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Band 47 2014 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 47 B ria n Tu c ke r: T h e “ I nvi s ible M ove m e nt th at R ea din g I s ” : M eta p hor s of M otion in th e R ea din g D e b ate s a rou n d 1 8 8 0 Kath e rin e A re n s/ S a ndra B . S tra ubh a a r: E . T. A . H offm a n n ’ s Fa lu n : B alti c P rovid e n c e s a n d M a r ty rdo m s J illia n D e M air: U n s ettle d S oil a n d U n ce r tain S torie s in W ilh elm R a a b e ’ s S to pf ku c h e n R e n ata Fu c h s : “ E s wa r ein m al ein D or f, d a s h atte ein e n B r u n n e n u n d ein g rün e s M in a rett ” : Fair y Tale s a n d th e I m a g e of M u s lim Wo m e n in E min e S e vgi Öz d a m a r ’ s S tor y Colle c tion M utt e r z u n g e S ł awomir P iontek: “ F ür F ra n z J o s e p h K a rl H itle r ”. D ie A u s eina n d e r s et z u n g mit ö s te r rei c hi s c h e n M yth e n vo m K rie g u n d N a c hk rie g in G e r h a rd F rit s c h s Fa s c hin g periodicals.narr.de C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k COLLOQUIA GERMANICA BAND 47 C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik Herausgegeben von Harald Höbusch und Linda K. Worley Band 47 · 2014 © 2017 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All Rights Reserved Satz: pagina GmbH, Tübingen Druck und Bindung: CPI buchbücher Birkach ISSN 00 010-1338 Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s V INHALT Heft 1/ 2 Themenheft: Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture Introduction Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German Literature David N. Coury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in Verrücktes Blut Priscilla Layne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media Berna Gueneli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary Olivia Landry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms Heidi Denzel de Tirado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs Lindsay Lawton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut Faye Stewart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 VI Inhalt Heft 3 Themenheft: Material Worlds - Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century Material Worlds-Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century Arne Höcker, Franziska Schweiger, Lauren Shizuko Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 “Kirschrot funkelnder Almadin”: The Petrification of Love, Knowledge, and Memory in the Legend of Falun John T. Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Networking Matters: Literary Representations of Materiality in Stifter’s Nachsommer Franziska Schweiger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben Erica Weitzman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Who Cares About Society? : Sorge and Reification in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Kirk Wetters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Schriftkörper und Humor. Zur Materialisierung des Erzählens in Jean Pauls Leben Fibels Andrea Krauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Beilage zum Brief: On ‘Epistolarity’ and Materiality in Bettine von Arnim’s Die Günderode Lauren Shizuko Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Heft 4 The “Invisible Movement That Reading Is”: Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 Brian Tucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Falun”: Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen Jillian DeMair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Inhalt VII “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge Renata Fuchs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 „Für Franz Joseph Karl Hitler“. Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg in Gerhard Fritschs Fasching Sławomir Piontek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Inhalt The “Invisible Movement That Reading Is”: Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 Brian Tucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Falun”: Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen Jillian DeMair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge Renata Fuchs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 „Für Franz Joseph Karl Hitler“. Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg in Gerhard Fritschs Fasching Sławomir Piontek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Autorenverzeichnis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Band 47 • Heft 4 Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 309 The “Invisible Movement That Reading Is”: Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 Brian Tucker Wabash College Abstract: Motion, and the absence of it, played a central role in the debates about reading that occurred in Germany around 1800. Many critics of reading held that books were dangerous because they immobilized their readers, both physically and mentally. My paper argues that the discourse of reading as invisible movement, as edifying mental activity, develops around 1800 in response to the charge that books fostered inactivity and passivity. Johann Adam Bergk, writing in 1799, seizes on the invisibility of readerly activity to defend reading and cast it as an ambivalent practice. Though it seems that the reader is still and passive, it could be that the mind is moving all the time. Bergk employs metaphors of motion to connect reading practices with an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement through the exercise of mental faculties. Attending to these metaphors reveals the contours of the debate over how one ought to read and makes Bergk’s contribution more perspicuous. Keywords: reading, motion, rhetoric, Enlightenment, Johann Adam Bergk Reading is typically a silent, solitary, and stationary act. And yet, in the history of determining what reading is, writers frequently associate reading with a kind of movement. In other words, the way we talk about reading has often relied— for at least the last two hundred years—on a rhetoric of motion, movement, and vigorous activity. This kinetic essence seems at odds with the familiar phenomenon of reading, with the secluded stillness of the study carrel or the person passing time in an airport. Alberto Manguel captures this tension when he reflects on the process of reading and writes: “Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something […] unfurls, progresses, 310 Brian Tucker grows, and takes root as I read” (28). To understand the process of reading is to understand this “and yet”: the reader is passive and yet active, receives and yet creates, remains still and yet sets something in motion. My title, which begins with a citation from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, draws on this same tension between what reading looks like and what reading is. On the surface, there is no sign of motion. But the appearance of stillness, on this view, belies a concealed essence of movement and dynamism. Reading is a kind of movement, it asserts, even if that movement does not present itself to perception. Here is the passage in full, taken from the character Silas Flannery’s diary: In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven. (169) Calvino describes here a double or two-sided motion. On the one hand, it is the reader who moves in barely perceptible ways: the gaze shifts; attention focuses itself and then strays. On the other hand, it is language itself that is in motion as it travels through the reader. Crucially, Calvino’s passage blurs the line between these two movements, making it difficult to tell when words are moving and when mental faculties are moving—to tell, that is, when the reader is moving and when she is being moved. More important to the historical understanding of reading, though, is Calvino’s insight that all these blurred forms of movement remain, for the most part, invisible. Flannery, for example, cannot be certain that he perceives traces of movement in the reader’s “unmoving form.” When he writes, “I feel able to perceive,” he emphasizes the possibility that his perception is a product of his imagination, a movement merely imposed on an unmoving form. Herein lies the crux of the problem. If reading is, in essence, a kind of movement, but that movement always remains invisible, how can one be sure that the proper activity of reading is really taking place? In other words, if activity and passivity are, at least superficially, indistinguishable, how does one know that an engagement with books truly leads to movement in an edifying direction, that it does not in fact foster passivity and inactivity? At a distance, everyone who reflects on the private act of reading is like Silas Flannery—believing that movement is taking place but never being able to perceive it adequately, much less confirm it. These questions and concerns lie at the heart of the debates about reading that took place in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 1 Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 311 The discourse of reading as movement, reading as edifying activity, develops at this time in response to a growing skepticism with regard to the increasingly widespread practice of reading. As has been amply documented, in the 1790s, many German critics spoke out against the plague of Lesesucht infecting the country and warned against reading’s deleterious effects. My hypothesis, in short, is that the notion of invisible movement gets invented around this time as a way to countenance and counter those accusations. Sure, the argument runs, in many outward ways, books can seem to make people passive, lethargic, isolated, and neglectful of their duties. But inwardly, books—when read correctly—involve a great deal of effort and concentration, a setting in motion of the mental faculties. Though it appears that the reader is still and passive, the mind is moving all the time. In Germany at the time, the primary proponent of this position is Johann Adam Bergk, whose treatise, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen, published in 1799, sought to instruct the public on how to put books and reading to productive use, without succumbing to their dangers. Around 1800, the best one can say about reading is apparently that it is a deeply ambivalent practice; this, at least, is Bergk’s modest goal—to introduce ambivalence into the effects of reading by tempering risk with the prospect of potential benefit. While there is always the danger that reading will lull one into slothfulness, he introduces a degree of optimism: it could be that the mind is moving while the body is at rest. As a defender of reading, he employs metaphors of motion to connect reading practices with an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement through the exercise of mental faculties, and he uses the invisibility of readerly activity to his rhetorical advantage. Because Bergk refuses to meet the most vociferous critics of reading headon and to dismiss their claims out of hand, his position within this debate has remained somewhat difficult to pinpoint. The most common way to distinguish Bergk’s work from the mainstream denunciations of reading is to argue that, while other critics focus their concerns on the content of reading material, Bergk attends instead to the practice and process of reading. 2 This distinction, while not entirely incorrect, obscures Bergk’s intervention by acting as if other critics of reading were not also attuned to the reader’s attitude, method, or practice. 3 In fact, all the critics share this concern in common, for the various warnings about passivity and immobilization all return to fundamental misgivings not simply with the kinds of books being read, but also with what happens when readers consume literature. Scholars have long attended to the opposition of activity and passivity in the reading debates in general and within Bergk’s treatise in particular. Martha Woodmansee, for example, summarizes nicely Bergk’s emphasis on this op- 312 Brian Tucker position when she writes, “The dominating ‛rule’ of the craft [of reading] […] instructs us to become ‛active’ readers. This critical concept derives its meaning in opposition to the […] ‛passive’ mode of consumption ” (97). In what follows, I shall argue along similar lines that Bergk seeks to counter charges of readerly passivity with an insistence on readerly activity. I submit, however, that attending to the discourse of movement and mobility makes Bergk’s contribution to the reading debate more perspicuous in two key ways. First, it reveals the rhetorical strategies by which Bergk clears a space for active, productive reading. Whereas earlier critics saw a direct connection between the reader’s outward, physical immobility and her inward, mental immobility, Bergk deploys the mind-body duality to make the case for a movement of the mental faculties that cannot be discerned in an immobilized body. By insisting on the possibility of invisible mental motion, Bergk prepares the way for a new understanding of reading as a potentially worthwhile and edifying activity. Second, attending to Bergk’s metaphors of motion allows us to reassess the connection between his praxis of reading and Kant’s theory of the sublime in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Although reading looks related to judgments of taste and beauty, Bergk’s descriptions of salutary reading repeatedly draw on Kant’s language of the sublime. By the late eighteenth century, the practice of reading had taken hold in Germany. Increases in education and literacy rates, growing demand in the middle class for reading material, and advances in the publishing industry—all these developments reflected the “reading revolution” or “Leserevolution” that took place in Germany during the Enlightenment period (McCarthy 79). 4 In short, the number of people who read for pleasure and entertainment was rapidly growing; reading was becoming an increasingly common and widespread phenomenon. But what appears in retrospect to be a positive sign of progress was, to contemporary observers at least, a cause for grave concern. Thus, when Johann Adam Bergk notes in 1799 that “In Teutschland wurde nie mehr gelesen, als jetzt” (411), the comment is not the basis for unalloyed cultural congratulation. Indeed, toward the end of the century, a number of intellectuals were sounding the alarm that the trend of reading had spread out of control. From the perspective of this critical backlash, the “reading revolution” of the last century had given way to the Terror, and they began to describe it in alarmist terms as an addiction, a scourge, a plague, or an epidemic. 5 Andrew Piper addresses what many saw as a surfeit of reading, writing that “what was new around 1800 was the imminent sense of too-muchness that surrounded the printed book” (5). These critics perceived a problem of both quantity and kind. An excess of Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 313 readers consuming an excess of bad books could lead only to cultural and social decline. 6 The specific concerns regarding widespread reading took a variety of forms, and I do not intend here to retrace the lines of a debate that has already been the subject of repeated scholarly attention. 7 My focus falls, instead, on one common trope in these complaints—namely, that books, particularly works of narrative fiction, have the power to immobilize their audience. Reading renders people idle, indolent, and practically useless. There were two related layers to the problem of the immobilized reader: the first was a visible, physical immobility (that of the silent, stationary reader), and the second was an invisible immobility, a torpor of the mental faculties. Although education and self-betterment were certainly Enlightenment ideals, one had to be suspicious of anything that interfered with the efficient acquittal of day-to-day duties, especially domestic duties. J. G. Hoche, for instance, asserts in 1794 that “Die Lesesucht der Frauenzimmer stimmt ihren Fleiß und Thätigkeit herab, und führt zu einer falschen lächerlichen Empfindsamkeit” (122). There was clearly a paternalistic and gendered component in these debates about reading. Much of the hand-wringing over bad books and the pernicious effects of reading was directed at the women who constituted an ever-increasing segment of the reading public. One sees that sentiment clearly in Hoche, who not only frets about what women are reading but also worries that exposure to the wrong books will infect “Mannheit” with “Weichlichkeit” (16). In addition to the gendered nature of Hoche’s concerns, one should also note just how seriously he casts the danger of reading: it erodes work ethic and one’s underlying ability to act, to do anything. And if reading moves the subject at all, it does so by leading it in the wrong direction, toward sentimental excess. In a time in which leisure was the privilege of the upper classes, anything that made one unfit for hard work and vigorous activity was a dangerous impediment to practical life. 8 Johann R. G. Beyer takes up the same problem and puts it even more concretely. In his 1795 treatise “Ueber das Bücherlesen, in so fern es zum Luxus unserer Zeiten gehört,” he writes, “Tagelang sitzt der Leselustige auf einer Stelle und betrachtet jedes ernsthaftere Geschäft, das ihn von seinem Buche abruft, als eine Störung in seinem Vergnügen” (194). Beyer indicates succinctly why reading belongs to the realm of luxury: it is inessential, it distracts one from serious pursuits, and it costs time and resources. The real danger here, though, is the immobilizing force that the book exerts on its reader. Left undisturbed, the reading enthusiast would sit in one spot for days on end and would neglect all forms of movement and activity. The threat of physical immobilization played a prominent role in the critiques of popular reading around 1800. Erich Schön’s investigation of “Der Leser und sein Körper” documents this concern by trac- 314 Brian Tucker ing “die Tendenz zur Immobilisierung des Lesers” through a wide range of late eighteenth-century visual and textual sources (82). The question for writers like Bergk will be whether the reader’s visibly immobile body reliably signifies a corresponding immobility of the mind. In another instance, Beyer writes that reading undertaken for the sake of entertainment and passing the time “ist eines der verführerischen Vergnügen, welches den, der es einmal gekostet hat, so sehr fesselt und anzieht, dass er sich nicht wieder losmachen kann” (194). When Beyer asserts that pleasure reading “fesselt und anzieht,” he returns to a vocabulary that one finds frequently in the essay. “Fesselnd” is a common way to describe the consumption of literary fiction and of cultural products in general. In the English equivalent, one says that a book is “gripping,” “captivating,” or “enthralling.” But this discourse of dangerous reading binds together the loose and strong senses of the words “fesselnd” and “captivating.” Precisely because books are “captivating” in the loose sense—because they command one’s interest and attention—books also subject the reader to a more literal kind of captivity: they hold the reader immobile, prevent salutary activity, and even shackle the mind. There is at least one further point to make regarding Beyer’s passage on the “seductive pleasure” of reading: it describes reading through the language of narcotics and addiction. Just “one taste” is enough; after that, the person is hooked, held in bondage by the fetters of addictive reading. It is no coincidence that Beyer rhetorically equates the dangers of reading with the dangers of drug addiction, just as it is no coincidence that many writers, including Hoche, refer to the exponential growth in publishing and the reading public at the time as a “Lesesucht,” an addiction to reading. Both exemplify a common rhetorical strategy in the debate over reading around 1800. Even the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in lectures delivered in 1804 and 1805, likens reading to drug abuse: “So, wie andere narkotische Mittel, versetzt es in den behaglichen Halbzustand zwischen Schlafen und Wachen, und wiegt ein, in süße Selbstvergessenheit, ohne daß man dabei irgend eines Thuns bedürfe” (191). What makes reading analogous to a narcotic is, in Fichte’s view, precisely its ability to lull the reader into a trance-like state suspended between sleep and wakefulness. Furthermore, ingesting this drug of narrative fiction has the side-effect of inducing a kind of paralysis in the reader; in the thrall of books, one is indifferent to all forms of activity. 9 When Beyer, Hoche, Fichte, and others compare reading to drug addiction, they seek to explain and vilify the phenomenon of widespread reading by mapping onto it other discourses, other metaphors and patterns of behavior. The more specific narcotic analogue lurking in the background of these similes is opium. The idea of reading as a kind of opiate had already been established in Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 315 Karl Phillip Moritz’s “psychological novel” Anton Reiser : “Das Lesen war ihm nun so zum Bedürfnis geworden, wie es den Morgenländern das Opium sein mag, wodurch sie ihre Sinne in eine angenehme Betäubung bringen” (143-44). The two key points in this comparison of reading and opium are “Bedürfnis” and “Betäubung.” On the one hand, Anton has become dependent on—addicted to—reading; the passage goes on to report that he cares more about books than about basic needs like the clothes on his back. On the other hand, the opium analogy evokes one of the central concerns about reading in the late eighteenth century—namely, that it saps the will to move and act, that it deadens the senses and anaesthetizes the mind. Opium thus serves as a particularly powerful metaphor in the late eighteenth century for the dangers of reading: not only is it addictive, but it also acts as a sedative that slows the heart rate and circulation (that is, the movement of blood) and immobilizes the user. 10 These twin concerns are the very same concerns that proliferate in the warnings about excessive reading—addiction and torpor, or more specifically, an addiction that robs one of activity and leads to inertia. The popular correlate to this anxiety is the image of the opium den, where otherwise able-bodied citizens waste their days lying in a drug-induced torpor, the same liminal half-waking narcotic state that Fichte compares to pure reading. In other words, the opium analogy is simply an especially vivid variant of the critique that sees reading as a source of lethargy, sloth, and indolence. But like any other narcotic, reading’s more insidious effects were not as easily perceptible because they were thought to take place in the mind. Hoche refers to this physical-mental duality when he says that the reader of bad literature “fliehet alle Anstrengungen der Kräfte, alle Thätigkeit wird abgestumpft, weil sie keine Nahrung findet, sie sinken in eine Lethargie des Körpers und Geistes” (74). 11 Beyer, by the same token, includes among the dangers of reading both “Unthätigkeit,” visible immobility, and “Geisteserschlaffung” (204), or invisible immobility. 12 The point remains that these two forms of stagnation were inextricably linked. The outward signs of inactivity and sloth were but the physical manifestations of mental inactivity, mental inertia. Bergk’s Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen (1799) constitutes an important document within these critiques of reading because it takes the debate in a new direction. Among the condemnations of readerly immobilization, it inserts a positive potential. Instead of mere stagnation without redeeming qualities, Bergk sees reading as an ambivalent, problematic act. From his perspective, the visible immobility of reading could simultaneously inculcate in the reader an invisible mobility, a mobility of the mind. 316 Brian Tucker Bergk’s rhetorical strategy is not to refute these critiques directly. Instead, he adopts the more nuanced tactic of agreeing with much of what the critics have said, and then carving out a space for positive potential despite the pitfalls of reading. He aims in this way to move the practice of reading from a clear danger to something that is at least ambivalent. His point is that it could go either way: performed improperly, reading could be as passive and pernicious as writers like Beyer suggest. At the same time, however, he identifies a prophylactic method of reading that promises to shield the subject from every danger of torpor-inducing Lesesucht and indeed to bring about positive effects of mental mobility and independent thought. That is why he sets out from the idea of an “art” of reading books; it is a particular kind of skill or “Geschicklichkeit” that must be acquired, developed, and properly applied. As he puts it, “Es ist […] nicht genug, Wissenschaft zu besizzen, sondern man muß auch eine Fertigkeit erlangt haben, die Regeln, die man kennt, anzuwenden” (73). All this talk of knowledge, rules, and abilities makes clear that reading is a far more complicated endeavor than simply making sense of the words on a page. Beyond grammar and syntax lies a higher-order set of rules that dictate how one ought to approach a work of literature. Bergk derives a clear argumentative benefit from this regard for the rules and craft of reading. By conceding that there are both right and wrong ways to read, he is able to set aside the broader discussion of reading per se and make a more focused argument for the value of a particular kind of reading and a particular kind of reader. It is precisely this focus on a narrow subset (of reading practices, of readers, and hence of reading material) that sometimes makes it difficult to gauge how progressive or conservative Bergk really is with regard to the exponential expansion of reading. For one of the first moves in his argument is to cede a great deal of ground and to accept as true much of what others have written about the deleterious effects of reading. He agrees, for instance, that reading is a potentially hazardous activity, and he concedes that many read simply to entertain themselves, to pass the time, and to avoid boredom. He even imagines a person who pursues reading for its (more literal) narcotic effects, “um seine Körperschmerzen zu tödten.” By referring to the narcotic, pain-relieving effects of reading, Bergk basically accepts the characterization of reading as a kind of addictive drug. And he goes on to reiterate the more precise version of this trope: “Die Menschen wollen sich durch Lesen wie durch einen Zauberschlag in eine bessere Welt versezzen. Sie bedienen sich der Bücher wie die Türken des Opiums” (60). It is a formulation that would seem odd, were it not already established by other tracts in the anti-reading movement, and it is certainly not what he understands under the proper art of reading. While the passage does describe a certain kind of mobility—namely, fictional literature’s Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 317 power to transport the reader to a different world—this movement is immediate, magical, and even hallucinatory. It remains, perhaps ironically, a passive and stagnant form of mobility, one wholly at odds with the more positive movement of self-activation and exertion that Bergk emphasizes. The point is that, even in Bergk’s more charitable account, a great deal of what takes place under the rubric of reading remains a dangerous waste of time. Again, though, the crucial difference is that Bergk does not seek to make a case for the harm or benefit of reading as such; he argues, rather, for the ambivalent potential of media consumption, in this case the consumption of books and printed material. This is why he can say of reading both that there is no “zweckmäßigeres Mittel, unsern Geist auszubilden” (v), and that it corrupts “Kopf und Herz” (411). Reading, for Bergk, can have sharply opposed effects. It can cultivate Enlightenment ideals or ruin the mind, and he locates in the reader’s disposition the factor that determines whether the outcome is positive or negative. This ambivalence in outcome distinguishes Bergk from the critics of the 1790s, for whom the detriments of reading were all too obvious and unambiguous. To make as compelling a case as possible against reading, authors such as Hoche and Beyer present dire relationships of cause and effect. Confusion, weakness, inactivity, and so on: such ill effects are what popular reading leads to, and they are the only thing it leads to. They are, in Hoche’s words, reading’s “ganzes Verdienst” (15). Bergk agrees to an extent, but with an important twist: in his defense of reading, the causal becomes conditional. When he discusses reading, he casts its deleterious effects as a merely potential hazard, one contingent upon the subject’s attitude toward a text. 13 He writes, “Das Lesen bringt Gefahr, wenn es bloß ein empfängliches aber kein selbstthätiges Gemüth an uns findet” (64). The passage begins entirely in the vein of contemporary warnings about reading but then deviates from them with the introduction of a conditional clause that limits reading’s danger. The crucial shift is this: what others see as the effect, as the confirmation of reading’s danger (it makes one overly passive, sensitive, and receptive), Bergk sees as the condition of reading’s danger: the merely passive, receptive reader is exposed to danger. Whereas others locate reading’s risk in its ability to shape the subject’s attitude and disposition, Bergk reverses the direction of influence. He sees risk instead in how the subject’s attitude and disposition could shape the experience of reading. In the above passage, Bergk lays out succinctly the opposed poles of good and bad reading. One reads with either an “empfängliches” or a “selbstthätiges Gemüth”; one is either a passive and susceptible reader, or one is an independently active reader. On the side of excessive susceptibility, Bergk com- 318 Brian Tucker plains, “daß man so oft ohne volle Aufmerksamkeit liest, daß man sich so oft passiv verhält, und daß man sich nicht auf seine eigene Verstandeskräfte zu stüzzen wagt” (64). One will hear in this passage both an echo of the complaints about the immobilized reader and a note of difference. “So often,” one reads inattentively and indifferently, but in this case, passivity is not an inevitable effect emanating from the practice of reading. It is, rather, an unfortunate disposition that too many readers bring to books—too many, but not all, since Bergk’s formulation leaves open the possibility that readers will occasionally get it right. He makes this possibility more perspicuous in another formulation: “Es ist ein unnüzzer Zeitverlust und eine schmähliche Vernichtung unserer eigenen Selbstständigkeit, wenn wir uns beim Bücherlesen bloß leidend verhalten” (63). Once again, Bergk reiterates some of the most emphatic complaints about reading, but it is worth noting that previous critics would have ended the sentence before the conditional clause. For Beyer, Hoche, and others, widespread reading is a despicable waste of time, period. For Bergk, reading could be a waste of time—but only under the condition that one remains passive while reading, “sich leidend verhalten.” 14 When the critics of reading describe it as a kind of addiction, they emphasize the complaint that people are reading too many books, without pause, and consuming them for quantity rather than quality. Woodmansee notes the gendered tone of these critiques when they refer to allegedly excessive reading as “literary philandering,” an expression of consternation with readers “devouring greedily one after another these new titles, forgetting the last one the moment they turned to its replacement” (90). Critics see this promiscuous or extensive reading practice as the cause of many ills, but Bergk once again switches the poles of cause and effect. From his perspective, it is a passive and immobilized readerly disposition that leads people to consume one book after the other. He portrays this relationship in a passage that I will cite at length because it also reflects the high stakes of bad reading: Die meisten fahren im Lesen fort, weil sie keinen Funken von Selbstthätigkeit und Energie in sich spüren. Die Thätigkeit des Geistes ist von der Masse von Eindrücken gänzlich erstickt: der Mensch vegetirt bloß und ahndet nicht, daß er zu etwas Bessern bestimmt sey, als zum Schlafen, zum Essen und Trinken. Der ewige Ueberfluß an Büchern unterdrückt in ihm allen Adel der Menschheit. (65) He casts the dangers of excessive reading in the starkest terms: the mind suffocates, the body vegetates, and the dignity of human life is destroyed. But why do some people read immoderately? They do so because of a passive attitude toward books. It is not that they necessarily lack an internal spark—one of activity, energy, and independence—but rather that they are not able to per- Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 319 ceive ( spüren ) that spark within themselves. The passage suggests that even bad readers are not inherently passive or doomed to vegetate; it could be that they simply need to recognize and activate the faculties of good reading that already lie dormant inside them. But as long as they do not perceive any drive toward self-exertion, they bury themselves in an endless avalanche of textual stimuli. In sum, whereas others say that reading is damaging, Bergk says instead that it is merely dangerous—dangerous because it could potentially be damaging if done the wrong way. The problem is not that reading damages by leading to passivity and immobility; it is, rather, that a passive disposition leads to damaging forms of reading. If passivity constitutes the root of all readerly evil, then the antidote is fairly obvious. And in his warnings about passive, inactive reading, Bergk rarely fails to contrast passivity with its positive alternative: a mode of reading that is vigorous, energetic, and active, one in which the immobilized form of the reader hides a mind in constant motion. 15 The single most important word in Bergk’s argument is “Selbstthätigkeit,” and he conceives of the art of reading—of proper, salutary reading—as one that requires a “selbstthätiges Gemüth” (64). While the first move in Bergk’s argument is to shift the perceived effects of bad reading to the conditions of bad reading, his second move is to imagine a form of reading that occurs under different conditions, with different results. And this radically different form of reading is one in which the subject is ever active, alert, and independent: “Wir müssen selbstthätig seyn und den Inhalt des Buches durch die Bewegungen unsers Gemüthes und durch die Thätigkeiten unsers Verstandes in uns erzeugen, um denselben uns verständlich zu machen” (61, emphasis added). Bergk makes the case for reading by imagining a site of motion and activity that is hidden inside the subject’s “unmoving form,” to borrow Calvino’s words. Against this backdrop of physical immobility, Bergk perceives “that invisible movement that reading is” (169)—namely the invisible motions of intellect and understanding. He finds a vivid example of this discrepancy between outward appearance and concealed essence in Goethe’s Werther, who is so overwhelmed by nature and love that he can no longer produce art. For Bergk, Werther’s outward artistic stagnation or inactivity does not signify internal stagnation but rather its opposite: “Werthers Unthätigkeit rührt von dem Uibermaaße der innern Thätigkeit […] her” and further, “Alles, was er sieht und hört, macht auf ihn den lebhaftesten Eindruck, und setzt alles in seinem Gemüthe in die größte Bewegung und Thätigkeit” (241). One could, at first glance, be puzzled by Bergk’s sense that this depiction of artistic inactivity is magnificent or exquisite. And yet the response to Werther makes sense in the context of Bergk’s broader argument, for Werther models indirectly how the reader should consume and 320 Brian Tucker respond to literature. Books should set the mind to work and the faculties in motion. Werther furthermore does the important task of demonstrating that outward idleness can conceal—and indeed result from—an excess of internal, mental mobility. This discrepancy is the wedge that Bergk needs to counter allegations of lethargy and stagnation. Whereas most critics of reading saw a direct correlation between physical and mental passivity, Erich Schön has identified an opposed branch of the “‛Lesesucht’-Kritik” around 1800 that located the harm of reading in the “Mißverhältnis zwischen dem körperlichen Unbeweglichwerden und dem inneren Erleben” (90). In this regard, Bergk’s treatise turns one branch of the anti-reading movement against the other and uses the mind-body incongruity to his own advantage. It is precisely this discrepancy between physical and mental activity that Bergk promotes as the site of potentially beneficial reading. When the mind is in motion and the power of understanding is activated, reading becomes a productive rather than a receptive process. “Erzeugen,” to generate or produce, is the verb of choice: good readers do not consume or absorb a book’s contents; they reproduce it for themselves, through their own mental motions. 16 Bergk elaborates on this curious sense of productive reading in a related passage: Nicht das Buch muß uns eine Erklärung von dieser oder jener Erscheinung zu geben scheinen, sondern die Bewegungen unsers eigenen Gemüthes müssen den Verstand zum Reflektieren über seine Thätigkeiten nöthigen, und ihm die erzählte Thatsache durch sich selbst erklären. (62) Books do not simply give explanations and information. If they did, the reader would do nothing but receive them and would be merely receptive, which is to say passive and stagnant. Instead, it is once again the invisible movement of the mind while reading that produces— durch sich selbst —the knowledge that one seeks in books. From this perspective, books give the reader nothing but an occasion to think, a springboard for independent reflection. It is as if Bergk conceives of books as exercise equipment for the mind. For what do such machines do but allow one to move in specific ways while generally remaining in a single place? He sees reading similarly as a platform on which to activate, exercise, and thus to improve one’s mental faculties. And if the analogy of exercise equipment seems anachronistic, consider Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 letters on Ästhetische Erziehung, in which he compares “die Anspannungen einzelner Geisteskräfte” to “gymnastische Übungen” that produce “athletische Körper” (42). Schiller’s point is that such exercises—both mental and physical—are too specialized and one-sided, but Bergk remains more optimistic about the benefits of reading’s mental exercise. Because proper reading Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 321 requires an investment of effort and mental labor, its true purpose is to provide a vigorous workout for the mind. As Bergk puts it, “der Mensch muß also seine Denkkraft anstrengen” while reading, and “Durch diese Anstrengung übet er den Verstand und die Vernunft” (79). Exertion, activity, and exercise constitute the proper readerly disposition. He has thus moved the discussion of reading as far as possible from the narcotic-induced, trance-like state in which Fichte imagines the pure reader. Instead of immobilizing the mind or lulling us into indolence, reading “muß in uns die Kräfte in Thätigkeit sezzen” and “die Operationen in Gang […] bringen, die zur Hervorbringung von irgend etwas nöthig sind” (66). Reading is, in other words, a mobilizing force, an impetus to exertion. It puts the mind in motion and thought to work. With his seemingly endless remarks about activity, effort, and motion, Bergk could justifiably be accused of redundancy in his writing. At the same time, though, all the repetitions bolster his central aim—namely, to counter those critiques that cast reading as a narcotic or a soporific, as something that deadens both body and mind. For Bergk, good reading (artful reading) is not a soporific but rather a mentally invigorating tonic. His treatise moves the discourse of reading out of the opium den and into something that, to our contemporary eyes, looks more like a fitness center or training ground. And when one uses books to move and exercise the mental faculties in the way Bergk prescribes, one stops being a receptive reader and becomes instead a kind of writer after the fact. Good reading activates the same processes necessary to produce a text in the first place. Bergk is a late-Enlightenment thinker wholly in the Kantian mold. When he introduces his treatise on the art of reading with lines such as “Unser ganzes Leben soll ein Streben seyn, uns mündig zu machen” (iv), he signals via his choice of words that he is a proponent of Kantian ideals. The notion of “Mündigkeit” figures famously in Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay on the question “Was ist Aufklärung? ” wherein Kant’s contrast between passive dependence and independent thought prepares the ground for Bergk’s later distinction between passive and active reading. 17 Kant recognizes in the essay that reading could contribute to a comfortable and yet stagnant form of passivity: “Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Hab ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, […] so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nötig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann” (A 482, 11: 53). Kant is certainly not as alarmist as the reading critics of the 1790s; he sees reading less as a corrupting influence and more as a mental crutch, an instrument one employs to avoid the trouble of thinking for oneself. Here one finds the same language of comfort and exertion that Bergk will apply to the art of reading. In the latter case, though, the aim is to bring reading into the Kantian fold, to show that books, far from replacing 322 Brian Tucker human understanding, actually set understanding in motion and provide the impetus for mental activity. Kant indicates that books can exacerbate the laziness and passivity that prevent most people from taking their first “Schritt zur Mündigkeit” (A 482, 11: 53) and from learning to walk independently. When Bergk seeks to rehabilitate reading from a Kantian perspective, he works to show that books can necessitate thought, agitate the faculties, and induce effort. He writes in the preface, “Die Bücher muntern uns zum Denken auf, zeigen uns den Weg, den wir gehen müssen, um Aufschluß über uns und über die Welt zu erhalten” (ix). 18 His broader point is that because books have the power to set the mental faculties in motion, they also have the power to set people on the path to enlightened independence, just as Kant would want. There is a second peculiar way in which Bergk’s choice of words connects him to Kantian philosophy—not in the sense of a general borrowing of concepts and terminology but rather a more particular connection. Bergk’s treatise makes several excursions into Kant’s theory of the beautiful and the sublime, and scholars have noted that he draws much of his critical vocabulary from Kant and from the Kritik der Urteilskraft specifically. 19 While Woodmansee, for instance, finds a link between Bergk’s concept of reading and the Kantian cultivation of taste (94), focusing on metaphors of motion recasts that connection in a new light: when Bergk sets out to rehabilitate reading as a beneficial practice, he does so with recourse to Kant’s language of the sublime. Bergk repeatedly refers to the mental motion required by good reading as “die Bewegungen unsers Gemüthes” (61). Readers of the third Critique might recognize this turn of phrase as similar to the one Kant uses to describe the central difference between the beautiful and the sublime. He writes that the feeling of the sublime carries with it as a defining characteristic “eine mit der Beurteilung des Gegenstandes verbundene Bewegung des Gemüts” (B 80, 10: 168, emphasis in original) and foregrounds the important feature of a mind in motion. Given the objects that Bergk cites as inspiring feelings of sublimity—majestic oaks, for instance, or the night—it might seem peculiar to align the activity of reading with the sublime rather than with Kant’s notion of the beautiful. Bergk, however, is less interested in fidelity to the Kantian system than in repurposing Kant’s ideas to his own ends, a tendency that could be seen as exemplifying the same kind of productive reading for which Bergk advocates. Here the sublime and the beautiful provide him with a ready-to-hand distinction between active and passive modes of judgment. For when Kant asserts that mental movement is a characteristic feature of the sublime, he adds, in contrast, “anstatt daß der Geschmack am Schönen das Gemüt in ruhiger Kontemplation voraussetzt und erhält” (B 80, 10: 168, original emphasis). One should note that Kant himself Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 323 highlights the opposition of motion and rest in his explication of the beautiful and the sublime, and that it is this very opposition that Bergk will carry over to different kinds of reading. Bergk aims primarily to refute the claim that reading is necessarily restful and passive, that it leads inevitably to inactivity and immobility. And as a keen student of Kant, he recognizes that the third Critique equips him with an active-passive duality in the perception of different kinds of objects. Although he does not make the argument directly or explicitly, he claims, in essence, that the critics have mistaken reading for a judgment of taste about the beautiful when it is, in fact, a feeling of the sublime. Bergk reproduces Kant’s emphasis on motion and repose when he distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime: “Jenes [das Schöne] gefällt, dieses [das Erhabene] rührt uns. Der Genuß von jenem kostet weder Mühe noch Anstrengung, dieses wird uns nur durch einen Kampf mit gewaltigen Kräften zu Theil” (177). The distinction sounds familiar, because it is a note Bergk has been hammering all along in a different key: bad reading is pleasant and comfortable, but passive; good reading moves the mind by exercising the mental faculties. In his “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? ” Kant worries that reading is easy whereas thinking for oneself is strenuous, and thus that books could be another fetter of comfortable dependence. Bergk, however, by casting reading through the language of the sublime, uses Kant’s own vocabulary to counter that concern. Reading looks like passive contemplation (that is, like the beautiful), but on the inside, it requires effort, exertion, and movement (the sublime). Bergk’s frequent recourse to the language of the beautiful and the sublime underscores the primary goal of his text—to present reading as something that can mobilize, rather than immobilize, the mind. While it is true that he is concerned with the process of reading to a greater extent than other contemporary critics are, his more lasting and influential intervention in this debate is his move toward a discourse of reading as activity, motion, and self-exertion. As a result, reading must no longer be the cause of certain stagnation and passivity. The possibility of an invisible, internal motion allows Bergk to set reading, instead, on a fulcrum and balance it upon the reader’s method of consumption. Whether reading tips toward salutary or deleterious effects depends on the reader’s disposition and whether that disposition is inclined toward activity or passivity. Bergk’s treatise thus presents reading as an ambivalent, rather than a necessarily destructive, activity, and there is evidence that this sense of ambivalence persisted into nineteenth-century discussions of reading. For instance, the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson sounds like a disciple of Bergk’s art of reading when he writes in 1837 that “Books are the best of things, 324 Brian Tucker well used; abused, among the worst” (88). For Emerson, as for Bergk, the results of reading are uncertain, and the proper use of books means reading inventively, actively, and creatively. He goes on to write that “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” which might as well be a direct translation of Bergk’s insistence on a “selbstthätiges Gemüt.” In his explication of the active soul and the correct way of reading, Emerson adopts the same late-Enlightenment language of activity and self-exertion that Bergk applied to reading at the end of the eighteenth century: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion” (90). Here, too, effort is the key to making reading productive, and again, more importantly, the benefits of reading remain entirely conditional. Writers like Bergk and Emerson demonstrate just how effective the late eighteenth-century backlash against popular reading was. In the wake of that critique, even the defenders and proponents of reading must set out from the proposition that books can often have harmful side-effects. And yet they manage to carve out a space for “a right way of reading,” an art of reading, in which the critics’ alarm no longer applies and which indeed reverses the valuation of bookish immobilization. The unresolvable ambivalence of reading results then from the invisibility of mental movement and from the fact that right ways and wrong ways of reading are superficially indistinguishable. In the context, however, of unstinting attacks on popular reading, to introduce ambivalence is also to introduce positive potential, to create the promise of a different kind of reading, one flatly opposed to the torpor-inducing narcotic condemned throughout the 1790s. With his emphasis on movement and activity, Bergk does not just move the debate in a new direction; rather, he opens new lines of argument that will allow for future justifications of reading as a worthwhile activity. Notes 1 In Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, Jochen Schulte-Sasse sketches the history of this tension between “geistige Beweglichkeit” and “Trägheit” in the consumption of popular literature, 25 f. 2 See, for example, Woodmansee, who distinguishes Bergk from the “‛supply-side’ ideologues of reading” (92) as someone concerned instead with influencing demand; Bledsoe, who argues that Bergk is unique because he cares about the reader’s attitude more than content (475); and Kreuzer, who sees Bergk as a critic of reading practices but separates him from the conservatives who want to limit the scope of Enlightenment (66). 3 Furthermore, from the other direction, it is not as if Bergk completely sacrifices the “what” of reading for the “how.” His writing sounds remarkably Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 325 like other denunciations when he complains that most people read “die elendsten und geschmacklosesten Romane mit einem Heißhunger, wodurch man Kopf und Herz verdirbt” (411). Part of my point is that Bergk’s position is slippery, so to speak, because he adopts so many of the assumptions propounded by other writers, but that what he adds to the conversation is both nuanced and influential. On Bergk’s critique of reading as entertainment, see Frels, 250-53. 4 For an introduction to the history of German publishing and reading from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, see Lynne Tatlock, “The Book Trade and the ‛Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” For an in-depth study, see Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe, 1770 — 1910 . For comparison’s sake, William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period explores English-language publishing of the same general era. 5 Cf. Johann Georg Heinzmann’s Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur (1795), whose title contributes emphatically to this metaphor of popular reading as disease. 6 Woodmansee summarizes similarly a concern common to these debates over reading. The critics, she writes, generally agreed “that too many readers were reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results” (90). 7 Schenda provides a good overview of the “Anti-Lese-Bewegung” in Volk ohne Buch, especially pages 53-73. 8 Karin Wurst explores how gender roles inflected leisure time and reading practices in this period. See, for example, the sections on “The Site of Entertainment in Middle-Class Life” (32-40) and “The Role of Reading” (91-99). She furthermore summarizes the gendered vocabulary of cultural consumption, 111-16. 9 Matt Erlin does an excellent job of situating the concerns about reading within broader discussions of material culture and luxury consumption in the eighteenth century. See “Useless Subjects,” particularly pages 149-51, for his remarks on Beyer and Hoche. 10 In Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Thomas de Quincey seeks to correct the widely held but (in his view) mistaken belief “that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental” (60). The passage’s closing modifiers, “animal and mental,” return to the two levels of immobilization, physical and mental, visible and invisible, that were prevalent in the reading debate around 1800. 326 Brian Tucker 11 On the accusations of “geistige Trägheit” and “Passivität” in both the eighteenth century and the modern theory of kitsch, see Schulte-Sasse, 25-26 and 60-61. 12 Wurst summarizes the contemporary view of pleasure reading in similar terms: “Characterized by passivity, the ludic reader is no longer actively engaged ( Tätigkeit ) but is said to be merely occupied ( Beschäftigung )” (92). 13 Note that the potentially positive effects of reading also depend on the subject’s way of reading: “welche Vortheile erwarten uns, wenn wir in der Kunst, Bücher zu lesen, große Fertigkeiten erworben haben! ” (v). 14 “Sich leidend verhalten,” as an expression of passivity, seems to have enjoyed wider currency around 1800, and it was frequently used in contrast with expressions of activity. In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant employs the formulation to describe the apparent paradox of a subject that is both active and passive as it presents itself to consciousness (B 153, 3: 149). Friedrich Schlegel makes further use of the phrase in one of the Blüthenstaub fragments (attributed to Novalis) that appeared one year before Bergk’s book on reading (#26, Novalis 2: 423). Bledsoe sees Bergk as a writer whose ideas straddle Enlightenment and Romanticism, and it is perhaps interesting in this regard that Bergk’s turn of phrase also connects the two periods. 15 On the duality mental passivity vs. mental activity, see further Wurst, 108-11. 16 On a stylistic note, Bergk seems to be a more generous author for frequently using the first-person collective pronoun “wir.” While his contemporaries often turn to more distancing and condescending labels such as “der Leselustige” (Beyer), “der Leser,” or even “die Frauenzimmer” (Hoche), Bergk depicts good reading as a task and a challenge we all share. While there remains something exclusive, even elitist, in his hierarchy of active and passive readers, his use of “wir” implies that the guild of good reading is open to anyone willing to make the effort. 17 There is a general sense, reflected in Kant’s essay though certainly not unique to it, that enlightenment requires steady effort and exertion. Bergk situates himself in this vein when he calls the process a “Streben,” a struggle or difficult endeavor, something that requires striving, and when he describes reading as a constant state of alertness and self-exertion. 18 I note that “zum Denken aufmuntern” is the functional opposite of Beyer’s “Geisteserschlaffung” (204). Bergk uses a language of enlivened wakefulness to counteract the rhetoric of soporific reading. He writes similarly on the preceding page of the potential “Erweckung unserer Anlagen” (viii). 19 It has been widely noted that Bergk makes liberal use of Kantian vocabulary. See, for but two examples, Bledsoe (472) and Woodmansee (93). Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 327 Works Cited Bergk, Johann Adam. Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen. Jena: In der Hempelschen Buchhandlung, 1799. Beyer, Johann R. G. Ueber das Bücherlesen, in so fern es zum Luxus unsrer Zeiten gehört. 1796. Rpt. in Die Leserevolution. Quellen zur Geschichte des Buchwesens. Vol. 10. 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Tatlock, Lynne. “The Book Trade and the ‛Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In: Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Lynne Tatlock. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 1-21. Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP , 1994. Wurst, Karin. Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780 — 1830. Detroit: Wayne State UP , 2005. Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms1 329 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Falun”: Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 1 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar University of Texas at Austin Abstract: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1818 / 19) is often taken as a prototypical Romantic tale. This essay suggests that what Hoffmann called a tale of saints and martyrs is less a story of individuals sacrificing themselves in futile searches for money and succumbing to delusions, and more a commentary on the shift of power and economics in the Baltic regions in the wake of Napoleonic France’s incursions into Russia and the 1815 establishment of the Congress Kingdom of Poland. Keywords: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Falun, Serapionsbrüder, religious iconography, Napoleonic Europe, Congress Kingdom of Poland In 1720, two Copenhagen newpapers published reports about a well-preserved body found in a mine in December, 1719. These were the remains of a miner who had gone missing years earlier. 2 This extraordinary tale was given book form in a volume of Romantic science by Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, in his Ansichten der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808). From that source, the story was taken up by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who turned one of the most famous mines of his era into a literary milestone: Die Bergwerke zu Falun, an almost gothic story of lost love, madness, and fate. The tale was written between 1816 and 1818, published in the first part of a four-volume collection entitled Die Serapionsbrüder ( Serapion Brethren, 1819-21 [Kleßmann 427]), and was the only story written specifically for the collection (see Hoffmann 228 ff.). Hoffmann drew the basic materials for Falun from Heinrich Schubert’s work which he augmented with standard reference books on Sweden (Kleßmann 416-17). Today’s critics often see mines in literature as metaphors for the unconscious: entering them becomes a descent into hell or into the torments of sex and identity. All of these elements are present in Falun. 3 However, Theodore 330 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar Ziolkowski’s German Romanticism and Its Institutions (1990) suggests another dimension to a story about mines and miners. Mining was one of the institutions shaping the 1790s generation of Romantic intellectuals, many of whom were trained as miners or mining engineers (29), an important profession of the day (see especially 53 ff.). More than mere metaphors, mines referred to real geopolitical situations; miners and mining engineers were those people whose lives were split between the earth and the entities (commercial and governmental) profiting from their work. Hoffmann accounted for his own story in these terms. Mines like Falun, he noted, represent “die gnadenlose Vernichtung der Natur um des Profits willen, aber auch die Zerstörung der Menschen Natur durch einen bessessenen Arbeitswillen, der in neurotischer Getriebenheit Schuld tilgen möchte und neue Schuld verursacht” (Kleßmann 420). This “guilt” is thus related to real, experienced history, not just personal psychology. “Schuld” also means “debts” that need to be repaid. In fact, Hoffmann wrote to a friend in 1818 that he was writing “[ein] historisches Werk, welches über Heiligen-, Märtyrer- oder Einsiedlergeschichte […], der eine vergleichbare Aufgabe zukommen sollte, wie sie die Geschichte des Einsiedlers Serapion zu übernehmen” (Hoffmann 1258). On one level, Hoffmann means that reference to saints, martyrs, and hermits explicitly. The Serapionsbrüder collection’s title alluded to the “Seraphinenabende” in Hoffmann’s life, evenings spent with friends who traded stories and discussed issues of the day. Hoffmann doubles that allusion when he takes these Brethren into the collection’s frame narrative and situates one of their meetings on November 14, the name’s day of St. Serapion (Seraphim) in at least one church calendar (Kleßmann 428). 4 On another level, as we shall see, the idea of martyrdom also has a political dimension as a comment on Baltic politics in Europe’s post-Napoleonic era. This essay will pursue these connections, taking Falun back into its multilple contexts: the Baltic region’s economy and politics, the religious question of martyrdoms, and historical change. In these contexts, Hoffmann’s novella emerges as less a Romantic tale than as a morality fable for geopolitics and its victims. Falun not only has a position within the martyr-stories told by and for Hoffmann’s Serapionbrüder -martyrs, it is also the site of real mines that had played significant roles in the region’s politics and economics, not just in its natural history. Tracing how these three frames allow what seems at first to be a fairy tale to emerge as a much more political work, a direct commentary on the world bequeathed to Hoffmann’s generation and a source for a more politicized interpretation of Hoffmann’s late Romantic poetics. Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 331 From the first, Hoffmann situates Falun squarely within the Baltic’s economic nexus, opening in Göthaborg (today’s Göteborg, or, in English, Gothenburg ), one of the Baltic’s trading hubs, in July at the height of the shipping season. A ship comes into port and is greeted by teeming masses, including the representatives of the East India Company: “Ein reicher Ostindienfahrer glücklich heimgekehrt aus dem fremden Lande lag im Klippa-Hafen vor Anker und ließ die langen Wimpel, die schwedischen Flaggen lustig hinauswehen in die azurblaue Luft” (208). Hoffmann continues, Die Herren von der ostindischen Kompanie wandelten am Hafen auf und ab, und berechneten mit lächelnden Gesichtern den reichen Gewinn, der ihnen geworden, und hatten ihre Herzensfreude daran, wie ihr gewagtes Unternehmen nun mit jedem Jahr mehr und mehr gedeihe und das gute Göthaborg im schönsten Handelsflor immer frischer und herrlicher emporblühe. (208) “The gentlemen from the East India Company” would indeed bring life into the town, with profits on their ships in the era reaching as high as 60 %. Hoffmann’s story thus begins on a seemingly optimistic note. The ship’s company, numbering about 150, is welcomed with music and happy noise and taken into a local tavern to enjoy a hearty celebration, including wild drinking, dancing, and local prostitutes—the seductions enabled by the rich money from the India trade. And in the midst of the celebration, Hoffmann’s hero Elis Fröbom is introduced, “ein einziger Seemann, ein schlanker hübscher Mensch, kaum mocht’ er zwanzig Jahr alt sein” (208), sitting alone next to the door of the tavern. Readers at Hoffman’s time familiar with world economics would recognize this scene as fraught with nostalgia: those rich ships of 1806 no longer came into the harbor of Gothenburg in his day. 5 The Swedish East India Company had existed from 1731-1813, occupying a building at the heart of Goteborg. Over its lifetime, it sent 132 expeditions to China, shipping metals and alcohol out and bringing back mainly tea, its most profitable commodity. 6 The Company had the Dutch as its competition and had managed to undercut the tea trade in England. Ultimately, however, it was disbanded in 1813 when the tea trade had become less profitable. Its Dutch and British rivals had gone over to the opium trade, and the British East India Company had been nationalized by act of Parliament, 7 which gave it great economic support. Thus the story’s first images of economic prosperity are actually less than promising: Hoffmann’s hero Elis Fröbom has come to Sweden from a job in a trade that no longer existed (he gives a girl “ein schönes ostindisches Tuch” [211]). Elis’ back-story, however, shows that his family was indeed heavily implicated with the India Company. After Elis’ two brothers were lost as soldiers, 332 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar he had been the sole support of his widowed mother. His father, “ein tüchtiger Steuermann” (212), had been lost in a storm after he arranged for his son’s future in the service of the East Indian Company by securing him a place on a ship. The logic of the time would have it that, even as a common seaman, the boy would be able to get a share of the profits from each trip. His mother had encouraged this choice, as well, by telling him stories of his bold father (213). But this security was Elis’ father’s dream, not his own: the son wishes himself dead, “begraben in dem tiefsten Meeresgrunde! ” (211), because he was not cut out for the sea, having “keine rechte Lust am wackern Seemannsleben” (210). An old seaman in this scene confirms that Elis will never be a “proper sailor” ( ein ordentlicher tüchtiger Seeman ) because he can’t drink (“saufen kannst du gar nicht” [209]). More critically, Elis has returned home to find himself not only fatherless, but also motherless. Strangers occupy his one-time house since his mother had died three months earlier. Her things are available for pickup at the Rathaus by this now completely orphaned young man, abandoned and miserable ( verlassen, einsam, elend ). Elis feels that he should have stayed home to take care of her rather than going to sea, which he sees as an “irres, zweckloses Treiben” (212). This detail does indeed motivate Elis’ subsequent actions in terms of personal psychology, as most critics have pursued, but Hoffmann colors the situation differently by adding a religious dimension to it. His life will change on the feast of Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’ Apostles with the gift of tongues (Acts of the Apostles 2: 1-31). Notably, this feast falls seven weeks after the resurrection of Easter Sunday, and celebrates the miracle that confirmed the Apostles’ vocation to spread the Gospel of Jesus through the world. Elis has entered a classical night of the soul, a profound moment of selfdoubt from which he will emerge only when he sees a new life open up in front of him on that date. Elis’ savior is an old miner (“ein alter Bergmann” [211]) who picks him up off the street and encourages him to return to work. Ultimately, the miner concurs that Elis has no talent for the sea (214), and he offers him a job in his mine lease. Elis does realize that he is being tested again, as he is offered the chance to take up yet another profession in which he has no interest, but which can lead either to death by misfortune or to great riches (215). Elis is not sure about a profession that will force him to “gve up the sun”: “hinab in die schauerliche Höllentiefe und dem Maulwurf gleich wühlen und wühlen nach Erzen und Metallen, schnöden Gewinns halber? ” (214). The miner convinces him with tales of the beauty of the mines (“die Schachten wie die Gänge eines Zaubergartens” [215]) and in the way of life they provide which includes membership in a Stand, an estate with a social standing, and is not just a money-making enterprise. In a gesture again referencing tropes from the Easter story, Elis debates for three days if he will take up this new profession, until his fate is sealed by two dreams. In the first, he finds himself on a ship in the underground, viewing crystals with metal flowers, “unzählige holde jungfräuliche Gestalten” (217), and a mysterious “queen” who will endanger him; the second was a vision of his mother who warns him against the mine. On the fourth day, after dying to his life as a sailor, he is “resurrected” to a new profession: he gives up his family’s vision and goes through the gate into the mining town, which appears more like Hell than Heaven. It is situated on a blasted heath of ecological destruction, with a few towers rising between steaming lakes, leading to the mouth of hell ( Höllenschlunde ) that “froze his blood in his veins.” 8 A 200-by-600-foot-long hole is surrounded with slag, breakdown, and carpentry that leaves no chance for anything to grow: Kein Baum, kein Grashalm sproßt in dem kahlen zerbröckelten Steingeklüft und in wunderlichen Gebilden, manchmal riesenhaften versteinerten Tieren, manchmal menschlichen Kolossen ähnlich, ragen die zackigen Felsenmassen ringsumher empor. Im Abgrunde liegen in wilder Zerstörung durcheinander Steine, Schlacken— ausgebranntes Erz, und ein ewiger betäubender Schwefeldunst steigt aus der Tiefe, als würde unten der Höllensud gekocht, dessen Dämpfe alle grüne Lust der Natur vergiften. Man sollte glauben, hier sei Dante herabgestiegen und habe den Inferno geschaut mit all’ seiner trostlosen Qual, mit all’ seinem Entsetzen. (220) Images of hell and damnation proliferate, as Elis feels himself drowning in this world and panics. However, he is lulled into a kind of calm by his earlier experience of the miners in the orderly world of Gothenburg. Whereas the sailors had celebrated their work with a dunken orgy, the miners’ celebration seemed to Elis to be of a quite different order. In a community assembly, a Bergthing (an old Germanic title for a legal assembly), the miners had blessed a new mine as a kind of feudal guild, and then had come to celebrate it as a real community, an image that appealed to the now-orphan Elis in no small part because of its patriarch: “Die helle Fröhlichkeit, die, als Pehrson Dahlsjö hinaustrat, wie aufs neue angefacht, durch den ganzen Kreis aufloderte, war wohl ganz anderer Art als der wilde tobende Jubel der Seeleute beim Hönsning” (222). There, he also meets Ulla Dahlsjö, the apple of her father’s eye, a Scandinavian beauty: “Hoch und schlank gewachsen, die dunklen Haare in vielen Zöpfen über der Scheitel aufgeflochten, das nette schmucke Mieder mit reichen Spangen zusammengenestelt ging sie daher in der höchsten Anmut der blühendsten Jugend” (223). Longing for this girl binds Elis to this community and also to his doom: “Dem Elis war es, als läge er in dem wonnigen Paradiese eines herrlichen Traums, aus dem er gleich erwachen und sich unbeschreiblich Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 333 334 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar elend fühlen werde” (224). He refuses to let die the dream of a patriarchal, old Germanic guild that would take care of him and provide him a family. In Hoffmann’s work, however, old men with beautiful daughters often cause young men’s downfalls. Like the Archivarius Lindhorst and his daughter Serpentina in Der goldene Topf, head miner Pehrson Dahlsjö and his daughter Ulla are from a world of the past, from the traditional economic order of Scandinavia. That world looks homelike to the damaged young Elis, who does not realize that he is about to become cannon fodder for another doddering industry. He gets drunk and is seduced into the mine despite his fear and against his dream-mother’s warning (224). Dahlsjö warns him that he is joining a profession that is actually a calling requiring dedication: Es ist ein alter Glaube bei uns, daß die mächtigen Elemente, in denen der Bergmann kühn waltet, ihn vernichten, strengt er nicht sein ganzes Wesen an, die Herrschaft über sie zu behaupten, gibt er noch andern Gedanken Raum, die die Kraft schwächen, welche er ungeteilt der Arbeit in Erd’ und Feuer zuwenden soll. (225) Elis dedicates himself to the job and to Ulla, who prays he will stay (226). Elis’ first descent into the depths of the mine is a descent into hell; he is out of his element: “Immer tiefer und tiefer ging es hinab, zuletzt auf kaum ein Fuß breiten eisernen Leitern, und Elis Fröbom merkte wohl, daß alle Geschicklichkeit, die er sich als Seemann im Klettern erworben, ihm hier nichts helfen könne” (226). But he keeps on, supported by his visions of his angelic Ulla and by her father’s promises that his daughter’s suitor would be made a master, with a seam of his own leased to him to mine and profit from. A vision from deep in the mine again augurs ill for Elis. An old miner from Gothenburg appears to the “false member of the guild” ( falscher Gesell ) and tells him to be careful that “der Metallfürst, den du verhöhnst, dich nicht faßt und hinabschleudert, daß deine Glieder zerbröckeln am scharfen Gestein.—Und nimmer wird Ulla dein Weib, das sag ich dir! ” (228). The mine has to be a vocation : Elis does not belong here, if he sees the job as an entrancy to the master miner’s world. This moral is written into the story as an echo of the financial lie upon which the mines of Falun actually rested. The mine’s overseer ( Obersteiger ) explains that Elis has seen the ghost of “Old Torbern,” a miner who lived a hundred years ago when the mine was richer, a miner who knew the secrets of the earth and who dedicated himself to the mine day and night, because he had neither wife nor child. He “stood as one with the metal” and always predicted disasters for those who were not similarly dedicated. That story was based on fact: at midsummer, 1687, the mine had caved in, because greed had led the miners to expand it incautiously. It had taken years to restore it to productivity, and once it was, Torbern’s ghost showed up in the story to help the miners find the richest veins (“der ihnen allerlei guten Rat erteilt und die schönsten Gänge gezeigt” [230]). Elis’ peers take the ghostly apparition as a good omen, portending the discovery of a rich seam. The story takes a darker turn when Ulla is purportedly betrothed to a rich merchant, a rich Handelsherr who lives from the sea, not the mines: “Ich [Dahlsjö] geb ihm auf sein Werben meine Tochter zum Weibe; er zieht mit ihr nach Göthaborg, und du bleibst dann allein bei mir, Elis, meine einzige Stütze im Alter” (231). Elis’ reaction is a lapse into utter madness; he runs to the mine and shrieks to its ghost “mit furchtbarer Stimme”: “Unten liegt mein Schatz, mein Leben mein alles! —Torbern! steig herab mit mir, zeig mir die reichsten Trappgänge, da will ich wühlen und bohren und arbeiten und das Licht des Tages fürder nicht mehr schauen! ” (230-31). Against all proper mining protocol, he goes down into the shafts alone and does indeed find the promised new seam of ore. This work underground will, he believes, compensate him for lost love. At that moment, Elis begins to hallucinate. In a third vision he sees his descent leading him into the arms of the mountain queen who will drown him in the underground, in a sea of “purest crystal” (232). Elis only survives because Dahlsjö fetches him out of the mine and reveals Ulla’s betrothal as a hoax designed to test Elis’ love against the necessary devotion to the family business. Elis has passed the son-in-law test (233), but at his engagement party, he looks disturbed ( verstört [234]) as he flashes back to his vision. He sees the face of the queen, this time with the head of Medusa (a French Revolution symbol, nota bene ), and recognizes that the pit is “eine Hölle voll trostloser Qual trügerisch ausgeschmückt zur verderblichsten Verlockung! ” (234). Nursed back to health by Ulla after this breakdown, he returns to the mine, divided between “sein besseres, sein eigentliches Ich” down in the mine, in the arms of the queen, and a dark self “seeking his bed in Falun” (235). 9 Their wedding celebration is set for Johannistag, the Midsummer’s Night between the 23 and 24 June, celebrated by fires that commemorate St. John the Baptist, harbinger of Jesus’ public life and martyrdom. On that morning, Elis, fully dressed in wedding clothes, knocks on his bride’s door and gives her great news of the prophecy he brings. He will find their fortune (and his own inner peace), he tells her, if he recovers the Queen’s stone, “der kirschrot funkelnde Almandin” (236), a figment of his imagination. Later that day, the bridal party assembles, but Elis does not appear to join their ranks. Suddenly some miners appear, pale and disturbed, to report on a collapse, “wie eben ein fürchterlicher Bergfall die ganze Grube, in der Dahlsjös Kuxe befindlich, verschüttet” (237). Elis has been buried in the pit, in the world of his new “family,” and Ulla disappears, a bride without a groom. There will be no Dahlsjö heirs. Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 335 336 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar Outside the compelling psychological detail of these passages, Hoffmann’s Elis has lived and died in the context of the two great capitalist failures of Sweden: the India Company and the great open-pit mine collapse of the prior century. Hoffmann drives the point home by ending the story near the present, with the historical discovery of the miner Fet-Mats’s body: Da geschah es, daß die Bergleute, als sie zwischen zwei Schachten einen Durchschlag versuchten, in einer Teufe [sic] von dreihundert Ellen im Vitriolwasser den Leichnam eines jungen Bergmanns fanden, der versteinert schien, als sie ihn zutage förderten. Es war anzusehen als läge der Jüngling in tiefem Schlaf, so frisch, […] so ohne alle Spur der Verwesung seine zierliche Bergmannskleider, ja selbst die Blumen an der Brust. (238) In the story, this corpse is recognized as Elis Fröbom, and it is described as incorruptible, as a saint’s body would be. The reader also learns that Ulla is the Johannismütterchen who has shown up every year on Johannistag to commemorate her lost husband. She drops dead when she sees his corpse, which then abruptly deteriorates: “Man bemerkte, daß der Körper des Unglücklichen, der fälschlicher Weise für versteinert gehalten, in Staub zu zerfallen begann” (239). Both sets of remains were buried in the church together. The miracle has disappeared. Hoffmann plants a barb in the story which emphasizes for contemporaneous readers its distance from reality. Johannistag is not only a solstice celebration; it is also a quarter day in Europe, when rents and other payments were typically due. This rent was indeed due on Elis’s life, on the life of the mine, and on the patriarchal guild estates that run it. No matter how family-like this culture of miners had seemed to Elis, then, it offered only Faustian bargains. Elis Fröbom is not Barbarossa returning from under the mountain, but simply a victim of false promises made by Ulla’s father, and of an obsessive devotion to a profession that could no longer pay off. In this sense, Elis Fröbom has become a victim of Sweden’s economic illusions for a second time. His two fathers both have fostered delusions in their son; their “noble professions” live from the blood of workers and bring death to many. Elis’ parents had wanted him to go abroad and so had arranged his berth in the India trade. They had profited because his father was a pilot, one of the most highly paid of sailors. But his family was left rudderless when he drowns: the mother’s tales of his father keep Elis focused on the sea, not the direct example of his father’s presence. Elis finds a temporary new father in Dahlsjö, who is from the older paternalistic world of the mine. However, that world, that underground hell promising much but delivering little, will kill Elis off as surely as the era’s other dominant form of capitalism had killed his father. Adding to this body count of state capitalism are Elis’ two brothers, lost at war. In these fates, Hoffmann has painted not only the picture of a disturbed and unfortunate young man, but also a panorama of Sweden’s capitalist landscape at the end of its cycle, at the end of Sweden’s tall ships and the copper that clad the bottoms of Europe’s ships of trade and of the apprentice system that guaranteed success for hardworking youth. This world resembles nothing more than the miner’s body preserved in vitriol: a beautiful corpse that will disintegrate at first touch or light of day. That corpse only becomes a saint and martyr against the larger political background of Hoffmann’s day. Falun appeared in a collection framed by Hoffmann’s own circle of friends, his Serapionsbrüder who appear in the frame narrative as victims of the region’s politics. Hoffmann’s generation would have recognized Elis Fröbom’s tragedy as the fate of a generation in a region that had been ripped and made bankrupt by war among imperial powers. For Hoffman’s readers, Die Bergwerke zu Falun implicates more than just despair or the luncacy of creative minds forced into old, hereditary boxes that stifle them, since both Gothenburg’s harbor and Sweden’s Copper Mountain at the town of Falun were unmistakable reference points for Sweden’s fall and Prussia’s attempts to rise in the Napoleonic era. They were the economic heart of a Swedish empire that was failing because its hereditary income sources had radically shifted at the moment when war debts needed to be paid. The story is explicitly set in the very near past of its publication, in a late phase of the Napoleonic Wars after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the so-called War of the Fourth Coalition in 1806-07, in which Napoleon and the Rheinbund joined together against Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, the UK , and Sicily. French troops had occupied parts of Prussia since the Battle of Austerliz (1805), despite the Prussian king’s attempt at neutrality; they entered Warsaw itself on 28 November 1806 (Kleßmann 121). Napoleon followed them on 19 December, and the Poles welcomed Napoleon as their liberator, while the Prussians saw in him an agent blocking their ascent. The Peace of Tilset (9 July 1807) was dictated by Napoleon, creating the independent Duchy of Warsaw, which Prussia was to occupy until reparations were paid (Kleßmann 127). Ultimately, however, Prussia was to lose almost half its territory. Within Prussia, these losses led to the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms (starting 1807), aimed at restructuring and rationalizing Prussia’s law code and administration so that it could pay its reparation debts to France. Unfortunately, Hoffmann himself was part of that occupying Prussian bureaucracy that suffered when Napoleon “liberated” Poland. For a young state bureaucrat, Prussia’s annexation of Poland had promised careers. In the early throes of the political upheavals realigning the borders of the Baltic states and Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 337 338 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar after the fall of Sweden as a power had begun, Hoffman had been a state employee stationed in Posen between 1800 and 1802. Because he had drawn satirical caricatures of local army officers, he was then sent to Plock, a prior capital of Poland, but “ein tristes westpolnisches Provinznest” (Mangold 168). He stayed there until 1804, when he obtained a position as Regierungsrat in Warsaw. Hoffmann found in Warsaw an interesting intellectual life, offering contact with modern literature and with local intellectuals such as Zacharias Werner and Julius Eduard Hitzig (his eventual biographer and member of the Serapionsbrüder ). When Napoleon’s troops captured Warsaw on 28 November 1806, however, the bulk of Prussian civil servants employed there divided the remnants of the treasury among them and fled. The new French occupiers demanded a loyalty oath from the remaining Prussian officials, but were not accommodated. Not rich enough to simply cut and run, Hoffman stayed in Warsaw, working on music and organizing concerts. But ultimately he also left. Hoffmann and his family returned to Posen, and then, after 6 months of illness that trapped them there, they got passports from the French to return to Berlin. Berlin, however, was a city under stress: “Du weißt, daß ich kein Vermögen, sondern nur Talent habe, die mich erhalten könnten, diese Talente aber hier, in dem menschenleeren, geldarmen Berlin wuchern zu lassen, ist kaum möglich! ” (B1, 221 / 222, cited Kleßmann 128). In consequence, Hoffmann and his family moved on to Bamberg in 1808, where he got a job as theater manager (which he rapidly lost) and began to write for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a newspaper in Leipzig. His breakthrough as an author came in 1809 with Ritter Gluck, which also got him rehired at the theater in various capacities, including playwright. By 1813, he managed to secure a position as music director for an opera company, but the war again intervened. When Prussia declared war on France in the War of the Sixth Coalition (1813), the situation again worsened: Hoffmann and his family were trapped in the active war zones in Leipzig and Dresden, experiencing bombardments firsthand. He could not get to the company he was hired to direct; it took three months to reach his employer in Dresden, where he settled, only again to be caught in the bombardments associated with the Battle of Dresden. The city surrendered in November, and Hoffmann moved on to Leipzig with the opera company. By February 1814, he had quarreled with the company owner, was given notice and fired. At the end of September, he returned to Berlin, where he found work again as a jurist at the Kammergericht and where the opera put on his Undine to great success. No matter what critics may think about Hoffmann’s sense of politics (“Hoffmann, an jeglicher Politik vollkommen desinteressiert, begreift nicht im mindesten, was sich da anbahnt” [Kleßmann122]), he was completely engulfed by the region’s wars for a decade. Even after Napoleon’s 1815 defeat, the damage to Prussia would not be mitigated until the Congress of Vienna reestablished old order Europe. Unfortunately, this political resolution did not improve Hoffmann’s overall situation as a state employee, because Prussian remained in debt (Kleßmann 389). Although Hoffmann seems to have been a good jurist, according to his yearly performance reports, he remained underpaid (Kleßmann 440). The situation was no more promising elsewhere in the German lands. The anti-Semitic Hep-Hep Riots in Bavaria occurred in 1819 (alongside the rise of Turnvater Jahn, a nationalist figure), making emigration unfeasible as the situation in Prussia further deteriorated. By 1818-1819, liberals were trying for a constitutional monarchy in Prussia (Mangold 173), but the murder of August von Kotzebue in 1819 gave Metternich the opportunity to issue the Karlsbader Beschlüsse, intended to stifle radicals through censorship and court action; they applied to most German regions. Hoffmann tried to work against these anti-liberal policies as an “overreaction by the state” ( Überreaktion des Staates ), but to no avail (Mangold 175). Despite the deteriorating political situation, Hoffmann had begun to have literary success, which would continue to his death in 1822 from ill health. Although Hoffmann was a seemingly unpolitical author, he nevertheless suffered centrally from the politics of the era. It thus makes it unlikely that Hoffmann took up the story of the Falun miners as a fairy tale completely unrelated to the era’s socio-political conditions. Between 1816 and 1818, when Hoffmann was working on Falun, he saw any hope for a quick rise of the Prussian state dashed. No wonder, then, that he set his tale of a displaced sailor-miner into a contemporaneous frame narrative. That frame carefully marks Hoffmann’s generation as a collection of saints and martyrs to the era’s political and economic affairs. The Prussia that was supposed to create a future Germany had left them adrift in the economic and political wreckage of Prussia in the Baltic region. In turning to Falun, Hoffmann took up an imperial moment of collapse still in public memory, but not directly related to his own experience, which was a prudent choice in an era of censorship. Moreover, he clearly knew the mine’s history, since the details of its management in Falun are correct. The Swedish Empire was one of the region’s political ghosts, having lost huge territories in the Great Northern War with Russia (1700-1721). As noted, Falun had been an economic engine for Sweden’s past imperial might. The real mines of Falun are still found at the Stora Kopparberg, or Big Copper Mountain, an open pit copper mine 95 meters deep, 400 meters long, and 350 meters across, with a main underground shaft leading off it at 450 meters deep (see Forss for the complete technical details). Now a world’s heritage site, 10 Falun’s pit was first excavated before 1100, with considerable mining operations Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 339 340 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar already in place by 1288. “Soon the rich copper deposit aroused international interest, particularly among the merchants in the Hanseatic League. Trade was mainly by way of Lübeck” (Forss). King Magnus Eriksson had granted a letter of patent for Stora Kopparberg by 1347, organizing the enterprise to minimize the government’s risks (a state of affairs which is represented in Dahlsjö’s lease): “The mine was worked by the individual mining masters in relation to their copper smelter holdings” (Forss), under supervision of administrators. Reflecting the mine’s growing importance for the region, a town was chartered in 1642, taking the pit’s name as its own. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, new ores had been discovered in the historic pit, augmenting its traditional yield of copper with iron pyrite, zinc, and lead. In the mid-seventeenth century, the pit yielded 3000 tons of copper: “At times the mine accounted for almost two-thirds of the total world output of copper” (Forss). Even in Hoffmann’s era, the mine’s yield was still significant enough that the Stora Corporation that ran it as a surface pit mine (still existing today) had built a new mine building (1812). Cave-ins were frequent, because the pit masters functioning as independent contractors working individual claims often mined the lode too quickly. One of the most dramatic collapses happened on 25 June 1687, “when the walls dividing the three largest open pits along with underlying galleries collapsed, forming the present ‛Great Pit’” (Forss). This is the collapse that buried the miner Fet-Mats, Hoffmann’s prototype for his hero Elis. Notably, this piece of Swedish history was also Prussia’s history. The pit’s profits had financed Gustav II ’s campaigns in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and allowed Sweden to engage Russia militarily. When Sweden went bankrupt after the Great Northern War, a power vacuum rose in the Baltic as Sweden withdrew from the continent to retrench its economy, and Russia began to swallow up some eastern Baltic states, facilitating Prussia’s rise in the process at least until Napoleon temporarily halted its growth. No wonder, then, that Hoffmann could call Falun a historical work: when that kind of economy fails, individuals suffer. Hoffmann has built yet another layer into his collection, beyond history. Based on the fact that he called Falun the story of martyrs, it would be logical to suggest that there is an additional layer to this history: the stories of individuals who were martyred to these imperial legacies. There is a whole ethical layer to the stories about this historical space. The empires in question resemble the older family patriarchs in many of his stories, as they sell their sons and daughters into lives not of their own making. This is a nice metaphor for coalition politics in the Napoleonic era and in Metternich’s Europe, seen from the point of view of the generation that had to live that history while having no control over it. Hoffmann marks this historical space repeatedly with references to religion. The Serapionsbrüder of the frame narrative reflect the real group of writing friends with whom Hoffmann met regularly in 1816. From 1818 on, Hoffmann met with these friends in his own apartment (Kleßmann 429), and the collection’s frame refers to eight such evening meetings, reflecting real events occurring between 1818 and 1820. 11 The list of Bethren includes names familiar from the so-called Berlin Romanticism, including Adelbert von Chamisso (author of the famous Peter Schlemihl [1814], about a man who loses his shadow), Julius Eduard Hitzig (a civil servant working at the Berlin court who was associated with the Salon of Rahel Varnhagen and who had in 1808 founded a publishing house), Karl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa (a merchant whose younger brother was a poet), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (an author most famous from the 1811 Undine ), and occasional others. Their conversations, used to tie the stories together, gives evidence of their attempts at evolving an aesthetic program in their conversations (Hoffmann 1231), as they discussed how to express poets’ inner experience (Hoffmann 1247). The frame narrative not only contains these meetings of poetic friends, it also contains the story of St. Serapion (Seraphim), after whom both the club and the books were named. Hoffmann takes as his avatar in this frame specifically the Hermit ( Einsiedler ) Serapion, well known in religious circles (Hoffmann 1246). Cyprian, who was a diplomat and poet (likely a representation of Adelbert von Chamisso), tells the tale of the saint’s burial. The Brethren purportedly found the tale in an almanac ( Hauskalender [66]), a book form that in German had become associated with the education of scarcely lettered readers. Their Serapion was “nourished by solitude” until his death around 1809 (Hoffmann 34). He had looked on all with “des Hofmanns Auge” (Hoffmann 35), the courtier’s eye—but also the author’s. Cyprian was buried “mit Hülfe zweier Löwen” (36) as befits an evangelist or royal, and with two stags carrying a mantle, as would befit a king. 12 In the Catholic Church’s calendar of saints, this Serapion is probably Serapion of Thmuls (C. E. ca. 330-360), an Egyptian monk with a feast day on 21 March, who supported Athanasius in combatting the Arian heresy. This Serapion published a commentary against Arianism around 340, dying around 362; Hoffmann identifies him as a bible translator (Hoffmann 28). Yet there are actually multiple “"Sts. Serapion” or “Seraphim” woven through the frame narrative text. 13 Perhaps the most famous St. Serapion of all in Church history specifically is associated with sailors, the one whose feast day is the 14 November (in a German saints’ calendar) of Hoffmann’s Brethren’s meeting. This Serapion was a saint-martyr killed at Algiers in Africa (d. C. E. 1240), the first martyr of the Mercedarian Order (the Order of Our Lady of Mercy), whose charge was caring for the victims of Barbary pirates. 14 Hoffmann alludes to another famous St. Serapion: a martyr killed in anti-Christian riots (C. E. 252) Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 341 342 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar under “Kaiser Dexius” (Decius) in third century Alexandria (Hoffmann 26 and 1265). Still another St. Serapion (d. C. E. 211, with a feast day of 30 October) was a theologian and Bishop of Antioch, known for a tract decrying those who did not resist persecution. Another of Hoffman’s Serapions was actually canonized in 1767: St. Seraphim of Montegranaro (1540-1604), 15 with a feast day on 12 October. He was a shepherd who entered the Capuchin order, where he demonstrated “the gift of reading the secrets of hearts, and with that of miracles and prophecy.” Significantly, this Serapion has a career very parallel to many in Hoffmann’s own circles: “aus glänzender Familie” (Hoffmann 25), working in the diplomatic corps (advancing to Ambassador, Gesandter ), before he turned into a Hermit, eventually coming out of the desert to go to Rome (Hoffmann 28). 16 Hoffmann called his tale a story of a martyr, saint, or hermit, which straightforwardly associates it not only with morality fables, but with a particular devotional practice in the Catholic Church and a set of associated strategies for understanding stories as moral exempla. Remember that Scriptural interpretation insisted that the Bible needed to be read in four ways: a literal interpretation, focusing on words and historical facts in the text; a typological (figural) interpretation, making explicit connections between Old and New Testaments, seeing Christ’s life prefigured in the former; a tropologial (moral) reading of the story, suggesting what it should teach us about our daily lives; and an anagogical interpretation, focusing on death and life beyond death, an eschatological reading. With the frame narrative’s Serapions, Hoffmann encourages such multiple readings of the stories told by his own Serapion-Bretheren, the martyrs of his era who can be equated with the multiple Sts. Serapion noted above. As historical martyrdoms, these stories document a world passed from fathers to sons, an Old Testament whose covenant needs to be reread in the world of the New Testament. The multiple Serapions, therefore, encourage multiple rereadings of the text. In the world of Falun, for instance, the pit of hell that this historically real place has quite literally been opened to those like Elis trapped by the ideology of the old orders, the old empires, and traditional patriarchal guild families who pass jobs on to children they deem worthy. In an endtime of merchantile capitalism, however, the story suggests a different moral: those children will be lost if they follow the strategies that led the region into economic collapse, war, and devastation. Figurally, each Serapion echoes on the other, just as the characters in the various stories in the Serapionsbrüder overlap heavily in their identities and dilemmas. In this sense, Hoffmann’s frame narrative also points to another factor influencing his collection: the original story was found as a Kalendergeschichte or popular almanac tale. Almanachs (like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s ) were a mixed form, containing practical advice, humor, and short prose tales with moral points; Johann Peter Hebel had made them into an art form in the German language with his 1811 publication of the Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreundes (1811), taken from a long-running set of almanac volumes. In this sense, then, Hoffmann’s play with Serapions calls attention not just to the collection’s possible moral purpose, but also to its claim of presenting popular tales in straightforward language, but with refined narrative techniques. The Serapionsbrüder volumes are easily read as Kalendargeschichten —as a set of recursive morality fables that meditate on the generation’s martyrdoms. Just as multiple Serapions run through the frame narrative, questions about fathers and their legacies, art, and inheritances in end times run throughout these now-familiar stories. The first of the volume’s tales, Rat Krespel, is a familiar tale about a retired bureaucrat, a slightly addled father of a doomed daughter. This father tries to protect his daughter by forbidding her to sing because she was born with a weak heart. If she falls in love and starts singing, she will die—a clear morality of a choice between love and life. The next entry is Die Fermata (71), another story of music intertwined with young love, but this time it is more a black comedy than a tragedy. Theodor cuts off the trill sung by his beloved Lauretta and she rejects him; he finds her again 14 years later, when she, now a nun singing in church services, again complains about how he treated her. Love’s power has decisively faded, and some things never change in the damaging, often fatal, relations between men and women. A fragment playing “am 2. Pfingsttag” introduces the second set of tales (129). Set on the second day after Pentecost Sunday, it includes jokes about various contemporary works, including Kleist’s Bettelweib von Locarno (129), Hoffmann’s own Kater Murr (130), and Arndt’s Wahres Christentum (130). The stories here are decisively driven by the supposed opposition between art and commerce. Der Artushof, about Danzig (177), is set in a trade hall and exchange. The hero marries into a company of woolgatherers and is happy with his lot as a merchant, until an old man seduces him into becoming a painter by showing him a marvelous panel (186). 17 This is the tale paired with Falun, whose references to Baltic commerce necessarily call to mind the contemporaneous paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) featuring the region’s harbors and cities. The final story in this set and in Hoffman’s first volume is the familiar Nußknacker und Mausekönig, the source for The Nutcracker ballet, a comingof-age story that starts at the beginning of the liturgical cycle, on Christmas. Nußknacker shows straightforwardly that benevolent kingdoms are the stuff of Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 343 344 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar dreams, while, on the more practical level, to grow up, one must deal with the mice that come out of the walls at night. As a collection, then, this volume blends humor with visions and nightmares and heroes with (often unwitting) villains who offer them jobs. But one can go a step further with the religious analogies and figural readings. Like so many German Romantic tales, Elis’ story is the tale not just of a martyr, but also one of an orphan who lacks substantial, meaningful reference points within his own class, culture, and age group. He remains a well-meaning youth who, with few special gifts and only unacceptable opportunities available to him, will be sacrificed to the past as he tries to do his best and find a family or a community. The prominent roles played by the women in the other tales suggest that Ulla’s role in Falun also needs to be considered actively. Remember that when Elis dies in the mine collapse, the value of the Dahlsjö patriarch’s mine lease probably has also died. If this is so, then Ulla may be less a grieving widow than another victim of the economic realities of her world. She ended up not only without a bridegroom, but probably also without a dowry, and so she has become a kind of living ghost, a female victim of the mine. Even at the start of her courtship, she may have been less in love with Elis than happy to have found a groom at all—Elis, after all, did not have a city rival. Her father was looking to use his lease to find a son-in-law, not necessarily to pass on a family business in a declining industry. These tales of saints, martyrs, and hermits thus implicate a very specific readership and reading strategy, one leading back into the roots of the Romantic movement in its exploration of genre aesthetics. Taking Hoffmann’s own description of his historyand martyr-tales seriously opens up a broader sense of what Romanticism meant to this “third Romanticism” (after Jena and Heidelberg). Remember that the very term “romantic” refers back to the romance as a litery genre from high culture in the latter Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe. A romance was often a tale of a knight-errant on a quest or adventure, but one that focused on manners and mores, not just heroic deeds; it would often rework history, folk tales, or legends into more fictional form. 18 At the origin of the European novel, the romance also was a mixed genre, accommodating dialogue and poetry or song as well as exposition. And this, arguably, is what Hoffmann has provided in the Serapionsbrüder by adopting the almanac form with a frame narrative. His work is utterly political as a commentary on the mores of an era fatally disrupted by war and political realignments, leaving lives and careers in wreckage. Die Bergwerke von Falun is the key to this collection, since it is a story written for the collection, but ripped from recent history to bring the imperial politics of Hoffmann’s day into focus for individuals, as well as to question the value of traditional Bildung and the bourgeois social orders who are its proponents. The seduction offered by that older generation was economic and paternalistic: to become a “company man” as part of a ship or a mining lease, each with a distinct way of life, with its preferred celebrations and art. Yet older metaphors open up the moral core of this choice (the ultimate goal of a hero like Wilhelm Meister) when they are juxtaposed. In Christian iconography, a ship has always represented a world unto itself as it is a set of individuals under the complete disposition of the captain who, godlike, has their fate in his hands. The mine, in contrast, is almost a hermitage, a retreat from life on the earth into something more primitive, but totally under the control of skill and the whims of the mountain queen. Hoffmann’s Serapion Brethren are the saints among these people, survivors of the seductive bad advice that brought Elis Fröbom to his doom, a victim of the delusions fostered upon him by the traditional estates. But the families he shows us are traumatogenic: broken, orphaned, looking backwards and living off old wealth, with no clear way forward. These Seraphions from Berlin gained and lost their careers in Poland and retreated to the capital of a Prussia whose stratified society thwarted their hopes for a new future, a possible ascent into a new class, and a new social project. I would add that much of Romantic literature might be considered a product of cultural post-traumatic stress disease: they feature broken homes, lost loves, and desolate landscapes which disrupt the scripts through which individuals should author their own lives. Yet this literature is also a literature written under censorship, between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, so that the causes of these broken lives cannot be mentioned. Bringing the politics down to the everyday level of experience and focusing on the politics of economics, however, Hoffmann narrates the cultural and political causes of his generation’s traumas. This is a generation that, should it follow the scripts of the various guilds or Turmgesellschaften of the era, will be brought to its doom, a generation that needs Kalendergeschichten with clear morals and practical reason rather than the delusions of nationalism and Bildung among a bourgeoisie with infinite guile and little guilt about the costs imposed on its children as it asserts the political and economic ground of its existence long past its expiration date. Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 345 346 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar Notes 1 This essay was jointly conceived and researched, especially the argument about the position of Falun and Sweden in the Baltic and the cross-references to religious spaces; both authors have worked through the text first drafted by Arens. 2 Wunberg, 177 ff., has a good overview of the source history, albeit more with reference to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s version of the story. Neubauer takes up the versions in another way, reaching up through Wagner and Hofmannsthal. See Jacobs for quotations of the source in Schubert (56 f., n. 19). See Steinecke (1997) for a modern biography that also includes more extended accounts of the origin of each of Hoffmann’s works and an account of his employment history. 3 The vast number of modern studies addresses Hoffmann’s work through its aesthetics; see, for example, Kremer. Grossert and Böhme take on the Falun material psychologically. Montadon documents the contemporaneous sources from Scandinavia (211), and notes how Novalis is a secondary source, while offering an overall Freudian interpretation. E. L. Smith stresses the metaphor of understanding fate and thus a more psychologizing approach to myth; Rieckmann also approaches the story through fate, as he compares Hoffmann to Hofmannsthal. Fleck shows how Ibsen used it as a source; Stinchcomb does the same for Trakl. Wulff has noted that D. H. Lawrence used Hebel’s version of the story. The history of ideas has also figured prominently: Jennings takes on the text’s connections to Naturphilosophie ; Kugler (2013) and Uerlings (1996) deal with the mine as real and ideal. Maillard traces the tale back to romantic science, as well, with the emphasis on the unconscious and Carus, but then makes a modern psychoanalytic interpretation, referring to the structure of the soul. Rickels talks about how it early became a tourist trap, with Fet-Mats Israelsson (the historical prototype for Hoffmann’s protagonist Elis Fröbom) being multiply buried, but then defers this discussion to offer instead an overall Freudian interpretation. 4 The collection, published in four volumes, was originally intended to be titled “Die Seraphinen Brüder”; the change in name from Seraphim to Serapion seems to have been motivated by his wife’s Polish calendar (Hoffmann 1236 f.). An editor identifies the titular saint as Seraphinus von Montegranaro, whose feast day is 12 October (Hoffmann 1230). But as we shall see below, there are at least three different saint Seraphims that come into question as his referents, given how common Seraphim / Serapion is in Orthodox Christianity. 5 See also Voss (2009) for a tie between aesthetics and economics in this story. 6 A project has rebuilt a replica of Sweden’s largest India Trader, the Gotheborg. See the webpage by Jan-Erik Nilsson at www.gotheborg.com / project / project_introduction.shtml for the entire history of this investment and reconstruction. Information on the ship which was built in Stockholm to go to China (whereas any number of the British India Traders were built in India) and which originally sank in 1745 can be found at this site and at en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Götheborg_(ship) (accessed 28 April 2014). The original trade charter was set to expire in 1746, and the ship had left the harbor for Canton, China in 1743. In 1813, the Swedish East India Trade was given up (see en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Swedish_East_India_Company for a usable outline of the trade in English [accessed 28 April 2014]). 7 The British East India Company had been brought under political control in 1784 and in 1813 had nationalized its international holdings under the British Crown in the Charter Act of 1813 (53 Geo. III c.155). 8 See Hartma (2003) for a discussion of technical “progress” in mining. 9 Such passages explain the proliferation of psychoanalytic interpretations of the story. See, for example, Klesse 2010 or Wight 1990 for explicitly Freudian interpretations. 10 The full application documents (2001) are available at whc.unesco.org / uploads / nominations / 1027.pdf (accessed 28 April 2014). 11 Hoffmann is considered to be the Theodor represented in the text (Kleßmann 429). For a discussion of how this frame sets up Hoffmann’s project, see Brown (2006). 12 This image is probably a reference to the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, given that staghorns are part of the coat of arms of the house of Württemberg, which allied itself with Napoleon in the Rheinbund. Württemberg’s monarch changed from being one of the HRE ’s Prince-Electors to being a King. 13 See the commentary in the critical edition (Hoffmann 1265). 14 See www.orderofmercy.org/ and libro.uca.edu / rc / prolog.htm, or en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Serapion_of_Algiers, featured in a famous painting by Zurbarán (accessed 28 April 2014). 15 See the New Catholic Encyclopedia , Online ed. www.newadvent.org/ cathen/ 13726a.htm (accessed 28 April 2014) and en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Seraphin_ of_Montegranaro (accessed 10 May 2014). 16 One other St. Seraphim is important in the Russian Orthodox Church of the era, St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833), a famous hermit-monk, who, in 1815, had a vision of the Virgin Mary and turned to prophecy and healing; Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 347 348 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar he had, of course, not been canonized yet, but he was visible when Hoffmann was writing. See en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Seraphim_of_Sarov. 17 From a 12 March 1815 letter to Hippel: “Das Ganze dreht sich um ein wunderbares Bild im Arthushof, welches in der Seele eines jungen Kaufmanns den Funken der Kunst entzündet, so daß er sich von allem losreißt und Mahler wird” (Hoffmann 1318). 18 See the The Origins of the English Novel, 1660 — 1740 by Michael McKeon (1987) for the position of the romance in the history of the novel. Works Cited Arnold, Heinz Ludwig. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Text + Kritik Sonderband. München: edition text + kritik, 1992. Baldes, Dirk. “The Significance of Name-Days in the Literature of German Romanticism Using the Example of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Acta humanitarica universitatis Saulensis T. 8 (2009), 177-83. Böhme, Hartmut. “Romantische Adoleszenzkrisen: Zur Psychodynamik der Venuskult-Novellen von Tieck, Eichendorff und E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Text & Kontext 10, Supplement (1981): 133-76. Brown, Hilda Meldrum. Critique and Creativity: E. T. A. 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Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun. ” Modern Language Review 59.4 (October 1964): 609-15. Uerlings, Herbert. “Novalis in Freiberg: Die Romantisierung des Bergbaus—Mit einem Blick auf Tiecks Runenberg und E. T. A. Hoffmanns Bergwerke zu Falun. ” A urora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff Gesellschaft 56 (1996): 57-77. UNESCO World Heritage Committee. “ WHC Nomination Documentation: Mining Area of the Great Copper Mountain in Falun.” 2001. Web. 23 Dec. 2015. <http: / / whc. unesco.org / uploads / nominations / 1027.pdf>. Baltic Providences and Martyrdoms 349 350 Katherine Arens and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar Voss, Torsten. “Kapitalismus als Ästhetizismus: Die Geburt des Künstlers aus dem Geiste der Ökonomie: Tieck, Hoffmann, Hauff.” Literatur für Leser 32.1 (2009): 51-63. Wight, Doris T. “Masochism, Mourning, Melancholia: A Freudian Interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tale ‛The Mines of Falun.’” Germanic Notes 21.3-4 (1990): 49-55. 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He flounders in his attempts to depict a particular version of his homeland and also to assert his narrative credibility against the imposing presence of the title figure. While this instability stems from uncertainty surrounding themes that have often been studied in conjunction with this work, such as conceptions of Heimat, colonization, and globalization, the narrative is held together by an intricate mesh of ambiguity that resists the binary oppositions that have often been used to frame studies of this text. Complexly interlocking narratives ask us to examine such topics as the authority of a storyteller, the relationship between oral and written narrative, and the experience of bearing witness in an era characterized by social changes. Keywords: framed narrative, Heimat, geology, credibility, unreliable narrator “Wieder an Bord! ” (7) Eduard exclaims with relief as he begins the thirty-day ocean journey from a visit in his German hometown back to British South Africa, where he has supposedly made a fortune. Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen: Eine See- und Mordgeschichte, published in 1891, portrays a narrator who is on uneasy footing throughout the novel, not only within the confines of the ship, but also while in his homeland. Raabe underscores this instability by linking physically unstable ground with the disruption of narrative frameworks that would theoretically divide stories and geographical regions. In vain does Eduard 352 Jillian DeMair do all he can to convey stability. He frames his story in logbook style, occasionally reminding the reader of his present, seemingly neutral location onboard the ship, as if he could neatly enframe his homeland itself and thereby capture the perceived lost state of unity that he sees embodied by his childhood friend, Heinrich Schaumann, known as “Stopfkuchen.” While Eduard was making his fortune in Africa, Heinrich had been living a seemingly idyllic life with his childhood sweetheart, Valentine Quakatz, on her late father’s fortress-like estate, the Rote Schanze. Eduard’s efforts to construe his hometown as tranquil are subverted from within by Heinrich, who gradually unearths the truth about the decades-old murder of the cattle-dealer Kienbaum, for which Valentine’s father was long considered responsible. Heinrich thereby reveals unexpected deeper layers both through his own storytelling and also literally in his geological excavations of fossils on his land. Eduard, meanwhile, finds himself struggling to contain Heinrich within the frame of the narrative that is meant to be his own. I argue in this paper that Raabe shows the futility of Eduard’s attempt by linking narrative unreliability with the physical instability of the earth. This means that at the same time that physical unearthing and digging reflect the precariousness of Eduard’s search for identity and homeland, they also represent meditations on what it means to relate a coherent and credible story. Moreover, these concerns are intertwined in a historically relevant way and must be understood in relation to this world of modernization and colonization, which initially seems to be located far beyond Eduard and Heinrich’s hometown, but which actually cannot be kept separate from it. 1 The stories conveyed are inextricably linked to how these storytellers define their relationships to the land, especially in response to the perceived perils of an increasingly globalized world. Issues raised by colonization, globalization, and the definition of homeland are held together in this novel by an intricate mesh of ambiguity that calls into question the binary oppositions (e.g., home and abroad, colonizer and colonized, the modern and the antiquated) that have often been used to frame studies of this text. Raabe’s complexly interlocking narratives ask us to examine such topics as the authority of storytellers, the relationship between oral and written narrative, and the experience of bearing witness in an era characterized by profound social changes. Rather than telling a single story, Raabe’s text portrays a search for stability and specificity in an increasingly globalized world. For Eduard and Heinrich, this search extends to the question of how to represent these experiences. As many scholars have observed, Stopfkuchen is a self-reflexive text that not only addresses contemporary issues such as globalization and colonialization, but also deals with questions of representation (Zeller 9-15; Göttsche and Krobb 2). My focus is not just on how Eduard’s credibility as a narrator is undermined, but more specifically on how this instability is reflected in tangibly unsettled Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 353 ground. In essence, Eduard fails to delineate two different types of boundaries; he is able to frame neither a unified narrative nor a stable Heimat. 2 Mine is not the first study of the narrative implications of unsettled ground in nineteenth-century German literature. 3 It does, however, offer a different perspective on Raabe’s portrayals of tangible land and physical artifacts such as Heinrich’s fossil collection by reading them as instances of unstable ground that are symptomatic of Eduard’s loss of control over his story. I begin by considering Raabe’s deployment of Eduard as a figure who withdraws from the blurring of boundaries between the global and the local. By portraying Eduard’s need for stability, Raabe does not celebrate permanence but rather demonstrates how insecurity and a desire for unambiguous boundaries can be manifested in the structure and flow of the narrative. As Eduard fails to delineate his desired clear narrative structure, his lack of credibility becomes apparent. In the subsequent section, I examine how Raabe uses irony to say more than Eduard ever does, and also to undermine this narrator’s viewpoints. Heinrich, our oral storyteller, is instrumental in unsettling Eduard and his narrative authority, and I show in the following section how Heinrich’s geological excavations upend Eduard’s desire for a merely superficial perspective on his homeland. I conclude with an analysis of the different perspectives on progress conveyed by the two storyteller figures. Heimat in a Globalized World One of the reasons why the nineteenth century saw an interest in capturing and recording local traditions and cultural identities was the emergent threat to these regional particularities from industrialization and economic globalization (Grätz 245-46). Although Eduard is recording the events of his visit home after years away, he seems more interested in capturing a vague feeling of belonging than in truly conveying the identity of his homeland. Eduard thereby represents a contemporary sentiment in the era of industrialization, which Anton Kaes identifies as the point in time when the notion of Heimat began to be overloaded with meaning, connoting “the site of one’s lost childhood, of family, of identity” and representing an ideology that warned against “rootlessness, hectic activity, and transient, superficial values” (165). Through Eduard, Raabe depicts the ways in which increased mobility triggers a need for stability, but Raabe by no means takes an antimodern standpoint that warns against the dangers of abandoning Heimat with Eduard as a cautionary example. Instead, Eduard’s interactions with Heinrich suggest that Heimat in the sense Eduard imagines—in his futile search for “rechten, echten, wahrhaftigen, wirklichen Heimatsbehagen” (56)— never existed in the first place. If this is the case, then Raabe conceives of Heimat 354 Jillian DeMair not as a place but as a modern and already problematic impulse and this is part of the reason why Eduard’s narrative authority fails—he would like to set the narrative of his homeland within a framework that does not exist. As Kaes and others have pointed out, modern conceptions of Heimat are frequently inspired by feelings of homelessness (Kaes 163; Blickle 40; von Moltke 5).We can see Raabe’s challenge to this kind of sentimentality insofar as the literal instability of the physical soil undermines Eduard’s attempts to conceive of Heimat as a particular place. This is just one example among many that show that Raabe is not a representative of the idyllic. To the contrary, Stopfkuchen alludes to portentous problems in this era of colonial expansion, plantations, and slavery. We do not know for certain, for instance, to what extent Eduard has exploited the region where he has settled in South Africa, but we do learn in the first few lines of the novel that he has made a considerable fortune (7). Eduard attempts to keep this part of his life partitioned off from his narrative of his visit home, and yet Raabe enacts a critique of this mentality by preventing the more troubling topics of this era from disappearing entirely. Insofar as I argue for a connection between the challenges of framing narratives and navigating spaces, my reading positions Raabe’s text as one that reflects changing constellations of space in light of processes of modernization and globalization. Geographic space was reconceived around this time as a result of altered political borders, increased mobility, new distinctions between the provincial and the metropolitan, and the conquest of new land. As John B. Lyon demonstrates, these issues infiltrate many Realist novels in ways that go beyond portrayals of time and space to find expression in their narrative structure (91-98). In Stopfkuchen, place becomes a prerequisite for self-identification and the creation of narrative. Dirk Oschmann shows, for example, how Eduard’s narrative position below the deck of a ship represents a precarious transitional location between Germany and Africa (214-19). Other critics likewise point to the colonial context in Stopfkuchen as evidence for Raabe’s critical position towards the imperial ideology and authoritarian politics in mid and late nineteenth-century Germany (Dunker 147-60; Göttsche 38; Pizer 174-76; Ryan 631). Indeed, Raabe’s take on colonial discourse is striking because of the way it pervades his portrayals of German Heimat as well. This occurs in spite of Eduard, a narrator who would like to firmly separate his regional, self-contained community from the global process of modernization outside of its boundaries, but is unable to do so. Ironically for Eduard, one of the figures that embodies the increasing interconnectedness of the regional and the global is his childhood mentor, Friedrich Störzer, who Eduard claims was his primary inspiration in the decision to venture out and ultimately establish himself in South Africa (7). Notwithstanding Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 355 the revelation that Störzer is likely the murderer of Kienbaum in the unsolved case, he is a problematic figure for Eduard to claim as a role model if Eduard wants to establish his own position of belonging in a unified, provincial hometown. As a mail carrier, Störzer serves as a representative of modern, cross-cultural communication, and, more importantly, as a reminder of the impact that these modern changes had even on those who did not venture abroad (Ryan 634). He himself had casually linked travel and financial gain, as when mentioning another local who had emigrated to Chile: “dahin ist der ausgewandert und hat’s zum Millionär gebracht. Und das sollten wir alle tun” (18). But he was also a type of wanderer himself due to his mail carrier duties, and upon his death, the townspeople say that he has placed “seinen Pilgerstab in den Winkel” (14). 4 These factors, in addition to the torment he endured from the cattle dealer Kienbaum, make Störzer somewhat of an outsider. That Eduard should find his strongest connection to home in Störzer, who played a peripheral role in the community, is thereby ironically fitting, since Eduard himself can no longer find his place there. The emphasis that Eduard places on his own travel is another aspect that makes him seem less like a local depicting his homeland than a traveler with an uncertain identity. With his quasi logbook narrative, for instance, Eduard relies on a form that triggered his own interest in exploration. However, the conventions of this form position him as an outside observer and as a not entirely innocent one at that. As European nations experienced an expanding role in the world, there was a surge in travel and travel writing to go along with it, with which Eduard’s childhood mentor Störzer, we learn, had been so fascinated. Yet travel literature of this time period often went beyond entertaining adventure stories and into the realm of deleterious contributions to an ideology that promoted ideas of Western superiority. For example, the technological advances that allowed for the travel to and exploration of non-Western lands were often associated with intellectual ascendancy as travel writers presumed to understand and interpret the new terrain they encountered and its inhabitants (Bridges 53). We can detect this mindset in Eduard when he tries to exert control, not just over colonial land, but also over his own homeland, which he would like to see as an idyllic, easily framed community. His attempt to delineate a quaint Heimat stands in opposition to his economic exploits of what he might see as the unbounded terrain of colonial land. Eduard fails not in his colonial exploits, but in his ability to control the narrative, making for a subtle critique of Eduard’s reliance on an unrealistic perception fueled by fantastical travel narratives. Not only does Eduard struggle to maintain narrative authority, but the reader is inclined to question Eduard’s credibility considering that the travelogue is a form based on actual events but requiring faith in the accuracy of representa- 356 Jillian DeMair tion. As Kenneth Parker explains, travel accounts “belong neither exclusively to the inventions of fiction, nor to the ‛facts’ of scientific ‛discovery’” (26). Within the context of Raabe’s novel, Eduard’s report on his visit home is likewise a borderline form. Part travel account, part memoir, Eduard’s account is based on his experiences, but as Heinrich reminds him, he tends to fictionalize events. With Eduard, Raabe creates a fictional author who resembles contemporary travel authors. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs write about authors “exploiting the uncertain boundary between travel writing and the fiction which copied its form,” since many readers “hope for a literal truthfulness from travel writing that they would not expect to find in the novel” (6). Although Raabe’s readers are aware that this all occurs within a fictional storyworld, they might nonetheless be reminded of the ease with which the travel genre can be exploited. Eduard’s eagerness to establish his own credibility—even while conveying confusion and physical discomfort that occasionally contradict the essence of his narrative— thereby becomes all the more suspicious. As a result, the manuscript that is meant to be a traveler’s report on his visit home establishes neither a clear depiction of the territory to which he is returning, nor the credibility of his account. Irony and Disenchantment Eduard writes the entire narrative of his visit to Germany during his return trip to the Cape of Good Hope on a ship called the Hagebucher. 5 This intertextual reference to another one of Raabe’s own works reminds us how present the author’s own voice is, even with Eduard as narrator. Beyond the social critique embedded in the seemingly globally-oriented narrator’s lack of authority, Raabe also adds irony and humor to communicate with his reader over his narrator’s head. For example, the furtiveness of Eduard’s writing distances him not only from his fellow passengers, but from the reader as well, who cannot take entirely seriously Eduard’s self-conscious writing style and his conviction that the other passengers wonder “womit sich eigentlich der Herr aus der Burenrepublik so eifrig literarisch beschäftige, was er schreibe, worüber er jetzt knurre, jetzt seufze und jetzt lache” (59). The only hesitation Eduard expresses is a thinly veiled boast about how long he has been away from Germany, as he wonders “ob ich für das heutige Vaterland bloß nur allein orthographisch noch recht oder richtig schreiben kann” (8). It is difficult to overlook the irony imparted by Raabe that undermines Eduard’s narrative competence and self-assured attitude. Eduard’s emphasis on his physical act of writing comprises part of his attempt to establish a position of authority as narrator, but this is also one of the many ways that Raabe delays narration by reflecting on it rather than moving the plot forward. 6 As a result of these delays, the reader becomes aware of Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 357 the extent to which narrative stability is compromised for Eduard, often in a literal way onboard the ship. He attempts to steady his text with references to something tangible, emphasizing the physical manuscript he is in the process of producing, and even the supply of ink he supposedly depletes (195). 7 Eduard also conveys the impression that he does not plan to share his manuscript, thus suggesting a lack of pretense. All of these self-conscious cues superficially convey the legitimacy of Eduard’s narrative, but in actuality they highlight his own uncertainties. As Eric Downing ascertains, the portrayal of the act of writing within a narrative, while perhaps intended to establish credibility, can actually have the opposite effect of raising awareness of the constructed element of a story and reminding readers that the same process has taken place in creating the book they currently hold in their hands (174). Raabe lets Eduard play the serious writer here while remaining visible as the actual author. Moreover, making the writing process visible in a literary work that also highlights oral narrative raises the question of how we assign legitimacy to oral versus written narratives. In this novel, Heinrich’s oral narrative wins out as the authoritative version. What are we to make, then, of Eduard as a narrator whose credibility is undermined and who resists reflecting critically on his own role in a global world? As readers, we must consider how written texts can authentically bear witness, especially in an era of social change, as well as how the framing of written texts can obscure entire facets of a story. Even the title of this novel shows us that we should not necessarily trust what we read. Labeling the story as a “See- und Mordgeschichte” suggests that the book is something that it is not, namely a tale of murder on the high seas (Brundiek 124; Heiderich 91). With the use of a two-part, hyphenated subtitle, Raabe conflates the two parts of the story that Eduard attempts to keep separate with the narrative frame. One could argue that Raabe is misleading or playing a joke on his reader, but the title ultimately functions as an earnest suggestion that stories are not always what they seem to be. The “Mordgeschichte” told by Heinrich within the frame of Eduard’s narrative turns out to be less thrilling than one might expect, not least because of Heinrich’s protracted, self-possessed narrative style which is challenged only intermittently by his wife Valentine (Sammons 288), and not at all by Eduard. The notion of a “Seegeschichte” is important to Eduard only as the one narrative level over which he has control; there is no storyline here related to the sea. The reminders that the text is being written on the ship—comments about the weather and events on board—as if it were in the process of being written as we read, serve only as a frame around the murder tale, and Eduard frequently retreats to this frame when Heinrich’s story threatens his sense of stability in his Heimat. In one instance, this happens precisely when Heinrich contradicts Eduard’s memory. Instead of reacting to 358 Jillian DeMair the incongruity, Eduard breaks off and writes: “Keine Möglichkeit, heute weiterzuschreiben. Das Schiff stößt allzusehr” (101). Brian Tucker notes that the narrative cannot continue at this point because “self-narrative requires a stable grounding in memory” (576). Eduard therefore attributes his perception that he has no firm ground beneath his feet to the literal instability of the ship rather than to the disconnect he feels with his homeland as he begins to suspect that the idea of returning to his “Heimatstadt in Arkadien” (7) was an illusion. Although Eduard never fully acknowledges any disenchantment with his Heimat ideal, he unintentionally gives the reader numerous reasons to believe that he is over-sentimentalizing and embellishing not only the story of his relationship with Heinrich, with whom he has not had contact for years, but also his emotional connection to his homeland. We can discern Eduard’s feeling of disconnect with his homeland primarily in how he interacts with the physical landscape and how his observations are undermined by Raabe’s underlying irony. On his way to finally see Heinrich, Eduard observes the beauty of the landscape, and in a moment of childish awe, he exclaims, “Und alles noch ganz so wie zu deiner Zeit, Eduard! ” He then quickly contradicts himself: “Dem war aber doch nicht vollständig so” (31). For example, he observes that a swamp of four or five hundred square meters has been filled in to create more farmland, and expresses his great disappointment, since he recalls learning about the complex ecosystem of this “Lurkenteich” in school (32). Here we learn about the filling in of a portion of land, a process opposite to Heinrich’s excavations, which we learn about later, although both contribute to a sense that the ground is not entirely stable. Quickly dismissing the long legal process behind this change to the landscape, Eduard immediately links this physical modification of the land with a different court proceeding: “Da war ein anderer Prozeß, der schon von meinen frühern Jugenderinnerungen her eine ganz andere Bedeutung hatte: der böse Fall Quakatz in Sachen Kienbaum” (32). This is the trial of Valentine Quakatz’s father, who was blamed for Kienbaum’s mysterious death. That Eduard himself should link the literal and figurative upheaval of a community and its land is telling. This moment allows us to observe how Raabe endows Eduard’s memories and narrative with physical associations. As Eduard continues his walk, providing vivid depictions of the fields of his homeland, he remembers all the more keenly the excitement and details associated with the murder trial, as if the landscape itself were awakening penetrating memories that come back in a series of details: “Mit immer neuen Einzelheiten—eine immer interessanter als die andere! ” (33). Just as he seems dissociated from his own homeland, he views his own memories from a distance that allows him to examine them with fascination, as if being told or reminded of a story by a third party. Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 359 Not only does the landscape guide Eduard’s narration here, but disruptions to the soil capture Eduard’s attention in particular, from the filling in of the swampland just mentioned to the removal of a tree: “Sie hatte wahrscheinlich [. . .] zu sehr ihre Wurzeln im Grund und Boden ausgebreitet” (33). This missing tree provides a striking contrast to Eduard himself, who is far from rooted in his homeland and who is about to be further unsettled by Heinrich’s narrative once he arrives at the Rote Schanze. Eduard had distanced himself from his homeland in Germany, and from far outside its borders, he seems to have maintained only positive impressions and forgotten that this is a community that has alienated several of its members and has long been consumed by an unsolved murder. Owing to Eduard’s apparent lack of any true sense of home, he nonetheless perceives Heinrich’s lifestyle as especially idyllic compared to his own life in Africa, which he describes as “das ödeste, langgedehnteste, wenn auch nahrhafteste Fremdenleben” (81; Sammons 284). Even in this mild self-rebuke, he cannot resist mentioning his financial success. Upon returning to his “stillen Heimatwinkel” (195), Eduard wishes to define his homeland narrowly, and therefore attempts to enclose it, along with its inhabitants, in the frame of his narrative. Yet Heinrich, an imposing presence and a dedicated oral storyteller, refuses to be hemmed in. From the reader’s perspective, Heinrich’s narrative quickly overruns Eduard’s. The plot of this novel is conveyed primarily by Heinrich, and at times it is easy to overlook Eduard as the intermediary. At one point, Eduard says, “mir schwoll er heute schon von Augenblick zu Augenblick mehr über jeglichen Rahmen hinaus” (157). The idea of Heinrich as a boundless entity, seeming to break any reasonable frame, can be extended onto his narrative act: Heinrich’s knowledge and narrative go beyond the borders of his own experience. He tells not just about himself, but also conveys the stories of others; in this way, Heinrich is truly a traditional oral storyteller. Eduard’s periodic return to the outer narrative frame of the ship journey is just one example of how he constantly struggles to maintain control over the seemingly boundless figure of Heinrich; another example is his continued use of the less than flattering childhood nickname “Stopfkuchen,” which stems from their childhood, when Eduard and others used to make fun of Heinrich’s pudgy figure. Yet despite Eduard’s attempts to enframe Heinrich’s narrative with his own, the former expands into and imposes upon this outer frame. He disrupts Eduard’s expectations and sense of stability in the process and also conveys the message that storytelling is not always as structured and contained as Eduard would have it. Heinrich’s oral narrative exerts pressure on the textual conventions that Eduard clings to, providing a stark contrast to Eduard’s reliance on physical paper and ink as he isolates himself onboard the ship. 360 Jillian DeMair Digging up the Past Beyond their contrasting styles of storytelling, Eduard and Heinrich interact with their physical surroundings through different processes of discovery. Heinrich favors geology, digging vertically into the layers of the earth and uncovering that which is hidden under the surface. Störzer’s, and by extension, Eduard’s interest in geography, however, has a horizontal quality related to maps; he is occupied with discovering new territories, crossing manmade political boundaries, and traveling across the surface of land and water. 8 This difference emerges in Heinrich’s ongoing critique of Eduard’s decision to seek out adventure by going across the world to Africa. Eduard, on the other hand, cannot understand Heinrich’s disinterest in recent world events, commenting that “An der Schanze des Siebenjährigen Krieges ist selbst die neueste Weltgeschichte vorbeigezogen, ohne ein Zeichen hinterlassen zu haben” (41). For Eduard, “Weltgeschichte” means a familiarity with current events that he associates with reading the daily newspaper (29). It is part of his concept of what should be common knowledge for someone like himself who is eager to demonstrate “daß ich noch zu den Gebildeten mich zählen darf ” (7). Heinrich, on the other hand, does not concern himself with modern events, but instead focuses on historical ones such as the Seven Years’ War, telling Eduard, “Und wenn du auch die halbe neue Weltgeschichte miterlebt und in Afrika selber mitgemacht hast, Eduard, das mußt du doch auch noch wissen, daß in meines Vaters Hausgiebel eine Kanonenkugel stak und heute noch steckt” (68). The cannonball, a remnant of the Seven Years’ War, was fired on the community from the area of the Rote Schanze, which lies just beyond the edge of town. It has great value to Heinrich, who claims that “mein erstes Denken haftet an ihr” and asks Eduard whether he has anything better in Africa “um deinem Jungen oder deinen Jungen den Verstand für irgend etwas aufzuknöpfen? ” (68). With questions like these, Heinrich persistently challenges what he sees as a missing permanence and rootedness in Eduard’s life, even though the cannonball, a symbol of past violence, is hardly an endorsement of a peaceful conception of Heimat. For Heinrich, it is nonetheless an instructional tool insofar as it allows for a kind of storytelling that tangibly reveals rather than masks deeper layers of history. Lynne Tatlock sees this cannonball, which is suspended in a “domestic frame,” as symbolic of the violence that is inherent in this community, though for Heinrich, it serves as the impetus to confront and expose injustice (“Communion” 135-36). Indeed, at the conclusion of the novel, Heinrich essentially fires upon his community—not with violence or a literal cannonball, but with the revelation of Kienbaum’s murderer. This news serves as a reminder of past violence, akin to Heinrich’s insistence on pointing out the remnant of the Seven Years’ War. In this way, the cannonball is evocative Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 361 of the uncovering of two different kinds of layers in this novel—archeological artifacts and narrative testimony. Moreover, it reveals the potential violence that lies below an idyllic surface, and the way in which an orderly notion of Heimat like Eduard’s would cover up this violence. Two different approaches regarding how to deal with these layers are thereby at odds. Yet Heinrich’s notion of the cannonball as an instructional storytelling tool wins out over Eduard’s desire for harmony. The cannonball is just one of the physical remnants that represent Heinrich’s mode of layered storytelling. He also engages in paleontological research right on his own property, even taking over a room in his house for a “geologische[s] Museum” (76) containing fossils including the mammoth that Quakatz had discovered. 9 Here his digging into the past goes back much further than the Seven Years’ War. Though we do not know the extent of Heinrich’s research, he seems to believe that the biblical flood caused the extinction of the found specimens and washed their bones to the Rote Schanze (Raabe 77, 99, 101, 131). 10 The biblical verse that Heinrich has inscribed above his door also refers to the Great Flood: “Da redete Gott mit Noah und sprach: Gehe aus dem Kasten” (75). Heinrich frequently cites this verse as a catchphrase for his perspective on life. By directing the motto at Eduard, Heinrich implies that despite his world travel, Eduard has preferred to isolate himself from uncomfortable realities that do not fit into his orderly schema of the world. While Eduard’s ship journey seems to find some correspondence in Heinrich’s preoccupation with the biblical flood and supposed resulting geological shifts, we never see Eduard emerge from the ship or from the figurative “Kasten” that he has created with his narrative framing device. The writing of his manuscript takes place entirely on board, and he would likewise prefer to keep his story and his homeland neatly framed and contained. Eduard even avoids coming on deck when the Angra Pequeña Mountains are in sight, claiming that he forgets while immersed in his writing and that besides, he has seen them before (162). With his surface-oriented way of exploring, in contrast to Heinrich’s vertical digging, seeing once may be all that is necessary. Moreover, this particular landscape is perhaps an uncomfortable reminder of Germany’s colonial empire and reflects Eduard’s uncertainty about having chosen his colonial path. 11 His resistance to rigorous observation in favor of superficial glimpses represents a general avoidance of the true state of things. This continues even upon his departure, as he casts one final look at the Rote Schanze from the window of the express train to Hamburg, assuring himself that it truly had not changed. He is glad “daß ich sie, wie sie war, im Gedächtnis behalten konnte: als einen sonnenbeleuchteten Punkt im schönsten Heimatsgrün” (206). His use of the past tense to say that he will remember the Rote Schanze, “wie sie war,” is ambiguous. Since he is narrating after the fact, 362 Jillian DeMair this could either mean that he will remember it as it was at that moment of observation or as it was at some point in the distant past. Either way, his language reveals that he wants to see only an idealized image. He then quickly closes the window and draws the curtains, welcoming the “blaue Dämmerung” after having strained his eyes to see Heinrich und Valentine one last time, and claiming, “So etwas von Kohlenstaub aus der Lokomotive war mir so schon ins rechte Auge geweht” (206). These literal hindrances to sight reveal the deficiencies in his perception more generally. Heinrich may tend to stay within the borders of the Rote Schanze, but he appears capable of far more discovery than Eduard, despite the latter’s interest in world exploration. Heinrich is the one who uncovers concrete evidence of the past and sets straight the historical understanding of a variety of events: his own childhood, during which he was bullied by his companions, including Eduard; his conquest of Valentine and the Rote Schanze; and the murder of Kienbaum by Störzer. Despite the denial we still see in Eduard at the end of the narrative, he is not able to entirely fend off Heinrich’s insistence that the truth is more ambiguous than Eduard would like it to be. Downing demonstrates that Heinrich uses a parodic repetition of Eduard’s clichés in order to expose and exploit “his friend’s tendency to poetize his perceptions” (240). For example, Eduard’s narrative authority is undermined when Heinrich, referring to his own story about the murder, tells Eduard sarcastically, “ich für meinen Teil denke doch nur: da habe ich dem guten alten Kerl doch noch eine nette Erinnerung an die alte gemütliche Heimat mit aufs Schiff gegeben” (167). 12 This is just one attempt of many to disillusion Eduard, who is frequently speechless when Heinrich draws his attention to the historical rather than idealized version of events. Perspectives on Progress By undermining the voice of a character representative of certain aspects of globalization, Raabe may be challenging colonialism, but not necessarily the idea of modern progress. After all, despite what he would like to believe, Eduard is hardly a modern character. Although he considers himself an envoy of the world of modern communication and travel, the way he writes about his homeland reveals a conservative hope that this world might remain sheltered and unchanged. The idea that the new and old worlds might be kept separate is shown to be illusory, not least in the way we see colonization enacted on a small scale by Heinrich himself in what he describes as his “Eroberung” of the Rote Schanze (94). But even if Eduard gladly incorporates this achievement into his idealization of Heinrich as a hero, the reader can hardly fail to notice the discrepancy between Eduard’s conceptions of Heinrich as a harmless, good Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 363 natured fellow and his actual aggressive temperament that has allowed him to play an antagonistic role in the community and to overrun the narrative with his monologue (Tatlock, “Flutkatastrophen” 119). Therefore, what Raabe undermines is not modernization but rather the type of reaction to it that Eduard displays in his naïve homecoming. Eduard attempts to integrate a notion of Heimat into a globalized view, that is, to establish a fixed homeland to which one could return rhetorically, if not physically, as a stable home base against which global expansion and exploration could be carried out. The provincial exists, at least in Eduard’s imagination, as a safe haven against the modern world, though less as protection from it than as a point from which to admire it. Eduard’s is a self-congratulatory admiration; he has come from humble roots into the life of a wealthy colonizer. In addition, he may desire a peaceful and provincial Heimat to serve as a stable backdrop to the disturbing experiences he has had beyond it. We hear little about his life abroad, but he has certainly encountered new modes and speeds of travel, at least one new language (his children apparently speak a mixture of German and Dutch [207]), and likely conflict and violence. 13 He keeps all of these things well beyond the margins of his narrative. To his surprise, his actual encounters at home in Germany fail to fulfill his expectations for a point of contrasting stability because Heinrich reveals conflict, violence, and instability in their own community. Seeing as Eduard’s Heimat therefore needs to be artificially constructed, Raabe’s critique seems directed at a contemporary tendency to align Heimat with a sense of longing in response to unsettling experiences (Blickle ix; Lyon 10). Eduard’s selective fabrication of his ideal Heimat further highlights the unreliability of his narrative. Both Eduard and Heinrich seek physical things from which they can draw meaning and stability, especially in the face of modernization. For Eduard, very little in his hometown serves this purpose, so he resorts to pointing at the tangible instruments of his own writing. For Heinrich, the cannonball and the fossils he unearths function as anchors for his worldview. The layers of earth he imagines, the idea of being buried or unburied as a fossil himself, have little in common with Eduard’s desire to explore the surface of the earth, constantly moving across a horizontal plane, whether by ship or train. The vertical dimension of Heinrich’s pursuits provides a stark contrast to Eduard’s horizontal journeys, and Eduard himself notices the dissonance of these two worldviews when he takes in the panorama of the surrounding landscape from the Rote Schanze: Behaglich schliefen darunter und darin Heinrich Schaumanns Floren und Faunen sämtlicher wissenschaftlichen Erdballsperioden, Formationen und Übergangsperioden, das Riesenfaultier eingeschlossen und mit eingeschlafen. Darüber der Sommerspätnachmittagssonnenschein. Nur eine oder zwei neue Eisenbahnlinien durch- 364 Jillian DeMair schnitten jetzt die Ebene. Und der Zug, der eben auf der einen die Stadt verlassen hatte und mit langgezogener weißer Lokomotivenwolke der Ferne zuglitt, erinnerte mich in diesem Augenblick wieder daran, wie wenig Halt und Anhalt ich jetzt noch in der Geburtsstadt, in den Heimatsgefilden, habe. (123) The train that cuts across the horizon is representative of the modern progress Eduard espouses; in fact, he will sit in just such a train and take in the view from the opposite perspective when he eagerly departs his hometown once again. Yet as it glides into the distance, the train seems nearly insignificant compared with the vast depth of history described by Heinrich. Although visions of distant and foreign lands had immense appeal for Eduard as a child, he now begins to realize that it has led to a sense of dislocation. The superimposition here of train tracks, signifiers of technological progress and foreign travel, onto the landscape Eduard attempts to idealize, reveals that his homeland cannot be neatly separated from the modern world. The novel’s final and most significant process of unearthing the past is the revelation of Störzer, the mail carrier and Eduard’s mentor, as the murderer. Heinrich has known the truth for some time, but felt it wiser to simply keep the story to himself until Störzer’s death. Eduard, on the other hand, practically flees from his hometown immediately after learning that his dear old friend was a murderer, despite the fact that the murder was presumably unintentional and occurred after years of torment. Perhaps most shocking is that Störzer had never come forward, thus allowing Valentine’s father, Quakatz, to be blamed. Ultimately, the two protagonists’ differing points of view are reflected not only in how each of them conceives of his Heimat, but also in how they come to terms with this murder. The two problems are intertwined, as we see in Eduard’s literal flight to new ground in order to free himself from history (Tucker 577-78). Eduard is devastated by the revelation, as well as by the fact that the truth had been kept hidden by both Störzer and Heinrich: “Wer von beiden war mir nun der Unbegreiflichste, der Unheimlichste geworden? ” (195). His sense of Heimat has been overturned into something unheimlich. 14 This is primarily because his own identity and the origins of his desire for overseas adventure are so rooted in his childhood experiences with Störzer: Er, der mich im Grunde doch ganz allein auf die See und in die Wüste durch seinen Le Vaillant gebracht hatte, dem ich mein ‛Rittergut’ am Kap der Guten Hoffnung einzig und allein durch seine Unterhaltungen auf seinen Weltwanderungen auf seinen Landstraßen und Feldwegen zu danken hatte. (195-96, my emphasis) Eduard is unable to resolve this dependence on Störzer; after all, he is also Eduard’s reason for writing the manuscript (15). Eduard’s sense of self is shaken Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 365 by this discovery of the true murderer, and he keenly realizes his identification with Störzer when he says that he could not have fled the scene faster if he had been the murderer himself (201). Even in running away, Eduard is trapped in this role of identification because he is again simply repeating what Störzer encouraged him to do in the first place: to leave the confines of the small town for the wider world. Following the revelation of Störzer as the murderer, Eduard does this once again, making his way to the train station unnoticed via the small paths he remembers from his childhood. Conclusion The most tumultuous undertaking in Raabe’s novel would seem to be the lengthy ocean voyage in the outer frame. And yet Eduard instead scrambles most urgently for firm ground in an apparently stable landscape that nonetheless threatens to disrupt his identity and sense of Heimat. He would like to neatly frame his Heimat as an idyllic place, and at the same time, to maintain control over the narrative, but ultimately falters in each of these attempts. His predicament is mirrored in the physical instabilities—geographical uncertainties, geological excavations, and the swaying of the ocean—that accompany his story. Framing is one literary technique used by Eduard in an effort to deal with these instabilities, but we see his narrative authority undermined by Heinrich and his reliability diminished by Raabe’s undertones of irony. Raabe’s text nevertheless reveals serious concerns with memory, space, and representation, and the ways each of these are rendered unstable by modern forces, both literary and geopolitical. In a narrative with very little action and so many stories that remain at least partly untold, these forces exist just beneath the surface of the narrative’s literal and figurative ground. In this way, Raabe deals intensively with the possibilities and limits of storytelling in an era marked by social change and globalization, which saw accompanying new movements in literature about travel and Heimat. Against this backdrop, Raabe gives us a narrator who manipulates the frames of his story and yet finds his intended orderly and idyllic configuration impossible to maintain as he experiences tangible disturbances to the ground on which he stands and about which he writes. Notes 1 A number of articles highlight the ways that Raabe alludes to the violence of colonialism in Stopfkuchen , including those by Katra Byram, Axel Dunker, Dirk Oschmann, and John Pizer. 366 Jillian DeMair 2 Heimat expresses a concept of home and homeland that carries with it a sense of belonging, identity, and self. Complicating the inherent sense of the word is the fact that it has been central to cultural and political purposes since the late eighteenth century. See, for example, Hermann Bausinger and Peter Blickle. 3 Brian Tucker’s essay is particularly helpful in showing how the different spaces in Stopfkuchen are intrinsic to the destabilization of the narrative as each figure attempts to ground his memories territorially. Franziska Frei Gerlach’s essay studies the narrative implications of geological phenomena in the works of Adalbert Stifter. Esther Kilchmann’s book, Verwerfungen in der Einheit , includes a geological metaphor in its title, and although this meaning is not her primary focus, she does call attention to how Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Jeremias Gotthelf in particular use geological imagery to represent political instability. 4 Because of his endless walking, Störzer is reminiscent of Ahasver, the mythological Wandering Jew, who is condemned to wander the earth eternally. According to Heinrich, Störzer drew this comparison himself when deciding to take a short break on the side of the road after becoming weary: “‘Der ewige Jude bist du doch nicht, Störzer’, sage ich mir. [...] ‘Fünf Minuten wird’s ja mal Zeit haben’” (190). See also Gisela Warnke’s analysis (469). 5 The name of the ship, the “Leonhard Hagebucher” (197) has often been commented on because it is also the name of the protagonist in Raabe’s Abu Telfan oder Die Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge (1867). This hero shares a few similarities with Eduard. The former returns to Germany after spending twelve years in imprisonment in Africa, but is received as an outsider and is unable to come to terms with the conditions and the society in his home country. 6 The self-referential quality of this narrative has been examined by Hubert Ohl (252), Peter Detroy (23), and Christoph Zeller, who also notes the above two contributions (209). 7 According to Ulf Eisele, the inclusion of Eduard’s actual writing is a kind of realistic verification of what is actually fiction, and thereby serves within the fiction as a claim to the authenticity of the report (39). This strategy is also related to the device of the discovered manuscript, which was sometimes used by eighteenthand nineteenth-century authors to “lend their stories a historical ‘reality’ and substance which they did not in fact possess” (Lund 132). Of course, these kinds of self-conscious remarks have their ironic side as well, as Helen Chambers notes (26). 8 On this geology/ geography duality, see Eisele (7) and Detroy (60). Ohl sets up a similar dichotomy by establishing two competing images in Stopfkuchen : Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 367 “Le Vaillant” and the “Riesenfaultier.” He notes their “Entgegensetzung als Weite des Abenteuers und Enge der Seßhaftigkeit” but emphasizes that neither is glorified, but instead that Raabe’s irony constantly relativizes both (271). 9 Raabe’s interest in paleontology is likewise reflected in Keltische Knochen (1864), perhaps inspired by his June 1859 visit to the Celtic grave site in Hallstatt, Austria (Radcliffe 99). Raabe also discusses paleontology in his letters to Wilhelm Jensen (Warnke 472). Katharina Brundiek has done a thorough study of Raabe’s extensive interest in Darwin, evolution, geology, and paleontology (120-72). 10 So-called “flood geology,” or the “diluvial theory,” which held the view that a single, worldwide flood had shaped the earth’s major geophysical features, had already been called into question by the scientific community around 1830 and there was a general shift in opinion in the field of geology. For example, Adam Sedgwick (who had previously espoused the theory of a great flood) and Charles Darwin began moving away from the idea of a single great flood in favor of a theory of many local floods. Sedgwick recalls that while he was in Paris from 1826-1827, Alexander von Humboldt ridiculed the diluvial doctrine “beyond measure” and Louis-Constant Prévost lectured against it (Herbert 173). 11 The land surrounding the Angra Pequeña Mountains (present-day Namibia) was declared a protectorate of the German Reich by Bismarck in 1884 (Williamson 153). Judith Ryan explains that the German reader of 1890 would have been well aware of this colonial acquisition (635). 12 The adjective gemütlich —used here ironically by Heinrich (“die alte gemütliche Heimat”)—along with its noun form, “Gemütlichkeit,” is a key word for considering Heimat, whether seriously or ironically. 13 The only war mentioned in the novel is the historically distant Seven Years’ War, although the Anglo-Zulu War (1878) and the First Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881) in British South Africa would likely have belonged to more recent memory, at least for Eduard, not to mention countless other examples of conflicts, oppression, and annexation of land by colonial powers (Berger 66-69). 14 Relevant to Eduard’s discovery of a secret deeply connected to his own identity is Freud’s explanation that “Unheimlich sei alles, was ein Geheimnis, im Verborgenen bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist” (249). 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Textgeleitetes Textverstehen als fachmethodisches Verfahren.” Der Deutschunterricht 62 (2010): 90-96. Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 369 Herbert, Sandra. “Charles Darwin as a Prospective Geological Author.” British Journal for the History of Science 24.2 (1991): 159-92. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, ed. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2002. 1-13. Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat. Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1989. Kilchmann, Esther. Verwerfungen in der Einheit. Geschichten von Nation und Familie um 1840. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2009. Lund, Deborah S. Ambiguity as a Narrative Strategy in the Prose Works of C. F. Meyer. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Lyon, John B. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement and Modernity. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Moltke, Johannes von. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. 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Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 99-121. Tucker, Brian. “Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen and the Ground of Memory.” Monatshefte 95.4 (2003): 568-82. Warnke, Gisela. “Das ‛Sünder’-Motiv in Wilhelm Raabes Stopfkuchen. ” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 50.3 (1976): 465-76. Williamson, David G. Bismarck and Germany 1862-1890. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Zeller, Christoph. Allegorien des Erzählens: Wilhelm Raabes Jean-Paul Lektüre. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999. Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge3 7 1 “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge Renata Fuchs University of California, Los Angeles Abstract: This article examines all four stories from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s story collection Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990). The stories are linked through Özdamar’s unconventional storytelling created out of secular and religious themes and motifs present in Eastern and Western narrative traditions. The author fuses the East and West through linguistic signs and cultural themes. In order to rewrite the established practices and customs and ultimately the common literary canon, the author recasts popular fairy tales from both traditions. By depicting female characters as sexually progressive and autonomous, she forges a new model of a multicultural society. Özdamar makes her female protagonists the focus of her stories, emphasizing the role of Muslim women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the development of a global, common cultural discourse that results in a new “translocal” or World Literature, thus signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly fashioned society. Keywords: migration, multiculturalism, hybridity, fairy tales, Muslim women In her debut short story collection, Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990), Emine Sevgi Özdamar, the first Turkish-born author to win the prestigious Bachmann Prize, presents stories about Turkish emigrants in Germany. All four stories, “Mutterzunge,” “Grossvaterzunge,” “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland,” and “Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland, ” are interconnected not only through the unique language invented by the author 372 Renata Fuchs in order to reflect the hybridity of her protagonists, but through the original storytelling as well. 1 Transculturality and the linguistic aspects of the two first stories “Mutterzunge” and “Grossvaterzunge” have been extensively explored in the secondary literature. 2 In contrast with the scholarship to date, this article takes into consideration all four short stories included in Mutterzunge, focusing on the language phenomenon in connection with the act of storytelling and on the tales within the stories. Özdamar introduces fairy tale motifs from both Western and Eastern traditions in that she presents, for instance, two prominent characters: the figure of the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” and the persona of Ali Baba from the Arabic tales One Thousand and One Ni ghts ( MZ 60). At the end of the first story, “Mutterzunge,” Özdamar expresses her wish to bring the “Arabic writing and the Latin letters” together via storytelling. In her newly created tales, the author uses recurrent thematic elements, such as the “Granatapfel” and “Geduldstein” ( MZ 15-48), which are present in traditional Western and Eastern fairy tales. She subverts the power around her by mixing languages and various stories rooted in mythologies, religions, and traditional fairy tales, thus merging both the Occidental and Oriental discourses on which civilizing processes rest, rewriting them, and replacing one with the other. Özdamar’s refashioning of traditional fairy tales includes not only a multicultural approach, but also an eroticization of the text; within that context she gives a new voice to women, in particular to Muslim women. The author places her female protagonists at the center of her project, emphasizing the role of women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the formation of a global, common cultural discourse resulting in the new “translocal” or World Literature. Multicultural thinking, according to Jankowsky, “implies that acquiring knowledge about the different cultural structures that coexist within a country, as well as globally, will allow for a greater understanding of the mental map out of which people from various backgrounds participate in society” (263). Through her writing, Özdamar contributes to a better understanding of that mental gap even though she risks being categorized as a minority writer who produces a body of literature that “is at best an expendable ‛enrichment’ to ‛native’ German literature” (Adelson 305). Because Özdamar writes in the German language and with an inclination towards a majority, her oeuvre is split between both cultures. The effect of such deterritorialization is, Teraoka observes, almost a rule for the majority: “They [the minority] speak, while we learn to listen. We are no longer sovereign or manipulative toward their reality but unsure and ignorant. And it is only when the self can suspend the imposition of its beliefs that it can hope to listen carefully to what the other is saying” (Teraoka 161). By merging both Western and Eastern traditions and using more than language, Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 373 Özdamar’s stories create a space of unity for multicultural discourse based on fairy tales. Özdamar’s rewriting of children’s fairy tales for adult audiences should not come as a surprise. Folklorists point out that fairy tales were never really meant for children’s ears alone, as they were originally told, for example, at the fireside by adults to adult audiences (Tatar xxvi). Literary fairy tales were deliberately used in the 17th century to promote the Western civilizing process, and their discourse on manners and norms added to the creation of social norms (Zipes 1). According to Freud, to deal with unconscious and conscious conflicts and experiences like love, aggression, or fear, people reach to fairy tale archetypes such as mothers, fathers, kings, queens, witches, giants, or princes; an example of such a use of fairy tales is the stepmother serving as a projection of a bad mother (Tatar 144). The essence of our lives has been circumscribed by these common cultural discourses, which have inscribed indelible marks on our imagination and affect our behavior. Özdamar employs the power of these cultural myths. She is able to take this language and use it to create boundary-crossing and boundary-shifting works that subsume and subvert the power around her. The author refashions the social norms in order to create a global, common cultural discourse. Especially in her last story, “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” the author makes clear that the Western literary canon is not more important than other literatures. Özdamar is a most thought-provoking author who raises fundamental questions about multiculturalism and about roles of women in their new home, a multi-cultural space. Critics agree that the relationship established between identity and language in these stories is such that neither Turkish nor German identity is privileged (Bird 161). Places and experiences in Turkey and in both parts of Germany, past and present, overlap and mix in a uniquely interwoven language. The free flow of thoughts provocatively organized is a stream of cultural and political consciousness. Written in broken German, the stories effect a sense of closeness as well as alienation. Özdamar plays with the German language, peppering it with foreign metaphors, foreign-appearing words, and violating grammatical rules. In so doing, she brings out a new poetic sound and rhythm and establishes her own aesthetic art forms of expression. 3 The author and her narrator are “shaped by three different languages: Turkish, Arabic, and German. […] [As] language pairs, neither Turkish and German, nor Turkish and Arabic, nor Arabic and German have, from the perspective of historical linguistics, much in common” (Brandt 301). This linguistic disparity strengthens Özdamar’s unique voice: “In meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache. Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin” ( MZ 9). One can learn many new tongues even though they are marked by a foreign 374 Renata Fuchs accent (“gedreht”), which implies being multilingual and hybrid. She connects mother tongue with the act of “erzählen.” “Tiefe zu erzählen” requires that one must “Lebensunfälle erleben,” and without a tongue one cannot tell stories ( MZ 12). To facilitate the act of story telling, the narrator starts learning Arabic: “Ich werde Arabisch lernen, das war mal unsere Schrift. […] wenn mein Großvater und ich stumm wären und uns nur mit Schrift was erzählen könnten, könnten wir uns keine Geschichten erzählen” ( MZ 14). The spoken word of her mother’s contemporary Turkish that the narrator replaced with German leads her back to the written word of the grandfather’s Turkish, influenced by Arabic, and ultimately to storytelling. The author maintains the theme of storytelling in all four stories so that in “Karagöz in Alamania” the peasant says to his donkey: “Da sagte der Bauer: ‛Gut, erzähle Geschichte, so lange du kannst, und ich trage dich’” ( MZ 54), and in “Karriere einer Putzfrau” the mythical Ophelia relates theater stories. The first two stories “Mutterzunge” and “Grossvaterzunge” revolve around the dilemma of linguistic dislocation: “Wenn ich nur wüßte, in welchem Moment ich meine Mutterzunge verloren habe,” the protagonist / narrator wonders ( MZ 11). In these stories, Özdamar portrays a Turkish woman who lives in East Berlin, is alienated from her family, and in a way from her own self. The opening sentence suggests the protagonist’s biculturalism: “in meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache” ( MZ 9). This might be true of many languages; yet, in the German language “Sprache” and “Zunge” are separate signs and indeed a sign of the protagonist being divided. The main character has become so at home in the German language that even the most intimate memories of her mother’s words come back to her now “wie eine von mir gut gelernte Fremdsprache” ( MZ 9). Her position between Turkish and German culture is mirrored in the disunited city of Berlin, where two radically contrasting realities exist side-by-side; her hybridity is immediately apparent to her mother: “Du hast die Hälfte deiner Haare in Alamania gelassen” ( MZ 9). Although Atatürk’s westernizing reforms had a liberating effect on women, whose lives were no longer subjected to Islamic law, the protagonist supports the ideology of reviving the previous version of the Turkish language unstripped of its Arabic alphabet (Yildiz 151). She imagines that without the connection through the Arabic letters, she would not be able to tell stories to her grandfather (her roots) or to understand his stories. In an attempt to reconnect with the Turkish of her grandparents’ generation and the act of storytelling, she finds an oriental scholar, Ibni Abdullah, who teaches her Arabic letters. Thus, her identity becomes inseparable from language and storytelling and is enhanced by not rejecting traditional roles (although she ultimately rejects them), but by exploring them in her own context. Even though she perceives Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 375 herself as a progressive, emancipated woman, she falls in love with her roots embodied in her Muslim teacher. Özdamar draws attention to subjugation as a concern of importance for a traditional Muslim woman: “Ich bin die Sklavin deinen Antlitzes” ( MZ 32). The Arabic language becomes the language of love and suffering (Neubert 160): “Ich hatte Schmerzen in meinem Körper, […] ich legte mich hin, sah, wie der Schmerz meine Haut aufmachte und sich in meinem Körper überall einnähte, ich wußte, daß in diesem Moment Ibni Abdullah in meinen Körper reingekommen war” ( MZ 20-21). Özdamar’s text seemingly rejects the aspect of Atatürk’s reforms that contributed at least in part to literacy and education for women (Haines and Littler 120). The wish to take up willingly a position of subjugation within Islam (a position arguably even more circumscribed than in Christianity) and to embrace the patriarchal order cannot be reconciled with feminist theory (Haines and Littler 121). For that reason, Haines and Littler conclude that the protagonist is a nomadic intellectual who accepts her own hybridity, in place of the restoration of an intact identity (123). While their claim is certainly not amiss, I think that the protagonist is not just passively accepting her own hybridity, but rather she is consciously acting on a desire to rescue that which was lost in Islamic tradition precisely because of its Westernization, namely, a longstanding tradition of erotic narrative (Shafak 1). Unlike the Turkish Westernized elite alienated from their own cultural background, she reaches to the old erotic sources of narration, for instance The Thousand and One Nights, as a manifestation of her emancipation (Shafak 1). As the relationship between student and teacher turns into a passionate mutual desire, a conflict arises. Ibni Abdullah’s view of oriental femininity clashes with the narrator’s expectation of sexual autonomy. The narrator’s wish for sexual freedom appears to oppose her intention to learn Arabic, the language of the law of Islam, where female carnality is perceived as a destabilizing overindulgence, which must be restrained (Haines and Littler 124). The protagonist attempts to override the order prescribed by men through fully living her sexuality and also in the way she dresses: “I am going with Ibni Abdullah to a men’s party, I am wearing half men’s clothing, half woman’s, I sing there a song from the Koran, I am afraid of Ibni Abdullah’s cheeks, they are like Khomeini’s Mullah” ( MZ 22). This description produces a dynamic and ultimately subversive effect. She, the woman clothed in revolutionary attire, sits in the presence of men and reads from the Koran. Her western body produces Islamic words. The fascination with the Arabic language and letters culminates in a poetic passage in which the German language becomes pictorial, recalling Arabic calligraphy: “Es kamen aus meinem Mund die Buchstaben raus. Manche sahen aus wie ein Vogel, manche wie ein Herz, auf dem ein Pfeil steckt, manche wie eine Karawane, manche wie schlafende Kamele” ( MZ 18). This parade of images 376 Renata Fuchs enables the narrator to recontextualize Arabic within the German world, and it also connects Özdamar’s story to Arabian tales. The images invoke a beautifully illustrated manuscript of One Thousand and One Nights with its literary themes and techniques, such as the embedded narrative of a story within a story. Likewise, the figure of Ali Baba appears in the third story of the collection Mutterzunge, “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland.” The Arabic words that the narrator is learning are often personified as her companions in the room: Die Schriften lagen auf dem Teppich, ich legte mich neben sie, die Schriften sprachen miteinander ohne Pause mit verschiedenen Stimmen, weckten die eingeschlafenen Tiere in meinem Körper, ich schließe Augen, die Stimme der Liebe wird mich blind machen, sie sprechen weiter, mein Körper geht auf wie ein in der Mitte aufgeschnittener Granatapfel, in Blut und Schmutz kam ein Tier raus. ( MZ 26) The narrator’s body is described as a cut-open pomegranate, a fruit which was known in antiquity as a metaphor for sensuality and fertility (Isaacs 129). Hence the symbolism here might be associated with Orange Princess stories, classified as tale type ATU 408 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system. This type portrays brides or young princesses as fruit or as seeking fruit. To this category belong such tales as two popular Turkish tales, “The Enchanted Pomegranate Branch and the Beauty” (Kúnos 188-203) and “The Three Orange Peris,” (Kúnos 16-28). The latter was literalized by Giambattista Basile as “The Love for Three Oranges.” The dream of Özdamar’s protagonist in which she sees an animal emerging from her body and then invading it as well as stones needing to be submersed in water in order to come alive includes core motifs from “Little Red Riding Hood.” The author reformulates the motif of Little Red and her grandmother being swallowed by the wolf and then being ripped out of his body. She renders not only lively explicit sexual imagery, but also conveys a representation of a violent birth as a consequence of blind love. Additionally, the description of the stones provides another link to the Grimms’ tale, as Little Red fetches great stones with which she and her grandmother fill the wolf ’s belly and which cause him to collapse and fall dead. In turn the motif of stones leads us to the “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser” tale and to the theme of patience (Goldberg 59). Traditionally, the Arabian tale about Princess Parizade, “The Story of Two Sisters Who were Jealous of Their Younger Sister” spotlight the stone motif. It is a girl’s quest tale about a disenfranchised princess who must undergo a set of trials in order to establish her true identity and that of her brothers who have been turned into stones. The dominant theme of the stone appears several times in Özdamar’s narrative and emphasizes or ironizes female patience. The repetition of this particular motif along with that of the number forty can be Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 377 found in a popular Turkish tale, “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser,” where the girl is waiting with the prince for forty days in the fortieth room, (Kúnos 214-20); it is reflected in the forty days of the narrator’s sequester in her lover’s “Schriftzimmer” as well as in the assertion that one cup of coffee is worth forty years of friendship ( MZ 20). In fact, Özdamar retells the tale of “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser” almost entirely ( MZ 33-34), adding only a love potion and eliminating a mother figure. She thus sets the stage for her last story about Ophelia who is a contemporary false bride fairy tale character that I will discuss later ( AT 437) (Goldberg 59). In the story “Mutterzunge,” Özdamar fashions a tale about a woman’s patience based on the account of Zeliha and Yusuf, the Arab version of the biblical narrative about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife ( MZ 37-8). The attractive but pious Yusuf resists Zeliha’s efforts to seduce him and spends years in jail. Only later, when Zeliha’s husband dies, is she eventually able to marry Yusuf. The story told by Ibni Abdullah’s mother and recounted by him can be read as a mother’s warning for her son to be chaste. At the same time, it is also the vindication of women’s sexuality whose depiction has been systematically suppressed with the process of Westernization and modernization (Shafak). In the eyes of conservative Muslims, the figure of Zulaikah (here Zeliha) needs to be condemned and vilified for first seducing Joseph and later accusing him of raping her; however, for the Sufi mystic tradition, she represents someone purely and madly in love (Shafak). Özdamar reaches back to this longstanding tradition of erotic narrative in the histories of Middle Eastern countries by embedding the widely misinterpreted story of Zulaiha into a Western tale. Relating to the voice of the Koran and the language of ancient sagas and fairy tales, Özdamar interweaves into her story one of the most popular European fairy tales. She re-tells “Little Red Riding Hood,” a popular tale in the Grimms’ collection, which in itself took second place only to the Bible as the most widely read book in Germany (Zipes 18). Özdamar writes: Yusuf, wie schön ist dein Gesicht. Allah hat es so gemacht, Dank Allah. Wie schön sind deine Haare. Was nützt es, im Grab werden sie verfaulen. Wie schön sind deine Augen. Ich schaue damit zu meinem Allah. Yusuf, schau mit deinen Augen in mein Gesicht. Ich habe Furcht, daß meine Augen in der anderen Welt blind werden. Yusuf, du gehst weg, wenn ich in deine Nähe komme. Ich will in die Nähe von Allah. 378 Renata Fuchs Komm in mein Bett. Die Decken werden mich vor Allahs Augen nicht verstecken. Garten hat Durst. Gib Wasser. Garten hat Besitzer. Feuer ist da, lösche es. Ich hab Angst vorm Feuer. ( MZ 37) Özdamar emphasizes patience as of great importance for a traditional Muslim woman and simultaneously decontextualizes traditional roles by refashioning them. To achieve her goal, the author recreates the key dialogue from “Little Red Riding Hood.” This tale has been read as having evolved from a sexually charged male phantasy highlighting a socio-sexual struggle for domination as part of Western common cultural heritage (Zipes xi). 4 The sexual struggle for social domination in the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” is particularly visible, according to Bettelheim, in “pubertal sexual desires” (182). Instead of being repelled and scared, Little Red seems intrigued by the situation so that she makes no move to leave; “it is this ‛deathly’ fascination with sex which is experienced as simultaneously the greatest excitement and the greatest anxiety that is bound up with the little girl’s oedipal longings for her father” (Bettelheim176). From the very beginning, the female is dominated by a male ruling over her own desires. Özdamar uses this dialogue, which is already permeated with sexual desire, for a situation of role reversal. The author explores alternative behaviors within a female / male relationship and invents a gender-swap situation where a female sexual phantasy is given importance. The author transposes the gaze of the wolf, as she has the woman, Zeliha, appropriate the wolf ’s language thus sexually empowering the female seducer, a role that the narrator has given herself. She is casting herself into Zeliha’s role, and Ibni Abdullah as the beleaguered and seduced Jusuf, who in many versions is called “the Prophet Yusuf ” and is thus associated with Islam. Admittedly, there have been many modern uses and adaptations of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and some of them introduced role reversal. 5 Within this context, we are reminded that fairy tales could very well be directed to adult audiences and can tell us much about “real conditions in the world of those who told and those who heard the tales” (Tatar 50). Folklorists, cultural anthropologists, historians, sociologists, educators, literary critics, psychologists have all interpreted the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and seen it as a parable of sexual awakening and maturity or as a threat to the girl’s virginity (Tatar 39). The anthropomorphic wolf could symbolize a man, lover, seducer or sexual predator. With the role reversal strategy, Özdamar changes the old power dynamic. Just as Walt Disney, in order to enforce his own ideology, retold the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 379 retellings so is Özdamar retelling this fairy tale, which represents socio-cultural power relationships, particularly those based on gender, to present a new ideology. The author connects the tale of the attractive-but-pious Yusuf, who resists Zeliha’s efforts to seduce him, to the main plot in her text, in that she has the narrator promise at first to love Ibni Abdullah “in a sacred way” and to continue studying the text ( MZ 43). Moreover, she points to the associations among love, written text, and storytelling, especially when Ibni Abdullah makes the act of sexual intimacy dependent upon the narrator’s text study. The narrator spends precisely forty days in the study with Ibni Abdullah “within her body” before she decides against being patient and against succumbing fully to this “holy love.” 6 The physicality of language and its sensuousness as well as Özdamar’s insistence on corporeally grounded metaphors cause the physical body of the narrator to merge with the body of the text read by her. The proximity of the body and language to storytelling is also manifested in a story wherein the voice of the Koran’s firm lesson about the eternal punishment in fire is interspersed with passages from a Turkish love song, in which a lover declares lifelong pure love: Koran: “Es sei denn, mit seiner Erlaubnis.” Türkisches Lied: “Ich werde sie nie beschmutzen, wenn ich mich auch ins Feuer werfe.” Koran: “Was die Elenden anlangt, so sollen sie ins Feuer kommen.” Türkisches Lied: “Ich werde nie satt werden, wenn ich auch tausend Jahre an diesem Busen läge.” Koran: “Ewig sollen sie darinnen verbleiben, solange Himmel und Erde dauern” Türkisches Lied: “Ich will eine Nacht, die ich mit dir habe, lebenslang im Leben lassen.” Koran: “Es sei denn, daß dein Herr es anders wolle, siehe, dein Herr tut, was er will.” ( MZ 33) The author mixes the passages from the Koran with a Turkish song, illustrating the difference in the perception of love. The sensual voice of the Turkish lover is heard through the scriptural authority of the Koran, foregrounding human passion; thus, the new text decenters the original context (Bird 170). The narrator’s exploration of her identity through Arabic script, which initially embraces submission to a stipulated system, discloses itself as empowering. She shows how these texts can be enjoyed and transformed in new contexts, which are defined by her. Therefore, when Ibni Abdullah insists on pure religious love and locks her in the room, the narrator, after initially feeling intimidated by his words, sees in the Arabic text the narrative of her own love for him and her own escape in the figure of the bird (Bird 171). Here the author rewrites completely the meaning of the symbolic “forty days” and the “bird.” Instead of her waiting patiently for the lover / prince for forty days, she considers herself 380 Renata Fuchs to be a prisoner of his love and wants to fly away. Hence, the bird is not helping her to achieve the goal of finding her way to the prince but rather the opposite. Ibni Abdullah relates to her a story that he knows from his grandmother. It is one of the most published tales belonging to the category of the Patient Stone ( ATU 894) of which there are twenty-two texts (Marzolph 223). The story starts with a typical opening line used in fairy tales from the Middle East: “Es war einmal, es war keinmal.” Its protagonist is a girl who has to wait patiently forty days for the man of her dreams ( MZ 34). The whole text is a leveling performance between the language of love and affection, chiefly executed by mythological symbols and unsentimental metaphors (Neubert 159). The motif of a “Geduldstein” highlights the importance of patience within Islamic culture. The form of the fairy tale, however, as presented by Özdamar, is altered in that the author added the motif of a love potion, which causes the right bride to fall asleep / faint so that the false bride takes her place. This particular change of adding the key scene evoking the tale of “Sleeping Beauty” allows the author to merge two traditions of storytelling. Sensuality and desire predispose the narrator to follow her teacher’s wishes and to learn the new kind of love in order to please him: “Du Seele in meiner Seele, […] ich opfere mich für deine Schritte” ( MZ 32). As she talks herself into submission, her words become more like self-defiance. The narrator becomes more and more the property of her teacher, even to the point where she is silenced behind a veil in the room of the scripts (Neubert 160). The language and religious study entwine with physical love: “‛Gib mir deine Spucke in meinen Mund.’ Er gab. Seine Spucke ist ein silbernes Getränk, ich trank es und betete: ‛Mein Allah, mit der tötenden Liebe mach mich bekannt’” ( MZ 31). At first they both succumb to their lust; however, Ibni Abdullah does not relinquish his religious convictions, according to which only the female counterpart is to be blamed for demonstrating strong sexual desires: “‛Die Sünden sollst du tragen,’ sagt Ibni Abudullah und liebt mich in einer Moschee. Er hat ein Tuch über seiner Schulter” ( MZ 21-22). He covers his body while making love in the mosque and later is ashamed of his exploits. In the end, the narrator leaves because her sexual freedom and dissatisfaction with her partner is too quickly equated with unbelief. Ibni Abdullah remains trapped within the patriarchal religious tradition since he is not yet able to master the contradiction intellectually, as expressed in his words full of laughter: “Die türkischen Frauen wollen viel Sex” ( MZ 43). The narrator leaves the room of scripts in which she has been locked for forty days and throws the scripts she had studied on the highway: “Ich konnte nicht lernen. Ich warf jemandem den Schriftzimmerschlüssel in den Hof, er machte die Tür auf ” ( MZ 46). By eroticizing her text throughout, Özdamar ascribes a much more prominent role Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 381 to women. Imagining herself as a bird that must be patient while waiting for love, the “ich” tries to calm her heart by pressing against it ( MZ 20); later, she wants to press a stone against her heart to suppress that love ( MZ 40). At the same time, she compares her lover’s penis to a heart: “sein Penis atmete wie ein Herz. Im Schlaf ” ( MZ 36); thus, elevating the importance of love on both the emotional and erotic levels. The story closes with an episode detailing the narrator’s encounter with an unknown girl to whom the narrator describes herself as a “Wörtersammlerin” ( MZ 48). However, the “collector of words” was unable to find a dictionary for the language of her love: “ich habe kein Wörterbuch gefunden für die Sprache meiner Liebe” ( MZ 32). “Ruh heißt Seele,” says the narrator to the girl who then answers: “Seele heißt Ruh” ( MZ 48). With this line, the author finishes her second story in the collection, “Grossvaterzunge,” and couples the English word “rue,” a metaphor for regret as well as a herbal remedy for undesired pregnancy, with the German word “Ruhe,” rest and silence, and connects it to the Arabic word meaning the soul. As a woman, the narrator decides against her Oriental lover and his patriarchal ways tied closely to religious sentiments. On the level of the narration, however, the author fuses the East and West through the linguistic signs, thus signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly forged society. The third story of the collection Mutterzunge, “Karagöz in Alamania,” opens with a line usually found in fairy tales: “Es war einmal ein Dorf ” ( MZ 49). In contrast with the second story, wherein only some components of this structure of narration are apparent, the entire third story is transformed into a fairy tale. The magic aspects amalgamate with elements of reality and religious symbols merge with fairy tale motifs. Immediately at the beginning, the narrative becomes complicated with the introduction of a dream so that it is difficult to discern which events really take place and which belong to the realm of the dream. Özdamar’s fairy tale thematizes and problematizes migration between the Orient and the Occident, depicting identities before and during the actual process of migration. The protagonist, the farmer Karagöz, decides to go to Germany in search of a job and leaves his pregnant wife behind in Anatolia. The departure is preceded by a dream of the farmer’s wife, in which she witnesses an odd dialogue between her husband’s father and the owner of an apple tree. In the bizarre dream, Özdamar anticipates the protagonist’s immigration to Germany and mystifies the structure of the story even further by producing new linguistic forms. In fact, when the owner of the apple tree from whom Karagöz is stealing apples asks Karagöz’s father whether his son could work for him, the two men discuss the business by way of adages: “Die beiden sprachen über dieses 382 Renata Fuchs Geschäft nicht direkt, sondern in Sprichwörtern” ( MZ 50). Seyhan observes that they both engage in “dialogue” until Karagöz’s father gives up because he “runs out of fitting proverbs and the other man does not” ( Writing outside the Nation 110). Just as in the first two stories, where creative language mirrors the hybridity of the narrator, so it is the case in the third story where the newly coined linguistic code reflects the protagonists’ border identity. Ultimately, the code also demonstrates that the protagonists are just victims of the process of emigration and immigration. From the onset, the experimental use of the German language leads to the destabilization of the reader’s position who may be alienated by the new structures of the language: “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett” ( MZ 49). The first sentence in the story accentuates this phenomenon by misplacing the verb in the relative clause, introduced with the relative pronoun. Even though the sentence can be readily understood, its grammatical structure is incorrect and thus produces the alienation effect. In fact, the author employs the device of making strange in all her stories mentioned here. Already in the first story, she signals the intention to distance the reader: “Brecht war der erste Mensch, warum ich hierher gekommen bin” ( MZ 13). According to Fedemair, Özdamar resorts to the Brechtian concept of “Verfremdung” not in a political / didactic sense as used by Brecht himself, but rather to express herself poetically, that is, solely for aesthetic purposes (160). I, however, claim that Özdamar’s alienation effect reflects the emotional state of her figures in the most articulate way possible. For instance, the author’s lawless and at times defective language along with the sudden use of Turkish or Arabic words in the middle of the text express the immigrants’ experience of learning a new language. This third story, as previously mentioned, begins with “es war einmal,” which is a typical line signaling to the reader the fairy tale genre. In fact, the story features many elements that the Russian linguist and anthropologist Vladimir Propp distinguished as characteristic for the structure of a fairy tale: an unfair situation, the need to travel, the entry into a new realm, the encounter with the enemy and speaking animals, and a return home (Propp 147-224). Undeniably, the elements of the fairy tale structure are ubiquitous in the third story; yet, it is really more of a fairy tale parody than a traditional tale. On the surface, the tale does have some of the Propp elements, but it does not really ever suspend belief. The story also integrates other genres. For instance, as Seyhan indicates, Özdamar had originally written “Karagöz in Alamania” as a theater play in 1982, which was staged at the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus in 1986. The play was based on a letter written by a Gastarbeiter who had permanently returned to Turkey, and its title alludes to a traditional Turkish shadow play, commonly Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 383 called karagöz, which happens to be the name of Özdamar’s main character, who is a “comic fast-talking smart aleck who constantly ridicules his sidekick” ( Writing outside the Nation 111-12). Hence, Özdamar’s story includes some of the most characteristic elements of a play. The interchange of scenes introduced by the expression “Es wurde dunkel, es wurde hell” bears likeness to the curtain fall in a theater at the end of each act. It can also be argued that the line “Es wurde dunkel, es wurde hell” and its repetition brings to mind the biblical story of Genesis, more precisely “the Creation of the World” when God separates the darkness from the light. Consequently, the first scene involves the apple tree and resembles the Genesis story, “the Fall,” when Eve eats the forbidden fruit and gives it to Adam: “Die Frau war hochschwanger. Der Bauer war sehr arm. [...] Er stieg auf den Rücken seiner schwangeren Frau und erreichte einen Apfel. Er gab ihn seiner Frau” ( MZ 49). This comical role reversal changes the power distribution since now the male is responsible for the crime of taking a fruit from the tree, and the scene reveals and problematizes the harsh treatment of women and anticipates the farmer’s leaving his wife. At the same time, the story has affinities with the Brother Grimms’ “Rapunzel” and the peasant’s temptation to steal lettuce from the sorceress’s garden for his pregnant wife. As in any traditional fairy tale, the characters are depicted in a somewhat rigid fashion and are almost reduced to prototypes: the Gastarbeiter Karagöz, his wife, who is portrayed as a typical Turkish woman, fertile and financially dependent on her husband, the ignorant farmer of the town, and lastly an animal who can speak and who symbolizes the intellectual. The erudite donkey quotes Marx and Socrates and thus indelibly presents a link to the Western tradition of thought. The figure of the speaking donkey brings the story to the level of fairy tales and magic, on the one hand. On the other hand, however, the reader is reminded once again about religious stories—this time from the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, as well as from the Christian tradition. In Numbers 22: 28-31, we find the story of Baalam whose donkey refuses to carry him and is beaten by his master as a punishment; the Lord then opens the mouth of the donkey and the animal is able to speak. According to tradition, Mary, while pregnant, rode a donkey to Bethlehem. Özdamar’s donkey is witty and imaginative and able to produce ad hoc rhymes while pronouncing moral aphorisms. At the outset of their journey, the farmer and the donkey realize that they have a long way to Germany ahead of them. Since the donkey does not want to walk anymore, the farmer suggests that they tell each other stories and take turns in carrying each other so that the time would pass quickly. As in previous stories, here again Özdamar emphasizes the idea of storytelling. While the author is synthesizing fairy tales and stories of various origins, her evident knowledge of and fascination with different literary genres includes 384 Renata Fuchs elements from both Eastern and Western cultures. When the farmer and the donkey arrive in Istanbul on their way to Germany, a cunning urine seller calls the farmer “Ali Baba” ( MZ 59). The name Ali Baba is intended here pejoratively, yet it links the Karagöz story to the Oriental collection of fairy tales One Thousand and One Nights, which was compiled in Arabic and is rooted in ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, and Indian folklore and literature. It is comical that the character who has the magic “potion” for entry into the door is Ali Baba, and this “open sesame” potion is urine. Özdamar’s Karagöz resembles Till Eulenspiegel, an impertinent prankster figure originating in Middle Low German folklore that was used for political critique. The shadow theater, karagöz, was characterized by sexual and political humor lampooning those in power, thus defying censorship and enjoying an unlimited freedom (Öztürk 292-93). In the late nineteenth century, however, the theater became subject to the governmental bans and restrictions (Öztürk 299). By employing the figure of Karagöz, Özdamar attempts to restore performers’ loss of agency and to rescue the power of the Turkish shadow theater. As the story about Karagöz continues, it is divided into separate scenes; the sentence “Es wurde dunkel. Es wurde hell” serves here as the divider. The setting of some of the scenes remains unclear because the change of place is often difficult to determine and the sequence of departures and returns occurs in the text frequently. During the process of border crossing, the reader loses track of the characters’ actual location and is thus alienated again. Lastly, according to Wierschke, the reader is unsure where the protagonists find themselves, as they appear to be left in a state of being nowhere and always moving (203). The “Deutschland Tür” stands for the crossing point to another culture, a new world into which the remnants of the old world are brought along and introduced. Considering these circumstances, the representation of the door on the border to Germany intensifies the idea of a split, as it symbolically enacts not only the division between the two countries but also the limited capacity at the crossing point. The undertaking of crossing the border is momentous here because the characters develop a distinct code of communication, which only those who undergo the same experience are able to understand. They are oddly united in their hybridity. One of these unifying experiences is becoming familiar with the guidelines for guest workers described in Ein Handbuch für Gastarbeiter, which is a manual meant to be helpful for those arriving in the West for the first time. As the farmer starts reading out loud from the book, his reading creates a comical situation: “Das war ein Buch, das die türkische Arbeitsvermittlung für die nach Alamania gehenden Arbeiter geschrieben hatte. Es heißt: Ein Handbuch für Gastarbeiter, die in der Fremde arbeiten gehen […] ‛Lieber Bruder Arbeiter! Die Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 385 Toiletten in Europa sind anders als bei uns: wie ein Stuhl’” ( MZ 65). By way of this description, the stay in Germany is already preconceived as an out-of-ordinary experience and a clash of two different worlds. As difficult as it might be, the border crossing is, however, depicted as particularly challenging for Turkish women. Özdamar illustrates this predicament with two examples of contrasting characters in a dialogue with a compatriot: Die Türkin ohne Kopftuch sagte: “Könnt ihr nicht einen Tag leben, ohne Eure Schwänze in den Mund zu nehmen? ” Der Mann mit dem Schaf sagte: “Weib, wenn du nicht den Ketzerschwanz mit Muffe in den Mund nehmen wolltest, hättest du dir doch deine Beine abgehackt und wärst zu Hause geblieben.” […] Die Türkin mit dem Kopftuch antwortete: “Dein Schaf soll in deinen Mund scheißen, Kerl, ich hoffe, Inshallah, du sollst Schweinefleisch essen, Kerl.” […] Die Frau mit Kopftuch sagte beim Gehen: “Versteh ich etwas von Schmuck und Kopftuch? Verstehe ich nicht! Aber ich liebe mein Kopftuch. Ich nikis versteh, was wollen türkische Arbeitsvermittlung-Gastarbeiterhandbuch von meinem Kopftuch.” ( MZ 68) Özdamar problematizes here the issue of head covering for Muslim women: one woman does not wear a headscarf while the other does. The cleaning woman headscarf of the 1970s and the 1980s was a symbol that focused on national, class, and educational difference that located immigrant culture in a rural, traditional past (Weber 91). The author alludes to those debates and coincidentally actualizes them. The woman without the head covering is accused of promiscuity. According to her accuser, she should have never left Turkey if she could not protect herself from male desire by wearing a headscarf. The woman wearing a headscarf takes sides with the woman being attacked verbally, yet she wonders why the employment agency harasses her for wearing a headscarf. The position of either a duty prescribed or a prohibition leaves the women no alternatives. Either way they will be condemned. The headscarf is oftentimes perceived as an embodiment of the cultural opposite of emancipation because it manifests Islam’s tendency toward violence as well as cultural exclusion (Weber 99). However, feminist responses to the headscarf debate have been divided. On the one hand, the incompatibility with women’s rights or a modern life has been pointed out. On the other hand, research suggests that women who choose the headscarf also insist on women’s independence in relationships, education, and work (Weber 102). Özdamar expresses this ambiguity already in “Grossvaterzunge”: “Ich ging den arabischen Frauen mit Kopftüchern hinterher, ihre schwangeren Töchter neben ihnen, ich will unter ihre Röcke gehen, ganz klein” ( MZ 21). The westernized emanicipated narrator’s desire to search for her roots reveals itself in the inquiry into the feminine Orientalism embodying the “sweetness” of subjugation, something that European women have lost. 386 Renata Fuchs “Karagöz in Alamania” ends as it has begun, that is, with a bizarre dream—this time in a form of a poem. Having at first abandoned his wife because of the move to Germany, the farmer decides that he loves her after all: “Alles, alles geht vorbei, aber unsere Liebe nicht” ( MZ 89). As the farmer lies in his in-half-divided bed of which the other half is reserved for his wife and children, he begs for forgiveness in strangely religious terms: “Mein Liebling du, stolz und frei! Verliebt bin ich nun mal in dich. Erbarme dich doch meiner” ( MZ 102). His plea is answered by the apple tree: “Nach Prügeln wohl verlangt dein Herz. […] Lieb mich nicht, ich lieb dich nicht.” In turn, the farmer hits the apple tree in which he now sees his alter ego, that is, a nightingale singing ( MZ 103). In the end, the combination of different genres, code switching, and irony, creates a magnified alienation effect and entirely destabilizes the typical vision of migration. The readers, like the characters, now experience the disruptions of migration (Franzè 56). During the whole process of going back and forth between the two countries, the characters must grapple with Heimweh, besides other difficulties, but a final return will never take place because the author destines them to a perpetual migration. Just as at the end of the second story, where Özdamar introduces an element connecting to her last story through Shakespeare’s character Ophelia, so it is also the case here that she provides a link to the story that follows. Through the symbol of the nightingale, she points to yet another of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Julia. With this particular scene, Özdamar anticipates the last story in Mutterzunge, “Karriere einer Putzfrau , ” where the new Ophelia plays the prominent role. “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” begins with the introduction of the protagonist: “Ich bin die Putzfrau, wenn ich hier nicht putze, was soll ich denn sonst tun? In meinem Land war ich Ophelia” ( MZ 104). The transformation of Ophelia (referencing Shakespeare’s character) into the Turkish cleaning lady can be related to the Grimm Brothers’ tale “the Goose Girl” ( ATU 870A) since the transformation plot bears similarities with stories belonging to the categories of ATU 870A, ATU 437, and ATU 594 II and III . These are stories of the false bride, a true princess who is forcibly replaced by a usurper and made a servant before she is recognized as the true bride through a series of tests (Goldberg 59). “The Goose Girl,” however, does not contain the Stone of Patience episode, which is mostly present in fairy tales from Persia, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, or Spain, but rather the heroine’s recitation of her tale of woe is directed to the iron stove inside of which she sits (Goldberg 60). Only when the true princess tells her life story, is she recognized and marries the prince. Özdamar’s Turkish Ophelia tells the reader about the divorce from her mad husband Hamlet whose apparently deranged words, “Geh in ein Kloster! Geh! Leb wohl,” set the stage, literally and metaphorically, for the story that in the Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 387 second part becomes a play ( MZ 104). 7 Two well-known Western cultural figures end their relationship because of social class differences, as articulated by the husband: “Wir machen gute Liebe, aber das ist nicht alles, zwischen uns ist Klassenunterschied” ( MZ 104). Özdamar erases these social class differences in the second part of the story where all literary works are put on the identical level regardless of whether they belong to the Western literary canon or not. So-called “low” literature, including fairy tales, anecdotes, and oral stories, has the same status as “high” literature. Historical figures, politicians, artists, literati, or a simple cleaning lady are treated the same, and females are equal to males through role reversal. Thus, within Özdamar’s main story, the reader encounters stories populated with unknown, unimportant figures along with those who left an indelible mark on the cultural make-up of Western society (Ophelia, Hamlet, Caesar, Medea, Woyzeck) but receive new roles here. For example, the prince runs through the woods totally lost, the wolf appears to be friendly, and the narrator’s grandmother tells the departing Ophelia / cleaning lady a tale about Frau Scheiße ( MZ 105-07). By juxtaposing Western canonical works with the Frau Scheiße tale that evokes satirical Turkish shadow plays ( karagöz ) mocking hegemony, Özdamar disrupts and deregulates all established norms of discourse. The humorous tale of Frau Scheiße, belonging to the type ATU 1351, “The Silent Wager,” frames Ophelia’s journey to Germany as a cleaning lady. There are several versions of this particular tale all over the world including Goethe’s rendition “Gutmann und Gutweib.” However, the famous Persian variant, “Stubborn Husband, Stubborn Wife,” is almost identical to Özdamar’s story in which an argument about who should do the work in marriage results in the wager of silence and almost ruins the marriage because the couple, while insisting on the terms of the wager, lose goods. The practical spouse, here the wife, tries to recover the lost goods by chasing after the thieves and tricking them. The gist of this tale is that although silence is golden, too much silence is the mark of an utter fool. In fact, the second half of Özdamar’s story has affinities with the stories of “Dummer Hans” in which poor, dumb, and powerless characters trick powerful adversaries. In this case, Frau Scheisse evades those who want to sexually assault her. The unique element in this story is the name of the protagonist, Frau Scheisse, and her tricking the thieves and almost rapists with faked feces in their boots. The original story has the woman putting dough made of flour and water into the boots, not feces. Since defecation, scatological humor, and “beyond all enduring obscene” sexuality, often featuring the penis, are part of the karagöz theater tradition, there is a connection here between this tale and the karagöz sequence (Öztürk 296-97). Cleaning up feces is part of the cleaning lady’s job in Germany, and it is related to the dirty bed linens—a claim made against her 388 Renata Fuchs by her mother-in-law. The motif of “Scheisse” continues throughout the story in various scenes, for example, when she must clean up after Prince the dog and after the people in the apartment building who “haben in der Nacht […] von manche Türen geschissen” ( MZ 111). The cleaning lady (and at the same time Ophelia) sets her own life in parallel with those of well-known personalities, thus putting herself on an identical par with them. Özdamar shapes her narrative into the cleaning lady’s story and theater performance, never relinquishing the narrative flow to the control of other major texts (Rankin 5). The narrator is the playwright and director who decides to displace the stars from their own distinguished dramas. She gives voice to the powerful Western tradition embodied in its celebrated figures, but at the same time she points out its imperfections: Ophelia goes insane and drowns herself; Hamlet is the unstable prince tormented by his father’s ghost who alerts him to his mother’s infidelity with his uncle; Caesar is the egocentric leader murdered by his trusted friend; Medea kills even her own children as a revenge; and Woyzeck savagely slays his beloved Marie. Just like the narrator, the once-powerful figures who now play in her drama have all been betrayed by those whom they trusted most. No happy ending seems possible because “am Ende gewinnen immer die Bösen” ( MZ 105). Yet, with the new play within her story, Özdamar not only attempts to rewrite the tragic ending, but also participates in a conversation about the literary canon by suggesting a major reconsideration of its intellectual foundations. The cleaning lady’s minority text develops its own voice and deterritorializes major texts to which it alludes. 8 Canonical texts operate within the minority framework; thus, foregoing their power and legitimatizing the minority text. During this process the focus is shifted away from the prominent, powerful Occidental male figure to the seemingly fragile, obscure Oriental female figure. Whereas for Hamlet madness is metaphysical and linked with culture, for Ophelia it is a product of the female body and female nature. Ophelia’s flowers suggest the contradictory double conceptualization of female sexuality as both chaste blossoming and lustful corruption. She is the virginal rose and the sensual madwoman who, in distributing her wild flowers and herbs to the members of the court, is symbolically deflowering herself. Ophelia gives rosemary to Hamlet, pansies to Laertes, fennel and columbines to Claudius, and rue to the Queen and herself. By giving rosemary to Hamlet, she symbolically celebrates her wedding as well as her funeral. She reserves for herself rue, a bitter plant with medicinal qualities and used as a symbol of repentance. Özdamar connects Ophelia’s gestures in the last scene of Hamlet to her fourth story about Ophelia, “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” and to the closing line (“Ruh heißt Seele”) of her second story “Grossvaterzunge” (as discussed above) ( MZ 48). Through the Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 389 linguistic association of the German word “Ruhe” and the Arabic word “soul,” Özdamar brings together the Occident and Orient not in order to preserve a binary opposition drawn between them, but rather to erase epistemological distinction made between them. Regardless of their roots both women, the narrator from “Grossvaterzunge” and Ophelia from “Karagöz in Alamania,” refuse to go along with the patriarchal attitudes and subordination. Özdamar creates an image of self-assertion with no space for a melancholic, misty-eyed nemesis, as her Ophelia is reborn in Germany. The author transfigures the protagonist’s sunken dead body belonging to cultural imagination into a figure signaling the transformation of social norms, specifically those concerning diversity and marginalization of women. As a cleaning lady in Germany, the protagonist allows herself to become the drowned corpse of Ophelia, and at the same time she is “die ehemalige Leiche von einem Mann […], der Hamlet spielen wollte und sollte! ” ( MZ 107). She may have been killed in her own country, but she has resurrected herself on stage in Germany. Here she discovers that her fairy tale “prince” is a dog that she must follow with her white plastic bag: “Da stand ein Hund. Schwarz-weiß gekleidet, […] Ich bin diesem Prinz gefolgt. Meine Arbeit war leicht. Der Prinz schiß im Wald, ich bin immer hinter ihm gelaufen und habe die Scheiße in einer weißen Plastiktüte gesammelt und nach Hause in den Förstersalon gebracht” ( MZ 108). Özdamar relocates the acclaimed figures of the Western canon into the fairy tale woods where the prince, now turned into an animal, and Ophelia, now quasi princess, quasi Little Red Riding Hood, quasi a contemporary woman, are sent on an aimless chase. The fairy tale genre is yet again foregrounded, when the figure of a wolf is introduced: “Ein Wolf im Wald hat mich angesprochen,” and Little Red becomes a forest ranger who hesitates to shoot the eagle because it belongs to an endangered species ( MZ 108). It is also in the woods that she encounters a plastic serpent reminding the reader about the biblical paradise: “Es war eine Plastikschlange, und sie sang: Heut marschiert die Garde auf. Alle Mädchen freun sich drauf ” (MZ 110). This time, the serpent, a symol of the devil and temptation, acts as a guard against a public masturbator and rapist: “Eine Männerstimme: Ich bin dein Nachtgespenst, dein süßes Nachtgespenst. Ich weck dich, wenn du pennst, so oft, bis du mich Liebling nennst, sei bloß nicht so erschreckt, du wirst nur aufgedeckt, und wenn du aufgedeckt, dann wirst du wieder zugedeckt” (MZ 111). As the scene location changes to a high-rise building, Ophelia falls victim to stalking: “Dann knackte er auch oft mit seinem Schwanz” ( MZ 112). While dreaming in her new location, Ophelia sees the rapist as a wolf: “‛Jemand ist im Zimmer, Gott sei Dank bin ich wach’, sagte ich zu mir, in diesem Moment fliegen diese Füße über das Bett und kommen als Wolf wieder runter” ( MZ 111). Many 390 Renata Fuchs radical adaptations have transformed Little Red Riding Hood into a fearless, independent girl (Zipes 42). Özdamar’s version, however, does not rehabilitate the wolf and does not undermine the assumptions of the traditional cultural pattern. Here the wolf, as representative of sexuality in general, is still a threat. When the first part of Özdamar’s story “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” stylized as a fairy tale, ends, the second part, depicted as a theater play, begins. She turns to experimental subversive art in the form of Brechtian revolutionary theater, as the necessary catalyst for change (Weber 187). Özdamar’s last story epitomizes not just the collected memories of an obscure Turkish cleaning woman, but rather it is a part of an extensive fusion of separate identities that encompass literary canonical and historical figures regardless of their famous or infamous status. Along with the fabled prince included in the classic Grimms’ fairy tales, famed Hamlet, eminent Medea and Julius Caesar, and notable Woyzeck, Özdamar also introduces Adolph Hitler, Eva Braun, and Nathan der Weise, who is Germany’s most prominent symbol of enlightened thinking and a Jewish character capable of dialoguing peacefully with Christians and Muslims. By involving Nathan der Weise in her “mad” play, side-by-side with the anti-Semitic Nazi leader, the author shows the inadequacy of reason and the inability to unite the Western with the Eastern thought not only in the cleaning woman’s world, but also in the Western world. The cleaning lady casts herself as the mad Ophelia, a status that brings her closer to others participating in the “Blödsinn”: “ich habe soviel Blödsinn wie all Toten. So bin ich gelaufen, […] bis zum nächsten Theater” ( MZ 111-12). The displaced cleaning lady interacts dramatically with the figures engaged in her play. Because these figures are displaced themselves, either from their literary scenery or historical context, she can be perceived as being equal to them. Indeed the celebrated world-drama stage is “ein einziges Männerpissoir” wherein “Cäsar […] läßt Kleopatra die Pißbecken saubermachen” and “Ophelia macht im Männer-Pissoir den Boden sauber” while “alle Plastikschlangen lachen als Playback” ( MZ 114-15). The scenario is performed as a contemporary situation comedy with seemingly regressive misogynistic accents that, however, alert to the problem of women’s marginalization in history. When the drunken Hamlet “kriegt seine gespielten Orgasmen, Ophelia sagt zu ihm: ‛Hamlet, tue nicht so—gib dir nicht Mühe’” ( MZ 117). In this sexual act, Hamlet changes roles with Ophelia, as he takes on the role of the unsatisfied female pretending to have orgasms. Ophelia does not need her Hamlet to complete her. After all she is now the main character and the director of her play. Özdamar closes her story with a linguistic puzzle consisting of some like-sounding words: “Hier ist die Bohnermaschine, die Bühne wird täglich gebohnert, haben sie gesagt, nein, hier ist die Bohnermaschine haben sie gesagt, Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 391 die Bühne wird täglich gebühnert, die Bohne wird täglich gebohnert, nein, nein, die Bühne wird täglich gebohnert. Das war es” (MZ 120). The cleaning lady fulfills her obligation as far as keeping the stage clean and polished is concerned. Simultaneously, however, she feels responsible for keeping the stage occupied and performing. Özdamar’s text creates a space in which a minority figure, a status based on race, gender, and class, becomes not only visible, but also prominent in that she determines the fate of the majorities. In this particular story, the author does not mention any popular Turkish figures but alludes only to eminent Western characters that have been long established in the literary canon. The author subjects the celebrated figures to her power and places her cleaning lady on the same par with them. With the power of her narrating voice, the cleaning lady is herself the author communicating with the dramatically perished; thus, creating a space for a new tradition to emerge. According to Maria Tatar, fairy tales do not only influence us, they reveal realities already present in what she calls the “folklore of the human mind” (Tatar 57). Most importantly, however, “the hard facts of fairy-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult” (Tatar 192). By revising the fairy tales and biblical stories that have influenced Western thought and intertwining them with stories from the Eastern lore, Özdamar attempts to rewrite literary tradition in order to reflect the new realities of multicultural German society. Through such linguistic experimentations as code switching and mixing of narrative forms, Özdamar engages in new and unique forms of expression that illustrate the border identities she introduces. Literal and metaphorical borders, including those between life and theater, life and death, Occident and Orient, Western literary canon and minority works, are featured in all stories of Mutterzunge. Özdamar brings German culture into contact with Islam in different and unpredictable ways. Her prose is informed by secular, leftist values. Still, she draws on cultural background that has accommodated Islam as religious experience, and she is indebted to a poetic tradition in which sacred and profane are overlapping categories. Her new oriental woman embodies a site where intellect and body meet and where independence from tradition through sexuality is introduced. Özdamar’s stories display lucidly that a hybridized identity is not able to function in the new society without rethinking its historical past and taking part in the process of reshaping the present political landscape of the host country in order to provide livable conditions for numerous others who are also minorities. Gadamer argued against such naïveté because “the ontological ground of understanding in language, the fusion of horizons in interpretation, cannot explain other, vastly different cultures that do not share our histories” ( Writing 392 Renata Fuchs Outside the Nation 6). Because we participate in human experience through a dialogue sustained by shared traditions, Özdamar rethinks and reshapes traditional lore using religious and secular motifs from both traditions, Oriental and Occidental. In doing so, the author assigns women an integral dominant position in contemporary society, which is stimulated by the process of hybridization and globalization and can lead to the formation of global, common cultural discourse culminating in the new “translocal” or World Literature. Notes 1 I will refer to “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland” as “Karagöz in Alamania” and to “Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland ” as “Karriere einer Putzfrau.” I will refer to the story collection Mutterzunge . Erzählungen as Mutterzunge . When quoting from the story collection, I will use the abbreviation MZ within parentheses. 2 Critical works have examined Ozdamar’s writing in relationship to how it functions as a hybrid of German and Turkish culture (Monika Shafi, Margaret Littler Seyhan, Kader Konuk). Critics have commented on Ozdamar’s technique of literal translation, which is especially pronounced in her earlier work. This technique has been interpreted as a method of preserving and presenting authentic Turkish culture (Kuruyazici), as an act of affirming Turkish memory culture capable of opposing official history (Seyhan), as enriching German culture (Wierschke), as a study of the foreignness of Germany (Sölcün), and as an aesthetic experiment (Brandt). 3 In a 1996 interview with David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, Özdamar commented on her deliberate wish to write in German in this specific way: “I was also attracted to German as a new language. You see, at that time, I often traveled back to Turkey by train, finding myself together with ... all migrant workers. Their common language was German ... They made mistakes, of course, but the German they spoke was devoid of clichés and came out almost like poetry as they struggled to express the images of their mother tongue in this new language. And this, as I now realized, was the language of some five million Gastarbeiter” (47). 4 According to Zipes, there is a “Red Riding Hood syndrome” in Western culture, which persists at all levels of society and involves a perversion of sexuality that began during the 17th century (46). 5 Zipes explains that there were three major currents in the radical Little Red Riding Hood tales from 1950 to 1980: first, her portrayal as developing a sense of independence without help from males; second, attempts to rehabilitate the wolf; third, experiments debunking traditional narrative forms and seek- Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 393 ing to free readers and listeners so that they can question the conventional cultural patterns. These currents overlap to form critical statements about the way we view sexuality on the basis of the Riding Hood pattern (39). 6 Brandt points out that forty has a high symbolic value in the text. Not only it is the period that emblematically spans the generation between the mother tongue and the grandfather, but it is also a number that generally represents privation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (303). This way, the wait in Abdullah’s room acquires a sort of religious value (312). 7 Federmair reminds us that Brecht in his Arbeitsjournal identified Hamlet as a “new type”who distinguishes himself in an alienated way. This alienation effect is produced through a creation of a new type of figure - that of a doubtful intellectual - who does not fit into his historical surroundings where code of honor and acts of revenge need to be obeyed. Thus, Hamlet could be perceived as a foreigner, a migrant, a nomad within an orderly society. 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Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg in Gerhard Fritschs Fasching Sławomir Piontek Adam Mickiewicz Universität Abstract: Der Beitrag analysiert den Roman von Gerhard Fritsch Fasching im Kontext österreichischer Identitätsdiskurse, die sich in der Nachkriegszeit aufgrund der sogenannten Opferthese entwickelt haben. Diese Diskurse beziehen sich auf die Rolle Österreichs während der NS -Zeit und im zweiten Weltkrieg. Die narrative Konstruktion des Textes, in der drei wichtigste Aspekte dieser Diskurse zusammengeführt werden - Diffamierung der Deserteure aus dem deutschen Militär, der Mythos der ‚sauberen Wehrmacht‘ und die Frage des österreichischen Widerstandes - zeugt davon, dass der Roman programmatisch eine Demontage österreichischer Gründungs- und Identitätsmythen ansteuerte. Keywords: Opferthese, österreichischer Widerstand, Desertion, NS -Mentalität, Literatur der Nachkriegszeit Die thematische Konfiguration des Romans Fasching legt die Vermutung nahe, dass Fritsch mit seinem Roman bewusst einen Kollisionskurs auf gesellschaftliche und politische Mythen des Nachkriegsösterreich nahm. In mehreren Anläufen und Textentwürfen, in denen recht unterschiedliche Handlungskonstellationen konzipiert wurden und die doch um das zentrale Anliegen des Autors kreisten, „die Seifenblase der österreichischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft anzustechen“, wie Fritsch 23. 04. 1962 in einem Brief an Otto F. Best schrieb (Alker 101), arbeitete sich Fritsch an das Themen- und Motivgeflecht heran, das auch Jahrzehnte nach der Erstveröffentlichung des Textes an Reiz- und Konfliktpotential wenig eingebüßt hat. Wie wichtig für Gerhard Fritsch auch in persönli- 396 Sławomir Piontek cher Hinsicht die Auseinandersetzung mit den Folgen des Nationalsozialismus war, geht unter anderem aus den Erinnerungen Wieland Schmids hervor: Man sagt von Menschen, sie lebten von Erinnerungen. Bei Gerhard Fritsch war es anders. Er lebte aus der Abwehr von Erinnerungen, und er lebte für die Abwehr von Erinnerungen. Diese Erinnerungen lassen sich in wenigen Stichworten zusammenfassen: Faschismus - Krieg - Soldatsein - Fronterfahrung - Gefangenschaft. Diese Erinnerungen kamen immer wieder, bedrängten ihn, bedrohten ihn. Manchmal glaubte ich, er sei aus dem Krieg nicht ganz heimgekehrt, so mächtig standen die Erinnerungen um ihn. In seinen Gedichten und in seiner Prosa hat er sie beschworen, um sie zu bannen, sie zu überwinden, für sich und für andere. Mochten ihm zweifellos einige ‚gültige Gedichte‘, wie man sagt, gelungen sein - die Erinnerungen zu bannen, wollte ihm nie ganz gelingen. Vor allem die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (und des vorangegangenen sogenannten Austrofaschismus) bedrückte ihn, und zuweilen wähnte er, sie sei gar nicht wirklich vergangen. (Schmid 20) Ein 17-jähriger Volkssturmist Felix Golub desertiert in der Silvesternacht 1944 aus der Kaserne in eine nahegelegene steirische Kleinstadt. Er findet Unterschlupf bei der Baronin und Miederfabrikantin Vittoria Pisani, die ihn als Frau verkleidet und den Stadteinwohnern als ihre Verwandte Charlotte Weber vorstellt. Als Dienstmädchen (und zugleich geheimer Liebhaber Vittorias) verlebt Felix in der Stadt die letzten vier Kriegsmonate und hat dabei die Möglichkeit, die soziale Struktur der Stadt ungestört zu beobachten und die Gesinnung der Einwohner kennen zu lernen. Als russische Truppen im Anmarsch sind, gelingt es ihm durch Zufall, die zur Hauptkampflinie erklärte Stadt vor Zerstörung zu retten: Um bei Liebesavancen des Ortskommandanten, der die Verteidigung organisiert, nicht als Deserteur demaskiert zu werden, nimmt Felix den Kommandanten gefangen und zwingt ihn zur Kapitulation vor der Roten Armee. In der Schuld eines ‚Feiglings‘ zu stehen, ist aber für die Stadteinwohner unerträglich, sie schwärzen Felix bei den Russen an und er wird in ein Lager in Sibirien verschleppt. Als er nach zwölf Jahren in die Stadt zurückkommt, muss er registrieren, dass sich weder die soziale Struktur noch die Gesinnung verändert hat. Seine Anwesenheit erinnert die Einwohner an ihren einstigen Opportunismus, weckt Aggressionen und wird als Provokation empfunden. Als bei dem Faschingball, bei dem Felix zur Faschingprinzessin gewählt und als Charlotte verkleidet wird, die Stimmung kippt, muss er fliehen und sich vor der Lynchjustiz retten. Vittoria Pisani hilft ihm dabei und versteckt ihn in die gleiche Grube, eine Kammer unter dem Fußboden in einer Wohnung, die ihm nach seiner Desertion als Versteck diente und aus der sie ihn gerettet hatte. Ob Felix eine zweite Rettung gelingt, bleibt ungewiss. Die Romanhandlung entfaltet sich als eine Retrospektive während er in der Grube seiner Befreiung harrt. Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 397 Zum einen ist also der Protagonist in Fasching ein Deserteur, dessen Desertion als selbstverständliche Entscheidung geschildert und gebilligt wird. Dies führt den Roman in einen Themenbereich, der in Österreich lange sowohl politisch als auch gesellschaftlich für einen tief greifenden Dissens sorgte. Ein Denkmal für einen Deserteur, wie der Titel der Vorform von Fasching hieß, war in Österreich bis zum 24. 10. 2014 eine nicht erreichte Entität, noch 2006 urteilte der Historiker Hannes Metzler, dass es auch heute ein „klares Bekenntnis dazu [fehlt], dass die Tat, die Desertion aus der Wehrmacht, eine richtige war“ (Metzler, „Gedeckelte Auseinandersetzung“). Gleich nach der Errichtung des Denkmals waren Diskussionen auf den Internetforen nicht mehr sehr hitzig, es fehlte aber weiterhin nicht an kritischen und enttäuschten Stimmen (Mayr; [ AG ]). Die Desertion des Protagonisten hat dabei im Roman einen konkreten Grund, den Befehl, als Soldat unbewaffnete Zivilisten zu töten. Mit der Wahl dieses Stoffes hat Fritsch die mit dem letzten Lagebericht des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht vom 9. Mai 1945 einsetzende und in der Nachkriegszeit von Kameradschaftsbünden, Veteranenverbänden oder nicht wenigen Medien mitgetragene Legende von der „sauberen Wehrmacht“ anvisiert. Die „Sauberkeit“ wird hier in zweifacher Hinsicht in Frage gestellt, denn Fritsch macht sowohl die Praxis des militärischen Vorgehens gegen zivile Personen als auch die nationalsozialistische Ideologisierung der Truppen zum auslösenden Moment der Romanhandlung. Der Deserteur wird zudem zu einem Widerstandskämpfer. Dies geschieht wider seine Absichten und aus rein persönlichen Gründen, doch ist bei Golub die kognitive, emotionale und weltanschauliche Basis für diese Entscheidung bereits vorhanden. Das Ergebnis seiner zufälligen - wenn auch bewussten - Widerstandstätigkeit ist das bestmögliche aus der Perspektive des Potentials und der Möglichkeiten des damaligen österreichischen Widerstandes, d. h. die Verhinderung, dass eine südsteirische Stadt zur Hauptkampflinie wird. Eine Analyse der Widerstandsproblematik kann nicht ohne Verweis auf die zweite Passage der sog. Moskauer Deklaration der Alliierten aus dem Jahr 1943 erfolgen: „Austria is reminded, however, that she has a responsibility which she cannot evade for participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany, and that in the final settlement account will inevitably be taken of her own contribution to her liberation (Keyserlingk 207-8).“ Wichtig ist hier, dass die erste Passage, in der Österreich wörtlich als das erste Opfer Hitlers bezeichnet wird, das nach dem Kriegsende seine Staatlichkeit wiedererlangen soll (die die Grundlage für die sog. Opferthese schuf) nicht ohne diese zweite Passage zu lesen ist, denn gerade die Unterstützung / Animierung des österreichischen Widerstandes war das eigentliche Ziel der Deklaration. Je mehr aber im Laufe der Zeit die erste Passage politisch herausgestrichen wurde, 398 Sławomir Piontek desto genauer vermied man Hinweise auf die zweite, bis schließlich der Bezug auf sie 1955 in den Staatsvertrag nicht aufgenommen wurde, die einschlägige Stelle wurde am Tag vor der Unterzeichnung gestrichen. Durch die Auseinandersetzung mit den drei Elementen - Desertion, verbrecherische Kriegspraxis, österreichischer Widerstand - wird schließlich ein allgemeines und grundsätzliches Thema angesprochen: Die Entscheidungsmotivation und Handlungsfreiheit Felix Golubs erscheinen der Bevölkerung der Stadt, vor allem der Schicht der Vermögenden und Einflussreichsten, als unerträgliche Alternativen zu ihrem eigenen Tun, in dem „Opportunismus“ (Menasse 142), aber auch Gewinnsucht und Machtstreben die Konjunktur der nationalsozialistischen Parolen genutzt haben, um die jeweiligen Einflussbereiche zu vergrößern. Auch im demokratischen Kleid der Nachkriegsjahre bleiben die Konstellationen, an denen Golub schließlich zugrunde geht, unverändert. Eine solche Perspektive, die den Nationalsozialismus in das Kontinuum der österreichischen Geschichte stellt („für Franz Joseph Karl Hitler“: Fritsch 96) und dabei auf den Fortbestand einer von jener kakanischen ‚Art zu sein‘ (vide Moos auf den Steinen ) stark divergierenden Mentalität verweist, auf einen alternativen modus austriacus, gehört neben der Akzeptanz der Desertion, neben der Kritik an der kriminellen Praxis der Wehrmacht und an dem ambivalenten Status des Widerstandsbegriffes zu den am häufigsten tabuisierten und zugleich konfliktträchtigen Elementen im Geschichtsstoff der Nachkriegsrepublik. Die zeitgenössische Kritik reagierte verhalten. Der Rekurs auf den Nationalsozialismus war zu offensichtlich, als dass er hätte übersehen werden können, und doch waren die Rezensenten - mit wenigen Ausnahmen (Neumann) - bemüht, den Namen jener politischen Bewegung im Kontext der Ereignisse in der südsteirischen Kleinstadt nicht zu erwähnen. Die Spuren der Tendenz, im Roman einen „private[n] Bericht über […] private Folgen [der falschen Restauration]“ (Wimmer) zu sehen, sind noch in der Forschung der achtziger Jahre zu finden, die eine Analyse der „Innerlichkeit des Faschismus“ (Baumann 348) konstatierte. Der Paradigmenwechsel in den österreichischen Geschichtsnarrativen ist dagegen in den Besprechungen und Analysen nach der Neuauflage des Romans Mitte der 1990er Jahre zu spüren. Sie sehen die „nie abgelegte faschistische Uniform“ (Zeyringer) der Stadtbevölkerung, den „Habitus der alt- und neofaschistischen Gesellschaft“ (Hussong 120) als den Ausgangspunkt der Faschingsmaskerade an und führen den Misserfolg des Romans bei der zeitgenössischen Kritik und Leserschaft auf sein für die „österreichische Verdrängungsgemeinschaft“ (Podgornik) zu starkes konfliktträchtiges Potential zurück. Andere Probleme, wie die antimilitärische Haltung Golubs, insbesondere seine Kritik an der nationalsozialistischen Kriegspraxis oder seine ambivalente Stellung als Widerstandsfigur fanden weniger Beachtung. In neueren Interpretationsansätzen Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 399 arbeitet Stefan Alker weitere mögliche Lesarten des Romans heraus, in denen biographische Deutungen, religiöse Subtexte oder die Selbstreferenzialität des Schreibprozesses eine wichtige Rolle spielen (Alker 177-208). Robert Menasses Erklärung des Transvestitismus zur „durchgehenden Metapher“, die „Prinzip, Struktur und Telos“ (Menasse 140) des Textes ist, eröffnet neue Zugänge zum Roman, die mit Konstruktionen von kulturellen, sozialen und politischen Männlichkeitsbildern zusammenhängen (vgl. u. a. Hanisch; Krammer; Szczepaniak; Voß) respektive auf Schnittstellen zwischen Maskerade und Erinnerungskultur eingehen (Hackl). Im Folgenden möchte ich mich auf die drei angesprochenen Überschreitungen der damaligen Diskursgrenzen in Österreich konzentrieren und Positionen analysieren, die der Text bezüglich der Nachkriegserzählung von der ‚sauberen Wehrmacht‘, der Entscheidung zur Desertion sowie bezüglich des österreichischen Widerstandes einnimmt. Die Ideologisierung der Truppen Eine Folge der Opferthese war nicht nur die Verweigerung politischer Verantwortung und materieller Entschädigungen für die Opfer des NS -Regimes, sondern auch die nachträgliche und nachhaltige Entideologisierung des österreichischen Beitrags zum Nationalsozialismus, vor allem der Kriegshandlungen. Vom Konfliktpotential des Bildes der ‚sauberen Wehrmacht‘, das den „stärksten Kontinuitätsfaktor im Geschichtsbewusstsein dar[stellte]“ (Uhl 41), zeugt sowohl die Intensität der geschichtlichen Forschung zu dem Problem als auch etwa die Vehemenz der emotionalen Reaktionen im Zusammenhang mit der sog. Wehrmachtausstellung (Kepplinger; Embacher). Der Mythos vom ‚sauberen Krieg‘ beschwört eine Form der Kriegsführung, in der die Realisierung der militärischen Ziele nicht auf Kosten der Zivilbevölkerung erfolgt, er verweist auch indirekt - unabhängig von den der Kriegsführung zugrunde liegenden internationalen Konventionen - auf eine Art des Ehrenkodexes der Kämpfenden, auf die Achtung des Gegners, der ,ausgeschaltet’ werden soll, ohne dass eine Brutalisierung gegenüber den fremden (auch gefangen genommenen) Soldaten respektive den ,Nicht-Zielen’ (d. h. Zivilbevölkerung) betrieben wird. Diese traditionelle Matrix des Krieges wurde jedoch im Zweiten Weltkrieg vom Nationalsozialismus zunehmend aufgelöst: War die Grenze zwischen Kameraden und Nichtkameraden ehedem die zwischen Zivilisten und Soldaten (einschließlich der Soldaten der gegnerischen Seite) oder zwischen Frauen und Männern, so richtete der Nationalsozialismus diese Grenze neu ein. Sie verlief nun zwischen „Herrenmenschen“ und „Untermenschen“, und zwar 400 Sławomir Piontek jeweils beiderlei Geschlechts. Den Vernichtungskrieg trugen nicht mehr nur die Männer unter sich aus, er richtete sich, wie bekannt ist, explizit „auch gegen Frauen und Kinder“ (Kühne 547). Das Insistieren der Trivial- und Erinnerungsliteratur der Nachkriegszeit, der Illustriertenromane, der Tagespresse, der Veteranenverbände auf die traditionelle Kriegsmatrix sollte daher nicht nur das faktisch Verbrochene verheimlichen, sondern auch die Kampfhandlungen nachträglich und pauschal entideologisieren. 1 Auch im nicht-öffentlichen Bereich der familiären Kommunikation ist der Mythos von der ‚sauberen Wehrmacht‘ wohl die „wirksamste Legende“. 2 In spezifischen österreichischen Bedingungen diente diese Legendenbildung, so Cornelius Lehnguth, „als zentrale Scharnierstelle zwischen offizieller Opferthese und dem sozialpsychologischen Bedürfnis der Betroffenen nach authentischer Erinnerung.“ (Lehnguth 65). Lehnguth schreibt dazu: Dazu gehörte nicht nur, dass wie in der Bundesrepublik die Wehrmacht unter Ausblendung ihrer Involvierung in die NS -Vernichtungspolitik und mit dem steten Hinweis auf ihre soldatischen Tugenden entkriminalisiert und entideologisiert wurde; wesentlich war im Falle Österreichs vielmehr der Prozess der Entpolitisierung im Sinne einer Entkontextualisierung. Die deutschnationale Grundierung des ‚Dienstes am Vaterland‘ musste mit Rücksicht auf die Opferthese zugunsten eines entpolitisierten Heimat-Begriffes aufgegeben werden. Österreicher hatten retrospektiv weder für Führer noch für Großdeutschland gekämpft, sondern lediglich für eine ‚vage, imaginäre Heimat‘. Dieser Begriff eignet sich auch hervorragend dazu, ihn je nach Bedarf mit anderen Normen- und Wertesystemen aufzufüllen und dadurch für die geschichtspolitisch speziellen Bedingungen in Österreich begehbar zu machen. Entkontextualisierung bedeutete auch eine Enthistorisierung des Krieges. Erst dadurch konnten die Wehrmachtssoldaten moralisch rehabilitiert und ins österreichische Opferkollektiv aufgenommen werden, ohne gegen die Opferthese als hegemonialen Staatsmythos zu verstoßen (Lehnguth 65). Aufgrund mangelnder Fallstudien und Analysen können keine allgemeingültigen Aussagen zur Art der österreichischen Beteiligung an der deutschen Wehrmacht gemacht werden (Manoschek, Safrian; Safrian). Generalisierende Bemerkungen beziehen sich daher vordergründig auf sozial nachweisbare Prozesse und nicht auf Strukturen der Erfahrungsgestaltung des jeweiligen Soldaten oder etwa des jeweiligen Autors. Nicht alle Soldaten identifizierten sich mit den Kriegszielen und viele leisteten einen minimalen persönlichen Beitrag zu deren Realisierung. In ihrer Teilnahme am Kriegsgeschehen waren die Soldaten oft selber Systemopfer und viele wurden durch ihre eigenen Handlungen lebenslänglich traumatisiert. Auf der anderen Seite nicht zu bestreiten ist die Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 401 Tatsache, dass im Zweiten Weltkrieg die meisten Menschen nicht an der Front ums Leben gekommen sind, sondern infolge des Terrors in den besetzten Gebieten (Umbreit 3), wo „kein regulärer militärischer Krieg stattfand, sondern ein rassistisch motivierter Vernichtungskrieg mit dem Ziel, ganze Bevölkerungsgruppen […] drastisch zu dezimieren oder gänzlich auszurotten“ (Manoschek, Safrian 125). Nicht zu übersehen ist auch die Verkettung der Wehrmacht mit dem institutionalisierten und industrialisierten Massenmord hinter der Frontlinie: Die Konzentrationslager konnten nur funktionieren, solange die Front hielt (Hanisch 373). Fritschs Schilderung der Ideologisierung des Militärs außerhalb der SS -Formationen ist in der österreichischen literarischen Landschaft eher eine Ausnahme. Seine Thesen wurden erst ein paar Jahrzehnte später durch die Geschichtsschreibung überprüft, man denke hier an die erwähnte Ausstellung Verbrechen der Wehrmacht oder Annäherungsversuche an die mentale Befindlichkeit der Wehrmachtssoldaten in den Arbeiten u. a. von Omer Bartov, Klaus Latzel, Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek (Bartov; Latzel; Heer et al.). In Fasching, in der Schilderung der Menschenjagd auf „Fremdarbeiter, Diebsgesindel, Untermenschen, Polacken“ (Fritsch 35), geht Fritsch direkt auf die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht ein, die einer ideologisierten Kriegsführung entspringen. Als Rekrut eines Volksgrenadier-Regiments wird der siebzehnjährige Protagonist Felix Golub bei der Fahndung nach drei aus dem „Polackenlager“ (Fritsch 36) entflohenen polnischen ‚Fremdarbeitern‘ eingesetzt: […] und du Kamerad mußt mit, mußt mit, es kommt der Befehl, schießt sie zusammen, die Schweine ergeben sich nicht, es ballert die Jugend der Metzger ins Gebüsch, Pardon gibt’s nicht, Handgranaten gibt es, die besten Werfer treten vor, einer verdrückt sich, er hat in die Baumkronen geschossen, jetzt spielt er den Schlappschwanz und wird vom Gefreiten ertappt, er darf die Klumpen zusammensuchen, vor Wonne juxt die Kompanie, drei Untermenschen weniger im Wald, in der Welt, ohne Tritt marsch, sammeln bei der Birke am Weg. (Fritsch 35) Nach diesem Ereignis kommt es in Golub zu einem Umbruch, er durchschaut die „Logik der Metzger“ (Fritsch 35) und will sich den slowenischen Partisanen anschließen: „[W]enn ich Morde begehen muß, dann Morde an Mördern im Kampf gegen die Gesetze des Schlachthauses Deutschland, gegen die Gesetze, die alle logisch finden, hart, aber logisch […].“ (Fritsch 35) Mit der Entscheidung zur Desertion, die Golub nach diesem Ereignis trifft, setzt die eigentliche Handlung des Romans ein. Fritsch schildert die Praxis der Einübung in das Töten, der Überwindung der Todesangst durch ein Töten, bei dem man selbst nicht getötet werden kann. Das Überschreiten der Hemmschwelle erfolgt - wie der Soziologe Wolfgang Sofsky 402 Sławomir Piontek untersucht - durch die Eingliederung in eine ‚Meute‘, die von den Zwängen der Moral befreit und das „Töten ohne Schuldgefühl gestattet“ (Sofsky 15). Hannes Heer schreibt dazu: Die Verfolgungsjagden und Massaker des Partisanenkrieges folgten einer Schlachtordnung, bei der […] der Sieger von vornherein feststand. In dieser Verkehrung der in einem normalen Krieg ausbalancierten Chancen von Töten und Getötetwerden zur Selbstgewissheit, nur zu töten, wird das innere Prinzip von Krieg, das Agonale, ausgehebelt. Daher wurde diese Form des Tötens, ohne getötet zu werden, sehr bald zum feststehenden Bestandteil der Rekrutenausbildung. Bevor die jungen Soldaten an die Front geschickt wurden, durften sie dem Tod in seiner triumphierenden Gestalt begegnen. (Heer, Naumann 31) Diese Praxis wird im Roman ausdrücklich geschildert. Als Golubs emotionale Verfassung wegen der beobachteten und erlebten Zustände immer schlechter wird, versuchen ihm seine Kameraden Mut zuzusprechen: „[Bist du am] Ende wegen des bisschen Schliffs? “ (Fritsch 35) Der Mord an den drei ‚Fremdarbeitern‘ zieht sich wie ein Leitfaden durch den ganzen Text (Fritsch 44, 55, 49, 138). Durch die Schilderung dieser Praxis des Tötens greift Fritsch nicht nur Handlungen innerhalb der Wehrmacht an, sondern auch das Hauptprinzip der nationalsozialistischen Kriegsmatrix, die eine Kriegsführung ‚gegen Frauen und Kinder‘ ermöglichte und förderte. 3 Diese im totalen Vernichtungskrieg übliche Praxis ist eine Folge des Konzepts eines nationalsozialistischen Rassenkrieges, das sowohl bei „unserer Wehrmacht“ (Fritsch 54) als auch bei der Zivilbevölkerung der Stadt breite Akzeptanz findet: Im Wertesystem der Vittoria Pisani sind die Fremdarbeiter „ordnungsgemäß unschädlich gemacht worden“ (Fritsch 55). Bei dieser zivilen Verlängerung des Rassenkriegs ist man nicht weit von der ‚Mühlviertler Hasenjagd‘ entfernt, die im Februar 1945 - also zwei Monate nach den Ereignissen im Roman - tatsächlich stattfand. Somit überschreitet Fritsch deutlich die Grenzen der in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren geltenden medialen und politischen Diskurse in Österreich, die mit den Verweisen auf die Pflichterfüllung und Leistung der Soldaten, auf die Anständigkeit der Wehrmacht, auf die Niederlage bei Stalingrad, ein bestimmtes Bild der Wehrmacht kreierten und die Soldaten - wie es Alexander Pollak formuliert, der die Konstruktion der Wehrmachtslegende in der österreichischen Presse untersuche - als „missbrauchte Opfer des Krieges“ (Pollak 100) sahen. Dieser Prozess verlief parallel zur deutschen Legendenbildung, zu der nach 1945 konstruierten und kolportierten Vorstellung, „als hätten die deutschen Streitkräfte der Jahre 1939 bis 1945 mit dem Nationalsozialismus nichts zu tun gehabt, als wären Heer, Marine und Luftwaffe Teil eines historischen Vakuums Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 403 gewesen, losgelöst von der politischen Schubkraft und unabhängig von ihrem Oberbefehlshaber, der seit 1938 Adolf Hitler hieß“ (Giordano 170). Die Desertion Die Desertion Felix Golubs nach einer kurzen Ausbildungszeit ist eine Konsequenz seiner trotz (oder gerade wegen) des jugendlichen Alters vagen und dennoch unbeirrbaren und kompromisslosen Vorstellung von Gerechtigkeit und Gleichheit der Menschen. Aus diesen Grundsätzen heraus ist er imstande, den Druck der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda von den ‚Kameradenmördern‘ und der ‚Abwehr der Bolschewiken‘ zu überwinden: „[M]an muß mitmachen, man fällt dem eigenen Volk nicht in den Rücken, das Schlachthaus steht unter der Devise Gemeinnutz, es bricht ohnehin einmal zusammen, sagen die Vernünftigen, dann gnade uns Gott, wenn die Juden kommen, die Bolschewiken […].“ (Fritsch 35) Die Desertion resultiert nicht aus Angst um sein eigenes Leben und erfolgt nicht aufgrund einer sich bietenden zufälligen Gelegenheit, im Gegenteil, sie zeugt von Konsequenz in der Auflehnung gegen die nationalsozialistische Weltordnung. Gleich nach der Desertion, als er die Freiheit erlangt, fühlt Golub sich nicht mehr als Deserteur: Die „die von Gerechtigkeit und Menschenverstand desertiert waren, trugen Wehrmachtsuniformen, exerzierten bei den Baracken, sprengten Polen im Wald -“ (Fritsch 44). Eckpfeiler der Gesinnung des Siebzehnjährigen sind also Gerechtigkeit und Menschenverstand. Die Rekonstruktion der Lebensanschauung Golubs (lediges Kind, früher Tod der Mutter, die Auflehnung gegen die ihn erziehende Tante, Lehrerin und NSDAP -Genossin und ihre Übungen im „Stechschritt“, (Fritsch 188), mit elf „hass[t Golub] die Kommandoschreie“ bei der ‚Napola‘ und will keine „Elite“ werden (Fritsch 188), Flakhelferausbildung, kommunistische Namen als Signale eines Interesses (Fritsch 144), Glaube an die Gleichheit der Menschen und an die Brüderlichkeit (Fritsch 43), Sympathie für kommunistische Kämpfer in Spanien (Fritsch 34), Bewusstsein, dass die KZ keine Alliiertenpropaganda sind (Fritsch 66) unternimmt Albert Berger, der sie als „ethische[n] Humanismus, vor dem Hintergrund politischer Sympathie für kommunistische Ideale“ (Berger 70) bezeichnet. Davon, dass es ein unvoreingenommener, aber zugleich auch naiver Humanismus ist, zeugt die Hoffnung Golubs auf das Verständnis der russischen Behörden für seine Verteilung von Brot- und Mehlbeständen (mit denen die Besatzungsbehörden Schwarzhandel betrieben) an die hungernde Stadtbevölkerung (Fritsch 214). Berger bemerkt zu Recht, dass der Roman ausgespart lässt, woher Golub im Krieg sein Wissen, das seine Mentalität formte, bezogen hat. 404 Sławomir Piontek Mitbestimmend war sicherlich zum Teil die Vorstellungskraft bereits des jungen Felix, die Elemente der wahrgenommenen Realität ins Spiel transformierte und zugleich die Gründe dieser Transformation kritisch hinterfragte. Gemeint ist hier Golubs Eisenbahnerlebnis: Bei einem Spiel mit der Eisenbahn imaginiert 1938 der kleine Felix Golub einen Zugtransport auswandernder jüdischer Kinder und lässt seine Eisenbahn absichtlich entgleisen: Wenn ich die Höchstgeschwindigkeit einstelle, entgleist er dort unten, es liegt an mir, ob die Juden verunglücken oder nicht, eine jüdische Mädchenklasse zittert vor Angst, die Mädchen klammern sich an die Sitze, es liegt an mir, sie zu bestrafen, zu Krüppeln zu machen, in den Tod zu schicken, der Hebel des Transformators vibriert zwischen meinen Fingern, ich denke mich in den Waggon und wieder zurück, die Mädchen jammern, […] alle drei Waggons springen aus den Schienen, stürzen um […]. Ich schalte ab […], in ihren Coupés die Mädchen tot, ich laufe aus der Wohnung. (Fritsch 188 f.) In der Bewältigung dieses unheimlichen und bedrückenden Erlebnisses kann der Elfjährige die Hintergründe seiner Entscheidung identifizieren: „[E]s ist keine Kunst gegen die Juden zu sein, ich hasse sie nur, weil sie auswandern können, ich möchte mit ihnen fahren, der Tante entkommen […].“ (Fritsch 189) Als er nach der Rückkehr aus der Kriegsgefangenschaft wieder bei der Tante wohnen muss und nichts als weg will, also als die Situation aus seiner Kindheit reproduziert wird, stellt sich jene Erinnerung wieder ein: „[I]ch gestehe, dass ich kindischerweise kaum etwas tiefer bedaure als den mutwillig herbeigeführten Unfall des Zuges in der Kurve. Der geträumte Tod geträumter Mädchen hat […] mein Leben verändert.“ (Fritsch 192) Mit dem Thema der Desertion beschäftigen sich in den 1950 und 60er Jahren auffallend viele Romane der jungen österreichischen Nachkriegsschriftsteller. 4 In Fritschs Fasching ist die Desertion von Felix Golub der Beweggrund und die kompositorische Achse des Geschehens. Die Desertion als spontanen Einfall, der - obwohl bereits aufgegeben - wegen einer Reihe unerwarteter Zufälle ausgeführt werden muss, schildert Fritz Habeck in Das Boot kommt nach Mitternacht (1951). Für eine Frau desertiert auch Hans in Chronik einer Nacht (1988, Erstveröffentlichung 1950) von Reinhard Federmann. Werner Wist in Der Tugendfall (1953) von Karl Bednarik desertiert 1944 im Rheinland. In Letzte Ausfahrt (1953) von Herbert Zand findet man Schilderungen der Desertion / des Überlaufens der Protagonisten an der Front. Auch 1980 in Totale Verdunkelung von Alois Vogel münden die Handlungsstränge um Franz Prannowitz und Richard Wohlleben in die Desertion der beiden Protagonisten, als kurz vor dem Einmarsch russischer Truppen in Wien Auflösungsprozesse in der Wehrmacht einsetzen (Habeck; Federmann; Bednarik; Zand; Vogel). Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 405 Die Motive der Fahnenfluchten in den Romanen entsprechen im Allgemeinen einer Typologie der Desertionen in der Wehrmacht (Haase 145-48), es sind eher persönliche und situativ bedingte Beweggründe, die mit der ‚Lust auf Leben‘ oder mit der Erinnerung an das Vorkriegsleben verbunden sind. Bei Golub hat die Fahnenflucht einen deutlich antifaschistischen Unterton, bei Prannowitz und Wohlleben dominieren politische Beweggründe. Doch mehr als die Motive interessiert die Tatsache, dass die österreichische Kriegsprosa aus den Jahren 1945-67 den Deserteur - trotz einer insgesamt eher geringen Zahl der Desertionen innerhalb der Wehrmacht 5 - beinahe zu einem konstanten Typus macht. Noch interessanter ist die positive erzählerische Perspektivierung der desertierten Protagonisten in den Romanen (mit Ausnahme vielleicht von Das Boot kommt nach Mitternacht ), die deutlich von zeitgenössischen öffentlichen - und umso mehr von privaten - Diskursen abwich. Die Figur des Deserteurs ermöglichte eine Inszenierung der Prozesse des Reifens, des Umdenkens, der Entschlussfähigkeit der Soldaten, die, aus welchen ideologischen oder emotionalen Gründen auch immer, sich schließlich aus den sozialen Bindungen der Kameradschaft lösen, sich gegen das repressive militärische bzw. ideologische System stellen und somit auch Initiatoren eines Umwertungsprozesses innerhalb der österreichischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft zu werden erhoffen. In dieser Hinsicht geht die österreichische Literatur der frühen Nachkriegszeit den Fragestellungen der geschichtlichen Forschung sowie der (mangelnden) Offenheit der öffentlichen Meinung gegenüber dem Problem der Desertion deutlich voraus. Die Diffamierung der Deserteure in den Jahrzehnten nach dem Krieg hatte unterschiedliche Gründe. Sie hing damit zusammen, dass die Wehrmacht als eine unpolitische Institution betrachtet und nicht mit dem Nationalsozialismus in Verbindung gebracht wurde, wodurch die Etablierung des entlastenden Klischees, die österreichischen Wehrmachtsoldaten hätten „ihre Heimat verteidigt“, möglich wurde. Die Zeit des Kalten Krieges - der Verhärtung der Konfrontation zwischen Ost und West, der gescheiterten Entnazifizierung - förderte die Gesinnung, der Nationalsozialismus habe gegen den Kommunismus gekämpft und Österreich sei daher vom Kommunismus verschont geblieben. 6 Neben den Vorwürfen der ‚Feigheit‘, des ‚Kameradenmordes‘ oder des ‚Verrats‘ waren diese Meinungen lange Zeit Gründe für die ausgebliebene Bereitschaft, Deserteure pauschal zu rehabilitieren. Innerhalb der (militär)historischen Forschung schreibt Benjamin Ziemann über das Problem der Desertion, dass es „zu den am meisten umstrittenen Themenfeldern in der Diskussion über die historische Bewertung der deutschen Wehrmacht [gehört]. Wie sonst nur noch die Frage der von Wehrmachtangehörigen begangenen Kriegsverbrechen polarisiert dieses Thema seit Jahrzehnten die öffentliche Meinung ebenso wie die fachwissenschaftliche Diskussion“ 406 Sławomir Piontek (Ziemann 589). Die Tendenz zur Vermeidung öffentlicher Kontroversen, die den Konsens über die neue Republik beeinträchtigen könnten, hat in diesem Fall besonders stark gewirkt. Die ersten Forschungen kamen von deutschen Historikern und entsprangen vor allem privaten Forschungsinteressen. Seit Anfang der 1980er Jahre wurde in Deutschland in der Öffentlichkeit eine Debatte über eine entsprechende Würdigung der Opfer der NS -Militärjustiz, darunter auch der Deserteure, geführt. Entsprechend hoch ist seitdem die Zahl der Forschungsberichte, die teilweise der gesellschaftlichen Polarisierung bezüglich der Frage der Desertion folgen, teilweise aber in einer abwägenden Auseinandersetzung mit dem Quellenmaterial einen komplexeren sozialhistorischen Blick auf das Forschungsfeld ermöglichen. Über österreichische Soldaten, die sich den Kämpfen im Zweiten Weltkrieg auf verschiedene Weise entzogen haben, war bisher wenig bekannt. Eine systematische Aufarbeitung dieses Themas begann in Österreich - als Folge der Debatte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland - erst nach 2001 im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung im Rahmen des Projekts „Österreichische Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Militärgerichtsbarkeit“ 7 . Auf die seit dieser Zeit entsprechend steigende Zahl der Forschungsliteratur kann hier nur in einer Anmerkung verwiesen werden (vgl. Fritsche „Entziehungen“, „Deserteure“; Geldmacher; Manoschek; Metzler „Ehrlos für immer? “). Der Widerstand Die Gesinnung Felix Golubs, die ihn zur Desertion bewegt, liegt auch seiner Widerstandstätigkeit zugrunde, die sowohl Kriterien eines breit formulierten Widerstandsbegriffs erfüllt 8 , als auch - später - einer engeren, militanten Fassung. Der Widerstand Golubs ist nicht organisiert und nicht strikt politisch, er geht aber deutlich über den Rahmen des etwaigen ‚kleinen Widerstandes‘ hinaus 9 , er versteht sich vor allem als spontane, humanitär oder emotionell motivierte, gruppen- und personenbezogene Hilfeleistung, besonders gegenüber rassisch Verfolgten, worauf die Strafe der Gestapo- oder KZ -Haft stand. Nach dem Mord an den drei polnischen ‚Fremdarbeitern‘ im Wald bringt er Nahrungsmittel ins Lager der Fremdarbeiter und empfängt Filme mit heimlich im Lager gemachten Fotos: „Mitleid kämpft mit Furcht, Ergebnis ein halbes Kommissbrot für Polen, heimlich gemachte Fotos für Golub, wer soll diesen Film entwickeln? “ (Fritsch 36) Der bewaffnete Widerstand, die - wie es heißt - „Maskerade mit automatischen Waffen für den Frieden auf Erden“ (Fritsch 143), ist dagegen eine angstbedingte, kalkulierte Flucht vor der Demaskierung Charlottes als Felix durch Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 407 den Ortskommandanten. Der Widerstand erschöpft sich nicht in einer einmaligen Aktion: Felix führt eine Truppe von zwanzig Männern, entwaffnet flüchtende Wehrmachtsoldaten, kämpft gegen den angreifenden Volkssturm, der die Stadt zurückerobern will (Fritsch 200 f.). Seine Teilnahme am Widerstand ergibt sich dennoch aus einer kurzsichtigen Eigendynamik der Ereignisse als aufgrund einer langfristigen und umsichtigen Planung oder Widerstandstätigkeit. Felix hat dabei keinen anderen Grund als die Suche nach der polnischen Gefangenen Fela, „[w]enn er sie nicht wiederfand, wozu dann der Aufwand […]“ (Fritsch 201), sonst bleibt nur das „Abhauen in die Wälder“ (Fritsch 143) als Alternative. Zur Zeit der Entstehung des Romans war der österreichische Widerstand trotz des 1963 gegründeten Dokumentationsarchivs des Österreichischen Widerstandes in der innenpolitischen Landschaft, wie es Anton Pelinka formuliert, ein „Nischenthema“ (Pelinka 17). 1945 und danach wurde der Widerstand vom offiziellen Österreich betont und hervorgehoben, vor allem im Hinblick auf die Stützung der aus der Moskauer Deklaration resultierenden Opferrolle Österreichs. Der Historiker Bertrand Perz fügt hinzu: Der Widerstand „war in den 40er Jahren die Legitimationsbasis der neuen Republik und spielte somit eine wesentliche Rolle im Prozeß der Nationswerdung“ (Perz 151). Außenpolitisch verlor er an Bedeutung nach der Unterzeichnung des Staatsvertrags 1955. Die außen- und innenpolitische Spaltung der Widerstandsnarrative begann aber schon 1949 auf tagespolitischer Grundlage. Pelinka weiter: „Gegenüber den Alliierten waren die Frauen und Männer des Widerstandes diejenigen, die das eigentliche Österreich verkörperten; gegenüber den Wählerinnen und Wählern hingegen waren Heimkehrer und Bombenopfer diejenigen, die Österreich repräsentierten.“ (Pelinka 15). Diese Verkehrung der Perspektive hat ihren Grund nicht zuletzt eben darin, dass der österreichische Widerstand die Sache einer kleinen Minderheit blieb 10 , die als potentielle Wahlstimmen in der Nachkriegszeit zahlenmäßig unbedeutend war. Die Mehrheit der österreichischen Gesellschaft war in der NS -Zeit, so Pelinka, „in das System des privilegierenden totalitären Wohlfahrtsstaates eingebunden“ (16). Die zweite Zeitebene der Romanhandlung, nach der Rückkehr Felix’ um 1957, bezieht sich also auf die Zeit, in der diese Mehrheit „ihr eigenes Narrativ entwickelt hatte, in dem der Widerstand keinen Platz hatte und […] dieses Narrativ der Anpassung an die Diktatur vom Narrativ des Widerstandes herausgefordert, ja gefährdet erschien“ (16). Zwischen den beiden Narrativen steht Fritsch selbst - ähnlich seiner Romanfigur ein „Apache zwischen übermächtigen Stämmen, Rotweißrothaut“ (Fritsch 201) - und er rechnet in Fasching zugleich mit beiden ab. Er verweist einerseits auf die Zufälligkeit und Geringfügigkeit des österreichischen Widerstands, auf die Diskrepanz zwischen seiner Leistung und der ihm zugeschriebenen Bedeutung. Die ‚Eigenbefreiung‘ Österreichs vollzieht sich in Fasching als plötzlicher 408 Sławomir Piontek Rollentausch, als Maskerade und Posse, bei der alle lachen, sowohl die „wunderlichen Bundesgenossen des Aufruhrs“ (Fritsch 143) also die Widerständler, als auch „Plabutsch und [seine] Untertanen“ (Fritsch 143) also die nationalsozialistisch gesinnten Stadteinwohner. Die Republik, die niemand von den Stadtbewohnern will, wird proklamiert von einer Truppe zufällig zusammengeschütteter Ausgestoßener, von „Banditen im Niemandsland“ (Fritsch 202), einem Deserteur, „einem Franzosen, einem Polacken, einem chronischen Wilddieb“ (Fritsch 143). Sie alle retten eine Stadt, „in der keiner von ihnen daheim war“ (Fritsch 201). Auf der anderen Seite sind Desertion, Widerstand, Aufruhr doch tatsächliche Leistungen einer Minderheit, für die es im kleinstädtischen Narrativ sowohl der Kriegsals auch der späteren Nachkriegsjahre keinen Platz gibt. Statt eines Resümees möchte ich auf die im Text vorgeschlagene Lösung dieser geschilderten Problemlage eingehen. Felix’ Rückkehr nach zwölf Jahren kündigt eine unvermeidliche Konfrontation an. Zu dieser Konfrontation kommt es trotz der von ihm bewusst und zielgerichtet eingesetzten Anpassungsstrategie. Seine Bemühungen, in der Kleinstadtgesellschaft Fuß zu fassen, sieht er als ein „Experiment“, kompromissbereit um den Preis der Zurückhaltung eine Existenz aufzubauen. Er reflektiert dabei permanent alle Eigenschaften, die er dazu entwickelt und die im Widerspruch zu seiner früheren Gesinnung stehen, als eine bewusste Wahl: seinen „Opportunismus“ (Fritsch 104, 145), seine Clownrolle (Fritsch 144), seine Kollaboration aus „bester gewinnsüchtiger Gesinnung“ (Fritsch 147) und seine „ehrliche Anbiederung“ (Fritsch 221) an eine Gesellschaft, die ihn anwidert, aber ohne die er nicht leben zu können vermeint. Albert Berger sieht als Hauptthema des Romans „die Schwächung, die Depravation des ethischen Humanismus des Individuums Felix Golub vor dem Hintergrund seiner Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen des Kriegsendes und der Nachkriegsjahre“ (70). Man könnte diesen Gedanken fortsetzen und zuspitzen, denn in der Tat nicht das Scheitern Golubs auf Grund seiner Selbstaufgabe und nicht die - um mit Thomas Mann zu sprechen - „Negativität seiner Kampfposition“ (Mann 91) werden im Text kritisch herausgestrichen, sondern das Voraussetzungssystem der Depravation. Für Stefan Alker liegt das verstörende und provokative Potenzial des Textes im permanenten Changieren der Hauptfigur zwischen Aufklärung und Anpassung, zwischen einer imperativisch zu begreifenden Protesthaltung und Opportunismus. Erzähltechnisch wird es durch „ein permanentes Infragestellen der Beweggründe und der Disposition der Hauptfigur“ (Alker 188) erreicht. Der Grund für Golubs Handlungsdefizite liegt in der „Lähmung“ (Fritsch 63), die ihn im Kontakt mit Vittoria Pisani und nach der Rückkehr in die Stadt befällt. Diese Lähmung wird in der Tauben-Schlangen-Symbolik des Romans durchgespielt: Taube (tsch. Holub) als Frieden / Friedlichkeit und (Bewegungs) Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 409 Freiheit, Schlange als List und Rollenwechsel. Golub strebt die von Vittoria definierte Position in der Stadtgesellschaft an: „[Der Himmel] wünscht den Sterblichen als Zwitter, halb Schlange, halb Taube. Wehe den Tauben, Fluch den Schlangen, Felix.“ (Fritsch 20) Als Fotograf hofft Golub sie zu erreichen, beim Faschingsball sieht er sich als eine „Synthese aus Taube und Schlange“ (Fritsch 225), keinen Einzelgänger mehr, einen Mittelmenschen. In der Grube, auf der Flucht vor Stadteinwohnern, wird er sich aber dessen bewusst, dass sowohl seine Rolle als Kammermädchen als auch die Rückkehr in die Stadt ein „Experiment“ waren, „das die Fliege unternimmt, die auf den Leim gegangen ist“ (Fritsch 187): „Taube Golub in der Schlangengrube, flatternd auf den Leim gegangen […]. Wehe den Tauben, Fluch den Schlangen, die sich nicht häuten können, angeleimt an ihre Rolle.“ (Fritsch 186) Die Taube wird keine Schlange, sie entkommt ihr auch nicht, sondern erstarrt, von der Schlange hypnotisiert. Es ist gerade dieses Zusammenfallen von reflektierter Entscheidungsfreiheit und Lähmung, kritischem Bewusstsein und Handlungsdefizit, das das meiste rezeptive Unbehagen verursacht und Fragen nach dem Moment provoziert, in dem die Konzessionen eines Nonkonformisten um seines Nonkonformismus willen bereits in einen Konformismus umschlagen. Der Roman endet, wie eingangs geschildert, mit der Flucht Golubs vor der Aggression der Stadteinwohner in einen Keller, eine Grube unter seinem Fotoatelier. Ob er in diesem Versteck gefunden wird, ob er jemals aus ihm herauskommt, bleibt innerhalb der Diegese ungewiss. Ein symbolischer Schluss des Romans, der auch die Befreiung Felix’ aus der Grube bedeutet, wurde über vierzig Jahre später geschrieben: Am 21. Oktober 2009 beschloss der österreichische Nationalrat die Rehabilitation aller Opfer der Verfolgung durch die Wehrmachtsgerichte, am 24. Oktober 2014 wurde am Ballhausplatz in Wien das „Denkmal für die Verfolgten der NS -Militärjustiz“ enthüllt. Notes 1 Den Auftakt dazu bietet die bereits im November 1945 von Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch in Übereinstimmung mit mehreren Generälen verfasste Denkschrift für den Nürnberger Gerichtshof, in dem er das Credo der Generäle, sich von „der Politik fernzuhalten“, darlegt (Messerschmidt 531). 2 Margit Reiter schreibt dazu: „Wie kaum sonst vermengen sich hierbei familiäre mit öffentlichen Narrativen. […] In den Familien setzen sich die Narrative über die Unfreiwilligkeit des Kriegsdienstes, über die Schrecken des Krieges und die Gefallenen aus der Verwandtschaft fort. Die dabei trans- 410 Sławomir Piontek portierte Botschaft an die nächste Generation ist klar: Der Vater, Großvater, Onkel usw. war kein Täter, sondern Opfer des Krieges.“ (Reiter 67) 3 Golubs Grundsatz, „[eine] Wehrlose zu schlagen ist eine Gemeinheit“ (Fritsch 119), ist dagegen das auslösende Motiv seiner Hilfe für die polnische Zwangsarbeiterin Fela Pomorska. 4 Bezüglich dieser Thematik steht der österreichische Kriegsroman in einer starken Opposition zum deutschen: „Es kommen in allen Kriegsromanen aber nur eine Handvoll durchgeführter Desertionen vor.“ (Pfeifer 143). 5 Die Bestimmungsversuche dieser Zahl stoßen auf große methodologische Schwierigkeiten und führen zu heftigen Debatten (Ziemann 590—99). Nach neuerlichen Schätzungen beläuft sich die Zahl der Deserteure auf „kaum unter 300 000“ (Ziemann 596; vgl. auch Wüllner). In einer „Massengesellschaft von über 17 Millionen Soldaten aus vier Generationen“ (Förster 948), die die Wehrmacht bildete, wobei um 9 Mio. gleichzeitig im Einsatz waren, bedeutet diese Zahl - selbst wenn man sie in Kompanien mit Österreichern, die sich in ihren Einheiten isoliert fühlten, etwas höher ansetzt (Ziemann 612; Alfred M. Posselt schätzt die Gesamtzahl auf 130 000 Österreicher, Posselt 57) - einen unbeträchtlichen Prozentsatz. 6 Dies stellt Maria Fritsche in ihrer Forschung zum Problem der Deserteure in Österreich fest (Fritsche, „Über die niemand redet“ 16). 7 Ergebnisse dieses Forschungsprojekts liegen in dem Band von Walter Manoschek vor (Manoschek, „Opfer der NS-Militärjustiz“). Das Problem der Desertion gesondert bei Maria Fritsche (Fritsche, „Entziehungen“). 8 „Angesichts des totalen Gehorsamkeitsanspruches der Machthaber und der auf seine Verletzung drohenden Sanktionen muß jegliche Opposition im Dritten Reich als Widerstandshandlung gewertet werden - auch wenn es sich nur um einen vereinzelten Versuch handelt, ‚anständig zu bleiben‘.“ (Stadler 11). In der Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus definiert der Historiker Hermann Graml Widerstand als jeglichen Akt „aktiver Bekämpfung des Systems und seines Führers Adolf Hitler, von der Herstellung und dem Kleben regimefeindlicher Plakate bis zum versuchten Attentat und Staatsstreich […]“ (309). 9 Defätistische Äußerungen, Verbreiten von Gerüchten, Witzen bzw. Beleidigungen von führenden NS-Funktionären, Singen verbotener Lieder, Verweigerung von Spenden oder des Deutschen Grußes, Ablehnung der Normen und Ansprüche des NS-Systems durch bewusst anderes Verhalten usw. 10 Etwa 2700 Österreicher wurden als aktive Widerstandskämpfer zum Tod verurteilt und hingerichtet, und zirka 32.000 Österreicher (Widerstandskämpfer und Opfer präventiver Verfolgung) starben in Konzentrationslagern und Gefängnissen, insbesondere der Gestapo. Geschätzte 15.000 Österreicher Die Auseinandersetzung mit österreichischen Mythen vom Krieg und Nachkrieg 411 kamen als alliierte Soldaten, als Partisanen oder im europäischen Widerstand um. Rund 100.000 Österreicher waren aus politischen Gründen inhaftiert (Neugebauer; Luža; Ganglmair). Works Cited [ AG ]. „Wilde Streitigkeiten um Denkmal für Deserteure in Wien“. Kronen Zeitung [Wien] 07, March 2012. 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Inhalt 415 Autorenverzeichnis Katherine Arens Dept. of Germanic Studies 2505 University Avenue Burdine 336 University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78 712-1802 arens@austin.utexas.edu Jillian DeMair Independent Researcher Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literatures Harvard University 98 Palmer St. Arlington, MA 02 474 jdemair@gmail.com Renata Fuchs Dept. of Germanic Languages Royce Hall 311 University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90 095 Rfuchs2@ucla.edu Sławomir Piontek Institut für germanische Philologie Adam Mickiewicz Universität Al. Niepodleglosci 4 61-874 Poznan Poland spiontek@amu.edu.pl Sandra B. Straubhaar Dept. of Germanic Studies 2505 University Avenue Burdine 336 University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78 712-1802 sstraub@austin.utexas.edu Brian Tucker Modern Languages and Literatures Detchon Center 205 Wabash College Crawfordsville, IN 47 933 Tuckerb@wabash.edu Band 47 2014 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 47 B ria n Tu c ke r: T h e “ I nvi s ible M ove m e nt th at R ea din g I s ” : M eta p hor s of M otion in th e R ea din g D e b ate s a rou n d 1 8 8 0 Kath e rin e A re n s/ S a ndra B . S tra ubh a a r: E . T. A . H offm a n n ’ s Fa lu n : B alti c P rovid e n c e s a n d M a r ty rdo m s J illia n D e M air: U n s ettle d S oil a n d U n ce r tain S torie s in W ilh elm R a a b e ’ s S to pf ku c h e n R e n ata Fu c h s : “ E s wa r ein m al ein D or f, d a s h atte ein e n B r u n n e n u n d ein g rün e s M in a rett ” : Fair y Tale s a n d th e I m a g e of M u s lim Wo m e n in E min e S e vgi Öz d a m a r ’ s S tor y Colle c tion M utt e r z u n g e S ł awomir P iontek: “ F ür F ra n z J o s e p h K a rl H itle r ”. D ie A u s eina n d e r s et z u n g mit ö s te r rei c hi s c h e n M yth e n vo m K rie g u n d N a c hk rie g in G e r h a rd F rit s c h s Fa s c hin g periodicals.narr.de C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k