THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, Series Editors All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature Katra A. Byram THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Byram, Katra A., 1975– author. Ethics and the dynamic observer narrator : reckoning with past and present in German litera- ture / Katra A. Byram. pages cm. — (Theory and interpretation of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1276-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9381-2 (cd) 1. German fiction—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Literature and history—Germany. I. Title. PT741.B97 2015 833.009—dc23 2014037182 Cover design by James A. Baumann Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. For Todd, whose story is entwined with mine All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I • Contexts of Dynamic Observer Narrative: Philosophy and Narrative Theory One Modern Identity: Historical, Relational—and Narrative? 21 Two Structural and Historical Tensions in the Dynamic Observer Narrative 43 Part II • Nineteenth-Century Pasts Three On the Right Side of History: Emerging Dynamic Observer Narration in Friedrich Ludwig Textor and Theodor Storm 67 Four War of the Words: Radical Internarration in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stuffcake 98 Part III • Evolving Responses to National Socialism Five Günter Grass’s Litanies of the Past: Performative Language and Vergangenheitsbewältigung 129 Six My Mother, My Self: Language and (Dis)Identification in ostwarP Mother Books 160 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. viii • Contents ASeven Footnote to History: German Trauma and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz 191 Conclusion 221 Bibliography 229 Index 246 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. acknowledgments n writing this book, I have enjoyed support, encouragement, and con- structive criticism from many sources. The policies for junior faculty Icourse and service release in the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures have given me the time I needed to write this book. Many friends and colleagues have read portions of the text at various stages and have provided valuable feed- back. I thank them and look forward to continuing our writing exchanges in the future: Naomi Brenner, Sarah Copland, Jens Klenner, Bernhard and Marie Malkmus, May Mergenthaler, Kristin Rebien, Rob Schechtman, Megan Ward, and Chantelle Warner. Others gave valuable responses to pre- sentations: Silke Horstkotte, Barbara Kosta, Erin McGlothlin, Leo Riegert, Johannes Türk, and James A. van Dyke. My dissertation committee mem- bers, Chana Kronfeld, Elaine Tennant, and Robert Holub, offered comments and advice that guided the first steps of my revisions and expansions. Robert Holub also read parts of the book manuscript and provided strategic advice about presenting the project; I am grateful for his ongoing mentorship. I owe deep thanks to the four readers who reviewed the manuscript for The Ohio State University Press, all of whom read it exceptionally carefully, and with an eye to helping me improve and better communicate my argument: James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Irene Kacandes, and Scott Denham. James Phelan deserves particular recognition and gratitude for the encouragement he has offered since I first approached him about my project several years ix All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. x • Acknowledgments ago, and for his generosity with his time and advice during the revision pro- cess. The two acquisitions editors with whom I have worked at OSU Press, Sandy Crooms and Lindsay Martin, have been extremely responsive and helpful as I have prepared the manuscript for submission. All of these people helped make the book better. A number of other people have made it possible. My parents, Will and Joan Byram, always told me I could go wherever I wanted to go and gave me everything they could to help me get there, from self-confidence to a warm sleeping bag to babysit- ting and dinners cooked after work. I could not have finished the book when I did (and maybe not at all) without the practical advice and daily encour- agement I received from my online and on-site writing groups: Fiona, Sha- ron, TP, TB, MMFS, Lynn, Badia, profmaman, Adriana, Helen, Liza, Sylvia, Sophia, and Sarah, you know who you are. My children, Abram and Helena, have given me a reason to buckle down and write so I can go home and do other things. Finally, my husband, Todd, has challenged me whenever I didn’t make sense or wasn’t being clear; pushed me to trust my instincts and interpretations; shared the demands of the work/life balance; and, while being silly with me, always taken my work seriously. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. introduction How do people sometimes come to be in places where, when they stop to think, they wonder how they got there? —Wilhelm Raabe, Stuffcake: A Tale of Murder and the High Seas How did we become what we are today? —Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood ersonal identity and personal history have been defining preoccupa- P tions—one might even say obsessions—of the modern age. Questions much like those asked by Wilhelm Raabe and Christa Wolf drive both fic- tional and nonfictional accounts, from confessional literature and Enlight- enment autobiography, to the Bildungsroman and artist’s self-portrait, to the memoirs crowding the shelves (or claiming the gigabytes) of today’s book- stores. This book does not presume to explain this fascination or offer an exhaustive account of its exploration in writing, whether fictive or autobi- ographical. Instead, it investigates a peculiarity signaled by the similarity between Raabe’s and Wolf’s questions and the similar forms their answers take. The narrators’ questions reveal a common struggle to understand their present identities in relation to their pasts, to make sense of the events and experiences that have led them to where they stand. The novels that answer these questions share a common form, in which a character narrator relates a story about another character’s life. The shared questions and narrative forms suggest that these two works—separated from each other by nearly a century and straddling the line between the fictional and the factual—share a two-faceted conception of identity. First, identity relies on narrative. This narrative emerges from individuals’ history and experiences, and from their 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 • Introduction attempts to understand and explain who they are in the present by telling a story about the past. Second, identity is relational. The story one tells about the past doesn’t have to be about oneself, at least not centrally. In fact, telling a story about someone else’s past may be an extremely effective way to define who one is and has been—and who one is not.1 In other words, this book argues that the similarities between Raabe’s and Wolf’s novels are not peculiar at all; instead, they reflect fundamental aspects of the way many people have understood themselves for the last two hundred years. In Germany, the French Revolution and its aftermath crystallized the sense, already nascent in Enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity, of the relationship between the individual and a history unfolding its distinct eras through time. Within this new conception of history, the individual often understood himself as occupying a moment of historical flux and changing over time. This discovery of the “historicity of personal identity” informed a variety of the socially critical novel [Zeitroman] that combined the socially critical aspects of the genre with the focus on individual development char- acteristic of novels within the Bildungsroman tradition.2 Twentieth-century modernity, and then again postmodernity, have offered competing models of understanding identity and its relationship to history: in both philosophi- cal and narrative accounts, disjunction has often displaced development. Yet I argue that narratives in which one person tells a story about another’s past represent a recurring effort to understand the self in terms of its relationship to its contemporaries and to its own past. In associating this narrative form with these challenges of modern identity, this book answers Ansgar Nün- ning’s call to explore “the rich and messy domain of the history of narra- tive forms and the ways they are related to cultural history and the history of mentalities.”3 Modern lives and experiences are not continuous; they are punctuated by the myriad social, political, economic, and personal upheavals that separate what was from what is. The texts this book examines portray modern identity as being shaped by the need to negotiate these shifts and 1. The relationship between identity, self-narrative, and narrative about others has been discussed in two waves of autobiography studies.