Uwe Tellkamp - a novel that overflows and overpowers: it is rendered in sentences as baroque as the old Dresden Tellkamp’s characters long for. Memories and impressions grow wild across the lattice of the plot, bringing the symphonic book to, but never over, the brink of cacophony

Uwe Tellkamp, The Tower: Tales from a Lost Country, Penguin UK; Reprint ed., 2017.
Excerpt
Read the first chapter here

In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled toward November 9, 1989.

"In Mike Mitchell’s English, Tellkamp’s prose is polished, vivid and observationally acute. (...) But to accuse Tellkamp of prolixity would be to miss the point of a novel that marshals all its resources against the weakness of memory." - Anthony Cummins

"Der Turm is a novel that overflows and overpowers: it is rendered in sentences as baroque as the old Dresden Tellkamp’s characters long for. Memories and impressions grow wild across the lattice of the plot, bringing the symphonic book to -- but never over -- the brink of cacophony." - Jane Yager




Der Turm is set in Dresden, in the East Germany of the 1980s, then still the German Democratic Republic. The book covers the period right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, though it moves at varying speeds across these years, lingering over particular episodes and stretches, then leaping over longer periods.
       The 'Turm' (tower) of the title refers to a district of Dresden where most of the characters live. Not quite an island of intellectual escape, it is certainly far from representative of the workers' state. A central figure is Christian Hoffmann, a figure with some resemblance to the author, still in high school when the book begins, but eager to study medicine. His father, Richard, is a doctor, while his uncle (on his mother's side) is Meno Rohde, an editor at a publishing house specializing in fine editions.
       The arc of Christian's life is the central if not completely dominant one in the book. Political sensitivity is still very high, allegiance -- at least nominal -- to the party and nation essential if one is to have any hope of, for example, a university-spot, especially in a field such as medicine. Even minor high school outbursts and missteps can have grave consequences, and Christian barely scrapes by in this regard, his future hanging in the balance over such matters as being found with a Nazi book. Inescapable, too, is military service, which Christian embarks on before he is to begin university -- and here conditions and demands do crush him, preventing him from pursuing his dreams. He is not the only one who, by trying to maintain some personal integrity, is ruthlessly marginalized in a system that tolerates nothing that could be considered in any way subversive.
       The book begins with a lengthy description of the to-do around Richard's fiftieth birthday, and his situation suggests the possibility of getting by fairly comfortably in this society, as he has found considerable success and enjoys a few privileges. Yet he's also mired in an awkward affair that has no hopes of working out well, with gossip starting to reach his wife and the woman in question reacting poorly to their situation. Richard's half-hearted attempts to do the right thing don't work out particularly well. And while the doctors are held in considerable esteem, bureaucracy and the difficulties in getting supplies or necessary funds show the shortcomings of the socialist system in this area as well
       Meno is part of the local literary establishment -- based here closely on the actual local scene at the time, with a number of the writers only thinly disguised. His meetings at the local Writers' Union and his interaction with various figures make for a good overview of the difficulties faced by authors and publishers, and the compromises that were expected. The discussions get very frank, even as the amount of leeway the censor permits is limited. Meno is working on a lyrical work of his own, but it is the fate of an author he is drawn to and tries to take a bit under his wing, the very talented young Judith Schevola, that Tellkamp focusses on. Like Christian, she -- another promising member of the younger generation -- suffers most under the crushing weight of the regime and its demands.
       Tellkamp offers a vast survey of East German life, even as he keeps it within relatively limited areas: school, the workplace (the hospital and the publishing house), army life. For the most part, those whose lives are described are fairly well-to-do -- if not financially particularly well-off, at least relatively secure in their places, and certainly comfortable (even as that occasionally proves illusory). True, occasionally strangers are assigned a portion of their living spaces, as lines are redrawn in the houses and officialdom literally encroaches on their lives further, but most can get by relatively comfortably. Tellkamp does, however, pointedly describe the lives of the truly privileged, the nation's favoured sons, which some of the others catch a glimpse of -- an entirely different world.
       The official party line is the one thing that is sacred, as those who oppose it suffer Draconian punishments. Doubts about anyone being a good citizen -- defined largely on the basis of unquestioning support for the Soviet position -- can be devastating, while taking the step of filing an application to leave the country means burning all one's bridges in one quick and massive blaze.
       There is a great deal of period-detail here, such as the lines at shops that people get on even if it's unclear what will be on offer (the thinking being that any special delivery is worth getting one's hands on), or the amount of time involved in dealing with even the smallest bit of bureaucracy. It's not just far from a loving portrait, however: there's no Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old Eastern ways) here at all and, if anything, Tellkamp's version is almost too consistently sour.
       Christian is a self-conscious, acne-suffering teenager with incredible ambition and drive at the beginning of the book. He plows through books at a ridiculous pace, and barely seems to enjoy any leisure time, but there's also no sheer love of learning (or reading) here. It's all ambition -- and his choice of medicine as a field is also not fueled by his interest in helping others but simply because he wants fame and adulation. It's hard not to see Tellkamp in Christian, and it's hard not to see this book as the result of an only slightly more controlled ambition.
       "Mit 500 Seiten begannen die wirklichen Romane " ('Real novels started with at least 500 pages') Christian convinces himself, as if weight could equal worth, and there's little doubt that Tellkamp hasn't completely shaken that notion. At nearly a thousand pages Der Turm is well in the upper reaches of Thomas Mann territory, and there are points -- even stretches -- where one has to wonder why he didn't show more restraint. Der Turm is not a smooth-flowing narrative: the many, relatively short chapters may be Mann-like, but the overall result is a very different one. Certain chapters are true asides, excursions elsewhere, while others do follow a course of action in sequence. Tellkamp begins his book with a brief 'Overture' and closes it with a 'Finale' -- and music does play a small role in some of the characters' lives -- and there is something of a musical composition to the novel. Especially in those parts and passages that allow one or another instrument to show off a bit: Tellkamp has the writing chops and can't help but introduce a few flourishes -- but that doesn't always work to best effect.
       One of the writers notes:

"Wahrheit ! Als ob es in der Literatur um Wahrheit ging ! Romane sind keine Philosophieseminare. Romane lügen immer."

["Truth ! As if literature had anything to do with the truth ! Novels aren't philosophy-seminars. Novels always lie." ]

       The argument doesn't go unchallenged, but despite all the talk Der Turm is as much documentary as philosophical, trying to get at truth less through analysis (though there is also some of that) than through precise depiction. And it is the scenes and dialogues that re-present everyday East German life where Tellkamp excels, these fully realised confrontations and unfolding of events -- suggesting that, because this is how it was (and it often feels he got that precisely right), that's also all there is to it -- a more dubious proposition.
       The many characters and storylines allow for a truly panoramic view of 1980s East Germany, yet with the book so heavily populated and moving in all these different directions the picture loses focus too. In part, that's also because it is not a true family saga, Christian's story too dominant yet not the whole story either.
       Yes, in many respects Der Turm is a glorious epic of that sad last decade of East German history, with some remarkable patches of writing and some very fine scenes. Yet it feels incomplete as a history, the pendulum swinging too far and spitefully back in a book that drips with contempt and feels too personal in its reckoning with an entire nation and system.
       An important book, and certainly an impressive accomplishment; a good but not a great novel.
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ddr/tellku.htm

The Tower, by Uwe Tellkamp, may appear to be a monolithic, singularly heroic literary act by a surgeon and survivor of the indignities of the German Democratic Republic. This man, who lived to tell the tale, so to speak, penned an epic about a bourgeois family which has retreated into a kind of inner emigration in the crumbling but stately villas of the posh Weißer Hirsch neighborhood in Dresden. But The Tower is much more complex than that, and intellectually rich. The story, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, focuses on three men of various ages and various levels of complicity with the putrefying system of 1980s GDR, and it is now (finally!) available in print in English translation.
Who are these three men? Christian is a pimply and ambitious young student who dreams of following his father, Richard, into the field of medicine; he ultimately signs up for three years of military service in the hopes of securing a spot as a medical student. His efforts to mimic Party loyalty are largely successful until his collapse as a soldier. His father Richard’s 50th birthday party opens the novel and initially Richard appears equally eloquent and morally blameless. However, numerous affairs and a secret second family make him a pawn in the hands of the Stasi. Finally, Meno, Christian’s maternal uncle—something of a mentor to the teenage boy, and a former botanist—works as an editor at one of the GDR’s few high-quality imprints that frequently ran short on paper, rounding out the trio of protagonists.

Tellkamp’s multi-faceted book not only documents the slow demise of this once-illustrious family, it records the state of affairs in a country that no longer exists—a “lost” country—without slipping into misplaced nostalgia. In part, this is accomplished by emphasizing the brutality of army life and the willingness to repress the mounting protests in 1989. Christian is no longer able to maintain his façade of party allegiance after his unit is ordered to attack a group of demonstrators that October, which includes his mother. Those well-versed in GDR cultural history may be able to read The Tower as a roman à clef—the Old Man of the Mountain strongly resembles Franz Führmann—but special cultural or historical knowledge is not required to appreciate the impressive and occasionally surreal collage of scenes and character studies from a country that is not mourned but most certainly vanished.
One reason for The Tower’s length (unusual even by German standards) is Tellkamp’s tendency to describe these scenes in minute detail, using nebulously lyrical, almost flowery language. The novel spans seven years, but like Proust’s Recherche, devotes long stretches to single anecdotes. Michael Mitchell does a masterful job of translating Tellkamp’s prose in a nuanced and balanced manner without sacrificing reading fluidity. His sensitive rendering also makes it possible to follow Tellkamp’s stylistic shift from a kind of bourgeois realism à la Thomas Mann in the first half of the novel (“The Pedagogical Province”) to echoes of so-called socialist realism in the second (“Gravity”).
Under this socialist-realist sensibility falls the short Chapter 53 (page 750), devoted to the mechanics and aesthetics of the laundry wringer:

The ironing-woman, full-bosomed with piggy eyes and reddish down on the backs of her fingers and her upper lip, brusquely instructed them in how to operate the machine, after she’d checked their time in a notebook and ticked them off with a sharp pencil stroke […] Anne nodded, pressed a second button and now it sounded as if someone—or something—were being tortured, torment and pain were flying over the solid beechwood, worn by decades of use, of the wringer, shuttling to and fro, the boulders in the box thundering and rattling, a convulsive tremor from the transmission belts running over driving wheels on the side of the machine, obeying the blind, unfeeling voltage commands of a motor. For a moment there was nothing to do.

On the other hand, one of Meno’s diary entries, reminiscing of better times, falls distinctly into a bourgeois realist camp:

It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating the Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions—Classics!

Although Uwe Tellkamp became a household name in Germany after The Tower was awarded the German Book Prize in 2008, it was not at all assured that his thousand-page epic would ever be translated into English. The vagaries of the Anglophone publishing industry were such that all the major publishers took a glance and then decided it probably would not be worth it. Only after the up-and-coming eBook publisher Frisch & Co. had received Mitchell’s translation did Penguin purchase the rights to a print edition. The likely and deserved success of The Tower in English should serve as a lesson for publishers hesitant to commission translations of long and complex novels. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is a remarkable remembrance of a country lost to history—a great Christmas gift or a tome to tide you over through a long winter. - Bradley Schmidt

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2014/11/20/in-review-the-tower-by-uwe-tellkamp/


more reviews:
The Gryphon
The Independent
Lizzy’s Literary Life
Standpoint
The Telegraph