Copyright 1990 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

March 15, 1990

LENGTH: 821 words

HEADLINE: Books: Downhill in Weimar - Paperbacks

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

Weimar: Why Did Democracy Fail? edited by Ian Kershaw (Weidenfeld, Pounds 6.95) Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos (Penguin Pounds 5.99) Milena, by Margarete Buber-Neumann (Collins Harvill, Pounds 5.95) Articulate Flesh, by Gregory Woods (Yale University Press, Pounds 7.95)

IN Ian Kershaw's introduction he describes Weimar as an expression of modernity, in that during the 14 years of the Republic, 'nearly all the possibilities of modern existence were played out and in a whole number of scientific, technological and cultural spheres, the features of the world in which we live today, arose.' These essays present widely differing views as to why such a powerful expression of modernity led to disaster. No failed democracy has come under so much historical scrutiny: in recent years debate has centred on whether it was doomed from the outset. Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich finds the root of Weimar's problems in the high level of German interest rates, leading to high wage demands, increased consumption and finally hyper-inflation. Sounds familiar.

As the walls of Europe come tumbling down, this timely first in a new Debates In Modern History series shows the Weimar experiment raising fundamental questions about the viability of democracy, the relationship of economics to politics, the relationship between state and society and the stability of modern industrial society itself.

John Dos Passos was one of the few to tackle all these themes in one work, the gigantic USA. In Three Soldiers, an early novel set during the war before Weimar, he draws on personal experience to capture the clackety-clack of the war-machine. As in his masterwork, he uses popular song and bittersweet evocations of innocent youth in the face of ruthless power to trace the breaking of young men's dreams. With his elaborate narrative structures and seemingly effortless prose he shows that it is not just war that requires the suppression of liberty but modern industrial society too. But unlike the greatest first world war novel Journey To The End Of The Night there are signposts here of socialist paths that led far away from dystopia.

Since the hardback edition of the new translation of Milena was published last year, Margarete Buber-Neumann, friend to the mistress of Kafka for four years at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, has died. She died old enough to see the collapse of the Stalinist system that imprisoned her in Siberia, old enough to feel the great hopes that the socialism she fought for will now at last sweep through Europe.

Milena Jesenska fought for the cause too, in her writing and through her actions, leading to her arrest and incarceration at Ravensbruck. She initially sought out Greta Buber to hear the truth about Stalin; what developed was a deep and passionate love. Though Buber-Neumann is no great stylist indeed the book at times fails to come alive because of her reverence for Milena this is a profoundly moving memoir, part biography, part autobiography and part love story, even if, as the subject predicted, told by an 'indulgent judge.' For Milena, on her deathbed, commissioned Buber-Neumann to write this book as a document of life in the camps. However, the camp is but the terrifying context for a tale about a beautiful girl who turned the eyes of the Prague Circle in the Twenties with her boyish looks and who began a painful love affair with Franz Kafka and of how she outlived him and of how 'the living fire' as Kafka described her was quenched.

In Gregory Woods's wonderfully steamy as well as scholarly Articulate Flesh he names Kafka's In the Penal Colony as a brillant evocation of the tattooed body as a form of inscribed canvas. Woods's study draws on a range of poets from the Greeks up to the present day to examine how writers have treated the male as lover, warrior and father. His central thesis is that 'homo-eroticism is a major self-reverential part of male sexuality as a whole,' that the themes he deals with 'exist at the very centre of the mainstream' and 'that their meanings are open to the common reader, straight or gay or neither.'

Thus he liberates his criticism from the ghetto, once so valuable, of Gay Studies. Sexual preference does not influence a writer's treatment of sexuality according to Woods, yet of the five writers he chooses to focus on, four are homosexual, the other having problems with his own sexuality: Auden, Crane, Ginsberg, Gunn and Lawrence. Woods notes that Lawrence's ' most insistent, but necessarily self-contradictory erotic grail was the passionate, physical union of two heterosexual men.' This book, often perceptive and illuminating, does fill a vital gap in the libraries of literary interpretion and should definitely be part of the National Curriculum even if the chapter on War is on the lines that making love is like making war, and that the male genitalia resemble cannons on wheels.