I Loved a German

Introduction

A.H. Tammsaare was born in 1878 into a poor farming family, the fourth of twelve siblings. Serfdom had been abolished in 1861, and his father Peeter was able to buy a farm, though the land was either stony or marshy. If we take as our indicator Vargamäe, the first volume of his monumental pentalogy in which Indrik can be identified with the author, peasant life was slowly improving in that part of the Tsarist Empire. Tammsaare was born Anton Hansen, and added the name of his family’s farm to his own. His father was hardworking, built farm buildings on his land and made furniture and household utensils. He could also read and write, and newspapers were delivered by bicycle during the summer months.

When he wasn’t working, the young Tammsaare would spend his time getting muddy, observing insects and watching birds. This dreaminess was accompanied by an aptitude for study, and the family decided a little late in his teenage years to fund his education and he went to secondary education in Tartu from 1898 to 1903. And from 1903 to 1905, he worked as an editor at the Tallinn newspaper, Teataja. In Tallinn he was able to witness the Russian Revolution of 1905. While many Estonian writers supported it in part as a means for their own emancipation from the empire and German landowners, Tammsaare took a more cautious approach, supporting some of the aims but rejecting violence.

In 1907 he enrolled as a law student at Tartu University, but in 1911 he was unable to sit his finals, as he became very ill with tuberculosis. He was moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and then to the nearby Caucasus Mountains, where his condition improved. On his return to Estonia, he lived for six years on his brother’s farm where he encountered another life-threatening illness and underwent surgery for an intestinal ulcer. Unable to work, he threw himself into his studies and mastered foreign languages: English, French, Finnish, and Swedish.

He might have remained in the country writing articles and translating books, had he not met Käthe Veltman during a trip to Tallinn. They shared interests but when she turned up at his brother’s house with a newspaper containing the announcement of their marriage, which she’d placed herself, he was not amused and it was nearly a year before their marriage became a reality and he moved to Tallinn, where he would continue to live until his death in 1940. This move and the responsibilities of a family increased his literary output dramatically and he would be a prolific writer to the end.

I Loved a German was published in 1935, and superficially it concerns the “ethnic” (by which we mean linguistic) divisions in Estonian society since it had been annexed by Russia during the Great Northern War (1700-21). Like the Swedes before them, the Russians left intact the social structures under the German hegemony established in the Middle Ages. Hence German remained the language of culture and trade, the aristocracy was principally German, and the government and bureaucracy was Russian. The majority Estonian-speaking population was excluded from power and until 1861 effectively excluded from the cities and educational establishments. Analogous situations also existed in the Anciens Régimes of eighteenth-century Europe, though the French Revolution had removed a few of them and unsettled a great many more. Tammsaare’s life coincided with continuous change in these complex relationships, but in the Baltic States the final stage was sudden and complete, because both the Germans and the Russians were weakened after 1918. But was it so complete? Formally it was, but the human mind takes time to adapt to sudden change, and in part that is what this novel is about. Erika, the Baltic German granddaughter of a now dispossessed German landowner, and Oskar, the Estonian son of a hardworking peasant, have difficulty in navigating their courtship through the often unconscious prejudices and assumptions that govern their behaviour and expectations.

The novel is not of course incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with such situations, particularly those unused to polyglot societies, as problems of fast-moving social change are still with us. I Loved a German could be interpreted as a nationalist novel: Estonians have to become masters in their own land, and grow out of their residual subservience. It’s true that Tammsaare, a convinced pacifist, made an exception for the Estonian War of Independence. History had provided a unique opportunity, and Estonians had to take it. Equally you could argue that it is an anti-nationalist novel. The Estonian nationalist who appears towards the end of the first volume of his pentalogy, Truth and Justice, is not a positive figure. The author appears to be distrustful of his conviction and simplification of complex issues, and perhaps the latent bigotry. The personal level of our relationships remains the starting point for much of Tammsaare’s thinking, and there’s no doubt that the two young lovers are genuine in their sentiments, however innocent and self-analytical they undoubtedly are, as their anguish over lies and half-truths demonstrates. The primary obstacle to their love is national prejudice. This is already present in their early encounters, walks in the park under the moonlight not for romantic reasons but because Erika is ashamed of her worn gloves and other signs of financial constraints. Their different social backgrounds are often referred to: he apparently upwardly mobile and she downwardly mobile, but his finances are still in the worst state. Both are keen not to reveal their true situation, but when she starts to talk, she does confide in him.

The real turning-point in the novel is Oskar’s decision to ask her grandfather for permission to marry her. He is convinced that man-to-man he will be able to persuade the dispossessed German nobleman (who presumably was compensated for his loss). The meeting turns out to be a complete disaster. Much of the conversation between Oskar and Erika or between Oskar and her grandfather revolves around the fact he has become a Korporant, a member of a Korporation, which is a social organisation for university students and a sign of social status, expressed through the right to wear a particular kind of coloured cap. This would have been the almost exclusive domain of young German men and now it had been opened up to Estonians. We’re talking here about privilege more than national identity, though in pre-independence Estonia they were clearly interlinked. The arguments can occasionally appear arcane, but isn’t this true of all social prejudice? The grandfather is clearly incapable of assessing the new reality and to some extent he admits to this. Tammsaare is too good a writer to make him a caricature, and this condescending and occasionally obtuse man is capable of expressing some interesting ideas and is motivated by genuine love and concern for his granddaughter.

Following this encounter and an argument with Erika, Oskar starts to question his own love and asks himself whether he was more interested in the upper-class connections than in Erika herself, though this appears not to be the case after the final twist in the story. Oskar, the narrator of his own account he occasionally calls a “novel”, writes, “What was so terribly provocative was our long-humiliated and mutilated sense of ourselves as slaves when we tried, even outwardly, to be the masters of slaves, which we hid within ourselves [p. 30],” and perhaps even more revealingly, “My love must surely smell of coarse bread and a dusty granary, and that’s why it’s so precious to me. My reason tells me to defend the break-up of the manorial lands, but my emotions tell me to cling compulsively to them, as do all my contempraries [p. 30].”

I Loved a German is not so much a nationalist or anti-nationalist novel as a novel about nationalism and our socially ingrained prejudices which are so difficult to shake off even when the world around us has changed dramatically. I would hazard a guess based on my reading of the novel that Tammsaare was an exponent of civic nationalism avant la lettre. His concern was to salvage Estonian culture from the ravages of history and not to defend some mythical “ethnicity”. What is certainly the case is that this is a complex novel that imparts a number of paradoxes concerning both nationalism and more generally the human condition.

Finally a few words about the novel’s structure and style are in order. It is occasionally a discursive novel, though not on a grand scale. There is, for example, an amusing digression into the difference between writing in the evening and writing in the morning. The manuscript story is that Oskar started to write this autobiographical account after nearly all the events had occurred (i.e. before we or he know what happens to Erika after the split, which is revealed in her letter that ends the book). This manuscript is found after he too has disappeared, and it is handed over to Tammsaare who decides to publish it under his own name and writes an introduction, which of course is actually part of the novel. For some this may appear overly elaborate, but this and Oskar’s habit of calling it a novel undermine the text and that must have been intentional. There is something theatrical about the novel, and the conversations with the landlady and with the grandfather, which form the backbone of the novel, could easily be transferred to the stage. The encounters between the lovers are more typical of a realist novel, with detailed descriptions of the weather, the time of day and their walks. The landlady, who the lovers detest because she embarrasses them unrelentingly, is Estonian and proud of it. Tammsaare clearly finds her ridiculous, but she too is not a caricature. There is some humanity underneath her bluster and bullying. The Estonian maid, on the other hand, is a subdued character and treated with contempt by everyone, including Oskar, but it is revealed in the fictional introduction that she is the one person who had the greatest understanding of people and events. This does not become clear to readers until the end when they have the knowledge to make the judgement. Another reason why this is one of those novels that deserve to be read more than once.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, June 2018