Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain)

Abstract

In his 1998 ‘Peace Prize Speech’, Martin Walser complained that authors today are judged primarily for their public statements whilst their literary works are disregarded. This may indeed be especially true for Walser himself, who has the dubious honour of having had two media debates in unified Germany named after him: the ‘Walser–Bubis debate’, or ‘first Walser debate’, which followed his polemic on the way National Socialism is remembered in the same speech, and the ‘second Walser debate’ concerning his novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) regarding the question of anti-Semitism in this book. His 1998 novel Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) is closely linked to the first debate: the author’s speech can be read as his response to the reception of his autobiographical novel about a childhood and youth during the Nazi period. Literary works, therefore, do form a part of the discussions about the author, but in his opinion reviewers and commentators put contemporary social and political concerns ‘before aesthetics’ and thus neglect the specific quality of literature. Walser’s critique of memory in the Peace Prize Speech runs parallel to this distinction: the ‘spirit of the time’ demands political correctness and creates a hegemonic discourse about the past, which in Walser’s view is opposed to personal and literary memory but also to what he terms German ‘normality’. In this way aesthetics and politics are uncomfortably intermingled in Walser’s controversial speech. The author’s insistence, however, that works of art should be viewed on their own terms is of course one with which literary scholars tend to agree. Questions of aesthetic autonomy are especially pertinent and sensitive when a fictional text depicts a politically contested past. The following analysis asks, then, what the specific qualities of Walser’s literary form of memory are and whether his aesthetic approach is indeed free from memory politics.