The Bells in Their Silence : Travels through Germany

Rating:
Summary: Literary Tour De Force
Review: As a reader, Michael Gorra is erudite and generous. This is the conclusion you reach if you read his reviews in the New York Times, TLS, and other places. The Bells in their Silence, an unusual literary tour of Germany, demonstrates those qualities in abundance. But there's also more to enjoy here, a sense of movement and place, as well as a broader range of tone and perceptions, which combine to make this book more than either an academic exercise or simply a writer's report on a journey.

Rating:
Summary: Vaulting Godwin's law
Review: Michael Gorra notes that Germany's recent history causes certain stumbling blocks when writing literary fiction about modern Germany. Though he clears the barrier in his own travelouge, it sometimes feels like he is trying too hard to be erudite. Quoting everyone from Goethe to Bill Bryson gives the impression of scholarly name dropping. Still, the book is at its best when relaying personal vignettes from his year in Germany, such as his reaction when a German customs agents accidentally discovers an embarassing book he imports to the country, and his first-hand experience with the efficient German health-care system.

Rating:
Summary: Vaulting Godwin's law
Review: Michael Gorra notes that Germany's recent history causes certain stumbling blocks when writing literary fiction about modern Germany. Though he clears the barrier in his own travelouge, it sometimes feels like he is trying too hard to be erudite. Quoting everyone from Goethe to Bill Bryson gives the impression of scholarly name dropping. Still, the book is at its best when relaying personal vignettes from his year in Germany, such as his reaction when a German customs agents accidentally discovers an embarassing book he imports to the country, and his first-hand experience with the efficient German health-care system.

Rating:
Summary: Egghead on Holiday
Review: Michael Gorra, an American academic married to a Swiss academic, finds himself in Germany for a year. He's on sabbatical, so he doesn't have to go to work every day, but he needs something to show for his year off. This book is it.

Normally I wouldn't read something that seems so eggheady. But the New York Times gave it a good review and I was intrigued by Gorra's statement that no one travels in Germany for fun. So I skipped the parts on German literature and read about Gorra's adventures with the German language and the German people.

When Gorra talks about these everyday matters of travel and being in a different country, he is quite good. But when he goes off into literary discussions, he becomes the professor. Why is it that literature is interesting, but literary criticism always manages to squeeze every ounce of enjoyment out of a novel? I suppose it would be the same if you were to over-analyze a good joke.

In a surprising twist, Gorra also touches on travel writing in general, observing (but not over-analyzing) the writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Eric Newby to Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson.

The Bells in their Silence (which refers to the fallen bells of the Marienkirche in Luebeck) is mostly an enjoyable book on travel in modern Germany by an open-minded and curious writer.

Rating:
Summary: a literary tour of Germany
Review: Nobody writes travelogues about Germany," writes Michael Gorra at the beginning of his book "The Bells in their Silence: Travels through Germany." Indeed Germany has, in recent years, failed to inspire travel writing as sophisticated as that of Jan Morris or as candidly humorous as that Bill Bryson, a fact that makes Gorra's book a welcome addition to the genre. But after making such a statement, Gorra acknowledges the many writers who have travelled Germany before him, those who tried to makes sense of the country by seeking the marrow of the German culture beyond Lederhosen and the occasional oompah band.

A book that itself sometimes lingers too long in the past, "The Bells in their Silence" is an erudite rendering of the year the author spent living and travelling with his wife in the port city Hamburg and across northern and eastern Germany. Not a professed Germanophile, Gorra's distanced approach to Germany as well as his initial mistrust of the possibility of writing a travel book about the country are grounded in his understanding that travel writing itself is for amateurs seeking impression - and that those who choose to write about Germany are journalists. But once he gets past this initial barrier, Gorra has a keen eye, one that is guided by the extensive reading he did to prepare himself for his journey.

When the author isn't bemusing cultural differences and delighting in the small moments of daily life, he takes his reader on a literary tour of Germany from Goethe through Fontane and Thomas Mann. An English professor at Smith College, Gorra is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He is a traveller whose understanding of people and place is indebted to literature. Weimar can only be understood through Goethe - and the commercialization of the 19th century renaissance man that bloomed when the city was Europe's cultural capital in 1999. The Berlin that fascinates Gorra is colored by Theodor Fontane's Prussian Berlin, before, as historian Michael Wise writes, the "country's past rendered patriotism suspect." Towards the end of the book, his most touching and personal chapter concludes with a glimpse into the place that Thomas Mann's family saga "Buddenbrooks" has held in his life.

As a cultural investigator, Gorra is at his best in a chapter called "Hauptstadt," in which he dissects the peculiarities of the German capital. "Take the subway," he writes, "and mole your way beneath the city, dropping down into darkness and popping up again in a street that doesn't match the one you left behind, into rain you didn't know was happening, a view that seems suddenly all park, or all slum." When writing about Berlin's "big footprint," Gorra must have recognized that like Christopher Isherwood in the 1920's - whose "Berlin Stories" inspired the film "Cabaret" - he was viewing a city in full transition. He visited the German capital in 1993 and then again in the late 1990's, a brief few years that saw Berlin's Mitte district rise up as a cultural hotspot and when the city's edginess began to draw the country's artists to its empty factories and abandoned apartment complexes.

An appendix to the book - including works both literary and historical - is without a doubt one of the greatest boons of the book, for Gorra has selected a way to approach Germany without having to speak German. And it is appropriate that he chooses to settle into his daily rhythms in the very areas that are less often known to attract tourists seeking old world charm, cities that were left mere shells and rebuilt in a new aesthetic after the Second World War, cities that bare their scars openly but not proudly. Gorra seeks out those old wounds and dissects what they may mean for Germans and visitors to Germany today.

But if Gorra often falls into the same questioning that has defined the "German problem" for over half a century, he also displays a profound sympathy for the German people and the burden they carry as the children and grandchildren of Nazi Germany. The title he chose for his book doesn't come into play until the last chapter, when he visits Luebeck's Marienkirche, where a pair of bells lay destroyed in a courtyard as a testament to the tragedy of war. "But what, exactly, does it remember?" he asks. "Does is commemorate what Luebeck itself suffered, or does it mark the suffering of war in general? Does it tell the city that "this was done to us by them," or does it perhaps declare that "this is what we brought upon ourselves?" ... maybe it simply says that these particular and much-loved bells used to ring, and now can't." These lines are among the last resounding notes in an excellent investigation of Germany that might have been more colorful with more anecdotal insight into the Germans he met.