“Eine Straße des Ankommens und Anfangens”: European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg13 0 3 “Eine Straße des Ankommens und Anfangens”: European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 1 Ian W� Wilson Centre College Abstract: Barbara Honigmann’s autobiographical texts about Strasbourg, principally Chronik meiner Straße (2015), inscribe her search for home in an ever-changing Europe� Honigmann’s insistence on the constancy of change among the need for stability lies at the core of any understanding of contemporary Europeanness� Such emphases illustrate new open, heterogeneous conceptions of European identity that have become expressly part of the European project� Honigmann’s exploration of such issues in her adopted home of Strasbourg uses the location as a European city par excellence, contrasting the historical-symbolic site praised by official European discourses with its more complex contemporary realities, including multilingualism� As her texts on Strasbourg offer counterweight to political discourses, feminism and Judaism also come into play� W� G� Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), which depicts an unending search for home in a fixed but lost past, serves as a contrast to Honigmann’s positions� Keywords: Honigmann, Heimat, Strasbourg, feminism, work Contemporary literature in German often explores and disrupts European frames: its characters move through liminal, transnational space, wander across borders, and explore new conceptions of identity due to migration� Barbara Honigmann’s autobiographical texts about Strasbourg - principally Chronik meiner Straße (2015), but also the pieces collected in Am Sonntag spielt der Rabbi Fußball (1998) and Damals, dann und danach (1999), and “Bonsoir, Madame Benhamou” in Roman von einem Kinde (2001) - inscribe her search for home in an ever-changing Europe� As she attempts to generate stability in a new space, she simultaneously describes its dynamic changes� Honigmann’s insistence on the constancy of change among the need for stability lies at the core 304 Ian W� Wilson of any understanding of contemporary Europeanness� To delineate contrasts to Honigmann’s perspective on Europe, I will briefly discuss W� G� Sebald’s Austerlitz� Where Honigmann’s texts on Strasbourg create an ever-developing sense of home, Sebald’s novel depicts an unending search for home in a fixed but lost past� What do we mean when we use the term “European” at the present moment? According to Lena Wetenkamp in Europa erzählt, verortet, erinnert, commentators have tended to answer the question politically, by evoking the European Union (EU) and its borders; or diplomatically or economically, by gesturing beyond the EU to include locations like Switzerland and the United Kingdom (8)� Wetenkamp’s study emphasizes the ways the definition of “Europe” constantly changes to adjust to new pressures and to reevaluations of past and present identity-creating influences (8—9)� Globalisierungs- und Migrationsprozesse haben die Vorstellung einer homogenen kulturellen Identität porös werden lassen und Menschen sind gegenwärtig in Netzwerke und Zugehörigkeiten eingebunden, die weit über die nationalstaatlichen Grenzen hinausreichen� Diese Vorstellung ganz unterschiedlicher Identitäten, die aber dennoch eine Gemeinschaft bilden, liegt dem europäischen Motto zugrunde� (9) New open, heterogeneous conceptions of European identity have emerged; they are expressly part of the European project� But in her emphasis on globalization and migration - as well as her integration of postcolonial critiques - Wetenkamp gestures beyond traditional, insular definitions of Europe to include influences from the rest of the world, beyond Europe’s political or economic borders (15)� Wetenkamp describes how literary texts like Terézia Mora’s and Ilma Rakusa’s participate in designing and constructing “ein ganz neues Europa” (Wetenkamp 119)� She emphasizes how fictional literary texts can show how individual literary characters, portrayed in distinct situations and spaces, reflect and reimagine major historical and political developments: these texts become imaginative acts portraying how fictional individuals negotiate European realities (120)� Literary texts can therefore enhance traditional political discourses as an additional mode of exploring the effects of policy, describing how individuals experience the EU’s broad, transnational processes and the results of other drivers of globalization� Wetenkamp locates such experiences along the border, in searching for one’s home, and in negotiating one’s identity vis-à-vis others (116); determining which languages to speak where plays a role, too (15) - all of which are also primary elements of Honigmann’s Strasbourg texts� Literary texts provide richer, deeper engagement with human developments compared with official discourses, which can only describe such engagement in general European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 305 or abstract terms� Similarly, Randall Halle’s notion of Europe as an “interzone” in The Europeanization of Cinema describes culture in Europe as a process and a negotiation resulting from the interactions of various people from various backgrounds in a new, undetermined space (9—10)� The contrast between the official policy of European transnational entities and the experience of individuals living in such spaces comes into sharp relief in literary representations like Barbara Honigmann’s� Honigmann’s exploration of such issues in her adopted home of Strasbourg is apt: she uses Strasbourg as a European city par excellence, contrasting the historical-symbolic site praised by official European discourses with its more complex contemporary realities� Geographer John Western argues in a similar vein that Strasbourg is an “exemplar of Western European urban centers” (6) and highlights the combination of a prewar binational (French-German) past that led to a postwar international and then supranational present - as seats of the Council of Europe and the EU respectively� At the same time, the city shows an increasingly transnational inflection resulting from immigration from outside Europe’s traditional boundaries (8)� Since World War II, Strasbourg has frequently emerged as a symbol of the possibility of a new, peaceful Europe� In 1945, Charles de Gaulle described Strasbourg as a crucial border city that would again facilitate ship traffic but also the exchange of ideas, influences, and civilization (de Gaulle)� Winston Churchill drew upon the symbolism of the city’s war-torn past in his speech praising its election as seat of the Council of Europe in 1949 (Churchill)� As Western put it, “After those two world wars, the city was set up for a symbol of reconciliation and of a New Europe which was to transcend nationalist entanglements” (7)� 2 Such symbolic connections persist in official European discourses: The former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker referred to Strasbourg as a symbol of European peace and democracy in his tweet after the December 2018 terrorist attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market (@JunckerEU)� According to Western, contemporary Strasbourg has become a different kind of place than often portrayed by European politicians� While the symbolism of a binational and bicultural city contributed to the early success of the project of European integration, today the city displays a new, transnational reality much more prominently: […] we can see that the searing Franco-German dilemma for which Strasbourg had long been most known has been laid to rest by the European Union project beginning in the 1950s and continuing up until today� Yet, paradoxically, during this selfsame period, the solving (or at the very least the profound assuaging) of the Franco-German binational dilemma of the Alsatian Double Culture has simultaneously seen the cre- 306 Ian W� Wilson ation of an altogether novel set of transnational Double Cultures in Strasbourg sequent upon the arrival of settlers from afar� (249) Western argues that the historical French-German “binational” Strasbourg has been replaced by multiple transnational cultures, each one “doubled” with the city’s dominant French culture� As we shall see, Honigmann focuses her texts about Strasbourg on such dilemmas, exploring the ways that more complex, transnational individual experience contrasts with simplistic official political discourses� Critics have long noted how characters in Honigmann’s texts have established new, complex identities and searched for new homes to express those identities� Such searching is a key theme in her first novel, Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991)� Karen Remmler suggests that the strength of that book lies in Honigmann’s exploration of contemporary European Jewish identities, as the narrator engages in “en-gendering a female Jewish identity that is neither fixed nor homogenous, but rather fragmented and heterogeneous, yet not without agency” (“En-gendering” 189)� 3 As Honigmann became better known, autobiographical aspects of her texts have also received significant critical attention: critics often emphasize Honigmann’s personal search for a new home� Anna Kuschel’s Transitorische Identitäten describes how the interplay between autobiographical elements and literary representation in Honigmann’s work focuses readers’ attention on the process of identity development; Kuschel’s analyses locate elements in characterization and in plot that frustrate stable notions of identity construction� In considering Honigmann’s autobiographically focused Strasbourg texts together, I will highlight the recent shifts in Honigmann’s consideration of European models of identity, drawing attention to their specifically European features, including her focus on contemporary multicultural and multilingual Strasbourg� Honigmann’s Strasbourg-based texts explore real and discursive European space� This kind of exploration has been at the heart of the European project: international cooperation, trade, and exchange, but also the relatively free migration of people between locations in Europe, and the possibilities of locating new opportunities for the development of individual subjectivities in different spaces and in different languages - the chance to find one’s home� As Remmler and Dagmar Lorenz (214) have noted in regard to Honigmann’s work until 2000, issues of migration and home are inseparable from Honigmann’s Judaism and her gender� Such issues remain at the core of all of Honigmann’s texts, including Chronik� Honigmann reinforces the importance of Judaism and women’s experience to the formation of the multiplicity of successful European identities� In the confines of this essay, I will emphasize gender, while acknowledging the European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 307 substantial body of work commenting on the importance of Judaism in Honigmann’s texts� 4 Chronik meiner Straße is the key text for this analysis as it marks the furthest point yet in the evolution of Honigmann’s autobiographical project� This project has a number of overlapping phases, including her most fictionalized novels (Eine Liebe aus nichts; Soharas Reise; Alles, alles Liebe! ; Bilder von A.), her essays, and her work on her mother (Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben)� Her most clearly autobiographical texts have often focused on Strasbourg: first in the short observational pieces collected in Am Sonntag, then in the more structured essays in Damals and in Roman, most recently taking the form of a combination of the two, Chronik meiner Straße. This last title suggests both a deep personal relationship and a home: a neighborhood is not fully one’s own until one has made a home for oneself there� Honigmann’s texts - with the arguable exception of Soharas Reise - always feature protagonists active in the arts� Therefore “meine Straße” cannot simply describe the narrator-protagonist’s home but rather also the site where she works� “Work” in this case includes the typical activities readers associate with Honigmann (writing, painting, exploring Judaism, orchestrating her family)� If - as the text’s title claims - it is a “Chronik,” “work” also suggests a documentary responsibility, a duty to chronicle the details of the reality of her neighborhood, albeit one that is subject to fictionalization� Since Honigmann foregrounds the complex negotiation she has undertaken as a woman in her texts - as an artist, as a practicing Jew, as a mother, and as a wife - she highlights the role gender plays in her identity� I am drawn to the combination of gender, productive activity, migration to and within Europe, and observation in Chronik and other texts - presented in the intriguing location of Strasbourg, which encourages the reception of Honigmann’s work through a European lens� Examining these issues together highlights the creative act of European identity formation Honigmann undergoes in her texts alongside the other creative acts of painting, writing, raising a family, and exploring her Judaism� Chronik begins and ends with a similar description of Honigmann’s neighborhood, the area around the Rue Edel in east-central Strasbourg� On the first page, the narrator comments: Unsere Straße scheint also eine Straße des Anfangs und des Ankommens zu sein, bevor man nämlich in die besseren Viertel umzieht, die ruhiger sind und in deren Häusern nur zwei, drei Parteien wohnen, Häuser, die von kleinen oder größeren Gärten umgeben sind und in der Nähe von Parks liegen oder des Europa Parlaments, oder aus deren Fenster man einen Blick auf die Kathedrale hat oder auf die Ill, die ein Nebenfluß des Rheins ist und die Altstadt von Straßburg einschließt� (5) 308 Ian W� Wilson Here Honigmann not only describes this transitory space, which she, however, has inhabited for over thirty years but also its location far from the city’s typical European centers: European institutions on the one hand, the cultural heritage of the cathedral and the old city on the other� On the book’s final page, the conclusion speaks of the “kleine[r] Weltraum unserer Straße, die nach überallhin offen und doch auch ein bißchen geschlossen ist und von der so oft gesagt wird, ach ja, in der Straße haben wir am Anfang auch gewohnt” (152)� As I will describe below, between these two descriptions, Honigmann shifts her purportedly liminal space into a different kind of center, a microcosm of a transcultural, translinguistic, transreligious Europe that forms a fundamental element of - and becomes formed by - Honigmann’s own creative process� Central issues of gender, Heimat, the border, and the periphery versus the center come to the fore� Ultimately, Chronik suggests a new model of a transcultural Europe Yasemin Yildiz would call “postmonolingual” (4)� Honigmann’s book, both a “Chronik” and a memoir, gently negotiates the line between fiction and nonfiction� In her first “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung” (delivered in 2002) Honigmann commented: Auch das autobiographische Schreiben ist ja Fiktion� Der französischer Schriftsteller Serge Doubrowski fand 1977 für dieses Phänomen den passenden Begriff: Autofiktion� Das autobiographische Schreiben liegt irgendwo in der Mitte zwischen Tagebuch und Roman, und es ist nicht nur deshalb Fiktion, weil alle Verwandlung von Wirklichkeit in Schreiben Fiktion ist, sondern auch, weil sein Projekt der Selbstforschung, Selbstentdeckung und Selbstoffenbarung mindestens in dem gleichen Maß immer auch Selbstinszenierung, Selbstfiktionalisierung, Verwandlung des Lebens in einen Roman, manchmal sogar Selbstmythologisierung ist� In diesem Sinn kann autobiographisches Schreiben romanhafter sein als ein Roman� (Gesicht 39) She does not name herself as the narrator of Chronik, but her family’s circumstances and her husband’s first name match biographical facts, and the family name appears toward the end of the book (137)� As is the case with her other Strasbourg texts, readers are encouraged to identify the narrator with Honigmann the writer� 5 By contrast for its use of a narrator who is mostly unlike Honigmann, the short novel Soharas Reise (1996) nevertheless represents an important text for any discussion of Honigmann’s Strasbourg� The novel is largely set in the city, at the intersection of North African Sephardic traditions in exile in France and postwar European Jewish life, which the novel describes as dominated by the Ashkenazim and the legacy of the Holocaust� The novel foreshadows the emphases of Honigmann’s autobiographical Strasbourg texts, especially the in- European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 309 ternational and cultural border created by the Rhine and the complex legacies of the German language and Germany’s past� 6 We can already see elements of Chronik’s complexity and ambivalences regarding personal identity in this early novel, for example, through its contrasts between Sohara’s migration from Algeria and Frau Kahn’s Ashkenazic experience; in the discussion of multiple languages and customs (French, Arabic, and German); in the exploration of international borders; and in the depiction of Sohara’s role as a mother as creative� On the other hand, Soharas Reise diverges significantly in tone from Honigmann’s later texts� For instance, the novel concludes in a hopeful gesture of celebratory reunification for the eponymous Sohara with her children and an establishment of domestic peace (120)� Such comparisons with Chronik help us grasp the evolution in Honigmann’s thought� As we shall see, in the recent text, she deftly utilizes these dynamics to describe the identity formation that occurs in her neighborhood� In three short texts in Damals, Honigmann explores her family’s move to Strasbourg, further laying the groundwork for her portrayal of the city in Chronik� In the first, “Hinter der Grande Schul,” she comes closest to describing the reasons for the choice of Strasbourg, at most in part due to a legendary connection to Alsace through one of her grandmothers (Damals 59)� The number of Jews in Strasbourg, while as high as that who had lived in Berlin before the war (58—59), does not reach the size of the community in Paris, for example� Rather, her comparisons with Germany and Strasbourg’s German past are key to Honigmann’s own sense of the place� Though not Paris, Strasbourg seems “ein Jerusalem” in comparison with East Berlin (58), and Honigmann describes the fact that so many Jews have moved into the neighborhood Kaiser Wilhelm designed for his bureaucrats in the late 19th century as “[e]ine Ironie der Geschichte” (59)� In the second text, “Von meinem Urgroßvater, meinem Großvater, meinem Vater und mir” Honigmann grants her location in exile a key role in the critical distance that enables her writing: “Als ich nun in das andere Land gekommen war, wenn auch nur drei Straßen hinter der Grenze, habe ich auch zu schreiben begonnen” (46)� Sitting in a park on the Rhine, looking across to Germany, after chatting with a Turkish family who themselves had moved from Germany to France, Honigmann concludes, “Wir sitzen also auf der anderen Seite des Rheins und gucken nach Deutschland rüber, nach drüben, wie es in der DDR so lange hieß” (54—55)� The spatial remove, however slight, enables crucial critical insight� Finally, in a third text in Damals, “Meine sefardischen Freundinnen,” she describes the cultural mix of Strasbourg that is attractive but also confusing: 310 Ian W� Wilson […] und meine ganze Existenz hat nie aufgehört, ein Leben zwischen hier und dort zu sein, eine Art Doppelleben, oder ein Zwiespalt zwischen meinem Jüdischsein hier und meiner Arbeit dort, in beidem fühle ich mich an beiden Orten jeweils nicht verstanden oder nicht einmal wahrgenommen, und eigentlich ist es sogar ein dreifaches Leben, wenigstens am Rande berühre ich ja drei Kulturen, die französische, die deutsche und die jüdische nämlich, und wenn es ein guter Tag ist, fühle ich mich bereichert und denke, daß ich Glück habe, an drei Kulturen teilhaben zu können, und wenn es ein schlechter Tag ist, fühle ich mich zwischen allen Stühlen sitzend und verstehe gar nichts� (72) In “Bonsoir, Madame Benhamou,” the final text in Roman von einem Kinde, Honigmann describes how strange her new home in Strasbourg initially felt, especially so after her family’s return from their first vacation in France, travelling “nach Hause in die Fremde” (113)� Close and far, productive and vexing, Strasbourg has provided Honigmann with fertile ground to develop her search for identity and home for years� These details emerge most fully in her longest text about Strasbourg to date, Chronik� Chronik describes elements of many of the details familiar to Honigmann’s readers - growing up in East Berlin; stories of her mother’s hometown of Vienna and of her mother’s native tongue, Hungarian; her father’s origins in Hesse; her Judaism; and her family’s emigration to Strasbourg in the 1980s� These facts of dislocation - also including her parents’ dislocation due to the Holocaust and their personal circumstances, and her own, generally tied to increasing adherence to Judaism - provide an impetus for the seeking out of a new space: one in which to define herself, one that provides a site for her writing and her painting, and one to call home� Chronik again emphasizes Strasbourg’s location on the border, focusing on Honigmann’s street located not far from the Rhine canal that once served as part of the city’s defenses: “Wahrscheinlich ist unsere Straße eine der östlichsten Straßen Frankreichs, denn sie liegt am östlichen Rand der Innenstadt, wo es nach Deutschland hinübergeht� In der Zeit, als Straßburg deutsch war […]” (6)� The peripheral nature of her new chosen home is thus doubled as both a provisional space reserved for “beginnings and arrivals” and one moved out of Germany, but just barely: a contested location, both historically and culturally� The fact that the book presents such a description of her neighborhood in this now French city in German, its former dominant language, compounds this contesting� The text notes this status explicitly: the narrator and her husband knew the city before their arrival from one of its most prominent temporary residents, Goethe, who memorably wrote of the cathedral in Dichtung und Wahrheit, which Chronik explicitly references (18—19)� 7 European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 311 Yet rather than dwelling on such connections in the past, Honigmann’s texts focusing on her life in Strasbourg present her identity outside centers of recognized power, but ultimately representative of a specific type of European identity possible in one of the European capitals� This identity develops not in the European quarter of the city - near the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights - but in a neighborhood on its outskirts, a space dominated by the constant change of new immigrants, abandoned in efforts for upward mobility to more desirable spaces� Again and again, Honigmann stresses how her family has remained in the neighborhood for decades while others have moved away� She stresses how she and her neighbors have increasingly mastered the French language and French customs there (Chronik 83—86), how the neighborhood has reacted to her family’s evolving Judaism (see the discussion of the family’s Sukkot tent, 133—39), and how her family continues to rent the apartment even when moving seems logical (19— 20)� Perhaps most tellingly, she looks back on the past while thinking about her neighborhood, recalling over two decades of birthdays and also “Krisen und Krankheiten und Ängste und vielerlei Sorgen, Kräche, Aussprechen, Versöhnungen, Feste und Feiern, angespannte Zeiten, einsame Stunden und vertrödelte Tage, ich bin weggefahren und ich bin wiedergekommen” (34)� In this liminal space inhabited by Holocaust survivors from rural Alsace and from elsewhere in Europe, where Honigmann’s own minority Jewish religious practice has continued to develop, readers also encounter immigrants from Iran, West Africa, Turkey, South Asia, East Asia, Portugal, and Eastern Europe: the texts draw readers’ attention not to traditional modes of national identity but to emergent transnational models within a European city� Religion - principally Judaism and Islam - and language serve as points of contact but also of conflict� In Chronik Honigmann describes herself speaking four languages: French, German (through which she can understand some Yiddish), Hebrew, and English� Yet Honigmann describes her own successful attempt to create a long-term home for herself and her family in this space� Her texts require us to question what kinds of stabilization a European home might support� Honigmann layers two prominent aspects of her neighborhood over each other: on the one hand, the fact that it has become an established Jewish neighborhood - enough to refer to it as a “zweite[s] Ghetto” (Damals 59, Chronik 131)� On the other hand, as a transitory neighborhood of “arrivals and beginnings,” it is also filled with recent immigrants to France from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in Europe� Overall Chronik balances the human urge to establish a stable home with an emphasis on a multiplicity of divergent perspectives and the constant shifts that continue to alter the larger spaces in which that home might be located� 312 Ian W� Wilson Although Honigmann briefly explores lingering Alsatian elements of the neighborhood in Chronik, she does so primarily through a linguistic lens, focusing on her own use of Hochdeutsch versus what is for her a mostly incomprehensible dialect (25, 30—31, 60, 113)� More interesting to her besides her occasional use of German with some neighbors is the frequent appearance of French words, phrases, and customs in the book alongside the many other languages, religions, and cultures of the neighborhood: Viele Völker wohnen in unserer Straße, und man hört sie in vielerlei Sprachen sprechen� Abgesehen davon, daß die ganze Gegend mit der Zeit immer mehr zu einem jüdischen Viertel geworden ist, liebevoll das zweite Ghetto genannt, leben hier viele Araber, Türken und Kurden, dazu Schwarze in allen Abstufungen von Schwarz […]� Es gibt Pakistani, Inder und Sikhs mit Turbanen und Frauen in Saris, Asiaten, die vielleicht Chinesen oder Japaner oder Koreaner sind […], Portugiesen, Russen und andere Osteuropäer, Albaner, Rumänen, Bosnier� (9—10) These recent immigrants, like Honigmann herself, bring with them linguistic diversity: “Es ruft, redet, spricht, brüllt und schreit in unserer Straße in unzähligen fremden Sprachen […]” (13)� Specific examples include Frau Kertész, whose use of Hungarian is frequently noted (22, 25, 29)� 8 Rev Jechiel and his wife Lotte play important roles, too: the narrator communicates with the immigrant neighbor couple originally from Lithuania and Frankfurt am Main (via Israel) via four languages� French - the official language of the city - plays no role in these conversations: neither Rev nor Lotte Jechiel can speak it yet (125)� Other examples include the Iranian “Anne-Marie,” an Azeri who speaks neither Farsi, nor French, nor her own mother tongue Azeri well (82—83)� Furthermore, the narrator notes that at one edge of the neighborhood lies the “école internationale” (9), an institution named for the prominent Luxembourgish-French politician and one of the founders of the EU, Robert Schuman, for whom a number of elements of the EU are named� At this school, instruction takes place in French alongside English, Italian, and Spanish� Honigmann’s neighborhood is a polyglot, cosmopolitan space in which the narrator herself moves between cultures and languages fluidly, a space on the edge of, but inextricably linked to, the EU� Within this multicultural and ever-developing space, Honigmann also lovingly describes her desk, her writerly home� This desk becomes the base for many of the observations that dominate the book� “Mein Schreibtisch,” she writes, “steht am Fenster, neben der Balkontür […]” (Chronik 32)� From this vantage point, she views and hears the street, always returning to the balcony even when the observations take her out into the street, to shops, or to the neighborhood market� In “Von meinem Urgroßvater” in Damals, Honigmann includes her husband’s European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 313 comment about the context of their move to Strasbourg and their work, “eigentlich wissen wir gar nicht mehr so recht, wo wir nun hingehören, aber Peter hat geantwortet, das ist auch nicht so wichtig, wir gehören eben an unseren Schreibtisch” (39)� Yet in Am Sonntag, based on short pieces originally published from 1991—96 in the Basler Zeitung (Harig), Honigmann notes explicitly that she can set up her home office only once her oldest son has left Strasbourg to study in Nîmes: “Ich versuche derweil, sein ehemaliges Kinderzimmer in ein Arbeitszimmer für mich zu verwandeln� Das ist nicht leicht […]” (Am Sonntag 18), sentiments echoed in “Ein seltener Tag” in Damals (124—25)� This space, where she explores a language that itself serves as “irgendeine verlassene Heimat” that she carries around with her (Chronik 84), helps anchor the subjectivity at the center of Chronik in the variety of linguistic and cultural demands of her neighborhood� In “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” in Damals, Honigmann writes, “Ich denke aber, der Schriftsteller ist das, was er schreibt, und er ist vor allem die Sprache, in der er schreibt� Ich schreibe nicht nur auf deutsch, sondern die Literatur, die mich geformt und gebildet hat, ist die deutsche […]” (18)� Chronik’s narrator occupies a progressive space but also a place of privilege: in her role as narrator; as an educated, middle-class, artistic other living near public housing; and as a chronicler of the world from her desk on the third floor� The shifts between the domestic and the feminist resemble established frameworks in understandings of women’s spaces� Doreen Massey writes, “The limitation of women’s mobility, in terms both of identity and space, has been in some cultural contexts a crucial means of subordination” (179)� The essays in Damals suggest that Honigmann’s decision to leave East Germany was motivated by her understanding of Judaism and Jewish-German relations (14—17), but also by her bristling at the sexism of her Berlin artistic circle (52—54)� Her move into exile - to France, which she calls her “Land der Freiheit” (52) - can be read as partially motivated by her ultimate refusal of her existing restricted options as a woman and a Jew� Thus, her move to Strasbourg suggests a level of agency in her self-imposed exile� In other texts, Honigmann strongly ties her move to Strasbourg to increased Jewish religious practice� In Chronik, however, the move is less motivated, perhaps at least partially since the result of her move is more important for the book’s themes� The narrator-protagonist arrives in Strasbourg with her husband and oldest son and begins a new life, establishing a new identity for herself� Honigmann’s identity formation does not follow an expected model of liberation� The emphases on home and the family, especially while her sons are young, could be understood as continuing a pre-feminist model that links women to their homes� Massey writes, “The construction of ‘home’ as a woman’s place has, moreover, carried through into those views of place itself as a source of sta- 314 Ian W� Wilson bility, reliability and authenticity� Such views of place, which reverberate with nostalgia for something lost, are coded female” (180)� Indeed, Chronik presents the home as both the center for the narrator’s family life - especially related to her children, to the family’s Judaism, and to care for the neighbors - as well as her primary workplace� However, Honigmann presents domesticity as part of a creative gesture of self-definition, though one that is not without its potential complications� In Am Sonntag, she notes, “[…] aber ich weiß nun wenigstens, daß ich keine Dichterin oder Schriftstellerin bin, habe es ja eigentlich schon lange gewußt, dass ich nur eine schreibende Hausfrau und malende Mutter bin” (14)� As I have argued above, Honigmann’s texts frequently describe actions in her family life as creative acts themselves� Nevertheless, about twenty years later, when she writes Chronik, her sons have grown up and left home, allowing her to turn her focus increasingly to her painting and writing� In Keepers of the Motherland Dagmar Lorenz attributes the complications embedded in Honigmann’s writing not only to her religion or her gender, but to a combination of both with her life in France: Living as a Jewish woman in France requires that Honigmann negotiate modern and traditional, revolutionary and conventional values; the presumption of a woman’s right to equal access and freedom within the traditionally patriarchal Jewish structures is as problematic as reconciling the empowerment of women in physical, spiritual, professional, and creative terms with motherhood and the nuclear family� (214) In other words, the struggles of Honigmann’s gendered, intersectional work generate her creativity and force her to develop a new model into which she can fit all the elements of her life on her own terms� Honigmann thus fits well into Lorenz’s model outlining the complexities of literary work by Jewish women writing in German� By the time she writes Chronik, Honigmann has succeeded in creating a home, but she constantly emphasizes the change of everyone around her (including herself): moving in and out of the neighborhood, her own children growing up and leaving home, the elderly dying and the depressed committing suicide, and new people moving in� Inzwischen lebe ich schon so lange in der Straße des Anfangs, daß mir der Anblick vieler Gesichter, aus den Häusern gegenüber, aus den Häusern nebenan, Gesichter der vielen Völker und des ‘anderen Frankreichs’ vertraut geworden sind� […] Jahre sind vergangen, wir sind hier zusammen älter geworden, und vielleicht gerade, weil wir uns überhaupt nicht näher kennen, nehmen wir die Veränderungen auseinander stärker wahr; die Haare sind grau geworden oder gefärbt, der Gang hat sich European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 315 verlangsamt […]� Manche Gesichter jedoch sind verschwunden, an irgendeinem Moment ist mir aufgefallen, daß ich die oder jene Person sehr lange nicht, eigentlich gar nicht mehr gesehen habe, daß sie verschwunden ist, vielleicht gestorben, vielleicht weggezogen, und ich weiß nicht, ob ich sie an einem anderen Ort, in einer anderen Straße als die unsrigen, zu deren Bild sie gehörte, überhaupt wiedererkennen würde� (140—41) Despite the sadness in Honigmann’s description of the changes that her adopted home constantly undergoes, there is also a recognition of the importance of place in the relationships she has built� Her own aging plays a role here, but so too does the disappearance of the other people grown familiar, replaced afterwards with other, new faces� Honigmann’s own face was also once the new one in the neighborhood, and the place has created the condition for recognition� Just as these faces fit into the precise location of Honigmann’s Chronik, so too does it structure her own experience� As a crucial contrast to the new home established in Strasbourg, Chronik includes thoughts about the narrator’s lost Heimat, Berlin, as well� In Chronik Berlin is a “Heimatstadt” but remains ambivalent: Ich erkenne die Stadt an jedem Platz und in jedem Moment wieder, und wenn sie sich neuerdings auch noch so herrichtet und begehrt und bewundert wird, bleibt sie für mich doch immer der Ort, von dem ich mich, solange ich dort lebte, wegwünschte und fortsehnte� Und auch wenn ich jetzt wiederkehre, kann ich keinen Platz für mich finden, ich laufe kopflos durch die Stadt, deren Osten mir nur allzusehr vertraut ist […], deren Westen ich mir jedoch mit einem Stadtplan erlaufen muß […]� (69—70) Versus Berlin, which she visits in the book to finally see her father’s grave (73— 75), she contrasts her own wish to be buried in her new home, Strasbourg (78)� Honigmann is not alone among contemporary German-language writers in her search for home� In Heimat, Space, Narrative, Friederike Eigler writes of emerging new definitions of Heimat in German-language culture, noting a recent resignification of the term for a new era� Authors of a younger and ethnically more diverse generation in Austria and Germany no longer take National Socialism as the sole point of departure for critical or alternative renderings of Heimat� Responding to the challenges of a globalized world - marked by acceleration and increasing time-space compression - contemporary literature examines new notions of locality and belonging and, in the process, transforms the meaning of Heimat and the term’s cultural and historical baggage� (27) For Eigler, generational structure, ethnic diversity, and recent globalized migration patterns help to craft new models of Heimat� Honigmann links these 316 Ian W� Wilson attempts to specific European situations and possibilities� As the Jewish daughter of Holocaust escapees born shortly after the war and an immigrant from the mid-1980s German Democratic Republic to a working-class neighborhood in Strasbourg where she witnesses the complexities of contemporary urban French life, Honigmann is the kind of author both Eigler and Wetenkamp describe� Though the Holocaust appears in the book via several neighbors who are survivors, it does not dominate Chronik� And though her Judaism is a type of otherness familiar in the German-speaking world, Honigmann’s writing about France is tinged with a variety of explorations of past and present ethnic realities in the European capital of Strasbourg, which leads to a description of a new kind of European space� 9 Those realities highlight contrasts between the old Alsatian “binational” and new generally French (and European) “transcultural” identities� In other words, literature itself redefines this new space (Eigler 38—39)� Following Yuri Lotman’s “Semiosphere,” this conceptualization of Heimat allows us to understand space in literature as reflections of contemporary cultural conceptions of spatial relationships, which are often extremely complex� Lotman localizes these changes partially in the notion of the boundary, a site on the periphery� For Lotman, the periphery, “bilingual and polylingual” (136), eventually displaces and replaces the center (134—35)� Honigmann’s Chronik ties critical personal developments in specific spaces undergoing some of the same transformations: in understandings of the local, the transnational, the cultural, and the personal� These transformations occur in a location explicitly described as on the periphery: of the country of France, of the city of Strasbourg (a capital of Europe), and of the official French language� What of a periphery that aims to preserve its complex nature, to remain multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious? Can Honigmann’s place of “beginnings and arrivals” maintain this status if she remains present within it and acts as its chronicler? The “postmonolingual” and peripheral condition of Honigmann’s neighborhood helps enable her new European approach� 10 Chronik, written in German but set in France with substantial elements of the French language and French culture as well as material in Hungarian, Alsatian, Yiddish, Hebrew, etc�, develops a fundamentally different type of space as its core� As a German-language exploration of a diverse neighborhood in France, specifically in a location of cultural exchange among multiple cultures and one of the capitals of Europe, her book might be seen as one possible direction in the future evolution of Europe and of German-language literature� 11 Superficially, an author writing in German about the city of Strasbourg could seem a logical connection to the city’s past� But Honigmann’s text focuses on its present and future instead, 12 and on a space constituted by multiple heterogeneous groups: European bureaucrats, recent immigrants to France, a growing Jewish commu- European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 317 nity, all with echoes of an older international, intercultural past� Texts like this may not seem to fit well into a traditional sense of nation-based German Studies, yet the field today frequently explores matters far beyond the national borders of any single German-speaking space� Furthermore, as Bethany Wiggin reminds us, speaking of a monolingual German “national literature” is an ideological construction in need of historicizing, and one that we can destabilize and redefine� 13 In this sense, Honigmann fits well into the recent emphasis on writers in German who newly (re)conceptualize Europe� A counterexample to Honigmann’s approach to establishing a home in Strasbourg is provided by W� G� Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), which draws on many similar themes, but from the perspective of an unending search for home in the past� Sebald’s novel also utilizes an expressly European frame and it also questions the stability of national structures with regards to origins, languages, and identities� However, Austerlitz uses these techniques to a different end and with a different focus from Honigmann’s work� While her Strasbourg texts feature the creation of a new home in a dynamically changing present-day Europe, Sebald’s novel features a search for a lost, original home through attempts to reconstruct the missing past of Jacques Austerlitz, a Czech Holocaust escapee living in London� In contrast to the stable concentration on Strasbourg in Chronik, the core of Sebald’s novel features Austerlitz meeting the novel’s unnamed non-Jewish German narrator in neutral, transnational spaces: Belgium (Brussels, Liège, and Zeebrugge), London, and Paris� Their use of first French, then English plays a role as well, providing linguistic spaces that are neutral for the two of them (and also EU sanctioned)� The novel Austerlitz pairs its protagonist and its narrator as figurative twins: the Holocaust escapee and the anglophile German have intertwined European fates that overlap in European spaces with official European languages that enable their long conversations� 14 These discussions are open-ended, with Austerlitz continuing his search for home� While in Chronik the protagonist-narrator has made a real home out of a makeshift, temporary space, Austerlitz shows its protagonist on an open-ended search for home: first with his friend Gerald’s family, then in his wanderings through London until he recovers lost memories of the Kindertransport at the Liverpool Street Station� From there his search takes him to Prague, where he recovers his Czech when he encounters his former nanny, who still lives next door to his childhood apartment� Then he visits the former Theresienstadt, where he searches unsuccessfully for evidence of his mother’s fate� He returns to London, but then moves on to Paris, now in search of signs of his father’s fate� Returning to London from Prague by train, Austerlitz passes through Germany, noticing somewhere between Würzburg and Frankfurt another critical moment from his past: 318 Ian W� Wilson Von weither erinnerte ich mich, indem ich so hinausblickte, daß es mir im Haus des Predigers in Bala und auch später noch oft geträumt hatte von einem grenzen- und namenlosen, gänzlich von finsteren Waldungen überwachsenen Land, das ich durchqueren mußte, ohne zu wissen wohin, und das, was ich nun dort draußen vorbeiziehen sah, das, so dämmerte es mir, sagte Austerlitz, war das Original der so viele Jahre hindurch mich heimsuchenden Bilder� (Sebald 324) This terrifying moment makes clear that the European spaces Austerlitz travels through are sites of his own trauma� He searches through space after space in Europe, where the Holocaust has contaminated most sites for him� Sebald’s novel, then, can be understood as a motion through unremediated space, space still dominated by a traumatic past, space that prevents him from settling down� Thus Sebald inscribes a notion of the European that displays constant motion, displacement, and mourning� In this regard, Honigmann’s emphasis on a stable location developing into a home while witnessing constant change all around her is a very different conceptualization of European spaces within German-language literature: fundamentally, Honigmann’s work focuses on the present and the future, rather than the traumatic past� Honigmann has settled in her new home, has established her career, but remains transfixed by the changes that continue to swirl all around her, observing the dynamism of a new Europe� Mentioning Strasbourg’s binational history but emphasizing its contemporary transnational realities, Chronik meiner Straße participates in a redefinition of Europe and of the typical materials of German culture through multilingualism and constant change occurring in a peripheral location� As Chronik and her other texts on Strasbourg offer counterweight to political discourses, feminism and Judaism also come into play� Her texts about Strasbourg suggest that this change is at the heart of Europe: finding a home only to see that space continue to change, evolving into somewhere new all the time� In contrast to the retrospective orientation of Sebald’s Austerlitz, Honigmann’s Strasbourg texts describe the present, which constantly develops into unexpected future models� In contemporary Europe, identity remains in flux, open to new influences from across the globe� Notes 1 This essay developed out of papers at German Studies Association conferences in 2016 and 2018� I would like to thank the commentators for their questions and suggestions� Thanks to the editors of this issue for their helpful comments� The financial support of Centre College allowed me to conduct research at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv� European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg 319 2 See Hein for how Strasbourg was chosen as a capital of Europe� 3 See Herzog for a contrasting assessment� 4 See Stern; Remmler’s essays; Lorenz; Herzog; Eshel’s essays; Bannasch; Feller; Gillo; Gordinsky; Nolden; and Shahar’s essays� 5 Weiss suggests that Honigmann’s repetition of autobiographical elements in multiple texts with slight variations lends them a universal quality (20), which helps us understand how autofictional elements can work to the benefit of Honigmann’s project� At a reading for Chronik I attended on 12 May 2016 at a bookstore in Kehl, Germany, Honigmann moved from excerpts from the book to personal reminiscences� Slippages between life and text are clearly part of her performance of self in written and spoken modes� For discussions of the interplay between autobiography and fiction in Honigmann’s work, see also Steinecke; Guenther; Kuschel’s texts; Gsoels-Lorensen 369—70; Müllender; Schade; and the essays in Eshel and Weiss’s edited volume, Kurz, including the editor’s “Vorwort” 7—8� 6 See Shahar, “Jude sein” for a discussion of the Rhine as a border� 7 Other memorable associations of the city with German culture include Gottfried, Sachs, Gutenberg, Herder, Lenz (especially via Büchner’s prose piece about him), and Arp� A German writer’s place in Strasbourg has a traditional if anachronistic logic to it� 8 This name is likely an example of the fictionalization that takes place in Honigmann’s autobiographical texts� In an open letter in the Frankfurter Rundschau to Imre Kertész upon his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Honigmann mentions celebrating his win with a Hungarian neighbor, “Frau Egri” (“Schwarzfahrer” 17)� Honigmann may have changed the name of this real person in part in homage to the Hungarian Nobel laureate but also to protect Frau Egri’s identity� 9 See Feller, especially 97—98, on German-Jewish relationships with the term Heimat� 10 Yildiz argues that monolingualism structures most of one’s life, “from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” 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