Translating German in 2024

I have just submitted the manuscript of a book of translations and commentary I have written as part of a six-month (part time) residency at a Holocaust museum. When I sent in the first draft of the commentary or notes I felt physically sick. As I did also when I got the job. The stakes seemed impossibly high, and at the same time I felt it was hugely narcissistic to think of it in those terms, as if the work I could do there were at all important. The task was a very limited one, and that was the challenge, to do something well, to get it right, within the constraints of the task and the time.

When I applied for the job, Israel had been bombarding Gaza for six months. If this had not been the case, I might not have applied. I had previously taught literature that dealt with the Holocaust as part of university German literature courses, but it is not my specialism, and for the most part I had deliberately avoided reading or thinking, and certainly writing, about National Socialism or the Holocaust and its aftermath. I was put off by how too obviously ‘important’ it was, and so, in a way, ‘easy’. The more respectful and dignified approach felt like something close to silence. A friend has written an article about the epigraphs to Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, arguing that these allowed Williams to connect the book to the concerns of post-war society without producing kitsch. When I was reading around for the residency I came across Glen Newey’s review of a ‘Moral history of the twentieth century’ in the LRB, which Nikhil and his co-author also cite:

A lurking non-sequitur needs to be nailed before it’s possible to think clearly about the matters the book tries to address. This is that the undeniable importance of these events makes important whatever is said about them. It’s tough to think of anything which is both true and unbanal, and it plainly gets tougher the more saturated the market becomes. … Glover tells us that ‘no reaction of disgust and anger is remotely adequate’ to ‘this ultimate expression of contempt’ … Does he take his own point, before or after? No. … Those who write in this vein … are convinced on one matter: they are serious. I do not think that we have to take them at their own evaluation.

Nonetheless, something of the squeamishness around kitsch, a kind of gentlemanly squeamishness, had begun to feel off to me, a form of cowardice, at least on my part, an unwillingness to risk getting it wrong. And in any case, for the first time I could not avoid making work about the Holocaust. Silence, or extreme obliqueness, were not options. I was glad that The Zone of Interest had come out and I so had a sense that it was possible to make good, ambitious, imperfect work about the Holocaust. Quite late in the day I also watched Farocki’s films about the Holocaust and its memory – Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Respite [for which I am right now making English subtitles and will link when they are done], Transmission – and these also reassured me that it wasn’t impossible to get it right. A friend tried to reassure me by reminding me that the bar was low. But that’s exactly the problem – I don’t want it just not to be bad, I want it to be good. Or rather, it didn’t feel like a spectrum, from bad to good, but a binary: either kitsch or anti-kitsch.

But it’s not always clear what kitsch is. Or perhaps it’s more like that there’s a horseshoe of kitsch. At one end sentimental stories with vividly represented suffering that lead to an easy emotional resolution. At the other, the expression of concepts in material form in a way so direct as to be a gimmick. It’s partly about the ease of consumption, but it’s not just that, because difficulty can become its own form of kitsch. I’ve never been to the Jewish Museum in Berlin but was very affected by an analysis I read of it in the PhD of a friend when I was doing my Masters, in which she quoted a review by the critic Edward Rothstein, which found the use of form to create fractures and disorientation pretentious and trivialising: ‘rather than feeling something profound, you almost expect moving platforms and leaping ghosts, as in an amusement park’s house of horrors’.

I was asked, both in the interview for the job, and in a later interview, why I had applied for it, and the (arrogant) answer was that it sounded hard. Hard but, for the first time, personally at least, necessary. I should note here, although I think it is probably obvious, that I have no family connection to the Holocaust and I am not Jewish. I certainly did not previously think that it was necessary to have a family connection to begin to think about it, but I was always a bit grossed out by how eager non-Jewish British people were to study Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which I suppose I saw as a kind of rubbernecking at the suffering, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shame, of peoples they saw as other to them. Not to mention also the inane and dangerous self-congratulatory national mythology in the UK around the second world war, as well as the Kindertransport (etc.). I wanted to do the job because I wanted to make people take ownership of a history they had long assumed belonged to somebody else, which obviously meant that I would have to, too; and that would also mean risking doing it badly.

I wanted to do the job because I had, like everybody else, been feeling powerless in the face of a war that felt close to home, something that I was implicated in. (The last few years have been a very stark demonstration of how clearly these feelings of implication and emotional involvement are conditioned by our own histories and commitments – for which reason I find it dispiriting when people then just accuse each other of having bad reasons for feeling implicated or not, rather than noting the way that these impulses work and accepting them at the same time as moving past them. I recently read Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, which I saw recommended by Lara Pawson, a book about this phenomenon, among many other things.) Other people were dealing with these feelings by posting things on social media, and finding justification for this as a form of action. This didn’t feel available to me; nor did it feel right, in fact, although I could see that I had reasons for wanting to think it wasn’t right, and it’s possible I was wrong – more than possible. But whatever the case, it wasn’t an option for me, temperamentally speaking, either as a way of ‘doing something’ or of feeling as if I were ‘doing something’. I went on a couple of marches but felt somehow grossed out by the way it seemed to be an excuse to see and be seen in the pub afterwards. I have been on a couple more since then and have used my discomfort as a way to justify slipping away halfway through, the real reason for which is just the normal dislike of being ‘committed’, as they say in climbing, for instance if it were to end in a kettle.

Here, then, was an opportunity to ‘do something’ using the actual competences I had, and something I could make my own, something that could be an ‘authentic’ intervention at a time when the main forms of action appeared to involve aligning oneself with the words or slogans of others, or else faking a kind of authenticity by presenting oneself as an expert. Obviously there is a small number of people who really are experts, in one way or another, whom I relied on to help think things through, but they couldn’t be models for my own work and engagement. For that I would have to look to what it was that I, specifically, had to offer. I’m not the only person in the country and on the left who can translate from German and worry about what it is to produce kitsch. (Although I have sometimes felt that not enough people on the left have worried about this over the last 13 months.) But I am at least one of them, and I applied, and got the job.

I wanted to be able to ‘do something’, then, although what and how was unclear. But I also wanted, at least as a side effect, to transform my attitude towards German as a language. One of my current gigs is teaching German via translation at a university, which I have been doing as a side or main gig for nearly a decade. But (as I’ve written about before) I feel very ill at ease in German and Germany, a feeling which has grown the longer I’ve spent not spending time in Germany, but which began in Germany, in 2015, when I realised that another 6 months would not be enough to be able to speak and write as quickly and precisely as I wanted to be able to speak in German – perhaps even a lifetime would not be enough. I couldn’t give up, because I was halfway through a PhD in German, and I believed in the work I was doing, and wanted to continue doing it. But this trouble with the language, which was also a trouble with the culture, reached existential proportions, and I ran away from Germany, which I did again two years later.

I once tried to develop a project about the history of Modern Languages teaching in the UK, specifically the role of literature within it, and as part of this I read the memoirs of Elsie Butler, a professor of German literature who famously hated Germany and the Germans. Hating Germany in the 1930s is a different kettle of fish to hating Germany in the 2010s, but she had hated Germany in the 1920s, too (but was that then just xenophobia? was my own hatred of Germany a kind of xenophobia?). Doing this preparatory research I found scholars and readers wanting to separate the literature from the country and its politics, and wanting to act as caretakers of German culture at a point when Germany was morally unable to do so itself – an impulse which I wasn’t always convinced by, but there were others whose left-wing humanism, Roy Pascal for instance, I was drawn to. (I also came across quite a few examples of academics whose love of Germany and German culture meant that they continued working with people and institutions who were signed up, sometimes enthusiastically, to National Socialism, even into the 1940s.)

I have often liked the way that different cultures have different versions of what another country’s national literature looks like. Of the specifically British canons of German literature, there is one based around what texts work well in a UK teaching context. At one point it was, I think, shorter 19^th century prose fiction. Now, perhaps, it’s German written by those with less straightforward relations to Germanness, whether German-speaking people from outside of Germany who migrated there in the 90s, or Turkish- or Afro- or Arab Germans, or those who have learnt German as a second language. (Germans, for their part, have all, or so it seemed to me when I first moved there, read the novel Harold and Maude – actually the screenplay of the film of the same name – neither of which I had ever heard of, and have only since read because I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Germany.)

When I conceived of this project as transforming my attitude to German, I understood this as gaining a kind of confidence in it, understanding myself as ‘good enough’ in some way, and so being able to enjoy getting better at it and using it, rather than the joyless and fearful avoidance that had characterised most of my encounters with German since finishing the PhD. But when I handed in the most recent draft for feedback, I realised that on some level there was an element of revenge in it too, or at least, as Tom, the other writer-in-residence put it, resistance. This is both a personal revenge on a language which has, it sometimes feels, ruined my life. But it is a revenge that has wider implications – tied up in the ways that Germans really do feel they own certain aspects of their language and culture and exclude whomever they like from that ownership, and which make me desire to hit out at them, to show them how smug and condescending and limited and wrong they are.

I’ve not spent so much time in Germany, but enough that I am halfway able to understand what has gone wrong when there are moments of incomprehension – like when whoever it was on Twitter, some embassy even, suggested that Germany was an expert at recognising antisemitism, and all anglophones simply could not believe their eyes, and couldn’t see how the Germans couldn’t see that this was an unbelievable faux pas. Over the past 13 months analysis of German Zionism and philosemitism, which previously I had only ever found in niche leftwing blogs and online magazines, has become much more mainstream, and I think there is now a more general understanding of how this might not seem a faux pas from a German perspective. I don’t know how much this has gone the other way – there have been times when, from the little I have been following of things in Germany, it seemed that there was a growing understanding of the non-German perspective. I was pleased, for instance, when the president of the Goethe-Institut wrote in Der Spiegel about the way Germany seemed increasingly illiberal to international cultural organisations – although on the level of legislation things seem worse than ever.

And from the other side, I have been glad of what an experience of the German perspective has allowed me to see of the UK from the outside, especially around Palestine. I had friends in Berlin who had been in the antideutsch movement, or were still halfway aligned with it, some who had even volunteered in Israel, and while they had different commitments by the time I knew them, they had a sense of the problems that go unseen on the left. Talking to them made me realise how ignorant I was, and how much the moral obviousness of the injustices in Palestine, historical and contemporary, had meant that I had left many other things unexamined. And it also made me realise how historically contingent certain left positions are; which is not to say that they are wrong, but that holding one position and not another is sometimes a matter of luck more than critical engagement and a nose for the truth. This was 2015; two years later I felt I was going insane as people around me denied there was such a thing as left antisemitism, and two years after that I felt I was going doubly insane as the good faith of people who did recognise that there was such a thing as left antisemitism was exploited, and I strongly felt I had been had.

The last 13 months has changed the world’s attitude to Germany and German. This has felt like a kind of relief. Some of the things I felt slightly insane for knowing about at all, like the antideutsch, are now common knowledge, or closer to it. Hearing Emily Dische-Becker talk about the competitiveness of analysis, the ‘pseudo-expertise’ around antisemitism that characterises the antideutsch, felt like letting go of some kind of secret psychic burden, as did reading Wolfgang Streeck mention the way that German culture ‘perceives dissent as selfish and as a threat to social and political unity’ (‘it’s also seen as pointless’, he adds). (Dische-Becker also reminded me of how much my antipathy to the antideutsch had been based on the fact that they were doing what I, in principle, wanted to be doing – a critique of the left from the left, a politics of anti-naivety – and they believed they were doing it better than me; and of the sheer machismo of it all, which I was also reminded of when I was in Leipzig the other year, at an antideutsch bar for a friend’s party, the bar staff all tall men in sleeveless t-shirts, lean and muscled, around whom I felt suddenly weedy and soft.) But it has also meant that my sense of what it means to be complicit has changed.

At one point, early on in the residency, a friend mentioned that someone I was collaborating with had liked a facebook post by a poet, the translation of whose work I had helped edit. The post was an article by Herta Müller on Gaza. I have never liked Herta Müller’s work and the fact that she took the position she took wasn’t itself surprising given what I understood her politics to be. But some of the things she said in it were truly shocking, and I felt lightheaded with rage and confusion – at the idea that someone could be so wrong, in all ways, so publicly wrong, and then be applauded for it. I hadn’t slept, which didn’t help. But I freaked the hell out about the translation work I was doing, having no idea what the right thing was to do now – to pull out or say something or sign some kind of open letter as a way of making my position clear, or whatever. And I also freaked out about the work I was doing for the Holocaust museum, because what I did not want was for it to be the kind of thing that could ever be used to support the kind of positions that Müller was taking. But at the same time I did not want it to be about my specific position either, a kind of personal polemic or, much worse, moral self-congratulation, nor explicitly about Gaza at all, because what I wanted was to show how being careful and precise could get you to the truth, of whatever historical situation the work landed in, which at that point I could not know and still now cannot, and could cut through the kitsch.

Anyway, I have let it loose into the world now, barring a few rounds of editing. It should be coming out in March. And I am still terrified. That I have made it too much about me, too little. That I’ve done all of the things I most hate when people talk about translation or other languages. That I’ve made it too sentimental, or too gimmicky. That I’ve been cowardly. And so on. That I’ve made it possible for people only to hear what they want to hear, or not to listen at all, to say ‘oh they would say that, because…’, when, I hope, I’ve said whatever I’ve said there and also said here because it was true.