Martin Walser Quote
You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous.
You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous.
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About Martin Walser
His first novel, Marriage in Philippsburg, a satirical portrait of postwar society, became a success in 1957. Walser then turned to freelance writing. He published a trilogy of novels about the character Anselm Kristlein, beginning with Halbzeit in 1960, Das Einhorn (The Unicorn) in 1966 and ending with Der Sturz (The Fall) in 1973. Most of his major works have been translated into English, including the 1978 novella Runaway Horse, which was successful with both readers and critics. He also wrote plays (Die Zimmerschlacht), screenplays, story collections and essays. Several of his books have been adapted to the screen, including Runaway Horse in 1986 and again in 2007.
Walser received many awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize in 1981 and the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association in 1998. His acceptance speech for the Peace Prize caused controversy with Walser's remarks on German commemoration of the Holocaust. The "monumentalization of shame", he said, risks turning remembrance of the Holocaust into a "lip service" ritual. In 2002, Walser's portrayal of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his novel Tod eines Kritikers ("Death of a Critic") was regarded as anti-Semitic.
Walser is regarded, along with Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Siegfried Lenz, as one of Germany's most influential postwar authors.