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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J u l i a n Pr e e c e see craftsmen but no human beings, thinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, lords and servants, young and established people, but no human beings€– is it not like a battlefield, on which hands and arms and a multitude of limbs all lie in pieces on top of one another, meanwhile the spilt blood of life runs into the earth?’

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. Thi