Space and Place in Postwar Germany

David Clarke, Renate Rechtien, eds.. The Politics of Place in Post-War Germany: Essays in Literary Criticism. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. v + 291 pp. $119.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-7734-4736-3. Reviewed by Paul O'Hanrahan Published on H-German (November, 2010) Commissioned by Benita Blessing (Oregon State University) On the cover of The Politics of Place, a photo‐ tions of the relations between culture, geography, graph of a prefabricated building in Leipzig in and ideology. A subtle analysis of how spatial the‐ 2007 serves as a reminder of the aesthetic unifor‐ orists define place and space precedes a consider‐ mity that characterized the intersection between ation of place in literature and reference to key politics and place in the construction of the Ger‐ events in the postwar German political context. A man Democratic Republic (GDR). Happily, the vol‐ complementary genealogy of German literature of ume of essays that follows, based on a 2005 sym‐ place is supplied in a later chapter by Thomas posium at the University of Cambridge, is remark‐ Möbius. The latter's survey of the tradition of able for its diversity and eclecticism. The confer‐ landscape imagery in GDR literature ranges far ence was originally conceived as an investigation beyond the volume's postwar parameters to pro‐ into the work of author Angela Krauß, but ex‐ vide a welcome study of the evolution of land‐ panded into a wide-ranging consideration of the scape representation in German poetry. Two es‐ function of place in postwar German writing. says with a Berlin focus by Simon Ward and An‐ Thoroughly embedded in literary texts, the vol‐ drew Webber anchor the volume's deliberations ume explores responses to location in Kraus, on place, while Berlin is also integral to Dennis Hanns-Josef Ortheil, W. G. Sebald, Birgit Vander‐ Tate's reflections on Günter de Bruyn's ambiva‐ beke, Wolfgang Koeppen, Günter Grass, Ingeborg lent attitude to the city. Configurations of German Bachmann, Franz Fühmann, Günter de Bruyn, places in the contemporary era extend beyond the Gert Neumann, Helga Schütz, and Christa Wolf. national terrain in a number of instances. These In his introduction, David Clarke provides a include the East End of London and representa‐ useful summary of the emergence of a new em‐ tions of Theresienstadt in Sebald's Austerlitz phasis on space in the humanities and social sci‐ (2001); Vanderbeke's presentation of German mi‐ ences, which he allies with postcolonial investiga‐ grant experience in the south of France; and Füh‐ H-Net Reviews mann's textual embodiment of Budapest. Consid‐ film. Austerlitz's walk through the East End of ering the heterogeneous nature of the volume, the London connects the Bedlam asylum in London recurrence of Michel Foucault's concept of hetero‐ with Theresienstadt by spatial associations link‐ topia as a touchstone for many of these essays is ing asylum, cinema, and railway. Later the protag‐ intriguing, as Karen Seago acknowledges in her onist's quest for his mother leads to a viewing of a foreword. As Foucault's spatial theories have in‐ video of the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Imperial spired a range of interpretations in this volume, it War Museum. Austerlitz wants to believe he sees may be useful to foreground this review with the her in the flm but she is what Osborne terms "a following definition of heterotopia from his 1967 lost object of narrative desire": accessing the essay "Of Other Spaces," in which the idea of a space of the Holocaust is seen as continually sub‐ real location as a combination of incongruous ject to deviation and redirection (p. 63). spaces appears particularly resonant with a focus Emily Jeremiah explores gender and migra‐ on the literary representation of place: "The het‐ tion from Germany in the fctional work of Birgit erotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real Vanderbeke. Born in the GDR, Vanderbeke moved place several spaces, several sites that are in to West Germany when she was fve and now themselves incompatible."[1] lives in the south of France, a migratory trajectory Helmut Schmitz explores the traumatic ef‐ which is refected in her novella I Spy with My Lit‐ fects of the Second World War on his own family tle Eye (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siest, 1997). in his autobiographical novels Hedge ( Hecke, Germans living in the south of France fnd that 1983) and Farewell to the Combatants (Abschied migration does not erase the old self and place of von den Kriegsteilnehmern, 1992). The impact of origin; that is, Germany is subject to recurrent cri‐ war on the landscape is evident: society is dimin‐ tique and comparison, urban isolation contrasting ished both by the trauma of war and the haste of with French rural community. Although the host reconstruction. In Farewell to the Combatants, culture is never fully accessible to the outsider, Germany is a collection of bombed and reassem‐ the narrative depicts a slow growth towards com‐ bled villages, a manic patriarchal reconstruction munity. The south of France is again the location of a devastated world. Loss of home is experi‐ for Vanderbeke's more recent novella The Strange enced as expulsion from a regional Rhineland ter‐ Career of Mrs. Choi (Der sonderbare Karriere der rain, reflecting a postwar desire for peace and se‐ Frau Choi, 2007). A Korean woman, Mrs. Choi, ar‐ curity. Here Schmitz fnds similarities between rives in a village and opens a restaurant which Farewell to the Combatants and the opening serves to regenerate a place defined by corruption episode of Edgar Reitz's 1984 TV series Heimat in and ignorance. The narrator's occasional address which the modernity of war invades an ordered to a German male constructs the reader as a skep‐ agricultural world. tic towards Mrs. Choi but reinforces a critique of Dora Osborne interprets Sebald's Austerlitz male authority. Jeremiah sees the novella as con‐ through Foucault's focus on space as a form of re‐ firming the importance of the local within a glob‐ lation and Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (1995), alized world and as promoting a transnational in which the desire to know about the past threat‐ feminist community through surprising encoun‐ ens to consume its traces. Applying Foucault's het‐ ters with the unfamiliar. erotopia to depict spaces at once within and out‐ Simon Ward highlights how recent attention side reality, she analyzes a network of spaces in to sites of memory in Berlin has not been matched Austerlitz such as the incompatibility of the depic‐ by study of how Berlin memory is mediated. His tion of Theresienstadt as ghetto, spa resort, and focus is on an exceptional and little-known fgure: 2 H-Net Reviews Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer whose postwar texts in the German literary tradition and, specifically, are informed by memories of the Weimar Berlin in GDR literature. An overlap between the experi‐ of the 1920s and 1930s. "A Coffeehouse" ("Ein Kaf‐ ence of nature for itself and mythological associa‐ feehaus," 1965) is a short memoir that recon‐ tions with witches and spirits is depicted in the as‐ structs the history of the site of the Romanisches cent of the Brocken in Johann Wolfgang von Café close to the Gedächtniskirche in West Berlin. Goethe's Faust (1808). Heine continues the tradi‐ "Tiergarten" (1965) depicts the city's formation tion but also subjects it to irony in The Harz Jour‐ over the centuries. Ward skillfully teases out the ney (Die Harzreise, 1824) and undermines the as‐ political references and literary allusions in a sociation of the mountains with national unity in 1979 text, "Bless Our Exit, Our Entrance Also his Deutschtland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. Bless" ("Unsern Ausgang segne, unsern Eingang A Winter’s Tale, 1844). Möbius then proceeds to gleichermaßen"), in which a journey by the over‐ analyze how Heine's linkage of the landscape to head S-Bahn into the East Berlin of the GDR shifts political discourse is continued in the work of in and out of the past. post-1945 GDR writers, Irmtraud Morgner and Andrew Webber explores the haunted terrain Thomas Rosenlöcher. Morgner uses the folklore of of Berlin through a range of textual connections the mountains in Amanda. A Witch Novel (Ein and associations to which a Freudian emphasis on Hexenroman, 1983) in stories which critique pa‐ displacement and the unconscious is central. Re‐ triarchal power, appropriation of nature, and mil‐ lating postwar and post-unification perspectives itary occupation of the Harz as a strategic border to nineteenth-century Berlin, Webber reads location. Thomas Rosenlöcher in The Harz Jour‐ Fontane as a point of entry into the case history of ney (Die Harzreise, 1990) gives a contemporary the modern city. Playing with the saying that truth spin to the tradition of poetic Harz journeys and comes out on the pitch or "Platz," an Elfriede Je‐ to the Harz as a political symbol. Aware of linek poem becomes a meditation on the repres‐ Goethe's and Heine's landscape experiences, sion of truth underneath. Webber follows the log‐ Rosenlöcher's wanderer protagonist fnds that he ic of this insistence on the subterranean to Micha is unresponsive when he attempts to contemplate Ullman's underground memorial on Bebelplatz at nature himself. Möbius concludes by showing the site of the Nazi book-burning. The trope of how Rosenlöcher exposes the Western hegemony Berlin as an open feld in Grass's Ein weites Feld within the unification process by using enlight‐ (Too Far Afield, 1995) refers to Fontane and also ened irony. The ridiculous and the heroic combine implicates the no-man's-land of the Berlin Wall in an incident in which the wanderer walks stub‐ and the wartime ruin which is the 1963 home of bornly in front of an impatient Mercedes: the poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

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