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ISSN 0010-1338 T h e m e n h eft: Im a gin a rie s of E a s te rn E urop e G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: B ra ngwe n S ton e , N ora G or t c h e va , a nd A n c a L u c a H old e n B ra ngwe n S ton e , N ora G or t c h e va , a nd A n c a L u c a H old e n: I ntrod u c tion: I m a gin a rie s of E a s te r n E u rop e A nita L uki c : R e con s tr u c tin g th e A nti- Fa s c i s t L e g a c y in A d ria n a A lta ra s ’ T ito s B rill e L a ura B ohn C a s e: Ton k a ’ s Voi c e : N a r rative Pe r s p e c tive a n d th e D e s ire for S ile n c e in R ob e r t M u s il ’ s E a rly N ovella A n c a L u c a H old e n: L a n g u a g e , C ultu ral I d e ntity, a n d th e Politi c s of M a rgin ali z ation in R i c h a rd Wa g n e r ’ s A u s re i s e a ntra g . B e g rüßu n g s g e ld B ra ngwe n S ton e: R efu g e e s Pa s t a n d P re s e nt: O lg a G rja s nowa ’ s G ott i s t ni c ht s c h ü c ht e r n a n d S a s h a M a ria n n a S al z m a n n ’ s A uße r s i c h N ora G or t c h e va: R e fl e xiv e U n m a p pin g : T h e “ W ild E a s t ” in Vale s k a G ri s e b a c h ’ s We s t e r n ( 2 0 1 7 ) narr.digital Band 51 Band 51 Heft 1 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) 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 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 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 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 1,3 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 1,3 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 132,00 (print)/ € 168,00 (print & online)/ € 138,00 (e-only) Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax (0 70 71) 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder joseph.oneil@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Joseph D. O’Neil, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2020 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Hans Vilmar Geppert Realismus und Moderne Erträge, Vergleiche, Perspektiven 2019, 224 Seiten €[D] 49,90 ISBN 978-3-7720-8689-2 e ISBN 978-3-7720-5689-5 Das Buch sammelt in übersichtlichen Thesen Erträge langjähriger vergleichender Forschung zum Europäischen Realismus und Naturalismus. Die beiden Epochen sind, wie viele Beispiele zeigen, ganz unterschiedlich strukturiert und eröffnen immer wieder verschiedene ‚realistische Wege zur Moderne‘. So lassen sich beispielsweise die ‚feinen Erzählfäden‘ finden, die Fontane mit dem Europäischen Naturalismus verbinden. Die Frage nach Vorwegnahmen der Moderne im realistischen Erzählen bildet den zweiten Schwerpunkt der hier gesammelten Aufsätze: Balzacs Comédie humaine erweist sich je nach Blickwinkel zugleich als beispielhaft realistisches und bereits modernes, ‚polyhistorisch‘ offenes Werk. Fontanes Kunst der ‚Leerstellen‘ weist wesentlich auf das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert voraus. Oft finden sich in der Literatur des Europäischen Realismus plötzliche, kurze, etwa symbolistische, impressionistische, ja expressionistische bis hin zu surrealistischen Passagen. Es gibt aber auch umfangreiche und bereits klare Erzählmuster für einen Weg zur Moderne: etwa das Umschlagen naturalistischer ‚Totalisierungen‘ in Abstraktion und ein kreativ ‚Unbekanntes‘, oder das ‚Chaos der Zeichen‘ bei Raabe und dessen verblüffende Ähnlichkeit zu vielen zeitgenössischen Autoren, oder die ‚Impulse der Innovation‘, die sich in den Erzählungen zerstörter Bilder bei Balzac, Keller, Henry James und anderen abzeichnen, und die dann im Bezug zur bildenden Kunst der Moderne überraschend deutliche Konturen gewinnen. LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT \ DEUTSCHE LITERATUR Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 4,6 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 4,6 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 BAND 51 • Heft 1 Themenheft: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe Gastherausgeber: Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden Inhalt Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille Anita Lukic � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11 Tonka’s Voice: Narrative Perspective and the Desire for Silence in Robert Musil’s Early Novella Laura Bohn Case � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization in Richard Wagner’s Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld Anca Luca Holden � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 41 Refugees Past and Present: Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich Brangwen Stone � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 57 Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) Nora Gortcheva � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 75 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93 Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden The University of Sydney/ Mount Holyoke College / University of Massachusetts, Amherst There exists a long history of immigrants, refugees, and ethnic Germans hailing from outside the German-speaking states who have significantly enriched and productively undermined a narrow understanding of German culture, thereby complicating the very definition of German identity. Eastern Europe in particular has consistently played a role as an imaginary through which the German-speaking world has reflected upon itself. The so-called “refugee crisis,” which reached its height in the late summer of 2015, has once again revived the relevance of Eastern Europe� In the German imagination, Eastern Europe functions both as a vague geographic location and a placeholder for European civilizational anxieties and ambitions, but Eastern Europe is also a continuing force in German cultural life through writers, intellectuals, and artists of Eastern European origin. At the peak of the “refugee crisis,” relations between Germany and a number of Eastern European nations became increasingly tense, as these saw Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration of welcome as leading to a further influx of refugees and bristled at her suggestion that each nation accept a quota of refugees� Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban was most outspoken in his criticism, arguing that Merkel’s Willkommenskultur had “encouraged terrorism and spread fear” (Paterson n. pag.). Since Orban’s 2016 comments, the arrival of refugees in Germany has slowed down due to the closure of the “Balkan route,” and a number of German-language writers of Eastern European background have engaged with the “refugee crisis,” reflecting on parallels between their own fates and those of the refugees arriving in Germany now. Herta Müller, for example, wrote a short piece for Bild entitled “Ich war auch ein Flüchtling,” evoking both those who fled from Nazi Germany and from Eastern European dictatorships� In the instance of Ilja Trojanow’s 2017 Nach der Flucht , and Wladimir Kaminer’s 2018 Ausgerechnet Deutschland: Geschichten unserer neuen Nachbarn , two well-known authors of Eastern European descent have reflected on flight and refugees in a non-fictional context. In Julya Rabinowich’s 2016 Dazwischen: Ich , and Olga Grjasnowa’s 2017 Gott ist nicht schüchtern flight is central, but the 4 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden “refugee crisis” has also made its way into a number of other texts by Eastern European authors in recent years. Thus in Saša Stanišić’s 2016 collection of short stories, Fallensteller , Syrian refugees appear in three different stories in a variety of locales ranging from Stockholm through the Norwegian-Russian border to East Germany. In Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s 2017 collection Der Nabel der Welt , a number of stories feature refugees, one for instance centering on a Romanian border guard who decides to let a Syrian refugee cross the border, even giving him his own shoes, and two stories contain hordes of refugees arriving in a wealthy holiday town (Rügen and St� Moritz) to the great consternation of the locals� Florescu, who is a Romanian-born award-winning Swiss author, also overtly makes a comparison between the current wave of refugees and the earlier arrival of migrants: “Das Phänomen ähnelt stark der großen Migration der Fünfziger und Sechziger Jahre aus dem armen europäischen Süden nach Nordeuropa” (Florescu 9). In her influential 2008 article on contemporary German, Swiss, and Austrian literature, Brigid Haines identified an “Eastern turn,” evoking Leslie Adelson’s earlier concept of a “Turkish turn” but also marking an expansion of the traditional migrant canon. In her article Haines discusses “the collective contribution of a new wave of writers from Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia,” who have resettled in German-speaking countries shortly before or since the fall of communism (136). Despite arguing that the literary works of the “Eastern turn” resist “containment and collective treatment while overlapping and intersecting with other kinds of contemporary German-language literature,” Haines outlines five characteristics she contends they share (137—38). These are: (1) a content, focusing on the period from the end of World War II to the fall of communism in 1989 and its aftermath; (2) an autobiographical perspective that accounts experiences and memories of life in the Eastern Bloc under and after the influence of the Soviet regime; (3) a tendency to focus on enlightening and informing Western readers about their Eastern neighbors; (4) successful marketability due “to the perceived exoticism of foreign location in general and to depictions of the newly accessible east in a vastly expanded EU in particular”; and (5) an “accessible prose with a strong element of storytelling” (138—39). Nine articles (including an interview with Herta Müller and her translator Philip Boehm) published in a 2015 special issue of German Life and Letters (“The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature,” eds. Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden) further engage with Haines’s idea of the “Eastern turn” in contemporary German-language literature by offering indepth discussions and analyses of works from post-“Wende” German-speaking countries and post-communist Europe� Authors discussed in the nine essays include Irena Brezna, Terézia Mora, Marica Bodrozic, Ilma Rakusa, Zsuza Bank, Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 5 Melinda Abonji, Eleonora Hummel, Ludwig Laher, Kurt Drawert, Lutz Seiler, and Jan Faktor. Immigration, the relationship between language(s), cold war divisions and identity, journeys eastwards, and the impact of the rise and collapse of political regimes on the development and shifts of memories are major themes tackled in the volume, arguing that the “Eastern turn” is both a subset and a development in German-language literature as a whole (Haines, “Introduction” 145). The articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica result from a series of panels titled “German Imaginaries of Eastern Europe” at the 2017 conference of the German Studies Association in Atlanta. The findings presented in this special issue support Haines’s observation that the works of German-language writers of Eastern European descent “resist containment within historical, national or linguistic categories” (“Introduction” 146), yet they also show that the writing of such authors need not necessarily focus on the communist period in the Eastern Bloc, be autobiographical, or be intended to educate Western readers about their Eastern neighbors. Furthermore, the articles reflect on trends in the writing of the “Eastern turn” that have undoubtedly become stronger since the publication of the German Life and Letters special issue and were not originally discussed by Haines� One such development is the rise in writing by German-Jewish authors of Eastern European origin. Noting Haines’s concept of the “Eastern turn,” Maria Roca Lizarazu argues that “German-Jewish literature in particular has seen a surge in voices from Eastern Europe (Alina Bronsky, Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa, Vladimir Kaminer and Vladmir Vertlib, for example)” (Lizarazu 169). This increase of German-Jewish voices of Eastern European origin is indicative of a broader shift in Germany’s Jewish communities as a result of an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union as Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees). Between the early 1990s and 2005, when new restrictions were introduced, approximately 200,000 Kontingentflüchtlinge arrived in Germany (Weiss and Gorelik). While many of these refugees were not practicing Jews, they explicitly identified as Jewish; in fact, this was a prerequisite for being granted refugee status in Germany (Mueller and Garloff 3). This wave of immigration reshaped and revived the Jewish community in Germany, and as of 2017 more than 90 percent of members of Jewish communities in Germany now stem from the former Soviet Union (Belkin n. pag.). A number of scholars have noted that the work of these authors (to which one can add others not mentioned by Lizarazu such as Katja Petrowskaja and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, for example) does not focus on the Holocaust to the same extent as earlier German-Jewish writing. Lizarazu argues that Jewish authors of Eastern European origin have shifted their focus to “the issues surrounding transnational Jewish identities in modern-day Germany” (Lizarazu 169), and Stuart Taberner similarly suggests 6 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden that they center on “the often harsh reality of immigration to Germany” (Taberner 919)� Yet a number of these novels also center on life in the Soviet era, thus leading Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff to posit that more recent traumatic events such as the Stalin era, Soviet anti-Semitism, and the interethnic conflicts following the collapse of several Eastern European states “are more immediate historical reference than the Holocaust” for Jewish authors from the former Soviet Union (7—8). In her contribution to this special issue, Anita Lukic discusses the 2011 autofiction Titos Brille by the German-Jewish author Adriana Altaras (who fled Yugoslavia as a small child in the 1960s) as a model of the dialogic production of memory that could ground a postnational understanding of Europe� Lukic analyzes Altaras’s novel against the national narratives of the newly formed states after the Balkan civil wars of the 1990, which tend to refute the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity and justify the inevitability of the wars� Lukic responds to Haines’s claims about the collective contribution of contemporary writers from Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia in detail, arguing that such works do not fit Haines’s parameters for literature of the “Eastern turn.” Noting that Haines acknowledges Yugoslavia’s special political status as a non-member of the Warsaw Pact, Lukic contends that texts by writers from the defunct state are outliers within the “Eastern turn” due to this special status. In addition, because of their content they neither fit within the general thematic concerns of the “Eastern turn” nor do they share “the common mission to enlighten and inform Western readers about their eastern neighbors,” as Westerners could and did visit Yugoslavia (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138). Lukic suggests that while some authors from the former Yugoslavia continue to play into readers’ appetite for cultural clichés, particularly through a focus on the Balkan wars, Altaras’s novel defies these expectations. Instead, Titos Brille establishes a dialogical relationship between writer and readers where the latter are addressed as interlocutors and not as cultural consumers� Lukic’s close reading draws on David Herman’s “contextual anchoring” in which the readers actively search for analogies between the text and the real world. Analyzing Altaras’s innovative use of the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, Lukic shows that Altaras inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia and reintroduces anti-fascist resistance into discussions about postnational memory in the European context. Lukic further evinces that the second-person address in Titos Brille implicates the readers directly in a reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy� Laura Bohn Case’s contribution to this special issue focuses on an earlier era of German engagement with Eastern Europe, analyzing Robert Musil’s 1924 intimate autobiographical novella “Tonka.” In “Tonka” an unnamed protagonist Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 7 remembers his dead lover Tonka who died from a sexually transmitted disease a few days after giving birth to their stillborn son. Case suggests that the narrator’s desire for Tonka’s silence is central to the novella, situating the novella within linguistic history to develop her argument that the restriction of Tonka’s language mirrors an increasingly monolingual identity, which she contends was replacing the previous possibility of multilingual identities within the late Austrian Empire� Case reads Tonka’s silence through the lens of psycho-narration, contending that in “Tonka” it undermines the primacy of speech and enables Tonka to communicate despite the narrator’s desire for her silence. Through the novella’s criticism of speech and Musil’s complex use of psycho-narration, Case suggests that Tonka’s identity can be understood beyond the silence desired by her lover - not least because of her Czech bilingualism� Case concludes by arguing that the novella attributes Tonka’s death to the narrator’s inability to understand and accept her as an equal interlocutor, and suggests that the death of Tonka reveals Musil’s mourning for a lost multilingual German identity, which is, as she notes, uniquely Habsburgian. In her article, Anca Luca Holden discusses the two-part volume Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld (1991) by Banat-born German-Romanian writer Richard Wagner, tackling the issue of German identity and marginalization in Ceauşescu’s Romania and in West Germany of the 1980s� Holden observes that the volume exposes parallel practices of marginalizing German-Romanians in both countries but also notes major differences. She argues that in the first part of the volume, “Ausreiseantrag,” which takes place in Romania, “German-Romanian cultural identity becomes fragmented to the point of being almost annihilated.” In the second part, “Begrüßungsgeld,” characters are similarly challenged to defend their “Germanness,” this time in West Germany. This comes as a shock since the characters’ conceptualization of “Germany” is not a territorial state but a “Kulturnation” - an imaginary cultural space that includes parts of Eastern Europe which they, as ethnic Germans from Romania, felt that they were part of. However, despite their efforts to prove their “Germanness,” Wagner’s characters continue to be perceived as foreigners and outsiders by the locals� Holden concludes that they nevertheless successfully come to terms with and combine Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German legacies. Significantly, formal and stylistic devices in Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld capture the traumatizing effects of private and public alienation in the struggle for a distinct identity. Holden’s analysis effectively demonstrates how language itself becomes a thematic preoccupation in the text and a key site of negotiation. From linguistic contamination by totalitarian slogans and total paralysis in “Ausreiseantrag” to a split in narrative voices, attempts to imitate West German expressions, and eventual multi-lingual empowerment in “Begrüßungsgeld,” language most 8 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden saliently captures the inner crisis and its overcoming by the German-Romanian main character� Importantly, language also serves as a shelter in the protagonist’s perpetual state of in-betweenness, offering a complex, indeed hybrid, vision of German identity� Writing about two recent novels by former Kontingentflüchtlinge from the Soviet Union, Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich (2017) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) , Brangwen Stone draws a much-needed parallel between German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish experiences and present-day suffering of Syrian refugees and transgender people� Importantly, Stone applies Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” (which suggests that instead of understanding cultural memory as competitive and fearing that memory of one historical event may eclipse memory of another, representations of different traumatic histories can coexist, even across substantially different time periods, negotiating, cross-referencing and borrowing from each other) and details how both novels relate discrimination in the past to present violence against different marginalized groups. In her analysis of Salzmann’s Außer Sich, Stone reveals notable similarities between Soviet anti-Semitism and aggression against transgender people today� In contrast, Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern, Stone argues, relates the experience of Syrian refugees to victims of Nazi persecution� Critically, such analogies establish what Rothberg has called “complex acts of solidarity” aiming to evoke empathy for the marginalized. Considering Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, Stone compellingly shows that such affective work not only gives voice to but, most importantly, renders “human” the experience of refugees and transgender people� In the final article in this special issue, Nora Gortcheva expands the consideration of German imaginaries of Eastern Europe to the medium of film by exploring Berlin school director Valeska Grisebach’s 2017 film Western � She suggests that Grisebach departs from German clichés about Eastern Europe to propose a different take on the region through what Gortcheva describes as reflexive unmapping � Inspired by the genre of the Western, as the title indicates, Grisebach’s Western is set in a Bulgarian village near the Greek border and focuses on the interaction between German construction workers and the locals as the Germans prepare to build a hydroelectric power plant. After canvassing the historical conception of the “Wild East,” with special attention given to the period following the fall of the Iron Curtain that Grisebach has explicitly referred to in interviews, Gortcheva suggests that it is imaginaries of the present that are more resonant for the film and analyses contemporary iterations of such imaginaries including those of Eastern barbarity and Eastern Europe as an orientalized frontier during the so-called “refugee crisis.” Gortcheva’s ap- Introduction: Imaginaries of Eastern Europe 9 proach draws on Yuliya Komska’s notion of unmapping which challenges the “cartographic mandate” of this imaginary of Eastern Europe, an imaginary that conceptualizes Eastern Europe as in-between, periphery, or bridge and thus limits narratives about and scholarly approaches to Eastern Europe� Noting that Komska criticizes the way in which notions of betweenness and contiguity are central to mapping, Gortcheva suggests that reimagining the “Wild East” would involve unmapping and searching for discontiguities. Through a series of close readings, Gortcheva proposes that Western undertakes a process of reflexive unmapping , unmaking borders in filmic content, form, and style. Together, the five contributions to this special issue consider how relationships between the German-speaking world and Eastern Europe are depicted in cultural productions of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The works explored here range from novella, to novel, to autofiction and fiction film, but they all reflect how Eastern Europe is imagined and remembered. The way in which German-language authors and filmmakers - both with and without Eastern European ancestry - imagine, remember, map, and unmap Eastern Europe continues to shift. No doubt world events, such as the current “refugee crisis,” for instance, will continue to inflect future imaginaries of the East both due to their impact on Germany itself and on Germany’s relationships with its Eastern neighbours� Works Cited Belkin, Dmitrij� Jüdische Kontingentflüchtling und Russlanddeutsche � Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2017. Florescu, Cătălin Dorian. Der Nabel der Welt. Munich: C�H� Beck, 2017� Haines, Brigid. “The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 16.2 (2008): 135—49. —. “Introduction.” The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature. Ed� Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden� Spec� issue of German Life and Letters LXVIII.2 (2015): 145—53. Lizarazu, Maria Roca. “The Family Tree, the Web, and the Palimpsest: Figures of Postmemory in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014).” The Modern Language Review 113.1 (2018): 168—89. Mueller, Agnes, and Katja Garloff. “Interview with Olga Grjasnowa.” German Jewish Literature after 1990 . Ed. Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 223—28. Paterson, Tony. “Refugee Crisis: Eastern Europe Opposes Angela Merkel’s Policy on Asylum Seekers.” The Independent 16 Feb. 2016. Web. 20 Jan. 2018. 10 Brangwen Stone, Nora Gortcheva, and Anca Luca Holden Taberner, Stuart. “The Possibilities and Pitfalls of a Jewish Cosmopolitanism: Reading Natan Sznaider through Russian-Jewish Writer Olga Grjasnowa’s German-language Novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees).” European Review of History: Revue européen d’histoire 23.5-6 (2016): 912—30. Weiss, Yfaat, and Lena Gorelik. “Die russisch-jüdische Zuwanderung.” Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart � Ed� Michael Brenner� Munich: C�H� Beck, 2012. 379—418.- Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille Anita Lukic University of Pittsburgh Abstract: Adriana Altaras’ autobiographical novel Titos Brille productively challenges the category of the “Eastern turn,” first introduced and formulated by Brigid Haines. Unlike other writers from the former Yugoslavia, who mostly focus on the civil wars of the 1990s, Altaras engages readers through the strategy of double deixis in contextual anchoring. The figure of the dybbuk , which alternately appears as her deceased mother and father, addresses readers in the second person as interlocutors and thereby implicates them in the preservation of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy. In the context of Western European debates about post-national memory, she inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia. The reconstruction of anti-fascist and post-national memory opens up a path for southern Slavs to participate in European integration and post-war reconciliation� Keywords: Yugo-nostalgia, Titos Brille , Adriana Altaras, dybbuk , postnational memory Among the new trends in contemporary German-language literature at the turn of the twenty-first century, Brigid Haines identifies the so-called “Eastern turn,” echoing Leslie Adelson’s earlier “Turkish turn,” but also signaling an expansion of the traditional migrant canon� In this category she includes all literary works published by authors from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia since 2000. In her essay, “The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature,” from 2008, the same year that the Bosnian Saša Stanišić won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, she names five general traits that characterize these works. The first common feature that they share is their content, which spans the period from World War II to the end of the Cold War and its 12 Anita Lukic aftermath. Second, Haines describes their point of view as autobiographical, although the ‘I’ often speaks in the voice of the ‘we.’ Third, the authors intend to inform Western readers about daily life under communism� Marketability, which depends on the interest of Western readers in the perceived exoticism of Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia, is the fourth commonality among these literary works� Finally, Haines considers their narration as more realistic than postmodern and thus characteristic of the so-called “new readability” mode of narration (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138—39). Although such generalizations delineate the “Eastern turn” as a distinct trend within contemporary literature, they also obscure important differences among the authors and their works� Haines is sensitive to this issue when she writes: There are of course exceptions to all these generalisations. Not all prioritise accessibility: Zsuzsanna Gahse, Mora, Müller and Stanišić, for example […] have received critical acclaim for their postmodern, writerly prose […]. Not all write autobiographically inspired fiction or are comfortable with the role of cultural ambassador […]. And even those who do draw on their personal experience tend to find, like all migrant writers, that the urge to do so lessens with time� (139) While Haines allows for deviations in point of view, marketability, and narration (or the second, fourth, and fifth traits, respectively), the content and authorial intent remain more or less constant across the various literary works of the “Eastern turn.” Such claims of uniformity, however, are problematic for writers from the former Yugoslavia� In this article, I will demonstrate that Adriana Altaras’ autofiction Titos Brille productively-challenges Haines’s claims about the content of the works by “Eastern turn” writers. Altaras addresses historical and ideological narratives that have been repressed by the post-Yugoslav states through concrete memories of Yugoslavia. However, what makes- her autobiographical novel especially noteworthy is that it- provides a model of the dialogic production of memory- that could ground a postnational understanding of Europe. I will unfold my argument in four steps� First, I shall discuss Haines’s notion of the “Eastern turn” in more detail and argue that Yugoslavia’s history makes it a difficult fit for her categories. Then,-I will summarize Altaras’ novel, especially the scenes in which her deceased parents appear to her as dybbuks , followed by a narratological discussion of her use of the second-person address. Finally,- I will briefly-relate the content of the parents’ memories to the phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia and conclude by situating my reading of Titos Brille in current debates about post-national memory in Europe� Yugoslavia is unique among other communist countries of the Cold War era because it was not part of the Eastern Bloc. Stalin expelled the Communist Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 13 Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1948, which consequently allowed the country to develop better diplomatic and economic relationships with the United States and Western Europe. 1 More importantly, Yugoslavia could keep its borders open to both foreigners and natives, while other Eastern European countries had to close off theirs to prevent their citizens from leaving� 2 Haines acknowledges Yugoslavia for both its openness and special political status when she excludes the country from her definition of Eastern Europe: I use the Cold-War term “eastern Europe” deliberately to emphasise that for more than forty years these diverse countries, from the semi-Balkan Romania to the east-central-European Hungary to the northern European Poland, shared a common history� Yugoslavia, although geographically in eastern Europe, was not part of the Warsaw Pact but was in the Non-Aligned Movement. (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 136) Haines calls attention to the political difference between Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia due to the latter’s exclusion from the Warsaw Pact by referring to the geographic region called Eastern Europe as “eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia” (135, 142). Such terminological qualifications and differentiations are not the only factors that make writers from the former Yugoslavia outliers within the “Eastern turn.” The focus on the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s tends to erase, however, the unique political status that Yugoslavia gained during the Cold War and to rewrite its socialist past as an inevitable development towards nationalist dissolution. The danger of such a narrow historical view is evident in Haines’s reading of Saša Stanišić’ novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006). In an attempt to refute critics who have faulted the novel for recycling old clichés about the Balkan country, 3 Haines argues that they are actually “carefully crafted to show that the hatred of the other that emerged with frightening speed at this period came from tensions that had always been present” (“Saša Stanišić” 108). The explanation that Yugoslavia was an artificial country awaiting to implode is based on both new and old stereotypes� Scholars like Maria Todorova and Milica Bakić-Hayden show that the Slavs in the Western imagination always appear violent and backward looking for their readiness to take revenge for old grievances (Todorova 14; Bakić-Hayden 918). More recently, these images have served nationalists in justifying the wars among the different ethnicities in the 1990s (Woodward 21). While Haines’s reading of Stanišić’s novel is problematic for substituting one set of clichés for another, it also demonstrates how the content of writers from the former Yugoslavia is limited to the wars of the 1990s� This is the second factor that distinguishes them from the Eastern European novelists who may reflect in their works on the different temporalities of their 14 Anita Lukic countries: the everyday life of socialism, the transition after the collapse of communism, and the future of Post-Cold War Europe� These differences in content challenge Haines’s third characterization of the “Eastern turn,” which describes the relationship between the readers and the authors. Haines attributes the surge of publications by writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the twenty-first century to the curiosity of their readers: [T]hese texts tend to have a common mission to enlighten and inform Western readers about their eastern neighbors, whether it be to remember the “perfectly ordinary lives” […] lived under communism, or to bear witness to politically caused suffering. Writing in German, a choice for pragmatic reasons - to reach a wider, wealthier audience - or political - some of these writers are simply more confident in their second language - also shapes content in the direction of information giving, as the German-speaking readership cannot be relied upon to have the same store of cultural knowledge as the diverse political readership in their home countries. These aims mingle also with a pragmatic wish to exploit the interest in the lost time and spaces of the communist east. (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138) The assumption that Western readers are curious about the lives of their Eastern neighbors is again problematic in the case of Yugoslavia, whose borders, as noted earlier, remained open to foreign visitors during the Cold War period� In order to profit, nevertheless, from these readers, South Slavic writers might be forced to focus on the wars of the 1990s, which, in the history of socialist Yugoslavia, were the events that needed perhaps the most explaining. However, by playing to the readers’ expectations, writers from the former Yugoslavia not only reintroduce stereotypes through balkanization, but they also perpetuate the divide between Western Europeans and South Slavs. There is “no touching,” to return to Leslie Adelson’s “Turkish turn,” between the readers and the writers, only the consumption of more clichés ( Turkish Turn 20)� Adriana Altaras’ literary debut Titos Brille illustrates the relationship that could emerge between the readers and the writers of the “Eastern turn” when the former are addressed not as cultural consumers but interlocutors� 4 As in the case of other writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia, Altaras’ biography significantly affects the thematic content of her work. She was born in 1960 in the former Yugoslavia to German-speaking Jews. During the Second World War, her parents fought against the Nazis and their various collaborators (the Italians, the Croatian Ustaša) alongside the Yugoslav partisans, and became active members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In 1964, the family left Yugoslavia because of an impending trial against her father that was merely a manifestation of underlying but never officially acknowledged anti-Semitism. Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 15 Altaras’ novel stands out from other works by writers from the former Yugoslavia, for example Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Tauben fliegen auf and Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert , for two reasons� First, the wars of the 1990s are not the central focus of her biography� Instead, she traces her ancestors’ and family’s journey from Habsburg Vienna to Zagreb and Split, and finally to Gießen and Berlin, and focuses on the fighting that took place during World War II. The second difference is Altaras’ use of the second-person voice, which occurs whenever her deceased parents address her� However, by employing “ du ” (“you”), Altaras addresses readers directly and thus performs what the narratologist David Herman describes as “contextual anchoring,” which is the readers’ search for analogies between the text and the real world (Herman 331). On this understanding, the readers are not passive but active participants in the reading experience. Altaras’ practice of “contextual anchoring” is symptomatic of a certain strain of Yugo-nostalgia because it takes place when the readers are addressed by the pronoun “you” in passages in which the deceased parents speak of their partisan resistance to fascism� The phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia is a contentious topic among scholars. Zala Volčič, for example, argues that focusing on Yugoslavia’s resistance to fascism during World War II poses a danger to a politics of reconciliation in the post-Yugoslav states. Those who are looking to the 1940s are not taking responsibility for the war crimes committed in the 1990s (“Yugo-Nostalgia” 34). In contrast, Tanja Petrović, among others, contends that remembering Yugoslavia’s socialist past can have a liberating and empowering effect (and affect) on those who feel disenfranchised in the new arena of European politics: the fight against fascism and the resistance to the pressures from both the Soviet Union and the United States should remind former Yugoslavs of their power to self-determination (Petrović 200). Altaras’ work, I would argue, is Yugo-nostalgic in the second manner: its second-person narrative address reminds the readers of the unfinished task of resisting fascism. Altaras’ autofiction weaves together several life stories into a hodgepodge that transcends space and time� First, there is the author’s own biography� Altaras, who was born in Zagreb, was sent to live with her aunt in Italy when she was four years old. She reunited with her parents three years later in Gießen, but the reunion was short-lived, because she immediately went off to a boarding school in Marburg ( Titos Brille 122—23). While readers follow Altaras as she juggles her work at home and at the theater in Berlin in the present day, they also encounter her parents and their life stories. Her father Jakob and mother Thea met for the first time in 1936 in Zagreb and were first separated during World War II, then when he married another woman (for political reasons), and, finally, when each was in exile, he in Zürich, and she in Konstanz (11—34). 16 Anita Lukic Another prominent figure in Altaras’ life is her aunt Jelka, whose life story follows its own unique trajectory. After the liberation of the concentration camp on the Croatian island of Rab, Jelka fled to Mantua with an Italian soldier who had saved her life (113—35). Jelka’s decision to stay in Italy is both an expression of gratitude towards her husband as well as her critical stance against the communist government in Yugoslavia. There are other relatives, in Israel and the United States, but they remain marginal figures. The primary focus is on Altaras’ life in Berlin and her parents’ lives in Yugoslavia before, during, and after World War II. While Altaras narrates her own life story with the confidence of an omniscient narrator, she lets her parents and aunt speak for themselves� These various voices are not just a reflection of a postmodern narrative mode, but rather, and more importantly, an expression of Altaras’ particular identity. In the prolog to Titos Brille , Altaras confesses to her readers that she is “Jüdin,” before also revealing that she was born in “Titos Jugoslawien,” that she was “Vollwaise,” and that she hates “Geheimnisse” (6—8). Altaras’ first-person account of her daily life in Berlin is often interrupted by the appearance of her deceased parents. Their voices are italicized in the text and often occur at night, either waking Altaras up or preventing her from falling asleep. After one such occurrence - the mother has just described her father’s funeral in Zagreb - Altaras finally identifies these voices as belonging to dybbuks . Quoting a passage from a Jewish lexicon, she declares: “Ich bin stolze Besitzerin mehrerer Dibbuks, ruheloser Toter, die mir Gesellschaft leisten, nicht erst, seitdem mein Vater tot ist, nein, eigentlich schon immer” (47). By identifying her dead parents as dybbuks , Altaras invokes a figure from Jewish folklore that has also recently appeared in Jewish women’s fiction. 5 This reference, however, raises more questions than Altaras’ lexicon definition answers: Why are her deceased parents restless? Why was she always in the company of dybbuks ? The Jewish history scholar J.H. Chajes traces the emergence of the dybbuk figure through various religious and cultural traditions to the sixteenth-century rabbi Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, who explains that, souls of the evil dead [ dybbuks ] impregnate bodies of the living because they are unable to enter Gehinnom. Gehinnom, the Jewish precursor-analogue to the Christian purgatory or the Islamic barzakh , was the refinery for a “polluted” soul. There, after death, it could be purged of the dross accumulated over a lifetime of sin before taking its place in the World to Come. The duration of this cleansing was fixed at twelve months according to the rabbinic tradition� Without access to Gehinnom, the most the tormented soul could accomplish was a temporary respite from the afflictions associated with its endless limbo state, a respite provided by the shelter of another’s body� (Chajes 22) Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 17 Vital’s explanation for why dybbuks enter the bodies of the living expands Altaras’ definition considerably. While Altaras simply describes her dybbuks as “ruhelose Tote,” Vital in this passage associates them with nostalgia in its original meaning. The word nostalgia first appears in 1688 in a medical thesis by Johannes Hofer, who wanted to finally name the disease that was infecting his contemporaries. Nostalgia is, Hofer writes, “Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nostos , return to the native land; the other, Algos , signifies suffering or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land” (381). At the root of this new disease called nostalgia is homelessness� Hofer describes in his study men and women who have left their home and now feel nostalgia because they cannot return to it (382—83). Dybbuks in Vital’s account, as quoted above, are also nostalgic because they are thrice displaced: they cannot return to their earthly bodies; they cannot enter purgatory for purification; and they cannot find final rest in heaven� In this state of dislocation, they may only achieve temporary refuge when they enter a living person. While Vital specifies that only evil souls become homeless, Altaras suggests that the cause of her parents’ homelessness is the actual loss of their home. They had to leave Yugoslavia in the 1960s because of institutional anti-Semitism, but their dybbuks, unfettered by space and time, continuously return to the familiar scenes of their former homeland� The opening lines of the first chapter in Titos Brille , “mein vater, der held [sic],” reveal that Adriana’s father still thinks about Yugoslavia even after his death: “Wir haben gesungen! Gelacht! - Split! Das war eine Perle an der Adria! Die Dalmatier? Wie Italiener! Laut, fröhlich und vor allem keine Antisemiten. Man hat uns geholfen auszureisen, hat uns versteckt, und wir sind gemeinsam in die Berge. Als Kämpfer! ” (11). The exclamation marks underline the father’s positive memories of his life on the Croatian coast, due in no small part to the fact that he had not yet experienced anti-Semitism. Mixed into this first memory of home is also pride in fighting, not merely hiding. 6 “Ich war Arzt,” explains the father’s dybbuk , [a]ls Jude durfte ich im Krankenhaus nicht mehr arbeiten. Bei den Partisanen natürlich schon. […] Und ich habe Titos Brille repariert! Marshall Titos Brille. Aber das ist nicht alles! Ich habe gekämpft, im Wald geschlafen, wie ein Bär, und ich habe 40 jüdische Kinder gerettet und nach Nonantola gebracht (12) The father’s heroic actions fighting alongside the partisans and saving forty Jewish children become the most important markers of his identity. Throughout her novel, Altaras refers to her father as a partisan (25, 28, 60) and even identifies herself as a “Partisanentochter” (228). Her mother had also joined the partisans 18 Anita Lukic after she was liberated from the concentration camp on the island of Rab, but her relationship to Yugoslavia is more complicated� In the chapter appropriately titled “heimweh [sic],” Altaras contrasts her parents’ different experiences of nostalgia: “Im Gegensatz zu meinem Vater sprach sie nie von Jugoslawien. Sie sprach von ‘den Kroaten’ und ‘den Serben’ und zwei, drei Freunden� Das war’s� Nie vom Land, den Gerüchen, den Leuten, dem Meer. Den Toten. Sie doch nicht. Sie hatte kein Heimweh ” (107). The mother’s verbal breakdown of Yugoslavia into Croats and Serbs - the addition of Bosnians would have made this list complete - undermines the country’s ideology of brotherhood, unity, and multiethnic foundation� 7 The refusal to acknowledge Yugoslavia often goes hand in hand with the forced forgetting of everyday experiences that were outside the purview of politics� Altaras does not suggest that her mother actually subscribes to this post-war nationalistic trend� On the contrary, appearing as her mother’s psychoanalyst, she interprets her mother’s resistance as a repression of precisely the homesickness that she claims she does not have. “Ich habe mich geirrt,” Altaras admits, “[s]ie hatte schreckliches Heimweh. Sie fuhr durch Hessen, als sei es der Balkan. Und sie suchte nach den verlorenen Menschen, nach dem verlorenen Leben, als sei sie wieder zur Sommerfrische auf dem Land, bei ihrer Tante Alma und ihrem geliebten Onkel Marco” (107). While her mother’s dybbuk does not remember any heroic partisan actions like her father’s dybbuk , her mother still shows readers the lost life - “dem verlorenen Leben” - through narratives about her childhood and adolescence in Zagreb (67—69). The most striking narrative feature of the dybbuks is their use of second-person address, which underscores the dialogic form of Altaras’ work� In many instances, the “you” is directed at Altaras by her parents when they speak to her. For example, when the father’s dybbuk explains his decision to leave Yugoslavia, he addresses Altaras directly by her first name: “Weißt du , Adriana , mit den immergleichen Anklagen - Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus - waren die Juden doch die Ersten, die aus der Partei herausgefiltert wurden. Ich war weiß Gott nicht der Einzige! ” (25; my italics). Similarly, the mother’s dybbuk interrupts Altaras through direct address while the latter is reading, “ Adriana , was liest du da,” before proceeding to describe the family villa in Zagreb (67; my italics). In both examples the deictic reference is contextualized by direct reference to the narrator. Elsewhere, the references to the “you” reach beyond the fictional world to address readers directly, even when they are still framed as conversations between the narrator and her deceased parents. In one such example, Altaras provides the following setup for a conversation with her father’s dybbuk : “Mitten in der Nacht steige ich ins Auto und fahre nach Gießen. Es ist eine merkwürdige Fahrt, die Reise zu einem Toten, zum toten Vater� Ich bin Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 19 unnatürlich wach, unterhalte mich mit ihm. Und irgendwie antwortet er. Das ist tröstlich” (15). What follows this matter-of-fact description is a joke set in italics: Kennst du den Partisanenwitz mit den Bären? Ein Mann hat einen Bären an der Leine. “30 Dinar für den Bären! 30 Dinar! ”, schreit er auf dem Marktplatz. “Schön”, sagt ein Passant. “Aber wofür? Was kann der Bär? Kann er tanzen? ” “Nein.” “Aha. Kann er auf einem Bein stehen? ” “Nein! ” “Was kann er dann? ” “Nichts, aber er war im Wald! ” (15) Through the setup and typeface readers may infer that the father’s dybbuk tells Altaras this joke, which plays on the metaphor that partisans lived in the woods like bears when they were hiding from the Nazis� Although the meaning of the joke might be lost on readers who are not familiar with this cultural reference, the dialogic form of the joke still positions them as interlocutors� In another instance, Altaras organizes her father’s first visit to Yugoslavia since leaving the country in 1964: “Und so standen wir eines Tages im Juni an der Promenade in Split� Er schnappte sich einen Enkel und lief los� Traumwandlerisch bewegte sich dieser alte Mann durch die Gassen der Altstadt� Keine Abkürzung, kein Versteck hatte er vergessen, er war Kind und Greis in einem” (141)� At this point Altaras’ narration is interrupted by her father’s dybbuk , whose speech is again set in italics: Hier an dem mittleren Fenster haben wir gesessen, auf dem Peristil-Platz haben sie im Sommer alle großen Opern gespielt. Die gesamte Riege italienischer Tenöre hat hier gesungen! Mario del Monaco? Mein Freund! Merkst du, wie es hier stinkt? Drunter ist Schwefel! Das mögen die Fliegen nicht, deshalb ist unsere Fischhalle die einzige auf der Welt ohne Fliegen und Mücken! Sagenhaft! (142) The father’s dybbuk describes the familiar scenes of his childhood in the Croatian coastal town of Split, even calling attention to the smell of sulfur. Through the second-person address in the second paragraph, he directs his interlocutor to a sensory experience that is tied to a particular place in Split. While the “du” is probably directed at Altaras, it must have been initially addressed to one of his grandsons, who was the occasion for this outburst of deictic references (the word “hier” occurs three times). Syntactically, therefore, Altaras is in the same position as her readers, who are only now being asked to pay attention to the smell of sulfur. Here, as in the previous example, the dybbuk ’s second-person address positions both Altaras and her readers simultaneously as listeners� 20 Anita Lukic David Herman fittingly calls this form of double address “double deixis” because the single pronoun “you” may refer to a character in the fictional world or a reader in the actual world (Herman 352). “Doubly deictic you ,” he explains, “ambiguates virtualized and actualized discourse referents, or rather superimposes the deictic roles of non-participants and participants in the discourse, thus reweighing both terms in the text-context relation itself” (352). The destabilization that occurs between the fictional and extra-fictional world (or text and context in Herman’s terms) due to the intercutting of double deixis is part of the process that Herman calls “contextual anchoring,” “whereby a narrative, in more or less explicit and reflexive way, asks its interpreters to search for analogies between the representations contained” both in the story world and the real world (331). Through the doubly deictic “you,” in which the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist overlaps with an address to the actual readers, the text determines in part how it wants to be read. In the case of Altaras’ Titos Brille , the text directs readers to take the position of interlocutors through the dialogic form of her dybbuks ’ address. The particular interpretive framework through which readers are supposed to engage with the text is provided by Altaras’ experience as interviewer for the Shoah-Foundation� As part of her training to conduct interviews with Holocaust survivors, Altaras received the following guidelines, which she cites in quotation marks: Auf dem Weg zu den Interviews schiebt alles beiseite� Nichts ist mehr wichtig, was euch, euren Alltag betrifft, es geht nur noch um die Person, die gefragt und gefilmt wird. Lasst euch Zeit. Lasst sie reden. Überprüft, was sie beim Vorinterview gesagt haben, was jetzt� Sie werden Dinge vergessen, bewusst auslassen� Wenn sie Zeiten, Orte verwechseln oder sie durcheinanderbringen, hakt nach, behutsam, eventuell auch mehrfach. Aber wenn sie nicht wollen oder können, lasst sie in Ruhe. Es sind ihre Erinnerungen, auch wenn sie “ungenau” sind. ( Titos Brille 237) By directly quoting the instructions that the Shoah-Foundation developed for the interviewers, Altaras once again addresses her readers in the second person, only this time in the plural and as a collective, in which she includes herself� Throughout Titos Brille , readers have the occasion to engage with the text in the same way that Altaras engaged with her interviewees� When her dybbuks address themselves through the doubly deictic “you,” they do so in breaks requiring readers to take the time to hear their story. Her father’s dybbuk describes how he saved forty Jewish children over the span of five pages because he speaks at intervals, although the text encompassing the story could fit on two pages (11—16). Altaras also interlaces the text with documents, thus inviting readers to check what her parents’ dybbuks say against a record. For example, the mother’s dyb- Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 21 buk had already described her childhood and adolescence in Zagreb (67—69), when six chapters later, in the chapter appropriately entitled “aktenberge [sic],” Altaras provides a copy of a letter that a former employee of her maternal grandfather wrote and that redescribes the family’s life in Zagreb (164—66). Even the admonition at the end that interviewers should not dismiss their interviewees’ memories when there are gaps and/ or inconsistencies seems appropriate in the context of reading the dybbuks � Her father’s dybbuk claims, for example, that he had repaired Tito’s glasses when in fact Tito did not wear glasses, as Altaras finds out from a waiter (9). If readers are thus positioned to read the dybbuks with care and respect but also critically, then the relationship between the readers and the authors that Haines outlined and attributed to the “Eastern turn” does not apply here. Haines describes the writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia as cultural ambassadors who aim to enlighten their readers about life under communism and thereby profit from their curiosity about Eastern Otherness (“Eastern Turn” 138). This implicit agreement between the readers and authors only allows an exchange of information and translations of cultural differences. While Altaras’ novel might perform some of the same functions, it also, and more importantly, addresses the readers directly and implicates them in a reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy� This legacy is part and parcel of the phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia, one of several local variants of the so-called “red nostalgia” wave that has spread across former communist countries� 8 Nostalgia for the former Yugoslavia emerged after the civil wars of the 1990s as a reaction against the national narratives of the newly-formed states which were on a dual mission: first, to refute the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity, since any traces of it would have made the wars of the 1990s questionable; and, second, to ground their new identities in symbols and narratives that were antithetical to Yugoslav culture and history, so as to make the wars appear inevitable� Against the distortions and falsifications, ex-Yugoslavs have tried through a variety of medial strategies to preserve the memory of their country� 9 Altaras’ novel allows the readers to take part in this project of preservation and to reconstruct Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy in new and productive ways. By inscribing the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia through the figure of the dybbuk , she reintroduces anti-fascist resistance into discussions about post-national memory in the European context. Scholars agree that the founding myth of post-war Europe was the Holocaust� 10 In his essay on memory and nation building, “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’? ,” Benjamin Nienass describes the various institutions and laws that European countries have introduced to assert 22 Anita Lukic a post-national collective memory and community with three central aims: to commemorate the Holocaust, fight racism and anti-Semitism, and criminalize the denial of genocide (45). Although European countries have different national histories, they all share the same procedures for remembering the past. The “ethics of memory,” as Nienass calls this particular memory discourse, might appear to avoid the problems associated with finding a shared content for collective memory, but it has recently been criticized for prescribing how countries must interpret their past. One example that Nienass cites is Turkey’s negotiations for EU membership, which was in part contingent on Turkey’s admission of the Armenian genocide (49)� Against the limits of both post-national memory content and ethics, I suggest in conclusion that Altaras’ literary debut Titos Brille makes the case for a reflective return to the anti-fascist myth that had legitimized much of postwar Europe. Through the dybbuk figure, Altaras integrates the South Slavic countries into the discourse on the collective memory of Europe� If readers listen, they might just reclaim what has been institutionalized for them. “Ich, die Partisanentochter, muss in den Widerstand,” Altaras proclaims after she learns that the current Croatian government still refuses to return her family’s property, which had been confiscated by the Ustaša ( Titos Brille 228)� What follows this internal self-identification is an act of affective defiance when she shouts, “FASCHISTEN! ” (229). Altaras knows - and this is important - that this defiance is not her own: “[ J]ede Pore meiner selbst war Widerstand, doch nicht mein eigener Widerstand, sondern geerbter � Ich war die Partisanin von 1941, die im 21.-Jahrhundert weiterkämpfte” (62; my italics). It is through her parents that Altaras has inherited this anti-fascist resistance and through their dybbuks that her readers can share in this experience. Notes 1 See Lampe 233—65 for a detailed discussion of the Tito-Stalin split. 2 Between January and November 1948, twenty-two percent of all foreign visitors to Yugoslavia came from Western Europe (Tchoukarine 110)� In addition, between 1968, the year that Yugoslavia signed a labor agreement with the West German government, and 1973, 500,000 Yugoslav “guest workers” were employed in the Federal Republic of Germany (Shonick 719—20). 3 See Iris Radisch’s review of Stanišić’s novel. 4 While Titos Brille has received some attention in the German feuillteons (see Mangold; Bazinger), to my knowledge, only one scholarly article (Hitzke and Payne) has discussed the work in the context of post-Yugoslav fiction. 5 See Legutko� Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 23 6 After Germany invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it established a fascist puppet state in Croatia in 1941� From its inception the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) tried to systematically annihilate the Jewish populations in both Croatia and Bosnia. “Underlying these persecutions,” the historian John Lampe explains, “was the racist assumption that Croats were Aryans of Goth or Iranian origin who would be contaminated by contact with non-Aryan Jews or Slavs” (212). While South Slavic Jews, like Altaras’ parents, were persecuted in Croatia and Bosnia, they could find refuge among the communists who made up the multiethnic National Liberation Army (also known as the Yugoslav partisans) under the command of Josip Broz Tito, who became Yugoslavia’s long-running president after the Second World War� 7 Yugo-slavia consists of two words, one meaning South and the other Slav in Serbo-Croatian, and thus encompasses a wide variety of ethnicities to be found on the Balkan Peninsula. The National Liberation Army was the only organization that could underwrite the ideology of such a multiethnic state in post-war Europe. As Richard Mills explains: “In a series of conflicts that featured hegemonic nationalist extremists intent upon the acquisition, retention and forcible nationalisation of ethnically diverse territories, one multiethnic programme - that of Tito’s communist partisans - became increasingly attractive to people of all ethnic denominations” (1110). 8 See Velikonja 2008� 9 See Bošković for a more detailed analysis of Yugo-nostalgia, and a description of the famous Lexicon of Yu Mythology , which to this day publishes entries from private individuals about their everyday memories of Yugoslavia� 10 See Leggewie� Works Cited Adelson, Leslie� The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Grammar of Migration � New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005� Altaras, Adriana� Titos Brille: Die Geschichte meiner strapaziösen Familie � Frankfurt a�M�: Fischer, 2012� Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalism: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54.4 (1995): 917—31. Bazinger, Irene. “Mutterwitz mit Dibbuks.” Frankfurter Allgemeine 25 Feb� 2011� Web� 15 Oct� 2018� Bošković, Aleksander. “Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology.” Slavic Review 72.1 (2013): 54—78. Chajes, J.H. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism . U of Pennsylvania P, 2003� 24 Anita Lukic Haines, Brigid. “The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe , 16.2 (2008): 135—49. —. “Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert : Reinscribing Bosnia, or: Sad Things, Positively.” Emerging German-Novelists of the Twenty-First Century � Ed� Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. 105—18. Herman, David� Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative . U of Nebraska P, 2002� Hitzke, Diana, and Charlton Payne. “Verbalizing Silence and Sorting Garbage: Archiving Experiences of Displacement in Recent Post-Yugoslav Fictions of Migration by Saša Stanišić and Adriana Altaras.” Edinburgh German Yearbook 9�1 (2015): 195—212. Hofer, Johannes. “Medical Dissertation by Johannes Hofer, 1688.” Trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach� Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2.6 (1934): 376—91. Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Leggewie, Claus. “The Seven Circles of European Memory.” Eurozine.com 20 Dec� 2010� Web� 1 Oct� 2018� Legutko, Agnieszka. “Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction.” Bridges 15.1 (2010): 6—26. Mangold, Ijoma. “Der Rest: In ‘Titos Brille’ erzählt Adriana Altaras ihre Familiengeschichte.” Zeit Online 25 Aug� 2011� Web� 10 Oct� 2018� Mills, Richard. “Velež Mostar Football Club and the Demise of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ in Yugoslavia, 1922-2009.”- Europe-Asia Studies 62.7 (2010): 1107—33. Nienass, Benjamin. “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’? ” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26.1 (2013): 41—55. Petrović, Tanja. Yuropa: Jugoslawisches Erbe und Zukunftsstrategien in postjugoslawischen Gesellschaften � Trans� Aleksandra Bajazetov� Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2015� Radisch, Iris. “Der Krieg träft Kittleschürze.” Zeit Online 5 Oct. 2006. Web. 22 Oct. 2018. Shonick, Kaja. “Politics, Culture, and Economics: Reassessing the West German Guest Worker Agreement with Yugoslavia.”- Journal of Contemporary History 44�4 (2009): 719—36.- Stanišić, Saša. Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert . Munich: Luchterhand, 2006. Tchoukarine, Igor. “The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentralization, and Propaganda in the Early 1950s.” Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s) � Ed� Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor� Plymouth, UK: Central European UP, 2010. Todorova, Maria� Imagining the Balkans . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Velikonja, Mitja� Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz . Trans. Olga Vuković. Ljubljana: Peace Institute, 2008� —. “The Past with a Future: The Emancipatory Potential of Yugonostalgia.” chdr-ns.com n�d� Web� 5 Oct� 2018� Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 25 Volčič, Zala. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.1 (2007): 21—38. Woodward, Susan L� Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War � Washington, D�C�: Brookings Institution, 1995� Tonka’s Voice: Narrative Perspective and the Desire for Silence in Robert Musil’s Early Novella Laura Bohn Case Wheaton College Abstract: I read Robert Musil’s intimate autobiographical novella “Tonka” within linguistic history to show how the novella undermines the increasingly monolingual identity replacing possible multilingual identities within the late Austrian Empire. Through the novella’s criticism of speech and Musil’s complex use of psycho-narration, Tonka’s identity can be understood beyond the silence desired by her lover - not least because of her Czech bilingualism. The novella even blames Tonka’s death on his inability to accept her as an equal interlocutor, and I suggest the death of Tonka reveals Musil’s mourning for a lost multilingual German identity - something valuable and uniquely Habsburgian. Keywords: Habsburg Multilingualism, Psycho-narration, Language Politics, Multilingual Identity “Das war Tonka,” we read in the first paragraph of Robert Musil’s 1923 novella, “Tonka” (Musil, Drei Frauen 46). The unnamed male protagonist spends the next forty pages in a project of remembering and defining his lover. Significantly, most of this remembering is centered on his desire for Tonka’s silence� He presents her as being without meaningful language, and even “stumm” (57, 63). The first dialogue between the lovers opens with this representation of Tonka’s silence, as their conversation is missing her answer (50). The passage gives us only her lover’s question and then his response to whatever she said, thus foregrounding her silence from the very beginning of their supposed communication� In the following article, I interrogate this desire for Tonka’s silence� I show the limits to the protagonist’s representation of Tonka, as the novella’s criticism of speech and its complex narration, including several surprising moments of 28 Laura Bohn Case psycho-narration from within Tonka’s perspective, undermine his refusal of expression to Tonka. I then situate the novella within linguistic history to show how this restriction of Tonka’s language reflects an increasingly monolingual Austrian identity, which was replacing earlier possible multilingual identities within the late Empire� While Musil is well known for his vivid descriptions in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften of the Habsburg Empire just before its collapse, I suggest that a decade before starting this masterpiece, he mourns for a lost multilingual identity - something valuable and uniquely Habsburgian - in his intimate autobiographical novella, “Tonka.” The male protagonist of the story meets Tonka during a year of military service in what he describes as the provinces of the Empire� He pursues her, and their sexual relationship follows a pattern common to the literature of the time: the exploitation of working-class women, who are comfortable in a local language or dialect, by wealthier, German-speaking men� 1 Tonka becomes pregnant and dies from a sexually transmitted infection a few days after giving birth to a stillborn child� Despite the relationship’s predictability, an unsolved mystery arises because Tonka’s lover shows no signs of the illness himself and was away at the possible time of impregnation� While Tonka claims her faithfulness to him until her death - more specifically, she refuses to speak words admitting her guilt - the doctors in the novella insist that this is impossible� The novella follows the later attempts of her lover, as an older man, to settle what must have happened between himself and Tonka. The narrative never solves this central mystery of Tonka’s illness, pregnancy, and faithfulness� Instead, Musil displaces the importance of an answer, and the novella allows this medical impossibility within the “Möglichkeitssinn” that Musil attributes to fiction. 2 Instead of answering the question of her faithfulness, the novella shows that Tonka’s lover is unable to communicate with her, and thus the possibility for her faithfulness is left uncontained and unresolved. In Musil’s work, psycho-narration - identified by Dorrit Cohn as the “narration of the character's thoughts by a knowledgeable narrator, in the narrator's own-language and concepts” - allows deep access to a character’s mind, access to unarticulated ideas and impressions that lie beyond the thoughts of the characters (Cohn 14). Unlike other modernist narration that relies on inner monologue, Musil uses psycho-narration to allow expression beyond what the characters can even articulate to themselves. This narrative technique allows for expression that is independent from spoken or thought German words, as Musil’s fiction assumes that the mind works beyond speech. His use of psycho-narration shows minds whose workings are not limited by words. The novella’s use of psycho-narration undermines the primacy of speech and enables Tonka to communicate beyond her lover’s desire for her silence. “Tonka” is narrated Tonka’s Voice 29 in this third person very closely aligned with the characters’ psyches� For most of the novella, the narrator offers the perspective of the protagonist as an older man investigating various aspects of memory as he reflects on his younger self in this relationship with a troubling end� In fact, all of the secondary literature I have encountered assumes that the narrator is Tonka’s lover remembering his past� However, thrice-separated tenses and several moments of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective show the presence of an outside critical narrator despite this close alignment between the narrator and the male protagonist throughout most of the novella� In the following passage, as in many other instances, we find evidence of this outside narrator� Das waren gewiss lauter kleine Erlebnisse, aber das Merkwürdige ist: sie waren in Tonkas Leben zweimal da, ganz die gleichen. Sie waren eigentlich immer da. Und das Merkwürdige ist, sie bedeuteten später das Gegenteil von dem, was sie anfangs bedeuteten� So gleich blieb sich Tonka, so einfach und durchsichtig war sie, dass man meinen konnte, eine Halluzination zu haben und die unglaublichsten Dinge zu sehen (Musil, Drei Frauen 55)� The use of the past tense “bedeuteten” for the time from which the story is told indicates a narrative position beyond the older man remembering his youthful relationship� If he were merely remembering, the position from which he remembers would be in present tense� Musil’s use of tenses and the confusion they create persist throughout the novella. “Aber war es überhaupt so gewesen? Nein, das hatte er sich erst später zurechtgelegt. Das war schon das Märchen; er konnte es nicht mehr unterscheiden” (46). Here, the present narrator, in speaking in the past tense, again puts Tonka’s lover as an older man - “er” - into an earlier past tense, indicating again a triple remove of temporal distance� We also read, “Er erinnerte sich dann nur noch …” also indicating this distance (55). The events appear first as Tonka’s lover perceives them when they happen, second as he interprets them after her death, while the third separation comes from the remove of their narration to the narrator, away from Tonka’s lover’s memory� Tonka refuses to admit her guilt, and thus her lover dismisses her ability to communicate entirely. The logic goes something like this: if Tonka is unable to speak and communicate, then her silence around her unfaithfulness becomes insignificant. The pressure to represent Tonka as speechless shows the emotional investment of her lover in her refusal to admit to any unfaithfulness� Her lover repeatedly demands a verbal admission of guilt, and this desire becomes an obsession in the novella. The narrator uses tortuous and violent vocabulary as the young man again and again seeks Tonka’s admission of unfaithfulness (68). Indeed, the pressure on Tonka’s incommunicability is heightened in the scenes 30 Laura Bohn Case of confrontation around this mystery� Her lover reasons that if she will not confess, it must be because she cannot confess, and thus her silence presumes her guilt. The pressure on silencing Tonka becomes the only possible answer to her lover’s unfulfilled desire for her confession. From the first pages of the novella, his insistence on Tonka’s inability to communicate attempts to contextualize and cauterize her reticence in the face of his mistrust and accusations� He even dreams of this desire: “sie [die Träume] sagten wohl nur, Tonka sollte gestehen, und alles wäre gut” (78). By framing the dreams as speaking (“sagten”) the narrator casts suspicion on this need for her confession� Much of the novella’s speech, either in quotations or in the grammatical indirect speech, is framed by mistrust and misunderstanding. This aligns with Musil’s choice of psycho-narration over interior monologue, as words are secondary to the thought that is possible beyond speech in psycho-narration� By underplaying the importance of speech, the narrator also separates Tonka from the bureaucratic and instrumental use of German by the young man and other characters, including his family (60). For example, his mother’s meddling comments are reported through excessively marked quotations. “‘Denn,’ sagte sie, ‘es könnte dieser Unglücksfall ja geradezu noch zum Glück ausschlagen, und man wäre dann’ - sagte sie - ‘mit dem Schreck davongekommen: es gelte nur, die Zukunft vor der Wiederkehr solcher Ereignisse zu schützen! ’” (69) Here her address is marked by “sie sagte” twice, and Musil also uses grammatical indirect speech, an unusual and unnecessary over-marking of speech. The narrator replicates his mother’s words in their awful and insulting entirety as she explains why Tonka should be paid to disappear from her son’s life, and thus fluent spoken German is linked to prejudice against Tonka� Musil even uses the verb “sagen” to describe the mother’s insinuating smile. Her smile expresses suspicion around Tonka’s insistence of faithfulness: “[d] ieses Lächeln […] Es sagte: Gott, jeder Mensch weiß, dieses Geschäft?!” (49). By granting clichéd and prejudiced speech to this smile, Musil emphasizes the limits of all kinds of shallow, if fluent, communication. The family uses many other phrases - presented by Musil in quotation marks - to call Tonka’s morality into question, for example, “‘von so einem Mädchen’”; later, she is described as a “‘pflichtvergessenes Mädchen’” (69). The quotation marks in this context create ironic distance but also increase suspicion around speech� Moreover, the young man’s thoughts, for example his belief in his intellectual superiority, are frequently framed by “er sagte sich” and called into question by those who hear his remarks (52). Therefore, while the spoken German language is set against Tonka, it is also undermined throughout the novella and shown to be severely compromised in it its ability to communicate truth about her character� Tonka’s Voice 31 The unreliability of the protagonist’s memory reveals the possibility of fiction to allow for multiple realities, but it also shows the instability of the times, as Tonka’s lover struggles to define Tonka in terms of her language. For example, the narrator gives contradictory suggestions as to the location of the lovers’ first meeting, thus introducing a motivated uncertainty which continues throughout their entire relationship. After describing nature as the place of their first contact, he further suggests that they met at Tonka’s home (stigmatized by its proximity to prostitution). He then returns to his first version with, ‘[s]ie war ja doch an einem Zaun gestanden damals” (48). He supports this location with remembered peasant clothes, affirming Tonka’s connection to the land and nature through this repetition. However, the narrator finally settles on a meaningful urban meeting place, the city’s central Ringstrasse: “In Wahrheit hatte er sie zum ersten Mal am ‘Ring’ gesehen” (48), and the confirmation “[d]as war nun klar” only emphasizes the uncertainty and roundabout path to this supposed clarity (49). The Ringstrasse in Brno is a meaningful meeting place, as it separated the inner city of Brno, which was predominantly German, from the growing suburbs populated by the Czech working class� 3 These false, but meaningful openings reveal the ambiguity of the novella’s depiction of Tonka, and the tension within the narrator’s close alignment with the young man’s memories and their motivated misrepresentation of Tonka� Scholars agree that “Tonka” is highly autobiographical. While there is confusion in the secondary literature around the autobiographical details, it seems that the woman from Musil’s youth did not actually die as Tonka does in the novella� 4 I suggest that the heightening of tragedy through Tonka’s death can be understood symbolically to reflect Musil’s mourning for the end of multilingualism in the Empire� Tonka’s death symbolizes the end of a certain type of bilingual or multilingual identity previously possible� Historians such as Pieter Judson and Jeremy King have argued for a multilingual identity found in Habsburg Austria before the emergence of many Central European nations, and for the normalcy of this multilingual identity continuing even until the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire� Indeed, Austria celebrated a unique culture around language that promoted unity, with multilingualism and the equality of languages being a sign of authentic belonging to the Empire instead of its inevitable fragmentation� 5 The growing frequency and intensity of nationalist conflict in Austria-Hungary after 1867 was not an inevitable result of the multilingual quality of Austrian and Hungarian societies, as traditionally argued, but, instead, a product of institutions and those in power attempting to separate the population for political gain ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 273)� Instead of the urban centers enabling the most openness of identity, as we might assume of today’s metropolitan centers, language choice was most free in the 32 Laura Bohn Case rural imagined peripheries of the Empire where various languages were most mixed ( Judson, Guardians 6). The nationalist origin of rural conflict was often exaggerated, and much effort went into persuading the rural inhabitants to use only one language and to thus choose an exclusive nationality. Nationalist accounts document “the worrying absence of that which was being claimed […] that is, the frequent irrelevance of nationalist identities to rural society” ( Judson, Guardians 11)� In fact, the stringency of nationalist rhetoric in describing rural conflict indicates the very instability of this distinction. Thus until the First World War, national identity was much less important than has come to be expected and argued, and until this very late period of Habsburg history, self-identification with the German nation was flexible and dependent largely on language use and choice, where choice of language eventually meant choice of national identity� Indeed, there was a transition to identifying nation with language during the nineteenth century, and as the social asymmetry between languages slowly decreased it left different definitions of ethnicity. The normalcy of multilingualism was especially true around German identity, and, initially, German ethnicity was most open to assimilation� According to the claims of the liberal parties, anyone speaking German, often for bureaucratic reasons, could claim German identity ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 298). In this linguistic context the unease around Tonka’s bilingualism takes on greater significance. The unfolding of this history in Brno - widely assumed to be the unnamed city in “Tonka” as well as the town of Musil’s adolescence and the place of his experience of these language conflicts - was similar to that of other cities in Czech-speaking lands. As a city with a bilingual past, Brno experienced heightened nationalist conflict during this particularly tense period in the German-Czech relationship in Moravia� Historically, Brno was predominately German speaking, and remained German through the first wave of industrialization, but the Czech population soon began to grow as agricultural workers moved to the city in search of jobs in the factories. The Ringstrasse, where the lovers meet in “Tonka,” divided the German-speaking inner city from the outer Czech suburbs. These suburbs were not officially incorporated into the city to avoid a flooding of the vote and a shift of politics towards Czech interests, as the inclusion of the Czech population in city politics would have threatened the precarious German hegemony ( Judson, “Inventing Germans” 52). The historical background of Brno heightens the importance of the tension around Tonka’s bilingual identity� The young man’s insistence on defining Tonka’s speech fits into this history of linguistic power, as a character from a dominant class - here a German-speaking male - both defines and silences according to his desire. The Tonka’s Voice 33 young man insists on describing Tonka as without meaningful expression, as strange and foreign, and her language even as “seltsam” (Musil, Drei Frauen 48)� She is said to be “am falschen Platz,” and to be “fremd.” Later, when the couple moves to a German city, Tonka’s strangeness even comes to include him, for example when they first sleep together and the repetition of “das Unbekannte und Fremde” returns as her lover himself remembers feeling separated from this new German city in their moments of closeness (55, 65, 72). Yet, the young man is somehow blind to her actual foreignness. For example, Tonka is unsuccessful at getting a raise at her job in the city because she has neither good handwriting nor perfect linguistic skills. Her difficulty could also, of course, be explained by the fact her primary language is Czech rather than German� Yet, this bilingualism does not seem to enter the mind of her lover, who instead pokes fun at her broken grammar and childish script (62). Although Tonka’s language mixture is probably rich, multilingual, and has expressive quality beyond German, this is not reflected in any way in the young man’s description of it, and nowhere does he acknowledge the effect of her Czech background and bilingualism on her access and use of the German language� Tonka is of mixed Czech and German origin, and while her bilingualism reflects the freedom of linguistic identity, and her access to German identity, the novella also clearly shows the young man’s anxiety as he is excluded from her language. Tonka speaks Czech, and although she is fluent enough in German to function within the young man’s family and to work in the German city, he is unable to understand Czech. In first introducing Tonka, the narrator qualifies her name, exposing a significant underside to the frequent narrative uncertainties: “Übrigens hieß sie nicht ganz mit Recht Tonka, sondern war deutsch getauft auf den Namen Antonie, während Tonka die Abkürzung der tschechischen Koseform Toninka bildet” (48). However, neither the young man nor the narrator ever use “Antonie” again. Although her first name represents an attempt at social mobility and bilingualism, her last name (which is never given in the novella) connects her to the young man’s limited categories for her identity� While Tonka sings Czech folksongs, the “Volkslieder ihrer Heimat” (53), her lover interprets her singing to mean that she expresses herself only, or primarily, in song - rather than in speech - and thus pities her. The passage continues to connect her singing to some sort of greater speech, to “eine Sprache des Ganzen,” or a “Sendung” (53). As the young man is incapable of acknowledging Tonka’s bilingualism, he thus connects her to nature and to a mythical language in order to lessen the importance of, and to contain, her communication� Indeed, from the beginning of the novella, the influence of Czech on Tonka’s speech is described with suspicion - even as a criminal activity - and the novella refers to the mix of languages in the streets in proximity to the pros- 34 Laura Bohn Case titution around Tonka’s home, which taints this language mix with a dubious morality� When the couple sings Czech folksongs together, it is described as “Corpus delicti” and “Lokalaugenschein,” both words used in jurisprudence in the context of crimes. On the one hand, the narrator is using this vocabulary to poke fun of their out-of-tune singing, but on the other hand these terms criminalize the young man’s attempts at Czech (52). This is reminiscent of how the wrong choice of language on a census could land someone in jail shortly after this era ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 446). Furthermore, the young man calls into question the worth of someone who is considered speechless: he asks if they are “gut, wertlos, oder bös [sic]” and thus suggests that Tonka’s lack of expression may actually be evil and criminal (Musil, Drei Frauen 57)� Tonka is also called “stumm” in the context of the young man’s family while she listens to the reading of the grandmother’s unfair will, which confirms her financial exploitation, with “festgeschlossenen Lippen”(57). This cheating her out of money is directly connected to her Czech identity, as it is in this context that we learn about her Czech surname, itself invested with the novella’s confusion around her relationship to nature: “[der] traumhafte Nachnamen, der einer jener tschechischen Familiennamen war, die ‘Er sang’ oder ‘Er kam über die Wiese’ hießen” (55). Her last name, in both these possible meanings, exactly aligns with her lover’s interpretation of her speech, because he believes that she has both access to a mythical language when she sings and to nature. Her last name, the clearest expression of her identity in words, thus falls directly within her lover’s attempts at dismissing her communication and his family’s abuse of their power� The protagonist is unable to admit Tonka’s ability with language, even when the narrative includes examples of her linguistic and intellectual talent. This is evident in the following sentence: “Und zuweilen überraschte sie ihn durch Kenntnisse von Gedanken, die ihr ganz fern liegen müssten” (62—63). The final word in the sentence, the subjunctive verb form “müssten,” emphasizes the young man’s expectations of Tonka, and his inability to absorb truths that do not fit with these expectations. This passage includes another mention of “stumm” and emphasizes her silence when confronted with evidence to the contrary. When Tonka brings up chemistry examples she learned to help her brother study for his exams, the young man again judges this knowledge as something that she does not really understand, “[u]nd länger als zehn Jahre war das wie schöne Steine, deren Namen man nicht weiß, in einem Kästchen gelegen! ” (63). However, in trying to prove Tonka’s speechlessness, her lover becomes tied up in his own metaphor as it ends up expressing the opposite of what he tries to suggest - the fitting metaphor would be a loss of stones whose names are remembered, as he is trying to show that Tonka possesses more words than knowledge� In his eagerness to refuse Tonka access to language, her Tonka’s Voice 35 lover accurately describes her jewels of wisdom, supported in the narrative in moments from within her perspective� Indeed, behind the protagonist’s desire to silence Tonka, there is evidence of clarity and eloquence in her communication. The young man asks Tonka why she works for his grandmother: “Aber er sah, dass sie mit Antworten kämpfte, die sie immer wieder im letzten Augenblick von den Lippen verwarf” (51). He attempts to answer for Tonka and suggests several reasons for her willingness to work under such exploitative conditions. She responds, “Nein, aber das ist es doch nicht” (51). When he finally lets her talk, Tonka tells him that she has to support herself, “Ich musste mir doch etwas verdienen,” and in her supposed ineloquence expresses something beyond his mocked philosophizing, “Ach, dieses Einfachste! Welch feiner Esel war er und welche steinere Ewigkeit lag in dieser so gewöhnlichen Antwort” (52). This answer is one in several moments where she, in her supposed speechlessness, expresses a deeper and greater, though simultaneously simple truth. Later, Tonka even finds the perfect, meaningful words that give relief for the almost unbearable intimate situations between the lovers, “Komm zu mir, bat Tonka, und sie teilten Leid und Wärme mit traurigem Gewährenlassen” (82). Thus, from a place of supposed silence, her words bring about the perfect action of closeness and love� In a scene central to the couple’s early romance, they walk in the countryside together. Her lover again attempts to limit her within nature, but the narrator allows Tonka to fit into, and interact linguistically with, her natural environment. This is the first of the rare moments in which we hear Tonka’s thoughts, which here expose the young man’s distance from a world he claims to understand. Using the conditional tense, full of irony, the narrator gives the young man’s assumptions of Tonka’s intellectual weakness: “Hätte sie denken gelernt wie ihr Begleiter, so hätte Tonka in diesem Augenblick gefühlt, dass die Natur aus lauter hässlichen Unscheinbarkeiten besteht” (53—54). The narrator next offers Tonka’s actual thoughts, which are breathtaking in their wisdom and relevance to the moment and place at which the lovers stand: “Tonka hatte sich oft davor gefürchtet, dass einmal ein Mann vor ihr stehen würde und sie nimmer ausweichen könnte” (54). The informal “nimmer” reads as Tonka’s inflection, evidence that here the narrator is allowing us into her thoughts through the intimate psycho-narration. The narrator’s language becomes more precise, direct, and colloquial as we enter Tonka’s voice: “bis zu diesem Augenblick hatte sie noch nie gefühlt, mit einem Mann in seiner Gesellschaft zu sein, denn alles war anders” (54). The young man assumes Tonka is feeling shy and insecure because of his greater skill with language and is therefore silent, while Tonka’s thoughts actually reflect on the nature around them knowing, “jedes einzelne war hässlich, 36 Laura Bohn Case und alles zusammen war Glück” (54). Here we find reported emotion not limited by her lover’s assumptions, unlike throughout most of the rest of the novella� Sometimes her insights take the form of action: “Sie verstand nicht, was er dachte, aber sie las alles zugleich in seinem Auge und ertappte sich mit einem Mal bei dem Wunsch, seinen Kopf in den Arm zu nehmen und seine Augen zuzudecken” (54). Instead of responding in speech, she wants to respond with a comforting action� Yet, he misinterprets why she presses his arm as they walk together; the action expresses her tenderness and not, as he assumes, her helplessness in the dark and her need for him� Instead of speaking, she acts, communicating emotion through her gesture: “[sie wusste] nicht aus noch ein und fand bei der Jungfrau Maria keine andere Antwort, als dass sie ihren Arm inniger in seinen schob” (54). In these passages, we see the layering of perspectives that show the novella’s typical presentation of Tonka; we read the thoughts that the young man assumes Tonka to have� However, in this unusual scene, the use of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective shows how much more profound her thoughts are than her lover imagines and how much more fitting than his indulgence in daydreaming and philosophizing. The infrequent uses of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective show her thoughts to be strikingly relevant and expressive, supporting the truth of the words she does have represented in the novella. While the young man tries to define Tonka and to limit the meaning of her words, she confronts him with her love for him� In this moment, as both characters feel themselves to be in love, the narrator comes closest to allowing the reader access to the two thought worlds, just enough to show us how their communication fails� Tonka’s speech is generally underrepresented by quotation marks, and little of what she says is directly reported, except for words such as “oh, ja” and “O doch,” exclamations often not contained in quotes (for example 50—51). Words by her that are set in quotations are often clichés and exclamations instead of truly expressive uses of language, in either German or Czech. For example, to express her unwillingness to return home to her aunt, she comments, “‘[d]ann werde ich es eben wieder alle Augenblicke auf dem Teller haben’” (58). However, in the infrequent instances of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective her thoughts are strikingly relevant and expressive. To return to the scene when the young man offers to care for Tonka and invites her to join his life, we again find a response from her perspective. After his unclear offer she blushes and unpacks her belongings, accompanied by the profound statement “und [sie] fühlt: das war jetzt die Liebe” (58). Significantly, the narrator connects this greater truth to feeling and not to speech, again avoiding the novella’s suspicion towards speech� Tonka’s Voice 37 The last scene in the novella from Tonka’s perspective is more complicated than the earlier moments in which we hear from her, because this scene slides back and forth between Tonka and her lover’s psycho-narration. The narrator gives a clear description of Tonka’s faithfulness as resulting from a simple lack of interest in other men after her long hours of work: “Und wenn sie abends aus dem Geschäft kommt, ist sie ganz ausgefüllt von seinen lärmenden, lustigen, ärgerlichen Erlebnissen; ihre Ohren sind voll, ihre Zunge spricht innerlich noch weiter; da ist kein kleinstes Plätzchen für einen fremden Mann” (85). Her continued ability to use language - to hear and to speak - protect her from unfaithfulness, and make her lover’s insistence on her silence even more destructive� Finally, while her lover dominates the story, Tonka’s importance is evident from the title of the first collection in which it appears: Drei Frauen . We attribute the title of stories and collections to the author, and thus these outward textual markings challenge the attempt to silence Tonka. The narrative never refers to the male protagonist by name, but Tonka herself has this power of naming her lover� In speaking his name, something the narrator refuses to do, Tonka enters her lover: “[E]in sinnloses, Hilfe suchendes Wort, durch einen endlosen, einsamen Gang hervorstürzend, verwandelte sich in seinen Namen” (65). Therefore, despite the young man’s insistence on Tonka’s speechlessness, she is able to claim and to contain him in this one powerful word: his name� In conclusion: while much of the narrative supports the protagonist’s desire for Tonka’s silence, moments of psycho-narration in the novella question this determination. Through the novella’s suspicion around speech and the complexity of narrative perspective, we come to an understanding of Tonka’s identity beyond that suggested by her lover� She is greater than, and other than, the speechless woman he desires her to be� In these rare moments from Tonka’s perspective we see her as an intelligent, emotionally astute character attempting to live out a new romantic relationship� Her bilingual voice and the strength of her intelligence and love undermine the dominant perspective of the narrative and show the inadequacy of the young man’s memories and his attempts to silence her. The novella blames Tonka’s death on the young man’s inability to understand and accept her as a bilingual interlocutor and equal partner in communication. Their personal tragedy points to the loss of multilingual identities - especially around the use of German - in the last decades of the Austrian Empire as Musil’s masterful novella mourns the disappearance of a unique Habsburg possibility of open linguistic identity� 38 Laura Bohn Case Notes 1 A striking example is Max Brod’s 1909 Tschechisches Dienstmädchen , which spends 150 pages eroticizing a Czech servant girl and her connections to a nature from which her Viennese lover is excluded, in a tone reminiscent of “Tonka.” In much of this fiction, including “Tonka,” depictions of these women clearly depend on colonial vocabulary� 2 Musil famously explores this unique ability for fiction to explore possibility, to allow for this kind of contradiction, in the opening chapters of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften � 3 For further details see Felber 82, quoted in Prinz 149—59. 4 Most secondary literature assumes that the lover from Musil’s youth - Herma Dietz - followed Tonka’s fate and died. Peter Jungk points out the record of Dietz’s miscarriage appears in 1906, but notes that Musil mentions meeting Dietz in his journal as late as April 24, 1907� Neither journal entries nor documents suggest Dietz’s death, which significantly leaves this complication to fiction ( Jungk 154). 5 Judson quotes sentiments such as “[t]he more languages of the monarchy one learns, the more one becomes a true Austrian,” voiced by Joseph Baron Hammer-Purgstall in his “Vortrag über die Vielsprachigkeit” in a “Feierliche Sitzung der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften” on 29 May 1852 in Vienna, and concludes that “equality of language use symbolized a unity of peoples that was anchored in their fundamental interchangeability as citizens” ( Judson, The Habsburg Empire 242 ) . The work of historians Pieter Judson and Jeremy King consistently argues for this type of multilingual identity available to German speakers during the Habsburg Empire� For more information on the efforts put into creating artificially separate German and Czech identities see Judson, Guardians of the Nation � For an exploration of the disintegration of a possible bilingual identity see King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans. Works Cited Brod, Max. Tschechisches Dienstmädchen. Berlin: A. Juncker, 1909. Cohn, Dorrit� Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Judson, Pieter. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. —. The Habsburg Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016. —. “Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Hapsburg Monarchy.” Social Analysis 33 (1993): 47—67. Tonka’s Voice 39 Jungk, Peter Stephan. “Die Vergessene: Robert Musil und Herma Dietz. Ein Beitrag zur Musil-Forschung.” Neue Rundschau 103.2 (1992): 151—61. King, Jeremy. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Musil, Robert� Drei Frauen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002� —. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften � Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978� Prinz, Martin. “Brno-Brünn Musils Topografie der Vergehung.” Maske und Kothurn. Internationale Beiträge zur Theaterwissenschaft 47.3-4 (2002): 149—59. Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization in Richard Wagner’s Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld Anca Luca Holden University of Massachusetts, Amherst Abstract: This article traces the transformation of German-Romanian cultural identity in communist Romania and West Germany in Richard Wagner’s Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld (1991), two texts that fictionalize the author’s own experience of marginalization, migration, and integration. Despite fundamental ideological, political, economic, and cultural differences between communist Romania and capitalist West Germany, the two governments display similar practices of marginalizing German-Romanians based on biological, territorial, and state-centered concepts that betray the processes of exclusion through which they are articulated. By means of a close reading including discussions of Wagner’s innovative literary techniques and communist and post-communist Romanian and German history, this article analyzes how in communist Romania the German-Romanian cultural identity becomes fragmented to the point of being almost annihilated, while in West Germany Wagner’s character successfully negotiates triangular identity paradigms which combine elements of Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German languages and cultures, calling for a reevaluation of the “Germanness” of German literature and cultural identity. Keywords: migration, language, cultural identity, politics of marginalization, exclusion, homogeneity, resistance Richard Wagner (b� 1952), the acclaimed Banat-born German-Romanian writer, distinguishes himself in contemporary German literature with texts that draw attention to categories of newcomers to Germany such as ethnic Germans (particularly from Romania), East-Central Europeans, and former GDR citizens� An outspoken critic of the crimes of totalitarian regimes, especially the abusive 42 Anca Luca Holden treatment of ethnic Germans in communist Romania, Wagner also tackles several relatively under-explored aspects of the Holocaust like the genocide of the Roma, for example. While he examines the past, Wagner also scrutinizes the present. The effects of migration, displacement, consumerism, commodification of culture, and materialism on the formation of cultural identity in post-communist Eastern Europe and post-unification Germany are recurring themes in his literary works� As part of the generation of ethnic German writers that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in communist Romania, Richard Wagner and Herta Müller, his then wife, were referred to as Rumäniendeutsche both in Romania and after they immigrated to West Germany. The term Rumäniendeutsche was coined in the early 1950s because of the growing nationalism in communist Romania and the government’s inherent leveling, marginalization tendencies, and forced assimilation (Motzan, “Die vielen Wege in den Abschied” 108). Betraying the political motivation behind its invention, this collective label ignored the fact that ethnic Germans who lived in various territories in Romania had distinct histories and cultures. Attempting to distance itself from one culture (German) and prove its allegiance to the other (Romanian), rumäniendeutsche Literatur was actually in a “vielstrapazierte Sondersituation,” also described as a “Zwitterstellung” or a “Niemandsland” owed to its “in-between” position at the crossing of divergent political and cultural spaces (Csejka, “Über den Anfang” 17; “Bedingtheiten” 45). Yet despite its precarious political, cultural, and literary position in communist Romania, German-Romanian literature took center stage thanks to the authors of the literary circle Aktionsgruppe Banat , one of the most important dissident groups in Romania, co-founded by Wagner� Rejecting the idea that literature had an exclusively autonomous-aesthetic function, the Aktionsgruppe focused on promoting the sociopolitical function of their texts in particular and of literature in general. Unlike many who protested against Ceauşescu’s regime by turning to Western capitalist models for counsel and refuge, this group of authors, while denouncing the character of Ceauşescu’s nationalist communism, upheld Western Marxist principles based on ideas and theses of the Frankfurt School and aspired to Wagner calls a “Sozialismus mit menschlichem Antlitz” (Wagner, “Die Aktionsgruppe Banat” 122). Yet by employing literature as a tool of aesthetic resistance against Ceauşescu’s regime and by criticizing the antiquated Banat-Swabian Regionalliteratur , especially its ethnocentrism, the Aktionsgruppe became “eine Minderheit in der Minderheit,” as Wagner put it (Solms 298). Consequently, the group became the object of harsh criticism by both the communist regime and the Banat-Swabian community� Given its open criticism of the communist regime, the Aktionsgruppe was dissolved in 1975, only three years after its inception. Due to the incongruities Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 43 between Marxist ideals and Ceauşescu’s socialism, which culminated in an era of terror and totalitarianism spurred by the dictator’s nationalist communism and his personality cult, one by one, all the members of the Aktionsgruppe emigrated to West Germany� Wagner and Müller emigrated in 1987 along with other writers when interference by the Securitate became unbearable. The cultural, linguistic, and political challenges that Wagner and his fellow authors faced in West Germany and their efforts to reinvent themselves are recurring themes in their post-emigration writing� Even though Wagner succeeded in escaping the politics of marginalization of the communist regime, to his utter dismay, he was subjected again to tactics of marginalization in West Germany� Like other German-Romanian authors, Wagner perceived himself as a political exile and not as a typical Aussiedler or Heimkehrer because for him resettling in West Germany meant not a return to the Heimat, but a mere “Ortswechsel” (Neau 129). 1 Reflecting on the paradox of simultaneously belonging to and being a stranger in West Germany, Wagner argues that, for him, “Germany” is not a territorial concept but a cultural one because his conceptualization of “Deutschland” was always that of a “Kulturnation” opposed to a territorial state (qtd. in Rock, “’A German Comes Home’” 67). 2 The struggle of having to disclose and defend one’s “German identity” in addition to the contradiction of being part of the cultural notion of “Germany” and yet a stranger to the territorial concept of “Germany” are central themes in Wagner’s works� 3 In this article, I trace the transformation of German-Romanian cultural identity in communist Romania and West Germany in Wagner’s Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld by exploring some of the politics and tactics of marginalization in the two countries� Despite fundamental ideological, political, economic, and cultural differences between the communist and capitalist governments, I show that the two systems display similar practices of marginalizing German-Romanians based on biological, territorial, and state-centered concepts that betray the processes of exclusion through which they are articulated (Cooper 494). I analyze Wagner’s innovative literary techniques that include fragmented sentences, white spaces, unconventional punctuation, splits and intermingling of narrative voices, surrealist dreams, and the use of untranslated Romanian terms and phrases, and argue that, while in communist Romania the German-Romanian cultural identity becomes fragmented to the point of being almost annihilated, in West Germany, Wagner’s characters successfully negotiate triangular identity paradigms which combine elements of Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German languages and cultures� Calling for a reevaluation of the “Germanness” of German literature and cultural identity, Ausreiseantrag. 44 Anca Luca Holden Begrüßungsgeld contests cultural definitions of “Germanness” and challenges concepts about a homogenous German language, culture, nation, and identity� When Wagner immigrated to West Germany in 1987 with Herta Müller, he brought with him a manuscript that he managed to smuggle over the border (Wagner, “Lehrjahre” 45). Wagner published it as “Ausreiseantrag” in 1988, which was followed by “Begrüßungsgeld” in 1989. In 1991, the two texts were published in one volume: Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld . Both “Ausreiseantrag” and “Begrüßungsgeld” feature the same central character, the Banat-Swabian journalist Stirner, one of Wagner’s many alter ego figures since his biographical details closely resemble those of Wagner’s himself (Rock, “’From the Periphery’” 132, Jackman “Alone in a Crowd” 157). Set in a large city (most likely Timişoara) in the Banat in the 1980s, “Ausreiseantrag” records the events that lead Stirner and his wife, Sabine, to file an application to emigrate to West Germany. “Ausreiseantrag” captures historical events as well as economic and political aspects of daily life in communist Romania, giving the text a documentary character. Stirner’s blunt criticism of Ceauşescu and his regime and his coded language make “Ausreiseantrag” a “text for the drawer.” Wagner’s stylistic devices render “Ausreiseantrag” a politically subversive text that succeeds in unmasking the repressive apparatus of Ceauşescu’s dictatorship and its devastating impact on Romania’s population in general, and on ethnic Germans in particular� Narrated “through the optic of a single consciousness,” “Ausreiseantrag” depicts the bleakest period of Ceauşescu’s dictatorial rule, when food rationing was introduced, and heating gas and electricity blackouts became the rule ( Jackman 158)� During this time, artists and writers were forced to abide by the strict ideological prescriptions of Socialist Realism and to dedicate their works to singing the praises of the “glorious” achievements of the party and of its “beloved leader.” Stirner joins the Communist Party hoping to change something from the inside. Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, though, shows him that socialism is in effect working for the “‘abstract’ human through the systematic destruction of the ‘concrete’ human being: the individual” (Miroiu 107). As the communist regime turns him into a “Regimegegner” and a “Staatsfeind,” Stirner becomes doubly marginalized, as a writer and an ethnic German ( Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld 62). Like many artists and intellectuals in his situation, Stirner first cultivates a split identity separating his public life from his private interests� At his day job, he produces articles that fulfill the Party’s ideological expectations to some extent, while in private he writes “für sich selbst [und] für seine Bücher” (7). Stirner’s desperate efforts to keep his job at a newspaper that subscribes to the Party’s politicized aesthetics and his futile struggle to find a language of expression and an audience for the texts and subjects that interest him are accented by Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 45 the gradual fragmentation of his sense of cultural identity, which is paralleled by his loss of spatial and linguistic mobility. The structure and language of “Ausreiseantrag” masterfully reflect the fragmentation processes, disorientation, and isolation that Stirner experiences. Episodes that depict Stirner’s inner agony alternate with snapshot-like fragments that illustrate the dire material shortages that people around him have to put up with: a woman and her child gather moldy bread from a pile of garbage, people in outdated or worn-out clothes take their Sunday walks among cement apartment complexes, or, like Stirner, stand in endless lines to buy eggs, salami, frozen chickens, and butter. Most of these scenes are brief. Recorded on separate pages with white spaces, they interrupt the narrative that depicts Stirner’s thoughts and actions. Their distinct Verfremdungseffekt emphasizes Stirner’s growing alienation and isolation in the bleak atmosphere of the prison state� Maintaining a split identity becomes problematic as the newspaper increasingly pressures Stirner to produce articles that disseminate the Party ideology� While his boss instructs him on how to write in a manner that would serve the interests of the regime, Stirner is shocked to learn that his texts are supposed to show the achievements of the communist party and work like a “Pille” whose effects should become evident only after the readers swallow it (24). Stirner’s personal drama is intensified by the fact that the regime has occupied both the Romanian and the German languages (41)� While he feels a deep aversion towards Romanian, because as the “Staatssprache” it has become a powerful manipulation instrument of the regime, German, like Romanian, also shows the effects of communist indoctrination. Stirner learns about the alarming extent of the contamination of the German language when Sabine reports her challenges in the Romanian school where she teaches German as a foreign language� Instead of introducing her students to patriotic poems and concepts of the communist jargon like “Planübertreibung” and “Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft,” Sabine teaches words like “Salz,” “Aprikose,” and “Ente” (37). As such, a fellow ethnic German teacher denounces Sabine to the principal complaining that she does not comply with the Party’s ideological prescriptions (37). The deep effect of the communist indoctrination is evident when one of Sabine’s students confronts her defiantly after she skips a patriotic poem: “Genosse Lehrerin, warum haben wir dieses Gedicht übersprungen? ” (38). For a while, Stirner is a tolerated author whose “Selbstzensur” has become like a virus: “Man schreibt, und das Virus schreibt mit. Frißt sich langsam in den Text” (57, 76). Stirner’s books are heavily censored and while other authors whose patriotic poems are published on quality paper, one poem per page, Stirner’s poems are published on cheap paper; several to a page (57). The small number of volumes that Stirner is approved to publish disappear very quickly 46 Anca Luca Holden from the bookstores, which prompts him to wonder if the rumor that the Securitate (the Romanian Secret Police) buys and pulps the books of tolerated authors is in effect true (59). Even if the rumor is false, Stirner is still concerned with who his readers are, since his language and topics reflect only the interests of a small number of nonconformists within the German ethnic minority and an even smaller number of Romanian intellectuals who can read and understand German� Pressed by his boss at the newspaper to write about the achievements of factory workers and peasants, Stirner defies the regulation, an attitude which makes him true to his name “Stirner,” which is a pun on the German idiom “jemandem die Stirn bieten” (Rock, “’From the Periphery’” 126). Attempting to come up with his own topic, Stirner leaves the ideology-infested city to go to a small town in the country, only to discover disturbing evidence of heavy communist indoctrination� Back in the city, Stirner is again under the heavy influence of communist ideology. As a result, he experiences a growing inner paralysis and cultural disorientation, which are illustrated by his decreased linguistic and physical mobility. After he stops writing, Stirner is shown moving minimally within confined spaces such as offices, waiting rooms, small apartments, and restaurants. The only place where he still hopes to engage in vivid intellectual, critical conversations is the House of the Writers� However, when he visits this cultural center, he is struck by the isolationist attitude of his fellow writers: “Alle wollten unter sich bleiben, billig essen und ungestört über ihre Belange reden. Wie in einem Séparée” ( Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld 45). The metaphor of the private room is, in Stirner’s view, symptomatic of the indifference and isolationist attitude prevalent in the entire country: “Das ganze Land schien Stirner aus solchen Séparées zu bestehen� Keiner sah den anderen� Alle sahen auf die Bühne […]. Sie saßen in Séparées, jeder seiner Bedeutung bewußt, und von Séparée zu Séparée gingen wie Kellner die Leute von der Staatssicherheit” (45—46). Stirner’s growing alienation is best illustrated by a surrealist nightmare that is reminiscent of episodes from Kafka’s Der Prozeß. In his nightmare, Stirner finds himself in a “verschachtelte” building in Bucharest, Romania’s capital (42). While desperately trying to find the room where he is scheduled to hold a reading, Stirner is horrified to realize that the building is located in a cemetery. He further discovers in an open tomb a naked couple having sex, and on another grave, he finds parts of his lost luggage from which his manuscript is missing. After looking for the meeting room for a long time, Stirner finally arrives in a room full of people, some of whom he knows, but who do not notice his presence. Their talking is indistinguishable, like a babble and hum of voices, which Stirner cannot make any sense of (42—43). Stirner’s acute linguistic alienation Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 47 is paralleled by his increased spatial disorientation. Like the “Séparées” at the House of the Writers, the layout of this curious room, which has many outlets but no exit, is yet another metaphor for the state in which Stirner feels increasingly as a captive (45—46). Most discouraging for Stirner is the fact that respected writers have turned into “Rädchen im System der allegemeinen Repression” (100). As “Stempelinhaber” and “Unterschriftenmaler” the writing activity of these authors has been reduced to the issuing of reports and denunciations (100)� Unable to produce ideologically suitable material for the newspaper, Stirner is eventually fired. The dismissal letter issued by the editorial desk is syntactically the most fragmented text in “Ausreiseantrag.” This letter illustrates the despicable hypocrisy of Ceauşescu’s regime: dismissed employees were ordered to write their own resignation letters so that there would be no material proof that the institution, and by association the regime, was responsible for the firing. Stirner is no exception; he is also ordered to write his own resignation letter: “Weil Sie. Nicht nachgekommen. Und auch. Nicht. Ihren Aufgaben. Sehen wir. Keine andere. Lösung. Als uns. Von Ihnen. Zu. Trennen. Ab ersten Dezember. Wir stellen Ihnen frei, selber zu kündigen� Wenn Sie das nicht tun, sehen wir uns genötigt. Laut Paragraph. Sie zu entlassen” (70). The unconventional punctuation marked by the numerous periods confer a staccato tone to this passage and are not arbitrarily inserted. Placed after certain words, they show the absurdity of the letter’s content. Unable to find employment, Stirner walks aimlessly through the city streets feeling increasingly alienated and isolated. For a while, he attempts to write about what he sees and hears in the streets� As he watches people and listens in on their conversations, he hopes to find “den Sinn der Welt” but discovers instead “die Gosse in den Köpfen” (75). He listens in on people’s conversations and jokes in Romanian, which he then tries to translate into German (79)� Disappointed, he realizes that the German translations cannot capture the “Reiz” that the Romanian dialogues and jokes have (79). Consequently, as a writer, Stirner feels linguistically and culturally ever more like an “Ausländer” (79). Stirner’s growing linguistic paralysis is further accented by his increased disorientation and decreased physical mobility� His strolls through parks, among apartment complexes, and through the city streets are aimless and monotonous. He is shown walking “wie einer, dem man das Ruder entzogen hat” (73). His alienation is further underscored by the unusual effect that street signs and people have on him: he dreads encounters with friends and acquaintances and thinks that the red stop light for cars is aimed at him (74)� Eventually Stirner’s walking resembles the pacing of an inmate in a small prison cell: “Er ging wie 48 Anca Luca Holden ein Gefangener in jenem rundummauerten Gelaß, aus dem man nichts als den Himmel sah. Man war draußen und sah doch nichts von draußen” (104). Stirner experiences his deepest personal identity crisis in his apartment. While rereading love letters he wrote to Sabine years ago, he cannot recognize the handwriting or the man who wrote the letters (90). His acute linguistic paralysis and physical immobility reach a low point when he fails to use the simplest form of communication - his hands: “Er fing an, Zeichen zu machen, Scherenschnitte, wie in der Kindheit, aber er beherrschte die Spielregeln nicht mehr, und so wurde nichts Erkennbares aus dem, was der Schatten seiner Hand zeigte” (92). Due to his isolation and acute disorientation, Stirner and Sabine quarrel often and are unable to distinguish between living and surviving (105). The nadir of Stirner’s linguistic paralysis, which is also a breakthrough, occurs when Stirner is shown giving a speech that borrows phrases and the format from Ceauşescu’s trademark addresses to Party congresses and meetings. Since this speech is in German and has no explanatory footnotes, readers unfamiliar with Ceauşescu’s rhetoric cannot easily, if at all, recognize Stirner’s scheme. Stirner’s speech opens with Ceauşescu’s traditional address “Liebe Genossen und Freunde” [ dragi tovarăşi şi prieteni ] (130). Like Ceauşescu’s addresses, Stirner’s is an amalgam of empty phrases and slogans like: “Mehr denn je ist es notwendig, alles zu tun, um die internationale Solidarität und Zusammenarbeit all jener zu festigen [. . .] denen das Leben, [. . .] der Frieden teuer sind” (130). Similar to Ceauşescu’s speeches, Stirner’s presentation is interrupted by comments like “Starker Beifall” or “Hochrufe und starker Beifall” that are set in parentheses (130, 131). These phrases are literal translations of comments in Romanian like ovaţii şi aplauze puternice that TV anchors and journalists used to describe the allegedly “joyous” atmosphere at the Party meetings and congresses where Ceauşescu gave his speeches. Unlike Ceauşescu, however, Stirner interrupts his own speech with requests for alcoholic drinks. Stirner weaves comments and observations into Ceauşescu’s speech that contradict and criticize the dictator’s empty rhetoric� Stirner’s speech ends with a short summary of Ceauşescu’s falsified political biography, which presents the “glorious leader” as Romania’s most deserving hero. Curiously though, the last phrase of this pseudo-biography, “Die Beisetzung erfolgt heute, um sechzehn Uhr, auf dem Friedhof an der Lippaer Straße,” is a funeral announcement for Ceauşescu, which gives poignant expression to a unanimous desire - the dictator’s death (136). The abrupt change of scenery that occurs after the funeral announcement is marked by two sentences: “Plötzlich spürte Stirner die Stille. Er stand allein auf dem Bahnhofsplatz” (136). This sudden change of scenery indicates that Stirner’s speech was imagined (136). While his speech is a breakthrough from his previous linguistic paralysis Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 49 as Stirner succeeds in mocking Ceauşescu and the regime, he cannot publicly express the thoughts he imagined, and remains caught in a deep cultural and linguistic paralysis� The last scene in “Ausreiseantrag” depicts Stirner reflecting on the economic ordeal that awaits him and Sabine in the approaching winter. His bitter recognition of the submissive lethargy which oppression has produced in the Romanian people prompts him to type an application letter to leave “[d]as schweigende Land” (137). The last three sentences of “Ausreiseantrag” constitute the three opening sentences of Stirner’s letter to the passport and visa service, in which he and Sabine apply for an exit visa to emigrate to West Germany: “Wir stellen hiermit den Antrag zur endgültigen Ausreise. Unsere Gründe sind” (137). Although Stirner does not list the reasons why he and Sabine want to leave Romania permanently, the text of “Ausreiseantrag” has done just that. “Begrüßungsgeld,” the sequel to “Ausreiseantrag,” depicts Stirner and Sabine in West Germany, where they discover that their claim to “German” identity is contested. Categorized as foreigners due to their accent and antiquated vocabulary, they must demonstrate, perform, and defend their “Germanness.” Titled after the welcome stipend offered by the government to Aussiedler , “Begrüßungsgeld” marks the protagonists’ transition into a new society, in which money is one of the predominant factors that shape interhuman relationships (Rock, “’From the Periphery’” 126). Scenes in immigration and naturalization offices and in various locations in Berlin intermingle with the narrator’s flashbacks of Timişoara and his Banat-Swabian village. The loose narratives in the first and third person intermingle with poems in prose, vignettes, and scenes that have no apparent narrator� A few fragments told in the second person, which is also Stirner, further fracture the narrative in “Begrüßungsgeld.” The fact that the three narrative voices stand for one person is indicative of an acute identity crisis which has caused a deep breakup of the self. Thus the fragments of these three voices reflect Stirner’s profound linguistic and cultural disorientation and his painstaking journey to redefine his cultural identity and reinvent himself as a writer� Although Stirner left Romania with a clear sense that he is German, West German society contests his claim to “German” identity due to conflicting conceptualizations of “Germanness”: while immigration officials perceive Stirner as an Aussiedler , the locals treat him as a foreigner� Stirner is haunted for a while by flashbacks and surrealist nightmares, and the fear of being reached by the Securitate : “Wir haben einen langen Arm. Wir erreichen dich überall” is the threat that he cannot easily shake off ( Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld 161). The eerie feeling that they are on a journey back to the past is intensified when Stirner and Sabine stroll through the immigration building. The narrow hallways and 50 Anca Luca Holden small waiting rooms filled with people waiting silently to have their number called remind Stirner of the somber atmosphere in the buildings of the Securitate and the passport and visa service� But while Romanian authorities recognize Stirner and Sabine’s claims to German identity, German immigration officials do not. Consequently, they are subjected to a series of interviews that span over several months, during which they must prove, perform, and defend their German identity. Thus, like other ethnic German immigrants, Stirner quickly discovers the “Heimatlosigkeit im Deutschen,” because “das Deutsche war bloß aus der Entfernung eine Sicherheit gewesen” (177). During the long and harsh interviews, the immigration officials grow increasingly irritated with Stirner and Sabine because they do not fit the traditional profile of the Aussiedler : they speak and write German, left Romania for political reasons not family reunification, and would not use the collaboration of their families with the Nazi regime as proof of their Germanness (179)� Fragments of these interviews intermingle with flashbacks of Stirner’s interrogations conducted by Party and Securitate members, revealing striking similarities� Like the Securitate , German immigration clerks are cold and intimidating: “Der Beamte fragte, und wenn er nicht gleich Antwort bekam, wiederholte er seine Frage sehr laut. Stirner sah ihn erstaunt an” (141). Moreover, Stirner finds “Beamtendeutsch” akin to “Behördenrumänisch” because both are difficult to make sense of (143)� Terrifying nightmares in which he is back in Romania being interrogated, threatened, and humiliated by the Securitate and Party members, intensify the rejection he feels from German authorities. The terror he experiences at night extends to the day, for he cannot shake off the feeling that he is watched and followed when he walks in the streets and the hallway of his apartment� Afraid that a bomb might be hidden in his apartment, he develops the routine of first turning the door key and then hiding from the door (187). While the West German accent and vocabulary reflect a reality unfamiliar to Stirner, so are his distinct accent and pronunciation, use of archaic terms and expressions, and behavior to the people around him. Consequently, Stirner is often taken for a foreigner or a Romanian who has learned German and is occasionally asked if he is Swiss (184)� Given the hostile treatment of the immigration authorities, the terrifying feeling that he is continually followed by the Securitate, and the fact that he can only minimally function in the new German language and culture, Stirner experiences a deep personal and cultural identity crisis, which is paralleled by his desperate efforts to reinvent himself as a writer. While Sabine finds a job as a substitute teacher and can receive government aid, Stirner’s hopes to make a living as a writer are bleak� Nonetheless, he strives to become an insider by imitating the language of the “Germans” around him. Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 51 Yet, Stirner’s estrangement continues to grow: “Er kam sich vor wie aus der Handlung vertrieben. Er machte weiterhin mit, aber er spielte keine Rolle” (168). For a while, he writes about himself as the protagonist in the new environment: “Neben Stirner ist immer noch eine Person. Es ist Stirner, der Protagonist. Stirner geht die Straße entlang, und er sieht sich die Straße entlaggehen. Stirner denkt nach, und er schaut sich dabei unauffällig zu” (168). But more than providing him with a protagonist, the doubling of the self, in which one self acts and the other observes and writes is indicative of the deep identity crisis he is undergoing. Despite his efforts, Stirner cannot shake off the impression that everything is concealed from him and that he is like a hose through which events just shoot (204). As such, he feels as though he were in “Niemandsland,” where the only thing that he can claim as his own is his language: “Er war jetzt mit seiner Sprache allein” (159). Since he was living in a present that has no roots for him, everything, including language, seems both mysterious and frightening (195)� While he tries to write about the new country, Stirner also revisits the old one. Thus, he picks up unfinished pieces he started in Romania. Particularly interesting is a four-line story about a nameless woman who, for years, wanted to leave the country� Since she cannot do so, she is waiting for her death� In the short commentary that follows, Stirner debates with himself as to the reason he left the piece unfinished. This debate seems at first incoherent because it features two different voices: Stirner’s and that of his accuser. The emergence of the accuser who addresses Stirner with “du” is signaled by the sentence: “Er hatte gerade die Faust gegen sich erhoben,” which indicates yet another doubling of the self (153-54). After Stirner realizes that “es war Feigheit gewesen, nichts als Feigheit,” and that “er hätte das alles damals schreiben müssen,” the second “self” sharply snaps at him: “Du redest von dir wie ein Besserwisser, aber es nützt dir nichts� Du hast dich aus einem Leben davongemacht, mach es wenigstens mit diesem besser” (153—54). Following this accusation, Stirner suddenly thinks he hears the woman in the story talking to him� He can now continue the story� What follows is a dialogue between him and the imaginary woman which then turns into another dialogue with himself: “Er redete mit sich. Er redete von sehr weit her� Von einem anderen Ort� Dieser Ort entfernte sich, manchmal war er sehr nah” (154). Stirner’s attempts to write about his new environment also intertwine with episodes from his life during Ceauşescu’s regime, particularly his encounters with members of the Securitate, the Party, and the visa and customs service� These evocations are further entangled with episodes that involve the Banat Swabians’ collaboration with the Nazi regime and their deportation to the Soviet Union. Yet, while he is still dealing with the damaging effects of his traumatizing experiences with the Securitate , Stirner is drawn back to Romania by his 52 Anca Luca Holden interest in the events that followed his emigration. Thus, during a short visit in East Berlin, he buys all the issues he can find of the only Romanian newspapers available at a newsstand (171)� He listens to the Romanian dissident radio station Radio Free Europe, asks for news from his friends in Bucharest, and, when he accidently hears people speaking Romanian in various locations in Berlin, he eavesdrops on their conversations. Interestingly, unlike in “Ausreiseantrag,” where Stirner translates into German dialogues in Romanian that he hears in the street, in “Begrüßungsgeld” he records entire sentences directly in Romanian without translating them (217). For example, in a restaurant he overhears a woman talking on the phone in Romanian using slang phrases like “astias sonati,” meaning “these [guys] are crazy” (217). As if interested only in the sound of the language, Stirner leaves out the diacritical marks and ignores grammatical rules when rendering such phrases in writing: “astias sonati” should be spelled ăştia-s sonaţi. The love-hate attitude he has for Romania is also reflected in his relationship with the Romanian language: “Es war eine ferne Sprache in ihm, gegen die er sich zu sperren suchte, die er aber insgeheim wünschte” (195). The thought that this country would somehow vanish from his memory, something many of his fellow ethnic German immigrants hope for, horrifies Stirner because: “Ob [Rumänien] irgendwann völlig verschwinden wird? Wer aber bin ich dann, fragte sich Stirner? ” (178). Nonetheless, Stirner is sure of one thing: he is not Romanian. When a Romanian exile newspaper invites him to write an article in Romanian, Stirner refuses categorically, because, as he explains, “er [ist] ein deutscher Schriftsteller” (178). Likewise, when an editor assumes that the manuscript that he submitted was translated from Romanian into German, he immediately explains: “Ach nein, es war ja deutsch geschrieben” (205). But if German society questions and refutes his claim to German identity and if he denies that he is Romanian, who is Stirner? And what and who determines his cultural identity? As the development of Stirner’s identity as a writer shows, the answer to these questions ultimately lies with Stirner because he is the one who determines who he is. He does so by negotiating his experiences with the Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German languages and cultures� He is marked but not defined by his family’s involvement with the Nazis, the oppression of the communist regime in Romania, and the hostile treatment he receives in West Germany. Consequently, instead of trying to delete from his memory everything linked to Romania, he welcomes the reemergence in his thoughts of Romanian “nackte, schutzlose Wörter der Kindheit und der Jugend” (257). Rather than clinging only to his “mitgebrachte” German language, Stirner chooses, though not without struggling, to change it by appropriating certain aspects of West Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 53 German language that further his development as a writer. The tension of this choice is evident in the following passage: Es gab Wörter, über die er sich wunderte. Er murmelte sie öfter vor sich hin, als wollte er sie auswendig lernen. Andere Wörter fand er abstoßend, ich werde sie nie aussprechen können, dachte er. Aber nach einem halben Jahr sprach er sie trotzdem aus […]. Er entfernte sich von seiner deutschen Sprache, er näherte sich einer anderen deutschen Sprache� (195) Determined to construct his own cultural identity, Stirner eventually gives up on changing his Banat-Swabian accent, because he concludes, “[i]ch muß mich mit meiner Biografie abfinden” (184). Moreover, he is not troubled anymore by the term “exile” (245). In time, Stirner is gradually able to distinguish German dialects, which is further proof of Stirner’s “Sich-Zurecht-Findens” (256). But perhaps the most important sign that he is growing more at peace with the development of his cultural identity is the fact that Stirner can write again with ease about his new environment: “Er konnte wieder schreiben, er war wieder zu Beobachtungen fähig. Was er sah konnte er jetzt auch wieder einordnen […], daß er wieder schreiben konnte, machte ihn ruhiger” (269). This is the case when he writes about an episode in which he is traveling on a train from West to East Berlin with a GDR couple and two West Germans� At this rare meeting between three types of “Germans,” Stirner offers several remarkable insights. First, he quickly realizes that the West German man was evaluating the others’ “Germanness”: “[D]er alte Herr betrachtete die beiden DDR-Bürger mal als Repräsentanten ihres Staates, mal als Inländer, als Deutsche” (263). Unlike on previous occasions, Stirner does not seem to be bothered by the fact that neither the West nor the East Germans talk with him: “Stirner war Ausländer. Stirner war Luft” (263). Yet, he is an insider to the conversation that he is not asked to be part of� Having lived in a communist state, Stirner, unlike the two West Germans, can easily decode the information that the GDR couple is purposefully leaving out from their conversation in order to hide, among other compromising aspects, their involvement with the Free German Youth (260—64). Stirner’s detailed description of the scene and dialogue are accompanied by sharp criticism and sarcastic comments unveiling the truth behind the carefully orchestrated pretense of innocence that the GDR couple puts up. The remarkable aspect about Stirner as the “silent” participant/ witness is that even though he cannot orally demonstrate that he is an insider, he can do so in writing� As people start showing interest in his past, Stirner realizes, albeit reluctantly, that his experiences make good material for stories (269). Feeling pushed to the edge of his stories, Stirner remarks with a trace of bitterness that: “Der 54 Anca Luca Holden Rand meiner Erlebnisse ist keine Erzählung, der Rand meiner Erlebnisse bin ich” (269). Thus, although Stirner has succeeded in constructing a personalized German cultural identity without isolating himself from or assimilating into mainstream West German culture, society still places him at the “periphery.” Stirner, like Wagner, succeeds, in time, to reinvent himself as a German-language writer by negotiating a triangular cultural identity which combines elements of Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and West German languages and cultures� Thus, Stirner’s, and implicitly, Wagner’s experiences as an ethnic German in communist Romania and, what I would call, an “Ortwechsler” in West Germany document the linguistic, political, and cultural challenges and transformations that question concepts of a homogenous German language, culture, nation, and identity. By exposing the processes of exclusion through which homogeneity is articulated, Wagner and his characters contest cultural definitions of “Germanness” based on biological, territorial, and state-centered concepts (O’Donnell et al� 9) and criticize communist and capitalist politics and tactics of marginalization against ethnic Germans� Even so, Wagner and his characters continue to struggle with the lingering shadow of their harrowing experiences in communist Romania years after Ceauşescu’s demise. However, thanks to his innovative literary techniques and unique modes of writing, Wagner succeeds in his texts to articulate the traumatic effects of the tyranny and terror of the totalitarian regime both on the individual and on society and thus give voice to the voiceless, and to create artistic landscapes that can enhance our understanding of the communist era and the politics of the bureaucratic and immigration systems in Eastern and Western Europe and put them into historical perspective� Notes 1 Immigration officials and society challenged and contested the “Germanness” of ethnic Germans from Romania. Aussiedler or Heimkehrer, German-Romanians tried to convince the locals that they belonged to the German cultural space and explain why they are different than foreign immigrants. Still, both locals and foreigners rejected this “Sonderstatus,” which they often saw as a manifestation of arrogance (Wagner, “Sprachdesaster” 346). 2 Wagner’s cultural imaginary of Germany is akin to Friedrich Meinecke’s definition of “Kulturnation,” outlined in his 1908 book Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat which is “based on accepted and shared cultural and religious goods - such as a common language” (Kremer, “Transitions of a Myth? ” 55). The German language, Wagner contends, “war nicht nur meine Muttersprache, sondern auch die Sprache meines kulturellen Selbstverständ- Language, Cultural Identity, and the Politics of Marginalization 55 nisses” (qtd. in Rock, “‘A German Comes Home‘” 55). While Romania was for Wagner “der Staat” from which he and the German ethnic minority felt distant, he always had a territorial relationship with his native Banat region that he does not have with Germany, the state, since, he argues: “In Ostmitteleuropa sind die Regionen wichtiger als die Staaten, sie sind auch älter als sie. Für die Minderheit ist es selbstverständlich, sich zuerst mit der Region zu identifizieren“ (qtd. in Rock, “‘A German Comes Home‘” 67). 3 Like Wagner, Herta Müller feels the same tension: “ich [kann] in Deutschland nie dazugehören und ich [kann] aus Deutschland nicht weggehen” (Müller 30)� Works Cited Csejka, Gerhardt. “Über den Anfang. Betrachtungen die neuere deutsche Lyrik in Rumänien betreffend.” Neue Literatur 5 (1970): 16—19. —.-“Bedingtheiten der rumäniendeutschen Literatur.” Reflexe. Ed� Emmerich Reichrath� Bukarest: Kriterion, 1997. 45—54. Cooper, Thomas. “Herta Müller: Beneath Myths of Belonging.” The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe. Ed. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. 475—96. Jackman, Graham. “‘Alone in a Crowd: ’ The Figure of the ‘ Aussiedler ’ in the Work of Richard Wagner.” Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic. Ed. David Rock and Stefan Wolff. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002. 157—70. Kremer, Arndt. “Transitions of a Myth? The Idea of a Language-Defined Kulturnation in Germany.” New German Review 27.1 (2016): 53—75. Miroiu, Mihaela. “From Pseudo-Power to Lack of Power.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1994): 107—10. Motzan, Peter. “Die vielen Wege in den Abschied.” Wortreiche Landschaft. Ed� Renate Florstedt. Leipzig: BlickPunktBuch, 1998. 108—16. Müller, Herta. “Und noch erschrickt unser Herz.” Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel � Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991. 19—38. Neau, Patrice. “Von Auszug der Dichter. Zur Problematik des ‘Ortswechsels’ bei den rumänien-deutschen Autoren.” Migrationsliteratur. Schreibweise einer interkulturellen Moderne. Ed� Klaus Schenk, Almut Todorow and Milan Tvrdík� Tübingen: Francke, 2005. 129—41. O’Donnell, Krista, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin. “Introduction.” The Heimat Abroad : The Boundaries of Germanness. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. 1—14. Rock, David. “‘From the Periphery to the Centre and Back Again: ’ An Introduction to the Life and Works of Richard Wagner.” Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic. Ed� David Rock and Stefan Wolff. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002. 121—38. 56 Anca Luca Holden —.- “‘A German Comes Home to Germany’: Richard Wagner’s Journey from the Banat to Berlin, from the Periphery to the Centre.” Neighbors and Strangers. Ed� Ian Foster and Juliet Wigmore. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi. 55—71. Solms, Wilhelm, ed� Nachruf auf die rumäniendeutsche Literatur. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990� Wagner, Richard� Ausreiseantrag. Begrüßungsgeld. Frankfurt a�M�: Luchterhand, 1991� —.-“Lehrjahre eines Immigranten: Über den Versuch, in einem anderen Land anzukommen.” Neue Züricher Zeitung 11 Dec� 2004: 45� —.-“Die Aktionsgruppe Banat.” Nachruf auf die rumäniendeutsche Literatur. Ed� Wilhelm Solms. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. 121—29. —.-“Sprachdesaster und Identitätsfalle. Der Schriftsteller als Rumäniendeutscher.” Orbis Linguarum 26 (2004): 345—51. Refugees Past and Present: Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich Brangwen Stone The University of Sydney Abstract: This article focuses on two 2017 novels touching on themes of flight, migration and displacement written by former Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) from the Soviet Union: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern � While the former novel intertwines a narrative of gender transition in Istanbul with the protagonist Ali’s experience as a quota refugee and his family history, the latter focuses on two Syrian refugees who flee to Germany. Drawing on both Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, this article explores how these two novels draw parallels between present suffering and discrimination and German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish history, and simultaneously attempt to evoke empathy for those marginalized in the present day� Keywords: Kontingentflüchtling, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, refugee, multidirectional memory In 2015, the movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe, which had increased after the so-called “Arab Spring,” 1 reached its peak� In late summer 2015, Angela Merkel opened German borders at a time when many neighboring countries did not, and Germany briefly relished the international community’s admiration of its “welcome culture.” Yet this “halcyon moment” was not to last (Sieg, “Refugees”). Merkel soon began to face criticism both domestically and internationally, and in the 2017 federal elections the right-wing AfD ( Alternative für Deutschland ) party won 12.6 percent of the vote with a campaign platform largely based on opposition to immigration (Mudde)� While the bulk of refugees currently arriving in Germany come from the Middle East, especially from Syr- 58 Brangwen Stone ia, many refugees who settled in Germany in the twentieth century came from Eastern Europe. They arrived in Germany in several waves as a result of war and political turmoil, the most recent wave following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent conflicts in Eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia, in the 1990s. Writing about the “Osterweiterung” of German-language literature in 2008 - the same year that Brigid Haines observed an “eastern turn” (Haines 138) - Irmgard Ackermann argued that “die Literatur [braucht] längere Zeit, oft erheblich längere Zeit, zur Aufarbeitung der historischen Ereignisse” (Ackermann 13)� Though it might take a number of years for the refugees recently arrived in Germany to start writing and publishing in German, the current so-called “refugee crisis” and its attendant narratives of flight, trauma, and resettlement were almost immediately reflected in German-language literature. 2 A number of writers of Eastern European background with personal experience of flight have publically commented on parallels between their fates and those of the recent arrivals, and some have published literary works touching on themes of flight, migration, and displacement. Thus, Herta Müller, for instance, wrote a short piece published in the tabloid Bild newspaper in August 2015, entitled “Ich war auch ein Flüchtling,” in which she declared she had been a refugee too, and reminded of the many who had fled from both Nazi Germany and Eastern European dictatorships (Müller)� 3 In 2016, Saša Stanišić, who fled Bosnia as a teenager during the war, published a collection of short stories entitled Fallensteller , several of which feature Syrian refugees. The same year, Julya Rabinowich, an Austrian-Jewish author of Russian origin, published Dazwischen: Ich , a youth novel centering on a fifteen-year-old female refugee. A year later, the Bulgarian-German Ilja Trojanow reflected on his own experiences and flight generally in Nach der Flucht (2017)� This article will focus on two 2017 novels touching on themes of flight, migration, and displacement written by former Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) from the Soviet Union: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern � While the former novel intertwines a narrative of gender transition in Istanbul with the protagonist Ali’s experience as a quota refugee from Moscow and his family history, the latter focuses on two Syrian refugees who flee to Germany. Drawing on both Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, I will explore how these two novels draw parallels between present suffering and discrimination and German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish history, and simultaneously attempt to evoke empathy for those marginalized in the present day� I argue that placing narratives of Soviet anti-Semitism alongside present day anti-transgender violence in Außer sich , and interweaving the Refugees Past and Present 59 experiences of Syrian refugees with allusions to and citations of literary narratives of those fleeing Nazi persecution in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , represents what Rothberg calls “complex acts of solidarity” (Rothberg, Multi-directional Memory 11). I contend moreover that narrating such experiences, and drawing such parralels, is an attempt to establish empathy with those marginalized in the present day by making their experiences intelligible and thus bringing them “under the rubric of the ‘human’” (Butler, Precarious Life 46). The two authors are almost the same age and share similar backgrounds: Grjasnowa was born in 1984 in Azerbaijan, where she grew up as part of the Russian minority, and arrived in Germany in 1995, while Salzmann was born in Volgograd in 1985, grew up in Moscow, and came to Germany in 1996. Furthermore, both writers were part of a group of approximately 200,000 Kontinengentflüchtlinge , also called Kontingent-Juden , who emigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union between the early 1990s and 2005, when new restrictions were introduced� 4 This wave of emigration reshaped and revived the Jewish community in Germany, and more than 90 percent of Jews in Germany now stem from the former Soviet Union (Belkin). Wladimer Kaminer, who arrived in Germany in his twenties, and “put Russian-German literature on the map,” was the first quota refugee to become well known as a German-language author in the early 2000s and also to comically thematize the experience of quota refugees both in the Soviet Union and on arrival in Germany (Biendarra 212). Like Kaminer in Russendisko before Salzmann humorously addresses both the fact that many of those now arriving in Germany as quota refugees were not previously practicing Jews, and the cultural insensitivity of the German authorities in their provision for the new arrivals: Sie waren alle mit dem Eintrag “Kontingentflüchtling” in ihren Papieren gekommen, was hieß, dass sie in Familienstammbäumen nach jüdischen Ästen gesucht hatten, und wer keine fand, der erfand sich welche, je nach Inhalt des Portemonnaies� Man tat alles, um das geliebte Sowjetland zu verlassen, man war sogar bereit, Jude zu werden. [. . .] Viele konnten nicht essen, was in die Kantine gekarrt wurde, das war vor der Zeit, als man darauf kam, man müsste der Mischpoche, die mit dem Emigrationsgr- und “Jude” ins Land gekommen war, vielleicht koscheres Essen anbieten. (Salzmann 108—09) In the years since Kaminer first became an acclaimed author, a number of other quota refugees, including Alina Bronsky and Lena Gorelik, have also emerged as writers� 5 As Maria Roca Lizarazu notes, these more recent arrivals “no longer centre their writing on the Holocaust but tackle the issues surrounding transnational Jewish identities in modern-day Germany” (Lizarazu 169). Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff speculate that this shift may be explained by the fact that 60 Brangwen Stone “[f]or many Jewish authors from the former Soviet Union, Stalinist terror, the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Communist regimes, and the interethnic conflicts following the collapse of those regimes are more immediate historical reference points than the Holocaust” (Mueller and Garloff, “Introduction” 7—8). Außer sich , which was nominated for the German Book Prize and received a number of other prizes, is Salzmann’s first novel, but the author has been a successful and prizewinning playwright for a number of years� Ali, born as Alissa, the central protagonist and main narrator of Außer sich , arrives in Turkey to search for his missing twin brother, Anton, who sent a postcard from Istanbul only bearing his mother’s address, leaving the other side blank, “kein Text, kein Gruß” (Salzmann 87). In Istanbul, Ali is taken under the wings of Cemal, the uncle of his best friend and sometimes lover, Elyas, who has stayed behind in Berlin. Soon after arriving in Istanbul, Ali meets the transgender Ukranian dancer Katho, formerly Katüscha, still in the process of transition, with whom he begins a relationship. As Ali becomes more and more embroiled in questions about his own identity, he also delves into his past and the past of his family in “Odessa, Czernowitz, Grosny, Wolgograd, Moskau, Deutschland” reaching back three generations, and exploring different periods of Soviet history and the harsh realities of migration in the process (Salzmann 144)� Eventually, Ali also starts injecting himself with testosterone bought on the black market, turning every day more and more into his absent twin brother, and exchanging the pronoun “she” for the pronoun “he.” 6 Ali and family were, like Salzmann, quota refugees, who emigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union. On moving to Germany, the family exchanged generations of anti-Semitic discrimination - particularly harshly felt by Ali’s great-grandparents Etinka and Schura who were banned from practicing as doctors in Stalin-era Russia - for anti-Russian slurs� Shortly before Ali came to Turkey, the father, whom Ali’s mother Valja had left a few years earlier, had committed suicide. He had thrown himself off a balcony following a short-lived attempt to return to live in Russia ended after he was swindled out of his parents’ apartment (Salzmann 254—56, 296). Valja darkly says, “Migration tötet, es klang wie eine Warnung auf einer Zigarettenschachtel: Migration fügt Ihnen und den Menschen in Ihrer Umgebung erheblichen Schaden zu” (Salzmann 297), but as Ali ventures into the family’s past and remembers his own childhood, it becomes clear that the parents were no happier in Russia than in Germany� Gott ist nicht schüchtern is Grjasnowa’s third novel, and she has already built a reputation as a migrant literary success story with her two previous novels� Her first novel, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt 7 , was published in 2012 and Refugees Past and Present 61 won both the Klaus Michael Kühne Prize and the Anna Seghers Prize� Her second novel, Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe , was published in 2014 and was awarded a Chamisso Prize the following year, which is the third last year that this prize for German-language authors of non-German origins was awarded� Both these novels were adapted for the stage by the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, where Salzmann is author in residence� The third-person narration of Gott ist nicht schüchtern centers on two main Syrian protagonists: the actress Amal and the doctor Hammoudi. The novel traces their lives in Syria during the revolution, their flight to Western Europe along different routes, and their life on arrival in Germany. Grjasnowa acknowledges that these two characters are privileged in having the money to make their way to Europe: “Es ist der Mittelstand, der flieht, die Armen bleiben in den Flüchtlingslagern zurück” (Grjasnowa 242). The two central protagonist’s narratives, occasionally interrupted with brief digressions to trace other characters’ fates, are told separately for most of the novel. They are acquaintances in Syria and meet a few times before they flee. The bulk of the novel is devoted to their experiences as dissidents in Syria, as they suffer persecution and torture, and their grueling flight to Europe during which both survive as many of their fellow refugees die� After Amal and her boyfriend Youssef’s boat sinks, and the survivors drift in the ocean, Amal is entrusted with the baby Amina by its tired mother, and when they are rescued while the mother is not, they pass themselves off as a married couple and claim Amina as their own� Both Amal and Hammoudi end up in Berlin, but go separate ways� While Hammoudi spends his days listlessly wandering the streets, Amal becomes a TV cook, and “[w]enn sie Essen zubereitet, beschwört sie Erinnerungen herauf, nicht nur ihre eigenen, sondern auch die der Menschen, die sie die jeweiligen Gerichte gelehrt hatten, und die der Generationen zuvor” (Grjasnowa 295). The title of this TV show - “Mein Flüchtling kocht” - seems to satirize both the well-meaning condescension of Germans towards refugees and the use of food as shorthand for transcultural acceptance� Elsewhere in the novel too, Grjasnowa ironically evokes food as a metaphor for multiculturalism, “that arch cliché of capitalist pluralism“ (Sieg, Ethnic Drag 138), as Hammoudi and his fellow refugees bribe a police officer at the Serbian-Hungarian border: “Der ranghöchste Offizier nimmt das Geld entgegen, er sieht fröhlich aus und blickt seine Gefangenen neugierig an, als würde er sagen wollen, nehmt es nicht persönlich, auch ich esse gerne Hummus” (Grjasnowa 271). Towards the end of the novel, the fates of the two central protagonists intersect again, when they recognize each other in front of a supermarket on Sonnenallee (in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln) and begin a brief affair that ends 62 Brangwen Stone when Hammoudi is moved to a refugee hostel in the countryside. They stay in contact for a while, but eventually Amal stops answering Hammoudi’s messages. Hammoudi dies when a “Dorfnazi” throws a small homemade bomb through the window of his room (Grjasnowa 306). On a flight to Los Angeles to film a pilot for a cooking show, Amal awakes suddenly, “[s]ie hat von Hammmoudi geträumt und ein ungutes Gefühl macht sich in ihr breit” (Grjasnowa 307). Looking out the window she sees the endless blue surface of the Atlantic, and “das Wasser löst in Amal ein Ekelgefühl aus, sie kann das Meer plötzlich riechen und die Kälte in ihren Gliedern fühlen” (Grjasnowa 307). She vomits into a paper bag and resolves to call Hammoudi as soon as she has arrived in Los Angeles� In fact she does not, instead she calls her mother Svetlana in Russia to tell her the truth about her daughter Amina and of not being able to bear the Ocean anymore� Amal immediately books another flight back to Berlin, and requests a seat as far away from the window as possible. She flies back to Berlin on the same plane she arrived on, and the novel ends with the prosaic line, “Eine neue Besatzung kam an Bord” (Grjasnowa 309). This ending signifies Amal’s decision to grapple with the truth about Amina’s parentage, rather than moving to the United States to ensure that there is even less of a chance that anyone will ever find out as Youssef wants to (Grjasnowa 303). The decision against secrecy seems informed by the revelation in recent years both of her father’s second secret family, and the realization that her mother had not, as her father pretended all these years, cut of all contact with her children, but that he had made letters and parcels disappear, and even managed to prevent her from entering Syria twice despite a valid visa (Grjasnowa 297)� Yet the ending is also freighted both with Hammoudi’s death at the hands of a Neonazi - which Amal has not yet learnt of - and the continuing bodily effect that the trauma of fleeing Syria has on Amal. Using Grjasnowa’s writing as one of his examples, Stuart Taberner argues that in the work of a number of German-language authors of Russian-Jewish backgrounds Russian(-Jewish) protagonists interact almost solely with other recent migrants and secondor third-generation Turkish-Germans noting that this intensifies the “vague linkage between ‘things Jewish’ and ‘things Turkish’” that Leslie Adelson noted in 2000 (Taberner, “Possibilities and Pitfalls” 920). Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz also reference Adelson when remarking that “[m] uch of the discourse since the 1970s connecting migrants to the Nazi past has proceeded via the analogy ‘The Turks are the new Jews’ - meant critically by some and threateningly by others” (Yildiz and Rothberg 40). While Grjasnowa’s most recent novel shifts away from a Russian-Jewish protagonist to two Syrian protagonists (though there are still traces of this heritage as will be discussed later), in Salzmann’s novel this nexus is clear and the link becomes almost fa- Refugees Past and Present 63 milial in the form of the Turkish Cemal who becomes the nurturing accepting parent that Ali’s Russian-Jewish parents are not. Like the Stadtmütter project in Neukölln that Rothberg and Yildiz discuss, Salzmann’s novel opens “very different lines of affiliation and historical connection” (Yildiz and Rothberg 40). In both novels, the characters speak several languages and resist being defined by national identities. Salzmann’s Ali, who is transgender and feels neither German nor Russian, illustrates Jessica Berman’s argument that “[h]owever represented on our passports or other identity cards, our bodies often slide between and among the categories of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century citizenship, resisting and, at times, we hope, remaking, in a kind of catachresis, the forms and values of gendered national identity” (Berman 235). Ali has a German passport and is able to travel freely and legally, though his passage through immigration in Istanbul is briefly delayed by the fact he no longer presents as female (Salzmann 15—16), while Grjasnowa’s Syrian Hammoudi becomes trapped in Syria when the authoritarian government decides not to renew his passport, and his elite cosmopolitan existence as a doctor in Paris with a French girlfriend is suddenly taken from him� In Außer sich , Cemal‘s family, who has taken Ali under his wing, suggests that he join them in Germany after an attempted military coup, but he refuses: “Wenn man [ein Land] hat, kann man es nicht verlassen. Das schleppt man immer mit. [. . .] Das alles konnte ich nicht nachvollziehen damals, ich hatte keine Ahnung, was das heißt, ein Land zu haben” (Salzmann 361). Ali’s attitude to nation - he cannot identify with the feeling of belonging to a particular nation - mirrors the findings of ethnographer Regina Römhild that migrants in Germany, especially younger migrants, increasingly “refuse to define themselves in the territorialized terms of the nation states. And by creating transnational, imaginary homes of their own, they are slipping out of the hold of the nation state, both that of their family’s origins and that of their residence” (Römhild). One aspect that complicates national belonging for migrants such as Ali is collective memory, as it is integral to national identity, particularly in the German case. Rothberg coined the term “multidirectional memory” to describe “the dialogic emergence of hybrid memories in transnational and multicultural contexts” (Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory” 125) arguing that rather than competing, and threatening to erase one another, memories of different traumatic histories can coexist and resonate with each other. Rothberg and Yildiz apply this concept in the context of migrants in Germany, exploring the interplay between memory of the Holocaust and migrant memories (Yildiz and Rothberg)� In some recent German novels featuring refugees, memory of the German national past is similarly placed alongside memory of the refugees’ experiences. This includes Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen ging gegangen in which the narrator 64 Brangwen Stone frequently draws parallels between the fates of the refugees he meets and the German past (Stone). But other texts have also placed memories of earlier flight alongside the experiences of recent refugees. Furthermore, Mueller and Garloff note that German-Jewish authors of Eastern European background “often establish connections between oppression and violence in different geographical locations, including Eastern Europe” (Mueller and Garloff, “Introduction” 8). In Grjasnowa’s earlier novel Birken , for instance, the link between past and present suffering is more explicit, and Stuart Taberner argues that central protagonist “Mascha’s internalization of her grandmother’s story of displacement and dispossession during the Nazi genocide enables her empathetic identification with those traumatized in the present” (Taberner, Transnationalism 121)� He further suggests that the way in which the novel connects German, Middle-Eastern and Eastern-European pasts and presents undermines the “parochialism of the nation, and indeed national narratives” (Taberner, “Possibilities and Pitfalls” 926). Both Grjasnowa and Salzmann have specifically drawn parallels between the narratives of displacement in their novels and their personal and familial history in interviews, and Salzmann goes so far as to label Außer sich “autobiographische Fiktion” (May). Salzmann’s multigenerational story of life and suffering follows a general trend in German literature identified by Lizarazu towards the multigenerational or family novel (Lizarazu 169). The novel has similarities to other recent long novels exploring the multigenerational history of a family in Eastern Europe, such as Nino Haratschwili’s Das achte Leben , or Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam as Mariupol . Yet although Salzmann follows the “familiar framework” of third generation narrators exploring their family’s history “from a position of belatedness,” the narrative of gender transition in the present day, to which a sizeable part of the narrative is devoted, distinguishes Außer sich from these multigenerational novels (Lizarazu 169). In Grjasnowa’s novel, on the other hand, personal family history is less evident� Yet talking to Die Welt , Grjasnowa first emphasizes, before any discussion of either her Syrian husband or her personal experience as a quota refugee, that she grew up with the story of her Jewish grandmother’s flight, saying: Als sie vierzehn war, ist der Zweite Weltkrieg ausgebrochen� Sie und ihr Bruder waren die einzigen Überlebenden einer großen jüdischen Familie. Sie flohen von Weißrussland nach Baku. Sie haben für diese zweieinhalbtausend Kilometer drei bis vier Jahre gebraucht, damals wollte niemand zwei jüdische Waisenkinder beherbergen (Kämmerlings)� Grjasnowa later explains that the personal stories of flight and exile that her Syrian husband and his family members and friends have told her, “hat [alles] viel bei mir getriggert, aus meiner Kindheit. Das ist oft wirklich eins zu eins” Refugees Past and Present 65 (Kämmerlings). Moreover, she describes flight and exile as experiences that are timeless, and reflects that the questions those forcibly displaced from their homes ask are always the same questions her own grandmother asked, “Wo geht man hin? Und wie? ” (Kämmerlings). In an interview with Mueller and Garloff, Grjasnowa also underlines the universality of experiences of displacement, saying, “[w]hat interests me above all are the underlying structures of flight, expulsion and migration” (Mueller and Garloff, “Interview” 228). Speaking of Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Grjasnowa further emphasizes that “there aren’t any Jewish characters, but it is nonetheless a Jewish book for me. Migration is a very Jewish topic” (Mueller and Garloff, “Interview” 227). Yet although Grjasnowa specifically links the story of her own family’s forced migration with the experiences of the Syrian refugees in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , and labels it a Jewish novel, this history is not specifically present in the novel. Instead there are oblique references to this family history and to Jewish history in the form of references to a number of canonical literary works - both diegetic and extra-diegetic in the form of intertitles with marked citations - and Amal’s Russian (but not apparently Jewish) mother. Amal’s parents fell in love at the box office for the St. Petersburg Philharmonic when they spent seven hours in line for tickets next to each other while Amal’s father was studying in Russia (Grjasnowa 36). Amal had grown up speaking Russian at home, and before her parents divorced and her mother had left for Russia (though her father had for many years pretended she was dead), Amal and her family lived in a Russian parallel world. They had Russian friends, “meistens Männer mit dichten Schnurrbärten und Wohlstandsbäuchen, die als Professoren an syrischen Universitäten arbeiteten -, fuhren im Sommer auf die Datscha ihrer Großeltern in der Nähe von St. Petersburg, und am Neujahrsabend gab es einen Weihnachtsbaum, eine Flasche Sekt und ein Netz Mandarinen” (Grjasnowa 35). With her multigenerational family story, Salzmann illustrates the obvious point in Außer sich that multidirectional memory can also apply to family history as differing, even conflicting, histories overlap and fail to be contained within one nation state, crossing physical and cultural borderlines� Ali’s mother warns “[d]ie Erinnerung ist ein Parasit, fang ihn dir lieber nicht ein,” yet Ali ignores this directive, piecing together his family’s past through his own memory, remembered conversations and a brief unpublished memoir written by his grandfather Schura (Salzmann 274). Memories of personal and familial suffering - much of which is focused around anti-Semitic persecution - are placed alongside the contemporary suffering that Ali encounters in Istanbul. While Anton and Ali are repeatedly beaten up as children in Germany for being Russian, and in Russia for being Jewish, Aglaja and other protesters are attacked by the military during the violent crushing of the protests in Gezi park and the trans- 66 Brangwen Stone gender Katho is brutally attacked in the men’s toilets of a bar. Writing about violence against those who do not conform to gender norms in the essay which Salzmann has indicated Außer sich owes its title to, Judith Butler argues that the “person who threatens violence proceeds from the anxious and rigid sense that a sense of world and a sense of self will be radically undermined if such a being, uncategorizable, is permitted to live within the social world” (Butler, “Beside Oneself” 34). Elsewhere in the essay, which argues that “the terms by which we are recognized as human [. . .] have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included in the participatory sphere of political deliberation” (2), Butler notes the “racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human” (24). Racial violence is also apparent in Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern when Hammoudi is killed in a neo-Nazi attack, and earlier in the novel when a policeman at the Serbian-Hungarian border pulls out his penis “klein, rot und unbeschnitten” and urinates on Hammoudi’s face as he screams “’You immigrant cunt’” (Grjasnowa 270; English in original). Violence and discrimination based on racial difference is central to Außer sich , in the form of anti-Semitism, which mars Ali and her brother’s lives as it marred the lives of her parents and grandparents before her� Ali’s great-grandparents Etinka and Schura escape the fate of their fellow Jewish doctors (all summarily fired in 1953, the year of the supposed doctor’s plot) to some extent, as an exception is made for Etinka due to her unique expertise in treating children with tuberculosis, and Schura manages to become a renowned researcher despite his dismissal (Salzmann 168—79). Yet although they are spared the fate of many of their fellow Jewish doctors they face anti-Semitism on a daily basis. Etinka tells Ali of the endless series of anti-Semitic graffiti on their house wall: “‘Ich habe die Schmierereien jedes Mal überstreichen lassen, so oft, dass die Maler, ich weiß noch die Namen, Gena und Lölja, zu mir kamen und sagten, Etina Natanowna, wir machen das ja gerne für Sie, wir küssen Ihnen die Hände, aber wollen Sie nicht lieber einfach wegziehen? ’” (Salzmann 180—81). Ali’s mother Valja’s first husband beats and curses her with “Du Judensau, verrecke doch in deinem Israel” (Salzmann 62). Even her second Jewish husband beats her and curses her as a “Judensau” (Salzmann 65). Although quota refugees were granted refuge in Germany to escape the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the family continues to face anti-Semitism in Germany, including from other quota refugees wearing chains with crosses around their necks (Salzmann 109—10). As a child Anton asks “warum die anderen ihn als Russen beleidigten, wo sie ihm doch beigebracht hatte, stolz darauf zu sein, dass er Jude sei” (Salzmann 104—05). Yet once he tells them he is Jewish to escape the anti-Russian slurs, Refugees Past and Present 67 despite his mother’s advice to the contrary, he is beaten up by boys at school even worse (Salzmann 106). Though the Holocaust may be a common thematic concern for German-Jewish authors and, as Rothberg observes, the “emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 11), the Holocaust is only mentioned a few times in Außer sich . The word “Nazi” is only mentioned once in Außer sich , when the quota refugees in the refugee home respond to the twins being brutally beaten up: “Es fielen Wörter wie ‘Nazis’, noch mehr ‘Nazis’ und sie ‘wollen an unsere Kinder ran’” (Grjasnowa 107). The Holocaust itself is only referred to twice in a novel of 365 pages. Once when Ali describes a branch of his family that escaped from Germany to Kazakhstan in the thirties, just in time to live happily “fern der Schrecken der Schoah” (185), and a second time when commenting on his father’s suicide: “von allen meinen Rote-Armee-Verwandten inklusive Schoah- und Perestroika-Hintergrund war er der Einzige, der eines nicht natürlichen Todes gestorben ist, sondern einfach nur eines peinlichen” (296). This latter mention pragmatically groups the Red Army (short hand for the Soviet Union), the Holocaust, and Perestroika together as events with a traumatic effect. Elsewhere in the novel too, Salzmann brings “disparate histories in contact with each other” (Rothberg “Multidirectional Memory” 134). Ali and Katho, for instance, imagine that their Jewish and Ukranian ancestors respectively crossed paths in Odessa, and also wish for a past in which their gender variance has a family tradition: “Vorfahren, die so waren wie sie” (Salzmann 136). Salzmann’s scarce mention of the Holocaust confirms the observation of a number of scholars, including Lizarazu, Mueller, and Garloff, as noted earlier, that the Holocaust is not as central to the new influx of German-Jewish writers with Soviet origins as it was to earlier generations of German-Jewish writers. Yet the mentions that are made seem to assume that it is a history that readers are familiar with and does not need further elaboration� While Außer sich focuses on the discrimination faced by Soviet Jews and transgender people, in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Amal contemplates “[d]ie Welt hat eine neue Rasse erfunden, die der Flüchtlinge, Refugees, Muslime und Newcomer. Die Herablassung ist mit jedem Atemzug spürbar” (Grjasnowa 281). This observation of the lack of empathy felt for Muslim refugees reflects Butler’s argument that we are less likely to feel empathy for those who fall outside our dominant Western cultural frame of the human - including Arabs and gender nonconforming people - as signified by the way in which the loss of different kinds of lives are treated (“Beside Oneself” 24). In both the essay “Beside Oneself” that Außer sich derives its title from, and elsewhere, Butler argues that while some lives are publically acknowledged and grieved, other lives (such 68 Brangwen Stone as large-scale famine deaths in Africa, or deaths during the AIDS crisis) are “ungrievable” (“Beside Oneself” 24—25; Precarious Life 35)� Butler contends that the narratives in the Western media “stage the scene and provide the narrative means by which ‘the human’ in its grievability is established” ( Precarious Life 38)� In Gott ist nicht schüchtern, the local newspaper reports the attack on the refugee hostel in which Hammoudi is the only fatality, but “[ü]ber ihn selbst werden die Leser nichts erfahren, außer seinem Alter und seiner Nationalität” (306). While the local newspaper thus does little to establish Hammoudi as a grievable human being, the stories of Amal and Hammoudi narrated by Grjasnowa have a “humanizing effect,” producing “an intense identification by arousing feelings of fear and sorrow,” as did the accounts about the final moments of those who died in the 9/ 11 attacks published in the newspapers discussed by Butler ( Precarious Life 38)� Another way in which Grjasnowa urges empathic identification in the novel is by establishing parallels to lives that are recognized as grievable - the lives of those who fled Nazi persecution. Thus Amal takes Erich Marie Remarque’s Die Nacht von Lissabon (1961) and Anna Seghers’ Transit (1944) on her flight from Damascus (Grjasnowa 230). These two novels, which both focus on those fleeing from Nazi persecution and their desperate attempts to be granted asylum in other countries, share a number of central plots features, including the setting of Marseille and central émigré protagonists who attempt to flee to the United States by assuming the identities of dead men, yet decide shortly before embarking to give their ships passage to someone else� In both Die Nacht von Lissabon and Transit , the protagonists and other refugees are embroiled in a tedious Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare as they attempt to obtain all the documents necessary to escape wartime Europe. There are clear parallels in this respect between Seghers’ and Remarque’s novels and Grjasnowa’s description of Amal and Youssef’s endless waiting on arrival in Germany in the “Wartezimmer deutscher Behörden, die hoffnungslos überfüllt, deren Mitarbeiter chronisch überlastest sind und die zum Verzweifeln langsam durch die Gänge schlurfen” (Grjasnowa 278). 8 Elsewhere in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Grjasnowa also devotes an entire page prefacing Amal and Youssef’s arrival in Germany - and lengthy engagement with German immigration bureaucracy - to a well-known extract from Bertolt Brecht’s Flüchtlingsgespräch e that emphasizes the central significance of nationality and passport with bitter satire: Der Pass ist der edelste Teil von einem Menschen� Er kommt auch nicht auf so einfache Weise zustand wie ein Mensch� Ein Mensch kann überall zustandekommen, auf die leichtsinnigste Art und ohne gescheiten Grund, aber ein Pass niemals. Dafür wird Refugees Past and Present 69 er auch anerkannt, wenn er nicht gut ist, während ein Mensch noch so gut sein kann und doch nicht anerkannt wird” (Grjasnowa 277). The multidirectional memory evoked through the reference to Seghers’, Remarque’s, and Brecht’s texts is a memory of all those who were persecuted by the Nazis, rather than German Jews specifically. Elsewhere though, Grjasnowa does remind of the persecution of Jews, quoting the following passage from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory : “Someone in a Cambridge common room asked the self-designated ‘non-Jewish Jew’ and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher about his roots. ‘Trees have roots’ he shot back, scornfully, ‘Jews have legs’” (Grjasnowa 143). While Salzmann’s novel suggests, but does not explicitly articulate, a commonality between anti-Semitic violence and violence against political dissidents and transgender people, the quotations and literary allusions Grjasnowa inserts into her text are clear invitations to draw parallels between the fate of the Syrian refugees, German émigrés, and Jews historically. Grjasnowa seems to consciously preempt the criticism often leveled against such comparisons, especially in the case of the Holocaust, where some critiques see such parallels as threatening the recognition of the unique nature of the Holocaust, when her protagonist Amal reflects “sie weiß auch, dass Leid nicht vergleichbar ist” (Grjasnowa 181). Writing about Grjasnowa’s first novel Birken , Jonathan Skolnik argues that “multidirectional” readings of the novel “mistakenly obscure the continued centrality of the Holocaust in contemporary iterations of Jewishness,” and contends that his reading of the novel reveals “the Holocaust to be the trauma that underwrites all the other traumas which ostensibly displace it” (Skolnik 124). While I would not dispute that the Holocaust continues to be important to third-generation German-Jewish writers such as Salzmann and Grjasnowa, I would argue that Skolnik’s interpretation of multidirectional memory clings to the exact notion of “competitive memory” - in which memories are understood to crowd each other out of the public sphere, or “displace” each other in Skolnik’s words - that Rothberg is deliberately countering (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 3)� I contend, moreover, that in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , which focuses almost wholly on a different traumatic experience, Grjasnowa clearly does wish to bring these experiences into dialogue with exile in the Nazi era - albeit cryptically - and it is clear from interviews with her too that she has an approach to memory that could very much be described as multidirectional� Whereas Grjasnowa places memories of the Nazi era exile alongside more recent refugee experiences in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Salzmann inscribes the memory of an earlier generation of Eastern European migrants to the German-speaking countries into her multidirectional narrative in Außer sich by 70 Brangwen Stone directly and indirectly alluding to the Swiss-Romanian author Aglaja Veteranyi and her work. Veteranyi, who arrived in Switzerland as a refugee and committed suicide in 2002, is best known for her first novel Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht (1999)� Some aspects of Salzmann’s style, including moments of dark humor and scenes that border on absurdity, remind of Veteranyi’s writing. The first reference to Veteranyi comes early in the novel, when Ali sprays the bed bug infested Istanbul apartment he is living in with poison, “setzte sich auf den Balkon und rauchte, in der Hoffnung, das Veteranyi-Buch, das sie gerade las, wäre erst zu Ende, wenn alle Wanzen tot waren” (Salzmann 19—20). Later a figure called Aglaja, a red-haired accordion player, enters the narrative (Salzmann 39). This figure Aglaja, with whom both Ali’s lover Katho and Ali’s twin brother Anton - who may or may not be his alter ego - have a relationship, seems to be a combination of Veteranyi and the nameless child protagonist of her novel Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht . The injured, unconscious Aglaja later becomes a symbol for the Gezi park protests after she is hit in the head by a gas cartridge (Salzmann 131—33). When Brigid Haines first posited the development of an “eastern turn,” she suggested that the literature that was part of it had a “thematic concern with the communist period, in the eastern bloc, and its aftermath” (Haines 136). This description does fit one aspect of Salzmann’s Außer sich , though this narrative is queered, while Grjasnowa’s novel has a completely different thematic concern, and both novels venture both beyond Eastern Europe and beyond Germany� Yet in both novels, even in Grjasnowa’s, which focuses on Syrian refugees, there is still a reference to a German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish past. Placing these narratives alongside narratives of present-day discrimination and suffering represents what Rothberg calls “complex acts of solidarity in which historical memory serves as a medium for the creation of new communal and political identities” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 11)� Both novels also represent a desire to reposition those with whom the West does not easily feel empathy - in Grjasnowa’s case Syrian refugees, in Salzmann’s case transgender people - “under the rubric of the ‘human’” by telling their stories and drawing parallels to the lives of Jews and German émigres, who are now squarely under this rubric but were not always in the past (Butler, Precarious Life 46). Notes 1 The term “Arab Spring” refers to a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s� Refugees Past and Present 71 2 A few German writers of Middle Eastern background, who either arrived in Germany many years ago or were born in Germany, have also published novels on flight and arrival in the last couple of years. These include Abbas Khider, who fled Iraq as a teenager after being imprisoned and tortured in 1996 and wrote Die Ohrfeige (2016), and Shida Bazyar whose parents fled from Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the 1980s and whose first novel is entitled Nachts ist es leise in Tehran (2016). The project “Weiter schreiben” (https: / / weiterschreiben.jetzt/ ) pairs displaced authors - many Syrian - with established German authors and also publishes their texts in the original and in German translation on its website� A number of the German authors are of Eastern European background, among them Lena Gorelik, Nino Haratischwili, Olga Grjasnowa, Martin Kordić, and Saša Stanišić. 3 From a legal standpoint, Müller was not a refugee, as she left Romania with an exit visa for Romania and an entry visa for West Germany. 4 For a detailed discussion of the Jewish Kontingentflüchtlinge see Gorelik� 5 Bronsky has a Jewish father, but does not identify as Jewish. Vladimir Vertlib is sometimes also named amongst this group of Russian-Jewish authors writing in German, but left the Soviet Union much earlier (in 1971) and lives in Austria rather than Germany� 6 Although the novel uses the pronoun “sie” to refer to Ali until he decides to change pronouns, I will use the pronoun “he” for Ali throughout. 7 Henceforth referred to as Birken � 8 Grjasnowa is not the only artist to evoke Seghers’ Transit in the current so-called “refugee crisis”: Christian Petzold created a 2018 film adaptation of the novel, retaining the context of Nazi-occupied France, but setting the film in the present day, thus inviting viewers to see congruencies between Seghers’ narrative and contemporary events� Works Cited Ackermann, Irmgard. “Die Osterweiterung in der deutschsprachigen Migrantenliteratur vor und nach der Wende.” Eine Sprache - viele Horizonte. Die Osterweiterung der deutschsprachigen Literatur. 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Reflexive Unmapping: The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) Nora Gortcheva Mount Holyoke College Abstract: This article situates Valeska Grisebach’s film Western (2017) within historical and current imaginaries of Eastern Europe in the German media� It argues that contrary to still persistent modes of rendering the region as a peripheral or in-between space marked by barbarity, criminality, and backwardness, Grisebach’s project offers a different take through reflexive unmapping . Thematically, formally, and stylistically, the film aims to unmake borders and hierarchies between a presumed civilized West and a “Wild East” and establish an empathic landscape of everyday encounters. Through ambiguity and reflexivity, Western explores the discontiguous nature of quotidian experience in a humanist attempt at humility, without attempting to resolve tensions or prescribing a dominant perspective� Keywords: Eastern Europe, Berlin School, Valeska Grisebach, Western Valeska Grisebach’s film Western (2017) follows German workers setting up camp in rural Bulgaria with the intention of building a hydroelectric power plant on EU funds. Due to water shortage and lack of material, construction is suspended and the film turns to a deliberate reflection of the everyday, as Germans and Bulgarians clash, forge friendships, or simply co-exist in parallel. Similar to Toni Erdmann (2016), another celebrated work by a fellow Berlin School director and collaborator, Maren Ade, 1 Western primarily takes place in Eastern Europe and captures the conflicts and attempts at nearing of its protagonists. In interviews, the film’s director, Valeska Grisebach, elaborates on the choice of location: ” “I started off by travelling between Bulgaria and Romania because the story drew me to Eastern Europe and also because of all the legends that sprung up there following the end of communism: the idea of the ‘Wild East’ or the feeling that that was some sort of vacuum or empty page at the time, even 76 Nora Gortcheva if things are already very different there now” (Lattimer n. pag.). The filmmaker specifically draws a parallel between her project - inspired by the Western as a genre - and a German fascination with the notion of a frontier� 2 Like Karl May, whose adventure novels took place in locations he never visited, 3 Grisebach envisioned the film in unfamiliar Eastern Europe - in “some kind of border area, which creates this sort of fantasy or idea of ‘wilderness’ - or a ‘fake wilderness’” (Cumming n� pag�)� Once in Bulgaria, however, she embarks on a journey beyond the legacy of post-communism or an imagined elsewhere but immersed instead in first-hand encounters. Exploring the South in particular, the director speculates with fascination about “[the] cultural mixing [that] has taken place there, between Bulgarians and Greeks, Turks, and Serbs” and is magically drawn to the region “where the warm wind blows up from Greece” and “which the Bulgarians themselves see as very mythical” (Lattimer n. pag.). The selection of the village of Petrelik and its surroundings at the Bulgarian-Greek border concludes her “wandering around and hoping to experience something” (Cumming n. pag.), because, as Grisebach notes, “I just came to the place and everything clicked” (Lattimer n. pag.). Grisebach proposes a vision of filmmaking as a physical and intellectual challenge, as the director faces “this combination or contrasts between an idea, fiction and then some kind of reality” (Cumming n. pag.). In the process, she emerges as a heroic figure, not unlike the explorer at a frontier, who confronts a mix of preconceptions and realities and finally recognizes a new land and its people and settles on an enriching quest. Such an attitude - as somewhat contentiously teased out from interviews - with its romanticizing of nature and wilderness, mystic adventure amidst noble savages, and self-discovery - might sound alarmingly orientalist� I would argue, however, that this reading - or rather misreading - of Grisebach’s motivation points to a core, if implicit, purpose of Western to challenge persistent modes of representing Eastern Europe in German culture� Thus, this article first considers the meaning of the “Wild East” from a historical perspective and briefly engages with current discussions of the concept. Instead of investing in clichés such as Eastern European poverty, misconduct, and backwardness, Western proposes a different take on the region through - what I describe as - reflexive unmapping . The film reverses narratives about Eastern Europeans travelling to Germany in need for work, social services, or with criminal intent, telling instead a story about Germans going East on a journey often marked by brutal machismo, ethnic conceit, and plain neoliberal conquest. More significantly, Western compellingly captures cinematic possibilities to reflect upon cross-cultural encounters, offering a nuanced take on the borderlands of Europe� In such unmapping , Germans and Bulgarians meet each other Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 77 differently. Space is not submitted to clear frontier hierarchies, and the Balkans, where the action takes place, are not merely a symbolic crossroad or a bridge between the good West and uncivilized East� Western invests instead in affective geographies which are often devoid of clear linguistic comprehension since characters rarely share a common language, but are nevertheless immersed in an embodied and shared experience. Through gaps, discontinuities, and deliberation - while the camera lingers, the narrative proceeds through ellipsis, and characters reflect rather than deliver a clear message or explain their psychological motivation - the film shapes an empathic landscape of encounter. Reflexive unmapping does not produce a navigable site plan or a decisive rendering of institutional frameworks, national merits, or personal shortcomings� Like other works associated with the Berlin School, Grisebach’s cinema is one invested in a realist “aesthetic of discovery” marked by “disentangled cinematic time” (Cook et al. 19, 20). Moreover, it is not only the characters who are compelled to encounter the unfamiliar but also the spectator, as “the distance between the audience and the image [is eliminated], drawing the viewer physically into the film world through affective responses rather than openly deconstructing the performative, representational aspect of a filmic text” (16). In both form and style, Western captures the uncertainty of everydayness, arresting quotidian experience between alienation and belonging in a humanist attempt at humility. Significantly, reflexive unmapping remains ambiguous in its utopian potential - it contains dispersed moments of nearing without resolving underlying tensions� In interviews, Grisebach evokes the “Wild East” after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Eastern Block as an early reference for her project� A ZDF television documentary series has captured the conflictual nature of transition under the title Der wilde Osten - Aufbruch und Anarchie in der Wendezeit [Part I: The Wild East - Awakening and Anarchy during Re-unification , 2015] and Der wilde Osten - Konsumrausch und Abzocke in der Wendezeit [Part II: Consumption Frenzy and Rip-off , 2015]. Here, the “Wild East” corresponds to a particular imaginary of the Wendezeit as a lawless but exciting time, marked by unbound enthusiasm for consumption, short-lived lucrative opportunities, anarchic freedom, and danger� In a similar vein, popular historical accounts of the period associate the “Wild East” with a “society in upheaval,” detailing about dramatic changes in all spheres of life, most strikingly in economic and ideological terms with explosive and often opaque market developments and new freedoms in public and private life (Neubert 393—400). Yet, already in 1989/ 90 “dissonances” between East and West bring attention to glaring differences in mentality with lasting effects on society (400—03). 78 Nora Gortcheva In its application to the Wendezeit , the term “Wild East” implies an experiential watershed between two opposing civilizational realms� Given similar Cold War experiences, the conflation of Eastern Europe and East Germany is not surprising. Yet this composite “Wild East” also curiously emulates motifs from the 1800s and 1900s when Eastern Europe - a monolithic but indistinct whole - was seen “both as a dirty ‘Wild East’ marked by chaos and disorganization, and yet also as a land of tremendous future possibilities and potential for Germans” (Liulevicius 2). As Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius has noted, “what was at stake in [the] discourse about the East was actually a definition of German identity” which also explains why at various moments in history the broad term “the East” included “not only Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Russia, the Czech lands, the Balkans, [but] even the eastern provinces of Germany itself” (4, 2). Its territorial diffusiveness captures well the leaps of imagination that made “the East” a labor of abstraction, or, in other words, “not a location, but a state of being: an alleged condition of disorganization or underdevelopment” which constantly seemed to threaten and at times consume Germany as an imagined project itself (3)� While Grisebach summons the ghost of the “Wild East” from the 1990s as a reference for Western , it is the imaginaries of the present that find greatest resonance in the film and add to its critical impact. In recent media coverage, Eastern Europe continues to be associated with backwardness and brutality, evoking foundational 1800s narratives about “an intrinsic eastern disorder, disease, dirt, a deep incapacity for self-rule, […] expressed in the allied phenomenon of despotism and slavery; sympathetic encounters; and the assertion of a particular German national calling or mission” (Liulevicius 44). The persistence of such stereotypes confirms what Pamela Ballinger has called “the recursive nature of easternisms and peripheries” as a limiting but recurring mode of establishing hierarchies between the East and West (Ballinger 3)� Indeed, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and NATO’s and the EU’s expansion eastwards one would imagine that Eastern Europe as a term, and the features associated with it, might have proven superfluous. Yet grand - and sometimes less significant - events on the European scene have periodically revived anxieties about the region. For example, newly minted EU-member states Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007 in what some German politicians ironically described as “Beitritt auf Krücken” [“entry on crutches”] (Fritz-Vannahme n� pag� ) , have been regularly featured in the media as the suspect origins of poverty, crime, and corruption� 4 The free movement of workers from the same countries, which came into effect in 2014, coincided with another round of heated debates about much dreaded “Armutsmigration” [“migration out of poverty”] or “Einwanderung in die Sozialsysteme” [“immigration into Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 79 the [German] welfare system”]. 5 As critics have noted, such discussions exploit economic fears among the broad public - not unlike those around the infamous figure of the Polish plumber in France and Great Britain 6 - and also represent insidious strategies of racializing minorities in general and promoting especially anti-Roma prejudice when it comes to coverage about Bulgaria and Romania� 7 During the “refugee crisis” of 2015, with rising chaos on the so-called “Balkan route” - which at the time ran from Greece through Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary or Croatia with the goal of reaching Western EU-member states - another Eastern European specter reminded of its persistence (Gille 285)� Instances of institutional or individual violence against refugees evoked a long history of barbarity - a familiar presence in discussions about the region� 8 In its aftermath, the overall hostility towards refugees and migrants in Eastern Europe - often accompanied by exclusionist policies such as closing borders or rejecting a refugee quota altogether - “[have] raised renewed doubts about eastern Europe’s Europeanness” and underscored its failings (286). Without condoning Eastern European resentments, one might also note the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing agitation in Western EU-member states (and elsewhere in the world), and observe that xenophobia and aggression are a broader European, and indeed global, ailment� Repeatedly, the Balkans - and Eastern Europe as an umbrella term - have been defined by their “transitionary status” between the West and the Orient, between Europe and Asia, “evok[ing] the image of a bridge or crossroads” (Todorova 15). The region presumably serves not only as a geographic but also discursive battlefield between (Western) civilization and (Eastern) barbarity in a perpetual state of “Europe’s internal other” (Dzenovska 300). 9 As Nicholas De Genova notes, the “Balkan route” has drawn attention anew to the region as “the most enduring Orientalized frontier” (De Genova 19). Not surprisingly, De Genova concludes that, “[t]he spatialized partitioning of Europe from its putative outside notably begins within Europe itself, where the borders of Europe and boundaries of European-ness have been reinstituted in the uneasy borderlands that extend eastward” (De Genova 18). The “Wild East” of the present thus continues to signify a transient but indeterminate space caught in a permanent condition of overcoming but not yet having overcome its otherness and suspended between opposing civilizational realms. Like the American “Wild West,” a myth that served different agendas depending on who envisioned it, the “Wild East” is a product of the imagination. But if the American frontier - especially as it was conceived of in the German context - is marked by nomadic romanticism, civilizational purpose, and pre-modern harmony with the natural world (Nolan 10—13), the “Wild East” from the 1800s to the present is rarely a placeholder for nostalgia or utopia and 80 Nora Gortcheva most frequently a distorted mirror of opposites. For example, the “Wild East” of the 1990s contained the ruins of what used to be the world behind the Iron Curtain; the “Wild East” of the present signifies a peripheral space of indeterminate status, somewhat European but mostly extraterritorial and extraneous. Its geographic reach is often ambiguous and might span the former German East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans - all terms of outdated currency with a persistent, if uncertain, afterlife. The “Wild East” might fulfill conflicting purposes over time but its recurrence draws upon similar modes of negation� Yuliya Komska has critically named such enduring process of mapping - with its imposed hierarchies - “a cartographic mandate” and pointed out that the notions of betweenness and contiguity continue to limit both narratives about Eastern Europe and scholarly frameworks approaching the region (Kacandes and Komska 1—2). To reimagine a “Wild East” of a different kind then would mean to question not only such stereotypes but also the frameworks within which rethinking takes place - or to echo Komska’s proposal, one would need to unmap and search for discontiguities� Komska calls for reconceptualizing Eastern Europe “as an entity that is neither merely a ‘connecting bridge’ between its neighbors nor an ‘intermediate region’” (6). She exposes the limitations to exclusively applying a borderland paradigm to Eastern Europe which unjustly essentializes the region’s distinction as a periphery and overlooks the often violent and complex histories of shifting borders and traumatic neighborly encounters (3—4). In contrast to Komska’s resolute negation of the borderland, this article approaches unmapping - a process which is invariably and also about physical or imaginary territory - from the vantage point of a filmic encounter at borderlands� As I will make clear, Valeska Grisebach’s Western is by far not bound to “territorially limited engagements,” shaping instead a complex experiential geography of discontiguous encounters - German-Bulgarian, male-female, EU endowed-locally organized (Kacandes and Komska 4)� Echoing geographer Henk van Houtum’s dictum that “[t]he border makes and is made. Hence, a border is a verb,” I consider the unmaking of borders in film - thematically, formally, and stylistically - and read Western as an attempt to imagine a different sort of encounter, on a different sort of a map, shaped by a different kind of filmmaking approach (van Houtum 51)� Western (2017) includes some iconic elements: a symbolic frontier; a horse; a lone hero-construction worker, Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann); a compassionate local-provincial businessman, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov); a villain of sorts - the foreman of the German crew, Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek); a shared love interest, Vyara (Vyara Borisova); and a final showdown. Yet, the film can Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 81 hardly be classified as a Western. Instead of being suggestive of a neo-Western of an eastern kind, the title of the film itself capitalizes on the ironies of misplacement. Grisebach calls the project “a dance with the [western]” and voices fascination with “a genre which tells so much about the construction of society” (Cumming n. pag.). 10 In particular, the filmmaker is concerned with the subject of “latent xenophobia” as part of German identity which, according to her, “manifests in a diffuse sense of power, of superiority” (“Ein Gespräch mit Valeska Grisebach” n. pag.). The choice of location on the Greek-Bulgarian border - and not in Germany itself - thus shifts the focus towards a broader EU and global neoliberal critique. The displacement stages a frontier of a distinctive kind - as Germans and Bulgarians confront each other with “two different perspectives in Europe […] and the thereby internalized notions about status (“Ein Gespräch mit Valeska Grisebach” n. pag.). The theme of alienation is inverted - it is the Germans who are foreign in this case, on an unfamiliar ground that challenges them to expose or overcome misconceptions. Invariably, such strategy allows for a dramatic escalation, as characters navigate between colonial fantasies about conquering the landscape, in Vincent’s case, and romantic self-reinvention, in Meinhard’s� Western evokes but does not delve into a fixed vision of the “Wild East,” mediating instead between mostly abstract modalities - in the most direct form, speculating on the region’s presumed backwardness, but most frequently capturing an existential sense of incomprehensibility. State borders are hardly present. The only exceptions are Grisebach’s explanations about the choice of location in interviews or allusions to World War II and to the current refugee situation in the film itself. References to the past underscore the status of the area as a borderland frequented by Germans. When the main character, Meinhard, first visits the nearby Bulgarian village, the locals excitedly tell stories of cultured and well-behaved German soldiers in World War II, who mounted lanterns on unmanned donkeys in the dark, thus tricking - and targeting - the Greek patrol on the other side of the border� 11 The recent realities at the border are evoked when Meinhard gets a ride with some Bulgarians - after being abandoned by his German colleagues - and one of the men in the car speculates about the dangers of walking around in the dark: “[T]his is a border zone. Are you not afraid? There are refugees! ” Yet, both past and present crises remain largely out of sight - mentioned but not delved into, and mostly lost in translation� Critical to the film are different kinds of borders and, more significantly, their unmaking. The German workers and Bulgarian locals constantly renegotiate spatial boundaries, challenging physical or mental limits, nearing or confronting each other. The nature of such encounters is rarely elaborated in clear national terms, although familiar stereotypes about “the Wild East” are not absent. 82 Nora Gortcheva According to Vincent, the foreman of the crew, the German workers are there to bring infrastructure - and thus civilization - to the region� As the workers hoist a German flag on the viewing platform at camp, they respond to a colleague’s concerned question, “Have you gone crazy! Did you think about the locals? ” with irony, “Yes, we are crazy, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, would we? ” and “[…] we have thought only about the locals, that’s why we are building them a hydroelectric power plant.” In another scene, Vincent drives with a few from the crew to return the provocation of village youth, who have earlier trespassed the camp, and the Germans mockingly describe the trip as “a journey through time, back to the past.” Such references exaggerate character types - especially the villain of sorts, Vincent, who most starkly incorporates a mixture of brutal masculinity, sense of ethnic superiority, and outright disrespect for the locals� He serves as the engine of conflict, struggling to symbolically conquer both the surrounding landscape and its people but ultimately failing� In one of the first open conflict scenes, the German crew rests on the riverbank, playing not always innocent pranks on each other when three Bulgarian women arrive on the other side of the river� In point-of-view pans, the camera captures the perspective of the men, visually adding tension to the mixed soundtrack of catcalls, cheers, and water bubbling� Catching the hat of one of the women - Vyara - after it is blown away in the water, Vincent challenges its owner to enter the stream and confront him. In a misplaced flirt that turns to violence, he presses the hat on Vyara’s head and submerges her in the water� Both her companions and the workers tensely stand up and watch on opposing riverbanks. The confrontation is mapped out in clearly split compositions with shots of midstream action as Vincent and Vyara accost each other, same level reaction shots of the women on one side, and low-angle shots of the men on the other. Finally, Vyara retrieves the hat, hurriedly escaping the stream and fleeing with her companions while the camera tracks in a long shot� One of the workers chuckles disapprovingly, “That was a bit harsh, wasn’t it? ” The scene aptly sets up tensions which the rest of the film will tackle, if not always resolve. The deliberate framing of the two riverbanks visually emphasizes the physical division between two sides, here clearly defined through a linguistic barrier, Bulgarian-German, but also through a gender division. The immediate confrontation takes place in the middle, as the stream establishes an unstable meeting point, a transient space of bodily proximity and danger. Point of view shots and camera perspective locate the gaze on the German side and underscore another conflict at stake - that between Vincent and Meinhard. The camera constantly reframes Meinhard in reaction shots, while he observes the mid-action and finally also gets up. The stylistic devices call attention to the unfolding conflict between the two men and main antagonists. Vincent (the fore- Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 83 man anti-hero) and Meinhard (the inscrutable hero) represent two competing types of masculinity: on the one hand, Vincent - assertive, arrogant, ready to resort to violence, and Meinhard - self-contained, reflective, eager to encounter the locals, and strike a friendship with them� The confrontation is also sexual. Vyara - the woman who loses her hat in the river and who is also the only one around to speak German - serves as a romantic interest for both men. Through sexuality, the two male characters appear more ambiguous. Vincent exposes his vulnerability when he - surprisingly and unsuccessfully - asks Vyara out on a date� In contrast, Meinhard asserts his masculinity by casually hooking up with her on the hills overlooking the village, marveling the view and reflecting on the meaning of homesickness. In earlier scenes, he similarly courts a different, older woman from the village, Veneta. His romantic escapades are not exactly predatory but enough to attract the attention of local men who punch him in the closing scene, challenging his initial self-identification - likely a fabrication - as an experienced killer-legionnaire. Significantly, the initial conflict scene at the river marks a shift in topographies� At the beginning, the spaces that Meinhard occupies are dominated by Vincent, defined by attempts at enclosure or expansion, and controlled by clear hierarchies and linguistic occupancy (i.e., German) - around the fire, at the table, at the viewing platform, or at the construction site. There is no sense of recognizing the landscape or of clear connections between spaces� Tension builds up around not knowing - as the workers worry about being observed in the dark - or around encountering locals but not being able to understand them� Meinhard fits in uneasily and acts as an observer rather than a member of the crew. After the scene at the river, he symbolically escapes, riding a horse that he finds near the camp. He enters the village and meets the locals on their terms, befriending a Bulgarian, Adrian, who serves as his substitute “brother.” Although communication rarely rests on linguistic clarity and is frequently marked by misunderstandings, Meinhard most effectively navigates between worlds. He is ushered into public and private spaces - the village square, the local bar, and a home - and gets involved in transactions that he rarely understands but tackles in solidarity with Adrian nevertheless, serving as his “bodyguard.” The unmapping in Western is affective and relational. The most striking moments in the film are those of proximity. Spaces and exchanges might remain unaccounted for and not fully comprehended but characters - and especially Meinhard and Adrian - connect in embodied acts of nearing that produce a common ground� In such encounters, Meinhard leaves an imprint and bears collective knowledge - literally, as he helps the locals build a water fountain, and symbolically, as he partakes in moments of reflection, drawing closer to 84 Nora Gortcheva the landscape or to a shared experience thereof. A good example is a scene in which Adrian shows Meinhard the location of the lever that controls water distribution in the region - information that proves critical and that the foreman Vincent exploits later in the film. Adrian and Meinhard head to an elevation nearby and observe the area from above (00: 47: 00-00: 48: 19)� In a point-of-view pan, the camera scans the scenic view and pauses on a rock formation that resembles a human profile. The next, closer shot of the two men captures Adrian facing Meinhard and announcing “surprise,” implying that the view is special, and Meinhard gesturing towards his chest in gratitude. Adrian goes on to explain in Bulgarian about the warlike energy of the face-shaped rock, although it remains unclear if his companion understands this additional information� Throughout, Meinhard sits elevated on a rock above Adrian but the composition does not overtly indicate a hierarchy� It is rather a visual reminder of Meinhard’s ritualistic empowerment since his gaze upon an anthropomorphized landscape - indeed, a landscape with a human face - is at once endowed with private knowledge and shared. This is both a masculine, conquering gaze - as Adrian’s tale suggests the elevation grants command over the landscape - and also an empathic gaze turned towards the moment of encounter when Adrian and Meinhard enjoy the view together� The scene is mirrored in Meinhard’s rendezvous and consumption scene with Vyara in which the two similarly sit on an elevation in the dark and marvel the view of the village in the distance. This time, Vyara sits slightly elevated on the slope. The point-of-view shot is static, there is no camera movement, and the spare soundtrack features crickets and brief dialogue lines - as she expresses her love for the view. The image is associated primarily with Vyara - she is the anchor of appreciation, while Meinhard appears bemused to identify homesickness as a relatable sentiment. Their flirt and coupling too are captured elliptically in short takes that are psychologically distancing� In contrast, the earlier scene with Adrian - while also brief - is curiously more intimate. The expansive pan of the landscape, Meinhard’s affective gesture, and steady reflection associated with a male gaze endow the latter with a sense of immediacy. The world of Western thus remains decisively masculine at its core, not exactly homoerotic but certainly fraternal� Such unmapping complies with male codes of sharing and desire, reminding us of core features of the classical Western too� 12 Western ’s unmapping is marked by insistent mirroring and doubling of characters - the two women/ potential romantic interests, Vyara and Veneta; the two German antagonists, Meinhard and Vincent; or the brotherly pair, Meinhard and Adrian -, but more importantly, of film form and style elements. The closing scene is a good example. It mirrors the earlier conflict scene at the river - only this time, both Vincent and Meinhard are on the same riverbank with the Bul- Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 85 garians and are guests at a village celebration. The stream again serves as a middle ground where a clash plays out - here, between Vincent and local men who are in possession of the German flag, presumably the one that disappeared from the camp. The foreman similarly reaches to and pushes one of the Bulgarians under water, only now the fight is rendered as a half-serious game amongst men. Vincent finally emerges triumphant from the water, having retrieved the flag, yet it remains unclear what the outcome of the emblematic showdown is and who the warring sides are� Although Vincent overcomes the Bulgarians, the looks he exchanges with Meinhard - in a shot/ reverse shot mode that is typical for a duel - point to a different center of conflict here. Vincent observes Meinhard trade pleasantries with Vyara at the river - a suggestive conquest for Meinhard - and later, without interfering, Vincent watches his adversary being punched by the Bulgarians in the parking lot - a displaced revenge of sorts� The final scene does not give a definite solution to the project of unmapping � Adrian symbolically saves Meinhard: an object of violence is traded back as Adrian returns the knife that Meinhard had previously given as a present to his nephew, insisting that the latter does not need it. At the same time, Adrian acknowledges the attack against Meinhard, affirming in Bulgarian, “It is like this in the villages, everything can happen” but also inquiring “What are you looking for here? ” The camera closely frames Meinhard and Adrian stare at each other in silence, as Adrian stands up, pats him on the shoulder, and walks off screen. The following panning shot with a static camera captures Meinhard head out in the darkness - a composition that reminds of Vincent’s final exit from the scene earlier. The next, closer pan, however, pictures Meinhard stop and return in direction of the village feast. The camera - now mobile - tracks behind his back in a long take while he reaches the dance floor. The closing shots are of him dancing alone amidst the crowd, looking at people around him who appear in soft focus. One might recognize some of the faces - Adrian, Veneta, and unnamed other characters from the village - but there is no indication of any active exchange between them and Meinhard. Is Meinhard the lone explorer who falls victim to his own benevolent but nevertheless fraught attempts to become part of a world he barely understands? Does Vincent prevail after all - retrieving the German flag and retreating to a space of power, associated with EU funds and heavy-duty machinery? Do Adrian and the rest of the Bulgarians merely serve as noble savages, crude but mostly hospitable, imbued with knowledge about nature but trapped in a primordial paradise? Western ’s unmapping relies on affective gestures and reflexive after-work but does not settle on new coordinates. Its message is one of reflection and temporary suspension, as the dichotomies between West and 86 Nora Gortcheva East are provincialized in the daily rituals of time flowing, of people coming, of people encountering each other, and of people going� Writing about Grisebach’s previous film Sehnsucht [ Longing , 2006], Catherine Wheatley has characterized the director’s process as “a ‘feminine’ or ‘benign’ form of reflexivity which allows the spectator an extended period of time to reflect upon the image and thus distances them from the action on screen” (Wheatley 145). Marco Abel has similarly focused on “radical affective shifts” between the documentary-like and melodramatic moments in Grisebach’s work (Abel 212), which “result […] in an intensification of the act of observing itself” (213). Abel also notes that Grisebach’s cinema “refuses the implicit or explicit truth claims inherent to the aesthetic of documentary or representational realism to delimit the realm of the sensible, the perceptible, as one defined by the pleasures of recognition” (214). The goal of such an approach, he insists, is for the viewer “to see again, to enact our regard for reality” (215). Western ’s reflexive unmapping most saliently contains that promise of seeing and regarding again. Not only a matter of thematic engagements or implicit counteractions to stereotypes about Eastern Europe, unmapping is significantly about a mode of filmmaking that allows for ambiguity and reflexive spectatorship� Here, it manifests in a form of cinema practice that contemplates without committing - or even attempting - a definitive rendering of the “Wild East” and of the realities that it captures. To return to Komska’s search for discontiguities - through forms of discontinuities in space and disconnectedness, Western serves as a prime example of such discontiguous practice. It follows the logic of reflection, contains the fragments of affective encounters and empathic landscapes, as misunderstandings and violence loom at the edge of the frame but never fully explode, and the film draws its impact from the texture of the everyday� Notes 1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of sources in German are the author’s� Ade is listed as a producer for Western , and Grisebach as a script consultant for Toni Erdmann � 2 Kristin Kopp draws a connection between German colonial ambitions in the nineteenth century, frontier fantasies about the American “Wild West,” and the construction of a (Polish) “Wild East” as an attempt to agitate interest in eastward expansion. Kopp writes, “[i]f the American West was attractive to potential emigrants because they imagined it as a space where they could exercise free will and autonomous agency, or even because they entertained fantasies of proving their mettle against hostile ‘Indian’ forces, then map- Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 87 ping these potentialities onto eastern space enhanced its attractiveness” (Kopp 21). Kopp traces preunification discussions in the 1800s which specifically liken Poles to a non-European Naturvolk (primitive people), that is, similar to “Indians” and “noble savages” (22). 3 The connection between Eastern Europe and May’s fictitious American “Wild West” is quite literal when it comes to film adaptations of his work. For example, a popular 1960s West German franchise by the company Rialto, based on May’s stories about an imagined Apache hero Winnetou and his German friend Old Shatterhand, was shot on location in Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia (Bergfelder 181—204). Between 1965 and 1983, the East German DEFA shot Indianerfilme , some on location in Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania), which were meant as an ideological response to May’s popular adaptations in the West (Gemünden 243—45). 4 For example, Katharina Lampe has studied coverage about Bulgaria and Romania between January and March 2006 - leading to the anticipated official monitoring report by the European Commission in May 2006 - in two representative German newspapers, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung (taz)� Analyzing recurring motifs, Lampe identifies “the construction of a threat scenario through Romanian and Bulgarian entry into the EU” and recognizes the following repeating motifs: threats to “the legal system (through corruption and criminality), safety (food safety, health because of open borders), and the future of EU institutions” (Lampe 54). Lampe also observes more negative and more frequent coverage of Romania (50), clustering of the two countries in one whole, and an overall focus on sensationalist accounts and clear-cut dichotomies between Western EU-states and Romania and Bulgaria (55). 5 Michael Lausberg argues that “the term ‘migration out of poverty’ and the presumably related ‘immigration into the welfare system’ misleadingly define in big parts the debate about immigration from Romania and Bulgaria” (Lausberg 243). He notes that according to official statistics worries about dependency on welfare are unfounded since Bulgarians and Romanians are in general financially well-placed and “of economic and social use” for Germany, especially given its much publicized need for skilled workers (142—45). Lausberg observes that the backlash against immigrants during EU expansion eastwards erupted amidst the political mainstream - and not from the right - and with the help of centrist politicians who “participated in the stigmatization of immigrants, [advancing and magnifying] the ethnicization of social [issues]” (97). 6 József Böröcz and Mahua Sarkar trace the debates about the “Polish plumber” in French and British media and conclude that, “[d]uring the entire peri- 88 Nora Gortcheva od from the formal ‘accession’ of the eight erstwhile-state-socialist states to the EU on May 1, 2004 (and the birth of the Polish Plumber in Paris later in the same year) to the ‘Brexit’ vote of June 23, 2016, the increasingly demonized figure of the East-European worker dominated discursive space about labor policy, social rights, and eventually, European Union membership” (Böröcz and Sarkar 311). They read such coverage as “’racial’ downgrading” of Eastern European migrants and, in turn, speculate that hostility against refugees and immigrants in Eastern Europe itself might be explained as a fraught “claim, once and for all, to essential, unquestionable whiteness” on the part of Eastern European governments and public (314)� 7 Lausberg notes that in German media, Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants are often “wrongly identified as primarily (Sinti and) Roma or ‘gypsies,’ and have fallen and are [still] falling victim to social marginalization because of antiziganist stereotypes” (Lausberg 97). Such processes complicate an already explosive situation in the two countries where discrimination against Roma is common and systemic (Lausberg 147—72). However, as Alyosxa Tudor reminds us, one should be careful to distinguish between migratization and racialization in such debates. To explain their effect, Tudor gives the following example: “Racism can work through migratising strategies, for example, when Black Europeans are asked where they ‘actually’ come from. However, there are also forms of migratisation that are not racist; for instance, when a white person is told that they have an ‘Eastern European’ accent. That kind of statement does not automatically construct the person as non-white” (Tudor, “Queering Migration Discourse” 31). Similarly, migratization and racialization are often intermingled but affect differently white Eastern Europeans and Roma minorities� White Eastern Europeans are discriminated primarily because of their migrant background, although they might face some effects of racialization - as Fatima El-Tayeb has observed, “[the] claim [of Eastern and Southern Europeans] to […] whiteness is more ambiguous than that of the Northwest of the continent” (El-Tayeb xiv). Yet, the labeling of all Romanians and Bulgarians in German media as Roma and especially the backlash against Western media in both countries - in an attempt to correct the power implications of such leveling - clearly indicates that Roma are constant subjects to racialization, both at home and abroad (Tudor, From [al'manja] with love 246—47). 8 Famously, Larry Wolff has noted that “[i]t was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment� It was also the Enlightenment, with its intellectual centers in Western Europe, that cultivated and appropriated to itself the new notion of ‘civilization,’ an eighteenth-century neologism, Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 89 and civilization discovered its complement, within the same continent, in shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism� Such was the invention of Eastern Europe” (Wolff 4). 9 Dace Dzenovska gives an example from academic discussions in which “eastern Europeans [are depicted] as home-grown barbarians threatening to contaminate the European moral community” (Dzenovska 299). Echoing Maria Todorova’s and Larry Wolff’s canonic works that have traced similar conceptualizations historically, Dzenovska concludes that “despite complex and contentious debates on the ground, the politicized and moralized distinction between east and west that has long shaped perceptions about eastern Europe continues to be a convenient discursive tool for making sense of public and political reactions to the ‘refugee/ migrant crisis’ in east European member states of the European Union” (299). 10 Grisebach mentions well-known American Westerns such as My Darling Clementine ( John Ford, 1946), Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950), High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) as inspirations for Western � Classic Westerns evoke also familial memories, as she reminisces about watching them with her father as a child in West Berlin (Chan n� pag�)� 11 Numerous reviews of Western have referred to this scene as an indication of past trauma after presumed Nazi occupation of the region. However, such an interpretation is problematic since Bulgaria joined the Axis powers in 1941, remained a German ally until 1944, and hoped for territorial gains in Northern Greece and Macedonia� 12 Having grown up with a fascination for the male characters in classical Westerns, Grisebach voices eagerness to explore the topic in her own work and “[to] come closer to the lonely, exaggerated, often melancholic male figures from the western” (“Ein Gespräch mit Valeska Grisebach” n. pag.). Works Cited Abel, Marco� The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School � Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013� Ballinger, Pamela. “Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries: Whither Europe’s ‘Easts’ and ‘Peripheries’? ” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 31.1 (2017): 3—10. Bergfelder, Tim� International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s . NewYork/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Böröcz, József, and Mahua Sarkar. “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Polish Plumber and the Hungarian Peacock Dance around ‘Race.’” Slavic Review 76.2 (2017): 307—14. 90 Nora Gortcheva Chan, Andrew. “Home Out of Range: A Conversation with Valeska Grisebach.” criterion.com 14 Feb. 2017. Web. 3 Jan. 2018. Cook, Roger F�, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager� Berlin School Glossary. An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema � Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2013� Cumming, Jesse. “‘Where Are the Men I Can Imagine on a Horse? ’: Valeska Grisebach on Western.” Filmmaker Magazine 12 Mar� 2018� Web� 3 Apr� 2018� De Genova, Nicholas, ed� The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering . Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017. “Der wilde Osten - Aufbruch und Anarchie in der Wendezeit.” ZDFinfo, 29 Sept. 2015. Television� “Der wilde Osten - Konsumrausch und Abzocke in der Wendezeit.” ZDFinfo, 29 Sept. 2015� Television� Dzenovska, Dace. “ Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/ Refugee Crisis.” Slavic Review 76.2 (2017): 297—306. “Ein Gespräch mit Valeska Grisebach.” kulturexpress.info n.d. Web. 3 Jan. 2018. El-Tayeb, Fatima� European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe � Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Fritz-Vannahme, Joachim. “Beitrittszusage unter Bauchgrimmen. Das Europäische Parlament stimmt für einen EU-Beitritt Rumäniens im Jahr 2007.” Die Zeit 13 Apr� 2005. Web. 3 Jan. 2018. Gemünden, Gerd. “Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme .” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections � Ed� Colin G� Calloway, Gerd Gemünden and Susanne Zantop. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. 243—56. Gille, Zsuzsa. “Introduction: From Comparison to Relationality.”- Slavic Review 76.2 (2017): 285—90. Kacandes, Irene, and Yuliya Komska, eds� Eastern Europe-Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries . New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. Kopp, Kristin� Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as a Colonial Space � Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. Lampe, Katharina. “Die Entwicklung von Diskursen: Das Bild Rumäniens und Bulgariens in der deutschen Presse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Integrationsprozesses in die Europäische Union.” Balkanbilder in Ost und West: Mythen und Stereotypen auf der Spur. Anregungen zur Didaktik interkultureller Studienseminare � Ed� Valeska Bopp, Katharina Lampe and Andrea Schneiker� Berlin: MitOst, 2007� 46—60. Lattimer, James. “At the Frontier: Valeska Grisebach on Western.” Cinema Scope 71 (2017): n. pag. Web. 3 Jan. 2018. Lausberg, Michael� Antiziganismus in Deutschland. Zuwanderung aus Bulgarien und Rumänien � Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2015� Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel� The German Myth of the East 1800 to the Present . Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2009. Neubert, Ehrhart� Unsere Revolution. Die Geschichte der Jahre 1989/ 90 � Munich: Piper Verlag, 2008� Reflexive Unmapping : The “Wild East” in Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017) 91 Nolan, Mary. “America in the German Imagination.” Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan � Ed� Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000. 3—25. Sehnsucht [ Longing ]. Dir. Valeska Grisebach. Rommel Film, 2006. Tudor, Alyosxa. “Queering Migration Discourse: Differentiating Racism and Migratism in Postcolonial Europe.” Lambda Nordica 22.2-3 (2017): 21—40. —.- From [al'manja] with love: Trans/ feministische Positionierungen zu Rassismus und Migratismus � Frankfurt a�M�: Brandes Apsel, 2014� Todorova, Maria� Imagining the Balkans . Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2009. Toni Erdmann . Dir. Maren Ade. Komplizen Film, 2016. Van Houtum, Henk. “The Mask of the Borders.” The-Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies . Ed. Doris Wastl-Walter. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. 49—61. Western � Dir� Valeska Grisebach� Komplizen Film, 2017� Wheatley, Christine. “Not Politics but People: The ‘Feminine Aesthetic’ of Valeska Grisebach and Jessica Hausner.” New Austrian Film � Ed� Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. 136—47. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Laura Bohn Case Wheaton College Meneely 116 26. E. Main Street Norton, MA 02766- USA- bohn_laura@wheatoncollege�edu Anca Luca Holden 26 Spring Hill Rd Belchertown, MA 01007 USA alholden@umass�edu Anita Lukic 1525 Cathedral of Learning Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA alukic@pitt.edu Brangwen Stone Department of Germanic Studies Room 506 Brennan MacCallum Building A18 The University of Sydney- NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA brangwen�stone@sydney�edu�au Nora Gortcheva 1631 Euclid Ave Berkeley, CA 94709 USA nigortch@mtholyoke�edu Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 132,00 (print)/ € 168,00 (print & online)/ € 138,00 (e-only) Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax (0 70 71) 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder joseph.oneil@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Joseph D. O’Neil, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2020 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Hans Vilmar Geppert Realismus und Moderne Erträge, Vergleiche, Perspektiven 2019, 224 Seiten €[D] 49,90 ISBN 978-3-7720-8689-2 e ISBN 978-3-7720-5689-5 Das Buch sammelt in übersichtlichen Thesen Erträge langjähriger vergleichender Forschung zum Europäischen Realismus und Naturalismus. Die beiden Epochen sind, wie viele Beispiele zeigen, ganz unterschiedlich strukturiert und eröffnen immer wieder verschiedene ‚realistische Wege zur Moderne‘. So lassen sich beispielsweise die ‚feinen Erzählfäden‘ finden, die Fontane mit dem Europäischen Naturalismus verbinden. Die Frage nach Vorwegnahmen der Moderne im realistischen Erzählen bildet den zweiten Schwerpunkt der hier gesammelten Aufsätze: Balzacs Comédie humaine erweist sich je nach Blickwinkel zugleich als beispielhaft realistisches und bereits modernes, ‚polyhistorisch‘ offenes Werk. Fontanes Kunst der ‚Leerstellen‘ weist wesentlich auf das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert voraus. Oft finden sich in der Literatur des Europäischen Realismus plötzliche, kurze, etwa symbolistische, impressionistische, ja expressionistische bis hin zu surrealistischen Passagen. Es gibt aber auch umfangreiche und bereits klare Erzählmuster für einen Weg zur Moderne: etwa das Umschlagen naturalistischer ‚Totalisierungen‘ in Abstraktion und ein kreativ ‚Unbekanntes‘, oder das ‚Chaos der Zeichen‘ bei Raabe und dessen verblüffende Ähnlichkeit zu vielen zeitgenössischen Autoren, oder die ‚Impulse der Innovation‘, die sich in den Erzählungen zerstörter Bilder bei Balzac, Keller, Henry James und anderen abzeichnen, und die dann im Bezug zur bildenden Kunst der Moderne überraschend deutliche Konturen gewinnen. LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT \ DEUTSCHE LITERATUR Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 4,6 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 4,6 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 ISSN 0010-1338 T h e m e n h eft: Im a gin a rie s of E a s te rn E urop e G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: B ra ngwe n S ton e , N ora G or t c h e va , a nd A n c a L u c a H old e n B ra ngwe n S ton e , N ora G or t c h e va , a nd A n c a L u c a H old e n: I ntrod u c tion: I m a gin a rie s of E a s te r n E u rop e A nita L uki c : R e con s tr u c tin g th e A nti- Fa s c i s t L e g a c y in A d ria n a A lta ra s ’ T ito s B rill e L a ura B ohn C a s e: Ton k a ’ s Voi c e : N a r rative Pe r s p e c tive a n d th e D e s ire for S ile n c e in R ob e r t M u s il ’ s E a rly N ovella A n c a L u c a H old e n: L a n g u a g e , C ultu ral I d e ntity, a n d th e Politi c s of M a rgin ali z ation in R i c h a rd Wa g n e r ’ s A u s re i s e a ntra g . B e g rüßu n g s g e ld B ra ngwe n S ton e: R efu g e e s Pa s t a n d P re s e nt: O lg a G rja s nowa ’ s G ott i s t ni c ht s c h ü c ht e r n a n d S a s h a M a ria n n a S al z m a n n ’ s A uße r s i c h N ora G or t c h e va: R e fl e xiv e U n m a p pin g : T h e “ W ild E a s t ” in Vale s k a G ri s e b a c h ’ s We s t e r n ( 2 0 1 7 ) narr.digital Band 51 Band 51 Heft 1 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) 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 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 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 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 1,3 NARR_Colloquia Germanica_2018_51_1_Umschlag.indd 1,3 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51 10.01.2020 11: 37: 51