Fuck America - Edgar Hilsenrath

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Fuck America

by
Edgar Hilsenrath

general information | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Fuck America
Author:	Edgar Hilsenrath
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1980 (Eng. 2019)
Length:	287 pages
Original in:	German
Availability:	Fuck America - US
	Fuck America - UK
	Fuck America - Canada
	Fuck America - France
	Fuck America - Deutschland
	Bronsky ricorda - Italia
	Fuck America - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Bronsky's Confession
Originally published as Bronskys Geständnis ('Bronsky's Confession')
Translated by Peter Stenberg

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Our Assessment:

B : overdoes it some with the overall vulgarity, but much is very effective

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

[Note: this review is based on the German original of Fuck America; beyond the short extract [pdf] at the publisher's site I have not seen the English translation. Quotes from later in the novel are all in my own translation.]

       Fuck America was originally published as 'Bronsky's Confession' and is presented as an account by Hilsenrath-stand-in Jakob Bronsky (same age, same background and experiences (and, presumably, character)), mainly of his time in the early 1950s in New York. After a short Prologue, the novel opens with a diary-entry, from March 1953, in which Bronsky describes digging out his father Nathan's "desperate letters" to the American Consul General in Berlin in 1938/9 -- letters the reader has just seen, in the epistolary Prologue. Bronsky admits that he: "changed the text a bit, as I like to do, or because I like to find the truth lurking between the lines", but the gist certainly remains the same, the Consul General telling an increasingly desperate Nathan Bronsky that the quota-system limits how many can gain entry to the US and that, given demand, there's no hope of the Bronsky family escaping Germany anytime soon; if Bronsky fills out an application, he and his family (or their ashes, should Nathan's worst predictions and fears be realized) might get their turn in thirteen years, in 1952. The family does not make it to the US before war breaks out -- though, as narrator Bronsky notes, they did, eventually, after the war, and rather easily at that, as 'displaced persons', in 1952, just as predicted by the General Consul.
       While Bronsky's parents and brother went on to settle elsewhere in the States, Jakob remained in New York, struggling there, his sole ambition to write a novel -- for which he eventually takes up the suggestion of a fellow émigré for the title: 'The Wanker' ('Der Wichser'). (Bronsky at first objects: "But my book doesn't have anything to do with wanking. It is a serious book", but the man suggesting the title says that doesn't matter: "If he is a solitary man, then he is a wanker".)
       Bronsky works only as much and as often as he has to -- often waiting it out until he really doesn't have a dime to his name. Opportunities are limited for an émigré like him, with no education or special skills, but, like many other down-and-outs he regularly heads to 80 Warren Street with its forty employment-agencies and picks up a part-time gig. Bronsky describes several of these; often he fills in as a waiter, though he is terrible at that job -- but he doesn't care about making a good impression or holding onto a job, he just wants enough to tide him over until he can finish the next chapter of his novel.
       If not outright criminal, Bronsky isn't above the small- or medium-scale rip-off, from not paying for the bus (he has a complicated system, which does eventually get him to his destination for free) to the occasional (fancy) dine-and-dash to skipping out on his landlady when he's a few month in arrears with his rent . A decent payday comes with running out on a job at a large-scale Mafia joint, while a night porter job actually proves pretty cushy-- until he is assaulted. The steadiest job he holds (and the one he does so most competently) is as dog-walker, earning just enough to keep himself above water.
       Bronsky spends some of his time hanging out and writing at the all-night emigrants' cafeteria on Broadway and 86th, where he occasionally engages with his fellow émigrés. They're all a pretty sad lot, come down in life -- typically like Mr Weinrot: "around fifty, previously: married, six children, lawyer; now: single, wife and kids vanished without a trace in the war. He now works as a packer in the garment district". Then there is Mr. Grünspan, always writing air mail letters; when someone wonders who he is writing to Bronsky says: "'He's writing to no one. [...] The letters all come back".
       Bronsky himself is only twenty-seven but looks decades older -- fifty, someone suggests -- but he at least has some ambition. While he's lackluster regarding everything else, he is fixated on writing his novel -- certain that: "Jakob Bronsky is a great artist whom the greater world hasn't discovered yet".
       Sex is a problem -- especially as: "The more I write, the more my dick itches. The intensity of my desire for sex is directly correlated to my creative performance and the belief in my art". He takes occasional desperate measures -- including signing up with a matchmaker -- but generally falls back on the many prostitutes swarming about.
       Much of Fuck America is an account of these small-scale misadventures of the not very likeable narrator, with much of it in rapid-fire dialogue where, if Bronsky isn't lying (he does that a fair amount) he's very blunt. That, and the extreme circumstances and characters, do make for an effective if (intentionally) rough narrative. Bronsky goes out of his way to remain apart -- the solitary wanker of his novel's title --, not trying very hard to win anyone over (including at times, it would seem, the reader). So too even with his novel, which he writes in German, finding himself unable to switch to the local language.
       Only in a more fantastically spun out later section, where he imagines himself telling his story to TV personality "Mary Stone, the most famous psychologist in America", does Bronsky reveal more about himself and his family's experiences in Germany as the Nazi's came to power -- the experiences and events that haunt and weigh on him. While an uncle saw the writing on the wall, certain that the Nazis would slaughter all the Jews, Bronsky's father Nathan refused to believe that the worst would come to pass:

'They'll be overthrown,' my father said. 'The German people are open-eyed.'
'They aren't,' my uncle said. 'The German people are hypnotized.'

Bronsky describes how the family (amazingly) survived -- and imagines telling Stone that: "I've realized that it isn't enough just to have survived". He struggles to escape his demons and his fears -- and understands that the United States is not the place for him:

     'America is a promised land !'
     'America is a nightmare.'
     'Perhaps for people like Jakob Bronsky ?'
     'Exactly, Mary Stone.'

       In the concluding chapter he imagines himself having returned to Germany ("despite the fact that I haven't forgotten anything. Nothing"), and sees himself becoming the successful author Hilsenrath was. He is again typically curt and blunt in his responses to those who want to help him after his arrival; an association -- for 'Guilt and Atonement' -- provides the material support he needs to live comfortably; he finishes his book (but puts it in a drawer for years). (The German name of the association that supports Bronsky is 'Schuld und Sühne' -- literally 'guilt and atonement' but also the German title of Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment.)
       It all makes for an unusual take showing how lives were changed and shaped by the catastrophic turn in Germany in the 1930s, where the young Bronsky -- so blond and blue-eyed, on top of it, that he: "looked more Aryan than all the other kids in the class" and raised in a secular family --, could hardly comprehend what was going on around him. His father refused to believe what was happening, despite the mounting evidence, until it was basically too late. Yet Hilsenrath also leaves much unrevealed -- such as Jakob's break with the family, or how his parents and brother then managed and what their American experience was like. The other émigrés are also background figures, though their experiences and sad fates are more easily summed up in their present-day situations.
       Fuck America is also interesting for the picture of a certain slice of 1950s New York City life it depicts -- mainly that of (a certain kind of) émigré-experience, but also bits beyond it. Bronsky never sees New York or the United States as the promised land; he doesn't aspire to establish himself here, to try to make a success of himself -- refusing even to write in English, even as he stakes his claim as an author, the only thing he can imagine being. (The novel is clearly autobiographical in large part, and Hilsenrath also never fully took to America, abandoning it and returning to Germany in 1975. Ironically, after complications with the (German) publication of his first novel his breakout second work, The Nazi and the Barber, was published in English translation (1971) before it came out in the German original (1977).)
       Hilsenrath intentionally tends to the vulgar and base in Fuck America -- not least then in the (changed) title --; he means to be off-putting, so also in not making Bronsky a very likeable character. It is effective, but doesn't make it an any easier read. But it is all quite memorable, powerful in it its own sordid way -- with the smaller, indirect touches, in particular, hitting hard and well.

- M.A.Orthofer, 14 June 2026

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Links:

Fuck America:

Owl of Minerva Press publicity page
Eule der Minerva Verlag publicity page
Le Tripode publicity page
Errata naturae editores publicity page

Reviews:

Edgar Hilsenrath:

Official site

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of German literature

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About the Author:

German author Edgar Hilsenrath lived 1926 to 2018.

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