Life
TL;DR
Walter Abish, whose novel How German Is It remains one of the most unsettling works of American postmodern fiction, died in 2022 at 90 — in a week when the questions his work asked about collective.
MSM Perspective
The New York Times ran his 2022 obituary; no major outlet has revisited his work in the context of the current moment, a gap this paper is attempting to close.
X Perspective
Literary accounts on X have been returning to Abish this week — a writer who asked how a civilized nation explains atrocity to itself, publishing in a moment when that question seems freshly relevant.
Walter Abish died on May 28, 2022, at the age of 90, in New York. [1] He has been on this paper's reading list for weeks.
Abish was born in Vienna in 1931 and fled the Nazis as a child — first to Italy, then to Nice, then to Shanghai, eventually to Israel, and finally to New York, where he became one of the most formally inventive American novelists of the postwar period. His 1980 novel How German Is It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and remains one of the most precise inquiries into the mechanism of national amnesia that English literature has produced. [2]
The novel's premise: a West German architect builds a prosperous modern city on the site of a former concentration camp. The city is beautiful. The architecture is excellent. The citizens are orderly. The question the novel presses without relent is how much a civilization's surface reconstruction can coexist with the undisturbed burial of what it committed.
This paper has been covering a war for 39 days. The war has produced declarations of victory from both sides, a ceasefire that excludes Lebanon, fourteen more dead in Beirut on the night peace was announced, and a global market that responded by going up. Abish's question is not purely historical. It is the question any society asks of itself when it agrees, formally, that the thing it was doing has stopped — and moves on.
Abish spent his career asking what it costs a society to agree to move on. The answer his novels gave was: more than the society knows. [1]
-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York
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