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Measure for measure
By Avner Shapira
Tags: Israel News

"So much civilization and so much horror ... What a combination! The exact opposite of everything that Germany stood for."

- from "Measuring the World," by Daniel Kehlmann

In the first and third spots atop The New York Times' international best-seller list for the year 2006 were Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" and "The Da Vinci Code." But sandwiched between them in second place was "Measuring the World," a novel by German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann, first published in Germany in 2005. Kehlmann had previously published five books, but "Measuring the World" is the one that made him a shining star in German and world literature. The novel topped the best-seller lists in Germany for many weeks, became the biggest-selling book in the German-speaking world since Patrick Suskind's "Perfume" in 1985, and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
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"Measuring the World," currently being published in a Hebrew translation by Yiftah Hellerman-Carmel and Adina Stern (Aliyat Hagag Books and Yedioth Books), depicts an imaginary encounter between two prominent German scientists born in the 18th century: geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Both made a tremendous contribution to their fields and were part of the 19th-century German Enlightenment (see box). Kehlmann manages not only to illuminate some of Humboldt and Gauss' scientific insights, but even more, to paint a many-hued portrait ranging from dazzling to dark, of the protagonists' characters as well as of the spirit of the period in which they lived.

In an e-mail interview in English, Kehlmann describes how he got the idea for the book: "I lived in Mexico for a few months in 2002, and there I started reading Humboldt. I was amazed about how many funny situations came up in his travel writings - without him ever noticing - how many misunderstandings kept happening, how prototypically German he was. I thought: There is the potential of a comic novel in this character. Then I found out that Gauss, who was in so many ways his opposite, stayed in Humboldt's house as a guest of a scientific congress in 1828. And that was the moment when I saw the structure of a novel about two people, both of them measuring the world, but being the opposite of each other in about any other respect. It seemed to me so natural and necessary that I couldn't believe that I was the first person to think of writing that novel. But I was, and so I wrote it. I also was interested in writing a historical novel for people who, like me, hate historical novels. A novel that avoids all the traps of a mostly rather banal genre."

The book traces the two scientists' different paths and their convergence. Humboldt leaves Germany on a research expedition to unfamiliar parts of South America (together with the French explorer Aime Bonpland), where he encounters sea monsters and cannibals, fords rivers, scales snowy peaks, crawls through tunnels and climbs volcanoes. Meanwhile, Gauss stays put in the German city of Goettingen, examining the world through a telescope, using abstract thinking and mathematical formulas.

While the first is an avid adventurer who has no room in his life for romance with women, the second is largely depicted as lazy, irascible, preoccupied with self-gratification and involved in problematic family relationships. In the novel, the two meet for the first time in Berlin in 1828, against the backdrop of the political and social turmoil in Germany during the post-Napoleon era.

Do Gauss and Humboldt symbolize to some extent the kind(s) of personality (or personalities) that every scientist has to have?

Kehlmann, who divides his time between Vienna and Berlin, was born in Munich in 1975 to Austrian parents: theater and film director Michael Kehlmann and actress Dagmar Mettler. His grandfather was the Jewish expressionist writer Eduard Kehlmann, who converted to Christianity. His father maintained close connections with the Austrian underground in World War II and consequently was imprisoned in a labor camp, and several of his Jewish relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps.

When Kehlmann was six, his family moved to Vienna, where he grew up and went on to study philosophy and literature at the city university. He did not complete his Ph.D. - on the subject of philosopher Immanuel Kant's concept of the sublime - in part because he decided to focus on literary writing. He has been publishing novels and short stories since 1997, and won acclaim as a writer prior to the publication of "Measuring the World," which many critics have hailed as constituting a turning point in German literature.

After World War II, German literature was refashioned by "Group 47" - young writers who sought to create serious and searching prose while reckoning with Germany's Nazi's past. Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boell and Siegfried Lenz were among the group's prominent members, and although its influence began to wane over the years, its inspiration is still evident in the works of many contemporary German authors.

"Measuring the World" differs from the works of Group 47 and its disciples primarily in its style: Kehlmann laces the story of the two scientists together with a great deal of humor, joviality, irony and lightheartedness - elements more in keeping with the magical realism of South American literature, and foreign to most German books.

You told The Guardian newspaper that you tried to use a Latin American atmosphere: "I've written a Latin American novel about Germans and German classicism." Why did you want to make such a combination?

"These are the two traditions that formed me as a reader and as a writer. With Humboldt, who had traveled to South America as a Weimar classicist, I had the possibility to combine them, to confront them with each other. Humboldt's character was like a gift to me as a writer. I could use the techniques of magic realism, but I used them to write a comic novel about a German abroad. It felt immensely liberating to do that."

Some critics complained that you did not show enough respect for the real facts concerning Humboldt and Gauss. Why do you think writers can - and should - deal with history by inventing imaginary events and facts?

"Because fiction is a way to 'correct' the official ways history is written. If you read Humboldt you often get the impression that he does not narrate things exactly the way they happened to him. He cannot have been as relaxed, detached and aloof as he wants us to believe. Therefore in my novel the Humboldt-character often decides to write down things differently from the way they happened - a technique by which I am trying to show what I tried to do as a novelist: giving both versions, mine and his. In some cases my version might even be closer to the truth ... Only a novelist can do that, a journalist or a historian cannot. Only by making a contract with the reader, stating that nothing he or she will read is supposed to be taken at face value, can a novelist give us a form of truth that only literary art can provide."

It seems that readers are also being asked to relate in this way to Humboldt's sexual identity: He never married and is portrayed in the book as averse to the temptations of the female gender. Though not much is known about Humboldt's private life, some scholars have found partial evidence to suggest that he was active in Berlin's gay subculture. Why did you choose to hint at his attraction to those of the same sex?

"Some scholars indeed think that Humboldt was gay. For me that was the version of him I could use best: Seeing him as a repressed gay person, who is running away from something in himself that is frightening him, I give him an additional motivation, make him a more complex and torn person. It's a novelist's task to make the life of his characters more difficult - that's what a novel is all about."

This year Kehlmann published a new novel whose title, "Ruhm" ("Fame"), also hints at what he has experienced in the four years since the publication of his last work, which brought him numerous awards including the Thomas Mann Prize and the Heinrich von Kleist Prize. Unlike the earlier book, whose plot is set at the dawn of the modern age, the new one takes place in our day and examines, among other things, the influence of advanced communications technologies on human identity and on the blurring of the boundaries between reality and imagination. Kehlmann says he is currently writing a play. Asked about how the success of "Measuring the World" has affected his life, he says he's trying not to lose his skepticism and his sense of irony.

In his review about your book (in The Nation, April 12, 2007), Mark M. Anderson says that the "true subject [of the novel] is the failure of Enlightenment attempts to 'measure the world.'" This was also the impression from Gauss' understanding (at the end of the book) that an attempt to measure nature is also a way of changing it. Do you agree with Mr. Anderson's conclusion? And in the same context: It would be interesting to think about this issue in light of German history during the 20th century, remembering the philosophical claims (of the Frankfurt School and others) about the way that scientists lose their moral sensitivity.

Your father's family had a partially Jewish heritage, your father was imprisoned in a work camp during World War II, and numerous relatives were deported and killed under the Nazi regime. Does your background somehow influence the way you look at and write about German history and culture?

"I think it does. It is weird to grow up in Germany (and even weirder in Austria) as the son of a Holocaust survivor. It certainly makes it easier to look at Germans with a certain ironic distance, but at the same time I am a German, formed by German culture, whether I want it or not. I think 'Measuring the World' reflects that ambivalence, and that's one of the reasons I am so glad that I managed to write that book."
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