Mesoscope's Reviews > Annette, ein Heldinnenepos

Annette; Ein Heldinnen Epos is a well-received book that generated a lot of buzz after receiving the prestigious Deutscher Buch Preis in 2020. As the name implies, it was written as a heroic epic in blank verse somewhat approximating a loose Homeric hexameter. For that and other reasons, my immediate point of reference for it was Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea, which used Homeric verse modeled after Voß to tell a very different kind of story, also set against a backdrop of war and calamity. That poem was about two young people who discovered the heroic possibilities of everyday life during the Napoleonic Wars, falling in love and beginning what for many people is life’s great adventure.

Anne Beaumanoir, or Annette, grew up under the shadow of war in a small town in northern France. From an early age, she gravitated toward heroic tales of idealism, particularly Man’s Fate, Malraux’s novel about the turmoil preceding the Chinese Revolution. Taking idealistic conceptions of the good society as her guide, she joined the resistance after the Nazis invaded and became an ardent Communist. This is the first of the two periods this poem overwhelmingly focuses on.

Most of Annette’s activities during the Occupation revolved around delivering messages and packages. Because of the security measures used by the Resistance, she never knew much about what was going on, or who else was active. The most remarkable achievement during this time was when she saved to Jewish children at great risk to her own life.

After the war, she quickly became disillusioned with the Communists when it turned out that their agenda was not merely confined to justice and prosperity for all. For a few decades she focused on her second marriage and child-raising. She became a successful doctor, but, if the book is to be believed, was a bit bored by bourgeois life.

Unlike Goethe, for whom life as most of us live it is itself the heroic journey, Anne Weber is almost completely uninterested in the quotidian details of Annette’s life, such as her career, husband, or children, who do not appear in this poem with any depth or heft.

What does matter to Weber, apparently, is Annette’s deep political convictions, which to me occurred as often laudable, but also highly problematic, as they were dangerously naive and somewhat rigid. As Nietzsche said, convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

During the Algerian conflict, Annette once more took up the mantle of underground activist, this time acting against her own country, which she perceived to be the aggressor in this case. Again she acted as an underground courier, this time working as a bag man shuttling cash for the Algerian FLN.

Ultimately she was found out and, facing ten years in prison, fled to Algeria, leaving behind her career, marriage, family, friends, and her three children, including a newborn baby.

She lived in Algeria for the next several years up through Algerian independence, the succeeding short period of democratic reform, and then witnessed the collapse of the young government into a military dictatorship, at which point she fled again, this time to Switzerland. Far too late, she realizes that she sacrificed everything for a just government that survived for a few years.

Reading the book, I frequently came back to the subtitle, trying to understand if it was meant ironically or provocative, or if the author actually sees Beaumanoir as a hero. It became increasingly clear that Weber does in fact see Annette as heroic, and describes her first meeting with Beaumanoir in this book in terms of astonished awe that such a person could exist.

Here I simply have a different perspective from the author. In my perspective, the world is overflowing with people who are so committed to their deeply-held political convictions that they’re willing to sacrifice not just their own lives, but the lives of their families and children, to pursue them. I am rather of the opinion that the world would be a better place in aggregate with fewer.

In my reading, even Annette’s support of the French communists is somewhat dubious, but her uncritical support for the Algerian revolution went on long after she knew the FLN itself was involved in torture, political assassinations, and other kinds of brutality. And with the military coup, she ended up merely helping to replace one oppressive system in Algeria with another.

Should she have known better? For Weber, this is a deep question, but for me it’s easy to answer: of course she should have. Knowing what she knew about the revolutions in France, Russia, and China, she had every reason to understand that revolutions fueled by idealism often turn totalitarian. To me, she seems incredibly naive, and more interested in living according to her own untested concept of morality than critically examining the impact of her actions.

I gather that some Germans may respond differently to this book - Weber said as much in an interview, saying that as a German, the story of this woman who risked her life to save two Jewish children from the Nazis has a different impact than it would for a Danish or American reader.

Clearly that is a laudable act, but is Beaumanoir’s life as a whole heroic, in the sense that it exemplifies outstanding moral achievement? Here I go back to Goethe’s model - he saw the hero adventure as something to do with living and loving in the midst of calamity. Honestly, I just find it sad, that I live in an era in which for so many the ultimate value is to be found in these nightmares of history, and in the joyless dedication to our own ideals.