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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:49]
Uli Bear
Think about It. Deep Conversations with Uli Bear on Big Ideas and Great Books. I am really thrilled today to have a very special guest, Peter Wertzman, on the Think about it podcast. Peter, first of all, thank you for joining me today.
- [02:10]
Peter Wertzman
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [02:11]
Uli Bear
I can't do justice to your full scope of your work, but Peter is a playwright, a novelist, a poet, a translator, a travel writer, an essayist, kind of consummate sort of person who's been generating enormous amounts of books and commentary. And as a translator, you've translated Kafka, Musil, Musial, Heine, Altenberg.
- [02:35]
Peter Wertzman
Altenberg, that was a lot of fun.
- [02:36]
Uli Bear
Altenberg and the Brothers Grimm's. And then you have a whole book of sort of tales of the Imagination and from the German Tradition, an anthology.
- [02:44]
Peter Wertzman
In UK which is still getting royalties.
- [02:47]
Uli Bear
It's an enormous amount of translation and some of it comes out of this German moment that we sort of usually define as romanticism. And E.T.A. hoffman, who is the writer we're going to start, start talking about today, but we'll go in any direction you want. And you published. One of the books you published is called ETA Hoffman the Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny with Archipelago Books. So that is the Golden Pot, one of the key stories of German romanticism. And Hoffman, I think, to many American readers, is probably best known for Freud's rereading of the Sandman. So there's a 1919 essay called the Uncanny where Freud talks about the experience or the feeling of the uncanny. And he uses Hoffman's story the Sandman as a kind of key text for that. But maybe we'll just start out with sort of how you started your interest in Hoffman, who, when I just reread it this week, I tried to read as many stories as I could. It's just remarkable what it contains and how it sort of rings true to our 21st century ears right now and.
- [03:48]
Peter Wertzman
How freefall the whole thing is. Let's begin. I thought, by a definition, I thought we should define the uncanny for ourselves. So I just looked up, I think this was in either the Oxford Dictionary or Webster. The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar. That balance is interesting rather than simply mysterious. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar entity is encountered in a frightening, eerie or taboo context. And I think it's precisely that balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar that makes it so exciting. We're all children in relation to this story and we want those thrills from horror movies. And it's all because it comes too close. If it stays far, it doesn't work. And Hoffman, amazingly enough, I don't know if you know the Walter Benjamin essay on the Storyteller, which is about Nikola Leskov, but he also mentions Hoffman and I'm in agreement. I'm going to say something now that many might find horrible. Hoffman is a great storyteller, not necessarily in stylistic terms. I would say a great writer. I mean, for me, I'm interested in Hoffman's great, great grandchild, Mr. Kafka, who has an ability to express the ineffable in crystal clear classical language. And this I find, or Kleist, for instance, can do that. Hoffman, I know he wrote the imagination is unbelievable. The wealth and depth of his imagination from his childhood traumas. I'm sure he had an awful childhood.
- [05:33]
Uli Bear
So if we go back to one moment, the Uncanny, which is kind of the way in which some people. That's their gateway into Hoffman. But there's much more than the uncanny. Much more.
- [05:45]
Peter Wertzman
Is an amazing text, I think, I really think it has to be a movie. Here you have a middle aged, my wife would say second rate poet who becomes a brilliant detective. And I think nobody knows that story.
- [06:00]
Uli Bear
And Madame de Scuderie, just if you give us a synopsis, because it's also possibly before Edgar Allan Poe, really one of the first detective stories in your kind of. Afterward, to the Hoffman that I'm looking at, the golden part, you say it's agatha Castis, it's Ms. Marple, it's a female detective. It's a distinguished, dignified lady who's sort of receding from life and gets involved in an incredibly brutal spree of crimes and murders in sort of pre revolutionary France. And she has access to the court, but she also manages to, to find out the truth of something. And it's. It really reads like Poe before Edgar and Poe. It reads like Agatha Christie and it's a female protagonist and it's delicious reading.
- [06:45]
Peter Wertzman
It's delicious. You, you get the sense the, the goldsmith. The, the evil Goldsmith, yes, is kind of. It's Moriarty before Moriarty. He's brilliant. I stumbled on it and I thought, my God, this is. And it's unlike, it's unlike the rest. I wouldn't call it an uncanny tale. It's a detective tale.
- [07:05]
Uli Bear
It's a detective tale and it's probably one of the first detectives that we know. Poe is usually credited for Murder in the Rue Morgue is the first detective story. And I thought this is the first detective story. And Hoffman has this kind of influence as a kind of through line. And you talk about this a bit afterwards, how even people who don't know Hoffman have probably read stories. And to go back to the uncanny, the distinction seems to be something that's unsettling or disturbing or frightening in our everyday domestic environment. So it's an object that suddenly seems to be animate. And it's not a monster from outside that intrudes, but it's in your own world. Something suddenly takes on a kind of sinister dimension.
- [07:49]
Peter Wertzman
It strikes me as a thought in the first movie, Night of the Living Dead, when the daughter attacks the mother that's truly shocking. I don't know if you remember the daughter is resuscitated as a zombie and suddenly turns on the mother. That's that kind of moment literally in the home. Yeah, yeah. I think people don't realize the influence of Hoffman is very surprising. We can go like this. Hoffman in translation, Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, etc. Then the most interesting thing is Julio Cortazar, before coming into his own as a writer, is also a brilliant translator. And he translates all of Poe into Spanish. And that, to my mind, is one of the sparks that kindles magical realism. So we can really trace this arc back to Dr. Hoffman.
- [08:47]
Uli Bear
Oh, interesting. And so that goes into magical realism, South American. Then we have in America, Hawthorne, as you said, Irving kind of tales sort of of the uncanny, in a way, in the mid century. Then you have Baudelaire, who translates Edgar and Poe, which some people think, and I've had a podcast on Poe before, who makes Poe into a great writer. Actually, Baudelaire's translation and reverence for Poe turns Poe into a great American writer. While in America, Poe's standing is always.
- [09:17]
Peter Wertzman
I would defend Poe not as a poet, which is. They're very dated, standard forms. But a work like Eureka, I don't know if you know it, that's. I think he's on his way to the future there in ways that are very surprising. And there are one or two songs like this. The man of the Crowd is a brilliant, brilliant story. So I think of Poe as our American, I'm going to put it in quotes, our American Kafka, that is as a minor in the unconscious. That's what I would call all of these guys that I find interesting. And they're. And that was put. Stopped to stop immediately when Hemingway comes and Hemingway and William Dean Howells who say, no, the English sentence. The American English sentence has to be a simple, short, simple sentence. And not too much going down deep stuff. Just let's keep it manly, right?
- [10:16]
Uli Bear
And keep the iceberg hidden.
- [10:18]
Peter Wertzman
And my battle in life is to get back down to the depths, get back down because it was there in America and that it was cut short. And everything I write from my first book, Modern Way to Die, these are all fantastic tales, all derived from nightmares.
- [10:36]
Uli Bear
But say something about this. Why this part of our lives which all of us have, that all of us have sort of an imagination. Some have nightmares, some of you sort of thinking about things. You put the man in the crowd pose or this story here in Edgar in edr. Hoffman is my cousin's Corner window where you're observing the world passing by. Then you single out a figure. You imagine a story for them that could be charming, enchanting or frightening. When you're saying it with Hemingway, they sort of eradicate this. Hemingway, of course, knows he's playing a trick on everybody. There's the iceberg hidden beneath. There's a lot of simmering, sort of psychosis in Hemingway.
- [11:16]
Peter Wertzman
There's a lot of pretense. There's a lot of pretense.
- [11:19]
Uli Bear
How do you mean that?
- [11:20]
Peter Wertzman
I love him as a stylist.
- [11:22]
Uli Bear
Hemingway, yes.
- [11:24]
Peter Wertzman
I like brief, I like brevity. And as a stylist, he's extraordinary. He learned that from Isaac Bobbel. Then he imposes on the reader a pseudo philosophy about manliness, about the nature. And this is extremely dated. I don't think Hemingway is dated. I think Hemingway is one of our greats. I studied with Philip Ralph, one of the founders of Partisan Review, and he said one of the brilliant thing. At some point, you cannot reduce a writer to the message necessarily he or she wants to deliver. Because if we reduced Dostoevsky to sort of Slavic nationalism, it would be nothing. So the writer can be separated from what he or she thinks they're talking about. It's the manner in which they play around with it. You see what I'm saying?
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Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [12:15]
Peter Wertzman
I want to be clear. I'm not condemning Hemingway.
- [12:17]
Uli Bear
And I wonder if something splits in America and sort of. Because you have HEMINGWAY, let's say 1920s, so you have the Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to arms, 20s, you have Gatsby. And then you have the explosion of what today we consider Hollywood and the dimension that Poe has, which maybe. Which is also in Hoffman, of the uncanny, the creepy, the weird, the ungovernable. All of that ends up in America. We are full of that. Our culture is full of that. All the way to Stephen King, who actually is a master at this, of course. But it's.
- [12:52]
Peter Wertzman
Stephen King is surprisingly, in that sense, like, he's a great storyteller, but maybe he does it too fast. Maybe he doesn't.
- [13:00]
Uli Bear
Well, he is a prolific writer, as was Hoffman, as you are. So there's something about. In Hoffman, you see, you feel the urgency of. He wants to tell you a story. And what I also found remarkable in some of the stories, he tells you why he's telling you a story, what storytelling really means. I'm giving you only a fragment here, Rita. You want to know the solution? I'm going to withhold that because I want your imagination to fill it in it's very self aware writing, but it's written at incredible speed. You have a sense.
- [13:28]
Peter Wertzman
Remember, this man had three different lives. He was administrator for the Prussian regime, a lawyer by training, the crazy uncle, by the way. He was at one trial, lost it. And he never, never, never.
- [13:43]
Uli Bear
He lost a trial and then quit.
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Peter Wertzman
The law right after, never practiced again. So it's a very peculiar family. Very peculiar. Hoffman clearly was not that. I think he was by all accounts praised for his administrative work as well.
- [13:57]
Uli Bear
And he said, this is the one life. He's a jurist and he writes at night.
- [14:02]
Peter Wertzman
Very similar to Kafka. They're both lawyers, both in a position which they like, all right. But they really want to be known for what they do, which is the writing. There's another dimension in Hoffman. Hoffman wanted to be a composer and I think he was too precious about music. The way he describes music. I wrote that in the essay of this because I see the musical streak throughout. He was so careful, careful, but with words it was just, you know, whipping it out. And that's interesting. And that's interesting. So there's the regret for the music and the musical strain that you can see in his language. It's almost like he's wail, wailing, you know. It's wonderful stuff. I mean, I can't see someone not enjoying reading these stories. Impossible. Yeah.
- [15:03]
Uli Bear
And it's interesting what they do to us, sort of. You're carried along by the. There's a palpable excitement about the language. It's pulsing, it's funny, it's vivid, it has a lot of turns that you don't expect. And maybe I want to go to a passage which I really liked. And this is the fourth vigil in the Golden Pot. It's probably famous. I'm not so familiar with all the Hoffman scholarship, but when I read it, I thought, and I'll read it for a moment to our listeners to see this sounds like something that could be written today, addressed to today's younger generation. This is page 55. So there's several chapters in this story, the Golden Pot. And if you just give me a little bit of an outline of what the Golden Pot is about. It's the title story. It's a story of a student who is sort of kind of a fantastical story. And then we'll go to that paragraph.
- [15:54]
Peter Wertzman
A student who I would say sort of borderline meshuggah. He misses out on going to a festivity that he really wanted to go to. And to console himself, sits under A tree. And then he starts. Perhaps he'd been drinking too much. He looks up in the tree and there are these green snakes swirling around which are clearly very erotic for him. And he falls in love with one of the green snakes. And as in much of Hoffman, the ideal opposes what you can have. And he always wants. He has this girlfriend who seems like a quite a lovely, lovely girlfriend, but he has this other imaginary girlfriend who he's pining after the same as in, same as in the Sandman. Sandman.
- [16:41]
Uli Bear
There's a real, wonderful, real life girl who is actually clear headed, reasonable, intelligent, full of love for him, capable. And then there's the imaginary fantastical figure of some feminine seduction who becomes an.
- [16:56]
Peter Wertzman
Automaton, who is an automaton, stiff and lifeless. And I think you see that throughout Hoffman, actually. And I think it's. But we have it all. What you have and can have and what you pine after.
- [17:12]
Uli Bear
Yeah, what you.
- [17:13]
Peter Wertzman
Which is always, you know, I walk next to you. I think if I had one, one head taller on myself, life would be. Life would be different.
- [17:21]
Uli Bear
Would be different, yeah.
- [17:23]
Peter Wertzman
And it probably would be different, but, you know, it's hard to say.
- [17:26]
Uli Bear
But let's stay with this for a moment. So this is kind of tension between, let's say the real and the imaginary or the fantastical. So in these two stories in the Sandman, the real girlfriend is wonderful. And then there's this mechanical doll, beautiful to look at, kind of perfection. She can dance, she can sing, she can all these things, but she's lifeless. And I want to talk about this in a couple of minutes. Why Hoffman is so fascinated by machine like humans and what is so troubling about that. And one of the narrators is totally freaked out by the fact that we can simulate human intelligence. And I was reading these stories, I thought all these stories have to be read in what AI is doing to us right now, because it is the simulation of an intelligence and people fall for it. So to go back to the golden pot. So he has this real girlfriend, then he falls in love with this little snake. He seems to be a bit delirious. He sort of cries out, he almost throws himself overboard on the boat. And then he actually enters into a relationship. He starts to copy down manuscripts for this fancy professor in this home and then tell us what goes on there where the story is sort of very. It's a student having a job, he's transcribing manuscripts.
- [18:38]
Peter Wertzman
In fact, the job, when you think of it, is insane. He's transcripts of languages he doesn't know, but he has to essentially copy. Copy the letters. Is that already is borderline crazy?
- [18:52]
Uli Bear
Yes.
- [18:52]
Peter Wertzman
It's not exactly a steady job.
- [18:54]
Uli Bear
No.
- [18:56]
Peter Wertzman
But he does it well because he dreams of the green snake all the time. And it's the green snake that long after ideal rather than what you can have. I think what drives Hoffman along all throughout Hoffman down to. That's his last story, which you talked about when he visits his cousin at the window in Berlin.
- [19:22]
Uli Bear
The cousin My cousin's corner window, which.
- [19:25]
Peter Wertzman
Is not a great story, but the reason I put it in is it is our last message from him or the last message that he wanted to go public with.
- [19:35]
Uli Bear
And he's looking at a marketplace very busy and he's singling out figures and kind of imagining what their inner lives are like.
- [19:43]
Peter Wertzman
And he's explaining his process. He's explaining, this is how I write.
- [19:48]
Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [19:49]
Peter Wertzman
And that's why I included it there.
- [19:51]
Uli Bear
It's beautiful. Yeah. And that's what we all do. We have to single out one story over others. I want to go back to this. The ideal versus the real. So there's a real girlfriend. Then this ideal, the golden, the green little snakes. And then he's in some study copying languages he doesn't know. And he has to emulate Arabic script or whatever it is. He's really good at it. And then he starts to imagine he's in a completely transformed, mythical, mystical, phantasmagorical place, which is this kind of jungle like greenhouse where there's snakes slithering and palm trees and thorns and flowers and insects and it's colorful.
- [20:33]
Peter Wertzman
It's not Germany.
- [20:34]
Uli Bear
It's not Germany. It's exactly. It's a beautiful orientalist. He actually used that word, fantasy. And I think there he differs from Freud. And Hoffman doesn't say, oh, it's bad to have these desires and it's bad to imagine things to be different or otherwise. And it's bad to have a fantasy versus the real. And Freud says, well, that'll produce neurosis and frustration and some kind of our stymied longing. And Hoffman says, no, this will actually launch our imagination. And we actually. This is part of who we are and we don't want to excise it or medicated or clean it up.
- [21:08]
Peter Wertzman
Let's be honest. There's an incredible eroticism running throughout it as well. The golden pot is. I'm not going to psychoanalyze it, but I think the reader can understand clear eroticism throughout. Do I go for that glitzy girl? I said Girl, forgive me. Yeah, that glitzy one. Or do I go for that lovely one who likes me?
- [21:32]
Uli Bear
Yeah, but that's actually interesting, what we said earlier about the uncanny. Do we go for the domestic tranquility, sitting in front of a little house of our two kids playing in the yard. They would be a literal picket fence, maybe not white. Or do we go for what we're capable of, to imagine life to be otherwise, to be fantastical, to be continually full of surprises. And in the Sandman, that turns out to be a terrible, terrible desire. In the Golden Pot, it's not totally clear whether it's really terrible because you also want the protagonist to have these fantasies.
- [22:07]
Peter Wertzman
Yes. You know, we all have it at our disposal. I continue to play my life as I played as a five year old. I've never changed, really. And that playing element to think of. We use the word work, especially in the Protestant work ethic. The word work is all you got to work work. But the truth is, the only work that I've ever done that was any worth anything was when I was playing and I asked that to. For years I was an interviewer for Columbia Medical School for well known doctors, including Bob Leftkowitz, who a Nobel Prize winner who permitted me to start the interview by definition of play. And I said, do you ever find yourself playing? And this, this Nobel Prize winning scientist responds, I play all the time. That's all I do. By the definition of play, I'm not so being something flighty, but something very serious. Serious, by our own rules. It's that dimension.
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Uli Bear
So how do you mean that? Can you say a little bit more about that? A Nobel Prize winning scientist would say, I play all the time.
- [23:11]
Peter Wertzman
He said, I've never worked a moment in my life. I've never worked a day in my life. That is to say, the activity you do by mostly your own rules with some outer realm that gives you the most pleasure. Yeah. And in my case it's playing with words. And for instance, I do cut ups as well.
- [23:33]
Uli Bear
These are poems, cut up poems.
- [23:35]
Peter Wertzman
And I'm writing my fourth of these.
- [23:38]
Uli Bear
And you said when you were five, were you already inclined to do this? Did you have this kind of.
- [23:43]
Peter Wertzman
When I was five, school, I found, was a terrible waste of time. School was in the way of what I needed to do. All I did all day was out of Plastoline, make little soldier figures and set them to war. Unfortunately, that was my imagination. When I came closer to adolescence, there were sort of erotic scenes. But you know, early on it was you know, battle. And it was my heroes. This is my book. I wrote this in German, this book of stories. And in this Stinne und Atem is about a little boy whose parents come from the German speaking world who. Who, out of a pickle jar, smoke and other things, constructs gas chambers. Sorry, I'm going in that direction because that's the subtext of a lot for me. And this little boy is doing that as a game. Nobody realizes it. The narrator didn't realize it. I didn't realize it, what I was doing. But I know only can see it in retrospect.
- [24:45]
Uli Bear
So the child is constructing a reenactment of their.
- [24:50]
Peter Wertzman
A reenactment of the history that sent his parents packing.
- [24:54]
Uli Bear
Wow. Out of little domestic things like a pickle jar.
- [24:57]
Peter Wertzman
Yes. And then the child. Usually that child gave a performance every Saturday for the family. And one day he comes down. His father had given up smoking, but kept a pack, just in case, behind the radiator. And the son knew exactly where it was. It was, along with the dirty, dirty pictures. It was right behind the radiator. And the son takes a Chesterfield cigarette, clips off the Clips off the filter, dips the filter in black ink and puts it under his nose. And clearly that's. You would understand the performance he's about to give. It was very liberating and very difficult to muscularize my German sufficiently so as to write in it. I've been able to read in it a long time because I never went to school in German. I only know German from an auditory point of view. Then I really worked on it. I was on a Fulbright in Freiburg, in which city I dearly love. 17, 1973. 74. And that was the beginning of my muscularizing that. That German in me.
- [26:08]
Uli Bear
And prior to that stay in Germany. How was your German? Where did you get it from?
- [26:12]
Peter Wertzman
Oh, it's the language I spoke. We spoke at home.
- [26:15]
Uli Bear
So it's in the private.
- [26:16]
Peter Wertzman
Private language.
- [26:17]
Uli Bear
It's your private idiom.
- [26:18]
Peter Wertzman
Private family idiom. And English is the public language. But that private family idiom is loaded.
- [26:26]
Uli Bear
Yeah, it's.
- [26:27]
Peter Wertzman
It's explosive.
- [26:28]
Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [26:29]
Peter Wertzman
And there's jokes about it all the time. But it's actually, it was very important for me to go. I got an MA here in German.
- [26:38]
Uli Bear
I want to go back for a moment. So you grew up sort of hearing German. It's a language of your family home, but a private language. You have no academic connection to it until later. And we just shifted from the uncanny as sort of. There's both this. It's something terrible hidden in the domestic. And we said it gives rise to the genre of horror. And it's sort of. There's a kind of entertainment value. And it's thrilling and titillating and it's also really disturbing and genuinely frightening. And sort of to go back to what Hoffman gives us is that all of us probably at some level are still always children in relation to the real world. That can. In our domestic or in our everyday habitual environment, something terrible erupts. And so you turned that into a novel to say this child that knows without knowing this terrible history and then reenacts it as we must in a.
- [27:36]
Peter Wertzman
Way, because we are all heirs. When I read in Germany, I make it very clear there was a cultural marriage that existed for 1700 years between two groups that had stormy moments throughout Nazi period. There's nothing new, it's just more organized. But there was nevertheless that relationship between the Teutonic and the Semitic. And I feel very clearly and profoundly, I come out of the crossroads of that. That relationship. And that led to some of the worst of the 20th century, but some of the best at the same time. We can't separate it. You can't separate it. You can't conceive of an Einstein or a Freud or certainly not a Kafka outside of the context of the German language, of the structure of the German language. These beautiful sentences. Translating Kleist, I fell in love with the German sentence. And it's direct opposition to the Hemingway sentence. Right, The Hemingway American English sentence in America. It's funny, they don't like semicolons. And I wrote a whole essay in praise of the semicolon because the semicolon enables you and German preserves that semicolon. It enables you to think, it could be like this, or it could be like this and parallel, you know.
- [29:06]
Uli Bear
And you leave it to the reader to think how. What is. There's no causal relation. There's no and. But however, therefore.
- [29:14]
Peter Wertzman
I love it and I don't. I really think the structure of the German language, we. We can't separate those. Those two. Right?
- [29:24]
Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [29:25]
Peter Wertzman
You know, people try to analyze Kafka. Where are his roots? Clearly a big part of his roots come from Grimms and Hoffman, but they also come from my favorite Kafka. Pre Kafka is the book of Jonah in the Bible, which is a completely surreal tale. This guy is swallowed by the manifestation of his own fear and he is then spit out again. He begins in fear and ends in anger. So essentially it's an infantile he doesn't learn a thing, Jonah. And that clip way of storytelling is there as well. So it's those two influences that meld, you know, again and again.
- [30:10]
Uli Bear
And in some ways, I think what you just said, there is this kind of confluence of fusion, of sort of, as you said, the Teutonic, the Semitic, of Jewish and German existence. You translated Rachel von vanhagen's the Selection of Her Letters. I did a podcast on her. So she's a Jewish woman around 1800, who lives at Hoffman's time, the same moment, 1800, and she marries and she has really no social standing to speak of, and she invents a kind of world for herself by having a salon with writers and intellectuals and politicians and jurists as a woman. And Hannah Arendt, 130 years later, in 1930s, 20s, writes a book about her.
- [30:50]
Peter Wertzman
And says, this is really about Hannah.
- [30:51]
Uli Bear
It's really about Hannah. But what's interesting, I think, about this question you're raising, it's not that this. This question of what does such a symbiosis actually involve? It's still a question posed to us rather than it's been settled historically, people have left German, but what does it mean for different people to speak one language that gets transformed in that togetherness? So I'm just thinking this Jewish German question is, strangely enough, still a question for us. It's not. I make it very clear when I.
- [31:25]
Peter Wertzman
Give a reading or giving readings from my play, the Tattooed Man Tells all in Germany. I don't know if I can still go, but they're delightful, especially in East Germany. I start out always by saying, we are both the children of a stormy cultural wedding, cultural marriage. It ended in a terrible divorce. But in fact, Germans and Jews, we are children of that, and we need to perceive ourselves as that rather than, you're guilty, I'm guilty. The other insidious thing is, after the horrors of the 20th century, we inherit both sides. We inherit the evil and the good. They're both inside us. And Hoffman is great enough to allow that, to understand that, as you pointed out, there's a. Freud's a certain limitation. It's like he wants an orgasm but can't have it, you know, which, of course, Wilhelm Reich, you know, talks about much.
- [32:30]
Uli Bear
I just want to say Freud is, you know, he gets inspired by Hoffman, writes the uncanny. But there's a part where Hoffman doesn't totally let you settle on. Is this the student in the Golden Pot or the student in the Sandman who actually falls victim to a deception that he falls in love with a mechanical doll and he doesn't. Everybody makes fun of him. And he's completely smitten with this inanimate object who appears animate. Is he a victim of himself? Is he a bit of a villain? Is he also being a bit cruel to the real girlfriend? We're not quite sure anymore that all of the above, yes, and it's strange to write a kind of horrible story in a way, but not let people at the end walk away and say, well, there was evil and there was goodness. And he says we are producing a lot of this in ourselves. Of course there's evil in the world. But Hoffman says we have these things inside of us and we generate a lot of it ourselves. And that is actually a great capacity, which means we can also generate goodness.
- [33:34]
Peter Wertzman
You spoke of Hollywood before. We must then speak of the huge influence on Hollywood and transformation. When the emigres start coming in, when you know, Billy Wilder or Fritz Lang or suddenly a fairly simple genre is transformed to my mind into a very complex genre, and suddenly you have Sunset Boulevard, I don't know. Sensibilities, I guess, is my greatest example of a movie that never would have been made before. But it is rich in ways that the American cinema was not before.
- [34:16]
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- [35:12]
Uli Bear
Time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac Extra Value meal for $8. That means two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun and medium fries and a drink. We may need to change that jingle.
- [35:25]
Peter Wertzman
Prices and participation may vary.
- [35:26]
Uli Bear
I taught a class last week and one of the students said, what do you think of the movie get out, which uses the horror genre as an allegory of American race relations? And it's actually set up as a.
- [35:36]
Peter Wertzman
Is that a new movie?
- [35:37]
Uli Bear
It's a new movie. It's a really nice setting. There's an interracial couple, they drive to a country estate and there are guests there. And then it turns out to be a trap and a nightmare. And American racism made so explicit that it. It turned the horror genre into a sort of allegory of social relations. It's a very successful movie and it said it all in a really nice setting that we're all familiar with and say there's horror lurking beneath. So what you're saying. So Hollywood gets this infusion of German emigrese. It deepens its own commitment to horror. Not just to scare you a little bit, you walk out of the theater, but to say there may be things going on in this country even that you're not quite familiar with that are darker than we thought.
- [36:21]
Peter Wertzman
And Fritz Lang turns his. Turns his camera on with Spencer Tracy, that movie. There's a Lynch model, I guess he doesn't dare in that point have the character is black, but it's clear that the Spencer Tracy character should really be black. And that is then Lynch Mob comes out.
- [36:40]
Uli Bear
And I think what these movies are doing is to saying it's just beneath the surface. There's something lurking in our everyday interactions. Not always, not all the time. So Hoffman gives you that. That there's something a little bit darker than we think. And as Freud would say, that's repressed or over. That's a kind of repressed childhood memory. Or it's overcome sort of atavistic kind of cultural practices from some prehistoric time. And Hoffman says, no, they're as modern as can be. There's nothing atavistic, there's nothing that we should have overcome. Hoffman doesn't have the sense we should have actually overcome our childhood fantasies. Because our fantasy life is the most enriching thing we can have.
- [37:22]
Peter Wertzman
It is our true self. To my mind, I would say our.
- [37:26]
Uli Bear
Fantasy life, our true self.
- [37:28]
Peter Wertzman
It's the self that is always reaching for something more, reaching for something other. It's our curiosity and I am adamantly in favor of. There are parents who don't want their children to play with guns or things like that. I can tell you I played with guns and everything. And I'm not a violent person. I think it's a mistake to try to get rid of that violent streak in little children because they have it. Little children are not sweet little things. Little children are amoral essentially. Of course we have to teach them morality and ethics, but we have to give them a space to let them be who they are. We can overlook that space so that they don't get into physical danger. But you have to let them be to let them be. And I think in cases like Hoffman where he spends his entire day, you know, doing law and from what I believe is successful at it.
- [38:40]
Uli Bear
Right.
- [38:40]
Peter Wertzman
And then at night he just writes for hours and hours. Kafka, the same thing. Kafka says he could not use an insomniac. He could not imagine writing what he.
- [38:51]
Uli Bear
Writes in the daytime.
- [38:53]
Peter Wertzman
In the daytime.
- [38:54]
Uli Bear
I mean, look at the penal colony.
- [38:57]
Peter Wertzman
Penal colony. To me, clearly it's prescient of what's going to happen in the camps. It's a brilliant story to my mind perhaps. And it was Tucholsky who recognized that. Tucholsky wrote some of the first reviews of. I think the Penal Colony came out as a volume in and of itself. And Tucholsky recognized that this was great.
- [39:20]
Uli Bear
And Kafka writes a story about this machine which inscribes the sentence about a criminal on their body. And this is a torture machine and he will die by having it inscribed on his body. So all Kafka takes is that the law as a total abstraction and then turns that into an animate object that actually will inflict something on a live human body. And it's a really cruel story, but also really brilliant because as we trust the law to sort of be become self enforcing once there's been a sentence, it is just and fair and the prisoner will subject himself to this voluntarily. It's a very strange story about what.
- [40:01]
Peter Wertzman
The prisoner is even honored to be a part of the process.
- [40:04]
Uli Bear
Yeah. And that the law is this kind of absolute thing. And I think where Hoffman says there is what you said, this is our true selves. For Hoffman, it doesn't sound that there's an absolute state which we attain so that we become adults, we mature, we leave our. Leave our playthings behind and then we have overcome all this. And I think we live in a world today where we're saying there's enormous amounts of things that seem like repetitions of the past. There's enormous violence, there are crises, there are corrupt people, evil people, horrible people. And we act surprised.
- [40:38]
Peter Wertzman
One repetition that's going on is in Washington, as we.
- [40:42]
Uli Bear
And Hoffman would say, why is anybody surprised? Did we actually think we reached. And this is. Hoffman doesn't write these essays. Freud will Write this in 1929. Civilization at Discontents. He says, why do we make so much progress and then there's so much suffering and unhappiness in the world. Wouldn't we have actually eradicated a lot of that? And so Freud has his finger on this and he says we cannot eradicate some impulses in the human. That would be a mistake to sort of bring us into the so called, what he calls so called civilization. It has enormous costs.
- [41:14]
Peter Wertzman
It's interesting because the Protestant ethic in America tried desperately to eradicate, for instance, you look at the Shakers, or in some respects a marvelous movement. They took in escaped slaves, they. But no sexuality was permitted. Family, husband and wife had to be apart, live apart. Crazy, crazy. But it's there, the attempt to create this perfect human. And by that death, by that group's definition.
- [41:45]
Uli Bear
And I think today when we hear perfect human, we're horrified by the idea of it. And I think what horrifies it, that something would be eradicated from us that makes us human, actually, and not just our bad things, but all of our good things. And this literature, so romanticism sort of reminds us of how vital it is to keep those moments in ourselves intact and not repress them or not belittle them.
- [42:11]
Peter Wertzman
I think it comes down to the present moment. We saw it in the last elections. It comes down to the penis. In the context even of feminism, in the context of everything, can we nevertheless acknowledge drive in the male to a certain aggression, to a certain link with, after all, pleasure somehow? And I think in our current elections, Wilhelm Reich would have had a heyday thinking of all the mindless young men who voted for Mr. Trump essentially because they thought it was good for their penis, would make it grow. He basically is like a comic book character. Trump, not much more depth than that.
- [42:58]
Uli Bear
But he gives them a sense. They can lean into their aggressive, dominant.
- [43:03]
Peter Wertzman
They can let it all hang out.
- [43:05]
Uli Bear
They can let it all hang out. They can finally say it again. And they felt, apparently supposedly they felt they couldn't really express that or there was no outlet for it. And having a woman in charge for them was more threatening than many other things.
- [43:17]
Peter Wertzman
And certainly a woman of color is completely unacceptable to them. And I think that that's true and that we're under the illusion in the progress, and there is great progress that this culture has made in tolerating gays to live as everyone, as with as they are. We have made great progress.
- [43:37]
Uli Bear
And in some ways it's not the return of the repressed, really. It was always there. It wasn't probably acknowledged sufficiently or something like that. And I think Hoffman in his stories mixes this up in a kind of amazing Way when you read it, you don't quite know where he lands on. Is this part the aggressive streak? The diamond streak? Is that bad? Is the erotic? There's nothing really bad.
- [44:00]
Peter Wertzman
That's it. But that's the writer. He's not out to judge. He's out to express what's going on in his mind and put it on paper. When you start judging it, then it becomes morality. I am all for freedom of the imagination.
- [44:19]
Uli Bear
Your greatest sort of the writer's. Kleist, Kafka. Even the Grimm brothers, they give us something like morally unresolved moral dilemmas rather than moral prescriptions. They don't tell you what the right attitude is.
- [44:36]
Peter Wertzman
I just wanted to show you one thing that's very surprising. And my son in school heard a talk about Haitian paintings. And then I tried looking at some of these paintings, and I thought, geez, they would go perfectly well with my brother Grimm translations. I was onto something. There's an East German writer who wrote about exactly the same thing.
- [45:00]
Uli Bear
Really?
- [45:00]
Peter Wertzman
Because you look at it. Look at these paintings are extraordinary. It's not arbitrary that they can be used for the Brothers Grimm. It's that darkness of the imagination. It's what I look for in writing. I adore Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles. I adore the writer who is able to express the ineffable in a crystal clear style, in a classical style. I think it was deficient to my taste in our avant garde in America so far. The Beats, for instance, was a valid sense of letting loose, letting it all hang out, but not enough of a sense of style, a certain sloppiness of writing, certainly, at least the spoken aesthetic of Ginsburg, for instance, is first word, best word, nonsense. First word is just the first word. It might not be the best word. I spend endless amounts of time working on the verb as the verb. When I used to teach writing, I would say a sentence is a motor of meaning, and it rolls on the verbs. And the body of the car is the noun. And adjective is not indispensable.
- [46:14]
Uli Bear
No, that sentence is a.
- [46:16]
Peter Wertzman
A motor of meaning.
- [46:17]
Uli Bear
A motor of meaning. The verb is the.
- [46:19]
Peter Wertzman
It rolls on the verb.
- [46:20]
Uli Bear
It rolls on the verb.
- [46:22]
Peter Wertzman
That's why they're so crucial. That's why to my mind as a writer, when I look for the writers that I love, I look for his verbs.
- [46:28]
Uli Bear
And it's interesting, you're saying not the first word is the best word. But good writing takes an enormous amount of work to then make it look effortless, as if this was. This is obviously the verb that keeps it.
- [46:39]
Peter Wertzman
Yes, yes. So I'm not saying I'm not condemning the beats, but I. I feel more European in that sense. And I feel, for instance, that the Dada and surrealism comes out of. It's not arbitrary. It's a game that, for instance, Akutritas is playing. I think of Schwithas as the most realistic painter of the 20th century because he's depicting a culture that collapsed twice. First World War, Second World War, he lived between the two. He was in turn with my father on the Isle of Man, as all German speakers or many German speakers entering England were perceived as enemy aliens and were interned. So you had crazy combinations. But Sridhar is someone also I adore. Do you know the Onion? It fits well in this. That's a. It's a cut up story about someone going to attend their own execution as a festivity, you know, And I think it's. It's all true. That's why I think of him as a realist. Society fell apart, that he's putting the puzzle pieces back together.
- [47:48]
Uli Bear
I'm going to go back to this One passage on 55 in the Golden Pot. So this is a story of the student who, as we said, gets involved and gets a job and then sees this magical place that sort of. That is as real to him as the real place he's sitting in. And we don't quite know whether it's really a place with palm trees and slithering snakes and thorns and large insects or butterflies, or whether that's just a library. Like Hoffman doesn't really make a big effort to say, oh, he's imagining this. That is hallucination. And the other thing is reality, because it's as important that he sees those things as the reality he's sitting in, the drab reality. He gets thrown out every night at 6 o' clock and has fine.
- [48:29]
Peter Wertzman
So our nightmares, after all, are very real.
- [48:32]
Uli Bear
They can be more real than other things. And I read one passage which I really. Which I like quite a bit. It's the fourth chapter and he says, surely I may presume to ask you of all people, most gracious reader, a question. Have you experienced hours, indeed days or, and weeks on end in your life during which all of your mundane ditherings and doings stirred up a mighty malaise that made everything you ordinarily held true and dear suddenly seem foolish and worthless. You yourself didn't know then what to do and where to turn. You were gripped by a dark inkling that in some former time there must surely have been an ardent wish fulfilled that surpassed a limited sphere of all earthly pleasure, a wish that the human spirit, like a strictly raised, timid child, dare not even express out loud. In your longing for that unknown something that wafted around you wherever you went, like a perfumed dream, peopled with transparent personages that dissolve in the sharp gaze of the waking world, you felt silent, awestruck in the face of it all. You slunk about with a downcast gaze like a despairing lover. And all that you witnessed of what people were up to in the motley millet of life gave you neither pleasure nor pain, as if you no longer belonged to this world. If, most gracious reader you've ever felt this way, then you know from your own experience, the same as the student and Thomas was in.
- [49:53]
Peter Wertzman
I write exactly the same passage. I love that passage. It's what literature is about. It's what art, all art forms is what we seek. It's this alternate realm in which everything is possible. But that means everything. The frightening and the good and the bad. It's all there, and it's all. And we all have access to it if we let it, our fingertips.
- [50:16]
Uli Bear
And it's a beautiful passage where he says, have you had a moment when you felt everything you ordinarily do feels foolish and worthless? And I think we live in a world today where, you know, I teach very young students, and we all have moments like this. You know, I'm 59. I have those moments. People who are 19 have those moments. And does everything feel foolish, worthless? What am I here for? And then he says, but you have this other capacity to actually imagine and reawaken in yourself this ardent wish that goes beyond the limitless fear of earthly existence. And he doesn't go to religion. It's not transcendence. But he says, you, in your mind, have this capacity to see the world in a different way. And I think it's really encouraging because he says, we all have these moments when we think, why are we doing all this stuff? And then we're supposed to say, well, get up in the morning, make your list, accomplish your goals, do these things and become a good, upstanding citizen and make money and work in a bank or whatever the lesson is.
- [51:14]
Peter Wertzman
It's funny, in my current state, my illness, I have Parkinson's and other illnesses. There's a great liberating sense about it all. I have no schedule, really. I don't really have a sense of days either. It was my wife who suggested it for us. We spent three months in Kyoto in Japan. And she said, what difference does it make when you're awake or when you're not? So, you know, sometimes I write at 1 o' clock in the morning. Sometimes I write at 5 o' clock in the morning. It doesn't matter.
- [51:43]
Uli Bear
It doesn't matter.
- [51:43]
Peter Wertzman
It doesn't. No, it doesn't matter. It's a problem in terms of keeping appointments.
- [51:48]
Uli Bear
Right.
- [51:50]
Peter Wertzman
Which is, you know, our connection with the outside world.
- [51:53]
Uli Bear
Right.
- [51:54]
Peter Wertzman
But I am having the time of my life.
- [51:56]
Uli Bear
But that's beautiful that you can see it as in sort of a liberation from this ordinary life that sort of. Hoffman talks about that we have these moments when you think we could even in a simpler way, organize our lives differently.
- [52:11]
Peter Wertzman
In truth, it was both. I'm living the best of times and the worst of times at the same time. I am completely liberated. I have no censorship on my pen or my fingers on the keyboard. With almost every breath I've been writing. I started translation as a meditation exercise to calm myself down before writing. So I would translate two hours before getting to writing. I don't have time to translate anymore.
- [52:42]
Uli Bear
So you're just writing.
- [52:44]
Peter Wertzman
I'm in the zone.
- [52:45]
Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [52:46]
Peter Wertzman
I think of James Brown. His genius is to play it on the 1. It's not waiting 1, 2, as the Beatles typically 1. And he's at it immediately because he's in the groove.
- [52:59]
Uli Bear
And that's where you are now.
- [53:00]
Peter Wertzman
I'm 24 hours a day in the groove. There are awful moments and good moments. But I think of my illness as a teacher, as a very severe teacher. I feel privileged in some sense. I see the world differently. I'm peeking through a crack. Right.
- [53:18]
Uli Bear
And how. So what do you see? Or what's the world? How is it? It's different in one way to. You've lost this attachment.
- [53:28]
Peter Wertzman
The Japanese have this marvel expression. Wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is in relation to ceramics that are broken. And instead of trying to hide the crack, they will put gold over the crack to extenuate the crack. And to say, essentially, this is a new piece. It's broken, but it's a new piece. And I feel wabi sabi. I feel like a broken man. But in that brokenness, new possibilities arise, as they always do. There's always new. So I am that unkhout. It comes out of the uncle is weed. It comes out of the cracked cement.
- [54:09]
Uli Bear
But this is very moving that you're seeing. And maybe all the translations you've done. So you've done so many translations. Maybe there were A little bit of preparatory work for where you are right now, because. And can you talk a little bit about when you're translating? Because it's, to me, a very mysterious process. It's a very simple process. In a certain way, you sort of do the work, but then there's also something. Because the language of the writer you're translating has to really enter you in a way. And when I'm translating, I kind of think it's in my head and in my body. I have to feel it for a while to then know how to recreate it in the other language. But you really have to be inhabited by it. So when you were translating Hoffman, you have to kind of live not just in the world, the fictional world that he creates, but live in the world that is his language reflecting the world. And then you have to see the world a little bit differently because you really have to enter into his mindset.
- [55:05]
Peter Wertzman
You have to sing his song. In his case, it's. There's a lot of. There's always music there. But the passage you just read, if I do say so, it's not a bad translation.
- [55:14]
Uli Bear
It's beautiful, you know?
- [55:16]
Peter Wertzman
You know, because in language there's a rhythm. There's an abstract dimension of language as well, behind the meanings that are being conveyed. And a translator at best needs to be aware those. Those rhythms, the music. I find it hard to explain precisely, but that is the nature of language. When I speak, I am conscious that I'm singing. I am singing a song in a sense. After all, poetry was originally sung right by the bards. And I am chanting something. I am. So there is the meaning that I am expressing to you, but my manner of doing it is existent too. What I meant to say with Philip. Sometimes the manner of expressing is more powerful than the meaning. In the case of Dostoevsky, if we reduced him to his ideology, he would be a stuffy old. But in fact, his greatness comes in the way in which he expressed what he thought he was expressing.
- [56:20]
Uli Bear
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- [58:06]
Peter Wertzman
And I think you have to create this alternate universe. For instance, the only example that I can cite is specific. When I translated Muziel, one reviewer commented upon. I wasn't completely conscious when he goes into slang or ah, go. I go from regular English to Brooklyn English. Because that was the. That seemed to recreate it in a fashion that would work.
- [58:35]
Uli Bear
Yeah.
- [58:36]
Peter Wertzman
And that's the way I do it, pretty much. I try to reimagine. Because I myself live between those languages with French thrown into the mix now more than in the past. And I think of that as a.
- [58:52]
Uli Bear
Privileged place to live in those. To have those languages in your head like yourself.
- [58:59]
Peter Wertzman
To have more than one language and more than one way of looking at the world. More than one.
- [59:05]
Uli Bear
Well, to me, it's sort of that you have several languages. I think it's an amazing gift and a privilege, and it allows you to also. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of yourself as being different to yourself. And people say, oh, are you different in other languages? And I'm like, I don't really think about this this way. I'm sure I'm different depending on the day of time and who I'm speaking with. But, yeah, there is a difference, actually.
- [59:28]
Peter Wertzman
I consider it. I call it internal travel.
- [59:31]
Uli Bear
Internal travel.
- [59:33]
Peter Wertzman
You're crossing borders inside, inside yourself. And that is inevitably fruitful. If you take it, you know, if you really take it to its full extent, it's very enriching.
- [59:46]
Uli Bear
We live in times like other people who lived in terrible times. Let's say we live in, who knows, better or worse, more terrible. I was actually, when I was reading, rereading Hoffman's stories. So the Sandman is about falling in love with a machine. And then there's the Automaton, which is an incredible story, which I've never read before. And it's a similar story of kind of a machine created this doll that also the students, the narrator, finds incredibly charming and attractive.
- [60:13]
Peter Wertzman
Everybody remains mysterious till the end, we still don't know.
- [60:15]
Uli Bear
And everybody makes fun of him a bit. And I thought, okay, he's saying, when we want somebody to perform music, for example, we don't want complete technical perfection and accuracy. We actually. And then he says in one of the stories, which is pretty funny, after the scandal happened, that someone fell in love with a doll. They all asked their girlfriends to sometimes make a tiny mistake in their recitals. And before that, the height of perfection was you get every aria right, you write a perfect sonnet. You can play the piano with to perfection. And perfection then looks suddenly like a mechanical goal and it loses what he calls, variously, the vitality, human life, the human dimension. And when I was reading these stories, I thought, this is what we're dealing with with AI which actually sells us the idea that we can. That all stories must be relatively coherent, linear build on sort of what happened previously, that there's a kind of narrative arc. You end in a place where you are a little bit unexpected, but you're supposed to end up there. And it regularizes an assumption that actually the world is like this, that language can cover the world in this way. And what Hoffman reminds us, there's something incredibly sinister once you reach this kind of language that sort of addresses everything really fairly and accurately. And it's quite precise. And you could literally type in to AI Right now, write a story in the style of ET Or Hoffman.
- [61:46]
Peter Wertzman
It's brilliant that you come to this point.
- [61:48]
Uli Bear
For me, useful analogy. When we hear a musician and someone plays a piano, a great pianist or something, and they have technical perfection, that is not what we want, actually. We want something else. And it's quite interesting what we really want. We also don't want mistakes, but we want a human touch, a human dimension to this. And what is the difference between you can have a Steinway piano and Steinway is incredible. They've programmed the pianos and you can put a computer in it plays by itself all day long. And that is different from someone sitting at the piano and performing. And AI is actually putting us into. Has already put us in a world. It's already happened. It's never going to be removed again. That we're going to be generating literature and texts that are so well done that they look really good. And I can tell you they. I don't believe these people who say, oh, I can tell. I can tell the difference. No, you can't tell the difference anymore because the standard being imposed is this kind of smooth surface. The world can be addressed. And what you said earlier, the manner of speaking matters greatly because it captures a little part of what we are as humans. And it's a very hard thing to define what that is.
- [63:07]
Peter Wertzman
I love your allusions to that. There's that other marvelous story. Initially, the narrator thinks that the very eccentric man. But who prevents his daughter from singing. And the narrator falls in love with the daughter, of course, and thinks that the father is a monster and doesn't realize that the father is trying to save his daughter's life because a doctor has told her that if she sings too much her heart will give way.
- [63:40]
Uli Bear
Right.
- [63:40]
Peter Wertzman
And she does die. I just. I find this. He's. He's such a great writer. Is that with us all the time. All the time.
- [63:51]
Uli Bear
And it's. But this allegory of these kind of. That pushing a human to perfect. So he pushes that girl to sing in spite of that. It'll cost her her health. And it's like the achievement of great art at the expense of the human being. There's a lesson in there to say, like you should not push people to this for the sake of something greater. So he's a great writer. He believes in the imagination. He believes in music, in art, in painting. He said, also an artist. And then he says, here's the limit. If human life is compromised by this, then what does it mean to have a sphere beyond the human? This young woman is being sacrificed. And so there's a kind of warning in that too. That said, I'm giving you all these stories where the imagination is privileged in a way or the art and the creation of artist privilege. And here's a kind of cautionary tale. If you do that, you'll compromise life itself. There's another. There's a passage in this, the Automaton. And it's a really remarkable story. Sort of a key.
- [64:48]
Peter Wertzman
I don't know that one either.
- [64:50]
Uli Bear
I didn't know this at all. And there's Two people discussing whether the perfection of such a machine. A doll. There's a mechanical turk who would play chess or answer questions or perform something. They were dressed in kind of amazing garb. They were very beautiful. They came from a different culture and they were like. And sometimes they were actors hidden inside the device. And they could actually. They were actually humans. And then it was supposed to be a robot, but this one, they're supposed to. There's nothing there. Trust a machine or a doll. And then one of the two guys investigating this says. Mechanical music is for me an entirely frightful and ghoulish thing. And in my view a good stocking knitting machine infinitely surpasses the most perfect, splendid looking music box. Is it not the human spirit that just uses these physical devices to bring forth resounding notes from our deepest depth of the perceptible reality of life so as to make them audible to the ears of others and therefore elicit a wondrous hint of eternity from each note, like sparkling rays of light in the harmonic echo chamber of the spirit. To seek to manipulate valves, oil springs, levers, cylinders and whatever else may comprise a mechanical device to make it sound musical constitutes to my mind a foolish and futile effort to make the medium itself spurred at that secret. Something that only the inner strength of the human spirit can bring to life and modulate by an absolute mastery of every moment. So he says, there is this, the human spirit, the inner strength of the human spirit to be brought to life. We have to actually bring our own humanity into expression with others. We have to communicate our humanity.
- [66:26]
Peter Wertzman
All the rest is a waste of time. All the rest is, you know, talking about the weather or something like that. So I've always found I'm terrible at parties because I don't. I don't know how to say anything. If you ask me something, I'll tell you what I think. I don't know how to communicate in.
- [66:41]
Uli Bear
Any other way on the surface level. You know, I can't.
- [66:44]
Peter Wertzman
I cannot. I always got trouble with getting girls at these parties because I couldn't say the right thing.
- [66:50]
Uli Bear
And what is the right thing in a party to talk about the party.
- [66:53]
Peter Wertzman
The right thing finally is. Which I found in my relationship with my wife. We were at a party and when we first met and she asked me what I liked in life. And I said travel, literature and sex. And I, you know, somebody else, I could have been an saying something like that. But she asked me a question, I gave an answer. That was the beginning of our relationship.
- [67:18]
Uli Bear
That's beautiful. Actually, and it's very real.
- [67:21]
Peter Wertzman
Yes. IG asked me what it was that I wanted liked in life. And that's what I said.
- [67:25]
Uli Bear
And it's interesting because you didn't think how could I impress her? What would sound sophisticated or smart or cool? What would be too direct? So you wouldn't say sex maybe in the first answer, because you're not supposed to. Although everybody knows what people at a party want from each other. They want lots of things. That's one of the things they may want.
- [67:46]
Peter Wertzman
Well, what's also important is that I did try to impress her at the same time. This was all done in French. I was quite drunk, but in perfectly grammatic French talking about Maupassant. So there was that too. But when she asked me a question, I was perfectly honest, which I don't know any. I don't know any other way to be. I think of that frequently.
- [68:08]
Uli Bear
But it's interesting when you say you were. You're honest and you kind of can't be any other way. And then you write fiction and plays and poems which people tend to think are furthest removed from direct communication and from truth telling.
- [68:22]
Peter Wertzman
I'd say off the top of my head, you think they're all lies. I'm toying with the truth, toying with it constantly in different ways because it amuses me. I'm always. There's always something I found amazingly with the cut up form. Whether you get your words from. I cut them out with a newspaper. I started during the COVID time I was unable to write in the normal way and started these cut ups. And now there's the fourth. The third just came out, the laboratory of time. And somebody in Berlin is doing music to this laboratory of time. I really miss Berlin, I have to say. I really. Which brings us back to Hoffman and is. I do miss and I. It might be the Berlin that I miss no longer exists. Transitory Berlin, very much like the characters of these stories. In fact, specifically the east right after the fall of the wall is in this just transitional zone. It doesn't exist as it's falling apart in a building like the Takhalas, which was essentially about to collapse. But in its state of about to collapseness it becomes this art of free artists and Berlin, the Berlin that I first in 1973 as a Fulbrighter and then in subsequent years. Every five years or so I'd go there and then I rediscovered in 2010 when I was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. I fell in love with the city.
- [69:49]
Uli Bear
Interesting what you're saying that in Berlin was sort of on the knife's edge of history. We're sort of in two different worlds. And when the wall came down, these Germans felt themselves overnight in a new country, in their old city, exactly the same environment. Everything was the same, except everything was radically different and lost, too. And in some ways, I think this experience of an uncanny world where you're walking down the same street, you walk down, and suddenly everything has changed, but nothing has changed. And I think the uncanny is also a key to understand a little bit. When I'm looking at. And I'm talking to people in America today, so it's 2025, and people say this cannot happen in America. I'm shocked. And I'm thinking, well, actually, there's also another way of looking at it. This has been entirely predictable. It has actually been predicted by people like Richard Rorty wrote about this in, like, 1999, sort of, that a strong man will take over the country. What does he say? He'll denigrate minorities. He'll be rewarded for that. He'll scapegoat homosexuals and other people, and people will like him for being bullied by him. And he writes this in 1999. So it's. This is 30, almost 30 years ago. So in some ways, I'm saying what Berlin was like and what America is like today, the uncanny is a way to understand. There are some things in our reality we tend to overlook. And Hoffman says they're always there. You just have to look a little bit differently. And you suddenly see in this story here, you suddenly see a little green snake in a tree or something like that. That's just a metaphor for something. But you see, for example, this young man, this incredibly erotically charged world he's in because he can't put that anywhere else. And the domestic bliss awaiting him doesn't allow for that expression. What you said earlier about the election, that there's a lot of dimensions of American life that people felt were not properly given expression. They were given expression in the media, but somehow now they are full expression in the government. So the uncanny is a way to see what in our domestic life is already very disturbing, but we prefer to overlook it all the time.
- [71:57]
Peter Wertzman
And the other thing that you were saying, it's there in America all the time, the crack. I mean, after all, we have never really taken upon us and acknowledged the history of slavery. We've never really acknowledged the slaughter of the Native Americans. And it's there. It's there weighing on us. The current Administration will say, oh, that's, that's not part of necessary history like that from the surface, but it is part of the history that we must all acknowledge to live a full life, not to deny that in ourselves.
- [72:32]
Uli Bear
And what you said earlier when I asked you, you know, you're sort of a consummate sort of truth teller. You can't really have small talk or lie to people when I ask you a question. And then I said, why do you write fiction, poetry, plays? Because maybe this history that you're naming cannot be resolved and put away neatly and say, okay, this is what was done. This is what happened. This is the villains and the victims, and here we are finished. And say, rather, fiction allows you to think this is still a problem with us, that history is not. And I do think there's a difference between history writing and fiction. And fiction can keep open some ambiguities that politically are not livable, that sometimes you have to make a decision, well, to act.
- [73:15]
Peter Wertzman
We also, we have to make decisions.
- [73:17]
Uli Bear
All the time, all the time, because.
- [73:18]
Peter Wertzman
There are different roads that would take us different ways to make a limiting decision.
- [73:24]
Uli Bear
But I think fiction allows you two things. It allows you to see sometimes those decisions are difficult and they're not morally clear, as although we like to think so. And secondly, that in many decisions, some dimensions, we tend to make automatic decisions right away because we think this is the better way of living. Whereas Hoffman points out, you may be denying a whole part of yourself by opting for the easier, the simpler, the safer.
- [73:50]
Peter Wertzman
And like the German sentence with that lovely semicolon, it enabled us to maintain two possibilities, not necessarily for a while, put toy with each.
- [74:01]
Uli Bear
You know, I did a whole series of podcasts on these kinds of more political questions. And I talked to a professor at the University of Virginia, John Edwards, who is a historian and among other things, of the University of Virginia. And I was there a couple years ago after the Charlottesville incident. And he said the fact that Jefferson is being claimed by two distinct and different groups is totally accurate. And he said the fact that the proud boys and these neo Nazis claimed Jefferson and the fact that the students defended Jefferson and there include black students at University of Virginia and all of our students who are progressive. That is correct. And he said Jefferson does not belong to one group or the other. He actually is America, and he's both. And it really allowed me to see something. And he's a historian of the University of Virginia, you know, a black scholar. And he said they are right, both sides are right. And he didn't say, well, they're wrong. They're the bad Nazis. They're awful. He said, no, they're correct. Jefferson is that. And the other side is also correct. He gave us the University of Virginia. He gave us, you know, the writings that are sort of the soaring promise of America. And I really learned something that a historian could say that because I wanted to sort of say, well, no, those are the bad people. This is the wrong history. We have now moved on. And he said, like a fiction writer, this is Jefferson to us as a figure. And I think Hoffman gives us this sort of say, we can't quite settle always on what's good and what's bad.
- [75:28]
Peter Wertzman
It's interesting, you speak of Charlottesville. I, too, visited Charlottesville years ago. It was a time about the time of the French bashing. The first thing I noticed on the tour was there's a bust of Voltaire right here and two visitor centers. When you went to visit Monticello and the road going. And I stopped at both. The first visitor center is run by the Jefferson family, which does not acknowledge Sally Hemings. And I just politely. I took the literature. And then the visitor center at Monticello itself is run by the federal government, which does acknowledge Sally Hemings and the children that came from that. And that was really quite striking.
- [76:10]
Uli Bear
Now it does. And we're going to go through another period where the federal government may actually dismantle that part of the exhibit and actually think in the way. And this is really difficult because they're thinking, they're telling history in the correct way, and the other side is also thinking in a correct way. And what I wanted to say with sort of Hoffman and his college and what he said, there is no correct way. They both claim they're correct, and they both claim the right thing. From their perspective, this is right.
- [76:37]
Peter Wertzman
They're both politically correct.
- [76:38]
Uli Bear
Yes. And this is, of course, really difficult for us to acknowledge, because I would like to believe, no, there's only one way of looking at history. There's good and there's bad, and there's clear good and bad, and there's clear moral choices that this country has made. And they're right, and those are wrong. But to keep it open and to allow us to rethink that, we should never be so certain that the one story is going to prevail. I think that's what we're living in right now. And I say this quite a bit. Walter Benjamin has a sentence in his thesis on the philosophy of history. He says the statement that things like this are still possible in the 20th century and are shocking. Is not a philosophical attitude because it presumes that progress is inevitable, that we've moved on and that no regression could happen. That it's not a philosophical attitude. He said it's an attitude. Maybe it's moral, but it's not philosophical. It doesn't take into account how the world does not move toward one poor.
- [77:36]
Peter Wertzman
Walter Benjamin who commits suicide because he thought he was not going to be able to make the crossing to Spain. And the next day his group crosses over into Spain.
- [77:46]
Uli Bear
Yes, terrible freedom. In your afterward to the Hoffman edition here you talk about how. Here's an afterlife. We already went through the literary afterlife. And then you also pointed out something that I found really important. How the surrealists. He's really a surrealist avant la lettre in a way. And when Breton, who includes him in his anthology includes Hoffman and in some ways that surrealism, which to us. Which Breton, who I think is more intelligent and sometimes he's reputed to today like it's not just Nadja, but he actually says I want to access a dimension of experience that traditional writing doesn't allow me to access.
- [78:26]
Peter Wertzman
But the greatest writing does. It's there in Dante.
- [78:29]
Uli Bear
What part?
- [78:30]
Peter Wertzman
Dante goes to hell to visit hell. I mean, the Inferno is. Is so rich in stories. I can't believe it. I have a harder time reading the Paradiso because I. I don't live the paradise I live. I know. I understand the Inferno. Yeah, those are. Each one is a little nugget. The third is it the 13th canto where you. They. You break a branch off a tree and the bree. The tree howls. You know. I spent several years the research that led to my play the Tattooed man tells all interviewing survivors of the camps. In my arrogance, I wanted to see what hell looks like because Dante went to see what hell looks like. I wanted to see what hell looks like. And I found. I did see him. I did see him. I went to the Vienna that my parents fled, where the police came to visit me at three o' clock in the morning because my neighbors didn't like me and didn't. It was a very strange Vienna. Vienna somewhat portrayed by the movie the Third Man. I was there in the 70s. That was several decades after that. Vienna hadn't much moved on up until the Waldheim affair, when Vienna and Austria has to acknowledge that they were not just an innocent occupied nation, but that they were eagerly awaiting this occupation. Up until then Austria could get away with pretending to be just an occupied nation. And that was a lie that was lived up until the Waldheim affair, when it came out that Waldheim had a past that the public didn't know about, but other people knew about perfectly well. And then when Waldheim was reelected president of Austria after all this, that's another stunning thing. But then again, I admit to my prejudices. When I taught for a semester at Rutgers in the German department, teaching translation, my best students were Austrians. And I stayed in touch with them because my wife, who's French, insisted I have to give Austria another chance.
- [80:30]
Uli Bear
Okay, and that was worth it then?
- [80:32]
Peter Wertzman
It was worth it, yeah. It too is a country with its faults and.
- [80:37]
Uli Bear
Yeah. And what Austria can teach us that, you know, every group will construct a livable past for itself, and then that can be blazingly inaccurate, but it serves a purpose for the moment.
- [80:51]
Peter Wertzman
The only problem is if it uses a certain contingent of the population for that ideal, as was the case in Austria and Germany. What was Fairly stunning in 1973, 74, part of the rink was still called the Kandoega Rink. Karlueyga was the. Was their very well beloved mayor who was from the anti Semites party. That was their reason for being, the Anti Semites party. And up until the 70s, that was still there. There was still on Judenplatz. There was still a plaque in Latin how the Jews had poisoned the wells back from, you know, one of the lies from the Middle Ages that was still hanging on the wall. It was taken off later. But I think Austria was in a kind of naivete about the past.
- [81:42]
Uli Bear
Well, they were in a naivete about the past and what we're seeing today. Let's not be too sure that those plaques won't go back up and that there's any kind of settled history that finally everybody has recognized these things were terrible. I mean, what I think is really important to recognize that it takes kind of active work every day to teach people, educate people, let people know, rather than to assume, okay, we're done with this chapter. No one will ever return to another interpretation. And people are all around us who have completely different views of this.
- [82:19]
Peter Wertzman
And I think it's very important for us as writers and as scholars of literature to acknowledge an unlimited freedom in literature to say what it will, but not necessarily to teach. That doesn't mean that I'm saying that's okay. It just exists. It is. And then I choose which. Which direction to go. I choose what to do. But I don't censor the possibility of doing evil.
- [82:52]
Uli Bear
And I think Literature allows us to rehearse these other options. Not in real life. So you can explore. There is. There are terrible things in the world. And in literature you can sort of enter into the mindset of that. It's like Iago or something. In Shakespeare, you see the mindset of a corrupting, envious, jealous, horrible person. But maybe we need to actually. And we can't do it in real life because we don't want to be those people.
- [83:20]
Peter Wertzman
Play is this from our early childhood. Play is the place to enact it all within reason. You don't want one kid killing another kid or one kid severely hurting another kid. But play is that place. Especially if a child is playing alone. He or she is playing with all possibilities. Language, for instance, how do we acquire language and sauna? I'm an asthmatic. I'm convinced that words are, after all, in the exhalation, not the inhalation. And the problem with asthma is the exhalation, not the inhalation. So I think of words as puffs of air burdened with meaning. They're carrying meaning on their back.
- [84:06]
Uli Bear
Right?
- [84:07]
Peter Wertzman
It's all linked. It's all part of the same. Part of the same game.
- [84:11]
Uli Bear
But I'm really happy, Peter, to be talking to you. It's really. And it's very moving. You're in this kind of moment where you have a time for play, for serious play.
- [84:20]
Peter Wertzman
I'm having the time of my life.
- [84:22]
Uli Bear
Very serious play. I really want to also commend you on this sort of selection. Hoffman wrote a lot of things. He was incredibly prolific composer, etc. And you picked a couple stories. For me, the Automaton was really a story that should be read and taught. And say what?
- [84:37]
Peter Wertzman
I'm so happy you're saying that, because there have been reviews, you know, tls, it got a great review and other review. Why did. Why did he pick this and not that? Are you.
- [84:46]
Uli Bear
But they also. They work together. They're very kind of shimmering. They have some themes that go through. Music is a big theme. Sort of the human capacity to transcend ourselves is a big theme. The doppelgangers are a theme. Repetitions, childhood trauma. All the stuff that psychoanalysis picks out of this in here. But there's more to that. And the language of the translation is really remarkable, sort of. It's because it's a kind of soaring language. And the long sentences, you've been able to keep them in English. That's why I wanted to read these two passages. Because in English, we're not really comfortable with having Long sentences. And somehow here they work.
- [85:24]
Peter Wertzman
It's funny. When I translated that book called In English, I titled Posthumous Papers of Living Author by Muzo. I had a nightmare, and Musil came to me in a dream and said. Because I cut one of the sentences, Schlamperte arbeit.
- [85:41]
Uli Bear
Really?
- [85:42]
Peter Wertzman
Ever since then.
- [85:43]
Uli Bear
Really?
- [85:43]
Peter Wertzman
Yes. Ever since then, I felt obliged to look back at the German sentence. And it was then, in translating Kleist, I said, the hell is it? I'm leaving this long German, long sentence. And it's a thing of beauty.
- [85:58]
Uli Bear
But it takes someone like you to make it work in English. Because you have to do different things in English to make that work. I'm a bridge, and it works.
- [86:07]
Peter Wertzman
I'm a bridge between two ways of thinking. It's a great joy speaking with you.
- [86:12]
Uli Bear
Did you have a favorite story in this? For me, the Automata Gluck is your favorite story? Krespo, yeah.
- [86:24]
Peter Wertzman
He's quite a character about Crespo, I think.
- [86:28]
Uli Bear
Well, he builds a house. It's an amazing story.
- [86:32]
Peter Wertzman
He cuts out the windows.
- [86:32]
Uli Bear
Afterwards, he says he gets money to build a house because he did something for someone wealthy. So he goes, marks a square on the ground, says to the builders, start to build the walls. And they're like, how tall? It's like. Until I say, stop. No windows, no doors. Then he. They're all the walls. And he says, cut a window here, cut a window there, cut a door there, do that. And then it's a beautiful house. Looks strange from the outside, but it's a great allegory of how someone could shape their own life and not follow convention, not do it the way you're supposed to do it. There's no plan, there's no draft, there's nothing. I love this moment when he builds this house for himself. And then he says, and miraculously, it was a very comfortable, nice home inside. And it really worked out. It's just the bare structure.
- [87:16]
Peter Wertzman
And you realize it's interesting because the character viewed first by the narrator seems to be a bad, nasty guy in the back. He's a good man. Yes, he's a good man. He's protecting his daughter, of course. The interaction with the mother is hilarious.
- [87:34]
Uli Bear
It's a very funny story. That's true. So I would. So your recommendations are Counselor Crespel and Richard Gluck. And I think people should read the Automaton, the Sandman, obviously, and then Mademoiselle de Scudery, which is the First Detectives. It's a. He's brilliant and it's so well written. It's incredible. It's an incredible. It's a really wonderful story with an incredibly gifted goldsmith. With the King. Madame de Maintenon, you go into the king's chambers. When do you actually plead mercy with the King? When do you not do that? When is a lawyer's advice useful? How do you make somebody confess the right thing? It's a brilliant story.
- [88:10]
Peter Wertzman
It's interesting in a context where, for the German romantics, they're falling back on their German ness, whereas where Hoffman, whether he acknowledges or not, he knows French, a lot of his inspiration comes from the French, as, of course, is the case with the Brothers Grimm as well, where one of their major respondents was a Protestant who fled.
- [88:33]
Uli Bear
So what are you writing on? What are you working on now, Peter?
- [88:35]
Peter Wertzman
Working on a novel, dystopian novel about a world in which people are no longer able to sleep or dream, but there are surrogate dreamers who are hired. And it's about this also. A world in which there are clones at birth in case one goes bad and accidents happen, where the clone is permitted to live. And in this world, you're paid by time, directly in the palm of your hand and not by money. And when you run out of time, that's it.
- [89:10]
Uli Bear
Oh, wow. Okay. So we look forward to a science fiction story. Dystopian science fiction.
- [89:15]
Peter Wertzman
I've written another dystopian novel in the past, but I'm having a wonderful time doing this. I'm doing a new book with my daughter called Unreal Estate, New York's Notes of a Native New Yorker. Unreal Estate listings.
- [89:29]
Uli Bear
Unreal estate listings. Okay. After you did a book with your daughter. Quantapestriere.
- [89:33]
Peter Wertzman
Yes, yes, I would have to speak. It's called Odd Birds.
- [89:37]
Uli Bear
Odd Birds and Fat Cats and Urban Bestiary. So this is by Peter Wurzman. So the other book. So we want people to pick up the Hoffman, the Golden Pot. You've translated, as we said, the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka, Musil Altenberg. You edited a Penguin edition, Tales of the German Imagination, a novel called Stemmu and Out of Breath, out of Mind, Books of poetry, a play, the Tattooed Man.
- [90:05]
Peter Wertzman
The Tattooed man tells All.
- [90:07]
Uli Bear
Tells all.
- [90:07]
Peter Wertzman
It ran for eight months in getting it.
- [90:09]
Uli Bear
So there's a produced play. So fantastic. And then you're writing a science fiction dystopian novel for us. Now I hope to have you back on the podcast to talk about. Maybe we'll talk about your own work next time and not the translation work. Yeah, thanks. So much for being here today.
- [90:23]
Peter Wertzman
Thank you. Danke.
- [90:25]
Uli Bear
Better shirt. Great.
- [90:31]
Peter Wertzman
Sam.