Friedrich Christian Delius - Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman

Much of W. G. Sebald's writing concerns itself with German guilt following the second World War and the Holocaust, or rather, the average German's complete unwillingness to examine those years, to search deep into their souls to discover how they, as a people, were willing to perform such atrocities. In a remarkable example of self-deception, an entire nation was able to commit evil acts while, at the same time, remaining unaware of what was happening. On a clear day, civilians working near Auschwitz could see the flames and smoke of burning Jews, and the smell travelled for miles. A man who declared his neighbour a sympathiser of the Jews knew – he knew - that that meant his neighbour would be spirited away and might never come back. The Germans knew, and what is most remarkable is they didn't rise up and say, No!

No, they didn't at all. To forget and move on is reprehensible. To ignore what is right there in front of you, that, too, is reprehensible. In Friedrich Christian Delius' novella, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, we have as our protagonist Margherita, the young wife of Gert, a German soldier stationed in Africa. She is living in Rome, a place “full of hieroglyphics and puzzles that bewildered her”. Partly she is bewildered because she cannot speak Italian, and in fact seems to wilfully avoid learning. The other part is more critical, though it is linked – she simply does not want to know. About the war, about the killing, about what it means and what it says about her, her husband, and her country. She will never rise up and say anything, and least of all, No!

Anywhere else, in any other time, Margherita would be a lovely character. We meet her one afternoon, and follow her as she walks through the streets of Rome. She is on her way to a Bach concert, and she loves his music very much. Margherita is quite ignorant about the world, both in its immediate and pressing events, but also its history, the realms of culture and science, and the manner in which people from other nations live. But she is observant, and in her own uncritical way she is an intent examiner of the lives of others. She is certainly intelligent – we suspect, often, that she is in fact very smart indeed – but she is ignorant. It's easier that way, because then you don't have to focus on what's in front of you. Instead, you can just wander away the day.

I shall set aside the plot for a moment, because it is important to mention the novella's construction. It is all of a piece, an entire, 125-page sentence. Delius breaks up the text by paragraphing the sentence, but there is one period only, and it is at the end. An example of this is as follows:

particularly as it might be a few minutes after half-past five, when no lamps shone and windows were covered for the blackout to hoodwink the bombers who had yet to drop a bomb on Rome, and the holes and paving stones on the pavement were hard to make out,

-----See you at supper! said Schwester Helga, See you at supper! the young lady said, stepping through the door, and waited for a moment on the top step, as she took her first breath outside on this bright January afternoon,

So this is the rhythm of the text. The conceit of a single sentence allows us to bury ourselves within Margherita's mind, because we are never able to leave it. From the first to the last, it's all one long stream, but happily exhaustion never sets in, thanks to the proliferation of paragraphs. The effect of this is that we quickly come in close with Margherita, and then we become entangled. A comma at the end of a paragraph instead of a sentence reads quite remarkably different, and is in fact a triumph of stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Delius reinvigorates this well-worn technique, and succeeds so completely that he makes it his own. As a method for grappling with the ebb and flow of a person's thoughts, this technique is simply marvellous.

Another interesting effect that Delius employs is that of constructing his novella with the same rhythm as the war itself. At the outset, the language Margherita uses and the observations she make suggest the war is going well, and that Germany and their Italian allies are but a few month's away from winning. And, If we remember our early 1940s history, this was very much the case. The darkest hour for England was perhaps 1940, when it seemed that Germany's success was assured. But then, about halfway through the novella, Russia is mentioned, and then the victories don't seem so true, and then they don't come at all. This comes, mind you, through Margherita's thoughts, what she sees in cafes and on newspapers, and how she remembers the letters from her husband Gert. As the novella closes, it seems defeat is inevitable, and we are finally given a date for the work – 1943.

In effect, this allows Delius the opportunity to have Margherita function as a funnel for the myriad typical thoughts and emotions of the ordinary German soldier's wife from the start of the war until the end. She, perhaps like most soldier's wives, refrains from thinking too deeply about the war, because to do so is to admit that the chance her husband will return is slim. But she can't help thinking about it because – well, for the same reason. It's always on her mind, but she isn't willing to probe the war too deeply, because that way madness lies.

But we know she's not doing too well:

he had to tell her that he had been ordered back to the army, a sudden immediate redeployment to Africa, and she had not been able to understand,

-----only just arrived and immediately alone again, highly pregnant in a highly dangerous, foreign place, it was a shock, at twenty-one almost herself like a child that cannot walk without help or stand on its own two feet, exposed in a totally alien country and a totally alien language

Margherita's isolation by way of language serves to deepen her isolation from the events around her. The war is an abstract, faraway concept that does little more than fill the newspapers with news of victory, and cause bread shortages. For her, the war is a force affecting her access to food and her ability to be with her husband. It isn't much more than that – she refuses to make it more than that.

she looked straight ahead at the shallow steps, a pace apart, Africa is better than Russia, desert better than snow, one step, orderly room better than infantry, another step, lance corporal better than corporal, another step, he was alive, many had died or gone missing, yet another step, and he could look forward to the child with her, and one more, and he was close, just beyond the sea, far away and close at the same time, very close

It is while walking between a number of stone busts of famous Italian men that she begins to appreciate the terrible inherent potential of war. Great numbers are incomprehensible to us; a million killed in a flood, or six million Jews incinerated, or tens of millions killed in Stalin's Gulag – we can't really understand this. It takes a work of literature such as Elie Wiesel's Night or Primo Levi's If This Is a Man to understand, or a movie like Schindler's List, to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. We can understand the suffering of a single man, and we can use that as a metaphor for the suffering of a people or a nation. But we can't easily understand the suffering of millions, and, if we are honest with ourselves, learning that Stalin killed eighteen million people instead of seventeen million people is nothing more than an extra digit. But – another million! You can't imagine it, and neither can I. But it's a million brothers, a million sons, a million fathers, or daughters, or sisters, or mothers. They are people, but the catastrophe of human empathy is that we can only recognise them as numbers. It is no accident that Jews were tattooed with numerals on their arms – numbers are so much easier to deal with.

For our heroine, it is the smaller numbers, too, which remain incomprehensible. She doesn't understand that thousands of people are dying every day until she sees, clustered together, the group of stone busts. Suddenly she realises that groups very much the same size as this, are dying all the time, and that every thousand deaths is a thousand individuals destroyed.

she could not help thinking

-----that so many die each day on the battlefronts, each head a life, each life a gift, each life at the centre of other lives, although she knew that every day it was thousands more than these men here, but with these heads, all so different from each other, it was easier to imagine what each individual life meant, just how many hopes efforts, joys and pains, and yet she felt how narrow her power of imagination was, for in truth she was only thinking of one life, the one which influenced and affected her most

Yet still she personalises it – as she must, and as we must – for without the humanisation of the victims of war, we can never properly understand it. But this is as far as her empathy is willing to stretch. She is able to consider that in war, people die and that, in war, the destruction of lives and livelihoods goes beyond 'just' the person who was killed. But she can go no further – Margherita is, alas, unable and unwilling to go any further.

Delius' use of a single sentence propels us through the text with a rapidity perhaps impossible if normal punctuation and structure had been used. There is no dialogue, either, which means we are with Margherita from start to finish. Part of what keeps the novel moving so rapidly is that we know, even if she does not. We know what happened, what the Germans were capable of doing. We wait, and we wait, and we wait, and we wonder if this woman will open her eyes and see what terrible acts it is that her country is committing.

The close of the novel comes during the Bach concert. Margherita's soul, as anyone's soul must be, is uplifted by the music, and here she either does, or does not, accept the acts of Germany. It is difficult to talk too much about the ending without spoiling it, but what can be said is this – Delius remains true to the integrity of his novella, and the ending is complex and ambiguous, and offers no easy answers. What it does, and what the entire novella does, is raise questions, ones that must be answered by Germany, but also every other country which has committed atrocities or stood idly by while they occurred (read: All countries). The guilt of a people is a remarkable thing, it is insidious and it does not go away simply because people wish it would.

Perhaps most remarkable about Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is that Delius never judges his character. He simply shows her as she is, her good thoughts and her bad, and lets the reader decide from there. Like Margherita, if we wish, we can close the novella and consider it a good read (which it is); or, we can use the work as a starting point for examining our own guilt, and the concept of a nation's guilt. As an Australian, I should face the reality that there are Australian soldiers killing essentially harmless people in Iraq and Afghanistan and that, by doing nothing, I am giving implicit approval. But of course I won't, because those people are so far away, and nothing has ever really changed in my life because of it. This is my guilt, and if you are reading this review, it is probably your guilt, too. But we won't explore it, because it's easier not to, and besides, nobody will know if we do or don't anyway. For Margherita, the war is closer, and it does have an impact, but – really, why worry about all that? Just worry about your husband, and hope he comes back. Forget the Jews, forget the millions dead, forget the cities completely destroyed. It's so much easier – but it is to Delius' credit that, through this significant work, for a moment it's not easier. For a moment – just a moment, just one – it's a little harder to accept the easy answers we allow ourselves.

Author	Friedrich Christian Delius
Title	Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (Original Title: Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau)
Translator	Jamie Bulloch
Nationality	German
Publisher	Peirene Press
Published	2010 (English) 2006 (German)
Pages	125
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Amazon (DE)

See Also

List of titles by Peirene Press under review

Links

Delius Bibliography