Asian Fusion (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) 9781787073555, 9781787073562, 9781787073579, 9781787073586, 1787073556

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Asian Fusion New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde CAROLINE RUPPRECHT

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY ANd LITERARY IMAGINATION “Asian Fusion is a remarkably original book that delineates an exciting new field: AsianGerman cultural studies. Using an innovative call-and-response model, Rupprecht records the responses of contemporary Asian-German writers to the ‘calls’ made by a preceding generation of German artists and writers (Joseph Beuys, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald) toward Asia. A compelling and authoritative work!” — John Zilcosky, author of Kafka’s Travels and Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis and the End of Alterity “In Asian Fusion, Caroline Rupprecht ingeniously pairs three postwar German authors who engaged with Asia with three award-winning Asian-German writers, constructing compelling intergenerational dialogues between Sebald and Tawada, Weiss and Pham, and Beuys and Kim. Taking the Shoah as a point of departure and a point of reference, the book shoulders the intellectual as well as ethical responsibilities of addressing racism in Germany. A great read and a major contribution to Asian-German Studies!” — Qinna Shen, Chair and Associate Professor of German, Bryn Mawr College This book contributes to a historically evolving conversation about immigration as a facet of globalization in the European context. Focusing on literary and artistic works from the post– World War II era, the author uses a “call-and-response” structure – as in African-American slave songs, Indian kirtans, and Jewish liturgy – to create a series of dialogues between Asian-German authors, including Yoko Tawada, Pham Thi Hoài, and Anna Kim, and an earlier generation of German-speaking authors and artists whose works engaged with “Asia,” including W. G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, and Joseph Beuys. Considering the recent successes of the New Right, which have brought about a regression to Nazi anti-Semitic discourses grounded in the equation between Jews and “Orientals,” the author advocates a need for solidarity between Germans and Asian-Germans. Using “fusion” as a metaphor, she revises the critical paradigms of Orientalism and postcolonial studies to show how, in the aftermath of the twelve-year Nazi dictatorship, Germany has successfully transformed itself into a country of immigration – in part due to the new and pioneering Asian-German voices that have reshaped the German-speaking cultural landscape and that are now, for the first time, featured as coming together in this book.

Caroline Rupprecht is Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (2013) and Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (2006) and the translator, with an introduction, of Unica Zürn’s 1969 novella Dark Spring (2000).

www.peterlang.com

Caroline Rupprecht • Asian Fusion

Asian Fusion

Asian Fusion New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde CAROLINE RUPPRECHT

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 32 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Asian Fusion New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde Caroline Rupprecht

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rupprecht, Caroline, author. Title: Asian fusion : new encounters in the Asian-German avant-garde / Caroline Rupprecht. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019059868 (print) | LCCN 2019059869 (ebook) | ISBN 9781787073555 (paperback) | ISBN 9781787073562 (ebook) | ISBN 9781787073579 (epub) | ISBN 9781787073586 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: German literature--20th century--History and criticism. | German literature--21st century--History and criticism. | German literature--Asian authors--History and criticism. | Immigrants’ writings, German--History and criticism. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. | Alienation (Philosophy) in literature. | Intercultural communication in literature. | Other (Philosophy) in literature. Classification: LCC PT405 .R853 2020 (print) | LCC PT405 (ebook) | DDC 830.9/95--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059868 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059869 Cover image: Photo by Jiaxuan Zhang. Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-1-78707-355-5 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-356-2 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-357-9 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-358-6 (mobi) DOI: 10.3726/b16187 © Peter Lang AG 2020 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Caroline Rupprecht has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

For Richard, and for Fuxin

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction Call-and-Response 1 Part I  Parallels 31 hapter 1 C Silkworms and Concentration Camps: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz 33 hapter 2 C Writing Emptiness: Yoko Tawada’s The Bath, Das nackte Auge and “Flucht des Monds”

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Part II  Convergences 79 hapter 3 C From Auschwitz to Vietnam: Peter Weiss’s Viet Nam Diskurs and Notizen zum kulturellen Leben der Demokratischen Republik Viet Nam 81 hapter 4 C Translating Silences: Pham Thi Hoài’s Die Kristallbotin and Sonntagsmenü 113

viii Contents

Part III  Discordances 147 hapter 5 C Shamanic Performances: Joseph Beuys’s Der Eurasier, Eurasia Siberian Symphony, and Auschwitz Demonstration 149 hapter 6 C Shamanic Spaces: Anna Kim’s Anatomie einer Nacht and Die grosse Heimkehr 183 Epilogue “Asian Fusion”

225

Works Cited

229

Index 247

Illustrations

Figure 1. “Bodies at Bergen-Belsen.” Photo by George Rodger (1945), The LIFE Picture Collection. Reprinted in W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. © Getty Images.

36

Figure 2. World Premiere of Peter Weiss’s Discourse on Vietnam at the Städtische Bühnen, Frankfurt am Main, March 20, 1968, directed by Harry Buckwitz. Photo by Günter Englert. © Mathilde Englert, Frankfurt am Main.

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Figure 3. Photo of Joseph Beuys in Luftwaffe Uniform. Reprinted in Hans-Peter Riegel, Beuys: Die Biographie (2013). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Figure 4. Joseph Beuys’s sculpture Der Eurasier (1958). Photo by Wolfgang Fuhrmannek. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

165

Acknowledgments

A version of Chapter  1 is published as “Architecture and Desire in W.  G. Sebald’s Holocaust Novel Austerlitz,” Le Comparatisme comme approche critique / Comparative Literature as Critical Approach 3, edited by Anne Tomiche (Paris:  Classiques Garnier, 2017), 135–44. A  version of Chapter 2 is published as “Haunted Spaces: History and Architecture in Yoko Tawada,” South Central Review 33/3 (Fall 2016), 111–26. And a version of Chapter 4 is published as “Übersetzung als Begegnung: Pham Thi Hoàis ‘Fünf Tage,’ ” Publikationen der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG): Akten des XIII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Shanghai 2015 7, edited by Jianhua Zhu, Jin Zhao and Michael Szurawitzki (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 188–93. My thanks go to Jörn Etzold and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for inviting me to the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft in Giessen, Germany; Gary Wilder, Susan Buck-Morss, and David Joselit from the Committee for Globalization and Social Change for the Mellon Fellowship; Bettina Brandt, Joanne Myang Cho, Doug McGetchin, Neil Pages, Daniel Purdy, Lee Roberts, Qinna Shen, Christian Spang, Veronika Tuckerova, Chunjie Zhang and all other panelists and seminar participants at the German Studies Association and American Comparative Literature Association conferences for feedback along the way; Melanie Locay of the New York Public Library for the opportunity to conduct research at the Wertheim Study; Carola Hilmes at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main for her ongoing advice; and the author Thomas Lang in Munich for his creative writing suggestions. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues and students at Queens College and the Graduate Center, including my research assistants Meng Zhou and Tyler Bray; my copy editor Edward Batchelder; and my more-than-patient editor, Laurel Plapp. I thank my cousin, Phil Rupprecht, for his musicological advice; my late uncle-in-law, Earl Shuman, for the conversations about songwriting; and my friend Hilary Beattie, for her

xii Acknowledgments

expertise on China. Last but not least, I am grateful to my late father, Georg Friedrich Rupprecht, for inspiring me with his unfinished dissertation in Byzantine and Islamic Studies; and to my Chinese-German-American son, Noah Fuxin Wilson-Rupprecht, who with his amazing strength, integrity, and keen intelligence has been my guiding light throughout this process. My deepest gratitude goes to my wonderful husband, Richard Wolin, who, with his unconditional love, unfailing sense of humor, and profound intellectual insight, gave me the support and confidence to bring this project to fruition.

introduction

Call-and-Response

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland — Paul Celan, “Todesfuge” (1948) a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany — Paul Celan, “Death Fugue,” trans. Michael Hamburger

My title, Asian Fusion, is polemical: it refers to the culinary practice of creating new dishes by combining ingredients from different cuisines. I am aware of the pitfalls of using a culinary term to frame contemporary cultural issues, let alone one that is out of fashion. At least according to New  York Times food writer Ligaya Mishan, “[a]‌s the thinking on diversity in America has evolved from the metaphor of a melting pot to a mosaic, the concept of fusion has become archaic, replaced by a more organic understanding of how food changes when people immigrate.” However, when applied to the contemporary European scene, in terms of the topic of immigration – as it is my underlying purpose for this book – “fusion” continues to be an apt metaphor because it suggests a powerful fantasy of establishing connections through circulating energies, creating new communities by crossing linguistic and geographical borders, and undoing cultural boundaries that have traditionally kept people apart. And, as a former avant-garde concept, the historicity of a concept from a

2

Introduction

bygone era serves as a reminder for a progressivism that initiated, after all, where things stand now. Suffice it to say that Germany, the country on which I focus here, continues to be more than a metaphorical ocean away from the “organic” image of a “mosaic” that food writer Mishan so optimistically invokes (let alone that an “organic mosaic” sounds like a contradiction in terms). When it comes to contemporary Germany, where the specter of anti-Semitism continues to hover over the land – as evident, most recently, from the attempted attack on an unprotected synagogue in Halle, in which a whole congregation would have been assassinated during their Yom Kippur prayers had they not locked the door1 – fantasizing about a more naïvely benign “fusion” of cultural differences still seems like a step in the right direction. “Fusion” as an established practice usually evokes happy thoughts, yet when it comes to “fusion” between Germany and its immigrants, this way of thinking remains utopian. Instead, the playful culinary practices of mixing and combining distort the de facto reality of a migration flow marred by interruptions, hostilities and divisiveness. Most troublingly, Germans seem prone to defining their own identity vis-à-vis racialized Others, a problem that dates back at least to the time of Hitler’s infamous 1935 Nuremberg race laws that excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or related blood.” Anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.2

The Nuremberg laws forced Germans to classify themselves as Jewish or Aryan. It was permitted to marry someone from one’s own group but

1 This attack, which took place on October 9, 2019, is not an isolated event. It confirms that the growing new Jewish community in Germany is not immune to the resurgence of an anti-Semitism that many Germans believe to have been left in the past. 2 “The Nuremberg Race Laws,” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Washington, DC:  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Call-and-Response

3

Mischlinge [half-breeds] could no longer intermarry. Their only option was to falsify their mandatory ancestry record (Ahnenbuch), to qualify for the Aryan certification (Ariernachweis) that would allow them to obtain a marriage license. During that time, Jews were also associated with Asians, as has been noted, for instance, by historian Johann Chapoutot in quoting the following statement by the SS Department of Racial Expertise: “The Jew is a bastard […] of the Oriental” (73). Unsurprisingly, today Asian-Germans feel like outsiders in their own society – which is why “Asian fusion,” with its positive connotations of “mixing,” should be seen as an attempt to reimagine this situation. To be sure, métissage, miscegenation and mixing are terms that have had ugly histories in other places; after slavery was abolished, AfricanAmericans were lynched by white Americans to uphold segregation.3 After decolonization, Arabs in France were ghettoized, and Vietnamese women stereotyped as exotic trophies.4 In that sense, it is not surprising that, even after the 1963–5 Auschwitz trials had led to a public condemnation of antiSemitism, children of African-American GIs and German Fräuleins were still called Mischlinge in post–World War II Germany.5 A holdover from the Nazi rhetoric of Aryan superiority, the pejorative use of this term epitomizes the opposition to fusion.6 Germans have consistently viewed themselves in contrast to a variegated mass of “impure” others, even after their nation became a democracy

3 See the case of Emmett Till, a boy tortured and murdered for speaking to a white woman. The literature on the African-American experience is vast. See, for example, Frederick Douglass, The Life of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, and Malcom X, The Diary of Malcolm X. 4 See, for example, Azouz Begag, Le Gone du Chaâba and Laurent Cantet’s film Entre les murs about North Africans in France, as well as Kim Lefebvre, Métisse Blanche, and Linda Lê, Les Trois Parques, about French-Vietnamese women. 5 On German–American interracial relationships, see Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler. 6 See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, regarding use of the term Mischling. Under the Nuremberg laws, “pure” Germans were permitted marriage, as were “pure” Jews, whereas those deemed to be “mixed” were denied this right because their offspring could not be grouped along these binary categories.

4

Introduction

and a land of immigration. Following World War II, Muslims were taunted as Kanaken7 and Asians were condescendingly called Schlitzaugen [slit eyes], suggesting that the rhetoric of hate has never disappeared from German vocabulary. In a country where the acute fear of racial mixing culminated in the Shoah, this refusal to combine or “fuse” thus demands an approach that shows how, in fact, Germans and Asians are connected rather than separate. Contemporary Germany remains divided between “Germans” and Germans “with migration background” (mit Migrationshintergrund): secondand third-generation immigrants are still perceived as outsiders. AsianGermans, in particular, are seen as different and exotic: although considered a “model minority,” as in the United States, they lack the kind of communities – Chinatowns and Koreatowns – that would offer a coherent sense of identity and belonging.8 Instead, Asian-Germans remain isolated, with their literary and artistic voices underappreciated by a German public that continues to see itself in homogeneous terms. An example of this anxiety in the presence of people who are “different” is the shocking success of Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 bestseller, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen, which argued that Germans are in danger of becoming a racial minority in their own land, at risk of “extinction” due to the increasing presence of new immigrants.9 Rather than appreciating the overall potential of immigrants to make positive contributions to society, and recognizing the realities of

7 Kanake was a name German seafarers gave to Polynesians, which then came to designate anyone who looked foreign in Germany. Turkish-Germans have appropriated this pejorative term – see Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak. 8 See Sylvia van Ziegert’s comparison between Chinese people who live in Germany vis-à-vis those who live in the United States. 9 Regarding the debate caused by Sarrazin’s book, see for example the Spiegel Online article “The Man Who Divided Germany: Why Sarrazin’s Integration Demagoguery Has Many Followers” and Monika Maron and Nekla Kelek, “Endlich wurde gesagt, was ohnehin gedacht wurde.” For perspectives from France on the Sarrazin debate, see for example Frédéric Lemaître, “Allemagne: un pamphlet suscite un débat sur l’islam”; and Marion van Renterghem “L’Allemagne brise à son tour le tabou du débat sur l’islam.”

Call-and-Response

5

global migration flow, this kind of hysterical fear-mongering regresses to the racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric familiar from National Socialist rhetoric. Disturbingly, in view of the recent success of the German New Right, as manifest by the electoral breakthrough of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party after the influx of new refugees from the war in Syria, Germans seem less invested than ever in the possibility of successful integration.10 Instead, there is, once again, open discussion of remedial “ethnic cleansing.” As Samuel Salzborn has observed, contemporary Germany has become “a highly polarized society – one side very open to the world, supporting refugees and fighting racism, and the other increasingly loud in its racist sentiments and rejection of immigration” (57). Hence my aim for this book is two-fold: I want to highlight the significant artistic production of new Asian-Germans and at the same time draw attention to the fact that there are, already, established postwar German authors and artists, especially in the avant-garde, who have constructively engaged with “Asia” in the more immediate wake of the Shoah. I want to explore this connectedness between these younger Asian-Germans and the earlier generation of postwar Germans whose work can be called pioneering. After all, even though many older Germans still subscribe to Naziera stereotypes about Asians as “inscrutable Orientals,” other Germans, including the authors I selected for this book, have looked towards Asia and the East as a source of inspiration – or, as I maintain, have understood that the binary opposition between German “self ”/Asian “Other,” was never real in the first place. Attempts at “fusion” between Asia and Germany began prior to the onset of multiculturalism and global immigration flow of the 1990s. In the wake of the Shoah, during the Cold War, there were already attempts by cultural practitioners to open up perspectives beyond Germany, to challenge the provincial, claustrophobic atmosphere that characterized

10 A distinction should be made between “integration” as successful participation in society without having to give up one’s own ethnic and cultural identity and “assimilation,” which suggests that one should become “the same,” that is, erasing one’s former identity.

6

Introduction

post–World War II German culture under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and that continued well into the 1960s. My overarching purpose is to show how a historically evolving conversation about immigration constitutes a facet of globalization that is relevant in the European context, as it has taken expression in literary and artistic works from the post–World War II era until today. In order to add this historical dimension to recent immigrant cultural production, the structure of this book takes its cues from the musical practice of “calland-response.” I compare and contrast the works of a new generation of innovative Asian-German authors – Yoko Tawada (born in Japan in 1960), Pham Thi Hoài (born in Vietnam in 1960) and Anna Kim (born in Korea in 1977) – to those of an earlier generation of German authors and artists who turned to East Asia: W. G. Sebald (1944–2001), who featured China in Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings of Saturn]; Peter Weiss (1916–82), who wrote the anti–Vietnam War play Viet Nam Diskurs [Discourse on Vietnam]; and Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who attempted to link Europe with Asia in “shamanistic” performances like Eurasia, 34th Section of the Siberian Symphony. I view the more recent works as a “response” to the “call” made by an earlier generation who, although their familiarity with Asian language and culture was minimal, opened up international perspectives as they sought a reckoning with their own German history of the Shoah and World War II. Thereby, they “called” for a “response” to the question of German history as it has been shaped by the afterlife of National Socialist ideology and genocide, a legacy that has affected recent immigrants. Their precedent paved the way for a “response” by those who continue to experience racism and xenophobia today. Call-and-response has been used in African-American slave songs, Indian kirtans and Jewish liturgical services, and Tsitsi Ella Jaji has defined it as a “give and take, the collaboration among ensemble members that wins over the audience and allows them to make the connection” (176). This practice of call-and-response – which I refer to metaphorically as a way of making German and Asian-German authors and artists “speak to one another” – is fundamentally dialogical. Compared to traditional Western (Socratic) forms of dialogue, which are based on opposing sides working towards an understanding, call-and-response takes common ground as its

Call-and-Response

7

point of departure. It assumes that solidarity can exist between different members of the same group – and thus commends itself as a way of depicting rapprochement, interaction and exchange. Jaji further defines it in terms of solidarity within a shared auditory space: In audio engineering, a stereophonic system creates the illusion of being surrounded by a three-dimensional shell of sound […]. “Stereo” in these technologies refers to tools for experiencing the phenomenon of solidity. And stereo as a metaphor indicates a means of experiencing solidarity, the choice to work en bloc. (12)

In conjunction with my culinary metaphor of “Asian fusion,” where seemingly disparate flavors and voices complement one another in ways that create new connections, this choice to communicate by listening and responding to one another within a shared space becomes a way of combatting racism and exclusionary discourses that insist on segregation and separateness. Just to add some further background to what has motivated this book: Germany and its immigrants have been in a contentious relationship since the 1950s, when large groups of so-called guest workers (Gastarbeiter) were recruited from Mediterranean countries such as Turkey, with the intent of sending them back after they had performed their tasks. Acting as if these laborers did not need to settle within their new homes, Germans continued to treat even second- and third-generation German-born immigrants as foreigners (Ausländer).11 For a nation that once constructed Otherness by seeking to eliminate it – perpetrating the genocide of the Shoah, which encompassed the organized deportation and murder of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and anyone designated as ethnically different from socalled Aryan Germans – this became a disturbing reminder of the nation’s fascist past. Today, Germany is situated at a crossroads of a unified Europe but the specter of the Nazi blood laws, the jus sanguinis of “ethnic citizenship,” continues to hover over the country. Migration flow provokes hostility: until 11 Also see Fatima El-Tayeb on Germany’s reluctance to discuss race because of the term’s Nazi overtones, and its reference instead to immigrants as “foreigners” (or “aliens”) – as if they were outsiders in the community.

8

Introduction

2000, when citizenship laws were finally updated, even second- and thirdgeneration immigrants, who spoke fluent German and had spent their whole lives in Germany, were not automatically considered citizens but had to go through a lengthy application process to acquire citizenship. Meanwhile, ethnic Germans from neighboring countries such as the Sudetenland, socalled Volksdeutsche – who had never been to Germany and could not speak the language – were still automatically granted German citizenship based on the old Nazi “blood laws” that granted citizenship based on ethnicity and race. And, despite the fact that these antiquated laws were finally updated in 2000, racism and anti-Semitism are once again on the rise. It is for those very reasons that I find notions of solidarity and community to be crucial when it comes to the relationship between Germany and its immigrants. Presumably, positive relationships and friendships manifest themselves within these exchanges of call-and-response – even if, as will also become clear over the course of this book, one should not be so naïve as to assume that Kritik is not part of the picture.12 I focus on the relationship between Germans and East Asian Germans (from Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) rather than immigrants from the Mediterranean and the Middle East (e.g. Turkey) not only because the former topic is still underresearched, but because the representation of Asians in Germany can be traced back directly to Nazi anti-Semitic stereotypes. According to Jeffrey Librett, East Asians were constructed by the Nazis as Semitic in opposition to South Asians (certain castes of whom were typed as Aryan): “By the early twentieth century, the increasingly racist opposition between the Indian and Jewish (or Aryan and Semitic) poles of the Orient had become a concrete danger for European Jewry […] the later nineteenth-century Aryanists vehemently opposed Aryans 12 As Jürgen Habermas notes in a 1981 interview in Ästhetik und Kommunikation: “Being friendly doesn’t exclude conflict, but rather it’s a humane way of being able to survive conflicts” (my translation). Conversely, as Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing remarked during the violent times of the French Revolution, when times are finster [dark], Freundschaft [friendship] is most important. Lessing was the lone supporter of Moses Mendelsohn, a Jewish philosopher ostracized from German intellectual life. Also see Hannah Arendt, Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten: Gedanken zu Lessing.

Call-and-Response

9

to Semites” (213). The Nazis also lumped together various groups: as John Zilcosky shows, based on Carl Heinrich Stratz’s 1903 anthropological treatise Was sind Juden?, their anti-Semitism was based on images “of Jews as black – and sometimes as mulatto, ‘Oriental’, or even American Indian [in] popular and literary depictions.” Zilcosky refers to Stratz’s photographs as depicting “ ‘exotic’ […] looking Jews alongside ‘Jewish’-seeming Africans (Berbers), Turks and South American Indians” (95). Although German public discourse now separates between Jews – who are associated with the Shoah – and Asians, it continues to conflate Asian-Germans with Turkish-Germans and Afro-Germans in that all are perceived as, indiscriminately, “foreign.” Still, the specific historical associations between “Orientals” and Jews have been documented by, for instance, Achim Rohde, who states that the latter “for centuries […] have been ascribed an oriental, Asian character” (19). Rohde associates this with a form of gendered representation, where the depiction of Jews as orientals is a well-established trope with a long history in the German context. The same holds true for the image of physical and sexual deviance associated with Jews and Judaism. Against this background, modern German anti-Semitism can be characterized as an attempt to de-orientalize and masculinize the evolving German nation. (31)

Against these recent findings, it becomes relevant to return to this specific historical link between Jews and “Orientals.” The traces of the Nazis’ imaginary conflation between these two specific groups has been glossed over by the tendency to lump together all minorities in Germany, but East Asians are particularly prone to suffer from the old specter of antiSemitism that has begun to rear its ugly head. And, because East Asians are still seen as “foreigners” in general, they lack a specific historical narrative that could be contested within a German cultural and historical context associated with the Nazi period. East Asians do not currently have a discursive framework with which to combat historically racist attitudes that are, unfortunately, still directed against them. This is why it is important to present their works not just in isolation, but also in conjunction with other German texts that specifically address existing historical narratives about race and anti-Semitism.

10

Introduction

Granted, this specifically German historical narrative, of stereotyping the “Oriental” as the same as the “Semitic,” may seem counterintuitive to scholars outside Germany: as Frank Scherer explains, “in America the label ‘Oriental’ is commonly used for people originating in the ‘Far East,’ whereas near and Middle Eastern populations are broadly identified with ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’. […] specific Eurocentric imaginings that weave Jewishness and the Orient into one complex fabric are not reflected” (xix). However, this explicitly German link between East Asians and “Jewishness” is based on fantasies about Asia that evoke race-based ideologies established during the Third Reich and have been, primarily, applied to Jewish-Germans – it, therefore, becomes crucial to understanding how Germans have approached Asian-Germans now and in the past. If one wants to draw a Schlussstrich, to end racism and anti-Semitism in Germany once and for all, these preexisting links need to be incorporated in current discussions. To return to my dual aim: I want to draw attention to the connections between Germans and East Asians to deflect and offset previously constructed notions of Otherness, and also to feature new Asian-German voices that have already contributed to permanently altering the Germanspeaking literary landscape as a way of confirming, definitively, that these new voices do, indeed, “belong.” I furthermore want to introduce the idea that East Asia has functioned as a privileged site for German authors to negotiate their German Vergangenheitsbewältigung [working through the past] as it pertains to the Shoah and World War II, and that East Asians are, unfortunately, directly linked to the legacy of anti-Semitic stereotypes stemming from Nazi ideology.13 Nonetheless, for the German authors included here, East Asia has functioned, paradoxically, both as a place where “difference” could be imagined as a way of breaking out of the confines of Germany and also, simultaneously, as a way of returning to German anti-Semitism and Orientalism. Perhaps this is why, as James Hodkinson and John Walker have noted, the “German tradition of reflection about the oriental world […] was a self-confessed blind spot for [Edward] Said” (2) the author of Orientalism 13 Another group that suffers from being ostracized and has even less of a sense of community are Afro-Germans. The case of Afro-German poet May Ayim, who committed suicide because she felt so isolated, speaks volumes.

Call-and-Response

11

(1978), whose concept by the same title continues to be widely applied outside the German context. While some German Studies scholars, such as Susanne Zantop, Todd Kontje and Suzanne Marchand, have examined nineteenth-century German colonialism with reference to Orientalism, Said’s influential theoretical recognition that Westerners mainly focus on themselves when claiming to look at the “Orient” does not work well within the historical framework of twentieth-century Germany, where Asian-Germans have become an integral part of society and culture. Hence the question of which theoretical paradigm to apply to this project looms large, last but not least because of the prevalence of both Orientalism and postcolonial studies. Let me digress into asking to what extent the latter can be applied to the case of Germany. Clearly, after the socalled “guest worker” treaties were signed with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations, including Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Syria and Algeria, during the 1950s, Germany saw an influx of foreign workers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds that led to structures of oppression akin to colonialism. Although some Germans began to see their society as positively multicultural (multi-kulti) in opposition to its fascist past, in part as a way to level with their sense of guilt, others simply transmitted their hostility against Others from Jews to Muslims. Ironically, as postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha has observed, even “in societies where multiculturalism is encouraged, racism is still rampant” (129). Bhabha levels his critique at Western societies who appear to be “rational” only to cover up their underlying agenda of exploiting those constructed as racially Other. Consequently, postcolonially oriented critics like Christine Meyer refer to German society as structured by “inner colonization,” a term originally coined by Vietnamese-German sociologist Kien Nghi Ha, who adapted it from postcolonial theory. According to Meyer, Nazi historical aggression was transmitted to present-day attitudes among Germans vis-à-vis immigrants, and the German population continues to be hostile to perceived outsiders due to unrealistic expectations of assimilation: During World War II, with the conquest and occupation of extensive territories in Eastern Europe, combined with the systematic deportation of Jews and Sinti and Roma […], Germany developed a particularly radical and perverse variety of colonization. The unilateral worker exchange agreements West Germany implemented with

12

Introduction impoverished Mediterranean countries as early as 1955 constitute the beginnings of a government-regulated process of immigration for which the German population was poorly prepared. […] here one can identify postcolonial structures which – especially in light of Germany’s repressed colonial and National Socialist past – led to unrealistic expectations of assimilation and the emergence of racist enemy images. (12–3, my translation)

While this explains how Hitler’s colonization of neighboring eastern territories led to a racist ideology that continues into the present, Meyer’s assessment is not directly linked to anti-Semitism. She mentions German Assimilationserwartungen [the expectation of assimilation], as if immigrants were in a colonial setting. But what about those Germans who do not want to imagine anyone “other” in their midst – and who have gone so far as to construct “otherness” within their very own group? The contemporary construction of racist imagery (rassistische Feindbilder) Meyer refers to evokes, after all, the deportation and murder of German Jews who had been assimilated for centuries, and could thus not be called “colonized.” In fact, the New Right’s belief that the German nation has been, somehow, infiltrated by outsiders regresses to Nazi rhetoric, and differs from a colonial situation insofar as it suggests that society must free itself from the presence of an unwanted “other” from within. Drawing on primitive fears of having one’s space infringed upon, it is a type of language that must be related to the historical past and present of anti-Semitism in Germany rather than simply mapped onto postcolonial theory. Rather than subduing and incorporating “others” into their empire, as would be the case in colonial structures, Germans have taken pains to “other” people who are already part of their own society. Salzborn points out that the New Right cannily avoids clearly identifiable racist or Nazi rhetoric so as not to alienate voters, and instead uses euphemisms such as “ethnopluralism” to differentiate itself from the “Old Right,” that is, the Nazis. The aim here is to appear inclusive (as Bhabha also observes) and at the same time make a case for segregation. Salzborn outlines how the ideology of the AfD outright propagates a fundamental inequality [to advocate] the strict spatial separation and geopolitical division of people according to ethnic and cultural criteria. This separation by ethnic

Call-and-Response

13

categorization is based on a notion of difference that is both homogenizing and sociobiological in nature, looking at people only in terms of ethnic/cultural identity and not their subjectivity or individuality. They are always just part of a collective (which is unalterable), one that stands apart from and in opposition to other collectives. This also implies a hawkish friend-versus-foe dichotomy. (41)14

The New Right’s call for segregation, therefore, demands closing German borders to future immigrants. Rather than conquering other people and territories, it advocates closure and isolation, emphasizing differences between people, even among those who already live squarely within the confines of the German nation. Lamentably, when it comes to Asian-Germans, the fabrication of ethnic identity is not historically new: according to Jürgen Osterhammel, the construction of an all-inclusive – therefore: exclusive – “Asian” identity had been undertaken throughout Europe for centuries: “Asia,’ understood as an umbrella term […] is a European idea. In the eighteenth century the individual peoples of Asia did not identify themselves as ‘Asians’ ” (20). As an erasure of real existing cultural and linguistic differences, it is a definition that again lumps together everyone (at that time on the outside) so as to reduce real existing differences to a simplistic dichotomy, and in favor of cementing one’s own national identity.15 Along those lines, the concurrent pressure to better integrate or “assimilate” foreigners, as a proposed solution to the problem of racism and xenophobia in Germany, is actually experienced as detrimental by immigrants because it asks them to give up their unique identity and become like “Germans” – and this, of course, becomes impossible when one is, at the same time, “othered.” Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak has described his sense of being an outsider when it comes to historical narratives of World War II and Vergangenheitsbewältigung: “Turkey was spared in 14 For more on the New Right in Germany, see Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right. Also of interest in this regard are differences between colonial and Nazi propaganda as discussed by, among others, Elizabeth Baer, From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich. 15 The identification of a subjective group “self ” pitted against a “massed” group of illdefined invading “others” echoes twentieth-century American discourses around Chinese immigrants, who were represented as a “Yellow Scare.”

14

Introduction

World War II […] What access does someone whose father experienced World War II on the radio, far from the battlefields, have to this event? […] In 1945, my father experienced neither a liberation nor a collapse. He was neither victim nor perpetrator” (58–9). As he explains, it is difficult to come to Germany as an immigrant because one is excluded from a history that is not one’s own, while one at the same time feels the very effects of this history. Or, as Şenocak asks rhetorically: “Does the Nazis’ brutal effort to render Germany ethnically homogeneous have nothing to do with the present resistance to acknowledging, in Germany in 1995, the ethnic diversity that has arisen through migration?” (60). The problem – which I attempt to rectify with this book – is that these visions of successful integration and new “identity” are determined by Germans (or Europeans), not the immigrants themselves. Europe, it appears, does not allow for an American-style affirmation of immigrant identity because there is no positive immigrant narrative in which newcomers might partake. Hence the tricky question emerges as to what extent existing theories, like Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial studies, work sufficiently well for the emerging discipline of Asian-German Studies. What new theoretical approach is needed to break out of this existing mold of, mostly, Anglo-American scholarship, and to address the problem in ways tailored to the German situation? My solution here is to use call-and-response as a theoretical tool, so voices can address one another reciprocally, to amplify and diversify existing messages. This seems suitable to show how different generations are bound to one another within the same space (i.e. Germany). German studies scholars who focus on the period after 1945 have taken their cues from recent conceptual models like Arjun Appadurai’s “ethnoscapes” and Marie-Louise Pratt’s “contact zones.” They have participated in global discussions about the merits of postcolonial theory, which includes the notion of “writing back” (as in The Empire Writes Back), which has influenced my own approach: listening to what the “others” themselves have to say seems more pertinent than what others say about “them.” Hence I focus on the writings of Asian-German immigrants as a form of “writing back” but from within German mainstream culture.16 16 My commitment was originally informed by women’s studies, specifically Elaine Showalter’s “gynocriticism,” where it became important to read and appreciate

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15

However, some theorists, such as Rey Chow, have challenged the postcolonial paradigm altogether: Postcolonial theory and criticism have tended to share the emancipatory spirit of anticolonial political struggles […]. The range of issues that remains central to postcolonial debates, from the racial violence experienced by the wretched of the earth, to the problematics of Orientalism, subaltern representation, and subject formation based on class, gender, ethnic, and religious differences, is consistently about resistance. Albeit not always stated, then, the cultural logic at work in postcolonial thought in general is that of repression, understood both in the political and psychoanalytic sense. (160, my emphasis)

This is interesting because it seems to assume that it is possible to move beyond the dichotomies of power politics:  instead of what Chow perceives as a simplistic conceptual model of surface/depth, based on victims vs. perpetrators, she uses the metaphor of “entanglement” to describe minute interstices of cultural interactions. Chow has borrowed this term from quantum physics, where it “designates mysterious connections between particles, which are said to be entangled due to simultaneous reactions they produce, reactions that are not the result of proximity (that is, of particles drawing close to one another).” By using entanglement to depict affinities between Asia and the West, Chow argues against the postcolonial discourses she perceives as polarizing. However, she runs the risk of euphemizing real existing oppression by claiming that it is merely a “logic” of “thought.” To my mind, Chow’s entanglement lacks a political dimension, and when it comes to Asian-German writers, the concept of speaking in “one’s own voice,” from a position of “resistance,” is not captured by the neutral-sounding concept of “entanglement” – nor does it entail the choice to speak in solidarity. Surely, it is not a matter of coming up with ever new theories – but the complexity of a specific historical situation, such as the one I have described for Germany, does not permit one to simply transfer already existing critical paradigms. Within this German context, it is no longer simply a matter of pursuing narratives such as claiming a “continuity” between fascism and democracy, which had been proposed by some of the more radical “ ‘68ers” or of female authors.

16

Introduction

diagnosing a postwar pathology couched in Freudian psychoanalytic terms as a “return of the repressed,” which was a thesis advanced in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s then-popular book, The Inability to Mourn (1967). Such master narratives were already displaced around the turn of the millennium, when Germans suddenly reversed their self-image as perpetrators by declaring their “victimization” in World War II,17 and then, belatedly, by the nation’s atoning for its past crimes by welcoming more refugees than any other European nation (as recently, under Chancellor Angela Merkel). These debates are unique to Germany and raise the question of how one would strike a balance between its history and broader context of international and “world” history.18 Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting, The Angel of History is a reminder of how any history has to be recognized as unique because one cannot look forward without looking back. However, all national histories are now altered by the event of global migration flow. Perhaps an elaboration of Benjamin’s paradigm is in the African Akan folklore image of Sankofa, “a mythical bird that flies forward with its head turned backward [and] has become a powerful symbol for diasporans conceptualizing a relation to Africa” ( Jaji, 179). Here, looking “back” is not just temporally defined but also spatially, in terms of a “diaspora” that writes history from a perspective outside the nation. At stake is the question of how to look back at German history while, at the same time, looking forward to Germany as a country of immigration. Just how does one separate Germany’s National Socialist past from its post–World War II and contemporary present? It is a question that hovers as a leitmotif throughout this book. Given the centrality of the Shoah in twentieth-century German history, the urgency to write this book was in part fueled by recent scholarly observations about how East Asians, in the German cultural imagination, were linked to Jews, and that one cannot, therefore, cordon off post-1945 hostilities against “foreigners” – from the arson of dwellings housing Vietnamese workers in the former GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall to claims by the Alternative für Deutschland party that Germany must be 17 See Lothar Kettenacker, Ein Volk von Opfern? as well as Helmut Schmitz, A Nation of Victims. 18 See Thomas Beebee, ed., German Literature as World Literature.

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protected from a perceived invasion of “aliens.” All of these take place in the wake of crimes against humanity committed under the twelve-year Nazi dictatorship, some of whose ideological assumptions have begun to resurface with the proliferation of the New Right.19 The polemics of my study are, therefore, in its title of Asian Fusion as a metaphor for connecting what has appeared separate, and in the musical structure of call-and response as a conciliatory form of communication that differs from Western notions of Kritik as dialectic. For example, Fredric Jameson has shown that dialectics can be rethought as a simultaneous form of opposing thought that would be akin to Western paradox in an East Asian context, drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s reading of ancient Chinese philosopher, Mo Tzu. Instead of thinking about thesis-antithesis-synthesis as a dialectical sequence, paradox already contains opposing viewpoints – and is simply “extended” with the flow of time. Chinese philosophy, for example, the Dao, may be characterized as diametrically opposed to Western ways of thinking in that it aims to find common ground.20 To be clear, the current situation of East Asians in Germany is vastly different from that of German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Present-day Germany is a democracy and although racism and anti-Semitism continue to exist in the attitudes of many Germans, it does not compare to the mass-murder of millions of Jews under the dictatorship of National Socialism. Still, as I demonstrate, the German authors discussed here use Auschwitz and the Shoah as an over-arching paradigm to which they refer in conjunction with Asian imagery, which begs the question to what extent they might echo representations that conflate Asia with the “Semitic” in Nazi representations that once stereotyped German Jews. To the extent the Asian-Germans are also stereotyped in today’s world, further research on these possible continuities needs to be pursued and this book is an attempt to contribute to this newly emerging field of inquiry.

19 For a more broadly European analysis that focuses on specific figures that make up the New Right, see Claus Leggewie, Anti-Europäer: Breivik, Dugin, al-Suri & Co. 20 The concept of creating harmony through finding common ground can of course also be used to quench Kritik, so the critical task is to look at these different approaches together, not as mutually exclusively.

18

Introduction

My initial idea for this book had been to write a radio play between speakers from different backgrounds, to place them on equal footing within the same auditory space. The authors and artists under discussion would talk to one another and come to a mutual understanding, a “happy ending.” However, this plan was thwarted by the realization that deep-seated misunderstandings would have to be addressed in more critically creative ways. Eventually, using the metaphor of fusion, along with a structure of call-andresponse, became a way of allowing space for the exchange between differently positioned authors and artists. The reader should think of the ensuing chapters as a sequence of intergenerational exchanges: W. G. Sebald – Yoko Tawada, Peter Weiss – Pham Thi Hoài, Joseph Beuys – Anna Kim. Part I is called “Parallels” to trace affinities; Part II “Convergences” to suggest commonalities; and Part III “Discordances” to draw attention to the more polarizing discourses that question the idealistic notion of a “happy ending.” The overarching narrative of this book implies solidarity between a speaker who makes the “call” and another who “responds,” by a group (chorus) who reiterates and amplifies the phrase. Call-and-response does not presuppose a hierarchy between speakers in that there is an individual responded to by a group, but rather offers the possibility of relationship beyond power struggle. Listening skills require repeating, if only in one’s mind, what the other has said, so as to be sure the message has arrived. Thus a group response becomes both a repetition and an altered version that occurs through amplification, adding another layer to each phrase. Compared to a dialogue, in which Speaker A and Speaker B take turns inhabiting the power position throughout, amplification is a process that levels the “power” of the speaker. Rather than just an echo (or repetition), the temporal gap between the phrase initiated by the leader and the subsequent “response” of the chorus renders them both equally powerful to affirm solidarity. Let me briefly outline the philosophical approaches that have informed my thinking, by Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Lévinas and François Jullien. In Bakhtin’s model, dialogue is part of the socius, essentially a group event. To “respond” is like a political demonstration, or an uprising, which is the context in which all call and response has emerged: for example, chanting labor rhythms based on African traditions (as on plantations in the South)

Call-and-Response

19

created solidarity for resistance (see for example Harriet Tubman’s songs for the Underground Railroad, and songs chanted during the civil rights movement).21 Responding to the call derives its power from not just being limited to the individual subject because each person speaks with a voice that is submerged within the group: the response becomes varied, people drop in and out of the chorus, delay responding, etc. For Bakhtin (see “The Problem of Speech Genres”) all language is embedded in the socius so that, in effect, speakers or authors never operate in a vacuum. He defines linguistic discourse as socially determined: “a speaker’s utterance does not exist in isolation but responds to existing utterances. Any speaker is a respondent to a greater or lesser degree – he is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe.” Further, all utterances solicit responses: “What is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener.” This includes literary language: “Everything we have said here also pertains to written and read speech.” Bakhtin describes individual expression as “an echo of another’s individual expression” so that artistic works do not exist in isolation. Linguistic expression is never self-originating, but the way in which speakers and listeners modify their responses make their expressions unique. Bakhtin calls this an “echo” where response is modified by virtue of temporal delay. In this way, Bakhtin introduces a historical dimension, where discourses are embedded in historical moments, thus subject to change: Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative work), is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness,” varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and reaccentuate. Thus, the expressiveness of individual words is […] an echo of another’s individual expression. (89)

This echo is not passive: response is a form of “responsibility” where the speaker is willing to listen before shaping his/her own utterance: 21 It should be remembered that Bakhtin’s linguistic theory was his response to the horrors of Stalinism.

20

Introduction All real and integral understanding is actively responsive and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response […]. And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution and so forth […]. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances […] with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another […]. Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances. (69)

“Responding,” in Bakhtin, carries significance as an integral part of dialogue, and it includes the notion that all speakers or writers are part of a community. Lévinas, in turn, refers to human relationships as more basic, apart from any linguistic and sociological categories. He emphasizes the figure of the “other” (autrui). His insistence on this other as independent, yet related by way of a shared humanity, shifts away from conventional epistemological notions of boundaries that define a “self ” because it emphasizes relationality. Lévinas retains the notion that the “other” is unique and has to be respected in his/her difference. In “Peace and Proximity” he writes that “alterity is irreducible to a common genus where […] it would only have relative alterity” insofar as the other is always “inassimilable, irreducible, unique.” He describes “the stranger” as someone who is, by definition, recognized as a fellow human being, even when the stranger has his or her back turned to us. Further, he defines what he calls the “face of the other” as something that can be reached via an appellation or call. This image, of an unknown stranger who invokes a fellow humanity by virtue of being seen and addressed, suggests neither assimilation nor exclusion – Lévinas’s “other” is always different from, and yet at the same time similar to, one’s self. Lévinas explains that to him, “peace […] would be a ‘fraternal’ mode” or a “relative alterity,” where a basic human kinship can be recognized while, at the same time, differences are respected. Like Bakhtin, he explicitly focuses on language as the means by which relationships are established. One might overcome potential hostilities by way of address, by speaking to the other. Interlocution – address – becomes the operative principle enabling a dialogue. In this, he defines “dialogue” as a basic acknowledgment of

Call-and-Response

21

the presence of the other and this is presented in terms of a relationship between two subjects: The other (autrui) is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined. In other words, the comprehension of the other (autrui) is inseparable from this invocation. To comprehend a person is already to speak with him. To posit the existence of the other (autrui) through letting be is already to have accepted this existence, to have taken account of it. “To have accepted”, “to have taken account”, do not come back to comprehension and letting be. Speech delineates an original relation. It is a question of perceiving the function of language not as subordinate to the consciousness that one has of the presence of the other (autrui), his neighborliness or our community with him, but rather as the condition of any conscious grasp. (6)

If “speech delineates an original relation,” dialogues and writings from different languages and cultures “speak to one another” to establish a relationship.22 To cross the gaps that emerge when people try to establish intercultural relationships, contemporary French Sinologist François Jullien suggests that all dialogue opens up what he calls an “in-between” space (a concept drawn from Daoism). It emerges between moments of speaking and responding, adding the element of the unknown: A dia-logue, already known from the ancient Greeks, is all the more fruitful when a spatial gap becomes part of the scenario […] dia also refers to a path through space, where space itself functions as a form of resistance. A dialogue doesn’t just happen immediately, it takes time to develop: a dialogue is a process. Step by step, the two opposing positions – separated by a gap – discover one another, as one reflects itself within the other […] This scenario must play itself out according to a predetermined sequence. In light of this process, logos designates what intelligibility has in common […] passing through spatial gaps, commonality is born, because […] each position renounces its limitations, so that from this in-between now having become active, an understanding in common can emerge. (88–9, my translation)

22 Poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler, in her reading of Lévinas, has elaborated on this: “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and […] a ‘you’ over there […] relationality […] is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated” (22).

22

Introduction

What makes Jullien’s approach compelling is that it comes out of a current sociopolitical context, where Europe may recognize the difference between the West and other cultures: “In the dialogue between cultures, Europe has the opportunity to reflect upon itself from an external vantage point; and to transform its ability to reason, once again, into a construction site.” The disturbing increase of alt-right movements throughout Europe and the United States requires, according to Jullien, a self-evaluation of Western logos. Jullien writes about a shift that takes place in the process of dialogue based on this understanding of crossing a gap or empty space. With this opening, dialogue is no longer a situation in which one side merely tries to convince the other of its own righteousness: Both sides no longer look at the other’s position from the defensive point of view, but rather take on the perspective of looking for new possibilities to be discovered […]. Both positions relax, borders are crossed – and through minimal discrepancies a shift gradually occurs […] as each position gradually opens itself further towards the other, an in-between – the in-between of dialogue (entre-tien) – reveals itself […]. In this in-between, thinking begins to occur in new ways [and] this is why only this dispositive of the dia-logue is effective in and of itself. If that doesn’t happen, all that remains is the violent assimilation of one by the other […] and one continues to be stuck within a power struggle. (90–1, my translation)

Jullien concludes that the in-between that emerges from dialogic interaction is a dimension that permits further dialogue to emerge between cultures. Perhaps this is idealistic, yet it is a reminder of the need to reconceptualize intercultural relationships at this point in time. Assuming that power struggles are part of intercultural relationships, gender also plays a role: it does not seem coincidental that the strongest Asian-German voices – representatives of which I have selected for this book – are also female. Perhaps, integration in Western societies is especially fraught for East Asian women, as shown by Korean-American author and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental novel, Dictée: speaking as a Korean-American woman, she emphasizes the importance of makings one’s voice heard. She uses the figure of “dictation,” which with its overtones of “dictatorship” can be applied to patriarchal society at large (dictée means “taking dictation” – here used in the French grammatical feminine gender), and further to the cultural expectations placed on East

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Asian women in both Asia and the West to be obedient, passive and silent. Cha’s powerful voice serves as a reminder that these stereotypes need to be dismantled – a condition that also applies to the Asian-German authors covered in this book. As I demonstrate, they confound Western ideas of the “compliant” Asian woman that hamper East Asian female self-expression.23 Evidently, there are more female Asian writers of quality in the contemporary European literary marketplace than male Asian writers – according to Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, this is because women favor the medium of writing as more accessible – that is, less expensive – than filmmaking, which she says tends to be dominated by men. Let me conclude this introduction with a brief chapter outline. Part I: “Parallels” is on W. G. Sebald and Yoko Tawada. I show how each author, writing in the aftermath of World War II, addresses history in terms of architecture and space. Sebald’s emphasis is on the question of where, in what form, “history” resides in particular sites such as battlefields or cemeteries, and how man-made structures that house furniture or archival documents shape the way humans define their identities. In Austerlitz, Sebald features an architect who discovers that he was one of the Jewish children rescued by the 1938 Kindertransport to England. This protagonist, seen through the eyes of a German narrator, searches for his memory by traveling from city to city. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator refers to historical events in geographically distant places by way of analogy: he uses the empty cocoons of Chinese silkworms to create an imaginary link between Chinese history and the Shoah. In both books, Sebald furnishes extensive descriptions of built environments and architecture, and of landscapes and the objects that “inhabit” them. I analyze the role of Sebald’s objects as “containers” to explain how they function as repositories for human memory, and to alter the reader’s perception of topography and scale. In these postmodern travel narratives, Sebald expands geography and history from Europe towards Asia.24 23 The opposite of this stereotype would be, unfortunately, the “dragon lady.” For more on Theresa Cha, see Lisa Lowe, “Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictée.” 24 Note that Sebald chose to live in England as an expat, thus wrote from the periphery. Sebald is read primarily in the English-speaking world, even though he wrote in German. He decided to have his books first published in translation and this has stirred debate over which nation he “belongs to” as an author.

24

Introduction

Tawada, in what I construe as an imaginary “response,” parallels Sebald’s effort to reach beyond geographical and political borders. However, she refuses to define herself and others by nationality or ethnicity, creating experimental texts designed to undo any notion of “identity.” Tawada – who has by now become the most prominent Asian-German author – works with the Japanese concept ma (in-between), and her mode of storytelling suspends causal connections. She creates a flux of poetic images that are to remain, according to her own words, undecipherable. She is a secondgeneration practitioner of the Fluxus international art movement (which includes other Japanese artists such as Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama) and, in the context of the European avant-garde, she has been described as a successor to the Surrealists.25 While she refers to existing historical events – for example, the colonization of Southeast Asia, Japanese aggression during World War II, etc. – and current topics such as environmentalism, global warming and animal rights, her writings always first and foremost refer to language as a universe of its own. Her playful experimental texts – written in both her native Japanese and German, her second language – are designed to negate all forms of “identity” or references to a psychological, Western sense of interiority or “self.” Embracing travel as central to her work, like Sebald, she radically thwarts traditional narrative conventions on behalf of a poetic universe that defies social, cultural and linguistic norms. In that sense, she continues where Sebald left off. Part II: “Convergences,” on Peter Weiss and Pham Thi Hoài, focuses on different perspectives on the war in Vietnam. Weiss, who with his 1968 political play Discourse on Vietnam made a “call” for international solidarity, compared Vietnam to Auschwitz. He can be grouped with the German ‘68ers’ effort to create a global political movement as part of the anti–Vietnam War protest movement. Weiss researched Vietnamese history and culture and, as a member of the Russell Tribunal, traveled to Vietnam to meet with North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. However, Weiss’s motivation differs from that of the German ‘68er students who were of a younger generation. Whereas they confronted the guilt of their parents, who supported Hitler and National Socialism, Weiss wrote from 25 See, for example, the essay by Carola Hilmes, “On Yoko Tawada as Surrealist.”

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a perspective of empathy with the victims. Weiss’s father was Jewish and the family had to escape Germany from the Nazis. Weiss’s well-known play, The Investigation, about the 1963–5 Auschwitz trials, belongs to the same cycle of plays as Discourse on Vietnam, all of which are about human rights abuses and genocide across the globe (including Angola, Cuba, and others), based on Dante’s Inferno. This Dante-cycle was meant to depict “hell” in various places and Weiss relates all of them implicitly back to Auschwitz. However, unlike The Investigation and Weiss’s other famous play, Marat/Sade, about the French Revolution, Discourse on Vietnam was not a successful play. In my chapter, I ask what prevented a playwright of Weiss’s stature from writing about the Vietnam War in ways that would speak to his audience. I argue that Weiss’s personal experience as a Jewish German prevented him from depicting Vietnam realistically because the notion of “place” became impossible. Even though Weiss advocated for the Vietnamese people, his life was so affected by anti-Semitism that he could not transform his antifascist political agenda into a play that would raise consciousness to end the war. Unfortunately, Weiss was so plagued by feelings of guilt for having escaped what he called his “rightful place” in Auschwitz (see Meine Ortschaft [My Place]) that no matter how wellintentioned, he was unable to reach beyond his own European history. Chapter 4 on Pham “responds” to Weiss’s “call” for a representation of Vietnam. I introduce Pham, who resides in Berlin, as someone who writes from the perspective of having grown up in North Vietnam (formally, the People’s Republic of Vietnam, or PRV) during what is referred to there as the American War. Her novel Die Kristallbotin, which was awarded the Frankfurt LiBeraturpreis [sic], and her book of short stories, Sonntagsmenü (2012), were published only in German translation. Pham is no longer published in her native language because her works are banned in the PRV – and she herself is no longer allowed to enter the country. Once a well-respected Hanoi author, as well as translator of German authors like Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht, Pham has been censored for her honest depiction of urban conditions during the doi moi [postwar reform] period – including the exploitation of women by the sex trade and the garment industry. I show how Pham’s books address the problem of the traditional expectations placed upon East Asian women to be silent and obedient, and

26

Introduction

she introduces German readers to an Asian feminist perspective on the issue.26 The ways in which this Asian-German author negotiates her “voice” becomes central to my inquiry: Pham’s books contain, I demonstrate, many references to the inability or refusal to express oneself through speech, and they also refer to “waiting” as part of a sense of stasis among Hanoi artists and intellectuals living under what is shown to be a dysfunctional political regime. Pham, like Weiss, is a victim of political persecution, and I identify silence (and being silenced) as a major theme in her work; I also show how this is related to both translation and displacement insofar as her case raises uncomfortable questions about what constitutes a “national” author – no longer published in her “native” land, her work appears only in translation in the West.27 While she lacks a definitive place of “belonging” in the international literary marketplace, her work intimately depicts a Vietnam that Westerners like Weiss could not have seen, offering a nuanced and compelling picture of Vietnamese society and of women’s quotidian lives. She has critiqued Weiss for not understanding the politics of her country, yet ironically, had it not been for Weiss’s pioneering anti–Vietnam War activism, Pham’s own literary production as a Vietnamese-German author might have gone unnoticed. In that sense, these two authors “correspond”: their histories intersect through the links between the ‘68ers’ anti–Vietnam War protests in West Germany and the pro–North Vietnam stance taken by East Germany. Part III: “Discordances” turns to miscommunications and discrepancies between works by Joseph Beuys and Anna Kim. Both work with the concept of shamanism, as I demonstrate, but to diametrically opposite ends. I refer to Beuys and his biographical experience of having grown up in Germany during the Third Reich: Beuys was socialized in the Hitlerjugend 26 Pham discontinued writing fiction for several years, publishing a blog, Talawas, which was eventually also shut down by the Vietnamese government. As per our recent communications, she is now working on a detective novel, “the genre totalitarian regimes in Asia consider most scandalous” (personal correspondence, April 2019). 27 Her books are difficult to obtain: they are either out of print or expensive to ship, having been published in France and Australia but not in the United States.

Call-and-Response

27

(the Nazi Party’s youth organization) and voluntarily joined the Luftwaffe (German air force). After his plane crashed on the Eastern Front in 1944, he returned with a tale of having been rescued by nomadic Tartars in Siberia, claiming they had wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him warm in the snow-covered steppes and then tended to him for a fortnight in a yurt to heal his wounds. Subsequently, Beuys began to use fat and felt as his preferred artistic media throughout most of his oeuvre. My chapter focuses on two of Beuys’s performance pieces and installations from the 1960s about Eurasia (Eurasienstab and Eurasia Siberian Symphony) and on Auschwitz Demonstration, one of his few works that actually refer to the Shoah. Focusing on the relationship between East and West that defines Beuys’s philosophy, I show how these works emphasize his own suffering as a German over that of the Jewish victims.28 A self-styled “shaman” of the art world, Beuys was invested in a mystical vision of the East as “empty,” thereby evoking fantasies of territorial expansion that seem disturbingly akin to Hitler’s Lebensraum doctrine. Based on what is now proven by Hans-Peter Riegel in an extensive three-volume biography not yet translated into English, Beuys’s work was suffused by the Nordic mythologies that informed racist Nazi fantasies about “Aryans.” Thus, while Beuys seems to have benignly rejected Western values in favor of Asian mysticism, his version of Siberian shamanism is, in fact, linked to the same Celtic and Tibetan iconographies used in Nazi “spirituality.” Riegel, in fact, furnishes evidence that Beuys maintained close relationships with former high-ranking Nazis after the war, some of whom sponsored his exhibitions. Still marketed as progressive or leftist by the international art world, Beuys whitewashed these Nazi affiliations by turning himself into a shamanic presence beyond the seemingly restrictive moral categories of good and evil. Beuys seems to have largely ignored his role on the side of the perpetrators during World War II; as Riegel shows, Beuys must have seen the first gassing of Jews in the Wartheland in Poland, where he was stationed before his transfer to Ukraine (the actual site of the plane crash), yet he never referred to witnessing these atrocities. 28 Beuys’s philosophy was based on the writings of Rudolph Steiner. See Wolfgang Zumdick, Death Keeps Me Awake: Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner.

28

Introduction

Whereas Beuys’s artwork on Eurasia uses a form of self-styled Siberian shamanism to draw attention to his own suffering as a German, my last chapter argues that Kim’s writing is informed by Korean shamanism as a way to draw attention to the suffering of others. Born in Korea, Kim moved to Vienna with her family when she was 2 years old because her father was a diplomat. Kim was fully socialized as European, albeit in a Korean family; thus, while her writing is not directly autobiographical, it revolves around her sense of alienation from growing up “Asian” in a homogenously white, Austrian society. As Kim explains in her series of essays Invasionen des Privaten (2011), the Europeans she grew up with had an expectation that she would act “Korean” based on her East Asian physiognomy. She expresses her own painful need to withdraw from a society that reduces her to her physical appearance by craving her appearance in public, as an “exotic”-looking literary star. Kim now lives in Berlin and, considering her youth, her books have garnered an impressive number of literary awards. The tone of her writing is detached, and her descriptions are based on historical facts. In Die gefrorene Zeit [Frozen Time] (2008), Kim writes about the aftermath of the war in Kosovo through the eyes of a Red Cross worker whose task is to identify bodies in mass graves. In Anatomie einer Nacht [Anatomy of a Night] (2012), her protagonist is a journalist who comes to Greenland – an autonomous Danish territory – to research a wave of suicides among the Inuit. She describes how these “Asians” live in substandard housing, treated by the Danish like second-class citizens. Her most recent historical novel, Die grosse Heimkehr [The Great Homecoming] (2017), is about Korea, featuring a Korean adoptee who travels to Seoul to learn about her country’s history. Kim focuses on people on the periphery of Europe, and her personal experience of being ostracized for “looking different” has, by her own admission, played a role in this decision to write about the plight of social and political outsiders. She is shaped by European literary conventions and by secular Enlightenment ways of thinking.29 However, she also grew up in a 29 One might compare her, for example, with South Korean author Han Kang, whose novel The Vegetarian is about a woman whose response to victimization is insanity and self-destruction – a theme that connects to traditional images of Korean women as self-sacrificing. Kim, in contrast, avoids emotional excess and sentimentality.

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Korean-speaking household and my chapter proposes that what makes her work unique is that it draws on the Korean practice of shamanism, which is ubiquitous (although officially prohibited) both in Korea and among the Korean diaspora. Kim’s novels are haunting, and they revolve around suffering and death in ways that are, for a lack of a better word, “shamanistic.” I argue that Kim’s voice, unlike that of Beuys’s, functions as a medium for those who cannot speak for themselves, and that she offers a critique of Western rationalism from the perspective of an Asian-German author whose voice “responds” to the ways that she and her cultural background have been stereotyped and misrepresented. By offering a discursive exchange around the topic of Asia by AsianGermans and Germans of an earlier generation, I hope to stir debate over how Asian-Germans are represented in contemporary Germany, and to explore possible continuities to historical discourses that have conflated Asians and Jews during the time of National Socialism. I juxtapose German depictions of the Shoah that include references to Asia to the new Asian voices that have recently become part of a newly emerging European literary landscape. I present this juxtaposition in a series of exchanges structured in the form of “call-and-response” because this promotes the notion of “fusion” in a positive sense, where voices respond to one another within the same community – and also introduces critical perspective, as each participant speaks from their own unique position. “Fusion,” therefore, is always hinted at yet never quite occurs, so that the discussion continues – as in the ongoing reciprocity of voices in a song where verses need to be repeated in order to convey their effect.

Part I

Parallels

Chapter 1

Silkworms and Concentration Camps: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz

If traces of history survive in the form of architectural sites once inhabited by human beings, then traces of the living are metaphorically present in buildings and other inanimate sites. In this chapter, I focus on the writings of W.  G. Sebald (1944–2001), as they reveal a preoccupation with the sedimentations of life in abandoned objects and structures, from the cocoons left behind by silkworms, to the enclosures where prisoners were once tortured and killed. By establishing imaginary links between the lives that have passed and the objects that remain, Sebald poses the question of representation with respect to the Shoah as well as other genocides. As a non-Jewish German author born at the end of World War II, Sebald struggled with the challenge of representing German history. I argue that this accounts for his depiction of the “Orient” – and “Orientals” in his portrayal of both Asian and Jewish characters – as an alternative geographical space outside Europe. I discuss Sebald’s analogy between Germany and China during the Ch’ing dynasty in Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings of Saturn] (1995). And I analyze his subsequent novel, Austerlitz (2001), where he depicted the friendship between a German expatriate to England (modeled after himself ) and a fictitious Jewish man rescued by the Kindertransport in order to connect, hypothetically, with a lost Jewish German “Other.” Using these Asian-Jewish-German narratives as his basis, Sebald’s writings focus on abandoned material objects and architectural structures as containers now empty, conjuring up the “dead” in order to remind the reader of bygone lives.

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I Sebald’s travelogue The Rings of Saturn describes a trek through Suffolk, England, during which the first-person narrator  – modeled after the author – sees the emblem of a Chinese dragon on the side of an abandoned train that he passes. This sighting initiates a long digression about China and sericulture during the Chi’ing dynasty (1644–1912). Eventually, this seemingly extraneous diversion about China becomes connected to Germany, the narrator’s country of origin, where, he explains, Nazi sericulture was perfected into a Tötungsgeschäft [killing business] – a term he uses to characterize the Shoah. With this surprising analogy, Sebald links the Asian history of the silk trade, including the transportation of the silkworms from China into Europe, with the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Sebald’s analogy between the silk trade and the Holocaust makes sense if one considers that silk is harvested by unraveling the cocoons spun by larvae, a process that requires killing the caterpillars inside their cocoons before their normal development into moths damages the silk. Twentiethcentury German sericulture is depicted by Sebald in The Rings of Saturn as a particularly cold and cruel method because, unlike sericulture in ancient China, it involves technological mass production. Sebald presents the evils of National Socialism as a perverted outgrowth of technological advances precipitated through modern capitalism. His critique is ostensibly based on Marxist economics along the lines of the Frankfurt School, as evidenced by his letters to Theodor W. Adorno,1 as well as the contents of his library.2 On these grounds, Michael Hutchins has interpreted Sebald’s use of silk imagery as “a cipher for imperialism” and globalized colonialism, since silk fabric’s widespread use transcends its geographical specificity. In Sebald, silk, as Hutchins explains, is not just related to China but also to Africa – for example, in a passage he cites from The Rings of Saturn, where “colorful silken bows adorn a gaudy Belgian hotel […] in which Sebald stays while 1 See Marcel Atze, “Biblioteca Sebaldiana.” 2 See Richard Gray, “From Grids to Vanishing Points.”

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visiting Brussels, from whence the vast expanse of the Congo was ruled” (188). Seen from this vantage point, Sebald’s writing seeks to establish an overarching perspective that reaches beyond the confines of German national history. Still, this interpretive gambit raises questions concerning Sebald’s depiction of pre-existing links between Nazi anti-Semitism and orientalizing portrayals of “Asia,” as outlined in my introduction. While Sebald’s parallel between the silk trade and the Shoah is unmistakable, critics have debated whether The Rings of Saturn is mostly about German history or about “world history.” It seems important to remember that since ancient times the silk trade itself has connected East and West through the silk roads, described by Peter Frankopan as the true “center” of what lay east of Europe. David Kim, from the perspective of comparative literature, has proposed that Sebald’s writing transcends specific geographic and national histories so that in his case, “German literature is world literature” (my emphasis). Referring to Barbara Hui’s geographical “mapping” of spaces referred to in The Rings of Saturn, Kim describes Sebald’s text as “multilayered” and explains how it combines the local “recollection of a foot journey […] along the east coast of England with a complex set of narratives that eventually covers many parts of the world” (129). Kim points out that “scholars of German postcolonialism have […] begun to participate in […] the renegotiation between Western and non-Western cultures.” However, he cites Edward Said’s last preface to Orientalism to suggest that “Auschwitz repeatedly tampers with this cosmopolitical negotiation by overshadowing the colonial past around the globe […] such that the question for us seems to be why those memories of suffering and death compete against each other” (222). This apparent dichotomy, between “Auschwitz” and other non-European genocides, seems obsolete. Referring to David Damrosch’s notion of “world literature,” Kim proposes that “studying East Asia in German programs helps to illustrate in what sense Europeans and non-Europeans have come to establish a complex relationship of power” (223). My own approach is to study this relationship in terms of how Sebald’s texts about Germany and Asia play with notions of “scale,” by using verbal and visual imagery to interrogate the way that changes in size and amount alter the reader’s perception. Related to an overall container/containment

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structure, Sebald reverses chronologies as well as patterns of cause and effect, thereby creating a complex, non-linear literary historiography. Sebald’s description of Chinese sericulture and the silk trade occurs in Part VI in The Rings of Saturn. However, it announces itself earlier, in Part III, with a striking image, a full-page, centerfold photograph of piled-up human corpses in a forest (see Figure 1). The horizontal elongated shapes, laid out beneath the vertical tree trunks, are murdered victims at the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Yet Sebald declines to label this image. Kim – claiming that even non-German readers can relate to depictions of genocide in Sebald’s text – refers to the absent caption as a “verbal void.” Bergen-Belsen is mentioned elsewhere in the book, but only in passing, so Kim is correct that Sebald’s omission of a caption facilitates thinking about genocides in other contexts. However, this would require identifying the horizontal elongated shapes as human bodies, and given Sebald’s choice of a deliberately grainy texture for this photograph (which he has photocopied in order to achieve such an effect), such recognition may or may not take

Figure 1.  “Bodies at Bergen-Belsen.” Photo by George Rodger (1945), The LIFE Picture Collection. Reprinted in W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. © Getty Images.

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place in the viewer’s mind. Instead, there emerges a disturbing associative resemblance between the image of human corpses at Bergen-Belsen and Sebald’s subsequent, seemingly unrelated, description of silkworms, which negates the actual difference in scale. Since the photograph makes the corpses look less “human” in the reader’s mind, the silkworms and corpses appear to be equivalent. (This effect is also achieved by Sebald’s use of a photograph, elsewhere in The Rings of Saturn, depicting a huge pile of dead herrings). This uncanny resemblance creates a disconcerting effect. At the same time, readers unfamiliar with German history can still focus on Sebald’s vivid depictions of suffering creatures (silkworms, herrings). One can, as Sara Friedrichsmayer has pointed out, recognize the violence perpetrated against these smaller creatures, and one can appreciate, as Eric Santner has shown, Sebald’s insistence on the continuum connecting humans to other living creatures. By focusing on natural history, Sebald’s writing seeks to undo the human/nonhuman hierarchy, and the silkworms function as a device to establish an empathetic link between humans and nonhumans – an effect diametrically opposed to the one suggested above (i.e. trivializing human death by equating it with that of silkworms). Paradoxically, whereas the silk trade itself “weaved” together the disparate narrative “threads” about China and the West, Chinese silkworms in The Rings of Saturn are associated with the image of an Asian empress whose stereotypical femininity (of being overly emotional) is presented in contrast to the overdetermined masculinity (i.e. overly rational, technologized) of the Nazis. Sebald invokes these gendered national clichés through the nineteenth-century Chinese Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi as an emblematic “drama queen” who had “risen from the ranks of concubines and […] whose cravings for power was insatiable” (148). He then, near the end of the book, places her in contrast to the coldly detached Germans (as discussed further below). In a melodramatic plotting of how Tz’u-hsi gained her throne, Sebald describes her as a dangerous tyrant who murders her own son and daughter-in-law, and later commits infanticide: The Dowager Empress was the uncontested locum of the Chinese Empire […] a scant year after coming to the throne, [her son] T’ung-chih did die [and his wife], seventeen years old and several months pregnant […] poisoned herself [and there was] the suspicion that [she] had been got out of the way in order to prolong the regency of

38

Chapter 1 the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi, who now consolidated her position by having her two-year-old nephew Kuang-hsu proclaimed heir to the throne […]. [H]‌er craving for absolute power […] grew more ruthless with every year that passed. (148–9)

As if scripting a soap opera, Sebald makes this female figure the “locum of the Chinese Empire” and twice uses the phrase “craving for power.” Tz’u-hsi is described as “ruthless,” yet she is also vulnerable. Portrayed as irrational, she is frightened: “the fear of losing the infinite power she had so insidiously acquired grew within her” (150). This fear increases and she becomes so vindictive, frustrated and disappointed that she loses touch with reality. At this point, she begins to prefer her silkworms to her people, as described in this passage worth quoting in full: Travellers who were in China between 1876 and 1879 report that, in the drought that had continued for years, whole provinces gave the impression of expiring under prisons of glass. Between seven and twenty million people […] are said to have died of starvation and exhaustion […] when the ill tidings arrived from the south, the Dowager Empress had a daily blood sacrifice offered in her temple to the gods of silk, at the hour when the evening star rose, lest the silkworms want for fresh green leaves. Of all living creatures, these curious insects alone aroused a strong affection in her. The silk houses they were raised in were among the finest buildings of the summer palace. […] These pale, almost transparent creatures, which would presently give their lives for the fine thread they were spinning, she saw as her true loyal followers. To her they seemed the ideal subjects, diligent in service, ready to die, capable of multiplying vastly within a short span of time, and fixed on their one sole preordained aim, wholly unlike human beings, on whom there was basically no relying. (151–2, my emphasis)

Up to 20 million people starved in China while silkworms were being fed in what appears to be a quaint, preindustrial cottage industry. There is a discrepancy of scale: the passage centers on a singular human figure who takes care of a comparatively small number of silkworms, while the 7–20 million people recede into the background (they are only described in the abstract, in terms of numbers). There are two ironies: first, the Dowager Empress treats the silkworms as her pets and as alternative human “subjects.” Unlike humans, they do not have a choice as to whether or not they wish to sacrifice their lives on behalf of anything, and they cannot protest the interruption of their

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transformation into moths.3 Silkworms are cultivated by humans to generate silk and they produce silk by the act of dying. This dying is their labor and that is what the Dowager Empress loves about them: they die for her. Sebald uses a register of passion and high drama associated with this female Asian figure to juxtapose the Ch’ing Dynasty scenario against Nazi sericulture in Germany, where the emphasis is not on the silkworm caterpillars but on their cocoons. He thus caters to Western readers’ preconceived notions about the “Orient” as more sensual and more theatrical. We see this melodramatic excess – even campiness – of a stereotypical Chinese “dragon lady” (or what might be an evil stepmother in Western fairy tales).4 This gendered, orientalist representation competes with an affectless, disembodied Nazi Tötungsgeschäft, couched in masculine, technological terms. Near the end of the book the unequal relationship between a lesser number of dead silkworms vis-à-vis many millions of Chinese people’s deaths is leveled and inverted: silkworm deaths in Nazi Germany are increased to the billions, paralleling and surpassing the millions of victims of the Holocaust. The author thus draws attention to the ways in which enumeration and scale matter when it comes to the depiction of Nazi genocide. Silkworms from “China” – notwithstanding the Chinese people who died of famine (and never reappear in Sebald’s narrative) – now function as a foil against which to measure Holocaust victims. They also draw attention to the specifically cold, unfeeling way in which humans were murdered.

3 As Karl Marx has noted, “the silkworm would be the perfect wageworker if he were to spin silk in order to maintain his existence” (Lohnarbeit und Kapital; my translation). However, unfortunately, as in slave labor, the silkworm cannot sell his labor and is thus unable to “maintain his existence.” 4 The historical figure of the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi is generally represented as negative, and Sebald draws from these sources. A more recent 2013 book by Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi, however, argues that she was not power hungry but victimized for being a woman and that the charges against her were untrue, for example: “There is an allegation that Cixi [Tz’u-hsi] poisoned [Emperor Tongzhi]. This is groundless. Many suspect that he died of syphilis” (107); “Miss Alute’s death has been widely blamed on Cixi [but these charges are not] based on any evidence” (108); “It has been alleged that Empress Zhen was poisoned by [Tz’u-hsi], although no one has produced any evidence” (145–6). Also see Keith McMahon, Celestial Women.

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Chapter 1

In Sebald’s depiction of Nazi sericulture, actual living silkworms, which figured so prominently in the above passage about the Chinese empress, are absent. In this German silkworm passage, near the end of the book, Sebald’s narrator matter-of-factly explains how the Nazis conducted silk harvesting technologically, as he recounts one of their documentary films he had seen, not by putting the cocoons out in the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business [Tötungsgeschäft] is completed. (294)

This silkworm processing, clearly, is the analogy to the technological death of the Nazi gas chambers, where large numbers of humans were “processed” batch by batch.5 And, most poignantly, it bears no resemblance to the way silkworms were treated in China. The description of Nazi silk harvesting excludes how the silkworms were treated before being killed, whether they were “loved,” and how they were cared for during their lives. Sebald’s analogy suggests both similarities and differences between humans and silkworms, depending on the time and place. Sebald chose to go back in time to portray China as more ancient – he creates a temporal gap to support his analogy that the Nazis are cruel and unfeeling due to modernity, which is “Western” and, presumably, “masculine.” And there is no human figure in Sebald’s portrayal of Germany: no one in Germany loves these silkworms like the Dowager Empress in China. Whereas in feudal China, silkworms are lovingly nurtured and associated with passionate fantasies of power, Germany is predictably cold and disembodied. Disconcertingly, Sebald chose not to pursue the (mirroring) situation of the millions of Chinese victims who died of famine. It appears that he uses the imagery of the silkworms to create a narrative that applies to Germany at the expense of Chinese history, which he cites selectively and in a gendered way – to establish an opposition. 5 To extend the analogy of slave labor between silkworms and humans, Bergen-Belsen was a “labor camp” (as opposed to an “extermination camp”).

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Although there seems to be no direct link at first glance, there are some connections as to how German readers might construct “otherness” in terms of anti-Semitism, based on Nazi rhetoric where Jews and Asians are equated. According to Achim Rohde, “Jews have […] for centuries been ascribed an oriental, Asian character” (19) and: The association of Judaism with Islam and the depiction of Jews as Orientals is a well-established trope with a long history in the German context. The same holds true for the image of physical and sexual deviance associated with Jews and Judaism. Against this background, modern German anti-Semitism can be characterized as an attempt to de-orientalize and masculinize the evolving German nation. (31)

Frank Scherer refers to “the anti-Semitic stereotype of ‘the (male) Jew as feminised Oriental’ ” (xix). And John Zilcosky provides evidence of popular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German discourses about “Jews as black  – and sometimes as mulatto, ‘Oriental’ […] especially about the Ostjuden from the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (95).6 As I will demonstrate further, in the next segment of this chapter about Austerlitz, Sebald presents a similar dichotomy of “feeling” versus detachment in relation to a Jewish character and thus runs the risk of achieving the opposite effect of what he must have intended: “Asians” are used to support a Holocaust analogy, not addressed in their own right. The same problem, as will become more clear over the course of this chapter, exists in the portrayal of Austerlitz vis-à-vis the German narrator who controls his narrative. In The Rings of Saturn, along the lines of gender, Sebald’s single, overwhelming female Chinese figure is portrayed as destructive, whereas there is no equivalent German male figure to reckon with (the technological process takes care of itself ). Graley Herren, from a psychoanalytic perspective, has suggested that Sebald dislikes women because he did not get along with his mother – perhaps the empress may be seen as a negative maternal figure, and can be read as someone who threatens masculinity. Helen Finch has pointed out the emphasis on male figures in Sebald’s 6 Daniel Boyarin has also written about gender and Jewish imagery but he does not include orientalism. See Queer Theory and the Jewish Question.

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writing, while Eric Santner has noted: “It is hard not to see Sebald’s representation of heterosexuality and, above all, of female sexuality, as forming a complement to this persistence of homoeroticism.” So maybe the empress is not “female” in the way one might expect. The question one might ask, then: Is this really a “Chinese” figure either? I believe Sebald plays with these images deliberately. As Inka MuelderBach and others have shown, Sebald’s writing is postmodern, self-reflective, invested in the surface of things: she compares his text to the shiny surface of a reflective silk garment. It reflects back different discourses as well as its own artificial “constructedness.” It seems to me that the operatic, larger-than-life figure of the Dowager Empress could be read as if it were a drag performance, a theatrical display of exaggerated emotions resembling melodrama, and that this would generate feelings in the audience. But are those feelings called for? When we see one, we feel for it, whereas multitudes shrink in our imagination. By exaggerating the scale of this one human ­figure – including her vast irrationality – Sebald emphasizes the way we overlook the other millions of humans. The deaths of 7 to 20 million Chinese people disappear into the background as the narrative progresses: they “shrink” in favor of the silkworms. Sebald’s narrator then introduces another image into the story, that of the deaths of millions of silk worms in Germany, but in a way that does not elicit the empathy of the reader – they are, in a sense, separate from humans and from the silkworms in China. The uncaptioned Bergen-Belsen image grotesquely suggests that humans have died in the same way as the silkworms – a fact that would be consistent with Nazi ideology and its dehumanizing Tötungsgeschäft. Hence, while the Shoah is not directly mentioned in Sebald’s depiction of Nazi Germany, and the image of the Bergen-Belsen corpses is difficult to identify, the analogy is driven home by the detour through “China” – and so creates a shift in perspectives. Is this an analogy at the expense of China, and of female figures? Or is it an ironic reversal that occurs, in which the reader must experience a shift in perception that depends on the scale (and numbers) in which something is represented, a critique of the one-sided representations of historical narratives? It is a question for which there may not be a definitive answer, because how we read Sebald also reflects

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our own perspective, which is contingent. In the following section, I will focus on the subjective affinities between the German narrator and the Jewish “Oriental” Sebald introduces in his subsequent novel Austerlitz. Here, Sebald’s emphasis on inanimate objects and nonhuman creatures who possess the ability to “hold” the memory of conflicting emotions and lived experiences becomes even more apparent – and this, once again, is negotiated by detour through the “Oriental” as an alternative to the “German.”

II If one considers the silkworms as an analogue to human lives, what comes to mind is both their diminutive size and their multiplicity. However, Sebald’s novel Austerlitz also features “worm-like” imagery of a larger scale, now associated with architectural sites and objects. Austerlitz contains depictions of the concentration camp site Theresienstadt and the Gestapo prison museum Fort Breendonk that are portrayed as so uncannily alive as to resemble strange creatures – some resemble gigantic worms, as is evident from the photographs of the exterior walls of Breendonk in Sebald’s book.7 The protagonist Jacques Austerlitz’s profession is that of architectural historian, and the first half of the book revolves around architecture.8 The plot of Austerlitz is framed at the beginning and end of 7 The official website for the Fort Breendonk Gestapo Prison Museum is . For an analysis of the role of photographs in the book, see John Sears: “[Sebald’s] text relentlessly pursues its visual logic of the failure of words and images to illuminate their objects […]. Both writing and image ultimately fail to restore the past, embodying the [fear] that words and images both might ultimately prove ineffectual, and that they even might conspire in the erasure of things, implying destruction as the inevitable consequence of representation and its recuperative intentions” (“Photographs, Images, and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose,” 219–24). 8 The name “Austerlitz” refers to the battlefield and evokes “Auschwitz.” It was also the real last name of the dancer Fred Astaire; and it is derived from a Jewish folk figure (see Santner).

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the book by the narrator’s visits to the fort in Belgium, which served as a Nazi prison camp from 1940 to 1944 (the writer Jean Améry was tortured there, the narrator tells us). The narrator’s first visit to Fort Breendonk is prompted by Austerlitz’s remarks about the nature and function of fortifications. As the architect explains, the fortress had lost its purpose for defense and was abandoned, but was brought back to life during the Nazi occupation as a place where prisoners awaiting deportation were tortured by SS men. The building’s purpose became, literally, turned inside out as it was transformed from a site to defend against violent attacks from the outside into one where violence was carried out against those on the inside. Now a museum, in what one might call its third incarnation, its transformative power becomes evident as the narrator approaches it from a distance and, subsequently, sees it as a monster: [I]‌had an image in my head of the star shaped bastion […]. But what I now saw before me was a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen: the broad back of a monster, I thought, risen from this Flemish soil like a whale from the deep. […] a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence. (21)

Like the silkworms, the walls of the fort, from the perspective of approaching it on foot, are “rounded” and without a clear “shape” or definition. Sebald’s photograph depicts the elongated shape of the fortifying walls and the image resembles the shape of a large worm. The description, which includes an architectural blueprint, performs another transformation of the fort: from man-made structure (a “star-shaped bastion”) into organic matter, with references to monstrousness. Fort Breendonk, in the mind of the narrator, reveals its true nature, beyond humanity, from primordial times. It is comparable to the silkworms as an analogy between humans and their evolutionary predecessors, but here it becomes threatening due to its size. Even though the fort is ostensibly “empty” of what once took place in it, it is reanimated by the narrator’s imagination, in a subjective projection of the history of atrocities that once took place inside its walls (one might call it an “externalization”). As a second-generation German, the

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narrator struggles with imaginary projections, which point to feelings of transmitted guilt.9 The elongated, round, worm-like walls of the fort may evoke the vertical, round shapes of the silkworms, yet the silkworms are smaller, standing in for the victims of Auschwitz, whereas the fort epitomizes the monstrous inhumanity of the perpetrators. The narrator’s subjective imagination has animated the fortress’s exterior walls as a reminder of the barbarity that took place inside them, and this is connected to the fact that he is German. The narrator is deadpan when it comes to identifying himself, when he enters Fort Breendonk and peers into the Gestapo quarters: [I]‌glanced through the glass panes of a door on the right into the so-called mess of the SS guards with its scrubbed tables and benches [and] could well imagine the site of the good fathers and dutiful sons […] from the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps [sic],10 sitting here when they came off duty to play cards or write letters to their loved ones at home. After all, I had lived among them until my twentieth year.

Born and raised in the Bavarian Alps, Sebald himself was aware of that fact that he, as a German, was immune to the fate endured by children rescued from the Shoah like Jacques Austerlitz. His excitement and repulsion when approaching the “monster” of the prison museum points to a struggle with this knowledge. As a matter of fact, he cannot “win” this struggle: when he visits Fort Breendonk again, at the end of the book, he is unable to go in, sitting instead besides the moat to read Heshel’s Kingdom, a book about a family who perished in the Shoah  – a book Jacques Austerlitz had given to him. As with the silkworms, whose deaths leave behind empty cocoons, Sebald presents us with ruins whose “empty” interiors contain traces of victims who lost their lives here. Max Pensky compares Sebald’s ruins in The Rings of Saturn which are remnants of man-made history, to organic life. Pensky argues that these objects from the past encountered by Sebald’s narrator function as reminders of the “entropic processes that draw life and meaning from the dead stone, leaving empty husks in the way of the pilgrim that serve as hieroglyphs, ciphers prepared to take on the projection 9 On feelings of guilt in non-Jewish German authors including Sebald, see Julia Hell, “Eyes Wide Shut.” 10 The translator here mistranslates the Münsterland into the Bavarian Alps.

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of subjective meaning” (85). The “dead stones” that make up the walls of Fort Breendonk, as well as other related objects, would be such “empty husks.” The “pilgrim,” who in Austerlitz would be both the narrator and protagonist ( Jacques Austerlitz will be discussed in the following section), attributes subjective meaning to these empty ruins and abandoned things. The “cocoon” that is the fort is now empty, but it once contained life that can be remembered by those who come there as visitors – including the German narrator. Thus historical memory is rendered present by way of an interaction between the human imagination and the seemingly inanimate material objects and places.11 Fort Breendonk, however, as an “organic” entity that threatens due to its enormous size, remains inassimilable. To the human who seeks rational understanding of the Shoah, it defies such understanding.12 Bringing back to life or endowing something “dead” with life is implied in Austerlitz as part of remembering. When the narrator enters Fort Breendonk, he sees the cells where the prisoners slept on straw mattresses. Alan Itkin discusses these mattresses with regard to “the narrator’s attempt to bring back to life the past embodied in the objects that inhabit Breendonk” (169). They represent hollow, elongated shapes, with an emphasis on emptiness. This time, they are human-sized, akin to the tree trunks in the photograph in the Rings of Saturn mentioned above. After the narrator proceeds into the fortress, he experiences a shortage of air in the empty space that once held the prisoners. The experience is described in retrospect, as the recollection of the memory of his visit. The emptiness of this dwelling space – a cocoon of sorts – has an effect on him because

11 With respect to Sebald’s numerous representations of battlegrounds, cemeteries, torture chambers and concentration camps, Markus Zisselsberger refers to Sebald’s concern with “how a real, material history of human suffering that took place at specific geographical sites can be represented in the imaginative space created by literary writing” (14). 12 Mark O’Connell writes: “It’s insufficient to say that silk cultivation is a ‘metaphor’ for what happened to European Jews; this is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.”

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it marks the absence that signifies death. What he sees here resembles the “empty husks” of human bodies: Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken – and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time – as if they were the mortal frames of those who laid there in that darkness. I also recollect now that that as I went on down the tunnel […] I had to resist the feeling […] that with every forward step the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier. (24–5)

Clearly, the narrator struggles with this memory of a memory, as he recalls being physically affected by the weight of the “dead stones” that surround him. He has difficulty breathing even though the tunnel is, ostensibly, empty – a fact that reflects the exceeding discomfort he feels, a claustrophobia caused by the imagination. The metonymical allusion to human bodies through the shape of the mattresses on which they once slept, in the building where many of them died, becomes eerie due to the resemblance of those mattresses to the bodies themselves, rendering them “present” again in the narrator’s (and reader’s) mind. These empty mattresses, by extension, “contain” the very absence of the people who once slept on top of them  – and these people have now seemingly become identical with them; that is to say, they appear to be “inside” of them. Those who have perished during the Shoah, who are no longer present, continue to exist in this way. The “containers” that were once underneath now still seem to hold the “mortal frames” of the humans they once supported. What has happened to the narrator, who in the extension of these allusions to death feels himself suffocating as if he were being buried alive, is that he has become immersed in a threshold zone inhabited by the ghosts of the past. In Sebald, as I have tried to show, it becomes evident that the subject experiences anxiety when confronted with spaces that mark the presence of the dead. Karen Remmler writes that “Sebald’s prose engages representations of the dead through metonymical references to spaces such as landscape, buildings, houses, rooms, and even objects that can be identified as being both historical and imaginary” (146). In this way, the objects – for example, the mattresses – become ghostlike, turning the

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surrounding area into a transitional space between the dead and the living. As Sebald expressed it in a conversation with Arthur Lubow, the “borders between the dead and the living are not hermetically sealed […]. There is some form of travel or gray zone. If there is a feeling, especially among unhappy people, that there is such a thing as a living death, then it is possible that the reverse is also true” (160). Not surprisingly, Sebald’s style itself has been described as haunting and ghostlike. As I have tried to show, in Austerlitz he conjures up the ghosts of history through objects and environments, and these bear an uncanny resemblance to the silkworms in The Rings of Saturn. In both instances, the emptiness associated with death becomes central, and the cocoon or “container” with which the absence of life is associated functions as its “trace.”13 By emphasizing these shapes, Sebald reaches beyond the confines of national histories.

III The last segment of this chapter focuses on the Jewish “Oriental” character Jacques Austerlitz as a figure who himself is ghostlike. A  lack of connection to any particular space or place, to dwellings in any shape or form, is one of his main attributes – Jacques Austerlitz seems on all levels to be perpetually “out of place” and in a “queer” way (a topic in Sebald 13 Sebald’s strategy is to evoke, paradoxically, the paradigm of something “absent” within an object that is still “present.” Sebald uses “emptiness” in many of his architectural descriptions – for example, in this passage in Austerlitz about the monumental Palace of Justice in Brussels: “this huge pile of over 700,000 cubic meters contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and […] dark cul-de-sacs with rolltop cupboards, lecterns, writing desks, office chairs, and other items of furniture stacked up at the end of them” (30). These items of furniture uncannily populate the “empty spaces” as if they were the true inhabitants; they seem to evoke the presence of death because they are man-made artifacts absent of the humans that have created them for their quotidian use.

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on which I  have published elsewhere).14 He does not know who he is, and he does not seem to belong anywhere. As the narrator observes when Austerlitz disappears in Paris in search of his father, the character seems “oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world” (254). Jacques Austerlitz becomes the prototype of someone who is, by definition, permanently displaced.15 It does not seem surprising that Austerlitz, who likes to travel, is always engaged in looking at places, including the major architectural sites described in the novel. The motif of a journey, in fact, extends throughout this entire book, and is a constant throughout Sebald’s entire oeuvre – travel writing is his preferred genre.16 Sebald’s own concern with the way things are placed, in its most abstract form, is described autobiographically in Campo Santo, where he mentions “my passion for geography, which emerged soon after I began at school: a delight in topography that became increasingly compulsive as my life went on and to which I have devoted endless hours bending over atlases and brochures” (198). Perhaps the analogy Sebald draws between Germany and the “Orient” is less a parallel than a way of intersecting the two seemingly separate spaces. The question of where Jacques Austerlitz himself “fits” in with his surroundings – or whether he can even be said to exist independently – is exemplified by the contrast between his “crowded study [which left] hardly any space for himself among the stacks of books” (32) and his house in Alderney Street, which is empty, devoid of furniture, and painted in a monotonous grey, like the tombs in the Jewish cemetery next to which it is located. Austerlitz always seems to be existentially dislocated, and he even says of himself: “[I had] the idea that I had never really been alive” (137). 14 See my article on “Architecture and Queer Desire in W.  G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” in Comparatisme comme approche critique, ed. Anne Tomiche. Paris:  Classique Garnier, 2017. 15 Karin Bauer explains that “Austerlitz’s story is symptomatic for the emotional and intellectual fallout of the disruptions and dislocations of wartime Europe […]. [H]‌e belongs to the new type of European who is essentially homeless in time and space” (243). 16 On Sebald as a travel writer, see Simon Cooke’s Travellers’ Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald.

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This combination of a sense of lost vitality and of being always “out of place” sums up his overall condition. As a subject, he seems impenetrable, defined not by the expression of personal feelings but by his activities as a scholar and, later, his archival search for his dead parents. J. J. Long has argued that Austerlitz is “external to himself. While ostensibly a psychological drama of repression […], the novel in fact repeatedly shows that Austerlitz is devoid of stable and authentic subjective interiority. His subjectivity is produced largely by the archive” (171). Jacques Austerlitz is ghostlike, as is evident from his “displaced” relationship to objects that take the place of people. When Austerlitz wanders about – evoking the stereotypical diaspora figure of the “wandering Jew” – especially before he begins to search for his lost parents, his mental support seems to be his obsession with architectural structures. Then, after he learns of his true identity as a child who had been on the Kindertransport from Prague, he feels that his sense of self had been false and that “all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world” (123).17 He describes his mental state as profoundly alienated, as if he himself were missing: “[I]‌ could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed” (228). This image of a person cast out of his familiar surroundings recalls the silkworm cocoons in Rings of Saturn, and is metaphorically related to other objects in Austerlitz that are described as “containers” that have lost the life they once held. They are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century phenomenological psychologist William James’s description of external objects and spaces as extensions of “self ”: A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down. (291) 17 Sebald’s description is his subjective rendering. For historically accurate information about survivors of the Jewish children’s transport to England, and how they said they felt, see Claudia Curio, Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung as well as Mark Harris’s 2000 documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.

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The Jewish man, Jacques Austerlitz, is a fictitious character, but the German narrator projects onto him such feelings – and one might call Jacques Austerlitz Sebald’s doppelgänger or alter ego, as Hannes Veraguth has.18 Insofar as the characters in Sebald’s novel can be said to have a “self,” it is the concomitant sense of an internal life “dwindling and dying away” that is conveyed here. The attempt to bring back to life what has been lost  – to “fill” the emptiness  – would be consistent with Sebald’s own express attempt to give voice to Holocaust survivors who are too traumatized to speak for themselves, as he stated in a 2001 interview with Michael Silverblatt. This voice, in turn, is associated not only with humans, but also with “other” things. Ruth Klüger – a literary critic like Sebald but also a survivor – refers to the continued presence of “things” in terms of a consolation: “One could say that the overall message of [Sebald’s] books is that there is no redemption from the mistaken development of humankind. But children, animals and things are still there” (102, my translation). If being “still there” includes objects like silkworm cocoons, straw mattresses and architectural fortifications, these make up the “self ” (in James’s terms) that is the subject of Austerlitz. The fact that such objects may serve as material witnesses to history when endowed with “life” is evident from my next and final example, again from Austerlitz. Here, an architectural element – a column at a train station – turns into a “worm-like” primordial creature. This time, it is of human scale, stands erect and appears to be more benign as seen from the perspective of the rescued, Jacques Austerlitz. Traveling back from Prague after locating traces of his mother – who he has discovered was deported to Theresienstadt – Austerlitz suddenly notices a cast-iron column at the Pilsen railroad station as his train makes a stopover. There is no visual image of this column, but there is a photograph of several other columns earlier in the book, from Liverpool Station where Austerlitz is scheduled to arrive. The columns in that photograph are shrouded in fog and with their erect, 18 Veraguth writes:  “In Austerlitz sind […] der Ich-Erzähler und sein Protagonist Austerlitz nur scheinbar zwei getrennte Personen; denn Austerlitz denkt und spricht wie ein Doppelgänger des erzählenden Ichs” [In Austerlitz, the first-person narrator and his protagonist Austerlitz are only apparently two separate people, for Austerlitz thinks and speaks like a doppelgänger of the narrating ego] (33).

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elongated shapes could be seen as resembling humans. Similarly, Austerlitz’s description of the cast-iron column at the train station in Pilsen reveals his uncanny feeling that this architectural object, this seemingly inanimate structural element, may nonetheless be somehow “conscious” of him: All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast iron column which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. (221)

One could interpret this passage as a projection on his part as he imaginatively endows the cast-iron column with a form of consciousness he feels is lacking within himself. He makes reference to its primitive, alien appearance in a way similar to the German narrator’s impressions of Fort Breendonk: both are reptile-like with a “scaly surface” (and reminiscent of a silkworm). But whereas the fortress functions as antagonist, a persecuting force, the column presents itself as a “witness,” a repository of Jacques Austerlitz’s own, human memory (which is, presumably, too traumatized to be recovered). What makes Austerlitz “uneasy” is the “ridiculous” idea – in German: unsinnig [irrational] – that the column is more than a passive surface for imaginary projection, that it could have become, so to speak, an active part of his self that is somehow no longer connected to him. The column – which is hollow inside like the silkworm cocoons after the caterpillars have been killed  – not only triggers Austerlitz’s memory of what happened to him as a child on the Kindertransport, it also functions as a repository of a memory he himself has lost. What he can no longer “recollect” for himself is nonetheless present, with the added caveat that it is seen as “outside” of himself. What kind of consciousness then, is represented through this column, as well as through the image of the silkworms in their cocoons? What unsettles Austerlitz is that the column might remember things he himself does not, and thus

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that the location of his memory is displaced in a way similar to that in which he himself feels displaced and disoriented. Conventionally, the objects that trigger memories remain external while the corresponding memories are internal – one does not think of objects as possessing interiority (nor regard insects as “subjects” as the Chinese empress does). Sebald here extends the range of places that contain feelings, both geographically on the level of scale, and in terms of the spatial relations between external and internal.19 In Sebald’s rendering, it is as if Jacques Austerlitz’s consciousness had somehow, literally, passed into the column, which would be consistent with Austerlitz’s sense of himself as, comparatively, “empty.” In this way, the boundaries between inside/outside, human/nonhuman, organic/manmade seem erased. Austerlitz’s human subjectivity, marked by the capacity to be sentient and have a consciousness, able to remember and reflect on the past, has lost its vitality, while the cast-iron column has become a receptacle or “container” of memory. Jacques Austerlitz is troubled by the fact that his memories are no longer his own and that they may, instead, be lodged in the column, outside of himself. He has not only lost the ability to recollect what has happened to him in the past, he also has to recognize that the conveyance of his memory may depend on the unlikely testimony of this “other” object, which thereby approaches the nature of a human subject with its own ability to retain subjective feelings associated with past experiences. He may ask himself: does the column’s stoic nature make it impossible to retrieve those memories? What kind of a “witness” can an object be? The reader, in turn, is forced to look at Jacques Austerlitz differently. As in the analogy with the Chinese Dowager Empress, Sebald uses clichés in order to undermine them – the stereotypes (i.e. congealed, fixed images) do not hold in these scenarios. The cocoons of the silkworms that are left behind after the Tötungsgeschäft, the walls of Breendonk, the straw mattresses left behind in its prisoners cells and the cast-iron column at the Pilsen railroad station function as repositories for historical memory. Life has been drained from 19 Also see Rei Terada’s theory of affect as “feelings” not bound by a “subject,” a condition I discuss further in my next chapter on Yoko Tawada.

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them, yet they are also still “alive” in an uncanny way. By undoing the boundaries between the living and the dead, the past and the present, Sebald opens up another perspective on the representation of history beyond nationally focused narratives. His images refer to Germany and have, ostensibly, little to do with the history of the Chi’ing dynasty and its Dowager Empress in China in The Rings of Saturn or with a Jewish experience perceived as distantly “Oriental.” Sebald’s images are constructs, as he himself shows, and yet, they are also a form of engagement with an “otherness” the author himself may have felt within himself that led him to live his life outside the confines of his native Germany as an expatriate to England. In my next c­ hapter – which represents what I imagine as a “response” to Sebald’s “call” – I discuss the writings of Japanese-born author Yoko Tawada (b. 1960), who immigrated to Germany and so brought with her an understanding that the crossing of national, cultural and linguistic borders may open up an entirely new perspective. Tawada’s texts show that depictions of historical memory do not have to be grounded in the Western metaphysics of presence associated with a sense of “self ” or “identity.” Radically negative, this new Asian-German author transcends potentially orientalizing references to specific national histories by conveying historical experience in terms of ontological “emptiness” – decidedly non-European, yet “made in Germany.”

Chapter 2

Writing Emptiness: Yoko Tawada’s The Bath, Das nackte Auge and “Flucht des Monds”

cellar: We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations! What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations, what horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below. — Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse1

In contrast to German author W.  G. Sebald’s admittedly Eurocentric historiography (e.g. he wrote about, but never lived in, China), which I discussed in the preceding chapter, this chapter focuses on a younger Japanese-German author, Yoko Tawada (b. 1960). She, too, writes about architecture, albeit with the understanding that it is possible to achieve complete disintegration of all boundaries, so as to uncover the “empty spaces” beneath  – and to thereby undo perceived orders of how space should be divided. As I  will demonstrate, her ontology differs from a human-centered Western philosophical model, and thus contributes to what I see as a “new European” approach to cultural and linguistic boundaries, as well as to the geographical borders that have been politically at stake since the end of the Cold War. 1 Walter Benjamin, 455. A note on Jephcott’s translation: the German word Souterrain (imported from the French, orig. “sous terre,” literally:  “underneath the ground”), which Benjamin uses here, refers to a finished, habitable, basement – not a storage “cellar,” that is, what would be a Keller in German, which is unfinished, often without windows. However, these can be used interchangeably and this reflects the fact – as this chapter demonstrates – that such underground spaces are often amorphous, illdefined, and prone to change their function depending on the situation. Due to this linguistic and architectural indeterminacy, I here use, for the most part, the more neutral English “basement,” to refer to either of these.

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Architects have long recognized that buildings, like trees, have life spans, albeit at a different pace from humans. Postmodern theorists like Katherine Hayles argue against anthropocentrism by suggesting “that every real object possesses […] its own experience of the world, including biological, animate, and inanimate objects” (178). As a postmodern contemporary creative writer, Tawada, even more than Sebald, highlights the relationship between people and architectural environments as it pertains to history, where connections between the dead and the living are porous. By introducing a dual perspective, as an expatriate who experienced the rapid Westernization of an “archaic” culture in post–World War II Japan before moving to Germany, Tawada is in a unique position to create an even more complex, anti-polarizing form of representation. She deliberately seeks to erase the human subject and, as I show, this is connected to the way she represents history in terms of space. Literary critics have long analyzed linguistic structures apart from authors or characters – especially when viewing poetry as two-dimensional “architecture” where layers of vertical and horizontal lines constitute the semantic grid. Still, when reading literature from the standpoint of Western metaphysics, we are accustomed to thinking of architectural structures as “containers” that separate inside from outside, thus representing psychic structures: they function as external renderings of internal feelings and conflicts, or as passive surfaces for projection by protagonists whose subjectivity is defined in relation to their surroundings. Western readers are ensconced in Immanuel Kant’s 1781 dictum that “outward objects are nothing else than mere representations [so that] if we take away the subject […] space and time themselves disappear” (13). And the human subject, in Kant’s scenario, is central when it comes to the mapping of space, as he wrote in his 1770 dissertation on geography: “The most complete chart of the heavens […] would not teach me […] on which side to look for sunrise, unless [this were] determined through the position of the plan relative to my hands” (22). However, in the age of the Global Positioning System, the centrality of the human body no longer determines topography – human existence is disembodied through virtual space, and some claim we live in a posthuman age.2 There are strands of contemporary theory that address 2 Discourses about the posthuman were initiated in the 1980s – for example, by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

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the question of what constitutes the human: whether it can be said to exist; and if so, in what relation to other species and things. Some interventions resort to non-Western, premodern ways of thinking: Ann PangWhite, for example, describes the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Dao in terms of a “mutual influence among things and human beings, an ‘interthing intersubjectivity’ at an experiential level. Contrary to Kant, the sensible nonhuman natural world [is not just] subject to the whims of human moral ends” (71). Others refer to scientific discovery, such as object-oriented ontologists like Timothy Morton, who finds that humans are simply too small to comprehend “hyperobjects” like the Planet Earth. Bio Art engages in creating objects that exhibit their own sentience, and the hierarchical relationship between humans and manmade stuff (e.g. Styrofoam cups) is revisited by cultural critics like Jane Bennett, who maintains that the pathology of hoarding reveals a more in-depth understanding of how things “speak” to people. Relevant here in particular is postmodern philosopher Rei Terada’s questioning Kant’s traditional subject-object distinctions in terms of affect theory. Terada supports “the possibility of emotion after the ‘death of the subject’ ” (8) by arguing – against the perceived notion that a “dead subject” would not feel anything – that emotions can be located outside the (human) subject. With this in mind, it might not be too far out to ask, at least hypothetically, if buildings may also have “feelings.” We have already seen this in the previous observations about Sebald’s writing, but here it becomes even more radically experimental. I have primarily chosen to read Tawada because she is now known for writing about other forms of life – animals, plants, minerals, etc. – as if they were “human.”3 However, as I intend to demonstrate in this chapter, this is not limited to biology but also includes the architectural spaces that Tawada features in her texts. Tawada holds a Ph.D. in German literature and has defined her poetics to claim that the “subject” – that is, how we see ourselves as humans in the West, as based on Kant – does not exist. The “subject” is akin to “time and space” in Kant in that it is also “empty,” so 3 One of Tawada’s recent novels, Etüden im Schnee (Tübingen:  konkursbuch Verlag, 2014), is narrated by a polar bear.

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that one cannot claim for it a position of priority.4 According to Tawada, who depicts this more concretely through her writing, the “subject” is an artificial construct. It is a linguistically designed structure that reveals itself, I would add, as an illusory way of aggrandizing the supposed superiority of humans vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Tawada’s work thus resonates with the seemingly primitive superstition of the haunted house that appears in the above quote by Walter Benjamin, and it enacts the violent disintegration of linguistic “architectural” structures to which Benjamin alludes, so that the borders that separate the categories between here/there, dead/alive and inside/outside crumble. This experimental work, informed by the international avant-garde movement Fluxus (to which one might call Tawada an heir),5 works with what architects might call “negative space”: space that escapes definition, where – for Tawada – humans are free to cross into territories where spirits dwell. More than in Sebald, the dead of history come to the fore from beneath the rubble in what Tawada might refer to as this “in-between” space. Here, it is no longer about history as subjective “memory” but about a different temporality and understanding of the confines of the material world. Whereas in Sebald, objects are often central, Tawada experiments with writing and language in ways that make it impossible for the reader 4 In a somewhat confusing contradiction to Kant’s above-cited passage, on the “disappearance” of space, Kant also claims, in a preceding passage, that this disappearance is impossible because space is a priori: “We can never imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space.” However, he goes on to say that one can imagine a space devoid of objects, that is, “empty” space: “though we may easily enough think that no objects are found in it” (3). For the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to this more common-sensical perception, of empty space as space devoid of things or people in it – this then only leaves the question of form, of what delineates such a space (e.g. the walls of an empty room, the shape of an empty vessel, etc.). The question of whether “space,” in and of itself, can be said to exist is a question for quantum physics. See for example Peter Mittelstaedt, “The Constitution of the Object in Kant’s Philosophy and in Modern Physics.” 5 Fluxus emerged in the 1960s, informed by earlier international avant-garde movements, such as Surrealism. It can be connected to other 1960s political art movements, such as the Situationists. Also see Jaquelynn Baas, ed., Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life.

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to uphold traditional Western subject/object distinctions on the basis of fixed spatial configurations and structures. According to David Spurr, “the study of the relations between architecture and literature needs to go beyond mere analogy” (5) because, in the context of modernity, “the inner space of the subject [is no longer] sovereign” (60). In that sense, Tawada’s texts open up space to rethink conventional categories. Her experimental avant-garde writings expand the definition of what is “human” by imbuing architectural structures with life as they seek to eradicate spatial, linguistic, national or any other kind of boundaries. After all, spirits occupy liminal spaces not only in traditional Japanese cultural productions like Noh theater – where actors must stomp the ground to clear a passageway to the stage from resident ghosts before the performance is free to begin – but also in the paradigmatic “nonspaces” of supermodernity defined by Marc Augé: the airports, hospitals and refugee camps in which anonymous humans lead transitory existences, only to get trapped in place as the migrants in Tawada’s texts often do. (The author herself has what Germans call a Migrationshintergrund or “migration background.”) From a postmodern point of view, the spirits Tawada conjures up emblematize paradigmatic spaces of modernity, such as the Vietcong tunnels and German basements used as air raid shelters. Her texts decenter the “human” in light of the experience of World War II – where Germany and Japan were, in fact, aggressors – and its aftermath, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Preoccupied with the ghosts of history to which Benjamin obliquely refers, Tawada’s spectral presences inhabit the liminal, underground territories that conjure up the dark underside of the Enlightenment. No longer just in terms of analogy or metaphor, her texts destabilize the human subject altogether, revealing it to be the self-styled subject of language, of discourse and of (his)tory.

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I Tawada’s poetics focus on the Zen Buddhist concept ma  – the empty, “in-between” space – as a way of challenging European rationalism.6 The Kanji character for ma signifies “space in-between” or “interval”; it is the same sign used for the word ken, “architecture.” The ma sign consists of a combination of symbols: one for “gate” (two vertical lines with horizontal tops representing portals that make up the gate) and the other for “sun” (the symbol for which appears, literally, “embedded” in the empty space between the portals). Tawada’s deliberate attempt to erase the “subject” is connected to the way she represents space. In what follows, I focus on three examples from Tawada’s prose, all of them connected to the architectural site of the “underground” that, as I demonstrate, evokes the “in-between” space ma. There, humans have no fixed identity, they become like spirits. The transitory nature of what I would call a ghostly existence has been lauded by some critics who have focused primarily on the freedom of movement in Tawada.7 As Leslie Adelson has observed, Tawada criticism “is a bit tipsy, too, from so much – admittedly necessary – talk of her writing project as a transformative one” (166). In fact, I find that Tawada often conveys a sense of being “fixed” in place, especially in the case of the migrants who figure prominently in her writing. She does not uncritically celebrate the kind of cosmopolitanism she herself engages in when traveling freely around the globe (though the itinerary of her lecture schedule reads like a travel agent’s nightmare). Rather, 6 Tawada herself defines this concept and its specific relevance to her poetics in her essay “Ma and Mu,” Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. 7 Petra Fachinger sees Tawada in terms of reviving the genre of the “picaresque” in “Postcolonial/Postcommunist Picaresque and the Logic of ‘trans’ in Yoko Tawada’s Das nackte Auge.” And Yasmine Yildiz sees her as creating a “new transnational imaginary” in “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Toward a Transnational Imaginary.” These approaches are important in understanding Tawada as an author writing beyond the immediate German context in which she is recognized; and of drawing attention to the fact that migration is not, by definition, a negative state of being. Tawada celebrates the freedom to travel and cross boundaries, but she also draws attention to the political and institutional structures that impede this freedom.

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she seems aware that movement is a privilege accorded to only a select few. For this reason, I would argue that, paradoxically, Tawada works with concepts associated with movement precisely in order to show how nomadic characters can become “fixed” in place. At least to me, this is a form of critique that would include the spatial rather than focusing exclusively on the transitory.8 And unlike Sebald’s travel writing, which tends to be slow and meandering (the narrator, emulating the pace of the nineteenth century, walks or takes the train), Tawada refers to a fast-paced technological world of airline travel and high-speed bullet trains vis-à-vis ancient Japanese traditions. Still, in both Western and non-Western mythologies, the space most conducive to harboring spirits is underground. It is the metaphorical space for things unsaid, for that which is liminal or “in-between” (ma) and that which is dark and mysterious. In the West, at least, cellars are such spaces ( Japanese buildings, because of earthquakes, tend not to have cellars). The underground is of particular consequence for Tawada, as I will show. Her reorganization of conventional topographies questions the principles of verticality and horizontality that are operative in construction above ground. Tawada focuses on an, as of yet, undefined space that escapes structural hierarchy and definition. Benjamin asks what “foundations” are “laid bare” when “the house” is “under assault.” He evokes bombing and war, suggesting things that are interred (e.g. bodies). In her Japanese story “In Front of Tran Tien Bridge” (2000), Tawada writes about an underground space excavated by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In her novella The Bath, also written in Japanese (1993), she writes about a deserted cellar in Hamburg, Germany, a city that was bombed during World War II. Another example, which includes racism as part of an East–West cultural encounter, comes from her novel Das nackte Auge [The Naked Eye] (2004), about a North Vietnamese woman who ends up, via East Berlin, in a basement in Paris. In 8 Also see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience: “Spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act. […] In the act of moving, space and its attributes are directly experienced. [Therefore space] is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world” (52).

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these examples, the reader meets the ghosts of history in both Europe and Asia, of what Benjamin calls the “things that were interred and sacrificed.” According to Robin Tierney, Tawada likes “the possibility of occupying a cavernous, but exit-able, space [and] vessels from which things can be expelled or into which things can be crammed” (106). This preoccupation with “containers” (reminiscent of Sebald, yet different in this context) extends from the human body outwards: Tawada writes about women who find themselves in cellars or tunnels, confined and yet oddly comforted as well.9 Here, they encounter the ghosts of the past in the form of spirits, so that what has been repressed by history can come to the fore. Thus, although she has been praised for writing about movement in positive terms, and may also be seen as a proponent of womb fantasies,10 Michiko Tanigawa finds that Tawada’s “in-between” conjures up a darker, more haunting space: To locate oneself in between two languages and two cultures means to have access to both, but also to be in danger of being torn apart. Tawada’s creative use of language derives from this dangerous place. She once said that she does not conduct linguistic experiments just for fun, to play around, but because her positive playfulness arises from a very pressing, negative situation. (335, my translation)

Tawada’s radical negativity avoids fixation on any one place, language or nation, and this negative space of the “in-between” no longer refers to any specific place. It is both linguistic and architectural or, as Tanigawa puts it, Tawada “positions herself at the border between two languages and cultures [because] she wants to measure the width and depth of the liminal spaces between two languages” (355). Clearly, the human body is part of this: in my first example, from “In Front of Tran Tien Bridge,” Tawada describes the claustrophobic experience of a Japanese tourist, Kazuko, when visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels, a complex of passages dug by the Vietcong to serve as living quarters. Kazuko begins by walking stooped over and ends up crawling:

9 Whereas Sebald, as confirmed by Finch, focuses on male characters, Tawada emphasizes female characters and imagery. 10 Also see my 2013 book by the same title, Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art.

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When the light disappeared, the darkness would worm its way deeper into her cheeks with every inch. […] Even if there was room enough to get through, with the sheer closeness pressing down on her spine as her field of vision closed like a wilting flower, where would her body go? Something inside her crumbled and she would soon unleash a wail as if possessed by some spirit. […] A force not her own was losing control, filling her yet utterly alien to her, making her want to scream. […] A dampness that was neither the tunnel wall nor her own skin clung to her like a fishnet and she could no longer move. […] this clammy web she was caught in could not be real; if she chanted a magic spell it would surely disappear. But nothing came to mind. Not even “dark”. (85–6)

Kazuko merges with the subterranean environment and there is the suggestion of Benjamin’s “magic incantation” to accompany this experience. The passage concludes with the inability to find the right utterance. Then, however, magically, the words emerge: “two words materialized: ‘all right.’ ALL RIGHT. The words were suddenly on her tongue then reached out to enshroud her shoulders and belly until her whole body was covered and the fishnet melted and disappeared. She climbed out of the tunnel” (87). Language is what saves Kazuko and enables the narrator to put things in perspective when concluding: “More bombs were used in Vietnam than in World War II” (87). It is how Tawada establishes a link between two chronologically distant wars through the common image of bombing and seeking shelter underground, and between Kazuko’s “crumbling” body and its surrounding space. As with the relationship connecting history, space and the human body in Sebald, Tawada also merges geographical and physical imagery from the iconography of both East Asia and Germany, as I will continue to demonstrate.

II In my second example, from Tawada’s 1993 novella The Bath, the firstperson narrator is a Japanese translator living in Hamburg, Germany, where Tawada lived before she moved to Berlin. The city was firebombed in 1943, and there are references to both fire and seeking shelter in a cellar.

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The implicit iconography of burnt bodies can be linked, indirectly, to the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Again, Tawada establishes a connection across geographical boundaries and histories to the point of merging them. Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenoçak has written that it is difficult to come to Germany as an immigrant because one is always forced to confront a history that is not one’s own – that of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Tawada, however, is able to create a shared frame of reference that encompasses German history as well as the devastating consequences of the atomic bomb that have shaped so much of Japanese postwar consciousness.11 Reading her decentered writings, a “hierarchy of suffering” with respect to “other” nations is no longer at issue – at least not in the way it is in Sebald’s more “German” writing – because both histories are equally relevant. The more direct link, of course, is that both nations were the aggressors during World War II. Linda Koiran has pointed out that Japan uses the bombing of Hiroshima for discourses about victimization in the same way that Germans have emphasized their own victimization in the firebombings of the cities of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne: to alleviate the sense of guilt that attaches to being a nation of perpetrators.12 However, whereas Germans have been obsessed with Vergangenheitsbewältigung [working through the past], Japan, according to Koiran, has kept silent in regard to its own historical crimes. As far as Tawada is concerned, what has attracted her to living in Germany is the possibility of feeling less guilty, as she points out ironically: “In Amerika oder in Drittländern werde ich oft mit Skepsis darauf angesprochen, warum ich nach Deutschland gegangen sei, als sei die Kombination Japan-Deutschland sehr verdächtig. Das ist sehr unangenehm. In Deutschland passiert mir das natürlich nicht” [In America or other countries, I’m often asked skeptically why I went to live 11 See for example Tawada’s engagement with the Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan, as discussed by John Namjun Kim in “Writing the Cleft: Tawada Translates Celan.” 12 For an immediate postwar depiction of the Hamburg firebombings, where German victimization is portrayed melodramatically, see Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang (1948). Recent debates were triggered by Jörg Friedrich’s volume of photographs, Brandstätten (2003) which, disturbingly, likens air raid shelters to gas chambers. For more information, see Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern?

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in Germany, as if that combination, Japan-Germany, were particularly suspicious. This is very unpleasant. In Germany, of course, this doesn’t happen to me] (335; my translation).13 Again, two culturally different nations are merged to make a separation, perhaps more forcefully, between victims and aggressors (in this instance, both nations being the latter). The Bath includes vague references to both German and Japanese histories but is otherwise fantastic, incorporating elements of fairy tales and folklore, including the supernatural. This seems better suited to bring home the uncanny experience of what lies buried underneath – it “haunts” more than direct descriptions of historical fact. The story takes place in Hamburg, where the narrator meets a woman who leads her into an unfinished “basement apartment in an old gray building whose windows had iron bars like a prison. The woman went down the pitch-black stairway in front of me […] groped for matches and lit a candle. The outlines of a chair and a table appeared against the darkness” (21). This underground space – more like a storage cellar than the souterrain of which Benjamin speaks – is inhabited by the strange woman, as well as by a horde of rats. The narrator is forced to stay there with the rats, and her tongue is torn out by the woman: “So this is what it feels like to die, I thought, and suddenly I was terrified and tried to scream, but a big hand covered my mouth. […] The woman showed me what she held in her hand. It was my tongue” (26). As in the Vietcong tunnels, a scream is stifled and the subject is threatened with extinction, as if “interred.” Language, and the ability to have a voice, are always essential in Tawada’s texts. Her body is mutilated in a space that resembles a human habitat (it contains stairs, a chair and a table) but only a ghost lives there. The narrator escapes the basement but returns the next day. To her surprise, it looks as if no one is living there, but when she returns again at night, the ghost is back. The nightmare continues to exist underground, even if one departs from it.14 As the narrator learns from a neighbor, it is 13 The statement is from an interview with Tawada cited by Linda Koiran, “Schattenloses Schreiben im Unterwegs? Suche nach Vergangenheitsspuren in den deutschsprachigen Texten von Yoko Tawada,” in Christine Ivanovic, ed., Yoko Tawada: Poetik der Transformation. 14 This scenario of suspended temporality resembles the flogging scene in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The protagonist returns the following morning, hoping that his nightmare

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the ghost of a suicide: “ ‘What happened to this place?’ – ‘Here? A month ago, a woman committed suicide, burnt herself to death, and it’s just been left like that” (32). Tawada works with the traditional Japanese belief that suicides continue to haunt places long after their death, and she establishes a link between the narrator and this ghost, who becomes her alter ego. When she revisits the place at night to retrieve her tongue and the ghost reappears, one of the rats has taken on the face of the ghost. The narrator then discovers that her own face resembles that of the ghost, and also of the rat. When she flies back home to Tokyo, she suddenly realizes that it is the face of her pet rat, Kuma, which she had kept as a child, so that she herself now has the face of this rat. Through this chain of uncanny imagery emerging from the cellar, Tawada connects Germany and Japan, and she introduces doubt within the reader as to the substance of the human body, which metamorphoses into a ghost when entering the liminal space of the cave-like, rat-infested cellar.

III My third example is even more puzzling: Tawada’s 2004 novel The Naked Eye works with visual imagery by referring to the ghostly medium of film. The story again refers to Vietnam, this time in relation to communism. A  North Vietnamese woman comes to East Berlin, gets abducted by a West German man, and ends up as an illegal immigrant in Paris where she is seduced by the movies. In an interview with Bettina Brandt, Tawada – who says she grew up in a Marxist family15 – states that “Vietnam is an interesting scene from which to observe the last one hundred years of history. […] In my eyes, the Vietnam War is not over, and colonialism in Southeast Asia is not over either. I  don’t have the impression that has disappeared, but when he opens the door, he finds the same horrible scene, frozen in time – it changes only when he participates in it. 15 She told me this in a personal conversation at Queens College, on December 14, 2004, when we invited her to give a lecture for my women’s studies class.

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communism, as a topic, has been resolved” (41). Still, the reader might wonder, why not write about Japan? Perhaps because, as Koiran noted, Japan’s war crimes against other Asian nations are not publicly discussed, so it may be difficult for Tawada to engage with them. According to Koiran, very few Japanese authors have written about events like the 1937 Nanjing massacre, the medical experiments conducted on Korean and Chinese inmates of concentration camps in Manchuria, and the sexual enslavement of Korean and Philippine women by the Japanese army; these have not been part of public discourse in Japan. Publically, the country has perceived itself primarily as a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sense of defeat that existed among the populations of both Germany and Japan after World War II is still prevalent in Japan. Conversely Vietnam, with its long history of oppression and warfare, first by the French, then by the Americans, is an example of an Asian country victimized by the West. The Naked Eye draws correlations between North Vietnam and East Germany, a history relevant to Tawada’s chosen homeland, Germany, which has a sizeable population of former GDR workers from North Vietnam. The fact that this novel focuses on the encounter between an Asian and a white woman may speak to Tawada’s own experiences as a Japanese woman living in Western Europe.16 The Naked Eye features an imaginary relationship between Catherine Deneuve, the iconographic blond, blueeyed French movie star, and a nameless North Vietnamese woman, who finds comfort in the dark space of the movie theater where she falls in love with Deneuve’s image. The emphasis on this image refers to the ghost-like medium of film, and it becomes emblematic to the story itself: the reader finds out at the end that the Vietnamese woman herself is not actually “alive.” The Naked Eye represents the Vietnamese woman as someone seduced by but unable to deal with Western capitalism, and so ends up seduced by the movies: she travels to East Berlin, is abducted by a West German man, and ends up living in a basement in Paris, where she discovers the movies. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that her life is itself a movie 16 The comparative absence of discourses on race in European literature and culture is identified by Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others.

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(all the chapters are titled after, and often describe scenes from, films with Deneuve). As in The Bath, the basement is described as confining, but here the dreamlike encounter with spirits becomes connected to the movies: Im Kellerraum war der Lichtschalter defekt, aber durch das vergitterte Fenster konnte man etwas Licht sehen, das die Pflastersteine reflektierten. […] Tagsüber lief ich in der Stadt herum, um nicht hinter den Gittern sitzen zu müssen. […] Um von der ruhelosen Strasse wegzukommen, flüchtete ich ins Kino. Dort durfte man für wenig Eintritt lange verweilen. […] In dem Kino war es zwar dunkler als in dem Keller, aber es hatte etwas Beruhigendes. (47–51) In the basement room the light switch was broken, but through the barred window one could see a little light reflecting off the cobblestones. […] During the day I walked around the city so as not to have to sit behind bars. […] To escape the agitation of the streets, I sought refuge in movie theaters. One could linger here for hours for little money. […] The movie theater was even darker than the basement, though there was something reassuring about the space. (51–5)

In this space, the unidentified narrator-protagonist, as if in spite of her impossible situation (she has no visa and does not speak the language), makes herself comfortable. What is striking here, as in Sebald’s Austerlitz, is the way Tawada pursues the idea of an alter ego, the uncanny doubling associated with two female figures. The Vietnamese woman addresses Deneuve as her substitute: “Es gab keine Frau mehr, die ‘ich’ hiess. Denn Sie waren für mich die einzige Frau, mich gab es also nicht” (54) [There was no longer any woman whose name was “I.” As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist (59)]. Deneuve becomes her savior, but also the figure that erases her identity. When the Vietnamese woman watches the film Indochine, she describes the tango scene between Deneuve, who plays Eliane, an adoptive mother in colonial Vietnam, and her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille. The Vietnamese spectator is puzzled:  “Das Mädchen sieht jemandem sehr ähnlich. Ich kann es nicht glauben, aber es ähnelt mir” (85) [The girl bears a strong resemblance to someone. I can hardly believe my eyes, but the girl resembles me (98)]. She describes their intimate relationship:  “Eliane und das vietnamesische Mädchen […] tanzen zusammen Tango im Wohnzimmer. In der süsslich schwankenden Melodie sind sie miteinander verbunden

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wie Verliebte” (85) [Eliane and the Vietnamese girl […] dance the tango together in their living room. The sweet undulating melody binds them together like lovers (99)]. One woman transforms into the other, yet they do not quite become one: the narrator addresses Deneuve in the formal register – Sie – so it is about a relationship, not identification.17 Deneuve blends into the Vietnamese landscape in a distinctly French way, through fashion: Sie tragen ein modernes Kleid, dessen Schnitt wahrscheinlich von dem traditionellen vietnamesischen Kleid “ao dai” beeinflusst ist. Die gerade Linie des schmalen Kleides verdeckt Ihre reifen, weiblichen Körperlinien, und Ihre Gestalt verwandelt sich in die eines Bambus […] Auf diese Weise versuchen Sie, sich an die südostasiatische Landschaft anzupassen. (87) You are wearing a modern dress that resembles a traditional Vietnamese áo dài. The straight lines of the narrow dress camouflage your shapely, feminine contours, giving you a figure like bamboo. […] This is your way of adapting to the Southeast Asian landscape. (101)

Deneuve becomes “Asian” in the Vietnamese woman’s eyes, as she herself disappears:  “Nur in der Dunkelheit des Cinéma war ich geschützt vor den Blicken der anderen. Mein Cinéma war eine Ma, sie packte mich ein in ihre Schleimhaut. Sie schützte mich vor der Sonne, der Macht der Sichtbarkeit” (146) [Only in the darkness of the movie theater was I protected from the eyes of others. My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility (166)]. Ma here connotes both the Zen concept of “in-between” and the German/English/French maternal syllable, as suggested by “mucous membranes.” As in the Cu Chi Tunnels, corporeality is disintegrating: “[I]‌ch schlief im Keller und lebte in den Kinotheatern […]. Ich hatte keine Angst mehr, allein im Keller zu sein, denn meine Haut bekam eine ähnliche Farbe wie die Kellerwände” (146) [I went on sleeping in the basement and living in the movie theaters […]. It no longer frightened me to be alone in the basement since my skin was taking on a color similar 17 The second-person German formal address Sie, akin to the Japanese anata, differs from its informal Du. This is a distinction that cannot be translated into English, which knows only a single form of second-person address: “you.”

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to its walls (175–6)]. The question of race, or skin, is “resolved,” as the Vietnamese woman dissolves into the darkness she inhabits. She haunts the novel like a spirit, and, at the end of the story, she is no longer to be found. Tawada’s “subject” has left the scene and, at the same time, what remains are the spaces inhabited by spirits: the dark, cavernous movie theater, the Parisian basement apartment, the cellar in Hamburg, and the Vietcong tunnel.

IV In the spirit of Fluxus, Tawada’s writings create a universe in which nothing is fixed; consequently, nothing can be fully understood or controlled. The destabilization that occurs through linguistic experimentation can be understood as a restructuring of “space,” in the sense that subject-object boundaries are rearranged to no longer separate the “human” from its surroundings. As I have attempted to show, Tawada’s texts evoke a negation of (human) identity in favor of the “in-between” space called ma. According to Gabriele Eichmanns, Westerners tend to overuse the concept of “emptiness” to mystify Japanese culture, yet she also affirms that emptiness does form “an essential component of Japanese philosophy” (241). Still, as Sigrid Weigel points out, it would be reductive to approach Tawada in terms of Buddhist philosophy simply because she is from Japan – my own belief is that she should be seen as a transnational artist – and yet Tawada does draw attention to this aspect of herself. As an author, she deliberately occupies the “in-between” space of both countries. Having come to Germany at age 22, she chose to write in both languages, and she continues to publish in both countries, with the aim to deconstruct the reader’s sense of mastery: scholars in Japan discuss her work in Japanese and scholars in Germany do so in German – neither can feel in control of the rapidly emerging bodies of secondary literature in the other’s place. I would agree with Weigel that the empty, in-between space in Tawada

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may not represent an “Asian” way of thinking but rather the “Negation einer Europa-Ontologie” [negation of a European ontology] (21).18 As John Namjun Kim argues, Tawada’s writing makes it possible to explicitly critique Western philosophical discourses such as Kant’s. Kim explains that, since the words and concepts for “I” and “self ” are rendered completely separately in Japanese, and have very different connotations, one cannot identify a coherent “subject” in the same way Kant would, based on his use of the German language. Kim observes about Tawada’s The Bath that the narrating “I” differs, at each moment, from itself, to the degree that the subject becomes vastly discontinuous, in effect a “liar” (94) with respect to her identity. She has none, but takes on a series of different ones: the reader does not know whether the woman who tells the story is a student, a translator, a circus performer, a rat or a fish because she undergoes so many transformations. Kim argues that the discussion of what an “I” is supposed to be relates back to Kant’s metaphysics insofar as the “I” in Tawada constantly reflects back upon itself, yet in Tawada’s version, the “I” by definition remains temporal, without substance or position, whereas Kant relies on a spatial conception of the “self ” that would be, by definition, fixed. Kim concludes, on linguistic grounds, that Kant could have “learned something from Tawada” (96). In this spirit, let me return to Kant’s conception of space, which fixes the subject and does not leave room for the kind of “emptiness” Tawada introduces in her writing. Unlike Kant’s human figure, who confidently stands at the center of the universe to map his surroundings, Tawada decenters the “subject” to establish fluid boundaries between the living and the dead; and between humans and the objects and environments that surround them. Like Sebald, she undoes boundaries, but unlike him, she de-emphasizes historical memory. It may be the changing face of Europe that is reflected in this transnational author, who uses language to restructure conventional hierarchies of subject-object relations in architectural and poetic terms – and it may be, as Benjamin suggests, that when the 18 Tawada herself refuses to be typed as “Asian,” as evident from her lecture “Asia, Fantasia, Germasia” at the Asian-German Studies Conference at Humboldt University in Berlin, on June 27, 2014.

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“house [is] under assault,” what was once buried below is now visible in the space that has opened up. To return to my initial point about European intersections with Asia, I now analyze one of Tawada’s experimental, bilingual poems as constituting, in and of itself, a form of “architecture.” The disintegration of linguistic boundaries I identify in this poem may be associated with the image of present-day Europe, where borders are shifting, national identities are decentered, and geographic and political structures are being reconstituted – one need only glance at Europe’s changing demographics, with its rapidly shifting patterns of migration, to recognize the significance of Tawada as a European author. As I have shown, Tawada’s prose refers to underground spaces, yet this poem also performs disintegration through the very way it which it is constructed. One of Tawada’s most radically experimental works, it is a bilingual poem about a moon that escapes from the sky, a story I discuss in more detail below. Formally speaking, Tawada rearranges the layered spaces that constitute the semantic grid through which we read, and thus raises the question how human subjects may reconstitute themselves through language. If meaning depends on linguistic “architecture” (i.e. the semantic grid), the unknown “foundation” to which Benjamin refers may reveal itself, paradoxically, only when the structure has come undone. Basements, though not normally part of a building’s design other than providing the foundation, are part of vertically organized construction. This particular poem by Tawada, on the other hand, undoes the hierarchical organization of space altogether. She takes the reader directly to the negative “inbetween” space ma, where a “foundation” in any traditional sense can no longer be said to exist. Ma, as I have explained, refers to “emptiness.” As Sigrid Weigel has pointed out, it would be reductive to approach Tawada in terms of Buddhist esthetics just because she is from Japan – indeed, as I have explained, she can be seen as an international artist. Still, Tawada draws attention to the fact that she works in both Japanese and German, and it would be equally reductive to avoid the fact that she is not originally from Europe – having grown up in Japan has had an impact on her writings in German. Tawada came to Germany at age 22, and she writes in German that bears the traces

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of her native Japanese, but is also a new language of her own making.19 Compared to Sebald, Tawada uses language itself as a way of undoing boundaries between Asia and the West. Tawada publishes in both Germany and Japan with the aim to deconstruct the reader’s sense of linguistic mastery: scholars in Japan discuss her work in Japanese and scholars in Germany do so in German – but neither can feel fully in control of the rapidly emerging bodies of secondary literature in both countries (with the exception of bilingual scholars, who still must choose one language for their publications). An example of the degree of linguistic experimentation is the poem I now cite, “Die Flucht des Monds,” which she decided to restore into Japanese. It was first published in a bilingual edition with the German translation by Peter Pörtner, in the 1998 volume with the suggestive title Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts [Only where you are there is nothing].20 Tawada subsequently, in 2003, created a CD with jazz musician Aki Takase that included her reading of both versions of the poem. And then, in 2010, she created this composite to striking visual effect:

19 Tawada does not limit herself to Germany and Japan. She has become a “poster child” for the emerging discipline of Asian-German Studies (see Ha’s edited volume Vietnamesische Deutsche; Shen and Rosenstock, eds., Beyond Alterity; and Fuechtner and Rhiel, eds., Imagining Germany Imagining Asia). Considering that the largest group of Asian immigrants to Germany is not Japanese but Vietnamese (followed by Korean and Chinese), her writings about Vietnam may be seen as a form of panAsian solidarity. 20 German version:  “Die Flucht des Monds : Ich sang in der Toilette da kam der Mond herangerollt / nackt / auf einem Fahrrad / Er hatte den Weg mitten durch den Metaphernpark genommen / um mich zu treffen / Draußen die Straße entlang / spazierte zähneputzend eine schöne Frau / Auf der Bank im Park / trank ein Mann in Umstandskleidung Apfelsaft / Am Ende eines Jahrhunderts ist Gesundheit eben angesagt / Im Himmel klafft ein Loch / Die mondgestaltige Angst der mondgestaltige Kummer sind weg / Alles Gestaltige flattert munter / um das Loch herum / Die Falte des Abgrunds glättet sich / Auf der blanken Oberfläche der Sorge treten die Dichter auf Schlittschuhen an / Mond – meiner – neben mir.”

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Chapter 2 Die 逃走 des 月s 我歌 auf der 厠 da 来 der 月 herange転t 裸 auf einem 自転車 彼 hatte den道 mitten 通 den 暗喩公園 ge選 um 我 zu 会 戸外 die 道 entlang 散歩e 歯磨end eine 美女 auf der 長椅子 im 公園 飲 ein 男 in 妊婦服 林檎汁 Am 末 eines 世紀s ist die 健康 eben 適 Im 天 穿 ein 穴 Die 月的不安 Der 月的苦悩 sind 去 全「月」飛翔 活発 um das 穴 herum Die 皺 des 深淵s 平 Auf der 光滑en 表面 der 苦悩 登場 die 詩人 auf 氷靴 an 月 我的 neben我

Clearly, it is impossible to “read” this poem in a conventional way because one would first have to translate the other half. Visually, Tawada depicts a disintegration of the semantic grid: the “layered space” that constitutes language is compromised by shifts from one language to the other, and this represents a destabilizing move. The semantic structure remains intact if one performs the various maneuvers of translation, but due to the contrasting shapes of the Western alphabet and the Japanese characters, the reader is torn between “reading” the poem and just “looking” at it. The ensuing linguistic disorientation may be indicative of a sense of displacement akin to that which occurs in the movement of migration, from one geographical space to another. As an author who chose to immigrate to Europe, Tawada embraces disorientation and, at the same time, draws attention to the precarious nature of boundaries, both linguistic and geographic. If one compares the poem to a map (e.g. of Europe) its “borders”

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cannot be clearly defined, and no coherent pattern for interpretation can emerge. In this sense, Tawada’s poem abolishes the “subject” as a fixed entity whose identity is normally defined by linguistic, cultural and political boundaries. Grammatically, the poem is based on nouns in Japanese, and articles and prepositions in German. If one focuses on either sign system, one cannot understand the poem but knowing, as a German reader, that neben means “next to” (i.e. not “and” or “above”) establishes a spatial structure against which the nouns can be read.21 This structure, where the Kanji letters literally “inhabit” a German syntax, may be seen as a pun on “immigration” (Ein-wanderung), where the language of one group is introduced into the space of another. Not only are the Japanese signs embedded in the German syntax, the poem has to be read horizontally, from left to right, as in the Roman alphabet – not vertically, from right to left, as in Japanese. Thus while it was composed in the author’s native language, Japanese, the translation into German dictates its current structure. Given that it is published in a German volume in Germany, the poem would appear to prioritize German. Regardless, neither a Japanese reader who does not know German, nor a German reader who does not know Japanese, can understand this poem. Visually, the languages take up roughly an equal amount of space. And they are, literally, located next to one another – undoing the kind of hierarchy an “embedded” structure might suggest (where something is contained by something else that would then be, by definition, larger). I would argue that, in the case of this poem, the opposition container/contained does not hold, because the “content” is rendered deliberately incomprehensible – unless, that is, one traces the poem’s process of becoming by returning to the two initial, separate versions, and this then introduces a third, temporal dimension. In that case, one might want to include the spoken versions on the CD in comparison to the written versions on the page, and one might find so many “dimensions” of reading that the absence of one definitive, overriding version would become all the more obvious. In other words, like Sebald, Tawada plays with “scale” to alter dimensions. 21 I am indebted to Yixu Lü for this observation, when she responded to my analysis of this poem at the 2015 Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik in Shanghai.

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I would argue that the poem’s immediate visual impact supports the idea that Japanese is equally represented, since German is based on phonetic letters, not pictorial characters. One does not have to understand the content of the poem to recognize that it represents a balanced juxtaposition between two mutually exclusive systems – neither is more powerful than the other, as in a structure supported by the tension between equally weight-carrying elements. One also does not have to know either of those systems well to recognize that they differ substantially in kind – but that they coexist within the same textual universe. As in a built structure, they coexist as elements of the same structure, so that it would be difficult to take them apart. Hence Tawada undoes the notion of one language being more powerful than another – their relationship is not about power, as they must support one another in this structure. If one thinks of a poem as a visual grid, a “space” created from a series of lines with gaps or empty spaces in between, this poem’s multidimensional state (vertical/horizontal, visual/spoken, past/present, etc.) expands the notion of a built structure by drawing on tensions between opposites to create a new pattern. Its organization makes it seem like a built environment, where a structure supports the “gaps” or spaces “in between.” At the same time, because language is always shifting and can be, at times, incomprehensible, the structure is not stable. As in buildings designed to withstand earthquakes, the poem is flexible enough to yield to different readings (it is not nonsensical), yet holds itself together – and this differs from holding as containment in Sebald. The semantic grid, however, seems to crumble, and the poem deprives the reader of a sense of linguistic mastery. One could not possibly read it (at normal speed), even if one did know both languages equally well. And yet, there is a sense of intimacy between these languages, suggesting that if one gives up the need to “master” comprehension, one can approach the “other”: Germany and Asia appear, literally, side by side. In terms of its story, the poem suggests that connection is possible across the rift of incomprehension, and at the same time, that it may never be possible to fully understand one another. Here is my rough translation from the German, just to illustrate this point:

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The Moon’s Escape I was singing in the bathroom when suddenly the moon came rolling along naked on a bicycle. He had taken the path that goes straight through the park of metaphors to meet me. Outside in the street a beautiful woman went for a walk while brushing her teeth. On a park bench a man in maternity clothes drank pomegranate juice. At the end of a century, one’s health is important. There is a gaping hole in the sky. Moon-shaped fear moon-shaped grief are gone. Anything that has a shape is fluttering about joyfully around the hole. The crease of the abyss is smoothing itself. The poets are preparing to skate on sorrow’s shiny surface. Moon – mine – next to me.

The poem tells of an anthropomorphized moon who escapes from the sky on a bicycle, to join the nameless speaker (who uses the personal pronoun “I”). The absence of the celestial body leaves a hole in the sky and, impossibly, its dimensions are shrunk to the same size as those of the human “I.” In the end, there is a sense of intimacy – the moon and his/her lover might start out as distant as the moon from the earth, but they end up “next to” each other. In this love story, the poet refers to urban spaces (apartment, bicycle, park, etc.) but also ancient Chinese folklore. Pomegranates are traditional fare for the mid-autumn moon festival, and the poem alludes to the story of Chang’E, wife of an emperor who escaped to the moon after stealing the emperor’s immortality potion, as well as Wu Gang, a Sisyphus figure condemned by the Jade Emperor to forever cut the Katsura tree because he wanted to become immortal – the emperor planted the tree on the

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moon and these are the “creases” we see on its surface. The last line, about the poets who skate on the moon’s surface, suggests an image of writing that refers to the topography of Europe, where multilingual poets like Tawada increasingly leave their marks. In that sense, the poem “contains” an active process of change: a language in perpetual flux from one structure into another, layered and forever shifting. In terms of its “content,” it stages an encounter between the ancient and the modern, East and West, and humans and nature – and it renders the apparent opposition between those categories suspect. Compared to Sebald, Tawada introduces an even more radical rewriting of conventional ways of seeing and writing. As I have tried to show in this dialogically conceived juxtaposition of two contemporary European authors, both create intersections between Germany and Asia. However, Tawada’s insistence on an “in-between” space, where neither place or language is hierarchically privileged, moves one step further in undoing constraints associated with national historical narratives. At the same time, both of these approaches occur outside situations of conflict, where lines would be drawn more forcefully. The next part consists of my second dialogic consideration of how space is translated and conceptualized, this time focusing on the relationship between (East and West) Germany and Vietnam (during and after the so-called American War). The authors I have selected are Peter Weiss (1916–86) who wrote the documentary play Discourse on Vietnam in 1967, and North Vietnamese author Pham Thi Hoài (b. 1960), who lives in Berlin and has published a novel, Die Kristallbotin (1993), a selection of short stories, Sonntagsmenü (2012), and a series of commentaries on the Vietnam War. Their juxtaposition further tests my hypothesis of an already existing Asian-German “dialogue.”

Part II

Convergences

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From Auschwitz to Vietnam: Peter Weiss’s Viet Nam Diskurs and Notizen zum kulturellen Leben der Demokratischen Republik Viet Nam

Internationally renowned playwright Peter Weiss (1916–82), in his autobiography, Fluchtpunkt (1962), refers to a fundamental sense of Ortlosigkeit [lack of place]. Born Peter Ulrich Weiss in Nowawes, near Berlin, his father, Jenö (in German: Eugen), had been born in Hungary, into a Jewish family. Jenö had worked in the textile industry and married Weiss’s mother Frieda, an actress, in Berlin, in 1915.1 She had been baptized a Protestant and although they had a Jewish wedding ceremony, Jenö’s family disapproved of their marriage: according to Jewish law, the maternal line determines the identity of a couple’s offspring, and this caused a rift between Jenö and his family. He converted to his wife’s religion and they raised their son, Peter, as Christian. Jenö Weiss only revealed his Jewish identity to his son in 1935, a year after the family had emigrated to England in escape from the Nazis. Peter Weiss then realized he would have been considered a Halbjude [halfJew] according to the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws – and might have been deported and murdered in an extermination camp. At the same time, he felt that, had he remained in Germany not knowing of this paternal Jewish line, he would have simply participated in anti-Semitic persecution, like all the other Germans he had grown up with. One can only speculate to what extent these conflicting identities contributed to Weiss’s intense, life-long sense of Ortlosigkeit which, as I attempt to show, had a direct effect on his 1967 “Asian” play, Viet Nam Diskurs [Discourse on Vietnam]. Intended to raise consciousness and to support 1 This biographical information is based on Henning Falkenstein’s Peter Weiss. For more detail, see the biography by Robert Cohen, Peter Weiss in seiner Zeit.

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the victims of the Vietnam War, the play failed to impress its audience and this raises the question of why an author of Weiss’s fame and ability would not have been able to write a more engaging play. Perhaps, Weiss’s sense of Ortlosigkeit is what prevented him from conceiving of Vietnam as a viable place to be represented on stage. To begin with, one can imagine that moving repeatedly from country to country must have felt as if no place could ever become “home.” When in 1936 Jenö Weiss’s textile business failed to thrive in England, the family moved to Czechoslovakia, where Peter studied at the Prague Academy of Art from 1937 to 1938. Then, when the Nazis invaded in 1939, the family again had to escape, this time to Sweden. Émigrés from Germany were hardly welcome among the supposedly “neutral” Swedish. Still, Peter Weiss remained in exile in Stockholm for the remainder of his life, all the while confessing that he never felt at home there – nor anywhere else.2 Other events compounded a depression Weiss experienced over the first four decades of his life. When the family relocated to Sweden, Peter had traveled separately, via Germany, because he had a Czech passport and had come from Switzerland, where he visited Hermann Hesse, at that time his mentor. During this trip through Germany, he witnessed the 1938 pogroms (commonly referred to by the Nazi euphemism, Kristallnacht). This horror was preceded, in Prague, by the discovery that his mother had destroyed his surrealist-style paintings because she was afraid that the Nazis, about to descend upon Prague, would consider them entartet [depraved] – and that this would place her in danger ( Jenö, who was in greater danger,

2 Stockholm’s Jewish Community was founded in the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, Jewish authors and scientists escaped to Sweden because it was not occupied by Germany. The trajectory of émigrés like Weiss is documented, for example, by the exhibit Exil in Schweden, curated by Schlösser. Swedes pride themselves on having rescued Danish Jews on fishing boats in 1943, but as Asbrink shows, they were antiSemitic: “Sweden demanded that the Nazis stamp the letter J in red ink on the passports of German Jews to make it easier for the Swedish authorities to turn them away at the border. [I]‌n 1939, a rumour that the medical board was inviting Jewish doctors to Sweden triggered mass protests at its top universities, with students demanding a stop to the ‘Jewish invasion’ in order to ‘save the race’.” This probably contributed to Weiss’s never feeling at home in Sweden (also see Müssener).

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had already departed to Sweden). In his 1961 autobiography, Abschied von den Eltern, Weiss described the relationships with both of his parents as increasingly negative: his father wanted to force him to take over the bynow-lucrative textile factory, in spite of the fact that Peter was committed to becoming an artist. This negativity in Weiss’s family relationships was compounded by their earlier loss, in Berlin, of Weiss’s 12-year-old sister, Margit, who had been killed by a speeding car while playing on the curb next to the road by their house. Weiss’s early paintings (e.g. Selbstporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester, 1935), address this tragic event. In 1944, Weiss became a Swedish citizen, but he traveled back to Germany during the postwar period and thereafter – for example, as a reporter for the Swedish newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen. In his second autobiographical narrative, Fluchtpunkt (1962), Weiss described his profound sense of rootlessness or Ortlosigkeit during the years from 1940 to 1947. He had begun to write in Swedish and German; his first successful book, the experimental novella, Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers [The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman] (1952), was published in German. And he married and divorced twice before finally marrying the woman who became his life-long partner, set designer Gunilla Palmstierna, in 1952.3 Weiss turned to playwriting late in life, his formative years having been spent as a visual artist.4 His 1963 play about the French Revolution, Marat/Sade, catapulted him to fame, and was turned into an acclaimed film by British director Peter Brooks. This was followed by another groundbreaking play in 1965, The Investigation (Die Ermittlung), based on the 1963–5 Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt am Main. Written in the form of an oratorio, The Investigation was drawn from real-life testimonies by Holocaust survivors and conveys a profound sense of sorrow and loss, recounting the witnessing of torture, murder and genocide. In 1975–81, Weiss had another international success with his groundbreaking political trilogy, a roman à clef, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Die Ästhetik des Widerstands), which bore autobiographical traces and became an instant cult classic in 3 The close working relationship they shared is movingly described in her posthumous letter, “Nachdenken,” in Peter Weiss: Leben und Werk, 321–30. 4 See the catalogue to the 1980 exhibition of Weiss’s visual oeuvre at the Museum Bochum Kunstsammlung, Der Maler Peter Weiss, ed. Spielmann.

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Germany. A prolific author of plays, prose narratives and journals, Weiss became an integral part of postwar Germany’s literary canon. A lesser-known fact is that The Investigation was part of a group of plays Weiss called his “Dante-project,” which contains Discourse on Vietnam. Inspired by early modern Italian playwright Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Weiss intended to depict “hell” not just in Auschwitz but all over the world, from Angola to Cuba to Vietnam, where war took place from 1954 to 1975. Discourse on Vietnam was conceived of as “documentary theater”: it follows the 2,500-year-old history of the Vietnamese people – including their struggle against Chinese invaders and their colonization by the French – up to the point of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which escalated American involvement.5 Discourse on Vietnam has two parts, each consisting of eleven “stages” (Stadien). This structure follows that of Weiss’s oratory The Investigation, which is composed of eleven songs, each subdivided into three, thus totaling thirty-three parts. As Andreas Huyssen notes, “Weiss’s oratory parallels that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically the Inferno […]. The symbolic weight given to the number 3 in Dante reappears in The Investigation in yet another way: there are 3 representatives of the court, 9 witnesses and 18 accused” (After the Great Divide, 109). However, as described by Stefan Howald, Weiss’s plan to create an over-arching “global theater” (Welttheater) based on the Divine Comedy did not materialize: Weiss began to build an archive in June 1965, collecting information about countries ranging from Europe to Africa and Latin America and, in August 1965, decided to incorporate Vietnam, working on the Discourse on Vietnam script from February 1966 until mid-1967. Evidently, based on Howald’s reading of Weiss’s journals, the playwright was trying to connect his Vietnam material to Dante’s Inferno but eventually had to curtail this more extensive project. Discourse on Vietnam, though initially intended as part of a larger cycle associated with the Divine Comedy, ended up as an independent play. Discourse on Vietnam is preceded by another “Third World” play, about Angola, titled Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz [Song of the Lusitanian Bogeyman]. Since Weiss’s plan was to create a “global theater” (Welttheater) 5 An estimated total of 3 million Vietnamese were killed during the Vietnam War.

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about war and oppression all over the world, including South Africa, Latin America and the Congo, Discourse on Vietnam should be understood first and foremost from the vantage point of the playwright’s consciously leftist political agenda, as an expression of international solidarity during the Cold War that was meant to reach beyond the confines of European history. Looking at this play offers clues to the West German ‘68ers reaction to the Vietnam War, and to how the Left in the West conceived of conflicts in the so-called Third World in Asia.6 Discourse on Vietnam is difficult to read and was not well received; directed by Harry Buckwitz, known for directing plays by Bertolt Brecht, it opened in 1968 at the Städtische Bühnen in Frankfurt am Main, and during the postproduction discussion, its audience of antiwar protesters called it schlecht [bad]. They may have had a point: Discourse on Vietnam seems lengthy and uninspiring, a condition that is all the more irritating when one considers the superb quality of Weiss’s famous works, Marat/ Sade, The Investigation, and The Aesthetics of Resistance. Discourse on Vietnam drew attention not for its artistic merits, but for the scandal it caused: Peter Stein, the director of the Munich production, called for the cast’s postperformance collection of funds from the audience in support of the Vietcong. Although DM 500 were donated at opening night, the artistic director of the Münchner Kammerspiele objected to carrying political activism into the theater, and future collections were prohibited by the city government.7 The following evening, according to co-director Wolfgang Schwiedrzik, the audience spontaneously decided to toss another DM 500 onto the stage, and the Berlin production, at the Schaubühne, officially incorporated the call for Vietcong donations into the performance. Yet Weiss, who agreed with Stein about the Vietcong collection, was not happy with Stein’s severely edited version of his play’s script. Moreover, Stein’s set included a billboard stating: Dokumentartheater ist Scheisse [documentary 6 For a comprehensive perspective on Maoism in France and Germany, see Wolin’s The Wind from the East. 7 In Germany, cultural institutions are publically funded and thus subject to government approval. For more on the scandal around the Munich production, see Dorothea Kraus, “Alles nur Theater? Zur Politisierung von Strasse und Bühne in den 1960er Jahren.”

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Figure 2.  World Premiere of Peter Weiss’s Discourse on Vietnam at the Städtische Bühnen, Frankfurt am Main, March 20, 1968, directed by Harry Buckwitz. Photo by Günter Englert. © Mathilde Englert, Frankfurt am Main.

theater is bullshit], parodying the rather earnest, didactic genre Weiss himself had decided to work in (see Figure 2).8 Yet another production, in the East German city of Rostock, may have been better liked by Weiss (it was not edited), yet judging from the photographs reproduced in the 1987 dissertation by Roger Ellis (Peter Weiss in Exile) it appears to have been “orientalizing”: it compromised Weiss’s 8 “Documentary Theater” originated during the Enlightenment and is often associated with political activism. For Weiss’s own definition, see “Der Kampf geht weiter”: “Das reine dokumentarische Theater ist ja doch nur ein Theater, das direkt aufbaut auf dem Dokument, auf dem authentischen Material [aber bei] mir sind diese Figuren Repräsentanten von gesellschaftlichen Kräften.” Weiss evidently wanted to intellectualize the genre even further.

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minimalist, deliberately anti-exotic, stage directions by embellishing the actors with Chinese masks, asking them to perform monkey-like gestures, and added a bamboo forest to the set.9 After this, unfortunately, Discourse on Vietnam was rarely performed or discussed by anyone. As Howald notes in the context of the reception history of Weiss’s plays, there is hardly a play that is as mercilessly cast aside as Discourse on Vietnam. After its four initial productions from March–April 1968 in Frankfurt, Rostock, Munich and East Berlin, the play was hardly produced at all – and in the by now quite extensive secondary literature on Peter Weiss, there is not a single monograph about it; in works about his oeuvre, it is glossed over. (176, my translation)

So why should this play be pulled out of the proverbial dustbin of history? No matter how noble its intended message, Discourse on Vietnam falls short of being a good play.10 This failure, by an international playwright known for Marat/Sade, The Investigation, and The Aesthetics of Resistance is, however, in and of itself significant. It seems that the playwright’s own experience of Ortlosigkeit has affected his ability to represent Vietnam as a viable place (Ort) – and that for him, the very notion of “place” has, perhaps, become impossible. One might like to see Weiss as a pioneering playwright whose internationalism reaches beyond the confining, provincial atmosphere of post– World War II Germany to delve into the “hell of war” in Southeast Asia. Weiss’s play may represent a bridge between East Asia and the West in ideological terms through communism: while the history of the Vietnamese revolution is certainly different from the history of communism in other Asian countries, Weiss took pains to bridge this gap as well:11 Discourse 9 This orientalizing occured in spite of the fact that GDR had a real relationship with North Vietnam – it probably stems from older German stereotypes about Asia (see my introduction). 10 There are, however, from time to time, attempts to draw renewed attention to the play:  for example, at a 2016 exhibition about George N.  Katsiaficas’s essay “The Eros Effect” at the Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture in Stockholm, Discourse on Vietnam was staged with contemporary choreography. 11 For a history of the communist revolution in Vietnam, as opposed to other Asian countries, see Hue-Tam Ho Tai.

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on Vietnam’s lengthy actual title, to be quoted with line breaks, was designed to evoke Mao Zedong’s 1938 Über den langdauernden Krieg [On Prolonged War]: Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading Up to It as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance Against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution.12

Discourse on Vietnam was meant to be epic, portraying the long-term historical “ebb and flow” of Vietnam that resembles a recurring cycle of invasions, from ancient conflicts with China to French colonialism and culminating in the US involvement in 1954 that, as the plot slows down, takes up the play’s entire second half. Weiss’s overt anti-Americanism can be contextualized in terms of the revolutionary movement of the West German Left who, according to Quinn Slobodian, had “personal connections to foreign students and intellectuals [that] were key catalysts to West German Third World activism” (208).13 In fact, Michael Hofmann has recently interpreted Weiss as a postcolonial author, based on descriptions of the Cambodian temple Angkor Wat in The Aesthetics of Resistance. And Katja Garloff has emphasized Weiss’s decision “to stay in Stockholm and observe Germany from [a]‌distant perspective” in order to claim for him a “diasporic position.” All of these approaches contribute to the possibility of seeing Weiss as a more international author, and if one were to think of Discourse on Vietnam as an “Asian” play, it would certainly fit the bill 12 The translation is by Geoffrey Skelton. 13 On the ‘68ers in Germany, also see Koenen and Brown, who however focus less on “International Solidarity.” Slobodian suggests that West German student activists were in touch with foreign dissidents to challenge the narrative of German ‘68ers as engaged primarily with their own history – it remains debatable as to what extent ‘68er politics were really “international.” Not coincidentally, some the less dogmatic ideas among German ‘68ers, as well as the turn to Maoism, arrived by way of a European neighbor, France (see Wolin).

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of the European avant-garde, which has turned to non-Western cultures since the early twentieth century. Given that theater, as a medium, transcends linguistic boundaries – performance relies on nonverbal signifiers – Discourse on Vietnam can be grouped in the context of this international theatrical avant-garde that engages with “Asian” traditions. As an experimental play inspired by the political, avant-garde theater of Bertolt Brecht, Discourse on Vietnam breaks with the conventions of “bourgeois” psychological realism. Brecht’s revolutionary method of defamiliarizing the audience with what would otherwise seem natural (his Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect) was shaped by his interest in Peking opera, as well as his reading of ancient Chinese philosopher Mo-Tzu.14 Weiss, by his own account, was inspired by Japanese Kabuki theater and the American groups Living Theater and Bread and Puppet Theater, which radically questioned Western theatrical conventions. Wolfgang Schwiedrzik, who worked with Stein on his Munich production of Discourse on Vietnam, remembers an overall esthetics of “breaking the rules,” describing actions such as happenings, and acknowledges the influence of these American anti–Vietnam War protest theater groups on the German scene (227). Weiss’s wife, Gunilla, confirms that Weiss admired these American groups who “performed over here and Peter liked their work” (Ellis, 147). Weiss’s work is part of a theatrical avant-garde whose interest in nonWestern forms dates back to Surrealism – for example, to Antonin Artaud, who turned to Mexico for inspiration. This primitivism continued into the 1960s with practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski, who adapted rituals from numerous non-Western places such as the Caribbean.15 Weiss attempted to incorporate “Asian” and “African” elements into his theater 14 Brecht witnessed a performance by Peking opera actor Mei-Lan Fang, which inspired him to write his imaginary Asian plays (e.g. The Good Person of Szechwan). The influence of Mo-Tzu (referred to in Brecht as Me-ti) is examined by Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method. 15 For more on primitivism in the early avant-garde, see David Pan. Today’s transnational theater is represented by directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine, who worked with Cambodian Puppet performers (in Tambours sur la digne); and Peter Brooks, who works with African performers in Paris.

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in plays like Song of the Lusitanian Bogeyman, where he used puppets on stage to conjure up an uncanny environment: Through my African puppets, I want to conjure up something, something uncanny, rustling, cracking, shapeless, ghostlike, the kind of substance that lives on stage and works there effectively, as a mythological symbol of real life, in the world outside. (Rekonvaleszenz, 104, my translation)

However, Song of the Lusitanian Bogeyman and Discourse on Vietnam are also thoroughly Western plays in that they draw on the Enlightenment tradition of the “documentary” as factual.16 Weiss became inspired by the younger generation of German ‘68er student protesters, who acted in solidarity with the antiwar student protesters in France and the United States. Although US imperialism in Southeast Asia did not directly involve West Germany or West German soldiers, it became discursively linked to the East/West division of Germany because of the United States’ continued European presence after World War II, which in the context of the Cold War was intended as a strategic support against the perceived threat of communism (i.e. as in the “domino theory”).17 As a result, Auschwitz and Vietnam became equated by many German ‘68ers. They acted in response to the generation of their parents, who had lived through the Nazi era and had supported Hitler, and then welcomed American troops as their “liberators,” but had remained silent about their own role in the Shoah. Since West Germany was used to station over 100,000 US troops, with some military bases used as fueling posts for bombers sent to Vietnam, this contributed to the ‘68ers assumption that the Vietnam War was a continuation of fascism “by other means.” According to Mererid Puw Davies, the West German students’ generation who protested against the Vietnam War “displac[ed] atrocities onto a faraway place, people, and perpetrator, masking any suppressed knowledge about German perpetrators” (157). Instead of confronting their 16 Weiss was unfamiliar with Vietnamese theatrical traditions, which are described, for example by Colin Mackerras, “Theatre in Vietnam.” 17 West Germany was geographically suited as a strategic location for the US during the Cold War, which is why it was not turned into an agrarian state after WWII, as had been initially proposed by the Morgenthau Plan.

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parents directly for the crimes against humanity they had helped commit on European soil, the leftist student protesters turned to a geographically distant conflict. Still, it was a contemporary conflict, and the same movement that protested against this “occupying force,” the United States, was inspired by the American antiwar protesters who helped end the Vietnam War. Weiss’s own analogy between Auschwitz and Vietnam has deeper origins, in part because he belongs to the previous generation, that of the ‘68ers parents. His identity as a Jewish-German émigré was shaped by survivor’s guilt – as well as, perhaps, by choosing exile and citizenship in a nation (Sweden) once complicit with Nazi anti-Semitism. Weiss grew up thinking of himself as a non-Jewish German who might have become a Nazi until his father revealed his Jewish identity to him. For example, in Fluchtpunkt [Vanishing Point] (1961, 53), Weiss recalls how his father had always worn pajama bottoms when submerging himself in water to take a bath, so that his son would not see that he was circumcised. In 1964, Weiss composed an essay in response to a call for authors to write about “a place that had been particularly significant” in their lives, for a literary Atlas published in 1965. Weiss titled his essay “Meine Ortschaft” (translated as “My Place” by Roger Hillmann; the German original was reprinted in Weiss, Rapporte [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968], 113–24) and chose Auschwitz, which, based on a recent visit, had given him the eerie feeling that he had come “twenty years too late” (113). Based on the Nazis’ paternal Jewish identification, he would have likely been murdered there, which led him to express this sense of negative belonging: “It is the one place which I was destined for and which I escaped” (114). What Weiss is saying here is that, in effect, there would be no other place for him apart from this one place, which cannot, however, be an actual dwelling place because it is associated with death. Unlike Dante, who was a visitor to hell – that is, “destined” to return to the world of the living – Weiss states that he should have remained in hell and that the fact that he escaped was seen, by him, as somehow freakish, an affront against destiny itself. Logically speaking, Weiss’s statement leads the reader ad absurdum because he speaks of the one (and only) place he was meant to be, and yet it is, by definition, the exact same place to which access is barred him as long as he is alive. In what appears to be a case of classic survivor’s guilt, Weiss

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conveys this feeling of permanent displacement as no longer associated with any fantasy of “return” to an existing geographical location. This particular sense of displacement, as it is conveyed in “Meine Ortschaft,” can never be ameliorated by imagining, as in a subjective day-to-day experience of exile, a continuously existing homeland to which one might, potentially, return. Thus, whereas Dante was able to paint an imaginary picture of hell because he was just “visiting,” Weiss not only writes from the position of temporal disjunction (his “moment” has passed) but based on the fact that if he had gone there, he would not have survived to tell the tale. Due to this tragic predicament of a mistaken survival, Weiss appears to have suffered from the feeling that he did not “belong” among the living, and that his “living” was shaped merely by having escaped the place of death, not as a condition in its own right – at least not one that has a proper “place.” Sadly, it sounds as if, against all odds, the author felt that he had brazenly stolen himself away from a punishment he believed should have been meted out against him, when, in fact, the more logically intuitive understanding would be to see one’s own survival as positive. At the same time, what makes Weiss’s stated predicament artistically and intellectually significant is that by virtue of this impossible scenario, he attempts, like Dante, to creatively represent his own unique version of hell – in this case on the theatrical stage. In this artificial “place” of (mediated) representation, Weiss reconstructs the impossible structure of his personal experience of Ortlosigkeit by locating it somewhere. Theatrical space has been defined by Henri Lefebvre (in The Production of Space) as both a real existing place (the stage is constructed from building materials, e.g. wood) and a virtual space that contains representations of real existing places (as is the case with maps and architectural blueprints). Furthermore, according to Lefebvre, the stage is among the “representational” spaces of magic, sorcery and prohibition, which are associated with death, including “holy or cursed places […] associated with hidden powers and their exorcism [which] qualify as special preserves” (35). These representational spaces “tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (38) and thus “need obey no rules of consistency or cohesiveness” (41). The following year, in 1966, Weiss presented a fifteen-minute paper at a conference of the Gruppe 47 at Princeton University in 1966, entitled “I

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come out of my hiding place.” There is a sound recording of this speech, which is autobiographical and thus quite moving, as it also relates Weiss’s newly found political conviction, now in conjunction with his sense of guilt from a progressive, activist position, with phrases such as “If you don’t fight injustice, you too are guilty” and “You have to stand up for the oppressed in your writing” (Peter Weiss reading from his works – the speech was not printed, but a related article with the same title was published by Weiss in The Nation, March 30, 1967). Clearly, Weiss’s vision of himself as having escaped from the negative space of death explains his lifelong interest in Dante’s Inferno and the fact that, in plays like Discourse on Vietnam, he was trying to represent hell as a theatrical place.18 It also “marks his explicit turn to the politics of the Third World” (36) as Arlene Teraoka has noted when she addresses this interest in Dante from a feminist perspective, using the metaphor of Weiss’s apparent “rebirth” into politics through his new project of an international Welttheater. As she states with reference to Weiss’s Gespräch, where he discusses his newly found political commitment, “Vietnam” now functions as a damsel in distress as equivalent to Dante’s lost love, Beatrice, and thus places Weiss in the position of rescuer: We hear in Meine Ortschaft the immense guilt of the young Peter Weiss who had escaped his rightful “place” in Auschwitz [and] who had done nothing to save the person he loved, who had fled instead to a safety that enabled him to pursue his artistic interests. Sitting and writing somewhere in exile like Dante, Weiss realizes his ethical failure as an artist: the aesthetic isolation and all that it afforded him are bought at the price of his moral responsibility to other human beings [... which] leads to the modern Dante’s denunciation of his life and work as false and to a poetic, personal, and political rebirth. This new beginning is located in, and defines, the Purgatory of Weiss’s world theater. […] Instead of leaving the beloved Beatrice to die, Weiss’s Dante proclaims his solidarity. Specifically, for the reborn Weiss, the cause of the lost love in Auschwitz is replaced by, and regained in, the commitment to the cause of Third World revolution. (35–6)

18 The Aesthetics of Resistance is based on Dante’s Divina Commedia as well. Weiss, like Brecht, was attracted to the nightmarish fantastic paintings of Pieter Brueghel, to which his own paintings bear resemblance.

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Teraoka observes that Weiss’s political engagement through the medium of writing functions in terms of symbolic restitution, to compensate for his personal sense of loss (of homeland, of identity). “Vietnam,” she argues, becomes Weiss’s “object” of pursuit – though it is not so much an “object” as it would be a part of his own lost self: the displaced person who was not deported to Auschwitz and can therefore never be in that supposedly “rightful” place. Perhaps, Weiss saw himself as Beatrice/ Vietnam and identified with her/it rather than imaging it as “other.” What is significant about Teraoka’s reading of Discourse on Vietnam is the emphasis on “rebirth,” that is, Weiss’s conversion away from art, towards an abstract-intellectual commitment to politics. This intellectualizing of feeling may have hampered the writing of Discourse on Vietnam – Weiss, after all, did not himself feel either that he had completed this play successfully.19 He had, during this political activism period, turned away from fiction and fantasy, which he perceived as too subjective. As he stated in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau: “I no longer read novels and poems. I read theoretical texts, newspapers, and magazines” (141).20 Clearly, Weiss’s motivation to political action was precipitated by the spirit of the 1960s and the urgency of the ‘68er anti–Vietnam War protests, yet I agree with Teraoka that his writing about Vietnam originated from a

19 E.g. Rekonvaleszenz:  “Der Abschluss des Discourse on Vietnam befriedigt mich nicht” (184). Roger Ellis, in Peter Weiss in Exile, points out: “Weiss did not attempt to write any more documentary-style plays. Perhaps he recognized from their critical reception and their poor box office that they could not give his writing the immediacy and contemporary impact which initially he had desired. In the Angolan and Vietnamese dramas he had written about political conditions with which he had no personal contact and about which he possessed only an intellectual – though very thorough  – understanding. He had therefore abandoned the combination of the personal with the political which had inspired Marat/Sade” (70). 20 Manfred Müller and Wolfram Schütte, “ ‘Der Kampf geht weiter’:  FR-Gespräch mit dem Dramatiker Peter Weiss.” The leftist student movement in Germany was not interested in “art” apart from political Aktionen, such as student leader Dieter Kunzelmann’s emerging from a coffin in a white funeral gown to distribute leaflets during a 1967 demonstration – this in spite of the fact that they were influenced by the French Situationists, who connected art and politics.

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deeper struggle around the sense of Ortlosigkeit, caused by his exile.21 Weiss became a self-professed “outsider” (see his Fluchtpunkt, 37) and this begs the question: to what extent did this position as a Jewish-German refugee who had lost his “place” (Ort) in the world render Weiss unable to “translate” his political engagement into new ways of seeing “Asia”? A key for approaching this question may be found in another excerpt, from his posthumously published autobiographical text Rekonvaleszenz, where Weiss recalls childhood feelings of loss associated with moving away from his home: Often when I write […] I am concerned with restoring something lost, that may have been still present at the time my parents stood with me in front of our garden gate in Nowawes; but which already at Grünenstrasse [in Bremen], a few years later, had driven me into an ambush out of whose ivy jungle I anxiously peered, clasping my wooden gun. (165, my translation)

This passage, about the boy who clasps his “wooden gun” in the “jungle,” refers back to the 1920s, yet was written in the 1970s. In a 1968 Der Spiegel interview, Weiss had felt he needed to defend himself against Frankfurt School scholar Herbert Marcuse’s charge that he was just an armchair philosopher, politically radical without being willing to take up real arms. Indeed, this is consistent with the image of the frightened boy. As Weiss laconically stated in the interview:  “I believe I  would not be very good at finding my way around a Vietnamese jungle with a machine gun.”22 Instead, he confessed, he would rather stay home and write. In Rekonvaleszenz, he conveyed that he felt hurt by Marcuse, who “insulted me […] because I wrote about Vietnam instead of taking a machine gun and going to Indochina to fight against imperialism” (78, my translation). The grown man, Weiss, has replaced his little boy’s “wooden gun” with the writer’s pen. The tropical setting and allusions to war and genocide are evoked in more detail in a scene from The Aesthetics of Resistance, referring to a 21 This is a major difference from Dante’s Commedia, where the pursuit of Beatrice is voluntary – Weiss’s exile certainly was not. 22 Winfried Scharlau and Georg Wolff, “ ‘Amerika will den Völkermord’: Gespräch mit Peter Weiss,” Der Spiegel ( July 1968).

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childhood memory from the same period. Here, the boy looks at a diorama depicting indigenous people at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, fascinated by the exotic scenery inhabited by “dark-skinned” people: Threatened by extinction, they lived in the rainforests of Equatorial Africa. They had built their cupola-shaped nest between roots and brambles, supported by bent branches, covered with leaves, wrapped with vines. A deep, dark snail shell, it was surrounded by infinitely expanding jungle. […] The forest dwellers were barely taller than myself, a six-year-old boy. Immobile, they held their breaths in silence, charged with tension. They did not notice the tips of my fingers touching their matte-shiny dark skin. (98–9, my translation)

Here, the autobiographical narrator remembers his desire to enter the imaginary territory of the figures on display, spurred by the fact that “they” do not “notice” him. This enables him to imaginatively project his own subjective sense of space as “allotted” and on display, as in a theater. Weiss continues:  “What belonged to me of my childhood resembled those hunting grounds allotted to the Pygmies. Everything that happened to me here was condensed into a small space […] that came alive when exposed to the fixity of my gaze” (100). The whole scenario creates a sense of the boy looking in and projecting himself into the space, identifying with the “forest dwellers.” Weiss – looking in – reverses the relationship between the (threatened) interior jungle space he perceives vis-à-vis his own presumably (safe) space as an outsider – the one who did not have to go to Auschwitz. No longer just a spectator, he imagines himself as among the Pygmies under siege by trying to reach into the diorama – yet he remains outside, prevented from entering this artificial, theatrical “place” (i.e. the stage). When attempting to transgress the border between real and imaginary spaces, Weiss seems to have been consumed by the notion of not having a dwelling place – of being in ambush, under siege and frozen in time, as if he, too, were one of the nearly extinct Pygmies. Not surprisingly, this vision of immanent death reflects Weiss’s personal biographical experience of Ortlosigkeit, resulting from his family’s persecution by the Nazis – he identified with the Pygmies’ vulnerability, which resembled his own as a Jewish exile. Following Teraoka, this would explain his attempt to rescue

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a people threatened by “extinction,” now the Vietnamese, in a “rainforest” in another part of the world. It is important to note that Discourse on Vietnam was written before Weiss actually traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia – which he did for a month with his wife and set designer, Gunilla, in 1968. Weiss had worked extensively with one of the younger SDS student activists, Jürgen Horlemann, in compiling Vietnamese sources for the script (which contains a bibliography of over 100 entries), and, it was as a consequence of this already existing play that Weiss received the invitation to visit the People’s Republic of Vietnam. Weiss, in the above-cited Spiegel interview, had expressed his desire to live in Vietnam for a longer period of time, so as to “get to know the Vietnamese people and their rather peculiar traditions.” The invitation was issued based on Weiss having joined the Russell Tribunal in Sweden (organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre) to contribute to its humanitarian work, and entailed traveling through what had by then become a dangerous war zone. Weiss and Gunilla met with political leaders – including Ho Chi Minh – as well as intellectuals, and villagers. However, like many Europeans, Weiss found the tropical climate difficult and was hospitalized for a week due to pre-existing kidney stones. Weiss, who had never been outside of Europe, must not have seen much of Vietnam in this short period of time (although, unlike many other Europeans, he at least left his own geographical, cultural and physical comfort zone). He and Gunilla authored a factual report, the Voltaire Flugschrift 23: Bericht über die Angriffe der US-Luftwaffe und -Marine gegen die Demokratische Republik Viet Nam, nach der Erklärung Präsident Johnsons über die ‘begrenzte Bombardierung’ am 31. März 1968, describing the brutal effects of US policies in Vietnam from their eyewitness point of view.23 And they took notes, which they organized into book form, published as Notizen zum kulturellen Leben der demokratischen Republik Viet Nam [Notes on the Cultural Life of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam]. It appears that here, figuratively speaking, Weiss entered his boyhood diorama: one of the photos contained in the volume of these travel notes 23 The Voltaire Flugschrift was edited by Bernward Vesper, son of Will Vesper (Hitler’s poet), companion of Gudrun Ensslin (who joined the Red Army Faction), and author of German cult classic Die Reise.

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depicts the tall middle-aged European traveler Weiss (which means white) towering over a Vietnamese village elder, surrounded by other villagers of equally shorter stature. Weiss’s large, slumping body seems awkward, as if the boy had grown up to surpass (and survive) the Pygmies. One might say traveling to Southeast Asia enabled Weiss to “touch” the victimized people whose plight he had captured in his play – yet it did not bring him closer to them; he remained a European outsider. One might also say that these other two Vietnam publications by Weiss, the travel journal and the Voltaire Flugschrift, stem from a more “authentic” experience of actual travel, and presume that lack of authenticity might account for the preceding play’s failure. However, it is a matter of genre itself: whereas the travel notes are predictably descriptive, providing “local color,” the avant-garde play Discourse on Vietnam investigates Ort [place] in a creative enterprise. Whereas Dante’s fictitious version of hell can be envisioned as an actual “place” – a colorful group of sinners endure entertainingly perverse punishments there – Weiss’s hell on stage is sterile and visually uninteresting. Meant to represent death, it is designed as a negative theatrical space where the audience is sensorially deprived, thus it becomes difficult to imagine anything. Vietnam as geographical territory is referred to, but its borders are constantly shifting, depending on the actor’s positions, to show how the land is altered under siege. This is specified in Weiss’s stage directions: “The figures move within the framework of the points of the compass, as indicated: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, N.” Foreign invasions are depicted choreographically, with stylized gestures and pantomime, and the human figure appears only as part of a larger mechanism: the theater of war. Weiss states that he avoids visual imagery to focus instead on physical movement because he wanted to represent the movement of history: Since there is neither scenery nor the usual sort of stage furniture, the actors have nothing to rely on but their own movements, positionings, relationships to one another, groupings and regroupings. Absolute precision is essential in following prescribed paths, in taking up and leaving positions, in observing their relationships with one another, in the formation of groups and in maintaining the varying tempi of each scene. […] This precision of movement is necessary. (Discourse on Vietnam, stage directions)

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Consequently, the depersonalized, dehumanized actors, who perform on a near-empty, brightly lit stage, do not have named parts but are referred to only by numbers, from 1 to 15. According to Ellis, they were costumed either in black (for Vietnamese) or in white (for colonialists and other foreigners). […] The frequent mass movement of the ensemble illustrated how the population density changed as a result of treaties, migrations and invasions. Stage directions, in the Vietnam play, therefore, are more extensive than in any of Weiss’s other dramas. (67)

To the degree the play relies on stage directions over narrative, figurative or mimetic depictions, its stylized movements vaguely evoke what would be more a formalized “Asian” theatrical style of performance. After all, the actors perform dance-like ritualistic movements and chant songs (which may be construed as reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy) – but Weiss wished to avoid any kind of primitivism or exoticism because he thought that would result in an excess of sensual information. He writes about the music, for instance, that “on no account should it sound exotic. Here too the utmost simplicity is called for – rhythmic rather than melodic.” As a result, Discourse on Vietnam comes across as rather bland. Culturally nonspecific, it is paired down to essentials but does not appear to offer the kind of minimalist esthetics that one might expect in the tradition of avant-garde theater. Politically, Weiss’s aim was to depict the essence of conflict in its purest form – oppressor against oppressed. He did so not to elicit emotions from the audience, as in melodrama, but to create a detached, intellectual perspective. This makes his work resemble a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt where the aim is critical thinking, not empathetic identification, but Brecht used this form imaginatively, with a sense of humor. Here is an excerpt from Weiss’s Discourse on Vietnam that illustrates the formalistic way in which he has his actors’ parts interchange; and how movements and speech are written to achieve a “ghostlike” effect: 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 move quickly on the group of people, surround them and herd them close together. The group of people sinks to the ground. 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 go slowly back to their previous positions. The group of people looks like corpses in a mass grave. Their words are muffled and scarcely audible.

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Clearly, this scene, of Vietnamese prisoners being forced to dig their own grave is haunting. It seems reminiscent of Paul Celan’s 1948 poem Death Fugue (from which I have quoted in the epigraph to my introduction) about his experience in a labor camp. Being buried alive and speaking from the grave, the figures on stage seem unreal and devoid of life, but Weiss’s refusal to sensationalize these horrible experiences entails turning away from the physical body. The figures appear as a group, in the abstract, and they speak “muffled” – how is one to relate to them? Weiss stated intent was to take away from the distracting esthetic pleasures of song and dance by documenting political processes by way of geometrical patterns. His emphasis is on space, that is, “place” (Ort), overriding that of people in it. Just to give an idea of what would be a diametrically opposed approach, within the same setting of the Vietnam War, I quote the following passage by Vietnamese-French author Linda Lê. Having experienced the war as a child, she escaped with the Boat People from Saigon in 1975 and expresses the trauma of violence through figurative language: [T]‌he orphan emerged from her foxhole, but everyone was well and truly dead, hacked to bits, an arm here, a foot there, guts served cold, an ear in red sauce, bits of brain in a charred nest of angel hair. The world’s kitchen smelled very bad. Everything was raw. Spiced with powder. The orphan stepped over the lumps of meat, squelching through red rivulets that tickled her bare feet. The odor of blood hanging in the air appealed to her. She smiled shyly at the emptiness […] there was no one left, nothing but bone-weary skulls and ghoulish goulash on the cold barbecue. (147)

Using food metaphors to describe slaughter, Lê, in contrast to Weiss, emphasizes corporeality. Like Dante, she transforms dreadful suffering into

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grotesque imagery, enabling her readers to partake in the experience of the child who steps onto a battlefield littered with corpses and severed limbs. Lê draws attention to the material reality of the body, whereas Weiss is intellectualizing. Conceiving of groups of anonymous victims from a bird’s eye view (instead of from the ground up), his is the perspective of a grown-up. Rather than creating an immediate visceral experience through the eyes of a child, as Lê does, he portrays the murderous effects of technological warfare in an equally cerebral fashion. In another example from Discourse on Vietnam, the audience learns about villages being burnt down, families separated, and groups of people deported to camps, all of which, again, invoke the Shoah: Music ends. Resumption of mimed display. 8: Drive them out of their houses 9: Drive them out of the villages 10: Burn down their houses 12: Destroy the rice stocks 11: Break up the village communities / Split up the families 13: Put them in camps 6: Hundreds of thousands are being shifted / concentrated grouped and sifted / Once safely under lock and key / they’ll be out of reach of the enemy End of music. The representatives of the Diem government and the American advisers move away from the group of Viet Nam people. These all stand close together, their hands and arms behind their backs, as if bound. 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 go off in SW and SE. 14, 15, remain in front of the group. (203–4)

It becomes evident from this passage that Weiss relies on the abstraction of pantomime, of sounds altering with silences, and of choreographed group movements. The content of the scene, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people, is recounted in chanted verses, by an actor performing the part of number 6. For the pantomime, the director, Harry Buckwitz, hired a French mime, Jean Soubeyran, but the effect must not have been dramatic because the audience found it uninteresting. Perhaps this was because it was confusing to tell what exactly was said by which actor, as they kept switching parts – or because Discourse on Vietnam performed in full lasts several hours.

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I think the play fails by avoiding engaging with the human figure as a living, flesh-and-blood entity. Human actors are subsumed under, incorporated into, spatial structures. Ort [place] becomes paramount, yet is not shown in its potential for (human) dwelling, only as abstract geographical location. Along those lines, Weiss stated he did not want to depict a utopian vision. As Jan Koska explains, Weiss deliberately wrote against his own political positioning, not permitting utopia to congeal into a place that could represent an alternative to hell. Koska draws on Weiss’s dictum of seeing “no vanishing point beyond the worst” (kein Fluchtpunkt hinter dem Schlimmsten, 125) – so that it becomes difficult for spectators to envision any kind of perspective (because hell has no vanishing point). At the same time, Weiss’s “utopia” is somehow, according to Koska, “dynamic” in that he may have seen – by way of Brecht – a relationship with the “Asian” ontology of perpetual flow. As Anthony Tatlow explains: Belief in a stable ontology is, of course, only “traditional” within Western culture. East Asia views it differently. Recognizing ontological instability [was] one source of Brecht’s interest in East Asian cultures. […] In philosophical Buddhism, there exists no ontologically fixed self capable of being undermined, since ontology itself offered no self-sustaining stability. Social relations, under those different circumstances, could be differently imagined. (23)

Tatlow suggests that destabilizing the (Western) psychological self aids the cause of rethinking social relations. He thus explains Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, situating it in relation to “Asian” influences, and this may have influenced Weiss’s thinking, too (one can only speculate here). However, “Asian” theatrical traditions, of which neither Brecht nor Weiss knew much, are also dramatic, and sensual. They differ from the “empty” space of Buddhist philosophy to which Tatlow refers (i.e. Asian philosophy does not automatically translate into Asian theater). Like other avant-garde theater practitioners, Weiss was inspired by Brecht, including Brechtian concepts like Gestus and Epic Theater. It had the purpose of undoing nineteenth-century bourgeois realism, which was grounded in psychology and mimetic representation (as derived from Konstantin Stanislavski). Martin Puchner writes that Brecht adapted Japanese Noh “not because he is amazed by their stunning costumes or

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the spectacular nature of their performance [but because of its] technique of diegesis that controls the mimesis of the actor.” Non-Western theater was seen as attractive because it was anti-mimetic. According to Puchner, the stage is then also no longer a coherent space: “Because actors are distanced from their role, because they are agents of both mimesis and explanatory diegesis at the same time, the space of the stage is endlessly interrupted [and becomes] a fractured ensemble of interpretation, commentary, and distanced enactment.” Weiss used similar avant-garde approaches in his Dokumentartheater, but that invites a contradiction: “documentary theater” derives from Western melodrama, with audiences encouraged to critically root for social justice by way of empathy and emotional response – and this would entail identification. Introducing theatrical traditions from other cultures naturally “alienates” the audience, who is unfamiliar with this “other” iconography, so that its response must be by definition, based on something else, such as esthetic quality. If such experimentation is curtailed due to fear of exoticizing or orientalizing, or of being too artistic or decadent, audiences do not have anything to respond to. Asian performance techniques are spectacular because they are passed on through generation, learned from childhood on. However, German actors were not trained in the same way. Tatlow describes, for example, Japanese Noh and Kabuki acting techniques (here with reference to intercultural director Tadashi Suzuki, who works with both Western and Asian performers): Acting in Asian theater depends upon a […] principle of dynamic immobility that is achieved through the actor’s mastery of the body. […] when movement has apparently ceased, then it is at its most dynamic. […] The vestibular system is reorganized in order […] to refunction conventional or natural balance, to put normal corporeal dispositions into jeopardy. When this is accomplished, […] the body is no longer just in space. […] It has pulled spatial dimensions into itself and is thus transformed into an extraordinary means of representing dynamic tensions, oppositions, or contradictions. (71)

Here, the human body is not the seat of an individual, psychological self, but a locus of dynamic energy. Weiss could not draw on such expertise: he did not have Asian performers. In many Asian theatrical forms, the body

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becomes “space” by focusing dynamic energy onto the human figure, but Discourse on Vietnam does the opposite. According to his wife and set designer Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, who worked with Weiss on Discourse on Vietnam, he familiarized himself with Japanese Kabuki and, presumably from reading Brecht, knew about Peking Opera. Still, Christoph Deupmann sums up the detrimental effect of Discourse on Vietnam due to the fact that the actors are subdued by “spatial” considerations: Instead of a theater whose action takes place against the background of a set designed to represent specific locations, the stage, laid out in accordance with the directions of the compass, is transformed into a geo-political model of space. This endows the movements of the actors, who resemble figures on a chessboard rather than performers, with political significance, so that broad historical developments can be depicted. As movements from West to East become intelligible as acts of an aggressive “imperialism,” […] the principle of guerilla combat is symbolized by the way in which the partisan fighters of the Viet Minh step forward and back into the line of the Vietnamese “people.” Therefore, an esthetics is re-established by way of a structure in and of itself designed to illustrate (historical) structures. (176–7, my translation)

According to this description, the comparison to a game of chess imposes itself insofar as Discourse on Vietnam represents a miniature “theater of war,” a model used by generals to determine the strategy for their campaign. Ironically, given how empathetic Weiss was, this becomes an inhumane perspective in that armies and soldiers are instrumentalized. Weiss repeats this gesture rather than counter it:  according to Julie Zencker, Weiss’s actors lose their individual agency, being made to perform like marionettes. For political reasons, Weiss was attracted to this ontology of movement, he aimed to convey the contingency of historical processes. Indeed, the notion that things are in flux makes for a different relationship between humans and their surroundings, but it also compromises the theater’s ability to create the “illusion” of another “place” (to which the audience can be transported). Such a “place” would entail boundaries and some form of stability or grounding. It is a problem addressed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space when he distinguishes between different kinds of theatrical space:

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[In the theater] bodies are able to pass from a “real,” immediately experienced space (the pit, the stage) to a perceived space – a third space which is no longer either scenic or public. At once fictitious and real, this third space is classical theatrical space […]. To the question of whether such a space is a representation of space or a representational space, the answer must be neither – and both. Theatrical space certainly implies a representation of space – scenic space – corresponding to a particular conception of space (that of the classical drama, say – or the Elizabethan, or the Italian). The representational space, mediated yet directly experienced, which infuses the work and the moment, is established as such through the dramatic action itself. (88)

Weiss’s play may be designed to forego what Lefebvre calls the representation of space (i.e. depiction of Vietnam as an actual place), to draw attention to the material reality of representational space (i.e. the stage). Weiss’s deliberate undoing of traditional conceptions of classical (Western) theatrical “third space” (in which audiences are transported to an imaginary “other” location through use of conventions such as the fourth wall) may be thought of as a critique of Western conceptions of space. Unfortunately, since the effect is lost, using any kind of theoretical apparatuses to “rescue” Discourse on Vietnam – for example, explaining what it might have attempted to do – clouds over the fact that the playwright himself drew on his personal experience of Ortlosigkeit, as seen from his other texts. I would suggest thinking of Discourse on Vietnam as a sign of disintegration, and a staging of loss. As I have tried to show, Discourse on Vietnam has rather little to do with Vietnam. On the other hand, connected to Weiss’s own childhood experience and his view of the diorama as a location of “extinction,” it becomes the location where he confronts his own loss of home. Interestingly, when Weiss actually went to Vietnam, the imagery he chose romanticizes people and their dwellings, and there is a strong invocation of “place” (Ort). Unfortunately, in Notes on the Cultural Life of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, the representation of the Vietnamese people is idealized. “They” are always polite, friendly to children, and appreciative of their elders, and “they” live in an atmosphere of peaceful community, gathered together in a bucolic setting: Relationships between people are shaped by mutual politeness, respect for elders, and friendliness to children. Due to this attitude […] smiles and laughter accompany

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Ostensibly visiting a warzone, Weiss describes the Vietnamese in their traditional everyday life as supremely gentle. He equates Vietnamese people with poetry as well as innate fortitude – he glorifies their sensibilities and struggles in ways that mythicize them. Weiss, in these travel notes, constantly draws negative comparisons to the West, which he portrays as decadent – he makes the Vietnamese villagers appear innocent, almost childlike. It’s as if perspectives are reversed: Weiss admires their (grown-up) fierceness as resistance fighters, but he also writes that they must be educated. For example, he explains that “they” have no time for subjectivity and art, which he juxtaposes to rationality, Vernunft, a quality he promotes as essential to achieving revolution: [I]‌n this [southern] part of the country, nothing was more important […] than the development of reason, of critical consciousness. Here, between mutilated bodies burned by napalm, between hordes of children without parents, who were homeless, begging, and stealing; between apathetic refugees, destroyed villages, and overcrowded prisons, artistic expressions that would demand an autonomous basis were a fraud, a betrayal. (80–1, my translation)

Like Le, Weiss describes mutilated Vietnamese bodies on the ground, but he does so for the sake of an intellectual argument: “art” is a form of “betrayal” because in the war of the jungle, survival is what truly matters. This stance both elevates and demotes Weiss, the Western artist who has the luxury to write because he lacks the strength to fight. Weiss denies the Vietnamese access to expressions of subjectivity on account of their more immediate physical sufferings – that is, he does not portray them as equals. Notes thus contradicts his previous political program, which Discourse on Vietnam attempted to tackle in esthetic terms. Weiss’s travel notes even go so far as to  – unconsciously, one would assume  – evoke German nationalist notions of Volk, as Stefan Howald has noted: Weiss “simply equates the nation with the Volk, then associates both with the

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resistance movement […] this is compounded by the way in which, time and again, a mythical belief in the Volk resurfaces within Weiss’s text” (184, my translation).24 Still, Weiss does not see himself as superior to the Vietnamese, but rather portrays himself in the negative, as an invalid. As if he were once again the boy projecting himself into the diorama, he compares his precarious health, while in hospital in Vietnam, to the strength of the young Vietnamese, whom he describes as nobly fighting their enemy “in their helmets covered with green branches” (29). One is reminded of the boy with his wooden gun who mourns the loss of his home, determined to defend himself. Compared to the heroic struggles in Discourse on Vietnam, these travel notes movingly describe the detrimental effects of American bombings on children; for example, a little boy tells Weiss how he was fishing in the stream, then had to run and hide in a bamboo grove, and a 13-year-old girl reports how she was cooking rice when the Americans came, and she had to rescue herself by running into a foxhole, while everything was on fire (115). These images are concrete and remind the reader of the distance between Weiss, the “decadent” European, and the suffering Vietnamese children. They are also evocative of Weiss’s own history as a child, of having to “run and hide,” and to “take up arms” in the struggle for place and home. In Rekonvaleszenz, Weiss ends up condemning the engagement that had fueled his writing of Discourse on Vietnam, and his subsequent trip to Vietnam, both of which he now portrays as a form of Western hubris: He had […] written an epic play about the Vietnamese resistance struggle […] and now wanted to follow up by traveling to the place, Vietnam, where current consciousness was focused, wanted to turn himself into a witness right then and there [but] the actual experience of his trip [was] the recognition of his own fragility, his own limitations […]. He, whose intention had been to help his friends in their efforts through his writing and traveling, now had to let himself be helped by them. (26, my translation)

24 The term Volk is now primarily associated with its use during National Socialism. See Helmut Kellershohn “Volk, völkisch, völkische Bewegung.”

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Weiss had liked to think of himself as “a European intellectual who prefers to speak in the name of his Vietnamese, Cuban, African friends” (Rekonvaleszenz, 80, my translation) before this trip, but his insight from Vietnam seems to have been the recognition of his European limitations. The purpose of the trip – to get to know Vietnam, and come to its aid – was defeated, but Weiss realized that he was not in a position to rescue the Vietnamese. Clemens Kammler explains the ensuing internal conflict: Vis-à-vis the Vietnamese, Weiss sees himself as a spokesperson for wealthy nations, a moribund representative of a culture doomed to disappear […]. His self-chastisement has the function of mobilizing his damaged sense of responsibility […]. Weiss’s political super-ego here impedes [his] ability for self-reflection due to a relentless exhortation. (109, my translation)

The suffering Weiss, in this scenario, was suspended between opposing views of himself: he identified with the “oppressed” as a group, to which he belonged, insofar as he had been exiled, but he recognized his position as a European, who came from the side of the oppressor. This is reminiscent of being both a Jewish exile and a potentially anti-Semitic German perpetrator. It confirms that Weiss found that he did not “belong” among the Vietnamese, whom he “othered” by romanticizing them – just as he had not been able, as a boy, to enter the diorama in the museum, where the Pygmies dwelled apart from him.25 Weiss expressed an eerie feeling of extreme Ortlosigkeit [here: homelessness] in his journal entry from April 24, 1968, when offended by Ruth Berghaus’ production Discourse on Vietnam: Last rehearsals of Discourse on Vietnam at the Berlin Ensemble. The whole thing is like a nightmare. Not only is the play performed in just a few excerpts that don’t leave anything of great historical continuity, but when they see me they simply keep performing over my head: it is as if I didn’t even exist. (My translation)

25 Klaus Scherpe refers to Weiss’s identification, in The Aesthetics of Resistance, with the proletariat as a group of oppressed people who do not “belong” and are similar to himself, the exiled writer – so that he would feel less like an “outsider” (252).

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This phrase, “it is as if I  didn’t even exist,” is telling in that Weiss not only felt disrespected in his artistic vision (as when he felt attacked by Marcuse), but also as if he might not even be there. If one takes his boyhood image, from his first home in Grünenstrasse, of pretending to be ambushed and clasping his wooden gun in the “jungle” of Berlin as leitmotif, it appears the author must have projected his own uprooted self onto the scenario of Vietnam. I therefore conclude in anticipation of my next chapter, on VietnameseGerman woman writer Pham Thi Hoài (b. 1960), with the female figure of “Vietnam” as a national allegory. Teraoka has drawn attention to Weiss’s relationship to “Vietnam” as a female figure (Beatrice), and Discourse on Vietnam ends with the ‘68er protest mantra: “The Struggle Continues” (as per the Italian movement, La Lotta Continua), meaning there can never be closure. However, “Vietnam” allegorically portrays itself as a female victim who also fights and then, eventually, wins. Vietnamese iconography, in fact, centers around this female figure of Kieu, a long-suffering woman from Nguyen Dû’s nineteenth-century verse epic The Tale of Kieu (Truyen Kieu, trans. Huynh Sanh Thong). She is sold into prostitution because she sacrifices herself for her family, and must move further and further away from her homeland, but in the end, she is able to return and marry her beloved. Weiss refers to Kieu in Discourse on Vietnam; he was well-informed about Vietnamese iconography, as confirmed by his use of symbols like water buffalo, tortoises, or the Sisters Truong.26 Weiss was aware, as evident from his Notes, that Kieu’s story was the consummate national allegory. In an interview he records with a Vietnamese woman writer, Cam Than, she explains to him: 26 In a dream he recorded, Weiss imagines the tortoise as female, with breasts. In Puw Davies’ estimation, this points to the Eureopean Weiss’s fear of his own impotence vis-à-vis the forces of history. Similarly, Teraoka has diagnosed Weiss’s sexism in terms of his “othering” the Vietnamese woman. Teraoka, like Puw Davies, diagnoses a sense of impotence, but in terms of the playwright’s survivor’s guilt complex (as explained in the beginning of this chapter). She suggests that Weiss associated his own activity of writing with Dante and his female muse, Beatrice. However, Vietnamese iconography itself depicts “Vietnam” as a woman and it is likely that Weiss did not so much “objectify,” but rather identify with “her.”

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Chapter 3 The female figure was always the main character in Vietnamese literary imagination. If she wasn’t worshiped, she was at least pitied and empathized with. In what is now one of the major classical works, Kieu appears as the one who endures all humiliations and sufferings that were experienced by generations of women. Literature became a place for women to lament their fate. […] The themes in women’s writings were always: saying goodbye, waiting, hoping, despair, dependency. (Notes, 72, my translation)

Weiss follows up on this with affirmation: “It is in Kieu’s suffering that the people of Vietnam recognize themselves” (Notes, 72, my translation). Critics like Teraoka have understandably focused on his supposed sexism, as the play subsumes women’s oppression to oppression in general.27 For example, Puw Davies observes that, in the context of the West German student movement, there were “some representations of Vietnamese women that appeared, in some instances, identical to representations of Vietnam itself ” However, this tradition is based on Vietnamese – not just Western – cultural imagery. The notion of “Vietnam” as a nation expresses itself in equivalence to a female figure by following ubiquitous conventions of geographical locations (cities, nations) as gendered female. More importantly, it is not Kieu’s suffering but her ability to fight that is appreciated about this heroine: in Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha depicts the situation of Vietnamese women with reference to The Tale of Kieu: she shows how female self-sacrifice is paramount in traditional Vietnamese society, and how this is tied up with admiration for Kieu’s endurance, her ability to resist and continue fighting. In Weiss’s version, that is not apparent. Kieu, who sacrifices herself in martyrdom, returns home to marry her beloved, which represents the fortitude of her struggle, her strength. Karma is fulfilled positively in the end, when her suffering is balanced with a happy conclusion: 27 Weiss believed in women’s liberation, but only after the revolution:  according to Thilo Diefenbach, he subsumed questions of sexuality to those of politics. Indeed, there is little “femininity” in Discourse on Vietnam apart from a longer passage about “pregnant rice fields.” Among fifteen parts for actors, only two are designated female. And, there are a few instances where roles represent women: a Vietnamese peasant, a French woman wearing an ao dài, an American personal secretary.

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This we have learned: with Heaven rests all things. / Heaven appoints each human to a place.  If doomed to roll in dust, we’ll roll in dust; / we’ll sit on high when destined for high seats. / … In talent take no overweening pride, / for talent and disaster form a pair. / Our karma we must carry as our lot – / let’s stop decrying Heaven’s whims and quirks. / Inside ourselves there lies the root of good: / the heart outweighs all talents on this earth. (The Tale of Kieu, 167)

Hence Kieu is the Vietnamese symbol not just for suffering and fighting, but also for homecoming: she must leave her family and, throughout the poem, tries to return. Viet Kieu is the name for overseas Vietnamese, the diaspora assumed to “long for a return.” But in Weiss’s version of “Vietnam/Kieu,” there also is no anticipated homecoming. If one takes his boyhood image, from his first home in Grünenstrasse, of pretending to be ambushed and clasping his wooden gun in the “jungle” of Berlin as a leitmotif, it appears the author must have projected his own uprooted self onto a vulnerable being under siege, and onto the scenario of Vietnam. However, in contrast to Kieu, Weiss did not see himself as a fighter, and he did not believe in happy endings. Instead, his profound sense of Ortlosigkeit as a Jewish-German forced into exile seems to have prevented him from believing in the revolutionary message of hope he attempted to convey with Discourse on Vietnam.

Chapter 4

Translating Silences: Pham Thi Hoài’s Die Kristallbotin and Sonntagsmenü

In my previous chapter, on Peter Weiss, I have discussed his references to the traditional Vietnamese allegorical female figure, Kieu – a “prostitute with a heart of gold” from Nguyen Dû’s nineteenth-century prose poem, The Tale of Kieu – in his 1968 play, Discourse on Vietnam. My point was that, due to Weiss’s preoccupation with the Shoah as an author of JewishGerman background, his history of the Vietnam War, in Discourse on Vietnam, became limited to a mere analogy of German history. Instead of portraying Vietnam on its own terms, and engaging it figuratively, Weiss treated the universal themes of war and genocide in terms of the absence of real human beings on stage, in what he called the Dantesque hell of Auschwitz. His actors performed stylized movements on a brightly lit, near-empty stage; and his audiences, consequently, found productions of Discourse on Vietnam disappointing and esthetically sterile. Compared to Weiss’s other, internationally renowned plays, Discourse on Vietnam was considered a failure. As I have argued, Weiss seemed unable to relate to Vietnam because of his own historical experience as a German with a Jewish father: his family had to flee the Nazis to Sweden. Thus, in spite of the extensive research Weiss conducted on Vietnam, along with his travels there, which included meeting Ho Chi Minh, he remained caught within a Eurocentric framework. And, although Weiss wanted to support the plight of the Vietnamese people, his depiction of Vietnam on stage seems limited to its abstract status as victim of US imperialism. In his travel journals, as I have demonstrated, he recorded his perceptions of rural society in ways that romanticize and infantilize the Vietnamese people. In contrast, this chapter introduces Vietnamese-German author Pham Thi Hoài, born 1960 in Hai Duong, People’s Republic of Vietnam (PRV). I focus on her novel, Thien Su, published in Hanoi in 1988, translated four

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years later into German as Die Kristallbotin (and translated into English as The Crystal Messenger by Ton-That Quynh-Du), which won the Frankfurt LiBeraturpreis, and on her 2012 collection of stories, Sonntagsmenü (translated as Sunday Menu, also by Ton-That Quynh-Du).1 Pham has published novels, stories, and essays, and is a known translator of German literature into Vietnamese of authors like Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. Having originally come to Germany for a degree in library studies from Humboldt University, she has been living in Berlin for over two decades, in Lichtenberg, near the former East German Vietnamese community around the Dong Xuan Center. Her residence, where I interviewed her in 2014 and 2017, is located next to the historical site of the Bornholmer Strasse Grenzübergang, the first border crossing opened by the GDR in 1989. She is making a living as a translator, as well as is currently working on a detective novel. Pham grew up in Vietnam during the so-called American War, about which she has published a blog that was censored by the Vietnamese government.2 Once a celebrated author in the PRV, Pham’s works have been banned from publication for over two decades, and she cannot travel there – she has to go to third countries to see her family. As Erhard Haubold stated in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on December 9, 1997: “[Sie] wird geächtet. Keines ihrer Bücher ist

1 Die Kristallbotin was translated into French by Phan Huy Duong, La messagère de cristal (1991). Sonntagsmenü was also published in France, in a translation by Colette Kowalski, Menu de Dimanche (1997), but is based on the German translation, that is, a translation of a translation. Of the eleven stories translated for the German and French editions, six were then translated into English, for the Australian edition of Sunday Menu, from which I quote here. This edition also contains four other stories translated into English. Another story, “Chin Bo Lam Muoi (Nine Down Makes Ten),” was translated into English by Peter Zinoman and published in an American journal in 1992, then reprinted in a 1996 book edited by Linh Dinh. Another novel, Marie Sèn, was published in 1996 and is no longer available. 2 See Pham’s Vietnamese blog talawas.org, which was censored in 2010. Asked about its contents, whether they merit translation, Pham replied in an e-mail of July 31, 2018:  “My topics mostly addressed events relevant within Vietnam. For example, I wrote a lot about Ho Chi Minh […] all of this is too specialized. One would have to have a lot of background knowledge about Vietnam” (my translation).

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im Handel zu haben, keines wird besprochen” [[She] is ostracized. None of her books is on sale, none is discussed]. Pham portrays the gritty reality of everyday life in contemporary Hanoi with “subjective” Western avant-garde techniques like Brechtian alienation and Kafkaesque surrealism. She represents Vietnamese labor conditions, especially for women, in an urban environment, during the postwar period of Doi Moi [Renovation], the 1986 reforms designed to introduce a free market economy. According to Pham’s Australian translator, Ton-That Quynh-Du, in his afterword to Sunday Menu, this is what led to censorship: In Vietnam, [Pham’s] writings drew enthusiastic acclaim from readers and literary critics. Her detractors were just as vocal: Vietnam’s cultural bureaucrats objected to her critical views of contemporary Vietnam and were offended by her lack of respect for traditions and disregard of social taboos […] writers and artists were expected to participate in the national struggle, serve the people and support the common cause. Running even more deeply is the traditional view that regards literature as an instrument for the betterment of society. Pham Thi Hoài’s writing is somewhat at odds with these expectations. […] While Pham Thi Hoài has never been directly accused of political dissent, her detractors have charged her with holding an “excessively pessimistic view” of Vietnam. (139–40)

Quynh-Du explains how Pham’s texts were deemed subversive because they fit neither the progressive paradigm of Socialist Realism, nor the older didactic paradigm of Confucianism. Indeed, one might see books like The Crystal Messenger as political allegory, with the twin sisters featured there as representing North and South Vietnam. However, Pham’s style of writing can itself be perceived as a form of critique. She undermines, for example, the Asian cliché of the socially determined “mask” in an often brutal, yet comic style. As Matt Martin observes, “much of the pain inflicted on her characters stems from an emphasis on face and appearances that’s metastasized into a dominating social force. Entire lives are organized according to the imagined expectations and opinions of peers.” Pham is outspoken against conformity, in favor of Western individualism. For example, in a roundtable discussion about Vietnamese immigrants in Germany, she argued against the stereotype of the “Tiger

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Mom”: “Vietnamese parents are often very conservative in their educational approach; they try to completely dominate and control all aspects of their children’s lives. This expectation of absolute loyalty and respect children are supposed to have is quite annoying.” And she asserted her identity by reacting against the image projected onto her by Germans: “I do not represent Vietnamese people in Germany, I only represent myself and my own personal opinion. If you like my opinion, that’s fine, and if you don’t, you are free to disagree with me” (my translation).3 However, unlike the author herself, Pham’s female characters struggle to liberate themselves from social norms that require submission, obedience, and silence. Many of Pham’s texts focus on conditions for women, and she works with esthetic distancing devices, such as using a male narrator, that draw attention to how women might feel discouraged from expressing their own, subjective voices. Pham’s stories are frequently told from the perspective of a male narrator – her female narrators and characters speak little or are absent from the scene. In fact, as I demonstrate, Pham’s writing often centers around the topic of “silence,” and this may be in relation to gendered stereotypes as well as her experience of being censored.

I Politically speaking, Pham has critiqued the Western view of the Vietnam War as limited to US imperialism and Cold War politics by arguing that it originated from a Vietnamese domestic situation: The Vietnam War did not result in the collapse of the US. Rather, it led to the disappearance of the Southern Republic of Vietnam, a nation that once dominated half of the country and which was no less legitimate than its brother in the north. After liberation, however, Southern society was subjected to intense repression: prison, concentration camp, the seizure of property, discrimination against bi-racial children, the purge of intellectuals, the destruction and prohibition of Southern culture, the 3 See Kien Nghi Ha, ed., Asiatische Deutsche.

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complete erasure of numerous careers and many lives […]. The country has never once acknowledged the painful exodus of almost 1 million southern Vietnamese, the “boat people.” It is as if they are no longer Vietnamese […]. The war originated from national division. […] Vietnamese and Americans can now shake hands, but Vietnamese continue to refuse to offer a hand to their fellow Vietnamese.4

Pham was not among the Boat People – unlike many French-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American authors – but she was considered antagonistic by a socialist government that wanted to see itself as having overcome the separation between North and South. Unlike those of other diaspora South Vietnamese authors who had to flee to the West after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Pham’s insights are informed by living in North Vietnam during and after the war. She does not emphasize death and devastation because she came to East Germany as a student, not as a refugee. The relationship between the GDR and North Vietnam Pham experienced was based on benevolent economic exchange: starting in 1957, when Ho Chi Minh first visited the GDR, North Vietnamese “specialized workers” (Facharbeiter) and students were invited to East Germany. Approximately 60,000 went, and although two-thirds of them returned to Vietnam upon the fall of the Berlin Wall when their visas expired, a sizable demographic continues to live in Berlin-Lichtenstein. Compared to Boat People in France, the United States, and West Germany, Pham’s views are informed by this relationship between East Germany and North Vietnam, as shaped by the concept of “International Solidarity.” After the war, when Vietnamese agriculture was devastated, Facharbeiter were invited to receive technical training, and then return to rebuild their country. This was a relationship of economic exchange – yet unequal, with the GDR being the wealthy host. Vietnamese laborers sent home goods such as bicycles, mopeds, fabric and sewing machines, and their living arrangements were equivalent to those of “guest workers” in West Germany – meant to remain temporary (this included the policy of female workers being sent home when they became pregnant).5 And, in spite of the amicable relationship between their governments, Vietnamese in the GDR were 4 In “What Remains: Vietnam in My Heart.” 5 See Karin Weiss, “Das Schicksal der DDR-Vertragsarbeiter aus Vietnam.”

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considered “foreigners” by the local German population and they experienced discrimination after the fall of the Wall, when xenophobia became rampant in the Neue Länder [new territories – a reference to former East Germany]. Nonetheless, since the GDR had supported cultural institutions in Vietnam (for example, by linking the Vietnamese film industry to the DEFA studios in Berlin-Babelsberg, and by constructing buildings like the Orthopedic Hospital Ba Vi near Hanoi, which is still in use), it created an ongoing positive relationship between Vietnam and Germany beyond 1989. German companies continue to invest in Vietnamese construction, education and technical training. Pham’s perspective differs from Francophone and Anglophone Vietnamese diaspora authors mainly because she did not leave Vietnam under the same circumstances. Americans primarily associate Vietnam with the Vietnam War, which ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The South Vietnamese exodus is described from the perspective of an American CIA agent in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer: The marines flew in on helicopters to get the rest of the people from the airport and the embassy […]. The ones who were supposed to get to the helicopters couldn’t get to them. Same story at the airport, no way in. The docks, totally impassable. Even the buses going to the embassy couldn’t get in, since the embassy was mobbed by thousands. They were waving all kinds of paper. Marriage certificates, employment contracts, letters, even US passports. They were screaming. I know So-and-So, Soand-So can vouch for me, I’m married to a US citizen. None of that counted. The marines were on the wall and pounding anybody who tried to come up. […] All those Vietnamese in front weren’t letting any Vietnamese in back get ahead. So we’d look and wave, and they’d look and wave, and then after a while we just looked away and left. […] Guess what? None of those people got out. (30)

Francophone Vietnamese authors, on the author hand, conceive of Vietnam in more historical terms, as associated with French colonialism in Indochina. The fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended French colonial rule and thousands of Vietnamese anti-Communists fled to the South, whose government in Saigon was propped up by the United States. French-Vietnamese author Linda Lê (b. 1963 in Dalat), experienced the fall of Saigon as part of a family that left South Vietnam from the beach

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at Vung Tau. In her 1995 novel Les Trois Parques, she describes  – in a mocking tone – how the wealthy South Vietnamese, who had collaborated with the US, fled the arriving Vietcong: The runaways crowded in from Saigon, which was about to fall at any minute […]. In the middle of the night, shadows piled onto the dinghies and glided to boats waiting offshore to carry them far away from the plague then unfurling over Saigon. They left like thieves, without closing up their houses, emptying their pools, or parking the second car in the garage. Decamping at first light, in the big car sans chauffeur, they had arrived at Vung Tau, faces ashen and eyes ringed red, lips murmuring prayers to the god of the rich not to let them down, now that they’d abandoned to the Communists their villa with swimming pool, Chinese antiques, American bar, spying chauffeur, and shiftless servants […]. The women arched their backs, perched on shoes with dangerously high platform soles, the cavities of which were stuffed with jewelry […]. In Vung Tau, the rich were first in line to flee this land they had loved so well, which in return had fattened them up more than was good for them. (17)

Lê does not sound sympathetic to those who fled South Vietnam because her novel focuses on the way families were torn apart in the country’s internal division between wealthy Southern Vietnamese and Communists from the North. Lê’s novels depict ways in which overseas Vietnamese see themselves, due to their situation, versus how they are perceived by both Europeans and Vietnamese residing in Vietnam. As Lan P. Duong explains in terms of gender, with reference to The Tale of Kieu: Kinship metaphors and the trope of loyalty abound in the postwar diaspora […]. In the introduction to his translations of Truyen Kieu, or The Tale of Kieu, the beloved nineteenth-century epic poem by Nguyen Dû, Huynh Sanh Thong argues that Vietnamese diasporic subjects are “victims of a perverse fate” similar to the poem’s main character, Kieu, a wandering prostitute. Thong appropriates female suffering by arguing that the term for overseas Vietnamese, Viet Kieu, is based on the character of Kieu, who eventually returns home after many trials. As errant subjects dispersed globally in the postwar era, diasporans always look homeward, according to Thong’s reading. Forging an identity informed by migration and displacement, the exilic community remains a fundamental part of the national family. In spite of having migrated elsewhere, the exiles’ true roots are in Viet Nam. These popular notions of kinship, family ties, and nationalistic sentiment reinforce a sense of transnational cohesion through the production of “a fictive ethnicity.” (6)

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Coming from a South Vietnamese family, Lê is critical of their political affiliations, yet at the same time she experienced what it was like to be among the so-called Boat People. After the American withdrawal, over a million Vietnamese refugees took the maritime route to refugee camps in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, and an estimated 300,000 of them died at sea. Due to starvation, disease, pirates, etc. many of them drowned or died on the boats and only around 800,000 safely made it overseas to final destinations including the US, France, and West Germany. Vietnamese-American author Nam Le has described the experience of being one of the Boat People in graphic terms in his 2008 story “The Boat,” about a female protagonist named Mai: It had been hot, and Mai had faced the choice of being on deck and burnt by the sun or being below in the oven-heated hold. In the beginning people swam in the ocean, trailing ropes off the slow-moving junk, but afterward the salt on their bodies cooked their skin like crispy pork. She spent as much time as she could bear out of the hold, which simmered the excrement of a hundred people. […] they were on a broken-down junk, stranded in the Eastern Sea – here, or maybe here – an easy target for pirates – everyone knew about the pirates, had heard stories of boats being robbed and then rammed, of women being taken, used, dumped. On top of that they were starving, some of them beginning to get sick. […] Inside the hold, the stench was incredible, almost eye-watering. The smell of urine and human waste, sweat and vomit. The black space full of people, bodies upon bodies, eyes and eyes and eyes and […] she could hardly breathe, let alone move. Later she counted at least two hundred people, squashed into a space meant for fifteen. […] Thirst set in. Some people trapped their own urine. […] It was fantastic to be surrounded by so much water and yet be dehydrated. Mai […] imitated some of the other youth, hauling up a bucket tied to the bowline. […] She drank [the seawater]. It was all right at first. It was bliss. Then her throat started scalding and she wanted to claw it out. (234–51)

Pham, in spite of having come to the West as a student, empathizes and identifies with the situation of the Boat People who are, like herself, Viet Kieu. For thirty years, the Vietnamese government did not want Viet Kieu to return from capitalist countries; it was only in 2005 that Interim Foreign Minister Nguyen Phu Binh presumably welcomed them back and proclaimed: “We highly value the overseas Vietnamese community’s contribution to their fatherland.” In an e-mail of February 27, 2016, Pham refers to the tense relationship between the PRV and diasporic

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Vietnamese in terms of the aftermath of war, and in support of the Boat People: There are two extremely important sides to the Vietnam War […]. First of all, it was a proxy war. American bombs at the time were not purely American, just as Russian bombs in Syria today are not purely Syrian. Secondly, it was a civil war between North and South Vietnam. GI vets are and have been desirable tourists in Vietnam, but the South Vietnamese Boat People are not. (My translation)

Her point is that the Vietnam War was not based on an East/West conflict but on an internal division – that is, a civil war – and that this, in turn, led to the continued division between the current Vietnamese government and its diaspora (to which she herself belongs as a former East German exchange student). According to Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, the global Vietnamese diaspora looks back on the war in a way similar to Pham’s statement (above) in that it was both a proxy and a civil war – that is, in terms of the country’s own internal division: The war involved a fratricidal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the noncommunist Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and extended to neighboring Laos and Cambodia; however, it was also a proxy war in a Cold War contest between the communist bloc and the western bloc. North Vietnam had the massed support of the Soviet Union and China and their satellite states while South Vietnam had the backing of the United States and its allies. […] The history of the war has been a partial one, underscored by […] the focus on American policies. (4–5)

Evidently, it is primarily in the West that Vietnamese politics are seen as derivative to US/Asia and Cold War politics. What both Pham and Nguyen suggest with their emphasis on “proxy war” and “civil war” is that the representation of the Vietnam War in the West is doubly skewed – not only is the history of Vietnam reduced to its so-called “American War” (this view has become commonplace), but even this war is never represented from the Vietnamese’s own points of view. The literary production and reception of Vietnamese authors in the West is, at the same time, largely based on the paradigm of war trauma. According to Nguyen, most write in English (having fled, mostly, to the US): “Since the largest overseas Vietnamese communities are in

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English-speaking countries, the majority of narratives are in English, in which they have articulated their experience of war and loss, trauma and survival, as well as the process of deculturation and acculturation in a new land” (130).6 Vietnamese-American filmmaker and author Trinh T. Minh-ha discusses her experience of “silence” as part of war trauma. On March 12, 2005, I heard her speak about her post–Vietnam War experiences in auditory terms. She described not the visually coded “flashbacks” one is accustomed to as symptoms of survivors in depictions of post-traumatic stress disorder, but rather a response to the absence of sound: When I first came to the United States from Vietnam in 1970, for several months I could not get a good sleep during the night. No matter how hard I tried to surrender to it, I repeatedly found myself lying still, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting. Waiting for what? […] Rather than finding peace and repose in the warmth of the bed, I was dreading what to me seemed like an endless moment of false cessation […] until one night a distant shooting in the streets outside unexpectedly shed a light on the situation. I realized I was briefly home again [in] a war-torn land whose daily sound environment populated by the war machines did not simply stop after dark [but] tended to take one by surprise during sleep time when one was at one’s most vulnerable […]. What appeared most strikingly foreign to me then were these long spacious American nights enveloped by uninterrupted silence. It was in this kind of silence that I experienced the keen feeling of being different – a stranger living in a strange land. (11–2)7

Evidently, Trinh’s need for constant vigilance had made sense in Vietnam during the war, but now ceased to serve its purpose. She described silence, paradoxically – for it might otherwise be considered soothing – as keeping her awake at night. The audience wondered why, now that she was safe, and in a faraway place, she would not be able to rest, and why the absence of noisy explosions would not translate into a calming of the nervous system. In a striking performance, Trinh conveyed that silence as part of war trauma can be “noisy.” In contrast, the silences of Pham’s writing are not presented in terms of traumatic origins – as she explained to me in 2014, growing up during the war felt “normal” to her. The silences depicted by Pham can be associated 6 Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, “War through Women’s Eyes.” 7 This excerpt from her speech is from the printed version in Elsewhere, Within Here.

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with political censorship and the experience of having one’s voice curtailed based on gender discrimination. Pham’s reception in Germany is different from that of Trinh in the US, with its larger diasporic communities, because she is among the very few Vietnamese public voices there. Unfortunately, as Young-Sun Hong states, “in contrast to the vast amount of research on foreign immigrant workers in West Germany, the question of foreigners and racism in East Germany has attracted scholarly interest only in the last decade. Even here, though, the focus has been primarily on contract workers [Facharbeiter] during the last years of the East German state” (191).8 Still, as a Southeast Asian intellectual living and working in Germany, Pham’s voice adds perspective to that of the Anglophone and Francophone – as well as formerly West German – Viet Kieu diaspora. As I demonstrate in the following, the “silences” in her writing may be attributed to the experience of censorship and misogyny – and, possibly, to a sense of intellectual and cultural isolation. At the same time, I argue, Pham uses translation to bridge the gap between creative writing and censorship, that is, not being allowed to have a voice.

II The first-person narrator in The Crystal Messenger is named Hoài, the author’s alter ego, as is eventually revealed, and the novel focuses on her being reduced to passive, silent, waiting. In The Crystal Messenger, the twin sisters are described as opposites:  the more beautiful sister, Hang (who may represent Saigon), who defines herself through her relationships to men, and the narrator, Hoài, who defines herself through the absence of such relationships. If the sisters represent the two geographical parts of a divided Vietnam, this may be an ironic rendering of the Sisters Truong, a folklore image from ancient times. Considered symbolic of the Vietnamese fighting spirit, 8 Young-Sun Hong, “The Benefits of Health Must Spread Among All.”

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Chapter 4 they led the first resistance movement against the occupying Chinese […]. The stories of the Trưng Sisters […] are cited by some historians as hints that Vietnamese society before sinicization was a matriarchal one […]. The two sisters are considered to be a national symbol in Vietnam. They represent Vietnam’s independence. They are often depicted as two women riding two giant war elephants. Many times, they are seen leading their followers into battle against the Chinese […] they are powerful symbols of Vietnamese resistance and freedom.9

Ironically, the sisters in The Crystal Messenger are passive and depend on men. Whereas Hoài patiently waits by the window for her man to arrive and rescue her from oblivion, Hang has many suitors: the plot revolves around her unhappy affairs and marriages, including when she becomes pregnant and decides to abort the child. Hoài, in turn, characterizes herself as living vicariously through her twin sister. The theme of silence is evoked through the death of their younger sister, the toddler Little Hon, who is the “crystal messenger” (Kristallbotin) of the title. Little Hon represents true happiness, and Hoài describes herself as the writer who records this death, now being relegated to be “the youngest child, the voluntary silent stenographer of the family history” (6). She explains that Little Hon had been, before her death, the youngest, and Hoài inadvertently came to take her place. The Crystal Messenger begins with this death, which changes the family order. Countering the reader’s expectations as to what constitutes the “natural” chronological order of things. Pham’s storytelling focuses on family constellations. Hoài writes in a self-effacing way, her narration revolves around Little Hon and then Hang. Little Hon’s death is the focus of the family drama, the beginning of everyone’s unhappiness. As Hoài waits by the window of her tiled room for twenty-odd years for a man who, in the end, mistakes her for her sister (Hang), her physical growth remains stunted; she continues to be a little girl – as if the spirit of her dead sibling, Little Hon, had been magically transferred to her. One might read The Crystal Messenger in terms of a sense of being held back, or being made to feel belittled also in political terms. There is another character, the vertically challenged “dwarf ” Qang, who decides 9 Wikipedia entry:  Trưng Sisters. Also see the longer rendering of their story by Ly Te Xuyen.

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to become a powerful party cadre after his overtures are rejected by the beautiful Hang; yet another male character is a poet, is the only man who truly loves Hang, yet they cannot be together because he has no political power. This notion of diminished human scale is accompanied by a sense of spatial limitation. The Crystal Messenger opens with the narrator’s voluntary confinement: “The house has only one room, sixteen square metres of brown glazed tiles; the room only one window, a rectangular opening […]. Four hundred brown square tiles and a magic ever-changing window, rotating like a Rubik cube” (1). The reader does not know why the narrator is waiting, but she states: “My capacity to wait is unmatched” (4). The novel represents a postwar condition of feeling stifled – there is only one reference to the war: “When I was ten, the war forced us to evacuate to the countryside. I attended Year Five at the village school […]. One day it rained and a few drops of rain fell right on my desk. I cried uncontrollably” (8). Crying and silence are a connected as a theme in The Crystal Messenger. After Little Hon’s death, Hoài describes crystal (Kristall) as a transparent material whose fragility encompasses Little Hon’s limited ability to speak. The toddler’s voice is associated with her smile, which is poetically compared to the song of cicadas: [She was a] fragile and gentle crystal messenger […]. She could not put a stop to her crystal smile, no more than the cicadas could their singing […]. When she learned to speak, little Hon was able to say just the one phrase: “Give me kiss.” […] If only all those who looked as if they had never been able to smile could be enlightened by the crystal halo emanating from this precious little girl. (10–2)

Little Hon is described as bringing happiness to everyone, and this is associated with the narrator’s change to a less muted tone. It appears as if those around Little Hon are unhappy but she is able to bring them happiness, thereby altering the way they utter sounds: [When she smiled] It was as if a magic wand had been waved in rhythm with a rare smooth pulse of life. Those humans whose vocal chords had seemed to know only how to emit aggressive grunting noises, whose faces had seemed forever engraved with life’s harsh worry lines, were suddenly transformed back to their original innocence. (11)

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Unfortunately, Little Hon’s short life is described as amounting to a “mistake.” When she dies, the happiness that came with her dies as well, and the narrator and their mother react with a complete loss of their voices: The next day little Hon did not wake up. […] little Hon never woke up again, the fragile crystal messenger who had entered this world by mistake, giving out kisses and smiles […]. I did not cry [and] Mother lost her capacity to speak for a week. When she regained her voice, she could only utter bitter recriminations. [Later, when] they opened the coffin […] the only thing remaining was the ever-friendly crystal smile of an expelled messenger. (14–5)

The “messenger” (Botin) brings loss, and the reader can interpret the narrator’s waiting, which lasts throughout the book, along with her stifled growth as a response to this loss. Pham’s tone captures the fragility of a singular moment whose effects last a lifetime. This is shown in terms of loss of sound. The narrator describes going to fetch water at the public water tap, again in terms of sound and silence: “I would remain silent and the tap would wastefully sing an unending hymn, without key, without crescendo, a steady nocturnal lullaby. […] please do not dry out [tap], do sing forever this nocturnal lullaby, do not turn silent like me. It would be sad if we were both mute” (17). And the narrator describes her twin sister Hang’s dramatic reaction of “crying in silence,” and of herself comforting her: My power to become invisible proved useful. In a minute I brought everything she needed for her midnight rinsing […]. Five minutes later we were lying next to one another, she still stunned, I hurt and upset. She cried in silence […]. Silently I undid the buttons of her blouse, caressed her breasts as a child would its mother’s, allowing her to drift into a heavy sleep. (39)

The narrator takes on this maternal role, but her growth is stunted as she keeps sitting in her room, waiting for a man she had seen from a distance at the beginning of the novel. Her twin sister, in the meantime, becomes infertile: “She was unable to conceive again. I know that for a child she would be prepared to exchange anything and everything […]. She is lonely” (42). Compared to her sister, the narrator is self-effacing and calls herself mute: “The world sees me as its dumping place. Who do I have?

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Me, the reluctant youngest of the family, the world’s mute snail, a humble bottomless bin” (56). However, while the central part of the book describes Hang’s life in relation to her suitors, there is an excerpt from Hang’s diary addressed to her sister Hoài: “I have chosen you, a sister younger by less than a minute but so different to me, because I couldn’t face confessing my sins to myself […]. You’re like a mute witness, intelligent, firm and decisive, and you’ve never turned your back on me throughout my crazy, compromised life” (121). The narrator is described as a “mute witness,” superior in her silence: “If only I could exchange beauty for something else? For a bit of your determined silence?” (127). It appears as if the narrator’s silent waiting is transformed into a strength – she becomes the writer who records the family’s history. The ending describes the man’s arrival, as he finally notices the narrator. However, they cannot connect, the scene is presented as a time warp where Hoài magically transforms herself into Hang, while the man is looking for her as a child: “Take me with you, please” The man stared at me in bewilderment and looked longingly at the space that little Hoài had just left. “Excuse me, who are you? I’m sorry … I’m meeting someone else, a little girl …” For fifteen years I waited [for the man], clinging onto the window ledge, contracting myself to the extent of losing my voice, and now at the decisive hour, I decided to become a 29-year-old woman, beautiful, the image of my sister Hang. My man has come, has smiled at me. I extended my two beautiful hands with their tapered fingers towards him. “Take me with you, please.” “I’m waiting for my little girl,” he said. He waited and waited in increasing hopelessness and then left, dissolving into the surrounding loneliness. It was a day in early 1988. (142–3)

Clearly, The Crystal Messenger is focused on stagnation and loss, coupled with the inability give verbal expression to an overall sense of stifled possibilities. This may be connected to Pham’s own identity as a Vietnamese woman as well as a censored intellectual during Doi Moi. (And, if Hang

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allegorically represents Saigon, as I  have indicated, Hoài  – who would represent Hanoi in the North – has not kept pace, that is, she has not “grown up”).

III Family relationships in Vietnam, as well as dating and marriage are also emphasized in Pham’s Sunday Menu, a collection of short stories about urban life in Hanoi. They include references to prostitution and garment shop workers as well as to the intellectual milieu of writers and artists, and to gender relations, including marriage, cohabitation, affairs, and other arrangements that appear “modern” and Westernized in the context of Doi Moi society. The story after which the collection is titled, “Sunday Menu,” is about the passing of time, here in relation to corporeality and physical decay. The narrator indulges in the sensuality of cuisine but includes the grotesque image of the decomposing body of her grandmother, who had been a chef. Death is connected to food – it enters the mouth, the organ of speech. To turn to cuisine as metaphor is not new in Vietnamese diaspora writing. Linda Lê, for example, deploys culinary imagery in Les Trois Parques to communicate the violence of a massacre during the Vietnam War, in a scene where a little girl “emerged from her foxhole, but everyone was well and truly dead, hacked to bits, an arm here, a foot there, guts served cold, an ear in red sauce, bits of brain in a charred nest of angel hair. The world’s kitchen smelled very bad” (147). Lê’s emphasis on the corporeality of food juxtaposes the everyday domestic life of the kitchen to the trauma of war. Pham, on the other hand, here describes the everyday scene of preparing food for cyclo-drivers in Hanoi. She and her mother are running a food stall, and the narrator visits her grandmother every Sunday to tell her what she and her mother had been cooking up to serve to their customers, presented as a list of exotic-sounding recipes: “Last week on Monday we had Chicken with Golden Flowers, on Tuesday it was Phoenix Embryo,

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Dragon’s Beard for Wednesday, Golden Sand Abalone for Thursday, Hibiscus Fried Crab on Friday, White Bird Returning to Nest on Saturday, and today, Sunday, we had Duck with Holothurian” (17). Eventually, the grandmother dies but the narrator refuses to bury the body; she leaves it in the attic until it is covered with maggots: “Grandma was lying on the floor. Her face was turned towards the door waiting for me, her mouth next to a bowl of shark fin soup. A terrible flow of slime oozed from her mouth to the bowl, or was it rising from the bowl to her mouth? […] I closed my eyes tight. When I opened them again, I saw millions of busy maggots” (29). The mouth here is the dominant image, along with the maggots who feed off the decaying corpse in a chain of conspicuous consumption. Associated with plenty, this may be seen as an ironic comment on the new Vietnamese capitalist economy. While this story is not directly about “waiting,” it shows the limits of temporality. And while it is not directly focused on “silence,” the mouth, as the location from which speech emanates, is silenced by the maggots. This image, of the grandmother’s decaying corpse is grotesque, but the narrator’s refusal to bury her extends their “relationship” beyond mortality, as if time had not passed (which resembles “not growing up” in The Crystal Messenger). Furthermore, in addition to the passing of time, reproduction plays a role in “Sunday Menu.” The female narrator is working with her mother in the kitchen together with a young man who puts eggs into her blouse – this increasingly after the death of her grandmother. Eggs suggest fertility, a new life cycle, and she says: “I will definitely get married one day” (27). Then she describes herself in terms of the times she lives in: “[E]‌ach person belongs to an era in a natural way, like every painting has its own frame, and I don’t know which frame I belong to. I am always in between this frame and that frame, nothing is settled. That’s all. I am not difficult like Grandma, not insouciant like Mother” (26). Again, this may be a reference to Vietnam’s intellectual and economic climate as a result of Doi Moi. It appears the narrator feels displaced by the historical moment, and thus arrests time by not burying her ancestor, pretending instead that it is “always Sunday.” One of the more esoteric topics in Pham’s writing

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is this arresting of time, here in terms of mortality and reproduction.10 A concurring theme in texts by Pham is counting, the notion of a series of events that is repeated, often connected to dates, such as years and months, and to repetitive relationships: see, for example, Pham’s stories “Chin Bo Lam Muoi” [Nine Down Makes Ten], translated by Peter Zinoman, and “Allumfassende Liebe” about a woman’s seven lovers, also in Sunday Menu. Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, in The Ironies of Freedom, positions the link between women and food in Vietnam as part of the culture of bia ôm [restaurants with hostesses]. This practice developed in the wake of Doi Moi and it is possible that Pham’s focus on corporality and cuisine refers indirectly (and, again, ironically) to this link between women and food. Nguyen-vo explains: [Because] the state sector […] occupied the pivotal position, the private entrepreneurs often found themselves paying for the former’s “entertainment” to facilitate business deals. This customarily meant taking the contacts, and others involved, out to bia ôm, literally “hugging beer,” a catchall term for places that serve various foods, alcoholic drinks, and invariably pleasure through access to women’s bodies in a range of semi-sexual to sexual services. (18)

Nguyen-vo cites interviews with bia ôm hostesses who describe their exploitative working conditions: they “had to work from ten in the morning until midnight without pay. They lived on the tips given them by the men. They would have to compete with a couple dozen other women […]. Should the customer become displeased with their service or their appearance, they would be replaced by their coworkers” (32). Most striking is the connection between sex and food made by both men and women in the interviews she conducted: Hang described her relationship to her male customers at the bia ôm restaurant in this way: “In that place, I am their cake. They buy it, they eat it any way they want.” Minh said she felt “worse than selling fish” when the guests refused to tip her for her services, as if people keep poking the fish flesh at the market without wanting to buy it. 10 In spite of suggestions that Vietnam was once matriarchal, kinship patterns are now patriarchal, an effect of the impact of Confucianism imported from China. Pham’s story about three generations of women may refer to a possible history of matriarchy in Vietnam.

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As women expressed their feelings of being devoured or their vulnerability at being rejected as a not-good-enough piece of edible flesh, metaphors of food repeatedly showed up in references to these pleasure practices. One Nguyen Dinh Dam, in justifying his bia ôm habit, likened his wife to dry squash fibers (xo muop) and the bia ôm hostesses to young gourds (bau non), both vegetables used in rural dishes (49).

Although Pham does not write directly about bia ôm culture, her story “Sunday Menu” evokes Vietnamese food and women in the lists of exotic-sounding dishes served by female vendors from a food stall in the street. Nguyen-vo explains that as a consequence of Doi Moi, “people no longer liked to eat [beef, chicken, fish, pork] but snakes, centipedes, cicadas [and] as an aphrodisiac [men] enjoyed the snake blood beaten into a custard-like cake” (49). Vietnamese delicacies like “eels, turtles, frogs, snakes, leaves, shoots, water lilies, roots, and so forth were exotic in their fantastic variety” (51). Nguyen-vo relates this to a newly developing nationalism, which focuses on what is unique to Vietnamese cuisine, and she also draws correlations between sex and food through rurality that was imbued with a sense of nationalist nostalgia for when the land was being won and cultivated, a primal connection between man and land, enactable in the sexual connection between man and woman, conflated with the act of ingesting wildly exotic dishes of indigenous edibles. […] the act of eating [had] its now twin sex act, vulgar in formulations of bodily functions and gluttony. (55–6)

Pham’s story, in contrast, evokes a different relationship to food:  three generations of women who prepare meals are shown as connected to essential human themes of kinship and mortality – the grandmother and her cooking are essential to the narrator’s existence.11

11 Note that the author herself teaches Vietnamese cooking in Berlin. As she told me, cooking to her is more a “sensual, more satisfying activity” than writing, because it seems more “real” to her.

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IV I now discuss two stories in which gender discrimination becomes evident through the use of a male narrator, with continued emphasis on voice/silence. Looking at the situation of women in Vietnam, one finds conflicting renderings. According to Tran Thi Minh Thi, women have fared better under what the PRV refers to as socialism: Modernization has brought about autonomous ways of life among the Vietnamese. Since the 1950s, the position of Vietnamese women has significantly improved in many aspects. […] The socioeconomic miracle that followed the country’s opening to the outside world and the post-1986 Renovation have dramatically changed social mores […]. Collectivism is weakening, while individualism, which used to be weak in traditional society, has become one of the most influential factors. (109)12

And yet, while Doi Moi has urbanized and Westernized Vietnam, the combination of private enterprise and continued central government control has not necessarily led to economic improvements for female workers. As Hy V. Luong explains, marketization and globalization have increased income-generating opportunities for many women. However, this often means an increase in paid working hours on top of unpaid domestic work. The contraction of the state’s role in the public domain and the selective reinvention of tradition outside the government-controlled sphere have also led to the resurgence of the male-oriented kinship model to the disadvantage of women […] gender inequality in Vietnam persisted even at the height of socialist reform […]. Vietnamese women’s significant roles in the economy do not necessarily lead to a restructuring of gender relations to their advantage. (50–1)13

At the same time, in contrast to the above, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, in Vietnamese Voices, reaches back in history to suggest that Vietnam’s kinship model has been traditionally based on female power, especially in comparison with neighboring China: 12 Tran Thi Min Thi, “Divorce Prevalence under the Forces of Individualism and Collectivism.” 13 Hy V. Luong. “Gender Relations in Vietnam.” 25–56.

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Although Vietnam underwent ten centuries of Chinese domination (from 111 B.C. to A.D. 939), it has always had a more liberal approach to women than China. There were both male and female army leaders during the short-lived rebellion of the Trung sisters against their Chinese overlords in the first century A.D. Footbinding was never practiced in Vietnam. Until the fifteenth century, women were on a par with men in matters of inheritance and marriage. The Code of the Le Dynasty (1428–1788) was far more liberal towards women than the parallel Chinese Codes of the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties. Women enjoyed a greater degree of protection under criminal law provisions and were entitled to significant property interests that had to be respected by their spouse’s family. (16–7)

The two stories I’m discussing, “In the Rain” (In einem Regen) and “Man Nuong,” are told from a male narrator’s point of view. This reverses the frequently used paradigm of the allegorical figure of Kieu, the victimized prostitute from Nguyen Dû’s nineteenth-century Tale of Kieu, who is often seen as a national allegory: In choosing a woman [Kieu] as the central character of his poem, Nguyen Du was following an established tradition in Vietnam – an apparent propensity among male writers to let female protagonists illustrate and embody the great tragedies and triumphs of life. This issue has not yet been the subject of critical attention. Perhaps, it was more acceptable for a woman than a man to voice personal anguish. The use of a woman protagonist might also have provided, superficially at least, a distancing device to protect a male author from direct accusations of sedition and subversion. (16)

Pham uses the device of a narrator who has the opposite gender of the author – perhaps because this allows her to foreground the way in which women’s voices remain silent.14 Waiting is again featured in her story “In the Rain.” A sense of impotence is expressed in the image of a man waiting in a public space, a café in Hanoi. The narrator is a celebrity of sorts, who waits for Vi, whom he describes as the least attractive of three sisters, with a slight tone of condescension: she is trusting but boring, and the café she chose is “nondescript” (95). Eventually, a prostitute solicits him but he still ends up alone, standing outside in the rain. In a reversal from The 14 Feminist critics frequently interpret the use of male narrators by female authors in terms of the insecurity related to saying “I” as a woman. However, this does not apply to Pham, who uses strong female narrators.

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Crystal Messenger, the male narrator in this story waits for a woman in vain. He is a singer, which means his voice is doubly present, whereas the female figure remains absent. The opening already anticipates disappointment, yet the man decides to wait:  “The end-of-autumn rain has been falling for eight hours. It has been years since I last sat in the same spot for an entire shift like this. The first time was in my childhood, the second in my early adulthood, and this time, the third time, I am in my midlife […]. I am going to leave this date as empty-handed as I came” (95). He has a voice: “[My name] is quite well known, too: three times a day my voice is broadcast on air over several stations” (96). However, “my singing voice [is] the voice of a national People’s Artist who sings for everybody but me” (101). He identifies himself as a commercialized public figure: I asked only to have a coffee with her, using the excuse that I had composed a song, especially for her. I am a singer of national fame, I have performed for Vung Tau Tourism, for Bao Loc Silk and Textiles, for Thang Long Tobacco, for Song Da HydroElectric, for Hoan Vien Crematory, for Family Planning, and now I have a song just for Vi. (99)

Here, the singer has a public voice he wants to use privately, for the woman he’s waiting for as if she were his muse, yet she doesn’t come. Interestingly, the description of his waiting is interjected with his memories about screaming, and associated with death. This then shifts to silence, and then song: Seven long hours passed […]. I had achieved similar records in waiting like this before. The first time was when my mother, the best singer in the world, passed away. I hid in a corner and cried non-stop […]. Then I began to scream and scream until my mother was placed in a coffin and the lid was closed. The second time was when I ran into an old friend [and he said] he would be straight back in a few minutes. I sat there for the whole afternoon [but] My friend never came back. […] This time, […] I did not cry, scream or sob. Instead, I maintained a stoic silence […]. I prayed that Vi would turn up so that for once I could sing without spotlights, without props, not as a “People’s Artist,” without the orchestra – that all-purpose salad dressing that we call musical accompaniment. (102–3)

The story ends with an emphasis on the passing of time: “I heard the clock strike 12. Vi didn’t turn up. She can sit next to me for hours in comfortable

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silence. But she didn’t come. The rain cast its last drops around two. On cold nights like this young girls often sleep very soundly” (106). The dominant image is the rain and the empty, semipublic space of the café. The question for the reader becomes: why does the man keep sitting there? It appears as if the passing of time itself, combined with the notion of voice, is the topic of this story. The man in the café who waits for a woman and looks out at the rainy streets of Saigon resembles the female narrator in The Crystal Messenger in the activity of silent waiting, but here the narrator is male, and the woman he waits for does not enter the story, thus has no voice. Her absence, however, speaks volumes. In the story “Man Nuong” (which is translated only into English), Pham refers to another traditional Vietnamese folklore figure. According to Keith Weller Taylor, in popular Vietnamese culture, Man Nương was a poverty-stricken temple orphan. Being a stutterer, she could not recite the sutras, so she worked in the kitchen to feed the monks and their disciples. One night […] Man Nương fell asleep in the doorway. She became pregnant when Già La Xà Lê stepped over her to pass through the door. Both Man Nương and Già La Xà Lê were embarrassed; she left to dwell in a different temple. When her daughter was born, she brought the child to Già La Xà Lê, who committed the infant to a tree and gave Man Nương a staff with which to obtain water in time of drought. When Già La Xà Lê was over ninety years old, the tree fell over and floated down the river to the temple. No one could move it until Man Nương lifted it out of the water and placed it on dry land. When craftsmen carved four Buddha images from the tree, they found the rock and threw it into the river; it flashed light and all the craftsmen died. Man Nương prayed; divers retrieved the rock and gave it back to the statue from where it had come. Già La Xà Lê named the four Buddha images Cloud Dharma, Rain Dharma, Thunder Dharma, and Lightning Dharma. Man Nương was called the Mother Buddha, and the day of her death was celebrated as the birthday of the Buddha. (110)

Pham’s choice to introduce this popular folk figure, which in Vietnam is worshiped as a powerful Earth Mother, is in contrast to the use of the other figures, the Sisters Truong and Kieu. Man Nuong is portrayed as a victim – she is an orphan – but she becomes a maternal figure who wields some power over nature.15 Interestingly, the original story of Man Nuong 15 Man Nuong has been called the “Barbarian Lady” in some renderings, but Keith Weller Taylor gives less credence to this: “Man Nương is apparently a Sinitic rendering

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in Taylor’s rendering includes that she “stutters.” We can see this in Pham’s story where the male narrator describes Man Nuong as “quiet”: she does not talk back and this is a quality he appreciates. Here, Pham clearly draws attention to the way in which female silence is considered a prime virtue in Vietnamese culture. “Man Nuong” again takes place in the close confines of a small room, in a contrast between myth and the everyday. The male narrator names his lover, who appears to be a cadre, as this folklore figure: “Man Nuong, that’s what I call you during these blue afternoons in a third-floor room of four by 4.5 by 2.8 metres, a room empty except for the two green branches of a tree” (67). The story recounts their lovemaking by comparing its clumsy ways with how sexuality is represented in popular magazines, as glamorous and exciting – again this refers to the newly emerging capitalist consumer society of Doi Moi. As the man observes, neither of the protagonists are physically beautiful, and they experience awkward silences in each other’s presence. The story is touching because it is unromantic: they are affectionate, but the narrator is married. In Pham’s version, the male narrator is shown to love Man Nuong tenderly, yet with a certain detachment. The story begins and ends with two green branches (placed as decoration in the otherwise empty room): one of these the man breaks off to give to Man Nuong; the other of which he plans to take with him, but ends up forgetting: On our last afternoon together, as you were doing up your hair in a bun, I broke off one of the two branches and gave it to you. You blinked a couple of times in surprise, put it inside your cadre’s backpack and firmly zipped it shut. […] I planned to take the remaining branch the following morning when I was due to leave Hanoi, but was so busy packing, I forgot. (77)

of a demotic understanding of A Man as Ả Man, with ả being an archaic word for young women in vernacular Vietnamese […]. The [Chinese] character used to represent Man means ‘ “southern barbarian’ ” […] translators have rendered the name as ‘ “barbarian lady’ ” […]. However, this is implausible considering that in the story this person is portrayed as a civilized girl who is a respected resident of the regional urban center” (108).

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Perhaps these branches symbolize the impossibility of their relationship and/or its fragility. If Man Nuong is a Buddhist symbol for life and fertility, it seems ironic that “life” (nature) is reduced to these branches in this closed urban space. What seems interesting is that Man Nuong is a cadre, and she has a daughter. Pham’s choice of this female figure explicitly rejects the sentimentalized connection between femininity and prostitution that Kieu represents, and it normalizes the theatrical heroism and fighting spirit of the Sisters Truong. She describes Man Nuong’s position as a married man’s lover as precarious:  the man does not seem to care about her beyond their secret meetings, and the reader learns little about Man Nuong beyond her ability to be the man’s lover. The situation of women in Vietnam is precarious. Thu-huong Nguyen-vo describes Doi Moi in terms of a newly developing capitalist economy that includes prostitution and trafficking of women: “Economic liberalization had called into question the socialist revolutionary promise and its utopian time line. But it had put in its place the lure of capitalist modernization and its teleology of progress, its fetish of the new, which, in the case of a Vietnam newly opened to the world, was synonymous with the foreign […] this love affair with the new life came with anxieties about native women won over to foreign power and foreign money, that old story about the native whore” (55). She writes about the literary figure of Kieu as a romanticized image of the past. Her interviews with sex workers, as well as the wives of men who frequent them, depict an economy where the “commodification and consumption of pleasure in women’s bodies had to do with liberalizing economic practices in the current distribution of political/economic power […]. These practices, visible to ordinary Vietnamese and officials alike, undermined the credibility of prostitution as a vestige of ancient regimes” (62). As she explains, the sex trade is represented by the Vietnamese government as a vestige of the past: sex workers are arrested and imprisoned, to be “reeducated.” Clearly, there is a disconnect between the literary rendering of Kieu’s story and the actual reality of prostitution in bia ôm where representations of this leisure/pleasure activity harked back to the aesthetic experience of the old leisure class’s visits with courtesans who were well versed in music and literature, poeticized by that quintessential Vietnamese poet Nguyen Dû in his

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Chapter 4 nineteenth-century portrayals of Kieu and cô Cám. But those representations were not credible to most people. [The interviews led to] descriptions of the vulgarity and ugliness of the whole sex and pleasure scene. Theft of public wealth was a frequent reference to the speculated source of the money spent in the pleasure houses. Men’s behavior in the pleasure places was characterized as vulgar and obscene. The bia ôm women were described as dishonest, cheap, gaudy, withered, ugly, and even frightening. There were frequent characterizations of sex as pleasure of the flesh, on a par with other bodily functions. The high culture of music and poetry recitals provided by the courtesans of the past, immortalized in Nguyen Dû’s Kieu and Cám, failed to provide the aesthetic anchor for this contemporary pleasure scene. (41–2)

Pham’s modern, realistic characters counter these pretensions to the leisure class of the ancien regime that gloss over the social and economic inequities in contemporary Vietnamese economy. Her figures are unlike the stylized figures from Vietnamese folklore – they do not lend themselves as easily to allegory. As Nguyen-vo observes, there is a huge gap between literary representations that function to allegorize Vietnam in the popular imagination and the actual “contemporary pleasure scene.” Pham portrays gender relationships in the above-discussed stories “In the Rain” and “Man Nuong” in terms of female absence and silence. As I demonstrate in my concluding discussion of another of Pham’s stories, communication between spouses is also marred by these conditions, yet “translation” becomes a way of bridging the gap between silence and voice.

V The third story told from a male narrator’s point of view is “Five Days” (“Fünf Tage”), and it deals with the topic of translation, although it is ostensibly about a marriage, told from the perspective of the husband: he complains that his wife does not speak. Based on Westernization and Hanoi urban culture, the notion of the woman as more vocal, more sexually desiring and more educated has gained currency. In that sense, the woman’s return to silence can be construed as a form of rebellion. As Tran Thi Minh Thi explains: “Gender equality and increased independence for

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women in marriage and family have resulted in the dominant trend of women initiating divorce. […] divorce no longer carries the social stigma it once did. Vietnam’s transition to a market economy also began to reshape lifestyles and values [and this includes a] rising divorce rate” (109). I have described the themes of arrested development and silencing as a form of victimization but the wife in this story is the one who walks out. Here, translation becomes also a theme – perhaps not surprisingly, given that the author is a translator. Silence takes on an added dimension insofar as it inhibits dialogue. The story features the silence of a wife in the five days that mark the end of the marriage: she walks out because of the couple’s inability to communicate. Again, the story is structured in terms of segments of time; it gradually becomes clear that the married couple is unable to communicate, and that the relationship is bound to end. The inability to speak, and the tension that builds, are featured through images of the face and mouth as mask-like. Indeed, Pham often plays with the idea of face and masks that have become clichés in Asian culture. Pham here writes in a style that leaves out information. As in Kafka, the authority of the narrator is compromised by omissions and doubt as to what is real versus subjectively perceived. And as in Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect], reality is defamiliarized in Pham’s writings through the use of recurring tropes such as the mask – which includes the mouth, the organ of speech – which becomes a device through which she demonstrates the inability to communicate. Pham’s story is about a couple’s separation based on their inability to speak the same language. They coexist, but are not happy. Everyday life has become routine, and it has become stifling for the wife. She wants to leave and what happens in the five days leading up to her departure takes place nonverbally: looks, gestures, physical contact, etc. The husband is unable to tell his wife how much he loves her. Instead, he tries to relax his facial features, which are stuck in place. Pham’s comic style has him describe his face as ugly: “I knew she didn’t want to look at my face. Nothing on my face would interest her: the pimples on my cheeks, the stubble on my chin. Even I dislike my face. It’s the face of a Head of Institute at home and of a low-ranking worker at the real Institute” (122). It is a grotesque exaggeration of the Asian cliché of the mask. The man expresses surprise about his wife’s

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use of make-up: “She began to use lipstick shortly after we were married. Why was that, I wondered idly” (122). At some point, they end up having intercourse and he describes her reaction in terms of the face: “She powdered her face in the same way sanitation workers spray disinfectants on plague-carrying dead rats. Clearly, one night’s passion was not enough to reinfect her with the disease of love” (125). The analogy between her prepowdered face and “plague-carrying dead rats” alludes to her post-coital relaxed facial expression, which she is trying to “disinfect” as if the “night’s passion” would otherwise rekindle the onset of “love,” here described in terms of a “disease.” For her, passion is “not enough” to bring her to love him anew, and to make her reconsider her decision to leave. And yet, he sees her as putting on powder only to return to the cool mask she has been wearing: the “disease of love” he refers to, which he would like her to be “reinfected” by, is not negative from his point of view but rather something he would like her to “suffer” from, so the description must be read as a projection of he thinks she feels (repulsed) – whereas the woman herself is not expressing her own viewpoint. However, her very silence is indicative of her desire to leave, and of her refusal to engage in communication. The story extends her looming departure, reiterating the paradigms of silence and waiting that can be seen as both based on feeling silenced and on using silence as a means of resistance. Given that here, the problem is about an intimate relationship where verbal communication fails after it had, presumably, once existed, one can interpret this in connection to the paradigm of translation (as I do below), and of the way nonverbal physical expression is related to – and may end up stifling – speech. The husband keeps trying to change his facial expression to visually communicate but the author redirects this to the mouth, the organ of speech, which becomes representative of the face. The narrator comments on both his own mouth and that of his wife. For example, he smiles at her but she drops her jaws: “I broke into a silly grin showing all my 32 teeth. But my smile sank without trace when it met her pursed lips with lowered corners, an expression of coldness that I knew so well, that I was so sick of ” (217). In the German translation by Dieter Erdmann, the passage uses a colloquialism pertaining to the woman’s mouth in conjunction with the man’s feeling of having had to swallow this all-to-familiar expression and

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now wanting to vomit: “[den] Mund der Gleichgültigkeit, den kenne ich nur zu genau, der hängt mir zum Hals heraus” (79). This literally translates into: “her mouth of oblivion, I am so sick of it that it comes out of my throat,” akin to the English colloquialism: “I have had it up to here.” The German also evokes another throat-related colloquialism: “ich habe den Hals voll” meaning: “don’t feed me more, I’ve had enough of this.” Both alternatives refer to something being stuck in one’s throat, that is, perhaps: words. The narrator expresses his desire and inability to speak: I wanted to say to her, “Let’s not say another word, let’s just wait till night comes and everything will be all right again. There is no need for pretence. We’ll stay together forever, until we die and become a pair of interlocking skeletons. Let me unpack your books, let me gladly put those shoes on your feet, my lovely centipede who does not like to touch the ground. This way we will both be better off.” But those words couldn’t leave my mouth, as my face again hardened into a permanent frown. The joy we felt the night before was genuine but it had not percolated down deep enough. There was nothing in common between day and night.16

The passage establishes a contrast between what he wants to say and what he is able to say in accordance with “the mask” that appears to dictate his expressions. As a visual image, it is the antithesis to words, yet physiologically, they are connected, the focus is on the throat as the origin of speech  – the abyss of silence and of the gaping emptiness beyond the 16 After “Let’s not say another word and everything will be alright again,” the English translation says “There is no need for pretence”; whereas in German it states, with reference to the mouth: “Wir werden uns nicht ansehen und fleissig eingeübte Münder vergleichen müssen” [we will no longer be forced to look at one another to compare our mouths, which have been practicing so diligently]. Furthermore, the English translation omits the following, which in the German translation comes after “This way we will both be better off ”: “dann quäle ich weniger den Spiegel und die Muskeln um den Mund, und auch die Augenbrauen und Wimpern brauchen sich nicht mehr bereitzuhalten. Schweig, so ist es für dich leichter” [then I won’t torture the mirror and the muscles around my mouth anymore, and my eyebrows and eyelashes will no longer have to stand at attention. Be quiet and it will be easier for you]. Both translations continue with “But those words couldn’t leave my mouth” and the meaning of the passage is not lost but it is clear that the German translation, by Dieter Erdmann, dwells more extensively on images pertaining to the mouth as a symbol of speech in opposition to silence.

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surface of the “mouth.” The man is looking for silence, but only underneath the surface of the skin/mask, and the words that would lead him there, paradoxically, cannot be found. He cannot tell his wife of the depth he is seeking to penetrate. This is actually good because, as the reader sees, the wife is not interested in her “depth” being “penetrated.” The reader does not know what the wife feels: perhaps she has a lover, perhaps she just wants to be free. She is silent. This silence becomes a weapon and a way of escaping before she actually leaves their apartment. Throughout the story, the reader sees the woman as wanting to leave, and the man as entertaining hope that he might be able to convince her to stay. He searches for a kind of silence of his own that would enable him to speak, which is what he desires. But the woman’s silence is absolute. The irony is that the man is inhibited by the rigidity of his own “speaking device” (his mouth) and this is also funny: he is rendered impotent by his own stiffness. He does not understand the woman, she is a mystery to him, and he comes across as an inhibited “square.” No matter how hard he tries to communicate, he is confronted with a wall of silence. The moral of the story is that “depth” is an illusion. The man appears to want to control or rescue the relationship through logos but the visual takes over. The woman’s silence has more power. The ending is anticlimactic, the story has tension but no plot or drama. She just takes her things and leaves, with the narrator including her in the list of objects that depart with her: “her hats, her shoes, her cosmetics, her books, and herself, my feminine wife – all have taken leave” (128).17 He seems resigned, and she seems cruel because the reader, by definition, is drawn into the narrator’s subjective point of view. However, the reader sympathizes with her desire to break out of the scene of control, ritual, logos. The husband is trying to possess the wife, yet does not understand her and is unable to communicate his own feelings. In terms of this being a paradigm for cultural encounters – for understanding the “other” – Pham’s story suggests that it is 17 Again, the German translation of this concluding sentence differs by suggesting that the woman steals herself away clandestinely and avoids any sounds (including those associated with speech): “meine liebe Ehefrau […] hat sich still und leise davon gemacht” [literally in English: “my dear wife […] has escaped quietly, without making any noise”] (81).

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important to remember that one does not understand the other. Just as in translation, there is always a gap, a misunderstanding, an inability to know. Any encounter between people – especially from different cultures but also between spouses – can take place nonverbally, beyond language. TurkishGerman author Zafer Şenocak, similarly to Pham, uses metaphors of “illness” and being “different” to critique the Western emphasis on logos (trans. Leslie Adelson): Maybe we, Germans and Turks, would have to learn a third, common language that no one except us would understand. […] A language that would inject us into each other like a vaccine and immunize us against each other so that we can be together without hurting each other […] A third language crafted from the alphabet of the deaf and dumb, from the broken sounds, a bastard language that transforms misunderstandings into comedy and fear into understanding. (35)

One might relate this to the concept of an écart by François Jullien, whose the notion of an “in-between” space I have discussed in my introduction. There is always a discrepancy, an opening, an emptiness, between people(s). Perhaps, if the husband hadn’t insisted so much on speaking, they might have found a way of communicating. However, Pham is keenly aware of the connecting quality of translation, without which it would be impossible for anyone to read her work. Having translated German authors into Vietnamese, she also has received literary awards in Germany for her own books that were translated from Vietnamese. Since her works have been banned in Vietnam, she can effectively be read only in the German, French, or English translation. Her native language connects her to her homeland, where she is not allowed to visit (she has to travel to a third country to see her family). Her attitude is to distance herself, arguing that her works become “other” when translated into foreign languages. She wrote to me in an e-mail: I have come to recognize that my work, once it has been transposed into another language, takes on a life of its own, which no longer has much to do with me anymore […]. It doesn’t matter if my works live their lives in whichever way they are meant to be in other languages, they no longer concern me […]. I have been so free from worries about my works in other languages that I haven’t even glanced at them

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Chapter 4 […] After all, I don’t know a word of Finnish or Japanese, and my works have been published in these languages without me meddling. (My translation)18

For the reader, this means that not only can one not read her work in the original, but also that the translations are not reliable insofar as she herself is not involved in their production. This constitutes an added dimension to the “silence” featured in her texts, as she does not claim authority over the translations, and of her texts insofar as she has been officially “silenced” by the Vietnamese government and the translations become the only way in which her works can be read. Their presence on the marketplace, ironically, magnifies the fact that the Vietnamese original is not available. Readers are forced to read Pham via translations without being able to ascertain their quality and accuracy by comparing them back to the published originals. In the case of French, one translation is not even directly from the Vietnamese but is rather a translation of a translation from the German. And if one compares the different translations to one another (e.g. German and English), there are so many derivations, modifications and omissions that it becomes difficult to tell which translation is most reliably based on the (unpublished) original Vietnamese. Pham’s reader has to reckon with the fact that there is no “original.” And depending on which language, there is discrepancy: while the English translation is different from the German, the German and French translations are nearly identical – perhaps because, ironically, the French translation is based on the German, which is already a translation. I suppose that, rather than experimenting with different renderings of the text, the French translator must have decided, not knowing the Vietnamese original, to stay as close to the German as possible. The condition of not having an “original” in many works of contemporary literature is discussed by Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. She explains that contemporary writers frequently experiment with translation, including writing in a foreign language, translating their own work, or even deliberately destroying the original so that the translation 18 Pham’s e-mail of July 5, 2015, in response to my question regarding the English translation.

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de facto becomes the new “original.” In each instance, however, the different renderings are competing with one another. The problem of translation as an impossible task is addressed, in turn, by Emily Apter in Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, where she explains that translations are not seen as the cultural property of a nation. Therefore, Apter claims, they acquire an untrustworthy reputation, being seen as illegitimate, akin to plagiarism: “Translation, seen as authorized plagiarism, emerges as a form of creative property that belongs fully to no one […]. Translation is haunted by the anxiety that it is unoriginal or illicitly appropriated intellectual property” (15).19 This makes Pham’s case interesting insofar as there is no claim of belonging to a national literary canon vis-à-vis the translation as derivative. Her book are free-floating when it comes to “national” belonging. My own labeling of Pham as an “Asian-German” writer, in spite of the fact that she does not in German, is based on this: she has been living in Germany for two decades and this is where she has published – yet can one call her a “German” writer? And, conversely, if one were to continue to call her a “Vietnamese” writer, would this make sense, given that she neither lives nor is published there? What Apter refers to is the question of “ownership” – her claim of untranslatability is connected to the idea that literature always contains a modicum of foreignness, it can never be fully appropriated. This argument is timely insofar as translations, especially into English, often sound as if they were not translations but rather written in the original, so that all “strangeness” is removed in favor of accessibility. Gayatri Spivak has commented that many books, especially from developing countries, are made to sound the same in English, as they are published in a “a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan” (182). Apter’s view implies a critique of a global marketing strategy for books that is intended to make it appear as if all cultures were “the same.” Her notion of the “untranslatable” insists on difference, foreignness and unknowability.

19 Walkowitz explains that Apter is not “against” world literature or translation itself, but rather only against nationalist appropriations of literary works.

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What is one to make of the significance of translation both in this author’s stories and as the main activity in her life? The translator is often a figure of neutrality, he or she has to listen and render what they hear. The assumption is that they will not alter the content of what is being said. Politically speaking, the translator has to be neutral and “reliable,” which means they have to refrain from any kind of editing or additions that might reflect their own points of view. Translation implies mediation, diplomacy, reconciliation, and so on; it does not have a critical voice or agency. Perhaps, remaining silent is the “voice” of complete refusal, the counteraction to being reduced to translation. At the same time, Pham’s choice to continue working as a translator could be seen as a form of resistance: her voice is also – still – being “heard.” Compared to Weiss’s apparent failure of representation, Pham’s writings are engaged in articulating, paradoxically, the silences and miscommunications that ensue from the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Rather than thinking in terms of analogies, as Weiss does, Pham addresses the impossibility of understanding, the inability to communicate, and the failure to “translate” one culture or historical period into another.

Part III

Discordances

Chapter 5

Shamanic Performances: Joseph Beuys’s Der Eurasier, Eurasia Siberian Symphony, and Auschwitz Demonstration

This chapter focuses on German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys (1921– 86), who created performance pieces and installations referencing “Eurasia” and who billed himself as a modern-day shaman. He took an anti-Western, antimodern stance, yet was received as progressive by the German public, as well as internationally. Known as, supposedly, one of the founders of the Green Party, Beuys was seen as a leftist German artist who practiced Vergangenheitsbewältigung [working through the past] after World War II. His shamanism was seen as cathartic with respect to the legacy of National Socialism, which he experienced as both a member of the Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth] and then, voluntarily, of the Luftwaffe. Only recently, with the biography by Hans-Peter Riegel, has it become known that Beuys entertained close friendships with highranking former Nazis, and that while he was marching for peace as an environmentalist, he was also attending meetings of World War II veterans who celebrated their heroic wartime deeds in the armies of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps because this biography has yet to appear in English, Beuys continues to be seen as leftist and progressive in the United States, and his Nazi affiliations remain unrecognized, ignored or downplayed by a public that seems invested in keeping their postwar German artists “clean” from the taint of fascism. My chapter elaborates on this debate and analyzes the specific ways in which Beuys constructed a reactionary version of “Eurasia” that appears dangerously close to the ideas behind Hitler’s Lebensraum doctrine that justified the country’s expansion eastward. In Beuys’s work, the crimes against humanity that took place at Auschwitz are minimized while “Eurasia” appears as a pristine and empty territory to be occupied by shamanic spirits such as himself.

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Beuys became internationally known after causing a scandal in the United States in 1979 while exhibiting his works at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the catalogue to the exhibition, curated by his friend Caroline Tisdall, Beuys stated that “we are now experiencing Auschwitz in its contemporary character.” This analogy between the Shoah and the present was designed to be provocative, but it was also deeply offensive. Art critic Benjamin Buchloh published a scathing denunciation of Beuys’s work. And Ron Manheim, whose paternal relatives were murdered in a German concentration camp, observed that Beuys was anti-Semitic in his refusal to recognize the necessity of understanding the dangerous ideology of Nazi Germany on its own terms – it could not simply be equated with the overall ills of society as a whole. German critics, on the other hand, stylized Beuys into the figure of an exorcist; informed by the popular concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung as it had been introduced on a broad scale by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s popular Freudian book, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern [The Inability to Mourn] (1967), they drew on the assumption that the German population had repressed its historical memories of the Third Reich, and hence needed artists like Beuys to bring this repressed content to the fore.1 The 1965 Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt am Main, in which former concentration camp guards were finally brought to justice (twenty years after the Nuremberg trials!), ushered in a new era of Germans suddenly and publicly reckoning with their nation’s past. Precipitated by the 1968 German student movement, which combined an overall leftist anti-imperialist stance with a specific confrontation with the guilt of the students’ Nazi-generation parents, artists like Beuys ended up faring well. What began as the histrionics of an enfant terrible within the avant-garde became pronouncements of a public clairvoyant, able to bring home truths that had once been denied, and to safely incorporate them into a cultural discourse intent on exculpating the German nation.

1 See Sigmund Freud, “Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten” [Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through]. They were also influenced by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, “Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” [The Meaning of Working Through the Past] (1959), in Eingriffe (1963).

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However, things are less dramatic than they might appear: the reception of Beuys, in retrospect, was skewed by its transatlantic metamorphosis from “German” to “international.” As Riegel has pointed out, Beuys’s work wasn’t unique in referencing Auschwitz; many German artists during the late 1960s and 1970s gained notoriety by doing so. In a society that relegated Vergangenheitsbewältigung in part to creative discourses by artists and filmmakers, referring to Auschwitz was “keine aussergewöhnliche Tat” [not a heroic deed] (304).2 Another way of deflating the overblown notoriety of Beuys’s attempts to shock the bourgeoisie is to recognize that his supposed engagement with the Jewish victims of the Shoah can be considered so ignorant as to hardly be called an “engagement” at all. As Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius laconically stated in 2014: “[D]‌ass Beuys’ indirekte Bearbeitung der Vergangenheit sich auch auf die Verfolgung der Juden bezog, ist an seinen Arbeiten trotz der Auschwitz Demonstration nicht ablesbar” [Any relation between Beuys’s indirect processing of the past and the persecution of the Jews is scarcely legible in his work, despite Auschwitz Demonstration] (208). One could say that Beuys’s 1979 reference to Auschwitz was a form of tokenism, borne out by the fact that the only work in his oeuvre that bears any direct, literal reference to Auschwitz is the 1970 showcase Auschwitz Demonstration 1956– 1964. Housed at the Hessische Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, it includes a map of the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, yet, as Matthew Biro has observed, “the only possible reference to Jewish victims in the vitrine, a dead rat lying in a bed of straw in a cylindrical container […], risks restating Nazi stereotypes of Jews as vermin (Ungeziefer).”3 Beuys’s innovative use of the materials of fat and felt may be seen as referring to Auschwitz in the abstract – for example, Gene Ray attributes significance to “their most basic material form. […] According to legend, if not fact, fat was rendered from the bodies of the murdered for use in the production of soap. Hair cut from victims was shipped to factories to be made

2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are my own. 3 Biro’s observation is paraphrased by Peter Chametzky, “From Muscle Men to Fatty Remains,” 187.

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into felt” (188).4 However, grotesquely, such attempts to show that Beuys did not need to refer to the Shoah literally because his whole oeuvre was, somehow, transfused by it, sound only more offensive – to say that the bodies of Jewish victims are referred to as “soap” and “hair” repeats the dehumanization it purportedly inculpates. On that account, it may be more productive to receive Beuys formally, beyond the political or historical discourses surrounding the Shoah.5 As Peter Chametzky explains: Felt is one of the oldest human fabrics, made not from weaving but from pressing together fibers that can derive from many different sources […]. Fat hardens and contracts […]. As a soft material it was appropriate to Beuys’ conception of his work as Plastik (modeling) as opposed to Skulptur (carving). Fat and felt materialized Beuys’s expanded concept of art. (189)

In fact, Beuys’s seemingly universally significant “expanded concept of art,” to which Chametzky refers, is designed to accommodate readings of Beuys that feature the artist’s suffering as a placeholder for the German people who, unable to work through their past, must confront it unwillingly, with resistance. Beuys’s work appears as what Gerald Schröder in 2011 called – perhaps in reminiscence of the reception of the Mitscherlichs’ book – an image of the “kollektive Verdrängung das den Holocaust als traumatisches Ereignis der deutschen Geschichte ausweist” [collective repression that identifies the Holocaust as a traumatic event in German history] (222). It is not specific but universal – Schröder claims that Auschwitz Demonstration “bietet die emotionale Anmutung eines traumatischen Zustands [und deshalb] einer ungewollte Erinnerung an den Tod” [offers the emotional impression of a traumatic condition 4 Ray’s observation is paraphrased by Chametzky in “From Muscle Men to Fatty Remains,” 188. 5 Constanze Fritzsch  – following her presentation “ ‘Kein Ideologisches Gequatsche vom Sozialismus’: Auseinandersetzung mit Marx bei A.R. Penck, Carlfriedrich Claus und Joseph Beuys” at the German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, on September 29, 2018 – proposed that by enabling these diametrically opposed interpretations, “Beuys zwingt uns, sich an ihm abzuarbeiten” [Beuys’s work forces us to have to work through our own issues].

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[and therefore] an unwanted memory of death] (223). A  similar approach is taken by sociologist Nicole Fritz, who ascertains that Beuys “das historische Ereignis Auschwitz verallgemeinernd im Sinne eines ‘absterbenden Prozesses’ interpretierte, der als notwendige Leidensstation in Kauf genommen wird, weil er die ‘Auferstehung,’ d.h. in diesem Kontext die spirituelle Weiterentwicklung im Geschichtsverlauf erst ermöglicht” [interpreted the historical event of Auschwitz in a general sense, as a “process” that entails “gradual extinction” but has to be accepted as an inevitable Station of the Cross, because it enables a “resurrection,” i.e. a progressive spiritual development that should take place over the course of history].6 What these recent critics refer to is the ways in which Beuys created an overarching spiritual narrative of redemption and historical

6 Fritz’s book Bewohnte Mythen: Joseph Beuys und der Aberglaube (Tübingen, 2002) is quoted in Riegel, Beuys:  Die Biographie vol. 2, 109. Note that Riegel’s new threevolume biography contains information that supersedes his initial 2013 biography, from which I  quote here unless otherwise indicated. Comparing these two biographies, the more recently one does not necessarily substitute for the previous one (now out of print): it contains new evidence but also some edits and omissions, such as the photo of Beuys in Luftwaffe uniform I have reproduced here. Riegel states in his preface to Volume 3 (which contains supporting documents): “Nachdem 2013 die erste Ausgabe meiner Beuys-Biographie erschienen war […] zeichnete sich [ab], das die kritische Wissenschaft zu Beuys blockiert ist, weil der Beuys-Nachlass offenbar nur mit ihm genehmen Kreisen zusammenarbeitet und keine Archivalien verfügbar macht” [After the publication of the initial edition of my Beuys biography in 2013, […] it turned out that critical scholarship on Beuys is blocked by the Beuys estate, which apparently chooses to work only with scholars it deems agreeable, and it does not make any archival materials available] (3:7). Although Riegel explains how he was able to expand his first biography due to some materials’ entry into the public domain, and because he compiled documents for his own archive, there is reason to assume that the Beuys estate exercises some control over the contents of the first biography, and perhaps did not approve of them. I decided to work with the initial biography and cite the second one primarily in instances where the information is clearly updated with new findings. And, I would suggest consulting both Riegel biographies, if at all possible. As for the biographies in English, Adriani, Konnerts et al., it is clearly outdated and also out-of-print, so quoted here only in cases where information was not otherwise available. And, as for the recent biography in English by Claudia Mesch, it seems largely identical with Riegel’s, so I am citing the German one under the assumption

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progress, through overcoming a form of collective suffering that relegates both victims and the perpetrators (of Auschwitz) to the allegorical Christian image of a station of the cross. Informed by his Christian upbringing, Beuys turned to the anthroposophic philosophy of Rudolf Steiner as a way of taking an antimaterialist, spiritually oriented stance against the excessive materialism of the 1950s German Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle], which he associated with a repressive authoritarian government along the lines of a ‘68er’s critique. In 1967, Beuys stated, according to Riegel’s biography: The government allows the sculptural abilities innate to all human beings to dry up and rot. They only want people who look as if they were human. The invisible [spiritual] human being is systematically destroyed. Our society, in the end, is worse than that of the Third Reich. Hitler only threw the bodies into the ovens. (306)

The problem here is the insistence on a mind/body separation that suggests that, in spite of the fact that people were actually murdered, their souls remained intact – whereas the Vernichtung [extermination] of the human spirit should be considered a truly heinous crime. Clearly, Beuys’s assertion that the Nazi Final Solution had, somehow, morphed into a universal problem applicable to contemporary Germans like himself presupposed that Nazi ideology was grounded in a form of biological, pseudoscientific materialism, that, however, left the spiritual dimension intact. At the same time, Beuys aligned himself with the progressivism of science. Beuys – who never finished high school – had wanted to pursue a medical career and become a doctor – in other words, he was attracted to natural science, including chemistry, biology and physics. Beuys saw himself as scientifically progressive when he fended off frequently voiced charges that his work was primitivist: This is not regression […]. I do not want to go away from modern achievements. [However,] modern man is inclined only to satisfy his intellect and to understand

that Riegel in Switzerland has more direct access to German-speaking materials. My assessment of Riegel’s sources is that they are reliable and up to date.

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everything according to the laws of logic. [I want to] break off all the residues present in the subconscious [because] the beginning of the new always takes place in chaos.7

By “chaos” he meant quantum physics, which is what may have prompted him to issue statements like this, from a 1979 conversation with Robert Filliou: “[Der Mensch] ist gar kein Erdwesen […]. Er ist für diese irdischen Verhältnisse partout gar nicht gemacht […]. Er wird eines Tages vielleicht auf einem anderen Planeten leben” [Man is in no way a creature of the earth. He is in no way made for these earthly relations. One day perhaps he will live on another planet] (160).8 Clearly, Beuys was “spaced out” enough to revert to baroque paradigms like the Great Chain of Being in his seemingly revolutionary rhetoric, as evident from this statement from an October 12, 1971 interview with Achille Bonito Oliva: If I want to create a revolutionary concept of the human being, I have to speak about all the forces connected to him. If I want to give a new anthropological position to the human, I first have to give a new position to everything that concerns him. He has to be connected to animals, plants and nature underneath, and to the angels or spirits above. (47)9

Based on an idiosyncratic holistic worldview, modeled after the anthroposophic philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, Beuys believed in a spiritual union between humans and nature, and this turned him into an avid environmentalist. However, in addition to this affirmation of an interconnectedness between humans and the spirit world that derives from paganism, Beuys, raised Christian, deliberately evoked the suffering of Christ, meaning that he centered on the human fi ­ gure – that is, himself – as the channel by which to alleviate suffering. Seeing himself as a healer, 7 This interview is cited in Joseph Beuys:  Life and Works, eds. Adriani, Konnerts, Thomas. Trans. Patricia Lech. New York: Barron’s, 1979. 71–2. 8 Filliou, Lehren und Lernen als Aufführungskünste. Köln, 1979. 9 This interview is published in Beuys, Eurasienstab. 47–8. Beuys here refers to the early modern idea of a Great Chain of Being. His spiritual approach was profoundly influenced by the anthroposophic philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. For more on the influence of Steiner’s writings on Beuys, see Wolfgang Zumdick, Death Keeps Me Awake. Victoria Walters notes that “Steiner held highly problematic views of racial evolution, an element of his work that is now rightly held in disrepute.”

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Beuys’s invocation of an injured, suffering male who becomes a martyr for a cause presents a Christ-figure with a twist that connects Western paganism to Far Eastern mysticism. As a figure correlative to that of the shaman in places like Siberia and East Asia (and also in Native American culture), Beuys combined northern Germanic, Celtic and Druid narratives with a gaze towards the “East,” which is what I  focus on in the following.

I What interests me is Beuys’s works about “Eurasia,” which are based on the so-called Tatarenlegende, the story he fabricated in the aftermath of his plane crash in the Crimea as a soldier in the Luftwaffe during World War II while stationed in Poland and Ukraine (see Figure 3). As I demonstrate, the specific works that deal with Eurasia  – the sculpture Der Eurasier [The Eurasian] (1958) and the performance piece Siberian Symphony (1963) – appear in opposition to Auschwitz Demonstration in that they not only disregard the legacy of Auschwitz but invoke a “return of the repressed” Nazi German expansionism (Drang nach Osten). Rather than being an early form of artistic multiculturalism, as recently marketed for an exhibit in Antwerp in 2017, these Eurasian works could easily be understood as an attempt to reinstate the aggressive imperialist fantasies it purportedly undoes. Referring to “Asia” as a nebulous, seemingly all-encompassing, concept in order to pitch Beuys’s artwork, Nav Haq, in the attempt to show that Beuys’s Eurasia was progressive and thus rescue him from charges of primitivism (and, I take it, anti-Semitism), argues that Beuys was antifascist: It is hard to disagree that there is a certain orientalism to Beuys’ perception toward the “East” – the mystical land of spiritual energy and boundless nature. [And] it is important to note that Beuys only made one trip to Asia, late in his life, to Japan in 1984. […] Two years earlier in Bonn, Beuys had met with the bastion of Eastern spirituality, the Dalai Lama, together with numerous artists and friends, seeking

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Figure 3.  Photo of Joseph Beuys in Luftwaffe Uniform. Reprinted in Hans-Peter Riegel, Beuys: Die Biographie (2013). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. cooperation in realizing his vision of Eurasia. [However,] What we take from Beuys’ vision, distinct from the historical colonialist enterprise of orientalism, is its attempt to reconcile notions of self and other. Eurasia is one vast culture. A Rhinelander is a Eurasian, a Mongol is a Eurasian and a Crimean Tatar is a Eurasian, just as a Fleming is a Eurasian. [This is a] trait we find very relevant in the crisis of today’s political climate, with rampant identitarian and nationalistic movements having emerged in many European nations and beyond. (8)

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My own take on Beuys’s Eurasianism, which I expand upon in the following, is that it is deeply regressive, and that it represents not so much the opportunity to “work through” the German past by opening up new perspectives into “Asia,” but rather disavows this past through a Wiederholung [repetition] that has, really, nothing to do with Asia. In the politicized decade of the 1960s, when student protesters reacted against the fascist legacy of their parents – who had supported Hitler – Beuys supposedly associated himself with the Left, yet maintained an attitude detached from politics.10 Although his activism extended to participating in the foundation of the Green Party, he stated in a 1978 interview that he was critical of what he saw as the dogmatism of its leading figures: “We will not fail to help bring alternative people into parliament [but] we also have our problems […] with Rudy Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, people who believe in a kind of Marxist science” (124).11 Beuys founded what he called the Free International University, in the belief that “the left-wing movement is only one part of the alternative movement” (123). Beuys believed in “creativity” as an organizing principle as a result of his association in the art world with Fluxus, an international movement emerging in the wake of Dada and Surrealism, which celebrated the “fluidity” of boundaries. Beuys was connected to the kind of Minimalism that had reached the United States via East Asia, including Fluxus artists such as Nam June Paik, Yayoi Kusama, and Yoko Ono. Like many American artists in the 1960s and 1970s, he was informed by an intellectual opening to East Asian philosophies. 10 While Beuys belonged to an earlier generation than the ‘68ers, he is sometimes associated with them in the context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Gerd Koenen has asked whether the ‘68ers movement was an “outburst of something new” or a “return of the repressed” (Das rote Jahrzehnt, 70). This discussion is relevant to understanding Beuys’s politics as well. 11 Beuys, interview with Caroline Tisdall. Clearly, Beuys’s work refers to environmentalist concerns: see for example his 1982–7 Projekt 7000 Eichen [7000 Oaks Project] for the documentas 7 and 8, which refers to Waldsterben [death of forests]. However, this does not mean his politics are, by definition, progressive. As psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has argued in Sexuality and Mind (1987), parallels can be drawn between Nazi worship of the soil (Blut und Boden) and the environmentalist movement that emerged in the 1980s.

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In Germany, which was divided into East and West, this took on an added dimension: Eugen Blume, in his preface to Eurasienstab, the book documenting Beuys’s 1963 Fluxus performance piece Eurasia Siberian Symphony (a version of which is recorded in a twenty-minute video, and whose props are exhibited at MoMA), which I discuss in more detail below, refers to Beuys’s “founding” of a utopian fantasy state on May 12, 1967, “den freien Demokratischen Sozialistischen Staat EURASIA, [einen geistigen Staat] den er ausdrücklich nicht mit den Staaten in Ost und West verwechselt wissen wollte” [the free Democratic Socialist State EURASIA, [a spiritual state] which he expressly did not want to be confused with the states in East and West] (7).12 As a postwar German, Beuys dealt with both the dual legacy of fascism and the Shoah, and with a country divided into East and West as part of the Cold War. However, the “East” for Beuys was not East Germany, and the “West” was not associated with NATO. Rather, he saw these political entities outside of national boundaries, in terms of spirituality and abstract principles. According to Bart de Baere, “[u]‌sing Eurasia to name a fictive state or a political party, as [Beuys] did, was a reproach to the conformism of progressive political thinking in West Germany at that time, just as much as to a societal call for East and West to meet” (22). De Baere, in a footnote, cites from a 1969 interview with Ursula Meyer where Beuys distinguished between Westprinzip [the way in which the West operates] as encompassing connotations of being a Kopfmensch [a person who only lives in his head] and Ostprinzip [the way in which the East operates] as its opposite, associated with Asia, where “das andere doch weitgehend noch präsent ist” [these other ways still tend to be quite present after all] (22). Like many postwar artists, especially during the conservative 1950s, Beuys engaged in a withdrawal from day-to-day political reality in the stuffy atmosphere of West Germany under Adenauer in order to situate the “East” as not just exotically other, but also as close to Germany, a neighbor more accessible than the “Far East.” Turning to Eurasia, with its vast empty spaces of Siberia and its nomadic tribes, enabled Beuys to rekindle his childhood 12 Blume, Eurasienstab. The information he refers to regarding this utopian state is located at the Joseph Beuys Medien-Archiv in Berlin.

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imagination shaped by cultural imagery – including the Nordic imagery promoted by Nazi iconography – surrounding Genghis Khan. It also enabled him to work with his own biographical experience during World War II, when his plane crashed in the Crimea and he was, supposedly, rescued by Tatars. Informed by his readings of the Genghis Khan tales and Nordic myths of powerful heroes that had been so popular during his youth, Beuys thus expands upon the glorification of the East as a more pristine territory in Nazi iconography. Beuys saw himself as a shepherd with a mystic connection to animals – the main props of the Eurasia performance include a shepherd’s staff and an embalmed dead hare, symbolizing nomadism and transitoriness. And, Beuys’s incorporation of Celtic and Germanic iconography extends to these images about Eurasia as the “East.” Riegel states that Beuys made “Anleihen beim Germanen-Kult des Nationalsozialismus” [drew on the German Cult of National Socialism] (57)13 and this includes his repeated reference to Genghis Khan: One of the entries in Beuys’s “Life Work Resume,” which refers to 1929, is the “Exhibition at Genghis Khan’s grave.” […] During the thirties, the “Genghis Khan” myth became standard reading for all secondary schools because Genghis Khan […] according to the teaching of National Socialism about race, had the “components of a Nordic-Germanic bloodline.” (25)

Hence Beuys drew on various versions of Nordic mythology14 – shepherd staff, animals, etc. – in conjunction with “Asia.” However, Beuys’s invocation of an imaginary “Eurasia” that, supposedly, transcends all boundaries, was not just imaginary or influenced by cultural propaganda, but derives directly from the experience of his plane crashing in Ukraine when he was an assistant pilot in the Luftwaffe. Instead of confronting critically what he witnessed and experienced during that time, as a soldier going to war for Hitler, Beuys instead fabricated a rescue tale about himself that became the basis for much of his art work and performances. It was 13 These page numbers refer to Riegel’s original 2013 biography, published bei Aufbau Verlag in Hamburg. 14 See Lutzhöft, Der nordische Gedanke. Also see Sean Rainbird, Joseph Beuys and the Celtic World, on Beuys’s use of Celtic iconography.

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the story of “Eurasia” as a mystical, unearthly location from which he returned with an understanding that would enable him to address German history in spiritual terms, as a self-styled artistic shaman. In this frequently cited 1963 interview with Keto von Waberer, Beuys recounts his version of the events of this mythical plane crash: I was shot down directly behind the front lines, in the steppe. It was winter, there were snowstorms. When you got down there, you couldn’t see much in that snow anymore, and there was immediately yet another layer of snow. So when the unit arrived home, they realized that one of them didn’t return. Then they would fly search planes to canvas the area, to see if wreckage could be found. They didn’t find any traces of me for days. The whole thing probably went on as long as fourteen days. I was found by Tatars, by shepherds, who took me into their hut.15

Here, the Siberian steppe and nomadic Tatars, to which Beuys’s mythologizing conceptual art so consistently refers, appear exotic and primitive, located within the otherworldly terrain of a vast, snow-covered territory on the periphery of Europe. Linked to the history of German expansionism, that is, Hitler’s Drang nach Osten, this representation confirms the notion of soil (as in the oftdeployed Nazi phrase, blood and soil) offering itself to be conquered by Germany. And this would be consistent with Beuys’s own historical experience, as a German soldier in the colonized Eastern territories of Poland, Ukraine and Crimea during World War II. However, this fantasy story ignores any representation of what truly happened in that region. Perhaps a form of denial, it attests to Beuys’s refusal to confront the atrocities he had witnessed, and his desire instead to transform the realities of warfare into a mythical, orientalizing tale of rescue and redemption. In actuality, Beuys had joined Hitler’s army as a radio operator and was first stationed in Poland within walking distance of the concentration camp Posen from May to December 1941. Posen was used as a transfer 15 von Waberer, “Das Nomadische spielt eine Rolle von Anfang an: Interview mit Joseph Beuys,” in Carl Haenlein ed., Joseph Beuys:  Eine innere Mongolei:  Dschingis Khan, Schamanen, Aktricen, catalogue to the exhibit. Hannover: Kestner Gesellschaft, 1990. 197–223.

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station for prisoners selected to be transported further east to extermination camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim), established in 1940. Posen was the initial site where genocide was committed by means of gassing. It was where, in October 1939, mental patients had been executed through carbon monoxide in a bunker and where Heinrich Himmler, according to Riegel’s biography of Beuys, “[liess sich] Die Wirkung der Vergasungsmethode […] im Dezember 1939 demonstrieren. Es war die erste systematische ‘Vergasung,’ die Vorübung zum Genozid” [held the first demonstration of the effects of gassing in December 1939. It was the first systematic “gassing,” the rehearsal for the genocide] (54). Riegel furnishes evidence that Beuys – who never referred to these events – must have witnessed the initial gassings of Jews by Nazi SS special troops: The Holocaust began in the Wartheland and was directed out of Posen […]. During that summer when Beuys was stationed in the Wartheland, SS Special Troops began to hunt down Jews and murder them in gas trucks, or by shooting. (53)

Furthermore, Riegel provides proof that Beuys’s story about the rescuing Tatars is fabricated and embellished – while this had been suspected by other critics in the past, the actual facts are now clear. Two years after the above stationing in the Wartheland, in December 1943, Beuys was reassigned to the Fliegerhorst Karankut. He was the copilot to Hans Laurinck in a JU 87 plane.16 On March 16, 1944, their plane crashed somewhere in the Crimea. Laurinck was killed in the crash; Beuys was found and moved to Field Hospital 179 in Kurman-Kemeltschi on the same day. His admission to the hospital was not registered in the log book until the morning of the following day, March 17, but Riegel relates the testimony of Beuys’s immediate superior, Kapitän Heinz Georg Kempken: “ ‘Wir hatten unsere Bomben über Sewastopol abgeworfen und als wir zurückkamen war eine Wolkenbank aufgezogen.’ Noch am Tag des Unfalls habe er Beuys in einem nahen Feldlazarett aufgesucht. Beuys klagte über Kopfschmerzen, im Übrigen jedoch sei er wohlauf gewesen” [“We dropped our bombs 16 Beuys was unable to become a pilot because color blindness compromised his vision. In German, the eye disease he suffered from is called Rot-Grün Blindheit [Red-Green Blindness] and may account for Beuys’s frequent use of the color brown.

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on Sevastopol, and when we got back the cloud bank had lifted.” On the actual day of the accident he had visited Beuys in a nearby field hospital. Beuys complained of a headache but otherwise was well] (65). According to Claudia Mesch, whose new biography in English overlaps with parts of Riegel’s, “Beuys remained there for 22 days, until 7 April; his recorded injuries included a concussion and facial lacerations” (24). Hence, while all of this must have been a traumatic experience for Beuys, no doubt, it certainly does not even remotely resemble the story he fabricated of having been in the care of Tatars for fourteen days. As has been shown by Riegel as well, even the snow is fabricated: “Auf einer in der Beuys-Literatur als Beleg des Absturzes verbreiteten Fotografie, welche eine verunglückte Maschine bei deren Bergung durch ein Bergungskommando zeigen soll, ist jedoch kein Schnee zu entdecken” [However, there is no snow to be found in a photograph published in the Beuys literature as a proof of the crash, which is intended to show the damaged machine as it was being salvaged by a rescue team] (65). Last but not least, the Tatars themselves are fabricated: There have not been any “nomadic” Tatars in the Crimea since the 1930s. The Crimean Tatars originally lived off of pillaging and the slave trade, and they were otherwise settled farmers with livestock. At any given time, only very few Tatars moved across the land with their livestock. The remaining ones disappeared with Stalin’s forced collectivization during the thirties. The only Tatars Beuys could have met would have been Tatar aides to the Wehrmacht, translators and informants. However, near the end of the war, most of them had already fled, or had been executed by the Germans. (70)

In a recent documentary by Andreas Veiel, Beuys vaguely admits, at some point, that he might have invented the story, but only after he is pressed, and only in passing. Beuys’s defenders have exculpated him from the charge of lying – which is, in fact, what it is – by suggesting that his brain injuries may have altered his memories, or that he was so much in shock that he confused dream and reality. While this may be true, it is nonetheless ethically untenable that such a representation of his wartime experiences would go along with a complete denial of the fact that he witnessed the beginnings of the Shoah – Beuys’s “East” is whitewashed and it seems ironic that, indeed, he covers the territory with an invented layer of snow.

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What seems most disturbing is not that Beuys may be Orientalist in his conception of benevolent “nomadic Tatars” – which, indeed, is also true – but that he alludes to Eurasia as a place supposedly untainted by civilization. Most irritatingly, Beuys stylizes himself, a Nazi Wehrmacht soldier, as the suffering victim who had to be rescued by inhabitants of a pristine landscape that remains conveniently free from any association with the Holocaust perpetrated by his own people – the landscape “East” of Germany certainly was not empty. Nonetheless, Beuys conceived of the space as empty to transform “Eurasia” into his own personal, shamanic space. Shamans travel into spiritual spaces to commune with the dead and return with messages for the living – the area they travel to needs to be empty because shamanic space is not a real territory. It’s a space where spirits dwell, where shamans go to visit as part of rituals designed to heal. According to Alain Borer, whose definition of shamanism is based on anthropologist Mircea Eliade’s, “for Beuys, everything occurred as if he had lived the life of a shaman and had been considered as such: the medicine-man or primitive magician, who managed to communicate with the dead, who dominated the spirits of nature and established contact with domestic spirits, which take on animal forms” (30). However, I would argue that Beuys’s international success as a German artist who, supposedly, was able to “heal” the German people from the guilt of their Nazi past by provoking them into confronting it is based on a Freudian “return of the repressed” (Wiederkehr des Verdrängten), in which Beuys compulsively revisits the scene of his own encounter with the Holocaust “back East” (“im Osten”). This is where Hitler aimed to expand his territory, and where millions of people were murdered in extermination camps.

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Figure 4.  Joseph Beuys’s sculpture Der Eurasier (1958). Photo by Wolfgang Fuhrmannek. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

II An example of how this appears in his artwork is the 1958 Eurasier sculpture which depicts a small figure wrapped in gauze with a shepherd’s cane. The figure stands at the bottom of a quadrangular empty surface made out of felt that extends before him as if he were gazing out at the steppe (see Figure  4). The sculpture was created shortly after Beuys’s nervous breakdown, preceded by drawings such as Schlaf im Schnee [Sleeping in Snow] (1957) and oil paintings such as Tatarenhäuser auf der Krim [Tartar Houses in Crimea] (1957), where he evidently processed the trauma caused by the plane crash. He uses a shepherd’s cane (also in Eurasienstab), which indicates the shaman’s wandering or traveling and is consistent with his description of the Tatars as Hirten [nomadic shepherds]. And the felt surface is made from animal hair, suggesting the shaman’s ability to communicate with animals (see, for example, Beuys’s 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me, where he is wrapped in felt and holds

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a shepherd’s pole in the company of a coyote for three days in honor of native Americans).17 Der Eurasier evokes the story of being rescued after the plane crash in its depiction of the little man with the shepherd’s staff wrapped in bandages, with traces of blood. Alain Borer notes that the shaman, in some societies, is associated with “falling out of the sky,” and with triumphing over death after being injured: It could be said that in a legendary way Beuys returned from death, endowed with the higher knowledge that nowadays is only attributed to accident victims who have come back from the great beyond. Such a figure is the shaman in traditional societies, described by Mircea Eliade: he is first and foremost “a sick man … who has succeeded in curing himself,” a man who triumphed over death, most often he is “chosen” by an out-of-the-ordinary accident, such as falling out of a tree – falling out of the sky in fact. (30)

There are other anthropological references to death that may have influenced Beuys’s survival story. For example, Claudia Mesch states that Beuys claimed his copilot Laurinck’s corpse had been “pulverized.” This is interesting because, according to Chris Thomson (in Felt: Fluxus, Beuys and the Dalai Lama), the “pulverization” of bodies is part of a Tibetan burial tradition: “In Tibet, […] the body of the deceased may be given a sky burial. Taken to a place outside town, […] the body will be cut up and offered […] to the gathering vultures. The bones will be hammered to pieces and ground to a powder and mixed with grain to feed the crows that arrive for the burial’s second round” (134–5). Beuys, who was informed about Tibetan burial rites and other shamanic practices of Celtic and Nordic origins (and later, in 1982, met with the Dalai Lama), may have drawn from this – at least as far as we know, Laurinck’s body was not “pulverized.” Clearly, the Eurasier sculpture also represents a visualization of how Beuys must have felt in the hospital after the plane crash: bleeding and wrapped in bandages. Even if his injuries were not severe, he must have been in shock, and this depiction in the sculpture approximates a correlation to what he thought/said had happened. The rectangular piece of felt, 17 The performance took place in May of 1974 at the Rene Block Gallery in New York.

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reminiscent of the felt in which the Tatars supposedly wrapped him after the crash to keep him warm, is mounted on a surface that stretches out in front of the little man who gazes at it as if contemplating whether to traverse this empty “steppe.” Here, the felt is brown, not “snow-covered,” but the bloody gauze bandages that completely envelope the little figure holding the shepherd’s staff are white – almost as if the elements (snow and felt) were reversed by switching colors. The shepherd’s face is obscured by bandages, but his posture suggests that his gaze is directed outwards, into the empty plain that stretches out before him. It suggests the beginning of a journey into a territory off the map, bearing no traces of actual geographical variations and natural or artificial boundaries. It is a purely imaginative (conceptual) rendering that appears indicative of the shamanic journey, or that of a pilgrim or nomad, as Beuys experienced it; as Beuys stated repeatedly, nomadism is a theme that has always interested him and is central to his oeuvre. The implication is that the wounded shepherd is about to undertake a shamanistic journey across the empty plain extending before him. The combination of injury, pain and crisis, and the willingness to travel across normal human boundaries into “other” worlds to communicate with spirits, suggest that the figure (who represents the artist) is heroic, a special person. And, the reason for any shamanistic journey is to return with healing powers, a concept that applies to both healing one’s own self (first) and (then) that of others – in this case, that would seem to be postwar Germans who reckon with the injuries (but, evidently, not the crimes) of their own past. In that sense, Der Eurasier has nothing to do with “Eurasia” as a real place, but everything with Beuys and Germany. Interestingly, when seen in the context of the overall arrangement of the vitrines at the Hessische Landesmuseum Darmstadt, where the Eurasier sculpture is located, Beuys’s placement at an angle just across from Auschwitz Demonstration, seems significant. The latter vitrine contains objects about the Shoah, such as the dead rat, but its most explicit reference, is a map. Chametzky describes this as follows: The vitrine contains fourteen pieces dating from 1956 to 1964. Several refer directly to Auschwitz, such as a folded map of the camp – a fourfold, five-part panoramic photograph standing on its edge and therefore visible from both sides, to the left end of

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Chapter 5 which Beuys appears to have added two more sections that include a plan of the camp that faces in the opposite direction from the photograph. Next to the map a viewer can read, with some effort, the beginning of a description of the photograph: “Site plan of the camp in Brzezinka, on which is visible the train tracks leading to the gas chambers and the crematorium. To the left of the tracks is the women’s camp.” (187)18

Geography thus plays a major role within the Auschwitz Demonstration showcase, and I believe it also matters to the overall arrangement of showcases in the series of rooms that comprise the Block Beuys. According to Günter Schott, the curator, Beuys personally supervised this installation in Darmstadt in 1970; and was particular when it came to determining the vitrines’ exact locations, that is, not only which vitrine went into which room but also their placement within rooms. Given Beuys’s engagement with maps and positioning, it seems not coincidental that the vitrine containing Der Eurasier was placed diagonally across from Auschwitz Demonstration at an angle that roughly matches that between Poland and the Crimea on an actual geographical map of Eastern Europe. At least if one takes Beuys’s emphasis on location and geography seriously, one could draw similarly angled diagonal lines between the two vitrines – between the one designating the site of the Shoah and the one alluding to the artist’s plane crash further east. The only difference is that the museum visitor passing through the room would see Auschwitz Demonstration first, because the Eurasier vitrine is located in back and to the right, whereby it would properly be located “north-east” (not southeast) on a real map. Still, it appears that Beuys’s choice of placing them diagonally across from one another, let alone within the same room, creates an associative link between the site of his plane crash – as invoked by Der Eurasier – and the site of Auschwitz in Poland (near Posen, where Beuys had been previously stationed). Even though the directions are not identical in terms of an actual compass, the viewer’s gaze when standing in front of Auschwitz Demonstration will move diagonally across to Der 18 Auschwitz Demonstration is seen by Hoffmann-Curtius as anti-Semitic because Beuys did not consider it offensive to place in it “vier Blutwürste – ein für die Juden ‘unreines’ Material (Gen. 9.4)  – neben das Leporello der KZ-Anlage AuschwitzBirkenau” [four blood sausages  – a material that was ‘impure’ for the Jews (Gen. 9.4) – near the leaflet of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau] (208).

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Eurasier and vice versa when passing through the room and/or walking around in it to look at the vitrines. My point is that Beuys suggests this imaginary link between the victims of Auschwitz, whom he alludes to only obliquely, and his own fate as a German who has suffered injury during wartime. Der Eurasier is tied to the vision of the nomadic, rescuing Tatar tribe as a life-giving force for the dying German soldier, in contrast to the murdered Jewish population, whose representation is elided. Whereas the bandaged little figure offers a comforting fantasy, drawing the viewer in with its childlike connotations of a tiny puppet, the objects in Auschwitz Demonstration have a distancing, repulsive effect. One might even go so far as to say that this conceptual staging of calling the viewer’s gaze away from the vitrine that refers to Nazi atrocities, and toward the more intact landscape further East, envisioned as more pristine, less densely populated and thus more “pure” makes the artist’s “opening up” towards non-Western cultures like Eurasia seem like an escape from, and denial of, what happened in the more closely neighboring East of Germany. Beuys’s emphasis is on the empty geographical landscape of an uninhabited “soil” (Erde, i.e. the brown square made of felt) – not on the towns and villages where the Shoah was perpetrated, and where he himself had served as part of the Luftwaffe. In Beuys’s Siberia, there is no Shoah: humans peacefully commune with animals in a primordial existence outside “civilization” – a vision akin to that of, for example, nomadic Koryaks hauling a whale through the snow in a diorama at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Some of this might be explained by the psychology of the injured soldier who feels hurt (i.e. the opposite of Nazi grandiosity). The miniature scale of the sculpture makes it look like an architectural model (i.e. the opposite of monumentality). The suggestion of the injured and bandaged and diminutive figure confronted with an empty space all by himself makes him seem vulnerable, evoking the notion of Christian martyrdom. A suffering male who at the same time becomes a healer because he works through his pain is a figure that transcends Western and non-Western cultures: it is both Christ-like and shamanistic (i.e. of pagan and Asian origins).19 Beuys 19 It is consistent with medieval Germanic and pagan culture, for example Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (later turned into an opera by Wagner), where the Fisher King

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draws on Germanic, Celtic and druid pagan narratives and combines them with his gaze towards the East (i.e. Mongolia and Siberia) to stage not only power but also defeat. The production of the sculpture Der Eurasier was preceded by the artist’s nervous breakdown. It is the representation of a tiny, injured man. He is bandaged and stands in front of a huge empty plane. The magnitude of Beuys, the artist, as a human figure is contrasted to this tiny injured man. But it’s a “puppet,” a representation of a human but also a sculpture that is doll-size – small as if made for a child to play with. It’s therefore uncannily connected to madness and impotence; it represents pain not tended to. The fabricated story along with the sculpture offers these clues: being rescued by aliens (Tartars) and then released into the world of normal human beings is the experience of a war veteran. It connotes: being injured, a victim. Yet this comes from a German artist who chose to represent his own victimhood over that of others, and to minimize his role as a perpetrator.20 One might say, then, that the fantasy of a welcoming group of “Asians” which then leads to the identification with shamanism that turns Beuys himself into one of them, is of both an appropriating and compensatory nature: the artist is able to recover his power when being healed by an intact Other. The nonintact “Other” (the victims of the Shoah) are elided and forgotten by this scenario. And, ironically, for all its connotations of peaceful healing and renewal among a group of primitive people in a pristine natural environment, Beuys’s narrative of being rescued by Tatars is, in fact, just another war story.

is injured and Parzival, the Dümmling [fool], fails to receive the Holy Grail because he fails to ask the question: “Why?” He must then pursue an arduous journey to find the Grail, which in that narrative is a magic (druid) stone, later turned into the Cup of Christ. 20 See Bill Niven, Germans as Victims.

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III Perhaps not surprisingly, as Riegel shows, the Block Beuys where the vitrines are located was funded by a fervent ex-Nazi, the wealthy industrialist Karl Ströher. As a Freemason, Ströher was not accepted into the Nazi party. Still, there is written evidence that he actively supported Hitler and lamented the fact that he could not be in the party. He apparently donated large sums to the Nazi Party and produced electrical and chemical goods for German armament. His wealth increased significantly during National Socialism. He fled to West Berlin in 1948 and was sentenced to only ten months imprisonment by the Landesgericht Zwickau under the Soviet Occupation for criminally supporting the Nazi regime because he had employed Zwangsarbeiter [forced labor] and POWs. Then, in the 1950s, he turned Wella (known for its shampoo) into a successful international conglomerate. Riegel explains: “Er hatte sein Unternehmen und damit sein Vermögen als Kollaborateur des NS-Regimes begründet” [He founded his business and accumulated his wealth as a collaborator of the NS-Regime] (2:77–8). Riegel explains how Beuys was able to make friends with Ströher, who was otherwise a recluse, and how Ströher then sponsored the Block Beuys in Darmstadt. Beuys may or may not have known about Ströher’s past (he claimed he did not), but it is a fact to be reckoned with that Ströher paid for the largest permanent exhibit of Beuys’s works. There is also evidence of Beuys’s close friendship with a former Nazi SS Officer, Karl Fastabend, in Riegel’s biography. Beuys met Fastabend because he posed as an activist for democracy after the war and kept his past hidden. Riegel writes: In 1933, [Fastabend] was accepted into the SS and employed by the staff of the 49th SS-Standarte in Brunswyck as a full-time Sturmbann-Adjutant. Membership in the overall “black” SS was possible only for selected National Socialists, [and] only a small group of SS members, such as Fastabend, had full-time employment there. […] Whether Beuys knew of Fastabend’s past is unclear [but] Fastabend became a central figure in Beuys’s entourage […]. Fastabend’s writings consisted of strange language […] he conjured up the “Volk” […] and, in other places, referred to “questions about

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Chapter 5 the fate of the Volk,” suggesting there should be greater concern about Volksgesundheit (health of the German Volk). (357–9)21

So, on the one hand, Beuys created work that marginally acknowledged the Shoah; on the other hand, he maintained intimate friendships with the perpetrators. Beuys’s own history as a member of the Luftwaffe stationed next to the site in Poland where the Final Solution was initiated must have had a disturbing effect on him (as it would on anyone) but if so, he never dealt with any possible sense of guilt or shame openly in his work.

IV Instead, he continued to work with the sham story of “Eurasia”: Eurasia Siberian Symphony was Beuys’s first Fluxus concert. It took place in Düsseldorf in 1963, and was developed into a full-fledged performance piece, Eurasia, presented 1966 in Copenhagen and Berlin. In this piece, Beuys also focused on his imaginary geography of Eurasia with reference to his own personal story, the plane crash in the Siberian steppe in 1944, the so-called Tartarenlegende.

21 The term Volk should be left in its original, not translated euphemistically into “German people” or the even less specific “people,” as is the case in most American translations. Volk, as contemporary German speakers know, is an antiquated Nazi term that is no longer in use. Volk connotes belonging to an exclusively “Aryan” group and was used to implement the racial doctrine of anti-Semitism. That is why, nowadays, this term would be considered taboo. As far as translation is concerned, Volk cannot be accurately rendered into an English equivalent. Given that a good translation should strive for historical accuracy, not just accessibility, avoiding this original German term and its disturbing connotations could be construed as a way of contributing to “whitewashing,” including the fact that traces of Nazi German language have persisted among those who continued to support or strive to revive anti-Semitic ideology, for example, among the alt-right.

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His 1963 performance Eurasia Siberian Symphony for the Fluxus Festival in Berlin was created after Der Eurasier and before the Auschwitz Demonstration, but around the time of the collections of objects that comprise the latter. Beuys himself explained the initial performance in how he designed and conceived of it in the space: The Siberian Symphony was in itself a composition for piano. It began with a free movement that I composed myself […] the piano would then be prepared with small clay hills, but first the hare would be hung on the slanting blackboard. In each of these small clay hills a bough would be placed, then, like an electrical overhead wire, a cable would be laid from the piano to the hare, and the heart would be taken out of the hare. That was all; the hare was actually dead. That was the composition, and it had for the most part sound; then something else would be written on the blackboard with chalk. […] That was [my] first public Fluxus action. […] What I wanted to achieve with the hare […] was a contextual reference to expression, to birth and death, to shocking the public.

Clearly, Beuys dealt with the grand themes of life and death, but only in an abstract, mythologizing way. The figure of the dead hare, who has become one of Beuys’s trademarks, is indicative of this self-expressed need to “shock” as more important than, for instance, to reflect (or to commemorate). As Beuys develops this performance, he – the shaman – becomes the master of life and death, as the scenario morphs into a version where he “revives” the hare. Here is a spectator’s description of Beuys’s subsequent 1966 performance of this action (Aktion) in Copenhagen – now including Eurasia in its title – which refers to a one and a half hour long segment (“34th movement”) from Siberian Symphony, as found in the initial Beuys biography (now out of print) by Adriani, Konnerts, and Thomas:22 Kneeling, Beuys slowly pushes two small crosses that lie on the floor toward a blackboard. On each cross is placed a watch with a set alarm device. On the board he draws a cross, erases half of it, and then writes under it “EURASIA”. The rest of the piece is comprised of Beuys maneuvering along a drawn line a dead hare whose legs and ears are lengthened with long thin black wooden sticks. When Beuys has the hare 22 This biography is now out of print – it contains some factual errors and has been superseded by the biographies by Riegel and by Claudia Mesch.

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Chapter 5 on his shoulder, the sticks touch the floor. From the wall Beuys goes to the blackboard, where he deposits the hare. On the way back […] he sprinkles white powder between the legs of the hare, places a thermometer in its mouth, and blows into a pipe. After this he turns to the board with the half cross and lets the rabbit smell with its ears, during which he lets one of his feet, to which an iron plate is tied, hang over another plate on the floor. Every so often he stamps his foot on the plate. (138–40)23

The symbolism of the hare as a shamanic animal is in its movement, which is associated with nomadism, a topos frequently featured by Beuys.24 Geographically, it supposedly reaches outside the borders of Germany and Europe; but also into a space that doesn’t exist on the map, a nowhereland. Beuys, as the performer, is like Der Eurasier in that he performs movement across space, and is a “shaman” who communicates with the dead animal. According to Evan Firestone, Eurasia Siberian Symphony was ostensibly a comment on religion. It treats the division between East/West in religious terms: the split between Rome and Constantinople that led to the founding of the Byzantine Empire and the Greek Orthodox Church. Beuys references the otherworldliness of iconic saints, as well as the links between European and Middle Eastern cultures. Firestone, who in this context also explains that Tibetan shamanism may involve a journey of escorting the soul to the Land of the Dead, makes reference to these religions. Similar to the above description, but with an emphasis on religious content, he writes about being a spectator of Eurasia Siberian Symphony in Berlin: In this Action [Beuys] pushed two small bronze crosses up to the blackboard, drew a cross, erased its lower section, connected the arms with a horizontal line, under which he wrote “Eurasia”. The partial cross represented the historic schism between Rome and Byzantium, and begged for completion. For most of the performance, Beuys maneuvered a dead hare, its legs and ears attached to long wooden stilts, a seventh rod bracing its back, along a straight chalk line between the blackboard and an equilateral triangle made of stretched felt in an opposite corner […] The movement of the stilts caused tremors in the hare, in a sense revivifying the dead animal. (146–7) 23 This same action was then performed at the Rene Block Gallery in Berlin. 24 Note the performance in 1970 where Beuys “explains Fluxus to a dead hare” with his face covered with honey: Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt [How to Explain Paintings to Dead Hare], November 26, 1965, at Galerie Schmela Düsseldorf.

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Apparently, Beuys refers to a distant past of Eurasia, before national borders were drawn, and certainly before his own experiences from 1941 to 1944 during World War II. He refers to an empty space in between East and West, which may or may not refer to any actual geographical or political border – though it does refer to the realm of ideas, in which Beuys was invested based on his attachment to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. Having come of age as an artist in postwar Germany, which was divided in East/West, Beuys insisted on transgression to a territory behind the Iron Curtain – a space connoted as both “East” and “Asian” – and this may or may not have been in order to make a statement about the division of Germany after World War II (as suggested by both Blume and Pohl). However, the performance refers to German history from a dimension outside the parameters of conventional historiography. There is no causal connection, only an associate link, between Beuys’s past and present historical experiences. If this performance is received as synonymous with a spiritual (rather than a political) undoing of the division between East and West, it may have been because Beuys, as a postwar West German artist, was aware of the tensions produced by the Cold War, and of the need for Germans like himself to move beyond the dangers of a nationalism that had led to National Socialism. Ironically, this move away from historical reality occurs at the expense of it: Beuys seems to have aimed at escaping from history altogether and, instead, invents a space akin to an andere Planeten [another planet]. Clearly, such an imaginary and spiritual – that is, completely abstract – “merging” of territories is problematic when seen in the context of Beuys’s biography. However, the attraction of Beuys’s work seems to have been precisely based on this move away from historical facts (e.g. the Tartarenlegende). At least this is how Beuys seems to have been received in Germany, and even internationally. For example, Blume, the curator of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, writes in somewhat grandiose terms that Beuys aimed for a “re-unification” of East and West: What the hare, who played a major part in this Aktion, has already accomplished without restrictions – namely, an ongoing movement and settlement onto the Eurasian landmass – humans now follow by taking a more labor-intensive path. In

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In spite of Blume’s allusion to “peacefulness,” Beuys’s vision of a united, undifferentiated (borderless) all-encompassing territory of “Eurasia” precipitates discomfort in the viewer who may not only be reminded of Hitler’s expansionist politics – including the vision of a greater Germany towards the East – but also of the way in which “Eurasia” itself has always been politicized. “Eurasia” is the name given to a geographical landmass that links Europe and Asia. Jürgen Osterhammel traces the history of this name visà-vis the actual landscape and explains that it does not correspond to the nominal concept: “the division of the Eurasian landmass into two separate continents, which we tend to take for granted today, is a geographical convention that bears no compelling relation to the Earth’s physical features” (38). He also explains that there is a confusion over what exactly is part of this area, for example, Asians versus Europeans and how to differentiate them: “Those who spoke of ‘Asiatics’ at the end of the eighteenth century [included] Mongols” (22). In the eighteenth century, Siberia was “ ‘Asianized’ and stylized as a colonial supplement to a ‘European’ Russia that now looked to the West for its identity” (42). Osterhammel traces the continuous ideological and political struggles surrounding this territory: Ever since the conquest and economic development of Siberia, beginning in the early seventeenth century, […] Russia alone […] extend[ed] from the Westernleaning urban societies of Saint Petersburg, Tallinn, Riga, and (later) Minsk to the hunter-gatherer tribes of Siberia. […] Asia visibly began at the political border of the [Russian] empire. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was a shifting military frontier, defended – and increasingly pushed outward – in three directions: against the Islamic powers of Iran and the Ottoman Empire, against the nomadic horsemen of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Steppes, and against the mountain tribes of the Caucasus. (39–40)

Osterhammel continues to describe the development of nineteenthcentury Orientalism into the twentieth century to ask:  “Where does Europe end? Where does Asia begin? […] Since the collapse of the Soviet

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Union in 1991, and the rise of a Russian great-power nationalism supported by ideologies of the country’s special ‘Eurasian’ position athwart two continents, the problem of Europe’s eastern limit has been posed anew.” Quite clearly, Beuys’s claim that he “liked the Tatars” because they stood for “a no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, they favored neither side” is not borne out by the reality that they were also part of a larger political picture around a contested territory.25 His version of an empty stretch of land inhabited by people who are on neither side is a romanticized fantasy of “Eurasia” that conveniently ignores the role of German history – and Beuys himself therein.

V In the context of Putin’s Russia and the European New Right, “Eurasia” has recently begun to function as a neofascist concept: Marlene Laruelle traces the “contacts between far-right movements in Europe and Russia [that] existed before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution” (2).26 Laruelle describes how Germany connected to these existing far-right movements (White Russians) because, even though “Germans denounced Slavs as an inferior race, they [the Germans] were ready to [defeat] Soviet Russia” (5). She explains how in the 1960s and 1970s – when Beuys created most of his oeuvre – anti-Soviet sentiment was based on “enthusiasm for Oriental religions and mysticisms […] Shamanism and Tibetan mythology” (6).27 And she traces the continuation of Eurasianism as the continuation of a dangerous right-wing philosophy in the 1980s, as a supposedly nonracist fascist ideology. It is promoted by far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, who “welcomed cooperation with non-European peoples from Asia and the Middle East, who were considered part of a shared Aryan genealogy 25 Cited by de Baere, “Eurasia as an Island,” 17. 26 Laruelle’s book and the topic of right-wing Eurasianism should be seen in the context of the Neue Rechte (see my introduction to this book). 27 Tibetan mythology was also referred to by Nazi ideologues.

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[based on] the Russophile Eurasionist line, led by Reinhard Heydrich [which] was open to non-European peoples” (9). Since 2014, “Eurasia” refers to the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) that includes mostly former Soviet territories. Geopolitically speaking, this term circumscribes a desire to (re)merge areas that were separated after the Cold War; and denotes a nationalist agenda seeking to establish new boundaries. The notion of shifting borders within Eurasia yields to the vision of a unified, more powerful territory, with the center of Europe moving to the east. Hence, while the Siberian steppe and the nomadic Tatars to which Beuys’s mythologizing artworks refer appear exotic and primitive, they are located within the contested terrain of a peripheral European territory that can be linked to the history of German expansionism (Hitler’s Drang nach Osten) as well as to existing right-wing movements in contemporary Germany and Eastern Europe. Beuys’s experience of “Eurasia,” which is so central to his oeuvre, is not about a distant place, but rather engages Germany’s neighboring territories. Although Beuys refers to an imaginary, idealized geographical space that is conceived of as empty, it is connected to his biography and therefore not apolitical, as I have shown. Considering that his art depended so much on his person, especially in his performance works, his celebration of “Eurasia” is problematic. As a postwar German artist living and working in Germany, Beuys was aware of the need to reference the Shoah in his work, yet this stands in an uneasy relationship to his worshiping of Tartars and the East as an empty space, where no atrocities seem to have happened. “Eurasia,” in this scenario, does not include genocide; the people that are referenced are the nomadic tribe of Siberians who survive the ice and snow in ways associated with Nordic, Germanic tribal imagery. They appear primitive, connected to animalism, and they represent a return to nature and mysticism in Beuys’s work that bears little resemblance to what happened in densely populated, urban, “civilized” Germany under Hitler. Victoria Walters, in an article that reckons with Beuys’s treatment of Eurasianism, recognizes, along the lines of Laruelle’s research, that Eurasianism is a proto-fascist ideology: With the Nazi expansionist notion of Lebensraum and Putin’s more recent ideas about Eurasia in mind, a figure suggesting “the penetration of space” across Eurasia

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must surely elicit caution. Lebensraum, the concept that a given race requires a certain amount of space for its survival, was the basis on which the Third Reich pursued an aggressive form of settler colonialism, envisaging the expulsion of most of the indigenous populace of Central and Eastern Europe. Today, Putin’s idea of Eurasia […] could be understood to seek a larger empire for Russia. Its related Eurasianism – championed by Putin’s strategic advisor […] Aleksandr Dugin – may not be fascism in the strict sense [but could] be seen as neo-fascism.28

However, according to Walters, Beuys’s use of warmth primarily connotes healing so that “there is much to suggest that this sense of warmth encounter was part of a loving stimulus to genuine dialogue about creativity, an attempt to communicate something essential about the potential of people to shape society rather than the imposition of a particular culture or dogmatic faith tradition.” Indeed, as he developed his Eurasian-themed performance pieces about East/West, Beuys did not address fascism and the Holocaust perpetrated in its name in the territories east of Germany – instead, he turned to an earlier time period (the Byzantine Empire) and used geography as a metaphor for religion. Still, Beuys-as-shaman has become a commonplace because he deliberately established a seamless continuity between his life and his work. In that sense, one cannot simply separate his wartime experiences as an avid volunteer for the Luftwaffe and as an observer who witnessed the murder of German and Polish Jews from his later progressive political position. He is a figure who embodies both continuity and difference between Germany before and after WWII. His performances, which were highly ritualistic, required his presence, and as Chametzky notes “since Beuys’s death […] his prominence has 28 Walters, “Joseph Beuys and EURASIA,” Tate Papers, no. 31 (Spring 2019). . Walters does not cite Laruelle, and she translates Der Eurasier, which refers to the singular figure that comprises the sculpture, by its plural in English, calling it “Eurasians.” Still, her article, while indebted to the tact taken by the Antwerp exhibit (of Beuys as a benevolent multiculturalist), is informative in that it offers a comprehensive overview of Beuys’s work on Eurasia, along with introducing various debates about it. Given that Riegel’s biography has not yet been translated into English, it makes sense that Walters would take a less critical view of Beuys than he does.

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diminished rather than risen: his art’s potency, its ability to arouse strong passions, seems to have required his shaman-like presence” (188). Beuys’s history, in other words, is tied up with the way in which he experienced the terrains of both his own personal rescue and the postwar acknowledgment of his culpability as a German, that is, of his “people” as perpetrators. Beuys interweaves his own personal World War II narrative with a postwar sensibility that recalibrates the relationship to “Others” outside Germany – to him, it appears, it is an internationalism that opens up borders, yet from the position of an outside observer, and in hindsight, it can be understood as simply a displacement. The “victim” Beuys represents in the case of Der Eurasier is himself, not the victims murdered by Nazis in extermination camps alluded to by Auschwitz Demonstration. And the performance in which he merges East and West under the rubric of “Eurasia” romanticizes the place where the Final Solution began – yet never mentions it. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that German artists like Beuys had a vested interest in covering up their tracks when it came to gauging the extent of their involvement with National Socialism. Instead, modeled after the quasi-mystical anti-rationalist philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, Beuys created a fashionably “environmentalist” mix of organic artwork around decomposing matter. Working with animal products (fat, felt, sausages) as well as actual animals (the embalmed hare) and their secretions (the living coyote), Beuys had an interest in biochemical processes in which spiritual transformation allegedly took place. His work evokes the “dirtiness” of nature and the mundane human inability to clean up after oneself. It was a messy affair: Where Jackson Pollock had seemed to ejaculate into drip paintings that could be hung in the museum because they consisted of oil on canvas, Beuys accumulated fat corners in rooms that began to smell; where Marcel Duchamp had created a “readymade” toilet that was clean and properly labeled, Beuys exhibited a dirty bathtub that gained notoriety because it was accidentally cleaned by the museum cleaning personnel. What becomes clear is that there is a conceptual emphasis on “dirt” vis-à-vis “whitewashing” (including an invented “snow cover”) that could also be seen as a political metaphor. Unfortunately, the biography by Hans-Peter Riegel, first published in 2013, went largely unnoticed in English-speaking academia. An opinion

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essay by Jillian Steinhauer in a Brooklyn-based electronic journal noted, somewhat waveringly, that “A new biography [contends] that he hung out with quite a few former Nazis” and critiques “the art world’s selective political myopia,” but suggests that “A nationwide political brainwashing takes generations to undo” even though this “isn’t to let Beuys off the hook.” Now Riegel has updated his biography and included a third volume with supporting evidence, which came out last summer – shortly after the documentary film Beuys by Andreas Veiel was released. In a review of the film in Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Cara Jordan observes that “Beuys’s connection to the Nazis, which cannot be denied, has been the source of much of his demonization within the art world.” The review mentions “Veiel’s unwillingness to explicitly address the new research on this period in Beuys’s life” but does not mention Riegel’s biography specifically (presumably because the author does not read German). Although recognizing Beuys’s “association with former Nazi members and sympathizers, such as his collector Karl Stroeher and his collaborator Karl Fastabend,” the review ends with a reference to “recent increased interest in Beuys, evidenced by his inclusion in course syllabi about the history of socially engaged art.” Indeed, Beuys continues to be seen as a “social practice” artist in the United States, in keeping with his own, carefully cultivated stance as an engaged leftist provocateur.29 After what Riegel reveals, this couldn’t be more wrong: he explains that critics have made a fatal error in their lack of rigor and critical distance when it comes to Beuys studies (2:183). Until today, in the English-speaking world, Beuys’s Nazi leanings have been either downplayed or completely denied, and he is still marketed in the art world as a leftist, progressive artist – it’s time for a change.

29 See, for example, Greg Sholette, Delirium and Resistance.

Chapter 6

Shamanic Spaces: Anna Kim’s Anatomie einer Nacht and Die grosse Heimkehr

Life in Copenhagen: stares turned into gestures, a slap on the arm, a kick in the butt: dirty Eskimo. — Kim, Anatomie einer Nacht In my solitude You taunt me With memories That never die. — Billie Holiday, quoted by Kim in Die grosse Heimkehr

This last chapter “responds” to the works on Eurasia by artist Joseph Beuys, discussed in the previous chapter, by introducing a new European literary discovery, Asian-German author Anna Kim (b. 1977). Born in Korea, Kim was two when her family moved to Vienna, Austria, where her father was a diplomat; she now resides in Berlin, Germany. In contrast to Beuys’s self-invented shamanism, which as I have argued was based on mystifications of Siberia and Eurasia that linked Asian and Nordic mythologies and evoked Nazi iconography, I here show Kim as introducing Korean and Siberian shamanism from a more informed, less grandiose, perspective. Her writings are based on research and fieldwork about the Inuit and Korean cultures, and her approach to fiction is what one might call journalistic. At the same time, Kim’s approach incorporates her own subject position as a Korean-German. Writing about what it is like to be “othered” by European society, Kim, in her 2015 volume of essays, Der sichtbare Feind: Die Gewalt des Öffentlichen und das Recht auf Privatheit [The Visible Enemy: The Violence of the Public and the Right to Privacy], begins by describing how

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regular citizens are now subjected to increasingly sophisticated surveillance techniques. Personal identity, for everyone, is no longer shaped by the vicissitudes of chance (Zufall), but rather is subject to the totalitarian gaze of new media, which regulate people’s private lives.1 After Kim makes this general observation, she relates it specifically to racism. She explains how the disappearance of one’s private sphere is more painful to those who are already subjected to a more penetrating public gaze – those perceived to be “other” among white Europeans. She then personalizes these essays by relating her own experiences of what it’s like to be Korean in Vienna. In spite of the prestige she has acquired as a German-language literary sensation, she is still routinely treated as a foreigner on account of her “exotic” looks. Sensitized to a public exposure that denies her privacy and her ability to feel like a regular person – or a unique individual apart from her external appearance – she highlights this sense of alienation among those made to feel like outsiders. She concludes that they are doubly exposed to mechanisms of surveillance, resulting in their having even less of a sense of privacy. The two novels I analyze, Anatomie einer Nacht [Anatomy of a Night] (2012) and Die grosse Heimkehr [The Great Homecoming] (2017),2 are directly related to this problem of being turned into an outsider – and they convey what I identify as “shamanism.” My focus in analyzing Kim’s fiction is on her representation of space: as homeland (Heimat); and as “shamanic” space. Shamanism is regularly practiced in both Greenland and Korea, where Kim’s novels are, respectively, situated. As should become evident, Kim’s books refer to an additional dimension of space, beyond reference to actual existing geographies. These become invested with “otherness” through the subjective experience of a contested privacy, where alienation occurs as personal and geographical boundaries begin to shift. Kim’s text takes into account what it feels like to have no space, and to exist on the periphery of society. As an anthropological paradigm, “shamanic space” is associated with journeying to the realm of the dead, to 1 This is confirmed by the recent scandals over data sharing in social media – for example, by Facebook, as shown by documentaries such as The Great Hack (2019). 2 So far, only one of her books, Frozen Time, is available in English. Therefore, all translations of her work are mine. Kim’s most recent book, not included in this discussion, is Fingerpflanzen (2017).

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meet ancestral spirits. I argue that this becomes central to understanding Kim’s novels, as they depict an emphasis on the dead as much as on the spaces of the living.

I In the above-mentioned volume of essays (Der Sichtbare Feind), Kim refers to her specific experience as a Korean woman in Austria. She describes her “Germanisierung” [Germanification] (82) by her Korean parents, who were anxious for her to grow up assimilated. Kim’s response, however, was to feel a lack of a sense of belonging: I asked myself whether my parents wanted to deliberately turn me into a European […]. They called me Anna, neglected to give me a Korean first name, and thus did not even give me a chance to be unquestioningly accepted by Korean society. (81)

Kim recounts experiencing prejudice in Vienna as a child:  how fellow school children would invasively touch her hair without asking her, and how she had come across an article about “foreigners” like herself, which felt to her as if she were a mere object of scientific study, a “guest-worker child” exposed to the gaze of sociologists (“they surveilled us,” 85). In this trenchant critique, Kim refers repeatedly to this opposition between her external East Asian appearance, and her internal sense of being Austrian like everyone else:  “The dilemma [is that of ] an optical illusion:  the Korean heritage I  represent is not […] what I  myself wish to represent […] my private self, in spite of public opinion to the contrary, is not nurtured by my biology” (100). She criticizes cultural stereotypes about East Asians as “erroneous clichés based on prejudice, such as the assumption that Asians are shy, overly solicitous, easily manipulated, and unable to pronounce the letter R correctly” (102). And, she relates this divided sense of self – the contrast between personal and public identities – to the broader question of what is Heimat (homeland). In Der sichtbare Feind, Kim explains how this concept is subjective: “For most of us, Heimat is

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an empty word […]. Some are looking for it, they believe they can pin it down geographically. For them it becomes an extension of their place of birth” (106). Geography is central in Kim’s novel, Anatomie einer Nacht, about the Inuit. This book is preceded by Kim’s travelogue, Invasionen des Privaten [Invasions of the Private] (2011), about her on-site research for this novel, based on a fellowship in Greenland. As an imaginary geographic fixation, Heimat becomes central to Anatomie einer Nacht: the characters in this novel have no way out of an imaginary city. The plot is based on real-life events, an epidemic of eleven seemingly unrelated suicides that happened over five hours during the course of a single night. Kim’s novel describes a sense of depression among the Inuit that must have led to these suicides, which seem essentially connected to their arctic urban residence, Amaraq.3 This is a space Kim represents as empty and devoid of life. The emptiness of Amaraq is linked to the emptiness of Heimat as a concept described in Der sichtbare Feind, where Kim writes about the effect of “location”: What would have happened if my parents had indeed returned to South Korea after a year or two? […] Would I have been happier with a purely Korean self? […] [F]‌or me there is this location, which attaches itself to the word [Heimat], and it accompanies that word whenever I speak it; I enjoy saying this word because I know that I don’t know anything about that location to which it refers, it just feels like an abstract expression, hollow to a degree, a vast empty space through which, from time to time, a feeling scurries by, disguised as word. (95)

Geography and location  – rather than “identity”  – are thus central to Kim’s novels, Anatomie einer Nacht as well as Die grosse Heimkehr (to which I turn in the second half of this chapter). Anatomie einer Nacht 3 Also see the recent article “The Highest Suicide Rate in the World” by Helen Epstein, who reviews two new books about suicide among the Inuit in Canada. One explanation for this phenomenon is supposed to be the need for survival, or as Epstein explains: “In a harsh environment, mutual understanding and trust are essential to survival. An unhappy person is a dangerous one […] ‘The theory I have is that [Inuit] who commit suicide are doing it to protect the community,’ Bonnie, an Inuit government official, told me” (18). The article also mentions the need for counseling and the effects of persistent poverty.

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emphasizes being in the vast empty space of the arctic landscape. The Inuit of East Greenland, with whom Kim identifies based on their Asian physiognomy, inhabit this place of endless nights and days, which they connect to the belief that the soul travels, and can detach itself from the body. Thus Amaraq represents an actual location and an imaginary dwelling place for the souls of the dead. Arctic Greenland comes to resemble a negative space, and although shamanism is not overtly the topic of Anatomie (though it is referred to in passing), this novel’s consistent references to the souls of the dead, in conjunction with descriptions of an eerily otherworldly landscape, conjure up an “other,” unreal shamanic space. Perhaps, in this novel already, Kim connects her Korean background to the Inuit in terms of shamanism, which is practiced in both Korea and Greenland. In fact, Hyung-key Hogarth explains that “ ‘Korean musok’ [shamanism] derives from Siberian shamanism” (113) and that “Siberia is often considered the place which is most closely associated with shamanism” (29). She refers to a “Siberian-type ‘trip’ of the shaman” as “a going forth of the spirit” and – relevant to Anatomie – refers to this journey in terms of water: The North American Eskimo [Inuit] shaman, called angakok […] undertakes mystical flight and the journey to the depths of the sea. [Their] main functions are healing […] to ensure a good supply of game, fair weather and fertility […] As a precaution against their being lost in heaven or sea forever, they bind themselves with rope. (35)

Hogarth elaborates that in Inuit cosmology, the shamanistic journey involves the concept of going to a “heavenly space,” so that spatio-temporal relationships are not causal or logical in the Western sense. She cites anthropologist Mircea Eliade’s 1964 research on shamanism:  “The basic ideology […] is the return to ‘a paradisiacal age in which human beings could easily go up to the sky and maintain familiar relations with the gods’ ” (117). Here it does not matter whether the space consists of water or land – and whether it is located above or below. Peter Jordan also describes this type of nonlinear cosmology: [T]‌he basic structures of historically constituted and socially sanctioned cosmologies enable the shaman figure to make communicative contact with the supernatural world, and to move between a number of different domains inhabited by spirits, deities and human persons either living or dead. […] [S]hamanism does not equate

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In Inuit lore, the soul is part of a belief system conceived in terms of geography, and this became an issue when Greenland was colonized by Denmark. Invasionen des Privaten recounts Danish colonization, starting with seventeenth-century Danish miscegenation laws, administered to ensure the Inuits’ “racial purity.” Their whale hunting skills, according to Kim’s citation of Jorgen Fleischer’s A Short History of Greenland, were thought to deteriorate should they intermarry with Europeans. The whaling industry relied on the Inuit and their hunting skills as producers of whale fat (Tran) because this was used as fuel before the discovery of petroleum. To ensure successful trading, the Inuit were forced to remain hunters, to be seen as “noble savages” – that is, deliberately prevented from being Europeanized. Kim’s description of Inuit culture includes the introduction of Christianity by the Danes to replace the Inuit’s indigenous religion, which she says was shamanism. And she explains how the Danes’ main interest was to retain Inuit society’s hunting skills, whereby some of their original beliefs should be retained: “[the colonizers] emphasize that they do not wish to destroy the way of life of the Inuit, but in reality, they are only interested in the proceeds from the Inuit’s hunting practice” (19). The racist policies are revealed as similar to the anti-Semitic Rassenpolitik [racial politics] of Nazi Germany in the following description by Kim: “Real” Greenland women were reserved for “real” Greenland men, because “Mischlingskinder” [mixed children] were observed to be improperly raised, unlike “normal” Greenland children, who became hunters and hunters’ wives. Mixed marriages, therefore, were not in the interest of the KGH [Kongelige Grønlandske Handel, or Royal Greenland Trading Department] […]. Greenlanders were not permitted to be lured away from their work, i.e. hunting. and they were not to depend on European goods because that would only corrupt their lifestyle. Meaning: it would reduce their hunting catch and thus reduce the profit of the KGH […] raising “Mischlingskinder” was controlled. They had to become good Greenlanders, i.e. hunters. (14–5)4 4 Kim elaborates on these economics: “The Danish benefitted from the profits of Inuit hunting for Tran or so-called polar oil. They needed Inuit expertise on how to obtain

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Kim further explains how, as soon as the Inuit were no longer needed as part of Danish industry, starting in the nineteenth century, they were dänifiziert [Danified]:  they were considered “primitive” and thus perceived as in need of being educated so as to now “fit” into Danish society. This could be seen in the practice of taking Inuit children away from their families to ensure that future generations would lose their “savage” customs.5 This belated Europeanization of Greenlanders who had maintained traditional customs and beliefs led to a profound sense of alienation. Invasionen des Privaten continues with twentieth-century assimilation strategies, and after 1953, when Greenland became officially a part of Denmark, the Inuit population had to struggle with this combined legacy of racism and colonialism. Kim reports on her friendship with a Greenland woman, Karen, whom she interviewed about having been adopted by a Danish family. Karen, like Kim, felt that she had lost her culture and did not “belong” in either Greenland or Denmark. The beginning of Kim’s travelogue also merges Greenland’s history with the author’s own biography: “Julie said you look more like someone from Greenland than I do, which is why I undertook this trip up North; that is also how my journey concluded, in my own biography” (7). The book, in fact, concludes with the recognition that Karen is the author’s Inuit Doppelgänger. Kim relates how the adopted Karen tells her about a teacher who commented on her “Mongolian eyelids” as Rassenmerkmale [racial characteristics]. To document the official continuation of racist ideology even after 1958 decolonization, Kim cites a government booklet Greenland by the Danish Foreign Ministry: “It is commonly observed that the ‘Eskimos’ are […] ‘Mongolian’ in their appearance: their bodies are short and squarely shaped, with high cheekbones,

it and thus claimed the Inuit had an ‘instinctive knowledge of hunting’ that needed to be preserved. However, they were not interested in preserving any other Inuit customs or traditions” (16). 5 The Danish population policies were designed to assimilate Mischlingskinder by taking them from their families and having them reside with foster families on the mainland. As Sabine Scholl explains, this radical assimilation led to “returning children who had become completely alienated from their own families and society” (90–1).

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flat noses, mongoloid eyes and straight black hair. Their hands and feet are small and attractively shaped, and their skins are light-brown” (24). Shamanism is also discussed by Kim in Invasionen: “Fleischer reported […] that Elik was arrested and whipped by Egede and his friends because he was a shaman and thus represented a pagan competition to the Christian minister” (13). Kim interjects the question: “To what extent are these two shamanic societies, Greenland and Korea, similar to one another?” (60) and refers to the introduction of Christianity as common to both places: “Christianity has destroyed shamanism and its rituals” (61). Hence the author’s own experience as a Korean in Austria is compared to the situation of the Inuit, and she makes references to folkloristic practices that exist in both her family’s Heimat and Greenland. This research, in turn, informs her writing about the suicide cases in Anatomie einer Nacht, which I now discuss. In Anatomie einer Nacht, depression leading to suicide becomes a social problem because it is an “epidemic” – it appears to be a response to racism and oppression in Greenland The shamanistic space would be the fictitious city of Amaraq, modeled after the real-life city of Nuuk. In Invasionen, Kim had described the modern Danish architecture of Nuuk as lacking connection to the Arctic landscape and this becomes visible in Anatomie: “[T]‌he architects who […] were from Scandinavia reproduced the colonial history of Greenland in their designs […] interesting about Nuuk is not what is there but what is lacking” (26). She describes Nuuk as ill-conceived for the Arctic landscape, the “imitation of an ideal” which is not habitable but instead “only the utopia of a city” (23). In this architectural context, Kim portrays Inuit culture as transitory (spurenlos) vs. European culture as solidified (verfestigt). Kim describes characteristics and beliefs of Inuit society – for example, the way in which a person’s name “contains the soul of its owner and as long as the name continues […] its owner is immortal.” The soul is disconnected from the body, but is also part of the landscape, which has been compromised by European modernization and urbanization imposed by Danish architecture. Amaraq in Anatomie einer Nacht is uniquely laid out in a landscape of ice. The landscape appears vast and empty, and Kim’s text attributes geometrical shapes to a superimposed urban environment at odds with

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its arctic surroundings. There are “edges and corners” in contrast to the rounded contours of the glaciers (Eisberge) and the liquid and frozen surfaces that surround the city. This contrast between the Greenland landscape and the modern Danish superimposed city is related through this first description of Amaraq: Amaraq is located at the end of the world, it’s a place gobbler: a place that gobbles you up, along with the place where you are: a place that pretends to be not so much a place, but rather the entrance to another place, which you can’t leave because once you’ve entered, its entrance is not an exit. (18)

Kim portrays the “epidemic” of eleven suicides that occurred in this city (or actually in Nuuk) over the period of five hours during a single night with reference to geometry and geography, the clash between urban/natural landscapes. The book is based on the actual incident, but is fictionalized to connect to the concept of souls departing from their bodies, of people finding no way out of their lives other than death. The emphasis on Ort – the geographical location on the map, as well as the arctic landscape of Danish affordable housing – appear as determining factor for the depression leading up to the suicides. Although the characters in the novel don’t know each other, they share in common a despair over the desolate location. Kim describes it as the “end of the world,” a space that consists of water and land, inseparable from the sky. The beauty of the fjords is set in contrast to the sadness of its inhabitants, who live in subpar housing and are economically disadvantaged, including being un- or underemployed. The picture that emerges for the reader is one of depression linked to location: there is no escape other than death from Amaraq – and yet that is also the way in which the soul becomes part of the landscape. Linda Koiran explains: Here the contrast, between the limitations of the hopeless lives of individuals and the limitless opening of space into the universe, makes itself visible, especially at night, when the borders – the blue of the sky – that make the daylight appear, fall away. Amaraq represents a place of implosion in the face of the impenetrable night, its arctic cold and vast expanse of arctic landscape. This place is a metaphor for the infinity of interior space, into which the individual is thrown, and which envelops it

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Kim’s description of Amaraq in conjunction with the suicides of the eleven characters uses the (Inuit and Korean) paradigm of shamanism as associated with this specific region, where the souls dwell. The question becomes to what extent those who lived in Amaraq and committed suicide already felt no longer alive before they died, and to what extent their crossing of boundaries, between the living the dead, invites social critique. The question of what motivates the suicides is addressed by Danish characters in the novel. This conversation in a bar between Peder, the tourism minister of East Greenland, and Ella, a woman he is interested in pursuing, shows the ignorance and prejudice concerning the Inuit suicides’ motives: We believe alcohol is responsible for this large amount of suicides. […] Why do you believe there are so many suicides? she asks, it’s their mentality, Peder replies, it’s in their nature, the Greenlanders live too much in the present and if it’s shitty then, he clutches his neck with his hand as if to strangle himself. Hems and haws when Ella doesn’t laugh. The suicides are rarely planned, you know, Peder says, they are always spontaneous, the Greenlanders simply don’t have the ability to control their misery, he says and shrugs, they are lacking the capacity to reason, if you know what I mean? (100)

Peder’s explanation acknowledges the social problems but then blames the Greenlanders. He deflects from the living conditions in Amaraq to attribute a lack of reason to the Inuit suicides. As the narrator later explains, the Inuit are made to appear as if they were weak by nature, so that their behavior would seem beyond anyone’s control: The Danes invented the theory that it’s the fault of violent modernization, which began in the West during the 1950s, and that Inuit culture, which doesn’t condemn suicide, contributed to its becoming so widespread; they said that colonial policies caused identity problems among the Inuit, and they took all of these theories and turned them into a weapon that they aimed at their victims to say but you couldn’t deal with any of this because you’re weak, and that’s why you started drinking and committing suicide. (284)

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What Peder’s understanding lacks is a recognition of the soul (Seele) as specific to Inuit belief:  the narrator points out that “the soul is not in the body but on the outside. It follows people like a second shadow. Only shamans can see it, and only they can separate it from the body” (279). The shaman becomes the arbiter of the connection between body and soul, including the belief that several souls can be housed in a single body: “The human body is where the souls pool, with the most important soul being the soul of the name. It is as large as a snowflake, and it is located directly beneath the neck, right next to the soul of life” (38–9). The name as container of a soul is the carrier of identity: humans are seen as immortal as long as their name continues to be passed along: “the name is not just a mark for identification […] to keep order among people, it also contains the soul of its owner” (35). Kim’s narrator goes on: “If only one of the many souls departs from the body, the person falls ill and dies” (39). And the departure of one of the souls – here the soul of “sleep” – is connected to the city of Amaraq, with its impoverished economic conditions: Poverty in Amaraq is relative, as long as the individual doesn’t demand freedom and is happy to be part of the community, where everything is shared, and everyone owns only one thing: themselves. And this piece of property, whose contours have been marked accurately around the borders of the skin, is questioned only during sleep, when the soul of the sleeper leaves their body, causing a condition that resembles loneliness. (16)

While asleep, at night, the inhabitants of Amaraq become aware of their loneliness because their souls leave their bodies. They roam about in the surrounding arctic landscape. The narrator’s description of Amaraq represents an environment that controls people’s lives to the point of “it” (the city) seeming responsible for the suicide epidemic: Meanwhile, the city prepares itself for this epidemic, accepts it with an uncannily relaxed attitude, and a thought reigns that Amaraq might no longer exist if the disease were cured – meaning one could not be thought of without the other, one story not told without the other, so one would end up fearing that if the root of this disease were extracted, the entire population hanging on it would be extracted along with it, and then nothing would be left, except for the husk of the city. (56)

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The narrator attributes agency to the city of Amaraq in ways that link it to the suicides – including departure of souls – and make it appear like an additional “character” in the book. In the middle of the passage below, one can see how Kim shifts perspective from portraying “Amaraq” as twodimensional, a surface for projection, to the personal pronoun “she”: Amaraq is both a place that generates longing, and a surface on which to project all sorts of longings, because all possible characteristics can be attributed to it. Since Amaraq is everything, it is, at the same time, nothing. Nothing because everyone moves within their own fantasy of what it is, and has lost, over time, the ability to see the city’s true nature […]. So the city withdrew and only at night began to reveal its true self […]. Under cover of darkness, nonetheless, its true shape remains schematic, shadowy, so that one can only guess that it looks really quite different, yet to determine what this difference consists of seems beyond imagining – only at certain times, during the formation of a cloud cover that spreads moonlight evenly across the earth, the city reveals itself and takes off its disguise – and then something emerges that nourishes a longing no one had known to possess before. (90)

The city of Amaraq appears separate from its inhabitants, yet their relationship seems intimate, including the ability to conceal or reveal. Their interaction is described in terms of desire (Sehnsucht). Amaraq elicits desire based on being “nothing” (nichts), thus functioning as a surface for projection; but “it” takes on a “shape” (Gestalt) of her own. Subject-object boundaries are blurred when the city “betrays itself ” (verrät sich) and “renounces its disguise, so something reveals itself.” What seems to “betray itself ” most is that the city has power to make the soul depart from the body  – this is shown as both comforting and destructive. Amaraq is, therefore alive, capable of growth, representing the origin of the universe as much as its ending: Though maybe Amaraq is not the end but rather instead the beginning of the world. It seems that the only purpose of beginning a world would be to create a lot of paths into that world, so its point of origin will enlarge, meaning there must be streets that just aren’t long enough yet, streets that end up nowhere, that still need time to grow, as is the case in Amaraq. (45)

In this expectation of “growth” (of more streets), temporality is oriented towards the future and, at the same time, suspended (being both

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beginning and ending). At night, when the suicides take place, Amaraq offers the consolation of darkness: It’s self-evident that, at the end of world, all other ends will come together, and it’s only natural that this would happen at night, because nights in Amaraq are finite, they are the end point where the unavoidable recognizes its own unavoidability and then yields to it, because the darkness carries a finality, but also a sense of comfort. It offers a feeling of safety beneath a cover that can develop only after the ability to see has been removed. (235)

The question is whether the souls that depart from the bodies of suicides have a “place” in the landscape of Amaraq. Is it a consolation, a merging with the greater natural environment that would be consistent with shamanist beliefs, or a desperate act of escape, as Peder would say from his Western point of view? Interestingly, beyond being a symbol of complete darkness, Amaraq shows nuances of a painterly landscape that keeps changing as it reflects the natural environment around it: “Everything is mirrored in Amaraq, the sky in the fjords, the brown color of the mountains in the brown earth, the pattern on the walrus in the pattern of the rocks” (288). The reason Amaraq seems alive is that it is located in this environment of the Arctic landscape, habitable only to a degree: “Nothing can be planned here, where nature demands to be recognized in its power, to be respected. Nature in Amaraq only protects people when it suits her” (286). The human sense of comfort provided by darkness can be deceptive because nature exists without them. Amaraq does have spatial coordinates, and the fact that over the course of the night the blurring of spatial boundaries that occurs makes all ground disappear represents a destabilization of human agency. It underscores the problem of being unable to exit this place: At night, Amaraq is covered by a blackness that is thick like unmixed paint, and neither fjord, nor mountains, valleys, lakes or rivers exist, there is only this black mass, this nothingness that spreads spottily over the landscape, infringing on what remains of it but also permitting gaps that it then fills with abstract elements, light shows, light waves, and an ocean of light. At night, Amaraq turns into a wide-open plain, the second dimension melts into the third, the earth with the sky, and everything suddenly is sky. (24)

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However, in the morning, the light returns, and spatial dimensions reappear to make the environment, once again, habitable: Beginning at 3 a.m., the city’s blackness becomes infiltrated by a narrow strip of light that carefully dilutes it, and then Amaraq transforms itself, once again, into a space. From the second dimension a third one grows, and from the sky the earth. (247)

This paradox, of a night that makes humans feel comforted through the absence of vision – and that represents the time and space during which the suicides occur – versus a day in which space becomes habitable but, presumably, hostile  – is indicative of the problem of humans being invisible and immobile. It appears to be related to an existential depression, where suicide becomes, paradoxically, another form of agency and self-empowerment: Amaraq pretends to be infinite because the nature by which the city is surrounded infects everything exactly with it. The city part of Amaraq is infinite because in it, nothing ever changes. The small changes that do occur never change the essential condition of things, and each change is gobbled up by time, thus remains unnoticed. Even the existence of human beings is infinite, because individual and community are one, so that each person becomes immortal through the group. (206)

As I have tried to show, Anatomie einer Nacht represents Amaraq as a “shamanic space.” The situation of the people in Greenland is represented in terms of their connection to a landscape that has been appropriated by the Danish, and continues to function as an “other” realm. The Inuit suicides – attributed by the Danes to alcoholism, ignorance and personal failure – are connected by Kim to a desire to fully inhabit the landscape of Amaraq, away from dehumanizing housing projects and geometrical streets. As Kim shows, the suicides become a way of reconnecting with precolonial identity – yet the soul must now travel to find a place of belonging. Suicide – which is not considered immoral in Inuit culture  – is retroactively pathologized by the Danes in the interest of distracting from the social conditions that may have, in point of fact, produced it.

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II The focus of Kim’s more recent historical novel, Die grosse Heimkehr [The Great Homecoming], is the partition of Korea, specifically during the years 1959–60. Woven into her epic narrative is the ugly, racist history of colonization by Japan (1910–45), as well as the Korean War (1950–3) – events that account for the ongoing, unresolved struggle for nationhood that defines Korean history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book’s title, The Great Homecoming, refers to an actual 1960s “repatriation” program designed by North Korea to recruit Zainichi, the unfortunate stateless Koreans who had fled to Japan from anti-communist persecution under South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. Rhee had come into power as a result of American-backed elections in 1953, after the (supposed) end of the Korean War, which had begun in 1950, when the communist North invaded the South, following the so-called “temporary” division of the peninsula at the end of World War II. While warfare itself subsided after three years, the country remained divided and the Korean War has, officially, never ended. Moreover, South Korea became a real democracy only thirty years after the fact: dictator Rhee was successfully ousted in 1960, with the support of the US, and succeeded by the more moderate Yun Posun, but he was overthrown in 1961, via a military coup by the next South Korean dictator, General Park Chung-hee, who ruled until 1979. This violent history of Korea’s ongoing partition is preceded by Japan’s brutal colonization of Korea, which had lasted from 1910 to 1945. It included Japanese seizure of Korean property, random executions of Koreans (many of whom fled to Manchuria, China, and to Hawaii), as well as the systematic erasure of Korean linguistic and cultural identity: Koreans were not permitted to speak their language, Hangul, wear traditional Korean clothing, and even their hair, traditionally kept long, was forcibly cut by the Japanese to erase all sense of Korean identity. Then, during World War II, Koreans were “recruited” by force into Japan, to work in ammunition factories which is why, according to Kim’s novel, victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also included many of these Korean workers,

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a piece of information that is little known. Furthermore, in what continues to be a matter of public shame, Korean women during World War II were used by Japanese soldiers as so-called “comfort women”, that is, raped and reduced to the status of prostitutes – which is another fact that is rarely discussed. Many of the women who were brought over from Korea subsequently bore children in Japan, who would be pejoratively called hafu [halfling], due to their Korean-Japanese ancestry. As Kim’s novel shows, Japanese racism designated people of Korean descent as second-class citizens, even if they were born and raised in Japan. The stateless Zainichi, who fled the South Korean dictatorship, ended up in ghettoized neighborhoods of cities such as Osaka and were ostracized by the Japanese population because they were believed to have “impure blood” (509). Die grosse Heimkehr thus links the Japanese colonization of Korea to Japan’s treatment of expatriate Koreans who lived in Japan after World War II, for example through one of its secondary characters, Mio Kobayashi. She has a Korean father and a Japanese mother and commits suicide “because she experienced herself as Hafu, as halfling. Half human, half subhuman” (422). The reader learns that her Korean father had collaborated in recruiting Koreans to Japan as ammunition workers and as comfort women who, as Kim specifically spells out, “were imprisoned in bordellos and forced into prostitution” (385), a form of treason that may be one reason for Mio’s suicide. At that point, Kim refers to the European history of the Holocaust when she introduces the question of reparations: Mio is solicited to return to North Korea via the Great Homecoming repatriation program and is told that she should go because “You owe your country reparations” (385). In an arguably broad comparison, Kim – who grew up in Austria – states: I wonder whether the relationship between Koreans and Japanese is comparable to that between Jews and Germans. In the case of Korea and Japan, victims and perpetrators are also clearly defined, as is the guilt that connects the perpetrators to the victims. (71)

One might take issue with this conflation of European and Asian histories, which is an authorial digression only mentioned in passing, but

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Kim’s novel does contain an investigation of the overarching issues of homeland, identity, and belonging in the face of racism and exploitation that pertains to both her homeland, Austria, and Korea, the country of her birth. Die grosse Heimkehr is not an actual comparison between East Asian and European histories, but its main character, Hannah, is a Korean woman who was adopted into Austria and returns to Korea in what may be construed as her own “Great Homecoming.” In that sense, Kim’s novel is not only a fictional representation of historical facts but also a subjective rendering of what it feels like not to have a “homeland” or Heimat – a term that is also particularly fraught in the German-speaking context, especially Austria.6 Here, the emphasis on place associated with this term takes on different connotations because the Korean peninsula is a divided territory where there is no hierarchy between center and periphery (and Japan, the other place in the novel, is not a place for Koreans to escape to either). As I propose, this absence of any sense of place or belonging in the Korean context – the inability to apply the concept of Heimat in the way it would be applied in a German-speaking context – makes it possible to read Kim’s novel in terms of the indigenous Korean practice of shamanism and the otherworldly location it constructs. The shaman enters an imaginary territory to communicate with the spirits of the dead, and Kim’s novel, as I suggest, transgresses into the spiritual, beyond mimetic representations of geopolitical conflicts that normally define the genre of the “historical novel.” If Kim herself writes from the perspective of the Korean-Austrian first-person narrator Hannah, who over the course of the novel learns about the story of a fictitious historical character, KoreanAmerican double-agent Eve Moon, a female character who appears as somewhat of an alter ego to Hannah, one might call this an alternative historiographical approach. The story of Eve Moon, however, is told to Hannah by Yunho, who was Eve’s contemporary, so that Hannah has the passive function of being his interlocutor, as he conjures up the voices from the past to make Korean history come alive. Hannah’s journey into

6 Syngman Rhee’s second wife, Francesca (1934–65), was Austrian.

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the past might be described, in turn, as a benign shamanic encounter, as I demonstrate in the following.7 Given that Korea is an East Asian country whose iconography and mythology are distinct from other East Asian countries, my methodology is informed by the recognition that “primitivism,” in contemporary East Asian societies, has functioned as a form of critique against the perceived ideological impact of modern technology in the course of Westernization. To give an example: Chinese dissident Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Prize–winning novel Soul Mountain turns to folklore and ancient “superstitious” beliefs to represent Chinese traditions in opposition to rationalist ideologies instituted under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, when religion was prohibited. Folk customs were seen as undermining the progressive ideology of communism, and communal rituals served to cement the politburo’s power. Gao’s approach, seen in this context, is not reactionary but a way of countering the People’s Republic of China’s official policy. At least this is how Rujie Wang interprets Soul Mountain: [H]‌aunted by the memory of social revolutions, the hero goes to the backwaters of China to collect ancient myths, legends, songs, and superstitious rituals that, though primitive, have far more life in them than the outworn political phrases of authorities. His contacts with Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, and uneducated peasants, enable him to see his spiritual poverty in a country committed to the ideology of progress and historical materialism. (17)

Similar to Gao, a dissident and expatriate, Kim’s perspective as a European who grew up in a Korean family is unique in that she is branded as an outsider to both Austria (where she is seen as a foreigner due to her physical appearance) and Korea (where she would be seen as an outsider due to her cultural background).8 As my chapter demonstrates, Kim’s strategy of

7 Given that Anna Kim grew up in Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freund, the exchange between Yunho and Hannah might also be construed as a take on the structure of psychoanalytic sessions. 8 Kim’s essays always have a comparative perspective – for example, in “Die koreanische Spur” about searching for “Korean traces,” where she refers to the Korean practice of eating dogs with reference to Austrians eating horses: “Austrians used to eat horses in

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dismantling stereotypes on both sides is to feature two female figures who cross over boundaries: first, the adoptee narrator who comes to Korea to search for her roots, and second, a Korean woman who works as a spy for the US in South Korea. Both, I argue, can be specifically connected to the Korean figure of the female shaman. Shamanism in Korea is practiced widely but secretly and unofficially; it represents the continuation of an indigenous religion that predates Westernization. It can be understood as a form of social critique, and it offers the possibility of a feminist critique that takes into consideration folkloric images associated with female figures like the kumiho, or nine-tailed fox, who wreaks havoc with conventional Confucian society. According to Lauren Kendall’s anthropological studies, shamanism is mostly practiced by women in Korea who have had the experience of historical trauma and are thus in a unique position to communicate with evil and benign spirits to heal their patients. While Kim does not directly refer to this practice, she does feature the two female figures and creates a scenario that establishes “North Korea” as a mysterious, unknown territory. This, I argue, is akin to the realm of spirits the shaman must access in order to communicate with the ghosts of history, as they could be found only in this imaginary, spiritual territory. How then, is “North Korea” represented as shamanic territory? Die grosse Heimkehr revises the conventional (Western) genre of the historical novel, based as it is on linear narrative and an emphasis on factual information, and maps out a territory that does not exist in “reality” insofar as it can only be narrated in the form of a shamanic dialogue. “North Korea,” in this figurative sense, is negatively associated with the question of what constitutes a Heimat in the specifically Korean context. In spite of the fact that Kim is a “European” author, shamanism as a widely practiced Korean religion9 can be related to Kim’s explicit emphasis the same way Koreans used to eat dogs. But Austrians believed that Koreans would eat any kind of dog, whereas in reality they only bred certain kinds of dogs” (42). 9 Korea, due to the arrival of French missionaries in the nineteenth century, is largely Christianized but shamanism continues to be practiced there in secret (it is officially prohibited). Korean shamanism, which includes benign communications with friendly ancestral spirits, differs from Chinese shamanism in that the latter is more of a form of exorcism to evict evil spirits.

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on the realm of the dead in all of her novels. In the books Kim published before Die grosse Heimkehr, narrators do not possess an “identity” but perform the role of a medium that accesses places of violence and atrocity. Die gefrorene Zeit features a female humanitarian aid worker charged with identifying bodies from mass graves in Kosovo, and Anatomie einer Nacht documents, in an impersonal factual voice, an epidemic of suicides among the economically marginalized and socially oppressed Inuit in Greenland. In each instance, territories in which death reigns are visited by female figures and/or voices, who appear to be able to communicate with the dead – thus they bring home to the living (the readers) a form of historical knowledge that does not fit (Western) paradigms of representing history as chronological and easily accessible. Whereas the political partition of Korea is ostensibly the subject matter of Die grosse Heimkehr, Kim’s novel features the female figure of the spy as a shaman who performs new identities and allows the reader to cross over into “other” worlds (the realm of spirits) – thus challenging the conventional racist and nationalist imagery of “identity” and “homeland” (i.e. Heimat) prevalent in both Korea and Europe. North Korea, as an inaccessible negative space, is invested with magical thinking in ways that lend themselves to a reconsideration of how we look at territories, borders and nations.

III Kim’s title, Die grosse Heimkehr [The Great Homecoming] is the name of a “repatriation” program into North Korea during the 1960s  – by that time an inaccessible territory – that led to the disappearance and death of Koreans who mistakenly thought this “homecoming” would be a solution to their statelessness. As Kim explains In 1952, all Koreans lost Japanese citizenship to become de facto stateless […]. [South Korean president] Rhee showed little interest in the future of these 600,000 people […]. [North Korean premier] Kim Il Sung was not even asked to participate in negotiations. In 1954, following widespread resentment against South Koreans, all Koreans

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in Japan became North Korean citizens […] to educate the children of the Democratic People’s Republic [i.e. North Korea], the future would be in North Korea – in the Heimat that could now be, once again, reached. (310)

As portrayed by Kim, the Zainichi [stateless Koreans living in Japan] were “repatriated” to North Korea because Japan’s policy was to dispose of them when they were no longer needed. Japan therefore supported North Korea’s “luring” the Zainichi into signing up for this repatriation program, even though these former South Koreans had no idea what would expect them there. It was billed as a return “home” and the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, ran articles presenting North Korea in a favorable light, enforcing a sense among Korean expatriates that to return “home” meant a return to the welcoming North (not the South, to which access continued to be barred because the Zainichi were seen as traitors there). Japan seems to have supported US anti-communist ideology by helping to channel these resident Japanese-Koreans, including left-leaning refugees from South Korea who had fled the invading North Koreans, into North Korea. However, ironically, the Zainichi and should have been seen as anti-communist because they were accused of being communist sympathizers by dictator Syngman Rhee; and as Kim shows, they were indeed not only welcomed but also considered suspect by North Korea. As Kim portrays it in Die grosse Heimkehr, a migration flow of Korean refugees into Japan had occurred in response to the anti-communist policy of dictator Rhee in 1960. Rhee had been supported by US occupying forces, but then his departure was forcefully called for by the citizens of South Korea, and thus supported by the United States, that is, General MacArthur. Historian Bruce Cummings describes how an enormous crowd of at least 100,000 students […] demanded to see Rhee. Palace guards fired directly into the crowd [and] least 115 young people died, and nearly 1,000 were injured […] On April 25, several hundred university professors held a peaceful demonstration calling for Rhee’s resignation […]. The next day when another 50,000 people turned out in the streets of Seoul, Ambassador McConaughy and General Magruder went to Rhee and urged him to resign; as they left the palace, assembled crowds gave them a resounding ovation. This action […] and the release of Korean troops convinced many that the United States had arranged Rhee’s departure; a few

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A related quote from Die grosse Heimkehr shows General MacArthur irritated by the Japanese support of the North Korean repatriation program: “For months Japan has been sending Koreans to North Korea [. . .] ‘The communist pigs can’t abduct our people so easily’ ” (129–30)  – “our people” meant the presumably anticommunist South Koreans, who would have been on the side of the US had they been sent to the South instead of the North. The fact that he blames North Korea, not Japan, is interesting but Kim does not provide much information as to what may have motivated Japan to support the North Korean repatriation program. Die grosse Heimkehr focuses on the fact that many displaced Koreans erroneously went to North Korea because they believed they would finally return to their “homeland” in this way. The official rhetoric is cited by Kim: “Dropped by South Korea, raised up and repatriated in North Korea” (326). As Kim explains, in 1965 entry visas were issued in Japan for the North Korean People’s Republic, as well as passports for South Korea which did not, however, welcome what they would have seen as returning “communists.” There were no North Korean passports available but instead, Korean-Japanese could sign up for the grosse Heimkehr (327), as long as they agreed to never return to Japan (which may be one reason why Japan was eager to support the program). What happened to the Zainichi in North Korea is referred to only obliquely by Kim – no one really knows, but there is enough evidence from which her novel draws – but due to the North Korean government’s distrust of these “newcomers” – who were suspected of being anticommunists and thus potential traitors  – many were imprisoned, disappeared and executed. Hence, while Die grosse Heimkehr critiques South Korea and its dictatorships, Kim also makes it clear that North Korea became an even more dangerous territory. And as she shows, it is far more repressive, with the added caveat that no one ever knows what exactly is happening there. Kim describes North Korea’s dictatorship as follows: If Korea had not been cut off from the rest of the world for such a long time, the country’s exploitation by the Joson Dynasty would have ended much earlier.

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Supposedly, North Korea today is ruled as an absolute monarchy following their model: it, too, cements its own power by way of isolation. Kim Jong Un is not a communist, let alone a politician, he only is an heir. His father Kim Jong Il also did not have a vision of his own, but he did have some ideas: at least he understood how to perfect Kim Il Sung’s heritage of a totalitarian state. (75)

The first-person narrator of Die grosse Heimkehr, the adopted KoreanAustrian woman, Hannah, ostensibly travels to Korea to search for her own personal roots, but this becomes tied up with a lesson in Korean history and politics.10 The underlying topic of the novel concerns the question to what extent identity is controlled by governments and political ideologies to the degree that the individual loses all sense of personal integrity. In her related volume of essays, Der sichtbare Feind, which is not about Korea but about the loss of privacy due to government control, Kim critiques the internet as a technique of surveillance that violates people’s private spheres, to the extent that “identity” is determined only from outside, in this case on the basis of ethnicity. Kim links this to her own subject position as a German woman who is treated as if she were “Korean” solely because of her physical appearance. Her parents emigrated from Korea to Germany and Austria when she was 2 years old, yet she continues to be perceived as a stranger in European society, despite writing in German and being the recipient of prestigious German-language literary awards. As her Doppelgänger, an Inuit woman named Karen she meets in Greenland, explains in Invasionen des Privaten, an Asian-looking woman in Europe is expected to act as if she did not belong: They expect me, the “Korean,” to not have mastered the German language, and should I happen to speak it fluently, to constantly return to my language of origin, to use Korean turns-of-phrases, patch up the way I speak by inserting Korean proverbs, and to hybridize my language. (94)

10 Although Kim herself was not adopted, she may have identified with the demographic of Korean children who were adopted by Western European families  – it certainly makes the character of Hannah (whose name is also a Jewish name) more believable.

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From the position of an author who invents fictitious characters and thus conceives of constructing identities creatively, Kim interprets such stereotyping as a possibility for transformation. As an outsider wanting to “fit in,” she is not only determined by others, but is also able to rebel against such forms of ostracism. Referring to the “stranger’s” implicit position of being disempowered by society, Kim invents an ontological condition she calls Other-Existence (Andersdasein): It became clear to me that being different (Anderssein) was my primary characteristic, and perhaps this insight contributed to my transforming the terror about being different (Schrecken des Andersseins) into an “Other-Existence” (Andersdasein). I desperately wanted to belong, to have a voice in decisions, not be controlled by other people’s decisions – because that is what marks the outsider: passivity: one is destined to be ruled by others. (66)

The Andersdasein, I would suggest, revises the way in which we conventionally conceive of memory and historiography. and conjures up ghosts of the past that point to other identities and other moments in time. Kim’s historical novel, Die grosse Heimkehr, accesses the past by narrating events surrounding the partition of Korea through the eyes of an archiver, 78-year-old Yunho Kang.11 Yunho recounts his memories surrounding the ousting of dictator Rhee from April 19–26, 1960  – and the subsequent flight to Osaka by South Koreans accused of being communists – to the first-person narrator, Hannah, the German woman adopted from Korea who came to Seoul to search for her biological mother (i.e. her Korean roots). This set-up, which is implicitly tied to nationalist narratives about homeland and belonging, evokes narratives about personally finding one’s ancestors through archival research (which Kim has conducted in order to write this historical novel – as well as going on site to Korea). Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, describes the archive as a place where ghosts appear, yet from which one must depart to experience a more immediate encounter with one’s own, lost, identity. As an African-American whose ancestors had been brought 11 Yunho is clearly a father figure and the book itself is actually dedicated to Kim’s father.

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to the US as slaves, Hartman recognizes the limitations of institutionalized identities (including the disappearance of records, etc.) and, like Hannah in Kim’s Die grosse Heimkehr, sets out to Ghana to visit the actual scene of original departure. She is compelled to do so because the archive only contained what you would expect: […] bills of sale; itemized lists of bodies […]. In every line item, I saw a grave. Commodities, cargo, and things don’t lend themselves to representation, at least not easily. The archive dictates what can be said about the past and […] about the persons cataloged, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios. To read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold. (17)

Like Hannah, who goes to Seoul to find her biological mother, Hartman travels to Ghana to visit the sites where slaves were held for the Middle Passage, and thus hopes to gain visceral, material knowledge about her identity as their African-American descendant. Hartman describes her sense of loss of identity in terms similar to Kim, as an ontological condition that condemns a person to be a “stranger”: The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one’s country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage. (5)

And, like Hannah, Hartman expects to find answers by going on location, yet this desire is also thwarted in her narrative: [In Ghana] I could not detect any blood or bones or gunpowder. I had tried, desperately, to wrench tragedy from the landscape and had failed. It had produced the opposite effect. I was blind to everything but the insignificance of the past and the unremarkable routine of the present. Little that I saw seemed noteworthy. Perhaps I had even been mistaken about the ghosts. (69)

However, compared to Hartman’s nonfiction account of a historian’s search for new methodologies, Kim’s novel, Die grosse Heimkehr, recounts history only fictitiously, by way of second-hand narration. Hannah listens to the archiver, Yunho, who tells her of his subjective historical experience and thereby functions as eyewitness, a living memory to transport

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the reader into an imaginary historical past. Both Hartman and Kim raise the question of how to represent “history” but Kim’s methodology as a creative writer may be more shaped by the possibilities of rewriting history through imaginary characters. In Die grosse Heimkehr, “history” is conveyed through the eyes of fictitious characters who perform a ritual of speaking and listening to one another: Hannah learns about Korea from Yunho, who in turn confesses to sharing his political secrets with a stranger because, as he explains, he could not talk about them with anyone in Korea. He was, for example, forced to participate in voter fraud under Rhee, as well as in a murder of which his friend Johnny is then falsely accused, leading to both of their departures to Japan. Like the history of Korea, Yunho reveals how it became impossible for him to take sides, and this is emblematized by his telling of the story of Eve Moon, the spy who kept switching sides. The bond of secrecy between Hannah and Yunho vis-à-vis Korean history is established through Yunho’s narrative about his love for the Korean double-agent, Eve Moon, who crossed territorial boundaries by taking on different identities – none of which could be verified as “true,” thus departing from notions of “roots” and original “belonging” that would also be at the core of racist ideologies (such as National Socialism). This mysterious figure of the female spy, I propose, functions as an articulation of Kim’s own express sense of Andersdasein, and it thwarts the reader’s expectations about historical novels as repositories of actual “truth.”

IV The influence of American culture in the novel is pronounced. The main character of Yunho’s story is the South Korean spy, Eve Moon, who originally had fled the North, then took on the identity of an erotic dancer in an American GI club to obtain information from the American occupying forces supporting dictator Rhee. Subsequently, she switched side to

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those who were supporting future South Korean dictator, Park Chunghee, Rhee’s successor: Eve worked as an informant for the South Korean military’s secret service; in the early 1950s, she closely cooperated with the Americans, was even paid by them, but then switched sides to join a group of young officers who were planning a coup against the government. Their leader was Park Chung-hee. (523)

The military coup was eventually executed and the reader learns that this was not the first time Eve Moon has switched sides. She had been previously accused of being a “whore for the Americans” (“Ami-Flittchen”) during the time North Korea invaded the South, and thus changed her identity into a supposed spy for the Red Army (on the basis of having come originally from North Korea). It becomes clear that Eve Moon (Moon is a generic Korean name) takes on various names and identities throughout the book in order to survive, and that she does not have any loyalty for any side (she remains mysterious). When she – originally called Yunmee – is initially found by the owner of the GI dance club on the streets of Seoul, after having fled from the North, she is in rags, and illiterate. This American gives her a name with reference to Eve Harrington, from the American film All about Eve. This movie portrays Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) as envious of a celebrated actress (played by Bette Davis), seeking to usurp her place. Significantly, it is not an actual “person” Eve Harrington seeks to be, but the performer, an actor whose identity is to inhabit different roles. Eve’s first name derives from the Biblical figure, representing seduction and betrayal, and her “sin” is not to have an “identity” – meaning she cannot be known (and is therefore, not to be trusted). However, Eve was one of those people who cover up their biography because they believe that is a way to protect themselves. Since she was unable to offer a biography that was readily acceptable to society, the story of her life was full of gaps and empty spaces. For her, secrets were not a form of concealment, but rather an essential ingredient of her attempt to be normal. (159)

Like an identity constructed on Facebook, Eve symbolizes the superficiality of all “identities.” In this, she also functions as an alter ego to the

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adoptee narrator, Hannah, who has come to Korea to discover her “true” identity, which she associates with national and biological origins. By introducing Eve Moon through a period in Korean history that highlights the division and undoing of nationhood – the ousting of Syngman Rhee and subsequent escalation of tensions between North and South – Kim’s novel Die grosse Heimkehr thus raises the question of “identity” as divided or split: there are two diametrically opposed female figures who complement each other in ways that question readers’ possible assumptions about coherent concepts like “homeland” and “belonging.” When it comes to nationalist ideologies, the figure of the spy dramatizes a split between private and public identities. In Der sichtbare Feind, Kim features an actual historical female spy, British photographer Elizabeth Tudor-Hart. Here, Kim refers to identity as a repository of memory based on representations such as digital images or photographs, which may therefore be erased: [Tudor-Hart] worked as a spy for the Soviet Union and destroyed part of her own archive from fear that her spying activities would lead to consequences. Naturally, she took pictures of her personal life, her family, her friends and relatives. How would that feel, I asked myself. Liberating? Probably yes, for an initial moment, but then what came after? Regret? Mourning? Because it would feel like an erasure of one’s memory?12

The question becomes:  how does one separate fabricated from actual identity? And what happens to traces of the latter when the surface of the former disappears? Tragically, the spy who takes on too many false identities may end up left with none, thus is threatened with existential angst of disappearing altogether. What disturbs Kim in this erasure of memory (Auslöschen der Erinnerung) that is performed only out of fear (Angst) of being discovered is that the self forced to become “other” to “fit in” may get lost in the process of its attempt at self-liberation. In this, both TudorHart and Eve Moon represent the perversion of the above-mentioned “stranger’s” desire to become part of society by fitting in – living with a false identity entails the possibility of self-annihilation, and this reflects 12 Interview with Isabella Pohl.

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back on the character of Eve Harrington – Eve triumphs in her ability to play the part previously performed by Bette Davis, yet this is just another performance – an endless series of enacted “false” identities. However, this is also Kim’s point: Die grosse Heimkehr challenges Western paradigms of self-identity by introducing the possibility of nonidentity that is, in turn, associated with shamanistic performative practices, as I would maintain. The departure from conventional (Western) notions of homeland (Heimat) and “belonging” based on ethnic, national and linguistic characteristics is staged in terms of an entry to Andersdasein which is, in turn, associated with the realm of memory and the spirits of ancestors that constitute the ghosts of the past from a historiographical perspective.

V Tina Chen describes shamanism in performative terms that yield, in turn, to the possibility of social critique: In Korean shamanism, shamans (known as either mudangs or mansin) are predominantly women who experience tragedy and as a result undergo a psychic transformation that renders them able to call upon the spirits to possess them while they are in trance states […] the figure of the female shaman [is] a particular kind of impersonator: a traumatized individual who must submit to spirit possession in order to constitute her own destined identity; a skilled performer who must embody an/Other by theatricalizing therapy to heal both self and other; a medium whose impostured identity troubles any notion of a Self that exists in isolation from a community made up of those she lives with and those who have come before her […]. The shaman’s success does not […] depend upon imitative ability […] but on an act of profound identification, an experience of possession that requires the shaman to inhabit a self not her own in order to effect the rituals of healing which she is asked to perform […]. In this dualistic performance, the shaman truly displays a double agency – she is both the agent worked upon and the agent working, a figure whose unique positionality ensures her ability to perform the memory-work and rituals of remembrance necessary for incisive social critique. (119)

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Hence, shamanism is a dialogic ritual that involves divided territories: the figure of the shaman is able to communicate with spirits on the “other” side, able to access what one might call, with Kim, Andersdasein. She is also like a spy (agent) in that she conveys information from one (secret) side to the other. The search for Hannah’s “real” Korean identity is the narrative frame and conceit of Die grosse Heimkehr. The novel concludes open-endedly, as Hannah never finds her biological mother: all she (and the reader) has heard is Yunho’s subjective narration about a segment of Korean history he has experienced, the Partition and its aftermath. At the same time, the experience of listening to his story (about Eve Moon) conjures up ghosts such as the voice of Billie Holiday, Eve’s favorite performer, whose lyrics are quoted throughout the text. The ritual of speaking and listening to voices can be related to the indigenous Korean practice of shamanism. Kim, the author, does not specifically refer to this, but there is a ghostliness in the way Yunho’s narration to Hannah is depicted. One could compare the act of storytelling, the dialogue between Yunho and Hannah, to a shamanistic ritual, and this would be consistent with the temporality established by Hannah at the beginning and end of the novel. The opening sequence evokes her memory of the past, a description of place as “home,” an atmospheric memory of light in the former American quarter of Seoul, which Hannah recalls from early childhood: “The light of the late afternoon […] produced a shadow play between the walls [and brought] a shimmer to the gloomy facades of the old town” (13). Hannah reminisces about the effects of the monsoon, the scents of spices, fruit, and mold she remembers from having lived there as a young child, and then enters the house of Yunho, who tells her his story. He asks: “What do you know about your homeland?” and the narrator responds: “I looked at him cluelessly” (15). From then on, Hannah dwells in the twilight space of Yunho’s memory: My present existence did not take place within the story told by Yunho […] rather, it took place in reality […]. However, as soon as I entered his house, it was there again: the glass wall, with myself being caught behind it. Or perhaps it might have been the opposite: the hours Yunho spoke about the past felt more present to my mind than the real present; and, conversely, the present seem to have been already passed – passed before it had even begun. (292)

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Here, the question of what differentiates the past from the present – or the realm of the ghosts from that of the living – is represented in terms of the unreality of the confines of Yunho’s house, which becomes a separate, secret space. Korean shamanism is usually performed in a small, secluded room of a house (or sauna) and does not involve more than two people (it is not a public ritual). Hannah’s experience of temporality becomes nonlinear, nonchronological. Kim’s novels portray the effects of racism and genocide based on historical evidence (which she has researched in archives and on site), but they also contain a dimension beyond the factual, where the narrative voice – here that of Yunho in Die grosse Heimkehr – becomes like a messenger reporting back from an “other,” seemingly incommensurable space or territory – one outside politically drawn borders, and outside historical “time.” In this way, Kim specifically departs from the genre of the historical novel to set up a scene of “shamanic” correspondence with the dead. When Hannah comes to Seoul to search for her roots, and learns about Korean history from the archiver Yunho, she and the reader are transported into Korea and Osaka, Japan during the years of 1959 and 1960. In this “time travel,” Hannah takes on the function of a “shaman” who accesses the realm of spirits who dwell in Yunho’s memory and are conjured up through his narration. Eve Moon, the spy, becomes Hannah’s emblematic “other,” the spirit with whom she communicates across borders of time and space. If Eve Moon’s persistent, explicit “nonidentity” represents the flip side of Hannah’s search for her “original” Korean identity, these two female figures represent the two sides of the boundary the “shaman” must traverse in order to return with information that will allow the patient to “heal” (i.e. understand where negative spirits are coming from, and how to communicate with them). Because shamanism in Korea is practiced mostly by women who have been traumatized, they are considered “other” and remain outside society. Akin to witches in Western iconography, such women are perceived as capable of creating conduits to spirits with whom they communicate, to heal patients who come to them. Crucial in this scenario is the understanding that spirits (or ghosts) are not “exorcised” but rather incorporated into the self of the patient who suffers – they are not “chased away” but spoken to, in ways that will make them participate in the healing

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process. Perhaps akin to Western therapeutic techniques, where understanding one’s suffering becomes relational between patient and therapist, the technique of shamanism involves a dialogue between the shaman and spirits from the patient’s past (i.e. ancestors). In a one-on-one ceremony, the shaman crosses over the boundaries between the everyday territory of the living, and the “other” world to which she has access by virtue of her “otherness” (Andersdasein).

VI The otherworldliness of the “shamanic” encounter mirrors, ironically, the historical, political content of Yunho’s narration about the partition: the Korean peninsula is divided into two separate territories, of which one (the North) becomes accessible only to those who sign up for the “repatriation program,” die grosse Heimkehr. The migration flow from the North to the South, and then from the South to Japan, is reversed, and this constant movement also is traced by Eve Moon’s shifting identities from North to South Korean, back to North Korean, then to Japanese, back to South Korean, and finally American (Eve marries an American GI and moves to the US). The figure of the female spy can be related to the figure of the female shaman in that territorial boundaries are crossed in both real (diegetic) and imaginary terms – this, in turn, becomes an alternative form of historiography. Kim suggests a transformative, creative encounter with the ghosts of the past that becomes part of an alternative way of being (Andersdasein), and does not rely on notions of “roots” and original “identity.” The storytelling ritual that constitutes the shamanic dialogue between Yunho, Hannah, and – one might say – Kim’s readers does not rely on notions of racial origins and Heimat, a concept particularly contested in the German-speaking, as well as in the Korean, context. Having grown up in Germany and Austria, Kim is familiar with the most aggressive ideology pertaining to homeland, that of National

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Socialism, which includes the racist concept of blood and soil, and the geopolitical Lebensraum ideology associated with German expansion and colonialism. In the German-speaking context, the glorification of Heimat belongs to a fascist rhetoric, and Kim suggests similarities between Nazi concepts of Heimat and certain Korean nationalist narratives. What is different in the Korean context, however, is that due to repeated invasion, colonization, occupation and division, the above-described aggressive Nazi expansion policies (which in Germany were justified on the basis of supposedly “unstable” borders, similar to Korea) are not possible in the same way. As a peninsula, the so-called “hermit kingdom” Korea is situated differently geographically, and nationalist ideology is construed mainly in reaction against the erasure of Korean identity by the West and other occupying Asian nations (China, Japan). As Lisa Lowe writes: The case of Korean nationalisms is [complicated] because Korean nationalist influences were and are both Western and non-Western, and because the division of Korea, and the involvement of outside powers in the governing of both North Korea and South Korea have further exacerbated the factionalized nature of its nationalist practices. (215, note 19)

Still, while one cannot compare Germany and Korea (in spite of the fact that at some point, both became divided nations), Die grosse Heimkehr does address the problem of what constitutes the discursive field of Heimat. In the Jewish-German context, for example, Heimat becomes central for those who have had to flee into exile and/or were deported by the Nazis: the survivors of the Shoah who have lost their homeland resemble the Koreans who have had to flee to Japan (and/or return to the North after the partition). This discursive overcoding of the term Heimat causes some commentators, such as Bernd Hüppauf, to reduce it to a universal term: Heimat can be called a popular myth. It doesn’t suffice to see it in terms of a fantastic story, rather it should be seen as something that circulates around a basic core of human needs. It is not spectacular, it remains largely invisible, and everyone shares in it. It has been appropriated by ideologies in the past, but even in its distortions, it opens a window onto reality. It has been an affirmative ideology, but to unmask

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On the other hand, Stephan Günzel, in an essay about Heimatkunde philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow, questions whether the word Heimat is itself “profane” because Bollnow’s is really a theory of space (Raum), to conclude:  “What could be worse than encountering a philosophy of Heimat when what is sought is a theory of space?” (“Was gibt es Schlimmeres als auf ein Heimatdenken zu treffen, wenn eine Raumtheorie gesucht ist?,” 43, my translation). Clearly, the Heimat concept – in spite of its links to the Lebensraum ideology and discourses about displaced persons (Vertriebene) – is neither universal nor clearly defined. Hence Kim educates German readers about the specific use of the word Heimat in the postpartition Korean context: it is neither a glorification of homeland from a nationalist agenda, nor a nostalgia for return. Rather, it is about division, the uneasy coexistence between two separate territories. Perhaps because the concept of two coexisting territories thwarts the hierarchy of “original” belonging, Kim has chosen to engage with Korea postwar history rather than with the earlier history of Japanese colonization of Korea. In this, she differs from, for example, Korean-American author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose family fled the Japanese to Manchuria and then came to the US via Hawaii. In Cha’s book, Dictée, postpartition Korea is shown as part of American history, and the book is thus mainly focused on the devastating effects of Japanese colonization. In Kim’s Die grosse Heimkehr, on the other hand, Japan appears less prominently: Osaka is primarily mentioned as the location where South Koreans flee to and are leaving from.

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VII Korean history is tied up with that of the West via the United States. In a number of scenes, the novel describes Eve Moon’s cultural Westernization in ways that resemble images from postwar German history:  GI bars, chocolate and cigarettes, American music (Billie Holiday is quoted throughout the book). Eve Moon becomes the emblem of Westernization, as she wears American make-up like a mask: The second time Johnny met Eve, he found her in the embrace of an American soldier for whom slow-dancing the blues was not enough, he was pushing her into the direction of a room in back. Her lips were as red as her dress, her hair bleached into a light brown and turned into curls, and her naturally ochre skin shimmered through from beneath her white facial powder. (49)

Eve, the spy, is racialized and becomes a “traitor” to Korean identity through her wholesale acceptance of Westernization/Americanization, and this includes the way she furnishes her house: That night, I suddenly entered her world, and it was completely different: the interior of her house […] looked like an American bungalow. The tables could not be reached from the floor, the wardrobes could only be opened while standing up, and Eve slept on a bed in an alcove, not on a firm mat on the ground. Every three hours on the dot, a cuckoo popped out of her wall clock, and she kept a bottle of milk in her icebox, along with a two-month-old cheese that was stinky and she wasn’t sure it was still edible. (154)

Having moved away from the grounded places found in Korean homes, Eve uses chairs and elevated beds; eats and drinks dairy; and has a cuckoo clock. (There are a few such Austrian references – South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee was married to an Austrian, Francesca, his second wife, from 1934 to 1965). Korea, like Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has not been a unified nation, and this is reflected by the cultural imperialism of the American occupation, of which Eve becomes representative – she wants to be “everything but Korean.”

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As if to continue the departure from the myth of an “originary” time and place, Part II of the book takes place in Osaka, where Yunho and Eve, among many others, have fled. North Korea becomes the “homecoming” (Heimkehr) destination for those Koreans who fled to Osaka after being accused of being communists by the Americans. This then caused the North Koreans to institute the grosse Heimkehr repatriation program, which resulted in torture and disappearances because the home-comers were not trusted. The above-described tension between the Americans and the Japanese – who isolated Korean refugees in ghettoized neighborhoods and treated them as second-class citizens, thus making them want to be recruited for return to North Korea – becomes part of Kim’s Cold War narrative. Essentially, the second half of the book describes the longing for Heimat/homeland by Koreans who live in Japan. However, it becomes clear that this “homecoming” remains fraught with mystery: No one really knows what North Korea is like, and whether the tales coming from those who went there are true or just propaganda. The question of what constitutes “home” is asked in relation to North/South Korea after the refugees learn – while in Japan – that Rhee has been ousted, and Yunho asks: “Did Eve want to return to South Korea without us? Or did she not want to return to her homeland at all? Did I actually want to go back home? Was my home still my home?” (388). The novel questions reductive notions of belonging and origins, not just in terms of place but also in terms of family histories: Hannah, the adoptee searching for her biological mother, and Yunho, who has become painfully separated from his brother Yunsu who has disappeared into North Korea. The following dialogue between Yunho and Hannah is worth quoting at length because it illustrates the impossibility of Heimat in the Korean context, but also the possibility of finding a place outside national boundaries: [He asked me] whether I was disappointed in my Heimat […]. “No,” I answered, “not disappointed in South Korea as a country but disappointed that it doesn’t feel like Heimat.” “How does Heimat feel?” He looked at me curiously. “Different.”

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“Different?” Of course he wanted more of an answer. I tried to respond by saying: “Perhaps I should ask you this, instead of you asking me. What would I know about Heimat anyway?” “That’s what I’m trying to find out. What do you know about Heimat?” “Not much, I think. I’m not an expert.” He dismissed this, saying this was a contradiction in terms, Heimat and being an expert. Then he squinted. “Are you of the opinion that I’m an expert?” I nodded. “More so than me.” “Why? Because I was born and raised in the same country?” “No, because you were never told that you don’t have a Heimat.” He broke into a loud laugh. “Now you’re mistaken! This is something you and I have in common. My whole life I’ve had to listen to people telling me I don’t have a Heimat.” “Why?” “Because, supposedly, I’m on the wrong side,” he responded and cleared his throat. “And you? On whose side are you?” “On the side they let me be on. On all and none.” “So then you are truly and really homeless?” “I don’t believe in Heimat. Meaning I don’t believe in the place called Heimat.” “In what else then?” “I believe there are places one loves. I even believe there are places in which the soul feels at home. Soul landscapes.” He nodded slowly. He once read somewhere, he said, that no matter where one arrives, one is always searching for one’s own soul. “Does this mean,” he asked, “that there is a connection between the soul and Heimat?” (281–2).13 13 According to Antonetta Brunio, The Gate of Words, shamanistic rituals are performed in the form of dialogues. The overall plot of Die grosse Heimkehr is structured in the form of an ongoing dialogue between Hannah and Yunho, containing many exchanges such as this one.

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Here, the concept of a “soul landscape” (Seelenlandschaft) implies that a place where one feels at home does exist, but that it is not connected to any existing national or political territory. Rather, its condition precludes attachment to any particular “place,” as the soul is unhinged and, presumably, free to subjectively select its own imaginary Heimat. I would argue that, in this way, Kim most incisively challenges conventional, reactionary notions of Heimat associated with nationalist politics, and draws attention to another, invisible spatial dimension that – as I have argued – is connected to the realm of spirits in shamanism. Visiting the “other” side of the Seelenlandschaft would be to access an Andersdasein in this context, thus transforming the alienated, homeless condition of the “stranger” I have referred to in the beginning into a subjective “place.” North Korea, being an uncertain, imaginary rendering of a possible Seelenlandschaft, also represents the alienating Andersdasein that is the experience of the slave and stranger in Hartman and Kim. It becomes the uncharted territory where the shaman must meet both evil and benign ghosts – and to which others do not have access. As I have tried to demonstrate, Kim’s novel Die grosse Heimkehr questions received European notions of Heimat and belonging through concepts such as Andersdasein which I have interpreted in terms of shamanism and the figure of the female spy. Kim describes the outsider who wants to “belong” as being ruled by a desire to “fit in,” thus becoming estranged from herself – a state I metaphorically related to that of slavery as described by Hartman – but in Kim this opens up the possibility of discovering a space associated with another dimension, away from politicized territorial ideologies and racialized conceptions of ethnicity. Linda Koiran sums it up by saying that Kim questions the familiar to the degree that [t]‌he stranger is a genuine part of our own self. He or she is revealed within us in the encounter with one another. At the same time, the stranger embodies his or her own linguistic, cultural, and historical space. [The stranger] stands in a “destructive” opposition to our own familiar, heimisch space because he or she fundamentally questions our thoughts and feelings in what they normally refer to. [That] becomes the trigger for Kim’s self-questioning [and] helps Kim to distance herself from the “European point of view.” (32, my translation)

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Die grosse Heimkehr pertains to North Korea and I  would conclude that it represents the ironic reversal of the above-described imaginary Seelenlandschaft (and/or Andersdasein). It is a place of hope for those who “return” but it becomes a negative, impossible space – and a place connected to death. On the level of the story, “disappearance” into the seemingly inaccessible territory of North Korea is emblematized by the disappearance of Yunho’s brother, Yunsu. Yunho says: “I [had] left Nonsan […] because I did not want to endanger my brother. I was the only connection to Yunsu, the only one who could confirm that he had joined a North Korean guerrilla group” (“ich [hatte] Nonsan verlassen […] weil ich meinen Bruder nicht gefährden wollte. Ich war die einzige Verbindung zu Yunsu, der Einzige, der bestätigen konnte, dass er sich einer nordkoreanischen Guerilla-Gruppe angeschlossen hatte,” 94). This lost connection to his brother is featured throughout the text. At the same time, the relationship to his friend, Johnny, Eve’s boyfriend (Yunho’s love for Eve is unrequited) is uncannily like family: Johnny asks Yunho whether he knew that his father has adopted Yunsu: “If you look at it precisely, your brother is my brother” (“Wenn man es genau nimmt, ist dein Bruder mein Bruder,” 431). As some of the characters who are introduced in Part II decide to go to North Korea, Yunho is grateful to Johnny – who goes there – not to have ended up there himself, despite the possibility of reuniting with his brother. Yunho has since learned that, as Kim explains, in the 1970s and 1980s many Japanese-Koreans who “disappeared” into the North ended up in work camps (Arbeitslagern) or were executed (551). This was, as mentioned above, because the North Korean regime did not trust those new arrivals, even though, paradoxically, it had recruited them. The logic of this recruitment – the repatriation program that forms the title of Kim’s novel – was initially fueled by Cold War politics: “In early September General Douglas MacArthur reconquered Seoul […]. Everyone who hadn’t escaped on time was suspected of collaborating with the communists” (175). Those who later flee and arrive in Osaka, Japan – Yunho, Eve, Johnny – quickly recognize that the Koreans already in Osaka are actually communists, based on being against the South Koreans and the US. There is, for example, knowledge of the “mass murder on the ‘red’

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island Jeju, by the Americans” who conducted “lynchings, for example by boiling a police officer in a pot of oil” (399). Kim here refers to the American response to the April 1948 Jeju Uprising, when from 1949 to 1950, up to 30,000 Koreans were killed, and another 40,000 fled to Japan (these are the Koreans Yunho, Eve and Johnny encounter in Osaka). Kim writes that the American “occupying forces were of the opinion that the Koreans were receptive to communism, like all other Asians, and that even the Japanese were helplessly exposed to this evil ideology” (306) but she also offers a rationale for anti-American sentiment on the part of Koreans who fled to Osaka. The various miscommunications and misrepresentations are thus made more obvious – at least according to Kim’s novel, there appears to be no real logic on the part of either side for what constitutes anyone’s political motivations. Japan, for example, may have sided for or against the US at different moments, but this did not then translate into any support of the opposing side, that is, communism – and, evidently, neither into welcoming the Koreans in Osaka who had been forced, after all, to flee anti-communist persecution. Given that South Korea, due to US policy, was no longer accessible, propaganda easily spread in Osaka about North Korea as the place to go, both through Japanese newspapers, and by word of mouth among the ghettoized Zainichi who suffered from being stateless: [T]‌he only real alternative was North Korea, a new democracy. In Ikaino, they only had good things to say about the North. Kim Il Sung was worshiped. His writings about the revolution belonged to the basic intellectual equipment of every household, and their popularity surpassed that of the oeuvres of Stalin and Marx. The Korean schools in Osaka and Kobe were decorated with his portrait. (305).

The initial stories coming from the North were all positive: 50,000 people […] have lived in North Korea for five months, in beautiful, clean, and modern homes, built especially for them by General Kim Il Sung. They didn’t have to worry about their food anymore, nor about the rent; their children would get an education […]. Work for everyone. Education for everyone. (338)

Inaccessible behind the DMZ (demilitarized zone), North Korea was represented only by propaganda and anecdotal, mostly inaccurate

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information. Kim’s novel’s second part portrays the Korean refugees as homeless (i.e. stateless) and thus easy prey for recruitment by North Korea. No one knew what North Korea was actually like. The text introduces discrepancies between the success stories and the actual situations of the home-comers (Heimkehrer), but these are based on hearsay since no reliable information was available: [Tetsuya’s] cousin […] had emigrated. At first he wrote […] that his family of four had been assigned a two-room apartment in northern North Korea. That it was on the fourth floor […] new and even outfitted with a toilet. (355)

However, they found out that there was no running water: they hear from someone that “the faucets and sinks are decoration, worthless dummies” (355). The home-comers had to get water from the river where laundry is done, which is not potable and leads to disease. Unfortunately, they were now trapped there, and more home-comers arrived. Like the unknown territory visited by the shaman, who returns with new “information” (like the spy), the patchwork of received images about North Korea is filtered through hearsay and rumors. Historiography, in the sense of archival documents that can verify information, is not possible in this scenario. Shamanism, on the other hand, emerges as a way of reading Die grosse Heimkehr because Kim, as a creative writer who brings home this knowledge about North and South Korea, relates it back to readers in the German-speaking world. A generation younger than Tawada and Pham, her contribution to German-speaking culture offers hope in the face of globally increasing xenophobia – reminding readers that a positive “fusion” between Germany and its immigrants has already occurred  – thus should be able to withstand the divisiveness of the new forms of racism that have recently resurfaced again.

epilogue

“Asian Fusion”

If you miss me at the back of the bus, and you can’t find me nowhere. Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be sittin’ right there. I’ll be sittin’ right there, I’ll be sittin’ right there. Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be sittin’ right there. — Charles Neblett & Pete Seeger, 1963

It might not come as a grand reveal that this book’s sequence of three Asian-German dialogues, presented in the form of call-and-response, turns out to have resisted its own premise, suggested by its title, in that it does not conform to the comforting notion of “fusion” as a happy ending. The reader will not find an assortment of voices arriving, metaphorically speaking, on the same plate. Instead, this book’s narrative is designed to reveal a widening gyre of (mis)understanding: it began with a measured attempt to cross over into new territories (Sebald-Tawada), rose to a crescendo in a search for common ground, in what promised to be a discursive “fusion” (Weiss-Pham), and concluded by dissolving into dissonance (Beuys-Kim). And, as the reader parts with the idea of a harmonious synthesis between opposing voices, they are confronted with the fact that there is reason for concern. In today’s Germany, citizens of immigrant background, including a newly expanding, vibrant Jewish community, continue to experience racism and hostilities, as they remain relegated to the status of outsiders. Although Germany is now a country of immigration, it continues to reckon with a historical legacy of anti-Semitism that dates back to the Middle Ages, when Jews were barred from most professions and prohibited

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from purchasing any land. In sum, they were branded as “internal enemies.” As Robert Wistrich observes in his book A Lethal Obsession (pp. 69–70): Attacking the Jews became an accepted way for Christians to affirm their faith […] Gruesome fantasies with no objective basis in fact, such as the ritual murder by Jews of Christian children at Easter in order to use their blood in the ceremonial Passover meal, were invented [to brand] Jews as bloodthirsty “others” who deserved to be killed. One can find echoes of such medieval delusions eight hundred years later, in Nazi anti-Semitism.

If such negative stereotypes of Jews were perpetuated for centuries, to eventually culminate in the Shoah, as Wistrich here suggests – broadly speaking – there is reason to believe that their repercussions also affect Asian-Germans today. As outlined in my Introduction, new research shows how East Asians, in particular, were associated with Jews by the Nazis, who branded both groups as “Orientals.” Having pseudoscientifically conflated the “Oriental” with the “Semitic” to cement their own supposed identity as an “Aryan” race, the Nazis created a lasting stigma. Asian-Germans are subject to similar rhetorical mechanisms of vilification that brands them as outsiders who are threatening a perceived status quo. Thus, the happy vision of a “melting pot” has tipped over into something of a medieval “witch’s brew,” with the poisonous ingredient of apocalyptic Fremdenhass [fear of “foreigners”], the impulse to aggressively “protect” oneself from an imaginary attack. These primitive phobias are contained within the poisonous xenophobic and anti-Semitic messages of alt-right and Identitarian propaganda – one need only to recall the recent attack on the Halle synagogue during the Yom Kippur service in 2019 to recognize the dangers of this resurgence. Clearly, over the decades since the end of the Cold War, the advent of globalization has led to cultural anxieties that resist “fusion” and prioritize “identity” in an extremist fashion (see, for example, the very name of the reactionary and now ubiquitous “Identitarian” movement), thereby eschewing Enlightenment ideas about “tolerance” as conditioned, above all, by people’s ability to travel. The idea that a people should be rooted to its soil, once prevalent in Nazi ideology of Germanic Volk and “blood and

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soil” (Blut und Boden) has functioned to justify fantasies of ethnic superiority in the anti-immigrant and white supremacist rhetoric of the New Right, as they see themselves as under attack by Jews and “foreigners” – including Asian-Germans. The metaphor of “Asian Fusion,” with its culinary connotations, is meant to suggest a diverse confluence of elements categorically opposed to the idea of a biologically determined link between Volk and Boden, people and the places they inhabit. Migration patterns are not just transitory but rather re-establish roots in new locations, contributing to their elective communities in numerous ways as productive citizens. In that sense, “fusion” scientifically speaking, functions as a dynamic concept: it represents a rich renewal and reconfiguration of the status quo ante – as in an electrical circuit that, despite occasional “jolts,” facilitates the smooth travel of energy. “Fusion” is not an end point or telos because there is no end to the movement of history. It echoes the lines of a song that are repeated as a resistance to stasis. Call-and-Response, as an expression of solidarity within a community, resists the notion of “fusion” as a happy ending, since reiteration and repetition are meant to amplify the message. Just as in a collective musical performance, the new Asian-German voices I have presented here – Tawada, Pham, and Kim – as “response” to their predecessors’ “calls” – Sebald, Weiss, Beuys – remind us of the right to belong: a right that is akin to Rosa Parks’ claim at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement to a place at the front of the bus, as cited in the preceding epigraph. As Parks knew then, as we have realized today, these rights cannot simply be taken for granted.

On an added note, the completion of this book coincides with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been accompanied by increasingly vicious attacks against East Asians. While the virus is new, this scapegoating, reminiscent of evils committed in the past, is not – I can only hope that this book will contribute to keeping at bay this current wave of anti-Asian prejudice.

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Index

Figures are indicated by page numbers in bold print, footnotes by the page number ­followed by “n” and the footnote number. Adelson, Leslie  60 Adenauer, Konrad  6 Adorno, Theodor W.   34 Africa: folklore image Sankofa  16 silk trade  34 All about Eve (film)  209 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party  5, 12–13, 16–17 Améry, Jean  44 Angola  84 Appadurai, Arjun  14 Apter, Emily: Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability  145 architecture: of concentration camps  43–4 in Greenland  190 life span of buildings  56 linguistic  72 and literature  59 and poetry/literature  56, 59 structures as containers  23, 56 underground and inner spaces  23, 55, 59, 60, 61, 72 see also emptiness Arendt, Hannah  8n12 Artaud, Antonin  89 Asahi Shimbun  203 Augé, Marc  59 Auschwitz see Beuys, Joseph, Auschwitz Demonstration; Shoah

Auschwitz trials  3, 25, 83, 150 Ayim, May  10n13   Baer, Elizabeth  13n14 Bakhtin, Mikhail  18, 19–20 Bauer, Karin  49n15 Begag, Azouz  3n4 Benjamin, Walter  16, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 71–2, 114 Bennett, Jane  57 Bergen-Belsen  36–7, 42 Berlin  173, 174 Museum für Gegenwart  175 Beuys, Joseph  26–8, 27n28, 149–81 Auschwitz Demonstration  27, 151–2, 156, 168–9, 168n18 as anti-Semitic  168n18 beliefs/themes: Christian imagery  153–4, 155–6, 169 creativity  158 “East” and “West”  159, 163 environmentalism and Green Party  149, 158, 158n11 Fluxus (fluidity of boundaries)  158 Great Chain of Being  155 humans and nature: spiritual union  155 interest in East Asian philosophies  158 left-wing politics  158 minimalism  158

248 mystic connection with animals  160 nomadism  167, 169 progressivism of science  154–5 shamanism  26, 27, 28, 149, 164, 166, 179 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past)  149, 150, 158n10, 180–81 biographies about Beuys  149, 153n6, 154, 160n13, 162, 163, 171, 173, 173n22 connections with Nazis  26–7, 149, 164, 171–2, 180, 181 “Eurasia”  6, 27, 28, 156–70, 172–7 air crash and Tatarenlegende (fabricated rescue tale)  27, 156, 160–67, 172 as artistic multiculturalism  156 Beuys as war victim  164, 180 dead hare image  173, 174 Eurasienstab  159 Eurasier, Der  156, 165–8, 174 founding of fantasy state  159–61 as neo-fascist concept  177, 178–9 Nordic mythology  160 placement in museum  167–9 progressive or regressive?  156, 157, 158 references to Genghis Kahn  160 as shamanic space  164, 166 shepherd imagery  160, 165, 166, 167 and Shoah  149, 156, 159, 161–2, 167, 169, 178, 179 Siberian Symphony  6, 27, 156, 159, 172 performances  173–6 use of name “Eurasia”  159, 176–8 exhibition at Guggenheim Museum 1979  150 friendship with Fastaband  171–2

Index friendship with Ströher  171 in German army  161–2 I Like America and America Likes Me 165–6, 166n17 in Luftwaffe  26–7, 153n6, 156, 157, 162–7, 179 nervous breakdown  170 Schlaf im Schnee (drawing)  165 Tatarenhäuser auf der Krim (painting)  165 witness of Nazi atrocities  161, 162 Bhabha, Homi  11 Binh, Nguyen Phu  120 Bio Art  57 Biro, Matthew  151 blood and soil (racism)  214–15 Blume, Eugen  159, 175 body and soul  193, 194–5 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich  216 Borer, Alain  164, 166 Boyarin, Daniel  41n6 Brandt, Bettina  66 Bread and Puppet Theater  89 Brecht, Bertolt  17, 89, 89n14, 102, 104, 114 alienation effect  139 Brooks, Peter  83 Brueghel, Pieter  93n18 Brunio, Antonetta  219n13 Buchloh, Benjamin  150 Buckwitz, Harry  85, 101 Butler, Judith  21n22   call-and-response 6–7, 14, 17, 18–20, 29, 227 Cantet, Laurent  3n4 Celan, Paul  64n11 “Death Fugue”  1, 100 cellars  61, 62 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Dictée 22–3, 216 Chametzky, Peter  152, 167–8, 179–80 Chang, Jung  39n4

Index Chen, Tina  211 China: Chinese philosophy  17, 57 Cultural Revolution  200 migrants in USA  13n15 shamanism  201n9 silk trade see silk trade starvation of people  38–9 Tz’u-hsi, Dowager Empress  37–9, 39n4, 40, 42, 53, 54 and Vietnam  84, 123, 133 Chow, Ray  15 Christianity: and anti-Semitism  226 and Greenland Inuit  188 in Korea  201n9 and shamanism  169, 190 Station of the Cross  153, 154 suffering of Christ  155–6 Cold War  85, 90, 159, 175, 221 and German partition  159, 175 and Vietnam War  121 Cologne  64 Cummings, Bruce  203–4 Curio, Claudia  50n17   Damrosch, David  35 Dante  25, 84, 92 Divine Comedy: Inferno  84, 91, 93, 93n18, 113 Dao  57 Darmstadt, Hessiche Landesmuseum  167, 168, 171 Davies, Mereid Puw  90 De Baere, Bart  159 depression and location  191, 196 Deupmann, Christoph  104 dialogue  18–19, 20–22, 78 and in-between space  21, 22, 143 and shamanism  201, 212, 214 silence in  139 see also call-and-response

249 Diefenbach, Thilo  110n27 “Documentary Theater”  85–6, 86n8, 94n19, 103 Douglass, Frederick  3n3 Dresden  64 Du, Nguyen: The Tale of Kieu  109, 110–111, 113, 119, 133, 137 woman as central character  133 Duchamp, Marcel  180 Dugin, Alexander  177–8 Duong, Lan P.   119   East Asia/ns  8, 9, 22, 87, 226 cultural stereotypes  185 and Germany  8, 9–10, 17, 35, 117–18 linked to Jews  9–10, 16, 226 Nazi view of  8, 9–10, 226 primitivism  200 stereotyping  23, 185 women  22–3, 25–6 see also China; Japan; Korea; Orient/ Orientalism; Vietnam Eichmans, Gabriele  70 El-Tayeb, Fatima  7n11 Eliade, Mircea  164, 187 Ellis, Roger  86, 94n19 Ellison, Ralph  3n3 emptiness 45–7, 48n13, 53, 54, 58n4 and death  48 in dialogue  22 in East  27 empty space  55, 187, 191–2 Eurasia  149, 159, 164, 167, 178 Greenland Heimat 186–7, 190–91 in-between space  60, 70–71, 143 in Japanese philosophy  70 in landscape  169, 170 Epic theater  102 Epstein, Helen  186n3 Erdmann, Dieter  141 Eurasia see under Beuys, Joseph

250 Fachinger, Petra  60n7 Fastaband, Karl  171–2 Fehrenbach, Heide  3n4 Filliou, Robert  155 Final Solution  154 Finch, Helen  41–2 Firestone, Evan  174 Fleischer, Jorgen: A Short History of Greenland  188 Fluxus (fluidity of boundaries)  58, 58n5, 70, 158 Fort Breendonk  43, 43n7, 44–7, 52 “husks” of human bodies  46–7 prisoners’ cells  46 Frankfurt  150 Frankfurt School  34 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung  114 Frankfurter Rundschau  94 Frankopan, David  35 Freud, Sigmund  150n1 Friedrich, Jörg  64n12 Friedrichsmayer, Sara  37 Fritz, Nicole  153, 153n6 Fritzch, Constanze  152n5 “fusion” 1–6, 29, 225, 227 and globalization  226   Gao Xingjian: Soul Mountain  200 Garloff, Katja  88 Genghis Kahn  160 Germany: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party  5, 12–13, 16–17 and Cold War  159, 175 East Germany and Vietnam  117–18 Green Party  149, 158 New Right  5, 12, 13 and Orient  49 partition  90, 159, 175, 179 racism/anti-Semitism 2–5, 2n1, 4n7–9, 8–9 Afro-Germans  10n13

Index blood and soil  226–7 East Asians  8, 9–10, 17, 35, 117–18 Jewish stereotypes  226 Jews as “Orientals”  9–10, 35, 41, 54, 226 migrants: and call for end of immigration  13, 16–17 and colonization  11–12 expectations of assimilation 11–12, 13 fear of/hostility to  4–5, 7–8 and fusion  2, 227 identity 13–14 migrants as “Other"  2, 3–4, 5, 10–11, 12 and multiculturalism  11 as outsiders  225 Vietnamese 117–18, 123 present day  225–6 Rassenpolitik: preservation of “racial purity"  188 and term Volk  172n21, 226 reunification 175–6 student movement (1960s)  150, 158 US troops in West Germany 90–91, 90n17 Wirtschaftwunder (economic miracle)  154 as World War II aggressor  64 see also National Socialism; Shoah Gestapo  45 Gestus theater  102 Global Positioning System  56 Green Party  149, 158 Greenland and Inuit: body and soul  193 culture as transitory  190 Danified: fitting into Danish society  189, 189n5 Danish architecture  190 Danish colonization  188–90

Index introduction of Christianity  188, 190 names and identity  193 and “racial purity"  188–9 shamanism  184, 187, 188, 193 suicides  186n3 reasons 192–3, 196 whale hunting  188 Grotowski, Jerzy  89 Günzel, Stephan  216   Habermas, Jürgen  8n12 Halle: synagogue attack (2019)  2, 2n1 Hamburg  63, 64, 64n12, 65 Hanoi 128–9 Haq, Nav  156, 157 Harrington, Eve  209, 211 Harris, Mark  50n17 Hartman, Saidiya: Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route 206–7 Haubold, Erhard  114–15 Hayles, Katherine  56 Heimat (homeland)  185–6, 199, 202, 215–16 imaginary location  185–6 Jewish-German context  215 Koreans 185–6, 199, 201, 202–3, 218–20 and Lebensraum  216 in National Socialism  214–15, 216 and shamanism  184, 190 as universal term  215–16 Herren, Graley  41 Hesse, Herman  82 Heydrich, Reinhard  178 Hiroshima  67, 198 Hitler, Adolf  2, 27, 149, 161, 164 Ho Chi Minh  97, 113 Hoài, Pham Thi see Pham Thi Hoài Hodkinson, James  10 Hoffman-Curtis, Kathrin  151 Hofmann, Michael  88

251 Hogarth, Hyung-key  187 Holliday, Billie  217 Holocaust see Shoah Horlemann, Jürgen  97 Howald, Stefan  84, 87, 106–7 Hui, Barbara  35 humans: bodies 56–7, 62 as “cocoons”/”husks"  46–7, 48, 48n13 body and soul  193, 194–5 and emotions  57 names and identity  193 and other life forms  57 spiritual union with nature  155 Hüppauf, Bernd  215–16 Hutchins, Michael  34   identity: divided  210 journeys to find  206–8, 209–210 names and identity  193 and nonidentity  211 search for  212 and self, sense of  50, 71 and surveillance  184, 184n1, 205 Itkin, Alan  46   Jaji, Tsitsi Ella  6, 7 James, William  50 Jameson, Fredric  17 Japan: atomic bomb  64 colonization of Korea  67, 197–8, 203, 218, 222 emptiness in philosophy  70 Kabuki theater  89, 103, 104 Noh theater  59, 102, 103 racism 197–8 sense of defeat  67 World War II aggression and crimes  59, 64, 67

252 Jordan, Cara  181 Jordan, Peter  187–8 Jullien, François  18, 21–2 “in-between” space  143   Kafka, Franz  65n14, 114, 139 Kammler, Clemens  108 Kanaken  4, 4n7 Kang, Hans  28n29 Kant, Immanuel  56, 57, 58n4 space  71 Kempken, Heinz Georg  162–3 Kendall, Lauren  201 Kim, Anna  6, 26, 28–9, 28n29, 183–223 adoption  205n10 Anatomie einer Nacht (Anatomy of a Night)  28, 184, 186–7, 190–96 Amaraq  186, 187, 190–96 attribution of agency  194 darkness  195 growth 194–5 body and soul  193, 194–5 empty space  187, 191–2 loneliness and poverty  193–4 names and identity  193 shamanism  187, 190 souls  187, 193 suicides  186, 190, 191, 194, 202 reasons for  192–3, 196 essays  200n8 family background  183, 200–201, 200n7, 205 Geforeme Zeit, Die  28, 202 Grosse Heimkehr, Die (The Great Homecoming)  28, 184, 197–223 female spy, Eve Moon  208–9, 210, 212, 213, 217, 221 hafu (halfling)  198 Hannah 199–200, 200n7, 205, 206, 207–8, 210, 212, 213, 214 Yunho and Hannah dialogue  200n7, 214, 218–19, 219n13

Index Heimat (homeland)  185–6, 199, 202, 215–16, 218–19 and “soul landscape”  220 identity: divided  210 journeys to find  206–8, 209–210 and memory  210 and non-identity  211 and politics  205 search for  212 influence of American culture 208–9 narrator, Hannah  199–200, 205, 207, 209–210 North Korea  201 repatriation program  197, 198, 202–3, 204 North Korean dictatorship  204–5 Other-Existence (Andersein)  206, 212, 214, 220 partition of Korea  214 past and present  213 shamanism  212, 213 spirits or ghosts  213, 214 Westernization of Korea  217 Yunho  199, 206, 206n11, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214, 218, 221, 222 Yunho and Hannah dialogue  200n7, 214, 218–19, 219n13 Yunsu  218, 221 Invasionen des Privaten (Invasions of the Private)  28, 186, 188–90 friendship with Greenland woman 189–90 Greenland Inuit: colonization and racism 188–9 shamanism  190 location  186 otherness  184 as outsider  205–6 realm of the dead  184–5 realms of the dead  201–2

Index sense of being an outsider  184, 185 shamanism  184, 190, 201–2 Sichtare Feind, Die (The Visible Enemy) 183–4, 185, 186, 205, 210 space  184, 186 surveillance and identity  184, 184n1, 205 Kim, David  35 Kim, John Namjun  64n11, 71 Klee, Paul: The Angel of History  16 Klemperer, Victor  3n4 Klüger, Ruth  51 Koenen, Gerd  158n10 Koiran, Linda  64, 65n13, 67, 191–2, 220 Kontje, Todd  11 Korea: “comfort women”  198 Heimat (homeland)  185–6, 199, 201, 202–3, 215, 218–20 Japanese colonization and racism 197–8, 203, 213 Jeju Uprising  222 Koreans in Japan  218, 221 loss of culture and identity  197 North Korean repatriation  197, 198, 202–3, 204, 218, 221 partition  214, 216, 217 refugees  203, 204, 208–9, 214, 223 shamanism  184, 190, 199, 201, 201n9, 211–12 Westernization  217 women and shamanism  201, 213 Zainichi  197, 198, 203, 204 Koska, Jan  102 Kraus, Dorothy  85n7 Kunzelmann, Dieter  94n20 Kusama, Yayoi  158   language establishing relationships  20 linguistic architecture  72

253 socially determined  19–20 verbal and non-verbal  143 Laruelle, Marlene  177, 177n26, 178–9 Lê, Linda  3n4, 106, 118–20 Les Trois Prques  119, 128 Le, Nam: “The Boat"  120 Lebensraum  149, 178–9, 215, 216 Lefebvre, Henri  92 The Production of Space 104–5 Lefebvre, Kim  3n4 Leggwie, Claus  17n19 Lemaître, Frédéric  4n9 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  8n12 Lévinas, Emmanuel  18, 20–21 “Peace and Proximity”  20 Librett, Jeffrey  8 Living Theater  89 Long, J.J.  50 Lowe, Lisa  23n23, 215 Lubow, Arthur  48 Luong, Hy V.   132, 132n13   McArthur, General  203, 204 Malcolm X  3n3 Manheim, Ron  150 Mao Zedong  200 Marchand, Suzanne  11 Maron, Monika and Kelek, Nekla  4n9 Martin, Matt  115 Marx, Karl  39n3 Mendelsohn, Moses  8n12 Merkel, Angela  16 Mesch, Claudia  166 Meyer, Christine  11, 12 migrants/refugees from Germany  215 and history  16 integration in West  22 Korea  203, 214 migrants in Germany see under Germany Vietamese Boat People  100, 117, 119, 120–21

254 Minh Thi, Tran Thi  132, 132n12 gender equality  138–9 Minimalism  158 Mishan, Ligaya  1, 2 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete: The Inability to Mourn  16, 150 Mo-Tzu  17, 89 Morton, Timothy  57 Muelder-Bach, Inka  42 Müller, Manfred and Schütte, Wolfram  94n20 multiculturalism  5, 11, 156 Muslims  4   Nagasaki  67, 198 Nation, The  93 National Socialism  2–3, 7, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 17, 64 blood and soil (racism)  214–15 expansionism  161, 178 Final Solution  154 Heimat (homeland)  214–15 Lebensraum  149, 178–9, 215, 216 Nuremburg race laws  2–3, 2n2 progroms (Kristallnacht)  82 Rassenpolitik  188 and silk trade  34, 35, 36, 39–40 see also Shoah New York: Guggenheim Museum  150 Museum of Natural History  169 New York Times  1 Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau  23, 121, 137 Vietnamese Voices 132–3 Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer  118 Nguyen-vo, Thu-huong: The Ironies of Freedom  130, 131 nomadism  167, 169

Index non-Western theater  103 Kabuki theater  89, 103, 104 Noh theater  59, 102, 103 Nossack, Erich  64n12 Nuuk  190   O’Connell, Mike  46 Oliva, Achille Bonito  155, 155n9 Ono, Yoko  158 Orient/Orientalism 10–11, 39, 176–7 and Jews as “Orientals"  9–10, 35, 41, 54, 226 Osaka  222 Osterhammel, Jürgen  176–7 Other-Existence (Andersein)  206, 212, 214, 220 Other/”otherness"  7, 20, 41, 184 Jews as  41 outsiders  13, 220 and race  2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 170 realm  196 and self  210, 211, 213 shamanic space  187 uniqueness of  20–21   Paik, Nam June  158 Palmstierna, Gunilla  83, 83n3, 89, 97, 104 Pang-White, Ann  57 Park Chung-hee, 197, 209 Pensky, Max  45 Pham Thi Hoài  6, 25–6, 26n26–27, 113–46 Asian-German writer  145 background and work  113–14 blog  114, 114n2 conformity and individualism  115–16 critical style of writing  115 Crystal Messenger, The (Thien Su/Die Kristallbotin)  25, 78, 123–8 Little Hon  124, 125–6 as political allegory  115

Index publication and translation 113–14, 114n1 silence and crying  124, 125, 126 two sisters  123–4 exile and censorship  114–15 experiences of Vietnam War  117 “Five Days” (“Fünf Tage”)  138–43 “depth” as illusion  142 faces and masks  139, 140 German translation  140–41, 141n16, 142n17 husband and wife separation 139–40 “other”  142 silence  139, 142 translation as theme  138, 139 in GDR  117–18 “In the Rain” (In einem Regen) 133–5, 138 male narrator  133 private and public voice  134 waiting 133–5 “Man Nuong”  135–8 story of Man Nuong  135, 135n15 origins of Vietnam War  116–17, 121 silences 122–3, 124, 138, 139, 143, 144 subjection of women  116 Sunday Menu (Sonntagsmenü)  25, 78, 128–31 “Allumfassende Liebe”  130 “Chin Bho Lam Muoi”  130 counting  130 cuisine as metaphor  128–9, 131 decay and death  128–9 publication and translation  114, 114n1 sympathy for Boat People  120–21 translation 143–6 Pilsen train station  51, 52 Pollock, Jackson  180 Pörtner, Peter  73

255 Posen 161–2 postmodernism  56, 57 Pratt, Marie-Louise  14 Puchner, Martin  102–3 Putin, Vladimir  177, 178   Quynh-Du, Ton-That  114, 115   racism/anti-Semitism: in Austria  185, 205 and Christianity  226 in France  3 in Germany see under Germany in Greenland  188–90 in Korea and Japan  197–8 racial mixing/miscegenation  3, 188 “racial purity”  3, 188–9 in USA  3, 3n3, 13n15 see also National Socialism; Shoah Ray, Gene  151 refugees see migrants/refugees Remmler, Karen  47 Renterghem, Marion van  4n9 Rhee, Syngman  197, 203, 209, 217 Riegel, Hans-Peter  27, 149, 151, 153n6, 154, 160, 162, 171, 180–81 Rohde, Achim  9, 41 Russia  176, 177, 179   Said, Edward: Orientalism 10–11, 35 Saigon  100, 117, 118–19, 135 Salzborn, Samuel  5, 12–13 Santner, Eric  37, 42 Sarrazin, Thilo: Deutschland schafft sich ab  4, 4n9 Scherer, Frank  10, 41 Scherpe, Klaus  108n25 Schott, Günter  168 Schröder, Gerald  152 Schwiedrik, Wolfgang  85, 89 Sebald, W.G.  23, 23n24, 24, 33–54

256 Austerlitz  23, 33, 41–2, 43–54 ”cocoons”/”husks" of human bodies 46–7, 48, 48n13 the dead and the living  48, 54–5 Fort Breendonk  43, 43n7, 44–7 image of emptiness  48n13, 53 Jacques Austerlitz  43, 45, 46, 48–54 out of place  48–50 Sebald’s alter ego  51, 51n18 train station columns and memories 51–3 and voice of survivors of Shoah  51 name Austerlitz  43n8 photographs  43n7, 44 representations of the dead  47–8 ruins 45–6 Campo Santo  49 female figures in writing  41–2 focus of males  62n9 Rings of Saturn, The (Die Ringe des Saturn)  6, 23, 33–43 “Bodies at Bergen-Belsen”  36, 42 China and silk trade  34, 35, 36, 37–40 silkworm processing  39–40 and starvation of people  38, 39, 40, 42 Tz’u-hsi, Dowager Empress  37– 9, 39n4, 42 German history or world history?  35 Nazi sericulture  39–40 Orient/Orientals  33, 39 ruins  45 silk trade in Africa  34–5 Seelenlandschaft (soul landscape)  220 self, sense of  50, 71 Senoçak, Zafer  13, 14, 64, 143 Seoul  212 shamanism  26, 27, 28, 149

Index China  201n9 and Christianity  169, 190 dialogues  219n13 Eurasia  164 Greenland Inuit  187–8, 190 and the hare  174 Korea  29, 184, 190, 199, 201, 201n9, 211–12 and nomadism  167 and performance  211–12 and the shaman  164, 165, 166, 169–70, 173, 179, 212 shamanistic journey  167, 174 in Tibet  174 Shoah  16, 17, 27, 29 Auschwitz  17, 25, 84, 90, 91, 113, 149, 151 Auschwitz trials  150 “Bodies at Bergen-Belsen”  36, 42 escape from  91, 92, 113 and fear of Otherness  7 and fear of racial mixing  4 gassing of Jews  162 Posen 161–2 and silk trade  34, 35, 39–40, 46n12 Tötungsgeschaft (killing business)  34 and Vietnam  90, 91, 113 voice of survivors  51 see also Fort Breendonk; National Socialism; Beuys, Joseph, Auschwitz Demonstration Showalter, Elaine  14n16 Siberia  169, 176 silk trade: and cells at Fort Breendonk  46–7 and deaths of Chinese people  42 metaphor for Jews in Shoah 46–7, 46n12 and National Socialism  34, 35, 36, 39–40 silkworms and labor  39n3

Index Silverblatt, Michael  51 Sisters Truong  123, 137 Slobodian, Quinn  88 Soubeyran, Jean  101 space  71 and freedom  61n8 speech  19 Spiegel, Der  95, 97 Spiegel Online  4n9 Spivak, Gayatri  145 Spurr, David  59 Stein, Peter  85, 89, 108 Steiner, Rudolf  27n28, 154, 155n9 Steinhauer, Jillian  181 Stockholms-Tidningen (newspaper)  83 strangers  20, 122, 205, 206, 207, 210, 220 Stratz, Carl Heinrich: Was sind Juden?  9 Ströher, Karl  171 suicides  186, 190, 191, 194, 202 surveillance and identity  184, 184n1, 205 Suzuki, Tadashi  103   Takase, Aki  73 Tanigawa, Michiko  62 Tartars  27, 177, 178 Tatlow, Anthony  102, 103 Tawada, Yoko  6, 24, 54, 55, 57–78 as Asian  71n18 Bath, The  61, 63–5 links across boundaries  63–4 suicides 65–6 concepts of “I” and “self ”  71 “Flucht des Monds, Die” (bilingual poem) 72–8 disintegration of boundaries  72, 73 English translation  76–7 German version  73n20 juxtaposition of German and Japanese 74–6 linguistic disorientation  74

257 ma (in-between space)  72 publication in Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts  73 Fluxus  70 haunted house  58 human body  62 “In Front of Tran Tien Bridge”  61, 62–3 life of architectural structures  59 living in Germany  64–5 ma (“space in-between”)  60, 60n6, 61, 62, 70–71, 78 Naked Eye, The  61–2, 66–70 alter ego theme  68 Catherine Deneuve image  67–9 “subject” as “empty”  57–8, 60, 71 subject/object distinction  58–9 travel across boundaries  60–61, 60n7, 71 underground space  61, 62–3 womb fantasies  62 Terada, Rei  57 Teraoka, Arlene  93–4, 96, 109, 110 theatrical space  92, 104–5 Thomson, Chris  166 Tierney, Robin  62 Till, Emmet  3n3 Tisdall, Caroline  150, 158n11 translation 143–6 and neutrality of translator  146 and untranslatability  145 Trinh T. Minh-ha: Surname Viet Given Name Nam  110 war trauma  122 Tuan, Yi-Fu  61n8 Tudor, Hart, Elizabeth  210 Tz’u-hsi, Dowager Empress  37–9, 39n4, 42   USA: bombing of Vietnam  107, 121

258 Chinese immigrants  13n15 Cold War  90 and Korea  203, 217 racial segregation  3

  Veiel, Andreas  163, 181 Veraguth, Hannes  51, 51n18 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past)  149, 150, 151 Viet Kieu  120, 123 Vietcong  61, 119 Vietnam  25, 26, 61, 63, 66, 84, 90, 90–91 collectivism and individualism 115–16, 132 Doi Moi  128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 137 French colonialism  118 idealization of Vietnamese people 105–6 labor conditions  115 modernization  132, 137 “Vietnam” as female figure  109 women  26, 109–110, 109n26, 115 gender equality  138–9 marriage and divorce  139 and modernization  137 prostitution and trafficking  137–8 restaurants with hostesses (bia ôm)  130, 130n10, 137–8 stereotyping  3, 3n4 subjection  116, 132–3 “Tiger Mom”  116–17 see also Weiss, Peter, Discourse on Vietnam Vietnam War: and Auschwitz  90, 91 effects of US policies  97 end of war  100, 118–20 massacre  128 origins 116–17, 121 protests  94 “proxy war”  121–2

Index refugees (Boat People)  100, 117, 119, 120–21 “silence” as war trauma  122 US bombing  107, 121 Vietnamese in GDR  117–18

  Waberer, Keto von  161, 161n15 Walker, John  10 Walkowitz, Rebecca: Born Translated  144 Walters, Victoria  178–9, 179n28 Wang, Rujie  200 Weigel, Sigrid  70, 72 Weiss, Frieda  81, 82, 83 Weiss, Jenö  81, 82–3, 91 Weiss, Margit  83 Weiss, Peter  24–5, 26, 81–111, 113, 146 Abschied von den Eltern (1961 autobiography)  83 Aesthetics of Resistance, The 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 93n18, 95–6, 108n25 Discourse on Vietnam  6, 24, 78, 81–2, 84–90, 87n10, 93–4, 98–111, 113 acting styles/techniques  99, 102, 103, 104 as Asian play  88–9 criticism of  86–7, 102, 104, 113 Stein’s production  108 and Dante’s Inferno  93, 98 depiction of war  98 as “Documentary Theater”  85–6, 86n8, 94n19, 103 emphasis on place  100 excerpts 99–100, 101 experience of Ortlosigkeit  105 idealization of Vietnamese people 105–6 influence of Brecht  102 influence of non-Western theater 102–3, 104

Index Kieu 109–110, 110n27, 113 orientalizing  87, 87n9 politics of Third World  93 premiere in Frankfurt  86 staging 98–9 theatrical space  104–5 “Vietnam” as female figure  109 Weiss’s “rebirth”  94 Weiss’s visit to Vietnam  97, 107, 113 family background  81, 82–3, 91, 113 Fluchtpunkt (1962 autobiography)  81, 83, 91 Gespräch  93 “global theater” (Welttheater)  84–5 and Gunilla: Voltaire Flugschrift report on US policies in Vietnam 97–8 Investigation, The  83, 84, 85, 87 lack of place (Ortlosigkeit) 81–2, 87, 91–3, 105, 108, 111 childhood memories  95–6, 109 and Dante’s hell  91, 92, 93 escape from Nazis to Sweden  82, 82n2, 113 “I came out of my hiding place” (conference paper)  92–3

259 “Meine Ortschaft” (“My Place”)  25, 91–2 Weiss as outsider  94–5, 96 Marat/Sade  25, 83, 85, 87 marriage to Gunilla Palmstierna  83, 83n3 Notes on the Cultural Life of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam 105–6, 109 Rekonvaleszenz  90, 94n19, 95, 107, 108 Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers, Der  83 Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (painting)  83 Song of the Lusitanian Bogeyman  84, 90 Weller Taylor, Keith  135–6, 135n15 Wistrich, Robert: A Lethal Obsession  226 Wolin, Richard  85, 88 Woods, Roger  13n14   Yildiz, Yasmine  60n7   Zaimoglu, Feridun  4n7 Zantop, Susanne  11 Zencker, Julie  104 Ziegert, Sylvia van  4n8 Zilcosky, John  9, 41

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB This series promotes critical inquiry into the relationship between the literary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encourages the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through literature, visual culture and the performing arts. Contributions of a comparative or interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome. Individual volumes might, for example, be concerned with any of the following: •

The mediation of cultural and historical memory,

•

The material conditions of particular cultural manifestations,

•

The construction of cultural and political meaning,

•

Intellectual culture and the impact of scientific thought,

•

The methodology of cultural inquiry,

• Intermediality, •

Intercultural relations and practices.

Acceptance is subject to advice from our editorial board, and all proposals and manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review assessment prior to publication. The usual language of publication is English, but proposals in the other languages shown below will also be considered. For French studies, contact Kenneth Loiselle For German studies, contact Sarah Colvin For Hispanic studies, contact Rodrigo Cacho For Italian studies, contact Heather Webb

Vol. 1 C  hristian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2  Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds):  German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3  Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4  Anthony Fothergill:  Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad's Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5  Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / USISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6

 enata Tyszczuk:  In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in R Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9

Vol. 7

 hristian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the C City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X

Vol. 8  Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds):  Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9

 hristian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in C Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1

Vol. 10  Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 U lrike Zitzlsperger:  ZeitGeschichten:  Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241  pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 A lexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 C  arlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 M  onique Rinere:  Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicis­ simus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 K  atharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 A nna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 M  artin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds):  Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F.  Malkmus (eds):  Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 K ristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds):  Playing  False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 G  uy Tourlamain:  Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A  Study of Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 R icarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds):  Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0 Vol. 23 H  enriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1

Vol. 24 B  ernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 M  arjorie Gehrhardt: The Men with Broken Faces. Gueules Cassées of the First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 D  avid Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds): Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 Vol. 27 R  obert Craig and Ina Linge (eds): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature Around  1900. 448pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9 Vol. 28 R ebecca Waese:  When Novels Perform History. Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature. 272pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-84-0 Vol. 29 U  dith Dematagoda:  Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic. A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. 222pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-289-3 Vol. 30 B ernard Beatty and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez (eds):  Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution. British Views on Spain, 1814–1823. 342pp., 2019. ISBN 978-3-0343-2249-2 Vol. 31 R  emko Smid: European Vistas. History, Ethics and Identity in the Works of Claudio Magris. 184pp., 2020. ISBN 978-1-78997-635-9 Vol.  32 Caroline Rupprecht: Asian Fusion. New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde 259pp., 2020. ISBN 978-1-78707-355-5