After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post- Socialist Patterns of Thought Jakob Norberg Duke University Abstract: Judith Schalansky’s novel The Giraffe’s Neck (2011) lucidly and trenchantly analyzes the logic underlying a hard turn from leftist to rightist ideology. Schalansky’s narrator is a disoriented and disaffected biology teacher who has experienced the collapse of the GDR and draws on her discipline to explain the demise of the socialist project. Specifically, the novel traces the transition from a radical socialist egalitarianism to a biologistically motivated belief in intractable because natural and heritable differences in human abilities. She thinks back to grand socialist projects of generating unlimited resources for a human collective undivided by exploitation, but now invokes natural constraints to such projects. Humanity, she implies, does not have a special position or calling in nature, and its members have no particular moral or political obligation to one another. Mingling cynical reflection and pained recollection, The Giraffe’s Neck maps a momentous ideological shift from socialist principles of redistribution to a biopolitical concern with inheritance, from the ideal of collectivism to reliance on kinship. This ideological analysis qualifies the novel as one of the most important literary works to date on post-socialist Germany. Keywords: Judith Schalansky, DDR, socialism, biopolitics Judith Schalansky’s novel The Giraffe’s Neck: A Novel [Der Hals der Giraffe: Bildungsroman] 1 was very warmly welcomed by critics, nominated for the German Book Prize in 2011, the year of its publication, and soon after noticed outside of the German language area. Translated into English but also French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Swedish, it received favorable reviews in such venues as The Independent and the New Yorker. While not a sensation comparable to 42 Jakob Norberg the novels of bestselling authors such as W. G. Sebald or Daniel Kehlmann, The Giraffe’s Neck nevertheless became something of a respectable minor success. The theme of The Giraffe’s Neck is a fairly familiar one to those acquainted with post-1989 Germany: it deals with the transition away from the socialism of the German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall and the unification of East and West Germany. The main character is a disoriented, soon-to-retire biology teacher whose life is marked by socialism’s collapse and the rapid dismantling of the GDR. In this situation, she is forced to search for a coherent and compelling set of beliefs that could make sense of a disrupted world as well as help her accept, and perhaps even derive some satisfaction from, her own precarious post-socialist situation. It is a novel about the confusions of post-socialist life, published about two decades after the demise of the GDR. None of this would strike the reader acquainted with recent German history as exceptional; there are many literary texts that capture East German life after reunification. Works by authors more established than Judith Schalansky come to mind, such as the novels and short stories of Christoph Hein, Ingo Schulze, or Christa Wolf. These authors have in one way or another offered accounts of years of loyal dissidence under a socialist regime, depicted the challenges of surviving in a capitalist economy, or recorded tragicomical German-German misunderstandings. Schalansky’s work is neither one of the first nor one of the most well-known novels in a kind of post-socialist mini-canon. But Schalansky’s novel possesses a distinct focus, namely sharp ideological change; the focus of the text is a hard turn from a leftwing to a rightwing conception of society and politics. Specifically, the text represents a transition away from a hopeful anticipation of a world mastered by socialist humankind to quasi-naturalist discussions of sapped vitality and necessary adaptation to an unforgiving environment. 2 Through Schalansky’s elaboration of the main character’s disillusioned view of state-mandated utopian thought, the reader can see how the notion of man-made progress is replaced by the concept of unmasterable evolution, schemes of economic redistribution marginalized by a concern with lines of inheritance, and celebrations of solidarity within large collectives edged out by longing for familial intimacy. In the form of an internal monologue, The Giraffe’s Neck presents a methodical, even relentless reconstruction of the passage from a grandiose vision of the transformation of nature for humanity’s benefit to a humbler - or bleaker - view of humans as one species among many, subject to relentless pressures in a treacherous environment. The subject of this paper is precisely this ideological transformation; it seeks to map Schalansky’s analysis of post-socialist patterns of thought. The novel offers us, this essay submits, a psychologically plausible and politically relevant account of a transition from a high modernist commitment to humanity’s tri- After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 43 umphant achievement of boundless prosperity to a post-modern anticipation of humanity’s likely demise; from efforts to conjure large-scale human collectives to a narrower belief in the endurance of smaller, genetically defined kinship groups; from egalitarian redistribution subtended by solidarity to inheritance between biologically linked individuals. It is this trenchant vision of ideological change that makes The Giraffe’s Neck one of the most captivating and significant literary works on life and society after socialism. How did people who were once firmly committed to the GDR deal with the end of the socialist nation? What coping mechanisms and interpretive vocabularies were available to them? In The Giraffe’s Neck, Schalansky channels a voice from the sparsely populated post-socialist Eastern parts of Germany. The voice belongs to a teacher, Inge Lohmark, whose classes are steadily becoming smaller and smaller; the gymnasium in her rural area of Vorpommern is scheduled to close because of dwindling numbers of qualified pupils. Lohmark sums up the development by speaking of the changing shape of the age structure graph for the current population. With the fertility level far below replacement level and an “excess of seniors,” the age pyramid for the area went from looking like a pine tree to a beehive to something like an urn (Schalansky 37). Schalansky’s novel thus gives us a perspective from within a vision of decline. By representing Lohmark’s slow-moving ruminations, the text brings us the reactions and rationalizations of a person faced with the end - the end of her professional career, the waning of her physical vitality, the breakdown of her already minimal family, the unstoppable depopulation of her province, and, finally, the now two-decade old dissolution of the socialist nation in which she spent most of her active years. Simultaneously disoriented and hardened, Schalansky’s main character makes sense of these conditions by drawing on the subjects that she teaches, biology and ecology. Lohmark is, it turns out, quite ready to affirm the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 1990 vision of “blooming landscapes” in the East, by which he meant that the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification would inaugurate a new era of prosperity in the former GDR. Only Schalansky’s biology teacher takes the phrase “blühende Landschaften” literally and reflects upon the greening of the deserted region (71). Soon enough, she predicts, plants will cover the ruins of abandoned towns and cities. And she maintains that this should not be seen as a phase of lamentable decline but of great and proliferating life: maggots, mushrooms, and microbes are perpetually at work as agents of decomposition. Resilient vegetation will take over the earth. As Lohmark walks through the contracting county town, she notes that the buildings that were renovated and sanitized after West Germany absorbed the 44 Jakob Norberg former GDR now stand empty, ready to be covered over by indomitable weeds. All the time that people built their towns and cities, the flora was just waiting, sitting in ambush even, always ready to shoot forth everywhere. This does not exactly mean that plants are about to win out over humans. Her approach is, in the end, reducible to the statement that what survives clearly survives, as opposed to that which disappears. In German: “Wer überlebt, überlebt” (Schalansky 217). In her novel, Schalansky thus lets her protagonist imagine the “world without us” as it is about to unfold in a provincial area of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. 3 Sensing how her own career, life, epoch, and even species are coming to an end, Lohmark studies what she regards as the stronger force or more ingenious life form. This is the “green front” that sustains itself and expands simply by capturing sunlight and water (Schalansky 68). If she, too, would be able to draw energy from photosynthesis, she notes, she would be relieved of the constant burden of working and gathering food. From this perspective, the resistance against the loosening hold of humans over the landscape is dismissed as a futile enterprise. And the futility of all human interventions is a recurrent theme in Lohmark’s jaundiced reflections. For example, interregional redistribution for the benefit of weaker regions, that is, money flowing from the former West Germany is, she thinks, a form of artificial life support that should be turned off. Such transfers from more densely populated and prosperous areas to less attractive and sparser ones only represent an institutionalized form of parasitism among humans, set up to in order to sustain that which is plainly unsustainable. Lohmark also thinks that the effort to maintain enrollments at her school and thus save her workplace by lowering the entrance requirements for local children is bound to fail. Given the varying levels of intelligence among different individuals, it would, she asserts, be senseless to open up the theoretical disciplines to adolescents who should be trained for practical jobs. Disparities among pupils remain intractable, she holds, no matter the teaching effort. To sum up her stance, Lohmark rejects any remedies to the current distribution of resources and opportunities across regions, communities, and individuals; they have no beneficial or lasting effect. It is futile to keep a dying region going with money from elsewhere, and futile to open up the education system to talentless pupils. 4 In her terms: Why struggle against nature? Facing the bleak prospects of this post-socialist region and realizing that she is moving into old age herself, After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 45 Lohmark seeks to ally herself emotionally with the force of inexorable natural laws, to at least get a taste of the triumph in her moment of demise. 5 In The Giraffe’s Neck, there is, according to the main character, no effective way of preventing the German hinterlands from sinking into the wilderness again, and no good reason to put up resistance. Presented as the dark thoughts of a single character, the novel may seem like a study in an individual pathology. But the attitude of Schalansky’s anti-hero, oscillating as it does between Schadenfreude and muted desperation, amounts to nothing less than a twisted, symptomatic working-through of GDR’s legacy. As a former GDR citizen whose mind often drifts to scenes from an earlier professional life in a dismantled system, Lohmark sees in socialism the most fantastical endeavor to manipulate the world to better serve the needs and wishes of humanity. A staff-room discussion with her colleagues leads her to recall, and to ridicule, Soviet visions of redesigning the earth to fit the purposes of mankind pictured as a peaceful union of all peoples. Soviet scientists wanted to melt the polar caps, irrigate the deserts, tame wild animals, eliminate cancer and so on. The title of the book, The Giraffe’s Neck, alludes to the revival of Lamarckism in the Soviet Union, the theory that traits acquired over a lifetime would be inheritable; the giraffe’s constant reaching for leaves, for instance, would gradually elongate the neck, a trait that it would then pass on to its offspring. As experiments would show, however, overheated socialist visions of giving new shape to a malleable natural world never bore fruit. To use a concept that has emerged more broadly a little after the publication of Schalansky’s novel in 2011, the anticipated socialist anthropocene never quite materialized. Strawberries, Lohmark remarks, did not grow very well on the Soviet plains; ambitious socialists could never truly overcome the limits of the geography. In Lohmark’s post-socialist retrospection, the plans of the socialist regime in the end succumbed to the limits of people’s genetic endowment and the challenges of recalcitrant environments, all of which exercise a more genuine dictatorship, an “echte Diktatur,” over human affairs (Schalansky 49). Deeply disappointed with the failure of the socialist vision, Lohmark has become an advocate of a bitterly anti-socialist, anti-utopian, naturalist view of the world. Her “scheinbar postideologische[s] Einüben in eine ‘Verhaltenslehre der Kälte’,” Steffen Richter points out, is nothing if not “hochgradig ideologisch” (Richter 60). Whether Lohmark reflects on schemes to save her school in a period of declining enrollments or on utopian socialist plans to transform the material world to the benefit of all humans, she tends to invoke the limits of human nature or evolved ecologies. After the end of socialism and its vision of a unified, self-determining, and self-transforming humanity able to reduce and annul the dispar- 46 Jakob Norberg ities among people and regions of the world, it seems that some form of fatalistic biologism 6 becomes more attractive. Mankind cannot, Schalansky’s figure insists, lay claim to any special status vis-à-vis nature and is not called upon to exercise dominion over it. Instead, humans are simply one species among many, engaged in constant intra-species rivalry, 7 and quite likely to meet its collective demise, should the environment not sustain human beings. This is her post-socialist position, her evolution-inspired rejection of Cold-War era humanism. Schalansky’s novel suggests that a character disoriented and profoundly disillusioned with socialism might come to espouse particular anti-socialist beliefs, which draw authority from biology. This is, so to speak, the central thesis of the novel as a study in post-socialist psychology. Specifically, the disaffected Inge Lohmark asserts that humanity has no special standing or historical mission and cannot successfully bring radically egalitarian projects to completion. Instead, she believes that the collective of humans constitutes one vulnerable species among many, whose members are differentially endowed. In this perspective, solidarity among all of humanity’s members and grand political attempts to raise everyone up by means of a redistribution of resources make little practical sense. There is a certain logic to these beliefs. Lohmark’s decomposition or fragmentation of humanity into competing and unequal individuals, on the one hand, and her erasure of the boundary between humanity and other species, on the other, belong together. These two positions that emerge in the internal monologue of Schalansky’s novel reflect, I would argue, broader ideological trends in the post-socialist era. Studying dominant sets of politically efficacious beliefs in the post-socialist world, the sociologist Steve Fuller has suggested that contemporary individualism and radical ecological thought converge, however much their respective advocates might consider each other alien. In his book The New Sociological Imagination from 2006, Fuller sees in socialism an endeavor to generate tremendous resources for a future humanity conceived of as one collective, undivided by exploitation. Socialism thus weds a “broadly utilitarian, pro-science and pro-industry policy perspective to an overarching sense of responsibility for all of humanity, especially its most vulnerable members” (Fuller 2006, 38). Put concisely, socialism consists in a commitment to a collective of equals that includes all humans and only humans. Today this vision of a unified human collective of equals, Fuller continues, is less likely to be embraced as dignified or viable. Covering the rise of new paradigms of thought in the last couple of decades, Fuller identifies two successful and complementary counter-socialist strategies. The first strategy involves “specifying a clear hierarchy within Homo Sapiens that makes it unlikely that After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 47 all of its members can ever be equal participants” (Fuller 2006, 36). The most prominent example today is the neoliberal vision of how free markets separate out people with different levels of ability in a way that should decidedly not be mitigated by the state. According to this line of reasoning, all individuals are not equally productive and are therefore not likely to earn the same. Inequality is thus the manifestation of an underlying unequal distribution of capability. Political regimes that seek to minimize differences in wealth through state-organized transfers only eliminate people’s incentives to be creative, and to invest in creations. 8 Burdened by constant redistribution of resources, exceptionally talented, hard-working, and risk-taking individuals, along with those who are willing to finance their ventures, will unjustly be denied the opportunity to reap the full rewards of their investments and, as a consequence, perhaps even lose interest in undertaking projects. Indeed, people will be pacified by the prospect of universally guaranteed employment and resources. Without the expectation of formidable and rightful gains, individuals cease to develop their potential and, as a consequence, value-generating products never enter the market. A society that strives primarily for socioeconomic equality will therefore become an inefficient, stagnant society. 9 It would be unproductive and unfair to seek to level out all distinctions among individuals, groups or regions in the name of a unified humanity. The other strategy that Fuller describes depends not on breaking up humanity into an agglomeration of individuals with disparate abilities, but to blur the boundaries between humans and other species, “such that the concept of humanity loses its metaphysical grounding and moral priority” (Fuller 2006, 36). This is the project of radical ecology movements concerned with sustainability and animal welfare, but also of deconstructive or post-humanist academics interrogating the “ontological efficacy of the human/ animal divide” (Wolfe 124). Neat categories, this group argues, are always invaded by that which they are designed to exclude. Timothy Morton, a proponent of a “queer ecology” that combines the thought figures of ecological consciousness and poststructuralist theory, asserts that all life-forms are “liquid.” This fluidity renders futile any attempt to raise barriers between species. Instead, we must, Morton argues, come to accept and affirm that all “life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (275-276). The environment is not the environment in the sense of a contained outside, a reified domain out there beyond the edge of a fully constituted humanity. There are in fact no cleavages or rifts between humanity and the environment. 48 Jakob Norberg To sum up: neoliberal individualists argue that the exponents of an egalitarian humanity ultimately suppress individual achievement, with negative effects for all, whereas poststructuralist ecologists argue that defining humanity is impossible (you cannot cut up a liquid continuum) and bigoted (you should not lock polymorphous life into simplistic oppositions such as male-female or human-animal). We can even speak of a curious alliance between anti-egalitarian, anti-redistributionist neoliberalism and an updated, ecological form of deconstruction, between the advocates of the liberated market and the advocates of a “queer ecology,” insofar as both these groups reject the concept of a shared humanity. The human collective, held together by a special solidarity that extends to all its members, is both dissolved from within and frayed at the edges. Neoliberals promote fragmentation and hierarchies among human beings while radical ecologists or post-humanists tear down hierarchies between species. Both these moves destabilize the ideal collective of socialism by contracting or expanding ethical obligations. These two lines of attack finally converge in their condemnation of humanity’s artificiality. Neoliberals want to release individuals from the burden of redistributive welfare programs and let them join efforts with one another voluntarily for mutual gain. These individuals will then tend to identify permanently only with their immediate families or some other self-chosen group and promote only their own progeny. The queer ecologist or posthumanist in turn discerns violence in the attempt to determine any firm borders of humanity and urges us to rethink “the ‘distribution’ of subjectivity across species lines” (Wolfe 125). The brittle normative human order only serves to obscure the fluid, non-hierarchical relationality of all forms of life. In both cases, neoliberalism and queer ecologists hold that institutionalized forms of solidarity meant to enforce duties to unknown other human beings within specified borders are constructions that quell spontaneous patterns of vitality. Socialist attempts to exercise conscious control over what are impenetrably complex self-organizing economic and ecological systems, so the argument continues, even tend to be self-undermining. The socialist state that seeks to plan production and guide distribution in order to ensure that everyone is given access to goods and services only strangles the economy, for some centralized committee of planners can never acquire and process all the information needed to make the best decisions about resource allocation. 10 And in the realm of ecology, continued human interference disturbs the delicate weave of interrelationships in the ecosystem and disrupts its ability to regenerate itself. In other words, committed socialists seek to exercise human dominion over the environment and promote the material equality of all humanity’s members, and this makes them guilty of interfering with systems of near-incomprehen- After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 49 sible complexity. Socialists upset the laws of ecology by ruthless depletion of natural resources in the name of human material development, and they upset the laws of economy by trying to supervise and control production and resource allocation for the benefit of disadvantaged classes. The vision of a unified and egalitarian humanity drives socialists into dangerous interventions that throw off the internal balance of poorly understood super-organisms. From an economic and an ecological perspective, socialism is nothing but clumsiness. 11 Through her portrait of a disaffected and resentful biology teacher, Schalansky admittedly works within a completely different discourse than ideology analysis. She does not critically compare and reflect on ideologies, their convergences and divergences. Yet by spinning out the internal monologue of one disenfranchised, deeply disappointed biology teacher socialized in the former GDR, The Giraffe’s Neck carefully traces the transition from a socialist to a naturalist agenda. The narrator, Inge Lohmark, was once committed to the socialist project, but is now left to cobble together a new worldview after East Germany’s collapse using materials from her discipline. The reader learns of her past enthusiasm for defiant Soviet projects to reorganize the planet to fit collective needs, to overcome and transcend whatever obstacles the earth seems to present to striving humanity, as well as her current austere view on how nature imposes limits on human ambition and disallows any grandiose collaborative projects. Schalansky’s figure does not believe that humans occupy an especially exalted or protected position in nature, and she does not believe that interregional, socially conscious redistribution and widely available education can in any way raise up poor pupils or struggling individuals. Along with neoliberals, she denies that hierarchies among individuals can or should ever be flattened through schemes of redistribution, and, along with post-humanists, she disputes that a clearly contoured and bordered humanity enjoys a metaphysically grounded moral priority. The two first sections of Schalansky’s novel are entitled “Naturhaushalte [nature households]” and “Vererbungsvorgänge [processes of heredity]” (7 and 85). Both concepts point to the conditions and limits of human action. What humans can do is limited by ecological circumstances and who they are as individuals is determined by heredity. The Giraffe’s Neck constitutes a sustained exploration of post-socialist or anti-socialist patterns of belief, which involve a turn to ecologism and biologism: in the main character’s estimation, humans are neither special vis-à-vis other species nor able to erase biologically rooted inequalities among themselves. Yet Schalansky’s novel is certainly not a work that ends up celebrating socialism as the more inspiring ideological project or looks back to East Germany with nostalgia. By means of its careful portrait of Lohmark, the text rather includes 50 Jakob Norberg a critique of how socialist collectivism, at least as understood and practiced by Inge Lohmark herself, involved other varieties of interpersonal indifference and coldness. The novel’s clinical analysis of Lohmark’s post-socialist beliefs and attitudes is thus complemented by a look at rationalizations of callousness in socialism; Lohmark, it turns out, also used socialism to disengage from the imperative to care for others. Put in general terms, the novel looks at how loyalties can be divided between larger political collectives and groups of intimate relatives, humanity and family. Socialists have often held that the moral commitment of individuals should be transferred from constricted tribes of close relations to humanity, ultimately integrated into one productive unit that relies on everyone’s labor to satisfy the needs of everyone. 12 Critics have likewise noted that socialism works to break down “ancestral lineage,” or that it moves from an emphasis on generational inheritance (of traits, of property) that perpetuates differences to programs of collectivization and redistribution designed to reduce them (Avery and Goldstein 243). More concretely, with an eye to a specific society, life in the GDR possessed a collectivist character; people were organized into units such as work brigades, seminar groups, sport communities, all of which were tasked with furthering the integration of the individual into socialist society and helping to form the socialist personality. 13 These GDR-specific collectivities embodied and consolidated the dominant societal ideal of equality: within the collective, all members should work together, demand the same things, and harbor the same hopes for a shared future. And, according to the sociologist Wolfgang Engler, people were in fact made equal in the GDR: there was remarkable wage equality, no particular esteem for academic degrees and qualifications, uniform conventions of social interaction and taste, a narrow range of commodities, all of which dampened the efforts of individuals to set themselves apart (217). As the fundamental unit of work and leisure life, the numerous collectives functioned as schools of equality, bodies in which people engaged in continuous horizontal negotiations with and adjustments to each other. 14 Presumably, Lohmark lived her life in such collectives and was told or trained to serve her comrades, or to serve humanity. But such devotion to the collective may come at the price of studied disinterest in one’s own family members and relatives. This is at least the suggestion of an episode, a recollection, inserted at very end of Schalansky’s novel, meant to serve as a final illustration or clarification of Lohmark’s flawed character and frozen life. Inge Lohmark’s own daughter, Claudia, at some point went to her mother’s school and even took her mother’s biology lessons. During this time, we piece together from Lohmark’s memories, Claudia’s peers systematically excluded After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 51 and mistreated her. And the teacher - that is, Claudia’s mother Inge Lohmark - demonstratively did not intervene. In fact, Lohmark refused to be addressed as a mother in the regulated space of the classroom, even in the moment her daughter broke down and called for her help. Schalansky here casts a harsh light on the effects of the notion that kin should not receive preferential treatment in an institutional setting and that all special familial relationship should be set aside. Lohmark, we are led to believe, let her sense of duty and disgust with atavistic nepotism stifle any impulse of protectiveness. Her conscientious adherence to socialist collectivism was in fact pathological: at a crucial moment, she displayed a cruel unwillingness or inability to be summoned by her daughter’s desperate call for “Mama” (Schalansky 219). The end of the novel seems to highlight a very personal failure, albeit one anchored in a system that undermined families and inadequately protected individuals. In fact, evolutionism, ecological thought, anti-redistributionism, but also socialist anti-family collectivism all seem to function quite well as vehicles of Lohmark’s primary misanthropy - she merely goes from being an indoctrinated unpleasant person to being a disillusioned and unmoored unpleasant person. But Lohmark’s own recollection of how she as a mother once refused to help her daughter also fits with the novel’s analytical approach to the question of what worldviews are more generally available in the wake of socialism’s collapse. In the aftermath of socialism, Lohmark comes to embrace a particular kind of biologism as the proper way to think about what can be achieved by humans, and also uses it to debate which unit she actually owed and owes loyalty, the collective or her kin. After the GDR and its nationwide conglomerate of collectives dissolved, people often felt isolated and disoriented, having to scramble for some other form of integration. The question of the time was: “Whom can I join [Wem kann man sich anschliessen]” (Lange). Not coincidentally, Lohmark herself declares that she misses her daughter, with whom she no longer has any meaningful contact. When the post-socialist and post-collective condition has set in, her once-shunned daughter makes a reappearance as an object of care. It was not just that the general plans and ambitions of socialism for a future humanity were misguided - this is Lohmark’s explicit analysis. But the recollection of her daughter’s vulnerability suggests that Lohmark now believes that she, too, devoted herself to the wrong social formation - to the collective rather than kin - and hence wasted her energies. In the frame of Schalansky’s novel, the slowly emerging, painful longing for the mistreated daughter represents a post-socialist form of regret. The collective demanded a rejection of kin, but it 52 Jakob Norberg proved prone to dissolution, and in the post-socialist condition, the promise of kinship reasserts itself, albeit far too late. Through its portrait of a stranded post-GDR existence, Schalansky’s Der Hals der Giraffe indicates how familial and intergenerational bonds, as well as the transmission of hereditary traits, can attract increased attention in the post-socialist, post-collective situation. When the socialist promise of a gigantic horizontal collective, ultimately encompassing all of humanity, begins to crumble and can no longer make any claim on the individual’s imagination and loyalty, familial units and lines of inheritance become more salient as the proper targets of anxious concern and sustained investment. Lohmark’s obsessive focus on reproduction, on “Fortpflanzung,” in the guise of her own minimal family and her estranged daughter’s childlessness, constitutes a response to the disintegration of a particular kind of collectivized life that sought to transcend the private household and even render it insignificant (Schalansky 68). Indeed, Lohmark’s ongoing articulation of a biological worldview more generally can be interpreted as a reaction to the perceived failure and disappearance of the socialist vision of a unified and internally egalitarian humanity building a future for all of its members. Lost in the post-socialist era, Schalansky’s character claims that humanity is only one species among many, composed of a population of individuals with unequal levels of ability. In this way, she tears down the hierarchy among species and erects a hierarchy of human animals, slipping into thought patterns that parallel the counter-socialist strategies of radical ecologists and neoliberals, respectively. The human collective, she believes, enjoys no special privilege in the natural world, and merely consists of individuals in competition with one another. Humanity will proliferate or be wiped out depending on environmental pressures for which it may or may not be well prepared. Schalansky’s anti-heroine espouses, then, a symptomatic bundle of distinctly post-socialist beliefs. After the undivided, egalitarian human collective has been swept away as the supreme ideal, familial ties rise in importance; and after the socialist efforts to reshape society and the natural world have been retired, the constraints of genetic endowment and limits of ecological systems appear insurmountable. To conclude, Schalansky’s of a disoriented biology teacher in a sparsely populated post-socialist region lucidly captures how biological thinking becomes increasingly appealing during periods in which previously dominant political or religious collectivities begin to dissolve. In her analysis of racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that claims about a common racial origin are typically voiced when traditional kinds of interconnection, sustained by shared customs and institutions such as citizenship, are coming under pressure After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 53 (157). People resort to what they deem indisputable biological facts, their shared blood or common racial traits, precisely when other forms of collectivity are destabilized. In Arendt’s eyes, aggressive race thinking is a testimony to the weakening of the political community rather than to its strength and self-confidence. Steve Fuller offers a similar view of the correlation between the “meltdown of institutions” and the embrace of “pre-institutional forms of social life” for which authentic kinship provides the “grounding ontology” (2006, 65-66). Whenever religious or political communities, which typically seek to reach beyond the borders of small kin groups or even want to neutralize them, are about to lose their institutional embodiment and grip on the imagination, people become more likely to conceive of themselves as at one with the natural world and subject to its laws. Or, in the words of Arendt, people start to gravitate towards “naturalistic ideologies” which consider tribes the largest viable grouping and thus render them “unconscious of the solidarity of mankind” (157). Published in 2011, Schalansky’s novel does not reflect the post-2015 surge of nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan sentiment across Europe, but the ethnically defined nation could constitute yet another pseudo-natural unit below the level of a unified humanity. For Lohmark, the interest in evolution seems to fill the gap left behind by grandiose, feverish dreams of collective progress. By representing the dark ruminations of a biology teacher who is forced to witness the decline of her region and who herself begins to long for the remote, once-rejected daughter, The Giraffe’s Neck traces the shift from collective to kin, from redistribution to inheritance, from utopian anticipation of a man-made future to prudent adaptation to the environment. But are all post-socialist visions of human life as dark as the one explored by Schalansky? Of course not. There are still energies of hopeful anticipation in the present. In the recent past, people’s desire to transform their material being and enhance their life has been boosted, for instance by developments in biomedical research. Inspired by technological and scientific advances, many dream of the improvement of “human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span” (Garreau 231-32). But, however exhilarating, these visions of technology breakthroughs and health care innovations that are now recharging the belief in a glorious future for humanity do not seem as intimately coupled with a concern for, or even concept of, a unified and classless collective. Instead, the enhancement of individual human beings is likely to widen the gap between groups along extant socioeconomic lines. People will live healthier and longer lives, but likely only if they are wealthy. We have retained the idea of human progress but separated it from the focus on egalitarianism (Antonio 47). 54 Jakob Norberg Notes 1 The German title contains a more specific genre declaration: Der Hals der Giraffe is not just a “novel,” but a “Bildungsroman.” Recent German-language scholarship has not unsurprisingly clustered around this self-categorization and read Schalansky’s text as a response to and development of a central German cultural concept of Bildung. See Yvonne Delhey’s 2011 paper and Anja Lemke’s 2016 contribution on Schalansky’s novel. This paper deals with a different aspect of the novel, namely its critical representation of leftand rightwing ideological discourse. 2 I draw the opposition between “anticipation” and “adaptation” from Steve Fuller, who in turn derives it from Tomoko Masuzawa’s schematic division of Western religions of prophecy (anticipation) and Eastern religions of wisdom (adaptation) (Fuller 2011, 236). 3 The phrase “the world without us” is taken from Alan Weisman’s 2007 book with this title. This post-human aspect of the novel is emphasized by Wolfgang Struck in a recent paper. 4 For a discussion of the concept of futility in reactionary thought, see Albert Hirschman’s famous book on reactionary rhetoric. 5 Referring to the conservative philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, Theodor Adorno calls the attempt to derive satisfaction out of a seemingly hopeless situation by identifying with overpowering forces “Spenglerei” (567). 6 For a definition of biologism as the belief that all human social and normative life can be derived from biological imperatives and constraints, see Urte Stobbe’s 2016 paper on Schalansky and Jenny Erpenbeck. 7 One of Lohmark’s colleagues with a GDR background claims that the Darwinian view of “innerartliche Konkurrenz [intraspecies competition]” is merely a reflection of capitalism (Schalansky 144). 8 In a recent book that seeks to complicate the rigid division of ‘Western’ capitalist and ‘Eastern’ socialist economic knowledge, Johanna Bockman presents neoliberalism as a school of thought that speaks for competitive markets liberated from political (state) intervention, strong (state) protection of private property, and hierarchical management of private firms (1-15). Neoliberalism is thus not against the state, but rather envisages a tightly circumscribed role for it. It should not be involved in redistribution of resources or promotion of equality. 9 For a discussion of equality versus efficiency, see Arthur Okun’s book on the concepts. Efficiency Okun defines simply as getting the most out of a given input (48). After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 55 10 The major articulation of this argument is found in Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The anti-regulation argument is premised on inevitable and irredeemable human ignorance: central planning is, Jeremy Friedman argues with reference to Hayek, epistemologically impossible. 11 The twin dangers of economic crisis and ecological disaster are neatly captured by the history of intensified brown coal use in the GDR during the early 1980s. Trying to avert the threat of bankruptcy due to overgenerous subsidies put in place by Erich Honecker in a time of declining energy supplies, the GDR Economic Secretary Günter Mittag embarked on a path of frugality and started cutting costs by blocking further investments in production. As part of this strategy of parsimony, Mittag also saved Soviet oil, sold relatively cheaply to the GDR, in order to secure a higher price for it in Western currency, all the while replacing oil use with domestically mined brown coal in the GDR itself. To prevent insolvency, the GDR thus imposed merciless cost-cutting measures on East German factories, shipped its Soviet oil to the West, and engaged in ruthless strip mining at home without care for the resulting pollution (Zatlin 104-115). 12 John Urang has shown how GDR authors and cultural officials viewed the exclusivity of love affairs as a threat to socialist integration. The pair relationship had to “remain subordinate to the claims of the socialist collective” even in the realm of romantic fiction (65). 13 Here I rely on Lydia Lange’s evocative portrayal of East German society. 14 This did not mean that the collectives were always conduits of party-state visions: the non-competitive and sometimes conspiratorial internal sphere of the collective could offer a sense of predictability and security and as such constitute a buffer for the individual in relation to the oppressive political hierarchies which undeniably did exist. Works Cited “Briefly Noted.” The New Yorker, 12 May 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2020. <http: / / www.new yorker.com/ magazine/ 2014/ 05/ 12/ briefly-noted-753> Adorno, Theodor W. “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Vol. 10.2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 555-72. Antonio, Robert. “After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.” American Journal of Sociology 106.1 ( July 2000). 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