THE SINS OF THE FATHERS: LEONARD FORSTER'S REPLY TO AN EARLY CRITIC OF THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GERMAN VERSE1

Abstract

This essay follows-up on a reminiscence written by Leonard Forster for GLL in 1988. Forster was the editor of The Penguin Book of German Verse, first published in 1957. The anthology was intended for a post-war British readership, particularly in schools, that seemed, despite everything, to have preserved an affectionate admiration for German poetry. Forster's selections often appear to have served as deliberate correctives to the ideological preferences of the previous generation's National Socialist critics, some of which had also resonated with several British Germanists. Shortly after publication, Forster received a letter from ‘Bernward Michaelsen’, who objected at great (though courteous) length to many of the anthology's inclusions. Forster and fellow German scholar S. H. Steinberg judged the writer to be an elderly German schoolteacher whose conservative literary taste had been formed after World War I. Forster's equally courteous and detailed response to Michaelsen's criticisms received no answer. What they did not know (although Steinberg came close to guessing) was that Michaelsen was actually Bernward Vesper, the eighteen-year-old son of Will Vesper, a notorious National Socialist editor and poet. Bernward's political trajectory from extreme right to left after his father's death was not unique for his generation but, unknown to Forster in 1988, had long since ended in tragedy.