Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/121
2014
474
Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen
121
2014
Jilian DeMair
This paper argues that Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen (1891) explores the limits of framed narratives through tangible disruptions to the narrator’s frameworks for organizing both physical space and his story. This novel features a narrator who visits home in Germany after a long absence and finds his conception of it unsettled. He flounders in his attempts to depict a particular version of his homeland and also to assert his narrative credibility against the imposing presence of the title figure. While this instability stems from uncertainty surrounding themes that have often been studied in conjunction with this work, such as conceptions of Heimat, colonization, and globalization, the narrative is held together by an intricate mesh of ambiguity that resists the binary oppositions that have often been used to frame studies of this text. Complexly interlocking narratives ask us to examine such topics as the authority of a storyteller, the relationship between oral and written narrative, and the experience of bearing witness in an era characterized by social changes.
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Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 351 Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen Jillian DeMair Independent Researcher, Harvard University Abstract: This paper argues that Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen (1891) explores the limits of framed narratives through tangible disruptions to the narrator’s frameworks for organizing both physical space and his story. This novel features a narrator who visits home in Germany after a long absence and finds his conception of it unsettled. He flounders in his attempts to depict a particular version of his homeland and also to assert his narrative credibility against the imposing presence of the title figure. While this instability stems from uncertainty surrounding themes that have often been studied in conjunction with this work, such as conceptions of Heimat, colonization, and globalization, the narrative is held together by an intricate mesh of ambiguity that resists the binary oppositions that have often been used to frame studies of this text. Complexly interlocking narratives ask us to examine such topics as the authority of a storyteller, the relationship between oral and written narrative, and the experience of bearing witness in an era characterized by social changes. Keywords: framed narrative, Heimat, geology, credibility, unreliable narrator “Wieder an Bord! ” (7) Eduard exclaims with relief as he begins the thirty-day ocean journey from a visit in his German hometown back to British South Africa, where he has supposedly made a fortune. Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen: Eine See- und Mordgeschichte, published in 1891, portrays a narrator who is on uneasy footing throughout the novel, not only within the confines of the ship, but also while in his homeland. Raabe underscores this instability by linking physically unstable ground with the disruption of narrative frameworks that would theoretically divide stories and geographical regions. In vain does Eduard 352 Jillian DeMair do all he can to convey stability. He frames his story in logbook style, occasionally reminding the reader of his present, seemingly neutral location onboard the ship, as if he could neatly enframe his homeland itself and thereby capture the perceived lost state of unity that he sees embodied by his childhood friend, Heinrich Schaumann, known as “Stopfkuchen.” While Eduard was making his fortune in Africa, Heinrich had been living a seemingly idyllic life with his childhood sweetheart, Valentine Quakatz, on her late father’s fortress-like estate, the Rote Schanze. Eduard’s efforts to construe his hometown as tranquil are subverted from within by Heinrich, who gradually unearths the truth about the decades-old murder of the cattle-dealer Kienbaum, for which Valentine’s father was long considered responsible. Heinrich thereby reveals unexpected deeper layers both through his own storytelling and also literally in his geological excavations of fossils on his land. Eduard, meanwhile, finds himself struggling to contain Heinrich within the frame of the narrative that is meant to be his own. I argue in this paper that Raabe shows the futility of Eduard’s attempt by linking narrative unreliability with the physical instability of the earth. This means that at the same time that physical unearthing and digging reflect the precariousness of Eduard’s search for identity and homeland, they also represent meditations on what it means to relate a coherent and credible story. Moreover, these concerns are intertwined in a historically relevant way and must be understood in relation to this world of modernization and colonization, which initially seems to be located far beyond Eduard and Heinrich’s hometown, but which actually cannot be kept separate from it. 1 The stories conveyed are inextricably linked to how these storytellers define their relationships to the land, especially in response to the perceived perils of an increasingly globalized world. Issues raised by colonization, globalization, and the definition of homeland are held together in this novel by an intricate mesh of ambiguity that calls into question the binary oppositions (e.g., home and abroad, colonizer and colonized, the modern and the antiquated) that have often been used to frame studies of this text. Raabe’s complexly interlocking narratives ask us to examine such topics as the authority of storytellers, the relationship between oral and written narrative, and the experience of bearing witness in an era characterized by profound social changes. Rather than telling a single story, Raabe’s text portrays a search for stability and specificity in an increasingly globalized world. For Eduard and Heinrich, this search extends to the question of how to represent these experiences. As many scholars have observed, Stopfkuchen is a self-reflexive text that not only addresses contemporary issues such as globalization and colonialization, but also deals with questions of representation (Zeller 9-15; Göttsche and Krobb 2). My focus is not just on how Eduard’s credibility as a narrator is undermined, but more specifically on how this instability is reflected in tangibly unsettled Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 353 ground. In essence, Eduard fails to delineate two different types of boundaries; he is able to frame neither a unified narrative nor a stable Heimat. 2 Mine is not the first study of the narrative implications of unsettled ground in nineteenth-century German literature. 3 It does, however, offer a different perspective on Raabe’s portrayals of tangible land and physical artifacts such as Heinrich’s fossil collection by reading them as instances of unstable ground that are symptomatic of Eduard’s loss of control over his story. I begin by considering Raabe’s deployment of Eduard as a figure who withdraws from the blurring of boundaries between the global and the local. By portraying Eduard’s need for stability, Raabe does not celebrate permanence but rather demonstrates how insecurity and a desire for unambiguous boundaries can be manifested in the structure and flow of the narrative. As Eduard fails to delineate his desired clear narrative structure, his lack of credibility becomes apparent. In the subsequent section, I examine how Raabe uses irony to say more than Eduard ever does, and also to undermine this narrator’s viewpoints. Heinrich, our oral storyteller, is instrumental in unsettling Eduard and his narrative authority, and I show in the following section how Heinrich’s geological excavations upend Eduard’s desire for a merely superficial perspective on his homeland. I conclude with an analysis of the different perspectives on progress conveyed by the two storyteller figures. Heimat in a Globalized World One of the reasons why the nineteenth century saw an interest in capturing and recording local traditions and cultural identities was the emergent threat to these regional particularities from industrialization and economic globalization (Grätz 245-46). Although Eduard is recording the events of his visit home after years away, he seems more interested in capturing a vague feeling of belonging than in truly conveying the identity of his homeland. Eduard thereby represents a contemporary sentiment in the era of industrialization, which Anton Kaes identifies as the point in time when the notion of Heimat began to be overloaded with meaning, connoting “the site of one’s lost childhood, of family, of identity” and representing an ideology that warned against “rootlessness, hectic activity, and transient, superficial values” (165). Through Eduard, Raabe depicts the ways in which increased mobility triggers a need for stability, but Raabe by no means takes an antimodern standpoint that warns against the dangers of abandoning Heimat with Eduard as a cautionary example. Instead, Eduard’s interactions with Heinrich suggest that Heimat in the sense Eduard imagines—in his futile search for “rechten, echten, wahrhaftigen, wirklichen Heimatsbehagen” (56)— never existed in the first place. If this is the case, then Raabe conceives of Heimat 354 Jillian DeMair not as a place but as a modern and already problematic impulse and this is part of the reason why Eduard’s narrative authority fails—he would like to set the narrative of his homeland within a framework that does not exist. As Kaes and others have pointed out, modern conceptions of Heimat are frequently inspired by feelings of homelessness (Kaes 163; Blickle 40; von Moltke 5).We can see Raabe’s challenge to this kind of sentimentality insofar as the literal instability of the physical soil undermines Eduard’s attempts to conceive of Heimat as a particular place. This is just one example among many that show that Raabe is not a representative of the idyllic. To the contrary, Stopfkuchen alludes to portentous problems in this era of colonial expansion, plantations, and slavery. We do not know for certain, for instance, to what extent Eduard has exploited the region where he has settled in South Africa, but we do learn in the first few lines of the novel that he has made a considerable fortune (7). Eduard attempts to keep this part of his life partitioned off from his narrative of his visit home, and yet Raabe enacts a critique of this mentality by preventing the more troubling topics of this era from disappearing entirely. Insofar as I argue for a connection between the challenges of framing narratives and navigating spaces, my reading positions Raabe’s text as one that reflects changing constellations of space in light of processes of modernization and globalization. Geographic space was reconceived around this time as a result of altered political borders, increased mobility, new distinctions between the provincial and the metropolitan, and the conquest of new land. As John B. Lyon demonstrates, these issues infiltrate many Realist novels in ways that go beyond portrayals of time and space to find expression in their narrative structure (91-98). In Stopfkuchen, place becomes a prerequisite for self-identification and the creation of narrative. Dirk Oschmann shows, for example, how Eduard’s narrative position below the deck of a ship represents a precarious transitional location between Germany and Africa (214-19). Other critics likewise point to the colonial context in Stopfkuchen as evidence for Raabe’s critical position towards the imperial ideology and authoritarian politics in mid and late nineteenth-century Germany (Dunker 147-60; Göttsche 38; Pizer 174-76; Ryan 631). Indeed, Raabe’s take on colonial discourse is striking because of the way it pervades his portrayals of German Heimat as well. This occurs in spite of Eduard, a narrator who would like to firmly separate his regional, self-contained community from the global process of modernization outside of its boundaries, but is unable to do so. Ironically for Eduard, one of the figures that embodies the increasing interconnectedness of the regional and the global is his childhood mentor, Friedrich Störzer, who Eduard claims was his primary inspiration in the decision to venture out and ultimately establish himself in South Africa (7). Notwithstanding Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 355 the revelation that Störzer is likely the murderer of Kienbaum in the unsolved case, he is a problematic figure for Eduard to claim as a role model if Eduard wants to establish his own position of belonging in a unified, provincial hometown. As a mail carrier, Störzer serves as a representative of modern, cross-cultural communication, and, more importantly, as a reminder of the impact that these modern changes had even on those who did not venture abroad (Ryan 634). He himself had casually linked travel and financial gain, as when mentioning another local who had emigrated to Chile: “dahin ist der ausgewandert und hat’s zum Millionär gebracht. Und das sollten wir alle tun” (18). But he was also a type of wanderer himself due to his mail carrier duties, and upon his death, the townspeople say that he has placed “seinen Pilgerstab in den Winkel” (14). 4 These factors, in addition to the torment he endured from the cattle dealer Kienbaum, make Störzer somewhat of an outsider. That Eduard should find his strongest connection to home in Störzer, who played a peripheral role in the community, is thereby ironically fitting, since Eduard himself can no longer find his place there. The emphasis that Eduard places on his own travel is another aspect that makes him seem less like a local depicting his homeland than a traveler with an uncertain identity. With his quasi logbook narrative, for instance, Eduard relies on a form that triggered his own interest in exploration. However, the conventions of this form position him as an outside observer and as a not entirely innocent one at that. As European nations experienced an expanding role in the world, there was a surge in travel and travel writing to go along with it, with which Eduard’s childhood mentor Störzer, we learn, had been so fascinated. Yet travel literature of this time period often went beyond entertaining adventure stories and into the realm of deleterious contributions to an ideology that promoted ideas of Western superiority. For example, the technological advances that allowed for the travel to and exploration of non-Western lands were often associated with intellectual ascendancy as travel writers presumed to understand and interpret the new terrain they encountered and its inhabitants (Bridges 53). We can detect this mindset in Eduard when he tries to exert control, not just over colonial land, but also over his own homeland, which he would like to see as an idyllic, easily framed community. His attempt to delineate a quaint Heimat stands in opposition to his economic exploits of what he might see as the unbounded terrain of colonial land. Eduard fails not in his colonial exploits, but in his ability to control the narrative, making for a subtle critique of Eduard’s reliance on an unrealistic perception fueled by fantastical travel narratives. Not only does Eduard struggle to maintain narrative authority, but the reader is inclined to question Eduard’s credibility considering that the travelogue is a form based on actual events but requiring faith in the accuracy of representa- 356 Jillian DeMair tion. As Kenneth Parker explains, travel accounts “belong neither exclusively to the inventions of fiction, nor to the ‛facts’ of scientific ‛discovery’” (26). Within the context of Raabe’s novel, Eduard’s report on his visit home is likewise a borderline form. Part travel account, part memoir, Eduard’s account is based on his experiences, but as Heinrich reminds him, he tends to fictionalize events. With Eduard, Raabe creates a fictional author who resembles contemporary travel authors. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs write about authors “exploiting the uncertain boundary between travel writing and the fiction which copied its form,” since many readers “hope for a literal truthfulness from travel writing that they would not expect to find in the novel” (6). Although Raabe’s readers are aware that this all occurs within a fictional storyworld, they might nonetheless be reminded of the ease with which the travel genre can be exploited. Eduard’s eagerness to establish his own credibility—even while conveying confusion and physical discomfort that occasionally contradict the essence of his narrative— thereby becomes all the more suspicious. As a result, the manuscript that is meant to be a traveler’s report on his visit home establishes neither a clear depiction of the territory to which he is returning, nor the credibility of his account. Irony and Disenchantment Eduard writes the entire narrative of his visit to Germany during his return trip to the Cape of Good Hope on a ship called the Hagebucher. 5 This intertextual reference to another one of Raabe’s own works reminds us how present the author’s own voice is, even with Eduard as narrator. Beyond the social critique embedded in the seemingly globally-oriented narrator’s lack of authority, Raabe also adds irony and humor to communicate with his reader over his narrator’s head. For example, the furtiveness of Eduard’s writing distances him not only from his fellow passengers, but from the reader as well, who cannot take entirely seriously Eduard’s self-conscious writing style and his conviction that the other passengers wonder “womit sich eigentlich der Herr aus der Burenrepublik so eifrig literarisch beschäftige, was er schreibe, worüber er jetzt knurre, jetzt seufze und jetzt lache” (59). The only hesitation Eduard expresses is a thinly veiled boast about how long he has been away from Germany, as he wonders “ob ich für das heutige Vaterland bloß nur allein orthographisch noch recht oder richtig schreiben kann” (8). It is difficult to overlook the irony imparted by Raabe that undermines Eduard’s narrative competence and self-assured attitude. Eduard’s emphasis on his physical act of writing comprises part of his attempt to establish a position of authority as narrator, but this is also one of the many ways that Raabe delays narration by reflecting on it rather than moving the plot forward. 6 As a result of these delays, the reader becomes aware of Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 357 the extent to which narrative stability is compromised for Eduard, often in a literal way onboard the ship. He attempts to steady his text with references to something tangible, emphasizing the physical manuscript he is in the process of producing, and even the supply of ink he supposedly depletes (195). 7 Eduard also conveys the impression that he does not plan to share his manuscript, thus suggesting a lack of pretense. All of these self-conscious cues superficially convey the legitimacy of Eduard’s narrative, but in actuality they highlight his own uncertainties. As Eric Downing ascertains, the portrayal of the act of writing within a narrative, while perhaps intended to establish credibility, can actually have the opposite effect of raising awareness of the constructed element of a story and reminding readers that the same process has taken place in creating the book they currently hold in their hands (174). Raabe lets Eduard play the serious writer here while remaining visible as the actual author. Moreover, making the writing process visible in a literary work that also highlights oral narrative raises the question of how we assign legitimacy to oral versus written narratives. In this novel, Heinrich’s oral narrative wins out as the authoritative version. What are we to make, then, of Eduard as a narrator whose credibility is undermined and who resists reflecting critically on his own role in a global world? As readers, we must consider how written texts can authentically bear witness, especially in an era of social change, as well as how the framing of written texts can obscure entire facets of a story. Even the title of this novel shows us that we should not necessarily trust what we read. Labeling the story as a “See- und Mordgeschichte” suggests that the book is something that it is not, namely a tale of murder on the high seas (Brundiek 124; Heiderich 91). With the use of a two-part, hyphenated subtitle, Raabe conflates the two parts of the story that Eduard attempts to keep separate with the narrative frame. One could argue that Raabe is misleading or playing a joke on his reader, but the title ultimately functions as an earnest suggestion that stories are not always what they seem to be. The “Mordgeschichte” told by Heinrich within the frame of Eduard’s narrative turns out to be less thrilling than one might expect, not least because of Heinrich’s protracted, self-possessed narrative style which is challenged only intermittently by his wife Valentine (Sammons 288), and not at all by Eduard. The notion of a “Seegeschichte” is important to Eduard only as the one narrative level over which he has control; there is no storyline here related to the sea. The reminders that the text is being written on the ship—comments about the weather and events on board—as if it were in the process of being written as we read, serve only as a frame around the murder tale, and Eduard frequently retreats to this frame when Heinrich’s story threatens his sense of stability in his Heimat. In one instance, this happens precisely when Heinrich contradicts Eduard’s memory. Instead of reacting to 358 Jillian DeMair the incongruity, Eduard breaks off and writes: “Keine Möglichkeit, heute weiterzuschreiben. Das Schiff stößt allzusehr” (101). Brian Tucker notes that the narrative cannot continue at this point because “self-narrative requires a stable grounding in memory” (576). Eduard therefore attributes his perception that he has no firm ground beneath his feet to the literal instability of the ship rather than to the disconnect he feels with his homeland as he begins to suspect that the idea of returning to his “Heimatstadt in Arkadien” (7) was an illusion. Although Eduard never fully acknowledges any disenchantment with his Heimat ideal, he unintentionally gives the reader numerous reasons to believe that he is over-sentimentalizing and embellishing not only the story of his relationship with Heinrich, with whom he has not had contact for years, but also his emotional connection to his homeland. We can discern Eduard’s feeling of disconnect with his homeland primarily in how he interacts with the physical landscape and how his observations are undermined by Raabe’s underlying irony. On his way to finally see Heinrich, Eduard observes the beauty of the landscape, and in a moment of childish awe, he exclaims, “Und alles noch ganz so wie zu deiner Zeit, Eduard! ” He then quickly contradicts himself: “Dem war aber doch nicht vollständig so” (31). For example, he observes that a swamp of four or five hundred square meters has been filled in to create more farmland, and expresses his great disappointment, since he recalls learning about the complex ecosystem of this “Lurkenteich” in school (32). Here we learn about the filling in of a portion of land, a process opposite to Heinrich’s excavations, which we learn about later, although both contribute to a sense that the ground is not entirely stable. Quickly dismissing the long legal process behind this change to the landscape, Eduard immediately links this physical modification of the land with a different court proceeding: “Da war ein anderer Prozeß, der schon von meinen frühern Jugenderinnerungen her eine ganz andere Bedeutung hatte: der böse Fall Quakatz in Sachen Kienbaum” (32). This is the trial of Valentine Quakatz’s father, who was blamed for Kienbaum’s mysterious death. That Eduard himself should link the literal and figurative upheaval of a community and its land is telling. This moment allows us to observe how Raabe endows Eduard’s memories and narrative with physical associations. As Eduard continues his walk, providing vivid depictions of the fields of his homeland, he remembers all the more keenly the excitement and details associated with the murder trial, as if the landscape itself were awakening penetrating memories that come back in a series of details: “Mit immer neuen Einzelheiten—eine immer interessanter als die andere! ” (33). Just as he seems dissociated from his own homeland, he views his own memories from a distance that allows him to examine them with fascination, as if being told or reminded of a story by a third party. Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 359 Not only does the landscape guide Eduard’s narration here, but disruptions to the soil capture Eduard’s attention in particular, from the filling in of the swampland just mentioned to the removal of a tree: “Sie hatte wahrscheinlich [. . .] zu sehr ihre Wurzeln im Grund und Boden ausgebreitet” (33). This missing tree provides a striking contrast to Eduard himself, who is far from rooted in his homeland and who is about to be further unsettled by Heinrich’s narrative once he arrives at the Rote Schanze. Eduard had distanced himself from his homeland in Germany, and from far outside its borders, he seems to have maintained only positive impressions and forgotten that this is a community that has alienated several of its members and has long been consumed by an unsolved murder. Owing to Eduard’s apparent lack of any true sense of home, he nonetheless perceives Heinrich’s lifestyle as especially idyllic compared to his own life in Africa, which he describes as “das ödeste, langgedehnteste, wenn auch nahrhafteste Fremdenleben” (81; Sammons 284). Even in this mild self-rebuke, he cannot resist mentioning his financial success. Upon returning to his “stillen Heimatwinkel” (195), Eduard wishes to define his homeland narrowly, and therefore attempts to enclose it, along with its inhabitants, in the frame of his narrative. Yet Heinrich, an imposing presence and a dedicated oral storyteller, refuses to be hemmed in. From the reader’s perspective, Heinrich’s narrative quickly overruns Eduard’s. The plot of this novel is conveyed primarily by Heinrich, and at times it is easy to overlook Eduard as the intermediary. At one point, Eduard says, “mir schwoll er heute schon von Augenblick zu Augenblick mehr über jeglichen Rahmen hinaus” (157). The idea of Heinrich as a boundless entity, seeming to break any reasonable frame, can be extended onto his narrative act: Heinrich’s knowledge and narrative go beyond the borders of his own experience. He tells not just about himself, but also conveys the stories of others; in this way, Heinrich is truly a traditional oral storyteller. Eduard’s periodic return to the outer narrative frame of the ship journey is just one example of how he constantly struggles to maintain control over the seemingly boundless figure of Heinrich; another example is his continued use of the less than flattering childhood nickname “Stopfkuchen,” which stems from their childhood, when Eduard and others used to make fun of Heinrich’s pudgy figure. Yet despite Eduard’s attempts to enframe Heinrich’s narrative with his own, the former expands into and imposes upon this outer frame. He disrupts Eduard’s expectations and sense of stability in the process and also conveys the message that storytelling is not always as structured and contained as Eduard would have it. Heinrich’s oral narrative exerts pressure on the textual conventions that Eduard clings to, providing a stark contrast to Eduard’s reliance on physical paper and ink as he isolates himself onboard the ship. 360 Jillian DeMair Digging up the Past Beyond their contrasting styles of storytelling, Eduard and Heinrich interact with their physical surroundings through different processes of discovery. Heinrich favors geology, digging vertically into the layers of the earth and uncovering that which is hidden under the surface. Störzer’s, and by extension, Eduard’s interest in geography, however, has a horizontal quality related to maps; he is occupied with discovering new territories, crossing manmade political boundaries, and traveling across the surface of land and water. 8 This difference emerges in Heinrich’s ongoing critique of Eduard’s decision to seek out adventure by going across the world to Africa. Eduard, on the other hand, cannot understand Heinrich’s disinterest in recent world events, commenting that “An der Schanze des Siebenjährigen Krieges ist selbst die neueste Weltgeschichte vorbeigezogen, ohne ein Zeichen hinterlassen zu haben” (41). For Eduard, “Weltgeschichte” means a familiarity with current events that he associates with reading the daily newspaper (29). It is part of his concept of what should be common knowledge for someone like himself who is eager to demonstrate “daß ich noch zu den Gebildeten mich zählen darf ” (7). Heinrich, on the other hand, does not concern himself with modern events, but instead focuses on historical ones such as the Seven Years’ War, telling Eduard, “Und wenn du auch die halbe neue Weltgeschichte miterlebt und in Afrika selber mitgemacht hast, Eduard, das mußt du doch auch noch wissen, daß in meines Vaters Hausgiebel eine Kanonenkugel stak und heute noch steckt” (68). The cannonball, a remnant of the Seven Years’ War, was fired on the community from the area of the Rote Schanze, which lies just beyond the edge of town. It has great value to Heinrich, who claims that “mein erstes Denken haftet an ihr” and asks Eduard whether he has anything better in Africa “um deinem Jungen oder deinen Jungen den Verstand für irgend etwas aufzuknöpfen? ” (68). With questions like these, Heinrich persistently challenges what he sees as a missing permanence and rootedness in Eduard’s life, even though the cannonball, a symbol of past violence, is hardly an endorsement of a peaceful conception of Heimat. For Heinrich, it is nonetheless an instructional tool insofar as it allows for a kind of storytelling that tangibly reveals rather than masks deeper layers of history. Lynne Tatlock sees this cannonball, which is suspended in a “domestic frame,” as symbolic of the violence that is inherent in this community, though for Heinrich, it serves as the impetus to confront and expose injustice (“Communion” 135-36). Indeed, at the conclusion of the novel, Heinrich essentially fires upon his community—not with violence or a literal cannonball, but with the revelation of Kienbaum’s murderer. This news serves as a reminder of past violence, akin to Heinrich’s insistence on pointing out the remnant of the Seven Years’ War. In this way, the cannonball is evocative Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 361 of the uncovering of two different kinds of layers in this novel—archeological artifacts and narrative testimony. Moreover, it reveals the potential violence that lies below an idyllic surface, and the way in which an orderly notion of Heimat like Eduard’s would cover up this violence. Two different approaches regarding how to deal with these layers are thereby at odds. Yet Heinrich’s notion of the cannonball as an instructional storytelling tool wins out over Eduard’s desire for harmony. The cannonball is just one of the physical remnants that represent Heinrich’s mode of layered storytelling. He also engages in paleontological research right on his own property, even taking over a room in his house for a “geologische[s] Museum” (76) containing fossils including the mammoth that Quakatz had discovered. 9 Here his digging into the past goes back much further than the Seven Years’ War. Though we do not know the extent of Heinrich’s research, he seems to believe that the biblical flood caused the extinction of the found specimens and washed their bones to the Rote Schanze (Raabe 77, 99, 101, 131). 10 The biblical verse that Heinrich has inscribed above his door also refers to the Great Flood: “Da redete Gott mit Noah und sprach: Gehe aus dem Kasten” (75). Heinrich frequently cites this verse as a catchphrase for his perspective on life. By directing the motto at Eduard, Heinrich implies that despite his world travel, Eduard has preferred to isolate himself from uncomfortable realities that do not fit into his orderly schema of the world. While Eduard’s ship journey seems to find some correspondence in Heinrich’s preoccupation with the biblical flood and supposed resulting geological shifts, we never see Eduard emerge from the ship or from the figurative “Kasten” that he has created with his narrative framing device. The writing of his manuscript takes place entirely on board, and he would likewise prefer to keep his story and his homeland neatly framed and contained. Eduard even avoids coming on deck when the Angra Pequeña Mountains are in sight, claiming that he forgets while immersed in his writing and that besides, he has seen them before (162). With his surface-oriented way of exploring, in contrast to Heinrich’s vertical digging, seeing once may be all that is necessary. Moreover, this particular landscape is perhaps an uncomfortable reminder of Germany’s colonial empire and reflects Eduard’s uncertainty about having chosen his colonial path. 11 His resistance to rigorous observation in favor of superficial glimpses represents a general avoidance of the true state of things. This continues even upon his departure, as he casts one final look at the Rote Schanze from the window of the express train to Hamburg, assuring himself that it truly had not changed. He is glad “daß ich sie, wie sie war, im Gedächtnis behalten konnte: als einen sonnenbeleuchteten Punkt im schönsten Heimatsgrün” (206). His use of the past tense to say that he will remember the Rote Schanze, “wie sie war,” is ambiguous. Since he is narrating after the fact, 362 Jillian DeMair this could either mean that he will remember it as it was at that moment of observation or as it was at some point in the distant past. Either way, his language reveals that he wants to see only an idealized image. He then quickly closes the window and draws the curtains, welcoming the “blaue Dämmerung” after having strained his eyes to see Heinrich und Valentine one last time, and claiming, “So etwas von Kohlenstaub aus der Lokomotive war mir so schon ins rechte Auge geweht” (206). These literal hindrances to sight reveal the deficiencies in his perception more generally. Heinrich may tend to stay within the borders of the Rote Schanze, but he appears capable of far more discovery than Eduard, despite the latter’s interest in world exploration. Heinrich is the one who uncovers concrete evidence of the past and sets straight the historical understanding of a variety of events: his own childhood, during which he was bullied by his companions, including Eduard; his conquest of Valentine and the Rote Schanze; and the murder of Kienbaum by Störzer. Despite the denial we still see in Eduard at the end of the narrative, he is not able to entirely fend off Heinrich’s insistence that the truth is more ambiguous than Eduard would like it to be. Downing demonstrates that Heinrich uses a parodic repetition of Eduard’s clichés in order to expose and exploit “his friend’s tendency to poetize his perceptions” (240). For example, Eduard’s narrative authority is undermined when Heinrich, referring to his own story about the murder, tells Eduard sarcastically, “ich für meinen Teil denke doch nur: da habe ich dem guten alten Kerl doch noch eine nette Erinnerung an die alte gemütliche Heimat mit aufs Schiff gegeben” (167). 12 This is just one attempt of many to disillusion Eduard, who is frequently speechless when Heinrich draws his attention to the historical rather than idealized version of events. Perspectives on Progress By undermining the voice of a character representative of certain aspects of globalization, Raabe may be challenging colonialism, but not necessarily the idea of modern progress. After all, despite what he would like to believe, Eduard is hardly a modern character. Although he considers himself an envoy of the world of modern communication and travel, the way he writes about his homeland reveals a conservative hope that this world might remain sheltered and unchanged. The idea that the new and old worlds might be kept separate is shown to be illusory, not least in the way we see colonization enacted on a small scale by Heinrich himself in what he describes as his “Eroberung” of the Rote Schanze (94). But even if Eduard gladly incorporates this achievement into his idealization of Heinrich as a hero, the reader can hardly fail to notice the discrepancy between Eduard’s conceptions of Heinrich as a harmless, good Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 363 natured fellow and his actual aggressive temperament that has allowed him to play an antagonistic role in the community and to overrun the narrative with his monologue (Tatlock, “Flutkatastrophen” 119). Therefore, what Raabe undermines is not modernization but rather the type of reaction to it that Eduard displays in his naïve homecoming. Eduard attempts to integrate a notion of Heimat into a globalized view, that is, to establish a fixed homeland to which one could return rhetorically, if not physically, as a stable home base against which global expansion and exploration could be carried out. The provincial exists, at least in Eduard’s imagination, as a safe haven against the modern world, though less as protection from it than as a point from which to admire it. Eduard’s is a self-congratulatory admiration; he has come from humble roots into the life of a wealthy colonizer. In addition, he may desire a peaceful and provincial Heimat to serve as a stable backdrop to the disturbing experiences he has had beyond it. We hear little about his life abroad, but he has certainly encountered new modes and speeds of travel, at least one new language (his children apparently speak a mixture of German and Dutch [207]), and likely conflict and violence. 13 He keeps all of these things well beyond the margins of his narrative. To his surprise, his actual encounters at home in Germany fail to fulfill his expectations for a point of contrasting stability because Heinrich reveals conflict, violence, and instability in their own community. Seeing as Eduard’s Heimat therefore needs to be artificially constructed, Raabe’s critique seems directed at a contemporary tendency to align Heimat with a sense of longing in response to unsettling experiences (Blickle ix; Lyon 10). Eduard’s selective fabrication of his ideal Heimat further highlights the unreliability of his narrative. Both Eduard and Heinrich seek physical things from which they can draw meaning and stability, especially in the face of modernization. For Eduard, very little in his hometown serves this purpose, so he resorts to pointing at the tangible instruments of his own writing. For Heinrich, the cannonball and the fossils he unearths function as anchors for his worldview. The layers of earth he imagines, the idea of being buried or unburied as a fossil himself, have little in common with Eduard’s desire to explore the surface of the earth, constantly moving across a horizontal plane, whether by ship or train. The vertical dimension of Heinrich’s pursuits provides a stark contrast to Eduard’s horizontal journeys, and Eduard himself notices the dissonance of these two worldviews when he takes in the panorama of the surrounding landscape from the Rote Schanze: Behaglich schliefen darunter und darin Heinrich Schaumanns Floren und Faunen sämtlicher wissenschaftlichen Erdballsperioden, Formationen und Übergangsperioden, das Riesenfaultier eingeschlossen und mit eingeschlafen. Darüber der Sommerspätnachmittagssonnenschein. Nur eine oder zwei neue Eisenbahnlinien durch- 364 Jillian DeMair schnitten jetzt die Ebene. Und der Zug, der eben auf der einen die Stadt verlassen hatte und mit langgezogener weißer Lokomotivenwolke der Ferne zuglitt, erinnerte mich in diesem Augenblick wieder daran, wie wenig Halt und Anhalt ich jetzt noch in der Geburtsstadt, in den Heimatsgefilden, habe. (123) The train that cuts across the horizon is representative of the modern progress Eduard espouses; in fact, he will sit in just such a train and take in the view from the opposite perspective when he eagerly departs his hometown once again. Yet as it glides into the distance, the train seems nearly insignificant compared with the vast depth of history described by Heinrich. Although visions of distant and foreign lands had immense appeal for Eduard as a child, he now begins to realize that it has led to a sense of dislocation. The superimposition here of train tracks, signifiers of technological progress and foreign travel, onto the landscape Eduard attempts to idealize, reveals that his homeland cannot be neatly separated from the modern world. The novel’s final and most significant process of unearthing the past is the revelation of Störzer, the mail carrier and Eduard’s mentor, as the murderer. Heinrich has known the truth for some time, but felt it wiser to simply keep the story to himself until Störzer’s death. Eduard, on the other hand, practically flees from his hometown immediately after learning that his dear old friend was a murderer, despite the fact that the murder was presumably unintentional and occurred after years of torment. Perhaps most shocking is that Störzer had never come forward, thus allowing Valentine’s father, Quakatz, to be blamed. Ultimately, the two protagonists’ differing points of view are reflected not only in how each of them conceives of his Heimat, but also in how they come to terms with this murder. The two problems are intertwined, as we see in Eduard’s literal flight to new ground in order to free himself from history (Tucker 577-78). Eduard is devastated by the revelation, as well as by the fact that the truth had been kept hidden by both Störzer and Heinrich: “Wer von beiden war mir nun der Unbegreiflichste, der Unheimlichste geworden? ” (195). His sense of Heimat has been overturned into something unheimlich. 14 This is primarily because his own identity and the origins of his desire for overseas adventure are so rooted in his childhood experiences with Störzer: Er, der mich im Grunde doch ganz allein auf die See und in die Wüste durch seinen Le Vaillant gebracht hatte, dem ich mein ‛Rittergut’ am Kap der Guten Hoffnung einzig und allein durch seine Unterhaltungen auf seinen Weltwanderungen auf seinen Landstraßen und Feldwegen zu danken hatte. (195-96, my emphasis) Eduard is unable to resolve this dependence on Störzer; after all, he is also Eduard’s reason for writing the manuscript (15). Eduard’s sense of self is shaken Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 365 by this discovery of the true murderer, and he keenly realizes his identification with Störzer when he says that he could not have fled the scene faster if he had been the murderer himself (201). Even in running away, Eduard is trapped in this role of identification because he is again simply repeating what Störzer encouraged him to do in the first place: to leave the confines of the small town for the wider world. Following the revelation of Störzer as the murderer, Eduard does this once again, making his way to the train station unnoticed via the small paths he remembers from his childhood. Conclusion The most tumultuous undertaking in Raabe’s novel would seem to be the lengthy ocean voyage in the outer frame. And yet Eduard instead scrambles most urgently for firm ground in an apparently stable landscape that nonetheless threatens to disrupt his identity and sense of Heimat. He would like to neatly frame his Heimat as an idyllic place, and at the same time, to maintain control over the narrative, but ultimately falters in each of these attempts. His predicament is mirrored in the physical instabilities—geographical uncertainties, geological excavations, and the swaying of the ocean—that accompany his story. Framing is one literary technique used by Eduard in an effort to deal with these instabilities, but we see his narrative authority undermined by Heinrich and his reliability diminished by Raabe’s undertones of irony. Raabe’s text nevertheless reveals serious concerns with memory, space, and representation, and the ways each of these are rendered unstable by modern forces, both literary and geopolitical. In a narrative with very little action and so many stories that remain at least partly untold, these forces exist just beneath the surface of the narrative’s literal and figurative ground. In this way, Raabe deals intensively with the possibilities and limits of storytelling in an era marked by social change and globalization, which saw accompanying new movements in literature about travel and Heimat. Against this backdrop, Raabe gives us a narrator who manipulates the frames of his story and yet finds his intended orderly and idyllic configuration impossible to maintain as he experiences tangible disturbances to the ground on which he stands and about which he writes. Notes 1 A number of articles highlight the ways that Raabe alludes to the violence of colonialism in Stopfkuchen , including those by Katra Byram, Axel Dunker, Dirk Oschmann, and John Pizer. 366 Jillian DeMair 2 Heimat expresses a concept of home and homeland that carries with it a sense of belonging, identity, and self. Complicating the inherent sense of the word is the fact that it has been central to cultural and political purposes since the late eighteenth century. See, for example, Hermann Bausinger and Peter Blickle. 3 Brian Tucker’s essay is particularly helpful in showing how the different spaces in Stopfkuchen are intrinsic to the destabilization of the narrative as each figure attempts to ground his memories territorially. Franziska Frei Gerlach’s essay studies the narrative implications of geological phenomena in the works of Adalbert Stifter. Esther Kilchmann’s book, Verwerfungen in der Einheit , includes a geological metaphor in its title, and although this meaning is not her primary focus, she does call attention to how Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Jeremias Gotthelf in particular use geological imagery to represent political instability. 4 Because of his endless walking, Störzer is reminiscent of Ahasver, the mythological Wandering Jew, who is condemned to wander the earth eternally. According to Heinrich, Störzer drew this comparison himself when deciding to take a short break on the side of the road after becoming weary: “‘Der ewige Jude bist du doch nicht, Störzer’, sage ich mir. [...] ‘Fünf Minuten wird’s ja mal Zeit haben’” (190). See also Gisela Warnke’s analysis (469). 5 The name of the ship, the “Leonhard Hagebucher” (197) has often been commented on because it is also the name of the protagonist in Raabe’s Abu Telfan oder Die Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge (1867). This hero shares a few similarities with Eduard. The former returns to Germany after spending twelve years in imprisonment in Africa, but is received as an outsider and is unable to come to terms with the conditions and the society in his home country. 6 The self-referential quality of this narrative has been examined by Hubert Ohl (252), Peter Detroy (23), and Christoph Zeller, who also notes the above two contributions (209). 7 According to Ulf Eisele, the inclusion of Eduard’s actual writing is a kind of realistic verification of what is actually fiction, and thereby serves within the fiction as a claim to the authenticity of the report (39). This strategy is also related to the device of the discovered manuscript, which was sometimes used by eighteenthand nineteenth-century authors to “lend their stories a historical ‘reality’ and substance which they did not in fact possess” (Lund 132). Of course, these kinds of self-conscious remarks have their ironic side as well, as Helen Chambers notes (26). 8 On this geology/ geography duality, see Eisele (7) and Detroy (60). Ohl sets up a similar dichotomy by establishing two competing images in Stopfkuchen : Unsettled Soil and Uncertain Stories in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen 367 “Le Vaillant” and the “Riesenfaultier.” He notes their “Entgegensetzung als Weite des Abenteuers und Enge der Seßhaftigkeit” but emphasizes that neither is glorified, but instead that Raabe’s irony constantly relativizes both (271). 9 Raabe’s interest in paleontology is likewise reflected in Keltische Knochen (1864), perhaps inspired by his June 1859 visit to the Celtic grave site in Hallstatt, Austria (Radcliffe 99). Raabe also discusses paleontology in his letters to Wilhelm Jensen (Warnke 472). Katharina Brundiek has done a thorough study of Raabe’s extensive interest in Darwin, evolution, geology, and paleontology (120-72). 10 So-called “flood geology,” or the “diluvial theory,” which held the view that a single, worldwide flood had shaped the earth’s major geophysical features, had already been called into question by the scientific community around 1830 and there was a general shift in opinion in the field of geology. For example, Adam Sedgwick (who had previously espoused the theory of a great flood) and Charles Darwin began moving away from the idea of a single great flood in favor of a theory of many local floods. Sedgwick recalls that while he was in Paris from 1826-1827, Alexander von Humboldt ridiculed the diluvial doctrine “beyond measure” and Louis-Constant Prévost lectured against it (Herbert 173). 11 The land surrounding the Angra Pequeña Mountains (present-day Namibia) was declared a protectorate of the German Reich by Bismarck in 1884 (Williamson 153). Judith Ryan explains that the German reader of 1890 would have been well aware of this colonial acquisition (635). 12 The adjective gemütlich —used here ironically by Heinrich (“die alte gemütliche Heimat”)—along with its noun form, “Gemütlichkeit,” is a key word for considering Heimat, whether seriously or ironically. 13 The only war mentioned in the novel is the historically distant Seven Years’ War, although the Anglo-Zulu War (1878) and the First Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881) in British South Africa would likely have belonged to more recent memory, at least for Eduard, not to mention countless other examples of conflicts, oppression, and annexation of land by colonial powers (Berger 66-69). 14 Relevant to Eduard’s discovery of a secret deeply connected to his own identity is Freud’s explanation that “Unheimlich sei alles, was ein Geheimnis, im Verborgenen bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist” (249). 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