German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives 9783110378283, 9783110378207

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”
I. Transnational Spaces: Mobility and Migration
Space Across Time and Place
“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress in Ottilie Assing’s “Reports from America”
Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place
Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”
Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation on Linguistic Spaces in Foreign Tongues
II. Seeking Space: Gender and Regulation
Spaces Within
Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries
The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement in Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman
Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck
Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”: Gender Ambiguity and Smooth versus Striated Spaces
III. Revisited Spaces: Repositionings and Points of Encounter
Marginalized Spaces, Marginalized Inhabitants
Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich
Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization of Fictional Space in Monika Maron’s Silent Close No. 6
Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)
The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments in the Works of Brigitta Kronauer and Jenny Erpenbeck
Works Cited
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 17

German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives Edited by Carola Daffner and Beth A. Muellner

ISBN 978-3-11-037820-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037828-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039233-3 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Diane Lubell (1988) Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

I

1

Transnational Spaces: Mobility and Migration

Beth Muellner Space Across Time and Place

19

Traci S. O’Brien “Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress in Ottilie Assing’s “Reports from America” 21 Laurel Cohen-Pfister Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

41

Silja Maehl Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins” 57 Chase Dimock Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation on Linguistic Spaces in Foreign Tongues 79

II Seeking Space: Gender and Regulation Beth Muellner Spaces Within

99

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries 101 Elaine Martin The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement in Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman 121

VI

Table of Contents

Alexandra Merley Hill Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

133

Necia Chronister Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”: Gender Ambiguity and Smooth versus Striated Spaces 149

III Revisited Spaces: Repositionings and Points of Encounter Beth Muellner Marginalized Spaces, Marginalized Inhabitants

169

Elizabeth Weber Edwards Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

171

Caroline Frank Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization of Fictional Space in Monika Maron’s Silent Close No. 6 193 Susanne Lenné Jones Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001) 211 Maria Snyder The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments in the Works of Brigitta Kronauer and Jenny Erpenbeck 229 Works Cited

247

Notes on Contributors Index

269

267

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn” German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives connects spatial studies, German studies, and women’s writing, and emphasizes a return to the written word as an original site of cultural interrogation. The idea to bring together the following essays emerged from a 2007 MMLA conference panel on German women’s writing, where the fluidity and familiarity of spatial metaphors made clear that the study of space and place was fully anchored within German studies, confirming Edward W. Soja’s statement that “we are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial as well as temporal beings” (“Taking space personally” 12). Indeed, in the last few decades, the phrase “spatial turn” has received increasing attention in German studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography when spatial theorists started reading space as a complex product of cultural, social, and discursive practices, as noted in Klaus Müller-Richter’s and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard’s 2007 co-edited volume Imaginäre Topographien: Migration und Verortung [Imaginary topographies: migration and place]. In an attempt to pinpoint the effect of the spatial turn more broadly within the German language realm, Jörg Döring’s and Tristan Thielmann’s 2008 edited volume Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften [The paradigm of place in cultural and social studies] considers the plurality and transdisciplinarity of spatial turns (versus a singular “turn”). The essays look at the mutual exchange and enrichment within and between the disciplines of cultural and media studies, history, and sociology, giving special attention to geography which Döring and Thielmann see as being pushed to the margins of more recent (specifically German) critical theory discussions on spatial thinking (11).1 U.S. German Studies scholars Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel pick up on this plurality in their 2010 edited volume Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Interpretations via a spatial lens, as Fisher

1 A broader disciplinary discussion and attempt to categorize the various cultural “turns” can be found in Doris Bachmann-Medick’s book Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften [Cultural turns: new orientations in cultural studies] (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 2006). For a more recent perspective on the spatial turn debate in German literary studies, see Katrin Winkler, Kim Seifert, and Heinrich Detering’s essay “Die Literaturwissenschaften im Spatial Turn” [Literary studies in the Spatial Turn], Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 253–270.

2

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

and Mennel suggest, open up new and unseen insights into German culture and history: German Studies seems particularly well suited to analyses of space, given the long-term centrality of space and spatial imaginary to German culture (the struggle for a German nation state, territorial wars of aggression, and constantly changing borders); but recent developments also suggest the severe limits of a traditionally spatial or territorial model for the German nation-state itself (“Introduction” 9).

In the vein of critiquing traditional models of space via cultural texts, Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele “challenge static notions” (3) of German space and place in the cultural-historical essays of their 2012 volume Heimat at the Intersection of Memory and Space. The present volume, German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives, continues the challenge to understand the representation of space and place in German language texts, and with its focus on the written word and the literary, the analyses in the following chapters indeed shake up traditional notions of German identity and language. Before looking more closely at what the authors presented in New Perspectives bring to the discussion on spatial theory and German literature, various terms need further definition, such as what the ideas of German, German women’s writing, and feminism mean for our project. We also outline a brief history of spatial studies, including what specific spatial theories are used in the interrogation of literature, and how spatial theory figures into the realm of feminist thinking and writing. Finally, we discuss the thematic divisions of the essays into the volume’s three sections.

Germanness, feminism, and German women’s writing The terms of Germanness, feminism, and German women’s writing need further explanation before we begin. Like history and space themselves, such label and identity categories are in a constant state of flux and indeed socially constructed, as Benedict Anderson reminds us with his idea of the nation as an “imagined community.” Approaches to space can also be shaped by specific cultural and historical experiences with nationalism: Katrin Winkler, Kim Seifert, and Heinrich Detering suggest in this context a German hesitation to discuss “Raum” [space] due to its association with German national-socialist politics. For Fisher and Mennel, an understanding of Germany in the twenty-first century presents limitations on traditional models of the nation state, while Eigler and Kugele challenge static notions of German space and place through reflections on memory and

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

3

Heimat [home]. Furthermore, shifts in emigration and immigration in the past two centuries have led to changes in how Germans are named and how those living in German-speaking countries label themselves. For example, the term “Afrodeutsche” conceived of with the help of African-American activist and poet Audrey Lorde was adopted in the 1980s to describe mixed race African-Germans; the long-used term “Gastarbeiter” [guest worker] to describe foreign-born migrant workers in Germany is no longer accurate and has been replaced with the longer but more politically correct Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund [people with an immigration background].2 Reforms to the nationality law (formerly based on jus sanguinis, or having German ethnicity) in 1999 and 2000 granted citizenship to foreigners who have lived in Germany for generations, and especially their children born in Germany (following the law of jus soli). While perhaps not directly, such considerations play an important part in how we define the German women writers in this volume. The writing discussed here spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, although the majority of the texts are more recent. While the perspectives offered are in general from white, heteronormative, middle-class authors (with the exception of Yoko Tawada), the authors and their texts shake up our assumptions about what constitutes a German author, as well as our expectations of traditional paradigms of a national literature. The writers in this volume defy a simple label: Ottilie Assing emigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in the 1840s; Yoko Tawada moved from her native Japan and has lived in Germany for over twenty years; Croatian-born Dragica Rajcic emigrated to Switzerland in the wake of the Balkan wars; Alja Rachmanowa was born in Russia and emigrated to Austria in 1925; Elisabeth Langgässer became known for her Catholic writings despite her Jewish heritage and persecution by the Nazis; Irina Liebmann was born in Moscow and moved to East Berlin in 1945; East German-born authors such as Monika Maron and Jenny Erpenbeck, as well as West German-born authors, such as Brigitta Kronauer, Inka Parei, Julia Franck, and Judith Hermann have moved either east or west after the Fall of the Wall. However unintentional, a pattern emerges that reflects migrations that are old (German migration westward in the mid-nineteenth century) and new (westward-migrating Eastern Europeans in the post-Cold War era), with an emphasis on east to west or horizontal migration, rather than south to north or vertical

2 The terms Afro-Österreicher, Afro-Swiss, and Afro-Europäer are also used. See http://www. bpb.de/gesellschaft/migrationmigration/afrikanische-diaspora/59383/zuwanderung-1884-1945; http://medienservicestelle.at/migration_bewegt/2012/07/25/afrikaner-in-osterreich-ein-kurzube rblick/; http://collectifafroswiss.blogspot.fr. For more on Afro-German history, see Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz’s book Farbe bekennen [Showing our Colors].

4

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

migration. Noticeably absent are contributions on German writers born in Turkey who reflect first generation migrant writers, for example.3 While the degrees vary greatly between the cultural positions or language regions from which the writers in this volume speak, Claire Horst offers the broad definition of writers with migration experience as able to report from more than one cultural space. She borrows Turkish writer Zafer Șenocak’s term “Bridge Literature” to mark their writing as “literature that can create connections” (Der weibliche Raum in der Migrationsliteratur [The female space in migrant literature] 10). Helpful also is Azade Seyhan’s suggestion that “[l]abels like “exilic, ethnic, migrant, or diasporic” are inadequate, because none completely grasps “nuances of writing between histories, geographies, and cultural practices” (Seyhan 9). In the presentation of geography and space through literary images and language – often in the spaces in-between, marginalized, disempowered, uncomfortable, overlooked, and unexpected – the German women writers presented in this volume challenge ethnic, national, or geographic labels, and thus, define the unique approach to space that we highlight here. The negative photograph of the Berlin wall from 1988 on the volume’s cover reflects this perspective as well. The present study differs from other recent U.S. interdisciplinary German Studies investigations of the spatial in its specific focus on women’s literary texts and language. Instead of analyzing film and visual representations, otherwise so prevalent in spatial studies, our contributors discuss the written word as a primary conduit for the interpretation of space; it is through language after all, through the adoption of various terms and metaphors of spatiality such as mapping, regions, place, space, territory, location, geography, and cartography, that geographical thinking migrated to other disciplines. In The Production of Space (1974; 1991 in translation), Henri Lefebvre discusses in this context how space is represented through language – how spatial codes are constructed by various individuals and how “the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space” (Dear and Flusty 140). While German is the language in which our authors write, it does not necessarily define their ethnic or national identities, nor does the condition of living in Germany, as Rajcic lives in Switzerland and Rachmanowa made Austria her home. It is the movement through and occupation of German language spaces that brings about their identity as German authors, where indeed, language and writing provide a new Heimat [home] in which to create one’s identity, or where they can provide an important artistic tension or resistance. Tawada and Rajcic, for example, “revel in the foreignness”

3 For more information on first generation immigrant writers, see the anthologies of Irmgard Ackermann.

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

5

of the German language, as Cohen-Pfister, Silke Maehl, and Chase Dimock discuss in their essays, intentionally playing with words and ideas that lead us to question our conventional sense of how German can or should be used, or of what it means to live in more than one cultural tradition and language. Likewise, it is in their continued attention to the concepts of gender, language, space, and power that allows us to consider the work of these authors within a framework of feminist spatial thinking. Our use of the word feminist is hereby in line with spatial theory’s focus on the social constructions of space, and, in particular, the social construction of gender and gender roles (Löw, Raumsoziologie, 253). Our emphasis on women’s writing is meant to bring together a variety of ways in which women authors experience space and represent it in fictional form, highlighting the multiplicity of approaches to deconstructing gender and space (as well as other intersectionalities such as race and class). Not all of the women authors discussed in the volume would accept the label feminist to describe their work. Yet what draws their work together are the ways in which each uniquely approaches concerns about space, power, and knowledge (specifically informed by German-language spaces and histories), how those concerns are reflected through fictional narrative forms and linguistic creativity, and how they often build on and play with everyday, “real” experiences of gender, space, and power. What reflects the feminist spatial-literary strategies frequently at play in the fiction discussed here are the blurring of the boundaries (as we discuss below in relation to Soja’s real-and-imagined spaces in “Thirdspace”), the questioning of marginalized positions, and the undoing of dualisms and hegemonies (as we discuss in relation to Doreen Massey’s call to accept that time and space are “inextricably interwoven”).

Overview of spatial theory A brief glimpse at the history of spatial thinking, including the consideration of terms such as the spatial turn, topographical turn, and geocriticism, can help illuminate its centrality within literary-historical studies in which gender and writing intersect, and provide insight on differences between German and AngloAmerican approaches. While German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1951) and French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958) are mentioned as important philosophical texts about space that come just prior to where we begin our history (Thacker), the names of the French scholars Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault appear most frequently in connection with a history of spatial theory and identity, based on their work on space, geography, and urbanism in the 1960s in Paris. They changed what many

6

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

theorists considered a long-standing subordination of space to time, at least since the nineteenth century (Warf and Arias 3). Indeed, it was Foucault who famously claimed that, “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history […] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (“Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias” n.p.). Inserting social theory into the study of urban geographies and the landscapes of class, the central tenet that Marxist geographers like Lefebvre and the English human geographer David Harvey agreed upon in the 1970s was that space is a social construct. In his classic text The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre divided space into three categories: first, concrete or real physical spaces; second, imagined spaces or representations of space, and third, the lived “spaces of representation” (38–40). Engaging initially with Lefebvre and then other Marxists such as bell hooks, American human geographer Edward Soja confirms and reaffirms in his texts Postmodern Geographies (1989), Thirdspace (1996), and Postmetropolis (2000) the argument of the “social-spatial dialectic” that insists on a reciprocal relationship between social processes and spatial forms. Having coined the phrase “the spatial turn” in 1989, and claiming it later, in 1996, to be “one of the most important philosophical and intellectual developments of the 20th century” (Winkler, Seifert and Detering 254), Soja’s three categories of space correspond roughly to Lefebvre’s. With a “perceived” or “Firstplace,” and a “conceived” or “Secondspace,” Soja describes a “Thirdspace” as “tentative and flexible, real-and-imagined, and open to new constellations and contestations,” as Susanne Lenné Jones summarizes in her essay (247). The invitation of Soja’s “Thirdspace” to thinkers beyond geographers, urban planners, and architects to consider spaces where the real and imaginary can coexist provides a chance to negotiate, contest, and remain flexible to spatial configurations of everyday life. Such opportunities situate women’s writing most comfortably within Soja’s third category, as Jones maintains. Marxist critics and feminist thinkers alike would argue against any sense of a shared experience of space and place, and any notion of space as abstract geometry: “both conveniently ignore the myriad ways in which differences of gender, age, class, ‘race,’ and other forms of social differentiation shape people’s lives” (Bondi and Davidson 17). Building on Foucault’s “rejection of a teleological version of history and his rescue of space from ‘the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile’” (Rose 315), feminist geographers such as Alison Blunt, Gillian Rose, Mona Domosh, and Doreen Massey (“probably the single most influential scholar in thought about space and gender” according to Pamela Gilbert [104]), critique gendered notions of time and space, further politicizing the Marxist contention that space is constructed. For these scholars, considering the everyday in relation to time and space and keeping in mind categories of identity that affect temporal-spatial relations means being aware of power. According to

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

7

feminist geographer Gillian Rose, “[f]eminism […] through its awareness of the politics of the everyday, has always had a very keen awareness of the intersection of space and power – and knowledge” (315). The subject of feminism outlined by Rose “depends on a paradoxical geography in order to acknowledge both the power of hegemonic discourses and to insist on the possibility of resistance” (322). This geography describes a subjectivity that includes paradoxical positions – of both prisoner and exile, of center and margin, of being on the inside and the outside at the same time, i.e., the “tentativeness and flexibility, real-andimagined spaces, and spaces open to new constellations and contestations” of Soja’s Thirdspace. While other Marxist geographers like Lefebvre or Harvey grappled with how to reassert space into a modern consciousness long dominated by temporal or historical thinking, feminist critics of cultural geography began to deconstruct a gendered “dichotomous dualism” that had come to define time and space. “With time are aligned History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics and Reason,” Massey writes, “portentous things with gravitas and capital letters. With space on the other hand are aligned the other poles of these concepts: stasis, (‘simple’) reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the body […] and space, in this system of interconnected dualisms, is coded female” (257–258). Massey concludes that the issue is not resolved through a total collapse or denial of differences between time and space (and related binaries), but rather through accepting that time and space are “inextricably interwoven,” that “definitions of both space and time in themselves must be constructed as the result of interrelations,” and that “space is not absolute, it is relational” (261). Thus, the idea that the social and spatial are inseparable and indeed, stand in a political reciprocal relationship to one another, marks the foundational understanding of space that has since been gradually adopted by virtually all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. It is this inextricably interwoven sense of space that comes to the fore in many of the essays presented in this volume. Moving closer to our contributors’ essays, we first take a closer look at how spatial theory plays itself out in the field of literary studies more broadly.

Spatial turns, postmodernism, and feminisms in literary studies In their 2009 volume Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Barney Warf and Santa Arias claim “[s]pace has played such a long and important role in literary criticism that it is difficult to know where to begin to summarize its significance”

8

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

(“Introduction” 8). German scholar Doris Bachmann-Medick (2009) differentiates between merely a heightened understanding of space within a discipline – such as in German historian Karl Schlögel’s monograph Im Raum lesen wir die Zeit [In space we can read time] (2002), which signaled the introduction of spatial concepts into the long temporally-focused field of history – and what constitutes the presence of an actual “spatial turn” within a discipline. For BachmannMedick, only the spatial theories that emerge from a specific postcolonial and postmodern understanding of cultural studies and the social sciences, emanating from the primary fields of geography, sociology and anthropology, can claim to constitute a spatial turn within a discipline. Most of the essays presented in this volume indeed align with this definition, and build on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Foucault, Lefebvre, Soja, Casey, and Marc Augé, to name a few, and so our use of the term “spatial turn” here is accurate. As a designated “undercurrent” of the spatial turn (Bachmann-Medick 299), Sigrid Weigel introduces the concept of the “topographical turn” in 2002 to define spatial studies within cultural studies, attempting to clarify what she sees as the “theorizing” practice of European cultural theory versus the “reconceptualizing [of] space and its meaning (and interpretation)” with which Anglo-American cultural studies is engaged (“On the Topographical Turn” 193). Weigel’s topographical turn, however, seems to have brought about a reterritorialization of theory (see Döring and Thielmann; Winkler, Seifert, Detering). In commenting on the shifts within his own discipline of geography, Soja responds to the multiplicity of disciplinary approaches and influences as they relate to cultural and literary studies: Through a process of hybridization, it has become increasingly difficult today to draw boundaries between who is a geographer and who is not, for the unprecedented transdisciplinarity of the Spatial Turn is making almost every scholar a geographer to some degree, in much the same way that every scholar is to some degree a historian” (“Taking space personally” 24).

The transdisciplinarity of the spatial turn is indeed apparent in the chapters of this volume. Our contributors adopt key concepts from a broad array of European and Anglo-American schools of thought, much like those mentioned in other studies on literary representations of space (Tally; Winkler, Seifert, and Detering; Fisher and Mennel, etc.). While not all of the theorists we will mention are adopted for analysis by our contributors, we highlight some of the most important influences on literary spatial studies to offer a broader context to our study. To begin, however, it is useful to keep in mind what is generally meant by space in literature. German sociologist Martina Löw helpfully differentiates between the concepts of place and space in her book Raumsoziologie, where she sees place as

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

9

geographically determined, and space as a metaphorical entity (201). However, space is referred to by others, such as Pamela Gilbert, as both “real” and “imaginary” in literature, although literary and cultural studies’ approaches tend to further delineate space in two directions: “one is concerned with ‘actual’ spaces, the space of proper nouns, so to speak (the London of Defoe, the Paris of Zola, or even Dickens’s fictional but highly specific Bleak House) and one is concerned with a ‘type’ of space: the city, the factory, the home” or in other words, how literature helps shape our understanding of space (105). As well, whereas space can be part of description, it can also take shape via characters within the story, i.e., within the psychological realm of individual characters, a primary concern in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. These dimensions of space are indeed reflected in many of the essays here, but given the feminist approach of the analyses, as well as the postmodern, postcolonial characteristics in the fictional writing, a focus on the spaces in-between or on reinterpreting and reclaiming unconventional spaces frequently characterizes the types of spaces explored here, i.e., abandoned buildings, parking lots, hotels.4 Likewise, as the actual spaces of cities listed by Gilbert happen to be those of male authors, we might also point out that the city-spaces described by our women authors thus necessarily become the Berlin of Inka Parei, or the Vienna of Alja Rachmanowa, i.e., different cities altogether than what we would expect from the Berlin of Alfred Döblin or the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler. Finally, whereas feminist literary theory as we outline it below might begin with a concern for space for women writers, New Perspectives is concerned with how space is represented in women’s writing. However, given the theoretical underpinnings of Marxist and feminist geography in this volume, we keep in mind Massey’s “dichotomous dualisms,” the “real-and-imagined” spaces of Soja’s “Thirdspace,” and Rose’s “awareness of the politics of the everyday [and] intersection of space and power – and knowledge” (315) in order to consider how the metaphorical spaces of women’s writing might help us understand the material spaces of women’s lives. The boundaries of postmodernist, poststructuralist, feminist theory are blurry, despite demarcations along the way such as U.S. American literary theorist Frederic Jameson’s book Postmodernism (1991) that created an important caesura in critical thinking (Arias and Warf, Tally, Thacker, Westphal). Jameson sees the spatial turn as a way to differentiate between modernism and postmodernism, in essence another twist on Foucault’s idea that if the modern period was dominated

4 Broadly stated, writing (and theories) that reflect postcolonial or feminist positions have a similar foundation in their examination of and questioning of the social constructions of power.

10

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

by historical thinking, then the postmodern is dominated by spatial thinking. In line with Gilbert’s suggestion that urban (public) spaces in literature are omnipresent, Franco Moretti’s 1998 Atlas of the European Novel, his “mapping of literary geographies” has helped us understand how cities are spatially constructed and become part of narrative form (Gilbert, Tally, Westphal). Moretti was influential in the development of French theorist Bertrand Westphal’s concept of “geocriticism” that has recently garnered interest, particularly with the translation of his 2007 book La géocritique: réel, fiction, espace into English by Robert Tally in 2011 as Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Critical Studies. Because exploration of all places on earth has reached almost full saturation without necessarily giving stable meanings to those places, as per U.S. cultural studies scholar Eric Prieto, Westphal’s focus on the areas in-between, in the borderlands, the interstitial, the hybrid spaces, and marginal zones offers a useful model for spatial thinking in the postmodern era. While Prieto ultimately sees potential in Westphal’s approach as a tool for ecocritical and activist approaches to writings on the natural world, Westphal’s embrace of radical thought (in the tradition of Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey, and Derek Gregory), postcolonial theory (such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Homi Bhabha), and Deleuzian notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” reflect well the myriad theoretical approaches to space used by our contributors. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because before we can consider postmodernity, we should look at the actual moment of the caesura itself and the “mini-spatial turn” of the early twentieth century prompted by Walter Benjamin’s writings, especially his influence on visual and literary studies of space (Soja “Taking space personally” 26). Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnundert [Berlin Childhood around 1900], Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street], and his unfinished magnum opus, Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project] reflect sociologist Georg Simmel’s thoughts on broad economic and social changes, such as the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the modern population in early twentieth-century Germany. Benjamin’s particular (if unintended) emphasis on gender in the public and private sphere as introduced in “The Return of the Flâneur” (1929) prompted a number of feminist cultural studies scholars to consider the possibility of the female flâneur and the role of women in urban spaces, as in Janet Wolff’s essay “The Invisible Flâneuse” (1985), Katherine von Ankum’s volume Women in the Metropolis (1997), and Anke Gleber’s book The Art of Taking a Walk (1998), as well as it inspired reflection on women’s experiences in private spaces, as in German literary scholar Annegret Pelz’s essay “The desk: excavation site and repository of memories” (1999). We can imagine that at the same time that Benjamin was writing about the place and space of the flâneur, Virginia Woolf was contemplating the place and

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

11

space of the female writer in A Room of One’s Own, published in the same year as Benjamin’s essay. This coincidence gives us one example of how reflections on public and private spaces and time might be considered interrelationally. A further example is Woolf’s text itself, where she seeks to create a space for women writers within the dense and select (male) canon of literary production and highlights the prominent theoretical and metaphorical function that space holds in women’s writing, thereby revealing how closely exterior and interior spaces are interconnected: walking on the turf instead of the path of Oxbridge campus was as transgressive for a woman as attempting to enter the library. Building on Woolf, North American feminist literary scholars Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s important study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) on nineteenth-century British women writers interrogates the myth of literary paternity and authority (“the pen as a metaphorical phallus”) that attempted to keep women writers who challenged the myth sequestered within confined spaces. Like the disruptions to history caused by women writers and their writing, feminist and poststructuralist literary theory is also engaged with disrupting traditional metaphorical and theoretical spatial organization, i.e., male public and female private spaces. French feminist thought, from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to the writings of poststructuralist feminist theorists Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, has affected broadly how we understand the relationship between sexuality, language, and women’s outsider position within the hegemonic spaces of patriarchal literary production. Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1975; 1976 in translation) admonishes that women must learn to write in order to enter into history and take their proper place (Signs 880). Still, while much of French theory concerns writing and the space that women occupy within history, many aspects have been criticized for reinforcing an essentialist standpoint. German literary scholars such as Inge Stephan and Sigrid Weigel build on French feminist theory to explore the ways in which German women writers have used their otherness vis-à-vis a specific German patriarchal cultural hegemony to find their own voice, as in Weigel’s titular reference to Cixous in Die Stimme der Medusa [The voice of the Medusa] (1987). In particular, they discuss metaphors of the body as they relate to manifestations of control or lack thereof (including hysteria, depression, madness, anorexia, and rape). In our volume, Elaine Martin’s essay on the healing process of the raped protagonist in Inka Parei’s Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman] reveals a paradoxical adoption of abject subjectivity (as per Kristeva) via a renewed exploration and embrace of urban space. Contemporary academic discussions of marginalized identities, body politics, and otherness in literary texts frequently refer to Russian literary theorists Michel Bakhtin’s notion of “chronotopos” (1937) – reflecting the inseparability of temporal and spatial relationships with literature – or Jurij Lotman’s concept of “semio-

12

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

sphere” (1982) – describing any process or activity in which signs communicate within a specific Umwelt [environment]. Due to its broad applicability, however, Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” (describing non-hegemonic places of otherness; see Les mots et les choses, 1966 [The Order of Things, 2001]) has become one of the most commonly cited terms in humanities approaches to spatial studies.5 In this volume, Caroline Frank looks at Monika Maron’s space-writing in Silent Close No. 6 as “literary reference and answer to actual space discourses.” Frank combines the powerful theoretical implications of Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” with Cixous’s écriture feminine [literally: women’s writing] to identify possible constants of female space-writing, and further uses Lotman’s theory of binary-topological perception to consider Maron’s adoption of potentially nonbinary spatial structures. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work, specifically the two-volume Schizophrenia and Capitalism, Anti-Oedipus (original 1972; English translation 1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (original 1980; English translation 1987), has been equally influential in discussions of male and female literary spaces. Deleuze and Guattari present various spatial-philosophical concepts used in literary analysis, such as “rhizome” (borrowing from botany) – a concept that allows for non-hierarchical, multiple entries of interpretation and representation – and the terms “territorialization,” “deterritorialization,” and “reterritorialization” – concepts that reflect a blurring of boundaries and a fluid and dynamic understanding of identity and meanings. In her essay on Judith Hermann in this volume, Necia Chronister adopts Deleuze’s and Guattari’s spatial categories of “smooth and striated surfaces” to describe the protagonist’s subjective experiences of urban and suburban Berlin in Sommerhaus, später [Summerhouse, Later]. If writers and theorists have long been preoccupied with public spaces of work and the city, feminist writers have long contested the private space of the home, particularly as any type of safe haven as demonstrated in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Here again, Woolf’s comment that “[f]iction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction” (24) reminds us of the function of metaphorical representations of space as they can reflect women’s lived experiences. While a feminist critique of home has a longer history,6 feminist geographers especially problematize the

5 While the ubiquity of Foucault is not necessarily present in this volume, in the papers presented at the 4-th Global Conference on Space and Place held in Oxford, England in October 2013, Foucault’s “heterotopia” was a key buzzword and was gently criticized as “overused.” The digital archive Foucault.info claims Foucault to be “the most cited author in the humanities.” 6 In sociology, we might look to the sharp criticism of women’s domestic realm in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1903 book Home: Its Work and Influence. From the history of technology, Ruth

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

13

notion of home vis-a-vis female subjectivity: “The home as a haven, as a sanctuary from society into which one retreats, may describe the lives of men for whom home is a refuge from work, but certainly doesn’t describe the lives of women for whom it is a workplace” (Blunt and Dowling 16). Poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty radicalize notions of home, critiquing it as a site of oppression, as well as seeing it as a place of potential resistance, or as a more fluid concept, metaphor and lived experience. Here we return to Massey’s notion of the interrelational: “home is neither public nor private but both. Home is not separated from public, political worlds but is constituted through them: the domestic is created through the extra-domestic and vice versa” (Blunt and Dowling 27). Monika Shafi’s recent study Housebound, for example, looks at contemporary German fiction that focuses on houses in order to better understand the ways in which “selfhood, social relations, and materiality intersect and influence each other” (4). To demarcate the unconventional spaces that Julia Franck has reconfigured into a fictional sense of home, Alexandra Merley Hill adopts the “non-places” theory of French anthropologist Marc Augé in her essay, specifically his book Non-Lieux (1992) [Non-Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995] that reflects on spaces we normally only pass through, like airports and supermarkets. Postcolonial literary theory continues this sense of negotiating, contesting, and remaining flexible to spatial configurations of everyday life, while illuminating the connection of space and body through movement. Led by critics such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai, postcolonial theory uses metaphors and terms of cultural geography to provide insightful readings to texts of travel, migration, and exile, where movement through space and the reconfiguration of identity within new spaces is a central concern. Like Soja’s “Thirdspace” that allows for transformation within the geographies of urban spaces, Bhabha’s sociolinguistic theory of “Third Space” reflects the cultural hybridity inherent in the conception of individual identities, suggesting resistance and challenge to old categories, and allowing for new subjectivities to emerge. Feminist literary scholars pick up on postcolonial discourse and prompt inquiries about how women writers discuss displacement, denial, or marginalization in their writing. Annegret Pelz’s 1993 book Reisen durch die eigene Fremde [Traveling through one’s own foreignness] on German and Austrian women’s travel writing as “autogeography” is such an example, and interrogates patriar-

Schwarz Cohen’s 1980 book More Work for Mother discusses the negative consequences of technical innovation in the home from a feminist perspective.

14

Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner

chy’s use of women’s bodies as spatial and topographical locations upon which histories have been mapped. Here, women’s travel and writing is seen as an act of reclaiming the female body within (and from) history. The mutual influences between postcolonial, feminist, and spatial theory are apparent in a number of the essays in our collection. Cohen-Pfister’s essay in particular points to the postcolonial theories of Said and Appadurai, among others, to discuss CroatianSwiss Dragica Rajcic’s ability to intersect gender, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory within her poetry.

Thematic groupings of the essays The themes of public and private space, the body, movement, and mobility flow throughout many of the essays in this volume, creating an interesting parallel to the approaches to space as reflected in the history of women’s writing, literaryspatial theory, and feminist theories of space. These multiple approaches are evident in the three thematic groupings and order in which we have placed the essays of the volume: “Transnational Spaces: Mobility and Migration,” “Seeking Space: Gender and Regulation,” and “Revisited Spaces: Repositionings and Points of Encounter.” The number of essays in the volume that are concerned with spaces of and between travel, mobility, and homelessness reveal these overarching themes to be the dynamic bookends to the concepts of stasis, the home, and domesticity that punctuate the middle section of our volume. To better grasp the volume’s interconnections, Beth Muellner provides a brief clarification at the beginning of each of the three sections as well as a short introduction to each individual essay. Traci O’Brien’s essay on Ottilie Assing, Laurel Cohen-Pfister’s on Dragica Rajcic, Silja Maehl’s and Chase Dimock’s on Yoko Tawada in the “Transnational Spaces” of part one are concerned with shifting the boundaries, knowledge of, and language of one’s world to another place and with the reporting on and linguistic playfulness of those experiences. In the “Seeking Space” of section two, Xenia Harwell’s essay on Alja Rachmanowa, Elaine Martin’s on Inka Parei, Alexandra Hill’s on Julia Franck, and Necia Chronister’s on Judith Hermann are concerned in various ways with gender and interior spaces, specifically when the individual is either exiled from, violated within, rejects, or is denied that space. Returning to themes of movement, the “Revisited Spaces” of section three includes Elizabeth Weber Edward’s essay on Elisabeth Langgässer, Caroline Frank’s on Monika Maron, Susanne Lenné Jones’s on Irina Liebmann, and Maria Snyder’s on the work of Brigitta Kronauer and Jenny Erpenbeck. We move from a theology of space created in the pilgrimage of survivors through a postwar landscape, to spatial shifts created in the wake of the former German Democratic Republic, to

Introduction: “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn”

15

“modern” spaces of nature viewed by German women authors as neither in the romantic nor apocalyptic traditions. In all of the chapters, Massey’s “inextricably interwoven” themes of history and nostalgia, reason and emotion, politics and the body, stasis and movement emerge repeatedly, binding the essays within feminist geography’s “relational sense of space and time,” as well as into the broadening realm of interdisciplinary German studies. With the diversity of women authors in this volume presenting a rather wide historical swath of literary-spatial configurations, we gain a clearer picture of how space figures in the lives and fictions of women in the German language.

I Transnational Spaces: Mobility and Migration

Beth Muellner

Space Across Time and Place The first of three sections in our volume, “Transnational Spaces” brings together four essays on three very different authors, Ottilie Assing, Dragica Rajcic, and Yoko Tawada – to whom two essays are dedicated. The authors are from different time periods and different birth countries, but all of them use the German language to reflect on a kind of fluidity of space in their experiences of movement from one place to another. In Assing’s case, her German heritage plays a critical role in how she views and judges the United States and its inhabitants; in the cases of the Croatianborn Rajcic in Switzerland and the Japanese-born Tawada in Germany, and later in the U.S., the readings and writings of the language spaces they inhabit are also marked by their unique cultural backgrounds, creating a sort of ebb and flow in their reflections on space and power. Two essays focus on observations while traveling within the space of a train: Assing’s in the nineteenth century and Tawada’s in the twentieth century. The causes for the migrations of these authors, from revolution and war to adventure and study, are as different as their reflections on mobility and space itself. In addition to the theme of gender and movement, other concerns that course through most of the chapters in this section are how race, ethnicity, and language factor into the spatial.

Traci S. O’Brien

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress in Ottilie Assing’s “Reports from America” Traci O’Brien’s opening essay provides us with an example of spatial thinking at a time in which the temporal ostensibly still held sway: the nineteenth century. As an educated German woman who emigrated to the United States when travel as a single woman was still rare, when the privileged urban space of the flâneur was still solidly male, and when a writing woman posed a threat to propriety, Assing crossed a number of boundaries. One of the more startling was her friendship and collaboration with the well-known African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography she translated into German and published in 1860. O’Brien’s essay traces layers of meaning as assigned to different spaces within the American landscape, building on Mark Simpson’s notion of mobility as a “contestatory process.” Assing’s journalistic essays sent from the U.S. to Germany during the mid-nineteenth century reflect perspectives on race and technology that vary greatly, especially through her comparison of the lives of African Americans and Native Americans. As O’Brien argues, Assing’s use of spatial and temporal metaphors to connect progress and freedom with increased technology and mobility for African Americans ironically required Native Americans to remain within spaces of stasis and primitiveness. For Assing, mobility and technology allow access to spaces of modernity and cultural superiority. In not seeking access to those spaces, Assing’s Native Americans are complicit in their own disappearance from the otherwise modern, progressive, and hopeful landscape of the U.S. abolitionist era. O’Brien sees Assing’s journalism as reinforcing the same act of erasure in depicting Native Americans as unable to cross spatial boundaries. Thus, unlike African Americans, they remain stuck in time. (Beth Muellner) In recent years, nineteenth-century German journalist, Ottilie Assing has garnered a good deal of attention for two main reasons. After having emigrated to the U.S. in 1852, Assing wrote numerous articles for the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser [Morning news for educated readers]1 in support of abolition, and many of them have been recently translated into English (see Assing, Radical Passion).2 Assing 1 Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [Morning news for educated classes], after 1837 Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser [Morning news for educated readers], published by Cotta from 1807–1865. On this influential journal, see Baasner. 2 On Assing’s work, see Keil, “Race and Ethnicity” and “German Immigrants”; Sollors; Behmer.

22

Traci S. O’Brien

also developed a long-term personal relationship with Frederick Douglass, the well-known nineteenth-century abolitionist, whose 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Assing translated and had published in Germany in 1860.3 One aspect of Assing’s work on which most scholars have commented is her reluctance to embrace fully the U.S. women’s movement despite her radical views on social justice. Unlike other radical women, both German and U.S. American, Assing does not view the struggle for increased human rights in the nineteenth century within the context of gender oppression. Instead, she defines this struggle in terms of the discrepancy between modern civilization – expressed in technological advances and in the values of “liberty and justice for all” – and the existence of slavery in the United States. Her gender does, however, play a role in Assing’s writing. In fact, one could argue that her embrace of technology and social justice could be read as an affirmation of women’s legitimate right to participate in public activities, as well as a validation of a new kind of modern and socially conscious masculinity. Nevertheless, this essay is more concerned with Assing’s social engagement in terms of her vigorous association of social progress with technological advancement, primarily in the area of travel and technology. In fact, throughout her work, Assing frequently depicts the increasing possibility of physical movement through space – via train travel, for example, but also via the abolition of slavery – as connected to the progress of humanity. Conversely, she transforms the spaces she depicts, from landscapes to train cars, by infusing them with the democratic ideals of progress. In the process, she defines progress in both temporal and spatial terms, linking it to an historical narrative of human development which privileges freedom over enslavement. At the same time, there is a startling contradiction in Assing’s work: her progressive vision of civilization and technology, with its expanded freedoms and mobility, requires the “primitive” (Native Americans) to disappear. Her depictions of spaces and of the people within them therefore also illustrate the qualities she deems necessary to civilized modernity. One can understand Assing’s rejection of the “primitive” in part as a reflection of her historical moment. She embraces the “passion for locomotion” which, Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, is typical of nineteenth-century U.S. culture both in terms of technological advances and individual human bodies (117). This is, however, complicated terrain: with the title of his work, the “politics of mobility,” Mark Simpson problematizes any streamlined narrative of nineteenth-century

3 See Douglass, Sclaverei und Freiheit [Slavery and freedom], trans. Assing. Terry H. Pickett first uncovered archival evidence of their relationship. See Pickett. Maria Diedrich’s Love Across Color Lines is a biography of Assing and of her relationship with Douglass. See also Lohmann.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

23

U.S. culture and the mobility of its citizens. Assing’s articles for the Morning news in the years 1852–1865 provide insight into, to borrow Simpson’s term, the politics of mobility. Simpson challenges that we “understand mobility not as a naturally occurring phenomenon but much more rigorously as a mode of social contest decisive in the manufacture of subjectivity and the determination of belonging” (xiii). This chapter centers on the ways in which mobility is a “contestatory process” in Assing’s work, as well as the way she invests modern forms of travel with “social value, cultural purchase, and discriminatory power” (xiii–xiv). Assing’s value-laden depictions of space itself, in addition to her depictions of movement in and through natural, technological, and urban spaces, ground the discussion. Further, the technology of travel provides a context for human action and experience. Thus, it follows that the types of spaces Assing energizes reveal very clearly the “subjectivity,” or human qualities, she endorses. In sum, Assing’s depiction of modernized space reveals several conceptions of social progress: her narrative includes the abolition of slavery as an institution as well as the inclusion of African Americans as free (and thus mobile) citizens. At the same time, Assing depicts Native Americans as beings who cannot adjust or adapt to modern life and who do not embrace technological modernity. Hence, technology and access to mobility also serve as the definitive signs of cultural superiority.4 The Native Americans in Assing’s reports are present as a disappearing phenomenon, and they represent in Assing’s work (and in U.S. society in general during this time) a culture that is giving way to modernity.5

German journalist on the American railway Despite the contradiction in her progressive standpoint, the reader of Assing’s reports today is immediately struck by her significant commitment to social change and racial equality. Both Hartmut Keil and Werner Sollors emphasize the radical nature of Assing’s assertions of racial equality between blacks and whites during the antebellum and Civil War periods. Her biographer, Maria Diedrich, argues that Assing’s mixed heritage – her father had converted from Judaism to marry her Christian mother – sensitized her to the “outsider” position and the injustice of racial segregation and slavery in the U.S. (138, see also Behmer 23–28).6 Assing was also unusually well educated for a woman of her time. She had vital 4 On the racializing tactics in Assing’s prose, see O’Brien. 5 On racism and the Native American, see Horsman. 6 Diedrich’s description of Assing’s “place” in nineteenth-century society, as well as the assertion that this “position” gives her a special vantage point exemplifies her predilection for spatial

24

Traci S. O’Brien

ties to both the Young German movement, which espoused German unification and political change, as well as to Poetic Realism, a post-revolutionary literary movement. These connections to both the arts and to social change remain strong over the course of her life (see Diedrich 35–37). A journalist who began her career in Germany at the time of the failed revolution, Assing came to the U.S. as a single woman in her thirties.7 Her hundreds of articles for the highly respected Morning news contributed to the ongoing transatlantic conversation between intellectuals on themes that included, in addition to general cultural topics, the U.S. women’s movement, Frederick Douglass, racial inequality, and the abolitionist cause.8 In many of Assing’s articles, travel is a recurring motif, beginning with her own journey from Hamburg to New York. She also recounts her extensive travel within the U.S. and her eventual residence in the New York City area. Assing’s increasing journalistic focus on the plight of African Americans is juxtaposed with the theme of her own travels. She vigorously supports the abolitionist movement as a logical consequence of a civilized society as such a society is based on republican principles and freedoms. During the antebellum and Civil War era, Assing reported on the controversial issues which gripped the U.S. population, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the secession of the Southern states and the War. Her texts reflect the belief that the U.S. was indeed headed somewhere. From the very beginning of her reporting from the United States, Assing embraces the technology of travel as one important aspect of humanity’s development, unlike others of the time who may have written about railroad travel with trepidation and/or disdain.9 In seeking to account for the “industrial subject” (Trachtenberg xv), Schivelbusch explains that the technological revolution in travel dramatically impacted human perception of the “absolute” powers of space (13). Travel technology brought about the “annihilation of time and space,” and, depending on one’s perspective, changes could be experienced as either a loss or a gain (13).10 Francis Lieber, like Assing a politically liberal German-American, for

metaphors for challenging injustice and imagining more egalitarian social relationships. See, for example, Keith and Pile. See also Price-Chalita on feminist uses of spatial metaphors. 7 Assing was one of more than one million German immigrants to the U.S. in the decade following the failed revolution of 1848. See Wagner, esp. xi and xvi. 8 Behmer specifically addresses Assing’s transition from cultural critic to abolitionist. 9 See Paul A. Youngman, who notes the view that the railway was “a device that constricted the lifeblood of culture” (9). On Heinrich Heine’s dubious comments, see Schivelbusch 44. 10 Michael Freeman notes that “time had annihilated space” (78). The privilege of time over space led to the recent “spatial (re)turn.” See Massey. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann reject the “annihilation” of space. Fritz Steele refutes this idea as well (5). For modern and postmodern perceptions of space and time, see Harvey, esp. 201–283; and Jameson, esp. 154–180.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

25

example, bemoans the advent of travel technology as the loss of connection both between human beings as well as to an authentic experience of nature. In the following, Lieber describes a memory of railroad travel in upstate New York in terms that convey physical separation and intellectual confinement, and the impact that these, in turn, have had on the traveler’s perception: From Albany to Schenectady, you travel by rail-road; and the least exciting of all travelling […] is decidedly locomotion by steam on a rail-road. The traveller, whose train of ideas is always influenced by the manner in which he proceeds, thinks in a steam car of nothing else but the place of his destination, for the very reason that he is moving so quickly. Pent up in a narrow space, rolling along on an even plain which seldom offers any objects of curiosity, and which, when it does, you pass by with such rapidity, that your attention is never fixed; together with a number of people who have all the same object in view, and think like you of nothing else, but when they shall arrive at their journey’s end – thus situated, you find nothing to entertain or divert you […] There is no common conversation, no rondo-laugh, nothing but a dead calm […]. (2)11

As a member of the previous generation, Lieber provides a useful contrast to Assing in a variety of ways. In Lieber’s depiction, the separation endured by the traveler from an authentic experience of nature is credited to the change in speed of travel (“so quickly”), as well as the speed with which things pass by (“such rapidity”), and thus he resists measuring the value of travel in positive temporal gain. Moreover, the enforced confinement is also responsible for the superficiality of both one’s “train of ideas” as well as one’s relationship to fellow travelers. Consequently, such travelers can no longer authentically experience the space through which they travel. The resulting “dead calm” could indicate, as Schivelbusch might say, fear caused by loss of control experienced over the journey, and the physical isolation of the compartment would intensify the feelings of “helpless passivity” (82), defined as intellectual passivity by Lieber.12 For Lieber, the only way to experience travel meaningfully is on foot. In this mode of travel, one moves on one’s own steam, so to speak, rather than being moved passively through space. Lieber’s “enlightened” view of foot travel is

11 Also cited in Schivelbusch 58. Like Assing, Lieber wrote as a U.S. correspondent for the Morning news (during the 1840s and 1850s). See Wagner 329–330. Though he belonged to the earlier generation of German immigrants to the U.S., Lieber’s stance on causes such as abolition coincide with Assing’s. See the section on slavery (Lieber 188–214). 12 Beth Muellner uses this helpless passivity experienced by early train travelers as a point of gendered contrast in (2012). Due in part to Assing’s anonymous authorship, the “ambiguity” (44) Muellner notices vis-à-vis explicit gender norms in travel texts by German women writers of the nineteenth-century is not evidenced in Assing’s work.

26

Traci S. O’Brien

enhanced by a sense of “romantic” individualism:13 an integral part of the travel, which he endorses, is an unmediated enjoyment of pure nature. Indeed, the strict separation of nature from culture is vital to his enjoyment of the natural space and his movement through it. Lieber’s enjoyment of this mode of transportation is also clearly predicated on his gender and class. Relying on Rousseau, he depicts this ideal mode of transportation from the point of view of the (white) male traveler of means (3–4). In contrast, Assing does not thrust herself as a traveling woman into her text. Publishing anonymously (as was the Morning news’ custom), Assing does not seem compelled to justify or qualify her views as a woman. Nevertheless, the subtext of Assing’s embrace of technology can surely be read in the mobility that Assing herself experiences as a woman traveling alone. Crossing boundaries and traversing great distances elicit excitement rather than anxiety in Assing. Here, she describes train travel with a much different aesthetic: How wrong are those who say that the poetry of travel has been destroyed by modern steam transportation! True, the acquaintances one makes along the way, the adventures of the wayside inns have come to an end; but what is such mail-coach romance compared to the greater poetry that lies in the lightning leaps from one country, from one people to another? The seven-league boots that our parents admired when they were children have been far surpassed, and yet it is said that poetry is in decline. Whoever grasps the poetry of the present reality will always be richly rewarded. (19–20)14

With this enthusiastic affirmation, Assing could have been responding directly to Lieber, and others like him, who were commenting on train travel in its “infancy” (Hadley 12). Assing describes the possibilities created by train travel and the new perception of space as a gain rather than a loss. Further, Assing connects this new experience of space – both as an expansion (one can experience more of the world and its people) and a compression (the world is smaller) – with time (“lightening leaps”). Both of these developments she connects to a linear and historical notion of progress that is also defined in terms of time, that is, the

13 Schivelbusch asserts: “The ‘esthetic freedom’ of the preindustrial subject is only discovered at the moment when the preindustrial methods of production and transportation seem threatened in their very existence by mechanization: this is a typical process of romanticization” (118). For a different view, see Andrew Cusack, who analyzes the symbolic connection of “self-directed physical locomotion” with “self-directed activity of thought” (16). 14 For quotations from Assing’s work, page numbers given will refer to the Lohmann translation where available. Citations from Morning news for educated readers will be listed with year of publication and page number: Morning news (1853) 1221.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

27

progress from one generation to the next and the opportunity to participate in technological progress. Assing’s vision of technological progress clearly privileges the modern traveler and connects modern subjectivity to the ability to “grasp” the rewards of the present age and technologically enhanced mobility. For Lieber, such mobility is like being “tied to the wing of a windmill” (187), a phrase which highlights the powerlessness the traveler feels at the beginning of the modern travel era. But for Assing, technology both empowers the traveler and improves the relationship between human beings and their natural surroundings.15 The improvement of human beings’ relationship with nature occurs not only in the experience of traveling through the natural landscape, or perceiving nature from the window, but also the experience of an authentic relationship with nature itself. During the first years of her acquaintance with the U.S., Assing makes several long trips out west and into upstate New York. In these articles, there is clearly a “new spatiality” (Schivelbusch 13) in evidence: technology’s incursion remakes the natural space by integrating into the landscape both the railway and the intrepid traveler who dares to meet technology on its own terms. The integrated landscape also allows human imagination an active role in the process, to discover the poetry of the experience.16 While the exuberance Assing demonstrates in 1853–1854 is later tempered and replaced with a sober consideration of moral and political factors in her adopted country, the reverence for freedom and mobility, as well as for the natural and technological spaces which seem to embody progress and potential, remains constant throughout her journalistic output. Assing comes to understand the idea of travel in terms of social progress. This includes not only actual travel and transportation, but also, in more abstract intellectual terms, the development of human rights (Keith and Pile 24).17 The “poetry of travel” comes to mean more to Assing than just traversing a set distance; instead, mobility is juxtaposed with

15 On the loss of a relationship to nature, see Freeman 78; Schivelbusch 37. Muellner notes that by mid-century, travelers are used to the change and “view the landscape as a new visual panorama, seeing it as enhanced and enlivened by train travel” (“Railroad” 41). Assing takes this one step further by actually inserting herself into the landscape. On the impact of modernization on the “observer,” see Crary. 16 A particularly vivid example is her description of a railway bridge over the Genesee falls and her own personal experience of it. See Morning news (1854) 720. 17 Highlighting the role of gender, Muellner points out the strategies women travel writers use to link “railroad travel unequivocally to political progress and women’s emancipation” (“Railroad” 30). Though Assing never becomes a staunch advocate of the women’s movement, there are obvious parallels in the use of this analogy.

28

Traci S. O’Brien

freedom, and she describes access to both freedom and mobility as a basic human right.

Urban mobility and the railroad For Assing, the technology of travel, with its steam engines and railroads, is conducive for progressive mobility and idealized human potential, activated for a specific – and political – cause. It is in this arena that Assing finds her niche as a journalist.18 She envisions developments in technology and progress in terms of human rights as stemming from the same impetus of human genius. Her reports about U.S. culture and politics were read by the educated elite in her home country, where the myth of American possibility, seen in the system of government, was strong. She focuses on democracy as an aspect of progress that must be included in the journey forward. Assing’s desire to create social change is fueled by a love of technology and by her admiration for the “Fortschritt mit Dampf,” or progress with steam, that she witnesses first-hand in the U.S. The role that the city, more often than not New York City of the 1850s, plays both for Assing personally and, in her depiction, for society at large, is seen in her preoccupation with travel to and within the city. One can read her endorsement of urban mobility and the railroad a consequence of her commitment to emancipation (for the self, in a Kantian sense, as well; see Cusack) and the “natural” evolution of travel technology. Thus, contrary to the previous generation exemplified by Lieber, Assing sees human progress as fostered by these new developments. Anke Gleber reminds us of the connection between the course of modernity and urban mobility as one traces “the footsteps of the flâneur as he strolls the streets” of major cities (171). Gleber’s focus is on the conspicuous absence of the “female flâneur” from the public sphere of modernity (173) and she looks into women’s complicity “with their exclusion from exteriority as well as from new directions of technology, production, and perception” (175). Assing stands out for today’s reader because she does not explicitly identify with the excluded feminine perspective. Still, there is surely a parallel between Assing’s clear preference for city life and its increased opportunity for freedom and mobility. Some have even read her unwillingness to identify herself as a female reporter, using the masculine “Berichterstatter” instead, as a concession to the

18 As Keil notes, Assing’s views “became the standard interpretation at the height of the conflict over slavery and abolition from 1856 to 1865” (“Race and Ethnicity” 4). See also Keil, “German Immigrants,” 149n38.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

29

social norms of patriarchy.19 Such debates aside, Assing often does her traveling in the city on foot. Like the modern flâneur, this allows her to become acquainted with the city at its most mundane and its most interesting, and to depict herself as the intrepid reporter once again. These “rambles,” or “Wanderungen in New York,” are a recurring theme in her articles.20 Technology still plays an important role in these rambles, emerging in the city landscape in a positive, protective way. At the very end of a report on “five points,” an area of the city filled with poverty, hopelessness and despair, for example, the railroad comes to the rescue: Just a few steps further and one comes to the place where Cross Street runs into Center Street. Here begins another world. Different railroad lines come together in a large depot, the steam machines roar in the numerous factories, the large passenger and freight trains roar over the tracks; the memory of “five points” remains simply as a bad dream, and it is gradually shaken off by new and vivid impressions. (Morning news [1855] 1072, my translation)

The train does not physically transport her anywhere but rather provides hope for positive change. These aspects of technology bring a new reality whereby one can “shake off” the encounter with misfortune. It is important to note, however, that Assing was not dismissive of urban poverty in general as simply a “bad dream.” In fact, she reported on urban problems with her tour of a city prison and her descriptions of social projects to ease poverty.21 Beyond her individual experience, Assing connects technological advancement to social progress in terms of racial equality as early as 1855 – even though she has not yet become a radical abolitionist (Lohmann xvii). The following passage describes Assing’s experience in a crowded train car leaving New York City, and the train compartment becomes a space where racial segregation can be lifted: [s]ince I had to give up the idea of having a bench to myself, I simply sat down next to an old Negro woman. […] Considering the prevailing prejudice, it is remarkable that the black and colored people are not stuffed into separate cars or so carefully segregated on the railroads

19 Regarding (Assing’s) anonymity, Wagner calls it standard practice for the Morning news to “protect” its authors with anonymity (xxiii), whereas Diedrich sees Assing’s reporting as a kind of “continuous intellectual cross-dressing” (103). 20 See, for example, Assing, Morning news (1856) 84–89, translated by Lohmann as “Rambles through New York” (47–53). 21 On prisons, see Morning news (1853) 643–646; and Morning news (1855) 1216–1217. On poverty, see Morning news (1855) 1070; and Morning news (1858) 498–501, esp. 499–500.

30

Traci S. O’Brien

as they are in theaters and similar places. In this regard alone republican equality rules; he who pays, whether white or black, travels in the same car. (Morning news [1853] 1221, 19)

In 1855, Assing has not yet found her niche as an abolitionist reporter. Still, for her the railway car is different from other public spaces in terms of the “republican equality” it can engender. As Assing becomes more engaged in the abolitionist movement, she often reports on issues in terms of mobility and access to public spaces. In June 1858, she reports on a gathering of the “Negroes of New York” to protest the violations to their “natural rights.” Unlike others who come to the abolitionist cause via religion, Assing does not ground natural rights in any kind of divine order. In this particular instance, Assing notes that one of the busiest streetcars in New York City “does not tolerate colored people of any shade to use the interior of its cars,” something that she calls a “barbaric restriction” (124). Assing is doubtful that the protest will have any effect on this streetcar company, but notes that “all other companies had gradually removed this restriction and opened their cars to everyone, regardless of color” (125). Assing depicts this race-based exclusion from technological advances as something old-fashioned and out-of-step. Nevertheless, she recognizes that the attitudes of many towards abolition and racial equality are ambivalent and describes this state of affairs in the same terms: “even among the decided foes of slavery there are only a few who would rise with lively interest on behalf of the free Negroes of the North; and whether blacks are allowed to ride in the cars on Sixth Avenue is, for most, a matter of such indifference that they would not bestir themselves” (Morning news [1858] 64, 125). Despite her sober assessment of racial tensions and the increasing sophistication of her analysis of racial politics in the U.S., and the knowledge that not every journey will reflect an uncritical conflation of technology and freedom, Assing’s association of technology with positive social change remains intact. During the Civil War, according to Assing, it is the “democratic” public conveyances that proclaim the survival and prosperity of the northern city, symbolic of the best it has to offer, and of the North itself. In contrast to the crumbling infrastructure and “backward motion” she describes in the slaveholding South, railway lines in New York City continue to expand. As she reports, almost all main streets [are] crisscrossed by railways, the surest sign of increasing traffic and prosperity. These city railways [pulled by horses] […] are a feature of modern times in New York, at the most twelve to fifteen years old. Ten years ago, there were only four lines, and they have grown to ten in the meantime, and currently there is a proposition underway through which the entire city would be crisscrossed with a net of city railways, for which the tracks have already been laid. Even Broadway, which normally is an impassable border between East and West, has in the upper part of the city its railway, while in the lower half it

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

31

is intersected by many railways, and soon there will be a complete connection in all directions. (Morning news [1864] 355, my translation)

Progress in terms of technological changes in the (urban) landscape also means the transgression of formally imposed boundaries (across Broadway). Her affirmation of technology echoes her faith in increasing social justice: the transgression of racial boundaries – that is, racial tolerance – and the “tracks [which] have already been laid” predict the “complete connection in all directions.”22 Such boundary crossing is possible because, as Assing recognizes, the technology of travel is not value-free, but rather creates a situation in which people’s perceptions of others change, and as a result, impact the way social meaning is created. As Simpson suggests, “contestatory processes” produce “different forms of movement” which then affect social perceptions (xiii). In the following, she connects more explicitly the physical space that the railway traverses with egalitarian ideals that the transportation system engenders. This “democratic arrangement” with its efficient and inexpensive technology, inspires riders to overcome their prejudices if only for the ride downtown: These city railways belong to the large comforts of life here [in New York], as they are accessible even to workers […] and make even the widest range of travel possible and easy. One would think that a type of transport that really is a democratic development (because of its low price) would be scorned and avoided by the upper class, but that is absolutely not the case. Whatever prejudices one upholds in other things, one is too enlightened to scorn comfortable and always available transport, simply because it is not exclusive and puts one on the same level as the working man. (Morning news [1864] 355, my translation)

Assing’s description of the city railway is not quite the “classless open car” which Schivelbusch describes,23 nor the “leveler of differences” which Lynne Kirby finds in the texts of railroad commentators (7). Nevertheless, Assing insists that motion forward through steam and progressive human rights should be running along the same track. The existence of slavery, for example, is for Assing one of the areas where the cause of human progress is derailed. Her advocacy of civilized

22 Though Assing is not enthusiastically supportive of the women’s movement in the U.S., she does see civil rights for women as the natural result of a civilized society as well. See, for example, Assing 111–112 [Morning news (1858) 383]. See Lohmann xxvii. On Assing and feminism see also Diedrich 209–122, 288–291. 23 On democratic hopes, as well as the difference in train travel between Europe and the U.S., see Schivelbusch 73–75, 104. On these differences, see also William Larrabee, esp. 76–77. See Muellner on Malwida von Meysenbug’s “liberatory tone” and her echo of “utopian visions” in Muellner, “The Deviance of Respectability,” 40.

32

Traci S. O’Brien

(and thus egalitarian) social structures includes the responsibility of the educated citizen – presumably her readership – to participate in these changes, is evident in the following from 1857: The very idea of approaching slaveholders with friendly and conciliatory intentions offends the deepest convictions of every abolitionist. It is not enough to assume an impersonal attitude and to argue that hate must be directed against a principle, not against individuals. Who but the slaveholders represent the principle of slavery? Who but the slaveholders try to maintain that principle in the face of opposition from the entire civilized world? How can one oppose the principle without fighting them? […] Frederick Douglass, the celebrated fighter for the freedom of his race, has argued these points with the full force of his mind, the brilliance of his rhetoric, and the fire of his convictions. (Morning news [1857] 1169–1170, 98)

Here, Assing singles out the individual – both negatively and positively – as a representative and an embodiment of principles. One is reminded of the depiction of herself as the courageous climber of the railroad bridge (see note 16) or the daring wanderer of city streets. This encounter with modernity, however, is not explicitly with modern technology, but rather with modern ideas of social progress. The motif of travel technology also highlights the ways in which U.S. society falls short of its own ideals. In the following, Assing expresses her disappointment at the contradiction between republican ideals and the reality for African Americans. The spread of technology is equated with the spread of (racial) tolerance. According to Assing, in Europe there are still a few out-of-the-way, primitive areas where, in spite of the railroad and the newspapers, the sunshine of education and enlightened thought has penetrated only slowly and incompletely, where the power of old prejudices and base customs presents a barrier against the most necessary and salutary innovations that is difficult to overcome. […] Should there still be disciples of the actual Middle Ages – the raw, naked, barbaric Middle Ages – they don’t exist in the old, aristocratic Europe with its dark remnants of the past, but they do in the young, democratic America, the land where progress is driven by steam. (Morning news [1858] 738, 127)

In this passage, the narrative of human progress is told through contrasts between light (“sunshine of education”) and “dark remnants”; barbarity and civilization; Middle Ages and “progress driven by steam”; and “old, aristocratic Europe” and “young, democratic America.” In addition to the historical narrative of progress she uses, Assing accounts for human progress “spatially”: enlightened thought is connected to technology, and like the railway, has penetrated increasing amounts of space. Thus, the dissonance in the U.S. between republican ideals and the reality of slavery is even more striking because, though it is outdated and barbaric, it exists in “young, democratic America.”

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

33

Assing equates concepts of (free) movement through space with the right to free social movement and justice; education and enlightened values, spread by modern technology, are connected to the progressive development of humanity and human society. No reader today would likely object to Assing’s conflation of civilization with the abolition of slavery, nor the notion that a nation’s active citizenry is responsible for participating in social justice. Here, one cannot help but draw a parallel between the actual technology of the railroad and the existence of the Underground Railroad, which without rails, it could be argued, carried people even greater distances. In addition to its name, the parallels are many: the Underground Railroad had destinations, stations along the way, and its reason for being was social and physical movement. With her vantage point in the Northeast, and via her relationship with Douglass, Assing is well aware of its role and writes about it several times (see, for example, Morning news [1859] 1224; see also Behmer and Diedrich). At one point, Assing comments ironically that “[d]espite […] assurances of other southern heroes regarding the enviable happiness of the slaves, the Underground Railroad has never transported as many passengers as it is doing now, which seems to prove that slaves, different from other human beings, have a peculiar passion for escaping from the place where they receive the best treatment” (Morning news [1858], 740, 130). The Underground Railroad is for Assing a symbol of freedom and mobility at the highest level and blends all of these themes which resonate for her. The motif of travel is both a movement through space enhanced by technology, and an all-too-human journey propelled by enlightened ideals.

Embodied disappearance: The “vanishing” Native Americans This analysis of Assing’s journalism places her in the flow of several different narratives of U.S., African American, and Native American history, and their respective interpretations of technology and modernity. Space (and access to it) plays a significant role in all accounts. Historians of the railroad have for many years sought to shed light on the changes wrought by the railroad in the U.S., and these were often restricted to seemingly objective facts, such as mileage laid, rate systems, and laws passed, or described in terms, much like Assing’s, of progress and development (see, for example, Schieldrop).24 As Leslie Decker noticed in

24 On the impact of the boom in railroad transportation which began mid-century, see Johnson and Van Metre, esp. 26–37.

34

Traci S. O’Brien

1964, “the specialists have long recognized the interrelationships of politics, lands, and railroads,” but that “recognition of these relationships has not normally produced the study of them” (6).25 In Assing’s case, her rejection of the barbaric, primitive, and uncivilized elements of U.S. society, as well as her conceptions of time and travel technology as progressive forces, are directly linked to her inability to include the Native Americans in her vision of a civilized and modern society. More recent cultural studies of transport have been enriched in some ways by postmodernist criticism with its analytic force trained on agency, power, and perspective.26 Kirby, for example, reminds us that, while the train was a force of integration, of linkage, of coherence, it “literally uprooted and destroyed both Native American and European-American communities in the United States.” In addition, it enforced differences, “which it tried to smooth out in its imposition of hegemonic homogeneity” (6, see also Keith and Pile 24–25). As noted, Assing advocates a socially and racially integrated city space. At the same time, she imposes a kind of civilized homogeneity which uncritically reflects the narrative of the “vanishing American.”27 Her narrative of technology and human progress and her attitudes towards Native Americans intersect in her value-laden depictions of social spaces and the people who populate them, as the technology of travel – both as a source of poetry, an improver of nature, and a purveyor of civilization, cohesion and tolerance – demands an active participant. In Moving Encounters, Laura Mielke provides useful historical and cultural context to the contestation of space on the North American continent which then culminated in the policy of Indian removal (see also Roy Harvey Pearce). Her analysis focuses on texts and performances from the 1820s to the 1840s which depict scenes of “first contact” and sympathy. The encounters, however, often “ended with the failure of sympathy to overcome the persisting differences of the two parties and the historical conditions” (3). Mielke marks an important historical moment, one which has passed by the 1850s (the time in which Assing begins reporting from America). In Assing’s texts there are no scenes of mutual choice and

25 There are ideological differences: for a pro-labor perspective, see Fagan; Dolores Greenberg’s perspective is pro-business. More contemporary approaches take into account theories of power such as Clarence B. Davis and Kenneth E. Wilburn. On the myth of an “ideology-free” association of Western technology with democracy, see also Staudenmaier. 26 Kirby’s book, for example, compares the technology of the railroad to that of the silent cinema. Though they caution against the complete abstraction of cultural metaphors of transit away from the actual history and practices of transport, Colin Divall and George Revill note some advantages to cultural theory; see also Seiler. This call for a “cultural turn” was not uncontroversial. See discussion in Journal of Transport History 27.1 (2006): 138–149. 27 On this trope in North American literature, see Orians. See also Stedman; and Dippie. See also Simpson.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

35

“first contact.” Instead, her journalism reflects the shift in social perceptions from the Native American to the African American as the defining other in U.S. society.28 In the following passage from 1855, Assing introduces the Native American as a passive figure as she describes a painting by Ary Scheffer (“Versuchung Christi,” or Temptation of Christ, 1854). Her description of the work more generally, and the figure of the fallen angel in it specifically, evoke dislocation, disinheritance and downfall. She states: One searches in this good-naturedly tormented face in vain for the stormy anger of the fallen angel, and I was vividly reminded of the poor Indians, who, in the lower half of the city shyly and shamefacedly offering up their moccasins, are clearly yearning to be back in their woods, out of a civilization which must appear to them to be the utmost barbarity, since they have been driven by its representatives from their native lands and, as time goes on, are going towards their complete downfall. (Morning news [1855] 927, my translation)

While the Native Americans occupy physical space in New York City, they do not really belong, nor are they included in Assing’s grand narrative of progressive development. Instead, she relegates them to a different historical narrative in which they rather passively embrace their “complete downfall” by “going toward” it. Even the choice of the word “downfall,” as opposed to “removal,” places the responsibility for the fate of the Native American squarely on his or her own shoulders, ostensibly because they cannot embrace a “barbarous” civilization of the type Assing endorses. In an 1856 article, Assing again focuses on the Native Americans she has encountered in New York City. She introduces them as “peculiar growths” (64), rather than people and invites her readership to visit their “forest primeval” (64). This places them in sharp contrast to the city itself, as well as to other city dwellers. Hence, they are again depicted as foreign in their modern surroundings: They are mostly short and squat, their skin color as dark as that of a mulatto, with whom they otherwise share no facial resemblance, however: prominent cheek bones; narrow sliteyes; a noticeably low forehead that looks as if hidden under glossy black hair and a large, round hat; the whole figure almost completely covered by a wool blanket which serves as an overcoat. They look sad and depressed and seem to approach the passer-by only with a shy reluctance to offer for sale colorfully embroidered shoes, bags, or satchels. (Morning news [1856] 454–455, 64)

Assing emphasizes their physical traits, but takes care to distinguish these people from others, such as Frederick Douglass, with whom they share “skin color as dark

28 See roundtable discussion on this topic in Gustafson.

36

Traci S. O’Brien

as that of a mulatto,” but little else. These individuals are “sad and depressed” and “shy.” Here there is no intrepid exploration, no discernible participation or protest. They are bodily present, but inert and out of place in a modern city. In 1864, while Assing is at other times insistent on dismantling the antiquated and uncivilized system of racial superiority which supported slavery in the U.S., she continues to rely on a fairly simplistic binary vis-à-vis the Native Americans. In the following, her description highlights the inauthentic nature of Native American rituals performed for spectators as commodities for enjoyment as opposed to an integral part of Native American culture. The contrast between the civilized (moral) and the uncivilized (immoral and barbaric) emphasizes the inauthenticity of the display. This inauthenticity which she registers also signals the disappearance of authentic Native American culture: These Indians [15 men and 4 women] from the Iroquois tribe […] are more than half-civilized and offered when they heard of the exhibit, [to contribute] a demonstration of their customs. […] They normally wear European clothing, but appear at this event in full Indian costume, decked out with feathers and pearls; only their legs, arms and upper body are – in a nod to the civilized notions of respectability – covered with tricots, which, however, display these beautiful strong bodily forms in their entirety. Their facial construction is not unpleasant, their foreheads higher than the completely uncivilized Indian tribes, and their expression good-natured and friendly […] In addition, many had black spots and stripes on their cheeks and above the mouth, as if they wanted to replace a non-existent moustasche, which nature has denied the unmixed Indian. Their dances and songs are primitive enough and show no trace of any type of influence […] But the most expressive and characteristic was the war dance, in which these red people jumped around screaming loudly, threw their upper bodies back and forth while brandishing their axes and clubs, and in the process developed a kind of wild grace. (Morning news [1864] 520, my translation)

The reader may notice an ambivalence in terms of value judgment, due to the “more civilized” rank of this tribe – which is demonstrated by the fact that some wear European garb, and that they, according to Assing, recognize the desirability of the masculine beard even if they lack the ability to grow one – and to her appreciation of their higher forehead and “beautiful and powerful bodily forms” which possess a “kind of wild grace.” Still, Assing’s report anticipates the irony present in the oft-cited speech given by Chief Simon Pokagon at the 1893 World’s Fair. Pokagon’s very presence at this fair, according to Simpson, spelled “certain disappearance and exemplif[ied] looming invisibility” (xii). In other words, he was a representative of the vanishing (Yael Ben-zvi). Similarly, Assing’s interest in this performance reduces its presence to the status of a cultural artifact, rather than a vital expression of a living culture. A major irony of Assing’s work, then, is that while her analysis of the hurdle that slavery represented for U.S. society is both accurate and sensitive, she is

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

37

unable to posit any intrinsic value in Native American culture. In her reports, they remain vital and robust only in those places untouched by technology. During her travels “in the wilderness,” Assing dedicates an entire article to the Native Americans upon whom the white people in the area rely for mail delivery in winter. She describes in detail the “very primitive” nature of their primary methods of transport, that is, snowshoes and sleds. They make up a different kind of train, but this one has no steam: [T]he reader must imagine such a caravan and a white man who, accompanied by an Indian, is appropriately outfitted to roam in the wilderness for four or five hundred miles. Their path goes through immense forests into which no living being strays except for the wild animals who live there […] The Indian leads the train, followed by the dogs and the person of civilization […] (Morning news [1859] 240, my translation)

In the “anti-civilization” she describes, the order of things has been reversed: the Native American takes the lead, followed by the dogs, and last by the “civilized” persons. While the caravans may evoke an image of the modern train, they belong to the technological past. The snowshoes and dogsleds bring to mind both Lieber’s advocacy of pre-industrial travel as well as Assing’s comments about the seven-league boots of her parents’ generation. As seen above, Assing repeatedly connects the penetration of technology with the improvement of the (natural) landscape and the spread of progressive humanism. Conversely, she associates backwardness with isolation from such technologies. Her perceptions of modern space have become “homogenous,” or rather validate a certain kind of individual as socially valuable. She cannot conceive of a different – and valid – relationship to living space and thus culture. The contrast between her outrage over the immorality of slavery and her ambivalence towards the Native Americans is striking. Another very large irony of Assing’s neglect of the value of Native American culture is that certain political and psychological features that we (and she) consider fundamentally U.S. American are said to have been heavily influenced by certain Native American tribes. For example, the concept of “government by the people” embraced by the Founding Fathers, was encouraged by the social systems of the Haudenosaunee. The latter’s deep reverence for personal liberty and autonomy manifested in their system of federal government which, some scholars have asserted, served as one model for the Founding Fathers when they were drafting the U.S. Constitution.29

29 This is by no means an uncontroversial assertion. See Grindle, Jr., and Venables. In addition, Jack Weatherford asserts that, “Freedom does not have a long pedigree in the Old World” (121) but does among the Native peoples in the US.

38

Traci S. O’Brien

Conclusion As myriad works on the history of the railroad attest, it was a potent symbol for multiple agendas. Arthur Hadley begins his 1885 history of railroad transportation by connecting the founding document of the U.S. to the foundational rails of the first railroad line, thus harnessing the symbolic potency of each event. Even against the background of this use of symbol, Assing’s work stands out for its uniqueness. Reconsidering “the politics of mobility,” which for Simpson are visible in “scenes of traffic and transit,” one can see how, in Assing’s work, representations of technology (or its lack) can be connected to her engagement in the politics of mobility. She repeatedly brings her readers back to concepts of social justice, social belonging and human rights, and how these are enacted in social spaces. She also accurately sees the gains brought about by travel technology, such as enhanced education, personal development, and the opportunity to experience a wide range of peoples and cultures. In addition, she sees it as a vehicle of democratization and tolerance. Assing herself clearly validated an inclusive notion of space. This is noticeable in her views of city spaces, which, ironically, did much to increase access to what she defines as “natural rights.” At the same time, in comparing all the above “scenes” of mobility and transit one can see how the contestatory processes, “produce possibilities for some and delimit or obstruct opportunities for others” (Kaplan 155). On the one hand, in Assing’s work African Americans actively engage in literal movement – either in the railway car or via the Underground Railroad. In contrast, Native Americans are disconnected from any kind of authentic or viable culture, and either travel by foot in nature or they are immobile (that is, passively sitting) in the modern city. In all scenarios, they are passing through on their way into obscurity. In Assing’s radical vision of civilization, with its technologically expanded freedoms and mobility, there is no space for the “primitive,” which must therefore vanish. Her uncritical association of the technology of travel with positive change blinds her to the nature of the past and present conflicts between Native American tribes and the U.S. government over land.30 One is subsequently left with the question of how to account for Assing’s conception of an inclusive and just social sphere, which displays so little tolerance and understanding towards Native Americans and their experience in the United States of America. Once could say, as her biographer states, that Assing “was incapable of perceiving equality in terms other than sameness” (138). What

30 See Dunbar on the advent of steam travel and encounters with Native Americans, especially chapters 49 and 50.

“Full Steam Ahead!”: Technology, Mobility, and Human Progress

39

she did not, could not, take into consideration was perhaps something as simple as different perceptions of space (see, for example, Hall 9). Assing was unusually insightful for her time about black-white race relations. However, her work also reflects the tenacity of another binary present in U.S. culture at that time – the civilized vs. uncivilized – and thus runs cover for governmental policy and corporate investment in purportedly civilized endeavors. These two perspectives intersect in her perceptions of viable and valuable social spaces and the people who will populate them. They also define the limits of her progressiveness.

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place Jumping to the 1990s, Laurel Cohen-Pfister’s essay interprets the work of Croatianborn poet Dragica Rajcic as an attempt to contest spatial hegemonies through the use of oppositionist poetic language. Using language consciously reminiscent of socalled “Gastarbeiterdeutsch” [guest worker German], Rajcic’s German defies the linguistic rules of grammar prescribed by High German, and Cohen-Pfister’s translations in English cleverly match this defiance. The poet comments on and criticizes the language precisely because her use of it stands outside the familiar and expected, much like a cultural geographer who interprets landscapes as an archive of cultural memories in which ideas of nationalism and otherness reverberate. Cohen-Pfister draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “deterritorialization” of minority language and Edward Said’s and Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on war, exile, and the detachment from home to delineate Rajcic’s language as oppositionist. At the same time, Cohen-Pfister demonstrates that the poet is not one to remain on the margins, but one who considers gender, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory within a “space of refusal” (bell hooks) and a “third geography” (Azade Seyhan). Between the imperative to express pain with the feminist exile’s subjectivity and the inability to articulate it within inscribed rhetorical patterns, Rajcic’s poetry resists the space of classification, but speaks to all from a linguistic space of social justice. (Beth Muellner) When asked about the role her homeland plays in her writing, the 2010 winner of the German and Swiss Book Prizes, Melinda Nadj Abonji, answered, more important to her would be class, and named Croatian poet Dragica Rajcic a major influence on her work. For Abonji, Rajcic has led the way as a woman writer struggling to escape stereotyped gender roles within the Balkan family and within the commonly adopted “homeland” of Switzerland. A Chamisso Prize winner, Rajcic resists marginalization as a “migrant” writer. A permanent resident of Switzerland since fleeing war-torn Croatia in 1991, Rajcic, who writes in German, claims her Heimat is in language, not any place defined by geographical boundaries.1 Often praised for its sharp irony and cutting insight, Rajcic’s language artfully deconstructs the reality it circumscribes. Defiant of the linguistic rules of grammar prescribed by High German, her German revels in its foreignness, in its 1 Personal interview, 8 Jan. 2009 in Berlin. Portions of this paper appear in my essay “Dragica Rajcic: Writing Women and War in the Margins” in the volume Poetry and Voice, ed. by Stephanie Norgate and Ellie Piddington (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). 137–147.

42

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

ability to comment and critique precisely because it stands outside the realm of the familiar and expected. She disregards, even destroys linguistic rules in order to defy violence and create her exilic home; orthography and grammar lose their power to delimit the perception and interpretation of what is experienced.2 In its real and invented brokenness, her language protects and isolates her, admits the writer; but it also liberates her to address directly the wounds of society and society’s wounded (Kummer et al. 162). While most of the attention directed toward Rajcic, much like toward Abonji, revolves around this position of foreignness and the questions of identity associated with a literature of migration, this essay relates this foreignness more specifically to the author’s experience of war, violence, and hegemonic structures of oppression. It is difficult, if not impossible, to define Rajcic’s position as a writer in the margins based solely on language and nationality. Rajcic’s position has been continually that of the oppositionist: as a woman in patriarchal social orders, both in Croatia and in Switzerland; as a antiwar activist horrified by territorial aggression; and as a so-called migrant writer of a minor and minority literature.3 I see in Rajcic’s war poetry an aesthetic that challenges patriarchal myths of conflict, combat, and heroism, just as it connects the overt violence of war with a private violence against women and with social constructs that maintain gendered spaces. Her poetry conveys the sorrow and pain of personal tribulation. It does not slide into passive lamentation, however. Rajcic’s masterful use and misuse of German attacks the notion of war with linguistic fodder and lays bare its rhetoric and mechanisms. Writing offers active resistance and protest, even if it cannot create a counter-vision. This essay systematically traces Rajcic’s poetic opposition through spaces: from the broadest of spaces – (ironically) the margins of transnational writing – into the more precise spaces of gender and nation, into the most private of spaces: the author’s personal feelings. Close readings of Rajcic’s poetry reveal the dislocations between the center and margin and also between a here and a space beyond. At the core of each consideration stands the impact war and violence make and have made on this writer’s worldview and her personal and literary response to gendered and nationalistic power struggles. In the end, this study questions which margin adequately houses this writer and to what extent her oppositionist stance,

2 For an excellent analysis of Rajcic’s linguistic style, see Erika M. Nelson, “Reading Rajcic,” Women in German Yearbook 26 (2010): 167–95. 3 See Deleuze and Guattari: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (59).

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

43

personally and politically, removes her to a no-where, utopian space, distanced from the incomprehensibility of humankind’s failure to love itself and others.

Which margin do we mean? There is irony in an attempt to analyze the oppositional aesthetics of a female, migrant writer.4 Rajcic’s work itself defies neat categories of “prevailing analytical paradigms,” which, Leslie Adelson notes, “are inadequate to grasp the social dimensions that […] inhere in the literature of migration” (1). Azade Seyhan also writes that the “emergent literatures of deterritorialized peoples and literary studies beyond the confines of national literature paradigms have as yet no name or configuration. In fact, […] contemporary forms of complex nonterritorial and transnational alliances and allegiances cannot be defined within the lexicon of available political languages” (9). Seyhan points to the inadequacy of labels like “exilic, ethnic, migrant, or diasporic” because none completely grasps “the nuances of writing between histories, geographies, and cultural practices” (9). Inherent in Seyhan’s reference to cultural practices lie certainly the socially constructed roles of gender and the differential created when these roles transverse cultures. Yet, the intersection of gender, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory within the parameters of set geographies, let alone the added dimensions of cultural and geographical displacement, is a growing field of research for which analytical paradigms are still being constructed and contested.5 In revealing the tensions and interconnections between gendered spaces and national and individual identities, Rajcic’s poetry defies any unidimensional categorization as marginal. Precisely this complexity leads to pursuing and questioning the multiple “centers” of power that elusively exert, as Russell Ferguson notes, “a real, undeniable power over the whole social framework of our culture, and over the ways that we think about it” (9). In a personal interview, the author asserts that the trauma and violence of war create her greatest impulses to write.6 In 1991, the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia sent her fleeing to Switzerland, a country she had lived in briefly in the late 1980s. Although exile spared her from physical harm, the riveting images

4 For more on the oppositional aesthetics of literature in the margins, see Petra Fachinger’s work Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 5 Likewise, as Hawkesworth notes: “The question of the effect of war on women and women’s literary response to war has been the subject of extensive study in recent years” (312). 6 Interview with the author on 27 April 2006.

44

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

of the conflict broadcast daily on Swiss television and the forced separation from family and friends created emotional wounds – “diese[r] kopf voll wunden” (“this head full of wounds”) (Pb 51)7 – that have found outlet in her writing. There one finds what Edward Said calls “the things to be learned” from the exile experience. Calling to mind Theodor Adorno’s reflections on exile, Said says “to stand away from ‘home’” is “to look at it with the exile’s detachment”: For there is considerable merit in the practice of noting the discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and what they actually produce. We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. […] Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. (Said 365)

To fight the wounds inflicted by the exile experience, the exile must “cultivate a scrupulous […] subjectivity,” nurtured by standing outside “the mass institutions that dominate modern life” (365). In light of the destruction of “houses” and the horrors committed by twentieth-century wars, Said concurs with Adorno: “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (365). Indeed, homes and familiar territory become provisional, and the safety they provide is fragile; only writing – that space beyond physical, intellectual, and conceptual borders and boundaries – offers refuge (365). Even then, as recent literary and psychoanalytic theories on the literature of genocide and extreme violence indicate, it is difficult to mediate these experiences through language – itself a conduit for ingrained gendered, social, and political patterns of thinking (Jambresic Kirin 74). Between the imperative to express pain with the exile’s subjectivity and the inability to articulate it within inscribed rhetorical patterns, Rajcic’s oppositional aesthetic finds and creates “home.” Considering the ethnic divisions that wrought violence in the Balkans in the early 1990s, “the exile’s detachment” – which for Rajcic should not be misconstrued as emotional distance – expresses itself in anger, frustration, and desperation at humankind’s ability to destroy its own. Her self-understanding has its geographical roots in the cultural and social practices of her Balkan homeland. Yet, the cultural and national identifications bear fractures incurred by nationalist, oppressive, and violent patterns of behavior manifested overtly in the war. Poems such as “Bosnien 92, 93,” “Bosnien 95,” and “Nach der Besichtigung der Krajina” (“After Viewing Krajina”) reference the historical reality of the Balkan Wars. Yet their critique of violence as a means for settling conflict places them

7 All translations are my own. I have tried when possible to incorporate some of the orthographic and grammatical twists of Rajcic’s style into the translation but realize the inadequacy of the translation in relaying word plays.

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

45

and the writer in a larger context of antiwar activism beyond national frameworks. Rajcic’s poetry gives prominent voice to displacement and the loss of communal and personal refuge. Familiar frameworks of family, heritage, and culture – in essence, the birth space of personal identity – appear maimed, tainted, or lost for both those who remain and those who flee. An early poem revels first in the headiness of acknowledging a long suppressed ethnic identity: Ich bin eine Kroatin ich bin eine Kroatin noch tausend mall konnte ich dieses Satz mit vergnügen schreiben zu einem es wahr lange verbotten zu zweiten wheil ich mir als etwas besonderes vorkomme etwas wie Pandabär Seltsames Tier (LIz 27)

I am a Croatian I am a Croatian another thousand timez I could write these sentence with joy for one it waz long forbitten for another becauze I feel like something special something like Panda bear Strange Animal

Simultaneously comes the realization that the label itself isolates and makes its party foreign, a “seltsames Tier” (“strange animal”). Thus, for the author, a purely national identity is ultimately too isolationist. The concluding lines of the poem reunite her with humanity at large: “then I lie down to sleepp / dream / I am allpeople together” (“dann lege ich mich schlaffen / träume / ich bin allemenschen zusammen,” LIz 27). Being “allpeople together,” a celebratory melding of races, ethnicities, and nationalities occurs, however, only when sleeping: it is a dreamer’s vision of harmony sustained only in the unconscious. As “humanity’s child,” she wrestles with the senselessness of intentional brutality: will glauben kann nicht glauben fest halten das gut für etwas ist der schlag aufs gesicht auf hinterkopf das alles einem so mir verborgenen sinn zeigen wird wenn es nicht mehr drauf an kommt zu leben wie menschens kind will fragen

want to believe can’t believe hold fast that it is for something good the blow to the face to back of the head that all that so hidden meaning will reveal itself to me later on hinter her when it no longer matters to live like humanity’s child want to ask

46

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

fürwas das gut krieg Toten ist (Pb 21)

for-what good is war Killing

With childlike naïvité, the poetic voice questions how violence can contain any deep meaning (“verborgenen sinn”) that might elevate it to a greater good or even make it “good for something.” Post-conflict, when peoples are once again expected to interact in a civilized fashion as though the brutality that scars them never took place, and indeed, the acts themselves become superfluous (“after wards when it no longer matters;” “hinter her wenn es nicht mehr drauf an kommt”), war and killing appear even more senseless. The political machinations that justify territorial expansionism are labeled “waschmittel für hirn” (“detergent for brain”) (“Bosnien 92, 93,” Pb 7) – propaganda intended to sway the people into agreement with governmental dictates. For an area torn asunder through so-called “ethnic cleansing,” the “detergent for brain” supplies the necessary product for the labor. With bitter irony Rajcic ridicules in “Pfahnen sind unentberlich” (“Pflags are Indispensible”) nationalist divisions that seem rooted in whimsy, not justified by tradition or heritage: Wessen ein fall es war beim Gipfellsturm stuck stoff aufzuhengen der Mond hat die Ehre eine mit sternen drauf zu schwingen vielleicht hatte Mond lieber eine mit halbmond wenn alles so weiter geht heng jeder von uns eine aufs kopf dass alle wissen das wir holzkopfe sind (Pb 43)

Whose idee-uh was it when storming the hill to heng up peece of cloth the moon has the honor to wave one with stars maybe moon would rather have one with halfmoon if it all keeps going like this each one of us will heng one from his head so all will know that we are blockheads

The victorious claiming of territory, when viewed with detachment, loses its patriotic content: flags revert simply to pieces of cloth; the designs on them, so imbued with meaning to insiders, become only caricatures of nature. With farcical intent, the poem envisions the ultimate ecstasy: each individual proclaims victory with cloth hanging from his or her own head. The unending cycle of conquer (and accompanying) defeat turns all, as though through some domino effect, into “holzkopfe” (blockheads), incapable of thinking and acting differently. Rajcic’s detachment from the “dogma and orthodoxy” of nationalist palaver removes her perhaps to a transnational or postnational state, but more accurately to a, as Seyhan terms it, “paranational” state, where she writes “estranged from both

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

47

[her] home and [her] host culture.”8 Violence is perpetrated by human ignorance (“holzkopfe” [“blockheads”]) and is beyond the comprehension of one “menschens kind” (“humanity’s child”). In writing against the dominant national “discourse of sacrifice for freedom and sovereignty as the highest national ideal” (Jambresic Kirin 66), Rajcic’s poetry emerges “as its effect […], its errat[um], its counternarrative” (Said, qtd. in Ferguson 11). If, as Said writes, “we appear as dislocations” when we “read ourselves against another people’s pattern” (qtd. in Ferguson 11), how more so alienating when the pattern is inscribed with one’s own national narrative. Rajcic defies the premise of living and writing “between two worlds.” This popular conceit for migrant writing presumes, as Leslie Adelson tells us, “a delimited space where two otherwise mutually exclusive worlds intersect” to be “originary, essentially intact worlds” (Adelson 3–4). Rajcic’s originary world is neither intact – indeed, it is itself in the early 1990s socially and politically fragmented – nor is the violence that defines it alien to the world she inhabits as a so-called foreigner. In the poem “Suisse like home,” Rajcic connects the civilized, tidy world of Switzerland with her homeland of Croatia, noting that domestic violence in Switzerland replicates the violence of war and domestic violence in Croatia: Suisse home Im haus gegenüber meinen dunkelen fenster ein mann hat bevor er nerven verloren hat frau blau geschlagen polizisten brachten mann brachten frau mit dem auto fort. spaeter war es ruhig

Suisse home in house across from my dark windows a man beat before he lost nerve his wife blue police took man took wife in car away. later it was quiet

es geht mir licht auf wie zu hause. (Pb 45)

inside me light goes on like home.

8 In agreement with Arjun Appadurai’s usage of the term, Seyhan defines transnational literature “as a genre of writing that operates outside the national canon, addresses issues facing deterritorialized cultures, and speaks for those in what [she calls] ‘paranational’ communities and alliances. These are communities that exist within national borders or alongside the citizens of the host country but remain culturally or linguistically distanced from them and, in some instances, are estranged from both the home and the host culture” (10).

48

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

“Suisse home” demarcates the non-interlocking, insular spaces of foreigner and native: separate walls for separate homes positioned “across” (“gegenüber”) from each other – the distance exacerbated by the juxtaposition of “dark” and “light,” and implicit loudness and silence. The poetic observer is likewise isolated not only through her proximity to the physical aggression, but also in her realization of sameness despite difference: she and her unseen neighbors connect through the violence witnessed by the poetic voice in other walls, in other streets, in another country. Ironically, “the interdependency of […] cultural experiences both at the local and the global level” (Seyhan 9), trademark of deterritorialized and globalized literatures, reveals a painful commonality between the author’s home and host countries. When it comes to violence and oppression, Rajcic’s “two worlds” come together so completely that the writer finds herself squeezed out of both. She is unable to identify with either since neither provides a safe haven. What manifests itself palpably in the Balkans in civil unrest is mirrored less visibly in the supposed “peace” of Western Europe in the breakdown of the human spirit: “total collapse in east / individual collapse in West / bit by oh / civilization consumes / words / where humankind remains / only devil knows” (“zusammenbruch in osten / einzelbruch in Westen / nach und ach // zivilisation verbraucht / Worter / wo mensch bleibt / fragt sich teufel,” Pb 49). Disorientation and dehumanization characterize the state of the world. While the dissolution of the former Eastern block countries created an observable catalyst for the degeneration of intact societies, the anonymity of the politically stabile West just as deftly, though certainly more subtly, facilitates destruction – here not of civil unity, but rather of individuals, lost to social indifference. In either case, common space is broken space; brokenness consumes language; the human being is diminished. The self, particularly the gendered self, finds no refuge. The search and longing for security mark the instable topography of the time, as Alberto Melucci observes, and are “an increasingly critical undertaking” in a day where “the individual must build and continuously rebuild her/his ‘home’ in the face of the surging flux of events and relation” (2). Rajcic’s lines reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and belonging and a displacement that is not only physical, but also deeply emotional. Creating “home” becomes a fruitless undertaking when the physical walls that house the refugee from war also house in peace oppressive power structures socially ingrained in gendered relationships. The political markings of a deterroritorialized minority literature, note Deleuze and Guattari, reveal “junctures and discord in a lack of common social space” for the exiled individual (59) – certainly evidenced in Rajcic’s writing. But even more so, her poetry highlights the precariousness of the self, in particular the gendered self, in all space, thus removing self from a secure placement in any national, cultural, or social context.

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

49

Gendered and national spaces Rajcic’s poetry cries out for humanity beyond specific national values; yet it is very much gendered in its representation of the social spaces and roles that men and women occupy.9 It mirrors the spaces deemed “feminine” and “masculine” in patriarchal discourses – spaces that recognizably reflect “the power relations of gendered identity” (Blunt and Rose 3) familiar to Rajcic from the former Yugoslav federation and from Switzerland. “Feminine” and “masculine” spaces appear in one sense polarized: women occupy the home and sustain family continuity; men perpetuate and sustain nationalist conflict, either as activists or pawns. In “Der krieg ist zu ende” (“The war is over”), women wait passively as guardians of the home front, the embodiment of a love and nurturing that lose the object of their desire: Die Mutter wacht in der nacht auf Stille erschreckt. […] die Frauen haben auf niemandem zu warten. […] Die tochter umwickelt ein stein falls es traurig wird zeihnet sie ihm eine träne (Pb 11)

Mother awakens in the night Silence frightens. […] the women have no one to wait for. The daughter swaddles a stone in case it gets sad she draws it a tear

Men, as another poem claims, “pass the stars / in competition” (“über holl[en] die sternen / in wettkampf,” Pb 55). They are either born to battle or forced into the role through nationalist patterns of thinking passed down from one generation of men to the other: “The father sells stories / from yesterday and today / victory-us. // […] The son plays hands up” (“Der Vater verkauft geschichten / von gestern und heute / sigesreich. // […] Der Sohn spielt Hände hoch,” Pb 11). The roles of war are perpetuated through the generations in a continuum from the Second World War to the 1990s, learned in childhood, passed on through the generations, and homologous to the socially constructed roles accorded men and women in her Balkan homeland. Through fathers, Rajcic maintains, the glory moments of battle and the title of victor are sustained and publically proclaimed as memory politics allow.10 The trauma of war is shared conspirato-

9 Gendered spaces are understood “less as a geography imposed by patriarchal structures, and more as a social process of symbolic encoding and decoding that produces ‘a series of homologies between the spatial, symbolic, and social orders’” (Blunt and Rose 3; they quote Henriette Moore, Space Text Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1988], 1). 10 “Dieser zweite Weltkrieg, der wirkt immer, durch die Väter, auch weiter an den Enkeln. Wer erlaubt Erinnerung, das ist offensichtlich die Politik. Deine private Erinnerung taugt gar nichts,

50

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

rially by grandparents and grandchildren because the grandparents, more specifically, the grandfathers, have silenced and then rewritten their histories to elide guilt, responsibility, and losing. As a result, the nationalist myths of war heroism resurface to mark yet another generation with their consequences. Rajcic criticizes nationalist aggression she sees endured and nurtured through family myth and patriarchal order. It would be preliminary to sense, however, a naïveté that ignores women’s complicity in war making.11 Cooper, Munich, and Squier have noted that “the basic polarity of man as fighter and woman as peacemaker miscarries” in the present age (xv). The poet-philosopher-humanitarian sees herself the nuances of the war machine and said machine sustained and/or tolerated through the social fiber. While the Balkan wars “made visible the impact of war on women and children through rape, bombings, and expulsion and exposed their vulnerability to enemy factions as representations of the nation” (Hawkesworth 312), women in Rajcic’s poetry must still question their guilt for atrocities committed by brothers and fathers.12 The human sameness between enemies makes both sides culpable in a shared crime: the destruction of humankind. In viewing the charred and shattered remnants of one lost community comes the realization that the ordinary lives of one side differ little from those of the other: sah schwartz mit grau feindliche hauser gerüch des feuers glaubte zu wissen

saw black with gray enemy housez smell of fire thought I knew

wenn sie nicht in dem Moment politisch flexibel ist. Das ist in Kroatien genauso jetzt. Mein Schwiegervater, der war bei beiden Armeen. Der hatte uns 40 Jahre klar gemacht, der war nur Sieger, also Partisan. Kaum kam die kroatische Regierung, er war Nazi. Er war beides. Aber wann sagt man was? Eigentlich ist das schizophren. Was macht man seinen Kindern an damit?” (Interview 2006). (“Through our fathers this Second World War continues have its effect, even on the grandchildren. It’s apparently politics that allows memory. Your own memory isn’t worth anything if it isn’t politically flexible. That’s the way it is now in Croatia. My father-in-law was in both armies. He told us 40 years long that he was a victor, meaning a partisan. The Croatian government was hardly in power when he became a Nazi. He was both. But when do you say which? It’s really schizophrenic. What damage do you do to your children by doing that?”) 11 For more on polarized gender systems, see Cooper, et al. viii–xx. 12 It is important to note here that women did play and continue to play an important role in peace and recovery efforts in the Balkan area. “The peace groups that sprang up throughout the territories of Croatia, Bosnia, and what is now the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were run for the most part by women, as were many of the practical voluntary groups providing help for victims of the war and refugees, as they continue to do today” (Hawkesworth 312).

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

das jahre in diesem haus wie jahre meinem haus waren das gleiche wörter verloren ihre kinder suchen und erbarmen (Pb 17)

51

in that years in this house were like years in my house that same lost words sought their children with pity

The “years in one home,” that of the enemy, surely paralleled in their routines and actions – even in the words that framed them – those in the poetic observer’s. The brokenness of language (“gleiche wörter verloren” [“same words lost”]), here exiled through war, emerges once again to express the brokenness of the human condition. Implicitly the double-edged question arises as to which guilt the enemy carries that it should endure such savagery and which innocence marks the observer that she should survive to survey it. In the end, “humanity’s child” realizes the sameness of wartime suffering on both sides and laments: “my fingers carried guilt of my brother” (“meine finger trugen schuld meines bruders,” Pb 17). The hands that curiously and forbiddenly pick up a “verlorene tasse an boden” (“lost cup on floor”) become complicit in the crime, and all the more so because the battle waged is on their “behalf.” Rajcic rallies against gender stereotypes that regulate feeling and action and stifle humankind’s ability to pursue peaceful, liberated modes of behavior. While the writer attacks the patriarchal order feeding nationalist aggression in the Balkans, she simultaneously recognizes its debilitating effects on both genders. Women and men both are injured through the gender roles assigned to them and from which they cannot escape in their social order. Her themes of loss and mourning give voice primarily to women and children, yet simultaneously recognize the emotional devastation war wreaks on the men who wage it. Men appear alone, separated from family activity through an alienation inflicted by the brutality of battle. As one poem describes a post-bellum state of emotional shell shock: “Brother develops / pictures in the dark./Brother teaches dog that crossed sides / to lose fear” (“Der bruder entwickelt / Bilder in der dunkelheit./ Der Bruder lernt übergelaufenem hund / Angst zu verlieren,” Pb11). The assumption that feelings are (negatively) feminine is attacked for its pathological effect on (men’s) emotional development. The language of the heart, she criticizes, is dispelled as the language of feeling, “blamed on women and therapied away as a disturbing factor” (“oder den Frauen angelastet und als Störfaktor wegtherapiert,” “Rede”). In spite and opposition she refuses to allow her own ideas and insights to be culturally written off in the negative as “feminine”: “women like me deny / all participation / in womenlike heartaches” (“Frauen wie ich / Verneinen jegliche beteilung / Am frauenähnlichen herzschmerz,” BvG 33). The ironic pronouncement acknowledges her role on the outside (“women like me”)

52

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

as an uncomfortable noisemaker whose social criticism respects no borders or boundaries.13

Countering the center in no-where space In her introduction to Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, Deirdre Lashgari writes of women’s response to violence that those in the margin create new perspectives on violence by “making the margin the new center of their own subjectivity.” By shifting their vantage point, they facilitate new insights and reveal forms of violence that had previously been masked. When the gaze is redefined, notes Lashgari, it changes what it sees; it deconstructs the master narrative (2–3). Rajcic’s portrayal of gendered spaces acknowledges the role space plays in both “masculinist power” and “feminist resistance” (Blunt and Rose 1). Women are charged to see things “differently” so that they can offer an oppositional discourse: “new thinking needs Woman / as we know / Men Think too much” (“neues denken braucht Frau / wie bekannt Menner Denken zu viel,” Pb 23). The poet thus rallies against “die eiserne Sprache der Macht” (“the iron language of power”) and “Tod als letztes Mittel des Kampfes / Als heilbrigend [sic] zu zelebrieren” (“celebrating death / as the last means of battle as sanctifying”) (“Rechte”). Women can resist the essentialist war myth of glory, heroism and patriotic duty by politicizing the private space they do occupy: the home, the family, and their bodies. Within the “feminine” space of family and children, the mother can oppose the war machine with her own private power: “bleib ungeboren mein sohn” (“remain unborn my son”) (Pb 7). Though speaking for the marginalized – mothers, daughters, children, the wounded – Rajcic’s poems simultaneously entreat the center to redirect its gaze and join the space of refusal. “Schrei / nein, danke” (“Scream / no, thank you”), insists the poem “Bosnien ‘92, ‘93,” which reframes the narrative of national defense and defense of family into a narrative of inescapable death: vatermutterschwesster land verteidigung vatermutterschwesster auf beerdigung ruffen Dein name einziger sohn hat deine geburts uhrkunde für dein Land

fathermothersisster country defense fathermothersisster at funeral call Your name only son your birth certificate for your country

13 “If the women’s writer’s root culture also has strong injunctions again “making noise,” notes Lashgari, “the temptation to self-silencing increases, as does the risk and necessity for breaking through” (2).

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

Todesanzeige bedeutet schrei nein, danke (Pb 7)

53

meant Announcement of Death cry no, thank you

Writing becomes a battle to counter the social norms and the machismo that end in oppression and violence. In doing so, Rajcic writes herself into the margins of her own cultural community. This position of estrangement allows, as Deleuze and Guattari note, “all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (60). The conscious sense of otherness becomes an otherness to selfsuppression, to violence, to senseless destruction, and to gender oppression. Yet the homelessness and alienation that result put her in no world, alone with her words. In “Hunderste gedicht ohne trenen” (“Hundreth poem without tears [or separation]”), the lyrical voice sees its isolation precisely from its vantage point outside the center: “even now I am not really from here / from here I see clearly / that I come from somewheres” (“noch immer bin ich nicht richtig von hier / von hier richtig sehe ich / das ich von irgends komme,” Pb 41). The lack of placement refers not only to the present, but also to the past. The “irgends” from where she comes – a created word implying “somewhere,” yet mimicking the word “nirgends,” meaning “nowhere” – takes on an indefiniteness that makes it impossible to trace her origin geographically. Rajcic thus comes from no-where in particular; she belongs no-where. In other words, to return to Lashgari, Rajcic so redefines the gaze, it is not even the margin, but rather her own subjectivity that becomes the center. The master narrative is certainly deconstructed, but so is the “transnational” narrative, and, indeed so is the margin itself. Rajcic detaches herself from the narrative so completely that she hovers above it. In doing so, she distances herself metaphysically from the violent patterns she reveals in an ultimate act of self-preservation. While she doubts that her writing can save either herself or others (“im schreiben ist auch kein versteck” (“neither in writing is there any refuge”) (Pb 51)), it remains an attempt to deconstruct hegemonic gendered social structures and to regain life and substance lost to them. Its title alone, “Poem für ein anderes Leben” (“Poem for another life”) makes clear that the space of peace exists not in this life, but in some other. Poetry offers no salvation to a world desperate for change. But the lack of desire for Poesie, with its ability to express pain and possibility, is itself imprisoning: “and whoever isn’t thirsty for poetry / for him there is no point in freedom / for-what, why” (“und wer nicht nach poesie durstig ist dem / hilft auch keine freiheit wofür, wozu,” Pb 51). Poetry offers release and escape; indeed, it creates a form of freedom. It provides sustenance in war; without it, even peace is hollow, for the soul cannot be nurtured.

54

Laurel Cohen-Pfister

In the “invisibility of the center,” Ferguson observes, lies its power to prescribe and maintain the dominant discourse that tacitly dictates all-encompassing norms (11). Certainly for writers in the margin like Dragica Rajcic, countering the center means laying bare such assumptions with their own language on nonconformity. However, in the invisibility of the margin – that space of protest outside the mainstream – the voice can question how loud it is and whether it is even heard. One senses in Rajcic’s poetry the idealist’s hope that humanity can indeed conquer its own tendency toward destruction and receive “Lebendigkeit Ihre zurück” (“Getting Back Her Living”).14 Yet the fatalism of the disillusioned and disappointed hovers nearby, and threatens itself to vanquish: “oh, god, don’t let me fall / my fatalism breaks my neck” (“ach, gott lass mich nicht fallen / mein fatalismus bricht mir genick,” Pb 51).

Conclusion One must in the end question which margin houses this writer. Which analytical paradigm suffices to encompass her oppositional aesthetics? As a women who fights against the patriarchal dimension of war and violence, as a foreigner who fights for the rights of those without representation, or as a human being who recoils at the injustice and perpetuation of oppression, Dragica Rajcic finds herself not in any one margin, but in many. Her home is everywhere and ultimately nowhere. This self-proclaimed “weltmensch” (“person of the world”) (Pb 31) is paradoxically “Entweltet” (“de-worlded”) and “Welt” (“world”), she notes sadly, “ist nur in Traum schön” (“is only beautiful in dream”) (HeG 75).15 For Rajcic, that “alternative space,” or “third geography” – “the space of memory, of language, of translation, […] a terrain (of) writing” beyond the borders of homeland and host country (Seyhan 15) – is, if anything, the “space of refusal” (hooks

14 “In meinem Fatalismus,” she says, “ist noch eine sehr kindliche Naïveté; das ist immer der, wer fragt, das kann nicht so sein. Ich habe immer das Gefühl, dass mir das leben noch durchgeht, und dass ich immer noch glaube, so nicht” (Interview 2006). (“My fatalism possesses a very childlike naïvité; it’s always that person who is questioning, it can’t be like this. I always have the feeling that life keeps going through me that I still think, not like this.”) 15 “Die Welt und Ich oder wie man mich Entweltet // Sie schickten mich in der Welt / und Ich wollte / etwas anderes in anderem Welt. / so ging mein Welt kaputt / zwischen Baumen in / weiten Welt / Stumm / werde Ich varückt / varükt war ich Stumm / und wer nich weiss / Welt ist nur / in Traum schön” (HeG 75). (“The world and me or how I was de-worlded // They sent me out into the world // and I wanted / something else in another world./And so my world became brocken / between treez in / wide world / mute / i go crazee / crazee I was mute / and if you don’t know / world is only beautiful in dream.”)

Dragica Rajcic: War, Space, and No-Place

55

341) created by language. There, in “a counter language” (hooks 342), in a “voice of resistance” (hooks 342), she lives and writes “in her own German out of spite and curiosity, out of desperation” (“in eigenen Deutsch aus Trotz und Neugier, aus Verzweivlung,” Kummer 162). In a language uniquely and deliberately her own, the poet, philosopher, and idealist, – in sum, “humanity’s child” – resists classification, and thus underscores the multiplicity of meaning in her oppositional aesthetics.

Silja Maehl

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins” The short stories of Tawada’s collection Wo Europa anfängt [Where Europe Begins] discussed by Silja Maehl well capture the themes of mobility, border crossings, nature, city-spaces, and language as presented in our introduction “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn.” In her essay, Maehl discusses the role of migration, travel, and geographical relations in what she refers to as Tawada’s “poetics of porosity.” Travel for Tawada in the text “Where Europe Begins” is interpreted as embarking on the journey from reading towards writing (Hansjörg Bay), much like Tawada’s constant interlocutor Roland Barthes demonstrates with his concept of “writerly texts” in the essay “S/Z.” Living in Berlin and writing in German and Japanese, Tawada develops a poetics of migration informed by non-geographical images such as metamorphoses, animal transformation or fluidity, continuously blurring the boundaries of the how, why, and where of language production. Where the city as trope does emerge, it becomes a realm where “magic” shapes the experience of space into a poetic text (Where Europe Begins 19). Maehl explains Tawada’s ability to replace a coherent self-image with the fluid conception of a transnational identity. Tawada, as Maehl points out, does not take on problems of assimilation to a foreign culture. Instead, her German prose is based on a fictional Japanese view of the strange German language, a point often lost on monolingual speakers, and playfully represents semiotic and cultural differences. (Beth Muellner) Over the last 20 years, debates about migration and multilingualism have contributed to a new aesthetic in which experiences of foreignness do not necessarily imply loss of identity, but rather foster experimental literary production. At the same time, and in the process of (re)describing the position of the so-called literature of migration, the notion that multilingual writers are situated “between two worlds” has been increasingly questioned, for it often rests upon territorial perceptions and thus raises the exact binaries it tries to overcome.1 Dissolving such binaries is an ongoing literary and literal endeavor for Yoko Tawada, who in “Wo Europa anfängt” [“Where Europe Begins”], an early text first written and published in German in 1991 and then translated into English for an eponymous

1 See, for instance, Leslie Adelson’s influential manifesto “Against Between” and Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue,

58

Silja Maehl

collection in 2002, imagines national boundaries as floating and invokes a fluid, transnational identity.2 Presenting overlapping and simultaneous cultural, linguistic, and narrative spaces, Tawada develops her poetics of porosity beyond a strictly geographical imagery.3 In contemporary German literature, Tawada, who publishes successfully in both Germany and Japan after learning German in her early twenties, is perhaps the sole author to approach questions of migration and travel through such disparate linguistic sign systems as Japanese and the Roman alphabet. In fact, she writes about the contemporary condition of living in more than one language, with identities in more than one cultural tradition, and while she depicts a world in which travel has become an essential part of people’s lives, it is particularly travel through language that lies at the heart of her work. Theories of space have been of interest long before the advent of a transnational literature; however, this literature, which operates outside a national canon, invokes a range of particularly relevant geographical and cultural spaces. Arising from experiences of migration, it turns borderland territories into the actual sites of cultural and political contact and contestation. Mobility, one of the key components of transnational literature, appears in Tawada’s work in such divers forms as tourism or colonial expansion,4 which is why the current parameters of Migrationsliteratur [migrant literature] fail to accommodate her writing. This is in keeping with the fact that her own life in Germany cannot be associated with economic migration or accounted for by established literary models such as diaspora or exile.5 Engaging postmodern and postcolonial discourses about language and culture as well as personal and national identity, her work makes an interesting case for connecting German Studies to theoretical work outside of its traditional disciplinary borders.

2 For the purpose of this article, I will quote from the English. In general, Tawada’s reception in the U.S. is continuously growing as can be seen from the number of translations so far: The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1998), Where Europe Begins (2002), Facing the Bridge (2007), and The Naked Eye (2009). 3 With the phrase “poetics of porosity,” I take up a, perhaps involuntary, tradition in scholarship on Tawada of describing her work as “poetics of interculturality” (Holdenried), “poetics of transformation” (Ivanovic), or “poetics of water” (Bay). 4 The latter becomes especially apparent in Überseezungen [Foreign Tongues] and The Naked Eye. 5 If labeling Tawada is at all necessary, a description such as “polyglot nomadic intellectual” strikes me as more apt, considering Rosi Braidotti’s definition: “The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” (Nomadic Subjects 22). Yet, Tawada’s texts rely heavily on the friction of nationalisms and flourish where linguistic boundaries remain intact. Nomadism in Braidotti’s sense could therefore only take place among national spaces, and like the label “migrant” can, on the whole, do little justice to the author’s complex and multi-layered work.

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

59

Having come from Tokyo to Hamburg in 1982, Tawada continuously travels the world giving lectures and workshops as well as attending international conferences. In view of this constant change of scenery, it is not surprising that Tawada remains comparatively untroubled by problems of cultural assimilation. Instead, her German prose works, such as Wo Europa anfängt [Where Europe Begins] (1991), Talisman (1996) and Überseezungen [Foreign Tongues] (2002), are based on a playful representation of semiotic and cultural differences. As Susan C. Anderson contends, the author utilizes “fictional Japanese narrators to filter the German cultural manifestations they encounter through a pseudo-Japanese perspective” (“Surface Translations,” 50). “Pseudo-Japanese perspective” in this case does not hint at a hidden authentic perspective but rather refers to Tawada’s exercised eye for cultural and semiotic differences and her experiments with managing these differences. Her writing effectively challenges the nationalistic image of homogenous cultures propagated by German Romantics such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who understand the idea of nation as inextricably linked to the idea of a common national language.6 Tawada’s work exemplifies how multilingual writing is a means of moving beyond the mother tongue(s), and thus beyond the resilient “monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz, Mother Tongue, 2). Tawada counteracts this paradigm by focusing on water as a medium that both separates and connects across discrete linguistic shores. In myths, legends, and fairy tales from all over the world, water is ambiguously conceived: it carries a seductive and feminine connotation (through the motif of sirens, for instance) alongside male attributes of adventure and conquest; it brings forth fertility and destruction, life and death. Water also poses a very tangible threat in the case of Japan. The surrounding waters of the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sea of Okhotsk shape its national identity, provide its sustenance, and sustain its industry, but they have also become associated (in its artistic and literary tradition) with tsunamis and pollution – most recently through the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, on which Tawada has commented repeatedly. Her Hamburg poetry lectures, published in Yoko Tawada. Fremde Wasser [Yoko Tawada. Strange water] (2012), are dedicated to the motif of water and to Fukushima. With its references to some European conquerors, travelers and scientists sent to Japan by the Dutch East India Company, these lectures describe the plurality of historical and political processes, which continue to generate and define oceans as social spaces. 6 Yasemin Yildiz gives detailed account of the role late-eighteenth-century German thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher have played in establishing a monolingual paradigm with its emphasis on a Muttersprache, a primordial mother tongue, as well as of the significance it had, and still has, for the modern nation-state.

60

Silja Maehl

“Where Europe Begins” foregrounds the fluid nature of both identity and space. The often-quoted first sentence of “The Bath,” published in the same collection, describes the general mutability and permeability of the human skin – “Eighty percent of the human body is made of water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees a different face in the mirror each morning” (3) – as well as that of the earth: “Seven-tenths of the globe is covered with water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees different patterns on its surface every day” (49). Moreover, the Western concept of identity is strange to the Japanese culture whose language has no independent personal pronoun equivalent to the gender-neutral “I,” and in which the Buddhist notion of rebirth and metempsychosis are part of a common conception of metamorphosis.7 The recurrent theme of Tawada’s work as a whole is a continuous and open-ended transgression through which the foreign becomes a part of the proper, thereby constantly reshaping the very nature of both. Within her poetics of porosity, the motif of foreign water embodies this permeability. In “Where Europe Begins,” the unnamed female narrator travels first by ship and then with the Trans-Siberian Railway from Japan to Moscow. The text begins as follows: “For my grandmother, to travel was to drink foreign water. Different places, different water. There was no need to be afraid of foreign landscapes, but foreign water could be dangerous” (121). The grandmother then tells the local tale of a girl, whose last hope for her incurably sick mother is a serpent, who advises her to see the Fire Bird because of his healing powers. Under no circumstances, however, should she drink water in the western city where the Fire Bird lives. When they arrive in the city, the girl is so thirsty that she forgets the serpent’s warning, drinks from a pond and ages rapidly while her mother vanishes in the flaming air. The motif of arrival in a strange city and the concomitant image of a body infused and permeated by foreign water is repeated at the end of “Where Europe Begins,” when it is the narrator who, upon finally reaching Moscow, is unbearably thirsty and drinks from a pond in the middle of the train station. After retelling the grandmother’s story, the narrator reflects on the notion of foreign water as a symbol for an amorphous, dynamic spatiality as well as for constant transformation. Traveling first by ship and then by train to Russia, she compares the globe to a sphere of water on which the continents are floating, prompting her to question a distinct border between “foreign” and “native.”

7 See John Kim for the role and use of the first personal pronoun in Tawada’s work. In her Tübingen poetry lectures, which center on the theme of metamorphosis, Tawada points out how Buddhist deities such as Senju Kannon are often depicted with multiple faces and arms attesting to their great ability to transform, whereas too much deviation from the proper Gestalt is conceived as a loss of identity in the modern Western world (Verwandlungen [Transformations] 52–60).

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

61

When I was a little girl, I never believed there was such a thing as foreign water, for I had always thought of the globe as a sphere of water with all sorts of small and large islands swimming on it. Water had to be the same everywhere. Sometimes in sleep I heard the murmur of the water that flowed beneath the main island of Japan. The border surrounding the island was also made of water that ceaselessly beat against the shore in waves. How can one say where the place of foreign water begins when the border itself is water? (123)

Especially from the standpoint of someone living on the Japanese archipelago, the idea of all continents as islands is hardly far-fetched. More importantly, this passage illustrates the absurd, and often violent, mechanism of drawing and redrawing borders, which becomes especially apparent if water, an epitome of motion and mutability, functions as such a line of demarcation. Seemingly incongruous images of water as a great divide and of water as a wide border that is virtually all-encompassing (like the ocean’s seeming endlessness) are conjoined in the narrator’s impressions of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, which also houses ocean fish such as the “omul” she eats in the restaurant car: But how could there possibly be a sea here, in the middle of the continent? Or is the Baikal a hole in the continent that goes all the way through? That would mean my childish notion about the globe being a sphere of water was right after all. The water of the Baikal, then, would be the surface of the water-sphere. A fish could reach the far side of the sphere by swimming through the water. (135)

The homophone of “hole” is “whole” as Hansjörg Bay points out (“Katze im Meer” 246) [Cat in the Sea], a wordplay that does not exist in the same way in German and through which the hole in the continent simultaneously implies the whole sphere of water. If one considers, however, that the German word for “hole” (“Loch”) has a homograph in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish referring to a lake or sea inlet (such as Loch Ness), the narrator’s thoughts on the globe’s porosity seem no longer “childish.” Traveling in “Where Europe Begins” does not merely take place on a physical level but includes a dislocation of meaning, in this case through a difference between spelling and pronunciation. The motif of the hole as well as the related notion of multilingualism and, by extension, translation as an opening or passage of meaning from one language to the other remain vital also for many of Tawada’s later works.8

8 Some examples are Facing the Bridge (“Saint George and the Translator”), Talisman (“Im Bauch des Gotthards,” [The Gotthard Railway] “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Celan liest Japanisch” [The Gate of the Translator or Celan reads Japanese]), and Überseezungen (“Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen,” [Words that sleep in the Ashes] “Die Ohrenzeugin” [The earwitness]). See also Tawada’s by now almost proverbial statement of the holes within and between language(s): “Because I am

62

Silja Maehl

In much the same manner as the vastness of the Pacific, Siberia is also perceived as “such a wide border!” (129). Instead of functioning merely as metaphorical thresholds, the Pacific and Siberia are charged with their particular historical subtexts: both regions were subjected to war and colonial expansion. The Trans-Siberian Railway is a remnant of the latter’s past. Christina Kraenzle, who provides a detailed account of the interconnections between space, mobility, and subjectivity in Tawada’s German texts, stresses that “Where Europe Begins” not only explores the promises, but also the problems inherent in crossing borders: “travel is not simply transgressive, but can also be conservative, linked to wealth, power and imperial interests” (Mobility 76), a reading that Tawada’s Hamburg lectures attest to. This is noted by the narrator when she comments how, instead of passing by some of the indigenous peoples she was told about, the train takes her through homogenous looking areas populated solely by Russians. She hence considers the Trans-Siberian Railway “a path of conquered territory, a narrow extension of Europe” (132). It is not a coincidence that the only other foreigner on the train is French: the French Invasion of Russia in 1812, Napoleon’s march on Moscow, as well as the prevalence of the French tongue in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia serve as a backdrop here. These kinds of subtexts point to the various political fantasies that have been projected onto Russia in particular and landscape in general.9 As delineators of difference and power, borders are another recurrent theme of “Where Europe Begins”; yet they are constantly on the move as Claudia Breger, among others, emphasizes (194). With her characteristically child-like manner of seeing and describing, the narrator undermines the Western cartographic system. Incited by a child’s question as to the exact location of Tokyo, she contemplates: “Hadn’t I also asked questions like that when I was a child? – Where is Peking? – In the West. – And what is in the East, on the other side of the sea? – America” (139). Instead of being absolute terms that are socially and politically charged, “East” and “West” are thus enacted as the geographical set of relations that they are, merely dependent on the particular location and perspective. Already the title “Where Europe Begins” is playfully misleading because Europe (or “Asia” for that matter) cannot be easily localized, neither geographically, nor politically, nor culturally, as the following quote from the narrator’s letter to her parents illustrates:

writing in two languages, I constantly discover black holes in the web of words. Literature emerges out of these speechless holes.” (Qtd. in Kloepfer and Matsunaga, “Yoko Tawada,” 2). 9 In The Naked Eye, Tawada more explicitly raises issues of France’s colonial past in French Indochina.

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

63

Europe begins not in Moscow but somewhere before. I looked out the window and saw a sign as tall as a man with two arrows painted on it, beneath which the words “Europe” and “Asia” were written. The sign stood in the middle of a field like a solitary customs agent. “We’re in Europe already!” I shouted to Masha, who was drinking tea in our compartment. “Yes, everything’s Europe behind the Ural Mountains,” she replied, unmoved, as though this had no importance, and went on drinking her tea. I went over to a Frenchman, the only foreigner in the car besides me, and told him that Europe didn’t just begin in Moscow. He gave a short laugh and said that Moscow was not Europe. (141)

For someone coming from Japan, Moscow might indeed represent Europe whereas the Frenchman defines Europe strictly as Western Europe. Despite this comically staged attempt of signposting – the Ural Mountains are in fact considered the demarcation line – the border between Europe and Asia (itself a European concept) remains a matter of perspective and is subjected to constant reevaluation. Suddenly, the narrator’s travels seem more like an open-ended process than a journey with a distinct origin and destination. In the course of the narration it also becomes clear that the protagonist, whose stated destination is Moscow, does not really aim to arrive there but rather wants to live the experience of passing through Siberia. Instead of traversing the land in order to arrive at a goal, “the important thing for me is traveling through Siberia” (125). On first glance, Siberia and Moscow are positioned as opposites. Yet, it turns out that both are subjected to a similar process of multiple encoding; they are, albeit differently connotated, imagined spaces. Siberia is depicted as a transitional space, whose vastness needs to be experienced through traversal, much like the process of reading extends itself in time. Consequently, the woods of Siberia, with their countless birches drifting by the train window, are implicitly attributed to the mother, who is an avid reader dreaming of an infinite novel stored in a library in Moscow and who is described as being surrounded by a forest of books.10 Whereas Moscow is ascribed to the father’s publishing company, and thus linked to literary production and masculinity, Siberia, associated with the mother’s reading, is given a feminine pronoun by the narrator: “SHE is Siberia.” Given the absence of gender in the Japanese language, however, the

10 The metonymic link between books and trees is also established in a passage, in which the narrator as a child lies in her hammock at night and perceives the stacks of books lined up against the room’s walls as turning into a thick forest (Where Europe Begins 130). In her conversation with Bettina Brandt, Yoko Tawada highlights the multiple meanings inherent in the first ideogram (and syllable) of her name (Yo), which can either refer to “ocean” or to “leaves,” both in the sense of the pages of a manuscript as well as in the sense of leaves of a tree (“Scattered Leaves” 13). In Paper Machine, Jacques Derrida connects trees and books by considering the latter’s etymology, the Greek biblion, as the “internal bark of papyrus and thus of paper” (6).

64

Silja Maehl

mother questions Siberia’s femininity and interprets her daughter’s choice of words as a sign of her incipient immersion into the Roman alphabet: “Why is Siberia a she? You’re just like your father, the two of you only have one thing in your heads: going to Moscow.” “Why don’t you go to Moscow?” “Because then you wouldn’t get there. But if I stay here, you can reach your destination.” “Then I won’t go, I’ll stay here.” “It’s too late. You’re already on your way.” (140)

Another of Siberia’s various connotations is that of “maturity and self-development” (Kraenzle, Mobility, 97). The narrator can only grow up if the mother remains at home, with home being the (maternal) space of childhood. Comparable to such literary forms as travelogue, Bildungsroman, or autobiography, subject formation and travel coalesce in “Where Europe Begins,” a combination that the author, however, develops beyond the bounds of genre.11 Similar to Siberia, Moscow is an overdetermined place, a “mental landscape,” as Christina Kraenzle aptly puts it (Mobility 99).12 The city is not only linked to the father but also to the mother’s dream of the infinite novel and Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, which the narrator’s parents once attended in a theater in Tokyo: “When Irina, one of the three sisters, spoke the famous words: ‘To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow […],’ her voice pierced my parent’s ears so deeply that these very same words began to leap out of their own mouths as well. The three sisters never got to Moscow, either” (132). In her dissertation Spielzeug und Sprachmagie [Toys and language magic], Tawada describes Kafka’s Prague in a manner that also applies to Russia’s capital in “Where Europe Begins”: “Literature turns a city into a poetic text, into a privileged place for the return of magic” (19). The suggestion that Moscow is in fact a literary topos becomes clear at the end of the text when the narrator, upon arriving in Moscow, actually sees Tokyo – the place where she attended the performance of Three Sisters. Due to its theatrical and mythologized nature, Moscow represents the desire for an arrival instead of an actual destination.

11 In one chapter of her dissertation Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Eine ethnologische Poetologie [Toys and language magic in European literature. An ethnologic poetics], Tawada discusses Bruce Chatwin, whose work is representative of the blurry boundaries between travelogue, novel, and short story and whose Anatomy of Restlessness reverberates in Tawada’s text. 12 Walter Benjamin’s poetic description of Moscow in “Städtebilder” [“City images”] might also have had an influence on Where Europe Begins, as Claudia Breger points out (“Mimikry,” 192).

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

65

In his insightful study on “Where Europe Begins,” Hansjörg Bay considers the narrator’s trip via Siberia to Moscow as a journey from reading towards writing (“Wo das Schreiben anfängt” 114). Although Bay concedes that there is no simple answer to the question where reading ends and writing begins, he nevertheless designates Siberia as a mere space for reading, not writing, thus developing an opposition between Siberia as a transitional space and Moscow as “a place of arrival” (112). Building on Bay’s analysis, I argue that, just as the initially developed binary opposition between Europe and Asia is dismantled in the course of the text, the distinction between the transition through Siberia (female) versus the arrival in Moscow (male) is also difficult to uphold. The narrator describes her mother as a good liar and therefore essentially a good storyteller – “for my mother was a good liar and told lies often and with pleasure” (137). On board the ship, the inherent link between lying and storytelling is established more explicitly when the narrator reflects on the jumble of life stories: “On board such a ship, everyone begins putting together a brief autobiography, as though he might otherwise forget who he is […]. On board such a ship, everyone begins to lie” (124–125). The entire farewell episode on the ship appears dreamlike, “suddenly” stirring up the oddest feelings in the narrator, and shortly after, she mentions how she was once praised for her school essay, a dream description, which she admits was not taken from an actual dream but entirely invented: “But then what dream is not invented?” (128). Such statements invite Tawada’s readers to conceive of her text as at least influenced, if not guided, by the principles of Freudian dream-work, whose processes of condensation and displacement, among other things, foreclose linearity. Thus, “Where Europe Begins” can indeed be considered a reflection on the author’s genesis as a writer and a journey from reading towards writing, yet one in which places function as mental landscapes and placeholders for different, albeit simultaneous states of being. Roland Barthes, who is a constant interlocutor for Tawada, does not consider reading and writing to be separate, something that is evident, for instance, from his discussion of writerly texts in S/Z – and neither does Tawada. In The Rustle of Language, Barthes distinguishes three types of pleasure of reading. Whereas the first type, a fetishist relation with the text through which the reader virtually loses herself in the text, could be attributed to the narrator’s mother, the second type is very much reminiscent of the narrator’s desire to travel through Siberia: “the reader is drawn onward through the book’s length […] the book is gradually abolished, and it is in this impatient, impassioned erosion that the delectation lies” (40). The third “adventure of reading,” as Barthes terms it, is that of writing. Here, reading is a “conductor of the Desire to write” and thus “a veritable production” (41). This scenario is paralleled in his famous essay “The Death of the Author,” in which, the reader is said to be “a site” and “the very space in which

66

Silja Maehl

are inscribed […] all the citations out of which a writing is made” (54). During the narrator’s traversal of Russia in “Where Europe Begins,” traveling, reading, and writing flow into each other: reading inspires travel, which in turn serves as an inspiration for writing – as well as for further reading. In her discussion of “Where Europe Begins,” which she relates to Arnold van Gennep’s work on rites of passage, Ruth Kersting associates the narrator’s journey with three concomitant phases: separation, transition, and reincorporation (107). Building on Barthes’s and Kersting’s tripartite structure as well as quoting the three sections of Eva Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language, a text that shares many observations on language and alienation with Tawada’s, I propose to use the term “exile” to refer to the journey on the ship and through Siberia, the term “the new world” for the episode in Moscow, and “paradise” for the passages on the narrator’s childhood in Tokyo. Rather than being consecutive, however, these three states are encapsulated within one another; in fact, their simultaneity is a creative prerequisite, which I subsequently intend to show. Upon leaving Japan, the narrator’s (self-imposed) exile from paradise, as it were, leads to a postlapsarian loss of speech, memory, and orientation, a state that Eva Hoffman in Lost in Translation describes as knowing that “there’s no returning to the point of origin, no regaining of childhood unity” (273). While on the ship, the narrator describes the red paper streamers as umbilical cords (“one last link between the passengers and their loved ones”), the green streamers change into serpents, and one of the white ones “became my memory” (123). Together, these colored paper snakes can, in many ways, be linked to the myth of Eden and the Fall: green and red could be the colors of Eden’s tree of knowledge and its fruits, whereas white is also the color of the snake in the grandmother’s tale with which Tawada’s story begins: “One day as the girl sat alone in the garden beneath the tree, a white serpent appeared” (121). Later on it is the narrator’s mother who “sat alone under a tree reading a novel” (137), in a way that is reminiscent of Eve, who succumbs to the serpent’s temptation to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.13 The ultimate link between the white paper snakes and the idea of knowledge, however, is established through the German word “weiß” which lies at the heart of the passage of the narrator’s departure from home: “I tossed one of the white [weißen] streamers into the air. It became my memory […]. The moment my paper snake disintegrated, my memory ceased to function. This is why I no longer remember [weiß] anything of this journey” (123–124). In German, “ich

13 The reading mother actually sits next to a Buddhist temple (137). The Judeo-Christian tradition is invoked as merely one template among others and only within a context of cultural and religious contact.

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

67

weiß” means both to know and to remember. In “Musik der Buchstaben” [Music of the letters], the associative link between knowing and white is explicit: “In the past, I always thought of the color ‘white’ [weiß] when I heard the German phrase ‘I know’ [Ich weiß]. ‘I know’ meant: ‘paperwhite’ [papierweiß]. If it knows something, the self turns white like an unwritten sheet of paper” (34). Analogous to dream formation, in which latent dream thoughts are translated into manifest dream content, the word “weiß” is transformed into the symbol of a white paper snake.14 Through its ripping, the narrator becomes detached from home and mother (tongue) and initiated into a new state of awareness and increased consciousness, in which she knows of the actual disparateness of words and things, of “words in their naked state” (Hoffman 107), and thus turns into an observer with double vision – with one prelapsarian and one postlapsarian eye, so to speak. The notion of split subjectivity becomes explicit in Transformations, when Tawada observes that someone speaking a foreign language “is an ornithologist and a bird at once” (22). The strangeness experienced and depicted in Tawada’s texts is therefore not necessarily that of a foreign culture, but is rather inherent in language itself, whose artificial, arbitrary nature monolingual speakers tend to forget. Similarly, Tawada exposes how “attempts by ethnographers, historians, and anthropologists to ‘understand,’ ‘describe,’ or otherwise appropriate cultures very different from their own” (Anderson 56) are mere attempts, nothing more. Given her double vision, speechlessness, and disintegrated memory, how does the narrator in “Where Europe Begins” actually describe her travels? The text is divided into 20 numbered chapters or rather literary sketches, some taken from a “travel report” written prior to the narrator’s trip to Moscow and others from a subsequently invented “diary.” I always wrote a travel narrative before I set off on a trip, so that during the journey I’d have something to quote from. I was often speechless when I traveled. This time it was particularly useful that I’d written my report beforehand. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what to say about Siberia. Of course, I might have quoted from my diary, but I have to admit that I made up the diary afterward, having neglected to keep one during the journey. (126)

The narrator’s unusual means of “documentation,” in this case the narrator’s “travel report” written before the trip, seems to be due to the fact that Europe has

14 Freud explicitly likens dreaming to translating, for instance, in the following passage of The Interpretation of Dreams: “The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dreamcontent seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation” (312).

68

Silja Maehl

already been part of the narrator’s past even before her departure. Indeed, her entire childhood has been influenced by her father’s talking about Moscow and her mother’s cultural references to Europe. In her retroactively written “diary,” she evokes the role and the tone of an observer who herself is part of her observation. The narrator in “Where Europe Begins” does not provide “authentic” impressions of her encounter with foreign people and places, but counteracts the possibility of a traditional, explanatory, ethnological and ethnographical discourse in general, something that is particularly reflected in the disintegration of plot. Tawada’s unconventional travel accounts in “Where Europe Begins” are related to her project of a fictitious ethnology: if both the subject and the object of an ethnographic study are invented, then ethnography has ultimately crossed the border to narration, reassessing culture as story. Consequently, Tawada’s narrators, as well as the author herself, are often referred to as ethnologists;15 yet the title of her dissertation Toys and language magic in European literature. An ethnologic poetics clarifies from the start what kind of ethnology is undertaken here. As mentioned before, her work has been repeatedly related to that of Roland Barthes, especially to his imaginative exploration of Japan in L’Empire des Signes [The Empire of Signs], and she indeed refers to him such as in Transformations and Toys and language magic, but she takes his fictive ethnological project of a hypothetical “system” of Japan one step further.16 While Barthes, who did not speak Japanese, looked upon Japan with a European eye and agenda, namely to deconstruct Western myths, Tawada applies a hybrid perspective in her observations of German life, through which she cites and, at the same time, re-writes Western narratives of knowledge and power. Her short text “Storytellers without Souls,” published in Where Europe Begins and in which the narrator casts a new light on the objects of exposition in Hamburg’s ethnological museum, can be read as a reference to Barthes and his idea of a fictive people: “One learns much more when one attempts to describe an imaginary tribe. What should their lives look like? How does their language function? What is this completely unfamiliar social system like?” (110). The following passage has often, and I believe rightly so, been interpreted as a focal point of the author’s poetics: “It is equally interesting to play the role of an observer who comes from a fictional culture. How would he describe ‘our’ world? This is the endeavor of fictive ethnology, in which not the

15 Alfred Kloepfer and Miho Matsunaga, for instance, refer to Tawada as a “poetische(n) Ethnologin fremder und eigener Kulturen” [poetic ethnologist of foreign and native cultures] (11). 16 See Roland Barthes: “I can also – though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) – isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan” (Empire of Signs 3).

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

69

described but the describer is imaginary” (110). Tawada’s fictive ethnologist virtually comes from Barthes’s invented and hypothetical society, as Andrea Krauß notes (65), and thus, instead of merely reversing Barthes’s critical gaze of an outsider, Tawada actually contemplates the “West” from within, through the eyes of a Japanese narrator who is aware of her “Asian” vantage point. Another of Tawada’s short prose texts attests to this strategy. Contrary to the idea of a naturalized Japanese view, which would merely amount to an albeit reversed Western essentialist attitude, the narrator in “Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht” [Don’t tell anybody but Europe does not exist] reflects on Germany from an assumed perspective, which she compares to a pair of fictive “Japanese glasses” (Talisman 51). Although inauthentic and constructed, her imaginary glasses cannot be put on or taken off easily but are paradoxically conjoined with the body, an image that shows how our immersion in a culture only allows for partial and incomplete detachment from cultural representations as well as the mother tongue. In an interview with Lerke von Saalfeld, Tawada explains how learning to look differently in order to reproduce stereotypical national narratives remains a continuous effort: while adapting to the foreign German language and culture initially required her full attention, she later became able to de-familiarize herself and to recreate an initial naïveté (“Where Europe Begins” 189). The author wittily deconstructs the possibility of an objective or authentic representation of self and other by suggesting that “Europe” and “Asia” are as much narrative constructions and products of mutual fabrication as the opposition “West” versus “East.” Furthermore, the motif of the “Japanese glasses” stands in a marked contrast to an exclusive, primordial nationalism. In his Addresses to a German Nation, Fichte, who emphasizes that the particular national language is irrevocably conjoined with the speech-organ and thus the body of the people, assumes German listeners who are inclined “to see with their own eyes things of this nature, but not at all such as find it more comfortable, in considering these subjects, to allow to be foisted upon them an alien and outlandish instrument of vision” (15). These “own eyes” are meant to be exclusively German and the “outlandish instrument of vision” is worn by all those who cannot or do not want to affiliate themselves with the German perspective. In Tawada’s “Don’t tell anybody but Europe does not exist,” on the other hand, the alien glasses are a prerequisite for perceiving cultural differences and toying with them. In order to avoid a merely inverted form of orientalism, her texts demonstrate how nation and identity exist exogenously through distinction with other cultures. Moreover, Tawada’s idea of glasses is an apt metaphor for a past, current, and future understanding of Europe and can indeed, I believe, assist in the formation of a common European identity, which is already, and will be further, characterized by a synchronicity of multiple affilia-

70

Silja Maehl

tions, calling for something akin to a state of perpetual double vision. Just as the European Union has never been a homogenous community, Tawada’s Europe is imagined, yet nevertheless real, with asymptotic borders, which explains how the narrator can be forever on the move without ever truly arriving. Kari van Dijk develops a reading of arrival that assumes an ongoing, restless European search for itself beyond notions of absolute knowledge, appropriation, and conquest, which posits “Where Europe Begins” as an “invitation to re-think Europe, to ‘arrive’ at new conceptions of what Europe is or should be” (164). Oscillating between the two shores of Europe and Asia, Tawada’s work suggests “an undulating movement by means of which a textual water is created that at once divides and connects” and from which the “fluctuating borderland” Eurasia emerges (172). Despite the indetermination of arrival in “Where Europe Begins,” the body remains bound to the laws and perils of border crossing. Upon reaching Moscow, the narrator’s visa has expired; moreover, she is as speechless as before and during her travels and can only let out a loud scream (the scream of a newborn?) leaving her with a burning throat, a coarseness that indicates the foreign body of a language she does not yet speak. In order to relieve her thirst and moisten her tongue, as the prerequisite for being able to speak at all, she drinks from a pond in the middle of the train station: “The water I had drunk grew and grew in my belly and soon it had become a huge sphere of water with the names of thousands of cities written on it” (145). Once again, the image of the sphere of water from the text’s beginning is re-invoked. As opposed to the grandmother’s story, the swallowed water in this narrative does not cause the narrator to age. Instead, siren calls emanating from the sphere of water (with the names of thousands of cities written on it) lure her to jump into the pond. In the subsequent passage, personal memories, stories, myths, and symbols are conjoined in a fluid, transformative vortex, in which letters, words, and things are disjointed, leaving her without a reference point of orientation: Here stood a high tower, brightly shining with a strange light. Atop this tower sat the Fire Bird, which spat out flaming letters: M, O, S, K, V, A, then these letters were transformed: M became a mother and gave birth to me within my belly. O turned into omul’ and swam off with S: seahorse. K became a knife and severed my umbilical cord. V had long since become a volcano, at whose peak sat a familiar-looking monster. But what about A? A became a strange fruit I had never before tasted: an apple. (146)17

17 Just as the serpent, the Fire Bird is an overdetermined, mythical motif, which permeates “Where Europe Begins” like the fragments from Siberian, Japanese, and European tales and which thus adds to the text’s polyphonic structure. Claudia Breger, Hansjörg Bay, and Christine Ivanovic, among others, have pointed to the Fire Bird’s role in Russian’s popular tradition and particularly to Igor Stravinsky’s eponymous ballet. Yet, it is also important to bear in mind its

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

71

In some ways, the six letters of Moscow are ciphers of the narrator’s rebirth into a new language and culture.18 Also absorbed into this transformative vortex are the familiar figures of her childhood as well as her trip: her mother, the omul’ (the displaced ocean fish from Lake Baikal), Japan (shaped like a seahorse), the globe, and the monster. A, the first letter and thus the symbolic beginning of the Roman alphabet, is associated with the apple – a symbol for the foreign language. Together with the serpent from the beginning of the text, the apple evokes the Fall of Man, which is in turn associated with the building of the Tower of Babel (the tower in the story) and the confusion of tongues, and thus with the culture of the “West.” Given the link between eating and speaking through the motif of the tongue, Tawada’s story ends with the narrator internalizing and incorporating the foreign signs and culture: Hadn’t my grandmother told me of the serpent’s warning never to drink foreign water? But fruit isn’t the same as water. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to eat foreign fruit? So I bit into the apple and swallowed its juicy flesh. Instantly the mother, the omul’, the seahorse, the knife and the volcano with its monster vanished before my eyes. (146)

In an interview with Bettina Brandt, Tawada mentions how it is useful “to fundamentally lose one’s sense of direction at least once [and to] break with the familiarity and routine of the culture and the institution of the society in which you grew up” (“Scattered Leaves” 14). She adds that one is thus “at least partially reborn somewhere else,” which provides one with the double advantage of maintaining a distance to the foreign world as well as to one’s own culture. Along the same lines, Tawada reports that she felt shocked and numbed by the actual experience of leaving Japan for Russia when she realized that traveling to a foreign country is nothing like reading books in a foreign language (Geisel). The feelings of being overwhelmed and speechless as well as the notion of rebirth are reflected in “Where Europe Begins.” Yet, instead of merely reiterating the essenti-

kinship with the legend of the Phoenix in Greek (but also Persian, Egyptian, or Chinese) mythology and its particular relation to transformation. The Fire Bird thus embodies the kind of selftransformative rebirth that lies at the center of Tawada’s text. Another example of the author’s strategies of polyphony and superimposition is the grandmother’s tale with which the narration sets out. Her supposedly true story of a girl searching for healing water for her sick mother echoes The Water of Life by the Brothers Grimm, which is, in turn, merely one version of an even older legend. Also, Grimm’s Snow White comes to mind when the narrator, after leaving her home and mother, arrives in a foreign place and swallows a piece of apple. 18 Most likely this is German though it is not explicitly stated. Tawada majored in Russian literature at Waseda University, Tokyo, and her narrator’s rebirth in Moscow into the Roman alphabet and not the Cyrillic script further underscores the author’s deconstruction of homogenous national settings.

72

Silja Maehl

alist category of birth, the foreign becomes now part of the self, suggesting that a new awareness must come before inner changes, which in turn precede a better understanding of otherness. “Where Europe Begins” at once conjures and transforms biblical, European, and personal founding myths, tying the question of identity to that of nationhood. Just as there is no individual identity constructed outside and beyond history, personal memory is encapsulated in collective memory and vice versa, becoming inscribed onto the body and into the flesh. While the deathlike, albeit temporary, obliteration of the narrator’s memory facilitates her rebirth, the encounter with a new tongue, a virtual new mother, returns her to a childlike state of amazement, of wonder and anxiety. Foreign water and foreign language(s) are inextricably linked in Tawada’s work; both are presented as corporeal and visceral. I want to stress the ambiguity underlying the motif of foreign water, its liminal status between foreign and proper, outside and inside, by pointing to two German words that come to mind in connection with water and birth: the first is Fruchtwasser [amniotic fluid] and the second Taufwasser [baptismal water]. In German, Fruchtwasser bears a twofold meaning referring to water from a fruit, such as the apple in “Where Europe Begins,” as well as to the fluid inside the womb.19 By swallowing the forbidden fruit, the two waters virtually meet inside the narrator’s body. Moreover, her drinking from, and subsequent leaping into, the pond invoke and invert the ritual of baptism. Through the act of incorporating foreign water, collective and individual myths of (re)birth coalesce. However, the act of swallowing also emanates an aura of threat and drowning, and throughout her text, the author skillfully intertwines symbols of departure and arrival with an atmosphere of both pleasure and menace. Consequently, Tawada ends her text with a promising, albeit fairly unpleasant prospect: “Everything was still and cold. It had never been so cold before in Siberia. I realized I was standing in the middle of Europe” (146). The author biography at the end of the German edition of Where Europe Begins mentions this trip with the Trans-Siberian Railway and thus contributes to its general status as a kind of founding myth, a “Gründungsmythos” (see, for instance, Holdenried 169 and Bay 110). In one of her later texts, “Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist,” Tawada likens the Christian god – “a man who creates sons with or without a wife” (14) – to a creator of literary works, only to subvert the authority of both and to playfully undermine the validity of any claim to mythical and biographical genealogy:

19 Another link between water and mother is established through the French homophones “la mer” and “la mère.”

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

73

While reading a book, one usually imagines what the writer looks like. The imagined writer rarely conforms to the actual one, but that is not sufficient reason to proclaim that the imagined one is an error. The authorial image produced from the work is the true author, and the living person who exists as the author may be, in relation to the text, a complete stranger. (15)

The deconstruction of biblical and personal founding myths is already implicit in “Where Europe Begins.” While the text sets out with the grandmother’s warning not to drink foreign water, invoking God’s command not to eat the forbidden fruit, only the narrator’s lapse allows for an actual “arrival” in Moscow and the Roman alphabet. Although the narrator explicitly designates her travel accounts as invented, she nonetheless begins almost every chapter by diligently indicating her respective sources – the diary excerpt, the first travel report, the letter to her parents, oral narratives, and the short novel she wrote before the trip – thereby ironizing the “rhetoric of origin” that permeates “Where Europe Begins.”20 Moreover, Tawada simultaneously creates and dissolves her own biographical myth in “Where Europe Begins” by weaving some facts (a young Japanese woman traveling via ship and train to Russia) into a web of stories. Maps and supposed historical facts are subjected to the same artistic play by which Tawada, as Roland Barthes might put it, removes “the safety catch of meaning” (Rustle 42) and creates a textual space her readers are invited to traverse and to sensually explore. Despite the evident playfulness with which this permeability of borders is enacted, the imagined spaces Tawada creates are precarious and shaky, which makes her readers feel as if they had just taken a voyage by sea. Within the continual transformations and border crossings that are central to her work, fluidity is not only the recurring motif but also the main stylistic device. By describing Tawada’s texts as osmotic, permeable membranes through which real and literary elements are in constant flux, Monika Schmitz-Emans has developed a fitting metaphor for a writing style that is very much characterized by its floating movement (“Fließende Grenzen” [Flowing borders] 332). “Where Europe Begins,” however, “flows effortlessly”21 despite or maybe because of its polysemous and palimpsestic quality. The author creates a hybrid textual structure by confounding autobiographical and essayistic elements, combining different literary genres such as the epistolary novel, the diary, fairytales of both Western and Eastern origin as well as by juxtaposing dreams, dialogs, and memories. Through this

20 Christina Kraenzle (Mobility 84) notes a “rhetoric of origin,” which is expressed through the question the narrator is asked by one of her fellow travelers: “Where did you grow up?” (Where Europe Begins 124). It coalesces with what one could call a “rhetoric of arrival,” which is also invoked throughout the text and is evident in the subsequent question, “Where are you going?” 21 This is how Wim Wenders describes Tawada’s style in his preface to Where Europe Begins (xi).

74

Silja Maehl

process of disassembly and rearrangement, as Elisabeth Bronfen describes hybridity in her introduction to Hybride Kulturen [Hybrid cultures] (14), Tawada detaches genres, styles or discourses from their habitual, seemingly natural, cultural context and relocates meaning in the act of writing as poiesis. Representing the cycle of life, water is the link between the grandmother’s story in the first chapter and the narrator’s experiences in the last. This circular narrative movement is reiterated through the motif of the sphere of water floating around in the narrator’s stomach with the names of thousands of cities written on it. She and the globe are encapsulated within one another like the Matroshka doll, which a boy on the train is playing with: “He removed the figure of the round farmwife from its belly. The smaller doll, too, was immediately taken apart, and from its belly came – an unexpected surprise – an even smaller one” (141–142). The magical moment (“an unexpected surprise”) of opening one doll only to find another hidden inside it contrasts with his father’s matter-of-fact assertion that the Matroshka is “a typically Russian toy.” Although primarily known by Europeans as souvenirs from Russia, Matroshkas are in fact influenced by Japanese dolls as the narrator explains, who once again unsettles stereotypical cultural assumptions and representations and highlights that the cultural border between Japan and Russia is permeable. The actual border between the two countries is even today cause for ongoing dispute as the territorial conflict over the (South) Kuril Islands remains unresolved, which is in line with the description of Japan as “this child of Siberia” due to the scientific claim of a prehistoric land bridge linking the archipelago with the continent (127). Emulating the mechanism of containment suggested by the motif of the Matroshka, the library with the infinite novel is located in the center of Moscow. Some discussions on paper, machine, and the book in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and Paper Machine parallel Tawada’s notion of incorporation: by means of intertextuality, the book is related to other books, all of which are potentially part of a collection such as a library, which in turn functions both as an archive and as a place for reading and writing, thus, enabling not only the storage but also the production of books. Derrida, an author that is demonstrably of vital interest for Tawada, points to the interrelatedness of personal and collective remembrance, reading and writing as well as, the past and the future of archiving. Where Europe Begins already raises issues about the future of the book and virtuality that Tawada will take up in later texts such as “E-mail für Japanische Gespenster” [Email for Japanese Ghosts]: “The letters on my screen seem to me more ghostly than brushstrokes on paper, because they are at once there and not there. They are only shadows on the surface of electronic water” (Transformations 42). Here the incomputability of the letters calls the notions of spectrality and trace to mind that pervade Derrida’s works. The mise en abyme implied in the intertextuality of

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

75

both Tawada’s endless book and Derrida’s idea of “the World Wide Web as the ubiquitous Book” (15) is just as incommensurable – and as uncanny – as Tawada’s image of “electronic water.” For fluidity is a quality not restricted to the element of water: the divisions between the sensuous and the cognitive realms, consciousness and unconscious, reality and virtuality are equally permeable. In contrast to Derrida however, who links electronic writing and the “ubiquitous Book” to the deity of Christian monotheism (“the book of God,” 15), Tawada tellingly refers to ghosts – “Japanische Gespenster” – as a plural. The letters of the Roman alphabet have taken on a life of their own. Here, Tawada is again closer to Derrida’s ideas on the primacy of writing than to the Western paradigm of spirit as the animating principle. She conducts Geisteswissenschaft [literally “science of spirit,” equated with the humanities] as Geisterwissenschaft [science of spirits],22 emphasizing the autonomy of signs against universal assumptions of meaning. If Tawada problematizes Europe as a utopian dream and explores a distanced look upon one’s mother tongue as source of creativity, then the question posted by Doug Slaymaker is indeed pertinent: “if everywhere is outside, and outside is the only place from which we can write, then where do we go, where do we reside, where do we locate ourselves and our voices?” (5). Slaymaker’s own answer is as follows: “The third place for writing,” he argues, “becomes the temporary space of travel, perhaps a way-station while traveling to another place, but that ‘temporary’ space of train compartments and stations often proves to be as much stability as we will find” (10). Tawada’s general affinity for places of transit such as ships, trains, train stations, border checkpoints, or Moscow’s Red Square reinforces this thesis. “Where Europe Begins” also exemplifies how language, rather than being a mere agent for fiction, becomes in the course of travel the actual matter of observation. In a world in which travel between places has become an essential part of people’s lives, travel through linguistic spaces – in the case of “Where Europe Begins” the transition to Roman script – is the more compelling journey.

22 See Weigel, “Transsibirische Metamorphosen,” 6: “Und so treibt die Literaturtheoretikerin Tawada das Studium der Geisteswissenschaft hier, wie sie sagt, durchaus auch als Geisterwissenschaft. Dabei interessiert sie sich besonders für das Verschwinden der Geister in der Idee des ‘Geistes’, vielleicht mehr noch aber für die Metamorphosen, in denen jene wiederkehren.” [“And thus the literary theorist Tawada conducts Geisteswissenschaft here also as Geisterwissenschaft, as she says. She is particularly interested in the disappearance of spirits into the notion of ‘spirit,’ even more perhaps in the metamorphoses, in which they reappear.”] Tawada also alludes to such a double reading of Geisteswissenschaften in “Klang der Geister” [Sounds of Ghosts] in Talisman.

76

Silja Maehl

Referring to one of the author’s more recent collections of story-essays, Überseezungen [Foreign Tongues] (2002), Kraenzle argues that “travel through language becomes a substitute for, not a side-effect of travel through space” (194). Here, traveling to foreign countries is initially presented as the physical movement into a foreign language.23 In addition to the East-West binary, Tawada also addresses an axis between North and South. The 14 essays are divided into tongues, namely the three chapters Euro-Asiatische Zungen [Euro-Asian tongues], Süd-Afrikanische Zungen [South-African tongues] and Nord-Amerikanische Zungen [North-American tongues]. As with many of Tawada’s texts, this work blurs the boundaries between essay, autobiography, travelogue and short story. The title of Überseezungen expands the motif of foreign water through the barely noticeable italicization of the title’s third syllable “See,” on the book’s cover page suggesting that the stress should fall there. Alternatively, if one reads the title as “Übersee-Zungen,” then this compound effectively evokes at once foreign languages and foreign places. Moreover, the semantics of the Latin “lingua” refer to the tongue [Zunge] as both an organ of taste and of speech – which is in line with the swallowing of the foreign fruit in “Where Europe Begins” – and the author thus accentuates and plays with the polysemous as well as corporeal nature of language. A third reading phonetically gestures towards the very similar word “Übersetzungen” [translations]. This reading in turn evokes yet another duality of meaning: “übersetzen” in German means to transport and to translate, literally and figuratively to ferry something over from one shore or bank to the other. In general, it is no coincidence that water and translation are central, if not the most prevalent, themes for Tawada. In a way akin to Derrida, who in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin speaks of “the shores of the French language,” and of “the unplaceable line of its coast” (2), Tawada, one might say, travels the unplaceable coast lines of Japanese and German. As an author often discussed in connection with Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar also deals with issues of (semi-autobiographical) migration, travel, and language in works such as Mutterzunge [Mother Tongue] (1998), Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn [The Bridge of the Golden Horn] (1998) or Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde [Strange stars stare toward Earth] (2003). According to Silke Schade, “German linguistic spaces” are “vital for the protagonists’ creation of a sense of home” (326) – motion and rootedness are intimately linked in Özdamar’s work (326). This is less true in Tawada’s case, whose depictions of language and place remain liminal, beyond a sense of home and belonging. Again, Schmitz-Emans’s metaphor of the membrane proves to be productive here as she emphasizes the

23 In German, “place” [“Ort”] is already a component of “word” [“Wort”].

Foreign Water: Yoko Tawada’s Poetics of Porosity in “Where Europe Begins”

77

significance of the motif of the tongue and the Mundraum [translated as “oral cavity,” literally meaning “space of the mouth”] as a transitional region (“Flowing borders” 327). Tawada thus depicts language not as something we own and master, but as a space or dwelling that is inhabited as well as haunted. According to Kraenzle, Tawada’s reflections on travel and displacement are “neither pure lament nor total celebration” (Mobility 259). I would go even further. Motifs of fluidity, the fluidity of a decentered world, are linked to the flowing nature of the imagination; in fact, this ambiguous fluidity is the prerequisite for creativity, which can only prosper in a position that is neither too shaky nor too comfortable. Only the movement between nations enables Tawada to perceive traditions as those fictional, or, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, imagined communities that they are. Because tradition, and by extension history, is already in a sense invented, no author needs to feel housed in or even genetically allied to one tradition: “Every artist may work with any of the elements found on the planet. Whether an artist can produce something new and exciting from that depends not on the origin of the artist but on the artist’s ability” (“Ist Europa westlich?” [Is Europe western?] 38). In Tawada’s case, this ability not only involves a constant questioning of the underlying concepts of language and identity but also an ongoing move beyond the concept of a mother tongue, in other words, it “requires constant exit strategies” (Yildiz, Mother Tongue, 142). The transfer of lived experience into acts of speech and writing, the bearing across of thoughts and meaning from one language into another, the transposition of the subject into another cultural and linguistic medium: that translation, as a metaphor for linguistic travel, is a constant theme for Tawada has been well documented in scholarship on her work. The degree to which moments of estrangement are performed differs within the field of transnational literature, and can, to some extent, be compared to different concepts of translation, which either rely on the domestication of the foreign or foster foreignization. By accentuating linguistic and cultural differences, Tawada’s texts are quite obviously promoting the latter. Her Japanese narrators frequently experience moments of disempowerment and impotence; conversely, the author exposes her German readers to a child-like and uncanny perspective that makes their familiar everyday life appear strange thereby providing them with vicarious experiences of traveling and foreignness, transforming their thinking, and eventually turning them into transnational readers. Despite, or rather because of, this eye-opening alienation, Tawada’s work is to be situated within the realm of an experimental appropriation of foreign places, not least because her protagonists are dwelling on and in an infinite process of (self)-translation, in which the constitution of identity, rather than within sites of origins, takes place through originality.

Chase Dimock

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation on Linguistic Spaces in Foreign Tongues The first section’s final essay provides an additional investigation of Tawada’s work, marking her importance as an author who brings an insightful transnational perspective to the realm of German-language literature. Using Tawada’s collection of essays Überseezungen [Foreign Tongues] as a model, Chase Dimock focuses on the sensual aspects of language spaces of the body, with a focus on listening as Tawada’s “most basic gesture of openness to a foreign culture.” Instead of exhibiting passivity, however, Dimock sees Tawada’s “synesthetic approach to consuming and reproducing language” as evidence of a dynamic activity that demonstrates spatial awareness. This spatial awareness comes to the fore in particular during Tawada’s writer-in-residency at MIT in which she explores anew the concerns of gender, space, and power, this time throwing U.S. American English into the mix of languages to be listened to and offered up for comparative analysis. Tawada’s exposure to U.S. American uses of language, as Dimock demonstrates, allows for a radically different perspective: The unconscious cultural ideologies of the language must be deliberately and consciously distilled in order for Tawada to understand them. In addition, her alienation as a foreigner in North America, as Dimock argues, is abated by a willful deployment of the senses, where her openness as a listener allows her to understand conditions of U.S. American culture that the masses ignore in their overwhelmingly monolinguistic world. For Tawada, then, listening as a passive act entails an expanded awareness of the space around the individual and its specific codes of communication, which reflect unconscious ideological constructions, such as the gendered, privileged position inhabited by the space of the speaker. By embracing her linguistic and cultural otherness, Tawada becomes an active listener who can critically analyze the ideologies of space and in turn understand the underpinnings of U.S. American academic and consumer culture. Dimock’s focus on the transnational body in this first section also segues into further explorations of space and gender in the next section of the volume, “Seeking Space.” (Beth Muellner)

80

Chase Dimock

“I think it an illusion to believe the mother tongue to be authentic. The mother tongue is a translation from non-verbal or pre-verbal thoughts, too. Language is not natural for us, but rather artificial and magical. People who like to believe that language should be identical with human emotions and thoughts do not like to speak foreign languages. They feel that they have to pretend to be somebody else or even that they have to lie when they speak foreign languages. Foreign languages draw our attention to the fact that language per se, even one’s mother tongue, is a translation.”– Yoko Tawada

In the quotation above, Yoko Tawada questions our tendency to naturalize our native language and conceive of it as somehow perfectly representative of our psychological and sensual beings. She deconstructs the binary opposition between mother tongue and foreign language by sensing the foreignness of one’s own primary language in so far as it is limited in expressing the interiority of thoughts, emotions, and the landscape of the unconscious that characterizes the great expanse of existence. For Tawada, all use of language, native or foreign, is an act of translation – a verbal transubstantiation of interiority into an intelligible and speakable exteriority. Words are not bare signifiers of abstract meaning, but a medium of expression enveloped with affective connotations that connect us sensually with the body of the listener, like how a term such as “mother tongue” genders language so as to suggest the warmth and familiarity associated with maternity. Words teem with affect and sensation, but are not wholly descriptive of the entirety of the feeling or mental cognition that the body can experience and process. Thus, any language is marked by the constant interplay of feeling and its translation into a word. The senses are inscribed into the words themselves and sent out to be both distilled by the mind as a decipherer of their literal meaning and felt by the body that absorbs the sensual dimensions of the expression. With this process in mind, foreign languages become less foreign in so far as all language is foreign from the natural condition of the body that must translate itself in order to be known by others. In the past two decades, Yoko Tawada’s prolific output of poetry, essays, and fiction about linguistic, physical, and psychological transformation and travel has cemented her place as an increasingly important figure in German, Japanese, and Comparative Literature. Her work is uniquely suited for the globalized world and the digital age of the twenty-first century as she explores constructs of nation and culture through writing in both German and Japanese in a world where the borders of national identity are consistently contested and redefined as new technologies of communication and cross-cultural exchange blur these boundaries. In her 2002 book Foreign Tongues, Tawada dramatizes the constant process of translation across national, geographic, and cultural spaces through fourteen personal essays arranged continentally according to her real and imaginary travels to foreign places. As Christina Kraenzle notes in her article on Tawada’s narratives of

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

81

mobility and travel, the title of the collection itself, Überseezungen, an invented compound word combining Übersee and Zungen to create roughly “overseas tongues,” “suggests a link between language and the body, or between sound and its physical production” (Kraenzle, “Traveling Without Moving,” 92). Furthermore Kraenzle identifies a phonic similarity between Tawada’s imaginary term “Überseezungen” and the common German word “Übersetzungen” [translations] thus borrowing the sound and feel of the German word for translations, but calling attention to translation as an embodied act of making language travel into different spaces and experiencing how shifts in language transform the body itself. Tawada’s attention to the affect of language frames her experience in America in the section titled Nordamerikanischezungen [Northamericantongues] about her time spent as the Max Kade Distinguished Visitor at MIT in 1999. Her uniquely corporeal process of translation allows her insight into the familial, bureaucratic, and consumerist discourses that construct U.S. American spaces of communication, employment, and consumption. Tawada’s perpetual status as an active listener allows her to cull connotations and conditions of U.S. American culture through constant translation of the words that surround her which even the people and institutions around her take for granted. Tawada’s fresh exposure to U.S. American uses of language allows for a radically different perspective on its implications in that the unconscious dimensions of the language must be consciously distilled in order to be understood. Yet, Tawada’s perpetual translation is not simply a process of looking up words in a dictionary; but instead it is a poetic meditation on the overwhelming sensual affect of linguistic expressions that she feels so intensely because they are new to her. Where the bare abstraction of words and meaning are insufficient and lacking in her vocabulary, all five of Tawada’s bodily senses arrive to supplement her understanding of language. Tawada formulates a synesthetic approach to understanding language where sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch actively work together to record the sensual dimensions of language into a bodily affect that augments the inadequacy of a dictionary definition. Tawada’s alienation as a foreigner in America is abated by this willful deployment of the senses, where her openness as a listener allows her to understand conditions of U.S. American culture that the masses ignore in their quotidian lives. Throughout her narrative of visiting the United States, Tawada emphasizes that the meaning and affect of language is dependent upon both the space in which communication is happening and how her body and the bodies of others are classified by linguistic constructions of gender, professional, and public identities. For Tawada, the body itself is a space, with the skin as the liminal point of mediation between self and other where language is digested and integrated into the body. Tawada is conscious of how gender and the body are discursively

82

Chase Dimock

constructed according to social norms imbedded in language. Yet, through the example of two U.S. American lesbian writers, Tawada shows how language can be reappropriated and used to break from patriarchy. Delving deeper into Tawada’s experience at MIT, it is apparent that due to her willingness to listen, despite the fact that she recognizes how the active speaker and the passive listener in America constitute a gendered relationship where speaking is connected to privilege, Tawada is able to tease out the buried ideological constructs of U.S. American discourses. In professional spaces and consumerist spaces, Tawada analyzes how language manipulates the bodily senses while stroking the ego of America’s militant individualism.

Touching speech: The linguistic space of the skin Early on in her narrative of living in Boston and deciphering American English, Tawada addresses her linguistic identity as a Japanese woman who writes both in her mother tongue and in German for a German audience. “I was born into Japanese, as though I was thrown into a bag. Therefore, this language was, for me, my outer skin. The German language, however, was something I swallowed. Since then, it sits in my stomach” (103).1 Her experience as a speaker of German is characterized by a feeling of volition; a willful infusion of the language and its affects into her body while Japanese is the precondition of her birth. While she acknowledges how the Japanese language constructed her body and character, she speaks of it without sentimentality or a desire to anchor the essence of her identity to the language. Tawada explains in an interview with Bettina Brandt: The skin is, of course, something that is very close to us. But at the same time, we human beings cannot take our skin off; that would, first of all, hurt a lot and, even worse, without a skin, we would finally just die. Think about it: we cannot even hold our skin in our hands and look at it, contemplate it. No, our skin is very close to us and because of that, it is also often invisible to us. Words in a foreign language are, to me, in a particular way, words that I am consuming. These words are outside of my body and I eat them, I consciously eat them. I can put them into my mouth and then they enter my body; but they are not part of my body. Sometimes these words turn out to be indigestible and then you easily can get a stomachache. These foreign words, though, can also slowly transform themselves and become meat and then, ultimately, they can become my flesh. Although sometimes this process does not work and then the foreign word remains something in between, in between my own body and the foreign body. But, in any case, foreign words are consciously consumed much later on; we are

1 All translations of quotations from Tawada’s Überseezungen are my own.

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

83

not born with these words. In my own case, this bodily image is also quite concretely linked to the feeling that I get when I pronounce words in a foreign language. (Brandt, “Ein Ort,” 4)

Tawada distinguishes her experience of speaking her mother tongue from speaking German with the image of her own body marked by the exteriority of her skin versus the interiority of her organs which consume, process, and ultimately merge the language back into her body, including into the skin itself. Yet, the metaphor of skin also purposefully undermines the dichotomy of interior and exterior that Tawada constructs because it is too close to the body and the self to be contemplated as an external object. The skin is not internal to the body, but not externally separated from it either. Instead, skin is the liminal point between the body and the outside world, a space that is receptive to the stimuli of the external and protective and encapsulating of the internal. The skin thus resides in the same space as translation; it is where the external is translated into the internal and vice versa. Tawada’s linguistic construction of the skin as both a culturally constituted and individually directed mediation between the self and the outside strikes parallels with the work of French philosopher Michel Serres in his book The Five Senses. Although Serres divides his book into five sections, his contemplation of the bodily senses does not seek to isolate and examine them a scientific abstractions, but instead to account for how they interact with one another to create a bodily affect of consciousness of self and the external world: The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that, I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle. (80)

Both Serres and Tawada conceive of skin as the level of bodily experience that interacts and coalesces with the external world, thus creating a space where the external and internal touch and merge. Serres refers to this as the “mingled body,” where the body becomes enmeshed with the world around it and begins to incorporate outside elements. He then extends the notion of skin to the world around him, granting all objects the elastic and sensual properties of skin. Everything meets in contingency, as if everything had a skin. Contingency is the tangency of two or several varieties and reveals their proximity to each other. Water and air border on a thick or thin layer of evaporation, air and water touch in a bed of mist. Earth and water

84

Chase Dimock

espouse each other in clay and mud, are joined in a bed of silt. The cold front and the hot front slide over each other on a mattress of turbulence. Veils of proximity, layers, films, membranes, plates. (81)

Interlaced and interwoven with one another, the commingled skins of different entities take on the characteristics of cloths or “voiles” in the original French that carries a stronger consciousness of the spinning of threads together. When the body enters a new environment, it does not merely witness it visually from a distance, but instead “visits” it by virtue of creating affective connections through his sensory perception. This relationship of the sensory self to the world around it becomes a series of veils under which there is no concrete or essential object: The state of things becomes tangled, mingled like thread, a long cable, a skein. Connections are not always unraveled. Who will unravel this mess? Imagine the thread of a network, the cord of a skein, or a web with more than one dimension, imagine interlacing as a trace on one plane of the state that I am describing. The state of things seems to me to be an intersecting multiplicity of veils, the interlacing of which bodies forth a three-dimensional figure. (82)

Skin is sensation of touch becomes the most privileged sense because it enmeshes the individual with the world around her. Yet, Serres’s concept of touch is not the common notion of touch in isolation from the other senses, but instead it becomes infused with all of the sensory methods through which we make direct contact with the world around us and become bonded with it. Because all the senses funnel stimuli from the outside world in through the body, all senses go through a process of touch as all vibrations, flavors, and odors make physical contact with the body as the senses interpret them. This metaphor of strings tied to one another bonding the self to the physical world informs Tawada’s own experience of writing in a foreign language. I do not believe that an author can use a language as a tool to express her thoughts. I imagine the author to become, by means of the language, a knot in a big net. This net consists of sentences and paragraphs which already have been uttered or could be uttered by other people. When I write, I am not a fisher fishing with a net but rather a knot in this net. And then I am ready to be powerless, so to speak. That’s the reason. It’s exciting, too, to lose yourself – You do lose yourself at first in a foreign language. (Totten, “Writing in Two Languages,” 95)

Tawada is not the master of language, but instead she is a distinct, thickened point bound in a network with others that function collectively to ensnare language. Here, the use of language as social phenomena marked by social relations takes on the same properties of relations between bodies based on

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

85

sensual connections. Tawada denaturalizes the function of language to the point where she cedes her own individuality as a speaker, preferring to see herself as interconnected in a network of language uses instead of solitary figure seeking mastery over language. The body through which Tawada senses language is itself made of language. Because the body is discursively produced as Michel Foucault would argue, and because gender is a repeated performance of stylizations of the body as Judith Butler would argue, concepts of the body and its gender expressions shift as it transitions through different cultures and languages. Yasmin Yildiz calls attention to how the gendered features of the different languages with which Tawada engages inform her concept of kinship and belonging: In these texts, gender does not just appear as an issue for embodied subjects, but is evoked as the very structuring principle of language and thus inscribed into the material out of which subjectivities are shaped in the first place. In the form of the mother tongue, gender is also linked to kinship, another organic category that is deconstructed. Because of the nature of the ideology of the mother tongue, the form of kinship that is reproduced through the mother tongue is linked to the nation. (“Tawada’s Multilingual Moves” 85)

The concept of a mother tongue is not an accident of etymology, but an insight into how ideological constructs of culture and gender become embedded in language. In Beyond the Mother Tongue, Yildiz further argues, “the notion of a ‘mother tongue’ can be productively understood as a ‘linguistic family romance’ because it produces a fantasy about the natural, bodily origin of one’s first language and its inalienable familiarity that is said to establish kinship and belonging” (127). In his typical use of the “family romance,” Freud asserts that a child explains his emerging sense of individualism and ability to dissent from the family by believing they are not his or her real parents. While this is just a fantasy, it sets a precedent for eventually realizing that the child is not a wholly controlled duplicate of the parents, but a complex individual formed out of many influences from outside the familial sphere. In breaking from the exclusivity of her Japanese mother tongue and willfully inviting the language and cultures of foreign nations into her consciousness, Tawada recognizes how monolingualism can serve to reproduce cultural ideology the same way a heteronormative family reproduces gender norms. In her essay “Writing in the Web of Words,” Tawada celebrates her distance from the mother tongue: I see an opportunity in this broken relationship to the mother tongue and to language in general. You become a word fetishist. Every part or even every letter becomes touchable, you no longer see semantic unity, and you don’t go with the flow of speech. You stop everywhere and take close-ups of the details. The blow-up of the details is confusing because it shows

86

Chase Dimock

completely new pictures of a familiar object. Just as you are unable to recognize your own mother seen through a microscope, you cannot recognize your mother tongue in a close-up picture. But art is not supposed to picture the mother in a recognizable way. The small elements of a word become independent and take a trip to find new relatives. (150)2

For Tawada, multilingualism creates a spatial paradox between the polyglot and the mother tongue in which she is distanced from the language because she has broken its exclusive hold on her consciousness, yet that critical distance allows her to zoom in and perceive the mother language’s subtle nuances. Being able to see at such an intimate, yet detached proximity suddenly makes the mother vanish, because once she understands its ideological construction complete with its contradictions and flaws, she will never again be able to see it as the organic, pristine whole that it was once presented as. Tawada believes that this break from the mother makes language more touchable, and thus sensual. This Freudian “linguistic family romance” comes with a Freudian “linguistic fetish” as well. Fetishism is the process of creating a sexual attraction to a part of the body or an accessory to the body that surpasses desire for a body or person entirely. Freud argued that fetishes were formed as a result of the fear of the castration of the mother. The child desires the mother, but also fears becoming castrated like the mother, so the child decides to repress knowledge of that castration by focusing desire on a body part or object. The child distances himself from the dangers of being consumed by desire for the mother and falling under her control by parceling the mother into common fetish pieces that can be transported onto other bodies and people to desire. In the same dynamic, Tawada’s linguistic fetishism seeks to escape monopolization of the mother tongue by dividing up the language into linguistic pieces like words, syntax, and phrases that can be transported across borders and fetishized in the context of all languages.

2 “Aber ich sehe eine Chance in dieser zerstörten Beziehung zur Muttersprache und zur Sprache überhaupt. Man wird ein Wort-fetischist. Jeder Teil oder sogar jeder Buchstabe wird antastbar, man sieht nicht mehr die semantische Einheit, und man läßt sich nicht im Fluß der Rede treiben. Man bleibt überall stehen und macht Nahaufnahmen der Details. Die Vergrößerung der Einzelteile ist verwirrend, weil sie vollkommen neue Bilder von einem vertrauten Objekt zeigt. Genau wie man durch ein Mikroskop die eigene Mutter nicht wiedererkennen kann, kann man die eigene Muttersprache auf einer Nahaufnahme nicht wiedererkennen. Aber in der Kunst geht es nicht darum, die Mutter so darzustellen, daß man sie wiedererkennt. Die kleinen Elemente eines Wortes verselbständigen sich und gehen auf Reisen, um neue Verwandte in der Ferne zu finden” [“Schreiben im Netz” 450].

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

87

Tawada ties the need to break from the mother tongue to a need to reconsider the gendered constructions of language by referencing two U.S. American lesbian authors: Gertrude Stein and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Comparing her identity as an expatriate writer to Stein’s, Tawada writes: You can choose which languages you want to learn, whereas you cannot choose your native language. Gertrude Stein wrote: “I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.” So you could also say perhaps: language makes the person, but the person, on the other hand, can make something in a foreign language. (111)

With Stein, Tawada cites a precedent from nearly 100 years ago who had to live away from the land of her mother tongue in order to write in an experimental style that deconstructed her own language and criticized the gender subordination it supported. In a poem like “Patriarchal Poetry” with its repeated lines “let her try, let her be,” Stein recognizes the need for women to adopt new, modernist styles of expression and to travel to a space where she can be independent so as to be able to free herself from patriarchal confinement and compulsory heterosexuality (65). Just as Tawada found liberation and opportunity for self-invention by breaking from the mother tongue and traveling, so too did Stein find in Paris a foreign space where she could live more freely as a lesbian and make herself as a person by experimenting with English and formulating her own modernist language. Tawada further unites U.S. American lesbian identity and a resistance to the gendered aspects of language by recalling her meeting with Minnie Bruce Pratt, whom she refers to as M.B.P., In a hotel in Downtown, I met the poet M.B.P. who was there for a lesbian-themed colloquium in Boston. She gave me her book “S/HE.” She grew up in the middle of WASP culture she said. She jokingly referred to the people to whom she feels she belongs now as “kinky people.” To her, the term lesbian was probably gathering dust. (146)

With the book title, Pratt calls attention to the fact that when a pronoun is used in the English language, the individual is reduced to a moniker of their gender as their defining feature. Pratt, along with her partner, author Leslie Feinberg, are known for their use of gender-neutral language, such as the use of “hir” instead of “him” or “her.” Tawada connects this rejection of restrictive gender markers to a rejection of WASP identity, otherwise known as “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Tawada learns that this term encompasses a large part of her peer group at MIT and that WASPs are the privileged identity group in the U.S. Tawada thus recognizes how public and private spaces in the U.S. support and privilege certain identities by controlling the language of kinship that presupposes certain normative racial, gender, and sexual identities. Pratt offers Tawada a glimpse of how to

88

Chase Dimock

use language to “queer” restrictive gender and sexual categories, using genderneutral terms and choosing to forge an affinity with all other “kinky people” who pursue non-normative desire instead of a specific category of desire.

Affective spaces of listening Tawada’s voluntary submission to foreign languages succeeds in large part due to her constant willingness to listen. Inspired by the sounds around her in an American coffee bar, Tawada reflects upon the nature of listening, “[b]y listening I can find a vibration that carries me further. You do not know the separation between inside and outside, needing and wanting, acting and waiting. Hearing does not mean obeying, but many people do not like to listen, because it is a passive stance” (112). Tawada recognizes in the U.S. a tendency to place listening in a binary relationship with speaking, constituting a gendered relationship between the active speaker and the passive listener. Tawada understands that the listener is “the other” in this power dynamic, a space of secondary consideration inhabited by gender and ethnic “others” who do not enjoy the same privilege to speak. Yet, she does not fear the passivity of listening and thus notices that the people around her speak as almost a defense against the passivity of listening. Due to the pervasive sense of the pursuit of self-interest and self-preservation in the U.S., this culture that privileges the individual thus also privileges the act of speaking over the presumed passivity of listening. Tawada connects this reluctance or ignorance regarding listening to the U.S. American privileging of the freedom of choice. “It is amazing that a man who cannot choose his mother tongue can hold on to the belief that they can freely make choices. In America, the absolute freedom of choice is being staged in everyday life” (111). Further analyzing the consumer space of the coffee bar, Tawada remarks about all the different sizes and variations one can ask for when ordering coffee, but “[a]fter all these many individual possible decisions, I always got a coffee, which disappointed my tongue” (112). This freedom of choice encourages a stark sense of individualism amongst U.S. Americans and is particularly emphasized in matters of consumerism such as the freedom to purchase any product one desires. Tawada’s observation disrupts the very foundation of this freedom of choice, noticing that one may individually tailor their coffee to their liking, but in the end they are all drinking the same product in the same space. Freedom of choice masks the underlying conformity of consumerism; the variations within the product celebrate the individuality of the consumer while ignoring the possible sense of similarity and conformity that all the consumers share by virtue of ordering the same base product. For Tawada, the concept of listening

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

89

in the North American context is thought of along a similar logic, that one speaks in order to declare their individualism above listening that threatens to inform them of their similarity and interdependence with others. Tawada exercises her faculty of listening throughout her stay in the U.S., allowing herself to absorb her surroundings instead of declaring herself against the cacophony of other voices and sounds. Although she labels listening a passive act, this does not mean that listening is aimless or indifferent. Instead, Tawada’s process of listening is as active and incorporative of her intellect as the act of speaking. Commenting on Serres’s chapter “Boxes” in which he theorizes the faculty of hearing, Steven Connor writes: Hearing takes what Serres calls the hard, le dur, and converts it into information, le doux, or the soft (141–149). This exchange is effected by the senses, or by the work of sensation, which, in turning raw stimulus into sensory information, also make sense of the senses, effecting a slight declination, or deflection within the word sens itself: sense becomes sense. These transformations are effected in every organism by a series of processes of transformation which Serres is wont to call “black boxes.” He means by this processes whose initial conditions are known and whose outcomes are known, but whose actual processes of transformation remain inaccessible to view or understanding. (328)

Serres draws a line between the act of hearing and the act of listening. Hearing can refer to any receptive sensation of vibrations or sounds, while listening is the act of deciphering meaning from these noises. The metaphor of the black box as a metaphor for the process by which sound becomes intelligible as meaning is shrouded in the mystery of the individual’s cognition in so far as each person has a distinct, yet unconscious process in which stimuli is converted into information. This concept of listening as converting the hard into the soft and vibration into language fits Tawada’s own experience of active listening while sitting in her office at MIT that mimics the set-up of Serres’s black boxes. Tawada begins her first essay, “Die Ohrenzeugin” [The earwitness], by walking down the hall of her office building and reflecting on what she hears. From Room Number 317, Tawada hears a discussion over a paper one of the people has written, “[o]ne of the voices was hardy and didactic and became louder. It followed me up to my office and did not let me go. Why does the voice speak in a tone as if it were preaching a sermon? Is writing a sin?” (95). The conversation follows Tawada, emanating down the hall from one office to another. Just as Tawada has traveled from nation to nation and culture to culture, so too do sounds have the ability to travel, in this case traveling from one enclosed space down a corridor to another. Tawada’s act of listening picks up more than just a recording of the content of the conversation. Her active listening also senses the tone and inflection of these words, garnering more information about the relationship of the people and their

90

Chase Dimock

disposition toward the writing than just the bare content of their words would entail. Mere transcription is insufficient to understand the conversation; an affective sense of the tone of the “Predigt” [sermon] demands a full use of the present body in understanding its true impact. This conversation is then interrupted by another coming from Office Number 326, her friend Monika speaking to a U.S. American student who misunderstands her question, “Did you hurt yourself?” (96). Tawada remarks on her own subjective relationship with the word, “The German word ‘hurt’ [verletzt] suddenly seemed so familiar, as if it was written on my skin. In America, I often noticed a physical proximity to the German language” (96). Once again, the act of listening involves the use of her entire body, plucking the word “verletzt” out of the air and ruminating on her emotional attachment to the word. The metaphorical use of skin recalls her earlier comment about Japanese forming the skin of her body and German being the language she willfully consumes and incorporates. In the context of the ubiquitous English in America, German seems more familiar and thus more like the skin-properties of Japanese than in a German-speaking environment. Just as Serres’s black boxes convert hard sounds into soft subjective knowledge, Tawada’s act of listening in her office takes the hard sounds from other offices and absorbs them directly into the softness of her body and skin and her personal relationship with the words. Tawada further explores this structuring of space as a recorder of sound with her contemplation of shells and the sound their valves produce that mimics the ocean. She writes, “[a]s a child, I pressed shells against my ears and heard the sound of the ocean in them. This was my first overseas call” (99). The shell’s tone that imitates the sound of the tide records its travels across the ocean. For Tawada, the sound of an object is not determined solely by the sound it produces in and of itself. She also listens for how an object channels outside sounds through itself and thereby changes the pitch, tone, and frequency of sounds that filter through it. The shell does not make the sound of the ocean itself, but its shape channels already existing tones into a direction that replicates the ocean. Tawada’s consideration of the shell recalls French spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre’s essay “Notes on the New Town” in which he compares the community development of a town to a sea creature that has “secreted a structure” according to the shape of its body. The spatial layout of a city and a shell are the same in that “it summarizes the immense life of an entire species, and the immense effort this life has made to stay alive and to maintain its own characteristics” (116). Similar to how the shell takes on the spatial needs of the body, so too do the residential and commercial spaces constructed by man presume a certain bodily relation to space in which the body informs how the space is built and the space in turn governs the behavior of the body.

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

91

Much like Serres’s theory of the black boxes, the shell takes ambient frequencies and reinterprets them into a soft, knowable tone culled from its experience in the sea. Tawada compares the shell’s inner-spatial layout to the architecture of her office building at MIT with its halls and spaces that consciously compartmentalize language and communication into an order and logic that promotes worker efficiency and upholds the hierarchy of the university. After her meditation on the shell, Tawada writes, “I wanted to call Kurt. He had his office in Room No. 224, thus on a lower floor. Another floor meant another world” (99). The separation of one floor from another, a mere matter of feet away, constitutes a completely different and separate world according to her subjective experience of space. This space is divided according to a separate administrative function, thus even in a college environment, space becomes bureaucratized according to taxonomies of efficiency. The space of a shared building encourages a group identity, but the cordoning off of separate offices restricts the intimacy of bodies, allocating a separate, yet usually identical office space for each body. Although he is only feet below her, Tawada’s feeling of being in another world from Kurt compels her to call him on the phone instead of visiting his office. Modern technologies of communication serve to close the distance between individuals, beaming in the presence of their voice from afar into the space that Tawada inhabits. The same process that connects Tawada to an individual only feet away can replicate the same effect with someone half the globe away without any noticeable difference. The function of the telephone thus erases the varying lengths of distance, yet it does not completely erase the feeling of distance itself. Tawada remarks upon this when reaching Kurt’s answering machine, signifying that he is not present in the determined space that she presumed him to be and is thus in an unknown distance away from Tawada. “Technological development has made human voices more independent of human bodies. You can leave, copy, deposit, double, color, distort, speed up, or rewind voices. But, can a voice really exist independently of the body?” (100). Tawada’s contemplation of the answering machine recording questions the nature of technology to disembody elements of humanity for the purpose of efficient communication. Despite the list of ways in which the voice can be infinitely altered by technology in modes beyond possible recognition of its original state, the voice always signifies the presence of a human being, even in the case of the answering machine where the purpose of the recording is to notify someone of one’s absence. Technology destabilizes the assumed binary relationship between presence and absence in which Kurt’s voice on the answering machine signifies his presence in order to explain his absence. For Tawada, technologies of communication and their objects in an office space can take on the characteristics of gender. In the essay “Von der Mutter-

92

Chase Dimock

sprache zur Sprachmutter” [From the mother language to the mother of language] from her book Talisman, Tawada recalls learning the German words for all the office supplies on her desk and realizes that the only feminine object is her typewriter. She likens the typewriter to a female body as it becomes “a ‘mother of language’ for the author by giving her the gift of a new language” (Stoehr 456). While the typewriter granted her the freedom to become the mother of her own language and to give birth to something tangible like a typed manuscript, Tawada worries about computer technology and email possibly erasing the material roots of language and the physical effect of writing. Unlike the phone, which at least transports the actual voice, email and digital texts erase all material traces of the author that produces the work, which could lead to ignoring the embodied state of gender and race that informs her work. In the essay “Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist,” Tawada argues that electronic communication should not erase the bodies of writers or the printed pages they write, but it instead should infuse them with an even more precarious aura of materiality because “they do not immediately disappear” (15). The book as material reminds us that “the person who writes […] [books] actually exists, with ears and nose, having pulled shoes onto his or own feet; the experience of talking to such particular individuals seems all the odder in our contemporary world” (15). Face to face communication becomes more concentrated on the physical and the affective as it becomes more “odd” because so much electronic communication has made physical presence more rare and thus more precious. According to Tawada, the unstable relationship between presence and absence comes back to the idea of the body and the presumed liberation from the body that Enlightenment-era philosophy still holds in America, “I noticed that the word ‘unabhängig’ is not as euphoric sounding as the word ‘independent.’ How do they manage to serve up this word so convincingly? Does one get a secret recipe on Independence Day?” (100). Tawada connects the divorce of the voice and mind from the body to the constant valorization of independence and freedom as a political and cultural value in the U.S. The idea of a voice that is “unabhängig” [independent] suggests the influence of Cartesian logic and the division between mind and body in which mind is conceived of as a higher, perfectable faculty over the imperfect, materiality of the body. Just as American values of liberty and independence always recall 1776 and the creation of an independent American democracy influenced by the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, so too does the continued privileging of the faculties of the mind over the body bear the continued influence of the Enlightenment thought that sought to liberate the higher faculties of the mind from the base and carnal desires of the body. This harkens back to Tawada’s analysis of the choices at the coffee bar in which the marketing of variations of a single product make the consumer believe

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

93

he is exercising his individuality and independence. Just as variation falsely advertises ultimate power of choice, so too do all these technologies of communication falsely promise the individual’s triumph over physical space and the power of the individual’s thought to escape the material bonds of the body and be transmitted as the pure disembodied communication of thought.

Consuming language and the language of consumerism Traveling outside of the academy, Tawada explores the marketing and packaging of language to consumer culture in America. Tawada uses a light-hearted example, thoroughly philosophizing the post-modern condition of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” brand margarine. People constantly communicate with each other and exchange information. With the words “communication” and “information” I always think of a dairy product that I once saw at “Star Market.” This product is called “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.” The product had nothing to do with butter itself, but only the positive memories attached to the word “butter.” (105)

The fact that the word margarine does not appear in the name of a product, but only the word butter, which the product itself imitates speaks to the effect that language has on a sense so base and carnal as taste and hunger. The suggestion of butter attempts to make the product taste like the butter it is imitating, thus showing that a large part of the sensation of taste is not the physical experience on the taste buds themselves, but the knowledge of what has been placed upon them. We already know that when one smells melted butter like at a movie theater, one seems to almost taste it, because a large part of our ability to taste is actually based on our ability to smell what we are tasting. Listening to a word parallels the hidden function of smelling in the process of tasting; we hear the word in a certain way because it conjures associations of taste – the word is flavored. Because the product’s name is a declarative statement, the consumer is not just eating a butter substitute; he is eating information. Tawada thus adds, “Does communication have a taste without sugar? Does information have a taste without fat? The sense of taste is intelligent. It cannot be not fooled, provided it is not spoiled” (105). Tawada evidences the fact that a synesthetic disposition toward interpreting language is not an aberration, but in fact a given condition of the human mind. Words have flavors, and those words have the power to alter the sensation of taste through mere suggestion. This phenomenon is central to American consumer

94

Chase Dimock

culture and the advertising industry that markets products like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” based on the knowledge that language has the ability to seduce with a “mind over matter” prospect where the repeated suggestion of a concept can eventually coerce the individual into experiencing that concept sensually. Tawada’s analysis reveals that the consumer culture that capitalizes on this militant individualism by making mass-marketed products that seem personalized is symptomatic of a greater reluctance to lose individuality within the space of language that we all share. Relating the experiences of her fellow Germanspeaking colleague known only as “P,” Tawada writes, “P complains that too often her American students use the verb ‘haben.’ You do not say ‘Zweifel haben’ [to have doubts] but rather ‘Zweifel hegen’ [to harbor doubts]” (105). Tawada emphasizes a difference between merely possessing something [haben] and actively enriching that thing through nourishment, care, and cultivation [hegen]. In this case, a doubt is not something one just possesses. They fabricate the doubt and actively sustain it. Furthermore, Tawada explains, “The word ‘haben’ reassures us of a capitalist, enlightened, proprietory gesture as one might own different feelings, just as you can own a house and furniture. ‘Hegen,’ however, suggests an uncanny relationship between the people and their feelings” (123). For Tawada, the impulse of the students to exclusively use “haben” indicates a particularly capitalistic orientation toward other objects. They feel the need to reinforce their exclusive ownership over something, including an abstract concept like doubt which functions like a form of intellectual property. Contrasted with “hegen,” Tawada notices that the word both denotes a relationship of ownership between the speaker and the object and at the same time distances the object and separates it from the subject. This is too uncomfortable of a relationship for the U.S. American students to sustain. They must retain direct ownership that reflects full mastery over their thoughts and objects, preferring not to step into liminal space of translation in which Tawada so intrepidly loses herself. This classically liberal vision of mediating self versus other and relationships of ownership and property influences the way the students learn German, even if it means using the language improperly. Tawada’s analysis of how ideology works through language to structure relationships between individuals and objects does not stop at the level of careless mistakes by students, but extends to how learning English has altered P’s German. Tawada recounts a time when P asks her if she would like to share a ride with her to an event, “P called me and asked: ‘Do we want to share the ride together?’ At first I did not understand what she wanted to say” (124). As Tawada further explains, “The expression that P had used, was influenced by American ideas. But that did not change the fact that we have actually shared this ride. It was not important that I reached the goal more quickly and comfortably. Moreso,

Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation

95

P gave me the feeling that we were sharing a bit of time together” (125). P’s usage of German had been changed not just by the English construction of grammar and vocabulary, but also by U.S. American culture and its own way of conceiving of sharing. Tawada finds the word “share” and its connotations unsatisfactory when compared to how the German language would phrase the same action of sharing a ride. The word “share” seemed like a good-natured gesture, while, objectively, the word “teilen” even sounded cold. You share a piece of cake with your siblings, you don’t do it voluntarily, and you do it with a sharp knife. When it is not divided equally, there is strife. Therefore, the moment of cutting is more important than the moment of giving. (125)

According to Tawada, the concept of “sharing” speaks to a specifically American concept of the relationship between self and others. When P requests to share a ride, she uses the German word “teilen” as a dictionary translation of “share.” When Tawada hears “teilen,” she immediately thinks of the word with its more often used meaning as the process of cutting something in half. Clearly P does not suggest cutting the car in half, yet the meaning lost in translation speaks to the unconscious ideology embedded in the word “share.” Most often, sharing entails equally dividing up something (let’s say a cookie) and giving a “fair share” to others. While both parties eat part of the cookie, they do not experience together the same piece of cookie, only the portion that is rightfully theirs. If one were to cut the cookie in half, one half to eat now and another half for later, one would not say that they are sharing it with themselves. Share, in the U.S. American context comes into play only when a second party is involved. Although sharing has this manifest concept of magnanimity and generosity and thus inviting communion with another person, it has as well an unconscious meaning that distances the other person from the individual in possession of the item by cutting off a separate portion for another. This concept of sharing as division harkens back to Tawada’s identification of U.S. Americans as possessive individuals who cherish their individuality and separation from others. Even the act of sharing places others at a difference, performing a gesture of intimacy and kindness that at the same time distances themselves from the other. This anxiety over sharing speaks to the previously detailed preoccupation with constantly asserting ownership and exercising one’s freedom of choice. Tawada’s concept of the U.S. American steadfastly valorizes individuality as a form of personal identity that acts consciously against the interpenetration of others. The individual is constantly afraid of incorporating any form of otherness into the self, going so far as to reconfigure the idea of sharing from a co-presence of space and experience with another to an act of economically apportioning goods.

96

Chase Dimock

To come full circle, perhaps the overwhelming monolingual character of the average U.S. American is a symptom of this anxiety over the penetration of otherness. Tawada encounters several people in the university and on the street who speak multiple languages, but they are always marked as “others,” immigrants or foreign intellectuals. If speaking a foreign language means an exciting willful loss of the self for Tawada, the presence of a foreign language for the majority of the U.S. American public means a feared encounter with otherness, a loss of identity and a loss of the property and rights that that identity is assumed to guarantee. Her most basic gesture of openness to a foreign culture is the mere act of listening – a process too often thought of as passive and self-effacing. Tawada’s synesthetic approach to consuming and reproducing language turns this passivity on its head and instead chronicles how active listening makes her more aware of the specificities of her person and more aware of how she is situated in and constituted by spaces.

II Seeking Space: Gender and Regulation

Beth Muellner

Spaces Within As we move from themes of transnational movement in the first section to focus more intently on interior spaces in this second section, we see thematic overlaps. In her study on the literature of migration, Claire Horst makes clear the interconnection between the body and space: Space is constructed through the actions of individuals within it, and thus the body takes center stage […] through movements of the body, space manifests itself. The intersection of interior and exterior space are mapped onto the body: skin provides the border between them […] Sight, sound, smell and touch have a spatial function […] (18, translation by editors).

While Dimock’s focus on the sensual experience of the body in Tawada in the first section indeed homes in on the skin at one point, the broader focus in section one is on bodies moving from one geographical space to another, or indeed within another moving space (i.e., trains), offering at times sensual reflections on those experiences. In this second section of the volume, our focus on the body undergoes a slight shift. Whereas the first and last sections of German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn bookend the middle section and reflect on bodies and subjectivities more obviously moving through or repositioning themselves within space, this section, “Seeking Space: Gender and Regulation,” looks at the body as a space and the body within a static space. We should recall Horst here, for she suggests that the individual even within a static space does not stop moving, its movement defines that space as much as it is defined by it, thus remaining dynamic. Chapters of section two concern specifically what it means to inhabit or occupy space in the work of authors Alja Rachmanowa, Inka Parei, Julia Franck, and Judith Hermann. As with the diverse authors studied in the first section, what makes it logical to consider together the group of women writers under examination in this second section is their focus on negotiations within interior dwellings often reflecting a sense of loss, ambiguity, alienation, or discomfort – experiences frequently associated with the fragmentation of modern and postmodern subjectivities. As in section one, metaphors of language and writing emerge as spatial refuge for subjectivity.

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries Xenia Harwell’s essay on the relatively little-known Russian-Austrian writer Alja Rachmanowa, whose life and work spans much of the twentieth century, introduces readers to an intriguing voice in the world of German women’s writing. Harwell takes a close look at how the “political and sociocultural transitional events” in the trilogy of stories that makes up Meine russischen Tagebücher [My Russian diaries] – written by Rachmanowa in the 1930s, a period that saw her transition from living in her native Russia to her forced exile in Austria (published in 1960) – are “acknowledged and enacted through the imagery and construction of space and of the space/body relationship.” Harwell argues that “the positioning and re-positioning of the narrator’s body in various spatial configurations is a key narrative technique that demonstrates the changing political and cultural landscape, altered social relations, and the impact of traumatic events.” As a young student, Rachmanova experiences the upheaval and disruption of the Bolshevik revolution, the civil war, and permanent exile in Austria. For Rachmanova, these events of “spatial (re) location” are “intimately connected and informed by notions of home, mobility and confinement, memory, and identity.” Basing her analysis on David Seamon’s understanding of spaces and places of living as fundamentally located in the body, as well as on Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma, Harwell develops the idea that Rachmanowa’s formal temporal structure (in the form of the diary) serves merely as a backdrop for the “thematic clustering” of more privileged spatially-bound content. With filling a page with writing as a “spatial tactic,” Harwell sees the narrator as able to “construct a stable alternative space, displacing herself, as it were, into the textual space that the act of writing offers.” (Beth Muellner) Not surprisingly, the work of Alja Rachmanowa (1898–1991),1 who experienced extensive geographical dislocations in Russia between 1919 and 1925 prior to her

1 Alja Rachmanowa is the pen name of Galina Nikolaevna Djurjagina. Alternate spellings of her name can be found in World Cat Identities. Scholars have identified her by several variants: Alexandra Galina Djuragina (Grieser and Eltz-Hoffman), Galina Alexandra Djuragina or Galina Alexandra Nikolajewna Djuragina (H. Leidinger), Alja Rachmanowa or Galina von Hoyer (Riggenbach), Alja Rachmanowa or Alexandra von Hoyer (R. Leidinger 91), Galina Nikolaewna Djurjagina (Gebauer). Rachmanowa was born near Perm, Russia, and raised among the educated elite. She

102

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

exile to Vienna, is rich in spatial discourse. Her trilogy, consisting of Studenten, Liebe, Cheka und Tod [Flight from Terror] (1931), Ehen im roten Sturm [Marriages in the red storm] (1932), and Milchfrau in Ottakring [My Milkshop in Vienna] (1930), published together as Meine russischen Tagebücher [My Russian diaries] in a 1960 redaction,2 comprises a literary reconstitution of the author’s diaries and notes,3 and parallels the author’s own experience. Today, only the third volume of the trilogy, which treats the exile of the narrator in Vienna, is known within German studies.4 However, the other two volumes, both of which depict the narrator’s encounter with revolution and civil war in Russia, are essential for contextualizing the third volume. In fact, the Russian diaries are important in that they offer a woman writer’s unique perspective on revolution and war and their effects on the civilian population. The three diaries are thematically bound together in that they encompass the transitional period in the narrator’s life, a time when spatial (re) location and identity reformulation are intimately connected and informed by notions of home, mobility and confinement, memory, and identity. One might wonder why the third diary, My milkshop in Vienna, should belong in a trilogy of “Russian” diaries when its setting is clearly Vienna. I would respond that

and her family fled east with the White armies to escape the Red Terror. In Siberia, she met and married Arnulf von Hoyer, a former Austrian prisoner-of-war, and in 1922 gave birth to a son, Jurka. In 1925, she was advised to leave Russia. In Vienna, Rachmanowa ran a grocery store in Währing until von Hoyer completed his studies, whereupon they moved to Salzburg. Rachmanowa’s son was killed near Vienna at the end of World War II. After the war, the von Hoyers fled to Switzerland to escape the Soviets. Von Hoyer died in 1970 and Rachmanowa – in 1991. For additional biographical details, see Eltz-Hoffmann. 2 For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the 1960 edition of the first two volumes of the Russian diaries and the 2003 edition of the third. I have noted some interesting differences between the 1960 and 2003 editions of Milchfrau. The 1960 version does not include the sections about the uprisings in Vienna and the narrator’s negative reaction to them, or the passages relating to the film Ivan the Terrible. The 2003 version of Milchfrau leaves out the stories of Serafima, Mimi, Fräulein Fischer (the prostitute), and of the woman waiting in vain for her soldier husband. Differences also exist between the 1960 version of Studenten, Liebe, Cheka und Tod and its English translation of 1934, Flight from Terror. Such textual differences warrant an in-depth discussion, but are outside the scope of this paper. 3 See Gebauer for a discussion on differences between author and narrator. 4 Although Rachmanowa wrote in Russian, her works first appeared in print in her husband’s German translation. Very popular in the interwar period, they were translated into many languages. There are Russian-language versions of Studenten, Liebe, Cheka und Tod (Studenty, liubov’, cheka i smert’: Dnevnik russkoi studentki) and Ehen im roten Sturm (Braki v krasnom vikhre), neither of which specifies a date or place of publication, and the source of these versions is unclear. The anti-Soviet tone of the works would have precluded their publication in the Soviet Union.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

103

although the narrator is physically present in Vienna, her mental space is still very much occupied by Russia. Using spatialization as an “analytical framework” (Low 36), and examining space as it relates to “sociocultural processes and social relations” (Low 38) as well as to the notion that “the spaces, places, and environments in which a person typically lives and dwells – his lived-space, […] is first of all grounded in the body” (Seamon 161), in this chapter I demonstrate that political and sociocultural transitional events are acknowledged and enacted in the diaries through the imagery and construction of space and of the space/body relationship. I show that the positioning and re-positioning of the narrator’s body in various spatial configurations is a key narrative technique that demonstrates the changing political and cultural landscape, altered social relations, and the impact of traumatic events. It should also be noted that as one of the two organizing dimensions of the texts, the spatial is privileged over the temporal. While, as diaries, the texts are arranged chronologically, groupings of entries are often positioned in such a way that they revolve around a particular theme, which is highlighted, developed and elaborated upon from several angles, but which is fundamentally spatiallybound. In other words, although the temporal element provides the frame, the spatial element elicits content. I call this narrative technique “thematic clustering.”5 The spatial matrix, though common to both the Russian and the Vienna diaries, places an emphasis on divergent social and personal processes. The Russian diaries, which describe the gradual takeover and redefinition of Russian society by the Bolsheviks from the point of view of a member of the upper class, engage the idea of the contestation of space. As Lefebvre and others theorize, “absolute command over physical space is the focus of these contests, because it ensures ‘invisible’ control over the social reproduction of power relations” (Low and Lawrence-Zunega 20). Underlying this idea is that the “assumed neutrality of space conceals its role in maintaining the social system, inculcating particular ideologies and scripted narratives” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 30). As Anne Buttimer points out, the awareness of values associated with space is “not brought to consciousness until they are threatened: normally, they are part of the fabric of

5 One such cluster involves a visit by the narrator to a marriage license bureau. This initiates a string of voices that present different points of view on marriage, childbirth, sex, and the new Soviet woman, and results in an extended discussion of gender issues. Gebauer correctly notes that the diaries are polyphonic in nature. I would add that part of Rachmanowa’s technique is to spatially ground the polyphonic voices. The fact that thematic clustering takes place also confirms its literary construction (in contrast to a diary, which would place events chronologically and therefore randomly, throughout the year).

104

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

everyday life […]” (167). I suggest that the Russian diaries clearly illustrate this type of spatial phenomenon – the moment in history, a rupture, when space and its meaning lose their façade of neutrality and become suddenly visible through challenge to and contestation of existing power structures. At this juncture, “spatial tactics,” defined as “the use of space as a strategy and/or technique of power and social control,” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 30), come into play and manifest themselves in an assault on both space and the body. The Vienna diary, with the perspective of loss not only of home but of homeland as well, foregrounds the struggle with a new reality and new identity. Buttimer writes: “It appears that people’s sense of both personal and cultural identity is intimately bound up with place identity. The loss of home, or ‘losing one’s place’ may often trigger an identity crisis” (167). As the narrator seeks to redefine her identity and carve out a position within a new and foreign spatial milieu, the focus shifts to her interior space, where she can perform the work of healing and readjustment, and of coming to terms with her fate. Finally, whether she is in Russia or in Vienna, the narrator valorizes the act of writing as a “spatial tactic” of her own. The gesture of filling a page with writing counteracts the growing absences – of home, values, people, and lastly and eventually of herself from Russia. Thus within the diaries, the narrator is able to construct a stable alternative space, displacing herself, as it were, into the textual space that the act of writing offers. The Russian diaries focus on the profound alteration in the narrator’s status during the upheavals of the Bolshevik revolution and resulting civil war through the lens of a radically-changing physical environment, the contestation of public and private space, and the narrator’s trajectory through a series of uninhabitable places. In depicting the body as suffering, humiliated, starved, tortured, or murdered, Rachmanowa challenges the “foundational fictions” (Schaffer 102) of the Bolshevik state and contests its creation mythologies. According to Bloomer and Moore, “[s]ome of the most vivid and energizing images of the body in space come out of Russia in the years closely bracketing the Revolution. […] [These images] feature man in action as the dominant theme” (65). Coming to the events of the Russian revolution and civil war from an oppositional political view, Rachmanowa’s works provide a counter-space to the heroic Bolshevik narrative and a memory-space for events and spatial configurations that the new order intended to obliterate.6 Her alternate view projects a revolutionary body that is destructive rather than constructive, versus the sacrificial body of the opposition. The forces of revolution are gendered male in their association with the energy

6 Rachmanowa’s texts demand a place in the collective memory of Russia.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

105

and violence of their penetration into all spheres of Russian life,7 to which the counterpoint is the world of the narrator, which is primarily feminine, familyoriented, nurturing, humanistic and genteel.8 This is brought clearly to light in a scene in which students discuss going on strike and the narrator leads a contingent of students favoring completing semester exams. Afterwards, a male revolutionary comments, “These women, these disgusting bookish dames, […] spoil everything for us. For them the revolution means absolutely nothing at all; just as long as they can sit behind their books and cram!” (Flight from Terror 132).9 However, the fact that Alja speaks up in a hall of revolutionary students contradicts notions of female passivity. In addition, Alja’s self-selected role as social observer / recorder (by both training and vocation) places her into a masculine position.10 Moreover, as a teen Alja already demonstrates that she is an independent, progressive thinker who is not stereotypically upper-class. She moves beyond her mother’s class sense of decorum, for example, by convincing her to rent a room to a student. Alja breaches social convention even further when she asks her parents for permission to conceal in their home a female student revolutionary being hunted by authorities. Both of these instances characterize Alja through her relationship to space – as someone willing to share her private space in unique (for the time) ways. Establishing a priori the narrator’s sympathy to the struggles of the Russian people, her willingness to cross social boundaries, and her support of social change, enhances her credibility as a narrator depicting the revolutionary machine in a negative light. In the diaries, the dwelling, as it portrays the arc of social change and social demotion, is a central focus of narration. The grandfather’s house, featured in the first diary, represents the established social roles and identities of old Russia. In describing Christmas 1916 in this house, where the entire family has gathered from different parts of Russia to honor the grandparents, the narrator writes, “Conviviality, peace and contentment enveloped body and soul. Everything here was as it had been twenty, thirty years ago […]” (Flight from Terror 73). In the

7 Interestingly, the only woman revolutionary depicted in the novels is Griselda, a crazed sadomasochist, suggesting that a female revolutionary is an aberration. 8 Alja’s father, as a physician, is in a nurturing profession. 9 Later, staying within the educational system through teaching is part of the narrator’s strategy to gain a foothold in the Soviet space. She is excluded from the system because the values she associates with education (enlightenment through knowledge) are diametrically opposed to those of the new state (priority of political activism in hiring and awarding of degrees over intellectual engagement). Blunt and Rose point out that “spaces are constructed through struggles over power/knowledge” (5). 10 Blunt attributes the masculine role to the “scientific observer” (57–58).

106

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

tranquil countryside, Christmas rituals confirm the old social order. The wealthy but benevolent grandfather receives village children and church choirs singing carols and hymns. Workers come to the back door to offer holiday greetings and receive gifts, while in the main rooms the table is abundantly set for family and guests, and the provincial gentry wear their Christmas finery. To Alja, the house represents the Russia of bygone days, the real Russia: Everyone dances with enthusiasm. How far this world is from the student gatherings with their calls for revenge, for destruction and annihilation! At this moment here, where everything is full of peace and where everyone is concerned only about the trifles of everyday life, it seems odd to me that Russia is said to be a powder keg. (Flight from Terror 78)

Having just come from the city, where the revolutionary spirit is taking hold, Alja feels the acute contrast between the revolutionary developments in Perm and the unchanged world she finds here. To her the latter still appears to be more authentically representative of her idea of what Russia is. Moreover, the house’s unique architectural layout suggests a deeper symbolic meaning. The house consists of two distinct parts, one modern, bright and airy, and the other older, darker, and more traditional. The divide suggests a binary of male versus female, modern versus ancient, worldly versus sacred; the ancient and sacred space is occupied by women. However, while the house reveals the historical divide of the binary, through its inner spatial flow it simultaneously presumes the historical continuum of Russian history from ancient to modern and the harmonious confluence of both tendencies. Alja can walk from the modern part of the house into the old section, where she can recapture what she terms the “great” ancient values of peace, harmony, remoteness from the present, and grandness. In her mind, these values stand apart from the revolutionary ideology she has witnessed in Perm. It [the dining hall] is illuminated by petroleum lamps; the floor is covered with soft rugs. […] In one corner hangs a venerable icon, and beneath it hangs a votive candle, the flame of which is never extinguished. […] A few old women with black caps sit around [the table]. It seems as if they have always lived in grandfather’s house; it seems as if they were born in it, as if they had never been young, as if they have been sitting by the samovar and carrying on their quiet conversations there for their entire lives. There is something very ancient about them, as if they come from a different world. […] The women speak of events that took place thirty or forty years ago as if they had occurred yesterday. (Flight from Terror 78–79)

The dimly lit, quiet room decorated with icons on the walls and occupied by old women has an almost church-like atmosphere that to Alja seems to be a reverential and idyllic space. In fact, the concept of the “idyllic chronotope” that Renate Rechtien puts forth in her discussion of Christa Wolf, another writer who experi-

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

107

enced great social change during her life, can also be aptly applied when speaking of the grandfather’s house. Rechtien defines the “idyllic chronotope” as having unity of place, slowing down the passage of time and highlighting stability, rootedness and belonging. The idyll illuminates the fundamental aspects of everyday life, foregrounding family relationships over the generations, parents’ loving care and protection of their children, and life in harmony with the rhythm of nature. (268)

The grandfather’s house as a site of familial and social interaction, as well as in its reflection of timeless values, is representative of the “idyllic chronotope,” and as such, is a site of longing for the narrator. Alja’s identification with the old section of the house (“how mysterious, how cozy this all is!” Flight from Terror 79) is part of her narrative strategy to connect herself to old Russia and the Russian people.11 This connection is established repeatedly in the diaries, but most explicitly when on his way to war, Alja’s first love, Vadim, says to her: “Alja, you and Russia, the two of you are one, great Russia and you, my little Alja” (Flight from Terror 153). David Clarke’s explanation of the concept of nation adds an important dimension to what appears to be just a romantic utterance. Speaking about the formulation of the idea of “nation,” Clarke states: Places are culturally produced geographical entities, which are always experienced subjectively. Part of the “imagining” of such entities is that the difference of subjective experience and individual identity is often erased by the fantasy of a collective experience and identity. The prime example of such “imagining” is […] the nation […]. (12)

The exchange between Alja and Vadim, both representatives of the patriotic upper class, illustrates Clarke’s view of nation as a distinct construct by those within a particular milieu in that what underlies the exchange between the two is the assumption that the Russian national space has an immutable and universal meaning. It should be noted that the idea of the “idyllic chronotope” also contains within it assumptions regarding the universality of one’s view. Later, of

11 The narrator wages a (figurative) campaign in the diaries to underscore her Russianness and the subsequent folly of being thrown out of Russia. She associates herself with the Russian folk (she collected local folksongs and stories as a child, and with ancient religious traditions (through the figures of the holy fool Mother Dorothea and Archpriest Avakuum)). See Gebauer for a discussion of links between Avakuum and Alja. I would add the following links: they both speak out against authority, are exiled to Siberia, and keep diaries. It is also possible to look upon Alja’s diaries as works of auto-hagiography, just as, according to Margaret Ziolkowski, Avakuum’s diary may be considered to be in the same genre (197).

108

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

course, when the Bolsheviks introduce a different view of nation, the identification between Alja and Russia becomes invalid and she is seen instead as a “foreign body” that needs to be expelled. In the diaries, the idea that the revolution challenges the conception of space held by people like Alja and Vadim is conveyed from the perspective of Alja by means of a visually-oriented narrative mapping of the occupation and physical domination of space by the Bolsheviks as they move across Russia from the political center (St. Petersburg) toward the periphery of European Russia, where Alja is situated. As the upheavals move closer, they have a more and more direct impact upon the narrator as they intersect with the public and private places she inhabits, and finally, with her bodily spaces. First, as the revolutionaries encroach upon Perm’s public places (shops on main streets), Alja is forced indoors into the private and initially protective space of her home, while the street, in contrast, is personified as a monster: We now receive guests not in the salon and music room, but in the dining room, because its windows do not face the street. Mother says it is better this way, because there is no point in provoking people. Now we never forget any more that right outside our windows the monster “Street” threatens us, a monster that believes it has a right to our property and our lives (Flight from Terror 178).

Initially, then, the intrusion into Alja’s private space is psychological rather than physical in that fear becomes a part of her life. The actual physical penetration of the house follows in stages. When a street mob gains partial entry into the front rooms, it is pushed out, but the incursion alters Alja’s relationship to the house, which she now sees as a trap. Once the Bolsheviks are in control, the penetration of the house becomes systematic and frequent, and the intentional chaos of house searches, during which family possessions are strewn about, leave the family feeling exposed, vulnerable, and chronically on edge. Alja writes: “But we have the sensation that we will choke from lack of air. Something in our lives is shattered, broken […]” (Flight from Terror 173). The process of penetration continues as additional families, then soldiers, move in and displace the family into two rooms. Its spatial anxiety balloons when Gorbunow, the murderer of Alja’s grandmother, moves in. Alja says: “And now this animal and his wife will live next to us, separated from us by only a thin wall! Our house has now become a hell for us!” (Flight from Terror 220).12 This concludes a process by which the

12 Gorbunow also forbade her burial in the family cemetery, impaled a local holy man and dismantled the grandparents’ home. His presence leads Alja to contemplate the nature of evil.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

109

meaning of the home to Alja undergoes a gradual and complete transformation, shifting from a protective site of refuge to one of claustrophobic exposure and horror. The grandfather’s house is similarly attacked once the revolution has inevitably reached the countryside. Its destruction at the hands of the Bolsheviks13 occurs as the grandfather lies unconscious and dying inside. Both the house and the samovar, which formerly symbolized the vitality of home and hearth, become invested with human qualities that parallel the condition of the grandfather: “The samovar had fallen silent. It stood lifelessly in the corner, dead […]. The house was breathing its last” (Flight from Terror 179). The demise of this house, with its architectural evocation of the melding of eastern and western traditions in Russian history, metaphorically points to the fact, perhaps, that Bolshevik victory demands the effacement of both strands of cultural heritage that preceded them. Alja grieves the loss of her grandfather’s house and that of the life it represented: “Oh, how sad it is, an old house that has grown silent! The people destroy it mercilessly, and I grieve so for this venerable, peaceful life in this large, old house […]” (Flight from Terror 179). By the time the narrator flees Perm,14 she has passed through the spatial “zones of familiarity” (Clarke 10) made uninhabitable through invasion and destruction and at this stage, as she becomes a part of the less than human milieu, it is her bodily space and her body that bear the burden of her new existence. The last familiar stop on the journey east, an aunt’s house, is also the juncture at which the plunge into a completely different space takes place: “For the last time the redolence of fine culture, which wafted from each small corner of the house, enveloped me, and then I went forth, toward the filthy, stinking cattle cars” (Flight from Terror 266). The family’s new situation in the cattle car delineates the loss of rank, power, prestige and privilege associated with ownership of their home. As they take their beastly (in both senses) position in the cattle car, Alja says: “We are sitting crowded in upon each other, staring at each other like obtuse animals” (Flight from Terror 267), and “The straw […] is soaked and putrid with excrement” (Flight from Terror 269). Previously, when they were attached to

Observing his politeness, tenderness towards his wife, kindness to animals and love of music, she states, “However, the most horrifying thing is that he is actually not a monster. If he were a monster, it would be less terrifying” (Flight from Terror 221). Her conclusion is reminiscent of the notion of the banality of evil expressed several decades later by Hannah Arendt in a different context. 13 The Bolsheviks decree that the house and grounds were not to be cared for and they boorishly carried on a death watch over the grandfather in anticipation of acquiring his home. 14 Perm was occupied first by the Reds, then by the Whites (with whom she flees), and then again by the Reds.

110

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

a house, they could speak “with authority” (Blunt and Rose 2), but now, without a house they are, like animals, deprived of a voice. David Sibley explains the social significance of beast imagery:15 […] the boundaries of society are continually redrawn to distinguish between those who belong and those who, because of some perceived cultural difference, are deemed to be out of place. In order to legitimate their exclusion, people who are defined as “other” or residual, […] are commonly represented as less than human. In the imagery of rejection, they merge with the non-human world (107).

In the case of Alja and her family, they are represented as less than human not just symbolically or through imagery, but are actually placed “out of place” and made into “other” by means of their spatial repositioning into the space normally occupied by animals. The family’s exclusion from society continues to be suggested by other living spaces it occupies, which are usually of limited dimensions or shared (e.g., a corner of a room with three other families living in the other corners). Sibley theorizes that space “is implicated in the cultural construction of outsiders in two respects. First, marginal, residual spaces, places […] confirm the outsider status of the minority” (112). Spatial and social coercion go hand in hand. The text provides many instances in which former upper class individuals live in former animal facilities. One of Alja’s friends becomes insane when his house is taken from him. On the other hand, Alja’s family gradually becomes desensitized to the idea of private space. Additionally, the image of the rail car as home concretizes the idea that marginalization can be achieved by destabilizing the living space.16 Alja says: “Who can imagine what it means to live in a railroad car for months on end? If one leaves the car for just a few minutes, […] one can never be sure that, upon one’s return, one will not find an empty space in the spot where the ‘home’ was

15 Beast imagery is prevalent in the diaries. Alja refers to the mob as beasts, and she thinks of the people of Irkutsk, who have not yet experienced the Red Terror and who continue to enjoy life, as unsuspecting beasts about to go to slaughter. 16 Outrunning the Reds on the speeding train is only temporarily successful – the image of the Reds in pursuit is of a relentless and uncontrollable force. All of Russia appears to be on rails and therefore destabilized. Thousands of refugees on trains are wildly seeking food and trying to outrun their fate: “The cattle cars are crammed full with people […] But are they still people? Many no longer have teeth; their gums are bloody and their faces are greenish-gray […] Most of the children are almost naked […] The most terrifying thing is the eyes – dull, lackluster, and with a stupor that follows lunacy. One knows in looking at these people that they must have suffered something horrifyingly unspeakable, but that this pain is already past. That which still flickers is the extinguishing of life” (Ehen 417). The railroads symbolize the stirring up of social space prior to its reconstitution.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

111

located” (Marriages 442–443). Situated in cattle cars, Alja and her fellow outsiders read Molochowets, a traditional Russian cookbook targeted at young housewives. While this diverts their attention from their horrible meals,17 it is a gesture that allows them to re-enact the social rites of sharing meals, if not in designated spaces, then at least in the sharing of a book. The narrator’s circular journey from Perm to Irkutsk and back discloses the futility of motion within the Russian space. Though this space is expansive, it has no outlet, therefore evoking images of incarceration, imprisonment, and death.18 Alja is ordered to return to Perm by the Bolsheviks, and does so against her will. The return to the city where she was once at the top of the social pyramid foregrounds the theme of appearance and masquerade. Alja’s unexpected concern with how she looks suggests that a momentary lapse into the social space of her girlhood – into her vestigial upper-class persona – has been evoked by the return to that space. Alja states: “I was truly afraid that I might meet one of my old acquaintances, for the reason that I was so badly dressed! […] But it seems to me that the city was also very ashamed to look me in the eye” (Marriages 431). Alja and her native city mirror one another in that the years of war and terror have made them both unrecognizable and visibly downtrodden in appearance.19 Perm is no longer the bustling urban center it once was, just as Alja and her family are no longer at the center of society. The shame Alja feels and projects onto the city indicates that she has not yet acknowledged that her decline was beyond her personal control. Nor does she fully realize that the members of her social strata have been decimated and are no longer there to judge her appearance. The shock of the return does involve the gradual realization that the spaces formerly occupied by the upper classes have been appropriated by the proletariat. Gorbunow, for example, now lives in a villa that he has furnished with the belongings of Alja’s grandfather and other well-to-do persons (Marriages 427). His

17 Speaking about her diet while among the Bolsheviks, she says: “Sometimes we ourselves wonder how we can still eat this Soviet soup at all. The cow eyes, teeth and bristles are becoming more and more frequent, whereas in contrast, the pieces of liver, which the cook throws into the soup with his filthy fingers, are becoming smaller and smaller. […] What misery […]” (Flight from Terror 312). 18 Russia’s open spaces are deceptive. In Omsk, Alja notes: “I can go […] far into the steppe. […] And nevertheless I am not free, I feel like I’m in prison […] Oh Omsk, you city in which Dostoevsky was incarcerated, you are now a huge prison for thousands […]” (Flight from Terror 310). 19 Perm is empty, looted storefronts are boarded up, houses have disappeared, the church is a railroad club, and everything is dirty. Alja learns of friends who were executed when the Reds retook Perm, and sick people lie untended on the street (Ehen 433). Both house and city might be considered to occupy a female gendered position in that they are “passive” against the onslaught of revolutionary might.

112

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

maid wears a white apron and serves rare and exotic Russian dishes during this time of famine. Gorbunow’s use of both space and artifacts clearly illustrates Hilary Winchester’s contention that: Powerful agents creating the landscape may make use of particular techniques to promulgate a natural order; the techniques include the processes of domination and legitimation. Domination may involve the taking of prime space, the control of space […] as to effect control. Legitimation may involve the use of other power or authority to validate this control. Both processes may involve symbols, myths and the subconscious associations to establish that domination and legitimation (141).

While symbolic, Gorbunow’s occupation of this space is hollow. Without having undergone the social process of becoming upper-class, his is only a surface imitation – a Bolshevik imaginary of upper class life.20 More importantly, he is also the imitation of the revolutionary because he has not implemented the revolutionary ideology. Alja unmasks him: I remembered the wild, cruel, bloodthirsty Gorbunow, the proletarian who hated the bourgeoisie with an infernal frenzy. […] But now, that same Gorbunow […] was bourgeois, just like all of those whom he had murdered! […] Yes, Gorbunow had murdered the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie had won, because Gorbunow himself had become bourgeois (Marriages 430).

Alja realizes that despite all of the rhetoric, the social order has not been fundamentally altered by the Bolsheviks. Instead, she notes, they had simply placed themselves into the slots of those who had been in prominent social positions after eliminating them through violence. The positioning of the narrator as the birthing body in the maternity hospital amplifies the themes of confinement and powerlessness, violence and the disappearance of humane values, and underscores them within a specifically gendered context. Dressed in a bloody gown (and forbidden to wear her own as a “bourgeois” desire), and placed on a blood-soaked mattress in a confining and uncomfortable position, the narrator is told not to have the child until morning. Her cries for help are ignored as the child arrives during the night. Weak from massive bleeding, lying in a frigid room without cover, she is unable to reach her newborn. The bloody and almost deadly scene reveals the disregard for life in a place that should be devoted to its appearance and sustenance. More importantly, it discloses that neither Alja’s reproductive act nor her offspring are valued in the new

20 In another example, the family’s former maid, Masha, now owns their house and proudly wears the mother’s clothes.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

113

social system. In a sense, then, the eviction of Alja, her husband and child, from Russia in 1925, i.e., their final obliteration from the Russian space, is a logical final step to the process of removal that began in 1917.21 Despite the hardships and suffering in Russia, the pivotal traumatic event of the narrator’s life is her removal from Russia. Alja associates her banishment from Russia with the violence of an exorcism she once witnessed. A young village woman was being beaten and tortured to cast out the devil within, when in reality she is distraught after losing her fourth child. Alja sees both the exorcism and her own ejection from Russia as cruel means of dealing with social ills (My milkshop 191).22 Insofar as eviction from Russia is the focus of Alja’s trauma, Cathy Caruth’s analysis of Freud’s exile experience may be instructive. Caruth points out that for Freud, neither the German invasion of Austria nor the Nazi persecution was the locus of trauma, but rather it was the “trauma of leaving” (21). She postulates that trauma is “the story of the unbearable nature of the event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (7, 60, 64). This offers a plausible explanation of the narrator’s depressed state of mind, of her obsession with the banishment itself and of homesickness for the homeland. Caruth further theorizes that when there is excessive trauma, the individual is unable to truly grasp and assimilate the events as they are occurring (9). In the case of the narrator, the rapid succession of events in Russia followed by ejection might have been difficult for the narrator to assimilate as they occurred, whereas once the journey ceases, in Vienna, the work of memory and working through trauma can begin.

21 Roslyn Deutsche states “[h]ow we define public space is intimately connected to what it means to be human, the nature of society, and the kind of political community we want’ (1996; 296). Furthermore, Dowler contends that “[m]orality is forged in the[se] same negotiations that structure social space as democratic, autocratic, totalitarian, or otherwise; therefore, the concept of a public sphere mirrored by a private sphere conveys […] a particular set of beliefs and habits that would be called morality“ (6). This suggests that both exorcism and the banishment are appropriate within the context of the rules of morality of the corresponding social systems. Alja is a deviant from the Soviet moral code. Kristin Gebauer theorizes that the narrative “I” of the diaries represents pre-revolutionary national cultural identity and morality and is playing the didactic role of warning against the dangers and excesses of communism (120) and extolling the religious virtues of love, hope, and faith (118). 22 The process Alja passes through after her catastrophic loss reminds one of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle. Alja experiences the first three stages in Russia: denial (she feels it must be a mistake and seeks out officials to try to correct the situation), anger, and bargaining (she seeks out authorities to allow her to remain in Russia until her child is well). In Vienna, she reaches the fourth stage, depression, and struggles to reach the final stage, acceptance.

114

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

As the discarded body, the narrator perceives herself as the undesired Other in the Soviet space.23 At the same time, dislocated and repositioned in the exile space of Vienna, she feels as Other there too.24 The urban environment elicits the sense of otherness in the narrator immediately upon her arrival in Vienna. The noise, bustle, and all-night traffic, the damp, dirty and foul-smelling rented room, and her child’s cry to go “home,” all establish Vienna as “not home.” As often in Rachmanowa’s works, the clothes (old and worn) make it clear that the narrator does not fit the new space.25 The city that the narrator maps is one of back streets and small neighborhood parks. Absent are Vienna’s landmarks and tourist sites. The narrator acknowledges her marginality by preferring to occupy marginal spaces – on Sundays, for example, she strolls through side streets to avoid the festive spaces where people wear their best clothes. She inhabits the dark corners of churches, feels their unfamiliar structure, longs for the sounds of prayers in her native language, and seeks to locate God in exile. Nature is only a tentative presence in the urban landscape. A blade of grass next to concrete, or a patch of blue sky deny the narrator the fullness of nature as a site for restoration and contemplation, as it had been in Russia.26 This absence becomes a site of desire: The life that we lead now in Vienna seems to me to be so hard to bear also because it has completely torn me away from nature. Nature has always played a very special role in my life […] And now I have to forego everything that was such an essential component of my self. I feel like I have been thrown into a prison. (My milkshop 140–141)

23 Alja expresses unconditional love for Russia: “[…] even though I have understood the cruelty of my homeland very well, I nevertheless felt that I would never be able to stop thinking about it and loving it […]” (My milkshop 256). 24 Alja states: “[…] in this glorious clear frosty weather, Austria again seems to me to be the cold stranger. But Russia has also already become a stranger to me. […] And again it seems to me that there is only one homeland for people – death” (My milkshop 160). While talking about suicide, Alja draws on her literary roots for strength: “Often I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s words. He said: The Russian woman is brave” (169), and “On days such as this, which bring no sparks of joy, either for me or for those around me, I take up my diary and write. I write about the everyday, which depresses me, and in doing this I again think of Dostoevsky’s words“ (Flight from Terror 169, 170). 25 Clothing frequently reflects spatial discomfiture in Rachmanowa’s works. For example, when the narrator visits the luxurious railroad car of a Bolshevik official, she says: “In my sandals with the string soles and in my worn dress made of sack canvas, I felt completely awkward in this ‘cultivated’ milieu. Stepan Petrowitsch Pugowkin also seemed to feel that I didn’t quite fit in here. He didn’t even ask me to sit down; instead, he left me standing” (Flight from Terror 317). 26 Alja talks about her religious convictions with a fellow university student, telling him that she finds God in her belief in nature.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

115

The intensity of the need for nature is reflected in a scene in which the narrator has such a strong mental visualization of herself in nature in Russia that she physically senses that she is occupying that space. On the other hand, even when spring arrives, the narrator positions herself as the outsider who cannot partake of its foreign pleasures: “I am ashamed of my mutilated life on this day when nature celebrates […]” (My milkshop 219). Alja has a similar strong reaction to nature when she views the film Ivan the Terrible. In this case, she eagerly soaks up the screen images of the Russian landscape, and then leaves the theater. Moving from the darkness in the theater into the darkness of the street, she walks through the city, peering into the windows of the Viennese pursuing their evening activities. She perceives the film scenes of Russia as real, while the Viennese in their windows appear to be fantastic (unreal). The distancing effect of the dark space and her hidden body in its shadows again articulates her position as the Other. Exile signifies the body’s positioning within a locational matrix of social relations for which it is unprepared. Alja’s sense of otherness is fueled by a wide range of factors. Neighbors are xenophobic; Austrian housewives ridicule her housekeeping (after voyeuristically examining the personal items she is laundering); and some wish her business to fail. Others are fervent admirers of the new Soviet state, and publishers reject her stories. Her sense of alienation is heightened by the 1927 riots, when Alja is dismayed that such disturbances could surface on western soil, and experiences deja-vu in her fear of the mob’s unpredictable appropriation of space.27 External historical events are connected to the personal experience of the narrator through a woman’s space. The laundry room metaphorically localizes and condenses Austrian culture as one of order, regularity and hierarchy. The Austrian women allow laundry procedures to become disrupted during the riots. Alja’s own foray into disorder is her accidental dyeing of a batch of laundry in the color red. When the riots cease, order returns to the laundry room, and Alja’s return to normalcy is signified by her happy attitude towards home and housework. In the third diary, there is a distinct narrative shift inward, and the articulation of self-observation manifests itself with greater frequency and is expressed as a disassociation of mind and body: “I stand next to myself, as it were, and observe myself and how I react to the blows of fate” (138). At the same time, issues relating to identity become problematic: “The most difficult thing in my life today is that I have, so to speak, lost my inner physiognomy, or, to express it more clearly, all of

27 As they had in Perm, everyone hides at home. Alja, who fears mobs, is caught in one mob scene, but otherwise is informed of outside events by others (a recurrent technique of Rachmanowa’s).

116

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

the people around me do not see me as I actually am, but rather as someone else, as someone who is completely foreign to me, yes, even as someone completely the opposite of who I really am” (My milkshop 39). Contributing to this issue is her own uncertainty about accepting her new profession: (“I wanted to be a university professor, but I became a ‘milkmaid’! One must accept life as it is, without sighs and lamentation,” [My milkshop 56]). The milk shop represents spatial withdrawal and the retraction of the self into a womb-like enclosure away from the urban environment, with some private Russian space created for herself and her child. It is a space from which the husband is often absent. In a sense, it represents a return to a traditional gendered space, in that the narrator has little opportunity to venture beyond its boundaries, that most of her customers are women, and that the product being sold is milk. Isolation in the shop and confinement to a routine reflects the narrator’s initial disengagement from and anxiety about the Viennese landscape, particularly in reference to her son’s desire to venture out to embrace street life and ill-mannered behavior. Although the narrator is confined to the shop, the stories of those who rotate through this space broaden her experience and inscribe the shop with a narrative meaning.28 Some of the stories have an additional role of either mirroring the narrator (e.g., the journalist) or showing who she is not (e.g., Serafima, who is also married to an Austrian prisoner of war,29 the German “underground man,” and the poor Russian émigrés who have no future, such as the button seller). The mind/body split in the narrator’s identity is expressed spatially in the form of the double life she leads – in Vienna as the physical site of day, and virtual Russia within the dreamscape. Dreams allow Alja to reclaim the aborted relationship with Russia, but they also force her to face the reality of what Russia has become. For example, a dream in which she sees herself looking at and moving closer to her cozy home becomes a nightmare when she looks closer to find it is occupied by soldiers with bayonets. Her reactions to these dreams range from hopelessness to a sense of contentment with life in Vienna, and also trigger a space/body response. In one instance, bounded by grief, she feels that she is in an impenetrable darkness floating in space: “I write in the darkness […], I feel that, which a person can only feel when she is completely alone, suspended in

28 The narrator has an interest in depicting women’s issues. Many of her own anxieties are the anxieties of women – her desire to care for her parents in their old age, her concern for the happiness of her husband, and the cultural integrity of her child. Her concern with transmitting her culture to her progeny is elicited early in the diaries when she reflects on the meaning of the loss of the grandfather’s house to future generations. 29 Serafima’s story is not included in the 2003 edition of Milchfrau von Ottakring.

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

117

space” (My milkshop 153). In another instance, happy to be free, she energetically cleans the bedroom.30 The writing space is the place to which the narrator consistently returns throughout the diaries. Writing under the direst of circumstances in Russia – facing starvation, cold and lack of housing, in the midst of mass executions, or in a weakened state after illness or childbirth – she performs both a life-affirming gesture, as well as an act of witnessing.31 Writing in a frenzy also reflects her psychological state32 (as well as the frenzied state of the world), and as she writes, records and narrates, she insures her own survival: “I am writing my diary on small, loose scraps of paper, on fragments, just like the ones that make up my life. Is there ultimately a purpose to this eternal writing down? I don’t know, but I feel as if this is the source from which I keep drawing new strength in my struggle” (My milkshop 138). In both Russia and Vienna the diary represents a private space when life is lived primarily in public. In Soviet Russia, Alja is watched by the Cheka/ GPU, by acquaintances, by colleagues, and by strangers (e.g., the cripple under their railroad car). In Vienna she is on display in her shop, and being scrutinized by her Austrian neighbors. Writing helps not only to deflect the gaze but also, through observation and recording, to return the gaze of those surveying her. The third diary, compared to the first two, appears to be more self-consciously literary. Alja expresses her desire to be a published writer on several occasions. Her double, the journalist who visits the shop, mirrors the narrator’s own interests and intentions as a writer. The advice she gives Alja illustrates this: You are intelligent; perhaps you could observe today’s women for a while and then tell me a little about them. You see, I write primarily about the lives of women, especially of women who live on the outskirts of the city. […] Of course, you won’t have the gift of observation that is required of a writer […] (My milkshop 209).

The importance of writing is mirrored in the value placed on the diary as an object. Prior to the first house search in Russia, the revolutionary Griselda warns

30 Later, dreams demonstrate the narrator’s growing acceptance of Vienna, as she begins to dream about her present, and no longer, past, life. 31 W. G. Sebald suggests that the greatest destructive traumatic events can only be depicted through simple description, without emotional elaboration. He says, “The ideal of truth inherent in […] entirely unpretentious objectivity […] proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction” (53). The Russian diaries adhere quite consistently to this technique. This is not to deny that Rachmanowa has her own perspective on events. 32 The narrator is manic in her studies as well. In one year she passes 14 exams and 8 seminars. Studies are a refuge. At one point, she states that burying herself in her books is the only way to survive the constant killings.

118

Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

Alja to hide her “valuables,” by which she means the diary. When the mob attacks the narrator’s house, Alja’s mother gathers her gold items while Alja gathers love letters and diary. When Alja flees Perm, she takes only her diary. When the mob penetrates the house, Alja stands paralyzed, expecting death, but holding her diary across her chest in a gesture of oneness with the artifact. Finally, to protect the diary (and herself) she gives it to an Austrian friend to take out of Russia. Thus, when she sends it “blindly out into the distant land” (Flight from Terror 323), the diary becomes a material artifact of the culture of displacement, and foreshadows her own eventual propulsion into that same blind space. The narrator’s journey through war and exile force her body into numerous spatial configurations. As a corporeal body, she is subject to various forms of duress and at times comes close to death. As a body of “lived experience,” she passes through terror, war, exile and maturation from girl to woman; as a “center of agency,” she is represented by her moral values and actions; and as a “location for speaking and acting on the world” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2) – as writer and witness. To view the narrator in the full context of the diary trilogy is to see her in a way that is not possible if the reading is limited to My milkshop in Vienna. However, reading the third diary alone does allow the reader to repeat the experience of the narrator’s Austrian neighbors – to perceive her as she is in the moment and on the surface, and as one without a previous history. The diaries represent a journey that begins with the narrator situated within a space that can be described as an idyllic chronotope, and concludes with her repositioning in a similar space, displaced now to Salzburg. The narrator finds her connection with nature, not in the liminal space of Vienna, but in the natural beauty of this small town. Additionally, if, as Caruth states, the trauma of exile lies in the loss of expected reality and of the “locus of referentiality” (6), then Salzburg provides the opposite, what Anne Buttimer considers a basic need of every individual – “a home and horizons of reach outward from that home” (170), i.e., hope for the future. The narrator exults in the newly-discovered oneness with the people, nature, and God – the idyllic chronotope in the new homeland: It warms my heart to watch how the child runs from here to there, picks flowers and […] chatters about the beetles and the butterflies. […] The sun was scorching, the blue skies curved up above, and below spread out before us lay the expansive land, with many small villages and hamlets, with blue streams and rivers […] You are beautiful, Austria! […] To beauty you also add a peace, a feeling of clarity and safety, in a way that is not familiar to anyone in Russia (My milkshop 291–292).

We know from history that this idyll will be short-lived for both narrator and author. For Rachmanowa, finding Salzburg does not signify a move away from her homeland. Her subsequent literary oeuvre, consisting of works situated in

Repositioning the Exiled Body: Alja Rachmanowa’s Trilogy My Russian Diaries

119

Russia and of biographies of well-known Russians, suggests that to a certain extent, Rachmanowa remained within the Russian space both psychologically and intellectually. In the opening scene of the trilogy My Russian diaries, on the day of her seventeenth birthday, the narrator Alja intently examines her nude self in the mirror before becoming embarrassed and quickly drawing on her clothes. The type of inner reflection that this opening image promises is not characteristic of the first two diaries, which are not texts of introspection, but rather of observation and depiction of changing daily life. It is as if the narrator turns the mirror away from herself and onto society, reflecting in her diaries the social upheavals taking place in Russia and their consequences to society and the individual. Thus the first two diaries engage with the external manifestations of change, and the narrator is somewhat hidden behind the mirror – as observer and recorder of events that change quickly and move from one (dis)location to another in rapid succession. Only in the third diary, in exile, when motion through spatial configurations slows and the narrator seeks to regain equilibrium, is the promise of the opening scene fulfilled as the mirror is turned starkly back onto the narrator, now mirroring her interior world through reflection, dreams, memories and a more explicit articulation of the need for self-expression through writing. Spatial discourse unifies and is an integral and essential part of the narrative structure and patterns of the trilogy. Because both war and exile are fundamentally spatiallygrounded (and un-grounding) events, embedding the themes of war and exile within a discourse on space is particularly fitting as a means of representing, symbolizing and amplifying sweeping social and cultural transitions and the ensuing challenges to the body, the mind and identity. Access to and domination over space is a key symbol for gaining or losing power, position and status within a particular society, whether one’s own altered society, or a new one into which one seeks to gain entry. The home in its multiplicity of manifestations is a central experience of these transitions, foregrounding and illuminating the processes of struggle, trauma and change. Nature is positioned as a site of longing and restoration that contrasts to the traumatic. However, it is writing that re-centers the narrator by providing an alternative space for her to overcome her spatial losses and to reformulate notions of home, agency and memory within a creative context.

Elaine Martin

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement in Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman Inka Parei’s novel Die Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman] describes the immediate post-Berlin-Wall German capital in a way rarely done, with “prose that imitates the dark, crumbling, and ravaged atmosphere of East Berlin as well as the psychological state of the narrator,” as Monica Carter describes in her review of the novel (Three Percent). Elaine Martin’s discussion of the novel pushes our reflections on the body in space to a new level, namely that of the body as space, specifically the violation of the space of the body through the experience of rape. Recalling Massey’s “inextricably interwoven” sense of time and space, the temporal space of Parei’s novel revolves around the shift from a formerly divided East and West Berlin to its reunification and aftermath (1989–1994). The process of the city’s reunification is layered onto the spatial metaphors of the healing raped body, divided into a “pre-rape” Dunkel (dark) and a “post-rape” Hell (bright) that also seek to be reunited. In discussing Parei’s use of spatial metaphor throughout the novel, Martin carefully outlines the steps that the protagonist takes to piece herself back together, moving through phases of healing located in theories of trauma and rape as discussed by Christiane Künzel and Julia Kristeva. The mapping of the rape victim’s experiences onto the changes occurring in East and West Berlin offers a subjective and alternative understanding of reunification, as Martin explains: “The spaces on Hell’s map have little to do with the spaces on the physical map, of course. Her markers are not Berlin’s famous icons such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column which dissipate in her dream; […] The focal point for Hell is instead the space where the rape took place, and this point now determines all subsequent direction.” Martin’s interpretation reveals abjection as a potential space for the empowerment of the female subject, thereby allowing for a feminist reclaiming of the space and body of Parei’s narrator. (Beth Muellner) In her debut novel Die Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman] (1999), Inka Parei explores the devastating consequences of sexual violation. The time frame is May 1989 to 1994. The main protagonist remains to all intents and purposes unnamed: we are introduced instead to Dunkel [dark] and Hell [bright], the central protagonist’s ego and alter ego. Parei provides no semblance of a metanarrative with which to contextualize the scenes; nor does the text follow a linear structure. Rather, a narrative present – a spring week in 1994 – is interlaced with

122

Elaine Martin

a narrative which covers the period prior to 1994 as memory. This past narrative is related, however, in the present tense. Chapters appear to lead on from one another at first sight, but the reader quickly learns that the first person narrator is, in fact, in a different location at a different time. We are presented with “an atemporal, causally disconnected, closed horizon from which there appears to be no escape” (Fricke 92, my translation). By continually demolishing any sense of structural certainty, Parei succeeds in mirroring the fragmentary and disruptive nature of the traumatic experiences on a textual level. She sets her reader the task of piecing together the chronologically disjointed, fragmented scenes as a means of tracing Hell’s arduous journey to rediscovering her sense of self worth, her identity and to reestablishing her subjectivity. May Day of 1989 marks a personal catastrophe for Parei’s central character. Looking on as leftist demonstrators clash with police in the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin from her usual point of observation, namely, “the Turkish takeaway beside the shell crater” (50),1 she gets caught up in the mass of demonstrators fleeing from the police, loses orientation and is raped in an abandoned railway building in the Görlitzer Park. Parei’s victim subsequently witnesses its own harrowing oblivion as a subject on two levels: having been objectified during the rape, the victim now experiences anew the process of desubjectification in the aftermath of the traumatic event by entering a category of existence in which she experiences herself as neither subject nor object, but rather abject. Defined by Julia Kristeva as the unsignifiable which “disturbs identity, systems and order” and which disregards “borders, positions and rules” (1) the concept of abjection is useful for understanding the collapse of identity that befalls Parei’s central character. The crime of rape is viewed by Kristeva as a quintessential example of abjection since it represents an intimate psychological and physical border crossing. It not only shatters the integrity of the victim’s physical boundaries, it also shatters the integrity of the ego’s boundary and along with it the notion of a coherent identity. The individual beset by the state of abjection is placed “literally beside himself” (Kristeva 1). Parei’s protagonist duly splits and becomes psychologically abject as the identity boundaries of the self break down. In addition to their allegorical names, there are several indicators in the text to support this reading of Dunkel and Hell as the two sides of the traumatized split subject. Dunkel remains a mysterious entity throughout the narrative. She represents everything that is opposite to Hell, down to the point of where they place their shoes in the hallway (7). Hell squats in an apartment which, in terms of design, is described as a mirror

1 All translations of quotations from Die Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman] are my own.

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement

123

image of Dunkel’s apartment which in turn lies directly opposite Hell’s: “two identical floor plans mirroring each other across the center point of the hallway.” When Hell sees her “fellow tenant,” she feels like she is looking “into an uncontrollable mirror”. The narrative is related from the perspective of Hell, the traumatized alter ego, rendered abject by the feelings of denigration, shame and by the perceived sense of pollution that results from sexual violation. Hell’s task is to reconnect with Dunkel, her lost, pre-violation identity. By applying the discourses of space and abjection to Parei’s narrative, the traumatic consequences of sexual violation can be explored. Parei’s text reveals how the borders of perceived diminished space demand acknowledgement and transgression in order for the victim to confront and assimilate a traumatic reality that threatens to assimilate her. In her attempt to represent the profound internal turmoil associated with the shattering of corporeal and psychological integrity and the slow road thereafter to the reestablishment of the abject victim’s subjectivity, Parei draws heavily on spatial motifs. The ever-diminishing physical spaces perceived by Hell in the aftermath of the traumatic event act as evocative metaphors for the dissipation of the female subject and by extension for the trauma that accompanies sexual violation. Conversely, the gradual expansion of space with the passing of time plays an equally important role in communicating the abject victim’s slow road to healing. In the aftermath of the assault, Hell’s world begins to rapidly close in upon her. Her first reaction is to retreat almost entirely from society, emerging only to report the rape and to buy essential foodstuffs. Her life now centers on a bare balcony room: I move into the small, bare balcony room. The last occupant had left behind a broken blackand-white television and a foam mattress around two square meters in size. I lock my room and I set myself up there. I unplug the telephone and avoid contact with the world outside. Some days my life seems to stretch from the door of the room as far as the balcony railings; on other days just as far as the edge of the mattress. Every now and then it ends at the point at which my body can physically stretch no further. (88–89)

In this passage Parei makes powerful use of spatial motifs to represent the harrowing trauma, degradation and humiliation experienced by victims of rape. The boundaries of Hell’s existence have undergone a radical alteration. Her life now revolves around a claustrophobically narrow space. A good day is marked by her ability to make it across the room; on other days her space is limited to how far her body can physically stretch. Hell’s illusory perception of the space that surrounds her and her social withdrawal are illustrative of the distorted perceptions and the self-imposed isolation that result from the transgression of the body’s physical and psychological boundaries previously considered intact. This distorted perception of reality has been identified in trauma research as a prevalent symptom

124

Elaine Martin

among victims of rape (Schneider 29). Hell’s yearning to ‘diminish’ to the point where she disappears ‘within’ herself is an example of the self-loathing considered by Kristeva as a classic symptom of abjection. The abject person, she argues, attempts to purge the most troubling aspects of the abject self (3). In the case of Parei’s split subject, this self-loathing is taken to its extreme: the abject alter ego imagines the ‘minimization’ of the self to the point of self-obliteration. The activities which Hell undertakes within this stiflingly narrow space are entirely anxiety-driven. She spends hours each day surveying her environment and the surrounding noises in order to re-train her eyes and ears. She displays a state of heightened awareness to detail and a hyper-alertness against imagined dangers: As regards seeing and hearing, I have to start from the beginning. I have to learn these things anew. Up to now, I went about my business too casually, too carelessly. Now, I spend several hours every day staring at a small section of papered wall. Or I study the flow of the skirting board, the irregular lines of the floor grooves, the noise of car tires on the wet street. (88)

Hell’s state of hyper-alertness reflects a universal tendency observable in victims of acute trauma, namely, the shifting of the traumatized person’s defensive structures in the aftermath of the traumatic event towards the single goal of blocking out awareness of the shocking reality (Hegeman and Wohl 76). By intensely focusing on isolated items in her immediate surroundings, Hell puts herself into what trauma researchers call a “dissociative trance” as a coping mechanism to numb pain (Hegeman and Wohl 78). Hell views her way of life before the rape in terms of careless imprudence. Perfectly normal habits are viewed in retrospect as inciting danger. Her life before the rape is considered to have been “a deception,” “risky and careless,” “lived at the expense of the here and now, for which I can barely muster strength some days” (11). In addition to vigilantly surveying her surroundings, Hell takes up martial art classes. This decision represents what Hegeman and Wohl call the traumatized victim’s “dread of vulnerability and the need to destroy it” (Hegeman and Wohl 82). The decision results, in other words, not from the abject victim’s wish to regain subjectivity, but rather from anxiety-induced trauma. As Hell looks on at the kung fu class she hopes to join, the reader gets a sense of her ineffable terror and the abject self’s painful awareness of its own exposure: I’m still standing in the doorway. Half of me stands in the door frame. My right foot is standing on the doorstep, my left behind it. My shoulders are raised, my elbows press into my ribs and my toes are crunched in my socks. My hands are clenched into fists in my jacket pockets. Not in the manner of fighters, but rather helpless victims. Four fingers are locked around my thumb. (116)

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement

125

Parei communicates the depths of her character’s trauma with exceptional clarity here. Hell displays all the physical hallmarks of terror, including hunched shoulders and clenched fists. She remains acutely conscious of absent defenses and of the permeability of the boundaries of the self that were previously considered impenetrable: “My skin sends forth an army of rigid hairs. Black fluff, tensed up in defense but so easy to penetrate. This skin is too thin, the boundary between outside and inside is too narrow, too easily destroyed” (56). The decision to take kung fu classes has been driven not by a subjectivity that is beginning to reassert itself, but rather by an all-consuming state of hypervigilance. The “disturbed physical and psychological boundaries of the previously intact subject,” to draw on Kristeva, “induce […] a state of […] hyper-awareness of the defenselessness of the boundaries of the self” (Kristeva 1). Hell suffers from the distorted perception of the world commonly observed in victims of sexual violation. The world is perceived in terms of threat and familiar surroundings are considered inimical to the preservation of the self. She finds herself acutely conscious of her vulnerability and yet desperate to protect the self from an awareness of that same vulnerability. One of her trauma-induced selfpreservation steps is carefully planning any movement that requires her to leave the confines of her West Berlin apartment, the one place she perceives to be a safe haven. It becomes clear, however, that this secure space is in fact a space that encourages memory suppression, serving only to compound the victim’s trauma. Before embarking on the short trip to the police station to report the rape, for example, Hell carefully calculates the number of steps required to cross the street. She selects with care her spot on the bus and alights with equal precision so as to avoid getting caught up in the crowd of passengers. This development of fears and phobias specific to the circumstances of the rape is an example of the psychological defenses common among rape survivors: I take the bus to the police station. I pull the key from the door lock, slide the metal ring onto my middle and index fingers and, clenching my fingers around the keys, I hide my hands in the pockets of my cardigan. In two steps I have crossed the pavement and I reach the bus stop. I push myself into the floor space fitted with hand straps opposite the exit. I escape the alighting passengers by way of sideways movements and make it to the curb. (61–63)

Hell’s avoidance of crowds is illustrative of how the perceptions that trigger fear are often dissociated re-enactments of the original trauma. Getting caught up in the crowd of protesters fleeing the police in the Kreuzberg district had been part of the sequence of events prior to her rape on that May Day. Avoidance thus represents a coping strategy. Such actions provide Hell with a feeling, however illusory, of reasserting control of the space around her. Such acts of self- preservation are examples of what Roberta Culbertson describes as “templates of re-

126

Elaine Martin

sponse.” The body, Culbertson argues, “is designed to take the lessons of violence seriously. To do so, it need not, perhaps best not, recall the violence itself, but rather must merely arrange to avoid it in the future” (175). Careful calculation of movements with the surrounding space is thus a coping mechanism employed by the abject self. The need to exert this control, however illusory, is evidence that trauma is in fact controlling Hell and manifesting itself in the form of imagined spatial ensnarement from which she must escape. In the waiting room of the police station, the reader senses Hell’s acute vulnerability. Hell notices that since the rape she continually feels cold despite it being the warmest spring in years. An inner cold attacks her and seeps into her gut: The policeman leaves the room. I begin to wait. As I wait, I become cold. Cold has been attacking me for days; it comes out of nowhere and often stays for hours while the heat rises outside, the hottest spring in years. The heat behind my legs is coming from a central heating system that hasn’t yet reacted to the fact that it’s spring. While cold caused by genuinely low outside temperatures doesn’t disturb me anymore, this heat, in which I cannot get warm, wears me down all the more. Cold from an unknown source has been seeping into my gut for days now. All I can do is sit there and hope that it will pass, move as little as possible so as not to make the rupture any deeper. (66, 76)

The rupture motif in this passage is significant. It may be interpreted in two ways. It may be read as a metaphor for the psycho-physical split experienced by many rape victims – “the breaking or ripping apart of the psycho-physical union of body and soul,” as Christiane Künzel describes it (265). The rupture motif may also be read as an allusion to the abject alter ego’s awareness of the lost ego, the pre-violation identity, Dunkel. Hell is conscious of her abject, split state and her thought process is entirely focused on minimizing the depth of the rupture so as render possible the recovery of this lost identity. As the tumultuous events leading up to November 1989 occur outside her West Berlin apartment, Hell sits and stares at the walls in a paralyzed, trance-like state with one thought going through her mind: “If only I had stayed put” (14). This retrospective wish to have acted differently in the moments leading up to the traumatic event is intimately bound up with the feeling of guilt, an almost universal symptom cited by victims of rape in the period following the violation. As Julie Allison and Lawrence Wrightsman observe: “[M]any victims will reason that things would have been different: ‘If only I hadn’t been on that street […]’” They further observe that self blame can be so strong that the victim believes the rape was her fault (154). It is only with the fall of the Berlin Wall that Hell is forcefully awoken from her numb state. She is suddenly drawn into events as GDR citizens begin to flock into West Berlin and filter into Hell’s “Neukölln, unaffected by the events of the

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement

127

day” (51). Having been exposed to political events only on television within the narrow confines of her West Berlin apartment, Hell is entirely unprepared as the masses of East German citizens start to infiltrate her familiar neighborhood. It is only at this point that the fall of the Wall begins to assume any real meaning for Hell: And then they come. Suddenly, one day in November, they come. I was unprepared. The first of them come across the street and they surround me at the narrow gate that leads to the entrance and to the parking zone. They stare at my shopping basket. I am encircled by strangers. Some of them are so close that their shoulders almost touch me. I drop my shopping and run down the street. The thought of going back to gather my supplies and of getting tangled up again in the staring, unresponsive crowd or of walking home along the pavement that is filling up with people is unbearable. (94–95)

A vocabulary of constriction abounds in this passage as evinced by the verbs “bedrängen” [surround], “umzingeln” [encircle], and “verstricken” [tangle up in]. Hell feels ensnared by the GDR shoppers who, she imagines, stare at the goods in her shopping basket. She displays an acute sense of claustrophobic fear, perceiving the passersby to be so close to her that they almost touch her. Having lived in near total isolation since the rape, Hell flees, abandoning her shopping basket in the process so as to accelerate her escape. The imagined specter is communicated not by an evaluating omniscient narrator retrospectively, but rather from the perspective of the traumatized alter ego in the present tense. Parei’s choice of narrative structure contributes to the uncanny nature of the scene. Her use of the present tense is an important representational device in terms of narrating the trauma that accompanies sexual violation. The violation of the body, as Roberta Culbertson writes, remains “trapped within”; it lies “beyond the constructions of language.” It is unsignifiable and as such it “seems to continue in a reverberating present that belies the supposed linearity of time and the possibility of endings” (170). This “reverberating present” is tangible in Parei’s choice of tense in this passage. Of course, the shoppers are neither staring at nor following Hell. Parei’s decision to avoid nestling this uncanny scene within any explanatory framework thus serves to intensify the victim’s trauma. In addition, Hell’s perception of the ordinary shoppers around her as “a staring, unresponsive crowd” attributes a grotesque dimension to the general atmosphere of the scene. The illusory threat of a zombie-like crowd is an example of intense fear being triggered by what trauma researchers call a “sensory impression” (Hegeman and Wohl 83). Just as the crowds on the bus incited fear, the crowds in this scene can be considered a connector to the traumatic event. Hell’s fear is thus aroused once again in a context that is divorced from the original traumatic incident, but one which due to “sensory impressions,” however remote, incites pathological fear.

128

Elaine Martin

Hell eventually makes it to an underground station. The extent to which her hypervigilance towards imagined menacing specters has adopted pathological dimensions is evinced by her sense of relief at having finally escaped the crowd: “I collapse onto the green seat, cool the back of my head against the window pane and close my eyes as I glide into the tunnel” (95). Evading a scene that triggers memories of the traumatic event is suggestive of the trauma-induced protective defense mechanism “dissociation” common among rape victims, whereby the victim attempts to mentally and physically escape from an experience of stress that is either directly related or perceived to be related to the memory of the original traumatic episode as a means to emotional survival and self preservation. J.M. Davies describes this strategy employed by victims of trauma as a “last ditch effort to salvage some semblance of adequate mental functioning” (65). The tunnel image is significant. It suggests that while Hell has physically escaped the immediate ominous scene, she now enters the tunnel of traumatic memory. In terms of Parei’s use of spatial motifs, the timing of the tunnel motif is significant. Mental processing of the traumatic memories begins as Hell conquers a new space, namely, the train. By taking the train, Hell avoids going home to her West Berlin apartment via her usual route for the first time since the assault. Attempting to foil the emergence of painful memories by fleeing what she imagines to be a threatening scene, Hell is unconsciously embarking on the slow road to healing. The space within which the abject victim operates begins to progressively expand from this juncture. Perceiving her safe haven to be under threat in the face of the influx of GDR citizens, Hell is forced to take action. The movement of people facilitated by the fall of the Berlin Wall thus forces Hell to conquer new space. She remains oblivious to the fact that this forced expansion of the boundaries of her existence is symptomatic of the abject self gradually reasserting its subjectivity. While the masses flock to the West, Hell flees to the trauma-free East. Just as Berlin is being set in motion by tumultuous political events, so, too, is Hell. She is suddenly yanked out of her shock-like state and begins to gradually take control. It is in the trauma-free space of East Germany that Hell finally embarks on her journey to recovery. While she initially continues to calculate the space that surrounds her with exactitude and continues to adhere to a rigid daily routine, the boundaries of her previously narrow existence have expanded: she now occupies an abandoned, dilapidated tenement block as opposed to a single room. She operates, in other words, within a larger radius than was the case in West Berlin: My daily routine is always the same. Two hours of training in the morning on an empty stomach. Afterwards, a long breakfast and a midday nap brought on by the rush of the completed exertion. In the afternoons, I wander aimlessly in my quarter or I walk from the

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement

129

Hackescher Market across Alexanderplatz to the city library. As long as I keep one foot in front of the other, I imagine I am doing something sensible. (33)

The execution of daily, familiar tasks, Hegeman and Wohl point out, exerts a stabilizing effect on the victim (Hegeman and Wohl 72). By asserting herself in this physical way and by exerting a semblance of control over the surrounding space, the abject victim avoids reflecting on the traumatic event. Although Hell’s daily routine remains the same, it involves more than merely hiding out in the confined space of her apartment as she did in Neukölln. She ventures onto neighboring streets and repeats – albeit very specific – walks through the town. It is thus only by moving to the East and thereby gaining physical distance from the traumatic space of West Berlin that the horizons of Hell’s claustrophobic existence gradually broaden. Achieving physical distance from the traumatized space is a prerequisite for confronting her trauma, breaking free of her abject state and reasserting her subjectivity. The sudden disappearance of Dunkel, the other – imagined – occupant of the otherwise abandoned East Berlin tenement block, drives further action on the part of the damaged, abject alter ego. Parei uses Dunkel’s disappearance to send Hell in search of her missing side, namely, her pre-violation identity. It is only by integrating the two identities that the psychologically abject victim can become an intact subject again. The first stage in this search is marked by Hell breaking into Dunkel’s abandoned apartment out of concern for her neighbor: this symbolizes the conquering of yet another space, however small, outside the immediate space of her East Berlin apartment. Dunkel’s bedroom forms a complete contrast to Hell’s bare room: this symbolizes the alter ego’s disconnect from the pre-violation self. As she looks around Dunkel’s “stuffed room” (18) that is filled with all manner of items relating to the protagonist’s life before the violation, Hell is confronted with an identity with which she is unable to identify. Hell’s detachment from her former identity is a quintessential instance of the alienation from the self, or psychological abjection, that rape induces. Rape, as pointed out by Christiane Künzel, represents “a violation not only of the body but of the integrity of the personality which leads to strangeness towards the self” (267). This sense of strangeness towards the self is evoked very powerfully in this scene as the abject victim views personal items belonging to the pre-violation self as the property of a stranger. The search for Dunkel breaks up Hell’s strict daily routine in East Berlin. With the mysterious Markus März, whom she encounters in Dunkel’s apartment, Hell begins to walk through the streets of the city, thereby expanding her usual radius. This movement within yet another extended space symbolizes Hell’s gradual psychological coming to terms. As the boundaries of her existence expand, repressed memories of the rape begin to surface. The past is slowly recalled and

130

Elaine Martin

related by Parei’s first person narrator in the present tense, symbolizing healing in progress. These recollections of the traumatic event become more intrusive as the road to recovery progresses and Hell begins to relive the trauma: “An ugly face that I wanted to forget appears once again in a blue haze, it creeps out of the thick smoke like a genie in a bottle and looks at me” (11). Psychological intrusions of the crime are on the one hand symptomatic of the abject condition as outlined by Kristeva: “[F]rom its place of banishment,” she argues, “the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). On the other hand, these intrusions are also markers of the healing process in terms of processing traumatic memories. Parei draws very powerfully on spatial motifs in her attempt to represent the repressed memories which slowly begin to infiltrate Hell’s sleep. She chooses the city’s topography as a means of narrating these intrusions:2 I find myself in the center, somewhere between N12 and T7 and this center begins to disintegrate. The Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate have disappeared in crooked furrows. A hole surrounds the area around the Neukölln district. I know that I’m sliding towards the hole, that I’m making it bigger each second by the gash caused by my weight and that I will plummet into the darkness that lies behind it. The attempt to shift my center of gravity by inclining my head in a north-westerly direction succeeds. I slowly shift myself onto my stomach with my neck tilted to its maximum in the direction of my escape towards Moritzplatz. I manage to roll to the canal and lie exhausted on the grasslands. I look back and see a gash that has followed my path and almost reached me. The only thing in front of me is water. I’ll become lighter in the water, I think to myself. The gash won’t be able to touch me there. Headfirst with forced knees, I dive into the blue which doesn’t feel wet, a layer reflecting the color of the sky on a fair day which carries me to the East. (82–83)

Having browsed over a creased map of Berlin earlier that day, Hell dreams that she is now part of the map. In this dream, the area around north Neukölln, the site of the rape, is pictured as a deep hole which threatens to draw her in. She flees in a north-westerly direction, but upon reaching the canal she meets a dead end. On looking back at the path she has travelled, Hell observes a gigantic tear. This tear in the map has a similar function to the rupture motif encountered earlier: it may be read as a metaphor for the rupture and resulting psychological abjection of the self. By longing to be carried by the water to East Berlin, Hell divides the space of Berlin into trauma-laden and trauma-free space. Hell’s mental mapping of Berlin is, in other words, intimately related to the experiences, perceptions and memories she associates with the city’s spaces since the traumatic event. The spaces 2 Katharina Gerstenberger interestingly argues that Hell’s trauma runs parallel to the trauma of the city of Berlin. The questions of memory, forgetting and coming to terms with the past, she argues, are as relevant for the city as they are for Hell. See Writing the New Berlin (Rochester and New York: Camden House, 2008), 36.

The Violated Female Body: Abjection and Spatial Ensnarement

131

on Hell’s map have little to do with the spaces on the physical map, of course. Her markers are not Berlin’s famous icons such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column which dissipate in her dream. These have no place on Hell’s mental map which is intimately bound up with her personal trauma. The focal point for Hell is instead the space where the rape took place, and this location now determines all subsequent direction. While West Berlin is imagined in terms of a dark black hole, the East is imagined conversely in terms of a sky-blue shade. The leap into this blue water marks a juncture in both Hell’s mental map and in her journey to recovery: it symbolizes hope. The East remains an unscathed space, unbound from personal experience. It is perceived as open and limitless in contrast to the black hole that threatens to engulf her in West Berlin. Hell’s acknowledgement of the “black hole” around Neukölln is, in its own right, a step forward in the psychological recovery process. As she continues to come to terms with the rape, she increasingly reasserts her subjectivity. The abject victim regaining subjectivity reaches its height as Hell begins to harbor plans to take revenge on the rapist. In contrast to West Berlin and the early days in East Berlin when “sensory impressions,” however remote, had induced Hell to flee any scene she perceived as ominous, these impressions now begin to provoke action on her part. On the day of the rape, a large dog running in her direction had caused her to flee in the direction of the abandoned railway house where the rape took place. On the day of Hell’s planned confrontation with the rapist, however, this same trigger is used by Parei to represent the coming to terms process. Instead of fleeing, Hell kicks the dog that attempts to attack her near the spot of the planned confrontation: “I make my move while he jumps. His chest collides with the edge of my foot. He squirms, and struggles to land on his side, looks at me offended” (20). Her subsequent abandonment of her retribution plan marks yet another progressive step in the healing process. Investing her energy into making whole the split self, after all, affords more healing and closure than retribution. One of the final signs of recovery is when Hell finally disposes of the most direct connector to the rape site in her possession, namely, a tobacco pipe which, for no apparent reason, she had picked up as she fled the abandoned railway site on that May Day. Driving home in a taxi through East Berlin from the planned site of confrontation with the perpetrator, she whispers to herself: “I must offload this burden. Whatever happens, I must offload this burden. Open your hand. Throw away the weight. Retract your hand” (134). That Hell does indeed throw the pipe out the window is then confirmed not by an omniscient narrator but rather by the taxi driver’s words: “Everyone is giving up smoking” (134). The ultimate sign of healing is the single instance of future projection at the end of the novel: “I put the glass to my lips. I want to empty it in one go. When it’s empty, I want to place it on the table in front of me. Then I want to draw breath,

132

Elaine Martin

face my nose and chin in Dunkel’s direction and ask her if she’d like a flat mate” (142). This instance of future projection can be contrasted with what Hannes Fricke describes as the “atemporal horizon” that dominates the rest of the text (92). Whilst the alter ego, Hell, had threatened throughout to sublimate Dunkel, the ego, the healing process ultimately prevents this sublimation as the two sides of the psychologically abject victim are reunited. Indeed, Parei’s text suggests that the ego has won, since the protagonist’s pre-violation identity will guide the violated, damaged identity: “Outside Dunkel takes my arm as though she must lead me” (140). Uniting with Dunkel marks the final “integration phase” characteristic of the recovery process of rape victims, whereby in place of memory suppression, survivors are able to process the trauma of sexual assault and incorporate the acknowledged memory into the spectrum of other life experiences (Reddington and Kreisel 92). In this way, the traumatic event desists being a repressed memory that exerts a devastating power over their lives and becomes instead an experience that changed the victim’s life but no longer controls it. The reuniting of Hell and Dunkel thus marks the final sign of healing; the abject victim is no longer split. Memory of the traumatic event has been recovered from the depths of psychological suppression and integrated, thereby facilitating the concomitant recovery of the displaced identity. Parei’s novel paradoxically reveals abjection as a potential space for the empowerment of the abject female subject. The author’s use of spatial motifs are a crucial representational device in this respect. By exploiting spatial motifs, Parei demonstrates how, with time, the abject victim learns to see a way out of their abject state and make whole an incoherent sense of self. The victim’s narrow, tunnel-like existential borders in the aftermath of the traumatic event are gradually, almost imperceptibly, replaced by expanded boundaries within which the initially powerless victim slowly regains subjectivity and emerges from the split, psychologically abject state. By allowing the reader to move with the victim between the various spaces, Parei succeeds in communicating both the deleterious consequences of sexual violence and the complex, arduous journey thereafter to recovery.

Alexandra Merley Hill

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck While Judith Hermann has been called the “poster child” for the Fräuleinwunder [literally: girl wonder] generation of young German women authors (in Monika Shafi’s Housebound), Julia Franck is an equally prominent voice in the group. In her specific focus on frequently negative maternal figures in her fiction, about which Alexandra Merley Hill has already written a monograph, Franck adds an intriguing dimension to the literary landscape of postmodern German fiction. Hill’s essay begins with an overview of common domestic tropes found in various German women’s texts since the late 1990s. Here, she detects a pronounced longing and search for a place to call home in literature published after the World Trade Center bombing on 11 September 2001. Since these reflections on home and the maternal exist primarily within the realm of fantasy, Hill focuses on how fantasies of home and motherhood clash with lived experience. This focus reflects the concern to consider how the metaphorical spaces of women’s writing help us understand the material spaces of actual women’s lives, a topic we raised in our introduction “Gender, Germanness, and the Spatial Turn.” In her essay on Franck’s novels Der neue Koch (1997) [The new cook] and Lagerfeuer (2003) [West], Hill adopts anthropologist Marc Augé’s concepts of place and non-place of supermodernity to indicate that the “continued significance of domestic space in contemporary literature by German women writers points to an ongoing connection to (if uneasy relationship with) home, intimacy, and a universal maternal.” Hill highlights female protagonists’ abilities to create new homes out of unlikely places and new families out of unexpected social networks. (Beth Muellner) Julia Franck, already considered a lasting and important author of her generation, as well as one consistently engaged with women’s issues, is particularly concerned with women’s experiences as lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters, and others and the spaces that they inhabit. Urban landscapes, apartment stairwells, a refugee camp, interrogation rooms, cafés, checkpoints and border crossings, a hotel, a hospital, trains, and many kinds of homes are the private, public, and politically charged spaces frequented by her protagonists. This article focuses on homes in Franck’s oeuvre – not the homes that one typically thinks of as domestic spaces (i.e., houses or apartments) but seemingly unlikely locations for one to make a home in (i.e., a hotel and a refugee camp). Franck’s texts are part of a broad interest in the idea of home in contemporary German literature; highly gendered and contested spaces, homes are nonetheless the objects of fantasy, as

134

Alexandra Merley Hill

symbols of attachment and connection. Drawing from the anthropology of “supermodernity” and feminist geographies of home, this article grounds the longing for domesticity in the German literature of a globalized era. I argue that the unlikely homes in Franck’s texts demonstrate useful reconceptualizations of domestic space in this fractured and homeless age. With the increasing focus on migration and transnationalism within German cultural studies, the interest in the home (if not in the sense of Heimat) seems an old-fashioned throwback to pre-modernist bourgeois values. “Yet,” as Monika Shafi points out, “each instance of migration or displacement corresponds to a prior placement, however fraught or tentative” (Housebound 342). Especially for women, home retains a central significance. Feminist geographers Mona Domosh and Joni Seager pointed out in 2006: “Home seems to be a geographical anchor for many women – their identities are bound up with their homes in complex ways. So even as women move into the workplace and gain new sources of selfidentity, these are not replacing the private identities shaped by a symbiosis with home” (31).1 The continued significance of domestic spaces is evident in the literature of a younger generation of German women authors, namely those born in the 1970s. Often the site of memory, either personal or – with increasing frequency – collective, homes and their associations with family serve as objects of loathing and longing in contemporary literature. Although the functions of home in these texts are numerous, the following examples draw attention to some of the common domestic tropes in German literature by women since the late 1990s. An antagonistic relationship to home emerges in texts by Judith Hermann and Alexa Hennig von Lange, authors associated with the Spaßgesellschaft [Fun society],2 or in Tanja Dückers’s debut Spielzone [Play zone]; in these texts, home is something to rebel against, a remnant of middle-class narrow-mindedness and rootedness that seems antitheti-

1 Domosh and Seager drew this conclusion based on a study conducted by Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt in 1995, which compared the distance between home and workplace for both men and women working outside of the house. The results show that women tend to live significantly closer to their jobs than do men, indicating that home is more important to women than to men. Domosh and Seager seem to interpret this as an indication that women value where they live more than men do. It is possible, however, this close proximity serves as evidence that women are still culturally expected to “drop everything” and prioritize childcare and domestic tasks. Thanks to my colleague Laurie McLary for this insight. 2 The term “Spaßgesellschaft” has been used frequently since the 1990s to describe the apolitical party culture of German youth, as reflected in, for example, Christian Kracht’s 1995 novel Faserland [Land of fibers]. Similar in connotation to the “me-generation” (or “Ich-AG”), the Spaßgesellschaft lacks goals and motivation beyond wandering from party to party, and also seems to lack responsibility or obligations of any kind (familial, financial, occupational).

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

135

cal to the exhilaration of Berlin around the turn of the twenty-first century (see, for example, Hennig von Lange, Relax and Hermann, Sommerhaus, später [Summerhouse, Later]). In the media and scholarship alike, the characters in Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later came to represent a mobile, event-focused, apolitical party generation, who moved aimlessly between eastern and western Berlin and across national boundaries.3 Shafi, however, points to the significance of homes in the texts of such authors (specifically Hermann and Susanne Fischer), a significance that is unexpected in light of the texts’ “cool characters, i.e., women protagonists who want no truck with the domestic middle class life of their parents and its entanglements in routine and responsibility” (Housebound 342). Despite the outward rebellion against bourgeois domesticity in Hermann’s texts, domestic spaces illuminate the ways in which the characters nonetheless continue to uphold “domestic middleclass traditions and concepts” (354). In contrast to the above-mentioned characters who avoid home, others seek it: in some cases a home that never existed, in other cases a home that can not be reclaimed. Jo, the nineteen-year-old protagonist of Zoë Jenny’s Das Blütenstaubzimmer [The Pollen Room], travels to Italy to her estranged mother and tries to make a place for herself in her mother’s house (and, by extension, in her life). When this fails, she returns to the tumultuous life in her father’s house and finds that there is no space for her there, either. Widely regarded as a critique of the 1968 generation, The Pollen Room represents the children of ‘68ers as adrift and unwanted. By contrast, Claudia Rusch and Jana Hensel reflected in a semi-autobiographical form on the former GDR as a kind of home. In the case of the Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend [My free German youth], the relationship with home was a somewhat antagonistic one, which meant limitations to movement and freedom. In Hensel’s Zonenkinder [After the Wall], home, the GDR, and childhood are impossible to separate, and the disappearance of all three resulted in a generation of ex-pats, who learned to pass as Westerners and disavow their cultural heritage. For these authors, home was political, something to distance oneself from but also something inescapable. Political and historical events are inscribed on homes and houses, and domestic spaces are frequently the sites of a clash between the personal and the political. In Katharina Hacker’s Die Habenichtse [The Have-Nots] (which won the Deutscher Buchpreis of 2006), domestic violence echoes the military violence of the Iraq War. The protagonist of Heimsuchung [Visitation] by Jenny Erpenbeck is a plot of land and the houses on it, as she traces twentieth-century German history and its effects on the people who called that place home. Focused closely on the

3 In Hermann’s latest collection of short stories, Alice, home becomes intertwined with loss.

136

Alexandra Merley Hill

growth and development of gardens and on construction and decay of dwellings, Erpenbeck watches the inhabitants of the spaces only out of the corner of her narrative eye. For the characters in Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper [Heavenly bodies], houses become receptacles of objects and the weighty histories attached to them: photographs, necklaces, and human hair are physical evidence of a family’s history and clues of their connection to Germany’s National Socialist past. Going through the collections of things in her mother’s and her grandmother’s houses is a process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past] for Dückers’s protagonist. Not completely dissociated from history and politics is the home that is unheimlich [uncanny] in contemporary German literature. Some of these homes draw on Freud’s description of the uncanny, while others are simply un-home-ly. In addition to many of the homes listed in the examples above, there is the rundown, abandoned apartment building in Inka Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman]. It is there that Parei’s protagonist recovers after her rape, hides from unfolding political events (the fall of the Berlin Wall), and gradually prepares herself for seeking revenge on her attacker. Perhaps no home in recent German literature is as uncanny as the house in Regenroman [Rain] by Karen Duve. Purchased for 40,000 DM by two western Germans, and located on the edge of a moor outside a small, economically depressed eastern German town, the house is plagued with leaks and mold, while the garden is devoured by slugs and mud. Drawing on literary traditions of the romantic, the grotesque, and the Gothic novel, Duve creates the most unheimlich of residences.4 As different as these examples are, most of the characters from these texts have in common that, whether creating homes of their own or running from homes of their past, they are possessed by a vague longing for something domestic. They have sufficient independence and freedom to crave ties, connections, and a place to call home. I argue that this search is more common in literature published after the World Trade Center bombings of September 11, 2001, the rise of the Euro and the European Union, and the increased focus on globalization; and it is related to a desire for intimacy and connection, which has been documented by scholars of contemporary literature (see, for example, Meise and Feßmann).5 In theorizing this search for connection, scholars have drawn on the theory of “places” and “non-places” by anthropologist Marc Augé (see, for example, Meise and Stuhr). According to Augé, places are locations in which

4 For a good analysis of gender and nature in the book, see Ludden. 5 For an interesting consideration of Judith Hermann’s first two books in the context of globalization, see Biendarra, “Globalization.”

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

137

people form social bonds, such as a home, a village square, or a place of work. They are “places of identity, relations and of history” (Augé 43). Non-places, by contrast, are spaces through which people simply pass, such as airports, supermarkets, or city streets. The increase of non-places in the globalized world – in Augé’s view a particular characteristic of “supermodernity” – causes humans to lose their sense of grounding and rootedness. One consequence of this, which is evident in German literature, is a desire for connection and intimacy, a desire that is rarely satisfied (see Biendarra, “Gen(d)eration Next” and Feiereisen). While the binary of places and non-places does not exactly overlap with private and public, this is often the case, with home being the locus of fantasies of social connection. Home is the physical space that represents the emotional state of being “im Schoß der Familie” [in the lap of the family]. Domestic space is, of course, highly gendered, and one most commonly associated with women and mothers (as extensively documented by feminist geographers and as discussed below). For most, it is the mother’s lap that is conjured in this image. Thus the continued significance of domestic space in contemporary literature by German women writers points to an ongoing connection to (if uneasy relationship with) home, intimacy, and a universal maternal. In my analysis, I focus on the way that fictional characters interact with space, either failing to meet expectations of maternal domesticity or succeeding in creating a sense of home in unusual places. Drawing on Augé’s theory of places and non-places, as well as feminist geographers’ theorizations of home, I examine the troubled domestic spaces in two novels by Julia Franck: Der neue Koch [The new cook] (1997) and Lagerfeuer [West] (2003). The new cook is set in a hotel that the protagonist, a thirty-year-old woman, inherited from her mother. Every year she receives the same guests, who, despite her ambivalent relationships with them, form a kind of family. A strange mix of public and private space, and at once a place and a non-place, the hotel is a home for many of the characters (who stay for extended annual visits), and also a backdrop for the parodies of gender and domesticity that take place within it. In a very different setting, the Berlin-Marienfelde refugee camp in the 1970s, the four narrators of West are also grappling with the idea of home. Nelly Senff has fled East Germany with her two children and, in processing her relationship to her past and future countries, fails to create any kind of home for her children (while others, by contrast, transform the non-places of the camp into places). At the same time, Nelly’s ability to mother is called into question by West German expectations and her own ambivalence towards fulfilling this role. Although both settings suggest the impossibility of emotional connection, due to their non-place status and the frustrated fantasy of maternal domesticity, Franck shows that even non-places have the potential to become homes. Many previous works argue that Franck desires a reinterpretation of motherhood (see Hill, “‘Fe-

138

Alexandra Merley Hill

male Sobriety,’” “Motherhood as Performance,” and Playing House). That she presents a reconsideration of home has thus far been unexamined. Cultural geography provides a variety of definitions for the concept of home, reflecting the manifold forms and subjective experiences of domestic space. In their book Home, Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling define home as “both a place/ physical location and a set of feelings” (22), a definition that, although vague, allows for both the fantasy and the complicated reality of what home means. In its idealized form, one might agree that “[h]ome is a place that offers security, familiarity and nurture” (Tuan 164). Similarly, one can speak of “what home symbolizes: community or familial solidarity, fixity, stability, and refuge” (PriceChalita 239). Blunt and Dowling are quick to point out that, for a significant portion of any population, lived experience of home does not meet this ideal, and they therefore do not seek to unify the “set of feelings” in their definition as positive or negative, allowing for a variety of emotional interactions with domestic space. A more detailed description might be: “As a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear, the home is invested with meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships that lie at the heart of human life” (Blunt and Varley 3). And of course home has a political dimension as well, as pointed out by Duncan and Lambert: “As perhaps the most emotive of geographical concepts, inextricable from that of self, family, nation, sense of place, and sense of responsibility towards those who share one’s place in the world, home is a concept that demands thorough exploration by cultural geographers” (395). All of these notions of home are correct, and, while home as a reality rarely meets the expectations of home as an ideal, the tension that arises from this conflict does not diminish the power of the domestic fantasy. In this essay, I am concerned largely with the ideal or fantasy of home, just as I am with the ideal or fantasy of motherhood, and how that fantasy is in conflict with lived experience. This division between ideal and reality also holds true in considering the physical space of home. Blunt and Dowling speak to an ideal when they argue that some locations can generally be considered “homely” (i.e., those locations that “correspond to normative notions of home” [26], such as a single-family dwelling with all of its markers of comfort). They point out, however, that these images of “ideal homes” are culturally determined, first of all, and then further subject to individual experience (101). In the United States, home for many can call up an image (or stereotype) of a suburban, single-family, detached home, often with a garage and a yard. In Germany, however, where the majority of families live in apartments and not single-family detached structures, the image is a radically different one (109, 114), though arguably no less homely for its residents. And of course homely physical surroundings are not enough to guarantee that a person feels “at home” in a space. An example used by Blunt and

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

139

Dowling is that of a woman who is abused in her home. To such a woman, the house she lives in may no longer be safe or welcoming, regardless of its appearance. The converse is true as well: one can call a space “home” that does not at all conform to the domestic ideal. As Blunt and Dowling explain: “Home, in other words, can be created, and takes different forms, in unlikely dwellings: student accommodation […]; travelling caravans and mobile homes […], residential homes for the elderly […], and squatter settlements” (121). The creation of home has long been a gendered activity. In his book Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski links the birth of home to the emergence of the idea of comfort, which was dependent on the separation of private and public space and which therefore was the responsibility of women (223). There is no question that today’s women are less confined to the domestic space than they have been for hundreds of years. Yet, even as the image of the working woman becomes as widely known as the stay-at-home mom, “[b]oth these powerful images of women rely on the home as the basis for definition: in the case of the ‘traditional’ women by her literal attachment to the home, in that of the ‘working’ women by the fact that her activities take place at a distance from the home” (Domosh and Seager 1). As Dillaway and Paré summarize: “‘Mother’ becomes synonymous with ‘home’ as well, as ‘family’ is defined as residing in this particular location. In our imaginations, mothers exist only within the home, and we uphold this spatial equation almost regardless of whether mothers are in the home all the time” (442). Of course real life differs significantly from popular discourse about mothers and expectations of the maternal. But in the cultural imaginary, “‘[h]ome’ means nothing without women and their caregiving activities within it” (451). The locations of the two novels discussed in this article are among those that Blunt and Dowling consider “unhomely,” a refugee camp and a hotel. Augé, too, mentions both these locations as examples of non-places (97). Yet, as I will show, both these spaces are regarded as homes by their inhabitants, at least partly because of the typically maternal activities that take place there. The setting of The new cook, a hotel, is an inherently confusing mix of public and private, both a non-place and a place. While a hotel is expected to be comfortable, it is nonetheless a transitional space. One stays in a hotel, but it seems contradictory to live in a hotel. In its transitional character, it is a non-place according to Marc Augé’s definition: a space through which one simply passes, without making connections with other people. Yet not everyone does just pass through this hotel. The narrator and her mother (now others’ memories of her mother) reside in the hotel, the housemaid Berta spends all day there (although she sleeps elsewhere), and regular guests return annually for visits of extended duration. These characters, with the possible exception of the narrator, do make the hotel a place.

140

Alexandra Merley Hill

Maternal domesticity certainly seems to be lacking, however. The narrator’s mother has died before the start of the novel, and the reader comes to know her only through the memories and stories of the other characters.6 While it is impossible to gain an unbiased glimpse of the mother, it is significant that the narrator recalls no moment of tenderness between them. Instead, her memories and comments characterize her mother as a woman who prioritized running the hotel, sleeping with men, and spending time with her guests, over creating a warm and nurturing environment for her daughter. The narrator’s memories of her home are, although generally negative, typical of childhood: eating dinner with both familiar faces and a new guest, being chided by her mother for her laziness, being bullied by a classmate, running errands for her mother. From these memories, there is no indication that the child felt strange or uncomfortable in the space she inhabited; the hotel was a home for her, and even the guests came with such regularity that they became (as familiar as) family. Yet the failure of the mother to meet her expectations remains a major disappointment. In the narrator’s estimation (perhaps also in the reader’s), the mother is more concerned with creating a home for her paying guests than for her daughter. The tension between the domestic and the commercial arises in a memory of the mother spending afternoons upstairs with the florist or the carpenter, trading sexual favors for flowers and carpentry work. Both the commercial transaction of prostitution and the exhibition of the mother’s sexuality conflict sharply with the domestic ideal of the non-sexual mother and homemaker. This memory reveals gears behind the machine, exposing the business transaction behind the façade of domesticity. This façade wears thin in the years following the mother’s death; without her presence, domesticity becomes a commodity bought and sold at the hotel. The guests praise Berta for keeping the hotel feeling cozy and inviting, but the fact that Berta is the hired chambermaid underscores the business of domesticity. The narrator is unwilling to use her sexuality as currency and unable to otherwise pay for improvements, so the hotel begins to look run down and becomes a memorial to better times. Despite her death ten years earlier, the memory of the narrator’s mother is very present and is kept alive by the hotel’s inhabitants. Most of the guests are regulars, who have been visiting for years, such as Madame Piper: “She has already been visiting the hotel longer than I have been alive, she says that to me

6 Both characters remain nameless throughout the novel. The new cook of the title and the hotel itself are also unnamed. Berta, the maid, and almost all of the guests of the hotel are identified by name.

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

141

often, she knew my mother longer than I did” (7).7 When the guests gather at the dining room table, Madame Piper “tells of old times, how she went with my mother to dance cafés [and] that the men were right to hang on her skirt hems” (31). A portrait of the mother hangs over the reception desk, and the presence (or even absence) of freesias reminds the guests of their beloved hostess. Everyday acts trigger the narrator’s memories of interactions with her mother, and the narrator comes to resent the hotel. She feels stuck there and fantasizes about escape, even making a half-hearted attempt to burn the hotel down. Towards the end of the novel, she plans to take a trip to Cuba. It will be the first time that she leaves the hotel since her mother’s death, and, on the day of her planned departure, the narrator speaks of feeling strange, as if everything around her were new: “Maybe that which I am experiencing now is the memory of birth, the loss of my placenta … a memory solely of that moment when foreignness began, and the continuing, desperate attempt to make this foreignness my own” (142). The idea of flight is so exciting, so overwhelming that she keeps it a secret from the guests and employees. In the end, however, the narrator gets as far as the airport before returning; she does not travel to Cuba. She is either unwilling or unable to leave her home, and is thus similarly unable to leave her mother. A number of guests pass through the story who draw attention to motherhood. Elisabeth, a young married woman consumed with the desire to have children, fights with her reluctant partner (leading him to seek comfort in the narrator’s bedroom). Another guest, an unnamed woman referred to as the Spätmutter [late mother], is a ghostly presence in the hotel. Gliding silently into rooms, subtly favoring her young son, and coldly withholding attention from her daughter, the Spätmutter is a flat screen of motherhood on which the narrator projects her conflicted feelings. She strongly identifies with the young girl, who informs her, “this here is a hotel and no home” (45). Most intriguing is Madame Piper, simply referred to as Madame, an overweight, childless widow, who takes it upon herself to be a mother figure to the narrator: “Madame Piper says she loves me like my mother. I don’t know how my mother loved me” (7).8

7 All translations of quotations from Franck’s The new cook are my own and all page numbers refer to the German original. The narrator continues: “and I insist, she means by that, that she knew her better. That is fine with me, because I never wanted to know my mother better than I had to” (7). This gives a sense of how strained the relationship between mother and daughter was. 8 The name “Madame” is suggestive of prostitution, and it is possible that she was the madam of this informal brothel. At one point, the narrator’s mother wants to pass one of her lovers (or customers) off to Madame. Disappointed, the man leaves the hotel altogether (9). If she was in fact a madam in the sexual sense, this underscores Madame’s role as a mother figure to both the narrator and her mother.

142

Alexandra Merley Hill

Although she is not a biological mother, Madame gladly takes on the role of a mother figure in the narrator’s life, over-signifying her gender in the process. Excessively overweight, often burping, sweating, or secreting fluids from a body that seems permeable, Madame embodies the abject maternal body as theorized by Julia Kristeva; her sheer mass threatens to engulf the narrator (see Macnab). Madame is unable to groom herself without help, and the narrator must frequently assist her with making her body feminine: “She later becomes a grotesque caricature of femininity, as she makes the narrator shave her armpits for her, pluck her eyebrows off and apply false eyelashes, constantly advising the narrator to wear a dress and make up herself” (Macnab 109). Although Madame’s femininity is exaggerated (for example, when putting on lipstick, she paints her mouth to twice its normal size), the reader recognizes that it is similar to that of the narrator’s mother, who also wore skirts and make-up and flirted with men.9 Madame, however, better lives up to the expectations of the maternal role than the narrator’s mother did. By advising the narrator in financial and personal matters, using pet names like “meine Kleine” [my little one], and even simply showing affection towards her, Madame repeatedly demonstrates the mother’s failings as a mother and her own desire for intimacy with the narrator. The narrator consistently rejects others’ attempts to reach out to her, at times out of social awkwardness and at other times from a lack of interest. When a guest invites her to a women’s social group, she declines, and she routinely bungles the cook’s sexual advances. Significantly, she does not consider Madame a family member or a friend, and she rejects the intimacy implied by Madame seeking her help with her toilette, even going so far as to say, “You are paying for a hotel room, but I don’t come with it.” When Madame then does try to pay her, “so that you will treat me humanely,” the narrator is startled and refuses the money, perhaps realizing that their relationship cannot be explained as a transaction (43).10 At no point does the narrator confess to loving Madame; only once does she appreciate being called her “Kleine.” More frequently, she complains about the guests and their demands upon her, even referring to them as “Parasiten” [parasites] who are hanging on her “quite small, shriveled-up heart,” a heart that is shriveled perhaps as a result of her mother’s coldness (67). She longs for everyone to leave the hotel and even fantasizes about firing Berta “solely from the

9 This performative quality of Madame’s gender identity is reminiscent of drag, which, according to Butler, draws attention to the very constructedness of gender. I elaborate on this in Playing House. 10 Note in this exchange that the narrator insists on using the formal “Sie” with Madame. This could be indicative of the fact that Madame treats her as a child, while she would rather be regarded as an adult. Or it could signify her own desire to keep Madame at a distance.

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

143

wish of finally feeling alone in the house” (11). Note that she claims to desire time alone at home, but her actions (e.g., consistently seeking out the company of Madame and the others) reveal her desire for connection. In sum, the space of the hotel seems to be a non-place, a site of failed connections where domesticity and intimacy are commodities to be purchased. Significantly, the reader learns towards the end of the novel that the mother had not intended to leave the hotel to her daughter but to Berta instead. She also wanted to leave Madame and another regular guest some money to live on, indicating that she valued these people in her life as much as biological family. This act of generosity also seems to render null and void the earlier transactions between hotel owner and guest, revealing a deeper friendship that had likely existed all along. By contrast, the narrator is completely overlooked in her mother’s will, which she burns, so that she might keep the hotel. Although the narrator’s relationship with her mother was a disappointment, she still clings to their home as the only piece of her mother that she has left. For the narrator, her mother’s omission of her in the will confirms the lack of intimacy between them. She mourns the ideal family that she never had, but the narrator fails to recognize that the hotel does in fact offer connection in an unexpected form. Madame indicates at different times that she would be only too happy to have a warmer relationship with the narrator (as does Berta). The guests who return year after year make a kind of motley family, with the narrator as their “Kleine” and with the hotel as their home.11 Especially the dining room is a place within the nonplace of the hotel.12 It is there that the guests gather for the ritual of their evening meal, and such domestic rituals strengthen and can create the sense of home in a place – even though, in this case, the food is prepared by an employed, male cook (see Romines). Therefore, while the hotel seems to be a non-place, it does in fact have the potential for being a domestic place, characterized by intimacy and connection among members of a non-traditional, reinvented family. By contrast with the unconventionally domestic and maternal interior of the hotel in The new cook, the spaces of the Berlin-Marienfelde refugee camp in West are public, unhomely, political, and masculine. The clear power structure enacted in the spaces also has the effect of gendering its inhabitants. Like a hotel, a refugee camp is a transitional space, but here even less attention is given to making the space homely. While customers have the economic power of shopping around for the accommodations of their choice, inhabitants of the camp have no 11 Macnab reads this group of friends as a parody of a family, with a mother figure, a father figure, and so on. I use the term “family” more loosely, to indicate that they possess an affection and concern for each other’s well-being, even knowing their faults and foibles. 12 Thanks to my former student Megan Irinaga for this idea.

144

Alexandra Merley Hill

choice and little control over their surroundings. In West, little institutional attention is paid to comfort; instead the priority is to provide minimum requirements for the maximum number of people. The West German government and the Allied Powers (including one of the four main characters, U.S. American secret service agent John Bird) run the camp, admitting and assisting refugees according to a rational order. They encourage suspicion and surveillance among the refugees in order to keep them in line.13 The feminized refugees from East Germany and Poland are not only subordinated to this Western system but are expected to express gratitude for their marginalized and transitory position. When the characters attempt to retain some degree of agency and selfhood, either by withholding information about themselves or attempting to make their own decisions, they are rebuffed. For example, Hans Pischke, an actor from East Germany, turns down a number of job suggestions made by the camp’s career counselor, none of which speak to his qualifications as an actor. The counselor’s response is telling: “I don’t get it […] you come here, yeah, without everything, yeah, without winter shoes and without a washing machine, yeah, there’s not even enough wash for a washing machine, yeah, without a roof over your head and without a mark, yeah, and you hold your hands out and take and refuse and make demands, yeah” (132–133).14 In other words, the refugees should take what they are given and do what they are told in this masculine, alienating space. Some of the refugees try to make their shared quarters more homely, although it is difficult. Each room sleeps four people and has minimal furniture (a table, four chairs, two bunk beds), and the kitchen areas are shared by more than one room (i.e., at least eight people). With their limited possessions and restricted financial means, it is difficult for the inhabitants to claim their territory through personalization or decoration. Nelly Senff, for example, uses part of her Begrüßungsgeld [greeting money]15 to buy a small lamp to illuminate the table while her children eat breakfast in the morning, and she spends part of her days cleaning the shared spaces. But the strangeness of her surroundings, the presence of strangers in the common space, the cigarette butts and trash of others in the kitchen sink dispel any illusion of coziness coming from her reading lamp. As if clinching the impossibility of creating domestic space within the camp, Nelly’s roommate Susanne is a prostitute who uses her earnings to escape from the camp’s rules and hierarchies; while ostensibly leaving the camp for her job at a bakery, she is in fact spending the night with men and in clubs, earning far more 13 For more on surveillance, see Norman. 14 All translations of quotations from Franck’s Lagerfeuer are my own. 15 “Greeting money” was a gift of money given to East Germans entering West Germany during the later years of division.

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

145

than she would at her camp-sanctioned job. The incompatibility of autonomous female sexuality and motherhood echoes Freud; and the sexually active characters in Franck’s texts, if they are mothers, are “bad” mothers. As Nelly eventually turns to prostitution herself (see below), the camp remains unhomely. Nelly is thus unable to provide her children with any semblance of domestic comfort in the novel. Their family is suffering from multiple fractures: Nelly’s partner, the father of her children, died mysteriously years ago, and their flight to the West marks a geographic break from Nelly’s own mother. The space they currently occupy is unhomely, and she insists that she cannot afford to buy the markers of home that would make it more comfortable. She cannot even afford to buy her children shoes or new glasses, which leads to them being picked on and beaten up in school. One would thus expect Nelly’s goal to be to get her family out of the camp and establish a home of their own, as soon as possible, but her pride prevents her from taking any job that is offered her. When the career counselor finds her a position in a beverage store, she declines it, partly due to her qualifications as a chemist, and reflects, “What is all the western freedom there for, if not for making decisions?” (174). But Nelly is also unable to provide the emotional comfort and sense of security that come with the fantasy of home, partly because of her own sense of unease. After weeks of interrogations and demeaning experiences, she no longer knows whom to trust. Rather than bringing Nelly closer to her children, the atmosphere at the camp alienates them. Nelly’s effectiveness as a mother is clearly brought into question. When her son Aleksej is beat up at school, she learns at the hospital that her son is underweight and has lice. That she has not noticed either fact may be excusable, and that both are related to life in the camp is likely. But as the doctor treating Aleksej accuses her of neglect, Nelly (like the reader) begins to question her ability to take care of her children. She finds that she can not meet the Western expectations of motherhood, as represented by the mother of Aleksej’s bully: impeccably and expensively dressed, she arrives in a riding habit at the hospital to make her son deliver a gift of apology (a cassette tape, which is a gift that Aleksej can not use, because he has no tape player). Overwhelmed by these experiences, Nelly retreats into herself and watches her daughter, Katja, acting out the motherly role that she can not: sitting on Aleksej’s bed, feeling his forehead for fever, bringing him his favorite stuffed animal, and singing to him. Nelly’s subsequent decision to turn to prostitution may be motivated by a desire to improve their (financial) situation, but this leads to no significant changes: by the end of the book, she and her children are still living in the camp. The one character who succeeds in creating a domestic space is Krystyna Jablonowska, a Polish woman who traveled to West Germany with her elderly

146

Alexandra Merley Hill

father and ill brother, in order to secure her brother’s medical treatment. She is a motherly character for both of them, although neither acknowledges this nor seems grateful; on the contrary, they both seem irritated by her care. Her success at creating a domestic space is clear in the chapter in which she takes care of Katja and Aleksej for the afternoon. The room that she and her father share with others is almost like another world. There is music playing, and the room smells of coffee and cooking food. It is noteworthy that Krystyna is cooking cabbage and pork, neither of which was distributed as part of the food rations that the refugees received. Probably Krystyna used part of her wages from her menial job (first working as a cleaning lady, then in a fast food restaurant) to buy food to cook for herself and her father. This is only one sacrifice required to make this space homely; the reader learns that Krystyna was a cellist and teacher, who sold her cello to purchase the necessary papers for herself, her brother, and their father. After her brother dies, Krystyna dreams about having her own place: “From day to day I sensed less desire to go to my father in the camp. Is that supposed to be my home?” She fantasizes about buying a cello from an antique shop and moving it right into “the little apartment” in which she could live (197). In fact, she does find herself a little apartment, and she is the only one of the four narrators who succeeds in leaving the camp. When Krystyna moves out of Berlin-Marienfelde, she disappears from the narrative, leaving the reader to speculate on why she is the only character to successfully transition out of the camp. Certainly her ability to create a welcoming place within the alienating spaces of the camp is unique, although many of the things she does are stereotypically feminine: she does laundry, socializes with her neighbors, babysits and does favors, grooms and cares for her father and brother, cleans, and cooks. These deceptively simple acts are nonetheless deeply meaningful. For example, Blunt and Dowling point out that choosing what to eat and preparing it oneself is “another important aspect of home as an autonomous and culturally important space,” particularly in the context of a communal area like a refugee camp (222). In other words, unlike most of those around her, Krystyna maintains a sense of ritual and tradition while investing in this transitional space as a place of residence. Although the other characters in the novel struggle against the limitations of life in the camp, Krystyna accepts them for what they are. At the same time, she changes what she can. When they do not receive pork and cabbage in their food rations, she buys them. When she is offered a job, she takes it. When others insult her intelligence, she does not correct them, but she does not let it prevent her from moving forward. This cheerful, determined resourcefulness is an echo of earlier paragons of thrifty, hard-working domesticity. Thus Krystyna’s choice to leave behind her ungrateful and belittling father when she moves out of the camp is surprising. While the reader may wonder about Krystyna’s decision,

Homesick: Longing for Domestic Spaces in the Works of Julia Franck

147

there is no question of her strength. When she leaves, her absence is sorely felt, and all emotional connections in the camp seem at an end. In both of these novels by Julia Franck, a female protagonist in her thirties doubts the existence of home and expresses skepticism towards the nuclear family. Indeed, their prior familial experiences have been far from ideal. Yet in both novels, another female character, unrelated to them, demonstrates how new families can be created out of unexpected social networks and how new homes can be made in unlikely places. It is no coincidence that female characters create a sense of home in these texts, nor that there are women who possess a maternal quality (and motherly figures). Home has been the woman’s sphere for hundreds of years, and, despite the attempts of the 1968 generation and the women’s movement to change it, the definition of “women’s sphere” remains. In the works of Julia Franck and her colleagues, readers see that the fantasy of familiarity and connection – the fantasy of home – exists even for those who think of the bourgeois family as a myth and who themselves are no longer rooted. Even in a world characterized by a prevalence of non-places, Augé points out that “there are no ‘non-places’ in the absolute sense of the term” (viii). In other words, every non-place has the potential to become a place, an assertion that these two novels underscore. No space must remain devoid of history and social significance. Blunt and Dowling argue: “Moreover, home is a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging. […] What home means and how it is materially manifest are continually created and re-created through everyday home-making practices, which are themselves tied to spatial imaginaries of home” (254). Reminiscent of Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as a process, this remarkable conclusion means that home must be imagined – and can be reimagined in new configurations and unlikely settings. Lest we become dependent on old-fashioned notions of maternal domesticity, however, Blunt and Dowling point to co-housing as one way to reimagine domestic space, which “involves unsettling the normative assumption that an ‘ideal’ home is one inhabited by a nuclear family and rather suggests ways in which people can live in more collaborative, collective or cooperative ways” (262) – and, one might add, in a potentially unhomely space. The feminist appeal of this configuration is shared domestic work (of cleaning, cooking, and childcare), and the human appeal is shared experience and emotional support. One can speak about the domestic arrangements in these two novels as a kind of co-housing: the residents of the hotel and some of the residents of the camp elect to share spaces, responsibilities, and lives with each other (although, granted, they do so under the emotional leadership of one mother-like character). In the non-places of supermodernity, co-housing might in fact be another way of theorizing and creating home.

Necia Chronister

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”: Gender Ambiguity and Smooth versus Striated Spaces Necia Chronister’s essay uses Judith Hermann’s short story from 1998 to question Berlin as a heterogeneous and one-dimensional consumerist space. The inclusion of the work of Hermann in this volume is essential, in particular because so much of her short story oeuvre focuses on the “brave new world of globalization […] Her protagonists – mainly unattached, urban women – have been seen as quintessential global characters, moving in and out of relationships and locales, engaged in a relentless search for meaning, human connection, and stability that leaves them for the most part lonely and alienated” (Housebound 113). Chronister reads the ambivalence of the protagonist’s interest in moving from Berlin to the countryside in tandem with the narrator’s ambiguous gender identity: both reflect the narrator’s inability to settle into any particular space or place. Although previous scholarship on Hermann’s story assumes a female narrator, presumably because Hermann herself is a woman, Chronister contends that the narrator is androgynous and refuses to settle into a single gender identity. Moreover, her reading of the narrator as queer makes possible a new interpretation of the way space functions in the story. As the narrator refuses to settle into a stable gender identity, she or he, as Chronister argues, also refuses to settle into any given space. As a result, Berlin and Brandenburg are coded as binary counterparts in this text: Berlin becomes the place where “smooth” spaces and free floating gender identities are possible, whereas Brandenburg becomes the place in which spaces are “striated” and where a conventional, heterosexual way of life threatens to stifle the narrator’s sense of personal freedom. (Beth Muellner) To a generation of young adults from both West and East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the political reorganization of Eastern Europe that followed meant being able to cross into territories forbidden them up to that point in their lives. Many writers, including some in the new wave of women writers to emerge on the literary scene in the mid to late 1990s, began processing this historical phenomenon in their work by focusing on issues of space, movement, and gender. Judith Hermann quickly became a representative of this new generation of authors not only because she thematized the historical phenomenon of spatial reconfiguration, but more importantly, because her short stories capture the mood of the era. In her breakthrough collection Sommerhaus, später [Summerhouse, Later] (1998), Hermann thematizes issues of space and mobility that Ger-

150

Necia Chronister

man unification occasioned and aestheticizes the melancholy, the boredom, and the detachment of those young Western Germans who did not find satisfaction in the newly accessed spaces. In the titular short story, “Summerhouse, Later,” Hermann sets an ambivalent love relationship against the backdrop of the spatial politics of the day. During the 1990s, the rightful ownership of a large number of properties in former East Germany was in dispute, and property transactions that favored Westerners often resulted in the displacement of Easterners. “Summerhouse, Later” revolves around one such property. The story opens as the first person narrator receives a phone call from a former lover, a man named Stein, who wants the narrator to accompany him to visit a recently acquired estate in Brandenburg. He wants to make a life for them there, but the narrator, who is accustomed to a more bohemian lifestyle in Berlin, is hesitant to start a more conventional life in the country. Nevertheless, the two make the trip to Canitz together, giving the narrator occasion to reflect on their previous relationship. Upon seeing the home, the narrator disapproves of it but also refuses to make a concrete decision regarding whether or not to move in with Stein. Time passes and the narrator delays the decision until one day, word arrives that Stein has burned down the country home. Most analysts of “Summerhouse, Later” assume the narrator is female. I argue that this assumption is not grounded in textual evidence. Jörg Döring, Nancy Nobile, and Monika Shafi (to name only a few who have written on Hermann’s work) discuss gender in tandem with other issues, such as Hermann’s melancholic tone, her treatment of a generation coming of age in the era of advanced globalization, the inability of her characters to connect emotionally, and her position as a leading figure of the so-called “Fräuleinwunder.” Moreover, scholars who examine gender in Herman’s texts tend to work with a binary gender system. Anke Biendarra argues that while male characters are more active and creative in Hermann’s texts, their ultimate failure to achieve happiness through their endeavors puts them essentially on the same level as the female characters, who are largely passive (Gen(d)eration Next 229). Biendarra ultimately preserves binary gender in her attempt to level it. Esther Bauer suggests that Hermann’s entire collection, Summerhouse, Later, is concerned with addressing archetypal and stereotypical images of women in an attempt to historicize female subjectivity (52). Only Georg Mein mentions the possibility of a non-female narrator in “Summerhouse, Later” in an endnote, but then dismisses the possibility as irrelevant to his reading of group identity in Hermann’s story (154). A close reading of “Summerhouse, Later” warrants an interpretation of the narrator as gender ambiguous. Hermann omits information about the gender of the narrator, who is never referred to with a gendered pronoun, but rather, with only “ich” (I) and “du” (you). Furthermore, like his/her friends (including Stein),

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

151

the narrator practices bisexual, non-monogamous sex and thus cannot be oriented within what Judith Butler calls the heterosexual matrix.1 Indeed, with “Summerhouse, Later” Hermann creates a narrator-protagonist who seems to display no gender at all. The narrator resists settling into a gender identity, and the careful reader is challenged to resist imagining a gender for him/her. More importantly for the subject of this anthology, a reading of the narrator as gender ambiguous sheds light on the narrator’s inability to settle into any particular space or place. The very title of the story, “Summerhouse, Later,” indicates the narrator’s inability to settle into any particular space. S/he avoids settling by suspending the decision in time. Secondary literature on “Summerhouse, Later” has focused on the temporal element in the title (Magen 41, Schweska 151–152). In “Summerhouse, Later” the narrator categorizes spaces and places according to the social groups that inhabit them, and different spaces and places thus represent very different possibilities for sexual and gender identity for the narrator. The most important categories organizing space and identity in the story are the urban spaces of Berlin and the rural spaces of Brandenburg.2 The narrative codes Berlin as a place where bisexual polyamory, a bohemian lifestyle, and gender ambivalence are possible. Brandenburg, by contrast, represents a more conservative and heteronormative way of life. However well delineated this binary might be for the narrator, s/he remains incapable of making any active

1 The term “heterosexual matrix” was first coined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Butler defines the heterosexual matrix as a “hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality” (151). Butler argues that while the heterosexual matrix is likely invisible to those who function well within in it – who “perform” heterosexual gender and sexual desire “appropriately” – it is oppressive to those whose bodies, genders, and desires do not line up neatly within it (6–7, 35–38). In later works, Butler changes her terminology from “heterosexual matrix” to “hegemonic heterosexuality.” I maintain the term “heterosexual matrix” because of the spatial implications of the term. Gender ambiguity provides a useful counterpoint to the “heterosexual matrix,” confounds it, and can be considered a “space outside” of it. 2 Helga Meise argues that the connection between movement through different spaces and the search for a stable identity is a common theme in contemporary literature written by women. She draws on Marc Augé’s theory of places and non-places when she reads protagonists in Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later,” Julia Franck’s Liebediener [love servant, or more literally “yes-man,” or “boot-licker”] (2001) and Inka Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin [The Shadow-Boxing Woman] (2001) as moving through “places with ‘identity, relations, and history’ and those without ‘identity, relations, and history’” (128, my translation).

152

Necia Chronister

decision regarding which space or place to inhabit and remains in a precarious position regarding space and identity in the text.3 The narrator’s difficulty settling into a place, and thus into a single social and gender identity, is further complicated by his/her relationship with Stein. Coded as both bisexual and heterosexual in the text, Stein has the ability to navigate both urban and rural spaces and therefore problematizes the binaries the narrator sets for him/herself regarding space and place. At the same time, the narrator feels unease at the potential of being assigned a female gender upon entering a romantic relationship with Stein, and thus being oriented within the heterosexual matrix. Throughout the story, the narrator reveals little about him/herself, avoiding any concrete indications of gender identity. A reading of the narrator as gender ambiguous allows for a new interpretation of the narrator’s response to the parallel spaces, Berlin and Brandenburg, that make up the focal points of the story.4 Moreover, a reading that focuses on gender sheds light on the narrator’s melancholic attitude toward the newly opened spaces of former East Germany. Hermann, like many of her contemporaries discussed in this anthology, creates characters who are motivated by the traversal and exploration of spaces. The collection Summerhouse, Later is populated by young Western Germans who enjoy a high degree of mobility, travel to exotic locations around the world, and venture into spaces in the former East. Unlike her contemporaries, however, Hermann presents her readers with a gender ambiguous narrator in the titular story, challenging us to associate ambivalence regarding gender with ambivalence regarding space. In the sections that follow, I examine how the narrator perceives the city spaces of Berlin as allowing for a free-floating gender/sexual identity and Brandenburg as threatening an imposed heteronormative female identity. An application of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “smooth” and “striated” spaces will illustrate how gender/sexual identity, like space, can become delineated or abstract according to the individual’s perceptions. Finally, by connecting the narrator’s resistance to settling into a place to his/her larger fears about the gendered system of possession and dispossession that s/he witnesses in the former East, I will argue that Hermann’s story presents a criticism of the way in which Eastern Germany was privatized after unification.

3 Judith Hermann’s characters typically prefer to dream about happiness and a stable identity rather than to seek those things out actively (Borgstedt, Magen, Rink, Stuhr, Weingart). Characters thus remain continually in precarious positions regarding space and identity. 4 Although gender neutral pronouns such as “zi” and “hir” have emerged from trans communities, I have chosen not to use them here. I feel that the consistent use of “s/he” and “his/her” in reference to the narrator helps foreground my reading of the narrator as someone who fluctuates in terms of gender.

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

153

The smooth and the striated “Summerhouse, Later” opens with the narrator receiving a phone call from Stein, a former lover who has just bought a house in Brandenburg. He wants the narrator to be the first person to see it. Surprised by Stein’s wish, the narrator reluctantly agrees, and the drive out of Berlin into Brandenburg provides a narrative frame for the narrator’s reflections on his/her previous relationship with Stein: “The relationship with Stein, as the others called it, had already been over for two years. It hadn’t lasted long and consisted mostly of rides together in his taxi. I had met him in his taxi” (140).5 The narrator explains that Stein is, in a sense, homeless and both works and lives in his taxi when he is unable to live with friends. S/he describes their brief attempt at cohabitation some two years before, when Stein had moved into his/her apartment and s/he threw him out three weeks later. Within that time, he had entered the narrator’s circle of friends and since then proceeded to live successively with other members of the group, sleeping with them all, both men and women: “He moved in with Christiane, who lived in the apartment beneath mine, then to Anna, to Falk, then to the others. He slept with them all, which was unavoidable. He was quite attractive. Fassbinder would have been delighted with him” (142). Two years later, Stein has bought a house in rural Canitz, and the narrator disapproves of Stein’s decision to leave Berlin.6 The narrator’s previous experiences with Brandenburg consist of group outings, during which his/her circle of friends rented country homes as spaces in which to indulge in drugs and sex. For the narrator, Brandenburg represents a set of values opposite to those that s/he associates with Berlin: We sat […] in the gardens and houses of people we didn’t have anything to do with. Workers had lived there, small farmers, and amateur gardeners who hated us and whom we hated. We avoided the locals. Just thinking of them ruined everything. It wasn’t right. We took from them their sense of being only among themselves, blemished the villages, fields, and even the sky. They got that from the way we walked around with our Easy Rider gait, flicked the burned butts of our joints in their flower beds and front lawns, rough-housed with each other, excited. But we wanted to be there, despite everything. (143)

The narrator and his/her friends reaffirm their identity as bohemian Berliners through the sharp contrasts between city and country, conservatism and poly-

5 All translations of “Summerhouse, Later” are my own, in consultation with the translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo. Page number citations reference the German original. 6 It is unclear whether the Canitz in the story is a real place. The actual Canitz is in Saxony, but Stein refers to a Canitz near Angermünde (Brandenburg) and speaks of the landscape as “märkisch,” thus referring to the Mark-Brandenburg.

154

Necia Chronister

amory/drugs, and conventional and artist types that their presence in Brandenburg illustrates.7 The circle of friends shows its disrespect for traditional values and aesthetics by using the houses for sex and indulgence in cocaine and marijuana, by disposing of their joints in the neighbors’ flower beds, and by presenting a marked casualness with their bodies in their dress and mannerisms. As Helga Meise points out, the narrator’s identity as a Berliner relies on his/her access to Brandenburg. She writes that in “Summerhouse, Later” Berlin “is geographically available mainly in its suburbs or in the streets. […] The streets stand for pure movement in- and outside the city” (145–146, my translation). Likewise, Brandenburgers participate in this reciprocal affirmation of identities by painting “Berliners leave!” on their fences (142). Even though the divisions between Berlin and Brandenburg are clear to the narrator, s/he cannot wholly reject Stein’s purchase of a country home. On the one hand, the narrator sees his/her skepticism validated. The house is old and dilapidated, and the narrator is afraid to go near it: “The house looked as though it would collapse into itself, suddenly and silently, at any moment. […] The house was a ship. It was situated on the edge of a village road in Canitz like a proud, longstranded ship. […] The house was beautiful. It was the house. And it was a ruin” (148, original emphasis). At the same time, however, s/he sees beauty in the proud ruin, the stranded ship. Stein is wholeheartedly enthusiastic and speaks of renovating it. He wants to create a place for the narrator to visit him, even live with him.8 Incapable of sharing Stein’s enthusiasm, the narrator expresses his/her disapproval of the house and disappoints Stein. The two drive back to Berlin in silence. It is important that the narrator’s visit to the country home is bracketed by a long automobile ride with Stein. In the cultural and literary imaginary, the automobile has multiple, often contradictory significations. It represents the freedom of mobility, allows for the exploration of foreign space, and can make familiar space seem foreign. Most importantly for the topic at hand, automobiles and driving are often sexualized in cultural productions. In “Summerhouse,

7 Katja Stopka points out that characters in Hermann’s larger body of works tend to inhabit spaces outside of Berlin with “urban self-confidence” whether in the countryside in “Summerhouse, Later,” in the Caribbean, the United States, or elsewhere (159). Both Anke Biendarra and Helmut Böttiger correlate Hermann’s characters’ inability to engage with their surroundings with cultural globalization and an inability to connect with one another (Böttiger 286–296, Biendarra, “Globalization,” 233–243). 8 Georg Mein reads the “ship” and “ruin” metaphors as an expression of Stein’s hopes for the relationship between the narrator and himself. The house represents vestiges of a past, and Stein hopes to renovate the house just as he hopes to re-initiate his past romantic relationship with the narrator (73–77).

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

155

Later,” the automobile evokes strong associations with sex and hints at the potential for an exclusive, romantic relationship. Moreover, it figures ambivalently according to the different spaces it traverses. While in the city, Stein’s taxi is capable of transforming space, as I will demonstrate, and thereby allows the narrator to suspend any sense of identity (including gender or sexual identity) that might otherwise be tied to city spaces. When driving through the countryside in Brandenburg, however, the car prepares the way for a heterosexual monogamous relationship between the narrator and Stein. The taxi’s ability to transform city space is illustrated most clearly in the scene in which the narrator recalls cruising the Frankfurter Allee with Stein for the first time. S/he describes traversing the rainy boulevard, repeatedly, for an hour, smoking and listening to music, until s/he becomes disoriented and alienated from the familiar spaces of the city: My head was completely empty. I felt hollowed out and in a strange state of suspension. […] The Stalin-era buildings on both sides of the street were giant and foreign and beautiful. The city was no longer the city that I knew. It was autarchic and uninhabited. Stein said: “like an extinct prehistoric animal,” and I said I understood him. I had quit thinking. (141)9

Stein and his automobile create a context in which the narrator becomes alienated both from the familiar spaces of the city and from his/her own sense of self. The narrator employs both corporal and spatial metaphors to describe his/her experience of disorientation and alienation. S/he describes both him/herself (his/ her head in particular) and the streets as empty. S/he feels hollowed out and in a state of suspension, just as s/he describes the city in similar terms. The narrator has “stopped thinking” – that is, s/he has stopped relying on a sense of self or a coherent identity – in the moment in which s/he can no longer interpret the spaces of the city. The scene reads like a drug-induced experience, beautiful but ambiguous, romantic and post-apocalyptic. Of course, the city is unlikely to be empty. The Frankfurter Allee is a major boulevard in Berlin and is never without traffic or people. For the narrator, however, Stein and his taxi are capable of transforming the Frankfurter Allee, ridding the urban space of its distinct characteristics and social significations. In their work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualize two main categories of space: the striated and the smooth. Striated space is marked and delineates specific places, differentiated spaces, structures, and organizations of space. The city becomes

9 Mein points out a parallel between this scene and the scene in which the narrator visits Stein’s house. In both instances, the old and “extinct” are described as beautiful (72).

156

Necia Chronister

striated when we look at buildings in terms of our own use for them, assign them specific meaning, and situate them in relation to other buildings that have meaning for us. In striated space, the “point,” and not the “vector,” is important. In smooth space, on the other hand, the differentiation of “kinds” of spaces becomes less important and the movement through space takes precedence. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the two kinds of space are not physically different; nor are the categories oppositional. Rather, they describe different subjective experiences of space that can even flow into one another for the individual. For example, a space as “smooth” as an ocean or desert can become striated when one tries to navigate it. Likewise, a city can become smooth for the “city nomad” or the flâneur, who walks aimlessly to experience the motion and energy of the city. In the Frankfurter Allee scene in “Summerhouse, Later,” the striated spaces of Berlin become smooth. The individual landmarks – the buildings, intersections, and specific points on the map that make the Frankfurter Allee distinct – are no longer important; more significant is the narrator’s experience of travelling through space past them. Moreover, the narrator experiences the city not only visually, but rather through multiple (perhaps even heightened) sensory perceptions. Smooth space, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is space that one experiences through the senses. As they drive, Stein and the narrator smoke and listen to music; they feel their motion through the city sensorially rather than interpreting it intellectually. The narrator’s description of him/herself as “empty,” “hollow,” and “in a state of suspension” in this scene fits the narrator’s character more generally. As the narrator moves through spaces, as well as in and out of relationships, s/he demonstrates his/her propensity to suspend any stable identity. Throughout the story, the reader learns more about the identities of the narrator’s friends, where they work, and what they like to do, than about the first person narrator.10 Helmut Böttiger has written that in Hermann’s larger body of works, “the point is to name the empty center” (295, my translation); in “Summerhouse, Later,” one can read the narrator him/herself as that empty center. After this initial street scene, the narrator tells of riding in Stein’s taxi through the boulevards of Berlin, down country roads, and on the highways. The narrator enjoys driving with Stein because he has the capability of keeping them in smooth space, that is, in a space where identity can be suspended. The narrator’s relationship with Stein thrives on being in a constant state of motion within the city space.

10 Mila Ganeva describes the anonymity of the narrator as serving a narrative strategy that lends the reader a sense of uncertainty. The reader’s uncertainty belongs to the aesthetic effect of the text (270).

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

157

There is, however, a basic problem with the narrator’s attraction to Stein and his taxi once they leave the city. The taxi allows the narrator to experience the city as “smooth,” but can also bring the narrator into what s/he perceives to be “striated” (or perhaps “striating”) countryside. The narrator has preconceived notions about the gender dynamics of what s/he sees to be a conservative Brandenburg. While in Brandenburg, the heteronormative implications of the automobile also become apparent. In the cultural imaginary, driving is often coded as a masculine activity. Professions like truck and taxi driving are largely gendered as male; there are few female professional drivers. The automobile also presents strict delineations of control. One person drives (and thus has control and is active), while the other person is driven around (and is thus passive and relatively powerless). In “Summerhouse, Later,” Stein always drives and navigates, taking the active role, while the narrator takes the passive (and thus in the heterosexual matrix, female) role. Even if we were to read the narrator as biologically male, his/ her gender can still be considered intelligible as female once the automobile becomes associated with the heteronormative spaces of Brandenburg, given Judith Butler’s concept of a heterosexual matrix that establishes gender through the performance of roles aligned with binaries such as active (masculine)/passive (feminine).11 The taxi thus functions differently according to the type of space it traverses and the purpose attached to the taxi in that respective space. While in the city, Stein and the narrator cruise in order to feel the motion of the city (the vector) whereas in Brandenburg the taxi has the purpose of bringing them to the house (the point). The taxi is thus implicated in the striation of space, and thus gender for the protagonist, while in Brandenburg, a function it does not have for him/him in the city. Stein’s purchase of a house in Brandenburg marks a further step toward a traditional gender order, of which the narrator is not wholly willing to partake.12 The purchase of a house is a clear, traditional signifier for a long-term, monogamous, perhaps even reproductive relationship. The imagery of domesticity becomes even stronger when a neighborhood child insists on watching as Stein and

11 See Butler, “Chapter 2: Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix.” 12 Antonie Magen reads the house as a symbol of Stein’s utopian notion of social stability and family (45). Katja Stopka reads it as a symbol of masculine fantasy of domesticity that goes up in flames when not reciprocated by the narrator (162). Helga Meise reads the house as a “place” with identity and a history, as opposed to the “non-places” like streets and transit spaces Hermann’s characters typically inhabit (146–7). Christian Rink and Thomas Borgstedt discuss the house as part of a conservatism that runs through Hermann’s larger body of work, expressed through the repeated thematization of domesticity, as well as in her non-experimental narrative style and her unwillingness to engage with political issues in her work (Rink 117–118; Borgstedt 207–232).

158

Necia Chronister

the narrator explore the house together. However, the narrator has indicated his/ her disavowal of domesticity in multiple instances earlier in the story, first when the narrator describes having ejected Stein from his/her apartment after only three weeks of living together and then later more explicitly when s/he describes his/her disdain for conservative values that s/he sees existing in the rural space of Brandenburg. Perhaps most importantly for the narrator, Stein’s purchase of a country home represents his rejection of both Berlin and the migratory lifestyle symbolized by his taxi. It is a rejection of the smooth spaces that had been the basis of his relationship with the narrator within the city and represents a desire to settle into a striated space in the countryside that implies heterosexual monogamy. The narrator has noted earlier in the story that Stein often lives in his taxi while in Berlin. The purchase of a home would mean replacing the ambivalent, mobile taxi with a monosemous, immobile house. For the narrator, the house represents the opposite of what s/he identifies with in Berlin. It provides no freedom to move through space or to practice bisexual free love. Gender, sexuality, and space are striated to dictate a conventional, monogamous, heteronormative framework. If the narrator were to move to the countryside with Stein, s/he would also be choosing to settle into a (female) gender. The narrator’s description of the house as a “stranded ship” expresses his/her negative feelings about settling in this manner. The ship, as Georg Mein points out, can be read as an allusion to The Odyssey, where the ship represents the quest to find home. The fact that the narrator in “Summerhouse, Later” describes this ship as stranded implies that s/he fears being stranded in Brandenburg, unable to return to the bohemian lifestyle that the city allows (Mein 73). This point gains strength when coupled with my reading of the automobile. Unlike the automobile, which can move freely through the streets of Berlin and the countryside, the stranded ship is a symbol of lost freedom, that is, of a mobility that has become arrested. Although the narrator despises the lifestyle that the country house represents to him/her, s/he delays the decision either to move in with Stein or to reject his offer. After the two return to Berlin, Stein disappears, and after some time the narrator receives postcards from him asking him/her to visit. S/he keeps the postcards in a drawer, always putting off the decision to go to Stein. In the final scene of the story, the narrator is in bed with Falk (a man in the group with whom Stein has also had an affair) and reads a newspaper article that Stein has sent anonymously. From the newspaper article s/he learns that Stein’s house has burned down and that the police suspect arson. S/he sets the newspaper article aside with the postcards and thinks, “later.” The decision can always come later; it can always be suspended. Helga Meise describes this temporal delay in spatial terms: “The narrator does not respond to

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

159

Stein’s offer to visit him, but rather, delays the decision until ‘later.’ The search for a stable place turns instead into a deferment, an act of keeping oneself at a distance, also a distancing of the place itself, as it were” (137, my translation). The space can remain abstract, less striated, and less real for the protagonist if the decision to either move to it or stay away from it remains suspended temporally. In a final act that both affirms and destroys the heterosexual order, Stein has taken the active role in making the decision to destroy the house, and thus the possibility of domesticity, while the narrator remains passive. The narrator remains in the realm of polyamorous sex, drugs, and city life. S/he suspends gender identity and clear sexual orientation. For the moment at least, s/he is with Falk, the falcon, the road map. Stein, the stone, the sedentary, is no longer a possibility.13 Stein, however, represents a bridge between the striated and the smooth. He is capable of operating in both realms. He smoothes space for the narrator at the beginning of the story and then asks the narrator to live in striated space. Stein is both mobile and domestic. He is both bisexual and heterosexual.14 His taxi represents this paradox. It provides sexual freedom in Berlin, which is characterized in the text as a space outside the heterosexual matrix, and makes way for a restrictive, heteronormative life in Brandenburg (the space in the story that represents adherence to the heterosexual matrix). Stein bridges these dichotomies, but his trajectory toward a heterosexual monogamous lifestyle is a choice the protagonist passively rejects. And yet there is a sense of loss at the end of the story. When the protagonist says “later” as the last word of the narrative, one gets the sense that s/he is no longer referring to the decision to move in with Stein. This would be illogical, since the possibility has been destroyed. Rather, “later” is when s/he will deal with the emotional loss of his/her friend, as well as the loss of a possibility. This is a very ambivalent loss, typical of the emotional state of Hermann’s characters, as Brigitte Weingart describes them: “Losses – of utopias as well as of love objects – [are] not mourned, but rather converted into the

13 The symbolism of Stein’s name has been noticed by scholars who do not pin down its meaning (Mein 73, Rink 117). I see two possibilities for interpreting Falk’s name. One could read it as a derivative of “falcon,” and thus a symbol for freedom. One could also read it as referencing the Falk company, which produces German road maps. Either possibility would be fitting for understanding the narrator’s choice of partner at the end of the short story. 14 Georg Mein points out other binaries operating in the text, the two most important being “Rausch – Realität; Kunst – Wirklichkeit” (intoxication – reality; art – reality) (71). Stein collapses these binary divisions. He is always a part of the group, which belongs to the binary side of Rausch and Kunst (intoxication and art), but never completely. He is also working class, operating his taxi and renovating houses. This puts him also on the side of the binary including Realität and Wirklichkeit (reality).

160

Necia Chronister

ambivalent feeling of melancholy” (169).15 The protagonist will remain suspended, emotionally and in terms of gender and sexual identity.

Property, loss, and gender in former East Germany In their essay, Deleuze and Guattari describe striated space as “the space instituted by the State apparatus” and smooth space as “space in which the war machine develops” (474). In Hermann’s story, these spatial categories are inverted. Berlin, the newly reinstated capital, the space “instituted by the State apparatus” is smoothed by Stein’s taxi. It is the place in which the narrator can enjoy a bohemian lifestyle and where both sexual and gender identity can be suspended. By contrast the rural countryside, the smooth space that is being taken over and changed by the “war machine” of the West, is striating for the narrator who sees his/her identity being artificially determined if s/he settles there. The otherwise striated city space allows for a smooth freedom from gender identity for the narrator, whereas the otherwise smooth space of the rural countryside striates identity for him/her. Although Hermann does not divulge the specific circumstances of the estate in Canitz, her characters’ story hinges on the historical phenomenon that would allow Stein to purchase such a home. In the decade following German unification, many properties in the former GDR were disputed as the courts privatized formerly publically held lands and sought to determine rightful owners. An eighteenth century estate such as the one in Hermann’s story might have had multiple claims on it, given the history of confiscation and re-appropriation of such properties over the course of the twentieth century. Property claims following unification came from a variety of groups, including Jewish groups and other victims of the Nazi era and their descendants, whose properties had been confiscated by the fascist regime. In addition to these groups were the claims of German citizens whose lands had been expropriated by the Soviet government during occupation, as well as former East German citizens who had been relocated by the government after the formation of the GDR or who had fled to the West but retained property titles.16

15 My translation. Weingart alludes to Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy. According to Freud, the melancholic person is incapable of overcoming loss and incorporates the lost person into his/her sense of self in an unhealthy manner, whereas the person in normal mourning integrates the memory of the person without altering his/her own personality. See Freud “Mourning and Melancholia.” 16 The process of determining home ownership was complicated. Jewish victims of the Nazi regime were typically awarded reparations rather than restitution, but reparations cases often

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

161

Additionally, following unification wealthy individuals and business interests from the West purchased properties in Eastern Germany through loopholes in the law or through private transactions (McAdams 124–133).17 A house like the country home in Canitz stood through the various regimes of modern Germany; perhaps even been the site of various events related to the country’s early experiments with democracy, the rise of fascism, or the administration of Communism; and may have passed through multiple hands over the course of the twentieth century. Hermann thematizes the dispossession of Easterners following unification and Westerners’ profit from their displacement in the scene just prior to her characters’ arrival at the country home. As the narrator and Stein approach Canitz, Stein explains that the previous tenants of the house, a woman and her child, were evicted a year prior by the owner from Dortmund (147). The faceless and faraway owner (indeed, one can hardly go further West in Germany than Dortmund) might be a rightful claimant to the land or a Western business interest who capitalized on cheap property values in Eastern Germany following unification. Before Stein and the narrator can enter the home, Stein must retrieve the key from these former tenants, and the narrator is forced to face these people who suffered loss because of unification, the privatization of properties, and ultimately, Stein’s purchase of the country home. S/he watches from the car as Stein interacts with the previous tenant, and as they drive away, the narrator makes the elitist statement, “They’re loathsome” (147). This statement not only expresses the narrator’s class prejudice (well established in earlier scenes in which the friends encounter inhabitants of Brandenburg), but also reveals his/her true anxieties regarding space and gender. For the narrator, private property is associated with patriarchal values that striate and determine gender. Under the patriarchal paradigm, possession is masculine and to be feminine is to be property. The previous tenant of the country home shows the narrator that dispossession and displacement are also feminine. In calling the woman and her child “loathsome,” the narrator rejects the role s/he believe s/he would also play under the patriarchal paradigm and chooses instead to remain genderless.

delayed decisions regarding home ownership. Moreover, a court decision in 1990 determined that properties seized and re-appropriated during Soviet occupation were bound by international agreements and thus not subject to new claims after unification. The majority of cases in which a house came under dispute regarded former Easterners who had fled to the West but retained property titles. 17 For good overviews of the various kinds of property disputes following German unification, see McAdams, “Chapter 5: Corrective Justice. Returning Private Property” and Merkl, “An Impossible Dream?”

162

Necia Chronister

The narrator prefers the public (and commercially-owned) spaces of the city over the private habitations of the country, because the city allows him/her to avoid the patriarchal paradigm of private possession. City spaces are open for the public to traverse and facilitate movement and transience. The narrator’s friends live in apartments that they do not own, and thus these temporary abodes do not represent private possession to the narrator. As Helga Meise writes, apartments in Hermann’s stories “do not stand for a home in the conventional sense, but rather for the homelessness that the protagonists have arranged for themselves” (129, my translation). They are not the bases for striated identity because there is always the possibility of moving on to the next apartment and into the next street. The country home, by contrast, means settling into a conventional identity and perhaps also a troubled history of possession and dispossession that the city renders less visible. Perhaps herein lies the privilege of the Western youth over the Easterners, according to Hermann’s story. Whereas Easterners are subjugated to the striation of the State apparatus, Western youth can concentrate on the individual struggles of gender identity. Although Hermann does not explicitly state that her protagonists are from the West, her story draws on the well-known and highly-publicized phenomenon of Westerners purchasing properties in the East and thereby displacing Easterners from their homes.18 In Hermann’s story, this economic disparity creates two different groups of people with dissimilar values and priorities. Hermann’s protagonist can live cheaply in formerly Eastern parts of Berlin without having to busy him/herself with economic concerns and can indulge in activities that facilitate the suspension of a stable identity. S/he has economic independence, and thus the luxury of evading the patriarchy of possession and striation. At the same time, it is less clear that Stein is a Westerner. He both belongs to the group and operates outside it, and he is capable of existing in both the city and in the Eastern countryside. Nevertheless, even if Stein possibly comes from former East Berlin, he is connected with the group of Westerners and participates in the economic dispossession of a family in the East, an incident that was closely associated with the West in discourses at the time. Without indicating awareness of it, however, the narrator draws parallels between the city and the country. S/he selects two areas formerly belonging to East Germany, the Frankfurter Allee in Berlin and the estate in Canitz, as ostensibly oppositional examples of space, while describing the buildings in both spaces in similar terms. As the narrator looks at the Stalin-era buildings of the

18 For example, see the article: “Alte Rechte, neues Unrecht” [Old rights, new injustice], Der Spiegel, 29 June 1992.

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

163

Frankfurter Allee, s/he describes the city as looking like “an extinct prehistoric animal” (141) and later the house in Canitz as “a stranded, proud ship” and “a ruin” (148). The narrator views both places as belonging to a previous time to which s/he does not belong and romanticizes them by giving them poetic associations like “an extinct animal,” “a ruin,” and “a proud, stranded ship.” These places were restricted to him/her until only recently, and once the narrator has access to these spaces, what remains are the “ruins” of Communism. Unlike in the countryside, however, the city provides a means for experiencing romantic longing without having to face the present-day politics resulting from a difficult national unification. The Frankfurter Allee exemplifies city space that has been westernized as businesses have taken up shop there. The young Western German narrator can enjoy the former Eastern parts of the city without encountering the individual loss of those people who formerly held property there. In the countryside, by contrast, the tension is felt between the dispossessed Easterners and the culturally privileged Westerners – whether the distant and faceless business interests (the owner from Dortmund) or the vagrant Stein, who has managed to cobble together enough money to buy a cheap piece of property to call his home. The narrator prefers to remain in the city space rather than settle in the home that would attach him/her to a long history of gender striation and subordination. In their essay, Deleuze and Guattari privilege striated space over smooth space, arguing that the war machine of smooth space ultimately serves the interest of striating space for the State apparatus. However, in Hermann’s short story smooth space endures. After the narrator refuses to settle into the country home – and instead pushes the decision indefinitely into the future – Stein burns the house down. He will not realize his dream of living with the narrator in a monogamous relationship; he will not own the home that has been passed from owner to owner. The patriarchy of striated space has failed, and Stein relinquishes his claim. He will not determine the narrator’s gender or sexual identity, nor will he participate in a lineage of ownership in which one generation’s property is confiscated and decades later sold to the highest bidder. The country home will not serve the State apparatus of Westernization. Rather, it is burned down, taken out of space and time.

The possibility to transform space, frustrated The country home represents heteronormativity to the narrator, even after Stein offers to transform it into a space that would accommodate the circle of friends’ bohemian lifestyle. Indeed, when trying to convince the narrator to approve of the

164

Necia Chronister

purchase, Stein speaks of creating a commune where their friends could visit or all live together, consume their drugs in peace, and engage in leisure activities together. The narrator cannot believe him. For the narrator, the space and its location in Brandenburg necessarily represent conservative values and thus an end to his/her freedom from a striated gender. However, the logic of the story points to the possibility of a transformed space, one in which the narrator might be happy. After all, the narrator experiences the historically fraught spaces of Berlin and the Stalin-era buildings as liberating smooth space, that is, as space in which to suspend identity and to exist in the present motion. These Stalin-era buildings exist today in part because of the bombing raids of the Allies that leveled Berlin during the Second World War. In the present era, Stein has leveled his own building, the country home that has seen the regimes of modern Germany. With the destruction of the fraught space, a parallel potential exists for the construction of a building that allows for smooth space to emerge. Stein may have taken the house out of time and space, but this action is itself a repetition of history and will likely make way for new construction. Like those before them, this generation has the opportunity to create its own architecture, make its own history, and determine the way gender is displayed in those spaces. The melancholy at the end of the story, however, frustrates such an optimistic reading. Hermann is not interested in suggesting a happy solution to the tensions following German unification or in proposing that the new generation of young adults will be liberated by their new access to once forbidden spaces. Even if Stein has burned down the historically fraught country home to make way (knowingly or not) for a smooth space to emerge that would accommodate the gender ambiguity and bisexuality of the narrator, the narrator’s utterance of “later” as the last word of the text resists settling on that conclusion. This narrator does not look into the future, but rather, delays considering new possibilities indefinitely. S/he is likely to remain in Berlin, out of passivity as well as out of fear that the move to Brandenburg would mean the striation of his/her gender and the determination of an identity. The “later” that concludes the text is melancholic not only because it expresses the loss of an opportunity, but also because it demonstrates the narrator’s resignation to already existing options regarding space and gender. “Summerhouse, Later” presents us with a tightly constructed system of space and gender. A reading of the narrator as gender ambiguous rather than as straightforwardly female allows for an examination of the narrator’s trepidation at the prospect of settling in Brandenburg, that is, his/her resistance to making any active decision to settle into both a place and a gender/sexual identity. The narrator resists being restricted by a “striated” identity, including any intelligible gender or sexual identity, and prefers instead spaces like urban apartments and

Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later”

165

public or commercially owned city spaces, which allow for easy traversal and mobility. By thematizing dispossession as an inherent part of Stein’s dream to own a country home, Hermann provides an overt criticism of the means by which privatization was implemented. Moreover, by writing a narrator who demonstrates non-commitment to space by inhabiting transitory and transitional city spaces, who explores the spaces of the former East through a romanticizing lens but refuses to participate in the gendered system of possession and dispossession of private property, and who passively refuses to participate in the redevelopment of historically fraught spaces, Hermann levels a subtle (self-) criticism of the melancholic, resigned, and narcissistic generation that came of age in the era of unification and failed to propose positive solutions to the problems that accompanied the unification of East and West.

III Revisited Spaces: Repositionings and Points of Encounter

Beth Muellner

Marginalized Spaces, Marginalized Inhabitants As Pamela Gilbert has pointed out, the “actual” spaces of literature reflect the city. While Berlin still appears predominately in the narratives of many German women writers discussed in this volume, the more obvious tourist destinations of the city do not take center stage. Like the unfamiliar and alienating interior spaces inhabited by bodies in the second section of this book, in this third and final section, “Revisited Spaces: Repositionings and Points of Encounter,” we encounter women authors engaging with alternative spaces in Berlin itself or with the broader, surrounding region of Brandenburg. In these encounters, protagonists are occupied with ways to re-order or reclaim narratives that have been denied them or other marginalized groups. As in the second section, with Parei’s reclaiming of an abandoned railway building that begins the process of bodily healing for her protagonist, thematic overlaps occur in this section as well. In the third section, we learn that former “radical anti-places” such as death camps can hold the potential for redemptive renewal for author Elisabeth Langgässer; that Monika Maron’s female narrator can take over the “politicized space” from a GDR functionary’s mansion to bring about a release from political oppression; and that the currently gentrified shopping area in East Berlin, Hackischer Markt, can be rewritten from a post-reunification East German perspective by Irina Liebmann. In the volume’s final essay, parking lots and human dwellings take on new identities in Brigitta Kronauer and Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, in spaces where “hierarchies and dualities, such as masculine and feminine, domestic and public, […] can be broken down.” This interpretation offers a hopeful note on which to conclude.

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich Elizabeth Weber Edwards’s essay brings an important spiritual dimension to our analysis of the spatial in German women’s writing, an appropriate focus given Langgässer’s biography and reputation as a Christian-oriented writer. Designated as a “non-Aryan” in spite of her father’s conversion from the Jewish to the Catholic faith, Langgässer survived the war despite a Nazi writing ban and her expulsion from the Reichsschriftumskammer [Reich Writer’s Board]. Her daughter, whom Langgässer bore out of wedlock with a married Jew, was transported to Auschwitz. She also survived the war. In Langgässer’s novel Märkische Argonautenfahrt [The Quest] (1950), Berlin serves as the point of departure in a tale of seven diverse characters on a postwar pilgrimage across the countryside to a convent where they hope to repent for their “collective guilt.” John Inge’s Christian Theology of Place and Victor and Edith Turner’s writings on pilgrimage inform Edwards’s analysis in which she concludes that “[p]ilgrimage frames the individual characters’ experience and functions not only as a reestablishment of a single national (German) identity over all others, for victims and perpetrators alike, but also represents very real temporal and spatial issues, such as borders and geographical definitions of Volk [people], at stake for the future German entity.” In the landscape through which Langgässer’s characters move, they encounter what Edward S. Casey has described as the “radical anti-place” of the death camp. While Casey maintains that the interactions of human beings and their environments have been dramatically compromised in the cataclysmic events of war and genocide in the twentieth century, creating a “permanent state of nonplaceness,” Edwards reads the religious dimension in the motivations of Langgässer’s characters as a redemptive reassertion of community and place. (Beth Muellner) At the end of the Second World War, Germany stood in ruins and its people were utterly defeated, the remnant of what had promised to be a thousand year empire. Germans stood on a threshold, without a moral compass. What had they just experienced? How were they party to it? Why were they hungry among ruins, when greatness had been promised to them? Elisabeth Langgässer’s Märkische Argonautenfahrt [The Quest]1 (1950) does not directly answer these questions;

1 For quotations from Langgässer’s work Märkische Argonautenfahrt [The Quest], page numbers given will refer to the Jane Bannard Greene translation.

172

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

instead, the novel offers solutions to the German people’s physical and spiritual malaise through pilgrimage. Seven characters representing the German people journey to a convent outside of Berlin, where they hope to repent for their “collective guilt” (7, my translation). Pilgrimage frames the individual characters’ experience and functions not only as a reestablishment of a single national (German) identity over all others, for victims and perpetrators alike,2 but also represents the very real temporal and spatial issues, such as borders and geographical definitions of Volk, at stake for the future German entity. Change occurs during pilgrimage. Movement offers a metaphor for spiritual development as well as a physical means for doing penance and receiving absolution for sins. The dual physical and spiritual modes of pilgrimage are inseparable.3 Crossing boundaries both physical and spiritual, the pilgrims enter into a liminal state that tears down the old structures of the past (political, personal, spiritual), and helps them reconstitute a single community for the future. This community exists both between individuals (what T.F. Torrance would call the horizontal axis of the pilgrimage) and between the group and God (spatially conceived as a vertical axis). As characters move through the ruined landscape, they are confronted by their own sins. While each character has his or her own individual sin, the group collectively represents the shared sin of idolatry, where some other object, person, or idea has replaced God. This essay will focus specifically on the character Friedrich am Ende, whose sin most clearly maps on the spatial aspects of the pilgrimage. His name, “am Ende,” means at the end. A nihilist, am Ende represents the Germans who are emotionally and spiritually at their ends and feel they have nowhere else to go. He separates spiritual and physical worlds, engaging in a sort of atheistic Gnosticism. Because his sin divides the two worlds the pilgrimage will reconnect, am Ende plays a central role in reestablishing the connections between physical and spiritual on the path to each of the pilgrim’s, and therefore Germany’s, healing. Scholars of Elisabeth Langgässer’s work pay much attention to racial identity, biography, religious identity, or the setting for her early novels. Langgässer was born in 1899 in Alzey, Germany to a Jewish father who was baptized just before his marriage and a Catholic mother. Her strong Catholic faith and penchant for the mystic was evident in her early writings (Hilzinger 63–67). Despite being

2 Konstanze Fliedl calls this a Doppelwegstruktur [double-path structure], referencing the spiritual and physical journeys each protagonist undertakes. 3 John Inge makes a distinction between what would be Gnosticism, where the body is judged evil and separate from the soul, and Christianity, where the body and soul are inexorably combined: “the Christian religion is not the religion of salvation from places, it is the religion of salvation in and through places” (92).

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

173

forbidden to publish during the Nazi Regime, Langgässer continued to write. During the Regime, Langgässer’s eldest daughter, Cordelia, who was considered a “Volljüdin” [“Full Jewess”] under the Nuremberg Race Laws, was separated from the rest of the family and eventually deported to Auschwitz by way of Theresienstadt. The complexities of the relationship between Langgässer and Cordelia have been interpreted differently by not only mother and daughter, but by scholars as well. For the past twenty-five years, their contentious relationship has been at the center of Langgässer scholarship.4 A handful of scholars have continued to publish on Langgässer’s works. But when relation to space warrants mention in Langgässer scholarship, it remains secondary to considerations of time and eschatology. Konstanze Friedl’s outstanding work on The Quest, for example, considers the temporal elements of salvation. From its very title, Zeitroman und Heilsgeschichte [Period novel and salvation history], we see that concepts of history and salvation are primarily temporal events, while the setting of the novel – post-war Germany – as well as the emphasis on community and physical journey, fall into the background.5 This gap in Langgässer scholarship is especially noteworthy when we consider her very special relationship to nature (including ecology), geographical and political boundaries (all of her novels, Gang durch das Ried [The path through the reeds] (1936), Das unauslöschliche Siegel [The indelible seal] (1946), and The Quest, include some sort of personal development mapped on a geographical journey), and her attention to racial categories, where a number of her works focus on baptized Jewish protagonists. The spatial relationships that make up ecologies, environments, and communities are central to Langgässer’s theology and personal theory of fiction. The spatial turn in theological studies of the pilgrimage connect the interior, or spiritual identity, with the external journey. Especially Victor and Edith Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978) and John Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place (2003) have renewed an interest in the spatial turn and Christianity through their emphasis on body, place, and pilgrimage as a liminal experience. Their work illuminates Elisabeth Langgässer’s choice of a pilgrimage as one of the framing narratives for The Quest, where the pilgrims attempt to atone for their sins and reconstruct a community among the rubble. Pilgrimage becomes a vehicle for starting anew. In the course of crossing the land, with the convent at Anastasiendorf as their goal, the pilgrims cross a threshold, moving

4 See El-Akramy. 5 A “Zeitroman” [period novel] offers a critical look at the author’s own era, including how social forces act upon and influence the individual. “Heilsgeschichte,” roughly translated as “Salvation history,” tells the redemption narrative throughout history. Fliedl’s title references the contemporary plot in The Quest and the concurrent eschatological story.

174

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

away from the guilt of the German people and their acceptance of Nazi rule and the criminal acts perpetrated against their fellow citizens, specifically the Holocaust. The journey emphasizes the sacredness of place and underscores the presence of God across time and space.6

Incarnation in space and time The Incarnation embodies the presence of God across space and time, where a single body spatially defines divinity while transgressing all boundaries. The doctrine of Incarnation was established over centuries of debate. Theologian Brian Hebblethwaite explains that the Incarnation is central to the classical Christian creeds and has been explored through the great systematic theologies: “the doctrine expresses, so far as human words permit, the central belief of Christians that God himself, without ceasing to be God, has come amongst us, not just in but as a particular man, at a particular time and place” (1). In Hebblethwaite’s definition of Incarnation, the particularity of time and place help define the physical person of Christ. Thomas F. Torrance explores the doctrine of the Incarnation, also focusing on the intersection of space and time in Space, Time and Incarnation: By the Incarnation Christian theology means that at a definite point in space and time the Son of God became man, born at Bethlehem of Mary, a virgin espoused to a man called Joseph, a Jew of the tribe and lineage of David, and towards the end of the reign of Herod the Great in Judea. Given the name of Jesus, He fulfilled His mission from the Father, living out the span of earthly life allotted to Him until He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but when after three days He rose again from the dead the eyes of Jesus’s disciples were opened to what it all meant: they knew Him to be God’s Son, declared with power and installed in Messianic Office, and so they went out to proclaim Him to all nations as the Lord and Savior of the world. Thus it is the faith and understanding of the Christian Church that in Jesus Christ God Himself in His own Being has come into our world and is actively present as personal Agent within our physical and historical existence. As both God of God and Man of man Jesus Christ is the actual Mediator between God and man and man and God in all things, even in regard to space-time relations. He constitutes in Himself the rational and personal Medium in whom God meets man in his creaturely reality and brings man without, having to leave his creaturely reality, into communion with Himself. (52)

6 Central to the space occupied by characters in both novels and their movements across space and within time are the concept of God’s created space and his omnipresence. See Bergmann 356–357 and Moltmann 29–30.

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

175

Torrence’s explanation of the Incarnation, while repeating and rephrasing the key Christian creeds Hebblethwaite refers to in his own definition, defines the Incarnation as a presence of God and man in all things, including space and time. Because the pilgrimage is a movement of the human toward the divine and makes use of space and time, it also mirrors the mediation of Christ “between God and [hu]man[s].” The pilgrimage is therefore an imitation of the Incarnation.

The Argonauts The three aspects of pilgrimage include the journey to a sacred space, the journey as allegorical representation of life (moving from birth to death, accompanied along the way by faith and doubt), and the journey as eschatological, where the earthly destination stands in for heaven, the pilgrim’s final goal.7 These aspects do not compete with one another, but are present in every pilgrimage, including The Quest. The convent at Anastasiendorf is the pilgrims’ sacred goal.8 During the pilgrimage, each of the pilgrims work on their various life histories. This includes coming to terms with guilt, remembering their roles, and forgetting as they move forward, dying to themselves. At the journey’s end, the convent and the New Jerusalem of Revelation stand together, offering the promise of reconciliation and ultimate community before God. The novel follows the pilgrimage of seven characters the summer after the fall of the Nazi regime. These people, accompanied by two nuns, journey toward the convent Anastasiendorf. Together, they represent the German people: a baptized Jewish couple, Arthur and Florence Levi-Jeschower, who found shelter at the convent during the Holocaust to escape deportation and whose children emigrated; Irene von Dörfer, a political prisoner returned from a concentration camp and now off to visit her aunt, the prioress of the convent; Ewald Hauteville, Irene’s German love interest who experienced the war on the home front; Lotte Corneli, his sister, who is married a renowned Jewish composer who was imprisoned in a

7 “Pilgrimage is journey to places where divine human encounter has taken place […] it is travel to the dwelling places of the saints. […] Secondly, pilgrimage is about journey. It reminds those travelling that their lives are a journey to God: the pilgrimage is symbolic of that larger journey. […] the third ingredient of pilgrimage, an eschatological one, which is about destination and the consummation of all things in Christ” (Inge 92). 8 As John Inge has demonstrated in his work on sacred space, monasteries (and, by extension, convents) represent a space for reconciliation between people and between God and people. The pilgrimage serves as a spatial representation of an interior, spiritual development; the movement represents an approach toward freedom. Compare to Bergmann 343–344.

176

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

concentration camp and discovered to have survived only after the pilgrimage is completed; Albrecht Beifuß, an actor who falls in love with Lotte and dies defending her; and Friedrich am Ende, a soldier returned from a Russian prison camp who does not want to go on the pilgrimage, but finds himself part of the group anyway. The motley assortment of characters offers a frame, like that of the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, for the intellectual and emotional responses to the German landscape scarred by war. Two other characters, nuns whose primary role is to evidence God’s omnipresence, join the pilgrims. Because they only serve to point to God like sign posts, their individuality disappears. Dressed in identical black and white habits, Ewald describes their photographic likeness as “black flies” (6). The nuns seem interchangeable, to the point that they are given the nicknames Pat and Patachon.9 Despite their similarity, Ewald notes: “To me they all look alike […] though naturally I firmly believe that to them the difference is quite plain and that in the eyes of their Creator each is wholly unique” (6). Closely tied to the divine, the nuns will demonstrate God’s enduring presence and involvement throughout the journey, bridging the divide between God and pilgrims. In a landscape full of ruins, “they are [probably] the only figures that fit into the landscape” (265), with their bodies standing like two lone towers pointing heavenward. As holy sisters they actively demonstrate faith for the pilgrims and also point to the divine the pilgrims cannot perceive. They belong to the landscape as much as they belong to the pilgrims’ lives. The nuns walk alongside the pilgrims for a time, sharing in the sorrows and guiding them toward healing. They occupy the liminal space the pilgrimage transverses, moving in the world “below,” filled with ruins, and pointing to God above, whose ways remain a mystery, indecipherable like the meaning of the stars.

Pilgrimage as a liminal phenomenon Victor and Edith Turner adapted Arnold van Gennep’s three rites de passage to describe the process of the pilgrimage. Separation, limen or margin, and aggrega-

9 Although the nuns were nicknamed Pat and Patachon because of their comical appearance (one is short, the other tall), their actual names bear meaning for the journey the pilgrims are undertaking. The larger is Dolores, the smaller, Perpetua. Mamertus as the first person narrator lets us know the significance of these names: “It dawned on me that Pain and Evermore, which their names meant, were the Argonauts’ escorts; just as they, as a matter of principle, accompany and win love in every person’s life.” Langgässer, The Quest, 407, my translation. The Argonaut’s journey is, ultimately, a life of perpetual sorrows.

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

177

tion spatially clarify the spatiotemporal social development of individuals as they move from childhood to adulthood and total membership within a community.10 Turner adopts the rites to the work of the pilgrimage, where the three stages correspond to departure from one place, the experience of the pilgrimage in between places, and the collection of experiences upon return and the changes to daily life those experiences make. The liminal experience of the pilgrimage, with all its transgressions, enables change by reestablishing communities. Pilgrimage has some of the attributes of liminality in passage rites: release from mundane structure; homogenization of status; simplicity of dress and behavior; communitas; ordeal; reflection on the meaning of basic religious and cultural values; ritualized enactment of correspondences between religious paradigms and shared human experiences; emergence of the integral person from multiple personae; movement from a mundane center to a sacred periphery which suddenly, transiently, becomes central for the individual, an axis mundi of his faith; movement itself, a symbol of communitas, which changes with time, as against stasis, which represents structure; individuality posed against the institutionalized milieu. (Turner 34, see also Inge 101–102)

Pilgrimage transgresses boundaries and transposes individual and community identities by producing an external movement. The individual moves between two places, where the individual leaves the profane and re-centers on the sacred. External movement mirrors internal movement, where the individual re-centers on a new faith. The movement transmutes multiple identities and creates a new community through the shared experience. Part of the pilgrimage’s redemptive work is the reestablishment of community. The journey helps pilgrims work through existential questions of identity, explore how the individual has acted in the past, and establish new patterns and relational connections.11 The community, a representation of the Church, can be understood as a body. Epistles in the New Testament describe the Church as a metaphorical and physical body.12 The Church, however, is not just a body, but

10 Van Gennep “paved the way for future studies of all processes of spatiotemporal social or individual change” (Turner 2). 11 “[P]ilgrimage has remained both a practical expression of religious faith and also an image applied down the ages to the journey of human life and existence. […] The reformers sought to drive out idolatry; the writers of the Enlightenment effectively undermined what they believed to be superstition. The broader understanding of pilgrimage, however, which used the term as a way of understanding one’s life, remained an image rich in its resonances.” (Platten 12 and 14; quoted in Inge 101) 12 Col. 1:24, 1 Cor 12:27, Eph 5:30 (NRSV).

178

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

the body – Christ’s body.13 Ross Langmead, for example, connects the Church’s role as Christ’s body with the Incarnation: “Both Roman Catholicism and AngloCatholicism emphasize that the incarnation will only be complete when the mission of God is fulfilled by Christ and the church together in drawing all nations to God.” Further, he explains that, “It is also common to see the incarnation in terms of God assuming a cultural existence in Jesus, bound to a time, place and culture. On this understanding the incarnation becomes a theological foundation for the ongoing process of inculturating faith in the various cultures of the world” (162). The church community as the Incarnation functions as one entity: interactions with the world are described in terms of a body acting and interacting with its surroundings with the goal of redeeming these surroundings, whether defined by place or culture. The body metaphor establishes a connection between the spiritual and physical worlds, which are separate entities, but indistinguishable from one another. The material and spiritual worlds are completely married to one another, just as the divine and human are married in Christ through the Incarnation. The presence of the body of Christ, both through the Church and through the Incarnation, supports the importance of the created world as space. Starting with the creation myth, as evident in Langgässer’s work, God relates to space, and Christ has agency in this creative act.14 The Incarnation’s continued existence through the Church means that space has been “Christified” through daily interactions and the crucifixion redeems all of creation. As we learn to talk about the body and its relation to space through the Incarnation, we must […] reassert the importance of place […]. The two are inseparable, since place is always there at the first level of human experience: just as there is no experience of place without body, so there is no experience of body without place. It is fascinating that although the importance of the body is increasingly recognized in theology and other disciplines, the obvious interrelationship between place and body, and therefore the importance of place itself in human experience, is scarcely commented on in theology. (Inge 53)

13 “For centuries Catholic theologians have been united in seeing the church as a continuation of the incarnation and, in a strong sense, the body of Christ, both human and divine” (Langmead 163). 14 “[I]t is more satisfactory to begin with an appreciation of sacramental encounters in which the material becomes a vehicle for God’s self-communication. […] the role of place is essential. When places become associated with divine disclosure they become the defining coordinates of a sacred geography the function of which is to remind believers that they are to understand all their experience in the light of the creation of the world by God and its redemption in Jesus Christ. Sacramental encounters also have an eschatological dimension, since they reveal the reality of things as they will be.” (Inge 91)

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

179

Langgässer devotes particular attention to the materiality of the places the pilgrims interact with, in addition to the relationships these places host/foster. The novel’s epigraph is a quotation from Ephesians: “[…] When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?” (Ephesians iv, 8–9) This epigraph sets up the pilgrimage’s vertical axis, one of the two axes the pilgrimage traverses. The vertical axis connects God and human beings (both individuals and groups), while the pilgrimage’s horizontal axis connects individuals with one another. Christ’s incarnation and resurrection models the movement on the vertical axis, where he first descends to earth in human form. Christ undertakes this act in order to serve as an example, building up the “body” – the Church. As attributed in the passage, the function of Christ’s descent to the lower parts of the earth is two-fold in the novel: one is to show that Christ is present in the hellish situation of the Stunde Null [Zero Hour] as well as the genocide preceding this moment; the other demonstrates how the pilgrims, in their journey to atone for Germany’s sins, participate in the body of Christ and move closer to God.

Death to resurrection: Crossing Hades to arrive at reconciliation The pilgrimage accesses the lowest points on earth in order to make future reconciliation between people possible. Set up in the epigraph, the quote from Ephesians plays off of the geographical relationship between heaven and hell and is echoed in the Greek concept of Hades. The dead enter Hades by first crossing the rivers Acheron (the river of sorrow) and Styx with Charon’s (the ferryman) help. Spatially, the river mediates the pilgrims’ relationship to their past and provides means for the spiritual journey towards reconciliation, where memories of transgressions must be left in the past. The river defines the border between the two worlds. Traversing the river represents not only the journey the pilgrims are taking, but also a sort of baptism, where the individual dies and reemerges, echoing Christ’s death and resurrection. Both the Greek myth and Christian tradition relate to the world through physical bodies and a navigation of space. These similarities are visible in Langgässer’s description of the Argonauts crossing a lake as they travel to their end goal. A ferry, with its motor long-since dismantled and two oars in its place, becomes the means for crossing the lake. In the boat is a whisky bottle, still smelling of fire and giving off the strong, bright sounds of a trumpet as it is thrown

180

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

in into the water: “It was as if a drunken water sprite had taken the last swallow as an underworld gift” (209). The crossing’s ritualistic properties pull the pilgrims into the present and help them leave the past behind. Irene von Dörfer dips her hand into the “cool and seductive” water, thinking “How sweet Lethe is! […] How sweet, how sweet, how sweet!” (210). According to Greek tradition, the Lethe is the river of oblivion and forgetting. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the dead must have their memories erased by the Lethe in order to be reincarnated (705). For the pilgrims in The Quest to move beyond their pasts, they too must “forget.” Crossing the Lethelake enables the pilgrims to begin their new lives and continue moving forward. The group discusses possible means for crossing the lake, and concludes that Friedrich am Ende will row the group across, then remove his clothes, return the boat, and swim back. Rowing across, Charon-like Friedrich am Ende exhibits “an almost anonymous power,” so that “the boat seemed to glide along almost effortlessly” (210). His quiet strength creates an unbreakable connection that transforms him: “Friedrich seemed to take back into himself the rhythm of the quiet rowing motion, and his being, which in the give-and-take of conversation had shot out sparks like the crystal ball, collected itself once more behind a boundary that was indestructible” (210). A force external to Friedrich am Ende reestablishes his connection to the material world and also the physical definition of his body, inexorably connected to his soul. This puts him on the path toward recognizing that body and soul cannot be separated, and that his previous belief that there is no moral truth was false. By crossing the lake, am Ende “forgets” his previous nihilism and becomes prepared to recognize the role of the numinous in daily objects and interactions, as help him learn to rely on others (see Behrendt 112). Time, or, more specifically, history plays a role here, too. The single instance of pilgrimage connects with geographically diverse places, and across time through individual memory as well as through the public practice of memory, myth. The group, paused between the two banks, looks back on where it came from: “The wooded shore, broken at irregular intervals by gaps of light, seemed to the travelers […] to resemble a row of burning houses out of whose cellars were rising columns of smoke and hopping phosphorescent spirits that were seeking an escape” (213). The ruins remind them of smoldering Gomorrah after God’s wrath rained down upon it. This vision of burnt out ruins widens to include all of Europe, from “from Lisbon to Kiev, from Helsingfors to Gibraltar” (213). Friedrich am Ende’s work becomes something far more significant, where the journey becomes connected with perhaps the most primal of all journeys: “or had these people perhaps boarded the Argo, the Ark of the Covenant, timbered with hope and pitched with the obstinate longing for joy that holds its planks together?” (213). The mythic here refers to a primal trip, like that of Noah’s ark (and connected with the ark of the covenant), enduring and unspecific. Temporal

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

181

elements are then completely changed through a flip of perspective, moving from the macro to the myopic in abutting sentences: “What a moment between heaven and earth! What a breathing-space and what calm – here between cradle and grave! What stillness!” (213). Part of a mythic trip, the “Argonauts” are also at a specific moment in time and a precise point in space, mapped onto the path of their lives. Time is both stopped and continues on as part of an eternal story, with a quest in process: “It hovered over the waters in the form of crane and heron wings, of that hieroglyph of ancient times which pointed the way to enchanted Colchis and to the Golden Fleece. Nothing but the faint gurgling of the depths, the cracking of the wood in which the splinter of the Dodonian oak began to speak and to prophesy the future” (213; emphasis in the original). From this point in the middle of the lake, paused by the break in rowing, the pilgrims sit in a boat connected with the past, with ancient stories. The wood is like the prophetic oaks of Dodona, capable of telling the future and helping the pilgrims continue on their way to a new era.

Anastasiendorf – concentration camp: Place – anti-place As the seven pilgrims move through the German countryside, they encounter war-torn, otherworldly land- and cityscapes, “landmark of Saturn” or “mountain pass on the moon”; the whole planet appears devoid of inhabitants (111). Without people, the scarred landscape loses its designation of specific place (see Inge 1–2),15 so that it becomes mere space, where only bodies, not ensouled bodies, exist. Edward S. Casey argues in The Fate of Place that the sense of place we have as individuals or communities, made up of the world we immediately interact with, has been compromised in the twentieth century: Other reasons for the shunning of place as a crucial concept are less pointedly logical or linguistic, yet even more momentous. These include the cataclysmic events of world wars, which have acted to undermine any secure sense of abiding place (in fact, to destroy it altogether in the case of a radical anti-place such as Auschwitz); the forced migrations of

15 Inge argues place is relational, even emotional or spiritual. As the individual body interacts with the space around it, place is created. The designation “place” can refer to where we were brought up, what we are in direct contact with, and implicit in place is community. Through modernization, however, we increasingly think in terms of space and time. Place becomes space, simply a set of geographical coordinates and a quantified way of encountering the world devoid of relational elements.

182

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

entire peoples, along with continual drifting on the part of many individuals, suggesting that the world is nothing but a scene of endless displacement; […] Each of these phenomena is truly “cosmic,” that is, literally worldwide [.] (xiii)

The loss of place within modern space stems from war’s destruction. The demolished landscape externally represents the dissolution of communities.16 The single city becomes an illustration for the wide-scale rootlessness and loss of community across Germany. Casey advances from the loss of place to the ultimate lost place, Auschwitz, which he calls a “radical anti-place,” suggesting that anti-places have lost all relational possibilities. While Langgässer does not make such a radical assertion, she does refer to the death camp as a “Todesstadt” – city of death. “Anti-place” connects ideas of killing, death, and cuts out the human relation to space through loss of body, the very means by which we define place. The term “radical” in reference to Auschwitz suggests a permanent state of non-placeness. Place is connected with experience, and human life constructs place. But while Casey and Konstanze Fliedl refer to the camps with dichotomous language, setting them up in oppositional pairs to the relatable place (Casey) or the heavenly city (Fliedl), Langgässer sees even the death camps as redeemable through a reestablishment of relations between individuals. Conversations between characters establish a dialectic that works through each of their assumptions and secular interpretations of the past, helping characters come to a new understanding of their experience (see Behrendt 11–14).17 These conversations map onto the journey through the ruins, connecting the intellectual conversations with the redemption of place. If the most radical anti-place we could conceive of truly were inescapable like Hades (as the post-war landscape is described), then the pilgrimage, with its attempt to reacquire Germany, would be pointless. The pilgrims experience and create place. As they travel along, they make the space describable and begin the process of reclaiming place. The moment in which Germany finds itself, with the signs of civilization flattened by war, matters – but it is not unique. As Konstanze Fliedl has shown, the “death city,” including the various concentration camps, includes cities from Troy to Hiroshima. Real cities and mystical cities stand side by side: “Mythological and apocalyptic images appropriate Hades as archaic topos for the locus of terror and horror” (41, my translation). Together, the cities form a composite picture of 16 See Langgässer, The Quest, 160: A single old man holds vigil by a defiled gravesite as a living grave marker. 17 Behrendt analyzes the characters as individuals and as pairs, where each pair shows to sides of the same “German” sin.

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

183

Hades; Langgässer consistently refers to the landscape along the pilgrims’ course as chthonic. Fliedl’s analysis of mythical, contemporary, and apocalyptic cities argues for continuity in event, if not in space and in time. Place loses its defining characteristic and the places are thought of only in terms of desecration, end, loss of human habitation, and loss of civilization. As we will see, however, this hell the pilgrims encounter may be full of horror, but it too can be redeemed through repentance and atonement. Irene von Dörfer, for example, continued challenging the regime even from within the camp (215–216). She is also an example of one returned from the city of death; Corneli, Lotte’s husband, is yet another who survives the camps. Their persistence in body and soul demonstrates that death is not the end, that the space between the camp and life is not linear, but elliptical.18 The geography of the Todesstadt subsumes into the redemption narrative. When Friedrich am Ende, a nihilist soldier returned from fighting in the East, encounters the destroyed city, his response is to deny any connection between spiritual existence and the material world. He does not try to redeem the space by interacting with it, but to “atomize” it and push it into the furthest realms of notbeing. His dismissal of the possibility of place becomes a radical assertion of empty space. The only thing to remain of these cities, then, is a memory: “What remained of it was a tormenting dream, which today had to be dreamed to the bitter end; a memory that decomposed soundlessly in horrible laboratories: in gas chambers, in death cells, in atom-smashing shells, which were nothing but precedents” (120). The relegation to process makes the place less real, like a dream, disconnected from the present. The renunciation of the material world turns these places into anti-places. Still, he continues traveling with the pilgrims despite his efforts to set out as an individual; he cannot escape the community that, by the end of the pilgrimage, will redeem the place Germany. Am Ende cannot see the distinctions in the hellish, extraterrestrial landscape. Despite his inability to see the connection between the material and the numinous worlds, the landscape still points to its creator. Even the air defies him and pushes its createdness onto him, as the narrator objectively comments on the air’s appearance: [T]he very air seemed to have become more rarefied. In his orbit it seemed to evaporate and the same time to become clearer. Its composition, unfit to be inhaled by human beings, destroyed the lungs into which it penetrated, and had the effect of forming around their owner a danger zone of ice and ethereal poisons and a deposit of sharp, dazzling crystal, which imparted to him a remote and statuary quality. (119)

18 Victor Turner uses the term “elliptical” to refer to the course of the pilgrimage; a pilgrimage is not linear because pilgrims return home to complete their journeys. See Turner 1–39.

184

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

The air is both vapor and sharper: its interaction with his lungs and with the surrounding environment is made possible by its own materiality. As the air acts upon him and interacts with him, there is a dissonance between the narrator’s report and Friedrich am Ende’s gnostic atheism; the narrator continues on as am Ende remains silent: “Before and behind Friedrich Am Ende the world seemed for the first time to become visible and its limits clearly defined. […] Only later under the eyes of God would a new, more accurate differentiation of its categories take place, and a division into good and evil would be accomplished only in the last Judgment. Then Friedrich’s magical atheism too would be judged, that subtle AntiGod of Jehovah” (119). Like the air he breathes in, this place is made up of material, and, because it has a spiritual dimension, this place can be redeemed. His silent denial of substance contrasts with the narrator’s objective stance on the very same situation, where the narrator’s view becomes one with God’s omniscience. In the same city where am Ende denies the material world through his silence, a second conversation is indicated by a set of brackets. The conversation takes place in another place entirely – Anastasiendorf, the pilgrims’ destination. The prioress and the priest have a conversation about the pain of redeeming the material world: “‘What – hurts?’ Mother Demetria would ask. ‘Matter,’ Mamertus was to reply, ‘that is inhaled. Only the angel in the flesh can take in matter with every breath’” (120). In Anastasiendorf, earthly angels bridge the space between material and spiritual. They are capable of drawing matter into themselves with every breath, combining the physical world with their souls. The process heals the damaged material world. The fusion of spiritual and physical in the body of a numinous figure contradicts am Ende’s assertion that material and spiritual worlds are separate. The angels give yet another example of the connection between soul and body, of ensouled bodies, of incarnation. Breath, substance, and sound all belong to the creation myth in Genesis 1 and 2, where the world is spoken into being, distinctions between forms are made through commands, and Adam is filled with God’s breath. The world, the reader is reminded, was spoken into being, and denial of this fact is equated with silence, “What stillness in the satanic chambers of the big annihilation camp!” (120). Rejection of creation as space is not simply the “anti-place” of the death camp, but “anti-creation” and a rejection of God. Silence becomes a crime against God’s creation, where silence represents the lack of witness and therefore an absence of memory. This silence spreads across the world: As from the crematoriums of the east only the smell of the chimneys penetrated to the outside world, and from the cells of the martyred scarcely more than a whisper reached the ears of humanity – so also about the experimental barracks of the atom-smashing fields there was a wall of impenetrable silence; about the prison camps of Siberia, and about the

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

185

offices where the misery of an entire people was split up into abstractions, administrative measures, calories, and fictions. The end of the world – who would deny it? – was a relapse into ghostly silence, dumbness, and fearful soundlessness, as its beginning had been the tireless speech of God. “God spoke […]” (120)

God’s command in the heavens moves to create (Gn 1–2): “the Word moved back and forth ceaselessly like a weaver’s shuttle” (120). The Word – both the command and, as mentioned in conjunction with the trinity, also Christ – moves in the heavens to create the very substance that the world is made from. Christ is also the means for redeeming this creation through his crucifixion. Here, in contrast to the silence of the crematoria and concentration camps, the voice creates and redeems.19 The image of weaving points back to the opening of the passage, where a figure that represents Justice and Klio stands weaving on the edge of the destroyed city both under- and otherworldly.20 As Klio, she is in the process of weaving and she maintains an objective distance from the “Styxbewohner” [literally: the inhabitants of Styx], the pilgrims. She does not weave history so that all the events have already happened, but she records the story as it unfolds. History is a process and the travelers, Friedrich am Ende included, add to the story’s tapestry. The journey’s end is Anastasiendorf, a recast New Jerusalem. As the end goal, Anastasiendorf represents what these characters (and what Germany could have been) during the war. By seeking Anastasiendorf after the war, the pilgrims realign their lives with the numinous. Along the journey, they sacrifice their personal experiences through symbolic deaths, they reaffirm that both the land and time belong to God. Through this realignment, they redeem Germany’s space and recent history. Just as the New Jerusalem represents the end goal of the Christian life, Anastasiendorf stands at the end of the pilgrimage, a physical goal that represents atonement and wholeness of body and soul. Place and numinous are joined together. Anastasiendorf survived the war, and continues to be a safe haven for those seeking succor. Jews, including the Jeschowers, were kept safe there. While the Todesstädte [cities of death] grew throughout the war, Anastasiendorf persisted.

19 The crucifixion, including the events leading up to it, is mirrored in the pilgrimage. See Virgil Elizondo viii and Turner 9–10: “Inside the Christian religious frame, pilgrimage may be said to represent the quintessence of voluntary liminality. In this, again, they follow the paradigm of the via crucis, in which Jesus Christ voluntarily submitted his will to the will of God and chose martyrdom rather than mastery over man, death for the other, not death of the other.” 20 The city, Tartarus, is an abyss in Greek myth; here it is opened to the sky and visible. See Langgässer, The Quest, 126 and 127.

186

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

Anastasiendorf, a representation of the New Jerusalem, is a place on earth where God dwells among his people.21 By pilgrimaging to the convent, the seven representative characters realign themselves with the nuns’ mission to help all people and live as a community. In the convent, the nuns work assiduously to contribute to communal life. The idyllic setting supports even the insects, where the nuns put out a special plate with overflow from baking hosts for the flies so that the completed hosts are left alone. The whole convent is an image of perfect harmony with creation. Even the nuns’ embroidery featuring vine and wheat, lily and rose, show the path of the Heilsgeschichte [salvation story] and also the story of the soul at the same time. The convent experienced war as well, as a New Jerusalem; it was not isolated from suffering. The red sky over the city could be seen at night, making war suddenly present in the ideal. Bombs flew overhead and alarms sent the nuns and guests into the bunker, yet the rhythm of daily payers continued ceaselessly. The seasons and the appropriate work continued as well, and even the prisoners of war sent to work fit into long-established patterns. When the Yugoslavians take over the convent for the Russians, they protect the convent.22 The nuns, through their faith, were kept safe;23 as models, the pilgrims, with their eyes set on the convent, will learn to pattern their lives in the same way. Coeval Anastasiendorf and the Todesstadt [city of death] in The Quest show that place persists, especially during the war. The difficulty with this assertion is the idea that genocide in the death camps can be redeemed and “re”-placed through the movement and persistence of community. This optimistic stance avoids speaking about how the cities of death gained their status. The assertion of silence surrounding the loci of death contributes to the city’s anti-place quality, and the notion that that quality can be countered through speech appears too simple. The narrator acknowledges the presence of gas chambers and death camps, but does not speak about the horrors that occurred in these specific

21 See Rv 21, especially verses 3–4 and 7–8: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.’” 22 “Kein Haar vom Haupt und kein Sperling vom Dach” [Not a hair from your head and not a sparrow off the roof] was harmed, a paraphrase of Luke 21:18 and a German folksong. Langgässer, The Quest, 93. 23 The major exception to this statement, at first glance, includes the wide-scale rape of the nuns.

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

187

locations. As a result, the anti-place can be talked about, but not actually articulated. Presence in and interaction with the memories of these places is the only possible source of redemption in the narrative.

Decentering and recentering through pilgrimage Geographical/spatial movements mirror spiritual movements, where the normal rootedness of the polis, as well as the stable known world become exchanged for uncertainties, challenging the old places that defined individual identity in relationship to a larger whole. Pilgrimage helps “the believer to place the religious routine of the closed and concentric worlds of household, parish, or guild in a broader and more complete perception of the sacred, which transcend while affirming local allegiances” (see Duffy 197 and Inge 102). What exists on the margins or beyond the polis’s borders challenges the cities with their churches, traditionally the center of religious life. The decentering act of a pilgrimage makes possible a spiritual re-centering away from the traditional sources of religion and political power. Among the ruins of the Third Reich, this decentering becomes a vital part of moving on and creating a new community, Langgässer’s mission in her fiction.24 The subversive movement of religious and political hierarchies in pilgrimage also occurs in mysticism. Orders which traditionally house mystics remove the religious experience from the external rites in the church and place them within the individual.25 Turner identifies the challenges mystical experience poses to the status quo: pilgrimage may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage. The pilgrim physically traverses a mystical way; the mystic sets forth on an interior spiritual pilgrimage. […] Both pilgrimage and mysticism escape the nets of social structure […] Pilgrimage has its inwardness, as anyone who has observed pilgrims before a

24 The dedication to Das unauslöschliche Siegel [The indelible seal] (1946/1947) reads “commystis committo” (“to my fellow mystics”). For her, writing establishes a mystic community, a community that finds a new center in the numinous. 25 Teresa of Avila’s writings provide a prime example of this. Her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila, provides guides to her nuns concerning mystical experience, but takes special cautions to demonstrate her continued acceptance of church authority over her. She walks a tenuous line between re-centering the act of worship on the individual and remaining part of the church, with its traditional male authority and distinct power structures. See Schlau 286–309, and Weber 42–76.

188

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

shrine can attest; while mysticism has its outwardness, as evidenced by the energetic, practical lives of famous mystics. (33–34)

The mystic quest for the divine follows the model of Christ’s suffering. Mystics’ experiences of personal suffering help them to identify and suffer with Christ on the cross. Mystics speak of the way of the cross (via crucis), the distinct path that the soul moves through, as stages indicated by specific markers or experiences. Levi-Jeschower realizes the importance of grace and recognized it in little markers along their path toward Anastasiendorf. The moral choices to be made while going through the world are like choosing a course based off of signs: “By the signposts. By the wooden signs that are set up for us. Of course there is nothing to prevent us from taking the wrong road. But the goal does not alter and lies as always in the region that has been indicated to us” (266). In his spatial understanding of how God’s grace works, signs mark the journey through the world, and the battle between God and Satan invests this demarcated world with meaning. The destination remains the same; the course to be taken depends on the traveler. Jeschower’s willingness to follow these signs throughout his journey, coupled with his use of the plural second-person pronoun “uns” [us] shows his new understanding of the community he belongs to. The destination remains the same and the course to be taken depends on the traveler. This gains specific importance as Friedrich am Ende contemplates breaking away from the group and going his own way. He minimizes the significance of this moral journey through his lack of interest in the physical one, and ignores the importance of the metaphors of physical journeys in favor of the interior one only. “The goal is in us” (266), he asserts, and, further, argues that the interior journey alone is enough to find the “hub” (Nabel) of the world. Irene elaborates this mystic-oriental concept: “He [who stands at the center of the world] has extinguished his consciousness and, with his consciousness, the world. Interior and exterior coincide, the all and the nothing” (267). The mystic concept is not wrong, but the placement of the individual in the center is, just as total loss of individual consciousness is also wrong. The soldier Friedrich am Ende represents these heresies associated with total annihilation of the self and the material world. Recently returned from prison in the East (Russia), Friedrich am Ende survives in the basement ruins of a building. A lonely and solitary place, the ruins reflect Friedrich am Ende’s spiritual state. The mere hull of a human being, he stands “like a last imperious barrier between being and non-being, between yesterday and tomorrow, decay and remembrance” (27). He seeks a material means to completely eliminate his material existence and elevate himself to spiritual ecstasy. A bead from a destroyed rosary that he discovers on the floor of the church becomes a fetish that centers his nihilist, self-serving mystical prac-

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

189

tice. By the end of the journey, am Ende rejects the bead he learns to connect with the nuns’ rosaries, where every prayer begins and ends with the crucifix. Rejecting this connection, am Ende requests that the bead be taken from him: “I no longer want it. It is not a means of freeing me from myself, but an annoyance. If I were to follow this ball, I would come to the cross” (366). The bead, taken from the ruins, is returned to form a complete image of the Incarnation, where divine in human form redeems the world through material. In this metaphor, the pilgrims represent the beads on a rosary, and their pilgrimage offers hope for the future rather than ruins. Like the separate bead that is still recognizable as part of the rosary and therefore sacred, am Ende belongs with the pilgrims, despite his claim to have never wanted to be part of the group. At the journey’s end, the priest instructs Patachon, whose name is actually Perpetua – constant without interruption – to take the bead from am Ende, as “[t]he child on the arm of our Mother of God has been holding out his little hand for a long time” (366). The gesture of the Christ child demonstrates he is ready to hold the representation of (and, by extension) the actual world. The gesture demonstrates how the material world points to the anticipation of the spiritual world, to a fore-ordained connection between Christ who holds this sphere in his hand, am Ende’s journey to Anastasiendorf, and finally, the completion of the pilgrimage and the dissolution of the mysterious band. Like the individual beads strung together on the rosary, the journey kept the pilgrims from going their own way until they were ready. While this may read as a negative image of predestination, it does somewhat accurately reflect the communal rather than the individual state of the German people in their connection to one another in the post-war period. The rosary, both the individual bead am Ende holds in his hand, and Patachon’s complete rosary, pull together and unify physical and spiritual sides of am Ende – he feels how his own flesh pushes against the conception of himself as a nihilist (260), where borders come into contact with one another rather than simply dissolving into nothing. The act of prayer drives through these separations of soul and material, “into non-being, and ultimately to the center of the void, the beads of the rosary, because they flowed back to the cross, which had been their point of departure” (261). Transcended borders connect the cross at the beginning and end of the rosary with the very core of am Ende’s being. Here, his “end” is his beginning; the figure of the rosary, always returning to its beginning, always returning to the cross, represents a unity of the physical and the spiritual rather than a divorce of them. This reaffirms the importance of both body and soul together, and underlies why the physical pilgrimage is totally connected with the spiritual act of movement.

190

Elizabeth Weber Edwards

Conclusion The crucifixion, the end of Christ’s Incarnation, centers the story of Christ’s “descent” to earth and “ascension” back to heaven.26 The metaphor of life as a journey exemplifies the horizontal axis, and also helps us understand the person of Christ, as well as the pilgrimage, in terms of space and time. T.F. Torrance explains the relationship between Christ and space and time: the “relation established between God and man in Jesus Christ constitutes Him as the place in all space and time where God meets with man in the actualities of human existence, and man meets with God and knows Him in His own divine Being.” This movement is both horizontal and vertical. One cannot exist without the other for humans to fully understand the relationship of the divine to their lives and for them to connect with the divine and one another: “[U]nless the eternal breaks into the temporal and the boundless being of God breaks into the spatial existence of man and takes up dwelling within it, the vertical dimension vanishes out of man’s life and becomes quite strange to him – and man loses his place under the sun” (Torrence 75–76). The two axes of relationship, vertical and horizontal, are necessary for orientation within human life, which we have already seen is spatially bound. Inge builds on Torrance’s work, stressing the spatial relationship of the incarnation, where place becomes key: “incarnation implies that places are the seat of relations or the place of meeting and activity in the interaction between God and the world, then this balance is maintained by an incarnational perspective” (Inge 57; emphasis in the original). The Christian journey, especially the pilgrimage, is an exploration of these places, as both internal and external journeys. The journey’s transformative and redemptive qualities are not simply human or divine actions, but rely on a synergy of both axes. Langgässer demonstrates the synergy across interpersonal conflicts and discussions, as well as the intrusion of the divine into the pilgrims’ lives in The Quest. In order to demonstrate the interrelated divine and human interactions, Langgässer provides the reader with two spatial metaphors for spiritual development. The movement of the pilgrims in the main narrative of the novel makes up the horizontal axis and provides the movement for the pilgrims’ spiritual quest to repent for their past sins and reestablish a Christian identity in the wake of war’s destruction. The vertical axis, present from the epigraph on, references the Incarnation and its establishing power between divine and human, from the 26 The spatial relationship Christ as the Incarnation is not horizontal, but vertical, according to W. D. Davies because of Christ’s descent from above and ascent back into heaven. Davies recognizes the movement between God and humans in the person of Christ, but ignores Christ’s full humanity, and the horizontal aspect of his relation to others. See Davies 335.

Elisabeth Langgässer’s Theology of Place: Germany after the Third Reich

191

descent to hell to the ascension to heaven, as well as the spiritual quest “upward” to reach God. A corresponding, concluding narrative bookends Christ’s descent and ascension, where a brother and sister live in a robbers’ underground stronghold, an apparent perdition. The discovery of a staircase to a world above provides them with a means for escape. Their story models the relationship of the soul to the divine, and represents differently the eschatological aspect the pilgrimage. Langgässer consciously maps a spiritual and an existential journey onto a physical one in The Quest, where the final destination represents a complete and reconciled state between individuals and the divine. As a community, the pilgrims are bound to one another physically and spiritually. The group’s processing of the past, death unto themselves in the present, and hope for the future provide, in miniature, a model for the German people at an impasse. Their journey enables them to redeem the fraught geography of Germany, a place formerly defined by the Third Reich, genocide, and death camps in the aftermath of the war. Acknowledgment: Research for this article was made possible by the generous support of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, where the Langgässer archives are housed, through a Marbach-Stipendium.

Caroline Frank

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization of Fictional Space in Monika Maron’s Silent Close No. 6 Caroline Frank offers a structuralist reading of Maron’s classic text Stille Zeile Sechs [Silent Close No. 6] (1991). The title refers to the address of a mansion in an affluent quarter of East Berlin inhabited by socialist party officials, one of the spaces in which the action of the novel takes place, and a space that Frank labels “politicized.” Another primary space is a pub, which Frank describes as both heterotopic and politicized, a space of “both … and …,” given the power and gender dynamics at play there. Frank’s reading of Maron’s novel uses the spatial theories of Jurij Lotman, Michel Foucault, and Katrin Dennerlein, and questions whether women authors explain space differently than their male counterparts. Frank sees maneuverability in the concept of a gender-oriented narratology based, among other things, on the experiences of various cognitive factors. In this focus, one that also draws on sensual perception, we see echoes of the thematic emphasis on the body presented in the second section of this anthology. Because the female protagonist of Silent Close No. 6 acts only within her imagination rather than within the actual space of her oppressor’s mansion, a sense of ambivalence in overcoming the past remains. However, this fictional oscillation between liberation and destruction might be said to mirror women’s (and men’s) actual lived experiences of the GDR. (Beth Muellner) With the interdisciplinary proclamation of the spatial turn, literary scholars interested in female forms of space-writing raise a wide range of questions: can female authors develop alternative concepts which challenge existing spatial dichotomies, thus undermining spatial essentialisms? What methods of space-writing do they employ and do they enable texts to express the other as spatially and sexually marginalized through a fixation of meaning? So far, no toolkit exists in order to answer these questions. The present article offers one attempt to examine different narratological criteria to analyze narrated spaces on the evidence of their heuristic potential. My analysis is based on Monika Maron’s novel Stille Zeile Sechs [Silent Close No. 6] and reveals how the novel deals with the GDR’s omnipresent influence on its citizens through the creation of gender-specific territorialized spaces. As a novel, Silent Close No. 6 offers rich opportunities for spatial analysis in the strong connections and tensions that exist between the characters and their living spaces. The title Silent Close emphasizes space as well as metaphor, and suggests a

194

Caroline Frank

great significance of the narrated space for both the plot and the characters who place themselves in relation to space. The connotation of space as a place of oppression and concealment, which escalates in the course of the novel, is metaphorically intensified in the image of the district named Silent Close. The novel, for which Monika Maron was awarded the Kleist-Prize in 1992, tells the story of main character Rosalind Polkowski in the mid-1980s’ GDR. The time in which the story takes place is a time of stagnation and regression; the GDR was far away from Glasnost and Perestroika. Rosalind’s laconic first sentence “Beerenbaum was buried in the part of Pankow Cemetery”1 offers no doubt about the end of the novel, which is told retrospectively by Rosalind herself: former party official Herbert Beerenbaum wants his memoirs to be written down and is in need of a typist whom he finds in Rosalind. In several episodes, she then discusses her visits at Silent Close,2 an exclusive residential area in Berlin’s district Pankow, where the party leadership, shielded from the rest of the citizens, resided until the mid-1950s.3 Beerenbaum’s hackneyed phrases and his success story from “working class lad” to “professor with a primary school education” (162) tempt Rosalind so much that she looks for confrontation despite her resolution to remain as uninvolved as possible. In a final argument, her aggressive space-taking serves to get even not only with Beerenbaum but also with her suppressed past.

1 Monika Maron, Silent Close No. 6 (London: Readers International, 1993), 5; this edition is cited throughout the whole text. German version: Monika Maron, Stille Zeile Sechs (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1991). 2 On the one hand, it’s really quiet there: “The mansions are surrounded by a strange silence, strollers suddenly talk quietly; the houses and front gardens seem frightening, the whole district “as bleak as a mining town after a goldrush” (7). On the other hand, silence is a motif for dilapidation and hidden guilt which intensifies during the course of the novel and symbolizes the stagnating, ideologically depressed system. Unstoppably doomed, the system in Silent Close sticks to the deceptive order that cannot conceal its real state of dilapidation. This impression reoccurs in Rosalind’s description of Beerenbaum: the system seems to be inscribed in Beerenbaum’s body; his right hand’s tremor becomes a symbol of the ailing state; his death becomes a foreboding of the approaching collapse of the system. 3 According to Umberto Eco, such an identification of real-space reference should not induce to equalize spaces in fictional texts with their reference objects (83). The exclusive residential area Pankow that at the same time frightens and attracts Rosalind is a fictive “parasite of the real world” and thus fundamentally different from spatial reality.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

195

Selection and combination of partial spaces Structuralist spatial theory – most notably represented in Jurij Lotman’s work – intensively engages with spatial relations and question of the semantic potential of binary spatial structures (217–231). According to Lotman, a binary-topological perception of reality is reflected in the topography of fictional texts. The fact that many texts contain a semantically charged spatial dichotomy with a topographically manifested border does not mean that binary spatial patterns should be sought after in textual analysis to the exclusion of other types of textual decoding. From the perspective of gender, the question emerges as to whether women writers might possibly favor certain (potentially non-binary) spatial structures in their fictional topographies, allowing for different contextualizations and historicizations. While the broader ramifications of such a consideration is beyond the scope of this chapter, the spatial relations in Maron’s Silent Close No. 6 serve as an example of how women writers consider space differently. Which paradigms serve the spatial structures in Silent Close No. 6 and what is the relationship between the various partial spaces in the text?4 The analysis of narrated spaces requires – as do all kinds of structuralist analyses – what one could call the correct key of classification.5 Selecting and classifying individual partial spaces in Silent Close No. 6 only with regard to the degree of their “fictivity”6 is of little meaning when it comes to identifying how the spaces contrast to and correspond with one another. A spatially-ordered pattern is only created when the partial spaces are differentiated according to their meaning for Rosalind and assigned to individual spatial paradigms, since Rosalind’s emotional mental state depends drastically on where she is.7 The spaces she withdraws to stand in contradistinction to the spaces in which she feels exposed to a strange, threatening power, those which clearly reflect the patriarchal power of the ruling system.

4 A spatial paradigm denotes a group of spaces that are in an equivalent relationship. 5 This once more supports Roland Barthes’s thesis that structuralism has to be understood as an intellectual activity. This does not imply that the spatial order of fictional texts is random. A reception-oriented approach rather draws the attention to the necessity to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate versions of the fictional space model (see Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” 1128–1130). 6 Fictivity means the degree of fictionality concerning the whole story-world (characters, space, plot). For further explanations on the degrees of fictivity see Zipfel 90–102. 7 For further explanation on the connection between space and feeling see Gertrud Lehnert (ed.), Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung [Space and emotion. The spatial turn and the new field of emotion research] (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).

196

Caroline Frank

Filled with hatred for the generation that deprived her of her own biography and forced her to comply, Rosalind stigmatizes spaces that are connected to that power, like Beerenbaum’s house, his sickroom and the cemetery in which he is buried. The best adjective to describe these spaces would be politicized, since they are dominated by the hegemonic discourse of the political system. In contrast, those spaces to which she can withdraw and enjoy the company of people close to her seem particularly peaceful and harmless. All positively-connoted spaces have in common that they, as counter-worlds, offer a space of refuge to the marginalized other. This other carries a double meaning of difference: female and non-conformist. This is why Rosalind’s and her friend Thekla’s apartments, as well as the pub where Rosalind regularly meets her former partner Bruno and the Count (a Sinologist they are friends with), belong to the group of heterotopias. This neologism is used by Michel Foucault to describe those spaces within a society “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (“Of Other Spaces” 24). The other’s spaces in Silent Close No. 6 can be further specified with reference to Foucault as heterotopias of deviation where non-conformist characters like Rosalind stay.8 These characters, however, are not forced into the heterotopic spaces by the power of the system, but instead created a spatial niche themselves where they can escape the repressions of the systems – which is simply called “it” (164) by Rosalind and the Count. They require no further explanation. Rosalind uses her story to integrate those heterotopias into the equalizing spatial discourse of patriarchal power. Several times, she emphasizes how much she appreciates the opportunity to withdraw herself spatially and how diametrically different those worlds are in her perception. Besides the “halfway unspoiled oasis” of the park at Niederschönhausen (164), the description of which harkens back to the well-known literary motive of cultivated nature as an ordered means of escape, the pub, too, seems to be a place of the other: “an Orcus in which other laws applied and urban natural right held sway. Whoever stepped into the realm of the bar was no longer under the power of the upper world but was subject to another order” (144). Thus, the systemic non-conformity through the topos of the pub, gains spatial compression: in this symbolically-laden sphere “Beerenbaum […] had as little say here as in Thekla Fleischer’s apartment” (145).9 8 Heterotopias of deviation are in contrast to heterotopias of crisis, where those people stay who are in a critical life situation. 9 Rosalind’s endeavors to undermine the socialistic-teleological discourse of the former generation through another version of history somehow find an equivalent in the concept of a counter-

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

197

Lotman’s assertion that every text creates a dichotomous space structure seems to ring true with Silent Close No. 6 – but only at first glance. Maron’s spacewriting asserts a certain ambiguity, since the pub takes a special place within the spatial network of relationships, resolving a strict binarity. It is a space of both heterotopos and politicized space. It is connected to the group of heterotopias in its function as a counter-world that offers shelter to the nonconformist characters. At the same time though, it belongs to the group of politicized spaces, governed by patriarchal power. Although the pub is not governed by the system’s power, it is still governed by a power of knowledge characterized as male: “The bar is,” says Bruno not without irony, “the last preserve of male freedom. […] Women upset the order every bar creates over time through the free interplay of forces, because, of course, no bar, and nothing else in the world for that matter, can manage without someone being in charge. In Bruno’s bar the Latins ruled the non Latins” (60). Knowing Latin – the pars pro toto for knowledge – divides the pub’s guests into two classes and generates a hierarchical structure that appears to be a projection of the socialistic system into the heterotopos. Although Rosalind understands that as a woman she is a stranger in the world of the pub, she does not avoid this space. The benevolent way she draws the bizarre, likeable picture of the pub’s guests suggests rather that she enjoys attending to their educational vanities as an interested observer.

Narrative techniques of creating space Classically structuralist narratologies differentiate between layers of the narrated world (story) and layers of depiction (discourse).10 The question arises, however, as to whether female writers use different techniques of linguistic generation and discursive conveyance to narrate space than their male colleagues. The feminist literary theory of the 1970s, which is oriented to poststructuralist theorems, would

world that she creates: on the one hand, she questions Beerenbaum’s memoirs directly and unequivocally on the level of the story by recalling events entrusted in collective oblivion. On the other hand, she questions the ruling elite’s repressive discourse on the level of space perception and description. 10 The story can be told in different ways, that is why narratologists separate the story from the discourse. This distinction can be encapsulated in the two questions: “What is narrated?” (story) and “How is a story mediated through narrative?” (discourse). Story can further be defined as the events which are told, abstracted from their arrangement in the text, and reconstructed in their chronological order. In contrast, the discourse is the stylistic and rhetorical means used by the narrator. The analysis of the discourse level begins with the questions of who is narrating, and from whose perspective the fictional world is presented (see Neumann and Nünning 13–14).

198

Caroline Frank

have answered this question in the affirmative with reference to an écriture féminine that differs in every respect from a male-denotative style of writing. Analyses of narrated spaces influenced by this concept of difference would conclude that female authors deconstruct static spaces through the use of rhetoric-semiotic language. A gender-oriented narratology, according to Natascha Würzbach, depends on culturally (and gender-specific) cognitive preconditions that relate to individual impressions, values, experiences, and feelings. While texts can reflect traditionally masculine connoted attitudes of narrating superiority, so too can they reflect traditionally feminine perspectives of sensuality and emotionality, without necessarily being connected to the gender of the protagonist or narrator. And while Würzbach does see a correlation to the gender of the author in certain instances, such a claim cannot be verified in this analysis of a single text. Instead, I draw on the aspects of the spatial syntagm, narrative forms, modes of spatial perception and techniques of narrated spatial perception in my investigation of Maron’s text in order to identify possible constants of female space-writing.

Spatial syntagm As mentioned, the structure of Silent Close No. 6 is divided in three spatial paradigms: heterotopias, politicized spaces, and spaces of both. The examination of the spatial syntagm, although closely related to the structure of narrated spaces, is located on the level of discourse. The term syntagm describes a class of partial spaces that chronologically follow each other and are contiguously related.11 In Silent Close No. 6, the sequence of the partial spaces designed in discourse is connected to the narrative organization of the plot: the novel starts and ends in the narrative present in which Rosalind talks about the events accompanying Beerenbaum’s funeral.12 The route of her movement through the narrated space of the framework-story starts in front of Silent Close No. 6 and takes her to Beerenbaum’s grave via the cemetery chapel. The framework-story is interrupted again and again by the main story that comprises several temporal levels. In the most extensive analepsis that consists of several episodes, which do not immediately follow each other in the syntagm, Rosalind talks about her acquaintance with Beerenbaum, starting with their first meeting and the begin11 While the paradigmatic level of selection functions according to the principle of metaphor that is based on similarity, the syntagmatic level of combination works according to the principle of metonymy that is based on syntactic compatibility (Jakobson 350–377). 12 For more information on the rondo structure see Chou 139–143.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

199

ning of their employment relationship and ending with their final discussion during which Beerenbaum suffers a heart attack. The setting of this action is Beerenbaum’s house and his study in particular. The second analepsis, which is not only shorter but also chronologically located between Beerenbaum’s collapse and his funeral, deals with a single event that is narrated at three different places of the novel: Rosalind’s visit in the hospital and the lascivious attack of the dying Beerenbaum, who reaches for Rosalind’s breast from his sickbed. While these two time levels are close to the narrative present, the third analepsis deals with the more distant past of Rosalind’s childhood. In several episodes that cannot be dated exactly, Rosalind describes the difficult relationship with her father for whose love she longed in vain as a child and whose attention she could only get by contradicting him.13 For the most part, the setting is Rosalind’s parental home that becomes the symbol of paternal power and unsatisfied desires. Feelings Rosalind fails to express directly are mirrored in the perception of her parental home. She draws a picture of a geometric space to show how hemmed in and oppressed she felt during her childhood: “This put me in the triangle between van Gogh’s Sunflowers, my father and my mother. Everyone stared at me – the flowers unperturbed, my father full of hatred, my mother in despair” (95). The triangle as a fixed geometric figure becomes symbol of intransigence, outdated dogmatisms, and emotionless reason. The reader initially identifies the different narrative levels through the spaces in which the action takes place, since Rosalind always starts her description of the single events with a spatial localization. As a result, the impression of a conflicting relationship between heterotopias and politicized spaces is increased through the chronological succession of the narration. On the one hand, Rosalind strings together episodes in her associative stream of memories, which are in strong contrast to each other and thus intensify the contrastive relation of the acting spaces. For example, after the account of Beerenbaum’s attack in the hospital, she describes her new friend Thekla’s cozy apartment in great detail – probably in order to suppress the previous experience: A delicate secretary bureau, the dresser, the old brass floor lamp with a yellowing silk shade, the huge myrtle in front of the window, a beautiful carpet worn where steps led to the door, everything had something of Thekla Fleischer’s faded old-fashionedness. (104)

On the other hand, episodes of different time levels, the acting spaces of which are alike in Rosalind’s perception, follow one another – for example, the descrip-

13 For further information on psychoanalytic interpretation on the relation between father and daughter see Pietzcker 50–51.

200

Caroline Frank

tion of Beerenbaum’s living room immediately follows the geometrical perception of her parent’s living room. This perception intensifies the equivalence relation between the two rooms and the two father figures Fritz Polkowski and Herbert Beerenbaum: “And once again I suddenly found myself between the cabinets and the furniture, and I howled” (96). Thus, the oppositional space pattern is stabilized by this contrastive and correlative connection of the rooms in the succeeding narrative chronology.

Narrative form – from I to she As an autodiegetic14 narrator, Rosalind is part of the narrated world; by using I, she reports her own experiences concomitant with her spatial acting from different temporal distances. The telling and experiencing I never diverge much,15 because Rosalind only narrates what she has been feeling during the various situations in the past. The distance between Rosalind’s narration and her experience is only productive – which is, supporting the self-reflection – when she wants to explain her strange relationship with Beerenbaum.16 However, she never reflects her spatial perception, except when, following one of the numerous descriptions of Beerenbaum’s study, she realizes the subjectivity of her spatial experience by revealing Beerenbaum’s gigantic silhouette as an optical illusion (51). At another point in the narrative, she suddenly changes the narrative form and describes her spatial acting in the third person. This scene in which she attacks Beerenbaum verbally in the narrated reality and physically in her imagination is a key scene in the novel. The heated discussion was preceded by a conversation with the Count, in which he revealed to Rosalind that Beerenbaum was jointly responsible for the former’s imprisonment in the 1960s. Beerenbaum, at the time a representative for ideological questions

14 One of the criteria, by which different kind of narrators can be distinguished according to Gérard Genette is that of involvement into the narrated world. The question here is if the narrator is personally involved in the story as a real character: Whereas a heterodiegetic narrator is located outside the fictional world, a homodiegetic narrator appears as a real character in the fictional world. A homodiegetic narrator, who is also the main protagonist and narrates the story of his life instead of being just an observer or a witness, is called autodiegetic (Neumann and Nünning 93). 15 Of course, the separation into a telling and narrating I is artificial and should help to describe the narrator’s distance to his own experiences. 16 The numerous comparisons to Rosalind’s father may enable the reader to realize that she hates Beerenbaum not only because she condemns his acting, but also because she discovers some of her father’s features in him. She realizes only to some extent that she is about to reexperience the traumatic relationship to her father while hoping for emotional liberation.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

201

at the same university that the Count worked for, learned that the Count had smuggled a dissertation manuscript to the FRG, for which he, consequently, denounced him: “This education was our property; anyone who ran away with it was a robber, your Sinologist was a thief, yes, indeed. A thief belongs in prison” (173). When confronting Beerenbaum with the question about the Count’s fate, Rosalind, the narrating I, suddenly faces difficulties with the first person and distances herself from the experiencing I by changing the narrative form (see Boa 141).17 This change is significantly indicated by a description of a spatial constellation: “I see them in front of me: Beerenbaum and Rosalind. He is sitting behind the desk caught in the yellow light of the table lamp. She is sitting opposite him, two paces away, entrenched behind the Rheinmetall typewriter” (172). While Rosalind, during her earlier stays in his study, always seemed to be inferior to Beerenbaum, controlling everything from behind his desk, she now appears like a vengeance goddess behind her typewriter. The Rheinmetall typewriter – Rheinmetall being a German armaments concern – becomes the highly symbolic starting point of her belligerent attack. The formerly emotionally involved narrating I thus becomes a passive observer and distances herself from her own experience. As a heterodiegetic narrator, Rosalind reports in the third person about Beerenbaum’s attempts to justify himself and about her steadily growing aggression that is mirrored in her spacetaking, theatrical gestures: “Rosalind bent forward, her arms resting on the typewriter keys. With every syllable she jerked her head in the air like a barking dog” (173). The distancing from her own experience even increases when the narrator reports what Rosalind would have liked to do. In a space of imagination, she overcomes the spatial distance which still exists in reality and hits Beerenbaum until he falls on the floor. Full of hatred for the former generation, she mutates into a Nemesis-figure who tortures her male victim until it does not move anymore. Only when Beerenbaum suffers a heart attack in the narrative reality does Rosalind end her fantasies of violence and the narrating I regains narrative control. This change from first person to third person narration simultaneously describes a change from a feminine to a masculine connotation of space: within a gender-oriented understanding of the text, the transition from homo- to heterodiegetic narration, accompanied by the change from personal experiencing to a distanced attitude, can be interpreted as a transition from a feminine, subjective spatial semanticization to a masculine, socially consensual one (“Raumdarstellung” 62). While Rosalind perceived space only from a subjective perspective so far, she now, as a heterodiegetic narrator, becomes a distanced observer of her

17 For more information on the change in narrative form see Rossbacher 21.

202

Caroline Frank

own spatial acting. The novel’s difficulty with the first person that Elizabeth Boa identifies also seems to be a difficulty the I-narrator has with her potential for violence and her visions of overcoming the spatial border between her and Beerenbaum in order to physically attack him.

Modus of space perception The reader is tied to Rosalind’s point of view through the internal focalization;18 information about the narrated world is gained only through the filter of her subjective perception. In contrast to the heterotopic places, Rosalind detects a morbidly threatening atmosphere in the politicized rooms that are controlled by the patriarchal power of the system. She expresses her feelings of unease and inferiority in these places indirectly through their description. She especially perceives Beerenbaum’s study as a space of heteronomy: A square room condemned to eternal darkness by a stout copper beech in front of its single window. He sat down at the desk in front of the window. The sparse light from outside and the early twilight reduced Beerenbaum to his contours, like a cardboard figure in a shooting range. He motioned to me to sit down at a small round table dominated by the typewriter, a gigantic fossil. (37)

Every detail is semantically-laden and becomes a means of expression. Shape, color, and size of both the objects and the room itself bear an expressive character. The square floor plan can be associated with the motif of the prison cell which Rosalind uses repeatedly in connection to the politicized spaces. She explicitly calls her former workplace at the Barabas’s research post a prison cell and in another snapshot in Beerenbaum’s study, she feels imprisoned as if she were in a photo (117). She has to take a seat assigned by Beerenbaum at a small round table, as cited above. The table’s size seems to correlate with the value she attaches to herself in this room filled with Beerenbaum’s power. Furthermore, its round shape, symbolizing the feminine, represents a contrast to the square and there-

18 The category of focalization is used to refer to the non-verbal perception of the fictional world. It includes all the cognitive, perspectival and emotional elements within the consciousness of the narrator or the characters. In case of the zero-focalization, the narrator could tell more than the characters perceive or know. He can, for example, take a look into the future or shift into the thoughts of every character. Internal focalization means that the narrator only tells what the characters can perceive or know; external focalization that the narrator tells less than the characters perceive or think.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

203

fore masculine connoted floor plan. Rosalind’s simplistic and selective perception creates a memorable impression of the study that she often recalls in the following scenes by only mentioning a few details. The tree in front of the window functions as such an evocative detail. The copper beech [Blutbuche]19 represents one part of a complex chain of signifiers that also contains Beerenbaum’s psychosomatic nosebleed, the metaphor of the bleeding GDR and Rosalind’s bloody fantasies of violence which all symbolize threat and death. The tree darkens the whole study and causes lighting conditions that hinder Rosalind from seeing anything but Beerenbaum’s silhouette. From time to time, the silhouette turns into a characterless “cardboard figure in a shooting range” and thus a comical picture of Beerenbaum’s stereotypical and conformist biography; another time, it turns into “grotesque grimaces” of gigantic size (51).20

Techniques of narrated spatial perception In general, Rosalind’s spatial impressions are descriptions; she only occasionally conveys spatial information through the narration of incidents, as in the fight scene, for instance.21 However, both the situation-bound and the non-situationbound thematic focus on space are always narrated perceptions. As a rule, Rosalind does not move during the moments of perception and keeps a fixed spatial position. Her trip to the funeral as well as the fight with Beerenbaum and her way home from a working day in Silent Close, which is described twice, are the only exceptions. Immersed in thought, she ponders her relationship to Beerenbaum on these trips home, and what has happened before. Her impressions and thoughts on her first trip home are a reaction to the protean distorted picture of Beerenbaum’s face. Filled with fear that she could have adapted to the world of ghosts of Silent Close, she wishes to be able to look into a mirror in order to make herself sure of her own identity. Only when she turns into her street, where she sees Thekla watering the little fir trees that she raises on her balcony instead of flowers, does Rosalind’s emotional tension relax and she remembers that she originally wanted to learn to play the piano (52).22

19 Literally translated “blood beech.” 20 For further information on the function of the grotesque in Silent Close No. 6 see Byrnes 70 and especially Leisten 144–146. 21 Description as a non-situation bound thematization of space is a type of text that conveys features of a space without describing a single event at the same time. See Dennerlein 141. 22 Her wish to learn to play the piano is one of the novel’s leitmotifs and symbolizes her hope for a satisfied and autonomous life.

204

Caroline Frank

Her second trip home immediately follows her first confrontation with Beerenbaum during which she accuses him of being responsible for the orders to shoot because he approved the building of the Berlin Wall. After a riotously childish outburst – she leaves the house screaming – she feels unprotected and exposed to usurpation on her way home: The only sound was the rustling of withered leaves under my feet. The “village” lay lifeless in the October haze. […] I walked along the roadway, close to the gutter where the wind had piled the leaves, dragging my feet in the rotting leaves until I had left the “village” semicircle […] It all belongs to them, I thought, the paving stones, the houses, the trees, the light behind the windows. […] I belonged to them too as soon as I entered this house, the accursed house at Silent Close No. 6. (97)

Filled with anger for Beerenbaum’s ignorance, the noises she produces are supposed to abolish the paralyzing and threatening silence as well as her powerlessness. But she has to realize desperately that the system’s influence on her life and her self-discovery is much bigger than she thought. The narrating I manages to express her own helplessness as well as her childlike desperation in an inner monologue with particular attention to nuances without concretely denoting her feelings. The narrator sticks closely to her own perception and only distances herself in a concealed way from her emotional mental state by the choice of words – for example with the adverb “lärmend” [noisy], which in the German original describes the noise Rosalind’s feet make during her walk.23 Instead of taking on a traditionally masculine connoted attitude of narrating superiority and of perceiving the room panoramically from above, the spatial perception in Silent Close No. 6 is marked as feminine: in a close-up, the narrating I captures spatial details and transports moods through the description of perception. An emotional closeness to the experiencing I is created by the suggestion of spatial closeness. Furthermore, a masculine perception of space is manifested in objective descriptions and meta-fictional reflections, while Rosalind’s spatial perception remains uncommented upon for the most part. Her feminine connoted dedication to impressions is additionally intensified by the fact that she perceives space with multiple senses: she sees it, hears it, smells and feels it. According to the findings of cognitive psychology, the sense of vision is the most important sense when it comes to one’s orientation in a room, but at the same time, vision is the one sense most distant from direct physical experience

23 In the English translation the adverb is missing: “Ich lief auf dem Fahrdamm, dicht neben dem Rinnstein, wo der Wind die Blätter gehäufelt hatte, und zog lärmend die Füße durch das modrige Laub, bis ich das Halbrund des Städtchens verlassen hatte.” Maron, Stille Zeile, 118.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

205

(Würzbach, “Raumerfahrungen,” 191). Although the description of visual impression predominates quantitatively, the auditory impression of a threatening silence gains a particularly expressive quality since it becomes a leitmotif. The surroundings’ palpation, which is closest to physical experience, is also part of Rosalind’s experience of space: “At that moment something brushed against my skin, as gently as a daddy longlegs, as delicately as a butterfly at rest. It was the cosmea” (69). Rosalind sensualizes her feelings, which do not require immediate reflection anymore, and gives subjective quality to her spatial perception through experiencing that which is close to the body.

Space as signifier On the one hand, spaces are intrafictionally meaningful to the characters: starting from the space’s socio-geographic conception as a perceived order of human beings and objects, the characters’ spatial experiences can be understood as an oscillation between actively locating oneself and passively being-located by others (Löw, “Raumsoziologie,” 63). On the other hand, there is a connection between space and plot: an important feature of many spatial structures is the border between single, partial spaces, which often seem to be insurmountable in the characters’ perceptions, thus gaining the status of spatial essence. However, characters can spatially violate the predetermined order, manifested in the narrative’s topography through the enactment of various events and border crossings.24 All female protagonists in Maron’s works, as Alison Lewis puts it, are more or less beset with the longing for an act. Rosalind Polkowski in Die Überläuferin [The Defector] – who does not only share name and profession, but also the circle of friends with the character Rosalind in Silent Close No. 6 – is tempted by activist longings, too. However, she is unable to make these longings come true; her taking action only occurs in her mental space. Thus, she serves as a narrative precursor to the real spatial acting of Rosalind in Silent Close No. 6 to some extent, as the man in the red uniform predicts in one of her visions: “Hear, hear! So you want to let the potential murderer dream about murder until he dares to commit the crime! The one who dreams about a crime today is tomorrow’s criminal” (“The Defector” 125). In Silent Close No. 6, Rosalind does not only dream of attacking Beerenbaum. While she acts physically violent in a mental space that stretches out over the diegesis, she acts verbally in reality and confronts her opponent with his denied guilt. In the mental space, she also overcomes the border that Beerenbaum created

24 Cf. the chapter on “The Problem of Plot ” in Lotman 231–239.

206

Caroline Frank

between her position in the study and his, and thus between her body and his. In the narrated reality, these borders stay intact, but Rosalind’s verbal acting is nevertheless equivalent to what Lotman means by crossing the border. Not only does she herself know about her crossing an invisible border and guilt, Beerenbaum, too, accuses her shortly before he dies: “You are my enemy, he whispered” (175). Rosalind tries to finally find a self-determined life through her verbal attacks. Reading those as successful acts of release and fulfillment of her longings does not live up to Rosalind’s problematic search for identity. She is fighting for a subject position, hoping not to feel like victim of her surroundings and socialization anymore. Following this impulse, she stops her work as a historian in Barabas’s research post before getting to know Beerenbaum, after she realized in a moment of epiphany how meaningless and heteronomous her life had been thus far. This first act of autonomy is closely related to positioning herself in space, too: so far, she had voluntarily locked herself in the room allocated to her that was basically the size of a prison cell (16). She finds a space-related metaphor for her wish to be free and not to be under somebody else’s control: “to be a cat rather than lead this dog’s life, to get your food anyplace, politely say thanks, then go back to your own patch” – and thus to become spatially unattached (16). If she realized that plan and released herself from her dependence, her adolescent search could be successful. But for reasons even incomprehensible to herself at the beginning of the novel, she reenters a relationship of financial dependence and endures yet another assigned space – this time in Beerenbaum’s study. The fact that she refuses alternative, potentially identity-establishing models of life for herself – like the affair between Thekla and Mr. Solow beyond social conventions – has multiple reasons. On the one hand, she seems incapable of transcendent love because of her feeling of having lost herself; on the other hand, her longing for an act of revolt is not compatible with those models of life established in the text whose existence requires at least partial arrangement with the system. Thekla’s bliss of love with Mr. Solow can only continue because she accepts the role of a lover. Like Rosalind, Thekla is also unmarried and childless. Neither woman conforms to the female stereotype of a working wife and mother proclaimed by the GDR leaders. Their common ground is mirrored in Rosalind’s spatial perception. She experiences her own and even more so Thekla’s apartment as places of retreat from an otherwise omnipresent patriarchal power: The worst part of it is when the same power and same rules apply in your own home as outside. My father ruled over my school and he ruled at home. […] Here, in your place [at Thekla],” I said with a glance taking in the lamp, the sofa, and the other furniture, lingering on the piano, “he would have had no say.” (112)

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

207

The fact that Rosalind describes her friend Thekla repeatedly as blind with love and stuck within her own four walls indirectly contributes to the characterization of Rosalind. Trapped herself within her own hatred for Beerenbaum and the previous generation, she is unable to regard her friend’s bliss as anything but a deficient compensation for an unsatisfying life. But Thekla obviously is the happier of the two women – and even Rosalind’s distorted perspective does not allow any doubt about that. Through the description of the female secondary character, Maron manages, as in The Defector, to provide a glimpse of what successful female self-discovery looks like. As a contrast, a psychological reading of Rosalind reveals an unconscious attempt to compensate for one’s behavior through an aggressive takeover of mental space: in his study Der Gefühlsstau (build-up of emotion), written shortly after the Wall came down, psychotherapist Hans-Joachim Maaz describes the character profile of a GDR citizen in which clear parallels to Rosalind’s psychopathography are reflected. According to Maaz, patriarchal and authoritarian education produces a pathology necessary to maintain the system. The pressure to conform passed on from parents to children leads to an oppression of inner and outer basic needs, and since emotional reactions to this complex deficiency were forbidden in the GDR, a build-up of emotion develops with far-reaching consequences (Gefühlsstau 59–60). This neologism appropriately describes Rosalind’s tense emotional state. Imprisoned in colossal hatred towards Beerenbaum, which can only be explained by transference, the social role of an aggressive oppositionist seems to be the only way to live a self-determined life. Therefore, she transfers her pent-up anger about the withdrawal of affection she suffered as a child onto Beerenbaum who, in his role as the antifascist hero and educator, continuously offers himself up through his lengthy but empty confessions. In moments of reflection that become more frequent towards the end of the novel, she realizes the futility of her act. The hope that the “day after tomorrow” will be the moment in which she finally finds emotional release is revealed by Rosalind herself as an illusion in an inner monologue during Beerenbaum’s funeral: “Beerenbaum is dead and buried. And it is as if everything were over. The day after tomorrow is the day after Beerenbaum’s death. When is the day after tomorrow? Tomorrow, the day before yesterday, the day after tomorrow? Did the day after tomorrow pass by already without my noticing it?” (182). Describing Silent Close No. 6 as a failed depiction of female identity formation does not do justice to Monika Maron’s complex and continuous attempt to reestablish meaning. Just as the spatial structure that breaks binaries remains ambivalent, so too do Rosalind’s actions oscillate between emancipatory and destructive moments.

208

Caroline Frank

Narrated space and spatial discourse Influenced by the spatial turn’s investigation of cultural constructions of space, literary scholarship’s close reading of spatial structures expands as well to a wide reading, i.e., beyond the internal spatial boundaries of the primary text as the only carrier of meaning and into its role within the broader spatial discourse of representation.25 Monika Maron’s space-writing in Silent Close No. 6 can be read as literary reference and answer to actual spatial discourses: on the basis of various signals of subjectivity (as one might call them), the reader realizes that Rosalind’s narrating I, despite the temporal distance, usually conveys spatial experiences with little emotional distance. Thus, the description of spatial perception is not obliged to any objective realism. Because of the lack of a heterodiegetic narrator who has an overview of the narrated world to vouch for the validity of spatial descriptions, Rosalind’s spatial model is a matter of debate, since Rosalind herself actively constructs a spatial dichotomy that consists of positively and negatively connoted spaces. Although the heterotopias she creates give expression to her desire for resistance and individuality, they are – as are the politicized spaces – a result of her processes of semanticization. Through this de-naturalization, the novel undermines the idea of space as independent from perception. Of course, the narrated space has the potential to be a means of expressing other culturally created constructs, running the gamut from gender stereotypes to social and ethnic differences. According to Würzbach, gender discourse crosses all the other discourses and joins them in the semanticization of narrated spaces – for example when space is object to matriarchal mythologization, loaded with female sexual symbols or critically reviewed (“Erzählter Raum” 113). Silent Close No. 6 lacks gender-stereotypical symbolizations of space. But obviously, the narrated space is gender-specifically territorialized and indirectly refers to real-world gender relations: the GDR – like other socialist states – proclaimed gender equality. Women were integrated into economic plans, but at the same time, they were supposed to do their duties as housewives and mothers. However, the resulting double burden and its consequences were never part of the public gender discourse. Although women were part of the plan for workingclass emancipation, the only historically important subject was the male worker (see Boa 126). Also of note is that men held leading political positions most of the time, which led to the development of a ruling system that is specifically understood as

25 See the theoretical orientation of the contributions in Hallet and Neumann.

Female Topographies: Depiction and Semanticization

209

patriarchal.26 But how are gender relations manifested in the fictive spaces of Silent Close No. 6? A crucial function of Rosalind’s perception of narrated space is whether women or men stay within them. Before Rosalind herself turns into a female aggressor, the State’s influence seems omnipresent to her: “All around you there’s something lying on the streets called power. […] Everyone takes a little bit of it and some can’t get enough – so they become policemen, porters, or politicians” (111). She feels herself as a victim of patriarchal power and is especially unable to withstand the influence of older men: “I gave them [old men] everything they wanted before they had time to ask me for it” (18). This lack of will is the result of a transmission process. In many elderly men – since the stereotypical biographies of the generation of the founding fathers of the State allow those comparisons – she recognizes her father and thus remembers the undigested trauma of her childhood. Retrospectively, her father’s exercise of power can be localized exactly, since he rules school and family. Beerenbaum’s power is equally closely related to a specific space – the Silent Close. The novel’s gender-specific topography is mirrored by the fact that in the former GDR, public as well as private space was imbued with the system’s influence. It is the purportedly private spaces especially that expose Rosalind to male influence. But can she keep a Room of One’s Own à la Woolf? Thekla’s flat, the park and Rosalind’s own home are definitely areas of privacy, but can she find peace there? The text’s metaphorical level gives a clear answer: using spatial metaphors like “then he [Beerenbaum] infested my life like the plague” (25) or “I was putting him out of my life where he had taken a place long before we had met, a place he had taken as if it had been his own” (46), Rosalind expresses that she has even lost her body’s space as her last refuge. In positively connoted spaces, she only seems to prepare for winning belatedly a lost fight against Beerenbaum. And suddenly she becomes the attacker: with her female gaze, she reduces Beerenbaum to a grotesque physicality. Her imagined act allows her to conquer the room at least for a short moment, and thus to re-semanticize it: the former place of oppression turns into a place of emancipation. Consequently, the perception of the study is particularly marked with ambivalence and turns this room into a space that oscillates between male heteronomy and female autonomy.

26 Feministic social-geography has already pointed out several times that social practice inscribes into ‘real’ space and that separations of gender are realized in material space practice: “it is possible […] to identify a key aim and constant of a feminist geography or geographies: it is to demonstrate the ways in which hierarchical gender relations are both affected by and reflected in the spatial structure of societies” (McDowell and Sharp 4). For further information on the analysis of gender-sensitive territorialization in literary texts see Spokiene 123–140.

Susanne Lenné Jones

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001) Born in Moscow in 1943, former East German author Irina Liebmann belongs to the generation of post-World War II authors who takes a more serious approach to the legacy of National Socialism and who questions the linear workings of memory, but who still sees truth hidden in the space of material objects, such as photographs. While Liebmann’s photo-essay Stille Mitte von Berlin [Quiet Center of Berlin] (2001) includes a visual element, creating what Jones refers to as a “multifaceted narrative” that spans three timeframes, 1848–1945, the mid-1980s, and the post1989 period, the emphasis here is on the written text. Focusing on the “quiet places” of Berlin, Liebmann’s text well reflects Massey’s “inextricably interwoven” sense of space and time. Jones builds on Lefebvre’s notion of “perceived, conceived and representational spaces” and the “flexible and in-between-state” of Soja’s “Thirdspace” to relate to readers how Liebmann’s text shifts away from one-dimensional narratives that are often shaped by hegemonic discourse. In this feminist opening up of the space-time binary and attention to quiet, alternative spaces, we come to understand Liebmann’s presentation of the past (and present) as more open, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. (Beth Muellner) Since the 1990 unification of Germany, a great number of Berlin texts have populated the literary market both in Germany and abroad.1 It is no surprise that the capital would attract such attention both in literary and scholarly realms since this city, uniquely identified in terms of space for over four decades, has been forced to re-inscribe its spatial identity in the wake of drastic political changes. A notable example is Irina Liebmann’s photo-essay Stille Mitte von Berlin [Quiet Center of Berlin] (2002),2 which was published a little over a decade after the Berlin Wall’s dismantling. It forms part of a newer trend in contemporary German literature that

1 Among the many books that have appeared just in the last few years are Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt [Measuring the World, 2005], Iris Hanika’s Treffen sich zwei [When two meet] (2008), Chloe Ardjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and Anna Winger’s This Must Be The Place (2009). In her article “Play Zones: The Erotics of the New Berlin,” Katharina Gerstenberger has diagnosed a trend in which Berlin has become the “Sehnsuchtsort” [desired destination] of the 1990s, a place of idyllic co-habitation, especially in the individual neighborhoods of the city (260). 2 The book’s title translates to Quiet Center of Berlin (unless indicated otherwise, all translations from this work as well as other quotations from the German are mine).

212

Susanne Lenné Jones

rejects existing chronological and one-dimensional approaches to the past.3 While scholars have most recently described a new, third generation of writers, who have come of age largely after the fall of the Berlin Wall and who are reframing recent history as they seek more multi-dimensional approaches to Germany’s Nazi-past, Irina Liebmann is not part of this trend. At first sight she seems to belong to the socalled second generations of writers, who were born in the final years of World War II and who take a more serious approach to the legacy of National Socialism. The authors of this second generation might question the linear workings of memory or dominant historical discourses, but are very much still in search of a truth hidden in material spaces, in photographs or the archive. As this essay will show, Liebmann’s work exhibits characteristics of both the second and the third generation, thus positioning herself in between the two generations of authors writing about the effects of the Jewish genocide on German post-war and post-Wall society. The author explores the interrelatedness of history, social relations, and space in search of forgotten or repressed narratives. By zooming in on particular places within Berlin’s “quiet” center and following various material, archival, and other traces, Liebmann is able to discover different, at times divergent accounts of gender relations in the nineteenth century, critical factors contributing to the rise of antisemitism in the early twentieth century, and East-West relations during Germany’s division. Exploring the confined space of the GDR allows the author to expose feelings of entrapment, inferiority, and powerlessness on one side, as well as a western definition of the East as a passive, feminine, static, and de-politicized non-space. Records of home ownership in nineteenth century Berlin call into question prevailing narratives of the public sphere as an exclusively male domain, while archival documents detailing church politics in the city’s former Jewish quarter offer some insights into the origins and dynamics of the ideological tide that swept the nation around the turn of the twentieth century. Examining the ways in which urban spaces have been perceived, understood, and imagined – and how these perceptions, interpretations, and invented or real representations change over time – thus reveals the significance of power hierarchies in the physical structuring of space, in its subsequent representation, and ultimately in the shaping of its meaning for future generations. With the end of the Cold War, the spatial manifestations of the political divide of the previous forty years began to fall apart, leading to drastic spatial reconfigurations. As Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel have noted in their recent book Spatial Turns: Space, Place and Mobility in German Literature and Visual Culture

3 See the recent book Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (2010), edited by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani.

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

213

(2010), space constitutes a central forum for the unfolding of history and its effects on social relations. In fact, political geographer Edward Soja, who has strongly advocated for a spatial turn outside of his discipline in the past few decades and who has shaped the discussion in important ways,4 argues that social relations only become real when they are “spatially inscribed” (Thirdspace 46). The ways in which critical historical and political developments and ideologies of the second half of the twentieth century in central Europe have shaped its geography support the notion of spatial turn scholars like Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault, and Doreen Massey, that things unfold in space as they do in time and history. Thus, in order to gain a more complete understanding of the human experience during key periods in Germany history, such as the Cold War or the rise of National Socialism, one must analyze not only the temporal dimensions – the chronology of events – but also their unfolding in space. If, on one hand, social, political, and economic developments shape space, on the other, the psychological effects on the individual people living in each political entity reflect the consequences of such large-scale geographical determinations, such as the division of Germany into a socialist German Democratic Republic in the east (GDR) and a capitalist Federal Republic of Germany in the west (FRG). More precisely, spatiality as a political and cultural product defined the socio-historical context of the GDR and thus shaped the identity of East Germans. Both phenomena are central to Berlin author Liebmann’s exploration of Berlin’s “quiet center.”5

4 In his book Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Modern Critical Theory (1989), Soja maintains that space is an equally important category of analysis as time when trying to understand the human condition. In his 1996 study Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Soja develops the notion of Thirdspace, in which “everything comes together […] subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (Thirdspace 57). 5 In fact, this urban space, the “Mitte” district, is so critical to her undertaking that it might easily be considered the book’s protagonist. This assertion is supported by the title, Quiet Center of Berlin (2001), which specifically names the district as the work’s main point of interest. In her photo essay, she uses above all spatial representations, such as place metaphors – referring to Berlin’s center, for example, as “ein ganzes, großes Wohnzimmer, [das da] verwitterte und verstaubte” [“a whole, large living room, [which] was withering away and gathering dust”] (Quiet Center 5) – as well as actual photographic images, to describe the lives of the people in East Berlin during the 1980s. In fact, photography – especially of urban landscape as in Liebmann’s book – is essentially a visual reference to space and the places within, such as streets, buildings, and courtyards, and it complements the narrative laid out in the book’s first half.

214

Susanne Lenné Jones

In Quiet Center of Berlin, Liebmann chronicles and meditates on her (re) discovery of the formerly “quiet center of Berlin.” The writing of this photographic essay was prompted by her rediscovery of pictures and notes she herself had taken in the early 1980s of the area around the Hackescher Markt, a central and historical part of (East) Berlin.6 Liebmann’s images document its radical change over the next twenty years, above all following German reunification in 1990. First and foremost, she is interested in finding out how the past has led to the present, particularly, how a city so vibrant with democratic and liberal ideas during the mid-nineteenth century could have devolved barely a century later into a city so central to the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War.7 As she explores this city-space and its history, she becomes most concerned with the glaring gaps that she is unable to fill through historical research or with public narratives of Germany’s past. Thus, she ventures into Berlin’s “quiet” and forgotten spaces in search of evidence of a past that may help her understand the ruptures and discontinuities brought about before her birth but which continue to affect not just her own life trajectory, but also that of many of her fellow Berliners and the German nation as a whole. While Liebmann’s research spans the time from the German Revolution in 1848 up to the present, the focus is on three major time frames: 1848 to 1945 (the past before the GDR); the time of her original research in the early eighties (the time of the GDR); and finally, the time of her writing around the turn of the millennium (post-GDR present). This article will follow her research achronologically, beginning with her initial research during the final decade of Germany’s division when she explores the then current East-West-relations in Berlin. At the same time, she is examining housing records of the past that shed light on gender relations in nineteenth-century Germany. These records ultimately seem to fill some of the gaps in understanding how an overwhelming majority of the German people could buy into the ideologies that ultimately led to the persecution of the German Jews.

6 Born in 1943 in Moscow, the author is of Jewish descent and has lived and worked as a journalist and author in Berlin since 1975 – until 1988 in the East and then in the Western part of the city, which has become a central component in most of her works. While she had previously published novels set in the city, such as Berliner Mietshaus [Berlin tenement] (1982) and Mitten in Berlin [Smack-dab in the middle of Berlin] (1989), Quiet Center of Berlin is the most direct, conscious exploration of the spaces surrounding the Hackescher Markt and ultimately of the past tied to them. It is also the first time that Liebmann has published her own photographs of this area along with her reflections. 7 In addition to her notes and photographs, this book includes quotations from archival sources such as newspapers, city and church records, as well as encyclopedias.

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

215

Though the photographs reprinted in her book were taken in the 1980s, Liebmann reveals their complex relations to various critical moments in German history, such as the rise of antisemitism as well as the country’s division. By including these images and tying them into a multifaceted narrative reaching back to different points in time – even referencing the 9/11-attacks on New York’s twin towers and the then impending war in Iraq – I suggest that Liebmann’s Berlin places represent “spatio-temporal events,” which are constituted by the intersection of numerous, constantly shifting trajectories in both “natural” and “cultural” spaces (Massey 130 and 149). As a result, Liebmann’s book opens up the space-time binary8 to more multi-dimensional inquiries allowing the reader to understand better the complex narratives of the past, as well as the present. On the surface, the images of mostly empty streets, old, worn-down, crumbling facades, and closed shop windows illustrate the author’s attitude towards life in the GDR, which she describes as wrought by decay, stagnation, neglect, and isolation. The abandonment and desertion visible in this central area of the East German capital epitomizes the decay of living space throughout the socialist republic. Rereading her notes from the 1980s, Liebmann realizes not only the wide extent of the decay, but also the degree to which living in such run-down spaces had compromised even her own notion of normal: “Reading my notes I realized just how normal that fact [relating to the existence of the decaying old buildings] had become to their residents – I never asked about the condition of these houses or how it was explained“ (11). In order to be able to live in the East, inhabitants had to accept the socio-political practices of the state and their effects on the material environment and mental spaces of its inhabitants as normal.9 This adjustment to the “new norm(al)” serves as merely one example of the many ways in which changes in space brought on by political change shape the mental spaces of its inhabitants. This passage also highlights the transformation in meaning of a certain space or place within it over time. As social scientist and feminist geographer Doreen Massey has argued, space is not the static, passive, and de-politicized category for which it had long been misunderstood

8 Massey has criticized the understanding of time and space as opposites, as noted by scholars of the Modernity, such as Anthony Giddens. In his study The Consequences of Modernity (1990) he argues that the invention of the clock in modern times has separated space from time in what he calls a process of “time-space-distanciation” (3,14). 9 Liebmann’s notes, as well as numerous instances of communist “red humor” among the East German people serve as evidence of the fact that this endeavor was more of an ongoing struggle rather than a successful accomplishment (see for example Kurt Hirche’s collection of jokes circulating in Germany during the National Socialism and Communism: Der “braune” und der “rote” Witz [The “brown” and the “red” joke”] (1964)).

216

Susanne Lenné Jones

(6–7).10 Recalling that a geographical space changes or signifies different things in different socio-political contexts, Liebmann’s present recognition of her previous unawareness of this area’s neglect exemplifies this shift in meaning. What was seen as normal during the GDR era now stands out as a symbol for the conditions and mental states of that time as much as it does for the ensuing changes. Recognizing that physical space is not static, as often presumed, but that places along with their meanings do change, opens up the possibility to explore such transformations in order to gain insights about the social relations tied to these spaces in the past and present. As the above example indicates, Liebmann sees physical and mental spaces not only as changing over time, but also as closely interrelated. She describes the inability of many of her East German friends to make themselves at home in the GDR,11 and thus alludes to the “Ausweglosigkeit,” the inevitability of their situation. Many – including the author – dreamt about fleeing from the East to the West as a way out: “In the notes [of my diary] I read of separations everywhere, and: travels, applications for departure permits, farewells, visits from the West, and after all: The West! That was the main topic during these years, the West! Out of the GDR!” (22, italics Liebmann).12 However, flight to the West was not an option for most East German citizens, which led to a feeling of resignation: “Resignation was part of our attitude towards life” (23).13 Inhabitants of the socialist part of Germany felt physically imprisoned, trapped in the limited space they were permitted to inhabit and travel. In addition to an altered understanding of normalcy, this

10 In her book Space, Place, and Gender (2007), Massey criticizes the traditional binary of time, as associated with history, progress, civilization, politics, the universal, theoretical, and conceptual, versus space, as having to do with stasis, passivity, depolitization, the local, the specific, concrete, and descriptive (6–9). 11 The term “home” itself is problematic in the context of Eastern Germany. As Jennifer MarstonWilliam asserts, “[t]hose in the East were uprooted without ever relocating physically, obligated to find their way within freshly defined boundaries (metaphorical and physical) and new structures (institutional / systemic, but also physical […]” (88). Peter Bickle defines the idea of home (specifically the cultural term of “Heimat”) as “the imaginary space where a reconciliation with an alienated, moving world” takes place (40). Because Berlin’s Mitte district is home to the author, her book can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile with the alienated and fast-paced world of postwall Germany. 12 All passages stemming directly from Liebmann’s journal notes written in the 1980s, here referred to as her “Notizen” [notes], are reproduced in italics by her and subsequently in this essay. 13 Those who dared to request permission to leave often faced years of sanctions, such as employment restrictions, the denial of access to higher education and other forms of political repression.

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

217

feeling of physical entrapment is engrained in the psyche as well, erasing the mental spaces for hope and the imagination of a fulfilling life in the East. The concept of physical space affecting the mental maps of its inhabitants closely correlates to the basic understanding of space outlined by Henri Lefebvre, which has been influential in subsequent studies, most notably by Soja and Massey. Lefebvre divides space into three categories: first, the concrete, “real” physical spaces (also referred to as “perceived” or “Firstplace” in Soja’s work14); second, the imagined spaces or representations of space (“conceived” or “Secondspace”); and third, the lived “spaces of representation” (Lefebvre 38–40). This third category is the most elusive of the three and is often described as a mixture of the first two, as “lived (social) spaces” (Fischer and Mennel 14). Soja further defines these concepts, focusing on the last category, which he calls “Thirdspace” and describes as tentative and flexible, real-and-imagined, and open to new constellations and contestations (Soja 2, 6, 13). Applying this trialectic understanding of space to the above example from Liebmann’s text, the physical borders, along with the buildings and streets in them belong to the first group of real, concrete space. This perceived urban scape in turn affects how it is conceived and imagined by its residents, above all the author of the book (whose perspective is offered as representative for many). Such conception is based on a large variety of factors, including socio-political conditions, private experiences and so forth. To the politically informed author and her friends, the physical boundaries thus result in feelings of entrapment, statis, and hopelessness. On another level of imagined space, the geographical restrictions of East Germans are conceived – by the author and her East German acquaintances – as a restriction of time as well. Their resignation indicates that they have given up hope for progress and a different future. Such perception of a denied future based on geo-political conditions is expressed by some of Liebmann’s friends bluntly: “We had no future” (24). This temporal limitation is instantly tied to a reference that contains both space and time, the “death zone:” “Supposedly they had already shaded us in black stripes on their maps; here was the death zone; therefore we would only be allowed to visit each other, people from the death zone, GDR and ČSSR, back and forth, not to bother the others” (24). “Death” is the time limit that spans a person’s life, while a zone refers to a geographical entity. Its shading in black stripes on the West Berlin map serves as a dual visual reference, first to the temporal restriction that is death and second to the space

14 In his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Edward Soja further refines Lefebvre’s trialectics.

218

Susanne Lenné Jones

itself, which is deprived of the temporal dimensions of a present and a future.15 In the GDR, the boundaries of time and space seem to converge into a then-current void that is only recognizable in contrast to the many places housing the past. With no place to go and no present or future to live for, Irina Liebmann thus turned to exploring the only option she saw available to her – Berlin’s past: Those who could not decide to pack up everything and apply for a permit for departure from the German Democratic Republic needed a nice and difficult task; one that would tie up all energy and that would suppress everything else – I had found such a task, but I cannot say that I was able to breathe any more freely because of it. (23)

In Quiet Center of Berlin, Liebmann puts forth the notion that East Berliners, bereft of the right to move geographically (other than within Eastern block countries or with special permission) and unable to imagine advancement toward a future, could only remain stagnant or move backwards in time. This notion harkens back to Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, in which the real and imagined merge. In this way, the past not only becomes a mental space that embodies what went before, but it can also morph into an alternative, imaginative present. While her surroundings resist change – “all around the same” (23) – Liebmann’s perspective of them has evolved based on her engagement with a different (temporal) dimension of life. Although the past is a bygone and physically unattainable reality, the space exhibiting markers from this past is undeniably – Liebmann presents her photographs of these palimpsests from the past as material, though mediated, proof – still present in all its materiality. Quiet Center of Berlin presents thus an escape into a space that is both real and imagined, although Liebmann can only approximate the reality of the past by researching in depth specific places and engaging her imagination to put together the puzzle pieces she encounters. Thus, Soja’s Thirdspace with its flexibility, fluidity and openness becomes indeed fruitful to consider. Liebmann’s engagement with the physical loci of Berlin’s center (Firstspace) and its representations (Secondspace) brings about the concept of Thirdspace to gain a more complete understanding of how this area relates to the larger historical development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this sense, Stille Mitte achieves movement, neither spatially nor toward a more fulfilling future, but rather toward a better understanding of the history that continues to the present.

15 At the same time, the word “Todeszone” recalls the well-known Berlin non-place, the death strip (Todesstreifen), which marked the narrow territory between the Berlin Wall, or the border between East and West Germany, and the space accessible to persons standing on the socialist side of the border (which, in the case of the Wall, was not always to the East in strictly geographical terms).

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

219

However, while researching the past serves to distract the author from resignation to her fate in the GDR and the focus on the West, ultimately it cannot liberate her from the geographical and mental imprisonment she feels subjected to: “Separation attempt is written on every page, and that I could not sleep during the night, no air, separation attempt!” (23). As the above examples show, the geographical isolation of Eastern block countries translates into feelings of isolation, stagnation and despair. The lives led inside the boundaries of East Berlin seem cheap, unimportant, negligible (12 and 65), the distance between the two parts of a divided Germany insurmountable.16 Such a conceptualization of space by East Berliners seems obvious and inevitable, but the implications of the physical division between East and West reach far beyond the political realm into the deeply private, even intimate, offering rather surprising insights. As much as the Oriental has been sexualized in western post-colonial discourse, the opposite was taking place in East Berlin before 1989: “Everything behind the wall seemed erotic. Most erotic of all a lover from there, a new relationship, a wedding in the end” (25). While East German relationships and marriages are described as constantly in flux or on the brink of breaking under the dullness of everyday existence, an affair with a Western lover promises excitement and progress, as in the example of Liebmann’s friend who has been trying to separate from her East German partner for six years and only manages to do so after meeting a man from the West (24). The mere fact that a potential partner is from the West provides a source of extraordinary excitement: A married friend is indignant over such observations, then receives a letter from a first love from Hamburg who has not been in touch for 20 years, but wants to come now, for just one day; she is in a state of emergency since then. (25)

Here, the geographical origin is sexualized in the reverse direction of postcolonial discourse, while the individual characteristics of a particular person – who in this case has been absent for twenty years – appear to be irrelevant. By recording the personal and intimate space conceptualizations of her female friends, Liebmann further distances her writing from post-colonial discourse, which is often dominated by a male, white, western viewpoint.

16 It is striking that Liebmann’s description of life in East Berlin is rarely truly about what this life was as it is what this existence in the socialist part of the city was not: rather than being defined on its own terms, it nearly always is simply a negative, or a counter-image of Western capitalism: it is a void, an absence of life, liberalism, and progress. The West, on the other hand, takes on nearly mythical qualities: it signifies salvation from the languishing in the East, representing life, plurality, freedom, and democracy.

220

Susanne Lenné Jones

East Germans are not alone in defining their space against the image of the West. People living on the other side of the Wall equally let political and spatial markers, such as borders and political maps, shape their mental image of a Cold War urban space. Liebmann cites examples of West Berlin friends and their concepts of what the Eastern part of Germany is like. One particularly striking illustration comes from a woman whose perception of Berlin’s space seems distorted by the political division: One day, out of the blue, a friend from West Berlin shows up at the door; she has discovered that it is just around the corner, the way we live, only half an hour away. She has realized that I am quite near her. You live next to us and are not even there. She said that of us, then does not come for a long time, a year. (25, italics Liebmann)

This passage once again emphasizes the degree to which “mental space of cognition and representation” (Soja, Postmodern, 120) is often shaped by socio-political forces. Not only does this woman harbor an unrealistic perception of distance but to her the Eastern side of the city seems not even to exist: “You […] are not even there” (25). Harboring such an impression, this friend echoes the political maps – typical for both German states – that marked the territory of the other state as blank white or yellow space, merging in its Secondspace, to some extent, the conception of material space with its representation both on paper and in the residents’ minds. At this point an interesting phenomenon emerges: while East Germans fill the blank space on maps with mythical or sexualized imaginations of the occidental part of the nation, the Western mind appears to accept the void suggested by printed maps and the public media. The relationship between these two national spaces is defined by a certain structure, which shall be explored below, that prompts the residents in each state to conceive of the space on the other side of the Wall differently. One of the central assumptions of spatial discourse is its undeniable link to power, or, as feminist geographer Doreen Massey pointedly asserts, “society is constructed spatially” (254). The position of individuals and groups within a given space reveals existing power hierarchies of a particular country, society, or nation. This notion can be extended to our mental conception of inhabited space. The ways in which space is imagined, described, and represented can be said to reflect and shape these hierarchies even more lucidly. Rather than simply portraying the geography of city space, expressions of imagined space show how these spaces are conceived (Secondspace). The West German friend’s comments reveal the egocenteredness of West Berliners and their self-perceived higher positionality within the hierarchy of power between the two nations. Although geographically speaking West Berlin was the smaller entity, enclosed by the Wall, it is the only space that exists in this friend’s perception. Quite different from the East Germans’

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

221

perception of a superior West, to the Western resident, life beyond the Wall seems remote, non-existent. While no one doubts the stronger position of the FRG in terms of political and economic factors, Liebmann also shows how such a standing affects the perception of physical space and how it is imagined or represented. Another Western visitor to Liebmann’s house is described as a prolific author who comes to the East to cheer up his friend, telling her that he goes to France when thoughts of the nuclear arms race depress him. Comments such as this or his remark that he looks forward to “eating like at mother’s” at Liebmann’s place (25), equally reveal a sense of hierarchy. The East, which can only “receive” visitors, becomes associated with passivity, the static, the feminine and the private. Here, the culinary culture has not evolved since the time of his childhood (likely the postwar years), when food was prepared largely at home by the woman of the house. The fact that he travels to the East to cheer her up demonstrates his perception of his own superior position, from which he can lift up someone beneath him. When he himself needs uplifting and non-private, political dialog, he looks to the West, to France, which is associated here with the political and dynamic public sector. Liebmann’s portrayal of the conversation with her West German friend demonstrates the spatial organization of society and the hierarchies conceived therein, with the West identified as the superior, the active, the political, and the public, while the East is associated with the inferior, the passive, the private.17 Similar binaries figure prominently in the scholarship on space: east versus west, space versus place, and finally, the masculine versus the feminine. Many recent studies in geography, philosophy, and urban planning suggest that space is gendered and that the city as an ideological, official, and political space exhibits largely male-dominated urban practices. In her study of German women’s writing in the eighteenth century, Diana Spokiene, for example, asserts that women are placed in the domestic realm of the city and outside of the masculine public sphere. As men in society have traditionally determined, allocated, and controlled women’s spaces, their spaces in the city have been restricted, limited, and typically interior and their urban experience has been seen as irrelevant to the development of the aesthetic of modernism. (130)18

Liebmann exposes the complexity of such seemingly rigid gender relations through her research of building records of the houses in the Große Hamburger

17 There is some irony in this view of the inherent hominess of the East, given that most East German women were employed outside of the home and therefore were much more present in the public sphere than many West German women. 18 See also Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988).

222

Susanne Lenné Jones

Straße, located near the Hackescher Markt, this time reaching further back than in her previous considerations on East-West-relations during Germany’s division. In doing so, she underscores the multiple historical narrative layers that can be uncovered by studying the spatial configurations of Berlin’s center. The files of individual houses reveal the names and professions of the residents, as well as the type of businesses housed there. More importantly, the records cast doubt on the general assumption of women’s complete economic dependency on their husbands or male relatives during the nineteenth century. The documents tell of numerous women who bought, sold, built, and tore down houses, or ran an inn or another type of business: “This did not at all conform to my image of the oppressed women from the past” (31). Liebmann was very much aware of the discourses on women’s restriction to the private realm alluded to above – often put forth by male authors – in which society in the nineteenth century was usually presented as male-dominated, and in which most women were economically dependent on men and unable to own property or manage businesses. Yet these building records call into question such static assumptions. While they show how intimately geography of space is involved with social relations, they also demonstrate how the perception of such space and the social hierarchies exposed through it can be shaped by subsequent representations by any dominant social group. Aleida Assmann’s study Erinnerungsräume (1999) suggests that the investigation of specific places which have not yet been “researched, measured, colonized, annexed, networked” as public or well-known spaces can offer alternative narratives about the past (300).19 Examining closely specific records of places as Liebmann does in Quiet Center of Berlin offers an alternative narrative, which counters the dominant impression of a patriarchal society in which women had no power or means of self-determination. Such endeavors are in line with feminist geographers who condemn the restrictive understanding of urban space as fixed and as containing clearly divided gender roles and experiences.20 This more complex reading of gendered space harkens back to the notion of space as a “power grid,” by which indivi-

19 In her study, Assmann writes: “Räume im Sinne von ‘bekannten Ländern und Gegenden’ sind erforscht, durchmessen, kolonisiert, annektiert, vernetzt; Orte dagegen, wo man ‘auf jeden Platz, in jedem Moment’ in die Tiefe gehen kann, gewahren noch ein Geheimnis.” [Space in the sense of “familiar countries and areas” has been researched, measured, colonized, annexed, and networked; places, however, where “every locale, every moment” provide an opportunity to go into depth, still harbor a secret.] (300). 20 See Kim England’s article “Gender Relations and the Spatial Structure of the City,” Geo-Forum 22.2 (1991): 135–47 and Gillian Rose’s study, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1993).

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

223

duals, groups, and values are defined. Within the context of gender relations, the “higher position” is occupied by the men, who in turn determine the positionality of women. As Spokiene asserts, “women’s relegation to the domestic (private) space (and conversely fewer public spaces) historically, reflects their lower position in the existing power hierarchy of a particular community, society, or nation” (131).21 In order to gain a more accurate and complete understanding of the positionality of gender roles at any particular point in time, it is crucial to go beyond the conception of a specific space through the representation by the dominant group (occupying the higher position), and to bring in other voices to complement or dispel existing, one-dimensional narratives about the past. Women’s voices such as Liebmann’s suspend existing mental maps of what went before and bring formerly unknown insights into the discourse. Liebmann is acutely aware of the close link between material space and power structures, as well as how this relationship transforms over time. In Quiet Center of Berlin, as this discussion of gender roles shows, she is not only interested in East-West relations during the GDR, but also in the developments leading up to the reorganization and eventual division of Germany. In fact, it is this forgotten urban space that she hopes will provide her with clues as to how her nation could have become a hotbed of the struggle between such liberal and conservative minds. She thus does research on the Jewish editor of the Urwählerzeitung [direct voters’ newspaper],22 Aaron Bernstein, and opposing nationalist forces, represented by the factory owner Franz Pretzel, at a crucial time in Germany’s past. Both men lived in this central district of Berlin in the second half of the nineteenth century and exerted considerable influence on the public sphere – the former through a liberal newspaper advocating for democratic ideals, the latter through political ploys to advance the conservative cause –

21 As a woman growing up in the socialist East, Liebmann would have been particularly aware of the gender discourse, as it was highly emphasized in schools and the public media. The fact that women were employed as much as men was celebrated as gender-equality, an achievement of socialism over the capitalist past or current non-socialist societies. As a result, women would have been in the public sphere as much as their male counterparts. Lieberman, however, never explicitly draws this contrast out. In fact, the book offers very little consideration of the status of women in the GDR. 22 The Urwählerzeitung [direct voters’ newspaper] was established in 1849 by Aaron Bernstein as an “Organ für Jedermann aus dem Volke” [organ for the common people], pursuing liberal and democratic ideas even after the 1848/49 Revolution had failed. The paper was forbidden in 1853 and reappeared shortly thereafter as the Berliner Volks-Zeitung [Berlin People’s Newspaper], which continued to be published in great numbers until 1 September 1944, but with limited political content.

224

Susanne Lenné Jones

epitomizing the opposite forces struggling to win the support of the German people at a pivotal point in the nation’s history.23 In an attempt to understand the reasons behind Pretzel’s sudden move to buy property precisely in this historic part of Berlin, as well as his strong influence on local politics, Liebmann researches the streets’ building history, including the church archives of the local Sophienkirche (Saint Sophia’s Church), and she even walks the streets Pretzel must have taken to get from his factory to his place of worship. She wonders, for example, why the Sophienkirche was “turned around” in 1905, the entrance moved from the West to the East, from the Rosenthaler Straße to the Große Hamburger Straße (45). Was it, Liebmann wonders, that in the former street the entrance was facing the Zentrum der Arbeiter (Center for Workers), which was run by the democrats and socialists until they were banned in 1884? Was this reorientation of the church meant as a repudiation of the liberal area surrounding the workers’ gathering place?: “Did he (Pretzel) eventually turn his back on all of these liberal goings-on when he moved his house and factory to the Große Hamburger Straße; is that in the end the reason why he turned around the whole church?” (45). Though she cannot be sure that this shifting of the church’s entrance was motivated by ideological considerations or even that Pretzel was the driving force behind it, her musings reflect her growing understanding of the dynamics in this area of Berlin around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Despite all her research, Liebmann cannot find a definitive answer to her queries regarding the motivation for Pretzel’s actions. The questions she asks, however, demonstrate her acute awareness of “the deeper social origins of spatiality, its problematic production and reproduction, its contextualization of politics, power, and ideology” (Soja, Postmodern, 124). The different layers of spatialization, in fact the many spatial hierarchies in society, come to the fore through her exploration. The physical space of Berlin’s center is shaped by the social relations within it, by the ideological convictions of its residents and their

23 The author is well aware that the area around the Große Hamburger Straße and Rosenthaler Straße was the center of Jewish life in Berlin until the National Socialists began persecuting them in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, weary of an ever-increasing body of literature on the Holocaust, she initially resists the idea of writing a book about the Jews and their genocide: “The Jews, were they the topic of this area? Regarding this topic I was equally self-conscious as my interviewees. […] Nothing would have been more irritating to me than if my book about the Große Hamburger Straße would have turned into a book merely about the Jewish fates; nothing more embarrassing than that” (Quiet Center 18). However, in the end she allows the narratives she finds, including those of the Jewish genocide, to be told in the book. I have discussed the relationship between the images of the book and Holocaust remembrance in the book What’s in a Frame?: Photography and Memory in Contemporary German Literature, Diss. University of Cincinnati, 2005.

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

225

subsequent molding of the places they inhabit. This is true as much for the “turning” of the church by conservative forces as it is for the construction of a more prominent building to house the growing group of liberally minded workers.24 Lefebvre’s term “spatial practices” describes how the inhabitants of these streets constructed and perceived their concrete (First)spaces, offering insight into the ways in which society organizes itself at any given time. Researching these practices reveals the ideological, economic, and political forces that gained dominance and “secreted space” (Lefebvre 37). Liebmann thus exposes these forces and weaves them into her own narratives revealing the many small-scale developments and practices that have led to the inexplicable historical events of the twentieth century. As important as it is to comprehend how space is conceived by those constructing or inhabiting it, is to understand its importance at a given point in time. Whatever the reasons for the move of the church’s entrance around the turn of the nineteenth century, for Liebmann who is wrestling with her own experiences of oppression by a totalitarian regime approximately a hundred years later, the move is tantamount to a devaluation of the liberal and democratic movement once housed in this area. The move of the building’s physical entrance symbolizes for her the ultimate turn of Germany away from the progressive, democratic ideals of the Revolution of 1848/49 towards conservative, nationalistic sentiments. By means of researching the building records of this district of Berlin, as well as the church archives, the author attempts to trace the nationalistic and antisemitic elements, which were gaining momentum here and ultimately throughout the country. Using the example of the factory owner Franz Pretzel, she highlights the critical function of urban space and its control through property ownership or other authority over it in this process: Starting in 1883 the name Pretzel also appears in the member registry of the church council; Pretzel attends eagerly. Already in 1884, exactly at the same time at which he purchases his house and land, a building commission is voted into place; and he is in. (46)

Even before he is voted into an influential position in the church council, property ownership in the area allows Pretzel to play a crucial role in shaping the social and ideological relations of his district: “He was able to submit very different kinds of proposals than the have-nots of the church council. This is roughly how I imagined it to be” (46).

24 In 1904, the Handwerkervereinshaus [Trade Association Building] opened in a large, newly constructed building, including the well-known terra cotta Sophiensäle [Sophia Halls]. A year later, the entrance of Sophienkirche was moved to face the West, to the Rosenthaler Straße.

226

Susanne Lenné Jones

Such is the case in 1896, when Franz Pretzel – then one of eleven church elders – proves to be influential enough to fight the Church Council (Gemeindekirchenrat) regarding the hiring of a third priest. The controversial candidate, Father Iskraut, was serving at that time as a representative of the antisemitic German Social Reform Party (Deutschsoziale Reformpartei) in the German parliament, the Reichstag. Despite an official rejection by the consistory and the superintendent, as well as a collection of signatures from the church community against Iskraut, he was elected twice as the third priest for the Sophienkirche because he was backed by Pretzel and other conservative entities in Berlin.25 Ultimately, Iskraut was not allowed to accept the post, but this episode documented in the church archives illustrates the strengthening of the conservative, nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in the center of Berlin around the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it underscores how closely the influence of these forces was tied to material space – either directly through property ownership or more indirectly through control over places and their inhabitants or users (as in the case of the church). The examples discussed in this article illustrate how closely space is tied to historical developments and social relations. Focusing on a chronological approach alone will only yield incomplete, oftentimes one-dimensional narratives, which are often shaped by dominant groups. The three concepts introduced by Lefebvre – perceived, conceived and representational spaces (or First-, Second-, and Thirdspace in Soja) – are useful in describing how physical space relates to its material or imaginative representation. In Quiet Center of Berlin, the confined space of the GDR instilled in its inhabitants a sense of hopelessness and entrapment, while creating a sexualized myth of the West. In turn, Western residents were able to define the East as a non-existent void or a passive, feminine, static, and depoliticized space. They were able to do so from a perceived position of superiority, since groups and individuals in higher positions within social and spatial power hierarchies dominate the representation of space and thus influence the discourse about the past. Liebmann demonstrates that it is possible to call into question such prevalent and biased discourses – be they about east-west relations, gender roles in nineteenth-century Berlin, or the rise of antisemitism in Germany – by zooming in on specific places and researching them in depth. Weary of the public history discourses of the German nation, Liebmann homes in on the localized space of

25 Among those are the so-called Parochialvereine der Positiven [positivistic parochial clubs], conservative and nationalistic parochial groups who grew out of the anti-liberal Positivistic movement.

Chance Encounters: The Secrets of Irina Liebmann’s Quiet Center of Berlin (2001)

227

Berlin’s Mitte district to seek clues about the past that might have escaped the collective memory narrative, thereby entering a kind of Thirdspace as described by Soja. Its flexibility and in-between-state allow her to break open existing fixed, historical accounts. By doing so, she encounters narratives that expose myths and (mis)conceptions that have shaped the relations between East and West Germans. Furthermore, her investigations reveal counter-narratives to established, dominant discourses, such as women’s unquestionable dependency on men in nineteenth-century Berlin or the rise of antisemitism and National Socialism in turnof-the-century Germany. Irina Liebmann’s photo-essay Quiet Center of Berlin is part of a newer trend in German literature – and cultural history in general – one that is skeptical of public history discourses of the German nation. These authors reject the kind of “learned memory of our nation” (Bastéa 9) that has been transmitted and reinforced through education, socialization, the media, and official state rhetoric, precisely because of its rituality, rigidity and objectifying affects. Instead, Liebmann seeks out particular loci within the vast urban space that encompasses Berlin and exposes bits and pieces of its residents’ stories through archival research and oral interviews with them.26 Finally, she engages the emerging, often divergent narratives in dialogue with each other in order to gain a more open and dynamic, but also multi-dimensional and therefore more complete image of the past. Liebmann thus positions herself between the second and third generations of authors trying to come to terms with the German past through literature. While her text is largely autobiographical, and she heavily relies on authentic sources and traces such as photographs of city spaces and architectural markers, she also recognizes the limitations of such an approach. By allowing for multiple perspectives, which she clearly shapes into her meta-narrative, however, she can be included in the group of young women writers to emerge in the 1990s and early twenty-first century referred to as the “third generation.” Their approaches are marked by de-ideologization, multi-dimensionality, and a lack of passing judgment.27 By engaging with the more ambiguous and flexible “Thirdspace,” Liebmann admits a certain degree of imagination and fictionalization to push the boundaries of her reliance on authentic and carefully researched materials in her search for the truth.

26 Examples of such interviews are the conversations Liebmann has in the 1980s with the women residents of the Mulackstraße, in which the lingering antisemitic sentiment is exposed (20–21). See What’s in a Frame? for a more detailed discussion of these interviews. 27 See Katharina Gerstenberger’s article “Fictionalizations: Holocaust Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers,” published in Cohen-Pfister’s and Vees-Gulani’s Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, 95–114.

Maria Snyder

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments in the Works of Brigitta Kronauer and Jenny Erpenbeck Maria Snyder’s essay rounds out the section on “Revisited Spaces” with an analysis of the work of authors Jenny Erpenbeck and Brigitte Kronauer in relation to the important field of ecocriticism. With nature as the “revisited” space of German literary history, Synder sees Erpenbeck and Kronauer as offering a connection to the natural world that is neither romantic nor nativist. By inserting these two authors otherwise not considered as nature writers into an analysis of ecocritical discourse, Synder presents an alternative perspective to past nature writing, largely considered a masculinist endeavor. According to Snyder, Erpenbeck and Kronauer break from the reflection of wilderness as a space of the sublime or as a frontier evident in German and American Romanticism, as well as from the timeless or ahistorical relationship to the land found in German blood-and-soil rhetoric, and in the new pastoralism of Wendell Berry. Thus, in the tradition of Kronauer’s engagement with the everyday, Snyder sees her novel Das Taschentuch [The Hankie] as presenting an alternative through the intermingling of humans and nature in the lost places of a sprawling urban landscape. In her reading of Erpenbeck’s novel Die Heimsuchung [Visitation], Snyder attempts to recover Heidegger’s sense of inhabiting the land, and sees human dwelling and the landscape suffering the same fate over time. (Beth Muellner)

Challenges of American ecocriticism in a German context Every era brings with it a particular language for depicting the relationship between human beings and their environment, and literature offers one realm of creation in which this language takes shape. The ecocritical mode of analysis promises to analyze that language and perhaps discover in it the origins of the human destruction wrought upon nature. However, in the North American context this approach has been hampered by a degree of narrowness that results from its historical and geographic origins. In what follows, I will attempt to contrast two differing modes of negotiating the human relationship to nature, both of

230

Maria Snyder

which have special relevance for the imaginative position of women in relation to the non-human world. On the one hand, recent North American ecocritical models propose a universal methodology, yet conserve a discourse imprinted with national interests and gendered spaces. On the other, two imaginative efforts in novels by the German authors Jenny Erpenbeck and Brigitte Kronauer offer insight into other paths for understanding the way that women might be said to imagine the space of the modern world. These two novels, I argue, make no claim to universality, but instead foreground the specific and the historical, and disrupt the usual categories of the subjective perception of nature in the western literary tradition. Further, they offer us an opportunity to consider the relevance of cultural and philosophical frameworks of imaginative literature in the European modernist tradition, and the alternative perspectives they present, particularly in contrast to the U.S. American ecocritical approach. A close examination of this ecocritical context will be necessary here. Ecocriticism has, over the past several decades, developed into a wide-ranging discipline with a host of methodological approaches, as Ursula Heise notes in her survey of the field (503–506). Still, one can identify a central division that separates ecocritics into two large categories. On the one side, there are those whose work centers on an anglophone pastoralist tradition, following ecocriticism’s origins in the writings of North American and English naturalists. Though ecocritics in this realm are now often thought of as post-structuralists, their approach predates the theoretical turn of the 1980s and 1990s, sharing with writers like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Thomas Hardy or John Clare a desire to approach nature directly in order to partake not only of its beauty, but of the ancient wisdom and moral consolation it offers. In the works even of ecocritics in areas of deep ecology, it is Nature (that is, the embodiment of all that this idea represents) that is the guide and source of ultimate truth. Not only skeptical of recent literary theory, critics on this side of the divide are more fundamentally engaged in a struggle against certain conditions characteristic of modernity: the state of alienation from the material world, and the epistemological condition of doubt as regards our ability to know that world (Raglon 248). James Proctor has laid out in detail the lines of battle along which the war over the social construction of nature has taken place, but it will suffice here to point out that, among defenders of the idea of un-constructed Nature, “spiritual connection with the natural world” is a bastion to be preserved (Dunlap; Proctor 357). Though lyric poets of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries laid the groundwork for this direct appeal to nature, for many North American ecocritics, Thoreau is the point of origin not only for close observations of the relation between society and nature, but also for a political tradition of social activism. Attacks on the existence of Nature thus also become attacks on the political defense of the natural world.

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

231

On the other side of the chasm are those who, as noted above, might be called the social constructivists. They regard the category of nature as a historical and cultural object of study, and thus exclude the idea of a direct experience of the natural, untainted by human categories. This group has not been the dominant voice of North American ecocriticism, and has in fact attracted strong criticism for threatening the activist force of ecocriticism by accepting nature as an abstraction, rather than as a vital object to be saved from destruction (Proctor, Heise). There is evidence, as Proctor notes, for a great divide not only between ecocritical methodologies, but between philosophical approaches on either side of the Atlantic (368). Perhaps for that reason, attempts at a phenomenological approach to the subject-object relationship between humans and the environment, the kind seen in Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, have also had difficulty finding resonance in the larger discussions of North American ecocriticism. However, Proctor’s analysis points out that the charge of “relativism” is central to this distinction, as well. If attention is directed toward the “knowing subject” rather than the object of knowledge, the analysis become focused on the instability of knowing, and for those interested in ecocriticism as a form of advocacy for nature, this stance is too perilous. By placing our idea of Nature at the center, rather than the urgent moral duty to Nature, historical and phenomenological approaches seem like the next thing to moral relativism. Further, proponents of Heideggerian phenomenology face the challenge of recovering it from its historical context, as the association between Heidegger and Nazism remains in the foreground of North American discussions of the philosopher more so than in the European context. Yet I will argue here that we may in fact usefully turn to both a German philosophical framework and to contemporary German literature and find models of how a fraught relationship with homeland and soil can be addressed directly, without romanticization.

The problem of wilderness For that part of North American ecocriticism that originates with Thoreau, environmental awareness or awareness of the non-human has long been predicated on a sense of wilderness, of the world untouched by modernity or modern human attempts at shaping and building. Certain strains of ecocriticism valorize a nonanthropocentric ideal, a conceptual unity of all living and non-living things, with no hierarchical position for human beings (Love 13–15). However, this is only the most pronounced expression of a perceived opposition between Culture and Nature (the capitalization is necessary for these embodiments of ideals), most importantly, between Nature and modernity. As William Cronon has pointed out,

232

Maria Snyder

the definition of Nature found in the works of canonical North American naturalists such as Thoreau and Muir relies on wilderness conceived as an expression of an American sublime: awe-inspiring cataracts, soaring peaks, and cathedral-like forests (84–87). It is by their opposition to urban life and the age of machines that these landscapes acquire the status of sites for the kind of meditation and reflection once reserved for chapels and monasteries. And like the sacred sites that were the model for Romanticism’s creation of the sublime, the wilderness must remain pure, unsullied by human plans or desires. Cronon notes that wilderness in North American literature is typically characterized as either a space of the sublime or as a frontier. The consequences of these categories are, among others, an association between masculinity and the conquest of natural space, a preference (extending even to political efforts) for certain categories of space, and an inability to integrate concepts of wilderness and contemporary civilization.

Deep local knowledge and nationalism Parallel to this reverence for wilderness, there exists within the North American agrarian strain of ecocriticism a preference for an ethical relationship with nature based upon habitation of a certain landscape over long periods of time (Berry, “A Native Hill”). Ecocritics urge their readers to reject universalist concepts hostile to “deep local knowledge” (Armbruster 23). While ecocriticism critiques nationalism, in large part because it prioritizes human categories over natural ones, it is in fact inescapably national (Rosendale xvi). In the case of a writer such as Wendell Berry, whose poetry is in the tradition of nineteenth-century North American pastoralists, the issue of rootedness cannot be separated from the particularly modern historical origins of Berry’s immediate antecedents in the essay form. Berry references his North American agrarian predecessors and is comfortable as one of the inheritors of the “antimodernist, anti-industrial, and anticapitalist thought of the southern agrarians,” best typified by the landmark collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand (1951). Yet the “Twelve Southerners” who composed I’ll Take My Stand were deeply Catholic, great defenders of the much-maligned Southern culture, and resolute in their belief that even the racial conflicts in the South were to be resolved, along with all the ills brought about by modernization, by a general return to small farming. Their anti-modernism and antipathy toward technology and cities were not incidental to their argument, nor are they to Berry’s or that of other ecocritics in this tradition. In the agrarian and pastoralist argument, the most ancient forms of human society were aligned with the patterns and rhythms of nature, and a turn away from tilling the soil is a turn toward automatization and a loss of freedom. There is no way to pass from this

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

233

backward-looking orientation, which locates ecological balance in a specific time in the past, into an acceptance of the fundamental conditions of modernism, not to speak of post-modernism. The supposition on this side of the chasm is that modern society is profoundly and irreparably broken, in the way that Man after the primeval act of sin is broken. Returning to the ways of pre-modern farming is thus not a political or financial choice, but a spiritual one. This agrarian tradition clearly runs parallel to the tradition of North American utopianism, though this vision is seen as simply a necessary response to a dystopian present. When we observe Berry’s praise of traditional (that is, nineteenth-century) North American farming and trans-generational, agricultural relationships to the land, or note the emphasis on a cultural sense of place, the idea is the same. Residing on the land, occupying it, drawing from one landscape culturally and aesthetically: these are the basis of an ecological ethics. Berry goes a step further, insisting that the human relationship to the land is “ruled […] by nature and by human nature,” in a timeless, ahistorical manner. In Berry’s view, land can only be “properly cared for,” as long as those who live on it, “feel that the land belongs to them, that they belong to it, and that this belonging is a settled and unthreatened fact” (“Conservation and Local Economy” 195–196). In the context of a highly mobile American society of the twentieth century, this statement seems almost reassuring; it affirms the value of farm life against urban disaffection. Yet the same pronouncement, in light of German blood-and-soil rhetoric, of the traditional calumnies against “rootless” peoples such as Jews and Roma, and the forced displacement of countless peoples in the course of nationalist conflicts, takes on an entirely different character. As we will see below, this naturalizing view of local and national identity fits easily into the program of far-right thinkers in Europe as it does in North American ecological writing. If we wish to think clearly about our perceptions of habitation and what it means to belong to the land, we will need other guides whose imagination can take in history as well as ecology.

Wilderness and modernity Both wilderness-centered and agrarian ecocriticism not only reject modern conditions of life, but turn their back on the shift in meaning brought about by this transformation. Having grown out of the philosophical tradition of the sublime that gave rise to Romanticism and then to North American pastoralism, they cannot (or have not yet managed to) separate from the sublime’s dualities (Simonson 28–29; Rorty 78). Insisting on the divisions between human subjects and natural objects, this form of criticism simply reverses the hierarchy, so that

234

Maria Snyder

humans must bow to a greater reality. As noted in the case of Cronon, these ecocritics feel that the urgency of protecting the environment requires that humanity, and more precisely, the written word, be measured against the truth of Nature. If modern ecological writing does not require Nature to be Man’s spiritual home, it still places Nature at the top of the moral and conceptual hierarchy of which humans are a separate and subordinate element. For that reason, even subtle ecocritics such as Lawrence Buell can still insist that ecological literature give a central place to Nature, without being troubled by the inherent conflict within this categorical distinction (7–19). The relevance of this reliance on Romanticism has implications for the realization of space as well. Because the dualities of Man and Nature stay in place, it becomes difficult to substantially question other such binary relationships or to alter other objects within the hierarchy dominated by Nature. These Cartesian dualities, elevated to mythic status by Romantics, have passed down to us the concept of Earth as mother or as virgin, a position outside of history. The role of humanity, in this configuration, is to long for a return to Edenic origins, to lust for dominance, or to worship at the altar of sacred nature in self-abnegation. This may seem an extreme characterization, but it must be admitted that a substantial part of contemporary ecocriticism, by refusing to engage with phenomenological questions, gives us few tools for achieving its goals of thinking about the world apart from its perception by humans.

Contextualizing ecocriticism in light of German history The reasons that these particular moral foundations for ecocriticism are problematic in the German context must be apparent. Ecocriticism persists in fostering a Romantic hope for transcendence through what Robinson Jeffers called “inhumanism,” or the valorization of the non-human over the human world; in political terms, human subjection to non-human ideals has taken many malevolent forms (Dodd 177). What Glen A. Love calls eco-consciousness is also evidently an idea that finds a warm reception politically both on the far left and the far right. Surely the existence of far-right ecological parties in Germany, with their focus on Heimatschutz and their common assertion that immigration causes and is itself a form of ecological degradation must make evident that local ecological concerns do not translate simply into globally applicable ethics (Olsen 2–6). The focus on wilderness, the insistence on local knowledge, and particularly the negation of historical detail common in many ecocritical analyses pose serious problems in a

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

235

context in which these ideas have been the object of intense literary production, appalling political misuse, and ongoing historical debate. After the misuse of the very idea of native land in Nazi blood-and-soil ideology, the link between the present and a pastoral place of origin was permanently disrupted (Lekan 252–263). For that reason, the analysis of alternate perspectives not based on a valorization of wilderness nor predicated on native habitation, seems particularly useful. Just as ecologists have turned their attention to the long history of human intervention in what was thought to be untouched wilderness or to the surprisingly resilient flora and fauna in urban environments, we may examine in contemporary German literature a view of nature interwoven with human cultivation and habitation, a view neither romantic nor apocalyptic, but decidedly modern.

Two models for an alternative conceptualization The two novels I consider in my analysis, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Die Heimsuchung [Visitation] and Brigitte Kronauer’s Das Taschentuch [The Handkerchief] offer just such an alternative, avoiding the pitfalls of natural transcendence and heroic wilderness. Each work introduces repeated images of inhabiting or dwelling in the natural world, yet neither presents this nature as boundless wilderness, unproblematic homeland, nor as a natural space of origin and final return. Instead, the natural world emerges in Erpenbeck’s Visitation as the foundation of human history and its unheard voice, while the figures in The Hankie repeatedly gesture toward nature that is as confined, constrained, and lost as they are.

Kronauer Brigitte Kronauer, the author of numerous novels, essays, and short story collections, has been an important figure in the Germany literary scene since the early 1970s. She has received the nation’s most prestigious form of literary recognition, the Georg Büchner Prize, and her work has had a strong reception both popularly and in critical circles. Neither Kronauer nor Erpenbeck is thought of as an environmental writer or a chronicler of nature, even if Kronauer’s depiction of animals has attracted some interest (Ittner 2006). Instead, Kronauer has distinguished herself as a writer whose analysis of other writers’ conceptual positions is of a piece with her own creative production (Sill 6). In particular, her interest in daily life and domesticity takes up the question of domesticity as a literary trope and addresses phenomenological issues of what it means to live moment to

236

Maria Snyder

moment the experience of the mundane (Jung 42). In Kronauer we find a chronicler of consciousness and its objects, someone aware of the balance between the act of perception and the shaping of the self through that which it perceives. As an alternative both to the subjugation of nature to human fantasy and to the attempted erasure of the human, Kronauer’s careful tracing of perception may offer a route. Nature in Kronauer’s novel is one participant in a conversation about time and finitude. The Handkerchief (1994) reflects on the narrator’s relationship with her childhood friend, Willi, and the moments that made up that friendship in the year before his sudden death. The title refers to Willi’s habitual reliance on his pocket-handkerchief, perhaps a personal tic, but perhaps a hint of the unseen weakness that leads to his final collapse. Blowing one’s nose is, after all, one of a thousand tiny gestures with which we maintain our physical selves, and thus is one of the infinite manifestations of mortal frailty. This physicality, along with dialogue, the said and the unsaid, the ability to speak truthfully in the face of death, form the core of the narrative. We see Willi’s physical movements, his gestures, most of all his cautious navigation of the minute universe he inhabits as a small-town pharmacist and the moments of silent understanding he and his friend share: “My quiet Willi. When I recall that last year […] I demand that he be recognized in the midst of fray. It is what he deserves” (30). My Willi, the narrator calls him and claims him with this act of recognition, yet in the same moment she acknowledges that he is easily lost in the chaos of events, that he is now ultimately lost. The justice done to him will happen only in her memory. Though bearing witness to an intimate connection, the narrative is punctuated with such gaps: “What I never dared ask Willi” or, “What to this day Willi doesn’t know” or the narrator’s occasional direct questions: is Willi a good pharmacist? does he pay enough attention to his family? is he still the same faithful friend he was as a child? Knowledge of another human being does not translate into unity nor permit one to escape loss. It only establishes the ground for observation and demands yet more patient attendance. No object can exhaust the attention that we pay it, nor do the objects of our thought ever entirely reward our contemplation. This attention to physical and moral presence, however, does not stop with Willi nor with the figures grouped around him. In a novel framed by mortality, the problem of human absence and psychological inaccessibility is of a piece with the physical barriers and gaps presented by the natural world. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator and a group of friends drive together from the German city of B., on a day’s excursion to the seaside at Oostende. On that morning, though rainy weather make it a poor day for a journey. “The false hellebore and various true hellebores were in bloom in the Botanical Garden,” and it is two months, the narrator remarks, before the date

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

237

of the novel’s first pages, an evening when she read from a manuscript, “while outside the chestnut trees had burst into flower” (246). It seems as if natural events frame the action, setting it between the blooming hellebores in early spring and the blossoming of the chestnut trees as spring ends. Yet the flowers here bloom in the botanical gardens and the chestnuts are ornamental trees lining the streets of a city. Rather than signaling the repetition of eternal cycles, the rhythms of nature in Kronauer are cultivated, the result of human caretaking. Invoking the role of caretaker simultaneously invokes a sense of loss, as it reminds us of the labor required to make nature smile at us, and underlines the tension in this uneasy truce between our desire for flowers and for pavement. As Kronauer’s figures make their way through the equally indifferent streets and gardens, it is evident that the two domains are not separate; the natural world and the civilized one are embedded in each other and share the painful effects of modernity. The natural habitat shared by the narrator and Willi consists of parks, gardens, and cemeteries where they share walks and conversations in which observations of the seasons of nature and of the seasons of war have equal precedence. The journey to Oostende offers one such instance. During the long drive there, the landscape is political territory, the manifestation and reminder of how history has shaped this piece of Europe. Behind this group of travelers lies not only a path across central Europe, but also, the narrator recalls as they stroll along the esplanade, the continuing Gulf War and even post-war Germany’s most dramatic political scandal, the Barschel affair.1 The conversation turns to James Ensor, the Belgian painter who lived in Oostende and was the creator of works such as Skeletons Fighting Over a Hanged Man and other carnivalesque images of death. But as two old friends reach the sand and face the water, Willi begins to speak of a favorite topic: Attila the Hun, and his whirlwind sweep of destruction across Europe: “I can understand very well […] that someone would want to write off the whole thing, culture and civilization, right down to zero, to sea-level, to what you see here; just wipe out the vertical dimension and reduce it all to one level” (258). It is one of many references to Attila in the novel, and calls up the idea of nature as the zero point of civilization, the space into which it unfolds, as well as the abyss into which every civilization must eventually fall. All war, all paths of conquest must find a limit at last. The sea before them speaks of human limits, of the limits known in the past and those to be faced again. Willi can imagine the desire to be done with culture and civilization, the desire to reduce 1 The Barschel Affair was a Watergate-like scandal, as it involved accusations of political spying, in this case around the 1987 election in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. It was never resolved, and the accused politician, Minister-President Uwe Barschel, resigned the same year, and then died immediately afterward under mysterious circumstances.

238

Maria Snyder

everything to earth and sea again. But he also recalls Attila’s final request: “Bury me deep, deep, deep in the earth,” a plea that sounds like a longing for a final limit outside of conquest and destiny. Crucially, neither earth nor sea offers a release from human civilization, only a last barrier, a stopping point. What makes the encounter with the sea at Oostende remarkable is its departure from the usual conventions evoked in this context: there is no reflection on the infinite expanse of the sea, no sense of the sublime in the face of the sea’s awesome force, no longing for the realm beyond the horizon: in short, no shade of romantic response to wilderness. The sea is neither mirror nor sounding board, but instead a real, historical limit, a physical presence that, over time, has accrued meaning and demands interpretation of that meaning. Precisely this kind of interest in the non-human world characterizes the novel’s engagement with an idea of subjectivity that constantly tests its limits and seeks to exceed them. Throughout the novel, Kronauer allows ideas to unfold in the presence of nature, in the same way that the narrator constantly interrogates the limits of her knowledge about the other people who surround her. Both nature and the social world confront this thinking mind with an opposing presence, a set of limits, a realm of doubt. What Kronauer achieves with her narrator is the acceptance of those doubts and limits as part of an ongoing, inconclusive, but necessary process. Kronauer’s narrative engagement with conversation as the form through which to explore the limits of our own ideas and to engage with the fundamental perceptional issues of phenomenology recall the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. As a philosopher who both observed the interplay of thought and conversation and employed conversation as a form for some of his most serious thinking, he models the way that the division between subject and object may be negotiated, if not overcome. In Gadamer’s proposition, dialog with the Other, whether that may be another person or an other such as the natural world, is a process of both understanding and transformation. “To permit the Other to be valid in opposition to oneself, means not only to accept in principal the limitation of one’s own proposition, but further, it in fact demands that one go beyond one’s own possibilities in a dialogic, communicative, hermeneutical process” (97). One can go beyond one’s own limits only through dialog, only through an encounter with an Other who can resist our imposition of meaning and have a separate claim to truth (Gjesdal 300; Zapf 854). In The Hankie, neither the narrator nor the environment that surrounds her (material and human) offers final and irrefutable meaning. Instead, a variety of dialogs and an ongoing engagement are part of a search for understanding and a change in the narrator’s own position. Nature is implicated in the same web of doubt and resistance to interpretation as are human beings. In a later scene, the friends again explore the landscape by car:

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

239

Suddenly and without a word to anyone, Willi drove into a little parking lot, where there was neither a restaurant nor bathroom, but only a trash barrel and two benches. […] Willi unbuckled his seatbelt: “Not a polar landscape, but something different” […] We got out, all three of us with similarly patient goodwill, all three not exactly curious. Flat all around, you could tell right off, and behind the bushes there were just fields and farmland. Willi tramped straightaway towards the greenery, more or less broke through the bushes and ran back and forth a few steps. “A pond,” he yelled, “A pond.” We came step closer. “But there’s no pond here at all. I’m looking for it here, but this is the wrong place.” (276–277)

What Willi wants to show them is no sublime or breathtaking natural scene, no polar landscape. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of nature and modern life that seem to him so extraordinary. Willi explains that he had driven along this stretch of highway at the same time in the previous spring and had made a stop at a little parking lot like this one. But surprisingly there had been a pond there, surrounded by reeds and larks; ducks swam on the pond and even a few swans. But he cannot find the place again: “That you could find it there all of a sudden, not a soul far and wide, and yet so close to the highway, the highway at Pentecost! I just have to see it again. It was such a lucky chance, something like that, and I want to know why” (279). It is not the beauty of the pond alone that attracts his attention, but the sudden discovery, the mixture of a world dominated by humanity and one that persists beside it. In one sense, the beauty he appreciates is conventional: birds and water and reeds; but this moment, this search for the lost view from the parking lot, suggests that such beauty is not always necessarily accessible. Has Willi simply forgotten the location, or has he become unable to see it beyond the trash and the dog droppings he does find? Even he seems uncertain why that glimpse of water and grass moved him; it was not something other than the built world, but perhaps his experience was part of his response to that world. The moment in which he saw the pond was more than a visual impression of the picturesque. He uses the word Pfingstautobahn, that is, the highway at the time of Pfingsten, or Pentecost, which might simply mean the highway during this time of year when travelers are on the road for the holiday. But his enthusiastic response transforms the highway dense with holiday traffic into a springtime highway, a highway of the season of miracles: Pfingstautobahn, something other than either the highway or the springtime of nature. There is no mysterious Nature that absolves human beings of the effort of understanding. Through the narrative, neither Nature nor the modern, technologically-modified world entirely dominates. As the group of friends travel across a politicallyformed landscape, herds of sheep cross the highway and at a highway rest-stop, the sun and clouds compete with a self-regulating, climatized building with automatic blinds. Neither the natural nor the constructed space receives the

240

Maria Snyder

status of the “real” world. Instead, one encounters strata of nature: constructed, cultivated, neglected, and surprising. Even the technology that enables these figures’ journey both reveals and interferes: they attend to what is beside the highway, but the highway itself prevents them from approaching it. Nature does not mystically withdraw from humanity; society has simply created a system of technology that constantly interposes itself. And like the building with automated blinds, people, too, go through the motions of responding to the environment in ways they have not themselves determined. The narrator confronts an external world that is allowed to be historical, and whose development and meaning may not be in tune with her own. At another point, while traveling by train, the narrator witnesses a sunset, but this trope of expressive Nature seems capable of artifice. I was traveling in the train through the blazing glow of the sunset, and the reflection of that sinking sun made it seem as if we were headed into the midst of a battle […] Surely, when they looked up, all the other passengers would be painfully reminded of the war that was supposed to last until the end of the month, even if the heavenly pomp to the northwest raged in the wrong part of the sky. It was scarcely to be imagined that this fiery chaos, these broad, red strips of cloud weren’t concerned with the thing they inescapably illustrated, really almost beyond the bounds of good taste. After all, the newspapers with their headlines about the burning cities of Iraq, and the burning oil wells, were lying around on the seats. (281)

When the narrator rides into the blazing sunset as if into the midst of a battle, she goes beyond the Romantic gesture in which an individual’s internal struggles manifest themselves in stormy skies. She explicitly states that the other travelers must see this sunset and think of the war and on the burning oil fields in Iraq, since newspapers with this same story lie strewn about the compartment. The sunset does not exist in an alternative world, apart from human affairs, but is instead one phenomenon in time that makes reference to another; there is no pure, non-human space, but only a web of connected objects, human-made and not. Repeatedly, the moment of silent reflection in nature, the pause in which a romantic sense of nature might fill with euphoria or mystical unity, turns instead to painful reminders of human conflict. In Kronauer’s version of the relationship between humans and nature, the connection appears most frequently in terms of history. I want to emphasize this aspect, because a variety of ecocritical analyses of literature propose that the reader search urgently for strategies that circumvent or reverse the hierarchy of human subjectivity. Given that this subjectivity is the foundation of the western tradition of the novel since the seventeenth century, this poses an insurmountable critical obstacle. The author of a given novel is called upon by the ecocritic to release nature from the bonds of human domi-

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

241

nance and to invoke a world of interconnected, interdependent, non-hierarchical community among all things living and non-living. I would like to argue that the path away from historical continuity, away from human subjectivity, from embeddedness in temporality and historical contingency, is a false one. Without understanding how human meaning is made, it is impossible to substitute in its place an alternative, non-human meaning, or rather, to understand why there is no position outside of existing meaning from which to perform this operation. For a methodology that prides itself on its pragmatism, the creation of meaning must be vital to advocating certain values. Unfortunately, ecocriticism often avoids precisely the opportunity to see how a certain way of inhabiting the landscape has come to be, in favor of a purely materialist approach to both human and nonhuman nature. There is, in that case, no room for the production of imagination.

Erpenbeck Jenny Erpenbeck is best known as a novelist engaged with memory, particularly the deeply-chiseled memories of childhood. Her novels have been translated into English, and are widely seen, both within Germany and without, as engagements with a nation’s dark memories and uneasy transformations. Like Kronauer, she is no nature writer, but Erpenbeck’s prose is deeply engaged with a historical sense of place, and further, with the problem of displacement. Her earlier novel, Geschichte vom alten Kind [The story of the old child] (1999), was a tale of an abandoned girl, a child seemingly without a past, and was read by many as a sort of parable of the lives of the former inhabitants of East Germany. Far from perpetuating an ideology of the love of the homeland or the native soil, Erpenbeck’s novels struggle with the condition of those who, though they remain in place, are cut off from their connection with their own past. In Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation (2008), the narrative is structured around a piece of land and those who live on it. The title is the same one used by Goethe for one of a series of biblically-suggestive chapter titles in his Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, and as in that work, it is heavily portentous. The word suggests the idea of a return home (Heim means home, and suchen is the word for to search or seek), but it may be variously translated not only as visitation, but also retribution, infestation, or even haunting, as if by a painful recollection.2 The

2 The novel has been translated by Susan Bernofsky as Visitation. However, in this essay, all translations of the novels of Erpenbeck and Kronauer will be my own. This choice has been made in order to focus on the specifics of word choice in each case.

242

Maria Snyder

novel opens with a description of the geological formation of the place where a house, the house stands: “About twenty-four-thousand years ago the ice advanced up to the rock massif, which in the mean time was visible from the house only as a gentle hill” (9). The land itself, in the form of a now worn-down mountain, appears first, as it was in the time of the glaciers: “By means of the immense pressure of the ice, the frozen trunks of oaks, alders, and pines had been snapped and ground down, parts of the rock massif were blasted apart, splintered, scraped away, lions, cheetahs, and saber-tooth cats were driven southward” (9). Glacial ice has already crushed the trees that once stood here and has cracked the rock and driven off the great predators. Erpenbeck thus begins with a first image of loss, the first of many in the novel, as one founded in the processes of nature, which is here neither frame nor backdrop but the underlying force. The lake formed by the glacier receives a name much later: “Märkisches Meer, but one day that would disappear as well, for, like every sea, this one, too, was only there for a time” (10). The lake and its name will one day be gone, and by extension, the narrative suggests that the traces of the humans who named it and dwelt near it must vanish, too. The last lines of the opening chapter reiterate this theme, noting that the Sahara, too, once contained water: “Only in the modern period did that process appear which in scientific language is called desertification, and in German laying waste” (11).3 The narrative that follows is something of an explication of the modern meaning of that term in this small piece of Germany. A place once inhabited is overrun, plundered, made hostile to its human inhabitants by war, and the land observed here must take part in the process. From the earliest geological formations, the narrative leaps to more recent human habitation of one piece of land on the shores of this lake, the place where stands the house glimpsed in the novel’s first sentence. But this point in time, long after the first naming of the lake, is the moment in which human history and natural history become alien to each other. Each chapter of the novel is named for a person who lives for a time on this land, and the first of these is simply called the gardener. He reappears at regular intervals, a more-than-human presence who seems to live through multiple generations. To suggest, as some readers have, that he represents Nature would, however, miss the mark. Instead, the gardener is precisely that: a human who cares for and cultivates the land where people have built a house. His role is to mediate between the human demands and environmental necessities. He is described as owning no land of his own, but only assisting those who do, and the brief descriptions of his labors repeat the

3 The German word used is Verwüstung, which contains the root “wüst,” meaning a piece of waste ground, an unusable, uncultivated area. The verb verwüsten means to wreck or destroy.

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

243

same phrases, the same tasks recurring year after year, with small modifications as the owners of the house come and go beside him. If his role is relatively static, though, a decisive rupture appears in the first story of those housed on this land. The figures of the prosperous Großbauer, a large-scale farmer, and his four daughters are portrayed as existing in the last moment in which the structure of social life is still anchored in nature’s time and nature’s systems. The phases of the moon and the weather determine the best time for a wedding; the ivy on the bride and groom’s chair has the same value as the bride’s woven veil. Erpenbeck knits together the narrative with pieces of folk wisdom, poetry, and song referring to flora and fauna and evoking the feeling of a dialog between humans and the land. Why dialog rather than cause and effect? Pieces of advice such as the following: “If a maiden wishes to know if she’ll soon marry, she must knock on the door of the chicken coop on New Year’s Eve. If a hen responds first, she’ll have no luck, if it’s the rooster, her wish will be fulfilled,” do not suggest causality (17). Rather, such references to prognostication or strategies of wish-fulfillment create an underlying current of assumptions. They rest on the idea that the natural world is constantly speaking; it has a particular language and demands certain rituals of conversation, but it is always producing meaning, always prepared to reveal something to us that we do not know about ourselves. When the land loses its caretaker, as it does when the farmer’s daughters do not marry and the land is divided for the first time and sold, this dense and continuous dialog ends. The novel makes clear that it is not movement away from the land and to the city that makes this kind of folk wisdom irrelevant. It is that the task of tending to the land has been delegated, and those who inhabit a place no longer feel the need to enter into a dialog with it. On one level, the narrative traces the path of human beings away from this dialog and toward technologies of living. If we look again at the structures of perception that guide this interaction between humans and nature, we might once again see how a phenomenological approach can lead past the binaries of human actors and material objects of their action. One might think of this in terms of the Heideggerian contrast between living and dwelling, in which dwelling also contains the idea of tending, cultivating, and taking care of the earth where one dwells. Heidegger considers the etymological linkage between the terms bauen, to build, and wohnen, to reside (147). At first, this seems as if Heidegger is making his argument by means of etymology, yet it is more than that. The usage of these terms establishes their human history; the cultivation of the land and the cultivation of meaning in that act have grown together over time and the separation of the terms point to cultural change. Heidegger attempts to recover the earlier sense of wohnen as rescuing the land, which in turn does not mean removing it from contact with humans, but rather permitting it as much as possible to remain

244

Maria Snyder

essentially what it is, as he says in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”: “to allow something to be free in its own presencing” (Heidegger 197; Rigby 431). Erpenbeck’s narrative presents just such a contrast between tending the land with what Heidegger calls “struggling with it or even exploiting it” (150). The pages of the novel that follow the division of the farm all center on a house, so that modern, twentieth-century habitation is created out of a loss of meaning. That the environment is precisely not permitted to remain essentially itself is demonstrated by its next inhabitant being an architect, who engages in the following discussion: Through this natural frame, each of the upper meadows will become a stage, says the landscape designer to his cousin, the homeowner, while the gardener empties a wheelbarrow of compost onto the future rose bed beside the terrace. The homeowner says: Basically, it’s always just a matter of directing the gaze. And of variety, says the landscape designer: light and shadow, open ground and dense foliage, the view from above, or looking up from below. The gardener uses the edge of his shovel to spread the earth evenly over the bed. (31)

While the landscape designer intends the hillside to be a stage, the homeowner and architect speaks of directing the gaze; both agree that the environment must be shaped above for its visual effects. Whether these uses respond to the nature of the soil here or to the weather seems of little importance. When a tree is left untouched from what was once a cultivated forest, it is to provide shade in the summer. In contrast, the gardener continues his task of attending to the land in its particulars. His daily labors continue, though only in part, and in an everdiminishing form, the earlier relationship of human cultivation. Rather than suggesting that the relationship with nature must be authentic or native-like, the novel depicts an essential kind of attention as the foundation for a dialog with nature. The gardener does not exploit or wrestle with the land, but feeds and cares for it. Not surprisingly, the architect sees his own work as creating a relationship with this place: “Anyone who builds fixes his life to the earth. Giving a body to the act of staying: that is his vocation” (43). Though he believes that building can attach the self to the earth, the embodiment of dwelling is only a body. When political conflicts force the architect to leave his job and East Germany, he leaves behind the house he built, as well, and because the relationship to the land existed only through the house, the story of habitation must move to the next resident. In the chapters that follow, the novel introduces other residents for whom the house is habitation, refuge, military camp, squat, or temporary place of passage. The gardener continues his work. The lake and the woods persist, at least for a time, but only occasionally do the people who live there seem to recognize the persistence of nature. Dishes are buried under a tree and the family silver hidden

The View from the Parking Lot: Political Landscapes and Natural Environments

245

underwater on a sandbar, to be found by later inhabitants or lost forever. Because these residents do not tend to the walnut tree or concern themselves with the earth in the flowerbeds, they close off a connection to those who came before and those who will come after. Because they have lived only in that body, that house that they made foreign to the ground beneath it, their story ends with the story of a building. While the novel began with the shaping of the earth by glaciers, it ends with the house being torn down. The final chapter describes the manner in which the demolition company is required to dispose of the various components of the house and to avoid ecological damage either through excessive noise or dust. Ultimately, this place was a house, a place to live, but not a place to dwell. The workmen who pull it down take their mid-day break on the grass, rest among the trees, look out at the lake, and witness to the possibility of dwelling here: “Before another house shall be built on the same place, for a brief moment, the landscape once again resembles itself” (189).

Conclusion We have here two novels that are object-oriented, that allow people and objects and history and ideas to have equal validity. In that way, they create, at times (though not always, not necessarily even consistently) a place where those hierarchies and dualities can be broken down. Space no longer needs to be divided into masculine and feminine, domestic and public, historical and nonhistorical, natural and civilized. Instead, there is a narrative that creates relationships among objects and ideas and events, and that narrative has the capacity to bring relationships into being or to reveal the presence of various objects (including people) in relation to each other, they reveal, they open, they expose, rather than dividing or submitting one object to the dominance of another. While North American literary pre-occupation with wilderness has emerged from a Romantically-tinged pastoralism, contemporary German literature concerned with the space of contemporary life shows the traces of a contemporary philosophy that grapples with questions of meaning and a future beyond nationalism. Here one finds, in the place of reveries about or elegies for nature, a persistent concern with historically-determined subjectivity and with the existential task of creating a meaningful world. If Wendell Berry’s agrarian idealism may stand in for the North American literary longing for a return to the values and the philosophy of the nineteenth-century, one can imagine Kronauer and Erpenbeck as co-creators, with W.G. Sebald and others, of a German paradigm for the acceptance of a disenchanted world in which shared meaning can no longer be found, but must be laboriously gathered and cultivated.

Works Cited Ackermann, Irmgard. Als Fremder in Deutschland. Munich: dtv, 1982. ———. In zwei Sprachen leben. Munich: dtv, 1983. ———. Türken deutscher Sprache. Munich: dtv, 1984. Adelson, Leslie A. “Against Between: A Manifesto.” In Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, edited by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, 244–255. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen/NAi Publishers, 2001. ———. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Allison, Julie A., and Lawrence S. Wrightsman. Rape: The Misunderstood Crime. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Anderson, Susan C. “Surface Translations: Meaning and Difference in Yoko Tawada’s German Prose.” Seminar 46:1 (February 2010): 50–70. Anzaldùa, Gloria E. Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Franciso: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory Culture and Society 7 (1990): 295–310. Aridjis, Chloe. Book of Clouds. New York: Black Cat, 2009. Armbruster, Karla. “Bringing Nature Writing Home.” In Reading Under the Sign of Nature. New Essays in Ecocriticism, edited by John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington, 3–23. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. Assing, Ottilie. “New York, Mai: Die Tombs – Die Washington Exhibition – Die Minstrels.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 27 (1853): 643–646. ———. “Aus dem Norden der Vereinigten Staaten, Oktober: Von Newyork nach Schenectady – Die Shakerkolonie.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 51 (1853): 1221–1224. ———. “Newyork, Juni: II. Von Westen nach Osten.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 30 (1854): 719–720. ———. “Gesellschaftsleben in Newyork, Schluß.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 39 (1855): 927. ———. “Spaziergänge durch Newyork.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 45 (1855): 1069–1072. ———. “Ein Ausflug nach Sing-Sing im Staate Newyork. Ein Campmeeting – Das Staatsgefängnis.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 51 (1855): 1212–1217. ———. “Wanderungen in Newyork. Ein Blick auf die Schulen.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 4 (1856): 84–89. ———. “Newyork, März (Schluß): Die Chinesen – Die Indianer – Jochplesileila – Zigeuner.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 19 (1856): 453–456. ———. “Newyork, Oktober: Die Geldkrise – Rechtspflege – Bewegungen in der Antisklaverei – Die Industrieausstellung.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 48 (1857): 1168–1170. ———. “Newyork, December: Die Mayorswahl – Kunst – Ein flüchtiger Sklave – General Worths Leichenbegängniß.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 4 (1858): 93–96. ———. “Newyork, März: Religious revivals – Conventions for woman’s rights – Weibliche Kleiderreform – Frauen in Aemtern.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 16 (1858): 382–384. ———. “Newyork, April: Kansas – Revivals – Speisung der Armen – Drei-bis-zwölf-cents-Herbergen – Auswandererschiffe.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 21 (1858): 498–501.

248

Works Cited

———. “Newyork, Juni: Kansas – Anniversaries.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 27 (1858): 642–644. ———. “Newyork, Juni: Eine Excommunication – Die Sklaverei und die Deutschen – Ein deutsches Fest.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 31 (1858): 738–741. ———. “Newyork, Januar (Schluß): In der Wildnis.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 10 (1859): 240. ———. “Newyork, November: Blondin und de Lave – Frederick Douglass – Rowdythum.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 51 (1859): 1223–1224. ———. trans. Sclaverei und Freiheit. Autobiographie von Frederick Douglass. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1860. ———. “Newyork, Februar: Die Flucht der gefangenen Unionsoffiziere – Überraschende Wirkungen des Kriegs.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 15 (1864): 354–357. ———. “Newyork, April: Die große Ausstellung.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 22 (1864): 520–523. ———. “Newyork, November: Die Präsidentenwahl.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 52 (1864): 1243–1246. ———. “Newyork, Mai: Der Proceß – Trauerfeierlichkeiten – Reconstituierung – Jefferson Davis.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 27 (1865): 645–647. ———. Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass. Edited and translated by Christoph Lohmann. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Baasner, Rainer. “Literaturkritik. Theorie, Geschichte, Praxis: Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (ab 1837: Leser).” Accessed 13 April 2011. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1958). Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1994. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowolt, 2006. Bakhtin, Michel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. “The Structuralist Activity.” In Critical Theory since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, 1128–1130. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. ———. S/Z. An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. ———. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. ———. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Bastéa, Eleni. Memory and Architecture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Bauer, Esther K. “Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermann’s Summerhaus, Later.” Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009): 50–75. Bay, Hansjörg. “Wo das Schreiben anfängt. Yoko Tawadas Poetik der Migration.” In Literatur und Migration, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 109–119. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2006. ———. “‘Eine Katze im Meer suchen.’ Yoko Tawadas Poetik des Wassers.” In Yoko Tawada. Fremde Wasser. Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr, 237–268. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2012. Behmer, Britta. Von deutscher Kulturkritik zum Abolitionismus: Literarische und journalistische Betrachtungen der Emigrantin Ottilie Assing. MA thesis, University of Munich, 1996. Behrendt, Johanna E. Die Einheit von Elisabeth Langgässers Weltbild in der Märkischen Argonautenfahrt. Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms, 1964.

Works Cited

249

Benjamin, Walter. Einbahnstrasse. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1955. ———. Das Passagenwerk. Gesammelte Schriften 1, 2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 1983. ———. Berliner Kindheit um 1900. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. ———. “Die Wiederkehr des Flâneurs.” In Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2, 416–421. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2011. Ben-zvi, Yael. “‘Where Did Red Go?’ Lewis Henry Morgan’s Evolutionary Inheritance and U.S. Racial Imagination.” New Centennial Review 7.2 (2007): 201–229. Bergmann, Sigurd. “Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God.” Religion Compass 1.3 (2007): 353–379. Berry, Wendell. “A Native Hill.” In Wendell Berry. Recollected Essays 1965–1980, 73–113. New York: North Point, 1981. ———. “Conservation and Local Economy.” In The Art of the Commonplace. The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 195–196. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2003. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bickle, Peter. Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Rochester: Camden House, 2002. Biendarra, Anke S. “Gen(d)eration Next: Prose by Julia Franck and Judith Hermann.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 28.1 (2004): 211–239. ———. “Globalization, Travel, and Identity: Judith Hermann and Gregor Hens.” Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006): 233–251. Bloomer, Kent C., and Charles W. Moore. Body, Memory, and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Blunt, Alison. “Mapping Authorship and Authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape Descriptions.” In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, 51–72. New York: The Guilford Press, 1994. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. Key Ideas in Geography. New York: Routledge, 2006. Blunt, Alison, and Gillian Rose. “Introduction: Women’s Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies.” In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. 1–25. New York and London: Guilford, 1994. Blunt, Alison, and Ann Varley. “Geographies of Home: An Introduction.” Cultural Geographies 11 (2004): 3–6. Boa, Elizabeth. “Schwierigkeiten mit der ersten Person. Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina und Monika Marons Flugasche, Die Überläuferin und Stille Zeile Sechs.” In Kritische Wege der Landnahme, edited by Robert Pichel and Alexander Stillmark, 125–145. Vienna: Hora, 1994. Borgstedt, Thomas. “Wunschwelten: Judith Hermann und die Neuromantik der Gegenwart.” Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006): 207–232. Böttiger, Helmut. Nach den Utopien. Eine Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2004. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Brandt, Bettina. “Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada.” Women in German Yearbook 21 (2005): 1–15. ———. “Scattered Leaves: Artist Books and Migration, A Conversation with Yoko Tawada.” Comparative Literature Studies 45.1 (2008): 12–22. Brauner, Sigrid. Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

250

Works Cited

Breger, Claudia. “Mimikry als Grenzverwirrung.” In Über Grenzen. Limitation und Transgression in Literatur und Ästhetik, edited by Claudia Benthien and Irmela Krüger- Fürhoff, 176–206. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999. Bronfen, Elisabeth, Benjamin Marius, and Therese Steffen. Hybride Kulturen. Beiträge zur angloamerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1997. Buell, Lawrence. “In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7–19. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Buttimer, Anne. “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place.” In The Human Experience of Space and Place, edited by Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, 166–187. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Byrnes, Deirdre. Rereading Monika Maron. Text, Counter-Text and Context. Britische und Irische Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Vol. 50. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Carter, Monica. “Three Percent Review of ‘The Shadow-Boxing Woman.’ http://www.rochester. edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=3781. Accessed 29 November 2014. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. University of California Press, 1997. ———. Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875–893. Clarke, David. “Introduction: Place in Literature.” In The Politics of Place in Post-War Germany, edited by David Clarke and Renate Rechtien, 1–24. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. Cohen-Pfister, Laurel. “Dragica Rajcic: Writing Women and War in the Margins.” In Poetry and Voice, edited by Stephanie Norgate and Ellie Piddington, 137–147. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. ———. and Susanne Vees-Gulani. Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Work, Family, and Black Women’s Oppression.” In Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, edited by Patricia Hill Collins, 45–68. New York: Routledge, 2000. Connor, Steve. “Michel Serres’ Five Senses.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader, edited by David Howes. 318–334. New York: Berg, 2005. Cooper, Helen, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier. Introduction to Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, xiii-xx. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Cowan, Ruth Schwarz. More Work for Mother. The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2004. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995. Culbertson, Roberta. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, ReEstablishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169–195.

Works Cited

251

Cusack, Andrew. The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism. New Jersey: Camden House, 2008. Davies, J.M., and M.G. Frawley. Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sex Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Davies, W.D. The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974. Davis, Clarence B., and Kenneth E. Wilburn, eds. Railway Imperialism. New York: Greenwood, 1991. Dear, Michael J., and Steven Flusty. The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography. Blackwell: Oxford, 2002. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (1952). New York: Vintage, 1974. Decker, Leslie E. Railroads, Lands, and Politics: The Taxation of the Railroad Land Grants, 1864–1897. Providence: Brown University Press, 1964. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. ———. “1440: The Smooth and the Striated.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, 474–500. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. “What is Minor Literature?” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 59–69. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990. Dennerlein, Katrin. Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Paper Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Diedrich, Maria. Love Across Color Lines. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Dillaway, Heather, and Elizabeth Paré. “Locating Mothers: How Cultural Debates about Stay-atHome Versus Working Mothers Define Women and Home.” Journal of Family Issues 29 (2008): 437–464. Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Divall, Colin, and George Revill. “Cultures of Transport: Representation, Practice and Technology.” The Journal of Transport History 26.1 (2005): 99–111. ———. “No turn needed: a Reply to Michael Freeman.” Journal of Transport History 27.1 (2006): 144–149. Dodd, Elizabeth. “The Great Rainbow Swamp. History as Moral Ecology in the Poetry of Michael S. Harper.” In Beyond Nature Writing. Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace, 177–194. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Domosh, Mona. “Gender, Race, and Nationalism: American Identity and the Economic Imperialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, edited by Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty, 534–549. Blackwell: Oxford, 2002. ———. and Joni Seager. Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001.

252

Works Cited

Döring, Jörg. “Hinterhaus, jetzt – Jugend, augenblicklich – Hurrikan, später.” In Fräuleinwunder, literarisch. Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, edited by Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, and Helga Meise, 13–35. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 2005. Döring, Jörg, and Tristan Thielmann, eds. Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. Dowler, Lorraine, Josephine Carubia, and Bonj Szczygiel. “Introduction: Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space.” In Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space, edited by Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia, and Bonj Szczygiel, 1–15. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Dückers, Tanja. Spielzone. Berlin: Aufbau, 2000. ———. Himmelskörper. Berlin: Aufbau, 2003. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. London: Yale University Press, 1992. Dunbar, Seymour. A History of Travel in America (1915). New York: Tudor, 1937. Duncan, James, and David Lambert. “Landscapes of Home.” In A Companion to Cultural Geography, edited by James Duncan, N.C. Johnson, and R. H. Schein, 382–403. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Dunlap, Thomas R. Faith in Nature. Environmentalism as Religious Quest. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Duve, Karen. Regenroman. Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 1999. ———. Rain. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2002. Ecker, Gisela. Feminist Aesthetics. Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1985. Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Edvardson, Cordelia. Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987. Eigler, Friedericke, and Jens Kugele, eds. Heimat. At the Intersection of Memory and Space. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2012. El-Akramy, Ursula. Wotans Rabe: Elisabeth Langgässer, ihre Tochter Cordelia und die Feuer von Auschwitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Neue Kritik, 1997. Elizondo, Virgil, and Sean Freyne, eds. Pilgrimage. London: SCM/Concilium, 1996. Eltz-Hoffmann, Lieselotte, von. Salzburger Frauen: Leben und Wirken aus 13 Jahrhunderten. Stadtverein Salzburg: Colorama, 1997. England, Kim. “Gender Relations and the Spatial Structure of the City.” Geo-Forum 22.2 (1991): 135–147. Erpenbeck, Jenny. Heimsuchung. Berlin: Eichborn, 2008. ———. Heimsuchung. Munich: BTB, 2010. ———. Visitation. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2010. Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins. Montreal & Kingston, London and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Fagan, James O. Labor and the Railroads. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Feiereisen, Florence. “Liebe als Utopie? Von der Unmöglichkeit menschlicher Näheräume in den Kurzgeschichten von Tanja Dückers, Julia Franck und Judith Hermann.” In Zwischen Inszenierung und Botschaft: Zur Literatur deutschsprachiger Autorinnen ab Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Ilse Nagelschmidt, Lea Müller-Dannhausen, and Sandy Feldbacher, 179–196. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006. Ferguson, Russell. “Introduction: Invisible Center.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 9–14. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990.

Works Cited

253

Feßmann, Meike. “Poetik der Nähe: Zur Topologie des Intimen in der Gegenwartsliteratur.” Sinn und Form 56.1 (2004): 58–76. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fisher, Jaimey, and Barbara Mennel, eds. Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literature and Visual Culture. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Fliedl, Konstanze. Zeitroman und Heilsgeschichte. Elisabeth Langgässers “Märkische Argonautenfahrt.” Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. ———. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 6 (1986): 22–27. ———. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49. http://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html. Franck, Julia. Der neue Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2001. ———. Lagerfeuer. Cologne: DuMont, 2003. Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. “‘Turn if you want to’: A Comment on the Cultural Turn in Divall and Revill’s ‘Cultures of Transport.’” Journal of Transport History 27.1 (2006): 138–143. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Translated by James Strachey, 243–258. London: Hogarth, 1957. ———. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon, 1998. Fricke, Hannes. Das hört nicht auf: Trauma, Literatur und Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Frisby, David. Simmel and Since. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität. Subjekt und Person (1975).” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 10. 87–99. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995. Ganeva, Mila. “Female Flâneurs: Judith Hermann’s Sommerhaus, später and Nichts als Gespenster.” Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 3 (3004): 250–277. Gebauer, Kerstin. Mensch sein, Frau sein: Autobiographische Selbstentwürfe russischer Frauen aus der Zeit des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs um 1917. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2004. Gerstenberger, Katharina. “Fictionalizations: Holocaust Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers.” In Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, edited by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani, 95–114. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010. ———. “Play Zones: The Erotics of the New Berlin.” German Quarterly 76.3 (2003): 259–272. Geisel, Sieglinde. “Fremdkörper Sprache.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung. http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/ startseite/article71HPS-1.468004. Accessed 1 September 2013. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Standford: Standford University Press, 1990. Gilbert, Pamela. “Sex and the Modern City: English Studies and the Spatial Turn.” In The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, 102–121. Routledge: London and New York, 2009. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Home: Its Work and Influence (1903). Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2002.

254

Works Cited

———. Charlotte Perkins. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Fiction, edited by Ann Lane. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Gjesdal, Kristin. “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Some Problems and Challenges in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.2 (2008): 285–305. Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Glotfelty, Cheryl, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Greenberg, Dolores. Financiers and Railroads, 1869–1889. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980. Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 1994. Grieser, Dietmar. Wien: Wahlheimat der Genies. Vienna: Amalthea, 1994. ———. Introduction to Milchfrau in Ottakring: Tagebuch aus den dreissiger Jahren, by Olga Rachmanova, 5–15. Vienna: Amalthea Signum, 1997. Grindle, Jr., Donald A. “Iroquoian Political Concept and the Genesis of American Government.” In Indian Roots of American Democracy, edited by José Barreiro, 47–66. Ithaca: Akwe:kon Press and Cornell University, 1992. Gustafson, Sandra M., ed. “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies: A Roundtable with Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian.” Early American Literature 41.2 (2006): 303–337. Hacker, Katharina. Die Habenichtse. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. ———. The Have-Nots. Trans. Helen Atkins. New York: Europa, 2007. Hadley, Arthur T. Railroad Transportation: Its History and its Laws (1885). New York and London: G.P. Putnam, 1903. Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Hallet, Wolfang, and Birgit Neumann. Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Hannika, Iris. Treffen sich zwei. Vienna: Droschl, 2008. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Hawkesworth, Celia. “Reflections on the Recent Conflict in Former Yugoslavia in the Works of Women Writers.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 5.3/4 (1998): 311–328. Hebblethwaite, Brian. The Incarnation. Collected Essays in Christology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hegeman, Elizabeth, and Agnes Wohl. “Management of Trauma-Related Affect, Defenses and Dissociative States.” In Group Psychotherapy for Psychological Trauma, edited by Robert Klein and Victor Schermer, 64–88. New York: Guilford, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken. (1951).” Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954. 145–162. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971. Heise, Ursula K. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 503–516. Hennig von Lange, Alexa. Relax. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000. Hensel, Jana. Zonenkinder. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002. ———. After the Wall: Confessions of an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

Works Cited

255

Hermann, Judith. Sommerhaus, später. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1998. ———. Summerhouse, Later. Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. ———. Alice. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2009. Hill, Alexandra M. “‘Female Sobriety’: Feminism, Motherhood, and the Works of Julia Franck” Women in German Yearbook 24 (2008): 209–228. ———. “Motherhood as Performance: (Re)Negotiations of Motherhood in Contemporary German Literature.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 35.1 (2011): 74–94. ———. Playing House: Motherhood, Intimacy, and Domestic Space in Julia Franck’s Fiction. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Hilzinger, Sonja. Elisabeth Langgässer: Eine Biografie. Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2009. Hirche, Kurt. Der “braune” und der “rote” Witz. Düsseldorf: Econ, 1964. Hoffmann, Elisabeth. “Jüdin – Deutsche – Katholikin. Fragen nach der Identität am Beispiel von Elisabeth Langgässer und Cordelia Edvardson.” In Von einer Welt in die Andere: Jüdinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jutta Dick and Barbara Hahn, 286–296. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1993. Hoffmann, Eva. Lost in Translation. Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin, 1989. Hoffmann, Gerhard. Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit. Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978. Holdenried, Michaela. “Eine Poetik der Interkulturalität? Zur Transgression von Grenzen am Beispiel von Yoko Tawadas Schreibverfahren und Sprachprogrammatik.” In Yoko Tawada. Fremde Wasser. Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr, 269–283. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2012. hooks, bell. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” In Yearnings. Race, Culture and Politics, edited by bell hooks, 41–50. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 1990. ———. “Marginality as Site of Resistance.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 341–343. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990. Horsman, Reginald. “Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” American Quarterly 27.2 (1975): 152–168. Horst, Claire. Der weibliche Raum in der Migrationsliteratur. Berlin: H. Schiler, 2007. Hsin, Chou. “Von der Differenz zur Alterität: Das Verhältnis zum Anderen in der Fortschreibung von Identitätssuche in den Romanen Die Überläuferin und Stille Zeile sechs von Monika Maron.” PhD diss., Universität Freiburg, 2006. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. Penrith, UK: Humanities-EBooks, 2008. Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One (1977). Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Ittner, Jutta. “Particularly Cats: Feline Encounters in Brigitte Kronauer’s Narratives.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 42.1 (2006): 58–77. Ivanovic, Christine, “Aneignung und Kritik: Yoko Tawada und der Mythos Europa.” Études Germaniques 63 (2008): 131–152. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960. Jambresic Kirin, Renata. “Narrating War and Exile Experiences.” In War, Exile, Everday Life: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Renata Jambresic Kirin and Maja Povrzanovic, 63–82. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 1996.

256

Works Cited

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Jenny, Zoë. Das Blütenstaubzimmer. Munich: BTB, 1997. ———. The Pollen Room. Translated by Elizabeth Gaffney. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Johnson, Emory R. and Thurman W. Van Metre. Principles of Railroad Transportation. New York: Appleton, 1923. Jones, Eliot. Principles of Railway Transportation (1924). New York: Macmillan, 1931. Jones, Susanne. “What’s in a Frame?: Photography, Memory, and History in Contemporary German Literature.” Electronic Dissertation. University of Cincinnati, 2005. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. 9. October 2014. Jung, Werner. “Alltag – die Kulisse für das ordentliche Voranleben. Anmerkungen zu Brigitte Kronauers Prosa.” Text und Kritik 112 (1991): 42–53. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Keil, Hartmut. “German Immigrants and African-Americans in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.” In Enemy Images in American History, edited by Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl, 137–157. Providence: Berghahn, 1997. ———. “Race and Ethnicity: Slavery and the German Radical Tradition.” Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies and the Center for the History of Print Culture. Madison, WI. 3 February 1999. Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile. Introduction Part 2 to Place and the Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 22–39. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Kersting, Ruth. Fremdes Schreiben: Yoko Tawada. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006. Kim, John Namjun. “Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yoko Tawada’s ‘Eine leere Flasche’ (A Vacuous Flask).” The German Quarterly 83.3 (2010): 333–352. Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Kloepfer, Alfred, and Miho Matsunaga. “Yoko Tawada.” Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur 64.3 (2000): 1–17. Kofman, Eleonore. “Feminist Political Geographies.” In A Companion to Feminist Geography, edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, 519–533. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Kracht, Christian. Faserland. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995. Kraenzle, Christina. Mobility, Space and Subjectivity: Yoko Tawada and German-Language Transnational Literature. Ottawa: National Library of Canda, 2004. ———. “Traveling Without Moving: Physical and Linguistic Mobility in Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices From Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker, 91–110. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ———. “The Limits of Travel: Yoko Tawada’s Fictional Travelogues.” German Life & Letters 61.2 (2008): 244–260. Krauß, Andrea. “‘Talisman’ – Tawadische Sprachtheorie.” In Migration und Interkulturalität in neueren literarischen Texten, edited by Aglaia Blioumi, 55–77. Munich: Iudicium, 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. ———. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Kronauer, Brigitte. Das Taschentuch. Munich: Klett Cotta, 1994. Kummer, Irmela, Elisabeth Winiger, Kurt Fendt, and Roland Schärer, eds. Fremd in der Schweiz. Texte von Ausländern. Muri bei Bern: Cosmos, 1987.

Works Cited

257

Künzel, Christiane. Vergewaltigungslektüren. Zur Codierung sexueller Gewalt in Literatur und Recht. Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 2003. Langgässer, Elisabeth. The Quest. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene. New York: Knopf, 1953. ———. Märkische Argonautenfahrt. Hamburg: Claassen, 1959. ———. Märkische Argonautenfahrt. Ms. 70.3045. Marbach a. N.: Deutsches Literaturarchiv. Langmead, Ross. The Word Made Flesh. Towards an Incarnational Missology. New York: University Press of America, 2004. Larrabee, William. The Railroad Question. A Historical and Practical Treatise on Railroads, and Remedies for Their Abuses. Chicago: Schulte, 1893. Lashgari, Deirdre. “Introduction: To Speak the Unspeakable: Implications of Gender, ‘Race,’ Class, and Culture.” In Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari, 1–21. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. ———. Introduction to Modernity. New York: Verso, 1995. ———. “The Production of Space.” In Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, edited by Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty, 131–141. Blackwell: University Southern CA Press, 2002. Lehnert, Gertrud, ed. Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Leidinger, Hannes, and Verena Moritz. Russisches Wien: Begegnungen aus vier Jahrhunderten. Cologne: Böhlau, 2004. Leidinger, Renate. Der Blick in die Tiefe: Gesellschaftsdarstellung im Wien der 20er und 30er Jahre untersucht anhand zweier Romane der Zwischenkriegszeit: Veza Canetti “Die Gelbe Strasse” und Alja Rachmanowa “Milchfrau in Ottakring.” Diploma Thesis, Universität Salzburg, 2004. Leisten, Georg. “‘Leib wart ihr euch selbst genug …’ Schrift und Körper in Monika Marons Roman Stille Zeile Sechs.” In Monika Maron in Perspektive. “Dialogische” Einblicke in zeitgeschichtliche, intertextuelle und rezeptionsbezogene Aspekte ihres Werkes, edited by Elke Gibson, 139–156. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002. Lekan, Thomas. Imagining the Nation in Nature. Landscape Preservation and German Identity 1885–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004. Leonhard, Sigrun. “Rosalind Polkowskis Sehnsucht nach der großen Tat: Monika Marons Roman Stille Zeile Sechs.” German Studies Review 27 (2004): 289–305. Lewis, Alison. “‘Die Sehnsucht nach einer Tat’: Engagement und weibliche Identitätsstiftung in den Romanen Monika Marons.” In Monika Maron in Perspektive.“Dialogische” Einblicke in zeitgeschichtliche, intertextuelle und rezeptionsbezogene Aspekte ihres Werkes, edited by Elke Gibson, 75–92. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002. Lieber, Francis. The Stranger in America: Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society, and National Peculiarities of the United States, in a Series of Letters to a Friend in Europe. Vol. 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1835. Liebmann, Irina. Stille Mitte von Berlin. Essay und Fotografien. Berlin: Nicolai, 2002. Lohmann, Christoph. Introduction to Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass, edited by Christoph Lohmann, xiii. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Lotman, Jurij (Yuri). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Michigan: Brown University Press, 1977.

258

Works Cited

———. “Künstlerischer Raum, Sujet und Figur.” In Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Jörg Dünne, Stephan Günzel, Hermann Doetsch and Roger Lüdeke, 529–545. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Love, Glen. “Why Ecocriticism?” In Practical Ecocriticism. Literature, Biology, and the Environment, 13–36. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Löw, Martina. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. ———. “The Social Construction of Space and Gender.” Translated by Paul Knowlton. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13.2 (2006): 119–133. Low, Setha M. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Low, Setha M., and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga. “Locating Culture.” In The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, edited by Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, 1–47. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Ludden, Teresa. “Nature, Bodies and Breakdown in Anne Duden’s ‘Das Landhaus’ and Karen Duve’s Regenroman.” In Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, edited by Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, 41–55. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Maaz, Hans-Joachim. Der Gefühlsstau. Ein Psychogramm der DDR. Berlin: Argon, 1991. Macnab, Lucy. “Becoming Bodies: Corporal Potential in Short Stories by Julia Franck, Karen Duve, and Malin Schwerdtfeger.” In Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, edited by Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa. 107–118. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Magen, Antonie. “Nichts als Gespenster. Zur Beschaffenheit von Judith Hermanns Erzählungen.” In Verbalträume. Beiträge zur deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, edited by Andrea Bartl, 29–48. Augsburg: Wißner, 2005. Marcus, Alan I., and Howard P. Segal. Technology in America: A Brief History. 2nd ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Maron, Monika. Die Überläuferin. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1986. ———. The Defector. London: Readers International, 1988. ———. Stille Zeile Sechs. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1991. ———. Silent Close No. 6. Translated by David N. Marinelli. London: Readers International, 1993. Marston-Williams, Jennifer. “Mapping a Human Geography: Spatiality in Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jacob.” In Spatial Turns: Space, Place and Mobility in German Literature and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Massey, Doreen. “Politics and Space/Time.” In Place and the Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 141–161. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994. McAdams, A. James. Judging the Past in Unified Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. McDowell, Linda, and Joanne Sharp, eds. Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold, 1994. Mein, Georg. Erzählungen der Gegenwart. Von Judith Hermann bis Bernhard Schlink. Munich: Oldenburg, 2005. Meise, Helga. “Mythos Berlin: Orte und Nicht-Orte bei Julia Franck, Inka Parei und Judith Hermann.” In Fräuleinwunder literarisch: Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, edited by Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, and Helga Meise, 125–150. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2005.

Works Cited

259

Melucci, Alberto. The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mennel, Barbara, and Jamie Fisher. Spatial Turns. Space, Place, and Mobility in Germany Literary and Visual Culture. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Merkl, Peter H. “An Impossible Dream? Privatizing Collective Property in Eastern Germany.” In German Unification: Process and Outcomes, edited by M. Donald Hancock and Helga A. Welsh, 199–221. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Mielke, Laura L. Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Moltmann, John. God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. London: SCM, 1985. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Müller-Richter, Klaus, and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard. Imaginäre Topographien: Migration und Verortung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. Muellner, Beth. “Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers on the Railroad.” In Trains, Literature and Culture. Reading and Writing the Rails, edited by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding, 29–49. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. ———. “The Deviance of Respectability: Nineteenth-Century Transport from a Woman’s Perspective.” Journal of Transport History 23.1 (2002): 37–45. Nelson, Erika M. “Reading Rajcic.” Women in German Yearbook 26 (2010): 167–195. Nelson, Lise, and Joni Seager, eds. Introduction to A Companion to Feminist Geography, 1–13. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2009. Nobile, Nancy. “A Ring of Keys: Thresholds to the Past in Judith Hermann’s Sommerhouse, später.” Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 9 (2010): 288–315. Norman, Beret. “Social Alienation and Gendered Surveillance: Julia Franck observes PostWende Society.” In German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transition, Transformations, edited by Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse, 237–252. New York: Berghahn, 2008. O’Brien, Traci S. Enlightened Reactions: Emancipation, Gender, and Race in German Women’s Writing. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt a. M., New York, and Vienna: Peter Lang, 2011. Oguntoye, Katharina, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Farbe bekennen: Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1992. Olsen, Jonathan. Nature and Nationalism. Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Orians, G. Harrison. The Cult of the Vanishing American: A Century View: 1834–1934. Toledo: H.J. Chittenden, 1934. Parei, Inka. Die Schattenboxerin. Frankfurt a. M.: Schöffling & Co., 1999. ———. The Shadow-Boxing Woman. Translated by Katy Derbyshire. London: Seagull, 2011. Paul, Georgina. Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Rpt. of The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (1953).

260

Works Cited

Pelz, Annegret. Reisen durch die eigene Fremde: Reiseliteratur von Frauen als autogeographische Schriften. Cologne: Böhlau, 1993. ———. “The Desk: Excavation Site and Repository of Memories.” In Producing the Past. Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, translated by Anne Puetz, edited by Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz, 135–207. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. Pickett, Terry. “The Friendship of Frederick Douglass with the German, Ottilie Assing.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 73.1 (1989): 88–105. Pietzcker, Carl. “‘Sie zwingen mich, das Abscheulichste zu tun, was ich mir denken kann: jemandes Tod zu wünschen.’ Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs.” Der Deutschunterricht 5 (2000): 48–60. Platten, Stephen. Pilgrims. London: Harper Collins, 1996. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988. Price-Chalita, Patricia. “Spatial Metaphor and the Politics of Empowerment: Mapping a Place for Feminism and Postmodernism in Geography?” Antipode 26.3 (1994): 236–254. Prieto, Eric. “Geocriticism meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and Environmental Thinking.” Èpistémocritique: littèrature et saveurs. Accessed 3 January 2012. Proctor, James D. “The Social Construction of Nature: Relativist Accusations, Pragmatist and Critical Realist Responses.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.3 (1998): 352–376. Raglon, Rebecca, and Marian Scholtmeijer. “Heading Off the Trail: Language, Literature, and Nature’s Resistance to Narrative.” In Beyond Nature Writing. Expanding the Boundaries of Eco-Criticism, edited by Karla M. Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, 248–262. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. Rachmanowa, Alja (Rachmanova, Alya). Braki v krasnom vichre: L. Rachmanova. s.l., s.t., ca. 1932. ———. Flight from Terror. Translated by Ida Zeitlin. New York: The John Day Company, 1933. ———. Ehen im Roten Sturm. Meine russischen Tagebücher, 325–636. Olten: Fackelverlag; Graz: Verlag Styria, 1960. ———. My Milkshop in Vienna. Translated by Kenneth Kirkness. London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd., n.d. ———. Studenten, Liebe, Tscheka und Tod: Tagebuch einer russischen Studentin. Meine russischen Tagebücher, 3–323. Olten: Fackelverlag; Graz: Verlag Styria, 1960. ———. Milchfrau in Ottakring: Tagebuch aus den dreissiger Jahren. Vienna: Amalthea Signum, 1997. Rajcic, Dragica. Lebendigkeit Ihre zurück. Edited by Verena Stettler. Zurich: Eco-Verlag, 1992. ———. Halbgedichte einer Gastfrau. Zürich: eco-verlag, 1994. ———. Post bellum: Gedichte. Zurich: Edition 8, 2000. ———. “Rechte statt Schranken.” Speech. Solidarité sans frontière. Bern. 13 March 2003. ———. Buch von Glück: Gedichte. Zurich: Edition 8, 2004. ———. Personal Interview with Laurel Cohen-Pfister. Gettysburg. 27 April 2006. ———. Personal Interview with Laurel Cohen-Pfister. Berlin. 8 Jan. 2009. Rakhmanova, Aleksandra. Studenty, liubov’, cheka i smert’: Dnevnik russkoi studentki. n.pl., n.d. Rechtien, Renate. “From a Topography of Hope to a Nightmarish ‘Non-Place’: Chronotopes in Christa Wolf’s ‘June Afternoon,’ ‘Unter den Linden,’ and ‘What Remains.’” In The Politics of Place in Post-War Germany: Essays in Literary Criticism, edited by David Clarke and Renate Rechtien, 261–284. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.

Works Cited

261

Reddington, Frances P., and Betsy Wright Kreisel. Sexual Assault: The Victims, The Perpetrators, and the Criminal Justice System. Durham N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2005. Rigby, Kate. “On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis.” New Literary History 35.3 (2004): 427–442. Riggenbach, Heinrich. Inventar des Nachlasses von Alja Rachmanowa (Galina von Hoyer): Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher. Frauenfeld: Thurgauische Kantonsbibliothek, 1998. Rink, Christian. “Nichts als Gespenster. Zur Idenititätsproblematik in den Erzählungen von Judith Hermann.” In Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität, edited by Ulrich Breuer and Beatrice Sandberg, 112–125. Munich: Iudicium, 2006. Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing and the Domestic Ritual. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Rorty, Richard. “A World Without Substances or Essences.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, 47–71. New York: Penguin, 1999. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. “Feminism and Geography.” In The Spaces of Postmodernity; Readings in Human Geography, edited by Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty, 314–324. Oxford, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Rosendale, Steve. “Introduction: Extending Ecocriticism.” In The Greening of Literary Scholarship, edited by Steve Rosendale, xiii–xxxii. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Rossbacher, Brigitte. “(Re)visions of the Past: Memory and Historiography in Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs.” Colloquia Germanica, 27.1 (1994): 13–24. Rusch, Claudia. Meine freie deutsche Jugend. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2003. Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking, 1986. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. “Reflections on Exile.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 357–366. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990. Schade, Silke. “Re-writing Home and Migration: Spatiality in the Narratives of Emine Sevgi Özdamar.” In Spatial Turns. Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel, 319–341. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Schaffer, Kay. “Colonizing Gender in Colonial Australia: The Eliza Frazer Story.” In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, 101–120. New York: The Guilford Press, 1994. Schieldrop, Edgar B. Conquest of Time and Space: The Railway, 1939; London: Hutchinson, 1956. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Translated by Anselm Hollo. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1986. Rpt. The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century. 1979. Schlau, Stacy. “Following Saint Teresa: Early Modern Women and Religious Authority.” MLN 117.2 (2002): 286–309. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003. Schmitz-Emans, Monika, “Fließende Grenzen und rätselhafte Verwandlungen. Yoko Tawadas Visionen von Europa.” In Europa – Stier und Sternenkranz. Von der Union mit Zeus zum Staatenbund, edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Roland Alexander Ißler, 319–337. Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2009.

262

Works Cited

———. “Metamorphose und Metempsychose. Zwei konkurrierende Modelle von Verwandlung im Spiegel der Gegenwartsliteratur.” arcadia 40.2 (2005): 408–413. Schneider, Hans Joachim. The Victim in International Perspective. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1982. Schweska, Marc. “Judith Hermanns Glücksgefühle.” Ästhetik & Kommunikation 34 (2003): 151–154. Seamon, David. “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place-Ballets.” In The Human Experience of Space and Place, edited by Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, 148–165. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. NY: Random House, 2003. Seiler, Cotton. “The Significance of Race to Transport History.” Journal of Transport History 28.2 (2007): 307–311. Serres, Michel, The Five Senses. New York: Continuum, 2009. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Shafi, Monika. “Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Narratives by Judith Hermann and Susanne Fischer.” In Neulektüren – New Readings: Festschrift für Gerd Labroisse zum 80. Geburtstag, edited by Norbert Otto Eke and Gerhard P. Knapp, 341–358. New York: Rodopi, 2009. ———. Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Shields, Ron. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1991. Sibley, David. “Outsiders in Society and Space.” In Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson and Fay Gale, 107–122. Melbourne, Australia: Halsted Press, 1992. Sill, Oliver. “Wirklichkeitsauffassung und Literaturverständnis. Zum programmatischen Charakter der frühen Erzählungen.” Text und Kritik 112 (1991): 6–12. Simonson, Harold P. Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989. Simpson, Mark. Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Slaymaker, Douglas. Yôko Tawada–Voices from Everywhere. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. ———. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. ———. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. ———. “Taking Space Personally.” In The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, 11–35. Routledge: London and New York, 2009. Sollors, Werner. “German-Language Writing in the United States: A Serious Challenge to American Studies?” In The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, edited by Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, 103–116. New York: Berghahn, 2001. Spivak, Gayatri. The Spivak Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Works Cited

263

Spokiene, Diane. “Gendered Urban Spaces: Cultural Mediations on the City in EighteenthCentury German Women’s Writing.” In Spatial Turns. Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel, 123–140. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Staudenmaier, John M. “Disciplined Imagination: The Life and Work of Tom and Agatha Hughes.” In Technologies of Power, edited by Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, ix–xx. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2001. Stedman, Raymond William. Shadows of the Indians: Stereotypes in American Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Steele, Fritz. The Sense of Place. Boston: CBI, 1981. Stein, Gertrude. “Patriarchal Poetry.” In Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson, 54. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stephan, Inge, and Sigrid Weigel, eds. Die Verborgene Frau. Sechs Beiträge zu einer feministischen Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Argument, 1983. Stoehr, Ingo Roland. German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism. New York: Camden House, 2001. Stopka, Katja. “Aus nächster Nähe so fern. Zu den Erzählungen von Terézia Mora und Judith Hermann.” In Bestandsaufnahmen. Deutschsprachige Literatur der neunziger Jahre aus interkultureller Sicht, edited by Matthias Harder, 147–166. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001. Stuhr, Uta. “Kult der Sinnlosigkeit oder die Paradoxien der modernen Sinnsuche. Judith Hermanns Erzählungen Nichts als Gespenster.” In Fräuleinwunder literarisch: Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, edited by Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, and Helga Meise, 37–52. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2005. Tawada, Yoko. Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag C. Gehrke, 1996. ———. The Bridegroom Was A Dog. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1998. ———. “E-mail für Japanische Gespenster.” In Verwandlungen, 41–42. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag C. Gehrke, 1998. ———. “Wo Europa anfängt.” In Ich habe eine fremde Sprache gewählt. Ausländische Schriftsteller schreiben deutsch, edited by Lerke von Saalfeld, 185–206. Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1998. ———. Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2000. ———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag C. Gehrke, 2002. ———. “Storytellers without Souls.” In Where Europe Begins, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, 101–115. Preface by Wim Wenders. New York: New Directions, 2002. ———. “The Bath.” In Where Europe Begins, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, 1–56. Preface by Wim Wenders. New York: New Directions, 2002. ———. Where Europe Begins. Translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, Preface by Wim Wenders. New York: New Directions, 2002. ———. “Writing in the Web of Words.” In Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, edited by Isabelle de Courtivron, 147–156. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. “Tawada Yôko Does Not Exist” (2004). In Yôko Tawada – Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker, 13–20. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ———. “Ist Europa westlich?” Trajekte: Newsletter des Zentrums für Literaturforschung Berlin 12 (2006): 34–38. ———. Facing the Bridge. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. New York: New Directions, 2007. ———. The Naked Eye. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2009.

264

Works Cited

———. “Schreiben im Netz der Sprachen.” In Interkulturelle Begegnungen in Literatur, Film und Fernsehen. Ein deutsch-japanischer Vergleich, edited by Hilaria Gössmann, Renate Jaschke, and Andreas Mrugalla, 447–454. Munich: Iudicium, 2011. ———. “Hamburger Poetikvorlesungen.” Yoko Tawada. Fremde Wasser. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2012. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Torrance, T.F. Space, Time, and Incarnation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Totten, Monica. “Writing in Two Languages: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada.” Harvard Review 17 (1999): 93–100. Trachtenberg, Alan. Forward to The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, translated by Anselm Hollo, xii–xvi. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1986. Rpt. The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century. 1979. Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand. The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Peter Smith, 1951. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Home.” In Patterned Ground: The Entanglements of Nature and Culture, edited by Harrison, S., Pile, S., and Thrift, N, 164–165. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Van Dijk, Kari. “Arriving in Eurasia: Yoko Tawada Re-Writing Europe.” In Re-Thinking Europe. Literature and (Trans)National Identity, edited by Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant, and Pieter Vermeulen, 163–178. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Venables, Robert W. “The Founding Fathers: Choosing to be the Romans.” In Indian Roots of American Democracy, edited by José Barreiro, 67–106. Ithaca: Akwe:kon Press and Cornell University, 1992. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Cecil Day-Lewis. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952. Von Ankum, Katharina. Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Wagner, Maria. Introduction to Was die Deutschen aus Amerika berichteten, 1828–1865, edited by Maria Wagner, ix–xxv. Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1985. Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias, eds. Introduction to The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 1–10. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York: Crown Publishers, 1988. Weber, Allison. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Weigel, Sigrid. Die Stimme der Medusa: Schreibweisen in der Gegenwartsliteratur von Frauen. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989. ———. “Transsibirische Metamorphosen. Laudatio auf Yoko Tawada zur Verleihung des Adelbert von Chamisso Preises 1996.” Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft 49 (1996): 5–6. ———. “On the ‘Topographical Turn’: Concepts of Space in Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften. A Cartographic Feud.” European Review 17.1 (2009): 187–201. Weingart, Brigitte. “Judith Hermann. ‘Sommerhaus, später.’” In Meisterwerke. Deutschsprachige Autorinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Claudia Benthien and Inge Stephan, 148–175. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. Weis, Kurt. Die Vergewaltigung und ihre Opfer: Eine viktimologische Untersuchung zur gesellschaftlichen Bewertung und individuellen Betroffenheit. Stuttgart: Enke, 1982.

Works Cited

265

Westphal, Bertrand. La Géocritique. Réel, Fiction, Espace. Paris: Les Éditions des Minuits, 2007. ———. On Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert Tally. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011. Winchester, Hilary. “The Construction and Deconstruction of Women’s Roles in the Urban Landscape.” In Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson and Fay Gale, 139–156. Melbourne, Australia: Halsted, 1992. Winger, Anna. This Must Be the Place. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Winkler, Kathrin, Kim Seifert, and Heinrich Detering. “Literary Studies and the Spatial Turn.” Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 253–270. Wolff, J. “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture & Society 2.3 (1985): 37–46. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1929. Würzbach, Natascha. “Erzählter Raum. Fiktionaler Baustein, kultureller Sinnträger, Ausdruck der Geschlechterordnung.” In Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, edited by Jörg Helbig, 105–129. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001. ———. “Raumdarstellung.” In Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 49–71. Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2004. ———. Raumerfahrungen in der klassischen Moderne. Großstadt, Reisen, Wahrnehmungssinnlichkeit und Geschlecht in englischen Erzähltexten. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2006. Yildiz, Yasemin. “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Toward a Transnational Imaginary.” In Voices From Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker, 77–90. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ———. Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Youngman, Paul A. Black Devil and Iron Angel: The Railway in Nineteenth-Century German Realism. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Zapf, Hubert. “Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts.” New Literary History 39 (2009): 847–868. Ziolkowski, Margaret. Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001.

Notes on Contributors Necia Chronister is an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at Kansas State University. She has recently published work on such contemporary authors as Judith Hermann, Angela Krauss, and Antje Rávic Strubel. Laurel Cohen-Pfister is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of German Studies at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on contemporary German memory debates, women and war, and the representation of war in literature and film. Carola Daffner is an Assistant Professor of German at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her research focuses on gender and the politics of space in German literature and film. Her monograph Gertrud Kolmar: Dichten im Raum (Königshausen & Neumann) appeared in 2012. Chase Dimock holds a Ph.D. in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His articles on Gale Wilhelm and Robert McAlmon have appeared in the journal College Literature (2014) and the anthology Paris in American Literatures: On Distance as a Literary Resource (2013) respectively. Elizabeth Weber Edwards, PhD, is Associate Director of Graduate Student Development at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her research interests include the intersection of religion and literature. Caroline Frank studied German and Geography at Saarland University. At the moment she is a Visiting Fellow at the University of the South in Tennessee and is currently finishing her dissertation “Fictional Topographing. A Toolbox for Analyzing Narrated Spaces.” Xenia Srebrianski Harwell taught German and Russian language, literature, and culture at a number of colleges and universities in the U.S. prior to accepting the position of Assistant Professor of German at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Susanne Lenné Jones is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. Her main research interests include literature of the Holocaust, memory studies, humor, and German film. She is author of Multiplicities of Memories in

268

Notes on Contributors

Contemporary German Literature: How Photographs Are Used to Reconstruct Narratives of History (Edwin Mellen Press 2013). Alexandra Merley Hill is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Portland in Oregon, where she teaches all levels of language, literature, and culture. Her research focuses on contemporary literature by women and the revival of feminism in Germany. Silja Maehl is a doctoral candidate in the Department of German Studies at Brown University with research interests in twentieth- and twenty-first century German literature, literary multilingualism, translation, and psychoanalysis. Elaine Martin is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her recent publications focus on Nelly Sachs and Weimar colonialism. Beth Muellner is an Associate Professor of German at the College of Wooster in Ohio, where she teaches all levels of language and literature. Her interdisciplinary research interests include the history of photography and travel writing. She is currently working on a monograph on photography and royal women. Traci S. O’Brien is Associate Professor of German at Auburn University. In addition to various articles on cultural, literary, and pedagogical topics, she has published Enlightened Reactions: Emancipation, Gender, and Race in German Women’s Writing (2011). Maria Snyder holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and specializes in the history of the book and of landscape in French and German literature. She teaches at Central College in Pella, Iowa.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 41, 44 African Americans 21, 23–24, 32, 38 agrarians and agrarianism, North American 232–233, 245 Alexa Hennig von Lange 134 alienation 51, 53, 66, 77, 79, 81, 99, 115, 129, 138, 155, 230 Anderson, Benedict 2, 77 anti-place 171, 181–182, 184, 186 Anzaldúa, Gloria 10 Appadurai, Arjun 13–14, 47 Argonauts 175–176, 179, 181 Assing, Ottilie 3, 14, 19, 21–39 atheistic Gnosticism 172 Augé, Marc 8, 13, 133, 136–137, 139, 147, 151 Auschwitz 171, 173, 181–182 Bachelard, Gaston 5, 9 Bakhtin, Michel 11 Barthes, Roland 57, 65–66, 68–69, 73, 195 Benjamin, Walter 10–11, 64 Berlin 3–4, 9–10, 12, 41, 57, 121–122, 125–126, 128–131, 135–137, 143, 146, 149–156, 158–160, 162, 164, 169, 171–172, 193–194, 204, 211, 213–220, 222–227 Berry, Wendell 229, 232–233, 245 Bhabha, Homi 10, 13 bisexuality 151–152, 158–159 blood-and-soil rhetoric 229, 233 body, the 7, 11, 14–15, 69–70, 72, 79–81, 83–86, 90–93, 99, 101, 103–104, 115, 119, 121, 123, 127, 129, 172, 178–179, 184, 193, 205 bohemian lifestyle 150–151, 158, 160, 163 border 30, 57, 60–63, 68, 70, 73–75, 83, 99, 122, 133, 179, 195, 202, 205, 218 bourgeoisie 112 Butler, Judith 85, 142, 147, 151, 157 Chatwin, Bruce 64 Cixous, Hélène 11 Dückers, Tanja 134, 136 de Beauvoir, Simone 11

Deleuze, Gilles 8, 12, 41–42, 48, 53, 152, 155–156, 160, 163 denial 7, 13, 113, 184, 216 Derrida, Jacques 63, 74–76 displacement 13, 43, 45, 48, 58, 65, 77, 118, 134, 150, 161, 182, 233, 241 domesticity 14, 134–135, 137, 140, 143, 146–147, 157, 159, 235 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 111, 114 Douglass, Frederick 21–22, 24, 32–33, 35 dreamscape 116 East Germany 128, 137, 144, 149–150, 152, 160, 162, 241, 244 Eco, Umberto 194 ecocriticism, North American agrarian 229–234, 241 Edvardson, Cordelia 173 Erpenbeck, Jenny 3, 14, 135–136, 169, 229–230, 235, 241–245 ethnicity 3, 14, 19, 41, 43 evil, nature of 66, 108–109, 172, 184 exile 7, 13, 41, 43–44, 58, 66, 101–102, 113–114, 118–119 farming 232–233 feminism 2, 7, 31, 268 feminist geography 9, 15, 209 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 59, 69 flâneur, the 10, 21, 28–29, 156 fluidity 1, 19, 57, 73, 75, 77, 218 Foucault, Michel 5–6, 8–9, 12, 85, 193, 196, 213 Franck, Julia 3, 13–14, 99, 133–134, 137, 141, 144–145, 147, 151 Freud, Sigmund 67, 85–86, 113, 136, 145, 160 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 238 gender – ambiguity 164 – ambivalence 151 – oppression 13, 22, 42, 48, 53–54, 169, 194, 207, 209, 225 Genette, Gérard 200

270

Index

genocide 44, 171, 179, 186, 191, 212, 224 German Democratic Republic See East Germany 14 German studies 1, 102 German women’s writing 1–2, 101, 171, 221 Germanness 1–2, 57, 133 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 12 Guattari, Félix 8, 12, 41–42, 48, 53, 152, 155–156, 160, 163 Harvey, David 6 Heidegger, Martin 5, 229, 231, 243–244 Hensel, Jana 135 Hermann, Judith 3, 12, 14, 99, 133–136, 149–152, 154, 156–157, 159–165, 267 heteronormativity 163 heterosexual matrix 151–152, 157, 159 Holocaust 174–175, 224, 227, 267 home 3–4, 9, 12–14, 28, 41–42, 44, 47–49, 51–52, 54, 64, 66, 71, 76, 101–102, 104–105, 108–110, 114–116, 118–119, 127–128, 131, 133–141, 143, 145–147, 150, 154, 158, 160–165, 175, 183, 186, 199, 203, 206, 209, 212, 216, 221, 234, 241 homelessness 14, 53, 58, 162 hooks, bell 6, 13, 41, 54–55 hybridity 13, 74 Ibsen, Henrik 12 identity 2, 4–6, 12–13, 42, 45, 48–49, 57–60, 69, 72, 77, 80, 82, 87, 91, 95–96, 101–102, 104, 107, 113, 115–116, 119, 122, 126, 129, 132, 134, 137, 142, 149–153, 155–156, 159–160, 162–164, 171–173, 177, 187, 190, 203, 206–207, 211, 213, 233 Irigaray, Luce 11 Jameson, Frederic 9 Jenny, Zoë 135 Kübler-Ross grief cycle 113 Kracht, Christian 134 Kristeva, Julia 11, 121–122, 124–125, 130, 142 Kronauer, Brigitta 3, 14, 169, 229–230, 235–238, 240–241, 245

Langgässer, Elisabeth 3, 14, 169, 171–173, 176, 178–179, 182–183, 185–187, 190–191 Lefebvre, Henri 4–8, 10, 90, 103, 211, 213, 217, 225–226 Lieber, Francis 24–28, 37 Liebmann, Irina 3, 14, 169, 211–227 literature of migration 42–43, 57, 99 living and dwelling, Heideggerian definition 243 Lorde, Audrey 3 Lotman, Jurij 11–12, 193, 195, 197, 205–206 mapping 4, 10, 108, 121, 130 marginalization 13, 41, 110 Maron, Monika 3, 12, 14, 169, 193–195, 197–198, 204–205, 207–208 Marxist geography 6–7, 9 Massey, Doreen 5–7, 9, 13, 15, 24, 121, 211, 213, 215–217, 220 memory 2, 14, 25, 29, 41, 43, 49–50, 54, 66–67, 72, 101–102, 104, 113, 119, 122, 125, 128, 130, 132, 134, 140, 160, 180, 183–184, 211–212, 227, 236, 241, 267 migrant writers 4 migration 1, 3, 13, 57–58, 76, 134 mobility 14, 19, 21–23, 26–28, 30, 33, 38, 57, 62, 81, 101–102, 149, 152, 154, 158, 165 motion 30–31, 61, 76, 111, 119, 128, 156–157, 164, 180 multilingualism 57, 61, 86, 268 mysticism 187 nationalism 2, 14, 41, 43, 69, 232, 245 Native Americans 21–23, 33–38 numinous, the 180, 183–185, 187 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 76 Parei, Inka 3, 9, 11, 14, 99, 121–125, 127–132, 136, 151, 169 pastoralism, North American 229, 233, 245 patriarchy 14, 29, 82, 162–163 phenomenology 231, 238 place – loss of 182 – non-place 133, 137, 139, 143, 147, 218

Index

politics of mobility, the 23, 38 postcolonial discourse 13 Pratt, Minnie Bruce 87, 134 race 3, 5–6, 19, 21, 30, 32, 39, 92, 221 Rachmanowa, Alja 3–4, 9, 14, 99, 101–104, 114–115, 117–119 Rajcic, Dragica 3–4, 14, 19, 41–54 Red Terror 102, 110 Rusch, Claudia 135 Russian revolution 104 Said, Edward 13–14, 41, 44, 47 Sebald, W.G. 117, 245 Șenocak, Zafer 4 Serres, Miches 83–84, 89–91 Simmel, Georg 10 slavery 22–23, 25, 28, 30–33, 36–37 Soja, Edward W. 1, 5–10, 13, 211, 213, 217–218, 220, 224, 226–227 space – and power 5–7, 9, 19, 23, 32, 34, 42–43, 48–50, 52, 54, 59, 62, 68, 79, 88, 93, 103–105, 109, 112, 119, 132, 138, 143, 174, 180, 187, 190, 193, 195–197, 199, 202, 206, 209, 212, 220, 222–224, 226 – as social construct 6 – city 9, 12, 28–32, 34–36, 38, 57, 60, 64, 90, 106, 111, 114–115, 117, 121, 129–130, 137, 152–160, 162–163, 165, 169, 182–186, 211–212, 214, 219–221, 227, 236–237, 243 – contestation of 34, 103 – domestic 133–134, 137–139, 144–147 – exterior 11, 83, 99, 188 – gendered 116, 222 – interior 11, 14, 99, 169 – language 4–5, 19, 79 – neutrality of 103 – private 12, 14, 52, 104–105, 108, 110, 117, 137, 209 – public 113, 139 – smooth 156, 160, 163–164 – static 198 – striated 156, 158–160, 163 – theology of 14 – urban 11, 21, 155, 213, 220, 222–223, 225, 227

271

spatial – discourse 102, 196, 208, 220 – matrix 103 – studies 1–2, 4, 8, 12 – turn 1, 5–6, 8–10, 173, 193, 195, 208, 213 Spivak, Gayatri 13 stasis 7, 14, 21, 177, 216 supermodernity 133–134, 137, 147 Tawada, Yoko 3–4, 14, 19, 57–77, 79–96, 99 technology 12, 21–24, 26–34, 37–38, 91–92, 232, 240 topographical turn 5, 8 topography 48, 130, 195, 205, 209 Torrance, T.F. 172, 174, 190 transnational 42–43, 46–47, 53, 57–58, 77, 79, 99 trauma 43, 49, 101, 113, 118–119, 121, 123–125, 127–130, 132, 209 travel 13–14, 21–28, 31–34, 37–38, 57–58, 60, 62, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 75–77, 80, 87, 89, 141, 152, 175, 179, 182, 216, 239, 268 – technology 25, 28 – technology of 38 – via train 19, 22, 25–27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 60, 62–63, 70, 73–75, 110, 124, 128, 240 – writing 13 Turner, Victor and Edith 171, 173, 176–177, 183, 185, 187 U.S. women’s movement 22, 24 Underground Railroad 33, 38 Volk 171–172 von Hoyer, Arnulf 101–102 war 19, 36, 41–44, 46–54, 62, 101–102, 104, 107, 111, 116, 118–119, 160, 163, 171, 173, 175, 181–182, 185–186, 189–191, 212, 215, 230, 237, 240, 242, 267 wilderness, concept of ecocriticism 37, 229, 231–235, 238, 245 Wolf, Christa 106 women’s issues 116, 133 women’s writing 1, 5–6, 9, 11–12, 14, 133 Woolf, Virginia 10–12, 209