At the end of January, I wrote that I was not sure I was going to finish Ehen in Philippsburg (Marriages in Philippsburg). It’s not that the book was bad, as such, it’s just that more than six months had elapsed since I had started reading, and that was a good indicator that the novel was not really holding my attention. I had two main reasons for not consigning it to DNFland. First, and more pragmatically, reading German is a skill, and like every skill, it needs practicing. Second, the Philippsburg was part of the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s first batch of great novels of the 20th century, and the editors who selected those 50 books for publication in a special edition had a mostly good track record of choosing worthwhile books that I probably would not have picked out on my own. So in the interest of skill and serendipity, after I finished Chevengur (which was two years in the reading) I resolved that I would finish Ehen in Philippsburg in May.

Truth be told, once I built up a little momentum, it was good reading, maybe even compelling. Back in January, I wrote that Walser’s “lead character is a young man on the make; he catches some lucky breaks, is sweet on his fiancée’s mother, gets business tips from his future father-in-law, and looks like he’s going places in postwar Philippsburg, a fictional city in the southern parts of West Germany.” I could tell from the pacing, though, that the rest of the novel could not continue on the same trajectory, and speculated that there might be a big fall ahead.

I had forgotten that some German books still put their tables of contents at the back of the book, and so I didn’t realize that Walser broke Philippsburg into four parts. Hans Beumann, the young man on the make in the first part, becomes a secondary character in the second and third parts, and returns more or less as the lead character of the fourth. The first section ends with a harrowing account of what happens when Beumann’s fiancée, Anne Volkmann, seeks to have an abortion. She is shuttled from doctor to doctor, some of whom have no intention of helping and indeed pretend to help while simply passing time in the hope that Anne will decide it’s too late to end the pregnancy. Other doctors are too mindful of their reputations and try to send her to someone else. She does finally succeed, and survives the various attempts, but it’s a hard reminder of what criminalizing abortion meant in 1950s West Germany.

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