Customer Reviews

The Film Explainer

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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.

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.

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!