Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler Joseph W. Moser Frank Trommler, Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika. Cologne: Böhlau, 2022. 384 pp. After 1945, the study of German literature and culture had to redefine itself in the United States, and this was largely accomplished by exile scholars who had escaped from Nazi Germany and Austria, such as Adolf Klarmann at the University of Pennsylvania and Egon Schwarz at Washington University in St. Louis. Then starting in the 1970s, the first generation of postwar Germans started to modernize and shape the study of German in the United States, which also contributed to the creation of German Studies and the German Studies Association. Frank Trommler, as a professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 2007, assumed a leadership role in the development of German Studies in the United States; his primary contribution was to redefine the field at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His autobiography, Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika, is a fascinating read and gives testimony to the Zeitgeschichte of German-American relations. It is written for a German audience but is nonetheless of great interest to German Studies scholars in the United States. This rich book is much more than a history of American German Studies, however. Trommler also redefined the role of Austrian literature within the German-language literary canon of the 1960s and 1970s, thus assuring that Austria would not be overlooked or subsumed into a general German narrative. His groundbreaking monograph Roman und Wirklichkeit: Eine Ortsbestimmung am Beispiel von Musil, Broch, Roth, Doderer und Gütersloh (Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966) actually demonstrates that some of the greatest German-language narrators of the twentieth century were in fact Austrian, and that the significance of Vienna as a center of German-language thought cannot be overlooked, even if the immediate post–World War II Second Republic of Austria was a somewhat less culturally diverse place than it [End Page 132] had been before 1938 (or than it is today). In his subchapter "Als Piefke auf Österreich-Mission," Trommler describes how he was received in Vienna in 1966, even if Hilde Spiel reminded him that Austrian literature did not end with Doderer—Handke had just debuted that same year. Trommler contributed to a rethinking of Austria as a multicultural and quintessentially European space within the German-language narrative. Trommler's work emerged parallel to that of Claudio Magris. As a member of the first postwar generation, he understood that Austrian literature needed to examine the Nazi period in order to become significant again—something that the generation of writers around Doderer had avoided doing. But of course Thomas Bernhard along with Peter Handke, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ilse Aichinger were just starting this process that would culminate and further develop in the 1980s. Trommler's achievements in advancing Austrian Studies in the United States cannot be understated. His autobiography of course goes well beyond Austria. His appreciation of Austrian culture comes from the fact that he felt displaced in postwar West Germany, having been born in Zwönitz, Saxony, in 1939 as a son of the proprietor of the then-famous brand of Trommler children's shoes. After the war his family could not stay in the Soviet zone. This displacement seems to have stimulated his interest in traveling and seeing the world beyond Adenauer's West Germany. He studied in Vienna in the late 1950s when German students were a rare occurrence, and he traveled across Europe and around the world before West Germans discovered their postwar Fernweh. Working as a journalist, he was able to visit South America and travel to Afghanistan via the Soviet Union (long before the Soviets invaded that country). His arrival in the United States was more of a coincidence; securing a job as a German professor at Harvard and then at the University of Pennsylvania was too good to dismiss, but it presented itself as a sort of career change. The German world traveler thus became a German living in the United States...