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 defne 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 refections on Günter de Bruyn's ambiva‐ beke, Wolfgang Koeppen, Günter Grass, Ingeborg lent attitude to the city. Confgurations 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‐ flm. 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 defnition 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, refecting 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 defned 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‐ frming 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:
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Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer whose postwar texts in the German literary tradition and, specifcally, are informed by memories of the Weimar Berlin in GDR literature. An overlap between the experi‐ of the 1920s and 1930s. "A Cofeehouse" ("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-unifcation 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 unifcation process by using enlight‐ (Too Far Afeld, 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. In the Bachmann text A spirit of Heine is not far away. Place for Coincidences (Ein Ort für Zufälle, 1964), In an essay on the relationship of self to envi‐ the Berlin of the 1960s is a combination of coinci‐ ronment in the fction of Angela Krauß, Ute Wölfel dence and collapse, a combination of tropes Web‐ explores how societal changes since unifcation in ber also locates in Cees Nooteboom's All Souls' East Germany are registered in her work. In her Day (Allerseelen, 1999) when a man falls on the 1986 text The Celebration (Das Vergnügen), the in‐ post-wall construction site at Potsdamer Platz. dividual is rooted in the nurturing industrial mi‐ In an extended tracing of literary inheritance, lieu of a briquette factory in Bitterfeld. After unif‐ Thomas Möbius considers landscape not as a giv‐ cation, this milieu disappears and the displaced en, but rather as a mode of perception and ex‐ individual must seek out new forms of identity. In plores the representation of the Harz mountains Summer on the Ice (Sommer auf den Eis, 1998), Kraus returns to the industrial landscape of The
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Celebration but now the perspective is of a wom‐ Budapest and back embodies the landscape of an for whom unemployment has become a threat modernism, the longer term signifcance of the to identity. Wölfel then traces a process whereby project revealed in Krause's comment that the recovery of a sense of self is constructed through project was far from exhausted on the author's re‐ memories of childhood but growth into self- turn. awareness also entails new forms of alienation. In an informed chapter on the life and work Skating on a pond, the woman, in despair, realizes of Günter de Bruyn, Dennis Tate profles an au‐ her own dispensability. A vision of a ship ofers thor often construed as the Theodor Fontane of what Wölfel calls a "scene of fulfllment" ("eine Er‐ contemporary German literature. Tate discusses füllungsszenerie"), a heterotopia of a real "other how in his 2005 autobiographical memoir Of the place" countering the industrial decline. Passen‐ Beaten Track: A Declaration of Love to a Land‐ gers on the ship bring the prospect of a new com‐ scape ( Abseits: Liebeserklärung an eine Land‐ munity in an ironic vision in which the polluted schaft), de Bruyn portrays the discovery of a cot‐ wasteland of Bitterfeld is fgured as an Eden and tage in Brandenburg in 1968 as the turning-point industrial space as utopia: "the miracle of the in his life. Tate relates this declaration to a per‐ chemical triangle" ("das Wunder im ception of East Berlin as dominated by the corrupt Chemiedreieck"). Wölfel warns that the irony im‐ GDR hierarchy in the novel Researches in the plicit in this fulfllment is an indication of its Brandenburg Marches (Märkische Forschungen, fragility. 1979). However, the picture is complicated by the David Clarke highlights the work of a neglect‐ tensions and GDR politics of relations between ed East German author, Gert Neumann, who, de‐ city and country in de Bruyn's 1960s novels, The spite being championed by Martin Walser, re‐ Ravine (Der Hohlweg, 1963) and Burdidan's Ass mains relatively unknown. In particular, Clarke (Buridans Esel, 1968). (Incidentally, and usefully, explores Eleven O’Clock (Elf Uhr, 1981), a novel he recommends the latter novel as one of the few which is in fact a hybrid form, incorporating a di‐ successful Berlin novels written in the GDR era.) ary, a poetic treatise, and a commentary on social Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tate is sur‐ and working conditions. In his depiction of prised by de Bruyn's detachment on revisiting the Leipzig, Neumann's concerns with the transfor‐ place of his birth and childhood in Britz in West mation of the ordinary into a poetic space can be Berlin. However, de Bruyn's consistent preference associated with Romanticism. Clarke presents a for an outsider stance continues to defne his loca‐ close analysis of Neumann's writing technique tion in Brandenburg and a critical perspective on and relates its efects to the incommensurability Berlin. of the Romantic sublime. Juliane Parthier considers the treatment of Stephan Krause reads GDR author Franz Füh‐ the former border zone which divided Germany mann's Twenty-two Days (Zweiundzwanzig Tage, and Berlin in her analysis of Helga Schütz's novel 1973) as a liberation from earlier stylistic con‐ Border to Yesterday (Grenze zum gestrigen tag, formity: a planned travel book based on a visit to 2000). Based on the author's own experience, this Budapest is transformed into a fuid text recreat‐ fctional account depicts how a family manages to ing the steam baths in the city. Krause locates Fou‐ live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. There they cault's heterotopia in the inaccessibility of the discover a degree of normality and happiness de‐ baths-as-labyrinth and traces the allusions to spite being surrounded by militarized terrain. The James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as a key intertext for novel challenges ofcial discourses about the GDR Fühmann. The latter's expedition from Berlin to by describing the everyday realities of life in a
4 H-Net Reviews dictatorship but also uses personal history to ex‐ lished till ten years later, the narrator is the sub‐ pose places such as war memorials which have ject of secret police surveillance and incursions been repressed in public memory. A marginal fg‐ into her privacy. Here Wolf refects the reprisals ure on the GDR literary scene, the author herself she sufered for opposing the exclusion of Wolf lived in the village of Grossglienicke near Pots‐ Biermann from the GDR in 1976. The city is con‐ dam where the wall bordered her own garden. demned as an infernal "non-place" ("nicht Ort") The wall's efect is experienced locally in its detri‐ and a crisis of alienation is only averted by the mental impact on the health of a child and on the consoling thought of a future reader and the depredation of the natural environment through emergence of independent vision in a new gener‐ the construction of supplementary fortifcations. ation of writers. Schütz presents a nonjudgmental and nonideolog‐ This volume is a storehouse of scholarly ical account of life in the GDR, unlike the alle‐ knowledge. The editors, Clarke and Rechtien, who gories of the brutality of the regime, a form which are both lecturers at the University of Bath, de‐ dominated in the 1990s. This lucid and patient serve congratulation for assembling a substantial, reading by Parthier is a sympathetic interpreta‐ ambitious and well-organized collection. A consid‐ tion of an unusual personal perspective on the erable contribution to postwar German literary politics of place. studies, it creates a context for renewed engage‐ Finally, an analysis of three works by Christa ment with place, politics, and contemporary Ger‐ Wolf is particularly rewarding in the attention it man texts. pays to her early stories. Renate Rechtien draws Note out the implications of the private garden setting [1]. Michel Foucault, "Des espaces autres" of "June Afternoon" ("Juninachmittag," 1965). Wolf (Conference paper for the Cercle d'études archi‐ constructs an idyllic scene but a garden is still a tecturales, March 14, 1967), Architecture, Mouve‐ bounded site: the narrator is irritated by the ment, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46-49; reprint‐ planes that fy overhead on the air corridor con‐ ed as "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Dia‐ necting West Germany to West Berlin. It could be critics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 25. paradise or a prison: a synecdoche for the GDR. In reality, the setting was based on the garden of Wolf's own house in the East Berlin suburb of Kleinmachnow. This private location contrasts with the very public and central situation of "Unter den Linden" (1974). Rechtien describes how this story combines reality, fantasy, memory, and dream, as the city's most ideologically con‐ tested boulevard is made the platform for a jour‐ ney into interior depths. The confdent claims of the narrator as fâneuse give way to uneasiness and self-questioning about her capacity for moral evasion and complicit behavior. However, the process of exposure extends beyond the self to the social context and the pressures of conforming to the arbitrary regulations and duplicitous proce‐ dures of a dictatorship. In What Remains (Was Bleibt, 1989), written initially in 1979 but not pub‐
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Citation: Paul O'Hanrahan. Review of Clarke, David; Rechtien, Renate, eds. The Politics of Place in Post- War Germany: Essays in Literary Criticism. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2010.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31418
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