The Dead Girls’ Class Trip (Selected Stories) by Anna Seghers
Part Two, as continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/21/the-dead-girls-class-trip-selected-stories-by-anna-seghers/
Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
New York Review Books 2021
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
nullimmortalis August 7, 2021 at 11:26 am
THE DEAD GIRLS’ CLASS TRIP
“…she would remember, as clearly as I do now, the little velvet ribbon in her hair and the white-walled inn and the sunny garden by the Rhine and the boys arriving just as the girls were leaving.”
Memory as palimpsest for memory, this is a German girl’s proto-Proustian memory of a class trip whereby the various girls, who are now engagingly described in their future lives with the men they married or didn’t marry, were taken from the sunny garden just as the boys, their would-be sweethearts, arrived in the river-boat.
Idyllic, with seesaws, tugged braids and a teacher with a huge crucifix in her cleavage and a duck-walk. But the ‘would-be’ palimpsest — of two future world wars, and the Nazi regime, and these once bosom friends falling out over fealty to the swastika et al — somehow grants them this book’s poignancy of life eternally. For example, the ‘narrator’, I infer, avoids her own death by the now constructive dream co-vividness of cacti and mountains elsewhere, a place where she would have ended up in older age. This genuine masterpiece should be required reading for all would-be inhabitant dreamers of the eternities future-projected by such literature — somehow miraculously creating our personal eternities for real by transcending the lethal fate of the planet where we once lived.
The End
Pages 182 – 187
“Does he actually have the same glass sphere as his neighbor?”
What glass sphere? Or have I missed something?
I am captured, if not captivated, by these first few pages of a novelette. As two men, working on the assumed German railway, seek rope to tie down their jolted cargo. One such worker Volpert has an instinct that the man Zillich, with tipped forward ears, who offers to sell them rope was part of the SS cruelties to those in the (erstwhile, now Soviet rescued?) concentration camp….
In fact, that instinct is more a detailed narrative of such cruelties. As if reliving, by dint of this book’s already established power of retrocausality, reliving something he never lived?