Spaces of Adolescence: Contemporary German-language Youth Literature in Topographical Perspective 3476059154, 9783476059154

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Spaces of Adolescence

Contemporary German-language Youth Literature in Topographical Perspective Anna Stemmann

Spaces of Adolescence

Anna Stemmann

Spaces of Adolescence Contemporary German-language Youth Literature in Topographical Perspective

Anna Stemmann Leipzig, Germany

ISBN 978-3-476-05915-4    ISBN 978-3-476-05916-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05916-1 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023 The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany

In memory of Britta Stemmann (1965-1999)

Foreword

This book is the translation of my doctoral thesis, which I defended at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 2018. In German, the book Räume der Adoleszenz was published in 2019. The English translation is an automated translation that was edited and processed by me. German language quotations that do not exist in an English publication have been translated for better readability. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Hannah Nelson-Teutsch, who assisted me with her sound and sensitive copy-edit. I would also like to thank Nane Pleger for the final review. Many people have helped me on the way to successfully completing my doctorate. I would especially like to thank Prof. Dr. Ute Dettmar, who has accompanied me since my studies. She has always given me new impulses and good advice for my doctoral thesis. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Heinz Drügh for his second supervision and his interest in the thesis. And I would like to thank Prof. Dr Caroline Roeder for preparing a third evaluation. With Prof. Dr. Berbeli Wanning I was unexpectedly able to work as a research assistant at the University of Siegen for two years after my studies, which made it possible for me to take my first steps into the academic working world. I am very thankful for the eventful and instructive experience. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the research unit at the University of Siegen: Dr. Elisabeth Hollerweger, Dr. Bastian Dewenter and Jessica Schmidt, who brightened my stay in the sometimes-­dreary Siegen considerably. Equally great thanks are due to my colleagues Dr. Bernd Dolle-Weinkauf, Dr. Claudia Pecher, Dr. Iris Schäfer and Dr. Andrea Weinmann at the Institute of Children’s and Young Adult Literature Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt who gave me such a warm welcome. I would like to thank Regina Jaekel in particular for her support in all organisational matters, for helping me along, and for the funny moments in my day-to-day work. With Dr. Heidi Lexe and her team at the Vienna STUBE I have been able to realise many joint projects across topographical borders in recent years. Many thanks for this stimulating collaboration, which was always a welcome change from the daily routine of dissertation work. Many people have read individual chapters of analysis in this thesis, examined them with a critical eye, and provided suggestions. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Scott Brand, Dr. Bastian Dewenter, Dr. Elisabeth Hollerweger, Dr. Sonja Loidl, Dr. Malena Ratzke, Dr. Iris Schäfer, Prof. Dr. Stefan Tetzlaff, and vii

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Foreword

Anika Ullmann. Particular thanks are due to Klaus Voigt and Jule Woest, who read this work more than once at a stretch and were always intrepid in their corrections of form and content. In addition to my academic companions, I would also like to thank my family, who followed this work with so much interest. I thank my friends Sarah Huck, Rike Kappmeier, and Melanie Ringger for the diversion from all scientific studies. I would like to thank Anika and Iris for the informal exchange at Pide; Jule for more than a decade of friendship, also at and despite all spatial distances. Maike, thank you for making my life so much more beautiful. This book is dedicated in memory of my mother Britta Stemmann. Leipzig 2022 Anna Stemmann

Contents

1

Topographies of Adolescence��������������������������������������������������������������������   1 1.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   1 1.2 Literary Imaginative Spaces of Adolescence: Diachronic Narrative Patterns��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   8 1.3 Varieties of the Adolescent Novel: Classic, Modern, Postmodern ����  12 1.4 Developments since 2000: The Text Corpus��������������������������������������  16

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 Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations ����������������  19 2.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  19 2.2 Topographies of Literary Studies��������������������������������������������������������  22 2.2.1 Jurij M. Lotman: Spatial Semantics����������������������������������������  25 2.2.2 Gerhard Hoffmann: Space, Situation, Narrated Reality ��������  26 2.2.3 Michel Foucault: Heterotopia ������������������������������������������������  27 2.3 Narrative Space, Narrated Space, Spatial Function����������������������������  29

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 Travelling and Driving Around: Road Novels����������������������������������������  33 3.1 Introduction: Busfahrt mit Kuhn, Fast genial, Tschick ����������������������  33 3.2 Intermedial Form: Audio-visual Narrative Space ������������������������������  39 3.3 Narrated Spaces in Motion������������������������������������������������������������������  50 3.3.1 Outbreaks and Break-ups: Dysfunctional Family Spaces������  50 3.3.2 Chronotope Journey: Stopovers����������������������������������������������  58 3.4 Space Function: Self-search on the Move������������������������������������������  67

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Adolescence and the City: Urban Spaces on the Move��������������������������  77 4.1 Introduction: Es war einmal Indianerland, Räuberhände, Tigermilch������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 77 4.2 Narrative In-between, Narrative Sampling: Narrative Space as Mosaic������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  84 4.3 Narrated In-between Spaces of the Big City��������������������������������������  95 4.3.1 Fragile Childhood Spaces ������������������������������������������������������  96 4.3.2 Heterotopic Retreats��������������������������������������������������������������� 102 4.3.3 Threshold Walks: Oscillating Forms of Movement���������������� 106 4.4 At the Boundaries of the Self: Space and Ritual�������������������������������� 113

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Contents

5

 Excursus: Transitional Passages in Archaic Space �������������������������������� 123 5.1 Introduction���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 123 5.2 Gender, Forest and Initiation: Mädchenmeute������������������������������������ 124 5.3 Choppy Movements: Bilder deiner großen Liebe������������������������������ 127

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 Stasis, Standstill, Staying: Poetics of Stagnation������������������������������������ 139 6.1 Introduction: Die Welt ist eine Scheibe, Hikikomori, Pampa Blues���� 139 6.2 Inside and Outside of Narration and Experience�������������������������������� 144 6.3 Isolated Areas of Action���������������������������������������������������������������������� 151 6.3.1 Familial Fields of Interference������������������������������������������������ 151 6.3.2 Stasis �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 157 6.3.3 Overlaps and Crossings in Narrated Space���������������������������� 163 6.4 Negated Self-search, Attempted Passage: Spatial Function���������������� 175

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Textures of Struggling������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 183 7.1 Textual Findings���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 183 7.2 Intersections of Adolescence, Space, Literature and Culture ������������ 187

Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 193

1

Topographies of Adolescence

1.1 Introduction Adolescence is a culturally determined concept that is discursively shaped by the framework of a social context. In definition, the term is correspondingly mobile and includes different dimensions in a diachronic perspective. Moreover, the construction of adolescence is discussed in various disciplines, such as sociology, gender studies, pedagogy, and literary studies, which means that even from a synchronic point of view, the understanding of adolescence varies in accordance with the disciplinary orientation.1 The different approaches nonetheless meet in a fundamental observation: physical, psychological, and social ‘rebuilding measures’ characterise adolescence as an incisive and potentially crisis-prone period of lifehistorical (re)orientation, which takes place as a ‘status passage’2 in the transition from youth to adulthood.3 This study deals with adolescence in recent German-language youth novels in a topographical perspective. The aim is to show which functions ‘spaces’ fulfil for the narration of adolescence. To this purpose, contextualising considerations will first be introduced which will reveal interdisciplinary interfaces to other fields. Helsper defines from the perspective of an educationalist adolescence as “an emotional and cognitive crisis in which the adolescent, in coming to terms with his childhood, is given the ‘cultural opportunity’ of detachment” (Helsper 1991, 79). He thus emphasises above all a moment of crisis-prone renewal that is inherent in

 This study is a translation from German. Quotations from primary and secondary literature have been translated from German where there is no English-language version available. 2  On the construction of such status passages from the perspective of educational science, see also: Fiebertshäuser 2009, 182. 3  With reference to Kristeva, such a process of reformulation of the self manifests in a deconstruction and destabilisation of the psyche (cf. Kristeva 1997). These processes are often accompanied by crises, especially in the phase of adolescence (cf. Wagner 1998, 51). 1

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023 A. Stemmann, Spaces of Adolescence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05916-1_1

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this transitional phase.4 Established structures collapse and in confrontation with the environment the self-image of adolescents sorts itself anew in this life-historical interim period.5 During adolescence, self-images are set in motion and defined through networks of relationships, through inclusion and exclusion, and the location of the individual within these structures “as the [...] process of the construction and revision of self-images to be accomplished, [takes] place at the intersection of social interaction and individual biography” (Glomb 2008, 307). The balance of power between adults and young people that determines social positions was described by Selinger Trites in her studies by asking how adolescents “disturb the universe” (Seelinger Trites 2000, 1). Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva underline that adolescence is a processual phase characterised by “internal turmoil of storm and stress” (Hilton/Nikolajeva 2012, 2). Spatial dimensions occupy an important position alongside the individual and social shifts taking place during adolesence. This is not only true in a metaphorical use of language to describe the “essential reconfiguration and reshaping of the subject’s inner spaces” (Erdheim 1998, 10), but also in actual movements through space, as described by Fiebertshäuser: “The human life course can be seen as a sequence of biographical status changes that are also usually associated with spatial transitions” (Fiebertshäuser 2009, 185). Habermas has pointed out the functional occupation of spaces as ‘personal places’ and instruments for determining identity in movement from a psychoanalytical perspective. He emphasises the detachment from the nursery, in an increasingly autonomous movement into an expanded experiential space, as a distinctive threshold of development: “The role transition from child to adult thus finds a [...] spatial expression”. (Habermas 1999, 167)6 Such a topographical order, which locates developmental psychological transitions in border passages, can be identified in various social spheres. Within the justice system, for instance, specific spaces may only be entered after reaching a certain age.7 According to Alkemeyer/Budde/Freist, the processes of adolescence thus prove to be “socio-culturally framed processes of discovery, (re)discovery and creation” (Alkemeyer/Budde/Freist 2013, 21). Throughout these processes of subjectivation, of ideas about self form and of change come together at the interface of space. Space can both create a structuring framework for (self-) positioning, and can also be deconstructed to enter unknown realms: due to this double function of space, which refers furthermore to ambiguous boundaries,  The definition is based on a psychoanalytical approach that interprets adolescence as a cultural force for the renewal of social conditions. From a gender studies perspective, such a semantisation must also be engaged critically, in that these processes were long considered to be solely male (cf. Lehnert 1996, 7ff.). Chapter 1.2 will discuss a gender-sensitive perspective in more detail. 5  From a sociological perspective, Flaake/King define the ongoing developments in terms of a bundle of characteristics, which they categorise as “the shaping of gender identity, the modification of the relationship to parents, and the shaping of one’s own love and work relationships as distinct from them” (Flaake/King 1995, 13). On the construction of adolescence, see also: King/Flaake 2005; King 2011; Vera King 2000. 6  On the function of the narrated children’s room, see also: Lexe 2014 7  On the relationship between adolescence and space from a sociological perspective, see also: Grunert/Deinert 2010; Thole 2010. 4

1.1 Introduction

3

orders, hierarchies, and relational structures, it becomes mobile in adolescence. Spatial constructions not only transport, frame, and support both overarching social structures and individual processes of growing up, but also have the potential to disrupt them or lead to irritations,8 and in this respect spatial constructions can be seen as multi-layered sign carriers. Building on these fundamental observations about adolescence in connection with spatial factors, it is productive from the perspective of literary studies to analyse novels that address adolescence with a focus on space. Narratives of adolescence address the ambiguous aspects of identity formation, self-searching, and self-positioning that take place during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, often linking the developments depicted in the narrative structure to movement through the narrated space. Literary representations of adolescence engage with the physical and psychological tensions of this phase of life, while simultaneously affording characters the opportunity to play with open identities and illuminating the complex relationship between protagonists and societies (cf. Glasenapp 2010a, 125). According to Koschorke, a sphere of “fluid meanings, affiliations, and identities opens up for the adolescent characters in the narrated space, in which social structural schemata no longer apply” (Koschorke 2012, 115).9 The construction and order of narrated spaces are vital to literary renderings of adolescence as a phase of drastic changes  – departures, travels, and search movements characterise adolescence as a processual and open phase of biographical work, in which often “the inner development [...] concretises itself as an outer movement” (Freese 1971, 156f.). Figures in motion appear as leitmotifs, crossing topological thresholds, performing border crossings, or lingering in in-between spaces, thereby refering in their topographical order and location in the narrated space to the developmental psychological liquefaction of familiar structures during adolescence. As a counterpart to the figures in motion, spatial metaphors, such as passage or transit, are frequently deployed to refer to ritual structures that follow a fixed course. The fixed course of these spatial metaphors can be contrasted with the open process of self-­determination so closely associated with a modern conception of adolescence. From the perspective of educational science, Fiebertshäuser emphasises that “initiation rituals related to status passages” (Fiebertshäuser 2009, 187) still take place even in modern societies. However, these rituals have become “individualised” in an increasingly complex society and elude a “uniform attribution of meaning,” which has led to a “differentiation of status passages in a wide variety of fields” (Fiebertshäuser 2009, 187). It is striking that the narrated or narrativised courses of adolescence in literary texts are still oriented regarding those spatial constants described by van Gennep as an anthropological pattern of a (pre-modern) rite of passage. In van Gennep’s model, the spatially referential concepts of door, threshold, gate (cf. van Gennep 1960, 15)

 For considerations of a cultural and literary discourse on disruption, see also: Gansel 2015; Gansel 2011; Roeder 2015a. 9  On de-structuring from a psychoanalytic perspective, see also: Erdheim 1992, 277. 8

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clarify how spatial transitions structure an inintiation in three phases: detachment, probation, and reintegration.10 Throughout the probation phase, initiates must move topologically into spaces beyond the familiar, and from there adolescents return to the social framework for reintegration into another phase of life. Turner has expanded upon van Gennep’s work and introduced the notion of the ‘liminal’ as an intermediate stage of de-­ structuring. Turner defines the liminal phase as a testing space between fixed social positions marking an exceptional threshold state in which previous rules no longer apply and the liminal persona must reorient itself through destabilisation (cf. Turner 1969, 95).11 As a topological as well as semantic zone of transition, the liminal in this model stands for a conscious ambiguity of border-drawing and border-crossing, because the “figurations of the border are in tension with the space of the culturally and socially normal” (Borgards 2012, 11). In the narration of adolescence, the liminal phase characterised by dissolved structures and alternative rules is notable and is shaped as an ambiguous state for the characters. Starting from this observation, an interesting possibility develops for linking ethnological theorisations of spatial transition phases and perspectives of literary studies, which inquire into the relationship between liminality and narration in a cultural studies orientation and consider the literary-aesthetic modeling of adolescence. The anthologies by Geisenhanslüke/Mein and Achilles/Borgards/ Burrichter are exemplary in developing and testing such a theoretical approach, and yet they do not explicitly address adolescence (cf. Geisenhanslüke/Mein 2008a; Geisenhanslüke/Mein 2008b; Achilles/Borgards/Burrichter 2012). Nonetheless, these theoretical approaches show how the study of narratively constructed border spaces can be used to analyse multiple dynamics of the social processes that are negotiated in the construction of narrativised space (cf. Borgards 2012, 9). For the following investigation of the representation of adolescence, a connection of the research approaches results. Thus, the spatial arrangements within the texts are examined and the narrative construction character is revealed. In addition, the respective functions of these constructions are discussed and reflected upon in the associated inscriptions. Topographical thresholds, transgressions, and the resulting interstices of experimentation are a traditional element of narrative in children’s literature. Fairy tales and fantasy, for example, make border areas visible and thereby materialise symbolic spatial orders (cf. Horn 1997).12 Liminal structures are equally evident in realistic forms of narration, which, while metonymically referring to an extratextual

 From a literary-scientific point of view, Titzmann has already demonstrated this structure as a powerful narrative pattern at work since Goethe’s time (cf. Titzmann 2002). 11  The concept of the liminal goes back to van Gennep’s study and describes the phase of thresholds associated with transition. Turner further elaborated upon this definition and embedded it in social processes (cf. Turner 1989). Three dimensions of liminality have been identified: “temporal (between before and after), systematic (between one and the other), and spatial (between here and there)” (Achilles/Borgards/Burrichter 2012, 7). See also further: Parr 2008, 20ff. 12  On liminal structures in fantasy see also: Hepp 2012. 10

1.1 Introduction

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reality in the staging of the places of action, but also work in forms of narration with symbolic overformations, they exhibit semantic boundaries, and establish liminal spaces of the in-between. This perspective of topographical thresholds and transgressions, on youth literary constructions, both at the level of histoire and discourse, can be connected to the aforementioned scholarship concerning the relationship between liminality and literary forms (cf. Geisenhanslüke/Mein 2008a). Borgards outlines the potential for general literary studies: “What comes into view are thus questions about the relationship between boundary and norm, about the process of drawing boundaries, about the concept of transgressive boundary space, about liminal plots, liminal characters, and liminal genres” (Borgards 2012, 13). For the analysis of adolescent literary texts, especially the adolescent novel, the aforementioned points of contact are equally fruitful and open up a new field of research.13 In the constitution of the liminal, Borgards speaks, for example, of “frontier dwellers of the most diverse provenance, of parasites, monsters, beastmen [...], vampires, suicides, migrants, homeless people, etc.” (Borgards 2012, 10f.), which are characterised by virtue of being situated in both a normative social and a topographical in-between. Adolescent figures can be added to this list, since it is in adolescence that a comprehensive and equally ambivalent self-positioning can be identified as pending, which is to say in-between. Adolescence is, as it has been described in this work and elsewhere, a period of in-between life par excellence and within adolescent literary texts characters are identified, in their “liminal actions such as travelling” (Borgards 2012, 11) or in open movements in space, as figurations of denormalisation. On the representational level of the texts, the disarranged self-image of the characters is often brought into correspondingly complex forms, such as an achronological narrative. Following Link’s studies, the life phase of adolescence can be described with a discourse of normality if adolescents are understood as figures of deviation (cf. Link 2001; Link 1999). This is true on the level of plot, space, characters, and representation as well as in terms of genre, which will be further elaborated in the following chapters. Literary texts contour adolescence as a liminal construction, which in turn is interwoven with ritual structures and processes in the narrated sequences.14 In terms of plot, the dissolution of boundaries during adolescence appears in narrative constellations that often expose adolescence and the processes of self-searching as moments of crisis, bringing them into close proximity with experiences of initiation and spatial threshold situations.15 In this respect, the protagonists of modern literary texts also appear during adolescence as figurations of the liminal and explicit borderline figures who stand in the “outside of all hierarchies of social life”  Parr points out that in this theoretical research context, “educational, developmental, and adolescent novels might be of interest” (Parr 2008, 45), without specifically engaging adolescent literature. 14  Of interest for the poetological reflection of the adolescent novel is the aspect of the liminal genre suggested by Borgards (cf. Borgards 2012, 13), which will be discussed later. 15  On the relationship between narratology and ritual, see also: Nünning/Rupp/Ahn 2013. 13

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(Wiest-­Kellner 2008, 424) as well as topologically in other spaces (cf. Foucault 1986). Through these considerations it becomes apparent that the representation of adolescence is not only about movement through space, but also, and above all, about the social orders and relationships associated with and encoded in space, which adolescent protagonists work through. In the following analyses, such forms and variations of spatial threshold areas and experiences prove to be a productive starting “as signs of spatial-light topographical zones of indecision,” which also contain “a temporal dimension” (Parr 2008, 17) and mark life-historical turning points. The ways in which the metaphors of threshold time draw together space and time that falls out of the normal flow of biographical time (cf. Bakhtin 2011, 154) is described by Bakhtin via the spatial model of the chronotope. By means of the chronotope, Bakhtin defines thresholds in their symbolic inscriptions as topological places within the narrated world where crises occur, fiasco and resurrection, renewal (cf. Bakhtin 2011, 248), thus implicitly connecting thresholds to the semantics of ritual transitions. When discussing the functions of spatial order within literary narrations of adolescence, a structure often emerges that is based on the structure of the rite of passage: individual subspaces of the narrated world, which Lotman defines as a semantic field (cf. Lotman 1997, 97), highlight transitional processes by way of oppositional places of action as well as the semantic codings associated with them and the protagonists’ transgressions of the boundaries between those contrasting places. Spatial constructions that Foucault characterised as heterotopic counterspaces of deviation are central to the representation of adolescence and establish a liminal social interspace (cf. Foucault 1986). Foucault’s heterotopias are characterised by mechanisms of closure and opening as well as a break with conventional time, and thus they describe a compensatory other-space distinct from normal space (cf. Foucault 1986, 26).16 Representations of adolescence deploy these characteristics of space coupled with the biographical transitions the characters make during adolescence, in order to flesh out the threshold phase of the in-between in all of its often-ambivalent facets. From a praxeological perspective, such spatial constructions continue to make connections to aspects of doing space as discussed in the sociology of space (cf. Löw 2001) in that novels of adolescence are also about the active taking of space by the characters and the opening up of new spaces as a self-determined act to mark adolescent tensions and upheavals as well as gains in autonomy. The following study focuses on the connection between topographies, spatial orders, and semantics in the literary construction and modelling of adolescence in the contemporary German-language adolescence novel after 2000. The linking of space, adolescence, and literature provide a methodological framework for a broad range of critical explorations: the text-internal stagings of spatial structures, hierarchies and orders, which correspond with the processes of adolescence, operate not only a backdrop, but also depict topographically networks of relationships and the developmental-psychological in-between of the characters. However, these spatial 16

 On the link between the concept of the liminal and heterotopia, see also: Parr 2008, 33f.

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orders cannot only be read for their metaphorical representations of coming of age; these narrated structures manifest extratextual processes of imagining adolescence and the associated power dynamics, which refer to their cultural context of origin and the associated processes of subjectivation. The following analyses principally consider how adolescent developmental processes are represented, condensed, and symbolised through the movements of the characters within the narrated space. If one interprets the spatial staging of the world of action with regard to the respective narrative functions (cf. Nünning 2009, 33), these can be read as semanticised sign carriers for adolescent transitions. At the same time, a topographically oriented analysis yields new perspectives that complement previous theorisations and trace newer tendencies within the genre of the adolescent novel. Nünning emphasises that the investigation of spatial structures is an important criterion for the formation of a genre poetics (cf. Nünning 2009, 33). The narration of adolescence could thus also be defined by a narration of specific spatial structures. The aim of this work is to open up such (textual) spaces, both by way of a methodological process of textual analysis and in the expansion of literary theorisations of the contemporary adolescent novel to include a topographical perspective.17 In a first step, the study is dedicated to the traditions of literary image spaces of adolescence in order to trace effective (narrative) patterns of departure in a diachronic perspective. Then, the state of research concerning the adolescence novel is briefly discussed in order to outline new tendencies in the narration of adolescence since 2000. For this purpose, aspects of both plot and representation are explored in order to grasp thematic and formal shifts that build upon earlier theorisations of the adolescence novel in German literature studies. The selection of the text corpus is based on these observations of recent developments. The observations made at the outset of this study concerning the narration of adolescence as a narration of movement through space build a bridge to the second chapter, which establishes connections to cultural studies research on topography. Chapter two outlines the movements of spatial theory(s) over the course of the spatial turn, and reflects on the applicability of spatial theory(s) for analysis in literary studies with a focus on the representation of adolescence. To this end, a new methodological approach is developed in order to produce detailed text analyses in which the considerations of adolescence and space are brought together. In the distinction between narrative spaces, narrated spaces, and spatial functions, the narratological, plot-logical, and metadiscursive inscriptions of these representations are illuminated, but always also considered in their mutual interplay. Heuristically, three categories of spatial structures are distinguished in the analysis chapters in order to trace varying varieties of movement and their respective functions: the journey as a moving passage in road novels, urban spaces of the big city, and a moment of non-movement or stagnation in various variations of an  Such an orientation can be found in short articles by Kalteis and Lexe and will be discussed in more detail below (cf. Kalteis 2011; Kalteis 2010; Kalteis 2009; Lexe 2011; Lexe 2010). 17

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isolated place of action. A short excursus chapter is also devoted to the staging of the forest as an archaic transitional space. The starting point for this structure are semantisations that are encoded in the respective topographies, which are briefly located in their literary-historical contexts for the narration of adolescence in the introduction to each chapter. For example, (large) urban spaces are contrasted with nature as signifiers of a cultural, but equally ambivalent, (post) modernity; and the journey, which has appeared since Romanticism as a traditional literary motif signifying freedom, is updated in road novels. Forms of non-movement, when characters are stuck or refuse to move, are the focus of the final analysis, which refers to other developments and negotiates an explicit ossification. The related question of what happens when topological movements are prevented or blocked is also of interest. The conclusion brings together the results of the textual analyses in an overarching manner and traces semantics and narratives that point to a new current in the narration of adolescence since 2000. Furthermore, these observations of text structures are evaluated in their cultural context (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 11). Throughout the subsequent study of the topographies of adolescence, space thus functions not only as a methodological tool for textual analysis, but also as an overarching figure of thought for reflection on the cultural constructions of adolescence in their textual “discourse spaces” (Reckwitz 2014, 17). On a meta-level, following Achilles/ Borgards/Burrichter, the literary texts appear as “enactments of liminal anthropologies” (Achilles/Borgards/Burrichter 2012, 7 [emphasis in original]) that process the relationship between social structures, processes, and the individual.

1.2 Literary Imaginative Spaces of Adolescence: Diachronic Narrative Patterns Although the term adolescence only emerges at the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Hall 1931), the processes denoted by the term, establishing an intermediate phase of development between childhood and adulthood, have been effective in Europe since the end of the 18th century. Adolescence itself, not as a term but as a distinct mode of existence, emerged in relation to social changes in the 18th century: Complex processes of social displacement, structural change and the associated semantics of individuality (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 15) open up new trajectories of growing up. In the context of the 18th and 19th centuries, this phase was usually described as youth. Literature in Europe around 1800 played a decisive role in the emergence, discursivation, and inscription of youth. In the cultural context around 1800, new ideas of subjectification developed (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 15); these in turn were also reflected in literary texts.18 Following Reckwitz, subject conception here means the ideas about one’s own self. Since the end of the 18th century, modern concepts of

18

 From the perspective of literary studies, see also: Steinlein 2004, 8.

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identity and coming of age have been developed, considered, and rewritten in the interaction between literature and society (cf. Ewers 1997).19 Literary texts that participate in shaping the concept of adolescence as an intermediary period between youth and adulthood both express social processes of upheaval and preseage developments in literary space as “‘anticipatory’ drafts” (Ewers 2017, 51). Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), for example, describes the concept of a (male) moratorium before it becomes a social reality (cf. Steinlein 2004, 8). Even if Die Leiden des jungen Werthers is not youth literature per se, it is a kind of text that exhibits specific constructions and images of the idea of youth. From the end of the 18th century to the present day, it is possible to trace the genealogy of the narration of adolescence, which reveals certain consistencies despite all the variations that have been realised. These consistencies are oriented in particular to spatial motifs that represent the primarily male adolescent hero’s “problems of detachment, self-discovery, or identity” (Ewers 1992, 291). Thus, it is significant that Goethe’s protagonist in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers expresses a necessary topological detachment with his first sentence: “Wie froh bin ich, dass ich weg bin” (“How glad I am that I am gone”) (Goethe 1982, 7).20 The reciprocity of identity, (spatial) threshold experience, and adolescence is united in literary representation as the processes of individual and inner boundary displacement become visible on a path through material space as a topological trace of movement to highlight “the entry into another symbolic order” (Böhme 1981, 136). In the macrostructure, a pattern emerges for the narration of adolescence that includes or possibly anticipates van Gennep’s ethnological model of departure, probation, and return (cf. van Gennep 1960). Parr discusses “whether van Genneps and Turner’s three-phase model has not always been practiced with the Bildungsroman, and accordingly described and analysed in literary studies, and here too through the symbolic or metaphorical spatialisation of life paths” (Parr 2008, 46). Titzmann defines such a structure as an essential feature of the initiation story, that has existed “from the beginning of Goethe’s time” (Titzmann 2002, 9), which stands in clear proximity to the Bildungsroman and the Entwicklungsroman, and has only varied slightly in later literary “subsystems” (Titzmann 2002, 9).21 Böhme has emphasised the structural ordering of space for the narrative of (male) adolescence in Romantic literature. He traces movements in space as corresponding to “markings of life phases” (Böhme 1981, 138),22 following van Gennep’s rite of passage. The associated three-phase structure prevails, despite social upheavals and transformations in  On the adolescent novel and its history, see also: Ewers 1994a; Ewers 1992; Kaulen 1999a; Kaulen 1999b; Gansel 2005; Gansel 2004; Gansel 2003. 20  As a genre-defining text, Goethe’s Werther reveals the existential threat of adolescence as the protagonist, who is ultimately unable to self-locate, chooses suicide as the only conceivable way out. 21  On the distinction of the adolescent novel from related narrative patterns, see also: Wagner 2007, 40ff. 22  Titzmann also refers to the central functions of movements in space (cf. Titzmann 2002, 12ff.). 19

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the literary representation of adolescence, imagining the liminality of adolescence as an explicit threshold period. 23 For the representation of adolescence, the so-called initiation journey story (cf. Freese 1971), as exemplified by J.D.  Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), marks a further modification of the narrative pattern. Accordingly, the narrative structure of the initiatory journey appears as “an inner course of events projected outwards [...] in which the stages of leaving, crossing and entering are clarified as departure, stay in a foreign country and return [...] as the stations of a geographically localised itinerary” (Freese 1971, 157). Kromoser subsequently couples the narrated travel of the characters in the adolescent novel to an initiation. She defines the “textual spaces” as “initiatory spaces” that make developmental psychological steps in rehearsals and probations “(spatially) visible” (Kromoser 2012, 7) and thus, as Eliade points out for the function of ritual, lead to an entirely different way of being (cf. Eliade 1958, 1-20) for the characters. These considerations develop from van Gennep’s study and emphasise how narrated adolescence follows ritualised spatial stages even in modern societies (cf. Freese 1971, 153ff.) and in literary representation, which “links forms of initiation and coming of age” (Achilles 2012, 145). Neumann accordingly draws a significant analogy between narrative space, adolescence, and movement by defining the “change of status [in adolescence] as a journey through space” (Neumann 2000, 108).24 Leaving familiar space is a necessary narrative starting point for “discover[ing] one’s own identity in the foreign” (Neumann 2000, 112). Thus, adolescent novels often take up the moment of departure of the rite of passage, as well as the subsequent threshold phase as a time of open search, which will vary in terms of specifics in order to serve different functions. It is significant that in the functional occupation of the third station of the rite of passage, literary representation deviates from the integration into society perscribed by the model of the ritual. Contrary to the structure of the ritual, in the narration of adolescence the final phase of reintegration tends to fail – texts often do not sketch a cohesive self-realisation or show (successful) integration into a new phase of life, despite invoking the structure of the ritual. Goethe’s Werther, for example, depicts tensions between the individual and society that cannot always be reconciled. Romantic literature dealing with adolescence, such as Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (1797), also develops the ambivalent facets of adolescence in modernity with its symbolically charged landscapes of the soul and does not offer any one-dimensional solutions. Even if early 19th century texts like Goethe’s and Tieck’s are not specifically categorised as youth literature, they are nevertheless, as mentioned at the beginning, a medium of expression and negotiation of the processes of growing up, and the narrative pattern traced from them has established itself in the symbol system (cf. Ewers 2012, 135) of youth literature and further  On the intertwining of the concept of liminality and heterotopia as a narrative structure, see also: Achilles 2012. 24  On the tradition of the figure of thought of a temporal-spatial transition, see also: Koschorke 2012, 115; on the relationship between figure and space, see also: Ehgartner 2009. 23

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differentiated itself over the course of the 20th century. This evolution results in interesting movements of exchange and overlaps between the fields of youth literature and adult literature. Thus, adolescence is not only a theme of the in-between on the level of the plot of the texts, but also, in poetological terms, what Borgard’s might describe as a liminal genre.25 Such overlaps between youth literature and adult literature are currently being discussed under the catchword ‘crossover literature’.26 Within the genre of the adolescence novel, further aspects of differentiation and oscillation emerge; in the depiction of adolescence, gender as well as socio-cultural and milieu-specific differences become apparent. From the end of the 18th century onwards, the life phase of adolescence has initially been reserved for young men from the middle class. Such gender occupations are in turn intertwined with body constructions, spatial arrangements, and social hierarchies, which preformulate gender identities and, following Butler, also prove to be cultural constructions (cf. Butler 1993) that shape the occupations of adolescence. Thus, although gender is not the focus of this work, it is necessary to ask how gender is inscribed in the narrated spaces as well as the movements of contemporary representations of adolescence. Such an approach is closely associated Weigel’s study analysing Topographien der Geschlechter (Topographies of Gender) (cf. Weigel 1990). For the narrative pattern described at the beginning, the forms and functions of the movements of characters differ according to gender (cf. Lehnert 1996).27 It is clear that not only van Gennep’s rite of passage, but also the literary initation journey, are models that are masculinised, and these gendered models are perpetuated, reproduced, and solidified in the associated narrative patterns. Beginning around 1800 and continuing to the present day, literary representations of adolescence have provided “a code that allowed us to talk about the developmental and educational years of young boys between childhood and adulthood” (Lehnert 1996, 10), while female adolescence has been linked to other narratives and spatial orders. In this respect, Lehnert speaks of the “Sleeping Beauty model” (Lehnert 1996, 11), thus accentuating the mostly passive role of young women to whom adolescence happens. Such a staging of femininity finds its counterpart in the spatial isolation of the characters, which refers to a specific lack of movement and a lack of power for women within the framework of social hierarchies.28 For the representation of female adolescence, the boarding school story, with its spatial order of removal to a shielded place, is an efficacious construction. Such a setting, in which the protagonists, far from the parental home, can be raised to  On such liminal genres and forms of representation, see also: Borgards 2012, 12.  On the developments of a crossover literature, see also: Hoffmann 2018; Blümer 2016. 27  With regard to the investigation of gender differences, there is a cross connection to gender narratology in literary studies, which asks how specific narrative forms create, take up, and perpetuate gender roles (cf. Nünning/Nünning 2004). 28  For a critical reflection on the representation of female adolescence, see Sauerbaum 1999, which starts from the “concept of female non-adolescence” (Sauerbaum 1999, 1) and traces how female adolescence has been omitted or otherwise staged in the history of children’s and youth literature. 25 26

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become future wives, proves to be a place for practicing the specific social roles of women. In these novels there is no open self-search and no phase of testing, but rather a housewifely duty of upbringing. Over the course of the 20th century, successive changes can be observed in this respect, analogous to overall social developments in extratextual reality. The paradigm shift in German youth literature in the 1970s not only resulted in thematic openings in the youth novel, but also extensions of gendered patterns, which continue through the developments of the so-called new German pop literature of the 1990s to the present day.

1.3 Varieties of the Adolescent Novel: Classic, Modern, Postmodern In German-language literary studies, the term adolescent novel (Adoleszenzroman) became established in the 1980s (cf. Ewers 1989). The studies by Kaulen and Gansel have sketched out a model that distinguishes three varieties of the adolescent novel. This model categorises texts as classical, modern and postmodern adolescent novels (cf. Kaulen 1999a; Kaulen 1999b; Gansel 2005). Despite its terminology, the model is not understood as a chronological sequence of stages, and is instead intended to emphasise individual thematic and narrative features as well as shifts. This structure has become the subject of critical consideration,29 but no alternative taxonomy has yet been developed in German-language research. In the following, the characteristics of the different varieties of the adolescence novel will be summarised following Kaulen and Gansel, but supplemented by a topographical dimension in order to outline new developments in the narration of adolescence from 2000 onwards, which have not been included in previous theorisations. Although the (narrative) pattern for the depictions of adolescence traced in the previous chapter has clearly originated in the 18th century,30 and individual texts have been repeatedly mentioned as effective precursors (cf. Kaulen 1999b, 7f.), the typology established to categorise the adolescence novel locates the origins of the text type around 1900 (cf. Kaulen 1999a, 328). Starting from “a distinctive type of form” (Kaulen 1999a, 328), that solidifies in this period, variations can be observed over the course of the 20th century, which come to define the adolescent novel as an evolving genre. The individual variations of the adolescent novel must also be considered in interaction with their contexts of origin. According to Kaulen and Gansel, the so-called classic adolescence novel refers back to the tradition of the school or puberty novel, which thematises the suffering of a sensitive (male) protagonist in an authoritarian environment (cf. Kaulen 1999a,  Ewers problematises the term ‘modern adolescence novel’ as a pleonasm (cf. Ewers 2013, 76). Bittner also pursues a critical reflection on the characteristics of the individual forms of the adolescence novel (cf. Bittner 2012, 67f.) and Wagner discusses these demarcations in the same way (cf. Wagner 2007, 431). 30  Before that, the pattern is equally effective as an aventiure journey in medieval texts, but fulfils a different function. 29

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328), which often exacerbates the “disintegration of the ego” (Wagner 2008, 136) as an existential crisis that leads to the death of the characters (cf. Gansel 2005, 374). In the social context of Europe around 1900, the literary representation of adolescence does not yet appear as a phase of open experimentation, but is instead embedded in strict hierarchies and repressive structures that the protagonist cannot resist. As a social space, school in particular functions in this respect as a limited, oppressive, and symbolic place of action that also topologically exhibits and reflects the stated “tensions between authoritarian (school) system and individual personality” (Wagner 2008, 136). These representations are linked to the concept of the masculinity of a “gifted, sensitive and artistically inclined outsider” (Kaulen 1999a, 328), which forms the foil to the patriarchal order of the fathers. A movement out of this system is not provided for in this construction, wherein the social failure is manifested as a spatial immobility. From the middle of the 20th century onwards, the so-called modern adolescence novel takes up “the dichotomy of adolescence and adulthood” (Gansel 2005, 375), in which the primarily male protagonists now offensively oppose fixed rules and norms, question them, and try to distance themselves from existing structures with various subcultural codes (cf. Gansel 2005, 376) and a fleeing movement through space. In the semantics of space, the contrary positions of adolescence and adulthood find their counterparts. The departure from familiar space marks a central threshold, but the ambivalence of the new space is also important. In the spatial gain of freedom, there is also a potential transgression and dissolution of boundaries over the course of the departure from familiar structures. This becomes apparent as characters wander through labyrinthine city spaces or embark upon chaotic road trips. It is no coincidence that the developments in adolescent novels described above, and exemplified in the USA by the works of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac, began as early as the 1950s and were marked of social modernisation tendencies and new constructions of youth, although these novels – like their historical predecessors – were not designated youth literature.31 While these US American novels circulating in translation in the German-speaking world do not appear in the field of youth literature, they were nonetheless read by adolescents. In the extratextual reality, a new form of rebellious adolescence emerges in Germany in the 1960s. In the course of the overall social awakening processes of the 1968 movement, new forms also emerged in the field of youth literature. These then experienced their “heyday” in the 1970s (Ewers 1989, 9). Since then, the genre of the adolescent novel has successively differentiated itself further as a genre of youth literature, while continuning to overlap with a broader literary fiction that addresses adolescence.32 The trend towards a distinct literature of adolescence was further accelerated by the development of the so-called postmodern adolescence novel. The  Many novels that deal with adolescence are not specifically youth literature, but some of them have become youth literature. This category includes not only the Werther novel by Goethe, but also to texts by Hesse, Musil, Salinger, and Kerouac. 32  The fact that the novels in the text corpus were published by both youth literature and general literature publisher is indicative of these shifts. 31

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postmodern adolescence novel emerged in the USA in the 1980s with texts such as Bret Eston Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985), and became established in the German-­ speaking world in the 1990s. Kaulen has pointedly summarised the changes from the modern to the postmodern adolescent novel: “Rebellion against the false whole [in the modern adolescent novel] is replaced by an unconditional affirmation of hedonism and the postmodern polyvalence of the ego [in the postmodern adolescent novel]” (Kaulen 1999a, 332 [insertion A.S.]). Whereas the modern adolescent novel was still about a rebellion against the parental home and conservative social structures, the postmodern adolescent novel opens up a new horizon of conflict (cf. Kaulen 1999a, 330ff.; Gansel 2005, 373ff.).33 The postmodern adolescent novel counteracts “traditional notions of finding identity, of autonomy and personality” (Kaulen 1999b, 9), in that characters allow themselves to drift through the narrated world and elude a fixed self-realisation. Thus, these texts not only represent a hedonistic search for fun, but also the ambiguous facets of postmodern developments “at the fault lines of the identity-finding process” (Lexe 2010, 217), which no longer allow for a fixed self-image. These shifts are evident in the potentially infinite spatial structures and fraying traces of movement that evoke the unsteady back and forth of the characters. Conflicts with the older generation recede into the background, in contrast to the modern adolescent novel, and the characters primarily revolve – even in their spatial movements – around themselves. These constructions are emblematic of increasingly differentiated and liberalised social conditions, but also reflect an escape from the excessive demands of increasingly individualised and precarious lives. The changes within the adolescent novel impact not only the themes of the texts, but also the narrative procedures, modes of representation, and textures. The thematic shifts are accompanied by narratological upheavals that establish increasingly complex narrative strategies. The period of the 1990s German youth literature in particular is increasingly marked by developments that manifest themselves in fluid genre boundaries, pluralistic genres, and complex narrative procedures (cf. Scheiner 2005, 180). Fragile and delimited self-realisations are fleshed out in narrative space through literary techniques of psychological storytelling, such as the autodiegetic voice, inner monologues, streams of consciousness, associative listings, dream sequences, and achronological time structures (cf. Kaulen 1999a, 327) generating a representational mode that reflects the lived experience of the characters. At times, the texts of the postmodern adolescent novel call into question any coherence at all: “A continuous plot can no longer be discerned in these texts, nor can firmly delineated characters, a clearly coded meaning” (Kaulen 1999b, 9). The dissolution of narrative boundaries corresponds to conflicts that manifest in the plot and the protagonists’ traces of movements. As a result of these developments, the border with adult literature becomes more permeable, to which the so-­ called Neue Deutsche Popliteratur has contributed decisively since the mid-1990s  On genre-poetological reflections of ‘postmodern aspects’ in the contemporary adolescent novel, see also: Wagner 2007. 33

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(cf. Degler/Paulokat 2008, 43; Gansel 2016, 8). Pop literature influences the narrative procedures of the postmodern adolescent novel - and subsequently also of the youth literature of the 2000s. Moreover, in addition to the connections at the level of representation, similarities emerge in the plot-logical constellations of the texts. As Gansel emphasises, German pop literature of the 1990s is often adolescent literature at its core (cf. Gansel 2003, 236): Work, profession, politics play no role, generational conflicts do not exist, the relationship to parents, for example, is not explicitly addressed, the need to rebel against them is omitted. Instead, the focus is on living out hedonism, on sex, drugs, ‘hanging out’, smoking pot. (Gansel 2003, 243)

To define the protagonists as merely hedonistic, however, falls short; in fact, the characters are marked by a laconism that no longer allows for consolidated self-­ realisations or the self-reflective search for identity as a relevant category, and the protagonists are offensively absorbed in a moment of dissolution, which often translated into an unrestrained movement through space. Although postmodern adolescent novels still make use of the moment of departure, this moment no longer develops as an act of rebellion against the parental generation, but potentiates instead the intrasubjective and potentially failing confrontation with the self. As Seelinger Trites points out, the “role of parents in adolescent literature is one defining characteristic of the genre.” (Seelinger Trites 2000, 55) With regard to the modes of representation, the overlapping of textual spaces remains interesting in a diachronic view of the genre. What remains constant in all varieties of the adolescent novel is an intertextual play of references. This system of reference expands increasingly in an intermedial perspective in the course of the 20th century (cf. Kaulen 2001, 86). In Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax (1997), for example, the comic figure Vampirella appears as a central reference point for the protagonist’s self-definition. The intermedial references not only establishes the diegetic self-description of the characters34 by way of subcultural signatures of demarcation rooted in pop music, but also shapes the narrative style of adolescent novels since the late 1980s. Such intermedial references, as Rajewsky’s terms them (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 17), shape the way the texts are presented, and in this respect the parallels between pop literature and postmodern adolescence novels become apparent: both pop literature and postmodern adolescence novels have influenced the narration of adolescence in youth literature of the 2000s. Intermedial references to films, music, or comics shape the narration, embed adolescence in an everyday world shaped by popular culture, and archive it, as Baßler has pointed out with regard to pop literature (cf. Baßler 2002). This intermediality results in new content, combinations, and superimpositions, which not only identify the characters within the diegesis, but also, on a poetological level, produce a narration of adolescence in constant motion.

34

 On this development see also: Kaulen 2001.

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1.4 Developments since 2000: The Text Corpus A look at contemporary German-language novels for young people shows that there are many texts that continue the narrative pattern of the rite of passage, but that can no longer be clearly assigned to the previously established categories of the adolescent novel. In contemporary texts, the protagonists do not move within a socially repressive apparatus as in the classic adolescent novel, nor do they rebel against social norms as in the modern adolescent novel, nor do they drift laconically in order to negate the search for self-realisation as in the postmodern adolescent novel (cf. Kaulen 1999b, 9). No longer negotiating repression, rebellion, or the dissolution of boundaries, contemporary novels of adolescence render protagonists who ponder their status, contest the conditions of their adolescence, and long for a consolidated self. Thus, contemporary adolescence novels ought to be understood as a post-postmodern constellation. Working from this foundational observation, this study explores three different forms of movement in order to examine three novels in each case. The corpus includes road novels that address explicit travel: Wolfgang Herrndorf’s tschick (2010), Tamara Bach’s Busfahrt mit Kuhn (2004), and Benedict Wells’s Fast genial (2011). This exploration is followed by big city novels that depict movements in an urban space: Finn-Ole Heinrich’s Räuberhände (2007), Nils Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland (2011), and Stefanie de Velasco’s Tigermilch (2013). Finally, the analysis concludes with novels that negotiate isolated sites of action and thus moments of stagnation and stasist: Kevin Kuhn’s Hikikomori (2012), Alexandra Kuitkowski’s Die Welt ist eine Scheibe (2013), and Rolf Lappert’s Pampa Blues (2012). Between the big-city and non-movement chapters there is also an excursus on two novels that are set in natural spaces, take up archaic elements, address specific gender roles, and thus also feature a different form of movement: Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Bilder deiner großen Liebe (2014) and Kirsten Fuchs’ Mädchenmeute (2015). In these novels, different plot-logical and narrative elements are combined and layered.35 The novels establish a play with signs, and semantics that are assembled into new forms. Superimposition is evident both in plot and in representation. The postmodern play with freely floating signs, entanglements (cf. Drügh 2007, 44), and overlays operates as an aesthetic principle here in order to create tension with the action in the texts in the deliberate overforming of the narrative: The intrasubjective fractures, cracks, and the characters’ struggling thus find a narrative counterpart.

 In Paulus Hochgatterer’s Wildwasser (1997) and Andreas Steinhöfel’s Die Mitte der Welt (1998), such a shift is already indicated: The absent father interpolates the adolescence of the male (!) protagonists, they struggle with this void and move through the narrated world in a search of support. On the connection between passage, space, and ritual in Wildwasser, see also: Lexe 2010. 35

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Narrative procedures of pop literature and the postmodern adolescent novel thus experience a shift in the text-internal function of contemporary texts. Although these novels narrate with chronological leaps, associative series, lists, and intermedial references, these textual features no longer merely trace a marking of youth culture and the pleasurable dissolution of boundaries, but problematise and reflect on the drastic consequences that accompany those shifts. The list as a stylistic principle then appears, for example in Nils Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland, as a means of autodiegetic voice to restore order to the disintegrated structure. Such a narrative recoding correlates with the shifts described above in terms of the plot of the texts, and the evolution of the concept of identity in texts from 2000 onwards as characters are depicted struggling and doubting in search of stability. Thus, on the level of discourse, the contemporary texts reveal connections to the postmodern adolescent novel and to pop literature, via simultaneous shifts at the level of action and a functional reorientation of these narrative processes. The pattern of the rite of passage associated with adolescence remains powerful in the 2000s. From a diachronic perspective, movements in space form a constant, but the reasons for the departure of the characters in each current are differentiated. However, this has not yet been taken into account in theorisations of the adolescent novel. It is crucial, however, to consider not only the threshold period, but also the phase before it. In the following, these movements and departures will serve as leitmotifs for the analysis of contemporary representations of adolescence. It will be shown that texts published after 2000 follow previously established topographical or ritualised patterns, but at the same time negotiate new facets of the construction of adolescence on the thematic and narrative level. The ambiguous moment of developmental psychological vagueness during adolescence manifests itself for the protagonists in oscillating and searching forms of movement through space.36 These modes of locomotion do not form a linear or one-­ dimensional developmental transition, but rather, in their variable spatial structure and a chronological timeline that often corresponds to it, represent ruptures, disorder, and excessive demands during this phase. Following cultural studies topography research, this provides a rich perspective for youth literature research to read the “texts [...] as expeditionary reports” (Roeder 2014, 14).37

 Kalteis, for example, proposes a typology of forms of movement and differentiates between the types of play in the narration of adolescence (cf. Kalteis 2010, 55). 37  The anthology Topographien der Kindheit (2014), edited by Roeder, is a foundational work for topographically oriented research on children’s and youth literature, but its title hints at the void it does not fill. The analyses focus on the construction of childhood spaces, which is supplemented by this work on the topographies of adolescence. In 2015, another volume, Himmel und Hölle, was published under Roeder’s editorship, but this one focuses on perspectives on the didactics of literature. 36

2

Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations

2.1 Introduction In the following analysis, cultural and literary spatial constructions function as a methodological tool with which to examine the literary representations of adolescence in their multi-layered inscriptions, interconnections, and discursivities. The focus on narrated space opens up points of contact in multiple directions, by virtue of the ways in which space bundles narrative threads, temporal progressions, characters, orders, and discourses. As early as the 1970s, Hoffmann referred to these interfaces of a topographically oriented literary analysis: This opens up the possibility of grasping the large-scale spatial structure of the novel, both with regard to the social conditions depicted and the figure of the protagonist (or protagonists). The [...] highlighting of typical path structures as well as the investigation of the phenomenon of the border offer themselves from here just as much as the recording of the symbolic referential power of the spatial-sensual expressive potential [...]. (Hoffmann 1978, 44)

With regard to spatial constructions, questions arise concerning structural sequences, movements, thresholds, and border crossings, as well as the metadiscursive and symbolic inscriptions of these arrangements. Such entanglements are particularly relevant for representations of adolescence, wherein the focus is not only on the individual processes of adolescent figures in motion, but also on the imbrication of those figures within overarching structures. In order to begin this critical analysis, it is necessary to clarify how this study understands the concept of space, which has occupied various positions within scholarly research. At the beginning of the 20th century, Cassirer stated from a philosophical perspective that the category of space as a vector of analysis contains several coordinates, is defined differently in individual research disciplines, and sees itself as an open concept:

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2  Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations And here, first of all, the one thing becomes apparent that is decisive for our consideration: that there is not a general, absolutely fixed view of space, but that space receives its specific content and its peculiar arrangement only from the order of meaning within which it is formed in each case. [...] Space does not possess a given structure that is fixed once and for all; rather, it acquires this structure only by virtue of the general context of meaning within which its construction takes place. (Cassirer 2006, 494)

Such an open definition of space invites a certain critical fuzziness, but in its flexible mobility a broad definition of space also enables broad access to different phenomena connected with space. Thus, the moment of movement serves not only as a leitmotif in the representation of adolescent characters within the novels’ world of action, but also, by analogy, as an important feature for the construction of (narrated) spaces. In Arts de Faire, Certeau has shown how narrativsed movements operate as a space-creating practice and, by correlation, fulfil identity-formation functions (cf. Certaeu 1988, 118f.). Analogously, Certeau understands space as a permeable construction: “A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (Certeau 1988, 117 [emphasise in original]). Working from foundations laid by Certeau, the discourses concerning spatial theory in cultural studies have evolved since the 1980s over the course of the so-called Spatial Turn.1 Theories of space from sociological (cf. Günzel 2010; Dünne 2006; Löw 2001), phenomenological (cf. Günzel 2006), media studies (cf. Günzel 2012; Döring/ Thielmann 2008c; Raunig 2004), and literary studies2 perspectives focus on different details. Two central tenents can be identified: The construction of spaces is oriented towards phenomenological experiences if space is understood as a ‘naturally’ given territory with an interior and exterior that are bounded. Accordingly, the understanding of space as a designated area with physical boundaries is formed “in the perception of lifeworld structures of experience” (Haupt 2004, 70). There is alternatively a more abstract view that questions the socially constructed nature of space. This approach highlights how spaces are constructed through social processes and are thus an expression of hierarchical-social structures. This approach differs from a mere demarcation of space and reflects cultural power, which does not necessarily correlate to visible or physical borders. Bachmann-Medick has elaborated the different conceptions of space that emerge within individual disciplines in the discourse on space (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006, 285). Bachmann-Medick identifies a crucial juncture in the Spatial Turn when “the territorial space as container or receptacle [is] decisive, but space as a social production process of perception, use and appropriation, closely linked to the symbolic level of spatial representation” (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 292 [insertion A.S.]) is no longer a point of contention. In this ‘new’ understanding of space, the focus is less  For a critical discussion of the term Spatial Turn, see also: Döring/Thielmann 2008a, 10ff.; Frank 2009 2  See, for example, Mehigan/Corkhill 2013; Huber/Lubkoll/Martus/Wübben 2012; Sick 2012; Dennerlein 2009; Döring/Thielmann 2008b; Piatti 2008; Böhme 2005. 1

2.1 Introduction

21

on the physical aspects and more on the social constructions transported in it. Such social constructions are also conveyed in literary texts through narrative representations and signs. Bourdieu’s theorisation of the production of space as a social practice emerges in the interplay with the social actors that appear in it (cf. Bourdieu 1977) marks an important position that directs towards a praxeological perspective: It is thus the lived, social practices of spatial constitution, also of inclusion and exclusion, towards which most spatially oriented research attitudes are directed in the course of the spatial turn. [...] The social constitution of the spatial is emphasised here, as is the role of space in the production of social relations. (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 291)

In a spatial sociological perspective (cf. Löw 2001), the relations of objects as well as subjects and the power relations manifested in space are then taken into consideration. These spatial orders can be further placed in cultural and transnational contexts in order to open up the ethnographic dimensions encoded therein. It is no coincidence that topography research takes up important impulses from postcolonial studies, which examine specific territorialisation strategies in terms of the power structures and hierarchies they contain or reproduce (cf. Said 1978). This perspective opens spatial theory up to intercultural explorations of spaces in which the ‘other’ or the ‘foreign’ are investigated. Bhabha, for example, has pursued these intercultural explorations by the use of the concept of hybridity and the category of the so-called third space (cf. Bhabha 1994). Questions about space are connected in a macro dimension with the construction of nations3, whose divergences correlate with power structures and spatial orders. These, in turn, also manifest themselves in cartographic procedures, with which the appropriation of space also touches on a medial dimension, if one reflects on the mode of representation through which such structures are conveyed. Weigel emphasises the function of cartography and thus of a specific mode of representation of spaces as a cultural ordering practice, in that “the meaning of spaces [is] radically reformulated: as a signature of material and symbolic practices” (Weigel 2002, 159). Literature also participates in this discourse and perpetuates specific narratives in its narrative modes.4 Böhme describes the symbiotic entanglement of narrated spaces and cultural practices as topographies of literature: “spatial techniques through which cultures embody, delimit, stabilise, and organise their material metabolism as well as their symbolic exchange.” (Boehme 2005, XXI) In addition to the macro-structures through which the differences of cultural demarcations are discussed, superordinate structures also have an effect on identity constructions in a smaller imagined framework. The question of identity can hardly be answered without reference to a territorial location. Ideas of identity and  On the relationship between political power orders and spatial relations in literature, see also: Werber 2014; Werber 2007. 4  This work does not aim to subject the texts to a postcolonial reading, yet the thought model of (de) territorialisation processes proves to be a fruitful reference point for the processes of self-­ positioning during adolescence. 3

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2  Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations

self-­realisation thus converge with topographical aspects, which can either support or disturb them. It is precisely this convergence that is interesting for representations of adolescence when ambivalent self-positionings are negotiated.

2.2 Topographies of Literary Studies For literary studies, a culturally oriented conception of space is a productive reference point, because narrated spaces also refer to physical boundaries and established spaces of action that can be differentiated by reference to either an inside or an outside. However, these narrated spaces are not only constructed to represent material space, but also to express social processes by which hierarchies are depicted in spatial structures. It is therefore not useful for the purposes of this study to make a static distinction between the orientations described above. Rather, following Reckwitz’s reflections on the materialisation of culture (cf. Reckwitz 2014, 19), a middle path can be followed that includes both components to bring the corresponding interconnections into view and to show that narrated space is relevant both materially and symbolically. Reckwitz identifies an overlap between culture and materiality: materialised things thus function as sign carriers of cultural systems and cultural codes in turn inscribe themselves into materialised things.5 Reckwitz defines this mixture as an “amalgamation and interconnection [of the material] with the sensuous and symbolic, which has classically been perceived as the sphere of the cultural” (Reckwitz 2014, 14 [insertion A.S.]). His core thesis is that cultural symbolic forms and material thing-like elements are entangled and form an indissoluble unity.6 In this regard, Reckwitz refers to the scientific history of media theory, in which both content and the technical nature of the medium in its materiality are taken into consideration (cf. Reckwitz 2014, 17). In this node, which is in the field of tension between an external and material surface and the content itself, Reckwitz establishes the interaction of materiality and culture.7 It is worth considering how Reckwitz’s thesis can be transferred to approach literary studies. A book is characterised by a specific materiality in its external composition. Beyond this, however, further references are also found within the narratives of a book. Literary texts can be interpreted in their medial narrative as reflexive instances of mediation. In the mesh structure described, literature thus occupies an intermediate position that is fed by specific literary-aesthetic means, a

 It is crucial that the references not only work in one direction but manifest themselves in a braid-­ like structure of mutual interpenetration (cf. Reckwitz 2014, 18). 6  The subject of concern here is not a one-dimensional causality, but the interplay of both poles. The image of a fabric thus invoked, with reference to Foucault’s concept of the ‘dispositif’ makes visible the ways in which concrete things and symbolic-sensual dimensions are interconnected and mutually dependent in a specific way (cf. Reckwitz 2014, 18). 7  With Michel Serres, Reckwitz captures the resulting meshwork of the ‘hybrid’ “as material and cultural at the same time” (Reckwitz 2014, 18). 5

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23

semantic openness as well as complexity, and which in turn participates in the process of the materialisation of culture. To put it more pointedly, this study explores the processes of a narrated materialisation. In a literary approach, cultural mechanisms that are represented in a text can be reflected. These include hierarchising processes and cultural representation, which are transported in the spatial construction of the texts. Reckwitz refers accordingly to the developments of the cultural studies spatial turn, which unites the poles of the material and the symbolic in many approaches. Literary studies have been influenced by the Spatial Turn in cultural studies while nonetheless establishing its own disciplinary models for engaging with text spaces, as exemplified by the work of Bakhtin or Lotman, which predate the cultural studies turn to space. Drawing from approaches to space manifested in literary and cultural studies, this work positions itself with reference to both approaches while negotiating a middle way invested in the concept of textual space: the spatial orders, semantics, and constructions that are shaped in literary texts and their narrated spaces are examined. The etymology of the word topography, from the Greek topos (place) and graphein (to write/draw), suggests a vital association: topographical perspectives inquire into both the description and the narrative function of space. This approach can be expanded if the associated inscriptions are also examined as the metadiscursive meanings that are encoded in the narrated spatial orders. As early as the 1970s, Hoffmann described such an interaction between space, literature and cultural context, according to which “space as a narrative element [...] of the work [...] depends both on the structures of the lived space of the empiricism and on the design conditions of the literary text” (Hoffmann 1978, 2). Literary-­ aesthetic modelling – for instance in narrative perspectives or focalisations – is a central aspect to the analysis. However, such literary construction also correlates with phenomenological aspects of spatial experience, and these aspects overlap. In her outline of a Narratologie des Raumes (Narratology of Space), Dennerlein points out, for instance, that while the social ‘madeness’ of space is an important factor, it is precisely for literary reception that the everyday understanding of space, with a clearly defined difference between inside and outside, plays an important role: Rather, it is a matter of doing justice to the fact that in everyday life everything that can be grasped as a container is referred to as ‘space’. [...] A fenced-in forest, a nation-state or a ghetto may, strictly speaking, be the result of social constructions, but in everyday life they are referred to as spaces with a fixed inside-outside distinction. (Dennerlein 2009, 62)

This study does not take up Dennerlein’s cognitive-psychological approach that locates a mental model of space (cf. Dennerlein 2009, 99ff.) in the reader’s head and focuses less on the narrative specifics of the literary text.8 Rather, the following analysis focuses on the specific constructions of the texts and their functions. For  The question of reception processes in the narrative production of spaces is not within the scope of this thesis. In the following, the narratological construction and the narrated spaces within the texts will be analysed and considerations of the effect on readers will be set aside. 8

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2  Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations

this purpose, narrated spaces can be analysed both according to their physical dimensions – as areas with insides and outsides – and according to the socio-spatial orders manifested therein, which become legible as the symbolic capital of differentiated attributions. The literary representation of space creates its own orders, which can relate to transgressions, interactions, and interconnections, while also referring to social inclusions and exclusions, limitations, parcellations, and hierarchisations. The narrated space is not an airless corridor, but is constituted, as Certeau suggests, by the figures who reside in it. With reference to Certeau, Würzbach reccomends asking “about statics or changes in the position of the perceiving subject, about types of movement, and about the division of space” (Würzbach 2001, 120). Drawing on the work of Lotman, Würzbach emphasises “that narrative space contributes to the implicit characterisation of characters” (Würzbach 2001, 122), and that within the established spatial order, movement is a semanticised signifier. Implicitly, such a consideration also refers to the processes of a doing space discussed in sociology, which interpret taking space as a conscious act of self-­ positioning and self-configuration (cf. Löw 2001). The fact that corresponding movements convey the developmental stations of the characters in literary narrative, when the physical movements refer to internal processes of the characters, makes this interdisciplinary focus of analysis particularly productive for the representation of adolescence. The entanglements of space, character, movement, and time can be read, following Bakhtin, in the chronotope of the road: “varied and multi-leveld are the ways in which road is turned into a metaphor, but its fundamental pivot is the flow of time” (Bakhtin 2011, 244). In his concept of the chronotope, Bakhtin emphasises that space cannot be interpreted in isolation and must be considered with relation to time: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (Bakhtin 2011, 84)

The interplay of space and time is vital to narrative representations of adolescence, wherein textual space becomes the space of experience and development in which temporal transitions become visible in movement.9 The threshold appears here as a narrative point of articulation that, as a topographical transition point and spatialised manifestation of change, not only describes physical conditions, but also conveys symbolic meaning. The threshold is then a place that appears as a “chronotope of crisis and break in a life” (Bakhtin 2011, 245 [emphasis in original]). Spaces, thresholds, and movements can be read as sign carriers that convey specific semantics, which are distinct from the spatio-referential meanings.

 Such a connection between space and time is a proven representational strategy in youth literature.

9

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25

2.2.1 Jurij M. Lotman: Spatial Semantics Lotman’s study of the Structure of Literary Texts has had a significant impact on the literary study of spatial constructions. In Lotman’s structuralist understanding, the literary text is constructed as a system of order in which all elements are meaning bearing. This order is primarily oriented towards spatial factors, or the structure of the narrated world, which is nurtured by binary oppositions. Lotman’s conception identifies literary texts for this purpose as ‘secondary model-forming systems’ that generate meaning.10 These models are secondary because they generate a semiotic system of their own from pre-existing linguistic signs, which are then endowed with additional meanings.11 Lotman defines the narrated world as a “semantic field” (1977, 97) in which different subspaces confront each other, while remaining separated by impermeable borders. As protagonists succeed in crossing borders, those movements determine which borders actually may not, can not, or should not be crossed. Thus, in Lotman’s understanding, the mere walk to the bakery, for example, is not unto itself an event. An event occurs only if action is perpetrated regarding spatial relations, which are unrelated to the demarcation of space12 and determined instead by normative boundary violations. Such a boundary, according to Lotman, marks corresponding semantic inscriptions. Following Propp’s Morphology of the Fairy Tale, Lotman traces narrative course structures that are oriented towards the hero’s path and emphasise the special significance of movement in the construction of space. In Lotman’s approach, the order of the narrated world is thus subdivided into oppositional and semanticised subspaces that are defined through the process of boundary violation. Lotman distinguishes three levels that determine the oppositions of the subspaces: topological, semantic, and topographical dimensions (cf. Lotman 1977, 233f.).13 Topological oppositions are determined by orientations in space, such as ‘above vs. below’, while semantic oppositions are constituted by evaluative attributions such as ‘protective vs. threatening’, and topographical oppositions involve concrete spatial designations such as ‘house vs. forest’.14 Fundamental to Lotman’s model is the contrast between different subspaces: More important is the fact that beyond the description of the things and objects which make up the environment of a text’s personae, there arises a system of spatial relations, the structure of the topos. While serving as the principle of organization and disposition of the personae within the artistic continuum, the structure of the topos emerges as the language  Cf. for the following remarks: Lotman 1977.  The model-building character describes the fact that the text does not merely represent arbitrary facts, but instead conveys specific cultural concepts. Lotman’s dual approach is thus not only narrative theory, but also cultural theory, which traces models of culture in the narrative structures of the literary text (cf. Frank 2009, 65). 12  On the significance of Lotman’s cultural semiotics, see also: Koschorke 2012, 116ff. 13  See also: Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 156f. 14  For a critical discussion of Lotman’s model, see also: Frank 2009, 67f. 10 11

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2  Space, Literature, Culture: Methodological Considerations for expressing other, non-spatial relations in the text. This determines the special modeling role of space within a text. (Lotman 1977, 231f.)

An additional meaning resonates in the narrated spatial structure, in which the topographical and semantic are intertwined.15 With regard to the representation of adolescence, the connection of a figure with a semanticised space can be transferred if subspace A is connected with the status of the still-youthful protagonist, while subspace B stands for a space of adults and the movement in between marks the threshold phase of adolescence. The classificatory element of the border becomes a decisive factor, not only in Lotman’s spatial semantic understanding of the order of the text, but also for the protagonists, whose border crossings, transgressions, and movements in material space can be used to trace their psychological developments and the status change associated with adolescence. This structure in turn reflects the ritualised sequence of leaving, the threshold phase, and the new entry, which characterises the narration of adolescence as a narration of ambulatory upheavals. The binary contrast between subspaces nevertheless falls short in many cases because the characters often move back and forth between different spaces. In order not to lapse into mere formalism and seek rigid spatial structures, and to be able to discuss the intermediate tones and variations that characterise adolescence, Lotman’s approach is therefore supplemented by other positions. Lotman’s suggestion that spatial orders are engangled with semantics that operate beyond spatial dimensions is nonetheless central to this work.

2.2.2 Gerhard Hoffmann: Space, Situation, Narrated Reality In his study Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit (Space, Situation, Narrated Reality), Hoffmann takes up Lotman’s considerations and defines “space as a structural element” (Hoffmann 1978, 3) of a literary text. From there, Hoffmann expands upon the concept of spatial semantics by developing a tripartite typology that captures different situations within a text as well as the spatial functions associated with them.16 The action space, the tuned space, and the viewing space describe different categories in this context, although these distinctions are only clear cut within the theoretical model, given that the different functions of the spaces within a text can overlap (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 47). With the action space Hoffmann describes the setting of the action as a necessary framework and defines all concrete topographical elements of the diegesis that interact with the narrated characters, influence, evoke, or accompany their actions (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 80). As the name implies, the action space is characterised by the fact that something happens in it. The action space can be contrasted with a viewing space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 93), which, according to Nünning, provides “a 15 16

 See also: Frank 2009, 72ff.  Cf. for the following remarks: Hoffmann 1978, 55ff.

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panoramic overview” (Nünning 2009, 38) and captures the spatial conditions that are narrated without being linked to actions. The category of tuned space detaches itself from physical factors and defines the atmospheric effect associated with the space. The tuned space is thus an expression of the protagonists’ impressions and is linked to their subjective perception. The idea that the outer arrangement gives insight into inner processes stems from the Romantic era and emphasises a close interaction between the inner life of the figures and the outer space. In particular, the distinction between action space and tuned space proves to be a useful dividing line for this study, as it makes clear that space in the literary text does not always have to be symbolically charged and can instead operate primarily as a place of action through which characters move. The fact that these arrangements can in turn be examined for their atmospheric mood, and that changes in space can be examined for their function, reveals the complexity of a topographical methodology. It is also necessary to analyse how the representations of space are shaped by the narrative. At this point, Hoffmann’s study needs to be expanded to account for “whether space is designed from the point of view of the narrator or that of one of the characters” (Hoffmann 1978, 48), in that narratology is significant in shaping the construction of the narrated space. This very extension is important for the analysis of the representation of adolescence, because the frequently realised subjective view of the characters with autodiegetic voice colors the narrated spaces accordingly. Above all, tuned space proves to be a central means of picking up on the intersubjective tensions of the characters.

2.2.3 Michel Foucault: Heterotopia The theoretical positions presented thus far have been devoted to the narrative – to the structure of literary texts and the semantisation as well as functionalisation associated with them. The individual subspaces of diegesis can further be brought together with – while remanining in tension with – Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, especially within the narrative of adolescence. Foucault pursues a view of space that emphasises entanglements and interconnections and is no longer structuralist in design: “We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” (Foucault 1986, 22) The temporal sequence of linear succession is thus increasingly (re)organised in spatially entangled structures. The image of the network is representative of both the complex, and in view of globalisation processes more open, spatial structures of cultural spaces and the reciprocal relationships they circumscribe. Foucault’s concept of space is organised by reference to the concepts of utopia, normal space, and the intermediate space of heterotopia. In this context, utopias are “sites with no real place” (Foucault 1986, 24) and they “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” (Foucault 1986, 24) Derived from the Greek terms tópos

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(place) and ou (not), the location of utopias can be explained: They are non-places that exist only as fictional constructs;17 by contrast, there is the normal space of everyday life, while in between, as “counter-sites” (Foucault 1986, 21), heterotopias emerge. Heterotopias are “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and in-verted.” (Foucault 1986, 21) Heterotopias exhibit a compensatory interface with utopia, for they can bring together “several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1986, 25). Heterotopias open up counterspaces for those, “whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm” (Foucault 1986, 25). To this end, Foucault distinguishes between heterotopias that fulfill different functions, such as the crisis heterotopia (cf. Foucault 1986, 24), the compensation heterotopia (cf. Foucault 1986, 27), and the deviation heterotopia (Foucault 1986, 25). With respsect to Foucault’s theorisations, adolescent protagonists can be understood as figures of deviation, but also of crisis, who are connected to heterotopic spatial structures within the narrated world. However, the characteristics of heterotopias cannot only be found in the concrete spaces of the cemetery, or the hospital identified by Foucault. Heterotopias can also be characterised as textual procedures (cf. Tetzlaff 2016; Tetzlaff 2014). Heterotopias follow specific principles: Access to heterotopic spaces is restrictive, as they always presuppose a system of openings and closings (cf. Foucault 1986, 26) and are not freely accessible. Heterotopias are characterised by transition, which is installed in various ways. The fact that transition is accompanied by specific constructions of time constitutes another feature of the heterotopia. Space and time enter into inseparable and irregular tension in that “heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault 1986, 26). In addition to these features of space and time, heterotopias continue to fulfill a meta-reflexive commentary function, while “these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about” (Foucault 1986, 24). The regulation of access, heterochrony, and self-reflection mark the three central mechanisms of a heterotopic space. The analyses that follow will show that these mechanisms correlate closely with the upheavals of adolescence in the manifestation of other spaces and an in-between. For the following analysis of the representation of adolescence, two central points of contact arise: Foucault’s model reveals the multi-layered interweaving of protagonists and the environment in the image of the network (cf. Foucault 1986, 22); and the reference to the course of time is interesting in that supposedly linear courses dissolve, de-structure, and remain diffuse. Even though Foucault’s approach is in tension with Lotman’s one can still clearly identify heterotopic spaces within a structuralist reading of adolescence that conforms to the narrative pattern of the rite de passage:

 The understanding is not convergent with the idea of non-place in Augé (1995). The meaning of the prefix ‘not’ in the latter does not aim at the actual topographical location, but highlights the identificatory disruptive function of these spaces. 17

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In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc. (Foucault 1986, 24)

2.3 Narrative Space, Narrated Space, Spatial Function In order to examine the relationship between space, literature, and adolescence, the analyses developed here consider not only what the texts tell, but also how these spatial constructions are realised narratively. The focus is thus on three central questions: How is space narratively staged? Which topographies are developed within the plot? What functions do these spatial arrangements fulfil at the level of discourse and histoire? For this purpose, a distinction is made between the categories of narrative space and narrated space. The interplay between narrative space and narrated space also gives rise to the category of spatial function. The category of narrated space encompasses the construction of the plot world as the spaces that constitute the diegesis and that are structured by movements of the characters. To describe this construction and the individual subspaces, this analysis draws on the spatial theories discussed in the previous chapters. Martínez/Scheffel also distinguish between “background space” and the “setting” of the action (Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 152). The former forms an unspecified space that delineates the rough cornerstones of the narrated world; the latter marks an explicit space in which the action is located. These settings, in turn, can be linked to extradiegetic reality through various strategies, for instance, place names, which “as cognitive triggers [...] invoke a geographical and cultural background knowledge” (cf. Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 152). This is accompanied by phenomenological aspects of spatial experience as well as specific realism effects that link the narrated world to the extra-literary one. Narrative space develops as a result of the complex narratological interplay of voice, mode, and focalisation, as well as representations of character and time. The manner in which narrative is enacted influences the ways in which space is shaped within the diegesis and suggests the functions of these spaces, therefore, a narrative-­ theoretical consideration of how literary space is constructed and enacted is vital to these analyses. It is important to determine from whose point of view and in which narrative voice the representation of space is shaped, as the “perception of space is always also subject-related” (Haupt 2004, 71). For this purpose, Neumann/Nünning distinguish between an authorial narration and a figural focalisation of space (cf. Neumann/Nünning 2008). Whereas the former is characterised by a static, onlooking description of the conditions of space from the outside, the latter is orchestrated from the point of view of a character within the diegesis (cf. Nünning 2009, 45). A figural focalisation of space encodes not only a displaced and intersubjective perception, but also the movements of the figure through the narrated space, so that in this construction the moment of movement gains additional relevance.

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In the following analyses, the mode of representation is understood as narrative space and highlights the nature of the discours. This definition of narrative space diverges from the one given by Kahrmann/Reiß/Schluchter who understand narrative space as “[t]he narration of the fictional narrator [...], i.e. the spatial dimension of his fictional speech situation (narrative situation)” (Kahrmann/Reiß/Schluchter 1986, 159). According to this definition, narrative space describes the location of a fictional narrator character in a space deviating from the diegesis, which is usually not further elaborated. With Genette, this would be a form of extradiegetic space; however, such a distinction is not relevant for this analysis, as the texts considered here do not work with such a construction.18 In the following analyses, narrative space rather comprises the narratological construction and means of representation that shape the lateral space as well as the structure of the text (cf. Stemmann 2016a; Stemmann 2016f; Stemmann 2016h). Intermedial references, by means of which narrative modes of another medium are imitated on the level of representation (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 17; Mahne 2007, 15) are vital to the construction of the narrative space – and, intertwined with it, to the narrated space – in contemporary youth literature. These intermedial codings fulfil a double function, as they reshape the narrative spaces and expand the diegetic spaces of action while also opening up additional levels of reflection.19 Playing with intertexts in order to generate additional meaning is not a new procedure in the narration of adolescence (cf. Kaulen 2001), but  – analogous to social processes of mediatisation (cf. Krotz 2007)20 – this intertextuality is increasingly intermedial.21 Contemporary youth literatures of adolescence establish sophisticated constructions on the level of discourse, which through their narrative procedures also represent the upheavals of adolescence in narrative space. Along with this, the facets of the search for the self fan out in diversified narrative spaces of histoire. The construction of space thus takes hold both in representation and action, and the interaction of narrative space and narrated space leads to the question of the function of space, which reflects the associated implications on a meta-level in order to illuminate the discursive, symbolic, and semantic-coded implications of the topographies. Space thus becomes a vector of analysis and a key to interpretation, revealing not only the narrative staging and construction of the diegetic spaces of  See also: Genette 1979. Exceptions are, for instance, frame actions that name an explicit narrative situation or prefaces in which the narrator reports on his writing process. A difference between the time of the narration and the experience becomes visible when a retrospective narrator reports and plays with this additional knowledge. 19  On the function of musical codes in young adult literature, see: Lexe 2016b; Lexe 2012; Lexe 2009; Lexe 2006a; Lexe 2006b; Rinnerthaler 2012. 20  On the relationship between youth, media, and popular cultures, see also: Dettmar 2016a. 21  In this respect, parallels emerge with the research discourse on New German Pop Literature, which emphasises a referentiality and referentiality game of storytelling (cf. Baßler 2005; Baßler 2003a; Baßler 2003b; Baßler 2002; Drügh 2007). 18

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action, but also discussing their respective functions. Although the three categories can be heuristically separated from each other, they always interact and are therefore brought together again in the analysis. Category Narrative space Narrated space Spatial Function

Textual form discours

Analysis tool Narrative, narrative construction, outer form

histoire

Diegesis, world of action, settings, projected spaces

meta

Discursive inscriptions, symbolic and semantic dimension, cultural context

Following Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (cf. Bakhtin 2011, 253), the analytical model can be embedded in the respective historical-cultural contexts of the novels in order to make diachronic shifts – rewritings, but also traditions – visible. Literary representations participate in an extra-literary discourse and this reciprocity is central for this study. It is important to note, however, that “there is a sharp and categorical boundary line between the actual world as a source of representation and the world represented in the work” (Bakhtin 2011, 253). In this work, the focus is initially on the constructions of narrated spaces within the diegesis, the realised orders as well as semantic inscriptions and narrative functions (cf. Nünning 2008, 606), in order to illuminate the relationships between adolescent figures and their environments. Going beyond the text-immanent level, these constructions can finally be considered again in their discursive imbrication, because narrated “spatial questions have [...] a topological ordering function in our culture” (Borgards 2012, 9). Subsequently, both the diegetic occupations and stagings of adolescence as well as the cultural framings and projections of these literary representations that go beyond them are captured.

3

Travelling and Driving Around: Road Novels

3.1 Introduction: Busfahrt mit Kuhn, Fast genial, Tschick The first chapter of analysis focuses on so-called road novels and thus novels that couple the characters’ self-search and self-determination with a (motorised) travel movement through space.1 Risholm defines three plot-logical and constituent elements that characterise this narrative form in the medium of film, but can also be applied to representations in the novel: “First the road, second the vehicle, third the movement from one point to another [...] as well as the interactions between character, vehicle and space” (Risholm 2003, 115). The last aspect in particular proves central to the following argument in discussing the relationship between adolescent developmental processes, self-realisation, and spaces in motion.2 In addition to content, road novels are also characterised – in terms of narrative – by an intermedial signature that results from references to a popular cultural register. In the 1950s, Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) established the genre of the road novel, whereby the genre designation, which only emerged later, is already inherent in the title and refers to a characteristic feature. On the one hand, the road appears as an essential place of action; on the other hand, this spatial framework determines the narrative structure in that a sequence of changing (spatial) stations follow one another in the constant movement of the main character. The movement that is core to the plot is self-reflexively exposed by the autodiegetic narrative voice in On the Road: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and

 Not all road novels tell of the processes of adolescence; the genre can also address other constellations of motifs and conflicts. The fact that such a travel movement in the narration of adolescence is an almost exclusively male-coded narrative also preserves gender-specific divergences. 2  Many road novels also incorporate other genre elements, particularly as they take up the story before and after the journey. On this genre hybridity, see also: Bräutigam 2009, 20. Road trips also form building blocks within other (adolescence) narratives, such as in Nils Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland (2011) or Verena Güntner’s Es bringen (2014). Risholm records such a sequence as a “mini-narrative” (Risholm 2003, 107). 1

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023 A. Stemmann, Spaces of Adolescence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05916-1_3

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nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move. And we moved!” (Kerouac 2000, 121) As prototypically realised in On the Road, movement is a source of narrative potential (cf. Certeau 1988, 118) in that various stops are strung together; movement can also be read as a moment of rebellion in the modern adolescent novel (cf. Kaulen 1999a, 330). In On the Road, the protagonist Sal consciously turns away from his space of origin, which he finds blocking due to rigid norms and values and embarks on journey into an unknown liminal space of travel. The manner of progress is almost incidental, the path structure fragmented, and the course of direction chaotic. Kerouac’s novel exposes an intentional aimlessness that is only secondarily concerned with arriving at a specific place. Rather, the frayed trail of movement provides insight into an adolescent experience of turmoil; the road, in its topological and semantic openness, is a metaphor for breaking free from oppressive structures to be able to redefine oneself. The seemingly endless expanse of the highways in the USA function not only as an ornamental “background space” (Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 152), but also as a boundless experimental field for self-testing and self-positioning. The moment of the journey correlates “with a space-enclosing movement, the vanishing lines of the highways” (Risholm 2003, 114) and the resulting freedom. This unhindered movement has positive connotations, which are contrasted with the trepidation that had been experienced in the initial space. The plot of the road novel is characterised by a continuous shifting of the characters’ personal and spatial boundaries. The road novel takes up the narrative of the frontier. This is particularly evident in the fact that characters appropriate new and unknown territories (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 641). Especially against the backdrop of the USA as the place of action, such a reference is reinforced. Within the road novel, the characters embark upon a voyage of discovery and conquer new spaces. However, the road novel can also be identified as a modification of the ritualised structure of the initiation journey story (cf. Freese 1971, 161),3 in that the characters on the move transgress boundaries to enter new topological territories, in what Turner describes the phase of anti-structure (cf. Turner 1969), standing outside the community and striving to prove themselves. And, the characters’ self-perception shifts as “space and time are experienced or condensed” (Risholm 2003, 107). The journey, with its inscribed semantics of freedom and independence, makes visible the temporal developmental steps taken by the protagonists in their movement through space. Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), for instance, exemplifies this connection by referring to the plot space of the USA. It is no coincidence that this very text is repeatedly cited directly within the diegesis of many adolescent novels and is used in its structural composition as an intertextual referential foil to actualise the mechanism of movement with a vehicle and to transpose it into a motorised scenario.4 The car in particular is emblematic of a process of  On spaces of initiation in children’s and young adult literature, see also: Kromoser 2012; Stichnothe 2017; Stichnothe 2016a. 4  On the importance of Twain’s text as a pattern for the adolescent novel, see also: Gansel 2005, 375. 3

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social modernisation in which new mobility promises autonomy and dissolves old boundaries. Through his escape-like movement in On the Road, Sal consciously eschews societal norms, breaks through the system of rules of his narrated world, and crosses a boundary that is classificatory in Lotman’s understanding (cf. Lotman 1977, 237). Link defines such journeys as a narrative type of “(non)normal journey” (Link 2001, 91 [emphasis in original]) and emphasises the associated “identity-forming power” (Link 1999, 173)5 for characters who move “on the margins of society” (Risholm 2003, 116). Although Link does not explicitly name the phase of adolescence in this context, this process has a particular effect on adolescent protagonists who find themselves in a developmental psychological in-between, possibly acquiring a car without possessing a driver’s license. In On the Road, the social marginalisation of adolescence is exacerbated by the characters’ self-identification with the subculture of the so-called Beat Generation.6 Their enthusiasm for jazz music marks processes of youth cultural renewal and subversive moments of upheaval (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 474), which continue in their direction of movement. The interweaving of space, movement, and music has developed into the characteristic feature of the road novel as an intermedial form. With the emergence of the cinematic genre of the road movie in the 1960s, the screw of intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 17) turned even further (cf. Kreller 2009, 23).7 From then on, cinematic narratives, fast cuts, and other audiovisual codes shape the design of many novels. In the road novel, driving around and the construction of adolescence are thus closely intertwined with a popular cultural or media register as various quotations are taken up and made fruitful for the narration. The narrative engagement with references to cultural archives embeds adolescence, at the latest in the representations of the 1990s in the German-speaking world, not only in a topological movement, but also in a moving media context. The developments of pop literature are representative of this intermedial work: narrative procedures of collecting, archiving, and cataloguing popular and everyday culture are stylistically formative, and even paradigmatic (cf. Baßler 2003a, 157), particularly in the context of the representations of the aforementioned representations of the 1990s, which also postulate a new or prolonged form of adolescence (cf. Frank 2016; Dietrich/Drügh 2002; Gansel 2003). The so-called “literature of second words” (Baßler 2003a, 160) plays with the material of language and the popular cultural archive. Song lyrics condense the narrated experience of the characters, shape the attitude to life of an eventful and ongoing (post) adolescence, and formulate this experience in a nested intertextual or intermedial system of reference. Music appears as a “wide-ranging ego-­ development” (Stuckrad-Barre 2016, 76), and the associated subcultural codes are markers of a corresponding youth culture within which adolescence takes place and expands. The  Using Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Baum’s Menschen im Hotel as examples, Link shows how space, movement, and identity designs intertwine (cf. Link 1999, 174f.). 6  On the influences of Beat literature and its productive further processing in German pop literature of the 1990s, see also: Drügh 2009, 163ff. 7  On the history of the road movie, see also: Bräutigam 2009; Risholm 2003. 5

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practices of “pop literary play with everyday culture” (Drügh 2007, 37). This reveals how youth cultural ciphers are fed by working with existing material, layering alloys of quotations, and generating new meaning by reference to a popular cultural register. Pop music, as described by the protagonist in Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’s novel Panikherz (2016), initates a break from the familiar space of childhood and a move into the new spaces of a subculture, “because pop music is always about youth” (Stuckrad-Barre 2016, 528). It is no coincidence that Stuckrad-Barre refers to Udo Lindenberg as a continuing chronicler of the Beat generation, and in this reference unfolds a moving canon of narrating adolescence that reconstructs and regenerates itself from references to semantic material: Also, such a longing hymn, in which the road is idealised, the road as the way out of the narrowness, being on the road as a way of life, Udo has translated and brought us at that time the on the road romanticism of Beat literature: I’ll just get in, see where you end up. (Stuckrad-Barre 2016, 372)

According to Diederichsen, pop music plays a specific part in the “popular culture of youthfulness” (Diederichsen 2014, XIV), thereby associating youth with “a representation of the new” (Diederichsen 2014, XIV), a trope which has been effective since Rousseau, and which is also represented topologically in the departure that begins the journey of the road novel. By means of recourse to pop music, which “repeatedly establishes relations between signs of different kinds and experiences that assign a content to the signs” (Diederichsen 2014, 14), a direct parallel to the in-between period of youth and adulthood – adolescence – emerges. According to Diederichsen: “In pop music, the liminal in-between stage of puberty corresponds to the staging and dramatisation of the particular insecurity associated with any medially mediated use of signs” (Diederichsen 2014, 12). In literary texts, popular culture set pieces open up counterspaces within the diegesis on various levels: both imaginatively for the characters in the scenarios of the lyrics and topologically in the movements evoked by them in clubs, bars, concert halls, or on journeys. The intermedial imprint in the narrative as well as the moment of movement within the plot are constant features of the road novel. In a diachronic perspective, however, the reasons for the departure change, and so does the self-­understandings of the characters. These shifts are connected to tendencies that Kaulen and Gansel have defined for all the varieties of the adolescent novel. On the Road is not only a road novel, but also a modern adolescent novel in which the protagonist rebels against a conservative social system. In the postmodern variant, this orientation changes: In these road novels, the psyche of the characters is revealed in a restless movement through space, but with a different orientation: In this nomadic generation, travel no longer functions as a way of setting oneself apart from others, as an expression of the greatest possible freedom, or to gain a particular broadening of experience, but rather to satisfy cultural or generational norms. (Schaefers 2014, 204)

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The nameless protagonist in Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995), for example, undertakes an aimless journey that no longer envisages a consolidation of the self as a relevant category. In detail, the autodiegetic voice describes with the first sentences the starting point on the island of Sylt, which is not coincidentally located at the topologically outermost edge of the German country:8 Well, it starts with me standing at Fisch-Gosch in List on Sylt and drinking a Jever from the bottle. Fisch-Gosch is a fish stall that is so famous because it is the northernmost fish stall in Germany. It’s at the top of Sylt, right by the sea, and you think there’s a border coming up, but in reality, it’s just a fish stall. (Kracht 1995, 15)

The design of the narrated space defines the action space, the framework for the action, and the experiential space available to the twenty-something who drifts on his road trip across Germany, via Hamburg and Frankfurt to Zurich. The topography of the novel represents a real spatial environment. But it also reveals a (post)adolescent dissolution of boundaries, which “under postmodern conditions by no means leads to a ‘successful’ adolescence” (Gansel 2003, 239)9. Instead it calls consciously into question a consolidated self-image such that the consolidated self-image no longer appears desirable. Within the postmodern road novel, it is evident that the moment of movement is not a rebellion, but a metaphorical expression of a laconism that mirrors the frayed self-perception of a protagonist in a society in which “youth has lost its clear contours in the process of modernisation” (Gansel 2003, 239). Accordingly, the novel Faserland tells of “a journey to which the very concrete goal is completely indifferent, because it is only about getting away” (Drügh 2009, 160).10 This aimlessness marks another functional occupation of movement. The character is a cipher for not only a persistent indecision, but also an associated indifference. The movement is correspondingly passive, as the protagonist does not drive a car himself, but is given a lift, sits on a train, “and is finally rowed across Lake Zurich as if on a dead man’s raft” (Drügh 2007, 34 [emphasis A.S.]). Although the novels of pop literature are not specifically youth literature, just as the texts of the Beat Generation or the modern adolescence novel for the most part were not, they nevertheless frequently thematise the phase of a turbulent life-­historical in-between and thus serve as meaningful expressions of the construction of adolescence. Stuckrad-Barre’s Panikherz is a meta-reflexive review of the tendencies of pop literature in which Stuckrad-Barre inscribes himself once again as the narrated and narrating protagonist.11 Even if Panikherz is not a genuine road novel, the text features a central moment on the road that, in contrast to the pop literature of the 1990s, is recoded and refers beyond the text to shifting social conditions. In Panikherz, the journey appears not as a temporary phase, but as a permanent feeling of

 On the function of this commodity aesthetic, see further: Drügh 2009, 158ff.; Degler/Paulokat 2008, 34ff. On the topography in Faserland, see further: Monreal 2013. 9  On the “finding of the self” in Faserland, see further: Gansel 2003, 237ff. 10  See also: Schaefers 2014, 205. 11  The loop of references is condensed, as Stuckrad-Barre, for example with Soloalbum (1998), himself had a decisive influence on the pop literature of the 1990s. 8

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impermanence, revealing a protagonist who struggles and almost breaks down as a result. Being on the road is neither an act of opposition, nor an aimless submission, but rather a search for structure in the highly differentiated and excessively open conditions of life in a late-modern society. Critically, the novel begins at a setting Augé understands to be a prototypical non-place and transit site: the airport, which as a transit space cannot create an identity (cf. Augé 1995). In this respect, Panikherz is an interesting excursus for the following argumentation, because it makes visible how the constructions of (post-) adolescence continue to result from a citational combination of set pieces on the narrative level while a different self-­image is realised on the plot level. Self-reflexively, Panikherz shows how growing up is “culturally mapped” (Stuckrad-Barre 2016, 66) along a popular cultural axis of reference and how musical pieces function as “preserved memories” (Stuckrad-Barre 2016, 346) of this life period. Such a conscious “reconstruction of a pop socialisation” (Baßler/Drügh 63) proves to be an important feature of contemporary texts of the 2010s, which continue tendencies of pop literature, but reformat them as well. Shifts in the construction of adolescence as well as in the self-realisations of characters are also evident in youth literature texts published after 2000. It is therefore interesting to ask how contemporary novels refer to the developments in the content and narrative of the road novel outlined earlier and to consider how these developments impact the self-images of the characters.12 To this end, first the narrative nature of the narrative spaces of the novels will be elaborated in order to trace the construction of the narrative spaces in motion and to discuss their function. Tamara Bach’s novel Busfahrt mit Kuhn (2004) tells of a road trip that 19-year-­old Rike takes with her friends after graduating from high school. The German title can be translated as ‘busride with Kuhn’. Kuhn thereby is the name of the VW bus with which the characters travel. In this novel, too, the moment of movement is already marked in the title by the journey. In the VW bus, the small group of travellers drives from the north to the south of Germany to a music concert at the border. What is striking here is how the narrated spaces are constructed through the narrating space as the novel plays with a screenplay form in its structure: musical references, dialogue sequences, cinematic shots, and cuts shape the construction of the narrative space as intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 16) and this stylistic construction as well as the movement through space show a processual development of the main character, who struggles with growing up.

 The road novel is experiencing a revival, especially in the 2010s. In addition to the novels analysed in detail below, see for example: Andrea Badey/Claudia Kühn: Strom auf der Tapete (2017); Alexandra Tubor: Minigolf Paradiso (2016); Gabi Kreslehner: PaulaPaulTom ans Meer (2016); Torsten Nesch: Die Kreuzfahrt mit der Asche meines verdammten Vaters (2015); Buster, King of the Sunshine Coast (2014); Joyride Ost (2010); Rüdiger Bertram (2013): Norden ist, wo oben ist; Tamara Bach: was vom Sommer übrig ist (2012); Karin Bruder: Asphaltsommer (2012); Benjamin Lebert: Im Winter dein Herz (2012); Andi Rogenhagen: Heldensommer (2010). 12

3.2  Intermedial Form: Audio-visual Narrative Space

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In Benedict Wells’ Fast genial (2011), the 17-year-old protagonist Francis Dean, accompanied by two friends, embarks on a road trip across the USA. The title of the novel translates roughly as ‘almost genius’, alluding to the perceived inadequacy of the main character. With a movement, he detaches himself from a familiar space that is negatively connoted in two respects, both via the topological location in the periphery of a small town and via family relationships. Against the geographical backdrop of the USA as the place of action, the text draws together the semantic occupations of the upwardly mobile narrative of the American Dream and the adolescent development of the main character. Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel Tschick (2010) tells of a road trip that takes 14-year-old Maik Klingenberg and Andrej Tschichachow, called Tschick, through eastern Germany. The novel has been translated to English and the title Why We Took the Car (2014a) points to the moment of movement.13 Together the boys hijack an old Lada during their summer holidays, break out of their familiar surroundings in Berlin, and take unplanned detours through the vastness of Brandenburg. In their uncoordinated movement through space, a bizarre and intermedially overformed scenery unfolds that highlights the unplanned nature of the journey as well as the adolescent struggles of the two boys.

3.2 Intermedial Form: Audio-visual Narrative Space In the previous chapter, it was pointed out that the road novel and the road movie each located in the narrative systems of literature and film respectively - mutually influence each other. This chapter is therefore first devoted to the specific narrative modes of the novels, tracing their intermedial colouring and discussing the functions of these modes of making, to develop a basis for analysing the interaction of these narrative procedures with the traces of the characters in the narrative spaces of the texts in the next step. In Tamara Bach’s novel Busfahrt mit Kuhn,14 the road movie Absolute Giganten (1999) is cited in the endpaper. By referncing the film in the paratextual narrative space, Busfahrt mit Kuhn locates itself in the intermedial history of the road novel; and, in addition to this medial contextualisation of the genre, the reference also suggests the central narrative concerns of the novel. The reference initiates an ongoing engagement with semantic material that serves as a source of self-description for the main character and anticipates the central narrative mechanism of the text. This excerpt leads smoothly into the actual plot and refers to the special function of music in shaping the characters’ experiences during the journey and the narrative itself: You know what I think sometimes? There should always be music. In everything you do. And when it really sucks, at least the music is still there. And at the point where it’s the most beautiful, the record should jump, and you always hear that one moment. (Bach 2007, 5)

 In the German text Maik is spelled with ai, while he is spelled Mike in the English text.  The title of the novel is again a reference to the children’s film Flussfahrt mit Huhn (1984). It tells the story of a group of children set off on a stolen boat. 13 14

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The desire to freeze a particularly happy moment and to revive it again and again by playing a song accompanies the protagonist Rike throughout her road trip and defines her self-perception. On a meta-level, this also refers to the preservation function of music, which stores and makes available certain periods of life and the feelings associated with them. Based on this premise, the text establishes an auditory narrative track by embedding musical fragments and quotations within the narrative. These references condense the experience of the journey from the protagonist’s point of view and semanticise the movement via a complementary code system of musical inscriptions. With the stylised acoustic track, the novel borrows from the representational conventions of film, especially the genre of the road movie. The ways in which the narrative mimics cinematic audiovisual representations are augmented by stage directions and other aural codes: “Meanwhile ... / (music: eels, hospital food) Outside, day” (Bach 2007, 55).15 Dialogues and cinematic devices such as close-up, camera panning, and fade-out mark the narrative staging of the text as a screenplay (cf. Bach 2007, 10ff.). The internal plot, which depicts the events of the journey from Rike’s point of view, is framed by a “prologue” (Bach 2007, 7) and an “epilogue” (Bach 2007, 155). The framing of prologue and epilogue connects with the internal plot. Both subtly merge and the contours of the narrative space blur in the same way that Rike’s self-­ perception dissolves. Thus, the prologue begins in medias res with a seven-point plan that, following pop-literary narrative strategies, abruptly lists requirements for the entrance exam to a film school (cf. Bach 2007, 9f.).16 Following the assignment, the prologue results in a kaleidoscope of possible film scenarios in screenplay style. This structure conveys a view that is typical of contemporary youth cultural lifeworlds through “media perceptions” (Kaulen 2009, 143) and is deposited in the aesthetic strategies. The fragments do not merely superficially depict a “lifeworld orientation” (Kaulen 2009, 142), but are accompanied by reflections of the narrative voice on cinematic modes of representation to generate a metareflexive moment: “How should a film begin? Maybe with music. Music that goes with a tracking shot” (Bach 2007, 10). The subsequent establishment of a “music like slow motion” (Bach 2007, 10) emphasises the narrative potential of intermedial references, which can generate both atmosphere and narrated time, and reflects on the modes of action of such procedures on a meta-level.17 By imitating filmic settings and embedding cinematic terms within the narrative, the exposition of the prologue finally shifts to a cinematic setting: “The camera eyes pan right into the street. [...] Or maybe so: a new scene. Yet it’s an old scene, it’s been done so many times before. It’s called repetition, maybe also retrospection. [...] A  On the function of the camera-eye in this scene, see further: Lexe 2006a, 80.  This list form also cites a stylistic device of the “archivists” (Baßler 2002, 184) of pop literature. 17  On the reciprocal construction of narrated time and narrated space in Busfahrt mit Kuhn, see further: Stemmann 2016d, 4f. 15 16

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blanket on grass. Repeat” (Bach 2007, 10f.). For Rajewsky, this marks “a procedure of the constitution of meaning [...] that a medial product can produce to a product of another medium [...] qua system” (Rajewsky 2002, 17), in that the novel explicitly resorts to filmic means and imitates them with its own media-specific narrative modes. In the prologue, fragmentary excerpts are strung together in rapid scene changes and short cuts until Rike, the protagonist and narrative voice, finally appears. With renewed recourse to film as a narrative medium, the now autodiegetic voice positions itself in the double function of actor and narrator in the mise en scène: “I am now entering the picture. This is my film” (Bach 2007, 12). The heterodiegetic narrative voice established at the beginning is unmasked at this point as an autodiegetic voice, and a metamedial construction emerges in which Rike is both the main character and the author of the present script. The narrative construction of the novel as a screenplay written within the diegesis corresponds very particularly to the conflicts of the plot level. The 19-year-old Rike is at a life-historical crossroads after finishing school and is struggling with her future path. Her insecurity is revealed in her searching movement through the space. But the way of narrating also reflects an insecurity. The central point here is the staging as a script: because Rike is not only the protagonist, but also writes the script herself. In the fragmented arrangement of the prologue, Rike’s open and potentially unsettling course of life is revealed as an intermedially assembled patchwork, which she herself co-authors in this production. The narrative arrangement illustrates a searching process in which the practice of writing provides the opportunity to try out different attitudes. This construction maps an inconsistent back and forth that epitomises Rike’s developmental psychological struggles during adolescence in narrative space. As the journey progresses, the practice of trial and error is enhanced by the possibility that the experiences described may also be part of the imagined script Rike intends to use to apply to film school. Various references suggest the staging of the events as part of the script: “We play long drive. I play Rike” (Bach 2007, 48 [emphasis A.S.]). The narrative construction of Busfahrt mit Kuhn thus proves to be a hybrid of screenplay and diary in both its frame and internal plot. The act of writing as a mechanism for self-realisation is emphasised by this combined narrative mode. For this purpose, the text establishes a narrative and an “observer position [...] from within” (Kaulen 2009, 143), that is, a narrative voice that itself actively participates in the “everyday life of adolescents and young adults” (Kaulen 2009, 143) and shapes the narrated world accordingly. Central to this is the narrative setting as a screenplay: Bach designs the concept of identity here as an open construction that emerges from a performative process in which Rike participates in the formal staging as screenplay (author). The differentiated levels of the narrative space convey the vagueness and plurality of the progagonist’s possible self-images, which results in “a metamedial structuring

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and functionalisation of the discours” (Rajewsky 2002, 81).18 The narrative space is constructed as a script with a dual function, serving as both a narrative element of the discours and as a leitmotivic thing-symbol of the histoire. In terms of narration, the screenplay serves as a structure-forming narrative framework; on the level of the plot, however, the screenplay is also a self-referential medium of reflection for the protagonist, in that she negotiates practices of writing and, analogously, facets of her self-image: “Then I take my book and write. For days my book has been in my backpack, only my head has been writing” (Bach 2007, 129). This enactment of the text as a fictional script that the main character, Rike, writes and always has with her defines her as an autodiegetic voice with an alternative possibility space: “Writing means that I can be a heroine” (Bach 2007, 130). Writing offers the character Rike the opportunity to try out varying self-images, by testing herself out without actually experiencing the imagined transformations: “Writing is lying. Writing is putting together a film that could be my life but isn’t” (Bach 2007, 130). By way of the development of the screenplay the boundaries between the narrated reality and the imagined script, which gives Rike the opportunity to try out different self-images, become blurred. The concluding epilogue does not resolve the confusion, but rather condenses it by introducing a new possibility – failure: “This is my film. This is just the beginning. [...] I’m not going to get accepted to the film academy. I didn’t even apply” (Bach 2007, 159). Through Rike’s autodiegetic narrative point of view and in her internal focalisation, the portrayal of a supposedly neutral screenplay breaks down repeatedly. Passages describing the setting in detail alternate with dialogues between the characters and narrative sections by Rike, who reports on the course of her journey as if in a diary and logbook. A narrative subjectivity is established as the narrative voice varies and rearranges scenes or flanks the dialogic sequences with comments inserted in parentheses. These comments map Rike’s experience and draw together the dialogic mode with her perspective: Noah comes and says: Have you seen Sissi? / Me: Noah, where is your ark? / [...] Me: (swaying a little and trying to hold on to the bench) Oops! / Him: (lifts me up and holds me. Damn, he smells good, why does he always smell .... well, he uses expensive fucking perfume and takes a shower when he can, mmh, like him ...) Rike, üüüh, did you throw up? (Bach 2007, 64f.)

In the cinematic editing process of a parallel montage, Rike’s brother Kurti also comes into view alongside the narrative strand around Rike. These sections are also shaped by intermedial references: Insertion / Very quick close-up on a face with beard and long hair, self-rolled cigarette in the corner of the mouth, the face looks angrily into the camera. Small cut, then same person leaning against a bus, the bus shining, flashing, blingbling [...]. / Back. (Bach 2007, 23)  It could be argued that developments are reflected in their literary form only belatedly, and Busfahrt mit Kuhn tells of an adolescence of the late 1990s rather than the 2000s. This divergence is evident, for example, in the songs cited, which do not correspond to the narrative present. On Tamara Bach’s self-reflection on the popular cultural archive, see also: Mikota/Oehme 2016b, 63. 18

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Analogous to his mental state, deranged by an alcohol hangover within the diegesis, Kurti’s plot line progresses more slowly. The dramaturgical structure of the text builds up to the finale in an arc that increasingly picks up speed, which finally lets Rike and Kurti meet in a showdown at the border at the big music festival. The camera view repeatedly pans to Kurti over the course of the novel, but in these passages it remains with the autodiegetic narrative voice of Rike, who no longer narrates only in her internal focalisation, but in zero focalisation seems to have an overview of the entire event. Rike acts as scriptwriter, arranging the scenes as marked at one point in the fractured transition between the two diegetic levels of action: “Fat Maddhin sits on the beach and rocks to his rhythm, he’s fine, loosen up, Kurti. / So break. Time to get some popcorn, go to the bathroom. Eyes closed and time” (Bach 2007, 128f.). It is evident that the text openly exhibits the nature of its construction but does not definitively resolve the questions that emerge from the nature of that construction. The prologue and epilogue appear as meta-reflexive narrative spaces that illuminate the nuances of the nested construction, but without clarifying the relationship between the levels or how Rike’s application process proceeds. The text consistently works with the resulting ambiguity of explicit references, an intermedial condensation of discourse, and the deliberately placed blank spaces. In this way, the novel develops a postmodern aesthetic and structure in its narrative procedures and the “quotation-like play with a wide variety of literary motifs and conventions” (Kaulen 1999b, 9), but on the plot level the narrative deviates from postmodern tropes and establishes a protagonist who struggles with the openness that a postmodern aesthetic and structure entails, as the following chapter will elaborate. Working on selfimage, or working through voids in narrative construction, is also at the heart of Benedict Wells’ novel Fast genial. The 17-year-old protagonist Francis is driven by the question of his family identity, and together with two friends he follows the few clues he receives from his mother to find his unknown father. Francis initially has no concrete topographical destination for his journey, but must shimmy from station to station, beginning on the east coast of the USA, and gather further traces. From this, a direction of movement develops in the cinematic tradition of the open road (cf. Freese 1971, 161), although in this case the departure no longer marks an act of rebellion and is instead an act of social reconnection as the protagonist moves out into the world to become closer to his family. The events are narrated in a heterodiegetic voice with zero focalisation, whereby Francis is installed as a reflector figure.19 Although this narrative method repeatedly permits a view of Francis’s perception, a distance is created via the narrative starting position that does not allow any direct insights into the character’s inner view. By means of various literary references, narrative traditions, and popular cultural set pieces, the self-image of the main character is crafted from the outside. Francis’ last name, Dean, is a reminiscent of iconic 1950s teen idol, James Dean. James Dean

 In terms of narrative device, this construction is unusual for contemporary narratives of adolescence; for example, with the exception of Die Welt ist eine Scheibe, all the texts in this corpus feature an autodiegetic voice. 19

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manifested a rebellious and non-conformist adolescence (cf. Kaulen 1999b, 7), which stands in marked contrast to Francis’ reality. Contrast runs through the text as a leitmotif, both topographically and via referential markers of the cultural archive. Francis and his girlfriend Anne-May, for example, are diametrically opposed to each other in terms of their educational milieu and background, as is strikingly exhibited through corresponding references. While Francis refers to TV series,20 films, and pop music, Anne-May reads Walt Whitman, plays the piano, and wishes to visit the Philharmonic.21 Thus, template-­like, two concepts of life confront each other in the narrated space of reference, which could hardly be separated by a greater distance, even topologically: “He remembered that Anne-May lived with her family outside the city” (Wells 2011, 56). High culture and popular culture thus appear at first glance to be irreconcilable, but as the text progresses it also combines different references and thus hints at a rapprochement between the characters that can, however, only take place in the exceptional intermediate period of the journey. The play with semantics and signs functionally maps the experience of the main character and, as a complementary carrier of meaning, refers to his developmental processes: The struggle and the moment of failure recur throughout Francis’ biography and in the intertextual and intermedial references. For example, the reference to the artificial replicants from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) mirror Francis’s own sense of incompleteness. These medial figures “looked like real people, talked like real people, felt like real people, and yet they were somehow incomplete” (Wells 2011, 272); Francis feels equally incomplete due to the absence of his father. The tension between artificial and natural identities alluded to in the reference is also central to Francis, as his father was an anonymous sperm donor, and he was conceived through in vitro fertilisation. The void in the identity of the medial figures is coupled with Francis’ self-­ perception and the recourse to the popular cultural figure thus adds a semantic alloy that emphasises Francis’ doubts about himself and his family identity. These intermedial forms of reference maintain plot-logical functions as diegetic conflicts are further differentiated and intensified by means of the contextual allusions. Within the diegesis, novels do not appear as the “central guiding medium” (Kaulen 2009, 145) in the setting of references, but “are perceived as an element of differentiated media ensembles” (Kaulen 2009, 145);22 however, Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) does function as an intertextual frame of reference (cf. Wells 2011, 35; 285). At the beginning, Francis admits to never having finished the novel, hinting at the open course of his own life’s journey. This parenthesis closes when Francis does finish the book at the end of the novel and finds himself identifying with the struggle of life represented in Hemingway’s novel.  The references incorporate various family constellations and constructions that are mediated by the media: Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, and The Cosby Show open up a view of family models that deviate from Francis’s experiences and represent an alternative. 21  Significantly, The Simpsons, which they watch together, can connect them (cf. Wells 2011, 35). 22  See also: Kaulen 2001, 94. 20

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Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not coincidentally “one of the few books he had finished reading,” (Wells 2011, 121) is also a central literary reference. The reference to the adventure novel as the guiding medium of adolescent socialisation conveys a specific sense of freedom because “as a child, he had often imagined riding down the Mississippi on the raft, like Huck and Jim, to freedom” (Wells 2011, 121). Furthermore, this reference serves as a topographical foil for Fast genial and illustrates how textual spaces and narrative patterns overlap. Instead of traveling by raft, like Huckleberry Finn, Francis travels by car across the U.S.23 Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Tschick also features such an intertextual parallel. The two 14-year-old boys Maik and Tschick steal a car and drive through Brandenburg. In contrast to Francis in Fast genial, Maik reports the events before, during, and after the journey with a retrospective autodiegetic narrative voice. His view expands to include brief daydreams, which are superimposed on the narrated present in the imitated mode of a cinematic dissolve: “I dangled my feet in the water, and Count Luckner began to talk to me. That’s my favorite book: Count Luckner, The Sea Devil.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 73) Once again, an intertextual reference is deployed in the service of the character’s self-description (cf. Kaulen 2001, 86), for with the quoted episode from the fictional intertext, Maik, as the narrative voice, encapsulates his own situation and foreshadows the course of the coming journey: “He works as a lighthouse keeper and a kangaroo hunter. I mean, he was fifteen. He didn’t know a soul down there. He jumped ship, joined the Salvation Army, then ended up working at the lighthouse hunting kangaroos” (Herrndorf 2014a, 73f. [emphasis in original]). Maik does not subsequently set off by ship or, like Huckleberry Finn, by raft, but he does set off by car.24 In Tschick, further referential elements are attached to the narrative pattern of setting out and proving oneself during the journey, which, in its aimlessness, also manifests in the tradition of Eichendorff’s Taugenichts (cf. Bartsch 2016, 114).25 Within the novel, Tschick develops a hybrid narrative cosmos; referents from literary history as well as pop music, computer games, and the Internet are diegetically present, and also shape the narrative style.26 Intermedial and intertextual quotations establish a narrative system of references in Tschick, through which Maik’s narrative voice describes the scenery, depicts his subjective experience, fans out sensations, and fleshes out the course of the plot. “Media and narration are recurrent themes in Tschick,” which, following Baßler, are also accompanied by “a poetological reflection” (Baßler 2015, 67). Here, in this narrative process, “adolescence experiences are marked, collected, archived” (Gansel 2003, 245), and the novel uses the symbolic capital of intermedial and intertextual references to draw in additional  Tschick is located in a German geographical context, but in the representations of open space the novel also plays with the media semantics of the ‘wild west’. 24  Maik’s insecurity growing up as well as his social isolation are also similar to the cited role model. 25  On intertextuality in Tschick, see also: Arnold 2016. 26  On media use in Tschick, see also: Hoffmann 2019; Baßler 2015. 23

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levels of meaning. For the narrative of adolescence, this principle of citation also shows “how subjectivity is constructed through externalisation, through procedures of writing down and collecting archival material in the first place” (Drügh 2011,130). For the references not only serve as markers of a medial youth culture, but also contribute to the emotional self-description of the characters. The text deftly returns to popular cultural as well as literary elements that semanticise the narrative space. And the narrative voice not only incorporates the different registers into its narrative tone as “pop-cultural poses” (Drügh 2007, 38), but also engages the narrative procedures of pop literature with “this amalgam” (Drügh 2007, 45) by nonchalantly mixing the popular-cultural finds with high-cultural elements. For example, as a vividly rendered storm appears to romantically represent a character’s inner life, that same storm is interwoven with “Independence Day” (Herrndorf 2014a, 105) in Tschick’s commentary and inscribed in a popular film and image canon. Accordingly, Maik describes the location in the pampaesque expanse of Brandenburg against an intermedial foil by drawing on scenarios from “Star Wars” and “Starship Troopers” (Herrndorf 2014a, 114 [emphasis in original]).27 The fact that not all of these intermedial references are part of a contemporary youth cultural archive can be read as an indicator that “the text decidedly [reveals] itself as a text that can be perceived not only as youth literary, but also as general literary” (Hoffmann 2019, 457 [Insertion A.S.]) and is thus to be understood as a crossover novel. The media references in Tschick are not limited to a list, but also influence the narrative style and the representation of the narrated spaces. The text of Tschick oscillates between representations of a space as a “landscape of the soul” (cf. Jung-­ Kaiser 2008, 16) in the Romantic tradition, and the cinematic overforming of the passage in artificial postmodern (narrative) space. It is no coincidence that Herrndorf was asked in an interview in the FAZ whether his novel, as a book of German Romanticism, was written with American (cinemativ) modes of representation (cf. Passig 2011, n.p.). Thus, a village at the end of the journey appears not only as the last topographical threshold location of the transition, but also as the backdrop-like setting of a postmodern Western that refers to Maik’s inner life. The narrative voice captures the panorama of the cinematic setting in its internal figural focalisation: “A crumbling road meandered between derelict buildings [...] No signs, no cars, no vending machines, nothing.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 175 [emphasis A.S.]) Even when there is no tumbleweed blowing across the street, the atmosphere of the Western resonates (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 55) and grows stronger when the last villager, Horst Fricke, abruptly shoots at the two protagonists. In Tschick, what Rajewsky terms the intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 16) shape the narrative space and, in interaction with it, the narrated spaces in the mode of cinematic storytelling. The aesthetic mimics a “visual and aural narrative”

 That these individual references are no longer part of a current youth culture marks an interesting tension. However, these quotations subtly invoke the pattern of the adventure journey, which the novel itself in turn borrows from. 27

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(Kreller 2009, 25) that intertwines with Maik’s internal focalisation. From within the Lada, Maik’s view as a passenger does not result in a headlong rush, but rather a slow tracking shot that focuses on the vastness of the surroundings as well as the bizarreness of the narrated spaces. Maik’s movements through the scenery in Brandenburg – in contrast to his tense experience in Berlin – also appear as a decelerated moment. The “slowing of the pace allows [...the reader] to focus on the intensified perception of nature” (Bartsch 2016, 118 [Insertion A.S.]) and provides insights into Maik’s inner life. In textual form, a pictorial representation of events is suggested as the narrative voice imitates cinematic shots for reference “qua system” (Rajewsky 2002, 12), and seems to film the surroundings: “The front of the Lada peeked out at the landscape” (Herrndorf 2014a, 105). The Lada establishes an elevated vantage point for a camera angle that encompasses the expansive scenery. This establishing shot28 introduces the scenography of the journey and provides insight into the following natural spaces: “A lush green cow pasture sloped steeply away below us, giving us a wide-open view over endless fields, groups of trees, farm roads, hills and ridges, mountains, meadows, and woods” (Herrndorf 2014a, 105). The narrating camera eye looks out of the car with Maik and zooms in on the surroundings. Maik describes his first impressions in the new space as a synaesthetic experience that realises intermedial references on the level of content and representation, while at the same time inscribing the external space with his internal life in the Romantic tradition (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 98). Despite the leisurely pace along the way, the two accidents at the end of the journey are unavoidable. These climaxes are staged in detail according to the genre conventions of the action film.29 In spectacular fashion, the Lada overturns and rolls down a slope. After a brief stop at the hospital, the boys can continue, but there is a final collision with a pig truck on the highway. In slow motion, because Maik, as the narrating self, interjects in retrospect with the thoughts that were racing through his head as the experiencing self during the collision, the two of them finally “rammed straight into the truck” (Herrndorf 2014a, 216). While Tschick and Busfahrt mit Kuhn realise intermedial references on the level of content and performance, in Fast genial these references occur almost exclusively on the plot level.30 In addition to the literary references already mentioned, musical quotations also appear as leitmotifs to describe the character. Francis hears Eminem’s song Lose Yourself (2002) at several points, and his personal dilemma becomes intertwined with the rapper’s lyrics. As a figure of disruption, Eminem is not an accidental reference. Disruption, following Gansel, “occurs when there are confrontations or transgressions of spatial boundaries” (Gansel 2012a, 11). It is precisely this ambivalence that distinguishes Eminem as an artist as he enacts a fractured self-image in his  On the function of this narrative procedure in current children’s and youth literature, see also: Rinnerthaler 2017. 29  Action sequences are a recurring stylistic element. 30  The parallels to the road movie in Fast genial do not arise in a cinematic narrative style, but rather through the motivic constellations. Contrary to the conventions of the genre, music plays no role during the journey. 28

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media appearance and struggles with his trailer park origins (cf. Wells 2011, 299). Nevertheless, he lives the narrative of the American Dream, swinging from underdog to music millionaire, and Francis also yearns for such social advancement. Parenthetically, the reference to Eminem at the beginning and end of the text thus frames Francis’ development and foreshadows an equally ambivalent course, for Eminem’s failure implies a possible failure on Francis’ part: It was said that he was no longer making music for the time being and was addicted to medication. Trying to balance on his different personalities, he had crashed. The star had faded into obscurity, the deadbeat dad from the trailer park had taken over. (Wells 2011, 284)

In Fast genial, references to pop music and rap thus appear less as subcultural vehicles of demarcation than as narrative functions in that the conflict constellations of the plot level are supplemented by the additional dimension of meaning. In Tschick and Busfahrt mit Kuhn, musical references are also a characteristic feature and recurring stylistic device. The texts take up procedures from pop literature and reinterprets them to a certain degree. A narrative tapestry of sound underpins the characters’ searching movement through space and adds supplementary layers of meaning through the musical subtext. In Tschick, music, “as an atmosphere-­creating phenomenon” (Hoffmann 1978, 56), tunes the narrated space.31 Maik and Tschick find an old cassette in the Lada that plays Richard Clayderman’s Ballade pour Adeline (1977) in an endless loop. The two protagonists are not accompanied by the rock song by The White Stripes that suggested a newfound sense of freedom for Maik when he heard it at home (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 73), and thus the sense of identification has shattered with the song. Lexe has noted that in the young adult novel the “interplay between literature and pop music” often “shapes the moment of the identificatory” (Lexe 2006b, 249). This principle is contradicted by Tschick, in that “kind of crap” (Herrndorf 2014a, 99) is not part of the two boys’ preferred repertoire. As Gansel has pointed out for pop literature, often “the ‘theme’ of ego-finding [...] is dealt with using pop [music] as an example” (Gansel 2003, 41). This procedure also subtly counteracts the acoustic reference to Clayderman, for the single-track soundtrack is neither a marker of a youthful subculture32 nor a source of self-­ identification for the two characters. Rather, the steady tapestry of sound evokes despair and underscores that the characters are moving outside their familiar terrain. In Busfahrt mit Kuhn, the musical references take on a similar function: via the quotations embedded in the narrative space, an additional aesthetic-discursive and functional component is added to the narrative space. The polyphonic soundtrack of the text, when intertwined with the movement of the character through the narrated spaces, also conveys an additional semantics, but without an ironic refraction. An extensive soundtrack punctuates Rike’s journey, spelling out her internal passage in  Above that, its topographical thresholds are likewise emphasised, for instance when the boys are caught in a thunderstorm and this movement correlates with the music (cf. Herrndorf 2014, 106). 32  The references to Destiny’s Child’s song Survivor (2002) prove to be such a marker, but Maik characteristically only hears it in Berlin. 31

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the space tuned by the music. Following Lexe, this narrative procedure supports the diegetic atmosphere of each situation to “pre-formulate the process of adolescent self-development” (Lexe 2006a, 76). Accordingly, the musical references appear in Busfahrt mit Kuhn as an identity-forming and identity-determining feature (cf. Gansel 2003, 41). For example, Rike can only articulate her feelings for her classmate Noah through a song that functions for her as a resonating space of the unspeakable: “Because it’s like this stupid song, touched a thousand times. [...] do you know how shitty that is, when you actually don’t like a song at all, but then it’s the song that describes it so accurately?” (Bach 2007, 17f.) This German song describes a platonic friendship that becomes love. For Rike, however, such a development is not on the horizon. Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1993) represents the imaginative longing of Rike’s crush on Noah, which she can no longer escape: “still I can’t escape the ghost of you...” (Bach 2007, 66). The fact that Noah, on the other hand, cannot even remember the song they sang together further highlights the emotional distance between these two characters (cf. Bach 2007, 67).33 As a discursive particle in the open process of Rike’s adolescence, the musical references are complementary sign carriers and support the semantisation of adolescence as a specific life phase of upheaval and in-between, as was already indicated at the beginning of the chapter with reference to Diederichsen. By way of various pop songs, symbolic material thus moves from one cultural sphere into another (cf. Greenblatt 2001, 55), and the literary text becomes the medium by which these processes of change are expressed. These developments in turn correlate with the movement of the main character through the narrated space and inscribe themselves as a topological trace:34 ‘[A]ll my life I’ve been searching for something, something never comes, never leads to nothing, nothing satisfies but I’m getting close, closer to the price at the end of the rope’, then the song gets louder and I want to throw my head against the seat cushion in rhythm. (Bach 2007, 74f.)

The pop music meshes intimately with the topographical construction, the narrative text mimicking the rhythm of the song and condensing the atmosphere of the road trip in constant motion as a time of openness: “We’re having an adventure here! / Then he turns up the music” (Bach 2007, 71). A narrated tapestry of sound accompanies Rike and the sonic allusions reshape her journey as a “polyphonic arrangement reflecting the characters’ mosaic perceptions and experiences” (Lexe 2006a, 81). The musical quotations are differentiated poetological principles and develop complementary interpretive possibilites, adding an auditory dimension to movement as the narrative voice also self-referentially comments, “[t]he radio is droning me  When Rike and Noah then go “to the grandparents’ bedroom with the separate beds” (Bach 2007, 67), the status of their platonic relationship is condensed and inscribed in the spatial arrangement of the diegesis. 34  On the connection between topographical constructions and acoustic codes involving Lotman’s spatial semantics, see also: Rinnerthaler 2015. 33

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down the miles [...] A thousand miles by Vanessa Carlton. My little soundtrack” (Bach 2007, 32). The soundtrack to Rike’s hero’s journey initially emphasises the positive connotations of the uptempo song, but the accompanying lyrics also hint at the ambivalent relationship with her friend Noah and anticipate the tensions to come. Rike’s love for Noah is not reciprocated and the resulting emotional interference is differentiated in the musical subtext (cf. Bach 2007, 66). In the novels considered here, the intertextual, cinematic, and musical references in the narrative space expand the coordinate system of the narrated spaces with additional semantic codings, and the texts establish a reference game with semantic material that connects to procedures in pop literature. However, these references fulfil different functions in that, on the plot level, they characterise the characters, condense conflicts, or trigger complementary dimensions of meaning. On the level of representation, the intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 16) influence the narrative style and thus the staging of the narrated spaces as an artificial postmodern backdrop.

3.3 Narrated Spaces in Motion In the genre of the road novel, the successive movement of the characters through narrated space is central. The topological trace of the journey manifests itself in varying stations in the narrated space and becomes usually most extensively apparent in narrative time and narrated time. However, it is still important to consider why the characters set out, because to determine the function of the movement, the trigger for setting out must also be examined. Therefore, in the following chapter, the initial situations of the protagonists will be explored in order to trace the paths of the subsequent journeys and their functions.

3.3.1 Outbreaks and Break-ups: Dysfunctional Family Spaces In Busfahrt mit Kuhn, the adolescence of 19-year-old Rike is marked by the metaphorical, but also topological process of searching. After graduating from high school, Rike finds herself at a life-historical parting of the ways uncertain of how to proceed, and she sets out on a journey from the north to the south of Germany to attend a concert (not coincidentally). Rike’s uncertainty not only refers to a topographical disorientation, but also gives insight into an indeterminacy of self-­ realisation. The prospect of eventually finding direction remains at a distance: “It goes on. We get up. And start walking. And at some point, our going will also have a direction” (Bach 2007, 159). Before that, however, there is a process of experimentation, searching, and doubting that outlines the core aspects of adolescence as a threshold and transitional period. The path taken during the road trip is laid out in the text as a developmental track that inscribes these processes in the narrative space. Before Rike can set off, she uses a ruse to steal her older brother’s old VW bus, thus staging the journey as a normative transgression of boundaries by crossing

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what Lotman understands to be a classificatory boundary (cf. Lotman 1977, 237) with her departure. Analogous to the novel’s title, the ensuing journey takes centre stage, tracing a self-search on the road and paying less attention to the conditions in the initial space. In the corpus of this thesis, the novel nevertheless occupies a key position in that the text marks an intersection between postmodern adolescent novels, pop literature, and a new current in the narration of adolescence.35 Rike’s journey takes place at a biographical breaking point: After the end of her school years, previously valid structures dissolve and she must determine her path anew. The protagonist repeatedly questions her own part in the developmental task of adolescence and doubts whether she can meet these challenges. She is aware that her high school graduation average noticeably limits the choices that are actually open to her, as she defiantly comments, “What the hell. I never wanted to study medicine. It’s a shame I can’t choose not to now either. It’s like I have a choice” (Bach 2007, 16). In a departure from the motivic cast of pop literature or the postmodern adolescent novel with protagonists who allow themselves to drift aimlessly through their present in the “pursuit of one sensory pleasure to another” (Kaulen 1999a, 332), here a greater awareness of open biographical status moves into the narrative centre and is problematised from Rike’s viewpoint. Although the character has a concrete goal in mind for the journey – the concert at the national border – the path to it is still open for her. The novel, as traced in the previous chapter, follows postmodern procedures on the level of discours – which is emphasised in the play with the textual form of the script – on the level of histoire, however, the plot conflict shifts. Rike wrestles with the direction of her life while her friends already have concrete plans for the time after graduating from high school. Rike comes to terms with the crisis associated with this openness herself – the parental figures are not present. Home and family move into the background,36 and in this constellation the novel is still close to pop literature or the postmodern adolescence novel (cf. Gansel 2003, 243). Rike does not fight with her parents about her plans and there is no tension-laden distinction. In their absence, however, the parents are also symbolic of flattening family hierarchies and a potential for self-development that is no longer inhibited by guidelines. The departure therefore serves a different function for Rike than for the protagonists in Tschick and Fast genial. Rike does not break free from a dysfunctional family space; rather, with the end of her school years, the focus is on a period in her life that is accompanied by a planned rupture. The maturity test of the Abitur, which is the highest German school-leaving qualification, introduces a new phase for Rike in which she is left alone with her doubts. She mulls over her own power to decide and act, which arises against an open but at the same time groundless horizon of plural possibilities. Contrary to the staging of characters in the postmodern adolescent novel, who, according to Kaulen, are “no  Moreover, Busfahrt mit Kuhn features a female protagonist on a journey, which means that counter-­gendered inscriptions of the road novel must also to be considered. 36  At school, Rike is not a typical outsider; she “somehow belongs without standing out” (Mikota/ Oehme 2016a, 22). More about the school in Busfahrt mit Kuhn, see further: Schwander 2014, 59. 35

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longer grasped as autonomous characters trying to shape their lives self-consciously” (Kaulen 1999a, 332), Rike’s character appears as a divergent alternative model. This suggests a new conflict: Rike is overwhelmed by her options, deals with it self-critically, and tries to design plans that make a consolidated self-image as a concept seem desirable again. The topographical stations of the journey, and thus implicitly the pattern of the rite of passage, provide a framework that Rike has so far lacked for orientation. In the chronotope of the journey, a life-historical in-between space emerges for the protagonist that allows her to play through various future designs in a manner analogous to that of the narrative procedure of the screenplay described above. In this way, the novel proves to be an interesting combination of narrative and content elements from pop literature, postmodern adolescent novels, and ritualised narrative patterns, while simultaneously realigning these building blocks to serve the logical constellation of conflicts in the plot, as Rike longs for a consolidated self-image and struggles with her dissolution of boundaries. Herrndorf’s novel Tschick also realises a combination of narrative and motivic set pieces. The 14-year-old protagonists Maik and Tschick do not yet have to plan their time after school, however questions of identity, self-search, and self-­ positioning nevertheless drive the autodiegetic narrator Maik. He doubts himself and his social connection to a non-existent circle of friends and misses the attention of his parents: “You could be boring and have no friends.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 15 [emphasis in original]), is Maik’s sober self-assessment at the beginning. The first part of the novel addresses the dysfunctional conditions in detail and establishes Maik as a figure of brooding and reflection on his own situation. In doing so, the novel also reveals the “not always so radiant flip side [...] that hides behind the liberal surface of contemporary socialisation conditions” (Kaulen 1999b, 8). Maik struggles with the loss of family ties and is left to his own devices most of the time; this process of isolation is symptomatic of the care situation: when Maik comes home after school, he finds only a note indicating that his food is in the refrigerator. Parental bonds, especially between Maik and his father, are correspondingly chilly.37 In this respect, the apparent material prosperity of the family proves to be a deceptive façade that offers little in terms of emotional support. Maik’s insecurities, which are further intensified by the physical and social changes during his incipient adolescence, are rooted in the dysfunctional family space. The text thus negotiates a new facet of conflict – or rather, the family is reactualised as a field of disturbance  – and shows an adolescent protagonist who is embedded in a network of dysfunctional relationships and who has to deal with parents who, as postmodern subjects, are also struggling with themselves. Maik’s mother goes to an alcohol withdrawal clinic, his father faces financial ruin and goes on a trip with his mistress, whereupon Maik remains alone for 14 days and his parents, significantly, do not even notice his outburst at first.

 Maik’s relationship with his mother, on the other hand, is not template-like negative, but drawn with positive overtones. 37

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The conditions of togetherness, which are prone to disruption, are inscribed in the semanticised coordinate system of the narrated world and are contrasted with the family space and the stations of the journey. This emphasis is reflected in the structure of the narrative space. In addition to the actual road trip, the text illuminates Maik’s tense experience in Berlin in detail in the first one hundred pages and illustrates the problematic family and social ties. That these correlate with the urban space of the metropolis and contrast with freedom in the natural space of the surrounding area also points to a shift in spatial semantics. Here, the city is not an open space of experience but rather a signifier of disruption and irritation.38 While Tschick’s milieu of origin – a high-rise housing estate in Berlin Marzahn – is only touched upon in passing, without problematising it with a voyeuristic gaze, Maik’s living environment moves to the centre of the text.39 The fact that Maik lives with his family in a large villa with a pool in Marzahn appears in the extra-textual reality as a virtually impossible constellation. Thus, although reference is made to the real geographical space (cf. Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 154) of Berlin, the specifics of the district as a so-called social hotspot are counteracted. In this tense modification of space, the plot location appears as a deliberately artificial setting in which Maik appears in every respect as a foreign body. The exceptional status of the apartment building in Marzahn, just like Maik’s experience of everyday school life and family togetherness, emphasises his isolation. An abandoned children’s playground, topologically located (not coincidentally) between the house and the school, functions within the semantic expanse of the city as an ambivalent in-between and retreat space for Maik that condenses his experience of isolation. Maik finds himself in a social in-between as well as a developmental psychological in-between, and this liminality is manifested in his location within the topological no man’s land of the narrated world. Maik’s movements in the action space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 80) circle restlessly around the playground; the fact that this playground is surrounded by a wasteland further underlines Maik’s isolation in the correspondingly dreary space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 55). The wasteland thus acts as a topographical threshold, marking Maik as a figure on the sidelines and emphasising his fragile self-perception: So I followed the route for the third time of the day, past the piles of dirt and the playground at the edge of the wasteland. I climbed up the lookout tower of the play fort and sat down. It was a wooden tower with a fence built partway around it so little kids could play cowbowys and Indians. If there’d been any little kids around. But I’d never seen a little kid there. Or even an older kid or adult for that matter. Not even junkies slept there. I was the only one ever there, sitting up in the tower when I felt crappy, where nobody could see me. To the east you could see the high-rises of Hellersdorf. To the north, Weiden Lane wandered off beyond the bushes, and farther on was a colony of little summer cabins. But around the playground was absolutely nothing, just a wide open wasteland that had originally been a construction site. (Herrndorf 2014a, 58f.)

 On the theme of rich and poor conveyed in this novel, see further: Roeder 2012.  The fading out is staged cinematically, as the camera eye follows the character Tschick from Maik’s view and finally loses sight of him in a fade out (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 63). 38 39

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In its elevated position, the tower extends the topography of the narrated world into a vertical dimension40 and opens up an unobstructed view of the surroundings. From there, Maik can observe the surrounding prairie of the viewing space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 93), while remaining unseen. These axes of vision convey a displaced agency that reverses Maik’s experience of powerlessness in everyday life. At the same time, this spatial arrangement also hints at the end of Maik’s childhood. The playground never fulfilled its original function, – cowboy and Indian play, though theoretically possible, is not practiced there.41 Other characters who prototypically stand beyond the normative social system, such as the (missing) aforementioned junkies, also no longer stray into the playground. Following Foucault, the tower thus appears as a heterotopic space that stands “outside all places” (Foucault 1986, 24), accessible only to Maik and bringing the rules of the narrated world into tension. There, Maik is able to combine in a single place several spaces, which are in themselves incompatible (cf. Foucault 1986, 25). This mechanism takes hold in the demarcation via the wasteland, which, when contrasted with the intact surroundings of the normative world, such as the allotment colony visible in the distance, emphasises Maik’s loneliness and thus makes “idyll and alienation [...] appear only a few blocks apart” (Kalteis 2011, 13). Maik stands on this ambiguous threshold, and the text identifies him as a liminal figure in the topological arrangement. The spatial superimposition as well as the in-between-ness in the playground work in yet another direction, highlighting Maik’s unrequited love for his classmate Tatiana. In his place of observation, Maik imagines the location of her room and brings together the spaces that are apart: I also admit there was another reason I hung around that playground. From up there on the top of the tower you could see two white apartment buildings. The buildings are behind the colony of summer cabins, somewhere beyond the woods. And Tatiana lives in one of them. I never knew where exactly, but there’s a window at the top of the building on the left where you can see a green light whenever the sun starts to go down. For whatever reason, I just decided that was where she lived. (Herrndorf 2014a, 60)

In its symbolic charge, the green light that references F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) builds the bridge between the two rooms that Maik longs for. For the first time, Maik can overcome the distance to Tatiana experienced in his everyday life and make his affection more real: “I peer through the cracks between the boards and carve letters in the wood with my keys” (Herrndorf 2014a, 60f.). Maik attempts to appropriate space through engraving, but fails with this territorialisation strategy, for he only scratches the indiscriminate letters into the surface. Maik uses  On the forms and functions of tree houses, see also: Sowa 2014. Vertically, the cellar in the apartment building serves as the counterspace to the tower and highlights the moment of burying and wanting to hide in a negative light. 41  At the same time, the tower refers to a Western motif and semantics that are later taken up in the depiction of Brandenburg. 40

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the fairy tale prop of the key as a symbol for opening up new spaces of thought and experience. In Berlin, however, this procedure is depotentiated and not yet successful in its application: Maik is not noticed by Tatiana and, analogously, the signature fails. The moment of dysfunction associated with Maik’s social relations is also implied in the fallow land that refers to the tensions within the family, for it was precisely this fallow land that triggered the family’s financial ruin, when Maik’s father’s investments in the development failed. As a result, the family’s wealth literally lies fallow, and figuratively so to does their togetherness. Maik’s isolated existence, both at school and in his family, thus fits seamlessly into the negative connotations of the wasteland. Accordingly, Maik eventually imagines a horror scenario that prefigures a symbolic death and the end of his childhood: “I pictured myself hanging from the playground lookout tower by a rope.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 61) Maik’s lonliness is narrated via the scenography, the passage in the image of the wasteland, which does not allow for any functional bonds and thus embeds him in a dysfunctional structure (cf. Zapf 2008, 33).42 Such isolation also marks the central point of conflict in adolescence for the 17-year-old protagonist in Fast genial, Francis, and comes to a head in the topological order. Francis lives with his mother, pushed to the edge in a run-down trailer park on the outskirts of the small US town of Claymont. This living space is characterised by its negative connotations, for the small town appears as a limited as well as a limiting space of action in which the protagonist is stuck (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 80). The symbolic spatial order within the small town maps a social hierarchy with Francis at the bottom. In a narrative zooming out, the semantic field of the narrated world gradually expands and, in macro-­ perspectival terms, establishes impermeable boundaries for Francis, which, in their uncrossability (cf. Lotman 1977, 237), emphasise his marginal social position. The big city of New York, while in close topological proximity to Claymont, remains for Francis the unattainable of the American Dream. The small town stands in opposition to the city as a dysfunctional antipole and, in semantic occupation, as the image of a failed existence: “All those lost figures who couldn’t get anything done, who didn’t have it in them to ever lift anything big.” (Wells 2011, 57) A fleeting movement, as experienced by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, resonates as an implied textual spatial overlay, but is expressly denied Francis in his frozen immobility. Such “correlative” topographical contrasts shape the structure of the narrated world and are realised as leitmotifs in Fast genial, “so that the overall spatial order [...] has a commentary function” (Haupt 2004, 79). The interplay of the micro and macro levels of spatial structure reveal “a graduated system of semantic borders […] on the basis of a hierarchy of binary oppositions” (Lotman 1977, 238)

 In the episode, Maik’s speech style shifts, echoing his father’s aggressive habitus and adopting swear words from his father’s vocabulary (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 61). When Maik reports on his father’s failed speculation, he picks up on his father’s thought pattern and shows how he is shaped by his father’s thuggish tone. 42

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within the narrative world: within Claymont, the area of the trailer park43 lies on the outskirts of the city opposite the centre; the small town of Claymont in turn lies opposite the big city of New York; the east of the country positions itself opposite the west of the USA. Francis, as a character, is always on the wrong side of the spatial continuum and is correspondingly marked (identified) in this assignment in the narrated space (cf. Wells 2011, 17). Francis’ living environment and the depiction of the trailer park are at times clichéd exaggerations. In its heterotopic structure, the area appears as a counter-space to a normalised social order that exists as one of those places that society maintains at its margins (cf. Foucault 1986, 24). In this space, parts of society are pushed away, the inhabitants live at the subsistence level and remain in a death-in-life state (cf. Zapf 2008, 15ff.), which excludes them from social and professional life outside this space. The representation of non-movement is crucial here – the trailers were originally intended as an interim solution, but the residents have since become stranded and stuck there. According to Augé’s theorisation of the function of a transit space, the non-place of the trailer park does not confer an identity (cf. Augé 2011). The living space of the trailer is limited to a minimum and Francis had to sort out many of his belongings during the move there. The loss of personal belongings, relics of memory, and a private space of retreat underlines the dysfunctional construction of these spaces. The perverse irony of the tailer park lies in the fact that the mobility envisaged for the caravan becomes its opposite and subsequently inhibits movement (cf. Wells 2011, 18). Francis believes that his prospects are explicitly blocked by the transformations at work in the trailer park: He moves along a continuum of prejudice, his own ambition, and the ever-present possibility of failure, which seems to be anchored to and inherent in his origins. The disadvantages of Francis’ starting position in are reinforced by his family situation. He has never met his father and his mother is mentally ill, so that he has to hospitalise her regularly and the roles of responsibility within the family are reversed. Similar to Tschick, the beginning of Fast genial initially focuses on the protagonist’s tense experience in his initial space and establishes a motionlessness that results not only from his marginal topological position, but also from his familial isolation. The very first sentences of the text mark this field of tension and abruptly introduce a dispute between mother and son: “I’m going to run!” / As he often did, Francis sat in the clinic, his mother beside him. The chair was too small for him, the back of it pressing into his back. He closed his eyes and imagined himself jumping off a cliff and diving headfirst into the sea. This is freedom, he thought / Meanwhile, his mother kept talking, “I’m going to get out of here or sue my way out. This is all your fault, Francis, you’ve ruined my life!” (Wells 2011, 11)

 Francis not only experiences rejection there, however; together with his neighbor Toby, he discusses the oppressive conditions of the trailer park, thus also fulfilling the meta-reflexive moment of a heterotopia (cf. Foucault 1986, 24). This further connects to an intermedial horizon of reference, for Toby produces texts himself: “He called them trailer park diaries. They were about the people from their settlement being in chains and just not knowing it” (Wells 2011, 90f.). 43

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The fact that the longing for departure is formulated here not by the adolescent protagonist but by his mother suggests a displaced familial structure; and Francis’ mother’s defiant apportioning of blame further consolidates the complete role reversal. She lapses into a childlike position in the wake of her illness, and her son must care for her. In this respect, the hospital is a spatialised image of Francis’ crisis and a symbol of the excessive demands placed upon him in the course of parentification. He bears the responsibility for his mentally ill mother, who blames him for this situation. As the chair with its oppressive backrest, which has become too small, symbolises, Francis can no longer remain in this inhibiting structure and must free himself from it. The initially only conceivable breakaway, which quietly confronts his mother’s grumbling complaint, is realised as Francis’ road trip progresses. In this context, the hospital also functions as a threshold and meeting place that, detached from social background, allows for the first contact between Francis and the young woman Anne-May, because only “in this parallel world, where medication [...] was more important than money, intelligence or background, only here did she belong to him” (Wells 2011, 84). Anne-May and Francis’ mother, as figures linked to specific spaces in the semantic field (cf. Lotman 1977, 97) of the microcosm, mark two important points in his journey from boyhood to manhood. One is the woman who gave birth to him, the other is the woman with whom he has sex for the first time and who subsequently gives him the impetus to move away from the initial space (cf. Wells 2011, 39).44 Hurst emphasises that such symbolic and ritualised practices mark the transition from childhood to adulthood and reestablish a cycle of death and rebirth in the narrative of adolescence (cf. Hurst 2002, 259). In this respect, the hospital proves to be a multiply coded threshold site between life phases that begin and end. This transition is also evident in the renaming that takes place there, for Anne-May, after they have slept together, calls Francis only Dean. The subsequent departure correlates with the mother’s renewed suicide attempt in the hospital and further highlights the beginning of detachment in her symbolic near-death. Fast genial is concerned at various levels with the drawing of borders, the associated socially marginal positions, and the identity constructions behind them, which are contoured by the contrasting spatial semantics. Francis is stuck within this structure and crossing the threshold that is “the basic topological border” (Lotman 1977, 238) seperating Claymont from the West, is not feasible for him on his own: “For years everything had been so pliable, so open, now everything seemed to harden, to become cold and solid” (Wells 2011, 29).45 It is only with the help of Anne-May and

 The end of this period of his life is coupled with the death of Francis’ cat. He got this cat when he was a little boy and it lies dead in front of the trailer in the evening; and the ritual funeral ceremony that follows serves as a symbolic farewell to his childhood (cf. Wells 2011, 58). In this respect, an interesting parallel arises with Es war einmal Indianlerland, when the protagonist Mauser buries a wild boar. 45  On immobility, see also: Hoffmann 1978, 594. 44

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his friend Grover that Francis is able to break free from his stagnation and embark on his journey across the United States.46 In Herrndorf’s novel Tschick, the eponymous character plays a similar role for the protagonist Maik. Tschick is necessary as a catalyst to free Maik from his paralysed state in the dysfunctional initial space when, in his despair, a literal immobility has seized him: “I cried, pressing my forehead onto the cold tile floor and doubling over. I cried on the floor about half an hour.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 67) It is only as Tschick’s awakens him that Maik reexplores his radius of action and crosses the classificatory boundary that separates Berlin and Brandenburg.47 The protagonists of both novels are not rebellious rebels in the tradition of the modern adolescent novel, but paralysed characters who struggle with their conditions and threaten to break in isolation. Fast genial and Tschick, are linked by the dysfunctional occupation of the familial space, in which social roles are reshuffled, the adolescent characters are left to their own devices, and as a result the protagonists must break free from the resulting deadlock. In Busfahrt mit Kuhn, on the other hand, Rike appears as a (self-)determined character who decides to set out on her own, but also struggles with her search for herself. A comparison of the three novels thus reveals a gradual shift in which the family space and conflicts with parents are problematised in new ways and protagonists are established who long for fixed structures.

3.3.2 Chronotope Journey: Stopovers The previous chapter has emphasised that the causes of the protagonists’ travel movements are rooted in a dysfunctional initial space, and that they embark on a search for stability. The unifying feature of the texts is the contrast between the initial conditions and those of the travel period. The schematic sequence of the rite of passage – departure, probation, and return – remains an important point of reference for contemporary road novels. Following Hurst, travelers thereby “change their mental, psychological, and emotional points of reference” (Hurst 2002, 268). Transitions into new phases of life are often represented in youth literature in terms of a movement through space (cf. Galling 2016; Neumann 2000; Roeder 2014, 17),48 but departure fulfils a different function here. Thus, the question arises as to how the paths of the journey are shaped in detail and what occupations are associated with them. In the chronotope of the journey, everyday routine is switched off, the conventional course of time is halted, and the journey opens up an alternative counter-space  On the aspect of the narrated scavenger hunt, see also: Stemmann 2016b.  Parallels likewise arise with Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland, wherein Edda serves as a catalyst figure to break Mauser free from the disruptive space of the big city. 48  On the tradition of the travel novel, see also: Pleticha 1979. 46 47

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in which the characters can “make acquaintance with themselves “ (Kreller 2009, 23).49 The journey can thus be read in two ways: either by considering the path structure of the action space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 590f.) and the traces of movement that the characters follow through the narrated space, whichthus contour the action space; or, by considering the symbolic and semantic charge of these paths, when the way of getting away, the changes of direction, and fraying traces provide insights into a gruelling self-search and thematise the loss of structure during adolescence (cf. Gerhard/Grünzweig/Link/Parr 2003, 7).50 In Busfahrt mit Kuhn, the protagonist Rike moves along the fragile edges of the self, and her in-between existence finds its chronotopic equivalent in the spatial semantic order of the text. The journey is a spatialised expression of a self-image, which is still open and for which it is necessary to come to terms with a multiplicity of choices. In Rike’s movement through space, her future “life curve” (Gerhard/ Grünzweig/Link/Parr 2003, 8) successively gains contour in the course of the plot, and the travel time fulfils the function of a moratorium,51 since decisions can still be postponed as Rike tries out various alternatives. The semantic field of the narrated world clarifies Rike’s liminal existence, as with her departure she crosses the classificatory boundary (cf. Lotman 1977, 237). With this crossing she is not assigned anymore to the space of her childhood, and she becomes a threshold figure in a moving topological and social in-between. During the journey, the space-time continuum that exists outside the confines of her former everyday world enables her to move into new and unfamiliar roles. The narrative pattern of the rite of passage is inherent in the structure of the journey and appears as an element guiding the action, which, also reveals Rike’s open self-image in the semantic inscriptions of Turner’s antistructure linked to the stations. As expressions of other, “non-spatial relations of the text” (Lotman 1977, 232), the spatial order and the movement between subspaces thus provide insight into Rike’s developmental process. Significantly, Rike and the other characters also act beyond the usual rules of everyday life, consistently drinking alcohol and successively inscribing the efforts of the journey as visible traces on Rike’s body. The individual stations of the journey are “causally linked” (Hoffmann 1978, 597) in sequence and run towards the final destination at the southern border of the country, both topologically and metaphorically. This also hints at a “cyclical conception of time” (Hoffmann 1978, 364) that points to an advancing change: “Summer promises every year something great to look for” (Bach 2007, 39). In seasonal symbolism, the period of summer appears as an indicator of the end of childhood.52 As a mobile heterotopia, like a “piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over” (Foucault 1986,  On the interpretation of self-searching in didactic terms, see also: Rauch 2014; Rauch 2012.  On the allegorical-symbolic capital of the path structure, see also: Hoffmann 1978, 597. 51  On the youth literary occupation of the moratorium, see also: Glasenapp 2014. 52  On Bach’s summer feeling, see further: Portugal 2016, 27. 49 50

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27), the VW bus becomes an equally meaning-bearing element that guides Rike through the narrated world and in this arrangement calls all other spaces into question (cf. Foucault 1986, 24). In the constant movement, Rike’s searching state of being in-between is made clear, for she has not yet found a fixed place and instead heads for changing stations of temporary duration. With the designation Kuhn, the car, which is not coincidently a van, develops an identity of its own and becomes the personified companion who shows Rike the way: “The bus acts as if it knows the way.” (Bach 2007, 32) Following Foucault, the subspaces of the journey exhibit heterotopic characteristics and open up counterspaces as heterotopias of “compensation” (Foucault 1986, 37) that lie “outside of all places” (Foucault 1986, 24), follow rules that deviate from everyday life (cf. Foucault 1986, 26), and in this orientation allow Rike in particular to play through different models of life. In the autodiegetic narrative voice and the figural focalisation of Rike, the stations are colored and semanticised accordingly to her subjective view. The narrated spaces of the journey are relevant not only in their materiality, but also according to the characters appearing in them, who represent different models of life as placeholders. With Hoffmann, the places and persons intertwine “in the sense of a [...] determinant [...] relationship” (Hoffmann 1978, 602) and together the couplings provide insight into the diversity of possible self-images. Rike’s hosts are exemplary orientation figures for scenarios of an adult life. While these figures are already bound to a fixed location, Rike can still move flexibly between them.53 Although she crosses a classificatory boundary out of her initial space, she does not come to a standstill in the “anti-field” (Lotman 1993, 241) and does not yet have to commit herself. The first stop with Rike’s cousin Ben, who is only a few years older, is located in topological proximity to her home and is associated with a positive semantics of a remembered childhood feeling: “How idyllic!” (Bach 2007, 37). Accordingly, this stop evokes various childhood memories in Rike (cf. Bach 2007, 39), which in turn initiate her slow detachment from this status: “I spread out the blanket. The horse blanket. I loved it as a child, now I’m almost a little embarrassed by it” (Bach 2007, 40). The horse blanket, which appears as the last relic of childhood, almost loses its significance for Rike. This detail reveals the oscillations at work in the ambiguous in-between of adolescence. Rike is moved into a state of trying things out, which serves the narrative game of the script: “We play nice time, we play holidays. We’re playing breakfast at Ben’s one more time.” (Bach 2007, 48) They are still playing an adulthood and the route of the journey is the playground.54 The second station is located in rural central Germany and, with the inhabitants living there, represents a traditional image of the family that, through its unspecific  On the aspect of mobility, see further: Hoffmann 1978, 591ff.  Accordingly, at the end of the novel Rike sits down with Noah on this blanket for the last time and lets the events pass by in a stream of consciousness: “We stop. We get off. A mountain. A tree, room for the bus. Trails without hikers, a bird in the sky. Noah spreads out the horse blanket” (Bach 2007, 128). 53 54

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localisation, is a universal placeholder for a village-like, conservative attitude to life. Aunt Hilde, who lives there, is a corresponding figuration of an old-fashioned image of women (cf. Bach 2007, 58f.; 68). With grandmother Tilly, a single and autonomous woman in her mid-sixties, a complementary (female) image is juxtaposed with this life concept at the third station in the Taunus.55 The fourth station completes the round of possible (female) lifestyles with Rike’s friend Marlene, who has forgotten about the visit and is on an unplanned trip. In her absence, she becomes the functional counterfoil of a consolidated lifestyle and performs a spontaneous openness (cf. Bach 2007, 98). Hilde, Tilly, and Marlene each represent different images of women, which Rike encounters on the journey at the individual stops as possible visions of the future and in which she plays along for a day at a time (cf. Bach 2007, 31). In this respect, the characters are also linked to different gender roles in their respective spaces, while Rike has yet to make a final commitment. With the journey from the north to the south of the country, Busfahrt mit Kuhn successively depicts the movement, but also the development of the character, in a macro-perspective. The topological stations seem to be set almost arbitrarily, because the focus is on Rike’s encounters with other characters in these spaces, and the text does not work with the real-geographical semantic material of the action space. Fast genial, on the other hand, features such an approach. The novel is an exception in the textual corpus of this study because the “background space” (Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 152) of the plot ties it into a non-European geographical context. This raises the question of whether the change of location also has an impact on the representation of adolescence, or whether a different adolescence is being narrated. The character Francis lives in the USA, and this space appears as a foil against which the observations of the representation of adolescence made so far also take place. The interplay of topographical semantics associated with this is interesting, for while novels such as Tschick or Es war einmal Indianerland subliminally invoke media semantics of US-American landscapes56 and project them onto a German context, Fast genial makes use of this spatial semantic panorama. As a “cognitive trigger [...] the action space USA complements the explicit spatial information of the text” (Martínez/Scheffel 2012, 152), and in this semantic coding the narrated space of the USA is a projection surface for the longings of the protagonist. The direction of movement towards the West not only follows the stations of the rite of passage, but also resonates with the narrative of the American Dream of social advancement (cf. Gerhard/Grünzweig/Link/Parr 2003, 7). In Fast genial, the exact destination is initially indeterminate, and as the protagonist moves in an exploratory manner across boundaries, the novel takes shape with reference to the frontier narrative.57 The vastness of the US landscape appears as an  The contrast between the characters is brought to a head in the practices of food preparation, as Tilly serves light salad instead of heavy home cooking (cf. Bach 2007, 77). 56  On the semantics of U.S. topographies, see also: Sauer-Kretschmer/ Bachmann 2014. 57  See further: Hoffmann 1978, 593. On the open road as a continuation of the frontier narrative, see also: Freese 1971, 161. 55

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inscription surface for Francis’ wishful thinking. His movement through space is not an indicator of directionless rebellion, but an expression of an unsubstantiated “inner drive” (Hoffmann 1978, 593). This results from the tense family conditions, as the previous chapter has shown. Francis’ experience during the journey oscillates between an exhilarating sense of freedom and an uncertainty about this openness. Although the plot focuses on Francis, the narrative is not told from the first-person perspective and the design of the narrated spaces is authorially shaped and neutrally descriptive (with a few exceptions) and not the subjective construction of an autodiegetic narrator. As a visual space, this representation is thus narratively detached from the “atmospheric relation to the subject” (Hoffmann 1978, 92). Insights into the character psyche are provided primarily by the direction of movement through space. The path structure serves as a “connecting line between these spaces” (Hoffmann 1978, 590) and can be read in its semantic inscriptions as a cipher for Francis’s inner life. In this respect, Hoffmann points to a close interrelationship between space, path, and time (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 591). The path structure in Fast genial is therefore only superficially chaotic; in fact, the structure is both “causal” and “purposefully sequential” (Haupt 2004, 79) in its overall order and has a narrative function. As at the intermediate stops Francis successively gathers information about his unknown father, which allows him to become manifest, and consolidates his own self-image. The text only indirectly recounts changes that affect Francis and instead focuses on the search for the phantom father. The vague prospect of finding the father acts as a compass, and strange men they pass along the way become screens onto which Francis projects his expectations (cf. Wells 2011, 213). The eventual meeting with his father, however, not only involves the prospect of a reconciliatory reunion, but it also resonates with a fear of rejection: “He would have preferred simply to have been on the road to him all his life without ever arriving” (Wells 2011, 202). The uncertainty of not knowing contains the possibility of maintaining the ideal image of his father, while with the actual meeting surfaces the possibility of rejection. After eleven days of travel, the tour group reaches the Mexican border, which Francis symbolically crosses on foot over a large bridge.58 The outsourcing of the destination to Tijuana, in its renewed topographical marginalisation, reflects the location of Francis’s home and foreshadows a possible failure: “At that moment Francis became aware that Tijuana did not actually belong to Mexico, but with all its shadowy sides still belonged to them. It was the rat’s tail of the United States” (Wells 2011, 270). There Francis encounters the spatialised shadow side of the American Dream and the abysses of his own self-image; for upon meeting his father, his ideal crumbles inexorably as his father proves to be a penniless fraud. Maik and Tschick also experience such an abrupt interruption of their journey and a disillusionment when they collide with a truck on the highway and their aimless 58

 Maik and Tschick also perform such a symbolic crossing at the end of their journey.

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journey comes to an end. As a leitmotif, the text establishes a chaotic movement before this, which picks up on Maik’s inner state of psychological disorder and condenses it in the climax of the accident. Along the individual stages of the journey, however, the novel also tells of the reformatting of a self-image whose consolidation is hinted at in the correlation of inner and outer movement, without assuming a fixed form at the end. This ambivalence is already hinted at in the intended destination of Wallachia proclaimed at the beginning.59 Maik and Tschick argue about the actual locatability of Wallachia versus its synonymous meaning of a non-­existent territory: “Wallachia is just a word, man, […]. It’s just an expression! Like East Bumfuck or the sticks!” (Herrndorf 2014a, 91). Nevertheless, they set out to get there, even as Maik continues to doubt: “That’s not exactly how normal people do it.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 90 [emphasis in original]). In addition to the ironic play with terminology, Wallachia’s destination manifests the open path structure of their journey and the resulting dissolution of the characters’ boundaries. They do not pursue an actual arrival; they merely force a departure. Wallachia is cast as a place of longing and an “escape space” (Schlupp 2016, 127)60 that cannot be located and that opens the imaginative counter-space to the negatively connoted starting space of Berlin. Their destination thus also appears as a “metaphor for the directionless distance” (Bartsch 2016, 116) that detaches them from the space of their paralysis. Although Maik initially struggles with the ambivalent formulation of the destination – “if you go somewhere, it’s helpful to know where you’re going” (Herrndorf 2014a, 91) – he nevertheless allows Tschick to persuade him to set off. Analogous to Maik’s uncertainty, the preparations for the trip are equally confused. They hijack the Lada at night, take barely functional luggage with them – “badminton racquets, a huge stack of manga, four pairs of shoes [...], six frozen pizzas” (Herrndorf 2014a, 96f.)61 – and set off without mobile phones or maps. The uncoordinated route, for they have no navigational aids with them, leads the two boys to the remotest corners of the narrated world. The spatial motif of the open road is linked to media semantics of the freedom of US landscapes and transferred to a Brandenburg context. The imperative to go west is ironically reversed as the characters are compelled to go east. As they arrive in the ‘wild west’ of the east, they enter a terra incognita of seemingly infinite expanse upon leaving the metropolitan area.62 From Maik’s narrative perspective, this open corridor of movement becomes an empty canvas for his personal projections. The journey’s prelude therefore begins with a cleansing storm that initiates a turnaround in the perception of landscape from Maik’s figural focalisation (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 98). When the boys leave the familiar territory of Berlin by car, this crossing of the threshold of the classificatory boundary (cf. Lotman 1977, 237) is synaesthetically  On the semantics of Wallachia and its function in Tschick see further: Schlupp 2016, 127ff.  On the depiction of the journey in Tschick, see further: Schaefers 2014, 207ff. 61  On the staging of the nocturnal departure, see further: Stemmann 2016g. 62  On the occupations of ‘the East’ in Tschick, see further: Baßler 2015, 76ff. 59 60

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charged in the tuned space and thus marked as “a meaningful departure from the norm” (Lotman 1977, 234). As if lifting a veil from Maik’s hitherto befogged vision, he encounters “a totally different world” (Herrndorf 2014a, 98) just beyond the city limits. This is intermedially shaped from his viewpoint and filled with bright colors and sounds in rich “surround sound” (Herrndorf 2014a, 98) invigorating the event of revival. The boys continue from there as if they have “landed in some alternate reality” (Herrndorf 2014a, 109). In order to be able to leave their previous world and enter this very parallel world, Maik and Tschick steal a car. In doing so, they appropriate a space that is usually reserved for adults – the space of the authorised driver. According to Risholm, their journey proves to be a temporary phase of “denormalisation” (Risholm 2003, 110), which lifts the two boys out of their everyday life. Maik observes that: “But there is a difference between sitting in a car with adults who are talking about construction-grade concrete and Angela Merkel, and being in a car with no adults and no chitchat” (Herrndorf 2014a, 98). It is no coincidence that they drive around in an old damaged Lada, as the “aesthetic, symbolic and narrative potential of the car” (Risholm 2003, 107) – in this case the deranged condition of the car – underlines their psychological state.63 The Lada functions for the boys as a mobile heterotopia – as the van does for Rike – that brings together several spaces in one and the same place (cf. Foucault 1986, 25). In their interior space, the boys seperate themselves from the outside world, but at the same time they move with it and establish their own order of space and time. Foucault cites as characteristic of heterotopia such a rupture with conventional time, as if this space itself could stand definitively outside of time (cf. Foucault 1986, 26). A shifted spacetime continuum is also established in the Lada and is self-­reflexively commented upon by the two within the plot (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 134f.). In Bakhtin’s understanding, space and time are no longer merely interwoven here, but seem to negate each other in Maik’s perception and develop their own rules (cf. Bakhtin 2011, 84). The perception of time during the journey shifts into a decelerated mode and focuses on the characters’ immediate experience. As a vehicle for topographical border crossing, the car combines the heterotopic characteristics of “a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port” (Foucault 1986, 27). Although they are not at sea, Maik and Tschick – in intertextual reference to Huckleberry Finn  – create a mobile space with their car within the lonely expanses of Brandenburg in which they establish their own rules. The occupation of the Lada as a heterotopic counter-space is paralleled with the experience of a boat trip: “I had my arm out the window too, the way you do in a boat” (Herrndorf 2014a, 210). Maik’s narrative voice realises one of the few analepses in this scene and reproduces a dramatic episode from his childhood. Triggered by the experience of the ride, he recalls how, as a child, he secretly tested and exceeded the limits of his surroundings for the first time. It is no coincidence that he refers to America as a place of freedom: “This was a whole new world, a completely different 63

 On the semantics of the wagon, see further: Parr 2012.

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world than it was during the day. I felt as if I’d just discovered America.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 212). The autonomy of the freedom of movement they have gained for themselves is equally central to their journey: “Anyway, this was a night like that.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 212). Together they do not discover America, but they do find freedom of movement for the first time in the open space of Brandenburg. The staging of the action and visual spaces (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 80) is shaped to a large extent by Maik’s figural focalisation. This form of spatial representation is a subjective building block for his inner dissonances, because Maik describes in an autodiegetic voice what happens in the space or what he sees there, and the text transfers this impression into the representation of a correspondingly tuned space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 55). In this narrative arrangement, the narrated space experiences a subjective-atmospheric charge, and in the realised “intersubjectivity” (Hoffmann 1978, 55), the natural space becomes an aesthetically malleable material that detaches itself from a naturalistic texture in order to convey Maik’s sensations in the staging of the landscape. Reminiscences of the Romantic idea of a “landscape of the soul” (Jung-Kaiser 2008, 16) are discernible in this nature-poetic shaping of the outdoor space.64 Bartsch has elaborated on how the figures’ “uncertainty in the positioning of the individual between subjectivity and plurality” reactualises the Romantic model of the “tipping figure” (Bartsch 2016, 128). However, these references are countered by the ironic linguistic style of Maik’s narrative voice, which deforms the narrated landscape of the viewing space (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 93) with absurd elements: “We didn’t come across another car for an hour. We were someplace where there weren’t even any houses on the horizon. In one field there were pumpkins as big as medicine balls” (Herrndorf 2014a, 103). The symbolically charged description of the black sky as a moment of absolute menace is further piled on top of the bizarre scenery and finally, ironically broken as the description of the threatening weather is followed by the observation of how “a cow fall over in one of the meadows.” (Herrndorf 2014a, 105) This mode of representation is not only to be read in recourse to Romanticism as a narrative space for Maik’s inner life, but also as an ironic commentary on this very textual procedure. Moreover, the spatial semantic occupations of Romanticism as well as elements of popular culture are consistently interwoven. The street signs appear in the counter-world of the journey, in which the narrative voice expects “Tony Soprano or dinosaur or a spaceship” (Herrndorf 2014a, 98) at any moment, as if in a foreign language (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 133), until Maik wonders “Were we still in Germany?” (Herrndorf 2014a, 158) Maik and Tschick use the freedom they gain to try out different strategies for finding their way. The practices of coincidence and the accompanying detours shape their movement as a processual experimentation that leads them to the most remote areas. The decision at which forks in the road they turn right or left is made, for instance, when they only head for places that begin with a M or a T. Deploying the first letters of their own names to set a course initiates a process of trial and error that leads them to the most remote areas. Thus, the initials of the figures become 64

 On the neoromantic processing in Tschick, see further: Bartsch 2016.

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signposts for the movement, and it becomes clear how the negotiation of self-image corresponds with and overwrites the inscriptions in the outside space of the journey. The ostensible emptying of the landscapes allows the space to become a blank surface for Maik’s longings. Following Bartsch, this shows that “it is not rational access to the environment via concepts and explanations, but the experience of directly experiencing and perceiving the world” (Bartsch 2016, 117) that dominates their journey. Goal-oriented movement through space recedes into the background; the focus is on negotiating each individual passage. This function is also reflected in their cartographic material – they only have a map of Berlin with them (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 98). Their coming thus cannot be planned in advance nor traced in retrospect, placing the moment of disorientation at the narrative centre, as Tschick self-­ deprecatingly remarks: “Maps are for pussies” (Herrndorf 2014a, 99). Maik does have a compass on his keychain, which he got “out of a gumball machine one time. It didn’t seem to point south inside the car and when I tried outside the needle spun all over the place” (Herrndorf 2014a, 99). The children’s toy proves useless in the heterotopic otherworld of the journey and underpins Maik’s liminal status in the in-between. Before returning home, the Lada runs out of gas and the two protagonists are stranded at a motorway service station. In Augé’s understanding, this is a transit space and non-place that does not allow for a permanent stay and does not fulfil any identity-forming functions (cf. Augé 2011). Accordingly, their masquerade as adults fails in this space, and the two console themselves in childlike regression with several servings of ice cream while observing the goings-on of the adults around them (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 138). Since they cannot fill up the tank, they want to steal fuel from another car instead; they assume that they will find suitable tools for this at a nearby rubbish dump. The walk to the landfill is arduous and marks the transition to a parallel world within the parallel world, one in which once again their own orders take effect, but whose code Maik and Tschick do not know (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 144f.). Böhme notes that “cultural topographies [...] can give rise to strangeness, disorientation, anomia or even identity crises” (Böhme 2005, XXI), which is evident in Maik’s struggles and installs the landfill as a further symbolic site of his crisis within the narrated world. It is Isa, who is the same age and lives there, who introduces them to the circumstances and helps them to find their way. On the one hand, the rubbish tip is a meeting place between Maik, Tschick, and Isa; on the other hand, this space also seems to stand in clear opposition to the world of Berlin established at the beginning. Maik clambers over a mountain of household rubbish and comes across two photo albums with family pictures. The find recalls the fractured family relationships of postmodern everyday realities and underscores the disrupted structure of Maik’s own family. The garbage dump thus appears as a spatialised metaphor for the affluent society (cf. Roeder 2012, 65) of which Maik has become a victim. Tholen reads this space as a dystopia, invoking the literal translation of an “evil non-place” (Tholen 2014, 381) that does not allow for bonding. This

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topological enclave thus re-emphasises the dysfunctional occupation of Maik’s familial space, as it did at the beginning with the playground in Berlin. Analogous to the rowdy coexistence in the family, Maik, Isa, and Tschick also initially grumble at each other here. Isa nevertheless accompanies Maik and Tschick for a short time, and they cautiously get closer as the journey progresses. As the penultimate stop, the three of them reach a mountain and their arduous climb up is rewarded with an idyllic setting by the reservoir: “It took us two hours to reach the very top, but it was worth it. The view looked like a really great postcard” (Herrndorf 2014a, 166). In the seclusion of the lake, which “in the tradition of the locus amoenus and as a place of the cult of friendship” (Schuster 2012, 395), Maik, Tschick, and Isa’s relationship solidifies. By contrast to the rowdy interaction at the dump, here they deal with each other harmoniously. However, cracks in the innocent idyll are also suggested, for example when they observe an old man masturbating on the lakeshore (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 162) and he disrupts the unbroken occupations of the childhood place with his action. Such a traversal is realised leitmotifically and inscribes the liminal status of the protagonists in the textual space. Isa finally says goodbye to the two boys on the mountain top and they have to make the last part of their journey alone and prove themselves in a final rehearsal.

3.4 Space Function: Self-search on the Move The previous chapter has traced the characters’ paths through the narrated space and has already hinted at the associated functions in conclusion. These same functional interactions are discussed in detail in the following section, tracing the liminal moment of anti-structure established during the journey. Before returning to Berlin, an abandoned open-cast lignite mine stands in Tschick as a final boundary that realises a threshold between the contrasted worlds (cf. Lotman 1977, 237) of the journey and the initial space. This stage leads the boys into the massively worked landscape of the mine, where all previous motifs converge: the disorientation, the intermedial yet romantic abundance of the narrated space, and the open-hearted friendship between the two characters. In the personification of the landscape, a space of action opens that is also a tuned space and leads the boys to the literal end of the narrated world: “The row of transmission towers ended and the wires hung down from the last one like hair. Ten meters beyond, the world ended” (Herrndorf 2014a, 172). The topologically vertical line in space (Lotman 1977, 237) of the open-cast mine marks the turning point of the plot at the end of the narrated world and, in functional terms, forces Maik’s inner transition. The abandoned lignite pit mirrors the previous setting on the mountain in a vertical perspective and represents the final topographical boundary. In Campbell’s vocabulary of the hero’s journey, they must literally enter the deepest cave of probation (cf. Campbell 2008, 99) before they can return. The uncertainty associated with this spatial transition also recurs to the uncertainty of their inner passage: “Behind us the massive swamp, in front of us the void” (Herrndorf 2014a, 173). The

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divergent charges of the diametrical topographies of mountain and pit, which are equally closely connected (cf. Niefanger 2012; Steiner 2012),65 create a tension between search and discovery that forms the core of the story. This process eventually culminates in the symbolic walk across a bridge. Maik’s developmental psychological crossing is manifested in space in this scene, through a topological transition-as-initiation where Maik has to prove his newfound courage.66 Maik walks in front of the Lada, taking on the role of the self-confident actor. After the threshold passage, the only villager, Horst Fricke, shoots the two boys and, in the symbolic death of the characters that is implied, Fricke sets an end to the final test as well as to their passage. Horst Fricke acts as the final gatekeeper and in accordance with the pattern of the hero’s journey, Fricke also offers an elixir. The fact that the elixir is useless and literally emptied of meaning continues the novel’s ironic play with literary traditions (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 181).67 After this final rehearsal, Maik becomes, in Campbell’s vocabulary, “master of the two worlds” (Campbell 2008, 229) and thereupon dares to drive the Lada on the highway by himself for the first time. The journey comes to an abrupt end with the accident that takes place while Maik is at the wheel. The process of Maik’s metaphorical rebirth continues with his return to Berlin. Together with his mother, he deconstructs the house and the material insignia of prosperity and tears down the façade of the dysfunctional family: TV, DVD player, and armchair end up in the pool. Freed from old ballast, they jump into the water together, suggesting the rebirth that comes with it. Maik’s dip in the pool, which ends the novel, develops as a figurative “reflective space” (Bartsch 2016, 123) in his return to the “processual happening” (Hurst 2002, 257) of growing up, by way of the mythical “imagery” (Hurst 2002, 257) of ritualised initiation. The water symbolises the longing for the “dissolution of boundaries in the archaic element of primordial water in the maternal matrix” (Gretz 2012, 476). The limited space of the pool protects and encloses the two characters like a womb, but at the same time it does not allow for a permanent stay, and Maik ends the narrative in this liquid state with a positive outlook on the future (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 245). Pavlik interprets this scene as a metaphor for a postmodern world in which Maik “symbolically flounders,” and then finds his way on the journey in order to finally dive into the “’pool of life’” (Pavlik 2016, 51). Like Maik, Rike also undergoes a mythic-ritualised transition at the end of her journey in Busfahrt mit Kuhn. With each stop, one of her friends is left behind, which ultimately leaves her on her own. Her road trip is thus not an unbridled celebration, and is in fact a slow farewell to an old way of life as well as consolidation of a new way of life. Eventually, only Rike and Noah are left, and in this isolated setting they

 This arrangement can also be read as an intertextual reference to Novalis’s mining motif in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). 66  On the symbolic function of the bridge in the narrative of adolescence, see further: Freese 1971, 168. 67  On this, see also: Albrecht-Rosenkranz 2011. 65

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are forced to come to terms with their failed relationship.68 Rike’s spatial orientation is already disrupted at this point, and she hands the wheel to Noah, who “drives as if he knows the way.” (Bach 2007, 128) That she can no longer stay with him and that their friendship is beyond repair becomes apparent to Rike along this last stretch of their journey together. At a stopover in Bavaria, she leaves Noah behind and Rike masters the final stage alone. In her now entirely autonomous movement, she is sure of her destination: “I’m heading towards the Alps as if on autopilot” (Bach 2007, 144).69 Rike gains the upper hand the closer she gets to her destination and she no longer follows Kuhn’s directional instructions: “The bus obeys me” (Bach 2007, 144). She has detached herself from the interference of unrequited love, leaving Noah and the accompanying emotional baggage behind. The path structure of the journey is central for Rike in two respects: on the one hand, ideas about a future life plan are formed, and on the other, Rike overcomes the emotional chaos and is ready for a new start. At the national border, which also marks a border for Rike’s personal development, Rike has sex for the first time at the music festival.70 This scene analogises her inner passage with a ritually marked moment of growing up-as-initiation. Her symbolic death and rebirth as a woman take place at maximum distance from her home on the national border. As Foucault points out, this is a powerful constant in diachronic perspective: “The young woman’s deflowering could take place ‘nowhere’ and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.” (Foucault 1986, 24f.) This representation serves a traditional literary topos of adolescence, and parallel to Rike, her brother experiences a similar sexual adventure on his journey. When the two meet again at the border, Kurti stands next to Rike “like a knight who has just come out of battle” (Bach 2007, 152) and has successfully concluded his heroic journey. Together they return after their probation and the doubling of the motif underlines the siginificanc of the journey as initiation.71 Following Certeau, movement appears as a central space-creating practice (cf. Certeau 1988, 118f.) through which the character’s developments are narrated “as a kind of ritual” (Gansel 2003, 247). Francis also experiences a coming-of-age ritual in Fast genial, but this ritual occurs at the beginning of his journey in order to mark the departure as a drastic experience. In Fast genial, Francis – like the other protagonists  In the organisation of the semantic field, Rike’s companions are assigned to specific spaces (cf. Lotman 1977, 241) and point to Rike’s process of emancipation in the successive reduction of the group throughout the journey. 69  The spatial exploration intertwines with the soundtrack of the text, imitating the rhythm of America’s A Horse With No Name (1971) and conveying Rike’s mood in musical subtext: “‘I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,’ in the last few days I’ve looked at the route so often in the atlas that now I drive it in my sleep. ‘You know it felt good to be out of the rain.’ It’s very simple. ‘In the desert, you can’t remember your name, cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain’” (Bach 2007, 144). 70  On the aspect of ritual in Busfahrt mit Kuhn, see also: Stichnothe 2017, 114ff. 71  Whereby gender difference resonates, because Kurti is the chivalrous knight, while Rike is denied this attribute. 68

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described here – is not concerned with rebellion. Instead, he is looking for his father and working to free himself from the obligation to care for his sick mother. The text amalgamates familiar topoi from the narration of adolescence, but also adds new facets. These manifests themselves in particular in the permanent reflection on the interrelationship between predetermination and personal responsibility in the course of life, and allow Francis to oscillate between self-confident action and resigned waiting as a character with a grievance. Following Böhme, the function of movements is revealed in the spatial act of detachment from familiar space: “Space is never simply there, but is that which must be overcome with effort and work” (Böhme 2005, XVII). The semanticisation of space fulfills a double narrative function: on the one hand, the conditions of the environment influence Francis’s self-image, and on the other hand his developments are encoded in the laborious overcoming of these conditions. In this respect, the novel has a unifying parallel with Tschick. The travel movement is framed by an extensive narrated time before and after, illuminating the tense experience in the familial space.72 Like Maik, Francis does not transition to a clearly defined new status upon his return and is allowed to continue to display intermediate shades of doubt. The plot structure of departure, probation, and return is retained in Tschick, Fast genial, and Busfahrt mit Kuhn, and reactivates elements of a ritualised passage with individual tests and initiation moments that frame the characters’ search for self “as mythical orientation schemes for identification” (Link 1999, 172). This structure intertwines with aspects of individualised adolescence as well as ambivalent family and relationship structures, and in this interplay the texts display layered subjects as well as integrated signs and semantics. The mythical pattern of the rite of passage carries narrative potential, but in its functional orientation within the text it does not prove to be a limiting schematic course for the characters; instead, the structure of the rite of passage provides framework within which the protagonists search for stability. The movements of the characters during the journey seem chaotic at first and superficially emphasise the loss of structure experienced during adolescence. However, each stop marks an elementary building block to tell of the characters’ inner passages. Following Hoffmann, “the assignment [...] to a specific spatial area” (Hoffmann 1978, 61) and the realised movement in between are means “to represent psychic changes as if in front of a foil” (Hoffmann 1978, 61). The characters’ paths are thus “purposefully sequential” (Haupt 2004, 79) in narrative and functional logic, in order to tell of a successive reformulation of the self-image. In Tschick, for example, the stations are not randomly placed, although Baßler does not see “any meaning-bearing structure” (Baßler 2015, 71) in them. The stations of the journey from

 It turns out that Anne-May has a child by Francis. They do not live together as a couple, however, and Francis struggles with not being able to be there for his child. The novel thus turns the screw of reproduced social roles even further. In this constellation, the experience of Francis’s own childhood is perpetuated, for in the recursive loop of the course of his life, the story of his own father is repeated, pointing to the fact that Francis’s cannot easily detach himself from his social structure. 72

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the cornfield,73 garden,74 forest, landfill, lake, and mountain come together “causally” in retrospect, in order to highlight the protagonists’ “developmental path” as they progress through space in the linking of narrated space and the passage of time (Haupt 2004, 79). These spaces are charged in their symbolic occupation and combine to form the moment of detachment, in that via the journey “the plot and characters are symbolically brought to the point” (Risholm 2003, 107). The boys’ places of residence gradually change from an initially untouched natural space to one increasingly shaped by human: from a field and forest, to a garden, to a reservoir, and finally to an abandoned open-cast lignite mine. On a symbolic level, which postulates the symbiotic unity of childhood and natural space by recourse to a romantic image of childhood, Maik and Tschick detach themselves further from this status with each station. They finally find themselves in the artificial scenery of a postmodern setting in which they must pass their final test and are metaphorically introduced to the adult world when Horst Fricke shoots at them. Leitmotifically, Maik and Tschick try to leave markings in space along their way, to appropriate and overwrite it through inscriptions. Maik has already tried out such an engraving on the playground in Berlin but failed there. At the beginning of the journey, the two curve through a wheat field in the Lada and try to leave their names as imprints, but fail after the first letter: “But we lost our sense of direction when we were crossing the first T” (Herrndorf 2014a, 105). The sequence of marking stations reveals a slow process of displacement, for it is only near the end of the journey that the characters finally succeed, with great difficulty, in leaving their initials in the summit cross on the mountain (cf. Herrndorf 2014a, 167). Although the development encoded in this inscription trace does not proceed in a straight line, as is emphasised by what appear to be many detours along the way, the initially aimless stages of the journey nevertheless sketch out a map of Maik’s developmental landscape as symbolic stations that trace his change. The threshold phase of adolescence finds its translation in a topographical in-­ between space and becomes an open space of experience and encounter in the time of travel as a moratorium, during which Maik can try out different facets of his self-­ image without having to commit himself. The conclusion also points to this, for the return to the familiar space is not associated with a clear ‘change of status’ (cf. Neumann 2000, 108) into another phase of life. The initiatory journey does not find a ‘classical’ conclusion, focusing instead upon the open process of the dissolution of self-image, which gains contours while continuing to be in flux – as is emphasised by Maik allowing himself to be carried by the water in the swimming pool at the end. The text thus creates an identity construction that refuses to be closed off, which also correlates with the age of the character. Maik is only 14 years old and can continue to test himself. With the journey, however, he and Tschick try to “escape their

 The cornfield is also a subtle reference to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.  On the function of the garden in children’s and young adult literature, see also: Freytag 2009. At a stranger’s family home, Maik and Tschick are invited to lunch and experience a loving togetherness in this locus amoenus. On the staging of this family, see also: Wölke 2014, 68. 73 74

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(adolescent) despair through escape movements” (Roeder 2012, 66) and thereby change their self-perception.75 With the “sum of the many small acquaintances” (Kreller 2009, 24) along the way, the structure of the road novel illustrates how Maik’s self-perception shifts from the beginning his negative self-asssment – “rich scaredy-cat totally unable to defend himself” (Herrndorf 2014a, 56) – to a more positive one. Maik no longer unreflectively adopts his father’s view of the world, but translates his travel experiences into his own view of the world (cf. Wölke 2014, 86). Thus, the topographical border crossings and the associated configurations of self-realisation – that the spatial and temporal series of human destinies (cf. Bakhtin 2011, 244)76 – are interlinked via the path. The positively connoted encounters with others ultimately lead to a changed self-­ image that allows Maik to deviate from his father’s dictum – “The world is bad and people are bad” (Herrndorf 2014, 203). Maik’s changed perception of himself, and others correlates with his emancipation from his father and illustrates that the formation of one’s own identity always takes place through differentiation from others. Accordingly, at the end of the trial he defies his father’s instructions and stands by his actions, which are beyond the legal rules. This behaviour is positively sanctioned within the diegesis, as a shift continues in the microcosm of the school class when Maik is suddenly noticed by his crush Tatiana and thus the “successful integration into society, as still envisaged by the classical adolescence paradigm” (Frank 2016, 75) does somewhat succeed after all. Although Tschick almost always remains at Maik’s side throughout the story, he is less able to develop as a character. While the reintegration of Maik into the class structure is hinted at by the end of the novel, Tschick is deported to a youth centre. This difference can be read quite critically, especially with regard to the image of Russia sketched within the plot, which works with stereotypes and clichés, as Rösch has pointed out (cf. Rösch 2015).77 This criticism falls short, however, because within the story Tschick as a character also contends with societal expectations in a humorous way, skilfully playing off his image as a supposed member of the “Russian mafia” (Herrndorf 2014a, 71) in order to keep older classmates at a distance and thereby unmasking the prejudices of this image of Russia. The focus, for this is laid out through the narrative voice and focalisation, is on Maik’s point of view and his personal interference fields, and Tschick is formed as a character solely through the filter of Maik’s point of view. However, Tschick opens up at the end of the journey and comes out as gay to his friend, which can be interpreted as a positive developmental step. In response to Tschik’s disclosure, Maik does not wrestle with the ‘wild elements’ outside the civilised order (cf. Erhart 1997, 328) in order to demonstrate his masculinity, but displays sensitive nuances: “I thought for a few minutes about what it would like to be gay. It could really have been the solution to all my problems. But it  On the friendship between Maik and Tschick, see also: Schindler 2016.  On the function of the road, see also: Bakhtin 2011, 245. 77  On the aspect of intercultural learning, moreover: Zierau 2015. 75 76

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wasn’t going to work” (Herrndorf 2014a, 208). The text carefully breaks down rigid gender stereotypes and establishes a fluid conception of life paths that can move beyond fixed expectations. While Maik and Tschick set off on the vague and directionless road to Wallachia, Rike in Busfahrt mit Kuhn and Francis in Fast genial each have a destination in mind. They are no longer concerned with merely being on the road, but also with actually arriving. As Rike points out at the beginning of their journey, “For all I care, we could fast forward a few days. Fast Forward” (Bach 2007, 49). Rike’s road trip is not an expression of adolescent rebellion or emblematic of a hedonism that is solely about getting away, but rather a way to compensate for an overwhelming openness. Implicitly, Rike moves within the framework of the “creativity dispositive” defined by Reckwitz (Reckwitz 2012, 40). Not only is she confronted with the task of reinventing her life in a “subject-centeredness” (Reckwitz 2012, 38), but she is also in danger of breaking down due to the associated pressure. It is therefore no coincidence that the screenplay also appears as the leitmotif of the text, perpetuating in the narrative process of writing the struggle to create something new. The fact that the narrative is oriented towards a ritualised sequence of events and, in its movement through space, leads the character from one self-image to another as a “narrative allegory” (Kreller 2009, 24), manifests the subliminal longing for a consolidated framework in the topographical order. The narration of adolescence in Fast genial is also a narration of movement, departure, and probation, which contains a decidedly counter-gendered moment. Francis longs for a male role model, while the conflicts with his sick mother are dealt with almost tersely. Nevertheless, the text offers an interesting new perspective on the function of departure by consistently asking about the relationship between social environment and self-determination in adolescence and addressing various moments of dysfunction. The central point of friction is the familial space, which contains another intergenerational tension: Parental figures who can no longer fulfil their role.78 In this way, the text refers to developments that are also evident in other novels. The crisis-prone late modernity is illuminated in both intrasubjective and social dimensions by the family environment and an ongoing loss of structure on the part of the adults. In their departure, Maik and Tschick also counteract the dysfunctional occupations of their familial space, and these character designs reveal a longing for stability and support. While Busfahrt mit Kuhn does not yet explicitly address this tendency – the novel merely hints at it – such an initial situation is found in Bach’s later novel was vom Sommer übrig ist (2012). In it, two girls take a road trip together in order to give each other the support they no longer receive in their disintegrating families. The fact that both sets of parents do not even notice the girls’ absence, as in Tschick and Fast genial, is symptomatic of the process of the new family conflict situation. In a departure from the occupations of the postmodern adolescent novel (cf. Kaulen 1999a, 332), family conditions are again thematised and problematised.  Following Degler/Paulokat 2008; Kaulen 1999a; Gansel 2003, the conflict is not present in either the pop-literary or postmodern adolescent novel and is reactivated here. 78

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It can be seen that the travel movements of the characters in contemporary road novels have ritualised aspects and form a liminal intermediate phase according to Turner’s understanding of anti-structure. However, these elements fulfill a new function, and this concerns both the phase of departure and the return. It is precisely this final observation that connects the selected novels: at the beginning, the protagonists struggle with their life situations and, along the journey, actively engage in the testing of a “coherent self-design” (Kaulen 1999a, 333). Narratives are told of transitions, upheavals, and developments that remain open at the end and do not offer a onedimensional solution so that “the journeys [...] are symbolically coupled with the biographical trajectories of the characters” (Risholm 2003, 120), but not solidified. The focus on space thereby makes visible that adolescence not only acts as an intrasubjective process, but also embeds itself in reciprocal frames of reference. The movement of the figures through space illustrates the fluid character of identity constructions along a topography that always moves along the interface of action space and symbolically charged construct. The counter-space of the journey opens up new possibilities for considering subjectivation practices anew (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 16), because the “socially regulated, typified, routinised [sic] form of bodily behavior” (Reckwitz 2008, 135) experiences an alternative course here. A reciprocal relationship between figure and space is crucial. In movement the development process is symbolised, yet the protagonists also shape the space, acquiring new perspectives and freeing themselves from the paralysis they experienced in the initial space. The interrelation of space and figure thus works in two directions and the texts provide insight into specific “subject and selfconcepts” that are “in a reciprocal constitutional relationship with their ordering structures” (Alkemeyer/Budde/Freist 2013, 10). It is no coincidence that Alkemeyer/ Budde/Freist refer to the parallel accentuation of spatial and bodily discourses in the context of the subjectification debate (cf. Alkemeyer/Budde/Freist 2013, 10). Processes of adolescence run along these axes, and are also evident in the literary imaginative spaces of adolescence. These can be discussed with the research focus on space in its multi-layered interconnections. It further connects the novels that the characters do not enter a new phase of life at the end. The endings remain open, although the preceding journeys along the ritualised sequence of stations have indicated a process of development for the characters. Although the characters cross a classificatory boundary (cf. Lotman 1977, 237) in their departure, they prove themselves during the journey in foreign spaces and return changed, thus making clear that, as Lotman describes it, “mobility is transformation” (Lotman 1977, 223). According to Kreller, these processes are equally readable as a “growing on wheels” (Kreller 2009, 23), yet do not insist upon a one-­dimensional resolution. In these novels, the journey no longer results in the great and conclusive change of initiation, but rather a series of successive adjustment the characters’ self-images, which point to the incompleteness and ongoing processuality of self-positioning. These texts thus refer to the increasingly unstructured courses of life in the late 20th and early 21st century, in which adulthood is no longer associated with a consolidated self-image (cf. Hurrelmann 2013b, 323). In Busfahrt mit

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Kuhn, Tschick, and Fast genial, the stagings of the narrative space and the narrated spaces move between semantic traditions, mythical elements of ritual transition, and new inscriptions of postmodern family constructions, self-images, and a media-­ based everyday and youth culture. Interestingly, within the diegesis of all the texts, the mobile phone as a medium of communication recedes into the background, and the novels do not establish a construct “that explores the scope and limits of modern notions of intimacy in the age of mobile telephony” (Drügh 2011, 133). The narrative of adolescence is intermedial, and following Wagner, this reveals a “medialisation of all life spaces” that “increasingly shapes the perception of time and space [...] medially” (Wagner 2007, 194). Thus, these narrative procedures also refer to extratextual processes of a social mediatisation (cf. Krotz 2007). Meanwhile, Herrndorf’s novel has not only undergone a change of media (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 15) from novel to film – directed by Fatih Akin in 2016 – but has also been situated within musical pop culture, thereby furthering a recursive loop of references. Bosse’s song Außerhalb der Zeit (2016), for example, negotiates the relationship between space, time, and movement in adolescence. Herrndorf’s novel serves as a reference for the lyrical self, marking a state of being in-between: “Outside of time / Falling out of all consequences / And never coming back / Far out into the wilderness / Amrum in December / Herrndorf in the hand” (Bosse 2016).79

 That Tschick is appropriately semantically occupied as a reference text for travel and adolescence is evident in the Tatort episode Das Muhli (2017): in it, the youthful protagonists read Tschick, as does the protagonist in Antje Herden’s novel Keine halben Sachen (2019). 79

4

Adolescence and the City: Urban Spaces on the Move

4.1 Introduction: Es war einmal Indianerland, Räuberhände, Tigermilch The second chapter of analysis is devoted to novels that feature a large city as the central plot location and establish characters who move through urban space, crossing topological as well as normative boundaries within this area and dwelling in heterotopic in-between spaces. In contrast to the road novel, there is no travelling in these novels; no movement through different stations one after another. Instead, the characters remain within an area that is clearly defined in terms of its outer boundaries, and which is subdivided into further subspaces as a metropolitan semantic field (cf. Lotman 1977, 97). The narrativised urban space becomes legible as a palimpsest onto which the life-historical development processes of the characters are inscribed in metaphorised traces of movement through space. The pattern of the rite of passage is also present in these novels in two distinct variations that develop within the framework of the big city. Adolescent characters either flee from the “rural province” (Kalteis 2011, 13) into an unfamiliar urban space where they have to prove themselves, or they already live in a city and the threshold phase thus takes place by way of a back and forth between the subspaces of the urban environment. In both cases, the moment of movement is realised as a leitmotif and establishes the adolescent figures as topological border crossers who reside in intermediate spaces. In the narration of adolescence, the big city has appeared  – at least since the 1950s – as an important place of action that consolidates the complex processes of growing up in the ambivalent semantic double coding of the urban: “Even as an image of terror and a juggernaut, on the one hand, and as a commercial, administrative and cultural centre, as a complex social space and space of experience, on the other” (Kalteis 2011, 12f.). The big city – not only as a result of its topological expanse – serves as a semantic sign carrier for a longed-for freedom beyond social norms – a space of possibilities that is equally disruptive as a “symbol carrier, spatial motif and almost action © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023 A. Stemmann, Spaces of Adolescence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05916-1_4

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figure” (Kalteis 2011, 13). With the open world of consumption (cf. Kaulen 1999b, 7)1 and in niche subcultures, urban space is a symbol of unlimited development that can also evoke the “alienation, disturbance and irritation” (Kalteis 2011, 13) of the individual. Tracing its origins to J.D. Salinger’s “cult book” (Drügh 2007, 35) The Catcher in the Rye (1951), this tension was taken up in modern narratives of adolescence to address crises and ruptures. It is no coincidence that the German paperback edition of Salinger’s novel, published in 1966 by Rowohlt Verlag, advertised on the cover that “this is the story of holden caulfield, who, expelled from school and alienated from his parents, wanders through the giant city of New York” (Salinger 1966, cover). Oscillating movements, a back and forth, and the resulting loss of orientation refer to the crisis-like processes of adolescence, and have developed from The Catcher in the Rye into a leitmotif and a “genre-forming pattern for the depiction of adolescent conflicts” (Kaulen 1999b, 7). Significantly, The Catcher in the Rye begins with the description of a departure that the autodiegetic voice marks as a decisive moment in the course of his life: “Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep” (Salinger 2010, 2). The topographic marker of Holden Caulfield’s growing up is the departure from boarding school – Pencey – in upstate Pennsylvania, and the move to the big city of New York. His departure creates a new, liminal, and open space for action in urban space, which not only topologically but also semantically serves as a foil for the constricting rules of the boarding school. Holden’s escape from Pencey is the expression of an adolescent rebellion – a means by which to flee the restrictive rules. In leaving, he consciously contradicts the school’s assertion: “Since 1888, we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men” (Salinger 2010, 2). He refuses the educational maxim of the “standardised sequence of stages” (Gansel 2005, 361) of growing up; he does not want to be a clear-thinking young man, and realises in flight an alternative course that evades rationality. Away from the strict rules of boarding school, Holden Caulfield drifts restlessly through New  York nightlife, conceives of a “rebellion against the false system” (Kaulen 1999a, 332), and thus becomes the prototypical protagonist of the modern adolescent novel (cf. Kaulen 1999b, 7; Gansel 2005, 368). The unsteady direction of his movements provides insights into the practices of an adolescent subculture of counterformation, which also interlocks with musical events (cf. Reckwitz 2006, 475). Holden Caulfield does not stay permanently in one place, but instead moves continuously from concert to concert in bars and clubs, “as an incarnation of American consumer society [...] settling accounts with the ‘American way of life’” (Wagner 2007, 74f.). It becomes clear that the text tells of the tensions of adolescence and embeds them in the specific cultural context. In this respect, the novel can also be interpreted as a negotiating space for extratextual processes. Holden Caulfield’s searching and rebellious trail of movement in the urban space of New  York points to a changed understanding of adolescence in the late 1950s  On the further development of the commodity aesthetic in pop literature as a motif of loneliness, see also: Drügh 2009, 160. 1

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USA. The protagonist rebels, and rebellion, according to Erdheim, is considered as a cultural force of social renewal and a powerful projection for shifts in adolescence (cf. Erdheim 1992, 283). Gansel emphasises that on the meta-level “it is no longer a question of generation in the style of an opposition between children and parents, but rather the contradiction of a youth to the institutionalised institutions of established society” (Gansel 2005, 377). For the character Holden Caulfield, this upheaval is made clear by the fact that in his fugitive movement he “revolted against established social instances, attacked outmoded role models, and was in search of himself” (Gansel 2016, 6). In the wake of The Catcher in the Rye, the big city has appeared in the narration of adolescence as an important diegetic place of action and, on a meta-level, as an expression of constructions of adolescence both in the USA and in the German-­ language modern adolescence novels of the 1970s (cf. Ewers 1989, 9). Novels of the 1990s, as discussed in the previous chapters, reveal a renewed shift in the representation of adolescence and expand the pattern of the modern adolescence novel with a postmodern orientation. The aforementioned intergenerational conflicts with parental figures are less central in this form of the adolescence novel as well as in the pop literature of the 1990s (cf. Gansel 2003, 243). Instead, these texts reflect a hypermodern adolescent subjectivity that shows the extent to which, under conditions of pluralisation, earlier transgressions of boundaries or rebellions against outmoded moral codes are dispensed with. The (post)modern adolescent subject faces different adolescence problems than Holden Caulfield [...]. (Gansel 2004, 140)

Although the big city remains a place of action, it fulfils a different function; as characters move through urban spaces the “literary exploration of metropolitan everyday and media experiences” (Kaulen 2009, 153) surface the new self-images of the protagonists. Staging the big city as a boundless field of aimless movement results in a directionless dissolution of boundaries, which highlights a “dissonance of ego-loss” (Kalteis 2011, 13) and shows how adolescence under “postmodern conditions [...] gains a new, a different quality” (Gansel 2005, 361).2 Conflict constellations shift, especially within the generational hierarchy: parental figures move into the background and “identity crises therefore no longer have their basis in the authoritarian family structures attacked by the adolescents” (Gansel 2004, 140). The protagonists of the texts try to evade “self-responsibility and self-assertion” (Gansel 2005, 361). They thus represent a counter-image that undermines the “traditional notions of identity, of autonomy and personality” (Kaulen 1999b, 9). These tendencies are evident both in the postmodern adolescent novel and in the German pop literature of the 1990s.3 Pop literature in particular highlights the experience and an egocentrism of mostly young men on the plot level.4 The twenty-somethings

 On the ambiguity of urban space and adolescence, see also: Kalteis 2009; Lexe 2011.  For a detailed discussion of the theoretical debate of the 1990s, see further: Wagner 2007, 87ff. 4  On the construction of gender in pop literature, see further: Degler/Paulokat 2008, 74ff. 2 3

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represented in these texts are emblematic of a prolonged adolescence in which “the telos of a (permanent) integration into society appears fragile” (Frank 2016, 64). These protagonists evade the so-called developmental task of adolescence and instead range along open paths through the metropolitan space: “Their thoughts revolve in constant repetitions and loops exclusively around banalities of everyday life, they have no direct connection and represent the opposite of the search for one’s own identity” (Gansel 2003, 243). In “the hectic movement from party to party, through the search for a constantly different experience, the striving from one to the other enjoyment of meaning” (Kaulen 1999b, 9), the self-image of these characters either evades or gives up on consolidation. In narrative terms, the experience of the characters is accompanied by procedures that “reproduced the youth cultural lifeworlds [...] also on the level of aesthetic realisation” (Kaulen 2009, 144). These texts draw on music, films, and comics in their quick cuts and changing perspectives, establishing a consistent “transfer from other media” (Kaulen 2009, 144) that shapes the structural principles of a post-­media narrative as described by Baßler (cf. Baßler 2015).5 Benjamin von Stuckrad-­Barre, for example, combines the protagonist’s disjointed movement with an intermedial system of reference by inscribing his novel Soloalbum (1998) with a soundtrack, as referenced by the title.6 Pop music is “used as a structural reference” (Lexe 2016b, 35) alongside which the story develops as it intertwines with movement through space. The protagonist appears as a “collector and dissector of everyday discourses” (Wagner 2007, 391), which he observes from his isolated vantage point – as suggested by the inclusion of ‘solo’ in the title – and his intrasubjective navel-gazing is at the centre of the narrative. The character hides behind his arrogant view of others and defines himself through his cynicism. The urban experience is a decisive element of the character’s self-image. Both the conflict constellations of the plot level and the place of residence are fundamental to the protagonist’s identity construction, but the self-image is also determined by the narrative procedures. The narrative voice meanders from one inconsequential event to the next and disintegrates into “fragmentary individual episodes” (Kaulen 1999b, 9). At the same time, the experience is stylised as a performance of laconicity through countless musical references. A fleeting stream of events is also realised in Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax (1997). In the narrated intoxication of the protagonist, a fixed space-time order disintegrates. By “blowing up of a linear sequence of action” the novel renounces “a coherent construction of meaning” (Kaulen 1999b, 9) and reveals an associative experience that no longer includes consistent self-image as a relevant category. Furthermore, the double perspective of the text is interesting, as it is narrated first in the autodiegetic voice of the young man, Chris, whose hedonistic self-perception is established in the first sentence: “Man. I’m a rock star” (Hennig von Lange 1997, 9). In line with this premise, the plot follows his drug trip through the nightlife while  On the connections of pop literature to aesthetic developments of the 1960s, see further: Drügh 2009, 146. 6  For a detailed analysis of Soloalbum, see further: Wagner 2007, 384ff. 5

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his girlfriend, who is only called Little (Kleine), stays at home. It is Little who narrates the second part of the novel. As she notes, the hegemonic distribution of roles and gender difference is clearly marked in the particular norming of movement: “Waiting. That is the task of the woman of the 90s” (Hennig von Lange 1997, 151). While Chris celebrates, she waits for him. The character passes the time she spends waiting by taking refuge in imaginary spaces that have been transformed by the media. She imagines scenarios from the Vampirella comics.7 These function as a projected counter-space through which the ‘little girl’ ascribes a new self-image to herself: “That’s really my favourite sentence: ‘I’m an emancipated woman and I can sleep with whoever I want!’ Vampirella is really a cool woman. I mean, she’s not stupidly waiting for her guy” (Hennig von Lange 1997, 138). However, meditations on movement and the desire to break free of immobility (cf. Haupt 2004, 81), remain little more than mental games. His existence at the party is in the foreground. In gender terms, this construction conveys a problematic constellation that perpetuates traditional narratives of movement and passivity. While Little hardly ever exits the domestic sphere of influence, leaving the apartment where she cooks and does the laundry for the protagonist only to do the shopping, Chris roams the clubs with his friends.8 Chris stands pars pro toto for the characters of the postmodern and pop-literary adolescent novel, for they “no longer appear as autonomous characters trying to shape their lives with self-confidence” and are, “as cultural set pieces of the consumer world and the media world” (Kaulen 1999b, 9), a metaphor for a postmodern perception of the world. Wagner observes that “the modern schema of the subject in search of autonomy and identity, critically perceiving itself and the world around it, is dismantled in Relax” (Wagner 2007, 358), sketching a potentially decomposed self-image that is no longer about a search for meaning. “You go out partying at night, you invite the guys over, and the chicks are crazy about you. No matter what shit you say, people think it is funny” (Hennig von Lange 1997, 9), is Chris’ credo. In the “ensemble of consumer, media, and leisure experiences,” the texts of pop literature refer in an extratextual perspective to a phase of adolescence “such as it had not been available in this form to earlier generations” (Kaulen 2009, 151). Helene Hegemann continues this approach in Axolotl Roadkill (2010). She designs the boundless experience of the main character in adolescence as “a loose play with those offers that an experience society makes available for the self-dramatisation of the ego” (Gansel 2003, 44) and deconstructs entrenched gender orders with the female protagonist. On the first page, the autodiegetic voice introduces her adolescent in-between status as she awakens from “anguished sleep” in the nursery

 On the interpretation of the Vampirella references, see also: Kaulen 2009, 152.  The relationship between the two resembles a mother/son relationship more than a boyfriend/ girlfriend relationship; both have not had sex with each other for a long time. The fact that at the end of the novel Chris collapses in his girlfriend’s arms after a drug binge and presumably dies further develops the figurative iconography of the Pietà and underlines the interpretation of a mother/son relationship. 7 8

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“quivering with fateful orchestras” (Hegemann 2010, 9) after a night of partying. The highlight-like experience of the protagonist as she drifts aimlessly in an unsteady movement through the Berlin party scene develops in the fragmentary narrative style. This narrative development does not reveal any coherent structure, collaging and weaving together various sources in what is purported to be plagiarism.9 Following Kaulen, it can be observed that the “sound of pop music and the visual worlds from films or comics [...] form the self-evident everyday backdrop of the plot characters” (Kaulen 2009, 152) and influence the narrative style. In this “felting strategy” (Drügh 2007, 44), the novel manifests a pop-literary mode of representation, which nonetheless “reformats the concept of identity behind it. [...] this identity construction, flexibly assembled from ever new building blocks and set pieces, is the counter-design to the effectively powerful notion of an individuality that (finds) itself” (Dettmar 2011, 31) and experiences a consolidation. Novels published from 2000 onwards, which also draw on narrative techniques of pop literature, such as those by Tamara Bach, show, however, that the self-­ awareness of the characters does change. Thus, contemporary novels clearly exhibit an emerging engagement with adolescence that is at odds with both the modern and postmodern approach. As Gansel defines the postmodern adolescent novel, it is not about “the characters’ strenuous search for their own identity or for the meaning of existence” (Gansel 2005, 380), and yet it is precisely this moment that is being re-­ examined in many contemporary novels. The protagonists are no longer simply in search of non-committal experiences – which break down the notion of “a holistic subject” (Kaulen 1999b, 9) – instead, they increasingly come to terms with their own roles in the process of growing up, take issue with what seem to be excessive demands, and contend with parental figures who are coping with their own crises. In Marsmädchen (2003), Tamara Bach places female adolescence at the thematic centre of a coming out story. The protagonists live in a small town, and the text unfolds around the semantic opposition of small and big city space. It is no coincidence that the titular Mars is situated at a great distance from earth while still serving as a utopian counter-space to the familiar action space of the characters. In between, the big city is cast as an attainable place of longing and juxtaposed with the narrowness and boredom of the small town. Thinking with Foucault, this space can be understood as a compensatory heterotopia between normal space and utopia (cf. Foucault 1986). The two young women can only live out their love for each other when they visit the big city, because the ‘otherness’ conceived within the framework of the small town order is only possible outside this social space. Life in the small town thus means not only a topological but also a developmental-­ psychological standstill. In addition to the normative and topological thresholds, musical quotations shape the texture of the novel. Thus, in the aftermath of pop-­ literary narrative procedures, Marsmädchen develops an intermedial system of references “to link the processes of coming of age to patterns of perception of mediatised realities” (Lexe 2016b, 41). Working from this premise, the subsequent analysis considers how the narrative of adolescence after 2000 refers to the

 On the “Hegemann case”, see further: Dettmar 2011, 28ff.

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aforementioned narrative but also motivic elements, how they alternate, and how the characters’ self-images are shaped or shifted as a result. The novels considered here – Räuberhände (2007), Es war einmal Indianerland (2011) and Tigermilch (2013)  – install a (large) city as a space of action (cf. Hoffmann 1978, 80), in order to highlight the protagonists’ disengagement from a dysfunctional family space. In Finn-Ole Heinrich’s Räuberhände, the protagonists Janik and Samuel travel without their parents for the first time after graduating from high school and have to prove themselves in a foreign counter-space.10 Within the text, the end of their school years marks a fork in the road of their lives together, and the journey to Istanbul takes the protagonists into a new phase. Istanbul is cast as an exotic counterspace and appears as a projection screen for the divergent expectations of the two protagonists. The novel tells of a travelling movement that contrasts the small town with the big city, and yet primarily locates the searching movement within Istanbul, which serves as the central vector of a ritualised search for self in urban space. In Nils Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland,11 the tension between the centre and the periphery of an unnamed German city develops as a characteristic feature of the text. The periphery, “at the edges of urbanity” appears here as a condensed “world of signs” (Kalteis 2011, 13) for the delimited self of the protagonist, Mauser. Physiological, psychological, and social boundaries mark individual points of rupture that connect with the topography of the narrated spaces in order to represent a fragmented identity. Mauser stands in a developmental-psychological in-between that drives him and translates itself leitmotivically into a rushed movement through urban space. He moves along a frayed path through a narrated world that, from his point of view – and analogous to his family situation – seems to have shattered. The disrupted urban environment opens up in the second part of the novel as a road trip that takes the protagonist to the limits of the narrated world and concludes with an archaic ritual of initiation. Stephanie de Velasco’s novel Tigermilch is limited to the city of Berlin as the main setting.12 The focus is on the experience and the oscillating movements of the protagonists Nini and Jameelah. Together, the two 14-year-olds explore the diffuse boundaries between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In doing so, they cross spatial boundaries within the urban area, but these are also connected with normative border crossings. Although the texts exhibit different forms of movement, these traces in the narrated space unifyingly characterise the phase of adolescent in-­ betweenness as a potentially overwhelming crisis. Tigermilch, Es war einmal

 The title of the novel is a neologism that combines the words robbers (Räuber) and hands (Hände). The novel offers different interpretations of the title. For example, the hands of the character Samuel appear as a leitmotif. 11  The literal translation of the title is: Once upon a time there was land of Indians. This alludes on the one hand to a fairy tale tradition, and on the other hand to a media archive of the Western. However, the term ‘Indian’ is not critically reflected. 12  The novel has been published in English translation under the title Tigermilk. The term describes a drink that the protagonists mix for themselves. 10

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Indianland, and, in some ways, Räuberhände, create an “image of postmodern society in which the adolescent heroes have to cope with their precarious everyday lives on their own” (Kalteis 2011, 13). This motivic shift is accompanied by complex narrative constructions that transfer the disorientation as well as the in-betweenness of the protagonists to the level of discourse and colour it intermedially. Movement through the big city – and the intermedial representation of that movement – is an important feature of the texts and cinematic references rather than musical ones (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 17) shape the narrative space.

4.2 Narrative In-between, Narrative Sampling: Narrative Space as Mosaic The novel Räuberhände fits in with the previous chapter as well as this one since it tells of both a journey and an urban space. However, the text does not feature the successive journeys to different stations that characterise the road novel. Rather, the focus is on the distant space of Istanbul and the movements of the characters between individual subspaces within the city. With their journey, the protagonists Janik and Samuel have topologically detached themselves from their families and roam through urban space without a fixed plan. As the protagonists set out to prove themselves in a foreign space their movements perpetuate a specific gender order and coding (cf. Würzbach 2001) and recall the pattern of the rite of passage defined by van Gennep (cf. van Gennep 1960). Conceived in this pattern, the city of Istanbul stands for the phase of threshold time and anti-structure. In the nature of the temporal narrative structure, however, this clearly defined sequence breaks down, for the chronology of events does proceeds not in a linear fashion, but in a convoluted temporal sequence that constantly shifts the point of action back and forth. In Janik’s autodiegetic voice, the text develops a web of analepses and prolepses that, at its core, weaves around the boys’ experience in Istanbul. Janik is the architect of these scenes, which he reassembles retrospectively in his internal focalisation of the narrative process. In this narrative mode, the temporal progression is split up and only successively fits together to form a coherent chronology and a coherent spatial image. The experiences in Istanbul, the weeks before and after, and individual memories from Janik’s childhood alternate one after the other in a collage of short episodes like video clips. In the “adaptation of musical rhythms and sampling techniques, interference with electronic entertainment media” (Kaulen 2009, 144) arises, which are imitated as intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 17) by way of the media-specific means of the novel. Janik’s struggling adolescent self is revealed in the construction of the narrative space by this narrative overlap: the levels of representation and action are correspondingly closely intertwined. The diegetic locations are each linked to a specific point in time so that the plot jumps back and forth between temporal and spatial axes. Only gradually do the narrative threads, or rather the meanings behind them, come together. The fragmented structure of the narrative space is accompanied by the mosaic-like arrangement of the narrated spaces, which are edited in a cinematic style. This mosaic structure of

4.2  Narrative In-between, Narrative Sampling: Narrative Space as Mosaic

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narrative sampling proves to be, on the one hand, a return to a postmodern aesthetic of dissolution (cf. Wagner 2007, 144f.), and on the other hand, a stringently composed structure that does more than merely exhibit a frayed self-image through the narrative design. The intersecting narrative strands are deliberately placed in sequence and, in the broken chronology, events that diverge in time are dramaturgically interwoven in narrative space by interspersing hints, vaguely outlining developments, and gradually situating the events in their contexts. The text deliberately plays with narrative gaps and allusions. Nils Mohl’s Es war einmal Indianerland exhibits a similarly fragmented, but also thoroughly constructed narrative mode. The novel thematises adolescence as a crisis phase, the delimitations of which the 17-year-old protagonist Mauser experiences first-hand. The novel begins with the autodiegetic voice’s view of a river and introduces the character’s tense experience in medias res: “Droplets churn the brackish waters of the river. The longer you look, the more frothy and turbulent the surface seems. A wild bubbling. Pure doomsday” (Mohl 2011, 13). The bubbling surface of the water reflects Mauser’s disturbed inner life; in terms of imagery, that which has previously been repressed breaks through and proleptically foreshadows the coming events on the brink of an individual end of the world right at the beginning. As the plot develops, the main character flounders through the narrated world, and his destabilisation is also reflected in the structure of the narrative space. The narrated time runs achronologically and is composed in fragments. The individual scenes are rapidly cut together and, in this cinematic procedure of hard cuts, manifest the psychological disposition of the main character in the narration in order to “outline the fragmented reality of postmodern growing up in brief flashes” (Kalteis 2011, 13). Narrated time is fragmented, exposing the protagonist’s diegetic disorientation, and the chaos abounds at all levels. Orientation is provided solely by the path to the text – the paratextual narrative space. The narrative is preceded by a calendar page that lists the most important events for each day of the narrated week (cf. Mohl 2011, 11), thus continuing a procedure deployed in pop literature (cf. Drügh 2007, 41). The beginning of each chapter picks up on this reference and indicates the direction of the leap in time with a media icon: “