Alfred Andersch 1914-1980
Rhys W. Williams praises the sheer readability of Germany's most controversial modern novelist

Recent literary criticism has been unkind to Alfred Andersch, questioning his personal integrity as well as his literary reputation. Yet his novels still figure on the school curriculum, attract new readers and impress by their sheer readability.

This paradox is related to the intensely autobiographical nature of his writings. Seldom has a German author been so marked by the cataclysmic events of recent German history. Andersch was born in Munich in 1914, the son of an early Nazi enthusiast, who took part in Hitler's Munich Putsch. As German political values polarised, Andersch's youthful rebellion saw him join the Young Communists, where he rose to become Youth Organiser for Southern Bavaria. In February 1933 he was arrested, becoming one of the first inmates of Dachau concentration camp. Released after six weeks, he was rearrested later in 1933. Terrified at the prospect of returning to Dachau he broke with Communism and set about accommodating himself with the Nazi regime. In 1937 Andersch married the half-Jewish daughter of a Munich industrialist. Although the marriage foundered, the personal experience of anti-Semitism (compounded by his own sense of guilt) remained with him. In 1944 Andersch deserted to the Americans in Italy and was interned in a PoW camp in the United States. Here he was re-educated as part of the anti-Nazi élite who would administer a new democratic Germany; here, too, he developed useful editorial skills working on the PoW journal Der Ruf.

Virtually all Andersch's later literary works involve re-working these experiences. They pose awkward questions about commitment, betrayal, fear and loyalty; they explore alternative versions of what might have been. Andersch knows that he made decisions which in retrospect appear questionable; through his fiction he explores, in historical and contemporary settings, potential alternative choices and their consequences. In his autobiographical Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1952) he justifies his desertion, but devotes equal space to his break with communism. Nor does he ignore his accommodation with National Socialism ('I too raised my arm and shouted "Heil!"'). The problem with Andersch's literary strategy is that the urge to confront past choices and postulate alternatives can also seem self-justifying and self-exonerating. His characters (including the many fictional versions of himself) are embedded in history, but history requires of them decisions which only hindsight will judge. Their sheer impotence makes them long to desert, as it were, from history. Andersch's literary strategy, then, is to play out alternative choices, but this invariably means postulating an alternative, re-writing a personal past. This is what irritates his critics, who enjoy all the benefits of hindsight. But Andersch's writing offers a subtle evocation of the sheer impotence of his generation under totalitarianism. What were his personal alternatives? Resistance or exile? Resistance meant a return to Dachau and exile, he frankly admits, never crossed his mind. Yet he presents his desertion as versions of both, even though it was neither. He wants to speak for all post-war Germans, those who reached an accommodation, those who resisted and those who fled. It is brave ambition, but one that can easily be (and has been) misunderstood.

In the 1950s Andersch edited the cultural programme of South German Radio in Stuttgart, publicising the writers of the Group 47 and shaping an eclectic, modernist, leftist literary canon that was specifically West German. In 1957 he achieved a major literary breakthrough with Sansibar. The book recounts the escape of a group of characters from Nazi Germany, though its central character, Gregor (a cipher for Andersch), reflects equally on his difficulties with the Communist Party. An anti-Nazi book, then, but also an anti-Communist one, in keeping with the Cold-War mood of the 1950s. His next novel Die Rote (1960) (The Readhead, trans. Michael Bullock) is set in Venice in winter with echoes of Thomas Mann and Hemingway. The central character, Franziska, suspecting that she is pregnant, flees the tensions between her husband and her lover, and throws herself on the mercies of an Italian ex-communist in Venice, where she becomes embroiled in the revenge of an Anglo-Irish former soldier on his Nazi interrogator. Again, in this sub-plot, Andersch is rectifying, or avenging, a past betrayal, a recurrent strategy in his fiction. The book offers a splendid evocation of Venice, its backwaters, history and culture. The inter-cutting of narrative strands, Andersch's hallmark, appears to lend itself to the film medium, though the film version was a box-office and critical failure, curing Andersch of his love affair with the cinema.

Efraim (1967) (Efraim's Book, trans. Ralph Manheim) confronts the theme of anti-Semitism. The Jewish writer George Efraim has survived the Holocaust in exile in London. His return to the Berlin of his childhood allows Andersch to confront both the Nazi past and the German present. Although an ambitious attempt by a non-Jewish author to confront the Holocaust, the book was not well received. Its emphasis on chance, on human impotence in the face of history, sits uncomfortably with issues of historical responsibility. Andersch's last major novel Winterspelt (1974) is set in the Eifel region during the Ardennes offensive. It plays out the possibility of a large-scale desertion, namely the notion that a German officer might have surrendered a whole division to the Allies, rather than prolong the bloodshed. Andersch explores recurrent themes: the attractions and dangers of communism, the psychology of the fascistic personality, the homosexual as outsider. All this is set against an evocative landscape at what might have been a turning point in German military fortunes. His last work, Der Vater eines Mörders, published posthumously in 1980 to great critical acclaim, (The Father of a Murderer, trans. Leila Vennewitz), is again a personal reminiscence of Andersch's school years in the Wittelsbacher Gymnasium, where his headmaster was the father of Heinrich Himmler, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. The book focuses on a Greek lesson given by the headmaster, a lesson in which the authoritarian structures of German society in the late 1920s are laid bare in the most indirect and unexpected manner. The text reveals one of Anderch's undeniable strengths, the interweaving of the public and the private, the personal and the political.

German history haunts Andersch's writing, confronting his protagonists with complex moral and political dilemmas and forcing his readers to question their own choices. The redemptive power of literature to imagine alternatives may sit uneasily with autobiographical authenticity, but the creative tension between them makes Andersch's fiction peculiarly stimulating.

Rhys W Williams is Professor of German at University of Wales Swansea