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Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 07 May 2015 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Ward, Simon (2009) 'Berlin as space and place in Wolfgang Koeppen's later texts.', in The politics of place in post-war Germany : essays in literary criticism. Lewiston (N.Y.), Queenston (Ont.), Lampeter [England]: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 67-84. Further information on publisher's website: http://mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=7776pc=9 Publisher's copyright statement: Ward, Simon (2009) 'Berlin as space and place in Wolfgang Koeppen's later texts.', in The politics of place in post-war Germany : essays in literary criticism. / edited by David Clarke and Renate Rechtien. Lewiston (N.Y.), Queenston (Ont.), Lampeter [England]: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 67-84. 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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk CHAPTER 4 Berlin as Space and Place in Wolfgang Koeppen’s Later Texts Simon Ward Remembering Berlin The surfeit of recent investigations into Berlin and memory, instigated principally by Brian Ladd’s study of The Ghosts of Berlin, has paid a tremendous degree of attention to the material ‘sites of memory’, but less close scrutiny has been afforded to the forms of mediation which are required to activate that memory. On the one hand, the medialization of memory has to be problematized in a more rigorous fashion, and not simply assigned to a pre-linguistic, pre-mediated state as asserted by Dolores Hayden, that Berlin is ‘a repository of environmental memory far richer than every verbal code’.1 On the other, a certain narrative of memory in and of Berlin has become paradigmatic, which sees the first post-war decades as an era of ‘repression and forgetting’, and which reads the remembrance of an earlier Berlin in the post-unification era as a new phenomenon. Central to this analysis is a reading of the Berlin that predated National Socialism, as this city is invoked as a kind of ‘prelapsarian urban utopia’ in, for example, the works of Wim Wenders, or the exhibition ‘Mythos Berlin’ (‘The Myth of Berlin’) from 1986, to mention two examples which predate the undoubted post-unification fascination with the Weimar era. Wolfgang Koeppen too was fascinated with Weimar Berlin, but the case of Koeppen is, in many ways, unique, and this is to a large extent due to his unusual autobiography. Wolfgang Koeppen’s life and prose centre around Berlin, but always in an eccentric fashion. Koeppen’s biographical details were always sketchy, but he did work for a Berlin newspaper in the early 1930s, until he voluntarily left Germany for Holland in 1934. He also worked in Berlin from 1938 onwards within the film industry, as recent biographical research has firmly 1 Cited in Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 227. 86 Simon Ward established, despite his many prevarications in interview. After the war, Koeppen lived and wrote in Munich. The setting of his first post-war novel, Pigeons on the Grass (Tauben im Gras, 1951) is modelled on the Bavarian city, and while Berlin does appear in that book, it is only through the haunted memories of the Jewish actress Henriette. Berlin lies in ruins, and with it the idea of a German-Jewish cultural tradition. Berlin also appears in his 1953 novel, The Hothouse (Das Treibhaus), but, with the exception of one example to be discussed below, only through the main character Keetenheuve’s recollections of his times at the Volksblatt newspaper. Berlin functions as a kind of ‘identity anchor’ in uncertain post-war times in these works, and indeed Koeppen’s post-war writings are, as I have suggested elsewhere, shaped by a remembrance of Weimar Berlin and of the cultural tradition associated with that time.2 It is only in Koeppen’s later (shorter) prose, however, that the city comes to the fore, and while Koeppen’s search for a lost self is frequently mediated through a meditation on his childhood in Masuria and Greifswald, a key role is played by Berlin. Since a fundamental given of Koeppen’s project is the ultimate inaccessibility of this ‘lost self’, which is only to be rendered through the masquerading performance of the fictionalizing act, then past Berlin played off against contemporary Berlin is a key strategy: past Berlin, invoked by the spatial markers of a cosmopolitan modernity and modernism, being inaccessible due to the passage of time, the traumas of history; present Berlin being dominated by the spatial structures of the administered world of instrumental reason, which Koeppen, throughout his post-war work, criticizes in a manner informed by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.3 As Koeppen is one of few post-war German writers to have experienced the ‘Weimar Berlin’ of the 1920s and 1930s, and to have been shaped by literary modernism and influenced by the modernist climate of the city in those years, his memory of 2 Simon Ward, Negotiating Positions: Literature, Identity and Social Critique in the Works of Wolfgang Koeppen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 99-129. 3 See Otto Lorenz, Die Öffentlichkeit der Literatur: Fallstudien zu Produktionskontexten und Publikationsstrategien: Wolfgang Koeppen, Peter Handke, Horst-Eberhard Richter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998). Berlin in Wolfgang Koeppen’s Later Texts 87 Berlin is mediated through his own peculiar literary method, informed by a modernist critique of the dogmas of modernity, suspicious of the technocratic homogenization inscribed in modernity as it was analysed by Siegfried Kracauer in his essays, particularly on ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1926), and indebted to the modernist critiques of modernity composed by Baudelaire and interpreted by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. This method manifests itself in a particular sensitivity towards urban space, and the interstitial spaces of the urban environment which seemed to provide a place for re-writing the prescriptions of the subject imposed by objective culture and space. In Koeppen’s The Hothouse there is a telling scene soon after Keetenheuve, the central character, arrives in the new, provisional capital, Bonn. A traffic policeman was playacting at being a traffic policeman in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He waved the traffic on down the Bonner Strasse. It swarmed and buzzed and squeaked and honked. […] What was the scene at the real Potsdamer Platz? A wire enclosure, a new international frontier, the end of the world, the Iron Curtain […]. Ein Schutzmann spielte Schutzmann in Berlin am Potsdamer Platz. Er gab die Bonner Straβe frei. Es wimmelte, es schwirrte, quietschte, klingelte. [...] Was war am wirklichen Potsdamer Platz? Ein Drahtverhau, eine neue und recht kräftige Grenze, ein Weltende, der Eiserne Vorhang.4 Bonn, the novel’s eponymous artificial hothouse, is only playing at the memory of what it means to be a capital, just as Koeppen’s prose recalls, for a sentence, what it means to use the stylistic devices of the ‘big city’ novel. The reality of Berlin is very different, the Potsdamer Platz already, as it would be for the next forty years, the marker of abstract division not just in Germany, but in the world. Already captured in this brief passage is Koeppen’s engagement with the abstract space of 4 Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2001), 64. Wolfgang Koeppen, Gesammelte Werke, 6 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), II, 257. All further references to Koeppen’s Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works) appear as GS. All translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own. 88 Simon Ward Berlin after 1945, a melancholic recollection of the topographical (and literary) motifs of the Weimar era played off against the frosty realities of the Cold War. In my earlier work on Wolfgang Koeppen, I demonstrated how his ‘non- conformist’ protagonists’ sense of self is primarily produced through a continual, if elusive negotiation with public contexts rather than trying to escape from them. Koeppen’s protagonists find an ‘anti-structural’ location in a liminal space between discourses.5 The city of Berlin as a site of discourse figures as a liminal space particularly in Koeppen’s later texts. To work with a distinction made by Marc Augé, neither the ‘place’ of Berlin past nor the abstract ‘non-place’ of Cold War Berlin’s present can be inhabited, with the result that the protagonist’s sense of self is generated out of the dialogue between past and present, but also situated in the interstitial spaces of Cold War Berlin itself.6 In the following analysis of key examples from Koeppen’s oft-neglected post-trilogy prose, I investigate how he plays the image of Berlin as an abstract space off against Berlin imagined as a place, whereby the idea of place is also firmly connected to a historical period now vanished and fundamentally irrecoverable other than through literary fiction. While the act of remembering Berlin past is Koeppen’s primary tactic for undercutting the dominant spatial reality of the present, the act of moving between the regulated spaces of both East and West Berlin is a parallel device for locating the self.

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