The Simple Life (Das Einfache Leben) (1939)
Ernst Wiechert (1887-1950)
336 pagesDuring the summer of 1938 Ernst Wiechert, the most published German author of his time, survived a short but harrowing imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp at the hands of the Nazi regime. Upon his return home he set about writing a book, in part it seems to cleanse himself of the experience; the following year the novel The Simple Life (Das Einfache Leben in the original German) appeared, in which a former German naval captain, Thomas von Orla, leaves behind his wife and son, and all his other social connections and expectations, to seek out a more basic, almost ascetic, lifestyle.
As the story opens, Thomas stands at a window in his home bathed in the last light of sunset while reflecting on the meaning of a passage he has just read in his bible: “We spend our years as an idle tale that is told.” (Psalms 90:9) A half dozen years have passed since the end of World War I, during which Thomas captained a frigate. In the wake of the horrific and seemingly pointless fighting he witnessed during the war, and without a current command in a largely demilitarized post-war Germany, he has been left adrift in an existential crisis about how to most appropriately live out his life. Arriving into the midst of his confusion the message of Psalms 90:9 --- that people tend to live their lives thoughtlessly --- becomes a clarion call for him.Apparently well-off enough for his family to get by without his working, Thomas has bridled at his wife’s efforts to try and secure him the glamour of an active position by socializing with his naval superiors. As that sunset darkens into night, the message of the newly discovered Psalm --- and the dinner party his wife has set up with an influential admiral --- drive him out of the house for a long nighttime walk through the city to try to make sense of his agitation. By the end of his walk he has formulated the outlines of a plan for rescuing himself from his uncertainty and misery: venture out into the German countryside in search of manual labor on the land, through which to bring a clarified meaning and intention to his life.
Within days Thomas boards a train and heads east with only his bicycle and a few belongings, traveling deep into the Prussian countryside toward the border with Poland. Without a specific destination, he allows serendipity to be his guide, and eventually finds and takes up the position of fisherman for a large estate headed by an aging former General, who lives alone except for an orphaned granddaughter he is raising. Given Thomas’ military background, and his innately respectful nature heightened now by a simple desire to carry out well his assigned work, he and the General immediately develop a rapport that will come to deepen over the years.
As part of his contract, Thomas moves into a cabin on a small swell on an island in a lake that lies on the estate. Over the subsequent half dozen years Thomas settles into his new life, tending fishing nets and a small garden during the summers, and using the quiet isolation of the winter months to write books in which he examines the lessons he has taken from his experiences in the navy, and now in his new life. As the seasons pass, Thomas comes to discover deep peace and powerful meaning in a simple life of work tied tightly to the rhythms of nature, and distant from the pretensions and the hectic social complexity of the city he has left behind.
The pacing and structure of Wiechert’s writing style reinforce and enhance the novel’s themes. With little plot or action in the traditional sense, Wiechert describes Thomas’ quest for meaning through extended, almost poetic, meditations by Thomas about his new life and work in the countryside, and the people he meets there. Settling into the bucolic world of East Prussia, Thomas revels in his sudden awareness of nature, which he has never before observed with such focus and experienced with such intensity. In the life-cycles of the forests and lakes, the flowers and birds, he finds profound connections to his work and daily routines, and so validation of the more deliberate life he has sought out. Through Thomas’ impressions and reflections, Wiechert presents a paean to the idea of slowing down and seeking out a less distracted life, one more deeply connected to the natural world.
Those interactions and conversations that Thomas does have with other characters serve principally as a means of highlighting aspects of the simpler lifestyle he has chosen --- expanding on and exploring it with like-minded characters, while counterposing it with those who represent the society he has left behind. In particular, Thomas finds a kindred spirit in the General’s granddaughter, a young girl wise beyond her years, who has, in a way like Thomas himself has come to do, lived an isolated life on the huge estate with her aging grandfather, and over her short life has become deeply impacted by the natural world that is her home.
The grace of the novel’s deliberate and introspective tone becomes evident in a wonderful meditation on time set in the days just after Thomas has established himself at the estate. Wiechert opens that chapter with the observation that “the clock over the estate palace is the measure and rule for the countryside around the lake,” (70) and then goes on to explore the implications of this “measure and rule” through a rhythmic structure built around vignettes that each begin “The clock bell rings…” and proceed to describe the work being done somewhere on the farm at that moment. In a startling transition toward the end of the chapter, Wiechert shifts to the city Thomas has come from, and captures how the clock guides the vastly different urban lives and concerns of the wife and son he has left behind.
In these and other ways, Wiechert uses the depth of each character’s links to the rhythms of the natural world as an implication of their nearness to or distance from achieving a simpler, more meaningful life. Given the deeply Protestant culture of the East Prussian countryside at that time, Wiechert’s emphasis of the natural world over religious traditions introduces a tension to the story --- one particularly acute for Thomas, whose religious faith has been shaken by the horrors he experienced in the war and the devastating effects he sees among even its survivors.
Though a biblical passage gave Thomas the impetus to emerge out of his malaise, as the seasons pass on the island he comes to reconsider the meaning of the faith he grew up with. Finding profound and compelling meaning in the work and natural surroundings of his new life, he begins to question the character of God, or perhaps more precisely, the commonly accepted image of God held by his fellow countrymen. In a passage with strong parallels to the ancient messenger in Mark Twain’s The War Story (my review here), who enters a church in which a congregation feverishly prays to God for victory in war, and steps to the pulpit to tell the assembled exactly what horrors they are asking of God, Thomas declares that
...I will find a different face [of God]. Not one that is to be beseeched, and not one that is to be thanked. Not one before whom people will begin shouting: “Now thank all ye God!”, if they have just beaten to death a thousand or ten thousand men. Because then must the others clearly be shouting: “Now curse all ye God.” (241)
Beyond the religious questions that occupy Thomas’ thoughts, he also finds himself plagued by more earthly concerns. Though the book’s pacing and plot actively evoke the quiet calm of the simple life, Thomas finds himself unable to ignore the societal forces and realities arrayed so powerfully against its fulfillment. Powerful economic and social disruptions roiled Germany in the 1920's, and Wiechert acknowledges them in the story through several characters whose arrivals serve to disrupt Thomas in his sanctuary in the rural East Prussian countryside.
Through visits from Thomas’ son Joachim, for example, Wiechert depicts the frustration and restlessness of German youth of the time. Disenchanted with their elders, who they felt had acted at best ineptly and at worst cowardly during the losing German effort in the Great War, these youth set themselves in opposition to the older generation, its leaders and social order, and looked to themselves to restore German glory. Despite his love for his father, as Joachim becomes a young adult his childhood reverence for his father as a ship’s captain fades, particularly as he struggles to understand his father’s dramatic withdrawal from the social standing he had held as a naval officer. Over time Joachim comes to view Thomas as part of the faded and failed older generation, and visits to his father on the island become ever more strained.
Writing in 1938, Wiechert has certainly witnessed first-hand the significant impact this angry generation had, ultimately contributing to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime. However, though the Nazi party existed during the time in which the book is set and had during the time-frame already begun its rise to power, Wiechert carefully avoids mentioning any political realities in his story. Having chosen to remain in Germany, and having just spent time in a concentration camp for what the Nazi’s felt was his questionable loyalty, he clearly had to walk a fine line. In the attitude of Joachim, however, Wiechert hints at the danger growing in the German world outside of Thomas’ personal sanctuary.
In the subplot involving the books Thomas writes about his experiences in World War I, Wiechert also touches on the constraints on public discourse in Germany at that time, and the risks and seeming futility of overstepping accepted bounds. Thomas comes to find that describing to others his search for a meaningful life, his discoveries in that process and what he has now understood about his past life in the navy, lie too far beyond the pale for comfortable discussion with anyone but his closest friends --- indeed his writings appear delusional, if not perhaps cowardly and dangerous, to many people he encounters or who read his books, including to his own son.
It seemed to him a mistake that he strove to offer his thoughts to the world. The world could be moved by thoughts, but was it not like with the pendulum that one pushes with one’s hand out past its two rest points? The clock would certainly not be affected by what happened beyond those points, but rather only by what happened between them. (256)At various moments in history such constraints may be narrower or broader --- and the implications of violating them harsher or milder --- but they always exist, strictly, if invisibly, enforced by society.
Despite these acknowledgements of the social realities of the time, Wiechert’s book is much more circumspect about the calamitous economic situation in Germany in the 1920’s than, for example, the novel Blood Brothers (Blutsbrüder in the original German, my review here) by journalist and social worker Ernst Haffner, which had appeared just a few years earlier. Whereas Wiechert provides a philosophical tribute to leading a simpler life, and only hints at how the broader problems in Germany are undermining its realization, Haffner’s story is ripped from the headlines of the day, presenting a generation of youth who are as dispirited as Thomas but without his personal history of discipline and hard work --- or his material resources --- as they desperately fight to survive in the streets of a country in the midst of a terrible economic depression. Like Wiechert, Haffner does not explicitly mention the political situation; but Haffner was apparently still too explicit in his critique: he was summoned to the Ministry of Culture in the late 1930’s, after which all traces of him were lost.
For modern readers, aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime and the consequences of the war that would begin just months after the novel was published, there are chilling aspects to the story that Wiechert could most likely not have imagined. For one, the Nazi’s would come to twist the message of Wiechert’s novel, as embodied by Thomas’ pursuit of a simple life of manual work and the shedding of the complexities and constraints of the world of his time, by posting on the entrance of several concentration camps (though apparently not the Buchenwald camp where Wiechert had been interred) a sign saying “Work Sets One Free” (“Arbeit Macht Frei”). Certainly, Thomas was “set free” from his disillusionment by the hard work of a life in the countryside --- but the consequences for him could not have been farther removed from those who entered the gates under that Nazi slogan.
Similarly, reading of Thomas’ growing spiritual joy in his new life comes with a dark foreboding for those familiar with the course of the second world war. Thomas refers repeatedly to the idyll of his island world, and his desire to live out his life there, with no intention of returning to the outside world.
[Here on the island it is like] a dream … but a good and solid dream, that will still be there in the morning and over the year also, if we do what is ours to do in order to maintain it.” (143)Just 15 years into his future however, East Prussia would experience utter destruction from Russian forces pouring westward in pursuit of the retreating German army, and exacting a destructive revenge for what their own country had suffered in the first years of the war.
In The Simple Life, Erich Wiechert has painted a meditative and loving portrait of a man who liberates himself of his demons by traveling into the countryside and immersing himself in manual labor on the land. A contrarian might argue that Wiechert’s vision is hopelessly nostalgic and romantic, one that would mean returning to an earlier time that had its own failings, and that, if broadly implemented, would at any rate require an unimaginable depopulation of the world. But I would argue that a more appropriate and beneficial view is to read the story as a reminder of the importance of achieving what in current parlance might be called mindfulness, and through that to discover the beauty in life and the natural world, even if one doesn’t decide to give oneself over to becoming a fisherman on an isolated estate. By so doing one can perhaps realize Wiechert’s fundamental message, to be found in Thomas’ realization shorty after coming to the island that becomes his home:
...how beautiful the world is, so beautiful that one’s chest aches. (74)
Other reviews / information:
More quotes from the book here.
The translations of the quotes used in the review from the original German are mine.
Translation and interpretation of the Psalm that plays a critical role in the book are many and varied. At Study Light, the literal translation from the Hebrew is said to be “We consume our years like a groan,” with the commentary that ‘We live a dying, whining, complaining life, and at last a groan is its termination.’ To try and capture my understanding of it, and how it applies to the novel, I have adapted the King James version by adding the word ‘idle’: “We spend our years as an idle tale that is told.” (Psalms 90:9), because I feel that the word ‘tale’, on its own, has tended to lose the implication of ‘gossip’ and so thoughtlessness that is appropriate here. Note that the original German has that implication: “Wir bringen unsere Jahre zu wie ein Geschwätz." which literally translates as “We spend our years like gossip.”
The Simple Life has interesting parallels to the novel The Wall by Australian writer Marlen Haushofer; my link to her book is at the right. Whereas Thomas seeks out the peaceful serenity of an isolated spot in the countryside, Haushofer’s character wakes up one morning in a mountain cabin to find herself completely isolated from the rest of the world. In both stories, however, the characters discover profound connections to nature that melt away the worries and concerns that had dominated their previous lives in the city.
Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s comment that “… to live means to have something definite to do — a mission to fulfill — and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty” (The Revolt of the Masses, 136, my review linked to at left) connects strongly to a fundamental truth at the heart of Wiechert’s novel.
The information from the first paragraph of the review comes in part from the Wiki pages on Wiechert (here) and the book (in German: here).
The following lines from the Chinese poet Wang An-shih, who wrote about his pursuit of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, reminded me of what Thomas sought and achieved in his move to a simpler life in the countryside. This poem is from the collection The Late Poems of Wang An-shih; my review of the book is linked to at right. At the Shrine-Hut on Eightfold-Integrity River
Alone in recluse quiet can be enough,
reality absolute itself such clear joy,
and mountains never hold eyes back,
river sounds never grate against ears.
Suddenly, there’s nothing at all to be.
What I am now I am, and am, and am.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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