SOURCE: Zimmermann, Ulf. Review of Ein springender Brunnen, by Martin Walser. World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 140-41.

In the following review, Zimmermann comments on the plotting of Ein springender Brunnen, drawing autobiographical parallels to the protagonist's literary experiences.

In his “Nachtlied” Nietzsche's soul is “ein springender Brunnen”; that is what language became for Martin Walser. Language enables us to get a fix or what has happened though it is dubious that what we record is actually the same as what happened, as Walser observes in the beginning of this autobiographical novel [Ein springender Brunnen] of childhood and youth between 1932 and 1945; for “as long as something is going on, it is not what it will be when it will have been,” and “when something is over, one is no longer the one to whom it happened.”

Johann, as the novelist calls his fictive self, early on becomes enamored of...