Temporality, Subjectivity and Postcommunism in Contemporary German Literature by Herta Müller, Zsuzsa Bánk and Terézia Mora
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PASTS WITH FUTURES: TEMPORALITY, SUBJECTIVITY AND POSTCOMMUNISM IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE BY HERTA MÜLLER, ZSUZSA BÁNK AND TERÉZIA MORA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Katrina Louise Nousek May 2015 © 2015 Katrina Louise Nousek PASTS WITH FUTURES: TEMPORALITY, SUBJECTIVITY AND POSTCOMMUNISM IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE BY HERTA MÜLLER, ZSUZSA BÁNK AND TERÉZIA MORA Katrina Louise Nousek, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 This dissertation analyzes future-oriented narrative features distinguishing German literature about European communism and its legacies. Set against landscapes marked by Soviet occupation and Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship in Romania (Müller) and against the 1956 Hungarian revolution, eastern European border openings, and post-Wende Berlin (Mora, Bánk), works by these transnational authors engage social legacies that other discourses relegate to an inert past after the historic rupture of 1989. Dominant scholarship reads this literature either through trauma theory or according to autobiography, privileging national histories and static cultural identities determined by the past. Shifting attention to complex temporal structures used to narrate literary subjectivities, I show how these works construct European futures that are neither subsumed into a homogeneous present, nor trapped in traumatic repetition, nostalgic longing, or psychic disavowal. My analysis extends and contributes to debates in politics and the arts about the status of utopia after communism and the role of society in political entities no longer divided in Cold War terms of East/West, three worlds, or discrete national cultures. By focusing on Müller, Mora and Bánk, I widen the purview of FRG-GDR discussions about communism to include transnational, temporal and narrative perspectives that scholarship on these authors often overlooks. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Katrina Nousek (b. State College, Pennsylvania, USA) holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University and an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard University. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my Special Committee for all their help in so many ways. I am especially indebted to my Special Committee Chair, Professor Leslie A. Adelson, for her careful reading, thorough comments, and unwavering support throughout my graduate career. Professor Patrizia McBride has been a helpful interlocutor, Professor Isabel V. Hull a consistent and patient reader, and Professor Paul Fleming a challenging, inquisitive, and much appreciated addition to the Committee. This dissertation would also not have been possible without the graduate community at Cornell and beyond. Many thanks go to Carl Gelderloos, a partner-in- crime from the get-go; Paul Flaig, for seeing my first colloquium through to its end and reading chapter drafts before they even resembled such a thing; Ari Linden, for his good humor and intellectual support; Sarah Pickle, for a crash course in Hungarian pronunciation; my Humanities Dissertation Writing Group (sponsored by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University): Miyako Hayakawa, Andreea Mascan, Annetta Fotopoulos, and Adam Bursi; and the Advanced Graduate Student Workshop at the University of Colorado-Boulder, organized by Paul Fleming, Patrizia McBride and Arne Hoecker. I would also like to express my appreciation for the financial support that has made my dissertation research and writing possible over the years. Many thanks to Professor Paul Michael Lützeler for an incredibly productive summer in the Max Kade Center Contemporary Literature Collection at Washington University of St. Louis sponsored by the Olin Library Summer Research Grant. Additional gratitude goes to the Humboldt University Exchange Fellowship, the Michele Sicca Grant for Research in Europe (administered by the Cornell Institute for European Studies), a Cornell University Graduate School Research Travel Grant, and the Cornell University Sage Fellowship for facilitating research and writing in Ithaca, Berlin and Marbach. Initial thoughts related to Chapter Two have been published by Wiley as an article in German Life and Letters as “A Future-Oriented Zeitrechnung: Narrating Post-Communist Temporality and Subjectivity in Zsuzsa Bánk’s Der Schwimmer (2002).” German Life and Letters 68.2 (April 2015): 302-323. Print. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………......................1 I. Postcommunism in Politics and Culture………………………………….......................1 II. Postcommunism and the German Democratic Republic……………………………...18 III. Postcommunist Literature ……………………………………………………………29 IV. Analytical method……………………………..………………………......................37 Chapter One ‘Intermental Thought and Alternative Futures: Postcommunist Narration in Herta Müller’s Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet.................44 I. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………44 II. Intermental Thought: Continuing Consciousness in Narratology………….................51 III. Herta Müller’s Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997).................................60 III.1 The Cobbler: Configuration of a Past-Present Age……………………………...…63 III.2 Schuld: Causality, Hypotaxis, Agency……………………………………………...70 III.3 Möglichkeiten vom Sattwerden der Welt: A Typology of Possibilities....................78 III.4 Intermental Thought: Lilli, Paul, Major Albu………………………….…………...81 IV. Alternative Conditional Prognoses & Future Possibility…………………................93 V. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….………...97 Chapter Two: Zeitrechnung: Non-Canonical Events in Zsuzsa Bánk’s Der Schwimmer (2002)......................100 I. Postcommunism and History………………………………………………………...100 II. Temporal Structures in Der Schwimmer…………………………………………….107 III. Narrating a Postcommunist Future…………………………………………………122 vi Chapter Three: Seeing Futures Present: Configuring Temporalities in Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004)……..130 I.1 Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004)................................................................................136 I.2 Form of Alle Tage…………………………………………………………………...139 II. Futures beyond Crisis………………………………………………………………..143 II.1 Erik: Future Crisis, Present Success………………………………………………..144 II.2 Mercedes: Present Crisis, Social Futures…………………………………………..147 II.3 Abel: Social Futures, Emerging Past……………………………………………….150 III. Forming Futures: Hypothetical Narration…………………………………………..158 III.1 Omar and Abel – Virtual Event, Direct Hypothetical Focalization……………….160 III.2 Abel and Danko – Actual Event, Indirect Hypothetical Focalization…………….168 III.3 Yugoslavia………………………………………………………………………...171 III.4 Spion………………………………………………………………………………182 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...187 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………194 vii INTRODUCTION I. Postcommunism in Politics and Culture Postcommunism in literature and the arts distances itself from political theories of postcommunism that posit a necessary transition from real existing socialism, understood as a failed state form that once existed in Europe, to liberal democracy as practiced in states without an official history of communist governments.1 Whereas postcommunism as a term in the political sciences refers to a teleological development of states, postcommunist literature reassesses the possibilities of constructing plural subjects and evidences utopian orientations toward better futures in the wake of public discourses that posit ends to history, utopia, and society with the end of state socialism in Europe after 1989.2 Yet literature that continues to engage with experiences in countries that existed in the name of communism in Europe during the twentieth century demonstrates the critical relevance these experiences have for conceptions of the new Europe today by returning to histories that political theory—still surprisingly inflected by Cold War dichotomies that divide Europe into a lingering notion of distinctly different forms of state development in east and west—relegates to the past. 1 By official history I refer to governmental forms of capitalist democracy and state socialism. In so far as capitalism and socialism were also cultural counterparts that mutually informed one another for the majority of the twentieth century, their official history is not simply separated. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2003), Susan Buck-Morss demonstrates ways in which a dream of mass utopia rooted in industrial modernity constructs a narrative of the twentieth century through both socialism and European modernity for example. See Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Print. By real existing socialism, I refer to governments in the East bloc existing in the name of the Communist Party. My discussion in later chapters will also include the former Yugoslavia, which was not a part of the East bloc after 1948. 2 Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article “The End of History” declared the end of communism in Europe to demonstrate a development of world orders in which liberal democracy was the ultimate stage of political development. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. Print. Susan Buck-Morss argues that 1989 marks the passing of utopian projects in both East and West in Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press,