The Country Road by Regina Ullman
For all of Switzerland’s
pastoral qualities (think Heidi,
think yodeling), this small, isolated nation proved to be one of the great hubs
of the seismographic art-cultural phenomenon known as modernism. A distinctly
urban invention, modernism burst into particular life there, in Zurich, in the
form of a revolutionary art movement called Dada, which quickly spread to other
cities in the West—to Paris, Berlin, and New York. Founded in Zurich’s Cabaret
Voltaire (after the great French satirist), Dada was conceived as an
unequivocal reaction to the chauvinistic, bourgeois norms that had brought Europe
to the brink of catastrophe in World War I, leaving in its wake an estimated
ten million dead and twenty million wounded. The German poet and Dadaist, Hugo
Ball, who had sought refuge from the war in Zurich, put it well, insisting that
his aim as a writer was to shock anyone who regarded “all this civilized
carnage as a triumph of European intelligence.” It was a whirling, multimedia
experiment that made a virtue of chaos, irrationality, and chance.
Remarkably, the stories of
Regina Ullmann seem to bear little connection to this artistic-cultural
upheaval that was raging all around her, reading more like nineteenth-century
village tales than satirical experiments in language or Candide-like attacks on the reigning status quo. Born into a
Jewish-Austrian family in 1884, the Swiss writer and poet was in fact perfectly
positioned to join the forces of literary modernism, as defined by such giants as
Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. Widely hailed for
her work by Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse (whose mother was
Swiss), she was championed for years by the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who spoke
of her and her work with a tender adoration. “Genius,” declared Musil. “Her
voice is something holy,” wrote Mann.
Clearly these writers
recognized something familiar, even modern, in her seemingly old-fashioned work.
Indeed, despite her spare, allegorical style, there is an abiding human sadness
in these stories, a philosophical brooding about the world, which, while surely
timeless, applicable to any age, seems particular, too, symptomatic of the
fraught and whirling times in which she lived. If she is a modernist (and I
believe she is) she is differently, obliquely so—“a modernist trailing ghosts
of the past,” as critic and blogger Joseph Schreiber puts it on his excellent
blog, roughghosts. Her conversion to
Catholicism and subsequent flight from Nazi Germany are indications enough
that, for all of the remoteness of her stories, her vision, she too was subject
to the forces of her times. As a Jew she could never have stood apart.
Here, for those interested, is some footage of the founding of Dada:
Peter
Adam Nash
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