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The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany

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Nobody writes travelogues about Germany," writes Michael Gorra at the beginning of his book "The Bells in their Silence: Travels through Germany." Indeed Germany has, in recent years, failed to inspire travel writing as sophisticated as that of Jan Morris or as candidly humorous as that Bill Bryson, a fact that makes Gorra's book a welcome addition to the genre. But after making such a statement, Gorra acknowledges the many writers who have travelled Germany before him, those who tried to makes sense of the country by seeking the marrow of the German culture beyond Lederhosen and the occasional oompah band.

A book that itself sometimes lingers too long in the past, "The Bells in their Silence" is an erudite rendering of the year the author spent living and travelling with his wife in the port city Hamburg and across northern and eastern Germany. Not a professed Germanophile, Gorra's distanced approach to Germany as well as his initial mistrust of the possibility of writing a travel book about the country are grounded in his understanding that travel writing itself is for amateurs seeking impression - and that those who choose to write about Germany are journalists. But once he gets past this initial barrier, Gorra has a keen eye, one that is guided by the extensive reading he did to prepare himself for his journey.

When the author isn't bemusing cultural differences and delighting in the small moments of daily life, he takes his reader on a literary tour of Germany from Goethe through Fontane and Thomas Mann. An English professor at Smith College, Gorra is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He is a traveller whose understanding of people and place is indebted to literature. Weimar can only be understood through Goethe - and the commercialization of the 19th century renaissance man that bloomed when the city was Europe's cultural capital in 1999. The Berlin that fascinates Gorra is colored by Theodor Fontane's Prussian Berlin, before, as historian Michael Wise writes, the "country's past rendered patriotism suspect." Towards the end of the book, his most touching and personal chapter concludes with a glimpse into the place that Thomas Mann's family saga "Buddenbrooks" has held in his life.

As a cultural investigator, Gorra is at his best in a chapter called "Hauptstadt," in which he dissects the peculiarities of the German capital. "Take the subway," he writes, "and mole your way beneath the city, dropping down into darkness and popping up again in a street that doesn't match the one you left behind, into rain you didn't know was happening, a view that seems suddenly all park, or all slum." When writing about Berlin's "big footprint," Gorra must have recognized that like Christopher Isherwood in the 1920's - whose "Berlin Stories" inspired the film "Cabaret" - he was viewing a city in full transition. He visited the German capital in 1993 and then again in the late 1990's, a brief few years that saw Berlin's Mitte district rise up as a cultural hotspot and when the city's edginess began to draw the country's artists to its empty factories and abandoned apartment complexes.

An appendix to the book - including works both literary and historical - is without a doubt one of the greatest boons of the book, for Gorra has selected a way to approach Germany without having to speak German. And it is appropriate that he chooses to settle into his daily rhythms in the very areas that are less often known to attract tourists seeking old world charm, cities that were left mere shells and rebuilt in a new aesthetic after the Second World War, cities that bare their scars openly but not proudly. Gorra seeks out those old wounds and dissects what they may mean for Germans and visitors to Germany today.

But if Gorra often falls into the same questioning that has defined the "German problem" for over half a century, he also displays a profound sympathy for the German people and the burden they carry as the children and grandchildren of Nazi Germany. The title he chose for his book doesn't come into play until the last chapter, when he visits Luebeck's Marienkirche, where a pair of bells lay destroyed in a courtyard as a testament to the tragedy of war. "But what, exactly, does it remember?" he asks. "Does is commemorate what Luebeck itself suffered, or does it mark the suffering of war in general? Does it tell the city that "this was done to us by them," or does it perhaps declare that "this is what we brought upon ourselves?" ... maybe it simply says that these particular and much-loved bells used to ring, and now can't." These lines are among the last resounding notes in an excellent investigation of Germany that might have been more colorful with more anecdotal insight into the Germans he met.

This is a wonderful travel book, and a great deal more than a travel book. Gorra spends a year in Germany exploring not only the present but the presence of the past, from Goethe's Germany of the poets and the thinkers to the great darkness of World War II. As anyone who has read Gorra's many reviews in "The New York Times" and other places would expect, the writing is elegant and the cultural observation shrewd. But the book goes beyond elegance and shrewdness to dignity and compassion. It exemplifies what, at its most profound, civility can bring to our understanding of even so terrible a trauma as Nazism. Like Germany itself, Gorra is haunted by that trauma, yet the range of his experiences, and of the reading he weaves into his travels, is wide. I especially loved the chapter on Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," in which Gorra tells the story of his own family, Lebanese immigrants to Connecticut who became fruit and vegetable wholesalers. It's a grand way to read "Buddenbrooks," making Mann's family chronicle resonate with contemporary American life in new and varied ways.

As a reader, Michael Gorra is erudite and generous. This is the conclusion you reach if you read his reviews in the New York Times, TLS, and other places. The Bells in their Silence, an unusual literary tour of Germany, demonstrates those qualities in abundance. But there's also more to enjoy here, a sense of movement and place, as well as a broader range of tone and perceptions, which combine to make this book more than either an academic exercise or simply a writer's report on a journey.

I was lured to check this book out by an interest in travel writing, also in hamburg, and by the positive reviews. but honestly this guy is a clown. unless you are one of the '...americans who are surprised that there are good things in germany other than oktoberfest', then you will be bewildered by how stupid this guy is. basically this book is a combo of 1, incessant references to various other travel writers, naipaul, greene, etc 2, a simplistic description of german patrimony- fontane, goethe, etc, which is fine as far as it goes but it just doesn't go far- for example, could he talk about, say, wolfgang tillmans, who lived in hamburg for many years? gerhard richter? german music since the war, a super rich tradition? beuys? etc. his vision of german intellectual history stops a long time ago. 3, a weird preoccupation with the holocaust. i know, maybe it seems reasonable to have, but i am frustrated by a vision that travel books about germany must be about the holocaust basically which is a good half of this book. he writes about being uncomfortable that young berliners can go to a restaurant or eat tagliatelle or something, which leaves me like WHAT i mean americans eat tagliatelle, what about vietnam? not that its comparable but i don't see his vision that all germans until the end of time (furthermore assuming all people in chic berlin restauraunts are german anyway) can't have any pleasure because of the holocaust. stupid passingby references to adorno, the fact that he couldnt really learn the language enough to read simple literature, etc doesnt help, nor do bizarre unrelated assertions about how the american civil war was caused exclusively by slavery and any other reason is a mystification. he is so provincial! and pompous! i mean its germany not like thailand or zimbabwe, it really isn't so exotic! yet for him the idea that he lived in germany for a while on a grant is some crazy adventure. and it could be if he'd done cool stuff there, but mostly he just sips on ice cold pilsners and stupid stuff like that. I never have been to hamburg, some of his info about that was interesting- on the level of the wikipedia article about hamburg- but his description of berlin, a place i have lived, is preposterous. where are the american-esque parts of berlin he talks about? its true as he points out, many parts of the city are relatively recent- but like, 1900, not 1950. in fact the city has contracted severely since 1950. where are the walmarts in berlin? maybe he's talking about like neukolln? but turks in weird pants and occasional discount shops aren't really american to me. honestly suburban paris or london is a million times more like newport news or silver spring MD than anywhere I have ever been in berlin, and I lived there for half a year.

basically this guy has less knowledge about german intellectual history, the recent history of the places he writes about, etc than a sophomore german studies student should. and that is coupled with a bizarre sense that germany is evil and no book written about it can not be about the holocaust.not reccomended at all for anyone who isn't self-satisfied, lacking in intellectual curiosity and over the age of 60.

Michael Gorra notes that Germany's recent history causes certain stumbling blocks when writing literary fiction about modern Germany. Though he clears the barrier in his own travelouge, it sometimes feels like he is trying too hard to be erudite. Quoting everyone from Goethe to Bill Bryson gives the impression of scholarly name dropping. Still, the book is at its best when relaying personal vignettes from his year in Germany, such as his reaction when a German customs agents accidentally discovers an embarassing book he imports to the country, and his first-hand experience with the efficient German health-care system.

I found this book because I was going to Dresden and was distressed about the firebombing of that city at the end of WW II. I needed a way to think about that horror. This excellent book covers all those feelings that Americans and German Americans feel about that war, the retribution bombings, the Holocaust, the fear and hate. Gorra reviews famous literary travel books from the past noting that Germany has always been a study, not a place to go for a sunny vacation. My experience over the past 30 years traveling to Germany tells me the people and culture has changed, that is, in acknowledging the terrors perpetrated by the Nazi government and accepting the Allies' murderous responses. Gorra's book helps put these changes in perspective.

To call this book a travel book is really stretching the definition. I would more describe it as a collection of rambling unstructured snippets of other authors' accounts of travelling in Germany. It rarely puts these into historical context, or relates them to what you might find in modern Germany.
The author inserts a few annecdotes of his own travels to the Harz Mountains, Weimar and Berlin and a small account of his life in Hamburg.

There is little original material and insight into living in Germany, travelling in Germany and modern German attitudes to themselves, their history and their place in the world.

The prose is often convoluted and frequently pretentious, and the name-dropping of other authors becomes irksome after a chapter or two.