Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film 9780838757574, 083875757X

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Nostalgia After Nazism

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Nostalgia After Nazism History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film

Heidi Schlipphacke

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

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䉷 2010 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-8387-5757-4/10 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schlipphacke, Heidi M. Nostalgia after Nazism : history, home, and affect in German and Austrian literature and film / Heidi Schlipphacke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8387-5757-4 (alk. paper) 1. German literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Austrian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Nostalgia in literature. 4. Escape in literature. 5. Motion pictures—Germany—History— 20th century. 6. Motion pictures—Austria—History—20th century. 7. Nostalgia in motion pictures. I. Title. PT405.S34435 2010 830.9⬘00914—dc22 2009042033

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For my father, Oskar Schlipphacke (1929–1997)

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Nostalgia After Nazism: German and Austrian Escape Fantasies

13

1. Displacing Nostalgia: The Case of Ingeborg Bachmann

37

2. Provincializing Nazism: Elfriede Jelinek’s Performative Entrapment

65

3. Leaving Home: Tom Tykwer, German Cinema, and the Aesthetics of Escape

123

4. Nation without a Home: Robert Menasse and Transnational Nostalgia

176

5. A Home at the End of the World: Birgit Vanderbeke’s Literary Departures

195

Epilogue: Post-9/11 Escape Fantasies

219

Notes

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Works Cited

288

Index

306

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Acknowledgments THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, FAMILY,

colleagues, and students about home and nostalgia. As with most books, it would be impossible to pinpoint the myriad ways in which these conversations enter into this work, but I am certain that my book was not and could not have been written without them. My research for the manuscript was supported in part by an Old Dominion University Summer Research Grant, a College of Arts and Letters Summer Research Grant, as well as a Senior Scholar Grant awarded by Fulbright. I thank the College of Arts and Letters and the ODU Research Foundation for their support of my research, and I am also grateful to Prof. Erika Fischer-Lichte for her generous patronage of my Fulbright grant. Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 have been previously published as journal articles. I thank the editors at Camera Obscura, The German Quarterly, and Modern Austrian Literature for their kind permission to reprint these portions here. I also thank Tom Tykwer for allowing me to reprint stills from his films in the book. Martin Vukovits generously gave permission to reprint his photo of Elfriede Jelinek in Chapter 2. I am also grateful to the editors at Bucknell University Press and the Associated University Presses. They have made the production process of this book a pleasant and exciting one. I am grateful to the many dear friends and colleagues whose insights and ideas have surely found their way into this book: Gregg Belt, Oliva Cardona, Carsten Eicke, Andrea Gogro¨f-Vorhees, Sangita Gopal, Richard Gray, Dana Heller, Ruth Hill, Frederick Lubich, Jeff Mann, Sandra Mathews, Christine Meyer, Letizia Modena, Patrick O’Donnell, Brigitte Prutti, Jens Rieckmann, Susanne Rott, Lisa Saltzman, Bethany Schneider, Ulrich Scho¨nherr, Biswarup Sen, Britta Simon, Richard Sperber, Astrida Orle Tantillo, Kate Thomas, Helen Townsend, Galina Tsoy, Susan Wansink, Silke-Maria Weineck and Sabine Wilke. I also want to thank the many students over the years at both Old Dominion University and Haverford College whose enthusiastic engagement in class discussions has inspired my writing. 9

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My family has been optimistic and supportive throughout the writing process. I thank my mother, Annie Schlipphacke, Eva Kopf, and Leila Larson for their moral support, for their humor, and for always cheering me on. In Germany, my partner’s family has encouraged me unflaggingly, and this support has meant a great deal to me. I thank Hilke and Heinrich Meyer, Birte Germer, Gerrit Meyer and their families for always treating me like family. For her enthusiastic engagement with the manuscript at all its stages and for her patience, I thank Imke Meyer with all my heart. Our conversations about all of the ideas in this book have kept me excited about the topic to this day. Without her, neither this book nor my life would be what they are today. With her, I have come to a deeper understanding of the word home.

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Nostalgia After Nazism

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Introduction: Nostalgia After Nazism: German and Austrian Escape Fantasies THE FEATURE FILMS OF TOM TYKWER, GERMANY’S MOST ‘‘GLOBAL’’ OF

filmmakers, end in tableaux of escape and departure. The figures fall or fly to a space beyond the entrapment of home and family. One falls from a window, another falls from a ski slope never to land, while yet others ascend into the sky in a helicopter that rises beyond the vision of the spectator and into the clouds. In The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin; Germany, 2000), two figures linked by an indefinable love drive to a secluded house overlooking the sea, and the camera slowly recedes from the sublimely beautiful place so that the mood of escape is achieved dialectically. The figures arrive at a mythical home in a setting unlike anything they have seen before, and the spectator is treated to an ever widening view of the idyllic scene. These moments mark a break not only in the narrative trajectory and aesthetic style of the films, but also in the manner in which German film confronts history and affect. The final tableaux of Tykwer’s films follow upon narratives of entrapment often filmed in claustrophobic spaces. Maria, the heroine of Deadly Maria (Die to¨dliche Maria; Germany, 1993), lives in a domestic hell forced upon her by her tyrannical father and husband, while Sissi of The Princess and the Warrior lives and works in a mental institution that serves as her prison and family. The particular openness of the final moments of escape for these figures is unexpected and unprecedented in contemporary German film, and this openness engenders the shock of the New. Tykwer’s films stage a fantasy of escape from the spaces of home, family, and nation, spaces that define these films prior to the final scenes. Films such as The Princess and the Warrior point to a transitional moment in post-fascist German-language aesthetics in which a critique of the crimes of Nazism is combined with a global fantasy of an imagined home beyond nation. Tykwer’s films link Germany’s recent history, aesthetics, and affect in a manner emblematic of current tendencies in contemporary German-language literature and film. They engage Germany’s 13

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fraught relationship with the Nazi past while simultaneously tapping into a global fantasy for a ‘‘home elsewhere.’’1 This fantasy is manifested in a particularly German manner, since the relationship to Heimat, the mythical national home, has been irrevocably compromised following the fall of Nazism and the caesura of the Holocaust. Hence, the longing for a ‘‘home elsewhere’’ resists nostalgia, since it ultimately reflects a desire to transcend the trappings of German national identity. In this way, the fantasy of an undefined, deterritorialized ‘‘home’’ beyond the limits of German history betrays the particularity of Germany and Austria, the two European nations of necessity most fixated on the history of Nazism. It points to the unique location of these nations within the discourse of globalism. Arjun Appadurai has shown how, in the age of global migration and the proliferation of electronic media, deterritorialized groups invent notions of a homeland ‘‘existing only in the imagination.’’2 The ‘‘nostalgia of exile’’ (Appadurai, 165) of diasporic groups is the deterritorialized nostalgia for an imagined homeland.3 In contrast, the German desire for escape, for a home ‘‘elsewhere,’’ as depicted in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior, must always remain immune to this form of nostalgia. For nostalgia, manifested as the return to the German and Austrian Heimat, is a potentially regressive emotion, reflecting a rejection of history and the desire to return to an idealized nation divorced from its tainted past. By reflecting on nostalgia, this book links the central tropes of post-fascist German-language culture (home, family, history, nation) with affect. A focus on German and Austrian literature and film, two art forms able to hold and reflect complex emotions, narratives, and cultural fantasies, offers a singular window into the longing and repressions informing contemporary German and Austrian cultures. Seminal post-Holocaust German and Austrian authors and filmmakers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, Tom Tykwer, Robert Menasse, and Birgit Vanderbeke perform a conflicted dance of historical critique and nostalgic longing in their works that points to a unique mode of engagement with history in post-fascist aesthetics. Indeed, nostalgia encounters a taboo in the former Nazi nations of Germany and Austria. As the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek puts it: ‘‘The culture of death Germany/ Austria’’ is ‘‘not like other nations,’’4 since these countries are not able to refer to their own great dead citizens ‘‘but rather to the dead whom they have produced themselves’’ (Meyer, Sturm und Zwang, 49).5 Hence, the caesura of the Holocaust has not only provided a

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historical link between Germany and Austria, two countries whose histories are otherwise divergent;6 it has likewise produced a space of melancholy in these nations. Since melancholy interrupts the process of mourning and seeks to replay the traumatic scene of loss, the repetition compulsion produced by the affect of mourning is compromised in Germany and Austria. Here, the space of the scene of trauma, the tainted Heimat, is colored by the guilt of the fathers, and a nostalgic longing for the damaged home is possible only in an alienated form. In this sense, an exploration of nostalgia after Nazism is fraught with the burdens of history, yet it simultaneously offers a route of access to the conflicted emotions of loss and alienation that characterize contemporary Germany and Austria.

Nostalgia After Nazism Nostalgia, a pervasive concept in academic and popular discourse, is in need of analysis in the German-language context. Nostalgia has saturated contemporary Western cultures. It is nurtured and commodified, harnessed in the interest of ideological and political agendas, and both derided and revered for its ability to slow the speed of globalization. Politically abhorrent due to the mantra of ‘‘never again’’ in German and Austrian public discourse, the linkage between nostalgia and nation is taboo in these countries. The longing for a past time and home always points to the period before 1933, and this sort of longing is akin to forgetting, to the erasure of the suffering endured in the Holocaust and of the national guilt for having inflicted this suffering. Thus, where nostalgia can function to recall past glories and virtues in nations such as France, Russia, or the United States, this emotion is generally associated with rightwing revisionary views of Nazism in Germany and Austria. Nostalgia insists on the primacy of the past over the present and of a perceived stability over change: home, nation, and family are privileged over the foreign and non-familial. What is more, nostalgia always of necessity averts its gaze from those elements in the past that degrade it. Nostalgia engenders forgetting, and German and, to a lesser degree, Austrian cultures officially deplore the act of forgetting. The mandate at the memorial site for Dachau and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is to ‘‘never forget.’’ So what becomes of nostalgia and its attendant emotions in the former Nazi nations? Perhaps the only officially sanctioned form of nostalgia in Germany is ‘‘Ostalgie,’’ the longing for the ‘‘unspoiled’’ state of East

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Germany with its socialist resistance to fascism and charming consumer products such as the ‘‘Trabant’’ car.7 And in Austria, nostalgia for the mythologized Habsburg Empire is sometimes seen in light of a utopian vision of multicultural harmony, but even this form of nostalgia is viewed with a level of skepticism. In particular, the phenomenon of ‘‘Ostalgie’’ has so far avoided questions of political and cultural guilt. Residents of the former GDR have far more often been theorized in light of their status as oppressed victims of a totalitarian socialist state8 than as former citizens of Nazi Germany who might be culpable in the crimes of the Holocaust.9 Hence, this book is concerned not with the vicissitudes of ‘‘Ostalgie,’’ but rather with those iterations of nostalgia that engage in complex ways with the history of fascism and the Holocaust. In calling nostalgia a ‘‘historical emotion,’’ Svetlana Boym emphasizes the simultaneously abstract and immediate nature of nostalgia’s pull.10 The affect that accompanies the encounter with the past is visceral and immediate, yet nostalgia also gains its power by reminding us of an unbreachable distance between the past and the present, between an idealized childhood and the loss of innocence that follows. In the case of Germany and Austria, this feeling of loss cannot easily be indulged. By exploring nostalgia, the point at which history and affect collide, this book looks through the prism of longing and its displacements at the junctures of history, memory, family, home, and nation. The Greek root words for nostalgia are nostos (‘‘to return home’’) and algos (‘‘pain’’ or ‘‘sorrow’’), and these notions conjure the pain associated with the loss of nation, home, and childhood.11 The word was coined in 1688 by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, who wrote his thesis on ‘‘nostalgia.’’ The term was used to describe what was seen as the medical condition of ‘‘Heimweh’’ [homesickness] as manifested in Swiss soldiers serving in foreign lands. As Jean Starobinski shows, the theory of nostalgia was developed in Europe at the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the population much easier. But at the same time, the social unit of the village, the particularities of the province, the local customs, the local dialects continued to exert all their influence (Starobinski, 102).

Nostalgia is a product of the displacement caused by migration; it is a concept that morphed from the medical term of the seventeenth century to, as Starobinski writes, ‘‘a literary term, thus vague’’ (Sta-

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robinski, 85) in the twentieth century. No longer a medical term, nostalgia has become associated with family and psychoanalysis, with the regressive interiorization of the village (Starobinski, 103). A product of migration, an ailment, a ‘‘vague’’ literary term, nostalgia is difficult to define, and those who write about it almost invariably point to the elusiveness of the concept.12 Nostalgia is often associated with regressive, reactionary tendencies,13 or, put another way, with the sense that ‘‘the present is deficient.’’14 Like Starobinski, Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw refer to the discontents of modernity, the anxiety associated with the loss of a sense of community [Gemeinschaft] brought about by urban life (The Imagined Past, 7), recalling Georg Luka´cs’s notion of the ‘‘transcendental homelessness of modernity.’’15 Based on these understandings of nostalgia, then, it is easy to see how the melodramatic German and Austrian Heimat films of the 1950s embody a form of regressive nostalgia. They long for a time of innocence, of the childhood of the nation before its fall from grace.16 Since Fredric Jameson’s discussion of nostalgia in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,17 scholars have been concerned with the role of nostalgia in postmodern culture. For Jameson, nostalgia appears in postmodern time as ‘‘nostalgia for the present’’ (Jameson, Postmodernism, 279). Appadurai describes this kind of American nostalgia as ‘‘nostalgia without memory’’ (Appadurai, 30). Jameson sees David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (USA, 1986), for example, as a film devoid of history, though it is filled with the style of nostalgic artifacts. We must remember, however, that Jameson disavows the role of affect in postmodernism; the demise of the subject, for Jameson, likewise replaces emotions with ‘‘intensities’’ (Postmodernism, 16). However, critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Svetlana Boym have reconceptualized the role of nostalgia in contemporary cultures so that irony, nostalgia, and affect no longer remain at odds with one another. Hutcheon provides a place for reflection within the postmodern that does not deny affect. In distinguishing between ‘‘revivalist’’ and postmodern architecture, she makes the following observation: The postmodern architecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia’s affective power. In the postmodern, in other words (and here is the source of the tension), nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very

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urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfillment of that urge. (Hutcheon, 205)

The play of postmodern cognition allows, according to Hutcheon, for irony and affect, two modes generally considered by Jameson to be incompatible with postmodernism. If nostalgia is to have a place in contemporary German and Austrian art, then it is in the sense described by Linda Hutcheon, as an affect that nevertheless retains its ironic distance. Only this form of nostalgia could guard against the regression leading to the erasure of history. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, nostalgia and utopia are not necessarily juxtaposed in the German-language context. For Huyssen, it is literature that can reflect the ‘‘shift from an exclusive future orientation to the memory pole,’’ a shift that he sees manifested in German-language literature since the 1960s.18 Nostalgia is retained by Huyssen as the twin of utopia, as the marker for longing. This longing is revealed in post-1960 literature through intertextuality with modernist moments of longing. In this sense, a reflective mode of nostalgia in post-1960 German and Austrian literature need not be incompatible with historicity and affect. Svetlana Boym’s recuperation of a creative notion of nostalgia as ‘‘reflective nostalgia’’ is particularly useful for the purposes of this book. Boym follows the observation made by Kant in his Anthropology (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798) that the nostalgic desires not so much the place of his birth but the time of childhood.19 Yet she suggests that nostalgic longing is not simply a desire for a specific time but rather for the temporality associated with childhood, ‘‘the slower rhythms of our dreams’’ (Boym, xv). ‘‘Nostalgic time is that time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one’s timetables and work ethic, even when one is working on nostalgia’’ (xix). For Boym, reflective nostalgia is aware of this longing and hence able to preserve a distance from the emotion: ‘‘Reflective longing thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately’’ (xviii). ‘‘Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’’ (xviii). This form of nostalgia, then, is reminiscent of Arjun Appadurai’s description of a ‘‘nostalgia of exile’’ (Appadurai, 164) that is the product of mass migration, creating diasporic groups doubly loyal to their nation of origin in its imagined form (Appadurai, 172). Boym claims that nostalgia, in its reflective form, is ‘‘a European

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disease’’ (Boym, 17). For Boym, America is predicated upon a ‘‘resistance to historical memory’’ (17), on the death of the national fathers. While this view of America might overlook certain complexities in American history (such as, for example, the Reconstruction era), it is nevertheless true that historicity functions differently in the American and European contexts. Within this framework, Germany and Austria could be said to stand somewhere between the anti-nostalgic American disavowal of the fathers and the European longing for a better time in the past. Unreflected nostalgia for the national fathers of the past is no longer possible in Germany and Austria. However, Boym suggests that reflective nostalgia might induce ‘‘an alternative understanding of temporality, not as a teleology of progress or transcendence but as a superimposition and coexistence of heterogeneous times’’ (Boym, 30). In the transitional state between the ‘‘unfinished project’’ of European modernity and globalization that characterizes, I suggest, the German-language cultural landscape, two forms of temporality are conjoined. In this sense, German and Austrian literature and film might preserve their link to historicity via reflective nostalgia, as a mode of longing that always retains the historical loss of modernism and as a reflective emotion that balances melancholy and mourning (Boym, 55). As in the case of Tykwer’s scenes of departure, the homecoming is delayed so that true return is always foreclosed.

Interrupted Modernity The films of Tom Tykwer critically engage with German history and film history via intertextual citations, repetitions, and subtle reworkings of German cultural icons. Yet these films, especially the international hit Run Lola Run (Lola rennt; Germany, 1998), have been most commonly viewed as representatives of a ‘‘global postmodern’’ aesthetic, a style typically associated with pastiche, citationality, the creative use of electronic media, and a lack of historicity.20 Tykwer’s films exhibit postmodern style, yet they nevertheless reflect a particularly German concern with the burdens of German history. The same is true of the 2004 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, whose work is, as she puts it, ‘‘compulsively’’ fixated on the crimes of recent Austrian and German history.21 Yet her work is nevertheless stylistically playful; Jelinek, the skilled ‘‘dentist of language,’’22 is lauded for her word play and creative citations of texts from

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Goethe to modern advertisements. Critics link Jelinek’s work to an aesthetics of postmodernism but, as in the case of Tykwer, Jelinek’s postmodern style cannot be divorced from history in light of the complex nexus of history, affect, and aesthetics in postwar Austria and Germany. The relationship between postmodern style, history, and nostalgia is not necessarily fixed globally, and the notion of a German postmodern must be distinguished from what has been called ‘‘Euro-American’’ postmodernism. German postmodernism is certainly a belated and displaced phenomenon, so that it is located on the periphery of the Euro-American context. By ‘‘German postmodern’’ I refer to the particular confrontations with postmodernity on the part of Germany and Austria, following Elfriede Jelinek’s assumption that the aesthetic concerns of these nations cannot be substantially separated after 1945. While the historical periodization associated with the notion of postmodernity has recently been called into question by cultural critics such as Ulrich Beck, the cultural debate surrounding the modernity/postmodernity question in Germany remains acutely relevant to discussions of post-Holocaust German-language literature and film. In particular, the modernism/postmodernism debate that still informs discussions about German-language history and aesthetics is keenly concerned with the role of literature in confrontations with the legacy of Nazism. In contrast, the ‘‘second modernity’’ model proposed by Beck is primarily informed by sociological concerns.23 The ‘‘second modernity’’ theory is highly productive for analyses of global currents and the repercussions of denationalization. Yet an understanding of the modernism/postmodernism debate surrounding post-fascist aesthetics provides the historical context for an analysis of the particular cultural contradictions and aesthetic modes at play in post-Holocaust German and Austrian art. In A Singular Modernity (2002) Fredric Jameson argues that ‘‘external history sometimes brutally interrupts the model of internal evolution complacently suggested by notions of this or that national tradition.’’24 In the case of Germany, modernisms were ‘‘cut short by Nazism’’ (Jameson, Singular Modernity, 102),25 a point that dovetails with Ju¨rgen Habermas’s notion that the theorization of modernity is not yet finished.26 Habermas’s insistence on the ‘‘unfinished project of modernity’’ as a protest against the encroachment of postmodern ahistoricity surely reflects the particular concerns of postwar Germany. The anxiety about a shift from the grounded concerns of modernity to the potentially groundless ahistoricity of postmodernity is a product of German postwar self re-

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flection. Interrupted by Nazism and the Holocaust, German modernity became asynchronous with its European and American counterparts and this state has led to a belated and displaced entrance into postmodernity and, by extension, globalization.27 In their recent discussion of discourses of German history in the American and German academy, the historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer argue along these lines that, at least in West Germany, the ‘‘implicit master narrative of critical historians has centered on the paradigm of modernization as the explanation of social development.’’28 They argue that the notion of ‘‘modernity’’ appealed to historians because it suggested a break from what might be seen as ‘‘pre-modernist’’ Nazi Germany. Despite the abundance of German architects, filmmakers, and other artists who experiment with fragmentation and postmodern style, the authors nevertheless note that the critique of modernity has been less harsh in Germany than in France or America ‘‘since such leading thinkers as Ju¨rgen Habermas defended the legacy of the Enlightenment as a source of social rationality, clinging to modernity as an ‘unfinished project’ ’’ (Jarausch and Geyer, 98). Jarausch and Geyer argue that historians of Germany ought to abandon the master narrative of modernity in light of the myriad cultural changes in Germany and Central Europe since the fall of Nazism that point to the breakdown of this master narrative. They advocate an embrace of postmodern pluralism that would ‘‘recover a multiplicity of contending continuities’’ (103), essentially amounting to an embrace of globalization. While they recognize that a resistance to postmodern contingency is rooted in large part in the ‘‘teleological fixation with 1933’’ (103) that is perhaps necessitated by a surviving need to come to terms with the Holocaust, an exclusive focus on the Third Reich neglects cultural movements such as ‘‘labor struggles, periodic religious revivals, the persistence of scientific work, the expansion of the economy, the development of popular consumption, or the spread of mass tourism’’ (103–4). In their call for the shedding of master narratives in favor of postmodern historiographies, they utilize a discourse of liberation that places postmodernism at the cusp of a transitional phase in German history, an opening into something new: ‘‘With the Holocaust serving as warning against an easy forgetting, the arguments over how to arrange the shattered pieces of the German past will, therefore, need to continue in a somewhat freer vein’’ (108). Jarausch and Geyer’s call for an integration of postmodern pluralist methodologies within critical historical studies points, once again, to Germany’s delayed engagement with postmodernism and

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globalization. The fantasy of liberation from a master narrative expressed by these authors in 2003 resonates with the call to arms against totalizing narratives by Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard twenty-five years ago.29 While German and Austrian art often utilizes postmodern style in myriad ways, this fact does not undo the conflicted German-language view toward the ‘‘postmodern condition.’’ What is presumed to be a cultural truth in the American academy does not translate easily into the German and Austrian contexts. Fredric Jameson’s seminal Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has been criticized for its tendency to overlook historical and cultural contingency, but even in this early work Jameson notes the potentially anomalous position of Germany in the modernity/postmodernity dichotomy, acceding that in Germany ‘‘Habermas may well be right, and the older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere’’ (Postmodernism, 59). Ingeborg Hoestery’s analysis of postmodern style and pastiche is particularly useful here, for she draws a crucial distinction between literary, or aesthetic, and philosophical postmodernism. The former is primarily concerned with ‘‘the typology of stylistic features and forms of signification.’’30 Postmodern theory has been generally associated either with the rejection of tradition (Lyotard), or, as with Jameson, a loss of connection to tradition and history, and thereby, a loss of affect. In contrast, Hoestery argues that postmodern style might not be similarly delineated. Certainly, as she suggests, theoretical ‘‘overlappings’’ exist, but aesthetic intertextuality can produce multiple, and contradictory, readings as well as complex modes of affective response. Hoesterey has likewise explored the concept pair modernism/postmodernism in comparative terms, suggesting that these notions function in dramatically different ways in German and American academic discourses.31 In Germany, postmodernism has historically been met with exceptional resistance on the part of philosophers, literary critics, and film critics. Indeed, the legacy of Ju¨rgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School continues to thrive in German theoretical and literary circles in contrast to a more historicized reception of these works in the American academy. The critique of fascism and the culture industry that underlies the writings of the Frankfurt School philosophers remains central to German-language considerations of culture and aesthetics. Horkheimer and Adorno’s infamous critique of the regressive nature of the culture industry focuses on pop cultural products such as film, jazz, and cars, all of which they compare to bombs in their ability to create homogeneity and ‘‘Anpassung’’ (ac-

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commodation).32 Despite the vibrancy of postmodern style in German-language literature and film, the categories of modernity and of the Frankfurt School philosophers of Critical Theory remain as ethical ghosts haunting assessments of post-Holocaust aesthetics. Although postmodern style has the potential of being associated with theoretical play and even liberation, it is also linked to an aesthetics of banality and, worse, a lack of historical reflection. Thus, while the term ‘‘postmodern’’ is used liberally by cultural critics of German film and literature,33 it takes on an ideological significance no longer of singular relevance in the American context.

A Global Provincialism German and Austrian literature and film is, to my mind, out of time. It cannot freely express a nostalgic mourning for the past, and it is therefore fixed both historically and geographically, unable to divorce itself from the national confines that resist the forces of globalization. Aesthetically, these works utilize postmodern style while nevertheless engaging in a repetition compulsion that is a response to fascism. Jelinek has articulated this fixation on history as an ‘‘eternal theme’’: ‘‘If one picks up German soil, it turns into ashes in one’s hand. That is my eternal theme. It is completely compulsive.’’34 Yet repetition is central not only thematically but also formally, to varying degrees, to all of the artists mentioned here. Thus, the fixation with what I call the ‘‘narrative of Nazism’’ is also reflected on a formal level, in the repetition of words, motifs, and historical images. The taboo on the representation of the Shoah has led not to a speechlessness but rather a kind of representational obsession with recurring tropes such as that of the fascist father.35 The space for affect, for the expression of nostalgic longing, is hence displaced aesthetically through citation and intertextuality or thematically through narratives of travel and departure. Yet these fantasies of escape only render German-language literature and film firmly provincial, unable to shed what Joschka Fischer has called the ‘‘building block of Germany—Auschwitz’’36 that defines these nations in a global context.37 What can be seen as a belated and troubled entrance into globalization follows from the interrupted modernity of 1933. Put another way, Germany’s presumed regression to pre-modernity during the Third Reich seems to have necessitated a delay in the shift from modernism to postmodernism and to an unfiltered globalism. As Ulrich Beck has suggested, ‘‘the debate on globalization

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which is now shaking public life has arrived in Germany with some delay.’’38 To my mind, Germany’s relation to the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy and its global repercussions seems to mirror rather that of developing countries such as India or China than its presumed corollaries in the West. In aesthetic terms, the interruption of modernity necessitated by the Holocaust has created a cultural environment unique to Europe in which Germany experienced an abrupt re-entrance into modernity that occurred synchronically with postmodern ruptures. In China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, Sheldon Lu makes the case for China’s particularity within the modernism/postmodernism debate, arguing, along the lines of Ju¨rgen Habermas, that nature might be gone for good, but the modernization process is far from complete, and modernity is still an ‘incomplete project.’ . . . Contemporary China consists of multiple temporalities superimposed on one another; the pre-modern, the modern, and the postmodern coexist in the same space at the same moment.39

China is, according to Lu, subject to ‘‘nonsynchronous, emergent, and residual formations’’ (12), so that China’s stance vis-a`-vis postmodernism resembles the contours of the German postmodern, albeit for very different reasons.40 In his analysis of contemporary Chinese aesthetics, Lu distinguishes Chinese modernism and postmodernism from what he calls the ‘‘Euro-American paradigm.’’ In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference Dipesh Chakrabarty attempts to decentralize the European paradigm for modernity. In both cases, the authors call into question a West/East dichotomy that uses Western models as normative paradigms. Chakrabarty questions the central European postulate of modernity that assumes the ‘‘ceaseless unfolding of unitary historical time.’’41 Chakrabarty does not question the usefulness of Western theories of history, but he seeks to destabilize the perception of fixity of the European model, ‘‘to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it’’ (43). This gesture of shifting the center is crucial to postcolonial thought and, perhaps surprisingly, it also provides a useful way to think about the German and Austrian location within this rubric.42 The critique of hegemonic European models for modernity and of ‘‘Euro-American’’ postmodernism questions assumptions about the homogeneity and universal ahistoricity of conceptions of mo-

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dernity, postmodernity, and globalization. Such an approach to Euro-American hegemony creates a discourse for cultural contingencies and differences outside of the Euro-American context. However, Germany and Austria’s arrested place within the modernity/postmodernity divide locates these nations as anomalies within postwar Western models of thought. In this sense, Germany/ Austria reside rather on the periphery of what postcolonial theory has historically viewed as a homogenous, hegemonic Euro-American theoretical and aesthetic body. Indeed, I have suggested that the synchronicity that characterizes China’s contemporary aesthetic landscape (Lu) might better approximate the status of current German-language artistic production than the relatively ahistorical American context. What is more, the place of Germany and Austria within Europe should not be oversimplified. As central players in the production of the narrative of modernity, these nations belong most emphatically to the Europe Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize. Yet in light of the interruption of modernity through the period of Nazism, Germany and Austria no longer engage in the same modes of representation as the rest of Europe. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes of a chance encounter with a Hitler impersonator in Moscow in the mid-1990s, a man from Kazakhstan. The man complained that he had recently entered a German pub while in his Hitler uniform, hoping to get a laugh. But the Germans turned their backs on him. The Hitler impersonator was annoyed at the lack of humor of the Germans, and had no clue ‘‘why the Germans ‘would object to their history in this way’.’’43 Boym does not use the anecdote to analyze the anomaly of Germany, but rather complains about the ‘‘deideologized’’ (57) attitude of Russians who refuse to view history in ideological terms. Yet the anecdote tells much about the stubborn fixation with ideology on the part of the Germans and the ways in which representation is potentially subject to different rules in Germany and Austria than in other parts of the world. In The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, published the year of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), Jacques Derrida reflects upon the ethics of translation in light of the potential of a united Europe. For Derrida, a European philosophy of translation should ‘‘avoid both the nationalistic tensions of linguistic difference and the violent homogenization of languages.’’44 Derrida’s heightened awareness of the catastrophic potential of nationalism recalls the seminal case of Germany and Austria and the horrors of the Holocaust. At the same time, though, Derrida is just as concerned about the ‘‘violent homogenization of languages’’ in the wake of global-

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ization that would erase cultural difference and marginalize cultural idiom. It is precisely this tension that concerns Julia Kristeva in her collection of essays Crisis of the European Subject. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic lens might seem somewhat regressive, but her concern for what she sees as the ‘‘destruction of the Western subjectivity’’ reiterates questions of European identity in an age of globalization.45 Kristeva points out that globalization leads to an erasure of national narratives that are constitutive of national identities.46 Along these lines, Kristeva mourns the loss of history and rejects the forgetting that she fears accompanies globalization. Both Derrida and Kristeva are concerned with the forgetting that attends globalization, with the loss of cultural particularity that threatens to shape the European Union. Yet the fixation with fascism that characterizes Germany and Austria throws these nations out of the model for Europe imagined by Derrida and Kristeva. Hence, Germany and Austria function as exceptions within all of the cultural and aesthetic groupings considered here, and contemporary German aesthetics reflect this status of anomaly. It is as if, in their historical fixation, Germany and Austria had literally slipped into the blind spot of globalization.47 While marching to the beat of Western cultural dominance, Germany and Austria nevertheless retain a particular mode of representational belatedness that seems anachronistic. This is the sense in which I see the fixated engagement with Nazism as a ‘‘provincial’’ endeavor. The Germanlanguage submission to the 2005 Academy Awards was Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (Der Untergang; Germany, 2004), a serious yet aesthetically rigid rendering of Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker. This film reflects the historical and aesthetic repetition compulsion that still characterizes much of the cultural production of Germany and Austria.48 Likewise, the 2007 and 2008 Oscars for Best Foreign Film were given to German-language films treating historical themes of totalitarianism, namely Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (Das Leben der anderen; Germany, 2006), which depicts the surveillance mechanisms of the Stasi in the former GDR, and Stefan Ruzowizky’s The Counterfeiters (Die Fa¨lscher; Austria/Germany, 2007), which tells the story of a Jewish counterfeiter during the Third Reich.49 As Timothy Garton Ashe has pointed out, Germany and Austria now excel in exporting and marketing totalitarianism.50 What I see as the defining feature of the literature and cinema of these nations—the fixation with fascism—is retained even in its export articles. In this book, I attempt to delineate the parameters of this aesthetic fixation and to point to moments of departure that provide access to the nostalgic emo-

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tions that remain embedded within German-language literary and filmic reflections on history.51

Leaving Home Returning to the scenes of departure in Tykwer’s films, it is significant to look at what has been left behind. The fantasy of a home ‘‘elsewhere’’ is alluded to in the most undefined manner; it is, rather, the home of the recent past that is clearly delineated in these films. All figures leave behind oppressive familial spaces, thereby undercutting a potentially regressive desire for a traditional Heimat. Sissi, the heroine of Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior, is the namesake of the beloved Bavarian princess played by Romy Schneider in the popular ‘‘Sissi’’ Heimat films of the 1950s.52 German and Austrian audiences indulged in a post-fascism ecstasy of forgetting and selective memory and nostalgia with the ‘‘Sissy’’ films. In its complex citational practices, Tykwer’s film seems to leave behind the Heimat associated with the forgetting of nostalgia. The heroine, trapped within a psychoanalytical hell in which her father is an unknown patient and the asylum is her ‘‘family,’’ leaves behind the claustrophobic spaces of home and family. This space is not only familial but also historical via intertextual markers of German history. The same is true of the protagonist Maria in Tykwer’s first feature film, Deadly Maria. This figure endures a stifling existence under the thumb of her tyrannical father and husband until, in the end, she jumps out of the window not to death, but to the possibilities of the New, a mode of alterity endemic to the original dream of modernity. Hence, it is not only home that is left behind, with all of its national and historical trappings, but also the family as the placeholder for the postwar German and Austrian relation to Nazism. All of the authors and filmmakers treated in this book are concerned with the nuclear family and, by extension, the parameters of a German and Austrian ‘‘home.’’ Literary critics and cultural theorists have noted that the father is a central figure in the Germanlanguage fixation with its recent history. Already in 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their psychoanalytic study of postwar Germans, The Inability to Mourn (Die Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern), and psychoanalytic readings of German Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung (coming to terms with the past) have been ubiquitous to German Studies ever since.53 The analysis of the work of confronting the past is often viewed in light of Freud’s writings on

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mourning and melancholy, and many suggest that the work of mourning, the acceptance of loss, has yet to take place in German and Austrian culture.54 Eric Santner has noted the centrality of the father for the process of postwar mourning, reiterating that it is through the father, Lacan’s paternal signifier, that ‘‘all mourning must pass’’ (Santner, 101); yet this figure represents a barrier to mourning in post-Nazi Germany and Austria where the fathers themselves are responsible for the originary traumas of the children. As Santner writes, ‘‘the legacies—or perhaps more accurately: the ghosts, the revenant objects—of the Nazi period are transmitted to the second and third generations at the sites of the primal scenes of socialization, that is, within the context of a certain psychopathology of the postwar family’’ (35). Hence, the post-war nuclear family is viewed as the site of the transmission of guilt and the legacy of fascism, and this site is always already tainted by the history of the fathers.55 In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari present a treatise calling into question what they see as the hegemony of psychoanalytic thought, the radically limiting model of the oedipal family. Their critique of the mindless ‘‘familialism’’ of Western thought goes so far as to link the deconstruction of Oedipus with the destruction of fascism. In his preface to the book, Michel Foucault already names the ‘‘major adversary’’ of Anti-Oedipus as fascism: And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini— which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.56

Here, Foucault sees the history of fascism as a history of Freudian desires, of the fixation on the family to the detriment of all other modes of community. A fixation with the paternal signifier, the Nazi father, as it were, is evident in German-language literature and film of at least the past four decades. As the chosen site for the representation of ‘‘everyday fascism,’’ the nuclear family is subject to a representational repetition compulsion. The conflicted dialectic between perpetrator and victim is repeatedly explored via the oedipal family, and it is the father who is most often the carrier for conflated and condensed notions of fascism and sadism. The Nazi father figures prominently in the works of the celebrated post-war Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann; he is a figure

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who forces his daughter into the gas chambers in her nightmares, and his sadism is mimicked by the majority of husbands and male figures in her texts. In Bachmann, gender oppression is ultimately a microcosm of the historical persecution of the Jews by the Nazis so that the critique of the oedipal space becomes a critique of Nazism. Bachmann has famously asserted that ‘‘fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman,’’57 unleashing intense debates about the universal applicability of the perpetrator/victim dichotomy. Bachmann’s conflation of sadism with fascism is mirrored in numerous works by postwar authors and filmmakers. Jelinek, too, represents the Nazi father precisely along these lines in novels such as Wonderful Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten, 1980), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the genius of the New German Cinema, repeatedly explores the connections between the brutality of the nuclear family and the residual ‘‘everyday fascism’’ in Germany. In this way, the oedipal space and the gender roles produced in it are always historicized in German-language literature and film, and the history of Nazism is inextricably linked with the history of the family. The critical representations of familial and gender dynamics in postwar German-language literature and film mentioned here point to conflicted encounters with the ‘‘historical emotion’’ of nostalgia. Robert Menasse has written extensively about ‘‘anti-Heimat’’ literature, work that is relentlessly critical of the regressive nostalgia, what Svetlana Boym calls ‘‘restorative nostalgia,’’ endemic to Heimat literature and film.58 Indeed, as Menasse points out, virtually every Austrian writer of note could be included in the list of anti-Heimat authors, so that this trend must be viewed as a major critical force rather than simply a counter-cultural movement. The critique of Heimat, of family and nation, is practically de rigeur in German-language literary circles, and the deconstructive aesthetics accompanying this critique complicate the affect of nostalgia.

The Dialectic of Entrapment and Escape In Nostalgia After Nazism I trace a dialectic of entrapment and escape within post-Holocaust German and Austrian literature and film, a dialectic that serves as an allegory of post-fascist German and Austrian history. Scenes of entrapment are often located in the oppressive space of ‘‘home,’’ the provincial Heimat imbued with the structure of ‘‘everyday fascism.’’ Robert Menasse and the Ger-

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man cultural critic Matthias Matussek express their frustration with their provincial homelands and their respective desires to ‘‘air out’’ the nations of Austria and Germany. Matussek articulates the desire for an ‘‘other Germany,’’ the ‘‘real’’ Germany, one that ‘‘fits into a global world, in which the borders have fallen. . . . It is airy.’’59 For Menasse, Austrian identity is a ‘‘dark and musty room where, if one enters for some reason, one immediately wants to move the curtains apart and open the window to let in some air and light. But if the window has no view and the room therefore wants to brighten only slightly?’’60 Images of entrapment like these abound in the seminal works analyzed in this book, often pointing to a fantasy of escape from restrictive spaces that connote the provincial ‘‘home.’’ In this book, I have chosen to discuss literary and filmic works that engage in especially complex ways both formally and thematically with the confrontation with recent history and the emotions that accompany such a confrontation. The earliest post-Holocaust work analyzed here is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Franza fragment from 1966, and the most recent texts include literary and filmic works from the past few years. I have structured the chapters in a loosely chronological manner. My narrative draws a line of analysis through a variety of modes for the representation of nostalgia and its repression. In my ordering of the chapters, I underscore a continuity in terms of a repetition compulsion of historical critique, but I also trace what I see as a subtle shift from the stasis of historical entrapment to instances of transnational nostalgia, a mode of affect that combines a critique of recent history with a more ‘‘polygamous’’ relationship to the concept of home. I begin with Ingeborg Bachmann because her work presents a crystallized form of the critique of ‘‘everyday fascism’’ while simultaneously approaching nostalgia via intertextuality. All other authors and filmmakers are likewise concerned with the embeddedness of fascist structures within post-Nazi cultural spaces, and they likewise all utilize intertextual strategies for the work of deconstruction and displacement. Elfriede Jelinek is deeply indebted to the literature of Bachmann, and her work offers the most fossilized form of historical critique via her reiterations of what I call ‘‘performative entrapment’’ in which nostalgia is virtually absent. The films of Tom Tykwer likewise borrow from the aesthetic and conceptual structures offered by artists such as Bachmann, Jelinek, and Fassbinder, yet his films offer an opening away from the space of historical entrapment and toward a reflective mode of nostalgia. Both Robert Menasse and Birgit Vanderbeke stage entrapment and its demise through a transnational mode of nostalgia in a manner that conjoins nostalgia

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and critique. The epilogue looks briefly at some very recent literary and filmic works that simultaneously retain and complicate the taboo on nostalgia in a manner that does not foreclose nostalgic longing. In tracing the displaced and partially deconstructed remnants of nostalgia in post-Holocaust German and Austrian literature and film, I attempt to retain a perspective that views these works from the periphery, from a vantage point neither within nor outside of the landscape I describe. In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson cites Walter Benjamin’s description of his own skewed gaze on modernity. Benjamin viewed French modernity, as he writes, from the ‘‘German valley,’’ a vantage point that provided new insights into the nature of modernity: What sprang up in 1919 in France in a small circle of literati . . . may have been a meager stream, fed on the damp boredom of postwar Europe and the last trickle of French decadence. . . . [But] the German observer is not standing at the head of the stream. That is his opportunity. He is in the valley. He can gauge the energies of the moment.61

It is this kind of gaze I attempt to apply to my readings of nostalgia and history in post-fascist German aesthetics, a gaze that situates the object of study comparatively via frequent returns to another familiar space that provides a slightly different vantage point—the space of Anglo-American literature and culture. A sort of crossed gaze, then, might help me highlight the historical fixation and complex affects that characterize this particular cultural moment in German-language aesthetics.62 I begin with Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated authors of postwar Austria. Bachmann was a member of the Gruppe 47, a group of writers and poets highly critical of the official German notion of the ‘‘zero hour,’’ a concept that in effect denied history by insisting that time began in 1945. In chapter 1: ‘‘Displacing Nostalgia: The Case of Ingeborg Bachmann,’’ I focus primarily on Bachmann’s seminal Franza fragment (1966), part of her unfinished prose cycle from the 1960s and ’70s, Ways of Dying (Todesarten). In Bachmann’s prose works, her formalist aesthetics overtly conflate gender oppression, fascism, and colonialism so that entrapment is all but complete with the exception of the intertextual space of displaced nostalgia. In the Franza fragment, Bachmann’s relentless critique of the residual fascism in the Austrian Heimat is interrupted by postmodern textual breaks that intermittently point to an idealized father figure, a clear reference to Wilkie Collins’s

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British Victorian detective novel The Woman in White (1860). The space of nineteenth-century England functions, then, as a foil for nostalgia and historical critique. Although the claustrophobic space of Bachmann’s prose is complicated by these intertextual ruptures, they ultimately provide no escape route. Bachmann’s writings are characterized by a complex coexistence of deconstructive aesthetics and displaced nostalgia. In my second chapter, ‘‘Provincializing Nazism: Elfriede Jelinek’s Performative Entrapment,’’ I analyze Jelinek’s works in light of her nearly seamless resistance to any mode of nostalgia. I argue that both her writings and her infamous self-presentation can be seen as as kind of ‘‘performative entrapment,’’ the hyperperformance of historical fixity within the global sphere. Jelinek perfects, I argue, a form of critical aesthetics informed by literary predecessors such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard that relishes its own state of entrapment. In her essay ‘‘War By Other Means’’ (‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln’’), Jelinek, always critical of her homeland Austria, nevertheless waxes poetic about Bachmann, the ‘‘cosmopolitan,’’ the woman without a clear home, a literary nomad.63 Bachmann, the German-language author who most precisely set out the parameters of a gendered critique of family and fascism, resonates with all of the authors treated in my study. All of Jelinek’s works are legible primarily through their critique of a residual ‘‘everyday fascism’’ in contemporary Austria and Germany. Indeed, Jelinek has repeatedly admitted that her work is ‘‘compulsively’’ fixated on the crimes of recent Austrian and German history, and her passionate rejection of a regressive mode of nostalgia has dramatically compromised her standing in her native Austria. I argue here that Jelinek’s relentless focus on the cultural idiom of Nazism renders her works ‘‘provincial’’ and untranslatable into cultural contexts not tainted by the crimes of Nazism: when translated into English, Jelinek’s celebrated novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983) (The Piano Teacher) appears to be simply a tale of sexual degradation rather than a radical indictment of the remnants of fascism in the nuclear family. In considering the translatability of Jelinek’s particularly German and Austrian critique of fascism I look to the American poet Sylvia Plath, a figure who plays a central role in Jelinek’s drama, Death and the Maiden V: The Wall (Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen V: Die Wand, 2002). Plath’s inclusion of Holocaust metaphors in her Ariel poems (1962–63) and her playful use of tropes of fascism contrast sharply with Jelinek’s critical aesthetic, thereby underscoring the representational exceptionalism of Germanlanguage literature. Austrian director Michael Haneke’s adaptation

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of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher as a French film, La Pianiste (2001), similarly illustrates the historical fixity of Jelinek’s original novel: the sonorous French language, Haneke’s liberal use of music by Robert Schumann, and the viable love story of the film almost entirely overshadow the historical critique at the heart of Jelinek’s novel. Ultimately aware of her own ‘‘provincialism,’’ Jelinek stands stubbornly and pessimistically for a German-language particularism that rejects nostalgic emotion and that cannot easily be integrated into globalization or European unity. In chapter 3: ‘‘Leaving Home: Tom Tykwer, German Cinema, and the Aesthetics of Escape,’’ I argue that the films of Tom Tykwer are exemplary for a transitional mode of aesthetics in post-fascist German-language film and literature. German cinema has been marked by the taint of Nazism ever since the Nazis appropriated film for the purposes of propaganda. Tom Tykwer’s films engage with the fraught history of German film from Weimar cinema through the radically critical films of the New German Cinema directors; yet Tykwer’s works are ‘‘global’’ in their appeal and legible beyond the confines of Germany and Austria. These films sidestep nostalgia via a rejection of traditional notions of family and home, and they end with what I call ‘‘escape tableaux,’’ scenes in which the figures break with their pasts and enter fantasy spaces that are undefined and open. The cinema of Tom Tykwer occupies an aesthetic space between the modernist avant-garde of formalist directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the celebrated directors associated with a ‘‘global postmodern’’ film style (formalism, pastiche, overcoded film citations) such as Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and Wong Kar-Wai. Although Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998) has been called a ‘‘global postmodern’’ film, I assert that his films offer a unique engagement with German history through the deconstruction of the melodrama, the regressive mode akin to the apolitical Heimat films and novels. Tykwer’s departure from the aesthetic and thematic modes of Heimat and melodrama is primarily limited to the final tableaux of escape in which spatial, aesthetic, and historical entrapment explodes, inducing a sense of openness that is anathema to regressive nostalgia. In chapter 4, ‘‘Nation Without a Home: Robert Menasse and Transnational Nostalgia,’’ I analyze the literary works of the celebrated Austrian-Jewish author and critic Robert Menasse in light of his assertion that Austria is a nation ‘‘without a home.’’ Menasse has criticized Jelinek harshly for her radical political actions and her aesthetics of repetition. In contrast, Menasse’s works resist the fixed entrapment of Jelinek’s writing, calling for a metaphorical

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opening of the windows. Menasse’s novel trilogy Trilogy of Dispiritedness (Trilogie der Entgeisterung, 1988–95) is simultaneously ironic and nostalgic, indulging in a longing for a home that is always displaced. The second novel of the trilogy, Wings of Stone (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt, 1991), takes place in Vienna, Austria and Sa˜o Paolo, Brazil, and the protagonists feel at home and alienated in both worlds. As Boym writes: ‘‘The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal’’ (12). In this sense, he/she reflects ‘‘the desire for untranslatability, the longing for uniqueness’’ (Boym, 13). This desire for uniqueness is satirized, ironized, and ultimately imbued with longing and affect in Menasse’s novel. Here, Ulrich Beck’s notion of a ‘‘polygamy of place’’64 could be complemented by a concomitant polygamy of time, for Menasse’s aesthetic nostalgia privileges distance over returns. Menasse’s intertextual references to seminal writers of Viennese Modernism such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Leopold von Andrian simultaneously revive the longing of Austria’s modernism and delight in a creative mode of citation that rejects any fixed notion of origin or home. Chapter 5, ‘‘A Home At the End of the World: Birgit Vanderbeke’s Literary Departures,’’ considers the place of the New, the tenet of modernity, in post-fascist German-language aesthetics. The popular German novelist Birgit Vanderbeke won the IngeborgBachmann Prize for her narrative The Dinner of Mussels (Das Muschelessen) in 1990, and she frequently cites Bachmann’s texts and life in her works. Like Bachmann’s Ways of Dying (Todesarten) works, Vanderbeke’s novels often detail the crimes of the fathers, dramatizing the claustrophobic nature of family, home, and nation in contemporary Germany. Yet Vanderbeke’s works likewise offer a perspectival shift that often leads to narratives of escape from the structure of ‘‘everday fascism’’ so abhorrent to writers like Bachmann and Jelinek. In The Dinner of Mussels a mother and her two children wait for the father to return from a business trip with a special dinner of mussels. During the four hours of waiting, the entire fabric of the family is deconstructed. The tyrannical father is unmasked as a construct, and the ending is entirely open. In this sense, Vanderbeke continues the work of authors such as Bachmann and Jelinek, but she also points to a space beyond the confines of historical critique. In a more recent narrative, I See Something That You Don’t See (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 1999), this space of possibility, of the New, is explored as the continuation of the subtle shift in perspective ventured in The Dinner of Mussels. A mother and her son cross the border from Germany

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into the unknown of France, and their ‘‘home at the end of the world’’ is a unique representation of the pleasure engendered by the reflective nostalgia of alienation. With its deliberately vague gender and familial roles, the novel resembles the American novelist Michael Cunningham’s work. In A Home At the End of the World (1990), Cunningham discards a traditional model for family while retaining a fantasy of a de-oedipalized home. Anglo-American literature, as was shown in the case of Sylvia Plath, can assume a certain freedom vis-a`-vis a use of historical metaphors that is divorced from historical responsibility. The persistence of history in contemporary Germany and Austria disallows this kind of aesthetic play. Yet Vanderbeke’s novels offer narratives of escape that imagine a home elsewhere, beyond the boundaries of those nations implicated in the crimes of Nazism. These fantasies of departure dramatize the emergence of a particularly German aesthetic—one that might conjoin nostalgia with historical reflection. In the epilogue, ‘‘Post 9/11 Escape Fantasies,’’ I look to a number of post-9/11 works in light of my frame of post-fascist nostalgia. I ask whether recent dramatic shifts in the global political scene can foster new modes of engagement with history and Heimat in Germany and Austria. The discourse of ‘‘normalization’’ is often linked to soccer and renewed flag waving in the former-Nazi nations, yet Robert Menasse’s play The Paradise of the Unloved Ones (Das Paradies der Ungeliebten, 2006) explicitly links the presumably untainted sport of national soccer with political corruption and fascism. I argue here that contemporary German and Austrian literature and film continues to confront the fault line of Nazism. Novels such as Vanderbeke’s Sweet Sixteen (2005), Lilian Faschinger’s City of Losers (Stadt der Verlierer, 2007), and Katharina Hacker’s The Have Nots (Die Habenichtse, 2006), winner of the 2006 German Book Prize, engage the discourse of global capitalism while nevertheless pointing to the residues of Nazism. These literary works along with films such as Hans Weingarten’s The White Noise (Das weiße Rauschen, 2001), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Experiment (Das Experiment, 2001), Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues (2003), Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals (Bo¨se Zellen, 2003), Ju¨rgen Vogel’s Free Will (Der freie Wille, 2006), and Andre´ Scha¨fer and Richard David Precht’s Lenin Only Came As Far As Lu¨denscheid (Lenin kam nur bis Lu¨denscheid, 2008) dramatize the claustrophobia endemic to a post-fascist, post-wall Germany and a post-fascist, globalizing Austria. They often depict an intense longing for escape from the trappings of history via other countries (Denmark, Spain, the United

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States, England) that serve as idealized alternatives to the tainted home of the post-Nazi imaginary. In this book, I trace the parameters of the German and Austrian aesthetic repetition compulsion manifested as historical critique via the tropes of family and home. Yet I also map what I have called fantasies of departure, aesthetically and thematically, from the entrapment of historical fixation. Thus, I ask whether nostalgia might return in a reflective form despite its banishment from the ‘‘antiHeimat’’ mode of the critique of Nazism. The escape tableaux in Tykwer’s films strike me as anti-nostalgic in their expansiveness and break from the oppressive past, yet the longing they convey reveals an ecstatic affect. In the final tableaux of Tykwer’s films, in Birgit Vanderbeke’s novels, or in the persistent alienation and desire for an elusive, transnational home as embodied in Robert Menasse’s figures of migration, the New is not represented as the uncanny, as the alienated return of the familiar, but as a longing for a ‘‘home elsewhere’’ and a temporal mode akin to the unmeasured time of childhood.

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1 Displacing Nostalgia: The Case of Ingeborg Bachmann THE WRITINGS OF INGEBORG BACHMANN CAN BE LOCATED AT THE

forefront of a post-fascist German-language literature that both displaces nostalgia and resituates it temporally. In Bachmann’s prose works, her formalist aesthetics overtly conflate gender oppression, fascism, and colonialism so that entrapment is all but complete with the exception of the intertextual space of displaced nostalgia. In Bachmann’s Franza fragment (1965–66) nostalgia is manifested via intertextuality as simultaneously affective, regressive, and ironic. The Franza fragment reflects the author’s experimentation with postmodern style such as intertextuality and overcoded citations, yet it simultaneously engages in a vigorous critique of the Austrian Heimat, of the residues of fascism in postwar Austria via the representation of gender and family relations of power and oppression. Indeed, Bachmann was first among postwar German-language writers to canonize the link between fascism and the German/Austrian family. The Franza fragment deconstructs the mechanisms of ‘‘everyday fascism,’’ yet this critical focus is interrupted by postmodern textual breaks that point to an idealized father figure via a citation of Wilkie Collins’s Victorian detective novel, The Woman in White (1860). This intertextual rupture reintroduces nostalgia into Bachmann’s novel fragment even as it exposes a misreading at the core of nostalgia’s return. Here, postmodern style is conjoined with an always already-alienated mode of nostalgia in a manner that anticipates discussions about postmodernism’s link to time and history that postdate Bachmann’s life and work. Since Fredric Jameson’s reconceptualization of postmodernism in his seminal work Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, it has become possible to conceive of the notion of nostalgia as a necessary byproduct of the postmodern. Generally considered to be a regressive or even reactionary tendency that would represent an anachronistic residue in the fabric of postmodern 37

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texts, it can also be seen as a necessary outgrowth of the lack of historicity that characterizes postmodernity. For Jameson, it is precisely the nostalgic that imbues the experience of the present with a sense of connectedness to any other moment in time. In aesthetic terms, Jameson has pointed out that nostalgia is produced through the intertextuality that is endemic to postmodernism: ‘‘We are now, in other words, in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles replaces ‘real’ history’’ (Postmodernism, 20). Out of the alienation from ‘‘real’’ history grows aesthetic intertextuality—a sort of history that recalls aesthetic tropes in idealized forms. For Jameson, then, art can conjure feelings of nostalgia through a reference to aesthetic moments that are themselves imbued with a historicity presumed to be absent in the postmodern work of art. This nostalgia, however, reflects, for Jameson, the ‘‘waning of affect’’ (Postmodernism, 11) he ascribes to postmodernity and the cultural context of late capitalism. Although linear time and history have lost the weight modernism attributed to them, a proliferation of nostalgic references in postmodern art points to the space of history, even if, as Jameson asserts, this historicity no longer calls forth ‘‘the pain of a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval’’ (Postmodernism, 19). As I have already suggested, Jameson’s anti-intuitive recuperation of the notion of nostalgia for postmodernity encounters a blind spot in the German and Austrian traditions in which the notion of historicity is saddled with the burden of the historical crimes of Nazism. The unique fixation with history in postwar Germany and Austria is reflected in an aesthetics often characterized by the coupling of postmodern style with historical critique. Yet Jameson’s linkage of a postmodern desire for temporality with aesthetic intertextuality also resonates in the context of postwar German-language literature. With an eye to postwar German aesthetics, Andreas Huyssen takes issue with Jameson’s assertion that postmodern aesthetics coincide with a ‘‘waning of affect’’ but proposes, rather, that ‘‘cynicism and utopia, disillusionment and utopia are far from being mutually exclusive.’’1 For Huyssen, European and, specifically, German literature since 1960 has undergone a shift from ‘‘anticipation and the future to memory and the past’’ (92). This literature still contains within it ‘‘intertextual traces of the project of modernist and avant-gardist aesthetics’’ (97), but it is no longer driven by the utopian energy that fueled modernism

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and the avant-garde. For Huyssen, the utopian dimension of German-language literature has not disappeared after 1960; ‘‘but the nature of that utopian has changed. The belief in the attainability of pure vision is gone, only the desire is left’’ (100). Huyssen points here to authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, and Alexander Kluge: By working through rather than cynically performing this problematic of utopia/reality, such literature can actually help maintain the tension between fiction and reality, aesthetic representation and history. It is in the attempt to maintain that tension, that dialectic, against the lure of the simulacrum that I see utopian energies at work in literature today. There is a utopian intertextuality with the past in many of the texts mentioned here that attempts to ground the reader in temporality going beyond facile quoting and superficial, arbitrary citation. (Huyssen, 101)

The search for utopia, ultimately doomed to failure, is, for Huyssen, a desire for temporality in the age of the simulacrum, and the nostalgia evoked through intertextual breaks in literary texts by authors such as Wolf, Kluge, and Bachmann reflects simultaneously cynicism and resistance. Huyssen’s analysis of postwar German-language literature dovetails with Svetlana Boym’s recuperation of nostalgia as ‘‘reflective,’’ a form of longing that relishes ‘‘longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately’’ (Boym, xviii). In this sense, post-fascist German-language aesthetics can engender a form of nostalgia that is simultaneously affective and ironic, along the lines suggested by Boym and Linda Hutcheon.2 Through intertextuality, works by authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann avoid the regression that leads to forgetting while preserving the ‘‘historical emotion’’ of nostalgia.

Displacing Nostalgia: Bachmann’s Franza Fragment The Franza fragment constitutes the first manuscript of the Ways of Dying (Todesarten) cycle, an unfinished collection of prose works written in the 1960s and ’70s. The Franza fragment was abandoned by Bachmann prior to final submission to her publisher.3 In November 1966 she wrote to her editor that she had re-read the manuscript in order to make some minor corrections: ‘‘But the shock was great, for I suddenly grasped that it does not work like this. . . . the manuscript strikes me like a helpless allusion to some-

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thing that has yet to be written.’’4 Despite Bachmann’s frustration with the project, the manuscript and drafts of the Franza fragment remain central to Bachmann scholarship, and they contain constellations of ideas that are vital to contemporary discussions of gender, race, aesthetics and Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung (coming to terms with the past).5 Sigrid Weigel has argued that Bachmann broke off her work on the Franza fragment because she realized that she was not able to avoid certain pitfalls and conflations in her representation of postwar fascism,6 gender relations7 and post-colonial relations:8 Even though Bachmann, in her work on the Franza book, therefore succeeded via the concept of the ‘‘belated damage’’ from the crimes of the Nazis to dissolve the precarious comparison of victims within a more complex theater of memory, she nevertheless broke off work on this book, probably not least because the female protagonist in it tends to remain, in spite of everything, fixated in the position of the victim, because of the symbolic repetition embodied by her.9

For Weigel, the repetition of the victim/victimizer constellation in the Franza book, manifested in terms of the power dynamics inherent in the tropes of gender, fascism, or colonialism, creates a loaded symbolism that oversimplifies structures of oppression.10 Weigel suggests that Bachmann abandoned the Franza manuscript in order to try to overcome this sort of conflation. She argues that the the final work in the Ways of Dying cycle, the novel Malina (1971), approximates more closely than the Franza fragment Bachmann’s aesthetic and critical vision.11 Malina, as Weigel claims, mingles a variety of genres and offers a more complex and ambivalent representation of its figures. In contrast, Weigel criticizes the symbolic/ formalist aesthetic that structures, in part, the Franza fragment—an aesthetic that easily slips into a mode of oversimplification and reification.12 The Franza fragment is, indeed, highly symbolic, engaging in an almost absurd conflation of victimizer-victim constellations. Father figures and lovers morph into a single sadistic figure. In this way, I suggest, the Franza fragment simultaneously reifies structures of oppression and points to their fossilization. The ‘‘symbolic’’ (Weigel) and, I would add, formalist nature of Bachmann’s use of tropes of oppression in the Franza fragment reveals a conflicted textual irony. Along these lines, Andreas Huyssen has singled out Bachmann’s prose texts as exemplary for a feminist irony:13 ‘‘it is no coincidence that the complex narrative work of Ingeborg Bach-

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mann, her Todesarten [Ways of Dying] cycle, was only ‘discovered’ after the Karin Struck/Verena Stefan phase of women’s writing had run its course’’ (Twilight, 98). Laden with the fraught tropes of fascism and family endemic to postwar Austrian literature, the Franza fragment is, I contend, perhaps the most frustrating text included in the Ways of Dying project. It simultaneously oversimplifies the victimizer/victim dichotomy and reflects upon this gesture via intertextual citations that undermine the stability of these roles. Bachmann uses postmodern style in the form of ironic intertextual citation that invites multiple and contradictory significations. The American architect Charles Jencks has called this sort of postmodern signification ‘‘double-coding,’’14 and this term spills into the notion of ‘‘overcoding.’’15 Ingeborg Hoesterey uses this term to argue, against Jameson, for the subversive potential of postmodern art and, in particular, postmodern pastiche.16 I explore here the particular citation of the Victorian anti-hero Percival Glyde from Wilke Collins’s The Woman in White—a citation that links historical critique with postmodern style. Bachmann’s fragment recalls this figure nostalgically, at times regressively, but the contradictory ‘‘codings’’ indicated by Glyde’s role in each text conjoin reflective nostalgia, irony, and affect. In this sense, this chapter engages in a dialogue with scholarship concerned with Bachmann’s critique of structures of oppression (fascism, gender oppression, and colonialism) while locating Bachmann’s work within a larger frame of postHolocaust aesthetics. Bachmann’s Franza fragment is paradigmatic for the fraught German and Austrian confrontation with the presumably ahistorical tenets of postmodernism, combining a modernist concern for history with postmodern ruptures.

Intertextuality: Postmodern Ruptures In the Franza fragment, Bachmann cites an iconic figure in British Victorian literature—the villain Percival Glyde, who appears in Bachmann’s text as the English Captain and ‘‘liberator’’ of Franza’s ‘‘Heimat,’’ Galicia. Percival Glyde is the first love of the protagonist Franza and one who is recalled a number of times in Franza’s memory as an idealized figure who seemingly represents an alternative to the patriarchal and, by extension, fascist structures that limit her adult experiences. In terms of the narrative, Percival Glyde functions as a nostalgic fantasy for Franza, a figure who represented an exceptional eroticism that was not sadistic and whom she recalls in moments of nostalgic fantasy in a vague mantra: ‘‘Sire, I will

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come’’17 [Sire, ich werde ankommen (KA 2, 249); Sire, ich will ankommen (KA 2, 284)]. On an aesthetic level, however, this figure provides an intertextual link to an entirely different literary tradition—the Victorian detective novel.18 The intertextual link to a Victorian literary tradition via Collins’s novel is, I suggest, on the one hand indicative of a nostalgia for a father figure located in a place and time outside of the ‘‘tainted’’ Austrian collusion in the Nazi crimes and within an idealized Victorian milieu; on the other hand, however, Collins’s Percival Glyde is a sadist, a cruel charlatan, so that a knowledge of this intertext complicates Glyde’s function in Bachmann’s novel. In this sense, the intertextual reference to Percival Glyde can be said to overcode Bachmann’s novel fragment. In her readings of Bachmann, Sigrid Weigel has cited Roland Barthes’s formulation that the intertext is a siren who seduces.19 The Franza fragment is, indeed, filled with such intertextual references that seduce the enlightened reader. As Joachim Eberhardt shows, a knowledge of the pretext (in this case The Woman in White) influences the critic so that the educated reader is able to navigate various intertexts in Bachmann’s works.20 Indeed, Bachmann scholars have devoted some energy to excavating many of these citations.21 In the Kritische Ausgabe (Critical Edition) of the Todesarten project, the editors map references to authors as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and the Mitscherlichs. These references shed light upon facets of Bachmann’s prose works as well as opening the texts to new readings.22 The editors often refer to the contents of Bachmann’s own library,23 inviting a kind of archeology of sources that reflects a current trend in Bachmann scholarship to consider the influence of her own time upon her work.24 The numerous intertextual references in Bachmann’s works have often been explored in the interest of biographical research or in terms of correspondences—that is, with a focus on textual and aesthetic overlappings and resonances.25 My reading of the Percival Glyde figure in the Franza fragment attempts to show how this intertext consistently resists correspondence, rather presenting ever new contradictory codings and ‘‘overcodings.’’ For Julia Kristeva, intertextualities construct dialogues between different semiotic systems that open up texts in ways that would not be possible through the simple tracing of sources: The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition from one (or several) sign system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘‘study of sources,’’ we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying

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system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality. If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), one then understands that its ‘‘place’’ of enunciation and its denoted ‘‘object’’ are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence—an adherence to different sign systems.26

The dialogue between the two texts, Bachmann’s Franza fragment and Collins’s sensational detective novel, produces, I maintain, polysemy and semantic ruptures that run throughout Bachmann’s text. The figure of Glyde simultaneously calls up and ironizes nostalgia in Bachmann’s text. What is more, the Glyde figure resides at the locus of multiple crucial nexes in the fragment: gender and family (as the ideal father/lover), fascism (as the father-figure’’/liberator’’ from Nazism), and colonialism (as the ‘‘good’’ colonizer). As an intertext, Collins’s Glyde ruptures and complicates these roles, so that this figure of nostalgia is displaced and ironized.

‘‘Fascism is the First Thing in the Relationship Between a Man and a Woman’’ Bachmann’s Franza fragment provides perhaps the most radical indictment of fascism in any of her literary works. It is this text that makes the explicit link between the political model of fascism and gender and family relations that Bachmann articulated in an oftcited 1973 interview: I have already thought about it before, where does fascism begin. It does not begin with the first bombs that are thrown, it does not begin with the terror one can write about, in every newspaper. It begins in the relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.27

The fascism that defines the recent histories of Germany and Austria is thus commonly scrutinized through the lens of psychoanalysis. Eric Santner has noted the centrality of the father for the process of postwar mourning, maintaining that it is through the father, Lacan’s paternal signifier, that ‘‘all mourning must pass’’28; yet the German father constitutes a barrier to mourning, since he is responsible for the traumas of the children. In this sense, the

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postwar German family functions as the site of the repetition compulsion that characterizes melancholy. The bourgeois family, the epicenter of the idealized Heimat, is consistently critiqued in works by Austrian postwar authors such as Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and Elfriede Jelinek. In her essay on Bachmann, ‘‘War By Other Means’’ (‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln’’), Jelinek points to the conflation of fascism with gender relations as Bachmann’s most significant contribution to Germanlanguage literature: ‘‘In fascism, the woman, if she dares to step out of her role as birthvessel and nurturer, is an epidemic, an enemy within, ‘rottenness in installments’ (Ce´line). She turns into the general annihilator, into the enemy from without. Like the Jews.’’29 Here, Jelinek draws a parallel between the oppressed Jew in Nazism and the oppressed woman in postwar Austria, a space still viewed by authors such as Jelinek and Bachmann as fascist.30 Literary scholars have criticized the parallelism outlined above that allies all victims, pointing out that not all victims are the same. Yet this parallelism is clearly a critical tool: the critique of fascism is achieved hyperbolically through a structural flattening of difference. In the fragmentary dialogue between Franza and her brother Martin from an early draft of the Franza fragment, Franza frames her relationship with Jordan in terms of fascism along the lines outlined above: ‘‘You say fascism, but that sounds strange, I’ve never heard that word used to describe a personal relationship’’ (Book of Franza, 75) [Du sagst Faschismus, das ist komisch, ich habe das noch nie geho¨rt als ein Wort fu¨r ein privates Verhalten] (KA 2, 53). Jordan, the medical researcher who investigates the experiments of Nazi doctors, is himself compared to a Nazi tactician, the perpetrator of instrumental reason and oppression of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment. In Franza’s dreams, Jordan is the Nazi father who gases Franza: ‘‘Just last night I dreamed that I was alone in a gas chamber, all the doors shut tight, no windows, and Jordan held the knob and was letting the gas in.’’ (Book of Franza, 71) [Heut nacht habe ich getra¨umt, ich bin in einer Gaskammer, ganz allein, alle Tu¨ren sind verschlossen, kein Fenster, und Jordan befestigt die Schla¨uche und la¨ßt das Gas einstro¨men].31 Likewise, Martin laments the fact that his sister married a man fifteen years her senior—‘‘that she had married her father’’ (Book of Franza, 22) [daß sie einen Vater geheiratet hatte] (KA 2, 154). In addition to Jordan’s age, Martin bases his comparison on the ‘‘two dark warts on [Jordan’s] face’’ (Book of Franza, 22) [zwei dunkle Warzen im Gesicht] (KA 2, 154) that recall the face of the dead father. The relationship between perpetrator and victim is simpli-

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fied in a purely formal manner here; all paternal male figures are interpolated into the role of the Nazi torturer, and all female figures are always already inscribed into the role of the victim. Franza’s own father is conceived in the same tradition of Nazi male figures; she dreams that he tortures her and becomes one with the figure of Jordan: Suddenly the dream pulls itself together and is suddenly a hit, a Shakespeare having loaned a hand, a Goya having painted the scenery, lifting itself suddenly out of the valley of your own banality and presenting you with your own great drama, your father and a henchman named Jordan together in one person. (Book of Franza, 78)32

In Franza’s recollection the dream sets the stage for the drama of the ‘‘Graveyard of the Daughters’’: The anthem begins, the first subterranean communication that the ancients are at hand, your mother, whom you never think about, leaning against every wall. Your free-floating fear, for which you have no basis, presents a story that assaults your sight and hearing, and you know for the first time why you feel such angst. I saw a graveyard at sunset, and the dream told me: That is the Graveyard of the Daughters. And I looked down at my own grave, for I was one of the daughters, and my father was not there. But because of him I was dead and buried there. (Book of Franza, 78)33

Franza’s dream reads like a parody of a bourgeois tragedy. The mother is noticeably marginal, relegated to the periphery, irrelevant to the primary narrative. The narrative voice shifts from second to first person, and it is in the first person that the dream interpretation crystallizes: ‘‘I saw a graveyard at sunset, and the dream told me: That is the Graveyard of the Daughters.’’ The father, conflated with the figure of Jordan, is located as the cause of death, of the daughter’s condition. This father figure, however, is physically absent, central to the narrative and yet a faceless construct. Critics have drawn parallels between the ‘‘Graveyard of the Daughters’’ passage from the Franza fragment and the numerous references to the Nazi father in Malina.34 In an interview from 1971, Bachmann analyzes the symbolic function of the father figure in the Malina ‘‘dream chapter’’ [Traumkapitel]: The father figure is, of course, the murderous one . . . that wears different costumes, until in the end he takes them all off and is recognizable as the murderer. A realist probably would narrate many horrors that

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happen to a specific person or persons. Here, everything is pulled together into this grand person that commits the acts that society commits.35

Here Bachmann explicitly rejects a realist aesthetics, describing her work as a kind of condensation of individual male perpetrators (murderers [Mo¨rder]). This figure, then, (‘‘this grand person’’) embodies the fascism underlying human relations in postwar Austria; he is represented as a monstrous conglomeration of the various masks worn by the perpetrators. In this sense, the turn from the father to Jordan in the ‘‘Graveyard of the Daughters’’ passage is significant, a metonymic shift that both solidifies the structure of oppression and indicates slippage within this structure.36 The concepts of displacement and ‘‘substitution’’ [Stellvertretung] are carried to their logical extreme in the Franza fragment. Thus, the Nazi is the murderer is the male is the father. This form of slippage is evident in an oft-analyzed passage in which Franza hallucinates in the desert and conflates Martin, Jordan, her father, and God: Then she saw the image, there in the red Arabian desert. . . . I have to run in order for it to become more clear. It’s him. I have to go to him, but it wasn’t Martin who was receding. It is him, it’s him in the white coat, he’s stepping out of the image, he’s come from Vienna wearing the mantle of comfort in order to take me home. No, it’s a terrifying coat that he’s throwing off, but it’s not him. My father. I have seen my father. He’s throwing off his coat, his many coats. . . . But it’s not him, he is not my father. . . . God is revealing Himself to me and I am standing before Him. She ran faster and cried and cried . . . I have seen God. (Book of Franza, 118)37

The metonymic shift from the ostensibly benevolent brother Martin to Jordan, the doctor in the white coat, to the father is only logical within a reductionist model for power relations—one that does not take into account differences in intention. Each male figure serves as a representation of masculinity that culminates in the image of abstract male power, God. Power is thus simultaneously oversimplified and elusive, since it manifests itself in figures who are explicit oppressors and also in those who are abstract or absent. The image of God, however, is deconstructed, indeed, even parodied, as Franza kneels before this image that is revealed to be not only a hallucination but also something of unspeakable foulness, a ‘‘sea cucumber’’ [Seewalze], half dead and monstrous: ‘‘She fell to her knees and there He lay, a black stump washed up on the shore,

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a sea cucumber, a shriveled-up monstrosity, not even a foot long, and barely alive’’ (Book of Franza, 119) [Sie stu¨rzte und kam auf die Knie zu liegen, und da lag Er vor ihr, ein schwarzer Strunk, aus dem Wasser geschwemmt, eine Seewalze, ein zusammengeschrumpftes Ungeheuer, keine dreißig Zentimeter lang, in dem ein leises Leben war] (KA 2, 287). The sea creature is simultaneously primordial (emerging from the sea) and yet deflated, impotent, small and ugly. Power, as embodied in the various male figures in the text and culminating in a vision of God, is revealed to be little more than an unthreatening lump of flesh, the residue of castration. The ultimate performance of the prototypes of male power occurs in the last portion of the novel fragment, which takes place in Egypt. Although Franza experiences moments of reflection within the idealized space of the Egyptian desert, she is unable to transcend the structures of oppression that inform her ultimately selfdestructive desires. In a classic performance of Freud’s ‘‘compulsion to repeat,’’ Franza seeks out a victimizer who best embodies the qualities of the Nazi father. Like the child in Freud’s ‘‘fort-da’’ scenario who throws the toy away in order to experience a loss over which he has control (through retrieval of the same toy), Franza approaches the ex-Nazi Doctor Ko¨rner who lives incognito in Cairo. He is, of course, another embodiment of the figure in the white coat from the hallucination in the desert. In a melodramatic performance of victim positions, Franza begs the doctor to give her a shot that would reenact the ‘‘euthanasia’’ experiments he conducted during the reign of the Nazis: ‘‘How could she make clear to him that she wanted to be eradicated? Yes, eradicated, that was it’’ (Book of Franza, 134) [Wie konnte sie ihm bloß klarmachen, daß sie ausgemerzt werden wollte? Ja, ausgemerzt, das war es] (KA 2, 313). Franza’s audacious assumption of the position of a victim of Nazi persecution is grotesque and parodical. Bachmann explicitly links the psychodynamics of power and gender with the critique of fascism in a manner that reduces all gender dynamics to the dichotomy Nazi/sadist/father-Jew/masochist/daughter. The formal nature of this relationship is revealed in the key concepts of repetition [Wiederholung] and substitution [Stellvertretung] that define Franza’s act of self-destruction that leads to her death (KA 2, 322). These terms encircle the reductionist mode of Bachmann’s critique of fascism. As the placeholder for the ‘‘victim’’ Franza masochistically attempts to choreograph the scene of her own murder; she mimics the violence perpetuated upon her by a rapist at the Egyptian pyramids. Following the rape, she bangs her own head against the wall of the pyramid: ‘‘She didn’t hear herself

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make a sound, but something in her said, No. No. The Repetition. The substitution.’’ [Und sie ho¨rte keinen Laut aus sich kommen, aber etwas in sich sagen: Nein. Nein. Die Wiederholung. Die Stellvertretung] (KA 2, 322). In linguistic terms, the concepts of repetition and substitution can be likened to the terms ‘‘metaphor’’ and ‘‘metonymy.’’ In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva draws a parallel between these linguistic concepts and the Freudian notions of ‘‘condensation’’ and ‘‘displacement’’: As we know, Freud specifies two fundamental ‘processes’ in the work of the unconscious: displacement and condensation. Druszeski and Jakobson introduced them, in a different way, during the early stages of structural linguistics, through the concepts of metonymy and metaphor, which have since been interpreted in light of psychoanalysis. (Kristeva, 59)

The circular nature of Kristeva’s use of these double terms resembles the meanings and uses of the terms themselves. Indeed, in the case of the Franza fragment, the psychoanalytic and linguistic levels of signification seem to coincide. The ‘‘substitution’’ [Stellvertretung] occurs as displacement and metonymy through the multiple projections and displacements that entangle Franza. The ‘‘repetition’’ [Wiederholung] is implicated in the numerous moments of violence and oppression in the text in which place is irrelevant, creating a sense of density and condensation. In her response to the hallucination in the desert, Franza compares her experience to similar moments in a variety of locations. In a draft of the novel from a reading in Zu¨rich in 1966, the notion of place as ‘‘repetition’’ [Wiederholung] and condensation is emphasized: She was always in Vienna, not here, she had merely picked the right equivalent of a room in which she lived with her ideas, yes, less than that, not the memory, nothing like that, but rather with the constant happening of that to which one refers as having happened. It also was not a recapitulation of a history, no change of place had occurred, she didn’t travel, either, she always was in one and the same place, in Baden or Vienna, since for her these two places were woven into Suez, and the time from two or three months ago was not over, but rather grasped, one cog into another, into this day, into every day.38

Not only space, but also time is conceived here in terms of equivalencies. In this sense, both repetition and condensation are implicated as the impossibility of movement within stasis. A certain recapitulation of history does occur, however, in the larger histori-

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cal frame, as Franza realizes that she is reliving the fate of earlier Frau Jordans as ‘‘the third one with this name’’ [die dritte mit diesem Namen] (KA 2, 207) in the house of Bluebeard. The fatal blow to Franza is caused by herself, as she throws her own head against the pyramid, an act that is perceived as ‘‘repetition’’ [Wiederholung], as resistance to the oppressive wall in Vienna as well as to the present moment of violation: ‘‘Her thoughts raced, and then she hit the wall, smashing her head, slamming it with full force, her head smashing against the wall in Vienna and the stone wall in Giza, her voice returning, herself saying aloud, No. No’’ (Book of Franza, 140) [Ihr Denken riß ab, und dann schlug sie, schlug mit ganzer Kraft, ihren Kopf gegen die Wand in Wien und die Steinquader in Gizeh und sagte laut, und da war ihre andere Stimme: Nein. Nein] (KA 2, 323). As the placeholder of the ‘‘victim,’’ she masochistically attempts to choreograph the scene of her own murder. Indeed, this moment of performative masochism recalls an earlier scene of gender oppression witnessed by Franza at the train station in Cairo in which a woman is bound and abused by her husband. Yet it is unclear whose desire is being met by the performance. Indeed, the bystanders suggest to Franza that it is the woman who is perverted: ‘‘He’s not crazy, she is’’ (Book of Franza, 132) [Nicht er ist verru¨ckt. Sie ist wahnsinnig] (KA 2, 308). Franza identifies with the woman simultaneously as victim and as unapologetic masochist, a figure who desires her own oppression: At least he brought her home. However, he didn’t bring me. . . . She began to sob. This woman will always be here, Franza said to herself as she nodded and walked away, for I have become this woman. She got back into the taxi and returned to the hotel. I am lying in her place. And my hair is twisted into a long cord that is held by him in Vienna. I am bound and tied. I will never escape. (Book of Franza, 132)39

The passage provides another instance of the excess of repetition and substitution in Bachmann’s fragment. Franza’s identification with the woman constitutes a substitution of scenes of oppression, scenes that are repeated throughout the text so that Franza cannot distinguish between the performance of abuse in the Cairo train station and her own domestic hell in Vienna. Yet the longing for a concrete oppressor such as the Egyptian in the train station, the desire to be ‘‘taken home’’ by him, reveals the ultimate circularity of the victimizer/victim dichotomy in the novel. All gender and familial relations can be condensed into this single scene, and the

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figure of the oppressed is a masochist, ultimately playing a central role in the perpetuation of ‘‘everyday fascism.’’40

‘‘Sire’’: The Benevolent British Father Bachmann’s formalist critique of fascism in the Franza fragment is achieved via a dialectic of substitution and repetition that seems to offer no reprieve from the victim/victimizer dichotomy. Yet the novel offers, I suggest, a space for displaced nostalgia in the form of the figure of Lord Percival Glyde. Glyde reintroduces the emotion of nostalgia into Bachmann’s text. He represents the single alternative to oppressive male figures in the novel: the sadistic Jordan, Franza’s father, Dr. Ko¨rner, Franza’s white rapist at the pyramid, and even her brother Martin.41 He is purely a product of Franza’s past, the period of her adolescence that coincides with the moment of ‘‘liberation’’ [Befreiung] from the Nazis by the English soldiers. It is the spring of Franza’s life and the spring of liberation: ‘‘And besides, it was noon and the nicest of all springs. Franza had fallen into such a state that there was hardly any more room in her body for such excitement. They’re coming, finally they’re coming. It means peace.’’ (Book of Franza, 39) [Und Mittag war es und in dem scho¨nsten Fru¨hling. Franza geriet in eine derartige Erregung, daß sie in ihrem Ko¨rper keinen Platz mehr hatte fu¨r soviel Aufregung. Sie kommen, jetzt kommen sie endlich. Es ist Frieden] (KA 2, 178). Franza’s idealized memory of the English officer is represented in utopic terms. For example, laughter is a form of expression associated with the jouissance of an authentic feminine experience, and in Franza’s memory ‘‘[s]he laughed often’’ [Sie lachte viel] (KA 2, 178) at this time in her life. The arrival of the English soldiers coincides, in Franza’s fantasy, with the potential disappearance of the German Nazis from her world: ‘‘Indeed, she was convinced that the Germans would never be heard from again. They would retreat ever farther to the north and down the other side of the globe, passing from day into night and disappearing, or at least retreating to places with names like Kiel and Magdeburg.’’ (Book of Franza, 37) [Ja, sie war beinahe u¨berzeugt, man wu¨rde nie mehr etwas von den Deutschen ho¨ren, sie wu¨rden immer weiter nach Norden zuru¨ckgehen und von der Erdkugel herunter eines Tages ins Nichts verschwinden, oder zumindest in Orte zuru¨ck, die Namen hatten wie Kiel oder Magdeburg] (KA 2, 174–75). In Franza’s first meeting with the English officer, she must use English, a language that is

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foreign to Franza and that contains within it a utopian potential no longer present in German, the language of fascism: ‘‘Sire this village is yours.’’ Was that it? She spoke so clearly, as if she were standing in the back row and had to be heard at the podium. ‘‘We have no arms.’’ Wrong. Weapons were called something else, as she looked at him intently and said, ‘‘We have no Germans and no SS, the people has left’’ (was that right, or was it lived?) ‘‘the village because of fear.’’ And Sire and peace, this king, this first man in her life, showed consideration and understanding as well, and she ceased to recite. Later she would walk through the village accompanied by the captain and other soldiers, her own sense of wonder still there. (Book of Franza, 42)42

Franza’s nostalgic memory contains moments of the magic of alterity and hope. The English captain treats Franza with deference and affection. In Franza’s memory, he is a ‘‘king,’’ a fairy tale figure who points to a utopia that never was. The captain and his troops stand in for the ideal father and God: ‘‘Yet how did one properly greet these heavenly hosts?’’ (Book of Franza, 38) [Aber wie gru¨ßte man hinauf zu diesen himmlischen Heerscharen] (KA 2, 177). However, even the memory of utopia is couched in the language Franza has learned in the wake of occupations. For the adolescent Franza, peace can only be conceived as the liberation from one occupying body by another occupying body: the Nazis are replaced by the much more attractive and personable English soldiers. ‘‘ ‘Occupation.’ That was a word that Franza pinned her hopes on and which she carried around inside of her’’ (Book of Franza, 37) [Besetzen, das war ein Wort, an dem Franza herumhoffte und mit dem sie herumlief] (KA 2, 176). Already an idealized memory, then, as in the sado-masochistic scene at the Cairo train station, the notion of ‘‘liberation’’ [Befreiung] becomes linked to ‘‘occupation’’ [Besetzung]. The moment of ‘‘liberation’’ coincides with the re-occupation of Galicia by the English troops,43 and this period coincides with Franza’s fantasies of rape: ‘‘And ‘rape,’ that was another word that caused Franza to imagine things capable of taking away the spring, and since there was no one she could speak to, rape and armies turned into longed-for heroes.’’ (Book of Franza, 38) [Und Vergewaltigen, das war ein anderes Wort, unter dem Franza sich fru¨hlingszeitraubende Dinge vorstellte, und da sie mit niemand sprechen konnte, wurden Vergewaltigung und Streitma¨chte zu ersehnten Idolen] (KA 2, 176). Hence, the nostalgic memory of the arrival of Franza’s first love, Percival Glyde, is framed in a discourse that combines utopic fantasies with images of oppression and vio-

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lence. The ‘‘miracle’’ [Wunder] of liberation from the oppressive fascist past is conflated with the miracle of sexual awakening. Yet this fantasy is also articulated in terms of rape and sadism, so that Bachmann simultaneously ironizes the use of nostalgia in the text.44 Perhaps the most powerful signifier for nostalgia is contained in the name ‘‘Sire’’ that Franza gives Glyde. With this signifier, Glyde is inscribed into the role of ‘‘foreign’’ idealized father and lover. ‘‘Sire’’ stands for an idealized home outside of the Germanlanguage realms of Germany and Austria, for the space and time of nostalgia. Franza experiences her first kisses with this man who represents the only instance of perceived alterity to the wasted Heimat of Austria. Yet ‘‘Sire’’ simultaneously stands for the erotic fantasies of rape and occupation. In this sense, Franza’s language never quite frees itself from the hierarchical structures of her fascist past, and the idealized ‘‘liberator’’ slips into his opposite. The utopic memories of Franza’s encounters with the English captain are thus singularly idyllic (‘‘Franza glowed’’ (Book of Franza, 44) [Franza strahlte] (KA 2, 184)) and yet ultimately already determined by the grammar of fascism. When ‘‘Sire’’ leaves Galicia, Franza ceases to ‘‘glow’’: ‘‘With that, Franza’s first love came to an end, and she remained behind, with no afterglow, only dazed, the glow flickering out within her, as she stood amid the dust cloud that floated behind the manifestation of peace as it drove away’’ (Book of Franza, 45) [Damit endete Franzas erste Liebe und sie blieb zuru¨ck, in keinem Widerschein, nur benommen und das ganze Strahlen ho¨rte auf in ihr, sie blieb zuru¨ck in der Staubwolke hinter dem Frieden] (KA 2, 185). As the embodiment of ‘‘peace,’’ ‘‘Sire’s’’ departure leaves Franza in the dust of fascism and patriarchy that accompanies her the rest of her life. Nevertheless, ‘‘Sire’’ functions throughout the text as a nostalgic trope, a memory, if false, of an alternative to the rigidity of postwar Austrian modes of identity. During her travels to the Egyptian desert, Franza fantasizes about spiritual renewal in the ‘‘sanatorium’’ (Book of Franza, 89) [Heilanstalt] (KA 2, 248) of the desert, and this fantasy coincides with reflections on ‘‘Sire’’: ‘‘Sire, I will come’’ (Book of Franza, 90) [Sire, ich werde ankommen] (KA 2, 249). The same call to ‘‘Sire’’ is repeated following a hashish-inspired hallucination in which Franza imagines repairing her own split identity: ‘‘I have become two people . . . I must become one’’ (Book of Franza, 116) [Ich bin zwei geworden . . . ich muß eins werden] (KA 2, 283). This hallucination concludes with a fantasy of ‘‘Sire’’ as an alternative location to the split scene of postwar Austria: ‘‘Once more the eyes have to, once more the eyes have to open. I will fly

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again, I will come, Sire, I will come’’ (Book of Franza, 117) [Die Augen mu¨ssen noch einmal -. Einmal mu¨ssen die Augen aufgehen. Ich will wieder fliegen, ich will ankommen, Sire, ich will ankommen] (KA 2, 284). Although Percival Glyde himself is incapable of rescuing Franza from her radically limited existence in postwar Vienna, the idealized ‘‘Sire,’’ as a nostalgic memory of something that never existed, provides a fantasy of escape. Thus, the notion of ‘‘Sire’’ is ultimately only utopian in its function, but not in content. Indeed, Franza seems to reflect upon the artificiality of the construct of ‘‘Sire,’’ for when he leaves Galicia, she does not attempt to retain contact: ‘‘because for Franza it was somehow better to think that nothing more would come, that there was no point of dispatch or return address for Sire’’ (Book of Franza, 45) [denn fu¨r Franza zumindest war es besser, wenn nichts mehr kam danach, wenn es keinen Absender und keine Adresse fu¨r Sire gab] (KA 2, 186). The revelation of ‘‘Sire’s’’ identity as Lord Percival Glyde occurs at a conference in London which Franza attends together with her sadistic husband Jordan. There, she attempts to speak with her ‘‘Sire,’’ and it is clear that he does not remember her. As she leaves the conference on her husband’s arm, she contemplates calling Glyde in his hotel room: ‘‘she . . . debated if she should call him up and see him, for now she had a body. She still owed him that. No, not him, but Sire. Then she laughed, since neither Percival Glyde nor a captain in the army would understand her’’ (Book of Franza, 48) [und [sie] u¨berlegte, ob sie anrufen solle und zu ihm gehen, denn jetzt hatte sie einen Ko¨rper, und den war sie ihm noch schuldig, ihm ja nicht, aber Sire, und dann lachte sie, weil kein Percival Glyde und kein ehemaliger Captain in einer Armee sie verstehen wu¨rde] (KA 2, 189). Franza realizes that this captain, this Percival Glyde is a complete stranger to her. In this sense, Franza distinguishes between ‘‘Sire’’ and his actual manifestations as Glyde/the captain. While the latter figures ultimately fall short, the former is pure construct and hence ideal. Thus, ‘‘Sire’’ becomes ‘‘my Idol’’ when Jordan attempts to deconstruct Franza’s memory of the kisses with ‘‘Sire’’: ‘‘If I admit this, like in the dream, then it’s much worse, for then I die twice over, once as well for him, my idol’’ (Book of Franza, 71) [Wenn ich das zugebe wie mit dem Traum, dann ist es doch noch schlimmer, dann sterb ich zweimal, einmal noch mit fu¨r ihn, mein Idol] (KA 2, 216). The nostalgic figure of Percival Glyde is functionalized by the text and the figure Franza herself; he embodies the ideal of paternal benevolence only ultimately to reveal its constructedness. Bachmann’s intertextual citation of Wilkie Collins’s novel con-

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joins postmodern style and displaced nostalgia. In early drafts of the Franza fragment, Bachmann uses the name ‘‘Baronig’’ to signify Jordan (KA 2, 47). ‘‘Baronig’’ is a clear citation of Collins’s Lord Percival Glyde, who is himself a baronet. Thus, names in the text do not only belie individuality45; they likewise can serve to conflate figures with seemingly opposed characteristics. Not only does the intertextual reference shed light on the ambiguity of Bachmann’s Glyde, but the figure who should function as an alternative to Jordan comes literally to signify him. Once again, this kind of slippage both reifies the power structures and destabilizes them. In this sense, Percival Glyde is an intertextual reference that both opens up the text and suggests substitution and sameness. Nostalgia is recuperated in aesthetic citation via Glyde and simultaneously exposed as a flawed notion in Bachmann’s text. The affect invested in the figure of Percival Glyde is partially informed by a regressive desire for home and patriarchy, but its displacement onto the Victorian landscape renders this desire alienated and unrealizable. Although the Victorian milieu can serve as a site entirely foreign to the destruction and guilt defining postwar Austria, this displacement is ultimately ironized. The ‘‘magical’’ alterity of Victorian England is deconstructed through a cursory knowledge of Collins’s novel. Glyde, the baronet, turns out to be a charlatan and a sadist. Hence, Bachmann’s use of Collins’s complex villain in the Franza fragment returns both nostalgia and irony to Bachmann’s text.

The Virus of Crime Like the ‘‘case’’ of Franza, The Woman in White is a detective novel in which the goal is to root out evil and expose it to the world. Indeed, the reader of the Franza fragment is invited to view the text as a detective novel. The Case of Franza (Der Fall Franza) was one of the titles considered by Bachmann and her editor for the manuscript, and it preserves the detective quality while emphasizing the psychoanalytic narrative in the fragment.46 The introduction makes clear that the text is concerned with crimes and even murder, and the first part begins as Franza’s brother, Martin, receives a cryptic telegram from his sister that serves as the first sign to her whereabouts and mental state. Although he is ultimately unable to save the victim, his sister, he initially attempts to gather clues that will lead him to her. In an early draft of the fragment entitled ‘‘Martin and Rosi,’’ Martin displays confidence in his detective abilities: ‘‘Martin felt that he was the best detective’’ [Martin hatte das Ge-

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fu¨hl, der beste Detektiv zu sein] (KA 2, 44). In the ‘‘edited main version’’ [edierte Hauptfassung] of the chapter ‘‘Homecoming to Galicien’’ (‘‘Heimkehr nach Galicien’’) however, Martin is no longer confident but rather keenly aware of his incompetence as a detective. In the empty salon of the apartment that Franza shared with her husband, Martin ironically compares himself to a detective: ‘‘Meanwhile, Martin had stood there looking like a detective about to set down chalk marks or track down footprints or pieces of glass in order to remember precisely where each person had stood’’ (Book of Franza, 13).47 In his essay ‘‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,’’ Carlo Ginzburg traces the origins of the method of the detective, showing how the focus on the detail has become the mode of detection in modernity. Ginzburg describes the work of the art historian Morelli, who was able to detect fraudulent art works through an analysis of minutia such as the representation of a finger or an ear. This method is recuperated in the ‘‘scientific methods’’ of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, as each bases his analyses on the trace of a previously unnoticed detail.48 Yet Martin’s attempts at detailed detective work become absurd, as he considers the minute details that one would need to remember and notice in order to uncover the crime. He looks through the desk in the study and finds a number of letters and notes from his sister along with some shorthand that he decides must have been written by Jordan. Unable to read shorthand himself, he copies down the symbols, mimicking the work of a detective: Martin took out his fountain pen and tried to copy down the symbols in his notebook as best he could and stuck them in his pocket. He debated whether he should take the pages with him, then he decided on another solution, namely to leave them lying on top of the desk so that the Professor would see that he had had them in his hand. Despite this, he still felt the disadvantages of an incomplete education. No knowledge of shorthand, and here everything was in shorthand. (Book of Franza, 17)49

The irony of the situation is not lost on Martin, and he leaves ‘‘with this ridiculous sense of triumph’’ (Book of Franza, 18) [mit diesem la¨cherlichen Triumph] (KA 2, 147), having left a mess on the desk of his sister’s torturer: ‘‘without having told the Fossil his opinion of him’’ (Book of Franza, 18) [Ohne dem Fossil seine Meinung gesagt zu haben] (KA 2, 147). Martin not only has trouble reading shorthand; he consistenly misreads Franza. In an early draft of the ‘‘prologue’’ [Vorrede], the

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narrator describes Martin as a brother who is ‘‘confronted’’ with his incomprehensible sister: ‘‘Prior to his research trip to Northern Africa (though, apart from this, the book is set exclusively in Vienna) he is confronted with his older sister, whom he does not understand.’’ [Er wird vor seiner Studienreise nach Nordafrika (obwohl sonst das Buch ausschließlich in Wien sich abspielt) mit seiner a¨lteren Schwester konfrontiert, die er nicht versteht] (KA 2, 17). Early drafts of the novel explicitly present an incest motif between the siblings, but later drafts, including the ‘‘edited main version,’’ relegate such a relationship to the past, a time when the siblings had, at least in idealized memory, a relationship outside of a traditional familial hierarchy.50 As an adult geologist, Martin attempts to comprehend Franza in geological terms, yet he must admit that she is not legible to him: ‘‘and the polish of his sister, who was from modern times, he could neither draw nor recognize’’ [und den Schliff seiner Schwester, die aus der Neuzeit war, vermochte er weder zu zeichnen noch zu erkennen] (KA 2, 337).51 Martin is not literate in his sister’s discourse; his desire to help ‘‘heal’’ her is, rather, a desire that she speak a language comprehensible to him. Thus, even after her death, Martin is bewildered by the entire Egypt trip: ‘‘Egypt had been a mistake for him’’ (Book of ¨ gypten war ein Irrtum fu¨r ihn gewesen] (KA 2, Franza, 145) [A 330); nor does he ever comprehend the dialectic of oppression and agency contained in the ‘‘fall’’ [Sturz] that kills his sister: ‘‘but how had she fallen to her death after she had lasted so long in her illness, which he had begun to grasp, or at least more than the Fossil would ever grasp. He could not stop thinking about the senseless fall’’ (Book of Franza, 142) [aber wie hatte sie sich zutodgestu¨rzt, nachdem sie so lange durch eine Krankheit gereist waren, von der er am Ende etwas begriffen hatte, mehr jedenfalls, als das Fossil je begreifen wu¨rde. Er kam u¨ber den sinnlosen Sturz nicht hinweg] (KA 2, 326). As Sara Lennox has pointed out, Martin is climbing the pyramids—a traditionally male activity—at the time when Franza is raped.52 Martin can neither transcend gendered power dynamics and comprehend the nature of his sister’s ‘‘illness’’; nor can he adequately take on the role of idealized male power figure. In this sense, he embodies the weakest link in the line of male perpetrators, ‘‘a weak guardian’’ (Book of Franza, 102) [ein ohnma¨chtig gewordener Beschu¨tzer] (KA 2, 265), a failed detective. The impotence of the postmodern detective is perhaps attributable to the nature of crimes in the post-war period. Martin finds his sister, but he achieves this more through luck and insight than astute detective work, guessing correctly that Franza has returned

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to their childhood home in Galicien. The insolubility of modern crimes is even reflected in an excerpt from the ‘‘Paralipomena’’ to the ‘‘edited main version’’ of the Franza fragment in which Martin reflects upon his own field of geology: ‘‘Nothing is certain in geology; it can be like this, but it can also be different’’ [Es ist nichts sicher in der Geologie, kann so sein, kann auch anders sein] (KA 2, 352). Perhaps the nature of empiricism itself is called into question by the text, and Martin’s shoddy detective work is merely a sign of this crisis. A passage that is common to a number of the drafts of the ‘‘prologue’’ [Vorrede] to the Franza fragment states that the book concerns itself with the crimes of the age: ‘‘The book, however, is not simply a journey through an illness. Ways of dying also include crimes. This is a book about a crime’’ (Book of Franza, 3) [Das Buch ist aber nicht nur eine Reise durch eine Krankheit. Todesarten, unter die fallen auch Verbrechen. Das ist ein Buch u¨ber ein Verbrechen] (KA 2, 77). The Franza fragment encircles the metaphor of postwar crime as a virus: ‘‘the virus of crime . . . cannot simply have disappeared from our world twenty years ago just because murder is no longer praised, desired, decorated with medals, and promoted’’ (Book of Franza, 3–4) [der [sic] Virus Verbrechen . . . , er kann doch nicht vor zwanzig Jahren plo¨tzlich aus unsrer Welt verschwunden sein, bloß weil hier Mord nicht mehr ausgezeichnet, verlangt, mit Orden bedacht und unterstu¨tzt wird] (KA 2, 77). Here, the author calls into question the nature of crimes in postwar Austria: ‘‘For today it is infinitely more difficult to commit crimes, and thus these crimes are so subtle that we can hardly perceive or comprehend them, though all around us, in our neighborhoods, they are committed daily’’ (Book of Franza, 4) [Denn es ist heute nur unendlich viel schwerer, Verbrechen zu begehen, und daher sind diese Verbrechen so sublim, daß wir sie kaum wahrnehmen und begreifen ko¨nnen, obwohl sie ta¨glich in unserer Umgebung, in unsrer Nachbarschaft begangen werden] (KA 2, 77–78). As a post-Shoah, postmodern detective novel, the crimes in the Franza fragment are never transparent, always partially hidden. It is, then, not simply Martin who is a bad detective; the crimes themselves are simultaneously more criminal and less apparent than those that originally defined the genre. Theorists of the detective genre often locate Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ of 1841 as ‘‘the work that founded the genre.’’53 Marc Lits suggests that there are two narratives in the detective novel, since the crime has already taken place, and so the story must unfold in reverse:

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However, if we say that there are two narratives, we must also say that there are two ‘protagonists’ where the detective serves as a sort of double for the criminal. . . . Moreover, the crime must be exposed. That is, the perfect crime cannot exist in a detective novel, since such a crime would invalidate the very premise of the detective genre. (Lits, 128)

In Bachmann’s Franza fragment, the detective and the criminal have something in common. As a reluctant embodiment of male oppression through his consistent misreadings of his sister, Martin plays both the criminal and the detective. However, the second narrative thread offered by Lits is absent in Bachmann’s novel fragment, for the crime is neither solved nor clearly named. As articulated in the ‘‘prologue,’’ postwar, post-Shoah crimes are those that remain just under the surface of everyday activities, like a virus. According to Lits, the detective novel should produce a ‘‘single solution following a sequence of correctly organized reasoning. It [the detective novel] is, therefore, the playful counterpart of a nascent industrial society and, at the same time, ‘the bearer of a democratic hope since it ties the reader to the solution of the enigma’ (Dubois, Naissance)’’ (Lits, 129). This last quality of the traditional detective genre is hopelessly absent in the Franza fragment. The reader’s model for detective work is the inept Martin. Despite his scientific background, he does not come close to finding the solution to the ‘‘enigma’’ of Franza. Likewise, the roles in Bachmann’s texts are constantly shifting, so that the detective is the criminal, and even the victim embodies the dual roles of victim and victimizer through her masochism. Carl Malmgren attempts to differentiate between the mystery, detective, and crime fiction genres in order to make a space for the detective novel in the postmodern. He suggests that, while the mystery novel is structured in terms of ‘‘centeredness,’’ the detective novel is rather ‘‘decentered.’’54 Thus, in detective fiction, according to Malmgren, there is no ‘‘solid ground’’ or absolute center (Malmgren, 74), and evil itself is ‘‘banal’’ (91). Such a reading of the detective genre corresponds to the decentered quality of Bachmann’s novel fragment; however, Malmgren argues that the centering figure in the hard-boiled detective novel is the detective himself: ‘‘When the case is over, Marlowe’s inimitable voice is finally what stays with us; it’s the one thing we can count on’’ (109). While the hard-boiled detective novel provides a decentered context much like the postwar Austrian landscape of the Franza fragment, the hard-boiled detective himself is neither decentered nor banal. In Bachmann’s text, no such inimitable voice speaks. Through multi-

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ple perspectives and the lack of clear roles, the Franza fragment forecloses the possibility of representing the figure of the stabile detective. Perhaps Eco’s famous motto in the Postscript to the Name of the Rose is relevant here: ‘‘any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.’’55 The detection process is left to the reader, and, presumably, this reader is always already implicated within the postwar, post-Holocaust world that condemns one to engage compulsively in detection while necessitating that the ‘‘detectives’’ never successfully uncover these crimes. In this sense, Bachmann’s text revitalizes the detective novel genre in order to reveal its impotence in post-fascist Austria.

‘‘The Secret Theater of Home’’: The Woman in White Just as Franza desires to uncover the malevolent intentions of Jordan, so do the protagonists in The Woman in White work ceaselessly to uncover the sinister secrets of Lord Percival Glyde and Count Fosco. All figures, however, are themselves implicated in the crimes endemic to ‘‘the secret theatre of home,’’ as Collins called the family: Collins had a different phrase, ‘the secret theatre of home,’56 on whose stage sinister family dramas were played out. In his fictions, the domestic sphere is rarely a reassuring environment—it is characterized by the threat of violence, criminality, or the attack of physical and mental illness. His novels are rich with troubling households.57

Thus, for Collins, the crime is not something alien to the family but rather something that arises within the household itself. The threat is not outside of the familial sphere; it is, rather, heightened by the sense of entrapment that pervades the domestic sphere. The same can be said, of course, about Bachmann’s novel, which concerns itself initially with the domestic crimes that take place within the Jordan household and which are never explicitly named. In this sense, Bachmann’s novel invites the reader to interpret it as a sort of ‘‘history of the morals of the era’’ [Sittengeschichte der Zeit].58 In the notes to the critical edition of The Book of Franza (Das Buch Franza), the editors make the explicit link between Bachmann’s ‘‘history of morals’’ [Sittengeschichte] in the tradition of Honore´ de Balzac (KA 2, 473) and J. A. Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques of 1874. As the editors point out, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s notion of the ‘‘hidden crimes’’ of society resonated with Bachmann: ‘‘However,

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due to their refinement and to the corruption that they assume as well as to their superior degree of intellect, the crimes of the extreme civilization are certainly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism’’ (my translation) [Cependant, les crimes de l’extreˆme civilisation sont, certainement, plus atroces que ceux de l’extreˆme barbarie par le fait de leur raffinement, de la corruption qu’ils supposent, et de leur degre´ supe´rieur d’intellectualite´] (cited in KA 2, 474).59 Indeed, Bachmann’s discussion of the subtle crimes of the postwar period, while adding the historical element of Nazism, closely resembles Barby d’Aurevilly’s formulation in Les Diaboliques.60 The works of all three authors, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Collins, and Bachmann, share a concern with unnamed crimes committed in the domestic sphere. The intertext of Collins’s Victorian detective novel within Bachmann’s fragment produces both narrative ruptures and resonances. Bachmann’s Franza is, in some ways, the sister-figure to Laura Fairlie, the innocent and naı¨ve woman who is duped by Glyde and Fosco. At first charming and handsome, Glyde proves to be sadistic and calculating. In fact, he embodies many of the same cold and calculating qualities of the fascist Doktor Jordan—the father/torturer figure par excellence in Bachmann’s text. And just like Laura Fairlie, Franza Jordan experiences the complete mental and physical entrapment of a Bluebeard wife: ‘‘I was caught in this labyrinth, in the entire house, I mean. In our apartment’’ (Book of Franza, 81) [Ich war gefangen in diesem Labyrinth, in dem ganzen Haus, in unsrer Wohnung meine ich] (KA 2, 55). Although Franza escapes this physical jail in which she has been controlled, observed like a medical specimen, and raped via the medical clinic when she is forced to have an abortion, the psychic jail is permanent and leads to her partially self-inflicted death. In The Woman in White, Laura is first constantly observed and trapped in Glyde’s home after marriage and subsequently imprisoned in a mental institution. In her initial descriptions of Percival Glyde in Collins’s novel, Marion, Laura’s sister, pays close attention to his fussiness, the obsessive-compulsive tactical behavior of the anal, sadistic personality. Marion states that most men reveal something of their dispositions in their own houses which they have concealed elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already displayed a mania for order and regularity which is quite a new revelation of him, so far as my previous knowledge of his character is concerned. If I take a book from the library and leave it on the table, he follows me and puts it back again. If I rise from a chair and let it remain where I have been

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sitting, he carefully restores it to its proper place against the wall. He picks up stray flower-blossoms from the carpet, and mutters to himself as discontentedly as if they were hot cinders burning holes in it; and he storms at the servants if there is a crease in the table-cloth, or a knife missing from its place at the dinner-table, as fiercely as if they had personally insulted him. (211)

In his obsession with order and his controlled, sadistic treatment of others, Lord Percival Glyde provides no qualitative alternative to the structures of fascism and oppression in Bachmann’s text. Indeed, his tyrannical concern for order and detail mirrors rather the sadistic yet detailed work of Doktor Jordan, whose every move is calculated: ‘‘He was a great strategist’’ [Er war ein großer Stratege] (KA 2, 209). Yet Glyde’s tyranny is revealed to be a product of his vulnerability. The ‘‘authoritarian personality’’ is constructed to mask a lack. Through the tireless efforts of Laura’s sister Marian and Laura’s beloved, Walter Hartright, Glyde’s true secret is revealed: Glyde is, in fact, not Glyde, but the illegitimate son of his father, Sir Glyde. Percival Glyde is a bastard and no lord. Indeed, what is perceived by Laura and Marion as infinite power is revealed to be subservience vis-a`-vis Count Fosco, who is consistently able to manipulate Glyde. In fact, it is Fosco and not Glyde who has succeeded in creating a willing and doting servant out of the ‘‘once wayward Englishwoman,’’ his wife, who has been transformed almost beyond recognition by her relations (Collins, 217). Glyde is, thus, not the most powerful male figure in the novel. In fact, it is through sheer performance that Glyde convinces Laura to marry him and, more importantly, instills fear in Laura and her sister. Their lack of suspicion as to Glyde’s true identity, despite numerous clues in the novel, reveals their own collusion in the making of ‘‘Lord Percival Glyde.’’ Similarly, the ostensibly omnipotent Leo Jordan is created, in part, with Franza’s help. Having based his career on his research on the damage inflicted upon female concentration-camp inmates [Spa¨tscha¨den], Jordan has a deep secret to hide. While conducting research in the library for her husband, Franza finds that Jordan had published a document in 1941–42, contrary to his own claims that his first publications appeared in 1948. This fact calls into question his ideologically superior stance vis-a`-vis Nazi Austria: It would be wrong to say that Franza had had a strong reaction back then, to the contrary, she didn’t even think about it very hard, but went back two weeks later and removed the card, without researching

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whether this publication could represent a burden or not. She did not wish to know it, and even less to let her baronet know about this or to pose a question to him. (italics mine)61

Instead of bringing this document to light, Franza destroys the evidence of her own sham ‘‘Baron,’’ playing in this way a not insignificant role in the creation of a tyrant.

Post-Holocaust Nostalgia Bachmann’s novel engages with the notions of nostalgia, home, and history in highly complex ways. Within the postwar, post-Holocaust Austrian landscape, nostalgia must, of necessity, be located outside of the Heimat, within an entirely different literary tradition. However, a reflection on the displaced nostalgia suggested by the figure of Percival Glyde reveals this idealized figure to be little more than a foil. For Franza, ‘‘Sire’’ functions as a fantasy of ‘‘otherness’’; however, this ostensibly non-Austrian and non-fascist nostalgia is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be a mere displacement of fascist structures onto an ostensibly ‘‘pure’’ Victorian landscape in which sadism actually runs rampant. In contrast to the Franza fragment, Collins’s novel provides a melodramatic ‘‘happy end,’’ since the sadist Glyde not only dies but is stripped of his title. Yet Franza’s reiteration of the notion of ‘‘Sire’’ throughout the Franza book contains within it this very tension: although the oedipal model is retained in the fantasy of ‘‘Sire,’’ Glyde himself is stripped of his allure. The tension between nostalgia and critique in the text is mirrored in the representation of female identity as masochistic—a mode of desire that simultaneously retains and ironizes the oedipal model. Although the oedipal model primarily functions as a foil for critique in Bachmann’s text, the fragment nevertheless engages in moments of nostalgia for the fantasy of the benevolent father. As has been pointed out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the oedipal narrative has become so deeply ingrained in the Western cultural consciousness that it has become a hindrance to subversive/creative thought. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari have linked their ideas on the hegemony of psychoanalysis and ‘‘familialism’’ to the structures of fascism. In his preface to the book, Michel Foucault reiterates the parallelism ‘‘fascism/Oedipus’’ that serves as the thesis for AntiOedipus. For Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, the history of fas-

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cism is the history of Freudian desires, of the fixation on the nuclear family to the detriment of all other modes of community. In light of the attempt to think beyond a psychoanalytical/Oedipal framework, the Franza fragment both illustrates the critique of Deleuze and Guattari and reveals why German and Austrian literature cannot simply cast away the central figure of the father. The death of the father in Austrian and German postwar literature would generate not only nostalgia, but simultaneously the loss of a placeholder—a figure around and through whom postwar Germanlanguage authors can locate their critique of fascism. If the source of power is the father, and, by extension, God the Father, then Bachmann’s ironic representation of this figure through at times absurd substitutions reveals both a nostalgia for the paternal source of power and a subversive tendency to oversymbolize and thereby demystify the family in general. In an early draft of the novel, Franza reflects upon her desire for a father figure, suggesting that it is both unrealizable and available to her as projection:62 ‘‘And I had an unacknowledged desire for a good strong solid supportive something, I have never forgotten my father, whom I have never seen, and he looked the way I imagined him’’ [und ich hatte eine uneingestandene Begier nach einem guten starken festen haltgebenden Etwas, ich habe meinen Vater nie vergessen, den ich nie gesehen habe, darum ihn nie vergessen, und er sah so aus, wie ich ihn mir vorstellte] (KA 2, 50). This passage suggests that the family and, specifically, the father, is reified in the Franza fragment as a nostalgic trope; yet this form of nostalgia is not entirely regressive and unreflected. In a passage from an early draft of the text, Martin reflects upon the anachronistic quality of the family in postwar Austria: ‘‘Recalling this, the thought occurred to him that he really had not acted differently from the member of an ancient family, and that he had done so in a time in which families no longer existed and should no longer exist’’ [Dies repetierend, fiel ihm ein, daß er tatsa¨chlich nicht anders gehandelt hatte als der Angeho¨rige einer antiken Familie, und dies in einer Zeit, in der es Familien u¨berhaupt nicht mehr gab und nicht mehr geben sollte] (KA 2, 20). In this sense, the text can be said to reflect upon the moment of the end of the nuclear family: by engaging in nostalgia for this institution that functions most successfully as an absent ideal, Bachmann’s Franza fragment preserves affect for that which no longer exists. As the locus of both longing and critique in a post-Nazi landscape, the family occupies a central role in each of the chapters in this book. The family represents both the site of the scene of the

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crime and, in an idealized and displaced form, an imagined home elsewhere. While Bachmann offers both scenarios in the Franza fragment, the writings of Elfriede Jelinek embody a kind of fossilization of the barbarism of the post-Nazi family. In the following chapter, I will demonstrate how Jelinek’s works block all routes to nostalgia and longing, relishing rather what I call the ‘‘performative entrapment’’ of ceaseless historical critique.

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2 Provincializing Nazism: Elfriede Jelinek’s Performative Entrapment In 2004, THE SWEDISH ACADEMY SHOCKED MUCH OF THE LITERARY

world by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek. The awarding committee praised the author ‘‘for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliche´s and their subjugating power.’’1 The American response to the announcement ranged from apathy to outrage, and even some German and Austrian critics were shocked at the choice. Although Jelinek has accumulated numerous Austrian and German prizes for literature over the past three decades, she has never been a popular figure in her home country of Austria where she has often been perceived as a ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin,’’ an ungrateful critic of her homeland.2 Her plays and novels reiterate a Marxist-feminist critique of postwar Austrian culture and, perhaps most significantly, they bring to light what Jelinek sees as the ‘‘everyday fascism’’ of contemporary Austria and Germany, the residue of Nazism that persists in all facets of public and private life. Jelinek’s concerns, then, are essentially local, specific to those nations—Austria and Germany—implicated in Nazism and the Holocaust. And it is precisely Jelinek’s ultimately ‘‘provincial’’ critique of fascism’s residues in Austrian institutions, such as government, high culture, and family, that has most likely fueled the generally cold reaction on both sides of the Atlantic to Jelinek’s receipt of the most coveted prize in literature. The frustration on the part of many of Jelinek’s readers is, to my mind, a product of the author’s merciless negation of any positive affect. Jelinek’s project of bringing to light the historical roots of the ‘‘everyday fascism’’ she observes in Austrian culture is certainly indebted to Ingeborg Bachmann’s fixation with residual structures of fascism; yet Bachmann’s texts occasionally offer a point of emotional attachment via instances of displaced nostalgia. In the case 65

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of Jelinek, there is no space for nostalgic longing. In Jelinek’s works, the domestic sphere, ‘‘the secret theatre of home,’’ is invaded by the ‘‘virus of crime’’ in a manner articulated by Bachmann, yet the prison of home in Jelinek’s text is shut tight. In her 1989 anti-pornography novel, Lust, the Heimat is a hole [Heimat in ihrem Loch],3 and this hole is a foolproof trap. In Jelinek’s works, escape is not even imagined. Erika Kohut, the protagonist of Jelinek’s most famous novel, The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983), lives in a ‘‘bell jar,’’ and the text performs a circumscription of this space of entrapment both stylistically and in terms of the narrative. The Austrian Heimat, be it the city of Vienna or the idealized province, is consistently emptied of all charm by the ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin’’ Jelinek. She compulsively writes herself and her figures into a stiflingly claustrophobic space of home. In this way, Jelinek’s works emphatically foreclose affect. Nevertheless, Jelinek describes her own compulsion to write in emotional terms, as the burning desire to negate through writing: ‘‘I can only describe how I experience it—in this regard, what I write is obsessive, because it is steered by emotion. They [my texts] are not cool constructs but rather the impetus comes from a personal drive, that is to say again from a gigantic process of fetishization. My whole œuvre is nothing more than the wish to ban these things.’’4 Hence, Jelinek’s emotional urgency results in what I call ‘‘performative entrapment,’’ a process of representation and negation of the Austrian Heimat that disallows all modes of nostalgia. In this chapter, I outline the features of Jelinek’s aesthetics of ‘‘performative entrapment,’’ pointing to her conscious provincialism, a form of negative symbiosis with her Austrian Heimat. Her compulsive fixation with the narrative of Nazism as well as her complex practice of intertextual citation render her works virtually untranslatable. For Jelinek, the language of German is tainted with the crimes of Nazism, yet this level of signification is only legible to readers in Germany and Austria. In order to trace the culturally unique resonance of the narrative of Nazism within the Germanlanguage context, this chapter explores engagements with the trope of German and Austrian fascism within four diverse spaces: Jelinek’s 1983 novel of female masochism The Piano Teacher; Sylvia Plath’s narrative of 1950s female entrapment in the United States, The Bell Jar (1963), along with her poems from the posthumously published Ariel (written in 1962–63) that recuperate the motif of the Nazi father as floating metaphor; and Jelinek’s own reception of Plath and Ingeborg Bachmann in her drama Death and the Maiden V (2003). Finally, I turn to the Austrian director Michael

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Haneke’s post-Berlin wall, pan-European French-language film adaptation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, made in 2002. Jelinek cites Plath in her novel, while Plath seems to borrow from the postwar German literary archive, and Haneke’s film effectively de-provincializes Jelinek’s narrative through its representation of more global concerns. Likewise, the film reintroduces affect into Jelinek’s narrative via the interiority of the figures, the substitution of French for German, and the use of classical music from the Romantic period. The correspondences and dissonances between these texts point, once again, to the particularity of German-language concerns within a Euro-American landscape, suggesting that German and Austrian literature and film is fixed historically in ways that the aesthetic products of their neighbors are not. Jelinek, the ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin,’’ has perfected the art of self-critique, and her works offer up a cracked mirror to her Austrian and German readers.

Framing Elfriede Jelinek: ‘‘a major regional author’’? Published responses to the Nobel Prize decision in the international press point to the eminently local, even provincial, concerns of Jelinek’s work. In addition to an easily detectable anti-feminist tone in many recent articles on Jelinek, German-language and international critics express rather ungenerously the suspicion that Jelinek’s local concerns are unworthy of a prize celebrating literature from around the globe, literature of such quality that it should lay claim to a semblance of ‘‘universality.’’ In The Daily Telegraph (London), Joanna Kavenna has pointed out that the Nobel Prize in literature is often viewed precisely as an indication of the ‘‘universal’’ nature of the author honored: ‘‘[It] is rather like a United Nations of letters, a literary version of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is founded, like all Nobel prizes, on the belief in a universally intelligible project of global civilization.’’5 In this sense questions of translation and cultural particularity seem to vanish in the face of the ideals of global understanding. Indeed, as Kavenna suggests, Jelinek insists ‘‘on the stark limits set by language, the impossibility of flawless literary communication between nations.’’ Jelinek’s resistance to claims of universality have prompted many critics to view the 2004 Nobel award as indicative of a failure in judgment on the part of the Swedish Academy.6 Prior to the 2005 decision, the writer Knut Ahnlund cited Jelinek’s 2004 win as the impetus for his resignation from the Swedish Academy. In the newspaper Svenska Dag-

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bladet, Ahnlund called Jelinek’s work ‘‘unenjoyable, violent pornography.’’7 Following upon her receipt of the prize, the prestigious German newspaper Die Zeit called Jelinek’s work ‘‘regional’’: ‘‘Austria is a very small country and Elfriede Jelinek a major regional author.’’8 Although such assessments of Jelinek’s œuvre are clearly reductive, overlooking Jelinek’s brilliant montage and citational techniques, her unique wit and humor, they nevertheless point to a quality in her work that might indeed be called ‘‘provincial’’ within the global landscape of literary works. It seems to me that the works of Elfriede Jelinek, one of the best writers in the German language today, exemplifys precisely the singularly provincial nature of German-language literature and film, a provincialism that I locate in a fixation with the history of German fascism that can no longer be said to resonate outside of Germany and Austria. It is not only the German and Austrian Feuilletons that invoke, perhaps inadvertently, a perceived provincialism in Jelinek’s writing; Jelinek herself has responded to the currents of globalization and shifting notions of nation with increasing inwardness.9 In 1996 she announced that she would retreat from public life, ‘‘into an internal emigration,’’10 and she has recently claimed that she ‘‘can not travel.’’11 In fact, her ostensible agoraphobia and acute shyness kept her from attending the Nobel award ceremony in Stockholm so that she, like her work, is intimately bound to the Austrian ‘‘home’’ that she ceaselessly criticizes.12 Even her videotaped acceptance speech begins with an idyllic image of the Austrian countryside accompanied by sentimental music, underscoring Jelinek’s self-conscious provincialism and her satirization of the Austrian nostalgia for the province. In an interview with Anders Lindqvist immediately following the announcement of her receipt of the Nobel Prize, Jelinek emphasized her resistance to the generalizations of ‘‘world literature,’’ defining herself as a provincial author whose work borders on the untranslatable: ‘‘The problem is that one can only translate it with difficulty. So in this regard I am a provincial author [Provinzautorin].’’13 What I see as Jelinek’s performative entrapment, her conscious provincialism that denies all access to nostalgia, is crystallized in a photo that appeared in the December 2004 edition of the German literary magazine Literaturen. In the photo, Jelinek is framed within a window, seated in a building in ruins. The photo was taken from outside the window, and the windows are broken; a few glass shards remain. Outside the window is rubble, and the inside of the apartment is empty and abandoned. Jelinek looks directly into the camera with a serious face. Her hair is neatly tied into two braids

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1. ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek Framed by History.’’ Courtesy of Martin Vukovits.

on each side of her head. The braids encode Jelinek as a daughter of Austria, an aging version of the naı¨ve heroine of Heimat novels and films of the 1950s. But Jelinek is not seated on the meadow; nor does she gaze out from the arms of her hunter lover. She sits alone, framed by the bottom right quadrant of the broken window. The image is reminiscent of the framing in Helmut Ka¨utner’s The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mo¨rder sind unter uns, 1946), the first German film made after the end of the war. Here, the rubble of history, of the destruction and brutality of fascism, meets the reflected image of the ‘‘natural’’ Austrian woman. However, there is no nature and nothing alive in the room in which Jelinek sits; on the right side of the photo one sees some blurred green shapes that

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are most likely trees through the window on the other side of the neighboring room, but this space is completely removed from the figure of Jelinek. The photo likewise recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic 1822 painting ‘‘Woman at the Window’’ (‘‘Frau am Fenster’’), a romantic emblem for female longing. However, in Friedrich’s painting, the woman is pictured from behind as she gazes out the window so that the viewer is placed in the room with the woman, experiencing her longing with her. In the Literaturen image the viewer remains outside of the room, separated from Jelinek by rubble and the broken window. Whereas the viewer is not confined, Jelinek herself is trapped by the rubble that separates the eye of the camera from the apartment and the broken window that frames her. Behind her, vertical bars on a half-hidden window in the back of the room reinforce the sense of entrapment. The reconstructed Heimat woman is trapped, immobile, completely static in the rubble of Austrian history. The static nature of the image seems, in fact, to belie Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image [Dialektik im Stillstand], for the image represents rather fossilization than a dialectical constellation. The figure of Jelinek, the Austrian woman in braids, the ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin,’’ is circumscribed by ruins. The Austrian author to receive the most prestigious literary award in the world performs her own entrapment within a fossilized Austrian history. The photographer, the viewer, is placed outside of the entrapping space of history, a history no longer of concern to those not rooted in the melancholic spaces of Germany and Austria. The rubble evokes the destruction of World War II and stands allegorically for a fossilized history, a space that compulsively memorializes itself. Yet it memorializes itself without indulging in a nostalgic longing to return to the space of ruin. The narrative of Nazism, of the unrecoverable fall from grace of the Germans, is repeatedly deconstructed in the works of committed authors such as Jelinek, yet this narrative is decidedly fossilized and irrelevant, provincial, to the global camera, to readers residing elsewhere in the world. The image is simultaneously a reflection of and a reflection upon the nature of Jelinek’s particular mode of provincialism, the compulsive attempt to reveal and deconstruct the underlying forces of fascism.

Translating Nazism Sylvia Plath’s transposition of the narrative of Nazism onto the 1960s Anglo-American context and Michael Haneke’s de-politici-

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zation of this same narrative in his French-language transnational film invite considerations on linguistic and cultural translation. Jelinek’s works are notoriously difficult to translate, and this very quality of untranslatability can be linked, it seems to me, to the provincialism I ascribe to the best German-language literature. The American reaction to Jelinek’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature attests to the untranslatability of Jelinek’s works. Some critics, such as Stephen Schwarz of The Weekly Standard, are outright hostile; Schwarz sees Jelinek as an anti-American ‘‘Austrian ogress’’;14 other critics condemn her for ostensible failings in style and narrative content.15 Yet these presumed failings are generally indicative of misreadings caused, I suspect, by the difficulty of translating Jelinek’s syntax and her local narrative concerns into English and the American context. In the London Times Online a critic points to Jelinek’s ‘‘tortuous phrases (‘Erika is baked inside the cake pan of eternity’)’’—phrases that are perhaps untranslatable—and all but ridicules the Swedish Academy’s praise of Jelinek’s ‘‘musical’’ style.16 Ruth Franklin of The New Republic writes that The Piano Teacher is ‘‘written in a terse, almost simplistic style,’’ yet Jelinek’s German is anything but terse and simplistic;17 it is simultaneously poetic and deconstructive, packed with neologisms and citations, yet these citations rarely have global currency. Jelinek herself has said that her literature ‘‘needs the tone of the German language.’’18 Franklin’s misreading of Jelinek’s text is not limited to syntax, though, since she ultimately complains that the novel reveals the ‘‘disturbed mind’’ of the author. The English translation of Jelinek’s most celebrated novel is thus read by an American literary critic as unnecessarily obscene, a gratuitous representation of a masochistic woman and her claustrophobic relationship with her mother. This sort of puzzled disdain for Jelinek’s presumed unmotivated lack of taste is echoed by Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times who complains that the dark fantasies of the protagonist, Erika Kohut, are ‘‘artificial and contrived.’’19 Some critics echo Knut Ahnlund’s outright rejection of Jelinek’s work, simply deeming it ‘‘pornography’’ and Jelinek a ‘‘porn author.’’20 Here, as in the case of Franklin’s complaint of having to read the work of a ‘‘deranged mind,’’ the specific cultural context, the narrative underlying Jelinek’s representation of sadism and masochism—the critique of fascism—remains untranslatable. And without this underlying narrative, Jelinek’s tale of self-destructive femininity strikes readers as banal.21 What is more, complaints by critics such as Kakutani that Jelinek’s figures are ‘‘artificial and contrived’’ can be understood as a complaint about the lack of emotional access the reader

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has to Jelinek’s protagonists. Jelinek’s rejection of interiority and her merciless representation of the ugliness of ‘‘everyday fascism’’ is simply too emotionally empty for many readers. Even those American reviews of Jelinek’s work that praise the author generally miss the historical critique of Nazism and ‘‘everyday fascism’’ that structures the power relations in Jelinek’s works. John Freeman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has called Jelinek a ‘‘brave, bold, savage writer,’’ yet his description of The Piano Teacher only notes that it is ‘‘about obsessive behavior.’’22 While this certainly holds true, nowhere does Freeman mention Jelinek’s merciless depiction of residual fascism in Austrian high culture and the petitbourgeois family. Similarly, John Wray of the New York Times writes that ‘‘Erika seeks escape from her mother through sexual kinkiness.’’23 The author makes no mention of a historical or cultural context for Erika’s behaviors. The problem is not just that Jelinek’s writings are ‘‘too downbeat’’ or ‘‘grim’’ for American publishers, as suggested by Peter Ayrton, Jelinek’s English-language publisher at Serpent’s Tail.24 Nor do I believe that the central barrier to Jelinek’s popularity in the United States is her criticism of American military power and the Iraq War in works such as Bambiland (2004). Instead, the particular cultural moment that resonates in Jelinek’s works in German seems to resist translation, so that American readers have difficulty contextualizing her themes. The banality produced in the act of translation is revealed not only in American and English responses to Jelinek’s works. In AlAhram Weekly Rania Khallaf shows how Jelinek’s indulgence in ‘‘superficial, and sometimes very local themes’’ contributes to the difficulty of rendering Jelinek’s works into Arabic. According to Samir Grais, a professor of German literature in Cairo who translated The Piano Teacher, despite Jelinek’s focus on the issue of Austrian guilt, she ‘‘remains one of the most influential writers in contemporary world literature, a brilliant explorer of female sexuality, sadomasochism and human cruelty.’’25 German literature is not widely available in Arabic translation, and Grais attributes this to Jelinek’s fixation with recent Austrian history: ‘‘There are many reasons for this, the main one being that, since World War II, German authors have tended to focus on the war and Nazi guilt, things that have little relevance for Arab readers—this is the reason why Patrick Su¨skind’s The Perfume was so successful.’’ Whereas Su¨skind’s novel is generally read as a postmodern novel reflecting global or at least Western European confrontations with the pitfalls of modernity, Jelinek’s works are always essentially Austrian. Grais has likewise reflected on the specific problems in translating Jeli-

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nek: ‘‘She takes no interest in her work being translated and has expressed surprise that any such translation should’ve been undertaken at all—she thinks of her work as of no concern to non-German speakers.’’ Rather than insisting on the universality of her own works, Jelinek chooses a stubborn provincialism that always retains the centrality of history. Insofar as ‘‘serious’’ German-language literature is reducible, at its core, to the deconstruction of ‘‘everyday Nazism,’’ it lacks resonance for monolingual American readers (on a global scale). And it is precisely this German-language narrative concern, this repetition compulsion of sorts, that might be loosely called, borrowing from Guyatri Spivak, ‘‘cultural idiom.’’26 That is, the untranslatability of The Piano Teacher into American English is indicative of the historical fixity of German and Austrian national identity that distinguishes these localities from a more homogenous Western European or even Euro-American identity. The questions of translation and the difficulties of translation have been explored by theorists such as Spivak and Derrida. Certainly, a concern for the preservation of ‘‘cultural idiom’’ over and against homogenization, the reservation of a place for ‘‘diffe´rance’’ in the encounter between two languages, seems to privilege the notion of untranslatability or at least the retention of cultural specificity over literal translation.27 Naoki Sakai sees the goal of translation as the production of ‘‘difference out of incommensurability.’’28 Yet, it seems to me that what I call the ‘‘cultural idiom’’ of Nazism, the untranslatability of German-language literature into another hegemonic language such as English, points to a cultural specificity that is rather fossilized than resistant. In other words, the relative untranslatability of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher must be distinguished from the untranslatability of certain tribal cultural idioms of developing cultures.29 The problem of cultural translation takes on an entirely different ethical meaning when translating the idiom of Nazism into the American or Western European context. Here, there is no ethical compulsion to preserve a voice for the idiom of the original, to see this idiom as ‘‘capable of turning up in-and-as an-other’s difference and turning the right to signify into an act of cultural translation.’’30 Far removed from postcolonial concerns of language and idiom in migration and diaspora, translations of Jelinek can either ignore or re-signify the particularly Austrian idiom of historical critique. The fact that the idiom of the critique of fascism does not enter the French-language film adaptation of The Piano Teacher suggests that Germany and Austria represent an aporia within an ostensibly homogenizing Western Europe.

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Put another way, Jelinek’s novel might be untranslatable precisely for the reasons offered by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay ‘‘The Task of the Translator.’’ In his discussion on the translatability of the original, Benjamin suggests that form translates while content is untranslatable: ‘‘The lower the quality and distinction of its language, the larger the extent to which it is information, the less fertile a field is it for translation, until the utter preponderance of content, far from being the lever for a translation of distinctive mode, renders it impossible’’ (23).31 Content is always, Benjamin seems to imply, context specific, and cultural context is precisely that which cannot be translated. Despite their formal sophistication, Jelinek’s texts are firmly planted in the frame of the ruins of Austria’s encounter with Nazism, and this ‘‘utter preponderance of content’’ underlies any aesthetic innovation in her works. Thus, in the case of German-language literature, untranslatability suggests, once again, provincialism, the fossilization of national identity.

New Europe, Old Nazis These observations have led me to consider the place of the narrative of Nazism—and of German and Austrian national identities— within a global frame, and, more specifically, within the newly formed space of a united Europe. Contemporary thinkers such as Etienne Balibar see Europe as a ‘‘vanishing mediator,’’ a space of fragmentation whose only idiom is ‘‘the practice of translation.’’32 Jacques Derrida’s reflections upon questions of national identity and language in the new Europe lead him to propose a European philosophy of translation that would ‘‘avoid both the nationalistic tensions of linguistic difference and the violent homogenization of languages.’’33 Derrida’s wariness regarding heightened nationalism is surely informed by the recent history of the Holocaust, but he is likewise concerned about the ‘‘violent homogenization of languages’’ caused by globalization that could erase cultural particularity. Julia Kristeva’s anxiety about the ‘‘destruction of the Western subjectivity’’ reiterates Derrida’s fear that globalization will lead to the erasure of difference in Europe.34 In particular, Kristeva mourns the loss of national narratives that constitute national identities in a globalized world. As Kristeva puts it, globalization leads to a form of amnesia as national histories become increasingly irrelevant. While Western European theorists, such as Derrida and Kristeva, express anxiety in the face of the postmodern fragmentation of the

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European subject, post-colonial theorists, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, point to the residual hegemony of a homogenous European notion of modernity and history. Chakrabarty’s project reconceptualizes history and third-world national identities in a manner that would introduce breaks and nuances into the presumed seamlessness of European modernity. Hence, despite their different objects of interest, post-colonial theorists and contemporary European philosophers nevertheless agree on a unified European narrative of modernity. However, it seems to me that both schools of thought face a blind spot when confronted with what I see as the anomaly of the narrative of Nazism. What has been called the ‘‘caesura’’ of the Holocaust35 marks a historical break, Germany and Austria’s regression to pre-modernity. In this sense, Chakrabarty’s notion of a hegemonic European continuity of historical time meets its contradiction within Europe itself in the exceptional cases of Germany and Austria. Similarly, when confronted with the anomaly of Germany and Austria, Kristeva’s perceived crisis of European identity brought on by globalization and postmodern ‘‘forgetting’’ faces its own limits. There is, I would suggest, precisely a lack of ‘‘forgetting’’ within Germany and Austria, the spaces of the historical break. Indeed, it is this inability to forget that has shaped the relatively unfragmented national identities of Germany and Austria. German-language literature, as reflected in the works of Austria’s most celebrated author, Elfriede Jelinek, is not in search of a narrative; rather, the fixation with the residues of Nazism as manifested in ‘‘everyday fascism’’ freezes German and Austrian national identities in a decidedly unfragmented manner. In this way, Germany and Austria function as anomalies both for European theorists concerned with national fragmentation in Europe and for those postcolonial critics such as Chakrabarty interested in rethinking a perceived homogenous European historical narrative. In his considerations on the ethical potential of a newly united Europe, Derrida expresses a suspicion of ‘‘both repetitive memory and the completely other of the absolutely new’’ (Derrida, 19). His notion of the future incorporates a form of memory that is not fixed. As mentioned before, Derrida’s concerns thus resemble those of the historians Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch who argue that a resistance to postmodern contingency on the part of German historians is rooted in large part in the ‘‘teleological fixation with 1933.’’36 In this sense, it is precisely the constant warning against forgetting that characterizes German historiography at the expense, at times, of a ‘‘somewhat freer’’ relation to the past.37 Jarausch and

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Geyer’s call for a postmodern methodology in German historiography in 2003 seems belated in light of the presumed centrality of Euro-American postmodernism, but this belated debate underscores the exceptional and provincial workings of German-language history and aesthetics.

Against Nostalgia: Elfriede Jelinek’s Repetition Compulsion Germany and Austria engage in a unique manner in the modernism/postmodernism debate. I have referred here to a ‘‘narrative of Nazism’’ that seems to provincialize Germany and Austria, a critical narrative that disavows nostalgia and is repeated ad absurdum by authors such as Elfriede Jelinek. Indeed, a certain repetition compulsion and its overcoming have often been attributed to German postwar history and aesthetics. Relying, in part, on the Mitscherlichs’ groundbreaking study of postwar German mourning and melancholia, The Inability to Mourn,38 critics such as Dominick LaCapra and Eric Santner align the poetics and philosophy of postmodernism with the break with a repetition compulsion associated with the horrors of Auschwitz. Santner has defined postmodernism as the undoing of ‘‘a certain repetition compulsion of modern European history,’’ a repetition compulsion that ‘‘found its ultimate staging in Auschwitz.’’39 In this sense, the Holocaust is seen, as articulated by Dominick LaCapra, ‘‘as at least one more or less repressed divider or traumatic point of rupture between modernism and postmodernism.40 The Holocaust stands in for a historical break: In this light, the postmodern and the post-Holocaust become mutually intertwined issues that are best addressed in relation to each other. The question to be posed to the postmodern critique of certain presumed modern projects such as totalization and liberation then becomes whether or to what extent various postmodern initiatives constitute symptomatic intensifications of generalized disarray—at most the acting-out of posttraumatic stress—or, serving to some extent as an antidote, become ways and means of recognizing and reinscribing prevalent conditions so as to further the possibility of counteracting a fatalistic repetition compulsion and thus of responsibly working through problems. (Habermas is closer to the former construction of postmodernism and Lyotard at times to the latter.) (188)

Both Santner and LaCapra inscribe the Holocaust itself in a paradigm of repetition compulsion that is potentially interrupted by

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‘‘postmodern initiatives.’’ For Santner and LaCapra, then, the postmodern would return Germany and Austria to the global time of Europe. Yet this scenario is also too simple, as LaCapra and Santner are well aware. European theorists such as Derrida and Kristeva certainly mean the Holocaust when they fret about the dangers of ‘‘forgetting’’ in postmodernism, but the aesthetic output of Germans and Austrians after Auschwitz seems to indicate, as I have suggested, rather a fixation with history than the forgetting associated with postmodern ahistoricity. What is posited as the potential of postmodernism is its ability to move beyond a repetition compulsion. Yet it is not clear that the repetition compulsion represented in extremis by Auschwitz has been overcome in critically acclaimed literature such as the works of Jelinek. In fact, her work seems to embody a repetition compulsion as critique in both content and style. In this sense, it is precisely the lack of forgetting that transfixes time and renders literary voices such as Jelinek’s out of sync with a specifically European form of postmodernism. Germany and Austria’s rather fixed relation to the past is recounted as performative repetition compulsion in the works of Elfriede Jelinek. The narrative of Nazism and its residues serves as the primary story that pervades all secondary narratives. Jelinek’s best and most celebrated novel, The Piano Teacher, depicts entrapment—the entrapment of history, family, and gender. Along with her 1980 novel Wonderful Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten), The Piano Teacher represents a stylistic departure from earlier works such as the pop novel We Are Decoys, Baby (Wir sind Lockvo¨gel, Baby [1970]) since a semblance of realism can be attributed to both novels. In contrast to her radically experimental works of the 1970s, these novels depict petit bourgeois families in postwar Vienna with narratives that are only minimally fragmented. Yet the relative realism of these novels is limited to the level of narrative, for Jelinek’s figures have no interiority; according to Jelinek, ‘‘the psychological novel is dead.’’41 In a 1993 interview, Jelinek describes her figures as ‘‘stereotypes/cliche´s that are filled with language, and when they don’t speak any more, they are simply gone.’’42 Jelinek’s novels invite her readers to consider her figures in psychoanalytical terms, since they often focus on family relations, on sadism and masochism (Erika Kohut, the protagonist of The Piano Teacher, even takes the name of Heinz Kohut—a psychoanalyst who studied narcissism),43 yet such readings always fall short. Jelinek’s figures cannot be analyzed, for they lack interiority

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and resist affective identification. In this sense, Jelinek’s texts engage in postmodern style, but they are firmly grounded historically. Jelinek’s signature style is often lauded for its postmodern techniques of citation, intertextuality, and non-linearity. Numerous scholars have ascribed postmodern style to the author while emphasizing the socially critical nature of her writings.44 Critics have elucidated Jelinek’s style of excess and deconstruction,45 her use of metaphor and excessive referentiality through the use of word play, homophones, metonymy, and montage.46 Crystal Ockenfuss points to a certain excess such as the ‘‘proliferation of metaphor’’ in Lust (79),47 while Gabriele Riedle eludicates Jelinek’s technique of ‘‘Wortvermehrung’’48 (‘‘word multiplication’’) and Sylvia SchmitzBurgard archives Jelinek’s abundant use of da-compounds leading to an excessive referentiality in the novel Wonderful Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten) (217).49 Numerous critics have pointed not only to Jelinek’s intratextual referentiality but also to her extensive and ironic use of intertexts, especially to her citational play with classical German literature.50 For example, in The Piano Teacher Jelinek not only thematizes classical music culture and its hypocrisy via her scathing critique of the sadism and misogyny embedded within Viennese ‘‘high culture’’; she likewise rewrites certain passages from Wilhelm Mu¨ller’s The Winter Journey (Die Winterreise), which had been adapted by Franz Schubert, so that romantic striving is deconstructed as banal objectification and pornography. For example, Marlies Janz shows how Jelinek appropriates passages from The Winter Journey (‘‘Why do I avoid the paths where the other wanderers go, search out hidden bridges. I have done nothing, that would make people avoid me.’’) [‘‘Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege, / Wo die ander’n Wand’rer geh’n, / Suche mir versteckte Stege . . . / Habe ja doch nichts begangen, / Daß ich Menschen sollte scheu’n’’] in a scene in which the perverted Erika Kohut ‘‘avoids the paths taken by other wanderers’’51 (‘‘Sie vermeidet die Stege, wo die anderen Wanderer gehen’’)52 in order to observe couples copulating in the Prater.53 Anne Critchfield likewise reveals how Jelinek cites canonical German-language authors such as Goethe, Rilke, and Kafka.54 These citations are, then, playful, yet meant to reveal the brutality underlying the idealism of high art. As Erica Swales has suggested, Jelinek’s ‘‘ironically fractured intertexting’’ is predicated upon the considerable education of the reader.55 Yet it seems to me that Jelinek frequently cites the same texts, such as Mu¨ller’s The Winter Journey, or works that are so canonical within the German context as almost already to embody their own parody, such as Goethe’s ubiquitous poem ‘‘The

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Fisherman’’ (‘‘Der Fischer’’). In this sense, then, high culture becomes popular culture, and Jelinek’s style plays with the tenuous line between the two. Jelinek’s style is simultaneously excessive and repetitive. The excessive referentiality of Jelinek’s texts is balanced by a certain minimalism. Erica Swales argues that Jelinek’s prose ‘‘shifts between the metonymic and the symbolic’’ (442) via the motif of the chain (‘‘die Kette’’) that connects these two modes.56 The metonymic shifts and word plays are thus met by metaphorical repetition and circularity. Put another way, Beatrice Hanssen sees Jelinek’s work as embodying a tension ‘‘between essentialist and poststructuralist positions.’’57 For Hanssen, Jelinek’s ‘‘excess of language and speech’’ is meant to expose the violence that underlies Austria’s Nazi past (111). Thus, Jelinek’s playful use of language via ‘‘metathesis, homonyms, puns, neologisms, lexical sliding, and parataxis’’ (Hanssen 106) is culturally specific, aimed at revealing cultural violence. In this sense, analyses of Jelinek’s particular form of postmodern style should reflect the specific historical context of postwar/post-Holocaust Austria. For all its virtuosity, Jelinek’s prose is always also reductive.58 It engages in a stylistic repetition compulsion that mirrors its historical fixation with the narrative of Nazism. A dialectic of stylistic excess and repetition frames Jelinek’s articulated fixation with the narrative of Nazism, the performative entrapment of historical fixity. In her essay describing her aesthetic of exteriority, ‘‘I Want to Be Shallow’’ (‘‘Ich mo¨chte seicht sein’’), Jelinek iterates these aesthetics of repetition: ‘‘Nothing can be changed anymore and thus undermines the eternal repetition of That Which Is Never Quite the Same.’’59 In an interview, Jelinek has described the repetitive critique of gender oppression and violence in her works as compulsion: her work is ‘‘steered by emotion. They [the works] are not cool constructs but rather the impetus comes from a personal drive, that is to say again from a gigantic process of fetishization. My whole œuvre is nothing more than the wish to ban these things.’’60 Jelinek has described her writing as compulsion, as ‘‘a necessity to rip open compulsively that which appears intact.’’61 ‘‘But there is something that internally pushes me to do this: it has to have this density, it has to be intensified to the utmost degree. . . . I am driven to be a perpetrator while I write.’’62 Jelinek’s obsession with filling linguistic holes (‘‘I cannot bear linguistic idling anymore’’63) suggests a performative undoing of her explicit task of uncovering the truth of Austria’s everyday fascism. In the density of language is contained simultaneously the truth and its masks.

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Jelinek’s thematic repetition compulsion, the critique of ‘‘everyday fascism,’’ is perhaps most dramatically mirrored stylistically in her 1989 anti-pornographic novel of sex, Lust. This novel reiterates the mantra that sex is repetition, and that the woman is always the loser in the eternal, useless war of the sexes.64 In Lust sex is one more space where the brutality of fascism is realized in banal repetition: ‘‘And the holy Direktorial couple, in perpetual repetition, are on their way back to the penal colony of sex, where they can whine for redemption to their heart’s content.’’65 [Und das heilige Direktorenpaar strebt wieder, in ewiger Wiederholung, der Strafanstalt seines Geschlechts zu, wo es nach Erlo¨sung jammern kann soviel es will (Lust, 78).] Sex embodies, for Jelinek, precisely the banality of repetition, the lie of newness told to us by pop culture: ‘‘The novelty of this has worn off, unfortunately, since he did it the same way last time. So there you are, all skin and flick, and your desire is always the same old film! An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time because the electronic media and melodies have accustomed us to having something new home-delivered every day’’ (Lust, trans. Hulse, 101–2). [Leider ist es diesmal nicht ganz neu, denn er hat es vorhin genauso gemacht. Da seid ihr endlich in eurer Haut, und eure Lust bleibt immer dieselbe! Sie ist eine endlose Kette von Wiederholungen, die uns mit jedem Mal weniger gefallen, weil wir durch die elektronischen Medien und Melodien daran gewo¨hnt wurden, jeden Tag etwas Neues ins Haus geliefert zu kriegen (Lust,123).] In the interview with Meyer, Jelinek defines sex as repetition compulsion: ‘‘Sexuality, then, not as an anti-formula, but rather as parody of pornography, not as a source of unending lust varied with the help of fantasy, but rather as the return of that which is eternally the same.’’66 Jelinek’s scepticism is reminiscent of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of ‘‘the culture industry’’ as the structural equivalent of fascism.67 The desire for the new is produced by the culture industry itself, and this desire is constructed so as never to be sated. In Lust and The Piano Teacher, the domestic sphere is defined by the repetition of the same,68 and this repetition suggests the oppression of time: ‘‘And the whole thing has been nothing but time passing’’ (Lust, trans. Hulse, 167) [Es ist nichts gewesen als Zeit (Lust, 205)]. The flowing of Erika’s blood in The Piano Teacher is the product of her repetitive self-mutilation: ‘‘A small puddle forms. And the blood keeps running. On and on. It runs and runs and runs and runs’’ (The Piano Teacher, 44) [Eine kleine Lache bildet sich. Und

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es rinnt immer weiter. Es rinnt und rinnt und rinnt und rinnt (Die Klavierspielerin, 45)]. This repetition is mirrored in the domestic space in which Erika, her mother, and her sadistic lover Klemmer are confined: ‘‘Klemmer laughs. Mother scratches. The TV screeches. The door is shut. Erika is still. Mother laughs. Klemmer scratches. The door screeches. The TV is off. Erika is’’ (The Piano Teacher, 223) [Klemmer lacht. Die Mutter kratzt. Der Fernseher kreischt. Die Tu¨r ist zu. Erika ist still. Die Mutter lacht. Klemmer kratzt. Die Tu¨r kreischt. Der Fernseher ist zu. Erika ist (Die Klavierspielerin, 225)]. The dialectic of activity and stasis is represented as repetition, and the sentence culminates in Erika’s ontology; she is repetition.69 As in a perverse realization of nostalgia, repetition retains the Heimat of the domestic sphere as a prison (‘‘home to its hole,’’ Lust, trans. Hulse, 109) [Heimat in ihrem Loch, Lust, 131]. The future will never arrive (‘‘When will the time that lies ahead finally begin?’’ Lust, trans. Hulse, 189 [Wann beginnt endlich die kommende Zeit? Lust, 232]), and the past never was (‘‘What was appears to have been nothing,’’ Lust, trans. Hulse, 191 [Was war, scheint nichts gewesen zu sein, Lust, 235]).

‘‘Culture of Death Germany/Austria’’ Jelinek’s experimental prose is thus firmly tied to history and to a fixation with erasing historical forgetting. Indeed, Jelinek herself has referred to the repetition compulsion of her work that reflects German and Austrian aesthetic concerns after Auschwitz. If one picks up German soil, it turns to ashes in one’s hand. That is my eternal theme. It is completely compulsive. I have the feeling that when one lives here—that is this Adorno quote—of course poetry after Auschwitz is possible, but no poetry without Auschwitz is possible. Robert Schindel, whom I know very well, an old friend of mine, has written a novel called Gebu¨rtig. He has said he wanted to work through it once so that he wouldn’t have to speak about it anymore, which is his good right as a victim. But I have the feeling I actually have to speak about it always. (Berka 137)70

Jelinek’s repetition is thus a product of history, the ethical compulsion to retell the story of Nazism. Thus, although Jelinek’s fixation with the narrative of fascism ties her to German authors such as Heinrich Bo¨ll, Gu¨nter Grass,71 and numerous others, she is specifically concerned with Austria’s late admission of guilt concerning

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Nazi crimes. In an interview, Jelinek claims that Germans were forced to face their crimes while the Austrians avoided taking responsibility officially until 1992:72 The official statement from Vranitsky concerning the participation of Austrians in fascism came now, this year. One needs to imagine this. That was the first time that Austria admitted anything officially in a statement from the government. I don’t know what the cause of this is, perhaps Catholicism, but the Austrians who, in terms of population, had a proportionally large number of criminals in the Third Reich, have never worked through this. (Berka, 136)73

According to Jelinek, ‘‘there are two countries that were able to evade responsibility (for crimes against humanity after World War II): Austria and Japan. Of course, Hiroshima came to the aid of the Japanese, whereas the Austrians simply carried it off’’ (Meyer, 47).74 Jelinek’s critique of what she sees as Austria’s particular relation to Nazism is articulated as a driving force behind her writing.75 The more the Austrians seem to reject their responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the stronger is Jelinek’s compulsion to reiterate the narrative of Nazism. Perhaps it is Austria’s belated recognition of its fascist past that is reflected quantitatively in authors like Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Jelinek, and her successors such as Marlene Streeruwitz. These authors reiterate cultural criticisms similar to those made by German authors, yet Jelinek’s writings seem to be paradigmatic for an exaggerated form of repetition compulsion particularly prevalent in Austria. It is as if Austria, in its state of repression, has become an especially dense repository for Nazi guilt. In its rejection of national nostalgia, Austrian ‘‘antiHeimat’’ literature is not qualitatively different from the critical literature of canonized German authors such as Heinrich Bo¨ll and Gu¨nter Grass; however, the prevalence of this form of literature in contemporary Austria reflects a particularly heated fixation with the legacy of Nazism. Jelinek’s scathing critique of Austria in her works negates the emotion of nostalgia. Indeed, her texts likewise lack the nostalgia for a multicultural Habsburg Empire endemic to some of Bachmann’s works. Jelinek seems likewise uninterested in the notion that Austria might be historically less invested in nationalism than Germany due to the multicultural nature of Habsburg Austria leading into World War I.76 Rather, for Jelinek, it is the Germans who, having committed the same crimes as the Austrians, are neverthe-

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less one step ahead in their ability to represent historical shame in their art. The Germans have at least repented ceaselessly in the area of culture, of course not in the courts and the medical establishment where certain perpetrators could enjoy a peaceful old age, but in the cultural arena they have created many critical films, tv shows, radio plays, etc. In Austria everything was quickly swept under the rug. This Ucicky, the director of ‘‘Heimkehr,’’ had already again filmed in the fifties an outspokenly pacifist film with the same actors, the same producers, just turning everything around. This very specific repugnant Austrian variety of lying. (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 47)77

Jelinek is referring here to the Austrian film Heimkehr produced in 1941, starring Paula Wessely, an actress who played in Nazi films in the forties and, according to Jelinek, whose career was propelled by a Jewish director who was forced to emigrate (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 47). In Heimkehr Wessely speaks the line, ‘‘You know, of course, we don’t purchase from Jews’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 46). Jelinek insists, without clear evidence, that the Austrian Heimkehr is the ‘‘worst Nazi propaganda film in film history,’’ worse than the infamous Hitlerjunge Quex (Germany, 1933) and Jud Su¨ß (Germany, 1940), the latter being the only film for which a director was tried for crimes against humanity after the war. Jelinek’s insistence on the particularly heinous nature of an Austrian contribution to this genre is likely rather a polemical device than historically accurate. The Germans also produced the extremely distasteful Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940), for example, a film that, like Jud Su¨ß, focused explicitly on the inferiority of Jews. In her zeal to pinpoint a particularly Austrian type of denial, Jelinek overstates her case. The committed ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin’’ even valorizes a presumed German repentance for her purposes. Although the above statements were made in the early 1990s, Jelinek’s stance vis-a`-vis Austria continues to be informed by her fixation with Austria’s repressed past. Her resistance to the now deceased Jo¨rg Haider’s reactionary ‘‘Freedom Party,’’ her close relations with German publishers, and her continued interest in the performative hypocrisy of the Austrian tourism industry, for example, attest to her rigid stance. The Maastricht Treaty and the growth of the European Union seem to have influenced Jelinek’s writing minimally. In many ways, though, Jelinek’s fixation with the narrative of Nazism is dependent upon a notion of ‘‘Germanness’’ that includes both Germany and Austria. She retains the sense that this ‘‘culture of death Germany/Austria’’ is ‘‘not like other nations’’

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(Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 49), since these countries are not able to refer to their own great dead citizens ‘‘but rather to the dead whom they have produced themselves’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 49).78 In this sense, the two nations form a kind of twoheaded monster. Indeed, Jelinek’s repeated critique of the Austrian ‘‘home’’ is rooted in the belief that the ‘‘provincial fascist German language was never de-Nazified but rather has seamlessly perpetuated itself in the Heimat kitsch of the fifties up until and including ‘Schwarzwaldklinik’ ’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 44).79 For Jelinek, the language of fascism continues to pervade the space of the German and Austrian home and cultural and bureaucratic institutions. The reference to the soap opera ‘‘Schwarzwaldklinik’’ underscores the shared language and cultural histories of Germany and Austria. Viewed in both Germany and Austria, the series is reminiscent of Heimat films of the 1950s that mythologized the Bavarian and Austrian Alps and the romances of those naı¨ve figures living close to nature. Just as Heimat films served to repress an undesirable past, so too does the ‘‘Schwarzwaldklinik’’ continue this postwar aesthetic tradition of petit bourgeois entertainment. Jelinek’s critique of contemporary Austrian fascism often focuses on the petit bourgeois family. According to Jelinek, the petit bourgeois (‘‘Kleinbu¨rgertum’’) class emerged from the brain drain of years of Nazism as the ruling class. Fascism ‘‘made these petit bourgeois classes into the ruling and normative class’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 22),80 a class that is defined, for Jelinek, by ‘‘lack of culture’’ [Kulturlosigkeit]. The petit bourgeois class ‘‘spawned fascism and sustained it and is still the ruling class’’ and continues to define German and Austrian culture with its fixation on petty oppression and social climbing: The petit bourgeoisie, which helped produce and support fascism and still is the ruling class today, in the end only wants to follow its own interests in social climbing. The ruling class of the petit bourgeois brought along with it this brain drain, which was caused by fascism’s extermination of the Jewish intelligence and also the poor Jews. That which is German (‘‘das Deutsche’’) is still infected by this class with its hope for social climbing and fear of social regression.’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 21).81

The seeds of fascism are, in Jelinek’s texts, propagated via the petit bourgeois Austrian family, and it is precisely this family that Jelinek portrays in novels such as Wonderful Wonderful Times, The Piano Teacher, and Women as Lovers (Die Liebhaberinnen) (‘‘once again love had to fail and brutality win’’).82 The father in Wonderful Won-

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derful Times (1980), Otto Wittkowski, is a blatant cliche´, a former SS officer who begins to abuse his family ‘‘on the very day the War was lost. Up till then, Father has been beating sundry foreigners. Now only Mother and the children were at his disposal.’’83 His abuses are also sexual: he performs rape scenes with his wife that he also films so that sex is, once again, represented as repetition compulsion.84 Within Jelinek’s œuvre, sex is subsumed under the rubric of fascism, as yet another manifestation of its residue. In this sense, gender relations, along with all human relations, are circumscribed by the logic of fascism. In her short essay on Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘‘War by Other Means’’ (‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln,’’ [1984]), Jelinek quotes Bachmann’s oft-cited mantra: ‘‘Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.’’85 As mentioned earlier, Jelinek goes on to make the explicit link, already made by Bachmann in her Todesarten (Ways of Dying) texts, between the victims of fascism, the Jews, and women, the prisoners of the domestic sphere: ‘‘In fascism, woman—if she dares to step beyond her role as birthmother and nurturer—becomes a contagious illness, enemy on the inside, ‘rotting in increments’ (Ce´line). She becomes the general spoiler, the enemy on the outside. Like the Jews’’ (312).86 The family is the placeholder for fascism, and woman is its victim. One could perhaps amend Bachmann here to define Jelinek’s aesthetic: Fascism is the first thing in the text, an all-encompassing and stifling logic. In this way, Jelinek’s writings engage in a dialogue not only with the work of her fellow Austrians such as Bachmann (or Thomas Bernhard and Marlene Streeruwitz), but also with German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder whose films ascribe to a similarly claustrophobic notion of everyday fascism.

A Father is Being Beaten: The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin) In The Piano Teacher, Jelinek’s most acclaimed work to date, the space of the postwar petit bourgeois Austrian family is stiflingly claustrophobic. It is this novel that is viewed as Jelinek’s central work.87 Here, the ubiquitous Nazi father is absent, but the structures of fascism remain entrenched in the space of home. To my mind, The Piano Teacher tests the limits of a fascist logic, since it is the father who, as in Wonderful Wonderful Times, stands in for Nazi oppression, for the ‘‘everyday fascism’’ that pervades German cultural institutions. The Piano Teacher depicts the dramatically re-

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stricted life of a middle-aged piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut, who lives with her mother in an apartment that embodies Jelinek’s petit bourgeois hell. Erika engages in erotic power games with a student, Walter Klemmer, who rapes her at the end of the novel. Erika’s father is absent from the domestic scene: Jelinek’s novel stages the defining moment of the death of the father/Nazi as anticlimax, as the family father is escorted away to an insane asylum. In its perfected deconstruction, The Piano Teacher marks a point at the end of a repetition compulsion. The novel stages the symbolic death of the father, yet a structure of oppression remains, and nostalgia is entirely absent. ‘‘Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?’’88 Roland Barthes’s analysis of narrative structure could be stated in another way: If there are no longer oedipal desires, then what will replace these? Or, if a story is told outside of the psychoanalytic construct, can it be properly interpreted and pleasurable? Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher revives the crucial elements in the oedipal family while emptying the model of its ubiquitous desires and affects. Mother, daughter, and father—absent or present—provide the focal points of a narrative devoid of desire. Potentially erotic moments between the figures are revealed to be mechanical at best. As a girl, Erika Kohut shaves her weak and impotent father and later uses the same blade in acts of self-mutilation. The masochistic rituals, however, yield neither pleasure nor satisfaction. As a middle-aged woman, Erika attempts an incestuous ‘‘rape’’ of her mother, a moment that seems to represent either a scenario of oedipal role playing or a return to a pre-oedipal site of pleasure; on closer inspection, however, the scene proves to be an exploration of the body as lack and the lack of desire in the text. In this sense, Jelinek’s novel simultaneously recuperates and negates the traditional plot of bourgeois literature—the oedipal scene and its repression. Jelinek’s critique of the remnants of fascism in the petit bourgeois nuclear family is thus realized and exposed as a critical construct in The Piano Teacher. In the first paragraph of the novel, the father’s role is emphatically declared to be purely symbolic: ‘‘The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, the father exited’’ (3). [Nach vielen harten Ehejahren erst kam Erika damals auf die Welt. Sofort gab der Vater den Stab an seine Tochter weiter und trat ab. Erika trat auf, der Vater ab (Die Klavierspielerin, 5).] Already in the beginning of the novel, the phallus is exposed to be an empty signifier so that the role of the father can therefore be

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taken over by any given figure. Indeed, Erika herself receives the rod at this point, and her masochistic games of control are a very literal performance of the internalization of the role of the father/ phallus. The metonymic value of the rod is also transferred to the razor blade, the fetishized tool with which Erika engages in selfmutilation: No sooner does the sound of the closing door die down than she takes out her little talisman, the paternal all-purpose razor. SHE peels the blade out of its Sunday coat of five layers of virginal plastic. She is very skilled in the use of blades; after all, she has to shave her father, shave that soft paternal cheek under the completely empty paternal brow, which is now undimmed by any thought, unwrinkled by any will. (86)89

The razor blade had not only belonged to Erika’s father; it is still the ‘‘paternal’’ blade, the phallus that has the power to seduce and deflower her. Indeed, the temporality of the passage performs the now of the present tense. If one were to rely upon the chronology of the text, then Erika’s father is already an absent signifier in her life. Earlier she had informed the piano student who pursues her, Walter Klemmer, of her father’s tragic descent into madness and presumed death at the psychiatric institution ‘‘Steinhof.’’90 Yet the narrative chronology is disrupted by the use of the present tense in this passage. Although the novel suggests that the father has long been locked away in the asylum, here the father is revealed to be both present and absent. The talisman, the razor blade, is inextricably linked to the father who is always present in the presence of the blade. Yet this same father is also always absent; he is a shell, signifying paternity while simultaneously emptied of those characteristics—power, a will, and the ability to inflict pain—that would continue to ensure his role as the ideal Nazi father along the lines of Bachmann’s fathers. Erika’s father fulfills the most rudimentary of paternal duties before he is dismissed as otherwise superfluous to the narrative. In this sense, the father is stripped down to his most basic masculine function: his capacity to impregnate Erika’s mother: Many years ago, in this very same bed, desire led to sacred motherhood; and desire was terminated as soon as that goal was achieved. A single ejaculation killed desire and created a space for the daughter. Father killed two birds with one stone. And killed himself with the same stroke. Because of his internal indolence and weak mind, he was

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unable to follow through on the consequences of his ejaculation. (231)91

Erika’s conception is represented as the only moment of sexual desire in the text. The paternal force is thus reduced to this single ejaculation, and this one moment is enough to secure a symbolic place for the father. Desire is defined here in terms of masculine desire—a product of the phallus. However, the above passage humorously revives the symbol of the phallus only to expose it as a caricature. The description of Erika’s conception parodies an Aristotelian model for reproduction in which the male sperm provides the spirit and the female womb is conceived as a mere vessel. However, in this case the male principle is weak of mind and body. Reproduction is thus not the work of a genius, but rather the accident of a weak man. The father’s function as empty signifier is reiterated in the farewell trip to the asylum. The local butcher drives the Kohut family to the institution, and numerous comparisons are made between the father and various types of meat and Wurst: After all, they [mother and daughter Kohut] have just lodged some very precious flesh and blood in an overcrowded dormitory, for which they spent precious money. The butcher shouldn’t believe that it was easy for them. A piece of them went along and remained in the home. Which piece, the butcher asks. (96–7)92

The loss of the father is revealed to be as tragic as the loss of an expensive piece of meat. The father naturally resists being moved into the institution, but his own will is no longer effective: ‘‘Nevertheless, Father instantly tries to get away when they put him to bed, but he is promptly apprehended and forced to remain. How else would the family get rid of their trouble maker, who disrupts their comfort . . . ?’’ (95): [Der Vater strebt dennoch sogleich wieder fort, kaum daß man ihn in die Ablage getan hat, er wird aber arretiert und zum Bleiben geno¨tigt. Wie beka¨me sonst seine Familie den Sto¨renfried ihrer Behaglichkeit los . . . ? (Die Klavierspielerin, 97).] The imprisonment of the father is thus not meant to liberate the family from the father figure as jailor. The Kohut women do not desire liberation but rather the undisturbed comforts of the petit bourgeois home. The transfer of the father to the asylum is entirely devoid of sentimentality or nostalgia; it is a capitalist exchange that benefits both parties: ‘‘One lives from his coming, the other from his going and never coming again. So long, it’s been good to know

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you. But all good things come to an end’’ (95). [Die einen leben davon, daß er zu ihnen kommt, die anderen davon, daß er gegangen ist und ihnen nicht mehr vor Augen kommt. Aufwiedersehn, es war so scho¨n. Doch einmal endet alles (Die Klavierspielerin, 97).] The father’s body is dumped unceremoniously by the Kohut women, and this moment, placed almost in the center of Jelinek’s novel, seems to point to a logic beyond the fascist father, a symbolic shift from an oedipal narrative to something more playful or postmodern, a space in which the narrative of Nazism is left behind. Yet what Jelinek offers, she quickly disavows. The removal of the father, a potentially important literary event, is merely anticlimactic in The Piano Teacher. Alternatives are never imagined in the text. Instead, with the father’s removal, Jelinek’s novel retains the same narrative of everyday fascism but without any clear victims or perpetrators. The reduction of the ubiquitous fascist father to his most symbolic functions as phallus (‘‘piece of flesh,’’ razor blade) and sperm (‘‘single ejaculation’’) ultimately castrates the figure while retaining the structures that define him.93 Herr Kohut is a placeholder embodying the minimum criteria for his role. He completely lacks the will and rationality of the ideal father. Erika and her mother leave him at home when they go to the movies in order to spare, as Jelinek so brilliantly puts it, the father’s last ejaculation of rationality: ‘‘To economize even more, they left Father at home. In this way, he could also save the final vestige of his mind, which he didn’t want to waste [to spend; literally: to ejaculate] at the movies’’ (199). [Zuhause blieb der Vater, um noch mehr Geld zu sparen und, im Fall des Vaters, auch den letzten Verstandesrest, den er nicht gerade in einem Kino ejakulieren wollte (Die Klavierspielerin, 200).] In the case of Herr Kohut, the ideal masculine qualities of reason and spirit, the force that causes conception, are conflated. In interviews, Jelinek has talked about her own father who, like Erika’s father, was weak and slowly lost his mind; Jelinek’s father was, as Adolf-Ernst Meyer asserts, ‘‘anything but a tyrant’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 50). In response, Jelinek reiterates the gravitas of the father even in his state of castration: That’s right, but in a certain way, he was [a tyrant], after all. He kept the family occupied through his weakness, through his extremely neurotic constitution, into which his illness turned seamlessly; through his moods, through his silence, which lasted for days and weeks and which he used to punish the family. (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 50)94

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Despite her claims that her own mother was ‘‘phallic,’’ Jelinek nevertheless insists on the structural place for a ‘‘paternal agency’’ (‘‘va¨terliche Instanz’’): So, on the one hand, there was this role switching, and on the other hand, there was the paternal agency. . . . That is, on the one hand, it was a role switching, on the other hand, this father of course hovered like a dark shadow above the family. Like something that could not take on the fatherly role in a conventional sense, but which after all determined everything through its silence. This withdrawal of the father apparently is something terrible for girls. In this context, I always think of Bachmann, who, in Malina, imagined the paternal rape, which surely did not take place. (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 50, 51)95

Despite her attempt to read gender roles in anti-essentialist terms, Jelinek nevertheless falls back on an almost idealized notion of paternity even in its drastically weakened form. It is as if the oedipal complex is invincible, even when the artificiality of the construct is made evident. Even the weakest of fathers has the potential to punish through his disappearance, to serve as a fantasy of punishment. The potentially punishing oedipal father in The Piano Teacher has been castrated and blinded: ‘‘Father, going blind, but safely guided, goes toward his future home after leaving his hereditary home’’ (93). [Der Vater strebt blindwerdenden Auges, doch sicher gefu¨hrt, sein zuku¨nftiges Heim an, nachdem er sein angestammtes Heim soeben verlassen hat (Die Klavierspielerin, 95).] The blinded father has passed on his sight, his field glasses, like the rod, to his daughter, who uses them to objectify copulating couples in Vienna’s Prater park.96 The blind father is reminiscent not only of the punished Oedipus but also of Lust, Jelinek’s self-described counter text to Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928). Jelinek claimed, though, that the task was impossible, ‘‘because a feminine language simply does not exist for this, . . . because during the moment in which I describe sexuality, I simply do not want to use this men’s language. That is a discourse of domination that has to be broken’’ (Berka, 128).97 Critics have nevertheless pointed out that Jelinek cites the metaphor of blindness and sight at the heart of Bataille’s erotic text and which the narrator links to his father in an epilogue entitled ‘‘Coincidences.’’98 ‘‘When I was born, my father was suffering from general paralysis, and he was already blind when he conceived me’’ (93).99 The father of Bataille’s narrator is not only blinded but also paralyzed; nevertheless, he is presented as the lifegiving force (‘‘when he conceived me’’), the ejaculation (‘‘Erguß’’). Like Herr Kohut, in Bataille’s text, the narrator’s father becomes a

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‘‘lunatic’’ and is abandoned by his family. He and his mother leave the blinded, paralyzed, mad father to the invading Germans during World War I. Yet the son does not escape the fate of Oedipus: ‘‘Today, I know I am ‘blind,’ immeasurable, I am man ‘abandoned’ on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror. What a ‘horrible pride,’ at moments, in Dad’s blind smile!’’ (Bataille, 101). The father and son have become the same, each castrated, yet in Bataille’s text there is a kind of perverse pleasure in the terror and freedom of castration. In Jelinek’s own Story of the Eye, Lust, male figures are simultaneously sadistic and castrated, in a ‘‘circle of doom’’ (‘‘Kreis des Unheils’’):100 ‘‘Men: their eyes have been poked out and now they’re always wanting to poke someone’’ (Lust, trans. Hulse, 188) [Die Ma¨nner: die Augen sind ihnen ausgestochen worden, und jetzt wollen sie auch dauernd wen ausstechen (Lust, 231).] Here, the punishment yields to more punishment and no reconciliation. A masculine logic of sadism is perpetuated despite, or perhaps as a product of, male blindness and castration. As Ina Hartwig has argued, Bataille’s text is concerned with the possibility of freeing society from sexual repression,101 while Jelinek’s writing resists the model of repression altogether. Through semiotic excess,102 the text belies interiority; everything comes to the surface as repetition and excess. Jelinek’s novel simultaneously presents an exaggerated model of Freudian psychoanalysis and deconstructs this model. In her works, there is no interiority and therefore no repression. There is no inside and thus no escape. In the central scene of The Piano Teacher when mother and daughter mourn the loss of ‘‘a member of the family’’ [ein Glied der Familie], Jelinek parodies the oedipal scene and its presumed demise. For Jelinek, the removal of the father does not signify the death of the fascist narrative. The novel rather underscores the inescapability of everyday fascism as German-language cultural idiom. After the departure of Erika’s father, the structures of instrumental reason and resentment continue. The brutal and brutalizing petit bourgeois milieu infects Erika’s sadistic relations with her students at the conservatory (‘‘The teacher has every right to do so because a teacher acts in loco parenti’’ (The Piano Teacher, 98) [Der Lehrer hat jedes Recht dazu, weil er die Elternstelle vertritt (Die Klavierspielerin, 99)]), as well as her oppressive relationship with her mother, and all sexual relations. Yet she simultaneously desires her own subordination to a ‘‘master’’—‘‘the master she has been longing for’’ (The Piano Teacher, 229) [Sie nimmt an, endlich den Herrn gefunden zu haben, nach dem sie sich sehnte (Die Kla-

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vierspielerin, 231)]. Her attempt at love with the sadistic student, Walter Klemmer, reiterates the notion that sex is another form of fascist repetition compulsion, and Erika’s masochism simply completes the circle of the claustrophobic narrative. Whereas she had previously rejected Klemmer’s advances (‘‘Each gentleman [literally also: ‘‘master’’] soon left Erika, and now she doesn’t care to have a gentleman’’ (The Piano Teacher, 75) [Jeder Herr hat Erika bald verlassen, und nun will sie keinen Herrn mehr u¨ber sich haben (Die Klavierspielerin, 77)]), she begins to respond to him with a growing desire to be subservient: Deep inside, she [Erika] feels an intense desire to obey. . . . Anyone who could get her to obey a command (there must be a commander aside from her mother, who cuts glowing furrows into Erika’s will) could get anything and everything from Erika. Erika needs to lean against a hard wall that won’t give. . . . Her paws grope towards ultimate obedience. (101–2)103

Erika’s cliche´ desire to be dominated corresponds to the point in the text where the father is removed from the home. Just as the role of the father is revealed to be entirely empty, so too is the relationship between Erika and her student represented as a performance by two ineffective actors: ‘‘Klemmer, the tragic hero, who is far too young for this role (while Erika is actually too old to be an innocent victim of his attentions)’’ (The Piano Teacher,160) [Der tragische Held Klemmer, der fu¨r diese Rolle eigentlich zu jung ist, wa¨hrend Erika fu¨r ein unschuldiges Opfer von Aufmerksamkeiten eigentlich zu alt ist (Die Klavierspielerin, 160)]. The misguided attempt to play out a bourgeois tragedy with Klemmer in the role of the seducer and Erika in the role of the virginal daughter merely reveals the limited roles available to figures in Jelinek’s text. Characters either play the oppressor or the oppressed, and such roles can be traced back to the passing of the rod from the father in the beginning of the text. The rod is possessed alternately by Erika, her mother, and Klemmer: ‘‘Erika gives up her will. Her mother has always possessed Erika’s will, and now Erika hands it, like a runner’s staff, to Walter Klemmer’’ (The Piano Teacher, 207) [Erika gibt ihren Willen ab. Sie gibt diesen Willen, den bisher immer die Mutter besessen hat, jetzt wie einen Stab beim Stafettenlauf an Walter Klemmer weiter (Die Klavierspielerin, 208)]. As in Bachman’s Todesarten texts, roles are purely structural and repetitive, mirroring the oedipal model that renews itself ceaselessly. Jelinek’s novel seems to respond to the critique of psychoanalysis

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leveled by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.104 As Michel Foucault already states in the preface, Anti-Oedipus is a philosophy ‘‘counter to all forms of fascism’’ (xiii)—‘‘the fascism in us all’’ (xiii). Among other things, Deleuze and Guattari’s critique links the cult of psychoanalysis and its fixation on the oedipal model to the restrictive structures of fascism. ‘‘There we have it, the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, enclosing the unconscious within the Oedipus, cutting off all vital flows, crushing desiring-production, conditioning the patient to respond daddy-mommy, and to always consume daddymommy’’ (92). Deleuze and Guattari trace a trajectory of modernism in which psychoanalysis links psychic structures to the ‘‘half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the family’’ and ‘‘the unending attempt to murder the father’’ (50). Thus, all of history can be retroactively subsumed under the false structures of ‘‘Oedipus and castration’’ (67). Deleuze and Guattari’s reconsideration of the tyranny of psychoanalytical models looks to Freud and social psychologists such as the Mitscherlichs, who analyze nations in terms of the central figure of the father. Thus, they point to the Mitscherlichs’ depiction of American society—‘‘the industrial society with anonymous management and vanishing personal power, etc.’’ (80)—as a ‘‘resurgence of the ‘society without the father’ ’’ (80). This interpretation of late capitalist American society is informed by a psychoanalytic reading of German society in The Inability to Mourn. Fascism, then, is conceived as an oedipal crisis. Deleuze and Guattari suggest, however, that ‘‘Freud himself was acutely aware of Oedipus’s inseparability from a double impasse into which he was precipitating the unconscious. Thus in the 1936 letter to Tomain Rolland, Freud writes: ‘Everything unfolds as if the essential were to go beyond the father, as if going beyond the father were always forbidden’ ’’ (80). The oedipal complex is simultaneously the moment to be overcome and the permanent state of things; the death of the father is always accompanied by internalization (superego) and displacement so that the structure of Oedipus is almost impossible to discard.105 As a particularly resonant narrative in the German-language context, The Piano Teacher simultaneously illustrates and affirms the critique set forth by Deleuze and Guattari.106 The familial space is shown to be a placeholder for fascism, yet its partial demise through the departure of the father provides no escape. Rather, the oedipal structure is seemingly indestructible in Jelinek’s novel. After the student Klemmer’s sadistic rape of Erika toward the end

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of the novel, she follows him to the university in order to stab him with a kitchen knife. Yet she masochistically wounds herself in the shoulder instead and remains inscribed within the text’s logic of entrapment. In the end, she willingly returns to the oppressive space of home, the space that serves as a microcosm for the ‘‘provincial German’’ fascism: ‘‘Erika knows the direction she has to take. She heads home, gradually quickening her step’’ (The Piano Teacher, 280) [Erika weiß die Richtung, in die sie gehen muß. Sie geht nach Hause. Sie geht und beschleunigt langsam ihren Schritt (Die Klavierspielerin, 283)]. In his introduction to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus, Mark Seem defines the ‘‘anti-oedipal forces’’ as including ‘‘orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories)’’ (xxi).107 The territorialities of familialism, religion, and colonialism are rejected in the notions of the extended family,108 lack of belief, and deterritoriality. Erika Kohut’s compulsive return home, to the overcoded territoriality of the oppressive familial space, underscores the extent to which the novel performs the limits of entrapment as illuminated by Deleuze and Guattari. As Mark Seems points out, slavery to the oedipal model in all its displaced forms is, for Deleuze and Guattari, true neurosis: ‘‘For to be bogged down in arrangements from which escape is possible is to be neurotic, seeing an irresolvable crisis where alternatives exist’’ (xxii). Erika’s entrapment, viewed outside of the oedipal model, is unmotivated and truly neurotic, and Jelinek’s novel makes this painfully clear.

Under the Bell Jar: The Claustrophobic Home The intensely claustrophobic nature of Jelinek’s text and Erika’s home is emphasized in the final pages of the novel, when Erika’s only real choices are self-mutilation and the entrapment of the maternal space of home. Erika’s life with her mother is represented as a kind of pre-oedipal hell in which time stands still: ‘‘They are enclosed together in a bell jar: Erika, her fine protective hulls, her mama. . . . Erika is an insect encased in amber, timeless, ageless. She has no history, and she doesn’t make a fuss’’ (The Piano Teacher, 14) [Unter einer gla¨sernen Ka¨seglocke sind sie miteinander eingeschlossen, Erika, ihre feinen Schutzhu¨llen, ihre Mama. . . . Erika ist ein Insekt in Bernstein, zeitlos, alterslos. Erika hat keine Geschichte und macht keine Geschichten (Die Klavierspielerin, 15–16)]. Erika’s entrapment mirrors the literary and historical entrapment that Jelinek circumscribes as the critical contemporary

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Austrian author par excellence. The text, and the petit bourgeois Kohut home, reiterate a structure of repetition that disallows any movement. Erika is the ‘‘prisoner’’ (The Piano Teacher, 37) [Gefangene[n] (Die Klavierspielerin, 38)]; she is simultaneously excluded from what she perceives as an exteriority to herself (‘‘SHE feels left out of everything’’ (The Piano Teacher, 38) [SIE fu¨hlt sich von allem ausgeschlossen (Die Klavierspielerin, 39)]) and imprisoned within the horrible space of home/Heimat and her own body: ‘‘Almost unintentionally, she peers out from the prison of her aging body’’ (The Piano Teacher, 78) [Wie unabsichtlich schaut sie aus dem Gefa¨ngnis ihres alternden Ko¨rpers (Die Klavierspielerin, 80)]. Entrapment is thus complete, so that Erika is compared to a mummy: ‘‘SHE is swathed in her daily duties like an Egyptian mummy’’ (The Piano Teacher, 81) [SIE ist mit den Stricken ihrer ta¨glichen Pflichten verschnu¨rt wie eine a¨gyptische Mumie (Die Klavierspielerin, 83)]. The space of textual and bodily entrapment is simultaneously a zone of comfort and an eternal hell, an all-consuming womb: ‘‘Erika glides down into the warmth, the body-warm brook of shame, a bath in which one submerges cautiously because the water is rather dirty’’ (The Piano Teacher, 246) [Erika la¨ßt sich ins warme Nest, ins leibwarme Ba¨chlein der Scham hineingleiten wie in ein Bad, in das man vorsichtig eintaucht, weil das Wasser ziemlich dreckig ist (Die Klavierspielerin, 249)]. Home is Erika’s prison and the place to which she masochistically desires to return even as she flees it. ‘‘Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change’’ (The Piano Teacher, 190) [Erika hat Furcht davor, daß alles so bleibt, wie es ist, und sie hat Furcht, daß sich einmal etwas vera¨ndern ko¨nnte (Die Klavierspielerin, 191)].109 The stability of time and space is stifling, yet change is unimaginable, indeed, unrepresentable in Jelinek’s novel. Erika is drawn home, to the maternal prison in a sort of death wish: ‘‘The domestic delight of dinner, inadvertently delayed, is a black hole for the star known as Erika. She knows that her mother’s embrace will completely devour and digest her, yet she is magically drawn to it’’ (The Piano Teacher, 118) [Die ha¨usliche Abendessenfreude, die sich heute ungewollt hinauszo¨gert, ist das schwarze Loch fu¨r den Stern Erika. Sie weiß, diese mu¨tterliche Umschlingung wird sie restlos auffressen und verdauen, und doch wird sie von ihr magisch angezogen (Die Klavierspielerin, 118)].110 Yet the distinction between mother and daughter is muddied in Jelinek’s seeming symbiotic nightmare: ‘‘Mother and child put their heads together. They are inseparable, virtually one person’’ (The

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Piano Teacher, 127) [Mutter und Kind stecken die Ko¨pfe ineinander, als wa¨ren sie nur ein einziger Mensch (Die Klavierspielerin, 127)]. Erika’s domestic prison mirrors her corporeal prison (‘‘She is locked into herself’’ (The Piano Teacher, 128) [Eingeschlossen bleibt sie in sich (Die Klavierspielerin, 128)]), and this logic allows for no exteriority. Erika’s body, her mother, and the space of the text are a black hole [das schwarze Loch]:111 Striding along, Erika hates that porous, rancid fruit that marks the bottom of her abdomen. Only art promises endless sweetness. Soon the decay will progress, encroaching upon larger parts of her body. Then she will die in torment. Dismayed, Erika pictures herself as a numb hole, six feet of space, disintegrating in the earth. The hole that she despised and neglected has now taken full possession of her. She is nothing. And there is nothing left for her. (The Piano Teacher, 198)112

Critics, and Jelinek herself,113 have suggested that Erika’s mother stands as a ‘‘phallic mother’’ who attempts to control and, ultimately, consume her daughter (Berka, Fiddler). In such a reading, a controlling, powerful mother usurps the logic of the father. Indeed, Frau Kohut can be seen as more powerful than her insane husband, and she attempts to use this power to control her daughter. However, as Jelinek herself points out, the role reversal in the nuclear family is never entirely complete. Especially in her interview with Adolf-Ernst Meyer, Jelinek delineates the parallels between her autobiographical family and the Kohut family, since Jelinek’s own father suffered from a mental illness that eventually led to his institutionalization.114 Thus, although Jelinek’s real father was, on the one hand, ‘‘anything but a tyrant,’’115 he punished the family with his silence. While Jelinek’s novel seems to deconstruct the traditional gender roles in the oedipal family, it simultaneously retains the symbolic structure of daddy/mommy, in the most traditional sense. Even in her own non-traditional family, the space of the bourgeois family is, by definition, paradigmatic, a microcosm of the fascist state in which the father or the ‘‘paternal agency’’ plays the tyrant. In her characterization of familial and gender roles in the novel and in her own family, Jelinek slips between a structural and essentialist position, and she invites this kind of slippage through her comparison of the two families. The mother is both ‘‘phallic’’ (Berka, 143) and not quite phallic, since, according to Jelinek, maternal power allows the daughter space for creativity:

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This, of course, is the life-long ego ideal I keep running up against, something that at least does not eliminate creativity in women, whereas a strong father—that is my impression—really eliminates everything in women. With a strong mother, at least the possibility of a prolonged childhood or childlikeness remains, something that is, after all, not uncreative. (Berka, 151)116

The mother is and isn’t the tyrant, the fascist father. She approximates but does not quite usurp him. As in The Piano Teacher the father as ‘‘agency’’ [‘‘Instanz’’] is never entirely absent; his ‘‘shadow’’ continues to ‘‘hover,’’ via the razor blade, the field glasses, and Erika’s desire for an idealized father figure (‘‘the master she has been longing for’’ [The Piano Teacher, 229]. Erika’s desire for a ‘‘commander aside from her mother’’ (The Piano Teacher, 102) [Befehlshaber . . . außerhalb ihrer Mutter (Die Klavierspielerin, 104)] reveals, in fact, that an alternative, non-oedipal model for power is not afforded by the text. Erika attempts a pseudo-rape of her mother, but this scene presents not a perverse reconfiguration of familial roles but rather an exploration of the female body as lack. The two women slip between a pre-oedipal womb-like state (‘‘a well-nourished fish in her mother’s amniotic fluid’’ (The Piano Teacher, 56) [dieser Fisch im Fruchtwasser der Mutter, der gut gena¨hrt worden ist (Die Klavierspielerin, 58)]) and a post-oedipal relationship of jealousy and rivalry.117 Neither of these models is able to kill the ‘‘paternal agency.’’ Indeed, the scene is prefigured by the reinsertion of Herr Kohut into the bedroom: ‘‘Now Erika slides into her own half of the bed, and Father is six feet under’’ (The Piano Teacher, 232) [Jetzt la¨ßt sich Erika in ihre eigene Bettha¨lfte gleiten, und der Vater ist unter der Erde begraben (Die Klavierspielerin, 233)]. Once again, the father, who is relevant in a purely symbolic manner, is most likely not literally buried. The father is rather reinserted into the text as a structuring element, as the return of the repressed that ultimately drives all movement in the text. Erika’s attempt to take over her father’s role and ‘‘seduce’’ her mother results in her desire to ‘‘uncover’’ the ‘‘truth’’ of Frau Kohut: ‘‘Erika cunningly uncovered her mother, so she could see everything, simply everything’’ (The Piano Teacher, 234) [Erika hat ihre Mutter sinnvoll aufgedeckt, damit sie alles, aber auch alles betrachten kann (Die Klavierspielerin, 237)]. Perhaps with the aid of her father’s ‘‘Feldstecher’’ (binoculars; literally ‘‘field stinger’’ 140) Erika attempts to explore her own body—a body she perceives as ‘‘a black hole’’—through an analysis of the body of her mother.118 The suggestion is that if Erika could only see into the black hole, the truth might be uncovered.

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The metaphor of uncovering (‘‘aufdecken’’) reveals the emptiness of psychoanalytical models within the novel. Hidden desires and meanings are never brought to light in the text because they are not present; the novel offers no space of interiority. Even the view of her mother’s pubic hair ultimately reveals nothing:119 ‘‘During the struggle, the daughter deliberately shoved around in her mother’s nightgown, so she could finally see this pubic hair which she has always known was there. Unfortunately, the light was very poor’’ (The Piano Teacher, 234) [Die Tochter hat absichtlich wa¨hrend des Kampfes im Nachthemd der Mutter herumgestiert, damit sie dieses Haar endlich erblicken kann, von dem sie die ganze Zeit wußte: es muß doch dasein! Die Beleuchtung war leider ho¨chst mangelhaft (Die Klavierspielerin, 236–37)]. The ‘‘uncovering’’ has revealed, in fact, nothing new. Erika’s desire to uncover the truth behind female lack merely underscores the futility of such an endeavor within the frame of the text. The scene thus simply reiterates the repetitive logic of the novel and of Jelinek’s œuvre in general. Erika’s eternal return to the oppressive domestic space is a kind of masochistic fort-da scenario in which mastery is impossible: ‘‘Erika wants to go home. Erika wants to go home. Erika wants to go home’’ (The Piano Teacher, 121) [Erika will nach Hause. Erika will nach Hause. Erika will nach Hause (Die Klavierspielerin, 121)].

Masochism and Female Entrapment Erika’s return to the entrapping home at the end of The Piano Teacher mirrors the Heimat prison that characterizes Jelinek’s œuvre. Within this restrictive world, action is possible only as negation and affect is absent. The narrative of Nazism that continues to resonate in the German and Austrian context is crystallized as masochism in The Piano Teacher. Erika’s self-inflicted stab wound, her return to the repressive home space at the end of the novel, and her self-mutilation and self-defloration with her father’s razor blade represent female desire as masochism.120 However, this desire always ultimately resists pleasure, rather reflecting the female figure’s mechanical performance of ‘‘feminine sexuality.’’ As Elizabeth Wright has shown, The Piano Teacher offers pathologies without characters.121 Erika Kohut’s pathology is most closely approximated through the model of masochism, and yet this pathology is, I suggest, merely a consequence of the entrapping structure of the novel.122 Put another way, since masochism provides the only model for Erika’s actions, Jelinek’s novel reinforces the traditional

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psychoanalytic thesis that female masochism is not perverse, since it is ultimately an extension of the natural (and culturally ingrained) passivity of women. Yet Jelinek’s novel simultaneously exposes female masochism as a product of fascist thought structures, a reality imposed from without. Jelinek strips Erika of interiority and the pathology of masochism of its inherent logic, so that female entrapment is presented as an unavoidable product of Austria’s historical entrapment that is nonetheless utterly lacking in psychological necessity. For Jelinek, female masochism is a product of fascism. As mentioned earlier, in her essay on Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln’’ (‘‘War by Other Means’’), Jelinek cites Bachmann’s famous statement on the fascism inherent in gender relations: ‘‘Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman’’ (312).123 Here, Jelinek’s analysis of Bachmann’s concerns is indistinguishable from statements that seem to reflect Jelinek’s own position. When she writes of the link between fascism and female masochism, Jelinek uses Bachmann’s biography and writings as a kind of paradigmatic case study, so that Jelinek’s voice echoes the voice of Bachmann: ‘‘Fascism negates the sexual autonomy of the woman, and this ideal of the de-sexualized woman ultimately leads the woman to negate her own sexuality’’ (314).124 In the logic of fascism, woman ‘‘becomes the external enemy. Like the Jews’’ (312).125 For Bachmann, as for Jelinek, the narrative of Nazism is all-encompassing, defining all relations of gender: ‘‘In Bachmann[’s texts], men sometimes suffer, but the women cannot but suffer’’ (316).126 Within this rubric, female subjectivity is defined as self-negation [sich . . . selbst zu verneinen (314)], and female desire is masochistic. Modern psychoanalytic theories of female masochism have generally focused on the father/daughter relationship. Jessica Benjamin’s work The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination attempts to explain the persistence of female masochism through an analysis of socialization via the nuclear family. In the traditional bourgeois nuclear family, it is precisely the daughter’s ‘‘ideal love’’ for the father that perpetuates masochism. The father, who is often away from the domestic sphere and represents an exciting, independent adventurer, becomes a symbol of difference, independence, and subjectivity. The mother, on the other hand, is less exotic, representing security and dependence. In her search for recognition, the daughter looks to the active, exotic figure in the family, the father: ‘‘Thus in ideal love, as in other forms of masochism, acts of self-abnegation are in

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fact meant to secure access to the glory and power of the other.’’127 Through ideal love for the father, the daughter acquires a ‘‘pseudosubjectivity.’’ Benjamin’s work on female masochism thus combines a critique of earlier psychoanalytic theories of the ‘‘natural’’ masochism of women (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and Helene Deutsch) with cultural conceptions of gendered power relations using Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s description of female masochism recalls those earlier theories in its focus on the oedipal complex. Female masochism might be culturally constructed, but its roots are in the traditional bourgeois family.128 Jessica Benjamin’s work reveals the difficulties inherent in theorizing the notion of female masochism. The few contemporary feminist theorists who have attempted to take on this subject have been caught in a double bind: female masochism should not be perceived as ‘‘natural’’ to women (in contrast to a ‘‘perverse’’ male masochism), yet it should nevertheless be treated with compassion. It is the task of these critics to debunk the notion that female masochism is a natural outgrowth of feminine passivity, yet they generally look to theories of the family that ultimately lead back to Freud.129 As is well known, masochism was coined by the turn-ofthe-century Austrian psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In his seminal Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalog of sexual perversions begun in the 1870s, Krafft-Ebing provides the terminology for masochism, a ‘‘sexual anomaly’’130 that he names after its literary father, the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In Sacher-Masoch’s novels, and, in particular, in the infamous Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs, 1870), the male protagonist willingly subordinates himself to a beautiful woman for the sake of sexual and psychological pleasure. For Krafft-Ebing, masochism is ‘‘the desire for the complete subordination under the will of a person of the opposite sex’’ (154).131 Yet this perversion, examined in detail by Krafft-Ebing through numerous case studies, is primarily a male one. Krafft-Ebing suggests that women are passive and ‘‘naturally’’ inclined to masochistic love and selflessness, an inclination that is supported by socialization, so that the ‘‘ability to sacrifice’’ (‘‘Opferfa¨higkeit’’) which leads one to desire humiliation or pain at the hands of a loved one is simply an extension of female love. The theories of masochism put forth by Sigmund Freud and Helene Deutsch follow this logic. For Freud, as for Krafft-Ebing, sadism is aligned with masculine activity whereas masochism is the product of a properly feminine passivity. Helene Deutsch generally reiterates the notion that natural feminine passivity entails, of necessity, masochism.132 Indeed,

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masochism is only interesting to Freud as male masochism, a neurotic extension of the fear of castration and the father that materializes as an internalization of aggressive drives. Elfriede Jelinek’s representation of female masochism as the consequence of fascism reiterates the old theories of masochism while placing it within a new political and cultural frame. This is the case in her novel Wonderful Wonderful Times, since the Nazi father figure is central to the narrative. Wittkowski, the sadistic former SS officer, brutalizes his family, and his daughter Anna deflowers herself with a razor blade. This scene can be read along the lines of a critical feminist analysis of female masochism. The daughter’s selfnegation is a repetition of the father’s brutality and an extension of her own passivity. The narrative of fascism embeds the daughter’s actions within the historical context, but her behavior invites the reader to analyze her in Freudian, oedipal terms. The immanent critique of gender constructions in Jelinek’s text is dependent upon the centrality of the father as Nazi/sadist. As explained earlier, in The Piano Teacher the father is simultaneously absent and present as a phantom. Yet the daughter nevertheless choreographs masochistic scenarios that conjure the father as symbol. The trip to the Steinhof asylum to discard the father occurs in the text following Erika’s most brutal act of self-torture with the paternal blade [die va¨terliche Allzweckklinge (Die Klavierspielerin, 88)]—the mutilation of her vagina. This act mimics, through the metonymic function of the blade, the Oedipal seduction scene, and recalls Anna Wittkowski’s brutal act, the moment of penetration of the hymen and the defloration of the virgin: ‘‘SHE sits down in front of the magnifying side of the shaving mirror; spreading her legs, she makes a cut, magnifying the aperture that is the doorway into her body’’ (The Piano Teacher, 86) [SIE setzt sich mit gespreizten Beinen vor die Vergro¨ßerungsseite des Rasierspiegels und voll¨ ffnung vergro¨ßern soll, die als Tu¨r in zieht einen Schnitt, der die O ihren Leib fu¨hrt (Die Klavierspielerin, 88)].133 The moment invites a psychoanalytic reading: Erika’s masochism would reveal a classic case of internalization of a father-daughter relationship based upon power and desire (Jessica Benjamin). However, in Erika’s case, there is no context for such a relationship. Erika’s father has done nothing to foster the father/daughter relationship, and the psychological conflicts that would create such a dynamic are absent between father and daughter. Thus, the Nazi father/victim daughter scenario from Wonderful Wonderful Times or the dream sequences from Bachmann’s Franza fragment and Malina are revealed to be artificial constructs, yet the underlying structure remains in place.

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The shift from the deflowering scene in Wonderful Wonderful Times to the displaced scene of female masochism in The Piano Teacher follows the logic of Freud’s ‘‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’’ (‘‘A Child is Being Beaten’’).134 In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari point out the tautological nature of Freud’s argumentation in his famous essay on masochism. Freud argues that the beating fantasies ultimately reveal the figure of the father to be the desired punisher, but Deleuze and Guattari show how the father is only presumed to be present by the analyst: ‘‘Never was the paternal theme less visible, and yet never was it affirmed with as much passion and resolution. The imperialism of Oedipus is founded here on an absence’’ (58). In the various phases of the child’s fantasy, the father never actually appears, but Freud insists on the centrality of the father via his famous second phase, which, as he admits, ‘‘has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account’’ (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, 59). Freud calls the various punishing figures in the children’s lives ‘‘representative[s] of the father, such as a teacher,’’135 but the related fantasies never explicitly point to the father. Even the case where the child fantasizes about the punishment of the mother indicates, for Freud, an underlying desire to be punished by the father: ‘‘The fantasy which has as its content being beaten by the mother, and which is conscious or can become so, is not a primary one. It possesses a preceding stage which is invariably unconscious and has as its content: ‘I am being beaten by my father’ ’’ (Freud, ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten,’’ 126).136 Deleuze and Guattari seize on this section in order to reveal the tautological nature of the paternal: ‘‘It is obvious that when traditional psychoanalysis explains that the instructor is the father, and that the colonel too is the father, and that the mother is nonetheless the father too, it reduces all of desire to a familial determination that no longer has anything to do with the social field actually invested by the libido’’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 62). Jelinek’s novel represents a number of displacements that recall Freud’s metonymic argumentation while simultaneously exploiting the absurdities revealed by Deleuze and Guattari. Not only is the father figure simultaneously castrated and present as the instantiation of masochism via the razor blade; female masochism, too, is revealed to be an unsatisfactory displacement of male masochism, the true perversion. The ending of The Piano Teacher in which Erika stabs herself in the shoulder is, as Jelinek herself admits, a rewriting of Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozeß), in which the moment

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of Josef K.’s execution is preceded by the opening of a window and the interested gaze of the person in the window: ‘‘With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window there suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help?’’137 Then Josef K.’s executioners lay their hands on him and stab him in the heart. In contrast, Jelinek’s Erika K. inspires no such interest on the part of bystanders, and no one fulfills her masochistic desires: ‘‘Windows flash in the light. They do not open to this woman. They do not open to just anyone. There is no good person, although he is called for. Many would like to help, but do not’’ (The Piano Teacher, 280) [Fenster blitzen im Licht. Ihre Flu¨gel o¨ffnen sich dieser Frau nicht. Sie o¨ffnen sich nicht jedem. Kein guter Mensch, obwohl nach ihm gerufen wird. Viele wollen gerne helfen, doch sie tun es nicht (Die Klavierspielerin, 283)]. Without the interest of others, in the absence of executioners, Erika’s self-mutilation is incomplete and pathetic: ‘‘The knife should dig into her heart and twist around! The remainder of the necessary strength fails. Her eyes alight on nothing, and, with no burst of rage, fury, or passion, Erika Kohut stabs a place on her shoulder, which instantly shoots out blood. The wound is harmless, but dirt and pus must not get in’’ (The Piano Teacher, 280) [Das Messer soll ihr ins Herz fahren und sich dort drehen! Der Rest der dazu no¨tigen Kraft versagt, ihre Blicke fallen auf nichts, und ohne einen Aufschwung des Zorns, der Wut, der Leidenschaft sticht Erika Kohut sich in eine Stelle an ihrer Schulter, die sofort Blut hervorschießen la¨ßt. Harmlos ist diese Wunde, nur Schmutz, Eiter du¨rfen nicht hineingeraten (Die Klavierspielerin, 283)]. Kafka’s figures represent the masochism of the alienated modern individual, yet Jelinek points out that ‘‘woman is not even found worthy of being the great victim of literary history; she simply is only half-hearted . . .’’ (Berka, ‘‘Gespra¨ch,’’ 152).138 As KrafftEbing already noted, female masochism is understood to be a natural consequence of femininity, the internalization of woman’s passive role. Erika’s self-mutilation is dismissed as unworthy of note so that the performative perversion of the text is simply revealed to be a natural consequence of the entrapment of woman. The anti-climactic Kafka citation that ends The Piano Teacher recalls the extended section in the novel that treats the ubiquitous letter of the masochistic scenario. Here, Jelinek represents the infinitely extended logic of the masochistic scenario as exemplified in the novels of Sacher-Masoch and described as pathology by Krafft-

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Ebing. Erika writes the letter, ‘‘hermetically sealed’’ (The Piano Teacher, 190) [hermetisch verschlossen (Die Klavierspielerin, 191)], to Klemmer, yet she insists that Klemmer read the letter in her presence after he has pushed his way into her bedroom. The letter is quoted at length in the novel. It opens in an antiquated style that recalls the language of an epistolary novel such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereux (1782): ‘‘You can easily guess the greater delights that I wish for. I don’t dare write them down. The letter shouldn’t get into the wrong hands’’ (The Piano Teacher, 225) [Du wirst unschwer erraten, welche gro¨ßeren Wonnen ich mir zusa¨tzlich wu¨nsche. Ich wage sie hier nicht niederzuschreiben. In unrechte Ha¨nde geraten soll der Brief nicht (Die Klavierspielerin, 226–27)]. Yet the letter includes indeed an excess of humiliating details that are scattered over forty pages of the novel (191–233). In this sense, the letter prescribes a suspended form of self-abnegation: For example, her letter says, I will writhe like a worm in your cruel bonds, in which you will have me lie for hours on end, and you’ll keep me in all sorts of different positions, hitting or kicking me, even whipping me! Erika’s letter says she wants to be dimmed out under him, snuffed out. Her well-rooted displays of obedience require greater degrees of intensity! (The Piano Teacher, 215–16)139

Ironically, Erika’s letter explicitly states that which should be intimated, the methods of torture and humiliation; indeed, it engages in a repetitive mode of confession that belies the notion of intensification (‘‘Steigerung’’). Erika’s expressed desires to be tied up, whipped, and humiliated reflect the internalization of bourgeois discipline to its logical conclusion—death through self-sacrifice. Erika’s extended ‘‘contract’’ follows the letter of Krafft-Ebing’s definition of the perversion of masochism. Indeed, the ‘‘desire for the complete subordination under the will of a person of the opposite sex’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 154)140 is, according to Krafft-Ebing, potentially at odds with the instinct of self-preservation [Lebenserhaltung, 123]. In its most extreme form, masochism would entail death at the hands of a chosen master/mistress [Lustmord, 123]. In this case, the desire for subordination outweighs the instinct for self-preservation, and Krafft-Ebing emphasizes the perverse nature of such desires. Erika Kohut’s cliche´d fantasies of self-destruction parody Krafft-Ebing’s case studies: ‘‘Erika is ready to go to her death’’ (The Piano Teacher, 247) [Erika ist bereit, bis zu ihrem Tod zu gehen (Die Klavierspielerin, 249)]. ‘‘Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire to destroy, to annihi-

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late; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure. Erika would gladly cross the border to her own murder’’ (The Piano Teacher, 107) [Der Schmerz ist selbst nur die Folge des Willens zur Lust, zum Zersto¨ren, zum Zugrunderichten, und, in seiner ho¨chsten Form, eine Art von Lust. Erika wu¨rde die Grenze zu ihrer eigenen Ermordung gern u¨berschreiten (Die Klavierspielerin, 108)]. Krafft-Ebing and Jelinek are both aware of the gendered nature of perversion. In contrast to the masochism of Kafka’s Josef K. that ultimately leads to his death, Erika’s masochistic acts are not noteworthy. Krafft-Ebing asserts that women are naturally self-sacrificing, so that female masochism cannot technically be seen as a perversion:141 ‘‘Whereas sadism can be seen as a pathological intensification of the psychic dimension of the male sexual characteristics, masochism is rather a pathological escalation of specifically female psychic characteristics’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 155).142 Female masochism is conceived, then, as simply a sign of ‘‘excessive’’ femininity. The most interesting engagement with this thesis in Psychopathia sexualis is Krafft-Ebing’s analysis of the twenty-one-year-old ‘‘Fra¨ulein X’’ (Case number 85). Fra¨ulein X desires ‘‘to be the slave of a beloved man; when chastised by him, she wants to kiss his foot.’’143 In contrast to the case studies of male masochists, who often turn to prostitutes and strangers for satisfaction of their desires, ‘‘Fra¨ulein X’’ fantasizes about the abuses of her lover that function as ‘‘proof of love,’’144 thus underscoring Krafft-Ebing’s theory that female masochism is not perverse; it is merely the realization of female love. In the case of ‘‘Fra¨ulein X,’’ she herself realizes that the subordination of women is nothing special, and she admits to having fantasized about playing the role of a male slave to her lover: Often I have dreamed that I was his slave—but, mind you, not his female slave! For instance, I have imagined that he was Robinson, and I the savage that served him. I often look at the pictures in which Robinson puts his foot on the neck of the savage. I now find an explanation in these strange fantasies: I look upon woman in general as low, far below man; but I am otherwise extremely proud and quite indomitable, whence it arises that I think as a man (who is by nature proud and superior). This renders my humiliation before the man I love the more intense. I have also fantasized myself to be his female slave; but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband.145

In imagining herself in the role of Robinson’s ‘‘Friday,’’ Fra¨ulein X is aware of the presumed unnatural quality of male masochism,

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and it is precisely the perverse nature of masochism that is the cause of its attraction. Only in the role of a male slave can she achieve a state beyond the natural, thus earning the attention and love of her beloved. The conundrum faced by ‘‘Fra¨ulein X’’ is mirrored in the case of Erika Kohut. The descriptions of degradation in the letter to Klemmer (‘‘Mock me and call me a ‘stupid slave’ and even worse names’’ (The Piano Teacher, 218) [Verspotte mich und nenne mich blo¨de Sklavin und schlimmeres (Die Klavierspielerin, 220)]) lead Klemmer rather to repulsion and reassertion of his own superiority than to acts of love. Indeed, the letter can be seen as the catalyst that brings about Klemmer’s rape of Erika. The letter places Klemmer in a position of mastery, yet it determines his actions in detail, thus choreagraphing a masochistic scenario reminiscent of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs scenarios: ‘‘Please tell me loudly what you’re about to do to me, and describe the degrees of intensification— without, however, getting any crueler. Talk about things, but don’t do more than hint at them. Threaten me, but don’t go any further’’ (The Piano Teacher, 218) [Beschreibe bitte immer lauthals, was du gerade unternimmst, und beschreibe Steigerungsmo¨glichkeiten, ohne dich jedoch in deiner Graumsamkeit tatsa¨chlich zu steigern. Sprich daru¨ber, doch deute Handlungen nur an. Drohe mir, aber ufere nicht aus (Die Klavierspielerin, 220)]. The masochist, as exemplified by Sacher-Masoch’s male masochist Severin, choreographs a scenario in detail so that the ‘‘mistress’’ of the situation cannot truly be said to control it. Erika’s letter is a desperate attempt to play Klemmer’s ‘‘Friday,’’ to insert a masculine element into the masochistic scenario so that she will be a worthy object of love. Yet Erika’s appropriation of the discourse of male masochism is ultimately impossible in Jelinek’s novel, as Klemmer realizes that the contract calls into question his own power: ‘‘Did he get it right: By becoming her master, he can never become her master? So long as she dictates what he should do to her, some final remnant of Erika will remain unfathomable’’ (The Piano Teacher, 216) [Hat er recht verstanden, daß er dadurch, daß er ihr Herr wird, ihrer niemals Herr werden kann? Indem sie bestimmt, was er mit ihr tut, bleibt immer ein letzter Rest von ihr unergru¨ndlich (Die Klavierspielerin, 217)]. The presumed master or mistress of the scenario is ultimately a pawn of the masochist. Gilles Deleuze describes the masochistic scenario in similar terms.146 Like Krafft-Ebing almost 100 years earlier, Deleuze bases his analysis of masochism on the writings of Leopold von SacherMasoch, in particular, Venus in Furs. As is the case with Krafft-

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Ebing and Freud, masochism is only perverse and, thereby, interesting when manifested as a male desire. Indeed, for the reasons described above, female masochism represents no paradigm shift. Whereas the male masochist seems to give up his own sovereignty, he in fact retains it via the contract. He creates the rules by which his ‘‘mistress’’ must play; he is the choreographer of his own fantasy. Deleuze deconstructs the dialectical relationship between sadism and masochism posited by Freud and shows rather that sadism and masochism follow two entirely different kinds of logic: A genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim (one of the monks’ victims in Justine explains: ‘‘They wish to be certain their crimes cost tears; they would send away any girl who was to come here voluntarily.’’) Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. He does of course require a special ‘‘nature’’ in the woman torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate and persuade it in accordance with his secret project, which could never be fulfilled with a sadistic woman.147

The presumed victim of the masochistic scenario is, in fact, the agent, and the masochistic scenario belongs to the masochist. A sadist would destroy the elements of suspension and extended intensification central to the fantasy—elements emphasized by Erika Kohut in her letter to Klemmer in terms of intensification [Steigerung (Die Klavierspielerin, 217)] and extended instructions: ‘‘Everything has to be depicted in loving detail’’ (The Piano Teacher, 217) [Alles muß in Einzelheiten ausgemalt werden (Die Klavierspielerin, 218)]. Erika’s attempt to control the love scenario is an unrealizable fantasy in Jelinek’s text: ‘‘She only wants to be an instrument on which she will teach him to play. He should be free, and she in fetters. But Erika will choose the fetters herself. She makes up her mind to become an object, a tool’’ (The Piano Teacher, 212–13) [Sie will nur Instrument sein, auf dem zu spielen sie ihn lehrt. Er soll frei sein, sie aber durchaus in Fesseln. Doch ihre Fesseln bestimmt Erika selbst. Sie entscheidet, sich zum Gegenstand, zu einem Werkzeug zu machen (Die Klavierspielerin, 214)]. Erika’s desire to play the role of Severin, to complicate the rigid power structures in Jelinek’s tightly framed novel, is met, of necessity, by Klemmer’s restoration of the gender structures implied in the logic of fascism.148 In response to Erika’s attempt to pervert, so to speak, the logic of the novel, Klemmer is represented in the role of Nazi sadist, ‘‘master of the situation’’ (The Piano Teacher, 255) [Herr der Situation (Die Klavierspielerin, 258)]. ‘‘He’s killing time. He’s willing to go, that

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much is certain’’ (The Piano Teacher, 250) [Er schla¨gt Zeit tot. Den Willen hat er, das steht fu¨r ihn fest (Die Klavierspielerin, 252)]. Indeed, Klemmer’s revenge is articulated in the sadistic terms of extermination: ‘‘Frau Kohut made fun of his feelings. . . . Now she’ll get her just deserts in a gruesome act of annihilation’’ (The Piano Teacher, 252–53) [Diese Frau Kohut hat sich permanent u¨ber seine Gefu¨hle lustig gemacht. . . . Nun erha¨lt sie, und selbst ist sie daran schuld, die Quittung in Form eines grausamen Vernichtungswerks (Die Klavierspielerin, 255)]. In the form of parody, Klemmer stands as an empty signifier for power in the novel, a place held and vacated by the father (‘‘the master she has been longing for’’ [229]): ‘‘Klemmer is material for a whole novel’’ (The Piano Teacher, 263) [Klemmer ist ein Motiv fu¨r einen großen Roman (Die Klavierspielerin, 266)]. In contrast to Erika, whose female masochism renders her less significant than Kafka’s Josef K., Klemmer’s masculine sadism codes him as significant. Klemmer’s performance as sadist locates him as a placeholder, an instance of fascism’s residue. His masculinity is articulated in terms filled with cliche´s: Man is identical with himself, never split: ‘‘Kicking her, he demonstrates the simple equation: I am I. And I’m not ashamed’’ (The Piano Teacher, 270) [Er beweist der Frau unter Tritten die einfache Gleichung ich bin ich. Und ich scha¨me mich dessen nicht (Die Klavierspielerin, 273)]; ‘‘The man managed to do it without straining himself. He is not at odds with himself. On the contrary, he has never been so intensely at one with himself’’ (The Piano Teacher, 266–67) [Ohne scho¨ne Anstrengung war der Mann dazu fa¨hig. Er trennt sich nicht von sich, sondern im Gegenteil, noch nie war er mit sich so einer Meinung (Die Klavierspielerin, 269)]. Klemmer’s appropriation of the floating signifier Nazi/father leads to rape, Erika’s annihilation [Vernichtung], a negation, however, that signifies nothing. Rather, the act is simultaneously brutal and, like the formulations in her letters, filled with cliche´s. Erika ‘‘says what people say after a play: Is that all there is?’’ [[Erika] spricht den Spruch von Theaterbesuchern: Ich habe mir mehr erwartet! (Die Klavierspielerin, 268)]. The act of violence is banal, perpetuating the narrative of fascism while emptying this narrative of any particularity. Erika’s masochism is merely an extension of this narrative, another form of entrapment. The possibility of escape occurs to Erika once in the novel, during the rape: ‘‘Erika thinks about escaping. She is used to thinking, not acting’’ (The Piano Teacher, 271) [Erika denkt an Flucht. Sie ist im Denken geu¨bt; nicht aber im Handeln (Die Klavierspielerin, 274)]. However, the thought is an anomaly and cannot be followed by action. The

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novel circumscribes the narrative of fascism so that the agency and even the place of escape are absent. The fascist father is impotent, yet the logic of the text is thereby all the more restrictive. The repetition compulsion that characterizes Jelinek’s own work is revealed as a form of aesthetic imprisonment. Erika’s return home at the end of The Piano Teacher underscores the exclusion of agency and affect from Jelinek’s Austrian post-Holocaust landscape.

Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust Metaphors Jelinek’s narrative of Nazism, like her literary œuvre, does not translate. Outside of Germany and Austria, her notions of fascism seem outdated, products of an outmoded feminism or an idiosyncratic fixation with fascism—in a word, provincial. They reflect the fixed relationship to history that continues to resonate in the oddly ‘‘non-European’’ spaces of Germany and Austria. The translation of this idiom—of entrapment, female masochism, and the logic of fascism—into the Anglo-American space reveals, indeed, an aesthetic flexibility not possible in the German context. The case I will consider is that of the American poet Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems (1961–62), poems that engage the narrative of the Nazi father/masochistic daughter ubiquitous to post-fascist German-language authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, and her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), which is explicitly cited by Jelinek in The Piano Teacher. Yet Plath’s infamous poems from the Ariel collection such as ‘‘Daddy’’ and ‘‘Lady Lazarus’’ utilize the Holocaust as a metaphor for the poet’s own suffering in a naı¨ve tone that would certainly be sharply criticized in post-Holocaust German and Austrian literary circles. In the poem ‘‘Lady Lazarus’’ Plath fashions the narrative ‘‘I’’ as a Jew, a figure whose self-demise Plath likens to the destruction of the Jews: my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.149

The poem blends the biblical tale of Lazarus with the poet’s own suicide narratives and the fate of those at Auschwitz. The narrative ‘‘I’’ is reduced to ‘‘ash’’:

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Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. (8)

Thus, in ‘‘Daddy,’’ the Nazi persecutor becomes the father, a father whose ‘‘German tongue’’ sticks in the poet’s throat. ‘‘I thought every German was you. And the language obscene,’’ and this father is an object of fear and fascination: I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. (50)

The narrative ‘‘I’’ of the poem conflates the father (Plath’s own father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant) with the Nazi caricature—the Luftwaffe, Aryan eye, swastika. Plath’s images are startlingly concrete, yet the images of Nazi persecution Plath represents ultimately serve as floating signifiers for any form of suffering. In contrast, the Holocaust poems of the Nobel Prize-winning German poet Nelly Sachs utilize a radically concrete imagery in order to foreclose any form of experiential translation and to fix these poems at a unique point in history. In the famous ‘‘O the Chimneys’’ (‘‘O die Schornsteine’’), from the collection In the Dwellings of Death (In den Wohnungen des Todes, 1947), the black sky as ashes embodies the nation of Israel: O the chimneys, On the ingeniously devised habitations of death, When Israel’s body drifted as smoke, Through the air— Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black, Or was it a ray of sun?150

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Whereas Plath uses concrete images in an associative, metaphorical manner, Sachs’s images are so clear as to resist metaphor. Here, Israel’s body is smoke, and the dead dwell literally as ash in the air. Yet the central tropes in Sachs’s poem seem to reappear as arbitrary metaphors in Plath’s poetry. Indeed, in Plath’s poem, the daughter becomes the Jew: An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. (50)

While Sachs’s poetry purported to speak from the voice of the victims of the Shoah, Plath simply speaks for herself and her own suffering. The poetic voice of Sachs was perceived as an authentic reminder of the horrors of Auschwitz (Sachs narrowly escaped death herself, and was permitted to move to Sweden in 1940). In 1966, the poet Hilde Domin expressed the belief that Nelly Sachs was exceptional in her ability to speak for the dead, since she herself had been a victim of Nazi oppression: ‘‘With your words they went the way which the dead go. Only a victim and exile who was also a German poet could do this. One familiar with the German language. . . . And one who shares the fate of the victims.’’151 In contrast, Plath’s voice is radically detached from the Nazi extermination camps.152 Her identification with the Jew is purely subjective, and her use of the Holocaust as a metaphor for her own experience is an early example of its appropriation by non-Jews in cultural contexts wildly dissimilar to Nazi Germany. Plath’s almost kitschy use of the Holocaust as a floating signifier for her own suffering has often been perceived by critics as tasteless, inappropriate, and naı¨ve. In ‘‘Mary’s Song,’’ Plath compares the preparation of the Sunday lamb to the extermination of the Jews. As in Sachs’ poems, the Jews remain as ash: Ousting the Jews. Their thick palls float Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out Germany. They do not die. Grey birds obsess my heart, Mouth-ash, ash of eye. They settle. On the high

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Precipice That emptied one man into space The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent. It is a heart, This holocaust I walk in, O golden child the world will kill and eat. (45)

Harold Bloom has viewed Plath’s use of the Holocaust as metaphor in her poetry as unsuccessful since it lacks the ‘‘life-enhancing’’ sense of literature: ‘‘ ‘Lady Lazarus,’ with its gratuitous and humanly offensive appropriation of the imagery of Jewish martyrs in Nazi death camps (an appropriation incessant in Plath) seems to me a pure instance of coercive rhetoric, transforming absolutely nothing.’’153 The poet Seamus Heaney has called Plath’s Holocaust metaphor in ‘‘Lady Lazarus’’ ‘‘self-justifying’’ (Brennan, 78). Leon Wieseltier expresses outrage at Plath’s appropriation of the status of Holocaust victim in a number of her poems (Brennan, 129). Wieseltier writes that Sylvia Plath had ‘‘broken the ice’’ by using Auschwitz as a ‘‘metaphor for extremity’’ (Brennan, 129), for she appropriates what is seen by many as a historical caesura to lend intensity to her representation of inner pain.154 This position is echoed by Joyce Carol Oates and Marjorie Perloff, who describes Plath’s metaphorical use of fascism and the Holocaust as ‘‘histrionic’’ and ‘‘empty’’ (Brennan, 129). In contrast, Jaqueline Rose155 sees Plath’s use of the Holocaust as personal metaphor as an engagement with issues of representation.156 In Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation James Young has argued that Plath’s ‘‘Holocaust confessions’’ are not about the Holocaust; rather, ‘‘the Holocaust exists for her . . . as an event available to her (as it was to all who came after) only as a figure, an idea, in whose image she has expressed another brutal reality: that of her own internal pain.’’157 Young locates Plath’s confessional discourse historically within what he calls the ‘‘era of victimhood,’’ a modern era in which one was ‘‘victimized by modern life at large as the Jews and Japanese had been victimized by specific events in modern life’’ (121). Young points to the highly publicized trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 that helped to cement the history of the Holocaust in the minds of those who had no personal experience with the Holocaust, such as Plath.

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Plath’s 1962 poems are nonetheless novel and unabashed in their use of the Holocaust as a floating metaphor within the AngloAmerican literary context. For Plath, the structure of fascism can be used as a metaphor for the family, as is most explicitly articulated in ‘‘Daddy.’’ Here the conflation of gender roles with Nazi perpetrator (father) and Jewish victim (daughter) mirrors the work of authors such as Bachmann and Jelinek. Plath even attributes a masochism to the daughter of the ‘‘Daddy’’ poem: ‘‘Every woman adores a Fascist’’ (50), and this notion of female desire is reiterated two, three, and four decades later in the works of Bachmann and Jelinek. However, in contrast to the works of Jelinek, there is a certain flippancy, a freedom to Plath’s use of Nazism as a metaphor in her poems (‘‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look’’ [‘‘Daddy,’’ 51]). Although she primarily utilizes Holocaust images, Plath makes a parallel reference to Hiroshima in the Ariel poem ‘‘Fever 103’’: ‘‘Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. The sin. The sin’’ (54). The banality of illness engenders a reference to the human tragedy of Hiroshima, so that Hiroshima and the Shoah are simply parallel metaphors that can be used without discretion. Sylvia Plath borrows the tropes of Nazism, of Hiroshima along with numerous other tropes as floating metaphors in her poetry. Plath’s recuperation of Nazism as a metaphor for family relations thus appropriates the central concern of German-language authors but reverses it: for German-language authors, traditional family structures and the authoritarian father figure rather serve as a metaphor for Nazism. In her appropriation of the central concern for postwar German-language authors—fascism—Plath thus simultaneously trivializes it. The ‘‘cultural idiom’’ of fascism that entraps authors such as Jelinek within the frame of history is cited playfully by the American Plath living in England. In a reverse mode of translation, her semiautobiographical novel of claustrophobic American family and gender roles in the 1950s, The Bell Jar, is clearly cited in Jelinek’s own semi-autobiographical The Piano Teacher. In both novels, mother and daughter are represented in the stifling space of home. The reference to Plath appears early in Jelinek’s novel: ‘‘Time passes, and we pass the time. They are enclosed together in a bell jar: Erika, her fine protective hulls, her mama. The jar can be lifted only if an outsider grabs the glass knob on top and pulls it up. Erika is an insect encased in amber, timeless, ageless. She has no history, and she doesn’t make a fuss’’ (The Piano Teacher,14) [Die Zeit vergeht, und wir vergehen in ihr. Unter einer gla¨sernen Ka¨seglocke

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sind sie miteinander eingeschlossen, Erika, ihre feinen Schutzhu¨llen, ihre Mama. Die Glocke la¨ßt sich nur heben, wenn jemand von außen den Glasknopf oben ergreift und ihn in die Ho¨he zieht. Erika ist ein Insekt in Bernstein, zeitlos, alterslos. Erika hat keine Geschichte und macht keine Geschichten (Die Klavierspielerin, 15– 16)].158 Years later, in 1998, Jelinek expressed her admiration for Plath by including an excerpt from The Bell Jar translated into German in the collection of her favorite texts entitled Jelineks Wahl: Literarische Verwandtschaften (Jelinek’s Choice: Literary Relations). Nevertheless, the correspondence between the two novels seems to have eluded literary critics, and I suspect this is a product, once again, of the question of translatability. Translated into the literary landscape of postwar Austria, Plath’s narrative of gender repression and insanity in 1950s America becomes subsumed under the cultural idiom of fascism. Jelinek cites Plath yet again via scenes of self-mutilation in The Piano Teacher, although these scenes take on dramatically different meanings in two divergent cultural contexts.159 In Plath’s novel, the depressed college student Esther Greenwood cuts her calf with a razor blade, ostensibly as a preamble to her suicide attempt and as an antidote to numbness. By way of ‘‘practicing’’ for the actual cut, she drops a Gillette razor, ‘‘like a guillotine’’ (The Bell Jar, 148), onto the calf of her leg: ‘‘I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe’’ (The Bell Jar, 148). Realizing that her mother will return home soon, Esther bandages her cut and leaves the house. In a parallel scene in The Piano Teacher Erika Kohut engages in self-mutilation as a ‘‘hobby’’: ‘‘When SHE’s home alone, she cuts herself, slicing off her nose to spite other people’s faces. . . . No sooner does the sound of the closing door die down than she takes out her little talisman, the paternal all-purpose razor’’ (The Piano Teacher, 86) [Wenn kein Mensch zu Hause ist, schneidet sie sich absichtlich in ihr eigenes Fleisch. . . . Kaum verhallt die Tu¨rklinke, wird schon die va¨terliche Allzweckklinge, ihr kleiner Talisman, hervorgeholt (Die Klavierspielerin, 88)]. Here, Erika seems to ritualize Esther’s failed suicide attempt; in Jelinek’s text, it becomes a mechanized repeated act of self-destruction. As with Esther, numbness accompanies the cutting: ‘‘As usual there is no pain’’ (The Piano Teacher, 87) [Wie u¨blich tut nichts weh (Die Klavierspielerin, 89)]. Yet Erika’s razor blade is not simply a Gillette, but the blade that had belonged to her father, an overcoded symbol of paternal potency. Erika’s cutting is refined and ritualized, and

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she literally ‘‘deflowers’’ herself with her father’s blade so that Esther’s bandage is replaced by a sanitary napkin in Jelinek’s narrative. Plath is said to have told a friend she thought of The Bell Jar ‘‘as an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.’’160 Here, the diverse contexts of the two novels are apparent: Plath’s novel is ultimately an individual depiction of alienated gender roles and mother-daughter relations in 1950s America, whereas these personalized aspects are peripheral in Jelinek’s novel. The postwar, post-fascist space of The Piano Teacher disallows transcendence of the past so that the personal is merely a symptom of historical fixity. Plath’s Esther is able to locate her father’s grave and mourn his death, while Jelinek’s Erika simply engages eternally with displaced paternal signifiers (such as the razor blade). Indeed, The Piano Teacher provides no space for mourning because the father is neither dead nor alive. He is physically displaced, emotionally absent, but nevertheless central as a residual structuring element. The Bell Jar, produced outside of the space of Nazism and its legacy, can represent the death of the father as personal loss. Esther cries at her father’s grave (‘‘I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain’’ (The Bell Jar, 167)—a catharsis that leads to the suicide attempt and, ultimately, to some form of healing. Plath’s fathers can be killed, whereas Jelinek’s fathers are constantly displaced, standing in for a structure that cannot be destroyed and can never be mourned. The poetic ‘‘I’’ of Plath’s ‘‘Daddy’’ fantasizes about killing the Nazi father: ‘‘Daddy, I have had to kill you’’ (49). In the end of the poem, this fantastic poetic ‘‘I’’ has become a vampire, killing numerous men and declaring her freedom from the paternal law: ‘‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’’ (51).161 In contrast, Erika Kohut’s father cannot be located; he merely reappears as a specter, and Erika neither mourns nor achieves catharsis. The circularity of her personal narrative—Erika’s half-hearted attempts at self-destruction in the end of the novel followed by her return home—reflects the circularity of the underlying narrative of fascism and its return. If the father is never truly killed in Jelinek’s works, he can also never really be claimed by his offspring. He represents a level of abstraction, always standing in for a larger historical imaginary, and ownership of this history is always, for Jelinek, unavoidable yet indirect. In her essay ‘‘oh mein Papa’’ (2001), Jelinek draws an explicit link between her own father and the crimes of the Nazis, though the location of guilt is never stable. In the essay, Jelinek re-

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produces a letter from July 5, 1939 in which her father, a Jew, is laid off by the SS (‘‘irgendein SS-Untersturmfu¨hrer’’). Jelinek articulates the affect associated with this personal discovery, yet she likewise questions her ownership of a history that—as part of an historical caesura—is never entirely personal: The life of my father and his family is my business, it is my private concern, no, it is none of my business, I do not have the right—for the cause of my Daddy, and for the cause of the others, whom I didn’t even know personally, I really don’t have the right—to make use of whatever collectives with which I am not really familiar. No right. Maybe I am even right, but a right I do not have.162

Whereas Sylvia Plath’s literary daughters are free to fantasize about murdering the father, identify with the victims of the father, and to mourn him, even Jelinek’s father is not her own. As a placeholder for historical guilt and the impossibility of reconciliation, Jelinek’s father is usable material for her work; yet he is simultaneously unrepresentable. The historical weight of his identity undermines the space of the personal: ‘‘Please, you know your Daddy, this subject, what do you know about him, after all, he’s been dead for a long time; and we, at any rate, don’t know him, either’’ (‘‘oh mein Papa’’). [Bitte, Sie kennen Ihren Papi, dieses Subjekt, was wissen Sie schon von ihm, er ist ja la¨ngst tot; und wir kennen ihn jedenfalls auch nicht.] Jelinek’s relationship to the father, as depicted in ‘‘oh mein Papa,’’ reflects the groundlessness of identity in Jelinek’s claustrophobic postwar Austria. Precisely because for the rest of us—who refer to a social convention of the Never Again as something that is a given and that is understood—history does not cease to be what it is, it remains for us—whose mouths are constantly agape because of the amazement that that much we are unable to imagine can have been—supposedly more concealed than for those who insinuate that we didn’t see that of necessity nothing can be certain.163

Jelinek deconstructs the discourse of ‘‘Never Again’’ in its conceit of memory.164 The syntax of her formulation underscores the lack of grounding for such pronouncements as ‘‘Never Again.’’ The long sentence abounds in relative and subordinate clauses, so that the ground of the formulation itself cannot be located. Guilt and innocence are likewise indefinable categories between which there is always slippage: ‘‘And we pronounce others guilty, so that we

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ourselves can count among the guiltless, a state of which, on the other hand, we may never be certain’’ (‘‘oh mein Papa’’). [Und wir weisen Schuld zu, damit wir selber zu den Schuldlosen geho¨ren ko¨nnen, ein Zustand, dessen wir aber auch wieder nie gewiß sein du¨rfen.] The representation of the personal, the literal father, is never simply personal in the post-Holocaust Austrian context. Memory of the father is an act which is immediately historicized, destabilized, and displaced, and nostalgia is thereby always disrupted.

Plath/Bachmann/Jelinek: Death and the Maiden V Jelinek’s appropriation and translation of portions of Plath’s novel underscore the historical fixity of post-Holocaust German-language literature. Whereas Plath’s narratives and poetry reveal a metaphorical fluidity, a certain rigidification of these very tropes occurs within Jelinek’s works. Jelinek reveals an ironic awareness of these issues in her 2002 drama Death and the Maiden V (The Wall). In this play, Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath slaughter together a ‘‘male animal’’ [ein ma¨nnliches Tier],165 a ram. Jelinek playfully deconstructs central themes of these authors—the father and the wall (Bachmann’s Malina)— and she links these to a fantasy of patricide. As Plath and Bachmann climb a wall together (avoiding the fate of the narrative ‘‘I’’ in Bachmann’s Malina, who disappears into the wall), both figures engage simultaneously in a dialogue about the father: (They are yelling) Daddy! Daddy! (They are screaming insanely loudly) Daddy! Daddy! Your Daddy was a Nazi and you are saying he is a pacifist! Your Daddy was a pacifist and you are claiming he is a Nazi! Your Daddy was a pacifist and you are claiming he is a Jew! (133)166

The ‘‘dialogue’’ between Bachmann and Plath thus resembles the dialogue between Jelinek and Plath—a one-sided conversation begun by Jelinek after Plath’s death. Here, Jelinek conflates all symbolic positions within the German imaginary—father, Nazi, Jew—so that Plath herself is appropriated by an amused Jelinek for the repeating narrative of Nazism. In effect, Jelinek re-inserts Plath’s narrative back into its original historical context. Thus, when elements of Plath’s real life suicide are represented in Jelinek’s play, the choice of death by gas oven is suddenly reminiscent of the Holocaust: ‘‘Now I have this great gas oven and can stick my

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head in in peace and quiet until it is well done. Don’t forget: turn on the kitchen timer beforehand! In the meantime, my children can simmer along in the adjoining room’’ (Death and the Maiden V, 129) [Nun habe ich diesen scho¨nen Gasofen und kann in Ruhe meinen Kopf hineinstecken, bis er gar wird. Nicht vergessen: vorher die Ku¨chenuhr einschalten! Meine Kinder ko¨nnen derweil im Nebenzimmer vor sich hin brutzeln.] Plath’s children were, in fact, shut in the neighboring room; in this way, Plath’s biography is reinscribed into the play. However, this gesture does not link Jelinek’s text to 1960s England; the cultural idiom of Nazism rather re-appropriates Plath’s biography, so that the gas oven immediately evokes the horrors of the Holocaust. Jelinek’s drama ends with a direct citation from Hesiod’s Theogony in which Cronos, the son, castrates the father, Heaven, at the bidding of his mother Earth. According to Jelinek’s stage directions, one of the actresses should read ‘‘the following nice words’’ (Death and the Maiden V, 142) [die folgenden netten Worte] from Hesiod’s text. The scene of patricide is thus associated with the figures of Plath and Bachmann while remaining simultaneously displaced from these figures. Just like the slaughter of the ram, Hesiod’s patricide points to the daughter’s murder of the father as unrealizable fantasy. Cronos, the son, murders his father while in the act of copulation with his mother: The son, however, from his hiding place reached for him with his left hand, took the giant, long, sharp-toothed sickle into his right hand, quickly mowed off his father’s sex organ and threw it behind himself so that it flew away; but it did not fall out of his hand without an effect, for all the bloody drops that fell down were received by Gaia and she gave birth over the circle of years to the strong Erinys, the great giants in gleaming armor and with long spears in their hands, as well as the nymphs, who on the infinite earth are called Melisches, that is nymphs of the ash tree. (143)167

The final line of Jelinek’s drama is thus a citation of original castration and patricide, but even here the father is not successfully murdered. The drops of blood effect the course of generations; these displaced paternal signifiers recall the razer blade of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Jelinek’s insertion of the passage in her drama reflects the impossibility of transcending the history of the fathers in her works. Death and the Maiden V does not easily translate, but it brilliantly conflates and parodies the overcoded nature of fascist symbols in post-Holocaust German-language aesthetics.

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Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste: The Return of the Woman at the Window If the displaced father can be seen as the invisible structuring force who stands in for the residues of the Nazi past, then Michael Haneke’s 2001 film adaptation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher seems to transcend this model. Haneke’s pan-European film adaptation of Jelinek’s novel almost twenty years after its publication (La Pianiste, 2001) won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Haneke’s film retains the focus on power dynamics that structures Jelinek’s text but seems to leave behind the national and historical concerns of the novel. In La Pianiste Erika’s father is mentioned only once as Erika (played by the current symbol for European femininity, Isabelle Huppert168) fashions herself a tragic figure by mentioning to Klemmer that her father has died. The departure of the father is entirely absent in the film, and Erika’s masochistic self-mutilation is not linked to the father: the razer blade is never coded as ‘‘paternal.’’ And, in many ways, Haneke’s film transcends the hold of the father. In its translation into French, the petit bourgeois post-war Austrian milieu is neutralized, and, in the process of cultural translation, the burdens of history seem to fall away. By relying on image, achingly beautiful music, and the sonoric French language to replace Jelinek’s biting prose, Haneke’s remake of the text erases almost entirely the traces of Austria while introducing affective pleasure into Jelinek’s narrative. Divorced from the background of fascism, the relationship between Erika and Klemmer gains a depth not found in the novel. Indeed, the figures themselves attain a level of interiority absent in the novel. A case in point is the scene in which Klemmer auditions for acceptance into the Viennese Music Conservatory. He is playing for Erika, his teacher of choice, yet other teachers also sit in the auditorium. The spectator initially sees the teachers in the background from behind where Klemmer is playing. The camera then zooms closer in to Erika’s (Huppert’s) visage, as she listens. Within the two minute scene, the camera zooms twice to give the spectator a closer view of Erika’s face. By zooming in increments, Haneke subtly focuses the spectator’s gaze. By the end of the scene, the spectator is viewing Huppert’s face as a close-up, as Klemmer plays Schubert’s Scherzo from the Sonata in A, the piece he had played when he first met Erika. The beauty of the music and the musical/ filmic memory invite the spectator to search Erika’s every gesture for signs of feelings.169 Huppert’s brilliant performance is initially

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highly controlled, but as Klemmer plays on, Erika is unable to still the movement of her hands, and her face twitches. The spectator is invited to read these signs as internal stirrings within Erika. The symptoms reveal the logic of repression; Erika’s repression of desire is manifested in her twitches and grimaces. Later, when she is alone with Klemmer in the practice room, her repressed desire is manifested iconically as hysterical coughing. In an interview with Stephan Grissemann Jelinek reveals a somewhat critical stance vis-a`-vis Haneke’s adaptation of her novel.170 Isabelle Huppert is, according to Jelinek, too beautiful for the role of Erika. Fassbinder, she states, would have chosen ugly actors to portray the ugliness of the text: ‘‘This courage to fill the role with an ugly woman would give the language a stronger component, more of a component of its own than it has with a beautiful woman like Huppert’’ (128).171 Jelinek takes issue with Haneke’s claim that his film is a parody of a melodrama: ‘‘It maybe is a deconstruction of melodrama. A parody it probably is not’’ (127).172 Perhaps, for Jelinek, the humor is missing in Haneke’s adaptation of her novel. Indeed, in his own interview with Grissemann, Haneke expresses his distaste for Fassbinder and Fassbinder’s role model, the director of 1950s Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk. In contrast to these formalists, Haneke sees himself, despite the highly controlled structure of his films, as a realist (Grissemann, 186). Yet Haneke’s use of the term ‘‘realism’’ is rather vague and ultimately allies him with a neo-modernist aesthetic:173 ‘‘I have a certain criterion for a work of art, namely that its form and content be absolutely identical.’’174 In this sense, Jelinek’s citational style, in its historical fixity, might approach a kind of realism removed from the narratives of Hollywood that Haneke’s more moving film does not.175 As numerous critics have suggested, Haneke’s La Pianiste is more concerned with the values of humanism than is Jelinek’s novel. In contrast to the frustrated reviews of Jelinek’s novel, critics of Haneke’s film were drawn in by the interiority of the characters and the pathos of a number of the scenes. In the Spiegel review of the film, ‘‘Hunger nach Intimita¨t’’ (‘‘Hunger for Intimacy’’), Elke Schmitter argues that the film is better than the book because the viewer of Haneke’s film can experience sympathy with the figures.176 And the LA Weekly review of the film suggests the same: ‘‘The Erika of the novel proves far less sympathetic than her screen counterpart, in part because of the humanity ingrained in Huppert’s face, no matter how impassive her expression or sadistic her behavior.’’177 This sentiment is mirrored in numerous reviews from both sides of the Atlantic. American and British reviewers of the film see it as ‘‘a

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woman’s picture with a vengeance,’’178 a film that ‘‘triumphs’’ because Huppert’s ‘‘character comes across as recognizably human.’’179 This is perhaps the sense in which Jelinek means that Haneke’s film is ‘‘altmodisch’’ (old-fashioned), still concerned with the dramas of bodies.180 She even suggests that Klemmer is represented humanely in Haneke’s film, and reviewers are generally sympathetic to this figure, who is a sadistic product of Austria’s ‘‘everyday fascism’’ in Jelinek’s novel. As the reviewer Dietrich Kuhlbrodt puts it: ‘‘The man owns the emotions of which the woman has been robbed.’’181 Thus, although Haneke himself has stated that his films are very ‘‘unpsychological,’’182 La Pianiste is invested with affect in a manner entirely foreign to Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. As J. Hoberman of The Village Voice points out, the Viennese locations in the film are alienating, and the French language ‘‘produces an odd linguistic disjunction—softening the authoritarian ambience that would have inevitably attached itself to a German-language version.’’183 The overburdened post-fascist German language of Jelinek’s novel is discarded in Haneke’s film so that Jelinek’s narrative of Austria’s historical entrapment becomes an isolated tale of a failed love and female abjection. Haneke’s shots are tightly framed so that the trope of entrapment resonates in the film,184 but this motif is belied by the final scene of the film in which Erika stabs herself in the shoulder. As in the novel, her self-mutilation is a reaction to Klemmer’s rape and rejection of her. However, Jelinek’s heroine returns home following this act, while Haneke’s Erika leaves her mother and Klemmer behind in the carefully framed space of the Vienna Conservatory, as she walks out of the doors and into the space of the unknown. Through the very beauty of its form, Haneke’s film opens Jelinek’s narrative to the possibility of affect, and through this final gesture of stepping outside the doors, the film transcends its Austrian roots, its provincialism. Haneke’s La Pianiste, as suggested by reviews of the film, is the product of a united Europe, a Europe whose cinema might engage in a kind of global aesthetic more attuned to affect than history. As Stefan Grissemann puts it in his interview with Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘It now seems to have turned into a European narrative’’ (133).185 Jelinek’s relentless critique of the cultural mechanisms of fascism are absent in Haneke’s de-historicized, postnational adaptation of the novel. In this sense, Haneke’s ‘‘new European’’ film seems to de-provincialize Jelinek as her formerly ‘‘banal’’ provincial narrative gains global resonance.186 In Haneke’s film, Erika steps out of the entrapping space of the conservatory, and this gesture reverses the entrapment of the Liter-

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aturen image of Jelinek within the framed, ruined space. Jelinek’s ‘‘performative entrapment,’’ itself a reversal of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘‘Frau am Fenster’’ (‘‘Woman at the Window’’), encloses desire. Where Friedrich’s painting suggests longing, Jelinek’s image and her texts circumscribe the parameters of desire and affect. Haneke’s film reverses this gesture not only in the final scene, but even in earlier ones, as Erika gazes out of the window of her practice studio in the conservatory. Early in Haneke’s film, we see Erika standing in front of her window in a classically romantic tableau similar to Friedrich’s romantic painting. Thus, Haneke’s La Pianiste establishes a grammar of desire early on—a grammar rejected by Jelinek. The ‘‘Woman at the Window’’ tableau is repeated in the film as leitmotif so that, when read independently from the novel, the final scene of escape has already been foregrounded visually in Haneke’s film. Removed from the cultural idiom of Nazism, Haneke’s film adaptation indulges in a longing that stems from the release of forgetting. The leitmotif of entrapment and escape is beautifully pictured in the dialogue staged between Haneke’s film version of The Piano Teacher and Jelinek’s novel. Whereas Jelinek’s novel radically disallows all modes of escape from the repressive Heimat, Haneke’s film offers aesthetic and, in the end, narrative escape. In the chapters that follow, I will look to filmmakers and authors who balance these tropes in a dialectical manner. The films of Tom Tykwer, and the literature of authors such as Robert Menasse and Birgit Vanderbeke, depict both the narrative of entrapment that characterizes post-Holocaust Germany and Austria and complex modes of departure and escape from a brutal and tainted familial and national space. In Chapter 3, I show how the films of Tom Tykwer, Germany’s most ‘‘global’’ contemporary film director, embody the dialectic of entrapment and escape I am laying out here. They borrow thematically and aesthetically from a literary and cinematic tradition defined by figures such as Bachmann, Jelinek, and New German Cinema directors such as R. W. Fassbinder. Yet they likewise offer routes of departure from family, home, and nation in a manner that complicates nostalgic affect, imagining a mode of aesthetics that is both critical and ecstatic.

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3 Leaving Home: Tom Tykwer, German Cinema, and the Aesthetics of Escape THE CLOSING TABLEAU OF EACH OF TOM TYKWER’S FEATURE FILMS

suggests a fantasy of escape. Within their respective narratives, the figures of these films are represented in flight, in the state of falling, entering an unknown space. These moments starkly contrast with the motif of entrapment that colors the worlds of the heroines in Tykwer’s films. In the closing scenes, the domestic melodrama is, at it were, turned on its head. The nightmare of entrapment is neither resolved through masochistic sacrifice nor marital bliss; rather, the familial and familiar space of home is left behind in both temporal and spatial terms. This is the logic of the final moments in Tykwer’s first feature film, Deadly Maria (Die to¨dliche Maria; Germany, 1993): the almost autistic Maria (Nina Petri), an anachronistic domestic servant of sorts to her husband (Peter Franke) and father (Josef Bierbichler), consciously allows herself to fall out of the window of her domestic prison after having indirectly murdered her husband and father.1 Rather than achieving a masochistic resolution to her attempts at rebellion, however, Maria’s fall is cushioned by the body of her shy and repressed lover (Joachim Kro´l), and the bird’s-eye shot of the two on the grass after the fall reveals the pleasure of surprise and the new on the faces of the lovers. Similarly, in the final scenes of Winter Sleepers (Winterschla¨fer; Germany, 1997), shots of two women traveling on a train are intercut with the dramatic fall from a mountain of their former lover, a ski instructor (Heino Ferch) who skis off a mountain. This fall is shot primarily from below or at oblique angles and in slow motion, so that the fall resembles infinite flight. The escape tableau is shot less dramatically in the popular Run Lola Run (Lola rennt; Germany, 1998), but even here the future is open in ways it had not previously been. Both Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) have escaped their deaths, and Lola has similarly left behind the notion of family with 123

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2. ‘‘Escape Fantasy.’’ The Princess and the Warrior. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/ X-Verleih.

all of its entrapping forces. The two lovers move through the unnaturally empty Berlin streets with the wonder of the new. Cinematically, the closing escape tableaux in both The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin; Germany, 2000) and Heaven (Germany and the United States, 2002) are strikingly similar. In The Princess and the Warrior, the figures leave behind family and country as they drive to a mythical home on the French coast.2 Philippa (Cate Blanchet) and Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), the unlikely lovers in Heaven,3 escape the Italian police by stealing a helicopter, leaving behind their former lives. The shot resembles the final moments in The Princess and the Warrior, also captured with a SteadyCam camera, as the figures slowly recede from the vision of the camera into the sky above. These tableaux of escape shape Tykwer’s films and lend them a quality of transcendence and openness altogether unique to German film and, indeed, to post-fascist German aesthetics. Tykwer’s escape tableaux call into question the generic and cultural categories of Tykwer’s films. Tykwer’s works are often characterized as ‘‘postmodern’’ or even ‘‘global postmodern’’ films. In particular, Run Lola Run has garnered global appeal through its popularity in diverse locations including Taiwan, Finland, Uruguay, and Brazil.

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The film’s love story, creative use of technology, and catchy techno music score certainly contributed to its release in thirty-seven countries and to its status as the second-most popular German film internationally after Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (Germany, 1981) ever to play in the United States.4 In many other ways, however, the film stands for a particularly German historical moment. Indeed, the canon of global postmodern films such as those by Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, or Wong Kar-Wai has not offered similarly expansive, euphoric endings. In Tykwer’s films, figures (generally female) utilize the majority of film time struggling within the restraints of oppressive and limiting environments and attempting to shed the chains that bind them within this space, arriving in the end at a place and time of mythical possibilities. While films such as Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2002) begin and end in a haze of questions and abstractions, Tykwer’s films generally begin with a relatively simple narrative only ultimately to move beyond the narrative frame into a space of infinite possibilities. In other words, quintessentially postmodern films such as Mulholland Drive, Wong’s Chungking Express (1997) or 2046 (2004), Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 (2003/2004), and Alejandro Gonza´lez In˜a´rritu’s Amores Perros (2001) and Babel (2006) all exhibit to varying degrees a non-linear, sometimes dream-like narrative structure, multiple narratives, and a level of open-endedness that pose as many questions as they answer. In contrast, Tykwer’s films present simple narratives that are then deconstructed within the film, only to be transcended altogether in the closing escape tableaux. Indeed, these tableaux are utopian in stark contrast to the often restrictive (tightly framed) scenes that precede them.5 Within the German film landscape, the films of Tom Tykwer represent a transitional moment. They dramatize, I argue, a particularly German entrance into the global aesthetics of postmodernism, the aesthetics of playful citation and lightness celebrated by theorists of the postmodern.6 They cite tropes and motifs central to the history of German cinema, yet they also stage a deconstruction and departure from these history-laden tropes.7 Tykwer’s films choreograph an elaborate escape from entrapment—the entrapment of home, family and, correlatively, of fascism and nation. To the extent that they evoke nostalgia, then, they do so in the sense suggested by Andreas Huyssen and Svetlana Boym, to mark historical shifts and to look not only backward but also forward. However, departures from a dominant post-Holocaust mode of German film aesthetics occur only in the final tableaux of the films and after much engagement with various histories on the level of the per-

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sonal, the political, and the filmic/aesthetic. In opening a space for escape and representing this escape in their final tableaux, Tykwer’s films offer a mode of reflective nostalgia. A regressive mode of nostalgia is deconstructed via the complex critique of the space of home and the repressive notion of family that defines this space. Yet Tykwer’s figures never really arrive at their new home. A ‘‘home elsewhere’’ is imagined and sometimes glimpsed, but true arrival is never possible. Hence, these films straddle the space between departure and arrival; the figures imagine a better home than the one they leave behind, but this home is not yet representable. Past and future, utopia and reflective nostalgia, meet in Tykwer’s films in the form of a temporal break, offering new modes of thinking about history and nation. Tykwer’s aesthetics of departure perform a radical break from the aesthetics of performative entrapment as exemplified in Jelinek’s works. Indeed, the notion of escape is thematized in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior in a dialogue between the heroine Sissi and her friend, Otto. The exchange between Sissi and Otto could be read as a response to Jelinek’s claustrophobic aesthetics of entrapment. In The Piano Teacher the narrator articulates Erika’s fear of change: ‘‘Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change’’ (The Piano Teacher, 190) [Erika hat Furcht davor, daß alles so bleibt, wie es ist, und sie hat Furcht, daß sich einmal etwas vera¨ndern ko¨nnte (Die Klavierspielerin, 191]. In Tykwer’s film, the heroine Sissi expresses her anxiety regarding the possibility of change in similar terms, stating, upon her return to the claustrophic ‘‘home’’ of the psychiatric ward, that she is afraid ‘‘that nothing will be as it was before’’ [Ich habe Angst, dass . . . alles nie mehr so sein wird, wie vorher]. Otto corrects her by asserting: ‘‘No, you are afraid that everything will be as it was before’’ [Nein, du hast Angst, dass alles wieder so sein wird, wie vorher],8 and Sissi admits that this is the case. Here we see the fantasy of escape from the stasis of entrapment, a fantasy that is foreclosed, both thematically and aesthetically, in Jelinek’s works. In this chapter, I trace Tykwer’s aesthetics of departure both formally and thematically. Tykwer’s intricate use of self-citation, what I call ‘‘hermetic intertextuality,’’ cuts across his film œuvre, producing moments of nonlinearity and timelessness that break from linear notions of history. Thematically, Tykwer’s films offer departure via the deconstruction of family and home, as the figures leave behind the entrapment of the German Heimat. Hence, I concentrate here on Tykwer’s first five feature films, as they offer a com-

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plex intertext focusing primarily on female heroines. These five films depict the heroines as they choreograph complex escapes from the entrapping spaces of family and home.9 I do not focus here on Tykwer’s most recent films, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mo¨rders; Germany, France, Spain, USA, 2006) and The International (USA, Germany, UK, 2008). Perfume adapts Patrick Su¨skind’s novel of the same name about a perfumer in eighteenth-century France who seduces the French public with his scents and is, in the end, literally cannibalized by those who desire his perfumes. The International weaves a tale of a global network of corruption from which there is no real escape (though numerous scenes in the film imagine this escape). Both films are big-budget international co-productions that feature male protagonists. Despite being larger budget films, both Perfume and The International continue to cite the earlier films stylistically. What I call the dialectic of entrapment and escape could be said to inform the narratives of these most recent films (in Perfume as implosion, as the dystopic anti-Enlightenment fantasy of consumption by the other, and in The International as entrapment and fantasy of escape on a global scale), but the focus here is less explicitly on the gender/family/home nexus than in the earlier films. I see Tykwer’s films as anomalies within the history of German cinema, and I lay out the key concerns of German film since its degradation to the mode of propaganda par excellence by the Nazis, pointing to Tykwer’s engagement with and departure from these historical concerns. In this context, the modernism/postmodernism debate offers some insights into the Newness of Tykwer’s cinema both formally and thematically. My analysis of Tykwer’s deconstruction of home and family is embedded within a discussion of the symbolic place of the oedipal model for post-Holocaust cinema and of the cinematic mode of melodrama that depicts the entrapment of home. In this way, I suggest that Tykwer’s film aesthetics re-insert affect as nostalgia for an imagined ‘‘home elsewhere’’ into the project of post-Holocaust German cinema.

The Persistence of History Escape and entrapment are logical topics of concern for a postwar German filmmaker, given the weighty nature of German history as well as film history. In an infamous speech given at the Berlin Krolloper on March 5, 1937, Heinrich Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, praised film as the art medium best suited

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to the dissemination of propaganda.10 For Goebbels, films could provide the illusion and spectacle that created, as suggested by Linda Schulte-Sasse, ‘‘imaginary wholeness’’ (33). Given the central role of film for Nazi propaganda,11 it is not surprising that a number of postwar German filmmakers have consistently attempted to sever the ties to German film history through disparate techniques of alienation and critique. Beginning with the Young German Cinema filmmakers of the 1960s and continuing with the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s and ’80s, works by the most celebrated international German directors such as Volker Schlo¨ndorff, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder have all been explicitly engaged in the task of critical confrontation with the Nazi past. While these directors and their peers continue to concern German film scholars,12 recent work on German film has focused on domestic trends such as popular film made during the Third Reich, the Heimatfilm genre, German film stars, and the German relationship comedies of the nineties.13 What a more recent focus on popular German cinema has brought to light is the clash between local, national, and global spaces.14 In contemporary Germany, with the possible exception of Tom Tykwer, local and national tastes rarely converge with the global, and popular German cinema is rarely associated with experimental or postmodern cinema.15 Eric Rentschler has argued that while the New German Cinema was intensely engaged in questions of history and identity, German national film of the 1990s—what he calls a ‘‘cinema of concensus’’—often side-stepped these very questions in the interest of entertainment and capital.16 Popular comedies such as So¨nke Wortmann’s Maybe . . . Maybe Not (Der bewegte Mann; Germany, 1994) and Helmut Dietl’s Rossini (Germany, 1997) recall comic film classics in that they are self-consciously apolitical. Yet these light comedies are innovative neither in content nor style. Rentschler admits here to his own nostalgia for the critical aesthetics of the New German Cinema (‘‘Post-Wall Cinema,’’ 261).17 Directors such as Doris Do¨rrie and So¨nke Wortmann, as Rentschler shows, pride themselves upon their antagonism toward the institution of New German Cinema; these directors strive to make popular films that correspond to strict genre categories (266), and they have achieved a great deal of success in Germany and very little in the rest of the world.18 While German comedies continue to be the most popular films in Germany domestically,19 the most successful German films internationally in the current decade have been those based on Germany’s recent dual histories of totalitarian regimes, the Nazi history

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and the GDR years. The German-language submission to the 2005 Academy Awards, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (Der Untergang; Germany, 2004), engages seriously with its subject, but it is aesthetically unambitious, its dim lighting and period verisimilitude embodying a Hollywood style of historical flatness. As mentioned earlier, the 2007 and 2008 Oscars for Best Foreign Film were given to the German-language films treating historical themes of totalitarianism, namely Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2007 Oscar winner The Lives of Others (Das Leben der anderen; Germany, 2006), which depicts the surveillance mechanisms of the Stasi in the former GDR, and Stefan Ruzowizky’s 2008 Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Die Fa¨lscher; Austria/Germany, 2007), which tells the story of a Jewish counterfeiter during the Third Reich. While ostensibly representing history, these films nevertheless eschew aesthetic experimentation. All three films mimic the style of Hollywood period pieces in both form and tone. And although they raise some questions about ethics and engage in contemporary debates on human rights and the politics of fascism, they ultimately remain circumscribed within their own narrative, avoiding any temporal or aesthetic breaks that might provoke uncomfortable thoughts on the part of the spectator. In their chapters on post-wall German cinema, both Rentschler (‘‘Post-Wall Cinema,’’ 275) and Hake cite Tykwer as one of the few promising filmmakers to have achieved popularity in Germany and abroad in recent years. Hake lauds the unique film style in Run Lola Run that is simultaneously self-referential and moves ‘‘beyond the conventional styles of the mainstream dramas and comedies’’ (Hake,192), i.e., beyond genre. With some exceptions, Tykwer is viewed by film historians and critics as an enigmatic figure. His work can perhaps be located somewhere between the repetition compulsion of historical critique endemic to the New German Cinema and the traditional aesthetic of the most popular postwar German film comedies and historical dramas. The somewhat ambivalent reception of Tykwer’s films reflects the split state of German postwar, post-wall film. The particularities of German film history and its intertwinement with the crimes of the Nazis have created the conditions for a highly cautious engagement with the seemingly ahistorical aesthetics of the postmodern.

After Nostalgia? Postmodernism and German Cinema Postmodern film style, as exhibited in the films normally associated with the term, is characterized by formalism, pastische, and over-

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coded citations of filmic and cultural moments. According to Fredric Jameson, this citational mode engenders a ‘‘nostalgia for the present.’’20 For Jameson the absence of history is apparent in American postmodern films such as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) which represents America in the fifties as ‘‘a whole simulacrum in its own right’’ (Postmodernism, 295): ‘‘The classical nostalgia film, while evading its present altogether, registered its historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination in lavish images of specific generational pasts’’ (296). For Jameson, postmodern American films indulge in a longing for that which was never lost, a nostalgia without affect. To some extent, Jameson’s notion of postmodern film as lacking historicity still holds, especially in the cases of American postmodern filmmakers such as Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. What distinguishes Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 (USA, 2003 and 2004) most are its citational practices, its celebration of film, creating a nostalgia for film that has no historical significance outside of the medium itself. Even films like Alejandro Gonza´lez In˜a´rritu’s Babel (France/Mexico/USA, 2006) and Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (China/France/Germany/Hong Kong, 2004) elude linearity and historical fixity, so that postmodern film style cannot simply be linked to the American context. Despite the centrality of American film for debates on postmodernism, however, the relationship between postmodern style, history, and nostalgia is not necessarily fixed globally. Both Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym suggest that nostalgia might revive historicity within the diaspora and developing cultures. Europe’s premier status as the placeholder for modernity likewise necessitates a rethinking of the aesthetics of postmodernism in European film. As mentioned earlier, even Jameson has pointed to the exceptional nature of German aesthetics. He concedes that the case of Germany may be anomalous and ‘‘that Habermas may well be right, and the older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere’’ (Postmodernism, 59). In other words, although postmodern style is not anathema to the post-fascist/post-wall German landscape, this does not necessarily mean that modernism and historicity have been discarded. As the historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer have argued, critical historians of Germany have ‘‘centered on the paradigm of historical development’’ as a result of the fixation with Nazism.21 Hence, Jarausch and Geyer call for the integration of the pluralist methodologies of postmodernism into critical historical studies so that historians can address social development in more creative ways.

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The almost programmatic optimism with which Jarausch and Geyer call for a consideration of postmodern historiographical methodologies is one side of the coin; the other is, to my mind, the cynicism and critical distance often accompanying the use of the term ‘‘postmodern’’ within the German context, especially in the German academy. Along these lines, German filmmakers themselves seem to have a very different view of the aesthetics of postmodernism than their American counterparts. Postmodern style has the potential of, on the one hand, being associated with liberation or, on the other hand, banality and, worse, a lack of historical reflection (Jameson). Thus, while the term ‘‘postmodern’’ is used liberally by cultural critics of German film and literature, it takes on an ideological weight no longer present in the American context. Indeed, German critics seem constrained in their discussion of postmodern film. A case in point is the collection of essays entitled Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne [The Film-Ghosts of Postmodernity] (1998). In his essay ‘‘Einleitendes zu den vielfa¨ltigen Erscheinungsformen postmoderner Geister’’ [Introduction to the Multifaceted Forms of Appearance of Postmodern Ghosts], Andreas Rost points out that relatively little has been published up to that point on the topic of postmodern film in Germany.22 As if to illustrate this point, not one German film is treated by any of the authors, and only one German-language filmmaker, the Austrian Michael Haneke (who in recent years has made exclusively French-language films), is named a postmodern director (19). A more recent edition of essays on postmodernism and film that appeared in Germany, entitled Oberfla¨chenrausch: Postmoderne und Postklassik im Kino der 90er Jahre [The Ecstasy of Superficiality: Postmodernity and Post-Classicism in the Cinema of the Nineties] (2002), engages in a similar discussion of postmodern film.23 Many of the essays in the volume attempt to define postmodern film style, focusing specifically on citation. Interestingly, the list of cited films at the end of the book includes only eight German titles out of more than 250 films. The essays in both Oberfla¨chenrausch and Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne analyze almost exclusively American/Hollywood films, with David Lynch as the premier filmmaker associated with postmodern style.24 Georg Seeßlen expresses his fascination with David Lynch’s film Wild At Heart, and the essay constitutes a jarring shift from the philosophical tone of the other contributions in the volume to a more personal one: ‘‘No theoretical introduction and absolutely nothing from the department ‘Eternal Truths of Film History’ will be offered here; rather, my personal fascination with the film Wild at Heart by David Lynch and with

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the cinema of the postmodern will be explained.’’25 In content, the essay is reminiscent of numerous essays by American film critics on postmodern film from the past few decades. It stands, however, in contrast to essays in which the notion of postmodernism is weighed against the supposedly more serious category of modernism, and postmodernism often appears in a less positive light as the more formal and superficial of the two. The concept ‘‘anything goes’’ looms large as a characteristic associated with postmodernism and its presumed lack of historicity.26 Ernst Schreckenberg associates postmodern cinema with the rise of the slick multiplex that has replaced numerous ‘‘Autorenkinos’’ (art cinemas):27 Hollywood buys out Europe, a position clearly informed by Frankfurt School receptions of film and the culture industry such as Adorno’s characterization of film as the most ‘‘drastic medium of the culture industry,’’28 a regressive medium that he compares to jazz, cars, and bombs in its ability to create homogeneity and accomodation.29 Despite the sophistication of the essays contained within the volumes mentioned here, they reveal precisely the kind of skepticism with regard to postmodernism on the part of German film scholars that Jarausch and Geyer associate with historians in German Studies: the categories of modernity and of the Frankfurt School philosophers of Critical Theory remain central to assessments of the postmodern. Already in 1988, Ingeborg Hoesterey pointed to the ‘‘apocalyptic dimension’’ associated with [p]ostmodernity for the Habermasian communication community, whereas idea and term of the architecture and art scene mean liberation from the limitations of an aesthetic modernism that has become canonical. And if one limits onself to one discipline, literary studies, one can observe with astonishment that a certain structure of poetic texts is considered postmodern by American Studies, whereas the same stylistic element will be considered typically modern by Germanistik and Romance Studies.30

Indeed, Hoesterey’s assessment of the German resistance to the notion of ‘‘postmodernism’’ seems residually apt twenty years later in the area of film studies. Critics have not hesitated to use the term ‘‘postmodern’’ to characterize Tom Tykwer’s film œuvre, especially his 1998 international hit Run Lola Run,31 a film that was generally lauded for its creative use of postmodern media and film techniques. For Sabine Hake Run Lola Run is ‘‘the quintessential postmodern film’’ (Hake, 192). Reviews of the film in Germany were mostly exuberant, as, for ex-

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ample, when Michael Althen of the Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung called it the film ‘‘of which the German cinema has dreamed all these years.’’32 However, the use of the term ‘‘postmodern’’ in reviews is generally associated with a critique of the film’s supposed superficiality. Janet Maslin of the New York Times sees the film as ‘‘essentially empty.’’33 The German film review for filmtext.com called the film ‘‘banal’’: ‘‘We have heard the term ‘postmodern’ before.’’34 In this review, Urs Richter seems to concur with Maslin that the film is more surface than substance, and he articulates this critique with, once again, derision in terms such as ‘‘everything goes.’’35 The term ‘‘postmodern’’ is clearly in circulation, yet it commonly assumes negative connotations when used in conjunction with German film.36 Timothy Corrigan has used the term ‘‘postmodern’’ to describe the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a director whose concern with German history is unquestioned. Corrigan sees the excess of material and narratives in Fassbinder’s films as evidence that ‘‘he and his work may be ultimately about ‘too much too fast.’ ’’37 However, Corrigan is simultaneously quick to point out that this excess material remains historical, that is, that ‘‘in the current compression of space across so many global textualities, temporality and history have not disappeared’’ (Corrigan, 154). Caryl Flinn has also approached the films of the New German Cinema, especially those of Fassbinder, in terms of the ‘‘shocks’’ of modernism, suggesting that there is a continuity between these shocks and their potentially postmodern manifestations in films such as Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (Germany, 1979). In this sense, affect and history might be linked in these films (Flinn, 46). In her focus on moments of rupture in films of the New German Cinema, Flinn suggests that the marriage of beauty and negativity in, for example, Peer Raben’s film scores for Fassbinder’s films perhaps points in the direction of the postmodern (Flinn, 101–2).38 ‘‘It [New German Cinema] challenges modernist-inflected film theory of the late 1970s and 1980s by bringing enjoyment and pleasure into political criticism’’ (Flinn, 273). Reassessments of the aesthetics of New German Cinema, then, attempt to take into account postmodern style, recognizing at the same time the cultural need to preserve history. The notion of ‘‘shock’’ often associated with early film could be applied to the escape tableaux in Tykwer’s films. To my mind, these tableaux crystallize the sense of the New in Tykwer’s films much more than his skilled use of film and digital technology; they signal a transition, a liberation much in line with those utopian notions of postmodernism that celebrate the loss of a center and a radical

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shift in perspective. Following upon film plots concerned, in large part, with disempowerment and claustrophobia, Tykwer’s film texts could be read as allegories of a national fantasy of deconstruction and departure from a static mode of history.

Nostalgia and German Film History: Sissi/Lola/Maria Tykwer’s films engage explicitly with German film history through citations of German film icons, Maria, Lola, and Sissi. Tykwer uses these historically loaded names for his heroines in the films Deadly Maria, Run Lola Run, and The Princess and the Warrior, underscoring thereby the embeddedness of his own films within the history of German cinema. Yet Tykwer does not revive these figures in order to indulge in a nostalgia for an escapist film history of starlets. Rather, his heroines engage in complex ways with their cinematic predecessors, performing a certain affinity with their namesakes while simultaneously deconstructing any rigid notions of femininity embodied in these film icons.39 The most obvious film citation in The Princess and the Warrior is the name of the ‘‘princess,’’ Sissi. This is a clear reference to Elisabeth of Austria who had also been called ‘‘Sissi’’ by the Germans. The Bavarian girl who became an Austrian empress was the heroine of the so-called Sissi movies of the 1950s (West Germany/Austria 1955, 1956, and 1957) starring the beloved Romy Schneider. These films depict the naı¨ve, nature-loving Bavarian princess as she meets and marries the crown prince of Austria, Franz Josef. The Sissi films are iconographic for the tradition of the Heimatfilme of the 1950s and 1960s. Heimatfilme met the desire on the part of Germans and Austrians to access a more naı¨ve past in the wake of their fascist history. These films presented an idealized view of nature and femininity in the attempt to remind the Germans of an innocence lost. Ernst Marischka’s Sissi films are often seen as reviving a nostalgic love of nation via the Bavarian Sissi who represents a more civilized and humane form of government than the barbarism of the Nazis.40 As a citation, however, Tykwer’s ‘‘Sissi’’ figure neither represents a nostalgic embodiment of her namesake, nor does she entirely deconstruct her. The Princess and the Warrior is neither a parody of nor an homage to Marischka’s Heimatfilm.41 Tykwer’s ‘‘Sissi’’ is naı¨ve, simple, and beloved by those around her—the patients in the psychiatric ward where she works. Like Romy Schneider’s ‘‘Sissi’’ in the first film of the trilogy (1955), Tykwer’s Sissi seems to represent a transparent femininity that attracts the weakened and alien-

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ated figures around her. In Ernst Marischka’s 1955 film, Sissi first appears as the mistress of the domesticated animals on her family estate. She rides a horse generally considered to be ‘‘wild’’ through the Bavarian hills and is encouraged by her father to jump over the rose bushes in front of the house. She then begins to feed a caged bird and then a fawn who, according to the manservant, will take milk from no one but Sissi herself. The caged animals love this maternal child of nature just as the patients in the psychiatric ward in Tykwer’s film are drawn to their own Sissi. Especially the male patients desire Sissi’s presence and her care. Even when her maternal activities are sexual in nature (as when she masturbates the psychotic ‘‘Steini,’’ a figure who, she later discovers, has killed her mother), they are carried out with the same kind of understanding but sovereign strictness with which her filmic predecessor protects the penned fawn from the family dogs. Indeed, both Sissis play the role of the nurse. The Bavarian Sissi of Marischka’s film is initially presented to the spectator in the idyll of her home ‘‘Possenhofen’’ on the Starnberger lake, yet the animals whom she feeds all live in cages, and the metaphor of a bird in a cage is often used in conjunction with Sissi once she moves into the palace with Franz Josef and his

3. ‘‘In the Asylum.’’ The Princess and the Warrior. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/ X-Verleih.

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mother. Similarly, Tykwer’s Sissi first appears in The Princess and the Warrior in the home space of the psychiatric hospital, a space that serves simultaneously as a ‘‘home’’ and a prison. The interior of the asylum is spacious and open, and the camera sweeps fluidly through it so that the sense of entrapment is mitigated. At the same time, there is a necessarily institutional feel to the asylum, and a certain claustrophobia characterizes all of the scenes in the central meeting room.Tykwer has compared the set for the asylum in The Princess and the Warrior to the classic expressionist set of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari; Germany, 1919), since it gives a sense both of spaciousness and narrowness.42 The space is not especially dark; indeed, a warm light falls on Sissi and Otto, the blind patient, in Sissi’s first scene in the film. Yet these colors are muted when compared with the almost artificial Technicolor-inspired brilliance of the final tableau of the house ‘‘at the end of the world.’’43 The sunny Agfacolor tones of the Sissi films are likewise recalled in the scenes depicting Sissi’s room in the asylum. Whereas there is an element of realism in the asylum scenes set in the patient areas, Sissi’s room is both a refuge from the all-encompassing world of the institution and inseparable from it. The overly bright tones of 1950s Heimat films are partially revived in Sissi’s room, which is simultaneously dark and lit in vibrant greens and yellows (with the exception of a sky-blue print depicting a seagull in flight). The primary colors that dominate the film (yellow, red, green) recall Tykwer’s symbolic use of color in Winter Sleepers and are reminiscent, as suggested by Sandra Schuppach, of the 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 23). Sissi’s room evokes the nostalgia associated with a past film aesthetic. Sitting upon a brilliant lime-green and yellow checked bed cover, Sissi watches Vittorio DeSica’s 1951 film Miracle in Milan. Although it was shot in black and white, Miracle in Milan evokes the dreamlike atmosphere of The Princess and the Warrior, telling the story of an orphan who performs miracles to help the downtrodden. The citation of Miracle in Milan evokes an atmosphere of fantasy that animates the space of Sissi’s room. It likewise invites a renewed reflection on film aesthetics and film history. A deleted scene entitled ‘‘Watching Television’’ portrays Sissi and the patients in the psychiatric ward screening the original Sissi film.44 Tykwer’s Sissi is mesmerized and mouths the screen-Sissi’s lines adoringly as she watches, performing her identification with her screen namesake. As the camera circles around the spectators, it cuts to the brothers Walther and Bodo (‘‘the warrior’’) watching television in their

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home on the hill. Far from relishing Heimat classics, however, Bodo is intensely watching a scene depicting war combat. The deleted ‘‘Watching Television’’ scene revives a sense of nostalgia, of both continuity and breaks; it reflects our own pleasure in an identificatory mode of spectatorship, and this pleasure is mirrored in the euphoria of Sissi, who simultaneously identifies with and adores her namesake. The deletion of the ‘‘Watching Television’’ scene is ultimately explained by Tykwer and his editor, Mathilde Bonnefoy, as the result of an excess of material, but I suspect the decision also had to do with the affect it inspires in the spectator. To my mind, the scene indulges in a dreamy pleasure in spectatorship and identification that is framed by the nostalgia coded in Romy Schneider’s ‘‘Sissi.’’ Yet Tykwer explains in the commentary to the deleted scenes that he and Bonnefoy thought the scene was not essential to the telling of the story, although the scene was their ‘‘favorite.’’ In my view, the citation is too explicit, writing an affect of nostalgia into the fabric of the film that is ultimately ahistorical along the lines articulated by Jameson. The pleasure in viewing is thematized in a manner that threatens to undermine the historicity of the film citation. With the deletion of the ‘‘Watching Television’’ scene, the name ‘‘Sissi’’ in The Princess and the Warrior serves as an evocative and indirect reference to German film history. Similarly, the citation of the film Miracle in Milan is subtly evocative. The film is not necessarily immediately recognizable to Tykwer’s audience, but the scene that plays on Sissi’s television is easily legible on its own: a young man expresses his hope to a young woman as they view the rising sun. The scene within a scene plays within the semi-magical space of Sissi’s room, and it corresponds with the viewer’s emerging sense that Sissi herself fosters naı¨ve hopes of happiness. Primarily, then, the Miracle in Milan clip helps provide an ambience of displaced nostalgia and wonder to the scene, and a knowledge of the citational reference does not significantly expand the spectator’s understanding of the film. The correspondences between Tykwer’s Sissi and Marishka’s heroine are numerous but inexplicit. In fact, we learn during her conversation with Bodo’s brother Walther that Tykwer’s ‘‘Sissi’’ is not a nickname for Elisabeth, but rather for Simone, the name not for a Bavarian princess but rather a foreign name. In this sense, nostalgic identifications are consistently complicated, but the historical link is preserved. The displaced citation of Romy Schneider’s ‘‘Sissi’’ in The Princess and the Warrior can be analyzed in tandem with ‘‘Lola,’’ who drives the story of Tykwer’s previous film, Run Lola Run (1998).45

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The two names recall unambiguously two female heroines endemic to the German film tradition, although the figures themselves cannot be said to strictly embody these female types. In contrast to ‘‘Sissi,’’ the ‘‘Lola’’ figure is traditionally a cabaret performer, a femme fatale. Whereas Sissi is naı¨ve and transparent, Lola is worldweary, a seductress of the screen as depicted by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel; Germany, 1930). Dietrich’s ‘‘Lola Lola’’ recalls, of course, Frank Wedekind’s amoral ‘‘Lulu’’ from the plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Die Bu¨chse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) (1893/94), and this figure is revived in Ophu¨ls’s Lola Montez (France, 1955) and in Jacques Demy’s film Lola (France, 1962) and again by the actress Barbara Sukowa in Fassbinder’s own Lola (Germany, 1981). Fassbinder revives the cabaret singer as a continuation of the amoral Lulu, and Fassbinder’s Lola knows how to turn the capitalist orgy in postwar Germany to her own advantage. To date, critics have not analyzed the links between Tykwer’s contemporary incarnations of Lola and Sissi and their filmic predecessors.46 This may be due to the complex correspondences between these characters and the types their names connote. Likewise, Tykwer’s films have most often been analyzed as ahistorical works,47 so that Tykwer’s newness is privileged. In an interview with ‘‘The Movie Chicks’’ Franka Potente points out that the top German film prize at the Berlinale has been named the ‘‘Lola’’ since the success of Run Lola Run. Tykwer then contextualizes the name: Tom: But, of course, we always have to admit it’s because the name Lola also spans over the whole world of filmmaking in Germany. Lola was the name of Marlene Dietrich’s character in The Blue Angel and there’s this Fassbinder film called Lola. Question: Was that why the character was named Lola, because of those influences, or just a coincidence? Tom: Yes, I think so. Maybe subconsciously, I love the name. It’s a simple stupid answer.48

Tykwer’s ‘‘simple stupid’’ answer recognizes the historical significance of the name Lola while simultaneously suggesting that the choice was a product of personal whim and taste. Lola and Sissi carry with them the mark of their filmic predecessors, yet they carry this mark lightly and in an idiosyncratic fashion, deconstructing the myths of their namesakes in the course of their films. While Tykwer’s Lola is able to manipulate the world to achieve her ends, her desires are anti-capitalist. She approaches her capitalist banker father in order to rescue her lover, but she is not able to manipulate

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him. Instead, she steals the money and then does not think twice before throwing the stolen bag of money away when her lover, Manni, is shot. Unlike Fassbinder’s Lola, Tykwer’s heroine is motivated not by the lure of wealth and social mobility but rather by love, something also alien to Marlene Dietrich’s incarnation of the figure. Lola’s disinterest in the capitalist system that dominates postwall Berlin is just one of the many ways in which she breaks character with the Lolas of German film history. She is simultaneously seductive as a screen figure and driven by love, a tough femme fatale who mourns her father’s rejection of her. (He refuses to help her and then informs her that he is not her biological father.) Likewise, Tykwer’s Sissi embodies certain naı¨ve characteristics associated with Romy Schneider’s Sissi. Yet she is also eminently pragmatic and, as a psychiatric nurse with an untraditional family, not unaware of the dark side of the human psyche. Indeed, her development within the film is perhaps even more dramatic than Lola’s evolution. Within the diegesis she transforms from a young woman content with her life at ‘‘home’’ in the psychiatric ward to a strongwilled figure who pursues and rescues the man who has saved her life. Even Lola, who ostensibly relives a twenty-minute run to save Manni’s life three times, actually seems to evolve in the course of the film. In the Director’s Statement for Run Lola Run, Tykwer emphasizes that the film should be read as a continuous run so that not only the spectators, but also the figures in the film, experience a kind of transcendence of the time/space continuum: ‘‘Run Lola Run is for me a continuous journey—whereby the most important thing is that the viewer feels that Lola really has lived through the various possibilities we show in the film. And not only the last twenty minutes.’’49 In this sense, Lola learns and changes in the film. In the first run sequence, she learns how to use a gun so that she is successful in holding up her father’s bank in the second sequence. More essentially, she learns how to prioritize her own will throughout the three sequences so that, in the final run, she is able to influence the hand of chance in the roulette game (and, ultimately, the logic of time).50 Lola’s development is, of course, anathema to the traditional notion of Lola as an amoral projection of male desire. Each figure recalls her namesake only to disrupt nostalgic identifications with her and to signify change. The names ‘‘Lola’’ and ‘‘Sissi’’ resemble brand names that cannot be separated from German film history but that can be playfully reconceived. Interestingly, both figures—Marlene Dietrich’s Lola and Romy Schneider’s Sissi—as well

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as the actresses themselves have acquired a certain camp value in German popular culture. Both figures appear on numerous postcards and magnets, and they have likewise gained popularity within German queer culture.51 Dietrich suggests sexual ambiguity and androgyny, while Schneider recalls the Agfacolor/Technicolor melodramatic world that is pure on the surface but potentially repressed and perverted underneath, mirroring the melodramatic aesthetic of Douglas Sirk. In 1958, Schneider starred in the remake of the lesbian-themened classic Ma¨dchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan; Germany, 1932). In this sense, Tykwer’s Lola and Sissi already carry with them the shifting meanings associated with the film icons to which they refer. The name Maria does not reflect a camp sensibility in the way that the names Lola and Sissi do, but it nonetheless bears a weight comparable to that of Lola in the annals of German film history. Maria is the heroine of Tykwer’s first feature film Deadly Maria, and this figure likewise retains a conflicted relationship with her biblical and filmic predecessors. The iconic virgin/whore figures (Mary and Mary Magdalene) of the Bible are notoriously represented as two incarnations of the same woman in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Germany, 1927). Maria reappears notably in Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy as Maria Braun in The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun; Germany, 1979), portrayed by Hanna Schygulla. Maria Braun is a femme fatale with a history, ostensibly driven by the ideal of love, a failed mother (she aborts her baby), and a sometimes vulnerable whore to the capitalist machinery of postwar Germany. The figure even appears in Werner Herzog’s 1976 adaptation of Bu¨chner’s Woyzeck as Woyzeck’s lover Marie, who is simultaneously mother and whore and who is all the while aware of her similarity to the biblical prostitute forgiven by Jesus. Like his Lola and Sissi, Tykwer’s Maria both revives and deconstructs the iconicity of her name. Her father punishes her for her ‘‘whorish’’ behavior, an erotic indiscretion with a schoolmate in the form of a kiss, and Maria is condemned to care for her father and her brutish husband in a thankless maternal role. However, a chance meeting with a neighbor opens her horizons, and the film combines the horror genre with an ending so original that it leaves all possibilities open. By employing names such as Lola, Sissi, and Maria in his films, Tykwer evokes the nostalgic longing for iconic film heroines. At the same time, however, he deconstructs these icons. Tykwer’s heroines represent simultaneously feminine types and the transcendence of these types. Yet a residue of their historical weight remains. In con-

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trast to non-German postmodern filmmakers like Lynch and Tarantino, Tykwer’s iconic film heroines can never be entirely de-historicized. Even in their camp reincarnations, Lola and Sissi carry the weight of history, for Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret performances and sadism comment on the rise of fascism in a manner alien to American actresses such as Mae West or Marilyn Monroe. And, for all her innocence, Romy Schneider’s Sissi can never suggest the same kind of innocent diversion represented by the naı¨ve Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor in Clarence Brown’s National Velvet (USA, 1945). In addition to any camp or nostalgia value, the Sissi films will always signify the postwar, post-Holocaust German and Austrian denial of history since they represent both an aesthetics of diversion and a mood of melancholy that cannot be understood outside of the Nazi history that preceded their production. Through thematic citations of German film icons, Tykwer’s films engage with German film history, yet they simultaneously stage a departure from this history aesthetically and thematically. Tykwer’s complex use of cultural and filmic citations locates his films in a particularly German space on the postmodern aesthetic map. In interviews, he has expressed a certain skepticism about the films of international postmodern directors such as David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, as well as about Hong Kong cinema.52 When asked whether he has been influenced by Hong Kong films, Tykwer notes the quotational brilliance of the genre, but admits he finds them often lacking in ‘‘character’’: I don’t know, I feel more influenced by the films they were influenced by, to be honest. In a way, they’re very much people who learned to quote other films very well and to overdo it in a completely crazy way. So it becomes something with a quality of its own. I like that. If you’re still aware of where you come from and what your influences were, but you make something of it your own, something that is special and has a unique quality and doesn’t feel like a rip-off.53

The cautious reception of film quotation reveals Tykwer’s ties to a modernist aesthetic that is very much concerned with the task of the auteur.54 Indeed, Tykwer’s comments are reminiscent of Andreas Huyssen’s criticism of an aesthetics concerned with ‘‘facile quoting and superficial, arbitrary citation.’’55 In his interview with ‘‘The Movie Chicks’’ Tykwer criticized ‘‘the quoting filmmaker,’’ someone who makes films so that the spectator can ‘‘count references.’’ In other interviews, Tykwer praises postmodern filmmaker David Lynch for the open-ended aesthetic

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of Mulholland Drive, a film that, Tykwer asserts, raises more questions than it answers.56 However, he is skeptical of Lynch’s aesthetic that no longer moves from the concrete to the abstract as it does in Blue Velvet but that rather exists entirely in the realm of the abstract. For Tykwer, characters and affect are lost in the metafilmic space of these films. He has also objected to the utter rejection of linearity and narrative in the films of Lynch and Peter Greenaway: The problem with someone like Greenaway is that there is a compulsive break with narrative structure. Then I think only, ‘‘Yes, yes, you know everything better.’’ The new Lynch film does that, too. It is fascinating, but from the first moment on it is outside of the narrative thread. It’s about the destruction of this thread. That is a little too much theory for me, and it creates distance.57

Tykwer’s fascination, especially with Lynch, is tempered by an alienation from what he sees as the intellectual rejection of linearity and affect. Although Tykwer’s own films remain open and are not strictly linear, they tend to privilege story more than the films of someone like Greenaway, who is almost exclusively concerned with visuality and sound. Critics have focused on Tykwer’s formalism and the artificiality of his narratives, his postmodern style. Yet I maintain that Tykwer’s relationship to postmodern citationality is an ambivalent one, indicative of the historically burdened German cultural context in which he has produced most of his films.58

A Hermetic Intertextuality: The Aesthetics of Recognition If Tykwer’s films combine postmodern style with a modernist concern for history and internal coherence, this latter quality is indicative of a certain auteur identity that the director has fashioned for himself and that links him to the filmmakers of the New German Cinema. Ian Garwood has suggested as much in his essay ‘‘The Autorenfilm in Contemporary German Cinema.’’59 Garwood argues against Eric Rentschler’s assessment that post-wall German cinema is antithetical to the New German Cinema, and he provides Tom Tykwer as an example of a post-wall auteur whose film Run Lola Run is nevertheless made for ‘‘an audience literate in the forms of global multi-media’’ (Garwood, 209). The auteur film has generally been associated with notions of nation, and Garwood argues that Berlin is a de-politicized space in Tykwer’s film, and that memory

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in Run Lola Run—in contrast to the historical memory evident in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (Himmel u¨ber Berlin; Germany, 1987)—functions superficially as ‘‘memory play’’ (Garwood, 207). While this reading falls in line with interpretations of the film that see it as exemplary of a ‘‘global postmodern’’ exercise, a reading that I believe misses the markers of history in the film, it nevertheless points out the ways in which Tykwer’s work can be aligned with the films of the New German Cinema. Just as the filmmakers of the New German Cinema were consistently concerned with narrative and history, Garwood argues that Run Lola Run reflects this same concern for a ‘‘usable story’’ (Garwood, 206). What is more, although he uses the ‘‘tools of an international, mass-marketed audio-visual language (the computer game, the music video, dance music)’’ (Garwood, 209), Tykwer nevertheless ‘‘adheres to the ‘artisanal’ principles of much New German Cinema’’ (Garwood, 209). Garwood cites Tykwer’s own production company, X-Filme, the fact that he wrote the scripts for his first four feature films, that he co-composes much of the music and often uses the same actors and crew in his films. Tykwer’s fixation with originality, his dictum that a good director should try to cut the ties with his idols and create something new,60 underscores a residual concern with the tenets of modernism. In keeping with the identity of auteur, Tykwer often uses the same actors in his films, and a number of crew members, such as the cinematographer Frank Griebe, have worked with Tykwer on all of his films. This method is reminiscent of the New German Cinema auteur par excellence, Fassbinder, who was known for the theater and film communities that he created. Fassbinder cast, for example, the actresses Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen in numerous films, and crew members such as the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and musical director Peer Raben worked with him on many films. Similarly, Tykwer has been known to refer to his ‘‘creative family’’ of cast and crew,61 and he links this increased intimacy to a hermetic atmosphere in his films: ‘‘I would like you to relate to our films a little as though they formed their own cosmos.’’62 Thus, the hermetic nature of Tykwer’s films creates a selfreferential universe that invites multiple associations within the ‘‘Tykwer world.’’ The hermetic nature of the many interfilmic resonances between Tykwer’s films allow him to create an aesthetic world detached from film history at the same time as his films indirectly reiterate motifs inherent to German and global film.63 I have argued that Tykwer’s citational practices must be differentiated from those of

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postmodern directors such as Lynch, Tarantino, and Wong KarWai,64 yet the manner in which he cites his own works within his films strikes me as highly playful and unusually direct.65 These citations are not hidden, but rather, as in the case of certain almost identical shots, they call into question the boundaries of the ‘‘artwork’’—a tenet of postmodern sampling—while retaining the primacy of the auteur/Tykwer. Joan Kristin Bleicher has pointed out that Niklas Luhmann sees ‘‘the decisive function of self-referentiality in the separation from the systemic environment. The system of film delineates itself from competing media such as television and the internet.’’66 In this sense, generic self-referentiality is a way of distinguishing film from other media. However, Tykwer’s citation of his own works within his films seems to function even more radically as a way to distance his œuvre from other ‘‘film systems.’’ Tykwer’s films play, at times, like intersecting worlds. Tykwer himself sees the films as thematically linked, so that, according to Tykwer, Heaven is thematically a twin of sorts to The Princess and the Warrior, whereas formally it resembles Run Lola Run.67 Thematic and aesthetic resonances are then intercut with literal interfilmic references such as the use of the same actor in the same function within different films. Armin Rohde, the actor who plays the guard at the bank where Lola’s father works in Run Lola Run, also embodies the role of the guard in the film Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life is a Construction Site; Germany, 1997), a film cowritten by Tykwer and produced by X-Filme. In an interview with Michael To¨teberg, Tykwer mentions this ‘‘Insidergag’’ along with other interfilmic connections [Querverbindungen]: There are many small interconnections, including the detail that the medic in the ambulance who gives CPR to Schuster is the same guy as the medic in Deadly Maria who gives Maria CPR. He is exactly the same guy; he also has this light beard—and it is the same actor who was surprised to receive a call five years later asking whether he would like to play the same role again. . . . On top of everything he is the brother of Nina Petri.68

The inclusion of relatives of the main actors in secondary roles serves to introduce varied intimacies across filmic and relational lines. In Run Lola Run, the actor who plays Manni, Moritz Bleibtreu, is helped by a blind woman who is played by Monika Bleibtreu, the actor’s mother. The familial intimacy collides, then, with the momentary understanding between the blind woman and Manni, as she lends him her phone card and points out the man

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who has stolen Manni’s money. Familial relationships cross diegetic and extradiegetic lines, contributing to an atmosphere of unexplained intimacies and interfilmic connections. Tykwer’s frequent use of actors such as Joachim Kro´l, Lars Rudolph, Heino Ferch, Sebastian Schipper, and Ludger Pistor—often in secondary roles—tends to create a hermetic film œuvre in which the logical time and space boundaries of the individual work of art become porous and can be transcended. It is as if actors and figures walk seamlessly from one film into another. At times, secondary figures appear to have a memory of their interactions in the previous movie. In a particularly uncanny scene, two peripherally related figures stare at each other in a manner that suggests a memory of their previous encounter—a filmic de´ja` vu. In The Princess and the Warrior, Bodo’s brother Walter, a bank clerk played by Joachim Kro´l, and the security worker at the bank (played by Sebastian Schipper) share a moment of recognition that is best explained through the intertextual reference of Run Lola Run. In this former film, the same two actors had discussed the purchase of a bike: Kro´l plays a homeless man named Norbert who purchases a bike from ‘‘Mike,’’ a bike thief played by Schipper. Within the film, this scene represents one of the few pauses from Lola’s hectic runs. Shot in video (as are all scenes in which Lola and Manni are not present),69 the scene takes place at a fast food stand. The dialogue between the characters is relatively banal, and the scene stands out as potentially the least essential one in the film. Norbert has the money to buy the bike because he is the lucky owner of the bag containing Manni’s 100,000 German marks, and we see that he has thus far purchased nothing of value with the money. The scene at the fast food stand provides for a feeling of sympathy for the homeless man, since he has most likely been the victim of bad luck for years, and his desires are by no means unreasonable—a couple of beers, perhaps a bicycle. In fact, he offers to buy Mike a drink. In a film ostensibly concerned with the expedient representation of plot, the scene stands as an anomaly, slowing the pace of Lola’s run. Likewise, the moment when these two actors stare at each other in The Princess and the Warrior potentially exceeds any logic of the film. This moment is unusually long in film terms (ca. nine seconds). The security guard (Sebastian Schipper) has been drugged by Walter (Joachim Kro´l), and he wakes up in a groggy state and reaches for his gun. As Walter comes in, Schipper points the gun at his face. There are no words exchanged between the two, simply an intense gaze. The camera initially reflects the perspective of the security guard and focuses on Walter as he comes into the room. The cam-

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era zooms in to Walter’s face, which does not betray panic, but rather a look of dim recognition. A short series of shot-reverse shots intensifies the sense of time standing still, as the faces seem to communicate an understanding and an affect that transcends the significance of the scene itself. The moment is finally broken by the abrupt movement of the security guard as he shoots the fire alarm box on the wall next to Walter. Tykwer’s interfilmic citations from his own work invite multiple affective responses. The slowing of time and the cross-textual break with linearity invites a nostalgic relation to Tykwer’s films that is always displaced. After having screened The Princess and the Warrior, the moment of recognition between Herr Meier, a colleague of Lola’s father, and Lola in Run Lola Run presents a similar moment of intertextual recognition. In the second run, Lola is hit by the windshield of Herr Meier’s car, and Herr Meier’s slow look of recognition as he views the panicked Lola through his windshield is not particularly noteworthy unless the spectator realizes that this very actor, Ludger Pistor, plays the role of Werner, the psychotic patient in The Princess and the Warrior who may be Sissi’s father.70 Thus, when Herr Meier asks Lola if everything is okay,71 the sincerity in his tone suggests that he might, in fact, have some paternal concern for Lola, something that her own father seems to lack. Ludger Pistor is then, in retrospect, a displaced father figure of sorts to Franka Potente, the actress who plays both Lola and Sissi. Such a reading is dependent, of course, upon multiple or non-chronological screenings of Tykwer’s films so that the logic of the hermetic world of his œuvre is by no means linear. Along these lines, Heino Ferch, an actor with roles in both Winter Sleepers and Run Lola Run, signifies a model for masculinity that seeps from Winter Sleepers to Run Lola Run. In Winter Sleepers, Ferch plays Marco, a ski instructor in a relationship with Rebecca but who nevertheless engages in multiple affairs with other women. He has difficulty communicating, as illustrated in scenes in which Marco expresses his feelings either to a mirror or while on the phone with no one on the other end. When Rebecca asks him if he really wants to be with her, he says, ‘‘Sure, don’t you?’’72 His inability to communicate recalls Manni from Run Lola Run, and Marco’s response to Rebecca is revived in Manni’s response to Lola when asked whether he loves her: ‘‘Well, sure.’’73 In Run Lola Run, Ferch plays Ronnie, Manni’s boss, a drug and diamond dealer whom Manni admires and desires to emulate. In an odd sense, then, Ferch, in his pre-Ronnie role as Marco, seems to provide a model for Manni. An uncanny similarity between Marco and Manni is re-

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vealed in Marco’s discourse with both Rebecca and Laura. When speaking to Rebecca after she discovers her grandmother has died, he tells her ‘‘You look horrible,’’74 and he uses similar words when speaking to Laura during a chance meeting in the hospital: ‘‘What’s wrong with you? You look horrible.’’75 Reflecting a classically insensitive male response to female suffering, Marco’s words to Rebecca are repeated almost verbatim by Manni in Run Lola Run when Lola and Manni finally successfully meet at the end of Lola’s third run. Manni’s words (‘‘You look horrible.’’)76 likewise repeat the words of Lola’s father, who had made the same critical observation when she stormed into his office. In this sense, these kinds of code sentences create affective correspondences between the films, imbuing each film with affects and meanings that transcend its own logic. Perhaps the most jarring instance of self-citation is Tykwer’s unique use of the actress Franka Potente, his own girlfriend at the time, in the starring role in both Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior. Initially, the figures Lola and Sissi appear to be radically different—Lola is driven and literally runs through the film, while the early Sissi moves slowly, as if she were in a dream state. However, Sissi encounters a number of the same actors in different guises as Lola had in the previous film, and both Lola and Sissi are ultimately driven to ‘‘save’’ their respective men and to reject certain established rules within the narratives of the films. The two films are linked intertextually not only by parallel scenes such as the encounters between Joachim Kro´l and Sebastian Schipper and Ludger Pistor and Franka Potente. Unusual parallel shots likewise serve to establish a porous intertextuality between the films. In particular, the shots accompanying the accidents of each figure are strikingly similar. Although each figure engages in a slightly different ‘‘quest,’’ both Lola and Sissi almost die in their respective films. The moments leading up to each ‘‘accident’’ include flight from the police and the gesture of tossing stolen goods into the air. Lola’s near-death experience is the result of her role as an accomplice to Manni in a supermarket robbery. Manni and Lola run away from the store and the approaching police in slow motion, the camera following them, to the tune of Dinah Washington’s ‘‘What a Difference a Day Makes,’’ a song about the relationship between time and chance.77 As the police surround them, Manni tosses the bag of money into the air, and the camera lingers on the slow-motion image of the bag shot from below against a brilliant blue sky. Worldly goods are insignificant when viewed from this angle. The shot of the tossed bag is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot and a cut to the bewildered face of an

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inexperienced policeman who has accidentally planted a bullet in Lola’s chest. The gunshot is followed by silence, and Lola falls to the ground. Here, we cut to a close-up of Lola’s face from above. The camera zooms in even closer to Lola’s face, and a red light is used. The image slowly fades to a scene shot with a red light in which Lola and Manni are lying in bed. The shot of Lola’s face as a close-up and from above is a highly unusual film shot, capturing the quiet, intense moments that precede death or call up a reflection on death. Such a moment is not germane to the action genre, and it breaks the speed and urgency of the scene, stretching time through a fade that shifts to the ‘‘out of time’’ dream-sequence love scenes between Lola and Manni. The uniqueness of the post-shooting close-up of Franka Potente in Run Lola Run is then repeated almost exactly in the accident scene in The Princess and the Warrior.78 Sissi’s accident is indirectly caused by her future love Bodo who, like the petty criminal Manni of Run Lola Run, has just robbed a convenience store. He runs with a basket full of goods from the store as the police chase him. Bodo then tosses the basket into the air, and the camera captures these goods in slow motion as they fall—a moment reminiscent of Manni’s red bag of money shot against the blue sky above Berlin. The Princess and the Warrior then intercuts shots of Bodo escaping the police with shots of Sissi walking in the city with the blind Otto. Bodo runs alongside a red truck, frustrating the driver, and this truck recalls both the truck from Run Lola Run that narrowly misses Lola as she runs to her destination and the red ambulance that runs over Manni. In her Sissi incarnation, however, Franka Potente does not dodge the red truck as she attempts to cross the street with Otto, and it hits her. A fade to black is then followed by a fade in to Sissi’s face with the identical camera position as in the parallel Run Lola Run scene. Sissi’s face is likewise shot directly from above and in close-up, so that the spectator relives Lola’s near-death incarnation in Sissi. The camera lingers on Sissi’s red face in this shot, recalling the fade to red following the accident in the previous film. Bodo attempts to flee the police, until he finally slides under the truck itself where Sissi lies breathing heavily. Although the plots differ from this point on, the close-up shot of Franka Potente from above following upon the images of releasing worldly goods are dramatically self-referential. The spectator familiar with Run Lola Run is invited to remember the previous accident scene, so that Lola and Sissi appear to represent one figure at different points in a non-linear narrative.79 These corresponding scenes enact a formal break in the narra-

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tives of the films; they suspend time, and introduce an aesthetic, narrative, and affective economy into Tykwer’s œuvre that partially detaches these films from an external film tradition. In formal terms, Tykwer is able to revive moods across films through the repeated use of various filmic devices.80 The bird’s-eye view of the city of Berlin in Run Lola Run recalls the same city shot of Wuppertal as Bodo looks down at the street from the roof of the bank where Walter works.81 The cities appear in these frames to be grids through which mechanical people and cars move, a computer program, simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and unreal. A similar shot of the grid-like streets of Turin in Heaven both marks the film as a Tykwer product and lends it semantic continuity with the previous films. Numerous bird’s-eye shots are used in The International; cities such as Milan and Istanbul are represented as beautiful yet alienating geographical spaces through which humans move, in a manner that recalls the earlier films. Another oft-used technique is the 360-degree shot, a luxuriously sweeping camera that pans around two figures, especially those in love or intensely connected.82 Tykwer uses this device to signify intense connection between figures such as the seemingly eternal kiss between Maria and Dieter in Deadly Maria, the scene at the kitchen table that precedes the first love scene between Laura and Rene´ in Winter Sleepers, the scene in the padded cell between Sissi and Bodo in which Sissi expresses her hermaphroditic dream of love in The Princess and the Warrior, and the love scene between Filippo and Philippa under the tree at sunset in Heaven. The panning, encircling camera around two lovers thus codes each scene with a transcendent atmosphere lent to it, in part, by previous films. Tykwer’s use of interior spaces is likewise often self-citational, since they are often vaguely expressionist and labyrinthian. The space within the mental institution in The Princess and the Warrior contains unusually long corridors and seemingly incoherent passageways so that this interior resembles the carabinieri headquarters in Turin that Filippo and Philippa must navigate in order to escape. Both couples in Heaven and The Princess and the Warrior escape through a garage in the institutions while the police believe they have already left the building. These labyrinthian interiors are then contrasted with the open spaces of Montepulciano and the French coast. Tykwer’s intertextual use of motifs include clocks, teapots, and musical scores, which he often co-writes. The clock that ticks at the beginning of Deadly Maria recalls the ticking clock that opens Run Lola Run. Indeed, clocks litter Tykwer’s films, reminding the spectator of the films’ explicit engagement with notions of temporal lin-

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earity and history. Likewise, Tykwer’s musical scores often sound eerily similar; the music that provides the suspenseful atmosphere for the first exchange of gazes between Maria and Dieter in Deadly Maria closely resembles the music played in The Princess and the Warrior when Sissi looks for Bodo. Icons and music function, then, as leitmotifs in Tykwer’s films. The close-up of the teapot in Sissi’s kitchen in The Princess and the Warrior recalls close-ups of Maria’s teapot, and in both films, the heroines ignore the whistling pots, suggesting that change in the realm of the quotidian is imminent.83 The radical interconnectivity between Tykwer’s films creates a mosaic of motives, techniques, images, and figures that plays with time and affect through a dialectic of repetition and difference. This dialectic is embodied in the recurring motif of the spiral in Tykwer’s films.84 Spirals are used in the initial animated sequence in the film, and a spiral stands as a symbol for the Bolle supermarket outside of the telephone booth where Manni makes his frantic calls.85 Spirals adorn the lovers’ sheets in the dream scenes shot in red lighting that link each running sequence, and in the casino there is a picture of a woman whose spiral hairdo is a reference to Kim Novak’s bun in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.86 The spiral is a symbol of the movement of time in Tykwer’s films. This concept is then illustrated through the ultimately spiral structure of Lola’s runs that are preceded by the famous quotation from the German soccer coach Sepp Herberger, ‘‘After the game is before the game.’’87 Repetition has not led to circularity, but rather to the spiral in which the end always signifies a new point on the continuum.88 Yet history is not entirely discarded, as Herberger is linked both to the rebirth of German nationalism after the 1954 World Cup soccer win and to the Nazi past, since he served as the national soccer coach from 1936–42. Hence, while the emblem of the spiral signifies change, it simultaneously retains a link to history. In The Princess and the Warrior Sissi’s life begins to change when she picks up the conch by the side of her bed and the camera enters this spiral-shaped shell, circling through the tunnels of the shell and Sissi’s ear and emerging in the streets of Wuppertal as Bodo runs from the police. Here, the spiral as symbol literally creates difference.89 This moment is reminiscent of the tunnel into the center of the earth into which Marco falls in his infinite flight/fall in Winter Sleepers and the tunnel through which the animated Lola runs in spiral form during the credit sequence of Run Lola Run. Even in Heaven, the lovers pass through a tunnel on the train on their way to the liberating space of Tuscany. Along these lines, Tykwer’s interfilmic repetitions and correspondences reiterate the structure of

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the spiral, creating a hermetic world of intimacies and meanings while simultaneously imagining difference. In this way, Tykwer partially distances his own films from the overburdened history of German cinema.

German Cinema’s Compulsion to Repeat The rampant self-referentiality within Tykwer’s œuvre suggests a dialectic of repetition and freedom, entrapment and escape. Themes, actors, scenes, and shots are repeated throughout his films, yet each film likewise introduces radical variation into each of these terms. In the case of the repetition of some variation of the moped/car/truck/bus accident scene in each of Tykwer’s feature films, this self-citation becomes highly formalist. The vehicle accident, the crash, is iconic for dramatic change; hence, the accident thematizes the notion of repetition in itself. Here, Tykwer’s films engage formally in a discourse on post-Holocaust aesthetics reminiscent of Jelinek’s performative repetitions. Repetition is not only an aesthetic method in Tykwer’s films, but it is likewise thematized within the films themselves. The emblematic clock stands in for the concept of repetition. In Deadly Maria, the alarm clock is frequently depicted in conjunction with Maria’s daily routine. Hence, the clock stands in for Maria’s ontological state: ‘‘This morning was like always.’’90 Each morning, she turns off the clock, makes the coffee and breakfast, feeds Heinz, and accompanies him to the door. In the film’s ending, Maria breaks this repetition by pouring the boiling water heated for the morning coffee onto her husband, thereby playing a role in his death. In this sense, repetition is deadly, and the break from repetition signifies both freedom and intense danger. On a thematic level, Tykwer’s films often depict the compulsion to repeat as an anachronistic illness that is nevertheless dominant. Manifestations of compulsion within these films thus strike me as a formalization of psychoanalysis, a performative representation of the Freudian notion of the compulsion to repeat. In this sense, Tykwer offers a deconstruction of psychoanalysis reminiscent of Jelinek’s project. Tykwer’s works engage with the trope of the ‘‘inability to mourn’’ that has defined the way Germans see their confrontation with the Nazi past.91 Maria’s attempt to overcome the trauma of her mother’s death and her imprisoned life is manifested as a compulsion—in this case, she redirects her aggressive feelings for her father to household flies, collecting the dead flies in a case. In a misguided

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attempt to gain mastery, Maria repeats the violence committed against her on animals and, later, on her husband and father. Freud’s compulsion to repeat can serve as a way of seeing the German engagement with its past in the form of the repeated representation of relationships of oppression. By reenacting the painful events leading to trauma, the subject, according to Freud, unconsciously hopes to master the event that caused his original trauma.92 Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior represent this phenomenon in highly formalist ways that undercut the psychological ramifications of these repetitions. The triple repetition of Lola’s ‘‘big run’’ offers a kind of superficial parody of Freud’s repetition compulsion. Similarly, the narrative of Bodo in The Princess and the Warrior offers a classic case of the compulsion to repeat. Bodo is caught in a cycle of repetition due to the death of his wife at a gas station for which he feels responsible. He consistently wakes up in the night hugging a heater that he mistakes for his dead wife, a symptom of his recurring dreams about her. The end of the film provides the most obvious engagement with Freud’s compulsion to repeat. Upon his deathbed, Bodo’s brother tells him to ‘‘get off the toilet,’’ the place where he had been when his wife died. What might be perceived as an instance of pop-psychological simplicity is, in my opinion, the formal representation of German cinema’s engagement with the trauma of its fascist history—the representation of guilt and its disavowal. When Sissi and Bodo escape from the institution, they stop for gas, and this gas station is naturally the same one upon whose toilet Bodo ‘‘still sits,’’ as Walter puts it. The escaping Bodo thus encounters the compulsive Bodo, and all three figures drive off together. Throughout the film Bodo has suffered from a compulsion to cry, a sort of melancholia that is free-floating. After Sissi and Bodo leave the gas station together, the crying Bodo is left behind in Germany on the side of the road, and the remaining Bodo no longer cries, ostensibly cured of his compulsion to repeat. This scene is a formalized representation of the trope of the compulsion to repeat and the overcoming of this trope. By forcing the compulsive Bodo to leave the car, Sissi and the ‘‘new’’ Bodo are able to leave Germany. The drive itself, the music that accompanies the drive, and the breathtakingly beautiful house on the sea that constitutes the final image of the film invite an openness that transcends the psychoanalytical model.

Fascism, Film and the Family: Fassbinder, Lynch, Tykwer The filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema were acutely concerned with the legacy of fascism and the sins of their

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fathers. Thomas Elsaesser has stated this fact as follows: ‘‘Thus, the royal road in the 1970s of West German cinema to German history was family history, and one can speak of a veritable oedipalization of this history’’ (289).93 Elsaesser cites the collaborative film Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst; Germany, 1977/78) as an extension of the Oberhausen Manifesto that carried the slogan: ‘‘Papas Kino ist tot’’ [Papa’s cinema is dead].94 A critique of the patriarchal family is tantamount, in this sense, to the critique of fascism along the lines articulated by Bachmann: ‘‘Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.’’95 Fascism, as Bachmann and Jelinek make clear, resides allegorically in the German and Austrian family, so that the postwar critique of fascism centers on the nuclear family as the site of sadism, masochism, and the gender roles implied in these power relations. Eric Rentschler argues that whereas the Young German Cinema and New German Cinema saw the cinema of the fathers as the source of their claim to difference, the New German Cinema serves as the authority figure against which the directors of German contemporary popular cinema create their works. In this sense, Rentschler likewise oedipalizes the cinema of Doris Do¨rrie, So¨nke Wortmann, and others as a cinema distinguishing itself from the burdensome cinema of its predecessors. However, as I have remarked earlier, the cinema of Tom Tykwer is markedly difficult to situate within the terms set out by Rentschler. If the family stands allegorically for oppressive structures associated with fascism and patriarchy, then Tykwer’s œuvre as hermetic intertext might be located in the space somewhere between the oedipal struggle and a point after Oedipus, between departure and arrival. Not only can Tykwer’s aesthetics of self-referentiality be seen as a departure of sorts from ‘‘Papas Kino,’’ but the narratives of Tykwer’s films also suggest a departure from traditional family constellations. Thomas Elsaesser has characterized the New German Cinema as an oedipal project, and he sees most films associated with the New German Cinema as engaging in a form of mourning (Trauerarbeit): ‘‘Trauerarbeit in this sense is ‘oedipal time’, the coming to terms with the absent father, or the father’s absent authority, the problem of how to relate to the loss or narcissistic internalization of love objects.’’96 To my mind, the films of Fassbinder, a director who combined melodrama and historical fixation, reiterate a critique of the oppressive power dynamics inherent to an oedipal model. In the melodramas as well as in, for example, Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn, the nuclear family and traditional gender roles are revealed in their violence and contradictions.97 Fassbinder’s dialogue with his mother in Germany in Autumn re-

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veals the mother’s desire for a paternal and state authority that repulses the son. Fassbinder’s melodramas in particular attempt to subvert the oedipal/fascist paradigm through immanent critique, yet they do not present an alternative. In this sense, I liken Fassbinder’s project to that of Jelinek, as a performative repetition of historical entrapment. Indeed, even Fassbinder’s films that focus on marginalized figures seem to revolve around a symbolic paternal center, and this center is usually represented in a radically negative manner. A case in point is Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitteren Tra¨nen der Petra von Kant) (Germany, 1972). This film ostensibly portrays a world without men, a world that might offer a queer alternative to the repressive legacy of fascist fathers. All figures in the film are women; in fact, all scenes occur within the domestic space—the bedroom of Petra von Kant. The film presents two parallel love narratives—the love of Marlene, the servant, for Petra, and Petra’s infatuation with the fashion model Karin. There are no men involved in these scenes, and lesbian love is posited as a possible digression from traditional power structures. However, the film is paradigmatic in its failure to represent lesbian love as an alternative to the bourgeois family model. Rather, female/female desire is negated within the film. Instead, the female figures reconstruct gendered power scenarios choreographed to highlight the huge nude figure of Dionysis in the Poussin painting ‘‘Midas and Dionysis’’ that adorns the wall of Petra’s bedroom.98 The ‘‘lesbian’’ love scenes between Petra and Karin are shot against the backdrop of the painting: Karin, the object of Petra’s desire, often aligns herself with the male nude Midas in eye-level medium shots. At times, Petra and Karin create a tableau vivant of sorts; they appear to interact according to the logic of the painting, a singularly masculine logic. During their first meeting, Karin lounges on Petra’s bed and is shot so as to be aligned on the right side of the painting with Midas, the most masculine figure amongst the three in the painting, while Petra, in her desire for Karin, is aligned almost perfectly with the female nude on the left of the painting. These tableaux vivants underscore the hopelessness of Petra’s fantasy of a love relationship that would escape the patriarchal dynamics of oppressor/oppressed. A utopic vision of anti-oedipal queer affect is imagined and denied within the film. Petra expresses her hope for a relationship of equals toward the end of her first meeting with Karin: ‘‘That shall now be completely different.’’99 At this point, the painting is no longer represented, and the two figures are shot so as to share one

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body with two heads. As Petra listens to Karin tell the sad story of her family, the body remains one, and the actresses’ heads simply change sides in a symbolic mingling of bodies and psyches. However, this moment is the only one of its kind in the film, and the ‘‘Midas and Dionysis’’ painting once again structures the ostensibly feminine space of the film. The dialogue between the figures reinforces this reading, since Petra’s desire to engage in a love relationship beyond power is linked to her experience with an ultimately unenlightened man and to the correlative brutality of German history. Her dialogue with Sidonie, a friend whose marriage is successful precisely due to the strict observance of gender roles, deconstructs the power dynamics inherent in such a relationship without providing a space within postwar Germany for an alternative. When Karin comes to visit Petra, Petra remarks on the antiutopic space of Germany: ‘‘Here things rarely change. In Germany things are as they are. One can’t do anything about it.’’100 In Fassbinder’s film, lesbian desire or any desire not subject to an oedipal logic is not representable in the wake of Nazism. As she leaves Petra, Karin stands before the Poussin painting with her head almost touching the penis of the Dionysis figure while Petra kneels at her feet in a kind of parody of penis envy. The tragedy of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant lies in the utter entrapment of the female figures within a post-fascist, oedipal model for love. In contrast, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)—a film that likewise represents lesbian desire—is truly American in its particularly postmodern aesthetic. Whereas both Petra von Kant and Mulholland Drive confront the notion of desire in unconventional ways, only Lynch’s film is able to free itself from the oedipal narratives that still inform contemporary German films. In general, American film, with its tenuous linkages to history, can more easily represent the play of desires outside of a strictly oedipal model. While Lynch’s film makes use of melodrama, nostalgia, and camp in the vein of Fassbinder, it is more playful in its employment of these styles. What is initially perceived as a film noir quickly shatters into disparate pieces that do not fit together. Power is diffuse in the film. Each powerful male figure is shown to be subservient to yet another figure, suggesting displacement rather than centrality. Moreover, lesbian desire in the film exists in a historical vacuum; one figure has lost her memory while her lover recreates her identity in Hollywood. History does not provide the ground through which these relationships can be understood. The love between Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) proves to be a manifestation of an alternative model for power relations. In this sense,

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Lynch’s film represents sexual desire as emotionally laden but displaced. The tragedy of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant lies in the utter entrapment of the female figures within a fascist model for ‘‘love.’’ Lynch’s film, on the other hand, is not structured by a historical/fascist model for power relations and thus reflects a more fluid mode of affect. Both Lynch and Fassbinder make films that utilize postmodern style, though Fassbinder’s works are rooted in historical critique, whereas films like Mulholland Drive elude historicity. The films of Tom Tykwer seem to straddle a line between these two film styles since, like Fassbinder, his films are never so abstract as to reject history entirely. Fassbinder’s hermetic, formalist aesthetics101 and his use of the same actors and crew seem to be revived in the films of Tom Tykwer, although Tykwer’s films differ in significant ways from those of Fassbinder:102 in an interview, Tykwer cites Fassbinder as follows: ‘‘The more beautiful and constructed, the more staged and stylized films are, the more liberating and liberated they are.’’103 Tykwer himself links the formalism of his films to the first formalist filmmaker, George Me´lie`s, suggesting that his film Run Lola Run is, above all, a film about film: A film about the possibilities of life—this was absolutely clear to me— must also be a film about the possibilities of the cinema. This is why there are different formats in Run Lola Run; there is color and black and white, slow motion and fast motion, in fact all elementary building blocks that were always used in the history of film. George Me´lie`s was already able to work with these effects, especially with double exposures and with tricks.104

As expressed by Fassbinder, the control of form is, ironically, linked to transcendence of the form. Tykwer locates his own films in the formalist filmic tradition and suggests that this is the key to the liberation of the imagination. Tykwer has expressed his desire to make films of aesthetic quality that are also popular: ‘‘I would really like to make films that are mercilessly entertaining but upon a second look contain a great complexity.’’105 Tykwer’s vision echoes Fassbinder’s own aspirations to make Hollywood films in Germany: ‘‘What I would like is a Hollywood cinema, that is to say, a cinema as wonderful and as generally accessible as Hollywood, but at the same time not so hypocritical.’’106 In this sense, Tykwer’s films could be placed on the trajectory of filmmakers from Me´lie`s through Sirk and Fassbinder. An aesthetic exploration of filmic possibilities characterizes Tyk-

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wer’s films, and yet Tykwer’s films stage a formal and thematic encounter with the repetition compulsion of historical critique that leads to a break with this aesthetic mode. Although Tykwer’s figures are initially trapped within structures of oppression reminiscent of the carefully framed spaces in Fassbinder’s films, the impossible escape is achieved in the final minutes, and herein lies Tykwer’s most unique contribution to German film aesthetics.

Tykwer’s Families The dialectic of entrapment and escape from family, gender, and history structures each of Tykwer’s first five feature films. To varying degrees, each film represents the departure from an oedipal logic. In Deadly Maria, Maria lives an anachronistic life of monotony and oppression as the caretaker of her ill father and her anal and repressive husband, Heinz. (On the evening when he proposes to Maria, Heinz notices that the clock on the wall is two and onehalf minutes fast.) Her fantasies of freedom are realized through the death of her father, caused by her extreme neglect, and of Heinz, through a combination of violence and chance. She pours the ubiquitous morning water boiled for coffee onto Heinz, and he falls onto a small statue, her talisman, as his chair hits the ground. The daughter symbolically kills the father and his placeholder, Heinz, with the help of a man who resembles neither, Dieter. Dieter is, as suggested by Sandra Schuppach, a ‘‘child man,’’ played by Joachim Kro´l.107 When Maria falls out of the window following her dual murders in the final minutes of the film, the moment resembles suicide, the masochistic capitulation to an oedipal model. However, the ‘‘man-child’’ breaks her fall in an attempt to save her, and the two lie looking at the sky beyond the courtyard into indefinable space. What is initially perceived by the spectator to be the inability to imagine life outside of power transforms to an opening into the New. Tykwer’s second film, Winter Sleepers, deconstructs the oedipal family via an impotent father figure and a critique of marriage.108 The plot turns on the death of a child in a car accident caused by Rene´, a film projectionist with a faulty short-term memory. The father of the child, Theo, is played by Josef Bierbichler, the same actor who portrays Maria’s father in Deadly Maria. Obsessed with reasserting his paternal identity through the capture of the offending driver, the father ultimately gets his revenge on the wrong man. The final scenes of the film represent cuts between Rene´ talking to

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his newborn baby and Marco, the man whom Theo believes is guilty, falling endlessly from a cliff in a skiing accident.109 The innocence of the nuclear family is consistently undermined in Tykwer’s film via the misplaced guilt of the male figures. Bierbichler embodies aspects of paternalism and a dark, pre-modernist mode of subjectivity in Winter Sleepers and Deadly Maria. Both fathers serve as heads of domestic spaces that appear primitive. Indeed, Theo’s appearance on the mountain with his German Shepherd is an iconographic image reminiscent of the Heimat films of the 1950s. He embodies the archetypal hero of the classical Heimat novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who, according to Andrea Kunne, is the paternal heart of the mountain village, ‘‘unaffected by urban civilization:’’ Conflicts arise, however, when strangers enter the village, who as outsiders are likely to disrupt the established order of the closed community. . . . In such a situation, the hero, who is characterized as authoritarian, patriarchal, conservative, religious, rooted in nature, comes into action. His strong personality enables him to prevent disasters . . . which endanger the village from the outside.110

In Winter Sleepers, Theo revives this anachronistic figure, yet he is unable to prevent the disaster (car accident) that tears apart his family. Hence, he embodies a mode of paternity that is revealed to be outdated in Tykwer’s films. The institution of marriage is subtly critiqued via the love story between Rene´ and Laura, the nurse who cares for Theo’s comatose daughter until her death. This romantic narrative is deconstructed before it begins, in a scene depicting the two figures skating on ice, describing the ‘‘ten greatest catastrophes of life’’: ‘‘have children, move in together, marry, get fat, get bored, watch tv, no more sex, get old, stink and die!’’111 Hence, the happy end depicting Rene´ and his newborn intercut with Marco’s fall invites multiple readings. Rene´ and Laura might indeed be on their way to living the ten greatest catastrophes of life, or they may have created a freer variation on the model through their seeming transcendence of power dynamics. Likewise, Marco’s fall coincides with the birth of the baby so that the juxtaposition of these images suggests a space outside of perfect closure. Indeed, Marco’s fall is never broken; he never lands. Winter Sleepers is the only one of Tykwer’s films that includes a baby as a symbol for the future.112 Yet the last line in the film destabilizes the familial idyll. As the baby cries, Rene´ smokes and says calmly, ‘‘You are not really hungry.’’113 With this utter-

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ance, he calls into question the healthy life force suggested by the birth of a baby. The highly intertextual films Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior explicitly challenge and move beyond the oedipal family. Although she is to some extent saddled by oppressive familial relationships, Sissi is able to leave behind oedipal structures in her escape with Bodo. The film presents black-and-white flashbacks of Sissi’s oppressive memories of a mother who was killed by a patient in the asylum. It is suggested that this patient, Steini, might be Sissi’s own brother. Likewise, Sissi confesses to Bodo that her father is in the asylum, but it is never clear which of the patients he might be, or if, indeed, this is really the case. Thus, although the asylum is oppressive and functions as a family for Sissi, her desires are nonoedipal. In fact, Sissi expresses her desires for happiness to Bodo in the form of a dream that rejects traditional familial relations: ‘‘I had a dream that we were brother and sister, mother and father, husband and wife . . . and we were both . . . both.’’114 The scene is filmed in a series of cross-fades from one 360 pan to the next. The two figures are in the enclosed, empty space of a padded cell, and the circling camera underscores the fluidity of Sissi’s dream. By suggesting that all of these relationships are, in some way, alike and

4. ‘‘Sissi’s Dream.’’ The Princess and the Warrior. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/ X-Verleih.

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that roles are by no means fixed, Sissi opens a door to desires that might not be structured in purely patriarchal terms. In an interview with Sandra Schuppach, Tykwer refers to the ‘‘Trans-GenderAspect’’ of this scene and admits that he cut a scene in which both figures had different sex organs: That was very abstract and a little like 2001—relatively extreme—also in this padded room and both were like naked hermaphroditic embryos. . . . I remember how Franka and I discussed it, and it was somehow also a crazy idea and we considered how we would do that if she were to run through the image with a penis—but that was also silly.115

While depicting some mode of family, The Princess and the Warrrior is nevertheless deeply concerned with the transcendence of a restrictive mode of gender relations. In Run Lola Run, Lola’s triple narratives entail the shedding of the traditional family as a prerequisite for escape. In each narrative, she runs from an alienating home, and this home is already shattered in the course of the first narrative. As in the bourgeois tragedy, her mother is irrelevant. Lola runs past her three times, and the mother always retains the same gestures and speaks the same words. Her father, to whom she turns for help, is having an affair, and he informs her in no uncertain terms that she is a ‘‘Kuckuck-

5. ‘‘Lola’s Rebellion.’’ Run Lola Run. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/X-Verleih

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sei,’’ a bastard who was unwanted by both her biological and her adoptive father. Contrary to critics who argue that Lola’s success in the final narrative is due to her intact family, I suggest the opposite.116 Lola must rid herself of the oppressive ties of the Heimat, of the family and the father, before she can gain access to the surplus represented by the casino, the game.117 Likewise, the father turns out to be entirely impotent, since even his mistress reveals that he has not fathered her unborn baby. He is merely an empty placeholder, as he himself complains, ‘‘the fool on call.’’118 Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior shift the logic of desire beyond the centrality of the father, rendering him inessential. The films attempt to represent a desire that digresses from the rigid family model—a model that has become fossilized in post-war Germanlanguage literature and film as a placeholder for fascism.119 The androgynous Franka Potente, an actress who simultaneously embodies vulnerability, strength, and a genderless intensity, reiterates a fantasy beyond gender in her performance.120 In Heaven121 the oedipal structure is transcended in ways reminiscent of the earlier films. Philippa’s obsession with murdering the drug dealer Vendice is driven by a desire to create a world in which a malevolent male figure does not dramatically limit the possibilities of others. In killing Vendice, he is replaced by the ‘‘good father,’’ Filippo’s father, who embodies paternal benevolence. Filippo’s betrayal of his father’s desires for him to be a policeman are met with love and understanding, but the father is ultimately irrelevant to the trajectory of the film. Indeed, his own impotence, and the ultimate impotence of all father figures in Tykwer’s films, is embodied in Filippo’s father’s lament: ‘‘Why can we never do anything at the most important moments?’’ Schuppach describes Filippo, a figure younger than Philippa, as another ‘‘man-child’’ along the lines of Dieter in Deadly Maria (Tom Tykwer, 89–90). As in earlier films, gender is thus rendered irrelevant; idealized figures are rather hermaphroditic and androgynous, reviving a state of equality beyond patriarchy and fascism. Philippa and Filippo shave their heads and, in so doing, they become androgynous twins, symbiotic and beyond power dynamics.122 Tykwer describes the relationship between the two as follows: ‘‘The torn homo sapien who becomes again a unity and thereby ultimately overcomes the gender differences.’’123 The oedipal home and the gender roles that shape it are left behind in an androgynous fantasy. The past, represented by the father and a burdened Heimat, is no longer significant.

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6. ‘‘Escaping.’’ Heaven. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/X-Verleih.

The Melodrama of Heimat Linda Williams has located the home as the primary category characteristic of the ‘‘melodramatic mode’’; home is the ‘‘space of innocence’’ where ‘‘melodrama begins, and wants to end’’ (29).124 ‘‘The narrative then ends happily if the protagonists can, in some way, return to this home, unhappy if they can not’’ (28). The genre of melodrama is generally conceived in regressive terms, as a desire to return to a space of innocence, of home. For Peter Brooks, all melodrama seeks to reassert a moral legibility in a post-sacred world following the French revolution.125 Melodrama, the genre of affect and pathos, of situationality over character,126 a genre that has traditionally been contrasted with realism,127 is seen to reflect the anxiety of modernity. The polarized representation of good and evil and the reassertion of a home space,128 for example, reiterate a nostalgic129 desire for an idealized space of innocence that temporally precedes modernity, a nostalgia, Ben Singer suggests, for a pre-capitalist community (‘‘Gemeinschaft’’).130 Singer describes the ‘‘fusion of anxiety and wish-fulfillment’’ (136) of melodrama, echoing readings of melodrama that characterize it as a dialectic of repression131 and excess. This is the way in

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which Nowell-Smith describes melodrama in his reading of the films of Vincente Minnelli.132 Indeed, it is Minelli’s films, along with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and others produced in the 1950s and ’60s, that have inspired a great deal of work on the genre. Films such as Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life can be seen to embody the contradictions and anxieties of modernity in a formalized and tightly framed depiction of gender, family, and race relations. The familial ‘‘crisis’’ instigated by the disappearance of fathers in the two families—one white and one black—brings to light instabilities of class, race, and family.133 The death of the African-American mother in the end, coupled with the reappearance of a pivotal male figure in a central paternal role, reestablishes the bourgeois home as an idealized space, even as the relationships between the family members remain highly ambiguous (Lana Turner’s daughter has fallen for the father figure Steve, and the daughter of the African-American maid/mother must reject her black identity and continue to ‘‘pass’’ as white). The threatened family and home, then, are often seen as the site onto which the anxieties associated with modernity are projected in melodrama. Thomas Elsaesser sees the genre of the family melodrama as an outgrowth of bourgeois resistance and a successor to the bourgeois tragedies of the Enlightenment.134 The home becomes the central space in which this resistance is played out, and in the family melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, the dramatic conflict is sublimated into ‘‘de´cor, colour, gesture and composition of frame’’ (Elsaesser, ‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ 52), so that the films of Minelli and Sirk are engaged in an aesthetics of compression and ‘‘an acute sense of claustrophobia in de´cor and locale’’ (Elsaesser, ‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ 52). The overcoded home is then a space that produces a dramaturgy of ‘‘vicious circles’’;135 the narrative is not linear but rather substitutive and symbolic.136 In contrast to those who attempt to define melodrama as a genre, Linda Williams has coined the notion of a ‘‘melodramatic mode,’’ ‘‘the dominant form of popular moving-picture narrative’’ that compensates for the ‘‘loss of moral certainty . . . by increasingly sensational, commodified productions of pathos and action’’ (23). In this sense, the traditional dichotomy between classical realism and melodrama falls away, and even the popular action film often makes use of the characteristics of melodrama. Williams’s analysis of melodrama renders the concept of melodrama useful in analyses of all film genres, and it even opens up a space for melodrama within film characterized as postmodern. Singer concludes his monograph on melodrama and modernity with a question along

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these lines: ‘‘Is it necessary to shift the terms of an analysis of contemporary sensationalism from modernity to postmodernity?’’ (296). In her analysis of Fassbinder, the New German Cinema, and melodrama, Caryl Flinn surmises that the shocks of modernity might be reconceived as post-Shoah, postmodern aftershocks in the New German Cinema (98–103). Williams cites Peter Brooks, who likewise points to the centrality of an innocent space in melodrama/theater that represents a lost past and the object of nostalgia: ‘‘Certain topoi belong to this structure. Remarkably prevalent is the setting of the enclosed garden, the space of innocence, surrounded by walls, very often presenting at stage rear a locked grille looking out on the surrounding countryside or onto the highroad leading from the city’’ (Brooks, 29). Home is closed off from the outside, so that the space can be simultaneously innocent and claustrophobic. Williams suggests that the nostalgia evoked by the idealized space of home recalls ‘‘a virtuous place that we like to think we once possessed whether in childhood or the distant past of the nation’’ (28). For Williams, then, melodrama is ultimately conservative, focusing on the victim as hero (29) and filled with a sense that it is ‘‘too late’’ (30). Both the space and the time of melodrama tend to look backward at a familial and national space and time in which the contradictions of modernity could be reconciled. In this sense, melodrama confronts ‘‘the transcendental homelessness of modernity’’ (Georg Luka´cs),137 a state of anxiety that is temporarily assuaged by melodrama. Neither the generic category nor the mode of melodrama has generally been invoked in conjunction with reviews and critical readings of Tykwer’s films.138 Since most of the focus has been on Run Lola Run, the director is rather associated with the future, with the innovative use of technology and the action genre. However, taking my cue from Linda Williams’s characterization of melodrama, Tykwer’s films seem to me to combine multiple generic categorizations, among them a melodramatic mode.139 The unique dialectic of entrapment and escape that, to my mind, defines his films reiterates certain national discourses on home and family.140 Tykwer’s figures, however, ultimately abandon the space of home with little regret and seem to create new and tenuous homes that were not representable in the films of the New German Cinema. While Tykwer’s films can also be characterized by their depiction of action genre staples such as bank robberies and car accidents, the space of home is central to the initial denouement of the narrative. The concept of home, however, cannot be separated in this discussion from the loaded German term Heimat. The German fan-

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tasy of Heimat mirrors Williams’s characterization of the American home in melodrama as a nostalgic myth. In his analysis of Edgar Reitz’s television miniseries, Die Zweite Heimat (Germany, 1993), Johannes von Moltke writes that Heimat is a myth about the possibility of community141 and that Heimat always indicts modernity.142 Indeed, Heimat seems to correlate in numerous ways to the generic category of melodrama and to a regressive mode of nostalgia. In its postwar, post-Shoah manifestations, Heimat is always in danger of falling into the regressive logic of melodrama and a notion of history that, like the Heimatfilm, threatens to reinsert Germany into the pre-modern space of Nazism. Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior gives a decisive nod to the Heimatfilm genre, but it is clear from the outset of the film that its concerns transcend those of that genre. Each of Tykwer’s films, however, is initially enmeshed in the structure of the melodramatic mode. Not only is the category of home central, to varying degrees, to each film, but Tykwer’s representations of interior spaces bear some resemblance to the overtly formal, tightly framed interiors of Sirk and Fassbinder. Tykwer’s attraction to vivid and symbolic primary colors, especially in Winter Sleepers, Run Lola Run, and The Princess and the Warrior, are reminiscent of the lavish Technicolor shades of Sirk’s films. Indeed, Tykwer’s crew members have made creative use of technology in order to approximate Technicolor’s brilliance in their films.143 The color coding of the characters Rebecca (red) and Laura (green) in Winter Sleepers renders them symbolic in ways that recall melodramatic characterizations. Lola’s red hair in Run Lola Run is matched only by the ambulance that both gives and takes life, and green and red likewise recur in extra-natural forms in The Princess and the Warrior, a nod to the artificial paradise of the Sissi films. The interiors of the protagonists’ rooms are likewise tightly framed and claustrophobic, overfilled with the iconography of the bourgeois home. These spaces help define the lives of the heroines in terms of entrapment. They reflect, according to Tykwer, a timelessness that lends itself to a thematic universality.144 According to Elsaesser, de´cor and character cannot be separated in melodrama: ‘‘Pressure is generated by things crowding in on them, and life becomes increasingly complicated because cluttered with obstacles and objects that invade their personalities, take them over, stand for them, become more real than the human relations or emotions they were intended to symbolize’’ (Elsaesser, ‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ 62). Scenes depicting the rooms of Rebecca (Winter Sleepers), Lola (Run Lola Run), and Sissi (The Princess and the Warrior) give the

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spectator a sense of claustrophobia and clutter, of symbolism in terms of color and iconography.145 Lola’s room is the space in which the viewer first encounters her, and it is highly cluttered, filled with the remnants of childhood, pictures, bottles, a pet turtle, and, notably, naked Barbie dolls, upon which the camera lingers in close-up before Lola runs out of the room. Barbie dolls have come to be highly symbolic in post-feminist Western cultures, since the dolls are almost exclusively purchased for girls, representing an ideal of beauty and feminine identity that is unattainable (Barbie’s measurements are impossibly inhuman) and static. These dolls overcode Lola’s room as a space of her girlhood and of bourgeois gender values, yet their nakedness reveals that they have lost their aura in Lola’s room. This space is almost incomprehensible in its density and depth, and certain objects, like the cigarette machine, are only seen once due to the shifting perspectives of the camera. At one point, a high angle shot of Lola reveals a pile of junk on her floor—magazines, pictures, lighters, and other indetectable objects. Lola’s room is filled with relics and junk in a heightened overcoded sense reminiscent of the interior spaces in Sirk melodramas. Sissi’s (The Princess and the Warrior) room is likewise impossibly green, decorated with a flowered wallpaper that provides a claustrophobic atmosphere to the room. The ‘‘natural’’ symbols of green and flowers rather add to the repressive and claustrophobic atmosphere of the room than give it a sense of openness. Even Sissi’s blue picture of a bird in flight seems artificial within this space. In contrast, Rebecca’s (Winter Sleepers) room is blood red, making her a placeholder for passion and sensuality. Her room is likewise intensely cluttered, filled with romance novels, pictures, and lamps, suggesting that her sensuality is less a conscious choice on her part than a restrictive role prescribed to her by the setting. The large pillars are reminiscent of the beams in Petra’s room in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,146 and Rebecca and Marco are framed visa`-vis these pillars in tableaux signifying miscommunication. The house in which Laura and Rebecca live is itself a sort of ‘‘depot’’ that Laura inherited from her aunt, the collector. This house is so intensely cluttered as to be almost unreadable. The dark living room is filled with lamps, and the kitchen overflows with dishes. The clutter of the house is reminiscent of Rene´’s apartment; his home is filled with photos that remind him of his recent past, the excess of memory and history. Numerous scenes in the film depict this kind of excess. In the local Sleeper’s Bar, Laura and Rene´ sit at a table overfilled with glasses filled with beer. Laura’s room is filled with bottles; her wall is adorned with framed butterflies, recalling

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7. ‘‘Rebecca’s Room.’’ Winter Sleepers. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/X-Verleih.

the collectors Maria and Dieter in Deadly Maria. Maria collects insects, and Dieter collects newspapers that are piled up in every corner of his apartment. The melodramatic spaces of the heroines’ rooms code their ‘‘homes’’ as claustrophobic, and each figure ultimately leaves the space of home behind, so that the melodramatic mode is called forth only to be discarded in the end of the films.147 Perhaps the most overtly melodramatic of Tykwer’s films is Deadly Maria. Maria is not only depicted in tightly framed shots of her dark apartment, but her story is the ultimate narrative of female entrapment. The first shot of the apartment is a pan that focuses on Maria’s artifacts—pictures and objects such as the talisman ‘‘Formino.’’ In contrast to the dark and narrow spaces of the apartment, Maria is often shot sitting or standing in the window, smoking. A small amount of light from the window sets off the dark interior, and the trope of the woman by the window recalls iconically, as argued by Elsaesser, the space of melodrama, ‘‘the enforced passivity of women—women waiting at home, standing by the window, caught in a world of objects in which they are expected to invest their feelings’’ (‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ 62).148 Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘‘Woman at the Window’’ is restaged here, in a manner recalling

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the performative entrapment of Jelinek’s texts. The image of Maria at the window is mirrored in a similar scene in Winter Sleepers in which Rebecca stands at the window smoking while Marco is skiing to his death with another lover. As a translator of romance novels, Rebecca embodies the waiting woman of Heimat romances, and the image of her gazing out the window that frames a mountain peak is reminiscent of the cover of a Heimat novel. Yet this image of her is complicated by her departure on the train in the end of the film. And Philippa, too, is pictured at the window in the attic of the Caribinieri headquarters where Filippo hides her before she rides the train to another world. In each of Tykwer’s films focusing on female protagonists, the melodrama of entrapment defines all but the final moments of the lives of the heroines.149

A Home at the End of the World Although Tykwer’s films reiterate a melodramatic mode both thematically and aesthetically, they break sharply from the ‘‘anxiety of modernity’’ that would engender the desire to return to a space of home that represents the past. In fact, the escape tableaux I have

8. ‘‘Philippa at the Window.’’ Heaven. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/X-Verleih

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9. ‘‘A Home at the End of the World.’’ Heaven. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/XVerleih.

described in Tykwer’s films explicitly reject the home of the past, thus discarding a regressive nostalgia for Heimat. The spaces at the end of Tykwer’s films are more beautiful and more open than any home otherwise depicted in the films. The drive to the French coast in The Princess and the Warrior reveals a ‘‘home at the end of the world,’’150 a house inhabited by Sissi’s only friend at the edge of an enchantingly breathtaking coastline. That this moment is predicated by a jump from the roof of the asylum is likewise suggestive. Sissi and Bodo’s jump resembles Maria’s conscious fall from the window; in each case, the spectator believes the figures have chosen suicide over entrapment. Generic conventions lead the spectator to expect traditional endings, but the films reject simple closure. During the jumping scene in The Princess and the Warrior, the spectator is led to believe she is watching a German Thelma and Louise (USA, 1991), that Sissi and Bodo have chosen the freedom of death over being captured by the police. In Deadly Maria, the generic conventions of the melodrama contribute to the sense that the heroine cannot break out of the oppression and violence of her life. Yet, in each case, generic conventions are discarded in truly surprising narrative and visual turns. In each film, ‘‘home’’ is discarded only to be replaced by some-

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thing radically open.151 In each film focusing on a female protagonist, all central figures move from a rejection of home and prescribed modes of existence to the almost spiritual ascendance to a utopian home beyond gender and family suggested by the shot of the receding and rising helicopter carrying the two lovers in Heaven. This ‘‘home’’ is indefinable, a utopic space that does not look back and, for this reason, cannot be located in coherent space or time. Thus, when Sissi jumps off the roof of the asylum together with Bodo and drives into the landscape and away from her Heimat, it is a decidedly un-German moment. The two drive out of Germany and into France, to a location that is almost mythical in its un-Germanic beauty. The Princess and the Warrior and Heaven exhibit some characteristics associated with the road movie genre. The protagonists attempt to escape the oppression of home, to find something different. Elizabeth Mittman has argued that ‘‘the road trip adventure merely masks the ultimate fantasy of escape from the symbolic order, figured as the return to an imagined home.’’152 In her analysis of German post-wall films such as Peter Timm’s Go Trabi Go (Germany, 1991) and Detlev Buck’s No More Mister Nice Guy (Wir ko¨nnen auch anders) (Germany, 1993), Mittman argues that the German road film articulates a desire both for escape and integration into the new Europe. The rejection of the regressive mode of nostalgic longing for the old Heimat in all of Tykwer’s films suggests that his films might also articulate a desire for integration into a new Europe, yet their endings also point to possibilities beyond the concept of a united Europe. In this sense, they might recall the global fantasy of a possible happy ending ‘‘elsewhere,’’ an ending, as suggested by Robert Stam and Ella Habiba Shohat, that is legible to a transnational spectator. ‘‘Transnational spectatorship can also mold a space of future-orientated desire, nourishing the imaginary of ‘internal e´migre´s,’ actively crystallizing a sense of a viable ‘elsewhere,’ giving it a local habitation and a name, evoking a possible ‘happy end’ in another nation.’’153 This global fantasy is lyrically depicted in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong, 1997), a film that aestheticizes the alienation of two Hong Kong lovers living in Argentina. During their residence in Buenos Aires, they fantasize about visiting the Iguazu falls, a location emblemized in a lamp they have purchased as a souvenir of the falls although they have, as yet, never visited Iguazu. The film begins with a close-up of the lamp, as Lai Yiu-Fai muses that he and his lover ‘‘could start over.’’154 The final scenes of the film show Fai, one of the lovers, gazing at the Iguazu falls before heading

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home to Hong Kong. The scene is immediately followed by shots of Chang, a Taiwanese traveler, standing alone at the cliffs of Ushuaia on the Argentinian coast. In a conversation with Fai, he had described the spot as a kind of home at the end of the world: Chang: They say it’s at the end of the world. I’d like to see it. Fai: They say people with emotional troubles can dump all their problems there.155

The camera circles around Chan standing at a lighthouse on the cliffs as he muses about the notion of home: ‘‘Jan 1977. I finally arrive to the end of the world. I left Taipei because I hated home.’’156 However, the home at the end of the world is deconstructed as a fantasy of sorts. Fai stops in Taipei on the way home to Hong Kong, and he visits Chang’s family. Fai idealizes the family of the man whose visit to the sea embodies the ‘‘happy ending’’ of the global e´migre´. His own notion of home is likewise deconstructed, since his father will not speak to him: ‘‘I can see why he [Chang] can afford to run around so freely. There’s a place where he can always return. I wonder what’ll happen when father sees me.’’ At this point, the spectator is treated to a glossy wide shot of

10. ‘‘On the Train.’’ Heaven. Courtesy of Tom Tykwer/X-Verleih.

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the city at night, and Fai rides the train, presumably on the way home.157 Like Philippa and Filippo in Heaven, he faces backward as the train moves.158 The global e´migre´ in Wong’s film experiences a ‘‘happy end’’ elsewhere, but this happy end never truly embodies a home but rather a concept that is alive only as an ironic projection. In contrast, Tykwer’s figures seem to reach an ontologically different space in the end of his films. Breaking from the classic films of global postmodernism such as Happy Together, Tykwer’s films dramatize an escape to an as yet unimagined home in a trajectory that is neither ironic nor regressively nostalgic. The notion of a deterritorialized space159 of home characterizes Tykwer’s works only insofar as these destinations are never truly reached.160 In this sense, Tykwer’s films might engage in a global fantasy of a happy end ‘‘elsewhere,’’ but even the category of happy end seems rather anticipatory. A success in Taiwan, Finland, Uruguay, and Brazil, Run Lola Run, of all of Tykwer’s films, has garnered global appeal.161 In the Director’s Statement for the film, Tykwer likewise underscores the transnational attraction of the film: ‘‘The film could be just as easily set in Peking, Helsinki or New York, the only thing that would change is the scenery, not the emotional dimensions. I think everyone, truly everyone, can identify with Lola.’’ Indeed, in an interview, Tykwer and Franka Potente celebrate the fact that Australian audiences memorized the German lines so that they could parrot the words during repeated screenings of the film.162 The euphoric marketing statements about the non-national character of Run Lola Run reflects the popularity of the film’s love story and techno music; in many other ways, however, the film stands for a particularly German historical moment, and Margit Sinka points out that the Sony version of the Director’s Comments substitutes the comments on the universality of the film for a lengthy discussion of Berlin.163 Tykwer suggests as much in an interview with the New York Times: ‘‘This [Run Lola Run] could take place in any major city of the world. But Berlin is the perfect match, because Lola is someone who is running between times and Berlin itself is a city between eras. The whole center of town is a construction site’’ (Winters). The claim to universality is thus tempered by a recognition of the unique historic and cultural position of Berlin as a placeholder for Germany’s complex relation to time and history. Tykwer has claimed that Berlin is simultaneously synthetic and alive in a unique way, and in Run Lola Run one sees this city at a point between modernity and demolition (Sinka, 5), or, as expressed by Klaus Hartung in Die Zeit, Berlin is a ‘‘grey zone be-

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tween the no longer and the not yet.’’164 The new Berlin is constructed on the site of the old, and Sinka points out that the old cannot entirely be discarded, as is illustrated in Run Lola Run: ‘‘Several areas on Lola’s run show scaffolding that had been removed, enabling new facades to be visible without removing the old ones from view. Rather than one erasing the other, the new and the old seem to be forming an unexpected, particularly interesting symbiosis’’ (Sinka, 5).165 In an interview, Tykwer describes Berlin as a city situated at a point ‘‘between modernity and its break.’’166 In contrast to the sometimes oversimplified statements about universality that accompanied the world distribution of Run Lola Run, Tykwer has been oddly insistent about the ‘‘Germanness’’ of his first international production, Heaven. In an interview with Der Spiegel entitled ‘‘That which is German about me is in this film,’’ Tykwer responds to the question of whether the film can be called German in the affirmative: Spiegel Online: Mr. Tykwer, the new Berlinale director, Dieter Kosslick, calls Heaven a ‘‘wonderful example for the creative potential of the German film scene.’’ But is your newest work really a German film? Tom Tykwer: I do think so. I have neither changed my perspective nor cut off my roots. In addition, I wouldn’t have taken on the film if I hadn’t been able to make it with my company and the same team as always. Only the language and the location for the shoots changed. But that which is German in me is in this film, as in my other films.167

When asked to elaborate on the precisely ‘‘German’’ nature of the film, however, Tykwer cites German topography and the nuances of the language, but is ultimately unable to provide a clear answer. These comments resemble his assertions in the interview with Michael To¨teberg included in the film book for Heaven that national characteristics persevere even when films are produced internationally: I hate these Europudding films because they don’t have an authentic atmosphere. Here, the decisive act was also linking the various influences into an organic whole. We had an Italian and a German assistant director, a German and an Italian director of production. These creative elements had to be brought into harmony with one another, which wasn’t always very simple; the methods of working are rather different in these countries, influenced by the mentalities.168

Tykwer’s insistence on individual national characteristics is based on intangibles, but it corresponds to a certain German hesitance

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vis-a`-vis globalization, a hesitance that can be linked to the culturally ingrained suspicion that the rejection of nation might imply the denial of history.169 Tykwer presents a fantasy of escape from time and place toward a ‘‘home at the end of the world’’ in a manner unlike any other postmodern filmmaker. If Berlin stands at a transitional point between ‘‘no longer,’’ and ‘‘not yet ,’’ then the endings of Tykwer’s films likewise pass beyond a fossilized notion of history, the ‘‘no longer’’ and venture into the space and time of ‘‘not yet’’ beyond the gaze of the spectator. As Lola steps into the space and time of surplus with her bag of money in hand, she enters empty, wide Berlin streets that seem to symbolize an urban tabula rasa where anything is possible. Where the figures in Wong’s Happy Together have already deconstructed the notion of the ‘‘not yet’’ while ironically repeating their search for it, Tykwer’s figures still feel the relief at a potential shift from the old to the new. The final escape tableaux in Tykwer’s feature films capture the transitional moment that his films anticipate. Tykwer’s aesthetic innovation signals a particularly German engagement with postmodernism, one that remains subtly dialectical, as revealed by Tykwer’s own description of his filmic vision: ‘‘to dream analytically,’’ a formulation that contains the seeds of European modernism while locating its primary space in the dream beyond rationality.170 This dialectical structure is evident in the trajectory of Tykwer’s first five feature films. Each consecutive film repeats the narrative of entrapment that dominated the previous film, suggesting that escape is illusory and fantastical. Yet each escape is more dramatic than the previous one: Maria’s fall from the window in Deadly Maria prefigures the falls and flights that precede Philippa and Filippo’s ascendance into the clouds in Heaven. The recurring trope of the spiral in Run Lola Run seems to define the shape of Tykwer’s films. These films have not entirely rejected the repetition compulsion of historical critique, but they simultaneously point to a rupture, to an aesthetic momentarily freed from repetition. Residing between the poles of departure and arrival, Tykwer’s films invite a reflective mode of nostalgia, one that rejects the Heimat of Nazi Germany while indulging in a longing for a home that is at once familiar and alienated. The melodrama of spatial, aesthetic, and historical entrapment suddenly explodes in unexpected ways, and the beauty of the escape tableaux induces an ecstatic sense of openness. The delicate dialectic of entrapment and escape offered in Tykwer’s films is predicated, in part, on the fantasy of a ‘‘home elsewhere.’’ Escape to an as yet unrealized elsewhere might entail a new

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perspective both toward the original homeland and to the imagined space of the future. In chapter 4, I analyze the writings of the Austrian-Jewish author and critic, Robert Menasse, in light of his complex use of perspective via multiple homelands that simultaneously evoke nostalgic emotions and alienation. Focusing in particular on the novel Wings of Stone (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt, 1991), I show how Menasse utilizes what I call transnational nostalgia as a mode of reflective critique that nevertheless reserves a place for longing between the multiple sites of home and family. Menasse advocates a perspectival shift that, like the films of Tom Tykwer, imagines a post-Holocaust aesthetics that can conjoin lightness with sustained historical critique.

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4 Nation without a Home: Robert Menasse and Transnational Nostalgia THE WRITINGS OF THE AUSTRIAN NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST ROBERT

Menasse offer a perspective on German-language history and aesthetics that is simultaneously ironic and nostalgic. In an essay on Austrian culture from the collection The Land Without Qualities (Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 1992), Menasse puts the question of perspective at the center of his reflections on Austria’s fraught relationship to history and time. Here, Menasse uses the metaphor of the window to advocate for a loosening of what he elsewhere describes as the petrified conditions (‘‘versteinerte[n] Verha¨ltnisse,’’ 13) of contemporary Austria.1 Austrian identity—this term is reminiscent of a dark and musty room where, if one enters for some reason, one immediately wants to move the curtains apart and open the window to let in some air and light. But what if the window has no view and the room therefore wants to brighten only slightly? (7)2

Menasse offers here an image that effectively reverses the perspective of the photo of Jelinek framed in the broken window. Menasse calls for the airing of the dark, petrified space, for the return of light and perspective to the Austrian imaginary. In Menasse’s proposed image, the woman in the window would not only look outside, but the external light and air would transform the space of preserved history within the room itself. Menasse ends his paragraph questioning not only the perspective of those looking out from within the room, but the construction of the room itself. For Menasse, both the observer/player and the architecture of history need to be thought anew, and not simply in isolation, but also in relation to one another. The dialectic of fixity and perspective is thus complicated anew, and past and future meet tenuously in the light of day. In 2000 Menasse published an essay in the Austrian newspaper 176

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Der Standard in which he called into question certain liberal assumptions about fascism in Austria.3 Specifically, Menasse points to the regressive, provincial nature of Austrian nationalism, and he shows how the infamous right-wing leader of Austria’s Freedom ¨ ), Jo¨rg Haider, had ironically furthered certain democParty (FPO ratizing initiatives that would serve to integrate Austria more successfully into the European community. In the article, Menasse also specifically criticizes what he sees as Jelinek’s histrionic response to the increased power of Haider and his party. Jelinek had recently declared that she would no longer allow her plays to be performed in Austria: ‘‘To prohibit the staging of my plays in Austria is the last freedom that remains for me.’’4 Menasse ridicules Jelinek’s statement that the removal of her plays from the Austrian stage was the last freedom left to an Austrian citizen: ‘‘The last freedom that remains for me’’—strange: I have overlooked something, missed something, repressed the truth of something: I go to demonstrations without being hassled. I can say, write, publish what I want. I can assemble with friends, with people who share my politics, I can make plans, I can try to realize these plans and I fail, if I fail, only because of myself, not because of the power of the state. I can enter the synagogue and can leave it again without being hassled. (163)5

For Menasse, whose father’s family fled Vienna in 1938, Jelinek’s ostensibly political act is a radical oversimplification of the political and historical complexities of modern Austria.6 Menasse’s critique of Jelinek is condensed into a parodical simplification of her work: ‘‘Can it, for instance, be true that an Austrian poetess really only harvests praise if she bases her œuvre for years on the idiosyncratic thesis: ‘Austria is fascist. Sports are fascist. Everything is fascist!’ ’’7 Despite Menasse’s own critical stance toward Austria’s fascist history and his praise of ‘‘anti-Heimat’’ literature, Menasse locates a regressive quality in Jelinek’s work. In Menasse’s satirical representation of Jelinek’s texts, all content is fascism. Here, Menasse points to the repetition compulsion in Jelinek’s writing. Yet it seems to me that while Menasse locates the symptom, he does so without analyzing its cause and its frame. As I have argued, Jelinek’s texts engage in a repetition compulsion ad absurdum, and this repetition compulsion reflects Jelinek’s ‘‘performative entrapment’’ within German-language literary and cultural history. In this sense, Menasse’s critique of Jelinek is descriptively accurate yet ignores the critical and aesthetic stance taken by the author.

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Despite his attack on Jelinek’s aesthetic strategies and political drama Menasse’s views on Austrian history dovetail in many ways with those of Jelinek. In 1992 Menasse articulated a critique of Austria that recalls almost word for word Jelinek’s views on the particularly unreflective nature of Austria and the Austrian public: ‘‘No country has problematized itself in public and thoroughly reflected upon itself as little as the Second Austrian Republic.’’8 Menasse is acutely aware of Austria’s false claim of innocence following crimes of Nazism. In the 2000 essay ‘‘In achtzig Tagen gegen die Welt’’ [Against the World in 80 Days] Menasse reiterates this view of postwar Austria: Of course it is true that the refounded republic steadfastly refused to take on in any form partial responsibility for the Austrian participation in the Nazi crimes. And as is well known, it is likewise true that instead the historical lie about ‘‘Austria as the first victim of Nazi aggression’’ was made into the basis of the sovereignty of the Second Republic. (165)9

Thus, in the same essay in which he criticizes Jelinek for what he sees as her oversimplification of Austrian identity, Menasse’s political stance resembles that of Jelinek’s own. In fact, he seems to straddle a line between Jelinek’s focused critique of everyday fascism and the desire to gain a more nuanced perspective on postNazi Austrian identity. In his reflections on the responses to the increasingly powerful position of Jo¨rg Haider and the Austrian Freedom Party at the turn of the twenty-first century, Menasse attempts to look both backward and forward—to the Nazi past that, he believes, must be distinguished from the present fascist trend and to an Austrian present and future that cannot be conceived only in linear terms. In questioning a linear notion of history Menasse critiques the belief that Haider was simply the logical follower of Hitler, the return of the ghost of fascism that was always residing under the surface: ‘‘Can it be true that Austria’s history, when we speak about Austria today, began with Hitler and systematically led to a supposed reincarnation [of this man]?’’10 For Menasse, the Austrian left is under the thrall of this linear notion of history. Students, according to Menasse, attain the status of an intellectual if they have written a seminar paper with the thesis that Austria swindled its way around a confession of its partial guilt for the Nazi crimes. On the surface, there is some truth to this thesis, but there is less truth to its implications: namely, it was deduced that a Nazi

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mentality or a silent approval of the Nazi horrors were still part of the ‘‘Austrian mentality.’’11

Menasse takes issue with the assumption that fifty years of history can be defined exclusively in terms of Nazism despite signs to the contrary such as the ascendance of the Social Democrats after World War II. In this sense, Menasse voices positions associated with both the right and the left, yet he seems to be searching for a standpoint beyond this dichotomy. In this chapter, I delineate Menasse’s unique stance vis-a`-vis history, politics, and aesthetics in his critical essays and literary work. Through his differentiated understanding of the cultural idiom of Nazism and its aesthetic limits, Menasse expresses a perspective that potentially looks beyond Jelinek’s performative repetition compulsion. As an Austrian Jew who spent time teaching in Brazil, Menasse’s perspective on German and Austrian fascism is simultaneously internal and external. In a manner reminiscent of the film aesthetics of Tom Tykwer, Menasse’s subtle combination of postmodern citation, historical deconstruction, ironic nostalgia, and nostalgic affect can be seen as historically engaged and yet qualitatively new. I focus here on the novels of the Trilogie der Entgeisterung (Trilogy of Dispiritedness), in particular the second novel in the trilogy, Wings of Stone (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt, 1991), as they perform a balancing act between historical reflection of fascism and a global aesthetic practice. This practice embodies the narrative of entrapment and escape in a manner that points to what I call transnational nostalgia in Menasse’s works. The novels in the Trilogie der Entgeisterung take place both in postwar Vienna and contemporary Sa˜o Paolo, Brazil. They are simultaneously concerned with the cultural translation of fascism and the Nazi family and with the non-linearity of time and the shrinking nature of global space. Regressive notions of nostalgia are constantly destabilized via what Ulrich Beck has coined ‘‘polygamy of place’’ and what can be seen as a concomitant polygamy of time. Menasse’s intertextual references to seminal writers of Viennese Modernism such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Leopold von Andrian simultaneously revive the longing of Austria’s modernism and delight in a creative mode of citation that rejects any fixed notion of origin or home.

Transnational Nostalgia: Wings of Stone In the essay ‘‘Against the World in 80 Days’’ (‘‘In achtzig Tagen gegen die Welt’’), which is concerned with Austrian cultural iden-

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tity and the threat of fascism, Menasse begins with the topic of translation. Menasse refers to the celebrated reception of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina in Brazil. In particular, according to Menasse, the Brazilians were fascinated with the notion of an abyss (‘‘Abgrund’’) on the border of which the novel’s protagonists drink coffee. Brazilians were taken with this image of ‘‘the dialectics of modernity’’ [die Dialektik der Moderne] (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’158), which combines the present and the past, surface and depth. Yet Menasse points out that the Portuguese word ‘‘fossa,’’ signifying gulf or abyss, would be translated back into German as ‘‘Graben’’ or ditch, and ‘‘Graben’’ is likewise the name of a swanky sweet in Vienna full of cafe´s. Menasse’s play with the dialectical model renders it absurd. For example, he reminds the readers that the ‘‘Cafe´ Europa’’ is on the ‘‘Graben,’’ yet this cafe´ had been closed for about one hundred days, the number of days during which, in 2000, the new coalition that included Haider’s party had been in power in the Austrian government.12 The excess of translation, reflection, and ironic citation results in the collapse of the dialectic. The translation of the notion of Austrian history and depth into Brazilian Portuguese is highly fruitful for the Brazilians: ‘‘The discussion about this novel was so intense that it undoubtedly led to very productive consequences in Brazilian literature and in the understanding of the world by the readers.’’13 Yet Menasse suggests that this productive Brazilian discussion can not easily be translated back into the Austrian context. With one foot, so to speak, in each country, Menasse retains a perspective outside of the false mirror between these two nations and languages. His perspective is always self-consciously skewed, and thereby never entirely provincial, rather revealing a ‘‘polygamy of place’’ that, as Ulrich Beck suggests, characterizes globalized lives that are spread across different geographical spaces. Perhaps this is the reason for the relatively quiet reception of Menasse’s literary works. Despite the high respect and critical acclaim afforded Menasse especially for Wings of Stone (for which he won the Heimito von Doderer-Preis and the ‘‘Literaturfo¨rderpreis der Deutschen Industrie’’), relatively little critical literature has been published on his work. This is, I suspect, a product of the transitional, hybrid nature of Menasse’s novels. Menasse’s texts do not reject the work of Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, as the writers of German pop literature generally do;14 nor do they continue to circumscribe the history of fascism in the manner of Jelinek’s works. They simultaneously deconstruct and provide nostalgic escape, yet in a highly idiosyncratic manner. Thus, whereas Tykwer’s films resonate globally via

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his creative use of conventional genres (melodrama, action, horror), Menasse’s novels are generically indefinable, and the intertextual references are often literary and philosophical, citing works ranging from the literature of Viennese Modernism to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. While not provincial, Menasse’s novels might nevertheless have difficulty traveling globally. (None of the translations of these novels is currently in print.) In Wings of Stone Menasse thematizes the absolute marginality of the work of art and philosophy. A postmodern deconstruction of modernist values, Menasse’s novel is relatively placeless in the contemporary Austrian cultural milieu. Yet in its complex use of a reflective, transcultural nostalgia, Wings of Stone returns affect to the postmodern Austrian novel. In this sense, Menasse’s aesthetic must be distinguished from the anti-Heimat genre about which he has written extensively. Far from idealizing a lost Austrian ‘‘home’’ in the manner of the classic Heimat novel, many contemporary Austrian authors have embraced a form of anti-nostalgia in the genre of anti-Heimat literature. Austrian authors such as Jelinek argue that Austria, in contrast to Germany, has been spared official sanctions and is therefore in dire need of rigorous self-critique. According to Robert Menasse, Austria is a nation but not a ‘‘homeland’’:15 Nation without a homeland. It is certainly no coincidence that in Austria, with the so-called ‘‘antiHeimat literature,’’ in international comparison, a completely separate, new literary genre came into being: Austria is the anti-Heimat par excellence. But the anti-Heimat literature is not only a separate Austrian genre, it is first and foremost the most important and most dominant form of literature in the Second Republic.16

In his list of authors writing in the anti-Heimat genre Menasse includes virtually every important Austrian author of the past few decades from Thomas Bernhard to Josef Winkler (Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 113).17 A genre specifically designed to criticize sharply the vision of Austria sold by the tourism industry, anti-Heimat literature forecloses a space for nostalgia. Yet as I have argued in the case of the paradigmatic Austrian ‘‘Nestbeschmutzerin’’ Elfriede Jelinek, anti-Heimat literature potentially engages in a repetition compulsion that can lead to critical and aesthetic paralysis. The Heimatstadt Vienna is one of two world cities at the center of Wings of Stone (the other being Sa˜o Paolo, Brazil), and the city is represented as the space of paralysis early in the novel:

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His ideas sounded odd in a city so particularly and stolidly ignorant of any notion that things could be different from what they were, a city that seemed so set in its ways that the expression ‘‘Vienna will always be Vienna’’ came across as a lie only because it sounded too much like a euphemism: the verb ‘‘be’’ was far too dynamic.18

The ‘‘joke’’ is that the beloved Heimat of Vienna has, in fact, not changed at all since the defeat of fascism. As the city of stasis, Vienna is rigidified, petrified in its historical fixity. Here, Menasse’s representation of Vienna recalls the historical fixity implied in the image of Jelinek in the window. Although Menasse’s novel appropriates the critical stance of antiHeimat literature, it likewise moves beyond this genre through the introduction of the second geographical space of Brazil, the erstwhile homeland of Leo and Judith, the central figures in the novel who are both children of Jewish e´migre´s. The space of Brazil opens the novel to complex moments of irony and transnational nostalgia. Not only a non-Germanic geographical location but also a developing-world country, Brazil signifies a less burdensome relationship to modernism as perceived from a Western European perspective. It thereby opens up spaces for literary play, cultural translation, and citation that are not subject to the same historical scrutiny. Leo is a perpetual student, who is unable to write what he imagines will be a philosophical masterpiece that will document the regression of contemporary society. The work attempts to detail the reversal of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Pha¨nomenologie des Geistes), the slow devolution of global cultures. In his notes, Leo distinguishes between the ‘‘advanced’’ regression of Western Europe and the belated progress and regression of Brazil: ‘‘In the dimension of world history, we are experiencing a regression. Only in Brazil? No. Brazil is lagging well behind. The fascisms in Europe managed it long ago’’ (Wings of Stone, 141) [Wir leben welthistorisch den systematischen Ru¨ckschritt. Nur in Brasilien? Nein. Brasilien ist ein Nachzu¨gler. Die europa¨ischen Faschismen haben das la¨ngst vorher geleistet] (Selige Zeiten, 199). In this sense, Brazil is associated with a pre-modern innocence that provides a space for hope and aesthetic innovation. Brazil stands for a less tainted and barbaric, since less fascist, historical moment, a space capable of inducing the emotion of nostalgia. Leo moves back to Sa˜o Paolo from Vienna after his father’s death. Thus, the space of Brazil holds the potential for a home beyond the family of fascism: ‘‘He was flying towards something better. Flying home’’ (Wings of Stone, 101) [Er flog ins Bessere. Er flog

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heim] (Selige Zeiten, 144). Likewise, Judith returns to Brazil after the suicide of her lover in Vienna, and this move is conceived as a return to innocence: ‘‘She thought it would be the ultimate return to innocence’’ (Wings of Stone, 187) [Sie dachte, das sei die endgu¨ltige Ru¨ckkehr zur Unschuld] (Selige Zeiten, 263). Despite the rise of a military dictatorship in Brazil, this geographical space serves as a placeholder for nostalgic fantasies in contrast to the rigid inflexibility of Vienna. During his first chance encounter with Judith in Vienna, Leo asks her whether she gets ‘‘homesick’’ (Wings of Stone, 9) [Heimweh] (Selige Zeiten, 18), and both figures immediately understand that Leo is referring to Sa˜o Paolo. Leo’s childhood memories in Sa˜o Paolo are recalled nostalgically throughout the novel—his sheltered life, the beloved father figure and art collector Lo¨winger, Lo¨winger’s big house and garden—and though these memories are partially deconstructed within the novel, they provide a space for nostalgia that complicates the anti-Heimat genre. Leo’s nostalgia for Brazil is linked explicitly to his idealization of Lo¨winger as a strong father figure in contrast to his own weak father, an assimilated Jew who engages in business transactions with former Nazis upon his return to Vienna and celebrates Christmas in order to ingratiate his Christian clients. Lo¨winger is for Leo ‘‘the ideal picture of a person’’ (Wings of Stone 109) [das Idealbild von einem Menschen] (Selige Zeiten, 155–56), a man whose sovereign and intellectual presence Leo conjures when wandering through the art museums of Venice: ‘‘If Lo¨winger had been there’’ (Wings of Stone 79) [Wenn Lo¨winger dabeigewesen wa¨re] (Selige Zeiten, 115). Without Lo¨winger’s structuring presence the collection of major paintings in Venice are illegible to Leo. When Leo returns to Sa˜o Paolo, he eventually lives on Lo¨winger’s estate; in effect, he exchanges the weak non-father for the strong father, a figure only conceivable in positive terms in a space untainted by Austria’s history: ‘‘after the weak father now the strong father’’ (Wings of Stone, 110) [nach dem schwachen Vater der starke Vater] (Selige Zeiten, 156). And although Leo’s ideal image of Lo¨winger is deconstructed through the continuation of their relationship in adulthood, the nostalgia for an idyllic childhood in Lo¨winger’s home and garden remains as a memory fixation: ‘‘And past were the days when the rich but familiar world of Lo¨winger’s house and garden was his only world’’ (Wings of Stone, 78) [Und vorbei die Zeit, da die reiche, aber u¨berschaubare Welt von Lo¨wingers Haus und Garten seine einzige Welt war] (Selige Zeiten, 113). The garden of innocence is a space containing only the strong, benevolent father figure. Lo¨winger’s vague connection to the military dictator-

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ship in Brazil reframes the fascist family trope so that Lo¨winger’s political connections remain peripheral to his function in Leo’s life. Leo’s oedipal crisis thus undergoes multiple displacements in the novel. Leo’s two father figures are complemented by two mother figures, his own sadistic mother and his beloved Judith, who alternately plays the role of object of sensual desire and nurturing mother.19 Indeed, the maternal figures in Leo’s life are powerful and sometimes cruel. Peter Arnds has suggested that the cruel mother symbolizes the homeland of Austria.20 Leo’s mother is unable to show love, and her obsession with control is exemplified through her habit of tying him to a table leg when he was a boy (Selige Zeiten, 43). Here, as in Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, the placeholder for sadism has shifted from the father to the mother, but this shift merely points once again to the persistence of the structure of fascism within the representation of the oedipal family. Menasse’s novel thus recalls Jelinek’s performative critical stance, yet the displacement of familial roles complicates this stance. When Leo’s mother dies, he dreams that Judith, the good mother, frees him from the table leg (Selige Zeiten, 219). Indeed, the only moment in which Leo feels ‘‘at home’’ in the present is in Judith’s modest home in Sa˜o Paolo: ‘‘He was at home here—and would never be allowed to be’’ (Wings of Stone, 232) [Hier war er zu Hause—und wu¨rde es nie sein du¨rfen] (Selige Zeiten, 324). This is the house she has purchased and filled with the furniture from her childhood bedroom—an extension of innocence and the realization of nostalgia in the present.

Reflective Nostalgia: The ‘‘Blessed Times’’ Menasse’s text links the Austrian fascist history with the question of a global home in an entirely unique manner. The ghosts of modernism recur in postmodern citation. In his conversations with a philosophy professor in Brazil, Leo points to the fragmentation and placelessness endemic to postmodernism while retaining the Hegelian notion of the ‘‘world spirit’’: ‘‘Today the world spirit is no longer at home anywhere, not in any particular place. One place would be only a small part of the whole. Nowhere at home anymore. Not here either’’ (Wings of Stone, 112) [Heute ist der Weltgeist nirgendwo mehr zu Hause, an keinem bestimmten Ort. Ein Ort wa¨re nur ein kleiner Teil vom Ganzen. Nirgends mehr zu Hause. Auch hier nicht] (Selige Zeiten, 160). The ‘‘transcendental

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homelessness of modernity’’ (Luka´cs) is embodied in Hegel’s world spirit, a concept neither entirely in place in post-Nazi Austria nor in Brazil, the idealized haven from Nazism. Indeed, Menasse’s title (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt—in literal translation, Blessed Times, Fragile World) recalls both Luka´cs and Hegel. The ‘‘blessed times’’ [selige Zeiten] directly cite the first lines of Luca´ks’s Theory of the Novel, a seminal reflection on modernity:21 Blessed are the times for which the starry sky is the map of the paths that are walkable and to be walked and whose paths are lit by the light of the stars. For those times, everything is new and yet familiar, adventurous and yet possession. The world is wide and yet like one’s own house, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essence as the stars.22

Here, Luka´cs is concerned with the nostalgia endemic to modernism. The ‘‘blessed times’’ are precisely those longed-for moments that bring forth a sense of belonging in the present. Luka´cs quotes the Romantic author and philosopher Novalis, for whom philosophy is a form of homesickness: ‘‘ ‘the drive to be at home everywhere.’ . . . That is why the blessed times have no philosophy, or, which says the same thing, all humans of this time are philosophers, occupants of the utopian goal of every philosophy.’’23 The philosophical impetus of Leo’s reversal of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the longing for the time of nostalgia—the ‘‘blessed times.’’ For Svetlana Boym reflective nostalgia is a nostalgia for time— for the breaks in time, the slowing of time. This is the manner in which nostalgia can move beyond regression. In Menasse’s novel, the ‘‘blessed times’’ are ultimately never successfully located in space, within the ‘‘fragile world.’’ Yet Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt (Wings of Stone) is primarily, it seems to me, a reflection on nostalgia, on the creative potential of nostalgia for post-Nazi Austria within the context of intercultural translation. Leo and Judith simultaneously embody the figure of the insider and the outsider in contemporary Vienna. As children of Viennese Jewish e´migre´s who have moved back to Austria, they enjoy a collective language of nostalgia. For Boym, this is the only way to discuss collective memory . . . through imaginary dialogues with dispersed fellow citizens, expatriates and exiles. One inevitably gets tongue-tied trying to articulate an emotional topography of memory that is made up of such ‘‘humiliating footnotes’’ and cultural untranslatables. The convoluted syntax is part of the elusive collective memory.24

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Leo and Judith share their ‘‘homesickness’’ for Sa˜o Paolo’s food and atmosphere in postwar Vienna, and this nostalgic moment rests precisely on the untranslatability of not merely the words but also the shared associations: Isn’t it funny: it’s like we were two namorados, how do you put it? you know: namorados in Sa˜o Paulo, going to the Bexiga for a pizza in the fusca! Leo peered with obvious ardour through the windscreen, flushed, despite the open window, by this offer, as he saw it, to establish an already long-assumed togetherness that could be summoned up at any time in very few words, words which only had a meaning for the two of them, here in this place. (Wings of Stone, 9)25

The ‘‘convoluted syntax’’ shared by Judith and Leo reveals nostalgia’s creative potential, an intimacy that is simultaneously individual and collective (Boym, 54). And the beauty of this transnational mode of nostalgia is that it is constantly placeless, never at rest in place. A reversal of this mode of nostalgia occurs in the ‘‘Bar jeder Hoffnung’’ in Sa˜o Paolo; Leo and Judith repeatedly return to this Austrian bar, which literally translates both as ‘‘Bar of Every Hope’’ and ‘‘Without Any Hope,’’ that both nurtures and subverts utopian hopes. Menasse’s novel simultaneously undercuts the nostalgia for prefascist modernism and revives nostalgia as a placeholder for history in a postmodern vacuum. In this sense it seems to realize the double gesture of reflective nostalgia as conceived by Boym: Reflective nostalgia has elements of both mourning and melancholia. While its loss is never completely recalled, it has some connection to the loss of collective frameworks of memory. Reflective nostalgia is a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future. (Boym, 55)

Menasse’s novel simultaneously disallows the idealization of a dominant cultural narrative and preserves a space for creative nostalgia. The text retains the critique of fascism as residue in, for example, the discussions between Leo and Judith about the recent Austrian past and the demonstrations against neo-Nazis. Likewise, the excessively sadistic mother reiterates the ubiquitous Nazi family, revealing that Menasse, too, has not ceased to mourn Austria’s fascist history. Yet the text resists Jelinek’s perfomative repetition (‘‘Austria is fascist. Sports are fascist. Everything is fascist!’’26) via the cultural untranslatability of the time of Brazil. Leo even interprets the oppressive fascist history in whimsical terms, suggesting

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that the rise of Nazism was ultimately good for his parents, since it brought them to Brazil: ‘‘Luckily for them, said Leo, they were better off there, and we would rather be there now, too’’ (Wings of Stone, 38) [Zum Glu¨ck, sagte Leo, es ist ihnen doch besser gegangen in Brasilien, und auch wir wa¨ren jetzt lieber dort] (Selige Zeiten, 58).

Postmodern Intertexts: Viennese Modernism Although the figure of Leo is willfully unaware of his own lack of originality, his personal and aesthetic concerns often read like direct quotations from the classics of Viennese and Parisian Modernism and the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism.27 In his aesthetic musings, he parrots the famous words of the symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck almost verbatim: For it can transpire that we don’t love the person we love, that the destiny of the one we choose is not our destiny, and that what seems to shine when illuminated by symbolic interpretations loses its brilliance and that we don’t find what we were looking for. (Wings of Stone, 72)28

These thoughts from the third-person figural perspective of Leo seem to parody Maeterlinck’s reflections on desire: As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.29

Menasse’s text mimics the crisis of perspective and the cult of aestheticism of Viennese Modernism. The Maeterlinck quote is cited by Robert Musil as an epigraph to his celebrated modernist Bildungsroman exploring the psychological and institutional origins of fascism, The Confusions of Young To¨rless (Die Verwirrungen des Zo¨glings To¨rleß, 1906). Thus, Menasse’s text indirectly recalls the modernist giant Musil, the author of The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), the source for the title of Menasse’s

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essay on Austria, The Land Without Qualities (Das Land ohne Eigenschaften). In the first section of The Land Without Qualities Menasse points out that contemporary Austria parallels Musil’s Austria of the novel in that the current age is conceived, as was Musil’s, as the end of an era [Endzeit] (Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 8). For Menasse, Austria is a nation with ‘‘a tendency towards ends of eras’’ [Hang zu Endzeiten] (Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 10), so that Austria is a nation that is defined by nostalgia: ‘‘The broad discussion about the nature of Austria was nostalgic from the beginning, i.e., the only issue, once we got to Brussels, was that we wanted to know who we used to be.’’30 Menasse’s Austria is an Austria of nostalgic longing, the Austria of the impossibility of the fulfillment of desire reflected in the Maeterlinck citation. The layers of citation underscore the lack of thematic originality in Menasse’s novel. In Wings of Stone, Menasse reiterates the recurring themes of Viennese Modernism in an ironic manner, yet the delicate layering of citations offers a complex balance between parody and nostalgic affect. Leo’s reflections upon the function of Judith in his life likewise recuperate a notion of desire endemic to modernist writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopold von Andrian and Thomas Mann: ‘‘He needed her as the constant object of a longing which he forbade himself. One has to get rid of the longing for consummated love, but not of the longing itself’’ (Wings of Stone, 49) [Er brauchte sie als sta¨ndige Sehnsucht, die er sich verbat. Man muß die Sehnsucht nach erfu¨llter Liebe abtun, aber nicht die Sehnsucht] (Selige Zeiten, 73). ‘‘[W]hat he needed in order to work was a condition of perpetual longing’’ (Wings of Stone, 206). [was er zum Arbeiten brauchte, war der Zustand sta¨ndiger Sehnsucht] (Selige Zeiten, 289). As in the Maeterlinck citation, desire is conceived as an end in itself, a state of longing that is preserved in aestheticism. In his tortured attempts to produce his philosophical masterpiece, Leo wanders from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, as if the manifestation of a historical cliche´. He reflects upon the dialectic between life and art as if he himself were the aesthete par excellence J. K. Huysmanns, as if his thoughts were original: He wanted something from life—but obviously not to lose himself in it. He knew that he could only be productive by renouncing life. But for that he had to have that minimum of life at least that would enable him to say: this I renounce. (Wings of Stone, 55)31

The disavowal of life for the sake of art is the quintessential maxim of aestheticism, and the recuperation of this maxim in Menasse’s

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postmodern novel seems simultaneously naı¨ve and ironic. The struggle between life and art is then momentarily resolved during a trip to Venice in a scene that resembles a parody of the decadence of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach (Death in Venice [Tod in Venedig, 1912]). Leo falls into the Venice canal in a kind of baptism that rejuvenates him, making him at once desirable and youthful, and this fall enables him to don new clothes: ‘‘[H]e was a young man’’ (Wings of Stone, 66) [Er war ein junger Mann] (Selige Zeiten, 96). In Sa˜o Paolo, however, Judith calls Leo ‘‘the senile child’’ (Wings of Stone, 178) [das greise Kind] (Selige Zeiten, 251) as he begins to dye his hair in an attempt to fight off the fear of death in yet another citation of Mann’s Aschenbach. In Venice, Leo christens himself the ‘‘Other’’ (‘‘He was now the Other’’ (Wings of Stone, 71) [Er war nun der Andere] (Selige Zeiten, 104), a name that seemingly signifies how he stands alone in the text. However, even this mode of signification is a copy, for Leo follows in the footsteps of those heroes of modernist literature who encounter the stranger, the Other.32 Ironic references to Viennese Modernism abound, so that Leo’s naı¨ve recuperation of ‘‘used’’ ideas is less nostalgic than ironic. The impossibility of originality is reflected in the questions surrounding Lo¨winger’s painting that he insists is a Klimt original which Klimt entitled ‘‘Portrait of my reflection’’ (Wings of Stone, 218) [‘‘Portra¨t meines Spiegelbildes’’] (Selige Zeiten, 305).33 The title itself emphasizes the multiple layers of mediation so that the question of originality remains completely open. This painting of a mirror likewise recalls a painting that mimics a mirror in the exile’s bar, the ‘‘Bar jeder Hoffnung’’ in Sensual Certainty (Sinnliche Gewißheit, 1988), the first novel of the trilogy. In this novel, Roman,34 a peripheral figure in Wings of Stone, reflects upon the repetitive nature of all experience and art: ‘‘These were farces in which things repeated themselves that I had never experienced. Farces without preceding tragedies. Original copies’’ [Das waren Farcen, in denen sich Dinge wiederholten, die ich noch nie erlebt hatte. Farcen ohne vorangegangene Trago¨dien. Original-Kopien].35 In Wings of Stone Leo himself experiences the fear of not being original, a state that would undermine his fantasies of genius: ‘‘[P]erhaps his life struggle was exemplary. His life exemplary? . . . This banal, uninteresting life, so rudimentary and yet so beyond his control, was this exemplary?’’ (Wings of Stone, 45) [Vielleicht war sein Lebenskonflikt exemplarisch. Sein Leben exemplarisch? . . . Dieses banale, uninteressante, so einfache und doch nicht gemeisterte Leben soll exemplarisch sein?] (Selige Zeiten, 68). Menasse’s novel engages in playful and ironic

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citation and consistently calls into question the category of originality. It reminds us that all creation is citation: ‘‘That was a text that ought to be written down sometime later’’ (Wings of Stone, 72) [Das war schon ein Text, der soll spa¨ter einmal geschrieben werden] (Selige Zeiten, 105). The age of postmodernism has rendered the desire for genius regressive, yet Leo Singer engages in rampant plagiarism in the lust for this anachronistic modernist identity. His own work of genius, Pha¨nomenologie der Entgeisterung,36 ripped from the dead hands of his lover who had been transcribing her notes of his thoughts, concludes with the following sentence in quotes: ‘‘ ‘In the beginning there is the copy’ ’’ [‘‘Im Anfang ist die Kopie’’] (Pha¨nomenologie der Entgeisterung, 87) and the disclaimer ‘‘This is how I see it’’ [So sehe ich das] (Pha¨nomenologie der Entgeisterung, 87): here, genius is reduced to radical perspectivism and quotation.

The Crisis of Masculinity Redux Wings of Stone begins with an anecdote about the impossibility of genius. A man has destroyed a Rubens painting in Munich’s Alter Pinakothek as an ostensibly political act: ‘‘He had to ‘sacrifice’ this work of art, so he said, in order to save all the other artistic achievements of mankind and, indeed, mankind itself’’ (Wings of Stone, 1) [Er habe dieses eine Kunstwerk ‘‘opfern’’ mu¨ssen, um alle anderen Kunstleistungen der Menschheit, ja um die Menschheit selbst zu retten] (Selige Zeiten, 7). In fact, the ‘‘perpetrator’’ (Wings of Stone, 1) [Attenta¨ter] (Selige Zeiten, 7) plans to use the trial as a kind of stage where he will present his groundbreaking philosophy. However, the vandal/philosopher is given no stage time and is promptly forgotten. The canonical work of art is sacrificed for the sake of scandal and little more. The postmodern world that consumes this information is interested neither in artworks nor lengthy theories. Genius, either in the form of the work of art or radical philosophy, has no place in postmodern Vienna. The Rubens anecdote can be seen as a parody of the crisis of genius, aesthetics, and masculinity that characterizes Viennese Modernism. For Leo Singer, political action is futile and uninteresting. Instead, the production of a philosophical work of art functions as the center of Leo’s existence, the realization of his potential for genius. This work, however, can neither be created nor read in postwar Vienna and is only finished via multiple layers of plagiarism in Sa˜o Paolo, Brazil. The inability to produce is a reflection of the nos-

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talgia for a Vienna never known, the mythological fin-de-sie`cle world of aestheticism—a world itself in crisis. Leo’s paralysis is a result of his blindness to the historical break of the Holocaust and the nostalgic attempt to locate historical continuity in postmodern time. In his desire for genius, Singer’s plight ironically recalls that of the infamous Otto Weininger, the tragic genius of Viennese Modernism. Reacting to fragmenting notions of identity and gender, Weininger attempted to produce his own work of genius, Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903). For the desperate Weininger, genius is defined in Kantian terms, as originating from nature, a product of autonomous thought. Such autonomy is a product of masculinity and inaccessible to those defined as ‘‘feminine.’’37 This crisis of masculinity is reenacted as false memory by Leo Singer in Wings of Stone. Singer’s desire to turn Hegel on his head, not as Marx had done, but in order to illustrate the devolution of culture, is both grandiose and anticlimactic. He attempts to revive modernist notions of genius and masculinity, those very notions that were in crisis at the turn of the century, yet his project fails in a decidedly anticlimactic manner. Just like Weininger, Leo believes he must negate coincidence and contingency as represented by life and woman: ‘‘That’s life all over. Pure chance. Life is nothing, the task is everything, life is all chance, and the task is fate itself’’ (Wings of Stone, 44) [Das ist das Leben selbst. Lauter Zufall. Das Leben ist nichts, das Werk ist alles, das Leben ist lauter Zufall, und das Werk ist die Notwendigkeit selbst] (Selige Zeiten, 67). Leo decides to deny sensuality through the mental destruction [abtun] (Selige Zeiten, 67) of his ideal woman, Judith. However, Leo’s philosophical attempt to turn the notion of time on its head is, finally, created only accidentally and vicariously via the female figure, Judith, whom he locates as his ‘‘muse.’’ Standing in for the ubiquitous femme fatale of Viennese Modernism, a figure who served as a nodal point for the crisis of masculinity, Menasse’s Judith represents a parody of this historical projection. In Venice, Judith gives Leo a postcard of Giorgione’s ‘‘Guiditta’’ painting, effectively defining her role as femme fatale in his life: ‘‘The painting showed a woman with a sword—at her feet lay the severed head of a man. The woman had her left foot placed on the brow of the head’’ (Wings of Stone, 83) [Das Bild zeigte eine Frau mit einem Schwert, zu ihren Fu¨ßen lag ein abgetrennter Ma¨nnerkopf. Die Frau hat ihren linken Fuß auf die Stirn des Ma¨nnerkopfs gestellt] (Selige Zeiten, 120). In an absurd desire for power over the idealized cruel woman, Leo fantasizes about the reversal of

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this image when he believes Judith is dead: ‘‘The woman, who had been standing there upright with sword in hand, had sunk down and the head of the man, which had been lying at her feet, had risen, raised itself and was now looking down at the woman lying in front of him’’ (Wings of Stone, 135) [Die Frau, die aufrecht mit dem Schwert in der Hand dagestanden hatte, war niedergesunken, und der Kopf des Mannes, der zu ihren Fu¨ßen gelegen war, hatte sich aufgerichtet, erhoben, und blickte auf die nun vor ihm liegende Frau hinab] (Selige Zeiten, 191). The woman who had earlier decapitated the man is now re-feminized in Leo’s fantasy of victory over his own projection of female power. As Leo’s love object and muse, Judith ostensibly inspires him to work. Indeed, it is when Leo discovers that Judith has died that his work is most productive, for her frozen image is precisely the impetus for the work of genius. In Menasse’s novel, however, no assumptions can be taken at face value; everything can be reversed, all perceptions falsified. Judith’s death turns out to be a false announcement, and she arrives in Sa˜o Paolo alive and well, destroying Leo’s careful construction of her. She consistently undermines all attempts on Leo’s part to functionalize her as traditional companion for the modernist crisis of masculinity. Indeed, Judith constantly frustrates Leo through her lack of predictability, but even this characteristic is a product of male projection: ‘‘[S]he wanted . . . to destroy all control’’ (Wings of Stone, 169) [Sie wollte . . . die Kontrolle zersto¨ren] (Selige Zeiten, 238). Leo sees Judith as ‘‘chaotic and irrational’’ (Wings of Stone, 175) [chaotisch und irrational] (Selige Zeiten, 246). She thus both embodies the stereotypical femme fatale and undermines Leo’s frozen ideal. Leo Singer’s work of genius is finally produced through the ‘‘muse,’’ but in a manner that reveals the ludicrous nature of the traditional crisis of identity and masculinity. In her cocaine-induced scribblings on Lawrence Sterne, Judith had reproduced the monologues given by Leo in the ‘‘Bar jeder Hoffnung,’’ producing in the process the only written form of Leo’s work. In order to take possession of these marginal notes and complete his manuscript, Leo kills his muse. That is, Leo borrows the ‘‘original copy’’ from the female counterpart to his genius. In this way, his own genius is removed once more from Judith’s supposedly derivative writings, reducing the final work to a product at least three times removed from the source. Through its ironic play with the historical crisis of masculinity of fin-de-sie`cle Vienna, Menasse’s novel parodies a form of nostalgia that looks to Viennese Modernism in the attempt to reinvest the postmodern with a semblance of real crisis. At the same time, how-

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ever, it recuperates a form of reflective nostalgia as an affective category not entirely out of place in contemporary Austrian literature. Indeed, the ‘‘blessed times’’ of the novel are revealed to be always a product of memory in the present: The truth is: heavenly are the days he had spent with Judith, but they weren’t heavenly, they haven’t been. They are now, in his memory, in his need for retrospective idealization, in this moment of writing. They are now untaintedly happy, innocently sublime and pure—that is, heavenly. (Wings of Stone, 136)38

In this sense, nostalgia is, as suggested by Svetlana Boym and Linda Hutcheon, rather a longing for a specific time than for a place. It is the longing for the slowing of time that engenders emotion. Leo and Judith’s ‘‘masterpiece’’ depicts the reversal of time, the movement away from ‘‘Geist’’ (spirit) to ‘‘Sinne’’ (senses), ultimately a return to the time of childhood. Wings of Stone occupies a unique place within contemporary Austrian literature. Indeed, it mirrors in many ways a more global postmodern aesthetic—an aesthetic that, according to Linda Hutcheon, can simultaneously accommodate nostalgia and irony.39 Menasse’s novel both ironizes nostalgia for Viennese Modernism and the time before fascism and preserves a place for nostalgia as a highly idiosyncratic ‘‘historical emotion.’’ Literary references in the novel are simultaneously ironic and nostalgic, returning history to the present time. Leo essentially becomes Lo¨winger when Lo¨winger dies; he inherits Lo¨winger’s belongings and moves into his house, mimicking the life of the aesthete. This moment recalls the life of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘‘merchant’s son’’ [Kaufmannssohn] in his narrative ‘‘The Fairy Tale of the 672th Night’’ (‘‘Das Ma¨rchen der 672. Nacht,’’ 1895); Hofmannsthal’s protagonist is defined only in relation to his father, as the ‘‘merchant’s son,’’ indicating that his life as an aesthete in his beautiful house is borrowed from his father, just as Leo’s life is borrowed from Lo¨winger after Lo¨winger’s death. The Hofmannsthal citation can, however, be read ironically if one looks to the first novel of the Trilogy of Dispiritedness (Trilogie der Entgeisterung), Sensual Certainty. Here, the Hofmannsthal citation is deconstructed in the second sentence: ‘‘My father was not a merchant’’ [Mein Vater war kein Kaufmann] (Sinnliche Gewißheit, 7). Hence, the novel that precedes Wings of Stone in the trilogy actually represents its endpoint. As in Tykwer’s films, a nonlinear intertextuality contributes to a sense of recognition and newness in Menasse’s novels.

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A nonlinear concept of time is theorized in Wings of Stone via the philosophical project of deconstructing Hegel’s notion of progress; yet linear time is also deconstructed via allegory in Menasse’s novel. Statues of angels for gravestones are stored in the courtyard of Leo’s Viennese apartment, alluding both to historical fixation and entrapment. At the conclusion of the novel, however, Leo discovers that the angels have been removed from the courtyard. The angels of postwar Vienna function as the ruins of history,40 and as such they provide a space for nostalgia: ‘‘As long as people need angels for their graves, thought Leo, history is not at an end’’ (Wings of Stone, 267) [Solange Menschen Engel brauchen fu¨r ihre Gra¨ber, dachte Leo, ist die Geschichte nicht zu Ende] (Selige Zeiten, 374). Menasse cites here Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism about the angel of history in the ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ ¨ ber den Begriff der Geschichte,’’ 1940), a figure that rather pre(‘‘U fers to look back in time than to embrace what is perceived as the ‘‘progress’’ of history.41 The gesture of removing the angels from the courtyard is reminiscent of critical anti-Heimat literature, for this gesture undercuts nostalgic longing. The survival of the angels in the graveyards of Vienna, however, preserves the nostalgic gaze of Benjamin’s angel of history in its reflective form, as an affective artifact of post-fascist homelessness. Menasse’s recuperation of nostalgia as what I call transnational nostalgia opens up a space for a relation to home that is both emotionally laden and critically reflective. In the following chapter I turn to the literature of Birgit Vanderbeke, whose writings likewise represent the deconstruction of the oedipal home and the departure to something outside of this traditionally tainted space. Like Menasse, Vanderbeke relies on minor shifts in perspective in order to imagine alterity within a post-Holocaust German world. Vanderbeke consciously embeds her writings within the history of postNazi German-language literature, imagining a mode of the New through nuanced perspectival shifts from the narratives that precede her own.

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5 A Home at the End of the World: Birgit Vanderbeke’s Literary Departures THIS BOOK IS CONCERNED WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF THE NEW IN POST-

Holocaust German and Austrian literature and film. In the German-language space of interrupted modernity and belated postmodernity, postmodernism and conceptions of the New seem to collide. In his essays on the return of the discourse of modernity in the current period of late capitalism, A Singular Modernity (2002), Frederic Jameson points to ‘‘the New’’ as a concept ultimately crucial to working notions of both modernity and postmodernity. ‘‘The new,’’ Jameson argues, ‘‘cannot be fully eradicated’’ from the postmodern, even as postmodernity is defined by a cyclical temporality.1 And this is indeed no small or insignificant contradiction for postmodernity, which is unable to divest itself of the supreme value of innovation (despite the end of style and the death of the subject), if only because the museums and art galleries can scarcely function without it. Thus, the new fetish of Difference continues to overlap the older one of the New, even if the two are not altogether coterminous. (5)

Despite the ostensible impossibility of originality in postmodernity and the nonlinear nature of time, a space for difference and the New is preserved in the discourse of postmodern art. Indeed, excitement continues to surround claims of newness, be the New conceived as a trend or an innovation so that a sense of impetus, of transcendence, is still central to a concept of artistic production in postmodernity. For German and Austrian writers and filmmakers, the New is not merely a residual trope of modernity still crucial for the production of postmodern art. The New is a constitutive quality of Germanlanguage postmodernism, a product of its belatedness, associated with a move beyond historical fixation. The ending tableaux of 195

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Tom Tykwer’s films garner their transcendent quality from a feeling of newness that immediately follows the moment of departure from the past. It is precisely the quality of the New that Elfriede Jelinek consistently forecloses in her œuvre. Jelinek’s ‘‘performative entrapment’’ is seen from a new perspective via the dialectic of entrapment and escape I have described in the films of Tom Tykwer. Indeed, Tykwer meets his literary complement in the texts of Robert Menasse and Birgit Vanderbeke. In the narrative The Dinner of Mussels (Das Muschelessen, 1990) Vanderbeke deconstructs the German family yet calls forth a sense of the New via a subtle shift in perspective that allows mother and children to conceive of community without the father. This sense of possibility is not clearly utopian, as it lacks a concrete shape. Yet the fantasy of a ‘‘home elsewhere’’ haunts later novels such as I See Something That You Don’t See (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 1999). Here, an idiosyncratic home is imagined in the French countryside in a logic that is neither patriarchal nor classically feminist. The trope of departure [Weggehen] from Germany and its historically circumscribed perspective is represented as radical Newness. These kinds of texts shed light on a particularly German aesthetic moment that has not completely rejected history yet simultaneously opens up a space for nostalgia in a displaced form. In this chapter, I discuss the place of the New, imagined as a vague fantasy of escape and departure, in the post-wall writings of Birgit Vanderbeke. I ask how home, family, and nostalgia are conceived vis-a`-vis the trope of departure in these works. I argue that Vanderbeke’s writings stage departure from history and family via subtle shifts [Verschiebung] in perspective. In this sense, these works offer a crossed gaze on history, a sort of queering, that offers new modes of seeing for the reader.

Nostalgia and the New Menasse’s postmodern recuperation of a form of nostalgia that might be called reflective seems to bridge the apparent contradiction between nostalgia and the New. The nostalgic citation of the idealized father figure Percival Glyde in Bachmann’s Franza fragment, though partially deconstructed within the text, reflects a potentially regressive desire for a restored patriarchal order. In contrast, Menasse’s transnational nostalgia in Wings of Stone (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt) destabilizes any idealization of the old. Although the intertextual reference to Percival Glyde in Bachmann’s

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novel fragment overcodes this idealized figure, he nevertheless stands for a perceived past utopic moment in which the benevolent father figure is able to keep the oedipal family intact—a moment that precedes the narrative of Nazism and the perversion of all fathers. This mode of nostalgia is ruthlessly disavowed in the texts of Elfriede Jelinek, as is any notion of the New. In Tykwer’s films and in Menasse’s novels, nostalgia confronts the New. The homesickness [Heimweh] experienced by Leo and Judith in Vienna is anything but regressive, for their desire never rests in one idealized place and time. Rather, their nostalgia is constantly shifting between the cultural spaces of Vienna and Sa˜o Paolo, so that nostalgia becomes a longing that will never be sated, that recognizes loss as the condition of modernity. The figures in Menasse’s novel and the text itself represent nostalgia as looking back from a new perspective. Cultural translation ensures that neither the figures nor the text can truly believe in the return to an uncompromised ‘‘home.’’ The mirroring and distortions, the destabilization of family and place, conjoin the emotion of nostalgia with reflective clarity. In Wings of Stone longing confronts the notion of the New as the untranslatability of cultural particularity, as transnational nostalgia. It is these repeated, impossible cultural encounters and ruptures that open up a space for reflective nostalgia—a longing for the unmeasured time of reflection itself. Menasse’s link to Bachmann via the confrontation between nostalgia and postmodernism recalls the intertextual resonances between all postwar German-language authors and filmmakers treated here. Even more than artists and authors in the AngloAmerican context, postwar German and Austrian authors and filmmakers share similar concerns. The narrative of Nazism that defines Jelinek’s work is ultimately a central historical concern for the majority of German-language artists. Hence, certain authors and filmmakers (Bachmann and Fassbinder, for instance) are cited repeatedly by contemporary German-language authors and filmmakers as a kind of overcoded shorthand. Jelinek, for one, openly admits her debt to Bachmann. And Birgit Vanderbeke likewise reveals the crucial role Bachmann has played for her literary production in multiple ways. In 1990 she received the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize for her narrative The Dinner of Mussels (Das Muschelessen), a text that deconstructs the figure of the fascist father central to Bachmann’s writings. Her novella Missing Parts (Fehlende Teile), published in 1992, likewise is tenuously linked to Bachmann’s biography, since the protagonist Lila is a literary citation of the female protagonist in Max Frisch’s novel Gantenbein: A Novel (Mein Name

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sei Gantenbein, 1964), a figure who has been compared to the actual Bachmann, the real-life lover of Frisch.2 Already in 1984, however, Vanderbeke published an essay on Bachmann’s novel fragment Malina (1971). In this essay, ‘‘No Right to a Language? The Speechless Space of Absence in ‘Malina’ ’’ (‘‘Kein Recht auf Sprache? Der sprachlose Raum der Abwesenheit in ‘Malina’ ’’), Vanderbeke draws out the central thematic elements in Bachmann’s work and even points, perhaps inadvertently, to the manner in which her own work will eventually deconstruct and find a way out of the tortured entrapment of Bachmann’s texts—texts that, as has been pointed out, brilliantly reflect the cultural period in which they were written.3 Vanderbeke frames her Bachmann essay in terms of the two central themes in Bachmann’s work, themes that she links to the body of German-language authors after World War II: the inability to express (‘‘Sprachlosigkeit’’—literally ‘‘speechlessness’’) and male domination in the guise of the father figure ‘‘in all his multiple meanings.’’4 These two central themes are, Vanderbeke writes, a product of the history of fascism in the German-speaking countries.5 The language crisis brought on by the crimes of Nazism is likewise linked to the figure of domination, the father ‘‘in all his multiple meanings’’ since the representation of fascism often circles around this figure of power (‘‘father/incest/fascism/murder’’) [Vater/Inzest/Faschismus/Mord] (‘‘Kein Recht auf Sprache?’’ 112). Vanderbeke points out that Bachmann’s text is primarily concerned with the dual figures of the fascist father and the female narrative ‘‘I’’ who is unable to express herself through speech. She faults Bachmann’s text for its cliche´d representation of the banality of love and for the sadistic and banal qualities of the male figure, Ivan, who represents a slightly milder version of the Nazi father. Ivan is, Vanderbeke points out, abusive (113), and his inability to love and to communicate is as banal as the telephone that often mediates the conversations between the lovers: ‘‘And that is banal—even though this banality makes apparent how appropriate muteness would be to love—a love within which and about which it is necessary to talk, clumsily and via cables that constantly get tangled up. And Ivan has to remain as banal as the things he says’’ (112).6 The narrative ‘‘I’’ in Malina spends numerous hours waiting for the phone to ring, and when Ivan finally calls, the communication is complicated yet ultimately empty. Here Vanderbeke suggests that Ivan represents the possibility for transcendence of the father: ‘‘It would be the only possibility to overcome the father within Ivan and to escape absence in this manner’’ (117).7 Whereas a represen-

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tation of true communication between the lovers could offer a new mode of human relations, Vanderbeke laments that Bachmann’s Ivan remains a banal copy of the fascist father. Vanderbeke is perhaps aware of the anachronistic demands she makes upon Bachmann, and so she follows her critique of the book with a question: ‘‘But would it still have had to be the book, then?’’ (117).8 Were Bachmann’s novel to achieve the aims suggested by Vanderbeke, to overcome the father via an alternative representation of masculinity, this book would have solved the historical problems of representation that haunt the literature of its time.

Birgit Vanderbeke’s Das Muschelessen (The Dinner of Mussels): ‘‘a special, quasi historical day . . . in the family’s history’’9 Vanderbeke’s narrative The Dinner of Mussels (Das Muschelessen), published almost twenty years after Bachmann’s Malina, attempts precisely the transcendent move that Vanderbeke finds missing in Bachmann’s novel. Here, the fascist father is indeed overcome, and this move beyond the father occurs subtly via the banality of the telephone. Where the narrative ‘‘I’’ in Bachmann’s novel had waited patiently for her lover’s telephone call, the family in Vanderbeke’s novella ultimately ignore the father’s phone call, thus committing an act of unprecedented rebellion. In The Dinner of Mussels, a mother and her two teenaged children prepare a special dinner of mussels for the father who is to return home after a particularly important business trip. The banal description of the preparations soon becomes uncanny [unheimlich] as the family waits for the return of the father. His absence, even for a few unexpected hours, leads the family to fantasize about his death. Four hours after his expected arrival, the telephone rings, and within these four hours, an alternative reality has been imagined. The mother, beginning to think in terms of an ‘‘on the other hand’’ [andererseits] (Das Muschelessen, 109), lets the phone ring, thereby rebelling against the tyrannical voice of the father. Hence, Vanderbeke’s novella begins at the point where she perceives Bachmann’s novel as falling into a representational abyss; it represents the absence not of the female protagonist, but of the father, and it overcomes this father via a nuanced shift in perspective on the part of the family members. In The Dinner of Mussels, Vanderbeke self-consciously combines the banal and the historical. Early on the narrative ‘‘I,’’ the teenage

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daughter of the family, calls the evening ‘‘historical’’: ‘‘a special, quasi historical day in the family’s history’’ [ein[en] besondere[n], sozusagen historische[n] Tag . . . in der Familiengeschichte] (Das Muschelessen, 8). On the surface, the day is historical due to the father’s impending promotion, which the family plans to celebrate with the mussel dinner. However, the word ‘‘Familiengeschichte’’ (‘‘family’s history,’’ ‘‘history of the family,’’ or ‘‘family story’’) refers simultaneously to the larger history of the family and to its representation. The novella itself constitutes a historical moment in the representation of the German nuclear family, particularly in light of the nuclear family’s function as critical foil for the critique of fascism in postwar German-language narratives. The day with the uneaten mussels is historic precisely due to the subtle but ultimately substantial shift in perspective on the part of the family members. The tyrannical father migrates from the center to the margins in the space of an evening and a 110-page narrative. In Vanderbeke’s text, rebellion and revolution are defined in radically minute terms, as a shift in perspective, a ‘‘Verschiebung’’ that irreversibly moves the parameters of the frame: It is very astonishing in general what people do when something does not run its normal course, a slight shift away from the normal, and suddenly everything is different, absolutely everything, as soon as something, due to some coincidence, is not as it normally is, they scatter apart, whereas before they stuck together. Murder and manslaughter starts. (Das Muschelessen, 33)10

The seemingly ahistorical structure of the bourgeois family is called into question in The Dinner of Mussels by the smallest of shifts [Verschiebung]. The father is late, and during his unexpected absence the family begins to perceive him in an entirely new way. The accident of the father’s tardiness, the uneaten mussels, and consumption of the father’s good wine permanently change the perception of ‘‘home.’’ On the one hand, the ‘‘Verschiebung’’ in the ostensibly unchangeable structure of the family calls into question its foundation. On the other hand, it is not clear what sort of alternative to the status quo is possible in the end of the novella. The balancing act between the representation of a fixed structure and the insight that this structure is dependent upon the preservation of a subjective perspective recalls the relationship between the subjective and objective in Immanuel Kant’s philosophical system. In the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), Kant is forced to link the

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subjective and objective with an ‘‘as if’’ [als ob]—as if the subjective were, in fact, grounded in objective reality: [T]he principle of judgement, in respect of the form of the things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the finality of nature in its multiplicity. In other words, by this concept nature is represented as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws (second italics mine).11

By exposing the fragility of the system, Kant potentially calls into question its necessity. However, once one has performed the mental hurdle of the ‘‘as if,’’ the realm of the subjective is perfectly intact. It is then no longer necessary to question the ‘‘usefulness’’ [Zweckma¨ßigkeit] of the system itself. Vanderbeke’s text performs the very same ‘‘as if’’ gesture as it exposes the fragility of the foundation for the patriarchal family. Rather than watching the evening news, something that the family normally does every evening, the mother and her two children sit at the table and drink the father’s good wine: ‘‘it was uncanny because it was not normal. If we had now turned on the TV, then we merely would have acted as if’’ [es ist unheimlich gewesen, weil es nicht normal war. Ha¨tten wir jetzt den Fernseher eingeschaltet, dann ha¨tten wir nur so getan, als ob] (Das Muschelessen, 34, italics mine). The text reveals its own construct—the potentially empty shell of the nuclear family. The preservation of this construct necessitates the mental leap of the ‘‘as if’’—something that the family is no longer able to do. The miniscule shift [Verschiebung] in the routine has exposed the constructed nature of the oedipal drama. The concept of the minor shift [Verschiebung] calls into question the stability of perspective, and this notion likewise informs Vanderbeke’s narrative style. Indeed, in its form, The Dinner of Mussels functions on the principle of ‘‘Verschiebung.’’ A word grouping is introduced only to be repeated in a slight variation on the original grouping. Vanderbeke often presents an idea, then slightly shifts its focus, and repeats it again. In this way, form mirrors content. For example, the bourgeois family is deconstructed at length in the narrative, and the formulation ‘‘a real family’’ (eine richtige Familie— literally ‘‘a correct’’ or ‘‘regular family’’) is likewise repeated frequently in a manner that simultaneously underscores the centrality of the concept and deconstructs the notion itself through variations in placement and repetition. In the father’s absence, the text reiterates his obsession with the ideal of ‘‘a real family,’’ and this mantra is repeated throughout the novella in a manner that

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simultaneously emphasizes the centrality of the notion of a ‘‘real family’’ and undermines its stability: to be a real family, as he called it, in reality, we thought, we were not a real family, everything in this family was only about our having to act as if we were a real family, the way my father imagined a family, because he didn’t have one and therefore didn’t know what a real family is, something about which he had nevertheless developed the most precise ideas, and we put those ideas into practice while he was sitting in the office, even though we would have liked reverting to wilderness, instead of being a real family. (Das Muschelessen, 23–24, italics mine)12

Far from cementing the transcendental truth value of the concept ‘‘a real family,’’ the repetition of this formulation leads to its exposure as a relative term. The formulation is repeated five times in this text passage, yet the repetition ultimately decentralizes the notion of an ideal family. The narrator’s family performs Kant’s subjective leap of the ‘‘as if’’ in its approximation of the father’s ideal, and the exposure of the performative nature of the family is a product of the perspectival shift [Verschiebung]. The repetition of phrases such as ‘‘a real family’’ throughout The Dinner of Mussels is complemented by Vanderbeke’s use of hypotaxis.13 In the above passage Vanderbeke uses hypotaxis excessively; the syntax is structured almost entirely according to the notion of subordination. Vanderbeke’s sentence resembles those of Bachmann or even Kafka in this sense, as the referent becomes lost in the syntactical sea of relative and subordinate clauses. This formal technique, then, mirrors the concept of ‘‘Verschiebung,’’ as notions are constantly shifting and the center is destabilized. The repetition of a term such as ‘‘a real family’’ becomes likewise subject to subtle shifts so that its meaning becomes relative.

Death of the Father: The Time of the Uncanny Freud defines the uncanny [das Unheimliche] as the conflation of two ostensibly opposing concepts: ‘‘heimlich’’ (homely) and ‘‘unheimlich’’ (unhomely, uncanny).14 Through an analysis of the etymology of these words, he arrives at the conclusion that the seemingly oppositional terms ultimately come to mean the same thing in certain contexts. Hence, the term ‘‘homely’’ (‘‘heimlich’’) connotes the known and familiar, yet in certain usages it can likewise signify the ‘‘unhomely,’’ uncanny, and unfamiliar, a secret.

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This meaning of ‘‘heimlich,’’ then, closely resembles the sense of the notion ‘‘unheimlich’’ as secretive, causing anxiety, unfamiliar. This etymological game provides the ground for Freud’s elucidation of the psychological repercussions of the uncanny. For the uncanny is precisely this meaning conveyed by the convergence of two opposites. The uncanny is the junction between the known and the unknown; the familiar returns from the repressed and is no longer familiar in the same way. The kind of alienation that engenders the shudder of the uncanny is the alienation from the familiar, that which was previously presumed to be known; the home becomes ‘‘unhomely.’’ In The Dinner of Mussels the depicted evening is ‘‘uncanny’’ ‘‘because it wasn’t normal’’ [weil es nicht normal war] (34). The uncanny is brought on by the sudden shift from the ‘‘normal’’ to the ‘‘abnormal.’’ Indeed, the narrative ‘‘I’’ experiences the uncanny mood exactly three minutes after the expected arrival of the father: ‘‘At three minutes past six, my mood tilted over into the ungood, yes, practically into the uncanny’’ [Um drei nach sechs ist meine Stimmung ins Ungute, ja, ins geradezu Unheimliche gekippt] (10). The construction of the family is ultimately so fragile that the slightest shift in timing causes a crisis in the stability of the structure. Likewise, the dinner of mussels, normally perceived as a celebratory meal, seems repulsive to the family at the moment when the uncanny mood sets in. The sounds of the opening mussels as they lie in their bowl of water ‘‘were definitely strange noises that gave me an uncanny feeling’’ [waren eindeutig sonderbare Gera¨usche, von denen mir unheimlich wurde] (13). The mussels that were never previously perceived as alive take on an entirely new meaning in the minutes that mark the father’s unexcused absence. In this sense, not only the sense of place, of home, shifts within the text; the sense of time is likewise destabilized. The three minutes that signify the potential death of the father indicate a slowing of time in the mood of the uncanny. The story time is about four hours; The Dinner of Mussels ends with the unanswered telephone call that is perhaps the father or news of the father, and this ringing occurs at fifteen minutes before ten. In this sense, the time depicted in the novella is likely marginally longer than the text time, since the narrative can be read in less than four hours. The time of the text represents thus a subtle ‘‘Verschiebung’’ akin to that depicted in Tykwer’s film Run Lola Run. In each case, story time only slightly exceeds text time, so that a sense of convergence is evoked, yet the subtle disparity reemphasizes the relative nature of time. The extension of the moment, the slowing of time, occurs in the crucial

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moment in the novella when the mother considers her actions. As the phone rings, she stands in the door, and everything seems possible: ‘‘this while was probably just a second, but also at the same time a long while, I didn’t feel anything except for the time which had stopped to stretch out in front of us and which had instead shrunken into this ringing of the phone’’ [diese Weile ist sicher nur eine Sekunde gewesen, aber doch auch eine lange Weile, ich habe gar nichts gefu¨hlt außer der Zeit, die aufgeho¨rt hatte, vor uns zu liegen, sondern in dieses Telefonklingeln geschrumpft war] (109).15 Time slows in the moment of limbo, the moment when the subtle shift in perspective moves the mother to speak this view: ‘‘but on the other hand’’ [aber andererseits] (109). The mother reiterates this perspectival shift once more: ‘‘on the other hand’’ [andererseits] (109) and proceeds to throw away the mussels that continue to open and close in a parodical performance of the return of the repressed that is no longer uncanny. This point in the text marks the end of fear and the total destruction of the myth of the family. Earlier, minor divergences from form, such as the drinking of the father’s wine, had been perceived as ‘‘rebellious’’ [aufsa¨ssig] (41). By the end of the narrative, the destruction of the myth of the father is complete. Before this moment, the mother is rebellious, ‘‘for the first time in her life’’ [zum ersten Mal in ihrem Leben] (95) as she expresses her preference for season tickets to the symphony over the more sophisticated cocktail hour enjoyed by the upper management in her husband’s company. Until the final two pages of the text, the moment when the family simply ignores, and thereby destroys, the father, the myth of the powerful father is retained in almost parodical form. No longer simply internalized as superego, the father in The Dinner of Mussels is projected outward as a mythical god who hears and sees all, a demonic Santa Claus. As the narrator and her brother express their desire for the end of the notion of continuity [das Weitergehen] (29) that the father fetishizes, the mother is superstitious, endowing the father with the qualities of a deity or demon: ‘‘my mother said shhhht, because she was afraid that he might hear us, even though he wasn’t there, but that’s what it was like with us, everybody thought he knew everything and saw everything, even though we knew that that wasn’t possible’’ [meine Mutter hat pssst gemacht, weil sie Angst hatte, er ko¨nnte uns ho¨ren, dabei war er doch gar nicht da, aber so ist das bei uns gewesen, jeder hat gedacht, er weiß alles und sieht alles, obwohl wir gewußt haben, daß das ja gar nicht geht] (30). The family simultaneously believes in the myth of the father and sees that this construct cannot hold according to the

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rules of reason. Yet the mother uses the term blasphemy when the daughter questions the familial order that demands the mother give up her own desires for those of the father: ‘‘my mother said, that is blasphemy, and we were very surprised that lightning didn’t immediately flash from the heavens to kill me’’ [meine Mutter hat gesagt, das ist Blasphemie, und wir haben uns sehr gewundert, daß nicht sofort ein Blitz aus dem Himmel gekommen ist und mich erschlagen hat] (103). The absent father retains a mythical power that is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, recalling the ancient anger of Zeus or the god of the Old Testament. In The Dinner of Mussels Vanderbeke plays with the tropes of family and fascism from the catalog of postwar German-language literature. The figure of the tyrannical father is represented as cari¨ bernazi who haunts his family. He is, incature, a postmodern U deed, the embodiment of instrumental reason in his hatred for weakness and illness: ‘‘my father hated weaklings, those lazybones, he said, who take advantage of others by playing sick, and sickness in general was something he loathed’’ [mein Vater hat Schwa¨chlinge gehaßt, diese Dru¨ckeberger, hat er gesagt, die krank feiern auf anderer Leute Kosten, und Krankheit u¨berhaupt war ihm zuwider] (31). During a vacation in Italy, the father is likewise cruel in his insistence that all family members experience the pain of a sunburn: my mother does not like sunburn, she always said, I can’t imagine that that should be healthy, to suffer like this, but my father said, you have to get through this, without a sunburn you won’t get tanned, he sprinkled lemon juice on all of our sore spots, we could never decide which was worse, sunburn with or without lemon juice, my mother said, martyrdom, yeah right, this is what purgatory is like, my father said, though, this is useful, and he laughed at us when we were making a fuss. (Das Muschelessen, 60)16

Vanderbeke’s father figure is a sadist in the tradition of German literary fathers. Yet here the representation of the father is framed via the ‘‘Verschiebung,’’ the almost humorous tableau of the family and the clacking mussels that finally lead to the father’s murder. Just as the representation of the father in his absence renders him a caricature of the fascist father figure, so too are postwar gender roles seemingly cemented via the figure of the gentle and understanding mother: ‘‘my mother was always very understanding about everything’’ [meine Mutter hat immer fu¨r alles Versta¨ndnis gehabt] (74). Whereas the father is a tyrant who abuses his son and forces his children to spend hours on a stamp collection that bores

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them, the mother is a martyr. She is musical, while the father is rational, privileging mathematics over music: ‘‘it was just that my mother thought concretely and my father abstractly, for him it was more about principle’’ [sie hat eben konkret gedacht und mein Vater abstrakt, ihm ging es mehr ums Prinzip] (33). Yet the growing mood of rebellion in the text leads the narrative ‘‘I’’ to question the dichotomy between music and math: ‘‘that music is not foreign to math, but rather deeply related’’ [daß die Musik der Mathematik nicht fremd, sondern tief verwandt ist] (93). In this way, the gender dichotomy is likewise deconstructed. The father is eternally disappointed that his daughter is unfeminine and logical while his son is similar to the mother, ‘‘illogical’’ [unlogisch] (25). The daughter is born with hair all over her body, a fact that torments the father in its violation of the tenets of ‘‘a real family.’’ Thus, the rigid gender notions of the tyrannical father are resoundingly destroyed by the queerness of his family: ‘‘which is why it was always said in my family that I would never get a husband, as uncharming as I am, whereas it was said, as girlish as is my brother, who even as a child sometimes wanted to wear little dresses, that is anything but normal’’ [ weshalb es in unserer Familie immer geheißen hat, ich bekomme, so uncharmant, wie ich bin, keinen Mann, wa¨hrend es geheißen hat, so ma¨dchenhaft, wie mein Bruder ist, der auch als Kind manchmal Kleidchen hat tragen wollen, das ist alles andere als normal] (73). Although Vanderbeke’s cliche´d representation of the father resembles the fascist father figures in texts by authors such as Bachmann and Jelinek, this figure is ultimately shown to be impotent in The Dinner of Mussels, a dinosaur. Despite his ranting, his family is not ‘‘normal.’’ He resembles a comedic figure in his rigid beliefs that are clearly out of sync with the logic of the text. He is unable to influence the characters and gender identifications of his children, and his family consistently resists being molded into ‘‘a real family.’’ Hence, it is not the family that ultimately needs to subordinate itself to the desires of the father, but the father who is shown to be irrelevant in the narrative. The narrative of Nazism has become its own parody. The rebellion [Aufsa¨ssigkeit] of the family in the end is therefore ultimately anticlimactic, caused by the slightest of shifts in perception. The moment of the death of the father is anticipated early in the text, as the family fantasizes about life without him: ‘‘and it soon turned out that my brother and I would find it better if he didn’t come, or best of all, wouldn’t come anymore at all, because we no longer enjoyed being a real family, as he called it’’ [und es hat sich

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bald herausgestellt, daß mein Bruder und ich es besser fa¨nden, wenn er nicht ka¨me, am besten u¨berhaupt nicht mehr ka¨me, weil es uns keinen Spaß mehr machte, eine richtige Familie, wie er es nannte, zu sein] (23). The father is perceived as a spoilsport [Spielverderber] (21), and this characterization of the tyrannical father renders him ultimately out of place in the playful space and time of the text. The moments of his absence are represented in cliche´d, utopian terms as mother and children ‘‘revert to a state of wildness’’ (‘‘verwildert’’) and tell fantastical stories: ‘‘whenever my father was on a business trip, the three of us told each other the craziest stories, and nobody was aghast’’ [wenn mein Vater auf einer Dienstreise war, haben wir uns alle drei die u¨berspanntesten Geschichten erza¨hlt, und keiner ist entsetzt gewesen] (15). Moreover, the absence of the father leads to numerous freedoms and pleasures that are brought to an abrupt halt by his cruel return: When my father was on a business trip, I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, I was also allowed to practice the piano for more than an hour, or even less, I was allowed to practice the piano however I wanted, which was not allowed at any other time, and for that reason alone I was sad when he came home, and my mother was sad, because then my brother quickly still had to take out the trash, with all the flowers and twigs and grasses in it. (Das Muschelessen, 63)17

The uninterrupted family is musical and creative; the mother collects flowers and branches, and a return to nature is achieved. This cliche´d representation of the non-oedipal idyll, however, is predicated upon the persistence of the father as threat, as the embodiment of the symbolic order who could destroy the pre-symbolic at any time. In this sense, the New enters Vanderbeke’s narrative only in the final moments, as the mother expresses the perspectival shift (‘‘but on the other hand’’ [aber andererseits]), ignores the ringing telephone, and throws away the mussels. Here the logic of the father is not retained as potential juridical power; the tyrannical father is simply marginalized as an anachronism. The entrapment depicted in the text is ultimately revealed to be artificial. The prisoners no longer need to fight their captors; they simply look sideways and see that the structure has fallen away. Vanderbeke’s ironic deconstruction of the bourgeois family is particularly significant in the German context, and the space of departure is only represented as a question mark. As the telephone rings, the mother throws away the clacking mussels, and the family even begins to ignore the tele-

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phone: ‘‘we didn’t hear the phone at all . . . when my mother threw the mussels into the trash, then she came back in and said to my brother, would you please take out the trash?’’ [das Telefon haben wir gar nicht geho¨rt, . . . als meine Mutter die Muscheln in den Mu¨ll geworfen hat, dann ist sie wieder hereingekommen und hat zu meinem Bruder gesagt, wu¨rdest du bitte den Mu¨ll runtertragen?] (109). The mother’s request to the brother recalls the role of the father, who always made the son throw out the products of nature, such as flowers, collected during his departure. Here, however, the son is asked to throw away the offering to the father. The moment resembles the ending of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor’s dead insect body is discarded so that the family can transform into a strong body. And, as in Kafka’s narrative, the ending is open. Yet in The Metamorphosis the family thrives on the martyrdom of the son, while in The Dinner of Mussels it is the family itself that had previously been martyred. The clacking mussels, no longer uncanny, are perhaps simply garbage in the ending of Vanderbeke’s narrative. Both the familiarity and alienation associated with home have been destroyed with the father, the placeholder for the oedipal family. The destruction of this space is anticlimactic yet monumental in its openness. My consideration of the place of Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Dinner of Mussels within the landscape of post-fascist German-language literature calls into question the ubiquitous role of the father within this critical tradition. I have analyzed the works of Bachmann and Jelinek with an eye to Roland Barthes’s question concerning the structural function of the father in literature: ‘‘Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?’’18 The pleasure in the narrative of the father is the pleasure of rebellion and nostalgia for an idealized oedipal family, yet the work of authors such as Vanderbeke and Menasse and filmmakers such as Tykwer seems to offer new pleasures. While Tykwer’s films garner global appeal, the novels of Vanderbeke and Menasse have not traveled extensively. Each has received critical acclaim, yet there is a relative dearth of literature on either author. This is perhaps a reflection of the global quality of film, of the relatively ubiquitous nature of a global postmodern film aesthetic. Literature, on the other hand, always remains, to some degree, provincial, and the issues of linguistic and cultural translation are more acute with the written word. Yet each artist’s engagement with history and narrative is reflective of a globalizing gesture, of the introduction of the New into the belated space of

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the German postmodern. It remains to be seen what will follow the gestures of openness treated in this book.

Perspectival Shifts: I See Something That You Don’t See (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst) The aesthetics of departure hinted at in the final lines of The Dinner of Mussels are embraced as a motivating force in Vanderbeke’s 1999 novella I See Something That You Don’t See (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst). Already the title of the novella recalls the central trope of The Dinner of Mussels—‘‘Verschiebung’’—the subtle shift in perspective that engenders change. ‘‘I see something that you don’t see’’ refers to a children’s game in which the object of focus must be guessed. That which is perceived as central to the one child is potentially invisible to those guessing. When the object is finally guessed, it suddenly looms as an obvious choice of focus. Vanderbeke’s novella conjures the children’s game with its title, but the title also refers to a series of radio shows produced by the narrative ‘‘I’’ that introduce famous painters to children, such as ‘‘Van Gogh for Children’’ or ‘‘Paul Klee for Children.’’ In this sense, the narrator teaches children to see, but the novella consistently emphasizes the contingent quality of perception. The novella begins with the narrator’s reflection on departure and escape [weggehen], and yet it quickly becomes clear that this is not a simple gesture in postwar, post-wall Germany. Following upon the destabilization of the center and the fascist family in The Dinner of Mussels, Vanderbeke’s more recent novella begins with the critique of absolute perspective: Someone said, you are crazy, to leave this place, to leave from amidst the culture, and it was better not to respond to that, because if someone thinks he is in the middle of something, at the center, so to speak, he goes wild when you say the center is relative.19

The narrator’s desire to leave Berlin for the French countryside is perceived in traditional terms of center and periphery, with Berlin as the cultural center. Yet Vanderbeke’s text relativizes all notions of space and time. Hence, even the perception of color is radically subjective. Already in Berlin, the narrator’s friend Minck sends her postcards of Van Gogh paintings, and she perceives these colors as false so that she believes that Minck is colorblind (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 17). Once in France she perceives the stars as green,

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as Van Gogh stars: ‘‘The stars look as though they were green’’ [Die Sterne sehen aus, als wa¨ren sie gru¨n] (45). The narrator becomes aware of her own desire to see these stars as ‘‘Van Gogh stars.’’ Yet even this magical shift in color and perspective in France undergoes another level of contingency as Rene´, the lover of the narrator, asserts that Van Gogh’s stars were not actually green. Rene´ is an expert in forgeries, and he explains to the narrator that Van Gogh’s stars were, in fact, painted in gold. I said, but I see green there, and Rene´ said that it used to be chrome yellow and that with time and light and dampness, chrome yellow can become chrome oxide green, and therefore I had to believe him. I said, I nevertheless see them as green. Rene´ said, this is also how the brownish black gets onto the sunflowers. If they even are by Van Gogh. (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 90)20

The magic of the green stars is thus a product of radical subjectivism. Despite the narrator’s desire to see differently, to experience the difference of the southern French sky, her perception of color is shown to be potentially false. Characteristically, the interchange ends with the radical relativization of any notion of truth, as Rene´ even questions the authorship of the famous ‘‘Sunflower’’ painting. Neither perception nor identity is fixed in any way.

Beyond Ostalgie The trope of leaving, of moving beyond the known of history, is treated in a complex manner in Vanderbeke’s novella. Just as the fascist family is painstakingly deconstructed in The Dinner of Mussels in order to create a space for the New, so too is the notion of departure in I See Something That You Don’t See represented as a nearly impossible feat. Leaving Berlin and Germany necessitates a decentering of these spaces that engenders a perspectival shift. Truly leaving suggests the absence of fear, the willingness to discard the known: ‘‘and when one is afraid, one is driven from behind and blocked in front, and one cannot change places in this manner very quickly’’ [und wenn man Angst hat, ist man von hinten gehetzt und nach vorne vernagelt, und auf die Art kommt man nicht so schnell vom Fleck] (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 14). In I See Something That You Don’t See, Vanderbeke rejects the possibilities of ‘‘Ostalgie,’’ the nostalgia for the former East Germany. Traveling between the eastern and western portions of Ber-

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lin is, for the narrator, not a real form of leaving, a true shift in perspective: and I already knew the East, and in the evening I drove back to the West and was in the West, and the only thing I didn’t know were double-decker busses, so therefore I hadn’t really left, but rather just to the degree that I couldn’t turn around and go back again, but not far enough to stay. (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 9)21

The former East and West are objects of curiosity for Germans traveling between them; each space is generally known by the Germans and thus does not necessitate a new mode of seeing. Nevertheless, the illusion that one is traveling outside of one’s own sphere of comfort is supported by the nostalgic objects of the former division, such as the double-decker busses. Yet the indulgence in this kind of non-reflective nostalgia is, Vanderbeke suggests, safe and ultimately uncritical. Perhaps nostalgia for the former East is precisely the only form of restorative nostalgia that is politically acceptable in Germany, a sanctioned form of longing that is not perceived as politically regressive: after all, the East was officially socialist, so the totalitarian elements of the Soviet regime escape explicit connections with the fascist Nazis. The nostalgia for the quaint products of the former GDR, the Trabant car, and special pickled cucumbers (‘‘Spreewaldgurken’’), as depicted in Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye, Lenin, perhaps indulges a longing on the part of Germans that had previously been officially curtailed. As Vanderbeke shows, however, a substantive mode of departure from the fixation with history is predicated upon a move beyond the perspectival shift that only comes with the deconstruction of the known and the glance into the unknown. ‘‘Really leaving’’ [RichtigWeggehen] is only possible ‘‘across the border’’ [u¨ber die Grenze] (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 9), in the leap into the unknown.22 Vanderbeke’s novella plays with the notions of departure and home in a manner neither regressively nostalgic nor utopic. The novel represents the experience of the New as emotional intensity, but without indulging in a mode of idealization. The moment of crossing the border into France engenders a new relationship to time and space; one, however, that remains abstract. Hence, time ceases to be simply linear; synchronicity [Gleichzeitigkeit] characterizes this moment, as the narrator and her son respond simultaneously with the exclamation ‘‘so’’ upon crossing the border (34). The narrator likewise perceives the French villagers as doing everything at the same time (81), but in a manner that cannot be mea-

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sured, in contrast to the German tourists who are obsessed with measuring time. The sense of immediacy and presence likewise defines the new perception of time and place: ‘‘I thought, now we are here, and the Now was strong, and the Here also was strong’’ [Ich dachte, jetzt sind wir hier, und das Jetzt war stark, und das Hier war auch stark] (35). Yet this seemingly utopic moment cannot be translated into terms normally associated with a nostalgic idyll. When the narrator of the son is disturbed by bugs in the new house, he expresses a desire to go home [Heim], to which the narrator responds, ‘‘that doesn’t exist’’ [gibt’s nicht] (36). There is no home in the old sense of the word, and hence no traditional notion of family or nation. A sense of belonging is expressed in terms of the pragmatic: ‘‘I thought, if it is warm in the house, then we belong here’’ [Ich dachte, wenn es im Haus warm ist, dann geho¨ren wir auch hierher] (91). Indeed, the French village is only ever named ‘‘No Man’s Land,’’ yet this term, normally associated with the danger of the frontier, inspires no fear in the narrator and her son: ‘‘Until now, we had been here in the no man’s land, and we had liked it well’’ [Bis jetzt waren wir hier im Niemandsland gewesen, und es hatte uns gut gefallen] (69). The space of ‘‘No Man’s Land’’ provides the context for the representation of the New: ‘‘as long as we still lived in the no man’s land and told each other every day what we saw, and there was something new every day, and it was beautiful every day, and it became still more beautiful from one day to the next’’ [solange wir noch im Niemandsland lebten und uns jeden Tag erza¨hlten, was wir sahen, und jeden Tag war es etwas Neues, und jeden Tag war es scho¨n und wurde immer noch scho¨ner von Tag zu Tag] (70). The shift in perspective is manifested as light, a particular source of light that the narrator had never previously seen: ‘‘It was bright and unclear at the same time’’ [Es war hell und unklar zugleich] (47). The New is simultaneously internally contradictory (‘‘bright and unclear at the same time’’) and ultimately cannot be conveyed. The narrator writes numerous postcards to Germany that are never sent and ultimately thrown away: ‘‘everything I had seen was in it, but everything was wrong’’ [es war alles drin, was ich gesehen hatte, aber alles war falsch] (45). What cannot be written also cannot be expressed in spoken words, and the narrator is unable to convey her experiences to those who call: ‘‘When I sat in front of the house later, I noticed that I couldn’t really tell all those people who had called anything, and it was strange’’ [Als ich spa¨ter vor dem Haus saß, fiel mir auf, daß ich all den Leuten, die vorhin angerufen hatten, nichts hatte erza¨hlen ko¨nnen, und es war seltsam] (67).

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Indeed, it is the openness of the sky, the seduction of the unknown, that renders communication with the German home almost impossible: In the evenings, I sat in front of the house and thought I should write letters and postcards, but that didn’t fit with all that sky and the fat stars that sometimes started tumbling around in the wind. . . . I will write letters and postcards when this sky ceases to enwrap me night after night, I thought, and I sat for a long time to impress upon me the trees and the sky and the wind. (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 39)23

The space of the New is often described in terms of vaguely incomprehensible natural phenomena. Hence, alienation is not articulated in negative terms but rather along the lines of the unexpected: ‘‘[The wind] was cool or unexpectedly hot. . . . I understood neither the weather nor the faces of the people. I heard what they said, and I knew the words, therefore I knew what they were saying, but I didn’t understand it’’ [[Der Wind] war unerwartet ku¨hl oder unerwartet heiß. . . . Ich verstand weder das Wetter noch die Gesichter der Leute. Ich ho¨rte, was sie sagten, und ich kannte die Wo¨rter, also wußte ich, was sie sagten, aber ich verstand es nicht] (38). Alienation is rather expressed in neutral terms, as the slow process of discarding the old: ‘‘. . . I realized that I had brought a world with me here that wasn’t valid here, and that with the world I had brought along or with the real world, I couldn’t understand the world here, not the heat, not the cold, not the blue and not the yellow’’ [ich merkte, daß ich eine Welt hierher mitgebracht hatte, die hier nicht galt, und daß ich mit meiner mitgebrachten oder der wirklichen Welt die Welt hier nicht begreifen konnte, nicht das Heiße, nicht das Kalte, nicht das Blau und nicht das Gelb] (113). The old language, colors, and perspectives are no longer relevant so that the narrative ‘‘I’’ must attempt to see the New according to its own logic, a feat almost impossible yet unavoidable within the new space. In I See Something That You Don’t See, the alienation experienced by the narrator is ultimately pleasant and therefore cannot be seen in light of the uncanny. Since, as the narrator tells her son, there is no more home, the dichotomy familiar/unfamiliar is no longer relevant. Indeed, the concept of the uncanny returns only in the rare moments when the space of Germany breaks into the narrator’s new life, such as, for example, during her phone conversation with her friend from Berlin, Lembek: ‘‘At the same time, I got an

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uncanny feeling’’ [Zugleich wurde mir selbst etwas unheimlich] (86): It was because I had left and everything was different from before. But I didn’t know what ‘‘everything’’ was, rather I knew only very little of it, but based on this very little amount I knew that I probably wouldn’t go back again and probably couldn’t go back at all, but that didn’t mean at all that I knew where I was. (87)24

The feeling of the uncanny stems from the reminder of the home left behind, yet the utter lack of familiarity of the new space is represented as a sign of hope rather than despair. This is the sense in which the New is represented in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior, as Sissi expresses her anxiety about the possibility of change: ‘‘I am afraid that nothing will be again as it was before’’ [Ich habe Angst, daß nichts wieder sein wird, wie es vorher war]. Otto’s response, ‘‘You are afraid that everything will be again as it was before’’ [Du hast Angst, daß alles wieder sein wird, wie es vorher war], reverses the logic of the uncanny.25 Rather than dread and anxiety, the foreign stands for longing. Vanderbeke’s novella resists the logic of utopia through the devaluation of a traditional notion of home and family. The father figure ‘‘Rene´’’ is anything but fascist; he rather comes and goes and seems to have little effect on the narrator and her son. He follows them to the French countryside and happily collects mushrooms and wood with them. He seems to relish the lack of rigidity in the life of the narrator, and the two engage in a form of simultaneous speech: ‘‘everything at once’’ [alles auf einmal] (65). Likewise, the narrator resists any sense of nostalgia for the German Heimat through her deconstruction of ‘‘Heim’’ via the imagined gaze of her mother. While attending a village festival she appropriates the gaze of her mother in order to see the ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ from the critical perspective of ‘‘home’’: Starting with the cotton candy, I thought, she would dislike everything, and for a moment, I looked at everything in the manner in which she would see it . . . When I got my own gaze back, I still saw what my mother would have seen, but since I saw it with my own gaze, it looked different, and it was perhaps in this moment that I began to love it. (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 64)26

The uncanny is deconstructed via the retention of dual gazes, one ‘‘heimlich’’ and one not uncanny but rather ‘‘unhomely.’’ Vanderbeke’s novella of escape into the unknown begins where

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her early narrative The Dinner of Mussels ends. This, too, is the moment achieved by the films of Tom Tykwer. Family and history are deconstructed, and the gaze is opened to the New. The repetition compulsion of the narrative of Nazism and its critique seems to implode as the gaze of the reader and spectator is turned to the imagined space beyond the fixation with history. Yet this new space, even when engaged in the reflective nostalgia of multiple cultural translations, is only very cautiously global. The German-language entrance into a more playful mode of postmodern aesthetics is perhaps so belated as to be already suspicious of the gap between the global and the local. The particular history that has defined German-language aesthetics for the past sixty years has likely prepared German-language authors for a more nuanced sense of the global. In this sense, the narrator of I See Something That You Don’t See is rather skeptical of the global claims of her friend Silvana, who threatens to visit at Easter: She had said, the world, after all, is nothing but a small global village, you simply need a few computers. I had to think of the violets, the tomcats and the teacher and of the families in the cloister, but I hadn’t known how I could tell Silvana about it, and therefore she would come for Easter. (118)27

Vanderbeke’s ‘‘home at the end of the world’’ is thus not yet a space for the pragmatic exchange of goods and information. It is still a space concerned with almost imperceptible shifts in perspective, in the cultural translation of nuance along the lines of the cultural mirroring in Menasse’s Wings of Stone (Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt).

Queering Home The nuanced perspectival shifts in Vanderbeke’s novellas signal radical departure and change. Indeed, such a notion of a gaze that is ‘‘quer’’ (German for ‘‘crossed’’ or ‘‘askew’’) is central to a notion of ‘‘queerness.’’ To ‘‘queer’’ is to slightly shift a perspective so that the natural, the ‘‘normal,’’ seems just barely off kilter. Hence, Vanderbeke’s texts engage in a praxis of queering; they queer the notions of family and home through a gradual process of slippage. The familiar is not radically deconstructed; rather, a miniscule slowing of time renders the ‘‘normal’’ abnormal and the homely unhomely.

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Reconceptions of family and home in Vanderbeke, Menasse, and Tykwer recall the American novels of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Cunningham, in whose works similar fantasies resonate. I take my title for this chapter from his 1990 novel A Home at the End of the World. A brief look at the aesthetic project of this American author sheds further light on the historical weight of the tropes of family and home in German-language literature and film. A Home at the End of the World (1990), along with the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Hours (1998) and Flesh and Blood (1995), are concerned with a non-oedipal reconfiguration of notions of home and family. Without simply discarding these notions, Cunningham’s novels nevertheless playfully restructure alliances amongst the figures to create nontraditional communities. His texts conflate melodrama and fragmentary narratives so that heightened affect often stems from the unexpected. Cunningham’s figures are usually in some way connected to a traditional nuclear family, yet each of the novels offers hybrid models for kinship that bond figures outside of a strictly heterosexual matrix. Hence, the two central figures in A Home at the End of the World, Jonathan and Bobby, are linked in a bond of kinship that defies familial roles. They are best friends and yet almost brothers, since Bobby moves in with Jonathan’s family after the death of his mother. Yet the two are also lovers in their teenage years, engaging in a form of pseudo-incest, but even this aspect of their relationship is not definitive. Bobby seems to be otherwise heterosexual, and the two do not live a conscious life of homosexuality together. They are simply bonded as kin in a relationship outside of traditional notions of kinship. Reed Woodhouse points to the fluid yet utterly bonded relationship between Jonathan and Bobby, and quotes the following line from the novel: ‘‘Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. We adore Clare but she’s not quite on the team.’’ As Woodhouse argues, Bobby and Jonathan constitute a ‘‘family’’ ‘‘not because they have defied the straight world and set up their own government in exile but because they have fused with each other and denied the necessity of further definition.’’28 Their reluctance to ‘‘label themselves’’ (86) is, Woodhouse contends, a product of ‘‘their general sense of belatedness’’ (86). Cunningham’s work comes after the Stonewall riots, after the ‘‘particularly gay bildungsroman, the coming-out story’’ (Woodhouse, 84). It is not the business of Cunningham’s novels to deconstruct the heterosexist bourgeois family, since this had been done in more explicitly political literature. Neither is Cunningham interested in revivifying the traditional family. His novels seem

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rather to queer the contemporary family in the true sense of the word—to render it indefinable in terms of its members while retaining the sense of primordial bonding and affect associated with traditional notions of kinship. In Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads Antigone’s rebellion and love of her brother not along the lines set by Hegel—in terms of the dichotomy between kinship and the polis—but rather as a potentially fluid representation of gender and kinship that ‘‘exposes the socially contingent character of kinship.’’29 Antigone’s almost indefinable familial relationships complicate the relationship between state and family, and this is the sense in which Michael Cunningham portrays ‘‘family’’ in his novels—as a space of intense affect that always of necessity transcends the state’s conceptions about what constitutes family. When the three central characters in A Home At the End of the World— Jonathan, Bobby, and their friend Clare—begin to call themselves ‘‘the Hendersons’’ and move to upstate New York to bring up a baby, they are simultaneously mocking traditional notions of family and emotionally moved by their bonds of kinship. In his novels, Cunningham represents a myriad of figures whose bonds cannot be easily defined, such as the relationship between Clarissa and Richard in The Hours. Clarissa is the former lover and caretaker of the gay Richard, yet she is also a mother who lives with her lesbian lover. That Cunningham approximates the affect of melodrama via these relationships—the emotions of entrapment and longing— underscores the space between old and new that these novels occupy. The final passage of A Home At the End of the World points to this space: ‘‘It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but too old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create.’’30 In the American literary landscape, the house at the end of the world gives the impression of having been built effortlessly. Postmodern novels such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) have prepared a relatively ahistorical space in which the family can be cited as one more outdated nostalgia object. Cunningham’s novels return affect to the family novel, yet they do so with an expansiveness that is anathema to German-language literature. The relative openness prepared by the deconstruction of the fascist family in the films of Tom Tykwer and the popular literature of Birgit Vanderbeke evokes Menasse’s call to open the Austrian window—a window that had come to signify entrapment and fixation. Indeed, the

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burden of history continues to define the moment of transition from interrupted modernity to belated postmodernity in Germanlanguage literature and film. A non-synchronous German and Austrian postmodernity, however, may offer a transitional temporality that imagines community beyond family and nation.

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tory and affect in post-Holocaust German and Austrian literature and film. Nostalgia in its regressive mode as pleasurable forgetting is foreclosed in the works analyzed here, a fact that suggests that Germany and Austria continue to be anomalous spaces in the Euro-American cultural landscape. Home serves as a split space of identification and alienation so that nostalgic longing is only possible as displacement. A belated temporality marks both German and Austrian literature and film and the spaces in which these works are produced. Recent events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center have contributed to dramatic shifts in the global political scene, but they do not seem to have shifted German-language aesthetic and thematic concerns away from the Nazi history and its legacy. In the concluding pages of this book, I look to a number of post-9/11 literary and cinematic texts that grapple with questions germane to a globalized world. I maintain that these works, despite often representing a new generation of artists, continue to posit home as a space of entrapment and to articulate nostalgia along the lines of departure and escape. A discourse of ‘‘normalization’’ has become ubiquitous to discussions about national identity, history, and art in Germany in recent years.1 The notion of a ‘‘normal’’ Germany, one no longer defined by its abnormal past but rather one that embraces globalism, is simultaneously desirable and unnerving to Germans. During the summer of 2006, when Germany hosted the World Cup soccer tournament, Germans desired to prove to the world that they could be a ‘‘normal,’’ gracious, relaxed host to the world.2 Indeed, one could say that the dream was almost realized; German flags were more prominent than ever before since the end of Nazism, yet these flags were generally not perceived as symbols of a neo-Nazi threat. Here, many claimed, was the arrival of German normalcy, of the new unselfconsciousness [Neue Unbefangenheit].3 Yet how would this normalcy be defined? The fantasy of normalcy was quickly shattered in the autumn of 2006, when the moral compass of the 219

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nation, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gu¨nter Grass, admitted to having served in the Waffen-SS, an especially brutal arm of the Nazi military machine, unleashing the familiar nation-wide debate about the relevance of the Nazi past for present-day Germany. Likewise, the excitement surrounding the 2008 European Cup, held in Austria and Switzerland, was dampened by new reparations claims by Italian forced laborers who were exploited in Nazi Germany. Hence, while soccer seems to offer the possibility of Germany’s unfiltered entrance into the age of globalization, the nation is not yet like other nations. As in Austria, a country with ambivalent feelings toward outsiders, crimes against foreigners immediately connote Nazism. It may be safe to assert that soccer functions as one of the few national tropes in Germany that provide an acceptable outlet for national feelings of nostalgia. So¨nke Wortmann’s hugely popular film The Miracle of Bern (Das Wunder von Bern; Germany, 2003), financed in part by the international soccer association FIFA, offers a nostalgic representation of the historic German World Cup win in 1954 that has often been viewed as a symbol for postwar German stamina and the Economic Miracle. In 2006 Wortmann released another soccer film, Germany: A Summer’s Tale (Deutschland: Ein Sommerma¨rchen), a documentary about the 2006 German World Cup soccer team. The clear reference to Heinrich Heine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale (Deutschland: Ein Winterma¨rchen, 1844), an homage to his homeland that the Jewish author wrote while in exile, reinserts a melancholic mood into the otherwise celebratory representation of German national soccer. Here, we are reminded that nostalgia is an emotion that can best be indulged in a displaced form in the former Nazi nations: perhaps even soccer is not free from the taint of Germany’s recent past. Wortmann’s allusion to Heine dovetails with comments made by Rabbi Alter of Oldenburg, who, in 2006, was among the first three rabbis to be ordained in Germany since the Holocaust. Speaking with regard to German normalization, Alter situates the World Cup and the Holocaust at diametrically opposed points in the path toward a new Germany, but in doing so, he likewise underscores the historical subtext that accompanies Germany’s favorite pastime. Asked if the appearance of German flags in the context of the 2006 World Cup might signal a ‘‘normalization of German-Jewish relations,’’ Rabbi Alter responded: ‘‘I really don’t know; time will tell. But relations will improve if we keep the spirit of the World Cup and if we don’t allow dark, right-wing forces to appear in Germany.’’4 Hence, the ‘‘spirit of the World Cup’’ represents simultaneously Germany’s better

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self, a global and ‘‘normal’’ self, and the ‘‘trace of the better’’ [Spur des Besseren]5 that always implicitly points to the dark truths of the past. In his 2006 political play The Paradise of the Unloved Ones (Das Paradies der Ungeliebten), Robert Menasse explicitly links the presumably untainted sport of national soccer with political corruption and fascism. This play, a denunciation of political corruption set in Denmark, stages the engrained fascism of European politics in a nation generally considered innocent of the crimes of Nazism. By choosing Denmark as his stage, Menasse underscores the ubiquitous presence of Nazism in the Austrian and German imaginary. What is more, the various political figures in the play are named after the Danish soccer players who led the nation to a European Cup victory in 1992. The European ‘‘Meister’’ are also political leaders, and the tropes of political corruption and power, soccer, Europe, and Nazism are linked in a complex manner. When the journalist Brian Laudrup accuses his step-father, Kim Christofte, of involvement with the Nazis, Christofte rejects this accusation: ‘‘There was no Nazi period here. The Nazis merely were here for a while’’ [Es gab hier keine Nazi-Zeit. Es waren nur eine Zeitlang die Nazis hier].6 By displacing the Austrian and German historical fixation with Nazism onto the ostensibly untainted tropes of Denmark and soccer, Menasse points, in a manner akin to Rabbi Alter, to the elusive nature of the ‘‘spirit of the World Cup’’ in light of the history of the Holocaust. The fabric of history, it seems to me, is a net that does not yet allow escape. The dialectic of entrapment and escape that I have traced in this book continues to offer a model for analysis of post-9/11 Germanlanguage literature and film. Three recent novels, Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots (Die Habenichtse, 2006), winner of the 2006 German Book Prize, Lilian Faschinger’s City of Losers (Stadt der Verlierer, 2007), and Birgit Vanderbeke’s Sweet Sixteen (2005) engage in playful ways with this dialectic. The narratives are embedded within discourses of globalization, but they nevertheless retain a residual critique of Nazism and the psychological structures of fascism. What is more, these novels continue to thematize home as entrapment and to imagine a mode of escape that would queer the tainted spaces of home and family. Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots explicitly engages with the events of 9/11. The lawyer Jakob receives an attractive transfer to the London offices of his firm when his colleague, who had been slated for this position, is killed in the World Trade Center attacks in New York. Hence, what seems like a successful move of escape

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to a world city free of the historical burdens that define Berlin is already marked by a logic of negation and violence. The escape that this move should signify is never realized. Images of entrapment abound in the space of London. In particular, Jakob’s wife Isabelle is constantly privy to the abuse her neighbors inflict upon their daughter, Sara. This scenario becomes grotesque as Sara is trapped in the high-walled garden that adjoins their apartments: ‘‘The garden, in which grass grew despite everything, in which even a rose patiently climbed up a piece of the wall, served as a prison’’ [Der Garten, in dem trotz allem frisches Gras wuchs, in dem sogar eine Rose geduldig ein Stu¨ck Mauer entlangkletterte, diente als Gefa¨ngnis].7 The garden, the locus of the idyll of home, serves here as a prison and a space where the structures of oppression are repeated ad infinitum. Here, Sara abuses her beloved cat Polly, the only creature that is consistently good to her, and here Isabelle is a silent conspirator in these acts of violence. The link between these structures of oppression and the logic of fascism is tenuous, but the novel explicitly introduces the history of the Holocaust into the narrative via Andras, Isabelle’s Jewish friend, and Jakob’s work, which is largely concerned with recovering property for Jewish families who lost their belongings due to persecution by the Nazis. Hence, the relationship between the two protagonists, Isabelle and Jakob, and this Nazi history is displaced, yet it functions like a virus that taints their lives even after they have left Berlin behind. The novel hovers in a space of melancholy in which the object of loss is barely recognized. In a conversation with his boss Bentham, a semi-closeted homosexual with whom Jakob is fascinated, the futility of the logic of reparations is revealed: If then the angel of history no longer exists, then there must be something else upon which we can rely, right? Good, I think so, too. But why can’t it be the law, why can’t it be the sheer exchange value of something? Why insist on that which has been lost, on the healing of something? Nothing will be healed. (146)8

Here, Bentham bemoans the logic of the reparations law that drives the compulsion to repeat without offering the opportunity for healing. In this sense, Hacker’s text is a melancholic response to Menasse’s angel statues from Wings of Stone. Here, there is no alternative to the futile march of ‘‘progress,’’ the mechanical process of repetition compulsion. Hacker’s text is driven by a melancholic logic that disavows nostalgia. The Have-Nots is indebted to the aesthetics of entrapment

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honed by authors such as Jelinek. Yet the state of entrapment is not complete in the novel, since the figures occasionally fantasize about escape and rebirth. Through discussions with Bentham and Andras, Jakob comes to see the farce of the law of reparations, since these laws are unable to return precisely the most precious belonging of all, the memories that never became memories. In this moment, he imagines a rebirth via a sort of baptism in the water: ‘‘He wished he were able to jump into the water, head first and with eyes closed, to slip into another skin, clearer, fresher, and to emerge as alive as he had never been’’ [Er wu¨nschte sich, ins Wasser zu springen, kopfu¨ber und mit geschlossenen Augen, in eine andere Haut zu schlu¨pfen, klarer, frischer und so lebendig wieder aufzutauchen, wie er niemals gewesen war] (187). Jakob’s dream recalls the leap into the water in The Princess and the Warrior, as Sissi and Bodo seem to enter a new mode of existence. True escape is imagined as complete otherness, the escape from the self. For the Jewish figure, Andras, escape is rather thematized as departure from place. Early on, Andras imagines leaving Berlin when Isabelle announces she will move to London. His formulation, ‘‘Nothing, as it was’’ [Nichts, wie es war] (37), undermines its own nostalgic gesture; Andras does not bemoan the fact that nothing is as it was before, but rather, the shorthand of ‘‘nothing, as it was’’ reveals the emptiness of nostalgic longing, its lack of content: ‘‘Nothing, as it was, Andras thought bitterly, and then he felt so scared that he rather wanted to run outside, to the street and farther into the Monbijou Park, along the river Spree, farther and farther, until he had left the city behind’’ [Nichts, wie es war, dachte Andras bitter, und dann war ihm so bang zumute, daß er am liebsten hinausgelaufen wa¨re, auf die Straße und weiter, in den Monbijoupark, die Spree entlang, immer weiter, bis er die Stadt hinter sich gelassen hatte] (37).9 Andras’s fantasy of departure is focused not on arrival but simply on the act of leaving. Only the suspension of arrival sustains the belief in the possibility of escape. Like Hacker’s novel, Lilian Faschinger’s City of Losers (2007) engages the ubiquitous themes of violence and the displaced manifestations of fascism. A detective novel of sorts that takes place in Vienna, Faschinger’s text seems to cite Bachmann’s prose work via the recurring theme of repetition. Even Bachmann’s notion of the ‘‘virus of crime’’ is revived here, as the newspaper reports that a computer virus has invaded Austria: ‘‘Computer virus attacks Aus¨ sterreich] (Faschinger, 286). Liketria’’ [Computervirus u¨berfa¨llt O wise, the notion of an environmental virus is frequently mentioned by the characters in the novel. Hence, the metaphor of the ‘‘virus

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of crime’’ has been extended to global environmental spaces. The detective narrative focuses on the figure of Matthias, a Viennese slacker who becomes a murderer. He murders his lover, who is also the wife of his brother. Prior to this violent act, he kills their cat in a scenario reminiscent of the scenes in The Have-Nots in which Polly the cat is tormented by Sara and then killed by the drug dealer, Jim; in each instance, the men perform the act of violence without a thought, snapping the necks of the cats. Yet in each instance, these violent moments signify a logic of repetition compulsion, a virus of crime. Just as Polly’s death and the violence she endures reflect the abuse Sara receives from her father, so does the violent death of the cat in City of Losers function as the repetition of abuses experienced by Matthias at the hands of his stepfather and as a premonition of further violence. Violence in City of Losers is a symptom of the compulsion to repeat and a product of the family. As in the other texts discussed in this book, the family in Faschinger’s novel is primarily a space of oppression, of the structure of fascism. Matthias’s family consists of doublings and displacements, but in no instance does the nontraditional nature of his family offer a reprieve from the structures of oppression: ‘‘I have one father who begot me, whom I don’t know, and who most probably is a pig, and a second one who adopted me and who is a pig for sure’’ [Ich habe einen Vater, der mich gezeugt hat, den ich nicht kenne und der ho¨chstwahrscheinlich ein Schwein ist, und einen zweiten, der mich adoptiert hat und der garantiert eines ist] (21).10 His adoptive mother had seduced him, and his birth mother hires a private detective to find him. In the course of the narrative, Matthias likewise discovers he has a twin brother. In this sense, the doubling is complete: two mothers, two fathers, two brothers. However, the multiple families do not offer utopian alternatives to the perpetuation of everyday fascism. The brother is the successful Doppelga¨nger of Matthias who is married to Matthias’s lover, and the birth mother looks for Matthias for selfish reasons: she is lonely, and she needs help with her business. Hence, what might function as a queering of the family that could lead to a renewed space of positive affect is simply more of the same. In the case of Matthias, the repetition compulsion is complete. As he reflects: ‘‘There were only exploiters and exploited ones. And the repetition of exploitation. There was nothing else’’ [Es gab nur Ausbeuter und Ausgebeutete. Und die Wiederholung der Ausbeutung. Mehr war da nicht] (167). Matthias’s narrative reads like an anti-nostalgic tale of entrapment. The trope of repetition is cemented in the image of Matthias’s neighbor, an autistic

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man who follows his mother and her dog around, only raising his head occasionally to yell: ‘‘Repetition!’’ [Wiederholung!] (284). Whereas Matthias’s narrative reiterates the trope of historical critique and entrapment endemic to writers like Jelinek, the narrative of Emma offers something of an opening into the New. The novel is told alternatively from the perspective of Matthias and of Emma, so that the entrapment of Matthias’s world is juxtaposed with Emma’s. A failed academic who used to teach at the Institute for Classics and Archeology, Emma has become a private detective. Here, Faschinger offers a witty comment on the manner in which all narratives have become detective narratives in the post-Holocaust German and Austrian landscape. Emma’s narrative presents direct citations of the Nazi past via her father, who imagines he was a war hero under Hitler and builds historically accurate submarine models from World War II. Yet in contrast to the portions of the novel concerning Matthias, the scenes with Emma’s father are funny and ironic. Emma’s ‘‘Nazi father’’ is actually the weakest figure in a household in which her mother, a New Age fanatic, is raising Emma’s son. In a clear citation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Emma’s mother and her son conspire to send the father to the ‘‘Steinhof’’ psychiatric hospital, recalling the departure of the father in Jelinek’s novel. However, despite the father’s explicit links to Nazism, he is not the perpetrator of violence. Similarly, his wife and grandson seem ultimately harmless in their fanatical obsession with reincarnation. Hence, the scene in which Emma takes her Nazi father to the lake to try out his model submarines is rather absurd than grotesque. Some passersby notice that a small swastika is flying from the model submarine, and they call the police. What is brought to the surface of the novel as repressed cause, the crimes of Nazism, is revealed to have far more complex and sinister manifestations in contemporary Austria than an aging former soldier. Hence, Matthias himself is a more menacing manifestation of the violence of everyday fascism than Emma’s senile father. Emma’s narrative not only offers a less sinister version of the ‘‘virus of crime’’; she is likewise able to combine a critical view on the Austrian Heimat with a reflective mode of nostalgia that imagines a home that is quer and queered. Whereas the doubling in Matthias’s family leads only to the multiplication of oppression, Emma’s nontraditional family and slightly skewed perspective open up possibilities for difference from repetition. To her surprise, she falls in love with Sissi Fux, a pathologist. Here, the figure of Sissi, who signifies the nostalgia for an untainted home, meets the cold eye of the pathologist who analyzes murder victims. Historical critique and nostalgia are combined in Sissi Fux, and Emma’s love affair with Sissi offers a space for departure from the repetition

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compulsion that defines Matthias’s life. The novel ends with the multicultural wedding of Emma’s colleague that takes place, as Emma’s father points out, in a building that served as barracks during both world wars. Here, history and change meet as Emma invites Sissi to dance with her. Whereas City of Losers juxtaposes a claustrophobic historical critique with the departure from a fossilized home embodied in Emma’s queer love for Sissi, Birgit Vanderbeke’s Sweet Sixteen (2005)11 imagines escape as the negation of negation. Along the lines of Nietzsche’s critique of the excess of negation, Vanderbeke’s novella tells the story of teenagers who leave their families out of a frustration with the dogma of negation, ‘‘no-saying’’ [Neinsagerei] (85). These teenagers, children of the parents who grew up under the influence of the anti-fascist ’68ers, reject the repetition compulsion of historical critique that, in itself, has become a dogma. Thousands of teenagers simply escape from their family homes, homes that are oppressive due to what one journalist calls ‘‘proto-fascist freedom terrorism’’ [faschistoider Freiheitsterrorismus] (86): The parents themselves, the man remembered, constantly tortured him with the request to criticize them or, respectively, to tell them ‘no.’ The constant no-saying, even the fundamental mental and moral obligation to a ‘no,’ the young journalist explained, had been the only opportunity throughout his entire childhood to win the parental love that is irreplaceable for every child, and for the sake of this love not only he, but his entire generation had, until they entered adult life, subjected themselves to ritual no-saying and the practice of counter-acting, revolting obscenities, and actionist misapprehensions with or without candle vigils.12

The parents, who treat the rejection of fascism as a religion, have ironically created a situation where this form of critical thought is no longer critical and where rebellion consists in the negation of negation. In Sweet Sixteen Vanderbeke uses her usual style of hypotaxis to reveal the absurdity of a system of rebellion that is ultimately tautological. The new generation of German teenagers can only resist the authority of the parents through an embrace of authority, a gesture that ultimately reiterates what Horkheimer and Adorno called the ‘‘cycle of doom’’ [Kreis des Unheils], the eternal logic of perpetrators and victims. During this long period of manipulation against any authority—which after all provides support and hence deserves recognition—but above all against the state, the unfulfilled wish for a ‘‘yes’’ survived in some

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who resisted the equalization through forced individuation, and sometimes this wish could be concealed only strenuously. Only later had it become possible to fulfill this wish, after the power of the parent generation in the context of the shaping of one’s own biography could be questioned and exposed as coercive and occasionally proto-fascist freedom terrorism. (Vanderbeke, 86)13

Hence, anti-fascism becomes fascism and the embrace of authority becomes anti-fascism. Vanderbeke’s text illustrates beautifully the state of entrapment constructed both by fascism and the compulsive critique of fascism. Yet her novella is primarily concerned with the dream of escape. The song that the narrator and her friends remember from their school days (‘‘school is stupid, at home it’s even worse, I want out, I want out, I simply only want out any more’’ [die Schule ist bescheuert, noch schlimmer ist’s zu Haus, ich will raus, ich will raus, ich will einfach bloß noch raus] (91)) becomes reality for the next generation. Thousands of sixteen-yearolds simply disappear from their homes, living the dream of departure. In Vanderbeke’s novella nostalgia is retained only as the longing for the longing for departure, as the memory of the song, ‘‘I want out’’ [Ich will raus]. Hence, the text ends with the narrator’s thoughts about the escaping teenagers and the words of the old ’68er musician, Kukutsch, who many believe is behind the disappearance of their children: ‘‘Kukutsch had said: Well, maybe something new is coming into being there. Something wild. Something exciting. Something all its own’’ [Kukutsch hatte gesagt: Nun, vielleicht ensteht da etwas Neues. Etwas Wildes. Etwas Aufregendes. Etwas Eigenes] (140). In this sense, the departures of the teenagers is the realization of the escape fantasies of the parents: ‘‘Oh so what, Kukutsch was quoted, maybe I’m a grandiose kook. But I have a certain dream’’ [Ach was, wurde Kukutsch zitiert, ich bin vielleicht ein pathetischer Spinner. Aber ich habe da so einen Traum] (140). These are the last words of Vanderbeke’s novel, the thoughts of the narrator as she looks out at the open sea. The introduction of the New is, once again, only possible via a fantasy of escape from Heimat and history. Vanderbeke’s narrator imagines the escape of the teenagers having left behind her own home for the open sea. An astonishing number of recent German films end as the protagonists escape to the sea or to another country. Films such as Hans Weingarten’s The White Noise (Das weiße Rauschen; Germany, 2001), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Experiment (Das Experiment; Germany, 2001), Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues (Germany, 2003), Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals (Bo¨se Zellen; Austria/Germany/Switzerland, 2003), Ju¨rgen Vogel’s Free Will (Der freie Wille; Germany, 2006), and Andre´

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Scha¨fer / Richard David Precht’s Lenin Only Came As Far As Lu¨denscheid (Lenin kam nur bis Lu¨denscheid; Germany, 2008) dramatize the claustrophobia endemic to a post-fascist, post-wall Germany and Austria. Yet they also imagine escape often in geographical terms; the German or Austrian family and homeland is left behind in a gesture of openness reminiscent of the dialectic of Tykwer’s films. The Austrian director Barbara Albert usually sets her films in the working-class suburbs of Vienna and the Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria. The claustrophobic lives of Albert’s protagonists are depicted mercilessly. Yet even in these films, escape is imagined via pop music that points to other locations. Perhaps the most affecting scene in Albert’s Free Radicals is the one in which the depressed teenager Patrizia (De´sire´e Ourada) is moved while hearing a street musician play Scott Mackenzie’s 1967 hippie hit ‘‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).’’ The music is incongruous to the setting of an underpass in the depressing Viennese suburbs, but Patrizia sings along with the musician in a moment that transforms her. Albert herself has articulated the belief that German and Austrian film is ‘‘darker’’ than corresponding cinemas of Western nations.14 Though Albert’s films rarely include direct references to the Nazi past, a residue of the structures of fascism and its critique inhabits her work. Escape from home is imagined as flight, travel to Africa, South America, or the United States, and as musical transcendence. The other films I have mentioned here all offer serious engagements with a conflicted history and the trope of escape via another country. Hans Weingarten’s The White Noise presents a narrative of schizophrenia, depicting the entrapment of a young man, Lukas (Daniel Bru¨hl), within the nightmare of paranoia. The film ends as Lukas sits at the sea in Spain. Although the film offers no easy answers, there is a sense that Lukas might escape his illness via the move to another geographical space, away from the German Heimat. He has stopped taking his medication, and Lukas gazes out at the sea, imagining a freedom that is cut off from the culture of home and society. Similarly, films such as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Experiment and Ju¨rgen Vogel’s Free Will represent the everyday culture of Germany as a hell of the perpetuation of violence. The Experiment depicts the Stanford experiments from the 1970s in which students played the roles of prisoners and guards. The cultural translation of this scenario into post-Holocaust, post-wall Germany immediately codes the narrative as a repetition of Nazism, as the guards perpetrate brutal crimes upon the prisoners. In the end-

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ing of the film, Tarek (Moritz Bleibtreu) has escaped from the institution where the experiment has finally been interrupted, and he sits at the sea with his girlfriend, looking out into the space of the unknown. Free Will likewise depicts extreme violence as an illness, as Theo (Ju¨rgen Vogel), a rapist, is let out into society. He rapes again, yet regrets his behavior and immediately rushes to provide first aid to his victim following his crime. In the final scene of the film, Theo has escaped to the sea, where he literally cuts into his body, slitting his wrists with a razor blade. Here, escape is linked to the sea and death, via a macabre performance of the split German subject. Even films that depict the everyday lives of Germans, such as Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues and Scha¨fer/Precht’s Lenin Only Came As Far As Lu¨denscheid, imagine the future elsewhere. In Schorr’s film, Schultze (Horst Krause) lives a life of utter stagnancy in the former German Democratic Republic following the fall of the wall. He is single-handedly revitalized by American music, in a manner reminiscent of Albert’s use of American pop music, as he hears a Cajun song on the radio. From this point on, he is fixated on America, and the second half of the film depicts Schultze’s visit in Texas, where he rents a boat and makes his way through the Bayou to Louisiana where he dies. The sheer motion and otherness of the experience is depicted as an idealized escape from the stagnant German home. Originally invited to Texas to play the accordion at a German heritage event, Schultze rejects this distorted mirror image of Germany for the anti-Heimat of Louisiana. Similarly, in Lenin Came As Far As Lu¨denscheid the nostalgic representation of Precht’s childhood is constantly undermined by the post-Holocaust consciousness of German crimes.15 Although the film is reminiscent of Goodbye, Lenin in its pseudo-nostalgic representation of a corresponding childhood in West Germany, it is clear that Ostalgie does not translate. Indeed, nostalgia in the film seems to be limited to the tropes of soccer and a Western form of Ostalgie, as Precht reminisces about his family’s idealization of the German Democratic Republic and its socialistic values. Once again, a regressive nostalgia is thwarted in the West German context, and the film ultimately represents the projection of this mode of longing onto the former East, thereby displacing nostalgia once more. Precht’s family itself is revealed in all of its contradictions, and the film ends with a kind of family reunion. This reunion, however, must take place elsewhere, outside of the already tainted space of Germany. Hence, the Precht family meets in the idealized neighboring coun-

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try of Denmark, a space where the engagement with history has not done permanent damage to the family idyll. The literary and filmic works mentioned in this epilogue represent Germans and Austrians as potential global e´migre´s, instinctively resisting the heavy pull of Heimat. These works often depict the desire for escape from the trappings of history via other countries (Denmark, Spain, the United States, England) that serve as idealized alternatives to the tainted home of the post-Nazi imaginary. Nostalgia is consistently undercut and displaced, retained in instances that reveal a longing for a home elsewhere. These moments of longing point to a reflective mode of nostalgia that looks with a split gaze at the damaged homeland. One eye is focused on the rubble of history and the other looks out to the sea, imagining a journey that indefinitely suspends the moment between departure and arrival.

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Notes Introduction 1. See Robert Stam and Ella Habiba Shohat, ‘‘Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the ‘Posts,’ ’’ in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 381–401: ‘‘Transnational spectatorship can also mold a space of future-orientated desire, nourishing the imaginary of ‘internal e´migre´s,’ actively crystallizing a sense of a viable ‘elsewhere,’ giving it a local habitation and a name, evoking a possible ‘happy end’ in another nation’’ (399). 2. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): ‘‘But the homeland is partly invented, existing only in the imagination of the deterritorialized groups, and it can sometimes become so fantastic and one-sided that it provides the fuel for new ethnic conflicts,’’ 49. 3. Appadurai likewise points out that diasporic communities, ‘‘safe from the depredations of their home states, . . . become doubly loyal to their nations of origin . . .’’ (172). 4. Jelinek sees postwar ‘‘Germanness’’ as defined in terms of Nazism, but she views Austria as even more criminal than Germany in its refusal to accept its role in Nazi crimes: ‘‘The Germans have at least repented ceaselessly in the area of culture, of course not in the courts and the medical establishment where certain perpetrators could enjoy a peaceful old age, but in the cultural arena they have created many critical films, TV shows, radio plays, etc. In Austria everything was quickly swept under the rug’’ [Die Deutschen haben zumindest im Kulturbereich ununterbrochen Buße getan, zwar nicht innerhalb der Justiz und der Medizin, wo die entscheidenden Ta¨ter ein friedliches Alter genießen konnten, aber im Kulturbereich haben sie viele kritische Filme, Fernsehspiele, Ho¨rspiele, etc. ¨ sterreich ist das alles ganz schnell unter den Teppich gekehrt worgemacht. In O den] (Adolf-Ernst Meyer, Elfriede Jelinek, and Jutta Heinrich, Sturm und Zwang: Schreiben als Geschlechterkampf [Hamburg: Klein, 1995], 47). Along these lines, see also Robert Menasse: ‘‘No country has problematized and thoroughly reflected upon itself publicly as little as the second Austrian Republic.’’ [Kein Land hat sich selbst o¨ffentlich so wenig problematisiert und grundsa¨tzlich reflektiert wie die Zweite o¨sterreichische Republik]. Robert Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften: Essays zur o¨sterreichischen Identia¨t (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 13. ¨ sterreich, die sich ja 5. [‘‘Die thematisiert diese Totenkultur Deutschland/O nicht wie andere Nationen auf die großen Toten in der Geschichte berufen kann, sondern auf die Toten, die sie selbst produziert haben’’] (Meyer, Sturm und Zwang, 49). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 6. Austria has produced a large number of authors writing ‘‘anti-Heimat’’

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literature critical of the residues of fascism in contemporary Austria. In this sense, the fact that Austria was not officially forced to pay penance for the crimes of Nazism may have contributed to the intense critical response amongst Austrian authors. Elfriede Jelinek and Robert Menasse suggest as much, and I address this issue in chapters 2 and 4. 7. I am thinking here of, for example, Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye, Lenin (2003) as well as the fetishization of former GDR consumer products such as ‘‘Ampelma¨nnchen’’ (traffic light man) paraphernalia and certain food products such as ‘‘Spreewald’’ pickles and ‘‘Rotka¨ppchen’’ sparkling wine. 8. See Paul Cooke’s compelling analysis of the GDR as a postcolonial space in Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 9. A number of recent feuilleton articles in German newspapers suggest that Germans are beginning to research the Nazi activities of former-GDR citizens. See, for example, Sylke Kirschnik, ‘‘Strittmatters Schweigen: Verdra¨ngung bestimmt die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Vergangenheit in der ehemaligen DDR,’’ Berliner Zeitung, June 17, 2008. 10. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001), 10. 11. See discussions of the history of nostalgia in Linda Hutcheon, ‘‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,’’ Proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association ‘Literature as Cultural Memory’: Leiden, 16–22 August 1997 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 189–207; here: 193; and Jean Starobinski, ‘‘The Idea of Nostalgia,’’ Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103. See especially pp. 84–89. 12. ‘‘Nostalgia remains unsystematic and unsynthesizable; it seduces rather than convinces’’ (Boym, 13). 13. See, for example, David Lowenthal, ‘‘Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,’’ in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 18–32: ‘‘Nostalgia today is less often prized as precious memory or dismissed as diverting jest. Instead it is a topic of embarrassment and a term of abuse. Diatribe upon diatribe denounce it as reactionary, regressive, ridiculous’’ (20). 14. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, ‘‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia,’’ in The Imagined Past, 1–18. 15. See also Boym, 24. 16. See in this context Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Johannes Von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Both authors analyze the complex ways in which the Heimat genre of literature and film is both a reaction to and product of modernity. 17. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 18. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 89. 19. See also Starobinski, 94. 20. In this sense, Fredric Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism is still seminal. 21. In an interview, Jelinek describes her writing as ‘‘an obligation to rip open compulsively those things that appear to be whole’’ [ein Muß, das, was einem heil erscheint, zwanghaft aufzureißen] (Meyer, Sturm und Zwang, 73).

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22. ‘‘die Zahna¨rztin der Sprache’’ (Elfriede Jelinek, Die Klavierspielerin [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983], 59). 23. For an overview of Beck’s notion of ‘‘second modernity,’’ see Ulrich Beck, ‘‘The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization,’’ in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). See also Ulrich Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 24. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 102. 25. ‘‘As far as modernism is concerned, we certainly must register a kind of aesthetic ‘uneven development’ on a world scale. For obvious reasons, the Axis powers missed their moment of modernism, as did the Soviet Union. All three countries (I omit Japan) had vibrant modernisms in the 1920s and until they were abruptly cut short around the same time in the early 1930s. On the aesthetic level, this situation certainly justifies Habermas’s well-known slogan of modernism as an unfulfilled promise, as an unfinished project. What is crucial for us is not only that they did not develop artistically, but that they also failed to reach their moment of theorization, which is to say, in our present context, the moment in which some properly ‘modernist’ aesthetic practice could be codified in the form of an ideology of modernism’’ (Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 167). 26. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘‘Modernity versus Postmodernity,’’ trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. 27. The notion of a German ‘‘belatedness’’ recalls debates about the German Sonderweg (alternative path) that have concerned scholars of German history. I am interested here in the aesthetic and affective consequences of this belatedness. For a well-documented overview of some discussions about German ‘‘belatedness’’ in the 1990s, see Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 6–8. See also Matthias Matussek’s analysis of German abnormality, in which he recalls Gordon Craig’s assessment of Germany as a ‘‘belated nation’’ (‘‘verspa¨tete Nation’’): ‘‘Wir Deutschen,’’ Wir Deutschen: Warum uns die anderen gern haben ko¨nnen (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2006), 11–22. 28. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 85. 29. See Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 30. Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 94. 31. Ingeborg Hoestery analyzes this cultural divide in Verschlungene Schriftzeichen: Intertextualita¨t von Literatur und Kunst in der Moderne/Postmoderne (Frankfurt/Main: Athenaeum, 1988). See also in this context Ernst Behler’s reading of Habermas in Derrida-Nietzsche, Nietzsche-Derrida (Munich: Scho¨ningh, 1988) and Paul Michael Lu¨tzeler, ‘‘Von der Postmoderne zur Globalisierung: Zur Interrelation der Diskurse,’’ in Ra¨ume der literarischen Postmoderne: Gender, Performita¨t, Globalisierung, ed. Paul Michael Lu¨tzeler (Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), 1–23: ‘‘Eines der hartna¨ckigsten Klischees, dem man in der Polemik gegen die Postmoderne begegnet, ist das des ‘Anything goes,’ das einer angeblichen postmodernen ‘Beliebigkeit’ auf allen Gebieten von Leben und Kunst’’ (Lu¨tzeler, 1). 32. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung: Philo-

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sophische Fragmente (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1993), 135. See also Eric Santner’s critique of the post-war conflation of fascism and the culture industry: ‘‘The representation of fascism, or of the connection between fascism and capitalism, or of the relation of both to the cultural sphere cannot and should not have to absorb the tasks of mourning and working through of guilt resulting from that other cultural legacy, the Holocaust’’ (Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990], 101). 33. See also Ernestine Schlant, ‘‘Postmodernism on Both Sides of the Atlantic,’’ in After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition, ed. Willy Riemer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 17–33. Schlant suggests that American postmodernism is more playful than European postmodernism: ‘‘Here, as in postmodern architecture, discovering the quotations may be a playful activity, a detective game within a detective novel. In fact, playfulness and openness, based on the exhilaration of inclusion, are some of the more salient characteristics of postmodernism on this side of the Atlantic, as opposed to the Continental version, where similarly observed phenomena often lead to apocalyptic presentiments’’ (22). 34. ‘‘Man nimmt deutsche Erde, und sie zerfa¨llt zu Asche in der Hand. Das ist ja mein ewiges Thema. Das ist ganz zwanghaft’’ (Sigrid Berka, ‘‘Ein Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 26.2 [1993]: 127–55; here: 137). 35. See, in this context, Andreas Huyssen, ‘‘Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,’’ New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 147–65. Huyssen analyzes Zafer Senocak’s novel Gefa¨hrliche Verwandtschaft in terms of the ‘‘repetition compulsions of the German-Jewish dialogue in Germany’’ (157). Senocak’s novel, Huyssen argues, provides the chance to ‘‘break through’’ this repetition compulsion via the introduction of a triangulation of the victim/victimizer dichotomy in the form of German-Turkish family history as the history of oppression of the Armenians (163). 36. ‘‘Es galt Joschka Fischers Diktum, dass Auschwitz der ‘Grundstein Deutschlands’ sei’’ (Matussek, 14). 37. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that the Holocaust functions as a negative model for enlightened acts in a globalized world. Here, the Holocaust would function as a global memory trope, though some non-Western theorists have taken issue with this argument. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). ¨ ffentlichkeit 38. ‘‘Die Debatte u¨ber Globalisierung erreicht, erschu¨ttert die O hierzulande verspa¨tet’’ (Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? 33). 39. Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 12. 40. See also Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,’’ in Postmodernism and Japan, eds. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 93–122. Sakai sees Japan along similar lines as a ‘‘heterogeneous instance that could not be easily integrated into the global configuration organized according to the pairing of the modern and the premodern’’ (97). 41. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15. 42. See also Enrique Dussel, ‘‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,’’ in The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–32. Dussel

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argues for a reconceptualization of the origins of modernity that, like Chakrabarty’s project, calls into question the universal applicability of the European models for modernity and postmodernity. 43. Boym, 57. 44. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 58. 45. Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2000), 130. 46. Ulrich Beck addresses the ‘‘denationalization shock’’ that affects Germany in the age of globalization, focusing primarily on the division and unification of Germany and the German welfare state. See, in particular, Was ist Globalisierung, 33–38. 47. Here, I am thinking also of Appadurai, who writes that both the United States and Germany ‘‘face the challenge of squaring Enlightenment universalisms and diasporic pluralism’’ (173). While this is, on the one hand, certainly true, this mode for comprehending Germany overlooks the period between the Enlightenment and ‘‘diasporic pluralism,’’ namely National Socialism. 48. Interestingly, critics of popular culture seem more inclined to view German aesthetics in light of a repetitive compulsion than Germanists and scholars of German literature. See, for example, Michael Burleigh’s review of the film Downfall: ‘‘Addicted to Cold Courtesies,’’ review of Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Times Literary Supplement, April 22, 2005, 18. Burleigh sees the film in light of what he calls ‘‘Germany’s own addiction to the Nazi past.’’ Similarly, in his review of contemporary German music (Alex Ross, ‘‘Ghost Sonata: What Happened to German Music?’’ The New Yorker, March 24, 2003, 64–71), Alex Ross points to the German compulsion to negate: ‘‘Why do German composers still fetishize dissonance and make a virtue of the ugly?’’ (64). He concludes that Germany cannot let go of its past: ‘‘This scorched-earth music yearns for Hitler’s hate; in some inverted way, it still salutes the Fu¨hrer, by fanatically disobeying his orders’’ (70–71). 49. Another compelling case in point is the Austrian film Gebu¨rtig (Austria, Poland, Germany, 2002), which Austria submitted as its choice for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2003 Oscars. The film deals explicitly with questions of Austrian guilt for the crimes of the Holocaust, tagging the line: ‘‘Once capital of the world for anti-Semitism, Vienna today has become the capital of forgetting’’ [Einst Welthauptstadt des Antisemitismus, ist Wien heute Vergessenshauptstadt geworden]. 50. ‘‘One of Germany’s most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world’s imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous century in human history. The words ‘‘Nazi,’’ ‘‘SS,’’ and ‘‘Auschwitz’’ are already global synonyms for the deepest inhumanity of fascism. Now the word ‘‘Stasi’’ is becoming a default global synonym for the secret police terrors of communism.’’ Timothy Garton Ashe, ‘‘The Stasi on Our Minds,’’ The New York Review of Books 54.9 (May 31, 2007), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20210. 51. To my mind, much of the ‘‘Popliteratur’’ associated with contemporary Berlin, for example, the works of Judith Hermann and Christian Kracht, sidesteps an engagement with history in a manner derivative of other national literatures. It seems to me that this type of literature, while claiming a global sensibility, rather mimics American aesthetic movements and a simplified notion

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of American postmodernism than contributing substantially to the aesthetic landscape of Germany and Austria. 52. The link between Tykwer’s Sissi and the Romy Schneider figure is made explicit in a scene from The Princess and the Warrior that was cut from the film, ‘‘Watching Television,’’ in which Sissi silently mouths the words spoken by Romy Schneider during a television broadcast of Sissy. (‘‘Deleted Scenes,’’ The Princess and the Warrior, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer [2000; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001]). See my discussion of this scene in chapter 3. 53. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967). 54. See, for example, Miriam Hansen, who describes what she sees as the ‘‘double bind of mourning work’’ in German culture. ‘‘That is, the narrative strategies I have identified entail a slippage from coming to terms with the past, in the sense of ‘working through,’ to a discourse of denial which strives to restore the damaged collective narcissism by eliminating from consciousness the very events that jeopardized the possibility of national identification in the first place’’ (cited in Santner, 100). See also Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Flinn puts forth the hypothesis that the repetitive nature of melancholia might actually be productive in its own right. 55. See also Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999). Schlant analyzes postwar moments of literary Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, focusing in large part on the generational issue as reflected in, for example, the ‘‘Va¨terbu¨cher’’ (‘‘father books’’), autobiographical attempts to come to terms with the familial and national past (80–98). 56. Michel Foucault, preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) xi–xv; here: xiii. 57. ‘‘Der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau’’ (Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir mu¨ssen wahre Sa¨tze finden: Gespra¨che und Interviews [Munich: Piper, 1983], 144). 58. Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 113. 59. ‘‘Es passt gut in eine globalisierte Welt, in der die Grenzen gefallen sind . . . Es ist luftig’’ (Matussek, 34). 60. ‘‘ein . . . dunkle[s] und muffige[s] Zimmer, in dem man, wenn man aus irgendeinem Grund eintritt, sofort die Vorha¨nge beiseite schieben und das Fenster o¨ffnen mo¨chte, um etwas Luft und Licht hineinzulassen. Doch wenn das Fenster keine Aussicht hat und sich der Raum daher nur wenig erhellen will?’’ (Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 7.) 61. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ in One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 225. Quoted in Jameson, A Singular Modernity. 62. My articulation of a split perspective recalls Sigrid Weigel’s use of the concept of a ‘‘schielender Blick’’ (a crossed gaze) for feminist studies. See Sigrid Weigel, ‘‘Der schielende Blick: Thesen zur Geschichte weiblicher Schreibpraxis,’’ in Aus dem Verborgenen zur Avantgarde: Ausgewa¨hlte Beitra¨ge zur feministischen Literaturwissenschaft der 80er Jahre, eds. Hiltrud Bontrup and Jan Christian Metzler (Hamburg: Argument, 2000), 35–94. 63. Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln,’’ Kein objektives Urteil—nur ein lebendiges. Texte zum Werk von Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Christine Koschel und Inge von Weidenbaum (Munich: Piper, 1989) 311–20.

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64. See Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? in particular chapter V.3: ‘‘Polygamie of place: to be married to several places is the entrance of globalization into one’s own life’’ [Ortspolygamie: Mit mehreren Orten verheiratet zu sein ist das Einfallstor der Globalisierung im eigenen Leben] (Beck, 127–35).

Chapter 1. Displacing Nostalgia 1. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 86. See also Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Hoesterey revives the notion of pastiche, arguing against Jameson’s definition of pastiche as ‘‘blank parody’’ (x). 2. Hutcheon, ‘‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.’’ 3. In the ‘‘Kritische Ausgabe’’ (Critical Edition, hereafter cited as ‘‘KA’’) of Bachmann’s ‘‘Todesarten’’-Projekt (‘‘Todesarten’’-Projekt, 4 vols., eds. Monika Albrecht and Dirk Go¨ttsche [Munich: Piper, 1995]), Monika Albrecht and Dirk Go¨ttsche make the case that The Book of Franza (Das Buch Franza) and not The Case of Franza (Der Fall Franza) was Bachmann’s intended title for the Franza fragment (KA, 393). They base their argument on the correspondence between Bachmann and her editors, and critics have generally adopted this title in their discussions of the text. However, in Ingeborg Bachmann: Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 1999), Sigrid Weigel uses the term ‘‘Franza-Buch’’ (Franza book). She also takes issue with the decision of the editors of the Kritische Ausgabe to include the Three Paths to the Lake (Simultan) stories within this project—decisions that, she asserts ‘‘cannot be justified on any grounds’’ [lassen sich durch nichts rechtfertigen] (511). Other critics who question decisions concerning the title of the Franza fragment include Mireilla Tabah (‘‘Zur Genese einer Figur: Franza,’’ 91–107) and Inge von Weidenbaum (‘‘Anmerkungen zur Werkausgabe von Ingeborg Bachman 1978 und dem ‘Todesarten’-Projekt von 1995,’’ 23–26). Both essays appear in the edited volume ‘‘Text-Tollhaus fu¨r Bachmann-Su¨chtige?’’: Lesearten zur Kritischen Ausgabe von Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesarten-Projekt, ed. Irene HeidelbergerLeonard (Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), and each author suggests that the true title of the Franza fragment ‘‘remains at this point undecided’’ [bleibt bisher unentschieden] (Tabah, 91). In this chapter, I use the term ‘‘Franza fragment,’’ since this denotation likewise leaves the question of the intended title open. 4. ‘‘Aber der Schock war groß, denn ich habe plo¨tzlich begriffen, daß es so nicht geht. . . . das Manuskript kommt mir wie eine hilflose Anspielung auf etwas vor, das erst geschrieben werden muß’’ (KA 397). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 5. Scholars take a variety of positions on the success or failure of the ambitious project of the Franza book, yet the fragment seems to resonate more deeply with time, despite the very specific cultural context depicted in this and the other Ways of Dying works. The newest wave of Bachmann criticism explicitly takes into account Bachmann’s desire to write a sort of ‘‘history of morals’’ [Sittengeschichte] of post-war Vienna, often mingling the theoretical approaches common to the eighties with a sort of New Historicism that situates Bachmann’s texts ¨ ber die Zeit within their very specific cultural milieu. The essays in the volumes ‘‘U schreiben’’: Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Essays zu Ingeborg Bachmanns ‘‘Todesarten’’-Projekt (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann, 1998, 2000, 2004),

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collected and edited by Monika Albrecht and Dirk Go¨ttsche, attempt to explore Bachmann’s œuvre through this lens. For example, Sara Lennox (‘‘Repra¨sentationen von Weiblichkeit in Ingeborg Bachmanns Der gute Gott von Manhattan’’ in ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben 2, 15–48), Monika Albrecht (‘‘ ‘Es muß erst geschrieben U werden’: Kolonisation und magische Weltsicht in Ingeborg Bachmanns Roman¨ ber die Zeit schreiben 1, 59–91), and Dirk Fragment Das Buch Franza,’’ in U Go¨ttsche (‘‘Ein ‘Bild der letzten zwanzig Jahre’: Die Nachkriegszeit als Gegenstand einer kritischen Geschichtsschreibung des gesellschaftlichen Alltags in ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben 1, 161–202) Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesarten-Projekt,’’ in U provide in their essays a historical context for Bachmann’s exploration of particular topics, reading her through a critical, historical lens. 6. Many critics have read Bachmann’s novel fragment as a comment on post-fascist Austria and the problem of cultural memory. This is, it seems to me, the thread that has been most commonly taken up by critics in the last decade or so. See Dirk Go¨ttsche, ‘‘Ein ‘Bild der letzten zwanzig Jahre.’ ’’ See also HansUlrich Thamer, ‘‘Nationalsozialismus und Nachkriegsgesellschaft: Geschichtliche Erfahrung bei Ingeborg Bachmann und der o¨ffentliche Umgang mit der NS-Zeit in Deutschland,’’ in Ingeborg Bachmann—neue Beitra¨ge zu ihrem Werk, eds. Dirk Go¨ttsche and Hubert Ohl (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann, 1993), 225– 24. Thamer’s essay is an early example of the current historical trend, since he contextualizes Bachmann’s work within the attempts in postwar Austria to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis. See also Holger Gehle, NS-Zeit und literarische Gegenwart bei Ingeborg Bachmann (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universita¨ts-Verlag, 1995). Imke Meyer analyzes victim/victimizer constellations in the context of the Nazi past in Bachmann’s short story ‘‘Unter Mo¨rdern und Irren’’ (Imke Meyer, ‘‘ ‘Ein Schandgesetz erkennt man, nach dem alles angerichtet ist’: Ta¨terOpfer-Konstellationen in Ingeborg Bachmanns Erza¨hlung ‘Unter Mo¨rdern und Irren,’ ’’ Modern Austrian Literature 31.1 (1998): 39–55.) For an exhaustive overview of Bachmann reception of the eighties and nineties, see Sara Lennox, ‘‘The Feminist Reception of Ingeborg Bachmann,’’ Women in German Yearbook 8 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993): 73–111. 7. Bachmann scholarship of the eighties and early nineties tended to focus on the oppressive structures associated with patriarchy, either pointing to moments of utopia or alterity or asserting, in contrast, that the Franza fragment does not transcend the oppressive structures it sets out to criticize. Sabine Wilke articulates this critical problem as follows: ‘‘The question is, now, whether and how Bachmann aesthetically shapes the realm beyond such a neutralization of the other (of woman)’’ [Die Frage ist nun, ob und wie Bachmann den Bereich jenseits dieser Neutralisierung des Anderen (der Frau) a¨sthetisch gestaltet] (Sabine Wilke, Dialektik und Geschlecht: Feministische Schreibpraxis in der Gegenwartsliteratur [Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg, 1996], 124). Examples of essays that point to Bachmann’s successful critique and transcendence, if fleeting, of patriarchal aesthetic structures include Christa Gu¨rtler, ‘‘Der Fall Franza: Eine Reise durch eine Krankheit und ein Buch u¨ber ein Verbrechen,’’ in Der dunkle Schatten, dem ich schon seit Anfang folge: Ingeborg Bachmann—Vorschla¨ge zu einer neuen Lektu¨re des Werks, ed. Hans Ho¨ller (Munich: Lo¨cker, 1982), 71–85; Marianne Schuller, ‘‘Wider den Bedeutungswahn: Zum Verfahren der Dekomposition in Der Fall Franza,’’ in Text Ⳮ Kritik, ed. Heinz Ludig Arnold (Munich: Edition Text Ⳮ Kritik, 1984),150–55; and Sigrid Weigel, ‘‘Ein Ende mit der Schrift, Ein andrer Anfang: Zur Entwicklung von Ingeborg Bachmanns Schreibweise,’’ in Text Ⳮ Kritik (1984), 58–93. Essays that tend to answer Wilke’s ques-

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tion in the negative include Wilke; Sara Lennox, ’’Geschlecht Rasse und Geschichte in Der Fall Franza,’’ in Text Ⳮ Kritik (1984), 156–80; and Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln,’’ in Kein objektives Urteil—nur ein lebendiges: Texte zum Werk von Ingeborg Bachmann, eds. Christine Koschel und Inge von Weidenbaum (Munich: Piper, 1989), 311–20. 8. See, for example, Monika Albrecht, ‘‘ ‘Sire, this village is yours.’ Ingeborg ¨ ber Bachmanns Romanfragment Das Buch Franza aus postkolonialer Sicht,’’ in U die Zeit schreiben 3, 159–73. Albrecht argues that Bachmann’s text represents the internalization of colonial thought structures via Franza’s desire to be ‘‘colonized’’ by Glyde. Newer essays that fall into this category include Monika Albrecht, ‘‘ ‘Es muß erst geschrieben werden’: Kolonisation und magische Weltsicht ¨ ber die Zeit in Ingeborg Bachmanns Roman-Fragment Das Buch Franza,’’ in U schreiben (1998), 59–91; M. Moustapha Diallo, ‘‘ ‘Die Erfahrung der Variabilita¨t’: Kritischer Exotismus in Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesarten-Projekt im Kontext des ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben interkulturellen Dialogs zwischen Afrika und Europa,’’ in U 1, 33–58. See also Sara Lennox, ‘‘ ‘White Ladies’ und ‘Dark Continent’: Ingeborg ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben Bachmanns Todesarten-Projekt aus postkolonialer Sicht,’’ U 1, 13–33. Lennox argues that Bachmann’s use of race in the Franza fragment is sometimes critical and at other times simply a projection screen (14). 9. ‘‘Obwohl es Bachmann in der Arbeit am Franza-Buch mit dem Konzept des Spa¨tschadens also gelungen ist, den preka¨ren Opfervergleich in einen komplexeren Geda¨chtnisschauplatz aufzulo¨sen, hat sie die Arbeit an diesem Buch dennoch abgebrochen, vermutlich nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil die weibliche Hauptfigur darin trotz allem durch die in ihr verko¨rperte symbolische Wiederholung tendenziell in der Position eines Opfers fixiert bleibt’’ (Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 505). 10. This point has been made by a number of critics. In contrast, Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner attempts partially to rescue Bachmann from such accusations by showing how the writings of Bachmann and Plath are ‘‘informed by both their reaction to the events of the Third Reich, as well as by the Austrian psychoanalytic tradition with which both were familiar and in which women have been associated with Jews.’’ Krick-Aigner, ‘‘The Female Poet as Persecuted Jew: (Mis)representation in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath,’’ in After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition, ed. Willy Riemer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 298–311; here: 299. 11. ‘‘Another aspect of Bachmann’s own dissatisfaction with the Franza manuscript might be located in the fact that in it, the reflexion of literarylinguistic elements recedes in relation to the symbolic structure. This changes in the novel Malina, in whose manner of writing and composition are included constant reflections on genre, discourse, and language patterns’’ [Ein weiterer Aspekt von Bachmanns eigenem Ungenu¨gen am Franza-Manuskript ko¨nnte darin zu suchen sein, daß die Reflexion literarisch-sprachlicher Momente dort hinter die symbolische Struktur zuru¨ckgetreten ist. Das a¨ndert sich im Roman Malina, in dessen Schreibweise und Komposition sta¨ndige Reflexionen auf Genre-, Diskurs- und Sprachmuster eingeschlossen sind] (Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 526). 12. In contrast, see Lennox (‘‘Repra¨sentationen von Weiblichkeit’’): ‘‘I think such an interpretation would make available a new and usable strategy for reading Bachmann’s Ways of Dying. Additionally, this strategy could explain why Bachmann abandoned the novel The Book of Franza in favor of the more complex literary strategies of the novel Malina and the narratives of the Three Paths

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to the Lake volume: Franza understands what has been done to her and rebells against it; the I in Malina and the women in the Three Paths to the Lake narratives cannot fashion a story that would allow them to tell of their own destruction’’ [Ich denke, eine solche Deutung wu¨rde eine neue und brauchbare Lesestrategie fu¨r Bachmanns Todesarten bereitstellen, die zudem erkla¨ren ko¨nnte, warum Bachmann den Roman Das Buch Franza zugunsten der komplexeren literarischen Strategien des Romans Malina und der Erza¨hlungen des SimultanBandes aufgegeben hat: Franza versteht, was ihr angetan worden ist, und sie lehnt sich dagegen auf; das Ich in Malina und die Frauen in den Simultan-Erza¨hlungen bringen keine Geschichte zustande, die es ihnen erlauben wu¨rde, von ihrer eigenen Zersto¨rung zu erza¨hlen] (Lennox, 46). 13. Sara Lennox (‘‘White Ladies,’’ 21) and Monika Albrecht (‘‘Es muß erst geschrieben werden,’’ 83) similarly assert that the Franza fragment contains moments that must be interpreted as irony, such as the Coca-Cola bottle from which Franza constantly drinks in Egypt. Albrecht shows how the perspective of the narrator breaks at times from that of the figure Franza. According to Sara Lennox ‘‘Coca-Cola can serve as an easily identifiable symbol of Western cultural imperialism’’ [kann Coca-Cola als ein leicht erkennbares Symbol des westlichen Kulturimperialismus dienen] (‘‘White Ladies,’’ 21). In her analysis of the representation of race and ‘‘otherness’’ in the Franza fragment, Lennox locates moments of ironic distance between the narrator and Franza who, according to Lennox, pictures herself as a heroic martyr whose masochistic sacrifice will rescue the Third World. Lennox views this as a liberal version of the belief that Europe could enlighten the ‘‘dark continent’’ (‘‘White Ladies,’’ 20). Lennox locates Bachmann’s representation of race within an academic tradition endemic to the 1960s for which racial ‘‘otherness’’ tended to function as a projection screen (14, 15). At the same time, however, Lennox sees Bachmann as one of the few German-language authors of the postwar period who attempts to expose the racism underlying European fantasies (15). 14. On Jencks and double-coding, see Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche, esp. 35. 15. See also Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s use of the term in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 260. 16. Hoesterey, Pastiche. 17. Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, trans. and intro. Peter Filkins (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). Filkins’s translation is largely based on Albrecht and Go¨ttsche’s edition of the texts that form the Franza book, but Filkins ‘‘also slightly rearranges them in order to attain a more readable text that represents a good number of the directions Bachmann took’’ (Filkins, ‘‘Translater’s Note and Acknowledgments,’’ xxii). Whenever passages from the Critical Edition (KA) are quoted that have equivalents in Filkins’s translation, I rely on his text (Book of Franza). All other translations are my own. 18. Sara Lennox (‘‘Bachmann Reading/Reading Bachmann: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in the Todesarten,’’ The German Quarterly 61.2 (Spring 1988): 183–93) and Monika Albrecht (‘‘Sire, this village is yours’’) have pointed to the link to Collins. Lennox suggests that this reference invites the reader to interpret Bachmann’s novel against the grain (191). 19. ‘‘Just as often, though, one encounters in her [Bachmann’s] writing a version of intertextuality that consists of the copresence of multiple voices from radically different texts—sometimes in the form of a quote or an allusion, as an echo of traces of readings or polyphony, similar to the way in which Roland

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Barthes characterizes the intertext, ascribing to it traits of seduction in the image of the siren.’’ [Ebenso ha¨ufig aber begegnet in ihrem Schreiben eine Spielart der Intertextualita¨t, die in der Kopra¨senz zahlreicher Stimmen aus unterschiedlichsten Texten besteht, sei es in Form von Zitat oder Anspielung, als Nachhall von Lektu¨respuren oder Polyphonie, a¨hnlich wie Roland Barthes den Intertext charakterisiert und ihm im Bild der Sirene auch Zu¨ge der Verfu¨hrung zuschreibt] (Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 188). 20. Joachim Eberhardt, Es gibt fu¨r mich keine Zitate: Intertextualita¨t im dichterischen Werk Ingeborg Bachmanns (Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002), 451. 21. See, for example, Sigrid Weigel, ‘‘ ‘Stadt ohne Gewa¨hr’—Topographien der Erinnerung in der Intertextualita¨t von Bachmann und Benjamin,’’ in Ingeborg Bachmann—neue Beitra¨ge zu ihrem Werk, 253–64. Weigel writes of a ‘‘silent intertextuality’’ [verschwiegene Intertextualita¨t] within Bachmann’s texts (261). 22. See also Joachim Eberhardt, especially 451–53, who points out the pitfalls of the analysis of intertexuality in Bachmann criticism. 23. Ingeborg Bachmann’s library has been catalogued by Robert Pichl, ‘‘Ingeborg Bachmanns Privatbibliothek. Ihr Quellenwert fu¨r die Forschung,’’ in Ingeborg Bachmann—Neue Beitra¨ge zu ihrem Werk, 381–88. ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben, volumes 1, 24. See, for example, the essay collections U 2, and 3. 25. Karen Remmler has analyzed Bachmann’s Franza fragment in terms of correspondences between Bachmann’s representations of remembrance and the writings of Walter Benjamin. Karen Remmler, Waking the Dead: Correspondences between Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Ways of Dying (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1996); see especially 41–87. 26. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 60. 27. ‘‘Ich habe schon vorher daru¨ber nachgedacht, wo fa¨ngt der Faschismus an. Er fa¨ngt nicht an mit den ersten Bomben, die geworfen werden, er fa¨ngt nicht an mit dem Terror, u¨ber den man schreiben kann, in jeder Zeitung. Er fa¨ngt an in Beziehungen zwischen Menschen. Der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau’’ (Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir mu¨ssen wahre Sa¨tze finden: Gespra¨che und Interviews [Munich: Piper, 1983], 144). 28. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects, 101. 29. ‘‘Im Faschismus ist die Frau, wagt sie es, u¨ber ihre Rolle als Geba¨rerin und Pflegerin hinauszutreten, Seuche, Feind im Inneren, ‘Fa¨ulnis auf Raten’ (Ce´line). Sie wird zur allgemeinen Verderberin, zum Feind von außen. Wie die Juden’’ (Jelinek, ‘‘Krieg,’’ 312). 30. Sigrid Weigel has articulated the function of the family in postwar German and Austrian cultures as follows: ‘‘For the collective of perpetrators, different forms of denial, defense against, and de-realization of the past are described. The favored place to enact them is the family or, respectively, the oedipal triad, so that that which has been split off often returns in the unconscious of members of the second generation’’ [Fu¨r das Ta¨terkollektiv werden verschiedene Formen der Verleugnung, der Abwehr und der Entwirklichung der Vergangenheit beschrieben, deren bevorzugter Austragungsort die Familie bzw. die o¨dipale Triade ist, so daß das Abgespaltene nicht selten im Unbewußten von Angeho¨rigen der zweiten Generation zuru¨ckkehrt] (Weigel, ‘‘Zur Polyphonie des Anderen: Traumatisierung und Begehren in Bachmanns imagina¨rer Autobiographie,’’ Ingeborg Bachmann: Die Schwarzkunst der Worte, eds. John Pattillo-Hess and Wilhelm Petrasch [Vienna: Verein Volksbildungshaus Wiener Urania, 1993], 9–25; here: 18).

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31. Quoted after Ingeborg Bachmann, Der Fall Franza. Requiem fu¨r Fanny Goldmann, eds. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Mu¨nster (Munich: Piper, 1990), 75. 32. ‘‘Plo¨tzlich aber nimmt sich dein Traum zusammen und tut den großen Wurf, ein Shakespeare hat ihm die Hand geliehen, ein Goya ihm die Bu¨hnenbilder gemalt, plo¨tzlich erhebt er sich aus den Niederungen deiner Banalita¨t und zeigt dir dein großes Drama, deinen Vater und einen Gesellen, der Jordan heißt, in einer Person’’ (KA 2, 229). 33. ‘‘Und ebenbu¨rtig einer großen Figur fa¨ngt der Hymnus an, die ersten unterirdischen Querverbindungen, die Alten sind immer dabei, deine Mutter, an die du nie denkst, lehnt an jeder Wand, deine flottierende Angst, fu¨r die du keinen Grund weißt, spielt dir eine Geschichte vor, daß dir Ho¨ren und Sehen vergeht, jetzt erst weißt du, warum du dich a¨ngstigtest, und so sah ich auf einen Friedhof beim Sonnenuntergang, und in dem Traum hieß es: das ist der Friedhof der To¨chter. Und ich sah auf mein eigenes Grab hinunter, denn ich geho¨rte zu den To¨chtern, und mein Vater war nicht da. Aber ich war seinetwegen gestorben und hier begraben’’ (KA 2, 229–30). 34. Weigel draws this path from the Franza fragment to Malina, arguing, however, that Bachmann succeeds in representing in Malina a daughter, ‘‘sitting in the father prison,’’ who is simultaneously victim and victimizer, something that, according to Weigel, the Franza fragment, due to its excessive symbolism, does not achieve (Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 506). 35. ‘‘Die Vaterfigur ist natu¨rlich die mo¨rderische . . . die verschiedene Kostu¨me tra¨gt, bis sie am Ende alle ablegt und dann als der Mo¨rder zu erkennen ist. Ein Realist wu¨rde wahrscheinlich viele Furchtbarkeiten erza¨hlen, die einer bestimmten Person oder Personen zustoßen. Hier wird es zusammengenommen in diese große Person, die das ausu¨bt, was die Gesellschaft ausu¨bt . . .’’ (Bachmann, Wir mu¨ssen wahre Sa¨tze finden, 97). 36. Peter Brinkemper argues that Bachmann’s text engages in a dialectic of metaphor and metonymy (159). Brinkemper also points to the ‘‘shifting’’ [Verschiebungsbewegung] (178) between the figures of the father and Jordan. Peter ¨ sBrinkemper, ‘‘Ingeborg Bachmanns Der Fall Franza als Paradigma weiblicher A thetik,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 18.3/4 (1985): 147–82. 37. ‘‘Da sah sie das Bild, in dem roten Arabien. . . . Ich muß laufen, es wird schon deutlicher, er ist es, ich muß noch bis zu ihm, aber es war nicht Martin, der zuru¨ckwich, aber er ist es ja, er in dem weißen Mantel, er steigt aus dem Bild, er ist gekommen aus Wien, in dem Trostmantel, um mich heimzuholen, nein, in dem schrecklichen Mantel, den er abwirft, aber er ist es nicht. Mein Vater. Ich habe meinen Vater gesehen. Er wirft seinen Mantel ab, seine vielen Ma¨ntel ab. . . . Aber es ist nicht er, er ist nicht mein Vater. . . . Gott kommt auf mich zu, und ich komme auf Gott zu. Sie lief wieder und weinte, weinte, . . . Ich habe Gott gesehen’’ (KA 2, 286–87). ¨ quivalent 38. ‘‘Sie war immer in Wien, nicht hier, sie hatte nur das richtige A eines Raums gewa¨hlt, in dem sie lebte mit ihren Vorstellungen, ja, weniger als dem, nicht dem Erinnern, nichts dergleichen, sondern mit dem andauernden Stattfinden dessen, was man als stattgefunden habend bezeichnet. Es war auch keine Rekapitulation einer Geschichte, es hatte fu¨r sie auch keine Ortsvera¨nderung stattgefunden, sie reiste auch nicht, sie war immer an ein und demselben Ort, in Baden oder Wien, denn fu¨r sie waren diese beiden Orte in Suez hineingeflochten, und die Zeit vor zwei und drei Monaten war nicht vorbei, sondern griff, ein Zahnrad ins andere, in diesen Tag, in jeden Tag’’ (KA 2, 27).

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39. ‘‘Er hat sie wenigstens mit sich nachhause genommen. Er hat mich nicht einmal, Franza fing zu schluchzen [an]. Immer wird hier die Frau sein, Franza nickte und ging, ich bin die Frau geworden, das ist es. Sie stieg in den Wagen und fuhr zum Hotel zuru¨ck. Ich liege dort an ihrer Statt. Und mein Haar wird, zu einem langen, langen Strick gedreht, von ihm in Wien gehalten. Ich bin gefesselt, ich komme nie mehr los’’ (KA 2, 308). 40. Franza’s masochism is presented via symptoms throughout the fragment. In an early draft of the novel, Franza’s desires are expressed in terms of selfsacrifice: ‘‘Making sacrifices definitely had to be part of it, and it should be grand, full of strenuousness, but also of glory for herself, with an early death’’ (my translation) [Opferbringen mußte unbedingt dazugeho¨ren, und großartig sollte es sein, voller Anstrengung, aber glorreich fu¨r sie selber, mit fru¨hem Tod, (KA 2, 233–34). Likewise, she suffers from anorexia (KA 2, 246). Critics have also noted the reference to Sacher-Masoch in an early draft (KA 2, 16). For an analysis of female masochism as internalization and desire for recognition of the father, see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988). See also Sara Lennox (‘‘White Ladies’’ and ‘‘Repra¨sentationen von Weiblichkeit’’), whose essays are concerned, in part, with the role of masochism in Bachmann’s texts, and, especially, in the Franza fragment. See also Barbara Mennel, ‘‘ ‘Euch auspeitschen, ihr ewigen Masochistinnen, euch foltern, bis ihr den Verstand verliert’: Masochismus in ¨ ber die Zeit schreiben Ingeborg Bachmanns Romanfragment Das Buch Franza,’’ U 2, 111–25. In ‘‘Ru¨ckzu¨ge und Selbstversuche’’ (Kein objektives Urteil, 502–15), Marlis Gerhardt suggests that masochism in Bachmann’s text ‘‘goes nowhere; she remains without gratification’’ [la¨uft ins Leere, sie bleibt ohne Gratifikation] (506). Indeed, female masochism in the twentieth century does not necessarily inspire masculine love. 41. The critics Franziska Frei Gerlach (‘‘Auf Sand Gebaut: Anselm Kiefers Antrag zur Geschwisterschaft in Ingeborg Bachmann,’’ Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 44 (2000): 235–64) and Monika Meister (‘‘Der Fall Moosbrugger—Der Fall Franza: Machtstruktur und sanktioniertes Verbrechen bei Musil und Bachmann,’’ Kunst, Wissenschaft und Politik von Robert Musil bis Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Josef Strutz [Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986], 63–81) have explored the brother/sister relationship in the Franza book in terms of an incestuous and mythical attachment informed by the Isis and Osiris myth. Ortrud Gutjahr argues that the incest taboo is not formed in the relationship between Franza and Martin due to the absence of their parents (544). (Ortrud Gutjahr, ‘‘Faschismus in der Geschlechterbeziehung? Die Angst vor dem anderen und geschlechtsspezifische Aggression in Ingeborg Bachmanns Der Fall Franza,’’ Kein objektives Urteil, 541–55). In contrast, see Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, ‘‘Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesarten-Zyklus und das Thema Auschwitz,’’ in Kritische Wege der Landnahme, eds. Robert Pichl and Alexander Stillmark (Vienna: Hora, 1994), 113– 125. Sara Lennox points out that Martin is climbing the pyramids—a traditionally male activity—at the time when Franza’s rape occurs so that he is allied with the oppressors. Sara Lennox, ‘‘Geschlecht, Rasse und Geschichte in Der Fall Franza,’’ Text Ⳮ Kritik, 156–80. 42. ‘‘Sire, this village is yours. Ob das ging? Sie sprach so deutlich, als stu¨nde sie in der Bank und mu¨sse bis zum Podium geho¨rt werden. We have no arms. Falsch: Waffen hieß anders, sie sah ihn beschwo¨rend an, und We have no germans and no SS, the people has left, war das richtig, oder lived? The village, because of fear. Und Sire und der Frieden, dieser Ko¨nig und der erste Mann in

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ihrem Leben, hatten ein Einsehen und verstanden auch noch, als sie nicht mehr rezitierte. Spa¨ter ging sie mit dem Captain durch das Dorf, begleitet von mehreren Soldaten, und das Wunder hielt an’’ (KA 2, 181). 43. Dirk Go¨ttsche (‘‘Ein ‘Bild der letzten zwanzig Jahre’ ’’) and Hans-Ulrich Thamer have each argued that the Franza fragment reveals a regressive affinity ¨ sterreich]. Go¨tton the part of the protagonist for the ‘‘House Austria’’ [Haus O sche links this nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire with Franza’s bond with her family, suggesting that ‘‘social history’’ [Zeitgeschichte] and ‘‘family history’’ [Familiengeschichte] coincide in this instance (193). 44. Sara Lennox (‘‘Bachmann Reading/Reading Bachmann,’’ 191) and Monika Albrecht (‘‘ ‘Sire, this village is yours,’ ’’ 164–65) also point to the ironies in this passage. 45. The meanings of names themselves are called into question in Bachmann’s text. Franza forges the passport that gets her to Egypt by using her maiden name, and, in considering the family name ‘‘Ranner,’’ Franza and Martin ‘‘were surprised how few first names were always in use all over Galicia, always the same ones. Martin, Jakob, Kaspar, Johann, Albin, it didn’t go much further, Elise, Agnes, Terzija, Marica, Magdalena, Angela, then once again Elise and Joseph and Magdalena. It was going around in circles. Not only the Ranners and the Gasparins had gone around in circles like that, and in addition around their family names, the vulgo Tobai, so that they had a dual baptism like the House Austria, which had gone around in circles with its three double names until its collapse and which, because of this, still suffered from amnesia, hearing the names for something it no longer was’’ [wunderten sich, wie wenig Vornamen rund um Galicien immer in Gebrauch gewesen waren, immer wieder dieselben. Martin, Jakob, Kaspar, Johann, Albin, viel weiter ging es nicht, Elise, Agnes, Terzija, Marica, Magdalena, Angela, dann schon wieder Elise und Joseph und Magdalena. Es drehte sich im Kreis. Nicht nur die Ranner und die Gasparin hatten sich so immer im Kreis gedreht, und dazu um ihre Hausnamen, die vulgo Tobai, ¨ sterreich, das sich mit seinen damit sie doppelt getauft waren wie das Haus O dreidoppelten Namen immer im Kreis gedreht hatte bis zu seinem Einsturz und davon noch an Geda¨chtnisverlust litt, die Namen ho¨rte fu¨r etwas, das es nicht mehr war] (KA 2, 170). The limited number of names reflects the lack of individuality and ‘‘substitutive’’ nature of identity in the text as well as the nostalgic nature of these well-known names. 46. Marianne Schuller (‘‘Wider den Bedeutungswahn’’) suggests that cause and effect are reversed in Bachmann’s novel fragment. In a reversal of Freud, Schuller argues that Franza’s hysteria is not cured but rather caused by psychoanalysis (Schuller, 151). 47. ‘‘Er stand da, wirklich wie ein Detektiv, als mu¨ßte er jetzt zuerst einmal Kreidestriche machen und Fuß- und Gla¨serspuren sichern, um sich genau zu erinnern, wo jeder gestanden war’’ (KA 2, 141). 48. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,’’ in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, eds. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 81–118. 49. ‘‘Martin nahm seine Fu¨llfeder heraus und versuchte, diese Zeichen so genau wie mo¨glich in sein Notizbuch zu u¨bertragen, und steckte es in die Tasche. Er u¨berlegte, ob er die Bla¨tter mitnehmen solle, dann entschied er sich fu¨r eine andere Lo¨sung, er ließ sie obenauf auf dem Schreibtisch liegen, der Professor sollte ruhig sehen, daß er sie in der Hand gehabt hatte. Nachteile einer unvollkommenen Schulbildung. Keine Kenntnis von Ku¨rzeln, und hier war alles geku¨rzelt’’ (KA 2, 146–47).

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50. Critics have explored the brother/sister relationship in the Franza book in terms of an incestuous and mythical attachment, but this mythical relationship, it seems to me, is not sustained by the adult siblings. Both Franza and Martin idealize their childhood bond, and their adult relationship is not without an erotic component, yet Martin consistently misreads Franza. Likewise, in the hallucination in the desert, Martin is the first in a metonymic line of powerful male figures (Martin, Jordan, father, God), suggesting rather correspondence than difference with these figures. See also Tabah, ‘‘Zur Genese einer Figur: Franza’’: ‘‘The time of sibling symbiosis and gender union is irrevocably over for Martin and therefore for Franza, as well: it is only valid anymore as a utopian projection into the lost childhood’’ [Die Zeit der geschwisterlichen Symbiose und der Geschlechtervereinigung ist fu¨r Martin und daher auch fu¨r Franza endgu¨ltig vorbei: Sie gilt nur noch als utopische Projektion in die verlorene Kindheit] (Tabah, 102). 51. Examples of Martin’s miscomprehension of Franza litter the text. As she realizes that she has scared Dr. Ko¨rner away from Cairo, Franza feels empowered and clenches her fists, a gesture that Martin not only misunderstands but attempts to influence: ‘‘Martin saw that she had clenched her fists. He did not understand her remark, the contextlessness of such sentences paralyzed him, and to get her out of her torpor, he took her hand, opened her fist, and talked about something else’’ (my translation) [Martin sah, daß sie die Fa¨uste geballt hatte. Er verstand ihre Bemerkung nicht, die Zusammenhanglosigkeit solcher Sa¨tze la¨hmte ihn, und um sie aus ihrer Erstarrung zu holen, nahm er sie bei der Hand, o¨ffnete sanft ihre Faust und sprach von etwas anderem] (KA 2, 317). 52. Lennox, ‘‘Geschlecht, Rasse und Geschichte in Der Fall Franza.’’ 53. Marc Lits, ‘‘The Classical Origins and the Development of the Detective Genre,’’ Paradoxa 1.2 (1995): 126–44; here: 127. Lits bases his arguments on the work of theorists of the genre, including Jean-Claude Vareille, Jacques Dubois, and Tzvetan Todorov. 54. Carl D. Malmgren, Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2001), 13. 55. Quoted in Malmgren, 95. 56. See also Bachmann: ‘‘She was inhaling this slowly and silently next to him, and all of the noise-making, discussing, door-slamming, glass-throwing, strangling, lurking seemed to her like a monstrous theatrical staging, a wretched cheap theater’s nine-year-long production of affections, interests, judgments, demands, and answers discussed to death’’ (my translation) [das atmete sie langsam und leise neben ihm, und das ganze La¨rmende, Diskussionsreiche, Tu¨renschlagende, Gla¨serwerfende, Wu¨rgende, Lauernde erschien ihr wie eine monstro¨se theatralische Vorstellung, eine neunja¨hrige Vorstellung eines Schmierentheaters von zerredeten Zuneigungen, Interessen, Urteilen, Forderungen, Antworten] (KA 2, 224). 57. Matthew Sweet, introduction to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. with an introduction and notes by Matthew Sweet (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), xiii–xiv. 58. See Dirk Go¨ttsche, ‘‘Auf der Suche nach der ‘grossen Form’—Ingeborg Bachmanns erster Todesarten-Roman,’’ in Klangfarben: Stimmen zu Ingeborg Bachmann. Internationales Symposium Universita¨t des Saarlandes 7. und 8. November 1996 (St. Ingbert: Ro¨hrig, 2000), 19–40. Go¨ttsche draws a thematic link between the early Eugen-Roman and the later texts of the Todesarten cycle such as the Franza fragment.

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59. See also Dirk Go¨ttsche, ‘‘ ‘Die Schwarzkunst der Worte’—Zur Barbeyund Rimbaud-Rezeption in Ingeborg Bachmanns ‘Todesarten’-Zyklus,’’ Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft, 3d ser. 17 (1987–90): 127–62. 60. In Les Diaboliques, however, the dangerous elements are almost without exception the feminine and, specifically, feminine sexuality. 61. ‘‘Es wa¨re falsch zu sagen, daß Franza damals eine heftige Reaktion gehabt habe, im Gegenteil, sie dachte nicht einmal sehr nach, ging aber zwei Wochen spa¨ter zuru¨ck und entfernte die Karte, ohne nachzuforschen, ob diese Publikation eine Belastung darstellen ko¨nne oder nicht. Sie wu¨nschte nicht, es zu wissen, noch weniger ihrem Baron davon Mitteilung zu machen oder ihm eine Frage zu stellen’’ (KA 2, 47; italics mine). 62. Christa Bu¨rger points to Bachmann’s ambivalent relationship to father figures and, by extension, fascism, and she concludes that Bachmann’s political stance as reflected in her literary production was ‘‘equivocal’’ (8). Christa Bu¨rger, ‘‘ ‘I and We’: Ingeborg Bachmann’s Emergence from Aesthetic Modernism,’’ New German Critique 47 (Spring-Summer 1989): 3–28. Sabine Go¨lz interprets the struggle with the father in Bachmann’s lyrical work as ‘‘the Oedipal conflict of an upcoming son-poet with one great Father-Precursor, be it Milton, Wordsworth, or Goethe, all rivals in their desire to possess the muse’’ (Sabine Go¨lz, ‘‘Reading in the Twilight: Canonization, Gender, the Limits of Language, and a Poem by Ingeborg Bachmann,’’ New German Critique 47 (Spring-Summer 1989): 29–52; here: 43).

Chapter 1. Provincializing Nazism 1. Alan Riding, ‘‘Austrian Writer of Sex, Violence and Politics Wins Nobel,’’ New York Times, October 8, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/ international/Europe/08nobel.html?oref⳱login&page. 2. According to the introduction to a volume covering Jelinek’s confrontations and dialogues with the media, Die Nestbeschmutzerin, the term has been used by Jelinek’s critics since the premiere of her drama Burgtheater in 1985. Pia ¨ sterreich (Salzburg and Vienna: Jung Janke, Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek und O und Jung, 2002), 7. 3. Elfriede Jelinek, Lust (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), 131. 4. My translation; unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own. ‘‘Ich kann nur beschreiben, wie ich es empfinde, insofern ist es obsessiv, was ich schreibe, weil es sehr emotional gesteuert ist. Es sind keine ku¨hlen Konstrukte, sondern der Impetus kommt aus einer perso¨nlichen Triebkraft, sozusagen wieder aus einem gigantischen Fetischierungsprozeß. Meine ganze Arbeit ist nichts anderes als der Wunsch, diese Dinge zu bannen.’’ Adolf-Ernst Meyer, Elfriede Jelinek, and Jutta Heinrich, Sturm und Zwang, 62. 5. Joanna Kavenna, ‘‘The Untranslatables,’’ Daily Telegraph (London), Saturday edition, Books, November 27, 2004, 1. 6. See, for example, Investor’s Business Daily, sec. A, ‘‘Base and Ig-Nobel,’’ October 11, 2004, 20. 7. Sarah Lyall, ‘‘Pinter Wins Nobel for Dramas of Ominous Power Struggles,’’ New York Times, October 14, 2005. ¨ sterreich ist ein sehr kleines Land und Elfriede Jelinek eine große regi8. ‘‘O onale Schriftstellerin’’ (Die Zeit, Feuilleton sec., ‘‘Die Heilige der Schlachtho¨fe,’’ October 14, 2004, 44).

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9. For a critical analysis of Jelinek reception and Jelinek’s performative selfpresentation, see Imke Meyer, ‘‘The Trouble with Elfriede: Jelinek and Autobiography,’’ in The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography, ed. Nicholas J. Meyerhofer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1999), 116–37. 10. ‘‘Sie begebe sich nun, so erkla¨rte die Roman- und Theaterautorin (‘‘Lust,’’ ‘‘Woken, Heim’’), in ‘die innere Emigration.’ ’’ Joachim Kronsbein, ‘‘Tu¨ckischer Boden,’’ Der Spiegel, April 15, 1996. 11. ‘‘Ich kann nicht reisen. Seit ein paar Jahren geht gar nichts mehr.’’ Sigrid Lo¨ffler, ‘‘Herrin der Unholde und der Gespenster,’’ Literaturen 12 (December 2004): 8. 12. A number of scholars have focused on the ways in which Jelinek follows in the footsteps of ‘‘Nestbeschmutzer’’ such as Thomas Bernhard. The volume Die Nestbeschmutzerin catalogues moments of dissent between Jelinek, conservative politicians, and the press. For example, this volume documents the contro¨ election campaign in which the conservative right party runs on a versial FPO platform that explicitly criticizes socially critical authors such as Jelinek who receive grants in support of their work. The campaign posters asked the question: ‘‘Do you love Scholten, Jelinek, Ha¨upl, Peymann, Pasterk . . . or art and culture?’’ [Lieben Sie Scholten, Jelinek, Ha¨upl, Peymann, Pasterk . . . oder Kunst und Kultur?] (Janke, 88). This campaign revealed the extent to which a portion of the Austrian population treated writers like Jelinek as unwanted Austria-haters. The volume likewise documents Jelinek’s famous ‘‘protest’’ of the political gains of ¨ in the 2000 elections. Jelinek forbade the performance of her plays on the FPO Austrian stages (Janke, 138–43). 13. ‘‘Das Problem dabei ist, daß man es sehr schwer u¨bersetzen kann. Also insofern bin ich eine Provinzautorin’’ (Anders Lindqvist, ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek— Interview,’’ Nobelprize.org, October 7, 2004, http://nobelprize.org/literature/laur eates/2004/jelinek-interview_text.html.) 14. ‘‘One would be tempted to say the Nobel recognition to an Austrian ogress proves that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only decent thing to come out of that Alpine land in the last two decades’’ (Stephen Schwarz, ‘‘Oops . . . They Did It Again: The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Elfriede Jelinek: Sensationalist, Communist, and Anti-American Hack,’’ The Weekly Standard, October 8, 2004, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArti.) 15. For example, a Reuters article on Jelinek published in The New York Times Online cites a German literature professor who calls Jelinek’s tone ‘‘shrill’’: ‘‘Gert Mattenklott, a literature professor at Berlin’s Free University, said Jelinek’s work ‘campaigned against the sexual subjugation of women and against patriarchal society’ in a shrill tone unlikely to appeal to a broad readership’’ (New York Times Online, ‘‘ ‘Piano Teacher’ Author Jelinek Wins Nobel Prize,’’ October 7, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nobel-literature.html?oref⳱ login&pagewanted). 16. Times Online (London), ‘‘Profile: Elfriede Jelinek: A woman of mad passion and mixed metaphors,’’ October 10, 2004, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ printFriendly/0,,1-1501-1302346-1501 ,00.html. 17. ‘‘The book (The Piano Teacher) is written in a terse, almost simplistic style, which by the novel’s end becomes completely subsumed in obscenity’’ (Ruth Franklin, ‘‘Who is Elfriede Jelinek: Nobel Savage,’’ The New Republic Online, November 1, 2004, http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i⳱2—411–1& s⳱franklin110104). 18. ‘‘Mein Problem ist das lautliche Sprachverfahren, mit dem ich arbeite.

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Das braucht den Klang der deutschen Sprache.’’ [My problem is the tonal speech process with which I work. This needs the tone of the German language.] (Lo¨ffler 12). In an interview for the New York Times Magazine, Jelinek likewise points to language as a central issue for the American reception of her work: ‘‘People here no longer understand wit, and people in America don’t understand the language in which I’m writing’’ (‘‘Interview with Elfriede Jelinek,’’ New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2004: 31). 19. Riding, ‘‘Austrian Writer of Sex, Violence and Politics Wins Nobel.’’ 20. For example, in his New York Sun article, Otto Penzler describes Jelinek’s writings as ‘‘pornographic journeys into sadomasochism and sexual violence’’ (‘‘A Heroine Behind the Scenes,’’ New York Sun, January 12, 2005, 16). The Investor’s Business Daily reminds its readers that Jelinek has been described as a ‘‘porn author,’’ and the diatribe against Jelinek in The Weekly Standard includes the claim that ‘‘Jelinek’s writings mainly verge on gross pornography.’’ 21. Some German critics have likewise deemed Jelinek’s works to be ‘‘banal.’’ See, for example, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ‘‘Die missbrauchte Frau,’’ Der Spiegel 42 (2004): ‘‘She never succeeded in writing a good novel, almost all of them are more or less banal and superficial. At the same time, in some of them, here and there, one cannot overlook a noteworthy stylistic artistry—and every once in a while even an astonishing virtuosity.’’ [‘‘Ein guter Roman ist ihr nie gelungen, beinahe alle sind mehr oder weniger banal oder oberfla¨chlich. Gleichzeitig ist in manchen hier und da beachtliche stilistische Kunstfertigkeit nicht zu u¨bersehen— und bisweilen sogar erstaunliche Virtuosita¨t’’] (180). 22. John Freeman, ‘‘Nobel Winner Jelinek Writes with Passion and Conviction,’’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, sec. B, October 17, 2004, 4. 23. John Wray, ‘‘The Noble and the Nobel: Austria’s two faces; Charles I and Elfriede Jelinek,’’ New York Times, October 11, 2004, 8. 24. Italie Hillel, ‘‘Austrian writer wins the Nobel; Elfriede Jelinek, proponent of social and political freedom, is 10th woman to win,’’ Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada), Friday final edition, sec. A, October 8, 2004, 15. 25. Rania Khallaf, ‘‘Freudian Slips,’’ Al-Ahram Weekly, April 26, 2005, http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2005/739/cu4.htm. 26. In her essay ‘‘Translation as Culture,’’ Spivak argues that translation produces the ethical subject and that a ‘‘cultural idiom that we must honorably establish so that we can ‘perform’ it as art’’ must be distinguished from a ‘‘generalizable semiotics that writes our life.’’ In this sense, a cultural idiom is not generalizable. Gayatri Spivak, ‘‘Translation as Culture,’’ parallax 6.1 (2000): 13–24; here: 17. 27. See also Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Niranjana provides a detailed analysis of theories of translation and their applicability for postcolonial studies. 28. Meghan Morris, foreword, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘‘Japan’’ and Cultural Nationalism, by Naoko Sakai (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 13. 29. I am thinking here of, for example, Gayatri Spivak’s translation of the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi’s short stories about tribal culture in West Bengal, India. In her introduction to the translations, Spivak expresses her concern for ‘‘differance.’’ ‘‘Indeed, if one reads carefully, one may be seen as the other’s differance’’ (xxvi). The preservation of cultural idiom in the context of tribal Bengali cultures, then, is an entirely different ethical exercise from the confrontation

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with a potentially fossilized German-language cultural idiom. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, preface, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweti Devi (New York: Routledge, 1995), xxiii–xxxi. 30. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation,’’ The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 234. Here, Bhabha provides a close reading of Derek Walcott’s poem ‘‘Names’’ ‘‘on the colonization of the Caribbean as the possession of a space through the power of naming’’ (231). 31. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ trans. Harry Zohn, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 15–23. [Je weniger Wert und Wu¨rde eine Sprache hat, je mehr ¨ bersetzung dabei zu gewinnen, bis es Mitteilung ist, desto weniger ist fu¨r die U ¨ bergewicht jenes Sinnes, weit entfernt, der Hebel einer formvollen das vo¨llige U ¨ bersetzung zu sein, diese vereitelt. (Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Die Aufgabe des U ¨ berU setzers,’’ Illuminationen: Ausgewa¨hlte Schriften 1 [Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], 50–62; here: 61).] 32. Etienne Balibar, ‘‘Europe: Vanishing Mediator?’’ We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 203–37; here: 234. 33. Derrida, 52. 34. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 130. 35. See Ann Parry, ‘‘The Caesura of the Holocaust in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader,’’ Journal of European Studies 29.3 (September 1999): 249–67. Parry provides an overview of the use of the notion of Holocaust as historical caesura by Theodor Adorno, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 36. Jarausch and Geyer, 103. 37. In her essay on modernist decadence, Silke-Maria Weineck (‘‘Loss of Outline: Decadence as the Crisis of Negation,’’ Pacific Coast Philology 29.1 [September 1994]: 39–50) cites Nietzsche’s critique of the decadence of ‘‘modern man,’’ which he describes as an excess of history, the inability to forget, quoting the line from the Unzeitgema¨sse Betrachtungen (1873), ‘‘I believe that we all suffer from a consuming historical fever—,’’ (43). A parallel condition of historical excess certainly characterizes the German-speaking nations at the turn of the twenty-first century, though the moral concerns behind this ‘‘historical fever’’ are unique. 38. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove, 1975). 39. Santner, 9. 40. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 188. 41. Donna Hoffmeister, ‘‘Access Routes into Postmodernism. Interviews with Innerhofer, Jelinek, Rosei, und Wolfgruber,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 20.2 (1987): 97–130. ‘‘The psychological novel is dead . . . Literature has to take account of the fact that individualism is no longer possible.’’ [Der psychologische Roman ist tot . . . Die Literatur muß dem Rechnung tragen, daß der Individualismus nicht mehr mo¨glich ist.] 42. Sigrid Berka, ‘‘Ein Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ 139. [‘‘Ja, sie sind wie Schablonen, die mit Sprache gefu¨llt sind, und wenn sie nicht mehr sprechen, sind sie einfach weg.’’] 43. Heinz Kohut, Narzißmus: Eine Theorie der psychoanalytischen Behandlung narzißtischer Perso¨nlichkeitssto¨rungen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).

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44. See Gu¨nther A. Ho¨fler, ‘‘Sexualita¨t und Macht in Elfriede Jelineks Prosa,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 23.3/4 (1990): 99–110. Ho¨fler describes Jelinek’s postmodern critique of language via the ‘‘picking up and deconstructing of metaphors’’ [‘‘Aufgreifen und Zerlegen von Metaphern’’] (100). Friederike Eigler elucidates Jelinek’s postmodern style especially in the case of her 1981 drama Clara S., in which the figure of Clara Schumann embodies the postmodern artist par excellence (50) as pure citation. Friederike Eigler, ‘‘ ‘Gewissenlose Erkenntnis:’ Frauen-Bilder und Kulturkritik bei Elfriede Jelinek und Friedrich Nietzsche,’’ Seminar 30.1 (February 1994): 44–58. See also Allyson Fiddler, ‘‘There Goes That Word Again, or Elfriede Jelinek and Postmodernism,’’ in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, eds. Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens, 129–49. Fiddler argues that while Jelinek employs postmodern techniques in her writing, her work can simultaneously be located within a modernist tradition of critique, though she goes on to elucidate theories of postmodernism that include critical deconstruction (144). See also Imke Meyer (‘‘Kulturkritik und Postmoderne: Elfriede Jelineks fru¨her Roman Michael,’’ Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 [2006]: 1–24.) who argues that Jelinek’s early novel Michael engages in a critique of the culture industry that both utilizes the arguments of the Frankfurt School and offers a potentially more productive reading of contemporary media cultures. 45. Especially readings of Jelinek’s work from the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on the deconstructive nature of Jelinek’s works. For example, a number of the essays in the volume Gegen den scho¨nen Schein: Texte zu Elfriede Jelinek, published in 1990, take on this thematic emphasis. See, for example, Rudolf Bu¨rger, ‘‘Der bo¨se Blick der Elfriede Jelinek,’’ Gegen den scho¨nen Schein: Texte zu Elfriede Jelinek, ed. Christa Gu¨rtler (Frankfurt/Main: Neue Kritik, 1990): 17–30. Bu¨rger defines Jelinek’s aesthetics in postmodern terms: ‘‘The concept of ‘postmodernity’ is her ideological motto’’ [‘‘Der Begriff der ‘Postmoderne’ ist ihre ideologische Parole’’] (18). He further analyzes Jelinek’s work as a microscopic, deconstructive critique of postwar Austrian culture (20). In another essay in the volume, Christa Gu¨rtler analyzes Jelinek’s deconstruction of nature and sexuality: Christa Gu¨rtler, ‘‘Die Entschleierung der Mythen von Natur und Sexualita¨t,’’ Gu¨rtler, Gegen den scho¨nen Schein, 120–34. 46. See, for example, Hans Hiebel’s detailed analysis of Jelinek’s ‘‘antirealism’’: Hans H. Hiebel, ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Satirical ‘Prose-Poem’ Lust,’’ in Johns and Arens , 48–73; here: 63. In the same volume, Ingeborg Hoestery links Jelinek’s stylistic techniques with the Austrian avant-garde and describes her work as ‘‘feminist bricolage’’: Ingeborg Hoesterey, ‘‘A Feminist ‘Theater of Cruelty:’ Surrealist and Mannerist Strategies in Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen and Lust,’’ in Johns and Arens, 150–66; here: 158. 47. Crystal Mazur Ockenfuss, ‘‘Keeping Promises, Breaking Rules: Stylistic Innovations in Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust,’’ in Johns and Arens, 73–88. 48. Gabriele Riedle, ‘‘Mehr, mehr, mehr! Zu Elfriede Jelineks Verfahren der dekorativen Wortvermehrung,’’ Text Ⳮ Kritik 117 (January 1993): 95–103. 49. Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, ‘‘Body Language as Expression of Repression: Lethal Reverberations of Fascism in Die Ausgesperrten,’’ in Johns and Arens, 194– 229. 50. In the interview with Sigrid Berka, Jelinek describes Lust as the pinnacle of her writing abilities. In particular, she mentions the intertextual complexity of the text, such as her citational play with Ho¨lderlin’s poetry (Berka, 131). 51. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London/New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), 141.

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52. Elfriede Jelinek, Die Klavierspielerin (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996), 140. 53. Marlies Janz, Elfriede Jelinek (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 85. See also Gertrud Lehnert, who shows how Mu¨ller’s Winterreise is also cited in Jelinek’s novel Lust. She likewise notes Jelinek’s perversion of Brecht: ‘‘Not only does she play with proverbs and quotes from other texts, which, put into a new context and often slightly altered, acquire an entirely new meaning. For example: ‘wie man sich bettet so liebt man’ (Lust 38) appears instead of the original Brecht: ‘Wie man sich bettet so liegt man’ ’’ (42). Gertrud Lehnert, ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust and Madame Bovary—A Comparative Analysis,’’ in Johns and Arens, 35–47. See also Sabine Perthold’s elucidation of Jelinek’s use of Schubert. Sabine Perthold, ‘‘Das Messer im gut gefetteten Sprachmuskel: Die Schriftstellerin Elfriede Jelinek und der Umgang mit dem Obszo¨nen,’’ Haneke/JelinekDie Klavierspielerin: Drehbuch, Gespra¨che, Essays, ed. Stefan Grissemann (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2001), 137–52. 54. ‘‘For example, in The Piano Teacher, the recapitulation of a childhood memory, the details of one of Erika Kohut’s first sexual encounters with the opposite sex echoes the tragic lines in Goethe’s ballad ‘The Fisherman’ which read: ‘Half drew him in, half lured him in; He ne’er was seen again.’ Jelinek rewrites this line to read: ‘He pulled her halfway down to him, she sank halfway to him.’ In this case, it is the male component, using dirty wrestling tricks and superior strength, that drags the female down’’ (176). Anne L. Critchfield, ‘‘Dominant Dyads: Father-Son and Mother-Daughter. A Comparison of Franz Kafka and Elfriede Jelinek,’’ The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature, ed. Frank Pilipp (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1997): 171–93. 55. Swales, 438. Swales continues: ‘‘Lust, for example, and above all Wolken. Heim are in fact dependent upon that high-bourgeois culture whose institutions and mechanisms Jelinek regularly debunks’’ (438). Erica Swales, ‘‘Pathography as Metaphor: Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin,’’ The Modern Language Review 95.2 (April 2000): 437–49. 56. ‘‘Thus the motif of ‘Kette’ and its variants range from the ‘Mutterba¨nder’ (75) of maternal coercion via Erika’s collection of bondage items and Klemmer’s ambition to ‘jede Frau an sich ketten’ (65) to the ‘Kette’ (113) of the conservatory and beyond to the tramway system: ‘Das sind Ketten, die nie abreißen’ ’’ (17) (Swales, 442–43). 57. Beatrice Hanssen, ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Language of Violence,’’ New German Critique 68 (Spring-Summer 1996): 79–113; here: 82. For Hanssen, Jelinek’s work employs the ‘‘performative contradiction’’ of simultaneously criticizing and utilizing the language of violence (80), and her texts thereby fall on both sides of the pornography debate (93). 58. See also Sabine Wilke, Dialektik und Geschlecht: Feministische Schreibpraxis in der Gegenwartsliteratur (Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg, 1996). Wilke argues that Jelinek recycles language: ‘‘Similarly to Bachmann’s . . . Jelinek’s aesthetic material constitutes itself from found language material that she [Jelinek] re¨ hnlich wie Bachmann . . . konstiworks satirically and heightens ironically’’ [‘‘A tuiert sich Jelineks a¨sthetisches Material aus vorgefundenem Sprachmaterial, das sie satirisch bearbeitet und ironisch u¨berspitzt’’] (122). 59. Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘Ich mo¨chte seicht sein,’’ in Gu¨rtler, Gegen den scho¨nen Schein, 157–61: ‘‘Nichts kann mehr gea¨ndert werden und unterla¨uft damit die ewige Wiederholung des Nie Ganz Gleichen.’’ 60. ‘‘Ich kann nur beschreiben, wie ich es empfinde, insofern ist es obsessiv, was ich schreibe, weil es sehr emotional gesteuert ist. Es sind keine ku¨hlen Kon-

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strukte, sondern der Impetus kommt aus einer perso¨nlichen Triebkraft, sozusagen wieder aus einem gigantischen Fetischierungsprozeß. Meine ganze Arbeit ist nichts anderes als der Wunsch, diese Dinge zu bannen.’’ Adolf-Ernst Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 62. 61. ‘‘ein Muß, das, was einem heil erscheint, zwanghaft aufzureißen’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 73) 62. ‘‘Es gibt aber etwas, was mich innerlich dazu treibt: Es muß diese Dichte haben, auf die Spitze getrieben sein. . . . Ich bin eine Triebta¨terin beim Schreiben’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 74). 63. ‘‘Ich kann sprachlich keinen Leerlauf mehr ertragen’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 74). 64. ‘‘Wir benu¨tzen oft das Bett, wo wir den Krieg der Geschlechter verschlafen’’. Jelinek, Lust, 148. 65. Elfriede Jelinek, Lust, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), 66. 66. ‘‘Also Sexualita¨t nicht als Anti-formel, sondern als Parodie der Pornographie, nicht als eine Quelle der unerscho¨pflichen und phantasievoll variierten Lust, sondern als die Wiederkehr des Immergleichen’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 64). 67. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Kulturindustrie. Aufkla¨rung als Massenbetrug,’’ Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung, 128–77. 68. Gertrud Lehnert describes Lust in terms of ‘‘endless variations of the always identical’’ (45). See also Sigrid Berka, ‘‘Ein Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 26.2 (1993): 127–55. In her interview, Berka refers to Jelinek’s ‘‘Wiederholungszwang’’ (compulsion to repeat) (130). 69. This mode of repetition is also reflected in the public sphere: ‘‘All sorts of mysterious things can happen here. For instance, if the foreigners standing around by themselves are not hawking newspapers, they might reach into their plastic briefcases and pull out a man’s shirt with fancy pockets (straight from the factory), stylish women’s dresses (straight from the factory), children’s toys (straight from the factory), albeit slightly damaged, boxes of cigars (straight from the factory), small electrical and electronic parts (straight from the factory or a burglary), transistor radios or record players (straight from the factory or a burglary), cartons of cigarettes (from goodness knows where). And the vendors peddle them, calling discreetly’’ (The Piano Teacher, 136). ‘‘Hier geschieht es beispielsweise heimlich, daß einzeln herumstehende Ausla¨nder, wenn sie nicht Zeitungen verkaufen, aus riesigen Plastiktragetaschen heraus sportive Herrenhemden mit Ziertaschen, direkt aus der Fabrik, modische Damenkleider in Schreifarben, direkt aus der Fabrik, Kinderspielzeug, direkt aus der Fabrik, wenn auch leicht bescha¨digt, Kilosa¨cke mit Ma¨nnerschnitten-Bruch, direkt aus der Fabrik, elektrische und elektronische Kleinteile, direkt aus der Fabrik oder vom Einbruch, Kofferradios oder Plattenspieler, direkt aus der Fabrik oder vom Einbruch, sowie Zigarettenstangen, woher auch immer, diskret bru¨llend anbieten’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 136). 70. ‘‘Man nimmt deutsche Erde, und sie zerfa¨llt zu Asche in der Hand. Das ist ja mein ewiges Thema. Das ist ganz zwanghaft. Man kann, wenn man hier lebt, habe ich das Gefu¨hl—das ist dieser Adorno-Ausspruch—natu¨rlich sind Gedichte nach Ausschwitz mo¨glich, aber es ist kein Gedicht ohne Ausschwitz mo¨glich. Robert Schindel, den ich sehr gut kenne, ein alter Freund von mir, der hat einen Roman geschrieben, der heißt Gebu¨rtig; der hat gesagt, er wollte das einmal abarbeiten, um dann nicht mehr daru¨ber sprechen zu mu¨ssen, was sein

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gutes Recht ist als Opfer; also ich habe das Gefu¨hl, ich muß immer eigentlich daru¨ber sprechen.’’ 71. Of course, Grass’s moral standing in this regard has suffered since the revelation of his service in the Waffen SS under the Nazis, a particularly brutal arm of the military machine. 72. A similar point is made by an Austrian Jew in Doron Rabinovici’s novel Suche nach M (1997): ‘‘Hadn’t Leon Fischer once said to Arieh: ‘The Germans look with pessimism to the future, but the Austrians here look full of optimism to the past.’ ’’ Doron Rabinovici, The Search for M, trans. Francis M. Sharp (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 182. 73. ‘‘So ist es. Vor allem die o¨sterreichische, weil die Deutschen ihre Ge¨ sterschichte immerhin noch in Pflichtu¨bungen aufgearbeitet haben, aber die O reicher nie. Die Regierungserkla¨rung von Vranitzky u¨ber die Mitschuld der ¨ sterreicher am Faschismus war jetzt, dieses Jahr, das muß man sich vorstellen; O ¨ sterreich etwas eingestanden hat, in einer Regierungsdas war das erste Mal, daß O erkla¨rung offiziell. Ich weiß nicht genau, woran es liegt, ob es am Katholizismus ¨ sterreicher, die ja, was die Bevo¨lkerungszahl anbetrifft, einen u¨bliegt, aber die O erproportional großen Anteil an Verbrechern des Dritten Reiches hatten, haben das nie aufgearbeitet.’’ 74. ‘‘Es gibt nur zwei La¨nder, die sich aus der Verantwortung geschlichen ¨ sterreich und Japan. Den Japanern ist natu¨rlich Hiroshima zugute gehaben: O ¨ sterreicher es so vollzogen haben.’’ kommen, wa¨hrend die O 75. Ingeborg Hoestery and Allyson Fiddler emphasize the specific Austrian cultural and aesthetic legacy embodied in the discourse of Sprachkritik and the avant-garde Wiener Gruppe. Hoesterey, for example, cites Austria as an ‘‘exemplary locus of innovation’’ in her analysis of aesthetic hybridity: ‘‘Hybridity as Aesthetic Discourse,’’ in After Postmodernism, ed. Willy Riemer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 34–44; here: 42. Fiddler likewise points to the specificity of the Austrian literary context in Rewriting Reality: An Introduction to Elfriede Jelinek (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), 17–26. 76. See, for example, Matthias Konzett, ‘‘Transcultural Profiles in Contemporary Austrian Jewish Literature,’’ in After Postmodernism, ed. Riemer, 315–40. ‘‘Historians generally agree that the multinational and dynastic character of the Habsburg empire did not allow for a strong, or at least, clearly defined, sense of national identity as witnesses, for example, in late imperial Germany’’ (319). As Konzett points out, Benedict Anderson likewise sees the rise of the German language in nineteenth-century Habsburg courts as having ‘‘nothing whatever to do with German nationalism’’ (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities [London: Verso, 1991], 78. ) See also William M. Johnston, ‘‘A Nation Without Qualities: Austria and Its Quest for a National Identity,’’ in Concepts of National Identity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Dieter Boerner (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1986), 177–87. 77. ‘‘Die Deutschen haben zumindest im Kulturbereich ununterbrochen Buße getan, zwar nicht innerhalb der Justiz und der Medizin, wo die entscheidenden Ta¨ter ein friedliches Alter genießen konnten, aber im Kulturbereich ¨ sterhaben sie viele kritische Filme, Fernsehspiele, Ho¨rspiele, etc. gemacht. In O reich ist das alles ganz schnell unter den Teppich gekehrt worden. Dieser Ucicky, der Regisseur von ‘Heimkehr,’ hat schon in den fu¨nfziger Jahren wieder einen erkla¨rtermaßen pazifistischen Film mit denselben Schauspielern, denselben Machern gedreht, also alles umgepolt. Diese ganz besonders widerwa¨rtige o¨sterreichische Variante von Verlogenheit meine ich.’’

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¨ sterreich, die sich ja 78. ‘‘Die thematisiert diese Totenkultur Deutschland/O nicht wie andere Nationen auf die großen Toten in der Geschichte berufen kann, sondern auf die Toten, die sie selbst produziert haben.’’ 79. ‘‘Diese faschistische deutsche Provinzsprache nie entnazifiziert worden ist, sondern sich bruchlos in den Heimatkitsch der fu¨nfziger Jahre bis hin zur ‘Schwarzwaldklinik’ fortgepflanzt hat.’’ 80. ‘‘So eine Kulturlosigkeit ist nirgendwoanders festzustellen, und fu¨r mich ist auch das eine Folge des Faschismus, der diese kleinbu¨rgerlichen Schichten zur herrschenden und auch zur normgebenden Klasse gemacht hat, auch wenn es la¨ngst wieder eine o¨konomische Oberschicht gibt.’’ 81. ‘‘Wa¨hrend das Kleinbu¨rgertum, das ja schon den Faschismus mit hervorgebracht und getragen hat und heute immer noch die herrschende Klasse ist, letztlich nur den eigenen Aufstiegsinteressen folgen will. Dieser brain drain, den der Faschismus verursacht hat, indem er die ju¨dische Intelligenz, aber auch die armen Juden vernichtet hat, hat das Kleinbu¨rgertum als herrschende Klasse mit sich gebracht. An dieser Klasse mit ihrer Hoffnung auf Aufstieg und der Angst vor Abstieg krankt das Deutsche bis heute.’’ 82. Elfriede Jelinek, Women as Lovers, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994), 102. [‘‘wieder einmal mußte die liebe scheitern und die brutalita¨t gewinnen,’’ Elfriede Jelinek, Die Liebhaberinnen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975), 85.] In Women as Lovers passages such as the following one express the brutality of the father: ‘‘dada and gerald take the view, that paula can’t be allowed to shirk things by doing light clean dressmaking, when they themselves do heavy dirty woodcutting. she better not believe, that she can escape dada’s hate, with a clean job, when dada after all had to marry mother because of her, well, not because of her but because of her eldest sister, who is already married now and unassailable. since we already hated your momma, because she was allowed to do clean housework, while we have to do the dirty heavy work, so we’ve time and again beaten your momma half dead when we were drunk, so we’ve thrown our dirty boots in your momma’s face and our dirty trousers onto the bench, . . ., so we also want frequently to throw our dirty boots in your face too and our dirty trousers onto the bench, which you then must clear up’’ (Women as Lovers, 18–19): ‘‘der vatter und der gerald sind der meinung, daß paula sich nicht mit der leichten sauberen schneiderei dru¨cken ko¨nne, wenn sie selber die schwere schmutzige holzarbeit machen. sie soll nur nicht glauben, daß sie vatters haß entkommen ko¨nne, mit einer sauberen arbeit, wo der vatter doch die mutter wegen ihr hat heiraten mu¨ssen, na, nicht wegen ihr aber wegen ihrer a¨ltesten schwester, die jetzt schon verheiratet und unangreifbar ist. Haben wir also schon deine mutta gehaßt, weil sie die saubere hausarbeit hat machen du¨rfen, wa¨hrend wir die dreckige schwere arbeit machen mu¨ssen, haben wir also schon deine mutta im rausch oft und oft halbtot gepru¨gelt, haben wir also schon deiner mutta die dreckigen stiefel ins gesicht und die dreckigen hosen auf die bank geschmissen, . . ., wollen wir auch dir die dreckigen stiefel ins gesicht und die dreckigen hosen auf die bank schmeißen, was du dann wegputzen mußt,’’ Die Liebhaberinnen, 20. 83. Elfriede Jelinek, Wonderful Wonderful Times, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 31. [Elfriede Jelinek, Die Ausgesperrten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980): ‘‘Die Pru¨gelei begann angeblich an dem Tag genau, als der Weltkrieg verloren war, denn vorher pru¨gelte der Vater fremde Menschen in wechselnder Gestalt und Form, jetzt hat er dafu¨r nur die Gestalten von Mutter und Kindern’’ (32).]

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84. See Schmitz-Burgard, 194–228. In Schmitz-Burgard’s reading of Wonderful Wonderful Times, the ‘‘contemporary private sphere and the public sphere of the past are linked’’ (195). 85. Jelinek, ‘‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln,’’ 312: ‘‘Der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau . . .’’ 86. ‘‘Im Faschismus ist die Frau, wagt sie es, u¨ber ihre Rolle als Geba¨rerin und Pflegerin hinauszutreten, Seuche, Feind im Inneren, ‘Fa¨ulnis auf Raten’ (Ce´line). Sie wird zur allgemeinen Verderberin, zum Feind von außen. Wie die Juden’’ (312). 87. In an interview with Stefan Grissemann, Jelinek bemoans the fact that The Piano Teacher stands as her most accepted work: ‘‘If not even the only accepted text I’ve ever written. I sometimes almost believe that when I hear how people talk about me. In that regard, this book is a curse’’ (Grissemann, 130): ‘‘Wenn nicht u¨berhaupt der einzige akzeptierte Text, den ich je geschrieben habe. Ich glaube das manchmal fast, wenn ich ho¨re, wie die Leute u¨ber mich sprechen. Als ob ich nichts anderes je geschrieben ha¨tte. Insofern ist dieses Buch auch ein Fluch’’ (130). (Grissemann, ‘‘ ‘daß dieser Film auch eine Rettung meiner Person ist’: Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Haneke/Jelinek, ed. Grissemann, 119–37.) 88. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 47. 89. ‘‘Kaum verhallt die Tu¨rklinke, wird schon die va¨terliche Allzweckklinge, ihr kleiner Talisman, hervorgeholt. SIE scha¨lt die Klinge aus ihrem Sonntagsma¨ntelchen von fu¨nf Schichten jungfra¨ulichen Plastiks heraus. Im Umgang mit Klingen ist sie geschickt, muß sie doch den Vater rasieren, diese weiche Vaterwange unter der vollkommen leeren Stirn des Vaters, die kein Gedanke mehr tru¨bt und kein Wille mehr kra¨uselt.’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 88) 90. ‘‘Erika, in gentle music, tells Klemmer that her father lost his mind and died in the Steinhof Asylum. That is why people have to be considerate of Erika, she has gone through so much’’ (The Piano Teacher, 71–72): ‘‘Erika sagt in sanfter Musik, daß ihr Vater, vollsta¨ndig umnachtet, in Steinhof gestorben sei. Daher mu¨sse man im Grunde Ru¨cksicht auf Erika nehmen, denn Schweres habe sie schon durchzumachen gehabt’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 73). 91. ‘‘Bei ihr hat vor vielen Jahren, ebenfalls in diesem Bett, Begierde zu hl. Mutterschaft gefu¨hrt, und die Begierde wurde beendet, sobald dieses Ziel erreicht war. Ein einziger Erguß to¨tete Begierde und schuf Raum fu¨r die Tochter; der Vater schlug zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe. Und erschlug sich selber gleich mit. Aus innerer Tra¨gheit und schwachem Geist heraus vermochte er die Folgen dieses Ejakulats nicht abzusehen’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 233). 92. ‘‘Schließlich mußten sie [die Kohuts] soeben leider ein ihnen sehr teueres Fleisch und Blut zu teurem Preise in einem vollgepferchten Schlafsaal unterstellen. Der Fleischer soll nicht glauben, es sei ihnen leichtgefallen. Ein Stu¨ck von ihnen ging mit und blieb dort in dem Heim in Neulengbach. Welches spezielle Stu¨ck denn, fragt der Fachmann’’ (98). 93. In an interview with Anke Roeder posted on Jelinek’s Web page, Jelinek states that ‘‘die Ordnung kommt vom Vater’’: ‘‘Order comes from the father.’’ ¨ berschreitungen: Ein Gespra¨ ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ Elfriede Anke Roeder, ‘‘U Jelinek’s Homepage July 1996, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/el friede/INTERVW.HTM. 94. ‘‘Das stimmt, aber in gewisser Weise war er es natu¨rlich doch. Er hat die Familie in Atem gehalten durch seine Schwa¨che, durch seine schwer neurotische Konstitution, in die diese Krankheit haltlos u¨bergegangen ist, durch seine

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Launen, durch sein tage- und wochen-langes Schweigen, mit dem er die Familie gestraft hat’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 50). 95. ‘‘Es gab also einerseits diesen Rollentausch, andererseits die va¨terliche Instanz. . . . Also ist es einerseits ein Rollentausch, andererseits ist dieser Vater natu¨rlich schon wie ein dunkler Schatten u¨ber dieser Familie geschwebt. Wie etwas, was zwar die va¨terliche Rolle im konventionellen Sinne nicht u¨bernehmen konnte, aber doch das ganze letztlich durch sein Schweigen bestimmt hatte. Dieses Sichentziehen des Vaters ist fu¨r Ma¨dchen offenbar etwas Schreckliches. Ich denke dabei immer an die Bachmann, die in Malina die va¨terliche Vergewaltigung imaginiert, die sicher nicht stattgefunden hat’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 50–51). 96. ‘‘And the binoculars. Inherited from Father, who, when still possessed of a lucid mind, used them to spot birds and mountains even at night’’ (The Piano Teacher, 140). [Und den Feldstecher. Vom Vater vererbt, der in hirnklarer Zeit damit Vo¨gel und Berge auch nachts ausspa¨hte (Die Klavierspielerin, 140).] 97. ‘‘weil einfach keine weibliche Sprache dafu¨r existiert, . . . weil ich in dem Augenblick, wo ich Sexualita¨t beschreibe, mich eben dieser Ma¨nnersprache nicht bedienen will. Das ist ein Herrschaftsdiskurs, der gebrochen werden muß.’’ 98. See Ina Hartwig, Sexuelle Poetik: Proust. Musil. Genet. Jelinek. (Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer, 1998). Hartwig argues that Lust is simultaneously ‘‘highly morally coded’’ and ‘‘strictly pornographic’’ [‘‘hochmoralisch codiert’’ and ‘‘streng pornographisch’’ (247)]. Within this dialectic desire is presented as purely masculine and ugly. See also Allyson Fiddler, who reads Jelinek as presenting ‘‘a deliberate reversal of Bataille’s pretentious allusions’’ (Rewriting Reality, 157). 99. Georges Batailles, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 1987). 100. ‘‘Als blind Zuschlagende und blind Abwehrende geho¨ren Verfolger und Opfer noch dem gleichen Kreis des Unheils an’’ (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung, 179). 101. See also Hiebel, who distinguishes Jelinek’s anti-sexuality from Bataille’s attempt to reverse the Enlightenment ban on sexuality (53). 102. ‘‘Verschiebung und Verdichtung’’ (Hartwig, 264). 103. ‘‘Doch in sich fu¨hlt sie den heftigen Wunsch zu gehorchen. . . . Wer von ihr erreichte, daß sie einem Befehl gehorchte—ein Befehlshaber mu¨ßte es sein außerhalb ihrer Mutter und deren glu¨henden Furchen durch Erikas Willen -, der ko¨nnte ALLES von ihr bekommen. Sich an eine harte Mauer lehnen, die nicht nachgibt! . . . [I]hre Pfoten zucken dem letzten endgu¨ltigen Gehorsam sehnsu¨chtig entgegen’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 103–4). 104. Deleuze and Guattari’s work first appeared in German translation as ¨ dipus in 1974. Anti-O 105. ‘‘For what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the ‘instincts,’ so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction’’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 134). 106. Marlies Janz reads Jelinek’s novel as a parody of psychoanalysis: ‘‘The novel unfolds the meaning of the loss of the father’’ [Der Roman entfaltet die Bedeutung des Vaterverlusts] (72) as symptom, yet, as Janz argues, there is no depth to this structure. 107. Mark Seem, introduction to Anti-Oedipus, by Deleuze and Guattari, xv– xxiv. 108. Deleuze and Guattari point out that the extended family ultimately breaks the triangulation of the oedipal complex (97).

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109. This quote resembles Sissi’s dialogue with Otto (The Princess and the Warrior) in the claustrophobic psychiatric institution where she lives and works. Sissi tells Otto upon returning to the institution after an absence that she is afraid ‘‘that nothing will be as it was before.’’ Otto corrects her by asserting: ‘‘No, you are afraid that everything will be as it was before,’’ and Sissi admits that this is the case. See my discussion of this dialogue in chapter 3. 110. A similar description of the domestic sphere links the claustrophobia to the drone of the television: ‘‘The powerful magnet of domestic silence, interlaced with the sound of the TV (that center of absolute rest and inertia), is turning into physical pain inside her’’ (The Piano Teacher, 118) [Der machtvolle Drang der ha¨uslichen, nur vom Ton des Fernsehers durchwirkten Stille, dieser Punkt absoluter Tra¨gheit und Ruhe, wird jetzt schon zu einem ko¨rperlichen Schmerz in ihr (Die Klavierspielerin, 117)]. 111. Elizabeth Wright describes the perverse pleasures of Jelinek’s text as abject, without seams or boundaries. In this sense, Erika’s body and the body of the text are the ‘‘schwarzes Loch’’: ‘‘The figure that conjoins death, gender and sexuality is a hole, itself an ‘abject.’ There is abjection of the reproductive function itself, as a ‘rancid fruit’ and, hence, elsewhere, not surprisingly, a hysterical rejection of romantic love as a sublimation of that function.’’ ‘‘An aesthetics of disgust: Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin,’’ Paragraph 14:2 (July 1991): 184–96; here: 190. 112. ‘‘Im Gehen haßt Erika diese poro¨se, ranzige Frucht, die das Ende ihres Unterleibs markiert. Nur die Kunst verspricht endlose Su¨ßigkeit. Erika la¨uft dahin. Bald wird diese Fa¨ulnis fortschreiten und gro¨ßere Leibespartien erfassen. Dann stirbt man unter Qualen. Entsetzt malt Erika sich aus, wie sie als ein Meter fu¨nfundsiebzig großes unempfindliches Loch im Sarg liegt und sich in der Erde auflo¨st; das Loch, das sie verachtete, vernachla¨ssigte, hat nun ganz Besitz von ihr ergriffen. Sie ist Nichts. Und nichts gibt es mehr fu¨r sie’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 199). 113. See Jelinek interview with Berka (143). 114. Jelinek asserts in this interview that The Piano Teacher is her most autobiographical novel (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 36). 115. ‘‘alles andere . . . als ein Tyrann’’ (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 49). 116. ‘‘Das ist ja nun das lebenslange Ich-Ideal, gegen das ich anrenne, was ja immerhin bei Frauen die Kreativita¨t nicht vernichtet, wa¨hrend ein starker Vater—so hab’ ich den Eindruck- bei Frauen wirklich alles vernichtet. Bei einer starken Mutter bleibt wenigstens noch die Mo¨glichkeit einer verla¨ngerten Kindheit oder Kindlichkeit, die ja nicht unkreativ ist’’ (Berka, 151). 117. Barbara Kosta likewise sees the pseudo-incest scene as regressive and not genital. ‘‘Muttertrauma: Anerzogener Masochismus: Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch, Die Zu¨chtigung und Elfriede Jelinek, Die Klavierspielerin,’’ Mu¨tter-To¨chterFrauen: Weiblichkeitsbilder in der Literatur, eds. Helga Kraft and Elke Liebs (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 243–67; here: 256. 118. See Marlies Janz, who links Erika’s appropriation of the father’s ‘‘Fernglas’’ with the paternal eye and the denial of castration (77). 119. Marlies Janz has suggested that Jelinek’s text provides a parody of Freud and Lacan in representing the female body as lack (71). 120. Maria-Regina Kecht argues that Jelinek recognizes the complicity of women in patriarchal oppression, even if a patriarchal structure is ultimately the cause of this oppression. ‘‘ ‘In the Name of Obedience, Reason, and Fear’: Mother-Daughter Relations in W. A. Mitgutsch and E. Jelinek,’’ The German Quarterly 62.3 (1989): 357–72.

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121. ‘‘The text insistently proffers the pathology of its characters, yet at the same time its heterogeneity and intertextuality continually undermine the search for character or author viewpoints whereby a reader might position herself’’ (Wright, 185). 122. Crystal Mazur Ockenfuss argues that masochism likewise structures the novel Lust, since the reader of Lust, ‘‘the sensation novel carried to its logical conclusion’’ (78), becomes the masochistic subject. ‘‘Keeping Promises, Breaking Rules: Stylistic Innovations in Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust;’’ in Johns and Arens, 73–89. Annagret Mahler-Bungers treats Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher as a case study, and argues along the lines of Ockenfuss that the text creates masochistic readers: ‘‘einen Text zu analysieren, den man nicht libidino¨s besetzen kann, ist ein hartes, ein bitteres und ein masochistisches Unterfangen’’ (95). ‘‘Der Trauer auf der Spur: Zu Elfriede Jelineks Die Klavierspielerin,’’ in Masochismus in der Literatur (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann, 1988), 80–95. Other essays that focus on the function of masochism in The Piano Teacher include Sigrid Berka, ‘‘D(e)addification: Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Johns and Arens, 229–54; Barbara Kosta, ‘‘Inscribing Erika: Mother-Daughter Bond/age in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin,’’ Monatshefte 86.2 (1994): 218–34. 123. ‘‘Der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau . . .’’ 124. ‘‘Der Faschismus muß die sexuelle Autonomie der Frau negieren, und dieses Ideal der entsinnlichten Frau bringt die Frau schließlich dazu, ihre Sexualita¨t selbst zu verneinen.’’ 125. ‘‘Sie wird zur allgemeinen Verderberin, zum Feind von außen. Wie die Juden.’’ 126. ‘‘Bei der Bachmann leiden die Ma¨nner manchmal, aber die Frauen ko¨nnen nicht anders als leiden’’ (316). 127. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 117. 128. Benjamin’s theories are indebted to Nancy Chodorow’s analysis of mothering. Chodorow points out that gender roles are reinforced by the traditional nuclear family with its gendered division of labor. The dissolution of this model would lead, according to Chodorow, to the reconception of gender. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 129. See also Paula J. Caplan, The Myth of Women’s Masochism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 130. ‘‘sexuelle Anomalie’’; see Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1997) 105. 131. ‘‘die Begierde nach schrankenloser Unterwerfung unter den Willen der Person des anderen Geschlechts’’ (154). 132. Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, vol. 1 (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944), 239. 133. Sabine Wilke interprets this act of self-defloration as the woman searching for a phallus. Sabine Wilke, ‘‘Ich bin eine Frau mit einer ma¨nnlichen Anmaßung’’: Eine Analyse des ‘bo¨sen Blicks’ in Elfriede Jelineks Die Klavierspielerin,’’ Modern Austrian Literature 26.1 (1993): 115–44; here: 134. MahlerBungers argues that the cutting suggests the attempt to castrate the self, to create separation and identity (87). Barbara Kosta argues that Erika is driven to use the razor blade by the absence of her father (‘‘Inscribing Erika,’’ 225). 134. ‘‘ ‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’ (Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Entstehung sex-

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ueller Perversionen),’’ Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 7, eds. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2000), 229–54. 135. ‘‘ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’ A Contribution to the Origin of Sexual Perversions,’’ Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1974), 114. [‘‘Vatervertreter (Lehrer),’’ Freud, Studienausgabe, 237.] 136. ‘‘Die bewußte oder bewußtseinsfa¨hige Phantasie des Inhalts, von der Mutter geschlagen zu werden, ist nicht prima¨r. Sie hat ein Vorstadium, das regelma¨ßig unbewußt ist und das den Inhalt hat: ‘Ich werde vom Vater geschlagen’ ’’ (Freud, Studienausgabe, 248). 137. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Knopf: New York, 1956), 286: [‘‘Wie ein Licht aufzuckt, so fuhren die Fensterflu¨gel eines Fensters dort auseinander, ein Mensch, schwach und du¨nn in der Ferne und Ho¨he, beugte sich mit einem Ruck weit vor und streckte die Arme noch weiter aus. Wer war es? Ein Freund? Ein guter Mensch? Einer, der teilnahm? Einer, der helfen wollte?’’ Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1960), 165.] See also Klaus Nu¨chtern, ‘‘Schubert im Pornoladen,’’ in Grissemann, Haneke/Jelinek, 153–66. Nu¨chtern calls the ending of Jelinek’s novel ‘‘eine groteske KafkaParaphrase’’ (164). 138. ‘‘[d]ie Frau wird nicht einmal fu¨r wu¨rdig befunden, das große Opfer der Literaturgeschichte zu sein; sie ist eben nur halbherzig . . .’’ (Berka, ‘‘Gespra¨ch,’’ 152). See also Alfred Barthofer, ‘‘Vanishing in the Text: Elfriede Jelinek’s Art of Self-Effacement in The Piano Teacher and Children of the Dead,’’ in Meyerhofer, 138–64. Barthofer links passages from The Piano Teacher to Kafka’s Der Prozeß (150) and the figure of the ‘‘Tu¨rhu¨ter’’ (145). 139. ‘‘Denn sie schreibt hier zum Beispiel brieflich, daß sie sich wie ein Wurm in deinen grausamen Fesseln winden wird, in denen du mich viele Stunden liegen la¨ßt, und mich dabei in allen mo¨glichen Stellungen sogar schla¨gst oder trittst oder gar auspeitschst! Erika gibt brieflich an, sie wolle unter ihm ganz vergehen und ausgelo¨scht sein. Ihre gut eingebu¨rgerten Gehorsamsleistungen bedu¨rfen der Steigerung!’’ (Die Klavierspielerin, 217). 140. ‘‘Begierde nach schrankenloser Unterwerfung unter den Willen der Person des anderen Geschlechts’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 154). 141. As support for this claim he cites Lady Milford from Friedrich Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe, 1784): ‘‘See the remark of Lady Milford in Schiller’s ‘Intrigue and Love’: ‘We women can choose only between ruling and serving, but the highest joy of power is only a poor crutch if the greater joy remains closed to us, namely to be the slaves of a man we love!’ (act II, scene 1)’’ [ Vgl. Den Ausspruch der Lady Milford in Schillers ‘‘Kabale und Liebe’’: ‘‘Wir Frauenzimmer ko¨nnen nur zwischen Herrschen und Dienen wa¨hlen, aber die ho¨chste Wonne der Gewalt ist doch nur ein elender Behelf, wenn uns die gro¨ssere Wonne versagt wird, Sklavinnen eines Mannes zu sein, den wir lieben!’’ (II. Akt, 1. Scene.)] (Krafft-Ebing, 151, footnote). 142. ‘‘Wa¨hrend der Sadismus als eine pathologische Steigerung des ma¨nnlichen Geschlechtscharakters in seinem psychischen Beiwerk angesehen werden kann, stellt der Masochismus eher eine krankhafte Ausartung spezifisch weiblicher psychischer Eigentu¨mlichkeit dar’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 155). 143. ‘‘die Sklavin eines geliebten Mannes zu sein; sie will, wenn von ihm gezu¨chtigt, seinen Fuss ku¨ssen’’ (Kraft-Ebing, 153). 144. ‘‘Beweis der Liebe’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 153). 145. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories, ed.

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and trans. Domino Falls (London: Velvet Publications, 1997), 84: ‘‘Sehr oft habe ich schon getra¨umt, ich sei ein Sklave—merkwu¨rdig! Nie eine Sklavin. So z.B. habe ich mir ausgemalt, er sei Robinson und ich der Wilde, der ihm dient. Ich sehe mir oft das Bild an, auf welchem Robinson dem Wilden den Fuss auf den Nacken setzt. Jetzt finde ich eine Erkla¨rung der oben erwa¨hnten Vorstellung: Ich stelle mir das Weib im allgemeinen als niedrig vor, niedriger stehend als der Mann; nun bin ich aber sonst sehr stolz und lasse mich um keinen Preis beherrschen, daher kommt es, dass ich mich als Mann denke (der von Natur stolz und hochstehend ist), dadurch wird die Erniedrigung vor dem geliebten Manne um so gro¨sser. Ich stellte mir auch vor, dass ich seine Sklavin sei; das genu¨gte mir aber nicht, das kann am Ende jedes Weib—seinem Manne als Sklavin dienen!’’ (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, 153). 146. Barbara Kosta uses Deleuze’s theory of masochism in her analysis of the novel. Indeed, she reads Frau Kohut as Deleuze’s ‘‘oral mother’’ (‘‘Inscribing Erika,’’ 218). 147. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone, 1991), 41. 148. Jelinek points to this contradiction in her interview with Meyer: ‘‘That is the true crossing of a boundary. In this surrender of sexuality that has been forced by the mother she simultaneously has the presumption of ruling. She tells him exactly what to do with her. And with that, such a young man is, of course, ¨ berschreitung. Sie hat in completely overburdened’’ [Das ist die eigentliche U dieser durch die Mutter erzwungenen Selbstaufgabe in der Sexualita¨t gleichzeitig die Anmaßung des Herrschens. Sie sagt ganz genau, was er mit ihr machen soll. Und damit ist so ein junger Mann natu¨rlich vollkommen u¨berfordert] (Meyer et al., Sturm und Zwang, 60). Jelinek is likewise aware of Deleuze’s theory of masochism: ‘‘The other component is, of course, that, in contrast to the ‘acting out’ of the sadist, the masochist experiences everything phantasmatically and that he cannot want the realization of his phantasies to come about. Masoch’s masochist in that moment wishes nothing more than to escape his phantasm, than that this Greek guy, who in contrast to the woman in furs really is a sadist, beats him up. Masochism, then, is a purely phantasmatic phenomenon’’ [Die andere Komponente ist natu¨rlich, daß im Unterschied zum ‘acting out’ des Sadisten der Masochist alles phantasmatisch erlebt und gar nicht wollen kann, daß die Verwirklichung seiner Phantasien zustande kommt. Masochs Masochist wu¨nscht sich in dem Moment nichts sehnlicher, als seinem Phantasma zu entkommen, als dieser Grieche, der im Unterschied zur Frau im Pelz wirklich Sadist ist, auf ihn einpru¨gelt. Masochismus ist also ein rein phantasmatisches Pha¨nomen] (Berka, ‘‘Gespra¨ch,’’ 142). 149. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 6. 150. ‘‘O die Schornsteine, Auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes, Als Israels Leib zog aufgelo¨st in Rauch durch die Luft—Als Essenkehrer ihn ein Stern empfing, Der schwarz wurde, Oder war es ein Sonnenstrahl.’’ Nelly Sachs, In den Wohnungen des Todes (Berlin: Aufbau, 1947). 151. Ehrhard Bahr, ‘‘Hilde Domin publishes Nur eine Rose als Stu¨tze and Nelly Sachs publishes Flucht and Verwandlung, both of which deal with flight and exile,’’ Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096– 1996, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 710–16. 152. Another poem in Ariel, ‘‘Little Fugue,’’ recalls Paul Celan’s ‘‘Death Fugue’’ (‘‘Todesfuge,’’ 1947) and seems to trivialize the historical weight of Cel-

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an’s poem. Plath’s poem combines images of Christ with those of the German father: ‘‘Gothic and barbarous, pure German’’; ‘‘You had one leg, and a Prussian mind’’ (71). 153. Bloom quoted in Claire Brennan, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 78. 154. ‘‘I do not mean to lift the Holocaust out of the reach of art. Adorno was wrong—poetry can be made after Auschwitz and out of it. . . . But it cannot be done without hard and rare resources of the spirit. Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed. My own feeling is that Sylvia Plath did not earn it, that she did not respect the real incommensurability to her own experience of what took place’’ (Leon Wieseltier, ‘‘In a Universe of Ghosts,’’ New York Review of Books, November 25, 1976: 20). 155. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991). 156. See Brennan, 128. 157. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 118. 158. In Plath’s novel reference to the ‘‘bell jar’’ metaphor comes near the end: ‘‘If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because where I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.’’ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999), 185. 159. Likewise, both Esther and Erika are voyeurs. In Plath’s novel, this symptom is established early on: ‘‘I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it’’ (13). In Jelinek’s novel voyeurism is also a symptom of Erika’s alienation, but it reflects more explicitly the appropriated gaze of sadism, as Erika screens pornography and watches copulating couples in the park. 160. Lois Ames, ‘‘Biographical Note,’’ The Bell Jar, 261. 161. See also Jacqueline Rose: ‘‘if (‘Daddy’) is a suicide poem, it is so only to the extent that it locates a historically actualized vacancy, and excess, at the heart of symbolic, paternal law.’’ (quoted in Brennan, 139). 162. ‘‘Mich geht das Leben meines Vaters und seiner Familie was an, es ist meine Privatsache, nein, es geht mich nichts an, ich habe nicht das Recht, irgendwelche Kollektive, die ich im einzelnen gar nicht kenne, fu¨r die Sache von meinem Papi einzuspannen und fu¨r die der andren, die ich perso¨nlich nicht einmal gekannt habe, schon gar nicht. Kein Recht. Vielleicht habe ich ja recht, aber ein Recht habe ich nicht.’’ Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘oh mein Papa,’’ Das ju¨dische Echo 50 (December 2001): 295–97. 163. ‘‘Gerade dadurch, daß uns u¨brigen, die wir uns auf eine gesellschaftliche ¨ bereinkunft des Nie Wieder als einer Selbstversta¨ndlichkeit beziehen, die U Geschichte nicht aufho¨rt zu sein was sie ist, bleibt sie uns—die wir dauernd den Mund offenstehen haben vor Staunen, daß soviel gewesen sein kann, was wir uns nicht vorstellen ko¨nnen—angeblich verborgener als denen, die uns unterstellen, wir sa¨hen nicht, daß notwendigerweise nichts sicher sein kann’’ (‘‘oh mein Papa’’). 164. ‘‘One takes out that which is hidden in oneself as memory and shows it, and then one puts it away again’’ (‘‘oh mein Papa’’). [Man holt das, was als Geda¨chtnis in einem verborgen ist, hervor und zeigt es, und dann steckt man es wieder ein.]

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165. Elfriede Jelinek, Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen V (Die Wand), Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen I–V (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 101–43; here: 103. 166. ‘‘(Sie rufen) Papi! Papi! / (Sie bru¨llen wahnsinnig laut) Papi! Papi! / Dein Papi war ein Nazi und du sagst, er wa¨re Pazifist! / Dein Papi war Pazifist und du behauptest, er wa¨re ein Nazi! / Dein Papi war Pazifist und du behauptest, er wa¨re ein Jud!’’ (133) 167. ‘‘Der Sohn aber griff aus dem Versteck mit der linken Hand nach ihm, nahm die riesige, lange, scharfgezahnte Sichel in die Rechte, ma¨hte rasch das Geschlecht seines Vaters ab und warf es hinter sich, daß es fortflog; doch fiel es nicht ohne Wirkung aus seiner Hand, denn all die blutigen Tropfen, die herabfielen, empfing Gaia und gebar im Kreislauf der Jahre die starken Erinnyen, die großen Giganten in strahlender Ru¨stung und mit langen Speeren in der Hand sowie auch die Nymphen, die man auf der unendlichen Erde Melische, also Eschennymphen nennt’’ (Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen V, 143). 168. For example, in I ⽦ Huckabees (USA, 2004) in which Huppert parodies her role in Haneke’s film, as well as Franc¸ois Ozon’s 8 Femmes (France, 2002). 169. Although Haneke is known for his exclusive use of diegetic music (see Willy Riemer, ‘‘Beyond Mainstream Film,’’ in After Postmodernism, 159–71), Stefan Grissemann points out that the music in La Pianiste, while performed by the figures and thus diegetic, often seeps into the scene that follows (Grissemann, ‘‘In zwei, drei feinen Linien die Badewannenwand entlang,’’ in Haneke/Jelinek, ed. Grissemann,16). By stretching his own rule, Haneke invites a more associative, and thereby identificatory, relationship to the music of the film. 170. Jelinek sees Fassbinder as a formalist whereas Haneke provides more opportunity for spectator identification. In fact, Jelinek admits that David Lynch, her favorite director, is ‘‘unselfconscious’’ [unbefangen] in comparison to Haneke (123). Grissemann, ‘‘ ‘Daß dieser Film auch eine Rettung meiner Person ist’: Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Haneke/Jelinek, 119–37. 171. ‘‘Dieser Mut, eine ha¨ßliche Frau zu besetzen, wu¨rde dazu fu¨hren, daß die Sprache eine sta¨rkere, eigene Komponente beka¨me als bei einer scho¨nen Frau wie der Huppert’’ (Grissemann, ‘‘Daß dieser Film auch eine Rettung meiner Person ist,’’in Haneke/Jelinek,128.). 172. ‘‘Es ist vielleicht eine Dekonstruktion des Melodrams. Parodie ist es wohl keine’’ (127). In Haneke’s interview with Grissemann, Haneke claims that his film is, indeed, a parody of a melodrama: ‘‘Ich halte meinen Film fu¨r die Parodie eines Melodrams, so wie der Roman eine Art Parodie des klassischen pscyhologischen Romans ist.’’ Grissemann, ‘‘Einen Film zu drehen, der zugleich komisch und scheußlich ist,’’ Haneke/Jelinek: 175–91; here: 179. 173. See Georg Seeßlen, who argues that Haneke brings realism and formalism together in his films (208). Georg Seeßlen, ‘‘Alltag und Katastrophe: Das Ding, der Ko¨rper, das Bild, die Sprache und das Grauen der Wirklichkeit. Anmerkungen zu den Filmen von Michael Haneke,’’ in Haneke/Jelinek, 193–212. 174. Willy Riemer, ‘‘Beyond Mainstream Film: An Interview with Michael Haneke,’’ in After Postmodernism, ed. Willy Riemer, 159–70; here: 167. 175. Along these lines, Brigitte Peucker sees in Haneke’s films a mourning of the fragmentation of the bourgeois family (187). Brigitte Peucker, ‘‘Fragmentation and the Real: Michael Haneke’s Family Trilogy,’’ in After Postmodernism, 176–88. 176. Elke Schmitter, ‘‘Hunger nach Intimita¨t,’’ Der Spiegel 41 (October 8, 2001), http://www.spiegel.de/Spiegel/0,1518,162251,00.html. 177. Manohla Dargis, review of The Piano Teacher, LA Weekly, April 12–18, 2002, http://www.kino.com/pianoteacher/piano_rev.html

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178. Dargis. 179. Derek Lam, review of The Piano Teacher, Camera-Stylo 2002, http://www .camerastylo.com/haneke.com. 180. Grisseman, ‘‘daß dieser Film,’’ 136. 181. ‘‘Der Mann besitzt die Gefu¨hle, deren die Frau beraubt ist.’’ Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, review of Die Klavierspielerin, Filmzentrale, http://www.filmzentrale .com/rezis/klavierspielerindk.htm. 182. Riemer, ‘‘Beyond Mainstream Film,’’ 164. 183. J. Hoberman, ‘‘Prisoners’ Songs,’’ review of The Piano Teacher, The Village Voice, March 27–April 2, 2002, http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/ 0213/hoberman.php. 184. See also Grissemann: ‘‘Haneke’s characters are prisoners: within themselves and within the images in which they dwell. The staging grants them almost no flexibility in space, no freedom to move’’ [Hanekes Figuren sind Gefangene: in sich selbst und in den Bildern, in denen sie sich aufhalten. Die Inszenierung gewa¨hrt ihnen fast keinen Spielraum, keine Bewegungsfreiheit] (19). Grissemann also sees the final scene of the film as Erika’s escape from prison: ‘‘out of a prison into which this film locked her’’ [aus dem Gefa¨ngnis heraus, in das dieser Film sie gesperrt hat] (31). Grissemann, ‘‘In zwei, drei feinen Linien die Badewannenwand entlang: Kunst, Utopie und Selbstbeschutzung: zu Michael Hanekes Jelinek-Adaption,’’ Haneke/Jelinek, 11–31. In contrast, Jelinek sees the film as completely closed: ‘‘The staging is very claustrophobic, the film doesn’t open itself up even a single time’’ [Die Inszenierung hat dieses sehr Klaustrophobische, der Film ‘o¨ffnet’ sich kein einziges Mal] (Grissemann, ‘‘Daß dieser Film,’’ 124.) 185. ‘‘Es scheint nun zu einer europa¨ischen Erza¨hlung geworden zu sein’’ (Grissemann, 133). 186. However, as Grissemann points out, the film La Pianiste and the author Jelinek are not particularly popular in Austria. The reception of Haneke’s film in Austria was less than enthusiastic: ‘‘The first reports which—still before the prize—reach the Austrian media speak, rather, about a failure, about booing and an atmosphere of embarrassment’’ [Die ersten Meldungen, die—noch vor der Ehrung—in o¨sterreichischen Medien einlaufen, sprechen dagegen von einem Mißerfolg, von Buhrufen und einer Atmospha¨re der Peinlichkeit] (Grissemann, ‘‘Vorbemerkung,’’ Haneke/Jelinek, 7–10; here: 8).

Chapter 3. Leaving Home 1. In an interview with Michael Althen, Tykwer states that the image of falling is central to his concept of film: ‘‘And then this image of the fall—that also keeps coming up. Going to the movies also is somehow related to that: to let oneself fall’’ [Und dann dieses Bild vom Fall, das kommt auch immer wieder. Ins Kino gehen hat irgendwie auch damit zu tun: sich fallen lassen] (Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Generalschlu¨ssel fu¨rs Kino,’’ in Szenenwechsel: Momentaufnahmen des jungen deutschen Films, ed. Michael To¨teberg [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999], 17–33). 2. In the Director’s Comments on the DVD, Tykwer explains that the location is in Cornwall, England. Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Director’s Comments,’’ The Princess and the Warrior, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (2000; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001). 3. The original screenplay for Heaven was written by Krzystof Kieslowski.

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4. Michael To¨teberg, ‘‘Run, Lola, Run,’’ in Szenenwechsel, 48. 5. In a New York Times article on the impact of Run Lola Run, Tykwer is quoted as seeing utopian elements in the film: ‘‘I think a lot of people want to see a film that believes in utopian elements. Utopian not in the old-fashioned socialist sense, but in the sense of believing in the power of inventiveness. The film invents its own system: it says, ‘I don’t care if the time is only 20 minutes, I’m going to make it become 60 minutes.’ Just as Lola says: ‘I don’t care if I can’t get there. I’m just going to do it’ ’’ (Laura Winters, ‘‘A Rebel With Red Hair Rumples Stuffed Shirts,’’ New York Times, late edition, sec. 2, July 13, 1999, 17). 6. See Sandra Schuppach, who argues that Tykwer’s films represent the notion of transition thematically through coming-of-age narratives (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer [Mainz: Bender, 2004], 199). 7. See also Barbara Kosta, ‘‘Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and the Usual Suspects: The Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and History,’’ in German Pop Culture: How ‘‘American’’ Is It?, ed. Agnes C. Mueller (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 165–80. Kosta suggests that ‘‘with Lola, Tykwer steps outside of the politically motivated framework of the New German Cinema and its compulsive preoccupation with national identity and the past’’ (176). 8. ‘‘Welcoming Committee,’’ The Princess and the Warrior, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (2000; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001). 9. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer depicts entrapment and liberation in an exciting way, but it is also a more cynical film and one over which Tykwer had less authorial control. Perfume begins in the space of a dark prison, and it proceeds to depict the liberation of the murderer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, from the confines of the prison and city as he travels to the expansive lavender fields in the French countryside in his quest for the perfect scent. Yet the film, and the novel upon which it is based (Patrick Su¨skind, Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mo¨rders [Zu¨rich: Diogenes, 1985]) offer a dystopic view of the Enlightenment, and the final scene of the film pictures Grenouille being literally consumed by others in the streets of Paris. This final tableau suggests a kind of reverse Enlightenment and, in the narrator’s view, a liberation from the imprisonment of the state of subjecthood. 10. ‘‘This is the really great art—to educate without revealing the purpose of the education, so that one fulfills an educational function without the object of that education being in any way aware that it is being educated, which is also indeed the real purpose of propaganda’’ (Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996], 33). 11. See also Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 12. See, for example, Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2004) as well as John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 13. For example, the notion of popular cinema is of central concern in the recent British Film Institute volume on German film: Tim Bergfelder, Erica Cater, and Deniz Go¨ktu¨rk, The German Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2002). See also the essays on German popular culture and film in the following collections: Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, eds., Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); and Agnes Mueller, ed., German Pop Culture: How ‘‘American’’ Is It? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

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14. See Andrew Higson, ‘‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,’’ in Cinema and Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000), 63–75. 15. Marc Silberman shows how the German comedies of the 1990s created a domestic cinema boom. These comedies had no global currency, however: ‘‘As is usually the case with comedy, it is rarely exportable, so these domestic successes have not translated into international distribution’’ (Marc Silberman, ‘‘Popular Cinema, National Cinema, and European Integration,’’ Mueller, German Pop Culture, 151–64; here: 154). 16. Eric Rentschler, ‘‘From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,’’ in Cinema and Nation, 260–78. 17. Rentschler’s assessment of German film in the 1990s is echoed by Georg Seeßlen in his article ‘‘Das Kino der Autoren ist tot. Glauben wir an ein neues?’’ [The Cinema of the Auteurs Is Dead. Do We Believe in a New One?]: ‘‘What is happening right now with German film evokes on the one hand euphoria and on the other hand uneasiness. Needless to say that the euphoria is of an economic nature and the uneasiness of a cultural nature and that the protagonists of each reaction are as far apart as art and finance are supposed to be’’ [Was derzeit mit dem deutschen Film passiert, lo¨st einerseits Euphorie und andererseits Mißbehagen aus. Unnu¨tz zu sagen, daß die Euphorie o¨konomischer und das Mißbehagen kultureller Art ist und daß die Protagonisten beider Reaktionen so weit voneinander sind, wie es Kunst und Wirtschaft gefa¨lligst zu sein haben] (quoted in Sandra Schuppach, Tom Tykwer [Mainz: Bender, 2004], 21). 18. See Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), who likewise notes the return of popular cinema and genre in post-wall German filmmaking (180) and Randall Halle, ‘‘ ‘Happy Ends’ to Crises of Heterosexual Desire: Toward a Social Psychology of Recent German Comedies,’’ Camera Obscura 15.2 (2000): 1–39. 19. For example, Michael Herbig’s Der Schuh des Manitu (Germany, 2001), a parody of German westerns based on the novels of Karl May, is listed amongst the most popular films in the country on numerous lists. The comedy classics of the popular stand-up comedian Otto Waalkes generally top these lists. 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 279. 21. Jarausch Geyer, 85. 22. Andreas Rost, ‘‘Einleitendes zu den vielfa¨ltigen Erscheinungsformen postmoderner Geister’’ in Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne, eds. Andreas Rost and Mike Sandbothe (Munich: Verlag der Autoren, 1998) 9–27; here: 9. 23. Jens Eder, ed., Oberfla¨chenrausch: Postmoderne und Postklassik im Kino der 90er Jahre (Mu¨nster: Lit, 2002). 24. See especially the essays by Georg Seeßlen (107–18) and Ernst Schreckenberg (118–31). 25. ‘‘Hier soll keine theoretische Einfu¨hrung und schon gar nichts aus dem Ressort ‘Ewige Wahrheiten der Filmgeschichte’ angeboten, sondern von meiner perso¨nlichen Faszination am Film Wild At Heart (1990) von David Lynch und vom Kino der Postmoderne erza¨hlt werden.’’ Georg Seeßlen, ‘‘Die Faszination des Schreckens in Wild at Heart von David Lynch,’’ in Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne, 107–18; here: 107. 26. Mike Sandbothe, ‘‘Was heißt hier Postmoderne?’’ in Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne, 41–54; here: 42. 27. Ernst Schreckenberg, ‘‘Was ist postmodernes Kino?—Versuch einer kurzen Antwort auf eine schwierige Frage,’’ Die Filmgespenster der Postmoderne, 119–30; here: 127.

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28. ‘‘das drastische Medium der Kulturindustrie’’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem bescha¨digten Leben [Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987], 270). 29. Adorno, Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung, 135. See also Birgit Recki, ¨ sthetik des Kinos,’’ Filma¨sthetik, ed. ‘‘Am Anfang ist das Licht: Elemente einer A Ludwig Nagl (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 35–60. Recki points out that much of German aesthetic theory has been influenced by Adorno. See especially pp. 37–38. 30. ‘‘ ‘Postmoderne’ [hat] fu¨r die habermasische Kommunikationsgemeinschaft eine apokalyptische Dimension . . . , wa¨hrend Idee und Term der Architektur- und Kunstszene Befreiung von den Zwa¨ngen einer kanonisch gewordenen a¨sthetischen Moderne bedeuten. Und beschra¨nkt man sich auf einen Fachbereich, die Literaturwissenschaft, so kann man staunend wahrnehmen, daß eine bestimmte Struktur poetischer Texte der Amerikanistik als postmodern gilt, wa¨hrend dasselbe Stilelement in der Germanistik und auch Romanistik fu¨r typisch modern angesehen wird’’ (Hoesterey, Verschlungene Schriftzeichen], 130). 31. Run Lola Run has played in over thirty-seven countries worldwide. Within three weeks in Germany it reached number one with one million viewers (Michael To¨teberg, ‘‘Run, Lola Run: Michael To¨teberg u¨ber die Karriere eines Films,’’ Szenenwechsel, 45), and it made 7 million dollars in the United States, making it the second-most popular German film ever in the United States (To¨teberg, ‘‘Run Lola Run,’’ 48). 32. ‘‘von dem das deutsche Kino all die Jahre getra¨umt hat.’’ Michael Althen, ‘‘Ein Narr, wer den Zufall Schicksal nennt. Sie la¨uft und la¨uft: Tom Tykwer schla¨gt mit Lola rennt ein neues Kapitel deutscher Filmgeschichte auf,’’ review of Lola rennt, directed by Tom Tykwer, Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung, August 19, 1998, in Vogt, Guntram, Die Stadt im Kino: Deutsche Spielfilme 1900–2000, ed. Guntram Vogt (Marburg: Schu¨ren, 2001), 737. 33. Janet Maslin, ‘‘Film Festival Review: A Dangerous Game with Several Endings,’’ review of Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, New York Times, March 26, 1999. 34. ‘‘Wir haben den Begriff ‘Postmoderne’ schon mal geho¨rt.’’ Urs Richter, review of Lola rennt, directed by Tom Tykwer, Filmtext 1998, http://filmtext.com/ start.jsp?mode⳱2&lett⳱1&archive⳱202. 35. In contrast, Alice Kuzniar (The Problem of Agency in the Digital Era, Occasional Paper Series, Rutgers [2003]) criticizes Run Lola Run for not being experimental enough. She compares Tykwer’s film with the Web-based art of Michael Brynntrup and argues that Run Lola Run ultimately retains certain traditional structures. She suggests that the film allays our anxieties about postmodern identity by giving Lola agency (Kuzniar, 12). 36. See Maurice Yakowar, who links Tykwer’s postmodern aesthetics with a departure from the past that is, however, rather a dream than reality in Germany: ‘‘Undaunted by the weight of the past, the corruption around her, and a discouraging future, she strives and then re-strives until she gets what she wants. But then Tom Tykwer’s Lola is lucky. Unlike most of us, she’s living in a brilliant post-modernist fiction’’ (‘‘Run Lola Run: Renn for Your Life,’’ Queen’s Quarterly 106.4 (Winter 1999): 557–65; here: 564). 37. Timothy Corrigan, ‘‘The Temporality of Place, Postmodernism, and the Fassbinder Texts,’’ New German Critique 63 (Fall 1994): 138–54; here: 154. 38. Raben also composed some of the music for Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046

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(China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, 2004), a science fiction film about unrequited love. 39. Hans-Gu¨nther Dicks points to Tykwer’s knowledge of film history and his use of citation: ‘‘In other regards, too, Tykwer shows that he knows film history; for the cineastes, he serves up hints to Hitchcock as well as to slapstick comedies, and in his choice of cinematic means, he does not leave out any register’’ [Auch sonst zeigt Tykwer, daß er die Filmgeschichte kennt, er bedient die Cineasten mit Anspielungen auf Hitchcock wie auf Slapstick-Komo¨dien, und in der Wahl der filmischen Mittel la¨ßt er kein Register aus] (‘‘Fast nur Spielerei,’’ Neues Deutschland, August 20, 1998, in Die Stadt im Kino, 738). However, as I will show, Tykwer’s method of citation should be distinguished from the citational practices of many postmodern filmmakers. 40. While this is the most common interpretation of the function of the Sissi films in 1950s Germany and Austria, it is also possible to analyze them through a queer lens, as offering an aesthetics of melancholy that complicates a nostalgic reading. 41. The Heimat genre in film and literature has often been criticized in the form of parody by postwar German and Austrian filmmakers and authors such as Marlene Streeruwitz and Valie Export. Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl (Das schreckliche Ma¨dchen; Germany, 1990) offers another instance of this film genre. Most recently, Michael ‘‘Bully’’ Herbig has created an animated parody of the Sissi films, Lissi und der wilde Kaiser (Germany, 2007). 42. Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 223–53; here: 244. 43. Tykwer, ‘‘Director’s Commentary,’’ The Princess and the Warrior. 44. Tykwer, ‘‘Deleted Scenes,’’ The Princess and the Warrior. 45. In Run Lola Run the security guard, played by Armin Rohde, calls Lola the ‘‘Prinzessin’’ when she asks to see her father, so that Potente is already a ‘‘princess’’ in the earlier film. ‘‘Papa 1,’’ Run Lola Run, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (1998; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 1999). 46. As an exception, Maurice Yakowar suggests that ‘‘Tykwer’s Lola (Franka Potente) is an emphatic antithesis to the horde of Lolas, Lulus, and Lilis that stud the classic German film. Where they are usually languidly ornamental blonde femme fatales who try to destroy their adoring gulls, this Lola is a flaming redhead with a wiry, muscular build and facial features that are homey, just short of homely. With her astonishing stamina and will she saves her undeserving lover’s hide. Far from being the object of her man’s love/lust, she makes herself the determining force in both of their lives’’ (Yakowar, 558). 47. Dan Jardine calls Run Lola Run ‘‘superficial and meaningless,’’ but great fun (Dan Jardine, review of Run Lola Run, Apollo Movie Guide, July 6, 2004, http://apolloguide.com/mov_fullrev.asp?CID⳱1459); and James Berardinelli writes that watching the film was ‘‘the most fun I have had at any movie thus far in 1999’’ (James Berardinelli, review of Run Lola Run, 1999, http://moviereviews.colossus.net/movies/r/run_lola.html); J. Hoberman of the Village Voice calls the film both ‘‘philosophical and brainless,’’ ‘‘a hipster exercise video’’ (J. Hoberman, ‘‘So Long a Go-Go,’’ review of Run Lola Run, The Village Voice, June, 1999, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9924/hoberman.php). Roger Ebert points to the film’s postmodern form: ‘‘The director, a young German named Tom Tykwer, throws every trick in the book at us, and then the book, and then himself’’ (Roger Ebert, review of Run Lola Run, Chicago Sun-Times, July 2,1999, http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi), and the British journal Empire likewise concentrates on the film’s style, calling it a ‘‘hugely likeable bit of adrena-

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line-pumped Euro-nonsense’’ (Caroline Westbrook, review of Run Lola Run, Empire, November 1999, http://www.empireonline.co.uk/site/incinemas/Reviews InFull.asp?FID⳱5091). 48. ‘‘Interview with Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente,’’ The Movie Chicks, June 8, 2001, http://themoviechicks.com/jul2001/mcrtprincess.html. 49. Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Run Lola Run: Director’s Statement,’’ Sony Pictures Web site, 1999, http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/runlolarun/statement/state ment_text.html. See also Michael To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentThriller: Tom Tykwer im Gespra¨ch mit Michael To¨teberg,’’ Lola rennt (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998), 129–42. In this interview, Tykwer says: ‘‘The time-space-continuum is unhooked—so what? We are at the movies, after all!’’ [Das Raum-Zeit Kontinuum wird aus den Angeln gehoben, na und? Wir sind doch im Kino!] (137). 50. Critics such as David Bordwell have pointed to the film’s dalliance with concepts introduced by quantum physics (David Bordwell, ‘‘Film Futures,’’ SubStance 31.1 [2002]: 88–104). 51. One of the many examples is the ‘‘Sissi-Bar’’ in Konstanz that caters to gays and lesbians. Ralf Ko¨nig, the celebrated gay comic book author, represents the allure of ‘‘Sissi’’ for gay men in the sketch ‘‘Schwulendemo’’ in which a group of gay men dress in drag for a gay and lesbian demonstration. The dress of choice is the ‘‘Sissi-Kleid’’ over which the men bicker (Ralf Ko¨nig, Prall aus dem Leben [Hamburg: Carlsen, 1989] 39–41). 52. See also Sandra Schuppach’s interview with Tykwer: ‘‘These are films I certainly respect, for instance the works of Haneke, sometimes also certain works of Greenaway, which I admire the first time, but where I never have the feeling that I will see something new the second time around’’ [Das sind Filme, die ich durchaus respektiere, zum Beispiel die Sachen von Haneke, manchmal auch bestimmte Arbeiten von Greenaway, die ich fu¨r das eine Mal bewundere, wo ich aber nie das Gefu¨hl habe, ich werde beim zweiten Mal etwas Neues sehen] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 225). 53. Tom Mes and Joep Vermaat, ‘‘Tom Tykwer: Interview,’’ Musicolog, http://www.musicolog.com/tykwer_interviews.asp. 54. Tykwer’s notion of the film is often articulated in terms reminiscent of modernist aesthetics. For example, in an interview with Sandra Schuppach he speaks of the identity of the film and states that he likes films that ‘‘have a personality’’ [eine Perso¨nlichkeit haben] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 250). 55. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 101. 56. ‘‘Watch David Lynch’s new film: there are plenty of mysteries that are not being solved. Mulholland Drive proves how exciting it can be to enter into territory that is rather opened by questions than by lectures.’’ [Sehen Sie sich den neuen Film von David Lynch an: Da gibt es lauter Mysterien ohne Auflo¨sung. Mulholland Drive beweist, wie aufregend es sein kann, in Bereiche vorzudringen, die eher durch Fragen geo¨ffnet werden als durch Vortra¨ge.] (Merten Worthmann, ‘‘Du triffst jemanden und weißt, der ist es,’’ Die Zeit, July 2002, http:// www.zeit.de/archiv/2002/07/200207_tykwer-interview.xml.) 57. ‘‘Das Problem bei jemandem wie Greenaway ist, dass da zwanghaft ausgebrochen wird aus der narrativen Struktur. Da denke ich nur: ‘Ja ja, du weißt alles besser.’ Der neue Lynch-Film macht das auch. Er ist faszinierend, aber er ist vom ersten Moment außerhalb der narrativen Linie. Es geht um die Destruktion dieser Linie. Das ist mir einen Tick zu viel Theorie und ha¨lt auf Distanz.’’ (Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Ich bin einer der Stu¨rmer,’’ Interview with Thomas Winkler, Die Tageszeitung, June 2, 2002, http://www.taz.de/pt/2002/07/04a0158.nf/text.

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58. See Barbara Kosta (‘‘Run Lola Run,’’ 168) and Christine Haase (‘‘You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Transcultural Filmmaking in Run Lola Run [1998],’’ in Light Motives, 395–417; here: 403–4). Both point to Tykwer’s citations of popular and high culture, though they do not talk about his practice of self-citation. 59. The German Cinema Book, 202–11. 60. ‘‘sich von seinen Vorbildern abnabeln,’’ Mes and Vermaat. 61. ‘‘They are actors I know, who belong to my creative family, who run through my films sometimes in a main role and sometimes in a supporting role.’’ [Es sind Schauspieler, die ich kenne, die zu meiner kreativen Familie geho¨ren, mal als Hauptrolle, mal als Nebenrolle durch meine Filme laufen.] (To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller,’’ 138.) 62. ‘‘Ich mo¨chte, daß man sich auf unsere Filme ein bißchen als eigenen Kosmos bezieht.’’ Dirk Jasper, ‘‘Interview mit Tom Tykwer,’’ Dirk Jasper Filmstarlexikon 2002, http://www.djfl.de/entertainment/starts/t/tom_tykwer_i_01.html. 63. Schuppach points to the ‘‘pronounced hermeticism’’ [auffa¨llige Hermetik] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 29) of Tykwer’s films in her monograph and, although she tends to read Tykwer’s films outside of film history, she draws numerous parallels between his own films. 64. In his analysis of Run Lola Run, David Bordwell describes what he calls a ‘‘bricolage’’ aesthetic (David Bordwell, Visual Style in Cinema: Vier Kapitel Filmgeschichte [Frankfurt/Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2001], 184.) that he already locates in the Nouvelle Vague French films of the 1960s, an aesthetic he likewise uses to characterize the films of Wong Kar-Wai. In this sense, his analysis overlooks the cultural specifity of Tykwer’s film. 65. See Joan Kristin Bleicher’s essay ‘‘Zuru¨ck in die Zukunft: Formen intertextueller Selbstreferentialita¨t im postmodernen Film’’ [Back to the Future: Forms of Intertextual Self-Referentiality in Postmodern Film], Oberfla¨chenrausch. 66. ‘‘die entscheidende Funktion des Selbstbezugs in der Abgrenzung von der Systemumwelt. Das System Film nun grenzt sich ab von konkurrierenden Medien, etwa dem Fernsehen und dem Internet’’ (Bleicher, 129). 67. ‘‘In this sense, Heaven is the non-identical twin of The Princess and the Warrior. The film’s climate, however, is completely different. Heaven is the narratively ascetic, much more controlled twin. I do not see advantages or disadvantages in one of the versions, but rather, they are two completely different approaches to dealing with a specific set of topics. At the same time, I get back here to my film Run Lola Run, which in a similar way tried to narrate very efficiently. Formally, even if it doesn’t seem like that at first sight, Heaven is a relative of Run Lola Run rather than of The Princess and the Warrior.’’ [So gesehen ist Heaven der zweieiige Zwilling von Der Krieger und die Kaiserin. Das Klima des Films ist jedoch vo¨llig anders. Heaven ist der erza¨hlerisch-asketische, viel kontrolliertere Zwilling. Wobei ich u¨brigens weder Vor- noch Nachteil in einer Version entdecke, sondern es sind zwei vo¨llig verschiedene Herangehensweisen, sich mit einem bestimmten Themenkomplex auseinander zu setzen. Zugleich komme ich damit wieder zuru¨ck auf einen Film wie Lola rennt, der auf eine a¨hnliche Weise auch versucht hat, sehr effizient zu erza¨hlen. Formal, auch wenn es auf den ersten Blick nicht so scheint, ist Heaven eher ein Verwandter von Lola rennt als von Der Krieger und die Kaiserin.] (Michael To¨teberg, ‘‘Die Reise vom Schatten ins Licht: Tom Tykwer im Gespra¨ch mit Michael To¨teberg,’’ Heaven: Ein Film von Tom Tykwer [Munich: Belleville, 2002] 97–115; here: 98.)

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68. ‘‘Es gibt viele kleine Querverbindungen, bis hin zum Detail, daß der Sanita¨ter im Krankenwagen, der Schuster beatmet, derselbe Typ ist wie der Sanita¨ter in Die to¨dliche Maria, der Maria beatmet. Es ist genau derselbe Typ, er hat auch diesen leichten Bart—und es ist derselbe Schauspieler, der sich gewundert hat, fu¨nf Jahre spa¨ter einen Anruf zu bekommen, ob er dieselbe Rolle noch einmal spielen mo¨chte . . . Obendrein ist er der Bruder von Nina Petri.’’ To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer . . . ,’’ 139. 69. In his interview with Michael To¨teberg, Tykwer explains his reasons for using both 35-milimeter film and video: ‘‘Everything that is not happening in the presence of Manni and Lola is shot on video; it is claimed, then, that the world outside of those two is artificial and unreal. When Lola runs through the frame, it’s film—then, in keeping with cinema’s nature, miracles, too, are true. As soon as Lola has run around the corner and is no longer at the locus of the events—for instance during the accident of Mr. Meier—the image switches from 35 mm to video.’’ [Alles, was nicht in Gegenwart von Manni und Lola passiert, ist auf Video gedreht; es wird also behauptet, die Welt außerhalb dieser beiden sei ku¨nstlich und unwirklich. La¨ uft Lola durchs Bild, ist es Film—dann sind, ganz kinogema¨ß, auch Wunder wahr. Sobald Lola um die Ecke gerannt und nicht mehr am Ort des Geschehens ist, beispielsweise beim Unfall von Herrn Meier, wechselt das Bild von 35 mm zu Video.] (‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer . . . ,’’ 134.) 70. Schuppach likewise suggests that, although Tykwer never clarifies who Sissi’s father might be, he might indeed be Werner (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 115). 71. ‘‘Alles . . . in Ordnung?’’ ‘‘Run and Hit 3,’’ Run Lola Run, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (1998; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 1999). 72. ‘‘Na, klar. Du nicht?’’ ‘‘Haircut,’’ Winter Sleepers, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (1997; New York: Fox Lorber Films, 2000). 73. ‘‘Na sicher’’ (‘‘What a Difference A Day Makes,’’ Run Lola Run). 74. ‘‘Wie siehst du denn aus?’’ (‘‘Becky Breaks Down,’’ Winter Sleepers). 75. ‘‘Was ist los mit dir? Du siehst schlecht aus’’ (‘‘Good Years,’’ Winter Sleepers). 76. ‘‘Wie siehst du denn aus?’’ (‘‘Everything is Okay,’’ Run Lola Run). 77. The use of this song is likely a citation of Wong Kar-Wai’s postmodern classic Chungking Express (Hong Kong, 1996), which was released two years before Run Lola Run. Wong’s film is highly atmospheric, creating nonlinear narratives within a dream-like setting. One of the stars of the film, Fay Wong, wonders out loud to herself, ‘‘Can dreams be catching?’’ In one of the two parallel narratives, a young policeman is involved with a stewardess who is about to leave him, and Washington’s song provides the background as she plays with a toy airplane in bed. Tykwer’s scene recalls motifs similar to those in the Chungking Express scene, such as the naı¨ve policeman, the lovers about to be separated, and the notions of fate, chance, time, and dream. David Bordwell likewise compares Tykwer’s use of freeze frames and Washington’s song with similar moments in Wong’s film. David Bordwell, Visual Style in Cinema, 199. 78. Sandra Schuppach has pointed out that each of Tykwer’s films contains an accident. Maria is almost hit by a car, Theo’s daughter is killed in a car accident, Manni is hit by an ambulance, Sissi is hit by the truck, and Phillippa is almost hit by a motorcycle. As Schuppach suggests, falling leads to a break with the past, to change (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 141–44). 79. Another moment that seems to suggest interfilmic memory is when Sissi

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reaches for Bodo’s hand as she is wheeled away on the stretcher—a gesture reminiscent of the moment when Schuster reaches for Lola’s hand as Schuster lies on the stretcher. Similarly, when Sissi asks her friend to borrow a car so that she and Bodo can escape from the police, she expresses her needs with two words: ‘‘now, immediately,’’ words that are at odds with the passive and patient Sissi of the first portion of the film but that rather recall the active and driven Lola of the earlier film as she cajoles her father to give her money using the same words (‘‘Shock Therapy,’’ The Princess and the Warrior). 80. See Andrew James Horton, ‘‘The Great Manipulator: Tom Tykwer’s Der Krieger und die Kaiserin,’’ Central Europe Review 3.16, May 7, 2001, http:// www.ce-review.org/01/16/kinoeye16_horton.html. Horton compares Tykwer’s expansive use of various film techniques to Eisenstein’s ‘‘montage of attractions.’’ 81. This shot is reminiscent of the bird’s eye shots of Buenos Ares in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. 82. The technique is reminiscent of the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus’s encircling camera in Fassbinder’s Martha (1973), as Martha first meets her future lover and husband, the sadistic engineer Helmut. 83. Even the sun could be seen as a leitmotif in Tykwer’s films, perhaps dramatized most beautifully in the citation from Miracle in Milan that Sissi watches in The Princess and the Warrior. The orphan Toto, who represents hope and change, asks a poor girl, ‘‘Do you want, the sun?’’ The scene is kitschy and melodramatic, but it moves Sissi, and the sun remains a self-conscious leitmotif of hope or change. In Winter Sleepers, Tykwer’s most entrapping film, the sun is potentially lethal. Rene´’s first words after the car accident are ‘‘the sun’’ [‘‘. . . die Sonne’’]. He sees the sun through the snow surrounding his car and climbs out into the light. Laura’s fixation on the sun seems to bring about disaster; she opens the blinds in the hospital room of Theo’s comatose child, and the shock of the sun leads to the child’s death. Rene´’s conscious naming of the sun as a significant power in the Tykwer cosmos transcends what could be otherwise seen as an overused kitsch metaphor. 84. The interfilmic reference of the spiral could be extended to include the scenes with the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (Germany, 1931), a film likewise set in Berlin. Barbara Kosta also points out that the blind woman (Monika Bleibtreu) who helps Manni is reminiscent of the blind man who helps the police in M (Kosta, Run Lola Run, 174). 85. See also Sandra Schuppach, who suggests that in ‘‘Tyktown’’ the spiral is the dominant symbol: ‘‘Tyktown is a stylized world that shimmers in all colors and whose symbol is the spiral’’ [Tyktown ist eine stilisierte Welt, die in allen Farben schimmert und deren Symbol die Spirale ist.] (Sandra Schuppach, ‘‘Tyktown: Im Kino des Tom Tykwer,’’ Splitter im Gewebe: Filmemacher zwischen Autorenfilm und Mainstreamkino, ed. Maruc Stiglegger [Mainz: Theo Bender, 2000] 302–14; here: 312). 86. In an interview with Michael Althen, Tykwer describes how he asked the artist Alexander Manassis to create the picture of Carlota Valdez, the woman in the painting from Vertigo, in fifteen minutes (‘‘Generalschlu¨ssel fu¨rs Kino,’’ 30). 87. ‘‘Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel.’’ A German audience would be familiar with Herberger and would immediately link him with his role as coach in the famous 1954 Soccer World Cup final that Germany won against Hungary—a historic moment often seen as signifying the revitalization of German nationalism after the end of Nazism. The game is famously cited in the last minutes of Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun, and it serves as the dramatic center of

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So¨nke Wortmann’s popular film, The Miracle of Bern (Das Wunder von Bern; Germany, 2003). 88. Run Lola Run also begins with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s 1942 poem ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ number 4 of the ‘‘Four Quartets.’’ The first four lines of the last stanza of the poem signal very clearly the kind of circularity and play with time and space that permeates the film: ‘‘We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.’’ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), 39. See, in this context, Christine Haase, who shows how Tykwer brings high and low art together and even calls into question the supposed cultural superiority of Germany over America with the use of American high culture motifs (Eliot) and German low culture motifs (Herberger) (Haase, 404). 89. These scenes recall the entrance into the ear in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (USA, 1986), a film Tykwer admits to having greatly admired: ‘‘Lynch lives in his own singular cosmos. I once adored him, now I merely admire him. When one compares Mulholland Drive with Blue Velvet, a film that influenced me greatly, one sees a decisive difference. Blue Velvet moves from a clear narrative structure into the abstract. With that I can identify. That he [Lynch] does in an exemplary way’’ [Lynch lebt in seinem eigenen, einzigartigen Kosmos. Ich habe mal fu¨r ihn geschwa¨rmt, jetzt bewundere ich ihn nur noch. Wenn man Mulholland Drive mit Blue Velvet vergleicht, einem fu¨r mich sehr pra¨genden Film, sieht man einen entscheidenden Unterschied. Blue Velvet bewegt sich aus einer klaren narrativen Struktur ins Abstrakte. Damit kann ich mich identifizieren. Das macht er vorbildlich] (Worthmann, ‘‘Du triffst jemanden und weißt, der ist es’’). In an interview with Sandra Schuppach, Tykwer likewise refers to the timelessness in Blue Velvet as a model for the relative use of time in his own films (‘‘Interviews,’’ 233). In Blue Velvet, the camera seemingly enters the disembodied ear that Jeffrey (Kyle McLaughlan) has discovered in a field, signifying the film’s entrance into a different space and time via a dark tunnel. In the film about the making of Blue Velvet, Lynch calls the ear ‘‘an opening into another world’’ (‘‘Mysteries of Love,’’ Documentary, Blue Velvet, DVD, directed by David Lynch [1986; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2002). In his comments on the film, Tykwer explains that this moment signals a shift in tone and mood in the film (Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Feature Commentary,’’ Heaven, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer [2002; Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2003]). 90. ‘‘Heute morgen war wie immer’’ (Die to¨dliche Maria [Deadly Maria], directed by Tom Tykwer [1993; Hamburg: Warner Home Video Germany, 2009]). 91. See Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern. 92. See Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Studienausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2000). See especially Section V (244–52). 93. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘‘The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,’’ in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, eds. Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 280–307. 94. Elsaesser, ‘‘The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,’’ 286. 95. ‘‘Der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau,’’ 144. 96. Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 145. See also Flinn, who argues that the state of melancholy and not mourning is conducive to aesthetic work: ‘‘It can

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be argued that hysterics, mourners, and melancholics are all people who remember too much. Specialists in the past, they are consummate historians. Yet only the mourner gets it right, by any conventional measure. For this reason, I believe that those who ‘get it wrong’ may have more to offer. For melancholia acknowledges the impossibility of overcoming the past—and even questions the desirability of doing so’’ (55). 97. In contrast, Elsaesser has argued that Fassbinder’s films are often ‘‘antioedipal.’’ Films such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitteren Tra¨nen der Petra von Kant; Germany, 1972) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf; Germany, 1974) ‘‘are similar and similarly anti-oedipal films about what another authenticity vis-a`-vis German history might have been’’ (‘‘New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,’’ 290). ‘‘In Fassbinder, neither ‘authenticity’ nor Trauerarbeit are operative terms. . . . Both visually and in his narratives, Fassbinder in effect distances himself from the oedipal time of the family romance and the primal scene of ‘the marriages of our parents,’ giving no illusion of depth, of entering or penetrating the recesses of the fiction: his flat, evenly or underlit images invite no ‘inwardness,’ but merely complicate infinitely a visual surface, put ‘en abyme’ by the multiple frames and overlaid action spaces of sound and image’’ (Fassbinder’s Germany, 145). While I find Elsaesser’s assessment of Fassbinder’s films as ‘‘anti-oedipal’’ in form and content compelling, it seems to me that, despite the films’ critique of the oppressive nuclear family, they nevertheless do not transcend the oedipal; in other words, they are not nonoedipal. While they engage in a hermetic aesthetic of impenetrability, Fassbinder’s narratives nonetheless reiterate a concern for power dynamics inherent to an oedipal model. 98. See also Lynne Kirby, ‘‘Fassbinder’s Debt to Poussin,’’ Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 13–14 (1985): 5–27. Kirby provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic function of Poussin’s painting in Fassbinder’s film. 99. ‘‘Das soll ja nun ganz anders werden.’’ ‘‘A Heartwarming Story,’’ The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1972; New York: Wellspring Media, 2002). 100. ‘‘Hier vera¨ndert sich selten was. In Deutschland, da sind die Dinge, wie sie sind. Da kann man nichts machen.’’ ‘‘The First Date,’’ The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. 101. Schuppach repeatedly emphasizes the formalist nature of Tykwer’s aesthetics, as in, for example her description of his use of colors as symbols in Winterschla¨fer (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 43–46). 102. The link between the two directors has been made by varied critics such as Laurence Kardish, curator of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: ‘‘I think Tykwer is the first person since Fassbinder to do something radically different in German cinema’’ (Winters). 103. ‘‘Fassbinder hat einmal gesagt: ‘Je scho¨ner und je gemachter und inszenierter und hingetrimmter Filme sind, um so befreiender und freier sind sie’ ’’ (To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller,’’ 136). 104. ‘‘Ein Film u¨ber die Mo¨glichkeiten des Lebens, das war mir vo¨llig klar, muß auch ein Film u¨ber die Mo¨glichkeiten des Kinos sein. Deswegen gibt es in Lola rennt verschiedene Formate, es gibt Farbe und Schwarzweiß, Zeitlupe und Zeitraffer, also alle elementaren Bausteine, die in der Filmgeschichte immer schon benutzt wurden. Georges Me´lie`s hat mit diesen Effekten schon arbeiten

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ko¨nnen, speziell mit Doppelbelichtungen und mit Tricks’’ (To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller,’’ 131). 105. ‘‘Gerne wu¨rde ich Filme machen, die gnadenlos unterhaltsam sind, aber auf den zweiten Blick eine große Komplexita¨t bergen’’ (To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller,’’ 130). 106. Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 346. 107. See Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 88–89. 108. In an interview, Tykwer has contrasted the pace and movement of Run Lola Run to Winter Sleepers, a film that reflects the stagnation of the Kohl years: ‘‘Lola is an act of liberation, because I didn’t want to make another film like Winter Sleepers, which reflects on this phlegm and this stagnation’’ [Lola ist ein Befreiungsschlag, weil ich nicht noch einen Film wie Winterschla¨fer machen wollte, der das Phlegma und diese Stagnation reflektiert] (‘‘Wie Lola laufen lernte: Interview mit Tom Tykwer u¨bers Schlaraffenland,’’ Interview with Michael Althen, Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung, film section, August 20, 1998). 109. See Schuppach, who sees Marco’s fall as a realization of his desire to return to the maternal womb (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 96). 110. Andrea Kunne, ‘‘The Heimat Novel,’’ in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997) 213–19; here: 213. 111. ‘‘Kinder kriegen, zusammenziehen, heiraten, fett werden, sich langweilen, Glotze kucken, keinen Sex mehr haben, alt werden, stinken und sterben!’’ (‘‘The Car,’’ Winter Sleepers). 112. Since a baby generally allegorizes rebirth within the oedipal machine, Winter Sleepers is perhaps less clearly an attempt to depart from the oedipal narrative. The baby stands in contrast to the claustrophobic and aggressive atmosphere at the home of Laura’s parents in the first scene depicting Laura. She sits on the stairs, filmed behind the bars of the stairwell in a shot reminiscent of numerous Fassbinder and Sirk shots of alienation. As the camera pans around her, the parents fight in the background. Laura’s rejection of the space of her parents is decisive, yet her pregnancy and reproduction of the nuclear family potentially repeat the cycle. When Laura returns to the house she shares with Rebecca, Rebecca asks her, ‘‘Why do you still go home?’’ (‘‘Fainting Spell,’’ Winter Sleepers). 113. ‘‘Du hast gar keinen Hunger’’ (‘‘Over the Edge,’’ Winter Sleepers). 114. ‘‘Ich hab getra¨umt. . . . Wir waren Bruder und Schwester. Mutter und Vater, Frau und Mann. Und wir beide . . . waren . . . beides’’ (‘‘Wanted,’’ The Princess and the Warrior). 115. ‘‘Das war ganz abstrakt und ein bisschen 2001-ma¨ßig—relativ extrem geschrieben—auch in dieser Gummizelle und beide waren wie so nackte doppelgeschlechtliche Embryos. . . . Ich weiß noch wie Franka und ich diskutiert haben und das irgendwie auch eine verru¨ckte Vorstellung war und wir uns schon u¨berlegt haben, wie wir das dann machen, wenn sie nun mit Penis durchs Bild la¨uft—das war aber auch albern . . .’’ (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 231.) 116. See Yakowar: ‘‘For one thing, her final situation is less than stable because it rests upon her remaining oblivious to her father’s detachment’’ (Yakowar, 562). See also Haase: ‘‘So, whereas the first two versions entail family and social drama as well as individual suffering and tragedy, culminating in the death of a main protagonist, the last version ends with the suppression of all former conflicts and the resolution of the primary problems’’ (Haase, 412). Schuppach attempts a psychoanalytical reading of Tykwer’s figures when she suggests that

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the neuroses of his female figures are a product of a ‘‘lack of familial attention’’ [Mangel an familia¨rer Aufmerksamkeit] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 115). 117. See also Schuppach, who argues that Lola’s use of the pistol against her father in the second run represents her resistance to ‘‘the law’’ [das Gesetz] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 53). 118. ‘‘der Depp vom Dienst.’’ 119. See Schuppach, who likewise sees the destruction of family structures in Tykwer’s films, though she does not link this tendency to German history (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 118). 120. Schuppach sees Tykwer’s female figures in general as androgynous and desexualized (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 84). In contrast, see Alice Kuzniar and Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey, both of whom fault the film for its retention of the heterosexual romance narrative. O’Sickey argues that Lola loses her power in the end of the final run and that the film reinserts a patriarchal Hollywood ending with the final close-up shot of the couple holding hands: ‘‘But it seems to me that the ironic close up shot of the couple holding hands tells the story that desire must be returned to the male protagonist as a quotation of traditional endings in Hollywood romances’’ (‘‘Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets (Or Does She?): Time and Desire in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run,’’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19 (2002): 123–31; here: 131). Kuzniar likewise argues that Lola embodies the ‘‘cinematic woman par excellence’’ as Marlene Dietrich did, since the heterosexual romance ‘‘endows the film with a sense of ‘naturalness’ ’’ (Kuzniar 14). Barbara Kosta, on the other hand, points out that Lola retains a secret and that the ending is therefore ironic: ‘‘Lola has one hundred thousand marks in the bag and has won the game on her own terms. She remains an image of fantasy that is not reabsorbed into the convention of the happy heterosexual couple’’ (Kosta, Run Lola Run, 174). 121. Although Heaven was originally written by Krzystof Kieslowski, Tykwer did make some changes to the script that went through a number of drafts in various languages: ‘‘Minghella, the director of The English Patient, wrote another version for me. He then did a complete English rewrite, because the script is in English and Italian, and I of course don’t know native English—in other words, absurdly, we translated a Polish script from French into English and I then did a rewrite in German. This rewrite was translated into English and reworked, and out of that the final draft was produced’’ [Minghella, der Regisseur von Der englische Patient, hat mit mir noch mal eine weitere Fassung geschrieben. Er hat dann noch einmal eine komplette englische Bearbeitung gemacht, weil das Buch englisch/italienisch ist und ich kann ja nicht native English,—also wir haben absurderweise ein polnisches Buch vom Franzo¨sischen ins Englische u¨bersetzt und ich habe dann auf Deutsch noch einen Rewrite gemacht. Dieser Rewrite ist noch mal ins Englische u¨bersetzt und bearbeitet worden, und daraus wurde dann der Final Draft gemacht] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 236). 122. Schuppach describes the couple as a ‘‘symbiotic pair of twins’’ [symbiotisches Zwillingspaar] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 72). 123. ‘‘Der zerrissene Homo sapiens, der wieder zu einer Einheit wird. Und darin letztlich auch die Geschlechterdifferenzen u¨berwindet.’’ Tykwer, ‘‘Die Reise vom Schatten ins Licht: Tom Tykwer im Gespra¨ch mit Michael To¨teberg,’’ in Heaven, ed. Michael To¨teberg,105. 124. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 125. ‘‘We may legitimately claim that melodrama becomes the principle mode

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for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era’’ (Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 15). 126. See Lea Jacobs, ‘‘The Woman’s Picture and the Poetics of Melodrama,’’ Camera Obscura 31 (1993): 121–47. Jacobs questions the simplicity of this dichotomy. See especially 121–25. 127. See Gledhill (‘‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill [London: BFI, 1987], 5–39), who takes issue with this dichotomy. 128. Williams, 28. See also Brooks, 29. 129. See Gledhill, who points to a ‘‘persistently nostalgic vein’’ in melodrama (21). 130. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 138. 131. See Gledhill, who argues that melodrama is tied to repression of the past (32). 132. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘‘Minnelli and Melodrama,’’ in Home Is Where the Heart Is, 70–75. 133. See Singer, who argues that ‘‘in serial-film melodramas the frenzy of hostile competition was triggered, without fail, by the murder or incapacitation of a father figure’’ (145). 134. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is, 43–70; here: 45. 135. Jacobs, 124. 136. In Imitation of Life, roles are substituted and displaced, and Fassbinder has explicitly linked his own melodramas to the inspiration of his idol Sirk. In his ‘‘women’s films’’ starring Margit Carstensen, such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Martha (Germany, 1974), Fear of Fear [Angst vor der Angst] (Germany, 1975), and Chinese Roulette [Chinesisches Roulette] (Germany, 1976), Carstensen plays mother or daughter figures trapped within the restrictive confines of the bourgeois family. Her attempts to escape the prescribed gender structures through lesbian love (Petra von Kant), love of a brutal stranger (Martha), alcohol and hysteria (Fear of Fear), and an extramarital affair (Chinese Roulette) are predestined to fail, as is made evident through the tightly framed scenes and the highly iconographic, overcoded de´cor of the interior spaces that dominate the films. In Fassbinder’s ‘‘women’s films,’’ especially those films of the mid-seventies starring the masochistic Margit Carstensen, there is no space outside of oppression. This is perhaps the sense in which Elsaesser suggests that Fassbinder’s films are ‘‘essentially melodramatic’’ (Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 147), and Caryl Flinn links the melodrama of Fassbinder’s films to a structure of repetition more akin to melancholia than to the linearity of mourning (Flinn, 56–57). 137. Georg Luka´cs, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 121. 138. See, as an exception, my essay on the topic, ‘‘Melodrama’s Other: Entrapment and Escape in the Films of Tom Tykwer,’’ Camera Obscura 62 (2006): 108–43. 139. Kosta points to the various genres in Run Lola Run such as the fairy tale, melodrama, and soap opera, though she locates the melodrama in the love scenes between the father and his mistress (Kosta, Run Lola Run, 172). 140. See also Vogt, Die Stadt im Kino. Although Vogt does not use the term

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melodrama, he does point out that Run Lola Run is much more than an action film and that, in fact, the tropes of blindness and waiting are central to an understanding of the film: ‘‘Blindness and waiting are thus the counterpart to the seeing and forceful activity of Manni and Lola. One could say that in some sense Tykwer is continuing with these motifs and motivations a line of inner (spiritual) perception begun by Wim Wenders’’ [Blindsein und Warten sind damit der Gegenpart zur sehenden und forcierenden Aktivita¨t von Manni und Lola. Man ko¨nnte sagen, in gewisser Hinsicht setze Tom Tykwer mit diesen Motiven und Motivationen eine von Wim Wenders begonnene Linie der inneren (spirituellen) Wahrnehmung fort] (Vogt, 743). The blind woman (Monika Bleibtreu) who helps Manni seems to see more than those figures who act in the film. Likewise, Lola herself gains insights in the third run when she closes her eyes while running and waits for inspiration. 141. Johannes von Moltke, ‘‘Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinema in Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat (1993),’’ Cinema Journal 42.3 (2003): 114–43; here: 119. See also von Moltke’s more thorough elucidation of this theory in No Place Like Home (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 142. ‘‘Inasmuch as it always functions to denote ‘something lost,’ the notion of Heimat indicts the (modernizing) forces that occasion that loss’’ (von Moltke, ‘‘Home Again,’’ 132). 143. ‘‘In the copy facility we used a method that intensifies the colors and adds to the film a colorly brilliance. Technicolor—we unfortunately don’t have access to that anymore. There are no more Technicolor copy facilities, and that’s why we have to settle for today’s methods.’’ [Im Kopierwerk haben wir ein Verfahren angewandt, das die Farben versta¨rkt, dem Film eine farbliche Brillanz verleiht. Technicolor, da kommen wir leider nicht mehr ran. Es gibt kein Technicolor-Kopierwerk mehr, deswegen muß man sich mit den heutigen Methoden abfinden.] (To¨teberg, ‘‘Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebes ExperimentalThriller,’’ 134.) 144. ‘‘I believe that through old people and also through an historical and faded de´cor a film is automatically associated with a timelessness, and that people prefer to remain in a timelessness, because something more general can be attributed to the film that way.’’ [Ich glaube, dass durch alte Leute und auch ein historisches verlebtes Dekor ein Film automatisch einer Zeitlosigkeit zugeordnet wird, und dass man sich lieber in einer Zeitlosigkeit aufha¨lt, weil man dadurch dem Film was Allgemeineres geben kann.] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 182.) 145. See also Schuppach’s descriptions of the interior spaces in Tykwer’s films (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 162–68), spaces that, according to Schuppach, these figures must of necessity leave behind. 146. Petra dances at one point to the Walker Brothers’ song ‘‘In My Room’’ (‘‘A Heartwarming Story,’’ The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant). 147. Even Heaven shares in this structure spatially. In the ‘‘Director’s Comments,’’ Tykwer has remarked that the gridlike topography of Turin resembles a prison, whereas the topography of Montepulciano is open and expansive. These topographies correspond to Philippa’s imprisonment and escape. 148. Elsaesser also points to a self-destructive tendency on the part of heroines in melodramas: ‘‘This typical masochism of the melodrama, with its incessant acts of inner violation, its mechanisms of frustration and over-compensation’’ (Elsaesser, ‘‘Tales of Sound and Fury,’’ 65), and this characterization certainly holds for Maria until the final scenes of the film.

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149. In Heaven, as I have suggested earlier, it is the male lead who must leave behind the security of home. 150. Tykwer, ‘‘Director’s Comments,’’ Heaven. 151. In an interview with ‘‘The Movie Chicks,’’ Tykwer articulates his understanding of the ending of The Princess and the Warrior in these terms: ‘‘The framing of the film is a very important thing, the whole issue about there is a place waiting for them, and the place is very beautiful, but also like the beautiful version of the end of the world, like somewhere where you can not only hide, but also start over again, go for a new future’’ (‘‘Interview with Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente’’). 152. Elizabeth Mittman, ‘‘Fantasizing Integration and Escape in the Post-Unification Road Movie,’’ Light Motives, 326–48; here: 340. 153. ‘‘Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the ‘Posts,’ ’’ in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 381–401; here: 399. 154. ‘‘Starting Over,’’ Happy Together, DVD, directed by Wong Kar-Wai (1997; Kowioon, Hong Kong: Mei Ah, 1999). 155. ‘‘Chang Listens,’’ Happy Together. 156. ‘‘Lai Returns,’’ Happy Together. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. In Heaven, the train takes Philippa and Filippo into the ‘‘home’’ space of Montepulciano, a space that, with its magical light, reflects the psychic state of the figures. In the ‘‘Director’s Comments’’ to the DVD, Tykwer says that Philippa has moved from an introverted, hard state to something more open, and the space represents the inner states of the characters. 159. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986). 160. Schuppach suggests that nature serves in Tykwer’s films as a ‘‘home (of choice)’’ [(Wahl)-Heimat] (Schuppach, Tom Tykwer, 161). 161. ‘‘The Movie Chicks,’’ ‘‘Interview with Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente.’’ One of the few notable exeptions to the global appeal of Run Lola Run was its failure in France. For an analysis of the French reception of Run Lola Run, see Rainer Gansera, ‘‘Lola rennt in Frankreich nicht’’ [Lola Does Not Run in France], Die Welt, May 7, 1999, http://www.welt.de/daten/1999/05/07/0507ku65 935.htx?print⳱1. 162. ‘‘Interview with Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente.’’ 163. Margit Sinka, ‘‘Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt: A Blueprint of Millennial Berlin,’’ Glossen 11 (2000), March 20, 2004, http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/ germn/glossen/heft11/lola.html: 5. 164. ‘‘Grauzone zwischen dem Nicht-Mehr und dem Noch-Nicht’’ (quoted in Sinka, 5) 165. In this sense, Run Lola Run cannot be interpreted as an entirely apolitical film. In a 1998 interview, Tykwer suggests that Run Lola Run symbolizes the opening of a stopped drain in German political culture, a movement away from the stagnation embodied in Helmut Kohl. Lola is a heroine, according to Tykwer, with an anarchic potential (‘‘Tykwer spricht: Ein Gespra¨ch mit dem Regisseur von Lola rennt,’’ Artechock 1998, http://artechock.de/film/text/interview/t/ tykwer_1998.htm.) 166. ‘‘zwischen Moderne und Abbruch,’’ Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Interview,’’ Votivkino, August 1998, http://www.votivkino.at/votivkino/328intv.htm. 167. ‘‘Spiegel Online: ‘Herr Tykwer, der neue Berlinale-Chef Dieter Kosslick

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bezeichnete ‘‘Heaven’’ als ‘‘wunderbares Beispiel fu¨r das kreative Potenzial der deutschen Filmszene.’’ Aber ist Ihr neuestes Werk u¨berhaupt ein deutscher Film?’ Tom Tykwer: ‘Das denke ich schon. Ich habe ja weder meine Perspektive gea¨ndert noch meine Wurzeln abgeschnitten. Außerdem ha¨tte ich den Film nicht angenommen, wenn ich ihn nicht mit meiner Firma und demselben Team wie immer ha¨tte machen ko¨nnen. Nur die Sprache und der Drehort haben sich gea¨ndert. Aber das, was an mir deutsch ist, steckt in diesem Film wie auch in meinen anderen.’ ’’ Ru¨diger and Julia Sturm, ‘‘Das, was an mir deutsch ist, steckt in diesem Film,’’ Spiegel Online, February 6, 2002, 17: 47. 168. ‘‘Ich hasse diese Europudding-Filme, weil sie keine authentische Atmospha¨re haben. Auch war hier der entscheidende Kraftakt, die verschiedenen Einflu¨sse zu einem organischen Ganzen zu verknu¨pfen. Wir hatten einen italienischen und einen deutschen Regieassistenten, einen deutschen und einen italienischen Herstellungsleiter. Diese kreativen Elemente mussten miteinander in Harmonie gebracht werden, was nicht immer ganz einfach war—die Arbeitsmethoden sind ziemlich verschieden in den jeweiligen La¨ndern, von den Mentalita¨ten beeinflusst’’ (To¨teberg, ‘‘Eine Reise vom Schatten ins Licht,’’ 113). 169. In her reading of Run Lola Run, Christine Haase sees this film as a successful transnational product, a film that exemplifies Roger Chartier’s concept of popular culture that is able to appropriate and yet makes the object of appropriation its own: ‘‘The smart, assertive, and ironic way in which he quotes and uses genres and styles resonated with a transnational cultural zeitgeist. Tykwer appropriates by way of innovation and reinterpretation, bringing together the old and the new, the serious and the entertaining, the transatlantic and the continental, offering a fresh perspective on sights that have become all too common, habitual, and accepted. By the same token, his work opens up questions about the ‘nationality’ of Hollywood and popular culture in general, and whether it is still adequate to conceive as ‘American’ the mass entertainment paradigms and phenomena in question as they exist and emerge globally today’’ (Haase, 413). 170. Parts of this speech point to the central concerns of Tykwer’s most recent film, The International. Here, the structures of globalization take on the oppressive and entrapping characteristics of the German nation. In a sense, one could say that Tykwer translates his very German understanding of nation onto his conception of a globalized world: ‘‘While the world becomes enmeshed in a hypercomplex construct of economic forces and dependencies in an ever more hopeless way, the needs and yearnings of humankind stand in ever more massive contradiction to this construct. And none of the arts reflects this conflict more explicitly than film. The production process of cinema and of course also (even more clearly so) of TV reflects the power contest of many unequal antagonists: the pressure of the economy against the freedom of ideas, the worry about ratings against narrative diversity, the madness of the stock market against the intellectual risk’’ [Wa¨hrend die Welt sich immer heilloser in einem hyperkomplexen Konstrukt wirtschaftlicher Zwa¨nge und Abha¨ngigkeiten verstrickt, stehen die Bedu¨rfnisse und Sehnsu¨chte der Menschen dazu in immer massiverem Widerspruch. Und keine der Ku¨nste reflektiert diesen Konflikt expliziter als der Film. Im Produktionsprozess des Kinos und natu¨rlich auch (und noch deutlicher) des Fernsehens spiegelt sich das Kra¨ftemessen vieler ungleicher Gegner: der Druck ¨ konomie gegen die Freiheit der Idee, die Quotenangst gegen die erza¨hlerider O sche Vielfalt, der Aktienwahn gegen das geistige Wagnis] (Tom Tykwer, ‘‘Analytisch tra¨umen: Ein Vortrag von Tom Tykwer anla¨sslich des Nederlands Film Festivals in Utrecht,’’ September 2001, http://www.x-filme.de/html/statements .html.)

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Chapter 4. Nation without a Home 1. See also Peter Arnds, who argues that Menasse’s project of ‘‘depetrification’’ is the desire to rid Austria of its ‘‘ethnocentricity and to shape its selfunderstanding, since according to Hegel’s dialectic, one gets to know oneself better by getting to know the other’’ (224). Arnds, Peter, ‘‘The Fragmentation of Totality in Robert Menasse’s Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt,’’ Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in GermanSpeaking Countries, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Renate S. Posthofen (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998): 215–26. ¨ sterreichische Identita¨t—dieser Begriff hat etwas von einem dunklen 2. ‘‘O und muffigen Zimmer, in dem man, wenn man aus irgendeinem Grund eintritt, sofort die Vorha¨nge beiseite schieben und das Fenster o¨ffnen mo¨chte, um etwas Luft und Licht hereinzulassen. Doch wenn das Fenster keine Aussicht hat und sich der Raum daher nur wenig erhellen will?’’ (7). 3. ‘‘In achtzig Tagen gegen die Welt: Eine o¨sterreichische Zwischenbilanz,’’ ¨ sterreich: Essays zur o¨sterreichischen Geschichte (Frankfurt: SuhrErklar mir O kamp, 2000) 158–76. (Originally published in Der Standard, May 13, 2000.) ¨ sterreich zu verbieten ist die letzte 4. ‘‘Die Auffu¨hrung meiner Stu¨cke in O Freiheit, die mir noch geblieben ist.’’ Jelinek, quoted in Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 163. 5. ‘‘ ‘Die letzte Freiheit, die mir noch geblieben ist’—seltsam: ich habe etwas u¨bersehen, versa¨umt, nicht wahrhaben wollen: Ich gehe unbehelligt demonstrieren. Ich kann sagen, schreiben, publizieren, was ich will. Ich kann mich versammeln mit Freunden, mit Gleichgesinnten, Pla¨ne schmieden, ich kann diese Pla¨ne versuchen umzusetzen und scheitere, wenn ich scheitere, nur an mir selbst und nicht an der Staatsgewalt. Ich kann in die Synagoge gehen und sie unbela¨stigt wieder verlassen’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 163). 6. ‘‘Meine Familie va¨terlicherseits hatte 1938 vor Hitler nach England flu¨chten mu¨ssen. Wegen eines Haider wa¨re sie gewiß nicht geflu¨chtet’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 164). 7. ‘‘Kann es, zum Beispiel, wahr sein, daß eine o¨sterreichische Dichterin wirklich nur Schulterklopfen erntet, wenn sie u¨ber Jahre ihr literarisches Werk ¨ sterreich ist faschistisch. Der Sport ist auf der eigentu¨mlichen These aufbaut: O faschistisch. Alles ist faschistisch!’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 163). 8. ‘‘Kein Land hat sich selbst o¨ffentlich so wenig problematisiert und grundsa¨tzlich reflektiert wie die Zweite o¨sterreichische Republik’’ (Robert Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften: Essays zur o¨sterreichischen Identita¨t [Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1995], 13). 9. ‘‘Natu¨rlich stimmt, daß sich die wiedergegru¨ndete Republik beharrlich geweigert hat, in irgendeiner Form Mitverantwortung fu¨r o¨sterreichische Beteiligung an den Nazi-verbrechen zu u¨bernehmen. Und bekanntlich stimmt auch, ¨ sterreich als erstem Opfer der Nazidaß statt dessen die Geschichtslu¨ge von ‘O Aggression’ zur Grundlage der Souvera¨nita¨t der Zweiten Republik gemacht wurde’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 165). ¨ sterreichs, wenn wir heute von 10. ‘‘Kann es wahr sein, daß die Geschichte O ¨ sterreich sprechen, mit Hitler begann und systematisch zu einem angeblichen O Wiederga¨nger fu¨hrte?’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 163). ¨ sterreich sich darum herumgeschwindelt hat, seine Mitschuld an 11. ‘‘daß O den Nazi-Verbrechen einzugestehen. An dieser These ist a¨ußerlich was Wahres dran, weniger aber an ihren Implikationen: abgeleitet wurde na¨mlich, daß Nazi-

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Mentalita¨t oder stillschweigende Zustimmung zu den Nazi-Greueln immer noch Bestandteil der ‘o¨sterreichischen Mentalita¨t’ sei’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 164). 12. See also Menasse’s ironic play with the notion of ‘‘the new chancellor’’ [der neue Kanzler], and the impossibility of translating this concept back into the Austrian cultural milieu (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’159). 13. ‘‘Die Diskussion u¨ber diesen Roman war so intensiv, daß sie zweifellos zu sehr produktiven Konsequenzen in der brasilianischen Literatur und in der Welterkenntnis der Leser fu¨hrte’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 158). 14. See, for example, Christian Kracht and Judith Herrmann, among others. ¨ sterreich ist eine Nation, aber keine Heimat’’ (Menasse, Das Land 15. ‘‘O ohne Eigenschaften, 103). ¨ sterreich mit der 16. ‘‘Nation ohne Heimat. Es ist gewiß kein Zufall, daß in O sogenannten ‘‘Anti-Heimat-Literatur’’ eine im internationalen Vergleich vo¨llig ¨ sterreich ist die Antieigensta¨ndige, neue literarische Gattung entstanden ist: O Heimat par excellence. Aber die Anti-Heimat-Literatur ist nicht nur eine eigensta¨ndige o¨sterreichische Gattung, sie ist vor allem auch die wichtigste, die dominante Form der Literatur in der Zweiten Republik’’ (Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 113). 17. See also Michael P. Olson, ‘‘Robert Menasse’s Concept of Anti-Heimat Literature,’’ in Austria in Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 153–65. 18. Robert Menasse, Wings of Stone, trans. David Bryer (Paris/London/New York: Calder Publications/Riverrun Press, 2000), 8. [Seine Thesen klangen bizarr in einer Stadt, die so besonders abgebru¨ht ignorant war gegenu¨ber allen Ideen, daß etwas anders sein ko¨nnte, als es war, die so besonders erstarrt erschien in ihrem Sein, daß der Satz ‘‘Wien bleibt Wien’’ nur deshalb als Lu¨ge empfunden wurde, weil er zu euphemistisch klang: das Verbum ‘‘bleiben’’ war schon viel zu dynamisch. (Robert Menasse, Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Welt [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994],16.)] 19. ‘‘But nothing astonished Judith more than the fact that she didn’t offer any resistance to being forced into the role of mother to this child’’ (Wings of Stone, 90) [Aber nichts erstaunte Judith mehr als die Tatsache, daß sie sich nicht dagegen wehrte, von diesem Kind in die Rolle einer Mutter gedra¨ngt zu werden] (Selige Zeiten, 130). 20. Peter Arnds, ‘‘On Despotic Mothers and Dethroned Patriarchs: Barbara ¨ ber die Verha¨ltnisse and Robert Menasse’s Selige Zeiten, bru¨chige Frischmuth’s U Welt,’’ in Barbara Frischmuth in Contemporary Context, ed. Renate S. Posthofen (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1999), 203–24. Peter Arnds argues that Leo desires not the destruction of the father, but rather the death of the mother. 21. Peter Arnds points out that a few reviewers of Menasse’s novel have seen the love relationship between Leo and Judith as a representation of that between Georg Luka´cs and Irma Seidler. Arnds, ‘‘The Fragmentation of Totality,’’ 216. 22. ‘‘Selig sind die Zeiten, fu¨r die der Sternenhimmel die Landkarte der gangbaren und zu gehenden Wege ist und deren Wege das Licht der Sterne erhellt. Alles ist neu fu¨r sie und dennoch vertraut, abenteuerlich und dennoch Besitz. Die Welt ist weit und doch wie das eigene Haus, denn das Feuer, das in der Seele brennt, ist von derselben Wesensart wie die Sterne’’ (Georg Luka´cs, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch u¨ber die Formen der großen Epik [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000] 21.) 23. ‘‘ ‘der Trieb, u¨berall zu Hause zu sein.’ . . . Deshalb haben die seligen

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Zeiten keine Philosophie, oder, was dasselbe besagt, alle Menschen dieser Zeit sind Philosophen, Inhaber des utopischen Zieles jeder Philosophie’’ (Luka´cs, 21). 24. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001), 52. 25. ‘‘Ist es nicht witzig: als wa¨ren wir zwei namorados, wie sagt man? Na du weißt schon: namorados in Sa˜o Paolo: mit der fusca in die Bexica auf eine Pizza! Leo Singer starrte geradezu pathetisch durch die Windschutzscheibe, trotz des offenen Fensters glu¨cklich erhitzt von diesem Angebot, wie er es verstand, eine Gemeinsamkeit herzustellen, die allerdings auch schon la¨ngst vorausgesetzt war, jederzeit abrufbar durch ganz wenige Worte, die nur fu¨r sie beide hier an diesem Ort eine Bedeutung hatten’’ (Selige Zeiten, 18). ¨ sterreich ist faschistisch. Der Sport ist faschistisch. Alles ist faschis26. ‘‘O tisch!’’ (Menasse, ‘‘In achtzig Tagen,’’ 163). 27. As Peter Arnds points out, reviewers and critics have located abundant intertextual allusions to a variety of literary contexts (‘‘The Fragmentation of Totality,’’ 216). However, the link to Viennese Modernism has to my knowledge not yet been explored by critics. 28. ‘‘Denn es kann sich herausstellen, daß wir den, den wir lieben, nicht lieben, daß das Schicksal des Erwa¨hlten nicht unser Schicksal ist und das, was in der Analyse im Licht des Symbolischen leuchtete, seinen Glanz verliert und wir nicht finden, was wir gesucht haben’’ (Selige Zeiten, 104–5). 29. Quoted in Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young To¨rless, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 2001), 1. [Sobald wir etwas aussprechen, entwerten wir es seltsam. Wir glauben in die Tiefe der Abgru¨nde hinabgetaucht zu sein, und wenn wir wieder an die Oberfla¨che kommen, gleicht der Wassertropfen an unseren bleichen Fingerspitzen nicht mehr dem Meere, dem er entstammt. Wir wa¨hnen eine Schatzgrube wunderbarer Scha¨tze entdeckt zu haben, und wenn wir wieder ans Tageslicht kommen, haben wir nur falsche Steine und Glasscherben mitgebracht, und trotzdem schimmert der Schatz im Finstern unvera¨ndert.] (Quoted in Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zo¨glings To¨rleß [Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978], 7.) ¨ sterreichs war 30. ‘‘Die breite Auseinandersetzung u¨ber die Verfaßtheit O aber von Anfang an nostalgisch, das heißt, es ging nur noch darum, daß wir, in Bru¨ssel angekommen, wissen wollten, wer wir gewesen sind’’ (Das Land ohne Eigenschaften, 12). 31. ‘‘Er wollte etwas vom Leben haben—natu¨rlich nicht, um sich darin zu verlieren. Er wußte, produktiv werde er nur sein ko¨nnen, wenn er sich das Leben versagte. Aber dazu mußte er doch wenigstens jenes Minimum vom Leben haben, das es ihm ermo¨glichte zu sagen: das versage ich mir’’ (Selige Zeiten, 82). 32. ‘‘But it was precisely this strangeness that suddenly seemed open to him, and to him in particular’’ (Wings of Stone, 63) [die Fremde, die ihm, besonders ihm, plo¨tzlich zuga¨nglich schien] (Selige Zeiten, 92). I am thinking here in particular of Leopold von Andrian’s use of the figure of ‘‘the other’’ in his seminal novella, The Garden of Knowledge (Der Garten der Erkenntnis, 1895). 33. See Arnds, ‘‘The Fragmentation of Totality,’’ who analyzes the function of mirrors in Menasse’s novel. 34. The name ‘‘Roman’’ also stands for the novel itself, since ‘‘Roman’’ is the German word for novel. Hence, the figure of Roman is always potentially significant. 35. Robert Menasse, Sinnliche Gewißheit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 116. 36. The title is a play on words involving Hegel’s Pha¨nomenologie des Geistes

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(Phenomenology of Spirit); it could be approximately rendered as Phenomenology of Dumbfoundedness or Phenomenology of Dispiritedness. Menasse published his character Leo Singer’s opus magnum as a separate book: Robert Menasse, Pha¨nomenologie der Entgeisterung. Geschichte des verschwindenden Wissens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 37. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1980). 38. ‘‘Die Wahrheit ist: Selig sind die Zeiten, die er mit Judith verbracht hatte, aber sie waren es nicht, sind es nicht gewesen. Sie sind es jetzt, in seiner Erinnerung, seinem Bedu¨rfnis nach nachtra¨glicher Idealisierung, in diesem Moment des Schreibens. Sie sind unbefleckt glu¨cklich, unschuldig erhaben und rein, also selig’’ (Selige Zeiten, 192). 39. Hutcheon, 205. 40. In Wings of Stone, Judith compares Leo’s desire to ruins: ‘‘This burntout shell—all that remained of a longing? In ruins like his hopes, which she had destroyed as she had her beauty, like she had herself?’’ (Wings of Stone, 258) [Diese Ruine einer Sehnsucht? Die zersto¨rt war wie seine Hoffnungen, die sie zersto¨rt hatte wie ihre Scho¨nheit, wie sich selbst?] (Selige Zeiten, 360). ¨ ber den Begriff der Geschichte,’’ Illuminationen 41. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘U (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 251–61.

Chapter 5. A Home at the End of the World 1. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 5. 2. See also Marlies Gerhardt, ‘‘Lila ist eine andere,’’ in ‘‘Ich hatte ein bißchen Kraft dru¨ber’’: Zum Werk von Birgit Vanderbeke, ed. Richard Wagner (Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer, 2001): 96–104. 3. See, for example, the three volumes on Bachmann edited by Monika Al¨ ber die Zeit schreiben 1, 2, and 3 (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigsbrecht and Dirk Go¨ttsche, U hausen & Neumann, 1998, 2000, and 2004). 4. ‘‘in all seinen verschiedenen Bedeutungen’’ (Birgit Vanderbeke, ‘‘Kein Recht auf Sprache? Der sprachlose Raum der Abwesenheit in ‘Malina,’ ’’ Text Ⳮ Kritik: Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold [Munich: Edition Text Ⳮ Kritik, 1984], 109–19; here: 109). 5. ‘‘For the German-language writer, however, these possibilities of language were out of reach in the face of the unimaginable and therefore unspeakable collective crimes during fascism; almost everybody experienced the impossibility of having to voice silent horror in language. Speechlessness, a constant theme in Bachmann’s œuvre, has a specific historical locus: the post-war period. In addition, it has another locus that reaches further back and that specifies itself via patriarchal power relations: male dominance has always forced the exclusion of women, of ‘the feminine’ (of concrete persons and of structural components) from history and culture, and therefore also from language. This (other) locus of historical marginality has also been explained psychoanalytically, that is, in terms of individual history, as a repression of the early relationship with the mother. In Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Malina,’ this locus is thematized as ‘absence,’ and the key figure for its genesis and paralyzing consequences in life is the ‘father’ in all his multiple meanings.’’ [Dem deutschsprachigen Schriftseller nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg jedoch haben sich angesichts der unvorstellbaren, also unaussprechbaren Kollektivverbrechen im Faschismus genau diese Mo¨glich-

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keiten von Sprache entzogen; fast jeder hat die Unmo¨glichkeit erfahren, stummes Entsetzen mit Sprache beschwo¨ ren zu mu¨ ssen. Sprachlosigkeit, durchga¨ngiges Thema in Ingeborg Bachmanns Werk, hat einen genauen historischen Ort: die Nachkriegszeit. Sie hat dazu noch einen anderen, der weiter zuru¨ckreicht und sich aus dem patriarchalischen Herrschaftsverha¨ ltnissen bestimmt: ma¨nnliche Dominanz hat seit je einen Ausschluß der Frauen, des ‘‘Weibliche’’—hier sowohl konkreter Personen als auch strukturaler Momente—aus Geschichte und Kultur, also auch Sprache erzwungen. Dieser (andere) Ort ist als das historische Abseits auch psychoanalytisch, d.h. individualgeschichtlich erkla¨rt worden als Verdra¨ngung der fru¨hen Mutterbeziehung. In Ingeborg Bachmanns Roman ‘‘Malina’’ ist er als ‘‘Abwesenheit’’ thematisiert, die Schlu¨sselfigur fu¨r seine Genese und paralysierenden Lebensfolgen ist der ‘‘Vater’’ in all seinen verschiedenen Bedeutungen] (‘‘Kein Recht auf Sprache?’’ 109). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 6. ‘‘Und das ist banal—obschon in dieser Banalita¨t deutlich wird, wie angemessen die Stummheit der Liebe wa¨re, in der und von der dann aber eben doch unbeholfen und durch sta¨ndig sich verheddernde Kabel gesprochen werden muß. Und ebenso banal wie das, was er sagt, muß Ivan bleiben’’ (112). 7. ‘‘Es wa¨re die einzige Mo¨glichkeit, in Ivan den Vater zu u¨berwinden und so der Abwesenheit zu entgehen’’ (117). 8. ‘‘Aber ha¨tte es dann noch das Buch sein mu¨ssen?’’ (117). 9. ‘‘ein besonderer, sozusagen historischer Tag . . . in der Familiengeschichte’’ (Birgit Vanderbeke, Das Muschelessen [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997], 8). Subsequent quotations from this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 10. ‘‘Es ist u¨berhaupt erstaunlich, was die Leute machen, wenn etwas nicht normal verla¨uft, eine kleine Verschiebung weg vom Normalen, und plo¨tzlich ist alles anders, aber auch gleich alles, kaum ist durch irgend einen Zufall etwas nicht so wie normal, laufen sie auseinander, wo sie vorher zusammengehalten haben, Mord und Totschlag geht los’’ (Das Muschelessen, 33). 11. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. and analytical indexes James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) 19–20. [So ist das Prinzip der Urteilskraft, in Ansehung der Form der Dinge der Natur unter empirischen Gesetzen u¨berhaupt, die Zweckma¨ßigkeit der Natur in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit. D.i. die Natur wird durch diesen Begriff so vorgestellt, als ob ein Verstand den Grund der Einheit des Mannigfaltigen ihrer empirischen Gesetze enthalte] (Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 89; second italics mine). 12. ‘‘eine richtige Familie, wie er es nannte, zu sein, in Wirklichkeit, haben wir gefunden, waren wir keine richtige Familie, alles in dieser Familie drehte sich nur darum, daß wir so tun mußten, als ob wir eine richtige Familie wa¨ren, wie mein Vater sich eine Familie vorgestellt hat, weil er keine gehabt hat, und also nicht wußte, was eine richtige Familie ist, wovon er jedoch die genauesten Vorstellungen entwickelt hatte, und die setzten wir um, wa¨hrend er im Bu¨ro saß, dabei wa¨ren wir gern verwildert, statt eine richtige Familie zu sein’’ (23–24, italics mine). 13. See also Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘‘Birgit Vanderbekes Erza¨hlen,’’ in ‘‘Ich hatte ein bißchen Kraft dru¨ber,’’ 81–94. Arnold discusses Vanderbeke’s use of hypotaxis in her writings. 14. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Das Unheimliche,’’ Studienausgabe: Psychologische Schriften, vol. 4, eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2000), 241–75.

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15. In Tykwer’s Run Lola Run the telephone likewise signifies the slowed or quickened movement of time. 16. ‘‘meine Mutter mag keinen Sonnenbrand, sie hat immer gesagt, ich kann mir nicht denken, das das gesund sein soll, so zu leiden, aber mein Vater hat gesagt, da muß man durch, ohne Sonnenbrand keine Bra¨une, er hat uns allen Zitronensaft auf die wunden Stellen getra¨ufelt, wir haben uns nie entscheiden ko¨nnen, was schlimmer ist, Sonnenbrand mit oder ohne Zitronensaft, meine Mutter hat gesagt, von wegen Martyrium, so ist das Fegefeuer, mein Vater hat aber gesagt, das nu¨tzt, und uns ausgelacht, wenn wir uns angestellt haben’’ (Das Muschelessen, 60). 17. ‘‘Wenn mein Vater auf Dienstreise war, habe ich lesen du¨rfen, soviel ich wollte, ich habe auch la¨nger als eine Stunde Klavier u¨ben du¨rfen, sogar weniger, ich durfte Klavier u¨ben, wie ich wollte, was es sonst nie gegeben hat, und schon deswegen bin ich traurig gewesen, wenn er dann wieder nach Hause kam, und meine Mutter ist traurig gewesen, weil mein Bruder dann schnell noch den Mu¨ll runtertragen hat mu¨ssen mit all den Blumen und Zweigen und Gra¨sern darin’’ (Das Muschelessen, 63). 18. Barthes, 47. 19. ‘‘Jemand sagte, bist du verru¨ckt, von hier wegzugehen, mitten aus der Kultur, und es war besser, darauf nicht zu antworten, weil wenn jemand denkt, er sei in der Mitte von etwas, sozusagen im Zentrum, wird er wild, wenn man sagt, das Zentrum ist relativ’’ (Birgit Vanderbeke, Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001], 16). Subsequent quotations from this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 20. ‘‘Ich sagte, aber ich sehe da gru¨n, und Rene sagte, daß es Chromgelb gewesen sei und daß Chromgelb durch die Zeit und das Licht und die Feuchtigkeit Chromoxydgru¨n werden kann, und also mußte ich es ihm glauben. Ich sagte, ich sehe sie trotzdem gru¨n. Rene sagte, so kommt auch das bra¨unliche Schwarz auf die Sonnenblumen. Wenn sie u¨berhaupt von van Gogh sind’’ (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 90). 21. ‘‘und ich kannte den Osten schon, und am Abend fuhr ich zuru¨ck in den Westen und war im Westen, und das einzige, was ich nicht kannte, waren Doppelstockbusse, also war ich nicht richtig weggegangen, sondern gerade so viel, daß ich nicht umkehren konnte und wieder zuru¨ck, aber nicht weit genug, um zu bleiben’’ (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 9). 22. See also Daniel Linke’s review of the novella, ‘‘Vera¨nderung der Sichtverha¨ltnisse,’’ in ‘‘Ich hatte ein bißchen Kraft dru¨ber,’’ 287–90; esp. 287. 23. ‘‘Abends saß ich vor dem Haus und dachte, ich sollte Briefe und Postkarten schreiben, aber das paßte nicht zu dem vielen Himmel und den dicken Sternen, die im Wind manchmal anfingen herumzutorkeln. . . . Briefe und Postkarten schreibe ich, wenn dieser Himmel aufho¨rt, mich Abend fu¨r Abend einzuwickeln, dachte ich und blieb lange sitzen, um mir die Ba¨ume und den Himmel und den Wind einzupra¨gen’’ (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 39). 24. ‘‘Es lag daran, daß ich zwar weggegangen war und alles anders war als vorher. Nur wußte ich nicht, was ‘alles’ war, sondern nur sehr wenig davon, aber nach dem wenigen wußte ich, daß ich wahrscheinlich nicht wieder zuru¨ckgehen wu¨rde und wahrscheinlich gar nicht ko¨nnte, aber deshalb wußte ich la¨ngst noch nicht, wo ich war’’ (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 87). 25. ‘‘Welcoming Committee,’’ The Princess and the Warrior, DVD, directed by Tom Tykwer (2000; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001). 26. ‘‘Angefangen bei der Zuckerwatte, dachte ich, wu¨rde sie alles nicht

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mo¨gen, und ich schaute mir einen Moment lang kurz alles so an, wie sie es sehen wu¨rde . . . Als ich meinen eigenen Blick wiederhatte, sah ich immer noch, was meine Mutter gesehen ha¨tte, aber weil ich es mit meinem eigenen Blick sah, sah es anders aus, und es war vielleicht in diesem Moment, daß ich begann, es zu lieben’’ (Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, 64). 27. ‘‘Sie hatte gesagt, die Welt ist doch nichts als ein kleines globales Nest, du brauchst bloß ein paar Computer. Ich hatte an die Veilchen, die Kater und die Lehrerin denken mu¨ssen und an die Familien im Kloster, aber ich hatte nicht gewußt, wie ich Silvana davon erza¨hlen ko¨nnte, und also wu¨rde sie Ostern kommen’’ (118). 28. Reed Woodhouse, ‘‘Michael Cunningham (1952– ),’’ Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993): 83–88; here: 86. 29. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6. 30. Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World (New York: Picador, 1990), 336.

Epilogue 1. See Stuart Taberner’s nuanced engagement with what he terms ‘‘latitudinal’’ and ‘‘longitudinal’’ normalization, in particular: preface to German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005). 2. This sentiment was expressed in the World Cup’s official slogan, ‘‘Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden.’’ 3. See the discussion of ‘‘normalization’’ within contemporary German political discourse in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, Introduction to German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, eds. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (Camden House: Rochester, NY), 1–15. 4. Mark Landler, ‘‘3 Rabbis Ordained as Judaism Re-Emerges in Germany,’’ New York Times, September 15, 2006. 5. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung, 128. 6. Robert Menasse, Das Paradies der Ungeliebten. Ein Schauspiel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 41. 7. Katharina Hacker, Die Habenichtse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 228. 8. ‘‘Wenn es schon den Engel der Geschichte nicht gibt, nicht wahr, dann muß doch wenigstens etwas anderes zuverla¨ssig sein. Gut, das finde ich auch. Aber warum kann es nicht das Gesetz, warum kann es nicht der schiere Gegenwert von etwas sein? Warum auf dem bestehen, was verloren ist, warum darauf, daß etwas geheilt wird? Es wird nichts geheilt’’ (Hacker, 146). 9. The phrase ‘‘Nichts, wie es war’’ is ambivalent and can be understood both as ‘‘nothing as it was’’ and as ‘‘nothing, as it was.’’ 10. Lilian Faschinger, Stadt der Verlierer (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2007), 21. 11. Birgit Vanderbeke, Sweet Sixteen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005). 12. ‘‘Die Eltern selbst, so erinnerte sich der Mann, haben ihn andauernd mit der Aufforderung gequa¨lt, sie zu kritisieren, beziehungswese ihnen gegenu¨ber nein zu sagen. Die andauernde Neinsagerei, ja, die grundsa¨tzliche mentale und moralische Verpflichtung zum nein war, so der junge Journalist, seine gesamte

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Kindheit u¨ber die einzige Mo¨glichkeit gewesen, die fu¨r jedes Kind unersetzliche elterliche Liebe zu gewinnen, und um dieser Liebe willen habe sich nicht nur er, sondern seine gesamte Generation bis zum Eintritt ins Erwachsenenleben dem rituellen Neinsagen und der Einu¨bung ins Dawiderhandeln unterzogen, abstoßenden Obszo¨nita¨ten sowie aktionistischen Irrtu¨mern mit oder ohne Lichterketten’’ (Vanderbeke, 85). 13. ‘‘Wa¨hrend dieser langen Zeit der Manipulation gegen jegliche im Grunde doch Halt gebende und also anerkennenswerte Autorita¨t und vor allem gegen den Staat, habe sich bei einigen, die der Gleichmacherei durch Zwangsindividualisierung widerstanden haben, der unerfu¨llte Wunsch nach dem Ja erhalten und manchmal nur mu¨hsam verbergen lassen. Dieser Wunsch sei erst spa¨ter erfu¨llbar gewesen, nachdem die Macht der Elterngeneration bei der Gestaltung der eigenen Biographie hinterfragt und als gewaltta¨tiger, bisweilen faschistoider Freiheitsterrorismus entlarvt werden konnte’’ (Vanderbeke, 86). 14. ‘‘An Interview with Director-Writer Barbara Albert,’’ Free Radicals, DVD, directed by Barbara Albert (2003; New York: Kino Video Kino International, 2005). 15. Precht originally wrote a novel upon which the film is based: Richard David Precht, Lenin kam nur bis Lu¨denscheid: Meine kleine deutsche Revolution (Berlin: List, 2007).

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Index 9/11: 35, 219, 221. See also World Trade Center Adorno, Theodor, 22–23, 44, 80–81, 132, 226. See also Horkheimer, Max Aesthetics, 33–34, 40, 46, 66, 122, 163, 179, 190, 222, 230; camp, 140–41, 155; comparison between Germanlanguage and Euro-American, 74– 76, 129–34; deconstructive, 29–34, 70–71, 73, 78, 86, 96, 117, 179–81, 193–94; of departure, 123–26, 174– 75, 207–9; formalist, 31, 37, 40, 50, 151–52, 156; and globalization, 23– 27, 74–76; modern/postmodern, 19–23, 37–39; post-Holocaust German-language, 13–15, 20, 23, 29– 31, 41, 75–76, 117–18, 125, 127–29, 136, 141, 151, 157, 175–76, 195, 215, 219; queer, 140, 154, 196, 215–18, 221, 224–26; of recognition, 142– 51, 153; and repetition, 76–81. See also Global postmodern style; Postmodern style Affect, 13–18, 20, 22–23, 29–31, 34, 36–39, 41, 51, 54, 63, 65–67, 78, 86, 98, 109, 116, 119, 121–22, 127, 130, 133, 137, 142, 146–47, 149–50, 154, 156, 158, 162, 179, 181, 188, 193– 94, 216–17, 219, 224 Agfacolor, 136, 140 Ahnlund, Knut, 67–68, 71 Albert, Barbara, 35, 227–29 Althen, Michael, 133 Andrian, Leopold von, 34, 179, 188 Anglo-American literature, 31, 35, 70, 109–13, 197, 216–18 Anti-Heimat literature, 29, 36, 82, 181–83, 194 Appadurai, Arjun, 14, 17–18, 130 Arnds, Peter, 184 Ashe, Timothy Garton, 26

Auschwitz, 23, 76–77, 81, 109, 111–12 ¨ ), 83, Austrian Freedom Party (FPO 177–78. See also Haider, Jo¨rg Auteur, 141–43 Authoritarian personality, 61 Avant-garde, 33, 39 Ayrton, Peter, 72 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 14, 28–29, 30– 32, 34, 37, 39, 65–66, 82, 85, 87, 90, 99, 101, 109, 113, 117–18, 122, 153, 180, 196–99, 202, 206, 208, 223; and detective novel, 54, 58–62; and ‘‘everyday fascism,’’ 43–45; and father, 45–47; and masochism, 49–50, 58; and post-Holocaust nostalgia, 62–64 —Works of: Franza Fragment, 30–31, 37, 39–54, 58–64, 101, 196; Malina, 40, 117, 198–99; Ways of Dying (Todesarten), 31, 34, 39–42, 57, 85, 92 Balibar, Etienne, 74 Ballhaus, Michael, 143 Barthes, Roland, 42, 86, 208 Bataille, Georges, 90–91 Beck, Ulrich, 20, 23–24, 34, 179–80 Becker, Wolfgang, 211 Benjamin, Jessica, 99–101 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 70, 74, 194 Berlin, 15, 26, 67, 124, 127, 138–39, 142–43, 148–49, 172–74, 209–10, 213, 219, 222–23 Bernhard, Thomas, 32, 44, 82, 85, 181 Bierbichler, Josef, 123, 157–58 Bleibtreu, Monika, 144 Bleibtreu, Moritz, 123, 144, 229 Bleicher, Joan Kristin, 144 Bloom, Harold, 112 Bluebeard, 49, 60 Bo¨ll, Heinrich, 81–82

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Bonnefoy, Mathilde, 137 Boym, Svetlana, 16–19, 25, 29, 34, 39, 125, 130, 185–86, 193 Brazil, 34, 124, 172, 179–87, 190 Brooks, Peter, 162, 164 Brown, Clarence, 141 Bru¨hl Daniel, 228 Bu¨chner, Georg, 140 Buck, Detlev, 170 Butler, Judith, 217 Carstensen, Margit, 143 Castration, 47, 89, 91, 93, 101, 118 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 24–25, 75 Chase, Malcolm, 17 Childhood, 16–18, 36, 57, 97, 164, 166, 183–84, 193, 226, 229 Claustrophobia, 13, 27, 32, 34–35, 66, 71, 85, 92, 94, 113, 116, 126, 134, 136, 163–67, 226, 228 Collins, Wilkie, 31, 37, 41–43, 53–54, 59–62 Colonialism, 31, 37, 40–41, 43, 94 Corrigan, Timothy, 133 Critchfield, Anne, 78 Critical Theory, 23, 132. See also Frankfurt School; Adorno, Theodor, Horkheimer, Max Cultural idiom, 26, 32, 73–74, 91, 113– 14, 118, 122, 179 Cultural translation, 70–73, 119, 179, 182, 185, 197, 208, 215, 228. See also Translation Culture industry, the, 22, 80, 132 Cunningham, Michael, 35, 216–17 D’Aurevilly, Barbey, 42, 59–60 Day, Doris, 141 Deleuze, Gilles, 106–7; and Felix Guattari, 28, 62–63, 93–94, 102, 104–5 DeLillo, Don, 217 Demy, Jacques, 138 Denmark, 35, 221, 230 Derrida, Jacques, 25–26, 73–75, 77 DeSica, Vittorio, 136 Detection/detective novel, 32, 37, 42– 43, 54–60, 67, 223–25 Deutsch, Helene, 100 Dietl, Helmut, 128 Dietrich, Marlene, 138–41 Displacement, 16, 30, 46–48, 54, 62, 93, 102, 155, 184, 219, 224

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Domin, Hilde, 111 Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von, 26, 129 Do¨rrie, Doris, 128, 153 Eberhardt, Joachim, 42 Eco, Umberto, 59 Economic miracle, 220 Egypt, 47–49, 52, 56, 95 Eichmann, Adolf, 112 Elsaesser, Thomas, 153, 163, 165, 167 Enlightenment, 21, 127, 163 Entrapment, 13, 29–33, 36–37, 59–60, 64–66, 68, 70, 77, 79, 94–95, 98–99, 103, 108–9, 121–23, 125–27, 136, 151, 154–57, 164–69, 174, 177, 179, 194, 196, 198, 207, 217, 219, 221–25, 227–28 Escape, 13–14, 23, 29–36, 49, 53, 60, 66, 72, 91, 93–94, 108–9, 111, 122– 27, 133, 149, 151–52, 154, 157, 159– 60, 164, 168, 170–72, 174, 179–80, 196, 198, 209, 211, 214, 219, 221–23, 225–30 Escape tableaux, 33, 36, 123–25, 133, 168, 174 European Union, 26, 83 ‘‘Everyday fascism,’’ 28–30, 32, 37, 50, 65, 72, 75, 79–80, 85, 89, 91, 121, 178, 224–25 Family, 13–17, 32–37, 59, 63–65, 88– 91, 96, 99–101, 116, 122–27, 135, 139, 143, 157–64, 170–71, 175, 177, 196–97, 199–204, 212, 214–18, 221, 228–30; and fascism, 27–29, 41, 43– 44, 72, 77, 84–86, 93–94, 113, 152– 57, 179, 182, 184, 186, 205–10, 224–26; petit bourgeois, 77, 84–86, 88, 91, 95, 119 Faschinger, Lilian, 35, 221, 223–25 Fascism, 16, 22–23, 26–32, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 43–44, 46–47, 50–52, 61–63, 65–73, 75, 79–82, 84–86, 89, 91, 93– 94, 99, 101, 107–9, 112–15, 119, 121, 125, 129, 141, 152–53, 161, 177–82, 184, 186–87, 193, 198, 200, 205, 221–28; language of, 51, 84. See also Nazism Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 14, 29–30, 33, 120, 122, 128, 133, 138–40, 143, 152–57, 164–65, 197

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Father, the, 13, 15, 19, 23, 27–29, 31, 34, 37, 40, 42–47, 50–52, 60–63, 66, 84–93, 96–102, 108–10, 113–19, 123, 135, 138–40, 144, 146–47, 151– 54, 157–61, 163, 171, 177, 182–84, 193, 196–208, 214, 221, 224–26 Ferch, Heino, 123, 145–46 Fischer, Joschka, 23 Flinn, Caryl, 133, 164 Forgetting, 15, 21, 26–27, 39, 75–77, 81, 122, 219. See also Memory Foucault, Michel, 28, 62, 93 France, 15, 21, 31, 35, 127, 130, 138, 170, 209–11 Franke, Peter, 123 Frankfurt School, 22–23, 132–33. See also Adorno, Theodor; Critical Theory; Horkheimer, Max Franklin, Ruth, 71 Freeman, John, 72 French language, 33, 67, 71, 73, 119, 121, 131 Freud, Sigmund, 27–28, 48, 55, 63, 91, 93, 100–101, 107, 151, 202–3; and compulsion to repeat, 47, 152; and ‘‘A Child is Being Beaten,’’ 102 Friedrich, Caspar David, 70, 122, 167 Frisch, Max, 197–98 Garwood, Ian, 142–43 Gender, 29, 31–32, 35, 37, 56, 77, 79, 90, 96, 100–101, 105, 107, 127, 153– 55, 157, 160–61, 163, 166, 170, 191, 217; and fascism, 40–44, 47, 49, 85, 99, 113–15, 205–6 Genius, 29, 88, 189–92 German film history, 13, 23, 33, 69, 125, 127–29, 134, 137–41 German pop literature (Popliteratur), 180, 235–36 n. 51 Geyer, Michael and Konrad Jarausch, 21, 75–76, 130–32 Ginzburg, Carlo, 55 Global postmodern style, 19, 24, 33, 124–25, 143, 172, 193, 208 Globalism/globalization, 14–15, 19– 27, 30, 32–33, 35, 67–68, 71–75, 77, 121–22, 124–25, 127–28, 130, 133, 143, 170–74, 179–82, 193, 208, 215, 219–21, 224, 230 Goebbels, Heinrich, 127–28

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 78 Grais, Samir, 72 Grass, Gu¨nter, 81–82, 220 Greenaway, Peter, 141–42 Griebe, Frank, 143 Grissemann, Stephan, 120–21 Gruppe 47, 31 Guilt, 15–16, 28, 54, 59, 72, 115–17, 152, 158, 178; Austria’s admission of, 81–84 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 20–22, 24, 76, 130, 132 Habsburg Empire, 16, 82 Hacker, Katharina, 35, 221–23 Haider, Jo¨rg, 83, 177–78, 180. See also Austrian Freedom Party Hake, Sabine, 129, 132 Haneke, Michael, 14, 32–33, 67, 70, 119–22, 131 Hanssen, Beatrice, 79 Harring, Laura, 155 Hartung, Klaus, 172 Hartwig, Ina, 91 Heaney, Seamus, 112 Hegel, Georg W. F., 100, 181–82, 184– 85, 191, 194, 217 Heimat, 14–15, 17, 27–29, 31, 33, 35– 37, 41, 52, 62, 66, 69–70, 81–84, 95, 122, 126, 161–70, 174, 181–83, 194, 214, 225, 227–30. See also Home Heimatfilm, 17, 27, 29, 33, 84, 128, 134, 136–37, 158, 165 Heine, Heinrich, 220 Herberger, Sepp, 150 Hermaphrodite, 149, 160–61 Herzog, Werner, 128, 140 Hesiod, 118 Hiroshima, 82, 113 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 26, 35, 129, 227–28 Hitchcock, Alfred, 150 Hitler, Adolf, 25–26, 28, 178, 225 Hoberman, J., 121 Hoesterey, Ingeborg, 22, 41, 132 Hofer, Johannes, 16 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 34, 179, 188, 193 Hollywood, 120, 129, 131–32, 155–56 Holmes, Sherlock, 55 Holocaust, the, 14–16, 21, 24–25, 32,

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59, 62, 65, 74–77, 79, 109–13, 117– 18, 122, 191, 194, 220–22, 225, 228– 29. See also Aesthetics: postHolocaust German language; Shoah Home, 13–19, 27, 29–30, 32–36, 39, 46, 49, 52, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 62, 64– 66, 68, 81, 84–85, 88–90, 92, 94–95, 98, 109, 113–15, 121–27, 135–37, 139, 160–76, 179, 181–86, 194–97, 199–200, 202–3, 207–8, 211–17, 219–22, 225–30. See also Heimat Horkheimer, Max, 22, 44, 80, 226. See also Adorno, Theodor Huppert, Isabelle, 119–21 Hutcheon, Linda, 17–18, 39, 193 Huyssen, Andreas, 18, 38–40, 125, 141 In˜a´rritu, Alejandro Gonza´lez, 125, 130 Intertextuality, 18–19, 22–23, 27, 30, 32, 34, 37–39, 41–43, 53–54, 60, 66, 78, 126–27, 142–51, 153, 159, 179, 181, 187, 193, 196–97 Irony, 24, 40–41, 55, 62–63, 78, 117, 172, 180, 182, 188–89, 191–92; feminist, 40; and nostalgia, 17–18, 34, 37, 39, 43, 52, 54, 176, 179, 193 Jameson, Fredric, 17–18, 20, 22, 31, 37–38, 41, 130–31, 137, 195 Janz, Marlies, 78 Jarausch, Konrad, and Michael Geyer, 21, 75, 130–32 Jelinek, Elfriede, 14, 19–20, 23, 29–30, 32–34, 44, 64–67, 126, 151, 153–54, 168, 176–82, 184, 186, 196–97, 206, 208, 223, 225; and Michael Haneke, 119–22; and Nazism, 81–85; and ‘‘performative entrapment,’’ 31, 32, 64–66, 68, 79, 122, 126, 168, 177, 196; and Sylvia Plath, 113–18; and provincialism, 67–70; and repetition, 76–81; and critical response to Nobel Prize win, 67–68, 71–72; and translation, 70–74 —Works of: Bambiland, 72; Death and the Maiden V: The Wall, 32, 66, 117–18; Lust, 66, 78, 80–81, 90–91; ‘‘Oh mein Papa,’’ 115–17; The Piano Teacher, 32–33, 66–67, 71–73, 77– 78, 80–81, 84–99, 101–9, 113–15, 118–19, 121–22, 126, 184, 225; Women As Lovers, 84; Wonderful

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Wonderful Times, 29, 77–78, 84–85, 101–2 Jencks, Charles, 41 Kafka, Franz, 78, 102–3, 105, 108, 202, 208 Kakutani, Michiko, 71 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 191, 200–202 Ka¨utner, Helmut, 69 Kavenna, Joanna, 67 Khallaf, Rania, 72 Klee, Paul, 209 Klimt, Gustav, 189 Kluge, Alexander, 39 Kohut, Heinz, 77 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 100, 103–6 Krause, Horst, 229 Kristeva, Julia, 26, 42, 48, 74–75, 77 Kro´l, Joachim, 123, 145, 147, 157 Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich, 121 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 43 LaCapra, Dominick, 76–77 Lang, Fritz, 140 Lennox, Sara, 56 Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider, 234 n. 37 Lindqvist, Anders, 68 Lits, Marc, 57–58 Lu, Sheldon, 24–25 Luhmann, Niklas, 144 Luka´cs, Georg, 17, 164, 185 Lynch, David, 17, 33, 125, 130–31, 141–42, 144, 152, 155–56 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 22, 76 Maastricht Treaty, 25, 83 Mackenzie, Scott, 228 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 187–88 Magdalene, Mary, 140 Malmgren, Carl, 58 Mann, Thomas, 188–89 Marischka, Ernst, 134–35 Masculinity, 46, 108, 146, 190–92, 199 Maslin, Janet, 133 Masochism, 49–51, 58, 62, 66, 71–72, 77, 86–87, 92, 94–95, 98–109, 113, 119, 123, 153, 157 Matussek, Matthias, 30 Melancholy, 15, 19, 28, 44, 70, 76, 141, 152, 186, 220, 222

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Me´lie`s, George,156 Melodrama, 17, 33, 47, 62, 120, 123, 127, 136, 140, 153–55, 162–69, 174, 181, 216–17 Memory, 16–19, 27, 38, 40–41, 48, 50– 53, 56, 75, 116–17, 119, 142–43, 145, 155, 157, 166, 183, 185–86, 191, 193, 227 Menasse, Robert, 14, 29–30, 33–36, 122, 175–94, 196–97, 208, 215–17, 221–22; and Elfriede Jelinek, 177–79 —Works of: The Paradise of the Unloved Ones, 35, 221; Trilogie of Dispiritedness, 34, 179, 189, 193; Wings of Stone, 34, 175, 179–94, 196–97, 215, 222 Metaphor, 35, 48, 57, 66, 78–79, 90, 98, 135, 176, 223; the Holocaust as, 32, 109–13 Meyer, Adolf-Ernst, 14, 80, 82–84, 89– 90, 96 Minnelli, Vincente, 163 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margerete, 27, 42, 76, 93 Mittman, Elizabeth, 170 Modernity, 17, 31, 34, 55, 72, 75, 130, 132, 162–65, 168, 172–73, 180, 185, 197; comparative, East/West, 23–27, 74–75; interrupted, 19–21, 23–27, 195–96, 218; and postmodernity, 20, 22, 25; second, 20; unfinished project of, 19–21. See also Postmodernism; Postmodernity Moltke, Johannes von, 165 Monroe, Marilyn, 141 Mother, the, 34, 45, 71–72, 81, 85–89, 91–92, 94–95, 98–99, 102, 113–15, 118, 121, 135–36, 140, 144, 151, 153–54, 159–60, 163, 184, 196, 199, 201, 204–8, 214, 216–17, 224–25; phallic, 90, 96–97, 184, 186 Mourning, 15, 19, 23, 28, 43, 76, 115, 153, 186 Mu¨ller, Wilhelm, 78 Musil, Robert, 187–88 Mussolini, Benito, 28 Nationalism, 14, 25, 74, 82, 150, 177, 220–21 Nazism, 13–15, 20–21, 25–27, 29, 32– 33, 35–36, 38, 43–44, 60, 65–66,

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72–75, 81–82, 84, 113, 115, 118, 122, 130, 155, 165, 178–79, 185, 187, 198, 219–21, 225, 228; narrative of, 23, 66, 70, 74–77, 79, 83, 89, 98–99, 109, 117, 197, 206, 215 Nestbeschmutzerin, 65–67, 70, 83, 181 New, the, 13, 27, 34, 36, 127, 133, 157, 174, 194–97, 207–8, 210–15, 225, 227; and nostalgia, 196–97 New German Cinema, 29, 33, 122, 128–29, 133, 142–43, 152–53, 164. See also Fassbinder, Rainer Werner Nobel Prize for Literature, 14, 19, 65, 67–68, 71, 110, 220 ‘‘Normalization,’’ 35, 219–20 Nostalgia, 14–20, 25, 27, 29–39, 42, 52, 62–64, 66, 68, 76, 81–82, 88, 117, 125–30, 134–37, 141, 155, 162, 164– 65, 169, 174–75, 179, 181–84, 188, 192–94, 196–97, 208, 210–11, 214, 217, 219–20, 222, 225, 227, 229–30; displaced, 31–32, 37–39, 50, 54, 62, 65, 132, 229; and irony, 17–18, 43, 52, 54, 179, 193; reflective, 18–19, 35, 39, 41, 126, 184–86, 193, 197, 215, 225; regressive, 17, 28, 165; restorative vs. reflective, 18; transnational, 30, 33, 175–76, 179, 181–82, 186, 194, 196–97 Novak, Kim, 150 Novalis, 185 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 163 Oates, Joyce Carol, 112 Ockenfuss, Crystal, 78 Ophu¨ls, Max, 138 Ostalgie, 15–16, 210, 229 Ourada, De´sire´e, 228 ‘‘Performative entrapment,’’ 30, 32, 64–66, 68, 79, 122, 126, 168, 177, 196 Perloff, Marjorie, 112 Petersen, Wolfgang, 125 Petri, Nina, 123, 144 Pistor, Ludger, 145–47 Plath, Sylvia, 32, 35, 66–67, 70, 109–18 Poe, Edgar Allan, 57 Pornography, 66, 68, 71, 78, 80 Postcolonial theory, 24–25, 73–75 Postmodernism, 17–25, 33, 37–38, 41, 54, 56–58, 72, 74–79, 89, 124–25,

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127–34, 141–44, 155–56, 163–64, 174, 179, 181, 184, 186–93, 195–97, 205, 208–9, 215, 217; and globalization, 24, 27; and the Holocaust, 76–77 Postmodernity, 20–22, 24–25, 38, 131, 164, 195, 218 Postmodern style, 19–23, 37–38, 41, 54, 78–79, 130–31, 133, 142, 156. See also Global postmodern style Potente, Franka, 123, 138, 146–48, 161, 172 Poussin, Nicolas, 154–55 Provincialism, 23–26, 29–30, 32–33, 65–71, 73–74, 76, 84, 94, 109, 121, 177, 180–81, 208 Psychoanalysis, 17, 43, 48, 62, 91–93, 99, 102, 151 Rabbi Alter, 220–21 Raben, Peer, 133, 143 Rape, 47, 51–52, 56, 60, 85–86, 90, 93, 97, 106, 108, 121, 229 Rebellion, 123, 160, 199–200, 206, 208, 217, 226 Rentschler, Eric, 128–29, 142, 153 Repetition, 19, 23, 30, 33, 40, 47–50, 79–81, 91, 95, 101, 150–52, 154, 174, 186, 201–2, 223–25, 228 Repetition compulsion, 15, 23, 26, 28, 30, 36, 44, 73, 76–77, 79–82, 85–86, 92, 109, 129, 151–52, 157, 174, 177, 179, 181, 215, 222, 224, 226 Richter, Urs, 133 Riedle, Gabriele, 78 Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 78 Rimbaud, Arthur, 42 Rohde, Armin, 144 Rose, Jacqueline, 112 Rost, Andreas, 131 Rubens, Peter Paul, 190 Ruzowizky, Stefan, 26, 129

Sa˜o Paolo, 34, 179, 181–84, 186, 189– 90, 192, 197 Scha¨fer, Andre´, and Richard David Precht, 35, 228–30 Schindel, Robert, 81 Schipper, Sebastian, 145, 147 Schlo¨ndorff, Volker, 128 Schmitter, Elke, 120 Schmitz-Burgard, Sylvia, 78 Schneider, Romy, 27, 134, 137, 139–41 Schorr, Michael, 35, 227, 229 Schreckenberg, Ernst, 132 Schubert, Franz, 78, 119 Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 128 Schuppach, Sandra, 136, 157, 160–61 Schwarz, Stephen, 71 Schwarzwaldklinik, 84 Schygulla, Hanna, 140, 143 Second Austrian Republic, 178 Seems, Mark, 94 Seeßlen, Georg, 131 Shaw, Christopher, 17 Shoah, the, 23, 57–58, 111, 113, 164– 65. See also Holocaust Shohat, Ella Habiba, 170 Singer, Ben, 162–63 Sinka, Margit, 172–73 Sirk, Douglas, 120, 136, 140, 156, 163, 165–66 Sissi films, 27, 134–37, 139, 141, 165 Soccer, 35, 150, 219–21, 229 Spiral, as symbol, 150–51, 174 Spivak, Guyatri, 73 Stam, Robert, 170 Starobinski, Jean, 16–17 Stefan, Verena, 41 Sternberg, Josef von, 138 Streeruwitz, Marlene, 82, 85 Struck, Karin, 41 Sukowa, Barbara, 138 Su¨skind, Patrick, 72, 127 Swales, Erica, 78–79

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 100, 103, 106 Sachs, Nelly, 110–11 Sadism, 28–29, 52, 62, 77–78, 91, 141, 153, 184; and fascism, 28–29, 71; and masochism, 100, 105, 107–8 Sagan, Leontine, 140 Santner, Eric, 28, 43, 76–77

Tarantino, Quentin, 33, 125, 130, 141, 144 Taylor, Elizabeth, 141 Technicolor, 136, 140, 165 Temporality, 18–19, 38–39, 87, 133, 195, 218 Third Reich, 21, 23, 26, 82, 127–29. See also Nazism

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Timm, Peter, 170 To¨teberg, Michael, 144, 173 Translation, 25, 67, 70–74, 94, 109–10, 113, 117, 119, 179–82, 185, 197, 208, 215, 228. See also Untranslatability Trauma, 15, 28, 43, 76, 151–52 Turner, Lana, 163 Tykwer, Tom, 9, 13–14, 19–20, 27, 30, 33, 36, 122, 123–27, 129, 168–75, 179–80, 193, 196–97, 203, 208, 214– 17, 228; and Fassbinder, 156–57; and family, 157–61; and German film heroines, 134–42; and intertextuality, 142–51; and melodrama, 164–68; and postmodern aesthetics, 132–34; and repetition, 151–52 —Works of: Deadly Maria, 13, 27, 123, 134, 140, 144, 149–51, 157–58, 161, 167, 169, 174; Heaven, 124, 144, 149–50, 161–62, 168–74; The International, 127, 149; The Perfume, 127; The Princess and the Warrior, 13–14, 27, 124, 126, 134–37, 144–50, 152, 159, 161, 165–66, 169–70, 214, 223; Run Lola Run, 19, 33, 123–24, 129, 132, 134, 137–39, 142–50, 152, 156, 159, 160–61, 164–66, 172–74, 203; Winter Sleepers, 123, 136, 146, 149– 50, 157–59, 165–68 Uncanny, the, 36, 145–46, 199, 201–4, 208, 213–14 Untranslatability, 34, 71–74, 186, 197. See also Translation Utopia, 16, 18, 38–39, 51–53, 125–26, 133, 154, 170, 185–86, 196, 207, 211–12, 214, 224 Van Gogh, Vincent, 209–10 Vanderbeke, Birgit, 14, 30, 34–36, 122, 194–97; and Bachmann, 197–99; and Ostalgie, 210–11; and queer aesthetics, 215–18; and the uncanny, 202–3, 213–14 —Works of: The Dinner of Mussels, 34, 196–97, 199–210, 215; I See Something That You Don’t See, 34–35,

................. 17571$

INDX

209–15; Sweet Sixteen, 35, 221, 226–27 Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, 27, 40, 180 Victim, the, 16, 40, 54, 81, 85, 92, 103, 107, 111–13, 116, 145, 164, 178, 225 Victim/victimizer constellation, 28–29, 40–41, 44–45, 47–50, 58, 89, 101, 226, 229 Victorian literature, 32, 37, 41–42, 54, 60, 62 Vienna, 34, 46, 48–49, 53, 56, 66, 77– 78, 86, 90, 119, 121, 177, 179, 180– 83, 185–86, 190–92, 194, 197, 223–24, 228 Viennese Modernism, 34, 179, 181, 187–93 Virus (of crime), 54, 57–58, 66, 222–25 Vogel, Ju¨rgen, 35, 227–29 Washington, Dinah, 147 Watts, Naomi, 155 Wedekind, Frank, 138 Weigel, Sigrid, 40, 42 Weingarten, Hans, 35, 227–28 Weininger, Otto, 191 Wenders, Wim, 143 Wessely, Paula, 83 West, Mae, 141 Wiene, Robert, 136 Wieseltier, Leon, 112 Williams, Linda, 162–65 Window: as symbol, 13–14, 27, 30, 34, 44, 68–70, 103, 119, 122–23, 157, 167–69, 174, 176, 182, 186, 217 Winkler, Josef, 181 Wolf, Christa, 39 Wong, Kar-Wai, 33, 125, 130, 144, 170, 172, 174 Woodhouse, Reed, 216 World Trade Center, 219, 221. See also 9/11 Wortmann, So¨nke, 128, 153, 220 Wray, John, 72 Wright, Elizabeth, 98 X-Filme, 143–44 Young, James, 112

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