Weimar Migrations: Katherine Anne Porter in Berlin

In the 1920s and the 1930s the Texas author Katherine Anne Porter lived out the life of a modernist expatriate, restlessly moving from one country to another, but it was a short trip to Weimar Berlin between September 1931 and January 1932 that had the strongest influence on her fiction. Porter came to feel by 1940 that her Berlin stay shaped what she called the entire “plan” for her literary output. This is because she found exemplified most starkly in late Weimar Germany the moral predicament that most of her fiction is about: a “collusion with evil” on the part of supposedly “good people.” In Berlin she witnessed at close hand the demise of the nineteenth-century liberal state and the rise of a new type of total or biopolitical state, one that was specific to twentieth-century modernity. Her two Weimar fictions, the novel Ship of Fools (1962) and the long story “The Leaning Tower” (1941), attempt to find modernistic literary forms that can represent this shift. The political element in Porter’s writing makes her transatlantic modernism quite unlike that of the Lost Generation writers. It is more appropriate to compare Porter’s work with that of a Weimar expatriate, Hannah Arendt, especially in their mutual emphasis on the thoughtlessness of evil; on the particular need for the exercise of the faculty of judgment in times of crisis; and on Saint Augustine’s concept of natality as a means for counteracting the existential despair of interwar Europe.