eJournals

COLLOQUIA GERMANICA BAND 41 00Titelei_End.indd I 00Titelei_End.indd I 19.08.11 09: 36 19.08.11 09: 36 00Titelei_End.indd II 00Titelei_End.indd II 19.08.11 09: 36 19.08.11 09: 36 in Verbindung mit Jane K. Brown (Seattle), Katherina Gerstenberger (Cincinnati), Todd C. Kontje (San Diego), John Pizer (Baton Rouge), Maria Tatar (Cambridge), Anthony Tatlow (Dublin) und den Mitgliedern der Division of German Studies (University of Kentucky) Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik Herausgegeben von Theodore Fiedler und Harald Höbusch Band 41 · 2008 Published for the UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY by A. FRANCKE VERLAG TÜBINGEN AND BASEL 00Titelei_End.indd III 00Titelei_End.indd III 19.08.11 09: 36 19.08.11 09: 36 © 2011 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All Rights Strictly Reserved Satz: Informationsdesign D. Fratzke, Kirchentellinsfurt Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren ISSN 0010-1338 00Titelei_End.indd IV 00Titelei_End.indd IV 19.08.11 09: 36 19.08.11 09: 36 INHALT Heft 1 H ORST L ANGE : Betting on Providence: Gambling in G.E. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 S EAN F RANZEL : Cultures of Performance, Gender, and Political Ideology: Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 D ANIELA P UPLINKHUISEN : Vexierspiele europäischen Denkens in deutscher Prosaliteratur nach 1870/ 71: Conrad Ferdinand Meyers historische Novelle Der Heilige . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 R ÜDIGER S CHOLZ : Heine in der deutschen Presse der Nachkriegszeit 1945-1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Besprechungen/ Reviews H EINRICH D ETERING AND S TEPHAN S TACHORSKI (Eds.): Thomas Mann: Neue Wege der Forschung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Heft 2 Themenheft: Germans Reading China C HUNJIE Z HANG : From Sinophilia to Sinophobia: China, History, and Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 D AVID D. K IM : Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater: Enlightenment and Empire in Schiller’s Turandot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 M ARY R HIEL : A Colonialist Laments the New Imperialism: Elizabeth von Heyking’s China Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 N ANCY L UKENS : Reading China, Resisting Hitler: Adam von Trott’s Engagement with Chinese Political Philosophy and Culture 1935- 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 M IN Z HOU : Lu Xun, Peking Opera, and Modernism: China as a Literary Model in Anna Seghers’s «Zwei Briefe über China» . . . . . . . 155 Besprechungen/ Reviews S AMUEL W EBER : Benjamin’s -abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd V 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd V 19.08.11 09: 35 19.08.11 09: 35 VI Inhalt R ICHARD D. C RITCHFIELD : From Shakespeare to Frisch: The Provocative Fritz Kortner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 S IEGFRIED M EWS : Günter Grass and His Critics from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 C HRISTINE A CHINGER : Gespaltene Moderne: Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben. Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 H ANS R UDOLF V AGET (Ed.): Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. A Casebook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 M ONIKA C ZERNIN : «Jenes herrliche Gefühl der Freiheit». Frieda von Bülow und die Sehnsucht nach Afrika . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 T HOMAS A. K OVACH AND M ARTIN W ALSER : The Burden of the Past. Martin Walser on Modern German Identity: Texts, Contexts, Commentary. . 188 M ONIKA S HAFI (Ed.): Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum . . . 190 Heft 3 Themenheft: Contested Autobiographies J ENNIFER R EDMANN : Eine Frau in Berlin: Diary as History or Fiction of the Self? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 R ACHEL H ALVERSON : Hermann Kant’s Abspann: Shifting Paradigms and the Fiction of Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 K ATHLEEN C ONDRAY : Unorthodox Immigrant Autobiography in the Œuvre of Wladimir Kaminer: A Twenty-First Century Model . . . . . . 227 C AROLE A NNE C OSTABILE -H EMING : Overcoming the Silence: Narrative Strategies in Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Besprechungen/ Reviews P ETER C. P FEIFFER : Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Tragödie. Erzählung. Heimatfilm/ C LAUDIA S EELING : Zur Interdependenz von Gender- und Nationaldiskurs bei Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach/ M ARIE L UISE W ANDRUSZKA : Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Erzählerin aus politischer Leidenschaft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 R ANDALL H ALLE AND R EINHILD S TEINGRÖVER (Eds.): After the Avant- Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film . . . . 265 T ILLMANN K REUZER : König Kind? Literarische Figuren zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts in Werken der realistischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VI 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VI 19.08.11 09: 35 19.08.11 09: 35 Inhalt VII S ABINE H AKE : Topographies of Class. Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 R ICHARD T. G RAY : Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 E RNEST S CHONFIELD : Art and its Uses in Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull . . . 274 K ARIN B AUMGARTNER : Public Voices. Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 M ICHAEL M AREINER (Ed.): «Von einer edlen Amme». Eine mittelhochdeutsche Minneallegorie. Wörterbuch und Reimwörterbuch. MittelhochdeutscheMinneredenundMinneallegorienderWienerHandschrift 2796 und der Heidelberger Handschrift Pal. germ. 348. Vol. 8 . . . . . . 277 H ILLARY H OPE H ERZOG , T ODD H ERZOG AND B ENJAMIN L APP (Eds.): Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Heft 4 Themenheft: Transnational Writing in German A ZADE S EYHAN : The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm in Contemporary German Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 H ILTRUD A RENS : Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities: Rewriting the Past for the Future in Rafik Schami’s Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen and Zafer Senocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft . . . . . . . . . . 295 B ORYANA D OBREVA : Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities: The Case of Rumjana Zacharieva. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 E KATERINA P IROZHENKO : Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City: Magic in Yoko Tawada’s Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. . . . . . 331 Besprechungen/ Reviews B RAD P RAGER : Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images 357 K ATHARINA G ERSTENBERGER : Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 S TUART P ARKES : Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945-2008 . . . . . . . . . . 360 R UTH B. B OTTIGHEIMER : Fairy Tales: A New History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 D EREK H ILLARD : Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VII 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VII 19.08.11 09: 35 19.08.11 09: 35 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VIII 00Jahresinhalt_V-VIII_End.indd VIII 19.08.11 09: 35 19.08.11 09: 35 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Christoph Bode Der Roman UTB S 2., erweiterte Auflage 2011, XX, 358 Seiten, €[D] 19,90/ SFr 30,50 ISBN 978-3-8252-2580-3 Der Band bietet eine anspruchsvolle, doch lebendig und verständlich geschriebene Einführung in die Romananalyse und ist für Studierende aller neuphilologischen Literaturwissenschaften konzipiert. Die Einführung in narratologische Terminologie und Methoden wird mit grundlegenden literaturtheoretischen Überlegungen verknüpft und mit einer Fülle anschaulicher Beispiele illustriert. Die Zweitauflage bietet eine ganze Reihe von Berichtigungen, die »Basisbibliothek Romananalyse« ist aktualisiert und ergänzt worden, vor allem enthält der Band aber nun einen Namensindex. 004711 Auslieferung Januar 2011.indd 30 19.01.11 16: 03 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm in Contemporary German Literature AZADE SEYHAN B RYN M AWR In the last two decades, a major critical concern of German Studies in American academia has been the future trajectory of research and teaching in our discipline. A good number of edited volumes, special issues of scholarly journals, and conference sessions have been devoted to envisioning a new transformative paradigm that would shift the study of modern German language, literature, and culture from the nationally defined borders of traditional Germanistik to a transnationally conceived field of literary and cultural study. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, German Studies in America has taken into its purview gender studies, issues of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cross-cultural identity, colonialism and postcolonialism in German literature, and the diasporic cultures of contemporary Germany. Tales from the German diaspora represent a variant of the global flow of cultural capital but also serve as cautionary tales about repressed forms of racism and xenophobia that need to be confronted. Although these interdisciplinary and transnational inquiries got off to a slow start in German Studies - whereas French Studies got a tremendous boost first from poststructuralism, beginning in the sixties and, subsequently, from Francophone literature - the growing visibility of Bindestrich or hyphenated German writers and artists in the European, Balkan, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern cultural contexts has inspired scholars to envision novel modes of cognition and recognition with regard to cultural identity formation, collective memory, language, and translation. In an age of the transnational flow of monetary and intellectual capital, high-speed communication, and an unprecedented scale of human movement within and without national borders, the question of «traveling» and «hybrid» languages and the growing need for cultural translation have become a focal point of scholarly and political interests. «A language that travels is always made of many languages, since a language that really travels is always an open language, porous, inclusive, and willing to disappear into another language,» notes Paolo Bartolini. It emerges from the other language with «its very own singularity,» thus replenishing «both itself and the host language» (87). This generative fusion of languages is, in Walter Benjamin’s view, the operative CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 281 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 281 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 282 Azade Seyhan principle of translation that is the appropriate expression of the intimate connection languages share: «So ist die Übersetzung zuletzt zweckmäßig für den Ausdruck des innersten Verhältnisses der Sprachen zueinander» (52). The centrality of language, translation, and biand multilingualism is arguably the most prominent characteristic of the diaspora literatures of Germany, since these otherwise resist easy classification. German writers of Turkish origin make up the largest majority among the transnational literary figures who hail from many lands, including Iran (Said, Torkan), Italy (Franco Biondi), Spain (Jose Oliver), Russia (Wladimir Kaminer), and Japan (Y ō ko Tawada). Since none of these writers share in a colonial history, the idiom of postcolonial studies does not always offer the adequate critical apparatus to understand and appreciate their work. The crosscurrents of diverse cultures in the contemporary German literary scene, their different ports of entry, and their multiple destinations shape and reshape our notions of critical inquiry and demand appropriate strategies of reading. Since cultures need not «be rooted in a given place, that fragments of culture can survive in multiple places, and that cultural meanings may […] transform themselves across the gaps of time» (Papastergiadis 331), the conceptualization of cultures in transition and translation requires a range of critical protocols. However, as Nikos Papastergiadis duly recognizes, the «appreciation of ‹diasporization› of culture has been remarkably undertheorized» (331). Neither postcolonial theory nor discourses of identity politics can address the diversity and complexity of diasporic narratives that emerge from transit points between languages, cultures, and belief and value systems and thus resist classification. In Writing Outside the Nation (2001), I used the designation «transnational literature» to describe a literary genre created by writers, living and writing outside their homelands and negotiating different languages and idioms. However, because the semantic field of the term has since geometrically and geographically expanded, it has forsaken its specificity. The implosion of creative and conceptual wealth that characterizes the recent work of transnational writers poses a continuing challenge to theorizing the «diasporization» of culture. Furthermore, if in today’s «global village,» to use Marshall McLuhan’s prescient metaphor, the fortunes of nations are, for better or for worse, interlinked, then our experience of the modern world is grounded in a transnational consciousness. Consequently, writers who write «outside the nation,» cannot be the sole agents of transnational literature(s). Authors who represent and endorse various forms of cultural bior multilingualism, whether they write in their nations of origin or in those of their domicile, contest and complicate the notion of the nation state as an object of affiliation. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 282 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 282 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 283 The transnational turn in European literature was set into motion by the displacement and transplantation of individuals and communities into host countries in Europe. The large-scale migrations of our era are the result of various and at times interlinked histories of political persecution, economic hardship, globalized corporate control, and sociopolitical movements, such as the migration of colonized populations to the countries of their former colonizers and an international division of labor, whereby hosts of Gastarbeiter have fanned out all across Europe and, more recently, moved to India, the Arab Emirates, and Turkey, thus reversing the westbound migratory trend. The ongoing transnational traffic of economic and cultural capital has thrown the need for increased translational activity into sharp relief. In addition to the basic necessity of translation in the everyday dealings of transplanted peoples, translation of their social practices, modes of thought and belief, and value systems need to be addressed in order to ensure not only their integration into the life of the host country but also the preservation of their linguistic and cultural heritages. The guardianship of language and memory emerges as a self-proclaimed mission of many writers and artists in diaspora. At the beginning of his celebrated novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a testimony to the persistence of memory in exile, Milan Kundera remarks, «The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting» (3). Jacques Derrida, whose philosophical career is grounded neither in the language of the country of his birth nor in that of his faith, but in French, and who late in life reflected on being «monolingual» in the language of the «Other,» eloquently expresses the trauma caused by the loss of the mother tongue or an originary language. «Today, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages,» he writes in Monolingualism of the Other, «they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better. A tragic economy, an impossible counsel» (30). In this very personal yet highly theoretical treatise, Derrida mourns the forcible amnesia of one’s rightful inheritance of ancestral and familial languages, «I have only one language and it is not mine» (25). The writer in diaspora, moving between borders of language, memory, personal and collective identity, and national affiliation needs to plot complex and layered strategies of translating to negotiate these competing forms of identification. Perhaps the least ideology-driven manner of remembering languages and cultures lost, fragmented, or damaged in transport is realized in cultural translation. There have been noteworthy critical attempts to refine and redefine the semantic and conceptual sweep of the term transnational. In a field of cultural production that aspires to keep up with global strides, ter- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 283 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 283 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 284 Azade Seyhan minology gets stretched to elucidate emerging events and developments that can no longer be described by the original term. In Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk, Venkat Mani shows how writers who write in their own lands and languages, such as Sten Nadolny and Orhan Pamuk, and others, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimo ğ lu (Turkish-German), who write beyond the borders of their homelands in another language make «cosmopolitical claims» by challenging the one-dimensional representations of other selves, cultures, and beliefs. Cosmopolitanism has for some time been the preferred designation for progressive political views and figures prominently in a wide spectrum of social theories. It is seen as an alternative both to a unified grammar of nationalism that is based on such common denominators as territory, language, and religion, and to articulations of a multiculturalism largely driven by identity politics. Mani’s study is one of a handful of monographs that offer a theoretical framework for Germany’s transnational literary scene. While these studies offer different critical approaches to reading contemporary writers of non- German backgrounds, they all see in the work of these writers both the will to participate in the hi/ stories (as Geschichte and Geschichten) of their host land and a resistance to nostalgia for home - which has become an unstable and contested category - as well as to a ready identification with the receiving or adopted nation. Despite the desirable ring of cosmopolitanism, it seems that many treatises on this concept include some disclaimer about being able fully to define it, and this inability of the inclusivity of the term cosmopolitan undermines the desire to contain contemporary diasporic movements and cultures within stable or meaningful parameters. It may be that both terms, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, have become overextended after much use, and, to borrow Nietzsche’s words, appear canonical and binding («kanonisch und verbindlich»); they are like metaphors without sensory impact or empirical basis, coins that have lost their image and exchange value and can be used only as metal, «Münzen die ihr Bild verloren haben und nun als Metall, nicht mehr als Münzen, in Betracht kommen» (114). To extend the metaphor (and avoid overextending the designations transnational and cosmopolitan), can we melt the metal and recast it in a different mold? Can we cast the character and characteristics of diaspora experiences and cultures in another idiom? Is a transnational writer necessarily a hyphenated (Turkish-German) or multiply hyphenated (German-French-Czech) writer? Or given the increasingly shifting economic, ideological, cultural borders of the world, should we remove the hyphen and consider all writers/ artists with translingual and transcultural interest transnational agents of literature and art? Literature is also a «travel- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 284 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 284 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 285 ing» language that is, as Bartolini notes above, already composed of many languages (and these, I would add, have already been translated in advance) and that is «open,» «porous,» «inclusive» (87) and ready to merge into other languages to form interlingual alliances. Likewise, innovative literature and art invariably participate in intertextual associations. The transnational writer, broadly defined, considers literature a traveling phenomenon that changes the culture of the spaces it enters and is changed by it. A more layered understanding of cross-cultural or transnational writing needs to enact both a backward and a forward translation in a geschichtsphilosophisch continuum. Such a strategy lies at the core of cultural translation, which investigates or analyzes cultural differences and convergences not only between geographical entities but also between different temporalities. Simply to graft or superimpose a theoretical model, be this postcolonial, psychoanalytical, or gender specific, on new or emergent forms of writing in a world of increasingly porous borders does not work. On the other hand, the work of translation, an activity that has been indispensible ever since humans have used some form of language, can offer both a historical context and a modern critical insight into diasporic experiences. Many contemporary commentaries on transnational cultures fail to catch the Zeitgeist that gives rise to them, for they almost always circumvent the historical precedents in the chronology of intellectual paradigm shifts. Incorporating critical legacies of translation into the discussion can shed light on contemporary questions of exile and transnationalism. Since language and translation are the twin tropes diaspora writers employ, in the following discussion I also briefly touch on stylistic strategies that destabilize meanings and restabilize them in translational gestures of narration in the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Y ō ko Tawada. Translation is conventionally understood as an act that sets into motion a contest for correspondence between two languages that would ideally yield access to the singular modes of expression and models of understanding in a given culture. At the same time, it initiates a competition between expressive powers of respective languages. This contest often poses a threat to the culture that has less power to preserve its expressive legacy. And how can this threat that sets one language against the other and jeopardizes cultural communication and understanding be checked and averted in advance? Under what conditions would languages and cultures be equal partners in translation? What would be the imperative of cultural translatability? Theories of translatability are legion, but let me step back for a moment into the late eighteenth-century moment of early German Romanticism, known as the Frühromantik, where the twin fields of modern hermeneutics and translation premeditated the critical questions of translatability that have been mediated to our contemporary CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 285 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 285 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 286 Azade Seyhan «transnational» sensibilities through the work of Walter Benjamin, Antoine Berman, Jacques Derrida, and company. Friedrich Schleiermacher («the veil maker»), who developed hermeneutics into an art of interpretation that went far beyond biblical exegesis and took into its purview all manner of linguistic analysis, in effect unveiled translation as a cultural and sociopolitical act. While his theory of translation has been criticized because of its nationalistic bias - he strove «to shape German into a language of world culture» and educate the citizenry through its linguistic capacities - Schleiermacher argued that «the desire to translate is to be understood positively, as a desire to build community,» and not a desire - by the translating agency - to dominate and domesticate the foreign, a desire incompatible with Schleiermacher’s emphasis on «the interconnectedness of ethics, dialectics, and hermeneutics» (Faull 14). Congruent with Schleiermacher’s theory of language, which understands each speech (Rede) in its historical contingency and with regard to its multireferential nature, is his concept of the «divinatory» (die divinatorische [Auslegung] AS) (Schleiermacher 169) in «psychological interpretation» (psychologische Auslegung), which intimates the perception of the suprasensible (in imagination). In the divinatory method, which complements the comparative method - and the two methods form the basis of psychological interpretation - the interpreter aspires to understand directly and merges into the «other» (the text, the language, or the mind of the writer): «Die divinatorische ist die, welche, indem man sich selbst gleichsam in den andern verwandelt, das Individuelle unmittelbar aufzufassen sucht» (169). The concept of the divinatory, which has been the source of many misconceptions in Schleiermacher reception, makes perfect sense, if understood in the context of «Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,» Benjamin’s overly referenced essay. Benjamin’s notion of the pure language [die reine Sprache], which connotes a suprasensible or divined language, reveals itself only in translation. This «messianic character of translation,» Derrida notes in reference to Benjamin’s essay, is not a result of translation’s (or interpretation’s) success, because «[a] translation never succeeds in the pure and the absolute sense of the term. Rather, a translation succeeds in promising reconciliation. […] [T]hrough the translation one sees the coming shape of a possible reconciliation. Translation offers the sense or presentiment [or divination, as Schleiermacher would say, AS] of what language itself is - ‹die reine Sprache.›» This pure language revealed in translation «is what makes a language a language.» Translation shows us «that there is language […] and that there is a plurality of languages which have that kinship with each other coming from their being languages» (Derrida, «Roundtable on Translation» 123). Thus, both the original language CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 286 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 286 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 287 and the translation should be recognizable «als Bruchstück einer größeren Sprache» (Benjamin 59). This larger language denotes the translatability of all language. What does this really mean? Benjamin explains thus: one can speak of an unforgettable life or moment that, although it may be forgotten by everyone, lives in God’s memory [Gedenken Gottes]. By the same token, the translatability of language holds the promise of being fulfilled, even if it proves to be untranslatable by human beings (Benjamin 51). The desire inherent in this metaphysics of translation is itself the deepest expression of freedom from rankings of status among languages. Although Benjamin sees the pure language of translation as an arbiter between languages (59), the tales of today’s displaced and exiled come with a more sobering message: that other worlds are not necessarily transparent in translation, that there are spaces of irreducible untranslatability between cultures, that such spaces mark the silences of exile, and that the idea(lity) of a pure language that equalizes languages does not conform to the reality of a world where many are dispossessed of their familiar spaces and the hospitable environment of their own idiom. It is in the work of writers whose writing is conceived in and operates between cultural heritages and addresses issues confronting what I call «paranational» communities that problems of cultural translation are perhaps best articulated. These works represent the influence of cultural translation on the world of interdependent economies that have emerged from the transnational movement of capital and, in turn, necessitated increased communication across languages and cultures. In my earlier work, I considered the unruly biand multilingualism of these works as representing transnational intellectual and cultural crossings. What do such concepts as the transnational and global really mean today? University administrators pronounce statements like «we have to train global citizens» so frequently and unthinkingly that these have been emptied of all meaningful content. The idea of the global resides neither in the universal, since that Enlightenment ideal is seen as culturally specific, nor in the normative parity of cultures in a hermeneutic pact but in the constant interaction and interpretation of cultural differences which we understand as a process of cultural translation. The literary expression of contemporary exilic experience embodies a culturally and emotionally more complex sensibility than that of the long-established exile literature which claims an illustrious past, particularly in the work of such writers as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, or James Joyce. The unprecedented scale of mass migrations that have marked the last decades of the twentieth century have thrown issues of cultural, public, and collective memory as well as national or ethnic identity in sharp re- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 287 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 287 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 288 Azade Seyhan lief. Although modern writers of diaspora invest a certain amount of heritage capital in their work, their literary and sociocultural portfolio has become increasingly diverse. This diversification has not only expanded and transformed the semantic field of «transnational» but also given rise to an implosion of commentary to contain the steady flow of literary and critical works issuing from national, international, between-national spaces. Since questions of the transnational, of location and nation, and of identity now confront us with a particular insistence, the critic needs to summon, in Cynthia Ozick’s words, «multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions» (73) that make good on the promise of nonexclusionary conversations that lead to an understanding of different, unknown, or emergent cultural movements. The multiple starts with the singular that casts abstract argument in the form of detail, a specific idiom, in the corporeality of re-membered languages fractured, erased, or lost in traumas of colonialism, political persecution, abjection, and military invasions of sovereign states by arrogant superpowers. The scribes and artists of diasporic geographies become translators/ voices of the dead - of languages and cultures drowned in the currents of colonialist expansion. But they are also translators of living languages that are, nevertheless, relegated to diminished status in a Europolitan culture. In the alternative spaces now being created in that cultural geography, the transcultural intellectuals, whether they write in the language of their homeland or host land, move far beyond sociologically oriented accounts of the migrant experience through works of unprecedented sociopoetic scope. They become cultural translators in the most comprehensive sense of the term, for in narrating they not only link personal or community memory to a larger history (often in autobiographical voices that serve as what I have elsewhere called an unauthorized biography of the nation) but also correct the misinterpretation/ flawed translation of their languages/ cultures in the host country. Two prominent multilingual women writers, writing in Germany in their - to use Assia Djebar’s felicitous phrase - «stepmother tongue,» Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who is Turkish born, and Y ō ko Tawada, who is well known both in her native Japan and in Germany for her critical fictions, have shown that questions of translation and bior multilingualism confront prejudices that go beyond problems in cultural communication. By remapping the territory of translation, Özdamar and Tawada initiate a conversation above and beyond nationality and race and provide novel forms of linguistic identity to travelers between languages. Although the two writers hail from the opposite borders of the East, their writing is informed by an uncanny resemblance in terms of an alienating/ foreignizing translation of their respective idioms that CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 288 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 288 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 289 jolts German readers into reflecting on the biases of their own language use and how this in advance condemns the foreign. Their work is a testimony to Benjamin’s view that translation reveals the essence of language, language as such, and the visible and hidden kinships between languages. Through a third language, German, Özdamar and Tawada «translate» Japanese into Turkish and vice versa, and this three-way translation supplements, in the Benjaminian - and Romantic - sense, the two original languages. At the same time, translation illuminates or points to inexplicable content or the impossibility of interpretation. In one of her essays, Tawada speculates that since a lot of meat is eaten in German culture, German curse words often name animals that are cannibalized - e.g., Kuh, Schwein - and since the Japanese diet is mostly vegetable based, Japanese curse words make use of vegetable names, e.g., a stupid person is an eggplant [Aubergine], a provincial person a potato [Kartoffel], a teacher who cannot teach, is paprika (Überseezungen 25). Özdamar reflects similarly on her mother tongue in a collection, aptly named Mutterzunge [Mother Tongue] - here the translation illuminates something that is concealed in the original. While tongue also means language in Turkish and English, it does not in German. Özdamar explains this by showing how in Turkish tongue is used metaphorically to express a range of linguistic and oratory skills. In his introduction to Y ō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, Doug Slaymaker names the artistic markers of Tawada’s work as «parody and tonguein-cheek joking, non-sequiturs that hide surreal punches, winks at myths and folktales, and persistent toying with national identities and linguistic traditions» (1). Özdamar employs almost identical writing strategies. As a professional actress and theater director, she choreographs intricate steps of words that weave in and out of languages. In her bilingually titled stage play, «Karagöz in Alamania/ Schwarzauge in Deutschland,» included in Mutterzunge, she borrows the figure of the protagonist Karagöz from a traditional Ottoman-Turkish shadow play, where a cast of characters from the diverse ethnic populations of the Ottoman Empire spar in different idioms and exchange double entendres to comic effect. In Özdamar’s play, Karagöz is a migrant worker and crosses the border into Germany with his talking donkey who smokes Camel cigarettes and lectures on Marxism. The play’s motley crew speaks in different tongues, switching and transferring codes. The object of Özdamar’s relentless parody is capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of human labor and resources. The indentured laborers are not only alienated from their work, in the Marxist sense, but also from their origins, languages, and families. The play proceeds in the tempo of a macabre tango between various borders. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 289 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 289 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 290 Azade Seyhan In a certain sense, Tawada and Özdamar share a Nietzschean sensibility that sees the truth of human experience as embedded in metaphor (as in «Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn»). For these two cultural translators, metaphor metamorphosizes the world and our experience of it in a way that defies constriction and conscription. Metaphor reminds us of a time before the emergence of logical thought. In Tawada’s view, under the dominance of language that claimed reason and truth, the metaphorical force of language was repressed. Its purchase now survives only in literature and dreams. In constantly translating German and Japanese - and also English - into the terms of the other, Tawada shows how cultural difference is performed in linguistic space. This space is both the absence of a lost language and its circuitous transport into a new idiom. But is it really an alternative space where a translingual and transnational agent can claim a nonterrestrial geography? I’ll return to this loaded and, by now, contested question momentarily. As various forms of migrant experience - intellectual, academic, economic, sociopolitical - impinge on historically rooted and orthodox lives and communities, those affected by such experience often engage in corrective retranslations of cultural mistranslations that reveal new forms of knowledge. Adolf Muschg, a contemporary Swiss author who grew up in Japan, attempted to translate the masks of Japanese faces into a recognizable German idiom. In «Japan - Versuch eines fraktalen Porträts,» the central essay of his book Die Insel, die Kolumbus nicht gefunden hat: Sieben Gesichter Japans, Muschg begins with a reference to Churchill’s famous bon mot about Japan as «a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma» (34) to underline the «Mehrdeutigkeit» that informs Japanese culture which we mistakenly see as «fuzzy logic» (38). What Churchill may have seen as fuzzy logic, Muschg sees as open-endedness and generativity (a marker of Tawada’s writing) that has enabled the Japanese to regenerate tradition or update it in the wake of relentless technological progress without giving in to traditionalism. By employing the critically valorized notion of multivalence, Muschg explains the enigma in terms understandable to the reader/ critic schooled in the postmodern notions of the fragmentary, nonlinear, or nonreferential. Before Muschg, another German-speaking author Kurt Singer, a refugee from the Nazis who taught for many years in Japan, translated the enigma of Japanese signs, so to speak, into English through the lens of German idealistic philosophy - a three-way translation. While Singer’s Mirror, Sword, and Jewel has for long been considered the most insightful portrait of Japanese culture by an outsider, it is in Tawada’s work - a form of self-translation (since she writes in German) and retranslation - that the multiply embedded riddle reveals itself not in explana- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 290 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 290 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 291 tion but as an experience of the absence of explanation, as the experience of the irreducibility of the enigma. Tawada as well as Özdamar both alienate the reader with language games whose rules are not given and invite them to cross the bridge that simultaneously connects and separates the original and target languages. While these various forms of cultural translation suspend absolute concepts of home and nation, do they offer the displaced a sense of place that preserves the integrity of their diminished or lost languages in the continuum of their (hi)stories? The social and political significance of translation inheres in the process of nation building. While deconstructionist readings of various persuasions can debunk all essentialisms, it is the actual dictate of political realities - the great divide between, say, the superpowers and the «small nations» that Milan Kundera sees «secluded behind their inaccessible languages» (Testaments Betrayed 193) - that constitutes our lived experience. Here Kundera is not referring to a smallness of scale, but of destiny, the destiny of nations that have at some point or another «passed through the antechamber of death; always faced with the arrogant ignorance of large nations» (192). So, why do we have so little access to other imaginations and forms of knowledge? Who declares these languages inaccessible? English, French, and German were inaccessible to Tawada, Özdamar, Rafik Schami, Said, and many others before they engaged in their translational endeavors. The recognition that they were expected to access the inaccessible does not suffice to rectify such lack of parity. Although I once used the term «transnational literature» to define/ designate mostly those literary narratives written outside the nation by authors no longer residing in their homelands and negotiating different cultural idioms, it is probably time to expand the semantic field of the term to include writing written inside national borders yet that defies the limits of nation-specific canons. It is not only the writers of diasporas who translate from spaces at the intersection of different languages - of the home land and the host land - and personal and communal destiny, but also writers writing from «home,» such as Orhan Pamuk, German-speaking writers Sten Nadolny, Barbara Frischmuth, or Robert Menasse, who have broadened the scope of transnational and translational engagement. Their writing variously challenges the traditional notion of the nation state as a locus of identity and an object of affiliation. As the network of international and multinational connections expands, the consequences of oneor two-dimensional representations of other selves, cultures, beliefs, and practices begin to show dire effects beyond the borders of text and image and demand the recognition of diversity in the ways we live, learn, worship, become political, fight, and die. While academic and intellec- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 291 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 291 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 292 Azade Seyhan tual imaginations and discourses create theoretical or virtual spaces for genuine democratization, their translation into intervention in actual sociopolitical life is poised at the initial station(s) of an unmapped itinerary. On the other hand, writers and artists, such as the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, living in selfimposed exile in North Africa, the Austrian novelist and critic Robert Menasse, the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, currently teaching at Columbia University, or filmmakers, such as the Turkish- German Fatih Akın, the Indian Mira Nair, or the Mexican Guillermo del Toro, all living and working between literal and figural borders, explore the transnational not so much as a literal crossing of boundaries but as a way of being and seeing which includes means of approaching time and space, complex constructions of selfhood, and ways of navigating our pathways through the world. They bear witness to the centrality of fiction, of representation, of translation - which, as the German Romantics and Walter Benjamin, whose doctoral dissertation was on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism, well knew, is representation par excellence - to our understanding of our and others’ worlds. Speaking the «stranger’s» language may be the most empathetic form of identification with the others. While we cannot learn all the languages of the others we hope to understand, an engagement with translating in the many senses of the term brings us, as in Schleiermacher’s favored model of translation, whereby the translator brings the reader to the text rather than bringing the text to the reader, to intersubjective understanding. In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricœur remarks that the life history of each one of us is caught up in the histories of others. He then asks if this entanglement of life stories with one another is hostile to the narrative understanding nourished by literature, or if it finds in these interlocking narratives a model of intelligibility (161). The transnational writers participate in different collectivities, lend voice not only to their own compatriots in exile but also to those exiled in their own lands, and employ the metaphorical purchase of language(s) to empower its subjects. In the final analysis, translation marks an entry point into another language and culture. It also implies disassembling and reassembling language. In every reassembly there is the danger of a gap caused by parts that may be missing or are misaligned. Ultimately, how we assemble our versions of the self, translate ourselves, lies at the core of our identity, our forms of being and seeing and facing the brave new world. The tales of transnational Scheherazades recover the centrality of fiction to our understanding of how cultures get interpreted as they move from geography to geography and generation to generation. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 292 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 292 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 The Transnational/ Translational Paradigm 293 Works Cited Bartolini, Paolo. On the Cultures of Exil, Translation, and Writing. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. «Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.» Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 50-62. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. -. «Roundtable on Translation,» The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985. 93-161. Faull, Katherine M. «Introduction.» Translation and Culture. Ed. Katherine M. Faull. Bucknell Review 48 (2004): 13-21. Kundera Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York and London: Penguin, 1986. -. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. Mani, Venkat. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. Muschg, Adolf. Die Insel, die Kolumbus nicht gefunden hat: Sieben Gesichter Japans. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. «Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn.» Werke. Bd. 5. Ed. Karl Schlechta. München-Wien: Hanser, 1980. 309-22. Ozick, Cynthia. «Literary Entrails. The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin.» Harpers (April 2007): 67-75. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. Mutterzunge. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990. Papastergiadis, Nikos. «The Limits of Cultural Translation.» Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture. Ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: MIT Press, 2004. 330-47. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. Singer, Kurt. Mirror, Sword and Jewel. Richmond, Surrey, England: Routledge Curzon New Edition, 1997. Slaymaker, Doug. «Introduction: Yo ¯ ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere.» Yo ¯ ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Ed. Doug Slaymaker. Lanham, Boulder, New York: Lexington Books, 2007. 1-11. Tawada, Yo ¯ ko. Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2002. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 293 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 293 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 294 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 294 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Peter V. Zima Komparatistik UTB S 2., überarbeitete und ergänzte Auflage 2011, XII, 425 Seiten, €[D] 19,90/ SFr 30,50 ISBN 978-3-8252-1705-1 Im Anschluss an eine detaillierte Einführung in die Wissenschaftsgeschichte der literarischen Komparatistik geht der Autor ausführlich auf die wichtigsten Probleme und Themen der Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ein: Vergleichstypen, interkulturelle Rezeption, Übersetzung, Periodisierung, Gattungsgeschichte, Thematologie und Mythenforschung. Mit zwei neuen Kapiteln: Gattungsgeschichte: Der Roman und Thematologie und Mythenforschung. 004711 Auslieferung Januar 2011.indd 32 19.01.11 16: 03 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities: Rewriting the Past for the Future in Rafik Schami’s Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen and Zafer Senocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft HILTRUD ARENS U NIVERSITY OF M ONTANA German literature of the 1990s explores three crucial trends that dominated the public discourse of that decade: integration, normalization and globalization (Taberner 3). Connected with these major and overlapping concerns, it was also a decade that brought not only epochal political changes but saw «the emergence of a transnational or global memory culture of astonishing proportions» (Huyssen 147-48), affecting literary production on cultural and individual memory of the twentieth century in Germany and elsewhere. A growing body of literature, embedded in the larger framework of the period, focused on issues of national and individual identity, ethnicity, family histories and cultural/ personal memory and thematized a diversity that was not only recognized as being part of the evolving present of a unified Germany but that also reached back to previous generations. This literature reflected on the new social realities and cultural struggles shaping and changing German society with an intense look at the past, the present, and the future. Questions of national identity and the memory of the past that had been suppressed became foremost concerns because of and following unification, which also resulted in new debates on racism, immigration and Germany as a de facto multicultural, multiethnic society. The 1990s offered a historical moment, a juncture, in which the recognition of a shared - even if conflicted or contested - past for minorities and ethnic Germans living in Germany became crucial. As early as 1990, Zafer Senocak had asked in his essay «Germany - Home for Turks? » «Doesn’t immigrating to Germany also mean immigrating to, entering into, the arena of Germany’s recent past? » (Senocak, Tropical Germany 6). 1 Sixteen years later in 2006 Senocak concludes that the wish for normalization since unification and the process of immigration and integration (especially of Turks in Germany) are still at odds. In his view Germany not only remains unprepared to deal with the current multiethnic society and the social conflicts that arise but also needs to adopt a different approach to- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 295 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 295 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 296 Hiltrud Arens wards its past if it wants to include the new German citizens. German history, specifically World War II and the Holocaust, is no longer the history of all current German citizens (das land 150-52). 2 It is in the literature of the 1990s where the impact of these new national and psychological constellations and changing perspectives played out in reflections on evolving cultural perceptions, questioning previously held notions of an ethnically fixed homogeneous German identity and with that a homogeneous outlook on its past. 3 In this essay I discuss two novels from the 1990s which aimed to offer new perspectives on issues of identity and the discourse on memory and family histories: Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen (1995) by Arab German writer Rafik Schami and Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998) by Turkish German author and poet Zafer Senocak. Both novels are part of post-wall German literature of the 1990s and are texts embedded in various forms of transnational and cross-cultural entanglement, portraying multilayered references. As transnational texts, these writings convey a plurality of cultural experience and with that an awareness of simultaneous, at times also contrapuntal, dimensions, moving between times, spaces and places, thereby crossing into other histories and territories (Seyhan, Writing 14). Yet, more than (just) crossing into other histories, both texts to different degrees engage notions of historical and personal (family) «entanglement» across nations, languages, histories and memories - notions that have become the foci in debates on postcolonial studies and transnational histories in the social sciencies (Conrad and Randeria 17). Leslie Adelson suggests instead of the term «entangled histories» the notion of «touching tales» in her analysis of the literature of Turkish migration since these, she argues, are literary stories and not historical or sociopolitical accounts of causes and effects of entanglements (Turkish Turn 21). For her the concept of «touching tales» describes figurative ambivalences and effects of exchanges and interactions that reveal the historical and social interconnectedness in which the metaphoric touching of individual (his)stories portrays entangled histories and interwoven cultural contexts that are not necessarily easily understood, sorted out and categorized (Turkish Turn 21). 4 The concept of touching tales and close cultural entanglement also challenges, on the one hand, the commonly held idea of distinct (fixed) sides communicating with one another either as nations or as individuals and, on the other, the notion that immigrants live in suspension between two worlds. Thus the binary focus on the two sides is enhanced and not the connection between them and the change that has occurred within groups and individuals. The chosen texts question the construction of distinct entities through various means and challenge German society’s dominant political and cultural self- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 296 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 296 19.08.11 09: 37 19.08.11 09: 37 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 297 understanding in vital ways. They importantly point to newly imagined life stories with a broader spectrum of shared histories in transnational contexts and as multiethnic identities than previously assumed. Gerd Gmünden in his critical essay on three German intellectuals and their problematic nostalgia in connection with a narrowly constructed German national identity argues for «acts of memory that connect the present with the past in profitable ways,» affecting the future positively (131). Both Schami and Senocak have been outspoken about minority rights and the art of cultural production by minority artists in Germany since the 1980s. They both have argued for different ways to engage in a dialogue to enter into new realms of understanding in the German context (Schami, «Reden; » «Literatur» 56-57; Senocak, das land 119-21, 141-42). Schami has fostered an idea of dialogue that is supported by and integral to a multicultural atmosphere of tolerance and respect that many of his stories and novels portray; Senocak demands productive self-criticism as a prerequisite for a meaningful dialogue and a different approach to the German past and to Jews and Turks in contemporary Germany (das land 121). Even though Schami and Senocak pursue very distinct narrative and thematic models, there are striking similarities that I want to focus on (as well as differences) between these two texts. 5 The main protagonists in both works find or inherit a box with documents containing (supposedly) revelations about their family history that was previously hidden from them. This event triggers a search for identity in diverse historical, transnational and imaginary contexts. The main protagonist in each novel and their respective individual story represent «the heterogeneity that already exists within Germany - certainly as a consequence of forty years of Western integration, but also because the alleged cultural and ethnic homogeneity has always been a fictional construct» (Gmünden 131). The main characters in both novels fulfill this critical function of undermining notions of binarism by introducing cultural heterogeneity that embodies complex hybrid identities (Dollinger 59-60). In addition, the entangled family histories of both main protagonists reach back beyond the postwar era and go back to the early twentieth century, disclosing an even longer directly shared interaction that had to be imaginatively recaptured to make it known. Furthermore both texts do not present marginalized and disenfranchised minority protagonists living in Germany. The authors do not claim to be depicting representative minority experiences but «point to other lived experiences precisely in order to question the idea of an identity that is representative» (Hall 74). Both texts fit into a larger context of writing about family histories in Germany in the 1990s that reflect new ways of confronting German history, seeking to incorporate ethnic, cultural, religious, national, and biographic diversity into a different type of com- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 297 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 297 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 298 Hiltrud Arens ing to terms with the past as, for example, Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte and Kathrin Schmidt’s Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition show. 6 While the attempt of «Vergangenheitsbewältigung,» of coming to terms with the past, meaning the Nazi past, was a West German project prior to the 1990s, a new way of thinking and literary writing about the past emerged in the 1990s that was more experimental and included different psychological constellations beyond the generational confrontations of older stories mainly focusing on the father-and-son relationship. One can say that the themes and the theoretical preoccupation of the 1990s had shifted to discourses focusing on various forms of memory in connection with forgetting, with history, with trauma, with narrative, and with mourning (Gerstenberger 237). In a number of essays during the 1990s, Senocak criticized the mainstream German attempt to come to terms with the Nazi past («Vergangenheitsbewältigung»), which he saw more as a strategy to forget and suppress what had happened. Yet he also took issue with the Turkish immigrant population that wanted to gain financially from the migration north that shared Germany’s present but took no interest in its history (Senocak, Atlas 20). He wondered then how a doubly divided («geteilt und getrennt») country, in East and West and from its past, such as Germany, spared the new immigrants their own confrontation with just this history (Atlas 20). We can see how Senocak’s novels of the 1990s are influenced by his knowledge of this gap and also that his literary production is part of Turkish German literature of the 1990s that «signals cultural transformation beyond the mere themes of unification and Vergangenheitsbewältigung» (Adelson, «The Turkish Turn» 327). The novels Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen and Gefährliche Verwandtschaft participate in these developments by introducing new characters, plots and schemes to ask different types of questions. Both novels focus on individuals and their hidden, fragmented family histories as telling examples through which the protagonists experience the connection between the past and the present. My focus in the examination of these two texts is on how they turn forms of remembrance for the(ir) (different) past(s) into a significant moment of change in the present by performing acts of memory that connect the present with the past in ways that the protagonists gain from this moment a sense of direction for a transformation in the future. The main protagonists attempt to overcome the ghosts of the past by wanting to invent the story that they can only imagine and will never fully know. As an author and storyteller, Rafik Schami emphasizes the dialogical structure at work in his stories through which he aims to offer alternative viewpoints to the reader («Literatur» 55-58). By incorporating his particular con- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 298 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 298 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 299 cerns and sociopolitical ideas, his experience of life in Syria as well as his life of exile in Germany into his narrative, Schami introduces new elements of cultural hybridity into the text itself and into the German literary landscape. This articulation of difference and hybridity is seen as an ongoing complex negotiation between different processes that emerge in moments of historical transformations (Bhabha 2). In the 1980s, Schami was keenly aware of the emerging transnational literature in Germany as bringing forth «andere lebendige Formen, die aus dem Schmelz herauskommen» (Tantow 39). The author understands his literary contributions as a synthesis of European and Arabic influences and wishes to break open the limits of German literature and to seek new horizons (Damals 91). The emphasis on dialogue and storytelling can lead, in his view, to greater cross-cultural understanding and forms of polycultural identities (Schami, «Reden» 58; «Literatur» 56-57). These ideas correspond to similar views expressed by Senocak on multiple identity construction, syncretic writing styles, and important criticism on the current discourse on memory and the nation (Senocak GV 127, Atlas 63, das land 141-53). By intercultural dialogue Schami understands concrete conversations among various characters or between two individuals, as for example, among the circus troupe members, between Valentin and Nabil, as well as Valentin and his half-sister Hanan in Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen. For him, the act of listening and reciprocity is crucial to a meaningful dialogue, which is a theme and also a structural device embedded in many of his stories (Reise 182). The term intercultural communication has been criticized (Eigler 95-96, Adelson, Turkish Turn 33) since it often foregrounds an encounter between distinctly homogeneous parties without problematizing the understanding of such a homogeneity and the image of the self/ other. Yet, this is not the understanding of dialogic communication that Schami and Senocak uphold. Their viewpoints resonate in Friederike Eigler’s proposal of a more dynamic and useful understanding of interculturality and dialogue stemming from a revised perspective on the evolving and changing internal processes of culture and identity in recent scholarly studies (95-97). For Schami, it is precisely in transnational literature, in storytelling, and in the arts as threshold spaces that cultural master monologues can be countered and a dialogue made possible as an alternative model against an orientation towards fixed contours and outcomes («Literatur» 55-58). Senocak also formulates a hope in literature as a translating - touching - force with transforming energy (das land 32). In fact, as some of his essays and his novel problematize, Senocak aims to shake up and restart a seemingly stuck conversation, as for example, between Turks and Germans, or Jews and Germans, and open up a real or «figural image of a trialogue» (Adelson, Turkish Turn 121). CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 299 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 299 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 300 Hiltrud Arens One important aspect of Schami’s unique syncretic narrative style is his synthesis of the Arab oral and literary traditions and fairy tale form(s) with current discourses in Germany. 7 In the fairy tale novel Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen the reader encounters characters that live in Germany of the 1990s and imaginary «Arabia» of the same time period. There are many «real» as well as clearly fantastic fairy tale elements interwoven in this text in the fashion of an Arabian story. This structure allows Schami to inject «real» elements as well as purely fantastic events which connect different possible layers of time, location, and cultural significations. The author fictionalizes more than in his previous writing the challenge of an inclusive (hybrid) German cultural identity, a search for one’s roots, and topics relating to twentiethcentury German history, moving away from earlier concerns of migration and immigration. Moreover, not only Germany experienced demographical, sociopolitical and conceptual shifts, but the Arab World and the Middle East were undergoing enormous political changes as well, starting with the long civil war in Lebanon, the Intifada, the first Gulf War, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the breaking down of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, the growing Islamic fundamentalism of the last two decades, and the Rushdie Affair, to mention only the most obvious instances. These changes, along with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, created a new reception in the West of the East, in which the images and reports turned from a cultural to a political dimension, and Arabs could become the new enemy (Aifan, Araberbilder 80). All these developments have influenced Schami and other Arab German writers. Schami saw a need to link his new themes with his agenda to inform his readers about the Arab world to counteract the increasingly negative images of Arabs that he experienced in Western media (Damals 63). As Uta Aifan points out, the 1990s generated a differentiation and reorientation in Schami’s work in terms of Middle East developments and national (German) affairs and changes (Araberbilder 234-36). During that decade Schami concentrated on mediating the historical and contemporary relationship between the Orient and the Occident against existing clichéd images of the Arab world, on the one hand and, on the other, increasingly discussed the self-understanding of Germans, which had become a pressing issue after unification (Araberbilder 233). By negotiating these crucial elements thoughtfully in a story, Schami gives readers a chance to embark on a journey of reviewing notions of Arab and German identities and societies from a new angle. The author’s fictional and essayistic work aims to present mediations and questions that contribute to a revision of the fixed understandings of Germans and Arabs of one another and of themselves respectfully and self-critically (Eisberg 40-50). 8 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 300 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 300 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 301 In the frame story of the novel Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen, Valentin Samani, the sixty-year old director of a hundred-year old circus lives in a little town in Germany. He is waiting for an opportunity for his circus to travel and perform again. However, he is financially unable to get his troupe and his animals on the road. Then, surprisingly, he and his circus are invited to perform in fictive «Arabia» simultaneous with Valentin’s discovery of his mother’s diary in the attic. The journal tells the story of her secret love for his biological Arab father whom Valentin has not known about. Now he sees his own childhood, family life, his mother’s suffering, and his (nonbiological) father’s behavior towards him in a different light. By traveling to «Arabia,» by searching for his biological father’s family and his mother’s lost (her)story, the protagonist also realizes his wish to become a writer to narrate his mother’s life and hidden love story. The metaphor of circus life is central to Schami’s web of tales and memories in Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen, a text that creates an alternative multiethnic, multilingual, and transnational atmosphere. In an essay entitled «Vom Circus der Kulturen» (1999), Schami recognizes the circus itself as a fitting art form to negotiate complex interactions (albeit allegorically in his novel) between cultures. He discusses the existence of an intricate historical connection between the East (Arabs) and the West (Germans). The author speaks of the East as the cradle of Europe («die Wiege Europas») and of the forgetting of this relationship in our modern times («Circus» 30). Schami refers to images from the world of the circus to describe some specific difficulties as well as joys in this encounter between the East and the West, Arabs and Germans. A motive he has in using the circus image, as he explains elsewhere, is precisely to mix playfulness and ease with hard, risky work as is done in the circus itself: if an author presents a story in an artistically well-thought out, varied and gripping manner, readers/ listeners will continue to pay attention (Damals 140). The way Schami uses circus acts and images in the essay to examine the problems of Arab German relations does not transfer easily to his novel, in which he portrays circus life through various interconnected layers. But the role of circus director that Schami takes on in his essay to mediate between Germans and Arabs resonates in the role of Valentin Samani, the main protagonist and circus director in the novel. Valentin functions as a mediator in many roles: between members of the troupe (Reise 224), between the circus and the outside world on their travels, and between the past and the present and his own manifold «real» and «unreal» impressions of living in «Arabia.» The circus in the novel stands for an array of ideas that he artfully configures as multilayered tales of love, of admiration of the circus as an art form, of transcultural exchanges, of migration and travel, and especially also of the CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 301 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 301 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 302 Hiltrud Arens search for one’s family roots and complex identity. The circus functions as a metaphor for life and its complexities as well as its absurdities. 9 The sixty-year old Valentin Samani is trying to discover his family’s past, his biological father’s identity, and the reason why his mother lived her life in separation from the man she loved. With the German Valentin, a son of a Hungarian mother who married into the German circus family, and an Arab German (paternal and nonbiological) grandmother, the family has had family ties and close connections to the Arab world reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century and even to the Middle Ages (Reise 24). His paternal grandfather, married to an Arabic woman from «Ulania,» adopted the Arabic name «Samani» as their family name in 1900, discarding the name «Ruprecht» because he had such fond memories of the expression of an Arab friend: «Ja, Samani! O meine Zeit» (25). Valentin, restless and lonely after the death of his wife, coincidentally finds his mother’s diary and discovers the untold story of his Arab father and the secret life-long liason his mother had. Very soon afterwards he wishes to write his mother’s secret love story. One aspect of Valentin’s writing project illuminates Schami’s own narrative style (Eisberg 17): Valentin wants to construct his tale as a circus show. Alternating difficult acts with lighthearted clown pieces, he wants his readers not to be subdued by the complexity of the whole, but to be drawn into the story in an entertaining manner (Reise 40). In the process of envisioning places and story lines, it becomes very clear to Valentin that all the significant threads of his own life story come together in so-called Arabia (Reise 39). This corresponds strongly to the idea Schami expresses in his essay on the circus: the East as the cradle of Europe, forgotten and suppressed in the grand scale of history as well as in private lives. The novel reveals yet another vital dimension: when it becomes known to Valentin late in his life that his biological father is an Arab, heterogeneity enters the story consciously and questions - without leading to a discussion of the political consequences and social implications much further - the notion of an ethnically and culturally homogeneous German identity. 10 The fictional account of Valentin’s multiethnic, heterogeneous identity is manifest in the following facts: his mother is Hungarian, his father an Arab, his paternal/ nonbiological grandmother also an Arab, his nonbiological grandfather and father German. He was born in Australia and has lived in about 40 countries with the circus that calls Germany its home. These cultural and biological linkages present touching tales which invert the alleged homogeneity of a self-perceived German identity that has been publicly constructed throughout the twentieth century. It is significant that Schami presents Valentin’s evolving hybrid identity and transnational family connections reaching back at least a hundred years and several generations, biologi- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 302 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 302 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 303 cally and nonbiologically. At the same time that references are made to Arabian and Aramaean history and architecture, political repression and military rule, Valentin also remembers the hunger, sickness, poverty and despair during and after World War II as a child (Reise 57-60). Schami constructs Valentin’s family history in such a way that the character is able to reclaim, through conversations with Arab friends and his half-sister, bits and pieces and other secrets of his parents’ story which were hidden from him earlier. However, it remains a fragmented family history, lost and partly retrieved between words and worlds, across locations and times and then invented by Valentin himself, often in close dialogue and critical correspondence with his lover, Pia. It is neither a typical family nor a family story by any means since it is the circus that makes up Valentin’s «real» family, and it is importantly the circus that gives him the chance to travel East and to research his background and family history. Schami merges the layer of Valentin’s family tale and search for identity with the adventurous existence and travels of the circus 11 and with that strategy creates a constellation that reaches beyond the nuclear-family construction as a primary institution to experience the connection between past and present. Ironically, Valentin finds out that his family secret was not a secret for many in Ulania at all; neighbors and family members knew about the two lovers. Once it even grew into a scandal, although his mother chose not to write about it in her diary. And then his biological father died prematurely, so their complicated relationship ended abruptly (348-51). Despite an overall emphasis on a microcosmic community of multicultural and multilingual circus troupe members (Reise 85, 97), the most important cultural encounters, the touching tales, happen between and among the Arab and German characters. 12 The circus as the central stage provides this space, an in-between-space, where new developments are possible and fostered, as they are for Valentin and his Arab host, Nabil. Homi Bhabha interprets such an «in-between-space» as a temporal condition of revisionary time, a «beyond» in which the cultural present is newly described (7). This «beyond» consists of an ambivalence of time and space and an oscillation that brings about plural (re)visions in the characters involved. The conversations between Nabil and Valentin, who both embody outsiders’ positionalities and hybrid identities, happen after the performances late at night and the early morning hours that the characters call «Nachmorg» (Reise 117). Then they tell each other stories of their lives, their joys, their sorrows, their interpretations of events, and learn about each other’s culture, and offer questions, critique and insights that allow for nuanced understandings of their lives. The meeting hour of Valentin and Nabil has a dreamlike utopian charge to it. 13 This time of inner travel between night and morning, referred to in the title of CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 303 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 303 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 304 Hiltrud Arens the novel, evokes a connection, a temporal and symbolic coming together of the West (as «Abendland») with the East (as «Morgenland») in the figures of these two protagonists, a German with a Hungarian-Arab background and an Arab who was raised with German culture and language. Their private dialogue and the continuous reflections in their talks stand in stark contrast to the increasingly negative and dangerous political scenario unfolding in Ulania that ends in the sudden departure of the circus. Senocak’s novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft stands apart from his other fiction in that it is more closely linked to the concerns of his essayistic work on issues of German identity, history and society (Littler 359). In this novel, the author set out to ponder those identity questions that he articulates in his essays: «Aber bis auf das dritte Buch habe ich die Theorie von den Büchern immer sehr fern gehalten. Im dritten Buch ist es bewusst drin» («Einfach» 22). 14 In another interview in 2003, the author also emphasized that he wanted his writing to be understood as coming from an outsider’s perspective, that of «einem Randgänger» (Konzett, «Gespräch» 132), and not necessarily or only from an ethnically fixed position assigned to him. Senocak chose to write Gefährliche Verwandtschaft, which is the third text in a tetralogy published in the 1990s, in an open form only loosely resembling a novel. Letters, journalistic essays, and interviews are interspersed throughout the text. In doing so, Senocak renounces a conventional story line, tackles the multilayered and interconnected aspects of the narrative more expressively, and also mirrors the fragmentation the main protagonist experiences. Senocak has been criticized for not representing a «richly detailed» family story (Shafi 210). But this is not the writer’s intention as others have pointed out (Cheesman 102). Instead he has the narrator question the conventional narrative style and focuses on a fragmentary representation throughout the text in a language that is at once »banal, hyperbolic and abstruse» as well as objective and intellectual, in the process constructing a persona that challenges blind spots of German and Turkish national histories and identities (Cheesman 102-06). The novel touches on many important layers of complex issues of historical, ethical and literary concern (Huyssen 160). My focus in the following is to examine the importance of secrets in the main protagonist’s family history and see how it relates to his construction of identity and especially how it corresponds to Schami’s story of Valentin. In Gefährliche Verwandtschaft we encounter Sascha Muhteschem, the first-person narrator and writer of Turkish, Jewish and German ancestry who has just returned to Berlin in 1992 with his girlfriend Marie after living for several years in the US. After the death of his parents in a car accident, Sascha CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 304 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 304 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 305 inherits not only a significant amount of money but also a silver box containing his paternal Turkish grandfather’s diaries from the years 1916-1936 15 spanning the crucial and formative years from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the firmly established Turkish Republic. Similar to Valentin’s search in Schami’s story, these diaries lead the narrator to explore his German-Jewish- Turkish family history with a focus on the Turkish side «to assess this complicated heritage as he reflects on his own position as a writer and journalist» (Gerstenberger 238). Sascha intuitively senses that a secret lies within the words of the inherited notebooks that might not only reveal why his grandfather committed suicide in 1936 but perhaps also offer a key to his own ambigious identity: Ich sehnte mich danach, tiefere Schichten meiner selbst zu finden. Diese Tiefe war nur durch die Entdeckung meiner Herkunft zu erreichen. Ich wollte nicht mehr wurzellos sein, unverantwortlich für alles, was länger als zwanzig Jahre her war. Plötzlich erschien mir Grossvater als das Geheimnis, das zwischen mir und meiner Herkunft stand. (GV 118) This statement has to be taken with a grain of salt since at other times Sascha mocks fixed identities and understandings as well as the attempts to document history objectively in his discussions with his girlfriend Marie (GV 18- 22). He relates artistically and mentally more to an atmosphere that does not reveal everything that it shows (GV 22). When it becomes clear to him that these personal documents in Turkish, written in Arabic and Cyrillic script (GV12), do not offer what he wishes to find - not because he cannot read any of these languages and scripts (which he cannot), but because even the translated version does not convey what he is looking for (GV113-118) - he turns to the project of fictionalizing his grandfather’s death (GV 23). Sascha’s fear of discovering the truth behind the mystery, and at the same time his indecisiveness in getting all notebooks translated as well as his open-ended recreation of his grandfather’s final year at the end of the text, heighten his contradictory and ambiguous feelings toward the notebooks, his family history and himself (Eigler 77; Littler 360). In fact, even before he had some of the notebooks translated, he did not simply want to reconstruct his Turkish grandfather’s life. Rather, he wanted to invent it in his own words (GV 38). However, despite his decision to recreate the story of his grandfather, the diaries have a disruptive and provocative quality, forcing the unsuspecting recipient to revise stories of his own life (Gerstenberger 236). This can be said about Valentin in Schami’s novel as well. Yet, there is the enormous difference that Valentin’s secret is not burdened directly by history with guilt and victimization as these are evoked in Sascha’s story. 16 For very different reasons, Sascha’s parents have been utterly silent. His Jewish mother reacted to questions with CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 305 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 305 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 306 Hiltrud Arens silence due to the traumatic loss of her relatives in the Holocaust because she wanted to save him from the burden of that past (GV 58-59). On the other hand, Turkish was not spoken while he was growing up in Germany because of his parents’ separation and his own alienation from his father. But more than any of these alienating and complex circumstances, it seems that it is his father’s unwillingness to share stories and his claim that «über Geheimnisse haben wir keine Sprache» (GV 36) that imprints itself in Sascha’s mind. It takes on a double meaning related to his grandfather’s implication in the Armenian genocide and the taboo against discussing it. 17 In setting out to write about his grandfather, Sascha counters however ambiguously and contradictorily (since he also does not know the «truth») his father’s claim about the inadequacy of language by airing imaginary secrets. Sascha also overcomes his writing block and finds his narrative voice and identity, counteracting the notions that others try to impose on him. Due to his lack of family ties and a pronounced absence of a communicative family memory of the past (Eigler 68) as well as the great mystery surrounding the inherited diaries, Sascha’s decision to concentrate on his paternal Turkish family history is his alternative project to find himself and at the same time to begin a new conversation, a trialogue between Germans, Jews and Turks or Christians, Jews and Muslims (GV 89). 18 In their different ways, both novels speak out against an amnesia evident in our contemporary globalized histories and lives. They give voice to silenced aspects of Turkish, German, and Syrian histories. History and individual as well as communal memory and imagination are key aspects interwoven into these two texts. Senocak criticizes different levels of forgetting that involve Turkey, its own history and its relation to Europe. As Senocak states, «Im 20. Jahrhundert waren die deutsche und die türkische Geschichte mehr als einmal miteinander verknüpft. Doch es gab daran keine nennenswerte Erinnerung mehr» (das land 161). In a recent essay entitled «Die Hauptstadt des Fragments» the author explains how his move to Berlin inspired him «diese verborgenen Geschichten aufzuspüren und zu erfinden» (das land 161) that we read about in his novel. As a writer living in exile, Schami deals with «the diversity of exilic memory» in many of his texts (Seyhan, «Lost» 418). 19 According to Azade Seyhan, this kind of literature becomes the «restorative work of cultural memory» which offers - in contrast to official historical accounts and forgetting - alternative viewpoints and interpretations of the past; it is marked by the culture of origin as well as the culture of residence (Seyhan, Writing 14-15). In this way, narration, storytelling, dialogue, and discussions of various historical topics and their representation by characters in the text bring forth a plurality of individual and collective lives and very importantly CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 306 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 306 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 307 also of their historical times and society. These texts offer a counterweight to negative public views fostered in Europe and the West about the Middle East and articulate criticism of positions that are sanctioned by Syrian and Turkish official reports (Schami, Hürdenlauf 15). Both Senocak and Schami portray unusual family configurations - multiethnic, transnational, fragmented - with secrets their protagonists discover or realize only as adults and a lack of communication about the familial pasts that challenge conventional nuclear family constellations and the characteristic generational stories of father’s and son’s in the 1970s and 1980s in German literature (Eigler 68-69; Gerstenberger 236). Even though there is no family life as such in Schami’s novel, the community of the circus takes the function of an unconventional and extended family, one not connected by biological relation, but brought about by the love for and work in the circus. In contrast, Sascha is the last member of his family. He is much younger and also understands himself as the grandchild of victims and perpetrators (GV 40), a status that brings forth a very different configuration of how history and memory play out. As the grandchild, he can confront the guilt and the taboos that the parents could not face or articulate. For Valentin, his mother’s secret and the truth of his paternity are not burdened by things unsaid and deeds done. The difference in their respective family histories is apparent. Whereas Valentin discovers a secret he can live with positively, Sascha inherits the difficulty of assuming or knowing that his «Verwandtschaft» on his father’s Turkish side of the family connect to the responsibility for and silence about the Armenian genocide, and the narrator subsequently revises his notion of his Turkish grandfather as «ein Held der Nation» (GV 27). But the author does not compare the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, nor does he juxtapose guilt versus innocence, victims versus perpetrators (Gerstenberger 240), at the same time that the protagonist ponders historical events, guilt, forgetting, silences, and betrayal. The protagonist does not identify with one side of the family more than with the other. He does not choose among the plurality of his family background and between the moral implications of these different histories. He only resolves for himself that he has to write about the Turkish grandfather and imaginatively confront these issues and layers of the past. In Schami’s story, it is the son who finds his mother’s diary. 20 His story does not thematize guilt, neither victims nor perpetrators, as the German, Jewish and Turkish settings do. No one has committed a mysterious suicide or a crime. Just as Valentin in Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen wants to tell his mother’s story in his version, Sascha decides to write his story, and an excerpt of the end of it is given at the end of the novel, which nevertheless does not CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 307 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 307 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 308 Hiltrud Arens offer closure but subverts that expectation (Cheesman 205). Both novels hint at the reimagined tale, but essentially leave it as another story to be told elsewhere and at a different time and forgo closure. Sascha and Valentin identify the importance of a fictional narrative, of storytelling as crucial to reclaiming their complex family histories and individual identities, and would agree when Sascha says, «Erst wenn man keine Geschichten mehr hat, hat man wirklich nichts mehr» (GV 47). They create a more complex German identity with various consequences for society. Both protagonists inherit a multiethnic background through which affinities among ancestors of different ethnic and national heritage are explored. Neither novel can be categorized as a historical novel, despite the mention of dates and historical events in the narratives (McGowan 209). 21 Senocak and Schami each argue for stories to be told in order to engage in the discussion of German heterogeneity and cultural memory of the 1990s. They produce important texts that open up debate on hybrid identities, transnationally shared stories and interconnectedness. Despite the fact that ensuing migrations and births have made Turks the largest national minority residing in Germany, they and the members of other minorities have to be recognized as becoming part of a meaningful national narrative of postwar German history and unification. Both novels I have discussed offer views of a historically different relationship between individuals of various ethnic, national, cultural, and religious groups in Germany’s history. They envision a differently understood German identity itself. Both texts are embedded in the multilayered context of the literature of the 1990s in Germany in significant ways. The texts ask us to shift our focus to the numerous and varied shared qualities of a volatile moment in time that reaches from the past into the future (Adelson, «Coordinates» xxxv). They provoke us to rethink our notions about relationships between mainstream Germans and minority communities and nations figuring in Germany’s history. Such a shift and restructuring of perspectives necessitate a different coming to terms with various pasts that are untold, forgotten or repressed. This new perception also breaks down dichotomous views of Germans and Jews, or Germans and Turks, or Germans and Arabs and opens up new visions of inclusion and interaction. Both authors feel and express that immigrants as well as Germans must enter into a conscious and conscientious relationship with a vexed German history (Adelson, «Coordinates» xxx). In an essay entitled «War and Peace in Modernity: Reflections on the German-Turkish Future,» written in the mid 1990s, Senocak wondered in a polemical rhetorical mode about the future: «Germany long ago became part of us German Turks. Now a question is being posed that we cannot answer alone. Are we also a part of Germany? » (Tropical Germany 98). He calls CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 308 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 308 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 309 for a «new shared language» that needs to be acquired. Senocak’s as well as Schami’s narratives give provocative credit not only to a shared, intertwined, complex present but also to a previously untold and entangled hidden history. Their artistic involvement with heterogeneous forms of cultural memory and aspects of the past and the present underline the fact that their voices have become integral to Germany. Schami states that Reise is his most political and «realistic» novel, for which he saw a need in the 1990s (Ohland 39). Senocak likewise wanted to weave his theoretical ideas into his novel. Schami wraps his multifaceted tale into the disguise of a love story that has political and social implications reaching back to move forward, just as Senocak ends his novel in a fragment of a love story that evokes other layers of remembrance, guilt and new possibilities. Both texts remain future oriented in the way they opt to recreate and diversify perspectives on the past, its memory/ ies, and the multidimensional layers of interconnectedness and touching tales despite existing contradictions and struggles. They subvert the notion of one German cultural history and memory archive, and through their imaginative reflection on profound intersections and networks of thoughts, cultures, and peoples, they rewrite history, albeit fictively, and give food for thought. Notes 1 Throughout the article I quote mostly from Leslie A. Adelson’s English translation of Zafer Senocak’s Atlas des tropischen Deutschland as Tropical Germany. This citation can be found in the German original on page 16. When using the German text I will refer to it as Atlas. 2 Andreas Huyssen asks this question as well: «how such histories are remembered and how they can be imagined and written at a time when the changing memory culture of Germany poses new problems for the Turkish immigrants and their descendants» (160). Empirical studies in the social sciences are being conducted that examine these issues and how the global and specific German memory of trauma and the Holocaust effect immigrant youth and their reflections upon this history in terms of their (German) identity; see, for example, Georgi. 3 In Senocak’s perspective it is still too early to tell if internal social and psychological borders will become less rigid and give space to a critical reflective, multiple national German identity: «so einer kritisch-reflektierten, multiplen deutschen nationalen Identität Raum geben, bleibt abzuwarten» (das land 142). 4 For Adelson this also means that it recognizes reciprocal mental dimensions that are reflected in the literature of Turkish migration when it comes to German and Turkish history: fear of migration and victimization, national taboos, and Turkish perceptions of German fantasies (Turkish Turn 21). 5 Senocak has criticized writers such as Schami who allegedly use the readers’ fascination for oriental storytelling (GV 127, 130-31). Even though Schami has often chosen the fairy tale novel as his genre and definitely helped to increase the general popularity of CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 309 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 309 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 310 Hiltrud Arens (multicultural) fantastic storytelling in Germany, he distances himself from the German fairy tale tradition of the Grimm brothers. He is also averse to a purely folkloristic interest in his work as an oriental storyteller (Tantow 37-42). Since both authors have been at various times critical commentators and spokespersons for the rights of minorities in Germany and have written critical essays dealing with sociopolitical as well as literary issues, I think they have more in common on political (and even literary) issues than Senocak’s criticism conveys. Senocak is considered by many the leading Turkish German public intellectual in Germany; see Matthias Konzett «Writing» and Littler 357. 6 Andreas Pflitsch discusses three Middle Eastern novels which narrate different family (his)stories spanning the twentieth century and several generations in epic panoramas of diverse Middle Eastern locations and societies. He includes Schami’s Die dunkle Seite der Liebe (2004) in his examination of «Erinnerungsbücher […], die den autobiographischen Ansatz um die familiäre Dimension erweitert haben» (289). His article makes clear that family histories and entanglements are also of literary concern in other national settings and that Schami connects these touching transnational discourses. 7 See Lutz Tantow, Iman Khalil, as well as Uta Aifan («Grenzgängerliteratur») respectively. Khalil does not emphasize the fairy tale tradition as such but asserts that Schami like several other Arab German writers incorporates «motifs, metaphors, and elements of style from Arab narrative traditions» (233). Aifan points out that Schami works with the «topos of Oriental storytelling and the motif of the cunning Oriental» (244) and inverts readers’ expectations with irony to make them realize the criticism of false perceptions. 8 See, for example, Senocak’s essay «Das Scheitern der arabischen Welt» (das land 127- 130) in which he remarks on the lack of democratic structures and civil institutions in most Arab nations. In a different but similar vein, Schami points to the lack of vision despite plenty of resources in the Arab world, which for him stems from a lack of humanistic traditions and values, even though they also make up the central message of Islam («Circus» 32-33). 9 To read more on the importance of the depiction of circus life in the novel, see Arens. 10 There is another curious twist to Valentin’s identity in terms of age. After falling in love with Pia, who is much younger than he, he starts playing a game with her on aging that makes him feel increasingly younger and her feel much older (Reise 74-77). 11 It is telling that the circus is chronicled in a «Circuschronik,» an archive of twelve volumes, that his grandfather had started. The emphasis is clearly on the circus and not on the family genealogy/ history (Reise 26). 12 The encounters between Arabs in the novel are crucial as well since they pose questions to each other and voice political criticism, as Nabil does when he tells a story in the circus ring that insults the President and for which he is then imprisoned and ultimately dies, signifying the power and fear of the word and oral storytelling. 13 As Schami emphasizes the dreamlike nature and the possibilities that arise from the conversations at «Nachmorg,» Senocak tells us, «Es gäbe gar keine Geschichten, wären sie alle wirklich. Die Konturen der Wirklichkeit sind am schärfsten an der Grenze zum Traum» (GV 77). 14 In this interview Senocak explains further that the contradictions and ambiguity of the main figure Sascha was something that he wanted to capture and write about since he felt it to be an important topic that others are also concerned with («Einfach» 21). 15 As other scholars have pointed out as well, the books are referred to as notebooks with the number of the year printed on them (GV 13, 14, 115) and as diaries (GV 41). 16 Valentin is also not portrayed as ambiguous and contradictory as is the figure of Sascha. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 310 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 310 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 311 17 In the framework of this article I cannot go into this aspect of the text. See Adelson, Eigler, Littler, McGowan, Hall for further discussions. Several scholars discuss critically both the importance and the marginalization of the Armenian genocide as the background stage for Senocak’s character to deal with guilt, victimhood and identity formation in individual and national terms, supposedly transferring German guilt onto a different platform. See Eigler (73-80) and Littler (360-67). 18 Sascha ponders his phantasies of a «trialogue» since the reality is gloomy and he himself cannot even connect the three parts of his identity. He concludes: «Bekanntlich sind Dreieicksbeziehungen am kompliziertesten» (GV 90). 19 Huyssen remarks on the difference between diasporic and transnational writers. Schami and Senocak can both be considered transnational (German) writers, but Schami’s writings and concerns fit more the understanding of a first generation writer in exile or in the diaspora. Their loss of homeland and an imaginary of roots in the culture of ancestors is articulated in the texts (162). 20 Schami also thematizes the different gender-specific perspectives when his character searches for and ponders his mother’s (not father’s) experiences in fictive Ulania. 21 Historic dates and events are unclear and fictionalized in both novels, and the writers do not claim historical accuracy. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie A. «Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction.» Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998. By Zafer Senocak, Ed. and trans. Adelson. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2000. xi-xxxvii. -. «The Turkish Turn in Contemporary Literature and Memory Work.» Germanic Review 77 (2002): 326-38. -. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary Literature. Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2005. Aifan, Uta. Araberbilder. Zum Werk deutsch-arabischer Grenzgängerautoren der Gegenwart. Aachen: Shaker, 2003. -. «Staging Exoticism and Demystifying the Exotic: German-Arab Grenzgängerliteratur.» German-Language Literature Today: International and Popular? Ed. Arthur Williams. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000. 237-53. Arens, Hiltrud. «The‹Circus of Cultures› and the Culture of Circus in Rafik Schami’s Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen.» Seminar 42 (2006): 302-20. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria. «Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten - Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt.» Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Ed. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria. With support of Beate Sutterlüty. Frankfurt/ New York: Campus, 2002. 9-49. Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement. Cosmopolite Fictions. Rochester: Camden House, 2006. Dollinger, Roland. «Hybride Identitäten: Zafer Senocaks Roman Gefährliche Verwandtschaft.» Seminar 38 (2002): 59-73. Eigler, Friederike. Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 311 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 311 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 312 Hiltrud Arens Gemünden, Gerd. «Nostalgia for the Nation: Intellectuals and National Identity in Unified Germany.» Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spritzer. Hanover/ London: UP of New England, 1999. Georgi, Viola. Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2003. Gerstenberger, Katharina. «Difficult Stories: Generation, Genealogy, Gender in Zafer Senocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft and Monika Maron’s Pawel’s Briefe.« Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic. Ed. Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay. Rochester: Camden House, 1999. 235-49. Hall, Katherina. «‹Bekanntlich sind Dreiecksbeziehungen am kompliziertesten›: Turkish, Jewish and German Identity in Zafer Senocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft.» German Life and Letters 56.1 (2003): 72-88. Huyssen, Andreas. «Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 147-64. Khalil, Iman O. «From the Margins to the Center: Arab-German Authors and Issues.» Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins. Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-Speaking Countries. Ed. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz and Renate S. Posthofen. New York: Camden House, 1998. 227-37. Konzett, Matthias. «Interview: Zafer Senocak im Gespräch.» German Quarterly 76 (2003): 131-39. -. «Writing against the Grain: Zafer Senocak as Public Intellectual and Writer.» Zafer Senocak. Ed. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yesilada. Cardiff: U Wales P: 2003. 43-60. Littler, Margaret. «Guilt, Victimhood, and Identity in Zafer Senocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft.» German Quarterly 78 (2005): 357-73. McGowan, Moray. «Turkish-German Fiction since the Mid-1990s.» Contemporary German Fiction. Ed. Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 196-214. Ohland, Angelika. «Geschichten sind wie Freunde. Mit märchenhaften Erzählungen aus Damaskus verführt Rafik Schami zu einem offenen Dialog zwischen Orient und Okzident.» Das Sonntagsblatt 9 Feb. 1996: 39. Pflitsch, Andreas. «Familienbande. Erinnerungspanoramen in drei nahöstlichen Generationenromanen.» Poetry’s Voice - Society’s Norms. Forms of Interaction between Middle Eastern Writers and Their Societies. Ed. Andreas Pfitsch and Barbara Winckler. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2006. 281-95. Schami, Rafik. «Reden wir lieber über die Details. Bemerkungen über die Probleme der Solidarität.» Kommune 3 (1985): 53-58. -. «Eine Literatur zwischen Minderheit und Mehrheit.» Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Standortbestimmung der Ausländerliterartur. Ed. Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich. München: Piper, 1986. 55-58. -. Der brennende Eisberg. Eine Rede, ihre Geschichte und noch mehr. Frauenfeld: Im Waldgut, 1994. -. Hürdenlauf oder Von den unglaublichen Abenteuern, die einer erlebt, der seine Geschichte zu Ende erzählen will. Rede in der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, 28. Juni 1996. Frankfurt: Institut für Jugendbuchforschung, 1996. -. «Vom Circus der Kulturen.« Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 3 (1999): 30-37. -. Reise zwischen Nacht und Morgen. München: Carl Hanser, 1995. DTV, 1999. -. Damals dort und heute hier. Über Fremdsein. Ed. Erich Jooß. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1998. -. Die dunkle Seite der Liebe. München: Hanser, 2004. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 312 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 312 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Family Secrets and Hybrid Identities 313 Senocak, Zafer. Atlas des tropischen Deutschlands. Essays. Berlin: Babel, 1993. -. Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998. Ed. and trans. Leslie A. Adelson. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2000. -. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft. Roman. München: Babel, 1998. -. Zungenentfernung. Berichte aus der Quarantänestation. Essays. Berlin: Babel, 2001. -. «‹Einfach eine neue Form›: Gespräch mit Tom Cheesman.» Zafer Senocak. Ed. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yesilada. Cardiff: U Wales P: 2003. 19-30. -. das land hinter den buchstaben. Deutschland und der Islam im Umbruch. München: Babel, 2006. Seyhan, Azade. «Lost in Translation: Re-Membering the Mother Tongue in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei.» German Quarterly 69 (1996): 414-26. -. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Shafi, Monika. «Joint Ventures: Identity Politics and Travel in Novels by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafer Senocak.« Comparative Literature Studies 40.2 (2003): 193- 214. Taberner, Stuart. «Introduction: Literary Fiction in the Berlin Republic.» Contemporary German Fiction. Ed. Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 1-20. Tantow, Lutz. «Abenteuer in der anderen Sprache. Interview mit Rafik Schami, Träger des Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preises für Gastarbeiter-Literatur 1985.« Die Brücke 24 (1985): 37-42. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 313 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 313 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 314 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 314 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Isolde Schiffermüller Franz Kafkas Gesten Studien zur Entstellung der menschlichen Sprache 2011, 205 Seiten, zahlreiche Abb., €[D] 49,00/ SFr 69,50 ISBN 978-3-7720-8392-1 Die immer komplexeren Methoden und Diskurse, die am Werk Franz Kafkas erprobt wurden, haben den Zugang zu seinen Schriften nicht leichter gemacht. Aktueller denn je erscheint der Ratschlag Walter Benjamins, Kafkas Werk nicht zu deuten, sondern als Kodex von Gesten zu lesen, als befremdliche Gebärdensprache, die immer neue Fragen aufwerfen kann. Das Buch stellt den ersten umfassenden Versuch dar, das Erkenntnispotential von Kafkas Gesten zu studieren. Diese gewinnen im medial geschärften Blick unserer Gegenwart erst ihre volle Signifikanz: als Träger eines kulturellen Gedächtnisses, in dem vielleicht mit den Spuren der Entfremdung auch die Momente einer profanen Erlösung entzifferbar sind. 004711 Auslieferung Januar 2011.indd 28 19.01.11 16: 02 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities: The Case of Rumjana Zacharieva BORYANA DOBREVA U NIVERSITY OF P ITTSBURGH Migration is a well-documented phenomenon of our transnational age. Since the 1960s, a great body of literature on migration has emerged in the Germanspeaking world alongside the migratory movements from the East/ Southeast to North and West. The literature of Turkish-German migration has attracted significant scholarly focus, especially within US German Studies. Such attentiveness can be explained by the realization that (1) the Turkish-German immigrant population is the largest minority group in the country and that (2) Turkish immigrants are continuously constructed as the Oriental Other in public discourse. 1 With the exception of Russian-born German author Wladimir Kaminer, Eastern European migrant writers such as Dimitre Dinev, Zsuzsa Bánk, Terézia Mora, and Rumjana Zacharieva have received scant academic attention despite the great media and public popularity of their plays and texts. Nonetheless, German scholars like Hannes Schweiger, Erika Berroth, and Martin Hielscher have drawn attention to the importance of migrant narratives from Southeastern Europe as instances of transnational writing in German. Literary-critical discourse on the whole, however, seems to confirm anthropologist David Kideckel’s observation that «[t]o much Western historical, social scientific, and political authority, East and West remain fundamentally separate categories of thought with gradations unrecognized» (par. 5). This perception holds true especially for Europe’s East within - the Balkans, whose cultural Otherness is almost always taken for granted and is rarely problematized by Western critics. 2 This article grows out of a dissertation that analyzes the role of Balkan migrant writing in articulating a transnational identity in and through literature. The present contribution focuses on the Bulgarian-born author Rumjana Zacharieva, who has lived and published first in West Germany and then in unified Germany since 1970. Her bilingual works have received numerous favorable reviews in German literary magazines and newspapers. Where Wetzlarer Neue Zeitung and Junge Welt praise the sensual and hypnotic power of Zacharieva’s poetic style, General-Anzeiger acclaims the Marquezesque fullness of her prose («Pressestimmen»). Zacharieva is also the recipient of the Förderpreis des Landes NRW in 1979 and the Literaturpreis der Bonner Lese CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 315 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 315 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 316 Boryana Dobreva in 1999, awarded to a nonnative author of German for the first time. However, Zacharieva’s oeuvre remains an appropriate example of the benign neglect towards lesser known transnational literatures, including that of Eastern European intellectual émigrés. Many have been persistently inscribed into a Balkanist discourse, even when these intellectuals are not political dissidents but have migrated West for other reasons, including love, as is the case with Zacharieva. 3 Against this backdrop of Balkanist discourse and issues of alterity, I consider Rumjana Zacharieva’s works as an important contribution to the study of the culture of the Other. Like many intellectuals and writers from Europe’s Balkan margins, Zacharieva, to paraphrase Roumiana Deltcheva’s words, is deeply cognizant of the antagonistic relationship between East and West, New Europe and Old Europe, and her narratives denote the author’s engagement in describing, interrogating, and reconfiguring the space in-between (559). Zacharieva’s literary output not only illuminates the concepts and demarcations that inform European collective imaginations but also introduces a Balkan dimension regarding the formation of modern identity beyond a national focus. In this paper, I proceed as follows. I first define the term «Balkanism» and how it relates to «Orientalism.» I then provide a close reading of Zarachieva’s second novel, Bärenfell (1999), by mapping out the narrative strategies she uses to address problems of identity formation and identification in a transnational context. Central to my discussion are the following questions: (1) How does the novel engage the Balkanist discourse? (2) In what ways does it negotiate cultural difference, shifting identity, and feelings of belonging and displacement through the representation of history and memory? Specifically, I look at how the novel negotiates the experience of migration from East to West in order to articulate a particular kind of personal identity under the auspices of a long tradition of Orientalism and Balkanism. Few scholars have been up to the task of breaking the hermetic logic of the Balkan trope, which has persisted, as Michael Herzfeld writes, even in those «academic circles, in which the condemnation of prejudices has been the loudest» (x). One scholar who has been up to the task is the Bulgarian expatriate and historian Maria Todorova. Todorova established herself in the Englishspeaking world in the mid-1990s with her studies of past and current constructions of the Balkans in popular and scholarly discourse. In other words, she can be called the founder of a critical Balkan Studies that examines in depth the West’s representational, identificational, and power frameworks within which the Balkans have been constituted and further revisits knowledge about the region and its peoples as a generalized and simplified non-West. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 316 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 316 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 317 Todorova’s most important intellectual achievement is her groundbreaking study Imagining the Balkans (1997) - the first discussion of Balkan imagology from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Meticulously researched and highly informative, Todorova’s book is an exploration of the roots and routes of a three-century-long history of Balkan misrepresentations that has culminated in a set of stigmatizing attributes that maintain the image of the Balkans as the «powder keg» and «residue» of Europe. Todorova’s interdisciplinary, comparative methodology allows her to show lucidly how the Balkan trope was and is still being used by scholars, politicians, and journalists as a powerful rhetorical device that, in a manner similar to that of Orientalism, helped sustain the superiority of a self-essentialized and dominant West. While acknowledging common characteristics with Orientalism, 4 Todorova draws attention to the ambiguity and fragmentation inherent in Balkan identity formation, two aspects that have been conditioned not only by Western Balkanism’s othering practices but also by the region’s semi-colonial history and peripheral geography. In the chapter «‹Balkans› as Self-designation» from Imagining the Balkans, she remarks that self-conceptions of the Balkan nations have one common feature that has been bitterly construed throughout the centuries as «an abnormal condition» or «a stigma» (58). That is, Balkan peoples have persistently looked at themselves and their countries as being in a «state of transition, complexity, mixture, ambiguity» (58). Adrian Otoiu correctly observes that Todorova reads this transition as both a spatial and temporal in-betweenness (92). As a broad geographic area, the Balkans have for centuries been a crossroads of different religions, peoples, cultures, and political systems, a bridge that both connects and divides West and East, Christendom and Islam. Historically, the region has simultaneously partaken of several imperial legacies - the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Soviet - of which, as Todorova claims, the Ottoman has had the most lasting effect on the perception and self-perception of the Balkan peoples (Balkan Identities 13). With respect to its temporal dimensions, Todorova conceptualizes the transition as «a bridge between stages of growth,» where Balkan peoples seem to be in a limbo, appearing as «backward, semi-colonial, semi-civilized, semi-oriental» (Imagining the Balkans 16). She masterfully elucidates that while Orientalism is a way of confronting an antagonistic Other, Balkanism engages with being «the incomplete self» of Europe (18) because it is not a discourse of discrete oppositions (i.e., East versus West), but one that «treats […] differences within one type» (19). Thus, the Balkan self is a self that is neither fully Oriental, nor altogether Western, but is instead «erected against an Oriental other»; a self caught in its spas- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 317 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 317 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 318 Boryana Dobreva modic desire for and in constant frustration and shame over its never fully achieved Europeanness. 5 Rumjana Zacharieva’s second autobiographically inflected novel, Bärenfell, takes its reader into the maze of Balkanism and Balkanite self-definitions via the female protagonist - the Bulgarian-born migrant and writer, Mila. To summarize briefly the novel’s plot: Mila, her German husband, and their daughter travel to Mila’s home country, Bulgaria, during the mid-1990s. A three-day hike in the Central Balkan mountain range, one of the largest protected habitats of Europe with a substantial brown bear population, features centrally and metaphorically in the narration of Mila’s search for a sense of identity that had been shattered through the experience of migration, and of her attempts to reclaim an identity against the persistent inscription of her self as a writer and a woman into ethnic, gender, and national paradigms by both Bulgarians and Germans. 6 At the story’s end, Mila attempts to shed her «Bärenfell,» that is, the physical weight gain that had plagued her body since her arrival in Germany, and the emotional weight or burden of being estranged from both her home and her adopted country. Yet, the novel remains open-ended and does not offer closure, only holding out the possibility of resolution: the successful, however painful, gesture of self-translation, of transcoding the Other (also within): Ein Film aus mehreren Handlungssträngen lief in ihr ab: das Jetzt in Deutschland und in der deutschen Sprache, das Gestern in ihrer Muttersprache, das Land ihrer Kindheit, Achim, das Kind, die Eltern, das Radio, das Literaturbüro, die Kollegen, die Redakteure, die Publikationen, die ganze Palette der Sinneseindrücke, die permanente Gewichtszunahme, die undefinierbare Schuld, die Erinnerung an Freude, der Hunger, das Essen, das Bärenfell. (59) This passage characterizes not only the protagonist but also the polydimensional and dialogical character of the narrative. For Mila, the novel’s main setting in the Balkan mountain range turns into a site of remembrance and recollection. Impelled by memories about past experiences in both East and West, the story evokes a multiplicity of foci, spaces, and times, and a polyphony of voices and narratives, which are all juxtaposed to create an episodic, nonlinear mode of narration. 7 Thematically, the novel oscillates between the Balkans and Germany, between childhood memories formed in the young repressive communist Bulgarian state and a somber critique of the brutalizing years of Bulgaria’s current neoliberal era. It also includes reflections on European ignorance of lesser known cultures and a palimpsest of literary modes. The narrative constructs the protagonist as a Balkan writer educated in Western traditions but formed intellectually under Bulgarian communism. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 318 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 318 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 319 Like Zacharieva, Mila is a graduate of an English-speaking high school in the northern Bulgarian city of Rousse and later finishes her college education in English and Russian literature in the West German capitol, Bonn. In West Germany, the twenty-year-old Mila picks up German with relative ease and soon establishes herself as a German-language writer, translator, and poet. Zacharieva’s decision to include an article written by her for the German Westdeutsche Rundfunk ascribes the novel a documentary note, making Mila’s figure more palpable and realistic and further blurring the boundaries between author and main character. As a Bulgarian woman and an intellectual, Mila is confronted with the West’s indifference to her home country as well as with a constant conflation of differences within the East: Die Eigentümer der Fremdsprache Deutsch kannten kein einziges Wort Bulgarisch, von Russisch hatten sie keine Ahnung, und die kyrillische Schrift erschien ihnen rätselhafter als die chinesische. Und sie behaupteten, dass die bulgarische Hauptstadt Sofia in der Türkei liege, und von der 500jährigen Osmanenherrschaft hatten sie noch nie gehört. (48) In the novel, Zacharieva’s protagonist refers to this form of imperial/ colonizing practices as the «Ungerechtigkeit der Geschichte» (13), as a result of which Mila, like many Balkan intellectuals in the West, aware of the invisibility of their small countries, «battle[s] an inferiority complex as a consequence of [her] status as the Other» (Deltcheva 559). 8 Mila reflects on the state of affairs: «Das permanente Gefühl des Andersseins: Strafe und Privileg zugleich. […] War sie nicht in Deutschland eine Barbarin unter den Europäern? War sie nicht zu Hause eine Europäerin unter den Barbaren? » (45). The narrative represents the female protagonist as belonging to what Azade Seyhan has termed «paranational communities and alliances […] that exist within national borders or alongside the citizens of the host country but remain culturally and linguistically distanced from them, and in some instances, are estranged from both the home and the host culture» (8). Mila’s eventual immersion in the host culture as a German writer, yet one who hardly finds reception beyond small academic and literary circles, is thus characterized by estrangement. The novel captures this hard-to-articulate emotional and mental state of separation in the metaphor of the «Bärenfell.» Having first emerged in her adoptive country, the bearskin feeling envelops Mila’s body and soul to form both a suffocating outer skin and a safeguard against the impertinences of the outer world, be these (1) the lack of genuine (cultural) differentiation by her German interlocutors or (2) her family’s nationalistic, fascist, and racist predilections, which she encounters upon her trip back home to Bulgaria. Mila’s misrecognition by and alienation from CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 319 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 319 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 320 Boryana Dobreva both societies thus emerge as the product of an inscription into Orientalist paradigms subsumed under the Balkan umbrella by the German majority culture. 9 Torn between Germany/ the West and Bulgaria/ the Balkans, self and other, civilization and barbarity, the subject thus seeks to resolve the aporia that marks the shifting identities she is attempting to redefine. The protagonist’s attempts at negotiating her unstable but highly self-reflexive position are fashioned as two dynamic forms of self-interrogation that grant Mila a sense of agency. The first form concerns her gesture of attachments to and detachments from the country of birth and that of residence, affiliations, and disaffiliations with national and ethnic origins, 10 a kind of «experience-in-identity,» to use Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak’s words (781). The second form emerges out of the literary self’s attempts to think through what Venkat Mani refers to as the «situationality» of her cultural difference (25). In both instances, the notion of history as one that «slouches» in Mila’s Balkan/ Eastern European origins, as a history that is «ready to comfort and kill» (Spivak 781), plays a crucial role in Mila’s struggle to construct an intellectual identity abroad. As the product of a first-generation migrant, Mila’s relationship to the Balkans has historical depth, and the essentialist notion of being Bulgarian looms large in the protagonist’s quest or rather struggle for a new identity. Bulgaria as the space of her childhood home and «das Land meiner Geburt,» to which the already westernized Mila frequently returns, becomes a determining factor in her search for self-definition (42). As Mila tries to connect with her roots and to fuse the past with the present, her diasporic memory inevitably begins to mimic, to quote Andreas Huyssen, «the identity fictions [and inscriptions] that [have] energize[d] nationhood» in the Balkans (152). The heroine stages the «experience of history» in identity and in «origins» (Spivak) by evoking Bulgaria’s 1300-year-old ancient history, and by reenacting major junctures around which Bulgarian identity has been historically and culturally constructed, including Bulgaria’s liberation from 500 years of Ottoman Rule, life in a totalitarian Bulgaria, the collapse of communism, and the ensuing difficult transitional years. In this first instance, this reenactment often takes the form of informance and performance, of ardent retelling and reciting of passages from heroic epics and ballads that glorify the struggle against the Ottoman invaders and self-sacrifice for a centuries-long cherished freedom, all of them literary and oral creations that continue to be powerful shapers of ethnicity and nationhood in Bulgaria and the Balkans. 11 The reader is presented not only with dates and names of military and political figures, revolutionaries, and poets, but also with the heroine’s interpretation of key events such as the Russo-Turkish War’s Battle of Shipka Pass in 1877-78 that ultimately led to CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 320 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 320 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 321 Bulgaria’s liberation. The following passage illustrates how the historical signifiers of a nation are retrieved and performed in the narrative consciousness of the expatriate. Standing at the foot of Shipka peak in the Central Balkans, Mila envisions herself standing on an epic battlefield, at «the unlocked gates of lost time» (Ruschdie 10): Sie befindet sich in einem Gedicht. In diesem pathetischen, gereimten Gedicht. Sie kennt «Die Landwehrsoldaten am Schipka» auswendig. […] Sich in einem Gedicht befinden ist ein Ereignis, das ihr für einen Moment das Phänomen namens Geschichte offenbart. […] Denn damals ist jetzt. […] Ein Bilck in die Höhe: eine Handvoll Christen. Ein Blick in die Tiefe: Tausende Söhne Mohammeds. […] Die Landwehrsoldaten - «eine Handvoll Spartaner gegenüber dem Pack eines Xerxes.» […] Die Ereignisse am Schipka-Paß - die Antwort Bulgariens auf die Vorwürfe der Welt, sein Volk sei ein Sklavenvolk, das sich niemals gewehrt habe. Das mit den Leichen, die die Bulgaren auf die Türken geschmissen haben, ist keine Legende - es ist einer der vielen authentischen Berichte über die letzten Kämpfe zwischen Osmanen und Russen, denen sich die bulgarische Landwehr angeschlossen hatte und die zur Befreiung vom Osmanischen Joch führten - endgültig 1878, nach 500jähriger Sklaverei. (123-24) These literally and politically formed moments cohere around the partial yet, as Maria Todorova argues, still persistent Ottoman legacy, along whose lines semi-colonial structures of Balkanist self-perceptions have been reproduced. It is noteworthy to mention that Todorova distinguishes between two types of Ottoman legacy: as continuity and as perception. Whereas the former is associated with political, cultural, social or economic dependence, the latter expresses itself as a process of constant reevaluation and reinterpretation of history by each generation. While the Ottoman legacy as continuity now belongs to the past, the Ottoman legacy as perception can still be traced in the discursive construction of the national and cultural identities in most Balkan countries (Balkan Identities 13). As I have shown thus far, Mila inserts into her personal account flashes of Bulgaria’s history and literature. In so doing, she writes her migrant life story as a narrative of identification and disidentification, in which she mimics and recreates current Balkan modes of cultural self-representations, whose present moment is European but whose past is constructed by non-Western, Soviet, and Ottoman experiences, memories, and fictions. While she reconstructs her tale in migration, Mila finds herself, as a woman, an intellectual, and a Balkanite, haunted by multiple pasts. Her desire to account for the differences of Bulgaria’s subordinated pasts from a «subaltern» perspective leads her to the insistence of cultural translation, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, as a »staging of cultural difference» (227). CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 321 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 321 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 322 Boryana Dobreva At the same time, however, Mila’s performance gesture disturbs an easy transcoding of cultural difference, what Spivak calls, in the postcolonial context, «the horror of an absolute act of intercultural performance» (782). Consider the opening pages of chapter 4, where Mila passionately recites an untranslated couplet from the Bulgarian ballad «Chadshi Dimitar,» a song that praises the haiduts, Bulgaria’s adored nineteenth-century resistance fighters: «Nastane wetscher, messetz izgree/ zwezdi obsipjat swoda nebessen/ gora zaschumi, wjatar powee/ Balkanat pee chajduschka pessen» («Evening comes, the moon rises/ Stars flood the vaulted sky/ The woods rustle, the wind blows/ The Balkan sings a haidut song») (69). Mila’s refusal to translate the song into German thus marks a space of cultural untranslatability, of that which remains unshared and contested between cultures. As she remarks, Das Gedicht war schöner als die Sommernacht des Balkan, schöner als die Sterne, als das Unglaubliche, von dem die Rede war, und dieses Unglaubliche war der Tod […] Davon gab es nur schlechte Übersetzungen und eine Menge Sekundärliteratur […] Und das Gefühl der Ohnmacht. Das Unübersetzbare blieb unübersetzt. Und nur diejenigen, die das Original gelesen hatten, wußten wovon sie sprach. (68) Denying an easy translatability in which Mila-as-writer would otherwise sustain the illusion of an institutionalized absolute translation of intercultural performance and fixated identity, the artist casts aside the possibility of agency through self-identification and self-explanation (via language) in favor of linguistic self-representation grounded in «Das Unübersetzbare blieb unübersetzt» (68). She resists «the possibility of assertion of agency by a minority artist» and thus frustrates what would otherwise result in, following Mani’s discussion of Spivak, «the cooptation of the artist by ‹imperial malevolence›» (68). And transcending the author, these differences can be heard only in native tongues, as they constitute the very memory of communities, whose stories are still silenced by the hegemonic West and, as a result, remain in the periphery of knowledge, unnecessary and untranslatable. In their discussion of the future of the postcommunist bloc in a new European order, the editors of Over the Wall/ After the Fall quote Istvan Rév’s words that since «memory constitutes identity, the writing of history […] establishes and reestablishes identity ‹through new narratives,›» which, one could add, cohere as memory unto themselves (qtd. in Forrester et al. 22). In Bärenfell, Mila’s conscious act of remembering and retelling her individual story, juxtaposed with the dominant version of Bulgarian national history, reveals her desire to perform a willed self-creation. In her critical engagement with and retrieval of specific elements of great and small hi/ stories, private accounts, and official narratives, Mila creates a sense of self and homeland by CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 322 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 322 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 323 charting her individual space and time within and against Bulgaria’s national space and time. The protagonist does not construct a timeless, romantic image of her home country because her image of Bulgaria is mediated through the diasporic experience of someone who shuttles between the home and adoptive country and has maintained strong familial ties. Hence, her attachment to the home country is rather burdened by the recollection of a national framework that is marked by incarceration, hopelessness, and inferiority and temporally centered on her childhood in a totalitarian Bulgaria and her experience of the chaotic years of the Bulgarian transitional postcommunist period. Her particular insider/ outsider position of the expatriate thus affords her privileges otherwise unavailable, as she is able to bring the host and mother culture into one single space of interaction and to gain a more somber insight into the peculiarities of today’s Bulgarian sociopolitical and cultural life. In Mila’s eyes, the living conditions in the 1990s are likened to that of dogs: hungry people roam the streets of Sofia along with famished stray dogs. To escape the long, cold winter days, the impoverished and desperate pensioners of Bulgaria are a constant presence in the heated Sofia buses or the source of quarrels among the residents of Sofia waiting for bread in the long queues in front of empty grocery stores. 12 Disquieting articles in the newspapers about murders in families, injustice, and desolation inform Mila’s perception of her home country as a jungle where animals fight for everyday survival and existence: Auf offener Straße verhungerte streunende Hunde, immer wieder die Hunde. In den Wäldern des Balkan, in der Nähe der Dörfer, wurden immer mehr Wölfe und Bären gesichtet: Die wilden Tiere witterten das Tier im Menschen. […] Der Mensch ist dem Menschen […] ein Wolf, ein Bär, ein Hund, dachte Mila. (101) For Mila, the brutalization of her nation plays itself metaphorically as the bearskin, an «identitarian discomfiture» that is mediated through acts of disidentifications and disaffiliations with ethnicity and the nation (Mani 89). One of the most provoking scenes in the novel consists of Mila exchanging opinions with her parents and friends about nationalistic approaches to preserving the threatened ethnic Bulgarian identity and extricating the country from the suffocating financial and political crisis. Mila rejects her interlocutors’ fascistic approval of past, terribly misguided Nazi attempts to do the same followed by such, to Westerners’ ears, hazardous statements that what Bulgaria needs now is someone with Hitler’s iron hand, someone who would establish discipline and order in this devastated country (120). There is nothing left for Mila but to renounce her compatriots and their attempts at a flawed, simplistic reclaiming of the ethnic as a superlative category: CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 323 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 323 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 324 Boryana Dobreva Du hast kein Land mehr Bärin, kein Geburtsland mehr, geschweige denn ein Vaterland! In deiner Sprache heißt es öfter ‹Land meiner Geburt› als ‹Vaterland.› Und du hast immer behauptet, du seiest eine Deutsche ohne Hitler im Kopf. Sieh sie dir an, deine eigenen Leute: lauter kleine Faschisten! Warum bist du nicht schon im Englischen Gymnasium gestorben, Bärin? (42) As this example makes clear, Mila transcends Bulgaria as a history that kills. That is, she disidentifies with the poisonous fabrication of a consolidated ethnic identity in order to embrace the multiplicity of cultures and identities that constitute her own life: «Erst die Konfrontation mit der deutschen Sprache tötete den kleinen Faschisten in ihr» (62). To apply Tzvetan Todorov’s words to Mila’s context, «as someone who has lived within a foreign culture […] I can no longer subscribe to my ‹prejudices› as I did before, even if I do not attempt to rid myself of all ‹prejudice.› My identity is maintained, but it is as if it is neutralized; I read myself in quotation marks» (15). It is for this last reason that this novel succeeds in transcending the formulaic, normative, and all too common representations of «good German, bad Balkanite,» of identities between and beyond ethnic and national stereotypes. In performing a self-proclaimed identity as «deutschsprachige Autorin bulgarischer Herkunft,» Zacharieva, and by extension her alter-ego literary self, transcodes an ethnic and collective history into a defanged individual and paranational memory that allows Mila to claim her personal space in time: «Ich bin eine Deutsche ohne Hitler im Kopf» (131). Venturing through the sands of time, Mila overcomes the fatal twentieth century to weigh the ten previous centuries against the twenty years of communism she experienced: Es gab dieses andere Bulgarien, das noch vor dem 9. September 1944 existierte. Dieses Bulgarien hatte es seit dem 7. Jahrhundert gegeben. Das Bulgarien der Protobulgaren, der Slawen und Thraker. Das Bulgarien vor 1396, das Bulgarien vor 1990, dem Jahr der freien Fassaden. Was waren die zwanzig Jahre sozialistisches Vaterland im Vergleich mit dem der vergangenen Jahrhunderte? (130) Mila claims a home in history, but it is a history the meaning of which she, like many other expatriates estranged from their homes, builds out of, in Salman Rushdie’s words, «scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved» (12). Like Rushdie’s India, Mila’s version of Bulgaria is a Bulgaria «of the mind,» an imaginary place, a «Traumland» that paradoxically but painfully allows her to remain at home while abroad because, as she states, «Nie würde sie ihr Land verlassen, nie» (130). At the heart of my discussion is my interest in the ways Balkan migrant authors self-interrogate questions of origin and Otherness as they negotiate the meticulous process of identity building. Given the different set of histori- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 324 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 324 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 325 cal relations informing the Balkans, an important question arises for me as to how to approach cultural productions within this setting methodologically and theoretically. My particular focus is thus on the possibilities of applying concepts advanced by postcolonial and western scholarship to this kind of diasporic literature, all the while drawing attention to Balkanism as an alternative paradigm to theories of alterity and subjectivity. Focusing on history and memory, I have explored the intricate and oftentimes highly ambivalent ways in which Rumjana Zacharieva’s Bärenfell engages, questions, struggles with, negotiates, and, in short, «take[s] responsibility for and before the Balkan ‹identity›» at home and abroad (Antic´ 162). Her diasporic voice finds linguistic and historical coordinates that cross the spaces of memory and time to connect with the stranger in her self while revealing «more complex and contingent patterns of degrees and shades of otherness» in current identity constructions in the German world and beyond (Kuus 478). As a narrative from the borderlands of cultures and traditions, I see Zacharieva’s transnational writing as one that enables us to look anew at existing constellations of selves and others. To challenge and to rethink such configurations means, in the end, to seek a way out of the daunting definitional bog of alterity and to find a path towards cultural integrity. Notes 1 In the German academic field, the thematically rich and linguistically complex border narratives of Turkish-German writers like Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aysel Özakin, Feridun Zaimoglu, Aras Ören, Renan Demirkan, and others have challenged German literary critics to unremittingly revisit their reading practices of writings born out of displacement, migrancy, and diaspora. American Germanists such as Azade Seyhan, Leslie Adelson, Petra Fachinger, Hiltrud Arens, and Venkat Mani, to name just a few, have expanded and modified their analytical focus on migrant subjectivities, hyphenated identities, the networking of cultural and diasporic memory and historical dis/ continuities, language, writing, and translatability. These scholars have not only offered new insight into the dynamic nature of emerging transnational literatures, they have also stressed the need for a renewed understanding of the cultural function of minority literary discourses in postwar Germany. For the individual contributions of these authors, see Works Cited. 2 In recent years, a number of Balkan scholars at home and abroad have published numerous articles and books in which they, while drawing on but also parting company with Edward Said’s Orientalism and other postcolonial theorists, have conceptualized the historical, epistemological, and methodological conundrum of Balkan subjectivity as well as the Balkan imaginary as the European «other within» from both a Western and a Balkan perspective. The list of intellectual achievements in Eastern European and Balkan Studies would be unthinkable without Larry Wolff’s wideranging historical study Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlighten- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 325 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 325 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 326 Boryana Dobreva ment (1994); Maria Todorova’s fundamental work on Balkanism Imagining the Balkans (1997); Vesna Goldsworthy’s critique of Balkanist neocolonialism, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998), Milica Baki ć -Hayden’s brilliant contribution to Orientalist variations a la Balkan, „Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia“ (1995), and D.I. Bjeli ć ’s and O. Savi ć ’s erudite essay collection on a Balkan theme Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (2002). Although these works have found wide resonance in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, and ethnography with respect to EU politics, integration, and migration, critical literary studies have remained less attentive to the perspectives that critical research on Balkanism might offer (when applied to Balkan migrant literary works in a transnational context) for uncovering and rethinking, in David Gramling’s words, «the hidden epistemological fissures through which transnational subjects continue to emerge» (389). 3 Viewed within the historical context of immigration to Germany, Zacharieva is representative of what Carmine Gino Chiellino has termed, in his introduction to Interkulturelle Literatur, the seventh voice of immigrant authors (56). That is, although Zacharieva moved to West Germany in 1970, her life story as a migrant and writer is not that of the Turkish, Italian, or the Yugoslav guest worker or of the Ukrainian, Russian, or Romanian quota refugee of the 1980s and 1990s. Zacharieva herself has emphasized that what brought her to Bonn were «personal reasons» and her «love for a German man,» and not the dire political and economic situation in her country or the repressive communist system (Bärenfell 61). Her story «Metamorphose» as well as her novel Bärenfell represent Zacharieva’s literary attempt at critique and confrontation with current attitudes to reduce her profile to the commonly circulating images of a dissident writer and the corresponding Betroffenheitsliteratur from the communist Balkans: Was berechtigt mich andererseits, die Selbstbespiegelung nachzuahmen, die von den anderen Autoren der neuen deutschen Prosa und Lyrik bis zur Selbstvergessenheit betrieben wird? Und wie lange kann ich an deutsche Türen (Verlagstüren u.a.) klopfen, die sich in zwei oder höchstens drei Fällen wohlwollend öffnen: wenn ich mich zu meinem literarischen Gastarbeitertum oder zu meinem Fremdsein hierzulande bekenne, oder aber (unbedingt) bereit bin, die Geige recht betroffen zu stimmen: es muß ja tragisch gewesen sein, eine sozialistische Kindheit gehabt zu haben. («Metamorphose» 45) 4 Like the Orient, the Orthodox Balkans were incorporated in the Europe/ non-Europe opposition as non-Europe, thus always embodying the second element of representational dichotomies: more dark than white, more wild than civilized, more violent than peaceful. 5 For a more detailed discussion of Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, see Otoiu 92-94. 6 In fact, the novel registers a variety of issues such as gender, writing, and language change, issues that overlap and intersect in the narrative’ negotiation of identity, and need to be accounted for in the broader discussion of identity. However, for this particular paper, I have decided to focus only on the role of history and memory in negotiating subjectivity as the focal point of East/ West clashes. 7 Here I draw upon Hamid Naficy’s discussion on aesthetic and stylistic structural similarities of exilic and diasporic films in his An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001). Naficy’s ideas of tactile optics and a memory-driven narrative strike me as relevant in the context of diasporic autobiographical writing with its tendency towards modernist fragmentations and stream of consciousness in the form of a filmic montage-like structure. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 326 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 326 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 327 8 In the context of Bulgarian intellectual expatriates abroad, Roumiana Deltcheva remarks that «[t]heir eventual immersion in the culture of the West, rather than integrating them to the center, reinforced their status of in-betweenness. Most became exiles for life: neither part of the firmly established Western identity, nor belonging to the unstable Bulgarian identity which they consciously sought to redefine» (559). 9 For further details about Western Balkanism’s willingness to look at the Balkan region from a macrocolonial perspective, see Alexander Kiossev’s discussion in «The Dark Intimacy» in Balkan as Metaphor (2002) 10 For more on affiliations and disafiliations, see Venkat Mani’s Cosmopolitical Claims (2007). 11 Unlike industrialized and secularized Western Europe, where the epic no longer exists as a living tradition in the imagination of national ideology, in the less developed Balkans, the heroic epic has made its way into national discourses and has become a major ingredient in the constructed corpus of national past and memory (Baki ć -Hayden 33-34). For further details about the historical role of literary cultures and oral narratives in the construction of national and ethnic memory in Eastern Europe, in general, and in Kosovo, in particular, see Milica Baki ć -Hayden’s essay «National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo» (2004). 12 The novel’s portrayal of the animal-like interpersonal relations the main protagonist encounters in Bulgaria’s capitol in the 1990s and the general decline of moral and political values in the country is an emerging common theme among Bulgarian expatriates in Europe. With certain variations, we encounter the dog-like or wolf-like motif most notably in French theorist Julia Kristeva’s second semi-autobiographical detective novel The Old Man and the Wolves (1994) and Austrian writer and journalist Ilija Trojanow’s reportage novel Hundezeiten. Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land (1999). Both works take a sober but personal stance on posttotalitarian Bulgaria and the dehumanizing standard of living created by the state and its institutions. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Antić, Marina. «The Balkans and The Other Heading: Identity and Identification on the Margins of Europe.» Spaces of Identity 6 (2006): 151-65. Arens, Hiltrud. Kulturelle Hybridität in der deutschen Minoritätenliteratur der achtziger Jahre. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. Bakić-Hayden, Milica. «Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.» Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917-31. -. «National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo.» Balkan Identities. Ed. Maria Todorova. New York: New York UP, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Chiellino, Carmine. Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: ein Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Deltcheva, Roumiana. «The Difficult Topos In-Between: The East Central European Cultural Context as a Post-Coloniality.» The Sarmatian Review 3 (1998): 557-62. Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: «Other» German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 327 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 327 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 328 Boryana Dobreva Forrester, Sibelan, Magdalena J. Zambrowska, and Elena Gapova, eds. Over the Wall/ After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: St. Edmundsbury P, 1998. Gramling, David. «The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. (Book review)» The Germanic Review 81 (2006): 385-89. Herzfeld, Michael. Foreword. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Dušan I. Bjeli ć and Obrad Savi ć . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. ix-xii. Huyssen, Andreas. «Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 147-64. Kideckel, David A. «What is in a Name: The Persistence of Eastern Europe as Conceptual Category.» Special Edition of Replika 1996. 28 Jan. 2006. <http: / / www. c3.hu/ scripta/ scripta0/ replika/ honlap/ english/ 01/ 03ckid.htm>. Kiossev, Alexander. «The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities, and Acts of Identification.» Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 165-90. Kristeva, Julia. The Old Man and the Wolves. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: U of Columbia P, 1994. Kuus, Merje. «Europe’s Eastern Expansion and the Reinscription of Otherness in East-Central Europe.» Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004): 472-89. Mani, Venkat B. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2007. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Otoiu, Adrian. «An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.» Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23 (2003): 87-105. «Pressestimmen.» Rumjana Zacharieva. 2008. 20 Aug. 2008. < http: / / www.zacharieva. de/ Pressestimmen/ pressestimmen.html>. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Viking, 1991. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. «Acting Bits/ Identity Talk.» Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 770-803. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Morals of History. Trans. Alyson Waters. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1995. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. -. ed. Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory. New York: New York UP, 2004. Trojanow, Ilija. Hundezeiten. Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land. München: Carl Hanser, 1999. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Zacharieva, Rumjana. Bärenfell. Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1999. -. «Metamorphose.» Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Standortbestimmung der «Ausländerliteratur.» Ed. Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich. München: Piper, 1986. 42-46. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 328 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 328 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City: Magic in Yoko Tawada’s Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen EKATERINA PIROZHENKO U NIVERSITY OF I LLINOIS AT C HICAGO Yoko Tawada is one of a growing number of German-speaking minority authors whose linguistic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds differ substantially from those of their mainstream counterparts. She was born in Tokyo in 1960. In 1979, she came to Germany for the first time via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Tawada graduated from Waseda University in Japan in 1982 with a major in Russian Literature and then moved to Hamburg, where she lived until 2006. After receiving her Master’s degree in contemporary German literature at the University of Hamburg, Tawada obtained her doctorate from the University of Zurich under the supervision of Sigrid Weigel. Her dissertation, Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur, was published in 2000. In addition to her literary work, Tawada has also written scholarly essays on, for instance, Paul Celan and Goethe. In 1999 she was a Max Kade Distinguished Visitor (writer-in-residence) in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2006 Tawada moved to Berlin, where she continues to live as a freelance writer. Tawada is one of the few authors who writes in two languages - German and her native Japanese - and is acclaimed in both of them. Her first publication, Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts, came out in 1987, and since then she has published one or two books per year. Tawada has been awarded numerous prizes for literature, including the prestigious Akutagawa prize (1993), the Adalbert von Chamisso prize (1996), and the Goethe Medal (2005). In this paper, I will analyze the position of women as flâneuses in Tawada’s Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. I draw parallels between Tawada’s narrative text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Walter Benjamin’s concept of flânerie. I focus primarily on women, more specifically on female bodies within the urban landscape, and on Tawada’s renegotiation of the dichotomy of subject and object. I argue that Tawada’s flâneuses are different from the traditional flâneurs mainly because they experience cities through their bodies more so than through their minds. In addition, I will show that Tawada’s flâneuses do not experience cities as «other,» but instead disregard the boundaries between their bodies and the urban environment, constantly CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 329 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 329 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 330 Ekaterina Pirozhenko incorporating the «city body» into their own bodies and vice versa. Tawada’s flâneuses are postmodern, postcolonial, and transnational beings who - as I will show - rebel against the European authoritarian notion of a subject within the city. I will also deal with elements of magic and intoxication as thematic points in Tawada’s work. Tawada’s Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen narrates the metamorphoses of twenty-two women. The prototypes for these women are taken from Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses. In his poetic text, Ovid narrates the metamorphoses of gods, people, and animals, and indeed that of the whole world, which involves a metaphysical aspect. Ovid introduces the philosopher Samos who teaches the Roman king Numa Pompilius about the constant and eternal change of things, about souls that travel from one body to another, and about bodies that change their physical shapes. 1 Indeed, there is a scholarly debate whether Ovid’s intention was to connect the physical transformation of characters to philosophical conceptions of nature and thus to overcome humanity’s fear of death by introducing the notion of eternally traveling souls. Ovid’s Metamorphoses center on bodily transformations. Interestingly, the physical changes do not correspond to Samos’ suggestion of traveling souls that change bodies since Ovid’s characters do not leave any «old» bodies behind. Rather, their own bodies are transformed into new bodies. Ovid’s characters are transforming bodies per se. 2 The theme of metamorphosis is one of the key concerns in Tawada’s work, especially when it comes to bodily transformations. Written characters and texts are also «bodies» for Tawada. They belong to a bodily world or the world of objects that can be interpreted. Furthermore, constant metamorphoses indicate that there is nothing stable in our world. This instability especially attracts Tawada since it is a main source for creativity, imagination, and the formation of individual identity. Before I turn to feminist perspectives and Tawada’s approach to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I want to consider the connection between imagination, body transformation, literature, and the contemporary world. At the beginning of the Common Era, Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses that everything changes: weather, seasons, landscapes, animals, people, and gods. This change is a natural, dynamic process. He goes so far as to say that there is no place for death, only for transformation of the material: Everything changes and nothing can die, for the spirit wanders wherever it wishes to, now here and now there, living with whatever body it chooses, and passing from feral to human and then back from human to feral, and at no time does it ever cease its existence. (527) CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 330 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 330 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 331 The Ovidean world is prescientific, which means that there is no distinction between science and myth. «Magic» transformations of people into plants, birds, or animals are, for him, also natural changes. In her article «Metamorphic Changes in the Arts,» Sabine Coelsch-Foisner writes that in Ovid’s text, «Culture and cosmos are governed by the same principle of change» (44). «The stories in Metamorphoses characteristically abound in processes of seasonal, diurnal, climatic changes. [There are many correspondences between] the human world and the world of plants, animals, minerals, creating a pervasive sense of hybridity» (43). The notion of hybridity is significant not only because of the lack of the binaries science vs. myth, science vs. culture, or human vs. animal, but also because of its connection to the passing of time. All transformations happen in time; something changes in appearance, shape, form, condition, etc. from what was «before» into what is «now.» The old manifests itself in the new such that the past and the present coexist with each other in a hybrid form. There is a difference, though, in the metamorphoses of gods as compared to people. If gods create their new shapes through their own power, people are subject to «magic» forces. Further, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, in addition to definitions of the term metamorphosis in biology, zoology, pathology, chemistry, and biochemistry, transformations can be caused by «supernatural means.» 3 Each metamorphosis is a unique, unpredictable, spontaneous, miraculous event that transgresses biological natural laws of evolution (like aging). Metamorphosis is usually irreversible. Coelsch-Foisner connects features of metamorphoses to cultural development in our contemporary world. She points out that in the twentyfirst century we are unable to think about biological, «natural» changes in mythological terms. There is no magic for us. Thus, the term metamorphosis means for us a fixed, predictable, and foreseeable change (44). However, we can see a given culture as metamorphic: These parameters: uniqueness, unpredictability, spontaneity (lack of cause and effect), transgression (of norms and laws), hybridity (the old survives or shines through in the new), plurality (one soul has several shapes) constitute the crux in re-conceptualising metamorphosis as a paradigm of cultural change in an intellectual climate on the one hand dominated by scientific concepts of man, identity, history, society, culture, art, on the other hand marked by an erosion of these very concepts. (42) Taking into consideration Coelsch-Foisner’s notion of our culture as metamorphic, Tawada’s Opium für Ovid would be a great example of multiple kinds of hybridity. The old «shines through»: Tawada’s text is a dialogue, not only with Ovid and not only in its rewriting of Greco-Roman mythology from a feminist point of view, but also a dialogue with Benjamin, as it presents CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 331 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 331 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 332 Ekaterina Pirozhenko a rethinking of the female subject’s positioning in the city. It also rethinks antiquated Greco-Roman myths and their application in the contemporary world. The text suggests a coexistence of dreams and reality that influences society. It demonstrates a cultural transformation of the perception of female bodies. It represents, also, a transformation in understanding German literature, what it is and how authors who are not native speakers and not ethnic Germans transform German literature and German national identity. Tawada’s Opium is about the dialectic of otherness and sameness in terms of women who in some ways stay the same but get a new body, women who perceive their bodies differently, or women who are perceived in the city as «others» due to their «foreignness,» even though they have almost all the attributes of the native culture. In addition, Opium is a text about instability and about ambiguity. It is not surprising that Tawada chose Ovid’s epic as a starting point for her text. Kathleen Anne Perry reviews Ovid’s Metamorphoses from a feminist point of view and sees in it a challenge to the concept of absolute Truth: Metamorphosis is the crucial phenomenon for Ovid’s thought precisely because it explodes the notion of a stable, unchanging truth to which men can refer as if to a polestar. If everything is changing and moving, then so are man’s preferred points of reference, and his knowledge is purely relative. This relativity destroys the supremacy of logic, and of rational discourse, and prepares the way for the reign of the imagination in poetry. (77) Tawada’s text is a product of the world’s instability. Imagination prevails in her text, with no fixed position for her characters. In this way, the world becomes dynamic and magical. According to Tawada, literature makes the magic of the world more accessible. Myths are still a living tradition. As Thury writes, «We continue to incorporate mythological themes and messages in our culture today. Even our modern mass media reflect the motifs and characters which can be found in ancient stories from around the world. Myths are as close to us today as the adventures of Indiana Jones, the Starship Enterprise, or The X- Files» (3). Thury states that myth depends on a cultural context. Myths can be told differently and transformed according to historical periods. As she further suggests, «While mythic ideation strives for the general, the idealized, the circular, modern writing emphasizes the particular and the individualistic» (671). In Tawada’s texts, the particular and the individual are expressed by the perception of the city from the point of view of twenty-two women. In Tawada’s Opium für Ovid, some women meet with each other, some do not; some are fantasy creations of female characters who are writers, while others are not. However, all of them experience some sort of transformation. It might be the bodily experience of pain, gaining weight, pregnancy, paraly- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 332 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 332 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 333 sis, the change of gender perception, or the perception of the body as being invisible. Tawada constructs these transformations of female bodies and feminine identity beyond stereotypical notions of beauty and youth. She represents them as poetical, sensual events in the realm of magic. The metamorphoses take place in a dreamy world of opium-like intoxication and carry a sense of happiness with them. Tawada’s narrative is surrealistic. She does not operate with the categories of logic, objectivity, and «reality.» Her world is a poetic fantasy. In one of her interviews, Tawada states that metamorphoses and hybrid creatures attract her the most. She has looked for a variety of such metamorphoses in different sources: in classical Greek mythology, African legends, and Asian myths (Brandt 11). Like Christa Wolf’s novels Cassandra and Medea, Tawada’s Opium is written about women from a female perspective. It can be interpreted as a dream of what women can be if they are not defined through the male gaze and presence, when women are amongst themselves and when they are free of family and social obligations. Tawada’s style also deserves attention: she connects stories of twenty-two women in such a way that each woman is present in the story of another woman; there is no consistently omniscient narrator; and the narration itself is decentralized and surreal. Tawada’s playfulness is embodied in switching from firstto third-person narrative, from omniscient narration to narration from the point of view of one of the women. Tawada’s Opium is very complex, and her style is hard to define. In this sense, I agree with French feminist writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous, who wrote in her essay «The Laugh of the Medusa» that «[i]t is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist» (253). Cixous thematizes Greek mythology, language, dreams, femininity and masculinity, and feminine writing (Écriture féminine). She insists that «woman must write woman» (247), and that feminine writing comes through their bodies. Cixous describes her own writing practice as follows: «When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking» (264). Similar to Cixous, Tawada creates a text about women and their bodily experiences. 4 Their bodies are transformed in the city. They do not «lack» anything because they are complete. In her interview with Bettina Brandt, Tawada states that feminist approaches to writing are important for her, and she rejects the genre of family novel. She herself describes Opium as follows: CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 333 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 333 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 334 Ekaterina Pirozhenko When we think about «women in literature,» we typically picture women in the role of mother, sister, or lover. In Opium, on the other hand, I created twenty-two women who depart from these family roles. Some have been divorced for a long time, others never wanted a family in the first place, and most have completely forgotten their mothers. These twenty-two female characters don’t lead what is commonly referred to as a «typically feminine life.» They are not related; they are outside the family context, and they are completely free. I was interested in how these unconventional women perceive the city, and what a female perception might mean in that specific context. (Brandt 12) Keeping in mind Tawada’s intention to create twenty-two women outside of traditional feminine roles free of any boundaries, I will analyze the female perception of the city and of women in the city. Tawada chooses the city of Hamburg. She mentions different parts of the city in her text, such as Altona, Speicherstadt, Ottensen, Barmbek, Alsterpark, Winterhude, Sternschanze, and others. Her female characters go for walks in the city, observe people, sit in café houses, use the S-Bahn and U-Bahn, get lost in the labyrinth of the city, and reflect on consumerism, tourism, and foreigners. How different is this female perception from the male gaze of a flâneur? In a very traditional canonical understanding of the term flâneur (and it is especially true for the concept of flânerie in the nineteenth century) the flâneur acts as a subject; he is the bearer of a gaze. He strolls in the city and controls the urban landscape. He interprets the city like a text according to his views and owns it while passing on his vision of it. There is nothing which remains unnamed. He is a creator, and he names events, objects, and passersby. The city is an object of his scrutiny, and he is a researcher. Therefore, there is no place for magic. Male flânerie is a science. Even though the flâneur is a subject, he is disembodied. He walks, but very rarely is his body perceived by others, and he never reveals his own bodily feelings. He has eyes and a voice, and he embodies an impersonalized camera lens. Jonathan Crary, however, rereads the body of the observer in the nineteenth century as a visual apparatus, while the notion of gender does not play any role for him. Anne Friedberg shows that the body was a fiction for French feminists: «For Irigaray ‹the look› replaces the body, separates itself from it, and renders the body immaterial» (33). For Irigaray, it does not matter if the body is male or female - the look or gaze is crucial. Like other scholars (Crary, Benjamin, Pollock, Wolff, Buck-Morss), Friedberg maintains that the male flâneurobserver in the nineteenth century subjected women’s bodies to his gaze. Like Kevin Hetherington, Friedberg sees the emergence of the female flâneur, the flâneuse, in the period of the decline of the Parisian arcades and the emergence of the new department stores, where women could stroll without escort: CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 334 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 334 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 335 The female flâneur, the flâneuse, was not possible until she was free to roam the city on her own. And this equated with the privilege of shopping on her own. The development in the late nineteenth century of shopping as socially acceptable leisure activity for bourgeois women, as a ‹pleasure rather than a necessity,› encouraged women to be peripatetic without escort. (36) Friedberg connects the term of a flâneuse and a female subject to consumerism and to the notion of class. The female observer was a consumer-shopper and unmistakably bourgeois, while experiences of other women remain on the periphery. More important for Friedberg’s argument is the fact that shopping «relied on the visual register and helped to ensure the predominance of the gaze in capitalist society» (37). In this sense, the body - whether engendered or not - is not at the core of consumerism, but rather the gaze. Consequently, flânerie was instrumentalized by a consumer society in order to sell more and more goods. It was not just «looking at» and idling, but also establishing a relation between looking and buying, between need and desire, where desire could replace need. Flânerie itself became a form of commodity. Strolling in the department stores suggested a new illusion of spatial and temporal mobility. The idler was virtually «transported» to other countries, continents, and times, while looking at goods on display from different countries. Shopping windows could offer the illusion of «foreignness» and «travel» in time and space. In his essay Der Flaneur, Benjamin writes that the flâneur is unthinkable without the Parisian arcades with their luxury goods, that he needs to see consumers, goods, a phantasmagoria of illuminated shopping windows to «botanize» the city. Benjamin calls the city and the arcades the flâneur’s habitus, where he is both at home and at work and where he «botanizes»: «Habitus des Flaneurs, der auf dem Asphalt botanisieren geht» (538). Flâneur is a city researcher doing empirical work. He scrutinizes the society, collects impressions, makes observations, and interprets the world around him. Benjamin implies that only men can act as city scientists. Some of Tawada’s female characters in Opium für Ovid also play the role of city researcher, such as Galanthis. 5 Tawada’s Galanthis walks in the city and «studies» shops: «Es gibt Tage, an denen Galanthis sich hellwach fühlt. Sie studiert dann einen Laden nach dem anderen, kniet und streckt sich den ganzen Tag vor den Regalen, schleppt Prospekte herum und geht abends noch eine Stunde spazieren» (23). However, this kind of «study» leaves out any results. Galanthis is occupied with window shopping. She observes objects on display without buying them or coming to any conclusion about them. Tawada also draws attention to the fact that the wish to take a walk depends on Galanthis’ mood. In the case of the flâneur, it seems he is always on the streets, as if flânerie were his main CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 335 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 335 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 336 Ekaterina Pirozhenko occupation. Galanthis, on the other hand, is driven by her occasional mood: «Es gibt Tage, da möchte man nicht einer geraden Straße folgen. So fährt Galanthis nach Ottensen, wo sie nichts zu erledigen hat, schlendert müßig herum, biegt ohne Grund ab und verirrt sich in eine krumme Gasse» (23). Like a flâneur, Galanthis walks aimlessly, letting the streets lead her. However, in contrast to a flâneur, she is not looking for visual irritations. Instead she saunters for the sake of physical movement. Here, the bodily experience of idling is put in the forefront. Therefore, Tawada focuses on women’s feet. For instance, Thetis, one of the characters in Opium and a silver-footed sea nymph in Greek mythology, can walk the whole day looking only at her feet. 6 In addition, walking in Jenischpark, the unnamed narrator finds a piece of wood that looks similar to a foot, and she reflects on the feet of women she knows: Galanthis has pale and flat feet, while Salmacis has small feet (105). The narrator has an idea to portray a foot in the shape of a woman whom she calls Clymene, which means «Fame.» 7 In Tawada’s Opium, Clymene is a linguist who travels to many cities and is constantly on the move. She is literally «walking feet.» Clymene is a nomad without a tribe rather than a migrant. If migration implies a total change of habitat, nomadism implies periodical and cyclical movement. 8 Being on the move, however, brings the association of restlessness and homelessness, which Tawada resolves by connecting physical mobility to a linguistic one. Clymene does not feel homeless because she lives in languages: «Ich dachte, wir wohnen in den Sprachen. Deshalb habe ich nie das Gefühl, dass ich obdachlos bin, selbst wenn ich wochenlang unterwegs bin» (105). Clymene is a linguist and a poet and she works a lot with dictionaries. Once, when she is with Daphne in a bookstore, a thick dictionary accidentally falls on her foot (100). Being alone at home, Clymene takes off her socks and erotically caresses her foot: «Sie streichelt ihn langsam, in jede Richtung einmal, sie schaltet das Licht aus und streichelt weiter» (103). Tawada expands the theme of feet to a discussion of shoes, which is innovative if one takes into consideration that the shoes of a male flâneur are unlikely to be mentioned. Due to the endless walking of her characters, their shoes become worn out very quickly. Their soles touch the street pavement, and their insides touch women’s skin. Galanthis has a feeling of intimacy with her old shoes. The shoes break boundaries between streets and her body, the private and public spheres. For example, Galanthis calls any place her «home» depending on where her shoes are. 9 Being on the street, she can always feel a part of her home on her feet, whereas being at home, she brings a part of the city on her shoes into her private sphere. While they idle, the awareness of their bodies distinguishes Tawada’s female characters from the traditional flâneur. Women in Opium are not walk- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 336 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 336 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 337 ing camera lenses, but they are walking bodies. For instance, physical movement forward is, for Galanthis, an obsession and a need. If she stands, she consumes more energy than by walking: «Galanthis schwitzt, wenn sie steht, weil sie zu viel Kraft verbraucht, um nicht hinzufallen. Das Laufen fällt ihr hingegen sehr leicht. Sie kann drei Stunden lang pausenlos in schnellen Schritten gehen» (24). Her body reacts with sweating. Her sweat translates visual aspects of the city into the fabric of her undershirt: «Der Schweiß zeichnete Landschaften auf den Stoff» (24). The dynamics between women and the city leads to a bodily reaction to the environment. It is reflected in sweating and in experiencing pain. The city emerges as a sphere where women’s bodies are exposed to injury. For example, Galanthis is run over by a car, and the unnamed narrator receives injuries on a regular basis: «Eine Woche später lag ich wieder verletzt und verlassen auf einer Landstraße in Schleswig-Holstein» (19). Due to pain and injuries, these strolling women pay attention to shopping windows of pharmacies. For instance Leda, 10 a pharmacist and Galanthis’ doctor, studies products in the pharmacy’s window display: «Leda steht vor dem Schaufenster einer Apotheke und studiert die neuen Frühjahrsprodukte» (19). The danger of injuries on the street and of potential pain does not restrain women from strolling in the city. In Tawada’s Opium, some characters are driven by Thanatos to self-destructive and risky acts. Their ultimate goal, however, is to encounter Thanatos’s twin brother Hypnos and to be transferred into another «reality.» The narrator describes her state after the car crash and her injuries as follows: «Dann fiel ich in einen Schlaf wie man einen Hang hinunterrollt. Ich hatte nie zuvor ein vergleichbares Gefühl erlebt, und mir fiel nur das ganz unpassende Wort Glück ein» (18). Losing consciousness and falling asleep promises happiness that is comparable to opium intoxication. If Galanthis, after her street injuries, finds herself in hospitals where she gets drugs and then goes to pharmacies for the same reason, Salmacis, on the other hand, falls into a sleep obsession. She spends more than 12 hours a day in bed. Her passionate sleep offers her happiness and transition to a magical world of dreams, similar to the magical effects of opium. In the state of intoxication, the first-person narrator that binds as a red thread all stories in Opium perceives visual information differently: «Im Rauschzustand verwirrt mich das Optische am meisten. Denn alles, was sichtbar ist, scheint unverändert zu sein, dennoch ist augenfällig, daß es im Rausch nicht mehr das ist, was es war. Sein Schweigen sticht mich» (53). At first glance, it may seem paradoxical that objects that are seen have not changed; at the same time, these objects are not what they used to be. Here, however, Tawada shows that objects are polysemantic. If one takes a look at CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 337 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 337 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 338 Ekaterina Pirozhenko them from another angle, their surface will offer a new dimension for reading. Objects do have a language, yet they keep silent. The task of an observer is not to interpret or to understand the meaning of the objects, but rather to read and translate the constantly changing surface of these objects and to confront the ambiguity of the world of objects over and over again. I will elaborate on the relationship of surface and ambiguity in connection with Benjamin below. Here, I would like to draw attention to the fact that in Tawada’s case, the body of an observer/ flâneuse contributes to the understanding of ambiguity because the body itself changes continuously while constantly interacting with the world of objects by touching, smelling, sweating, etc. Therefore, it is very difficult to draw a line between the flâneuse’s body and objects, and the border between them becomes more fluid. Other female characters in Tawada’s text are attracted by ambiguity as well, such as the writer Coronis, 11 who comes from one of the countries under a dictatorship and is married to a «local man» (der Einheimische), as she calls her husband in Hamburg. Coronis’s vision weakens, and she needs eyeglasses. While an optometrist thinks that Coronis is afraid of eyeglasses and tries to calm her by saying that people mistakenly interpret eyeglasses as a symbol for aging, Coronis, quite to the contrary, believes that a life without eyeglasses would be boring. Coronis can perceive the surface of objects as ambiguous due to different eyeglasses: «Ich sehe jedesmal was anderes. Durch häufigen Brillenwechsel Mehrdeutigkeit erleben, soll das der Sinn einer Brille sein? » (83). Tawada combines, here, body and culture - vision and visuality. Coronis’s weakened vision is a «defect» of her body; she needs eyeglasses in order to see clearly and diminish the bodily «defect.» At the same time, Coronis’s obsession with different eyeglasses has nothing to do with her nearsightedness, but rather with her visuality in terms of the interpretation of visual information. With the diverse eyeglasses, she chooses how to see the environment. Her choice has nothing in common with prejudices; rather it is a way of understanding the world in its variety and ambiguity. Tawada likes to use the metaphor of optic devices that frame a view or function as a lens in her texts. For instance, she plays with the concept of «Japanese eyeglasses» in her short story «Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht,» in which the Japanese eyeglasses are fictional and symbolize fictional Japanese sight. This means that Japanese perception does not exist because a pure Japanese culture does not exist (Talisman 50). In «Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Ein deutsches Rätsel,» also a short story from the Talisman collection, Tawada mentions a so-called Fuchsfenster and a camera lens that helps, on the one hand, to frame a view, and, on the other hand, to make objects appear smaller and less threatening, like in a puppet theater (Tal- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 338 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 338 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 339 isman 33). In Opium, Coronis tries to do exactly the same when she wants to perceive the women in a subway through a lens - through a theatre program that she rolls into an «opera glass,» so that women would appear like dolls or marionettes on a stage (79). In order to make clear connections between opium intoxication, surface (ornament), flâneur, and doll, I will provide an overview of Benjamin’s understanding of the world of objects as well as an overview of Tawada’s interpretation and application of that understanding. The connection between opium intoxication, ornament, and surface is essential for understanding Tawada’s positioning of women/ flâneuses and female bodies within the city and for the communication between women and the city. In my further explanation, I mainly refer to Tawada’s dissertation and Benjamin’s Crocknotitzen and Einbahnstraße. In Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Eine ethnologische Poetologie, Tawada claims that toys have not received appropriate attention by academic scholars. She considers toys and games as important components of culture, and she regrets that nowadays they are mostly compartmentalized and used as pedagogical tools. Tawada refers to earlier eras when there was no distinct separation between game and work, children and adults, the profane and the sacred, when objects could be used in everyday life and, at the same time, still be sacred. She quotes Levi-Strauss who claimed that the distinction between «holy» and «profane» is a characteristic of European culture. She points out that science cannot replace magic. Referring to Adorno and Horkheimer, she comes to the conclusion that the term mimesis constitutes a forum where magic and art can be related to each other. Tawada believes that there is no place for magic in the consciousness of the modern subject. Literature, however, provides a space where magic can appear. People are not conscious of the magic of the world of objects, but literature makes this magic visible (226). For Tawada, magic is something that cannot be explained by science, the rational mind, or logic. In a magical world, objects are animated and words can have a direct meaning. Tawada’s magic world is similar to a child’s world in which objects communicate with people. It is not by accident that Tawada connects myths and magic in her texts about women. Myths can provide a meaning and work together with ideologies. All cultures create their own myths, for instance myths of their origins, myths about great heroes, or myths about their destiny. Myths in terms of Roland Barthes’ interpretation are thus constructions that guide and control people’s behavior (111-15). In Tawada’s understanding, myths are similarly constructions that restrict people’s ability to develop and to change according to their personal choices. Magic, however, works against myth. Her Opium is about magic that CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 339 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 339 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 340 Ekaterina Pirozhenko deconstructs negative elements of Greco-Roman mythology - the foundation of European thought. Magic can be subversion, as it energizes the ability to change beyond restrictive European norms, beyond given identities, and therefore provides the ability to gain freedom. That is why Tawada’s women are free of traditional patriarchal obligations. According to Tawada, literature constitutes one of the spaces in European modernism where magic can come back: «Literatur [ist] einer der Orte in der europäischen Moderne […], an den die Magie zurückkehren kann» (Spielzeug 226). In addition, Tawada uses Benjamin’s linguistic theory about the existence of different kinds of languages - poetic, plastic, art language, etc. - and also the language of objects (156). 12 People are not able to understand the language of objects, but literature translates that language for them (16). Tawada writes about the magic of the surface. She insists that the surface of a doll has an important meaning. She refers to Benjamin’s description of a mannequin in a shopping window (Schaufensterpuppe) in his Passagen- Werk, claiming that the doll is a surface on which appearance or illusoriness comes to the forefront. Tawada continues: Eine Puppe stellt einen menschlichen Körper dar, indem sie vor allem seine Oberfäche nachahmt. Es gibt in ihrem Körper nichts, was menschlichen Eingeweiden entspricht. Besonders bei Schaufensterpuppen ist es deutlich, daß die Oberfläche ihr Wesen ausmacht. (153) Tawada draws a parallel between such mannequins and books. She states that books, especially those with illustrations, are toys that are similar to dolls because our three-dimensional world is transformed into the two-dimensional surface of the book. Tawada continues discussing Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße, in which he points out that a children’s book represents a silent surface that does not send any messages to a child, but, more importantly, absorbs the child into its surface. The child disappears in the book as if it were in a game of hide-and-seek. Using the example of this game, Benjamin claims that children can experience the world of objects in its immediacy and that their perception of the world of objects is magic: «Begriffe wie ‹Magie› oder ‹Zauber› bezeichnen bei Benjamin einen Zustand, in dem eine ‹andere› Wahrnehmung entsteht. Auch die Kinderbücher ermöglichen diesen Zustand, den man zugleich als eine Art ‹Rauschzustand› verstehen kann» (162). Furthermore, Tawada quotes Wolfgang Schlüter, who connects Benjamin’s drug consumption and his passion for collecting children’s book, claiming that the fact that Benjamin dreams about collecting objects while under drug intoxication proves his extraordinary collector’s passion. In his «drug» études, Benjamin speaks about «Physiognomie,» which means that the sur- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 340 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 340 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 341 face should not be understood as an expression of the inner «truth» or that there is a meaning behind the surface. Tawada notices that other terms are more important for Benjamin, namely a net and a coat (Netz and Mantel): Während das Netz aus Maschen besteht und dazu benutzt wird, Vögel oder Fische zu fangen, ist der Mantel eine Umhüllung, die schützt bzw. verbirgt. Das Wort «Netz» kann in Verbindung mit dem Wort «Haut» eine «Netzhaut» bilden, die ein Objekt optisch einfängt. Der Mantel hingegen bedeckt ein Objekt und macht es unsichtbar. Insofern bilden Netz und Mantel einen Kontrast. (164) Tawada is fascinated with the way in which Benjamin elaborates on the net. When the net throws a shadow on a human body, this shadow has the role of a coat that veils the body. In this case, the net and the coat are one whole, while human skin and the shadow of the net are one whole as well. It is a «Netzhaut» («net skin» - retina). Tawada comes to the conclusion that the body is a retina - an eye, which allows people to see objects. People can optically perceive objects with their bodies (164). The world becomes then a «webworld/ networld,» and it is impossible to distinguish on which side of the net the outer world is. Furthermore, Tawada refers to Benjamin’s Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen in which he claims that a person under opium intoxication is able to penetrate into the world of surfaces that can be regarded as an ornament. The fantasy or imagination of the opium smoker is similar to the ornament itself in the sense that they both consist of small details and elements connected to each other and are built into endless sequences (164). In addition, if a viewer pays closer attention to the ornament, he/ she can discover that it has some new details. The observer finds new ornaments in the old over and over again: Weil Vorhänge und Marionetten als Dinge betrachtet werden, die keine innere Welt besitzen, fällt es leicht, sie als Oberfläche wahrzunehmen. Benjamin, der angesichts einer Schaufensterpuppe die eigentliche ‹Oberflächlichkeit› eines lebenden Menschen wahrgenommen hat, fällt es nicht schwer, die Gesichter der Menschen als Oberfläche zu lesen. Die Schaufensterpuppe hatte er aus der Perspektive eines Flaneurs betrachtet. Jetzt ist er Haschischraucher, der menschliche Gesichter liest. Beide Zustände sind geeignet, die Oberfläche zu lesen. Im Surrealismus-Aufsatz nennt Benjamin beide Tätigkeiten, das Flanieren und das Haschischrauchen, in einem Atemzug: «Der Leser, der Denkende, der Wartende, der Flaneur sind ebensowohl Typen des Erleuchteten wie der Opiumesser, der Träumer, der Berauschte.» (165) The surface does not have a message. It allows for many different interpretations. Benjamin compares this reading to the body of a dancer. Tawada states that the surface of a dancer’s body - a moving surface - does not have any inner world, which reminds her of Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater. The Marionette is all dancer. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 341 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 341 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 342 Ekaterina Pirozhenko Benjamin’s main concern is not to read and to interpret people’s faces and what is behind them, or to classify them according to some qualities, but rather to discover ambiguity and polysemy of the surface and to make this polysemy readable. The method of such a reading and perception of the surface is for Benjamin «Täuschung» - deception. In each face, he recognizes some features of faces of his friends and acquaintances. Those faces do not disappear completely, but partially, in a dreamlike way. The same process of discovering surfaces can be applied to the world of objects, in which case the observer would be called «Physiognomiker der Dingwelt» (Spielzeug 167). At this point, I would like to emphasize the connection between intoxication, ornament, and flâneuse that I promised earlier. Drug intoxication - it is opium intoxication both in Benjamin’s and in Tawada’s texts - generates a new perspective of looking at objects and perceiving the world of objects. Like intoxication, optic devices - such as eyeglasses or rolled-up theatre programs - can also give rise to a new visual perception. The world around us has surfaces. However, as noted above, there is no «inner truth» behind the surfaces. The surfaces constitute constantly changing ornaments that can become visible under opium intoxication. Moreover, the world of objects is considered magic by Tawada. Only children and hashish smokers can perceive the world of objects in its immediacy and can be absorbed in its magic. The flâneuses are like hashish smokers: they observe modifying surfaces. Tawada’s flâneuses stroll in the city as if under opium intoxication - the first person narrator is clearly a drug user since she discovers many things under intoxication (53, 78, 175) - and they have immediate contact with the city that stands for the world of objects. Flâneuses collect images of different surfaces, impressions, and stories. As the anthropologist Susan Greenwood points out, «As alternative mode of consciousness, magic can take a person via her imagination deep within herself and also, paradoxically, out into a wider emotional relationship with another being such as a nightingale or an owl - so much so that bodily boundaries appear to merge» (7). 13 Despite the fact that Western cultures are influenced by Enlightenment and that people perceive themselves as rational beings, magic or irrationality is still deeply rooted in human consciousness and manifests itself in superstitions and celebrations of holidays (for instance, Halloween). As an illustration for Benjamin’s theory about collectors, Tawada introduces in Opium the female character Scylla, who collects and sells old furniture. 14 Scylla is a true collector, as it is not the furniture per se nor the classification of the furniture that is essential to her, but rather the stories that are closely related to them: «Zu jedem Möbelstück fällt Scylla eine Episode ein. Man könnte sagen, sie verkaufe eigentlich Geschichten, der Trödel sei nur eine Zugabe» CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 342 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 342 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 343 (57). The same approach to collecting is true for Thisbe, who works as a hairdresser. 15 She collects and passes on stories of her female clients. We do not know the name of the narrator who tells us about all these women - about Scylla, Thisbe, Galantis, Coronis, etc. It is also ambiguous if the narrator is actually an author, as for instance in the following passage: «Eines Tages erzählte mir die Friseuse, sie kenne eine Kundin, deren Nachbarin eine Autorin kenne. Diese habe ein Buch geschrieben, das von zweiundzwanzig Frauen handelte, unter anderen auch von ihr» (190). Knowing Tawada’s playfulness, she can refer here to herself. Sometimes her narrator has a very strong presence in the text, especially in the passages with first-person narration. Sometimes she is transformed into a narrated character. The unnamed narrator states that she does not have any desire for the physical possession of any objects. She is a nonconsumer who wants to stroll through the city and see objects on display in shopping windows: Am liebsten wäre mir, die Gegenstände würden in einem Schaufenster sitzen, und ich könnte sie bei einem nächtlichen Spaziergang begrüßen. Wenn es zufällig einem Möbelstück gelingt, in meinen Wohnbereich zu dringen - zum Beispiel durch eine Gewalttat namens Geschenk -, werde ich gezwungen, es zu beachten, und die Summe der Blicke, die ich ihm schenke, bekomme ich niemals zurück. (54) The objects on display have their own life. The narrator can greet them and expect a greeting back. Walking in the city assumes communication between women and the world of objects. The shopping windows are also personified: they are not just looked at but also look back at women. For instance, Ariadne experiences the exchange between her gaze and the shop windows’ gaze as follows: «Ariadne geht durch eine Einkaufsstraße. Die Schaufenster der Läden blicken sie an, die Markenzeichen versuchen, in ihr Nervensystem hineinzuschleichen, das kitzelt. In dieser Stadt gibt es keine Gebäude, sondern nur Schaufenster» (203). Here, as in other examples, the world of objects (city) causes Ariadne’s adverse bodily reaction. She feels as if the objects penetrate her body and nervous system. In contrast to a male flâneur, strolling women are objects, even in the gaze of the objects themselves. In this case, objects are animated. There are no separate worlds of objects and subjects because Tawada tries to resist these categorizations. Tawada plays here with the word «shopping window,» Schaufenster, which consists of the word Fenster, «window,» and the verb schauen, «to see» or «to look at.» Tawada shows that, on the one hand, people look at shopping windows; on the other hand, those windows also look back at people (die Fenster schauen). In the quotation above, the narrator states that there are no buildings in the city. There are only «Schaufenster,» a word that does not only imply shopping windows that are CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 343 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 343 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 344 Ekaterina Pirozhenko looked at by people, but rather any windows through which objects can look at people. The city is personified and is in constant visual communication and optic exchange with women. The problem of being observed and being on display is a big issue for the strolling woman. While a male flâneur is free from being objectified by gazes of passers-by, a woman’s body is exposed to strangers’ gazes. This situation leads to self-censorship. Thus, Leda, an illegal pharmacist, feels obligated as a young woman to construct her bodily performance according to the demands of the city population: Als Leda zwanzig war, schwamm sie durch die Menschenmenge - zurechtgeputzt und kühl konzentriert. Sie fühlte sich verpflichtet, nicht mehr mädchenhaft, nicht mehr ländlich und nicht mehr schüchtern oder erkältet auszusehen. Erst dreißig Jahre später konnte sie aus ihrem Körper etwas entfalten, das besonders war. Man hat das Gefühl, an jeder Stelle ihres Körpers eine Öffnung finden zu können, durch die man einen anderen Raum betreten kann. (10) Interestingly, Tawada connects the metamorphoses of the body and bodily performance to aging. Young Leda tries to correspond to the notion of a city woman. This imaginary woman has to be cool, self-confident, clean, mature, and an opposite of provincial. She has to look different from what she really is. Only through the passing of time is Leda able to free herself from these stereotypes and to be more conscious regarding her body. The freedom allows her body to develop and to be open for spaces outside of the restraints that were put upon her by the patriarchal city and its inhabitants. Tawada reevaluates aging as a positive process. The writer sees the body as a space with openings. At the start of this paper, I mentioned that Tawada breaks boundaries between bodies and the environment. In this sense, the quotation above is a very good example for such a fluid border. Tawada is convinced that the body consists of many holes - mouth, nostrils, ears, vagina, anus, pores of the skin, etc. Also, the whole body consists of small particles (molecules) that are not tied to each other; rather they collide with each other and then push away from each other. Therefore, the body always maintains open spaces into which surroundings can penetrate in the form of sound, fluid, food, and smell. Consequently, the body is always changing. The environment constantly gets something back from the body (exhalation, sweat, urine, etc). 16 In addition to the physical aspect, one can read the quotation above metaphorically: aging is a process of better understanding the world, when new spaces open themselves up to exploration. I will come back to the lack of borders between the body of the flâneuse and the city in the section about Ariadne, in which I will explore how Tawada deconstructs the dichotomy of subject and object. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 344 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 344 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 345 As I have shown, the flâneuse Leda frees herself from the judging gazes of passers-by and stereotypes. Another example of a strolling woman who reflects on patriarchal judgmental attitudes in the city is a divorced woman, Salmacis. She remembers how she was constrained within patriarchal norms while being married to her husband. She does not want to go for a walk alone because she always remembers her mother’s words: «Meine Mutter sagte immer, es sehe besser aus, wenn eine Frau männliche Begleitung habe» (73). Walking with her husband in Barmbek means to meet the expectations of others: «Wir passen optisch wunderbar zueinander. Das haben andere Spaziergänger festgestellt» (73). People on the street perceive her as «other,» as a woman. Only outside of her marriage is Salmacis able to overcome the dichotomy male versus female. As mentioned earlier, she gives herself over to the power of sleep. While sleeping, her body becomes bigger, and she encounters androgyny. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Salmacis falls in love with Hermaphroditos, passionately wanting to unite with him. While raping him, her body becomes one with his body: neither female nor male, but both (Ovid 138). Tawada, however, disregards the part of the story related to Hermaphroditos. In her version, the change originates in Salmacis alone, who believes that metamorphoses can happen only in the world of dreams, outside of the heterosexually oriented public sphere. She says, «Ich bin eine schlafende Revolutionärin, daher glaube ich: nur im Schlaf gibt es Veränderungen» (71). Tawada also believes that what people call «masculine» and «feminine» is already within each body regardless of its sex. Instead of strolling alone in the city where people identify her according to her sex and where she has trouble being a flâneuse, Salmacis prefers to stroll in her dreams. Her immovable sleeping androgynous body is a container for her strolling mind. Salmacis idles in the dreamy world beyond physical material «reality.» There are two women with a migrant background in Opium, Coronis and Clymene. Similar to Salmacis, who was perceived as «other»/ woman within the patriarchal frames of a marriage, these two women are «others» in the city due to their «foreignness.» Coronis, who is married to a «local man,» has problems in the realm of the urban landscape. She would like to merge into the urban mass; however, she always sticks out as a «foreigner: » Coronis wird oft von Passanten betrachtet. Die Augen der Dorfbewohner starren sie an. Die Augen der Großstädter starren sie ebenso an: in Straßenbahnen, in Restaurants, in Kaufhäusern. Das ist insofern rätselhaft, als es bei ihr nichts Auffälliges gibt, was man als fremdländisch empfinden könnte. (90) Coronis plays the role of a migrant flâneuse. Due to her enigmatic «foreign» look, she is not able to idle on the streets and to use public places without being noticed. She is constantly reminded of not belonging to Western European society, as if CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 345 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 345 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 346 Ekaterina Pirozhenko she has no right to walk in the city. She is tired of questions about her origin: «Ich möchte Tomaten kaufen dürfen, ohne nach der Herkunft gefragt zu werden» (90). She would prefer it if such questions were forbidden, but she understands the irony that one cannot forbid the asking of questions in a democratic society. Tawada also deconstructs the concept of «foreignness» by pointing out its mysterious character since there is nothing «foreign» about Coronis’ appearance. Further, Tawada develops the theme of «foreignness» in the city, introducing the notion of tourism. Clymene, a constantly traveling linguist, has to face her foreignness in other cities. Traveling puts her into the position of a person who «does not belong here,» into the position of the «other.» The «otherness» deprives her of her right to exist and to stroll. While in a third-world city, for example, Clymene is perceived by others not as an independent subject, but as a part of the mass of tourists: Clymene kannte in der Stadt niemanden außer den Veranstalter der Tagung, grammatikalisch gesehen lief sie in der dritten Person herum, denn für keinen der Passanten dort bedeutete Clymene ein Du, nicht einmal ein Sie, für alle war sie ein Teil einer anonymen Touristengruppe. Wenn Postkartenverkäufer Clymene ansprachen, meinten sie sie nicht persönlich, sie war mit jedem anderen Touristen austauschbar. (99) A traditional flâneur within the urban landscape never doubts his subjectivity. He is always an I, whereas people around him are «they» or «others.» In contrast, Clymene takes into account her «otherness.» She is neither I nor you; rather she is a grammatical third person. While Clymene strolls in the city in the third person, she is transformed into a body - it. That is why Tawada pays attention to what Clymene eats: she is absorbing the city into her body. She does not look at the city, but digests it. Eating food - and one can go further by interpreting the process of eating and digesting food as consuming the city - proves to be a positive act in Tawada’s understanding. Clymene and the city are one whole; there are no physical borders between them. This might also be a reason why Clymene disappears as a subject. As I have illustrated through the example of Clymene, Tawada wants to break down boundaries between subject and object, foreign and native, the other and the same. She undertakes the same kind of washing out of borders between the notions of male and female. In texts by Kracauer, Benjamin, Hessel, and Baudelaire, the flâneur is a well-known male urban subject, which implies that he has a male body and male sexuality. The flâneur is also heterosexual. Women in the streets are «allowed» to be lesbian in their texts; however, they remain objects of the flâneur’s gaze. Feminist scholars who either claimed the impossibility of being a flâneuse in the nineteenth century or affirmed the existence of flâneuses in such public spheres as department stores CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 346 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 346 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 347 still operated within the normative heterosexual system. Tawada, however, breaks from this tradition. She plays with dichotomies of the male and female body and male and female sexuality, and she shows how these categories are shaky and unstable. Her narrative style suggests that the reader should experience the text as if it were a drug. The intoxicated reader should be transferred to another reality beyond heterosexuality and patriarchy, and beyond the European way of thinking. One of the examples of Tawada’s characters who struggle with boundaries is Iphis. The daughter of migrant parents from an unspecified foreign country and Scylla’s neighbor, she also has a problem with positioning herself as a subject in the city. On the one hand, she feels alienated because of her «foreign» name, which reveals to others that she belongs to the second generation of migrants. On the other hand, Iphis has issues with her lesbian sexuality and gender. She decides to be a man and signals her transformation with a «businessman’s» haircut at Thisbe’s. In Opium, Iphis makes the decision to be a man by herself, whereas in the Ovidean version, Iphis is transformed into a man by the goddess Isis. 17 Tawada’s Iphis has to struggle with her gender identity within the city. Being a man, she cannot decide on a name for herself, and she is not able to walk in the city using the first-person I. The alienation leads her to address the previous embodiment of herself as «she» and the present self as «he»: Iphis hat immer noch keinen neuen Namen für sich gefunden. Alle männlichen Namen, die ihr einfallen, passen nicht zu einem Geschäftsmann. Außerdem kann sie nicht mehr «ich» sagen, denn, wenn sie «ich» sagt, weiß man nicht, welche Person damit gemeint ist. Die von früher oder die von heute? Stattdessen bezeichnet sie die frühere Person als «sie» und die heutige als «er«. In der dritten Person spaziert Iphis durch den Stadtteil Eimsbüttel. Einige Dinge werden von der neuen Person «er» ausprobiert, andere werden nach wie vor von der alten «sie» vollzogen. Er geht in ein Cafe und schaut sich um, sie bestellt eine Tasse Kaffee, er trinkt ihn schnell aus, sie zahlt und gibt zuviel Trinkgeld, als hätte sie ein schlechtes Gewissen, und dann gehen beide gemeinsam nach Hause. (186) Tawada follows feminist thinkers and describes the complexity of female identity - the sex which is not one. Looking at the quotation above more closely, one can notice that the actions performed by «him» and «her» differ. For instance, «he» is active in terms of trying something new, whereas «she» has the attribute of «old» and is hesitant and more conservative. The masculine component of Iphis allows himself to appropriate the space in the café and to look around, whereas the feminine part chooses the role of a «servant,» ordering a cup of coffee so that «he» could drink it. In addition, «she» has a bad conscience and also a feeling of solidarity with the café service staff. The CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 347 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 347 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 348 Ekaterina Pirozhenko dramatic gender interplay is resolved by jointly walking home. Interestingly, Iphis’ masculine component, «he,» is still the bearer of the gaze: «[er] schaut sich um.» He is the one who needs to see and who is irritated when he cannot or is not allowed to see something: «Eine kräftige Frau mit geblümtem Kopftuch überquert die Straße. Er ist beleidigt, weil er ihre Haare nicht sehen kann» (187). Tawada shows that «he» indeed represents the masculine part of Iphis. Seeing means for «him» knowledge and also ownership. When «he» is refused this, «he» feels rejected and powerless. Iphis remains an interesting variation of a flâneuse. Her body is still female. The perception of the city, however, varies depending on Iphis’s «he» or «she.» Iphis cannot perceive herself as a competent subject in the city - as an I. The permanent fluctuations between gender identities and Iphis’s migrant background do not allow her to walk with self-assurance. She always reacts to and interacts with the city environment. Such mutual exchange between the city and the flâneuse is also characteristic of Tawada’s Ariadne. In Greek mythology, Ariadne helped Theseus to kill the Minotaur and to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Tawada connects the traditional association of Ariadne and a labyrinth with another association, namely the city as labyrinth. Tawada’s Ariadne constantly needs fabric or material - not only in the sense of a fabric in which she can veil her body (and Tawada uses red silk as an allusion to Ariadne’s ball of red fleece thread from the myth), but also as material for reading: «sie muß etwas lesen, Briefe, Bücher, Notizen, Lesestoff» (202). Tawada transforms the city into reading material. For Ariadne, the city is a fabric, which is both created by her and at the same time absorbs her. She walks in a city, which is a product of her fantasy: Noch besser wäre eine Stadt, in der sie spazierengehen könnte, aber man muß eine solche Stadt zuerst erfinden, es hat keinen Sinn, einfach aus dem Haus zu gehen. Ariadne könnte eine Stadt aus dem Nichts erfinden, in der es keine Stoffe gäbe, aber da ist diese Sehnsucht nach einem Stoff, den sie in die Hand nehmen und wieder loslassen kann. (202) Tawada tries to combine materiality and immateriality of a city as well as materiality and immateriality of human thought and imagination. Ariadne creates a city from nothing, and it remains immaterialized fantasy. However, this fantastic city can become material if it is transformed into a written text. Thus the city becomes reading material, which then further provokes the reader to recognize immaterial city images. Tawada creates a highly ambiguous image of Ariadne’s city, balancing between reality and unreality, materiality and immateriality. Ariadne goes for a walk in the city that she knows from her childhood. She doubts, though, whether anybody else has ever idled in this city. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 348 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 348 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 349 Even in this imagined city, the relationship between the city and a woman’s body is at the center of attention. The city becomes an imprint on Ariadne’s body: Ihre Bluse ist eine Membran, ihre Jacke ein Stück Seidenpapier. Zuerst ist sie dünn angezogen, unterwegs zieht sie weitere Schichten an. Jede Gasse, durch die sie geht, legt sich auf ihre Schultern. Jeder Schatten, der sich auf ihren Rücken wirft, bleibt dort kleben. Eine seltsame Feuchtigkeit dampft aus der Haut der Straßenbäume und bildet ein unsichtbares Netz um ihren Kopf. Ihr wird es immer wärmer. Sie läßt keinen Weg hinter sich, sondern sie zieht alle Wege an, als wären sie Kleidungsstükke. (203) Ariadne’s body and the city’s body build a single organism. Their relationship constitutes a biological symbiosis in which one influences the other, cannot live without the other; they are inseparable. The city’s streets leave marks on Ariadne’s body. They stick to her back and shoulders. She also pulls at the streets and does not want to leave them behind. Ariadne’s strolling in the city is probably the most vivid embodiment of the connection of Benjamin’s version of the flâneur, of the opium smoker, of the Ovidean Ariadne, and the notion of the city as a labyrinth. In the quotation above, one finds Benjamin’s metaphors of the net and the coat - the net as a web of surfaces and ornaments that are visible, the coat as a cover that protects objects. City streets are coats that cover Ariadne’s body - the street’s shadows are on her skin, creating a perfect «Netzhaut» or retina. In fact, Ariadne «sees» with her body, and, at the same time, the city is part of her body. Thus Tawada resists the dichotomy of observer and observed, of subjects and objects. Tawada’s flâneuse is a product of a postmodern world, where hierarchies are destabilized. Her relationship to the city is no longer about possessing or evaluating, but rather an organic exchange between her and her environment reflecting flexibility and totality. Tawada animates the city. The city has a body and acts like a living organism. She represents it as an animal that swallows the passers-by: Ab und zu wird sie [Ariadne] von einem Loch verschluckt und aus einem anderen Loch wieder ausgespuckt. Diese Stadt ist ein Tier mit zahllosen Körperöffnungen. Es speist lebendige Passanten, genauer gesagt speist es nur die breiartigen Gedanken aus dem Kopf der Passanten. (203) The city is not just a labyrinth where one can be lost, enter one hole and exit from another, but rather the city is like a Minotaur who eats people’s ideas and thoughts. Yet the city does not represent a monster since Tawada rejects the notion of a city as an «other» or as an object. People are organic parts of the city, and the city is an organic part of people’s life. They constitute a single CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 349 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 349 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 350 Ekaterina Pirozhenko body. Therefore, a personalized city that digests people’s thoughts also appropriates them and makes then part of its body. In Ariadne’s imagined city, streets stick to her body and veil it like a dress. At the same time, streets are part of a Minotaur who can eat people’s thoughts. Ariadne also experiences a metamorphosis. She feels herself transformed into a side street: «als sei sie selbst eine der stillen Gassen. Andere Menschen gehen durch ihren Körper hindurch, manchmal nehmen sie einige unbrauchbare Adjektive von ihr mit, oder hinterlassen dort überflüssig gewordene Gedanken. Man sieht sie nie wieder» (206). A woman’s body is like a street, and a street is like a woman’s body; people penetrate those bodies that have holes. 18 Interactions between the bodies of women and the city and the idea of being lost in the labyrinth of relationships and interactions can be understood as the fluidity of women’s identity. Elizabeth Grosz writes, «Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react» (XI). Because of permanent interaction between outer and inner, borders are destabilized. The female body is characterized by fluidity: «Blood, vomit, saliva, phlegm, pus, sweat, tears, menstrual blood, seminal fluids, seep, flows, pass with different degrees of control, tracing the paths of entry or exit, the routes of interchange or traffic with the world» (195). Since the identity of all women constantly changes and since women interact with the environment and experience organic exchange as in the quotation above, Tawada shows that neither an original nor the ultimate single identity exists. Due to the lack of a stable identity, one cannot see the «same» woman again. The narrator who tells the stories of 22 women also begins to doubt who she is and suspects that she was transformed into a side street like Ariadne: «Ich war auch unter den vielen Passanten, die gerne durch diese Gassen gegangen sind. Eines Tages verlor ich mich, wie man einen Handschuh verliert. Seitdem weiß ich nicht mehr, wo ich gerade gehe, vielleicht habe ich mich auch in eine Gasse verwandelt» (206). Ariadne, the narrator, and the city merge into one whole. The topography of a flâneuse and the city merge. The dichotomy of a subject and an object is broken. The interaction between the flâneuse and the urban environment is so vivid that one cannot separate one from the other. Tawada places the flâneuse in a new context. Published in 2000, Tawada’s Opium für Ovid meets all parameters of literature coined as postmodern and postcolonial. Postmodern cultural production is characterized above all by the plurality of contemporary knowledge, cultures, life styles, social concepts, etc. Multiple ways of thinking and multiple perspectives coexist with one other. In his work Unsere postmoderne Moderne, philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, one of the important theoreticians of postmodernity, has argued that postmodernity is a historical phase in which plurality is real and recognized CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 350 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 350 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 351 as a core of society and is fundamentally opposed to old hegemonies and hierarchies thanks to a global democratization of society (5). Plurality also suggests multiplicity of cultures and rethinking of what cultures mean. In order to accept minority groups in terms of their lifestyles, language, and cultural production, one should understand the complexity of cultures as social constructs and understand that cultures are not fixed or closed entities, but are flexible. In the age of globalization, more and more cultures overlap and create new cultural formations. The term multiculturalism was criticized for the assumption that cultures are fixed, and it has been gradually replaced by the term transculturalism, which implies the constant interchange, interference, interaction, and webbing of cultures. The definition of our time as «postcolonial» implies that the relationship between colonizing and colonized countries has been revisited in terms of cultural transfers. If the former relationship between the two entities was thought to be unilateral and hierarchically structured - that the colonizing country superimposed its culture upon the colonized - the current view of the process of colonization has shifted toward the recognition of mutual cultural influences - the colonizing countries are also culturally influenced by the colonized ones. The concepts of postmodernity and postcolonialism have had an impact on literary studies as well. Describing features of contemporary art and literature, Paul Michael Lützeler identifies the movement toward a plurality of styles, toward respect for historical context; a movement from scrutiny of empirical knowledge toward artistic incorporation of playfulness; a movement from strictly «pure» styles toward preferences of popular forms and eclectic and hybrid styles; a movement from monological discourse toward doubleand multiencoding and polysemy (33). The positioning of the subject has also moved away from a Eurocentric, dominant patriarchal one toward an ethnic-, gender-, and region-specific orientation. The belief in historical continuity no longer appears justified and has been replaced by the acceptance of historical discontinuity and longing for a new dialog with history. Taking into account postmodern and postcolonial notions, I conclude that Tawada plays with the concepts of the European heritage. 19 It is not the first time that Tawada has gone back to Greco-Roman mythology. In 1998, she published her radio play Orpheus oder Izanagi in which she combines the myth of Orpheus and the world of the dead with the Japanese figure Izanagi. Like in the radio play, Tawada mixes European and Japanese traditions in Opium. She takes as a core for Opium one of the canonical texts of European literature - Ovid’s Metamorphoses - appropriates it and transforms it significantly. Moreover, her text constitutes a dialogue with Ovid and responds to his status as an embodiment of the European tradition and legacy. As Myung- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 351 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 351 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 352 Ekaterina Pirozhenko Hwa Cho-Sobotka points out, the title Kopfkissenbuch indicates an appreciation of the tradition of Japanese women writers: anderseits verweist die Bezeichnung Kopfkissenbuch auf eine Tradition der japanischen Literatur, einer berühmten Tagebucherzählung der Hofdame Sei Shonagon aus der Heian-Zeit (793-1185), deren Blüte sich insbesondere durch zeitgenössische berühmte Frauen mit ihrer literarischen Kreativität in nie da gewesenem Maße herausgebildet hat. Autorinnen wie Izumi Shikibu, Murasaki Shikibu und Sei Shonagon haben zwischen Ende des 10. bis Anfang des 11. Jahrhunderts das Goldene Zeitalter der japanischen Literatur mitgestaltet und geprägt. (173) Just as the diary of the court lady Sei Shonagon was written as a first-person narrative and consisted of small episodes in her life, Tawada connects her first-person narrator with Ovidean mythological characters. Moreover, Tawada’s Opium constitutes an uprising against European literary tradition. It is not just opium for Ovid; rather it is an opium war against Ovid according to the first-person narrator: «Ein Opium gegen Ovid, mein Opiumkrieg ist noch nicht zu Ende» (172). It is a war against European cultural hegemony. In many passages of the text, Tawada goes back to colonial aspects of our globalized world. Her narrator says she wants to be free of colonial power: «ich will meine Schmerzen selbst komponieren, keine Abhängigkeit von einer Kolonialmacht» (172). Tawada addresses the colonial opium war amongst China, India, and Great Britain. 20 Her characters also negate the colonial authority of European literary traditions as they want to be free of these ties. For instance, when asked about her opinion about Joyce, Proust, or Musil, the writer Coronis in Opium says that she does not want to have grandfathers, «Ich möchte keinen Großvater haben […] Ich möchte keine Vorfahren haben und keine Nachkommen erzeugen» (91). Thus, Coronis denies the patriarchal authority of European writers and pleads for the postcolonial revision of the literary tradition. Using mythological figures from Ovid, Tawada questions the validity of European identity and subjectivity. Tawada’s flâneuses challenge the notion of the European disembodied observer. Her flâneuses are moving bodies that interact with the changing city environment, that move across city borders, that eliminate the borders between private and public spaces, and that struggle for a postcolonial and transnational reading of the city. In fact, because of Tawada’s resistance to subject/ object, same/ other dichotomies, her flâneuses are migrants in the sense that they are never at the same place, but always move towards the next change. They are also not really subjects. Tawada’s flâneuses do not have stable identities, and they are in a mutual interaction/ movement/ playfulness/ migration with the city environment. Tawada constructs the flâneuses’ dynamic life force as a positive model. These flâneuses experience magical transformations, CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 352 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 352 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 353 not mythical ones. Myth refers to our societal structure that has specific strict prescriptions on how to live, to behave, even to think. Especially the restrictive, prescribed lifestyle and behavior come from rational prescriptions of a patriarchal society from which women often do not benefit. Such prescriptions rob women of their potential development. The ability and the courage to transform oneself nevertheless lead to the kind of freedom the women in Tawada’s Opium experience. Developing this human potential to transform oneself could be equated to letting magic into one’s life. It can lead to breaking harsh restrictive bonds. Thus, boundaries between the individual and the environment become porous. In Tawada’s texts a woman rejects being used as an object and asserts her subjectivity. But it is not the traditional self-centered subjectivity of the male flâneur, but rather a kind of intersubjective existence, in which the ‹other› is not objectified or incorporated, but offered mutual experience. Notes 1 See Schmitz-Emans 390. 2 See Schmitz-Emans 392. 3 See «metamorphosis» in Oxford English Dictionary online: http: / / dictionary.oed.com. proxy.cc.uic.edu/ . 4 The body plays an enormous role in Tawada’s writing. Moreover, Tawada herself participates in theater workshops and performances, where reading and movement of the body complement each other. 5 In the Ovidean text, Galanthis helps her mistress, Alcmena, to give birth to Heracles - for which she is punished and transformed into a weasel by the gods. 6 «Sie [Thetis] wanderte den ganzen Tag, schaute meistens auf ihre Füße» (118). 7 In Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Clymene is mentioned as the mother of Phaeton, who wants her to prove that his father is the god of the sun Helios. In other versions of the Greek myth, Clymene is an Oceanid named Asia. 8 Nomadism is usually defined as a way of life or a form of social organization in which people without permanent settlement move from place to place within a defined territory in search of better hunting, gathering, or pasture for their animals. Because international borders are more secured nowadays, tribal nomadism across state borders has become complicated. Due to people’s social and physical mobility in the global era, the notion of nomadism can refer to people’s disconnectedness from one particular place, and nomadism, in the view of one observer, has become a common mode: «Nomads live in a disconnected world much of the time as they travel between their office, home, airport, hotel, automobile, branch office, bedroom, etc. Thus they must take the disconnected state as a ‹usual› one, instead of an ‹exceptional› one. To be disconnected is not a failure mode, as is the current view. Rather, it is a common mode» (Goyal 67). 9 «Da Galanthis viel spazieren geht, halten ihre Schuhe nicht lange. Mit alten Schuhen ist oft ein Gefühl der Intimität verbunden. Auf dem Bett liegend, betrachtet Galanthis ihre Schuhe, die in der Ecke des Zimmers stehen. Wo ihre Schuhe stehen, ist sie zu Hause. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 353 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 353 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 354 Ekaterina Pirozhenko Sie hat plattgedrückte, flache Schuhe, graue Turnschuhe und auch lange, geschmeidige Stiefel, die bis über die Knie reichen» (23). 10 Leda was impregnated by Zeus in the shape of a swan in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 11 In Ovid’s epic, having been impregnated by Apollo, Coronis commits adultery with another man. A white crow flies to Apollo to deliver the news of Coronis’s betrayal to him. In his rage, Apollo turns the white crow’s feathers black. Coronis is punished and burned alive for her unfaithfulness. 12 Tawada calls Benjamin a «language magician»: «Benjamin ist nicht nur Theoretiker der Sprachmagie, sondern auch ein Magier der Sprache. Er praktiziert selbst eine ‹Lektüre der Dinge›, in der deren magische Momente aufblitzen» (Spielzeug 19). 13 «The word magic comes from ancient Persia - the Magi were a class of priests - and the Greeks turned the word into mageia, later becoming magia in Latin. Both mageia and magia had negative associations that still exist today. A dictionary definition of magic reflects this general negativity when it describes magic as ‹the pretended art of influencing [the] course of events by occult [hidden] control of nature or of spirits, witchcraft; black, white, natural, - (involving invocation of devils, angels no personal spirit); inexplicable or remarkable influence producing surprising results›. So magic is a pretended art that produces results that are both surprising and cannot be explained» (Greenwood 5). 14 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scylla is initially a beautiful nymph, loved by Glaucus, who is turned by her rival Circe into a monster and later into a rock. 15 In Book IV, Ovid tells the love story of Thisbe and Pyramus. While their parents forbid them to see each other, as neighbors they can communicate with each other through a crack in the wall. They agree to meet each other under a mulberry tree. However, due to misunderstanding, Pyramus kills himself thinking that a lion murdered Thisbe. After Thisbe sees his dead body, she kills herself with the same sword. Because their blood stains the berries on the tree, mulberries are red (121-57). 16 I talked about bodies and their surrounding world with Tawada in Berlin in summer 2010 and am very thankful for her insights. 17 Since Iphis’ father, Ligdus, wants to have a boy, her mother, Telethusa, does not reveal to him the birth of the daughter. She hides the betrayal by raising the girl and dressing her as a boy until the time of the marriage to Ianthe approached. Responding to Telethusa’s prayers to help her, Isis transforms the girl into a boy. After the metamorphosis, a happy wedding takes place (See Ovid 337). 18 For instance: «Diese Stadt ist ein Tier mit zahllosen Körperöffnungen» (203). 19 Tawada is not the only author with a transnational background who plays with European identity and the literary canon in Germany. For instance, in analyzing Aras Ören’s Eine verspätete Abrechnung oder Der Aufstieg der Gündog ˘ dus, Elizabeth Loentz points out that the Turkish-German author adverts to Homer’s Odyssey: «By positioning himself as Odysseus, the hero of a building block or canonical text of «European» culture, the narrator lays claim to a place within this tradition. The choice of the Odyssey is especially interesting due to its significance in terms of a kind of cultural currency appropriated as «European,» but stemming from a part of the world that today has marginal European standing» (101). 20 For more examples of the opium and «tea» wars between India, China, and the United Kingdom, see Cho-Sobotka 199. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 354 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 354 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Flâneuses, Bodies, and the City 355 Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. London: Vintage, 1993. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. «Der Flaneur.» Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.2. Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp, 1980. 537-69. -. «Einbahnstraße.» Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 4.1. Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp, 1980. 83-148. -. «Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen.» Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 6. Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp, 1980. 558- 618. -. «Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2.1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. 140-57. Brandt, Bettina. «Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada.» Women in German Yearbook 21 (2005): 1-15. Buck-Morss, Susan. «The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.» Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Ed. Beatrice Hanssen. London, New York: Continuum, 2006. 33-65. Cho-Sobotka, Myung-Hwa. Auf der Suche nach dem weiblichen Subjekt. Studien zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina, Elfriede Jelineks Die Klavierspielerin und Yoko Tawadas Opium für Ovid. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. «The Laugh of the Medusa.» New French Feminism. An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 245-64. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. «Metamorphic Changes in the Arts.» Real 20 (2004): 39-58. Freud, Sigmund. Cocaine Papers. Ed. Robert Byck. New York: Stonehill, 1974. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and The Postmodern. Berkeley: U California P, 1993. Goyal, O.P. Nomads at the Crossroads. Delhi: Isha Books, 2005. Greenwood, Susan. The Anthropology of Magic. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2009. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994. Hessel, Franz. «Städte und Porträts.» Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Ed. Hartmut Vollmer and Bernd Witte. Oldenburg: Igel, 1999. Hetheringdon, Kevin. Capitalism’s Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kleist, Heinrich. Über das Marionettentheater. Aufsätze und Anekdoten. Frankfurt: Insel, 2007. Krakauer, Siegfried. Straßen in Berlin und anderswo. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. Loentz, Elizabeth. «A Turkish-German Odyssey: Aras Ören’s Eine verspätete Abrechnung oder Der Aufstieg der Gündog ˘ dus.» Writing against Boundaries: Nationality, Ethnicity and Gender in the German-speaking Context. Ed. Barbara Kosta and Helga Kraft. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2003. 99-112. Lützeler, Paul Michael. Postmoderne und postkoloniale deutschsprachige Literatur. Diskurs - Analyse - Kritik. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 355 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 355 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 356 Ekaterina Pirozhenko Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Charles Martin. New York: Norton, 2005. Perry, Kathleen Anne. Another Reality. Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch and Ronsard. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. «Metamorphose und Metempsychose. Zwei konkurrierende Modelle von Verwandlung im Spiegel der Gegenwartsliteratur.» Arcadia 40 (2005): 390-413. Tawada, Yoko. Opium für Ovid. Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2001. -. «Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht.» Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2003. 45-51. -. «Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Ein deutsches Rätsel.» Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2003. 28-38. -. Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Eine ethnologische Poetologie. Tübingen: Konkursverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2000. -. Orpheus oder Izanagi. Hörspiel. Till. Theaterstück. Tübingen: Konkursverlag Claudia Gehrke, 1998. Thury, Eva M., and Margaret K. Devinney. Introduction to Mythology. Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Welsch, Wolfgang. Unsere postmoderne Moderne. 6th ed. Berlin: Akademie, 2002. Wolf, Christa. Medea. Stimmen. München: Luchterhand, 1996. -. Kassandra. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1983. Wolff, Janet. «The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.» Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990. 34-50. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 356 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 356 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews B RAD P RAGER : Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. viii + 287 pp. $ 75. From its own day through to ours - and particularly in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s pioneering dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1920) - German Romanticism has tended to be interpreted as a literary movement bound up in complex fashion with post-Kantian German philosophy. Since the major figures of so-called first-generation or «Jena» Romanticism attended Fichte’s seminars, took copious notes, and wove figurative elaborations, parodies, and critiques of «critical philosophy» into their texts, no special pleading is required to understand Romanticism as a hybrid phenomenon: a literary movement energized and perhaps even defined by its proximity to poetry’s ancient antagonist, philosophy. And in recent years the Konstellationsforschung school of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank has emphasized the conceptual incisiveness of the engagement with Fichtean philosophy that characterized the «constellation» of writers that shone so brightly (if so briefly) at or around Jena in the late 1790s. Brad Prager only sporadically refers to such critics. He shares their point of departure, but he redefines the parameters to the point that the Jena circle, centered on the Schlegels and Novalis, barely flickers into view in his study. Instead of following out webs of public and private communications with an eye toward making Jena Romanticism into a corporate reflection on and critique of Fichte, Prager offers a general thesis - that Romanticism figures and reflects on the «self-producing subject» of idealist philosophy - and then goes on to study texts and paintings by nine late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century German writers and artists who moved in a variety of circles or contexts (though since the world of letters was small, they tended to know each other, to the point of even occasionally editing or writing about each other). The guiding thread is Prager’s interest in vision and the visual arts. After providing an introduction on Kant, Fichte, and the beginnings of idealist philosophy, Prager offers chapters on Lessing’s Laokoon (1766); on Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796-97) in conjunction with Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798); on Brentano’s strange novel Godwi (1801); on paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch; on paintings by Philipp Otto Runge; on Kleist’s stories «Die heilige Cäcilie» (1810) and «Der Findling» (1811); and on Eichendorff’s novella Das Marmorbild (1819). A brief conclusion reinvokes the post-Kantian philosophical tradition and characterizes Romanticism as an «inwardly directed movement» driven by the undecidability of «the question of whether the world figures the self or the self figures the world» (227). The more heterogeneous one’s clutch of examples, the thinner one’s unifying principle tends to get; and obviously the risk Prager has taken here is that his close studies of his chosen authors and texts will be linked to each other by a Romantic inwardness CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 357 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 357 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 358 Besprechungen / Reviews of near gossamer abstraction - an empty dance of «self» and «world» stripped of the textual and conceptual complexities that emerge when, say, one is examining in detail how Novalis argues with and tropes on Fichte. Two separable impulses seemed to have animated this book: on the one hand, a desire to write about visual as well as literary texts; on the other hand, a firm (and as noted above, quite traditional, and quite defensible) conviction that German Romanticism needs to be understood in relation to Kant’s «Copernican revolution» in philosophy. Prager seeks a connecting body for these two wings of his text in the metaphor of reflection, which he presses toward a literally visual register by reminding us of Fichte’s fantasies of an eye that could see itself seeing. (Here Prager cites a helpfully authoritative remark by Dieter Henrich: «Der Gedanke eines Blickes, der sich selbst erfaßt, hat Fichte von 1801 an und während der letzten dreizehn Jahre seines Lebens unverändert fasziniert.» [Henrich, «Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht,» Subjektivität und Metaphysik: Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer, eds. Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1966) 209, cit. Prager 9]). The figure of reflection is unquestionably bound up with that of eye and gaze, and in principle there probably was a way for Prager to have woven a densely coherent meditation on seeing and thinking by way of his chosen novels, paintings, and stories. In practice, however, the close readings tend to have a somewhat distant relationship to the Fichtean problematic with which the book begins, as Prager himself admits: «My aim was not to produce the perfect template, in which all things Romantic become transformations of Fichtean idealism, but rather to show the pervasiveness of the Romantic uncertainty surrounding representation, as well as the many nuanced responses» (227-28). Fair enough. But inevitably the result is a conclusion with somewhat attenuated content. The value of Prager’s study will therefore depend on the quality of its individual acts of close reading of those various «nuanced responses» to that rather abstractly couched predicament, «the Romantic uncertainty surrounding representation.» Delivering close and interestingly contextualized readings of a suite of texts is really as much as most literary studies aspire to provide, and Prager’s readers will profit from his knowledgeable and keen-eyed studies of ekphrastic figuration and aesthetic meditation in his chosen texts and paintings. The discussions of Friedrich, Koch, and Runge will be of particular interest to a literary audience; let me also single out Prager’s innovative reading of the ways in which Brentano’s novel (or anti-novel) Godwi «examines the limits imposed on the process of signification» (192). And though I have quibbled over the abstracted thinness of this book’s overarching theme, thinness is not simply bad; it can cut like a knife. Noting that «visual aesthetics, like all cultural practices of interpretation, is […] essentially rhetorical» (230), Prager reads his paintings and novels as texts that reflect back to us our own inability to see ourselves seeing. Thus Romanticism, making its narratives and images out of the shards of that Fichtean dream of pure vision, tells us a version of the story of our modernity. Brown University Marc Redfield CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 358 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 358 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 359 K ATHARINA G ERSTENBERGER : Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post- Wall Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 220 pp. $ 75. Katharina Gerstenberger’s new book, Writing the New Berlin, is an important contribution to the ongoing examinations of the shift in cultural and literary production in post-unification Germany. Her focus on representations of Berlin in the 1990s highlights the German-specific reunification process but also contextualizes it within the ongoing processes of modernization and globalization. Gerstenberger begins the study by recounting the myriad calls by literary critics and cultural pundits for a Berlin reunification novel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is quick to point out that such a novel never materialized. Germany and the Germans were, Gerstenberger surmises, too diverse, German history too complicated, and the changes that German society was undergoing too problematic to be captured in a single novel about the newly reunited capital of one of Europe’s newest and increasingly diverse nation states. Adding to the impossibility of the reunification novel was the rapid realignment of cultural production and the relative marginalization of literature that took place as part of the process of normalization that followed the end of the Cold War in Germany. It is the non-arrival of the so-called «reunification novel» that is the starting point of Gerstenberger’s study. She focuses on the hundreds of other texts that fill the void of the never-to-be-written Berlin reunification novel and which, in a more limited fashion, negotiate the shifts in the socio-cultural landscape of Berlin and the post-wall German identities that take form there. Her task is thus twofold: to trace how German identity is constructed and negotiated within the texts she examines while remaining conscious of the changes in cultural production that come to bear on literature during the period. The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter is dedicated to a thematically oriented examination of the varied ways in which identity has been renegotiated in Berlin literature in the 1990s. The first chapter focuses on the city and its erotic sites; the second on the monstrous scars of Berlin’s past, namely the Holocaust and the Wall; the third on the imagining of a Jewish Berlin; the fourth on negotiating the disappearance of East Berlin; and the fifth on the attempt to find new perspectives at the building site of Postdamer Platz, a space in which the national past comes into conflict with a global, internationally oriented future. The five chapters can each be read individually but are also connected by an underlying logic of historical trajectory. The first chapter examines literary connections to the erotic Berlin of the Weimar Republic and leads into the second chapter, which explores the monstrosity of the Holocaust and the traces left on the post-Nazi city. Chapter three then goes on to investigate the possibilities for a post-Holocaust Jewish space in Berlin and leads to an examination of the vanishing East in chapter four. Both of these chapters focus on the literary representations of voids and absences in present-day Berlin. Chapter five moves the study into the future and explores the active renegotiation of German identity as it is found in representations of the Potsdamer Platz, a space that, in one way or another, links the previously discussed themes and points toward a German future in a global context. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 359 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 359 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 360 Besprechungen / Reviews The strength of Gerstenberger’s book lies in the wealth of her primary materials. She introduces close to three hundred primary works and gives excellent introductory readings of many of these, including works by Peter Schneider, Christa Wolf, Tanja Dückers, Ingo Schramm, Zafer Senocak, and Yadé Kara. This wealth of material is, unfortunately, also the weakness of the study. There are times when the reader wonders why a particular author’s work was included and another work or author left out. One wonders why a particular passage is quoted in full but so much of the novel left unexamined. The answer seems to be that those works and passages that fit best with the themes which Gerstenberger chose to organize her book around were included and cited extensively while much of the material that didn’t fit these themes was left out or marginalized. This is, of course, the danger inherent in any work that attempts to broadly survey the literary production of a period while exploring particular themes across works. What I found lacking was a compelling argument as to why the work was organized around the themes Gerstenberger chose. Did these themes emerge from her extensive readings of 1990s Berlin literature? Or were the themes chosen because of their relative importance as commonplaces of the discourse on modern German identity? One suspects the latter, but Gerstenberger never makes this clear. In all fairness though, the project is not intended to be encyclopedic, and Gerstenberger manages to provide a good overview of the period with some particularly interesting readings based on the themes she chose to highlight. What I found more troubling was the elevated status some works acquired simply because they resonated with and where seen to explore the identity themes around which the study was organized. One wonders, for example, why Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir and Judith Hermann’s Sommerhaus, später receive a passing paragraph while Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone is discussed in great detail. I still need to be convinced that Dückers’s work is somehow more significant to the renegotiation of post-unification German identity than the others. I think one could just as easily make the opposite case. Nevertheless, the study offers sound, well-researched insights into the works examined and should be included alongside works like Stuart Taberner’s German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond and Moritz Baßler’s Der deutsche Pop-Roman by scholars and students hoping to understand German literary production in the 1990s. Just as our ideas about cultural production in the Weimar period continue to evolve with historical distance, so too will our understanding of the profound changes in German culture in the 1990s. Gerstenberger should be commended for tackling such difficult material so soon. Her book helps lay the groundwork for future studies of the period. University of Kentucky Jeff Rogers S TUART P ARKES : Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945-2008. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. x + 239 pp. $ 65. Perhaps the title of the present study may not immediately reveal to the reader that the author is dealing with a time-honored topic that particularly in a German context is frequently couched in the antithetically perceived terms of «Geist und Macht.» But in his introduction Parkes does provide a brief survey of the problematic relationship CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 360 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 360 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 361 between the representatives of the two spheres by referring, for instance, to the opposing views of the Mann brothers Heinrich, champion of «the world of intellect» (3) and admirer of the French Revolution, and Thomas, erstwhile defender of German Innerlichkeit (1). To be sure, as a consequence of the disastrous pre-1945 German history the concept of Innerlichkeit had lost its luster, and Parkes acknowledges the shift in emphasis by indicating his intent to provide specific and reliable information about postwar writers’ engagement in the political arena as «public intellectuals» (5) who are avoiding the proverbial ivory tower and express their support of or opposition to the various representatives of the political sphere in both divided and unified Germany. By offering a wealth of pertinent information that generally serves him as the basis for drawing well-reasoned, tenable conclusions, Parkes essentially achieves his goal of summarizing as well as elucidating «the political and literary developments» (5) from the immediate postwar period to the twenty-first century. This period of more than sixty years, which in political terms extends from the crushing defeat of Nazi Germany to the Cold War and the division of the country, unification, the Berlin Republic and the “grand coalition” of 2005-09 formed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, is characterized by literary developments that range from the vaunted Stunde Null of 1945 and the subsequent Trümmerand Kahlschlagliteratur (12) to Gruppe 47, the revival of literature under different auspices in both West and East, its survival of the serious challenge posed by the revolting West Berlin and FRG students of the 1960s whose slogan «Schlagt die Germanistik tot/ Färbt die blaue Blume rot» (not cited by Parkes) was indicative of the presumed social irrelevance of literary pursuits. But the «death of literature» proclaimed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and others proved to be premature; as Parkes judiciously remarks, the entire «debate can be seen as merely a brief episode» (81). After all, writers continued to produce literary works in both East - despite the limitations imposed by the cultural policies of the SED - and West; eventually a German literature emerged that was no longer subject to the obstacles and restrictions imposed by the political division. The study is divided into two major parts; the unification process of 1989-90 provides a both convenient and obvious turning point in Parkes’s coverage of the period in question. Although the structuring of chapters according to decades in the first part may appear somewhat rigid, Parkes posits the primacy of political events and developments by providing at the beginning of each chapter brief summaries of such developments before analyzing the literary responses and debates they evoked. Unsurprisingly, writers’ preferred mode of intervening was by means of their pen; less frequently, they responded by becoming actively involved in the political process. Günter Grass’s energetic engagements in election campaigns on behalf of Willy Brandt and the SPD, which ultimately contributed to Brandt becoming Chancellor (1969-74), are presumably one of the best-known examples of a writer’s active participation in the political sphere. At the same time, the (temporary) cooperative relationship between Brandt and Grass as well as other intellectuals was not entirely unproblematic; the comparative brevity of the «honeymoon» (a coinage by journalist Dieter E. Zimmer; 92) is indicative of the fact that the collaboration between politicians and intellectuals in the FRG constituted the exception rather than the norm. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 361 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 361 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 362 Besprechungen / Reviews It goes without saying that there is a broad spectrum of persons, events, and developments that writers felt called upon to respond to or to take issue with; in general, Parkes provides both a sufficiently detailed account and circumspect assessment that steers clear of excessive claims about the political significance of intellectuals. Nevertheless, he regards their role as by no means negligible and credits them with contributing to the establishment of «the democracy of the [pre-unification] Federal Republic» (196) - no mean feat in view of the sometimes open hostility towards and contempt of writers on the part of prominent CDU/ CSU politicians such as Ludwig Erhard and Franz Josef Strauß, the «bête noir of intellectuals» (89). In the election campaign of 1965 Erhard condescendingly characterized intellectual critics as «ganz kleine Pinscher,» and in the 1978 campaign Strauß disdainfully dismissed writers and their ilk as «Ratten und Schmeißfliegen.» Ultimately, the numerous controversies attracted considerable public notice and contributed to a change in the perception about the function of writers and their role in the democratic process. As to the GDR, perhaps Parkes’s cautiously expressed opinion that writers were seeking to improve «the political system» (196) of their state tends to understate the hurdles they faced; the notorious Biermann affair of 1976 is a case in point; the administrative obstacles imposed upon writers by Hermann Kant, long-time president of the GDR Schriftstellerverband, among others, severely restricted reform efforts and ultimately impeded writers’ creative process. The Literaturstreit concerning the (belated) publication of Christa Wolf’s Was bleibt (1990) offers a prime example of the consequences of a writer’s acquiescing in restrictive cultural policies. As is to be expected of a detailed, analytical survey such as the volume under discussion, a useful apparatus consisting of a fairly comprehensive section of Works Cited and an Index facilitates readers’ orientation. Yet there are also a number of mostly minor errata such as misspellings and mistranslations; specifically, it appears odd that in a work presumably intended for English-speaking readers in general and literary scholars at the beginning of their careers in particular the translation of titles of literary works is handled inconsistently in that only in rare instances information about extant English renderings is provided (see, e.g., Martin Walser’s Eiche und Angora; 168). Ultimately, however, such minor blemishes cannot significantly detract from the general usefulness of the volume. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Siegfried Mews R UTH B. B OTTIGHEIMER : Fairy Tales: A New History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 152 pp. $ 14.95. How old are fairy tales? Were they part of the oral tradition of our distant ancestors, or are they a more recent invention, a product of the new print culture of the Renaissance? Exactly when, where, and why did they first appear? And - a question upon which all the others turn - how should «fairy tale» be defined? These are issues Ruth B. Bottigheimer has worked with for years, and in this deftly written book she draws her conclusions together into a history of the fairy tale from Straparola to Grimm. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 362 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 362 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 363 We need a new history of the fairy tale, she argues, because of widespread misconceptions about this genre embraced not only by the general public, but also some of the critics. Chief among these misconceptions is the belief that the fairy tales we tell today were devised by country folk and transmitted by word of mouth for centuries until people like Perrault and Grimm took the initiative to write them down. She is of course not the first to maintain that there never was an oral fairy tale, or oral wonder tale, that possessed the same quality and aesthetic force as our popular fairy tales do today, or that in general the storytellers of old were not very good at preserving complex narratives by word of mouth over generations. This critical line stretches from Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer’s skepticism about the creative limits of the oral tradition («The folk does not produce; it reproduces.») through Albert Wesselski, Detlev Fehling and Rudolf Schenda, to Hans-Jörg Uther, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, and an increasing number of critics today. And even many who conclude that there must have been an old oral wonder tale tradition (Jack Zipes, for example) see its pre-literate manifestations as much less sophisticated than the literary tales of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. But Bottigheimer draws an especially sharp line between what Straparola was doing and what came before. Thus this book, which sets out to replace the romantic, «oralist» view of this tradition with a new «book-based history of fairy tales.» No time is wasted marveling at the genre’s mystical aura, or the fascinating vagueness of its origins. Her subject is something specific: «fairy tales as we know them in the modern world» (115), wonder tales in the style of Straparola, Perrault and Grimm, and more specifically «the tales of magic that end in weddings» and «the beginning of life lived happily ever after.» «Common usage,» she says, «and scholarly terminology both recognize these tales as fairy tales» (6). As she presents her case and explains what a fairy tale is and what it is not, she proceeds systematically, drawing several sorts of distinctions: urban versus rural; fairy tales versus «tales of fairyland»; secular magic versus religious magic; rise tales versus restoration tales; and fairy tales versus «genuine folk tales.» «Folk tales,» she says, «differ from fairy tales in their structure, their cast of characters, their plot trajectories, and their age» (4). It is here, in the plot structure, that she finds her core definition of the genre. The real center of this storytelling, she argues, is not the restoration tale (where protagonists are driven from home and later return to their original social position and wealth) but the rise tale, and specifically the well-known rise tale plot in which poor protagonists are the beneficiaries of magical intervention that enable them to marry royalty and become wealthy. «Rise fairy tales,» she explains, «begin with a dirt-poor girl or boy who suffers the effects of grinding poverty and whose story continues with tests, tasks, and trials until magic brings about a marriage to royalty and a happy ascension to great wealth» (11-12). Is the rise tale she describes in fact at the center of the whole genre, and is this plot structure the key to understanding the fairy tale’s distinct qualities and lasting popularity? If so, then some of our best-known stories, at least in their most popular variants, are slightly off-center, since they are restoration tales, for example: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Goose Girl, and Cinderella. On this issue she does address Cinderella, and in defense of her argument she points out that it is «generally understood to be a rise fairy tale» (13). As in her earlier work, Bottigheimer puts the origin of the rise tale she describes in the Italian Renaissance city, where the new prosperity inspired people to dream CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 363 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 363 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 364 Besprechungen / Reviews dreams of fabulous personal success, even in places where the economy was experiencing a temporary slump. Venice in Straparola’s day offered particularly fertile ground for the development of this plot structure, she concludes, in part because it was illegal there for noblemen and commoners to intermarry, so that a story about successful marriage into the nobility required a far-away setting. For these reasons, therefore, it was Venice that gave birth to «the world’s first perfected rise fairy tale» (95), Straparola’s «Costantino Fortunato,» one of several new narratives of this type that struck a chord with people at the threshold of the world we live in now. «Rise fairy tales were new stories for a new age. They were stories about people like us» (115). Although Straparola borrowed freely from other authors, he managed, unlike his predecessors, to hit on this rags-through-secular-magicto-marriage-to-riches plot structure that Bottigheimer says is both new and at the center of the tradition. Earlier stories that might seem to fit, she says, actually do not. For example, «Lionbruno,» a fairy tale-like narrative published in the late fifteenth century, does not qualify because its hero marries out of the rise tale sequence she describes. The plot also turns on religious rather than secular magic - another of the measuring sticks by which she judges the genre. If we were to apply her criteria to even older material, for example the Latin medieval story «The Turnip Tale» («Rapularius»), it too would fail to meet these criteria, since the hero of that story likewise does things out of order, skipping over marriage on his way to wealth. The book relates its new history in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Grimms, and here the focus is on how the brothers stumbled at first and did not draw a very clear line between recent literary culture and age-old oral tradition. The Grimms have probably already taken enough heat for their early fuzziness about the status of the stories they were collecting, but revisiting this episode does help Bottigheimer write her new history, since it may be the best example of the wishful thinking that she wrote this book to help stamp out. From the Grimms she moves on - that is, to say, back - to the French fairy tale tradition, where she marshals evidence showing how deeply d’Aulnoy, L’Héritier, Perrault and the others were indebted to the stories of Straparola and Basile. Bottigheimer argues that Perrault «found in Straparola’s stripped-down style a perfect textual model for his project of creating contemporary French tales in a modern mode» (69), suggesting furthermore that it was Perrault’s acquaintance with Straparola’s style that led him to put aside the more sophisticated language of his early stories «Griselidis,» «Peau d’Ane,» and «The Ridiculous Wishes» and, beginning with «The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,» to start writing in a style that would give his prose the look of a simple folk tale. This section contains several nice comparative readings. Perrault is given credit for being a «skilled reformulator» and for other contributions, like creating, with his story «The Fairies,» «the reigning model for modern morality tales, in which magic rewards good behavior» (65). From France we move to Italy, where Bottigheimer places the birth of the fairy tale, and where she gives credit not just to Straparola but also to Basile. She admits that Basile wrote very few rise tales, but given the extraordinary richness of Lo cunto de li cunti and its huge influence, her assignment of co-authorship of the new genre to Basile is unavoidable. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 364 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 364 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 365 For readers already familiar with Bottigheimer’s work, this book is an opportunity to see how her ideas play out as the basis for a short history of the fairy tale. Some will find her definition of the genre to be limited, though the plot structure she sees at its center is a well-worn route to the fairy tale’s «happily ever after,» and she is not the first critic to recognize its importance. There may be a few snags in her argument’s overall historical thread, for example in Basile’s neglect of the rise tale and popular tradition’s embrace of the restoration tale. But she does address these seeming inconsistencies, and in doing so she brings up issues that are thought-provoking in and of themselves. Whatever your opinion about the way this book ropes off its subject, there are flashes of insight here that would not exist if the author had lacked the tenacity to lay hold of this slippery genre, wherever she decided to grab it, and set about trying to pin down its origin and write a brief account of its history. University of Louisville Alan Leidner D EREK H ILLARD : Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2010. 181 pp. $ 47. For those familiar with the biography of the German-language poet Paul Celan, it comes as no surprise that the motif of melancholy, or images of mental illness, surface in his poems. From the winter of 1962-63 on, Celan was hospitalized repeatedly in psychiatric clinics. It is also no coincidence that connections between the poet’s battles with depression and paranoia and his premature death in 1970 have been drawn. In his book Poetry as Individuality: The Language of Observation in the Poetry of Paul Celan, Derek Hillard cautions against viewing the references in the poems to madness, or other psychiatric phenomena, as a simple expression of the poet’s struggles with mental illness - with much justification. The title of Hillard’s book does not betray this, but it presents an extensive study of the motif of madness and the themes related to it. In many fastidious individual discussions of poems, as well as of the famous Georg Büchner Prize address, «Der Meridian,» the author aims to show the interpretive and poetic significance of this «language of madness» in Celan’s work beyond biographical considerations. Using Celan’s statement that «poetry is the language of an individual that has become form» from his Büchner Prize address as starting point, Hillard examines the «efforts at individuation that [Celan’s] poems pursue» (22). With madness as the dominant theme, he focuses on three main motifs that he considers connected to «discourses of self-observation»: Schein (semblance, illusion, appearance), Wahn (madness, delusion), and Wunde (wound, trauma). Hillard divides his study into five main chapters. Chapter One, «The Phenomenology of Illusion,» contains in its first part an investigation of the notion of Schein in an early poem by Celan, «Die letzte Fahne.» In order to demonstrate how poems «conceive of themselves as agents that ward off attacks» (27), Hillard turns to Nietzsche. He is able to apply the opposition between the Dionysian threat to individuality and the shelter against it that Apollonian semblance and appearance provide in The Birth of Tragedy to the poem. He then looks at the notion of Wahn in two additional poems, «Ich kenne dich» and «Kleine Silbe.» Among other details, Hillard CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 365 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 365 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 366 Besprechungen / Reviews discusses the «conflict» between «the clinical and metaphorical concepts of madness and depression» (47). The study continues with readings of Celan’s «melancholy poems,» poems that refer to Schwermut. The chapter concludes with an interpretation of «Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch» from the volume Atemwende. Celan’s engagement with the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is of particular importance for Hillard’s interpretation of these texts. Binswanger’s writings on melancholy facilitate compelling conclusions about the temporality of melancholy in the interpretation of «Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch.» In Chapter Two, entitled «Hallucinations,» Hillard turns to Celan’s 1960 Büchner Prize address, «Der Meridian.» He views the speech as «a reflection on the relationship of madness and literature» (58) and considers writings by Eugen Bleuler and Karl Jaspers as well as a discussion between Foucault and Derrida concerning the relationship of madness to reason. This proves to be particularly useful for understanding the relationship between art and poetry that Celan posits in his speech, and stresses the formal, more narrowly poetic, elements that illustrate the way in which poetry addresses itself «to the entirely other.» The focus on madness also leads him to read the remarks on dates in the speech in the sense that «every poem may be inscribed with its own crises, its own madness, political, experiential, biographical, or linguistic» (73). Hillard also sees here the opportunity for creating a date that is marked by «the voice of the emerging individual in the void of the voice that has been silenced» (ibid.). The reader is able to observe such poetic attempts at the emergence of individuality in the reading of a single poem from the volume Die Niemandsrose, «Huhediblu,» that forms the third chapter of Hillard’s book, entitled «Slivers of the Self.» The interpretation relies fundamentally on ideas set forth by Ludwig Binswanger in his book Melancholie und Manie (1960), a book that Celan read. According to Hillard, the poem exhibits the use of a «manic language» (90) in Binswanger’s understanding but employs it for the projection of «individual meaning into the void of the extinguished» (91). This view opposes the loss of the authentic individual that Binswanger postulates in connection with mental breakdown. Hillard lends further depth to his elucidation of «Huhediblu» by engaging additional contexts, such as essays by Adorno on Valéry and Hölderlin, and by Heidegger on Georg Trakl. In the fourth chapter, «Original Translations,» Hillard seeks to explore another aspect to madness in Celan’s poetry by investigating the link between originality, genius, and illness in the poem «Tübingen, Jänner,» in which the poet refers to, and repeatedly quotes, Friedrich Hölderlin. The chapter recounts in its opening passages not only eighteenth-century Germany’s fascination with origins - especially as represented by the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder - but also a rapid history of the association of madness and (literary) genius. The central goal of Hillard’s reading of «Tübingen, Jänner» is to demonstrate how Celan questions the «essence of natural geniality» (168), as the quote from Hölderlin’s hymn «Der Rhein» in this poem has traditionally been read. According to Hillard’s interpretation, this critique is ultimately aimed at the «claim of authority» that lies at «the core of the ideology of origins» (115). Contrary to other chapters, in which Hillard contradicts the impetus to read Celan’s poetry along biographical lines, he concludes the reading by viewing CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 366 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 366 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 367 the way in which the poem challenges the cult of originality from the perspective of a moment from Celan’s life. This biographical occurrence relates to the plagiarism case leveled against Celan by Claire Goll, since support in this matter from Walter Jens had been one of the purposes of his visit to Tübingen in 1961. Hillard devotes the second half of this fourth chapter on genius and illness to the poem «Ich trink Wein» from the posthumous volume Zeitgehöft. He reads this text in basically the same vein. Celan asserts his «critique of origins and the link between illness and poetry» here not through a technique of recitation (as in «Tübingen, Jänner») but through one of «similarity and semblance» (126). Hillard derives this to a great extent from the use of the simile in the poem. In place of madness, wounds are the central metaphor under investigation in the fifth and last chapter of the book. Hillard glances at a couple of poems from Celan’s early work in order to demonstrate a development with respect to wounds in the late work from which most of the examples in this chapter are taken. While in the early work Celan’s concern was with the wounded body, particularly that of his mother, wounds are more textually based in the late poems. According to Hillard, Celan locates them «in textual bodies» (139). A slight shift takes place towards the end of the last chapter from the investigation of texts that mention wounds explicitly to those that address the psyche and the effects of traumatic events. In all of the last three texts interpreted, the author underlines the figure of repetition that he also links to the texts of Freud, as well as the overarching agenda of the book, the emergence of the individual through the word. The reading of the final poem analyzed in this work («… auch keinerlei») contains the important claim that the poem alters Freud’s theory of the «protective shield.» With Poetry as Individuality, Derek Hillard has written the first comprehensive study of the motif of madness and its related phenomena as they appear in Paul Celan’s poetry. Far from employing a one-sided approach, he tackles this topic from a variety of perspectives - philosophical, more narrowly textual (e.g., madness as an effect on and of language), and biographical. He deserves much credit for avoiding, and speaking out against, simple biographical identifications in Celan’s poems. At many points in the book, his interpretations powerfully confirm the self-referential nature of this poet’s work. While Hillard presents close and meticulous readings of the investigated poetry and prose, his study offers also another excellent contribution to the wider topic of Celan as a reader by referring to other authors’ texts that provided Celan with material for his work. In this way, Hillard demonstrates his methodical efforts in exploring Celan’s library at the literary archive in Marbach, Germany. One could add in this respect that the book also displays the usefulness of the more recent Tübingen edition of Celan’s works that has made a lot of valuable material accessible for scholarship. The array of additional sources that Hillard incorporates to supplement his readings shows considerable erudition. Among this material are texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Binswanger, Mandelstam, and Hölderlin. Highly laudable is the inclusion of some more obscure texts from which Celan drew material for his poetry, as well as renowned texts whose connection to Celan’s works has not yet been explored - such as Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Hillard’s will to trace developments within Celan’s work with respect to the use of CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 367 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 367 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 368 Besprechungen / Reviews the motifs he investigates is also impressive. This keen devotion to the macro level, the author balances with shrewd and attentive observations on the micro level. Here, he displays tremendous sensitivity for rhetorical detail in the poems - individual passages of «Huhediblu» are exemplary here (84-85). This also holds for the phonic element, and the reading of «Seelenblind» presents a remarkable instance (149-50). While Hillard does discuss an impressive array of authors whose work is relevant for the poems he analyzes, a more in-depth discussion of these theoretical, philosophical, or literary sources would at times have left it less to the reader to discover the exact parallels or interconnections. A passage where this can be felt is in the remarks on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Here, Hillard employs the connection of the Dionysian to Wahn, and the conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but the entire theory of aesthetic representation in Nietzsche’s early work that is associated with this dichotomy remains largely unexplored. This also holds for Nietzsche’s related remarks on the German national character that may be highly relevant in this context. Similarly, it would have been desirable if Hillard had positioned himself more clearly towards earlier scholarship on some of the texts that he investigates. Such positioning may have lent depth to his readings of «Der Meridian» (Chapter Two) and «Huhediblu» (Chapter Three), both texts that have been scrutinized in excellent books and essays (on «Meridian,» cf. Buhr 1976, Lacoue-Labarthe 1986, Müller-Sievers 2003; on «Huhediblu,» cf. Kudszus 1978, Derrida 1986, Colin 1991), to which he refers only very briefly. In general, Hillard’s book shows a tendency more towards the commentary of particular lines than towards an overarching, comprehensive analysis of an entire text. This is not to say that Poetry as Individuality lacks all-embracing interpretive narratives completely. However, they often appear at the end of investigations of individual texts, and statements are not always derived from closer analysis. On a related note on the subject and the goal(s) of the study, this reviewer could not fight the impression that the fifth chapter of Hillard’s book (on wounds) did not harmonize well with the preceding four chapters that were so clearly about madness and related concepts. This issue may be connected to the goal of the book, viewing «poetry as individuality.» One of Hillard’s phrases specifies this goal as observing the way in which a poem transforms «words into works which is also to say into individuals in their own right» (127). The concern with individuality is certainly undeniable in Paul Celan’s poetry - his poetics of «gestaltgewordene Sprache eines Einzelnen» and the encounter alone bear witness to this. However, in Hillard’s study the transition from the discussion of interpretive details to the assertion of a meaning pointing to the emergence of the individual is hardly ever linear. Most often, it is declarative and at times seems forced. This creates the impression that the concern with individuality is a more general result that is supposed to supplement and unify analyses from more specialized perspectives, i.e., madness and wounds. While the analytical link between these «metaphors for observation» and the emergence of the individual in the poems is not always apparent, Hillard’s provocative work will certainly provide material for further discussion in Celan studies. Kenyon College Paul Gebhardt CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 368 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 368 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38