‘Life Goes On,’ by Hans Keilson

“Life Goes On” is both a very good first novel and a chilling reminder of the Nazis’ success at destroying Germany’s rich literary culture for a generation, if not longer. The author, Hans Keilson, wrote this lightly fictionalized account of his life about 80 years ago, when he was in his early 20s. To give just one example of how much the world has changed since then: Keilson tells us in an afterword that the impetus to start the novel was the fury he felt after he’d been turned away as a patient by the powerful Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. (A few years later, the institute would be taken over by a cousin of Hermann Goering, and most of its analysts would flee to Palestine.) The publisher, the great S. Fischer Verlag, accepted the novel for publication in December 1932. The extremely poor and extremely elated Keilson took his advance and went skiing for the first time in his life. When he came back, the Reichstag was on fire, the Nazis had begun arresting Communists, and the publisher told Keilson to change his ending, which had a Communist twist. The novel appeared, with the altered ending, in 1933. It was banned in 1934. And that is the story, Keilson explains in the afterword, of “the last debut by a Jewish writer from the old S. Fischer Verlag.”

Keilson lived to the age of 101, having survived the Nazis in hiding; published two more novels; abandoned fiction writing because, he said, he’d lost his audience; become a psychotherapist treating Jewish war orphans; and written an important treatise on trauma in children. (He died in 2011.) Though his third novel, “The Death of the Adversary,” sold well in America and was one of Time’s top 10 books of 1962 — along with fiction by Faulkner, Roth, Nabokov, Borges and Katherine Anne Porter — the German Jewish writer had been forgotten by the English-speaking world in 2007, when the translator Damion Searls found another of his novels, “Comedy in a Minor Key,” in the bargain bin of an Austrian bookstore. Searls picked the book up only because he mistook it for another one. At that point, Keilson had only just been rediscovered in Germany; Fischer issued his “Collected Works” as a boxed set in 2005. Searls translated “Comedy in a Minor Key” into English, and in 2010 The New York Times Book Review published an essay on that novel and “The Death of the Adversary” that called them “masterpieces” and Keilson “a genius.”

“Life Goes On,” also translated by Searls, is not a masterpiece, but it is certainly worth reading. Partly a work of social realism and partly a bildungsroman, it contrasts the financial and psychological decline of a clothing merchant and his wife in a small German town during the Great Depression with the artistic awakening of their watchful, worried son. The boy’s father, Herr Seldersen, already exudes a downtrodden timidity when his fat, mincing landlord comes into his store to announce that he’s expanding his stationery business and moving Seldersen to a smaller space next door. Vaudevillian as this opening is, it aptly prefigures Selder­sen’s future as a man at the mercy of ­forces too big for him to push back against. “That winter was the first one when all the poverty and misery was out in the open. Unemployment was rampant,” the boy observes. “People came by and told stories, complained about all sorts of things, and were all so discouraged.” Seldersen extends credit to his customers, but fewer and fewer pay him back. His troubles multiply: tax audits, angry letters from unpaid suppliers, ruinous loans.

Meanwhile, the son, Albrecht, goes from roaming at will with his best friend, Fritz, through their town and its pastoral surroundings, “all-powerful masters of the world,” as Albrecht thinks of it, to noticing with alarm the country’s rapid disintegration and his family’s worsening situation. Fritz, a strong, handsome boy who “could make anyone in the world laugh,” descends into a strange, reckless moodiness and abruptly leaves home. Albrecht, a good-enough but distracted student, senses his own possibilities shrink. One night at the local literary club, though, he hears a lecture on Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger” and is befriended by the lecturer, who lends him the novella: “Grand, strange, wonderful thoughts came to him, and he had no idea himself how they had arisen, but for the time being astonishment and uncertainty outweighed everything else. This fateful book was decisive for Albrecht.”

 Albrecht’s literary development shadows Kröger’s in the sense that Albrecht is equally alienated from the mainstream of German life, but otherwise their lives could not be more different. The wealthy Kröger glides to fame in pre-World War I Germany, retreating into his “fastidious, exquisite, precious, refined, hypersensitive” poetic sensibility, as Mann puts it. Albrecht goes to college in Berlin, which roils with hunger and rage and violent social upheaval. He plays violin in a band to pay his way through school, then to support his parents; this is harsher labor than you’d think if what you long to do is study and write. He keeps his distance from the turmoil at first, as his literary mentor and his own cautious temperament urge him to do, but ultimately plunges into the fray and achieves political consciousness, although the exact nature of the politics he becomes conscious of is never specified.

And that lack of specificity, I have to say, makes this novel a little weird to read. Keilson tells us that he had to cut the ideological content out of the ending, but the rest of the book feels as if it’s been neutered too. For all the sharply observed details of the economic crisis and the riots in the streets and the approach of an unnamed menace, Keilson, writing in the run-up to Hitler’s ascent to power, never names a party, never speaks of Nazis or Communists, utters not one single word about Jews. We who know not only what was happening in Germany while Keilson wrote but also what happened right after his book came out (and that, of course, is nearly all of us) can’t help interpreting the Seldersens as Jewish. Their growing terror, deteriorating social position and loss of dignity make that identification hard to avoid. But Keilson refuses to say that they are.

Was Keilson drawing an allegorical veil over the events and characters of his novel so as to keep it from being pigeonholed by the ideologues of the day? Or was he being evasive? If he was, do we have the right to judge him for that? His other two novels, one or both written while he was in hiding (it’s not clear when “Comedy in a Minor Key” was begun), deal somewhat more directly with the experience of German Jews, although “The Death of the Adversary” pursued a contrarian argument about the love/hate relationship between victims and oppressors that made the novel unpopular among Jewish readers after the war. Still, whatever his attitude toward his own identity during those terrible times, he can’t be accused of having run away from it later.

In any case, “Life Goes On” is an important and heartbreaking novel, and not only because it lets us hear the power of Keilson’s young voice just before it was silenced for more than a decade. The book also lets us relive and understand, a little, the anguish and confusion from which a madman emerged as chancellor. Moreover, as grim as the material is, the prose is a pleasure. Keilson has a lovely, easy style, a gentle tone and an analytic mind. He depicts complicated human interactions — between a broke customer and a near-bankrupt merchant, a tactful schoolteacher and a loving but obtuse father — with a precocious mastery of nuance and full comprehension of what can’t be said. He was so young, and such a natural. We should have had more than just three short novels from Hans Keilson.