The Film Explainer [Hardcover]

Gert Hofmann (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1996

An exploration of a boy's relationship with his grandfather in 1930s provincial Germany which won the 1995 "Independent" Foreign Fiction Award. Grandfather narrates the action for silent films, and new technology threatens to displace him. Hope of a return to the old ways arrives with the Nazis.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Film Explainer was first released in Germany in 1990, hailed as a work of comic genius. In it, a boy tells of the life of his grandfather, Karl Hofmann, who worked in the Apollo theater in Limbach/Saxony as a film explainer and piano player. As the Nazis rise in power, Grandfather goes along until a bomb falls on the Apollo. Beneath the surface of this seemingly simple tale are complex undercurrents--the folly of Grandfather's life, the grandson's memoir, the glory of the cinema, the choices of the German war generation--all told in Hofmann's quick, comic dialogue that earned him critical praise for both his novels and radio plays.

From Publishers Weekly

Though this work does not read as smoothly as Hoffman's previous novels (Spectacle of the Tower, Before the Rainy Season), it shows, without sentiment or accusation, how one man loses his soul in Nazi Germany. Hofmann merges novelized biography and submerged history in the character of his grandfather, an elderly Saxony cinephile caught between the twilight of Germany's silent film golden age and the Nazi regime. With dozens of movie plots committed to memory (and dominating his conversation), Karl, the ne'er-do-well grandfather, survives, financially and spiritually, as a "film explainer"-a combination of barker, storyteller and piano accompanist-for a cinema in an economically depressed provincial town. His muddled artistic aspirations and dismal home life are palliated only by Leni Riefenstahl in Alpine dramas, Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh, Dr. Mabuse's plans for world domination and Greta Garbo in Joyless Street. When The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, announces the end of "film explaining," Karl looks for another outlet for his bombast and fantasizing, sinisterly finding it in the buffoonish local Nazi party. Recounted from the perspective of his younger, adoring self, Hofmann's background theme of his grandfather's retreat into semi-fantasy during Germany's darkest hours is a tantalizing one, as readers know that, just outside the cinema, Hitler lies in wait. But despite some tellingly contrasted ironies, Hofmann's flat, somber narrative never fully comes into focus, since the author chooses to sidestep the issue of the degree to which Karl is responsible for his complicity with the Nazis .
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 250 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; Translated edition (June 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810112930
• ISBN-13: 978-0810112933
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,487,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Man is the only creature that recognizes his own grandfather.", August 2, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Film Explainer (Hardcover)

Gert Hofmann (I suppose we can call him 'Gert", though he never declares his name in his first-person narrative) is a small boy, living with his unwed mother and his maternal grandparents in the shabby village of Limbach, near Chemnitz, in Saxony in the 1930s. The mother apparently supports the family as a piece-work seamstress. The grandfather earns a pittance as the pianist and "film explainer" at the village cinema, where 'talkies' have not yet arrived. The grandmother cooks and knits, and passes sardonic judgments on her eccentric husband, who lured her to dreary Limbach and made her life there a nightmare. The village does indeed seem to be as dreary as any could be in unemployment- and inflation-ridden postwar Germany. Even the cinema can't dredge people out of their apathy and gloom.

Gert tells the story of his grandfather entirely (and convincingly) from the perspective of the boy he was during the seven or eight years that he knew him -- from his pre-school memories (though he displays preternatural powers of recall) until the grandfather's death in 1944, and while doing so, tells a version of the story of ordinary small-town Germans in the Hitler years. The boy is a precocious questioner, but none of his questions address what adult historians of Nazism would want to ask. His world is his impoverished, dysfunctional family, and his horizons are broadened only by the silent cinema, as interpreted to him by his chief companion, his "meshugge" grandfather, whom he both idolizes and feels embarrassed by. Nazism will rise and fall before the boy is mature enough to question it. Part of the context of his story, however, is that his boyish immaturity is scarcely less naive than that of his adult neighbors and townspeople. Most of the boy's time is spent with his grandfather, walking, sitting in the Bierstube, and at the Apollo Cinema. The grandfather knows the plot of every silent film ever shown, though at times his version of the plot may differ from the director's. His conversation with the boy, and over the boy's head with his friends, consists chiefly of film recountings and tributes to film stars.

Grandfather, Karl Hofmann, born in 1873, a wounded WW1 veteran, had worked as a circus barker and has now been working as a pianist and "Kinoerzähler" -- the role really did exist, of plot narrators who explained the action of silent films to rural audiences in Germany -- since before the boy was born. Audiences for silent films have dwindled, however, and Karl's self-inflated identity as an "artist" and cinema maven is jeopardized. The owner of the theater, Herr Theilhaber, decides to introduce 'sound' ...

Karl is a garrulous narcissist, a fabulist full of self-pity and fond of self-mythologizing. He's seedy and disreputable, a village laughing-stock really; there's nothing nicey admirable about him yet the reader will embrace him in the aura of his grandson's love. Late in the book, for a brief moment, author Gert Hofmann looks back at his grandfather from an adult 'historical' perspective:

""For all his lack of formal education -- just six years of primary school -- Grandfather was for a long time the embodiment of the unworldly scholar so highly respected in Saxony, thick-waisted from so much sitting, reading and beer drinking. 'You would think to look at him that he ate paper' (Grandmother). His beer glass and cigar he had put aside now, 'by force of adverse circumstances'. His left eye watered as he smoked. Seeing him in such a state, Grandmother shook her head ... He's been crying again, she said. Unemployed, he let his hair grow; it saved on the barber. But it made him look like a hobo or an old woman. Gray waves rippled over his head, which he called 'his little curls' and which gave him a Semitic aspect. I'm not, though Grandfather told me, I'm much too heterogenous".

Funny he should mention that "Semitic look"! Anti-semitism is there in Limbach, though the boy has no explicit inkling of it. Herr Theilhaber, the Jewish cinema owner, disappears one day, and the Grandfather surely knows why but brushes the boy's questions aside. Grandfather Karl, I'm almost certain, will strike Anglophone readers as a familiar ethnic figure, the loud exaggerated Jewish older-generation father or grandfather of American Jewish novelists like Saul Bellow or filmmakers like Woody Allen. Honestly, I found it a treat to discover a German in literature with such archetypical traits. But it's painful, extremely painful, to find "our" beloved Grandfather putting on a Brown Shirt and a Swastika armband, chiefly for companionship.

There's a lot in this novel or memoir that must be 'read between the lines'. It is an account of the years from roughly 1935 to 1944, the Hitler years, and Hitler is mentioned both by name and as "HE" or "HIM", an icon of hope to the struggling villagers. But DON'T make the mistake of expecting this book to defend or exonerate anyone! "Hope" was the bitterest irony of all. Limbach would be bombed by the Allies, occupied by the Russians, and incorporated into Communist East Germany, from which author Gert Hofmann would have to flee. Hofmann (born in 1931) had an odd career as a university lecturer and writer of 'radio plays' before publishing his first novel in 1979. Michael Hofmann, his son, is a poet residing in England as well as one of the most skilled translators of German literature into English. It's his translation that you'll read in this edition of his father's book.

I should add, in the plainest English, that I enjoyed this book immensely.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book deserves more attention, January 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Film Explainer (Hardcover)

This book has so much to recommend it. The really outstanding thing is the child narrator's voice - it's always exactly appropriate to the child's purported age. Nothing precocious - only what the child could really know and say.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One note samba, December 17, 2003

By 

simon barrett "blond omnivore" (Beckenham, Kent, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Film Explainer (Paperback)

Nothing in this book evolves, despite the advent of Hitler and then WW2 - or is that the point? An inflated novella, or a one-note samba!