He outraged the German Jewish community with polemics about the Holocaust. German writer Martin Walser died at the age of 96. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported about it with reference to his loved ones. The winner of the Georg Büchner Prize has developed into one of the most important, but also the most controversial, authors of post-war German literature. He left behind an extensive body of work.
Walser was born in 1927 in Wasserburg, Bavaria. He wrote his first poems at the age of twelve, after the Second World War, when he had to go to the front, he studied literature. In 1955, he published his first collection of short stories. He was one of the most recognized authors in Germany, among other novellas Prchající kůň and Gallistl’s disease and the novel Johann were published in Czech.
His theater drama Smrtihlav, which was translated into Czech by Jiří Stach in 1967, was already well known here. In the same year, the publishing house Mladá fronta published a collection of Walser’s short stories, translated by Jiří Janovský, called Complicity in my end. These were wonderful stories from life or just life situations, captured without a deeper depiction of the characters, without clarification of psychological motives and deliberately not brought to an end. In this way, the author strove for a potential multiplicity of interpretations.
Later, local readers could become familiar with, for example, Walser’s psychological novel Without Love. She told about an aging representative of a business company, who in the pursuit of a comfortable life breaks off relationships with people and family and realizes that he is losing life in a borderline situation.
In the satirical socio-critical novel Philippsburg Marriage Unions, the writer depicted the marriage unions of manufacturers, lawyers, politicians, managers and artists living in the big city.
In another novel by Walser, Příboj, published in Czech, a fifty-five-year-old professor of German literature is invited to a university in California, USA, full of brightness, warmth and other people. This change will create a desire for change in him as well. The hero gradually falls into a platonic relationship with a student, but he cannot take a decisive step on his own.
In his native Germany, Martin Walser published countless works. More than two dozen prose works, plus novellas, essays, poems and speeches, as well as many theater and radio plays. “A titanic work,” literary critic Denis Scheck once said of his legacy.
However, some of his works and statements were controversial. Walser outraged the German Jewish community years ago. In 1998, this former Wehrmacht soldier under the Nazis received the prestigious German Booksellers’ Peace Prize, which was also given to Václav Havel, who was then imprisoned, in absentia before the fall of the Iron Curtain in autumn 1989. Speaking in Frankfurt am Main, Walser warned against the “instrumentalization of German national shame” linked to the events of the war.
He urged that the Holocaust not be constantly used as a “moral weight”, and criticized the “exploitation” of Auschwitz and other terrible monuments of Nazism. He regretted that the Germans were “constantly reminded of their shame”. The then chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, called Walser a “spiritual arsonist”.
