The Novel in German since 1990

T h e Nov e l i n Ge r m a n si nc e 1990

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller, demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German. s t ua r t t a be r n e r is Professor of German at the University of Leeds. He has previously edited The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (2009) and Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic (2007).

T h e Nov e l i n Ge r m a n si nce 1990 e di t e d b y Stua rt Ta be r n e r

ca mbr idge universit y pr ess Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521192378 © Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The novel in German since 1990 / [edited by] Stuart Taberner. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. i s b n 978-0-521-19237-8 (hardback) 1.╇ German fiction–20th century–History and criticism.â•… 2.╇ German fiction–21st century– History and criticism.â•… 3.╇ German fiction–Europe, German-speaking–History and criticism.â•…I.╇ Taberner, Stuart. pt772.n66â•… 2011 833.9209–dc22 2011015313 isbn 978-0-521-19237-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements

page╇ vii viii

Introduction: The novel in German since 1990 Stuart Taberner

1

1. Robert Schindel’s Gebürtig (Born-Where)

19

2. Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield)

35

3. Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us)

50

4. Christa Wolf’s Medea. Stimmen (Medea. A Modern Retelling)

64

5. Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship)

79

6. Monika Maron’s Endmoränen (End Moraines)

94

Helmut Schmitz Rebecca Braun

Anna Saunders Georgina Paul

Moray McGowan

Katharina Gerstenberger

7. Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain)

108

8. Michael Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North)

123

9. Christian Kracht’s Faserland (Frayed-Land)

136

Kathrin Schödel

Stephen Brockmann Julian Preece

v

vi

Contents

10. Elfriede Jelinek’s Gier (Greed)

151

11. Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song)

165

12. Herta Müller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums)

180

13. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

195

14. Walter Kempowski’s Alles umsonst (All for Nothing)

211

15. F. C. Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as a Murderer)

226

16. Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin

241

17. Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World)

255

18. Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion)

270

Select bibliography Index

284 302





Helen Finch

Alison Lewis Lyn Marven

Mary Cosgrove Karina Berger Anne Fuchs

Petra Fachinger

Stuart Taberner Monika Shafi

Contributors

Karina Be rge r, University of Leeds Re b e cc a Brau n, Lancaster University S t e ph e n Brockma nn, Carnegie Mellon University M a ry Co sgrove, University of Edinburgh Pe t ra Fac h ing er, Queen’s University, Canada H el e n Finc h , University of Leeds A nne Fu c h s, University of St Andrews K at h arina Ge rstenberg er, University of Cincinnati A l iso n Lew is, University of Melbourne M o ray McGowan, Trinity College Dublin Ly n Marve n, University of Liverpool G e orgina Pau l, St Hilda’s College, Oxford J u l ian Pre e c e, University of Wales, Swansea A n na Sau nd e rs, Bangor University H e l m u t Sc h m itz, University of Warwick Kat h rin Sc h ödel, Universität Erlangen M onika Sh afi, University of Delaware S t uart Tab e rn er, University of Leeds

vii

Acknowledgements

Without the support of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) and the School of Modern Languages at Leeds, which generously funded a workshop in Leeds in September 2009 at which most of the contributors were present, this book would have been a less coherent and less ambitious enterprise. I am especially grateful, of course, to all the contributors to the volume for their hard work and forbearance with my editing. As always, I am also indebted to my colleagues at Leeds, particularly for their support and enthusiasm. Most of all, of course, I am grateful to my family, and especially to Ali and our son Ivor as we eagerly await our new arrival! This book is dedicated to all three.

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Introduction: The novel in German since 1990 Stuart Taberner

T h e probl e m w i t h t h e G e r m a n nov e l In his The German Novel, published in 1956 and for a long time a standard reference work in the English-speaking world, Roy Pascal averred that even the very best of German fiction was marred by a ‘sad lack of the energy and bite of passion’. It was impossible to deny, the British critic claimed, that there was ‘something provincial, philistine’ at its core. Indeed, he concluded, German writing was strangely lacking€– ‘Altogether the characters in the German novels seem less alive, less avid of life, less capable of overflowing exuberances, than those of the great European novels.’1 Pascal’s oddly damning assessment of his object of study might today be merely of historical interest as an example of the supposition of a German Sonderweg (special path) apart from other European nations, widely promulgated in the countries that had defeated Nazism only a few years earlier, if it were not for the fact that similar indictments feature throughout the 1990s in a series of debates on the German novel’s postwar development. These more recent criticisms, however, were voiced not by critics outside Germany seeking to identify its ‘peculiarity’ but in the Federal Republic itself. While scholarly attention has focused, then, on Ulrich Greiner’s attack on Christa Wolf’s alleged cowardly opportunism in waiting until the collapse of the GDR before publishing Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990), an account of the way the East German security service had hounded her composed ten years previously,2 of greater interest here are the broader criticisms of the German novel elaborated by Greiner and his fellow conservative critic Frank Schirrmacher around the same time with regard to its ‘provinciality’3 and its bland, post-Nazi ‘aesthetics of political conviction’ (Gesinnungsästhetik).4 As if echoing Pascal’s comment of three decades earlier, Schirrmacher declared that contemporary German fiction was ‘lifeless, lacking in confidence, copied; in short:€lacking in originality’.5 1

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Unlike Pascal, however, Greiner and Schirrmacher direct their criticism exclusively towards the German novel’s development after 1945€ – they would certainly reject his dismissal of its exemplars from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) to Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924). What’s more, they identify a very different cause for its failings. Pascal, then, betrays his Anglo-Saxon prejudices by moving swiftly from the intriguing assertion that the German novel is best appreciated ‘in relation to the metaphysical aspiration, the longing for night and death, which was formulated most comprehensively by German Romanticism’ to the bizarre conclusion that it ‘fails’ because, with the exception of Goethe, the private lives of German writers are incapable of generating what F. R. Leavis had defined as the strength of the great English novelists€– that is, their ‘vital capacity for experience’.6 For Pascal, it seems, the German novel is not ‘English’ enough. For Greiner and Schirrmacher, on the other hand, the German novel, in its contemporary manifestation at least, is insufficiently ‘German’. Thus the timid parochialism they identify results, they insist, not from a surplus of metaphysical reflection but from a lack of national self-belief, caused by Germany’s belated emergence as a nationstate, its lack of metropolitan centres to rival Paris or London, and, after 1945, a self-flagellating obsession with the Nazi past and the emergence of an aesthetically neutered moralism.7 Other, left-liberal commentators such as Martin Hielscher and Uwe Wittstock appeared in the mid-1990s to echo Pascal more directly, unwittingly, of course, and with a twist to match present-day realities:€German writing needed to become not more ‘English’ but more ‘American’. According to Hielscher, then, ‘American literature was a synonym for what is missing in German fiction’.8 For Wittstock, reanimating the Sonderweg thesis, German writing was ‘other-worldly’ and ill-fitting with the Western democracy now firmly anchored in the Federal Republic.9 A ‘new readability’ (Neue Lesbarkeit) would require ‘German’ ponderousness to mutate into an ‘Anglo-American’ delight in story-telling, plot and character development. A good start had been made in the 1980s, Wittstock argued, with Patrick Süskind, Sten Nadolny, Klaus Modick, Michael Krüger and Christoph Ransmayr, but a large gap remained. Indeed, twenty years after unification, international successes such as Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995) and Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005) are still rare. Throughout the 1990s, other writers and critics ranged over similar terrain. Maxim Biller, then, claimed that German fiction was about as

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‘sensuous’ as the ‘city plan of Kiel’ (1991),10 whereas Iris Radisch identified an East–West split, with an authentically ‘German’ aesthetic from the former GDR drawing on the ‘metaphysical traditions of the German cultural tradition’ contrasting with ‘American pragmaticism’ in West German texts:€ ‘The East is tragic, the West is comic.’11 Matthias Politycki, alternatively, complained that the ‘fixation on “readability”’12 had set German authors off on ‘the wrong track, an American track’,13 and Biller railed against a ‘limp-dick literature’ incapable of taking a moral stance.14 To be sure, the contestants mostly divided along generational lines (the wartime generation; former ’68ers; vocal ’78ers; the post-Wende 89ers; and faux-sociological constructs such as the ‘Generation Golf’) and politics (conservatives versus ‘old’ West German left-liberals versus self-consciously apolitical younger writers), although they were strikingly homogenous in terms of provenance and gender. (Almost all were men, excepting Radisch, and from West Germany, and amost none were from ethnic minorities, excepting Biller, who is of Jewish-Czech origins.) Yet the concerns remained the same. Is there a German Sonderweg which condemns German fiction to remain provincial, navel-gazing and unmarketable abroad? Is German writing too philosophical, or too moralistic, or simply too dull? Is the German novel too German€– or not German enough? F rom t h e G e r m a n nov e l t o t h e nov e l i n G e r m a n Two key blind spots in these debates are insinuated above. First, that Wittstock’s favoured writers are all men might appear to imply that the German literary tradition is created by male authors alone. Do women writers, then, have different (more trivial?) concerns to the profoundly philosophical issues raised by men? Second, does the framing of German literature as an instance of a German ‘otherworldliness’ or, more recently, as an exclusively West German discourse mean that minority (or East German) authors cannot participate per se? Biller may occupy the traditional Jewish role of insider/outsider (he is ‘almost white’), but are we to assume that other minority writers have nothing to contribute to German fiction, or to German culture? Scholarship since the late 1980s has amply demonstrated the centrality of both women writers and minority authors to German literature past and present. Moreover, the existence of multiple states in which German is a majority language and of writers who are, or once were, members of German-speaking populations in other countries (in Poland or Romania,

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for example) has always complicated the easy assumption of an ‘ideal’ correspondence between today’s (Federal Republic of) Germany and German writing. Indeed, rather than The German Novel, it is surely better to speak of The Novel in German. A survey volume such as this, therefore, would certainly be woefully lacking if women authors did not appear alongside their male peers, but it would also be deficient if former East Germans were not present, or key Austrian and Swiss writers. (Christian Kracht was born in Switzerland, but Peter Bichsel, Peter Stamm or Zoë Jenny may be more representative€– indeed, as Julian Preece argues in this volume, his Faserland (Frayed-Land, 1995) may even reject the Swiss tradition.) The same is true of writers of Turkish origin, and the present book is certainly less complete for its lack of chapters on authors with other migration histories, for instance, Libuše Moníková (Czech), Carmen Francesca Banciu (Romanian), Terézia Mora (Hungarian), Ilija Trojanow (Bulgarian) or Sasa Stanišić (Bosnian), all exemplars of what Brigid Haines has called the ‘eastern turn’15 in recent German-language writing. Of comparable significance are writers with a Jewish background, some born nationals of a (defunct or existing) German-speaking country and still living in one (e.g. Katja Behrens, Esther Dischereit and Robert Schindel) whereas others are resident abroad (e.g. Barbara Honigmann), and some migrants with complicated ‘migration routes’ (e.g. Biller and Vladimir Vertlib) or ‘returnees’, from Israel or the United States for the most part (e.g. Rafael Seligmann and Ruth Klüger). Still others self-identify as something different than Jewish:€Wladimir Kaminer, for example, who projects himself as ‘Russian’. All these writers add to the transnational reality of the German-language novel, as do authors such as Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, and Richard Wagner, both from the Germanspeaking Romanian Banat. And, self-evidently, identities may intersect, overlap or diverge in the same person. Monika Maron, for example, is part-Jewish (thematised in Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters, 1999)) yet she also consciously foregrounds her experience as an East German and, in Endmoränen (End Moraines, 2002), as an ex-GDR and a woman writer unsure of her relevance in the post-Wende order. Diversity, as I have noted elsewhere, is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, and not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style.16 Yet this diversity does not mean that we need shy away from identifying key characteristics of Germanlanguage novels as a corpus of texts produced in interaction with certain social, political and cultural discourses. It simply means that we must be

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more subtle, more differentiated, and certainly more cautious. Thus the focus on the German-language novel’s metaphysical bent, the Â�dilemmas of national identity, and the aesthetic value of ‘engaged literature’ is not entirely misguided. What needs to be more fully grasped, however, is the complex interaction between these ‘structures of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) and a much wider range of authors as they inflect discourses of self, identity and ‘posture’17 within local contexts and in relation to the broader transformation of the world in an age defined by globalisation, religious and ethnic confrontation, and astonishing shifts in social, political and economic power. Some authors complicate these discourses from perspectives within, adjacent to, or traversing ‘the German tradition’; some ‘migrate’ into them but also bring different, parallel and overlaying experiences to bear; and still others seek to restate, deconstruct or reinvent them entirely, although they never quite succeed, of course. In this introduction, I survey three aspects of the novel in German since 1990. These relate to its depiction of the social change in the present, modes of representing the past, and engagement with today’s transnational reality. Along the way, key aesthetic features are also referenced. In my brief discussions of a range of recent texts, I hope to exemplify some of the issues described above and to show something of the presentday diversity of a novelistic tradition that remains as relevant to the contemporary moment as it ever was. T h e nov e l i n G e r m a n a n d t h e pr e s e n t On 3 October 1990, East and West Germany were reunified, marking a key moment in the end of the Cold War. Almost immediately Â�writers set about re-mapping not only the enlarged Federal Republic but also the broader social, political and cultural transformations in the Germanspeaking countries and beyond as a new era in world history began. Twenty years later many of these texts are forgotten but a number stand out for their compelling engagement with societal change. Of these, plenty have to do with the upheaval in the former GDR, but numerous others focus on the erection of new borders (some actual, others cultural, psychological or economic) and, in the course of the 1990s, on the global phenomena of mass migration, religious and ethnic confrontation, and the opening up of markets, lifestyles and cultures. The novel, of course, has always typically spoken of its age. Indeed, it is the literary form most closely associated with the rise of Western modernity, emerging at around the same time as the ‘rational state’ and

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a large and assertive middle class to depict the unpoetic realities of massification and the conflict between individual and society. This is no less true of the German-language novel since 1990, which inflects this general understanding of the genre in dialogue with internalised and/or imagined traditions and sensibilities linked to the contexts of its production and reception. Immediately striking about key texts relating to German unification, accordingly, is their tendency to go beyond ‘sociology’; that is, beyond a more or less realist portrayal of the structural transformation of the Neue Länder (the ‘new states’ of the former GDR), or, for that matter, the ‘old’ states in the West, and their propensity to frame the end of the GDR and the beginnings of a unified Germany in distinctly€– and traditionally€– metaphysical terms as the loss of (the dream of) a utopia never actually achieved:€‘What I never had, I will forever miss.’18 Christa Wolf’s Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), for example, sends the author’s hospitalised alter ego on a descent into fantasy through a labyrinth of tunnels running beneath the building sites of the new unified Germany to excavate the GDR’s utopian ideals. Similarly, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Turn to Earth, 2003, the title a quotation from the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler alluding to exile and cosmopolitanism) offers a wistful account of the Turkish actress’s Â�border-crossings between East and West Berlin, the idealistic commitment of East German colleagues, and the political romanticism of West German flatmates. Other novels, of course, are more narrowly conceived, such as Brumme’s Nichts als das (Nothing Other than That, 1994), recounting his childhood in the East German village of Elend (‘misery’); Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal (Dance by the Canal, 1994), portraying the sexual and economic exploitation of its itinerant protagonist before and after unification; Christoph Hein’s Napoleonspiel (Napoleon Game, 1993) and Willenbrock (2001), in which the failings of the GDR are simply substituted for the anarchy of the free market; and the wave of Stasi-novels dealing with the security service’s infiltration of the private sphere of GDR citizens.19 At the same time, a series of similarly prosaic, if cheerier, texts present life in East Germany as a ‘home’ to be recalled fondly despite the hardships, including Thomas Brussig’s Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (At the Shorter End of the Sonnenallee, 1999), and West Germans too wrote Â�novels reflecting on what they had lost:€for instance, Andreas Neumeister’s Ausdeutschen (Out-of-German, 1994), Norbert Niemann’s Wie man’s nimmt (How You Take it, 1998), Politycki’s Weiberroman (Women-Novel, 1993), Frank Goosen’s liegen lernen (Learning to Lie, 2000), and Sven

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Regener’s bestseller Herr Lehmann (Berlin Blues, 2001). These novels frequently invoke nostalgia (for ‘togetherness’ in the former GDR, or for the cosy provinciality of West Germany’s consumer culture) as a response to abrupt social change€– the best is Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998), which reproduces the texture of life in the East German province while resisting, via the density of the relationships between its multiple narratives, incorporation into an all-German, or globalised, whole. Of greater significance, however, excepting Simple Storys, is a series of brutally dystopian novels. It is certainly true that Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995, see Saunders in this volume) channels a loss of faith in utopian promises into comedy€– the impossibly named Uhltzscht claims that he brought down the Wall with his penis€ – as do Jens Sparschuh’s Der Zimmerspringbrunnen (The Indoor Fountain, 1995) and Matthias Biskupek’s Der Quotensachse (The Quota-Saxon, 1996), much as Volker Braun’s Wendehals (Wry-Neck, 1995) transforms disillusionment with the alacrity with which so many GDR functionaries switched to serving the new capitalist order into a philosophically inflected satire. But other texts are far darker. We might point, then, to Ingo Schramm’s Fitchers Blau (Fitcher’s Blue, 1996), which reworks the Bluebeard legend in an unremittingly bleak portrayal of ‘progress’; Thomas Hettche’s Nox (1995), where the dream of German unification is parodied when the narrator’s murderer is mounted by a dog on 9 November 1989; or Karen Duve’s Regenroman (Rain, 1999), in which extreme violence penetrates the swamplands of the former East Germany. Or, turning to more global concerns, we might think of Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a LoveSong, 2002, see Chapter 11), whose self-loathing female protagonist both exploits, and is exploited by, modern-day consumer culture; Julia Franck’s depictions in Liebediener (Love Servant, 1999) of a loss of social solidarity in global Â�cities; or Zoë Jenny’s detailing in Blütenstaubzimmer (The Pollen Room, 1997) of the evacuation of the 1960s ideal of self-realisation by moral relativism. In the work of the 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek too, including Gier (Greed, 2000, see Chapter 10), the rhetoric of self-realisation is set against the degrading of the individual by patriarchy and racism, and Müller’s novels from Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then, 1992) to Atemschaukel (Everything I Possess I Carry With Me, 2009) reveal the gap between the promise of emancipation and the reality of broken human subjects, during the communist period in her native Romania and after her move to the Federal Republic. Kracht’s Faserland (1995, see Chapter 9) and Feridun Zaimoğlu’s German Amok (2002), alternatively, indict the triumph of global brands

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over poetic transcendence (Kracht) and the commodification of art and individuality within a colonising capitalism (Zaimoğlu). Still more self-consciously ‘metaphysical’ are novels by culturalÂ�conservatives such as Martin Walser, Botho Strauß, Peter Handke, Arnold Stadler and Martin Mosebach. Stadler’s Ein hinreissender Schrotthändler (The Scrap Dealer, 1999), for example, opens with the arrival of an asylum seeker who moves in with his wife while he attempts, in vain, to feel ‘authentic pain’, whether for this or his own loss of Heimat; his Sehnsucht (Longing, 2002), as the title suggests, wishes for ‘something beyond’ the mundane materialism and anxious political correctness of the Federal Republic€– genuine experience, awe, redemption:€divinity. In Strauß’s Die Fehler des Kopisten (The Errors of the Copyist, 1997), poetic transcendence is set against a prosaic, unsentimental modernity, and Handke’s Eine winterliche Reise (A Winter Journey, 1996) ignores Serbian atrocities during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in order to undertake a voyage of selfdiscovery through the region’s awe-inspiring landscapes. And Walser€ – whose work is not as tongue-in-cheek as Stadler’s, as self-Â�important as Handke’s, or as exhaustingly overdetermined as Strauß’s€ – nevertheless impresses with the obstinacy of his protagonists:€Alfred’s mania for collecting objects from the (German) past in Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (In Defence of Childhood, 1991) is a heroic yet ineffective effort to transcend the inane presentism of modern society; the modern-day Kohlhaas-figure in Finks Krieg (Fink’s War, 1995) refuses to be crushed by the self-serving bureaucracy from which he is unfairly dismissed, despite the overwhelming futility of his endeavours to assert his subjectivity; and Susi Gern, in Lebenslauf der Liebe (CV of Love, 2000), refuses to give up her naïve hope that love might enable her to transcend her own self and join with another even in a society as unremittingly bourgeois as post-1990 Germany. In the work of all these authors, as in Mosebach’s Die Türkin (The Turkish Woman, 1999) and Das Beben (The Quake, 2005), set in Turkey and India respectively, the instrumental thinking of the present day is seen as an imposition of the victorious Americans (and British) that, having triumphed in Germany after 1945, is now well on its way to colonising the rest of the world via consumerism, free markets and the globalisation of US culture. T h e nov e l i n G e r m a n a n d t h e pa st Other texts, of course, confront the contemporary moment by invoking the past. Most obviously, autobiographies feature heavily in post-1990

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German-language writing as authors reflect on the changing regimes through which they have lived:€for example Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger, Klüger, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, Christoph Hein, and Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), from 2006, by the 1999 Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass. In addition, other examples of ‘life-writing’ are marked by what Edward Saïd, drawing on Adorno, has termed ‘late style’:€ Uwe Timm’s Rot (Red, 2001); Maron’s Endmöranen (2002, see Chapter 6); Peter Schneider’s Skylla (2005); Grass’s Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995, see Chapter 2), Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (see Chapter 18) and Die Box (The Box, 2008); and Walser’s reprise of the seventythree-year-old Goethe’s infatuation with the eighteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow in Ein liebender Mann (A Loving Man, 2008). In each case, narrators juxtapose earlier periods, or youthful passions, with their ageing present-day selves and explore a sense of being, as Saïd puts it, ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’.20 Thus Timm and Schneider cast back to the revolutionary fervour of the late 1960s and ruminate on the material comfort and half-posed subversive sensibility that defines their lives today, whereas Maron and Grass hark back to the early Federal Republic, the GDR, or the Nazi period (and Fontane, in Ein weites Feld), and offer the ‘irascible gesture of leave-taking’ typical of late style, reiterating their selfÂ�stylisations as literary dissidents even as they acknowledge their redundancy.21 Finally, Walser confirms late style as the older writer’s prerogative, entailing the right to disrupt convention€– for example his comments in his 1998 ‘Friedenspreisrede’ (Peace Prize Speech) on the ‘instrumentalisation’ of the Nazi past€– without care for the consequences. More broadly, contemporary German-language novels dealing with the past crystallise a tension between fiction as a mode of historical reimagining and fiction as an instrument of historical interrogation€– once again, we return to a traditional concern with identity and with art either as a poetic transcendence of a flawed reality or as an immanent intervention in the same. Indeed, just as Grass’s Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad, 1992) sets itself against the ‘metaphysical’ investment in German unity typical of Walser (in Dorle und Wolf, for example, published two years before unification in 1988, describing Germans as ‘halved people’)22 with a depiction of a German (re-)colonisation of eastern Poland enacted via the reburial of German expellees in their pre-1945 ancestral home, so might his Beim Häuten der Zwiebel respond to Walser’s determinedly mythologising Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain, 1998, see Chapter 7) with a ‘worked example’ of how to approach the past critically. Whereas Ein springender Brunnen ‘brackets out’ Nazism to re-imagine Johann’s

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(Martin Johannes Walser …) teenage years as a more ‘pure’ engagement with poetry, therefore, in Zwiebel Grass confronts his adolescent self with his a posteriori knowledge of German culpability in a cross-examination that locates his own youthful obsession with art as deeply implicated in the fanaticism of the time. (An alternative reading of Zwiebel, focusing on its late style, might view the text as an idiosyncratic Künstlerroman, or novel of artistic development.) Other key novels mirror this divide between those seeking to re-imagine a past ‘unburdened’ by present-day knowledge€– an ‘authentic’ past that ‘would make itself available to us as if of itself’23€– and those bringing a critical consciousness to bear. Frequently, these texts reflect a re-emergence of interest in ‘German wartime suffering’. Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), depicting the response of three generations to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in early 1945 with the loss of thousands of German refugees fleeing the advancing Russians, is the best known example, but other authors also thematise this controversial issue. For example, Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (The Boy with the Bloody Shoes, 1995) and Walter Kempowski’s Alles umsonst (All For Nothing, 2006, see Chapter 14) each conjure up an ‘instinctive’ community that transcends the outward conformity required by an ‘alien’ Nazi regime. In Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen, a multicultural mix of Germans with Polish names, Jews and forced labourers resists the Nazis and Allied bombing in DüsseldorfOberbilk; in Alles umsonst, centuries-old East Prussian ways of life are only finally destroyed by the invading Red Army. In contrast, Schindel’s Gebürtig (Born-Where, 1992, see Chapter 1), Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Der Verlorene (Lost, 1998), Marcel Beyer’s Spione (Spies, 2000), Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (In My Brother’s Shadow, 2003), F. C. Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as a Murderer, 2004, see Chapter 15), Dagmar Leupold’s Nach den Kriegen (After the Wars, 2004), and Thomas Medicus’s In den Augen meines Großvaters (In My Grandfather’s Eyes, 2004) interrogate stories passed down within the family and official attempts to whitewash the past by juxtaposing these with historical accounts, original documents, photos, diary entries and letters. Yet the desire to re-establish an intergenerational consensus may sometimes trump the critical acuity implied in this juxtaposition of sources and perspectives. In Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder (Blurred Images, 2003), for example, the narrator confronts her ageing father with evidence that he was involved in atrocities on the Eastern front but comes to share his self-image as the ‘true victim’. In contrast, Michael Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North, 1998, see Chapter 8), on the other

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hand, similarly complicates the neat division between an (uncritical) reimagining and (critical) historical interrogation, elaborating an alternative, more positive German past in which Hitler hardly features while asserting the impossibility of this version. Indeed, almost all novels dealing with the Nazi period must recognise that German crimes were too horrific to be simply somehow transcended. This is the self-evident point of departure for those that set out to interrogate the past, of course. Those that seek to re-imagine the past, on the other hand, often display either a self-conscious irony or a self-conscious melancholia:€these, indeed, may be the peculiar inflections of the ‘metaphysical aspiration’ (Pascal) of the present-day novel in German. Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen, then, contains quasi-authorial insertions on the unfeasibility of telling the past ‘as it was’ even as the text as a whole attempts to do precisely that. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001, see Cosgrove), on the other hand, intimates that its protagonist’s efforts to re-imagine Austerlitz’s (Jewish-Czech) childhood and uprooting to Britain condemns him to his own form of exile, to the extent that his interrogation of the past necessarily ruptures his relationship to his own history, and to his own Heimat. The Nazi past, of course, is not the only past to be thematised in today’s German-language writing. Indeed, Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden is largely set in the Weimar Republic, whereas Christa Wolf’s Medea. Stimmen (Medea. Voices, 1996, see Chapter 4) returns the author to Greek myth (cf. Kassandra, 1983), setting the gold-obsessed city-state of Corinth against the equality-seeking Colchis, and projecting Medea€– cleared of the crimes attributed to her, including killing her children€– as a fantasyfulfilment of the socialist dream never realised in the GDR. Similarly, the narrator of Maron’s Endmoränen is writing a biography of Wilhelmine Enke, lover of Friedrich Wilhelm II, whereas Kathrin Schmidt’s Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition (1998) is set entirely in the GDR, as is Kerstin Młynkec’s Drachentochter (Dragon’s Daughter, 2004), the fictional autobiography of a woman belonging to the Sorbian minority. The four novels by women writers just mentioned, it is worth noting, simultaneously evidence a contemporary interest in gender, generation and genealogy, in corporeal transgression and self-mut(il)ation.24 T h e t r a ns n at ion a l nov e l i n G e r m a n ? ‘Does migrating into Germany not also mean migrating into recent German history?’,25 asked Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenocak in an essay of 1993. Indeed, Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous

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Kinship, 1998, see Chapter 5) points to a very different, and highly significant, potential for framing the Nazi past. Thus the novel locates the legacy of the Hitler years within a transnational history that includes Turkey’s responsibility for the Armenian massacres of 1915 and mediates the complexities of guilt, victimhood, and Christian–Muslim–Jewish relations within this larger context€– Jewish-German writer Edgar Hilsenrath’s Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (The Story of the Last Thought, 1988) had done something similar ten years previously. This kind of juxtaposition of the German and other pasts had long been regarded as risky because of the perception that drawing parallels might relativise German guilt, but many authors have recently begun to see positive possibilities in the production of transnational histories. In Christoph Hein’s Landnahme (Settlement, 2004), for example, the hostility faced by Germans resettled in East Germany following their expulsion from Poland in 1945 is juxtaposed with the fates of those fleeing civil wars in the 1990s. And in Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (The Special Memory of Rosa Masur, 2003), Rosa Masur fabulates the tale of her persecution in the Soviet Union for her German audience in order to expose the hypocrisy in its privileging her Jewish narrative in ritualised displays of historical remorse even as Germans remain indifferent to the stories of the refugees from present-day conflicts who live amongst them. The child narrator of Sasa Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2006), just such a refugee from the horrors of the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s, links German history more directly with contemporary Balkan atrocities via an allusion to Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’, 1948), and Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb (The Drive to Play, 2004) sends its young German protagonists on a journey to the former Yugoslavia in order to explore the challenge to their liberal values engendered by the post-ColdWar explosion of ethnic hatreds.26 Similarly, a text such as Moníková’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1996), set in Czechslovakia in 1992 as the country splits into two, reminds us that German, Austrian, central and eastern European histories€– and the present-day realities€– are inextricably linked by ethnic mixing, empire, war, migration and expulsion (again, the ejection of Germans from the Sudetenland is a key episode), as do Wagner’s Habseligkeiten (Belongings, 2004) and Catalin Dorian Florescu’s Der kurze Weg nach Hause (The Short Way Home, 2002).27 In all of these novels, borders, national identities and national histories are endlessly traversed and revealed as precariously (or liberatingly) contingent, in the past as in the present.

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More broadly, the profusion of transnational motifs in Germanlanguage novels today reflects a contemporary reality characterised by the interrelated phenomena of economic globalisation, mass migration, the huge growth in travel and tourism, and the universalising immediacy of the internet and new communications technologies. The most obvious expression of this dawning of a global mobility is the sheer abundance of foreign locations in contemporary German-language texts. Many depict lives lived transatlantically, as in Peter Schneider’s Eduards Heimkehr (Eduard’s Homecoming, 1999), Steffen Mensching’s Jakobs Leiter (Jakob’s Ladder, 2003), Brussig’s Wie es leuchtet (How it Shines, 2004) or Jakob Hein’s Vielleicht ist es sogar schön (Perhaps it’s even Nice, 2004)€– the first featuring a West German returning from a long sojourn in America, the latter three East Germans encountering the ‘West’ for the first time€– but others are set in Iran (Kracht, 1979, 2001); Italy, such as Treichel’s Der irdische Amor (The Earthly Love, 2002) and Schneider’s Skylla (2005); Turkey and India (Mosebach); Argentina and Africa (Stadler), or in popular tourist destinations in Asia and the Caribbean, particularly in contemporary pop novels. Sibylle Berg’s 2007 novel Die Fahrt (The Journey), indeed, is not unusual in sending its protagonists to multiple countries€– Germany, Iceland, Israel, China, India, America and Great Britain€ – and around the globe via the internet. Of perhaps greater interest, however, is the striking number of novels that reproduce, or re-imagine, diasporic formations. Some of these complicate the notion of fixed national identity by weaving ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ stories into one another, retracing migration routes while creatively undermining any linear understanding of the relationship between points of origins and points of arrival. Here, key examples are Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei€– hat zwei Türen€– aus einer kam ich rein€– aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanserai€– Has Two Doors€– I Came in One€– I Went out the Other, 1992) and Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998), and Zaimoğlu’s Leyla (2006), all of which trace lives lived between Turkey and Germany. Or increasingly common are novels in which multiple minorities are bonded by a shared experience of migration but also bring their own unique histories to bear on their relationship to one another and to the majority population. These include Yadé Kara’s ‘Berlin novel’ Selam Berlin (2003, see Chapter 16) and her Café Cyprus (2008), in which the Turkish-German protagonist migrates onwards to London only to rediscover there, in deterritorialised form, an exemplarily transnational dimension of his ‘own’ history (that is, the Greek–Turkish conflict over Cyprus); Terézia

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Mora’s Alle Tage (Day in, Day Out, 2004), which depicts the fates of those displaced by the collapse of multi-ethnic states and the emergence of new entities in parts of eastern Europe after 1990; or Yoko Tawada’s Das nackte Auge (The Naked Eye, 2004), in which a Vietnamese girl is removed from East to West Germany and then to Paris, where she experiences the end of the Cold War and the integration of the European Union coupled with her own ever-growing exclusion. And transnational tales are not only to be found in novels by so-called minority writers, of course. What Stuart Hall has described as ‘diasporic consciousness’28 is thus equally central to an array of other German-language novels thematising the re-emergence of transnational histories after the end of the Cold War, the modernday interest in contemporary and historical migrations, and the global debate on the co-existence of ethnic and national groups and the possibilities of a re-invigorated cosmopolitanism. We might think, then, of the imaginative journey undertaken to former German provinces in the east in Medicus’s In den Augen meines Großvaters and Kempowski’s Alles umsonst, or of Müller’s ‘German-Romanian’ fictions; Sebald’s story of the German emigrant Ambros Adelwarth in the United States, Europe and the Middle East in Die Ausgewanderten (The Exiles, 1992); Thomas Meinecke’s juxtaposition of German and other ‘minority’ influences on America in The Church of John F. Kennedy (1996); the voyage undertaken by Arnold Stadler’s protagonist in Feuerland (Fire Land, 1992) to the descendants of German migrants in Argentina; and many others too. What is particularly striking is the way the ‘trans’ contained within transnationalism, invoking both potential liberation and anxiety, frequently extends to other kinds of ‘crossing’. Kara’s choice of a teenage boy as the narrator of Selam Berlin thus disrupts both the national and the gender elements of conventional notions of Turkish masculinity€ – a woman author ventriloquises, in German, a young Turkish man€– whereas hints of homosexuality in Sebald’s Ambros story in Die Ausgewanderten, Kracht’s Faserland, Treichel’s Tristanakkord (Tristan Chord, 2000) and Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (see Chapter 17) signal either a cosmopolitan openness, where intimacy with another man is experienced as comfortable (Sebald),29 or a fear of the unfamiliar, where homosexual desire is repressed by protagonists who prefer to remain in their provincial German closets (Kracht, Treichel and Kehlmann). In Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006), the English Victorian explorer Richard F. Burton transforms his appearance in order to pass as a Muslim, having himself circumcised, darkening his skin with walnut oil, and learning to hold himself like a ‘native’€– this

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self-mut(il)ation€ – which is typical, as noted above, of much contemporary writing€ – allows for an exploration of Western stereotypes of Islam and ‘the Orient’, both in the past and in the present. Or the ‘trans’ within transnationalism is more obviously associated with language and translation, as in Müller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994, see Chapter 12), in which German ‘screens’ Romanian, namely the protagonist’s traumatic experience in that country and in that language, or, more positively, in any number of novels in which non-German lexical items recall other histories and other traditions, or invoke other possibilities and other anxieties. These might include Schulze’s Simple Storys, whose deliberately misspelled English title hints at its ‘glocalisation’ of the American short-story format and Anglo-American culture more generally; the work of Mosebach and Stadler, in which references to the Latin liturgy set the very different transnationalism of the (traditional) Catholic Church against a profane global consumerism; Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak (Wop Speak, 1995) with its stylised Turkish-German idiolect; Rafik Schami’s novelistic updating of the Arabic story-telling tradition; or various works by Seligmann in which the use of Yiddish (with glossaries) connects Germany, eastern Europe and Israel. In many of these texts, as in almost all of the self-consciously Â�‘border-crossing’ fictions mentioned above, the perennial concerns of the German-language novel re-emerge:€ How do we define ourselves? How do we negotiate a supposed legacy of metaphysical inwardness? And how do we balance cultural specificity with openness to other traditions? The transnational sweep of some contemporary novels, then, often in fact embodies an attempt to define what remains of local cultures in the contemporary era of the mixing of global influences and peoples. Walser, Strauß, Stadler and Mosebach, then, are most provocative in their dense invocations of Germany’s ‘difficult’ legacy of metaphysical deliberation€– Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche and Heidegger – and of its most universal yet also most nationally representative writers, particularly Goethe and Schiller, in their novelistic affirmations of a ‘German’ tradition. Kracht’s Faserland and Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt, on the other hand, enact a form of double-coding that may seem defensive, imitating a Anglo-American emphasis on entertainment, plot and character development, and ‘readability’ while simultaneously creating a web of allusions to German literature and thought, including Thomas Mann (Kracht) and Weimar Classicism (Kehlmann), in a melancholic re-affirmation of a national heritage. Other writers, alternatively, attempt a synthesis of a ‘German’ seriousness and less categorical understandings of how identities

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may co-habitate. Biller’s Esra (2003), for example, reconciles its JewishGerman-Czech narrator with the relatives of his Turkish-German girlfriend (whom he believes to be descended from the Dönme clan, which converted to Islam while living as ‘secret Jews’) over the Turkish tradition of tea-drinking€– both water and tea may be taken, so ‘you don’t need to choose’30€– and recalls Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), in which Christian, Jews and Muslims are connected by blood, adoption or simple empathy. Zaimoğlu’s hinterland (2009), similarly, marries an indebtedness to German Romanticism with a self-conscious orientalism€– a delight in narrative digression€– to describe protagonists on the move between eastern Europe, Berlin and Ankara in search of love, friendship and genealogy, whereas Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied mixes allusions to Grass and Goethe with contemporary Anglo-American pop culture. T h e nov e l i n G e r m a n s i nc e 199 0 The chapters for this book were commissioned in 2009 with the aim of providing an overview of the novel in German some twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of an era of dramatic social and political transformation following the end of the Cold War€– thanks are due here to the Modern Humanities Research Association for its generous funding of an event in September of that year at which contributors were able to discuss their ideas. The texts were selected to exemplify the key argument that I have put forward in this introduction, namely that today’s novel in German positions itself in relation to a set of concerns and traditions that scholars have conventionally identified with the Germanspeaking countries of central Europe while exhibiting a greater diversity and more intensive engagement with the wider world than ever before. Of course, other writers, and other books, might have been included, and other themes than those discussed here feature across the full range of recent works, as indeed many of the following chapters demonstrate. It is to be hoped, therefore, that readers of this volume might feel encouraged to explore further the rich variety of literary fiction in German in order to make good some of the omissions they discover here. No t e s 1 Roy Pascal, The German Novel (Manchester University Press, 1956), 301–3. 2 See Ulrich Greiner, ‘Mangel an Feingefühl’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ’:€ Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991).

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3 Frank Schirrmacher, ‘Idyllen in der Wüste oder Das Versagen vor der Metropole’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 15–27. 4 Ulrich Greiner, ‘Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ’:€Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991), 208–16. 5 Schirrmacher, ‘Idyllen in der Wüste’, 23. 6 Pascal, The German Novel, 297, 301. 7 Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Die permanente Theodizee’, Merkur, 41 (1987), 267–86, 274. 8 Martin Hielscher, ‘Literatur in Deutschland:€ Avantgarde und pädagogischer Purismus’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden, (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 151–5, 151. 9 Uwe Wittstock, Leselust:€ Wie unterhaltsam ist die neue deutsche Literatur? (Munich:€Luchterhand, 1995), 24, 25, 8, 10, 158–9. 10 Maxim Biller, ‘Soviel Sinnlichkeit wie der Stadtplan von Kiel’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 62–71, 62. 11 Iris Radisch, ‘Der Herbst des Quatschocento’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 180–8, 181. 12 Matthias Politycki, ‘Kalbfleisch mit Reis! Die literarische Ästhetik der 78er Generation’, in Die Farbe der Vokale (Munich:€Luchterhand, 1998), 23–44, 30 and 37. 13 Matthias Politycki, ‘Der amerikanische Holzweg’, Frankfurter Rundschau 66 (18 March 2000), Zeit und Bild, 2. 14 Maxim Biller, ‘Feige das Land, schlapp die Literatur’, Die Zeit 16 (13 April 2000), 47–9. 15 Brigid Haines, ‘The eastern turn in contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian literature’, Debatte, 16:2 (2008), 135–49. 16 Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2005), 1. 17 See Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scènes modernes de l’auteur (Geneva:€Slatkine, 2007). 18 Volker Braun, ‘Das Eigentum’, reprinted in Carl Otto Konrady, ed., Von einem Land und vom anderen:€Gedichte zur deutschen Wende (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1993), 51. 19 See Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman, eds., German Writers and the Politics of Culture:€Dealing with the Stasi (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 20 Edward Saïd, On Late Style:€ Music and Literature against the Grain (New York:€Pantheon Books, 2006), 24. 21 Saïd, On Late Style, 24. 22 Martin Walser, Dorle und Wolf, in Deutsche Sorgen (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1997), 276–405, 313. 23 Martin Walser, Ein springender Brunnen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Suhrkamp, 1998), 283.

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24 See Lyn Marven, ‘German Literature in the Berlin Republic:€ Writing by Women’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press 2007), 159–76. 25 Zafer Şenocak, Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Berlin:€Babel, 1993), 16. 26 Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (Munich:€Luchterhand, 2006), 147. 27 See Brigid Haines’s ‘German-language writing from eastern and central Europe’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–29. 28 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity:€ Community, Culture, Difference (London:€ Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37, 228. 29 I am grateful to Helen Finch for her insights here. 30 Maxim Biller, Esra (Cologne:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), 206.

Ch apter 1

Robert Schindel’s Gebürtig (Born-Where) Helmut Schmitz

It is one of the peculiarities of the literary discourse of ‘coming to terms with the Nazi past’ in Germany and Austria that, certainly until the millennium, it functions largely without the voices of the victims, whether the survivors or their descendants. Indeed, it is a characteristic of even the most differentiated literary assessments of the Nazi legacy in the so-called ‘second generation’ that they circumvent an engagement with the victims’ perspective, except in the most abstract form.1 In contrast to this, the early 1980s saw the emergence of a German-Jewish literature that investigates the possibilities and conditions of Jewish existence in the former perpetrator countries by means of an intense engagement with its non-Jewish environment. This literature of a ‘second generation’ after the Holocaust operates within a double field of historical tension:€on the one hand with respect to the history of its non-Jewish environment and on the other with respect to its own Jewishness in relation to the legacy of the Holocaust. Thomas Nolden, in his seminal study of this ‘young’ German-Jewish literature published in 1995, described this literature as a form of ‘concentric writing’, a term that describes the approach the German-Jewish writers take to the complex question of Jewish identity after the Holocaust.2 The central feature of this literature, Nolden argues, is that a traditional idea of Jewishness is no longer ‘given’ for these authors who are cut off from traditional identity both ‘by the history of assimilation of their predecessors, and more radically, by the exterminatory insanity of the National Socialists’.3 Furthermore, the experience of the Holocaust, transmitted by the suffering of their parents, occupies a paradoxical position in the self-understanding of these writers who see their lives as dedicated to the remembrance of their forebears’ suffering while also desiring to be free of a task that is experienced as an overpowering form of coercion. Thus the literature of the ‘second generation’ of Holocaust survivors both reflects, and reflects on, the contradictory psychological conditions of the children of the survivors. 19

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Robert Schindel’s novel Gebürtig (Born-Where), which I discuss in this chapter, can be regarded as paradigmatic in this sense.4 When it was Â�published in 1992, after Schindel had previously published four successful volumes of poetry, it sold 10,000 copies within two months and received almost universal praise in all major Austrian and German newspapers; it was then made into a successful film in 2002. Schindel’s novel investigates in almost encyclopaedic form the possibilities of Austrian-Jewish identities in the ‘second generation’ and simultaneously reflects on both the Austrian and the German manifestations of the ‘coming to terms with the past’ condition, and on the differences between these three forms of remembrance. The novel unfolds a kaleidoscope of second-generation Jewish existences and identities in Vienna that cannot be reduced to a common denominator, existences which have in common only their inability to exit from a history that determines them. In circular, de-centralised and non-linear form the novel narrates the stories of around two dozen characters, mostly Viennese Jews of the second generation whose sense of post-Holocaust Jewish identity is continuously tested and thrown into relief by either erotic relationships with non-Jewish characters or encounters with anti-Semitism. At the centre of the multifaceted action is the literary editor Danny Demant and his love affair with the non-Jewish Austrian doctor Christiane Kalteisen. This relationship is frequently interrupted, broken off and re-started in the course of the novel. To the extent that this love affair embodies a tentatively utopian possibility of a functioning Jewish–Gentile relationship after the Holocaust, Schindel investigates the possibilities of an AustrianJewish ‘normality’€– that is, of an uninhibited, intersubjective encounter not determined by the different histories of the characters’ families. This fragile utopia, which is neither completely shattered nor established on firmer ground by the end of the novel, is set against a novel-within-thenovel, the manuscript of the bank clerk Emmanuel Katz about the dramatist Hermann Gebirtig, a Viennese Holocaust survivor living in New York. Gebirtig, a fictional cousin of the Galician songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, is asked to come back to Vienna by the daughter of a veteran communist in order to testify in a trial of a former guard at the notorious Ebensee concentration camp. The novel is completed by a storyline centred on Konrad Sachs, the ‘prince of Poland’, son of the former governor general of Poland under Nazism, Ernst Sachs, who as a five-year-old played in the lanes of Auschwitz and who is haunted by his childhood self. Gebürtig contrasts Sachs’s attempt to exorcise the ‘prince of Poland’ within himself with Katz’s manuscript as a form of ‘coming to terms with the past’ and

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with the present of the entire Jewish cast in the novel, who are determined by a past they can neither live with nor escape from. Thus, as has been frequently noted, Gebürtig is characterised by a ‘symmetric’ structure,5 stories and characters mirror each other ‘as opposing figures or Doppelgänger’, continuously commenting on each other.6 Erin McGlothlin, in an excellent chapter on Gebürtig, thus analyses the Â�novel’s multiplicity of voices and the ever-shifting narrative focalisation. The novel’s reflection of the issues of representation and narration of (Jewish) identity generates, she argues, an ‘almost infinite chain of signification’ which evades ‘any fixed univocal perspective by which the Holocaust is remembered in the second generation’.7 The narrative heterogeneity, ‘its refusal to grant the reader clarity, closure or narrative certainty mirrors the confused and impotent struggle of its characters with the presence of the Holocaust past’.8 The overall tone of Gebürtig is characterised by an ironic distance that frequently breaks the taboos of memory discourse of the 1980s and 1990s. Central characters of the novel are inspired by figures from German and Austrian public life. Thus Konrad Sachs reminds us of Niklas Frank, who in 1987 published a series of articles in Stern magazine about his father Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor general of Poland. Schindel had met Frank ‘in the middle of the 1980s at the Frankfurt book-fair’.9 Hermann Gebirtig shares undeniable characteristics with the playwright George Tabori, who likewise lived in New York for a long time, while the frequent reference to Philip Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, featuring in Gebürtig as Gebirtig’s literary agent, indicates the literary context in which Schindel wanted to place himself and his novel:€to write about Jewishness and being Jewish in Vienna with a Rothian ironic lightness that only masks the desperation behind it. P o s t-Hol o c aus t J e w i s h i de n t i t y i n t h e s e c on d g e n e r at ion In his essay ‘On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew’, Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, who grew up as a Catholic country boy and the son of assimilated parents, describes the impossibility of freely determining his identity in relation to a living Jewish tradition. The free choice of Jewish tradition and heritage is denied to him because he cannot forget his catholic childhood and the deception about assimilation:€ ‘One can re-establish the link with a tradition that one has lost, but one cannot freely invent it for oneself … Since I was not a Jew, I am not one; and

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since I am not one, I won’t be able to become one.’10 On the other hand, there is no way out from the coercion to be Jewish, because, once ‘made’ to be ‘Jewish’ by the Nazi racial laws of 1935, this experience determines Améry’s entire further existence. The Nuremberg laws had ‘given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely that I was a Jew’. This new dimension consists in the existential experience of being excluded from the society of man by law, a ‘death sentence’ in Améry’s words.11 The complete loss of human dignity€– which, according to Améry, is nothing but a social agreement€– can only be reconciled by the recognition of the socio-historical fact of its denial:€‘To be a Jew meant the acceptance of the death sentence imposed by the world as a world verdict … acceptance was simultaneously the physical revolt against it.’12 Améry’s reflections on his status as a Jew after the Holocaust result in a paradox that consists for the non-religious assimilated secular Jews in the problem of having to be Jewish because the Nazi extermination policies turned them into Jews. This does not only mean a narrowing down of Jewish identity to the experience of the Holocaust but having to accept a definition of Jewishness that is not self-determined. This paradox does not become weaker in the second generation. Rather, it simply shifts from the unambiguous experience of victimisation in the parental generation to the duty to keep the memory of this experience alive without being able to fully identify with it. Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Polish Jews who writes in French, expresses it thus:€‘This immense suffering, that I thought I could appropriate by the proclamation of my Jewish identity … can never be appropriated.’ Finkielkraut thus speaks of a double exile with respect to the experience of the second generation of survivors:€‘exiled from a non-transferrable suffering and from a culture that is disappearing’.13 In fact, his 1980 essay expresses an experience that Marianne Hirsch later theorises in 1997 as the origin of postmemory, a form of second-generation memory that ‘characterises the experience of those whose grow up with narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’.14 The children of Holocaust survivors are thus doubly displaced, both by the legacy of destruction and survival that they cannot inherit fully, and by the total destruction of the geographical and social space of their parents’ origin. As such, they remain ‘always marginalized or exiled, always in the diaspora. “Home” is always elsewhere.’15 Robert Schindel expresses this paradox in an essay of€1995:

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I am a Jew only because others have made me a Jew, Hitler and those that were taught by him. I am a Jew because my ancestors were Jews for generations, religious, secularized and finally regarded as Jews … When my family was exterminated, I was exterminated as well. Of course, this is incorrect … This is the way cultural-historical memory operates. It names what is incorrect and now it is incorrect and is the whole truth.16

Schindel€– who was born in 1944 and who grew up in an internationalist, secular environment€ – sees himself as embodiment of this paradox, reinforced by the decisively un-Jewish education he received from his communist mother.17 Schindel, too, sees himself as unable to determine his Jewishness with respect to any specific content or to define it exhaustively. Questioned about his Jewishness in an interview he thus responds with visible indignation, pointing to the history of heteronomy through anti-Semitism:€ ‘Anyway, the world knows what it means to be a “Jew”, the Jews frequently don’t know what it means.’18 To the challenge that his Jewish identity had no ‘proper [i.e. self-determined] content’ because it referred only to an inherited experience, particularly the Holocaust, he replies in Améry’s sense that the heteronomy would have to be accepted first and foremost as a historical fact and undeniable historical experience:€‘If 1,000 years of Ghetto inside me is not a “proper” content … The majority always writes history for the minority.’19 For the secularised Schindel the re-discovery of his Jewish roots consists in a re-connection to the suffering of those parts of his family that he had never known. The cancellation of the fantasy of assimilation and the outspoken thematisation of Jewishness is tendentially of a different character in Austria from how it is in Germany, since Austria, unlike Germany, has not gone through a process of public engagement with the Nazi legacy, however flawed. In her book on the Austrian lack of engagement with the past, Ruth Beckermann concludes as late as 1989:€ ‘In this country the entanglement of the Austrians with Nazism was not discussed after 1945, nor was the problem of Jews and Non-Jews living together after Auschwitz€… One does not talk about the relationship between Austrians and Jews.’20 While in Germany a consciousness of the problematic relationship between Jews and non-Jewish Germans is to a certain degree written into the fabric of public discourse, Austrian Jews were for the most part denied their ‘particular fate under the Nazi regime … after the fact’ by official Austrian culture, Beckermann asserts.21 For Schindel, assimilation€ – that is, the insistence on a non-differentiated equality between Jews and non-Jewish Austrians€– turns into the betrayal of his dead family members:€‘Do I become the executor of Hitler’s extermination of the

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Jews if I renounce them, too?’ On the other hand, there is the question ‘what does connect me to my humiliated, tortured, deported, gassed and shot forbears of whom I do not even have a picture?’22 Characterising his Jewishness as ‘remembrance and resistance’, Schindel describes the impossibility and inescapability of the task that is given to the survivors’ children:€the survivors ‘at least form the arc from then to now with their own bodies … We, the generation after Celan, do not even have these two lives in our own body.’23 Gebürtig is thus a twofold act of exploration:€an exploration of the multidimensional and contradictory positions that result from the necessity of being Jewish in the shadow of the Holocaust and, as shall become clear, an attempted bridging to relatives killed in the Nazi genocide in the knowledge of its impossibility. Va r i at ion I:€spe a k i ng €– (u n)i n h i bi t e dn e ss Gebürtig circles the paradox discussed above by means of an multilayered action that takes place on three levels and which mostly consists of discussions and fights between Viennese Jews as well as between non-Jewish Austrians and Germans. The statements that are articulated by the Jewish characters in the course of the novel do not add up to any conclusive concept of Jewish identity and are always preliminary. The novel parades these statements in their contradictory and frequently mutually exclusive nature as a continuous process of searching for a position, a search that does not lead to a stable conceptualisation but is continuously referred back to the past through either anti-Semitism or other forms of remembrance of the suffering of murdered relatives. The novel is constructed in circular fashion. The opening ‘Prologue’, which, like a magnifying glass, bundles all the novel’s themes, turns out by the end of the book to be the chronological end of the narrative. The ‘Prologue’ presents the relationship between Jews and non-Jews of the second generation as an automatic, inauthentic acting-out of pre-established positions which are determined by the history of one’s parents. Erich Stiglitz from Mauthausen, the site of one of Austria’s most notorious concentration camps, provokes the halfJewish Mascha Singer, when she does not respond to his erotic advances, with the comment that Mauthausen is ‘a pretty nice place’. Mascha’s response acts out the position of moral indignation:€‘That’s going to take my breath away, she thinks … She could never really make up her mind whether sayings like that enraged her, because she simply always got upset’ (4). Both actors in this pre-determined farce are apostrophised by the text as ‘uninhibited’:€Erich, who played as a boy in the camp’s ruins because of

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his origin as a child of ‘innocent’ parents and an uncle who himself had been a camp inmate, and Mascha, who in her indignation ‘without any inhibition … drags one dead relative after the other out of her lap’ (5). The confrontation with Mascha’s dead predecessors produces something that could be described as a ‘Martin Walser reaction’, the feeling that one’s idyllic childhood is devalued in the encounter with the different perspective of Nazi victims, which is itself experienced as an accusation.24 The difference is that, in the second generation, the cards have already been dealt, the truth is even more complex and the result is even more predictable, which is why there are no further discussions:€‘You want to say that I am a fascist? Get Lost!’ (5) This situation is loaded with further irony by Schindel via the creation of Mascha Singer as a ‘half-Jew’ with an unknown Jewish father and nonJewish mother; according to the matrilinear laws of orthodox Judaism, Mascha would not be Jewish at all. With her ‘yearning to belong to the Jewish part of the family’ (29), Mascha is what Alain Finkielkraut describes as an ‘imaginary Jew’, someone who appropriates the suffering of their predecessors for purposes of identification.25 In contrast to Finkielkraut, though, who polemically renounced this position, Schindel portrays it as only one desperate facet of a spectrum of post-Holocaust Jewish identities:€Mascha is ‘unable either to swallow nor can she spit … out’ the stories of her dead father that fill her up (30). The false uninhibitedness of Stiglitz is contrasted by the true uninhibitedness of Danny Demant’s partner Christiane Kalteisen€– true because it is based on a naïve lack of interest in history rather than on repression or denial. It is precisely Christiane’s uninhibitedness which allows her to live in a pure present and encounter Demant not as a Jew but as a person. However, this in turn forces Demant to insist on his Jewishness as a marker of identity and confronts him with the principal incompatibility of his own history with hers. Whereas Christiane’s family roots in lower Austria signify a seemingly unbroken continuity, Demant’s family history with its Galician origins is defined by the rupture of the Holocaust with Auschwitz as its geographical centre:€ ‘“Where is Galicia?” … “Behind Auschwitz but before Brest-Litowsk”’ (125). Paradoxically, it is Christiane’s ability not to tie Demant to a fixed identity as the child of Holocaust survivors that provokes the counterÂ�reaction in him, so that he subsequently foregrounds exactly this part of his identity, an identity he otherwise is at pains to play down. On the other hand, this engagement with his non-Jewish environment produces this identification because it continuously confronts him with forgetting

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and repression. Danny’s real infatuation with Christiane is thus constantly undermined by the historical legacy that looms over his present. This paradox is taken to the point of absurdity at the end of the novel through the repetition of the ‘Prologue’ scene. Mascha reacts to Danny’s attempt to assuage her anger about Stieglitz with the accusation that Danny, who is reviving his relationship with Christiane for the third time, wants to get rid of his Jewishness in order to further his relationship with a non-Jewish woman. Danny’s bitter and violent reaction expresses the irresolvable dilemma of a Jewish present:€‘Can’t our Jews be a little dead now and then or do they have to be constantly sharpened even when they are nothing but bone meal?’ (8). With hindsight, at the end of the novel, Danny’s remark can be read as the attempt to put the relationship to Christiane after its repeated failure onto the foundation of a present that is not constantly undermined by the suffering of dead predecessors. However, the situation is absurdly turned onto its head by Christiane’s unexpected siding with Mascha. Thus this causes Danny to inquire how she has suddenly come by a Jewish soul, even if it be only a feminine one. The word ‘only’ ignites one of the usual quarrels, … in the process … I lose the thread and the question that I posed remains unanswered. (272–3)

The reference to the ‘usual quarrels’ can be read as both Demant’s acquiescence to the procedurality of any intimate relationship, and as a foreboding of the next breakdown. A Jewish-Austrian ‘normality’ which would allow for an uncomplicated relationship to Christiane thus remains improbable. Identity as a process of life in engagement with an Other becomes a problem if, as in Demant’s case, the present exists in a fixed relationship to the past from which it obtains a continuous nonÂ�negotiable and determining burden. The novel leaves open the fragile utopia of a functioning relationship between Jews and non-Jews. In any case, the utopia is relativised by Emmanuel Katz’s manuscript about Gebirtig and Katz’s encounter with Konrad Sachs. The encounter between Katz, the child of Holocaust survivors, and Sachs, the child of perpetrators, throws light on the relationship between Demant and Christiane and is an upside-down mirror-image of the ‘uninhibited’ encounter between Stieglitz and Mascha at the beginning of the novel. Schindel stylises the encounter between the guilt-ridden Sachs, who has always kept his provenance a closely guarded secret, and Katz as a ‘negative symbiosis’ personified:26 ‘There is no such thing as normalcy. Only guilt and innocence’ (92). Sachs, who is pushed by the oversized feeling of his unknown guilt into an excessive acceptance of the

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27

cultural legacy of Nazism as part of an ‘inhibited’ identity, forces Katz into the acceptance of the role of the Holocaust victim. The bitter irony of this scene consists in the fact that Katz’s acceptance of Sachs’s positioning continues the distribution of fixed roles into the second generation. Katz ‘felt a diabolical joy in pinning a Jewish star on himself here … in front of five Germans’ (91). The irony is increased by the fact that the Austrian Jew Schindel puts the only unequivocal admission of guilt and responsibility into the mouth of a German child of a perpetrator; the non-Jewish Austrians in Schindel’s novel are generally devoid of any feeling of guilt. In analogy to Adorno’s ‘there is no right way of life within the false’,27 Schindel’s novel does not portray any form of relationship between Jews and non-Jews as a possible right one. Sachs’s inhibition is only the reverse side of Stiglitz’s uninhibitedness, a desperate search for exoneration. Instead, the novel presents movements of searching within the ‘false’. The aggressively portrayed Jewishness of Katz is contrasted with the position of the poet Paul Hirsch:€ ‘I don’t deny anything. But I don’t wear it as a medal either. Besides, I don’t let Hitler tell me who I am’ (212). Any approach to Jewish self-determination in engagement with an either anti-Semitic or naïvely uninhibited and disinterested environment consequently ends in a preliminary tautology:€‘We are who we are’ (114). Va r i at ion II:€w r i t i ng €– c oug h i ng u p Besides the dialogic circulation of Jewish self-description, Gebürtig presents two different acts of writing which are ascribed to the children of victims and perpetrators as a possible form of engagement with the past. Konrad Sachs is driven close to suicide by his guilt-ridden memories of his childhood as ‘prince of Poland’ but finds salvation in the exorcism of his secret identity in the writing of a series of articles€– after their publication, he feels ‘excellent’ (270). This successful act of ‘coming to terms with the past’ is contrasted with Katz’s manuscript about Hermann Gebirtig. Through the character of Katz, Schindel describes the phenomenon of the intergenerational transmission of trauma from survivor parents to their children. In his study on the identity of second-generation Holocaust survivors, Aaron Hass notes that parents frequently regarded their children as symbols of ‘rebirth and restitution’. The close ties to the parents that were the result of this meant that the children frequently experienced difficulties in the processes of individuation and becoming independent, as they had to embody the unlived lives of their parents:€ ‘Becoming an individual and abandoning the felt obligation to care for survivor parents have been

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difficult tasks for many children’.28 However, rather than narrating the psychological dilemma of the second generation in an empathetic and sensitive manner, Schindel exhibits it with gross sarcasm. Katz, whose mother ‘survived three years of Auschwitz in the most pitiless manner’, had served his ‘deathly wounded family’ as ‘an all embracing container for their melancholy’:€ ‘Whenever young Emmanuel wanted to introduce a personal note into his life, she would look at him with half-broken eyes only to whisper bitter comments’ (14). Thus, Katz is the opposite of Mascha, who inherits the victim’s story indirectly:€‘Until two years ago Emmanuel held his ears out to his family without cease during every free moment of the day, and in this way the living death in all his words enters him’ (14). While Mascha is ‘unable either to swallow nor spit … out’ the stories of the past, spitting out is precisely what Katz does at his father’s death:€‘“Why don’t you join him”, he thought, “lie down with him, Mrs Katz”. Unannounced, hatred leapt at him. He became sick, and he vomited a green, spreading corpse directly in front of his mother’s feet’ (15). These scenes, which are amongst the most shocking of German-language literature of the 1990s, on account of their negation of the pious rituals of remembrance, point to Schindel’s despair at a past that is experienced as a form of incarceration:€‘I wanted to rid myself of the dead, the dead were supposed to be buried with the novel, so I can turn towards the living.’29 In contrast to Sachs’s articles, Katz’s novel within a novel, rather than focusing on his family’s suffering, is an engagement with the presence of the past in Vienna through the character of Hermann Gebirtig, a survivor of the concentration camp Ebensee. Simultaneously an attempt to ‘spit out’ history and a mediated connection to the legacy of the Holocaust, the manuscript functions as implicit contrast to and comment on both Sachs’s story and the relationship between Demant and Christiane, while also offering a satirical commentary on Austria’s lack of ‘coming to terms’. Through the story of Gebirtig’s return Schindel illustrates what Ruth Beckerman has termed the ‘de-realisation of the in-between’ (that is, the years 1938 to 1945, from the Nazi take-over of Austria to the end of the war).30 This de-realisation is ‘characterised by the justification of immoral actions with the exceptional situation of the war thus denying the necessity of consequences€– just as if no action had taken place at all’.31 Gebirtig’s encounter, after so many years, with his former neighbour and ex-SA-man Heini Hofstädter, who explained to Gebirtig’s brother Siggi ‘already … in the early thirties what the Führer wanted to do with

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29

the Jews’ (241), characterises the forgetting, the lack of memory and the Austrian self-stylisation as victim: Do you know, we were radical at the time, very bitter. Hunger, cold, lots of homeless. Most people were really in bad shape. Hitler had an easy time of it.€… Me too, I admit it. Well, what did it get me? The Eastern front. Wounded at Kursk. Five years as POW, that’s no candy store. (247)

Other neighbours welcome the returning Gebirtig as if he were a long-lost friend. The tobacco store where his father used to be a regular customer is the scene of an uncanny dialogue full of sly obsequiousness which, rather than being the sign of a feeling of guilt, grotesquely exposes the lack of such a feeling: ‘Imagine Annamarie, that is Herr Hermann, the son of Herr Doktor Gebirtig. … You went to America?’ ‘That was later, Frau Leitner. First I was in the camp.’ ‘Horrible, Herr Doktor. It was horrible back then. Did Papa go to America as well?’ ‘No, Frau Leitner. He did not survive.’ ‘Horrible. Those were horrible times. And your health?’ (245–6)

When the former camp guard against whom he is to testify is acquitted after a short trial, Gebirtig, who had taken the fake warmth with which he is welcomed as an indicator that Vienna had changed in the fifty years since the war, begins to see things a little differently. The neighbour Frau Leitner ‘greeted him as courteously as always, but her eyes looked cold’. The same German shepherd who had been previously addressed by his owner as ‘Nero’ (241) is now called ‘Barry’ to Gebirtig’s ears, the ‘name of a German shepherd in Treblinka who was especially trained by SS-man Franz to bite the sexual organs of inmates’ (265).32 Gebirtig’s misperception, which overlays an event in the present with the experience of the camp, reminds of Jean Améry’s description of the loss of existential trust in the world as a result of the experience of persecution. This loss of trust in the world is, according to Améry, final and irrevocable:€‘Without trust in the world I face my surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone, and all that I can manage is to get along within my foreignness.’33 The novel in the novel contrasts both the experiential present of the Jewish characters in the main narrative and the utopian dimension of the Jewish–Gentile relationship. The experiences of Gebirtig correspond on the level of the main narrative to what Aaron Hass has termed ‘low level paranoia’ in the second generation. According to Hass, the members of the second generation are characterised by ‘fear, mistrust, cynicism’ and

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a lack of primal trust in the reliability of civil order, something they have inherited from their parents.34 Demant, who says of himself ‘I am always on the run’ (110), thus experiences two instances of déjà vu in the course of the narrative, seeing himself first abruptly in the person of his uncle in the camp of Theresienstadt and then in the person of his father in the French underground. (Pr e l i m i n a r y) f i n a l e€– f r ag m e n t s Gebürtig is a novel about the impossibility of the children of Holocaust survivors to fully identify with their parents’ suffering and the inescapability of this identification, if only because either anti-Semitism or the denial of the past in their non-Jewish environment continuously forces this identification upon them. If the Holocaust is the only ‘event’ which in the face of an authenticity-dismantling postmodernity preserves an aura of authenticity, this holds true only for the survivors who directly embody the suffering. The experience of the children when confronted with this authenticity is summarised by Mascha Singer:€‘And I exist in fragments. And what I am is foreign to me’ (8). The epilogue, entitled ‘The Despairing’, thematises this paradoxically mediated relationship between the children of survivors and their parents’ suffering. Here, Demant and forty other Viennese Jews are shipped to Osijek in Slovenia as extras for a US television series on the Holocaust in a bitterly ironic commentary of the problems of (visual) Holocaust representation, its relation to public memory, and the tendency of mass-media culture to sentimentalise suffering. In a grotesque hyperbole of the naturalism that animates mainstream visual culture, the director demands ‘real’ Jews for the representation of victims, thus inevitably confirming anti-Semitic clichés. The impossibility of clearly determining the line between reality and mediation and of escaping representational clichés is expressed in the assertion by one of the Jews with ‘a Jewish face’:€ ‘There is no such thing as a Jewish face. That’s an obstinate rumour, that’s all’ (279). The children, imitating on screen the suffering of their dead family members, look more ‘real’ than the historical reality which disappears behind its naturalist representation. Demant says of himself:€‘I am perfect because born after the fact, that is I can play’ (278). Here, the references to ‘playing’ and ‘despairing’ in the epilogue recall both Schiller’s claim that ‘Only when man plays is he totally human’35 and Hölderlin’s distich ‘Always you play and joke? You must! Oh friends! This makes my soul ache because only the despairing must do thus.’36 The oscillation between these contradictory

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sentiments expresses the paradoxical situation of the second generation, who can relate to their parents’ suffering only through mediation. The de-Â�realisation of the Holocaust in media culture doubly affects the children of survivors. On the one hand, contemporary memory culture is a guarantee against forgetting. On the other hand, after the death of the survivors the historical reality will only be accessible through images, and images of images. As a reflection on the impossibility of a German-Jewish and AustrianJewish ‘normality’ after the Holocaust, Gebürtig parallels the successful coming to terms of the perpetrator child€– including closure – with the impossibility of coming to terms for the victims’ children. All Jewish characters in Gebürtig resemble Russian dolls:€history dwells inside them like a foreign body. The successful act of ‘spitting out’, however, is reserved only for the perpetrator children. Yet Schindel’s assessment is less a categorical statement on the possibilities and differences of coming to terms for non-Jewish Germans and Austrian Jews than an engagement with the function of writing. While Sachs’s articles remain in the realm of a personal coming to terms in their engagement with his family history, Katz’s manuscript represents an attempt to link to a collective memory. This memory, in contrast to Sachs’s book, is not redemptive:€‘Which Jew felt funny when he invented the sentence:€the way to redemption is called remembrance. What is supposed to be redeemed at what remembrance?€… Let the dead wail, we cannot lessen their sorrow’ (117–18). Here, Gebirtig’s bitter remark refers to the famous expression by the legendary Hasidic Rabbi, the Ba’al Shem Tov:37 ‘Forgetfulness leads into exile, but memory leads to redemption.’ Indeed, Hasidic tradition ascribes redemptive powers to memory and particularly to the word,38 and the duty to remember is one of the constants of post-Holocaust memory discourse€– Ba’al Shem Tov’s words are placed on a sign at the exit of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.39 Gebirtig’s revocation of these words casts a questioning light on the redemptive and identity-creating role of memory culture. However, rather than a disparaging remark on the role of Holocaust memory for the state of Israel, this should be read as an ironic comment on the memory culture of the perpetrator countries. Ba’al Shem Tov’s words were quoted in German President Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1985. The speech is widely credited as a watershed in German memory culture, marking the German nation’s acceptance of responsibility of the Holocaust. Gebirtig’s refusal to subscribe to the sentiment of linking remembrance with redemption

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highlights a paradox within memory culture in the former perpetrator countries: The perpetrator countries are covered with a notorious babble about AuschÂ� witz.€… Do we notice that the dead disappear more and more under the words in these debates, that they are forgotten as real murdered victims? And in noticing it we have to talk still more, to do yet more. And thus, while we are silently deep in discourse, the Shoah becomes what it always was:€ unreal. Because of this there can be no normality.40

Because of this paradox, no redeeming qualities are ascribed to language in Gebürtig, not even to writing. Above all, the novel is characterised by a plethora of misguided and failed acts of communication. If anything, the purpose of language and writing is to hold fear in check. The novel, Schindel says in interview, ‘was somewhat like a Kaddish for my family which, apart from two people, died. I have not really unburdened myself through writing, but would rather describe it as “exorcising of fear”. The moment I capture my fear in words it disappears inside me.’41 This simultaneously locates and relativises the liberating aspect of his writing. Thus Schindel, who claimed that he had wanted to ‘get rid of the dead’ with his novel, is refuted by his own characters. Gebürtig is an ironic and selfconfident self-examination as contradictory child of the Holocaust. In an interview about the ‘newly developing self-confidence of the Jews’ in Austria, Schindel repeats the tautological self-description of one of his characters ‘We are who we are’ (114):€‘I am who I am’.42 No t e s 1 See my On Their Own Terms (University of Birmingham Press, 2004). 2 Thomas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur:€ Konzentrisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 10. 3 Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur, 10. 4 Robert Schindel, Gebürtig (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1992). Quoted from the translation by Michael Roloff:€Born-Where (Riverside, CA:€Ariadne Press, 1995). Translation modified throughout. All page references are in parentheses following quotations in the main body of the text. 5 Renate Posthofen, ‘Erinnerte Geschichte(n):€ Robert Schindels Roman Gebürtig’, Modern Austrian Literature, 3:4 (1994), 193–212, 194. 6 Erin McGlothlin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature:€Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006), 92. 7 McGlothlin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature, 92. 8 McGlothlin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature, 91. 9 Interview with Volker Kaukoreit, marabo, 1993, H.2, no page nos. 10 Jean Améry, ‘On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew’, in At the Mind’s Limits:€ Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities,

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trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN:€Indiana University Press, 1980, [first 1966]), 81–101, 84. 11 Améry, ‘On the Necessity and Impossibility’, 85. 12 Améry, ‘On the Necessity and Impossibility’, 91. 13 Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris:€ Les éditions du Seuil, 1980). Quoted from the German translation by Hainer Kober, Der eingebildete Jude (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 1984), 8. 14 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 15 Hirsch, Family Frames, 242. Hirsch explicitly refers to Finkielkraut in this context, p. 244. 16 Robert Schindel, ‘Literatur€– Auskunftsbüro der Angst’, in Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€Literatur€– Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 95–114, 112. 17 See Schindel, Gott schütze uns, 9–26, 12–13. For a biographical sketch, see Ekkehard W. Haring ‘“… die Generalpause meines Lebens”:€Ein Gespräch mit Robert Schindel über Literatur, Schoah und jüdische Gebürtigkeiten’, Modern Austrian Literature, 3:4 (2005), 85–98. 18 ‘Von 68 zu 38’, interview with Erika Wantoch, profil, 21 December 1987. Schindel asserts:€‘I was identified as a Jew before I even knew what “being Jewish” meant.’ 19 Schindel explicitly refers to Améry in his essay ‘Wer der Folter erlag kann nicht mehr heimisch werden in der Welt’, in Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€ Literatur€ – Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 121–36. 20 Ruth Beckermann, Unzugehörig:€ Österreicher und Juden nach 1945 (Vienna:€Loecker, 1989), 18. 21 Beckermann, Unzugehörig, 65. 22 Robert Schindel, ‘Judentum als Erinnerung und Widerstand’, in Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€Literatur€– Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 27–34, 28 and 29. 23 Schindel, ‘Judentum als Erinnerung und Widerstand’, 30–1. 24 See Hajo Funke, ‘Friedensrede als Bandstiftung’, in Micha Brumlik, Hajo Funke and Lars Rensmann, eds., Umkämpftes Vergessen:€ Walserdebatte, Holocaustdenkmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik (Berlin:€ Das Arabische Buch, 2000), 13–27. 25 See Finkielkraut, Der eingebildete Jude, 15. 26 See Dan Diner, ‘Negative symbiosis:€ Germans and Jews after Auschwitz’, in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past:€ Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate (Boston, MA:€Beacon Press, 1990), 251–61, 251. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:€ Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt:€Suhrkamp, 1969), 43. 28 Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust:€ The Second Generation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26–7. 29 Quoted in in S.L., ‘Der eingebildete Jude’, profil, 16 March 1992. 30 Beckermann, Unzugehörig, 28.

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31 Beckermann, Unzugehörig, 25. 32 Glossary to Gebürtig, page 355 of the German edition. The glossary is omitted from the translation. 33 Améry, ‘On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew’, 95. 34 Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 36–7. 35 See Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Fünfzehnter Brief, Werke in drei Bänden (Munich:€Hanser, 1966), vol. 2, 481. 36 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (Munich:€Hanser, 1992), vol. 1, 271. 37 ‘Master of the holy Name’, title of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, Founder of Chassidism. 38 See Byron L. Sherwin, Sparks amid the Ashes:€The Spiritual Legacy of Polish Jews (Oxford and New York:€Oxford University Press, 1997), 103 and 123–4. On the redeeming function of language see Martin Buber, Die Legende des Baalschem (Frankfurt am Main:€Rütten und Loening, 1916), 24. 39 See Emil L. Fackenheim, ‘The Jewish return into history’, in Emil L. Fackenheim and Raphael Jospe, eds., Jewish Philosophy and the Academy (Cranbury, NJ, London and Missisauga, ON:€Associated University Presses, 1996), 223–38, 238. Sherwin explicitly connects Hasidic tradition with Holocaust remembrance. Sherwin, Sparks amid the Ashes, 85. 40 Robert Schindel, ‘Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft:€ Anmerkungen zu Geschichte und Gegenwart des jüdisch-nichtjüdischen Verhältnisses in den Täterländern’, Text und Kritik 144 (1999), 3–8, 8. 41 ‘Ich war kein schlechter Ping-Pong-Spieler’, interview with Robert Schindel, wortlaut.de. Göttinger Zeitschrift für neue Literatur, www.hainholz.de/Â� wortlaut/schindel.htm (accessed on 30 June 2009). 42 ‘Von 68 zu 38’.

Ch apter 2

Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield) Rebecca Braun

When Günter Grass’s long-awaited ‘unification novel’ Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield) was published in 1995, the media furore that surrounded it was intense. It was widely felt that the author€ – with a 780-page book that wends its way across some 150 years of German history as its largely male, ageing characters meander through former Prussian/East German territories€– had created a literary work that was aesthetically and politically out of step with the forward-looking times.1 Such opinion can be understood as a resurgence of the programmatic attempt, led by the journalists Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher at the beginning of the decade, to declare as passé the kind of overtly socio-politically engaged writing associated with such ageing writers as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. There was, however, also a distinctly personal element to much of the polemic. Not only had Grass taken an unpopular stance on unification that had made him enemies across the political spectrum during the unification period, he had also been falling out of favour with leading literary critics since the mid-1980s. With publications such as Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986) and Zunge zeigen! (Show Your Tongue!, 1988), his work was judged to be becoming ever more whimsical in style and overly didactic in its political message, suffering, in short, from Grass’s outmoded sense of his own importance. If there was one thing that was not new in the united Germany, it was the idea that Grass, as both a cultural and political icon, was old. In fact, Grass’s literary output since the mid-1980s, from Die Rättin through to the autobiographically styled Die Box (The Box, 2008) and Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland (Travelling from Germany to Germany, 2009), merits being collectively considered as a body of ‘late writing’, in the Shakespeare-scholar Gordon McMullan’s definition of the term.2 McMullan explains that while late writing is generally associated with the end of an author’s career and thus the proximity of death, it is most useful as an aid for interpreting the author’s wider significance when 35

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applied to a certain manner of reading€– late writing is a category that is invoked retrospectively by those evaluating a writer’s work. Whatever the author may think he or she is doing at the time, lateness can be construed within both his or her person and work by others, and this can happen quite independently of biological age. With this, ‘late style’ as discussed by Theodor Adorno in 1937 and, more recently in 2006, Edward Saïd is above all a literary-critical construction, an approach to interpretation forwarded by cultural critics that pertains to the way an author’s positioning in relation to his or her era is perceived.3 Although his overall argument is a little different to McMullan’s, Saïd also makes the artist’s relation to the era central to his description of late style as ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’.4 In other words, an author’s late work may be characterised by a kind of quirkiness, a peculiarity of style or theme that deviates from dominant trends whilst at the same time refusing to be declared irrelevant to them, and this leads critics to construct arguments about its relationship to the cultural epoch. Specifically, in Saïd’s late twentieth-century construction of lateness, late work is modulated by a mixture of nostalgia, melancholic leave-taking, and obdurate ongoing self-assertion, and readers are likely to perceive within it a certain doggedness, wilful difficulty and a tendency towards deliberately unresolved contradiction. These characteristics clearly encourage evaluative responses. Late style as described by Saïd is likely to challenge, if not outrightly annoy, even as it might tickle or amuse in its carefree inappropriateness. While the former reactions to Grass have been well in evidence across the media ever since Die Rättin’s complex structure and apocalyptic vision led to almost universal exasperation amongst reviewers, critical interest in the notion that the author’s disregard for convention may be something altogether more playful, entertaining, and indeed intellectually valuable has only very recently begun to take hold. Where, for Karen Leeder, considering Grass’s poetry collection Letzte Tänze (Last Dances, 2003) along with Saïd’s ideas on late style ‘offer[s] a useful way of reading what in some ways might seem rather unsatisfactory work’,5 Stuart Taberner conceives of late style as something which the author may actually consciously invoke as a manipulative ‘literary gesture’. In Taberner’s reading of Die Box, Grass reckons with the affective nature of late style€– ‘the moment in which we submit to the ageing author’s presentation of his self as we glimpse the elegiac potential of our own inevitable fading’€– as a means of exculpating private familial failings within his greater literary project.6 This is a useful warning that an author such as Grass, who has been acutely aware of his public reception over the course of his career, may well start to reckon

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with what we might call ‘late readings’ of his writing; that is to say, readings in the manner of Saïd that begin to take his timeliness into account. These may be on the one hand more indulgent of an author believed to be ageing and on the other hand impatient with an icon considered increasingly out of date. In what follows below, I shall argue that these considerations have informed not just the immediate public reception of Ein weites Feld, but the text’s predominant style, theme and internal logic as well as the author’s understanding of the wider social possibilities that literature can afford at the end of the twentieth century. L at e n e s s i n

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Thematically, ageing and a sense of impending endings pervade Ein weites Feld. The novel opens with a commemorative birthday scene in December 1989, as Theo Wuttke, alias Fonty (b. 1919), celebrates his seventieth birthday within the context of a backwards-looking evaluation of his life and times, and it ends with multiple deaths and disappearances, including Fonty’s own, as he ominously declares, ‘I at least believe our field has an end’.7 In between, the biological reach of his life is extended backwards to encompass the life and times of Theodor Fontane (1819–98), with a particular emphasis on this nineteenth-century author’s late flowering as he positioned himself, somewhat awkwardly and under a similarly major change of political regime, as a literary commentator who evoked the fading of the Prussian nobility and the rise of the bourgeois nouveaux riches. Wuttke’s tendency towards the past that makes him, as Fonty, recreate large swathes of it in the present is doubly expressed, first in his appropriation of the life and times of a dead author, and second in his decision to alight on an author who was himself fast becoming anachronistic in his own era and whose main period of recognition came towards the end of his life. Through his identification with Fontane, Fonty thus lives out the final years of a life twice over, and his peripatetic wanderings through Berlin and its Brandenburg environs, which some commentators see as central to the book’s significance, are carried out in the distinctly oldfashioned mode of the flâneur, a literary figure who already at the end of the nineteenth century was beginning to seem outdated.8 In creating such an ostentatiously old character, doubling him up with the equally retrospectively extended Hoftaller/Tallhover, and then having the pair traipse through the transitional landscapes of 1870–71 and 1989–91, Grass creates an extended time-loop that plays out rather like the postfuturum video productions Oskar Matzerath develops to foreshadow

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his fellow fictional characters’ own deaths in Die Rättin.9 Through their historical doubling and the strong narrative weighting towards all four characters’ old age, Fonty and Hoftaller effectively spend the entire novel acting out their own ending to each other and watching their earlier lives flash before them. This facet of the novel accounts not only for the strikingly visual, and at times even filmic, element of the pair’s staged appearances; it also explains the tone of resigned acceptance that ultimately characterises their rather fractious relationship to one another. If the narrative appears at times ‘too plodding for the fast-paced 1990s’, as Katharina Gerstenberger sums up critical opinion, then this is not least because the main characters are very deliberately plodding through situations that are already known to them and deliberately placing themselves within this repetitive experience.10 Presenting history as an eternal return is of course a trope that runs through much of Grass’s work. It is also specifically a concept that critics to date have tended to emphasise in relation to Ein weites Feld as particularly indicative of Grass’s political message in respect of unification. Some of the novel’s most poignant images€– the great-crested grebe that repeatedly dives underwater only to re-emerge shortly elsewhere, the paternoster lift within the Treuhand Institute, itself a building put to ever-returning dictatorial uses€– lend themselves to interpretation as comments on the cyclical nature of history and thus an expression of the inability to shake off the weight of the past and move forward in any genuinely progressive way.11 This clearly encourages a reading of the novel that focuses on its author’s depressed political convictions regarding the success of a new, united Germany, as he has repeatedly expressed them in political speeches elsewhere. Yet such a reading underplays the ultimately end-focused nature of all the only apparently circular loops developed in the novel. Standing watching the paternoster lift rattle round the building, Fonty imagines not an unbroken loop of German dictator figures occupying this central landmark in a disconcerting eternal present, but rather the decline of the figures, one after the other, as they slowly descend past him and out of view. First he sees the current boss of the Treuhand descending towards him, then the Nazi leader Hermann Göring, followed by his entourage. At this point, the filmic technique underlying the imagined historical return is made explicit: Now the film was slowing down:€slow motion, cut. This segment was hardly over before Fonty began to film the historical transition, from the same perspective, but with a new reel. After all the uniforms, he called for the civilian dress appropriate to the postwar era, and directed the last

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chairman of the Council of State, Walter Ulbricht, whom the people called ‘the Goatee’, to come into focus in a descending cabin.12

Following the later GDR leader Erich Honecker’s imagined descent in the lift, the narrative continues: Now the series was complete. For the time being, no more historical scenes were being played out, although [Fonty] would have loved to squeeze the ruling mass, visiting from Bonn, into a cabin and display him on a sinking trajectory. Fonty replayed the episodic film once, and then again. United in the paternoster. … He grasped the changeover mechanism [die Wende] in the guise of a tirelessly obliging elevator. So much greatness. So many descents. So many endings and beginnings. (476, adapted)

Although Fonty replays the imagined time-loop several times and ends with a reflection on how beginnings follow endings, the passage as a whole is determined by ‘descents’, rather than ascents. The dictators disappear one after another, and their collective passing is ‘united’ in the lift’s ‘changeover mechanism’ (this is a pun in the German:€ Wende is both the famous historic turn of 1989 and a technical term referring to the lift’s transition at the top of its cycle round the building). The double Wende period that Fonty wanders through over the course of the novel is here made synonymous predominantly with the end of political regimes€– ‘So many descents. So many endings’€– to the point where Fonty even begins to anticipate the ‘sinking trajectory’ of Helmut Kohl in present-day Germany. This is a Matzerath-style postfuturum production he would surely like to play to Kohl, but in the subsequent chapters he contents himself instead with returning to the filmscript of his own death, acknowledging first his own mortality compared to the ‘immortal’ Fontane statue at Neuruppin, then finally accepting his irrelevance at the Handover Trust (where his last task, tellingly, is to find another word for ‘winding down’), before gradually phasing himself, through a series of iconic film stills, out of his German existence and into the eternal blue of France.13 Fonty’s understanding of his own rootedness in a certain historical moment that is on the wane is not just linked to political regimes, however. He reflects even more overtly throughout the novel on authorial groupings and their legacy. Clearly, in his biological life as Theo Wuttke, employee of the Cultural Union (Kulturbund), he has had much to do with GDR writers. This is apparent not least in the esteem in which he is held by the Prenzlauer Berg poets who wait patiently to celebrate his seventieth birthday with him. He personally identifies with Uwe Johnson

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and Christa Wolf in the scenes at the Neuruppin Fontane monument, before taking up the pen himself to create a similar kind of autobiographically inspired writing in his reworking of Fontane’s Kindheit und Jugend (Childhood and Youth, 1894). Beyond this, however, he is also seen as representative of a certain cultural tradition by others. Thus the archivists describe a painting by an East German cultural dissident dating from the 1970s in which Fonty is depicted surrounded by Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Gerhart Hauptmann, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, the Mann brothers, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Johannes R. Becher, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wolf, Wolf Biermann and Hans-Joachim Schädlich (38–9), while Hoftaller draws parallels between Fonty’s involvement with the Prenzlauerberg dissidents and Fontane’s participation in the ‘Tunnel über der Spree’ grouping (29). While all these authorial groupings are characterised by a critical or challenging stance towards their respective political times, they ultimately stand out more for the cultural movement to which they gave rise€ – realism, modernism or internationally recognised East German writing, for example€– and tellingly these movements are now past. The reappearance of these authors at various junctures in the text thus adds another, specifically cultural, dimension to Fonty’s wanderings across the Berlin/Brandenburg of the previous 150 years:€they emphasise a series of cultural moments within modern German literature, collectively a certain cultural tradition, which, through Fonty, is being given one final flowering before it is overlaid by what is to come. The fact that this tradition will gradually diminish in importance is at all times apparent through the repeated portrayal of Fonty as quirky, entertaining precisely in the odd way he facilitates the increasingly rare revival of past cultural icons, Theodor Fontane of course above all. Thus, when he bursts into one of his characteristic spontaneous performances of Fontane’s poetry in McDonald’s, the reaction to the historical epic he recites is a mixture of amazement and cultic adoration: No wonder every table had fallen silent. No one dared bite into a cheeseburger, a Big Mac. Fonty was rewarded with applause. All clapped, young and old. … His performance had filled the crowd with such enthusiasm that two squealing girls sitting nearby jumped up, teetered toward him, and showered him with hugs and kisses like maniacs. (25)

Likewise, much later on when he performs to a sell-out audience in the Culture Brewery (Kulturbrauerei), his lecture finds favour primarily for the way in which it transports its audience back to a cultural setting, which, while it can obviously be mapped onto a criticism of contemporary

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capitalist society, appeals precisely because it is the past. Fonty is valued so highly not least because he is one of the few remaining individuals able to bring this past back to life:€his generation, spanning three distinct political and cultural moments, is a dying breed. In this respect, celebrating Fonty by listing his achievements and minutely cataloguing his idiosyncratic performances and actions, as the archivists do throughout their 780-page ‘report’, is the ultimate gesture of nostalgic leave-taking from a certain cultural moment. It is also the key structuring device determining the entire text, and, importantly for my discussion of late work, this text comes not from Fonty but from his dedicated archivist-readers. In the book as whole, then, the idea of history as an eternal return is less vigorously pursued than the sense of taking one’s personal leave from the historical cycle, of seeing times pass and individuals and institutions fade away, whatever they will come to be replaced with. This thematic concern is accompanied by a broadly melancholic tone and an at times rather excessive tendency to catalogue minute and often enough repetitive detail, as befits the literary-critical stereotype of the archivist developed by Walter Benjamin.14 This is of course in itself a kind of political statement on the part of Grass, but not the Cassandra-style one with which he has come to be associated in dominant readings of the novel. The decision deliberately not to be future-oriented, to create a novel about personal ageing and collective leave-taking from historical and cultural eras and, in this sense, consciously and painstakingly living death, is a counter to the euphoria of unification and the anticipated emergence of a new Germany which predominated in the early part of the 1990s, but it is not necessarily a direct criticism of these trends. Rather, it represents Grass’s own idiosyncratic concerns at the time. According to my reading, Fonty is less a representative of the East, in either a positive or a negative sense, than of old age and the shifting concerns that ageing brings. As the novel progresses, he increasingly represents a certain distance to the cycle of life, whatever political period it is set within. It is true that he sees himself physically fading€ – and bouts of ill-health, senility and fragility increasingly take over his daily experience€ – as the political and cultural systems which have bounded his existence up to now are also beginning to fade, and this convergence makes his reflections on these times all the more poignant. But as Fonty alternately lurches between unexpected outbursts and ever more inwardturning bouts of contemplation it becomes clear that determining his character throughout the novel is much less a specific contemporary political agenda than the evolution of a very personal response to this process

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of personal historicisation. For, notwithstanding his Fontane-inspired tirades against certain political and social institutions, Fonty spends comparatively little time responding to major political developments.15 Rather, he sets about defining his place in the ‘wide-ranging field’ (weites Feld) of his individual historical circumstances and is determined precisely not to be overwhelmed by the delicacies of personal relations and wider social duties as was Briest in Fontane’s day. In determining that he can indeed see an end to the field that has bounded his existence, he lives out his final days in the geographical remove of France with all the insouciance of one who is determinedly still ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’. In this, he becomes a textual riddle, a late work that demands to be read by the archivists who are left behind to try to make sense of his doubly intransigent life. R e a di ng l at e s t y l e a n d c ons t ruc t i ng c e l e br i t y To return to the idea of the affective nature of late style raised by Taberner, it seems pertinent at this point to consider what Grass wishes to achieve by placing the concept of lateness so clearly at the centre of his text. For while there is a political point to be made in mapping the end of a culturally significant protagonist’s life on to the end of a historically significant political regime, lateness as a point of political criticism from the author hardly gives much contour to Fonty as a literary character who is explicitly described as an object of ongoing fascination for the archivists and other members of the public. Indeed, we are repeatedly reminded of Fonty’s importance for his contemporaries, with the inspirational effect he can have on both individuals and crowds drawn out in a number of scenes. This inspirational effect is only very tangentially related to any obvious political sympathies, as the lack of explicit knowledge amongst the youth at the Culture Brewery implies:€‘even the younger people were aware, though perhaps only by hearsay, that there had been something special about this man, sometime long ago. … Was supposed to have said something … Anyway, if this Fonty was speaking, you had to be there’ (629, adapted). Setting the potential political significance of his character to one side as in any case overlooked by many of Fonty’s contemporaries, I suggest a more rewarding way of understanding the protagonist and his function in the text is to focus on the processes of ‘celebrification’€– that is to say, the public construction of celebrity€– that coalesce around him and may be linked to the ideas of lateness as a thematic and stylistic concern developed above.16

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I have already hinted at the celebration of Fonty as a late cultural icon in the celebrity effect that seems to take over in McDonald’s, where Fonty finds himself mobbed by the enthusiastic young listeners who happen to be present at his epic recital. In fact, the construction of celebrity is deliberately highlighted in respect of Fonty’s character from a very early stage in the book. When he fails to show up to the seventieth birthday party celebrations with the Prenzlauer Berg poets, they immediately begin to speculate that he has been commandeered by West German TV talkshow hosts, while Fonty, citing Fontane’s letter to Pfarrer Jacobi, himself draws leading parallels between his seventieth birthday and that of the famous author, focusing particularly on the modern idea of celebrity:€‘I was feted colossally€– and then again not at all. Modern Berlin has made an idol of me; but the old Prussia … hardly lifted a finger’ (17). The implication in both cases is that Fonty/Fontane is rediscovered by a predominantly younger public in his late years as an eccentric cultural icon from the past, and is subsequently made into a cultish projection space, or, as Fontane puts it on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday and Fonty tritely recites to Hoftaller in an argument about his anti-Semitism:€‘To everyone present I was of note, / Each one had read some work which I wrote. / For many a year, to all I was known / And that is the main thing, so come along, Cohn!’ (46). The light-heartedness underlying Fonty’s use of this quotation should be noted, as it indicates the extent to which Fonty is, at least semi-consciously, complicit in public constructions of his person and enjoys witnessing the wider social effects that such iconicity can achieve. Thus if he finds himself placed by some overly zealous fans within monumentalising national-historical narratives, as some critics have argued, he does not necessarily occupy a victim position within these narratives.17 Indeed, the insistence, here and elsewhere throughout the novel, on Fonty’s ability to impress younger generations draws attention to the way in which the affective nature of late style is deliberately played out in the novel as a social phenomenon that can be actively empowering for stylist and interpreters alike. For if the quirks, discordances and irritations of late style are literally embodied in his ponderous, stubborn and often unpredictable character, the fascination that Fonty nevertheless exerts over a large number of unnamed members of the public results in him being actively constructed and inflected as a kind of inspirational late work by his contemporaries. His very lateness€– that is to say, the deliberately aesthetic, social and political untimeliness that is clearly an integral part of his self-conception€ – is what attracts attention in the first place, while the way in which he publicly allows himself to be guided by the liberties

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of old age proves on a number of occasions to be inspirational to those caught in otherwise more conventional modes of behaviour. Thus, for the Treuhand boss, Detlev Rohwedder, who is the official face of change and rationalisation in the new Germany by day, Fonty offers a rather more humane form of companionship and advice by night as the two meet at the Institute in the small hours and retreat to Fonty’s office. In his own quirky way, Fonty mixes literary insight with practical political relativism and personal warmth to offer friendship to someone with whom, both politically and generationally, he has little in common. He does this, significantly, through extended discussion of the late and little known text Quitt (1890) by Fontane.18 Taking time out from their everyday activities, they both have the space and time for Fonty to help his boss see things differently. Thus Rowedder returns to work with fresh élan as the sun rises, buoyed up by his time out with Fonty. If Fonty rather surprisingly establishes a valued personal connection to his boss that runs counter to what one might expect politically, he less surprisingly exerts the greatest influence over larger, like-minded groups of people who seek him out precisely because of his iconic cultural status. His ability to function as a kind of cultural rallying point is brought out explicitly in the chapter ‘Mortal Remains’, which details the exhumation and final burial of the Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm and his son, Frederick the Great. Here, Fonty pointedly distances himself from the royal pomp and circumstance, where he feels€– just as with Fontane’s seventieth birthday€– underappreciated by the Prussian nobility and their successors:€he knows they will never make him their ‘guest of honor with a front-row seat’ (615). Ordinary bystanders who have simply come to enjoy the spectacle, however, are quick to notice Fonty’s presence, ultimately showering him with too much adulation, as the archivists document: Perhaps his dignified demeanor, with hat, walking stick, and lightweight overcoat, commanded respect. At any rate, even in the densest crowd a path opened up for them. Older people greeted him. Some even doffed their visored caps. There was the impression that the incarnation of Prussian virtues was in their midst. The word ‘aura’ seemed fitting. … As the shouts of ‘Fonty!’ multiplied€– someone yelled, ‘Fonty’s our king!’€– it became too much for the object of this adulation. (619–20)

Spurned by real political power, Fonty is enthusiastically welcomed by the lay public who understand royal leadership in the rather more trivial terms of popular cultural representation and are quite prepared to elevate their democratically elected ‘king’ to a quasi-mystical position in

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a manner that shows clear parallels to processes of celebrity construction:€ Fonty is vicariously incorporated into his fans’ own lived experience. This, certainly, is exactly what happens in the scene at the Culture Brewery, where Fonty is given the time and space to exert a considerable influence over his admiring audience. Here, Fonty is under no illusions as to what exactly it is that has made him such a figure of popular projection. Rising from his (now granted) ‘place of honor’ he takes his place at the lectern ‘relying completely on his yesteryearly appearance’ (630) and proceeds to entertain the crowd with historical role-play as they are invited to imagine themselves as guests of the Treuhand, celebrating the thousandth ‘winding-down’ in fancy dress as one of Fontane’s literary characters. Offered a way in to the by-now rather arcane world of Fontane’s fiction, the audience is collectively carried away by their role-play and identifies absolutely with the drama Fonty describes of fires breaking out across Fontane’s works. The result is rather like the ‘Onion Cellar’ scene of Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959):€a kind of social anarchy is unleashed, as the public loses its ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and experiences the actual fire at the Treuhand as an emotional release to which they react in politically quite unacceptable terms, cheering and rushing off to enjoy the spectacle. Located ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’, Fonty thus offers a spirited model of resistance to a fast-changing world. His insistence on taking stock, making wide-ranging and complex links between art and politics, and reflecting on unresolved and often enough unresolvable contradictions in the world makes him an intriguing late work in and of himself, and this late work is inflected in various different ways by his readers, ranging from the hasty over-identification on the part of an admiring public in search of a cult figure, as discussed above, to the pedantic attempt to document the life and times of a literary and historical great, as carried out by the archivists throughout the narrative. Both groups are, each in their own way, trying to come to their own understanding of contemporary political developments and their place in the world, and Fonty, precisely because of his liminal chronological positioning, offers them an alternative way of reading this present that challenges and entertains in one. His figure, attributed a certain mystical ‘aura’ by these readers, thus takes on not just a celebrity status amongst his immediate contemporaries but is made to champion the affective power of late style for the world more generally. This last move clearly also points beyond the text, bringing us face to face with its author and his own timeliness in the literary and political landscape.

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In choosing to create a long, backwards-looking, slow-paced and decidedly non-euphoric narrative set in the unification period, Grass was clearly placing himself at odds with the dominant literary and political discourses of the first half of the 1990s. This fits in with a wider self-positioning that had become characteristic of Grass’s literary and political interventions since the end of the 1980s. I have discussed this in some detail elsewhere, emphasising the paradox of one of Germany’s most prominent literary intellectuals repeatedly insisting on his lack of public resonance in a broad range of high-profile places.19 Indeed, Grass’s continued selfstylisation since Ein weites Feld as old and therefore irrelevant, politically one of the ‘last Mohicans’ and aesthetically ‘leergeschrieben’ (literally:€he has ‘written himself empty’), is so clearly at odds with his ongoing ability to make front-page news that it can only be understood as a calculated rhetorical gesture from an author who is very much aware of the way in which his work is read and the expectations people bring to his person.20 Bearing in mind the way lateness functions as a pervading theme in Ein weites Feld and the main character textually embodies the affective nature of late style, it is tempting therefore to ask to what extent Grass’s depiction of Fonty is a concealed celebration of the author’s own potential to function as a kind of iconic late work. Certainly, as Nicole Thesz has pointed out, Grass has repeatedly stressed the ability of literature to enable a more complex, and thus meaningful, engagement with recent history than a politically led monument culture or the superficial reporting that characterises modern mass media.21 Tellingly, he refers to literature’s ‘delayed effect’ on society, or ‘Spätzündung’, in his 1999 Nobel Prize lecture, which considers at length the value of famous authors for the contemporary world.22 Here, and elsewhere, Grass makes it clear that the author has the ability to function as an important cultural rallying point, and that authors can consequently find themselves constructed as celebrity figures in a multitude of different contexts, utilised by their readers to different ends, and often enough chronologically and geographically transported to situations where they might not at first glance best belong. In this, key to Grass’s model of authorial value is however a very optimistic understanding of his readers and the efforts they are prepared to make to follow their author. For while Fonty may be able to pack out the Culture Brewery with generÂ� ations of fictitious German readers who possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of Fontane’s works and propel Fonty’s lecture forward with their

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identificatory enthusiasm, the way in which the novel Ein weites Feld set about recreating Fontane’s world in contemporary Berlin was not met with anything like the same degree of interest, or fertile literary grounding, from its actual readers. What many commentators discerned in the novel instead was a blatant attempt on the part of its author to elevate himself to a position of national importance by putting an unmistakeable Günter-Grass stamp on the last 150 years of German history. Where Fonty embodied a kind of late style that was not only entertaining in its quirkiness but positively useful in the way it helped those who engaged with it to see their world differently, Grass was widely accused of having fallen victim to the self-aggrandisement of old age and, as a result, produced a thoroughly unreadable text that was judged to have little to no wider social value. Such accusations do not detract from the novel’s status as a significant late work. In fact, following McMullan’s discussion of late writing as primarily a problematics of classification, they actively endorse it as such. The divergence between Grass’s fictional presentation of how lateness might be valued in society and the actual facts concerning the way his own lateness has been constructed by his contemporaries does point, however, to the different ways in which late style is abstractly valued in literary-critical terms and practically received in society. For critics such as Leeder and Taberner, Grass’s late work is turning out to be unexpectedly rewarding, both as a kind of evolving social comment on authorship and as individual aesthetic pieces that investigate stylistic engagements with the notion of ‘timeliness’. For not unrelated reasons, it has become quite unpalatable to a broad sweep of general readers, for whom Grass’s seemingly never-ending and stylistically overdetermined ‘Alterswerk’ (work of old age) has dominated the contemporary German literary scene for far too long. For the author, however, Ein weites Feld may well mark an important turning point in this ‘Alterswerk’, as lateness stops being a playful stylistic construct and starts becoming a philosophical fact of life. If the sustained public hostility towards Grass’s studied untimeliness in aesthetic and political terms over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s made the author increasingly acquainted with the more negative aspects of literary celebrity, there is strong evidence to suggest that he has now seriously begun to envisage the passing of his own star and finally really is setting about writing his own end with vigour, because, as he puts it in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006) ‘I want to have the last word’.23 With this, the aftermath of the novel Ein weites Feld represents one final leave-taking:€of Grass the author from the notion that literature

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can confer timeless insight on its readers and that authors can meaningfully outlive their eras. In programmatically reinserting himself as a historically bounded construct back into his life and times in the later works, whether ironically as in Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002) and Letzte Tänze or rather more questioningly as in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel and Die Box, Grass, as a result, has in fact made a timely move towards the more modestly grounded family narratives, life-writing and generational fiction which, as other contributions to this volume will elaborate upon, represent powerful and popular trends within the German-language novel since 1990. The fact that in so doing he is now producing a body of work that does, in fact, fit into contemporary trends but seems bound, for reasons of popular public perception, not to be acknowledged as such, shows the ageing author on course to live out the final stage of his career in a fitting paradox. No t e s 1 See Oskar Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty:€ Ein weites Feld im Spiegel der Kritik (Göttingen:€Steidl, 1996). 2 Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing:€Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3 I draw here on Karen Leeder, ‘Günter Grass’s lateness:€reading Grass with Adorno and Saïd’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 49–66. 4 Edward Saïd, On Late Style:€ Music and Literature against the Grain (New York:€Pantheon Books, 2006), 24 5 Leeder, ‘Günter Grass’s lateness’, 51. 6 Stuart Taberner, ‘“Kann schon sein, daß in jedem Buch von ihm etwas Egomäßiges rauszufinden ist”:€ “Political” private biography and “private” private biography in Günter Grass’s Die Box (2008)’, German Quarterly, 82:4 (2009), 504–21, 508. 7 My translation from Günter Grass, Ein weites Feld, in Werkausgabe, 16 vols., ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes (Göttingen:€Steidl, 1997), vol. 13, ed. Daniela Hermes, 781. 8 See Philip Broadbent, ‘Generational shifts:€Representing post-Wende Berlin’, New German Critique, 35:2 (2008), 139–69, and Michael Ewert, ‘Spaziergänge durch die deutsche Geschichte:€Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, 152:37 (1999), 402–17. 9 See Rebecca Braun, Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass (Oxford:€Clarendon Press, 2008). 10 Katharina Gerstenberger, Writing the New Berlin:€ The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2008), 9.

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11 See Stephen Brockmann, ‘Günter Grass and German unification’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125–38. 12 Günter Grass, Too Far Afield, trans. Krishna Winston (London:€Faber and Faber, 2000), 475. Subsequent references to this work appear as page numbers in parentheses in the text. 13 See Braun, Constructing Authorship, and Julian Preece, ‘“According to his inner geography, the Spree flowed into the Rhône”:€Too Far Afield and France’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€ Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 81–93. 14 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker’, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. 2, 465–505. 15 Nicole Thesz offers one way of understanding this, when she suggests that Fonty is too caught up in the past to engage productively with the present:€ ‘Identität und Erinnerung im Umbruch:€ Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Neophilologus, 87:3 (2003), 435–51, 446. 16 See Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London:€Reaktion, 2001). 17 Thesz suggests that ‘Fonty becomes the victim of a web of observers who divest him of his freedom and of his “Wuttke-identity”↜’:€‘Dangerous monuments:€Günter Grass and German memory culture’, German Studies Review 31:1 (2008), 1–21, 9. 18 Thesz works through the significance of Quitt in the narrative, and the idiosyncratic reading Fonty gives it, in “Without poachers, no foresters, and vice versa”:€Political violence in Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld ’, The German Quarterly, 80:1 (2007), 59–76. 19 Rebecca Braun, ‘Der alte Fuchs und die Medien:€ Autorschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Grass’ neueren Werken’, in Hanno Kesting, ed., Die Medien und Günter Grass (Cologne:€SH-Verlag, 2008), 29–39. 20 See my ‘Der alte Fuchs und die Medien’. On Grass’s contemporary political rhetoric, see Frank Finlay, ‘Günter Grass’s Political Rhetoric’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in The Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–38. 21 Thesz, ‘Dangerous monuments’. 22 Günter Grass, Fortsetzung folgt… (Göttingen:€Steidl, 1999). 23 Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London:€Harvill Secker, 2007), 8.

Ch apter 3

Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us) Anna Saunders

Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995) caused a notable stir in the German press after its publication, and has been aptly described as ‘the media event of winter 1995’.1 Within a year, the novel was already in its eighth printing, and an adaptation for stage was on the programmes of numerous theatres; in 1999, a film version was premiered to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Brussig€– little known before 1995, and whose first novel, Wasserfarben (Watercolours, 1991), was written under a pseudonym€– became an overnight hero, acclaimed for writing the ‘novel of unification’. Although he has since written a more weighty tome on the Wende, entitled Wie es leuchtet (How It Shines, 2004), the latter has failed to gain the same public attention as Helden wie wir. This is doubtless partly due to Helden wie wir’s irreverent humour, which focuses on the sexual development and perversions of the novel’s pathetic antihero, Klaus Uhltzscht. Yet the clever entwining of Klaus’s sexual fantasies with the perversions of state socialism also provided a fresh and provocative approach to the reworking of the communist past in the GDR and the early years of German unification, a period which was still fresh in the minds of many East Germans in 1995. Indeed, Helden wie wir seized the sentiment of the time, parodying the numerous memoirs, protocols and autobiographies that had been published in the early to mid-1990s. It also drew on the work of the much-read psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz, whose books explained the downfall of the GDR by analysing the inner psyche of the East German population, focusing particularly on authoritarian lifestyles and the mechanics of repression both within the home and in the public sphere.2 Brussig’s bestseller was, quite clearly, a well-timed novel which struck a chord with the concerns of the time. Despite its resonance with the mid-1990s, Helden wie wir also draws on longer literary traditions, most obviously on the picaresque genre, as Klaus recounts his dubious adventures from an autobiographical 50

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narrative perspective, and the text is a sharp satire of the society in which he lives. In this vein, Brussig’s novel reminds us of Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), for the protagonists of both live on the margins of their respective societies, yet they are also the immediate€– and disturbing€– products of these societies; while Oskar Matzerath chooses physical deformity by refusing to grow beyond his third birthday, Klaus grows into a psychologically and emotionally deformed adult. Furthermore, the opening paragraph of Helden wie wir, in which Klaus recounts his birth, reminds us of Oskar’s memory of his own birth, and the motif of the ‘fall down the stairs’ constitutes a life-changing moment for both narrators. Brussig’s antihero also reminds us of social misfits from the East German literary tradition, most predominantly Edgar Wibeau in Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W., 1973), who, like Klaus, records episodes of his life onto tape. As in Plenzdorf’s text, the influence of J.D. Salinger’s controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) can also be seen in Helden wie wir, in so far as both novels depict a frustrated adolescence and the desire to flaunt the norms of society. Indeed, there is little doubt that a large part of Brussig’s inspiration came from across the Atlantic, especially in his sexually explicit scenes and phallocentric tales. Such authors include John Irving, whose The World according to Garp (1978) features in Helden wie wir, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and above all Philip Roth, in particular with his novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).3 Brussig thus draws on an irreverent narrative tradition from the United States to depict a very German affair€– and in doing so brings a fresh approach to the writing of recent German history. It is the meeting of literature and history which forms the heart of Brussig’s novel, for he also draws on€– and subverts€– a number of historical traditions, thereby highlighting the fine line between story-telling and the writing of history. In taking one of the most momentous periods of contemporary history and reducing it to the sexual history of a teenager obsessed with the size of his penis€– to the point of the hilariously unbelievable€– Brussig forces us to question the status of historical ‘fact’, and consequently to explore the distinctions between fiction and history. Klaus introduces the reader to this relationship from the very start. On the opening page, he talks of his ‘historical responsibilities’ (5) and of the need to set the record straight€– thus to clear up a few historical misunderstandings, namely the oft-cited ‘the-people-besieged-the-Wall-legend’ (6) and the press conference ‘fairy tale’ at which Schabowski supposedly announced the opening of the Wall (6).4 Instead, Klaus corrects history

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with his own ‘truth’:€‘The story of the fall of the Wall is the story of my penis’ (7). This is a long-winded story in which he finally explains how he stunned border guards with his oversized penis into opening the border. Much like the black-and-white version of historical writing in the GDR, Klaus sets up his own story as the key to understanding German history, indeed as ‘the missing link of recent German history’ (323). It seems that Brussig presents us with a singular version of history that is much more ridiculous than the popular history which is under attack. However, Klaus’s account is not always so clear-cut. When recalling the story of his first allergic reaction to strawberries, for instance, he claims:€‘I’ve heard the story so often that I can hardly distinguish it from my own memories’ (22), and similarly, elsewhere, he admits to reconstructing his narrative ‘from shreds of memory’ (96). Thus where history becomes legendary and is reproduced in multiple forms and through diverse media, it rapidly enters the realm of myth, if not fiction. As this chapter shows, Brussig highlights this phenomenon by foregrounding the historical narrative as a construct, and he does so through the deliberate parody and perversion of three key elements:€ the concept of a masternarrative, the fragility of historical sources and the use of language. H i s t or y a s m a s t e r-n a r r at i v e Growing up in the GDR, Klaus is exposed to socialist propaganda in which history is written according to the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. He is taught that, through class struggle, society will move towards the future goal of communism, the end point in the master-narrative of historical progress. This is highlighted in Klaus’s student atlas, in which the countries of the world are coloured blue (capitalist), red (socialist) or green (young states on their way to socialism), with each successive map revealing an increasing number of red countries. Brussig plays with this notion of historical progress in Klaus’s vision of his own future. For, despite being ‘the most ill-informed person, a toilet-blocker, a loser of things, the result of a fuck on “Totensonntag” [Sunday before Advent, when the dead are commemorated] and the last doggy paddler’ (92), he remains convinced of his future greatness, seeing himself destined for not only the Nobel Peace Prize, but also the Nobel Prize for literature. Indeed, he sees his future to be pre-determined according to a greater historical scheme:€‘Someone had plans for me, and everything that happens to me becomes a mosaic stone, which joins with others to form a picture and convey a meaning’ (169). Such passages remind us not only of the GDR’s

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ambitious economic plans, but also of the Party’s deluded vision of the GDR’s future role in history. Klaus’s self-perception was similarly deluded, for his only claim to fame before November 1989 was the fact that, when he was nine, several national newspapers had published a photograph of him at the ‘exhibition fair of tomorrow’s masters’ (‘Messe der Meister von morgen’)€– hardly a claim to greatness. After joining the GDR State Security Services (Stasi), his sense of selfimportance increases and Klaus believes he is on an important historical mission, picturing himself as a James-Bond-like action hero. Brussig refrains, however, from framing his narrator within the world of Western action films, and remains true to the world of Eastern legends. Klaus thus draws a parallel with the East German TV spy series ‘The Invisible Target’ (170), yet, more importantly€– once his ‘mission’ has begun€– he aligns himself with the legendary figure of the ‘little trumpeter’, a bugler fatally shot by a policeman at a Communist Party rally in 1925, and widely celebrated in the GDR as a socialist martyr. Just as the little trumpeter allegedly put his life on the line for his party leader, Ernst Thälmann, and the greater good of communism, Klaus sees himself as Erich Honecker’s saviour, donating his blood in a life-threatening transfusion€– the irony being that, in contrast to the little trumpeter, he was unaware of the destination of his blood until the procedure was complete. Here Brussig parodies the socialist view that individual effort should be dedicated to the service of the greater good and that past sacrifices constitute part of the road to communism; as Klaus reflects after falling down a flight of steps at the 4 November demonstration and severely injuring his genitals:€ ‘I discovered that I have a past and that this past has a meaning’ (293). The parody reaches its symbolic high point when Klaus meets the convalescent Honecker and they play Mikado€ – ‘a game that is lost as soon as something moves’ (273)€– in an episode that pokes fun at the notion of a ‘progressive’ society which has come to a stand-still before reaching its end point. The writing of history in the GDR also falls prey to Brussig’s satire and is uncovered as little more than a farcical story which is manipulated by those in power to fit the master-narrative. One of Klaus’s colleagues in the Stasi, for instance, recounts how he covered up for breaking a mirror during a raid on a dissident’s apartment by inserting a report of a minor earthquake in the newspaper the following day (161). Even the natural elements, it seems, could be re-written by the Stasi. More notable, perhaps, is the manipulation of Klaus’s own life story by his father, also a Stasi member, who proved to be behind his son’s one moment of fame,

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the publication of his photograph in the national press. As Klaus discovered to his chagrin years later at maths camp, this had most likely been engineered by his father as a ruse to end the career of the Politbüro member with whom he was featured on the photograph (91–2). Both these incidents lead Klaus to question the writing of history and the recording of events in the GDR:€‘Is life simply a theatre set€– and the Stasi the scene-shifters?’ (162). The presentation of the Stasi’s Monty-Pythonesque employees as largely inarticulate and incompetent only further heightens this satire of the organisation’s attempts to manipulate history, and with it the very notion of the master-narrative. Qu e s t ion a bl e h i s t or ic a l s ou rc e s Brussig’s critique of historical writing lies not only in his subject matter, but also in the formal structure of his text, for he chooses to parody two types of historical sources:€the autobiography and the interview. It is, of course, significant that the memoirs and autobiographies of many wellknown politicians and writers were published during the years prior to the publication of Helden wie wir,5 and passages from Erich Honecker’s From My Life (1981) were notably analysed by Maaz. Other personalities chose to recount their lives to journalists and historians, leading to the publication of numerous ‘eye witness’ accounts of events, as well as collections of protocols of ‘everyday’ citizens who lived through this momentous Â�period.6 Brussig draws on these trends to give structural form to his text, as well as to allow him to critique the veracity of such historical sources. Although Helden wie wir is self-evidently not an autobiography, it alludes throughout to this genre and Brussig parodies common traits in the life stories of self-pronounced heroes. This is most obvious in the opening paragraph of the novel€– Klaus’s failed attempt to write his own autobiography€ – the grand opening of which links his first days to the broader political developments of the period. In this way, Brussig satÂ�irises those who attempt to write themselves into history and who see their public-political role as synonymous with their birth:€‘The air stank and trembled in a sinister fashion, and the world into which I emerged was a political world’ (5). The novel’s opening thus foregrounds the autobiographical genre as one which is highly constructed€ – and as one which should not be taken at face value. Although the rest of the text is presented as a spoken interview, Klaus’s constant efforts to entwine his own life with the broader sweep of history bear close resemblance to numerous autobiographical accounts, and the synchronised nature of Klaus’s

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life with that of the GDR cannot be overlooked. Born during the Prague Spring of 1968, as state socialism began to be subject to increasing criticism, he turns twenty-one in the year that the Wall falls, and his father€– a symbol of the authoritarian nature of the GDR€– dies just as the paternalistic state begins to collapse in 1989. Above all, his troubled puberty maps conveniently onto the perverted nature of GDR socialism in the 1980s€– a metaphor which continues into united Germany as ‘The Healed Penis’ (‘Der geheilte Pimmel’), the title of the last chapter and a satirical inversion of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963). This novel, written soon after the building of the Berlin Wall, provides an ideal target for Brussig, for despite its critical portrayal of some aspects of life in the GDR it ultimately supports the future of GDR socialism through the dedication of its central character, Rita, who provides a stark contrast to the perverted antihero Klaus. Brussig also delves into the private lives of both Klaus and the GDR, examining those elements which are to be hidden from public view:€Klaus’s overactive libido on the one hand and the inner workings of the Stasi on the other. In presenting each as ridiculous as the other, yet as central to the minds of their masters, Brussig underlines not only the pathetic nature of his narrator, but also the moral bankruptcy of the GDR regime. The intertwining of both lives does not stop here, however, and Klaus adopts many of the party’s formulae into his own life, thereby internalising GDR socialism and allowing Brussig to underline the absurdities of socialist rhetoric. Indeed, the elements with which Klaus identifies all take on a sexual quality. He keeps, for example, a ‘card index of a new type’ (‘Kartei neuen Typus’, 247) following Lenin’s ‘party of a new type’ (‘Partei neuen Typus’); not, however, a record of party procedures, but rather of his latest sexual perversions. Similarly, he identifies with socialist heroes in a somewhat unconventional way. Although he sees himself as Honecker’s ‘little trumpeter’, this legendary socialist hero is used more frequently in the text to refer to Klaus’s pitifully small penis, which somewhat diminishes his heroic standing. He also describes himself as ‘the Gagarin of perversion!’ (270), makes Mielke ‘the object of my masturbatory fantasies’ (196) and plays with GDR-style slogans, asking, for instance, ‘How do you like the dialectical entity socialism needs perversion, perversion needs socialism!’ (247). It is little surprise, then, that Klaus regards masturbating as a patriotic duty, and his life becomes so inextricably linked to that of the GDR that they become inseparable€ – the system becomes as perverted as he is. In drawing this parallel, Brussig once again lays bare the effects of repression within both the public and

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private spheres, and it is Klaus’s self-defence that is perhaps the most disturbing element of the novel, for€– as if confirming Maaz’s theories€– he sees himself to be nothing more than a product of the society in which he was raised:€‘but I am a child from their midst! I haven’t done anything that my teachers and TV programmes warned me against! I always did what others wanted! I never did what I wanted, otherwise I would be happy!’ (282). This outcry reminds us of other declarations of self-defence after the Wende, and Brussig’s text€– despite transcending the bounds of the believable€– provides a sharp critique of the many self-aggrandising accounts which were written following the demise of the GDR. Brussig’s decision to frame Klaus’s account as an interview with the New York Times reporter Mr Kitzelstein, however, targets a further type of historical source, and introduces a key relationship to the narrative:€that between interviewer and interviewee. This is critical in shaping the version of history that is consumed by the public, and although Klaus may be content with the illusion that the interview is simply a ‘voice test’ (18), Kitzelstein’s role is central to the uncovering of Klaus’s story. Yet the name ‘Kitzelstein’ (literally meaning ‘tickle stone’) does not generate much faith in this journalist, for it rather matches the roguish nature of his interviewee. What, indeed, are his intentions, and to what extent does he buy into Klaus’s story? The interview thus highlights the potentially unreliable nature of oral history on two levels. First, Klaus’s insistence on the truth of his (highly unbelievable) story challenges the status of the interview as a reliable form of historical evidence. Second, we are reminded that we depend ultimately on the discretion of the interviewer in the publishing process, and although Helden wie wir does not take us beyond the interview itself, Kitzelstein’s allusive name causes us to question his purpose. Furthermore, the presence of the tape recorder reminds us of techniques used by the Stasi to gather evidence, which both lends the interview a confessional character,7 and draws our attention towards the unsavoury way in which taped evidence may be deployed. Kitzelstein’s presence as a silent interviewer is also significant. Although we can sometimes gauge his reactions and facial expressions from Klaus’s comments, his voice is never heard. In this way, we, as readers, almost sit in Kitzelstein’s seat, and feel as if we ourselves are being addressed. On the occasions that Klaus poses a question and thereby turns the interview round, we become the object of inquisition. While the majority of Klaus’s questions are rhetorical, some are more provocative, such as his entreaty towards the end of the novel:€‘Look at the East Germans before and after the fall of the Wall. Passive beforehand, passive afterwards€ – how can they ever have

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demolished the Wall?’ (319–20). Faced with such a question, we, like Kitzelstein, are temporarily put in the hot seat, asked to pass judgement on the events of recent history and thus to step outside our passive role, and beyond the text itself. Despite Klaus’s criticism of Eastern passivity, the interview actually presents the Eastern narrator as active and the Western interviewer as passive, at least during the interview itself. Kitzelstein’s American identity allows Brussig not only to explain GDR references to his non-EastÂ�German audience, but also to thematise the relationship between East and West following the Wende, a relationship in which the East often allowed its story to be told by the West, thereby renouncing some of its influence. By recounting his story to Kitzelstein, Klaus thus inadvertently surrenders some of his newfound power. The view of some critics that Klaus is in full control of the interview and that Kitzelstein is little more than a ‘sounding board’8 and potentially even a figment of Klaus’s imagination9 does carry certain weight€– after all, Kitzelstein cannot get a word in edgeways. However, the fact that Kitzelstein will proceed to use Klaus’s story as he pleases ultimately places Kitzelstein in control. Here, we are reminded not only of the role of the West in shaping Eastern narratives after unification, but also of the fragility of the interview as a historical source, and of the fate of individual (hi)stories in the hands of their writers. Damning light is thus focused on the mass media and its frequent distortion of past events. The most biting criticism of this phenomenon is in the very last sentence of the novel, in which Klaus asks Kitzelstein:€‘Was that what you wanted to know?’ (321). Indeed, this ending leaves us with more questions than answers:€has Klaus fashioned his story specifically for Kitzelstein? Is it being told merely for commercial purposes? If so, what should we believe, if any of it? In this way, we are forced to question the motives of both interviewer and interviewee, once again encouraging us to approach oral history with caution. T h e us e of l a nguag e Alongside his critique of master-narratives and historical sources, Brussig also targets the use of language, a central component in the process of writing and re-writing history. Indeed, this is particularly important at times of revolutionary change, for a new language is often sought with which to break free from the discourses of previous regimes. As this section demonstrates, Helden wie wir highlights the search for a ‘new’ language amongst four key players:€the Stasi, Christa Wolf, Klaus and Brussig himself.

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Klaus’s training in the Stasi involves, amongst other things, learning to write observation reports. His practical training session draws our attention to the ridiculous nature of this activity, in which the importance of developing a ‘new language’ is highlighted. As Eule, his instructor, responds when asked in more detail about the man under observation:€‘It’s not about him, but about you! You need to learn how to write an observation report, and to write€– let me put it this way€– in a new language’ (180). The entire process thus concerns not the content of the report, but rather the way in which it is written. Indeed, Brussig highlights the absurdities of Klaus’s search for a new language: A woman came out of the house. My palms started sweating. What should I write? About whom? A woman? A female person? A person of the female sex? A female? A female creature? A female being? A she? Or a woman after all? How do you write A woman came out of the house if you work for the Stasi? (180–1)

The ‘new’ language which finally emerges, however, is little more than gobbledegook:€ ‘fm. pers. apprs. st. 8.34’ (181), a clear reference to the many acronyms and shortened forms used in the Stasi files. This ridiculous language is little different from the confused and pointless constructions used by Klaus’s colleagues, whether these be Eule’s constant use of the term ‘negation of negation’ (156) to refer to anything contradictory, Grabs’s search for monosyllabic names beginning with ‘G’ (154–5), or Wunderlich’s comical explanation of ‘post-structuralism’ (221–3), not to mention Klaus’s own misunderstanding of ‘microfiche’ as ‘microfish’ (226). Brussig evidently has fun with language throughout the text, and often with highly amusing consequences, yet his observations of the Stasi are disturbing for two reasons. First, numerous passages reflect revelations which emerged after the opening of the Stasi files, from the organisation’s abuse of language to its irresponsible waste of time and resources.10 Second, the term ‘Stasi’ is never used in its own company, and formulations such as ‘You know full well where you are’ (113) ensure that those working for the organisation, particularly on an unofficial basis, could later claim that they were never entirely sure who they were working for. Although Brussig’s comic representation of the Stasi and the GDR’s repressive machinery is problematic for some,11 this approach, alongside his targeting of language, ultimately leads us to question the contents of another form of historical document:€the Stasi files themselves. The Stasi’s attempt to use a ‘new language’ also provides a link to Christa Wolf’s search for a utopian language in Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990). Following the acrid tones of the ‘literature dispute’ (‘Literaturstreit’)

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of the early 1990s, these and other scenes reminiscent of Was bleibt cannot be overlooked (e.g. the breaking of a mirror during the raid on a female writer’s flat [161] and the observation scene in which Klaus and two colleagues sit in a car outside a woman’s appartment [180–1]). In the last chapter of the novel, however, Brussig leaves nothing to the imagination, and launches into a full-blown attack on Wolf to such an extent that the voices of Klaus and Brussig appear to merge. It is, above all, Wolf’s use of language which falls prey to Brussig’s ire, and it is no coincidence that her speech of 4 November 1989, which is quoted in full, begins:€‘Every revolutionary movement also emancipates language’ (283). The fact that Klaus misidentifies her as the ice-skating coach Jutta Müller is, in itself, damning enough, but his comments on the speech are biting:€ ‘A true speech of a figure skating coach, don’t you think? That strained elegance, that indulgence in passages which are guaranteed to hit a top B flat’ (286). This reminds him of his mother’s language and that of her generation, which had helped build the GDR in the early years and still placed faith in a socialist future. As Tanja Nause suggests, Brussig plays on the term ‘mother tongue’ here,12 for Klaus feels the need to free himself not only from the clutches of this generation and their hypermoralism, but also from their language, which he cannot accept as free:€‘But even now, when everything suddenly flows freely from our lips, they are speaking of socialism, and not of the fact that we should finally be able to travel freely throughout the world’ (288). Having grown up in the stagnant society of the 1980s, Klaus’s generation stands worlds apart from that of their parents. The attack is, however, aimed primarily at Wolf herself, along with her search for ‘subjective authenticity’ and a pure ethical voice. Yet Klaus sees her writing as little more than a failed attempt to sit on the fence:€‘How can the politics of a writer be fairly interpreted, when what she says is hardly ever politically explicit’ (309). His only uses for her writing, it seems, relate to his sexual world, first as an ‘erection suppressor’ (307) when lying in hospital, and second as inspiration for his postWende career as a porn artist, when he appropriates the idiosyncratic shout of Christa T. (310), the central protagonist of Christa Wolf ’s novel Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968). By ridiculing her texts, Brussig aims to discredit them as potentially important comments on the socialist past, and in doing so he highlights the similarities between Wolf’s and the Stasi’s unsuccessful endeavours to create a new language. Although Brussig’s satire is often far-fetched, his concern with the misuse of language finds its roots quite clearly in the

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events of November 1989; it was, after all, the lack of clarity on the part of party bureaucrats which proved instrumental in the GDR’s demise, as demonstrated in the bumbling announcement given by Schabowski on 9 November 1989, in which he unintentionally caused thousands of East Germans to rush to the border. Faced with the problematic use of language in various quarters, Brussig himself sets about finding a new language with which to communicate more effectively. He does so firstly through his narrator, Klaus, and secondly through his own experimentation with a new, more brazen, style of writing. Language causes Klaus difficulties from early in his life, as he struggles to understand the Berlin dialect of his fellow pupils at school (32). This is hardly a surprise considering his mother’s overly articulated high German (‘the linguistic pedant par excellence’ [53]) and his father’s gruff interrogative style (‘the exemplary Stasi father! Interrogation!’ [88]). Moreover, his own surname, Uhltzscht, proves difficult not only to spell, but also to pronounce (31), depriving him of a secure identity, and indeed of a voice. Subjected to the language of his parents and the slogans of the state, Klaus thus seeks a new, freer language more akin to the language of the girls he encounters.13 Marina, for example, to whom he loses his virginity, sings ‘Toodeloodeloo, toodeloodeloo’ (125) in a carefree fashion, while Yvonne, the girl to whom he cannot admit his true feelings, speaks with a serenity which starkly contrasts with Klaus’s awkward and self-conscious speech (212). Indeed, Klaus finds the constraints of his own language€– his ‘mother tongue’€– too much, and argues that the nonsense sounds of song lyrics, including Marina’s ‘toodeloodeloo’, prove more meaningful than the language of his mother’s generation:€‘If language is to be emancipated, then properly’ (308). Klaus thus seeks a voice through different means, not through words, but through action, freeing himself from the shackles of his mother’s generation on the night of 9 November. Yet as he admits, it was only once he had become the GDR’s ‘most wretched zombie’ (106) that he turned to action. Even more damning is the fact that his new weapon was the result of an accident rather than any carefully planned operation. Here, we cannot help but be reminded of Schabowski’s announcement, which has often been labelled an ‘accident of history’. Thus although Klaus’s newfound ‘language’ proved more successful than that of either the Stasi or Wolf, it is far from a positive model€– quite apart from the fact that it led him to become a post-Wende porn star. This ‘language’ is clearly not one which can be accepted as a sensible suggestion for successful future communication.

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It is, then, Brussig who presents us with a new language€– that is, the language of burlesque comedy. Unlike other authors, such as Grass or even Wolf, he seeks to reach his audience not through moralising, but rather by provoking them through humour and disgust. Although his use of language for comic effect is standard (using, for example, subversion, word play and double-meanings), the crude choice of subject matter which is used to comment on this very recent history marks a new departure. This is perhaps best symbolised by the book’s cover image, male genitalia sculpted in marble, which the East German publisher Volk und Welt would certainly not have allowed five years previously. The language of Helden wie wir thus breaks a number of taboos, and, as Steffen Dietzsch has highlighted, laughter can serve a therapeutic function in overcoming the past.14 Yet we are left with a number of questions, as well as laughter, at the end of the novel:€is this a suitable language with which to represent the past? Does it trivialise the Stasi? Can this novel provide anything more than a short-term solution to ‘reworking’ the East German past? T h e rol e of l i t e r at u r e i n w r i t i ng a b ou t h i s t or y At first glance it may seem that Helden wie wir presents us with little more than a comical and irreverent historical lie. Yet by ‘perverting’ the historical tradition of communism, the autobiographical form and the interview, as well as linguistic norms, Brussig seeks to question the ‘truths’ of history. Indeed, one could claim that he sees this as his own ‘historical responsibility’. In encouraging us to question historical accounts, he thus highlights the fine line between history and fiction, and as such encourages us to become more responsible and historically aware consumers of both. Furthermore, despite Klaus’s self-professed heroism, we cannot help but see him as both a perpetrator and a victim of the system.15 In this way, the novel serves to undermine simplistic, and often unhelpful, categories which divide the GDR population into two. Fiction, however ridiculous, can thus be just as important as historical writing in furthering our understanding of the past. In raising such issues, Brussig follows in the footsteps of many writers, including, ironically, Christa Wolf. While their style and choice of language may be entirely different, their aims are not dissimilar€– to break free from a past order by finding a new way of writing about historical events and their effects on contemporary society. Indeed, as novels dealing with, and written shortly after, momentous events in German

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history, Helden wie wir and Der geteilte Himmel are not so far apart as Brussig might hope, with their main protagonists both displaying ‘metonymic ties to historical events’.16 A further similarity lies in the detailed description of everyday life in the GDR provided by both writers. Indeed, this element of Brussig’s text was especially commended in reviewers’ comments, which praised his ‘genre picture of real socialism’ and his ‘memory for the banalities of life in the GDR’.17 His realistic depiction of the stifling atmosphere of the 1980s also helps to explain how, and why, a young man could become so eagerly involved in the Stasi. As in Wolf ’s works, the socio-political climate in which Brussig’s protagonist has grown up crucially shapes his personal and professional life. For all the fanciful details of Klaus’s life and the mythical proportions of his tale, these details locate Brussig’s novel firmly in the GDR, and serve as a means to remember. To what extent, then, should Helden wie wir be considered the ‘novel of unification’? Was Brussig€– like Klaus€– simply in the right place at the right time, or should this novel occupy a place amongst the classics? There is little doubt that Brussig drew on the sentiment of the time, painting a hilarious but devastating picture of the GDR in its final years. Clearly this cannot, however, be regarded as the only way in which to view this past, and constitutes far from Brussig’s final word on the GDR and German unification, as demonstrated by his later publication Wie es leuchtet. It is crucially only together with other texts on this period that a more complex tapestry of the past can be woven, with this ‘novel of unification’ complementing many others. Indeed, if we take one message from Helden wie wir, it is the fact that no single text can provide a reliable narrative of the past, whether presented as fiction or as history. Klaus’s account makes us highly sceptical of the framing of history in neatly packaged stories, and it is perhaps here that Brussig does his greatest service to the field of contemporary German literature. No t e s 1╇ Reinhard K. Zachau, ‘“Das Volk jedenfalls war’s nicht!” Thomas Brussigs Abrechnung mit der DDR’, Colloquia Germanica 30:4 (1997), 387–95, 387. 2 Hans-Joachim Maaz, Der Gefühlsstau. Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Berlin:€ Argon, 1990) and Das gestürzte Volk oder die verunglückte Einheit (Berlin:€Argon, 1991). Brussig admitted Maaz’s influence in a Stern interview; see Kristie Foell and Jill Twark, ‘“Bekenntnisse des Stasi-Hochstaplers Klaus Uhltzscht”:€Thomas Brussig’s comical and controversial Helden wie wir’, in Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman, eds., German Writers and the Politics

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of Culture:€Dealing with the Stasi (Basingstoke:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 173–94, 179. 3 See Brad Prager, ‘The erection of the Berlin Wall:€Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir and the end of East Germany’, Modern Language Review 99:4 (2004), 983–98, 983–4. 4 Thomas Brussig, Helden wie wir (Berlin:€Volk und Welt, 1995). Emphasis in all quotations is original; translations are my own. Page numbers in parentheses in the main body of the text. 5 See Rachel J. Halverson, ‘Comedic bestseller or insightful satire:€Taking the interview and autobiography to task in Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir’, in Carol Anne Constabile-Henning, Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell, eds., Textual Responses to German Unification (Berlin:€ de Gruyter, 2001), 95–105, 96–7. 6 For example Helga Königsdorf, ed., Adieu DDR:€ Protokolle eines Abschieds (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€ Rowohlt, 1990); Dieter Golombek and Dietrich Ratzke, eds., Dagewesen und aufgeschrieben (Frankfurt am Main:€ IMK, 1990). 7 Tanja Nause, ‘Post-Wende literature and cultural memory:€Moments of recollection in Thomas Brussig’s novel Helden wie wir’, in Christopher Hall and David Rock, eds., German Studies towards the Millennium (Oxford:€ Peter Lang, 2000), 155–72, 162. 8 Halverson, ‘Comedic bestseller or insightful satire’, 98. 9 Margrit Fröhlich, ‘Thomas Brussig’s satire of contemporary history’, GDR Bulletin, 25 (1998), 21–30, 22. 10 Sabine Brandt, ‘Bleiche Mutter DDR:€ Thomas Brussig kuriert den Sozialismus aus einem Punkt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 235 (10 October 1995), L2. 11 For example Wolf Biermann, ‘Wenig Wahrheiten und viel Witz’, Der Speigel 5 (1996):€ 186–7 and Roberto Simanowski, ‘Die DDR als Dauerwitz’, Neue deutsche Literatur, 2 (1996), 156–63. 12 Nause, ‘Post-Wende literature and cultural memory’, 167. 13 Nause, ‘Post-Wende literature and cultural memory’, 167. 14 Cited in Simanowski, ‘Die DDR als Dauerwitz’, 160. 15 Foell and Twark, ‘Bekenntnisse des Stasi-Hochstaplers Klaus Uhltzscht’, 177. 16 Prager, ‘The erection of the Berlin Wall’, 984. 17 Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Klaus und wie er die Welt sah’, Zeit, 8 September 1995; Biermann, ‘Wenig Wahrheiten und viel Witz’; see also Brandt, ‘Bleiche Mutter DDR’, and Konrad Franke, ‘Der Sieger der Geschichte. Thomas Brussig stellt vor:€“Helden wie wir”’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 October 1995.

Ch apter 4

Christa Wolf ’s Medea. Stimmen (Medea. A Modern Retelling) Georgina Paul

Medea. Stimmen (Medea. Voices, 1996, translated into English by John Cullen as Medea. A Modern Retelling, 1998) was East German writer Christa Wolf’s first new fiction to be published after German unification in October 1990.1 In June 1990, Wolf had published a short text entitled Was bleibt (What Remains),2 a fictionalised representation of her experiences of being under surveillance by the East German secret police, the Staatssicherheit, which she had written in 1979. This publication became the catalyst for a ferocious media debate during the summer months of 1990, driven above all by the leading West German newspapers the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Zeit, about the status of the critical East German writers such as Wolf who had remained in the GDR to the end.3 Up until 1989, these writers had largely been regarded in the West as dissidents whose work had fostered critical political discussion within the GDR. From the start of the Was bleibt debate, however, the tone changed. Writers such as Wolf, but Wolf pre-eminent among them, were now represented as beneficiaries of the system whose work had propped up the state by virtue of the oblique, imprecise and so compromised style of its political criticisms.4 As the debate unfolded, Wolf came under further attack as the exemplification of an ‘aesthetics of political conviction’ (Gesinnungsästhetik) held by some critics to have blighted German literature in both West and East in the post-1945 period. Judgements of the value of literature had, it was argued, been guided in this period by authors’ political stance rather than the aesthetic qualities of their work.5 In January 1993, her post-unification public credibility took a final blow when it became known that she had been an ‘unofficial collaborator’ (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or IM) with the Staatssicherheit from 1959 to 1962 (albeit with a much larger file as the object of a surveillance operation from 1969 on). While she tried to defuse public disapprobation by publishing her IM file in its entirety,6 her former standing as the GDR’s most internationally admired writer seemed irrevocably damaged. 64

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The publication of Medea. Stimmen in 1996 marked Wolf’s re-emergence as a novelist after three years of almost complete withdrawal from the public scene. With Medea. Stimmen, Wolf returned to the model of the retelling of classical myth which she had deployed so effectively in the early 1980s. Her Kassandra (1983)7 is a ‘re-vision’8 of the myth of Troy as recounted in Homer’s Iliad from the unfamiliar perspective of the Trojan seer Cassandra. It had appeared at the height of a particularly tense phase of the Cold War nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the Reagan administration pushed through the stationing of a new generation of Pershing medium-range missiles on West German territory. Wolf’s novel provided a feminist-inflected assessment of the processes by which the masculine values of pride, honour and military prowess, combined with jockeying for economic advantage, drew societies inexorably into destructive conflict. It was a parable which spoke forcibly to its historical moment, and was probably the most widely read internationally of all Wolf’s novels. However, it was also readable as a novel of allegorical self-examination. The seer Cassandra, the mythical figure whose fate it was to foretell the fall of Troy but not to be believed, is a daughter of the royal household, torn between her inclination to conform to those in power and her drive to understand the world around her.9 In the story of her gradual liberation from her loyalties to the palace and eventual integration into an alternative community of the excluded and marginalised of the besieged city could be discerned Wolf’s contemplation of her own career from loyal Communist Party member to dissident author living in an enclave of kindred spirits on the margins of the politically moribund GDR of the 1980s.10 The interpretative approach to Wolf’s Medea. Stimmen in the early reviews was doubly dictated€ – one might say doubly encumbered€ – by this dual context. In the first place, the novel was taken as an allegorical appraisal of the state of affairs in united Germany from the perspective of a writer whose anti-Western, anti-capitalist stance at unification was well known.11 Two passages in particular were repeatedly cited by reviewers in order to demonstrate the contemporary East–West analogy in the representation of Medea’s native Colchis, from the mainland Greek perspective a primitive culture on the easternmost edge of the navigable world, and proto-capitalist Corinth. ‘We in Colchis were inspired by the ancient legends of our land, where just Queens and Kings ruled, where the people lived in harmony with one another, and where property was so evenly distributed that no one envied anyone else or schemed to take

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his possessions or his life’, Medea reminisces in the second of her four monologues,12 while in her first she recalls how disconcerted she and her fellow-Colchians were to discover on arrival in Corinth that ‘the worth of a Corinthian citizen is measured by the quantity of gold in his possession, and the contributions he must make to the palace are calculated accordingly’ (24). As Akamas, the chief astronomer at the royal court of Corinth, explains to Medea, this is a basis for ‘dividing the Corinthian people into different classes, which is the first means of making a country governable’ (24). Against the backdrop of these two quoted passages, the novel appears to tell an allegorical tale of the arrogant disposal by the powerful members of a capitalist and class-oriented Western society of the€a lien and more primitive Easterners living in their midst. Furthermore, the tendency to read Wolf’s fictional protagonists as self-identificatory meant that her Medea figure was read within the East–West allegory as a representation of the author herself as the victim of a concerted media hate-campaign in the post-unification period.13 This was the easiest, if not the most differentiated, way of approaching Wolf’s surprising and radical reworking of the Medea myth. In the story as more usually told, Medea is a king’s daughter and priestess from Colchis who, through her knowledge of magic, helps Jason to win the Golden Fleece, flees with him back to Greece, and, when he abandons her in order to make an advantageous marriage to the daughter of the king of Corinth, avenges herself by poisoning the bride and killing her two sons by Jason so as to deprive him of his heirs. This fascinating and horrifying figure has been the subject of many treatments in literature, art and opera through the centuries of the European cultural tradition. Seneca, Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, Pierre Corneille, Franz Grillparzer, Nicolai Gogol, Hans Henny Jahnn, Jean Anouilh and Heiner Müller are just some of the writers who have worked with the Medea material. The definitive versions remain Apollonius Rhodios’ Argonautica, a third-century BC epic recounting the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts in their quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece from Colchis, and Euripides’ drama of 431 BC, which deals with the story of Jason and Medea in Corinth. For her Medea, however, Wolf turned to alternative sources. Wolf’s reading of classical scholars such as Robert Graves and Karl Kerényi14 in the context of her work on the Kassandra project had trained her to discern in the mythical stories which have been handed down subtexts concerning social and cultural shifts and conflicts in the ancient world, as well as hints at forms of cultural practice which pre-dated the written records and stories of the ancient Greeks. The name ‘Medea’ or ‘Medeia’, as she points out,15 means

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‘die guten Rat Wissende’, which Cullen translates within the novel as ‘She of Good Counsel’ (43). Several scholars have commented on the etymological relationship between the Indo-European root ‘med’ and the Latin ‘medicus’ (doctor), which gives us our ‘medicine’16:€‘Medeia’ is thus one possessed of the knowledge of healing. Some of Wolf’s sources indicated that Medea was originally a divine figure who had been brought down to earth as a priestess, healer and maker of magic in the course of the historical shift from worship of the Earth Goddess to a male-dominated pantheon.17 Given the traces in the Medea myth of prehistoric matriarchal cult practices, Wolf found herself unconvinced by representations of Medea as the killer of her children: A healer, with knowledge of magic, who must have emerged from very ancient layers of myth, from a time when children were the most prized asset of a clan and mothers were held in high esteem precisely because of their ability to reproduce the clan€– this figure is supposed to have killed her children?18

An article in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) by the Basel classical scholar Margot Schmidt confirmed what Wolf preferred to believe.19 Schmidt points to a source according to which Medea gives her children into the protection of the goddess Hera in her temple in Corinth, where they are subsequently killed by the Corinthians. Euripides’ version is identified in this context as the first to represent Medea as the killer of her children€– the aspect which has remained most consistent in representations of her ever since. (Graves cites a scholastic commentary on Euripides’ Medea which claims that the dramatist accepted a bribe of fifteen silver talents from the Corinthians to absolve them of the murder of the children.20) The temple of Hera variant formed the foundation for Wolf’s re-interpretation of Medea as an innocent figure who is made a scapegoat by the Corinthians. Wolf’s interest in myth has to do with its complexity and openness as a form and the freedoms which it offers to the writer. Looking back in 1997 on her earlier work with myth, she wrote: When I first encountered myth€– it was in the early 1980s, the myth was called ‘Cassandra’€ – I experienced the advantages of this discovery:€ a figure is there which moves within a given framework to which one has to adhere, but within which, if one only enters into it deeply enough, unanticipated freedoms are opened up:€to uncover, to bring to the surface, to interpret, to invent.21

As she acknowledges, the choices one makes in selecting a given material are an expression of the person one is, or, as she puts it:€‘Whatever one reaches for in the apparently “free market” of stories and motifs€ – the

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things which stay in the mind or in the hand are going to be things which have to do with this mind or for which this hand is formed.’22 In Wolf’s representation of Medea as an uncomfortable outsider figure in Corinth who becomes the victim of a destructive propaganda campaign, there is undoubtedly a connection to Wolf’s experiences of being under attack in the West German media in the period from 1990 to 1993. This has become all the more clear with the publication after a long gestation period of her autobiographically based novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr Freud, 2010) which gives a narrative account of the nine months she spent as a scholar of the Getty Foundation in Santa Monica, California in 1992 to 1993. It was during this time that she notified the German media of her discovery the year before of her IM file and had to deal with the press coverage which ensued. Stadt der Engel charts her profound depression in the face of the volume and vehemence of the articles published against her, as well as speculation among her Californian companions that the ‘present maniÂ� festations of the scapegoat ritual’ had been aimed at Wolf in particular because she was a woman23€ – an unmistakeable allusion to the Medea novel on which she was working during the stay in Santa Monica.24 But to see the central portrait of Medea as a self-justificatory self-portrait is to read Medea. Stimmen far too reductively.25 Rather, Wolf was interested in the potential of myth as a ‘model’:€‘[Myth] can help us to see ourselves afresh within our own time, it throws into relief aspects which we do not wish to acknowledge and removes us from everyday triviality.’26 In what follows, I will therefore set out a reading in more symbolic terms of the conflict between the two cultures which is at the heart of the novel, before considering its significance for the post-unification historical moment. A p o s t-u n i f ic at ion pa r a bl e : €g e n de r a n d g e n e r at ion Medea. Stimmen is constructed as a sequence of eleven monologues spoken by six different characters, three male and three female, some familiar from the Medea myth and some invented by Wolf. The six ‘voices’ of the title are:€ Medea herself; Jason; a former pupil of Medea’s from Colchis, Agameda, who denounces Medea to the Corinthian authorities out of jealousy-fuelled hatred; the king of Corinth’s chief astronomer and first minister, Akamas, a master-propangandist who is Medea’s chief antagonist in the unfolding plot against her; the king’s second astronomer, Leukon, a friend of Medea’s; and the king’s daughter, Glauce€– a particularly striking re-invention by Wolf as the unloved and epileptic child of King Creon and

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Queen Merope whom Medea goes some way to curing while she is permitted access to her but who commits suicide when Medea is banished from the city. The monologues are arranged in a symmetrical structure with Medea’s four monologues spaced evenly through the text: Medea–Jason–Agameda–Medea–Akamas–Glauce–Leukon–Medea–Jason– Leukon–Medea.27

Wolf skilfully builds up a chronological narrative of events through the varying characters’ perspectives, with retrospective reconstruction of Medea’s past in Colchis and the Argonauts’ adventures there in Medea’s and Jason’s early monologues. Medea remains the central focus, as all the speakers are in some way emotionally linked to her, whether by emotional attachment turned antipathy (Agameda), a mixture of admiration and calculated enmity (Akamas), emotional dependence with its attendant ambivalence (Glauce), friendship tempered by detached helplessness to intervene in her fate (Leukon), or shared history and sexual involvement (Jason). Each of the monologues bears an epigraph, quotations from earlier treatments of the Medea myth (Seneca, Euripides) or from works of philosophy and cultural critique:€ Plato’s Symposium, René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972), Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato (1995), and aperçus from Cato and Dietmar Kamper. These epigraphs serve to locate the events and characters depicted in the fiction within a cultural history, above all of conflict between contrasting gender cultures:€notable in the unfolding sequence of the epigraphs are the male’s desire for immortal renown (27), his misogynistic resentment of women’s child-bearing (163), and the generation of a patriarchal culture which places greater importance on the power to take away life than to give birth to it (183). Glauce’s monologue, the sixth and central monologue of the novel, in which the vitality and healing associated with Medea is shown in direct conflict with the oppression and destruction associated with Akamas’ scheming, is prefaced with an epigraph from the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s Franza-Fragment (1965–66), lines from a prose work set as verse: He took away my possessions. My laughter, my tenderness, my capacity for joy, my compassion, my helpfulness, my animality, my radiance; every single time one of them appeared, he trod it down, until it stopped appearing at all. But why would someone do that, I don’t understand… (103)

The history of the assertion of male power which the novel recounts is at the same time one of the destruction of the life-affirming forces of openness,

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relationality, self-confident corporeality, and knowledge of nature and healing which are drawn together in the figure of Medea herself. This links significantly to Wolf’s earlier interests. ‘How did we get to be the way we are today?’ was one of the leading questions in her autobiographical novel about her childhood in the Third Reich, Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976). By the time she was working on the Kassandra project in the early 1980s, this had turned into a series of questions about how contemporary Western culture came to espouse the values that it does, the origins of its conceptualisation of what it means to be a self, and consideration of points in history at which alternatives were suppressed. She was interested not least in how it was that women came to be so systematically excluded from power, with the division of labour between the sexes itself seen as a symptom of a pervasive thinking in binary oppositions which creates the potential for conflict and aggression. Her critique of the instrumental rationality characteristic of Western thought owes much to her reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), in particular their representation of the genesis of a masculine-connoted concept of selfhood based on self-preservation and self-control at the cost of alienation from the emotions:€ ‘Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self€– the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings€– was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.’28 Her interest in the Trojan War arose amongst other things from her perception that it marked a historical turning point, with the defeat of the Trojans bringing with it the elimination of a cultural alternative to the ancient Greek way of thinking which was to prove foundational for the entire Western tradition. As Cassandra acknowledges in the closing pages, following the destruction of her city:€‘It was obvious. The new masters would dictate their law to all the survivors. The earth was not large enough to escape them.’29 Where the culture of the Greek victors is already fully patriarchal and the hierarchical opposition between the sexes fully articulated, that of the Trojans in Wolf’s fiction shows traces of the memory of a preceding matriarchal culture.30 Notably, the utopian community eking out a living beyond the walls of the citadel towards the end of the novel worships a female deity, Cybele, an aspect of the Earth Goddess or Great Mother. This pattern is repeated in Wolf’s reading of the opposition between the primitive ‘barbarian’ culture of the Colchians and the Greek culture of the Corinthians in Medea. Stimmen. Although Colchis, like Corinth, is ruled by a king, the knowledge and confidence of Medea is explained in

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the narrative by her and her mother’s much greater influence in and centrality to Colchian culture (41), in contrast to the shadowy and powerless Queen Merope of Corinth. In general, the Colchian women appear more self-confident, less domesticated than the Corinthian women (9, 34). In short, Wolf represents Corinthian culture as further advanced in the transition to the characteristically patriarchal Greek culture than the ‘barbarian’ (i.e. non-Greek) Colchis. To the Corinthians, Medea’s confidence, including her physical confidence, her wild mane of hair, her laughter, her sharpness of insight, make them uncomfortable. She gives King Creon ‘the creeps’ (92), while her different value system, her espousal of the belief ‘that thoughts develop out of feelings and should not lose their connection with them’ are dismissed by Akamas as ‘[o]ld-fashioned, of course, outdated’ (92). The vendetta against Medea and the eventual eradication of the Colchians in Corinth represent, then, another variant of the elimination of a cultural alternative with the ‘victory’ of a patriarchal system and reading of history as its consequence (as witnessed, by implication, in the success of Euripides’ account of the Medea myth). The catalyst for the vendetta against Medea in Wolf’s version is the latter’s discovery at the novel’s outset of a child’s corpse in a cavern deep below the palace’s foundations. It turns out to be that of Creon’s eldest daughter, Iphinoe, who was ritually sacrificed in order to preserve her father’s hold on power. The city of Corinth is, then, as Medea realises, ‘founded on a monstrous deed’ (13). There are multiple ways of reading this addition of Wolf’s to the myth of Medea in Corinth.31 One possibility is to see it in terms of the novel’s gender symbolism:€in it is figured the sacrifice of a feminine-connoted conduct of politics through relationship and cooperation in order to drive through the patriarchal power structures associated in the novel with Creon’s rule. Akamas, Creon’s first minister, recalls a time when Queen Merope had wielded greater power, ‘because according to an old and now thoroughly pointless custom the King would receive the crown on loan from the Queen, and royal power was inherited through the female line’ (94). At that time Merope had argued for the acceptance of a proposal from a neighbouring city to enter into an alliance, ‘but only under the condition that Iphinoe marry the city’s young King and be named as Creon’s successor’ (94). Creon resists. Having ‘separate[d] Merope from any power or influence’, he is not prepared to ‘fortify the hopes of a new petticoat government in our daughter Iphinoe and the women who’ve attached themselves to her’ (95). He hastens to justify his resistance in terms of Corinth’s future:€‘For whoever knew how to read the signs of the times could see that all around us,

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amid strife and horror, states were taking shape, and a Corinth guided by women as of yore would simply not be a match for them’ (95). ‘If we hadn’t sacrificed [Iphinoe]’, Akamas tells Medea, ‘Corinth would have perished utterly’ (95). Little Iphinoe, once able to ‘walk through the streets of Corinth alone, surrounded and guarded and sustained by the people’s love, by their emotion at the sight of so much tenderness and vulnerability’ (99), was thus slaughtered in a secret ritual murder in the catacombs beneath the palace in order to maintain her father’s rule. His kingship is depicted as based on government by class division (24) and on public self-representation which is different from private manner (90):€in short, on power as a form of dissemblance and thus self-alienation reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the crafty Odysseus as the prototype Enlightenment subject in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.32 While it is tempting to see Wolf as setting up a simple opposition of a culture of self-alienation and social division in Corinth versus an idealised more primitive and equal culture in Colchis, it should not be overlooked that the ‘monstrous deed’ on which Corinth is founded has its counterpart in a not dissimilar ritual murder of Medea’s brother Apsyrtus in Colchis. In Apollonius Rhodios, it is Medea herself who kills her brother, scattering his dismembered body parts into the sea behind the Argo as she and Jason flee Colchis in order to delay her father King Aeëtes’ pursuit. Wolf perceived in the motifs of this story traces of prehistoric matriarchal cultural practices which would have been alien to and therefore not properly understood by the Greeks who transmitted the myth.33 In the presumed prehistoric matriarchal culture, the female head of the clan would be partnered by a king (possibly her own brother) chosen to rule for a year, at the end of which he would be sacrificed (or later, as human sacrifice was discontinued as a ritual practice, substituted by an animal sacrificed in his stead). Could Apsyrtus be a representation of such a Year-King, Wolf wondered? And was the motif of his dismemberment a trace of a ritual of rebirth€– like the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Bacchae€– which involved scattering the limbs of the sacrificed boy-king on the fields?34 In the novel as published, the slaughtering of Apsyrtus draws on another presumed prehistoric ritual, the killing of the ‘surrogate boy-king, or interrex’ substituted for a king in order to prolong his rule beyond the term of seven years35€– albeit a custom which is no longer current in Colchis at the time, but revived by King Aeëtes for the specific purpose of counteracting a revolt against his continued reign. Apsyrtus thus appears as the mirrorimage in Colchis of the ritually murdered Iphinoe in Corinth, ‘more your [Apsyrtus’] sister than I could ever be’, as Medea says in her imaginary

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dialogue with him (78). Both of these children are sacrificed in order to keep the current ruler in power, and this similarity collapses apparent distinctions between the Colchian and Corinthian cultures. Notably, it is the account of the ritual killing of Apsyrtus in Wolf ’s text that contains the suggestive allusions to the revolt against the ancien régime in the GDR in 1989. This passage may therefore be taken as holding the key to an interpretation of Wolf’s retelling of the Medea myth as a parable for the post-unification period. Frustrated at ‘the old, ossified king’, the ‘chief hindrance’ to the realisation of the increasingly distant collective dream of a harmonious society ‘where property was so evenly distributed that no one envied anyone else or schemed to take his possessions or his life’ (73), the ‘dissenters, especially the young people’ meet in the temple of Hekate, of which Medea is the priestess (72). This is so suggestive of the revolt of the GDR’s young people against the Communist Party’s gerontocracy under the aegis of the Protestant church that one reviewer went so far as to entitle his review:€ ‘Honecker is now called Aeëtes’.36 But if the story is to be read allegorically in this way, what is the meaning within the allegory of the murder of Apsyrtus after he is made surrogate boy-king for the day, Aeëtes’ strategy to retain his hold on power? Might it not be that Wolf is encapsulating in the image of Apsyrtus as king for one day her recollection of the moment of popular power in the GDR in the autumn of 1989, when people ‘marched as a mass through the streets, complete strangers who talked to each other about themes which only yesterday had been taboo, and who said and shouted out and did what nobody would have believed them capable of, least of all themselves, intelligently and imaginatively and with great discipline’,37 that ‘moment of beauty’, as fellow-GDR writer Helga Königsdorf called it,38 that proved to be a passing one of only apparent change and rejuvenation, suppressed all too soon with the return to political hierarchies at base quite similar to the ones which had gone before? In this reading, the youthful Apsyrtus and Iphinoe each stand for the potential for systemic rejuvenation in their respective societies which is quite literally cut down by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The fact that Wolf has made the sacrificed children, Apsyrtus and Iphinoe, representatives of the different sexes draws attention to a further aspect of the symbolic structures underpinning her novel. Just as the apparent simplistic opposition of East and West proves on closer inspection to mask structural similarities between the two poles, so the surface gender opposition between the ‘female’ (92) way of thinking and acting

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embodied by Medea and the ‘male’ lust for power embodied by Akamas and Creon becomes more blurred when the minor characters are taken into consideration. Agameda, for example, is a Colchian woman, yet she is as hooked on power as Akamas, whose speech patterns she reproduces in her own monologue, as Birgit Roser has shown. Medea’s Corinthian friend Leukon, meanwhile, joins Medea and their respective lovers, Arethusa and Oistros, in the novel’s most utopian alternative community, represented as an artists’ enclave on the outskirts of Corinth (also a momentary life-affirming refuge from the palace for Glauce). What is held up as the text’s ideal, then, is not so much a matriarchal system or a community of women (it is to be noted that exclusive groups of women are twice represented as committing acts of collective violence in the novel:€75, 160), but, as Roser has also perspicaciously observed, psychological wholeness.39 Knowing oneself, being at ease with oneself, not needing to turn others into the image of what one fears in oneself are represented as the basis for harmonious human relationship, both on an individual level and in the community. The patriarchal culture of Corinth, which is suggestively presented as the ancient predecessor of contemporary capitalism, is criticised, therefore, not because it is a masculinist culture as such but because it creates the hierarchically organised binary opposition between the sexes which makes men fear the women they have made their subordinates.40 Where a power hierarchy dictates relationships€– and this holds equally for the relationship between a dominant social group and its projected cultural Others such as immigrants or indigenous peoples€ – violence against the subordinated group is, as Horkheimer and Adorno argued, the inevitable consequence. Jason’s rape of Medea at the moment of her banishment is represented in accordance with this tenet, as the expression of his self-alienation:€‘That’s the way it’s meant to be. We should take women. We should break down their resistance. That’s the only way to root out what nature has endowed us with, the vile lust that spills over everything’ (171). In Medea, then, we should see not so much a self-identificatory figure for Wolf as an idealised literary personification of psychological wholeness, the goal towards which all of Wolf’s writing has striven. As such, Medea is also the parabolic embodiment of a historical alternative of a real union of differences that was passed up after the Cold War conflict between East and West came to an end. The degree to which Wolf was personally damaged by what she saw as the media ‘witchhunt’41 of her following the collapse of the GDR has become more evident with the publication of her most recent novel, but what was more serious for her

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was undoubtedly that the central vision of her writing was so vehemently rejected. As Stadt der Engel reveals, it left her with the sense that there was no place left on earth where the ideal of harmonious human community might be pursued. It is in this sense that Medea’s closing sentences should be read:€‘Where can I go? Is it possible to imagine a world, a time, where I would have a place. There’s no one I could ask. That’s the answer’ (186). No t e s 1 Christa Wolf, Medea. Stimmen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1996). 2 Christa Wolf, Was bleibt (Frankfurt am Main:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990); What Remains and Other Stories, trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (London:€Virago, 1993). 3 The articles which constituted the debate are anthologised in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ’:€ Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€ Spangenberg, 1991). For scholarly analysis of the debate, see Karl Deiritz and Hannes Kraus, eds., Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit oder ‘Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge’ (Hamburg and Zurich:€ Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1991); Bernd Wittek, Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland (Marburg:€ Tectum, 1997). See also Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Unification (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 See especially Frank Schirrmacher, ‘“Dem Druck des härteren, strengeren Lebens standhalten”:€Auch eine Studie über den autoritären Charakter’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf╛╛’:€Der Literaturstreit im verÂ� einten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991), 77–89. 5 See Ulrich Greiner ‘Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik. Noch einmal: Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf╛╛’:€ Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991), 208–16. 6 Christa Wolf, Akteneinsicht:€Zerrspiegel und Dialog:€Eine Dokumentation, ed. Hermann Vinke (Hamburg:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1993). 7 Christa Wolf, Kassandra:€ Vier Vorlesungen:€ Eine Erzählung (Berlin and Weimar:€Aufbau, 1983); Cassandra:€A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan van Huerck (London:€Virago, 1984). 8 See Anna K. Kuhn, Christa Wolf ’s Utopian Vision:€From Marxism to Feminism (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 178. 9╇ Wolf, Cassandra, 62–3. 10╇ The lives in rural East Germany of a group of dissident writers is realistically represented in Wolf’s Chekovian fiction Sommerstück (1989). 11 This is most clearly expressed in the public proclamation ‘Für unser Land’ (For our country), co-authored by Wolf and published on 28 November 1989, which sets out an ‘either-or’ scenario, with the option of unification

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with capitalist West Germany negatively characterised:€see Christa Wolf, Im Dialog:€ Aktuelle Texte (Frankfurt am Main:€ Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990), 170–1. 12 Christa Wolf, Medea. A Modern Retelling, trans. John Cullen (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland:€Doubleday, 1998), 73. Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses in the text. 13 See Thomas Anz, ‘Medea€– Opfer eines Rufmords. Christa Wolfs Weiterarbeit am Mythos’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2–3 March 1996; Frauke Meyer-Gosau, ‘Kassiber von drüben. Die DDR aus der Schlüssellochperspektive:€ der Roman “Medea” von Christa Wolf lädt zum Dechiffrieren und Spekulieren ein’, Die Woche, 8 March 1996; Volker Hage, ‘Kein Mord, nirgends. Ein Angriff auf die Macht und die Männer:€ Christa Wolfs Schlüsselroman “Medea”’, Der Spiegel, 26 February 1996, 202–8; Ursula Püschel, ‘“Ich selbst bin die Protagonistin”. Christa Wolf:€ “Medea. Stimmen”’, Neue deutsche Literatur, 44 (1996):€H.2, 134–41. 14 Birgit Roser examines Wolf’s use of the classical sources, including her variations of Euripides and Seneca, in Chapter 3 of her Mythenbehandlung und Kompositionstechnik in Christa Wolfs Medea. Stimmen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Peter Lang, 2000), 51–69. See especially her detailed evidence of Wolf’s use of Graves and Kerényi, 60–3. 15 Christa Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 11–17, 16; ‘Warum Medea? Christa Wolf im Gespräch mit Petra Kammann’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 49–57, 51. 16 Rita Calabrese, ‘Von der Stimmlosigkeit zum Wort:€ Medeas lange Reise aus der Antike in die deutsche Kultur’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€ Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 75–93, 75; Anna Chiarloni, ‘Medea und ihre Interpreten:€ Zum letzten Roman von Christa Wolf ’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€ Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 111–19, 112. 17 Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, 16. 18 Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, 15. 19 Reproduced in Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea, 34–6. 20 Robert Graves, Greek Myths (London:€Cassell, 1958), 617. 21 Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, 11. 22 Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, 11. 23 Christa Wolf, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 2010), 328–9. 24 See Christa Wolf, ‘Tagebuch’ (Los Angeles and Santa Monica), in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 38–9.

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25 This is argued by Martin Beyer in Das System der Verkennung:€Christa Wolfs Arbeit am Medea-Mythos (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), Chapter 9. 26 Wolf, ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, 15. 27 See Marie-Luise Ehrhardt, Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Eine Gestalt auf der Zeitgrenze (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), 50. 28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 26. 29 Wolf, Cassandra, 138. 30 Wolf’s assumption that the patriarchal cultures of ancient Greece which became formative for the development of the Western cultural and philosophical tradition were preceded by primitive matriarchal clan cultures, and that Greek myths can be read as bearing traces of these prehistoric cultures, is probably derived from the nineteenth-century classical scholar J.J. Bachofen, author of Mother Right (1861). 31 Birgit Roser, for example, reads it very productively (alongside the other sacrifices which feature in the novel) through anthropological philosopher René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982) as an exposure of the sacrificial mechanisms whereby social order has been maintained throughout the history of human culture:€ Mythenbehandlung und Kompositionstechnik, 82–90. 32 Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Excursus I:€Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 34–62. For a discussion of the significance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus for the post-1945 critique of the conceptualisation of the Enlightenment subject, see Georgina Paul, Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature (Rochester, NY:€ Camden House, 2009), Chapter 2. Wolf’s representation of Medea’s encounter with Circe arguably alludes to Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of the Circe story in Homer’s Odyssey. 33 Christa Wolf, ‘Brief an Heide Göttner-Abendroth’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 22–5, 24. 34 See Wolf, ‘Brief an Heide Göttner-Abendroth’, 24. The basis for her Â�speculations is probably her reading in Robert Graves’s Greek Myths. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film version of Medea (with the opera diva Maria Callas in the title role) includes a striking presentation of such a ritual fertility sacrifice. 35 See Graves, Greek Myths, 18. It is to be noted that Graves’s interpretations of the myths of the Greeks are now widely accepted to have been speculative and idiosyncratic, though stimulating. 36 Manfred Fuhrmann, ‘Honecker heißt jetzt Aietes. Aber Medea wird verteufelt human. Christa Wolf schreibt den Mythos neu’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2–3 March 1990. 37 Wolf, Stadt der Engel, 266.

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38 See Helga Königsdorf, 1989 oder Ein Moment Schönheit:€ Eine Collage aus Briefen, Gedichten, Texten (Berlin:€Aufbau, 1990). 39 Roser, Mythenbehandlung und Kompositionstechnik, 112–13. 40 This can be seen as an allusion to the master–slave dialectic discussed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 41 Wolf, Stadt der Engel, 203.

Ch apter 5

Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship) Moray McGowan

In the early 1990s, the phase of political and socio-economic uncertainty following the seismic shifts of 1989–90 had brought numerous outbreaks of xenophobic violence in Germany. In 1993, the year that five members of one Turkish family died in an arson attack in Solingen, writer Zafer Şenocak and political scientist Claus Leggewie co-edited the bilingual anthology Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar:€ Das Ende der Geduld/ Sabrın sonu (German Turks:€ The End of Patience).1 While this does not make Şenocak (any more than Leggewie, of course), a spokesman or representative of ‘German Turks’, it underlines his determined intervention in debates on migration, ethnicity, belonging and exclusion that had acquired a bloody contemporaneity. Five years later, in 1998, Şenocak’s novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998) returns to these same early 1990s, to the recently united Germany and to Berlin, soon to be reinstated as the country’s capital, to explore these themes in a novel whose allusive complexities have provoked multiple contradictory interpretations.2 The novel’s narrator, Sascha Muchteschem, born in Munich to a bourgeois Turkish father and a German-Jewish mother, inherits from his recently deceased parents a silver casket containing the twenty notebooks of his Turkish paternal grandfather from the years 1916–36. They hold, he feels sure, the key to an obscure and obscured portion of his family’s history. Will they perhaps explain his grandfather’s mysterious suicide in the latter year, when as a senior Turkish official he was about to accompany the national team to the Berlin Olympics? Will they shed light on his grandfather’s military career, indeed his possible implication in the Turkish deportations and massacres of Armenians during and after the First World War? However, neither Sascha nor his narrative seems in any hurry to answer these questions, and the novel is not about their resolution, but about questions these questions pose in their turn:€questions of memory, history, identity, guilt, fact and fiction. 79

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Alternately sensual and fastidious, diffident and opinionated, Sascha Muchteschem’s shifting contours are part of his author’s project of unsettling and unmapping fixed stereotypes of the native and the migrant, the German and the Turkish. This applies in particular to the tetralogy of interlinked prose to which Gefährliche Verwandtschaft belongs, together with Der Mann im Unterhemd (The Man in the Undershirt, 1995), Die Prärie (The Prairie, 1997), and Der Erottomane (The Erot(t)omaniac, 1999). This fiction is cerebral and allusive, indeed often elusive, associative rather than linear, challenging narrative convention and representational aesthetics, and its protagonists roam textual landscapes shaped by the suspension and subversion of fixed notions of time, space, gender, ethnicity or character, crossing fictional topographies suggestive of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), the condition of continuous and chronic uncertainty that has replaced the stability of institutions, structures and identities. Şenocak’s narrators move, too, in and out of representation itself:€the boundaries between figures as experiencing subjects and as symbolic or other textual markers are open and shifting.3 The sense of selves, especially male selves, in flux in his fiction4 is interwoven with his pursuit, in his essays, of a new consciousness of ‘what it means to be German in an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous German society’.5 These essays are collected as Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Atlas of Tropical Germany, 1992), War Hitler Araber? Irre Führungen an den Rand Europas (Was Hitler an Arab? Mis-Guided Tours to the Margins of Europe, 1994), Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation (Removal of the Tongue. Reports from the Quarantine Station, 2001) and das land hinter den buchstaben. Deutschland und der Islam im Umbruch (the country behind the letters. Germany and Islam in Transformation, 2006). They show Şenocak, who was born 1961 in Ankara, but has lived in Germany since 1970, to be a German-language author with ambitions to bring his distinctive insights to bear onto contemporary questions as a critical intellectual in the tradition of the German and European public sphere.6 His work is notably undervalued in Germany itself€– whereas it has been translated into at least eleven languages and is much studied internationally€– suggesting that Şenocak’s writing still sits uncomfortably with the German literary market’s perceptions of the proper role of ‘multicultural’ literature in general and Turkish-German writing in particular. Repeatedly, passages in Gefährliche Verwandtschaft take satiric issue with these perceptions whilst leading the reader back to the novel’s central concerns. Sascha mocks those writers who play the migrant card, with

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their banal texts ‘whose line breaks remind one of poetry’ or their ‘oriental’ story-telling about camels and donkeys (130–1). He pretends surprised amusement when his (by the sound of it, rightly) forgotten novel is rediscovered as ‘Ausländerliteratur’ and he is patronised for his skilled use of German (129). A journalistic commission, ‘to uncover the voices of those without a voice and lead them into language’ by researching and writing a pseudo-documentary series of monologues by young Turks in Germany, allows the narrator to pastiche Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak:€ 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Speak:€ 24 Discordant Notes from the Margins of Society, 1995) and the new stereotypes with which Zaimoğlu drives out the old ones. One monologue introduces a writer, ‘Zafer Şenocak’ (102–9). Like M. C. Escher’s lithograph of two hands each drawing the other, this aesthetic structure holds authenticity and fictionality in permanent suspension:€though many of the views ‘Zafer’ expresses are recognisable from the empirical Şenocak’s essays, the two are not identical. ‘Zafer’, whose first literary outings were in Munich punk fanzines, and whose declared affinities are to the European modernism of Rimbaud, Kafka, Camus, Celan, Eich, Huchel or Bachmann, is characteristically impatient of German audiences’ assumptions about his Turkish cultural identity. Turkish is for him a window he has built for himself in Germany and the German language, through which he can look back to the Turkish part of his childhood that is not necessarily more authentic or essential to him than the German part (107). He recalls his disdain for the anthology Als Fremder in Deutschland (1987), a real volume representative of several such anthologies in the 1980s, to which foreigners living in Germany were invited to contribute what were expected to be aesthetically naïve autobiographical accounts. Such anthologies, he argues, accentuate and perpetuate exclusion. But by dismissing Als Fremder in Deutschland as a ‘bad joke’, ‘Zafer’ had missed its ‘paradigmatic importance’, for ‘the Germans tend to smash the mirror in which their reflection appears’ (106). Such allusions to the phenomenon of racial violence as acts of exterminatory haÂ�tred against the mirror-image of the self (as when Wehrmacht soldiers or SS men in Poland faced Jews who might bear the same Germanic names as their murderers) jarringly suspend the harmlessness of these somewhat predictable sideswipes at the German response to literature by Turkish-German and other ‘migrant’ writers. For the novel is set in a time of heightened xenophobic violence in Germany, and the German-Â�Â� Jewish-Turkish triangle it sets up both posits and calls into question fateful parallels.

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Sascha hovers round his apparent theme, the unravelling of the mystery of his grandfather’s death, with a mixture of circumspection, procrastination and active avoidance of actions that might uncover the facts. The discovery that, while the casket is not locked, the notebooks therein are inscribed in Arabic and Cyrillic scripts that he cannot read gives Sascha ‘more time to decide whether I wanted to know who my grandfather was and the circumstances of his death in 1936 at the age of forty’.7 He begins learning Turkish then abandons it again (67–9). His goal in eventually narrating his grandfather’s biographical circumstances is neither to reveal nor to conceal, but to construct an imaginative and imaginary history. He even tries to forget what information he already has. ‘Should I destroy his diaries, in order to wipe my memory completely clear? [But] weren’t they part of my memory, even though I could not read them? I could not answer these questions until I had invented the figure of my grandfather’ (38). Thus Sascha values imagination over fact, since the imagination turns the inherited texts as opaque artefact into legible narrative. As a man of leisure, moreover, his inheritance providing sufficient independent means for writing as work or routine to play little part in his consciousness or his texts, Sascha can afford to shun the factual and the purposeful for the ambiguous and the oblique. While he vacillates, his girlfriend Marie, who in contrast prefers the documentary to the fictional, researches and produces her film about Talat Pascha. The last Ottoman interior minister and Grand Vizier, Pascha fled Turkey in 1918 to escape a death sentence passed by the successor government installed by the occupying British, only to be shot by an Armenian assassin in a Berlin street in 1921 in revenge for his leading role in the deportations and massacres. This reference€ – like Sascha’s reflections on the welcome given in Turkey to German, including German-Jewish, refugees from Nazi Germany (notably, Erich Auerbach wrote his seminal treatise on Mimesis during his exile in Istanbul in 1935–45)€ – establishes a link between Turkey and Germany that pre-dates and counter-balances the mono-causal and hierarchical example of labour migration. However, Sascha grew up largely unconscious of his ethnic background. Indeed, his fair complexion and blond hair reassure the Nazi widows from whom he acquires his collection of handwritten ephemera by prominent National Socialists, a pastime indicative not of right-wing tendencies but of his position at one remove from German history (63–6). But whilst he is in the USA as a writer-in-residence, the suspended animation of West Berlin in its ‘wounded, but peaceful’ state between the building of the Wall and its fall (19) is swept away, and on his return he

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discovers that he no longer belongs. He has missed participation in the historic events that revitalised German national sentiment, and he finds himself involuntarily identified as an ethnic interloper (120). Disoriented (or, perhaps, re-oriented), he begins to investigate a family past previously withheld and of little interest to him. This parallels the quintessentially German genre of ‘Väterliteratur’ (‘father literature’, a category subsequently extended to include texts about mothers, grandparents and other culpable relatives), in which autobiographical narrators redefine their relationships to their fathers in the face of the latters’ historical responsibility in the National Socialist period.8 But Şenocak’s novel is not autobiographical, and even within the fiction the notion of an ethical project of familial purgation is repeatedly subverted; indeed, its own narrator delays its realisation. Initially, the novel establishes a framework for just such a project. Sascha’s Turkish paternal grandfather fought on the German side in the First World War, then against the Allied occupation alongside Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, and may have been responsible for deportations of Armenians in 1921. Sascha’s Jewish mother survived Nazism by fleeing to Turkey, where she met his father and where Sascha was later conceived. But in her efforts to secure his assimilation in the Germany where he was then born, to save him from ‘an uncomfortable life between worlds’ (58), his mother has created a lacuna in his sense of self by suppressing all memory of the Holocaust. Murdered relatives who survive only in old photographs that Sascha discovers are erased again in his mother’s dismissal of these images as those of strangers. Thus, once activated, Sascha’s previously unconsidered Turkish and Jewish descent links him, potentially, to collective memories of both perpetration and victimhood. But he has to invent them, since his upbringing as a German gave him no access to those collective memories. Confronted with scattered hints such as his grandfather’s relationship to an Armenian woman at the time of the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915–16, Sascha invents a narrative hinting at his grandfather’s implication in the massacres, and providing a link from them to his grandfather’s suicide. The first mention of the suicide, though, is within the framework of its own fictionality, as a theme of Sascha’s planned novel (23). And the invented text, a fiction within a fiction, is the novel’s final chapter. Its delayed completion, brevity and in some ways perfunctory quality betray if anything the resistances its supposed author, Sascha, had to overcome to produce it. Thus Şenocak enmeshes his narrator in a Jewish-Turkish-GermanArmenian family history that is a dense pattern of interrelated

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circumstances which the narrator never fully knows or understands, even as he seeks to construct them in and through his imagination.9 It is worth noting that such convoluted biographies are not wholly fanciful:€German theatre director Nuran David Calis, for example, was born in Bielefeld in 1976 as the child of an Armenian and a Turkish-Jewish convert to Christianity who moved (back) to Istanbul after his birth, returning to Germany as asylum seekers at the time of the Turkish military putsch of 1980. But Şenocak’s purpose is not this kind of biographical authenticity, nor is Gefährliche Verwandtschaft a historical novel. Instead, it is a provocative and perspectivally distinctive contribution to the debates on cultural memory in the 1990s, exploring the paradoxes of seeking to secure a sense of belonging to a society of which one is a part but whose collective historical traumas one has not shared. Though the text is studded with references to twentieth-century European history, it provides a narrative neither of the massacres nor of the complex background to their contested historiography. Like comparisons between Soviet and Nazi campaigns of deportation and extermination, the link between the Nazi genocide of Jews and the Turkish treatment of Armenians since the latter nineteenth century, culminating in the mass murders and deportations of 1915–19 in Anatolia, is both hard to ignore and easily instrumentalised. Some accounts, typically by patriotic Armenian historians or some German revisionists, present the massacres as an anticipation of the Holocaust. Most Turkish historians drastically downplay their magnitude.10 The rare exceptions such as Taner Akçam who insist on the term genocide and on Turkish responsibility for it are forced to work abroad.11 As late as 2007, the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by Turkish nationalists for daring to call for honest engagement with the historical facts. The first public, though still unofficial, act of Turkish memorial to the Armenian victims took place in Istanbul in 2010, it too still provoking nationalist outrage more than ninety years after the massacres. Clearly, read alongside earlier German novels on the theme, from Franz Werfel’s Die 40 Tage der Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh; 1933) to Edgar Hilsenrath’s Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (The Story of the Last Thought; 1989), Gefährliche Verwandtschaft is not a novel of the Armenian tragedy at all. Its references to the forced marches, rapes and genocide are oblique, and framed by a narrative that repeatedly stresses its own fictionality, privileges invention over factual recall, or doubts the latter’s possibility altogether. Hilsenrath’s novel in contrast, despite its play with fairy-tale elements, is a form of historical witnessing, explicitly

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filling a gap in the Turkish history books and in the human geography of Anatolia by telling the story of the region’s once numerous but now absent Armenian population. Moreover, compared with Hilsenrath’s extended poetic satire of Turkish self-serving paranoia and myths that support denial, Şenocak’s novel might even be read as leaving the door open for these myths to be sustained, since the evidence his narrator offers for his self-confessedly imaginary reconstruction is oblique and circumstantial. But the significance of the Armenian theme for a German novel set in the early 1990s lies more in its invitation to think through contemporary points of comparison, as part of the novel’s wealth of what Leslie Adelson has called ‘touching tales’, ways in which national and ethnic histories and cultural practice intersect, illuminate and modify each other, sharing ‘common ground which can be thicker or thinner at some junctures’.12 The Turkish persecution of Armenians has often been attributed to Ottoman Europeans, driven from former European Turkey as was Talat Pascha himself, anxiously demonstrating their national belonging. ‘For these men, the loss of the Balkans in 1912–13 meant the loss of Ottoman identity, prompting them to evolve rapidly toward a profoundly antiÂ�Christian Turkish nationalism.’13 In this definition of the self through violent exclusion of the Other, though not of course in the scale of the violence, there are points of comparison (not crude equivalences) with the xenophobic violence in Germany in the early 1990s which prompted Şenocak and Claus Leggewie to publish Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar. In this context, Gefährliche Verwandtschaft is a double provocation, for in pointing to parallels between the genocide of the Jews and of the Armenians it posits a Turkish history of perpetrator guilt at the very time that Turks in Germany are experiencing racist violence as victims. From another viewpoint, Sascha can be seen as further exploiting the massacres for his own purposes. With his natural aversion to belonging he would prefer, he says, not to be part of ‘a community bound together by fateful history [Schicksalsgemeinschaft]’. But, ‘to be taken seriously as a complete person’, he needs origins (121). In post-Holocaust Germany, the offspring of victims and of perpetrators are linked, across the Â�divide of their ancestors’ role in it or their contemporary assessment of it, by a common past whose contested status only increases its phenomenological significance. If this is what a reconstituted, ‘normalised’ German identity will be based on, Germans without this past, such as Sascha, will always be excluded. So, unearthing, maybe actually faking, a war-Â�criminal grandfather, he straps on ‘a prosthesis-like identity’ (121). Now he can speak the ‘lingua franca’ (60) of contemporary Germany. ‘Suddenly I

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was no longer a stranger in Berlin. I was no longer just at home here. I belonged here’ (47). Sascha is excluded from the imagined community of perpetrator offspring until his imaginary addition to his grandfather’s biography provides his passport to integration. Thus the historical genocide is suborned to solve Sascha’s identity crisis, and it is possible to read Gefährliche Verwandtschaft as a critique precisely of Sascha’s practice of buying belonging with the doubtful or even counterfeit coinage of a putative culpability. However, there are two problems with analyses such as this. First, even though it will be argued below that as one of a number of variant readings of the Sascha figure he can and should be read as a consistent and morally capable psychological entity, he is significantly more than that. The ‘illusion of reference’ produced by the narrating ‘I’ is repeatedly interrupted.14 From this viewpoint he is neither a consistent moral subject nor a representative of an ethnic or even socio-economic group, certainly not of ‘Turks’ or ‘Turkish-Germans’. Rather, he is a construct, a textual ganglion where transnational historical processes intersect, from which Şenocak can develop new perspectives on central questions in modern German culture; unsettle and challenge German, Jewish and Turkish myths of self and other; explore the implications of a commingled Turkish, Jewish and German remembrance; and introduce new terms to topple the syllogisms of ethnicity rather than remaining trapped in their false-premise logic. These are abstract goals, to which the concept of the narrator as a textual figure, voided of any specific representational identity, however complex, lends itself. At the same time, precisely the apparently cool, detached surface of this narrative which encourages us to read Sascha as a fictional construct (which of course he is), or even, as Adelson argues, as ‘an abstract line of thought in the guise of an “I” who speaks’,15 can distract attention from a very different aspect of the text. For the textual evidence allows a reading of the novel as a poignant narrative of suppressed emotional pain. This does not cancel out its deconstruction of identity politics or its ironic subversion of the crude parallelism which would claim that Turks in Germany have stepped into the empty shoes of its murdered Jews, but it adds precisely the dimension of sensitivity and psychological depth that some critics have declared Şenocak’s novels to lack. In his fictional monologue, the writer ‘Zafer’ observes that ‘a protective home environment’ outweighs any insecurity migration may provoke. This contrasts markedly with the pain of absent parental love underlying the controlled surface of Sascha’s own prose:€‘If I sense an attack of grief

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I repress it. I protect my soul from bruises. I avoid struggles that could wound my soul.’ Hence his resistance to over-explicitness, ‘I don’t want to solve any puzzles’ (15), and his declared preference for film shot in poor light, ‘which did not yield up everything that it showed’ (22):€rationalisations of his anxiety about what he may discover if he looks too closely at the history of a family he tries to make the reader believe does not matter greatly to him. These claims accompany his account of his fading or non-existent relationship to his parents:€‘I did not even have to avoid my father. He disappeared of his own accord. … I seldom saw my mother either. There was almost nothing left in my life to remind me of her’ (24). The last meeting with his father in Istanbul is punctuated by Sascha’s aggressive questions; that they could as easily have been addressed to himself underlines the two men’s similarities as nomadic recluses:€‘What are you hiding from?’ ‘What do you do all day?’ Though his father declares, ‘There are a few things I must tell you’ and tells him that though he never trusted anyone else, ‘you stayed close to me’ (25), Sascha is unmoved. ‘I feel no closeness to him. What will his death mean to me? I pull myself together and try to seem interested’ (26). The meeting ends inconclusively with father and son as distant as they began it:€‘I cannot remember any more, not even our leave-taking’ (29). Two short chapters later he underlines this justification for the emotional coldness that others note in him:€ ‘it is a reaction to my helplessness in the face of pain and my deeply felt repugnance towards any kind of fetishistic way of dealing with suffering’. He claims no interest in the ‘secrets’ his father had wished to entrust to him and imagines his parents’ last day together before their road accident as a form of melancholy companionship born of loveless indifference (36–7). Even his principled refusal to mime the forced ‘Betroffenheit’ (affectedness) attached to rituals and monuments of Holocaust commemoration in Germany begins to seem a defensive mask (61). The novel’s opening sequence has been compared to that of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis, 1915), though where Gregor Samsa’s uneasy dreams transform into a still more nightmarish waking state, Sascha’s dream of being struck in the head by a bullet, yet surviving, reveals itself in a comic anti-climax to have been prompted by a facial pimple (7).16 Yet this passage is already uncanny as well as comic. Why was he targeted by an unknown gunman despite sitting on the back seat of a bus, which, he tells us in his characteristic know-all tone, is the safest place? The unexplained shooting, the pimple and the mismatch between Sascha’s pretence of worldly wisdom and its consequences prepare the reader for a novel in

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which chance, contradiction, ironic twists and a narrating subject who reels between self-importance and self-deflation will be constant companions. From the very first page of the novel, moreover, the dream points to his anxiety about the pain that may accompany the opening up of his family history. Significantly, he flees back to Berlin at the earliest opportunity, and delays the deciphering of the notebooks as much as possible. Against this background, the decision finally to pursue the family secrets assumed to reside in his grandfather’s notebooks takes on a note of euphoric courage. He agrees a rhythm of collecting sections of€ the translated notebooks from the translator, Sven, who like a psychotheraÂ� pist preparing a patient for a long course of treatment warns him the work will take a year of weekly sessions. Abandoning his customary lassiÂ� tude, he paces the Kurfürstendamm, the warm, dry air after a recent cloudburst matching his mood. ‘I declared the coming year a turning point [a ‘Wendepunkt’, his private version of the ‘Wende’ that transformed Germany’s political landscape in 1989/90] in my life. I longed to find deeper levels of myself. … I did not wish to be rootless … Suddenly grandfather appeared to me as the secret which lay between me and my origins. I had to air his secret in order to reach myself’ (118). Here the text departs its customary cool irony for a pathos made more credible once one has become conscious of the suppressed pain the narrator has had to re-engage with in order to undertake this project. When this narrator hears others breathing in the dark hole in which he lives, whose boundaries he cannot see, when he senses that the threads that link the three parts of his self (and which by implication suspend him over the limitless abyss of this dark chamber) are growing ever thinner, this ontological terror means he surely cannot be read only as a textual trope (90). If he is an empty void (‘my life has left no traces’, 132) this only matters if the reader, whilst not falling for the anthropomorphic fallacy of treating a textual construct as a real person, can regard Sascha’s lack of traces as evoking a humanly significant loss. However, the euphoric mood noted above relates to his rediscovered access to his own imagination rather than the clarification of a family secret. In the penultimate chapter, with the ruthless if cowardly singlemindedness of the creative artist, he breaks off with Marie by telegram, cancels his newspapers, readies his pencil and notepad and begins writing. ‘At last I feel myself in a position to tell the story the way it happened. It could end something like this:’ (134). This colon, with which the chapter ends, emphasises that the following, final chapter is tentative, the product of his imagination. It is a brief third-person omniscient account

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of the last hours of a man who may or may not be Sascha’s grandfather, in his garden on an island near Istanbul in 1936. A letter from his former lover of twenty years earlier, and mother of a daughter whom he has never seen and who may be his or may be the offspring of the rapes perpetrated by Turkish soldiers, a letter reminding him of a broken promise and a squandered emotional life, leaves him trembling. There is no return address; a letter he cannot answer gives him no opportunity to soften the reawakened guilt by some form of ritual apology. The impact of the letter’s profound challenge to his psychic economy is presaged a few chapters earlier in a passage supposedly copied from his grandfather’s notebook for 21 February 1921. ‘Our culture has no conception of guilt. We only know sin. It circumscribes our responsibility towards a godly being. But we have no responsibility towards ourselves. Guilt is a personal matter. One is always alone with one’s guilt. We are not used to being alone’ (119). Now, confronted with the letter, he appears prompted to end his life by personal guilt, not responsibility for genocide (about which to the end we are little wiser, despite references to plunder and the high price of victory), though the much-heralded suicide note itself sheds no further light on this:€‘“I wish to be buried here, in the garden of my house”. This sentence was all that stood in his farewell letter’ (137). While the novel’s many interwoven questions of history, memory, identity, belonging, truth and fiction have remained necessarily unanswered, their unanswerability performed too by the novel’s open, fragmentary structure, plotting and topography, the final chapter, and its final sentence, achieve a moment at least of melancholy ontological calm for that part of its narrator’s inner life that is represented in the textual construction of his grandfather. Where some critics have bemoaned the faint contours of Şenocak’s narrator, missing both the psychological patterns argued here and the opposite point, pursued by Adelson, of the narrator’s non-representational function, others have criticised its seemingly random structure and its fluctuation from the narrative to the essayistic.17 The novel is short and fragmentary (its thirty-five chapters averaging four pages in length, with some as short as eight lines), and the narrative movement oblique and repeatedly interrupted. But this is deceptive; an associative thread ties each chapter to the next, and the laconic style implies a reader alert to multiple resonances. For example, in Chapter 21, Sascha, making notes in the State Library, gazing at the as yet unfilled void of Potsdamer Platz, muses on what a future Berlin might bring:€ ‘The Prussian Berlin, the cosmopolitan one, the fascist one, the socialist, the capitalist, the alternative, the no man’s land?’ (83). In Chapter 22 he distinguishes between the

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notebook labelled ‘Inventions’ in which he writes his own thoughts and ideas, and that labelled ‘Memories’ in which he records significant quotations from his reading, only to then admit that he sometimes confuses them (84–5). Chapter 23, entirely in italics and therefore purporting to be an authentic document transcribed into his ‘Memories’ notebook, reflects the historical roots of Turkish-German anxieties about possible answers to the questions posed about a future Germany. Apparently a press release or similar, it reports the award of the ‘Prince Eugene Prize’ of the ‘PanEuropean Association’ for an essay ‘The Turkish Danger in Europe’ by the journalist Karl Schumann, ‘a liberal who is concerned about the future of Europe. … In his view too high a proportion of Turks weakens the European nations’ powers of resistance to incursion [Abwehrkräfte]’. Once Turkey drops its modernising reformist mask to reveal the Turks’ true identity as a martial Asiatic ‘master race’, then ‘Good night, Europe!’ (86). The countless proclamations of Europe’s need to defend itself against infiltration by an Asiatic Other since, for example, Kaiser Wilhelm II commissioned the court painter Knackfuß in 1895 to portray the Archangel Michael calling on the ‘Peoples of Europe [to] defend your holiest values’ against the Asiatic threat, give the text an authentic ring, and the name Karl Schumann sounds plausibly like that of several champions of the idea of ‘Europa’. Polemics against the putative dilution of the German and European gene pool are far from restricted to the neo-Nazi fringe, as was demonstrated again in 2010 by the bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away with Itself ) by Thilo Sarrazin, Board Member of the German Central Bank and former Berlin Senator for Finance. But the document in Sascha’s notebook and the details therein are invented.18 There is no ‘Pan-European Association’, though there have been many with similar names promoting conservative agendas and promulgating Europe as the Christian Occident. The name which Şenocak, through Sascha, gives the prize is also ironically allusive. Through his Â�victory in two Habsburg wars against Turkey, Prince Eugen Franz of Savoy (1663– 1736), established Austria as a major power.19 His equestrian statues still stand in front of the Royal Palace in Budapest and on the Heldenplatz in Vienna where Hitler announced Austria’s incorporation into the racial German nation in 1938. During the National Socialist period the ‘Prinz-Eugen-Preis’ of the University of Vienna supported ‘German ethnic culture [Deutsches Volkstum] in South-East Europe’.20 The 7th Alpine Division of the Waffen-SS, recruited largely from ethnic Germans in the Banat region of Rumania and northern Serbia, was named ‘Prinz Eugen’ in memory of his expulsion of the Turks from the region. The menace to

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the free movement and expression of cultural differÂ�ence represented by centuries of exclusionary discourses of Europe as the Christian Occident are thus here concentrated into a half-page fictional pastiche. In Chapter 24 precisely this menace intensifies:€the Frau Holle of the Grimms’ fairy tale has mutated into Tante Hölle, a heartless hag with a long memory who tosses ‘goodhearted Eva’ into the shaft below her bed whence she vampirically draws sustenance (87–8). Chapter 25 observes the fluctuating relationship between Germans, Jews and Turks, their mutual projections, suspicions and resentments. The adaptation from Snow White, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most German of them all?’ reinforces the link to the gruesome fairy tale of the previous chapter (90). Thus the apparently random succession and superficially changing theme and form of the chapters is in fact a tightly woven network of cross-reference and associative logic. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft is unlikely to emerge from its current nearoblivion in the German literary market, despite its established reputation internationally. But with its complex and narratologically polyvalent protagonist, its play with sometimes ironic, sometimes uncannily threatening points of contact and comparison between Turkish, German and Jewish experience in modern history, and its rethinking of the place and practice of memory in German culture to include quite different objects, anteÂ�cedents and trajectories, whilst also accentuating the place of the imagination in the practice of memory, it remains one of the most thought-provoking novels of its time and place. No t e s 1 Zafer Şenocak, Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar:€Das Ende der Geduld/Sabrn sonu (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1993). 2 As well as work specifically referred to in the course of the chapter, see Roland Dollinger, ‘Hybride Identitäten:€ Zafer Şenocaks Roman Gefährliche Verwandtschaft’, Seminar, 38:1 (2002), 59–73; Andreas Huyssen, ‘Diaspora and nation:€Migration into other pasts’, New German Critique, 88 (2003), 147–64; Yasemin Daıoğlu-Yücel, Von der Gastarbeit zur Identitätsarbeit:€IntegritätsverÂ� handlungen in türkisch-deutschen Texten von Şenocak, Özdamar, Agaoğlu und der Online-Community vaybee! (Göttingen:€Universitätsverlag, 2005); Elke Segelcke, ‘Cultural otherness and beyond:€From discourses of cultural Identity and “clash of civilizations” to a transnational aesthetics in the work of Zafer Şenocak’, in Ursula E. Beitter, ed., Reflections of Europe in Transition (Frankfurt:€Lang, 2007), 103–20; Monika Stranaková, Literarische Grenzüberschreitungen:€FremdÂ� heits- und Europa-Diskurs in den Werken von Barbara Frischmuth, Dzevad Karahasan und Zafer Şenocak (Tübingen:€Stauffenburg, 2009).

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3 However, Adelson’s profoundly argued case for reading Şenocak’s protagÂ� onists as tropes and not characters at all, is, I argue here, too narrow when applied to Gefährliche Verwandtschaft. See Leslie Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature:€ Towards a Critical Grammar of Migration (New York and Basingstoke:€Palgrave, 2005), 104–22. 4 See Moray McGowan, ‘Odysseus on the Ottoman, or “the man in skirts”:€Exploratory masculinities in the prose texts of Zafer Şenocak’, in Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yeşilada, eds., Zafer Şenocak (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 2003), 61–79. 5 Zafer Şenocak, Atlas of Tropical Germany, trans. Leslie A. Adelson (Lincoln, NE:€University of Nebraska Press, 2000), xl–xli. 6 See Matthias Konzett, ‘Writing against the grain:€Zafer Şenocak as public intellectual and writer’, in Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yeşilada, eds., Zafer Şenocak (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 2003), 43–60. 7 Zafer Şenocak, Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Munich:€ Babel, 1998), 41. Hereafter page numbers appear in parentheses in the main body of the text. 8 Katharina Hall, ‘“Bekanntlich sind Dreiecksbeziehungen am kompliziertesten”:€Turkish, Jewish and German identity in Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft’, German Life and Letters, 56:1 (2003), 72–88; Katharina Gerstenberger, ‘Difficult stories:€ generation, genealogy, gender in Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft’, in Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity:€Culture, Politics and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2002), 219–34. 9 See Margaret Littler, ‘Guilt, victimhood, and identity in Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft’, German Quarterly, 78:3 (2005), 357–73, and Adelson, The Turkish Turn, 104–22. 10 See e.g. Halil İnalcık, Turkey and Europe in History (Istanbul:€Eren, 2006), whose extensive treatment of twentieth-century Turkey does not mention Armenia or the Turkish Armenians. 11 See Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act:€The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (London:€Constable, 2007). 12 Adelson, The Turkish Turn, 20. 13 Hamit Bozarslan, ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I (Oxford:€Blackwell, 2010), 494–507, 498. 14 Adelson, The Turkish Turn, 112 (paraphrasing Paul de Man) and 118. 15 Adelson, The Turkish Turn, 121. 16 See Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement:€ Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester, NY:€Camden House 2007), 102. 17 See, for example, Monika Shafi, ‘Joint ventures:€Identity politics and travel in novels by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafer Şenocak’, Comparative Literature Studies, 40:2 (2003), 193–214. 18 One suspects Şenocak would be gratified that at least one critic has misread the essay as a historically extant document. See Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Berlin:€ Schmidt, 2005), 88.

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19 Ironically, Eugen’s trilingual signature ‘Eugenio von Savoy’ reflected a wealth- and power-backed transnational identity rather different from that of contemporary migrants lower in the pecking order. 20 There is a ‘Prinz-Eugen-Preis’ in Germany today, but it is awarded by the Bund Deutscher Pioniere for the top graduate in the training course for sappers.

Ch apter 6

Monika Maron’s Endmoränen (End Moraines) Katharina Gerstenberger

Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Monika Maron’s novel Endmoränen (End Moraines, 2002) is an answer of sorts to the literature of the 1990s, much of which sought to capture the spirit of this decade of rapid change. Many of these works feature young protagonists who live in the present and whose lives evolve in close connection with the developments in uniting Germany, in particular in Berlin. By contrast, Maron’s Endmoränen is told from the perspective of an ageing protagonist who reflects on the end of the German Democratic Republic and its impact on people’s lives more than a decade after unification. In a novel that can be regarded as Maron’s response to the issue of ‘what remains’ of the GDR, recollections of opportunities missed blend with questions about growing older and a narrowing of options in life despite the freedoms brought about by the end of the East German state. Endmoränen, whose title alludes to the debris left behind by the glaciers after the last ice age, suggests that these remnants are plural, their foundation, like that of the moraine, no longer visible yet decisively shaping the layers that have accumulated on top. While the end of the GDR meant a sudden increase in prospects for many, it also forced East Germans to find new ways of telling and interpreting their life stories in the absence of the state oppression that at times served as rationalisation for personal failures and disappointments. This biographical challenge informs Maron’s novel. Endmoränen, which consists of twenty-one sections of varying length, is the story of Johanna, a woman in her early fifties who makes a living as a biographer and as a writer of epilogues and publicity blurbs on record covers. Johanna spends a summer in her cottage in Basekow, a tiny village in Vorpommern near the Polish border, unsuccessfully trying to write the biography of Wilhelmine Enke (1753–1820), the mistress of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744–97). The house, which Johanna and her husband Achim, a Kleist scholar, had bought and renovated in the late 1980s, signifies continuity beyond the end of the GDR but, as 94

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its inhabitants grow older and the surrounding trees taller, it also marks the passing of time. Johanna’s writer’s block gives her the opportunity to reflect on the function of literature in a market-driven economy and, importantly, to revisit the received notion that the absence of censorship post-Â�unification has thrown former GDR writers into a crisis of legitimacy. Biography, both in its written form and as an everyday narrative, plays a central role in Maron’s novel as a construct that allows the individual to endow his or her life with meaning. As Johanna ponders her own past as a writer in the former GDR whose creative strategies were a response to censorship, she develops an argument for literary biography after 1989 and makes a plea for the nuanced and self-critical evaluation of personal circumstances within the socio-political contexts that shape them. During her summer in Basekow, Johanna works in her garden, goes for walks, and follows the conflicts that take place in the village. She meets with her friends Elli and Karoline, the former an East German journalist who had left the GDR in the 1980s, the latter a West German artist who moved to eastern Germany in the 1990s. This cast of characters allows Maron to trace East–West relationships across the caesura of 1989. By contrast, memories of her friend Irene, a woman with a deformed spine who died of breast cancer during the year Johanna and Achim had bought their house, recollect not only a life lived and ended before the fall of the Wall but one restricted by physical limitations rather than GDR laws. Johanna receives the visit of her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Laura, who informs her mother that she wants to pursue her career in physics in the United States and that she will terminate her unwanted pregnancy. A member of a younger generation, Laura can avail herself of options no longer open to her mother and her acquaintances, who need to adapt to new circumstances at a much older age. An important element in the novel is Johanna’s exchange of letters with Christian P., an editor for a small Munich publishing house whom she got to know in the 1980s. These letters, which recall an erotic attraction between the two correspondents, return to the misconceptions and prejudices that governed the relationships between East and West Germans while also dwelling on the loss of passion as a consequence of ageing regardless of the writer’s background.1 Towards the end of the novel Johanna spends the night with Igor, a middle-aged Russian gallery owner. A Russian who grew up in Bonn, the figure broadens the novel’s interest in East–West relationships beyond Germany. The encounter also reassures Johanna that she is still sexually attractive. On the final pages Johanna drives back to Berlin and to her husband. At a rest stop she finds an abandoned dog that she takes home with her.

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With its focus on biography, Endmoränen continues and develops a theme that runs through many of Maron’s previous works. For instance, Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters, 1999), the story of Maron’s maternal grandparents and the author’s most explicitly autobiographical book, contains numerous references to the writing of biography, including reflections on the author’s motivations for reconstructing her grandparents’ lives and deaths from memories, letters and conversations. In the opening pages of Pawels Briefe Maron answers her own question regarding why she is writing this book with a quest for meaning:€ ‘because the chaos of the past is unbearable, one comes to grips with it by retrospectively creating a purpose’.2 Endmoränen, which foregrounds biography as a professional as well as personal pursuit, picks up on this observation and demonstrates that the narratives through which individuals infuse their past with meaning can also limit their perspective. Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close No. 6, 1991), Maron’s first publication after the end of the GDR, pertinently demonstrates the reach of biography through a plot in which memoir writing becomes the object of a power struggle. Set immediately after the fall of the Wall, the novel tells the story of Rosalind Polkowski, a researcher who quits her position at an institute dedicated to the history of the working class, instead accepting a job typing the memoirs of Herbert Beerenbaum, a GDR functionary and professor with whose funeral the story begins. Due to her own similar family background, Rosalind is able to guess the old man’s life story before he tells it to her, the details of which trigger memories of Rosalind’s heated discussions with her father, also a committed communist. Despite her resolve not to get involved in Beerenbaum’s memoir except for the manual labour of typing it, Rosalind quickly finds herself drawn into a struggle with him, finding his biography full of lies as well as hackneyed formulations. Beerenbaum, who believes it to be his duty to leave his memoirs as a testimony to future generations, is a representative of the East German state and as such responsible for what Rosalind perceives to be the missed opportunities in her own life. The impossibility of distancing herself from the impact of Beerenbaum’s biography becomes literal towards the very end of the novel when Rosalind is presented with his typed manuscript and knows that she will not be able to throw it away. Stille Zeile Sechs personalises the clash of biographies under an authoritarian regime. In Endmoränen, Maron introduces a protagonist who must learn to conceive of her life beyond the biographies of the Beerenbaums of this world. The question of what might have been in a person’s life had the circumstances been different is central to Maron’s occupation with biography not

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only in Stille Zeile Sechs. This is, of course, particularly relevant to East German life stories and the state-imposed restrictions that often shaped them. The fear of a life not lived had already been expressed in Maron’s first literary work, the 1981 novel Flugasche (Flight of Ashes). In response to her own question ‘What do I have to fear?’, the narrator answers:€‘The life that I am not living.’3 In Animal Triste (1996), a novel set in the postunification period, the narrator, who estimates her age at ‘most likely a hundred’,4 reminisces about a love relationship that began too late in her life because the Berlin Wall prevented her and her beloved to meet at an age when they could have made a life together. Here, political circumstances interfere with individual desires. Endmoränen pursues the connection between external conditions and an individual’s opportunities into the present. Taking stock of her life thirteen years after the purchase of her summer house in Basekow, Maron’s narrator grapples with the paradoxical realisation that her personal life was happier during the GDR and that the state’s demise, which she wholeheartedly embraces, in the end cannot stave off a pervading sense of melancholy and loss. Some critics have rejected the narrative’s gloomy atmosphere as the ramblings of an ageing protagonist and its creator, yet many others praised the novel for its insights into the challenges of growing older. It pays to examine closely how the GDR is remembered and, importantly, how such reminiscences factor into the interpretation of a life as it continues beyond the caesura of the fall of the Wall. Many works of the 1990s have explored the impact of a capitalist economy on East Germans both as in increase in opportunities and as a loss of basic economic security. Novels set in the immediate post-Wall period such as Jens Sparschuh’s Der Zimmerspringbrunnen (The Indoor Fountain, 1995) or Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998) tell stories of travel abroad fraught with difficulties or attempts at opening businesses gone wrong because the protagonists lack the skills to succeed in a socio-economic environment that is profoundly alien to them. For Maron’s narrator, the newness of foreign travel or the challenges of earning a living under changed circumstances are a thing of the past. Johanna can look back on a number of foreign trips and she is able to make a living as a writer of biographies, the same profession she had in the GDR. Nevertheless, she is unhappy with her current life and believes that the political transformations should have resulted in more fundamental changes in her personal life as well. To her, this is a question of biography€– that is, how one tells the story of one’s life:€‘During the first year after the miracle anyone who had truly understood the signs of the time and did not hesitate for long could close his former life like

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a book and begin a new one.’5 Endmoränen debunks such thinking as a myth at least in so far that none of its characters manage such a radical new beginning. In seeking to understand the impact of the GDR’s end in the context of a life story, Maron calls for a revision of the narrative of 1989 as rupture, instead arguing for a more nuanced assessment of the interplay between continuity and change in an individual’s life. In a speech delivered before the German Historians’ Conference in 2002, the year Endmoränen was published, Monika Maron offered some reflections on the connection between individual life stories and historical events.6 Her opening comments confirm the results of autobiography scholarship since the early 1990s, in particular the observation that in telling their life stories people endow them with causality through the creation of a narrative structure.7 She also invokes scientific research according to which life trajectories are highly pre-determined by upbringing and genetics, giving the individual less agency than most autobiographers are willing to acknowledge. For Maron, biographies are about the tensions between a desired course of life and its realities. The contribution of Maron’s essay, which underscores the nature of biography as construct, lies in the application of those assumptions to the telling of East German life stories after 1989. ‘Anyone who lives in a dictatorship, even a moderate one, tends to attribute whatever does or does not happen to him to the one who interferes with his life without being invited to do so.’8 Rosalind Polkowski in Stille Zeile Sechs and the narrator of Animal Triste exemplify such thinking. Yet in this speech, as in Endmoränen, Maron calls this very construction into question, counting those who have to confront the fact that ‘they fail to achieve their dreams even under changed circumstances’ among the ‘losers’ of the end of the East German dictatorship. ‘East German life histories’, she claims, ‘often revealed their true meanings only after their continuation in united Germany.’9 What counts for Maron is that small space between external conditions and personal limits in which an individual can indeed shape her or his biography. In Endmoränen, she has created a protagonist who must come to terms with the realisation that radically changed political circumstances will not automatically prevent stagnation in her personal life. Lacking the insight of the conference speaker, Johanna must find out for herself how to reconcile the freedoms after 1989 with a sense that her own life choices are becoming increasingly limited. Rosalind Polkowski in Stille Zeile Sechs failed in separating the personal from the professional when she attempted to limit herself to the mechanical work of typing the functionary Beerenbaum’s memoirs. By contrast, Endmoränen, whose main character is a biographer who reflects on her

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own life story, explores biography as a professional and as a personal pursuit. In both cases, the characters attribute significant biographical implications to the end of the GDR. Throughout the novel, Johanna is torn between her understanding that biographies are inventions on one hand, yet difficult to change on the other:€‘It is odd that it did not occur to me, of all people, who knew enough about coincidence and fate in others’ biographies to re-invent my own or least to steer it onto a different track’ (43–4). Later she repeats:€‘I continued to prepare eel in dill sauce and it did not occur to me, at a time when that was possible, to invent a new life for myself; I had not even changed my hair style’ (77). She expresses this regret yet again in a letter to Christian P., when she writes:€‘I could have done away with all predeterminations and it would have been permissible to reinvent my life’ (213). For Joanna, who has no interest in postmodern identity games, the possibility of re-invention is closely tied to the immediate post-Wall period, which to her was a brief window of opportunity after the end of the GDR and before unified Germany became a political and social reality. ‘Back then, more than anything else, I celebrated the end of something we all had considered eternal; in the process I must have forgotten to begin something new’ (214). Johanna’s repeated returns to the topic are a process of working through a trauma of a different kind:€not the experience of oppression in the GDR but the realisation that she failed to move beyond it. Endmoränen explores the topic of biography within the larger context of GDR literature and the issue of censorship. The question of GDR literature after 1989 and in the absence of a censor has been much discussed in scholarly work and also with reference to Maron’s novel. Censorship, the argument goes, created a special connection between writers and readers who delighted in sending and decoding hidden messages through the literary text.10 The absence of censorship triggered a crisis of legitimacy for Eastern German writers. Katharina Grätz calls attention to the phenomenon of ‘concealed writing’ in a recent article in which she argues that Maron’s novel shows ‘how changes in literary communication result in an identity crisis’.11 Martina Ölke makes a similar argument when she writes that the novel reflects on the end of the GDR with a ‘sense of loss’.12 Maron’s protagonist, whose writer’s block throughout the entire novel is certainly a reaction to changed circumstances, does recall the sense of purpose she felt when hiding secret messages in her biographies she believed would evade the censor but be obvious to her readers. Yet she also states that she was ecstatic about the end of the GDR ‘also because I would never again have to conceal messages in biographies’ (41,

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emphasis mine). Johanna’s husband, a literature scholar who himself was subject to ideological restrictions, dismisses her need to encode messages in her texts as a ‘mental deformation’ (46) rather than creative acts of subversion. Endmoränen thus calls into question the notion that eluding the censor played a constructive role in East German literature. Instead of indulging in ‘backward longing’ (201), as suggested by Grätz, the novel shows a protagonist who seeks to come to terms with the changed conditions for writing and to determine literature’s place and value in the absence of censorship. Johanna repeats several times that she should have quit writing biographies after the fall of the Wall (41, 43, 213), but she also admits that she continues to write reader-friendly biographies because this is her only talent and that, furthermore, the end of the GDR did not set free hitherto oppressed creativity (44). While Johanna’s recognition of her personal limitations is infused with resignation she also realises that without secret messages biography is just biography, ‘diligent memories, kernels of knowledge for connoisseurs’ (38). Her readership may well be much smaller now but she takes solace in knowing that it will consist of those who are passionate about the subject. Now that she can choose freely about whom she wants to write and how, it is up to her which lives will be remembered, if only by a limited number of readers (45). Forced to develop a new sense of purpose and mission in the absence of censorship, Johanna begins to experience a degree of agency she did not possess before. In her speech before the German Historians’ Conference Maron emphasised the difference between censorship and market mechanÂ� isms:€ ‘Lyric poetry has a difficult time on the market not because it is forbidden but because too few people want to read it€– even though for the person whose poems do not get published the outcome is the same.’13 Her protagonist Johanna turns this insight into an argument for her own continued dedication to biography and for an idealistic commitment to writing. Johanna’s willingness to write for a small audience can then also be understood as an act of resistance, in this case against the pressures of the market place. Implicitly, Maron also offers a critique of the idea of East Germany as a country of readers (Leseland) by suggesting that East Germans read for political reasons rather than for its own sake. The fact that Johanna, in contrast to the poets in Maron’s speech, was able to secure a contract with a publisher for her proposed biography (36) confirms that market conditions do not mean the end of literature. Endmoränen includes four sections of increasing length with notes towards Johanna’s biography of Wilhelmine Enke, collecting facts

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of Enke’s life, quotations from existing biographies, and paragraphs that begin to approach the shape of the yet to be written work. One of Johanna’s letters to Christian P. includes a substantial section on Enke, in which she draws comparisons between Enke’s life and her own (214–15). Towards its end the novel includes a long quote from Enke’s own memoirs (243–4). Her frustrations notwithstanding, Johanna is making progress and her story about Enke as a woman of extraordinary resourcefulness and beauty is beginning to emerge. Wilhelmine Enke, who was later awarded the title of Countess of Lichtenau, was an unusual woman who overcame the odds of her class and gender. As a young girl from a lower-class family, she caught the attention of Friedrich Wilhelm II, who provided her with an education and later chose her as a mistress. Her beauty and intelligence quickly became legendary. Of her seven children, only two survived to adulthood. Her son Alexander, who died at the age of eight, was immortalised by Johann Gottfried Schadow in a famous sculpture.14 Even after their sexual relationship ended, Enke exerted significant influence on the King and thus became an important figure at his court and its politics. Aware of Friedrich Wilhelm’s profound and somewhat unorthodox religiosity, Enke pretended to receive messages from their dead son Alexander and used those to influence the King in the complex world of court intrigue. After Friedrich Wilhelm’s death, Enke was banished from the court and placed under house arrest from which she was released three years later. At the age of fifty, she married a man half her age. Wilhelmine Enke’s unconventionality and a life not ‘allocated to her on account of her lowerclass birth’ (215) make her an ideal subject of biography for someone fascinated by unconventionality and resilience. To Maron’s protagonist all of these qualities are testimony to Enke’s ability to live life to the fullest (214), and, by implication, make her own life seem less rich. Johanna’s engagement with Wilhelmine Enke serves a dual purpose. Her subject’s life provides Johanna with much needed inspiration. Much of this is understandable but also predictable. A woman concerned with ageing and her own loss of sexual attractiveness is likely to be intrigued by the fifty-year-old Enke’s marriage to a much younger man. Someone used to hiding messages in texts will be drawn to the ingenuity with which Enke manipulated those in power through supernatural communications. Had Johanna written her biography during the GDR, she muses, she would have hinted at the location of Enke’s grave on a former Berlin cemetery destroyed to make way for the death strip, certain that her readers would have picked up on her protest against the Berlin Wall€ (39).

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When Johanna pitched her project to her publisher in the late 1990s, the life of Wilhelmine Enke and her extraordinary ability to prevail in a network of intrigues presented itself to her as a ‘parable’ (36) not only for her own problems but for the shifting socio-political grounds in unified Germany. Two years later, as she is trying to write the book, this ‘convoluted logic’ (36) eludes Johanna. Johanna’s summer in Basekow and her painfully slow progress on her book mark her transition from an East German who writes to outwit the censor to a writer who has to come to terms with the creative conditions in a capitalist economy. Her slow pace and her failure to find satisfaction in her work also trigger the reflections on ageing on which the majority of Maron’s reviewers have focused. With respect to the novel’s narrative structure, Johanna’s inability to write opens up the space for those life stories and reminiscences that make up the bulk of Endmoränen. Endmoränen assembles an array of life stories which are conveyed in a number of different ways:€the narrator’s encounters with friends and villagers, her recollections and conversations, as well as letters and postcards. This variety of forms, voices and fates, which Monika Shafi has aptly described as Johanna’s ‘multiple biographical tools’,15 refract one another and contribute to the novel’s open structure and message. The influence of the GDR on a character’s biography, or, in the case of West Germans, its absence, is an important feature in the life stories with which Johanna surrounds herself and against which she assesses her own as she mourns the lives not lived and expresses the desire for a different life. Yet the comparison of life stories, including Wilhelmine Enke’s, and the different coping strategies offered by the various characters also place Johanna’s dissatisfactions in perspective. The first of these life stories is that of Johanna’s friend Irene, a woman crippled by a deformed spine and who died of breast cancer in her early forties. Irene, who chose a career in Slavic languages because the GDR allowed travel to those countries, lived with her mother for her entire life and admits to never having had a lover. Johanna, in whose construction of self independence and sexual fulfilment play a significant role, later in the novel muses that Irene should have engaged in an exchange of letters with a colleague from a country such as India into which she could have poured her erotic fantasies without running much of a risk of an actual encounter, due to GDR travel restrictions (162). Johanna’s friend Elli, by contrast, a journalist and a single woman, is a spirited and self-confident person who claims that she is no longer interested in sexual relationships (165). Less perturbed by the process of ageing than Johanna, Elli resists the

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pressures of circumstances and given facts. The daughter of a committed communist, Elli was named after a Soviet anti-Nazi hero called Elisaweta Soja (117). As a sign of protest, she chose Elli as the ‘most teutonic and the most unsophisticated variant’ (188) of her name. In the 1980s, she left the GDR for West Berlin after having patiently endured the government harassment that preceded such emigrations. If Irene’s and Elli’s very different lives point to the significant range among East German biographies, Johanna’s West German friend Karoline, an artist in the process of renovating an estate in a neighbouring village, seems to embody a more fortunate life with her international success as a painter, a house that is more beautiful than Johanna’s, and her large collection of high-fashion clothes. Predictably, Karoline, too, has her demons to fight, which come in the form of extreme fear of flying (180) and the existential question of what her legacy will be should she die in a plane crash. In interconnecting these life stories, Maron emphasises differences among East German biographies and points to the existence of anxieties and fears across the East–West German divide. The most elaborate biographical project in the novel, aside from the book Johanna is trying to write, is her exchange of letters with Christian P., an editor for a small academic publishing house in Munich whose friendship with Johanna goes back to the 1980s. The novel contains a total of four letters to Christian P., one of which never gets sent, and three letters he writes in return. Due to delivery delays they are not written and answered in consecutive order, underscoring the importance of these documents as personal reflections in which the addressee is as much imagined as he is real. The two do not meet again even though they suggest it repeatedly in their letters and both refrain from calling each other on the phone (98, 217). Johanna acknowledges that she wants to indulge in fantasies about Christian P. without the danger of ‘disenchantment’ (162) that would most probably result from a direct encounter. In her lectures on poetics Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann und es trotzdem versuche (How I Am Unable to Write a Book and Try Just the Same) of 2005 Maron explains that she had initially conceived Endmoränen as an epistolary novel before rejecting the idea as ‘anachronistic’16 but decided that the inclusion of some letters offered the opportunity to introduce a second voice into the novel. The written dialogue also allows for a level of reflection often absent from verbal communication. The exchange, in which the correspondents fill each other in on what happened in their lives in the years since their last encounter in Munich in the early 1990s (54), covers three main themes:€their friendship in the

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past and the unease over different standards of living that tended to characterise relationships between East and West Germans, the present with its challenges of ageing and failing or failed marriages, and the difficulties both of them face in coping with changed socio-economic conditions. Christian remarks that the humanities division, once the hub of the publishing house for which he has worked for over twenty years, has been relegated to the margins and his office relocated ‘to the attic’ (96). Many of Johanna’s own reflections on the changed conditions for writing biography find expression in her letters to Christian. The developments of the 1990s are as profound as the differences before the fall of the Wall. When Johanna bemoans the absence of excitement in her life (111) and Christian remarks that passion is generally overestimated (221), these are personal differences rather than owed to the different life experiences of East and West Germans. The letter that Johanna decides not to send is about the delicate issue of East–West relationships. In it, Johanna recalls Christian’s beautiful house in Munich where she visited him and his wife, whose elegant clothes she still remembers, after unification (99). Her own house, by contrast, and the meal she had served seem woefully deficient even years later, leaving her feeling duped by Christian because he had led her to believe during his visits to East Berlin that his own circumstances were in fact quite similar to those of Johanna and her husband (100). Johanna, who expresses comparable thoughts regarding her West German friend Karoline, admits to herself that this feeling of inadequacy led her to discontinue the relationship with Christian, adding that it took quite some time for her to realise that she and her husband were ‘the idiots’ (101) who had lost their ability to trust their own judgement. The widespread notion of East Germans as victims of West German arrogance and economic superiority created blind spots in the self-perception of East Germans. In writing these letters, Maron’s protagonist revisits and overcomes resentments common to East–West relationships, replacing them with a dialogue among equals. The inhabitants of Basekow, finally, offer yet another range of models for coping with unification and the perceived and real injuries East Germans suffered as a result. Friedel Wolgast, an elderly widow whose children have moved to the city, is engaged in a prolonged battle with a new neighbour from Berlin over various infractions and, angered by his habit of parking his car too close to her rose bushes, takes matters into her own hands and causes him to puncture his tyres (107). As the neighbour threatens to sue her for damages beyond the tyres, for which she has already compensated him, the old woman flies into a fit of rage, releasing

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her dog to bite him. The police are called, and a veterinarian ends up putting the animal down (227). The reader will easily identify with the old woman, whose anger over the West German newcomer’s greed is as understandable as it is self-destructive. Another village resident, by contrast, a refugee from East Prussia whose life story involves the expropriation of horses first by the Red Army and again in the GDR, takes advantage of the re-introduction of private property in Eastern Germany to overcome a life-long trauma:€he buys a pair of Haflinger horses (43). Ancillary plot lines such as these introduce additional life stories and ways of adjusting to changed circumstances. The differing outcomes underscore the significance of both individual attitudes and objective facts. In several of her novels Maron allows protagonists from her previous books to reappear. The first-person narrator in Pawels Briefe shares significant traits with Josefa Nadler of Flugasche. Rosalind Polkowski of Stille Zeile Sechs was already present in Die Überläuferin (The Defector, 1986). The story of Johanna continues in Ach, Glück (Oh Happiness, 2007), about four months after Johanna’s return from Basekow to Berlin with the dog she had rescued at an Autobahn service area at the end of Endmoränen. In her lecture series Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann…, held at the University of Frankfurt in 2004–05, Maron reports on the creation of this novel and reflects on her need to follow her protagonist’s life through another instalment. Maron’s poetics lectures, whose descriptive title recalls Johanna’s writer’s block in Endmoränen, is another example of her technique to multiply perspectives not only within her fiction but also between autobiography and fiction:€ ‘After extensive deliberations I found out that nothing interested me more than the continuation of this story.’ In the sequel, Johanna overcomes her sense of stagnation with a trip to Mexico and, at least according to Maron’s lectures, she finishes Wilhelmine Enke’s biography. Johanna, Maron states about her character€– perhaps also in response to her reviewers€– ‘is no self-pitying loser but a sober realist who assesses her shrunken possibilities in life’.17 Endmoränen is taking stock, yet again, of the end of the GDR and its aftermath. The immediate reactions to the switch from a socialist economy to capitalism or the often confrontational relationships between East and West Germans are largely a thing of the past also for Maron’s protagonists. Instead, Maron addresses the long-term implications of these changes and reflects on what they mean over the course of a person’s lifetime. The caesura of the end of the GDR remains a decisive point of reference but the novel challenges some of the received interpretations and outcomes of this event and does not absolve the individual of critical self-reflection and the

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labour of continued development. The novel’s focus on biography, with its mirroring and refracting of life stories, oral as well as written, across centuries and gender lines, as well as the East–West German divide, argues for the significance of continuities in the face of rupture. What remains, then, is the ongoing and critical evaluation of how we see ourselves and how we tell our stories. For Maron and her protagonists, the GDR and its end play a significant, if changing, role in this process. No t e s 1 See Volker Wehdeking, ‘Monika Marons rückläufige Erwartungen von Animal triste zu Endmoränen:€Das Unbedingte in der Liebe und die Bedingtheiten des Älterwerdens’, in Winfried Giesen, ed., Monika Maron:€ Begleitheft zur Ausstellung (Frankfurt am Main:€ Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, 2005), 60–74. 2 Monika Maron, Pavel’s Letters, trans. Brigitte Goldstein (London:€ Harvill Press, 2002), 5. 3 Monika Maron, Flight of Ashes, trans. David Newton Marinelli (London and New York:€Readers International, 1986), 5. 4 Monika Maron, Animal Triste, trans. Brigitte Goldstein. (Lincoln, NE and London:€University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 1. 5 Monika Maron, Endmoränen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Fischer, 2002), 41. Hereafter page numbers are given in parentheses after quotations in the text. Translations are mine. 6 Monika Maron, ‘Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 September 2002, http://archiv.sueddeutsche.de/sueddz/index.php?id= A22395312_EGTPOGWPPWPTOEGWWETSEOW (accessed 24 April 2010). 7 See Robert Folkenflik, ed., The Culture of Autobiography:€ Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford University Press, 1993). 8 Maron, ‘Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche’. 9 Maron, ‘Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche’. 10 Manfred Jäger, ‘Das Wechselspiel von Selbstzensur und Literaturlenkung in der DDR’, in Ernest Wichner and Herbert Wiesner, eds., ‘LiteraturÂ� entwicklungsprozesse’:€ Die Zensur der Literatur in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1993), 18–49, 42. 11 Katharina Grätz, ‘Rückblicke auf Strategien des verdeckten Schreibens in Romanen von Katja Lange-Müller und Monika Maron’, Seminar, 43:2 (2007), 194–205, 200. 12 Martina Ölke, ‘Reisen in eine versunkene Provinz:€ Die DDR in der literÂ� arischen Retrospektive. Erwin Strittmatter:€ “Der Laden” und Monika Maron:€ “Endmoränen”’, in Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Gräz and Olaf Hildebrand, eds., Wende des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989 (Berlin:€Erich Schmidt, 2006), 209–24, 221.

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13 Maron, ‘Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche’. 14 The work is on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. Wilhelmine Enke is the subject of several biographies and novels. 15 Monika Shafi, ‘German and American dream houses:€Buildings and biographies in Gregor Hens’s Himmelssturz and Monika Maron’s Endmoränen’, German Quarterly, 79:4 (2006), 505–24, 516. 16 Monika Maron, Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann und es trotzdem versuche (Frankfurt am Main:€Fischer, 2005), 20. 17 Maron, Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann, 8, 89, 78.

Ch apter 7

Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) Kathrin Schödel

In his 1998 ‘Peace Prize Speech’,1 Martin Walser complained that authors today are judged primarily for their public statements whilst their literary works are disregarded.2 This may indeed be especially true for Walser himself, who has the dubious honour of having had two media debates in unified Germany named after him:€the ‘Walser– Bubis debate’, or ‘first Walser debate’, which followed his polemic on the way National Socialism is remembered in the same speech, and the ‘second Walser debate’ concerning his novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) regarding the question of anti-Semitism in this book.3 His 1998 novel Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) is closely linked to the first debate:€the author’s speech can be read as his response to the reception of his autobiographical novel about a childhood and youth during the Nazi period.4 Literary works, therefore, do form a part of the discussions about the author, but in his opinion reviewers and commentators put contemporary social and political concerns ‘before aesthetics’5 and thus neglect the specific quality of literature. Walser’s critique of memory in the Peace Prize Speech runs parallel to this distinction:€ the ‘spirit of the time’ demands political correctness and creates a hegemonic discourse about the past, which in Walser’s view is opposed to personal and literary memory but also to what he terms German ‘normality’.6 In this way aesthetics and politics are uncomfortably intermingled in Walser’s controversial speech. The author’s insistence, however, that works of art should be viewed on their own terms is of course one with which literary scholars tend to agree. Questions of aesthetic autonomy are especially pertinent and sensitive when a fictional text depicts a politically contested past. The following analysis asks, then, what the specific qualities of Walser’s literary form of memory are and whether his aesthetic approach is indeed free from memory politics.7 108

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Au t hor i a l c om m e n ta r y€– pr e s e n t i ng t h e pa s t One of the distinctive features of Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen is the voice of an authorial narrator offering meta-fictional commentary in three short chapters, each entitled ‘Past as present’, at the beginning of each of the three parts of the novel. The narrator describes an aesthetics of presenting the past to which the whole novel corresponds. The past is literally intended to appear as present, as direct experience, unfiltered through later knowledge or judgement. The narrator coins the phrase ‘disinterested interest’ (‘interesseloses Interesse’),8 which is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics, often summarised as ‘disinterested pleasure’.9 The notion of a detached aesthetic perception is applied to the writer’s relationship to the past. This idealist concept of the reception of art, however, cannot easily be transferred to the reconstruction of history with its various political and moral implications and the conflicting interests arising from them. Walser’s narrator, too, knows that it can only be the ‘aim of wishful thinking’ (283) to be able to recreate the past€– that is, in the case of Ein springender Brunnen, the experiences of a five- to eighteen-year-old in the years 1932 to 1945€– as present. Yet the narrator maintains that there is a difference between his own approach and other versions of a shared memory of the past. For the latter he uses the metaphors of the museum and play-acting to characterise, first, the fossilising and thus distorting nature of public memory (9), the museum being one of its institutions, and second, the way in which the past is all too often modified to fit present-day requirements (282). In opposition to these images of cultured but lifeless codifications and hollow enactments of history, his own project of letting the past ‘emerge as of itself’ (283) aims at a dreamlike sensation of reliving experiences, not at classifying and explaining them. This concept forms a polemical contrast to the notion of critical engagement that has characterised public memory of National Socialism at least since the 1960s, namely the idea of avoiding a repetition of the Holocaust through knowing and understanding history and making moral judgements, of gaining political and ethical awareness by confronting the crimes of German history. Walser’s narrator implicitly rejects even such well-meaning concerns as a guideline for turning towards the past because they would interfere with the ideal of an aesthetically detached openness towards memory. What the narrator aims at is not an objective depiction of history ‘how it was’, but at empathetically recapturing a subjective, but authentic viewpoint on the past. The narrator admits that even such a reconstruction of authentic

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subjectivity can only ever be an approximation since the perspective of the reconstructing self will always interfere. Still this is what the whole novel attempts:€ to present as convincingly as possible how people may have thought and felt during the Nazi years and to abstain from moral judgement as well as from integrating their actions into history as we see it now, from an ex post perspective which has a much more complete overview of the consequences of their behaviour than any present observer could possibly have had. N a r r at i v e pe r s pe c t i v e Indeed, if the recreation of the viewpoint of an other, be it one’s own earlier self or someone else, is possible at all, then it is within fiction. The main body of Ein springender Brunnen is told from the perspective of its protagonist, Johann, who relates episodes of his childhood and youth in the village of Wasserburg on Lake Constance, Walser’s own birthplace, and later of his experiences in the Wehrmacht. The choice of a limited point of view in a novel set during the Nazi period has been criticised as being incapable of conveying relevant insights into the past.10 Yet such a generalising criticism of the text’s narrative strategy fails to take into account that the restriction to a figural narration potentially offers a new perspective on National Socialism. Walser’s decision largely to do without an authorial or multi-voiced narrative was at the time of the publication of Ein springender Brunnen rather exceptional within literature set during the Third Reich. Autobiographies and novels at that time tended to employ a self-reflexive authorial voice connecting past experience with later knowledge, as for instance in Ruth Klüger’s autobiography weiter leben (Still Alive, 1992).11 This was an important text for Walser and may have influenced his decision to employ a different form of narration in his own fictional rendering of his childhood and youth.12 His aim was to achieve what his narrator describes:€ a reconstruction of how things appeared then, not how they appear now. And he leaves it to his readers to draw conclusions and search for connections between the world of the novel and their own previous conceptions of the Nazi past. Some critics of Ein springender Brunnen thought that to leave out any hint of our present knowledge about the crimes of Nazism necessarily has an apologetic tendency.13 The limitations of the protagonist’s narrative must lead to a false image of the historical era. This would indeed be true if the reader’s expectation was to find a comprehensive picture of the historical period in the novel. But the restriction of the narrator’s point

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of view, the novel’s ‘narrative perspective’ to which Walser also refers in his Peace Prize Speech,14 does not raise such expectations. It offers a different view of history, the very quality of which lies in its limitations. The restricted horizon of the fictional world can provide an insight into, rather than automatically an apology of, the limited knowledge of its protagonists as well as their historical models. Walser succeeds in exposing how people were caught up in their everyday lives and personal worries and closed their eyes to the consequences of what was happening, even when they took an active part in it. When, for instance, Johann’s mother joins the Nazi Party, she is shown to act on economical considerations€– she wants to ensure that the party meetings take place in the restaurant owned by her family€– and to consciously brush away ideological doubts, which arise from her religiosity and her husband’s critical stance towards Hitler (87). The novel also reveals silences, forgetting and ‘displacement’ of Nazi crimes, for instance when the protagonist recalls a dialogue about ‘Dachau’ (123), the first concentration camp, and the fact that he forgot it, and even ‘forgot that he had forgotten’ (123). The whole village, indeed, is shown to be influenced by National Socialism. Walser is far from creating a provincial idyll when he describes the Nazi teacher, the ‘Ortsgruppenleiter’ (the leader of the Nazi Party in the village), and the protagonist’s own urge to become a soldier, to mention only a couple of examples. Even critics who disapprove of Walser’s narrative concept have praised the depiction of provincial Nazism in the novel.15 Yet the unease many critics have felt with regard to Walser’s rendering of the past is not entirely unjustified. Something is indeed missing in his seemingly detailed and authentic portrait of a village during the Third Reich as seen through the eyes of a young boy. Even though Nazi camps are mentioned and the persecution of the Jews is hinted at in an early scene where one of Johann’s classmates is excluded from the Hitler Youth because he is Jewish (133), Walser nevertheless creates a part of Nazi Germany which appears to be free of anti-Semitism. Not a single character, not even members of the SS or the radical Nazi teacher, mentions any of the well-known anti-Semitic clichés:€when Hitler is praised, he is praised for averting the dangers of ‘Bolshevism’ (90); when the Jewish boy is expelled, the group leader refers only to a ‘higher command’ (133). There is not a single reference to anti-Semitism in schoolbooks, songs or public inscriptions. And this lacuna is not shown to be one of the protagonist’s perception; the narrator hears€– and relates to the reader€– many conversations between grown-ups. Indeed, the family restaurant is a perfect setting for overhearing different voices, and even a radio broadcast,

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where other aspects of Nazi ideology are present. There is no hint that there might be something else which the young boy does not understand, or any other clue calling attention to this omission.16 Whilst the narrator’s limited perspective, as I have argued, is not in itself problematic, these gaps, which are in no way foregrounded, are nonetheless striking. It is not only that Johann’s mother becomes a member of the Nazi Party without any interest in its actual ideology,17 but one of the main pillars of Nazi thought, namely anti-Semitism,18 appears to have no relevance for any of the characters. There is hardly a trace of racial ideology either, so no one, not even the school teacher, who for instance insists on the correct form of the Hitler salute, is presented as a proud ‘Aryan’ or utters any prejudice against ‘inferior’ races or Jews. Walser creates a German village during the Third Reich, which is not free of Nazis, then, but of anti-Semites and racists€ – this is the way in which his autobiographical novel offers a euphemistic interpretation of history. Yet is there really no indication within the text that the reader should be alert to the danger of idealising the past, especially one’s own childhood memories, and be wary of taking the fictional work as historical truth? Does Walser in fact reckon with a reader who is on the lookout for distortions and lacunae such as the one identified here? ‘T h e m i r ac l e of Wa s s e r bu rg’€– r e a l i s m or fa n ta s y ? One episode in particular might be read as a warning not to take the narrator’s version of the past at face value:€ the chapter ‘The miracle of Wasserburg’ (‘Das Wunder von Wasserburg’). Here, Walser introduces an obviously non-realistic element when a Doppelgänger of the protagonist appears. While Johann cycles to a nearby village to visit a girl who is travelling with a circus, his alter ego stays at home and becomes an especÂ� ially well-behaved version of himself. This doubling is not explained in any way€– as a dream, for example€– but rather realism and non-realism are intermingled. The Doppelgänger figure thus highlights the fictional status of the text. It forces the reader to reflect on the constructedness of Walser’s fictional world, despite its realist setting in a recognisable part of Germany during a well-known period of fairly recent history. Moreover, a number of intertextual references, not only in the ‘Miracle’ chapter, highlight the connection of Walser’s novel to literary traditions and again foreground its fictional status. For example, the protagonist finds a piece of paper with the name Beatrijs written on it (233), which is an allusion to the legend of a nun for whom the Virgin Mary acted as a stand-in, and a literary model

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for Johann’s doubling.19 The title of the novel is, of course, also a quotation:€ it comes from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which is mentioned within the text as well (164). But are these devices used to make the reader doubt the realism of the novel’s detailed description of a childhood and youth in Wasserburg in its entirety? The double persona of the protagonist can indeed be read as a metaphoric incorporation of the problem of memory€– that is, of the split into a remembered and a remembering self, or of the constructive and dynamic element of memory which can produce two versions of a past self. Potentially, this obviously fictional moment might thus unsettle the reader’s view of the narrator and the status of his story. Can someone who relates a double presence of himself otherwise be a reliable narrator? Yet Walser’s departure from realism most probably has a different function. Effectively, the ‘Miracle’ chapter does not disrupt the consistency of Walser’s reconstructed past. Quite to the contrary, Johann’s Doppelgänger is shown to be an illusionary version of the ‘real’ Johann, who, rather than seeming less realistic, appears as even more authentic in contrast to his inauthentic, angel-like double. In a similar way, Walser integrates the intertextual references into the level of the plot, as a reading of the protagonist, or a piece of paper he finds, so that they lose their potentially disrupting effect on the closed narrated world. The Doppelgänger, then, rather than disturbing the realistic coherence of the text, functions as an impersonation of the way of representing the past against which the aesthetics of the novel is intended to work:€the figure demonstrates the distorted picture which is generated when an author mixes past and present perspectives. It illustrates what the authorial narrator describes in the meta-fictional chapter that comes just after the ‘miracle’ episode:€a case of ‘slipping out’ of the ‘real’ past (282). Johann’s Doppelgänger corresponds to the politically correct version of the past that Walser’s narrator criticises. Indeed, the Doppelgänger is an idealised Johann, who writes a critical essay about ‘race’ and ‘Heimat’ (252) that demonstrates an insight into Nazi ideology that his ‘real’ counterpart lacks. This is, in fact, the only instance where€– ex negativo and on a plot level distinct from the realist reconstruction of the past€– racist ideology is present. The protagonist, with his lack of interest in politics and his forgetfulness, for instance about the fate of the Jewish classmate (400) who was excluded from the Hitler Youth in Johann’s presence, is made to look more realistic via the contrast with his ‘guardian angel’ (253). Other than in the idealised Doppelgänger, it seems, Walser reveals a version of his past self that is not adapted to present interests, such as proving that one had always been critical and aware of the full extent of Nazi ideology and

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crimes, or€– for Walser equally misguided€– condemning one’s youthful fascist self in an act of self-flagellation. In this way, the novel embodies the author’s ideal of a non-judgemental perspective on the past, one that does not present the attitudes of people at the time according to categories that only emerged later. Rather than emphasising the literary construction of the text, this aesthetics of disinterested memory creates the illusion of historical accuracy:€the protagonist’s perspective on National Socialist, provincial Germany seems realistic, true to the narrated past rather than the present day with its need for justification and explanation. Yet in view of the gap in Walser’s depiction discussed above, this pose of aesthetic detachment and the supposed realism of the creation of a historically plausible viewpoint throw up some awkward issues. The fantasy of a German village free of anti-Semitism cannot be explained by ‘narrative perspective’ and it does not represent a ‘disinterested’ view of the past. Quite to the contrary, it fuels a politically problematic discourse of memory:€a tendency towards marginalising the memory of the Holocaust, not so much by not mentioning ‘Auschwitz’, which may be justified by the restricted perspective of the protagonist. Rather, Walser subtly disconnects German everyday life during the Third Reich from anti-Semitic ideology and thus from its consequences. As a result, Nazi crimes appear as the responsibility of a few, whereas ‘ordinary Germans’ are exculpated. One could argue, of course, that Wasserburg most likely had very few Jewish inhabitants20 and that a boy’s perspective on a village untouched by anti-Semitism need not necessarily imply that antiSemitism only played a marginal role in Nazi Germany. First, however, an actual encounter with Jews has never been a prerequisite for anti-Â�Semitic ideology, and, secondly, Walser would easily have been able to find evidence of anti-Semitic activities in his region, other than a mere exclusion from a Nazi organisation. In a chronicle of Wasserburg that is even mentioned in the novel (84), for instance, a 1935 ban on Jews using the public lakeside resorts is recorded.21 Also, the novel gives no indication that it is supposed to be read as the depiction of an exceptional instance of a village untouched by its political surroundings€– and the existence of such a place would have been a ‘miracle’ indeed. A n t i-S e m i t i s m a n d t h e G e r m a n – J e w i s h r e l at ions h i p It is surely an indication of a conscious decision on the part of the author, and not of aesthetic detachment, that there are only very few hints of

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everyday anti-Semitism in a story that covers the period of 1932 to 1945 in Germany.22 In this way, Walser’s autobiographical novel serves as fictional but realistic evidence for a view the author has also expressed in non-fictional texts:€ the idea that the centrality of the Holocaust within the history of the Third Reich is merely a perspective after the event, and one which distorts the reality of the importance of the Treaty of Versailles and its economical and political consequences.23 In this argument, what is in fact a one-sided interpretation of German history is presented as an authentic historical perspective, whereas other views which stress ‘the general experience of growing anti-Semitism’24 are portrayed as later interpretations without historical pertinence. In Ein springender Brunnen, indeed, the villagers’ turn towards Hitler is portrayed as a reaction to financial problems and anger about ‘Versailles’ (44). If these were presented as two of many reasons for the rise of National Socialism there would be little difficulty in accepting the novel’s version of the past, but to the extent that they are depicted as more or less the only motivations, the novel risks playing down the enthusiasm for Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic political agenda as well as reducing German guilt by blaming others for the rise of Nazism, namely the victorious powers after the First World War.25 In his Peace Prize Speech, Walser justifies this view of history as a desire to avoid seeing ‘everything as a road that could only end in Auschwitz’, because, according to the author, this transforms ‘the German–Jewish relationship into a catastrophe that was predestined under any and all circumstances’.26 The Jewish characters in Ein springender Brunnen, in fact, appear to feature simply in order to suggest a more differentiated and, above all, positive view of the German–Jewish past. There is a minor character Eberhard Wechsler,27 for example, who emigrates to Switzerland and has no qualms about conducting illegal business across the border with the SA leader in Wasserburg, Herr Brugger (370). Wechlser, the Jew, is in effect positioned as a parallel figure to Brugger, the Nazi:€they adapt to political circumstances, and their relationship€– as far as the situation allows€– is profitable for both. Their close connection is underscored by the fact that, after the war when Brugger is dead, Wechsler even offers to adopt his son, who bears the telling name Adolf. Neither the Jew nor the Nazi has any particular ideological conflict with the other, making this side-story an example of Walser’s downplaying of Nazi anti-Semitism and its impact. A Jewish woman, Frau Haensel, furthermore, is said to have been in contact with Rudolf Heß, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party, and to have enjoyed ‘protection from Munich’ (398). Walser thus makes the Jewish figures look similar to his non-Jewish German characters€ – that

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is, with their seemingly apolitical and non-ideological adaptation to National Socialism. Even the scene which most appears as an instance of anti-Semitic behaviour, the exclusion of Johann’s classmate from the Hitler Youth, fits this pattern:€ the boy, although classified as ‘half Jewish’, wants to belong to a Nazi organisation. Later on, the same boy even reports that, like Johann, he volunteered to become a reserve officer (397). The absolute and lethal difference between the conditions of survival for non-Jewish Germans and Jews is thus blurred and the distinction between perpetrators and victims is relativised. Rather than being a differentiation, as Walser claimed in the Peace Prize Speech, this seems to be a strategy of exculpation. bildungsrom an

With respect to the depiction of the inhabitants of Wasserburg, I have argued that despite the ideal of a ‘disinterested’ view of the past that the novel embraces, there is a manifest investment in the fantasy of a nonÂ�anti-Semitic collection of ‘ordinary Germans’, indeed even ‘ordinary Nazis’, as well as in the depiction of German Jews as parallel characters to these non-Jewish figures. Further to this, however, there is another, perhaps more harmless way in which the novel does not in fact allow the past ‘emerge as of itself’ (283). Despite his restricted point of view, the Â�narrator-protagonist’s development is structured as a gradual progress that eventually leads to him becoming a writer. This is a teleological structure that once again presupposes a perspective ex post. Johann goes through several stages of growing self-awareness, and several different aspirations, such as wanting to be a priest, a singer, a poet, and, in the end, a prosewriter, who€– on the last pages of the novel (404–5)€– invents precisely the aesthetics that the authorial narrator of the meta-reflective chapters propounds. And to characterise ‘his language’, he employs the title of the book, which thus forms the last sentence of the novel:€‘Language, Johann thought, is a gushing fountain’ (405). In this way, his closeness to the novel’s author is reiterated. This structure of the novel as autobiographical ‘novel of artistic development’ (Künstlerroman) suggests a proximity to Romanticism, but intertextual references evoke a stronger connection to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the prototype of the German Bildungsroman.28 It would be easy to condemn Walser for the tastelessness in dwelling on the successful development of his fictional alter ego at a time when millions of others were being killed, but there is more to be said about this aesthetic

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decision. Walser is making a point, not just trying to preserve a positive self-image, or indeed a positive image of German everyday life during the Nazi period. In so far as Johann is shown to be largely apolitical€– and even though the influence of Nazi propaganda, for instance on his view of war (284), is made explicit€– the novel as a whole celebrates the individual’s subjectivity and independence from political circumstances. In the face of a totalitarian system, this is a rather bold thesis, but this is what Walser describes:€how the influence of some critical grown-ups, especially Johann’s father, and Johann’s own interest in language and self-discovery lead him to a standpoint of distance to, and potential resistance against, those in power (see 355–6). In his Peace Prize Speech, indeed, Walser discusses Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and points out that the classical author did not mention ‘the guillotine’ (of the French Revolution and subsequent Terror),29 even though the novel was published in 1795. In an earlier essay, Walser explains in more detail why he finds Goethe’s aesthetics so attractive:€ political change, he argues, is not the only route to emancipation; there is, contained within writing and reading, a possibility of resistance (‘Sichwehren’) and of becoming the ‘subject’ of one’s own life rather than being a mere ‘object’ of circumstance.30 Certainly, Ein springender Brunnen may be seen as an expression of this view of history, which is decidedly non-materialistic and which emphasises the importance of private, individual life in opposition to politics, and the independence of personal subjectivity from socio-political conditions. This point is rather provocative and, I would argue, untenable in relation to a political system which meant death for so many. It is also a clear and deliberate departure from German cultural memory. At least since the late 1960s, the National Socialist period has been widely invoked as an argument for the need to develop civil courage and political awareness, and against any shape of blind conformism or blinkered focus on one’s own individual development. In contrast to this form of memory, Walser attempts a re-evaluation of the position of ‘inner emigration’, favouring private integrity over critical engagement and individual growth, or ‘Bildung’, over political change. This position echoes the stance of German classical authors during the French Revolution but in relation to a radically different historical context€– this is a differÂ� ence that Walser refuses to recognise, for instance when he compares Goethe’s omission of the guillotine and his own omission of ‘Auschwitz’. Nevertheless, the emphasis on subjectivity does usefully remind us that not every aspect of life during the Nazi period was entirely infiltrated by politics and that individual attitudes do matter. Indeed, such an emphasis

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on non-determinism could also draw attention to possibilities of resistance during the Third Reich that were not seized. This, however, is not the way Ein springender Brunnen works with its positive depiction of its apolitical artist-hero. T h e e n d of t h e nov e l :€Joh a n n a n d Wol f g a ng In the text’s final pages, the protagonist’s development towards becoming a writer who invents the aesthetics of the novel itself is set against the views his Jewish classmate Wolfgang expresses in a dialogue with Johann. The allusion contained within the juxtaposition of their names to (Johann Wolfgang von) Goethe seems to hint at a close connection between the two, perhaps evidence of the possibility of German–Jewish harmony after, and despite, the Nazi period. Yet their approaches to the memory of the Nazi period are contrasted, and not with the aim of synthesis but with a clear preference for the perspective of the non-Jewish German. Potentially, Wolfgang’s point of view might provide a corrective to Johann’s limited perspective, even to the lack of a depiction of anti-Semitism discussed above. The two young men meet shortly after the war and talk about the immediate past. Their exchange is, at first, another example of the way in which the novel highlights moments of silence and displacement. Johann’s inability to talk about the scene when Wolfgang was excluded from the Hitler Youth is made explicit (396), and yet his insistence on defending his perspective against Wolfgang’s is not presented as necessarily problematic. In contrast to the aesthetics of a disinterested view of the past and the search for one’s ‘own language’ (402) which Johann sets out at the end of the text, Wolfgang’s perspective on the past propounds the ‘conventional’ emphasis on political categories and moral judgement. Wolfgang reports, for instance, that an ‘anti-fascist group is working to document the persecution of anti-fascists in Wasserburg’ (398). This forms a marked contrast to the narrative style of the novel as a whole where politically and morally charged words such as ‘fascist’ or ‘anti-fascist’ do not appear. The aim of a ‘documentation’ is reminiscent of what the authorial narrator criticises in his description of public memory as a ‘museum’ (9) and contrasts with a dynamic, personal approach to the past. The ‘anti-fascist group’ is further shown to consist of privileged people living in the ‘villas’ (398) situated on the lakeside, not in the village itself, so that this early instance of a public, documentary memory is marked as coming from the outside. In the encounter between Johann and Wolfgang, Walser also subtly suggests that Wolfgang’s view threatens to push the protagonist’s experiences to the

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margins. Johann takes on the role of ‘the one who knows almost nothing’ (398), even when the other boy starts talking about the protagonist’s girlfriend. The information that Wolfgang gives, narrated in indirect speech€– ‘Lena and her whole family experienced the terrible air raid in April last year’ and ‘Lena’s father had always held anti-fascist views’ (398–9)€– is contrasted with Johann’s knowledge, which he keeps to himself:€‘Lena had told him that for her the worst thing about the night [of the air raid] had been that, after climbing out of the air-raid shelter, she could not go to the toilet anywhere in the burning town of Friedrichshafen’ (399). Johann recalls concrete, seemingly unimportant but intimate details whereas Wolfgang’s memory is characterised by a more general, factual knowledge about historical events and political positions. The narrator emphasises the dominance this form of memory assumes:€‘Wolfgang was so much the master of the specifics about Lena and her family that Johann felt excluded’ (399). The term ‘master’ (in German ‘Herr’) recalls the phrase the authorial narrator had previously used to describe his concept of memory:€‘Wishing for a presence of the past which we cannot control’, (‘Der Vergangenheit eine Anwesenheit wünschen, über die wir nicht Herr sind’, 283; my emphasis). In this way, the contrast between Johann and Wolfgang becomes the contrast between public memory and the novel’s aesthetics of ‘disinterested’ memory:€being ‘the master’ of the past is the opposite of the ideal of an aesthetic perception of it€– that is, letting it ‘emerge as of itself’ (283). In the dialogue between Johann and Wolfgang, the perspective of the young Jewish German is thus portrayed as less aesthetically valuable, and at the same time less authentic, than the memory Johann as narrator has presented to the reader throughout the novel. Rather than offering a corrective to the protagonist’s lack of knowledge about anti-Semitism and the victims of Nazism, it provides him€ – as well as the reader if he or she accepts the premises of the novel€ – with a further reason to turn away from the memory of the victims. This gives Walser’s seemingly apolitical, or even anti-political, aesthetics of memory a highly problematic political inflection. To the extent that the fictional past the author creates is based on the assumption that German everyday life was far removed from anti-Semitism and thus from the Holocaust, it follows that the Jewish perspective does not appear as a necessary part of the memory of National Socialism but as a point of view from the outside, as it were. The close of the novel combines this falsifying interpretation of history with the problematic opposition between two forms of memory, in which the memory of the survivor is presented as a threat to the protagonist’s aesthetic relationship to the past.

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1 Walser’s speech on receiving the ‘Peace Prize of the German Book Trade’, ‘Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede’ (‘Experiences while composing a Sunday speech’) was published in English in Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, The Burden of the Past:€ Martin Walser on Modern German Identity. Texts, Contexts, Commentary (Rochester, NY:€ Camden House, 2008), 85–95. 2 See Kovach and Walser, Burden, 93. 3 See Matthias€N.€Lorenz,€‘Auschwitz drängt uns auf einen Fleck’:€Judendarstellung und Auschwitzdiskurs bei Martin Walser (Stuttgart and Weimar:€ Metzler, 2005), 79–220. 4 See my ‘Normalising cultural memory? The “Walser-Bubis debate” and Martin Walser’s novel Ein springender Brunnen’, in Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity:€Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2002), 67–84. 5 Kovach and Walser, Burden, 90. 6 Kovach and Walser, Burden, 91. 7 See my Literarisches versus politisches Gedächtnis? Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede und sein Roman ‘Ein springender Brunnen’ (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). 8 Martin Walser, Ein springender Brunnen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Suhrkamp, 1998), 283. Further references to the novel appear in the text with the page number in parentheses, in my translation. 9 See Kurt Wölfel, ‘Interesse/interessant’, in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe:€Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden (Stuttgart and Weimar:€J. B. Metzler, 2001), vol. 3, 138–74. 10 See Gunhild Kübler, ‘Martin Walser und die Unschuld der Erinnerung:€Zu Martin Walsers Roman Ein springender Brunnen’, in Moshe Zuckermann, ed., Deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Göttingen:€Wallstein, 2003), 166–80, 172. 11 In the English version of the book, which came out in 2001, Klüger added a few pages commenting on Walser, whom she met as a student, and the memory of the Holocaust, including a reference to Ein springender Brunnen, which she calls his best novel. See Ruth Kluger [sic], Still Alive:€A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:€The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001), 165–9. 12 See Walser’s speech ‘Ruth Klüger zur Begrüßung’ published as a radio transcript in Stephan Braese and Holger Gehle, eds., Ruth Klüger in Deutschland (Bonn:€Selbstverlag Kassiber, 1994), 31–3. 13 This was the argument of the critics in the popular TV show ‘Das literaÂ� rische Quartett’, which Walser refers to in his Peace Prize Speech (Kovach and Walser, Burden, 90). See the transcript of parts of the TV discussion in Jochen€ Hieber,€ ‘Unversöhnte Lebensläufe:€Zur Rhetorik der Verletzung in der Walser-Bubis-Debatte’, in Michael Braun et al., eds., ‘Hinauf

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und Zurück/in die herzhelle Zukunft’:€ Deutsch-jüdische Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert:€Festschrift für Birgit Lermen (Bonn:€Bouvier, 2000), 543–59. 14 Kovach and Walser, Burden, 90. 15 See Kai Köhler,€‘Die poetische Nation. Zu Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede und seinen neueren Romanen’, in Johannes Klotz and Gerd Wiegel, eds., Geistige Brandstiftung:€Die neue Sprache der Berliner Republik (Berlin:€Aufbau, 2001), 101–54, 143. 16 See Wulf D. Hund, ‘Der scheußlichste aller Verdächte:€Martin Walser und der Antisemitismus’, in Johannes Klotz and Gerd Wiegel, eds., Geistige Brandstiftung:€Die neue Sprache der Berliner Republik (Berlin:€Aufbau, 2001), 183–232, 205. 17 See Amir Eshel, ‘Vom eigenen Gewissen:€Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte und der Ort des Nationalsozialismus im Selbstbild der Bundesrepublik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 74:2 (2000), 333–60, 337. 18 See Werner€ Bergmann, ‘Antisemitismus’, in Wolfgang Benz et al., eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Munich:€dtv, 2001), 365–7. 19 See Jakub Novák, Martin Walsers doppelte Buchführung:€ Die Konstruktion und die Dekonstruktion der nationalen Identität in seinem Spätwerk (Konstanz and Leipzig:€Universitätsbibliothek und Deutsche Bibliothek, 2002), 167. 20 See Helmuth Kiesel, ‘Zwei Modelle literarischer Erinnerung an die NS-Zeit:€Die Blechtrommel und Ein springender Brunnen’, in Stuart Parkes and Fritz Wefelmeyer, eds., Seelenarbeit an Deutschland:€ Martin Walser in Perspective (Amsterdam and New York:€Rodopi, 2004), 343–61, 351. 21 See Erich Seitz, ‘Hundert Jahre “Sommerfrische Wasserburg”:€ Eine Sonderausstellung des Museum im Malhaus vom 16. April bis 29. Oktober 2000 und in erweiterter Form auch im Jahr 2001’, www.wasserburg-Â�bodensee. de/Malhaus/archiv/sommerfrische.htm (accessed 7 February 2005). 22 Only at the end of the novel, after the war, the reader finds out that the Nazi teacher had threatened a Jewish woman in the village with deportation (397–8), but she, like all other Jews mentioned in the novel, survives the Third Reich. See Joachim Garbe, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Idealdeutschen:€ Autobiographien deutscher Schriftsteller am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Günter de Bruyn, Ludwig Harig, Sigmar Schollak, Martin Walser)’, in Manfred Misch, ed., Autobiographien als Zeitzeugen (Tübingen:€Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 199–212, 209. 23 See Martin Walser, Das Prinzip Genauigkeit:€Laudatio auf Victor Klemperer (Frankfurt am Main:€ Suhrkamp, 1996), 33–4, and, for example, the 2002 speech ‘Über ein Geschichtsgefühl’, in Martin Walser, Die Verwaltung des Nichts:€Aufsätze (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 2004), 253–62. 24 Walser quotes Gershom Scholem in Prinzip Genauigkeit, 33. 25 See Hans Mommsen, ‘Über ein Geschichtsgefühl:€Der Schriftsteller Martin Walser …’, Die Zeit, 16 May 2002, 41. 26 Kovach and Walser, Burden, 90. 27 See Lorenz, Auschwitz, 388.

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28 See Novák, Martin Walsers doppelte Buchführung, 164. 29 Kovach and Walser, Burden, 90. 30 Martin Walser, ‘Des Lesers Selbstverständnis’ (1993), re-published in Martin Walser, Leseerfahrungen, Liebeserklärungen:€Aufsätze zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1997), 702–30, 713.

Ch apter 8

Michael Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North) Stephen Brockmann

Michael Kleeberg’s novel Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North), published in 1998, is one of the major novels of German reunification, a reflection on the way that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and the coming together of the two parts of a previously divided Germany opened up a space for Germans to imagine a better country and a more positive identity.1 Ein Garten im Norden is also about the role of art generally, and literature specifically, in making possible and instantiating such imaginings. Kleeberg’s work is a novel of the Berlin Republic not just because it is about reunification and takes place largely in Berlin, but also because it conceives of German reunification as a coming together of Germany’s past with its present for the purpose of forming a more productive future. Ein Garten im Norden also partially reflects the life of its author. Like the novel’s protagonist and narrator Albert Klein, Kleeberg was born in southern Germany (in Baden-Württemberg) at the end of the 1950s but spent his adolescence in Hamburg. Also like his protagonist, Kleeberg left a divided Germany in 1983 and spent over a decade living elsewhere before returning to a reunited Germany in the mid-1990s. Kleeberg wrote about his protagonist Klein’s return to Germany before he himself returned to his native land from France, however, and in this sense Ein Garten im Norden actually prefigured its author’s own life€ – an ironic twist, since the novel is also about the way that fiction prefigures, and influences, reality. Kleeberg currently lives in Berlin, just as his protagÂ� onist Klein winds up in Berlin. Other details in Ein Garten im Norden suggest an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical account. For instance, Chapter 44 of Ein Garten im Norden tells the story of a young married man named Volker, a friend of Albert Klein’s, whose wife leaves him not for another man but for a woman; a similar story forms the basic plot line of Kleeberg’s novel Karlmann (2007), an extended reflection on masculinity in the Federal Republic during the decade before German 123

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reunification. The names Klein and Kleeberg start with the same three letters. All these similarities suggest that Kleeberg imagined his protagonist Albert Klein as fundamentally similar to himself, but with a twist. Finally, both the names Kleeberg and Klein can be Jewish, and this fact hints at the non-Jewish Kleeberg’s desire for a reimagination of German and Jewish history and identity. Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden may be a novel about Germany, but it is also a novel about individual identity and the way that individual identity is wrapped up in national or collective identities. The narrator Albert Klein is a West German who, like so many Germans€ – indeed, ‘like all Germans’ (39), the protagonist notes€– is uncomfortable with his Germanness and who goes to considerable lengths to avoid it.2 The narrator’s very discomfort with Germany is configured as quintessentially German. Not only does he spend twelve years living in foreign countries, but he is ill at ease when foreigners recognise him as German and speak to him in German:€‘I was not at all pleased at the fact that my nationality was so clearly recognisable’ (39). Like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, the narrator has an encounter with the police on his return to his homeland. Klein is highly critical of what he sees as Germany’s ugliness, and he ascribes that ugliness to a lack of historical continuity and knowledge of the national past. ‘What I hated about Germany was its ugliness. More than the dark past, more than all the fanatics, what scared me away was the ugliness of the cities and the countryside. The perverse pleasure in ugliness’ (28). The connection between ugliness on the one hand and discontinuity on the other is established by the fact that ‘beauty also has to do with remembrance, because beauty is created by comparisons. And remembrance is continuity’ (28–9). For Klein (and probably also for Kleeberg), Germany is a country of ‘zero hours’ that is constantly breaking off its own cultural traditions and beginning anew. Continuity has two dimensions, historical and geographical, and these two dimensions belong together. Beauty can come from continuity with previous times, or it can come from continuity with other places, or both. The central project of Ein Garten im Norden€– both within the plot of the novel and also, by implication, outside the novel itself, in post-reunification Germany€ – is the creation of beauty. That beauty is to come from both comparative dimensions:€ from comparison with the national past, and from comparison with other countries and other places. The improvement of Germany is thus conceived as a reclaiming by Germany of its connection with its own past, but also, perhaps paradoxically, as a renunciation of all Sonderwege, all special paths

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that separate Germany from its European neighbours. The new Germany is to be comfortable with its own Germanness but also comfortable with other nations and peoples. The term ‘Ein Garten im Norden’ refers to a number of different but interrelated things:€(1) the novel itself; (2) an extensive novel-within-thenovel whose author is none other than Kleeberg’s semi-autobiographical alter ego Albert Klein; (3) a garden that is created, destroyed and then inherited within the novel’s plot by two characters named Albert Klein, one of them the novel’s narrator and the other a character in the novelwithin-the-novel. In addition, ‘Ein Garten im Norden’ also refers to (4) Germany itself:€ to all of the positive traditions in German history that make things like peace and beauty possible in the national context, and also to the hope that these traditions may, in the future, help to make of Germany€– perhaps for the first time ever€– ‘a garden in the north’. Just as the author Michael Kleeberg has created a semi-Â�autobiographical narrator named Albert Klein, so too the narrator Albert Klein creates a second Albert Klein who is a protagonist within the first Albert Klein’s imagination:€a character in a book that the first Albert Klein writes; but this fictional, secondary Albert Klein also, magically (through the power of fiction) becomes the grandfather of his creator at the novel’s end. The second Albert Klein€– the one who is a figment of the first Albert Klein’s imagination, but who also becomes his grandfather€ – creates a beautiful garden in the middle of Berlin in the 1920s. By the end of the novel the first Albert Klein, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, has become an heir to the second Albert Klein’s garden in Berlin, and he is largely responsible for maintaining its traditions. In other words the narrator’s literary imagination has turned into reality, and everything that the narrator Albert Klein has written is now true. By writing a book about a fictional character, the narrator Albert Klein has, within the framework of the novel, created a history and a character that turn out to have been real. By analogy, the novel’s author, Michael Kleeberg, has also created a fairy-tale-like story about Germany that he hopes will become real; he has provided a different and better German narration for a nation that will, he appears to hope, accept the responsibility for remembering its difficult past but also work to make the future better than that past.3 Kleeberg’s self-reflexive blurring of narrative levels, and of autobiography with fairy tale, reflect the fact that the novel is also about writing itself. Germany is not exactly a tabula rasa, waiting to be filled in, but the reunification of the nation has made possible the imagination of a different future. Albert Klein, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, is

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also€– again like the author Michael Kleeberg in his youth€– a would-be author, and his chief activity throughout the book is the creation of a story that begins with a chapter entitled ‘A garden in the north’ (87), and that could easily have the same title as the novel itself. Fiction in this novel is not unconnected to reality; on the contrary, it has a tendency to become reality, albeit in an uncontrollable way€– that is, in a way not necessarily intended by its creator. It has a life of its own that is connected to, but not controlled by, its author. The narrator warns readers of fiction’s effect upon reality at the very beginning of the novel, which constitutes a reflection on the difficulty, and danger, of narration itself. He refers to ‘the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the measurement of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon itself’ (9), and, in the context of the novel, what this suggests is that it is impossible to write about something without changing the very thing that one is writing about. Writing, then, is not a mere reflection of something that exists independently of the writer. Rather, it is a process of creation by means of which the writer inserts himself into reality while at the same time subjecting himself to the same process of change. The creative power of fiction becomes even clearer when the narrator, on his return to Germany in 1995, makes a stop in Prague, goes into a used book store, receives a book full of blank pages from a Jewish bookseller, and is told by the bookseller:€‘whatever you write will have become reality at the moment that you have finished the book’ (46).4 This is precisely what happens at the end of the novel:€the story that Albert Klein has written becomes his own prehistory, as he becomes the grandson of his story’s protagonist. He has created a story, but at the same time, paradoxically, he has become the creation of his own story. People create fictions, but they are also created by fictions. Germany, like all nations, may be a fiction in the sense that it is not ‘natural’ but created by human beings, and yet precisely as a fiction it has a powerful reality for good or ill. There is a structural similarity between the blank book that Klein receives in the Prague bookstore and the garden that his grandfather once created in Berlin. The chapter prior to the one entitled ‘A garden in the north’, which begins the story-within-the-story, is entitled ‘The hole in the middle of Germany’ and deals with a large empty space somewhere in the middle of Berlin where the Wall once stood. Both phrases refer to the same physical area:€a space that was once (in the 1920s) a garden in the middle of Berlin and that is now (in the narrative present of 1995) an empty lot where the Wall once stood. The empty space is one of the many ‘voids of Berlin’ (Andreas Huyssen) created by history.5 It is an imaginary

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space with no direct correlation to the real map of Berlin; however, readers familiar with the 1990s transformation of Berlin’s voids into spaces for commerce, tourism or reflection€ – at Potsdamer Platz or the Holocaust Memorial, for instance, or even at Berlin’s Jewish museum, the concrete instantiation of Huyssen’s Berlin voids€ – can easily imagine such an empty space pregnant with possibilities for the future. The empty space that the narrator Klein encounters in the chapter ‘The hole in the middle of Germany’ is described as just under 40,000 square metres€ – that is, roughly the same size as the retail space in the Potsdamer Platz-Arkaden, built in the second half of the 1990s, and twice the size of the Holocaust Memorial (which covers 19,000 square metres and was officially opened in 2005) or about one-fiftieth the size of Berlin’s Grosser Tiergarten, the real city park that constitutes ‘a garden in the north’ in the centre of Berlin. The narrator describes the ‘hole’ in the middle of Berlin as ‘wasteland that no one had taken care of for half a century’ (81), a description that could apply to the real Potsdamer Platz in the first half of the 1990s, or to any number of other formerly empty spaces where the Wall once stood. The emptiness of this ‘hole’ corresponds to the emptiness of the book that Klein received in Prague:€ ‘The book consisted entirely of empty pages’ (40) and is in fact nothing more than ‘writing paper’ (42, 46) that the protagonist is supposed to fill with his longing:€‘An empty book that you will fill with your love’ (46). Both the space in the middle of Berlin and the book itself are initially empty, and their emptiness makes it possible for the narrator to imagine filling them with meaning. The empty space in the middle of Berlin becomes a garden that is described in identical words at both the beginning of the novel itself and the beginning of the story-within-thestory:€‘Once there was a strange park in the middle of the empire’s capital’ (9, 87)€– words that, probably not coincidentally, recall the beginning of Theodor Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrungen (Diversions and Entanglements), written in the 1880s, at a previous time of change and modernisation in the German capital. Both the physical space in the middle of Berlin and the blank pages of the book are in essence filled in by the very same activity; the creÂ� ation of a novel and the creation of a garden are analogous activities. Both require imagination, knowledge and hard work, and both take elements from an often chaotic and incomprehensible reality and gradually transform them into order and meaning. Both transform emptiness or ugliness into fullness or beauty. Shortly before he goes to the Prague synagogue and sees a name that is similar to his own on the wall that commemorates

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the victims of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the narrator of Ein Garten im Norden walks through the garden of Prague’s Waldstein Palace and reflects on the significance of gardens as spaces where nature is forced to conform to human dimensions:€‘In the past I used to think that beauty, undiluted beauty, existed only in nature. Today I believe … that beauty created by human beings, whether inspired by nature or intended to domesticate nature and make it accessible to us, goes deeper and fits us better, a mercy. A mercy because it does not make us freeze up in terror but reminds us that, no matter what, we are not alone’ (27). The words ‘no matter what’ (‘so oder so’) can be interpreted as ‘whether God exists or not’, with the resulting meaning that gardens remind human beings that they are not alone, whether or not God exists. A garden, in other words, is the opposite of the sublime; whereas the sublime reminds human beings that they are small and unimportant (and therefore alone) when compared to the vastness of nature or God, which makes human beings ‘freeze up in terror’ (‘erstarren oder erschauern’), a garden reminds people of the existence, the work and the pleasure of other people, and it encourages them to participate in that very same existence, work and pleasure. A garden transforms ‘chaos and senselessness’ (28) and creates form. Something of that process of creation rubs off on the human beings who experience it:€‘The human beings who sit and walk here simply have to preserve something of the impression of beauty. Something confers itself upon us. Something improves us’ (28). These words are immediately followed by the previously cited words ‘What I hated about Germany’, suggesting that what the narrator finds particularly disturbing about Germany is its un-garden-like status:€ Germany is a space that has not been brought into conformity with human measurements. It may be a ruin or a void, and it may even be sublime; however, it is anything but a garden. The creation of the garden and of the novel-within-the-novel are intimÂ� ately bound up with the problem of love. When the narrator walks into the Prague bookstore and receives the empty book from the Jewish bookseller, he is informed:€‘Only people who love greatly come here. You love, Herr Klein’ (44). Of course the bookseller is right. Readers of Ein Garten im Norden already know at this point that the narrator left Germany partly because of his unrequited love for a woman named Beate Wittstock or Bea:€‘Because of her I had gone abroad, because of her I came back’ (10). For the narrator, Germany and Bea are connected to each other:€in returning to Germany, he also expects to return to his former lover. And yet the word ‘Bea’ is, the narrator admits to himself, ultimately ‘a cipher,

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timeless within me, without any connection to a year or a day of life together in the present or in the future’ (45). Love, then, is ultimately not a state of completeness or finality; rather, it is a state of lack and longing. The narrator’s reflections on love resemble those laid out by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium; Aristophanes defines love as the search for one’s missing half:€‘each of us is a mere fragment of a man’ and ‘we’re all looking for our “other half”’.6 In other words, love is a sense of incompleteness coupled with the longing to become whole. The narrator’s reflections are similar:€‘Love, what was love, then? Love was the longing to become whole. The consciousness of being just one half, a part with something missing in order to become whole, a part that does not close itself off but opens up like a flower’ (45). Whereas, for Aristophanes, love is always concretely for a particular man or woman, for Albert Klein the particular woman Bea is merely a ‘cipher’ for something else:€ Germany. The narrator’s reflections on longing and nostalgia imply that the object of the verb ‘lieben’ (to love) is really the country that Klein is returning to:€‘The longing for the hills and forests, for the landscape in May, and my dislike of this country that wasn’t like other countries, my path, my cynicism, my sadness, my curiosity, my destructive anger, my memories, my tears, my search€– was that not love?’ (45) Nowhere in the novel does the narrator actually supply the noun ‘Deutschland’ (Germany)€– or any other noun€– as an object for the verb ‘lieben’, a fact that is duly noted by the Jewish bookseller after Albert Klein has admitted:€‘Yes, I love’ (45). The bookseller waits for a moment, then says:€‘I was waiting to see whether an object followed’ (45). Nevertheless the implied object of the verb is clear. The object ‘Germany’ cannot follow the verb ‘love’, because a simple declaration such as ‘I love Germany’ would imply an unproblematic patriotism, one that is satisfied with the state of the country as it is (with love for a void, as it were). But for Albert Klein (and probably also for Michael Kleeberg) the love of country€– and especially of a country with a history as troubled as Germany’s€– is precisely not unproblematic or satisfied with the current state of affairs. Rather, love for Germany is an acute sense of Germany’s historical and current failures, a sense of what is lacking and what needs to be improved. It is the desire to make Germany more beautiful, to make of it none other than ‘a garden in the north’. Such a love€– a love that is intensely aware of lack and that seeks to improve the object of one’s love€– would be highly problematic in interpersonal relations, and, indeed, the narrator’s former lover Bea suggests to him that she left him precisely because he loved not her but his fictional idea of her (267). When directed not towards an individual person but towards a nation, however,

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such a love becomes practical and helpful because it seeks to improve the nation while at the same time opening up the self to a similar kind of improvement. For the narrator Albert Klein the work that he puts into filling up his empty book is a displacement of his love for Bea, and analogous to it. Bertolt Brecht’s Herr Keuner proceeds in a similar way:€‘“What do you do”, Mr K. was asked, “if you love someone?” “I make a sketch of the person”, said Mr K., “and make sure that one comes to resemble the other”. “Which? The sketch?” “No”, said Mr€K., “the Â�person”.’â•›7 Brecht’s anecdote is a reminder that human beings, far from being unchangeable, are themselves a kind of ‘Enwurf’, a design that can be worked on and improved. By analogy, nations too, which are created by human beings, can also be improved. The parallels between the narrator’s book and his namesake’s garden continue. When he learns from the bookseller in Prague that whatever he writes in his blank book will become true once he finishes, the narrator sets out to create a radically different German history, one in which love, brotherhood and peace prevail, and the forces of reaction and hatred are defeated. This will be a German history in which Adolf Hitler hardly exists and cannot be named€– ‘No. He doesn’t exist. In a few weeks he won’t exist any more’ (481)€– and in which the composer Richard Wagner was the modest, cooperative creator of left-wing, anti-nationalist, antiRomantic music that appeals to the rational pleasure of his listeners, a composer who created ‘a counter-melody … a counter-theme … whose quiet sound tells us of another line of tradition, different from the one that has become a European and worldwide cliché’ (338). The narrator’s Wagner, unlike the historical Wagner, always kept his own personality in the background, emphasising social obligations; far removed from any artistic autism, he ‘needed the You, the opposite pole’€ – one reason for ‘his continual work with librettists, his taste for teamwork, to use a modern word’ (344). In this alternative history of Germany, the philosopher Martin Heidegger was the laid-back, gregarious author of smartly written and easy-to-read literary essays, an enemy of pretentiousness who proclaims:€ ‘I don’t know … why I should make things more difficult and incomprehensible than I find them to be’ (175). Heidegger’s language is characterised by an ‘unprecedented elegance and simplicity. Heidegger wrote in a German that telephone operators and white-collar workers not only understood but actually enjoyed’ (175), and he is the author of the pathbreaking philosophical tome Polis und Zivilisation (Polis and Civilisation), which came out in 1926, not of the notoriously difficult Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which appeared in 1927. By creating a different

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Wagner and Heidegger, and through the cosmopolitan character of his namesake Albert Klein, a banker from southern Germany who loves art and civilisation and believes in reconciliation between Germany and its European neighbours, the narrator hopes to change his own memory and thus Germany itself. As he tells the Jewish bookseller from Prague, who has criticised him for his whitewashing of German history, ‘I don’t want to improve anything. No matter what you believe, I’m too modest for that. I just want a different memory. I will confine myself to revising my memory’ (182). The narrator would be happy, he tells the bookseller, ‘if your Heideggers and Hegels and Marxes and Luthers had been Dutch, English, or Italians, I grant them that honour, and instead Fred Astaire and Charlie Chaplin had been Germans’ (183). The narrator even dreams of going back into history as far back as Martin Luther in order to warn him of the dangers of a German Sonderweg (special historical path) and prevent him from writing his screed against the peasant revolutionaries of the sixteenth century (375–82). All of these changes or attempted changes are part of an effort to ascertain ‘what went wrong in German history’, and to correct history, as the Jewish bookseller remarks (374); they come from the fact that ‘you hate Germany. Very banal for a German’ (373). The narrator’s attempt to create a better, more cosmopolitan Germany in his book corresponds to his namesake Albert Klein’s partially successful attempt during the 1920s to create a garden in the middle of Berlin where former enemies can meet and talk to each other while enjoying no fewer than seven artificial landscapes:€ a Japanese garden, a French garden, an English park, a Black Forest, a so-called Blue Forest full of conifers, a fruit orchard, and a palm house€– a garden based on the real French garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte created by the Alsatian Jewish banker Albert Kahn (1860–1940) in Boulogne-Billancourt in Paris. Klein’s garden exists not only for the pleasure of its creator but for society at large, and in it Klein works hard during the Weimar Republic for the cause of European peace€– much as the historical Albert Kahn had done. Not far from this garden Klein also creates a foundation that enables promising young people from all over Europe to travel around the world in order to gain experience with other countries and customs. Of course, Klein creates the garden in no small part as a tribute to the love of his life, Charlotte von Pleißen, who happens to be the wife of his business partner Hubertus von Pleißen, just as the narrator of Ein Garten im Norden creates his narration out of thwarted love for a woman. Both projects are characterised by sublimated love and the desire for a better, more cosmopolitan Germany.

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In the end both projects fail. The banker Klein’s project fails because, as it turns out, he was born a Jew, and he is therefore unable to continue as the head of his investment bank once the Nazis have come to power. Like so many other Jews during the Nazi period, he is forced to sell his property at a price far below its real value, and the novel implies that he is ultimately murdered by the Nazis€– but not before his lover Charlotte von Pleißen becomes pregnant with his child. The narrator, meanwhile, fails in his attempt to rewrite German history (as well as in his attempt to reconnect with his former lover Bea), and the chapter in which his failure is described bears the title ‘The Bankruptcy of the Narrator’. As the narrator complains, ‘the elements that I had tried by violence or mischief to push out of their path simply sprang right back again’ (513–14), making his attempt to change German history look ridiculous. ‘My story has become pointless the moment it becomes possible, the moment it happens, that it’s the year 1933 in Germany and someone calls Klein a Jewish sow. That this is possible means a declaration of bankruptcy for my story’ (515). And yet, as it turns out, the narrator is anything but bankrupt. On the contrary, he is rich beyond his wildest dreams. His narration may be over, but his history still continues, taken up by the Jewish bookseller. As part of that history, the narrator learns shortly after he has given up on narration that his father, a conservative businessman with whom he has a tense relationship, is the love child of Charlotte von Pleißen and the banker Albert Klein. Therefore, in the wake of German reunification the narrator’s father inherits the former garden that is now a void in the middle of Berlin, and the narrator himself will run a foundation that controls the use of this space. The final chapter of the novel is called ‘Coming to terms with the future’, and the narrator concludes his story by proclaiming that ‘the most important thing seems to me to be to let what was once possible or what once should have been come into being in the future’ (585). In other words, even though it has proved impossible to change Germany’s past, it is still very much possible to change Germany’s future. The German Sonderweg, Hitler and the Holocaust are inalterable facts, but they do not absolutely determine Germany’s future. Germans themselves will create that future, and their success will depend on their willingness to work hard for the betterment of their country and the world. The narrator concludes his story with the words:€‘of course I would like to try to create Klein’s garden in the middle of Berlin, in the middle of Germany. Yes, everything still remains to be done’ (586). As Erhard Schütz has suggested, Ein Garten im Norden is not so much an alternative

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history of Germany as a novel that critically thematises the desire for such an alternative history and that thus demonstrates the real possibilities of ‘literature over and against historiography’.8 The novel, Schütz argues, is a ‘critical reflection of the desire … for another, better Germany, albeit without disavowing or doing without the desire itself’.9 The fact that the narrator, who at the beginning of the story had imagined himself to be an entirely non-Jewish German, turns out to have at least one Jewish ancestor is of course, as the narrator freely admits, a product of wishful thinking. When the bookseller from Prague objects to his making the banker Albert Klein into a Jew, the narrator argues:€‘You probably can’t understand why some of us would rather be something other than the child or grandchild of the murderers!’ The bookseller responds:€‘I’ve already heard that argument a lot. It’s very German. After you killed the fathers you want to mourn for us children. Can’t you just leave us in peace a while? Can’t you understand that we would like to be something other than the children of the victims?’ (491). The implication of the narrator’s sudden transformation into a man with Jewish ancestry is that while the past may be unchangeable, the future is not, and that identity categories are more malleable than they would at first glance appear, at least with respect to the future. What will be German in the future is not written in stone:€it will be written on blank paper that Germans themselves will be able to fill. In other words it is possible for Germans, if they are willing to work at it, to place more emphasis on their Jewish history€– not in order to escape the past but in order to create a better future. The job of creating a more cosmopolitan, friendly Germany will fall in no small part to the imagination, to efforts like books and gardens. Since identity is a category that human beings largely construct for themselves, the imagination plays a major role in creating it. In the future Germans will be largely who they work at being, and their work will be a process that is analogous to the creation of a garden or of a novel. It will be a fiction that, with luck, becomes reality. It is notable that East Germans do not play a major role in creating the imagination of the new Germany in Ein Garten im Norden. While the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and German reunification make possible the opening up of the space where the Berlin Wall once stood, the narrator’s relatives from Saxony are murdered by the end of the novel because they have allowed themselves to become involved in shady real estate deals and criminality. Far from working to transform Germany as a whole into a better place, these relatives are busy trying to transform East Germany into a mere copy of West Germany. The narrator

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agrees to adopt his East German relatives’ one surviving child, thus symbolically accepting responsibility for the German future. But he implies that the relative peace and quiet of East Germany prior to 1989 has been transformed, in the post-unification period, into an ugly copy of an antiseptic West German world in which human beings are interested only in making money. The narrator describes the garden where his relatives lived prior to reunification as ‘tiny but so circuitous that it seemed much larger, like a magical garden, a childhood garden’ (57). This is a garden that resembles writer Martin Ahrends’ invocation of the GDR in 1989 as a fairy-tale garden:€‘It was an untilled field, covered over with the most beautiful weeds, which bloomed impressively, able to reproduce themselves without interruption. Weeds that were not needed and which, if they did not suffer too much from their existence as weeds, lived happily, spreading wildly, self-satisfied, useful to no one.’10 For Kleeberg’s narrator Albert Klein, the pre-unification GDR is a place ‘that was not rich … but that only according to the standards of the West Germans seemed so run-down and in need of renovation as it was universally reputed to be’ (56). The narrator’s French lover Pauline even declares that ‘the cities of the GDR corresponded to European standards. What did not correspond to those standards was the chrome-nickel world of the Federal Republic’ (56). The narrator thus suggests that, unlike West Germany, East Germany preserved a certain continuity with its past, but that this continuity was threatened by the process of reunification itself. When the narrator returns to visit his relatives in 1995, five years after reunification, they are living in an ugly new development not far from Dresden:€ ‘the subdivision had not yet existed in 1990, and even now it still didn’t really exist’ (65). The peace and quiet of the GDR’s previous existence has now been replaced by hectic business:€‘In the first fifteen minutes Rudolph’s cell phone rang three times’ (65). Whereas the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German reunification offer the opportunity for Germans to confront their past and create a better German future, the narrator suggests that many in both the East and the West did not take advantage of this opportunity. But the opportunity is still there, as part of the work of the imagination. Gardens, which are created by human beings, can also be destroyed by them. But human beings also have the power, Kleeberg suggests, to recreate even the most neglected and run-down gardens. There is always work for the human imagination. Although it addresses a problematic German past and present, Ein Garten im Norden is optimistic about the future. Its playful approach to narration, and to the relationship between fiction and reality, suggests the

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possibility of a Germany that has come to accept itself as part of Europe, and the world. This is a ‘normal’ Germany when compared to the rest of Europe, and it is a Germany that is no longer defined by the norms of its problematic past. While the narrator is uncomfortable with particular aspects of that past, he comes to accept the fact that none other than his interlocutor the bookseller from Prague values precisely these aspects:€ ‘You can put your grubby fingers on everything and move it around, but keep your hands off Wagner!’ (370). These elements, however troublesome, remain a part of the German cultural tradition. It will be up to Germans themselves to determine how they use them in the future. No t e s 1 I would like to thank Michael Kleeberg for agreeing to be interviewed by me in the summer of 2009. 2 Michael Kleeberg, Ein Garten im Norden (Frankfurt:€Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003 [originally 1998]). All quotations from this novel appear in parentheses in the main body of the text. All translations are mine. 3 When the novel first appeared, it bore the genre designation ‘Märchen’; that is, fairy tale. In the paperback edition this was changed to ‘Roman’; that is, novel. See Elena Agazzi, Erinnerte und rekonstruierte Geschichte:€ Drei Generationen deutscher Schriftsteller und die Fragen der Vergangenheit, trans. Gunnhild Schneider und Holm Steinert (Göttingen:€ Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2005), 111. 4 As Elena Agazzi points out, Kleeberg also plays on motifs from Michael Ende’s novel Die unendliche Geschichte (1979). Agazzi, Erinnerte und rekonstruierte Geschichte, 111. 5 Andreas Huyssen, ‘The voids of Berlin’, Critical Inquiry, 24 (1997), 57–81. 6 Plato, Symposium, trans. Tom Griffith (Berkeley, CA:€University of California Press, 1989), 191d. 7 Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco, CA:€City Lights, 2001), 27. 8 Erhard Schütz, ‘Der kontaminierte Tagtraum:€ Alternativgeschichte und Geschichtsalternative’, in Erhard Schütz and Wolfgang Hardtwig, eds., Keiner kommt davon:€ Zeitgeschichte in der Literatur nach 1945 (Göttingen:€Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 47–73, 62. My translation. 9 Schütz, ‘Der kontaminierte Tagtraum’, 63. My translation. 10╇ Martin Ahrends, ‘The great waiting, or the freedom of the East’, trans. Stephen Brockmann, New German Critique, 52 (1991), 41–49, 43.

Ch apter 9

Christian Kracht’s Faserland (Frayed-Land) Julian Preece

Since its publication in the early summer of 1995 Faserland (Frayed-Land) has divided critical opinion. Increasingly hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters, it is still condemned as aesthetically worthless in others.1 One reason for this is the contested status of German ‘pop’ literature itself, with which Faserland and its author are associated as no other recent single work or individual writer is. Other reasons lie deeper and can be located in the novel itself. Both its form, an unreflective picaresque confession, and its content, a series of degenerate parties attended by the pampered jeunesse dorée, are said to be either strikingly new or hopelessly banal. For some, the novel, which ends with the narrator communing with the spirits of Goethe and Thomas Mann, is embedded in German literary tradition (though, as we shall see, that tradition has a specifically Swiss inflection). For others, it is a cheap imitation of an already boorish American genre. Novels by Bret Easton Ellis€ – in particular Less than Zero (1985), which is set among bored wealthy teenagers in Los Angeles€– are repeatedly cited as Kracht’s models. Yet any reader who comes to Kracht from Ellis will be struck by his moralism, which is distinctly lacking in the Californian original. Kracht is either a right-wing irredentist and a scourge of the sensibilities of ageing ’68ers or a despairing humanist in search of lost values. He either penetrates the dull Zeitgeist of egotistical consumerism, mourning its spiritual emptiness, or he skims joyfully on its surface, celebrating superficiality through his characters’ encyclopaedic recall of brand names and designer labels, and deeply held opinions on trivia. In the critical literature, which in its bulk already far exceeds the novel’s 150 pages, there is little consensus. Here, however, conflicting interpretations are mutually enriching. In this chapter, I set out what I see as the principal positions in the arguments over Faserland and contend that one sign of its enduring significance lies in the lack of critical agreement. I then conclude with some comments about its politÂ� ical stance. 136

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Novels which become landmarks in literary history break with conventions and challenge expectations. In other words, they do something new. They generate too, once enough time has elapsed for more considered appraisal, a variety of critical readings in which their connections with literary tradition become clearer. Faserland’s critical reputation as a serious piece of writing has been established by a number of scholars (mainly, it should be added, Germanists working outside Germany). The critical terrain is currently staked out roughly as follows. In 2002, Anke Biendarra argued that the novel should be read as a dream or hallucination, since, at least during the second half of his journey, the narrator recounts a number of chance encounters with friends that he has left behind en route.2 The narrowness of their social scene would be the other explanation. For Biendarra it is also a ‘certainty’ that he commits suicide. In a book on German ‘pop’ literature, Moritz Baßler calls Faserland a ‘coming out’ novel, picking up on the narrator’s numerous interactions with gay or bisexual men which he links to the penultimate episode looking for Thomas Mann’s grave. In contrast, for David Clarke the narrator is homophobic and the novel is about the correct reading of various sorts of codes. The narrator orients himself in the world by reading some of these codes, such as fashion and consumer labels, with skill, defining his own and others’ identity through their consumer choices and spending power. He falls down, however, when it comes to sexual signs, repeatedly finding himself in situations where gay men assume that he is gay too. For Clarke, ‘homosexuality disrupts the readability of appearances, unsettling the performance of identities in consumer society’, which reveals a ‘contradiction between being and appearing’.3 There is another way of saying that he is still wet behind the ears when it comes to sex and his own sexuality. Frank Finlay sees the novel as an expression of nausea at the state of contemporary Germany from the perspective of a nostalgic elitist whose views are close to those of the New Right.4 According to this reading, the narrator rejects the superficiality of expensive consumer culture and drug-fuelled parties in search of a lost authenticity, which he locates in pre-Nazi Germany. These readings are all somewhat puritanical and do not take account of the narrator’s humour. The critics who comment on Faserland in a recent collection of essays take its innovative literary methods and style as given. If their views can be boiled down to a sentence it is that the novel cannot be wrapped up in any neatly argued critical interpretation.5 It is often the case that future classics are greeted with a mixture of hostility, irritation and incomprehension by reviewers. Their very newness

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can be alienating. Kracht was at the time of the novel’s publication a little known Swiss-German journalist on the brink of thirty who wrote travel and lifestyle journalism for a number of magazines and fashionable weeklies. His public persona and what was known of his background were part of the problem when it came to welcoming his literary debut. By the standards of postwar, even nascent post-reunification, German literature his origins were highly unusual. Kracht is upper-middle class and from a well-off family. His father worked in a prominent position for the Axel Springer media group. Some older West German intellecÂ� tuals still boycotted Springer for its newspapers’ reporting of the Student Movement, which culminated in the hounding of the novelist Heinrich Böll in the early 1970s. Kracht was privately educated at Salem, the only non-state school in Germany of any distinction, which is also the school attended by Faserland ’s nameless male narrator. For many critics, confusing author with narrator, Kracht was provocatively frivolous, determinedly hedonistic, scornful of liberal opinion, and dismissive of the less privileged majority. Faserland ’s narrator certainly revels in many of these poses. The myth that the novel celebrates the designer-label culture that its narrator knows so well has proven remarkably persistent. Academic critics have repeatedly felt obliged to counter it.6 Faserland was published, moreover, at a point when there were fears that reunification would lead to a resurgence in nationalist sentiment among the republic’s traditionally liberal intellectual elite. The novel’s apparent disdain for the less well-off aligned it with a conservative agenda in the eyes of liberal and leftist critics. Faserland’s real politics are more sophisticated and are connected to its form, which is not as simple as it at first sight seems. It advertises some of its literary allusions more than others, but as an account of an alcoholic ‘bender’ it may be said to break some new ground in German. Compared with some other major national literatures, German is short of accounts of drinking marathons and their effects on mental behaviour. The celebrated drunken episodes in Goethe’s Faust Part 1 or Mann’s The Magic Mountain are not sustained. When Joseph Roth’s Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939) and Hans Fallada’s Der Trinker (The Drinker, 1944/50) touch on drink they are infused with the melancholy of their own and Germany’s predicament during the Third Reich. None of these are accounts of deliberate, wilful excess and its effects on body and mind over an extended period, as can be found, say, in works by American authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Kracht thus may have attempted to fill a gap.

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In fiction, it may be less appropriate than in life to keep track of what others are putting away because the suggestion of Rabelaisian excess is what counts. It would be impossible to keep up with the Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), for instance. Faserland’s narrator is counting his units. His thirst is heroic but not superhuman. In the first part of the novel he refers to his drinks mainly by brand name, in the second half by type only. A quick summary of what he drinks is also one way of introducing the basic plot, which takes the form of a journey from the far north of Germany to its southern border on Lake Constance and beyond into Zurich in Switzerland (what Biendarra calls ‘the German road to longing’).7 On the first day on the island of Sylt he drinks a bottle of Jever (beer) to accompany his two portions of scampi with garlic sauce, before moving on to champagne on the beach with Karin and two other friends, who are said to be sharing two bottles. He and Karin then drive on to a club where he buys two more bottles of Roederer (a type of champagne, also called ‘Cristal’, drunk by rap singers). They appear to consume these between them before buying a further bottle for the road. The next evening in the train to Hamburg he gets through five small bottles of Ilbesheimer Herrlich (that is, red wine) in the restaurant car. This must add up to a litre and a quarter. He continues with roughly a bottle of Prosecco (Italian sparkling wine) at the party that his Hamburg friend Nigel takes him to. He is all this time smoking an endless chain of cigarÂ� ettes, which he reaches for at moments when he feels nervous. He uses the Prosecco to wash down a pill (presumably ecstasy) given him by Nigel, but he refuses harder drugs when they are offered to him. After staying up all night, he breakfasts on the plane from Hamburg to Frankfurt on coffee, a glass of bourbon, and two peach-flavoured yoghurts. During the day he is sick but spends most of the time asleep in a hotel bathtub. In the evening he drinks a glass of ‘appelwoi’ (apple wine) at a Frankfurt club. On the train to Heidelberg, he uncharacteristically sticks to mineral water but once at the Max Bar he drinks a number of bottles of unidentified beer, noting that he gets drunk quickly because he has had no food all day. At an ensuing party he at first sticks with beer (two bottles), then takes a large swig of lukewarm gin before collapsing into a coma and waking up in Munich. Here he begins the fourth day at an outdoor rave. A quantity of beer goes down at the rave and at a Munich club where he is to be found until the early hours. At his friend Rollo’s birthday party the following evening, he starts with a gin and tonic, then orders four brandy Alexander cocktails from the bar, drinking them in quick succession. He has a fifth before driving off in Rollo’s car. We next meet him in

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Switzerland two days later eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee, he says for the first time in his life but it is the second time in the novel. The bender is now more or less over, but on his last day he still gets through a beer with grenadine syrup and a couple of glasses of whisky and soda. Rollo is dead and the narrator was probably the last person to see him alive. It seems likely that he intends to drown himself in imitation of Rollo when he hires a boatman to row him across Lake Zurich in the novel’s final paragraph. The novel’s trajectory is linear, the structure episodic and repetitious. It has a number of picaresque characteristics:€the narrator is something of a prankster and show-off and concerned with various bodily functions, especially excretion and vomiting; violence and war, which have been associated with the German picaresque since Grimmelshausen in the seventeenth century, play a role in his imagination. He is concerned with the collective memory of the Second World War, in particular the bombing of German cities. Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus travelled the length and breadth of Germany, beginning his retrospective account of his life with a reference to the damage the Thirty Years War had inflicted on the land:€‘For the chronology of my history demands that I leave my dear readers with an idea of the cruelties that were committed from time to time in this our German war.’8 Simplicissimus also found Switzerland to be an inspiring alternative to the Germany of his day, as Kracht’s narrator affects to do in his last chapter. In the seventeenth century a picaresque hero’s travels were also linked to the pursuit of pleasure, a vain attachment to worldly goods, an awareness of the body, and a search for spiritual meaning, all of which pertain to Faserland. Günter Grass’s Oskar Matzerath, the narrator and central figure in Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), is usually cited as Simplicissimus’s twentieth-century heir. He shares with Kracht’s narrator a fondness for word play and exaggeration, sarcastic comparisons, a superficial immorality, and a fundamental unreliability. Neither Oskar nor the narrator of Faserland can be taken at his€word. Kracht reduces the scope of the retrospective picaresque narrative, which originally took the nominal form of a confession of past misdeeds now repented. According to the commentary that Grimmelshausen appended to the first five books of his novel (which he declared to be its Continuatio or sixth book), Simplicissimus writes his life story living as a hermit on a desert island. This enables him to stabilise the meaning of his experiences by investing transcendent significance in them.

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Had his readers understood this meaning for the first time of asking, the Continuatio would evidently not have been necessary. Oskar narrates his past life from a mental hospital, where he has been incarcerated for a murder that he did not commit. Meaning is inherently unstable in Die Blechtrommel, but Oskar is still looking for it. In Faserland there appears to be little sense at all and only an occasional awareness of that lack. There is a hint in the opening phrase, ‘So, it begins with me …’,9 that he is not narrating a random sequence of days in the life of a degenerate but lonely rich kid, but that is how superficially he presents his tale. If the novel has a beginning, then it may have a middle and an end, in other words a teleology. This would entail a reason for including his mixture of childhood memories, free associations and the episodic account of his progress through the country. Why he has to begin drinking a bottle of Jever and eating his second portion of scampi and garlic sauce is puzzling. The climax to the German part of his narrative before the final more restful chapter in Switzerland is Rollo’s death, who drowns after consuming suicidal quantities of pills and alcohol at his own birthday party. Rollo’s distress was plain for the narrator to behold. He was crying and standing all alone, surrounded by guests who only pay him attention, as the narrator recognises disapprovingly, ‘because his family have a large villa on Lake Constance, a house on Cap Ferrat and another in East Hampton’ (139). The narrator steals away from him, possibly sensing what Rollo is about to do, certainly not reciprocating the friendship that Rollo showed to him by helping him get out of Heidelberg when he collapsed. He goes up to Rollo’s room, filches through his trouser pockets and finds the keys to his Porsche, which he then ‘borrows’ to drive himself to Zurich. He leaves Rollo’s car at the airport, guiltily wiping his fingerprints from the steering wheel. The following day he buys a newspaper and seems unsurprised to read of Rollo’s body being found in Lake Constance. He should at this point be presenting himself to the police to clear up the circumstances surrounding Rollo’s death. Instead he gets a taxi up to Kilchberg to find Thomas Mann’s grave. This makes the novel into a kind of confession of how he failed to help a friend at his moment of greatest need, if not also an explanation of why he ends his own life. If Kracht has read Grass, then Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse, 1961) may have left a greater impression than Die Blechtrommel. The narrator’s abandonment of Rollo at the water’s edge, Rollo’s drowning, the narrator’s subsequent attitude to him and his failure to confront his guilt are all reminiscent of what happens between Pilenz and Mahlke in Grass’s novella.

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The narrator’s thought processes are enumerative and comparative, entirely subjective, and infused with emotion. He is attached to surfaces of all kinds and strikes an unmistakable tone in the first paragraph: So, it begins with me standing outside Fisch-Gosch in List on the island of Sylt drinking a Jever out of the bottle. Fisch-Gosch is a fish-stall and the reason for it being so famous is that it is the most northerly fish-stall in Germany. It is to be found on the furthest tip of Sylt, right on the sea, and you think, there must be a border coming, but in fact it is just a fish-stall.

There is a distant echo here of Heinrich Heine. His North Sea (1826), part of a cycle of travelogues which was written on the neighbouring island of Nordeney, begins:€‘The natives are mostly anaemic and make a living from fishing, which does not begin until next month, in October, when the Â�weather is stormy’.10 Kracht and Heine mention the legend, which Faserland’s narrator remembers frightening him as a child, of a village, swallowed by the sea, whose church bells can still occasionally be heard.11 Both writers show a characteristic mixture of memoir, opinion, anecdote and travel commentary. Both use sudden changes of mood (Heine’s famous ‘Stimmungsbrechung’), which turns a potentially profound or serious moment into its opposite. Heine’s satirical attitude to the classical authors of what he called the ‘art period’ is mirrored by Kracht’s bilious ribbing of the ’68ers. The language in Kracht’s first paragraph is fairly typical of his rhythmic and alliterative style. ‘Fisch-Gosch’, which is repeated, turns into the more ordinary and less richly sonorous ‘fish-stall’ (Fischbude), which is repeated twice and with which he ends the paragraph bathetically. The promise of exclusivity in the brand name, which it owes only to its location, disappoints. The switch to the subjunctive (in German:€‘man denkt, da käme jetzt eine Grenze’) signals a hope which is dashed by an everyday sight. The word ‘limit’ or ‘border’ (‘Grenze’) has other connotations:€the new ‘fatherland’ which has existed for just five years has no internal border any more; and, possibly as a consequence, there are no longer limits or norms to guide the narrator’s behaviour. The dashing of a rising hope is a typical semantic movement in Faserland. The narrator always avoids complex grammatical constructions, as he does here, in favour of simple sentences with at most one subordinate clause. The present tense predominates, backed up by the simple past and the perfect, sometimes the conditional perfect, but very rarely passives. He uses subjunctives for reported speech or speculative thoughts. He does not like auxiliary verbs and there is not a single pluperfect. The main consequence of this style is that reasons and motivations

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are not readily given. Much reading between the lines consequently needs to be done. The narrator often does not say out loud to other characters what he thinks or feels, preferring to run away from an encounter or confrontation without speaking. In his thoughts, but less often in his actions, he is aggressive to people with less money than him, to older people and grown-ups generally, liberals and hippies. This is a pose. He is sometimes touched by acts of kindness or service, such as the anonymous hotel employee in Frankfurt cleaning up his sick while he slept in the bath. His rhetorical aggression is also a defence mechanism. He is emotionally damaged, thus vulnerable. While he refers frequently to his childhood (and finds himself crying the first time he does so), he mentions his mother and father just once or twice each and then only in passing. Like Alexander and Rollo’s parents, they provided money but not a presence. His fantasy is to have children with the actress Isabella Rossellini and to establish the happy, harmonious family that he has not yet known. Faserland deals in images and surface appearances rather than weighty philosophical thought or committed exploration of ideology, which are the common currency in German literary writing. Yet Kracht’s interaction with German and international literary tradition is wide-ranging. As well as the picaresque, he refers obliquely to Goethe’s best-selling debut, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774). Werther also flees difficult personal entanglements and eschews physical contact or consummation of his passion, falling in love with Lotte because as a married woman she is unattainable. His first line ‘How happy I am that I have got away!’ could have served Kracht as an epigraph, except that his narrator cannot match Werther’s capacity for joy. Werther famously kills himself, as Faserland ’s narrator may intend to do, echoing Goethe’s most famous poem, which ends ‘Just wait and soon / you will rest too’ (‘Warte nur, balde / ruhest du auch’). Compare Kracht’s novel:€‘Soon we will be in the middle of the lake. Pretty soon.’ (‘Bald sind wir in der Mitte des Sees. Schon bald.’) As he has asked to be rowed across to the other side, there is no immediate reason for him to look forward to getting to the middle. Lake Zurich has a special place in German poetry and letters generally, thanks to an ode by Klopstock, whom Werther venerates. The Swiss poet and novella writer Konrad Ferdinand Meyer, who suffered from bouts of depression including suicidal thoughts, is buried in Kilchberg. Faserland mentions a number of authors that the narrator was obliged to read. I had to read Thomas Mann at school too, but I found his books enjoyable. I mean, they were really good, although I have only read two or three. These books

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are not as stupid as the ones by Frisch or Hesse or Dürrenmatt or whatever else they had on the syllabus. (154)

Hermann Hesse, Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt were all Â�twentieth-century Swiss writers. By disavowing them, he is taking back what he has just said about the superiority of Switzerland. There may be more of a connection. Hesse and Frisch certainly dealt with identity, inadequacy and guilt. The novellas by Mann that Faserland most closely recalls must be Tonio Kröger (1903) and Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912). With Tod in Venedig it shares homoerotic elements, a north–south journey (from Sylt to Zurich or Munich to Venice), and the surrender to physical appetites which lead to self-destruction. Tonio Kröger learns to repress his gay urges and determines to live with his contradictions, which he sublimates into ‘artist’ and ‘bourgeois’. Like Kracht’s narrator, Kröger also re-encounters the objects of his adolescent desire (or individuals who for all intents and purposes are interchangeable with them) on his journey of self-discovery, which in his case is from south (north Germany) to north (Denmark). Suicide is a common topos in German literature. It can be either a gesture of rebellion or submission. In Tod in Venedig Gustav von Aschenbach can no longer live under the constraints of a homophobic society. Grass’s Mahlke cannot combine his need to be a hero with his innate humane values under the Nazi regime. The suicides in Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Springtime Awakening, 1891), Hesse’s Unterm Rad (The Prodigy, 1906), Franz Kafka’s Das Urteil (The Judgement, 1912) or even Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) bow to intolerable social, political or personal pressures. Given the title of Kracht’s novel, its most likely ending in suicide, and the German literary tradition of self-destruction as a response to the incompatibility of personal aspirations of self-fulfilment with prevailing social conditions, the cause of the narrator’s death must be ‘Germany’. In contrast to the other cases cited, there is not an immediately identifiable set of circumstances which are responsible for the suicide that can be removed or reformed. There are a number of indeterminacies in Faserland. Critics cannot agree about the narrator’s age, estimating it as either early or late twenties. He is not the first central character in literature to cause readers to pose this question. Hamlet has been thought to be anything between his late teens and early thirties. All that we know about Kracht’s narrator is that he has left school and is old enough to have his own credit card. He also has one or two memories of independent travel, to a gay beach on

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the Greek island of Mykonos, for instance. His friend Alexander, who recommended that resort to him, has reported back from more extended exotic journeys. On Mykonos he was disconcerted to find himself being paid attention by gay men, which is an indication of his confusion over his sexual identity. But school remains the narrator’s fundamental experience and his main point of reference. He says nothing about military serÂ� vice, university or professional work. Karin, however, the young woman who shares the champagne with him in the first chapter, says that she is studying economics in Munich. The only memory of sex that the narrator relays is of adolescent embarrassment. He claims that at the age of fifteen, after being poured three glasses of wine by the parents of a girl he was visiting and being asked to spend the night in a guestroom, he soiled the bed and ran away from the house in shame, never to speak to her again. Running away from social or sexual situations is a speciality. Failing to make the transition from school to the wider world is arguably what the novel is about. It emerges in an aside that he was accompanied to Sylt by Bina, when he reveals that she has ironed the shirts that he takes with him on his journey. From two other mentions of her name we know that she was his childhood nanny. Her presence and role on Sylt surely put his age lower even than early twenties. Rich young men do not have nannies. Other signs of immaturity abound. The characters in Ellis’s Less than Zero are around eighteen, as are Grass’s Pilenz and Mahlke at their time of crisis at the end of the Second World War. One of the narrator’s main juvenile interests is subcultures. His knowÂ� ledge of brands and labels helps him to categorise people, according to their tastes or income bracket. Identity is determined by what music you listen to, what clothes you wear, what products you eat or drink, what make of car you drive. These distinctions are both terribly important and impossible to take seriously at the same time. His reminiscences about reading the teenage magazine Bravo aged eleven are: at that time Bravo was not a kind of porn mag like it is today, with pairs of naked seventeen-year-old lesbians in the shower, but had decorous articles about ejaculation and photo stories about Robby Müller of the Teens, about Smokie, or about Thommy Ohrner in the television series Timm Thaler, the first series incidentally in which someone wears white Bermuda shorts and slip-ons with golden buckles. (89)

The last comment is another example of bathos. The combination of white Bermuda shorts and slip-ons with golden buckles is an irrelevance in the history of fashion. He is having his readers on. Another example

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is Rollo’s anecdote about Berlin squatters (or ‘Autonome’), who are said to buy Â�second-hand Fiat Unos in Frankfurt in order to drive them across the Sahara desert to Doula on the coast of Cameroon where they sell them for five times what they paid. The enterprise is not without its dangers because nomads of one sort or another, perhaps Tuareg or perhaps Polisario guerilla fighters, ambush them, steal the cars and their Doc Marten shoes, and leave the Berlin squatters to bake in the sun. They probably play the squatters’ tapes on the car sound systems and clap their hands and feel happy when Ton Steine Scherben booms out of the loudspeakers or The Clash, or whatever sort of tapes Autonome take with them when they travel through the desert. (120–1)

The story is plainly ridiculous from start to finish. For the narrator both the ‘Autonome’ from the urban jungle of Berlin and the nomadic camelriding Tuareg have their own very different but ultimately interchangeable subcultures. This is one reason that wealthy people can easily mutate into hippies. The narrator likes to wind up others, including his readers, who do not belong to his subcultural group. He has to pretend that his group is the best. Kracht’s title is a signal that he wants to be taken seriously. The term ‘Faserland’ has numerous connotations:€‘Faser’ means (hi-tech) ‘fibre’ or ‘fabric’, while the verb ‘faseln’ is to drivel and ‘zerfasern’ is ‘to wear out’ or ‘to unravel’, which suggests that the country is fraying or falling apart at the seams.12 The title is a German speaker’s pronunciation of the English word ‘Fatherland’:€ a best-selling political thriller with that title by the British novelist Robert Harris was popular in nationalist and neo-Nazi circles in the early 1990s. It is set in 1964 and depends on the counterfactual premise that the Nazis won the Second World War.13 As the German ‘Vaterland’ was discredited because of its misuse by the National Socialists and Germany was ‘Westernised’ as a result of defeat in the war, it is fitting that the word has to be re-imported from the language of the Western Allies. Kracht’s narrator is sometimes angered by linguistic imports or new-fangled constructions. He rails against the name ‘Bord-Treff’ for the on-board buffet on the train from Frankfurt to Heidelberg. In what has become a famous passage, he regrets, once he has arrived in Heidelberg, that National Socialism resulted in Germany no longer being associated with comforting German-sounding phrases such as ‘Neckerauen’ (watermeadows on the banks of the river Necker which flows through the city). He returns repeatedly to the after-effects of wartime destruction or the differences in the urban landscape pre- and post-1945. As a boy he used

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to play in the concrete bunkers on Sylt. Arriving in Hamburg he notices the Bloem & Voß shipyard, ‘where they used to build the U-boats until the British bombed everything flat’ (29); en route to the station in a taxi at the end of his brief visit he suddenly finds himself thinking of ‘the nocturnal bombing raids in the Second World War’ and the ‘Hamburg firestorm and what it must have been like, when everything was wiped out’ (47). One reason he prefers Zurich is that the tram rails are built into asphalt which was not torn up during the war and has had people walking on it for decades (147). He is also fascinated by a number of aspects of National Socialism, such as their liking for acronyms. ‘Hanuta’, a chocolate and hazel nut wafer biscuit, is an abbreviation of ‘Haselnußtafel’ (hazel nut bar). Another denotes his north-to-south journey:€ ‘die Hafraba’ stands for the Hitler motorway from north to south of the country, the ‘HamburgFrankfurt-Basel’ (35). His anecdote about Hermann Göring losing his dagger after relieving himself on a sand-dune on Sylt is more recherché (17). Approaching Frankfurt airport through the early morning clouds he cannot help thinking of the ‘splendid opening scene’ in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will; 60), in which Hitler flies to Nuremberg for the 1934 party rally. While Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite film-maker, gets full marks for artistic creativity, Wim Wenders, a leading director of the liberal New German Cinema Movement, is one of numerous ‘arse bags’ (62). Wenders is mentioned because the narrator has a hunch that a scene in his film Wings of Desire could have been inspired by the opening of Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens. When he had the opportunity of putting his theory to the film’s director, Wenders just stared back at him, which is a signal of the ’68 generation’s refusal to address its own connections with aspects of Nazi culture. This is the novel’s in-built answer to liberal readers who criticise the narrator for his ‘Nazi’ views:€liberals and ‘SPD-Nazis’ are no better, they just don’t realise it. When the narrator feels compassion for someone, on the other hand, then he imagines that he suffered during the period of the Third Reich. Thus he invents a biography for the hotel receptionist in Heidelberg who has two missing fingers on his right hand. He must be the honest, hardworking common man who has been dealt a tough hand by being born a German in the first half of the twentieth century. He must have lost his fingers from frostbite at Stalingrad. These references add up to an emphasis on German suffering at the expense of concern for their victims, on Nazi achievements such as motorways and films. At the same time, these revisionist tendencies appear to be countered by his dismissing

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contemporary Germans over a certain age as ‘Nazis’, which aligns him with an immature leftism or makes him a parody of ’68er radicalism. A middle-aged fellow passenger on the flight from Hamburg to Frankfurt, who is casting disapproving looks at his stuffing his pockets with goodies from a trolley provided by the airline, is an ‘SPD-Nazi’. This denotes a Social Democrat who is dictatorial in the propagation of his own liberal views, but the phrase is still a contradiction in terms. These references to National Socialism are not entirely random. They can be systemised. The narrator is not at ease with prevailing liberal views in contemporary politics and social mores. His break with his friend Alexander was caused by his irritation with the mainstream ‘green’ and utterly predictable opinions of Alexander’s girlfriend. The longest passage about Germany is written entirely in the imperfect subjunctive and occurs just before the end, between his reading about Rollo’s death and going up to the cemetery in Kilchberg. It is a variation on his fantasy about being married to the actress Isabella Rossellini, this time living with her and their numerous children in a Swiss mountain chalet at the edge of a lake. They are surrounded by nature rather than consumer items. He would be the perfect father and enjoy explaining the world to his children because he would always be right. He would tell them about Germany and the people who live there, in particular his own group, who are the ‘chosen’ because they enjoy themselves in a superior way to everyone else by consuming products which are superior. From Switzerland, Germany appears to be ‘a great big machine the other side of the border’ (149) and it is populated by a mass of different professions and mentalities€– or in other words, subcultures. He continues in a vein reminiscent of Hölderlin’s Hyperion reporting on his disappointment on returning to Germany from Greece at finding types but no human beings:14 I would tell them about the Germans, about the National Socialists with their cleanly shaven necks, about the missile engineers, who stick fountain pens in the breast pocket of their white overalls, all in a neat row. I would tell them about the selectors on the ramp, about the business people with their ill-fitting suits, about the trade unionists, who always vote SPD, as if it really mattered, and about the Autonome with their people’s kitchens and their dislike of tipping. … I would tell them about the waiters, about the students, the taxi drivers, the Nazis, the pensioners, the gays, the mortgage holders, about the advertisers, the DJs, the ecstasy dealers, the homeless, the footballers and the lawyers. (153)

Listing and comparing are his two favourite modes. He cannot explain why and how this seemingly heterogeneous mass fits together. If he could

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find an answer to the question there would be no need for him to end his€life. Faserland is in dialogue with the literary canon, both specific texts and archetypes. Its politics are defined by searching and questioning. To argue that its values are traditionally humanist because the narrator needs the love of another human being would earn his certain scorn. It remains true for all that. He is a monster created by a post-Apocalyptic materialist society which is still traumatised by its past. He reflects society’s own lack of values back at it. Yet he is aware of a lack and wants to compensate for it, which is what links him with the humanist tradition of suicide in German literature. No t e s 1 See Anke Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler als “postmoderner Flaneur” in Christian Kracht’s Roman Faserland ’, German Life and Letters, 55:2 (2002), 164–79, 165; and David Clarke, ‘Dandyism and homosexuality in the novels of Christian Kracht’, Seminar, 41:1 (2005), 36–54, 36. 2 Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler’, 172. 3 Clarke, ‘Dandyism and homosexuality’, 51, 52. 4 Frank Finlay, ‘“Dann wäre Deutschland wie das Wort Neckarauen”:€Surface, superficiality and globalisation in Christian Kracht’s Faserland ’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham University Press, 2004), 189–207. 5 See Andreas Schumann, ‘“das ist schon ziemlich charmant”:€ Christian Krachts Werke im literaturhistorischen Geflecht der Gegenwart’, in Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter, eds., Christian Kracht:€Zu Leben und Werk (Cologne:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 150–64, 155. 6 Schumann, ‘↜“das ist schon ziemlich charmant”↜’, 154–5. 7 Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler’, 173. 8 Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und Continatio des abenteurlichen Simplicissimi, ed. Rolf Tarot (Tübingen:€Niemeyer, 1967), 17. 9 Christian Kracht, Faserland (Munich:€DTV, 2002). Subsequent page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. All translations are my own. 10 Heinrich Heine, Die Nordsee, in Reisebilder (Frankfurt:€Insel, 1980), 99–144, 101. 11 Kracht, Faserland, 18–19; Heine, Die Nordsee, 115. 12 Biendarra, ‘Der Erzähler’, 167. 13 Robert Harris, Fatherland (London:€Hutchinson, 1992). Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (Cologne:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008) is also a counterfactual fiction. 14 Hyperion’s most famous letter begins:€ ‘This is how I came among the Germans … I cannot think of a people which could be more dislocated. You

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c h a p t e r 10

Elfriede Jelinek’s Gier (Greed) Helen Finch

Elfriede Jelinek’s Gier, published in 2000,1 is not her most famous work€– thanks to Michael Haneke’s 2001 film, her earlier Klavierspielerin (The Piano Player, 1988) is probably more internationally renowned, and indeed the author has several times said that she considers Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead, 1995) to be her magnum opus.2 Nor is it her most controversial work. Although Gier found as little favour with her critics in the more conservative sections of the Austrian press as any of her other works, Jelinek’s reputation as a ‘befouler of the national nest’ was established long before the novel’s appearance.3 Moreover, her most dramatic public interventions have been in other media, such as her much publicised boycott of Austrian theatres around the time of Gier’s publication, political theatre such as Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006), or the searing commentaries directed from her website, www.jelinek. com. However, Gier has a unique significance in that it was her most recent novel to be published prior to her Nobel Prize award in 2004. In this sense, it can be seen as her Nobel novel. A further, not insignificant, consideration is that Gier has been available in English translation since 2007, and is thus the only representative of Jelinek’s novelistic oeuvre since 1994 available in the English-speaking world. Finally, Gier was the first novel that Jelinek completed after the entry of Jörg Haider’s farright Freedom Party (FPÖ) into the Austrian government and therefore has a political significance as a direct response to an episode that, albeit briefly, was considered a major disruption to the European consensus following the Cold War. This chapter addresses the following questions. First, is Gier just more of the same from Jelinek? It is certainly the case that the concerns that have informed Jelinek’s work throughout her career reappear once more in Gier:€sexual violence against women, ecological pessimism, virulent satire of the twee outward appearance of rural Austria and its underlying fascist history, and an endless pulling-apart of language through 151

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punning, allusion and repetition, to undermine any idea of its direct referentiality, and to expose its inherent gendered violence. If Jelinek has explored these matters ad nauseam in earlier novels such as Lust (Lust, 1992) and Krankheit oder moderne Frauen (Illness or Modern Women, 1994), and plays from In den Alpen (In the Alps, 2002) to Bambiland (2004), does Gier add anything new? Second, is Gier in any way representative of the German-language novel since 1990? Does it contribute to literary and political discourses at play in Europe since the end of the Cold War? Or are Jelinek’s copious references to contemporary political events simply an excuse for her to repeat her decades-long critique of Austria, language and patriarchy? This was certainly the perspective of newspaper critic Matthias Matussek, who described Jelinek’s aesthetic as a ‘worn-out feminism front’,4 or of the Nobel Prize committee member Kurt Ahnlund, who sensationally resigned on 11 October 2005 over Jelinek’s appointment, calling her work ‘a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure’.5 Both of these critiques suggest that Jelinek’s work is an undifferentiated corpus, lacking those normative ‘masculine’ qualities of discreteness and aesthetic autonomy that characterise authoritative works of art in the canonical German Romantic and Adornian traditions.6 Jelinek, in her turn, resists any such norms of authority, portraying hers as a non-authoritative voice at the mercy both of a recalcitrant reality and an inadequate language in her Nobel prizewinning speech ‘Im Abseits’ (‘Sidelined’, 2004).7 Thus her work consciously subverts the masculine aesthetic norms assumed by Matussek or Ahnlund. Rather, her poetics mirror her repeated portrayals of the female body as indiscrete, non-self-identical, perforated, pornographically dismembered and liable to seepage. I therefore address a third question; namely, how the poetics of Gier are interlinked with Jelinek’s controversial decision not to attend the Nobel prize-giving ceremony on 10 December 2004, and instead to give her speech via video link. At face value, ‘Im Abseits’ states that Jelinek feels her authority to be irrelevant in the face of the power of her language. This suggests Jelinek’s non-referential language is an uncontrollable unity, one that defies any authorial division into discrete texts, genres and modes. But Jelinek’s video lecture at the prize-giving ceremony, a presence-in-absence, was a performance far more striking and memorable than the conventional presence of other Nobel Prize winners. As she gave the speech, far from being ‘sidelined’ by language, Jelinek’s face, hair, clothes, voice and manner were made inescapable on giant video screens. Paradoxically, as Alexandra Tacke has noted, this performance became in its own turn

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theatre, a text in itself.8 I argue that Gier has an equally ambiguous status as an individual and authoritative text. In this chapter, I suggest that Gier offers a challenge both to the conventional, authoritative structures of the novel and to well-meaning defenders of her work who suggest that Jelinek’s work can be arranged in a hierarchy with the magnum opus Die Kinder der Toten at its apex.9 Rather, the corrosive undercurrent of Austria’s toxic past emerges in Gier just as it does in the other, more conventionally ‘historical’ novels discussed in this volume. Jelinek shows that the presence of the dead cannot be confined to singular, cathartic novels. Thus Gier further demonstrates a seepage of meaning, reference and authority across her work as a whole, which undermines any attempt to view individual texts as discrete and authoritative. At the same time, I show that Gier’s babbling, apparently manic narrative voice simultaneously asserts and denies its authority over the material it is narrating, in a disorientating play from which it ultimately emerges as more powerful than the sorry victim of language that Jelinek described in ‘Im Abseits’. I show that far from being the ‘prisoner of language’ that her speech describes, the Jelinekian authorial voice demonstrates its own complicity in patriarchal violence and the violence of language, and further offers a challenge to the idea that German-language literature can help ‘come to terms with the past’. Gier

a s a n t i-nov e l

The German edition of Gier satirises its own claims to originality and authority on the title page, as it is subtitled Ein Unterhaltungsroman (‘An entertainment novel’), a term used in German-language literary discourse to denote undifferentiated consumer literature marketed for uncritical and entertaining reading aimed predominantly at women. As we would expect from Jelinek, the novel is anything but entertaining; it is both shot through with scenes of horrifying violence and characterised by a dense and complex use of language. Furthermore, the novel also refuses the traditional novelistic pleasures of plot by revealing its main narrative event early on:€Kurt Janisch, a blond and brutal country policeman, has seduced an older woman called Gerti while detaining her for speeding and plans to sexually subject her so that she will hand over all of her property to him. Meanwhile, he has also seduced and murdered a young girl called Gabi and attempted to dispose of her body in the lake nearby. Early on, the novel sets up a scene that has the potential to contain the suspense of a thriller€ – the figure of the policeman on the bank of the

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lake, the mysterious package wrapped in tarpaulin€ – but the garrulous narrator almost immediately destroys the tension: So, now you know exactly as much as I do, that is, everything, but that’s entirely thanks to me:€because I’ve attached a couple of pennants, bells, horns and flashing lights to this packet, so that now really everyone knows what’s inside.10

The novel could superficially be classed as a detective story, a form of consumer literature beloved by Jelinek.11 But, as Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger has pointed out, the crime is never solved; instead of creating a linear narrative arc from crime to punishment, Jelinek ‘repeatedly alters the time sequence of the narrative by using anachrony, analepsis as well as prolepsis’.12 So neither is Gier entertaining, nor does it adhere to novelistic conventions of plot and character. The narrator warns us right at the beginning that she is liable to become bored with her characters, even lurid ones such as Janisch:€‘It’s a frequent reproach, that I stand around looking stupid and drop my characters before I even have them, because to be honest I pretty quickly find them dull’ (8). Janisch rather embodies a perennial type of brutal and paranoid Austrian masculinity that Jelinek has repeatedly diagnosed in works from Lust (1992) to Das Lebewohl (The Farewell, 2000), and that she also associates with the (now deceased) FPÖ leader Jörg Haider.13 So the characters in Gier are not novelistic constructs in the sense either of the traditional bourgeois novel or of any ‘new readability’. Rather, they are all symptoms of an all-consuming neo-liberal greed€– Gier€– devouring contemporary Austria, where the strong prey on the weak. Furthermore, they are symptoms of the dual principles of violence towards fascism and towards women that underlie that greed. The novel’s focus on the symptoms of neo-capitalism and consumption provides a fresh lens for Jelinek to examine the pathologies that she has long portrayed underlying Austrian society and history. Jelinek’s work participates in a long history of writing that treats Austria as a symptomatic phenomenon, as Matthias Pickelhuas-Konzett has shown. ‘In her works Austria can thus be internationally grasped in two distinct ways:€(1) as a case study of symptomatic expression of crisis in postwar affluent Western societies … and (2) as a site of jouissance and perverse pleasure won from this symptom.’14 This symptomatic approach to Austria is closely linked to the compulsive usage of jokes and Kalauer (puns) in her work. These further undermine the subjective authority of the narrator:€Larson Powell and Brenda Bethman have shown that Jelinek’s jokes operate as a symptom of a weak ego formation, such that ‘humor and word games unsettle the symbolic formations underpinning subjectivity’, by refusing a stable

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significant.15 Further, her jokes also destabilise the wider sexualisation of language and society by means of the nom-du-père, aggressively oscillating between a hatred for Austrian culture and complicity in it.16 As Jelinek says in ‘Im Abseits’, Much is said against it [my language]. So it no longer has much to say for itself, that’s fine. … There’s nothing left to say except:€Our Father, which art. It cannot mean me, although after all I am father, that is:€mother, of my language. I am the father of my mother tongue.

Jelinek’s Gier explores the complex symptomatics of Haider, gender, language authority and Austrian culture. Quite how closely they are intertwined can be shown by close analysis of an episode in which the narrator is discussing a tirade of abuse that Janisch has just unleashed at Gerti, calling her an ‘instrument’. The jokes in this paragraph are untranslatable:€in German, the phrase runs ‘Das Wort Instrument kennt der Gendarm von der örtlichen Blaskapelle, die im Spritzenhaus der Feuerwehr übt’ (131)€– roughly to be translated as ‘The country policeman knows the word instrument from a local brass band, which practises in the fire station’ (96), a translation which misses the obscene puns on blasen (to fellate) and spritzen (to ejaculate). The narrator then claims that if she had not known the origin of the word ‘instrument’, she might have had to write down an obscenity against her will. As she has just done exactly that, the symptomatic, unwilled face of the obscene joke becomes clear. The next sentence links the obscenity with the Freedom Party:€addressing a certain ‘Baron Prinzhorn of the FPÖ’, she writes that the personal columns are constantly playing with these euphemisms:€‘Why don’t you just say what you want, Mr Prinzhorn? Take possession of the whole country and fuck it?’ The obscene puns thus translate Janisch’s violent desires towards Gerti and Gabi into the violent desire of the FPÖ to fuck Austria€– a sexualisation of the relationship between a violent fascist party and a feminised country that would appear to be repeating stock clichés that gender fascists as phallic males and conquered countries as hapless females€– were it not for the fact that, thanks to the obscene jokes, the narrator has already revealed herself as complicit in this desire. Jelinek here performs an oscillation between a gendered critique of the FPÖ and one that destabilises any clear gender division that could lend a stable meaning to this symptom, by naming it as the nom-du-père hidden behind Jelinek’s series of metaphors. This destabilisation of the anchoring power of the phallic male body is shown further on in the paragraph, when Janisch first muses on his Austrian male body, which he has disciplined sternly€– ‘it’s

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a worthy opponent, my body, even for myself it is:€unpredictable’€– and then reveals that sex and bodily discipline are stratagems to hold back his fundamental angst about masculinity and corporeality:€‘I always have to run away, but property could just hold me. That’s the best thing to stop me falling into this pit full of snakes’ (97). The unstable gender of the fascistoid Austrian male body is, according to Jelinek, a symptom of Austrian rejection of weakness and strangeness through the creation of a homoerotic ‘band of men’.17 Thus Janisch’s stream of consciousness lays bare the gender instability (the Freudian ‘pit of snakes’) behind such overt Austrian masculinity. ‘Perhaps the dead snakes embody a superabundance of property, which has been confiscated’, Janisch speculates, linking the lust for property with the male anxieties about lack and weakness that propel the FPÖ. In Jelinek’s unstable metonymic chain, each refers to and drives the other. Thus the complex poetics of Gier bind in the airy credit-driven property bubble of the New Economy with the rise of Haider to power, and incorporate these contemporary political concerns into the aesthetic and political issues that have obsessed Jelinek’s writing since the 1960s:€the subjugation of women, ecological crisis, the discontents of capitalism and the patriarchal structures of language. Jelinek’s Gier thus reveals impersonal and asymmetrical power struggles of man against woman, Austria and the FPÖ versus memory, man versus nature, truth versus language. These asymmetrical struggles are reproduced in the narrator’s struggles with her material. She swings between self-doubt, mockery, rage, blasphemy and glee, and her compulsive puns serve less to make the narrative humorous than to expose the profound and often grotesque connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. Again, this language of violence is vintage Jelinek, which the author describes as a non-psychological form of language rooted in irony.18 ‘This is the only kind of language available to a woman who is rendered speechless by language:€to deal with this speechlessness, to show by using this depraved language, how depraved it is and where this depravity comes from.’19 Yet, as we have seen in her production of sexually violent puns, the narrator reveals herself as complicit in the sexual violence of language and is not altogether powerless. The narrator of Gier rails against the impotence of the writer, and the need to repeat warnings over and over again, Cassandra-like: One day it could be too late, how often have I written this sentence and it’s still good. It’s indestructible, the sentence. Unfortunately, I always have to say, when it’s too late … Writing, that’s taking a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. (185)

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Yet the narrator also warns us that, now that she has told us how Janisch strangled Gabi, we will all be able to go and do it too (132). This tension between the inherent violence of language and authority and the narrator’s complicity with this violence are not unlike the productive tensions within Jelinek’s own public persona, between hypersensitive recluse, public scourge of Austria and yet willing resident. Janisch, the villain, represents all of the violence that the narrator claims to oppose, violence against women, against immigrants and against nature: to him nature is a green chaos, like the party associated with it, and like the chaos in his brain; and only his body, so that its performance improves, is worth being first looked after and then honed, one thing at a time. From such people we should learn to obey the state, without them needing to waste any manners on us. When they kick down our doors because we’re black or have worked in the black economy, we’re harvested and only then cut, by the neighbours. (203)

But Jelinek’s narrator, I suggest, enters into a fruitful and self-ironising complicity with this violence by submitting herself, in whatever fragmented and decentred way, to the conventions of the novel. In 2002, Ben Morgan suggested that the transformation of characters into zombies in Die Kinder der Toten means that ‘Jelinek no longer needs a narrator€– the tropes can speak through the characters themselves. The novel can give way to theatre.’20 But Gier represents a subsequent return to the novel, and to authority. Authority is not just bestowed on Jelinek by the adulation of the literary establishment, vilification in the press or the FPÖ, as her narrative voice is omnipresent in Gier. Precisely this game with absence and presence, with powerlessness and power, was present in Jelinek’s speech for the Nobel Prize four years later in 2004. Jelinek stated that she felt psychologically incapable of receiving the award in person in Sweden and instead delivered her lecture, ‘Im Abseits’, by video link, projected onto three huge screens. As Alexandra Tacke notes, ‘her “I’m already gone/back again” dialectic … came into play here once more, where the presence of Elfriede Jelinek was at once multiplied and enlarged by the video projection, and thereby achieved almost a phantasmic super-presence’.21 Just as the ceremony created a dialectic between authorial absence and presence, so the tension between the self-effacement of Jelinek’s narrative voice and the need to impose authority on her material provides a provocative contribution to the contemporary novel in Gier. Tacke argues that the dialectic of Jelinek’s presence and absence at the Nobel Prize ceremony was in keeping with the dictates of

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poststructuralism, in which ‘text and subject produce each other reciprocally, and the subject dissolves in the text’.22 However, Jelinek simultaneously insists on the author’s responsibility to the truth:€‘describing reality properly wrongly, because it always has to be described wrongly, there’s no other way, but so wrongly, that anyone who reads or hears it, notices the falseness immediately’.23 In Gier, the narrator constantly strikes false notes and also becomes sucked into the system of consumer greed at certain moments. For instance, delighted by the chimerical prospect of a new kitchen promised on a TV gameshow, the narrator exclaims:€‘How fantastic is that, overjoyed I write a whole novel, if necessary’ (264). The novel shows that a narrative position ‘in the sidelines’ can itself only be understood in an ironic fashion; in a global capitalist system, there is no position that is not itself complicit in exploitation and greed. T h e n at u r a l h i s t or y of de s t ruc t ion The question of the narrative voice’s power and autonomy becomes crucial when it comes to assessing the status of Gier within Jelinek’s work as a whole. As stated in the introduction, first, the question is raised as to whether Gier can be viewed as a discrete novel rather than one element in a continuous stream of textual production. Second, the question of Gier’s position in relation to Jelinek’s other works is pertinent. When reviewing the novel, Kathrin Tiedemann claimed that Gier in particular, and Jelinek’s work in general, is entertaining precisely because she is writing against the pervading tone of melancholy in contemporary German literature.24 Further, The Die Kinder der Toten seems to engage far more directly and indeed traumatically with the issues of melancholy, postmemory, Jewish identity and haunting that inform many of the novels discussed in this volume. Gier seems barely to touch on the question of Jewish identity and history. Instead, the novel deals with the symptoms of Austrian amnesia:€the villagers who prefer not to remember where Gabi was when she was murdered, or Janisch, who ‘in his greed for property€… forgets himself, sometimes quite suddenly, but he never forgets what he wants’ (74). Nonetheless, the hunger for property as commodity and for women as property that saturates Gier is in fact linked to precisely that Austrian-Jewish melancholy that saturates Die Kinder der Toten. One link can be seen in the manic mode of language present in both texts. Eric Santner, discussing the vicissitudes of melancholy under late capitalism, discusses this manic, agitated side of melancholy with reference to Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘allegorical sensibility’.

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The ‘petrified landscape’ of natural history is, in a word, a locus of extreme excitation and agitation; the allegorical intention is, Benjamin argues, in constant motion, following a trajectory ‘from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness [Schwindel] of bottomless depths’. This excess of animation becomes, for him, the norm in the culture of modern capitalism.25

The links that Santner explores between melancholy, modernity and the phenomenon of the commodity offer a useful way to read the particular poetics of Gier, which is concerned with the interplay of the destructive forces of capitalism and exchange in a gendered, post-Holocaust Austrian landscape. Santner points out that ‘what Benjamin refers to as petrified unrest pertains to the dynamic of the repetition compulsion, the psychic aspect of the eternal recurrence of the same that for Benjamin defined the world of commodity production and consumption’.26 Benjamin argues that modernity causes divine charisma to become ‘disseminated throughout the social space as a dimension of surplus value attaching to objects and bodies that thereby become the focal points of ceaseless economic, cultural and political administration’, a situation that allows biopolitics to emerge.27 Santner then concludes that ‘the “manic” side of modern melancholy can thus be understood at least in part as a mode of response to what Marx characterized as the spectral dimension of our life with commodities’, or the fetish quality of the commodity.28 The headlong mania of Jelinek’s prose, then, can directly be linked to a melancholy response to commodity fetishism€– greed€– and the biopolitical administration of both humanity and nature. Like Benjamin (and like W. G. Sebald, who is the principal focus of Santner’s book), Jelinek is also diagnosing something like a natural history of destruction in Gier. While in Benjamin, though, attention paid to these phenomena can open the way to messianism, Jelinek’s allegorical landscapes offer no possibility of redemption. Instead, the biopolitics of greed mean that people become one more fetishised commodity:€‘The point of these little houses inhabited by organisms will be, that each preceding model can be taken as security for the subsequent one, well, isn’t that a good idea to stimulate our economy and remove superfluous living beings?’ (15). In Gier, the free-floating rules of the New Economy mean that human beings are one more interchangeable element in a speculative economy that consumes people in a quest for value. Thus, when the loans financing the purchase of property are overstretched, ‘the branch manager will have to chuck money at it again, otherwise the whole lot will be gone; usually the auditor checks up on every peanut, which good children have set down, and which mark an ever broader sloping path, at

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whose end stands the most beautiful of all houses, the witch’s gingerbread house’ (16). At the end of the chain of property lies the house which looks as though it provides sustenance for children lost in the woods, but which is instead designed to consume them in its turn. The chain of unsustainable property loans, each loan secured against another on another property, is linked to the chain of signification itself in Jelinek, which as we have seen, becomes decoupled from a master signifier. Larson Powell and Brenda Bethman have shown, for instance, how Jelinek’s refusal to instate a metaphysical or hermeneutical vanishing point at the end of the chain of signification is linked to a ‘musical’ poetics that refuses the authority of meaning in favour of a slippery chain of puns. ‘The absence of such a metaphor or master signifier is what makes Jelinek’s work difficult to decipher in psychoanalytic terms:€ it refuses to form stably metaphorical “symptoms” of meaning.’29 Jutta GsoelsLorensen makes the same point in historical terms, when writing about Die Kinder der Toten. Here, she states that Jelinek does not allow us the ontological or epistemological security of a firm ground of the ‘present’; rather, she says that ‘what we call “now” presents itself not as the firm ground from which to survey the past in safe posteriority, but as a vexing field of objects folded, cut off, and ripped out of view’.30 Thus, the instability of the chain of value in the property loans that Kurt Janisch and his son have set up is not merely Jelinek’s barbed comment on the conditions of the New Economy in the year 2000; it demonstrates the overall ontological and epistemological instability of Jelinek’s poetics. Yet, as Powell, Bethman and Gsoels-Lorenson are swift to point out, the fundamental lack of any metaphysical or€– in this case€– financial anchor in the chain of value and meaning does not imply a postmodern arbitrariness of meaning. Rather, Bethman and Powell say, ‘the punning, doggerel rhymes in Jelinek are often as painful as the deliberately bad puns of Lacan … verbal music has lost the liberating quality it still had for Joyce and has allied itself with the death drive’.31 Rather, it allows a historical space to open; as Gsoels-Lorenson says, ‘their signification is dissolved into a procedure of differential relations … what allows for the emergence of history space is a dynamic, arbitrary network of “Bruchlinie[n]” whose force is their curious differential exactness’.32 And indeed, just as in Die Kinder der Toten, the literal ground of the narrative is unstable and prone to vertiginous slippages that lay bare the abyss of history underneath. And we don’t even want to start on about the clearing-up operations after the mudslide last autumn, we really must draw a line under this chapter, although we’re still so stuck to it. Even the police cadets spent five days helping out then,

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to say nothing of the tons of hair in the ground, which no one has yet been able to explain. For that we had to bring in units of the Federal Army, didn’t we? After last year’s fire the plots of land are once again firmly in the hands of our bank. Those are no grounds to be against the banks or the Jews, although that’s a fine tradition hereabouts. (17)

The ‘tons of hair’ in the ground also emerge at the end of Die Kinder der Toten, where hair is revealed after a landslip, far too much hair for the number of people estimated to be trapped, which runs through the rescuers’ hands as though it were a rope:€‘does it perhaps lead us to eternity, which we have already wanted to view for a long time now?’33 Here as in Gier, the presence of the hair is inexplicable to the characters and unexplained on the surface level of narration, but is a synecdoche for the Jewish dead buried just beneath the surface of the new, prosperous Austria. The reader must gather the few scattered references to the continuing presence of Nazi ideology in the novel in order to read the text as part of Jelinek’s decades-long intervention into the Nazi legacy in contemporary Austria, and to find the subterranean link between the two novels. In ‘Im Abseits’, hair€– a recurring preoccupation throughout Jelinek’s work€– is the opening metaphor for Jelinek’s discussion of the troubled relationship between writing and reality.34 Like reality, hair, Jelinek says, ‘simply won’t be tidied up’. It not only is recalcitrant to the author’s attempts to comb it, but it has a haunting quality: The writers run through it and despairingly gather together their hair into a style, which promptly haunts them at night. Something’s wrong with the way one looks … The beautifully piled up hair can be chased out of its home of dreams again, but can anyway no longer be tamed. Or hangs limp once more, a veil before a face, no sooner than it could finally be subdued. Or stands involuntarily on end in horror at what is constantly happening.35

Hair is an index both of the haunted horror of reality, and of the author’s inability to fully engage with reality. Jelinek’s speech moves on to describe the author as a voice that can only speak when it is ‘sidelined’ from reality, when it lies. Indeed, the author, in Jelinek’s account, is both protected and ‘sidelined’ by language itself:€‘My only protector against being described, language, which, conversely, exists to describe something else, that I am not€– that is why I cover so much paper€– my only protector is turning against me.’36 Just as hair is an index of the incommensurability of writing and reality, so the author herself claims not only to be ‘sidelined’ by reality, but also to be helplessly at the mercy of a language that, although it is bound up with patriarchy, can still approach reality more closely than she can. This claim, as we have seen, is as much part

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of Jelinek’s elaborate game with victimhood and complicity, power and powerlessness, as her own trademark hairstyle was part of her authoritative and authorial intervention at the 2004 Nobel ceremony. Like the hair that is revealed by the landslip as the traumatic memory buried in the landscape, the local lake is similarly a seemingly natural feature of the novel’s landscape that swiftly reveals itself to be in the highest degree unnatural and unheimlich. Far from being a living ecosystem, the lake is part of the ‘petrified landscape’ of melancholy to which Santner refers. ‘This water is simply not as close to nature as you’, warns the narrator (57), ‘even this water here drowns in itself without a single cry’ (60). Furthermore, the lake has been created in the gravel pit that was dug out to create the roads around where Janisch now preys on female motorists. The narrator suggests that the lake, which ‘has already killed everything in itself’, might be ‘a nice symbol for this man [Janisch] here, who is facing fairly critical times, because he would like to digest himself’ (121). But the lake’s Gier is less an aspect of the sinister, uncanny homeland of the Austrian countryside where Janisch hunts and more an agent of implacable justice. The very bottom of the lake is ‘the point, as it were, at which the body of water is unconscious, but nevertheless unceasingly, with a part of its memory, which had not been regulated by the Alpine Convention, … which is lying in wait, presumably lying in wait for its own terrible awakening’ (62). The lake proves to be the only entity in the neighbourhood that remembers Gabi’s death by regurgitating her corpse. Thus Jelinek draws a link between the murderous consumption of women by men, and the fascistic violence underlying Austrian society at the time of the rise of the FPÖ. The lake also contains the memory of the invisible industrial exploitation of the landscape, a memory that will have its revenge through the landslips that reveal the corpses hidden beneath the soil. Thus, the lake is an overdetermined metaphor for a link between patriarchal violence, the revival of Nazism via the FPÖ, and ecological disaster. It is this link, I argue, that makes Gier both an original work in Jelinek’s own oeuvre, and a significant event in German-language literature of the 1990s and 2000s. Gier refuses to engage with any form of ‘new readability’, to leave the literary past behind, and indeed Jelinek may be pursuing the same themes as preoccupied her in the 1970s. However, her gleeful way of drawing links between seemingly antiquated concerns such as linguistic scepticism, postmodern playfulness and second-wave feminism, and issues with more contemporary resonance such as memory, melancholy, ecology and the appeal of the FPÖ, not to mention her continued

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highlighting of the streak of patriarchal brutality underlying European society, are uniquely Jelinek and Jelinek’s alone. No t e s 1 Dates of publication in the text refer to English-language translations, where these are available, and to German-language texts where these are the only ones available. 2 See, for instance, Gitta Honegger, ‘Elfriede Jelinek:€How to get the Nobel Prize without really trying’, Theater, 36:2 (2006), 4–19, 18. 3 Jelinek has been referred to as a Nestbeschmutzerin at least since the 1995 premiere of her play Burgtheater. See Pia Janke, Die Nestbeschmutzerin:€Elfriede Jelinek und Österreich (Salzburg and Vienna:€Jung und Jung, 2002), 7–8. 4 Mattthias Matussek, ‘Alle macht den Wortenquirlen!’, Spiegel, 42 (2004), 178–82, 179, my translation. 5 Knut Ahnlund, ‘Efter Jelinek är priset ödelagt’, 11 October 2005, available at www.svd.se/kulturnoje/nyheter/artikel_465731.svd (accessed 21 June 2010). Cited in Tim Parks, ‘How to read Elfriede Jelinek’, The New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007. 6 Larson Powell and Brenda Bethman, ‘“One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly”:€Elfriede Jelinek’s musicality’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32:1 (2008), 163–83, 165, 7 Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Im Abseits. Nobel Lecture€ – Literature 2004’, trans. Martin Chalmers, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2004/jelinek-lecture-e.html (accessed 21 June 2010). 8 Alexandra Tacke, ‘“Sie nicht als Sie”:€Die Nobelpreisträgerin Elfriede Jelinek spricht “Im Abseits”’, in Christine Künzel and Jörg Schönert, eds., Autorinszenierungen:€ Autorschaft und literarisches Werk im Kontext der Medien (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 191–207, 195. 9 See, for example, Matthias Piccolruaz Konzett, ‘Preface:€The many faces of Elfriede Jelinek’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€ Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€ A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€Associated University Presses, 2007), 7–23, 20. 10 Elfriede Jelinek, Greed, trans. Martin Chalmers (London:€ Serpent’s Tail, 2006), 72. All subsequent page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. 11 Verena Mayer and Roland Koberg, Elfriede Jelinek:€Ein Porträt (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€Rowohlt, 2006), 233. 12 Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, ‘The audacious art of Elfriede Jelinek:€Tour de Force and irritation’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€ Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€ A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€Associated University Presses, 2007), 37–56, 43. 13 Helga Kraft, ‘Building the Austrian body:€ Jelinek’s celebrity workout’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€Associated University Presses, 2007), 221–49, 224.

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14 Konzett, ‘Preface’, 8. 15 Powell and Bethman, ‘One must have tradition in oneself’, 168. 16 Powell and Bethman, ‘One must have tradition in oneself’, 166. 17 See Volker Oesterreich, ‘Ironie unter der Straßenwalze’. Interview with Elfriede Jelinek, Berliner Morgenpost, 27 February 2000. 18 Elfriede Jelinek, intervewed by Gitta Honegger, ‘I am a Trümmerfrau of language’, Theater, 36:2 (2006), 20–37, 24. 19 Jelinek, ‘I am a Trümmerfrau of language’, 27. 20 Ben Morgan, ‘Jelinek, “Krankheit oder moderne Frauen”’, in Peter Hutchinson, ed., Landmarks in German Drama (Bern:€Lang, 2002), 225–42, 242. 21 Tacke, ‘Sie nicht als Sie’, 200, translation mine. 22 Tacke, ‘Sie nicht als Sie’, 206, translation mine. 23 Jelinek, ‘Im Abseits’. 24 Kathrin Tiedemann, ‘Der Traum von Macht und Größe. Elfriede Jelinek antwortet mit “Gier” auf die Haiderisierung Österreichs’, Der Freitag, 13 October 2000, available at www.freitag.de/2000/42/00423001.htm (accessed 21 June 2010). 25 Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life:€Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 80. 26 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 81. 27 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 82. 28 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 82 29 Powell and Bethman, ‘One must have tradition in oneself’, 166. 30 Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, ‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten:€Representing the Holocaust as an Austrian ghost story’, Germanic Review, 81:4 (2006), 360–82, 374. 31 Powell and Bethmann, ‘One must have tradition in oneself’, 166. 32 Gsoels-Lorensen, ‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten’, 374. 33 Elfriede Jelinek, Die Kinder der Toten (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€ Rowohlt, 1995), 665 [my translation]. 34 Jelinek, ‘Im Abseits’. 35 Jelinek, ‘Im Abseits’. 36 Jelinek, ‘Im Abseits’.

ch apter 11

Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song) Alison Lewis

Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song, 2000) is the second novel by Karen Duve, one of a number of women writers who are regularly associated with the phenomenon of the Literarisches Fräuleinwunder (Â�literary girl wonder). More a product of journalism than self-description, the Fräuleinwunder craze was one of the literary ‘events’ that occurred at the end of the millennium when the German Feuilletons announced in hyperbolic style the ‘miraculous’ emergence of a new wave of women writers. Duve, along with the others mentioned in Volker Hage’s article in Der Spiegel on 22 March 1999€– Judith Hermann, Juli Zeh, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Felicitas Hoppe and Zoë Jenny€– is often regarded as typical of this younger generation and as representative of a new direction in German writing. In reality, of course, there is far more variety among these writers, and variation in ages, than the Feuilletons would have us believe. Moreover, the Fräuleinwunder was not the only literary innovation of the post-Wall era, nor was it an isolated phenomenon, following hard on the heels of another new trend, the German pop novel. Of those women writers singled out by Hage, Duve is, in the words of another critic, the ‘most grim of the ladies’.1 She is also, with the exception of Hoppe (b. 1960), the oldest by almost ten years. In generational terms Duve arguably sits on the cusp between generations€– somewhere between Florian Illies’ ‘Generation Golf’, the German equivalent of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and the ’78ers2€ – and this in-between status is replicated, it will be argued, with respect to the work’s position vis-à-vis feminism and postfeminism. On the one hand, her writing, while witty and humorous, has a darker edge to it and there are echoes of a 1970s-style feminist critique of postwar gender relations.3 On the other hand, her entertaining style and readability seem to suggest that she belongs more to a postfeminist generation. Moreover, her deft and playful use of genre, her mixing of high and low culture, can be seen as heralding a new relationship to international literary models and to global popular culture more generally. Similar to texts 165

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of the Neue deutsche Popliteratur (New German Pop Literature), Duve’s novel revolves around the themes of adolescence, music, drugs, parties, fashion and relationships. Rather than treating Duve as yet another ‘new archivalist’ (Baßler) and classifying Dies ist kein Liebeslied as new German pop (in contradistinction to the older pop), I propose situating Dies ist kein Liebeslied in a different, international context. This will involve, first, an exploration of Duve’s use of intertextuality in relation to German as well as international models and, second, a discussion of the work’s relationship to feminism and postfeminism. The term postfeminism, or what is also referred to as ‘third wave’, ‘power’, ‘neo’, ‘post’, ‘revisionist’, ‘dissident’ or ‘post-ideological’ feminism, is sometimes used to circumscribe the backlash against second-wave feminism that occurred in the late 1980s.4 More recently, however, postfeminism has been associated with the coming-of-age of a new Â�generation of feminists.5 Postfeminists, according to Alyson Cole, like to think of themselves as being less dogmatic, less prudish, less averse to women’s power, less suspicious of money, consumerism and capitalism, and less hostile to beauty, fashion and popular women’s culture.6 One important distinction postfeminist scholars make between themselves and earlier feminists is with respect to women’s status as victims, with postfeminists eschewing the notion that all women are victims of all men. As we shall see, Duve’s response to many of the feminist issues raised in the novel continues in the feminist tradition while also displaying a strong affinity to postfeminism.7 In this chapter it will be argued that both Duve’s engagement with feminism/postfeminism and her use of intertextuality are indicative of a new globalising phase in German fiction that corresponds to the emergence of a new transnational literary culture. The overarching genre that Duve uses is the romance:€ girl meets boy, falls in love and marries, except that in this case the main character, Anne Strelau, never manages to entrap her Mr Right, the nonÂ�descript Everyman Peter Hemstedt. The novel begins with Anne€– who appears to be the same age as her author, which in 1996 was 35€ – sitting on a plane en route to London to belatedly tell Hemstedt that he is the love of her life. The trip to London is the novel’s ‘primary fabula’ and main story, which frames another, ‘embedded’ narrative. This is the story of Anne’s childhood and follows the pattern of the Bildungsroman, although, as some critics have suggested, it is more a novel of deformation, a Verbildungsroman8 or an Anti-Bildungsroman.9 According to Duve, what began as a love story set in the present morphed during the process of writing into a novel about childhood and adolescence.10 The

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binding theme that connects both temporal levels and primary and secondary fabula is love. The book opens with the announcement of the heroine that she made a resolution at the age of seven never to fall in love again. Already for the prepubescent Anne, love is a disappointment, much as it is for the woman in Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s song ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’, which Duve references. Indeed, for Anne love is, like it says in the song, a source of ‘lies and pain and sorrow’, with the result that she too declares, ‘so for at least until tomorrow’, that she will never fall in love again. For the young heroine growing up in the cloying stuffiness of the middleclass town of Barnstedt, love was ‘just as bad as I feared. It was humiliating, painful and completely outside my control. I was not loved in return; there was nothing that I could do to change that, and the effort it took not to love any more almost drove me crazy.’11 The theme of unrequited love runs, not surprisingly, through the novel like the refrain of a pop song, and, like the woman in Bacharach’s song, Anne has a string of unsuccessful relationships. The most formative of these is with Axel Vollauf, the boy next door, nicknamed by her family ‘saucer eyes’ (Tellerauge), whom she dumps because of his annoying habit of throwing his arms around her. Even though she and Axel are happy enough playing doctors and nurses with frogs who are maimed by the neighbour’s lawnmower, his affection for her only causes her embarrassment and she ends the relationship in characteristically insensitive fashion:€‘I lashed out, boxed him in the stomach, kicked him in the shinbone and finally knocked him over€… Axel went quite green in the face … Then he started to cry; he sniffed and snuffled and wiped his sleeve across his face’ (32). Furthermore, Axel, who could be seen as representing an alternative non-hegemonic model of masculinity, is no match for her, a point that is underscored when Anne accidentally breaks his collarbone at school:€‘This time I did not break his heart but his collarbone instead’ (45). Anne’s first experiences with adolescent boys and sex are painful and humiliating, serving only to cement her already well-developed sense of failure. She has a series of boyfriends, and when she finds her Mr Right, Peter Hemstedt, in a kind of romantic epiphany in Paris, he continues to treat her shabbily. Sex proves to be a bitter disappointment and a constant cause of embarrassment and shame as well as disgust. And while Anne would like us to see her as a victim of male desire, she is in reality relatively promiscuous and sexually rather precocious. In this respect she is a not too distant cousin of the character of Martina in Duve’s Regenroman (Rain, 1999), who as a teenager renders her father speechless, and her

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boyfriend as well, by performing oral sex on the latter in the family car. Duve’s sharp eye for the incongruities of adolescent sex and its humorous side prevents the reader from taking Anne’s protestations of victimhood too seriously, and Duve manages to maintain an ironic distance from her main character. Anne too is quick to condemn her submissive behaviour in relation to men as ‘repulsive’, all of which only serves to make the reader sympathise with Anne’s flawed but somehow likeable character. Anne is both feisty and neurotic, insecure and brash, victim and villain. She is feminine in a frumpy Bridget-Jones kind of way while also being something of a tear-away tomboy. The search for the right man is an age-old theme that has been taken up and repackaged by a newer form of romance called ‘chick lit’. Although the term started out life as an ironic label for avant-garde writing in the 1990s, it has now been co-opted by the publishing industry for branding a particular ‘line’ of popular books aimed at a female audience.12 Chick lit typically features a single woman in her twenties or thirties, who works in media or publishing, and who struggles to juggle career and relationships. It would be an exaggeration to say that chick lit subverts gender norms or decentres what Judith Butler and others have called the ‘Â�heterosexual matrix’ and ‘heteronormativity’, but it does, according to its defenders, offer a more realistic portrayal of single life and dating than earlier romances.13 As Ferriss and Young write:€‘Heroines deploy self-deprecating humour that not only entertains but also leads readers to believe they are fallible€ – like them.’14 The most well-known example and possibly the Urtext of the whole chick-lit phenomenon is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996).15 Other vital ingredients in the formula are a compulsive relationship to food, fashion, shopping and dieting. It is not hard to see how Dies ist kein Liebeslied merits classification as German chick lit.16 Before the issues of weight-gain and -loss, beauty and body-image are addressed, it is worth taking a closer look at the novel’s relationship to the romance and the Bildungsroman. Like Fielding’s novel, which unashamedly pays homage to Jane Austen’s novel of manners, Duve’s brand of chick lit also wears its literary allegiances openly on its intertextual sleeve. Interestingly, her literary antecedents are more German than British, more Goethe and Günter Grass than Jane Austen. The opening lines of Dies ist kein Liebeslied allude not only to the song by John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon, formerly of the Sex Pistols, with Public Image Ltd, they also contain an allusion to a modern German classic, Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959). We recall that Oskar Matzerath, the monstrous dwarf-like main character of the novel,

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makes a similar resolution to Anne, when, after falling down the stairs, at the age of three he decides to stop growing. And there are many other references to Die Blechtrommel. These include Anne’s sexually precocious nature, in which there are echoes of Oskar’s sexual exploits, and her semisupernatural powers of making herself sick, which quotes Oskar’s iconoclastic activities of destroying watches, glass cases and window panes. Although there are fewer fantastical or surreal elements in the novel than in Regenroman, Duve’s debt to Grass can be clearly seen from her use of satire, black humour, the grotesque and the obscene€– including her penchant for disgusting details such as frogs (in Regenroman, it is snails and slugs), which also recalls Grass’s fondness for eels and horse cadavers. It is Goethe’s international bestseller of the late eighteenth century, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1787), in particular, that resonates most strongly. It is surely no coincidence that Duve has chosen a text like Werther, which was ‘the first work of German literature to become something like a brand name’ and which popularised the discourse of sensibility.17 Like other modern adaptations of Werther, Duve has given the theme of unrequited love a modern makeover in addition to inverting the gender constellation of the main characters. Duve’s novel is possibly the first female Werther in German literature.18 The gendering of the Werther narrative has necessitated, as we shall see, a number of modifications not previously seen in other versions. At the same time, Dies ist kein Liebesleid also references the German Bildungsroman, the broader tradition of which Werther is a part. The topoi of mobility and growth are both stock elements of the genre, and Duve addresses both themes in ways that take chick lit into foreign territory. The novel, as we shall see, is on one level concerned with Anne’s emotional and even spiritual growth but it is also about her physical growth in size from 42 to 117 kilos. Duve’s heroine is also fairly mobile; she travels to Paris and London, owns a succession of cars and motorbikes, likes plane travel, and drives taxis for a living. Feminist critics have frequently called into question the accessibility of the Bildungsroman plot for women writers, arguing that the nineteenth-century heroine has only two choices open to her:€ marriage or death. Recently, scholars have challenged this view and contended that there is a tradition of the female, as well as the feminist Bildungsroman, which presents a gendered view of the standard themes of inner and outer development and integration into society.19 The male Bildungsroman does not typically rely on the marriage plot to achieve closure whereas the female version often does, although in

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modern feminist versions marriage is categorically rejected as a patriarchal trap.20 What makes Duve’s combination of both romance and Bildungsroman especially interesting is the way she uses genre to raise questions about twenty-first-century narratives of female development. In short, Duve’s genre ‘sampling’ becomes a heuristic device for pinpointing postwar gender trouble. The most extensive of the allusions to Werther occurs at the end of the novel during Anne’s visit to London, immediately after the semi-final of the European Cup in which Germany defeats England and Southgate misses the penalty kick. In a tragicomic ‘final’ of her own, Anne gets to confess her love to Hemstedt and to sleep with him. The love scene that Duve choreographs is straight out of Werther and contains a metafictional moment, during which Anne ponders on the possibilities of endings to her story€ – whether she should close with a ‘beautiful ending’ (282) and Hemstedt’s death or whether she should kill him. Duve’s scene quotes the famous moment of Werther’s epiphany at the window when Lotte utters the magical words ‘Klopstock’ even down to the details about the thunder: Later Hemstedt gets up to put on a new CD. Then he goes to the window and looks out. I prop myself up on my elbows. There is a thunderous sound from the side, because the loudspeakers are on the ground and a sad man’s voice sings ‘Don’t try so hard to be different’. ‘Southgate,’ I say. Southgate’s fate does not have much to do with the song’s text but Peter still understands what I mean. (282)

In both Goethe’s and Duve’s texts, feeling is communicated via contemporary cultural references€ – in Werther it is an allusion to Klopstock’s ode ‘Die Frühlingsfeyer’ (‘Spring Celebration’). Significantly, it is not the wonders of nature in the heavy storm that Duve’s couple contemplate but the thunderous blasts of a pop song from loudspeakers. It is not Klopstock that the lovers celebrate but the English soccer player Gareth Southgate. In the punchline, the reference to the cultural medium of literature has been transformed into a reference to sport. In turning the pathos of this iconic moment into a moment of extreme bathos, Duve is not only debunking literary traditions, she is also highlighting the importance of popular culture as a global lingua franca. Duve’s point with the Southgate allusion is that her generation has its own, mutually intelligible language of love that has now become a globalised, transnational system of communication. For Duve and her contemporaries the language of love is mediated not through poetry but sport and popular music.

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Nonetheless, it could be argued that this travesty of Werther€ – and travesty as ‘the comic imitation of another work which brings the high low’21€ – manages to pay sly homage to canonical German literature. While Duve’s novel does not display the reverence with regard to its literary forebears that Harold Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence’, it does reveal a covert indebtedness to tradition that resembles Bloom’s notion of ‘kenosis’. Kenosis denotes the particularly defiant stance a poet can adopt towards his or her precursors that emphatically rejects the influence of tradition.22 Two further scenes in the novel owe a serious debt to Werther and illustrate precisely this posture. The first example is a semi-comic scene when Anne tries to commit suicide in the wilds of nature, where it becomes evident that neither marriage nor suicide offers an appropriate ending to the postfeminist Bildungsroman. In this scene, in which the heroine tries but fails dismally to kill herself, the romantic view of suicide is thoroughly demystified. Anne is such an abject failure that she is even unable to take the tragic way out of her dilemma. The scene, in which she strikes herself repeatedly with a stone too small to inflict any serious damage, and then gives up at the first sign of pain, acts in many ways, like the Southgate scene, as a meta-fictional commentary on the problems of fictional endings:€‘There was a reason why suicidal people generally prefer a noose, sleeping tablets or bridge pylons. This here demanded too much decisiveness. I crawled around on all fours and found a bigger stone … That hurt so much that it became immediately clear to me that I did not want to die today’ (258). The other scene is one in which Werther is explicitly mentioned and is set in school when Anne has to write a class paper on the classic work. Anne finds Werther’s outpourings of emotion tiresome and indulgent. In characteristic style, she calls the famous Klopstock scene ‘repulsive’ (104). Goethe, she reckons, has too little distance from Werther’s sensibility and is not critical enough:€‘Goethe is not making any social criticism. Goethe thinks he himself is pretty cool, that is his problem’ (104). The surprising thing about Anne’s in-class musings is that she discovers that Werther’s sufferings still speak to her:€‘What a moody, vain jerk this Werther was! And yet€– when he began to talk of his love and his misfortune it was as if I was looking into my own heart. It speaks so clearly and truthfully and sadly. I understand completely what Goethe means’ (105). Despite her cross-gender identification with Werther, Anne still hands in a blank page to her teacher and destroys the love letter to Hemstedt she has composed in lieu of the essay. Anne, it seems, is not versed in the technique of writing love letters, and nor is she able to ‘write’ a substitute love letter by

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putting together a mixtape of her favourite music€– after all, the production of mixtapes is the prerogative of men.23 Anne is lacking in far more than the technical means of producing expressions of love; she also lacks confidence and thus lacks the ability to fashion herself into a suitable subject of desire or heroine of a love story. This problem of agency is, as we shall see, closely connected to her problematic relationship to food, dieting and body image. Like Bridget Jones, Anne Strelau struggles to maintain an acceptable weight. She measures her achievements in life in terms of the amount of weight she has lost and, conversely, her failures are signposted by the unacceptable weight she has gained. Hence, she ‘grows’ less in emotional terms than in physical volume. Body size features so prominently in Anne’s childhood narrative that the key rites of passage are all related to weight control and management. Accordingly, it is not her first experience with sexuality that marks her coming-of-age but her first diet: The decision to go on her first diet is a deciding, if not the most important moment in a girl’s life. In any case it is more significant than the massively exaggerated event of the loss of virginity. A type of initiation rite only that you do not emerge from it a grown woman but always have to start it all over again. You are eleven or twelve and maybe you are only ten when you comprehend that there is no way that you can stay the way you are. From then on you will try to be different, and that means better€– which means less. (44)

Anne is addicted to weight-loss programmes, which range from appetite suppressants, starvation, faddish diets and bouts of bulimia and purging. She is not so naïve as to think that she would be loved just for her looks€– she does not buy into the ‘beauty myth’€– but she is convinced that the shame of rejection would be less acute if she conformed to an ideal body size:€‘with thin legs I could cope better with not being loved’ (9). Anne is patently a victim of the ‘slim aesthetic’ and the pressures of normative ideals of femininity, as propagated by the global beauty and fashion industry.24 She is a perfect illustration of Susie Orbach’s thesis that ‘the preoccupation with the body is disturbing in its capacity to affect almost an entire life, from childhood through to old age’.25 Consequently, Anne lives in the shadow of thinner, smaller girls like the one who defeats her in the school elections for class speaker:€‘I had the wrong figure and the wrong jeans, I laughed wrong and said the wrong things … There would be no point listing all my mistakes€ – it was me that was at fault’ (56). Although there appears to be a ‘looks bias’ against overweight girls in the novel,26 the fate of ‘Little Doris’, her anorexic friend, and other pretty girls

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in her class who are mercilessly teased, suggests that both thin and fat girls are unable to live up to prevailing ideals of beauty. Thinness is not only thought by Anne and her friends to be a ‘guarantor of health’;27 it is ‘synonymous with success, femininity, sexuality and control over oneself and one’s life’.28 Body image and size are, like the experience of sex, a constant source of shame and humiliation for girls in the novel. In fact, shame is the dominant emotional register in Anne’s life, with parents, teachers and boyfriends alike all serving as agents for shaming her. If we think of shame as being caused by ‘the perception of negative evaluations of the self’, shame would appear to afflict girls more than boys in the novel.29 Girls are actively involved in rigorous self-monitoring to avoid or minimise the impact of shame, whereas boys manage on the whole to avoid being publicly humiliated. Anne, for instance, is shamed by her father, rather ironically, for being an overly dutiful and devoted daughter, when he accuses her of having an Oedipal complex. To the existing shame of being rejected by her father is added the shame of being accused of having a crush on him: At that moment my world exploded. I knew what an Oedipal complex was. Something to do with sex. I felt sick. It was as if I was falling, falling, falling. And when I thought I had reached the depths of shame there was still no bottom to be felt and I kept on falling into a second cellar of self-disgust. I had come on to my father. Oh God I was disgusting! (74)

School provides additional opportunities for public shaming through sport lessons, when underperformers are teased and made to feel inferior. Whether it is gymnastics or team sports such as Völkerball, sport means ‘humiliation, impotence, pain and shame’ (58). Even more damaging to Anne’s self-esteem are the mathematics lessons when the teacher has the class practise calculations by estimating pupils’ weight:€‘Calculate the difference between the second heaviest and the lightest girl in the class’ (44). Dominant norms of femininity are thus instilled in girls in the home and at school, where they are subjected to forms of institutionalised monitoring and discipline that lay the foundations for a lifetime of self-discipline and self-punishment. The final player in the all-encompassing ‘shaming dispositive’ that regulates bodily ideals of femininity are boys, who do not miss an opportunity to humiliate the girls and to mock everything about them.30 While feminists argued in the 1970s for throwing off the yoke of shame surrounding women’s sexuality, Duve’s novel shows that for a postfeminist

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generation shame and guilt are far from over. Shame is still a dominant means of social regulation of body image and a deeply entrenched technology for disciplining femininity. And for Anne there are plenty of reasons to feel ashamed:€being overweight, being the object of Axel Vollauf’s outlandish affections, having a ‘milk roll backside’ rather than an ‘apple backside’ (22), not knowing the names of bands and songs (David Bowie) and liking uncool music (‘girlie’ music such as Kate Bush and Enya). Duve’s novel shows, however, that it is not only contemporary femininity that is in crisis but masculinity as well. Duve’s boys struggle in an increasingly permissive society with the pressures to perform sexually and experience, to a lesser degree than the girls, their own culture of shame around their sexual prowess. The shame of sexual failure is only made bearable by the fact that it remains largely invisible, mainly because the girls do not dare expose the boys’ secrets. There are also numerous examples of gender confusion in the novel, especially around the demarcation of gender roles. Several of the boys appear feminised, such as Axel Vollauf, the boy Anne rejects because he is too emotional, who reappears later in the novel in Anne’s therapy group as a new-age man. When Axel reveals he had only recently freed himself from the need to prove himself by lifting the heaviest boxes, Anne is scathing: I was not especially enthusiastic about this new form of masculine selfÂ�confidence. If there was something that could make the usual male deficiencies more palatable to me then it was that my automobile mechanic friends always managed to keep my cars, motor bikes and electrical household goods in top shape and to carry up my heaviest boxes. I didn’t think that you should give up these little favours so easily without a clear increase in quality in other areas. (223)

Duve’s portrayal of female identity rejects clear-cut notions of girls as victims and presents a more differentiated account of femininity and women’s agency. Anne may not be quite the sexually voracious heroine we encounter in recent postfeminist works such as Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands, 2008), but she certainly is no sexual wallflower. She is assertive€– and this usually lands her in trouble€– and she emphatically rejects the vapid ideals of passive and compliant femininity characteristic of her mother’s generation. In this respect Anne is a postfeminist heroine. According to Alyson Cole, the postfeminist ‘indulges freely in a host of feminine pleasures, including the joys of lipstick, the euphoria of a traditional wedding, the thrill involved in making their work-places pretty, and even their fantasies of being ravaged by a man’.31 Anne too

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embraces the liberatory potential of make-up, she obsesses with the idea of finding the love of her life, and in Paris it is her suggestion to watch pornography. And while Anne is not especially addicted to fashion like other heroines of chick lit, self-adornment does play an important role in her life. The affirmative postfeminist sensibility in evidence for much of the novel is nevertheless belied by Anne’s chronic failure to make something of her life. This suggests that the novel still has a residual affinity with earlier feminist agendas that are concerned with victimhood, shame and equal opportunity. Despite her affinities to contemporary chick-lit heroines such as Bridget Jones, there is a grim desperation about Anne that is never entirely alleviated by the novel’s comedy. Moreover, Duve’s writing possesses a psychological realism that plumbs greater depths of character than we conventionally see in chick lit. Anne, for instance, leaves us in no doubt that her love for Hemstedt verges on the pathological:€ ‘I became aware of the repulsiveness of my love, the urgency and neediness of it’ (171). There are other divergences from the chick-lit plot that involve the use of German intertexts. For one, Anne is not a successful professional or even a moderately successful one. She has a string of menial jobs, one of which is working in a dog leash factory. Here, it is not hard to detect the legacy of Heinrich Böll (and his Bekenntnis eines Hundefängers, or Confessions of a Dog-Catcher, from 1953), while other elements, such as the failed love story, are reminiscent of works by contemporary German writers such as Monika Maron. At the beginning the narrator tells us she has been waiting all her life ‘for my turn, waiting for the deciding words that would fall so that I could step from behind the curtain and onto the stage and join in’ (8). And, unlike Bridget Jones, at the end of the novel Anne is still waiting for her big chance in life. Although she never discovers what her part in the theatre of modern German life is, she does take an important step forward when she packs her bags and leaves Hemstedt. Duve rejects the closure of the romance plot, and marriage, and concludes her novel with the resumption of the heroine’s wanderings across Europe. The novel thus ends with a trope straight out of the Bildungsroman. Duve rejects the plot of the novel of manners in the English tradition (e.g. Jane Austen), as well as the German tragedy of Werther, and aligns herself more with the male model of the Bildungsroman as found in Wilhelm Meister. In the course of the novel Anne undergoes a process of development, like the male characters in the Bildungsroman, that takes the form of an outer and inner journey. At the end of this journey, Anne arrives at a certain degree of

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self-knowledge, even if this knowledge is that she will probably continue to repeat the same mistakes over again. In that sense, and contrary to the title, the novel is, or resembles, a love song, in particular, a specific love song. The novel reads therefore as the answer to the question posed by the song ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’:€‘What do you get when you fall in love?’ Duve’s answer is, unequivocally, like Bacharach’s:€‘You only get lies and pain and sorrow / So for at least until tomorrow / I’ll never fall in love again.’ So what, in conclusion, does this bricolage of genres old and modern and of German and British styles mean for feminist and postfeminist aesthetics? If the feminist Bildungsroman was, as Rita Felski has argued, a meaningful mode of feminist writing that was appropriate to second-wave feminism,32 it could be argued that a hybrid aesthetic€– one that throws the high in with the low, the German in with the Anglo-Saxon and the comic together with the melancholic€– is best suited to the postfeminist generation. German chick lit employs irony and humour but adds into the generic mix a far stronger dose of social satire and black humour than its British counterparts. In a compelling combination of styles it fuses the wit of a novel of manners with all the psychological insights of modern engagierte Literatur (engaged literature). In stitching together in a patchwork aspects of the Bildungsroman and the romance, it thus crafts a local, or national, ‘dialect’ from ‘global idioms’. Duve’s referencing of both these genres is ironic and self-conscious, and her heroine accordingly neither fully develops into a successful professional nor does she find true happiness in love. In that sense, the work insists on discontinuity with the past, revealing the type of covert indebtedness that Bloom captured in the term ‘kenosis’. Her rejection of traditional German literary models and her ironic adaption of contemporary British genres such as chick lit possibly lead Duve into a generic impasse. While Duve, and Anne as well, are able to contemplate a greater variety of endings (suicide, integration into society, success and happiness, and to a lesser extent marriage) these are all rejected as inadequate. Indeed, it would seem that greater choice of generic formulae for emplotting female development has ironically not resulted in a happier ending for Anne. In its referencing of German and English traditions and juxtaposition of modern and classical literary models, Dies ist kein Liebeslied is representative of a more global, transnational turn in German literature. In conclusion, it is worth noting that it would be wrong to suggest that Duve’s adaptations of global idioms have lost their Germanness. This can be seen from an anecdote Anne tells about Germans and football.

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While watching the semi-final of the European Cup in a pub surrounded by British fans, Anne barracks for Germany, not out of any nationalistic fervour ‘but only because it would be even more stupid not to be for Germany’ (269). She recalls a conversation during a final between Argentina and Germany when a German teacher friend declared that he was barracking for Argentina only to be told:€‘You have not understood the game€… The purpose of the football game is to be for your own team. Every Argentinian is for Argentina, and every Frenchman is for France, and every Columbian is for Columbia’ (269). This could arguably stand as an apt analogy for Duve’s engagement with Germanness. Obviously Duve does not want to be like the politically correct German who does not barrack for Germany, since that would be pointless; she has after all understood the game of writing German fiction, which is in the first instance for a German audience. Hence, in any cultural clash of national traditions, her novel always comes down on the side of German traditions, since that is still, even in a global age, the nature of the ‘game’ of national literatures. No t e s 1 ‘Die Diät und das Leben:€Karen Duves Roman “Dies ist kein Liebeslied”↜’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 October 2002, 35. 2 Florian Illies coined the name ‘Generation Golf’ after the Volkswagen ‘Golf’, which was introduced in 1974. This generation coincides roughly with Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. See Florian Illies, Generation Golf:€Eine Inspektion (Berlin:€Argon, 2000). 3 Duve’s public comments about feminism are rather ambivalent:€‘Feminism is not only very chic it also keeps you thin!’ Karen Duve, ‘Interview mit Susanne Messmer:€ “Es ist eine erbärmliche Sucht”’, Die Tageszeitung, 25 September 2002, 15. 4 See Ann Brooks, Postfeminism:€ Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London:€Routledge, 1997), 2. 5 Sarah Gamble, ed., The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (London:€Routledge, 1998), 37. 6 See Alyson M. Cole, ‘“There are no victims in this class”:€on female suffering and anti-“victim feminism”’, NWSA Journal, 11:1 (1999), 72–96, 75. 7 See Cole, ‘There are no victims’, 72. 8 Evelyn Finger, ‘Exzesse der Trostlosigkeit’, Die Zeit 47 (2002), 14. 9 Heike Bartel, ‘Von Jonny Rotten bis Werther:€ Karen Duves Dies ist kein Liebeslied zwischen Popliteratur und Bildungsroman’, in Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, eds., Pushing at Boundaries:€ Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2006), 90–106, 91.

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10 Duve, ‘Interview mit Susanne Messmer’, 15. 11 Karen Duve, Dies ist kein Liebeslied (Munich:€Goldmann, 2004), 7. All further page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. My translations. 12 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit:€ The New Woman’s Fiction (Abingdon and New York:€Routledge, 2006), 3. 13 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London:€Routledge, 1999), 45; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA:€University of California Press, 1990); Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson, Men and Masculinities:€A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA:€ABC-CLIO, 2004), 384. 14 Ferriss and Young, Chick Lit, 4. 15 Ferriss and Young, Chick Lit, 4–6. 16 This chapter explores the line of enquiry opened up and prematurely foreclosed by Peter Graves, who argued that ‘Duve’s novel fits the bill’ of chick lit, only to reject the comparison because of its problematic usage. Peter J.€Graves, ‘The Novels of Karen Duve:€ Just “chick lit […] grime” (and dragons)?’, in Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, eds., Pushing at Boundaries:€Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2006), 27–40, 28. 17 Fritz Gutbrodt, ‘The worth of Werther:€Goethe’s literary marketing’, Modern Language Notes, 110:3 (1995), 579–630, 579. 18 Bartel, ‘Von Jonny Rotten bis Werther’, 92. 19 Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish:€ Female Development and the British Bildungsroman 1750–1850 (London:€Associated University Presses, 1999), 141; Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics:€Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1989), 133. 20 Michael Minden, The German Bildungsroman:€ Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2; Susan Johnston, Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction (Westport, CT:€ Greenwood Press, 2001), 85; Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 137. 21 Margaret A. Rose, Parody:€ Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 173. 22 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:€A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York:€Oxford University Press, 1973), 14. 23 See Alison Lewis and Andrew Hurley, ‘Love, popular music and “technologies of gender” in Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This is Not a Love Song)’, New German Critique 115 (Winter 2012). 24 Susie Orbach, Bodies (London:€Profile Books, 2009), 3. 25 Orbach, Bodies, 3. 26 Bonnie Berry, Beauty Bias:€Discrimination and Social Power (Westport, CT and London:€Praeger Press, 2007), 9. 27 Berry, Beauty Bias, 21. 28 Berry, Beauty Bias, 125. 29 See Thomas J. Scheff, ‘Shame and conformity:€ The deference-emotion Â�system’, American Sociological Review, 53:3 (1988), 395–406, 398–9; Ullaliina

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Lehtinen, ‘How does one know what shame is:€Epistemology, emotions, and forms of life in juxtaposition’, Hypatia, 13:1 (1998), 56–77. 30 Jennifer C. Mannion, ‘Girls blush, sometimes:€Gender, moral agency, and the problem of shame’, Hypatia, 18:3 (2003), 21–41. 31 Cole, ‘There are no victims in this class’, 74. 32 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 138.

ch apter 12

Herta Müller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums) Lyn Marven

Herta Müller had already emigrated to (then West) Germany when the Ceauşescu regime came to a swift and shocking end in 1989, but her work has continued to draw material from her experiences in Romania. The densely poetic Herztier (literally ‘Heartbeast’, 1994, translated into English as The Land of Green Plums) encapsulates her thematic concern with that state, depicting both the ethnic German community in the rural Banat that features in her earliest works, and the repression within the dictatorship.1 It is one of three novels that Müller wrote and published during the 1990s which depict Romania under Ceauşescu; the others are Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then, 1992) and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; literally ‘I would rather not have encountered myself today’, translated into English as The Appointment). These texts represent increasingly directly the effects of fear and repression on individuals and relationships, reflecting these in literary and linguistic form as well as in the novels’ plots and themes. Herztier is probably Müller’s best-known work, both in Germany and internationally:€ in Michael Hofmann’s English translation, it won the 1998 International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Herztier focuses on a group of friends, minority ethnic Germans studying in an unnamed town in Romania€– identified as TimiŞoara by references in the text to Trajanplatz (Trajan Plaza)€ – who are brought together by their suspicions about the death of their fellow student Lola, who hangs herself after falling pregnant by a party member. The friends are targeted by the Securitate (Romanian secret police), interrogated and harassed; some are forced to emigrate and others die in suspicious circumstances. Interspersed within this main narrative level are scenes from the narrator’s lonely and fearful childhood in a rural community. Finally, after the narrator loses her job as a translator, she leaves for Germany only to discover that her best friend Tereza is spying on her for the Securitate. 180

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Müller has written of the novel, ‘I wanted to show what friendship looks like when you can’t take it for granted that you’ll still be alive tonight, tomorrow morning, next week.’2 This chapter begins by focusing on the figure of Tereza, who represents a friendship which causes as well as results from fear for the narrator. The effects of this friendship, based on a real-life relationship, resonate through previous and subsequent publications and epitomise the interaction of autobiography and fiction in Müller’s work. As one of the few Romanian-speaking characters in the German-language text, Tereza also underlines the function of Romanian as a translated language within the text, highlighted further by the translation of Herztier into Romanian. Linking all three aspects€ – Tereza and her betrayal of the narrator; the relation between Müller’s life and work; and the use of German to convey Romanian€ – is the notion of trauma, which is the structure underlying both individual texts and the trajectory of Müller’s oeuvre.3 Trauma is defined by critical theorist Cathy Caruth as ‘a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event … :€the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly’.4 Herztier portrays the effects of traumatic events such as torture and interrogation, death (suicide, murder or natural) and, finally, the threat of violence implicit in Tereza’s spying€ – all events that also happened to Müller, as she has documented repeatedly in her autobiographical essays. Similar to Müller’s other work, Herztier is written in disconcertingly poetic language, which is at the same time the dissociated language of trauma, that draws on (but crucially does not use) Romanian for poetic imagery and lyrics.5 As a figure, trauma characterises the structure of an experience, rather than the event itself. It is defined primarily by the fact that it cannot be integrated into a narrative memory; it exists only as gap and cannot be articulated. The experience of trauma is thus one of simultaneity, living in past and present at the same time, and continually re-experiencing the event. The term ‘überendlich’, transfinite€ – a term that the narrator of Herztier finds in a technical manual€– expresses the recurring, achronous and overwhelming nature of the traumatic event. The narrative structure of the novel further enacts trauma’s disruption of chronology:€the preface is simultaneously the postscript, so the traumatic events have both happened already and are foretold in advance; and the strand relating the narrator’s childhood is narrated in the present tense. The symptoms of trauma include dissociation, a lack of affect that denies the impact of the traumatic memory, and which tends towards the splitting of the individual. This too is represented within the text in

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the splitting of the narrator into ‘I’ and ‘a child’. The autobiographical elements of Müller’s work can further be understood as a form of splitting where Müller creates an alter ego within literature. Traumatic memories also come to possess the individual:€ the memories cannot be processed and return involuntarily in response to particular triggers. This can be seen in the associative structure of the narrative of Herztier, and also in the fact that subsequent publications€– both fictional and non-fictional€– have repeatedly rehearsed motifs and scenes from Herztier. The intrusive images of trauma are finally notable for being surprisingly literal. Yasemin Yildiz has recently argued that literal translation performs this on a textual level;6 in Müller’s work, the use of German in the place of Romanian both acts as dissociation and enables representation. Both in the treatment of recurring memories€– not least the friendship which is the model for Tereza€– and, in her move towards Romanian, Müller’s oeuvre as a whole demonstrates the belatedness of the traumatic narrative, moving towards direct articulation. Tereza Although the character of Tereza only enters the novel nearly halfway through, she is pivotal in the text. The narration of her death is emblematic of the novel’s non-linear chronology, and, more significantly, her betrayal of the narrator is the trauma which marks the narration:€Tereza agrees to relay details about the narrator’s life in Germany (including making a copy of her door key) to the Securitate in exchange for a travel visa to visit her abroad, putting the narrator’s life in jeopardy. As Beverley Driver Eddy suggests, ‘This double loss of her friend€– through betrayal, then cancer€– is the personal, traumatic memory that sparks the narrative … because Tereza’s betrayal is such an integral part of the narrator’s own survival story, this aspect of the trauma looms larger than the others, as a lasting presence that offers no answers and no closure.’7 The trauma resonates beyond the novel, too, as the real-life friendship on which this depiction is based is something Müller has returned to insistently in a number of essay publications. Herztier begins with a short, unsignalled preface, the displaced conclusion to the text, which contains an ominous list, ‘a belt, a window, a nut, and a rope’.8 These intrusive images are the traumatic response to the respective ambiguous deaths of Lola (by hanging), Georg (falls from a window), Tereza (the nut is cancer) and Kurt (another hanging). The text€– ‘a sack of words’ (1)€– demonstrates the belatedness of trauma, as

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the meanings of these shockingly direct images are initially incomprehensible and only reveal their impact as the text progresses. Tereza’s death from cancer is related before scenes in which she still features, although initially the image of the nut remains cryptic:€‘still invisible to the eye, the nut was already there, under Tereza’s arm. It took its time, it swelled and grew. The nut grew against us. Against all love’ (146). It is only later that the image is explained through a simile:€‘Tereza’s armpit was bare. In it I saw a lump the size of a nut’ (166). Interestingly, the same German term ‘Knoten’ (lump or knot) recurs in the essay collection Der König verneigt sich und tötet (The King Bows and Kills, 2003) when Müller describes saying goodbye to the friend on whom Tereza is based:€‘standing on the platform I refuse to use my handkerchief to wave goodbye, to use the handkerchief to cry. I don’t need to tie a knot in the handkerchief so I don’t forget€– I already have a lump in my throat. Two years after this premature departure she died of cancer.’9 Here the knot and lump evoke ambivalent feelings towards the friend’s departure and her loss; they appear to anticipate her death, while also providing an intertextual link to the earlier literary depiction. While Tereza’s death is acknowledged in advance, her betrayal is left to play out in the narrative as unexpectedly as it did in the narrated time:€the narrator refuses the knowledge even in retrospect, indicating its continuing traumatic effect. A suggestion of eventual betrayal is, however, written into their first meeting, where the other women in the factory sing a song which comes to be associated with Tereza, and which foreshadows betrayal in its content as well as its function in the text, ‘Wer liebt und verläßt’ (‘He who loves and leaves’ [108]; in the German it is gender neutral). The narrator invokes the song as a curse after she realises Tereza has betrayed her by agreeing to spy on her (153). And towards the very end of the text the narrator cites it as a sign of her mixed feelings on leaving Romania and Tereza (231). While this thus pre-dates in ‘real’ terms Tereza’s spying, which is however related earlier in the text, the song carries the association of the betrayal. Although the narrator resists the conscious recall of Tereza’s eventual betrayal, it is nonetheless signalled through the poetic patterning of the text. Tereza, one of the few Romanian speakers in the text along with Captain Pjele, is associated with the Securitate:€ she is linked to Pjele when the narrator asks, à propos of nothing, if her father has a dog (like Pjele); she is also linked to blood sucking (and thus to the unnamed dictator who is portrayed as employing vampiric methods to combat illness [61]) when she is described as having a ‘bloody’ (144) mouth from

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eating raspberries; and finally she sings a song which she learned from her German-speaking nanny, which another Securitate man also sings.10 Moreover, the narrator’s fear of ‘you and me’ appears to signal her suppressed knowledge. When Tereza tells the narrator a fanciful story of two people touched by good luck, the narrator refuses to apply this to herself:€‘Who were those two people? I asked. I didn’t want an answer. I was afraid Tereza might say:€You and me’ (115). In the German, the present tense signals the continuing effect of this fearful intimacy and interrupts the narrative. ‘You and me’ refers to a conversation between the narrator and Tereza after the narrator discovers her spying, where the narrator uses the same phrase in German, ‘du und ich’. Tereza suggests deceiving the Securitate:€‘I’ll make up something to tell Pjele, something of no use whatsoever. We can make it up together, you and I. You and I. Tereza had no sense that you and I were finished. That you and I couldn’t be spoken in one breath’ (148–9). This conversation is both chronologically later in the narrated time and also narrated later in the text; the phrase ‘du und ich’ thus points to the trauma of betrayal in its meaning as well as its disruptive effect on the narrative. The pair ‘you and I’ is treated grammatically as a singular item in the German text, and the doubling of female characters€– the ‘I’ of Herztier and Tereza, as well as earlier pairs Irene and Dana (Reisende auf einem Bein, 1989; Travelling on One Leg), and Adina and Clara (Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger)€– represents a form of traumatic splitting. A series of images linked to the narrator’s childhood suggest that the narrator views Tereza as part of herself. As a child, the narrator used to give her father two nuts to crack, imagining that each was a loved one’s head:€‘The child puts a nut in her father’s left hand and another in his right. She always imagines them as two heads … When Father opens his hands, the child looks to see whose head has survived and whose is in pieces’ (195). Related so late in the novel, the image of the nut already carries the connotations of Tereza’s cancer; and, as Eddy demonstrates, the narrator provides Tereza with ‘metaphorical nuts, or means of betrayal’ by giving her the smuggled literature to hide.11 The nut-cracking game suggests mutual damage and the narrator’s complicity with Tereza:€when Tereza dies, the narrator invokes the same image of the heads cracking together, ‘Tereza’s death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other’ (240). Here the narrator internalises Tereza, in an image which foregrounds traumatic splitting, and demonstrates further that trauma also lies in survival, that ‘it is not only the moment of the event but the passing out of it that is traumatic’.12

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L i f e a n d l i t e r at u r e Re-reading the text more than a decade after its first publication, what is striking about Herztier is that€– almost alone of Müller’s texts€– it brings together all the key themes in Müller’s work. Marking the midpoint of her oeuvre to date, the novel is a compendium of the literary settings and concerns that run through her publications before and since. Individual issues treated fictionally in the novel are still rehearsed in her most recent publications, particularly ones related to Müller’s own life; indeed, she appears to deal with memories first through fiction, and only later reveals biographical details in interviews and essays. The reiteration marks these as traumatic, recurring images, and one might view this trajectory as an illustration of the working of trauma into a narrative; as the narrator of Herztier comments, ‘And what might be said about me, I only knew by turns, sometimes after three tries. And even then it was still always wrong’ (104). Herztier epitomises the key settings and themes of Müller’s Â�oeuvre: the narrative of the child recalls the rural, child’s perspective tales in Niederungen (Nadirs, censored version published in Bucharest, 1982; altered version published in Germany in 1984), Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango, 1984) and Barfüßiger Februar (Barefoot February, 1987), and the milieu of her parents and grandparents, the repressive rural community in Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986; literally ‘Humans are a great big pheasant in the world’, translated as The Passport). The repression in the cities and factories under the Ceauşescu regime in the main narrative of Herztier is also depicted in Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, although Herztier is more wide-ranging in scope. Herztier ends with migration to (then West) Germany, which is the impetus for Travelling on One Leg (set after Irene’s arrival in Berlin from an unnamed eastern European country) and as exists as a possibility in Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger and in the future in Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt. While Müller’s 2009 novel Atemschaukel (literally ‘Breathswing’, to be translated into English as Everything I Possess I Carry With Me) appears distinct in its setting (although notably similar in its poetic language), a significant link with Herztier is Oskar Pastior, on whose experiences Atemschaukel is based and whose translation of Gellu Naum’s poem provides the epigraph for Herztier. Themes from Herztier appear in collage publications, which have formed a growing part of Müller’s work since the 1990s:€texts allude to

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the secret police, betrayal by friends, suspicious suicides and murder; one collage reads ‘Sometimes they died an early end out the window or by the rope’.13 Individual images also recall motifs from the novel, such as toothbrushes,14 which are a sign of always being prepared for arrest€– ‘Ever since the searches, Edgar, Kurt, and Georg carried toothbrushes and hand towels in their jacket pockets. They were expecting to be arrested’ (66)€– or belt buckles:€Lola hangs herself with the narrator’s belt and a belt buckle appears in the traumatic childhood nail-cutting scene. Like many of Müller’s texts, Herztier draws on numerous details from the author’s past€– Müller’s preferred term for this incorporation of biography into literature is ‘autofiction’15€ – as the author herself recounts in (subsequent) essay publications. Herztier is particularly close to Müller’s experiences:€in addition to the betrayal by her best friend, like Müller, the narrator’s difficult father had been involved in the SS during the Second World War; the group of friends is based on the Romanian-German poets and writers Richard Wagner, Rolf Bossert and Roland Kirsch; Lola’s story resembles Müller’s report in Hunger und Seide (Hunger and Silk, 1995) about a student who hangs herself after attempting an abortion and is excommunicated by the party; and the narrator’s mother is forced to emigrate with her, as Müller explains happened to her in Cristina und ihre Attrappe (Cristina and her Decoy, 2009). Müller writes about Herztier in Der König verneigt sich und tötet. These essays comment on the text and directly or indirectly reference the friends and family on whom the characters are based:€the chess-playing grandÂ� father who carved chess pieces by hand and his hairdresser; her father’s service in the SS; friends and poets Roland Kirsch and Rolf Bossert. Many of these details are related in language strikingly similar to the novel, such as the phrase on the back of the card which arrives after Kirsch’s death:€‘Sometimes I have to bite my own finger to feel that I still exist’,16 which not only evokes the dissidents’ fragile sense of self and the alienated relationship they have with their own bodies as a result of their treatment, but also recurring textual motifs of fingers and vampirism. In a long account of the friend who betrayed her to the Securitate, she is acknowledged as an impetus for the novel:€ ‘I had to find the “heartbeast” and the “king” for this woman too. For both terms are doubleedged, they haunt the undergrowth of love and betrayal.’ The strikingly ambivalent description and the fact that the friend remains unnamed suggests the unresolved impact of this betrayal:€as Müller writes, ‘The loss of this friendship cuts a swathe through my life to this day.’17 This is by no means the first time Müller has written about this friendship. Eddy notes

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that Müller ‘told the authentic story of her friend’s betrayal … sometime after the publication of Herztier’ in an interview with a Danish newsÂ� paper.18 The repeated re-enactment of this relationship initially in literary texts and only belatedly in factual pieces (significantly, initially not in German) indicates its continuing traumatic effect. Müller details it again in Cristina, in direct rather than poetic language. In Herztier the mixture of affection and horror that the narrator feels for her duplicitous best friend is symbolised by the nut; in Cristina, Müller unpicks this metaphor to describe instead the ‘tangle of love and betrayal’.19 The chapter begins, ‘My file at least answered one painful question’20:€ such was the lasting effect of this betrayal that Müller had a lingering suspicion that the friendship might even have been set up from the start by the Securitate. This is intimated in Herztier by Edgar: ‘I think Tereza’s known Pjele as long as she’s known you. If not longer’ (152). However Securitate files indicated that she was only asked to spy on Müller after she had emigrated to Germany:€‘That my file proves that the feelings between us were real, almost makes me happy now.’21 It is all the more significant that the friend is finally named as Jenny (transcribed as JENI by the Securitate, the discrepant spelling indicating that the woman was initially unknown to them). A simple equation of life and literary work is not possible:€ not least, anecdotes related in the essays do not correspond in all details with depictions in the novel. As Müller says, her work has ‘her own experience as background, but reworked substantially as literature, and in that way it becomes fiction’.22 It is also difficult to categorise the relationship between the essays and novel as one of mere elucidation. Rather it is more akin to intertextuality:€the essays rewrite aspects of the literary texts in a different mode but without exorcising their effect, just as the story of Dana–Clara–Tereza–Jenny recurs each time in a different form. Indeed, the inadequacy of the factual account in Cristina in capturing the emotional impact of the betrayal is clear in the flat, distanced description; the heightened, literary version in Herztier is in that sense closer to the reality. As Müller herself states, ‘the literary text does not run alongside the verifiability of historical reality. It is the text alone that makes the whole thing imaginable, through sensory details.’23 T h e rol e of Rom a n i a n The Romanian language links Müller’s experiences and the issue of trauma within Herztier. In Hunger und Seide, she states, ‘In Romania every threat

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spoken was in Romanian’;24 the Securitate files reproduced in Cristina and Müller’s Nobel Prize speech reiterate that the language of interrogations and the state apparatus was Romanian. In this context, Müller’s use of her own mother tongue German to report interrogations in Herztier (as well as in Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet) can be seen as a screening device, allowing representation of the traumatic experiences by translating them:€German is both a distancing device and necessary for articulation. Herztier is explicitly concerned€ – uniquely among Müller’s works€ – with the multilingual environment in which the ethnic German friends find themselves.25 The novel is appended with a glossary of Hungarian and Swabian terms.26 However, Romanian is largely absent from the text:€ interrogations with Captain Pjele and conversations with Tereza, both Romanian speakers, are related in German; Securitate officers who visit Edgar’s parents have to rely on the latter to translate German into Romanian. The many folk songs in the text are identified as Romanian but quoted in German, and the epigraph is a German translation of a Romanian-language poem. Conversely, the translation of the text into Romanian highlights the importance of this mediating and distancing function of the German language, and the re-translation is not entirely congruent with the purported Romanian of Herztier. In the novel, the friends are brought together by their shared love of German literature; the narrator comments, ‘The books in the summerhouse had been smuggled into the country. They were written in … our mother tongue, the one in which the wind lay down’ (47). This poetic image is implicitly comparative with Romanian, as Müller explains in a later essay:€the normal collocation in German is The wind LAY DOWN€– that’s flat and horizontal. In Romanian on the other hand you say:€the wind stood still, vîntul a stat. That’s steep and vertical. The wind is just one example of the constant shifting that happens to one and the same fact between languages. Almost every sentence has another perspective. Romanian looks at the world as differently as its words are different.27

This Romanian-inflected perspective is also present in the text when the narrator comments of Pjele, ‘His … language calls the roof of the mouth the mouth-heaven’ (187). The strange term mouth-heaven (Mundhimmel in the German) is a literal translation from Romanian, as the same essay explains:€ ‘In Romanian the palate is called the mouth-heaven, cerul gurii’.28 Romanian thus intrudes into the language of Herztier, albeit rendered through German. Indeed, the title Herztier derives from a

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Romanian-language wordplay€– Müller invented the term inimal, from inima (heart) and animal. Literal translation of Romanian is a poetic device€ – the evocative terms mouth-heaven and heartbeast resemble the metaphorical condensations that Müller effects through the narrative such as the tin sheep and wooden melons (the invented compounds ‘Blechschafe’ and ‘Holzmelonen’ in German).29 However, as Yildiz argues in relation to Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work, literal translation can also function as a linguistic screening of trauma. Yildiz argues that Özdamar’s use of German to convey Turkish ‘plays a crucial role in the affective negotiation of traumatic recall. It specifically participates in the working through of the memory of political violence and its traumatic effect on language.’ As Yildiz contests, literal translation enacts the link between trauma and survival, between acting out and working through, in the most condensed form. Literal translation is in fact the means of working through. Because trauma is constituted by literal return, that is, by a pure form of repetition, the ability to work through relies on distorting that literality€– that is, on repetition with a difference.

This does not preclude the poetic effects of the text however:€‘In the process of translation, what is recalled is both preserved and altered, not just in its meaning but also in its affective quality.’30 Müller’s work at once is linguistically inventive literature and conveys trauma; the split between the mode of the content and the language employed to an extent even reiterates traumatic dissociation. The narrator herself works as a translator from German into Romanian (of industrial machinery manuals), but her attempts at translation for Tereza are unsuccessful€– ‘each time she asked me whether I’d managed to find out the Romanian name for the bird in Georg’s directions. But I could only give Tereza a literal translation [of the German]:€ butcher bird. She couldn’t find that name in any … dictionary’ (166–7). The text refuses the Romanian, just as the narrator, despite her facility with Romanian, can only translate the bird’s name literally (and poetically). In Der König verneigt sich und tötet, Müller notes that German-language conversations recorded by bugging devices were rendered in Romanian for the files and interrogations:€‘What disturbed me inside was that, in being translated badly into Romanian, our stories didn’t become any less politically dangerous but they were mutilated as literature. It was like all the poetry had been blown away. During the interrogation, as everything came back to you slowly during hours of going over it, you get the desire

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to correct the poetic loss.’31 One might thus see the strikingly poetic language of Herztier as an attempt to recoup the poetic through translation back into German. Romanian-speaking Tereza is particularly linked with the song ‘Wer liebt und verläßt’. Although in the novel it is rendered in German, it is a Romanian refrain:€Müller comments, ‘I had to draw on one of the lovely Romanian folk songs to help bring the chapter with my friend to an end in the book:€Wer liebt und verläßt … You didn’t need to say any more than that. The song is very well known in Romania, it suggested itself to me.’32 Interestingly, Müller still quotes the song in German here even while explaining it is a real, Romanian song€– maintaining distance from the Romanian lyrics as well as retaining the specific wording from the novel; a 2010 essay similarly cites the song in its German translation, while noting that it was part of the repertoire of the renowned Romanian singer Maria Tanase.33 The touchstone for the ambiguous presence of Romanian within the German text is the recurring motif of the Gellu Naum poem. The novel’s epigraph is a poem by Romanian surrealist writer Naum, translated by author Oskar Pastior, which also appears repeatedly within the narrative as a German-language citation. The cited verse is an extract from a longer poem originally entitled ‘Lacrima’ (tear or teardrop) in Romanian, dating from 1941, which suggests the impossibility of friendship in difficult circumstances:€the ‘wisp of cloud’ intimates the transience of relationships, as well as the suspicion attached to friendships which might actually be controlled by the Securitate.34 As an artefact, the poem affects the friends in the narrative:€the first interrogations are because of the poem (79); Kurt is forced to eat it on paper (79) and the narrator to sing it and transcribe pornographic rewritings (95). The verse features three times, and once more as parodied by Pjele in the narrator’s interrogation, and is set apart visually (like the other songs). Individual lines from the poem are also worked into the€text, finally as an imbedded quotation towards the very end:€‘Maybe the puddle where his head rested reflected the sky. Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud … nevertheless Edgar and I followed Georg’ (228–9). This partial quotation evokes the interpretation of the poem by Pjele€– that the poem exhorts people to flee the country; it no longer functions to bring the friends together. The epigraph names Naum as the author, though it is the German translation which is printed; the facing pages (part of the para-text along with copyright details, and outside the main text) name the translator Pastior.

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Throughout the text, the poem exists simultaneously in Romanian and German:€given Pjele’s interest in the poem and his parodic re-writing, it would appear that, in the posited reality of the text’s action, it exists in Romanian€– the narrator and her friends even call it a ‘folk song’ (80, 95), like the many other Romanian songs in the text. Thus, intriguingly, the dissident German friends are brought together by a Romanian poem.35 Quoted in a German translation which appears to post-date the setting of the text, the poem is moreover an example of the fictionality of the text and its literary agency. It is an impossible cipher for the experiences and their translation into literature and from Romanian into German. Herztier has been translated into Romanian, but this does not simply revert the text to an ‘original’ Romanian form:€ indeed, the translation renders the German compound noun Herztier as a genitive construction, Animalul inimii (literally ‘animal of the heart’). This normalises the German invention, and does not reproduce Müller’s quasi-Â�translated wordplay, allowing a certain alienation of Romanian through the German. Where Özdamar translates out of her mother tongue, Turkish, to express alienation, Yildiz comments that ‘an actual re-translation into Turkish erases the poetic and critical edge of the text’.36 By contrast, rendering Herztier in Romanian does not lay bare the ‘reality’ of the text’s action, but rather adds another layer of linguistic distance. The Romanian translation reveals quite how much of the German conveys Romanian:€for example, the name of the Securitate officer is changed to Piele (from Pjele) in Romanian, suggesting that this was Germanised in the original text. Even where the Romanian text includes songs stated to be Romanian in the German, the German textual explanation is still included, thus ‘Someone sang a Romanian song’ (27) becomes ‘Cineva cânta un cântec popular românesc’.37 The Romanian version is estranged further, rather than familiarised, through this overdetermined insistence on the Romanian song (unnecessary given that the song is also quoted, and both song and text are in Romanian) and the further repetition of cânta and cântec (also in the English sang and song, but not in the German ‘Jemand sang ein rumänisches Lied’). Similarly, while the epigraph is Naum’s poem, with no indication (understandably) that Pastior’s version is interpolated in German text,38 orthographical differences€– the result of linguistic reforms€ – make the version in Animalul inimii nonidentical to the original poem and draw attention to its updated context. In other ways the Romanian translation makes the text more naturalistic: it renders (almost all of) the rhymes in the language they would be in the posited reality of the text. Strikingly, however, one term is not

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translated:€überendlich appears in the original German in the Romanian translation of the text. Italicised, with explanatory footnote, it remains unassimilable, marking the trauma of the text even in translation. C onc l us ion The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 brought global attention to Müller’s work; articles and reviews in English-language newspapers reporting on the prize focused especially on Herztier, in its translated version The Land of Green Plums, her hitherto most internationally acclaimed text. Even before the Nobel announcement, the text continued to circulate in new versions, including translations into around a dozen languages and an adaptation for the theatre, all of which add to the resonance of the original.39 New editions were issued by Fischer and Hanser in 2007 which contest the novel’s literary interpretation. The Hanser hardback closely follows Granta’s cover of The Land of Green Plums, which has a woman’s face behind shadows resembling bars€ – both thereby present the novel as a personal, quasi-autobiographical account; while Fischer’s paperback shows a stylised bowl of plums, alluding to the metaphorical language of the text as well as the English-language title. As the Nobel committee recognised, it is precisely this combination of realism and poetry that marks out Müller’s work. The enduring impact of Herztier lies in the disjunctions it enacts throughout and between the novel’s content and language, confronting fear and friendship, autobiography and literary symbolism, politics and poetry. No t e s 1 Herta Müller, Herztier (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1994). 2 Herta Müller, Der König verneigt sich und tötet (Munich:€Hanser, 2003), 52. 3 On trauma in Müller’s oeuvre, see my Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German:€Herta Müller, Libuše Moníková, Kerstin Hensel (Oxford University Press, 2005). On Herztier, see Beverley Driver Eddy, ‘Testimony and trauma in Herta Müller’s Herztier’, German Life and Letters, 53:1 (2000), 56–72; also Brigid Haines, ‘“The unforgettable forgotten”:€ The traces of trauma in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein’, German Life and Letters, 55:3 (2002), 266–81. 4 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma:€Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3–12, 4. 5 See also Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt:€ Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany (Berlin:€ de Gruyter, 2003), especially the chapter ‘Literary production and trauma therapy’, 30–7.

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6 Yasemin Yildiz, ‘Political trauma and literal translation:€ Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 7 (2008), 248–70. 7 Eddy, ‘Testimony and trauma in Herta Müller’s Herztier’, 65. 8 Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 1998), 1. Hereafter page numbers appear in parentheses after quotations. 9 Müller, Der König, 79–80. 10 Intriguingly, Tereza is also linked with Lola (who hangs herself using the narrator’s belt); both are described as marked by their origins, ‘in her cheekbones, or around her mouth, or smack in the middle of her eyes’ (2, compare 107); and when the narrator meets Tereza she comments that Tereza’s dress has no belt. 11 Eddy, ‘Testimony and trauma in Herta Müller’s Herztier’, 68. 12 Caruth, Trauma, 9. 13 Herta Müller, Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm:€ vom Weggehen und Ausscheren (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1993), collage 30. 14 See Herta Müller, Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (Reinbek:€ Rowohlt, 2000), collage text beginning ‘verrückte Blaumeise’. 15 ‘Autofiktion’ is Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s term, which Müller uses in In der Falle (Göttingen:€Wallstein, 1996). 16 Müller, Der König, 60. 17 Both Müller, Der König, 80. 18 See Eddy, ‘Testimony and trauma in Herta Müller’s Herztier’, 65. 19 Herta Müller, Cristina und ihre Attrappe:€ Oder was nicht in den Akten der Securitate steht (Göttingen:€ Wallstein, 2009), 30; an English version, ‘Securitate in all but name’, trans. Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen, appears on sign and sight, www.signandsight.com/features/1910. html (accessed 3 March 2011). 20 Müller, Cristina, 30. 21 Müller, Cristina, 31. 22 ‘In interview with Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler’, in Brigid Haines, ed., Herta Müller (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 1998), 14. 23 Müller, In der Falle, 5. 24 Herta Müller, Hunger und Seide (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1995), 37. 25 See also Valentina Glajar, ‘Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and German: Conflicting identities in Herta Muller’s Herztier’, Monatshefte, 89:4 (1997), 521–40. 26 A separate glossary is not included in the Romanian or English translations. 27 Müller, König, 24–5. 28 Müller, König, 31. 29 See Ricarda Schmidt, ‘Metapher, Metonymie und Moral:€ Herta Müllers Herztier’, in Brigid Haines, ed., Herta Müller (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 1998), 57–74. 30 Yildiz, ‘Political trauma’, 250, 261, 262. 31 Müller, König, 31.

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32 Müller, König, 80–1. In the Romanian translation the song is cited as ‘Cine iubeşte şi lasă’, a popular love song. 33 Herta Müller, ‘Denk nicht dorthin, wo du nicht sollst’, Der Tagesspiegel, 22€ July€ 2010, www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/denk-nicht-dorthin-wo-du-Â�nichtsollst/1888610.html (accessed 3 March 2011). 34 See ‘Die Träne’ (‘Lacrima’), in Gellu Naum, Pohesie:€ Sämtliche Gedichte, trans. Oskar Pastior, Ernest Wichner (Basel:€Urs Engeler, 2006), 235. 35 And by Lola’s notebook:€it remains unclear which language this is written in (it is conveyed solely through the narrator’s citations), although as Lola comes from the south of Romania, she is unlikely to be a German speaker. 36 Yildiz, ‘Political trauma’, 258. 37 Herta Müller, Animalul inimii, trans. Nora Iuga (Bucharest:€Polirom, 2006), 31. 38 Similarly the English translation does not mention Pastior’s translation, though one might assume that it was translated from the German not the Romanian. 39 The production premiered at the Maxim Gorki theatre, Berlin, in April 2009, and continued in the repertoire into 2010; it also played in the Wiener Schauspielhaus in January 2010.

c h a p t e r 13

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Mary Cosgrove

It would be odd to publish a collection of essays on the novel in German since 1990 and omit internationally acclaimed writer W.G. Sebald. A German writer working as an academic in the UK since the late 1960s, his literary and essayistic output, which coincides with the recent boom in memory studies in the humanities, has been a source of intellectual fascination since the early 1990s.1 And yet the generic term ‘novel’ does not accurately describe any of Sebald’s works. Indeed, in the case of Austerlitz, the subject of this chapter and the last work to be published before his untimely death in 2001, Sebald clearly rejected the term ‘novel’, describing the narrative instead as a ‘prose-book of uncertain form’.2 Where his earlier works had been more clearly autobiographical€– although they too were ‘uncertain’ in the sense that they transgressed generic boundaries between document, fiction, memoir, travelogue€ – Austerlitz, because it both widened the gap between author and narrator and focused on the life story of a single protagonist, was nonetheless viewed as the most novelistic piece of writing Sebald had produced.3 Sebald’s rejection of the term ‘novel’ is worthy of closer examination because it reveals much about the genesis of Austerlitz against the backdrop of debates on the status of literature after the Holocaust. Now considered to be a canonical work of Holocaust fiction, Austerlitz is principally the story of an ageing male protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, who late in life begins to discover his traumatic past.4 The son of a Czech-Jewish Â�couple who sent him to England through the Kindertransport, an organised rescue operation to save Jewish children at the start of the Second World War, he has no personal recollection€– until a breakdown in the early 1990s€– of this event, of his real parents and early years in Prague. Apart from a vague but persistent sense of being haunted, this memory deficit means that he lacks an instinctive emotional connection to his past. Rather he is dogged by a sense of being in a false life and has thus always been a loner, melancholic and prone to depression-related illnesses. 195

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The second half of the narrative tells of how Austerlitz paradoxically tries to establish an intuitive feeling for his past on the basis of mediated images, stories and documents. His efforts are only partially successful:€ he finds his old nursemaid Vĕra in his former home in Prague and, through her, discovers his mother’s fate in the nearby concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Based as his search is on external memory props such as photographs, archives, films, books, museums and hearsay, his desire for an emotional connection, via retrieved memory, to his childhood past and his parents is problematised from the outset. External triggers, even in Prague, do not illuminate the unknown depths of his innermost self:€if anything, Austerlitz, when confronted with fragments from his previous life, ultimately comes up against his impenetrability as a human subject and against the impenetrability of others. In particular his failure to conceive a spontaneous memory of his mother embodies the terrifying epistemological challenge presented by his lost past. Indeed, Austerlitz’s situation as a person whose existence has been profoundly shaped by events he cannot remember or did not experience forms the second related major focus, alongside the Holocaust, of the book:€(post) memory and the matter of how, many decades after the end of the Second World War, individual and collective knowledge and understanding of the past is increasingly dependent on mediated and transmitted forms of knowledge, oral, visual and written.5 Austerlitz is the meeting point for these two articulations of memory and identity:€interior and individual on one hand, and exterior and collective on the other. The problem is that his individual memories barely exist, and so his very humanity is cast into doubt by his increasing dependence on external sources. Jonathan Long puts it succinctly when he describes Austerlitz as a psychodrama of the archive, an assessment which implicitly questions the main protagonist’s identity as a human.6 Viewed in this ambiguous light, Austerlitz is not just, with reference to the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a heroic melancholy bricoleur who assembles from scattered archival remnants a sense of his past; his very person is also a form of bricolage, incomplete, lacking and partly inorganic, supplemented by prosthetic borrowings from different cultural sources.7 The narrative seems to suggest through Austerlitz that reliance on mediated images of the past not only signals a growing distance from this past, it is equally the symptom of a culture of abstraction which is becoming more and more alienated from visceral, affective experience. The themes of mediation and media in the book thus function as indicators of disconnection and discontinuity, even as they act as (imperfect)

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transmitters of the past. As a counterpoint to this clear interest in artifice, media and construct, however, there is an undeniable groundswell of high emotion which informs the entire narrative, a phenomenon that this chapter explores in the context of fictional writing about the Holocaust. ‘F e e l i ng’ t h e Hol o c aus t Although some scholars have suggested that reading Austerlitz as a Holocaust narrative only is reductive and narrow, the main tendencies of reception suggest that this is predominantly how it has been regarded.8 Highlighting Sebald’s sophisticated meta-discourse on the lacunae apparent in forms of cultural mediation and memory discourses, one strand celebrates Austerlitz as a successful specimen of Holocaust fiction.9 The other views the book as less successful in this regard:€the general ‘lost and found’ structure of the narrative suggests a form of nostalgic foreclosure which runs counter to the demands of the Holocaust genre which, thus the implication, is premised not on ‘telling all’ but on evoking the gaps where the unsaid silently broods.10 A further point of criticism has been the relationship between the Jewish victim protagonist and the German first-person narrator figure. A loyal and dedicated listener, the narrator’s sympathetic yet marginal presence provides the confessional narrative framework which facilitates the telling, documentation and transmission of Austerlitz’s troubled history. This strand of criticism considers victim and perpetrator identities to be problematically blurred by the narrative strategy, despite Sebald’s efforts, by exploiting the possibilities of free indirect speech, to avoid usurpation by the descendant of the perpetrator collective of the Jewish victim’s voice.11 Recent studies on writing after the Holocaust observe that the genre of Holocaust fiction continually evolves in tandem with debates and discussions which take place beyond the literary text.12 From this perspective, Holocaust fiction is not just a way of writing but a way of reading too. Defining genre as a horizon of understanding where interpretation, text and readership come together, Robert Eaglestone shows how writers of Holocaust fiction continually engage with earlier texts on the topic and also with contemporary discussions on the ethics of memory.13 The formal features of Austerlitz, and also of the earlier texts, certainly signal Sebald’s awareness of this context. These traits include lack of a fixed genre, high levels of intertextuality, self-conscious preoccupation with anterior sources, mixing of fiction and document, obsession with the world and its past, unusual use of time, problematisation of the relation between author

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and narrator, and prioritisation of memory and identity.14 Along with the relatively divided reception of Austerlitz, these characteristics€– especially the author–narrator link and the related issues of identity and identification processes€– indicate on the part of writer and readers an awareness of a greater generic context of Holocaust writing which imposes constraints on configurations of empathy and identification, and on representation more generally. As several of his academic publications illustrate, Sebald was very aware of the risks of representing the victim perspective, and€– referring to, in his view, failed samples of Holocaust fiction€– spoke distastefully of the problem of ‘usurpation’ more than once.15 His rejection of the conventional form of the novel as a suitable vehicle for Holocaust literature and his insistence on a documentary approach to fiction follow pre-established trends and express malaise concerning the very matter of identification.16 In the second part of this chapter, however, I argue that despite his wariness of ‘usurpation’€– the danger of a clumsy and potentially apologetic appropriation by the ‘good German’ narrator of the victim other’s voice€– Sebald does not at all suppress the theme of identification. While he is sensitive to its compromised position in the context of relations between victims and others, he nevertheless incorporates identification as a key component into a wider reflection on what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. Identification is notoriously difficult to define. Eaglestone describes it as ‘the grasping, or comprehending, of another’s experience as one’s own by “putting one’s self in their place”’, signalling the moment of appropriation which seems to be necessary in order to feel or empathetically imagine another’s experience.17 For all of the potential ethical hazards in the moment of ‘grasping’ or ‘usurpation’, however, identification is also ‘a potent and … sincere force’ and arguably one of the most fundamental of reader experiences.18 Yet in the decades after 1945 it became contested in reflections on the form and tenor which post-Holocaust writing should assume. Identification and its main vehicle, the novel, were considered by survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi in writing on the Holocaust to be illicit, even blasphemous.19 These founders of Holocaust writing problematised text production by insisting on authenticity and uniqueness:€only those who had experienced the camps had the authority to write about the Holocaust. Testimony thus became the epitome of ‘authentic’ Holocaust writing. This requirement for authenticity further problematised text-reception by asserting an irrevocable existential gulf between Holocaust victim-survivors and others.20 In this new context

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of text production and reception, the figuring of identification both as impossible and undesirable presented not only an epistemological concern but, more critically perhaps, an ethical quandary. It was not just that identification could not happen in any meaningful way after the violation of the humanist tradition represented in the Holocaust; it was more crucially the case that identification should not happen, as if all identification with suffering in the Holocaust by those who were not there was somehow disingenuous. More recent debates about the explosion of a culture of ‘victimology’ in the Western world and the dangers of vicarious transference continue this discourse of suspicion on the matter of identification, although, as Carolyn J. Dean notes, reservations about humankind’s ability to feel in an appropriate manner for less fortunate others have also characterised earlier epochs.21 Recent efforts in theory to distinguish between Â�empathy and identification, which ascribe to the former powers of reason intrinsically absent from the latter, seem arbitrary and possible only in the abstract.22 This opposition of terms does not quite convince:€ empathy, identification and also sympathy all describe forms of feeling for the other and are difficult to distinguish.23 On the other hand, theories that do not sufficiently acknowledge the temptations of identification are also problematic.24 It is clear, however, that musings on the advantages and disadvantages of identification point to a culture of affective constraint, a kind of post-Holocaust dietetics of emotional life which, premised on the ethically inflected rationalisation of affect after the Holocaust, becomes particularly contested in cultural representations. Against this backdrop, Sebald’s use of the term ‘usurpation’ is pregnant with wary meaning and, interestingly, appears in both the interviews cited above in close conjunction with the term ‘novel’.25 While this is not the place to explore theories of the novel, it seems that what he means by the term is sentimental fictional writing based on identification and a naïve trust in mimesis. The many forms of the novel simply are not acknowledged, although developments such as the French nouveau roman of the 1960s have clearly exerted influence on Sebald’s literary style. His fear of descent into naïve melodrama in Austerlitz€– a representative form which derives much of its force from identification€– further articulates the same concern for the mistrust or ‘fragility’ of empathy which characterises the discussion of emotion in the context of Holocaust writing.26 One could argue that Sebald’s association of the novel with poor, Â�identification-driven writing makes real sense only in the context of the discussion about Holocaust writing; indeed, it echoes Wiesel’s authoritative words decades

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earlier.27 Sebald’s insistence in the same interviews on fact-based research as a basis for writing rearticulates the importance of fact as against fiction, a further topic of debate in writing about the Holocaust.28 His thoughts on the matter express the paradox of writing about the Holocaust, especially for those who were not victims:€the desire to meet the ethical standards of testimony while producing a fictional text. Despite this ongoing debate on the merits and drawbacks of identification, however, different controversies have revealed the extent to which identification continues to be a major force in how the, by now, largely ‘post-memorial’ Western world imagines the Holocaust:€ identification is that which bridges the gap between past and present, self and other, representation and the sense of something approaching ‘life’.29 Despite Sebald’s concerns about transgressing, via excessive emotion, the ethical boundary between narrating self and victim other, Austerlitz does not suppress the matter of identification. Instead, the narrative€– which is constructed around analogy, mimesis, resonance and coincidence€– explores the will to identification as a potent and sincere force, juxtaposing this fundamental image of similarity against the ruptures and discontinuities of feeling associated with transmission and mediation.30 By alerting us repeatedly to the goodwill and sincerity of persons who feel for others, Sebald questions the rationalisation of affect which characterises current debates on the risks of identification after the Holocaust. A central motif in this endeavour in Austerlitz is the ubiquitous image of the heart. My analysis of this symbol which challenges the work’s representation of the human subject as an ultimately impenetrable entity, considers Sebald’s engagement with identification, feeling and affect as part of his exploration of what it means to be human after the Holocaust. M at t e r s of t h e h e a r t An established motif in Sebald’s earlier works, the heart is a central image throughout Austerlitz. Despite his radical self-alienation, Austerlitz, for example, is singularly in tune with the raw and nervous pulsations of his own heart and the hearts of others. His characterisation as a kind of inorganic ‘archival man’ provides a foil against which the heart, life force and focal point of the body’s interior, is configured as a symbol of individual integrity and authenticity. Overall, the many invocations of the heart restore to Austerlitz’s ephemeral figure a sense of embodied, palpitating humanity, even if excessive feeling is often connoted as a destabilising experience.

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In the early stages of Austerlitz’s memory crisis, the beleaguered heart symbolises his terrible anxiety, confusion and panic at the strong feelings of revulsion he experiences with regard to writing and intellectual pursuits which, until this point in the early 1990s, had always been such sources of comfort:€‘overcome by a sense of anxiety … my heart felt constricted in my chest to a quarter of its size’ (176). At Liverpool Street Station, the momentous scene of the emergence of his long-repressed memories of his arrival in London as a refugee child is anticipated by ‘that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time’ (182). After visiting Theresienstadt in search of traces of his mother’s past, he feels another constriction in his heart (282). During the same sojourn in Prague, Vĕra explains to him why, when on holiday in Marienbad in the 1970s, he had felt that ‘something or other unknown wrenched at my heart’ (300); Marienbad, it transpires, was the destination for a family holiday during the Czech childhood which preceded childhood in bewildering exile. Austerlitz’s most recent breakdown, which occurs after he returns to London from his first visit to Prague and precedes his second admission to a mental asylum, is also described through the image of his heart contracting and fluttering in his throat (323). His first institutionalisation occurred two decades earlier in the 1970s when he lived in Paris; this breakdown too is represented as a crisis of the heart, a strong physical reaction to the contents of the museum of veterinary medicine which he stumbled across one day. Having viewed dissected and pickled body parts of animals and men, he begins to feel unwell on the metro, experiencing a phantom pain spreading through his heart, and thinks that he will ‘die of the weak heart I have inherited, from whom I do not know’ (376). In these examples, the heart is the privileged transmitter of the past, an organic image of mediation antithetical to the image of the archive, the photograph and the written word. Of course, the heart is a symbol with its own rich and varied media history, and in this semiotic sense it is a sign just like the document or photo. However, it has an undeniable status as the time-honoured symbol of natural human feeling, truth and authenticity.31 These associations make it an interesting aesthetic choice in a work which is so preoccupied with alienation from truth and authenticity. For even if Austerlitz is not in full possession of the facts and memories of his past, his heart is nonetheless replete with instinctive, impassioned knowing and thus constricts, aches or wrenches inside him in perfect harmony with the momentousness of key moments of discovery and revelation in his life. While this is terrifying, it is a fate preferable to that endured by

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his foster parents. He comments that his foster father, the dour Welsh pastor Elias, rarely allowed him ‘a glimpse into his clerical heart’ (72); later he remarks that Elias and his wife, for whatever mysterious reason, have always been characterised by ‘the petrification of their emotions’ (194), as if they ‘were slowly being killed by the chill in their hearts’ (86). Lack of feeling is configured here as a negative and deadly trait, an alienation from a key emotional vitality which ultimately reaffirms the human subject in life. Reinforcing this language of the heart is the melodramatic manner in which feelings in general are experienced and described in the novel. Contrary to reason-based conceptions of dealing with the Nazi past, such as are enshrined in the ideas of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past) and ‘working through’ trauma, the individual human subject in Austerlitz is rarely the master of his emotions.32 He does not overcome his feelings and his past; rather, feelings and the past always overcome him. When confronted by the Parisian train stations€ – mute signs of the repressed childhood journey into exile all those years ago€– Austerlitz is immediately ‘in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion’ (45). Upon his miraculous chance encounter with Austerlitz, after nearly three decades of silence, the narrator is ‘overcome’ by amazement (54). Likewise, when Austerlitz first learns his real name at school and tells his history teacher Hilary of it, he says that he had some difficulty in not losing command over himself. Hilary’s reaction is equally emotional:€unable to calm down, the latter strikes his forehead repeatedly, also in amazement (103–4). Just at the start of Austerlitz’s breakdown in the early 1990s, feelings of aversion and distaste overcome him at the thought of intellectual work and, unable to formulate sentences, he falls into ‘a state of the greatest confusion’ (174). In Prague, he struggles to compose himself at every twist and turn, experiencing a ‘rending’ (193) within himself, ‘as if something were shattering inside my brain’ (228). The rapidly returning memories reveal themselves to him through his reawakened senses, which so long numbed are now coming back to life (212–13). Vĕra is also deeply moved by his sudden appearance, after many decades of absence, on the threshold of the family home in Prague:€in a ‘gesture of alarm’ she covers her face with both hands (215). Later, she recounts how Austerlitz’s mother was torn apart by her decision to send her small son away on a Kindertransport; like Hilary, she is remembered in the act of hitting her forehead repeatedly in great emotional agitation. On Austerlitz’s return to London, his emotional life does not calm down; he is plagued by anxiety and panic attacks until he finally

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breaks down. Yet knowing the source of the emotional confusion which has accompanied him for so many years does not make things easier. In a statement which grants emotion precedence over intellect, Austerlitz says that ‘reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation€ … which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement’ (322). All of these situations illustrate how the experience of overpowering emotion€– configured in Austerlitz as a violent physical event€– is the profane and necessary companion to revelations of truth. Although his feelings are marginalised by virtue of the narrative structure, the narrator is also consistently invoked as an emotional being who worries about upsetting his highly strung but fascinating friend, brooding on possible misdemeanours and trying to overcome this state through the therapeutic act of writing (147; 165). Fundamentally, his presence in the narrative is the expression of an unquestioned devotion to the transcription of his friend’s story and of his unhesitating acceptance of the practical inconveniences€ – erratic travel, long conversations, strange sojourns€ – that this entails (173; 362). This relationship can be viewed through the prism of negative symbiosis, Dan Diner’s term for the awkwardness of relationships between Germans and Jews after Auschwitz.33 However, it may also be read in a wider cultural-historical context as a story of caritas in a quasi-religious sense, as a tale of reconciliation, suffering and salvation with Christian overtures of the imperative to ‘love thy neighbour’.34 From this point of view, the dramaturgy of the heart symbolically connects disparate characters in an unspoken but transcendent language of exalted feeling that links individuals across time and space. In so doing, it evokes the ideal of ‘oceanic’ feeling which Sigmund Freud discussed in his essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilisation and its Discontents, 1930), a sense of oneness with the universe and with others, the absence of which Theodor W. Adorno observed€– specifically using the image of the heart€– as a key characteristic of postwar Western capitalist society.35 Within the context of identification restraint and the suspicion of affect characteristic for post-Holocaust writing, Sebald’s image of the heart thus configures identification as a sincere and innate human trait. The relationship between Austerlitz and the narrator demonstrates how the ability to identify with others makes possible a sense of the always potential fellowship of humankind, captured in the recurring image of a beating, pulsating heart which is endowed with powerful physical qualities at the same time that it represents the divine in all of us. Indeed, there is nothing that is not imbued with intense, grandiose feeling in Austerlitz, from person, to landscape, to objects; even time is

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consistently described as a mysterious feeling (152, 168, 171–4). Within this pathos-ridden ambience, the heart occupies an important discursive position as the symbol of both the gut and the soul. It articulates precisely that collapse of the distinction between body and intellect, psyche or soul which, in the evolution of European narratives on the heart, took hold with Plato and was reinforced by Christianity, Descartes and Â�others.36 From this point of view, Austerlitz’s story reverses the repression of the body which went hand in hand with the discovery of self-consciousness, the shift from mythos to logos.37 Nowhere is this more evident than in his language crisis and its confirmation of the redundancy of logos or the written word. Mythos€ – connoted here as a sense of archaic power and wonder€– asserts its magical force some time later in the miraculous Â�re-emergence of his native Czech while he is in high emotional conversation with Vĕra.38 In contrast to the unifying potential symbolised by the heart, Austerlitz’s many reflections on the ideological history of architecture acknowledge the erosion of human dignity since the dawn of modernity and the rise of a rational world-view. The abjection of the human subject intrinsic to modernity’s building projects is conveyed in descriptions of fortresses, hospitals and asylums, and train stations, and also in the extended reflection on civilisation’s regression so evident in the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. These edifices are the architectural expression of a sinister Foucauldian diminution of human existence, which the narrative’s strategic positioning of the heart as a unifying force challenges. Significantly, therefore, Austerlitz ends with a further musing on the heart. After Austerlitz’s story is complete, the narrator returns to the scene of one of his first encounters with his friend, the fortress of Breendonk in Belgium. He sits opposite the fortress where the AustroJewish Holocaust survivor Jean Améry was incarcerated and tortured by the Nazis. Breendonk, now a museum of sorts, is a mute symbol of inhumanity and oppression. Facing this building from some distance, the narrator is immersed in a book given to him by Austerlitz. Written by a former colleague, Dan Jacobson, a South African Jew of Lithuanian descent, the book recounts Jacobson’s search for traces in Lithuania of his rabbi grandfather. Heshel, the grandfather, died of a weak heart just after the First World War, and, unable to come to terms with the loss of her father, Jacobson’s mother decided to emigrate to South Africa with her family. The narrator notes how, on his travels in Lithuania, ‘Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel’s weak heart had preserved his immediate

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family when it stopped beating’ (413). In the final pages the physically weak heart thus triumphs against the teachings of Darwinism and the rationalisation of the human subject, as a kind of spiritually and ethically virile saviour of potential victims of the Holocaust. And yet Breendonk’s looming hulk also remains within the narrator’s line of vision, a blunt interruption to the flowing, unstoppable language of the heart, a disturbance to the ‘ambient oneness’ which pervades the book.39 Does the language of emotion, melodrama, self-indulgence and wallowing€ – at one point Austerlitz describes his emotional confusion as ‘blissful’ (223)€– mean that Austerlitz is an ethically compromised work which performs through melodramatic symbolism and a mimetic narrative strategy clumsy acts of identification? Such a reading of the book would miss its paradoxical quality as a story of similarity and difference at the same time:€ Austerlitz is the highly emotional account of radical emotional disaffection. Not even the image of the heart, which has a clear analogical function throughout, entirely escapes this paradox. A symbol of yearning for€– as opposed to confirmation of€– the existence of the fellowship of humankind, it also acknowledges the discontinuity of human experience as implied by the book’s final scene. Perhaps the answer to this question lies also partly with the reader who must expand her or his terms of reference and question the suspicion of emotion or empathy fatigue which is now part of the meta-psychological conceptualisation of Holocaust memory. From this perspective, it is no accident that the narrator is pictured in the act of reading; in this final scene he becomes an allegory of the reader, a practice which has been implicit in his function as listener throughout the narrative. Jacobson’s book contains a clear reference to the irrational powers of the heart. However, it is the narrator as reader who alights on this detail and relays it to us as readers. The heart in this scene is thus pure allegory:€an image in a book within the narrative, Sebald’s inclusion of it in these last pages of Austerlitz subtly reminds us of the importance and necessity of identification. Indeed, his earlier essay on the area bombings in the Second World War, Luftkrieg und Literatur (The Natural History of Destruction, 1999) accused German writers in the immediate postwar period of failing to identify with the victims of the Allied offensive on German cities.40 This was a moral failure, in Sebald’s view, and his essay presented this failure in terms of a willed physical alienation from the ubiquitous putrefaction of the dead. The language of the heart in Austerlitz is thus also a language of the body which, at the risk of sentimentality, does not allow this moral failure to recur. In pausing to consider the final image, we as

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readers witness the narrator in a moment of identification. The scene, and especially the special place of the heart within it, seems to suggest that emotion is necessary for the development of ethical memory, even if it is potentially excessive and irrational. Counter to this interpretation, recent scholarship argues that Sebald’s narrators are neo-Romantic cultural heroes who are ultimately interested in moments of epiphany and transcendence.41 This kind of criticism amplifies earlier accusations of wallowing and self-indulgence, most apparent in the reception of Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn, 1998).42 But beyond the field of Sebald reception it also rearticulates the categorisation of affect in memory discourses as a symptom of amnesia or, worse still, as the performance of identity politics.43 These readings do not consider the self-deprecating irony which subtly informs Sebald’s ‘good German’ narrator figure, whose dejectedness and self-accusations when alone come across as inevitable and yet faintly ridiculous. In these moments where the narrator experiences himself as awkward and blundering, Sebald is not just referring to the shame felt by the descendants of Nazi perpetrators; here he also raises the necessity of critical self-reflection as part of the project of coming to terms with the Nazi past. A significant part of this endeavour is excessive emotion, transgression of critical boundaries between self and other, and the rapid self-correction which ensues in the form of other excessive feelings:€ embarrassment and shame. The German narrator’s relationship to himself is thus an unresolved one:€the restraint, modesty and self-control which otherwise inform the narrative strategy emerge from this personal awkwardness and its historical baggage. In this vein, the general melodramatic mode of representation in Austerlitz may also be understood as an ironic commentary on the ideal relationship between self and other articulated in the strategic organisation of the framing narrative situation. From this perspective, the wealth of emotions described in the account imply that physical and psychic realities do not conform to established mnemonic discourses, such as that suggested by a narrative situation which aims to perform the abstract ideal of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Claudia Öhlschläger suggests that the heart motif in Austerlitz signals negative emotion and the disconcerting temporal confusion of trauma.44 Yet in all of the above situations, the heart is a symbol for instinctive, innate feeling, expressing an intuition about the more obscure regions of oneself, or indeed a sense of fellowship and solidarity with others. True, emotions in this story of trauma and loss are often disturbing and terrifying, but more fundamentally they signal a kind of precious intuitive

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bodily knowledge€– a life force€– which transcends powers of reason and rationality and without which, as in the case of Elias and his wife, individuals wither away and die. From this perspective, we may read Austerlitz as a statement about the necessity of powerful feeling in a post-Holocaust world which is uncertain about what it means to be human. No t e s 1 See Scott Denham, ‘Die englischsprachige Sebald-Rezeption’, in Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., W. G. Sebald:€Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei (Berlin:€Schmidt, 2006), 259–68; J. J. Long, ‘W. G. Sebald:€A bibliographical essay on current research’, in Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long, eds., W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 11–29; Richard Sheppard, ‘“Woods, trees and the spaces in between”:€A report on work published on W. G. Sebald 2005–2008’, Journal of European Studies, 39:1 (2009), 79–128. On memory see Anne Fuchs, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte:€Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:€Böhlau, 2004). 2 Interview with W. G. Sebald, ‘Ich fürchte das Melodramatische’, Der Spiegel (12 March 2001), 228–34, here 228. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2003). English quotations are taken from Anthea Bell’s translation, Austerlitz (London:€Hamish Hamilton, 2001). 3 See Mark McColloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia, SC:€University of South Carolina Press, 2003) esp. 14–17. See John Zilcosky, ‘Lost and found:€ Disorientation, nostalgia and Holocaust melodrama in Sebald’s Austerlitz’, Modern Language Notes, 121:3 (2006):€ 679–98; J. J. Long, W.€ G. Sebald:€ Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 149–52. 4 See Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004), 103. 5 See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames:€Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1997). 6 Long, W. G. Sebald:€Image, Archive, Modernity, 163. 7 See Niehaus and Öhlschläger, W. G. Sebald, esp. 9; Fuchs, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte, 59–62; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London:€Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). 8 Using Michel Foucault’s thought, Long suggests a broader theoretical approach. W. G. Sebald:€Image, Archive, Modernity, 1–23. See also Denham, ‘Die englischsprachige Sebald-Rezeption’, 266. 9 See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Gray zones of remembrance’, in David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan, eds., A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 970–5; McColloh, Understanding W.€ G. Sebald, 108–37; Marianne Hirsch, ‘The generation of postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29:1 (2008), 103–28; Fuchs, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte, 28–39.

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10 See John Zilcosky, ‘Lost and found’, Modern Language Notes, 121:3 (2006), 679–98; Gisela Ecker, ‘“Heimat” oder die Grenzen der Bastelei”’, Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., W. G. Sebald:€Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei (Berlin:€ Schmidt, 2006), 77–88; Brad Prager, ‘The good German as narrator:€On W. G. Sebald and the risks of Holocaust writing’, New German Critique, 96 (2005), 75–102. I challenge the widespread assumption that good Holocaust writing is structured around gaps in ‘Narrating German suffering in the shadow of Holocaust victimology: W.€G. Sebald, contemporary trauma theory and Dieter Forte’s air raids epic’, in Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, eds., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Rochester:€ Camden House, 2009), 162–76. See also Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffmann, ‘Memory, authority and identity:€ Holocaust studies in the light of the Wilkomirski Debate’, Biography, 27:1 (2004):€25–47. 11 Bettina Mosbach provides a useful summary of the debate. Figurationen der Katastrophe. Ästhetische Verfahren in W. G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn und Austerlitz (Bielefeld:€Aisthesis, 2008), 13–31. See also Katja Garloff, ‘The task of the narrator:€ Moments of symbolic investiture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, and Ben Hutchinson, ‘“Egg boxes stacked in a crate”:€Narrative status and its implications’, both in Scott Denham and Mark McColloh, eds., W. G. Sebald:€History€– Memory€– Trauma (Berlin:€De Gruyter, 2006), respectively 157–69 and 171–82. 12 See Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern; Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London:€Routledge, 2000). 13 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, esp. chapters 3 and 4. 14 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, 107–8. 15 See, for example, his essays on Peter Weiss, Jean Améry, Wolfgang Hildesheimer and Günter Grass, all of which are in Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich:€ Hanser, 2003). Sebald was highly critical of Alfred Andersch in ‘Der Schriftsteller Alfred Andersch’, in Luftkrieg und Literatur. Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2003), 113–47. 16 See Barbara Foley, ‘Fact, fiction, fascism:€ testimony and mimesis in Holocaust narratives’, Comparative Literature, 34:4 (1982), 330–60. 17 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, 16. 18 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, 36–7. 19 See, for example, Elie Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as literary inspiration’, in Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Dorothy Rabinowicz, Robert McAfee Brown and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston, IL:€Northwestern University Press, 1977), 5–19. 20 Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as literary inspiration’, 7. 21 Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY and London:€ Cornell University Press, 2004), 2–3. On victimology see Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit:€ Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich:€Beck, 2006), 76.

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22 Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between identification and empathy along with his development of the notion of empathic unsettlement exemplifies this meta-psychological rationalisation of feeling. Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD and London:€ Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 41. 23 See Thomas J. McCarthy, Relations of Sympathy:€ The Writer and Reader in British Romanticism (Aldershot:€Scolar Press, 1997), 19. 24 Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory has been criticised for thisÂ� reason. See J. J. Long, ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe:€Photography, narrative and the claims of postmemory’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€ The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester:€Camden House, 2006), 147–65. 25 ‘Ich fürchte das Melodramatische’, 228–34, 228; Carole Angier, ‘Who is W. G. Sebald’, in Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed., The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (New York:€ Seven Stories Press, 2007), 63–75, 74. 26 See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Melodrama:€Genre, Gefühl oder Weltanschauung’, in Margrit Fröhlich, Klaus Gronenborn and Karsten Visarius, eds., Das Gefühl der Gefühle. Zum Kinomelodram (Marburg:€Schüren, 2008), 11–34. 27 Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as literary inspiration’, 7. 28 See Tony Kushner and Donald Bloxham, The Holocaust:€Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester University Press, 2005). 29 The Wilkomirski affair, in which it was discovered that Swiss writer Bruno Grosjean had adopted the false Jewish identity of Binjamin Wilkomirski, is one such case. See Gross and Hoffmann, ‘Memory, authority and identity’. 30 On similarity see McColloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 20–2; Sigurd Martin, ‘Lehren vom Ähnlichen:€ Mimesis und Entstellung bei Sebald’, in Sigurd Martin and Ingo Wintermeyer, eds., Verschiebebahnhöfe der Erinnerung: Zum Werk W. G. Sebalds (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 81–103; Lucia Ruprecht, ‘Pleasure and affinity in W. G. Sebald and Robert Walser’, German Life and Letters, 62:3 (2009), 311–27. 31 See Ole Martin Høystad, Kulturgeschichte des Herzens von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, trans. Frank Zuber (Cologne and Vienna:€Böhlau, 2006). 32 See LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 22. 33 Dan Diner, ‘Negative Symbiose:€ Deutsche und Juden nach 1945’, in Dan Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 1987), 185–97. See also my ‘The anxiety of German influence:€A ffiliation, rejection and Jewish identity in W. G. Sebald’s work’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester:€Camden House, 2006), 229–52; Stuart Taberner, ‘German nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish identity in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz’, The Germanic Review, 3 (2004), 181–202. 34 See Høystad, Kulturgeschichte des Herzens, 59–85, 81.

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35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’, in Studienausgabe Band IX:€Fragen der Gesellschaft, Ursprünge der Religion (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2000), 193–270; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia:€Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt:€Suhrkamp, 1969), 220–2. 36 See Høystad, Kulturgeschichte des Herzens, 66. 37 Høystad, Kulturgeschichte des Herzens, 33. 38 On the theme of wonder in Sebald’s works see Long, W. G. Sebald:€Image, Archive, Modernity, 91–108. 39 McColloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 20. 40 Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur. 41 Ignasi Ribó, ‘The one-winged angel:€History and memory in the literary discourse of W. G. Sebald’, ORBIS Litterarum, 64:3 (2009):€222–62, 254–55. 42 W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 1998). See Greg Bond, ‘On the misery of nature and the nature of misery:€W. G. Sebald’s landscapes’, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds., W. G. Sebald:€A Critical Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 31–44; Thomas Wirtz, ‘Schwarze Zuckerwatte. Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebald’, Merkur, 6 (2001), 530–4. 43 See Charles Maier, ‘A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial’, History & Memory, 5:2 (1993), 136–51; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the emergence of memory in historical discourse’, Representations, 69 (2000), 127–50. 4 4 Claudia Öhlschläger, Beschädigtes Leben.€ Erzählte Risse:€ W. G. Sebalds Poetische Ordnung des Unglücks (Berlin:€Rombach, 2006), 127–8.

ch apter 14

Walter Kempowski’s Alles umsonst (All for Nothing) Karina Berger

The 1990 Literaturstreit (Literary Dispute) focused attention once more on the postwar German tradition of socially committed literature. The ensuing debate about the future of German writing elicited a wide range of responses, with some participants advocating more ‘readable’ books and others calling for a return to the aesthetic complexity of the ‘great’ modern European novel (e.g. Joyce, Mann or Balzac) and a focus on the traditional ‘big’ themes of literary fiction, such as human nature, urban existence and the fascination of evil. Yet there was a general consensus among almost all contributors to the debate that the moralising tone of German literature from 1945 was now obsolete. Many younger authors too appeared to reject the determinedly political focus of the ‘Flakhelfer’ generation of Günter Grass or of writers such as Uwe Timm and F. C. Delius of the generation of ’68 and displayed little ambition to become the ‘conscience of the nation’. This changed attitude is especially evident in portrayals of Germany’s Nazi past. Contemporary representations of the National Socialist period, such as Marcel Beyer’s Spione (Spies, 2000), Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder (Blurred Images, 2003), Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies, 2003), Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (The Unfinished, 2003), or Thomas Medicus’s In den Augen meines Großvaters (In My Grandfather’s Eyes, 2004), for instance, tend to be less overtly critical than in the past, displaying greater empathy with the wartime generation. Often, this means taking ‘ordinary Germans’ as their subject and occasionally blurring the boundaries between victim and perpetrator. This shift towards a more open and inclusive, and less politicised view of the Nazi past in post-unification Germany has occurred, at least in part, as a result of the dissolution, or questioning, of the left-liberal consensus more widely, which some felt had institutionalised a form of ‘political correctness’.1 Indeed, even former ’68ers, including Timm and Delius, have reassessed their perhaps overzealous stance of previous decades and in recent works exhibit a more empathetic attitude 211

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towards the dilemmas faced by ordinary Germans during the National Socialist period. Stylistically, many recent works display a greater focus on story-telling, aesthetic complexity and openness to interpretation€– that is, traditional literary qualities. Especially noticeable has been a return to the epic and historical novel€– a clear shift from previous decades when conventional modes of narration were often associated with popular, and therefore trivial, aspirations, or even seen to carry conservative overtones.2 Critic Martin Hielscher argues that the recent tendency towards the epic may have as one of its main causes the renewed interest in history since reunification and claims that the adoption of conventional forms reflects the new post-unification willingness to re-establish emotional ties with the past.3 This emphasis on aesthetic rather than political criteria may be seen to embody a wish to ‘normalise’ German literature.4 Indeed, the past few years have seen a veritable surge in texts portraying the Second World War and its aftermath, notably the Allied bombings and the expulsions of ethnic Germans from the eastern territories. While initial responses to these texts focused on the reappearance of the controversial theme of German wartime suffering itself, and particularly on the widely asserted claim that a taboo had been broken, the debate soon moved on to the way in which the subject ought to be represented and contextualised in works of fiction. A key question has been how best to represent German suffering without relativising the Holocaust or sentimentalising German victimhood. Both Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (The Boy with the Bloody Shoes, 1995) and Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder, for instance, though arguably insisting on Auschwitz as a general context, have been criticised, respectively, for the ‘whitewashing’ of the complicity of ordinary Germans and historical decontextualisation, and for a ‘forgiving empathy’.5 Elizabeth Dye notes that even Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), commonly viewed as exemplary in its depiction of German suffering, occasionally ‘succumbs to the allure of narration’.6 Certainly, the return to conventional narrative forms presents a particular dilemma, creating an inevitable tension between some of the key qualities of fiction€– subjectivity, identification with individual characters, and coherent story-telling€– and the requirements of historical objectivity, or at least balance. Reminiscent of the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) of the mid-1980s, this recent focus on ‘human interest’ stories and the adoption of an often limited narrative perspective have been viewed with suspicion by historians and critics alike. Such representations, it has been

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argued, tend to disregard historical contexts and replace a broader analysis of structures and processes with a focus on individual experience and thus facilitate a ‘re-appropriation of the history of German suffering by sentiment’.7 Moreover, Eric Santner, writing in the early 1990s in a later response to the Historians’ Dispute, points out the risk of ‘narrative fetishism’€ – that is, the effect whereby disruptive elements are masked or covered by a teleological structure that bestows meaning.8 Yet, in the majority of cases, the return to traditional literary forms has not produced a wave of revisionist texts, nor has it returned us to the teleological, unreflected and often apologetic works of the immediate postwar period. Authors of contemporary texts that portray the Nazi past are acutely aware of memory processes and public debates and fuse a critical attention to the larger historical context with conventional forms. Crucial in this respect, and distinguishing them from earlier texts, is a high degree of reflexivity. Hielscher thus argues that the return to the epic is not a conservative roll-back but rather illustrates a heightened awareness of literary history and an engagement with, and reflection on, the literary form and traditional literary material.9 More generally, in her work on postmodernism and literature, Linda Hutcheon coins the term ‘historiographic metafiction’ to describe literary texts that are intensely self-reflexive and exhibit a self-conscious purchase on history or, in other words, a ‘problematising return to history’.10 She argues that, in addition to recalling literary tradition, such texts may also exhibit a parodic edge, which provokes a critical perspective. Hutcheon especially emphasises the ironic intertextuality in such works, which functions to question the concept of ‘historic truth’, thus challenging notions of both closure and single, incontestable meaning. While she acknowledges that postmodern parody has often been viewed as a form of ironic rupture with the past, she argues that it is more complex than that, drawing attention to the inherent paradox in the term ‘post’:€ ‘irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm … the connection with the past’.11 In other words, parody serves to legitimise and at the same time subvert that which it parodies, thus highlighting both continuity and difference, and opening up a critical space for representations of history. This chapter examines Walter Kempowski’s last novel Alles umsonst (All for Nothing, 2006), a text that may be seen as a recent example of the deliberate return to a conventional mode of narration but which also exhibits the parodic intertextuality identified by Hutcheon. Indeed, the text not only draws attention to past forms and representations, thereby

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seeking to affirm a connection with Germany’s literary history, but simultaneously distances itself from these. By questioning previous representations, the work also reflects more broadly on the wider debate surrounding the literary portrayal of German victimhood and considers the possibility, or even futility, of appropriately portraying the subject. I argue that Alles umsonst largely succeeds in synthesising a re-connection with the ‘familiar structures’ of the traditional novel form with a more measured detachment. This allows the text to indulge in the qualities conventionally associated with narrative fiction€– coherence and chronology, a focus on individuals, and the possibility of empathy with characters€ – while sustaining a framework that, on the whole, avoids an uncritical representation of German victimhood. Walter Kempowski’s work stretches across four decades. Over the course of his career, this prolific writer, who died in October 2007, produced more than a dozen novels, as well as diaries, short stories and children’s books, radio plays and various works of non-fiction. In his oeuvre, Kempowski thematises a multitude of subjects, yet he returns, time and again, to the Second World War and its aftermath. This found early expression in his bestseller second novel Tadellöser & Wolff (1971), set during the war years, as well as the survey books Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? (Did You Ever See Hitler?, 1973) and Haben Sie davon gewußt? (Did You Know About it?, 1979). Best known is undoubtedly the author’s multiÂ�volume project Das Echolot (Soundings, 1993), a large-scale ‘collective diary’ containing, over 6,000 pages, letters, diary entries, private notes, published material and official documents from the war years. In the second part of Das Echolot, Fuga furiosa (1999), a documentation of the defeat on the East Prussian and Silesian home fronts in 1945, Kempowski gathers together hundreds of eyewitness accounts of German wartime suffering relating to the expulsion from the former eastern provinces, the sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff, and the Allied bombings.12 Indeed, German victimhood emerges as one of the author’s principal interests:€ the bombardment of Dresden in 1945 is thematised separately in the non-fictional volume Der rote Hahn (The Red Rooster, 2001), and expulsion is portrayed as early as 1992 in the novel Mark und Bein (Marrow and Bone).13 While Kempowski’s work focuses, in the main, on Germany’s recent past, the way in which this past has been represented varies across different texts. Dirk Hempel has argued that the varied aesthetic and narratological structures in the author’s work stem from the attempt to give a differentiated answer to a set of complex questions relating to the€past, above all ‘how could it happen?’, both in terms of

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Kempowski’s own life, and the larger historical context.14 The tendency to vary the literary form from one text to the next reflects the author’s belief that content is shaped and determined by the form in which it is presented.15 The individual books€– a mix of fiction and non-fiction, personal and subjective texts, as well as collections of documents claiming to offer a high level of authenticity€– are thus designed to be read in conjunction with each other and to offset one another, with the aim of creating a nuanced, or balanced, representation across the oeuvre.16 The following analysis, therefore, will also briefly consider Alles umsonst in the context of Kempowski’s other works. Born in 1929, Kempowski was a member of the Flakhelfergeneration (sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys recruited to man the air raid batteries), yet his perspective differed greatly from many of his contemporaries, such as Günter Grass or Martin Walser. His stance as a merciless critic of the German Democratic Republic, borne of his early experience of persecution by the communist regime, as well as his hostility to the 1968 student revolt, marked him out from the dominant left-liberal literary establishment. In his own work, consequently, Kempowski broke with the widespread insistence on the irreconcilability of German guilt and German suffering and attempted to portray a more differentiated picture of the past. This included representations of the muddled, everyday life of ordinary Germans, where the roles of victim and perpetrator were often not clear-cut. In many ways, then, the author pre-empted some of the recent shifts towards a more inclusive approach to the Nazi past, and Alles umsonst continues in this vein by focusing on the everyday life of a small number of ordinary Germans. The narrative is set on an estate, the Georgenhof, in East Prussia, in the closing months of the war, and portrays the lives of the von Globig family:€Eberhard, who is serving in the supply corps in Italy, Katharina, his wife, and their son Peter, as well as the resolute ‘Tantchen’ (aunty), a relative who was driven from her home in Silesia after the First World War and who now runs the household. Three foreign labourers, Peter’s school teacher Dr Wagner, and the pedantic party member and neighbour Drybalski complete the microcosm of life in the formerly German provinces of the East presented in the narrative, which, however, is also largely cropped of its political and historical frame. The novel portrays, in great detail, the day-to-day life of the von Globigs in the last few weeks before they are forced to leave their home ahead of the advancing Russian troops. The period is presented almost entirely from the characters’ perspective, making their actions appear understandable, perhaps even inevitable. Hence, even though most

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characters are shown to be broadly, if superficially, pro-Nazi, or at least unthinkingly accepting of the ideology, they appear as ‘products of their time’ rather than as fanatics. Kempowski employs a clearly historicising mode here, which might be seen as apologetic. The text’s emphasis on story-telling would seem to exacerbate such problematic tendencies yet, as we shall see, a number of strategies are deployed to foreclose a revisionist representation of German victimhood. On a first reading, Alles umsonst appears to be an entirely conventional piece of narrative prose. Told in the past tense and related chronologically by a third-person omniscient narrator, the text adopts a tone of ‘old-Â�fashioned’ story-telling in the manner of some of Germany’s great novelists such as Theodor Fontane or Thomas Mann, both of whom Kempowski has referred to as role models. The opening sentence, for instance, which is stylised to resemble a ‘classic’ beginning, seems to reÂ�Â� create a ‘lost world’:€‘Not far from Mitkau, a small town in East Prussia, stood the Georgenhof manor with its old oak trees, which resembled, now in winter, a black island in a white ocean.’17 This traditional settingof-scene gives the narrative a distinctly timeless air, eliciting a sense of nostalgia. Within just one sentence, the narrator has zoomed in from the big picture to the small details, effectively drawing the reader in. The sentence contains a number of evocative details. The ‘old oaks’, for instance, conjure up a world of stability and deep roots. The figurative language lends the sentence the quality of a fairy tale, an enchanting world into which it is possible to escape. The pace is leisurely and comforting, continuing throughout the narrative and also characterising the development of the plot. Indeed, very little actually happens in the first half of the novel, leading Jan Philipp Reemtsma to comment that it is ‘slow in an eerie sort of way, almost in slow-motion’.18 The style of the narrative is conversational:€sentences are short, and the language is informal and strewn with colloquialisms. Characterisations are detailed and colourful, with descriptions of individual appearances and surroundings creating vivid pictures in the reader’s imagination. More than anything, the characters are brought to life by their idiosyncratic manner of speech and the frequent repetition of distinctive catchphrases, evoking a sense of familiarity and intimacy. Thus Alles umsonst adopts a range of stylistic methods that recall conventional narrative techniques. However, many of these conventions are deliberately undermined, notably via the use of irony as well as by means of a high degree of self-reflexivity and intertextuality. This not

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only opens up the possibility of a critical portrayal of history; on a metatextual level, it also throws into sharp relief the inadequacies of previous representations. Techniques of self-reflexivity and irony thus circumvent some of the problematic constructions typical of earlier, and also some contemporary, representations of German wartime suffering, such as the image of the ‘absolute victim’ or the sentimentalisation of German victimhood. For instance, despite the text’s adoption of the perspectives of its characters, the individuals portrayed often appear grotesque or comic, which prevents the evocation of undue sympathy, or unreflected identification. The use of the Hitler salute, for instance, is revealed as a farce throughout the text: He was getting ready to climb up the stairs to Katharina now, who leaned over the banister and enquired, Heil Hitler, ‘Yes, what is it?’ The Tantchen, who had been busying herself with her magazines, also opened her door, wanting to know what was going on, Heil Hitler. And Peter, too, peered out of his room. (204)

The close repetition of the phrase and its position between commas, reducing it to little more than a filler, make what should be a dynamic exclamation weak and unconvincing. In the first sentence, the salute is not even included in the quotation marks, suggesting its absent-minded, habitual use, and rendering it meaningless. The final ‘Heil Hitler’, in particular, tagged on to the end of the sentence as an afterthought, appears to mock the military precision with which the greeting was to be carried out. Indeed, the text makes use of a range of stylistic devices to distance itself from the conventional narrative techniques. These include frequent interruptions of the storyline, most often via quotations of song lyrics, verses or radio jingles, which is a typical feature of Kempowski’s work more widely. These indented, stand-alone paragraphs create an alienation effect, temporarily suspending the characters’ limited perspective and enabling a more critical point of view. In another context, Mark Ledbetter describes such interruptions as the points where the narrative reveals an ethic.19 For instance, in a passage where Katharina is questioned by a police officer about the hiding of a Jew, we find, between the officer’s thoughts and Katharina’s musings, a verse of a popular song from the 1937 movie Seven Slaps: And he thought of the black-haired Jew who had been shot in the cellar:€he had buckled in the knees and then slumped onto his side.

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Katharina thought of Felicitas. Just a little fifteen-minute walk, past the cinema and the post office, and she would reach Felicitas. (339–40)

Here, the abrupt interruption has a jarring effect on the reader, disrupting the flow of the text and forcing a moment of reflection, if not shock, at this seemingly tasteless insertion. Moreover, the poignant juxtaposition brings to the fore the stark disparity that existed under National Socialism:€even as Jews were being persecuted many Germans continued, at least at the end of the 1930s, when the film was released, to enjoy a normal life. The romance, produced by UFA, a company compromised under National Socialism, deals with the promise of heaven on earth€– a preposterous notion, of course, for anyone victimised by the Nazi regime. More generally, the passage also serves to relativise Katharina’s suffering. While she may have been arrested, she is treated humanely, and does not appear overly concerned about her fate, although her reaction may also be an illustration of her detachment from the world. A further key stylistic device in the novel is the inordinate number of question marks. Reemtsma argues that these may be read as a sign of helplessness and as a reflection of an underlying sense of uncertainty of the time.20 Occasionally, these follow set phrases€– ‘The Führer€– wasn’t he the ultimate saviour?’ (157)€– challenging the propaganda that many Germans had unthinkingly accepted. At other times, the question marks are used to illustrate the disbelief and denial that rumours of German war crimes were often met with:€‘That people with knowledge of the East had seen things that took place there? Our good German fatherland? For heaven’s sake?’ (81). The references here, although oblique, are evidently shocking to the characters, yet the question mark may signal insecurity and fear of the truth. While the mention of the ‘good German fatherland’ is clearly ironic, it is the subsequent phrase, usually followed by an exclamation mark, that brings home most pointedly the reluctance to recognise the full extent of German guilt. The frequent use of question marks also creates a sense of uncertainty, or ambiguity, on a textual level, undermining the narrator’s authority and indicating an openness to interpretation, negating any notions of closure or of a single historical ‘truth’€– or, indeed, of one single ‘correct’ representation of German wartime suffering. Occasionally, this effect is further underscored by the use of ellipses, leaving sentences only half-finished.

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Especially interesting are the many intertextual references to be discovered in the text. Apart from allusions to Mann and Fontane, then, there are direct references to other canonical authors such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Heinrich Heine, Goethe and Schiller. In addition, there are more implicit intertextual references to previous texts and literary traditions, both within Kempowski’s own oeuvre and beyond, most obviously to the eyewitness reports in Fuga furiosa, but also to earlier fictional representations of flight and expulsion. Specifically, Alles umsonst contains unmistakable intertextual references to one particular text€ – that is, Christine Brückner’s Jauche und Levkojen (Manure and Gillyflowers, 1975), one of the best-known expulsion narratives since the 1970s, which has sold well over a million copies and has been through numerous editions. The parallels in terms of setting, plot and tone are significant:€Brückner’s text is set on an aristocratic estate in Pomerania, and the narrative largely focuses on the everyday life of the protagonist Maximiliane and her children, who remain in the country while her husband serves in Berlin. The likeness of the two main characters is especially striking. Both are loners and dreamers and, on the surface at least, seem rather naïve, yet both ultimately remain ambivalent and elusive. The tone of the two novels, too, is comparable; indeed, many reviews noted the ‘Fontane style’ of Brückner’s novel. Yet while the two texts, on the surface, are very similar, Brückner’s novel lacks the self-reflexivity that characterises Alles umsonst. Kempowski’s novel, then, contains many elements featured in Brückner’s bestseller, such as the setting in a large aristocratic estate in the former eastern provinces, the advancing Russian troops, or the stereotypical character Drybalski, whose main function is to highlight the division between the ‘bad’ Nazis and the ‘good’ von Globigs, or ordinary Germans in general. The depiction of the trek itself also possesses all the familiar tropes:€ we read of the hazardous journey through the cold and the snow, of hopelessness and hunger on the long march westwards, of the inevitable attacks by Russian fighter planes, of the many deaths that occur along the way and, once they reach the coast, of the desperate attempt of thousands of expellees to get onto one of the last boats to safety. However, already in the small details we find subtle ironic changes, such as the fact that the von Globigs are not, in fact, ‘true’ nobility, but only ‘Wilhelmine civil service gentry’ (10), or that the Georgenhof is not a lush mansion, but instead in dire need of repair. Drybalski thus describes the estate, neglected by its inhabitants, as a ‘sloppy household’ (210). Drybalski’s unpalatable character, on the other hand, is rendered more ambivalent when, at the end

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of the narrative, he risks his life to save Peter, thus partly subverting the stereotypical image of the ‘bad’ Nazi. We also find differences in the way expulsion is portrayed:€ the expellees’ hardship, for instance, is undermined by describing the trek as ‘going for a hike’ (236), and ‘going on a journey’ (316), or by the use of such flippant phrases as ‘and off we went’ (236). Moreover, unlike many earlier portrayals, references to the trek in Alles umsonst are remarkably unsentimental, for instance when the sinking of refugee ships is described:€‘Many steamers had already been sunk in the bay, the masts remaining above the water level just like the heads of the dead horses in the ice of the Haff’ (378). Often, these depictions border on the grotesque, for example when the desperate situation at the ports, where thousands of expellees are being ferried to the evacuation ships, is described as a ‘grandiose image’ (376). Elsewhere, the seriousness of the situation is rendered as absurd:€‘A wall of silent people stood at the port, all waiting for a miracle, hoping another boat would come … To the ship! Across the sea! To Denmark… maybe we are lucky? Strawberries with cream, why not?’ (380). At key points in the text, the ironic re-writing of earlier fictional representations of German suffering is even more striking, and even more pointed. The depiction of a passing refugee trek, for instance, provides a compelling example of the narrative’s playful intertextuality: The oak trees were pounded by cold sleet. And then the large trek arrived! At first just a few carts, individually, then close-packed, one after the other. They were visible from afar as they hauled over the bridge, a never-ending line, with fluttering flags. … A convoy of carts that held together with steely determination, entire feudal estates, with a trek leader on horseback up front. … They marched silently, the only sound was that of the crunching wheels. … Occasionally, there were solitary pedestrians, with a rucksack and children’s sledge. They kept their gaze low. Their collars turned up. Bicycles, prams, handcarts. Where had such a thing ever been seen before? (221–2)

This entire passage is a self-conscious piece of story-telling, as signalled, for example, by the carefully constructed sentences, which gradually reduce in length and end, ultimately, with just three single nouns. It is clearly reminiscent of the description of treks in earlier expulsion texts, as well as many of the eyewitness testimonies published in Fuga furiosa, and appears to have been deliberately stylised to achieve this effect. However, several small changes turn what on first impression looks like a simple imitation into a parody of these early representations, highlighting the clichéd forms of expressions usually used by departing from them. The drama of the scene is subverted, for instance, by the exclamation mark

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at the end of the second sentence, creating an atmosphere of excitement rather than fear. Moreover, the use of words of strength (‘steely’) and active verbs (‘fluttering’) eschews sentimentality. Most significant of all, the closing question surely points directly to earlier expulsion narratives:€ though ostensibly a rhetorical question to convey the scale and impact of the trek on the apparently unprepared observers, it may also be read as a comic allusion to the 1950s genre of the ‘trek novel’ itself. In other words, the text acknowledges the texts and contexts of its past but simultaneously highlights their inadequacy by parodying their reliance on stereotypical phrases. This excerpt is typical of Alles umsonst and it is partly the frequency, as well as the poignancy, of such scenes that increases the sense of estrangement from the traditional form. Returning to Hutcheon’s concept of ‘historiographic metafiction’, therefore, such parodic episodes may serve both to highlight difference and to affirm a connection with the past. Indeed, the latter may be seen as key to Alles umsonst:€ while the novel thematises the expulsion at the end of the Second World War, it is in equal measure about the need to commemorate the past and preserve Germany’s cultural heritage. This is explicitly referred to several times in the novel, for instance when the baron, one of the guests staying at the Georgenhof, exclaims:€‘Someone had to write it down … to bear witness for all time’ (215), or, when Dr Wagner notes:€‘If humanity suffers, then it should be accounted for’ (363). The figure of the collector appears in various guises throughout the narrative:€the visiting economist collects stamps, while the later guest Herr Hesse collects Old Germanic artefacts. However, he has had to leave his collection behind in his flight, symbolic perhaps of the imminent loss of cultural heritage in the eastern provinces. Lastly, the baron carries with him his detailed chronicle of Berlin, containing brochures, books, restaurant menus, photos, and ancestral documents. These collectors may be seen to represent Kempowski’s own archival work over the decades. The numerous intertextual references to previous literary representations in the narrative are another way of referring to the commemoration of Germany’s past, and emphasise literature’s important role in this process. Although the text’s tone, irony and meta-reflexivity largely prevent a sentimental portrayal of German suffering, and avoid, on the whole, the schematic victim–perpetrator model that the subject of German victimhood has tended to provoke, some problematic aspects remain, notably in the form of apologetic, universalising and dehistoricising tendencies. Indeed, the novel’s epigraph, a Lutheran verse, reads:€‘With you nothing but your grace and favour counts in the forgiveness of

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sins; our deeds are therefore useless, even in the best life.’ The message is bleak:€ all actions in the novel, whether good or bad, are in vain; ultimately, it was ‘all for nothing’. The novel thus appears to suggest that whether one is a victim or perpetrator is simply a matter of timing and fate€– regardless of one’s ethnic background, or one’s guilt or innocence€– essentially exculpating ordinary Germans and levelling all victims. Another problematic aspect is the dehistoricisation of expulsion in the narrative. Tantchen’s fate, for instance, having already been expelled from Silesia after the First World War, may point to expulsion as a more universal issue, or as a recurring aspect of human history. Indeed, the frequent repetition of the phrase ‘Wherefrom? Whereto?’ (45, 124, 125, 133, 218, 313) may be seen as a reference to Germans’ feeling of transcendental homelessness since the end of the war, and also to expulsion as a defining occurrence of the twentieth century, or even human history more widely. The notion of seeing the Second World War as part of a greater story of suffering could be seen to relativise the Holocaust, or German crimes more generally. It may be useful, then, to consider Alles umsonst in the context of Kempowski’s wider oeuvre€ – that, at least, was the author’s intention. Kempowski portrayed the expulsion of ethnic Germans in three of his works:€Alles umsonst, Mark und Bein and Fuga furiosa. While the former two take the narrative form, Fuga furiosa consists entirely of eyewitness reports, in the form of letters, diary entries and other writings. Across the three works, we thus have a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with significant overlaps between documentary and fictional elements, as well as subjective and more ‘objective’ texts with a high level of authenticity (if we accept the inevitable problems of inaccuracy and unreliability associated with eyewitness reports). As mentioned earlier, this mix of literary forms and genres, which extends to the entire oeuvre, was intended by Kempowski to achieve an equilibrium between individual representations. Indeed, in many respects, the depictions of German wartime suffering in the novels and Fuga furiosa may be said to balance each other, offsetting, to an extent, the inevitable shortcomings of each work. It is striking, for instance, that although Kempowski was exposed to such a wealth of material and detail€ – he collected several thousand testimonies for Das Echolot€ – he deliberately chose to use the information sparingly in his fictional novels, thus creating a contrast to the lengthy eyewitness reports in Fuga furiosa. Moreover, the third-person perspective of the novels can be seen to balance the first-person accounts, just as the dispassionate and unsentimental language acts as a counter-weight to the unmediated and

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often overly emotional testimonies in Fuga furiosa. Taken together, the works arrive at a representation that gives a genuine insight into the event without, generally speaking, sentimentalising German victimhood or trivialising the Holocaust. However, it may be questioned whether such a ‘balancing act’ across an author’s wider oeuvre is entirely plausible. Certainly, Alles umsonst was received as an addition, or even complement, to Fuga furiosa in some reviews. Yet ultimately the novel’s title appears to admit defeat, and may be read as the author’s concession to the impossibility of adequately portraying German victimhood, questioning whether all attempts were, in the end, for nothing. Despite occasional dehistoricising or universalising tendencies, Alles umsonst portrays the past in a way that does not succumb to political correctness or evoke revisionist interests. Kempowski’s novel may thus be seen as an example of a recent text that successfully fuses a greater focus on the traditional literary qualities of story-telling, subjectivity, identification with characters, and openness to interpretation with a historically aware, critical framework that prevents a revisionist or apologetic representation of German wartime suffering. The text exhibits a keen awareness of literary history:€ we find allusions to some of Germany’s great storyÂ�tellers, and a clear engagement with earlier styles and representations. Such intertextuality may be read, if we follow Hutcheon’s argument, as an affirmation of a connection to the past, and also represents an acknowledgement of the valuable role that literature has to play in Germany’s ongoing Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). Moreover, by means of intertextual references, both to Kempowski’s own oeuvre and other texts, the novel reflects on its own linguistic construction, as well as the representation of history more widely, thus contributing to the broader debate surrounding the appropriate representation of German wartime suffering. The adoption of a less politicised approach and a greater emphasis on aesthetic criteria, then, can not be said to automatically render literary texts unpolitical, although their political engagement is certainly indirect. On the contrary, when combined with a high degree of reflexivity and a keen awareness of the historical context and contemporary debates, the return to a conventional mode of narration allows the synthesis of some of fiction’s most compelling features with a critical framework that makes possible a nuanced and inclusive portrayal of the Nazi past. This shift towards a greater inclusiveness, demonstrating a greater acceptance of Germany’s legacy, both historical and literary, surely represents a productive and perhaps less ‘burdened’ engagement with the past.

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1 See Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past (London and New York:€ Routledge, 2001). 2 See Martin Hielscher, ‘The return to narrative and to history:€Some thoughts on contemporary German-language literature’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece, eds., Literature, Markets and Media in Germany and Austria Today (Bern:€Peter Lang, 2000), 295–309, 302. 3 Hielscher, ‘The return to narrative and to history’, 300, 301–5. 4 William Collins Donahue, ‘“Normal” as “apolitical”:€Uwe Timm’s Rot and Thomas Brussig’s Leben bis Männer’, in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, eds., German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century (Rochester:€Camden House, 2006), 181–94, 181. 5 Bill Niven, ‘The globalisation of memory and the rediscovery of German suffering’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (University of Birmingham Press, 2004), 229–46, 241. 6 Elizabeth Dye, ‘“Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”:€ Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, German Life and Letters, 57:4 (2004), 472–87, 486. 7 Helmut Schmitz, ed., A Nation of Victims? (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2007), 6. 8 Eric Santner, ‘History beyond the pleasure principle’, in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation:€ Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1992), 143–54, 144, 150–2. 9 Hielscher, ‘The return to narrative and to history’, 297, 300–1. 10 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic metafiction:€ Parody and the intertextuality of history’, in Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, eds., Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore, MD:€ Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–32, 3. 11 Linda Hutcheon, ‘The postmodern problematizing of history’, English Studies in Canada, 14:4 (December 1988), 365–82, 366. 12 Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot: 18. Januar bis 14. Februar 1945:€Fuga furiosa (Munich:€Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1999). 13 See my ‘“Gegen den Strich”:€ The early representation of German wartime suffering in Walter Kempowski’s Mark Und Bein (1991)’, German Life and Letters, 62:2 (2009), 206–19. 14 Dirk Hempel, ‘Autor, Erzähler und Collage in Walter Kempowskis Gesamtwerk’, in Carla A. Damiano, Jörg Drews and Doris Plöschberger, eds., ‘Was das nun wieder soll?’ Vom Im Block bis Letzte Grüße:€Zu Werk und Leben Walter Kempowskis (Göttingen:€Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 21–33, 21. 15 Dirk Hempel, Walter Kempowski. Eine bürgerliche Biographie (Munich:€Random House, 2004), 200; Carla Damiano, Das Echolot:€Sifting and Exposing the Evidence via Montage (Heidelberg:€ Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2005), 100. 16 ‘Der Herr der Tagebücher’, Spiegel 53 (1992):€156–7, 157. 17 Walter Kempowski, Alles umsonst (Munich:€A lbrecht Knaus Verlag, 2006),€9. Translations are my own. All subsequent page references are in the main body of the text in parentheses.

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18 Jan Philipp Reemtsma, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung bei Arno Schmidt und Walter Kempowski’, in Stefan Hermes and Amir Muhić, eds., Täter als Opfer? Deutschsprachige Literatur zu Krieg und Vertreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg:€Verlag Dr Kovač, 2007), 57–74, 70. 19 See Mark Ledbetter, Victims and the Post-modern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body:€An Ethic of Reading and Writing (London:€Macmillan, 1996), 2–15. 20 Reemtsma, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’, 72.

c h a p t e r 15

F. C. Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as a Murderer) Anne Fuchs

Friedrich Christian Delius’s novel Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as a Murderer, 2004) is one of a number of post-1990 German-language narratives and films that deal with the question of German resistance to the Third Reich.1 The novel cross-stitches the reconstruction of the activities of a small and largely unknown resistance group which went by the name of the ‘European Union’ with a restrospective account of the student movement of 1968 and its attitude to the victims of National Socialism. Delius’s examination of 1968 as a significant lieu de mémoire in contemporary Germany is motivated, on the one hand, by his own generational affiliation and, on the other, by the debate about the contribution of 1968 to the liberalisation of West German society.2 The narrative therefore not only scrutinises various public expressions of the revolutionary zest of the student movement, but also homes in on the ’68ers’ personal sphere by relating the love story between the protagonist and Catherine. Their relationship is, as we will see, affected by the political debates and ideological battles of the time. The story is told by a former member of the student movement who, after the acquittal of a former Nazi judge by a West German court, decides to take matters into his own hands and to assassinate the judge for his service on the infamous Volksgerichtshof (‘people’s court’), the judicial wing of the National Socialist state which sentenced thousands of resisters and ordinary Germans to death. By telescoping a forgotten story of left-wing resistance through the eyes of a former ’68er, the narrative examines the divided memory cultures in East and West Germany in the postwar period as well as the ideological myopia of the generation of ’68, which had little sympathy for or interest in the real victims of National Socialism because its members saw themselves as the primary victims of their parents’ guilt for the Third Reich. Before offering a reading of Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder, it is necessary to briefly discuss the divided memory cultures in the two Germanys through the lens of 226

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the historical debate on German resistance, as this issue features prominently in the novel. R e s i s ta nc e n a r r at i v e s i n E a s t a n d W e s t G e r m a n y In current historical discussions, not only does the idea of resistance include widely divergent movements and people, covering the entire ideological spectrum from the elitist military plotters against Hitler of 20 July 1944 to the communist resisters, but it also reflects a whole range of activities, including organised resistance, individual acts of resistance or even spontaneous acts of non-conformity and civil disobedience in everyday life. However, the definition of the term ‘resistance’ remains a contested issue:€ some historians argue in favour of a flexible terminology that is capable of grasping different degrees of non-cooperation; others, however, warn against the erosion of the core idea of resistance. Influential historians in the first camp are Peter Steinbach and Hans Mommsen, who make a case for the analysis of the variety of ‘resistance practice’.3 Others, such as the British historian Ian Kershaw, favour a more normative understanding of the term, restricting its application to ‘the description of active participation in organised attempts to work against the regime with the conscious aim of undermining it or planning for the moment of its demise’.4 Notwithstanding such differences, there is consensus that the changes brought about by the methodological shift towards ‘social history from below’ have led to the demythologisation of the resistance movement. In the words of Ian Kershaw, the turn towards social history and the history of everyday life approach have thus helped to take the resistance narrative out of ‘the realms of unreachable heroics down to the level of ordinary people’.5 Furthermore, this removal of the heroic dimension of resistance and the widening of the term have also drawn attention to the social context in which resistance did or did not develop. The story of resistance is thus often a story of partial collaboration and conformity with the National Socialist system. In contrast to the nuanced understanding of resistance in historical circles today, in the postwar period the critical understanding of the complexity of resistance was fundamentally hampered by the ideological faultlines of the Cold War period. While West Germany’s memory culture centred on bourgeois conservative and Christian resistance movements, East Germany prioritised communist resistance and denounced as imperialist the conservative bourgeois resistance and Social Democratic resistance. From the 1950s right into the 1960s, resistance discourse in

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East and West Germany thus reflected and reproduced Cold War antagonisms. After the division of Germany in 1949, both German states began to circulate their own resistance narratives that, in their one-sidedness, consolidated two opposing, but nevertheless complementary, memory cultures. In East German discourse the bourgeois–conservative resisters were viewed in terms of a disgruntled extension of Hitler’s ‘imperialist’ rule. A distinction was made between the real anti-fascist resistance and bourgeois resistance. For example, an article published in 1947 by a leading member of the Communist Party argued that the men of 20 July had acted primarily as representatives of the ruling class which wanted to protect its own imperialist interests by toppling Hitler.6 After the enforced amalgamation of the KPD (German Communist Party) and SPD into the SED (Socialist Unity Party), it did not take long for Social Democratic resistance fighters to be submitted to this type of ideological denunciation too:€in the wake of the SED’s increasingly aggressive anti-Social Democratic campaign, leading figures of the Social Democratic resistance movement, such as Julius Leber, were demonised as agents of US imperialism.7 This division between real anti-fascist communist resistance and resistance movements based on ‘false consciousness’ and lacking ‘correct’ Marxist beliefs dominated East German historical discourse well into the 1970s. In West Germany the conservative and bourgeois opposition to Hitler began to play a pivotal role in official memory culture from the mid1950s onwards. After West Germany’s re-armament, the men of 20 July were held up as public examples of a positive national tradition with which the newly founded German army (Bundeswehr) and the nation as a whole were invited to identify. Other publicly celebrated resistance movements included resistance by church circles (Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are the most prominent figures), and resistance by the members of the White Rose. All these resistance movements represented conservative, Christian or middle-class opposition. Communist and left-wing resistance movements continued to be sidelined or even denounced in West German public discourse. A prominent example in this respect is the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group, which is more generally known as the Rote Kapelle (Red Chapel). Postwar West Germany for a long time dismissed the organisation as a group of communist agents who had been in the service of Stalin’s Soviet Union, a view that was first circulated by prominent members of the conservative resistance and then regurgitated in later publications.8 Although some leading figures in this group did indeed attempt to pass on information to Moscow about

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Germany’s imminent war against the Soviet Union, the Red Chapel had no Soviet-style vision for Germany. Made up of socially diverse members, its activities consisted of the distribution of leaflets, helping Jews and prisoners of war wherever possible. A re-evaluation of the diversity of this group has€only become possible after the opening of eastern archives in the early€1990s.9 However, in the West the hidden alliance between official cultural memory and historical research began to break up in the 1960s, when social history and the aforementioned history of everyday life instigated a move away from the elitist conception of resistance. Research on regional resistance showed the divergence of resistance movements, widening the scope of the concept ‘resistance’ significantly. The attempt on Hitler’s life of 20 July was also reassessed alongside such new studies. By the 1960s, 20 July 1944 had been firmly embedded in West Germany’s public memory culture with annual speeches and acts of remembrance. Against the backdrop of an increasingly enshrined memory discourse, historians began to analyse critically the social and political vision of the conservative resisters.10 In the postwar period, the cultural memory of resistance in both German states was thus characterised by the mutual exclusion of alternative resistance stories. From today’s perspective, such monolithic and monopolising discourse on resistance looks like simply another chapter in the dark Cold War narrative. However, while it is easy to dimiss the antagonistic dynamic of the discourse on resistance in this period, one should remember that both German states used a particular resistance narrative to articulate the idea of a viable German tradition. The circulation of two opposing cultural memories of resistance allowed both German states to see themselves as the legitimate successor to ‘das andere Deutschland’ (the other Germany) which, according to these postwar narratives, had been in opposition to Nazi Germany all along. In this way, the two opposing resistance narratives aimed to construct a moral legacy for the postwar generations; they gave expression to a strong transgenerational appeal that makes later generations the heirs of resistance movements. F.C. De l i us’s

Mein Jahr als Mörder

Prior to unification the celebration of communist resistance was an integral part of socialist realist writing in the GDR. In West Germany, by and large, organised resistance to the Third Reich did not preoccupy the

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postwar generations of writers who, rather than highlighting the roles of a few heroic individuals and groups, aimed instead to explore the issue of collective responsibility for and conformity with the Third Reich in order to establish a discourse of contrition as the main cornerstone of West Germany’s memory culture.11 The question then is why German resistance to the Third Reich has resurfaced since unification and how the topic is treated in Christian Friedrich Delius’s novel. The narrator and protagonist of Delius’s novel Mein Jahr als Mörder is a student during the upheavals of 1968 who, through his narrative, makes a belated confession that, at one point in his life, he was planning to assassinate a former Nazi judge.12 Combining fictional elements with documentary materials, the narrative uses the device of the self-proclaimed confession to relate the story of Hans Georg Groscurth, a lesser-known figure of the German resistance sentenced to death in 1944. Groscurth, a medical doctor at the famous Moabit hospital in Berlin, was a member of a small socialist resistance group, the so-called European Union (EU), which comprised a few doctors and scientists, including Robert Havemann, the later GDR dissident. The group helped Jews, politically persecuted people, and soldiers who wanted to avoid being drafted into a lost war. The group also distributed leaflets, advocating the end of National Socialism and the formation of a united free socialist Europe. In 1943 the group’s cover was blown when some members attempted to make contact with the Soviet Union via the communist Paul Hatschek, who was already under Gestapo observation. When Hatschek was arrested, he revealed the names of the group members, who were then in turn swiftly caught, tried and sentenced. With the exception of Robert Havemann, who survived because his research was deemed ‘Â�kriegswichtig’ (important for the war), all the other group members were executed in 1944. Delius’s narrative thus makes an important contribution to the cultural memory of German resistance by reconstructing in detail one of its many forgotten stories. However, in addition to adding another building block to the cultural memory of resistance, the novel also investigates the ruthless instrumentalisation of the resistance narrative during the Cold War period. The postwar story of Groscurth’s widow Anneliese exemplifies the crude logic of Cold War politics:€ working in West Berlin as a doctor in the public health system, in 1951 Anneliese became a member of a public committee that demanded a popular referendum in East and West on German unity and the threat of remilitarisation. The West German authorities in Bonn and Berlin banned the referendum, arguing that the committee

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had been orchestrated by East Berlin. Subsequently the West Berliner Tagesspiegel published an article revealing the names of those who had supported the referendum.13 Anneliese Groscurth was especially singled out by the paper’s anti-communist witchhunt because the committee met in her home. Publicly typecast as a communist, she was sacked by the West Berlin authorities and stripped of a special pension. Caught up between the fronts of the Cold War, she lost all financial entitlements, her status as a victim of Nazism and even her right to a passport, in several lengthy court cases which spanned two decades and involved the highest West German courts before a settlement was finally reached in 1972. The detailed case study of Anneliese Groscurth’s prolonged struggle for justice thus highlights the lengthy persistence of National Socialist attitudes in the postwar period. Her story offers an anatomy of the ‘restorative’ climate of the Adenauer era, which chanelled the Nazis’ deeply ingrained anti-Bolshevism into the staunch anti-communism of the Cold War. The plot is set in train on 6 December 1968, when the newsreader of radio RIAS in Berlin announces the not-guilty verdict in the case against the former Nazi judge Hans-Joachim Rehse, who had served in Freisler’s People’s Court and who had sentenced more than 230 people, including Hans Georg Groscurth, to death. However, the novel’s protagonist hears more than the announcement of the acquittal:€ in his imagination ‘the firm male voice’ (7) of the RIAS newsreader commissions him to take revenge on Rehse for his abuse of law during the Third Reich. His initial determination to accept this imaginary assignment is bolstered by his childhood friendship with Axel Groscurth, one of the Groscurth sons, whom he had befriended before the end of the war when Anneliese and the children sought refuge in his hometown of Wehrda. As the narrating self explains, this sense of indignant outrage at the lack of justice was further fuelled by the political upheavals of the late 1960s in which a range of iconic events, such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy or the massacres in Vietnam, seemed to underline the repressiveness of the postwar order in the West (13). In this way, the narrative assumes a dual perspective, analysing both the stifling climate of the postwar era as well as the formulaic reaction of the generation of ’68 against the West German process of ‘restoration’. The narrator’s attitude to the representatives of 1968 is highly ambivalent:€on the one hand, his astute analysis of the 1950s illuminates the farreaching legacy of National Socialism, thus contextualising the ferocity of the revolt by the members of 1968 against authoritarian parents and those postwar institutions which, like the judiciary, had absorbed National

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Socialists with little fuss. According to the narrator, 1968 can only be understood with reference to the immediate postwar era, the ‘stone age of democracy’ which had buried all the conflicts that eventually erupted in the late 1960s (126). On the other hand, he shows that the generation of ’68 shared a blind ideological dogmatism with their opponents which silenced the voices of the victims of National Socialism. Delius foregrounds the ’68ers disinterest in the real victims of National Socialism in a chapter describing a demonstration against the Rehse judgement. The protagonist participates in the event, albeit reluctantly, because he wants to convey the image of anti-Nazi Germany to the wider world. However, when a victim of the ‘people’s court’ attempts to make a speech, he is drowned out by the students for whom the anti-Nazi demonstration is a pretext for voicing their own ideological concerns (49–50). Surrounded by various Marxist splinter groups, the protagonist is repelled by the omnipresence of Maoist slogans and posters which have nothing to do with the reason for the demonstration:€‘in my view, the uniform images of the Party Leader from Beijing killed the resistance fighters all over again’ (49). In the end, he leaves the demonstration disillusioned by a student movement which, in his view, is dominated by dogmatic thinking, ideological infighting and an inflated revolutionary rhetoric that swaps the legacy of National Socialism for the world revolution:€‘Why was there such an inflation of revolutionary phrases, terms and utopias? The diverse groupings did not reach the masses, why did they have to move further and further away with Mao, Lenin, Che Guevara, Trotski?’ (52). Although 1968 was supposed to mark a break with the past and the possibility of a revolutionary future, it remained shadowed by the undigested legacy of National Socialism. As the students of 1968 began to oust the ghosts of the past by targeting the office holders in West Germany who had been active supporters of the Nazi state, they were driven by an aggressive antagonism to the parental generation that left little room for the voices of the victims. For Delius’s first-person narrator, the ideological jargon which the ’68ers hurled at the politicians and at their educators and parents is thus a symptom of a far-reaching disturbance of intergenerational communication. The inability of the parental generation to acknowledge their collective responsibility for and involvement with National Socialism was replicated in their children’s inability to recognise the victims of National Socialism. Although his age makes him a contemporary of the 1968 movement, the protagonist is a Hamlet figure who tries in vain to bridge the gap between word and action, intention and deed. His original plan is to

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write a book about his motives before carrying out the murder. However, he ends up deferring action in favour of detailed research until the judge’s sudden death releases him from the assignment. In the end, the narrative is the displaced deed:€interweaving the story of the Groscurth–Havemann resistance group with the story of Anneliese Groscurth’s persecution by the West German authorities in the postwar era and the story of the ’68 generation’s emotional entrapment in the past, the narrator finally manages to produce precisely the ‘small contribution to enlightenment, to democracy and justice’ (13) that he had abandoned thirty years earlier. This project also entails the analysis of the damaged German language in the postwar era, a theme that is introduced in connection with the narrator’s childhood memories. In a significant childhood scene the narrator recalls how he first learned of the grusesome death of Axel’s father. A conversation between the young protagonist, who is depicted as a naïve village boy with little knowledge of the wider world, and his friend Axel, the more grown-up city boy, revolves around the absence of fathers in the postwar era. The village boy has many friends whose fathers are ‘photo-fathers’ that have disappeared from life behind words, such as ‘gefallen’ (killed in action) or ‘vermisst’ (missing), that have become omnipresent in postwar discourse (22). While these photo-fathers adorn the sideboards of many homes, the village boy has never heard of a father who was killed by his own people. His shock is further aggravated when Axel reveals that his father was beheaded: Head chopped off, that’s what you do with chickens:€you grab their wings with one hand, put them on the butcher’s block where they continue to struggle, and then the farmer’s wife lifts up the axe€ – because this is a woman’s job€ – and chops off the head. With the blood spurting out, the head falls onto the ground, while the chicken keeps twitching. Even with rabbits you don’t chop off the head any more, pigs are killed with a bolt in their forehead, cattle are sent to the abattoir; there is no other animal whose head is chopped off€– so why do they chop off a person’s head? The village boy is left all alone with the words ‘head chopped off’; he can’t talk with his friend about it since he has said too much already. He’s left alone with the words:€head chopped off. (23)

The shocked child attempts to make sense of the incomprehensible words ‘head chopped off’ by incorporating them into the domestic world of the countryside. These comparisons with the world of animals, however, only accentuate the absolute incongruity and incomprehensibility of this death. Delius constructs here an original scene of a trauma which is at the heart of the protagonist’s later revenge fantasies. When the stuttering

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child asks his own father for an explanation for the death of Axel’s father, the child’s deep shock and sense of fear are brushed aside by means of the language of the Cold War: Yes, that was terrible, the father answered, I think he was shot, but he was a communist after all. But€– what type of ‘but’ is this, the child thought. The word ‘communist’ was terrifying, and yet the child dared to ask another question:€what is that precisely? Now the answer is more confident, less irritated:€Someone like those in the eastern sector, where they have no freedom and where they wanted to suppress religion. (24)

While the child’s stutter gives expression to an unmastered trauma, the father’s sterile and clichéd response serves to repress memory. In this way, the scene deconstructs the notion of symptom:€ here it is not the boy’s stutter which indicates an unmastered disturbance, but the fluency of the father’s formulaic explanations which swiftly bridge the abyss of National Socialism. The phrase ‘those people in the eastern zone’ provides the convenient alibi in the West for the collective repression of the past. For Delius, the impairment of tradition is thus most evident in the impairment of the German language long after the end of the Third Reich. While the father’s words make manifest the collective resistance to introspection and analysis, his grown-up son is by no means immune to such linguistic acting-out of an unmastered past. Although he realises the debasement of the German language by Nazi jargon, his own language shows traces of an aggressiveness that turns language into a weapon of assault. When he reads the judgement against Groscurth, he stumbles across the shocking proclamation:€‘stripped of their honour for eternity, they shall be sentenced to death’ (86). The eternal timeframe of this speech act draws attention to the psychotic megalomania of the Nazi ideology which strove for eternal world dominance. Furthermore, the very terminology of the judgement reveals how this ideology has damaged the German language itself:€‘the machine gun of repetitions:€defeatist, communist, without shame, intellectualist. The language itself showed the abuse of law’ (91). Studying the judgement, the protagonist experiences this type of German as a foreign language, in fact, as a dangerous minefield that is, however, strangely familiar because it is the register of the parental generation (87). Delius brings into perspective here a subliminal ghosting effect that marked the language of the postwar era. After the war the specific jargon of the Third Reich had been collectively dropped in East and West; however, the mode of expression and the tonal quality still carried traits of a deeply ingrained aggressiveness and authoritarianism

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that produced its own legacy. For, in spite of his own linguistic sensibility, the protagonist is shown to employ linguistic patterns that display precisely the defensive aggressiveness that he had sensed in his father’s anti-communist justifications. This is exemplified in an episode with his mother at Christmas 1968 where he submits her to a self-righteous interrogation. He overtly attacks her religious world-view, but in reality his aim is to deflect her justified concerns about his prolonged studies, which she is still financing out of her meagre income. Remembering his former self, the narrator takes issue with his own selfishness that draped itself in terms of ideological superiority:€‘I had no qualms about shutting her up and was thus freed from being disturbed by her any more’ (117). In Delius’s novel, the German language itself becomes the haunting ground for the ghosts of the past. The relationship between mother and son is characterised by a fundamental ‘lack of communication’ (114), which has its origins not so much in their different world-views but in a shared inability to come to terms with the past. Both the son’s aggressive interrogation and the mother’s inability to respond to her son display an unmastered legacy that yokes the generations together. Delius does not stop at exposing the continuities between National Socialist anti-Bolshevism and West German anti-communism during the Cold War. While his narrative examines the generational dynamic between the ’68ers and a parental generation that did not manage to confront the National Socialist past, he equally highlights East Germany’s negation of any responsibility for the past by foregrounding the crude instrumentalisation of the memory of left-wing resistance in the GDR. Robert Havemann, the only survivor of the EU resistance group and, after the war, Professor of Physics at Humboldt University, played a prominent role in building a socialist Germany before becoming a dissident and€– from the point of view of the SED€– an enemy of the state. However, in Delius’s narrative he appears as a highly ambivalent figure who manipulates Anneliese Groscurth into accepting a series of political assignments in which the emerging GDR had a vested interest. One of them is her involvement with a committee that was set up under Havemann’s auspices to investigate the events surrounding the Youth World Games of 1951, held in Berlin. These games became the arena for competing Western and Eastern propaganda:€ when East German youths marched into the Western sector, singing songs and carrying socialist flags, the West saw this as a deliberate provocation. The West Berlin police subsequently beat up and arrested a large number of socialist youths. While for the Eastern press the events were indicative of Western repressiveness

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and of anti-democratic police brutality, the Western media depicted the demonstration of the socialist youth as a provocation orchestrated by the GDR. Against the backdrop of rapidly deteriorating relations between East and West, the narrator imagines a conversation between Havemann and Anneliese Groscurth in which Havemann recruits her for his public inquiry into the events surrounding the games. Seeking Anneliese’s agreement to name the committee after her dead husband, Havemann is also shown as coaching her into signing a public petition which was published in the Berliner Zeitung. The narrator shows how Havemann, in the novel at least, used a form of emotional coercion that instrumentalised his dead friend for postwar political aims (164, 167). Trapped in the binary mindset of Cold War politics, Havemann reproduces the sterile language of anti-fascism which rendered abstract the memory of Hans Georg Groscurth in the same way as the Western remembrance culture rendered abstract the memory of the participants in the events of 20 July. What all these speech acts have in common is a monologic orientation that seeks to remove legitimacy from other political beliefs. By incorporating these warring voices into his novel, Delius makes the language of the postwar period a prime site of investigation. As a damaged code, this language is full of ‘agitated words’ that point to the presence of unmastered phantoms of the past.14 In the register of the Cold War period, ‘resistance’, ‘communism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ are not abstract nouns denoting political movements, but emotionally charged and highly contested terms that, from a psychoanalytical perspective, indicate that denial and transference operate across generational boundaries. The novel analyses how phantoms entered tradition within families and even national cultures through such agitated words.15 Tracing residues of Nazi jargon and thinking in the postwar period, Delius shows that the antagonistic language of the generation of ’68 was characterised by signs of frenzied fanaticism similar to the language of their opponents. In this way, the novel features the German language as a damaged heritage that, for many decades after the war, communicated unmastered phantoms of the past. However, while the novel examines the biases and ideological filters of the generation of ’68, it is important to emphasise that it eschews generational branding. For, although his age makes the protagonist a member of ’68, he is disillusioned by the movement and its abstract ideological debates. As he wavers between the need to do something about the blatant miscarriage of justice in the Rehse judgement and a Hamletian inability to act, he increasingly loses sight of his relationship with his girlfriend Catherine, a photographer who decides

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to travel to Mexico where she hopes to capture ‘a fresh world’ (191) in photographs, which should represent, as she explains, the range of human life between poverty and beauty. Catherine’s desire for an alternative life gives expression to her generation’s subliminal longing for an unburdened life at a remove from the harsh intergenerational antagonisms of postwar Germany. The protagonist, Catherine and their friends are therefore smitten by their English friend Hugo, who represents a more playful variant of ’68. When visiting Berlin, Hugo does not feel that he is visiting a country full of Nazis:€‘he did not feel that he was in Nazi land, he said, the people here who are young, laid-back and with their long hair are definitely not Nazis’ (32). And although the protagonist dismisses Hugo’s slogan of ‘love and peace’ (34) as a quasi-religious simplification of the world, Catherine remains attracted to a version of 1968 that, in spite of its anti-imperialist agenda, was far more cheerful and flirtatious than the members of the German student movement who hid their anger at having to carry a burdened history behind an ideologically inflated language. When she returns from a trip to London she explains the appeal of a culture in which serious political debates about the Third World and Mexico over an Indian meal can go hand in hand with a general politeness in public life (274–5). Contrasting with her experience of London as an open city where different lifestyles co-exist, Berlin strikes her as a city that is still at war (276). Catherine therefore decides to travel to Mexico, where she wants to photograph the country in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt (295). As the protagonist listens to Catherine’s Mexican project, he is overcome by the desire to join her and to abandon his own scheme to avenge the members of the EU resistance movement. In the end, all of his plans are superseded by Catherine’s violent death in Mexico; she dies after being stabbed in a robbery. The story concludes with the announcement by radio RIAS that judge Rehse has died of a heart attack. Both Catherine’s search for an alternative life and the protagonist’s determination to oust the ghosts of the past are the effects of the burden of being German after the Third Reich. While the protagonist’s objective to rehabilitate the resisters gives expression to a deep-seated need for a positive heritage with which the postwar generations could connect, Catherine’s trip to Mexico attempts to bracket off the burden of the German past by way of an engagement with global political concerns. Their projects are thus the complementary symptoms of an agitated legacy which, after a period of repression, erupted with the student movement in 1968. Since then, this legacy has produced an extremely dynamic memory culture that is characterised by publicly

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conducted and, at times, ferocious memory debates as well as a nearly imperceptible anxiety of influence. Delius’s novel Mein Jahr als Mörder makes an important contribution to Germany’s cultural memory because it explores the burden of history from the perspective of a former member of the generation of ’68. In the case of Germany, 1968 is an important lieu de mémoire not so much because of its political utopia and rhetoric, but because of its unacknowledged quest for a positive tradition that, paradoxically, manifested itself in the ’68ers’ anger towards their parents. No t e s 1 Wibke Bruhns, a well-known journalist and television news presenter, published Meines Vaters Land in 2004, reconstructing the story of her father, Hans Georg Klamroth, who was tried for treason in August 1944 and hanged in the same month. Recent films about German resistance to the Third Reich include Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl. Die letzten Tage (2005), Jo Baier’s Stauffenberg. Der 20. Juli (2004), and Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (2003). The current chapter is an expanded and revised version of an earlier interpretation of Delius’s novel in my Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). I thank Palgrave/Macmillan for the permission to use sections of the earlier chapter in the present context. 2 See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory:€Rethinking the French Past, Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York:€Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–23. On the divided memory cultures in East and West Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory:€The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA and London:€Harvard University Press, 1997); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance:€Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC:€University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 3 One extreme example of the widening of the term is the so-called Bavaria Project, which understood resistance to include all acts which blocked Nazism’s total claim to power. Here, Martin Broszat coined the term ‘Resistenz’ to capture the immunity of individuals or groups to the Nazis’ total penetration of society. Examples of such acts could include the refusal to say ‘Heil Hitler’ or the continued trade by Bavarian farmers with Jews. See Martin Broszat, ‘Resistenz und Widerstand’, Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Munich and Vienna:€Oldenbourg, 1977–83), vol. 4, 691–709. 4 Ian Kershaw, ‘Resistance without the people?’, in The Nazi Dictatorship:€Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London and New York:€ Edward Arnold, 1985), 150–79; 170. 5 Kershaw, ‘Resistance without the people?’, 168–9. 6 Anton Ackermann, ‘Legende und Wahrheit über den 20. Juli’, Einheit 7 (1947), 1172–82. Quoted in Ines Reich und Kurt Finker, ‘Reaktionäre oder Patrioten? Zur Historiographie und Widerstandsforschung in der DDR bis 1990’,

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in Gerd. R. Ueberschär, ed., Der 20. Juli:€ Das andere Deutschland in der Vergangenheitspolitik nach 1945 (Berlin:€Elefanten Press, 1998), 158–78, 159–60. 7 Reich and Finker, ‘Reaktionäre oder Patrioten?’, 161. 8 In the second edition of his Offiziere gegen Hitler, Fabian von Schlabrendorff claimed that the group had worked for an external power, thus denouncing the motivation of the group members as alien to German interests. See Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler (Zurich:€ Europa Verlag, 1951), 96–7. In his biography on Carl Goerdeler, the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter labelled the group ‘Edelkommunisten’ (champagne communists) who had been in the service of the enemy. See Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart:€ Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1955), 106. The implication of Ritter’s view is that resistance was illegitimate if it served the interests of the Soviet Union. 9 See Johannes Tuchel, ‘Das Ende der Legenden. Die Rote Kapelle im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus’, in Gerd. R. Ueberschär, ed., Der 20. Juli:€ Das andere Deutschland in der Vergangenheitspolitik nach 1945 (Berlin:€Elefanten Press, 1998), 347–65. 10 See Walter Schmitthenner and Hans Buchheim, eds., Der deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler:€ Vier historisch-kritische Studien von Herrmann Graml, Hans Mommsen, Hans J. Reichardt und Ernst Wolff (Cologne and Berlin:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1966). To a certain degree this move towards enhanced differentiation was replicated even in the GDR. Although communist resistance continued to be the yardstick for all resistance movements, the discussion of conservative resistance in the GDR began to loosen the straitjacket of Marxist-Leninist historiography. For example, when in 1967 the first GDR biography on Stauffenberg appeared, it drew a comprehensive and more nuanced picture of Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters. Kurt Finker, Stauffenberg und der 20. Juli 1944 (Berlin:€Union-Verlag, 1967). 11 A notable exception is of course Peter Weiss’s monumental Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, in Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Suhrkamp Verlag in collaboration with Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1991), written between 1975 and 1981, which concerns the activities of the members of the Rote Kapelle. For an analysis of Germany’s memory culture see Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit:€ Erinnerungskulture und Geschichtspolitik (Munich:€ Beck, 2006), and Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester:€Camden House, 2006). 12 Friedrich Christian Delius, Mein Jahr als Mörder. Roman (Berlin:€Rowohlt, 2004). All subsequent references are followed by the page number in parentheses in the main text. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 13 On 1 May 1951, the West Berlin Tagesspiegel published an article entitled ‘Kommunistenfiliale in Westberlin’ (branch of communists in West Berlin) which started the witchhunt against Anneliese Groscurth. After the publication of Delius’s novel the paper made no reference to its own involvement in the Groscurth affair.

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14 See Nicolas Abraham, ‘Aufzeichnungen über das Phantom:€Ergänzungen zu Freuds Metapsychologie’, Psyche 8 (1991), 691–8, 698. 15 According to Sigrid Weigel, in so far as the family romance of nations always goes back to dark origins and includes repressed events in its tradition, one has to assume that the phantom represents a regular way of forming traditions. Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik:€ Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (Munich:€Fink, 2006), 76.

c h a p t e r 16

Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin Petra Fachinger

Yadé Kara’s debut novel Selam Berlin (2003), which, as Moray McGowan observes, ‘exemplifies Turkish-German writing’s establishment as a marketable commodity’,1 can be read in a number of ways:€ as a postÂ�unification Berlin novel and the first Turkish-German ‘unification novel’, as pop novel, as chick-lit novel with a twist, as picaresque novel, and, above all, as a self-consciously transnational novel. Because Selam Berlin is written in a colloquial style to reflect the protagonist’s age and irreverent attitude, it is fun to read, making it easy to overlook its playful irony and self-referential qualities. Moreover, the fact that it makes many textual references, particularly to recent Turkish-German fiction and film as well as to the mainstream Berlin fiction mentioned later in this chapter, is not immediately obvious. Before focusing on the transnational features of Kara’s novel, I briefly consider the other literary contexts in which it can be read. The years since German unification have witnessed a remarkable boom in literature set in Berlin by authors from both East and West, including those with a migration background, and from all generations. Yet Phil C. Langer notes that in the years following the fall of the Wall no members of the ‘younger’ generation of Turkish-German writers had chosen Berlin as a setting.2 Langer believes that the irrelevance of the ‘Berlin myth’, a discursive context marked as German, is the reason for these writers’ alleged lack of interest in the rapidly changing city. This reductive interpretation of the Turkish-German position as that of always already being outside or Other stands out in Langer’s otherwise perceptive reading of Berlin novels of the 1990s. The literary interest in Berlin that several second-generation Turkish-German writers, including Zafer Şenocak in Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998), Feridun Zaimoğlu in German Amok (2002) and Kara, have expressed shows that, in the imagination of these writers, post-unification Berlin is certainly not interchangeable with Frankfurt, Kassel or Bielefeld as Langer suggests. 241

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In these texts, Berlin signifies more than mere geographical setting. The interest of German-Turkish writers in Berlin also confirms, to cite Leslie Adelson, that ‘Germans and Turks in Germany share more culture (as an ongoing imaginative project) than is often presumed when one speaks of two discrete worlds encountering each other across a civilizational divide’.3 The fictional treatment of Berlin in Kara’s text, whose action spans the time between the day of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the day of German unification, is exemplary of the new ways in which TurkishGerman writing has emerged as a participant in the ‘Berlin myth’. The significance of Selam Berlin as the first Turkish-German Wenderoman€– that is, a novel concerned with the immediate phenomenon of the fall of the Wall and its ramifications for the protagonist’s life€– puts it in the company of other novels that mark what McGowan has called a ‘turning point’ in Turkish-German writing. In his view, the first turning point was the publication of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue) in 1990 and the award of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1991 for her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai (Life is a Carawanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went Out the Other, 1992). The second was the publication of Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak (Wop Speak, 1995) ‘which together with the author’s media presence brought Turkish-German writing to an entirely new audience’.4 I would argue that Selam Berlin marks a third turning point by successfully addressing the most salient topics in German history such as the Holocaust, the German–Jewish relationship, the German student movement, and unification within a transnational context, and by using some of the strategies of pop literature. Kara’s nineteen-year-old protagonist Hasan Selim Khan Kazan, aka Hansi, who was born in Berlin Kreuzberg and has just graduated from the German school in Istanbul, returns to Berlin in order not to miss the ‘Berlin Party’5€– that is, the celebratory atmosphere in the wake of the fall of the Wall. The novel seems to make reference here to Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998), whose protagonist Sascha missed the historic events because he left Berlin in February of 1989 to be writer in residence at a small American college and subsequently feels ambivalent about unification upon his return in the summer of 1992. Rather than using Berlin as a mere backdrop, Kara engages the city in several emerging literary discourses and paradigms:€Berlin as a city in transition, Berlin as ‘play zone’,6 and Berlin as the ‘other’ city. The novel opens with the image of Hasan watching his parents stare at the TV screen in their living room in Istanbul, on which the images of the opening of the Berlin Wall unfold. Later in the novel it becomes clear why the opening of the Wall

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is bad news for Hasan’s father:€he has a son with an East German woman whom he still sees regularly on his business trips to East Berlin. To ensure that his second family remains his secret, he decides to leave immediately for the newly united Berlin where he runs a travel agency and where his Turkish family has a second apartment. Upon his arrival and in the days that follow, Hasan traverses the city on foot and by S-Bahn taking stock of the changes. The S-Bahn, because of its political significance in connecting the two halves of the city, has always played an important role in Berlin literature by evoking the city’s convoluted past. Journeys on the S-Bahn, particularly between Bahnhof Zoo and Friedrichstraße, representing the gulf between East and West, are a common motif in postwar Berlin texts.7 Hasan is especially fascinated by the masses of East Germans crowding the S-Bahn stations on their shopping tours. In an ironic reversal of ‘Western’ colonisation of the ‘East’ in the wake of the fall of the Wall, Hasan portrays East Germans as invading the West. As Mary Beth Stein puts it:€ ‘The arrival of the Other German upset essentialised categories of East/West; us/them; here/ there; order/disorder that the Wall had seemed to contain and by which it so conveniently defined postwar German experience and identity.’8 However, unlike many West Germans, Hasan does not feel threatened by East German otherness. The East Germans’ visibility (they can easily be identified by their drab uniformity) amuses the fashion-conscious Hasan, who shares his interest in style and brand names with many of the protagonists of German pop literature. As much as East Germans become objects of his ethnographic gaze, the three young women with whom Hasan comes to share an apartment and who, as he explains, ‘come from West Germany and so were not used to talking to Turks’ (205), treat him like a native informant. Hasan observes:€‘When they went back to their small towns, they were ahead of the other Wessis. They had come to know everything about Turks and multiculturalism’ (205). While he is not afraid of East German otherness, he does fear the neo-Nazi gangs that are becoming a predictable presence in the city. Narrowly escaping an assault himself, he learns that the group that harassed him in the subway later assaulted his best friend Kazim, who is also a German-Turk. He feels safe only when he gets off at the Kottbusser Tor:€‘I was relieved to see so many people with dark hair in the station’ (334). While Hasan realises that commuters at the Bahnhof Zoo are indifferent to his plight and will not come to his defence, Kreuzberg appears as a relatively safe haven. However, as Ulrike Zitzlsperger observes, the specific and unique ‘meaning’ that some Berlin

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districts had during the Wall years changed dramatically when it came down. This is particularly true of Kreuzberg, which, formerly situated at the margin of the city and in the shadow of the Wall, has moved to the centre.9 A number of other recent Berlin novels such as Sven Regener’s Herr Lehmann (Mr Lehmann, 2001) and Inka Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin (The Shadow Boxer, 1999) link their protagonists’ coming-of-age with their leaving Kreuzberg. The fall of the Wall marks the end of a lifestyle that identifies Kreuzberg as a refuge for non-conformists, a multicultural melting pot, and home to the largest transnational Turkish community outside of Turkey. Although Hasan eventually moves out of Kreuzberg, it remains a place of memory as well as a sanctuary for him. While his West German roommates treat the post-Wall city as a tabula rasa, the dismantÂ� ling of the Wall and the re-zoning of city districts indicate that the myth of Berlin as a city of alternatives is being replaced by that of Berlin as a city of the future, as Zitzlsperger puts it.10 Kara’s novel not only ironically captures moments of Berlin’s changing topography, but also satirises the swift turnover of cultural trends. Hasan is hired by a famous West German film-maker to play a Turkish drug dealer. He describes the plot as ‘a kind of Westside Story à la Kreuzberg including vengeance, blood, honour, disgrace, and murder’ (220). In an act of self-Orientalisation, he reinforces the common stereotypes of the ‘Turk’ with his effort to ‘improve’ the script:€‘The threatening exchanges were so lame and artificial that they reminded me of the Tatort11 Turks … To make it more real, I came up with a few Turkish expressions’ (220). While the film-maker believes that things Turkish are selling best at this particular moment, he turns his interest to things Jewish a few months later. The novel thus treats German philo-Semitism and the commercialisation of ethnicity with a great deal of humour and irony. Berlin is also portrayed as a kind of ‘play zone’€ – that is, a carnivalesque space in which people watch each other perform. In her discussion of Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone (Play Zone, 1999), Inka Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin (1999), and Christa Schmidt’s Eselsfest (Festum asinorum, 1999), Gerstenberger observes that ‘[i]f recent literature is any indication, Berlin is a place where people pursue sex’ (259). Like many other postWall novels, Selam Berlin probes Berlin through the topos of sex and sexuality. Where Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1996), arguably the very first Wenderoman, portrays the fall of the Wall as an act of male sexual conquest, Hasan secretly masturbates on the family sofa in Istanbul as his parents witness the opening of the Wall on the TV screen. Watching his parents freeze, he believes that his father is having

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a heart attack brought on by his activity:€‘“Baba, Babaaa!” I croaked out of my granite hard erection … When I recovered, a damp cloth lay across my forehead. My Levis 501s were sticky between my legs. It seemed like my parents were discussing something important’ (7). Ironically, Hasan’s sexual prowess does not match that of the protagonist of Helden wie wir, as he painfully comes to learn in his relationship with Cora, a photographer and documentary film-maker. On one of his exploratory walks through the city, Hasan sees Cora taking pictures of the disintegrating Wall. When she becomes aware of Hasan’s interest in her, she asks him to pose looking through its holes. Following Cora’s instructions, he begins a conversation with one of the guards on the other side of the Wall while Cora records the scene on videotape. For the nineteenth-century flâneur, women, observed on his walks through the city, become the objects of a sexualising gaze, whereas Hasan becomes the object of this woman’s calculating gaze. Cora, who happens to be the film-maker’s girlfriend, later callously dismisses him as a lover. As the film-maker switches his professional interest from Turks to Jews, Cora replaces Hasan with a Klezmer musician from Riga. For them and for other members of their circle, who live in a world reminiscent of that described in Zaimoğlu’s German Amok, Berlin is a ‘play zone’, a space in which the individual can appropriate a range of identities without serious consequences. Thus Selam Berlin also self-consciously taps into another genre that flourished in the 1990s:€the pop novel. Sabine von Dirke observes that the pop literature of the Berlin Republic is characterised by the following features:€it focuses on daily life, thematises the increased material uncertainty brought about by the global New Economy, often criticises consumerist society for ‘generat[ing] nothing but boredom and deceitful interpersonal relationships’, uses ‘predominantly first-person narrators and protagonists [who] have typically been raised in a solidly bourgeois milieu with access to higher education’, portrays characters who are as ‘avid connoisseurs of high culture as they are of modern music and shopping’, and engages in ‘label-crashing’€– that is, the frequent and deliberate use of brand names as part of a ‘neo-Realist representational strategy that attempts to convey contemporary life in an immediate, unsublimated way’. It also portrays the younger generation’s attitude towards life and politics as markedly different from that of the 1968 generation.12 According to Hasan, the way people dress reflects their personality and their values. His mother’s style thus indicates both her common sense and her cosmopolitan aspirations:€‘Mama’s style was a combination of Istanbul chic, burda katalog, and Italian design’ (114). While she feels most comfortable in Istanbul, she

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appreciates German products and know-how and admires the elegance of Italy and France. Hasan’s Boston-bound brother Ediz, like many educated young Turks who dream of attending business school in the USA, is described as follows:€‘As usual, Ediz had the classic look:€a cashmere scarf and Hungarian shoes. All that he was missing was a briefcase to make him business class. Ediz liked to be as well groomed and as well dressed as the boys from Eton’ (114). Hasan’s eccentric friend Kazim is characterised by a more flamboyant look:€ ‘He wore a stud in his earlobe and a black bandanna, a Calvin Klein suit, and cowboy boots of course. He looked like a city pirate although the Spree hardly offers any adventures’ (76). Finding only the wrong kind of ‘adventure’, Kazim leaves Berlin to follow his girlfriend Sukjeet, who is of Indian background, to London. In contradistinction to the younger generation, Hasan’s father and his friend and business partner Halim, who had influential SED friends, refer to themselves as Marxists. Halim met his German wife Ingrid on 2 June 1967, when thousands of German students took to the streets during the official visit of the Shah of Iran to protest against his brutally repressive regime:€‘Ingrid used to run around barefoot in the old days, and during the demonstration against the state visit of the Shah … she was hit in the head. She lay on the ground in front of the Deutsche Oper Berlin gushing blood when Halim lifted her up and carried her to the nearest hospital’ (26). While Hasan’s father Said and Halim are content with the moderate financial success of their travel agency, ironically, things take a more profit-oriented turn when Said’s East German partner and mother of his third son takes over the business. Chick lit uses a narrative discourse that shares with pop literature a focus on everyday life and the use of first-person narrators who are often connoisseurs of pop culture and shopping, and it too engages in labelcrashing. The term ‘chick lit’ was coined in 1995 by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey De Shell for the title of their anthology of ‘postfeminist’ fiction. As Mazza observes, they did not anticipate that ‘ten years later [their] tag would be greasing the commercial book industry machine’.13 Yet contemporary transnational chick lit, with its capacity for ambiguity, is not necessarily the complicit product of a new individualism defined by consumption, but is often critical of dominant trends in contemporary culture. It has also proven itself to be a very adaptable genre, ‘one that has tapped into larger social shifts in places like India and post-Communist eastern Europe, where traditional values collide in unexpected ways with a new economic order’.14 As Wenche Ommundsen argues, ‘it is this balancing of sameness and difference across a diverse cultural terrain that makes

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chick lit an ideal site for the study of globalization’.15 Common chick-lit themes include a single female protagonist in her twenties or early thirties with whom readers can identify, a complicated love interest, a circle of supportive friends, parents with odd habits, body image and clothes, and food obsessions. Chick-lit novels are usually written in first person in a funny, sarcastic, neurotic or irreverent voice. They have an urban setting, and usually end happily. Most recent ‘ethnic’ chick-lit novels tend to raise issues of identity, femininity and transnationality, portraying their female protagonists as moving freely between cultures and nations. In Germany, some of the most interesting contributions to contemporary chick lit have been made by writers with migration backgrounds such as Iranian-German Shirin Kumm in Royadesara (2003), Turkish-German Asli Sevindim in Candlelight Döner (Candlelight Kebab, 2005), and Russian-Jewish-German Lena Gorelik in Hochzeit in Jerusalem (Wedding in Jerusalem, 2007). Their multiple perspectives and their participation in at least two different societies enable them to view each of these societies from a culturally and discursively privileged position, and to undermine the reductive dichotomy of the clash of civilisations.16 Furthermore, by deconstructing the stereotype of the ‘Oriental woman’, Kumm and a number of Turkish-German writers17 celebrate a new transnational femininity. In doing so, they participate in a discourse that places itself in opposition to that of ‘Kanak Attack’ with its propagation of images of Turkish-German masculinity and emphasis on the local, the Kiez (neighbourhood). While using a number of chick-lit strategies in Selam Berlin, particularly those that highlight the transnational qualities of her characters’ lives€– all of the novel’s intimate relationships are cross-cultural, for example€– Kara writes chick lit with a twist by using a narrator who shares with the typical chick-lit heroine an acute sense of urban fashion and style, an irreverent attitude, and a proclivity for falling in love with the wrong partner. In doing so, she emphasises the qualities that put the recent wave of Turkish-German chick lit in opposition to the ‘Kanak’ discourse. Moreover, Hasan’s naïve gaze and the fact that he is easily taken advantage of make him look like a modern-day picaro. Although the definition of the picaresque, which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain, is problematic and contentious, particularly among Hispanists, it is a critical term frequently applied to contemporary German texts. Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995), Fritz Rudolf Fries’s Die Nonnen von Bratislava (The Nuns of Bratislava, 1994) and Der Roncalli-Effekt (The Roncalli Effect, 1999), Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal (Dance at the Canal,

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1996), Michael Klonovsky’s Land der Wunder (Land of Miracles, 2009), Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998) and Neue Leben (New Lives, 2007), and Jens Sparschuh’s Der Zimmerspringbrunnen (The Indoor Fountain, 1994) have all been referred to as picaresque by the critics. A number of Turkish-German writers have also written novels with picaresque features. Among them are Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1992) and Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998), Akif Pirinçci’s Tränen sind immer das Ende (Tears Are Always the End, 1980), and Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Abschaum (Scum, 1997) and German Amok (2002). Since the picaresque tends to flourish in times of social change, it does not surprise that many of the post-Wall writers born and raised in the GDR and those with Turkish-German backgrounds are drawn to this genre. The features usually associated with the picaresque were first identified by Claudio Guillén in ‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’, in which he lists the formal and thematic properties of the genre:€‘the pícaro both incorporates and transcends the wanderer, the jester, and the have-not, and the pícaro … is obliged to fend for himself … in an environment for which he is not prepared’; ‘the picaresque novel is a pseudoautobiography’ and ‘everything else in the story is colored with the sensibility, or filtered through the mind of the pícaro-narrator’; ‘the narrator’s view is also partial and prejudiced’ and ‘offers no synthesis of human life’; ‘the total view of the pícaro is reflective, philosophical, critical on religious or moral grounds’; ‘there is a general stress on the material level of existence or of subsistence, on sordid facts, hunger, money’; ‘the pícaro (though not always a servant of many masters) observes a number of collective conditions:€social classes, professions, caractères, cities, and nations’ which may or may not provide the pretext for social criticism and satire; ‘the pícaro … moves horizontally through space and vertically through society’.18 This list makes it obvious why the picaresque has come to be associated with authors who write from a non-mainstream position and those who portray immigrants and other outsiders. Although not all Wenderomane have picaresque elements, a fair number of them use the picaresque mode to criticise political practices in the GDR, the collapse of the socialist society, and the way in which it was colonised by the Federal Republic of Germany. By beginning her narrative with the fall of the Wall, Kara places her text within the literary discourse of the picaresque Wenderoman. Selam Berlin in many ways reflects the transition from a literary discourse preoccupied with the concepts of nation and nationality typical of the Germany of the 1990s to a discourse shaped by ever increasing globalisation. Within

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this transnational discourse, the figure of the picaro/picara signifies a position not between but across locations, cultures and languages. German writing has become increasingly transnational since the early 2000s:€ authors write their texts in a globalised world, the crossing of national borders has become a major theme, and the publishing industry treats books as cultural commodities in the multinational flow of capital and labour. Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser suggest at least three reasons why ‘transnational’ as a term reflects recent political, socio-historical and cultural developments more accurately than ‘migrant’ or ‘diasporic’. One reason is that ‘states are beginning to reappraise traditional concepts of sovereignty and citizenship’. A second reason is ‘the development of new identities among migrants, who are anchored (socially, culturally and physically) neither in their place of origin nor in their place of destination’. Several contributors to the volume also suggest that ‘transnationalism can be conceived as a reconstruction of “place” or “locality”’; that is, the meaning of ‘home’ has been changing within international migration. Transnational migrants have allegiances to multiple places, and they maintain economic, political and social networks that span several societies.19 More generally, the term ‘transnational’ may refer to the increase in the scope of cross-Â�border exchanges of cultures, ideas, money, commodities and people. With the creation of the character of Hasan, who moves with ease between German and Turkish social realities, Kara subverts binary identity politics. Her novel is involved in a complex negotiation about where is East and where is West, and how to distinguish East Germans from West Germans, Germany from Turkey, and Turkish-Germans from Turks. Turkey’s ambiguous position in and out of Europe at the juncture of two continents is juxtaposed with Germany’s geographical and cultural position between Eastern and Western Europe. Significantly, Hasan’s family disagrees as to where Europe begins:€‘In Mama’s view Europe ends south of the Alps. Everything beyond was too Nordic and cold. Baba took the opposite view:€for him, Europe begins north of the Alps’ (10). Selam Berlin also portrays Istanbul as a society in constant flux. The ‘old’ Istanbul, in which his parents grew up, no longer exists: For Baba and Mama Istanbul continues to be the city of glittering lights, tavernas, and open-air cinemas, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived peacefully side by side with each other. A one-million city situated on two continents and built on seven hills … But their Istanbul no longer exists. Today twelve million people live in this city … There are parts of the city where women wear shalwars and chadors. A few streets away, transvestites and prostitutes go about their business. (11–12)

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By comparison, Berlin, particularly the divided city, appears as both less sophisticated and less cosmopolitan. Selam Berlin also inverts common German stereotypes of the ‘Turk’ by portraying middle-class Turkish society as ‘orientalising’ Turkish-Germans:€‘These people live in the middle of Kreuzberg, Berlin, Europe. But they look east to Mecca. In Berlin, they were more Turkish than the Turks in Istanbul … The wealthy associate Germany with guest workers and menial jobs. Florida, Boston, and New York are the places that interest them’ (156–7). As the novel demonstrates, ‘East’ and ‘West’ are unstable concepts that are open to interpretation and whose usefulness is therefore limited and questionable. Selam Berlin thus stresses the inevitable fact of cultural transfers and mixing of Eastern and Western traditions in a global society. As a true member of the generation born in the late 1970s, Hasan has the kind of flexibility and mobility that a transnational society demands:€ ‘I did not want to have to commit myself … The nomad within urged me to move on … I wanted to go further west to London, New York, and San Francisco. Or should I go east to Tokyo, Teheran, and Tashkent?’ (382). His final words ‘I was enjoying my fag, and suddenly I knew where my life was going’ (382) reflect Hasan’s newly found self-confidence and his attempt to liberate himself from cultural and societal constraints. With regard to Turkish-German transnationalism, Ayhan Kaya summarises her observations as follows: Most German-Turks have become transmigrants, who can literally and symbolically travel back and forth between their countries of destination and of origin. They have developed something new along the way. Molded by social, cultural, economic, and political imperatives of both countries, they have adopted a rather more vibrant set of identities€– more cosmopolitan, syncretic, rhizomatic, and transnational. Agents of this transnational space, like hip-hop youth, are no longer migrants who left their homelands once upon a time to become entrapped in the confines of a remote land, but are also influencing social, political, economic, and cultural spheres of life in Turkey.20

Although Selam Berlin in many ways appears to be a fictional illustration of this celebratory assessment of contemporary Turkish-German life, it also represents racism as a force to be reckoned with in post-Wall Germany. As well, although Hasan is well educated, bilingual, well dressed and attractive, he is often perceived as Ausländer (foreigner) in Germany and as Almanci (German) in Turkey. It is one of the paradoxes of globalisation that while many reject the homogenising force of ‘McWorld’, the deepest fears appear to be directed at difference, as Benjamin Barber

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argues.21 Ulrich Beck has suggested that for several reasons Germany is particularly traumatised by changes associated with globalisation:€both its market economy and its social welfare system are challenged through the mobility of capital and the exodus of jobs through outsourcing. Germans also appear threatened by the flux of people as it is seen to undermine its self-image as an ethnically homogenous nation-state. Moreover, accelerated economic and cultural globalisation coincided with unification, creating increased tension between nation-building and transnational forces. As Beck puts it: Not only does this ‘denationalization shock’ call into question the key categories of postwar German identity, the corporatist ‘German model’ and its special social system; the whole experience and challenge also conflict with the disputes surrounding the unification of the two Germanies. For the unification drama€… forced the Germans into a preoccupation with themselves … It was during this phase of self-contemplation and self-questioning that the news of globalization burst on the country.22

As a consequence, German fears of difference and change have been projected onto non-European migrants and refugees. Ironically, it is not the space between Germany and Turkey that is the focus of Selam Berlin, but the space between the two Germanies and the effects of the fall of the Wall and unification on its TurkishGerman characters and their German partners. Hasan points out that he lives in an apartment building on Adalbertstraße that is located on top of the Wall rather than next to it:€‘There are streets in Berlin half of which belong to the East and the other to the West. I used to live in one of these streets immediately next to€– on top of the border’ (34).23 The dismantling of the Wall, by which Germany became physically a transÂ� national space, does not benefit the Turkish characters in this novel. Through its almost immediate disappearance Hasan loses a space in which he could be creatively transgressive:€‘After school, I strolled along the Wall with a piece of stolen chalk. That way, I didn’t get lost. The Wall stood there like a mountain. I wrote “Doff, anani sikim, Ali votze”’ (35).24 His father Said replaces his likeable Turkish wife with the not so likeable East German Rosa, and the travel agency loses its contract with the GDR. Sascha, the protagonist of Gefährliche Verwandtschaft, also misses the reassuring presence of the Wall:€ ‘It seemed that the fall of the Wall, the collapse of the old order, did not only have a liberating effect. Without the Wall one no longer felt at home. Identity as a concept has come to replace familiarity. People now feel the need to give

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themselves and others a fixed identity to justify feelings of comfort or distance.’25 According to Sascha, the creation of the transnational space has made identity politics more complex and urgent. Although Sascha, who is an unreliable narrator, should not be mistaken for Şenocak’s mouthpiece, the latter has repeatedly claimed that Heimat cannot be located in a particular place, but that everyone carries Heimat within themselves. Through their interest in foreign places, transnational texts and films reconfigure the notion of ‘home’. No longer is leaving one place and arriving in another necessarily accompanied by feelings of alienation and dislocation. Not only have cultures come to overlap to a certain degree, but awareness of the world as a single place has become part of everyday reality. Arjun Appadurai takes this notion one step further by claiming that imagination gains a special kind of power in people’s lives. More people in more parts of the world consider a greater range of ‘possible’ lives, the mass media being a major influence, than they have ever done before.26 By choosing to be a nomad rather than an exile, Hasan is doing just that:€he considers a greater range of ‘possible’ lives. Interestingly, he leaves Berlin and Istanbul, both described here as urban centres in constant flux, to move on to London, where it seems to be easier for him to be a citizen of the city without having to be a citizen of the nation€– we rejoin him there in Kara’s next novel Café Cyprus (2008). This utopian moment, which celebrates the nomad as the ideal global citizen, highlights the potential dilemma of transnational literature. Kara, who grew up in Berlin and has lived in various urban centres including London, Istanbul and Hong Kong, in an act of transnational self-stylisation, claims that she wrote Selam Berlin in Hong Kong’s Peak Café because it serves the only real cappuccino in town.27 Moreover, the book has been marketed as global literature, the cover of its first edition advertising it as ‘a breathtakingly tragicomic novel, featuring colourful characters and episodes, East and West’. Questions that need to be asked are to what extent does transnational literature resist or participate in the universalising discourse, and to what extent is it ambivalent about globalisation and aware of its own ambivalence. With her two novels Kara has joined the ranks of what Regina Römhild refers to as ‘transnational cultural brokers’. In Römhild’s words, transnational cultural brokers ‘play a crucial role in communicating, blending and commodifying local cultures of diverse origins for the cultural market-place of the global city’.28 Thus, at a new turning point, novels such as Selam Berlin and Café Cyprus show the necessity of renegotiating what ‘German’ literature is or can be.

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No t e s 1 Moray McGowan, ‘Turkish-German fiction since the mid 1990s’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 196–214, 200. 2 Phil C. Langer, Kein Ort Überall:€Die Einschreibung von ‘Berlin’ in die deutsche Literatur der neunziger Jahre (Berlin:€ Weidler Buchverlag, 2002), 193. Berlin has figured prominently in the films of young German-Turkish directors such as Thomas Arslan. 3 Leslie Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature:€Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York and Basingstoke:€Palgrave, 2005), 20. 4 McGowan, ‘Turkish-German fiction’, 197. 5 Yadé Kara, Selam Berlin (Zurich:€Diogenes, 2003), 9. Hereafter page numbers will be in parentheses in the main body of the text. All translations are mine. 6 Katharina Gerstenberger argues that ‘united Germany’s capital has inspired numerous city texts that probe the New Berlin through the topos of sex and sexuality’. She makes playful reference in the title of her article to the title of one of the novels that she includes in her discussion:€Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone (1999). Katharina Gerstenberger, ‘Play zones:€ The erotics of the New Berlin’, The German Quarterly, 76:3 (2003), 59–72. 7 See Keith Bullivant, ‘The divided city:€Berlin in post-war German literature’, in Derek Glass et al., eds., Berlin. Literary Images of a City:€Eine Großstadt im Spiegel der Literatur (Berlin:€E. Schmidt, 1989), 162–77, 173. 8 Mary Beth Stein, ‘The banana and the Trabant:€ Representations of the “Other” in a united Germany’, in Ernst Schürer et al., eds., The Berlin Wall:€Representations and Perspectives (New York:€Peter Lang, 1996), 333–46, 334. 9 Ulrike Zitzlsperger, ‘Städte in der Stadt:€ Berliner Erfahrungssräume’, Seminar, 40:3 (2004), 277–92, 281. 10 Zitzlsperger, ‘Städte in der Stadt’, 281. 11 Tatort (Crime Scene) is a popular long-running German/Austrian crime television series. 12 Sabine von Dirke, ‘Pop literature in the Berlin Republic’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–24, 113–22. 13 Cris Mazza, ‘Who’s laughing now? A short history of chick lit and the perversion of a genre’, in Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit:€The New Woman’s Fiction (New York:€Routledge, 2006), 17–28. 14 Rachel Donadio, ‘The chick-lit pandemic’, New York Times Book Review, 19 March 2006, 31. 15 Wenche Ommundsen, ‘From China with love:€Chick lit and the new crossÂ� over fiction’, in A. Robert Lee, China Fictions/English Language:€ Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2008), 327–45. 16 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993).

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17 See Karin E. Yeşilada’s ‘“Nette Türkinnen von nebenan”:€Die neue deutschtürkische Harmlosigkeit als literarischer Trend’, in Helmut Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur:€Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration (Amsterdam:€ Rodopi, 2009), 117–41. 18 Claudio Guillén, Literature as System:€ Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton University Press, 1971), 71–84. 19 Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser, eds., New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 20 Ayhan Kaya, ‘German-Turkish transnational space:€A separate space of their own’, German Studies Review, 30:3 (2007), 483–502, 483. 21 Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York:€Times Books, 1995). 22 Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge:€Polity Press, 2000), 14. 23 The fact that Hasan corrects himself by saying that the apartment building is located on the border rather than next to it also recalls the popular German children’s song ‘On the Wall, on the Lookout’, which in the GDR received an ironic subtext with its reference to the Berlin Wall and Stasi bugging devices. Also, the allusion to divided streets recalls Thomas Brussig’s film Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (1999), which he co-directed with Leander Haußmann and subsequently converted into a novel. 24 Kara provides the English translation in a footnote:€‘Fuck your mother.’ 25 Zafer Şenocak, Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Munich:€Babel Verlag, 1998), 47. 26 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture, 2:2 (1990), 1–24, 7–9. 27 Yadé Kara, ‘Ich hatte die Figur vor Augen und den Ton im Ohr:€ Das Berliner Zimmer im Gespräch mit der Berliner Autorin Yadé Kara’. www.Â� berlinerzimmer.de/eliteratur/yadekara_interview.htm (accessed 22 April 2010). 28 Regina Römhild, ‘Confronting the logic of the nation-state:€Transnational migration and cultural globalisation in Germany’, Ethnologia Europaea, 33 (2003), 61–72, 69.

c h a p t e r 17

Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) Stuart Taberner

Non-Euclidean geometry, number theory, and the eighteenth-century geological cult of Neptunism€ – these and other scientific obscurities scarcely seem to be the stuff of a novel destined to be a global hit. Yet Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) was precisely that. Following its release in 2005, it topped the German bestseller lists for over a year, sold more than a million copies by 2007,1 was translated into forty languages, and won a range of literary prizes, including the Candide Prize (2005), the Heimito-von-Doderer Prize (2006), and the Kleist Prize (2006). A book about two German historical figures, the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777–1855), opening with their meeting in September 1828 at the seventh German Scientific Congress and then moving back in time to tell, in alternating chapters, of Humboldt’s travels to South America and central Asia and Gauß’s obsession with parallel lines and ‘curved space’, had seemingly demolished the truism that when it comes to German literature and international markets ‘only Nazis sell’. (The previous honourable exception was Patrick Süskind’s Parfum [Perfume] from 1985.) As Mark M. Anderson pithily commented in The Nation:€‘Even more surprising:€It has nothing to do with Hitler.’2 Frequent references in newspaper reviews to Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) and to Latin American magical realists such as Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rolfo confirm both the novel’s global reputation and the intertextual ambition of its author.3 Without doubt, Kehlmann’s narrative is strongly reminiscent of Pynchon’s tale of the dour Charles Mason (in Die Vermessung, Humboldt is the killjoy), the licentious Jeremiah Dixon (Gauß in the German book), and their desire to give geometric expression to the Age of Reason by mapping the ‘new’ continent of America. The two surveyors of British North America even get a brief, most likely ironic, mention in the text.4 255

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As far as magical realism is concerned, bizarre happenings or illogical breaks frequently cut across an otherwise matter-of-fact narrative, disrupting the neat categorisations of Enlightenment thinking and revealing the German characters’ inability to cope with phenomena that they cannot measure or explain scientifically. Suddenly confronted by a sea monster off the coast of Tenerife, for example, Humboldt’s reaction points not only to the absence of a capacity for wonder but perhaps also to the rationalist prejudices of German and European culture at the time:€‘He decided to write nothing about it’ (45). Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt, it might be argued, selfÂ�consciously references ‘world literature’€– Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and magical realism qualify as such according to the definitions offered by David Damrosch in What is World Literature? (2003)€– in order to position itself as an ‘opening-out’ from the supposed provinciality of postwar German writing. Certainly, the appearance in Die Vermessung der Welt of Goethe, who first suggested the term Weltliteratur (‘world literature’),5 and the allusions to Kafka, in the chapter ‘Der Garten’ (‘The Garden’), which draws on Das Schloss (The Castle, 1922),6 may indicate nostalgia for past instances of German literature’s global impact. To this extent, Kehlmann’s novel displays a perhaps surprising affinity with other recent works such as Christian Kracht’s Faserland (Frayed-Land, 1995), in which a self-alienated dandy’s journey through a pitifully provincial Germany swamped by globalised consumerism ends in Switzerland at the (grotesquely defiled) grave of Thomas Mann. Geometry, mathematics and geology are thus clearly not the real themes of Die Vermessung der Welt. Indeed, as Kathryn M. Olesko points out, ‘there are gross inaccuracies that make historians of science wince’.7 The more profound concern is with the unstable simultaneity of a provincial longing for ‘home’ and an unbounded attraction to the vastness of the world that, ever since Humboldt’s era, has been seen as ‘typically’ German. Humboldt writes in French and prefers Paris to Berlin (214) but ultimately returns to the Prussian capital. Gauß never leaves the Germanspeaking lands, having little interest in foreign parts, but even he recognises the provinciality of his home:€‘Germany was not a land of cities … it was made up of thousands of forests and villages’ (194). The background to this interplay of Fernweh (‘longing-for-afar’) and Heimweh (‘longingfor-home’), embodied in the only apparent contrast between Humboldt and Gauß, is the period from the Napoleonic invasion up to the 1848 revolutions, a time of growing national consciousness as well as a time

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when Germans began to engage more intensively with the world. The correspondences between this epoch and the post-1990-unification period should be self-evident. In this chapter, I argue that Die Vermessung der Welt can be read as a sophisticated engagement both with broad philosophical questions relating to cross-cultural understanding and, more locally, contemporary Germany’s place in the world. The novel’s alternating chapters on Humboldt’s travels to South America and central Asia and Gauß’s work on ‘curved space’ generates, I suggest, an intriguing dialectic between Enlightenment universalism (that universal Reason leads to universal understanding) and cultural relativism€ – that is, the proposition that cultures are so shaped by history, custom and language that attempts to ‘translate’ them are doomed to be inadequate. This dialectic was central to Humboldt’s period, of course, roughly equating to the dialogue between Weimar Classicism and Romanticism, but the novel most likely also intervenes in the modern-day reworking of the same debates, for example, in relation to the legacy of 1968, to Germany’s post-Holocaust self-critical tolerance, and to multi-culturalism. More generally, its tone of (often tragicomic) self-effacement perhaps reflects the vulnerability of liberal humanism in the face of religious, ethnic and ideological bigotry since the end of the Cold War and post-9/11. Notwithstanding these rather sobering contexts, however, the synthesis of the extremes of universalism and relativism suggested via the juxtaposition of Gauß and Humboldt may also offer a more optimistic possibility for German culture in the present. Thus Gauß’s postulation that seemingly parallel lines in fact exist in an ever-changing relationship of convergence and divergence to one another, even potentially intersecting, certainly discredits universalism (i.e. everything is relative) but it also allows for multiple perspectives that may cross. German culture need not move along a (gloriously separate) parallel trajectory; nor need it deny its own specificities while creatively traversing the lines drawn by others. In the case of Kehlmann’s novel, a ‘German’ story of scientific genius, failed liberalism and emerging nationalism intersects with a ‘non-German’ aesthetic emphasising readability, entertainment and humour. At the same time, this intersection of perspectives may not be able to resolve the novel’s own contradictory Fernweh/Heimweh:€its straining to participate in Weltliteratur on the one hand and, on the other, its (nostalgically tinged) anxiety that German culture imitates rather than leads, that in the present, as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Germany remains a ‘belated’ nation.

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‘↜“You come from us,” said Goethe, “from here. You remain our ambassador, even over the seas”↜’ (37). The hint of smug superiority implied within the emphasis on ‘from us’ and ‘from here’ is hard to miss as Germany’s greatest poet sends Humboldt into the world as an ambassador for Weimar Classicism. Nor does Humboldt display any greater humility when he arrives in South America. His disgust at the persistence of slavery is genuine, an emblem of his Enlightenment conviction that reason inhabits all men (the British later prevent him from travelling to India on account of his anti-slavery rhetoric), yet his grasp of the way concepts such as reason and freedom are culturally determined is limited. Thus he buys three slaves in order to free them but cannot fathom their reaction:€‘One of them asked where they were supposed to go now’ (70). Elsewhere, his inability to reflect on his own assumptions has more damaging consequences. For Humboldt, then, it appears entirely ‘reasonable’ that he would remove body parts from a burial site in order to transport them to Europe for examination (120). What is intriguing about Kehlmann’s text, however, is that it does not straightforwardly present the critique of nineteenth-century European condescension that the modern reader, alive to the complexities of cultural difference, might expect. The book is not an invitation to perform an ‘orientalist’ reading in the manner of Edward Saïd of Humboldt’s voyages, therefore. (Indeed, Kehlmann offers a balanced impression of the real Humboldt’s ambivalent status as exploiter, colonial stooge, abolitionist and proto-environmentalist.)8 Rather, there may be a suggestion that the failure to understand ‘others’ may not simply be a matter of insufficient self-reflection but a symptom of a multitude of different ways of perceiving the world. In an extreme form, the cultural relativism thereby implied would demolish the universalist message at the heart of Enlightenment thinking. Here, however, gentle irony softens the blow. The four rowers who bear Humboldt into the Amazonian wilderness, for instance, are blessed with illustrious first names, invoking four famous magical-realist story-tellers:€ Gabriel (García Márquez), Julio (Cortázar), Carlos (Fuentes) and Mario (Vargas Llosa).9 Not only is the European incapable of making sense of the stories they attach to the alien environment he seeks to map, he is also not even able to narrate the world in the same way as they do:€ ‘He didn’t know any stories, said Humboldt and pushed his hat, which had been turned round by a monkey, into the correct position’ (128).

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The complexities of communicating to ‘others’ the form in which a culture perceives the world (rather than simply the content of its knowledge) is frequently adumbrated in the text, first and foremost in the repeated failure of translation. Most striking is the conclusion to the episode in which Humboldt declares that he knows ‘no stories’ when he renders into Spanish ‘the most beautiful German poem’. What follows is a version of Goethe’s ‘Ein Gleiches (Wandrers Nachtlied)’ (‘Wayfarer’s Night Song II’):€‘up above all the tops of the mountains it’s still, there’s no wind to be felt in the trees, and the birds are quiet too, and soon one will be dead’ (128). Nothing remains here of the poem’s ‘essential Germanness’: Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen in Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.

[Over all the hilltops is calm. In all the treetops you feel hardly a breath of air. The little birds fall silent in the woods. Just wait… soon you’ll also be at rest]

Johann Wolfgang Goethe:€‘Ein Gleiches’ (6–7 September 1780)

â•… In the original, ‘Gipfeln’ (hilltops) and ‘Wipfeln’ (treetops) evoke the mountain meadows of the Thüringer Wald where Goethe composed the poem. More profoundly, the melancholia of the ultimate harmony with nature€ – death€ – echoes the sentimentality associated with Germany in the middle of the eighteenth century and predicts Romanticism (e.g. Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s poem to music of 1823), to which Humboldt’s ‘scientific romanticism’10€ – his attachment to the natural world he measures€ – is connected. In Humboldt’s rendition, however, only ‘content’ remains:€‘bald werde man tot sein’. Humboldt’s tragedy is not simply that he is incapable of understanding the ‘natives’ but that his translations of his own culture are so mediated. The version of Humboldt’s rendition of ‘Ein Gleiches’ set out in the text is thus a translation of a translation€– it is a German version of Humboldt’s translation into Spanish of Goethe’s original. (And Humboldt’s ‘real’ language may well be French.) Indeed, all of Humboldt’s (and Gauß’s) words are a form of translation. The reported speech employed throughout signals that the phrases attributed to Humboldt and Gauß come to us via a ‘translator’€– that is, via Kehlmann as Humboldt’s (most recent) biographer. This translation is not nearly as ironically hopeless as Humboldt’s

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efforts to explain his Enlightenment universalism to Chinese representatives during a later journey to the ‘oriental edges’ of Imperial Russia€ – ‘There were no interpreters’ (284)€– but it is still insufficient. The epistemological shift intimated, in telescoped form, in Die Vermessung der Welt is from a nineteenth-century optimism to the principle of doubt which emerges from the early twentieth century:€ from Enlightenment universalism to the notion that everything (culture included) is simply relative. ‘Sometimes it’s enough to make you a little nervous’, Gauß confesses at the start of the book as he muses on where his theory of ‘curved space’ might lead (12). Where it leads is to the dismantling of Euclidean geometry and the stablity it had offered for over two thousand years. Thus Euclid’s fifth postulate sets out that for any given line ℓ and a point A, not on ℓ, there is exactly one line through A that does not intersect ℓ:€this line and ℓ are parallel to one another. Gauß, however, argues that this can apply only if we assume space to be flat. If we can show that space is elliptically curved then any line through A intersects ℓ. Or, if it is hyperbolically curved, there are an infinite number of lines through A which do not intersect ℓ. All relationships are relative:€it is a matter of perspective. From here to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1916)€– that time and space are one, and that gravity ‘curves’ spacetime such that its relativity is compounded€– is a short journey, and from there to philosophical relativism it is not much farther (although the step from scientific innovation to philosophical theory is by no means inevitable).11 Unlike Humboldt, however, Gauß appears to experience relativity not only as a cause for anxiety but also as a moment of liberation. Speaking to Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man, with Marquis d’Arlandes, to undertake a free balloon flight in November 1783, Gauß reveals what he has learned from a brief excursion over the (manifestly curved) earth: Now he knows, said Gauß. What, knows what? That all parallel lines cross one another. Wonderful, said Pilâtre. (67)

Later, he races to Königsberg to see Immanuel Kant on his death bed to relate the same. ‘Poppycock’ (96), replies Kant, as well he might, since Gauß’s insight threatens his theory of perception€– and Reason€– to the extent that Kant too bases his notion that the rational structure of the mind reflects the rational structure of that reality on Euclidean geometry. Subsequent to his precocious challenge to orthodoxy (and rebuttal), Gauß

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returns to his own ‘reality’. He marries, prostitutes his genius by servicing popular astrology, and visits his mistress Nina (supposedly) for the last time. The alternative reality, in which he would have learned Russian (Nina’s mother tongue) and led a different life, is denied. (Humboldt conforms by sublimating his homosexuality into science.) Towards the end of the book, however, in a rare episode in which both men feature, Gauß repeats his heresy:€ ‘The old Kantian nonsense … Reason doesn’t shape anything at all and it understands even less. Space bends and time curves’ (220). Humboldt, the less original of the two, dismisses the foolishness that space might be ‘bent’, noting that he has heard such ‘distortions’ before:€ ‘He had some porters on the Orinoko river who made similar jokes’ (220). The (unintended) implications of Humboldt’s attempted put-down are startling. Gauß’s geometry (in the anti-Kantian, proto-Einsteinian version it assumes in the novel), it would seem, ultimately intersects with the ‘alternative’ perception of Humboldt’s magical-realist rowers, Gabriel (García Márquez), Julio (Cortázar), Carlos (Fuentes) and Mario (Vargas Llosa). Western science and Latin American magical realism do not travel along parallel lines but eventually cross one another. This inflects the novel’s philosophical premise in a subtle direction. The universalism of the European Enlightenment is discredited, certainly, and translation is clearly problematic, but the unexpected intersections between different perspectives may make possible, however briefly, alternative realities. Both Humboldt and Gauß generally fail to recognise such moments, however. In the chapter ‘Der Garten’, modelled on Kafka’s Das Schloss,12 Gauß is thus unable to recognise God in the comically named character Graf Hinrich von der Ohe zur Ohe as he passes from the ‘real’ world into an alternative dimension.13 Ensconced within a paradise-like garden, God reminds Gauß that he had once berated him€– as a young man Gauß had complained of the inconsistencies in the laws of nature (88)€– but compliments his work on circular division in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1798), remarking that it contains ‘thoughts’ (189) from which he was able to learn. Gauß misses the hint that even God cannot know all the possibilities of the universe(s) he has created:€what Gauß had once lamented as ‘chance’€– the ‘enemy of all knowledge’ (13)€– may simply be the nonpredictable intersection of different potentialities. Humboldt, similarly, attributes the distorted perception that he and his companion Bonpland experience on their climb up Mount Chimborazo (1802) to the change in atmospheric pressure (171), whereas Bonpland simply adjusts to his own appearance in three forms (a version, perhaps, of Schrödinger’s famous

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thought experiment with a cat both dead and alive):€‘one who walked on, one who watched the one walking, and one who gave a running commentary on everything but in a language no one could understand’ (175). How does all this relate to German identity? Quite simply, Humboldt’s and Gauß’s inability to grasp the dynamic possibilities of intersecting perceptions of reality leaves them tied to the inherent conservatism of the Prussian state in the post-Napoleonic era. The reforms of government, army, state bureaucracy, tax, economic activity and education that followed the defeat by France in 1806 were ‘reasonable’, certainly, but they were hardly progressive.14 For Humboldt, however, no alternative can be imagined:€‘The Restoration was a blight over Europe … On the one side tyranny, on the other side the freedom of fools’ (218). Order or anarchy€– this is just one of the binary oppositions within which Humboldt, the Prussian civil servant, is paralysed:€reason or sentimentality, megalomania or melancholia, self-denial or vice… In short, he is ‘typically’ (if parodically) ‘German’. ‘Must you always be so German?’ (80), Bonpland asks Humboldt. Gauß may be less stereotypical but he too betrays a ‘German’ predilection for conformism and obeisance to the state, serving the Duke of Braunschweig, Napoleon, and the Kingdom of Hanover with equal meticulousness and lack of political curiosity. Both men once entertained alternative visions. Humboldt’s youthful fantasies of a ‘freer’ existence (for humankind in general, but perhaps also for himself as a homosexual) are destroyed by his mother’s educational zeal. Gauß, similarly, dared as a child to challenge his mathematics teacher, using the theory of triangle numbers to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 (57). ‘Germans’, then, are made, not born. Gauß’s characteristically precocious retort to his father’s insistence that a German ‘is someone who doesn’t sit curved’ (54)€– ‘nur das?’€– thus indicates a degree of youthful scepticism about a supposedly ‘German’ discipline. At the same time, obviously, the language used (‘curved’) also anticipates Gauß’s theory of ‘curved space’. As previously discussed, the problem encountered by the Germans in the novel may be precisely their inability to ‘bend’ their own particular reality in order to open up new perspectives. Kehlmann’s inverse correlation of straightbacked Germans and ‘curved space’ is not only an aesthetically pleasing metaphor€– it is also funny. Yet it is precisely humour that Germans, according to the stereotype, lack. Bonpland’s comment that a German is as likely to examine humour as a bird is to examine air is thus both meant ironically and is ironic in itself€– it is a ‘joke’ that Humboldt fails to get (111). In each of these examples of comic intervention, in fact, as so often elsewhere in the book, it might be

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argued that Kehlmann’s novel endeavours to transcend the limitations of its German protagonists by appropriating the humour attributed to its ‘foreign’ characters, ranging from the Frenchman Bonpland to the four Latin American magical-realist porters and their ‘jokes’ (220), in order to profit from intersections of cultures, histories and perspectives across curved space and non-parallel lines. Its ironic nods to Pynchon, Márquez or Nabokov (one of Kehlmann’s declared influences),15 then, are most likely also markers of gratitude. To this extent, Die Vermessung der Welt is not dissimilar to other recent German novels such as Georg Klein’s Libidissi and Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys, both from 1998. Klein’s allusions to John Le Carré, Graham Greene and John Grisham (and also to Pynchon) also acknowledge a debt to an ‘Anglo-American’ sensibility, in this case the laconic detachment of the crime thriller, and likewise open up the question of German identity in the age of globalisation. Schulze’s gestures towards Hemingway and Raymond Carver do something comparable, inflecting an ‘American’ matter-of-factness to local circumstances. It is more or less self-evident that Die Vermessung der Welt draws on its international intertexts in order to rethink German identity. What is less obvious, however, is the way its ‘imported’ humour, usually deployed at the expense of its two German protagonists, as much as its ostensibly ‘non-German’ lightness-of-touch and ‘readability’, also points to a certain regret, or rather disillusionment. In the process of bringing German culture to the wider world, it seems that Kehlmann’s only option is to render it as cliché. Humboldt and Gauß may achieve global recognition, but at the cost of being styled as ‘typically’ German. The subtheme of Humboldt’s fame thus assumes a greater significance than mere comic value. (Indeed, fame seems more generally to be a key theme for Kehlmann, as evidenced by his 2009 novel Ruhm [Fame].) The ‘German’, it seems, is unable to satisfy the demands of the journalists who accompany him for personal details or witty insights. (This may also be a comment on the fact that the real Humboldt’s international reception, as Oliver Lubrich puts it, has always ‘revolved more around his person than around his work’.)16 Nor can he tell a good story:€ ‘A hundred pages full of measurements, hardly anything personal and practically no adventures’ (239). Previously, I argued that Humboldt’s tragedy is not only that he misunderstands the ‘natives’ but also that his attempts to translate his own culture are so mediated. The wider tragedy, however, and one that Kehlmann’s novel, in its self-reflexive poignancy, hints at, may be that Humboldt’s science must be reduced to his ‘German’ attributes of stiffness, (comic) humourlessness

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and melancholia:€‘the man who has never experienced true metaphysical anxiety will never be a proper German’ (21). As the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries intensify the globalisation of news, scandal and gossip that, Die Vermessung der Welt suggests, began in Humboldt’s era, it seems that German culture needs to be made ‘marketable’ to a world audience. As so often, responsibility for the Holocaust may shape the parameters within which this German story can be presented. Hearing of a mass sacrifice at an Aztec temple, Humboldt declares:€‘So much civilisation and so much cruelty … Quite the opposite of everything that Germany stands for’ (208). The historical irony is obvious, of course, and only serves to underline the fact that the Germans in the novel, in fact, are sadly ‘exceptional’, out of step with the rest of humanity and lacking empathy. Frenchmen, natives of South America, Russians and Chinese all mingle easily (Germans alone get hung up on whether cross-cultural communication is universal or relative) but the Germans are only ‘comprehensible’ as the forebears of a nation that would be uniquely capable, in the modern era, of the fusion of civilisation and cruelty that Humboldt identifies but also demonstrates. Indeed, the German scientist adores his own stray dog but feels no compunction about feeding other, ‘racially inferior’ canines to crocodiles to further his ‘systematic’ investigations (169). Kehlmann’s international triumph may thus be a pyrrhic victory (and one which the novel perhaps even predicts):€Germans must be ‘bent’ to a clichéd version of their history in order to engage a global readership. Yet the book also engages in a campaign of subversion, concealing an antiquated intellectualism within its modern pop sensibility. The novel’s ‘overt’ story, therefore, depicts two Germans comically fulfilling national stereoÂ� types, employing motifs familiar from today’s global celebrity culture. These motifs include spicy innuendos concerning Humboldt’s homosexuality, titillating details of Gauß’s sex life, including an anecdote concerning his interruption of his love-making to correct errors in astronomical measurements (150), or other gossipy revelations relating to the flaws of the famous or talented (e.g. Gauß’s hypochondria, throughout the text; Humboldt’s efforts to deceive the world about reaching the top of Mount Chimborazo [181]), all pointing towards Germans’ supposed repression, otherworldliness, or self-aggrandising inferiority complex. The novel’s ‘hidden’ story, on the other hand, available only to those€– educated, most likely German€– readers who understand where its allusions point, styles nostalgia as resistance to the very same processes. In Kehlmann’s novel, the ‘in-group’ consists of those who know, for example, who Marcus Herz

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(22), Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (27), Abraham Gottlob Werner (30) and August Ferdinand Möbius (153) were, or, more poignantly, who know that Humboldt, far from being ‘typically’ German, was, in his time, a much greater influence on other countries than on his own. Indeed, many of his (French) travel texts were translated only very much later (if at all) into German.17 The nostalgia that suffuses Die Vermessung der Welt relates to the novel’s submission, insinuated rather than stated, that German culture, until the early nineteenth century at least, may have been more open to the world than, say, France or England. Humboldt and Gauß, then, reject the incipient German nationalism of the post-Napoleonic era. At the start of the novel, Gauß throws his son’s copy of Die Deutsche Turnkunst (the handbook teaching an anti-French ‘self-discipline’ published in 1816) out of the window (9); at the book’s close, both men are perplexed by the noisy confusion of liberal ideas with calls for national unity emerging from the student associations (banned by the Karlsbad decrees of 1819). More pointedly, allusions€ – again surely obscure to most non-German readers€– to a range of historical figures may prompt the book’s ‘domestic’ audience to resist its ‘overt’ stylisation of Germans as already always chauvinistic. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, for example, features:€the scientist and satirist best known for his ‘waste books’ of anecdotes, quotations and sketches was a passionate Anglophile. Elsewhere, Schiller yawns when Humboldt’s brother Wilhelm praises Wieland’s introduction of ‘blank verse’ to German drama with Lady Johanna Gray (1758) (37). It is unlikely that Schiller is mocking Wieland’s use of English precursors but rather Wilhelm’s nationalistic misreading of what Wieland is trying to do. (Wilhelm later displays a similar naïve chauvinism again when he comments that he would have preferred a German play to a performance of Voltaire [159].) The most telling allusions, however, are contained within Humboldt’s response to Bonpland’s ‘joke’ on the subject of ‘German humour’: Only a joke, said Bonpland. But an unfair joke. A Prussian can laugh as easily as anyone else, thank you very much. In Prussia people laugh all the time. One only has to think of the novels of Wieland or of Gryphius’s excellent comedies. Even Herder knew how to land a good joke. (111)

Humboldt is correct, of course, even if it is difficult for foreigners to believe that Germans were ever funny. Wieland, perhaps the foremost novelist of the German Enlightenment, wrote a satire on€– of all things€– German

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provinciality, with Die Abderiten, eine sehr wahrscheinliche Geschichte (The Abderiten, A Very Likely Story, 1774), but was also extremely important in opening Germany up to the world:€Die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (The Advertures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva, 1764), for example, is based on Don Quixote, whereas Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of Agathon, 1766–67) ‘translates’ Fielding’s Tom Jones into the German Bildungsroman (though with a Greek setting). Wieland also produced German versions of twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays, sparking the wave of enthusiasm for Shakespeare of the second half of the eighteenth century (including Goethe’s Im Schäkespears Tag [In Shakespeare’s Day], 1771).18 Gryphius, too, was both a satirist€ – Absurda Comica, oder Herr Peter Squenz (An Absurd Comedy, or Mr Peter Squenz, 1649) again lampoons German provinciality€– and a great translator of English texts.19 It is the reference to Herder, however, that is most intriguing. Long considered to be one of the forerunners both of German Romanticism and an aberrant German nationalism,20 Herder provides yet another pointer to the cultural relativism that forms a dialectic with Enlightenment universalism throughout the novel:€his argument, set out in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Yet another Philosophy of History, 1784–91), is that every nation has its own particular specialty (or ‘genius’). Yet Herder’s concept of the uniqueness of cultures may best be described as an ‘enlightened relativism’.21 It argues for the validity of all cultures, based on certain common human values, even as each possesses its own forms of expression. As Carl Niekerk puts it:€ ‘By assuming a common origin of all human life in spite of its manifest varieties, Herder successfully combines notions of universalism and cultural relativism, identity and difference.’22 What Herder rails against is imitation. In Shakespeare (1773), he declares that the Bard is a ‘genuine’ expression of English culture because he does not copy Greek forms. Elsewhere, he argues that Germans should not follow Gottsched’s attempt to impose French neoClassicism and that they should free themselves of the idealisation of Greece fostered by Winckelmann23 (particularly in Von Deutscher Art und Kunst [On the German Type and Art], the volume Herder edits in 1773).24 To this extent, Herder anticipates Nietzsche and his critique of Germany’s ‘epigonality’ (Nietzsche was referring specifically to the period after Goethe’s death).25 Fear of imitation haunts Die Vermessung der Welt, inflecting its fashionably phlegmatic tone with a melancholic edge. Humboldt’s plea that ‘even’ Herder is able to land a joke reveals precisely this, pointing to the tension between an ‘authentic’ German culture and the need to demonstrate that

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‘the Germans’ can learn to make themselves comprehensible to the rest of the world. Fear of imitation may be what prevents German culture from emerging from the obscurities of the text’s allusions to challenge directly, as manifesto rather than nostalgia, its (self-)distortion into cliché. Humboldt’s unkind stereotyping of Thomas Jefferson as a ‘backwoods president’ when he meets him in 1804 (211) thus most likely projects Humboldt’s own horror of provinciality and epigonality onto the recently founded United States. (In fact, the real Humboldt was rather taken with Jefferson.26) His boastful invocation of Winckelmann, identifying the neo-Classical buildings he sees being built in Washington as proof of the influence of the great German scholar (211), is all the more ironic, therefore, for its failure of self-awareness:€ the new Republic’s imitation of Germany merely commends Germany’s imitation of Greece. Indeed, German culture has always taken from elsewhere, as the book’s allusions also demonstrate:€Gryphius translates English pietism; Gottsched argues for French neo-Classicism; Wieland copies English blank verse and inaugurates a wave of Shakespeare imitators; and Herder, too, admires Greek drama even as he wishes for an ‘original’ Germanic form; and so on, into the early nineteenth century and beyond. ‘Germany? But where does it lie?’, ask Goethe and Schiller in their collection of satirical epigrams bearing the (Greek …) name Xenien (1797). Lacking a unified state until relatively late, (self-)consciously striving to ‘catch up’ with the ‘national cultures’ of France and Britain, and ambivalently open to outside influences, German culture, as it is adumbrated in Die Vermessung der Welt at any rate, is as subject to the contradictory impulses of Fernweh and Heimweh as its two protagonists. Kehlmann’s text, of course, is as much about the present as the past. Indeed, Humboldt’s gauche comment to Lichtenberg, that it is a vain exercise when an author sets his work in a distant past (27), humorously confirms this. Today, globalisation appears to ‘flatten’ the curved horizon beyond which the only apparently parallel lines of cosmopolitanism and provinciality may intersect. On the novel’s very last page, Gauß’s son Eugen lands in America, a metaphor here, as in so much recent German fiction, for the homogenisation of cultures across the world. (It is surely also significant that the German has already ‘forgotten’ the achievements of his own tradition:€ during a stop in Tenerife, Eugen comes across a huge dragon tree but only the most knowledgeable reader would be able to retrieve the cultural reference that clearly eludes him, namely that this is the tree described by Humboldt in his Atlas Picturesque of 1810.) The arrival of the land that was so desired, however, merely predicts the end of

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fantasy, and of awe:€‘this time it is no illusion or sheet lightning’ (302). By means of its complex interplay of humour, subversion and nostalgia, it is precisely this one-dimensionality that Die Vermessung der Welt resists. By maintaining all of these impulses in a productive tension, it declares its openness to the world and yet also engages creatively with its own traditions. To this extent, the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller (and Humboldt) is indeed its model. Though indebted to Greece, Italy, France, England, and other places besides, German culture in this period was no less original€– and no less German. No t e s 1 See Klaus Zeyringer, ‘Gewinnen wird die Kunst:€Ansätze und Anfänge von Daniel Kehlmanns “Gebrochenem Realismus”’, Daniel Kehlmann, Text + Kritik, 177 (2008), 36–44. 2 Mark M. Anderson, ‘Humboldt’s gift’, The Nation, 30 April 2005, www. thenation.com/doc/20070430/anderson. 3 Gunther Nickel, ‘Von “Beerholms Vorstellung” zur “Vermessung der Welt”:€ Die Wiedergeburt des magischen Realismus aus dem Geist der modernen Mathematik’, in Gunther Nickel, ed., Daniel Kehlmanns ‘Die Vermessung der Welt’:€Materialien, Dokumente, Interpretationen (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 151–68, 158. 4 Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (Hamburg:€ Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009 [2005]), 143. Hereafter page numbers appear in the text in parentheses. All translations are my own. Carol Brown Janeway’s English translation appeared in 2006. 5 As reported in Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Regine Otto (Berlin:€ Aufbau Verlag, 1982 [1835]), 199. 6 Nickel, ‘Von “Beerholms Vorstellung” zur “Vermessung der Welt”’, 162–3. 7 Kathryn M. Olesko, ‘The world we have lost:€history as art’, Isis, 98:4 (2007), 760–8, 762. 8 See Aaron Sachs, ‘The ultimate “Other”:€ post-colonialism and Alexander Von Humboldt’s ecological relationship with nature’, History and Theory, 42:4 (2003), 111–35. 9 Zeyringer, ‘Gewinnen wird die Kunst’, 43. 10 See Michael Dettelbach, ‘Alexander von Humboldt between Enlightenment and Romanticism’, Northeastern Naturalist, 8:1 (2001), 9–20. 11 See Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots (Mineola, NY:€ Dover Publications, 1999). 12 See Daniel Kehlmann, ‘Göttinger Poetikvorlesungen’, Diese sehr ernsten Scherze:€Poetikvorlesungen (Göttingen:€Wallstein Verlag, 2007). 13 See Joachim Rickes, ‘Wer ist Graf von der Ohe zur Ohe? Überlegungen zum Kapitel “Der Garten” in Daniel Kehlmanns Die Vermessung der Welt’, Sprachkunst, 38:1 (2007), 89–96.

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14 See Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (New York:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 107–8. 15 Daniel Kehlmann, ‘1940’, Der Literaturbote, 14/15 (1999/2000), 41–2, 42. 16 Oliver Lubrich, ‘In the realm of ambivalence:€ Alexander von Humboldt’s discourse on Cuba’, German Studies Review, 26:1 (2003), 63–80, 63. 17 I am grateful to Oliver Lubrich for information on editions of Humboldt’s work and his biographers. See also Oliver Lubrich, ‘Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859):€Zum 150. Todestag des Naturforschers und Reiseschriftstellers’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 2 (2009), 396–402. 18 Otto F. Best and Ulrich Karthaus, eds., Sturm und Drang und Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart:€Reclam, 1976), 29. 19 Eda Sagarra and Peter Skrine, A Companion to German Literature:€From 1500 to the Present (Oxford:€Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 29–30. 20 See Robert Reinhold Ergang, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York:€Octagon Books, 1967). 21 See Sonia Sikka, ‘Enlightened relativism:€The case of Herder’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31:3 (2005), 309–41. 22 Carl Niekerk, ‘The Romantics and other cultures’, in Nicholas Saul, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 147–61, 148. 23 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton University Press, 2007). 24 Nicholas Saul, Philosophy and German literature, 1700–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 47. 25 Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, ‘Nietzsche’s aesthetic solution to the problem of Epigonism in the nineteenth century’, in Paul Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity:€His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition (Rochester:€Camden House, 2004), 318–28, 320. 26 See Ingo Schwarz, ‘Alexander von Humboldt’s visit to Washington and Philadelphia, his friendship with Jefferson, and his fascination with the United States’, Northeastern Naturalist, 8 (2001), 43–56.

c h a p t e r 18

Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) Monika Shafi

In a famous bon mot Max Frisch attested that Bertolt Brecht demonstrated ‘the overwhelming ineffectiveness of a classic’,1 which suggested that eminence is gained at the expense of critical impact. Once elevated to exemplary status, the famed author and his oeuvre lead the esteemed life of canonical masters, admired and revered, but no longer owning their original challenge and vitality. By all accounts, this fate has not befallen Günter Grass. Germany’s most famous author and public intellectual, Nobel Prize laureate, an icon of postwar German literature and culture, and known the world over for his brilliant first novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), Grass holds memberships both in the German national and the international canon of world literature, and he continues to excite and provoke readers as well as influencing debates on memory, history and the role of the writer and literature.2 Probably no other recent work demonstrates Grass’s continued impact as author and public figure more powerfully than his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006), a primarily first-person account of the years 1939 to 1959. Ending with the publication of Die Blechtrommel, which catapulted the young author into instant success and fame, the autobiography not only corresponds thematically to his first hit, but it seems to rival it in terms of the outrage, scorn and admiration heaped on it.3 The discussion also revealed that any Grass publication, particularly one as controversial as his autobiography, cannot be divested from the ‘brand name’ Grass, and its dominant position in German letters and culture. The scandal caused by the autobiography and by the interview in Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 11 August 2006 preceding it, in which Grass revealed for the first time his membership in the Waffen-SS, has been aptly described as the ‘literary-political equivalent of a nuclear explosion’,4 and the fall-out was correspondingly vast and vicious. Initially, most of the attention focused on the motives of Grass’s sixtyyears-long silence and its effects on his reputation as Germany’s most 270

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outspoken critic of the Nazi past and denial. Subsequent analyses examined Grass’s revelation within contemporary German memory discourses while also emphasising the work’s literary qualities, particularly Grass’s ingenious play with autobiographical conventions and the unreliability of memory and narration. Scholars also began to reassess Grass’s novels and speeches in the light of his belated admission.5 Guilt and shame, already known to be prominent forces in Grass’s oeuvre, took on new meanings, and Katharina Hall rightly contends that his earlier publications, specifically the narrators in the Danzig Trilogy, may have pointed at Grass’s secret all along.6 Different interpretations of the autobiography€– whether focused on its key (memory) tropes,7 authorial images and ethics of Grass’s self-presentation,8 the transformation of private failings into an ‘exemplary’ biography,9 or the dominant thematic clusters, memory, war and art10€– all demonstrate what Taberner aptly calls ‘the polyvalency of Grass’s output; all of Grass’s literary texts … are capable of many different approaches and interpretations’.11 Taberner’s claim is well borne out by Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, whose titular memory metaphor already suggests that detecting the ‘true’ person or the ‘real’ event, a promise inherent to autobiographical genre conventions, may turn out to be futile. Instead the text shows a process of recollection that will reveal layer upon layer of memory and times past but is void of any core. Building on existing analyses, this article seeks to add another interpretative perspective to Grass’s autobiography by shifting attention to an area that has received so far scant notice, namely the community which shaped and educated the young artist. ‘Dedicated to everyone from whom I have learned’12 reads the text’s dedication, thus signalling from the very beginning the crucial role that Grass accords others€– family members, teachers, mentors, friends or lovers€ – in his development. Prominently drawing attention to their influence and his reliance on them highlights the relational nature of all identity and the extent to which the self is formed through interaction with others. Yet, for a self-confessed ‘Egomaniac’ (303), who obsessively pursued his twin goals of becoming an artist and famous, such an acknowledgement is surprising and indicates bonds that deserve further scrutiny. Autobiography is a notoriously difficult genre to define and to operate. Given that the author is both the subject and the object of the text, balancing fact and fiction, reality and imagination, or fidelity and invention are inherently problematic, particularly since readers expect some form of truthfulness from autobiographical self-reflection and representation. A cross-over form that cannot be corralled into the realms of either fiction

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or history, the act of self-accounting, though premised on the uniqueness of an individual and his or her story, is decisively shaped by dominant Â�literary and cultural models of selfhood and their worth.13 ‘Models of identity are centrally implicated in the way we live and write about our lives’, writes Eakin, for ‘[i]n forming our sustaining sense of self, we draw on models of identity provided by the cultures we inhabit’.14 This aspect is of particular importance to Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, for the text, I contend, entwines two conceptually distinct models of identity:€ one is the story of the sovereign self, determined and independent, the other the story of the embedded self aware of the debt he owes to others. The first narrates the tale of the self-reliant artist and the development of his talent against all odds of upbringing and historical ordeals; the second seeks to recognise those who helped him achieve his goals and whose sacrifices may have gone unnoticed. These two accounts, the autonomous artistic self and the relational self, incomplete and needy, shape the autobiography both aesthetically and thematically. At the heart of his conflicted self-presentation Grass places the figure of his mother. In one of the work’s most emotionally intense passages, in which he mourns his mother’s untimely death of cancer, he calls her ‘my vale of joy and my vale of tears’ (393) and states that her enduring presence and power had made and continues to make all of his writing possible. In almost all discussions of the autobiography so far, guilt and shame have been exclusively associated with Grass’s admission of his Waffen-SS membership. I would argue, however, that they also include the shame he feels as a son as well as the shame that implicates the mother herself. According to John D. Barbour, one of the main reasons why autobiographical authors engage so extensively with their parents, examining their character and history, is to assess their moral fortitude and character culminating in ‘the desire to forgive a father or mother’.15 Grass’s many detailed accounts of his mother, lovingly describing her personality and aspirations, reflect a complex desire to forgive and be forgiven. They warrant attention for they allow us to gain a fuller understanding of Grass’s self-presentation and the extent to which his autobiographical work also embraces broader, humanistic concerns of regret and failure, as suggested by Stuart Taberner in his interpretation of Grass’s subsequent novel, Die Box (The Box, 2008).16 Recent years have seen an upsurge in autobiographies, biographies and memoirs, as well as biographically inspired fiction.17 Frequently featured on bestseller lists, their enormous popularity transcends national boundaries, and ‘life-writing’ has become a global phenomenon. David

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Ellis surmises that, in times as cynical as ours, biographical accounts ‘can sometimes offer an inspiring example of how life ought to be lived’.18 But he also adds that it is the discovery of the human frailty of those deemed exceptional that draws readers to this genre. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff fittingly termed this attraction to the other person’s narrative The Seductions of Biography.19 It is the power of story-telling fuelled by our basic human curiosity that appeals to us to in the other’s life and the history and culture that shaped it. ‘We are a curious race’, writes McFeely, ‘and as much as we seek the self, the ego€– as determined as some of us still are to conceive of a just society rather than a celebrated individual€– we do conceive of human activities in personal terms.’20 This rationale also applies, I believe, to autobiography, biography’s ‘cousin’,21 and it poses a particular conundrum for Grass. Most of his biography was already well known since he had always made such ample use of his own life in his novels. With the exception of the Waffen-SS membership, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel offers no new factual revelations. Also, previously Grass had explicitly rejected the idea of autobiographical writing as a form that held no challenges for him. Yet he quickly followed Beim Häuten der Zwiebel with Die Box, a second autobiographical volume which spans the years 1959 until now and shows Grass in the role of father to his many children. Obviously, the earlier disinterest has given way to an intense preoccupation with autobiographical modes, a change that Karen Leeder interprets as Grass’s conscious acknowledgement of age, transience and finality, and that she captures in the term ‘late style’.22 In this volume, too, Rebecca Braun’s chapter further develops the notion of Grass’s late style in relation to Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995). How, then, does the Grass of late style entice readers to follow him once again down the road to his adolescence in Danzig, to travel back with him to the eastern battlefields of the Second World War, to an American prisoner of war camp in Bavaria, and to accompany him all the way to the ruins of Düsseldorf and West Berlin which saw the beginnings of his artistic career? In other words, what are the seductions of an (auto)biography that follows so closely in the footsteps of his first protagonist, Oskar Matzerath? First and foremost there is Grass, the brilliant story-teller who led a rich, extraordinary life and whose celebrity status invites curiosity. Yet a key strategy of Grass’s take on autobiography is to simultaneously reveal and obscure his tale. On the one hand, he seems to allow us an inside-look at his life and emotions, but on the other hand the constant emphasis on the unreliability of memory and narration undercut any certainty. This, however, was precisely how Oskar Matzerath, who in

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the autobiography appears to be almost indistinguishable from his creator, approaches his recollection in The Tin Drum, and his presence is felt right from the start. Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage onself in the third person remains great:€He was going on twelve, though he still loved sitting in his mother’s lap, when such and such began and ended. But can something that had a beginning and an end be pinpointed with such precision? In my case it can. (1)

Time has not lessened the temptation to (re)tell and to (re)disguise his story. Narration and the camouflage it invites is a transgressive, perhaps even illicit, act but the narrator has to heed its allure. Throughout the autobiography, Grass will repeatedly comment on this uncontrollable desire to transform reality into imagination, be it as the compulsion to produce words or to model in clay. The obsession with art is thus the first confession of the text, its inaugural scene, and the accidents of place and birth, Danzig in 1927, yields the second, the thematic obsession:€Germany’s (Nazi) history. That the autobiography opens with the end of childhood and not, as is more typical, with its beginning, could suggest that this moment functioned as a kind of second, conscious birthing act; life as he knew it began with the Second World War and is premised on loss. By including his mother in this setting, shown in a pose of great intimacy and harmony that also bears religious overtones (Virgin Mary), he accords her from the very beginning the same importance as those two other dominant forces which shaped his destiny. One may surmise that his relationship with his mother also features an obsessive element and that those three€– art, history and filial bonds€– form a narrative force field that can only be approximated but never exhausted. A very similar set-up characterises Die Blechtrommel, and both protagonists also suffer from the loss of their mother and an obsession with memory and history. Beginning with the first paragraph, Grass often addresses his younger self in the third person in order to signal that the adolescent is no longer accessible to his eighty-year-old successor. His frequent ruminations on the imperfections of memory all loop around the difficulties of retrieval and the frustration of not to being able fully to explain why he believed so fervently in Nazi ideology. This mix and match of self-loathing with the universals of remembrance has been seen as diluting the sincerity of his self-exploration since they amount to stressing the exemplary quality of his biography.23 The issue of guilt, both specifically in terms of his Waffen-SS membership and more broadly regarding his uncritical faith

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in Hitler, also touches upon the dilemma of the (dis)continuity of the self as seen in the following quotation: Time lays layer upon layer. What it covers is at best recovered through chinks. And it is through one such gap in time, which I do my best to enlarge, that I view him and myself simultaneously:€ he shamelessly young, I getting on in years; he reading the future in books, the past catching up with me. My cares are not his:€what he fails to see as disgraceful, that is, what makes him feel no shame, I, who am more than related to him, must somehow grapple with. Sheet upon sheet of consumed time lies between us. (42–3)

On the one hand, Grass asserts the gap between his former and current self. Separated by time, experience and knowledge, the two seem more like relatives than individuals sharing the same identity. He resents the young Grass’s carefree youth, and strains to recognise him. The distance between his current and his former self appears so vast that he questions the solidity and constancy of his self, reflecting Eakin’s insight that ‘our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration’.24 One of the prime lessons autobiographies can teach, according to Eakin, is precisely the recognition that ‘the self is dynamic, changing, and plural’.25 Yet, on the other hand, the self cannot exist without some sense of continuity which memories are to provide. In her fictive autobiography Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), which deals with a young girl coming of age during the Third Reich, Christa Wolf faced the same dilemma but she radically refused to address her former self as ‘I’, thus insisting on the discontinuity of self.26 By presenting his novelistic creations, most notably Oskar Matzerath, as his ‘dual self ’ (9), Grass complicates the dynamics of recollection even further by blurring the lines between different realms of personhood, time, memory and reality. One is reminded of a hall of mirrors in which the multiple and different reflections leave one wondering which image to trust. Yet, within this framework of ambiguity and doubt, Grass proceeds to tell stories that nevertheless supply richly drawn portraits of former comrades, friends and teachers as well as poignant tales from his years as soldier, prisoner of war and art student. In this gallery of fellow-Germans, the profile of his mother is of crucial importance. Grass shows her to be a pragmatic woman with a sense of humour, a down-to-earth businesswoman€– together with her husband she ran a small grocery store€– who profoundly admired all things beautiful. A member of Germany’s petty bourgeoisie, she struggled all her life to make ends meet but managed

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to send her son and his younger sister to a Gymnasium, the early but allimportant step in Germany’s hierarchical school system to achieve social mobility. Not surprisingly, the first lengthy description of his mother focuses on financial sacrifices. She, who had little patience with cautious child-raising methods … she, who was so gentle and warmhearted, so easily moved to tears … she, the most concerned of all mothers, pushed the ledger over to me and offered to give me in cash … five percent of all debts I collected if I was willing to make time … to visit the defaulting debtors. (22–3)

Smart and persuasive, Grass excels at the job that both resolves his lack of spending money and exposes him to the struggles of impoverished customers. The mother thus not only taught him a valuable lesson about being resourceful and thrifty but also laid the groundwork for his future novelistic production. Yet the extended anaphora in this extremely long sentence seem odd in a description of pedagogical common sense, for they resemble incantations associated with sacral speech. The repetitive invocation of the mother, which will reappear in further descriptions of her, is a narrative strategy well known from Die Blechtrommel. In that novel it is employed most prominently at the end of the chapter ‘Faith, Hope, Love’, where Oskar mourns the toy merchant Markus’s suicide during the November Pogrom of 1938 and the murderous course Germany was about to take. The repetitive evocations of the mother in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel function in a similar manner, inscribing an otherwise pleasant memory with loss and grief while also hinting at debt and open balances that may still need to be paid for. Together with the litany of superior maternal qualities this depiction turns the mother into an idealised maternal figure who can do no wrong. Terms such as her ‘[h]er one and only’ (47), ‘her darling little boy’ (47) or ‘mama’s boy’ (48), despite their somewhat ironic tone, further affirm the mother’s devotion and pride. She was the first to acknowledge and promote her son’s artistic career, and the autobiography, which follows the script of the Künstlerroman with its ‘portrait of an artist as a young man’,27 emphasises her crucial role. As artist, Grass styles himself on the model of the genius who, through the sheer force of his work, will and imagination, transforms reality. Prometheus-like, he endeavours to become ‘someone who turns mere clay into forms’ (243). Young, ambitious and driven, his trajectory is linear, future-oriented, and geared exclusively to fulfilling his own needs and desires. In Grass’s retrospective account, the protagonist’s grit and wit are rewarded with never-ending inspiration, productivity

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and influence. Though Grass tries to soften the grandiosity inherent in this self-representation by framing his early recognition as a fairy tale, stressing his luck as a ‘fairy-tale prince’ (407), who owned nothing but persevered and was richly rewarded with success, love, fame and money, it only heightens his exceptional life and stature. In fact, the text’s last sentences, ‘And from then on I lived from page to page and between book and book, my inner world still rich in characters. But to tell of all that, I have neither the onions nor the desire’ (425), stresses his inexhaustible talent. The autobiography, which was to explore omissions, guilt and shame, thus concludes with the grand (fairy-tale) finale of proud, extraordinary selfhood and its dual existence in fact and fiction. His mother’s life, on the other hand, was irrevocably broken by war and migration. Poor, sick and worried, she had lost her zest for life. (At the end of the war, she had been repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers.) The twenty-something Grass describes himself as being well aware of his parents’ constrained circumstances, and later of his mother’s illness, but also as too self-absorbed to be very helpful, and this indifference weighs on the eighty-year-old author. The chapter ‘While Cancer, Soundless’, which begins with a surprise visit he and his future wife Anna pay to his parents before they continue south to Italy, parallels the mother’s final months with the couple’s early bliss in Berlin. While the text allows him to intertwine these two trajectories€– his happiness and rise to fame, her misery and decline€– in real life her death ‘took place outside our time’ (391). The chapter concludes with Grass being called to his mother’s death bed and a summary account of their relationship poured into one gigantic, page-and-a-half-long sentence: She, out of whom I crawled screaming one Sunday€– ‘Sunday’s child, that’s what you are’, she liked to tell me; she, whose lap I still sat in at the age of fourteen€… she, who gave me, her darling boy, everything and received little; she, who is my vale of joy and my vale of tears and who, when I wrote before and write now, looks over my shoulder … she, who … set me free to write and write; she whom I would so like to kiss awake on paper still-white, so she could travel with me, only me, and see beauty, only beauty, and finally say, ‘That I should live to see such beauty…’; she, my mother, died on January 2, 1954. (392–3)

In the German original, Grass uses the anaphoric ‘sie’ more than twenty times, thus creating a seemingly endless list of his mother’s deeds and sacrifices for her son. This extended sentence, streaming tear-like, punctuated by the anaphora like heavy sobs, invokes the mother in the same incantation style Grass had used earlier. Revisiting previously narrated

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episodes and cataloguing typical utterances of his mother shows how her narrative helped create his (artistic) identity. Describing her as the everlasting inspiration of his work and giving her considerable control over his narrative, he acknowledges his debt, both in terms of what she gave to him and what he failed to provide. Grass has repeatedly stated that the loss of his home has been the driving force of all his work, but here he seems to accord his mother a similar influence, which would suggest that the mother refers also metaphorically to the loss of Heimat. One could also read his obsession with writing and remembering as substituting the text for the lost mother.28 While his account foregrounds the relational model of selfhood€ – his dependence on his mother€ – in a sense it also merges the relational and autonomous concepts by integrating his mother into his creative persona. The prolonged sentence thus both provides a synopsis of her life as his mother and encapsulates the maternal biography into his artistic autobiography. The child frequently pledging Italian journeys, fame and success in fact invents an imaginary autobiography whose plot the adult later felt obliged to turn into reality. In a way these early fantasies foreshadow Grass’s difficulty with keeping his empirical and his invented self apart. His mother greatly enjoyed these flights into a happy future but she remained mindful of their literary quality, calling her son Peer Gynt. What Grass struggles with, however, is that the mother never witnessed his meteoric rise, that his promises never materialised for her, and that he thus failed her not only as a son but also as an author. His intense and long-lasting grief, the text suggests, results from her untimely death, her profound influence on her son, and his guilt and shame that she only experienced sacrifice but not success. Yet there is a further layer to the grief and shame that is perhaps too painful to be openly acknowledged. Does it not seem odd that Grass excessively scrutinises the guilt of the adolescent but excludes his mother, the adult, from such historical scrutiny? He never investigates her attitudes to the Third Reich in any detail or wonders about her lack of questions. At the same time, he takes an in-depth look at his family’s class background, particularly its manifestations in the everyday of rituals, objects and behaviour, which shows that he is able to approach his parents as historical agents, and not as idealised or stereotypical figures. The mother, one can surmise from some aside remarks, was a Mitläuferin (fellow-traveller) and thus in Grass’s political and moral matrix not at all guilt-free. But by simultaneously elevating her to the status of Übermutter€– the function of the incantations€– and highlighting his guilt toward her, he creates a kind of double cover-up that allows him to exonerate her. In disclosing

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his mother’s extreme commitment to her son, he disguises her political allegiances and thus rescues her as an exemplary figure untouched by guilt and shame. Shrouding her in his love and devotion allows him to maintain the ideal. This kind of remake is not an uncommon strategy in German family memory discourses, as the research on family conversations documented in Harald Welzer’s volume of interviews Opa war kein Nazi has shown.29 Second- and particularly third-generation Germans tend to represent their parents and grandparents not as perpetrators but as victims or opponents of Nazi rule. While Grass’s autobiography does not attribute these positions to his parents, their political and moral responses to the Third Reich are not put to the test either. Seen within the context of German generational narratives, Grass joins a large group of authors€– among them Arno Geiger, Uwe Timm, Dagmar Leupold, Jenny Erpenbeck, Tanja Dückers, Ulla Hahn, Hans-Ulrich Treichel and Dieter Wellershoff€– who apply an intergenerational perspective to German history that can run the risk of a ‘privatization of history’.30 Yet Grass goes even a step further than these authors by not even interrogating his parents in the first place, instead assuming all the historical guilt himself. Particularly in his portrayal of his mother he participates in creating a reconciliatory intergenerational narrative that focuses on parental suffering.31 While Grass may circumvent uncomfortable questions of parental allegiance and ethics, he fiercely resents his class background citing, in fact, his milieu, ‘The two-room hole. The family trap’ (66), as the main reason for joining the army. It is not only the lack of space and privacy that bothered him; he is becoming increasingly aware of the relationship between class and identity and that space can define selfhood. Ashamed of not being able to meet the standards of his bourgeois peers makes him want to escape his milieu at all costs:€‘I racked my brain for flight routes. They all ran in one direction:€the front, one of the many fronts, as quickly as possible’ (67). So powerful is his insight that identity depends on hierarchically defined patterns of consumption and style that not even his mother’s love can assuage his shame or stop his urge to flee.32 Several years later, he and Anna briefly visit his parents, who by now had resettled in the West, while en route to Italy. His depiction lacks the furor and rage of his earlier accounts, yet the visit nevertheless continues to haunt him: That journey before the journey is still painful … Anna had never experienced such cramped quarters … Was the floor made of wood€– pine boards€– or covered with artificial material of a nondescript color? Did the tablecloth have a crocheted trim? Why did we eat in the tiny kitchen and not in the main room?

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Or was it the other way round? … Mother is darting here and there, not knowing what to say. (367–8)

His gaze seems detached, almost neutral. He is unable to recall any details but they are unimportant anyhow. Different floor materials or tablecloths would not change the lower-class ambiance. Coolly surveying the scene reveals how far he has removed himself from his parents and their environment. Though Anna, who is from an upper-class Swiss family, literally brings home the distinctions of class, taste and behaviour, he seems at ease and only his parents feel awkward. Their milieu is presented as something that is primarily different, a social space Anna is unfamiliar with, but that the young visitors are quite removed from. So why does the memory continue to remain so painful? I would argue that it is a pivotal encounter depicting multiple leave-takings and which, in its duality of loss and new beginnings, corresponds to the autobiography’s inaugural scene. Travelling to Italy but without his mother, he is distancing himself from his earlier promises and the bonds they entailed. As an art student about to embark on the long-awaited Italian journey he has escaped the trap of his origins and is free to recreate himself. Yet his entry into the world of art was also supposed to liberate his mother from the constraints of a narrow and confining milieu. He is well aware that the price for his freedom is paid by those he left behind, particularly by his mother. She remains enclosed, embodied and constrained by her class and illness while he, the disembodied son, can pursue the adventures they both dreamed about. Given his strong emotional and narrative bonds to his mother, he appears to be in a double-bind. He has to leave her and her world in order to become the artist he promised her to be, but in so doing he is not attending to her illness and fails her as a son. In retrospect he is deeply troubled by the way he resolved this ethical dilemma, which might also contribute to his sense of lasting shame. Just as the twelve-year-old suddenly had to enter German history, assumed guilt, and lost the safe world of his childhood, symbolised in his mother’s embrace, the adult is about to became part of the cultural establishment and separates himself from the needs of his mother and her milieu. Linking the two scenes also draws attention to the close relationship between national and social identity in Grass’s biography. Grass is the first to admit that his extraordinary ambition was most likely fuelled by ‘my petty-bourgeois background, the desire€ – a musty megalomania aggravated by the fact that I didn’t finish school … to produce something stupendous’ (422). But he detests social ambitions that are purely material. Stopping briefly in Bayreuth during the time of the

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Wagner Festspiele, he is disgusted by ‘the repulsive posturing of the nouveau riche rabble around the monstrous cult barn’ (379). While art validates his aspirations, the pursuit of financial success is seen as ghastly, even though Grass accepts and welcomes his own financial success. There is an element of hypocrisy in his disdain that connects to Grass’s perception of his artistic persona. In his very thoughtful review of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Ian Buruma suggests that Grass’s fierce critique of the Adenauer years and its conservative culture€– as evident in his disgust at Bayreuth’s festival guests€– and his virulent anti-Americanism are fuelled by class resentment as well as contempt for popular cultural and its indifference to intellectuals like himself. Buruma sees Grass’s literary and activist work as shaped by a heroic mode that makes Grass ‘one of the last examples of a German tradition that puts poets and thinkers on a high pedestal, from which they can deliver, like prophets, their verdicts on the world’.33 Grass’s autobiography provides ample evidence of his burning desire and ambition to stand on this pedestal, to have his name engraved into Germany’s literary and cultural imaginary. But the heroic mode and the quest for greatness also require the sacrifice of those left behind, whose role it is to prepare, guide, finance and generally enable the exceptional person. That role falls mostly to women€– mothers, lovers and wives€– and it implies the devaluation of their sphere, the mundane everyday that is lived, not literalised in fiction. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel traces Grass’s first thirty years and the start of his meteoric rise to fame and success€– the story of the genius German artist€ – as well as his life as a son, and maternal sacrifice is one of the nodal points where these two narratives intersect. In admitting multiple failures and omissions, Grass both undercuts his public persona and presents himself as a morally flawed human, vulnerable and suffering, acknowledging dependence. While the autobiography emphasises this contingent self, Grass remains at the same time indebted to the cultural norm of the heroic master-narrative which can also absorb and integrate sins and failures. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel entwines both these models of identity, the relational and the autonomous, a self that accepts his vulnerability and a self that exercises control, but it is the latter that wants ‘to have the last word’ (2). No t e s 1 Max Frisch, ‘Der Autor und das Theater:€ Rede auf der Frankfurter Dramaturgentagung 1964’, in Max Frisch:€Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge (Frankfurt:€Suhrkamp, 1976), vol. 2, 1964–67, 339.

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2 See Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 9–22. 3 See Martin Kölbel, ed., Ein Buch, ein Bekenntnis:€ Die Debatte um Günter Grass’ ‘Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’ (Göttingen:€Steidl, 2007). 4 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The road from Danzig’, The New York Review of Books, 54:13 (16 August 2007), 3, www.nybooks.com/articles/20490 (accessed 12 September 2008). 5 Beim Häuten der Zwiebel continues to generate a vibrant scholarly debate. Important contributions are:€ Rebecca Braun, ‘“Mich in Variationen erzählen”:€ Günter Grass and the ethics of autobiography’, The Modern Language Review 103:4 (2008), 1051–66; Anne Fuchs, ‘“Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt”:€ Günter Grass’s autobiographical confession and the changing territory of Germany’s memory culture’, German Life and Letters, 60:2 (2007), 261–75; Michael Minden, ‘“Even the flowering of art isn’t pure”:€ Günter Grass’s figures of shame’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 23–35; Richard E. Schade, ‘Layers of meaning, war, art:€Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’, The German Quarterly, 80:3 (2007), 279–301; Stuart Taberner, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 139–50. 6 Katharina Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’:€Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from ‘Die Blechtrommel’ to ‘Im Krebsgang’ (Bern:€Peter Lang, 2007), 19–20. See also Stuart Taberner, ‘“Kann schon sein, daß in jedem Buch von ihm etwas Egomä ßiges rauszufinden ist”:€“Political” private biography and “private” biography in Günter Grass’s Die Box (2008)’, The German Quarterly, 82:4 (2009), 504–21. 7 See Fuchs, ‘Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt’. 8 See Braun, ‘Mich in Variationen erzählen’. 9 See Taberner, ‘Private failings and public virtues:€ Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel and the exemplary use of authorial biography’, Modern Language Review, 103 (2008) 143–54, 144. 10 See Schade, ‘Layers of meaning, war, art’. 11 Taberner, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, 145. 12 Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London:€ Harvill Secker, 2007). Subsequent references appear in the text with the page number in parentheses. 13 See Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories:€Making Selves (Ithaca, NY and London:€Cornell University Press, 1999) and Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY and London:€Cornell University Press, 2004). 14 Eakin, How Our Lives Became Stories, 46. 15 John D. Barbour, ‘Judging and not judging parents’, in Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY and London:€Cornell University Press, 2004), 73–98, 93.

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16 Taberner, ‘Kann schon sein’, p. 507. 17 See Julian Preece, Frank Finlay and Ruth J. Owen, eds., New German Literature:€ Life-Writing and Dialogue with the Arts (Oxford:€ Peter Lang, 2007). 18 David Ellis, Literary Lives:€Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York:€Routledge, 2000), 1. 19 Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, eds., The Seductions of Biography (New York and London:€Routledge, 1996). 20 William S. McFeeley, ‘Preface’, in Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, eds., The Seductions of Biography (New York and London:€ Routledge, 1996), ix–xiii, xiii. 21 McFeeley, ‘Preface’, xiii. 22 Karen Leeder, ‘Günter Grass’s lateness:€Reading Grass with Adorno and Saïd’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€ Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 49–66, 49. 23 See Taberner, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, 142–4; see also, Fuchs, ‘Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt’, 269–70. 24 Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 93. 25 Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 51. 26 See Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 93–7. 27 Schade, ‘Layers of meaning, war, art’, 280. 28 Teresa Ludden has developed this argument for Die Blechtrommel, see Ludden, ‘“Getting back to the umbilical cord”:€ Feminist and psychoanalytic theory and The Tin Drum’, in Monika Shafi, ed., Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum (New York:€ Modern Language Association, 2008), 185–97, 186. 29 See Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall, eds., Opa war kein Nazi:€ Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2002). 30 Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse:€The Politics of Memory (New York:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 43. 31 See Helmut Schmitz, ‘Unscharfe Bilder:€ Reconciliation between the generations:€The image of the ordinary German soldier in Dieter Wellersdorf’s Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder’, in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, eds., Beyond Normalization:€German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, NY:€Camden, 2006), 151–66. 32 See Leora Auslander, Taste and Power:€Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, CA:€University of California Press, 1996), 415–25. 33 Ian Buruma, ‘War and remembrance’, The New Yorker www.newyorker. com/printables/critics/060918crat_atlarge, 7 (accessed 12 September 2008).

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Bergmann, Werner, ‘Antisemitismus’, in Wolfgang Benz et al., eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Munich:€dtv, 2001), 365–7. Berry, Bonnie, Beauty Bias:€Discrimination and Social Power (Westport, CT and London:€Praeger Press, 2007). Best, Otto F. and Ulrich Karthaus, eds., Sturm und Drang und Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart:€Reclam, 1976). Beyer, Martin, Das System der Verkennung:€ Christa Wolfs Arbeit am MedeaMythos (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). Biendarra, Anke, ‘Der Erzähler als “postmoderner Flaneur” in Christian Kracht’s Roman Faserland ’, German Life and Letters 55:2 (2002), 164–79 Biller, Maxim, ‘Soviel Sinnlichkeit wie der Stadtplan von Kiel’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€ Reclam Verlag, 1998), 62–71. â•… ‘Feige das Land, schlapp die Literatur’, Die Zeit 16 (13 April 2000), 47–9. â•… Esra (Cologne:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence:€A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York:€Oxford University Press, 1973). Bohrer, Karl Heinz, ‘Die permanente Theodizee’, Merkur, 41 (1987), 267–86. Bond, Greg, ‘On the misery of nature and the nature of misery:€W.G. Sebald’s landscapes’, in J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds., W.G. Sebald:€A Critical Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Braun, Rebecca, ‘“Mich in Variationen erzählen”:€Günter Grass and the ethics of autobiography’, The Modern Language Review 103:4 (2008), 1051–66. â•… ‘Der alte Fuchs und die Medien:€ Autorschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Grass’ neueren Werken’, in Hanno Kesting, ed., Die Medien und Günter Grass (Cologne:€SH-Verlag, 2008), 29–39. â•… Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass (Oxford:€ Clarendon Press, 2008). Braun, Rebecca and Frank Brunssen, ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 9–22. â•… Changing the Nation:€ Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 49–66. Braun, Volker, ‘Das Eigentum’, reprinted in Carl Otto Konrady, ed., Von einem Land und vom anderen:€ Gedichte zur deutschen Wende (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1993), 51. Broadbent, Philip, ‘Generational shifts:€ Representing post-Wende Berlin’, New German Critique, 35:2 (2008), 139–69. Brockman, Stephen, Literature and German Unification (Cambridge University Press, 1999). â•… ‘Günter Grass and German unification’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125–38. Brooks, Ann, Postfeminism:€ Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London:€Routledge, 1997). Brussig, Thomas, Helden wie wir (Berlin:€Volk und Welt, 1995).

286

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Bullivant, Keith, ‘The divided city:€ Berlin in post-war German literature’, in Derek Glass et al., eds., Berlin. Literary Images of a City:€Eine Großstadt im Spiegel der Literatur (Berlin:€Schmidt, 1989), 162–77. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (New York and London:€Routledge, 1999). Calabrese, Rita, ‘Von der Stimmlosigkeit zum Wort:€ Medeas lange Reise aus der Antike in die deutsche Kultur’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 75–93. Caruth, Cathy, ‘Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma:€ Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3–12. Chiarloni, Anna, ‘Medea und ihre Interpreten:€ Zum letzten Roman von Christa Wolf’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€ Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 111–19. Clarke, David, ‘Dandyism and homosexuality in the novels of Christian Kracht’, Seminar, 41:1 (2005), 36–54. Cole, Alyson M., ‘“There are no victims in this class”:€on female suffering and anti-“victim feminism”’, NWSA Journal, 11:1 (1999), 72–96. Confino, Alon, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance:€ Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC:€ University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Cooke, Paul and Andrew Plowman, eds., German Writers and the Politics of Culture:€Dealing with the Stasi (Basingstoke:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Cosgrove, Mary, ‘The anxiety of German influence:€ Affiliation, rejection and Jewish Identity in W. G. Sebald’s work’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006), 229–52. â•… ‘Narrating German suffering in the shadow of Holocaust victimology:€W. G. Sebald, contemporary trauma theory and Dieter Forte’s air raids epic’, in Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, eds., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY:€ Camden House, 2009), 162–76. Damiano, Carla, Das Echolot:€ Sifting and Exposing the Evidence via Montage (Heidelberg:€Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2005). Dayıoğlu-Yücel, Yasemin, Von der Gastarbeit zur Identitätsarbeit:€IntegritätsverÂ� handlungen in türkisch-deutschen Texten von Şenocak, Özdamar, Agaoğlu und der Online-Community vaybee! (Göttingen:€Universitätsverlag, 2005). Dean, Carolyn J., The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY and London:€Cornell University Press, 2004). Deiritz, Karl and Hannes Kraus, eds., Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit oder ‘Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge’ (Hamburg and Zurich:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1991). Delius, Friedrich Christian, Mein Jahr als Mörder. Roman (Berlin:€ Rowohlt, 2004).

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Denham, Scott, ‘Die englischsprachige Sebald-Rezeption’, in Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., W. G. Sebald:€ Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei (Berlin:€Schmidt, 2006), 259–68. Denham, Scott and Mark McColloh, eds., W. G. Sebald:€History€– Memory€– Trauma (Berlin:€De Gruyter, 2006). Diner, Dan, ‘Negative Symbiose:€ Deutsche und Juden nach 1945’, in Dan Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 1987), 185–97. â•… ‘Negative symbiosis:€ Germans and Jews after Auschwitz’, in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past:€ Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate (Boston, MA:€Beacon Press, 1990), 251–61. Dirke, Sabine von, ‘Pop literature in the Berlin Republic’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–24. Dollinger, Roland, ‘Hybride Identitäten:€ Zafer Şenocaks Roman Gefährliche Verwandtschaft’, Seminar, 38:1 (2002), 59–73. Donadio, Rachel, ‘The chick-lit pandemic’, New York Times Book Review, 19 March 2006, 31. Donahue, William Collins, ‘“Normal” as “apolitical”:€ Uwe Timm’s Rot and Thomas Brussig’s Leben bis Männer’, in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, eds., German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006). Duve, Karen, ‘Interview mit Susanne Messmer:€“Es ist eine erbärmliche Sucht”’, Die Tageszeitung, 25 September 2002, 15. â•… Dies ist kein Liebeslied (Munich:€Goldmann, 2004). Dye, Elizabeth, ‘“Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”:€ Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, German Life and Letters, 57:4 (2004), 472–87. Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004). Eakin, Paul John, How Our Lives Become Stories:€Making Selves (Ithaca, NY and London:€Cornell University Press, 1999). â•… ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY and London:€ Cornell University Press, 2004). Ecker, Gisela, ‘“Heimat” oder die Grenzen der Bastelei’, in Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., W. G. Sebald:€Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei (Berlin:€Schmidt, 2006). Eddy, Beverley Driver, ‘Testimony and trauma in Herta Müller’s Herztier’, German Life and Letters, 53:1 (2000), 56–72. Ehrhardt, Marie-Luise, Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Eine Gestalt auf der Zeitgrenze (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2000). Ellis, David, Literary Lives:€ Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York:€Routledge, 2000). Ellis, Lorna, Appearing to Diminish:€ Female Development and the British Bildungsroman 1750–1850 (London:€Associated University Presses, 1999).

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Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘Melodrama:€ Genre, Gefühl oder Weltanschauung’, in Margrit Fröhlich, Klaus Gronenborn and Karsten Visarius, eds., Das Gefühl der Gefühle:€ Zum Kinomelodram (Marburg:€ Schüren, 2008), 11–34. Ergang, Robert Reinhold, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York:€Octagon Books, 1967). Eshel, Amir, ‘Vom eigenen Gewissen:€Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte und der Ort des Nationalsozialismus im Selbstbild der Bundesrepublik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 74:2 (2000), 333–60. Ewert, Michael, ‘Spaziergänge durch die deutsche Geschichte:€ Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, 152:37 (1999), 402–17. Fackenheim, Emil L., ‘The Jewish return into History’, in Emil L. Fackenheim and Raphael Jospe, eds., Jewish Philosophy and the Academy (Cranbury, NJ, London and Missisauga, ON:€ Associated University Presses, 1996), 223–38. Felski, Rita, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics:€ Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1989). Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit:€The New Woman’s Fiction (Abingdon and New York:€Routledge, 2006). Finkielkraut, Alain, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris:€Les éditions du Seuil, 1980). Finlay, Frank, ‘“Dann wäre Deutschland wie das Wort Neckarauen”:€ Surface, superficiality and globalisation in Christian Kracht’s Faserland ’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham University Press, 2004), 189–207. â•… ‘Günter Grass’s political rhetoric’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€ Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–38. Foell, Kristie and Jill Twark, ‘“Bekenntnisse des Stasi-Hochstaplers Klaus Uhltzscht”:€ Thomas Brussig’s comical and controversial Helden wie wir’, in Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman, eds., German Writers and the Politics of Culture:€Dealing with the Stasi (Basingstoke:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 173–94. Foley, Barbara, ‘Fact, fiction, fascism:€Testimony and mimesis in Holocaust narratives’, Comparative Literature, 34:4 (1982), 330–60. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’, in Studienausgabe Band IX:€ Fragen der Gesellschaft, Ursprünge der Religion (Frankfurt:€ Fischer, 2000), 193–270. Frisch, Max, ‘Der Autor und das Theater:€ Rede auf der Frankfurter Dramaturgentagung 1964’, in Max Frisch:€ Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge (Frankfurt:€Suhrkamp, 1976), vol. 2, 1964–67. Fröhlich, Margrit, ‘Thomas Brussig’s satire of contemporary history’, GDR Bulletin, 25 (1998), 21–30. Fuchs, Anne, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte:€Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:€Böhlau, 2004).

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â•… ‘“Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt”:€Günter Grass’s autobiographical confession and the changing territory of Germany’s memory culture’, German Life and Letters, 60:2 (2007), 261–75. â•… Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse:€The Politics of Memory (New York:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Fuchs, Anne, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006). Funke, Hajo, ‘Friedensrede als Bandstiftung’, in Micha Brumlik, Hajo Funke and Lars Rensmann, eds., Umkämpftes Vergessen:€ Walserdebatte, Holocaustdenkmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik (Berlin:€ Das Arabische Buch, 2000). Gamble, Sarah, ed., The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (London:€Routledge, 1998). Garbe, Joachim, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Idealdeutschen:€ Autobiographien deutscher Schriftsteller am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Günter de Bruyn, Ludwig Harig, Sigmar Schollak, Martin Walser)’, in Manfred Misch, ed., Autobiographien als Zeitzeugen (Tübingen:€ Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 199–212. Gerstenberger, Katharina, ‘Play zones:€ The erotics of the New Berlin’, The German Quarterly, 76:3 (2003), 59–72. â•… Writing the New Berlin:€The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2008). Glajar, Valentina, ‘Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and German:€Conflicting identities in Herta Muller’s Herztier’, Monatshefte, 89:4 (1997), 521–40. Golombek, Dieter and Dietrich Ratzke, eds., Dagewesen und aufgeschrieben (Frankfurt am Main:€IMK, 1990). Grab, Alexander, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (New York:€Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Grass, Günter, Fortsetzung folgt… (Göttingen:€Steidl, 1999). â•… Too Far Afield, trans. Krishna Winston (London:€Faber and Faber, 2000). â•… Peeling the Onion, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London:€ Harvill Secker, 2007). Grätz, Katharina, ‘Rückblicke auf Strategien des verdeckten Schreibens in Romanen von Katja Lange-Müller und Monika Maron’, Seminar, 43:2 (2007), 194–205. Graves, Peter J., ‘The Novels of Karen Duve:€ Just “chick lit […] grime” (and dragons)?’, in Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, eds., Pushing at Boundaries:€Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2006), 27–40. Graves, Robert, Greek Myths (London:€Cassell, 1958). Greiner, Ulrich, ‘Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik. Noch einmal:€ Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ’:€ Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich: Spangenberg, 1991), 208–16.

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â•… ‘Mangel an Feingefühl’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht nur um Christa Wolf ’:€Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991). Gross, Andrew S. and Michael J. Hoffmann, ‘Memory, authority and identity:€Holocaust studies in the light of the Wilkomirski Debate’, Biography, 27:1 (2004), 25–47. Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta, ‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten:€ Representing the Holocaust as an Austrian ghost story’, Germanic Review, 81:4 (2006), 360–82. Guillén, Claudio, Literature as System:€Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton University Press, 1971). Gutbrodt, Fritz, ‘The worth of Werther:€ Goethe’s literary marketing’, Modern Language Notes, 110:3 (1995), 579–630. Haines, Brigid, ed., Herta Müller (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 1998). â•… ‘â•›“The unforgettable forgotten”:€ The traces of trauma in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein’, German Life and Letters, 55:3 (2002), 266–81. â•… ‘German-language writing from eastern and central Europe’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–29. â•… ‘The eastern turn in contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian literature’, Debatte, 16:2 (2008), 135–49. Hall, Katharina, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’:€Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from‘Die Blechtrommel’ to ‘Im Krebsgang’ (Bern:€Peter Lang, 2007). Halverson, Rachel J., ‘Comedic bestseller or insightful satire:€Taking the interview and autobiography to task in Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir’, in Carol Anne Constabile-Henning, Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell, eds., Textual Responses to German Unification (Berlin:€ de Gruyter, 2001), 95–105. Haring, Ekkehard W., ‘“… die Generalpause meines Lebens”:€ Ein Gespräch mit Robert Schindel über Literatur, Schoah und jüdische Gebürtigkeiten’, Modern Austrian Literature, 3:4 (2005), 85–98. Heine, Heinrich, Die Nordsee, in Reisebilder (Frankfurt:€Insel, 1980), 99–144. Hempel, Dirk, Walter Kempowski. Eine bürgerliche Biographie (Munich:€R andom House, 2004). â•… ‘Autor, Erzähler und Collage in Walter Kempowskis Gesamtwerk’, in Carla A. Damiano, Jörg Drews and Doris Plöschberger, eds., ‘Was das nun wieder soll?’ Vom Im Block bis Letzte Grüße:€ Zu Werk und Leben Walter Kempowskis (Göttingen:€Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 21–33. Herf, Jeffrey, Divided Memory:€The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA and London:€Harvard University Press, 1997). Hieber, Jochen, ‘Unversöhnte Lebensläufe:€ Zur Rhetorik der Verletzung in der Walser-Bubis-Debatte’, in Michael Braun et al., eds., ‘Hinauf und Zurück/in die herzhelle Zukunft’:€ Deutsch-jüdische Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert:€Festschrift für Birgit Lermen (Bonn:€Bouvier, 2000), 543–59.

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Hielscher, Martin, ‘Literatur in Deutschland:€ Avantgarde und pädagogischer Purismus’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 151–5. â•… ‘The return to narrative and to history:€ Some thoughts on contemporary German-language literature’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece, eds., Literature, Markets and Media in Germany and Austria Today (Bern:€Peter Lang, 2000), 295–309, 302. Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames, Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1997). â•… ‘The generation of postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29:1 (2008), 103–28. Honegger, Gitta, ‘Elfriede Jelinek:€ How to get the Nobel Prize without really trying’, Theater, 36:2 (2006), 4–19. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002). Høystad, Ole Martin, Kulturgeschichte des Herzens von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, trans. Frank Zuber (Cologne and Vienna:€Böhlau, 2006). Hund, Wulf D., ‘Der scheußlichste aller Verdächte:€ Martin Walser und der Antisemitismus’, in Johannes Klotz and Gerd Wiegel, eds., Geistige Brandstiftung:€ Die neue Sprache der Berliner Republik (Berlin:€ Aufbau, 2001), 183–232. Hutcheon, Linda, ‘The postmodern problematizing of history’, English Studies in Canada, 14:4 (December 1988), 365–82. â•… ‘Historiographic metafiction:€ Parody and the intertextuality of history’, in Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, eds., Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore, MD:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Huyssen, Andreas, ‘Diaspora and nation:€ Migration into other pasts’, New German Critique, 88 (2003), 147–64. â•… ‘Gray zones of remembrance’, in David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan, eds., A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, MA:€ Harvard University Press, 2004), 970–5. Illies, Florian, Generation Golf:€Eine Inspektion (Berlin:€Argon, 2000). Jäger, Manfred, ‘Das Wechselspiel von Selbstzensur und Literaturlenkung in der DDR’, in Ernest Wichner and Herbert Wiesner, eds., ‘LiteraturÂ� entwicklungsprozesse’:€Die Zensur der Literatur in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1993), 18–49. Jelinek, Elfriede, Die Kinder der Toten (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€ Rowohlt, 1995), 665. â•… “Im Abseits. Nobel Lecture€ – Literature 2004”, trans. Martin Chalmers, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2004/ jelinek-lecture-e.html. â•… intervewed by Gitta Honegger, ‘I am a Trümmerfrau of language’, Theater, 36:2 (2006), 20–37. Kara, Yadé, Selam Berlin (Zurich:€Diogenes, 2003).

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Kaya, Ayhan, ‘German-Turkish transnational space:€ A separate space of their own’, German Studies Review, 30:3 (2007), 483–502. Kehlmann, Daniel, ‘1940’, Der Literaturbote, 14/15 (1999/2000), 41–2. â•… ‘Göttinger Poetikvorlesungen’, Diese sehr ernsten Scherze:€ Poetikvorlesungen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007). â•… Die Vermessung der Welt (Hamburg:€ Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009 [2005]). Kempowski, Walter, Das Echolot:€ 18. Januar bis 14. Februar 1945:€ Fuga furiosa (Munich:€Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1999). â•… Alles umsonst (Munich:€Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 2006). Kiesel, Helmuth, ‘Zwei Modelle literarischer Erinnerung an die NS-Zeit:€ Die Blechtrommel und Ein springender Brunnen’, in Stuart Parkes and Fritz Wefelmeyer, eds., Seelenarbeit an Deutschland:€Martin Walser in Perspective (Amsterdam and New York:€Rodopi, 2004), 343–61. Kimmel, Michael S. and Amy Aronson, Men and Masculinities:€ A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA:€ ABC-CLIO, 2004). Kluger [sic], Ruth, Still Alive:€A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:€The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001). Köhler, Andrea and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998). Köhler, Kai, ‘Die poetische Nation:€Zu Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede und seinen neueren Romanen’, in Johannes Klotz and Gerd Wiegel, eds., Geistige Brandstiftung:€ Die neue Sprache der Berliner Republik (Berlin:€ Aufbau, 2001), 101–54. Kölbel, Martin, ed., Ein Buch, ein Bekenntnis:€ Die Debatte um Günter Grass’ ‘Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’ (Göttingen:€Steidl, 2007). Königsdorf, Helga, 1989 oder Ein Moment Schönheit:€ Eine Collage aus Briefen, Gedichten, Texten (Berlin:€Aufbau, 1990). â•… ed., Adieu DDR:€Protokolle eines Abschieds (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€Rowohlt, 1990). Konzett, Matthias Piccolruaz, ‘Writing against the grain:€Zafer Şenocak as public intellectual and writer’, in Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yeşilada, eds., Zafer Şenocak (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 2003), 43–60. â•… ‘Preface:€ The many faces of Elfriede Jelinek’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€ Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€ A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€ Associated University Presses, 2007), 7–23. Kraft, Helga, ‘Building the Austrian body:€ Jelinek’s celebrity workout’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€ Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€ A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€Associated University Presses, 2007), 221–49. Kübler, Gunhild, ‘Martin Walser und die Unschuld der Erinnerung:€Zu Martin Walsers Roman Ein springender Brunnen’, in Moshe Zuckermann, ed., Deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Göttingen:€Wallstein, 2003), 166–80.

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Kuhn, Anna K., Christa Wolf ’s Utopian Vision:€ From Marxism to Feminism (Cambridge:€University Press, 1988). LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD and London:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete, ‘The audacious art of Elfriede Jelinek:€ Tour de Force and irritation’, in Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds., Elfriede Jelinek:€ Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity:€ A Critical Anthology (Cranbury, NJ:€Associated University Presses, 2007), 37–56. Langer, Phil C., Kein Ort Überall:€Die Einschreibung von ‘Berlin’ in die deutsche Literatur der neunziger Jahre (Berlin:€Weidler Buchverlag, 2002). Ledbetter, Mark, Victims and the Post-modern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body:€An Ethic of Reading and Writing (London:€Macmillan, 1996). Leeder, Karen, ‘Günter Grass’s lateness:€Reading Grass with Adorno and Saïd’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 49–66. Lehtinen, Ullaliina, ‘How does one know what shame is:€ Epistemology, emotions, and forms of life in juxtaposition’, Hypatia, 13:1 (1998), 56–77. Lewis, Alison and Andrew Hurley, ‘Love, popular music and “technologies of gender” in Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love-Song)’, New German Critique 115 (Winter 2012). Long, J. J., ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe:€ Photography, narrative and the claims of postmemory’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests:€ The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006), 147–65. â•… ‘W. G. Sebald:€ A bibliographical essay on current research’, in Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long, eds., W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Würzburg:€Könighausen & Neumann, 2007), 11–29. â•… W. G. Sebald:€Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 149–52. Lorenz, Matthias N., ‘Auschwitz drängt uns auf einen Fleck’:€ Judendarstellung und Auschwitzdiskurs bei Martin Walser (Stuttgart and Weimar:€Metzler, 2005). Lubrich, Oliver, ‘In the realm of ambivalence:€Alexander von Humboldt’s discourse on Cuba’, German Studies Review, 26:1 (2003), 63–80. â•… ‘Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859):€Zum 150. Todestag des Naturforschers und Reiseschriftstellers’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 2 (2009), 396–402. Ludden, Teresa, ‘“Getting back to the umbilical cord”:€ Feminist and psychoanalytic theory and The Tin Drum’, in Monika Shafi, ed., Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum (New York:€Modern Language Association, 2008), 186. Maaz, Hans-Joachim, Der Gefühlsstau. Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Berlin:€A rgon, 1990). â•… Das gestürzte Volk oder die verunglückte Einheit (Berlin:€Argon, 1991). Maier, Charles, ‘A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial’, History & Memory, 5:2 (1993), 136–51.

294

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Mannion, Jennifer C., ‘Girls blush, sometimes:€Gender, moral agency, and the problem of shame’, Hypatia, 18:3 (2003), 21–41. Maron, Monika, Flight of Ashes, trans. David Newton Marinelli (London and New York:€Readers International, 1986). â•… Animal Triste, trans. Brigitte Goldstein (Lincoln, NE and London:€University of Nebraska Press, 2000). â•… ‘Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 September 2002. http://archiv.sueddeutsche.de/sueddz/index.php?id=A22395312_ EGTPOGWPPWPTOEGWWETSEOW (accessed 24 April 2010). â•… Endmoränen (Frankfurt am Main:€Fischer, 2002). â•… Pavel’s Letters, trans. Brigitte Goldstein (London:€Harvill Press, 2002). â•… Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann und es trotzdem versuche (Frankfurt am Main:€Fischer, 2005). Martin, Sigurd, ‘Lehren vom Ähnlichen:€Mimesis und Entstellung bei Sebald’, in Sigurd Martin and Ingo Wintermeyer, eds., Verschiebebahnhöfe der Erinnerung:€ Zum Werk W. G. Sebalds (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 81–103. Marven, Lyn, Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German: Herta Müller, Libuše Moníková, Kerstin Hensel (Oxford University Press, 2005). â•… ‘German Literature in the Berlin Republic:€ Writing by Women’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 159–76. Matussek, Mattthias, ‘Alle macht den Wortenquirlen!’, Spiegel, 42 (2004), 178–82. Mayer, Verena and Roland Koberg, Elfriede Jelinek:€ Ein Porträt (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€Rowohlt, 2006). Mazza, Cris, ‘Who’s laughing now? A short history of chick lit and the perversion of a genre’, in Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit:€The New Woman’s Fiction (New York:€Routledge, 2006), 17–28. McCarthy, Thomas J., Relations of Sympathy:€ The Writer and Reader in British Romanticism (Aldershot:€Scolar Press, 1997). McColloh, Mark, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia, SC:€ University of South Carolina Press, 2003). McGlothlin, Erin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature:€ Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2006). McGowan, Moray, ‘Odysseus on the Ottoman, or “the man in skirts”:€Exploratory masculinities in the prose texts of Zafer Şenocak’, in Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yeşilada, eds., Zafer Şenocak (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 2003), 61–79. â•… ‘Turkish-German fiction since the mid 1990s’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction:€Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 196–214. McMullan, Gordon, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing:€Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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295

Minden, Michael, The German Bildungsroman:€ Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge University Press, 1997). â•… ‘“Even the flowering of art isn’t pure”:€ Günter Grass’s figures of shame’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€ Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 23–35. Mommsen, Hans, ‘Über ein Geschichtsgefühl:€ Der Schriftsteller Martin Walser€…’, Die Zeit, 16 May 2002, 41. Morgan, Ben, ‘Jelinek, “Krankheit oder moderne Frauen”’, in Peter Hutchinson (ed.), Landmarks in German Drama (Bern:€Lang, 2002), 225–42. Mosbach, Bettina, Figurationen der Katastrophe. Ästhetische Verfahren in W. G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn und Austerlitz (Bielefeld:€Aisthesis, 2008). Müller, Herta, Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm:€vom Weggehen und Ausscheren (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1993). â•… Herztier (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1994). â•… Hunger und Seide (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1995). â•… The Land of Green Plums, trans. Michael Hofmann (London:€Granta, 1998). â•… ‘In interview with Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler’, in Brigid Haines, ed., Herta Müller (Cardiff:€University of Wales Press, 1998), 14. â•… Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 2000). â•… Der König verneigt sich und tötet (Munich:€Hanser, 2003). â•… Animalul inimii, trans Nora Iuga (Bucharest:€Polirom, 2006). â•… Cristina und ihre Attrappe:€ Oder was nicht in den Akten der Securitate steht (Göttingen:€Wallstein, 2009); English version, ‘Securitate in all but name’, trans. Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen, sign and sight, www.signandsight.com/features/1910.html (accessed on 3 March 2011). â•… ‘Denk nicht dorthin, wo du nicht sollst’, Der Tagesspiegel, 22 July 2010, www. tagesspiegel.de/kultur/denk-nicht-dorthin-wo-du-nicht-sollst/1888610.html (accessed on 3 March 2011). Nause, Tanja, ‘Post-Wende literature and cultural memory:€ Moments of recollection in Thomas Brussig’s novel Helden wie wir’, in Christopher Hall and David Rock, eds., German Studies towards the Millennium (Oxford:€Peter Lang, 2000), 155–72. Negt, Oskar, ed., Der Fall Fonty:€ Ein weites Feld im Spiegel der Kritik (Göttingen:€Steidl, 1996). Nickel, Gunther, ‘Von “Beerholms Vorstellung” zur “Vermessung der Welt”:€Die Wiedergeburt des magischen Realismus aus dem Geist der modernen Mathematik’, in Gunther Nickel, ed., Daniel Kehlmanns ‘Die Vermessung der Welt’:€ Materialien, Dokumente, Interpretationen (Reinbek bei Hamburg:€Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 151–68. Niehaus, Michael and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., W. G. Sebald:€ Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei (Berlin:€Schmidt, 2006). Niven, Bill, Facing the Nazi Past (London and New York:€Routledge, 2001). â•… ‘The globalisation of memory and the rediscovery of German suffering’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (University of Birmingham Press, 2004), 229–46.

296

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Nolden, Thomas, Junge jüdische Literatur:€ Konzentrisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). Novák, Jakub, Martin Walsers doppelte Buchführung:€Die Konstruktion und die Dekonstruktion der nationalen Identität in seinem Spätwerk (Konstanz and Leipzig:€Universitätsbibliothek und Deutsche Bibliothek, 2002). Öhlschläger, Claudia, Beschädigtes Leben:€Erzählte Risse:€W. G. Sebalds Poetische Ordnung des Unglücks (Berlin:€Rombach, 2006). Ölke, Martina, ‘Reisen in eine versunkene Provinz:€ Die DDR in der literarischen Retrospektive. Erwin Strittmatter:€ “Der Laden” und Monika Maron:€ “Endmoränen”’, in Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Gräz and Olaf Hildebrand, eds., Wende des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989 (Berlin:€Erich Schmidt, 2006), 209–24. Ommundsen, Wenche, ‘From China with love:€Chick lit and the new crossover fiction’, in A. Robert Lee, China Fictions/English Language:€Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2008), 327–45. Orbach, Susie, Bodies (London:€Profile Books, 2009). Pascal, Roy, The German Novel (Manchester University Press, 1956). Paul, Georgina, Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2009). Politycki, Matthias, ‘Kalbfleisch mit Reis! Die literarische Ästhetik der 78er Generation’, in, Die Farbe der Vokale (Munich:€ Luchterhand, 1998), 23–44. â•… ‘Der amerikanische Holzweg’, Frankfurter Rundschau 66 (18 March 2000), Zeit und Bild, 2. Posthofen, Renate, ‘Erinnerte Geschichte(n):€Robert Schindels Roman Gebürtig’, Modern Austrian Literature, 3:4 (1994), 193–212. Powell, Larson and Brenda Bethman, ‘“One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly”:€Elfriede Jelinek’s musicality’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32:1 (2008), 163–83. Prager, Brad, ‘The erection of the Berlin Wall:€ Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir and the end of East Germany’, Modern Language Review, 99:4 (2004), 983–98. â•… ‘The good German as narrator:€On W. G. Sebald and the risks of Holocaust writing’, New German Critique, 96 (2005), 75–102. Preece, Julian, ‘“According to his inner geography, the Spree flowed into the Rhône”:€Too Far Afield and France’, in Rebecca Braun and Frank Brunssen, eds., Changing the Nation:€ Günter Grass in International Perspective (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 81–93. Preece, Julian, Frank Finlay and Ruth J. Owen, eds., New German Literature:€LifeWriting and Dialogue with the Arts (Oxford:€Peter Lang, 2007). Radisch, Iris, ‘Der Herbst des Quatschocento’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 180–8. Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung bei Arno Schmidt und Walter Kempowski’, in Stefan Hermes and Amir Muhić, eds., Täter als Opfer? Deutschsprachige Literatur zu Krieg und Vertreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg:€Verlag Dr Kovač, 2007), 57–74.

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297

Rhiel, Mary and David Suchoff, eds., The Seductions of Biography (New York and London:€Routledge, 1996). Ribó, Ignasi, ‘The one-winged angel:€ History and memory in the literary discourse of W. G. Sebald’, ORBIS Litterarum, 64:3 (2009), 222–62. Rickes, Joachim, ‘Wer ist Graf von der Ohe zur Ohe? Überlegungen zum Kapitel “Der Garten” in Daniel Kehlmanns Die Vermessung der Welt’, Sprachkunst, 38:1 (2007), 89–96. Rojek, Chris, Celebrity (London:€Reaktion, 2001). Römhild, Regina, ‘Confronting the logic of the nation-state:€ Transnational migration and cultural globalisation in Germany’, Ethnologia Europaea, 33 (2003), 61–72. Rose, Margaret A., Parody:€ Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Roser, Birgit, Mythenbehandlung und Kompositionstechnik in Christa Wolfs Medea. Stimmen (Frankfurt am Main:€Peter Lang, 2000). Ruprecht, Lucia, ‘Pleasure and affinity in W. G. Sebald and Robert Walser’, German Life and Letters, 62:3 (2009), 311–27. Sagarra, Eda and Peter Skrine, A Companion to German Literature:€From 1500 to the Present (Oxford:€Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 29–30. Saïd, Edward, On Late Style:€ Music and Literature against the Grain (New York:€Pantheon Books, 2006). Santner, Eric, ‘History beyond the pleasure principle’, in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation:€ Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1992), 143–54. â•… On Creaturely Life:€ Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Saul, Nicholas, Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Schade, Richard E., ‘Layers of meaning, war, art:€ Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’, The German Quarterly, 80:3 (2007), 279–301. Scheff, Thomas J., ‘Shame and conformity:€ The deference-emotion system’, American Sociological Review, 53:3 (1988), 395–406. Schindel, Robert, ‘Judentum als Erinnerung und Widerstand’, in Robert Schindel, Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€Literatur€– Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 27–34. â•… ‘Literatur€ – Auskunftsbüro der Angst’, in Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€ Literatur€ – Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 95–114. â•… ‘Wer der Folter erlag kann nicht mehr heimisch werden in der Welt’, in Robert Schindel, Gott schütze uns vor den guten Menschen:€Literatur€– Auskunftsbüro der Angst (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1995), 121–36. â•… Gebürtig (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1992), trans. Michael Roloff:€BornWhere (Riverside, CA:€Ariadne Press, 1995). â•… ‘Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft:€ Anmerkungen zu Geschichte und Gegenwart des jüdisch-nichtjüdischen Verhältnisses in den Täterländern’, Text und Kritik, 144 (1999), 3–8.

298

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Schirrmacher, Frank, ‘“Dem Druck des härteren, strengeren Lebens standhalten”:€ Auch eine Studie über den autoritären Charakter’, in Thomas Anz, ed., ‘Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ’:€ Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich:€Spangenberg, 1991), 77–89. â•… ‘Idyllen in der Wüste oder Das Versagen vor der Metropole’, in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz, eds., Maulhelden (Leipzig:€Reclam Verlag, 1998), 15–27. Schmidt, Ricarda, ‘Metapher, Metonymie und Moral:€Herta Müllers Herztier’, in Brigid Haines, ed., Herta Müller (Cardiff:€ University of Wales Press, 1998), 57–74. Schmitz, Helmut, On Their Own Terms (University of Birmingham Press, 2004). â•… ‘Unscharfe Bilder:€Reconciliation between the generations:€The image of the ordinary German soldier in Dieter Wellersdorf’s Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder’, in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, eds., Beyond Normalization:€ German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the TwentyFirst Century (Rochester, NY:€Camden, 2006), 151–66. â•… ed., A Nation of Victims? (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2007). Schödel, Kathrin, ‘Normalising cultural memory? The “Walser-Bubis debate” and Martin Walser’s novel Ein springender Brunnen’, in Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity:€ Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY:€ Camden House, 2002), 67–84. â•… Literarisches versus politisches Gedächtnis? Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede und sein Roman ‘Ein springender Brunnen’ (Würzburg:€ Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). Schumann, Andreas, ‘“das ist schon ziemlich charmant”:€ Christian Krachts Werke im literaturhistorischen Geflecht der Gegenwart’, in Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter, eds., Christian Kracht:€Zu Leben und Werk (Cologne:€Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 150–64. Sebald, W. G., Die Ringe des Saturn (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 1998). â•… Austerlitz (Frankfurt:€ Fischer, 2003); trans. Anthea Bell, Austerlitz (London:€Hamish Hamilton, 2001). â•… Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich:€Hanser, 2003). â•… Luftkrieg und Literatur (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2003). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA:€University of California Press, 1990). Segelcke, Elke, ‘Cultural otherness and beyond:€ From discourses of cultural identity and “clash of civilizations” to a transnational aesthetics in the work of Zafer Şenocak’, in Ursula E. Beitter, ed., Reflections of Europe in Transition (Frankfurt:€Lang, 2007), 103–20. Şenocak, Zafer, Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar:€ Das Ende der Geduld/Sabrn sonu (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 1993). â•… Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Berlin:€Babel, 1993). â•… Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Munich:€Babel Verlag, 1998).

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299

â•… Atlas of A Tropical Germany, trans. Leslie A. Adelson (Lincoln, NE:€University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Shafi, Monika, ‘Joint ventures:€Identity politics and travel in novels by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafer Şenocak’, Comparative Literature Studies, 40:2 (2003). â•… ‘German and American dream houses:€Buildings and biographies in Gregor Hens’s Himmelssturz and Monika Maron’s Endmoränen’, German Quarterly, 79:4 (2006), 505–24. Sheppard, Richard, ‘“Woods, trees and the spaces in between”:€A report on work published on W. G. Sebald 2005–2008’, Journal of European Studies, 39:1 (2009), 79–128. Simanowski, Roberto, ‘Die DDR als Dauerwitz’, Neue deutsche Literatur, 2 (1996), 156–63. Stanišić, Saša, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (Munich:€Luchterhand, 2006). Stein, Mary Beth, ‘The banana and the Trabant:€ Representations of the “Other” in a united Germany’, in Ernst Schürer et al., eds., The Berlin Wall:€ Representations and Perspectives (New York:€ Peter Lang, 1996), 333–46. Stranaková, Monika, Literarische Grenzüberschreitungen:€ Fremdheits- und Europa-Diskurs in den Werken von Barbara Frischmuth, Dzevad Karahasan und Zafer Şenocak (Tübingen:€Stauffenburg, 2009). Taberner, Stuart, ‘German nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish identity in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz’, The Germanic Review, 3 (2004), 181–202. â•… German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (University of Birmingham Press, 2004). â•… German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond (Rochester, NY:€Camden House, 2005). â•… Contemporary German Fiction:€ Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007). â•… ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 139–50. â•… ‘“Kann schon sein, daß in jedem Buch von ihm etwas Egomäßiges rauszufinden ist”:€“Political” private biography and “private” private biography in Günter Grass’s Die Box (2008)’, German Quarterly, 82:4 (2009), 504–21. Tacke, Alexandra, ‘“Sie nicht als Sie”:€ Die Nobelpreisträgerin Elfriede Jelinek spricht “Im Abseits”’, in Christine Künzel and Jörg Schönert, eds., AutorÂ� inszenierungen:€ Autorschaft und literarisches Werk im Kontext der Medien (Würzburg:€Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 191–207. Thesz, Nicole, ‘Identität und Erinnerung im Umbruch:€ Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Neophilologus, 87:3 (2003), 435–51. â•… ‘“Without poachers, no foresters, and vice versa”:€Political violence in Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld ’, The German Quarterly, 80:1 (2007), 59–76.

300

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â•… ‘Dangerous monuments:€Günter Grass and German memory culture’, German Studies Review 31:1 (2008), 1–21. Vees-Gulani, Susanne, Trauma and Guilt:€ Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany (Berlin:€de Gruyter, 2003). Vice, Sue, Holocaust Fiction (London:€Routledge, 2000). Walser, Martin, Das Prinzip Genauigkeit:€ Laudatio auf Victor Klemperer (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1996), 33–4. â•… ‘Des Lesers Selbstverständnis’ (1993), re-published in Martin Walser, Leseerfahrungen, Liebeserklärungen:€ Aufsätze zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1997), 702–30. â•… Dorle und Wolf, in Deutsche Sorgen (Frankfurt am Main:€ Suhrkamp, 1997), 276–405. â•… Ein springender Brunnen (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 1998). â•… ‘Über ein Geschichtsgefühl’, in Martin Walser, Die Verwaltung des Nichts:€Aufsätze (Reinbek:€Rowohlt, 2004), 253–62. â•… ‘Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede’ (‘Experiences while composing a Sunday speech’), published in English in Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, The Burden of the Past:€Martin Walser on Modern German Identity. Texts, Contexts, Commentary (Rochester, NY:€ Camden House, 2008), 85–95. Wehdeking, Volker, ‘Monika Marons rückläufige Erwartungen von Animal triste zu Endmoränen:€Das Unbedingte in der Liebe und die Bedingtheiten des Älterwerdens’, in Winfried Giesen, ed., Monika Maron:€Begleitheft zur Ausstellung (Frankfurt am Main:€Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, 2005), 60–74. Weigel, Sigrid, Genea-Logik:€ Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (Munich:€Fink, 2006). Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall, eds., Opa war kein Nazi:€ Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt:€Fischer, 2002). Wiesel, Elie, ‘The Holocaust as literary inspiration’, in Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Dorothy Rabinowicz, Robert McAfee Brown and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston, IL:€Northwestern University Press, 1977), 5–19. Wirtz, Thomas, ‘Schwarze Zuckerwatte. Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebald’, Merkur, 6 (2001), 530–4. Wittek, Bernd, Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland (Marburg: Tectum, 1997) Wittstock, Uwe, Leselust:€ Wie unterhaltsam ist die neue deutsche Literatur? (Munich:€Luchterhand, 1995). Wolf, Christa, Kassandra:€Vier Vorlesungen:€Eine Erzählung (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1983); Cassandra:€A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan van Huerck (London:€Virago, 1984). â•… Im Dialog:€Aktuelle Texte (Frankfurt am Main:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990).

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301

â•… Was bleibt (Frankfurt am Main:€ Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990); What Remains and Other Stories, trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (London:€Virago, 1993). â•… Akteneinsicht:€ Zerrspiegel und Dialog:€ Eine Dokumentation, ed. Hermann Vinke (Hamburg:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1993). â•… Medea. Stimmen (Frankfurt am Main:€Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1996). â•… ‘Brief an Heide Göttner-Abendroth’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 22–5. â•… ‘Tagebuch’ (Los Angeles and Santa Monica), in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 38–9. â•… ‘Von Kassandra zu Medea’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€ Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 11–17. â•… ‘Warum Medea? Christa Wolf im Gespräch mit Petra Kammann’, in Marianne Hochgeschurz, ed., Christa Wolfs Medea:€ Voraussetzungen zu einem Text:€ Mythos und Bild (Berlin:€ Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, 1998), 49–57. â•… Medea. A Modern Retelling, trans. John Cullen (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland:€Doubleday, 1998). â•… Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud (Frankfurt am Main:€Suhrkamp, 2010). Wölfel, Kurt, ‘Interesse/interessant’, in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe:€ Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden (Stuttgart and Weimar:€J. B. Metzler, 2001), vol. 3, 138–74. Yeşilada, Karin E., ‘“Nette Türkinnen von nebenan”:€Die neue deutsch-türkische Harmlosigkeit als literarischer Trend’, in Helmut Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur:€ Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration (Amsterdam:€Rodopi, 2009), 117–41. Yildiz, Yasemin, ‘Political trauma and literal translation:€Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 7 (2008), 248–70. Zachau, Reinhard K., ‘“Das Volk jedenfalls war’s nicht!” Thomas Brussigs Abrechnung mit der DDR’, Colloquia Germanica 30:4 (1997), 387–95. Zeyringer, Klaus, ‘Gewinnen wird die Kunst:€Ansätze und Anfänge von Daniel Kehlmanns “Gebrochenem Realismus”’, Daniel Kehlmann, Text + Kritik, 177 (2008), 36–44. Zilcosky, John, ‘Lost and found’, Modern Language Notes, 121:€3 (2006), 679–98. â•… ‘Lost and found:€ Disorientation, nostalgia and holocaust melodrama in Sebald’s Austerlitz’, Modern Language Notes, 121:3 (2006), 679–98. Zitzlsperger, Ulrike, ‘Städte in der Stadt:€Berliner Erfahrungssräume’, Seminar, 40:3 (2004), 277–92.

Index

1945, 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 23, 28, 64, 109, 115, 146, 198, 211, 214, 224 ’68ers, 3, 136, 142, 147, 211, 226, 230–3, 235–8, 257, 280 ’78ers, 3, 165 9/11, 257 Adelson, Leslie, 85, 86, 89, 242 Adenauer, Konrad, 231, 281 Adorno, Theodor, 9, 27, 36, 70, 72, 74, 152, 203 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 70, 72, 77 Ahrends, Martin, 134 Al-Ali, Nadje, 249 America, 13, 14, 29, 255, 267 Améry, Jean, 21–3, 29, 204 ‘On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew’, 21, 33 Anderson, Mark M., 255 anorexia, 172 Anouilh, Jean, 66 anti-Semitism, 20, 24, 30, 43, 108, 111–12, 114–15, 118, 119 Appadurai, Arjun, 252 Argentina, 13, 14, 177 Armenian massacre, 79, 83–5 Atatürk, 83 Auerbach, Erich, 82 Auschwitz, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 114, 115, 117, 203, 212 Austen, Jane, 168, 175 Austrian writers, 4 autobiography, 8, 11, 50, 54, 98, 105, 110, 125, 181, 192, 270–81 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 69, 81, 144, 242 Franza-Fragment, 69 Malina, 144 Balzac, Honoré de, 211 Banciu, Carmen Francesca, 4 Barber, Benjamin, 250 Barbour, John D., 272

Bateman, Brenda, 154 Bauman, Zygmunt, 80 Liquid Modernity, 80 Baßler, Moritz, 137, 166 Becher, Johannes R., 40 Beck, Ulrich, 251 Beckermann, Ruth, 23, 28 Behrens, Katja, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 41, 158–9 Berg, Sibylle, 13, 43 Die Fahrt, 13 Berger, Karina, 10, 211 Berlin, 6, 7, 13, 16, 37, 40, 43, 47, 50, 55, 60, 79, 82, 86, 88–9, 94–5, 97, 101, 103–5, 123, 125–7, 131–3, 146, 185, 219, 221, 230–1, 235, 237, 241–5, 250–2, 256, 273, 277, 291–2 Berlin Wall, 16, 50, 55, 97, 123, 133, 242 Beyer, Marcel, 10, 211 Spione, 10, 211 Bichsel, Peter, 4 Biendarra, Anke, 137, 139 Biermann, Wolf, 40 Bildungsroman, 116, 166, 168–9, 171, 175–6, 266 Biller, Maxim, 2, 3, 4, 16 Esra, 16 Biskupek, Matthias, 7 Der Quotensachse, 7 Bloom, Harold, 171, 176 Böll, Heinrich, 138, 175 Bekenntnis eines Hundefängers, 175 bombing, 10, 140, 147, 205, 212, 214 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 228 Bonn, 39, 95, 230, 290 Borges, Luis, 255 Bosnia, 4, 12 Bossert, Rolf, 186 Braun, Rebecca, 9, 35, 273 Braun, Volker, 7 Der Wendehals, 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 40, 130, 270 bricolage, 176, 196

302

Index

303

Brockmann, Stephen, 10, 123 Brückner, Christine, 219 Jauche und Levkojen, 219 Brumme, Christoph, 6 Nichts als das, 6 Brussig, Thomas, 6, 7, 13, 50, 244, 247 Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, 6 Helden wie wir, 7, 50, 244–5, 247 Wasserfarben, 50 Wie es leuchtet, 13, 50, 62 Bukowski, Charles, 51 bulimia, 172 Bundeswehr, 228 Burroughs, William, 138 Buruma, Ian, 281

diaspora, 13, 14, 249 Dietzsch, Steffen, 61 Diner, Dan, 203 Dirke, Sabine von, 245 Dischereit, Esther, 4 Dresden, 134, 214 Dückers, Tanja, 211, 244, 279 Himmelskörper, 211 Spielzone, 244 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 144 Duve, Karen, 7, 16, 165 Dies ist kein Liebeslied, 7, 16, 165, 168, 176 Regenroman, 7, 167, 169 Dye, Elizabeth, 212 dystopia, 7

Camus, Albert, 81 Carpentier, Alejo, 255 Caruth, Cathy, 181 Carver, Raymond, 263 Cassandra, 41, 65, 67, 70, 156 Catholic Church, 15 Cato, 69 Cavarero, Adriana, 69 In Spite of Plato, 69 Celan, Paul, 12, 24, 81 ‘Todesfuge’, 12 censorship, 99, 100, 102 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote, 266 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 66 chick lit, 168, 169, 175–6, 241, 246, 247 Christian, 4, 12, 16, 85, 90, 95, 203, 227, 228 Clarke, David, 137 Cold War, 14, 16, 65, 74, 151, 152, 227, 229–30, 234–5, 257 Cole, Alyson, 166, 174 communist, 20, 65, 73, 228, 246 consumerism, 7, 8, 15, 136, 166, 256 Corneille, Pierre, 66 Cortázar, Julio, 258, 261 Cosgrove, Mary, 11, 195 cosmopolitanism, 6, 14, 90, 131, 133, 245, 250, 267 Coupland, Douglas, 165 cultural relativism, 257, 258, 266 Czechoslovakia, 12

Eaglestone, Robert, 197, 198 Eakin, Paul John, 272, 275 East Berlin, 231, 243 East German writing, 40, 99 East Germany, 1, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 35, 40, 50, 51, 53, 57, 61, 64, 94–8, 100, 102–3, 133–4, 227–8, 235, 243, 246, 251 eastern Europe, 15, 16 eastern European writers, 4 Eddy, Beverley Driver, 182 Eich, Günter, 81 Einstein, Albert, 260 Ellis, Bret Easton, 136, 145 Less than Zero, 136 Ellis, David, 273 empathy, 109 Enke, Wilhelmine, 11, 94, 100, 101, 102, 105 Enlightenment, 72, 256–8, 260–1, 265–6, 291 epigonality, 266–7 Erpenbeck, Jenny, 165, 279 Euclid, 255, 260 Euripides, 66, 67, 69, 71 expellees, 9, 219, 220 expulsion, 12, 90, 212, 214, 219–22 expulsion novels, 219

Dachau, 111 Damrosch, David, 256 de Bruyn, Günter, 9 Dean, Carolyn J., 199 Delius, F. C., 10, 211, 226 Mein Jahr als Mörder, 10, 226 Descartes, René, 204

Fachinger, Petra, 13, 241 Federal Republic. See€West Germany Felski, Rita, 176 feminism, 152, 162, 165, 166, 176 Fielding, Helen, 168 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 168, 172, 175 Fielding, Henry, 266 Tom Jones, 266 Finch, Helen, 7, 151 Finkielkraut, Alain, 22, 25 Finlay, Frank, 137 First World War, 79, 115, 204, 215, 222 Flakhelfergeneration, 211, 215

304

Index

flâneur, 37, 245 Florescu, Catalin Dorian, 12 Der kurze Weg nach Hause, 12 Fontane, Theodor, 9, 37, 39, 40, 42–7, 127, 216, 219 Briest, Effi, 42 Irrungen, Wirrungen, 127 Kindheit und Jugend, 40 Quitt, 44 former Yugoslavia, 2 Forte, Dieter, 10, 212 Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen, 10, 212 Franck, Julia, 7, 165 Liebediener, 7 Frank, Hans, 21 Frank, Niklas, 21 Fräuleinwunder, 165 Frederick the Great, 44 Freud, Sigmund, 40, 68, 203 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 203 Friedrich Wilhelm II, 11, 94, 101 Fries, Fritz Rudolf, 247 Der Roncalli-Effekt, 247 Die Nonnen von Bratislava, 247 Frisch, Max, 144, 270 Fuchs, Anne, 10, 226 Fuentes, Carlos, 258, 261 Gauß, Johann Carl Friedrich, 255–68 Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, 261 GDR, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 39, 50, 52–3, 55, 57, 58–62, 64–5, 73–4, 94–7, 99, 101–2, 105, 123, 133, 134, 215, 229–30, 235, 248, 251, See€East Germany Geiger, Arno, 279 gender, 3, 11, 14, 69, 71, 73, 80, 101, 106, 155, 156, 165, 168–9, 170–1, 174, 183 Generation Golf, 3, 165 German wartime suffering, 10, 212, 214, 217, 218, 222–3 German-Jewish writers, 4, 19 German-Russian writers, 4 German-Turkish writers, 242 Gerstenberger, Katharina, 9, 38, 94, 244 Gesinnungsästhetik, 1, 64 Girard, René, 69 Violence and the Sacred, 69, 77 globalisation, 5, 7, 8, 13, 170, 247–52, 256, 263, 264, 267 glocalisation, 15 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 9, 15, 16, 116, 117, 118, 136, 138, 143, 168–71, 219, 256, 258, 259, 266, 267–8 ‘Ein Gleiches (Wandrers Nachtlied)’, 259

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 143, 169, 170–1, 175 Faust, 138 Im Schäkespears Tag, 266 Wilhelm Meister, 2, 116, 117, 175 Xenien, 267 Gogol, Nicolai, 66 Goosen, Frank, 6 liegen lernen, 6 Gorelik, Lena, 247 Hochzeit in Jerusalem, 247 Göring, Hermann, 38, 147 Grass, Günter, 9, 10, 35, 61, 211–12, 215, 270 Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 9, 10, 47–8, 270–2 Die Blechtrommel, 45, 51, 140–1, 168, 270, 274 Die Box, 9, 35–6, 48, 272–3 Die Rättin, 35, 36, 38 Ein weites Feld, v, 9, 35, 37–8, 46–7, 273 Im Krebsgang, 10, 48, 212 Katz und Maus, 144–5 Letzte Tänze, 36, 48 Unkenrufe, 9 Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland, 35 Zunge zeigen!, 35 Grätz, Katharina, 99, 100 Greece, 66, 148, 266–8 Greene, Graham, 263 Greiner, Ulrich, 1, 2, 35 Grillparzer, Franz, 66 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von, 140 Grisham, John, 263 Groscurth, Hans-Georg, 230–6 Gryphius, Andreas, 265–7 Absurda Comica, oder Herr Peter Squenz, 266 Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta, 160 Guillén, Claudio, 248 guilt, 12, 26–9, 79, 85, 89, 115, 141, 144, 174, 215, 218, 222, 226, 272, 274, 277, 278, 279, 280 Hage, Volker, 76, 165 Hahn, Ulla, 211, 279 Unscharfe Bilder, 10, 211–12 Haider, Jörg, 151, 154–6 Haines, Brigid, 4 Hall, Katharina, 271 Handke, Peter, 8 Eine winterliche Reise, 8 Haneke, Michael, 151 Klavierspielerin, 151 Harig, Ludwig, 9 Hass, Aaron, 29 Hatschek, Paul, 230 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 40

Index Havemann, Robert, 230, 233, 235–6 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 130, 131 Sein und Zeit, 130 Heimat, 8, 11, 113, 252, 278 Hein, Christoph, 6, 9, 12 Landnahme, 12 Napoleonspiel, 6 Willenbrock, 6 Hein, Jakob, 13 Vielleicht ist es sogar schön, 13 Heine, Heinrich, 40, 142, 219 Hemingway, Ernst, 263 Hempel, Dirk, 214 Hensel, Kerstin, 6, 247 Tanz am Kanal, 6, 247 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 219, 265–6 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 266 Shakespeare, 266 Herz, Markus, 264 Hesse, Hermann, 144 Unterm Rad, 144 Hettche, Thomas, 7 Nox, 7 Hielscher, Martin, 2, 212, 213 Hilsenrath, Edgar, 12, 84, 85 Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken, 12, 84 Hirsch, Marianne, 22 Historikerstreit, 212 Hitler Youth, 113 Hitler, Adolf, 11, 12, 23, 27, 29, 80, 90, 111–12, 115–16, 118, 130, 132, 147, 214, 217, 227, 228–9, 255, 275 Holocaust, 12, 19–32, 83–7, 109, 114–15, 119, 127, 132, 159, 195, 196, 197–200, 203–5, 207, 212, 222–3, 242, 257, 264, 296 Holocaust writing, 198, 199, 203 Homer, 65 Iliad, 65 homosexuality, 14, 137, 261–2, 264 Honecker, Erich, 39, 53–5, 73 Honigmann, Barbara, 4 Hoppe, Felicitas, 165 Horkheimer, Max, 70, 72, 74 Huchel, Peter, 81 Humboldt, Alexander von, 237, 255–68 Atlas Picturesque, 267 Hutcheon, Linda, 213, 221, 223 Huyssen, Andreas, 126–7 Illies, Florian, 165 India, 8, 13, 102, 246 internet, 13 intertextuality, 166, 187, 197, 213, 216, 220, 223 Iran, 13, 246

305

irony, 11, 25, 27, 53, 88, 156, 176, 206, 213, 216, 217, 221, 241, 244, 258, 264 Irving, John, 51 The World according to Garp, 51 Islam, 15, 16 Israel, 4, 13, 15, 31 Italy, 13, 215, 246, 268, 277, 279, 280 Jahnn, Hans Henny, 66 Jefferson, Thomas, 267 Jelinek, Elfriede, 7, 151 ‘Im Abseits’, 152, 153, 155, 157, 161 Bambiland, 152 Das Lebewohl, 154 Die Kinder der Toten, 151, 153, 157–8, 160–1, 291 Gier, 151 In den Alpen, 152 Klavierspielerin, 151 Krankheit oder moderne Frauen, 152 Lust, 152, 154 Ulrike Maria Stuart, 151 Jenny, Zoë, 4, 7, 165 Blütenstaubzimmer, 7 Jews, 10, 16, 32, 81, 84, 85, 86, 91, 111, 114–16, 118, 132–3, 161, 203–4, 217–18, 229–30, 245, 249 Jirgl, Reinhard, 211 Die Unvollendeten, 211 Johnson, Uwe, 39, 40 Joyce, James, 160, 211 Kafka, Franz, 40, 81, 87, 144, 256, 261 Das Schloss, 256, 261 Das Urteil, 144 Die Verwandlung, 87 Kaminer, Wladimir, 4 Kamper, Dietmar, 69 Kant, Immanuel, 109, 260 Kara, Yadé, 13–14, 241 Café Cyprus, 13, 252 Selam Berlin, 13–14, 241 Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 265 Kehlmann, Daniel, 2, 14, 15, 255 Die Vermessung der Welt, 2, 14, 15, 255–7 Ruhm, 263 Kemal, Mustafa. See€Atatürk Kempowski, Walter, 10, 14, 211, 222 Alles umsonst, 10, 14, 211, 222 Das Echolot, 214, 222 Der rote Hahn, 214 Fuga furiosa, 214, 219–20, 222–3 Haben Sie davon gewußt?, 214 Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?, 214 Mark und Bein, 214, 222 Tadellöser & Wolff, 214

306 Kerouac, Jack, 138 Kershaw, Ian, 227 Kindertransport, 195, 202 Kirsch, Roland, 186 Kleeberg, Michael, 11 Ein Garten im Norden, 123 Karlmann, 123 Klein, Georg, 263 Libidissi, 263 Klonovsky, Michael, 248 Land der Wunder, 248 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 143, 170–1 Klüger, Ruth, 4, 9, 110 weiter leben, 110 Kohl, Helmut, 39 Königsdorf, Helga, 73 Koser, Khalid, 249 Kracht, Christian, 4, 7, 8, 13–15, 136, 256 1979, 13 Faserland, 4, 7, 14–15, 136, 141, 256 Krüger, Michael, 2 Kumm, Shirin, 247 Royadesara, 247 Kunert, Günter, 9 Künstlerroman, 10, 116, 276 Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete, 154 Langer, Phil C., 241 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 6 late style, 9, 10, 35, 36, 42–3, 45, 46–7, 273 Le Carré, John, 263 Leavis, F. R., 2 Ledbetter, Mark, 217 Leeder, Karen, 36, 47, 273 Leggewie, Claus, 79, 85 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 16 Nathan der Weise, 16 Leupold, Dagmar, 10, 279 Nach den Kriegen, 10 Levi, Primo, 198 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 196 Lewis, Alison, 7, 165 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 265, 267 Sudelbücher, 265 Literaturstreit, 1, 58, 64, 211 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 258, 261 Long, Jonathan, 196 Lowry, Malcolm, 138 Under the Volcano, 139 Lubrich, Oliver, 263 Luther, Martin, 131 Maaz, Hans Joachim, 50, 54, 56 Mann, Thomas, 2, 15, 40, 124, 136–8, 141, 143–4, 211, 216, 219, 256

Index Der Zauberberg, 2, 138 Tod in Venedig, 144 Tonio Kröger, 124, 144 Maron, Monika, 4, 9, 11, 94, 175 Animal Triste, 97, 98 Die Überläuferin, 105 Endmoränen, 4, 9, 11, 94 Flugasche, 97, 105 Pawels Briefe, 4, 96, 105 Stille Zeile Sechs, 96–8, 105 Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann und es trotzdem versuche, 103, 105 Márquez, Gabriel García, 255, 258, 261, 263 Marven, Lyn, 15, 180 Marx, Karl, 159 masculinity, 14, 123, 154, 156, 167, 174, 247 Matussek, Matthias, 152 McFeely, William S., 273 McGlothlin, Erin, 21 McGowan, Moray, 12, 79, 241, 242 McMullan, Gordon, 35 Medicus, Thomas, 10, 14, 211 In den Augen meines Großvaters, 10, 14, 211 Meinecke, Thomas, 14 The Church of John F. Kennedy, 14 melancholy, 11, 28, 87, 89, 97, 138, 158–9, 162, 196, 259, 262, 264 memory, 21–3, 29–32, 51–2, 62, 70, 79, 82–4, 89–91, 108–9, 113–14, 117–19, 131, 140, 145, 156, 162, 181–2, 189, 195–8, 201, 205–6, 213, 226–30, 234–8, 244, 270–1, 273–6, 279–80 Mensching, Steffen, 13 Jakobs Leiter, 13 metaphysical, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 160, 264 Meyer, Konrad Ferdinand, 143 migration, 4, 5, 12–13, 79, 82, 86, 185, 241, 247, 249, 277 Miller, Henry, 51 mimesis, 199, 200 minority writers, 3 Młynkec, Kerstin, 11 Drachentochter, 11 Möbius, August Ferdinand, 265 modernity, 5, 8, 159, 204 Modick, Klaus, 2 Mommsen, Hans, 227 Moníková, Libuše, 4, 12 Verklärte Nacht, 12 Mora, Terézia, 4, 14 Alle Tage, 14 Morgan, Ben, 157 Mosebach, Martin, 8, 13, 15 Das Beben, 8 Die Türkin, 8

Index Müller, Heiner, 66 Müller, Herta, 4, 7, 14, 15, 180 Atemschaukel, 7, 185 Barfüßiger Februar, 185 Cristina und ihre Attrappe, 186–8 Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger, 7, 180, 184–5, 188 Der König verneigt sich und tötet, 183, 186, 189 Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt, 185 Drückender Tango, 185 Herztier, 15, 180 Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, 180, 185, 188 Hunger und Seide, 186–7 Niederungen, 185 Reisende auf einem Bein, 184–5 Muslims, 16, 249 Nabokov, Vladimir, 263 Nadolny, Sten, 2 Naum, Gellu, 185, 190, 191 Nazi past, 2, 9, 11–12, 19, 110, 202, 206, 211, 213, 215, 223, 271 Neue Lesbarkeit, 2, 3, 15, 137, 154, 162, 165, 257, 263 Neumeister, Andreas, 6 Ausdeutschen, 6 New German Cinema, 147 New Right, 137 Niekerk, Carl, 266 Niemann, Norbert, 6 Wie man’s nimmt, 6 Niemöller, Martin, 228 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 15, 113, 266 Zarathustra, 113 Nobel Prize, 4, 7, 9, 46, 52, 151, 152, 157, 163, 188, 192, 270 Öhlschläger, Claudia, 206 Olesko, Kathryn M., 256 Ölke, Martina, 99 ommundsen, Wenche, 246 Orbach, Susie, 172 Orient, 15 orientalism, 16 Ostalgie, 7 Ovid, 66 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 6, 13, 189, 191, 242, 248 Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, 13, 242, 248 Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, 13, 248 Mutterzunge, 242 Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, 6 Parei, Inka, 244 Die Schattenboxerin, 244

307

Pascal, Roy, 1, 2, 11 Paul, Georgina, 11, 64 picaresque, 50, 136, 140, 143, 241, 247, 248 picaro, 247, 249 Pickelhuas-Konzett, Matthias, 154 Pirinçci, Akif, 248 Tränen sind immer das Ende, 248 Plato, 69, 129, 204 Plenzdorf, Ulrich, 51 Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., 51 Poland, 3, 9, 12, 20, 21, 27, 81 political correctness, 8, 108, 211, 223 Politycki, Matthias, 3, 6 Weiberroman, 6 pop literature, 13, 16, 136–7, 165–7, 170, 241–6, 264 postfeminism, 165, 166 postmemory, 22, 158, 196 Potsdamer Platz, 89, 127 Powell, Larson, 154, 160 Preece, Julian, 4, 7, 136, 291 Prenzlauer Berg, 39, 40 provinciality, 1, 3, 7, 14, 111, 114, 256, 266–7 Prussia, 10, 35, 37, 43, 44, 89, 94, 105, 214, 215, 216, 256, 262, 265 Pynchon, Thomas, 255, 256, 263 Mason & Dixon, 255, 256 Radisch, Iris, 3 Ransmayr, Christoph, 2 Reagan, Ronald, 65 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 216, 218 Regener, Sven, 7, 244 Herr Lehmann, 7, 244 Rehse, Hans-Joachim, 231, 232 Rhiel, Mary, 273 Riefenstahl, Leni, 147 Triumph des Willen, 147 Rimbaud, Arthur, 81 Roche, Charlotte, 174 Feuchtgebiete, 174 Rolfo, Juan, 255 Romania, 4, 14, 15, 180–3, 186–92 Romanticism, 2, 16, 116, 257, 259, 266 Römhild, Regina, 252 Roser, Birgit, 74 Roth, Joseph, 138 Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker, 138 Roth, Philip, 21, 51 Portnoy’s Complaint, 51 Saeger, Uwe, 9 Said, Edward, 9, 36, 37, 258 Salinger, J. D., 51 The Catcher in the Rye, 51

308

Index

Santner, Eric, 158, 159, 162, 213 Sarrazin, Thilo, 90 Deutschland schafft sich ab, 89 Saunders, Anna, 7, 50 Schädlich, Hans-Joachim, 40 Schami, Rafik, 15 Schiller, Friedrich, 15, 30, 219, 265, 267, 268 Schindel, Robert, 10, 19 Gebürtig, 10, 19 Schirrmacher, Frank, 1, 2, 35 Schlink, Bernhard, 2 Der Vorleser, 2 Schmidt, Christa, 244 Eselsfest, 244 Schmidt, Kathrin, 11 Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition, 11 Schmitz, Helmut, 10, 19 Schneider, Peter, 9, 13 Eduards Heimkehr, 13 Skylla, 9, 13 Schödel, Kathrin, 9, 108 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 15 Schramm, Ingo, 7 Fitchers Blau, 7 Schubert, Franz, 259 Schulze, Ingo, 7, 15, 97, 248, 263 Neue Leben, 248 Simple Storys, 7, 15, 97, 248, 263 Schütz, Erhard, 132 Sebald, W. G., 11, 14, 159, 195 Austerlitz, 11, 195 Die Ausgewanderten, 14 Die Ringe des Saturn, 206 Luftkrieg und Literatur, 205 Seghers, Anna, 40 self-reflexivity, 216, 217, 219 Seligmann, Rafael, 4 Seneca, 66, 69, 76 Şenocak, Zafer, 11, 79, 241–2 Atlas des tropischen Deutschland, 80 das land hinter den buchstaben. Deutschland und der Islam im Umbruch, 80 Der Erottomane, 80 Der Mann im Unterhemd, 80 Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar Das Ende der Geduld/Sabrın sonu, 79 Die Prärie, 80 Gefährliche Verwandtschaft, 11, 79, 241–2, 251 War Hitler Araber? Irre Führungen an den Rand Europas, 80 Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation, 80 sentimentality, 205, 221, 259, 262 Sevindim, Asli, 247 Candlelight Döner, 247

Sex Pistols, 168 Shafi, Monika, 9, 102, 270 Shakespeare, William, 35, 266, 267 shame, 145, 167, 172–5, 206, 234, 271–2, 275, 277–80 Sonderweg, 1, 2, 3, 124, 131, 132 Soviet Union, 12, 65, 228, 230 Sparschuh, Jens, 7, 97, 248 Der Zimmerspringbrunnen, 7, 97, 248 Stadler, Arnold, 8, 13, 14, 15 Ein hinreissender Schrotthändler, 8 Feuerland, 14 Stalingrad, 147 Stamm, Peter, 4 Stanišić, Sasa, 4, 12 Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, 12 Stasi, 6, 53, 55–62, 64 Stein, Mary Beth, 243 Steinbach, Peter, 227 Strauß, Botho, 8, 15 Suchoff, David, 273 Sudetenland, 12 Süskind, Patrick, 2, 255 Parfum, 255 Swiss writers, 4 Taberner, Stuart, 1, 14, 36, 42, 47, 255, 271, 272 Tabori, George, 21 Tacke, Alexandra, 152, 157 Tawada, Yoko, 14 Das nackte Auge, 14 Thälmann, Ernst, 53 Theresienstadt, 30, 128, 196, 201 Thesz, Nicole, 46 Third Reich, 70, 110, 111, 114–15, 118, 138, 147, 226, 229, 231, 234, 237, 275, 278–9 Tiedemann, Kathrin, 158 Timm, Uwe, 9, 10, 145, 211, 279 Am Beispiel meines Bruders, 10 Rot, 9 tourism, 13, 127 transnational, 4, 5, 12–15, 86, 166, 170, 176, 241–2, 244, 246–52 Treblinka, 29 Treichel, Hans-Ulrich, 10, 13, 14, 279 Der irdische Amor, 13 Der Verlorene, 10 Tristanakkord, 14 Trojanow, Ilija, 4, 14 Der Weltensammler, 14 Turkey, 6, 8, 11–16, 91, 189, 191, 241–52 Turkish-German writers, 4, 80, 81, 241, 247, 248 Turkish-German writing, 241, 242

Index Ulbricht, Walter, 39 unification, 2, 5, 6–7, 9, 35, 38, 41, 46, 50, 57, 62, 64–6, 68, 73, 94–5, 97, 104, 134, 211–12, 229, 230, 241–2, 251, 257 universalism, 257, 260–1, 266 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 202, 206, 223 Vertlib, Vladimir, 4, 12 Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, 12 Voltaire, 265 Waffen-SS, 270–4 Wagner, Richard, 4, 12, 186 Habseligkeiten, 12 Wagner, Richard, composer, 15, 130–1, 135 Walser, Martin, 8, 9, 15, 108, 215 Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, 8 Dorle und Wolf, 9 Ein liebender Mann, 9 Ein springender Brunnen, 9, 108 Finks Krieg, 8 Friedenspreisrede, 9, 108, 111, 115–17 Lebenslauf der Liebe, 8 Tod eines Kritikers, 108 Walser–Bubis debate, 108 Wedekind, Frank, 144 Frühlings Erwachen, 144 Wehrmacht, 81, 110 Weimar Classicism, 15, 257–8, 268 Weimar Republic, 11, 131 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 31 Wellershoff, Dieter, 279 Weltliteratur, 256, 257 Welzer, Harald, 279 Opa war kein Nazi, 279 Wende, 3, 4, 39, 50, 56, 57, 59–60, 88 Wenderoman, 242, 244, 248 Wenders, Wim, 147 Wings of Desire, 147 Werfel, Franz, 84 Die 40 Tage der Musa Dagh, 84 Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 265

309

West Berlin, 230, 235 West Germany, 5, 7, 14, 123, 133, 134, 226–9, 232, 243 Westalgie, 7 White Rose, 228 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 265–7 Die Abderiten, eine sehr wahrscheinliche Geschichte, 266 Die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, 266 Geschichte des Agathon, 266 Lady Johanna Gray, 265 Wiesel, Elie, 198, 199 Wilhelm Gustloff, 10, 214 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 266–7 Wittstock, Uwe, 2, 3 Wolf, Christa, 1, 6, 11, 35, 40, 55, 57–9, 61, 64, 275 Der geteilte Himmel, 55 Kassandra, 11, 65–6, 70 Kindheitsmuster, 70, 275 Leibhaftig, 6 Medea: Stimmen, 11, 64 Nachdenken über Christa T., 59 Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud, 68, 75 Was bleibt, 58, 59, 64 women writers, 3, 4 Yad Vashem, 31 Yiddish, 15 Yildiz, Yasemin, 182, 189, 191 Zaimoğlu, Feridun, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 81, 241–2, 245, 248 Abschaum, 248 German Amok, 7, 241, 245, 248 hinterland, 16 Kanak Sprak, 15, 81, 242 Leyla, 13 Zeh, Juli, 12, 165 Spieltrieb, 12 Zitzlsperger, Ulrike, 243, 244