The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance."

"The impression we gain as we observe technical processes of any sort is not at all one of abundance. The sight of abundance and plenty give us joy: they are the signs of a fruitfulness which we revere as a life-giving force. Rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming, ripening, and fruition–the exuberance of the motions and forms of life–strengthen and refresh us. The human body and the human mind possess this power of bestowing strength. Both man and woman have it. But the machine organization gives nothing–it organizes need. The prospect of vineyard, orchard, or a blossoming landscape cheers us, not because these things yield profits, but because of the sensation of fertility, abundance, and gratuitous riches. The industrial scene, however, has lost its fruitfulness; it has become the scene of mechanical production. It conveys, above all, a sense of hungriness, particularly in the industrial cities which, in the metaphorical language of technological progress, are the homes of a flourishing industry. The machine gives a hungry impression. And this sensation of a growing, gnawing hunger, a hunger that becomes unbearable, emanates from everything in our entire technical arsenal."