While We Were Dreaming is a long, stark, brutal, male novel and a brilliant depiction of the purposelessness of working class boys around the time of the ‘Change’. There are lots of violent clashes between ‘fash’ and ‘antifa’ not to mention ‘hools’ - supporters of rival football teams. If they opt to become bad boys, they can join gangs of neo-Nazi skins, anarchist ‘crusties’ (a new word for me), or Goths. The Party ‘Nomenklatura’ enjoyed a better life with plenty of treats and privileges. With time they might aspire to Party membership. The prospect before the boys is mapped out at school: they can choose to be good socialists and progress from the ‘Pioneers’ (politicised boy scouts) to the FDJ (Free German Youth - the regime’s version of the Hitler Youth). Daniel inhabits a panorama of slab blocks and ruins bisected by roads and railway lines, the only relief provided by a few grimy pubs filled with sodden old topers. He lives alone with his mother, his father having been sent to a camp after a punch-up with the ‘Vopos,’ the East German state police. It explores the circle of the adolescent Daniel Lenz, a bright, working-class boy growing up in the bleak eastern suburbs of Leipzig. Which brings us to While We Were Dreaming: it is a German Bildungsroman. If I want to know something about Thomas Cromwell, I read a proper book about him, not a novel. I should add very quickly that I can’t see the point of historical novels. I still love literature, however, but I confess that when I read a novel I am not immune from using it to feed my understanding of some aspect of the historical period in which it was written. I studied history and became a historian specialising in France then Germany. If we couldn’t go there, York had a good department but whatever we did, avoid Oxford.Īs it turned out, I didn’t go to Cambridge and I didn’t read English. Boys who desired to do English were told to apply to Cambridge. In his heart he had wanted to be at Cambridge, the home of the great critics F R Leavis and I A Richards. He had read English at Oxford, something that he found hard to live down. There were other tools, however: Coulson positively encouraged us to read literary criticism. It struck me there was something almost Lutheran about this: the book alone would provide all we needed to understand the book.
Camus, he declared, was not superior to Chaucer, he was simply sitting on the other man’s shoulders. He rejected both biography and periodicity.
You didn’t need to know anything about the author either. When I did English A-Level (a very long time ago), our inspirational head of English, the late Peter Coulson, would tell us the only information we needed to glean from a poem or a novel was contained in the work itself. Blog Clemens Meyer, While We Were Dreaming, Fitzcarraldo Editions
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