The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany

Michael Gorra, an American academic married to a Swiss academic, finds himself in Germany for a year. He's on sabbatical, so he doesn't have to go to work every day, but he needs something to show for his year off. This book is it. Normally I wouldn't read something that seems so eggheady. But the New York Times gave it a good review and I was intrigued by Gorra's statement that no one travels in Germany for fun. So I skipped the parts on German literature and read about Gorra's adventures with the German language and the German people. When Gorra talks about these everyday matters of travel and being in a different country, he is quite good. But when he goes off into literary discussions, he becomes the professor. Why is it that literature is interesting, but literary criticism always manages to squeeze every ounce of enjoyment out of a novel? I suppose it would be the same if you were to over-analyze a good joke. In a surprising twist, Gorra also touches on travel writing in general, observing (but not over-analyzing) the writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Eric Newby to Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson. The Bells in their Silence (which refers to the fallen bells of the Marienkirche in Luebeck) is mostly an enjoyable book on travel in modern Germany by an open-minded and curious writer.

Michael Gorra notes that Germany's recent history causes certain stumbling blocks when writing literary fiction about modern Germany. Though he clears the barrier in his own travelouge, it sometimes feels like he is trying too hard to be erudite. Quoting everyone from Goethe to Bill Bryson gives the impression of scholarly name dropping. Still, the book is at its best when relaying personal vignettes from his year in Germany, such as his reaction when a German customs agents accidentally discovers an embarassing book he imports to the country, and his first-hand experience with the efficient German health-care system.

Nobody writes travelogues about Germany," writes Michael Gorra at the beginning of his book "The Bells in their Silence: Travels through Germany." Indeed Germany has, in recent years, failed to inspire travel writing as sophisticated as that of Jan Morris or as candidly humorous as that Bill Bryson, a fact that makes Gorra's book a welcome addition to the genre. But after making such a statement, Gorra acknowledges the many writers who have travelled Germany before him, those who tried to makes sense of the country by seeking the marrow of the German culture beyond Lederhosen and the occasional oompah band. A book that itself sometimes lingers too long in the past, "The Bells in their Silence" is an erudite rendering of the year the author spent living and travelling with his wife in the port city Hamburg and across northern and eastern Germany. Not a professed Germanophile, Gorra's distanced approach to Germany as well as his initial mistrust of the possibility of writing a travel book about the country are grounded in his understanding that travel writing itself is for amateurs seeking impression - and that those who choose to write about Germany are journalists. But once he gets past this initial barrier, Gorra has a keen eye, one that is guided by the extensive reading he did to prepare himself for his journey.When the author isn't bemusing cultural differences and delighting in the small moments of daily life, he takes his reader on a literary tour of Germany from Goethe through Fontane and Thomas Mann. An English professor at Smith College, Gorra is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He is a traveller whose understanding of people and place is indebted to literature. Weimar can only be understood through Goethe - and the commercialization of the 19th century renaissance man that bloomed when the city was Europe's cultural capital in 1999. The Berlin that fascinates Gorra is colored by Theodor Fontane's Prussian Berlin, before, as historian Michael Wise writes, the "country's past rendered patriotism suspect." Towards the end of the book, his most touching and personal chapter concludes with a glimpse into the place that Thomas Mann's family saga "Buddenbrooks" has held in his life. As a cultural investigator, Gorra is at his best in a chapter called "Hauptstadt," in which he dissects the peculiarities of the German capital. "Take the subway," he writes, "and mole your way beneath the city, dropping down into darkness and popping up again in a street that doesn't match the one you left behind, into rain you didn't know was happening, a view that seems suddenly all park, or all slum." When writing about Berlin's "big footprint," Gorra must have recognized that like Christopher Isherwood in the 1920's - whose "Berlin Stories" inspired the film "Cabaret" - he was viewing a city in full transition. He visited the German capital in 1993 and then again in the late 1990's, a brief few years that saw Berlin's Mitte district rise

This is a wonderful travel book, and a great deal more than a travel book. Gorra spends a year in Germany exploring not only the present but the presence of the past, from Goethe's Germany of the poets and the thinkers to the great darkness of World War II. As anyone who has read Gorra's many reviews in "The New York Times" and other places would expect, the writing is elegant and the cultural observation shrewd. But the book goes beyond elegance and shrewdness to dignity and compassion. It exemplifies what, at its most profound, civility can bring to our understanding of even so terrible a trauma as Nazism. Like Germany itself, Gorra is haunted by that trauma, yet the range of his experiences, and of the reading he weaves into his travels, is wide. I especially loved the chapter on Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," in which Gorra tells the story of his own family, Lebanese immigrants to Connecticut who became fruit and vegetable wholesalers. It's a grand way to read "Buddenbrooks," making Mann's family chronicle resonate with contemporary American life in new and varied ways.

As a reader, Michael Gorra is erudite and generous. This is the conclusion you reach if you read his reviews in the New York Times, TLS, and other places. The Bells in their Silence, an unusual literary tour of Germany, demonstrates those qualities in abundance. But there's also more to enjoy here, a sense of movement and place, as well as a broader range of tone and perceptions, which combine to make this book more than either an academic exercise or simply a writer's report on a journey.